By R. Shaughnessy
This energetic and provocative learn deals a thorough reappraisal of a century of Shakespearean theatre. themes addressed contain modernist Shakespearean performance's relation with psychoanalysis, the hidden gender dynamics of the open degree stream, and the appropriation of Shakespeare himself as a dramatic fiction and theatrical icon.
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Additional resources for The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance
Sample text
There was plenty of serious and sustained theatrical commentary in circulation during the period in which Poel began his work, but it was confined almost entirely to the medium of print journalism. This marked a change from the position at the beginning of the century, which had seen literary professionals such as Lamb, Coleridge and Hazlitt ready to engage with performance (even if they were unhappy with it) as something worth documenting, discussing, and critiquing in relation to other reading practices; as Hugh Grady observes ‘Romantic criticism shared with that of the previous century a locus in a generalized, public sphere of coffee-house, magazine, and lecture-hall’ and chose the objects of its scrutiny accordingly; as criticism became professionalised ‘it passed out of the sphere of public discourse properly speaking, becoming instead a power/knowledge of new bureaucratic institutions’,26 and theatre, consequently, moved beyond its remit.
The combination was enough to persuade the Era’s exasperated critic of the fatuity of the exercise, as he described ‘the performance of the Shakespearian enthusiasts who dragged us from the bright sunshine, and occupied nearly three hours of our time at St George’s Hall, on the afternoon of Saturday last’ (23 April 1881). If this sense of stubborn perversity set the tone for the criticism that would be directed at him for much of his professional life, Poel was in turn determined to establish the validity of the enterprise in terms of its scholarly rather than conventionally theatrical virtues.
The recalcitrant presence of Macklow’s disordered body reveals a further schism between amateur and professional performance, and, in connection with this, between Poel’s incipient anti-pictorialism and the technologies of the picture frame stage. The relation of spectre to spectacle was one of the nineteenthcentury stage’s greatest challenges, with devices such as traps and gauzes carefully contrived to achieve ‘the ghost’s eery dematerialization’; thus at a production at the Lyceum in 1864 had the ghost ‘stood behind a large concealed wheel which, when started, caught up, at each revolution, a fresh piece of some almost transparent stuff, artfully tinted to match the background, until the requisite thickness was obtained.