2.4 (October 2002): 392-397
© 2002 National Communication Association

Interplay Between Communication Modes in the Theatre of Shakespeare

Jill Taft-Kaufman

Robert Weimann.  Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice:  Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Edited by Helen Higbee and William West.  Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture.  Ed. Stephen Orgel.  New York, NY:  Cambridge University Press, 2000.  xi + 298 pages.  Notes, bibliography, and index. $64.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

Great art, it is often said, thrives upon contrariety and instability.  A social milieu in which two different modes of communication compete and collaborate encourages tensions and dualities that can fuel exhilarating theatre.  Such was the case on Shakespeare’s stage, an environment shaped by centuries of oral culture interlaced with a rapidly growing culture of literacy.  Such is also the case with our own time, as literary modes of transmission are more and more displaced by electronically reproduced images and forms.

Robert Weimann views the shift in our cultural poetics today as producing an apt moment for questioning and studying Shakespeare’s theatre, partly in order to understand and acknowledge how two modes that exist simultaneously need not be seen in binary opposition.  As many critics, directors, and performers eschew literary and book-based work, displacing it with studies of the actor’s performance, Weimann embraces the chronic tension between the two modes.  This recurring tension constituted a source of strength in Elizabethan theatre through the use of concomitant theatrical practices that invited audiences to participate in and make meanings based upon multiple forms and assumptions.

Weimann distinguishes his exploration from two previous types of scholarship that have influenced the field of communication and performance.  Earlier work on orality and literacy by scholars such as McLuhan, Ong, Havelock, and Goody emphasized dual modes of communication but largely saw them as separate.  Previous work originated by Shakespeare scholars such as J. L Styan, Bernard Beckerman, and John Russell Brown, reminded us that Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed and not just read.  Yet, the performance focus that has subsequently ensued has been performance either of the plays or inscribed in the speeches.  Weimann seeks to understand how fields and modes interplay.  He is interested in the extent to which one mode of production influenced another, how “‘author’s pen’ is in ‘actor’s voice’ just as players’ voices and bodies, with all their contrariety, resonate in the writings of the pen” (xi).  Performance is thus viewed not as a corollary to dramatic writing but as “a formative element, a constituent force, and with, or even without the text a source of material and ‘imaginary puissance’” (5).

In the first two chapters, Weimann sets out arguments that justify the contention that actors’ voices and bodies constituted a major influence in the provenance of Shakespeare’s theatre.  Using Hamlet as a reference point, Weimann points out there are numerous instances in the First Quarto that foreground the presentational voice and delivery of the performer.  Delivery made directly to the spectators for their responsiveness highlights the competence and skill of the performer as public display, presenting evidence of an “‘open’ circulation, in the production process” (23).

Devaluation of performers’ contributions to the composition process in Shakespeare’s theatre prevailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among critics and editors who promulgated the idea of textual purity and superiority.  The perceived insularity of the text from the production process for which it was intended truncated and arrested critical understanding of a broader and more complex process.  The critical problem now, as Weimann articulates it, is “how to wrest a textual end product from an extremely fluid, largely unrecorded, partially oral process of working, writing, copying, rehearsing, and of course playing in the theatre” (37).

Understanding the fluidity of Shakespeare’s theatre requires us to re-conceptualize the authority involved in it, from an insular print-based text to “a broader view of the production (and the competence behind it) and the consumption of signs and meanings in the theatre” (42).  Weimann refers to the process by which a wider locus of meaning is engendered as a “circulation of authority.”  These new “locations of authority” in Elizabethan England were fostered by changes in the channels of communication, literacy, and entertainment.  The stage, the pulpit, the printing press, and most especially, the theatre, “all established an unwonted density in the public exchange of news, information, and opinions” (47).  According to Weimann, this plethora of communication encouraged an unprecedented number of people to “respond to an increasing and ultimately uncontrollable range of discursive practices” (47).

Weimann focuses in chapter 3 on the “bifold authority” of the writer’s craft in interplay with “performative achievement.”  He credits the emergence of a “new epistemology empowering writing as a dominant agency of knowledge, inspiration, and meaning” to Christopher Marlowe.  Marlowe’s Cambridge education endowed him “with the literary language and the symbolizing capacity for circumscribing the power of a new, Renaissance type of mimesis on common stages” (57).  As Shakespeare would demonstrate in his turn:  “here was a learned pen on a popular site, holding up a glass in which to view the ‘picture’ of a ‘world’ that, for all the lofty terms of its maker, was devised for common players to render and vulgar spectators to applaud” (57).  In examinations of the prologues and selected monologues in Marlowe’s Tamberlaine and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Henry V, Weimann traces the relationship between the crafted language of the text and the craft of the performer.  Troilus and Cressida, for example, depicts a world rife with inconsistency between word and deed.  In the playhouse these contradictions are reinforced through “duplicity and contingency in relations of textual meaning and performed practice” (62).  Drawing upon extensive Shakespeare scholarship, Weimann reminds us that the result of this interweaving of the imaginary world in the play with a “deliberate doubleness in the mise-en-scène” (75) evokes varying degrees of distance, sympathy and criticism in the spectators, imbuing them “as agents in the production of meaning” (77).

In chapters 4 and 5, Weimann amplifies his argument on presentational form as a source of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.  Actors used the form to burlesque high Renaissance style that was associated with a culture of literacy.  “Deformity” made its way into the text in the mouths of clowns who “disfigure” the language.  Parody of performance also inspired the creation of characters such as Bottom, who are “deformed” physically.  Exploiting the “display effect” in combination with the newly emerging modes of impersonation in the Elizabethan theatre led to the creation of personae such as Edmund, Iago, and Richard Gloucester, who embody apartness, isolation, or an exceptional degree of social or moral difference.  Permutations of madness and disguise played in presentational form emphasized the nature of playing itself while calling attention to the volatility of socially and sexually fixed roles.

In a chapter on “Histories in Elizabethan performance,” Weimann investigates the connection between presentational performance in the playhouse and other similar forms of popular entertainment such as that displayed by jugglers, minstrels, and jesters, each of whom played within situations in which permeable thresholds existed between presentational display and representation.  Weimann connects the decline of such entertainment with the rise of elite forms of culture that encouraged morality, gentility, and literacy.

Hamlet, produced at the turn of the seventeenth century, provides for Weimann in chapters 6 and 7 an example of a play directly and indirectly related to conflict between common purposes of playing and a Renaissance poetics of literacy.  Using Hamlet’s speech to the players as a microcosm, Weimann reads the Prince’s advice on acting as admiration for the new representational mode of performance.  This ostensible preference is undercut, however, by the “antic disposition” that Hamlet adopts, which “disfigures” the more careful forms of Renaissance rhetoric in the play.  The “doubleness” of clashing forms and the broader social implications they involve is reinforced in Hamlet by dual uses of the stage, a theatrical practice that Weimann examines more closely in one of the book’s most invigorating chapters.

Two simultaneous types of playing spaces were used not only in Hamlet but in all Elizabethan staging.  Plateau staging foregrounded presentational playing in an open area; locus use of space represented localized places, specific imaginary locales and a more “pictorial mode of symbolizing” and representation.  While the two kinds of playing spaces functioned differently, they were marked “not by confrontation but intersection” (208).  The first type of staging Weimann associates with the authority of the actor, whereas the locus suggests the authority of the character represented in the world of the play.  Weimann connects the plateau with the “immediate give and take of unstilted, possibly ‘unrefined’ perceptions of status, conduct and ideas” and the locus with “the dominant forms of poetic and rhetorical discourse” (194) emerging through literacy.

In a final chapter on Shakespeare’s epilogues, Weimann discusses endings as dramatic transactions that invite a type of “contractual relationship between playhouse and spectators” (217).  Epilogues provide direct appeals urging the audience to endorse, remember and keep alive the work of author’s pen and actors’ voice after the theatrical experience is over.  According to Weimann, the epilogue with its lack of closure, “is itself a catalytic agent of liminality serving the redistribution of authority in the playhouse” (241).

Weimann’s thesis offers stimulating engagement with a dynamic that will interest scholars of Shakespeare, performance studies, and rhetoric.  While the thesis itself and the material covered are consistently strong, the development of ideas in the first part of the book may challenge the reader through imprecision of terminology, needless repetition of the thesis, and a penchant for argument that emphasizes speculation.  Weimann acknowledges that the “ one difficulty in coming to terms with the unfixed, changeful order of relations of ‘pen’ and ‘voice’ in the Elizabethan theatre is that the present study has to cope with the lack of a sustainedly helpful terminology” (9).  At times, the terms and concepts he uses, many of which are drawn from Elizabethan texts, are clearly explained and developed; at times they remain vague, referring to varied phenomena collapsed under a sweeping phrase such as “circulation of authority” (4).  Upon occasion, imprecision gives way to a collapse between critical terms and character insight, turning Shakespeare’s personae into poststructuralist critics, as in:  “For Troilus, such ‘madness of discourse’ serves as a vehicle of discontinuity, upsetting the cultural and semiotic order of representations through a bewildering separation of visible signs of transcendent meanings” (66).

Part of the elusiveness of Weimann’s early descriptions might be traced to the fact that this study “was devised as a second, contextualizing chapter” to a fuller work in progress on “Authority and Representation in the Elizabethan Theatre” (xi).  A more precise, consistent articulation of concepts in the present study would help to establish an integral momentum for this work, as would tighter editing.  Redundancy of the thesis in the opening chapters makes it seem as though the book begins several times before it achieves momentum.

Speculative argument also undermines the book’s opening chapters when ideas become conjecture:  “Could it be that John Heminge and Henry Condell in 1623 echoed related sentiments that they shared with their author?” (52)  “There may well have been a show of gloating in the mouthing of words like ‘insinuate’ or ‘toze’ when the player himself advertised how skillful he was . . .”  (96).  “Could it be that the acrimonious, ungentle vein of the later author was in reference to the as yet unbroken strength of the same tradition . . . ?” (125)

This unevenness of style and argument drop away in the book’s final four chapters, in which Weimann articulates and illustrates his concepts compellingly.  Here form and matter coalesce; his contributions are deft, insightful, and exhilarating as he looks at historical precedents and antecedents to Shakespeare’s theatre and connects Shakespeare’s work with the social life of the day as well as to the prevalent Elizabethan forms and functions of performance production and reception.  One is left with depth and breadth of vision concerning production on Shakespeare’s stage, the creative interplay of performance and writing, the participatory and crucial role of the audience, and the cultural function of theatre.

Jill Taft-Kaufman is professor of Speech Communication and Dramatic Arts at Central Michigan University.