Content area
Full Text
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation. Edited by JAY L. HALIO. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995. Pp. 156. $29.50 cloth.
Reviewed by DEBORAH T. CURREN-AQUINO
In one classroom of a prominent Washington, D.C., university, there hangs an old print entitled "Washington Irving and His Literary Circle at Sunnyside." The American author of "Rip Van Winkle" is comfortably positioned in a salon setting, surrounded by fellow writers that include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. On the floor, occupying the foreground, is a crumpled piece of paper-presumably a literary effort that did not make it to the publisher. The anthology under review, like the print, provides the pleasurable experience of being in a room with gifted minds-in this case, distinguished scholars who have made significant contributions to Shakespeare studies over the years. Occasionally, though, the collection called to my mind the crumpledpaper image, since the quality of the essays is uneven.
In the editor's introduction to the volume, Professor Halio is quite frank about the volume's rather eclectic provenance. Three essays-Francois Laroque's "Tradition and Subversion in Romeo and Juliet," Jean-Marie Maguin's "Shakespeare, Hypnos, and Thanatos: Romeo and Juliet in the Space of Myth," and Jerzy Limon's "Rehabilitating Tybalt: A New Interpretation of the Duel Scene"-were part of a lecture series entitled "Shakespeare from an International Perspective" and delivered at the University of Delaware during the 1992-93 academic year. Since these three papers, quite by chance, were devoted to the same play, the editor decided to build on this happenstance and bring out a book focusing solely on Romeo. Thus three additional pieces were solicited-Alan C. Dessen's "Q1 Romeo and Juliet and Elizabethan Theatrical Vocabulary," Joan Ozark Holmer's "No `Vain Fantasy': Shakespeare's Refashioning of Nashe for Dreams and Queen Mab," and Jill Levenson's " `Alla stoccado carries it away': Codes of Violence in Romeo and Juliet." To fill out the volume, Halio turned to a paper he had written for a 1992 Shakespeare Association of America seminar on the topic of revision and adaptation in Shakespeare's two- and three-text plays and revised it as "Handy-Dandy: Q1/Q2 Romeo and Juliet"
Given the varied and somewhat expedient conditions surrounding the collection's genesis, it's...