Theatrical Shakespearegresses at the Guthrie and Elsewhere

T HHIS ESSAY BEGAN as a response to a complex challenge issued in a call for papers on Shakespeare's plays that should investigate the subject of contemporary productions: do such non-traditional approaches-with Ariel as an androgynous punk, for example-enhance the characters, the text, the beauty, the point of the plays, or have some directors distorted the plays in making them more accessible to wider audiences?' The question is appropriately ambiguous, because the answer is, I think, both. And M. H. Abrams's classic coordinates in The Mirror and the Lamp seem to me pertinent for the purpose: first, the artist (playwright, director, designer, and so forth); second, the audience(s); third, the workitself; and an implicit fourth, the world. Equally pertinent are such questions as what, where, and when is a play? Is it in the conception and composition of the playwright? So most have thought, more or less, some emphasizing the playwright and others the conception and composition. In the eyes, mind, and viscera of the beholder? So most have been bound also to think, from ordinary spectators to reception theorists. In some kind of mimetic relationship between the play and the phenomenal world? Probably, somehow, by common consent if not by the consent of solipsists and language prison-housekeepers. Or, with particular reference to theater, is it in the performance and/ or the eyes of the director and company? Also yes, notwithstanding Aristotle, who may have been right in theory about the distance between spectacle (i.e., performance) and dramatic art (i.e., script) but who did not foreclose upon the actualities of aesthetic and theatrical Realpolitik, where all definitions and evaluations have their practical essence and descent. There, I take it, is a primary rub. These issues have of course been persistently controverted. Two pertinent recent discussions taking opposed positions in effect are those of Charles Marowitz in his Introduction to The Marowitz Shake

Art · Economics · Production (economics) · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theatre and Performance Studies