Abstract
Afixture of recent work on Shakespeare’s audience is the insistence that non-naturalist techniques of early modern acting coupled with the technological limitations of the stage hindered the theater’s power to create realistic illusions. In his recent work on audience response, Jeremy Lopez implies that our awareness of a non-naturalistic theater would have surprised neither playwrights nor the audience in Shakespeare’s day, claiming that “the drama and its audience were very much aware of the limitations of the early modern stage, and that the potential for dramatic representations to be ridiculous or inefficient or incompetent was a constant and vital part of the audiences’ experience of the plays.”1 If we can judge by the responses of our own time, critics and audiences on the whole have little problem with Shakespeare’s visual and technological limits, finding as they do ample compensation in the language and action of his plays. Henry V might be considered an instance of this compensatory technique: the Chorus may complain about the wooden O’s inability to hold “the casques/That did affright the fields at Agincourt,” but the same poetry that complains of the theater’s limitations and the unrivaled drama of political intrique that follows the Chorus’ apology beggar realistic spectacle.
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Notes
Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.
David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Bertold Brecht, “From the Mother Courage Model,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 219
quoted in Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (New York: Routledge, 2005), 11.
Graham Holderness, Shakespeare’s History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985), 212, quoted in Escolme, Talking to the Audience, 18.
Frances Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (1984; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 17–18, quoted in Escolme, Talking to the Audience, 11.
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 26.
E. H. Gombrich, “Illusion and Art,” in Illusion in Nature and Art, ed. R. L. Gregory and E. H. Gombrich (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 194.
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960; repr., Princton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 205.
George Gascoigne, Supposes, in The Tudor Period, vol. 1 of Drama of the English Renaissance, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 102.
Cecil C. Seronsy, “Supposes as the Unifying Theme in The Taming of the Shrew” Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1963):15–30.
My use of this phrase is not meant to invoke Shirley Nelson Garner’s “The Taming of the Shrew. Inside or Outside of the Joke,” in which the author argues that whether one thinks the play is good or bad depends on the extent to which that person sees himself as inside or outside the joke that is being played on Kate. My use of the phrase refers only to the cognizance of the stage illusions; Garner refers to empathy with the characters. In Maurice Charney, ed., ‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 105–19.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 180.
Maynard Mack, “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hos-ley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962), 276.
Terrell Tebbetts, “Could Kate Mean What She Says?” Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (1987): 14.
To a different end, Marianne Novy makes a similar point: “Since, as the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream know, it was impossible literally to bring in moonshine, the Elizabethan audience depended on the dialogue for indications of whether a scene was set in day or not. They must have frequently watched a nighttime scene set in literal sunlight and used their imagination,” “Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew, “English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 272. In “The Naming of the Shrew,” Laurie Maguire takes the point about the imagination a step further. She discusses at length an Oxford Shakespeare Company production in which the actor who portrays Sly plays double roles to the point of absurdity. In the climax of the subplot, the actor is playing a number of characters (Vincentio, Pedant as Vincentio, Baptista, and the jailor) so that “every time a character addressed Sly … or emphasized a gesture toward one of these characters, he gestured toward a blank space.” To the point, Maguire says that “in theater, ‘this’ is what you say it is, even when ‘this’ is nothing.” Laurie Maguire, “The Naming of the Shrew,” in The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: Norton, 2009), 131.
Barry Weller, “Induction and Inference: Theater, Transformation, and the Construction of Identity in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 323.
Michael Shapiro, “Framing the Taming: Metatheatrical Awareness of Female Impersonation in The Taming of the Shrew” in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, ed. Dana E. Aspinall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 228.
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© 2011 Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill
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Wells, J. (2011). Bleared Vision in The Taming of the Shrew . In: Low, J.A., Myhill, N. (eds) Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118393_10
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