Abstract
For all its power in articulating the notion of a “literary dramatist, ” the “return of the author” in contemporary Shakespeare criticism extends what Michael Bristol calls “the incessant border disputes, skirmishes, and raids carried out between advocates of performance-oriented interpretation and the practitioners of more strictly and textually-based hermeneutic procedures. ” For Bristol, the “largely trivial character of this debate” has largely to do with its focus on “precedence and the allocation of authority” in an economy in which “precedence” has long been guaranteed: the assertion of the literary character of Shakespeare’s writing as motivating the force of “interpretive” performance is a nearly frictionless position both in contemporary Shakespeare scholarship and throughout the popular understanding of Shakespeare performance.2 The notion that performance has to be displaced for the author to “return” to literary studies might be paired with a pendant question: has the author ever really left the apparently unruly precincts of Shakespearean performance?
Where exactly does one want to draw the line separating performance from adaptation? Do such performances “really” constitute Shakespeare’s plays? —Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Where Is Hamlet?”
So he went to marching up and down, thinking— and frowning, horrible, every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he’d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky—and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth—and after that, all through his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before. —Huck Finn on the Duke of Bilgewater, Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn1
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Notes
Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation,” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 115. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, with Harriet Elinor Smith and Walter Blair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 178–9.
On the “return of the author in Shakespeare studies,” see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Patrick Cheney, “Introduction,” Shakespeare Studies, 36 (2008): 19; Michael Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 97. I have discussed this movement in “Intoxicating Rhythms; or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama, and Performance (Studies),” Shakespeare Quarterly, 62 (2011): 309–39.
Rachel Anderson-Rabern, “The Naure Theater of Oklahoma’s Aesthetics of Fun,” TDR: The Drama Review—The Journal of Performance Studies, 54.4 (Winter 2010, T-208): 94. On “de-dramatizing” and “scenic écriture,” see Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jurs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 74.
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 35.
Karinne Keithley, “Uncreative Writing: Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet,” Theater, 40.2 (2010), 70. On the function of Shakespeare in American secondary education, see Denise Albanese, Extramural Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 69, 67.
National Endowment for the Arts, Shakespeare in American Communities: Teacher’s Guide (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, n.d.), p. 17. This volume is part of the Teacher’s Toolkit available free from the Shakespeare in American Communities website; it contains the Teacher’s Guide, the Why Shakespeare? VHS, the Recitation Contest, and other materials.
Thomas Cartelli, “Doing It Slant: Reconceiving Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath,” Shakespeare Studies, 38 (2010): 33. See, for instance, the cover of No Fear Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet (New York: Spark Publishing, 2003).
Some reviews misidentify this as a°mock-Elizabethan style” and generalize it to “the traditional manner of bad Shakespearean acting the world over” (Christopher Isherwood, “Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, New York Times, 21 December 2009), “high-falutin’ pronunciations,” “fruity voices and grandiose gestures” (Alexis Soloski, “Verona meets Verizon in The Kitchen’s Romeo & Juliet,” Village Voice, 22 December 2009).
Joseph Roach, “The Emergence of the American Actor,” The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume I: Beginnings to 1870, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 351.
Richard W. Schoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 19.
Roger Kimball, “Farewell Mapplethorpe, Hello Shakespeare: The NEA, the W. Way,” National Review Online, 29 January 2004. As Todd Landon Barnes notes, after the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the budget of the NEA “rebounded 28 percent (a nearly 27 million dollar increase),” in which nearly “all this new funding was reserved for Gioia’s ‘favorite’ program: Shakespeare in American Communities”; “George W. Bush’s ‘Three Shakespeares’: Macbeth, Macbush, and the Theatre of War,” Shakespeare Bulletin, 26.3 (2008): 6. He also notes the “million-dollar” contribution by the Department of Defense (3). On his side, Gioia’s recourse to Shakespeare, and the successor American Masterpieces, might be regarded as having spared the NEA.
Amanda Giguere, Shakespeare in American Communities: Conservative Politics, Appropriation, and the NEA (Saarbriicken: VDM Verlag Dr. Miiller, 2010), p. 60.
Robert Frost, “Directive,” Poems, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), pp. 266–8.
Shakespeare in American Communities: Teacher’s Guide, p. 13. “The earliest known staging of his [Shakespeare’s] plays in the colonies” was not in 1750, as the Teacher’s Guide informs us, but in 1730; see Don B. Wilmeth and Jonathan Curley, “Timeline: Beginnings to 1870,” The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume I: Beginnings to 1870, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 33.
Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 133.
National Endowment for the Arts, Shakespeare in American Communities: Recitation Contest (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, n.d.), p. 5.
On “surrogation,” see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), passim.
Richard Schechner, “Collective Reflexivity: Restoration of Behavior,” A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 51.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1983), pp. 120–21.
Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation,” Works in Prose and Verse, by Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Henry Frowde for Oxford University Press, n.d. [1908]), p. 136.
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Worthen, W.B. (2013). “What light through yonder window speaks?”: The Nature Theater of Oklahoma Romeo and Juliet and the Cult(ure) of Shakespeare. In: DiPietro, C., Grady, H. (eds) Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137017314_8
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