Fields of Play in Modern Drama by Thomas R. Whitaker (review)

Reviews 181 to a “sacred fiction” and Macbeth to a victim of socially conditioned “overperception.” Finally, I feel that the tendency to reduce the plays to explorations of role behavior results in an extremely limited view of their contents. Although Felperin talks about “the fullness of humanity” of Shakespeare’s characters, his commitment to an anti-mimetic theory of art leaves him little to say about the moving human experience of the tragedies, and even his insight into the self-conscious role-playing of the characters is not worked out with the rich particularity one might expect. The relative “aporia” of Felperin’s argument (to use one of his favorite Greek loan­ words) is compounded by his preference for sociological, philosophical, and literary jargon. In this book, Shakespeare’s characters are not viewed in terms of their fundamental human relationships nor are they subject to powerful emotions; they are caught instead in a seemingly endless cycle of “mimesis and endomimesis,” “romanticization and deromanticization ,” “mythologization and demythologization,” “mystification, demys­ tification, and remystification.” Dramatic moments like Othello’s last speech, expressive as it is of grief, love, guilt, and shame, are reduced to academic cliches: His final speech and gesture can only point inward toward an indefinite antecedent, a radical self that remains humanly impossible to denote truly. He has reinvented his own earlier dramatic language with a new under­ standing that prior sign and present significance, conventional role and distinctive self, can never fully coincide, and creates in the process a more authentic, because more human magic than that displayed in any of his previous rhetoric of self-definition, (p. 85) Felperin may be right in insisting that art often does not imitate life directly, but passages like the one just quoted make one wish for a literary criticism that retains more feeling for “the thing itself.” W. DAVID KAY University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Thomas R. Whitaker. Fields of Play in Modern Drama. Princeton: Prince­ ton Univ. Press, 1977. Pp. 192. $11.00. Thomas Whitaker opts for an interpretation of drama based on a willed, empathetic, participatory experience by the audience-member of the individual play in performance and also for an interpretation based on the actors’ participatory interactions with each other as the play un­ folds. The spectator thereby “witnesses” the drama and comes at its meaning as the actors in their turn bear “witness” to the universe actu­ alized by the author within the play. In both instances the process is one of discovery and self-discovery. The modern stage play thus provides both (1) a configuration of characters who “witness” concerning each other and incrementally inform us about the themes, the situations, the philosophical and social orientation, and the conflicts taking place and 182 Comparative Drama (2) a medium through which the viewer participates in a voyage of discovery both about the play and about himself as he identifies with the characters as they perform their parts. Of the various sorts of “wit­ nessing” that he is concerned with, Whitaker discusses most often the obligations of the spectator to become an active element in the exper­ ience that is the drama performed in the theater. From one point of view Whitaker could be regarded as elaborating a truism, that we never can be sure of the final meaning of a dramatic work until we experience it as performance. There are few if any stu­ dents of the drama who would deny the importance of performance, in allowing us to come at the full meaning of a specific play. As a critic who regards this proposition not only as a central truth but the central truth about interpreting drama, Whitaker underscores the need felt by drama students to see plays as well as read them. Certainly, Whitaker is persuasive in giving this view great authority. My reservation concerning Whitaker’s thesis and his book (the book is the thesis illustrated) is this: he tends to make of the participatory process the only method whereby we can get at its reality. But cannot we actually get deep into the meaning of a dramatic work by partici­ pating with the author, as it were, through an alert, sophisticated, con...