Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (review)

W. B. Worthen has long been a prominent voice in ongoing conversations about drama and performance, especially about Shakespeare. This important, lucidly written book offers a comprehensive history and critique of how Shakespeare’s near-mythic authority figures “in the ways we account for the work of the stage” (2). Tracing how issues of authority and performance circulate in the discourses of directing, acting, and scholarship/criticism, Worthen shows how insisting on fidelity to the author not only brackets off “Shakespeare-in-performance” as a world apart but monitors and limits the potential work of performance. Throughout, Worthen combines two points: the need for changing discursive practices and to situate performed Shakespeare within the wider project of performance studies.

An initial chapter mobilizes editorial theory to ask how contemporary ideas of textuality (which see texts as increasingly provisional) might reframe the relations between works, texts, and performances and so provide an alternative to the text versus performance or text to performance paradigms of “performance criticism.” Viewing the text as a “field of play, activity, production, and practice,” Worthen aligns the ideological work of editing, which itself encodes certain interpretive acts and erases others, with that of staging, which produces a “new” work in dialogue with other texts and performances. Treating performances as “iterations” of the work inscribed by theatrical practice, Worthen sees the stage not as a “natural” venue where imagined meanings become realized but rather as one site among many in contemporary culture where “Shakespearean” meanings are produced and continually (re)negotiated.

This notion of productive intertextuality also informs the chapter on “Shakespeare’s auteurs,” which considers the role that “Shakespeare plays in modern directors’ understanding and imagination of the stage” (39). Drawing on Richard Schechner’s idea of performance as restored behavior, Joseph Roach’s idea of performances as surrogations, and Robert Benedetti’s typology of directing modes, Worthen shows how attempts to transmit “Shakespearean authority” produce interpretive closure, even in performances that seem otherwise invested in revising, resisting, or interrogating that authority. Here, a brilliantly negotiated case-study of Peter Sellars’s controversial Merchant of Venice (1994) sharpens Worthen’s point, for despite Sellars’s efforts to link the play to contemporary American race relations and to stage it in relation to the ways that contemporary culture reproduces its institutions and values, both director and critics judged the production’s success or failure in terms of how it did or did not reproduce “authentic” Shakespearean meanings (76–94). Assimilating stage practice to the sign of the author/director thus becomes a liability, preventing us “from grasping the work of production, from using it to ‘generate meaning’ rather than repeat it, from using the theatre to mean by Shakespeare” (94).

A third chapter, “Shakespeare’s Body: Acting and the Designs of Authority,” focuses on three “genres”—texts about theories of acting, texts about actor training, and accounts by actors describing their work in particular productions. Among these, various methods of Folio-based voice training, which map Shakespeare’s text onto a “universalized” body, offer the clearest example of “the mutual investment of text and body in the discourse of authority” (113). Especially telling here is Worthen’s analysis of how actors, (presumably) invested in the authority of their own performing bodies (or theatrical selves), describe their work as a conversation or confrontation with another body, a “Shakespeare” who resides “in” his text.

A final chapter, “Shakespeare’s Page, Shakespeare’s Stage,” traces the emergence of performance-oriented criticism from the 1960s to the present. Taking the “tradition” of performance criticism to task for reifying the text versus performance polarity without clarifying or interrogating it, Worthen argues for locating the space and practice of criticism in relation to performance practices, a shift from relocating meaning “in” the text to describing how the text can be made to perform (152–54). “How,” he asks, “might performance criticism explore how the organized systems of the stage ‘textualize’ performance?” (170). And how might such a...