Special Issue: Reviewing Shakespeare || Shakespeare, the Reviewer, and the Theatre Historian

George Washington University

Shakespeare, the Reviewer, and the Theatre HistorianAuthor(s): Cary M. MazerSource: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 5, Special Issue: Reviewing Shakespeare (1985), pp.648-661Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2869781 .

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Shakespeare, the Reviewer, And the Theatre Historian

CARY M. MAZER

I recommend the series of dramatic essays [collections of theatre reviews edited by William Archer and Robert Lowe] . . . to all actors who pretend to be indifferent to the opinion of such persons as myself; for it proves beyond contradiction that the actor who desires enduring fame must seek it at the hands of the critic, and not of the casual playgoer. Money and applause he may have in plenty from the contemporary mob; but posterity can only see him through the spectacles of the elect: if he displeases them, his credit will be interred with his bones. The world believes Edmund Kean to have been a much greater actor than Junius Brutus Booth solely because Hazlitt thought so. Its belief in the inferiority of Forrest to Macready is not its own opinion, but Forster's. The one failure of Charles Kean's life that matters now is his failure to impress Lewes in anything higher than melodrama. Some day they will reprint my articles; and then what will all your puffs and long runs and photographs and papered houses and cheap successes avail you, 0 lovely leading ladies and well-tailored actor-managers? The twentieth century, if it con- cerns itself about either of us, will see you as I see you. Therefore study my tastes, flatter me, bribe me, and see that your acting-managers are conscious of my existence and impressed with my importance.1

T HUS WROTE BERNARD SHAW IN HIS WEEKLY COLUMN of theatrical criticism in The Saturday Review on 20 June 1896, a theatre review reprinted, as

Shaw predicted, along with the rest of his theatrical criticism, under the general title Our Theatres in the Nineties. Shaw was, of course, right: we do indeed see his theatrical contemporaries as he (and, if we are at all cautious, as Clement Scott, William Archer, J. T. Grein, A. B. Walkley, and a dozen or so critics who have not subsequently been anthologized) saw them. Whether the reviewer defines the task of criticism in relation to the immediate present, or addresses the immense grandstand of posterity (the "Ghosts of the Distant Future" whom Salieri addresses in Shaffer's Amadeus), the reviewer is a valuable bridge to the past, a source of both information and opinion, and one of the most com-

1 Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties (London: Constable and Company, 1932), ii, 160- 61.

CARY M. MAZER, Assistant Professor of English and Co-Chairman of the Theatre Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Shakespeare Refashioned: Elizabethan Plays on Edwardian Stages; he is currently working on a book on Edwardian Shakespearean acting.



SHAKESPEARE, THE REVIEWER, AND THE THEATRE HISTORIAN 649

pelling and indispensable documentary tools available to the theatre historian. And this has become even more true in recent decades, as the discipline of

theatre history has entered the ranks of modern scholarship in both aim and methodology. Theatre historians have always drawn upon reviews, even at the turn of the century, when theatre history consisted primarily of laudatory bio- graphies of popular actors and straightforward chronicles, such as G.C.D. Odell's Annals of the New York Stage. In both cases, the historian would draw upon reviews as barometers of contemporary opinion. Reviews were valued because they were valuative: because critics, whether persons of letters or Fleet Street hacks, are more expressive than the anonymous theatregoer; and because their writings, however prejudiced or self-serving, are more durable than the applause of the audience, which is as evanescent as the actor's performance itself.

Today, the theatre historian is interested not so much in recording the fact that a theatrical event took place, nor even solely in appraising its success, but in understanding and interpreting the aesthetic experience of that theatre event in its context: the context of the particular playhouse, the particular audience, in the particular town, at the particular cultural and historical moment. The scholarly process of placing the aesthetic event in its historical moment begins, of course, with the event itself, and the principal activity of the historian is thus one of reconstruction, of recreating the shape of the event from its documentable details, and of recapturing the experience of the individuals in the audience, those people whose presence and participation complete the event itself. Reviews can often provide a source of precise detail about the performance, about text, picture, space, characterization, business, conception, and overall interpretation; and they can help us to recapture some sense of what it might have been like to have been in the theatre audience, participating in the theatre event.

The reliability of theatre reviews as a source of factual details about the performance itself has become a continual and increasing source of frustration for the theatre historian. In the passage I quoted at the beginning of this essay, Shaw recognizes the importance that his reviews will have for historians in the future because of the sheer weight of his opinions; but he says little about the descriptive powers of the critic, or the interest that the theatre historian might have in the details of what actually transpired on stage. We are inclined to accept the opinions of Shaw and his contemporaries; but we may wish they had described more of what they witnessed in the playhouse. The needs of the modern theatre historian have tempered our expectations of theatrical criticism. Imagining that historians in the future will share our interests and methods, we have begun to encourage contemporary critics to serve historians in the future better than the critics in the past have served us. And we have begun to prescribe formats and formulae for theatrical reviewing which will serve this higher purpose.

I do not wish to add to this list of prescriptions. Indeed, I believe that we have, in many ways, prescribed too much. Instead, I wish to describe the new format of scholarly theatre reviewing which has evolved in the last decade, and to trace its origins in the revolution in stage-centered Shakespeare criticism and Shakespeare performance history. This new format of theatrical reviewing has its distinct uses; but I would like to maintain that much has been lost, both to reviewing and to those historians in the future whom we are most directly aiming to serve.



650 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

I

Shakespeare performance history began, as a field, at the turn of the century, with the works of a theatre historian of the old school, G.C.D. Odell, and a theatrical critic-belletrist, William Winter.2 But the field as we know it is of far more recent origin, beginning with Arthur Colby Sprague, J. C. Trewin, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Robert Speaight, and, of course, Charles Shattuck.3 Modern Shakespeare performance history is really more a branch of stage-centered criticism than it is a sub-specialty of theatre history. Its tools, methodology, and areas of exploration are historical, but its principal aims have been dramatic interpretation and not theatre history. Whether the script is a precisely notated and strictly delimited score, or else a pretext for an infinite range of possible realizations (the truth, of course, lies somewhere in between), the very assumption that Shakespeare's plays are scripts implies that the scripts themselves are somehow incomplete, or at least unrealized, until they exist in the act of performance. This assumption in turn acknowledges the contribution of the artists of the theatre-the actors, directors, and designers-as agents or collaborators in the play's completion or realization in performance. And this in turn leads to the ultimate recognition, either celebrated or begrudged, that the theatrical artist is an interpreter, that the process of preparing a play for presentation before an audience is, consciously or subliminally, an act of interpretation, on a par with, if in several ways different from, the interpretive act of literary criticism. Literary critics leave behind a record of their interpretation, in the form of their published books and essays. But the theatrical interpreter's interpretation is the performance itself, which, like everything in the theatre, disappears in all but the memory of the spectator the moment the performance is over.

The historian of Shakespeare in performance acts on the conviction that these interpretations are valuable only if they can be preserved and made available in more durable form to the scholarly community at large. The task of the performance historian, then, is like that of the archivist, one of preservation, and like that of the critical historian, one of collation and presentation. It is historical insofar as it is interested in the changes in interpretation over time, and the possible significance of such changes; but it is essentially interpretive, in that it seeks, by accumulating theatrical "interpretations" through the centuries, to add to the aggregate of our own interpretive understanding of the plays themselves.

The shift in the presentational format in the books of that most encyclopedic of Shakespeare performance historians, Marvin Rosenberg, is indicative of this goal. The Masks of Othello (Berkeley:. Univ. of California Press, 1961) pre- sents, in a chronological narrative, the fortunes of the play's interpretation in

2 G.C.D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (1920; rpt. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966); William Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, 3 vols. (New York: Moffat, 1911-16).

3Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1944); J. C. Trewin, Shakespeare on the English Stage, 1900-1964 (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1964); Arthur Colby Sprague and J. C. Trewin, Shakespeare's Plays Today (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1970); Muriel St. Clare Byrne, "Fifty Years of Shakespearean Production: 1898-1948," Shakespeare Survey, 2 (1949), 1-20; Robert Speaight, Shakespeare on the Stage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Charles Shattuck, The Shakespeare Promptbooks (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), The Hamlet of Edwin Booth (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1969), Shakespeare on the American Stage (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976).




performance throughout history. But, first in The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), and then in The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), the chronological narrative is scrapped. De- tails of the individual performances are divided into little bits and, like so many file cards, reshuffled. The interpretations of performances in the past become data for an aggregate interpretation in the present. As Rosenberg notes in The Masks of Macbeth (p. xii), "I am essentially concerned with the interpretation, only secondarily the history." The entrance of each character, the physical business, the emotional flow of the speeches, the ebb and flow of character interaction, are discussed in order, as the audience would experience them. Rosenberg describes the drama of each interpretive moment by describing how that moment was interpreted in any and every documentable performance from the past. By showing the full range of theatrical readings arrived at to date, Rosenberg builds a prototype for all possible theatrical performances. The blueprint for the play's human vitality in performance, according to this school of scholarship, lies in the aggregate of all its human embodiments in the theatre through history.4 Admittedly, other Shakespeare performance historians, such as John Ripley, Margaret Lamb, and Dennis Bartholomeusz, have not chosen to follow Rosenberg's example.5 But their purpose has essentially been the same: by presenting the history of the play in performance, they can test, measure, and delimit the range of possibilities for performance today. If "meaning" lies only in performance, then by assembling the data of performance the Shakespeare performance historian creates, in effect, a variorum of the play's theatrical meanings.

Such an enterprise makes very special use of the documents of theatre history, and so makes a very particular demand on the theatrical reviewer as purveyor of documentary evidence. Reviews are, of course, only one of several potential sources of documentary evidence for the purposes of reconstructing the details of the theatrical event. If the historian is fortunate, there is the promptbook, the director's, or more often the stage-manager's, annotated working text of the play, developed during the rehearsal period, and used by the stage-manager as the cueing and prompting script of the play while the production is "running." A director like Glen Byam Shaw will keep his own "preparation" copy, which includes not only the cuts in the script and the basic blocking, but also a systematic description of the characters and a running account of the theme and action of each scene.6 At worst, the promptbook will be little more than a blueprint of stage positions, or, in such worst cases as several of William Poel's promptbooks, a cut version of the text with notations only of group

4 As Rosenberg writes in both volumes (The Masks of King Lear, pp. 1-2; The Masks of Mac- beth, p. xiii), "I assume a general accuracy in the observations of reviews and historical reports, though sometimes they disagree with each other. . .. What is important here is how much illu- mination the synchronized images may lend to our understanding of the play. . . . Some actors are not named because, like some critics, they add nothing to earlier illuminations of the play." The equation of the actor and the literary explicator is explicit.

5 John Ripley, Julius Caesar on Stage in England and America, 1599-1973 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 1980); Margaret Lamb, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1980); Dennis Bartholemeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), and The Winter's Tale in Performance in England and America, 1611-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).

6 In his facsimile edition of Glen Byam Shaw's Macbeth promptbook, Macbeth Onstage (Co- lumbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1976), Michael Mullin makes excellent use of Shaw's preparation copy for the marginal annotations of the promptbook.




entrances and exits.7 The well-annotated promptbook can be a very valuable resource indeed, but only rarely is it colorful, elaborate, or evocative in its notations.8 Another valuable document for the theatre historian is the artist's rendering of the scene or, in the last century, the production photograph. Great care must be taken with these documents, for they rarely convey with precision what actually took place on the stage. Artists tend to obscure details of space and picture in order to conceal the mechanisms by which the stage picture has been created. Early photographs were carefully posed, often in the studio and not in the theatre, and often using different costumes and properties. Even today, production photographs are often taken at special photo calls, for pro- motional rather than documentary purposes, often before the blocking has been set, and before the actors have rehearsed in costume. Yet another documentary source is actors' and directors' recollections, which are occasionally self-serving and are often colored by the passage of time and embellished by the theatre professional's love of anecdote.

This leaves, of course, the eyewitness account of the performance itself, the most eloquent, immediate, detailed, experienced, and professional of which is the review written by the professional theatre critic. But here, too, there are problems. The daily critic is, of course, bound by the restrictions of column inches and deadlines. And, as Michael Redgrave often pointed out, the history of the theatre, as written by the theatre critic, is the history of opening nights, the one (and usually the only) night that the critic attends the performance, often before the production has hit its stride and the performances of major roles have' matured and developed.

The main problem, though, with the theatrical review as a documentary source for Shakespeare performance history is simply that this was not the reason that the review was written. The critic writes for the contemporary reader and theatregoer, and not for the history books. Even Shaw was being ingenuous in the quotation with which I opened this essay: he was playing to the grandstand of history as a way of bullying and intimidating his contemporaries in the theatrical profession, using his platform as a theatre critic to propagandize for changes in the theatre of his own day, regarding his reviews "not [as] a series of judgments aiming at impartiality, but as a siege laid to the theatre of the xixth Century by an author who had to cut his own way into it at the point of a pen, and throw some of its defenders into the moat."9 Whatever the critic's claims to the contrary (and I expect that there are several such claims to be found between the covers of this issue of Shakespeare Quarterly), theatrical reviewing is first and foremost journalism: a combination of show-biz news reporting, of community boosterism in the smaller towns and more remote regions, and a theatrical version of Consumer Reports, in the more costly and volatile theatrical marketplaces such as New York."1 The critic with an eye for detail and a flair

I Anyone who has tried to work with Poel's promptbooks will be impressed with Rinda F. Lundstrom's ability to extract data from them in her book, William Poel's Hamlets (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984).

8 My own favorite stage-manager's annotation is a stage direction in one of the promptbooks, in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, for Beerbohm Tree's 1901 Twelfth Night: after Feste's "The whirligig of time brings in its revenges," Malvolio swings his staff at him, the promptbook records, "as though to sweep him out of existence." Such colorful language is rare indeed.

9 Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, I, v. 10 Arthur Miller, a playwright who is certainly not very fond of critics, tells a story about a




for description will, of course, leave behind a great deal that will be of use to a theatre historian: an extensive analysis of an actor's conception of a role, with some descriptions of details of inflection, business, or a glance of the eye; an elaborate metaphor for the actor's overall impression; or a vivid description of a particular set change, a vivid stage grouping, or an especially effective coup de theatre. These elements of the review will be of use to the theatre historian; but, even then, this will not be the reason the critic has written them. Critics wish to communicate their valuative appraisal of the production's worth to the theatrical consumer; descriptions of the details of a production are only a means to this end, a way of conveying to the reader the reasons for the critic's overall judgment, and of giving readers an impression of what is in store for them if they choose to attend the production.

II

It is small wonder, then, that the scholarly Shakespeare profession, goaded on by stage-centered critics in general, and by Shakespeare performance historians in particular, have called for a reappraisal of the functions, purposes, and methods of theatre reviewing. This process began in the mid 1970s, when Shakespeare Quarterly embarked on the Sisyphean project of creating an ongoing collection of theatre reviews of virtually every professional production of Shakespeare around the world; and it has culminated in this special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly itself. The principal goal has been to invert the priorities which have been the norm in theatre reviewing throughout the last two and a half centuries of popular commercial journalism. Reviews, the scholarly community insists, should be historical documents first, and consumer reports only afterwards, if at all. l

The guidelines for contributors of Shakespeare Quarterly theatre reviews make special mention of the fact that the review, appearing months after the production has closed, cannot function as a consumer report at all. These original guidelines recognize four potential readers for the reviews: (1) the general reader, who might not be a theatregoer at all (and whose patronage of the journal was then being sought, when Shakespeare Quarterly first began to be sold in book- shops and theatre stores); (2) the "avid, sophisticated, informed theatregoer"; (3) the theatre professional (the reviews' influence upon whom will be discussed

meeting called by the New York Times on the eve of the demise of the World Journal Tribune to discuss the implications for theatre criticism in New York. The editors claimed to be seriously concerned with the unprecedented power their critics would hold. Several members of the theatre community attending the meeting suggested that the Times should send not one but several critics to each production, and print the reviews side by side, as a critical forum; the editors declined the suggestion, asking "who, then, would represent the Times?" They clearly valued the Consumer Reports function of reviewing more highly than critical discourse.

I A similar decision was made by Michael Kirby when he took over the post of editor of The Drama Review in 1971. Kirby introduced theatre "reports," as distinct from theatre "reviews": " 'Reviewing' a performance means evaluating it. We are not interested in opinions and value judgments about what is 'good' and what is 'bad.' We feel that the detailed and accurate documentation of performances is preferable and gives sufficient grounds for a reader to make his own value judgments" (quoted in TDR, 100 [1984], p. 17). The avant garde performances reported in TDR rarely place as high a priority on the recorded verbal text as on the other aspects of live performance, and so theatre reports are often the only form of documenting the performance itself. For the reader who has not experienced the particular performance piece, or who is unfamiliar with current performance practice, these theatre reports can be unintentionally risible in their dead- pan descriptions.




below); and (4) perhaps most significantly, "the scholar, critic, theatre historian, or theatre professional of the future who wishes to have as complete and accurate a record as possible of some aspect of Shakespearean production of our time." Factual information about the production was to be included in a "fact sheet," naming the place and date, the artistic personnel, the cast, and the playing time. The reviews themselves were to "provide an accurate record of what the performance entailed" and to "provide a well-supported assessment of the performance."

These two functions-documentation and assessment-are, of course, inter- related, for the "assessment" was to measure the production's "significance," which was defined as "those factors of the production-directorial conception, stage and costume design, technical innovations, outstanding individual performances, etc. -that render it important," i.e., "worth calling to the attention of the world." The reviewer was to provide "reasons and supporting evidence for every major assertion . . . about the quality of the production." Details of the production, then, while having an intrinsic documentary function, would serve the larger purpose of helping to establish the importance of the production, as measured by the production's contribution to our collective understanding of the play. The Shakespeare Quarterly guidelines of the 1970s, then, generated a form of theatre reviewing which was by design concise, documentary, detailed, and factual; but, like Rosenberg's books, they were "essentially concerned with interpretation, only secondarily the history."

The concise format for theatre reviews generated by the Shakespeare Quar- terly guidelines provided a model for several reference works on the history of Shakespeare in performance. One is William Babula's Shakespeare in Pro- duction, 1935-1978: A Selective Catalogue (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1981).12 A current project of Samuel L. Leiter's, Shakespeare: Notable International Revivals, co-edited by Felicia Hardison Londre, Tice Miller, Mi- chael Mullin, and Daniel J. Watermeier, to be published by Greenwood Press, is a project which, like the New Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, has drawn upon so many contributors that it is unlikely that any Shakespeare performance historians will be left to review the volume disinterestedly when it appears. Leiter's guidelines for his contributors echo the priorities of the Shakespeare Quarterly guidelines: "entries [300 to 900 words] should examine, wherever possible, directorial interpretation, actor interpretation, and designer interpretation. Interpretive goals should be compared with artistic achievement, at least as far as can be determined by critical responses. The reader should be able to picture the essential nature of the staging, its degree of innovation and conventionality, and its stature amidst other productions of the time."

By 1982, Shakespeare Quarterly was facing a crisis in its coverage of theatre productions. In the late Seventies, reviews filled an entire oversize issue of the journal; and when the Editor distributed the reviews through all four issues, the reviews threatened to devour the available space and to overpower the articles, notes, and book reviews. Accordingly, the Editorial Board established a new set of guidelines for contributors. According to the new scheme, reviews would be carefully divided into two formats with two distinct functions. The reviews in Shakespeare Quarterly proper would be limited to "omnibus" sur- veys of particular regions, production styles, or individual plays in multiple

12 See Charles H. Shattuck's review of Babula's book in Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 243-44, for a discussion of the limitations of the concise format.




productions, to be written on commission. The revised 1982 guidelines allowed that the emphasis of such reviews "may be more 'journalistic' than in the past- in the sense that the premium will be on providing the reader with news and analysis, spotting trends where they are to be found, focusing on 'stories' . . . at least as much as on critical assessments of this directorial decision or on that acting technique." The documentary function of the reviews was to be borne by a different format altogether. This was to be more an expansion of the "fact sheets" than a condensation of the previous review format. The expanded fact sheets would not appear in the pages of Shakespeare Quarterly at all; they would be used by the commissioned authors in preparing their omnibus reviews, and they would be published in a special section of the annual World Shakespeare Bibliography. The fact sheets now would not only include place, dates, personnel, cast, and running time, but would also note "how extensively the text was cut, and whether it was in any way distinctive in its use of setting, costume, or other theatrical devices.13

Admittedly, not all of these changes in format have been implemented. Con- ventional, short-form theatre reviews still appear in the pages of Shakespeare Quarterly. Very few omnibus articles have been printed: an excellent one is Alan C. Dessen's "Staging Shakespeare's History Plays in 1984: A Tale of Three Henrys," SQ, 36 (1985), 71-79, which was based on personal theatre- going experience alone, and not on fact sheets provided by other reviewers. And the expanded fact sheets have not, at the time I am writing, appeared in the Bibliography. But the tendency is clear. The dual evaluative and documentary functions of the original guidelines have been split in two. And while some articles are free to be more journalistic, the data accumulated principally for the theatre historian, in the form of the shorter reviews and the expanded fact sheets, has become more concise, telegraphic, factual, and quantifiable.

III

The revolution in stage-centered Shakespeare scholarship, and the attendant minor revolution in Shakespeare performance history has, then, created a revolution in the way the scholarly community reviews Shakespeare in performance. Or, more accurately, the scholarly community, frustrated with the documentary and analytical limitations of conventional theatre reviewing, has created an entirely new genre of theatrical reportage, something which might not, in fact, be reviewing at all. The Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly, and the editorial teams preparing volumes on the recent history of Shakespeare production, continue to search for a format which will be at once informative, unbiased, and short, and have moved toward the shorter, more concise, and more telegraphic.

I believe, though, that something has been lost in this move toward the factual and the quantitative, something which the Shakespeare performance historian, and the theatre historian at large, is very likely to miss in the future. Of course we can never be quite sure what the historians of the future will want to see, what they will think is important, what they will curse us for not preserving. Notwithstanding, it is clear that the basis of selection which we have employed in developing this new genre of theatrical reportage is too narrow, too limiting,

13 An expanded fact sheet was proposed as early as 1976, when Bernard Beckerman asked me to prepare a prototype, based on my close observation of the New York Shakespeare Festival Henry V. See note 20 below.




and too misleading. If we communicate anything to the historian in the future through this new format, it may very well be the narrowness of our own interests, and our subversion of the function of theatrical criticism to the narrowness of our own scholarly biases. The concise, quantitative format into which we have compressed our theatrical reviewing has closed off the open- endedness of reviewing, and has prevented it from serving any of the many other functions which may be of crucial importance to the historian in the future.

The greatest shortcoming of the concise form of theatrical documentation championed by Shakespeare Quarterly is its inordinate emphasis upon interpretive concept. Shakespeare performance history, and performance-centered criticism in general, taught us all to "read" productions as essays in criticism. Theatre reviews designed to record a production's "significance" most often attempt to reduce the overall experience of the theatre event to a single, discrete critical thesis, the director's "concept" of the play (or, in even worse jargon, the director's "conceptualization" of the production). The theatre event is, of course, much more than this. John Russell Brown has shown us, in Free Shake- speare (London: Heinemann, 1974), that the reductiveness of the critical interpretive thesis among literary critics represents the same small-mindedness and reductiveness as the orientation toward "concept" in the Director's and Designer's Theatre. The concise documentary form of theatrical reportage seems to ignore this observation, priding itself on being able to reduce the performance to a concept, as though nothing else mattered, at least from the perspective of history.

To illustrate how the director's concept works in performance, the scholarly theatre reporter is encouraged to record the significant "choices." And here we come to the second major shortcoming of this type of theatrical reviewing: in singling out key moments, pieces of business, or dramatic cruxes, it fosters the belief that the play's "meaning" lies exclusively in such moments. As nineteenth-century critics would compare the "points" in the performances of Shakespearean actors (comparing, for example, Kean and Cooke in their treatment of such famous points as the business accompanying the Cibber line, "Richard is himself again," in Richard III), the contemporary scholarly reviewer compares the treatment of key staging moments which, according to current trends of scholarship and cliches of production, are regarded as particularly significant. How long does Isabella pause before joining Mariana in pleading for Angelo's pardon? How does she react to the Duke's proposal in the final lines of the play? Is it assumed that she accepts, or is she given pantomimic business to suggest that she declines? Is it left ambiguous? Or is it made quite clear that she hasn't, or cannot, or will not, make up her mind? I do not mean to suggest that these issues are not interesting, or even important. Certainly no performance can leave such choices unsettled. An actress' choices in embodying the character of Isabella, as well as her fellow actors' choices about their characters and their relationships with her, and the director's vision of the particular human experiences being dramatized in the play, will inevitably find expression in the treatment of such critical moments. But the meaning of the play does not necessarily lie in these moments alone; choices are not num- bers in an equation, or thesis statements in an essay. These moments are simply elements in the totality of the audience's overall experience of the play in performance. Perhaps we should not overestimate the reflexivity of scholarship and performance, so accurately described by Brown and J. L. Styan; but I shudder to think that our scholarly obsession with staging cruxes may have




encouraged a similar narrow-mindedness on the part of theatrical performers. 14 I will give theatre artists the benefit of the doubt and credit them with broader and deeper goals than this; accordingly, we owe them more in our documentation of their performances.

Yet another shortcoming of the current trend toward the quantitative and concise in our scholarly reviews of Shakespeare productions is the question of documentary redundancy. Reviews are perhaps no longer the most valuable or significant document which will be available to theatre historians in the future. At least for major productions, the range and regularity of accumulated archival documents has been increasing. Many major institutional companies (the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Fes- tival, and several regional theatres) either maintain their own archives, or have established connections with local research libraries, in order to preserve production photographs and promptbooks. The RSC has made audio tapes of live performances for each of its mainstage productions for over a decade. And virtually every major production in New York is videotaped during a live performance by the Theatre on Film and Tape division of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. 15

In its most concise form, the style of theatrical reviews cultivated by Shake- speare Quarterly, and employed by Babula and Leiter in their reference works, is of strictly limited use. The conciseness of the format, in part the result of the sheer volume of material that needs to be covered, places severe limitations on the amount of documentary information that can actually be recorded. The narrow focus on the director's conceptualization, the designer's concept, and the actor's business reduces the theatre artist's contribution to that of the critical essayist, trivializes the play's overall effectiveness in the theatre, and severely distorts our ways of looking at the script in performance. And, finally, this form of theatrical review is now no longer the most valuable, nor the most significant, form of theatrical documentation available to us, nor the one most likely to be used by historians in the future. The concise form of theatrical reportage has its functions: it places certain basic information at our fingertips, gives us an overview of Shakespearean activity, helps us to identify interpretive trends and theatrical trendinesses, and, properly computerized, will enable us to tabulate frequencies of performance and to trace the careers of individual theatre artists. But we must not think of this type of theatre review as a major documentary resource for the theatre historian of the future.

14 See Brown's Free Shakespeare, and J. L. Styan, The Shakespeare Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977). Styan's title is invoked explicitly in Shakespeare Quarterly's 1982 reviewing guidelines, in a spirit of self-congratulation.

15 See "Video Archive Brings New Dimension to Theatre Research," in Theatre News, 17:4 (1985), 1, 6. The tapes may only be viewed by theatre professionals, students, and researchers. Members of theatrical guilds and unions may view the material only after the production closes; researchers must wait two years from that date, and five years for a musical. The documentary accuracy of the videotapes in the collection was explored at a session chaired by Bernard Beckerman at the annual meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research in New York in 1979. Members attending the conference saw The Elephant Man on Broadway with the replacement cast, and the next day saw extracts from the Archive tape of the original cast in the original theatre. At that session, Jack Hoffsis, the director of the production, viewed the extracts for the first time. Beck- erman invited Hoffsis to share his own views regarding the reliability of the tape as an historical document, and proposed that directors regularly be allowed to view the tape when it is first made, and to provide a written commentary on the way the cameras succeed or fail in capturing details of blocking, business, focus, etc.




IV

Conventional theatre reviews, however commercial, journalistic, inaccurate, unreliable and impressionistic they may be, are nevertheless of enormous use to the theatre historian. They cannot, perhaps, be relied upon to recreate the physical details of a performance, nor do they always capture or convey the thrill and excitement of the production in performance, though the ideal theatre review will do both to a certain degree. But even the worst theatre review speaks with the voice of its own time. Theatrical conventions and tastes change with the passage of time. But, more significantly, what also changes is the entire way that members of an audience experience a play: what they look for, what moves them, how they "read" the characters' emotions and motivations, etc. These aspects of the codes of performance rarely get defined in a theatre review; but a period's definitions permeate the way critics sum up their experience in the playhouse. Occasionally, the more eloquent or intellectual critic will, in fact, attempt to articulate the criteria for evaluating the theatre event. For example, the theatre historian can read the distinction that George Henry Lewes draws between tragedy and melodrama in his discussion of the acting of Charles Kean, or Bernard Shaw's dismissal of point-making in his analysis of Duse. 16 Such explicit statements of a period's aesthetic criteria are uncommon, but the aesthetic assumptions themselves are present and operative even when they remain unstated. Often, the most important criteria are those that are so wide- spread that the critic does not need to articulate them; in such instances, the aesthetic priorities are often evident in their apparent absence. There are also occasions when issues that are given enormous prominence in the critical de- bates of the age are evidence of a greater, and more significant, degree of concord in the assumptions underlying the disagreement: for example, the Ed- wardian debate about illusionistic and non- or anti-illusionistic scenery is evidence of shared assumptions regarding the role of picture, place, and context; and disagreement about the relative merits of Duse and Bernhardt reveals the degree of agreement about the importance of the perceived personality of the performer, and the equation of dramatic character with the actor's on-stage persona. And then there is the principle I have immodestly referred to (though never before in print) as Mazer's Law: that those aspects of the theatre which writers of a particular time and place assume to be the most universal and timeless are likely to be the ones that are most peculiar to that time and place.

The most valuable resource for this type of historical analysis is the theatre review, for critics betray their criteria for judgment, explicitly or implicitly, in every judgment they pass; they reveal the bases for their aesthetic enjoyment of a theatre event every time they summarize or describe something in a performance that has given them pleasure. We cannot prescribe a formula for theatrical reviewing which will assure that this type of theatrical data is given priority; but we must make sure that the formulae we have prescribed for theatrical documentation do not actually prevent this type of data from being recorded. However much we may promote the newer form of theatrical documentary reportage, we must leave room in the archives for the journalistic hacks and consumer reporters; their hands are dirtier, and they are therefore more likely to leave fingerprints.

16 George Henry Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1875), pp. 12-22; Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, I, 146-47.




What can the Shakespeare performance historian do to preserve the theatre review as a form of historical documentation in its own right? Here the principal task is one of collation. Reviews of the New York theatre are collated and reprinted on a monthly basis, and for the last few years every review of productions in the London theatres has been anthologized in a similar format. Perhaps the Shakespeare industry can provide the same service for reviews of Shakespearean productions. No enormous bibliography or research skills are needed to collect the material: the publicity departments of each theatre company and producing organization will undoubtedly be willing and eager to lend their scrapbooks of press-clippings for the occasion.

Let historians in the future make whatever they want out of this body of documents.

V

There is, however, another form of theatre reviewing which the Shakespeare scholar can provide, and which might be of particular use to theatre historians in the future; and there are two avenues for creating and preserving this material for posterity.

The first involves the traditional avenue of print publication, but shifts the documentary function of the review from an emphasis on the physical details of the final theatrical product to a focus on the artistic process through which that product is created. In the past decade or two, many scholars have served as official observers, eyewitnesses, or minor functionaries with professional companies in their productions of Shakespeare plays. The RSC has occasionally permitted individual scholars to observe selected productions through the entire rehearsal period, as has the BBC in the rehearsals and taping of its video versions of the canon. A significant number of professional scholars have served as dramaturgs or literary advisors to productions; still more have taught seminars or conducted symposia in connection with Shakespeare festivals, and many have had regular access to both the performances and the artistic personnel. More ambitiously, the summer Shakespeare season at Santa Cruz has incorporated the observation and active participation of an entire panel of Shakespeare scholars, some with stage-centered critical or historical backgrounds prior to their participation, others with more conventional literary backgrounds.

Such scholars, whether serving as dramaturgs, rehearsal eyewitnesses, or merely festival residents, are in a unique position to document the evolution of the production, the process by which the script is given life in rehearsal, and the way the play is modified after repeated performances before the audience. Some of the better reviews in Shakespeare Quarterly in past years- for example, Alan Dessen's several years of commentary on the Ashland festival in the late 1970s, and Mary Judith Dunbar's more recent account of Audrey Stanley's seasons at Santa Cruz-have benefited from the unique position in which the scholar has been placed as an official participant in the Shakespeare festival. 17 These reviews are at the same time documentary, valuative, process-

17 Another significant example is a paper by Harry Keyishian, "The 1984 New Jersey Festival Merchant Production and Response: A Case Study," presented in a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Nashville in 1985. Keyishian uses his insider's association with the festival to document the evolution of director Paul Barry's conception, the form this took in performance, and the response by the community; he draws upon the director's preliminary notes, letters from audience members and Barry's responses to them. At the end of the paper, Keyishian




oriented, and, with the help of repeated viewings of the production over time, diagnostic. The scholar-dramaturg or rehearsal eyewitness might be regarded by the commercial press as being too biased to review a production; but it is precisely the scholar's personal and professional investment in the production which makes these reviews so valuable to the scholar and historian.

In increasing number, whole books have been dedicated to documenting single productions, both in rehearsal and in performance. Rosamond Gilder paved the way for this with her 1937 study of John Gielgud's Hamlet; and Gielgud's 1964 production of the play with Richard Burton was the basis of two books, one a chatty account by a rather jaundiced veteran actor, the other a systematic chronicle of the rehearsal sessions by a young actor in a minor role, who carried a concealed tape recorder into rehearsals, even leaving it behind with a live mike at one closed rehearsal session between Burton and Gielgud. 8 More re- cently, we have seen volumes documenting Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Timon of Athens, and Terry Hands's Henry V and Coriolanus.19 Such eyewitness accounts are of immense value to the historian. But it is clear that they make inordinate demands on our already severely overburdened system of print publication. Only a few select productions will ever be subjects of such book-length accounts. But how are we to judge which productions merit such treatment? In many cases, such as the ones mentioned above, the answer is obvious. But eyewitness accounts of minor, unsuccessful, or even disastrously ill-conceived productions may, for all we know, be of particular interest to the theatre historian, for such accounts may provide the key to the way we conceive the script in performance, or may reveal the creative idiosyncrasies of major theatrical figures, set in sharp relief against the backdrop of a noble failure or a half-baked conception.20 Besides, can scholars always know in advance whether a production on which they are serving as dramaturgs or eyewitnesses will prove to be significant or successful, either for present-day audiences or for posterity? The restrictions imposed by the hard-pressed scholarly publishing industry must not discourage us from collecting, preserving, and disseminating the type of documentation which can be provided by the scholarly eyewitness.

The solution is not publication, but archival preservation. I propose that a central repository be established-call it, if you will, the Archive of Contem- porary Shakespearean Performance-with the express purpose of preserving

quotes from his own forthcoming review of the production for Shakespeare Quarterly, effectively illustrating the limitations of such a review as a medium for the transmission of the information and insights he had at hand.

18 Rosamond Gilder, John Gielgud's Hamlet: a Record of Performance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937); William Redfield, Letters from an Actor (New York: Viking Press, 1967); Richard L. Sterne, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burtbn in Hamlet (London: Heinemann, 1967).

19 David Selbourne, The Making of A Midsummer Night's Dream: An Eyewitness Account of Peter Brook's Production from First Rehearsal to First Night (London: Methuen, 1982), and Glenn Loney, ed., Peter Brook's Production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for The Royal Shakespeare Company (New York: The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1974); Sally Beauman, Henry Vfor the Centenary Season at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1976); and David Daniell, Coriolanus in Europe (London: Athlone Press, 1980). A lengthy account of Brook's Paris Timon of Athens appears in volume 5 of Les Voies de la Creation The'atrale (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1977), a series which documents notable contemporary and historical modem productions.

20 I illustrated this point in my seminar paper, "The Play-Doctor as Director: Joseph Papp directs Henry V at the Delacorte Theatre, 1976," at the Shakespeare Association of America's 1985 meeting in Nashville. The paper drew upon my own unpublished and unarchivally deposited eyewitness notes about the production, on which I served as a production assistant.




any and all documents on the subject. The archivist would encourage individual theatre companies to contribute copies of promptbooks, press reviews, production photographs, and audio and video tapes, perhaps under the same restrictions currently governing the Theatre on Film and Tape collection. But, more significantly, a particular effort would be made to alert the scholarly community to the opportunity such an archive would afford for the deposit of scholarly eyewitness accounts of rehearsals and performances. The archive would publish a periodical census of its latest acquisitions. This census would in effect serve as an ongoing record of all Shakespearean performance activity, including factual performance data (personnel, playing time, length of run, etc.) and a bibliography of published reviews, and it would alert the scholar to the existence and location of promptbooks, photographs, and tapes. But the census would also serve an even more important function: it would provide some incentive for the scholarly contributor to prepare material for deposit, by offering a form of recognition in the scholarly community usually afforded only by actual publication.

But perhaps the most important function of an ongoing archive of documents on Shakespearean performance is that it would encourage a new type of theatre reviewing, one freed from both the consumer orientation of commercial journalism and the limitations of the current Shakespeare Quarterly documentary format. The archive would serve as a repository for any and all unsolicited and unpublished reviews of performances. Such reviews need not be extensively descriptive, nor need they be judgmental or evaluative. Rather, the contributors would feel free to record a general impression; to describe a key moment, a significant line reading, an insightful portrayal of a minor character, an interesting treatment of a relatively unimportant scene; to diagnose the reasons for a production's success or failure to entertain or to move them; or to attempt to share some of the experience, to describe what it was actually like to be in the audience, to participate in the creation of the theatre event at the moment of its performance, at a particular theatre on a particular date in history. In any given summer, and particularly during the biennial conference at the Shake- speare Institute, at least a hundred Shakespeare scholars from around the world will see any one production by the RSC. Why should scholarly commentary on that production be limited to the reviews in Shakespeare Quarterly, in Shake- speare Survey, and in the Times Literary Supplement? The Archive of Con- temporary Shakespearean Performance would serve as the collective memory of the theatre-going experience of a community of scholars, participating as alert and learned audience members in the most communal of art forms.

May theatre historians in the future learn about our theatrical activity, not just from our reviews, but from our individual and collective eyewitness accounts. And may they know how we created theatre, not just from what hap- pened on our stages, but from what transpired in the hearts and souls of our audiences.



Documents

Special Issue: Reviewing Shakespeare || Shakespeare, the Reviewer, and the Theatre Historian