Reinventing the Bard

Shakespeare in Canada is important business, in all senses of the word, and it can be contentious. These realities are neatly captured by three new books from Oxford University Press and University of Toronto Press. With a provocative flourish, two new OUP editions of The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet launch the Shakespeare Made in Canada series, under the general editorship of Daniel Fischlin,who teaches at the University of Guelph. Jennifer Drouin’s critical study Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender and Adaptation shines a very bright light on the ways that “Québécois adaptations … appropriate [Shakespeare’s plays] primarily, and often with irreverence, in service of the nation’s decolonization.” All three volumes expose aggression and conflict among nations, genders and cultures, and open into uncomfortable questions about Shakespeare’s place in 20th- and 21st-century Canada and Quebec. But Shakespeare—even when he is...