Book Review: Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson

Book Reviews: Edited by Kim Solga, with Sally Colwell As Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil note in their introduction, Shakespeare and modern drama may be thought "odd bedfellows" (3); however, in this collection, the two make for an engaging and stimulating group of fifteen essays that range from James C. Bulman's analysis of the bawdy language in Henry IV, Part Two, to Brian Parker's examination of Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana. Martin and Scheil frame the expansive range of the essays in their collection through adaptation theory, citing the work of Julie Sanders and Linda Hutcheon to reject the idea of Shakespeare's work as a privileged starting point for examining the relationship between his plays and modern or contemporary texts. The essays are also held together by a sustained focus on the reciprocal relationship between texts (and performances as texts), a relationship shaped by cultural context and its construction, by audiences and readers, and by the internal process of writing itself.