By William B. Worthen
This stimulating ebook asks how either textual content and function are construed as vessels of authority, and unearths that our realizing of Shakespearean functionality keeps a shocking experience of the potential for being ''faithful'' to Shakespearean texts, and as a way to ''Shakespeare.'' After a gap theoretical bankruptcy, Worthen examines the connection among textual content and function in 3 actions: directing, appearing, and scholarship. The publication contributes to the scholarly learn of appearing and directing, and to the broader discourse of functionality reports.
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Extra resources for Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance
Sample text
16 To regard performance not as an authorized version — better or worse — of the work, but as an iteration inscribed by the practice of theatre significantly alters the paradigmatic ways in which the meanings of performance have been related to those of texts: rather than reproducing the work, stage performance produces it anew. In part, performative iteration produces a new work because, as Patrice Pavis suggests, "text and performance adhere to different semiotic systems. Mise en scene is not the reduction or the transformation of text into performance, but rather their confrontation" (Theatre at the Crossroads 26).
Nor is the dramatic production to be conceived of as an "interpenetration" of these two spaces, textual and theatrical, or as a "realisation" or "concretisation" of the text. The relation Authority and performance 21 between text and production is not imaginable as that of an essence to an existence, soul to body: it is not simply a question of the production "bringing the text alive," revitalising and de-reifying it, releasing it from its suspended animation so that the imprisoned life it contains becomes fluid and mobile.
27 Much as in the practice of scholarship and criticism, what often remains unsaid by the practice of performance are the things that seem to need no saying, the things taken to be innate to the art itself. Though I share some of my colleague's hesitation, I don't think that the large and impressive body of work about theatre written by its makers is either purely redundant to their work onstage or merely dispensable self-promotion. Taking this work seriously means not merely using it as a mine of anecdote and aphorism, but bringing it into the larger dialogue about theatre and drama; this also means not treating it as a body of mystic, unquestionable lore, but engaging with it critically, taking its blindnesses as seriously as its many forms of insight.