The Prompter's Box: Toward a Close Reading of Modern Drama

A sense of the struggle of language with itself forces a certain liberation in interpreting texts that seems to some to go beyond the apparent evidence of their words … [T]o understand serious writing will precisely require us to question what a text asserts in order to arrive at the conviction that we are covering the ground gained in what its words actually contrive to say.

—Stanley Cavell (8–9)

ROS     What are you playing at?

GUIL     Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

—Tom Stoppard (32)

The title given to this column, "The Prompter's Box," is intended to signify diverse objectives. First, "The Prompter's Box" will aim to promote rigorous attention to the particular language(s) of dramatic texts. This goal does not assume that the text has an objective status apart from interpretation. On the contrary, it is supposed both to suggest and to reflect upon the creativity inherent in linguistic and literary self-reflexiveness, the productive tension between texts and performances, and the internal difference that is intrinsic to representation. "The Prompter's Box," it is hoped, will prompt thinking "outside the box." Attending to texts is not the same as "sticking to the script" – at least not in these pages – if that expression is taken to mean a rigid, unimaginative approach to the temporal experience of a genre that is largely defined as intersubjective and intended for actualization in time and space. Yet the responsibility of close reading that this journal has exemplified historically will, it is hoped, here be advanced in skeptical, detailed, and philological terms.

Philology, the study (literally the love) of words may be, as Edward Said suggests, "just about the least with-it, least sexy, and most unmodern of any of the branches of learning associated with humanism" (57). But that is not as it should be. Nietzsche, the most radical of modern thinkers, as Said points out, thought of himself first and foremost as a philologist. And even the logophobic Antonin Artaud derives his rhetorical power not from overcoming what he identifies in Le Théâtre et son double as "une rupture entre les choses, et les paroles [a rupture between things and words]" (10[7]),¹ but from dramatizing in his agonized, self-contradictory prose both the impossibility of that overcoming and the necessary "cruelty" of the effort. The medium (and hence the most common subject) of dramatists is language. Both ordinary language and more especially the language of drama and dramatic criticism are in continual, restless, constructive tension with themselves. As a result, what such texts assert – the experience that characters aim to express, that audiences and readers may imagine, in short, the meaning – can be understood only by attending first to the script and by working both to comprehend and to render intelligible, as Stanley Cavell remarks, "what its words actually contrive to say."

Writing in the Tulane Drama Review forty years ago, Richard Schechner reflected a central tension, even an antagonism, that has characterized studies of drama and theatre for the past half-century when he remarked, "The literary model is passing away and it is being replaced by a performance model whose shape, happily, is not yet fixed" (23). It is not clear that to have imagined such a vanquishing has been either correct or intellectually productive. Modern Drama, nearing its fiftieth anniversary, remains the most prominent journal in English to focus on dramatic literature of the last century and a half, although there are now numerous valuable journals that continue to distinguish themselves from Modern Drama along the lines Schechner and others have imagined. Among the most important, TDR (now The Drama Review) provides scholarship on performances and their social, economic, and political contexts, while, of the two principal organs of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Theatre Journal covers a wide range of historical and theatrical investigations for scholars in theatre studies and Theatre Topics focuses on performance studies, dramaturgy, and theatre pedagogy.

While Modern Drama is distinguished by the excellence of its articles' close readings of both canonical and lesser-known...