The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0558 Saturday, 25 August 2007
[1] From: Cary DiPietro <
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Date: Thursday, 23 Aug 2007 00:34:11 +0900
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0549 WashPost: Ourselves in Shakespeare
[2] From: John Drakakis <
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Date: Friday, 24 Aug 2007 15:15:47 +0100
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0549 WashPost: Ourselves in Shakespeare
[3] From: Julia Crockett <
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Date: Saturday, 25 Aug 2007 12:53:28 +0100
Subj: Roundtable discussion
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Cary DiPietro <
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Date: Thursday, 23 Aug 2007 00:34:11 +0900
Subject: 18.0549 WashPost: Ourselves in Shakespeare
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0549 WashPost: Ourselves in Shakespeare
Ros King writes:
"I am interested in achieving a criticism which looks at the
relationship between a playtext (with all its bibliographical problems)
and a whole set of historical contexts (relating to story, time of
writing, and of successive revivals), while analysing what might be
written-in to groups of words in terms of sound, colour, picture and
gesture, those building blocks of the emotions simulated in characters
and strangely experienced by readers and audiences."
I've had to work hard to think about if or why this perfectly common
sense and apparently reasonable formula for critical practice is an
inadequate answer to what you describe, Ros, as the endless
merry-go-round of the historicism/presentism debate.
You begin by suggesting the need to attend to the historical location of
the playtext, 'with all its bibliographic problems'. The language here
is perhaps incidental, but to suggest that the playtext is somehow
'problematized', whether by the vagaries and inconsistencies of early
modern printing practices or by theatrical/authorial revision, is
implicitly to presume that the 'text', the sought after historical
artifact and final arbiter of meaning, is a fixed and singular act of
intentional meaning, one that is inevitably corrupted over time by its
production as a material work in history. I understand that your
consideration of comparable early printed texts is not in any way to
attempt to reconstruct 'fair copy', but by the same token, I don't think
a few hasty qualifications about hagiography will absolve you of the
problem of intention that accompanies the notion of the early printed
text as a fixed system of signification, albeit one subject to
misinterpretation, often willed, as you argue. The evasion is
conspicuous in your curious elevation of the early printed text as an
arbiter of meaning entirely divorced from intention, ie, how F or Q2 of
Hamlet 'allows us to think'; does this mean we're not to entertain the
possibility of authorial or theatrical revision in this case? By the
same token, are we meant to argue that, for example, random
compositorial error creates valid meaning possibilities, e.g., the
'solid' for 'sallied' argument, without any sense of preference of one
for the other?
Our next task is to consider the relationship between this playtext and
the myriad of historical contexts, the performances and the acts of
criticism, that comprise what I think you would probably distinguish as
the long period of Shakespeare's reception. But to what purpose we are
meant to undertake this analysis, I'm not exactly sure. Are these acts
of critical production merely to be revealed as instances of the 'cherry
picking' you describe? To me, they sound like further layers of textual
corruption that need to be peeled away to arrive at some unmediated
core. You mention the case of Kean's production of King John as
'altering' Shakespeare rather than 'meaning by Shakespeare', which
strikes me as a misleading distinction: an act of cultural production
in the nineteenth century, as a historically determined work in its own
right, is no more a misprision of the 'text' than an act of cultural
production in the sixteenth century, however much closer to an authorial
ideal or intention that earlier production might happen to be; unless,
of course, you're comparing theatrical production itself to that textual
ideal, our task to reveal and correct the mistakes of the more recent
past to 'return to the text'. Am I misinterpreting you when you write,
'analysing what interpreters have had to do to a text in order to make
it mean what they wanted it to mean can be very revealing of the
structure and possibilities for meaning of the earliest printed texts of
the plays'?
And where does all of this lead? To an analysis of 'what might be
written-in to groups of words in terms of sound, colour, picture and
gesture, those building blocks of the emotions simulated in characters
and strangely experienced by readers and audiences'. By this point, we
really need to start interrogating what you mean by 'text': it was
conceived in a historical moment that determines its original meaning
and was then ostensibly 'fixed' in the early printed text, though
subject to textual variation; its been the object of misinterpretation
and appropriation over the years, potentially to a greater extent in
performance; but a close-reading analysis of its groups of words reveals
how and why its meanings continue to speak to us today, posing questions
about, for example, 'commodity, power and inheritance' that are still
relevant.
No, I don't think this is an entirely adequate response to answer to the
perceived limitations of the historicism/presentism debate, but if
anything, is a step backwards. What you appear to be advocating is a
fairly traditional historical scholarship, one that presumes 'meaning'
is a linear relationship between past and present, text and
interpretation, signifier and signified; and, no, quoting the OED is not
going to give us the theoretical depth we have come to expect in our use
of the terms 'text' and 'meaning'. Moreover, this historical approach
belies, I think, a romanticist investment in the text that is only
thinly concealed by an incomplete materialism. There is an underlying
historical allegory here that needs to be interrogated, this notion of a
continuous trajectory that connects us directly to Shakespeare; sound
historical scholarship will allow us direct access to an originary
meaning that has been, to greater and lesser extents, often willingly
misconstrued by performance and criticism of the past two or three
hundred years.
The irony is that I don't at all disagree with the critical project you
outline, and I would argue that presentism seeks to answer all of the
questions about critical practice you implicitly and explicitly raise:
what is it about these plays that creates the illusion of both
permanence and presence? How do they connect us to a past that, as
Freud argues, is shaped by our indestructible wish to imagine the future
in the present? Why is how we mean just as important as, and often more
revealing than, what we mean by Shakespeare?
Cary DiPietro
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: John Drakakis <
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Date: Friday, 24 Aug 2007 15:15:47 +0100
Subject: 18.0549 WashPost: Ourselves in Shakespeare
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0549 WashPost: Ourselves in Shakespeare
I think Ros, that you are expressing a disappointment that David Lindley
and I felt earlier about the 'Round Table' discussion on 'Presentism'.
What nobody seems keen to discuss is the question of 'history' and how e
deal with it that Presentism rises.
So, yes, let's try another way. I think you are right that 18th (and
probably 19th century) performances and what directors and actors did
with texts influenced the public perception of plays, and King John is a
case in point. It is the dialoguing with a 'text' that is not what we
would think of as something that has editorial 'authority'that's
interesting in this connection. Michael Dobson has done quite a bit of
work on this in his The Making of The National Poet, where he goes
through prompt books of late 18th and early 19th century productions.
Once we get beyond the obvious point that 'texts' such as Shakespeares
limit the parameters of meanings that we can generate - although Terry,
you may feel that even that is too constricting a formulation - then we
can speculate (a) about the meanings generated by these texts when they
first appeared (though that presents some insurmountable epistemological
problems and (b) about the meanings that subsequent epochs generate. I
have in mind here Terry's inventive gloss on the name 'Fortinbras' in
That Shakespeherian Rag; the question here is why? Or indeed, why not?
What is it that prevents us from launching off from the text? I ask
because there is some attempt to claim that some of the recent (less
inventive, and far more predictable) academic 'rewriting' of Shakespeare
is itself a radical and progressive gesture.
...And this leads to the much larger question: where do we go from the
rather large advances generated by the explosion of Theory in the
1980s?..not backwards, I hope!
Cheers,
John D
[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Julia Crockett <
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Date: Saturday, 25 Aug 2007 12:53:28 +0100
Subject: Roundtable discussion
I think the historicism/presentism dialectic is the debate. Maybe we
could reconvene on the subject. I don't think we gave Hugh Grady credit.
I should like to discuss his article in Shakespeare Vol. 1. The
inspiration for Shakespeare the (RSC?) the periodical is to relate the
disciplines of theory and practice. To engage performance with theory is
its purpose. Is it possible to incorporate the performative dimension
(which is a corollary to presentism anyway); which could be read as a
pedagogic imperative, to apply theory to performance to practice?
In the words of the infamous, 'onwards and backwards.' I would add
'forwards'.
Cheers,
Julia
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