Shakespeare and the Power of Performance

Abstract

Focusing on the practical means and media of Shakespeare's stage, this study envisions horizons for his achievement in the theatre. Bridging the gap between today's page- and stage-centred interpretations, two renowned Shakespeareans demonstrate the artful means by which Shakespeare responded to the competing claims of acting and writing in the Elizabethan era. They examine how the playwright explored issues of performance through the resonant trio of clown, fool and cross-dressed boy actor. Like this trio, his deepest and most captivating characters often attain their power through the highly performative mode of 'personation' – through playing the character as an open secret. Surveying the whole of the playwright's career in the theatre, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance offers not only compelling ways of approaching the relation of performance and print in Shakespeare's works, but also new models for understanding dramatic character itself.

The Singing 'Vice': Music and Mischief in Early English Drama

“…Although the seductive Vice tends to conceal his true nature -which is in fact not nature but artifice -from other dramatic characters, he typically reveals it to the audience or to other Vices; in this performative strategy, 'the personator', namely the actor, 'is not entirely lost in the personated' Vice figure. 23 Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster coin the term 'personation' to denote performance practice that 'privileges the making of the mask, the skill and the show of playing the role of another'. 24 Indeed, the Vice simultaneously foregrounds his performative identity and his musical and acting skills; song, in which the Vice sings about his activities or relishes the mischief he has already wrought, is a frequent vehicle for the Vice's personation.…”

“…As Weimann and Bruster point out, 'memories of the Vice are closely related to presentational practice in which performance is displayed in its own right'. 44 If, as Stevens and Rastall suggest, heavenly music represents holiness and heavenliness, then the possibility that worldly music represents corruption and worldliness might also be considered. 45 Because of the Shakespearean Falstaff 's mischief-making and his subversive activities, he has been taken to resemble aspects of the old interlude Vice.…”

“…As Weimann and Bruster observe, 'bodily performance and literary language helped constitute the agencies of clowns and fools'. 62 Another element that both constitutes and signifies the agency of the Vice-fool-clown is that figure's musical production in the form of song. Singing embeds agency when, as Tia DeNora notes, 'it is perceived as incorporating into itself and/or its performance some property of the extra-musical, so as to be perceived as doing the thing to which it points'.…”

“…Far from ushering her in, Mery Reporte attempts to seduce the woman and in fact hinders her suit, for which she wishes to speak with Jupiter alone. Weimann and Bruster emphasize the Vice figure's 'contrariety', 87 Mery Reporte's mischief is achieved through enchanting music that does the woman 'pleasure'. As Wisdom's Wyll well knew, 'the infinite powers of music may also allure and ravish the senses', and no one and 'nothing in the entire cosmos is immune to the charms of music'.…”

Shakespeare and Media Ecology: Beyond Historicism and Presentism

“…As Peter Hyland argues, studies that focus primarily on the subject of cross-dressing in Shakespeare "minimize the very theatricality of disguise" by "look[ing] through disguise in search of cultural meanings" (Hyland 2002: 78). This is why Weimann and Bruster (2008: 118) suggest considering "cross-dressing and disguise as a highly performative medium in its processes than as static objects, and also to avoid the impression of overly linear transformation processes that is often implied in alternative terms like 'mediatization' or 'mediation' (cf. Hepp 2013, Bolter/Grusin 1999, Siskin/Warner 2010.…”