Pursuing Shakespeare's Dramaturgy: Some Contexts, Resources, and Strategies in His Playmaking (review)

Perhaps the most tantalizing omission to the Shakespearean corpus are stage directions that say more than even the expressive instructions, "Exit pursued by a Beare." So much scholarly effort has been expended in pursuit of questions that a stage direction might have easily resolved. Is Hamlet supposed to see Polonius and Claudius spying on him? When the Duke expects Isabella's hand in marriage at the end of Measure for Measure, what did the playwright intend her silent expression to be? John C. Meagher's Pursuing Shakespeare's Dramaturgy attempts to bring some method and rigor to the speculative endeavor of reconstructing what actually happened on Shakespeare's stage.

Meagher arranges vital historical fragments to create an instructive picture of Elizabethan stagecraft. Shakespeare "did not merely release texts to the company's imagination," Meagher avers, "but worked with them all the way through to the performance pitch, staying in charge of how his plays were enacted" (22). Thus, that "the relative paucity of stage directions is not an indication that Shakespeare" (23) left the interpretation of a scene open to the actors. This may be true, but it would not explain why many other dramatists who were not as closely associated with performance also wrote scant stage directions. This vision of Shakespeare as a heavy-handed stage master does not take into account recent conceptions of Elizabethan drama as a deeply collaborative enterprise, suggested even in one of Meagher's main examples, the manuscript of Sir Thomas More. Meagher surmises that Shakespeare "probably composed his plays in the manner that seems, from the extant manuscripts of others [not identified], to have been routine at the time," in which the right column usually held the stage directions, which were "not infrequently added afterward" (32). When these manuscripts went to press, "printers understandably made more efficient use of space by . . . fitting stage directions wherever they could" (32–33) — suggesting, perhaps, why there are so few. The relation between these compositional practices and Shakespeare's plays would have benefited from a more tangible presentation of evidence; Meagher's assertions are often stronger than his documentation would allow. But the assertion that Shakespeare did not mean to leave dramatic interpretation open gives modern interpreters a strong incentive to reconstruct dramaturgical patterns from what little evidence the words themselves provide.

Meagher then turns to "dramaturgical structuring" (46), where he challenges Baldwin's five-act structure theory, arguing instead — since the acts are added to the Folio edition — that Shakespeare had no such structure in mind. Scenes may, however, "be considered structural units" (52), and Meagher advocates renumbering texts according to scenes only. His detailed interest in the material text brings him to a long discussion of punctuation and dramaturgy, showing the kind of "choreographic notation" (68) that punctuation can provide, again affirming his preservationist position. The next chapters explore stage direction, Shakespeare's varied stages, acting styles and playing conditions, casting, costumes, props, music, and audience.

Meagher's relation to his subject is sometimes rendered less transparent by an unnecessary antagonism toward a world that sadly comprises the better part of his audience. He states grumpily that his are "unfashionable assumption[s]," but that he has "no reason to apologize" (9). The interesting subject may suffer more from the author's sense of embattlement than from the vicissitudes of fashion. Such disclaimers have the added danger of rendering an author less beholden to current ("fashionable") standards and methods. "Contrary to prevailing dogma," he writes in one instance, "we can determine in many cases what Shakespeare intended" (21). Problematic though the word "intend" may be, editors and readers have always sought to make a good argument about what is meant to be happen-ing on stage. The author would have been better served had he defined his opposition — where it truly exists — more precisely. He would have benefited still more by recognizing how his own work...