A Midsummer Night's Dream and Shakespeare in Production: Whose History?

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed. by Trevor R. Griffiths. (Shakespeare in Production) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1996. xvi+234 pp. [pound]40;$59.95 (paperbound [pound]14.95;$18.95).

Shakespeare in Production: Whose History?. By H. R. COURSEN. Athens: Ohio University Press. 1996. xiv+287 pp. $39.95.

What is the history of theatrical production for? Who is it for? Can the fortunes of a play in production over a period of three or four hundred years contribute to our understanding of the text which we used to refer to unproblematically as 'the play', or is the play an unstable reflection or product of ambient culture spiced by an individual practitioner's or reader's imagination? What is the relationship between a production and concurrent academic or journalistic criticism? Is it even possible to write the history of performance when the evidence is so partial and subjective? (For what modern director would accept as reliable evidence for his or her achievement 100 years from now, simply the opinions of even our most respected theatre critics?) These are essential questions, but while H. R. Coursen's book gives us chapter headings couched in question form, it does not provide any coherent answers and Trevor R. Griffiths's book does not ask the questions.

The format of the new Cambridge series, Shakespeare in Performance, provides the text of the play as edited for the New Cambridge Shakespeare, annotated line by line with chronologically presented information on staging and interpretation culled from prompt books and contemporary reviews. An introduction charts general trends in styles of performance and interpretation based mostly on those same productions. Griffiths's choice of productions is limited to those appearing in London and Stratford-upon-Avon between 1662 and 1994, with the addition of Max Reinhardt's 1935 film, and Peter Hall's film of his stage production, but not Reinhardt's own stage versions, developed over thirty-four years, nor Moshinsky's production for television (possibly the plashiest until Lepage drowned the play in mud). The general editors' introduction stresses Shakespeare's use in translation in other countries where he 'may become the one dissenting voice that the censors mistake as harmless' (p. ix), but Griffiths eschews all productions in foreign languages on the grounds that 'the issues for a German production dealing with the early nineteenth century Schlegel-Tieck translations [. . .] are very different from those of an English director dealing with the language of the late sixteenth century' (p. 5). Instead, in the absence of any other early eighteenth-century London productions he gives us an account of Leveridge's Comic Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe with its characters Semibreve, Crotchet, and Gamut discussing the excesses of Italian Opera, possibly further from the text of Shakespeare than any straight-forward translation. Neither his position nor that of the general editors thus addresses the possibility that, as demonstrated in London briefly during the summer of 1996, a foreign language production might get visually and emotionally closer to certain aspects of the imagery and style of Shakespeare's language than one performed in English. Ninagawa's production was imbued with Japanese cultural motifs and practices that deftly stripped away the tired accretions of English theatrical tradition to display Shakespeare's structures and images as sparklingly fresh. Snug for instance, played by a former sumo wrestler, gave delicious point to the anxiety about Lion frightening the ladies. By contrast the inimitable, yokelized clog dancing of Northern Broadsides merely rollicked about in recycled let's-be-funny staging. Griffiths' book may conceivably be the springboard for further research as it is sure to alert the careful and already interested reader to possible fruitful lines of enquiry, but apart from the occasional comment on specific effects, he has not himself risen to the general editors' challenge to define how it is that 'some productions work and others do not' (p. ix).

If the productions chosen by Griffiths are too narrowly London-oriented, the only organizational principle behind H. R. Coursen's book seems to be 'productions I have seen' and indeed much of it reads like hastily transcribed post-performance notes, frequently with parentheses embedded within parentheses. The book starts with 'Whose History?' which is about historicizing Shakespeare, the relationship between text and production, and between one production and another. Then by asking, 'Romeo and Juliet: A Beautiful Film for Beautiful People?' it moves to a plea for the critical rehabilitation of Cukor's 1936 film, before diving into, ' "What's There?": Opening Hamlet on Film', which raises the question in my mind but not evidently in the author's, 'when is a quote not a quote?' A couple of chapters on comedies are followed by two on histories, the second asking with some deja vu, 'Is Shakespeare's History Our Own?' followed by two more on Hamlet, again.

A recurring point is the locus/platea distinction (a reduction of Weimann's article, 'Bifold Authority in Shakespeare Theatre' Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 401-17) here signifying the text as written (locus) and the production as played (platea). The methodology which is avowedly 'post-modern' (Coursen's favourite word) is actually eclectic. However, he perversely throws the dirt on eclectic productions, without attempting to theorize the ways in which the anachronisms and temporal circularities which characterize so many of Shakespeare's plays might effectively be realized on the contemporary stage. 'Evidence' consists of quoting the unsubstantiated opinions of one critic after another with just sufficient pause in between for the reference, while he appears himself to be of the gratuitous-abuse-plus-throwaway-witticism school of theatre commentary. In the circumstances, Coursen's final question-heading, ' "What, Out of This, My Lord?" ' may be considered a hostage to fortune. The confusions of style, and his even-handed desire to take swipes at the post-modern criticism he dislikes too, while using some of its vocabulary, mean that he is impossible to pin down: 'productions of Shakespeare's plays are superior to whatever contemporary criticism may be doing at its given moment and may even be superior to the means of reproducing them as plays' (p. 248). How can a product, particularly one that is consumed as a process, be superior to its means of (re)production, and again what do we mean by 'plays' in this context? Coursen's conclusion is no more than a precis of his initial chapter and it brings me back to my opening paragraph.