Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation

by Margaret Jane Kidnie

Shakespeare's plays continue to be circulated on a massive scale in a variety of guises - as editions, performances, and adaptations - and it is by means of such mediation that we come to know his drama. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation addresses fundamental questions about this process of mediation, making use of the fraught category of adaptation to explore how we currently understand the Shakespearean work. To adapt implies there exists something to alter, but what constitutes the category of the ‘play’, and how does it relate to adaptation? How do ‘play’ and ‘adaptation’ relate to drama’s twin media, text and performance? What impact might answers to these questions have on current editorial, performance, and adaptation studies?

Margaret Jane Kidnie argues that ‘play’ and ‘adaptation’ are provisional categories - mutually dependent processes that evolve over time in accordance with the needs of users. This theoretical argument about the identity of works and the nature of text and performance is pursued in relation to diverse examples, including theatrical productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told, the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and recent print editions of the complete works. These new readings build up a persuasive picture of the cultural and intellectual processes that determine how the authentically Shakespearean is distinguished from the fraudulent and adaptive. Adaptation thus emerges as the conceptually necessary but culturally problematic category that results from partial or occasional failures to recognize a shifting work in its textual-theatrical instance.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 2007

About the author

Margaret Jane Kidnie is a Professor of English at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Kidnie's basic argument here, which revolves around the problem of defining how we can know when something is (or more pragmatically, isn't) an adaptation of Shakespeare, either in performance, in new authorship, or in textual editing. Essentially, she argues that we must always evaluate any particular iteration of Shakespeare--again, performance, marked adaptation/appropriation, or 'authorized' edition--against a continually evolving notion of the "work." What's really interesting here is that, in what seems to me to be picking up from some postmodern notions of subjectivity, the work does not precede its iterations, but comes into being through them and is continually (re)defined through those iterations. One of her major points is that there is no unproblematic entity that could be identified as the true Hamlet (for instance). Therefore, Hamlet exists only as a work, and we as viewers/readers/interpreters/critics decide for ourselves--on the basis of an impression of Hamlet-the-work that is partially idiosyncratic and partially constructed by a larger cultural field emploting Hamlet for us--whether or not a particular instance IS Hamlet or not.

While I like this basic premise, I don't care for Kidnie's prose style or organization. Much of her analysis seems to depart from the fundamental question of adaptation, and even from the particular arguments she is making about the performances or texts immediately under consideration in a section. For instance, the section "Recognizing the Royal Shakespeare Company" essentially claims that because of Dame Judi Dench's performance, Gregory Doran's 2003 All's Well That Ends Well was a critical success, was regarded as a legitimate production of the play, and helped save the compromised reputation of the RSC. However, in making this argument (which stands in contrast to the criticism of Matthew Warchus' 1997 Hamlet), Kidnie gives us ten pages of what I feel is a digressive, though rather encyclopedic, narrative of the problems created for the RSC by the former Artistic Director Adrian Noble. While this is a detailed and moderately interesting account of the problems, challenges, and politics of restructuring the RSC, it has little immediate connection to the question of adaptation as such, and the point that the RSC was in major trouble during the late 1990s and into the early 2000s could have been made much quicker without shifting our focus off of adaptation for ten pages out of a nineteen page chapter.

[Asho · Rating 4 out of 5]

I opted to read this book because I'm interested in Shakespeare performance and I thought it would describe some interesting adaptations. I was right about that, and I think Kidnie complicates the definition of "adaptation" in interesting and useful ways. Only four stars, though, because sometimes I think she spent too much time on describing the performances and doing what basically amounted to script (or performance) analysis without immediately tying it back to her key points. She also muddles up her own definitions after a while, although I suppose maybe that's the point, that "adaptation" is a slippery term.