Abstract
Talk about “performance” in connection with Shakespeare more often than not tends to convey an interest in the performance of his plays; the play is viewed or even edited as a “play in performance” or, as the recent Cambridge University Press series has it, as the “play in production,” with particular emphasis on its “theatrical fortunes.” These no doubt are laudable projects, and I am the first to applaud the emphasis on the play’s text as a text written for and brought to life in the theater. And yet, this emphasis has its limitations, and these especially hinder a new departure in the approach to Shakespeare’s characters. Without in the least wishing to reduce an awareness of their literary quality (such as the huge debt they owe to Plutarch’s Lives), I propose to confront the text-related concept of character with a histrionic practice for which performance is so much more than the scripted performance of a text. In other words, let us push back the frontiers of characterization in search of an actor-character whose performativity exceeds the interpretation or the mediation of something. What in a new character criticism is at issue is the gestus and the language in which, to paraphrase the chorus to Troilus and Cressida, author’s pen is in (and beyond) actor’s voice while, simultaneously, actor’s voice is in (and beyond) author’s pen.1
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Notes
In the use of “personation” I follow Andrew Gurr in his Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 136–37.
More recently, Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) have underlined the concept of “person” as “the key category in theatrical performance” (7–8). Embracing “playgoer” and “actor” or even “in its triple sense—role, body, self” (Dawson’s phrase), the reference is to something “present and palpable.” The concept of “person” can qualify any exclusive concern with a “bodily-spiritual connection” in the character (14–15).
Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 29.
The vigor and expansion of such premodern performance practices in Elizabethan England has again been amply confirmed in Philip Butterworth’s Magicon the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans., Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Laroque’s emphasis on what he calls “the archaic survivals in Shakespeare’s work (including ‘songs, dances, disguises or spectacles’) “provides a new perspective on the whole theatrical process” (187). See this in connection with my own Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, trans., Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), with its strong emphasis on late ritual and medieval sources of performance.
Julian Hilton, Performance (London: Macmillan, 1987), 152.
Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 36.
As against Wells-Taylor’s strangely innocent insistence, there is for this reading “abundant support,” as in Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 175. The same may be claimed for “secretly open” as, in Eric Partridge’s wording, “open, in a secret part and in private, to [ … ] phallic ingression.” See Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 179.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 324. The reference to Émile Benveniste is to his path-breaking Problems in General Linguistics, trans., Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971). Even more relevant is Part II of the Problems, for which I was unable to trace an English translation.
William B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27.
Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, facsimile edn (New York: Garland Publishing, 1973), G 4. For a close study of the socio-cultural positioning in the Apology see my Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 147, 159.
A critical reconsideration of “representation” is overdue. See the collection of recent essays, with an Afterword by John Drakakis, Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature, ed. Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), 208–16. See also my debate “Representation and Mimesis: Toward a New Theory,” Symbolism 6 (2006): 3–36; with promising perspectives in recent critical approaches to mimesis and representation such as those by Jacques Derrida, George Hartley, Wolfgang Iser, Louis Marin, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others.
The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 53.
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© 2009 Robert Weimann
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Weimann, R. (2009). The Actor-Character in “Secretly Open” Action: Doubly Encoded Personation on Shakespeare’s Stage. In: Yachnin, P., Slights, J. (eds) Shakespeare and Character. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584150_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584150_10
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