Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page by Harry Berger, Jr., and: Shakespeare—The Theater and the Book by Robert S. Knapp (review)

284Comparative Drama Keyssar, Kane); and the definition of "the feminine" and feminine writing (e.g., the essays by Savona, Willis, Worthen, Murray), one of the most difficult and indeed probably indeterminable questions engaging contemporary feminist thought. Hence Brater's collection accomplishes a double task: it is both a landmark in a field which is only beginning to find a voice—feminist work on the drama—and an imaginatively diverse contribution to feminist literary criticism at large. GAIL FINNEY University of California, Davis Harry Berger, Jr. Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Pp. xv + 178. $25.00. Robert S. Knapp. Shakespeare—The Theater and the Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. xiii + 256. $35.00. In the last chapter of The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, Jonas Barish suggests that Yvor Winters' "anti-mimetic bias" represents perhaps the "last futile bastion" of anti-theatricalism in the Western literary tradition. In different ways, these books suggest that the anti-theatrical prejudice has continued to flourish in the age of poststructuralism, for the authors' distinctions between theatricality and textuality tend to renew rather than resolve disputes of playtext versus performance. In Shakespeare studies, these disputes have traditionally centered on authorial intentions, with disputants convinced that Shakespeare wrote either texts that demand close reading or scripts that require full performance . Berger, like the traditional literary critic, privileges the playtext over performance, but not for the traditional reason. Rather, he argues that performance undermines, not the author's intention, but the text's multivocality: "Why should the text of a competent playwright encourage interpretations that are theatrically gratuitous? Does the disproportion between essence and manifestation mean that the playwright is abnormal and self-indulgent, even self-defeating or at least prodigal, in producing a surplus no audience was meant to perceive? . . . Why should we oblige critics to prune their hedges rather than obliging directors and actors to try to represent them on stage?" (p. 31). Unlike Berger's earlier, more tendentious anti-theatricalism, this interrogative mood enables a dialogue. The dialogue is not, however, between Berger and the so-called "stage-centered" critics whom he wittily names the "New Histrionicists," but between Berger and those actors who do work with "the generosity or generativity" of the Shakespearean playtext, exploring its poetic, rhetorical, and narrative strategies, discovering polysemous gestures, images, and line readings. The "New Histrionicists " (most prominently Richard Levin and Gary Taylor) who dismiss Shakespearean textuality as "theatrically gratuitous" are not in fact "stage-centered" but "house-centered." They are playgoers rather than players and privilege the receptivity of the spectator without acknowledging the mediation of the actor. They argue that performance enforces simplicity because, like Berger, they reduce theatrical representation to the linguistic insights of literary critical discourse. Reviews285 This ultimately anti-theatrical epistemology, which demands that critics choose between text and performance as objects of inquiry, obscures other choices among interpretive activities. In reading, the critic intervenes actively to determine textual significance; in playgoing, he or she becomes the apparently passive recipient of an already interpreted script. This passivity is more apparent than real, yet it underlies Berger's anti-theatricalism. Rejecting the spectator's position, Berger substitutes the methodological innovation he calls "imaginary audition," "an approach that remains text-centered but focuses on the interlocutory politics and theatrical features of performed drama" (p. xiv): We practice imaginary audition when, in a dialogue between A and B, we imagine the effect of A's speech on B; listening to A with B's ears, we inscribe the results of this audit in the accounts we render of B's language. But we can do something else, something persistently encouraged by Shakespearean writing . . .: we listen to B's language with B's ears. We premise that every interlocutory act is partly a soliloquy in which the speaker constitutes himself as the theatre audience he shares confidences with or tries to persuade, affect, deceive, (pp. 45-56) I quote Berger's description at this length because I would not paraphrase a method I find so implausible. Believing that "any performance of a play actualizes what is (always) already an imagined performance , an imaginary performance" (p. 140...