“Illegitimate” Pantomime in the “Legitimate” Theater: Context as Text

Abstract

Romantic era drama has received increasing attention, with sessions at conferences devoted to plays and theater, with performances of plays by, for example, Baillie, Byron, and Beddoes, and with fine monographs and scholarly editions. (1) Still, as I have argued else where, (2) editorial efforts on nineteenth-century drama face considerable difficulties arising from such factors as the volume of dramas--with more than 25,000 nineteenth-century play texts to consider--and the perceived value of these works, as many continue to see the period between Sheridan and Shaw as a vast dramatic wasteland. In the end, however, I think the heart of the problem was diagnosed by Jane Moody in our best account of the theater of the period: Moody reminds us that, whatever we think of the literary drama of the time, the Romantic era was a period of enormous theatrical innovation, where what happened on stage is a key to understanding plays that for us remain only as texts. As Moody demonstrates in outlining what she calls the physical, visceral and thus illegitimate aesthetic of Romantic era theater, the written text on stage is hedged round by eloquent if bodies as well as dazzling visuals and stirring music. My question is: how should a textual editor, usually focused on the word, approach what Moody calls mute performance? (3) In a sense, the editor's task is to take up the traces of what was once a live performance in order to create a self-consciously textual representation of what we call theatrical experience. In most periods, dramatic texts are considered simply as texts, a set of written words in manuscript or print that are then realized by actors; while there is surely always a tension between the literary text and its particular physical embodiments, few doubt that the word precedes the act and takes precedence. In other periods, we would not primarily think of worrying about performance versions of texts. For example, while considerable effort has been put into publishing John Philip Kemble's promptbooks for his productions of Shakespeare, no editor of Shakespeare would re-edit the early modern print texts with those performance versions in mind. Simply put, we do not correct texts collated from print or manuscript versions on the basis of performance information. situation is different in large stretches of nineteenth-century drama where action, sets, and music displace language. While one can find similar moments in particular texts in other periods, the problems they pose are not as acute as in the romantic era. Issues arise when stage directions are key to the meaning of the play, when it is theatrical action rather than dramatic words that matter. This point becomes clearer if we examine moments where stage directions literally take center stage. For example, there is the famous dumb show in Hamlet, which is obviously done in pantomime, but Shakespeare describes the action in considerable detail (see the stage directions following 3.2.123), and then the players perform the action again, this time accompanied by speeches (3.2.139-242); a director does not have to puzzle out how to stage the scene. (4) Perhaps the most famous bit of stage business ever, Exit, pursued by a (Winter's Tale, 3-357), surely allows a wide variety of stage action, from having a real bear appear to using a projection of a bear, but we know what occurs. Moving ahead several centuries, we get this stage direction: Meanwhile, Hedda walks up and down the room raising her arms and clenching her fists as though in desperation. Then she throws aside the curtains from the French windows and stands there, looking out. (5) Ibsen's stage direction may have allowed Ingmar Bergman to introduce a great deal of mime in his productions of the play, for which he was criticized by those who prefer words to action, but Ibsen has provided us with a clear description of the stage business he imagined. Compare these moments to stage directions from early nineteenth-century melodramas: The whole scene passes in a mysterious and rapid manner; or, The ensuing scene ought to be conducted with much haste and mystery. …