Shakespeare, Theory and Performance

James C. Bulman, James C. Bulman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134819171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Shakespeare, Theory and Performance is a groundbreaking collection of seminal essays which apply the abstract theory of Shakespearean criticism to the practicalities of performance. Bringing together the key names from both realms, the collection reflects a wide range of sources and influences, from traditional literary, performance and historical criticism to modern cultural theory. Together they raise questions about the place of performance criticism in modern and often competing debates of cultural materialism, new historicism, feminism and deconstruction. An exciting and fascinating volume, it will be important reading for students and scholars of literary and theatre studies alike.

1
INTRODUCTION
Shakespeare and performance theory

James C.Bulman

Ever since John Styan coined the phrase “the Shakespeare revolution” twenty years ago to characterize the emergence of stage-centered criticism from traditional literary study, critics have wrestled with the idea that Shakespeare wrote playscripts whose potentials are best realized in performance. For Styan, this revolution involved an attempt to recover the authenticity of the original “Shakespeare experience” (5) by a study of modern performance practices: it forged a link between theatre history and the imaginative recreation of dramatic texts.¹ Nevertheless, like others of his generation, Styan was a card-carrying essentialist. He subscribed to the notion that Shakespeare’s texts are stable and authoritative, that meaning is immanent in them, and that actors and directors are therefore interpreters rather than makers of meaning. He believed, too, that audience responses to the plays are not historically particular, but universal. What The Shakespeare Revolution failed to take into account was the radical contingency of performance—the unpredictable, often playful intersection of history, material conditions, social contexts, and reception that destabilizes Shakespeare and makes theatrical meaning a participatory act. This volume marks how far we have come since the revolution.

In his opening essay, W.B.Worthen identifies in Styan’s totalizing concept of Shakespeare—as author and text—a refusal to address the question of how our acts of representation are implicated in the dynamics of contemporary culture and in themselves acquire meaning. Drawing on Foucault and Barthes, Worthen argues that allegiance to the author-function blinds us to other determinants of performance that give us today’s multiple “Shakespeares.” In fact, recent work in theatre semiotics has altered our very notion of what constitutes a text. No longer simply a literary artifact, the performance text, in the words of Marco De Marinis, “is conceived of as a complex network of different types of signs, expressive means, or actions, coming back to the etymology of the word ‘text’ which implies the idea of texture, of something woven together” (100).² The literary or dramatic text, furthermore, which is but one element of the performance text, is itself subject to historical inscription, the result of a process Patrice Pavis calls its concretization, wherein “signifier (literary work as thing), signified (aesthetic object), and Social Context…are variables…which can be more or less reconstructed” (27). This idea of text as process, as an interweaving of variable elements, reflects a post-modern desire to replace the logocentric idea of theatre with one in which performance becomes the site of cultural and aesthetic contestation—not merely, as it was for critics of Styan’s generation, “an incidental transcription, representation and explanation” of the literary text (Pavis 32).³

The relationship between a dramatic text and its performance, therefore, is neither simple nor oppositional. It has been further complicated by the work of textual bibliographers such as Michael Warren and Gary Taylor, who have demonstrated that Shakespeare’s plays exist as multiple texts whose variations may be accounted for in part by alterations made for, or during, performance.⁴ As Laurie E.Osborne suggests in her essay for this volume, Shakespeare left no originary text—no perfect, authorially sanctioned script—for performance. Even the Folio texts are, in a sense, copies, based on promptbooks or quartos or foul papers, and mediated by scribes and compositors. The much-maligned performance editions so popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are in many ways heir to the Folio, because they too record performance choices made in the theatre and, in so doing, inscribe the ideological pressures of their particular historical moment. By focusing attention on Shakespeare’s plays as sites of ongoing reproduction, these editions reveal, in Osborne’s words, “the global set of material practices which establish a particular play’s currency as a work” (180).⁵

That a single play may have multiple material existences has been made abundantly clear by the access to performance afforded by the technologies of film and video. The ready availability of Shakespeare in these media has encouraged readers to become viewers, and thereby to recognize performative elements that would have been denied them in the study. In a sense, film and video have become today’s performance texts. Film is a medium which has a peculiar power to subvert “authoritative” Shakespeare: especially as exemplified by Peter Greenaway in Prospero’s Books or Derek Jarman in his Tempest, it can use visual and performance techniques to subvert theatrical tradition and deconstruct the dramatic text. But as Douglas Lanier observes in his concluding essay, technology has paradoxically revivified the idea of the author-function and the sway that Shakespeare’s “book”—the monumental literary text—has held over performance studies. Because film and video allow us repeated viewings of a single performance, they encourage us to assimilate that performance to the condition of a literary text—a stable artifact rather than a contingent, ephemeral experience.
Our challenge, therefore, is to discover how not to replace the old textuality with a new form of performance textuality which may be “read”, Lanier warns, according to the interpretive protocols of close reading and with similar assumptions about textual monumentality (202). Such readings of video as text, increasingly common in the academy, risk an elision of the very historical and material contingencies which the return to performance has sought to recover.

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This focus on “reading” a performance is indicative of how, in the past twenty years, Shakespearean performance criticism has emerged from literary theory. Long dismissed as old-fashioned and anecdotal, ancillary to “real” criticism and worthy of only a page or two in major editions of the plays, stage history (as it used to be called) has attached itself to new forms of theoretical discourse and as a result has tended to view productions through a literary lens—feminist, psychoanalytic, cultural materialist, deconstructive. For doing so, it has earned the disapproval of those who believe that stage-centered criticism unnecessarily limits the free play of imagination which readers of Shakespeare’s plays as literature should enjoy. Harry Berger, Jr., for example, wryly labels performance critics “proponents of the New Histrionicism” who “argue that reading is irresponsible unless it imitates playgoing.” Their argument, he suggests, “establishes the empirical experience and psychology of playgoing as the exemplar whose privileges and constraints are to be reproduced in armchair interpretation” —a prioritization he calls “inadequate and invidious” (xii, xiv).⁶

The empirical experience and psychology of playgoing, however, are precisely what performance critics in recent years have been interrogating. Wary of the unexamined response to performance that leads to totalizing discourses, they have begun to historicize the practices of performance criticism and to discover how their own literary and cultural conditioning have shaped the way they see, and write about, performance. In other words, they have begun to investigate the role of reception. Those concerned with recuperating historical performances now turn their attention to the ways in which reviewers—sources of supposedly reliable evidence— in fact construct narratives which foreground their own cultural perspectives, thereby creating fictions that pass, or once passed, for objective reporting.⁷ In her essay for this volume, Juliet Dusinberre explores how performances of Antony and Cleopatra since Victorian times have inscribed cultural attitudes towards women in power, and how male reviewers have focused inquiry on the actress playing Cleopatra as “the principal signifier of the anxieties and obsessions, pleasurable and less pleasurable, which dominate the audience who watches her” (60).

In any criticism of performance, it must be recognized, we are bound by the perspectives of our own time and place. Indeed, as theorists are quick to point out, traditional assumptions about universality and continuity in the performance history of Shakespeare’s plays are themselves cultural constructs. Yet this challenge to the universalizing impulse of traditional stage history—this insistence on seeing cultural pressures and material conditions as constitutive—is itself problematic, for those who issue the challenge are not of one mind about how performance criticism should be practiced. Some claim to be disinterestedly historical in their approach; others are avowedly ideological.⁸ Historicists attempt to recreate authentic contexts for performances of a given play and thereby to gauge what the play has signified for its audiences at different times and in different cultures: in other words, they use performance history to discover what, and how, meanings are produced. Ideological critics, on the other hand, tend to delineate interpretive options independent of performance history: their “reading” of performance is thus less empirical and more politically invested than that of historicists.

The historicists’ attempt to contextualize performance might at first seem to be a more disinterested critical activity; but in fact, their ideological perspectives are often visible behind the discursive practices that mask them. Dusinberre’s findings about modern productions of Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, clearly are informed by a feminist interest in power relations and gender transference. Furthermore, any attempt to generalize about audience response to a given performance is suspect; for just as an author may envisage a community of readers but have no control over their individual responses, so, at a performance of a play, the cultural pressures that have helped to shape the production cannot guarantee that each member of the audience will experience the play in the same way.⁹ Critics who rely on traditional research tools to reconstruct a performance—theatre reviews and programs, eye-witness accounts (their own or others’), promptbooks and directors’ notes —frequently succumb to the temptation to generalize about its meaning for an audience.

The impulse to universalize audience response stands at odds with the insistence on contextual particularity which governs the poststructuralist approach to performance history. This is an understandable contradiction, for by such universalizing critics validate their own conclusions about a performance’s cultural significance: they create the audience for whom the performance is said to have had a particular meaning and thereby bring a complex negotiation between performance and audience to closure when, in fact, it is as difficult to construct a stable community of interpreters as it is to generalize about their responses. In a recent book, Marvin Carlson complains that performance critics have largely ignored work by reception theorists—Iser, Jauss, Eco, Bennett—which could help to explain “the means and mechanisms whereby all texts…may be ‘productively activated’ during what is traditionally, and inadequately, thought of as the process of their consumption or reception” (Bennett 214). Very little attention has been paid to the contribution of the audience to this process, Carlson laments, and still less to the factors which contribute to the formation of their “reading” of performance (86).

Barbara Hodgdon is a notable exception. In various essays she has tested the applicability of reception theory to audience response, and especially how such response is informed, if not fully determined, by disparate conceptions of gender, ethnicity, race, and class. She considers the performance text as an event constituted by the concrete conditions of its spectators; for, she writes, “it is in the ‘discursively saturated materiality’ of the historical circumstances in which a performance is seen that it makes its demands for narrative intelligibility” (69).
In her essay for this volume, she considers the problem of reception posed by an intercultural—and culturally confrontational—production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the National Theatre in London. Alert to her own subject position as an historically mediated reader—as “other” in an audience characterized by significant cultural homogeneity, and as a woman in a field dominated by men— she interrogates the processes by which a performance achieves meaning(s) for spectators in a specific sociohistoric moment. Hodgdon recognizes the inevitable variability of reception, and that recognition releases performance from the grip of totalizing discourses.

The effort to contextualize the discourses we use to discuss performance has lately taken aim at the Shakespeare revolution itself. The “revolutionaries” of stage-centered criticism have become the new establishment, and their sacred cows are under fire: John Russell Brown’s myth of a free access to Shakespeare, unencumbered by directorial intervention; Styan’s belief that the modern stage has recovered Elizabethan performance practices. Cary M. Mazer, in his present essay, historicizes as “the great creation myth of its era” (151) the standard account of how twentieth-century directors, beginning with William Poel and culminating with Peter Brook, re-discovered the use of non-illusionistic acting space as the means to recuperate the authentic Shakespeare. Taking the highly regarded work of Alan Dessen as his test case, Mazer argues that the past generation’s understanding of Elizabethan stage semiotics was not in fact historical, but grounded in the formalist assumptions of literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, when Shakespeare’s plays were regarded as poems whose patterns of imagery, both verbal and theatrical, were woven into an organic whole by the “unitary artistic authority” of the playwright. The search for unifying patterns in action, staging, and gesture during this period strongly influenced productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which themselves helped to shape Dessen’s conception of stage semiotics and his presumed discovery of a “neo-Elizabethan habit of mind” (Dessen 29). And so the wheel comes full circle: we reconfigure the Elizabethans as ourselves.

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Poststructuralist theory, therefore, has liberated us to discover in performance contingencies more radically destabilizing than anything known to literary critics. The material conditions of performance, the dynamics of audience response, the possibility of error latent in live performance, and above all the physical presence of the actors themselves, all contribute to making performance criticism more ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• 1. INTRODUCTION: SHAKESPEARE AND PERFORMANCE THEORY
• 2. STAGING “SHAKESPEARE”: ACTING, AUTHORITY, AND THE RHETORIC OF PERFORMANCE
• 3. PERFORMANCE AND PARTICIPATION: DESDEMONA, FOUCAULT, AND THE ACTOR’S BODY
• 4. SQUEAKING CLEOPATRAS: GENDER AND PERFORMANCE IN ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
• 5. LOOKING FOR MR.SHAKESPEARE AFTER “THE REVOLUTION”: ROBERT LEPAGE’S INTERCULTURAL DREAM MACHINE
• 6. SHAKESPEARE, VOICE, AND IDEOLOGY: INTERROGATING THE NATURAL VOICE
• 7. ACTING SHAKESPEARE IN POSTCOLONIAL SPACE
• 8. SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT HIS LANGUAGE
• 9. HISTORICIZING ALAN DESSEN: SCHOLARSHIP, STAGECRAFT, AND THE “SHAKESPEARE REVOLUTION”
• 10. RETHINKING THE PERFORMANCE EDITIONS: THEATRICAL AND TEXTUAL PRODUCTIONS OF SHAKESPEARE
• 11. DROWNING THE BOOK: PROSPERO’S BOOKS AND THE TEXTUAL SHAKESPEARE
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS