Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen (review)

Over twenty years ago, in his influential book Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Alan Dessen issued a modest manifesto:

The modern interpreter should make every possible effort to sidestep inappropriate assumptions, conventions, or expectations. A major part of this effort involves conceiving of the plays as staged events and consequently viewing the surviving documents as theatrical scripts rather than literary texts…but with the understanding that the logic of the staging then…may differ significantly from the logic of staging or "realism" now…. Any inferences or conclusions, moreover, should be based upon the original evidence…, but that includes the original stage directions, not the adjustments made by editors and other scholars who may not be sympathetic to theatre then or now.

(7-8)

Good as his word, throughout his career Dessen's aim has been to "establish what effects were possible, even likely, on the open stage and what assumptions were shared then by dramatist, actor, and spectator. What were the terms upon which they agreed to meet? And how are we to recognize them?" (17). The constant gardener, Dessen has established not just an area of research but a method of handling material: the careful cultivation of theatrical details until they fluoresce into coherent patterns of performative or symbolic value.

In their elegant introduction to Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen, Lena Cowen Orlin and Miranda Johnson-Haddad praise the unusual "coherence" of Dessen's career (12), and, indeed, he established his ground early and has worked it assiduously for over forty years. It is not just the steady scrutiny of theatrical detail that gives Dessen's work such coherence, however. It comes as well from the discipline of his work, or, rather, the discipline of that discipline. For in the space between what was "possible" and what was "even likely on the open stage" lies the key to the consistency of Dessen's work. It is precisely his reluctance to exceed what was "even likely"-the qualification is typically reticent and finely judged-that makes his work so ultimately influential. Taken as a whole, his body of work-descriptive not prescriptive, judicial not categorical, diagnostic not eulogistic or dyslogistic-constitutes an extraordinarily sustained act of critical restraint.

Staging Shakespeare is atypical of many festschrifts, then, since its subject has developed not just a field of research but a way of working it. There is a recognizably Dessenesque approach to evidence, particularly that "encoded" in theatrical scripts, and the essays here honor Dessen by adopting his methodology as well as his interests. When David Colvin traces the continuity of disguise conventions from morality plays to Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, he follows Dessen's work on the residually allegorical on the early modern stage. When Lois Potter considers the heading "the Oration" in three Renaissance plays to map the links between public oration and acting on stages early modern and modern, she mirrors Dessen's practice of coaxing implications from seemingly dormant material. And when Sheila T. Cavanaugh lavishes attention on two apparently frivolous versions of Macbeth-one featuring professional wrestling, the other plastic figurines-she adopts Dessen's "price tags" and "trade offs" approach to performance, in which choices are weighed within a Boolean network of theatrical value. As it turns out, following Dessen's methodological lead has its own "price tags" and "trade offs" for Staging Shakespeare, though there are splendid pay offs as well. When a contributor handles a matter with less adroit judgment than Dessen might, however, it only serves to highlight how deftly Dessen has moved between the possible and the likely.

Like most collaborations, the volume has stronger and weaker moments, but the editors know how to plot a collection. They divide the book into four acts: "Acts of Recovery," "Performing the Moment," "Recordings," and "Extensions and Explorations," which provide serviceably elastic boundaries for the occasionally heterogonous entries. The four parts...