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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses
THIS essay is a prolegomenon to a larger study of the relationship between casting, dramaturgy, and theatrical rhetoric on the early modern stage. The last decade or so has seen an increased interest in the importance of the acting company (rather than the playwright) as the fundamental unit of the early modern theater. Theater historians such as Roslyn Knutson, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, Andrew Gurr, and Tiffany Stern have focused our attention on the relationship between the structures of repertory playing and the creation of theatrical meaning. (1) My goal is to build upon the methods and discoveries of these scholars and to combine them with more literary, formal analysis in order to develop a critical method that attempts to imagine the way early modern acting companies, and their playwrights, might have used actors' bodies as formal devices not distinct from dramaturgical elements such as verse style, subject matter, and staging habits. Such a critical method might, I suggest, help put early modern plays into vivid and as yet unfamiliar dialogue with one another.
Much of the work of such a project is and will remain necessarily speculative, and the first word of this essay's title is intended to insist upon the value of speculation. Caesar and Polonius were probably played by the same actor, as probably were Brutus and Hamlet. The grim joke Polonius and Hamlet share about Polonius playing the part of Caesar at University (3.2.101-2) is probably the first half of an intertextual rhyming couplet that is completed when Hamlet kills Polonius in 3.4. (2) We do not, of course, have anything like evidence to support the claim that this cross-casting actually occurred. Nor do we have evidence to support the idea that Shakespeare was writing for a company in which there were two particularly strong boy actors, of notably different height and temperament (it doesn't help that he often seems unable to decide which is which) as he created the wonderful pairs of female characters in the stretch of plays through the mid-1590s: Helena and Hermia, Rosalind and Celia, Portia and Nerissa, Beatrice and Hero, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. Criticism at least since Gerald Bentley has been reluctant to pursue intertextual rhyming of this kind in large part because we cannot attach actors' names to roles (much less physical appearance or personalities to names). I think it is important not to be overly cautious about identifying particular bodies to the extent that we simply go on forgetting that some bodies did in fact inhabit these roles in the late sixteenth century. (3) Thinking about actual pairs of boy actors on Shakespeare's stage in the mid-1590s--whether the same or different pairs from play to play--creates a productive position from which to view the point of entry for particularly Shakespearean fantasies about love and language into literary and theatrical culture. A discussion, for example, of the convention of the witty but submissive woman from Hermia to Beatrice would be richly filled out by an attempt to imagine the way in which these roles might represent the career of a single actor (or even several different actors), and the way in which the ethics of the convention might have become tied to, and/or authorized in, an actor's body. (4)
I return to this point in more specific detail later in the essay. For the moment I want simply to say that the methodology I am trying to develop is not one of identifying likely role-rhyming or specific actors across plays and authors and companies; rather, it is one of imagining early modern characters as actors and actors as necessary agents of theatrical meaning--much as we might think of words or scenes or props--so that we can begin to think more specifically about the effects of acting on an early modern audience. In "Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism." (5) Paul Yachnin argues that "the semantic unit--the quantum of theatrical meaning-making in Shakespeare's playhouse--comprised the person.... [M]eaning was produced on the early modern stage through personation rather than by developing systems of ideas abstracted from the dramatic action" (7). Not theater history, but rather a critique of traditional theoretical approaches to theatrical problems such as the submission of Katherina in Shrew, Yachnin's article is concerned to demonstrate the way in which particularly literary critical models--materialist, rationalist, new historicist--anachronistically limit the possibilities for meaning that inhere in a theatrical text. In its insistence that the body of the actor in the theater allows a spectator to comprehend a wealth of complexity and contradiction (see 31), Yachnin's essay is a call for the development of a critical imagination that perceives the theater as a locus for the refraction of multiple systems of meaning through the prism of physical, speaking, thinking human bodies--and not only the bodies onstage, but those in the audience as well. A small polemical goal of my own essay, as it moves from a discussion of Shakespeare to a discussion of acting companies to a discussion of early modern drama "in general," is to suggest that theater history's disciplinary imperative to differentiate is occasionally in danger of limiting the possibilities for meaning that inhere in theatrical texts, and that a focus on playing companies and their different repertories and styles will only take us so far; given the state of the documentary evidence in the field, there is a point at which imagination must take over where evidence leaves off. (6)
In the particular and unique case of Shakespeare, the performance tradition and the critical tradition of performance studies allows us to see quite clearly the relationship between specific actors, audiences, and the reception and dissemination of a multiplicity of theatrical and interpretive conventions. It is easy to imagine how an influential company (like the Royal Shakespeare Company [RSC]) performing Hamlet and Coriolanus in the same season might draw out the echoes between Hamlet and Gertrude and Coriolanus and Volumnia, and might quite explicitly seek to frame those echoes within the critical tradition. (7) Companies frequently perform Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well in repertory, using cross-cast actors to underscore the intertextual echoes between the Angelo-Isabella-Mariana triangle in the former and the Bertram-Helena-Diana triangle in the latter. Possibly, though certainly less frequently, one might be fortunate enough to see repertory performances of Pericles and Cymbeline, two plays (possibly written and performed in succession) in which an actor must emerge, surprising audience and characters alike, from a trunk. It is very unlikely that one might also get to see, at the same theater or even a different one, a production of the nearly contemporaneous Family of Love (Barry) and start to think about what might have been so interesting to acting companies about boy-sized trunks in the first decade of the seventeenth century. (8) As far as I know, no modern company has presented in the same season the three perverse and chaotic families that burst onto the Globe stage in the remarkable 1606-7 season: Lear, Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan; Vindice, Hippolito, Gratiana, Castiza; Volpone, Mosca, Dwarf, Eunuch, Fool. (9) My point here is that the methodology I am attempting to sketch out is valuable, and perhaps essential, for allowing ourselves to imagine more fully the relationships between Shakespeare and other playwrights, and between other playwrights and other playwrights. It is valuable and perhaps essential for developing a vocabulary with which to discuss the dramaturgy of a large number of obscure plays whose coexistence with the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson can all too frequently seem merely coincidental.
In 4.2 of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Cloten's body becomes a prop. Dressed in Posthumus's garments and deprived of his head, Cloten has gone from animate to inanimate, from subject to object. Like all the best props he is an object whose history and meaning are open to multiple levels of interpretation. When Imogen comes upon him she misreads the...
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