Renaissance Forum: Volume 5, Number 1, 2000: Stuart Hampton-Reeves

W.B.Worthen. 1998. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 265pp. ISBN 0521558999. Ł13.95.

W.B. Worthen's Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance is a timely and sophisticated critique of various conjunctions of Shakespeare and performance, which focuses on the role of authority and authenticity in writings about performance - by directors, actors and, finally, academics.
In the introductory chapter, Worthen sets out a theoretical and historical framework for what he calls a 'critique of contemporary understanding of the relationship between text and performance.' The book opens with Antonin Artaud, observing and 'reading' the performance of the Balinese dancers. Aware of Artaud's idiosyncratic intercultural encounter, Worthen picks up on the irony that Artaud, the self-declared enemy of texts and writing, arrives at his idea of 'pure theatre' by analysing the Balinese performance as if it were a text. The implication, right at the start, is that there is no such thing as 'pure theatre': performance, once written about, is textualised. Worthen uses this observation to open up a discussion about the relationship between text and performance, and in particular how twentieth-century, western ideas about performance are deeply implicated in notions of textuality and, more important, notions about 'the text' and 'the author.' Worthen's argument here is complicated, drawing on theorists such as Barthes, Shillingsberg, McGann, McGuire and Grigely to develop a nuanced sense of what constitutes 'the text' (Worthen would rather speak of the 'polytext') and the ways in which authority configures, inhabits and haunts it.
The second chapter explores the ideological, authorising function of the director. In a long and subtle argument, Worthen aims to show how an Anglo-American 'crisis of legitimacy' is exemplified in the theoretical writings of directors like Marowitz and Miller. Though the directors are very different in their work and approach to Shakespeare, Worthen points to their similar concerns about the twin pressures of being 'true to Shakespeare' and making Shakespeare 'our Contemporary.'
Worthen then turns to a study of a more contemporary director, Peter Sellers, though this time the focus is on a production, The Merchant of Venice (1994). Here, the tension between fidelity to the text and fidelity to the audience is explored in terms of the ways in which Sellers uses the theatre to displace and disrupt the actors' performance, so that, for example, the actors' voices are distorted whilst television screens showed hand-held shots of the actors and footage from the Rodney King video. The authenticity of this production was called into question at the time but Worthen (via an ingenious detour on a performance piece by Anne Deavere Smith) argues that in this case the question 'is it or is it not Shakespeare?' turns out to be simply a poor question. The impasse arises because Seller's refuses to privilege an individual subject - director, author or actor - as the site of meaning. Instead, the production works through a displacement or 'abeyance' of authority - both textual and performative - designed to show the different ways in which identity is constituted.
From the director, Worthen moves to the actor. This chapter takes as its starting point Harry Berger jnr's observation that bodies are naturalising symbols in the theatre, which Worthen reworks, on the basis that the body is also the 'vehicle' for Shakespearean meanings, so that 'Shakespeare' is a naturalising metaphor for the body. The crux of the critique is the idea of a specific, ideological constructed Shakespeare being, as it were, written on the body through exercises designed to ironically denature the actor's body. Worthen argues that the influential training systems of Stanislavksi and Benedetti are rooted in the development of the individual, modern subject of capitalism. The 'subject' is thus universalised, the body rendered timeless. Here, the privileging of the body and of spontaneity in performance looks back to a romantic conception of the 'pre-industrial' body. Such essentialist strategies inform a range of actors writing about their own work and sustain current interest in the supposed authority of the actor over the meaning of Shakespeare's plays.
Worthen maintains a sceptical stance towards 'text into performance' style formulations right through the book but reserves a full critique to the last chapter, which takes on the assumptions of performance-based criticism, from Granville-Barker and Styan through to contemporary performance critics such as Dawson, Hodgdon and Taylor. The premise is a simple, familiar one: Shakespeare wrote for the stage, so consequently his works can only be articulated in the language of the stage. Yet this 'text/performance' dichotomy gives rise to an inevitable impasse - a self-defeating discourse in which the written word has already ceded authority to the performed word. The peculiar nature of performance criticism is, argues Worthen, perhaps explicable by the fact that both new criticism and new historicism have avoided or even rejected performance as a 'puzzling indeterminacy.' (The failure of new historicism to explore the theatre as a specific mode of production and a pertinent ideological context is a fair point, but one that overlooks the significant work of Stephen Mullaney and Jean E. Howard in this area). Performance criticism, meanwhile, seeks to displace such literary and historical interpretation with stage centred readings which privilege, in differing ways, performance as the authentic medium for the study of Shakespeare's work.
Worthen's book is not, however, an attempt to restore the priority of critical study, and it is at this point that he puts his cards on the table, and asks how a new methodology for performance criticism might be devised which moves beyond the impasse of the text/performance dichotomy. A way forward would be to study the ways in which modern stage practices textualise performance. Some critics have tried to move in this direction, and Worthen surveys the work of Roger Warren, Anthony Dawson and Harry Berger for a more critically formulated, thought-through approach to the study of Shakespeare in performance. However, even here practice emerges as an opposition to theory, as in Dawson's non-theoretical stage, or Berger's more sophisticated idea of reading as a mode of spectating. Barbara Hodgdon and Susan Bennet, on the other hand, approach performance and text as forms of cultural production. In his conclusions, Worthen invites us to practice a performance criticism that explores the reproduction of Shakespearean authority through the textualising processes of modern stage practices. Quoting Clifford Geertz, Worthen insists that all performance is a performance of ourselves. The inscription of Shakespearean authority onto this process impoverishes performance, and a true performance criticism needs to expose and demystify this process.
This book is a welcome intervention in the 'text into performance' field, which aims not so much to reject such notions as to lay down patterns of interruption in which the study of performance is disentangled from assertions of authority and authenticity. The discussion of Sellers is outstanding and it is regrettable that Worthen did not go further in matching his own sense of what performance criticism should or could be with such examples. Yet this remains a gauntlet thrown at the feet of those who write about Shakespeare and performance without thinking through the relationship between the two in a critical and theoretically sensitive way.

STUART HAMPTON-REEVES
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE