The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0651 Friday, 28 September 2007
[1] From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Thursday, 27 Sep 2007 14:03:50 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0647 Authorial Intention
[2] From: Brian Willis <
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Date: Thursday, 27 Sep 2007 13:01:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0647 Authorial Intention
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Thursday, 27 Sep 2007 14:03:50 -0400
Subject: 18.0647 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0647 Authorial Intention
Prof. Alan Dessen, whose special interest is the intersection of text
and performance, asks a very good question:
>should or should not the material conditions of London
>theatre in the 1590s and early 1600s be part of this discussion?
I think the answer depends on how we delimit the discussion. If we are
exploring only whether it is "futile" to attempt to derive authorial
intent, then it follows that contemporary stage conditions and
conventions are immaterial -- there is no case to be answered. But if
we allow that it is legitimate to inquire what an Elizabethan/Jacobean
playwright expected to be understood by his words, then a knowledge of
how he believed his text would be rendered on stage is highly pertinent.
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brian Willis <
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Date: Thursday, 27 Sep 2007 13:01:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: 18.0647 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0647 Authorial Intention
Alan Dessen makes invaluable points about authorial intention, and
necessarily so when speaking of drama of any period. In the process of
rehearsing and mounting a production of a play, the director and actors
are in constant negotiation about the "meanings" and "intentions" of any
given playwright, and especially so with Shakespeare. A play finds its
life within the context of the theatre space (although with Shakespeare
there are a long history of arguments about the private and silent
reading of those particular texts). But a play on the stage is the
culmination of many tiny and (usually) non-public negotiations about
meaning and, with the case of the truly dedicated actor, many private
interrogations of the text.
When a play is produced, (outside the draconian statutes of textual
fidelity as dictated by, say, the Beckett estate or Edward Albee's close
guarding of the rights to his plays), that text is no longer within the
"intentions" of the author even if we can assume that intentions
existed. Authorship of a play then becomes a collaboration between the
playwright, the actor choosing interpretations and line readings, and
the stewardship of the director. The performance we may see on any given
night is out of the hands of the author(s) and re-authorized as a public
collaboration. The text is embodied by the actor, and read within the
material of the mise-en-scene, and the signifiers presented through
his/her gestures, appearance, movement, and (especially important with
Shakespeare) voice, i.e. how the body intends the text to operate.
Within such a theatrical context, intention becomes very clouded indeed.
Brian Willis
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