Shakespeare Bulletin Theatre Review Guidelines
The critic could be retrained as a data collector, confined to the production of objective statements, and encouraged to redeem himself in a society for which […] he has served as a morally disruptive, and aesthetically destructive, influence.
Glenn Gould, The Glenn Gould Reader
The first thing any critic ought to make clear is his capacity for boredom. […] The extreme, total pleasure a critic gets out of a work of art is so elating that, in its absence, he resembles nothing so much as an addict who has lost his hypodermic.
Kenneth Tynan, first review in The Daily Sketch, 1951
Every piece of criticism I ever wrote grew out of […] a desperate tussle to follow the vagaries of my own style in order to understand fully the intricacies of my own reaction.
Charles Marowitz, Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic
Data-collector, prophet, pedant, enthusiast, addict, recording angel: the theatre critic is many things to many readers. The editors of Shakespeare Bulletin’s reviews section invite its reviewers to explore these multivalent critical possibilities and personae. We aim to create a rich archive relating to Shakespearean performance on the contemporary stage: an archive that captures and analyzes performances of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that will be of interest to present and future readers. Reviews of such performances have some obligation to offer an account that helps the reader clearly to understand the major conceptual, design, casting and acting choices made in the performance. But we also hope that your contributions to the journal will also provide a lasting record of the all-too-transitory passions theatre can incite. The lingering traces of elation or boredom, joy or disgust may prove just as valuable to present and indeed future readers striving to imagine a bygone production as any detail of costume, set, intonation or gesture.
In the tradition of our predecessor, Jeremy Lopez, we therefore welcome many types of review. A key objective of the Bulletin review pages remains to encourage Shakespeareans to experiment with new ways of writing about performance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the conventions of academic reviewing as practiced over the last five decades, but nor is there any compelling reason why we should limit ourselves to these conventions in the future. There should be as many ways of writing about Shakespearean performance as there are performances, with room for the formal and for the impressionistic, for the quasi-objective and the subjective, for the fully dressed and the slightly disheveled. One production might inspire a coherent and exhaustive review; another might prompt the critic to adopt a colloquial or fragmentary register. If most of the production strikes the reviewer as bland, but one moment stands out for its interest, brilliance or instructive mediocrity, they should feel free to dwell on that moment. What a theatre review is and what it does is open for discussion. We welcome reviewers’ proposals and creativity as they approach and experience early modern drama’s wide-ranging appearances in contemporary theatrical practice.
Roberta Barker and Paul Prescott, April 2013
When submitting your review, please format it according to the following template:
Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad
Presented by the Iraqi Theatre Company at Riverside Studios, London, in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. June 27-30, 2012. Adapted and directed by Monadhil Daood. Set and lighting by Jabbar Jodi Allabodi. Costumes by Fadel Qazzaz. Music composed and directed by Ali Khassaf. With Sami Abdulhameed (Teacher), Ahmed Salah Moneka (Romeo), Sarwa Rasool (Juliet), Fikrat Salim (Mercutio), Maimoon Abdalhamza (Montague), Haider Monathir (Capulet), Allawi Hussein (Paris), Ameer Hussein (Benvolio), and others.
Katherine Steele Brokaw, University of California, Merced
“The night should be for lovers,” lamented the Father Lawrence-like “Teacher” as the play’s opening sounds—sirens, bombs, machine guns—still rang in the audience’s ears. So began Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, an Arabic adaptation only loosely based on Shakespeare’s play. The RSC commissioned the Iraqi Theater Company to write and perform this work as part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, and in the weeks before the Olympics the company traveled from Baghdad to Stratford-upon-Avon to London. Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad was their first play since the official end of combat in Iraq, and scars of war as well as fresh wounds from continued violence formed the context for both artists and characters. As director and adapter Monadhil Daood’s program notes explained, “I am the legitimate son of tragedy…Understand that we live in a place where terrorists break our home over our heads.”
Additional stylistic notes:
· Use the American style for spelling, periods, and commas throughout the review. (UK authors: switching your spellchecker to US spelling will automatically alert you to US spelling conventions).
· we prefer Welles's (not Welles')
· words with multi and post should be spelled as one word (e.g. multicultural, postmodern)
· act one (not Act I)
· 5.1.163-64 (to indicate act, scene, lines)
· (20) to indicate page citation
· Spell out numbers up to 100, e.g. twenty-six (not 26). Numbers above 100 should be put in Arabic numbers.
If in doubt, please consult the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th edition, 2009) and/or use a recent issue of Shakespeare Bulletin as your model.