Customer Reviews

Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future

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This is a great book. I bought it because everyone was talking about it at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference last fall, and as I did it could not believe that I was spending $65 on a book, something I have never done before. But since I am a Shakespeare scholar -- I suppose I can call myself that now even though it is only my third year in grad school -- I figured that I need to have the new hot thing. What I did not know is that all the hipe was more than justified. Reynolds et al. are unrelentingly captivating in every respect: funny, smart, rigorous, engaging... Most important to me, however, is that this book is about change, responsibility, and empowerment. Shakespeare is just Reynolds' vehicle, that he uses to take his readers into "Shakespace," a conceptual and emotional space of expansion and learning, an other world where we can all move transversally. Thanks Reynolds et al. for getting my brain reeling, and getting me excited about my work!

This book has not only emerged brilliantly out of the new historicism's wake, utilizing everything productive the new historicism had to offer, but it creates a wake in which new historicists -- especially the more myopic ones -- continue to flounder. Reynolds and his fellow transversal movers and shakers launch cogent critique after critique, both implicitly and explicitly, of new historicist criticism (while improving upon the Althusserian and Foucaultian theory behind it), supplanting its often fly-by-night and defeatist rhetoric with optimism, rigor, and relevance to concerns of today the likes of which most new historicists never imagined or cared to imagine possible. Reynolds' performance-oriented and expansive method enables analyses of Shakespeare's plays and adaptations of them -- of the "Shakespace" (one of his many playful coinages) through which they move -- that are far-reaching in value and application across history, cultures, and academic fields. I would even go so far as to say that Reynolds is a visionary with the scope of Raymond Williams, and, like Williams, Reynolds envisions and wants to inspire -- with his "transversal poetics" -- a better future. For Reynolds, although clearly a lover of Shakespeare, Shakespeare is just one of many points of departure for transversal adventures to elsewheres of learning, empowerment, agency, and evolution. There is no book on Shakespeare that I would want my students to read more than this one.

Performing Transversally constitutes a major intervention in early modern studies that will no doubt be as important as Dollimore's Radical Tragedy but at the same time infinitely more useful to the future of critical inquiry across disciplines, ranging from theater studies to film studies. Reynolds' transversal poetics is the most exciting approach to lit-crit since deconstruction emerged on the scene in the 60s, and I am certain that the impact will be no less great. If it sounds like I love this book, it is because I do. It is rare in this profession to be truly inspired by scholarship, and Reynolds -- along with his many brilliant collaborators -- never ceases to inspire, with page after page of scintillating wit, groundbreaking ideas, and unwavering dedication to ethical and pedagogical concerns. This book has changed the way I think about authorship, performance, Shakespeare, and my selves, all the while reminding me of my responsibilities as a academic and even as a citizen. Buy it, read it, live it, you will be happy you did.

When the University of Alabama's Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, helmed by luminary Gary Taylor, chose hotshot University of California Professor Bryan Reynolds as one of the "the six most brilliant Renaissance scholars in the world under 40," I begrudgingly decided to read Performing Transversally. I had already heard too much buzz about his book on criminal society, and was confident that his kind of flashy scholarship -- a la his Harvard teacher-thaumaturgists Marjorie Garber and Stephen Greenblatt -- would be of little interest to an old-historicist like me. But now I must confess that I've read both books and found them to be more than impressive.

Reynolds is driven by a desire to mine the subterranean, which leads him to reveal such things as the bogus history of gypsies in Tudor-Stuart England, Shakespeare's anticipation of Stalinism, and the uncanny relationship between Shakespeare and American celebrity killer Charlie Manson. Along the way, Reynolds wrestles with almost every major critical tradition, and explains what he sees as their shortcomings and benefits for future research. His "transversal" approach is enhanced by his wit and chutzpah. In this, he reminds me of Leslie Fielder, or Susan Sontag (God bless them). Reading the work of Reynolds and his collaborators is like revisiting the 60s and 70s when literary theory aspired to ethical ideals and was fun to explore and do.