It's ironic that Shakespeare is in the title of Roslyn Lander Knutson's book, since “Shakespeare” and centuries of Shakespeare scholarship are parts of the problem she is addressing in Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time. Forget everything you think you know, she tells her readers, about the great rivalries of early modern commercial theatre practice. Forget the rivalry between the Lord Admiral's Men and the Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men, between landlords Philip Henslowe and James Burbage, actors Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage, and their spouses and in-laws and partners. Forget the passage in Hamlet about the “Little Eyases” of the boy companies whose success has forced the adult players to tour Elsinore, the “Rival Traditions” of the populist public theatres and the elitist private ones, and forget, above all, the “War of the Theatres,” the battles of wits in which Ben Jonson and his contemporaries lobbed satiric portraits at one another in rival plays written between 1599 and 1601 for the rival adult and boy companies. These putative rivalries, she explains, are the product of a misguided and self-perpetuating narrative, sculpted in the eighteenth century and cast in bronze in the nineteenth, a narrative that, in part, sought to exceptionalize Shakespeare and the theatre enterprise that nourished both his works and the writer whose genius inspired envy among his contemporary actors, playwrights, and theatre companies, and left them to fight for leftover scraps of business. To support this exceptionalism, Knutson advances a piece of court testimony from 1589–1590 by Edward Alleyn's brother John, testifying how James Burbage quarreled with the widow of his brother-in-law and business partner until his son Richard chased her out with a broom, testimony that morphed into a master narrative of cutthroat personal rivalries and even more cutthroat business practices.

Within the past few years, scholarship on Shakespearean culture in the Victorian and Edwardian periods has gained surprising momentum, with contributions by, among others, Jane Moody and Russell Jackson. Palgrave's decision to publish a two-volume collection of papers from the conference “Victorian Shakespeare” (London: Institute for English Studies, 2002) indicates that a critical mass of scholars is now profitably working at the intersection of performance criticism, literary history, and cultural studies. In the midst of what has been mostly specialist activity, Richard Foulkes has written the first general account of Shakespeare in performance from 1832 to 1916, that is, from the passage of the Great Reform Bill (and the meeting of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Select Committee on Dramatic Literature) to the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death.

“A bad Shakespeare burlesque,” Richard Schoch writes, “is bad in a way that has not been generally appreciated.” Schoch's study of Shakespearean burlesque is a celebration of the bad, a multifaceted examination of the ways that British (and American) theatrical burlesques of Shakespeare plays and performances stand in relation to the larger culture. Burlesque, Schoch explains, is both politically radical and conservative, both an attack on the pomposity of high culture and an attempt to rescue the essential Shakespeare from his own theatrical proponents. Burlesque attacks high culture in the form of low culture; but at the same time, Schoch observes, burlesque rejects “reductive oppositions between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.” In any event, the Shakespeare burlesque isunlike Shakespearean adaptation, or the transformations the script undergoes when it is performed in a theatrical aesthetic different from the one for which it was writtenarguably not Shakespeare: “while an adaptation is the play it adapts, a burlesque represents the play it burlesques.” Schoch is able to stand outside of the script and the performance itself, and to situate the burlesque in the larger culture, because, he explains, “it is impossible to stay inside such a script because, in fact, it has no inside; the burlesque is always outside itself.”

In the 1890s, professional Yiddish theatre was still a new and self-conscious form of art. Yiddish playwrights and actors were anxious to prove both themselves and their language. The Yiddish language, or zhargon (as it was commonly dubbed), was regarded by many as a language fit for housewives and itinerants but not for sophisticates, and certainly not for lofty theatre. Many feared that continued adherence to Yiddish would prevent new immigrants from becoming American and would stigmatize the rapidly growing American Jewish population. The Yiddish theatre that dominated the Lower East Side at the time did little to assuage these misgivings. The first generation of American Yiddish theatre was dominated by so-called shund (trash) theatre: melodramatic plots written by playwright hustlers, theatrical grandstanding by affected stars, and scripts rife with macaronic language and double-entendres. Even so, Yiddish theatre audiences of this generation could rival any for their sheer adoration of, if not their sophistication about, the stage. The notion of presenting Shakespeare in Yiddish seemed grotesque to much of high society, fantastic to Yiddish enthusiasts, and just plain strange to Yiddish theatre audiences, many of whom wondered who this Shekspir was. As Joel Berkowitz shows in this wonderful book, Shakespeare on the American Yiddish stage proved the value of Yiddish theatre, introduced Yiddish-speaking audiences to the Western canon, and introduced the American theatre world to its Yiddish counterpart. In these ways, Shakespeare served as a “cultural bridge” between new Jewish immigrants and the American culture into which they were assimilating.

Cambridge University Press issued the first edition of this magnificent book in 1993. Kennedy's insightful work explores how the scenography of Shakespearean production “transmits meaning” and how directorial treatment of plays from the canon signal cultural disposition. The 358-page first edition attracted critical kudos and quickly earned a place on many university reading lists. This second edition adds a complementary chapter to look at selected examples of international Shakespearean production from the final decade of the century that the book surveys. The enhanced contents add forty-five new pages of incisive commentary that include twenty-two black-and-white production photos (plus two new color plates to accompany the original twenty-one). Cambridge prints this augmented edition on a brighter gloss stock than the original, making an already richly visual volumeone where scrutiny of pictures is integral to appreciation of critical perspectiveeven more eye-friendly.

The very best in a long line of “Shakespeare Companions,” this latest entry from Oxford University Press is substantial in both a literal and figurative sense. Boasting over 3,000 entries, 608 pages, 100 illustrations, and more than a half-million words, it is the longest and most exhaustive volume of its kind ever produced. In addition, it carries the weighty authority not only of its highly respected editors, Michael Dobson and the venerable Stanley Wells, but also of a wide range of first-rate scholarly contributors, such as Helen Vendler, Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Bate, R. A. Foakes, and James Shapiro. Although the book is brilliant in many respects, it does have a conceptual flaw that somewhat limits its usefulness in the United States.

Ever since films of Shakespeare's plays have been available, first on cumbersome sixteen-millimeter celluloid reels, and more recently on inexpensive videotape and DVd, they have found their way into theatre classrooms and theatre scholarship. Whether viewed as records (albeit inadequate ones) of great stage performances, as examples of the differences between the theatrical and cinematic arts, or as evidence of Shakespeare's iconic position in high culture (and more recently in popular culture as well), the increasing availability and growing accessibility of Shakespeare films have expanded their usefulness far beyond the “Introduction to Theatre” course or articles in Shakespeare Quarterly. This has been particularly true in the past dozen or so years, as several major Shakespeare films, and even a purported biography (Shakespeare in Love), have appeared in the wake of Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film of Henry V.

Antony Tatlow's Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign is a sprawling, illuminating, and, finally, frustrating book. Tatlow opens with a challenging, though slightly misleading assertion: “Every engagement with a Shakespearean text is necessarily intercultural” in that the borders between “inter- and intracultural” performance are themselves questionable, not merely as a result of the insistent globalization of performance texts and practices, butat least as importantbecause the past itself “is really another culture” (5). Nonetheless, Tatlow retains a use for “intercultural performance in the older anthropological sense of employing, in whatever way, material from one culture within the context of another. Defamiliarizing the conventions of representation, the intercultural sign facilitates access to what has, on various levels, been culturally repressed” (6). Intercultural performance, then, frames an essentially Brechtian purpose: to render the ideological tissue of theatre visible to its audiences.

Chris Humphrey's reading of the customs of late-medieval English “festive misrule” offers a valuable critique of how contemporary approaches influenced by (chiefly) Mikhail Bakhtin's writings about carnival tend to overlook the particular contexts of and variations in cultural activities. Humphrey discusses the “safety-valve” and the “social protest” as contradictory theoretical strategies that characterize most analyses of carnival practices in the medieval period. The safety-valve approach sees carnival as a temporary outlet for suppressed social energies, which ultimately aims to restore social order at the end of an inversion of it. Alternatively, the social-protest attitude believes that carnival has the power to affectand, more important, the goal of affectingsocial relations and class struggle. Humphrey convincingly argues that although these two attitudes have great appeal, especially when one is trying to contextualize the contemporary practices of popular culture, these theories are both too general and too prescriptive, leading to inaccurate or even false conclusions about the evidence.

Wendy Wall's book analyzes domestic scenes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama by blending the methods of recent cultural studies with the caveats of recent literary theory. Examining such plays as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Shoemaker's Holiday, The English Traveller, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, she argues that the scenes of everyday life become uncanny, shifting their meaning so that the familiar becomes strange. These moments challenge the usual associations their original audiences might have harbored regarding everyday tasks. A kitchen scene might invert class relations, blur gender stereotypes, suggest illicit sexual attraction, and so forth. The book considers such domestic activities as wet-nursing, housecleaning, food preparation, medical care, and butchering. For each activity, Wall examines contemporary texts, especially books of household advice and manuscript collections, to understand the culture of the early-modern householder. She then considers how popular drama fits into such a householder's assumptions and beliefs, and she discusses what such scenes offered to early-modern viewers.

Although a minority of this important book's twelve chapters focus upon theatre and the theatrical, the volume as a whole makes an immense contribution to our understanding of the milieuor mentalityin which English plays of the early-modern period were culturally embedded.

Philip C. Kolin's volume of critical essays perfectly fills the niche between the academic study and the stage practice of Othello. Its twenty-one essays cover a vast array of material, including the major critical issues that are pertinent to the play.

These two studies of Beckett will be of enormous use to scholars but perhaps of somewhat less use to those charged with staging his plays, and therein hangs a tale.