The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Edited by Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 291 + illus. £15.99/$24.99 Pb; £45/$85 Hb. - Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage. By Frances Teague. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp ix + 221 + illus. £19.99/$31.99 Pb; £48/$91 Hb.

Abstract

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.

Enacting memories through and with things: Remembering as material engagement

“…'Leïla, souviens-toi, tu m'as sauvé jadis, soyez sauvés par moi' 6. Interestingly, while sharing Donald's arguments, Jones (2007) proposed a different view on how exograms externalise memory. For him, memory is manifested in the way in which people physically engage with exograms to retrieve specific information and not just in the content that exograms store.…”

9 Hogbacks: the Materiality of Solid Spaces

“…Thus, hogbacks can be theorized as a technological choice of material and form and as strategic skeuomorphism. These themes operated within a 'technology of remembrance' (Jones 2007;Williams 2006), projecting and constituting a distinctive vision of the dead and their identities in relation to a variegated constituency of survivors. In this context, hogbacks can be regarded as constituting and commemorating social status and identity and social memories of either de novo dynasties or established elites reformulating their identities within a new socio-political context.…”

3 Walking Down Memory Lane: Rune-Stones as Mnemonic Agents in the Landscapes of Late Viking-Age Scandinavia

“…Therefore, we must recognize that rune-stones with carved and painted texts, images and ornamentation are evocative and demand attention, forcing one's body to behave, and be oriented, perhaps even disoriented, in certain ways. as images, rune-stones affect and engage the beholder, and they are actively entangled in social structuration (Mitchell 2005;Jones 2007;Back danielsson et al 2012, 5-7). as such, the rune-stones introduce phenomenological registers that exceed the thought of rune-stones as encoded statements or representative of christian inaugurations.…”