Abstract
Among post-1960 British dramatists, Peter Shaffer is in many ways a theatrical contrarian, a playwright who has consistently gone against the current, achieving tremendous popular success and considerable critical acclaim with plays whose subjects, strategies, and style are often quite the opposite of prevailing theatrical trends.1 While such playwrights as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and David Storey explored the dramatic eloquence of the unspoken and understated (and perfected its theatrical potential), Shaffer created characters who speak with rhetorical flourish, articulating their concerns through frequently poetic images in soliloquies that are as emotionally intense and dramatically effective as any on the modem stage. Yet, in an age when theatrical discourse has often been dominated by angry outbursts of class-based frustration with the here-and-now, by anti-capitalist agitprop, and by various milder forms of social protest, Shaffer’s plays avoid such topical sociopolitical commentary. They have, in fact, often depicted the not-here and not-now, with subjects that are as diverse and seemingly as remote from contemporary issues as Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas and Antonio Salieri’s rivalry with Mozart. Even when his plays are set in modem English society, they are often fundamentally concemed with history, juxtaposing now-lost values of an intensely-lived (if idealised) past against the mundane exigencies of modem life. Consistently, his major characters resist - or at least rail against - the ordinary, the ‘average’, the ‘normal’, the ‘mere’. His plays are remarkable for their carefully balanced dialectical (and dialogic)structure, their revitalisation of on-stage ritual, and their uniquely theatrical flair.
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Notes
For a complete list of Shaffer’s plays to 1988, see Contemporary Dramatists, ed. D.L. Kirkpatrick (London: St James Press, 1988). Since 1988 Shaffer has published a radio play, Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing? (1990).
Peter Shaffer, ‘Preface’, The Collected Plays of Peter Shaffer (New York Harmony Books, 1982) p. vii. Subsequent page references to all prefaces and plays except Lettice and Lovage are taken from this edition, and have been inserted parenthetically into the text. Readers should be aware, however, that Shaffer has frequently revised his plays and that earlier versions of the text (particularly the early ‘acting editions’) may differ substantially from the ones quoted herein.
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (1929, rev. 1963; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), and also Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981).
Peter Shaffer, ‘In Search of a God’, Plays and Players (October 1964) 22.
Ibid.
Ibid.
For an overview of Eliade’s theories of desacralisation, see particu-larly The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1959).
For a discussion of the influence of Antonin Artaud’s theories on Shaffer’s use of ritual, see Gene A. Plunka, Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals in the Theatre (Rutherford NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988) pp. 42–50. Similarities between Artaud’s plans for staging The Conquest of Mexico and Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun are discussed on pp. 110–113.
For more detailed analyses of the play’s themes, see Plunka, 127–48 and also Dennis A. Klein, Peter Shaffer (Boston: Twayne, 1979) pp. 98–112.
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1959) pp. 278–9.
Langer, pp. 278–9.
For further discussion of Shaffer’s use of historic detail, see Plunka, pp. 175–82.
Claire Colvin, ‘Quest for Perfection’, Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review, 159 (First Quarter 1986) 11.
Peter Shaffer, Lettice and Lovage (London: André Deutsch Ltd., 1988) p. 93.
Colvin, pp. 11–12.
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Hutchings, W. (1993). Revitalised Ritual and Theatrical Flair: the Plays of Peter Shaffer. In: Acheson, J. (eds) British and Irish Drama since 1960. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22762-4_3
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