Shakespeare

Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and forgetting in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, 1916–2016 by Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead et al.

Item: Antipodal Shakespeare
Author: David Mcinnis

Reviewed by David McInnis •

September 2018, no. 404

Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and forgetting in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, 1916–2016

by Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead et al.

Bloomsbury, $160 hb, 239 pp, 9781474271431

Shakespeare

Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and forgetting in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, 1916–2016 by Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead et al.

Reviewed by David McInnis •

September 2018, no. 404

In 1916, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death coincided with the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, thus providing the impetus for this absorbing study of memory and forgetting, and what the authors call a specifically ‘antipodal’ dynamic of asymmetrical commemorations across the northern and southern hemispheres. The Shakespeare Tercentenary, they note, ‘lies at the cusp … of the imperial and the post-imperial’, and the antipodal reading they offer steers a middle course between the ideas of ‘global’ and ‘local’ Shakespeares by focusing on distinct but ‘antipodally connected’ parts of the world. Their focal cities – London, Sydney, Auckland, and Dunedin – have a ‘sustained socio-historical relationship across the hemispheres’ which causes them to function in a manner characterised by ‘resistance-yet-interdependence’. It is not simply ‘antipodean’ – this isn’t a study of Shakespeare in Australia or New Zealand – it is ‘antipodal’:

David McInnis

David McInnis is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne. He is author of Shakespeare and Lost Plays (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2021) and Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2013), and editor of Dekker’s Old Fortunatus for the Revels Plays series (Manchester UP, 2020). With Roslyn L. Knutson and Matthew Steggle, he is founder and co-editor of the Lost Plays Database. He has also edited a number of books, including Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave, 2014; co-edited with Steggle) and a sequel volume, Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time (Palgrave 2020; co-edited with Knutson and Steggle); Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play (Cambridge UP, 2018; co-edited with Claire Jowitt); and Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader (Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, 2020).