reviews 209 women, it is argued, were motivated by the desire to interpret on their own terms the greatest role ever written. After the First World War, the female Hamlet is realized in collaboration with, or in opposition to, the vision of the male director. Howard alludes to the volatility of this tension throughout his book, exploring it specifically in Joseph Papp's 1982 production, starring Diane Venora. His patriarchal attitude and her contradictory interpretations are effectively juxtaposed, in the same chapter, against simultaneous feminist struggles in Britain to helm Shakespearean productions. The author reconstructs each Hamlet in performance, through archival material, interviews and, when applicable, his own viewing memory, rendering an incisive study of how the female Hamlet resonated with or against the body politic of her time. For example, under the Soviet regime, Meyerhold's production, to star his wife Zinaida Raikh, was never realized due to state censorship. Howard illustrates how the couple's concept of the piece and the character reflected the critical politics for which both were eventually murdered. Meanwhile, in 1990s Dublin, Michael Sheridan's adaptation Hamlet's Nightmare, featuring Olwen Foure, was a commentary on the Irish state's increasing awareness of child abuse and the attendant crisis in the Catholic Church. Sinead O'Connor's initial involvement linked the production to popular culture while extending a critique of Irish society's gendered standards of normalcy. Part of Howard's project, he states, is to 'uncover some partially forgotten histories' (p. 316). His scope, however, is much broader than recovering lost figures or arguing for women's access to the canon; he succeeds in constructing a historiographical study that links the female Hamlet, whether overtly feminist or not, to (inter)national projects of political and social activism.