Alan Dessen, Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and
Modern Productions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), xi + 268pp, ISBN 0521007984
By “price tags” and “trade-offs,” Alan Dessen means the price that must be paid, along with the plusses, when a director rescripts a play by trimming and streamlining it for production or rewrites it on a larger scale. Dessen’s purpose, as in much of his writing about the theater, is to bring us close to the actual words of the playtext and the adjustments that shape productions. This idea in itself is a familiar one. What Dessen’s book has going for it is the wealth of experience he brings to bear as theater historian and critic. He is astutely knowledgeable about the conditions of performance on the Elizabethan stage, and has comprehensively defined for us the visual language through which
Elizabethan audiences learned how to interpret the meaning of riding boots, satin clothing, livery cloaks, blue coats, napkins draped over the arm, and much more, along with the aural meaning of trumpet signals, the discharge of cannon, and the like. At the same time, Dessen is a veteran of modern performances on an extensive scale. The combination of these two expertises enables him to draw on his knowledge of staging practices during Shakespeare’s working career “In order to shed some light on problems and choices found in the 1990s and early 2000s” (p. 2).
As with productions themselves, the value of such an undertaking is in the details, and here the book is abundantly wealthy. (Unfortunately, there are no illustrations, despite the abiding interest of this book in recent theater history.) Dessen is able to document for us notable instances of word changes aimed at glossing unfamiliar language for the audience, as when, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of
Hamlet in 2001, Laertes’s poisoned sword was “unblunted” rather than
“unbated,” or when the Royal Shakespeare production of Anthony and
Cleopatra in 1994 changed Enobarbus’s “rheum” to “cold” (3.4.279).
Other instances pour forth from Dessen’s cornucopia. So too with reworking or deletion of tangled syntax, or of phrases that are purportedly guilty of political incorrectness. The text is altered to fit an actor’s dress or failure to sport a beard. Updating of location creates problems when the text refers to swords, bills, doublet and hose, and copotain hats. At the opposite extreme, we learn of directors who retain what most editors dismiss as textual errors, like the Folio’s “pood pasture” in As You Like It ,
3.2.27. Dessen presents us with extensive and entertaining evidence on how Shakespeare’s plays have been cut for production. Some cuts are standard, like the Fortinbras materials in Hamlet ; others are more intriguing. Reassignment of speeches is often a matter of theatrical exigency, especially limitations in the personnel available. All these

economies carry price tags. Dessen discusses the pros and cons with piquant detail, relating such adjustments to the ways in which directors reconceptualize the plays they are producing even as they make pragmatic theatrical choices.
Another advantage of Dessen’s wide-ranging expertise in staging matters both Elizabethan and modern is that he speaks with authority about Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The book’s title is misleading to the gratifying extent that Dessen has wonderful things to say about productions of The Alchemist , Volpone , The Devil is an Ass (played at the
Swan in 1995 without most of its now-obscure references to contemporary monopolies and other legal niceties), The Shoemakers’
Holiday , Bartholomew Fair , and The Honest Whore , among others. In many such instances, running time was a major factor in cutting. Dessen is generally tolerant of directorial choices, allowing that theater marches to its own drummer. He is understandably more tolerant of matters of economy and obscurity than of larger rewritings in which the director usurps the role of dramatist. Barry Kyle’s version of The Maid’s Tragedy in 1981 for the RSC dealt with scenes that did not translate well into modern idiom by dispensing with them. A 1993 BBC production of The
Changeling did away entirely with the plot of Alibius, Isabella, Lollio, and Isabella’s two wooers.
Dessen’s entertaining book is valuable largely for its wealth of anecdotal material. Certain elements are grouped together in particular chapters on inserting an intermission or rescripting final scenes, with the compressing of the three parts of Henry VI as a special case, but much of the book is simply a leisurely, well informed stroll through recent stage history with Dessen as raconteur. Chapters on “adjustments and improvements,” “rescripting stage directions and actions,” and
“rescripting the First Folio” tend to overlap conceptually and double back on problems already encountered, but it doesn’t matter. This is a highly readable book, practical and historically rich. It is an encyclopedic archive for all those who see Elizabethan theater and wish they had time to see more. This book is like its author: a theater junkie who writes with ceaseless fascination about his subject. The fascination is eminently catching.
David Bevington University of Chicago