Imprinting performance: Editorial mediations of page and stage

Abstract

Printed plays are inherently Janus-faced in that they gesture towards, yet forever remain distinct from, their existence on stage. This essay seeks to bridge the interpretive gap separating page and stage by identifying editorial efforts to imprint, or encode for, performance. I begin by establishing the various tensions between text and performance as they are formulated and hierarchized in contemporary editorial theory and performance criticism. In response to the tendency to stress the undeniably limited ways that texts can account for performance, I introduce and define performancescape, a term that renegotiates the page/stage polarity by highlighting symbiotic exchanges between textual and performed modes of realization. Without denying that printed plays distort and fragment performance practice, I seek to navigate an intractable debate by shifting attention to points of intersection in Shakespeare's rich printed and performance histories. My methodology involves a broad perspective of the critical edition, one that embraces a reader's ability to utilize the ready stasis of the printed page and make tangential moves away from the playtext in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the play as performed. The essay concludes by modelling performancescape in relation to Michael Neill's recent Oxford edition of Othello (2006).

Keywords:

• printed drama
• editorial practice
• textual theory
• performance studies
• performance criticism
• editorial apparatus
• performancescape

Notes

1. The formulation of playtexts as dramatic scripts is so engrained in critical consciousness that it is now disseminated as an irrefutable fact. Consider Stephen Orgel's claim that “Shakespeare never conceived, or even re-conceived, his plays as texts to be read. They were scripts, not books; the only readers were the performers, and the function of the script was to be realized on stage” (1). Erne, who has challenged this orthodoxy, provides a useful reminder of the fundamental historical difficulty that proponents of Orgel's position must overcome: if plays were only written in order to be performed, “the very fact that a playtext has come down to us implies that a publisher counted on a considerable number of people thinking otherwise” (131).

2. The First Gentleman seems to process the Third Gentleman's report into a kind of imagined performance: “The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes, for by such was it acted” (5.2.79–81). Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from the second, 2005, edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Wells and Taylor).

3. Worthen makes this point in the process of responding to Anthony B. Dawson's essay, “The Impasse over the Stage”. In that essay, Dawson notes that construing and then critically reading a performance as if it were a text “is a perfectly legitimate, indeed an inescapable, strategy, since performance itself is obviously not stable, transparent or intrinsically knowable” (318).

4. The title of Berger's epilogue is “From Page to Stage: Riding the Shakespeare Shuttle”.

5. The editors of the recent RSC Complete Works (Bate and Rasmussen) have employed a similar strategy of attaching arrows to marginal stage directions to indicate that “a piece of business … may occur at various different moments within a scene” (lx).

6. John Jowett observes that “there remains scope for [an] editor to shape his or her edition in ways that no other editor would follow, to an extent that is often apparently belied by the shoe-horning of the material into the series format” (159).

7. Or, as Zachary Lesser puts it, “Part of what makes a history of reading so difficult to write is that reading occurs at the intersection of the material and the immaterial, the physical and the psychical, the letter and the spirit” (99).

8. My thanks to M. J. Kidnie for bringing to light the potential richness of this ambiguity.

9. Peter Holland's Oxford edition is the one I have in mind; his first commentary note references a production for the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop in 1966 where Hippolyta was “brought on as a captive animal wearing black body make-up and a leopard-skin bikini in a bamboo cage, her lines snarled with biting sarcasm” (131).

10. As Neill notes in his collation, the “asleep” portion of the direction was first introduced by Rowe.