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Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds.), Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii + 268.
Let's begin at the end. In the very last paragraph of his "Afterword" to the volume, Gordon McMullan quotes and critiques a passage from Chapter 1 by Franklin J. Hildy in which Hildy quotes and critiques a passage from Howard Brenton's May 2007 article from The Guardian. Against Brenton's enthusiastic account of a visit to die Globe ("seeing the scenes flow one against the other in some.· thing like their natural habitat, I marvelled at Shakespeare's stagecraft . . . " [13]), Hildy cautions that "[i]t is certainly possible [ . . . ] that the flow of scenes Bren ton observed has nothing to do with Shakespeare's actual stagecraft and everydiing to do with what we want that stagecraft to have been" (14). McMullan insists that the risk of which Hildy has warned is "worth taking": "More than that, it can be seen to be not a risk at all, but rather both an inevitability and a productivity of a kind [ . . . ]-not a recovery of things lost but a genuine, even an authentic, invention" (233).
One of the reasons I start my review with these quotes is that all three arguments are also reviews of sorts (Brenton's of a performance at the Globe, Hildy 's of Brenton's thoughts, McMullan's of Hildy's). Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment collects reflections on the new (or third) Globe Theatre's first decade of operation, and thus I am reviewing reviews. More important, these three arguments represent three different critical attitudes. They span from Brenton's enthusiasm about the new Globe's success in recuperating Shakespeare's stagecraft, to Hildy's caveat about this "naive notion" (14), to McMullan's qualified enthusiasm-if not about the triumph of any kind of historical recovery (let alone revival), then about the Globe's compelling achievement in creating "something new" that "draws on both early modern and postmodern practice ..." (233). These three attitudes epitomize both the current spectriim and the diachronic trajectory of the arguments (both in this book and beyond) regarding the conception and the first ten years of the new Globe Theatre.
Moreover, the quotes above create a strong cohesive link between the...