Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary, and: Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary by Alan C. Dessen, and: Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance ed. by James C. Bulman Anthony Graham-White Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary. By Alan C. Dessen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; pp. xii + 283. $49.95 cloth. Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance. Edited by James C. Bulman. London: Routledge, 1996; pp. vi + 218. $17.95 paper. Both these books deal with the contexts in which we read, edit, and direct Shakespeare. But these contexts themselves could not be more different. Indeed, one of the papers in Bulman’s collection, Cary M. Mazer’s “Historicizing Alan Dessen: Scholarship, Stagecraft, and the ‘Shakespeare Revolution,’” specifically criticizes Dessen’s influential earlier work. [End Page 527] Dessen’s context here is the more than six hundred plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as they appear in manuscript or in the earliest editions. These playwrights wrote for a theatre whose conventions they knew, and usually without much thought toward shaping their scripts for publication. Thus, Dessen suggests, “today’s reader is eavesdropping on a conversation [between the playwright and his professional colleagues in the theatre] carried out in an elliptical theatrical language that we only partly understand” (59). In order to determine the likely ways of staging certain kinds of scenes in Elizabethan theatres, Dessen focuses on the stage directions, and on the stage directions implicit in the spoken lines: how dying scenes were handled, what Juliet’s and other tombs may have looked like, how characters “vanished.” His purpose is three-fold: to show us Shakespeare as a theatrical craftsman, to suggest that editors should draw on the accumulated knowledge of theatrical practice in preparing the annotations to their editions, and to suggest that directors—whatever their own final choice of staging—may want to know what Shakespeare might have envisaged. Dessen sometimes cites a modern staging that possibly catches the intent of Elizabethan performance. Occasionally and discreetly, he points to an editor’s note or a director’s choice based on a misunderstanding of a practical point of staging. Both in this book and in his earlier Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (1984), Dessen goes beyond simply providing an inventory of Elizabethan stage devices. He comments, for example, on how often Shakespeare introduces sick-chairs into plays “that deal with some form of diseased authority” (116–17) and suggests a thematic counterpoint between thrones and sick-chairs. Stage images and verbal images reinforce each other. Some of these, of course, would be lost to a modern audience—for example, actions that evoke the image of the devil carrying someone off on his back—but others could be suggestive to a modern director. Dessen’s discussions of entrances and asides are particularly interesting. Modern editors sometimes move entrances to more “logical” places than in the earliest editions, quarto or folio—usually to immediately [End Page 528] before the character in question speaks. They thereby forfeit the chance for an entering character to learn something earlier than is subsequently revealed in dialogue, or for that character’s silent presence to comment ironically on the words being exchanged by those already onstage. Lines that editors mark as asides may be no such thing. Shakespeare may wish to emphasize the inattentiveness of the listener, perhaps as a hint of moral obtuseness; or he may wish to portray the speaker as not caring whether his or her words are overheard. Either, for example, might be true when Hamlet says, “A little more than kin, and less than kind” in the presence of the court (1.2.64–65 in the Riverside Shakespeare). This may be an aside, as modern editors regularly mark it. Alternately, however, Hamlet may be addressing Claudius—with the impudence toward him that he uses elsewhere. Either way, Dessen’s identification of options hardly seems to justify Mazer’s characterization of him as a prescriptive tyrant out to instruct directors on how they should “recreate . . . the play the author created” (Bulman, 163). Bulman’s collection looks at the contexts into which Shakespeare has been put since his own time. These are mainly theatrical and, except for a survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performance editions, entirely modern. When...