Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance (review)

Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance is a book that needs no reviewing—although I welcome you to read on—since it comes equipped with its own reader’s guide, in the editors’ introduction, and its own review, in Edward Pechter’s incisive afterword to what he rightly calls “this engaging collection” (169). It feels like a good SAA seminar: some excellent and some interesting papers, all requiring a pair of conveners and a respondent to explain why the writers belong in the same room. It helps to have sufficiently plastic critical terms so that participants can productively ignore the fact that they’re not talking about the same thing. The potent combination here of “performance” and “culture” is the WD-40 that keeps the conversational wheels freely rolling.

Respondents get to look smart because they have the work of the seminarians to draw on. Pechter’s postperformance commentary is one of the best things in the volume but not only because it comes last. He asks why those numinous terms—”performance” and “culture”—are so useful in recent critical discourse (only “representation” rivals them in ubiquity), and he points to ways in which their expansiveness can undo the hermeneutic work they propose to do. Performance is supposedly value neutral; no more good guys or bad guys, just everyone equally an actor. It’s a view that sounds good but one that opens itself to the dreadful fate of reductionism. Pechter puts it differently: “Unwilling or unable to specify values or beliefs outside the repertoire of culturally derived scripts, we find ourselves beholding a scene which is, with all its inhabitants mere players, governed not by distinction . . . but by equivalence” (173). Pechter calls performance “a one-size-fits-all solution . . . able not to contain the anxieties flooding over us, merely to absorb and disseminate them” (175).

As for “culture” (which Raymond Williams termed “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”¹), Pechter notices the word’s totalizing drive. “Culture” now stands in for everything we do beyond sitting, like Rousseau’s savage, alone under our particular tree. In Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, the word “bounces around across a sometimes bewilderingly wide and varied range of reference” (176). The afterword also provides an epigram worth memorizing. Referring to the appropriation of Clifford Geertz’s work by literary critics—Geertz, who claimed that he was appropriating the methods of literary criticism for anthropology—Pechter writes, “The history of interdisciplinarity may be charted as the process by which extraordinary thought is domesticated into regulative norms” (181).

The collection opens with David Bevington on Shakespeare’s theatricalization of country living. Along with a conspectus of the theme, Bevington indulges in a biographical fantasia: “Whether the legend of Shakespeare’s own poaching has any substance or not,” Shakespeare has produced “a tribute to the world of his own youth” (16, 23). Which leads to the actually perplexing question, “Who, other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, was better suited or more temperamentally inclined to put the English countryside to such advantageous dramatic use in his plays?” (26).

Two essays deal with giving, getting, and getting even in The Merchant of Venice. Sean Lawrence is “concerned with contractual, rather than dramaturgical, performances” (41). He cites Marcel Mauss on social exchange as a system for imposing obligations. Like Pechter, he reacts against a certain strand in performance criticism—“An analysis heavily reliant on reciprocity can never do justice to those things that would also threaten the world of the play” (51)—the case in point being readings that find no significant difference between Antonio (or Portia) and Shylock. Linda Woodbridge’s substantial essay also “deals with both monetary and retaliatory payment” (29). Her close reading of Bassanio’s request for a second loan doesn’t use the word “performance,” and some of what she says seems equally appropriate to a character-based analysis (for instance, “Turning on...