Reimagining Shakespeare's Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (review)

Joe Falocco's study of the experiments in "Elizabethanism" by a succession of twentieth-century directors—namely, William Poel, Granville Barker, Nugent Monck, Tyrone Guthrie, and Sam Wana-maker—occupies a new and unique place in the canon of scholarship on these theatre artists.

The first wave of serious scholarship on these figures was during the 1970s and '80s. These studies celebrated what J. L. Styan called the "Shakespeare revolution": a new and vital dialogue, Styan claimed, had been established between scholars and critics sensitive to the dynamics of theatrical performance and directors and designers receptive to scholarship and willing to meet the playscripts on their own theatrical terms, eager to revitalize the energies of Elizabethan stage conventions, and rejecting the proscenium for the open stage. Poel, Barker, and the newly rediscovered Monck were canonized as pioneers, while Guthrie was hailed as an advocate of open stages after his 1937 production of Hamlet was restaged on the fly when rain forced it to be moved from the courtyard of Elsinore Castle into a hotel ballroom, with the audience surrounding the playing space. For his part, Wanamaker was popping in at Shakespeare conferences and proselytizing, fundraising, and recruiting scholarly advisors for what he promised would be the ultimate scholarly performance laboratory: a rebuilt Globe Playhouse in Southwark.

That first wave of scholarship, however, broke against the shoals of newer and more highly theorized and historicized scholarship. Several scholars (most notably W. B. Worthen) called into question many of the premises of stage-centered scholarship; others placed the experiments of the early and mid-twentieth-century Elizabethans into the larger historical phenomena of cultural elitism, imperialism, and modernism. No sooner was Wanamaker's "Shakespeare's Globe" up and running at last, a few years after his death, than it was almost immediately savaged by critics for its touristic Disneyfied hyperreality. Meanwhile, a new generation of Elizabethanist fundamentalists began issuing fatwas in support of "original practices."

Of the several historicist re-readings of the Shakespeare revolution in recent years, Falocco's is the first to emerge from the original practices camp. He is no fundamentalist—he prefers the "free-hand" productions at Shakespeare's Globe to their more archaeological, all-male, Elizabethan-dress reconstructions—but he did put in his time as a young actor with the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express (forerunner of the American Shakespeare Center and its Blackfriars reconstruction in Staunton, Virginia) and has only good things to say about the experiments there. That said, Falocco's project is not to make a case for original practices, but rather to defend the twentieth-century Elizabethanists against accusations of antiquarianism and cultural and political conservatism, and to place them in a larger movement of progressive politics and theatrical modernism. Elizabethanists, he writes, were motivated by "a progressive desire to create new forms in response to the pressures of modernity" (171).

Poel's return to Elizabethan costuming and staging conventions on reconstructed Elizabethan stages is, for Falocco, a return to the pre-industrial, handmade artifact as a way of overcoming industrial and postindustrial alienation, in the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Guild Socialism of William Morris. Falocco turns every one of Poel's many eccentricities into virtues: his seemingly random (and all-too-often gender-normative) cross-gender casting is seen as a forerunner of contemporary nontraditional casting; and his attraction to scripts like the First Quarto Hamlet is seen as a preference for a script's theatrical, rather than literary, provenance. To his credit, Falocco sees Poel as Poel wished to be seen. When a committee commissioned a portrait of Poel for his eightieth birthday, Poel asked to be painted in the character of Father Keegan in Shaw's John Bull's Other Island—an other-worldly, arguably crazy visionary and self-confirmed mystic— whom Poel had played at Barker's Court Theatre in 1906. Falocco similarly praises later theatre artists for their Poel-like quixotic mysticism: Monck...