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Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance. By Pascale Aebischer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiii + 221 pages.
The title of this interesting and valuable study may be a little misleading: Pascale Aebischer is at least as interested in the ways in which human bodies are absent or expelled from playtexts, performances, and critical discussions as she is in their violation in a literal sense. She writes about how particular bodies are "under threat of erasure" because of their silence, marginalization, racial "otherness," "bemonstering," or death as well as because of their mutilation. The book focuses on four of William Shakespeare's tragedies, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, and they are treated in separate chapters, but some topics overlap from one chapter to another: the importance of wounded or dead bodies in revenge plots carries on from the Titus chapter into the Hamlet one, for example, and the Othello chapter looks back to Titus as it discusses "murderous male Moors." Aebischer's avowed intention is to marginalize the white male subject of tragedy in order to "make way for his gendered and racial Others," and more specifically to draw on performance history to demonstrate how the absence of these Others in the texts can be compensated for by their physical presence on stage (5).
Performance-based critical studies of Shakespeare's plays have become increasingly popular in recent years, perhaps especially amongst academics based in the United Kingdom who have comparatively good access both to productions and to theater archives. Indeed the very accessibility of the Royal Shakespeare Company's archives at the Shakespeare Centre Library at Stratford-upon-Avon has arguably resulted in a somewhat unfair "canonization" of productions by this one particular company, not only quite overtly in the Players of Shakespeare series edited from the Shakespeare Centre and the Shakespeare Institute, but also in books such as Penny Gay's As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Heroines (1994), Sarah Werner's Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (2001), and Carol Chillington Rutter's Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage (2001). The RSC features largely in Aebischer's contribution to this genre too, but she casts her net more widely to include several productions by the Royal National Theatre Company and film versions of each of the...