Shakespeare and the Imprints of Performance

J. Gavin Paul

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349493937, 9781137438430
• eBook ISBN: 9781137438447
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

Within the study of drama, the question of how to relate text and performance—and what interpretive tools are best suited to analyzing them—is a longstanding and contentious one. Most scholars agree that reading a printed play is a means of dramatic realization absolutely unlike live performance, but everything else beyond this premise is contestable: how much authority to assign to playwrights, the extent to which texts and readings determine performance, and the capability of printed plays to communicate the possibilities of performance. Without denying that printed plays distort and fragment performance practice, this book negotiates an intractable debate by shifting attention to the ways in which these inevitable distortions can nevertheless enrich a reader's awareness of a play's performance potentialities. As author J. Gavin Paul demonstrates, printed plays can be more meaningfully engaged with actual performance than is typically assumed, via specific editorial principles andstrategies. Focusing on the long history of Shakespearean editing, he develops the concept of the performancescape: a textual representation of performance potential that gives relative shape and stability to what is dynamic and multifarious.

CHAPTER 1

Mediating Page and Stage

As an example of the kinds of encounters that lie at the heart of this book, consider Henry’s Paris coronation scene (4.1) in Michael Taylor’s Oxford edition of 1 Henry VI (2003). Newly adorned with the French crown, Henry soon finds himself breaking up a potential duel between Vernon and Basset, champions for Richard (Duke of York) and Somerset, respectively. While the large number of bodies on stage at this moment surely complicates a reader’s ability to maintain a vivid version of Meisel’s “imagined theatrical representation,” (2), I mean to address an ostensibly simpler matter of stage business. The dialogue emphasizes the “sanguine colour” (4.1.92) and “paleness” (106) of the roses that Basset and Vernon presumably wear; their division and enmity thus are reinforced visually and linguistically.¹ Here is the central portion of what is Henry’s longest speech in the play, as it appears in Taylor’s edition:

Let me be umpire in this doubtful strife.

I see no reason, if I wear this rose,

He takes a red rose

That anyone should therefore be suspicious

I more incline to Somerset than York;

Both are my kinsmen, and I love them both. (4.1.151–5)

The sticking point—for readers, but not playgoers—is how, precisely, does Henry obtain his rose? There is no stage direction in the Folio text; Taylor inserts “He takes a red rose” and also includes a note, which is worth reproducing in full:

From where? From whom? [Edward] Burns’s [Arden 3] direction specifies from Basset, but Henry might well take it from Somerset himself, from Suffolk even. Better, perhaps, to leave open precisely who and where it comes from, but in the theatre it has to come from someone and from somewhere.

The note reinforces the inherent differences between reading and seeing plays: for an audience in a theater, the matter of the rose poses no interpretive hurdle whatsoever, since actors and directors will have solved the problem in advance. The stage is in a perpetual state of unalterable cause and effect: Henry’s rose must come from someone and somewhere. As we read, however, we have the freedom to imaginatively experiment with different causes and effects, or to not dabble in them at all—it seems entirely plausible that one could read the dialogue and relevant stage direction and be satisfied that Henry’s rose comes from no one and from nowhere but miraculously blooms to life through the necessities and peculiar physics of the imagined environment in which he exists as we read him into being.

Taylor’s playful “From where? From whom?” treats the source of Henry’s rose as what Meisel terms a “field of possibility” (73), a field that, as Taylor implies, can be reduced to a single interpretation on stage in a number of ways. Taylor’s utilization of the marginal space of his edited page to “open” the playtext to the possibilities of performance relies upon the paradoxical properties of the two modes of realization: the necessity of somewhere and someone in the theater is juxtaposed against the elusiveness and ambiguity of print’s relative fixity. If his note works in conjunction with his edited playtext as he intends, users of his edition will be reminded that reading and theater-going are incongruent activities; however, Taylor’s note and edited playtext also combine to undo this incongruence. His commentary, that is, challenges readers to envision divergent stagings of a particular moment, a textually entrenched interpretive move that respects and reflects the fluid possibilities of the play in performance. As the ambiguous origins of Henry’s rose suggest, and as the remainder of this study will demonstrate, the book of the play is not closed off from the possibilities of performance but is instead a potentially fertile site of cross-pollination that links reading and imagining to performing, page to stage. This chapter has two aims: first, to map the resonant space between textual and performed modes of realization, and second, to offer a conceptual tool for rethinking the complexities and contributions of editorial engagements with performance. Charting the generative capabilities of printed plays is the initial step in building a case for understanding their interpretive networks as a product of both editorial mediation and active readerly participation.

Reading Plays, Reading Bodies

Every printed playtext bears the markings of its own unique performance history. This history tends to be encrypted and fragmentary in comparison to the narrative history that can be written about a play’s ongoing manifestations on stage, but it nevertheless constitutes an essential signifying property of a play in print form. The imprints of performance take heterogeneous forms and appear with unsystematic and inconsistent frequency from play to play, text to text. In terms of the extant texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, some traces seem indicative of performance practices in the early modern theater, as theatrical data that offer brief glimpses of how certain moments were to be staged have somehow entered the complicated transmission process from manuscript to print: one thinks, for example, of stage directions rich with details clearly intended to guide performance—recall the Folio’s direction that Coriolanus “Holds her [Volumnia] by the hand silent” (TLN 3539). Other traces anticipate performance potential rather than reflect performance practice: here one might consider signs of textual revision or unstable speech prefixes, both of which seem in certain instances to gesture at conceptions of a play’s fictional characters and the real-world actors bringing them to life (think of “Lady Capulet” shifting between Wife, Capulet’s Wife, Mother, and Lady). And still other traces—such as scenes that lack the requisite entrances or exits for certain characters or those haunted by the (non)involvement of silent ghost characters like “Innogen,” identified as the wife of Leonatus in the opening stage direction of Much Ado About Nothing—are less remnants to be gleaned than lacunae to be filled, interpretive gaps that necessitate a consideration of the realities of performance. When texts undergo the interpolative work of editors as they are prepared for modern readers, certain traces of performance can be made explicit, some can be muted or even effaced, and new links to the play in performance can be forged. Broadly speaking, my concern is with the editorial mediation of these imprints: the necessity editors face of having to decode (and usually recode) the markers of performance they find in the extant playtexts they are working from, as well as their ability to encode for performance wherever they deem useful to do so (in introductions, commentary notes, interpolated stage directions). My work is governed throughout by the belief that to read a printed play is to confront both the page and the possibilities of the stage, to engage with what Worthen calls “the interface of performance and writing” (Print 162).

That a printed play gestures toward, yet forever remains separate from, its existence on stage means that the continued production and close study of edited playtexts occur at the crossroads of a number of often disparate forms of inquiry: textual theory, bibliography, theater history, as well as various forms of performance criticism, all have a considerable interest in editorial practice.² The reciprocal relationship between editorial practice and other modes of inquiry is a relatively recent phenomenon that came into being in the wake of the New Bibliography. Until the latter half of the twentieth century, the production of authoritative critical editions and the scholarly labors subsequently performed on these editions were seen as more or less discrete activities; editing and literary criticism were understood to speak fundamentally inharmonious dialects, with the former developing detailed systems of notation as well as sophisticated hypotheses to account for things like lost authorial manuscripts and memorial reconstructions, while the latter concerned itself with the pursuit of a different kind of truth—definitive readings rather than definitive editions. Under the New Bibliographers, editing rose to prominence as it became more nuanced in its historical attentiveness and theoretical sophistication; significantly, the ongoing refinement of editorial activity was countered by a burgeoning critical awareness of editing itself as a powerful interpretive act. Attentiveness to the effects of editorial labor (which began in earnest in the 1970s and was energized by the ascendancy of poststructuralism and New Historicism—both of which tend to destabilize texts and multiply authority) has become an indispensible facet of literary criticism. Calls for an approach to texts that “would keep in play not only multiple readings and versions but also the multiple and dispersed agencies that could have produced variants” (Werstine, “Narratives” 86), and of “rethink[ing] Shakespeare in relation to our new knowledge of collaborative writing, collaborative printing, and the historical contingencies of textual production” (de Grazia and Stallybrass 279) remain pervasive, and the desire for readers to be cognizant of editorial influence is now commonplace. In the words of one scholar, “the more aware we are of the processes of mediation to which a given edition has been subject, the less likely we are to be caught up in a constricting hermeneutic knot by which the shaping hand of the editor is mistaken for the intent of the author, or for some lost, ‘perfect’ version of the author’s creation” (Marcus, Unediting 3).

To compress a rather convoluted story then, the decline of the New Bibliography toward the end of the twentieth century was precipitated by a scrutiny of critical editions and editorial customs that focused on the ways in which editorial practices inherently distort, and unrealistically stabilize, the production and transmission of texts.³ For those studying the Shakespearean canon and other early modern dramatic texts, the ramifications have been significant: in addition to expanding the scope of inquiry to include the numerous nonauthorial agents and factors that influence textual production, editors and textual theorists have endeavored to develop a more detailed understanding of the interconnectedness of a play’s textual and theatrical manifestations. In short, engaging a play’s history in print is now largely inseparable from considerations of its performance potentialities.⁴

While the means by which editors grapple with issues of performance has become a popular subject for critical examination, the bulk of commentary on this issue tends to stress the fundamental differences between page and stage, and emphasizes the inability of texts to adequately represent the realities of performance. David Scott Kastan, for instance, writes that “performance operates according to a theatrical logic of its own rather than one derived from the text; the printed play operates according to a textual logic that is not derived from performance” (Book 9); similarly, Worthen states that “a stage performance is not determined by the internal ‘meanings’ of the text, but is a site where the text is put into production, gains meaning in a different mode of production through the labor of its agents and the regimes of performance they use to refashion it as performance material” (Force 23), and Lukas Erne claims that English Renaissance plays have a “double existence, one on stage and one on the printed page” and calls for “a reception that takes into account the respective specificities of the two media. To simplify matters, performance tends to speak to the senses, while a printed text activates the intellect” (Literary Dramatist 23). So entrenched is this line of thinking that critical editions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, although more alert to matters of performance than ever before, frequently concede the incongruity of text and performance as a matter of protocol. The general introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare, to provide a well-known example, stresses that more often than not an editor faces an inescapable choice: “Should he offer his readers a text which is as close as possible to what Shakespeare originally wrote, or should he aim to formulate a text presenting the play as it appeared when performed by the company of which Shakespeare was a principal shareholder . . . ?” (xxxv). Striking a similar chord, editors of a collected edition of the works of John Webster claim that

the Poem is editable, and available for discussion, while the Play is certainly not [ . . . ]. We cannot edit the Play since too much of the necessary data has been lost in the dark backward and abysm of time; we must therefore edit the Poem, which is what everybody has been doing all along, though not always in as explicit an awareness as could have been desired that this was indeed what they were doing. (Gunby et al. 37)

A heightened awareness of the thorny interconnections of text and performance—Poem and Play—in editorial circles is inseparable from developments in Shakespeare studies generally. Just as editors have seen fit to give more prominence to performance within their editions (sometimes, as we see in the quotation from the Webster editors, by conceding their inability to account for it as meaningfully as they might like), so too have text and performance been continually reprioritized in other streams of critical practice. One major consequence of the widespread resistance to locating meaning “in” the text is the belief that plays should not be read and interpreted as literary texts at all but are instead dramatic scripts intended solely for performance that should be interrogated by critics using specialized analytical procedures. An emphasis on dramatic scripts has, to various degrees, underwritten performance criticism for the past 30 years or so, an eclectic movement that Erne has called “perhaps the most important development in Shakespeare studies in the last century” (Literary Dramatist 21).⁵

The ascendancy of performance criticism was accompanied by the falling fortunes of explicitly literary close readings of Shakespeare, which were increasingly perceived as theoretically unsophisticated and historically short-sighted. As Worthen has demonstrated at great length, however, there remains a certain mode of Shakespearean performance criticism that “tends to regard performance . . . as a way of realizing the text’s authentic commands” (Authority 160).⁶ What is at stake in marking habits of critical reasoning and writing that are implicitly dependent on notions of textuality? For Worthen, to imply that performance is the result of merely realizing textual commands is to ignore the dynamic meanings and responses that are produced in performance, “to tame the unruly ways of the stage” (Authority 3). Worthen’s metaphor is indicative of the ongoing struggle at the core of critical engagements with performance: the desire to allow the nontextual elements of performance to remain undistorted and “untamed” while also managing to somehow bracket performance and subject it to critical analysis. Writing about performance is a task not unlike the one faced by the Third Gentleman from The Winter’s Tale who reports on the apparently spectacular reunion of Leontes, Perdita, and company; despite a presumably accurate and detailed account deeply colored by his own interpretations and responses (Perdita “did . . . bleed tears; for I am sure my heart wept blood” [5.2.88–9]), he concedes to his rapt listeners that the event in question was “a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of,” an “encounter . . . which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it” (5.2.42–3, 57–8).⁷ As the Third Gentleman suggests, it is the physical immediacy of certain encounters that provide them with much of their signifying and affective power (and here I am extending his claim to include theatrical encounters between actors and between actors and audiences), and a certain undeniable measure of both immediacy and affect is lost almost as soon as they are produced, never to be recaptured in any account, no matter how detailed. The Third Gentleman’s interpretation of the reunion can be voiced to his interlocutors in the world of the play, to the audience of the play in the world, and assume a typographical form in the play as printed text, but all of these versions of his report to some degree resist such textualization, the experience in question rendered “lame” (his words) or “tame(d)” (Worthen’s).

The primacy given to texts and textual meanings is something that performance criticism has become alert and responsive to; a consideration of a recent essay can help to reveal the extent to which its practitioners have endeavored to theorize performance in ways that do not reflexively defer to the text but rather embrace what James C. Bulman calls “the radical contingency of performance—the unpredictable, often playful intersection of history, material conditions, social contexts, and reception” (1). The title of Ric Knowles’s “Encoding/Decoding Shakespeare: Richard III at the 2002 Stratford Festival” announces his focus on one such point of intersection. Noting that most performance criticism “has concentrated its attention primarily on . . . the performance text” (302), Knowles offers instead an expanded tripartite model of performance analysis that considers not just the performance text but also the conditions of production (including actors, directors, the rehearsal process, and the neighborhood in which the play is staged), and the conditions of reception (the historical/cultural moment in which the play is received). If (adapting Worthen’s formulation) performance is inevitably “tamed” when subjected to critical scrutiny, then what we find in Knowles’s essay is that the interpretive arena in which performance must be enclosed is made as expansive as possible. Thus, his attempt to answer how the opening night of a particular staging of Richard III generated “radically different readings of the same production” (297) means that Knowles takes into consideration everything from the play’s central (and nostalgic) position in the Festival’s advertising campaign, to its mise en scène, to ticket prices, to the makeup of the Stratford Festival’s board of governors. Utilizing his theory of “materialist semiotics,” Knowles seeks not the meanings that Shakespeare might have originally intended when writing Richard III, nor meanings that are otherwise frozen within the text. In fact, Knowles stresses that no production (textual or theatrical) contains meaning; instead, “they produce meaning through the discursive work of an interpretive community and through the lived, everyday relationships of people with texts and performances” (300).⁸ Consequently, Knowles’s project is “designed to undertake precise ideological analyses of the conditions, conscious and unconscious, both of production, within and through which performance texts come into being and make themselves available to be ‘read,’ and of reception, spatial and discursive, withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Life and Writings of a Radical Humanist
• 2  The Roots of Radical Humanism
• 3  Radical Humanist Psychoanalysis
• 4  Psychoanalytic Social Psychology
• 5  Anti-Humanism: A Radical Humanist Defense
• Epilogue: Prospero’s Bands
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index