1 In Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson, the editors bring together fifteen scholars whose work is possible because of Levenson’s ground-breaking studies in the three title topics. Defending the seemingly arbitrary combination of topics in their introduction, the editors, Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil, argue: “These asymmetrical but overlapping spheres have created a mega-field of intertextual relations,” (3) and that these fifteen essays “contribute to the historical and contemporary discursive relationships that partially constitute both Shakespeare and modern drama as adaptive fields” (4). Throughout the introduction the editors play on a double meaning of the word ‘adaptation.’ Within the context of discussing dramatic and performative work, ‘adaptation’ means a new work derived from a sustained engagement with a literary text, as Julie Sanders defines it, whereas the term takes on Darwinian undertones when the editors shift to the use of ‘self-adaptation.’ Although this term is never explicitly defined in the introduction, I take it to be closely related to the New Historicist ‘self-fashioning.’

2 The essays have logically been compiled and organized into three sections: Shakespeare and Modern Drama, Shakespeare, and finally, Modern Drama. Part I focuses on Shakespeare in modern adaptation and performance, on stage, screen, and in narrative. This section broadly explores topics that include Hersh Zeifman’s discussion of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as being heavily influenced by not only Waiting for Godot, but also Beckett’s short stories and the Belgian philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Andrea Most examines West Side Story through the lens of early- and mid-twentieth-century Jewish influences on the entertainment industry in “West Side Story and the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism.” Peter Holland performs a reverse-chronological analysis of three adaptations for the stage in “Unwinding Coriolanus: Osborne, Grass, and Brecht.” Robert Ormsby and John H. Astington argue for performances of Shakespeare as reflections of nationalism in “‘Bold, but Seemingly Marketable’: The 2007 Stratford Ontario Merchant” and “Macbeth and Modern Politics,” respectively. This section, not only the longest in the book, but also the most diverse in its subject matter, also manages to discuss representations of live performance on film in Margaret Jane Kidnie’s “Staging Shakespeare for ‘Live’ Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty,” as well as the various identities crafted for the Bard with the emergence of the Shakespeare memoir in Katherine Scheil’s contribution.

3 Part II moves toward discussing Shakespeare’s stylistic evolution not only over time, but also within a single work. James C. Bulman’s contribution on “Editing the Bawdy in Henry IV, Part Two,” explores the increased use of bawdy wordplay from Part One to Part Two of Henry IV, whereas Stanley Wells’s “Extremes of Passion” examines the way that Shakespeare cues actors’ emotional shifts within the text of King Lear. This section also seeks to challenge long-held assumptions of Shakespearean scholarship, as in Alexander Leggatt’s “Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature,” and Hanna Scolnicov’s “Lear’s Conversation with the Philosopher,” wherein they each seek to problematize canonical readings of these studied texts. Perhaps the most intriguing essay in this section comes from Randall Martin as he discusses Pauline cartography as an intertext for The Tempest in addition to the oft-cited account of the lost Virginia Company expedition, Sea Venture. Martin asserts that The Tempest is a dual-sided discourse on the “supposed merits or demerits of colonial conversion,” (199), and argues that merely probing the late romance through a post-colonial lens does little for our understanding of the play’s reception in Jacobean England.

4 The third, final, and briefest section of this collection is concerned with modern drama, as it discusses works by Shaw, Williams, Coward, and Pinter. Alan Ackerman’s “An Experiment in Teaching: Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and Brian Parker’s “‘The Going to Pieces of T. Lawrence Shannon’: Notes on Tennessee Williams’s Drafts of The Night of the Iguana (1961),” explore the playwrights’ respective processes of self-adaptation and the textual histories of the discussed works. Ackerman throws Pygmalion’s ambiguous ending into relief with Shaw’s extraordinarily specific epilogue that concludes his novelization of the play. These two versions of Shaw’s Pygmalion story are contrasted with the saccharine ending of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. Parker’s study of The Night of the Iguana examines the multiple incarnations of Williams’s story from 1940 to 1961. Finally, Rebecca S. Cameron’s contribution, “‘How do you play this game?’: Nonsensical Language Games in Shaw, Coward, and Pinter,” analyzes the way that these three playwrights challenged authority and the forced standardization of the English language in Britain (and its colonies) in the early twentieth century.

5 This collection of essays, a unique tribute to Levenson, is, at times, a bit dizzying due to the breadth of the subjects under consideration. The volume ultimately lacks a unifying idea outside of being a dedication to this prolific scholar, her extensive body of work, and numerous accomplishments (which Jane Freeman’s afterword enumerates), and is difficult to digest. As the essays jump forward and backward in time, discussing adaptations, films, memoirs, Shakespeare’s own work, editorial practices, Elizabethan and Jacobean historiography, and finally, many of these topics within modern drama, I found it difficult to keep sight of what to take away from this collection.

6 Nevertheless, the scope and depth of the essays Martin and Scheil have included within this book is impressive, eliciting discussion and arousing interest in forthcoming projects by the contributing authors. Martin and Scheil’s collection can fruitfully be read in conjunction with Ruby Cohn’s 1976 landmark study Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, Julie Sanders’s and Linda Hutcheon’s discussions of the art of adaptation and appropriation, as well as Margaret Jane Kidnie’s Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama, an imposing assemblage of publications from English and Shakespeare scholars, will also prove useful to anyone interested in discussions of ‘self-adaptation,’ as well as Shakespearean and modern textual and performance histories.