The Actor in History: A Study in Shakespearean Stage Poetry by David Grene (review)

Book Reviews103 DAVID GRENE. The Actor in History: A Study in Shakespearean Stage Poetry. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. 158 p. In his introduction, David Grene charmingly characterizes himself as a "strayed classicist, with a lifelong interest in theater from Aeschylus to Ibsen and Synge" (11). To us strayed Shakespeareans, he is perhaps best known for his work with Richard Lattimore as general editors of University of Chicago Press' series, The Complete Greek Tragedies. In The Actor in History, Grene has assembled his reflections on eight ofShakespeare's plays, based on a series of lectures he gave in 1978. Grene's intriguing title invites a professional reader's curiosity: is it a history of the actor? does it investigate the actor in Shakespeare's culture? or perhaps it traces Shakespeare's notion ofthe actor? None of these questions, however, defines the aim or purpose of the book. Rather, the book attempts to draw a relation between "the values of the supreme world of Elizabethan and Jacobean reality" and "the poetry of the theater" (1). What Grene means by these phrases seems to vary from chapter to chapter. The "supreme world" at times seems to refer to the identities of chronicle figures: the "real" King Richard II, the "real" Antony or Julius Caesar. At times it seems to connote the realistic world created in a specific play (Shakespeare's character, Richard or Prince Hal, or sometimes the "world of the play," as in Measure for Measure). The "poetry of the theater" seems to refer to the histrionic quality in some ofShakespeare's characters—Cleopatra, Richard II, Prince Hal. At other times, the terms of the conflict shift. The "poetry of the theater" is aligned with "role-playing" or, as in the discussion on Measure for Measure, with one character's manipulation of the plot. Although Grene never explicitly describes his critical approach, he focuses on the metatheatrical in his discussions of the plays. Grene directs his text appropriately toward a general audience, rather than a scholarly, professional one. No chapter contains more than ten footnotes, and these refer to a very limited list ofsources—Derek Traversi's Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), Anne Righter's Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), Theodore Weiss' The Breath of Clowns and Kings: Shakespeare's Early Comedies and Histories (New York: Atheneum, 1971) chiefamongst them. No source is more recent than 1973. There is no bibliography and only a brief index. The task he sets for his book, then, seems to be to explain to a general audience (perhaps to lower division undergraduates) the basic issues that a conservative metatheatrical criticism takes up. What is the function of the histrionic in character's speeches? in the plot? How does this dimension affect an audience? In the chapters on the Henriad and on the Roman plays, the dichotomy between "supreme world ofElizabethan and Jacobean reality" and the "poetry ofthe theater" makes the most sense. In a nicely reflective, relaxed voice, Grene marvels at the dissonance between the histrionic and the political life. Thus, he finds that in Antony and Cleopatra, "the play brings to us an impression of a man who is allegedly a great statesman and general, but whose true reality for us lies in the poetry written for him—in the words, the rhythms, the 104Rocky Mountain Review enchantment. His poetic greatness supersedes the greatness of the public character in which he appears before us" (24-25). Similarly, the chapter on Richard II celebrates the triumph of Richard's histrionic sensibilities over his political defeats: "In virtue of our domination by the sound and the images which go to create the form and beauty ofthe poetry, we have embodied before us a kind of life richer than anything we have seen in his rival or even in the possibility of decisiveness and bravery in himself. When the theatrical illusion, in which Richard's speculations and gestures live so startlingly, makes us believe that here one has access to a deeper and truer reality than there, it is all up with the values ofthe less real" (41). Indeed, Grene is most comfortable...