Abstract
In the twentieth century the evolution of performance criticism, or stage-centred criticism, as it was first known, was one of the major developments in the academic study of Shakespeare. Performance criticism provides students of Renaissance texts with evidence of how the modern theatre negotiates the often paradoxical critical dilemmas which the plays embody. In the case of comedy, it has confirmed and reinforced critics’ sense of the contested and problematical nature of this genre.
One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons! A Natural Perspective, that is and is not.
(V.i.213–14)
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Notes and References
The RSC refer in their Mission Statement to ‘keeping alive the rich tradition of Shakespeare as well as performing classics of world drama and work by today’s leading playwrights... Our aim, in this age increasingly dominated by the visual image, is to expound and extend the power of language and poetry. It is an ambitious goal but, we believe, an important one.’
Quoted in Judith Cook, ‘King John Barton’, Plays and Players 21 (June 1974): 27.
John Barton, as quoted in Vincent Guy, ‘Director in Interview: John Barton talks to Vincent Guy’, Plays and Players 17 (November 1969): 49.
Stanley Wells, Royal Shakespeare: Four Major Productions at Stratford-upon-Avon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 48–9.
Guy, ‘Director in Interview’, p. 49.
Ibid.
Gareth Lloyd Evans, ‘Judi Dench talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans’, Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 141.
Wells, Royal Shakespeare, p. 62.
M. M. Mahood, ‘Shakespeare’s Middle Comedies: A Generation of Criticism’, Shakespeare Survey 32 (1979): 6.
The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Hough-ton Mifflin, 1974).
Anne Barton, Twelfth Night, RSC programme, 1969.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957)
C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).
Ibid., p. 181.
Ibid., p. 184.
Barton, Twelfth Night.
Ibid.
Anne Barton (née Righter), Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962).
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 183.
Barton, Twelfth Night.
Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, p. 4.
Barton, Twelfth Night.
For example, in the case of the Comedies, A. C. Bradley, ‘Feste the Jester’, in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. I. Gollancz (London: Oxford University Press, 1916) reprinted in
A. C. Bradley, A Miscellany (London: Macmillan, 1929)
H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London: Methuen, 1938)
B. Evans, Shakespeare’s Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)
John Palmer, Comic Characters in Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1946)
John Dover Wilson, Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies (London: Faber & Faber, 1962).
John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 8.
Ibid., p. 9.
John Barton, as quoted in Gareth Lloyd Evans, ‘Directing Problem Plays: John Barton talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans’, Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 65.
Barton, Playing Shakespeare, p. 15.
J. W. Lambert, Sunday Times, 24 August 1969.
Promptbook description. The promptbooks for the 1969 and 1971 productions have been lost. I consulted the one used at the Aldwych theatre in 1970.
Stanley Wells, ‘The Academic and the Theatre’, in The Triple Bond: Plays Mainly Shakespearean in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price (Pennsylvania and London: Pennsylvania University Press, 1975), p. 16.
Wells, Royal Shakespeare, p. 49.
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 182.
Wells, Royal Shakespeare, p. 50.
Barton, Twelfth Night: ‘the sea captain who first tells Viola about Illyria might justly have said to her what the Cheshire Cat says to Alice: “They’re all mad here”.’ Interestingly, critics have often made the connection between Lewis Carroll and Twelfth Night. For example, in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) François Laroque comments: ‘This nonsense logic, which Lewis Carroll was later to develop in the scenes of Through the Looking Glass... boils down to pointing out that, however different things look on the surface, it’s all the same underneath. Festivity takes us into the realm of illusion, a land where contraries seem to keep good company’ (p. 228).
Richard David, ‘Of an Age and For All Time: Shakespeare at Stratford’, Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 167.
Twelfth Night, ed M. M. Mahood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
Wells, Royal Shakespeare, p. 51. See also Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World, in which his description of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew is that ‘the veteran champions of festivity have become the pensioners of pleasure’ (p. 256).
Anne Barton, Twelfth Night.
Ronald Bryden, Observer, 24 August 1969.
J. Kingston, Punch, 19 August 1970.
Frank Marcus, Sunday Telegraph, 24 August 1969 noted that ‘Donald Sinden, as Malvolio, struggles valiantly but uselessly against the production. He is an expert comedian, and at times seems to enter into shamefaced conspiracy with the audience in order to rescue some threatened laughs.’
Benedict Nightingale, New Statesman, 21 August 1969.
Wells, Royal Shakespeare, p. 50.
Ibid., p. 62.
Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, quoted in the ‘Introduction’ to Chekhov: Plays, trans. and ed. Elisaveta Fet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 8. This translation differs from the J. J. Robbins translation of My Life in Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), in which this section forms part of Chapter XXXIII,’ symbolism and Impressionism’.
Chekhov in a letter to Maria Lilana, Stanislavsky’s wife and one of the leading actresses of the Moscow Art Theatre, 15 September 1903. Quoted in David Magarshack, The Real Chekhov: An Introduction to Chekhov’s Last Plays (London, Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 189.
Stanislavsky, quoted in ibid., p. 10.
Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, p. 240: ‘in my great desire to help the actors I tried to create a mood around them, in the hope that it would grip them and call forth creative vision.... I invented all sorts of mises en scène, the singing of birds, the barking of dogs, and in this enthusiasm for sounds on the stage I went so far that I caused a protest on the part of Chekhov.’ In a letter to Olga Knipper on 29 March 1904, Chekhov complained: ‘One thing I can say. Stanislavsky has ruined my play. Oh well, I don’t suppose anything can be done about it’ (Magarshack, The Real Chekhov, p. 192).
Alexander Leggatt notes that ‘this kind of tension is basic to Shakespearian comedy: it is at bottom a tension between stylized and realistic art. The lovers, having engaged our feelings as human beings, are now fixed in a harmony we can only believe in by trusting the power of fantasy’ (Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, London, Methuen, 1974, p. 253).
This is taken to greater extremes in Nunn’s adaptation because he is afforded the filmic luxury of ‘flashback’ in the sense that he creates the scene of the shipwreck before the play begins. The film opens with a reconstruction of this fateful journey from Messaline, where Viola and Sebastian, both dressed as women, are entertaining the passengers with a comic song. The song draws out the sexual ambiguity of Sebastian’s assuming another gender role. Critics also commented on the melancholic ‘Chekhovian’ context. ‘The settings and costumes place it firmly within the orbit of “heritage” cinema but with more than a hint of Chekhov about it. As in Chekhov’s short stories, landscape is used to mirror the characters’ emotions. Clive Tickner’s photography with its emphasis on dark, autumnal hues, underlines the sense of wistful melancholy which runs through the play’ (Geoffrey McNab, Sight and Sound 6, 11 (November 1996), p. 60.
James Treadwell, Spectator, 6 December 1997.
Robert Hanks, Independent on Sunday, 30 November 1997.
Guardian, 27 November 1997.
Daily Telegraph, 27 November 1997.
Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 27 November 1997.
Michael Billington, Guardian, 27 November 1997.
Peter Kemp, Times Literary Supplement, 12 December 1997.
RSC, Twelfth Night Programme, 1997.
For example, the character analysis for Viola quoted the critics Joseph H. Summers, C. L. Barber and Harold Jenkins, and Viola was identiied as ‘Type 2: The Helper — the caring, nurturing type. Loving, caring adaptable, insightful, tuned into feelings’.
Guardian, 27 November 1997.
Times Literary Supplement, 12 December 1997.
The Heath Introduction to Drama, ed. J. Y. Miller (Lexington, KY, D. C. Heath, 1996), p. 17.
This appears in the promptbook but had disappeared from the performance by August 1998.
Peter Thomson’s comment from 1973 still holds true: ‘The exploitation of performances as evidence of the superiority of his own conceptions over the theatre’s is the meanest use the academic makes of his role as audience’ (’shakespeare Straight and Crooked: A Review of the 1973 Season at Stratford’, Shakespeare Survey 27 (1973): 143–54).
Wells, Royal Shakespeare, p. 80.
Both productions used the New Cambridge edition of the text. Barton emended or cut 148 lines, and Noble 7 lines.
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© 2001 Janice Wardle
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Wardle, J. (2001). Twelfth Night: ‘One Face, One Voice, One Habit, and Two Persons!’. In: Cartmell, D., Scott, M. (eds) Talking Shakespeare. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-98574-8_8
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