Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 77. Sunday, 5 Apr 1992. Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1992 23:33:36 -0500 (EST) From: Luis Games, Fordham University, New York CityThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Subject: Charles Hallett on Scene v. Sequence I The posting of David Richman's review of my book Analyzing Shakespeare's Action: Scene Versus Sequence (SHK 3.0034, 11 Feb 92) sparked an interesting comment from Michael Dobson about the responses of Rowe, Dryden, Dennis, Theobald & Co. to the theatri- cal elements in Shakespeare's plays. Because one of the assump- tions of that book is that our understanding of Shakespeare's action -- in particular of his scenes -- remains hampered by practices that were begun in the 18th century, I would like to add a word on the subject. Like David Richman, I have not had an opportunity to see Michael Dobson's book, and I too look forward to reading it, because I am sure the fact that the early editors of Shakespeare were indeed "fellow-playwrights" has in many ways influenced their editions of the plays, and I am eager to learn what Dobson has to say on this subject. Yet insofar as their knowledge and experience in the theater affected their editions of Shakespeare, it seems to me more accurate to speak of them as men of "their" theater -- the theater of the proscenium arch -- complete with scenery "to allure the eye." Ironically, it may in fact be this very famil- iarity with their own theater and not any anti-theatrical per- spective that caused them to, may I say, "distort" Shakespeare, not only in their adaptations but in their editions. Let it be said immediately that we are highly indebted to the early editors of Shakespeare. Gratitude, however, should not blind us -- as I believe it unfortunately has -- to the serious shortcomings in their work. The specific shortcoming that draws me into this debate is the distorted emphasis of these editors on the structural importance of the scene in Shakespeare. In the theater that they knew, where the rendering of time and place made the stage designer rival the playwright in importance, the scene -- inevitably defined by scenery -- had great significance. On the proscenium stage the setting or stage picture of each scene had an impact on the sensibilities of the audience that had to be acknowledged by all theater practitioners, including those playwrights whom we remember today less as dramatists than as the earliest editors of Shakespeare. But this emphasis on the scene as a dramatic unit -- natural to the proscenium stage and therefore assumed by Shakespeare's 18th-century editors as natural to drama in general -- was alien to the Elizabethan-Jacobean stage and particularly to Shake- speare. In Shakespeare the clearing of the stage most often signals a change in time and/or place; in other words, the scene is not a unit of action but a unit of place. And these tempo- ral/spatial units were not for Shakespeare the all-important dramatic units they would become for his later editors -- and for everyone since the 18th century. When constructing an action, Shakespeare almost invariably thinks in "sequences," rising actions like those in which Iago tempts Othello to press him to reveal his thoughts (sequence 3.3.93-279) or in which Othello challenges Iago to prove his accusations against Desdemona (sequence 3.3.333-480). Because these actions, or sequences, are often embedded within scenes, their importance as separate and distinct rising actions that have to be articulated as such in production has long been obscured. When in the early part of this century Poel and Granville- Barker hauled Shakespeare out from under the clutter of 19th- century realism, they liberated Shakespearean productions from the tyranny of the proscenium stage. With the scenery gone, the action could begin to flow again. However, what remained behind of the tradition proved as crippling as what was disposed of. We freed ourselves from scenery but not from the idolatry of the scene. The encumbered stage which was frequently accented by the raising and lowering of the curtain fixed the scene as Shakespeare's primary dramatic unit in the minds of generations of his admirers. To break through the distorting effect of this mindset is to see Shakespeare working as a playwright in a way that his 18th-century editors, playwrights thought they were and closer to him in time, apparently failed to detect. II What authors would not feel especially blessed to have their work so thoroughly explained and so well appreciated as ours was by David Richman! For this, much thanks! What especially pleased us was that Richman engages our presentation in the very area in which we had hoped to encourage debate. Acknowledging, for example, that beat 2.2.54-58 (where Claudius repeats Polonius's theory to Gertrude) is indeed the beat unit we claim it is, he suggests enriching ways of staging the unit. And, in another case, questioning whether Hamlet's "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy functions as a concluding beat to sequence 2.2.380-605 or whether it is itself a sequence, he asks, "Could it not be argued, using the Halletts' own methods, that Hamlet himself is at once the propelling and resisting character here? Could not the dramatic questions be formulated as follows: Can Hamlet overcome his own rage and self-loathing, and allow himself to take useful action by employing what he has learned from the players? Would not a soliloquy driven in production by such a question prove more urgent, more intensely dramatic, than a soliloquy that is largely a 'review of what has gone before'?" It's an intriguing question. I would only gloss this word "review" as an "intensely emotional reflection" upon what Hamlet has just witnessed, and then ask, have any of the book's readers taken a position on this (or related) questions?