Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre ed. by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre ed. by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods Derek Dunne Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre. Edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017; pp. 368. Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre makes a welcome entrance to Shakespeare studies by bringing together editorial experience, practitioner knowledge, and theoretical chops to an elusive topic that hovers between page and stage. Indeed, it is the edited collection format that leads to such rich insights that no "monograph," with all that that prefix implies, could hope to achieve. Alongside long-time Shakespeare editors such as Terri Bourus and Suzanne Gossett, there are practiceas-research specialists like Martin White and Paul Menzer. The latter co-writes with doctoral student Jess Hamlet, while Sarah Dustagheer appears in conversation with Philip Bird, a veteran actor of the Globe stage. Such a collaborative approach models good scholarship not only through its inclusivity, but also through the holistic view that it produces of a complex theatrical riddle: In what sense can printed phrases that post-date performance be said to "direct" the stage? The book is divided into sections on taxonomy, text, editing, space, and plays, although naturally there is overlap among all of these. Throughout there is a great sensitivity to the many agents who may have a hand in the (re)production of stage directions: actors, authors, print-house staff, later editors. Tiffany Stern's opening essay gives a counter-intuitive history of the term stage direction, from a term of opprobrium used by Lewis Theobald to describe dumb shows in Shakespeare to late-nineteenth-century attempts to prescribe actors' movements. She goes on to pose the provocative question, "Are there in fact no stage directions in Shakespeare?" (40). Stern's work is complemented by Laurie Maguire's [End Page 527] wide-ranging survey of "The Boundaries of Stage Directions." Using both Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean examples, this chapter does justice to the multiplicity of directions that constantly toggle between fictional worlds and theatrical landscapes. Explaining a line like "Shift with a bag as it were full of gold on his back," Maguire takes the simple phrase as it were and shows the complex work that it does to mediate among audience, actors, characters, and later readers—"all theatre is 'as it were'" (50). The section is rounded out by Menzer and Hamlet, who discuss the difficulty of talking about early modern staging conventions, when so many stage directions are themselves unconventional. Taking one-off "nonce" stage directions like "Peter falls in a hole" or "An artificial charm of birds being heard within," they ask what is to be gained by paying attention to those unique (often non-Shakespearean) examples over the more familiar instances from the First Folio. The second section on "Text" has contributions from Emma Smith and Douglas Bruster. This may be down to reading one after the other, but Smith's argument on reading Shakespeare's stage directions as a form of free indirect discourse seems more nuanced and convincing than Bruster's take on "Shakespeare's Literary Stage Directions," which at times seeks to recover "Shakespeare's mind at work" (133). That most famous of stage directions, "Exit pursued by a Beare," becomes, in Smith's hands, "the joyfully random ursine irruption into the narrative" (113). Gossett and Bourus make up the "Editing" section, tracing the thin line that editors tread between facilitating understanding and closing off interpretation. Page design, asides, onstage deaths, and even the appearance of ghosts are all treated with the skill and sensitivity of seasoned editors, as they draw on their combined experience of editing the New Oxford Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, Arden Early Modern Drama, and more. Gossett's candor is to be admired when she says, "[c]onsciously or unconsciously editors assume that, given their intense familiarity with the text in question, they can envision its action better than an inexperienced reader" (147). Similarly, Bourus discusses editors being "caught between the demand for authenticity … and the demands of legibility" (172), while also toying with the literal marginality of the stage directions themselves. The section on "Space" is filled by White's discussion of indoor playing practice (including candles...