Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama, and Performance (Studies)

The past decade has witnessed, according to Patrick Cheney, a remarkably uncontroversial “‘return of the author’ in Shakespeare studies.”¹ Stimulated by Lukas Erne’s fresh engagement with the evidence for Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist in 2003, Shakespeare studies have taken up the case for Shakespeare not only as an entrepreneurial writer for the stage, churning out actable material, but “as a self-conscious, literary author” who used print publishing to shape a career as a “literary dramatist” parallel to his career as a working playwright in the theater.² Redressing “an increasingly dated view that threatens to reduce Shakespeare to ‘a man of the theatre’” and restoring a sense of Shakespeare fashioning dramatic works for a reading, as well as a spectatorial, audience Erne marshals evidence ranging from the frequency with which Shakespeare’s plays were published and republished during the first decade of his career in the 1590s (noting the increasing prominence of his name on various editions of those quarto volumes) to an ingenious argument for the essentially “literary,” print- and reader-directed address of many of Shakespeare’s longer plays. Too long for performance, Erne argues, these plays—mainly the tragedies—may witness Shakespeare’s intended appeal to a reading public.³ As Charlotte Scott puts it, Erne’s Shakespeare “wrote differently for the stage and the page, including in the text to be read things that would normally be performed (mannerisms, entrances, exits, physical behaviour, expressions).”⁴

These claims about Shakespeare’s authorship, David Scott Kastan observes, have “remarkably changed our sense of Shakespeare almost overnight,” galvanizing a surprising scholarly “eagerness” to confirm the distinctive inscription of a “literary dramatist” and the image of Shakespeare, and of dramatic performance, it appears to summon.⁵ Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster locate their reading of Shakespeare and the Power of Performance by noting the “swing of the critical pendulum” toward a “renewed stress on the page,” and Richard Dutton groups Kastan’s Shakespeare and the Book alongside Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist and Patrick Cheney’s Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright as part of “a concerted backlash against the long-standing certainty that Shakespeare is primarily defined by his role in the theater.”⁶

Shakespeare bestrides the book and the stage. Whether directly or indirectly, the “return of the author” requires a sustaining impression of the appropriate function of writing in the theater. Were the plays motivated by an individual conceptualizing himself as an “author” or did they emerge collaboratively from the busy hive of the early modern playhouse?⁷ Was the “literary dramatist” a cause or a consequence of the fashioning of plays in print? These questions point to a tangential problem: how conceptualizing the documents and their creator disciplines our conceptions of theatrical propriety. Rescuing Shakespeare from the stage enacts a vision of literature and theater, and of their conjunction, dramatic performance. The “return of the author” (was he ever really gone?) in Shakespeare studies, whatever it may say about Shakespeare’s responses to and manipulation of the emergent institutions in which he worked, surely says something about us: it points to the ongoing challenges of fashioning performance as an object and perspective of inquiry in Shakespeare studies and, perhaps more urgently, to an animating cultural dialectic between Shakespeare and performance.

I. Intoxications

The “return of the author” dramatizes the challenges of framing authentic Shakespeare performance studies today. Despite the polemical distinction between a “literary” and a “theatrical” Shakespeare, there is considerable common ground between them. Since the seventeenth century at least, the plays have been recognized as part of the formation of both literature and theater, although these institutions have not often shared a common perspective on the plays’ value, utility, or aesthetic identity. Early modern dramatic writing flourished as an essential element of an expanding commercial theater system; it was also slowly assimilated to nascent canons of vernacular “literature” emerging through the expansion of commercial print publishing and its often-contested relation to more settled modes of communication and models of authorship, and to the uneven spread of literacy.⁸ Whether Shakespeare was self-consciously part...