SHAKESPEARE AND THE AUTHORITY OF PERFORMANCE

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How do our ideas about Shakespeare inform our understanding of the limits of performance? This stimulating book asks how both text and performance are construed as vessels of authority. The author finds that our understanding of Shakespearean performance retains a surprising sense of the possibility of being 'faithful' to Shakespearean texts, and so to 'Shakespeare'. After an opening theoretical chapter, Worthen examines the relationship between text and performance in directing, acting, and scholarship. He considers how some prominent theatre directors articulate their role as régisseur under the sign of Shakespeare. Next he looks at how actors read Shakespeare's plays, and in the final chapter he inspects performance-oriented criticism of Shakespeare since the 1960s. This undogmatic and exploratory book contributes to the scholarly study of acting and directing, and to the wider discourse of performance studies.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Authority and performance
• 2 ShakespeareÆs auteurs: directing authority
• 3 ShakespeareÆs body: acting and the designs of authority;
• 4 ShakespeareÆs page, ShakespeareÆs stage: performance criticism

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In this challenging study of theatrical discourse and performance criticism, Worthen (Univ. of California, Davis) argues that the "institutionalized Shakespeare" of Anglo-American (high) culture has been assumed as authority for performance by the book, thereby subordinating the liberating genre of theater to the ideological constructs of modern literary texts. In four chapters--and more than 50 pages of notes, bibliography, and index--the author presents four views of modern "Shakespeare." Contemporary editorial theory (chapter 1) disclaims the "authority" of Shakespearean texts, recognizing them historically as changing constructs, which ultimately determined the dominant image of "Shakespeare" in modern literature and (redundantly) in the theater. When the author examines the writings of directors (chapter 2), actors (chapter 3), and critics (chapter 4) specifically since the 1960s, he finds that the discourse of Shakespeare performance is controlled by older, more conventional assumptions that a "legitimate" interpretation of Shakespeare is available in "the text" and that "the text" (whichever one is chosen) determines performance, thereby ignoring the true possibilities of director and actor as "authors" and "interpreters" in their own time and in their own right. For advanced readers only, graduate students through faculty. F. K. Barasch CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College