Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama (review)

There is a fine body of scholarship concerned with how narratives, including dramatic narratives, end: most famously Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending which discusses the anxieties attached to the end of any work of fiction in terms of the history of man's preoccupation with the end of the world. By contrast, studies of how literary works begin are scarcer. Edward Said's Beginnings: Intention and Method could perhaps be set against Kermode's Sense of an Ending in proposing a theoretical framework for understanding the anxieties associated with the beginnings of things. In Entering the Maze: Shakespeare's Art of Beginning Robert Willson Jr. collects a series of essays which examine the various devices Shakespeare employs to introduce his plays, including a reading of Richard III by Marie Plasse which examines the purpose of the prologue within a structural framing pattern, and an essay by H. R. Coursen which looks at various film adaptations of Hamlet in terms of the mood and emphasis with which they open. In "Some Shakespearean Openings: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, The Tempest" the late A. D. Nuttall argues that Shakespeare's beginnings are something other than ab ovo or in medias res: not so much in the middle of things as between things. He reads the openings of the three plays as thresholds which throw into uncertainty the boundaries between life and death, darkness and light, reality and magic — the unclear transitions exploit the palpable uncertainty experienced by the waiting audience as well as the nervous actors.

Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann's collaboration seeks to further our understanding of the prologue in early modern drama in a way which brings together and goes beyond these contributions. Their approach sets out a clear model built around a tripod of author, text, and actor supported by study of the cultural context in which the plays were written and performed, and of the ways in which the audience participates in lending authority and currency to the playwright, the text, and the actor.

Following a sketch of the conventional function of prologues (introducing the argument, begging favor for the play), the opening chapter details statistically the wavering popularity of the prologue in the Elizabethan theater, and describes its typical form and content. The authors mention, but only in passing, the current vogue in stage and film performance for providing prologue-like entities where the play has none, citing, for example, Belthazar's song, whose text flashes onscreen while Emma Thompson's voice is heard reading it at the start of Kenneth Branagh's film Much Ado about Nothing. These brief references seem to contradict the authors' later determination that "modern productions reveal the near obsolescence" of the dramatic prologue which "exists mainly in textual traces" (30). I would argue that particularly in contemporary productions of Shakespeare on stage and screen, enormous effort is invested in the liminal elements of the performance, so that entire inductions may be invented by the director where they are lacking, while various ingenious approaches to the prologues, where they exist, have been devised.

The rest of the chapter discusses the "prologue as actor," establishing an analogy between the orally delivered text and the theatrical rite of passage for the young actors to whom this role was often entrusted. Despite the actor's youth, his dress and props (exact details must remain speculative) lent him authority: an ecclesiastic black gown, a bay garland symbolizing poetic authority and tradition, a scroll or other papers in his hand. The authors trace the role of the prologue in establishing authority — of the players, of royal patrons, of authors, of paying spectators, of critics (especially religious ones); they show how these streams of authority flowed through the prologue's text, actor, and performance.

Chapter 2, perhaps the most innovative in the book, describes the "prologue as threshold and usher." The authors provide historical background about the role of usher in the Elizabethan household, as...