Volume 34, Number 18 · November 19, 1987
Much Ado About Everything
By Robert M. Adams
The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition
by Jan Kott, translated by Daniela Miedzyrzecka, by Lillian Valee
Northwestern University Press, 165 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Inexorable as the changing year, 'contemporary' versions and interpretations of Shakespeare come forth as by a natural process. Some good and little permanent harm is done thereby. However it may be butchered in an 'adaptation,' the established text of Shakespeare is not harmed; one can always return to it, or use it as the basis of another (and perhaps more successful) revival. Given the dreary way Shakespeare is taught in many classrooms, almost any variations that invite an audience to see our English classic as living theater are bound to be a good thing. On the other hand, one risks cheapening the original by implying that without circus tricks onstage, without virtuoso feats of free-association scholarship in the commentary, the plays are somehow insufficient. There's always a certain complacent, Whiggish assumption behind a 'modernizing' project that this is what the original creator would have approved if he had been fortunate enough to live in our time.
Review, 3791 words
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