Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign. By Antony Tatlow. Durham and New York: Duke University Press, 2001; pp. 298. $59.95 hardcover, $19.95 paperback

Extract

Antony Tatlow's Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign is a sprawling, illuminating, and, finally, frustrating book. Tatlow opens with a challenging, though slightly misleading assertion: “Every engagement with a Shakespearean text is necessarily intercultural” in that the borders between “inter- and intracultural” performance are themselves questionable, not merely as a result of the insistent globalization of performance texts and practices, butat least as importantbecause the past itself “is really another culture” (5). Nonetheless, Tatlow retains a use for “intercultural performance in the older anthropological sense of employing, in whatever way, material from one culture within the context of another. Defamiliarizing the conventions of representation, the intercultural sign facilitates access to what has, on various levels, been culturally repressed” (6). Intercultural performance, then, frames an essentially Brechtian purpose: to render the ideological tissue of theatre visible to its audiences.