Book Reviews

Abstract

Constructing Shakespeares by Emeritus Professor Balz Engler offers an important critical contribution to Renaissance studies and, together, to performance studies. Consisting of five essays—“Construction,” “Monumental Shakespeare,” “Occasions: Status and Process,” “Hamlet: Passages We Live By” and “Re-Productions,” with an introduction which sets the book’s “Premises” and its final “Coda”—the publication, supported by the Berta Hess-Cohn Foundation and the Max Geilinger Foundation of Zurich, is consistently interested in the Shakespearean oeuvre as a performative authority through history via the notion of the deconstruction of the text as a “classic,” and in contemporary times through the “media” apparatus that makes it enjoyable and relevant still today, in the global world, among different and differentiated audiences. The question of the “audience” is the focus of the “Premises,” which deals with the modalities in which the Shakespearean text (the main reference goes to Prospero’s Epilogue and its final invitation to the audience’s indulgence, that is, its applause) inserts the notion of the “performance as process” (17), the play being “an occasion of which the audience is part” (18). Indeed, Engler’s position is that the audience takes part, plays a central part in the performance, contributes to the success or failure of the play, and represents the oral/social agent of dramatic authority. “Sociality” and “communication,” therefore, are to be considered as essential elements to the “making of a great author,” and particularly to the magnitude of Shakespeare, thus advancing a benevolent criticism of the Romantic notion of his texts as “books to read” (the reference goes to Charles Lamb’s appreciation of Shakespeare’s soliloquies). The activity of reading, as Professor Engler maintains, is already and always part of