Abstract
As a summary of the action of The Merchant of Venice, the reading proposed by the original title page is doubtless perverse, but it may serve as an appropriately emblematic conclusion to this investigation, in that it so neatly exemplifies the utter dependency of text on interpretation, and accurately foretells the complex and divided history of performance. Increasingly strenuous attempts by playwrights to control the interpretation of their plays, from Jonson’s interventionist commentators and printed critical prefaces, to Shaw’s novelistic stage directions and disquisitions on what the characters feel, to Genet’s, Beckett’s, and Arthur Miller’s refusal, at times litigious, to allow productions of their plays they deemed unorthodox, only confirm the stubborn independence of the script. By the end of the seventeenth century and until late in the nineteenth, the author was often incorporated into the performing tradition by being made responsible for rehearsals, in effect becoming the director; but even so, it was a rare play that emerged in performance as it had been delivered from the author’s pen or appeared in print, and it was a much rarer revival of a play remaining in the repertory that truly replicated the original. The imitation of life is as changeable as life itself.
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© 2003 Stephen Orgel
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Orgel, S. (2003). Epilogue. In: Imagining Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596108_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596108_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51081-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59610-8
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