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Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil (eds.), Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.
Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil's volume brings together top scholars to examine the modern adaptations of Shakespeare and the work of adaptation in modern drama. The dust jacket advertises the collection of essays as the "first book-length international study to examine the critical and theatrical connections among [Shakespeare, adaptation, and modern drama], including the motivations, methods, and limits of adaptation in modern performance media." Together, the fifteen essays and invaluable introduction also advance the pioneering work of the scholar Jill L. Levenson. They honor her by forming an adept collection that illuminates the "adaptive relationships across and within" its subjects (10).
The tripartite grouping of the essays clarifies the book's intertextual purpose: Part I: Shakespeare and Modern Drama; Part II: Shakespeare; and Part III: Modern Drama. Part I mostly centers on Shakespeare adaptations for the modern stage. Peter Holland, in the volume's opening essay "Unwinding Coriolanus: Osborne, Grass, and Brecht," traces the multidirectional and creative history of "four plays, three productions, one lecture, and one quasi-play" to follow the hermeneutic relationship between Shakespeare and these modern reconstructions (27-28). While Hersh Zeifman's essay discusses the existential relationship between Belgian philosopher Arnold Geulincx's image of the boat journey in Samuel Beckett's Molly, Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, the three subsequent essays concern adaptations of Shakespeare in non-dramatic media such as musicals, novels, films, and television. Andrea Most observes that West Side Story inhabits a hybrid form of musical comedy and Elizabethan drama in order to "express the tensions and concerns of 1950s American liberal culture" (56). Margaret Jane Kidnie turns to fictionalized treatments...