Reviewed by: Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers and Big Daddies by Claire Gleitman Nicholas Duddy (bio) Claire Gleitman. Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers and Big Daddies. London: Methuen, 2022. Pp. x + 225. $115 hardcover, $34.95 paperback, $31.45 Ebook. Interest in the American theatre's representations of gender soared by the end of the twentieth century. In the space of a decade, several important studies—the collection Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama (1989) edited by June Schlueter, David Savran's Communists, Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (1992), Carla J. McDonough's Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama (1997), to name just a few—examined gender politics on the American stage. One could be forgiven, then, for expecting this critical space to now be overcrowded. This context underscores the achievement of Claire Gleitman's innovative book Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers and Big Daddies (2022), a study that traces representations of masculinity in American drama over seventy years while tracking how gender dynamics interact with attendant issues of race, class, and sexuality. "Toxic masculinity" is now in common parlance. "Anxious masculinity," however, is the phrase Gleitman employs to encapsulate "the suited figure of the 1950s male breadwinner" (5) that appears in Miller's early plays and that endures, decades later, in the drama of his theatrical descendants. Her justification is telling. "This anxiety about displacement, about losing potency, centrality, and privilege in an increasingly heterogeneous America, is the story of our times," Gleitman asserts, "and it is also the story told by the American drama that is the concern of this study" (19). Indeed, it is the concern of Gleitman's previous essays on Miller and masculinity in The Arthur Miller Journal and the collection Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas (2020), edited by Stephen Marino and David Palmer. Now in an expansive form, Gleitman once more explores "the gender dynamics—staunchly homosocial, vaguely or overtly misogynistic, anxiously homophobic—underpinning the life of the harried male breadwinner" (5) in Miller's drama. More than a single-author study, though, Gleitman's book illuminates manifestations of this anxious masculine archetype and "tangled and overwrought attitudes toward sexuality, gender roles, and domesticity" [End Page 261] (5) in the drama of Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, Suzan-Lori Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Jeremy O. Harris. Beyond presenting a chronological survey of masculinity in the American theatre, Gleitman also shows how, in several cases, playwrights have reinscribed problematic gender roles. While this book is primarily a textual analysis, Gleitman enriches her close readings with student perspectives gleaned from teaching the plays, details about the production histories and critical receptions of her case studies, and ideas from history, sociology, and gender studies. In particular, social historian Elaine Tyler May's notion of "domestic containment" (2), an ideology that promoted "a heterosexist, patriarchal world view" (3) after the Second World War to ostensibly secure American family life, serves as a central concept in Gleitman's study. Transhistorical in scope, interdisciplinary in style, and intersectional in subject, then, Anxious Masculinity offers a compelling account of gender in canonical American drama after the Second World War to the present day. Gleitman's study begins with the two plays that established Miller as a force in postwar American theatre, All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). In her discussion of the Keller family tragedy, Gleitman outlines how "men have ideals that connect them to the larger world," while "women focus on home and hearth" (38). Miller dramatizes these gendered spheres merging problematically, whereby feminized bourgeois domesticity diminishes male idealism to "self-defeating abstractions" (38). As Gleitman concludes, "there is no space for the kind of man that Miller's men claim to long to be in the inescapable prison-house of bourgeois living" (40). This is true of the most conspicuously anxious male in modern American drama: Willy Loman. Drawing on E...

Reviewed by: Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity by Kate Mattingly Crystal U. Davis (bio) Kate Mattingly. Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2023. Pp. ix + 244. $85.00. In Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity, Kate Mattingly offers an archival and autoethnographic analysis of how dance criticism has provided the frameworks within which dance history, careers, and curricula have developed and thus shaped the dance field. It engages a number of ongoing discussions in the field of dance, from the relationship between the moving body of dance and writing about dance; to the evolution of values and orientations in dance curricula; to the emergence of digital dance performance; to the tension between critic and artist, as well as the role of racial bias that culls the potential of dance criticism to reify a more racially inclusive span of dance performance. It also presents historical connections between these varying topics in an innovative way, thus helping to strengthen our understanding of dance history through the influence of dance criticism. Mattingly starts with John Martin's significant role in forging the terms and frameworks of talking about dance. Martin's influence includes the well-worn term "modern dance" itself, aesthetic orientation of how to look at and talk about dance, and what is deemed valid and what is invisibilized in dance criticism's early years. Mattingly continues by articulating the ways in which a theatrical approach and orientation to critiquing dance no longer served many dance artists as postmodernism began to disrupt the existing aesthetic expectations and storylines of early modern dance pioneers. In this context, the artist-critic emerges, where dancers begin to write about their work on their own terms, about the work of dance critics, and even the discourse of dance criticism itself. As dance critics continued to write about dance, the first dance programs in higher education began to emerge. Mattingly eloquently articulates the debate of early dance programs between dance as artistic prowess and technical display prominent in performance environments and dance as physical research process more aligned with the academic world of inquiry known in the humanities. Upon striking this distinction, this book continues by elucidating the emergence of Dance Studies and its relationship to dance as an academic field of study. Mattingly concludes with a rousing glimpse into the democratized future trajectory of dance criticism emerging in the proliferation of digital platforms that offer new frameworks for dance. This historical analysis of the dynamic relationship between dance criticism, the performing body, and digital performance and archive integrates an explicit critique of how invisibilized voices and artists now have access to digital platforms through which to offer these new frameworks for experiencing dance and dance criticism. [End Page 296] Most impressive in this book is the integration of conversations between dance criticism, dance academia, dance performance, and digital dance. It is this integration that makes this book a valuable read in each of the areas mentioned from writing about dance, dance history, movement analysis, dance curriculum, and critical theory courses on how power operates within the field of dance performance, academia, and criticism. Mattingly also makes visible the role of racial bias and exclusion of Black dance performances, choreographers, and critics by White dance critics who either wrote scathing reviews or wrote nothing at all about Black dance performances. The book illustrates, for example, how Martin obscured the work of Black artists such as Charles H. Wlliams, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora while elevating artists like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Agnes de Mille. In so doing, Shaping Dance Canons does a meticulous job of conveying the influence Martin holds in establishing frameworks such as early, "tropes of Black dancers as 'natural' performers" (50). Using examples like Yvonne Rainer, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Graham, and Jill Johnston, Shaping Dance Canons marks the tide shift of dancers critiquing dance critics and the practice of dance criticism as the Judson Dance Theater becomes a significant dance performance and experimentation space. Mattingly maintains her commitment to naming the invisibilizing of Black dancers in asserting that, even as this tide shifted in the midst of the socio-political climate of...

"The world to me is but a ceaseless storm":Pericles, The Porpoise, and the Resistance of Exile Rebekah Bale (bio) The adaptation of Shakespeare's plays into fiction has a long history. Early on it was considered a useful way to introduce the stories of the plays to children, as in Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, and more recently, Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories. However, contemporary authors have seen an opportunity to adapt and expand the stories of and within the plays in more sophisticated and mature ways. The most high-profile examples of this trend come from the Hogarth Press's series of "retellings" begun in 2016, which features adaptations by such giants of contemporary fiction as Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler, Jo Nesbø, and Jeanette Winterson. There is a clear advantage to having a familiar story to work with, and Hogarth authors were given the freedom to choose the play on which to base their work. The authors involved, it is fair to say, represent a range of talent and genre as well as literary heft. The plays chosen also largely represent Shakespeare's major works. However, the novel on which I focus in this essay, Mark Haddon's The Porpoise (2019), takes a slightly different tack by adapting one of Shakespeare's lesser known, collaboratively (and thus unevenly) written late romances, Pericles. Pericles' Nomadic Fortunes As Adam Smyth writes in the London Review of Books, the early reception of Pericles was rapturous. By 1609, Smyth reports, it had been performed "divers and sundry times," being a go-to performance for any occasion [End Page 87] needing something popular and rousing.1 It was the only late play to be printed while Shakespeare was still alive and, as Smyth continues, appears to have become a "by-word for audience appeal." The play's popularity tailed off dramatically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily due to its distasteful portrayals of incest and prostitution. These were not considered to be reflective of the moral education which Shakespeare was supposed to provide. The ambiguities of the play did not endear it to the didacticism of the literary establishment at the time. Although provisionally a happy ending, the lack of "punishment" meted out to King Antiochus for his incestuous relationship with his daughter was problematic—we only learn that both have died at the end of the play, and their deaths are presented as incidental rather than the proper conclusion to a crime-and-punishment narrative. Marina's kidnapping and stay in the brothel scenes also raised concerns, being largely performed as comedic rather than dangerous, thus not cleaving to the conventional wisdom surrounding women's virtue and its loss. Pericles did receive a brief post-World War II revival, possibly due to the protagonist's experience of suffering and rebirth as well as the transient nature of its settings. Yet the play has only truly returned from its artistic and critical exile in recent years. It could be said to be "having a moment"—its narrative and thematic combination of incestuous secrets, action scenes, isolation, hospitality, and the responsibility we have towards each other as strangers, migrants, and refugees all seem to resonate with contemporary cultural and political concerns. The loosely drawn, episodic nature of the play also reflects the fractured nature of our present selves and societies. As Patrick O'Malley states, "Pericles insists on the gaps, the resistance to the imperative of choosing the One."2 Although O'Malley is primarily focused on a queer reading of the play, he rightly points to the resistance of choosing one identity or consciousness over another as one likely reason for its current vogue. In a discussion of a recent prison production, Niels Herold notes that the play, somewhat counterintuitively, suits such an environment well. Comparing the spare resources of prison theatre programs with the "empty stage" of the early modern theatre, he argues that the play is especially appropriate for the prison context despite the initial reticence of the prisoners themselves faced with its odd design.3 Herold explains that the "restless voyaging" and the "episodic continuum of scenes" in the [End Page 88] play's formal structure...

Longing to Stay Tied:Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet as a Work of Creative Criticism Amy Muse (bio) I miss you, I miss you, I would give anything to have you back, anything at all. While Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (2020) is offered to us as a work of fiction, a historical novel, it might equally be understood and perhaps even more deeply appreciated as a work of creative criticism. She crafts a tale imagining what many readers want to know more intimately: the courtship and marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, the births of their children, the death of their son Hamnet, and the creation soon afterward of the play Hamlet. But O'Farrell rises above a mere filling in the gaps left by the factual record. Her creative re-imaginings of Shakespeare's marriage, his wife's own form of artistry, and both parents' grieving the loss of their child are not just fictional creations but also critical interventions in the way that Shakespeare's life—his wife, marriage, and parenthood—and his art—Hamlet—have been perceived. Like all the best criticism, O'Farrell's creative writing is a form of creative reading that brings us back to a desire for an encounter, a feeling of encounter with the text that was primary. Hamnet is less about Shakespeare than it is an encounter with Shakespeare, undertaken in a Shakespearean manner—that is, not littered with "thous" and "forsooths," but crafted in Shakespeare's distinctive art of indirection. O'Farrell's novel is also deeply informed by literary criticism; she cites Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife and the studies of James Shapiro among her prized sources. She conducted an enormous amount [End Page 9] of research on falconry, herbology, epidemiology of the Black Plague, and of what one would see and hear and smell in the streets of London in 1600. But none of that is trumpeted in the book; we are not taken out of the story to admire how clever and studious she is. Like Shakespeare did when composing Hamlet, a play that would accelerate not only his career but playwriting itself in its innovations of interiority onstage, O'Farrell writes by way of radical excision, paring away anything that would prevent our complete absorption in her world. That term, "radical excision," is Stephen Greenblatt's. When Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, Greenblatt argues, he found that he could "immeasurably deepen the effect" of his plays and create an "intense representation of inwardness" if he removed expected details, if he excised "a key explanatory element" or motive, whether of causal plot element or psychological rationale. This technique of radical excision was not used to make "a riddle to be solved" but instead to create a "strategic opacity" that "released an enormous energy" which had heretofore been "at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations."1 As a result, in Hamlet Shakespeare was not only able to represent Hamlet's inwardness but also his own, to conjure, as Greenblatt puts it, "the deepest expression of his being."2 Greenblatt assumes that this "conceptual breakthrough" of radical excision was not merely technical; in other words, it was not just a new aesthetic strategy, but a personal revelation. Hamnet's death shook Shakespeare so profoundly that it inspired him to fashion a new inner structure of plays that could express his "root perception of existence," his "preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled."3 But, we might ask, how could Greenblatt really know this? Is his biography a work of creative criticism, an expression of his own literary critic's desire to discover and share in Shakespeare's root perception of existence? In that case, might we also consider Hamlet its own brand of creative criticism—a work that resees the legend of Amleth as a tale of grief? A tale and a telling that critiques the popular genre of revenge tragedy and its tired conventions by getting under them to see how much revengers are grieving, and slowing down the pace of the play to sit with the revengers and listen to why? Perhaps all innovation...

Introduction:Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction Graley Herren (bio) and Niamh J. O'Leary (bio) "Every age creates its own Shakespeare," asserts Marjorie Garber at the beginning of Shakespeare After All. "What is often described as the timelessness of Shakespeare, the transcendent qualities for which his plays have been praised around the world and across the centuries, is perhaps better understood as an uncanny timeliness, a capacity to speak directly to circumstances the playwright could not have anticipated or foreseen."1 Shakespeare certainly still speaks to spectators, readers, and writers in the 21st century—but we also talk back. This special issue on "Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction" for Comparative Drama contributes to a larger ongoing discourse of "talking back to Shakespeare." The first book to use this term explicitly appears to have been Martha Tuck Rozett's Talking Back to Shakespeare (1994). Rozett notes that this practice stemmed from her experiences teaching undergraduate Shakespeare courses. When she started to encounter more and more [End Page 1] resistance from her students who questioned the values, assumptions, and biases they found in the plays, Rozett began devising assignments where students produced "transformations" of Shakespeare in response. She had long noted how theatre practitioners effectively offered such transformations through creative stage adaptations. But she became increasingly interested in the diverse array of Shakespearean transformations from contemporary creative writers. "As I continued to teach and write about Shakespeare," Rozett reflected, I began to see a kinship, a kind of temperamental and critical affinity, between the talking back that occurred in the classroom and the published transformations I was reading. When writers transform Shakespeare's plays, they challenge the author's perceived intent, or perhaps more precisely, the cultural and critical baggage the text has acquired over time. They talk back to the cultural authority that has been invested in the plays, even as they appropriate that cultural authority as the originating premise for a new imaginative construct.2 Jo Eldridge Carney further elaborates upon this transformative dialectical process in her recent book Women Talk Back to Shakespeare (2022). "Talking back," according to Carney, "typically implies a rebuke to an authoritative position, but it can also be a less accusatory impulse to continue a conversation." The works she examines "are not all unmitigated critiques of Shakespeare's plays but they do insist on reexamination of their aesthetic and ideological terms, and they invite a dialogue in which women and Shakespeare can talk back—and forth—with each other."3 The critics and novelists included in this special issue share the approach articulated so well by Rozett and Carney. The following articles all focus upon a contemporary novel (published within the past fifteen years), which significantly adapts or reinvents a play by Shakespeare. These critical and creative works engage with Shakespeare's drama, neither to praise the bard nor to bury him, but to talk back and forth in a meaningful and mutually enriching dialogue. The articles are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, but here is a brief preview of what you can look forward to reading in "Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction." In the opening article, Amy Muse argues that Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 historical novel Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague doubles effectively [End Page 2] as "creative criticism." The term was coined in 1910 by J. E. Spingarn, but it has enjoyed a resurgence in the 21st century. Muse cites as illustrations the exemplary two volumes (2009 and 2013) of The Story about the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, edited by J. C. Hallman. These collections feature writing about literature from celebrated authors like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Cynthia Ozick, and Salman Rushdie. There is a larger lesson to be learned from such writing, namely that, as Graham Holderness puts it in Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions, "the best criticism is actually creative writing."4 Creative criticism is an emerging force in Shakespeare Studies as well, witnessed, for instance, in the 2016 special issue on "Creative Critical Shakespeares" for Critical Survey. Muse makes a persuasive case for O'Farrell's Hamnet as the consummate realization of this aesthetic. The novel is not only a captivating work of fiction in its...