Learning Shakespeare's Secret Language: the Limits of ‘Performance Studies’

Abstract

As author of one of the pioneering books advocating the study of Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (1966), founder of the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre, John Russell Brown is in a uniquely authoritative position to look back over the intervening years as ‘Performance Studies’ have increasingly displaced the study of Shakespeare's plays as texts. But has this been as helpful as many, including the author, hoped, when in practice it is so often based on the second- or third-hand recreation of lost and isolated theatrical moments, and fails entirely to give a sense of the progressive experience of watching a play? John Russell Brown here argues for closer attention to what he calls the ‘secret language’ of the plays – implicit instructions to actors that are buried in the texts themselves, at a time when there was no director to encourage or impose a particular interpretation or approach. He concludes: ‘Rather than trying to describe and understand what very different people have made of the plays in very different circumstances and times, we can best study them in performance by allowing them to reflect our own lives.’ John Russell Brown's most recent books are Shakespeare Dancing (Palgrave, 2005) and, as editor, The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare (2008). In 2007 he was appointed Visiting Professor at University College London.