Looking for Shakespeare : the Textuality of Performance

Looking for Shakespeare : the textuality of performance Autor(en): Aebischer, Pascale Objekttyp: Article Zeitschrift: SPELL : Swiss papers in English language and literature Band (Jahr): 13 (2000) PDF erstellt am: 11.10.2021 Persistenter Link: http://doi.org/10.5169/seals-99980 Nutzungsbedingungen Die ETH-Bibliothek ist Anbieterin der digitalisierten Zeitschriften. Sie besitzt keine Urheberrechte an den Inhalten der Zeitschriften. Die Rechte liegen in der Regel bei den Herausgebern. Die auf der Plattform e-periodica veröffentlichten Dokumente stehen für nicht-kommerzielle Zwecke in Lehre und Forschung sowie für die private Nutzung frei zur Verfügung. Einzelne Dateien oder Ausdrucke aus diesem Angebot können zusammen mit diesen Nutzungsbedingungen und den korrekten Herkunftsbezeichnungen weitergegeben werden. Das Veröffentlichen von Bildern in Print- und Online-Publikationen ist nur mit vorheriger Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber erlaubt. Die systematische Speicherung von Teilen des elektronischen Angebots auf anderen Servern bedarf ebenfalls des schriftlichen Einverständnisses der Rechteinhaber. Haftungsausschluss Alle Angaben erfolgen ohne Gewähr für Vollständigkeit oder Richtigkeit. Es wird keine Haftung übernommen für Schäden durch die Verwendung von Informationen aus diesem Online-Angebot oder durch das Fehlen von Informationen. Dies gilt auch für Inhalte Dritter, die über dieses Angebot zugänglich sind. Ein Dienst der ETH-Bibliothek ETH Zürich, Rämistrasse 101, 8092 Zürich, Schweiz, www.library.ethz.ch http://www.e-periodica.ch Looking for Shakespeare: The Textuality of Performance Pascale Aebischer Shakespearean performance criticism has become very well-established in the last twenty-odd years - the beginning of this critical movement is conventionally identified with the publication of Styan's The Shakespeare Revolution in 1977, although it emerged a little earlier. Nevertheless, the branch of performance criticism which analyses modern theatrical productions of Shakespeare's plays has until very recently remained rather undertheorised. As a result, the analyses by performance critics have often tended to be far more "impressionistic" and subjective than those written by their colleagues in literary criticism. Twenty years into performance criticism, Coursen's programmatic claim in 1992 that "[ a] Shakespearean script exists only in performance. Period." 15) sounds oddly naive and anachronistic in its militant tone. This tone, however, becomes more comprehensible in the context of Coursen's introduction to his book on Shakespearean Performance and Interpretation, where he openly acknowledges what he sees as his and his fellow-critics') failure to elaborate an adequate theorisation of performance with the pessimistic statement: "I do not believe that any satisfactory 'theoretics of performance' will ever emerge" 10). What are the key problems for such a theorisation? Coursen quotes Worthen's view that "the central issue still eluding performance criticism [is] the problematic relation between the text's origin, its initial production, and its reproduction through history" 12). The very terminology used here reveals further problems: which "text" is being referred to? Is the "text's origin" its author or the first trace we have of the text? What is meant by production and reproduction: a material object, like a book or a manuscript, or a theatrical performance? To extend these questions raised by Coursen's invocation of Worthen with questions of my own: can we speak of stage productions and films as "texts"? And if we do so, how do we reconcile the ephemeral nature of the theatre with the fixedness associated with the notion 158 Pascale Aebischer of "text"? Is the textuality of stage performance the same as that of film? Is that of film the same as that of television and video? And when does a " performance text" detach itself from the authority of Shakespeare, discard its status as a version and become a new text in its own right? Is Looking for Richard a "text" by William Shakespeare or by Al Pacino? These questions addressing the textuality and authorship of Shakespeare's plays have become increasingly urgent with the recent explosion of film and television adaptations of literary works. Are they quite as unanswerable as Coursen seems to imply? I would like to suggest that an approach which is conscious of the historical dimension of the text, which takes account of the problems of authority, and which acknowledges the limits of textuality, can solve many of the difficulties perceived by Coursen. Ironically, I will begin my exploration of alternative terminologies where Coursen suggested one might begin: by "tak[ing] Shakespearean textual criticism as a paradigm" 12). This paradigm will allow me to address the problems of authority and the evolution of the plays through history. I will then proceed to a discussion of the differences between literary criticism and performance criticism, and will conclude with an enumeration and explanation of terms which I believe can help us to sustain differentiations in our discussion of different types of performances. As textual critics of Shakespeare have long recognised, the problems pertaining to the textuality and authorship of Shakespeare's plays have thenorigins at the time of their creation. The whole bardolatrous stable construct of Shakespeare as "the quintessential text, the Ur-book, the model for English literary textuality, not a script but secular scripture" Lanier 188), is revealed by textual critics to be just that - a construct. Let me take the textual situation of Romeo and Juliet as a detailed example. The text most of us are familiar with from the major scholarly editions is the text which was printed in Quarto format in 1599 by Thomas Creede under the title of The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet. This text more or less directly served as a copy-text for all subsequent seventeenth-century editions of the play, including the 1623 First Folio. The 1599 Quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet, however, is not the earliest printed version we have of the play, as is acknowledged even on its title page, which boasts that the 1599 text is "Newly corrected, augmented, and amended." The earliest extant printed text of Romeo and Juliet is the 1597 Quarto edition of An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet. Not only do we have two texts, but we even have two titles for the text. But who is the author? It is not until the fourth, undated, Quarto edition that some copies of the edition, though not Looking for Shakespeare 159 all of them, carry the mention "Written by W. Shake-speare" on the title page. Apparently it is only some time after the publication of the Third Quarto in 1609 and probably before the publication of the Folio in 1623 - and in the middle of a print run - that someone decided that the authorship of the play was at all relevant to its marketing. It is only in the Folio edition, itself based on the Third Quarto, which is a reprint of the Second Quarto, that author, play, and title are united in the form to which we have got used: according to the Folio editors, "Mr. William [Shakespeare]" is the author of "Romeo andJuliet." For centuries, editors were happy to rely roughly on either the Folio or the Second Quarto as copy-texts for their editions, here and there adopting some readings from the First Quarto, which was considered to be Shakespeare's first draft of the play. Then, at the beginning of this century, Pollard re-examined the Quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays and decided that the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet was to be categorised as one of Shakespeare's "Bad Quartos." Chambers in 1930 described those "Bad Quartos" in the following way: They have in common a measure of textual corruption, far beyond anything which a combination of bad transcription and bad printing could explain. The total effect is one of perversion and vulgarization. To emend is futile; it is incredible that Shakespeare should have written or the Chamberlain's men presented such texts. It cannot be doubted that these are primarilythe versions which Heminges and Condell stigmatized as "surreptitious." 156) Not surprisingly, the categorisation of the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet as a "Bad Quarto" entailed editorial policies which "sought to reduce their dependence on Ql" Evans 211). The situation which ensued was one with which bardolaters could feel relatively happy and secure: there was a single text, by a single author, and even though obviously other hands had meddled with the text in the printing process - the Second Quarto is printed less carefully than its "corrupt" predecessor - there was still the feeling that somehow there was a direct line going from author to early modern printing house to modern edition to modern reader. More recently, however, this happy situation has been upset by New Textualists who have taken a closer look at the First Quarto. This text is shorter than the "standard" version by one third - a shortness which is mainly due to obvious cuts. What New Textualists have found is that even if it should be proved beyond doubt that the First Quarto is indeed a memorial reconstruction written by one or more actors who at one time had performed 160 Pascale Aebischer in the play, the First Quarto remains an excellent acting text. Some critics have gone so far as to claim that this text is "authorial," thus postulating the existence of two separate authorial versions of the play. I myself am torn between those two interpretations. When I first worked on Romeo and Juliet I was convinced that the First Quarto was, indeed, "authorial" in the sense that I felt that it represented a cut version of a longer manuscript which, after some revision, became the copy-text for the Second Quarto. Since then, I have had the opportunity to direct probably the first production of the First Quarto, putting the claim that it is a good acting text to the test.1 In fact, the First Quarto works very well on stage, and interestingly enough, it tends to confirm Erne's speculations about the running time of early modern plays.

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