Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance.(Review)

W. B. Worthen. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. x +255. $49.95 casebound, $17.95 paperbound.

Thirty odd years ago or so, English departments across this green and pleasant land discovered that Shakespeare was a playwright. This revelation, coming as it did after centuries of philological commentary in various guises, shapes, and forms, produced a new breed of scholar-commentators known as performance critics. And they wrote, or so it seemed, something called performance criticism. Those of the lower orders, suspicious souls who had labored in the pragmatic world of the theater itself, regarded this activity with much misgiving, if not downright contempt. Was not all this clever word-making no more than armchair directing? How could you possibly write a how-to-do-it handbook about something you had never done yourself? Who told you that such and such a scene went in such and such a place on that notoriously hidden, mysterious world known as the open stage of the Elizabethan theater? But no matter: these intrepid types, ever au courant in the quixotic world of much, if not all of the hypertrophically politicized, massively egocentric world of contemporary scholarship, somehow knew the absolute truth about what went where, or who did what in Act 3, scene 2 of Twelfth Night. And those brave souls who dared ask the simple-minded, perhaps simplistic questions about this questionable activity were silenced with book after book that flowed unceasingly into the great delta-like world of Shakespearean studies. Fortunately, a goodly number of these still-born exercises have moved into their own richly deserved obscurity, languishing on those famous dust-filled library shelves, presumably or hopefully forgotten. And no sensible theater-worker would give them more than a passing nod, as he or she walked off to rehearsal ready to confront a cast with the day's job. Skeptics or the ancient, remaining, hard-nosed, traditionally-minded churls who still inhabit the academic landscape (hopefully ever conscious of the wild, free world which is the creative genius of the playhouse, a place that will never change and yet, paradoxically, is always changing) can take some relish in the partial diminution of these matters. The distinguished work of J.L. Styan or Bernard Beckerman, for example, (both of whom owe a great deal to their magnificent predecessor, Granville-Barker) never trapped itself in the dead-end chatter that sustained the daffy life of the performance critics, as they tenaciously marked out their turf with their Babel-like mutterings.

Now the admittedly truncated, hasty, exceedingly opinionated, and probably overstated remarks above barely hint at the plethora of approaches underway these days in the richly fertile land of Shakespearean studies. Everyone knows that Shakespeare has been subjected to approaches that often defy description, and suggest instead desecration, in the name of dramatic art, criticism, or scholarship. And the book here under review is but another tendentious foray intended to be "about theatrical performance [of Shakespearean plays] at the end of the twentieth century (2), or a summation of "an important theoretical advance in the performance criticism of Shakespeare," or so the encomiastic tribute of the publisher trumpets on the back cover.

Four chapters comprise this offering, treating in some kind of ascending order of importance, the text, director, actor, and the current state of the tired, tiring, and tiresome battle of the page vs. the stage, a survey of the history and development of performance criticism, a matter very much in need of a prompt burial. But if nothing else, this exercise is, ostensibly, up-to-date, laced with all the pertinent, timely terminology now in use: for instance, plays no longer have performances, but "iterations, or "surrogations." And the stage is not a "natural" site for drama to take place, but one of many venues in which contemporary culture affords all kinds of spaces, as the 60s taught us so well. Portmanteau words are ever the business of such undertakings, and the author has his basket full of them. Many are never defined precisely for the weary reader, but that is the least of the problems with this overweighted undertaking.

Chapter One is really a series of over-stated book reports on the provisionality of the Shakespearean text (its instability, to use the trendy word these days), and before the interested student gives up after a heady swim through these troubled waters, a bracing dose of common sense is very much in order. Which is to say that any bright sophomore in a beginning directing class is probably very much aware of the textual difficulties presented by any given play (Shakespearean, or otherwise) about to be produced. In fact, any director anywhere, anytime, anyplace makes his own play from various editions of the text, if necessary or possible. For those who still cling to the hoary notion of drama as drama, and not literature, and words, while surely the stuff of drama, as one of the many levels of the dramatic experience, much in this section is in no way novel, but merely an overarticulated, self-conscious, ...