Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture by David Bevington (review)

REVIEWS David Bevington. Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984. Pp. xiii + 227. $22.50. In his recent Clark Lectures Jonathan Miller argued that it is impossible to recreate even a recent production of a play although you may have a most careful film record and detailed production notes. In Miller's view the play text is "notation" for a collaborative venture which is jeopardized if the actor/reader of the text is constrained to reproduce the blocking, visual effects, or speech patterns laid down by conditions of continuous production—say by Stanislavsky for Chekhov or by the immediate successors to Wagner at Bayreuth. According to Miller, each fresh encounter with the text sets in motion this re-creation. Action as Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture offers to mediate between the theater historians' scholarly insights and the needs of today's actors. David Bevington's qualifications as editor and theater historian are excellent ones. He has now added a complete Shakespeare to his list of editions; this book may be its prolegomenon. As an accomplished historian of Tudor drama Bevington can be relied upon to elucidate a difficult passage from its historical context. In his efforts to make Shakespeare available for all time he has turned lately to anthropology, in particular the work of Victor Turner and Arnold van Gennep. Throughout most of his book Bevington uses "action" in its narrow sense, defined by Thomas Wright in 1630 as "a certain visible eloquence, eloquence of body or comely grace in delivering conceits, or an external image of an internal minde." There are chapters on visual interpretation, the language of costume, gesture and expression, theatrical space, ceremony , and violated ceremony. It is, however, in Chapter IV, 'The Language of Theatrical Space," that the term 'action' expands to have its Aristotelian meaning; Bevington shows how key moments of reversal and recognition in the plot are placed spatially to create very complex resonances : Hamlet's ghost in the cellerage, Juliet peering down from her window to Romeo who occupies the place where the coffins will finally rest. He pays tribute to the excellent (though neglected) work of George Kernodle on Renaissance theater façades, showing that while Shakespeare drew upon the visual "language" of the morality plays and pageanttheater façades with their heavens, thrones, discovery place, and hell, he used the newer staging traditions of neo-classical drama to challenge or question in spatial terms the moral certainties proclaimed by the very façades of the traditional English stages. Bevington is rightly suspicious of the current vogue for iconographie explication and of critics whose interpretation of Shakespeare's "speaking pictures" confine his questioning spirit as straitly as Tillyard's expounded homilies do. This book, then, offers some sympathetic and scholarly material for Miller's stimulating challenge. There is an urgent need to reconsider just what 're-creation' and 'realization' mean in current theatrical practice. 76 Reviews77 Those readers who come for the first time to Shakespeare will find much in the early chapters to interest them. This is a work of synthesis, generously paying tribute to the collaborative nature of theater studies. Readers familiar with the work of E. K. Chambers and Muriel Bradbrook will be rewarded by Bevington's self-effacing and thorough review of the fine-tuning of critical argument during the last twenty years. Devotees of Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber may not wish to exchange their terms of analysis for those of anthropology. To me terms such as 'liminality' and 'rites of passage' rest more lightly on the comedies than the tragedies. Occasionally the author's assumptions about gesture and staging fall short of the book's admirable insistence upon Shakespeare's mastery of complex double perspective. We can recover something about the heroine's gesture from Ulysses' description of Cressida in IV.v, or the movement of an otherworldly creature from descriptions of the ghost in Hamlet. Yet Leontes' description of Hermione walking in the garden with Polixines would be followed in gesture by an actress at her peril! Whether or not one stumbles at 'liminality,' Bevington's interpretation of the doors of entrance and exit is stimulating...