Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre (review)

When it comes to understanding how—and to what ends—performance practices interacted with scripted text on the early modern stage, Robert Weimann is the most accomplished critic of our time. In his new book he returns to themes broached in his earlier texts, especially Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978) and Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (1996), but he does so here with a mastery that is newly compelling. Of Weimann's various books, this is the most readable. In his preface the author pays tribute to Helen Higbee and William West as editors and collaborators on the project, and their joint efforts at streamlining the text have paid off. If one wants to show why Robert Weimann is one of the leading Shakespeare critics of the late-twentieth century, this is a book to which students can confidently be sent.

In Author's Pen and Actor's Voice Weimann argues that in Shakespeare's day the performer, that is, the common player, and the common player's performance traditions, had an authority in the theater that had not yet been eclipsed by the authority of the written script and of the author(s) behind that script. When actors such as Will Kempe, the clown in Shakespeare's company for much of the 1590s, spoke directly to the audience, improvised lines, or performed jigs and displays of acrobatic prowess, he was drawing on autonomous performance traditions that, Weimann claims, had as much interest for and authority with audiences as the humanist rhetoric penned by the young Marlowe or the elevated speeches given by Shakespeare to his kings and tragic heroes. This bifold authority of performance and text also had implications for stage space. While, Weimann argues, some of the action of Renaissance plays was localized by the script to particular places (the tent of Calchas, the Jerusalem chamber, Gertrude's closet), much of the action was unlocalized and associated not so much with the self-contained world of the scripted action but with the performative energies of the actor. Weimann refers to the upstage playing area, where localized scenes occur, as the locus, and the downstage playing area, near the audience, as the platea. Simply put, the locus marks the place of "the worthies," the high characters who remain primarily inside the fictive world of the playscript; the platea marks the place of the clown, the fool, and the madman who often more nearly inhabit the real time of stage performance and, with their improvisations and earthy speech, breach the wall separating actor and audience.

Each chapter of Author's Pen and Actor's Voice explores some aspect of what Weimann sees as the dual authorities governing the Shakespearean stage. Some of the most welcome new work concerns the evidence we have for the persistence of improvisation, unscripted clowning, and acrobatic display on the late-Elizabethan stage. In the third chapter, for instance, Weimann discusses the infamous preface to Richard Jones's 1590 octavo edition of Tamburlaine the Great. In it Jones speaks of having left out "'some fond and frivolous jestures, digressing and, in my poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter, which I thought might seem more tedious unto the wise than any way else to be regarded—though, haply, they have been of some vain, conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what times they were showed upon the stage in their graced deformities'" (59). Weimann speculates that Jones, applying emerging standards of humanist decorum, bowdlerized the performance text of the play, omitting the broad jests and irreverent clowning that, in his view, pleased the "fondlings" but scandalized the "wise." In the contest of authorities between author's text and common player's performance, Jones sided with the former, but his preface leads one...