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Shakespeare's Dramatic Transactions
By Michael E. Mooney Duke University Press
Copyright © 1990 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8283-6
CHAPTER 1
Integrating Actor and Audience
Process versus Product
Theater asks us to accept that the actors have temporarily put aside their true identities for the shadowy and shaped roles they assume on the stage. During a performance the actors assume fictional roles, and the spectators, aware that individuals like themselves have become theatrical personae, luxuriate in the illusion which makes this evanescent, unsubstantial pageant the only reality available to them. As Prospero recognizes in The Tempest, the dramatic fiction relies upon an audience's willingness to accept the illusion as "real," and he demands the same degree of attention from the inner audience to his masque. "No tongue! all eyes! Be silent," he commands Ferdinand and Miranda, and us. Only when threatened by a different stage reality does he break the illusion's magical spell, dismissing "these our actors" as "spirits ... melted ... into thin air ... like the baseless fabric of this vision" (4.1.148–151). Only when Caliban and his loutish companions threaten to intrude does Prospero acknowledge the theatricality of the "great Globe itself" and the dreamy stuff out of which he as an actor and we as an audience are made.
In drawing together two major Renaissance topoi, Prospero touches upon an assumption about the relation between life and art that modern sensibilities seem often unwilling to accept. As we know, the Renaissance viewed art in the same relation to life as a dream stands to waking and as the stage stands to the world. Art and life were interrelated and interpenetrating, and references to the dreamlike and theatrical nature of quotidian existence permeate the literature of the period. Hence, the spectators' willingness to accept the illusion as "real" did not rule out another level of awareness. Renaissance playgoers attended performances conscious that the actors had other lives antecedent to their fictional personalities and what they perceived in this theatrical space was ultimately a double vision. They saw, simultaneously, the real actor and the assumed role, and this way of seeing contributed to a theatrical epistemology that played upon the knowledge that their own lives were as full of provisional identities and imaginary posturings as those of the actors. The actor thus presented himself as actor and represented, mimetically, a role; every character was seen in dual perspective, as involved in an illusory world and as merely a player in this world. One can almost always see the actor behind the role, but the frequency with which actors in Renaissance drama appear to step out of their roles to address—or otherwise break the illusion to communicate with —the spectators is a distinguishing feature of this drama, typical of the engagement it fostered with the audience.
It is this relation between a presentational and representational drama and its audience that raises so many questions about the way modern criticism approaches the theater. From the earliest use in Greek drama of a nonprofessional chorus drawn from the populace, to the example of the English mysteries in which the audience could "recognize Christ on the cross as the local cobbler and still believe that they are witnessing the actual Crucifixion of the Son of God," to Prospero's admission in the epilogue to The Tempest that "Now my charms are all o'erthrown, / And what strength I have's mine own, / Which is most faint," dramatists have experimented with an audience's double, and simultaneous, awareness that what they watch is illusionistic and nonillusionistic, representational and presentational. They have so experimented, I believe, because drama is finally a transaction between the spectators and the play.
We may have lost the ability to understand the nature of this transaction by learning too much about its separate aspects. Renaissance commentators stressed the interrelatedness of drama and life, but twentieth-century scholars analyzed Shakespeare's plays as self-enclosed constructs divorced from their audiences. This, to be sure, was a step forward. Reacting to the excesses of nineteenth-century biographical criticism and psychological speculation, New Critical and Formalistic methodologies freed criticism from subjectivity by asserting the primacy of the text. But because they were largely ahistorical and more interested in poetic language and generic identity than in the theatrical dimension of Shakespearean drama, these methodologies drove a wedge between Shakespeare and his audience. Much modern criticism removed Shakespeare's work from the stage, and the study of his dramatic poetry became an end in itself, separate from the purposes of playing. New Critics, intent on the language of the text, lost sense of the way language and staging complement each other. And for many modern critics the "fourth wall" dividing actor from audience was more than just a useful term; it symbolized the division between the study of language and the recognition that a play's meaning depends upon the dramatic context.
This analytical approach was less inappropriate for the drama of the early twentieth century. Modern dramatists provided a number of plays which might be understood from the text. Certainly the works of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw helped convince scholars there were few significant differences between a literary and a performed drama. This view was upheld by T. S. Eliot, who averred that he did not like seeing Shakespeare performed and who, in recognizing that Renaissance drama was presentational, nonillusionistic, and "conventional" as well as representational, illusionistic, and "realistic," called it an "impure art." For Eliot, Renaissance drama was an art in which "there has been no firm principle of what is to be postulated as a convention and what is not." With this bias, and with the legacy of post-Darwinian evolutionary thinking influencing our view, it became clear to many that an illusionistic, literary drama was the most sophisticated of dramatic forms. It became easy to believe that Renaissance drama evolved toward the purity of self-enclosed representation. Inigo Jones's elaborate properties and illusionistic backdrops triumphed, after all, over Ben Jonson's insistence on the importance of the playwright and the audience in creating a scene, and in this century the power of William Archer's devotion to the realistic and representational quality of Ibsenist and post-Ibsenist theater corroborated the supremacy of a play as an entity in itself.
But if the plays of Ibsen might be fathomed from a reading of the text, the drama of the English Renaissance could not. In fact, not until Jonson audaciously published his works in 1616 did the notion that a play was more than a script enter "popular" consciousness, though classics for the schools and unauthorized quartos were available, of course. Words, in a Renaissance playscript, are meant to be spoken from different theatrical spaces; the success of a theatrical realization depends upon the way it is perceived by the spectators. It is in this sense that the theater's other hemisphere is so crucial. In this second of the theater's enclosed spaces, spectators draw a perspective on the action. Because we trust so much in Shakespeare's language, we should also trust in the way he directs our lines of sight and our attention to different theatrical spaces and be willing to explore the ways that meaning is created in the theater. The "fourth wall" of a strictly illusionistic theater does not so much prevent us from responding as separate us from participating in the creation of a play's meaning. The idea of an exclusively illusionistic theater, so amenable to critics bound to the analysis of a poetic drama, limits our understanding and devalues the importance of the audience. Indeed, if plays are analyzed only as texts, neither the modern theater of illusion nor the presentational and representational theater of the Renaissance will be fully apprehended.
Not all twentieth-century thinking has been limited in the way that Eliot and Archer proposed. Two continental artists and theorists developed a different, less limiting, view at about the same time the assumptions of the New Criticism took shape in England and America. In the 1920s and 1930s the Spanish philosopher-artist Ortega y Gassett argued that the theatrical experience was "radically epistemological." In a series of powerful essays entitled El espectador and in his lecture "Idea del teatro," Ortega insisted upon the role spectators played in the creation of dramatic meaning. His espousal of "perspectivism," an acknowledgment that meaning can only be validated by the confluence of individual viewpoints, helped reassert the existence of communicative lines between performer and spectator. Rather than turn toward a text, Ortega focused on the nature of theatrical space, "an enclosed place which contains two interacting spaces ... the hall, where the public places itself, and the stage, where the actors place themselves." What the public sees in this interacting space is a double vision of the actor and his role, in exactly the way that the Renaissance recognized the relationship between life and art, and this makes the theater a metaphor: "the stage and the actor are the universal metaphor incarnate, and this is the theater: visible metaphor." In the work of Ortegas slightly later French contemporary, Antonin Artaud, the audience became even more important. Artaud declared that the spectators should be "placed in the middle of the action" and be "engulfed and physically affected by it." For his "theater of cruelty" Artaud endorsed the idea of spectacle in an attempt to return drama to its ritual origins, to a state in which the staged event reenacts a shared primordial experience or "happens" anew.
By replacing the audience in the play, Ortega and Artaud (and their German contemporary, Bertold Brecht) contributed to a resurgence in the theatrical "happening," accompanied by a return of the theater in the round and the apron, as opposed to the illusionistic proscenium arch stage. But in supplying an approach that counterbalanced the illusionistic and literary separateness of early twentieth-century drama, Ortega and Artaud also journeyed too far from the particular suspension that is Renaissance drama. That drama, we now perceive, is precisely what Eliot disparagingly termed it, an "impure art," and that is the strength of its distinctive chemistry. Renaissance drama is not just self-referential or self-enclosed, nor is it, to use the terminology adopted by S. L. Bethell, either predominantly "conventional" (nonillusionistic and popular) or "naturalistic" (illusionistic, realistic, and literary). It is a drama that holds engagement with and detachment from the audience in equipoise; it is a theater of nonillusionistic as well as illusionistic effects, born from the synthesis of the discrete presentational and representational modes of popular and courtly or hall drama. Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe arrived at just that moment when the old traditions of the popular theater were not yet moribund and the new conventions of the continental theater of illusion would soon be introduced and, in private theaters and in courtly masques, even accepted. As a result, theatrical performance was often a mixture of two distinct modes. Direct address, in the simplest late medieval way, was still possible, and at moments in scenes where Inigo Jones's machines were used the production must have been "illusionistic" in an expressive new way. Most of the time there would have been sufficient suggestion of a particularized location to carry the basic illusion, but not enough to prevent older presentational conventions from operating. Indeed, soliloquy had probably not become so illusionistic (if in fact it ever has) that a character could still speak (in)directly to the spectators. The essence of Renaissance theater lay in the coexistence of presentational and representational modes.
But if our understanding of Shakespeare's theater has grown, critical response continues to lag behind. Because readers still prefer to discuss Renaissance drama as an illusionistic and literary construct, they have not been able to come to terms with either the "affect" or the intention of theatrical performance. Indeed, what occurs on stage is still assumed to be separate and distinct from what may occur in the minds of the audience. According to this premise, even if we could determine the "affect" a play created in the spectators or the playwright's and the cast's intention, we would be mired in subjectivity, less close to approximating the truth about a play's meaning than if we stayed at home and simply studied the language. It is not an unreasonable or untenable position, and it has of course immeasurably enhanced our comprehension of the thematics of Shakespeare's plays. It has the practical advantage of allowing us to write about plays we may not often see and the added comfort that, after all, one is writing about, and not staging, these plays anyway. Ortegas call for "perspectivism" has rarely penetrated the walls of the academic study.
A criticism which seeks to describe the effect of a play must certainly acknowledge that no single audience, nor single auditor, will necessarily respond in the same way as any other. That acknowledgment should not rule out the potential riches to be discovered in a playscript or to be found in Shakespeare's manipulation of the spectators. As the history of critical response reveals, there can never be a fixed meaning for a work of art. Meaning has always depended upon the perceiving eye. The possible reactions built into a Shakespearean play make meaning a product of the communicative act, of the playwright's and the actors' intention and of the audience's response. "Meaning" derives from a consistent, "affective" presentation of the playscript, one as true as possible to its subtlety and complexity. It resides in perception and experience as much as in "reductive intellection" after the event. And because we have begun to realize this crucial fact, we have started to hear the calls for a criticism that does not "suppress the nature of the aesthetic experience." Because we have begun to realize that "each critic in his own way suggests some conflict between the thematic pattern he identifies on reflection and his actual experience," we have come to acknowledge again that no figure in the carpet is the carpet. Norman Rabkin, most notably, argues that "we need to learn to talk about the process of our involvement" with a dramatic work "rather than our considered view after the aesthetic event." Unfortunately, despite the valuable contributions of New Critical, Formalistic, deconstructive, psychological, and reader-response methodologies, we still tacitly "deny the possibility of authorial communication or communal aesthetic experience, ... deny that at a certain level of experience a work of art controls the responses of audiences who share its culture, even though each member of the audience may interpret those responses differently." Unfortunately, these methodologies direct attention away from what we feel and think during a performance.
In the case of drama criticism seems particularly amiss. Although readers would agree that the most obvious difference separating drama from poetry and fiction is that drama is primarily meant to be performed, literary critics often remain within the confines of the academic study and the classroom. The affective fallacy ironically served not to protect us from subjectivity but rather to jail us. Our counterparts in departments of drama have not fared much better. Isolated by space and inclination and protected by distinctions between the performing arts and their analytic study, teachers of dramatic art also seldom venture beyond their secure demesnes. They are the guardians of performance; literary critics are the champions of the text. The division between the two has given rise to rival camps, each with its set of critical claims and each uneasily sharing the virtues and the shortcomings of the other. With some exception, dramatic and literary critics remain on their respective sides of the border. And despite the scrupulous work of theater historians, few attempts have been made to utilize objective conjectures about staging for a performance criticism. To be sure there have been essays written about stage properties and directions, but they often rely exclusively on factual details found in the text; similarly, studies of Shakespeare's use of visual images seek objective correlatives in Renaissance iconographic handbooks like Natalis Comes's Mythologiae or Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, sometimes missing the implications these images have in performance. These are valid approaches, and I do not wish to diminish their importance, but they are immured within a critical system that allows one only at his peril to consider the impact these emblems would have had on the nobility, the merchant class, and the groundlings standing in the yard. We want students to be "affected" by Shakespearean drama, but cannot let ourselves write about those "affects" except by a kind of scholarly legerdemain that allows us to objectify what is subjective, to convert affects into effects, processes into products.
Convention and Reality
We have not been able to describe a play's life in the theater because we have not accepted that Renaissance drama is presentational and representational. What has gotten in the way of our acceptance, however, can only partially be charged to our New Critical predispositions. Imperfect knowledge about stage conditions, Renaissance audiences, and popular modes of presentation also contributes to the uneasiness felt with an "affective" criticism. The truth of the matter is that it is impossible to determine the way any single play was performed on the Renaissance stage. For all that is known about the Globe and Blackfriars theaters, we actually know very little about the terms under which a particular play might have been offered. Modern productions (and records of earlier ones) are invaluable, of course, since they provide examples of the ways plays might have been performed. But for obvious reasons no modern production can duplicate an event which transpired four hundred years ago, and any two interpretations of the same play by a different (or even the same) cast or director might vary so that what we thought we understood could well be cast into doubt.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shakespeare's Dramatic Transactions by Michael E. Mooney. Copyright © 1990 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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