Abstract
The story of Cardenio began in a book. That story contained, as Roger Chartier recognizes, “a dramatic plot full of secret meetings, soliloquies of cadenced verses and scenes of a spectacular nature” (Chartier 44). But unlike Cervantes, a director must poner en escena, put onstage, that narrative. Directors place people and objects in an artificial space, in spatial relationships to one another and to spectators. Long before I became a scholar or director, I was an actor. But before I became an actor, I danced, and dance is all about the movement of bodies through space (figure 13.1). I think of actors as dancers who speak. In Shakespeare and Fletcher, the actors are poets too, dancers who speak words that dance, words that move rhythmically, like music.
the Actor is the Center
—John Webster (1615)1
Thus we move, because by the passion thus wee are mooved.
—Thomas Wright (1604)2
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Notes
Hall, Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003), 207.
On the anti-Aristotelian emphasis on particulars rather than generalities, see Elizabeth Spiller, “Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero’s Art,” South Central Review, 26.1 (2009): 24–41.
See Thomas Howard Ridley, Jr., From the Avenue — A Memoir (CreateSpace, 2012),
and C. Nickerson Bolden, Indiana Avenue: Black Entertainment Boulevard (AuthorHouse, 2009).
See Andrew J. Power, “Late Shakespeare, late Players,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613, ed. Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 172–86.
George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, and Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, ed. John P. Harrington, second edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 40, 247.
Tyrone Guthrie famously foregrounded “the costumed and choreographed bodies of the performers … upon the scenery-less platform” of the thrust stages he championed: see Robert Shaughnessy, “Tyrone Guthrie,” in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (New York: Routledge, 2008), 136.
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© 2013 Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor
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Bourus, T. (2013). Poner en escena The History of Cardenio. In: Bourus, T., Taylor, G. (eds) The Creation and Re-Creation of Cardenio. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344229_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344229_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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