Performance Theory and Textual Theory: A Retort Courteous

Abstract

Performance theory in tandem with critical theory has come to take for granted a number of critical positions, such as the distancing or demolition of the author, and the undermining of the authority of Shakespeare's texts by insisting on their indeterminacy. Performance theorists, distancing themselves from traditional modes of criticism, aim to free the productions of plays from bondage to the author or the text. They claim a special authority for performance as generating new meanings, and refashioning the texts of Shakespeare's plays. This claim, I argue, is over-pitched, in that all productions create meanings by working in relation to social and political circumstances at the time when a play is staged. Also, instead of liberating the play from the text performance inevitably closes down what the text leaves open, because each production has to choose one out of many possible alternative interpretations. Performance critics write as if traditional productions and criticism have exhausted the meaning of the plays, which thus have to be reinvented, and they seem to have lost touch with the great range of possible interpretations complex texts like that of Macbeth offer the reader and producer.