Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (review)

Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe. By Pauline Kiernan..ondon: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Illus. Pp. xiv + 172. $59.95 cloth.

Pauline Kiernan's is the first book-length study of performance at the New Globe. She writes from the viewpoint of a Leverhulme Research Fellow whose specific brief it was to observe and report on Shakespeare in production at the reconstructed "Elizabethan" playhouse. The shaping of the book may reflect the extent to which the brief has hampered her. She is exaggeratedly wary of speaking ill of anyone, and this steering clear of controversy is not always easily distinguished from evasiveness. The Globe enterprise is, after all, vulnerable to criticism from three directions. To build it at all has been to create a theme park where there ought to have been houses; to claim authenticity on the basis of a best-guess approach is inappropriate; to test ideas about Elizabethan performance through the agency of a substandard acting company is unhelpful. Cogent attacks have been mounted along all these lines, and Kiernan's decision to defend nothing is, in this context, extraordinary. It might, of course, be extraordinarily disarming, but that is not, I think, the eventual effect. The suspending of judgment may be a legitimate tactic so early in the game, but there is an associated risk of blandness. Kiernan's aim has been to provide an objective account of Globe productions in 1996 and 1997. There are points where she seems to be taking the minutes.

Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe is divided into three parts. In the first Kiernan summarizes her conclusions on the role of the audience, the nature of dramatic illusion in the open air, and the dramaturgical lessons provided by the architecture of the stage. In the second she charts the 1997 Henry V from planning through performance to review. The third she leaves open for brief comments from twenty-three members of the professional company. There is, as Kiernan readily acknowledges, nothing particularly surprising about the conclusions in Part One since practice has, for the most part, confirmed scholarly conjecture. The surprise factor has been the audience, and this is something on which Kiernan writes well. There is real force in the question with which she concludes her exploration of the audience-effect:

If an audience newly liberated, highly visible, and energized by the theatre's configuration of sky, building, stage and auditorium can influence the playing of a scene, the length of a play's running time, and make the actors feel that what is being performed is a joint creation, whose space do we call that?

(36)

In general, though, Kiernan has found it difficult to determine her readership. The actors' comments in Part Three are of random interest to performers as well as to scholars; Part Two is a skeletal record of a process that was of no great theatrical merit; and Part One exposes Kiernan's limitations as a practitioner without doing justice to her Shakespearean scholarship. All too often she writes as if the only architectural alternative to the New Globe is the proscenium arch. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that she commends the use of the discovery space (so beloved of nineteenth-century theater historians) as a site for crucial scenes. It is the presentation of the statue of Hermione in The Winter's Tale that she has particularly in mind for this lesson in how to offend spectators. But, she argues hopefully, the New Globe privileges the ear over the eye; and once audiences have learned how to listen, they will be happy to have scenes played out of sight. No practitioner could countenance this kind of sensory hierarchy. Nor is it an isolated example of historical naiveté. It is disappointing, in a book of this kind, to find an explanation for the survival of the public playhouses in Elizabeth I's anxiety that the actors should have "plenty of time to rehearse...