Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study

Abstract

In their introduction to this volume, Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter describe the trends in Shakespeare criticism that have seen source study gradually marginalized in favor of more theoretically focused methodologies. Although they suggest that the post-structuralist turn implicitly began this decline, inasmuch as the death of the author signaled (quite rightly) a loss of faith in the merits of reconstructing authorial intentions, for theater historians the decentering of authorship has been productive in ways that foster an alternative appreciation of source study. The repertory studies of such esteemed scholars as Bernard Beckerman, Roslyn L. Knutson, Scott McMillin, Sally-Beth MacLean, Lawrence Manley, Lucy Munro, and others have reoriented our perspective of London commercial theater such that the playwright’s role is seen as only one aspect of a much larger, more complex matrix. 1 Playing companies become the organizing principle, with what McMillin calls “company style” being the focus 2 : plays, in this view, are the essential commodity of a company, and how that company acquires, performs, and revives the plays in its repertory in response to playgoer demand and the offerings of other companies is paramount. Players, playgoers, and even playhouses have important roles in our understanding of the highly competitive theatrical marketplace of Shakespeare’s London. W. David Kay urges scholars to treat Shakespeare as a “creative actor-playwright” rather than author, in the hope of producing a more “theatrically-oriented source study,” 3 and a repertory studies approach would take this insight even further, focusing less on the actor-playwright and more on the theatrical context of the company for whom he wrote. In other words, I’m suggesting that we should reconceptualize source study as a means of further understanding how and why a company offered the plays it did for performance. What did companies (rather than playwrights) respond to, either by emulating or overwriting their own and their competitors’ repertories?