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Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page
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The Imaginary Audition as discussed by the authors proposes a new approach that cuts between the extremes of theater-centered reading and armchair reading, and demonstrates this approach in a radically new interpretation of "Richard II".Abstract:
"Imaginary Audition" responds to a major current conflict in Shakespeare studies between proponents of close reading of the academic armchair variety and proponents of what is called theater-centered (or performance-centered) interpretation. This conflict has come into focus at the intersection of several lines of reaction to the New-Critical and poetic-drama approaches practiced during the middle decades of the century: the revival of the "theater-centered" criticism that has flourished since the 60s; the rise of metatheatrical and metapoetic criticism in the same period; new developments in psychoanalysis and gender-theoretical criticism; new approaches to textual scholarship and editing; and the reorientation of social, political, cultural, and historical analysis associated with the new historicism.Harry Berger, Jr., confronts the first two of these developments. Beginning with a sustained critique of the theoretical premises and the practice of Richard Levine and Gary Taylor, he proposes a new approach that cuts between the extremes of theater-centered reading and armchair reading, and demonstrates this approach in a radically new interpretation of "Richard II". The close articulation of critique, theory, and interpretation lays the ground for a new approach to the reading of Shakespeare, one that will be more fully demonstrated in Berger's extended study of the Henriad, now in progress, and to which "Imaginary Audition" serves as a kind of prologue.read more
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Twin stars: Shakespeare and the idea of the theatre in the eighteenth century
Abstract: This thesis draws the line of a rise and a fall, an ironic pattern whereby the English stage of the long eighteenth century, in its relation to Shakespeare in particular, first acquired powerful influence, and then, through the very effects of that power, lost it. It also shows what contemporary literary criticism might learn from the activities that constitute this arc of evolution. My first chapter interrogates the relationship between text and performance in vernacular writings about acting and editing from the death of Betterton in 1710 to the rise of Garrick in the middle decades of the century. From the status of a distinct tradition, performance comes to rely on text as a basis for the intimate, personal engagement with Shakespeare believed necessary to the work of the sentimental actor. Such a reliance grants the performer new potential as a literary critic, but also prepares a fall. The performer becomes another kind of reader, and so is open to accusations of reading badly. My second chapter analyses the evolving definition of Shakespeare as a dramatic author from Samuel Johnson onwards. An untheatrical definition of the dramatic (Johnson’s) is answered by one which recognises the power and vitality of the stage, especially in its representation of sympathetic character (Montagu and Kenrick). Yet that very recognition leads to a set of altered critical priorities in which the theatre is, once more, relegated (Morgann and Richardson). My third and fourth chapters consider the practices and critical implications of theatrical performance of Shakespeare during Garrick’s career. I focus on the acting of emotion, the portrayal of what Aaron Hill called ‘the very Instant of the changing Passion’, and show that performance of this time, attentive to the striking moment and the transitions that power it, required from the actor both attention to the text and preternatural control over his own emotions. In return, it allowed Garrick and others to claim a special affinity with Shakespeare and to capture the public’s attention, both in the theatre and outside it. Yet this situation, that of ‘twin stars’, does not last. French and German responses to English acting, the concern of my last chapter, show its decline particularly well. They also, however, show the power that existed in such a union between page and stage, and equal weight is given in both my third and my fourth chapter to how the theatrical-literary insights of eighteenth-century critical culture might also illuminate modern approaches.
Journal ArticleDOI
"As from the Waste of Sophonisba"; or, What's Sexy about Stage Directions
TL;DR: The reading-text of a play represents the effort of an author or a culture to preserve, as best it can, the full pleasure of the original performances, to make that pleasure available in part to those who have not seen the play performed at all.