Imaginary audition: Shakespeare on stage and page (review)

120 Reviews potential library orders, a comment or two on the contents is in order. The volume consists of ten Past and Present articles, as well as the debate and author's rejoinder to one of them (Holt's 'Politics and property in early medieval England'), and Past and Present'sfirstsupplement (Maddicott's 'The English peasantry and the demands of the Crown 1294-1341'). Three of the articles have short 1987 updates; otherwise they are published essentially in their original form, together with their original typographical errors. In several ways this is a disjointed and uneven collection. Three of the articles, Dodgshon's 'The landholding foundations of the Open-Field system', Langdon's 'Horse-hauling: a revolution in vehicle transport in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England', and Gatrell's 'Historians and peasants: studies of medieval English society in a Russian context' are of rather general interest. The others relate far more squarely to the theme and tide of the volume. Holt and his critics, King and White, deal with the political and tenurial problems of the Anglo-Norman and Angevin aristocracy. King, Coss, Raban (indirectiy), and Britnell deal with the difficulties facing minor landlords and the knightly class in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Hatcher and Maddicott present almost opposing views on the condition of the peasantry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A detailed critique of these articles, one of which Hilton considers to be a classic, would be out of place. Several obvious candidates for a volume such as this have already been republished in the Society's Peasants, knights and heretics (1976), including Paul Harvey's 'The English inflation of 1180-1220', whose theme and consequences appear in the articles by King, Coss, and Hatcher. However, two articles that have not been republished as yet and that would have given this volume a useful comparative touch are Wendy Davies' 'Land and power in early medieval Wales' (1969) and Robin Frame's 'Power and society in the Lordship of Ireland 1272-1377' (1977). They would have been at least as relevant as Dodgshon, Langdon and GatreU. John Walmsley Department of History Macquarie University Berger, H., jr., Imaginary audition: Shakespeare on stage and page, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989; cloth; pp. xv, 178; R. R. P. US$25.00. Berger's rather oddly-structured work is, he tells us, an exercise limbering up for his major study of the Henriad. Indeed, he seems to have modelled himself on Shakespeare's Prince Hal, testing out in public various modes of critical behaviour, while all the while letting us know that he is seduced by none of them and that he is already the possessor of wisdom and power over his Reviews 121 'subjects': Shakespeare's theatrical texts. In arguing for his new method of reading, 'imaginary audition', Berger devotes a good deal of time to the paper tigers of what he calls the 'New Histrionicism': stage-centred criticism. This is chiefly represented by 'Richard Levin's critique of slit-eyed analysis' (or supersubde 'armchair readings') in New readings vs. old plays, and 'Gary Taylor's defense of wide-eyed playgoing' in Moment by moment by Shakespeare (published in 1985, well before Taylor made his own audacious bid for the critical crown in Reinventing Shakespeare). Few readers nowadays would argue with the centrist position Berger establishes: 'an attempt to reconstruct text-centred reading in a way that incorporates the perspective of imaginary audition and playgoing; an attempt to put into play an approach that remains text-centred but focuses on the interlocutory politics and theatrical features of performed drama ... ' (p. xiv). This is enlightened commonsense. The critic's job is to read with sensitivity and weU-informed accuracy in the hope that such readings will help, among others, the actors whose job it is to keep the play alive for each audience. Berger's challenge to the naiveties of Levin's belief in the 'intending dramatist' and the 'competent audience' and to Taylor's proposal that readers imagine themselves as 'innocent playgoers' is often subde and sometimes refreshingly acerbic. H e also anatomises the internal contradictions of much 'metatheatricar criticism. His own attempts to theorise the problematic of the...