The possibility of saying in the early modern playhouses

Abstract

ABSTRACTFor an ethical relation to exist between two interlocutors, according to Emmanuel Levinas, the potential for dialogue (an unimaginable future) must first exist. Levinas calls this Saying, opposed to the prescription of fixed meaning: the Said. Against the notion that a Shakespearean play text should be closed off by seeking to understand ‘what it means’ or that a performance can be measured by its fidelity to the text, each of which amounts to the Said, this essay proposes that the technologies of early modern performance open a text to the possibility of Saying. Attempts to characterise Shakespeare’s plays as either literature or theatre invariably situate key elements of early modern stagecraft (cue scripts, conventions for entrances and exits, actor extemporisation, or jigs) outside the play-as-text. The possibility of Saying is revealed through these technologies as the way the play text unfolds itself on the stage before an audience. More than merely directing or framing the action, after the manner of the Said, the early modern stage direction and the technologies of performance to which it refers are writ through the text as part of how the audience make sense of the play and engage with it.