Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence ed. by Edward Pechter (review)

LEITERS IN CANADA editor. Textual and Theatrical f::>l1czke:;pel':lre: Uu:estl,ons 1 ..... :;~T£1,..'OTh, of Iowa Press. X, 268- us of offers a assimilation or at mE~oretlcal ideas. For many Theatre scholars llistoricists to dJs,cm;s can or count as evidence the claims we of the ..""...",.......,........"'4-",. the stance the theatre historian as HUMANITIES 199 purveyor ofobjective information about performance. Nat only do weneed to be aware of the narrative emplotment of the performance scholar's own contributions, Laurie Osborne argues, but we must examine the rhetorical agendas, explicit and implicit, shaping the I documentary evidence' - both textual and visual- on which reconstructions of performances are based. When, for example, a nineteenth-century biographer describing actress Maria Tree's voice digresses to the prettiness of her leg, the slippage embeds the report of her performance .as Viola in historically specific 'discourses of gender propriety.' Neither are the visual engravings of Twelfth Night Osborne examines transparently illustrative of performance: the beholder is prompted by a gap between engraving and textual caption to produce his or her own narrative of the scene. Barbara Hodgdon's essay on twentieth-century theatrical stills of Prince Hal revels in the beholder's - or the desiring consumer's - use of celebrity photographs to ground even personal narratives. She also maps the Royal Shakespeare Company's use of 'crown scene' photographs to create its own institutional 'succession narrative.' People assume, Hodgdon claims, that a full stage picture offers more authentic testimony ofperformance than close-ups ofactors, butboth can embody a 'viewingpolitics,'whetherprivilegingthe spectator's'God'seye ' surveillance or the actor's emotional interiority. While Hodgdon finds in the archive anything but evidence of actual performance, Leanore Lieblein works with a definition of performance as 'event' which encompasses relative and shifting perspectives. If performance is 'a series of readings produced by individuals from an encolUlter with a text within a particularsocialsituation,' then from the discontinuous and even contradictory archival traces of Quebecois Shakespeare productions, Lieblein can reconstruct and celebrate the diverse 'apprehension of the theatre event.' Michael Bristol discusses most explicitly what standards of evidence obtain in recent materialist criticism. His thoroughgoing essay is a helpful synopsis of the current debate about I authorship' in Shakespeare studies. Kathleen McLuskie's piece critiquing conflated meanings of 'the market' in recent criticism is suggestive but leaves much more to be said on this subject. It is difficult to find any engagement with questions of evidence in Robert Weimann's opaque essay on performance as both 'representation and being' in Richard III or in John Ripley's sensible reading of Nahum Tate's Restoration adaptation of Coriolanus as Tory propaganda. In some essays, performance history simplyproceeds as usual, though this does not make essays like Catherine Shaw's on Edwin Booth's performances of Richard III any less interesting. Alan Dessen's sceptical reconsideration of evidence about Elizabethan staging is a calculated reminder that theatre historians need not import theoretically fraught scepticisms in order to understand that the surviving evidence is indeterminate. The tacit requirement that collections published by academic presses display a thematic unity and co-operative project is not entirely consonant 200 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 with the realities of scholarly production these days, but Pechter makes connections withvirtuosity and wit, occasionally going so far as to provide arguments contributors might have made to align their materials with key .issues. As the volume suggests, theory has transformed the scenebut by no means resolved all the issues. W.B. Worthen's conc1udingessayshows how the 'stage vs. page' divide in the Shakespearecommunityhasbeenredrawn since the New eriticism, with theatre practitioners now the ones embracing a 'hermeneutics of transcendence' and New Historicist readers a 'hermeneutics of suspicion.' Pechter speculates that such faultlines are on the whole productive for intellectual work. A substantial and worthwhile collection, Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare leaves us reflecting on the complex diversity of our 'Shakespearean engagements.' But-at least people are speaking across their differences. (LYNNE MAGNUSSON) Edward Pechter. What Was Slu:lkespeare: Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice Cornell University Press 1995. xi, 200. $18.30 Edward Pechter's What Was Shakespeare invalidates this review. If I say I like the book...