Lois Potter: Shakespeare and the Actor (Oxford Shakespeare Topics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

• W. B. Worthen

As a shrewd, critically observant, and thoughtful spectator, whose reviews and commentaries (mainly) on the British stage have enlivened professional scholarship on Shakespeare performance for decades, Lois Potter is ideally situated to write a book like Shakespeare and the Actor: rather than a “history of Shakespearian acting,” this “is a study of what the dramatist and the actor owe to each other” (p. vii). Despite Potter’s sense that “Shakespearian actor” is a potentially misleading term – from the early modern period onward, actors remembered now for their association with Shakespearian roles were often just as successful in other parts (David Garrick’s Abel Drugger comes to mind) – this book explicitly locates theatre and the practices of acting, directing, spectating, in relation to a fundamentally literary phenomenon, the cultural authority located in Shakespeare-as-literature.