Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 by John Ripley

Abstract

REVIEWS such patterns, but in the surviving archive of documents about the early modern theatre. These records show how “authorial presence” was compromised by habitual collaboration in the preparation of scripts for the stage and by equally habitual re­ vision of them by the companies, especially on the occasion of the revival of popular plays. Tromly’s readers will have to de­ cide for themselves whether to trust “patterns” or records, but readers deserve to hear the voices, suppressed in this book, of those who have studied the latter. According to G. E. Bentley, author of the seven-volume Jacobean and Caroline Stage, “al­ together the evidence suggests that it would be reasonable to guess that as many as half of the plays by professional drama­ tists in the period incorporated the writing at some date of more than one man” (Profession 199). Bentley also tells us that “re­ vision of dramatists’ manuscripts in the theatres occurred when the actors prepared the play for revival. There are a great many records of one sort or another of this common practice; even the general public seems to have taken it for granted” (Profession 237). No scholar who attends to these records would simply pre­ sume, as Tromly does, Marlowe’s unaided composition of The Jew of Malta in the form in which that play descends to us, since the only extant version of The Jew was not published until 1633, forty years after Marlowe’s death. WORKS CITED Bentley, G. E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 vols. Oxford: Claren­ don, 1941-68. ------ . The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 15901642 . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. PAUL WERSTINE / King’s College, University of Western Ontario John Ripley. Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994■ Teaneck NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Very much in the vein of John Ripley’s earlier book on Julius Caesar (1980), this is an impressively complete and judicious 225 ESC 26, 2000 history of a major Shakespeare play as it has been performed on English and American stages. Beginning with a little spec­ ulative reconstruction of what might have been the conditions and modes of its original performance, the author moves into a discussion of the style and structure of the play. His astute analysis of its performative rhythm provides the basis for his subsequent account of the attempts and repeated failures of production to take the measure of this complex and sometimes uninviting play. For, in a sense, failure is Ripley’s theme. As he makes clear throughout and reiterates in his Afterword, there seems never to have been in his eyes a fully successful version of the play. All have been partial, too quick to “stabilize” what Shakespeare leaves deliberately indeterminate, too eager to pro­ vide clarity of motivation and political alignment to characters and situations that Shakespeare leaves fruitfully ambiguous. In offering a prescription for what could be done to rem­ edy this situation, Ripley perhaps asks for too much. Indeed it is probably not possible to mount a production that would answer, and thus put an end to, all professorial desire. What would be desirable, as the author outlines it, includes an un­ cut text, an artful balance of psychology and politics, and a perfect weighting of the different forces in the play. He calls as well for equal emphasis on the three “centres of interest” in the play — the patrician-plebeian conflict, the military struggle, and the mother-son relationship — and for a perceptive attunement to the structural harmonies. A salient example of the fail­ ure of producers to tune in to the careful structure, he argues, is the almost universal cutting of a “pivotal” scene (4.3) that is actually a “key aesthetic device” (336) linking the two main movements of the play. Coming from an historian of the the­ atre, such prescriptions seem a bit surprising; they sound too much like a literary wish-list, too much at odds with the his­ torian’s even-handed consideration of the flow of productions as they have negotiated the tricky terrain marked by stylistic imperatives, audience taste, actorly skill, and the demands of the text. Ripley, like most...