Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen (review)

Little need be said in a theoretical vein about this collection of essays. They honor Alan Dessen, to whom we are immensely indebted for his lifetime study of the dramatic conventions employed by Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists. The essays here are about Shakespeare in performance, so that the book has coherence and value in its own right—a necessary and proper requirement these days for Festschriften. The essays are grouped into four categories, allowing for historical evaluations of Shakespeare’s staging in his own generation, of particular stage productions since then, of productions on film or video, and of adaptations. Let me focus on a sample of each.

Leslie Thomson returns to the matter of how actors are to “‘pass over the stage’” (23)—a direction defined by Allardyce Nicoll as indicating not that the actors were to enter at one stage door and exit by another, but that they were to enter into the yard and up onto the stage platform before descending again by way of exit. Thomson rightly points to the high-handedness of Nicoll’s assertive dismissal of the options he wishes to refute. She usefully describes how stage interpreters have lined up on opposite sides: Richard Southern and Robert Weimann adopting Nicoll’s hypothesis for their own reasons, with Mariko Ichikawa, T. J. King, and Andrew Gurr demurring on the grounds that we have no evidence for steps leading up from the yard to the stage and that the stage direction occurs in plays performed at court, where there would have been no yard. Thomson comes down convincingly on the skeptical side, using the wealth of information assembled by herself and Dessen in the invaluable Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (1999), expanding the argument in ways that the dictionary format could not accommodate. What Thomson usefully demonstrates is that “Pass over the stage” is worded in various ways and is used for several different kinds of stage action: dumb shows and processions, but also bits of action involving dialogue. Most generally, the direction is “for a visual stage event that relies on what is seen to convey information” (33). This is a definitive study of the problem and an entirely persuasive answer to Nicoll. Other useful essays about Renaissance staging problems include Daniel L. Colvin on the psychology of disguise and Ellen Summers on doubling, both solidly anchored in the sort of stage convention analysis that Dessen has made virtually synonymous with his name.

Edward Isser asks what directors are to do in the absence of explicit stage directions. The attempt here is to bridge the gap between the admitted fact of permissively imprecise texts that “support a multiplicity of staging interpretations” (114) and the desire one naturally feels to particularize from the “performance clues” and “Elizabethan staging codes” (114–15) that Dessen studies so aptly. The Tempest is especially rich in permissive or sparse directions, as when, at the play’s end, “‘Exeunt omnes’” (117) leaves unclear the order in which the many Neapolitans, mariners, and spirits are to depart before Prospero delivers his epilogue. Isser usefully shows us the various solutions of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Ben Iden Payne, Georgio Strehler, Michael Bogdanov, Sam Mendes, Bill Alexander, Adrian Noble, Lena Udovicki, and others, with special attention to the leave-taking of Ariel so beautifully presented by Giorgio Strehler. What does all this say about Prospero’s sudden relinquishing of power? What does it say about the intimacy of former master and slave? In what ways have Darwinist-colonialist stagings taken advantage of permissive and implied stage directions? The result is an attractive case history, making fruitful use of Dessen’s method in performance history. So, too, with Eric Binnie’s exploration of Richard II’s descent into the “base court” (81) and Cary M. Mazer’s meditation on authorial intention, where stage-centered scholars inevitably find themselves “in a...