Performance Dynamics and the Amsterdam Werkteater by Dunbar H. Ogden (review)

376 Comparative Drama 2() For a comparison of two of Lady Macbeth's speeches to examples in Seneca's Medea, see Bullough, p. 451; additional sources for Shakespeare may have been Ovid's Metamorphoses VII and Heroides XII. 21 For a discussion of madness in several Elizabethan plays and the significance of Seneca's Hercules Furens,. see Rolf Soellner, "The Madness of the Elizabethans," Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 309-24. Soellner finds Lady Macbeth's excuses for her husband's rapture when he sees Banquo, "being often thus" (lll.iv.61-62), as evidence of an epilepsy (p. 313). 22 Thomson, p. 120, links allusions to sleep by the Chorus in Hercules Furens, 11. l06Sff, to similar passages in Macbeth. Additional sources for Shakespeare's imagery associated with sleep are Ovid's Metamorphoses XI.623ff; Sidney's Astrophtl and Stella, Sonnet 39; and references to sleep in the dramatist's own plays such as Henry IV, Part II, m.i.5-31. 23 R. A. Foakes, "Images of Death: Ambition in Macbeth," in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 2-20. The damnation of Macbeth, his fall from divine grace, has long been a concern of scholars . Among those who discuss Macbeth in terms of Christian theology are Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's ludgment (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), pp. 159-82; Roland MushatFtye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 14446; Robert H. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1986), pp. 21-22, 70-77. 24 Huston Diehl, "Horrid Image, Sorry Sight, Fatal Image: The Visual Rhetoric of Macbeth," Shakespeare Studies, 16 (1988), 191-204. To Diehl, the play is full of acts of seeing and interpr.eting in an uncertain and invisIble world. Members of the audience gain ·prespective on the limitation of human knowledge as they watch the downfall of Macbeth, his lady, and Duncan. Allpicmres, like the apparitions, are enigmas in a fallen world where ambiguous signs disturb and confuse the audience. 2S Whitney, p. 138; the plate is from Omnia Andrea Alciati, p. 177. 26 A Collection of 79 Black-Letter Ballads and Broads/des (1559-1597), ed. Joseph Lilly (London, 1867), pp. 27-31, and The German Single-Leaf Woodcut (1550-16{)(), ed. Walter L. Strauss (New York, 1975), II, 674, 850. 27 Devises Herolques (Lyons: Jean de Toumes, 1557), p. 18. The woodcut, attributed to Bernard Salomon, shows a crown over a star. For other crown emblems, see ibid., pp. 23, 25. These devices were widely published, and a translation by P. S. with Plantin woodcuts was printed in London as The Heroicall Devices of M. Claudius Paradin (Lnndon, 1591). 28 The Nine Worthies were frequently illustrated and even used as wall decorations in upper middle class homes like the house on 61 High Street, Abersham, Bucks.; see Francis Reader, "Tudor Mural Paintings in Lesser Houses in Bucks.," Archaeological lournal, 89 (1932), 166-72. 29 The Porter elects to eschew the primrose way to Hell, and Laertes warns Ophelia that Hamlet walks "the primrose path of dalliance" (I.ili.50). Roses are associated with Venus, and the pleasant way of Vice is called the path of roses. Clifford Davidson relates the devil imagery which I have linked with classical myth to a Christian view of damnation in The Primrose Way: A Study of Shakespeare's Macbeth (Conesville, Iowa: 10hn Westburg, 1970). REVIEWS Dunbar H. Ogden. Performance Dynamics and the Amsterdam Werkteater . Foreword by R. L. Erenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Pp. xxii + 267. $37.50. Since the 1960's a number of theater companies in the United States have distinguished themselves as collectives in which the actors, working together, often create their own performance pieces: the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, Mabou Mines, Bread and Puppet Theatre, the Wooster Group. But of course this model is hardly exclusive to American avant-garde and political theater. In Europe, for example, groups organized by Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Ariane Mnouchkine have sometimes developed their own works, but none of them has operated as an actors' collective in the manner of...