The Shakespeare Revolution by J. L. Styan

Abstract

Reviews 277 was perhaps longer than the entire history of the United States from the Declaration of Independence to 1978. The York plays, which as the dramatic records state were staged “for the glory of God and the honor of the city of York,” need especially today to be accurately understood, both critically and in performance. CLIFFORD DAVIDSON Western Michigan University J. L. Styan. The Shakespeare Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1977. Pp. ix + 292. $13.95. Students of plays as performed in the theater have for many years been indebted to J. L. Styan for general studies such as The Dramatic Experience and particular ones such as Chekhov in Performance and Shakespeare’s Stagecraft. In The Shakespeare Revolution he adds to our indebtedness by discussing a subject of unusual interest—the extra­ ordinary change that has come about in our century in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays. The last flowering of the “Victorian Shakespeare” in the productions of Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, with their casts of hundreds and mind-blowing stage pictures, was so different from what we see today that it might seem to us more like operatic adaptation. The revolution of which Professor Styan writes, however, cannot be described entirely in terms of the differences between a Beerbohm Tree production and one by Peter Brook. It was not one revolution but two; for the criticism of Shakespeare has also changed radically between Brad­ ley’s time and ours and has been related, both as cause and effect, to the changes in staging. The complexity of the relationship between these concurrent revolutions is partly indicated by the author’s belief that the most important advances of Shakespearian scholars and critics have been due to awareness of the stage while the changes in staging and directing have been influenced in important ways by the discoveries of scholars and the new interpretive approaches of critics. These interconnections are presented in alternating chapters which put the work of the stage and that of the study side by side in the early years of the century, in the thirties, and today. Even before the publication of the Swan drawing in 1888, William Poel began his revolt against the reigning illusionism of theatrical production. In 1881, on the basis of what was then known about the Elizabethan public theater, Poel mounted an amateur pro­ duction of the first quarto of Hamlet on a bare platform stage in St. George’s Hall. Both the text and the performance were sarcastically re­ viewed, but the revolution had begun. Poel continued his experiments, won recognition, and inspired others, the most important of whom was Harley Granville-Barker with his productions at the Savoy in 1912-14 and his Prefaces to Shakespeare, which pointed the way to stage-oriented criticism. Despite the innovative force of Poel and Granville-Barker, Styan 278 Comparative Drama writes that “The real sense of change came when such apparent eccen­ trics as Nigel Playfair, Barry Jackson, and Tyrone Guthrie sought re­ peatedly to give their audiences what they took to be the stuff of the Shakespeare experience. . . . Where Granville-Barker had aimed at a new unity of tone and effect by returning to Shakespeare’s text and structural continuity, the new men aimed at hitting a modem approxi­ mation to the Elizabethan mode of performance” (p. 5). Accordingly chapters are given to each of these new men and one, preceding the discussion of Guthrie, to Shakespeare criticism in the thirties. The sub­ title to this chapter, “Retreat and Advance,” refers to a retreat by critics from concern for the stage followed by an advance toward a kind of interpretation which has been the basis for certain recent productions— an advance, that is, toward the mutual enlightenment of stage and study. The work of Peter Brook is offered as a culmination of this process and hence of the whole critical and theatrical Shakespeare revolution. The idea put forward by this very readable book is persuasive in its general outlines, and it is most instructive to observe the parallel develop­ ments of dramatic criticism and stage history, which, as Styan points out, are normally kept quite separate. Some details of...