Words for the Theatre

Four Essays on the Dramatic Text

David Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315283159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

In Words for the Theatre, playwright David Cole pursues a course of dramaturgical self-questioning on the part of a playwright, centred on the act of playwriting.

The book's four essays each offer a dramaturgical perspective on a different aspect of the playwright's practice: How does the playwright juggle the transcriptive and prescriptive aspects of their activity? Does the ultimate performance of a playtext in fact represent something to which all writing aspires? Does the playwright's process of withdrawing to create their text echo a similar process in the theatre more widely? Finally, how can the playwright counter theatre's pervasive leaning towards the 'mistake' of realism?

Suited to playwrights, teachers, and higher-level students, this volume of essays offers reflections on the questions that confront every playwright, from an author well-versed in supplying words for the theatre.

Essay II
The dramatic text as type of the text

The Theatre of God’s Judgments, The Theatre of Genealogies, Theatre of Cities, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum...

One cannot read very widely in or about early modern literature without coming upon book title after book title of this sort.

The Theatre of Fine Devices, Theatrum Vitae Humanae, Theatrum Mundi, Universae Naturae Theatrum...

None of these volumes are about theatre or contain plays. Some are works of philosophy or theology; others treat architecture, genealogy, geography, emblems… The Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings is a poetry anthology; The Theatre of Love, a collection of novels. Theatrum Sanitas is a medical handbook; Theatrum Chemicum, a compilation of writings on alchemy. What can have led all these authors of treatises and compilers of anthologies to call their books “theatres”?

One may feel one grasps, in a general sort of way, the logic of this practice. Books, after all, are “performances” designed to attract an “audience”; to publish is to bring a “production” before the “public,” etc.

Still, the trend is puzzling. For one thing, the experience of ploughing through these (mostly) weighty tomes cannot have been very much like theatregoing.¹ Nor was this an era (if there has ever been such an era) when associating one’s intellectual or artistic project with theatre was likely to raise it in anyone’s esteem. To early modern taste, epic poetry represented the height of literary attainment; theatre – profane, vernacular, urban – was far down the list of cultural splendors, if it so much as made the list. We may view the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain, France and England as a golden age of theatre. But it was no less a golden age of hostility toward theatre. Indeed, while medieval attacks on the stage were far from rare, one must go back to the Church Fathers² to find anything like the sustained torrent of abuse that greets us in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³ The “antitheatrical prejudice” so characteristic of the period was no doubt shared by more than a few of the sober scholars who titled their books “Theatre” or “Théâtre” or “Theatrum” of this or that. Why, then, did they so title them?

For a long time, I made small headway on this problem, until one day I chanced on a sentence by Paul de Man that seems to bear no relation to it:

We have, to a large extent, lost interest in the actual event that Mallarmé was describing as a crisis, but we have not at all lost interest in a text that pretends to designate a crisis when it is, in fact, itself the crisis to which it refers.⁴

De Man is here contrasting the slight intrinsic interest possessed by the subject matter of an essay of Mallarmé’s (certain minor advances in French pros-ody) as compared with the imaginative force displayed by the essay (“Crise de vers”) itself. Nothing could be farther from de Man’s mind than the use of “theatre” in book titles. Yet the terms in which he frames his contrast – “a text that pretends to designate a crisis when it is, in fact, itself the crisis to which it refers” – begin to suggest what may be at stake in such titling.

The text as event

How can a text be a “crisis”? For that, it would have to be even such an “actual event” as de Man here opposes to mere texts; for what is a crisis but a certain kind of – a decisive, a culminating – event? Can texts be events?

Indeed they can, critics of every stripe hasten to assure us. “The text is an event,” proclaim, in identical words, the deconstructionist William Spanos and the reader-response critic Stanley Fish⁵ – an “open event,” adds Wolfgang Iser,⁶ and therefore to be “experienced as an event.”⁷ “Texts as Events” an historian calls his essay on historical documents, for such “texts are events and make history.”⁸ “Books as Events” is the subtitle of a Folger Institute seminar that explores “how [seventeenth century] political books… were understood as deeds.”⁹

As these last two examples illustrate, it is not only texts in general but specific kinds of texts that may bear this character. “The poem… must be thought of as an event in time,” asserts Louise Rosenblatt (in an essay entitled “The Poem as Event”).¹⁰ “Poems are dialectical events,” claims Harold Bloom¹¹ – a claim that Paul Alpers perhaps only seems to reverse in proposing that “the ‘gross events’ of [Spenser’s] Faerie Queene… are… lines and stanzas of poetry.”¹² And much the same claim has been advanced for prose fiction by Maurice Blanchot: “The tale is not the narration of an event, but that event itself.”¹³

It is not hard to see what underlies this manner of speaking. After all, everything that can happen to a text, or that a text can make happen, is some kind of event. The conceiving, imagining and elaborating of a text are (mental) events. The writing and revising of a text are events. Publication is an event. Once published, the text may make a splash, stir controversy, or possibly sink without a trace – events all. Above all, “the reading of a text is an event.”¹⁴ Surely all these many events attendant upon the text must impart something of their event-status to the text itself? Surely the text itself can be no less of an event than all the events that produce, or are produced by, it?

But this makes no sense. The analytic philosophers have taught us to regard events as “changes in objects.”¹⁵ Doubtless, as between objects and the changes they undergo there are some middle cases. If I fix my gaze on a just-applied dab of cadmium yellow, am I looking at some still-wet pigment (an object) or watching paint dry (an event)? But there seems little doubt which side of the object/event divide texts must be placed on. Much as one might like to think (and I shall speak presently of why one might like to think it) that a text is “not an object… but an act that is also an event”¹⁶ or at very least is “suspended between object and event,”¹⁷ plainly a text is some kind of entity there before one. As complex, as dynamic, as elusive an entity as you please, but… a thing in the world, something in your path. “A thing, they say, is an event,” muses Robert Frost, but concludes: “Not quite.”¹⁸ Such was long since the verdict of Clement Greenberg on his rival Harold Rosenberg’s attempt to claim event-status for abstract expression-ist paintings (surely one of the sources for the subsequent literary trend to claim it for texts). What appears on these canvases, Rosenberg held, is “not a picture but an event.” No, countered Greenberg, merely “the… aftermath of an event”; for, as Mary McCarthy pointed out, you can’t hang an event on the wall.¹⁹

Nor can you slip one between the covers of a book. Mallarmé’s essay (to return to our Paul de Man passage) cannot in fact be the crisis it pretends to designate, though the writing, reading, and reception of it may all be crises and are certainly events.

All this seems too plain to argue with. Surely what we have here is not a false position that cries out to be refuted but a true need that cries out to be understood. It is a need that lets itself be glimpsed in such claims as the following:

Sometimes a book is itself an event and not only a record of events.²⁰

and declares itself openly in a formulation like this:

Even when a literary work is a representation of something else it is always also an event in itself.²¹

Not only a record… a representation of something else – do we not here catch an echo of writing’s perennial (or at least post-Platonic) unease with its own secondariness, its status as mere recounting, retelling, writing up? Must we not recognize, in all this talk of the text as an event like any other, the latest vocabulary for art’s longstanding aspiration to be no mere mimesis (“not only a record”) of reality but a reality among other realities, a force or act or presence in the world, “part of the res itself and not about it”?²²

This is, one might suppose, an aspiration plainly destined fo...