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What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? by Richard Burt and Julian Yates

2014; Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pgn.2014.0094

1832-8334

Marina Gerzić,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Reviewed by: What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? by Richard Burt and Julian Yates Marina Gerzic Burt, Richard and Julian Yates, What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; paperback; pp. ix, 166; 19 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$29.00, £17.50; ISBN 9781137270498. John Heminge and Henry Condell, both instrumental in the preparation of William Shakespeare’s First Folio, open the Folio with a plea that readers ‘Reade [Shakespeare] againe, and againe’ (p. 1). What’s the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare? According to scholars Richard Burt and Julian Yates, through a conversation with Heminge and Condell’s plea, the answer is, ‘not read him’ (p. 1). In their co-authored volume What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?, Burt and Yates embark on a project of ‘un/reading’ (p. 14) Shakespeare through the analysis of rich and varied responses to his work in a variety of media forms, focusing in particular on the ‘media specific interruptions of reading in print editions, film adaptations, and so on’ (p. 14). What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? comprises an introductory chapter and four other chapters. In each chapter, Burt and Yates attempt to present a rethinking of previous understandings and assumptions about Shakespeare’s work, through combining close textual and media analysis, and highlighting the complex interaction of the Bard’s work with various commentaries, adaptations, and re-workings. Chapter 1 begins with Burt and Yates defining readers as ‘biocultural wetware’ (p. 1), an organic system through which Shakespeare’s work survives and lives on. Emphasising the links between text, media, and reader, Burt and Yates encourage readers to view Shakespeare’s plays as a ‘mobile, conflicting, conflicted, and partially time-bound set of practices’ (p. 2). They then examine the ‘rhetoric of unreadability’ (p. 3) in notable critical debates in New Textualism and the history of the book. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are each devoted to a single play, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest respectively. Chapter 2 begins with a fascinating crosscut conversation between scholar John Dover Wilson’s seminal work What Happens in Hamlet and philosopher Avital Ronnel’s account of Hamlet in her work The Telephone Book. Through an examination of Hamlet’s role as a dysfunctional relay system in the play, Burt and Yates tackle Barnardo’s opening question in Hamlet, ‘Who’s there?’ exploring the way in which voices in Hamlet go missing, are interrupted, recorded, and relayed (pp. 30–37). In Chapter 3, Burt and Yates offer a detailed analysis of what they term a ‘spin off’ (p. 63) of Romeo and Juliet, the short film Where is My Romeo by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The film, which focuses on the reactions of a series of women watching Juliet’s suicide at the end of Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, examines ideas of presence and absence and mourning. In Chapter 4, Burt and Yates explore the contrast between George Lamming’s The Pleasure of Exile and Aimé Césaire’s The Tempest, and the idea [End Page 148] of book drowning and its connection to the paratext of the closing credits in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest. Chapter 5 tackles the film Anonymous, director Roland Emmerich’s take on the contentious Shakespeare authorship debate. While the film brazenly posits that the Earl of Oxford is the true author of the Shakespeare’s works, the film ‘refuses to bear witness to the fact of that writing’ (p. 114). Burt and Yates convincingly argue that Anonymous is part of the disaster film genre, concerned with the idea of the archive and its destruction, deconstructs ‘assumptions … about anonymous authorship’, and is ultimately a ‘catastrophic mess’ (p. 116). What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? is written in a refreshing quick-fire style, at times informal and irreverent, but nevertheless engaging, entertaining, and scholarly. Detailed endnotes, including full references of all works cited, a cumulative index of references, and over a dozen well-chosen black-and-white illustrations (mostly...