Sheakespeare's Theory of Drama.

Pauline Kiernan. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 218 pp. $ 49.95 ISBN 0521-55-046-7.

William B. Bache and Vernon P. Loggins. Shakespeare's Deliberate Art. Laham, NY and London: University Press of America, 1996. 257 pp. $36.80 (pap). ISBN 0-7618-0301-7.

An effect of the current critical boom in performance studies has been a renewed attention to the physical presence of the actor's body on stage. This crucial difference between the dramatic text-as-performance and the text-as-script motivates Pauline Kiernan's basic argument: that behind Shakespeare's "evident concern" with drama and aesthetics lies a coherent and specifically dramatic theory. The theory's central plank is Shakespeare's alleged repudiation of the mimesis concept of art in favor of a form which offers "the physical immediacy and present-centredness of Orphic presentation" (13). Upon this foundation the theory's other elements rest: the primacy of the human body; the rejection of history's claim to truth; the accommodation of mutability; dramas insistence on its own fictiveness.

The opening chapters of the book are meant to demonstrate the debilitating consequences of poetry's mimetic re-presentation, against which the vitality of dramatic presentation can emerge. Shakespeare's narrative poems, Kiernan suggests, are the dramatist's means of working out his relationship to non-dramatic literature. In Venus and Adonis, for example, he re-works the Ovidian concern with temporality and the loss of corporeal autonomy, to stage, as it were, a contest between mimetic and dramatic art. Against Venus's polished rhetorical verse (equated with the mimetic or hermetic) which dematerializes the very body it seeks to re-present, the poem's narrative voice asserts the power of dramatic presentation (= Orphic) which "reinstate[s] the body in all its sensuous and organic power" (55). Mimetic poetry's sterile rhetoric is transformed into an Orphic, dramatic language that can bring everything into new life (that this paradoxically occurs through the bleeding corpse of Adonis, Kiernan makes little of). The two subsequent chapters develop this opposition through a selective examination of Shakespearean drama. The contrast between The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Adronicus points up the inadequacy of poetic language in the face of unsupportable human suffering, while The Winter's Tale and The Tempest expose the ways in which mimetic art always kills its object of re-presentation. Dramatic presentation, though, eschews all claims to mimetic adequacy; it creates instead, through the bodies of the actors, a new organic reality independent of the real world. The banishing of the mimetic in the Nine Worthies Pageant of Love's Labour's Lost; the mechanicals' production as a staging of the failure of mimetic drama in A Midsummer Night's Dream; and Hamlet's self-reflexive production of audience belief in its own explicitly fictional creations, make up the next chapter.

Despite often nuanced local reading - e.g., the re-interpretation of the art/nature debate in The Winter's Tale - there are problems with the overarching analysis, most of which can be traced to Kiernan's deployment of the notion of mimesis. Even if we set aside the internal inconsistencies in her use of mimesis from chapter to chapter - other theorists have, after all, been hoisted by mimesis' petard - it hardly seems likely that mimesis-as-referentiality (which seems to be her preferred understanding of the term) constitutes the mainspring of poetic representation. Whether this be Shakespeare's bogey or Kiernan's (the book consistently erases the difference between these perspectives), the theory of drama developed comes with a heavy price: a penurious theory of poetry. Not only is the static opposition - taken over from Gerald Bruns - between Hermetic (= mimetic = referential) and Orphic expression inadequate to the task it takes on, that of capturing the relationship between poetry/history and drama, but her use of the opposition is also a distortion: what begins as an opposition between two forms of poetic language ends up here as an opposition between poetic re-presentation and dramatic presentation.

The argument against history's claims to truth works better, it being easier to see the importance of referentiality here. At the same time, the discussion of history is the least provocative part of the book as it recapitulates what is by now almost received wisdom: that, qua representation, history is always already fictional, that its arrangement of events constructs reality. Kiernan argues that in the history plays (specifically Richard II, Henry V, Richard III and Henry VIII) Shakespeare exposes the relativity of human history; he exploits the license of fictionality by creating, through the actors' bodies, new realities - themselves contingent and time-bound - that alter and replace earlier authorities, becoming through the "reality" of performance the "sources of further history" (151). In the concluding chapter she offers Antony and Cleopatra as a paradigm for Shakespeare's theory of drama and its engagement with history. All this seems quite close to what another terminology would put thus: Shakespeare exploits his recognition that all historical narratives are ideological in order to establish, quite self-consciously, the authority of his own (equally ideological) narrative. The difference between her account and this one, however, would seem to rest on the insistence on performance, on the centrality of the body as the only means by which the play establishes itself as an "original' event" (151). Performance and the body function as guarantees from the very outset for the fact that drama has "presence" (while any written form such as poetry does not). In the final analysis, it is this assumption that grounds her claim that drama can create new organic realities, while history and poetry can only re-present realities. But there is no reason to accept the dramatic claim to presence quite so unquestioningly. Indeed, in her own analysis, the specificity of the actor's body itself dissolves; no longer the particular body at a particular moment, it becomes something of an allegorical stand-in, the body in general. Given the book's implicit polemics against deconstruction, her analysis ironically does to the body precisely what she claims the "deconstructionist" notion of writing does to it.

Nevertheless, at the local level, one enjoys Kiernan's ear and attention to textual detail. And if Kiernan's fiction, unlike Shakespeare's, doesn't finally inspire belief, it certainly inspires interest. The issues she raises are both important and complex. I do not regret having engaged the text and would recommend it. I cannot, however, say the same for Bache and Loggins' Shakespeare's Deliberate Art, a book remarkable for its contemptuous dismissal of all literary critical approaches to Shakespeare since the heyday of the New Critics. Their grounding premise - no surprise here - is that of the universality and timelessness of Shakespeare's genius: "Spenser, Jonson, Donne ... were, in one way or another, hostage to their extraordinary time: they can be considered true disciples of the Renaissance. They were Shakespeare's contemporaries, but Shakespeare is our contemporary" (xiii). "Shakespeare is not only the world's greatest artist but also the world's best teacher" (xvi). The very fragmentary book that follows these remarks ranges widely over Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre, contributing snippets on one or more plays (on Richard II's garden scene, on Emilia in Othello, on Shakespeare's use of lists etc.). The book is at its weakest when it baldly dismisses other theoretical positions (for example, "we support [Richard Levin's] critical assertion that the 'feminist branch of thematism, like other thematic criticism' does not work"), and when it then attempts to present its own value-laden assumptions as objective and value-free. The book does sketch potentially useful structural patterns within single texts and across texts (the way simple plot problems generate Shakespeare's narratives; his use of two-part design), which may serve a reader able to dissociate them from their interpretive freight.

SHANKAR RAMAN Massachusetts Institute of Technology