Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in by Robert Weimann

By Robert Weimann

Robert Weimann redefines the connection among writing and function, or "playing," in Shakespeare's theater. via shut examining and cautious research Weimann deals a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan functionality and creation practices. The learn reports the newest methodologies of textual scholarship, the recent historical past of the Elizabethan theater, functionality thought, and picture and video interpretation, and gives a brand new method of realizing Shakespeare. Weimann examines various performs in addition to different modern works. an enormous a part of the examine explores the duality among taking part in and writing.

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Although Malone labored under what de Grazia calls a new ‘‘strain of exclusivity’’ (224), this view of the ‘‘higher character’’ of the poet advanced and enhanced parameters of authority that derived from a singular notion of writing as inalienably sustained by a unique, self-consistent identity. 4 Henceforth, the provocative gap between ‘‘author’s pen’’ and ‘‘actor’s voice,’’ deepened by eighteenth-century criticism and editorial practice, grew into the chasm that reached its greatest depth in the Romantic period.

There is none of the preparatory action motivating and anticipating the withdrawal of Gertrude, Claudius and Polonius before Hamlet’s entrance (‘‘King. Sweet Gertrude, leave us two [. ] Pol. 28; 54]). Instead, his entrance precedes their withdrawal. There results a simultaneity in the staging of the scene that works in so far as, in view of the continuing presence of four major characters on stage, the appearance and stage representation of Performance and authority 21 Hamlet is not automatically integrated into the scene at large.

However, even more consequential from the point of view of the present project was the prolonged attempt to strip the vulgar traces of production and performance from the text. We only need to look at recent editions of Shakespeare to realize that what we have are distinct products of ‘‘editing and criticism holding fast to a modern text that derives from an eighteenthcentury tradition’’ (de Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘‘The Materiality’’ 256). But in the past, as Michael Dobson, de Grazia, and other critics have shown, the supreme authorization of ‘Shakespeare’ as sole and sovereign source of the plays contributed to a cultural project that thrived on aims and 32 A new agenda for authority interests that, as a matter of fact, had little to do with the assumed purity of textual access to the bard.

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