Shakespeare Dancing: A Theatrical Study of the Plays (review)

In his latest work, John Russell Brown moves away from previous routines of literary analysis (theme, argument, text) to more theatrically relevant searchings for craft and means. The "dancing" of the title has little or nothing to do with period dance or dance exhibition in Shakespeare's plays. Brown's focus is not upon the period jig or the Renaissance galliard. He instead addresses more covert codes ("a network of instructions") that score and animate the physical apparatus of an actor and the resonant senses of an audience in a "dance" or "choreography" at work in each play (87).

Throughout the eight chapters of this succinct and accessible study, Brown explores, using the more well-known plays, ways in which imagination works in and through playwright, performer, and spectator. These three key producers of a play's playing, he argues, cannot remain immaterial to, or nonresonant with, the "sensation" of the "physical consequences of thought" set into motion by the occasion of performance (1). A play works (or dances) if a shared, visceral nervous-ness (or "sensuous provocation" as Brown puts it) binds writer, actor, and audience into a choreographed, triangular, and lived response to the experience of the unfolding production (1). Discovering precisely how this combination of prompts (both real and imagined) acts on the senses is the task of the book.

Brown is concerned too with approaches that look to text only ("the verbal expression of conscious thought") as the sole authority or set of coordinates that guides a study of the theatrical effectiveness of Shakespeare's devices (127). Such authority—using the seemingly set text as the foundation for such a study—is inherently unstable, he observes. The invitation not to be ignored, to paraphrase both Brown and Shakespeare, is to string the "sinews" of a poet's text to the resonators of a participatory imagination and so see, as Shakespeare's Proteus suggests, "huge leviathans / Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands" (1).

Brown is particularly persuasive regarding the necessary calisthenics of imagination employed and deployed by a play's wright. The leap of imagination that causes such impossible visions to play in the mind's eye is the stuff that renders theatre possible. This necessary capacity of the imagination to ride the unruly twin mounts of a) an actual and unfolding sensational response to the work of the actual actor on the stage and, at the same time, b) entertaining a virtually sensational response to the imagined virtual character that results from an engagement with an actor's work and the mind's eye forms the core matrix of Brown's exploration.

In this work, actors should rely, according to Brown, "on the sensations of being rather than on their understanding on motives, purposes and psychology," suggesting that "priority should, rather, be given to the embodiment of the text in physical action through an imaginative assumption of the sensations" (136). Brown calls for the actor to be moved, as Henry Irving recommended, by "an impulse of being" in order to "unlock responses hidden by habit or by too much talk about the work in hand" (136).

By releasing into the theatrical mix participatory (dancing) imaginations that are open to sensations suggested by actors playing out a script, Brown observes that the text in performance begins to lose its authority as "we are bound to become entangled in uncertainties" (6) and, as one chapter title suggests, we become increasingly adept at "seeing double." Text in this sense must be seen as an elaborate con, for the words spoken by actors that seem to be spontaneously invented at the moment of performance were in fact set down (sometimes centuries) before, as a suggestion of what might be said given similar, future approximations of sensational and theatrical engagement. Rehearsals and subsequent performances challenge the actor to recover from the dormant atrophy of the text not only a plausible reading, but physical and emotional circumstances that force an account of, and an...