Comparative Drama

420Comparative Drama Gendering Bodies/Performing Art is not without its organizational roughness, as if the book were straining to hold together so many different topics and figures. At times its juxtapositions of figures from dance and literature feel slightly forced. But the fact that the book's material tends to elude its author's attempt to give it narrative shape is perhaps inescapable given the complex interlocking of issues involved in an interdisciplinary project such as this. The chapters on dance are especially strong and will be of particular value to readers trained in the literary or non-dance performance studies. In the end, though, Koritz' study is less about the specific trajectories of dance, aesthetics, and literature than it is about the cultural field in which these trajectories find their individual and collective orientation. Gendering Bodies/Performing Art is an engrossing and illuminating portrait of that historical field in which modernism emerged as a cultural formation, the arts (elite and popular) established unprecedented forms of dialogue, and the gendered body came into its own as a site of aesthetic, political, and cultural contest. This emphasis on the body in culture makes Koritz' study a particularly valuable contribution to cultural studies and to our understanding of the corporeal politics of early twentieth-century Britain . What Koritz finds in her textual and historical material may cause some to revise their assessment of this moment when the twentiethcentury arts came into being. That many of the theorists/practitioners covered in this book sought to dehumanize and eclipse the (mostly female ) body—to objectify it within an aesthetics of male authorial control—is a disquieting commentary on symbolism, modernism, and their enabling cultural moment. STANTON B. GARNER, JR. University of Tennessee, Knoxville Yoshiko Ueno, ed. Hamlet in Japan. New York: AMS Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 313. $57.50. In her book Jung and Shakespeare (1992), Barbara Rogers-Gardner introduces the interesting story of a famous anthropologist who sat with a primitive tribe in New Guinea around the evening campfire and told them the story of Hamlet. The anthropologist's story fell flat: the tribesmen thought that Hamlet was a fool and that Claudius was a hero. They did not understand that Hamlet should grieve over his mother's hasty marriage with his uncle since a proper tribal man must marry his brother's widow. The chief said, "What a mess. No longer any king. Everybody's dead, and it's all Hamlet's fault. Listen to ghosts and you11 wind up one of them." The story tells us that the universality of Hamlet is by no means obvious everywhere in the world. But in Japan Reviews421 Hamlet has been the most popular of Shakespeare's plays since it was first staged in faithful translation in 1911. Perhaps nowhere except in Japan can one enjoy such a great variety of productions of Shakespeare's plays, particularly ?? Hamlet. For example , in 1990 seventeen different productions of this play were staged, including six from overseas and several adaptations of the original play, in Tokyo alone. Two years before, in the spring of 1988, the Tokyo Globe Theater, a replica of the original Globe on the south bank of the Thames, opened. The opening festival was celebrated with Hamlet by the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden directed by Ingmar Bergman. Since then, the Tokyo Globe Theater has been concentrating on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and including both Japanese companies and companies from overseas. While the Globe provides an authentic atmosphere, the trend among the younger generation of directors and actors has been to produce free and adventurous adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, most notably Hamlet. The purpose of collecting the essays in Hamlet in Japan is stated by the book's editor: "Although there are various Japanese studies and productions of Hamlet, not many are known outside of Japan. Quite contrary to the present economic situation, our imports have greatly exceeded out exports in regard to Shakespeare. This volume is an attempt to adjust such an imbalance, even if on a small scale." Anyone who opens this volume will be struck by the rich variety of essays, which range from new readings of the...