Shakespeare’s myriad-minded stage: Propositional spaces of cultural hybridity

The truth and fiction of Shakespearean performance

A theatrical performance is in more than one way both true and untrue, and at the same time outside the alethic space of truth value. Philip Sidney, in The Defence of Poesie, compares the art of the (dramatic) poet to the arts of other thinkers. Unlike the poet, the others are bound by the givens of Nature:

So doth the Astronomer looke vpon the starres, and by that hee seeth, setteth downe what order Nature hath taken therein. […] The naturall Philosopher thereon hath his name, and the Morall Philosopher standeth vpon the naturall vertues, vices, and passions of man; and followe Nature (saith hee) therein, & thou shalt not erre. The Lawyer sayth what men haue determined. The Historian what men haue done. (sig. C1^r) ⁵

In the final scene of As You Like It, Touchstone expounds on the subjunctive mode of speaking ‘vpon the seuenth cause’ of a lie (5.4.47–8), and the quarrel that is appeased by being predicated only on ifs: ‘Your If, is the onely peace-maker: much vertue in if’ (5.4.85). On Touchstone’s part (or Shakespeare’s?) this is more than a rhetorical tour de force but also a dramatic trick that prepares for the return of Rosalind and the nuptial god Hymen. As Maura Slattery Kuhn argues, it may have been in preparation for a possible theatrical magic: ‘What if […] Rosalind and Celia come in very much as they went out[?]’. ⁶ What Touchstone’s set piece may be doing theatrically is the opening up of the indeterminate, subjunctive mode – everything we are going to see in front of our eyes is only what if. After Hymen’s song, the dialogue remains in the subjunctive mode of if:

The theatrical opportunity, which offers itself here as a tool of maximising the effect of the performance, is to embrace the elusiveness of the embodiment and representation, the imaginary castles in the air that the poet has created. These are neither true, nor untrue – only the performative, subjunctive what if.

The complexities within a performance of a Shakespeare play are even greater, given the myth that Shakespeare’s works carry with them globally almost irrespective of whether audiences know the play in question or not, the dynamics of the subjunctive mode and its alethic qualities. The play in question simply is a cultural fact and it cannot be extricated from its canonicity. ⁸ In more than one way, a Shakespearean performance is an iteration of the known, a physical manifestation of the Shakespearean myth. In other words, it is a subjunctive what if event within a fictional world, and at the same time a re-enactment of a part of cultural memory. The latter perspective brings in an alethic dimension to the play: it becomes either a true or a false record of the Shakespearean memory – a rehearsal in its medieval and early modern sense (see OED ‘rehearsal’, 1a and 1b). When performing Shakespeare in translation, this sense of a possible re-enactment is further enhanced in that, as spectators, we are aware (though perhaps not always actively so) that the words we are hearing are a step or two removed from the Shakespearean original. Arguably – and in keeping with the specific truth value that Sidney advocates for the poet’s art – the truth of this record pertains to reality and its alethic qualities in a figurative sense.

The propositionality of the onstage space and action

The manuscript convolute Quodlibetica, volume II (dated 1680–99), deposited in the Premonstratensian Monastery of Prague, ⁹ contains diverse notes, accounts and stories, as well as occasional dialogues and plays in German or Latin, with the vernacular Czech surfacing here and there. ¹⁰ Apart from an adaptation of Andreas Gryphius’s Absurda Comica (itself an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the volume also has a section entitled

These rhymed riddles are often explicitly bawdy, playing with the vulgar (popular) usage of certain words – nowadays mostly retaining only their bawdy meaning. In the answer, which is provided after each riddle, alongside a chaste explanation, all possible bawdiness is wiped out, and the moral status quo is reasserted.

The two dozen listed riddles and several other logical teasers ¹¹ follow the same pattern: they flirt with the bawdy and the publicly suppressed before providing a plausible and morally innocent explanation. The riddles come in two steps:

triggering imagination, a free play of associations (the propositio phase: in propositione sua indecentia et turpia esse videantur); and

The first phase, propositio, evokes possibilities – the subjunctive what if – and coincides with the cognitive process of understanding of what actually goes on. The individual words used, indeterminate in themselves, open up spaces of indeterminacy (as Roman Ingarden would call it), an array of possibilities, interpretations and outcomes. ¹² The second phase, expositio, narrows down this array somewhat – more or often less, in the case of open-ended stories. Naturally, it is the first phase that constitutes the heart of these riddles, while disclaiming any alethic and ethic assertions made in that phase.

Arguably, the two-step process – formalised here in rhetorical terminology as propositio and expositio – is not only present but consciously and artistically deployed in performance. It extends into an action in space that is intentionally propositional – often signalling its elusive and unfixed nature. While the above instance from As You Like It is one particularly pronounced example, the entire presence of Rosalind in Arden in the ‘false’ shape and ‘untrue’ identity of Ganymede is probably capitalising on the physical qualities of the boy actor for whom the role was written:

Rosalind.

Were it not better,

Because that I am more than common tall,

That I did suite me all points like a man[?] (1.3.103–5)

Rosalind’s disguise is introduced by a propositional what if (‘Were it not better…’) and the boy actor’s cross-dressing back into his biological sex. In scenes that follow, the self-referential, metatheatrical perspective is present as a potentiality and can be worked with both within the fiction as well as in the propositional performance action ad hoc – here and now. Naturally, with a female actor playing Rosalind, the dynamics is different and, I would argue, perhaps even more complex in that another layer of propositional complexity: a role originally written for a tall boy actor is played by a female actor acknowledging the difference between the Shakespearean script and the theatrical performance here and now. ¹³

Shakespeare’s plays often conjure up this representational hybridity – very often in moments of heightened emotional upheaval. This is done probably to dislocate the audience’s experiencing of the story (the play) from its imperfect onstage presentation:

The Prologue to Henry V invokes the audience’s imaginary powers and effectively conjures up the propositional perspective: what presents itself to the naked eye is not the true essence of the story. In other words, the onstage space and the onstage action are in hybrid states: figurative and imperfect renderings (records) that mediate between the physical and the metaphysical states.

In a similar vein, after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the conspirators pause in what comes as a counterintuitive course of action. While they bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood, the dialogical exchange between Cassius and Brutus invokes the propositionality of their action, culminating in its ideological rooting: Cassius.

Stoop then, and wash. How many Ages hence

Shall this our lofty Scene be acted ouer,

In [States] vnborne, and Accents yet vnknowne?

It is all the more estranging that it is the ever-serious Brutus to dislocate the action through a comical comment – bleed in sport – as if in acknowledgement of the elusive representation of this notorious moment in world history. A similar trick is deployed in Antony and Cleopatra at the point of the Egyptian queen’s death when Cleopatra self-referentially speaks of ‘Some squeaking Cleopatra Boy[ing] my greatnesse / I’th’ posture of a Whore’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.260–1), tragicomically alienating the onstage action from the solemn moment.

Otakar Zich, in his seminal theatre theory oeuvre The Aesthetics of Dramatic Art (Estetika dramatického umění) (1931), devises what has become known as the actor triad: differentiating between (1) the actor and his/her role; (2) the stage figure (herecká postava), which is the result of the actor’s creative efforts, done with the help of stage direction, interaction, scenography and so on; and (3) the dramatic character or persona (dramatická osoba), which is a product of the spectator’s imagination based on the sensory perceptions of the performance. ¹⁴ As spectators we are very conscious of the materiality and specifics of (1) and (2): a particular actor portraying a particular role. On a more immediate level, the individual actions the actor takes may or may not contribute to the play; there are lapses, technical movements, slips of the tongue or even unconscious blunders, which we as spectators sift out and discount. This level of hybridity in the onstage action is an indelible part of the experience and is often navigated half-consciously, as if without noticing. At the same time, the fictional play (3) – the product of our selection, experience, judgment and imagination – is extrapolated from the hybrid perceptions of the propositions offered by the onstage action. ¹⁵ From this perspective, the onstage space and the onstage action are not only exempt from alethic judgment but also are elusive as embodiments of anything immanently tangible: they operate in a hybrid state of propositionality that often forestalls an objectively verifiable meaning.

From logocentric textuality to social interaction

Shakespeare’s plays are supreme works of literature – more than four centuries of readership have enjoyed and appreciated it as great and fundamental literary creations. This does not take away from their theatrical qualities but rather the opposite: their literary qualities can and often are enjoyed as one of the important components of their theatrical performance. However, this fact does not uproot or invalidate the essential basis of the plays as the textual rendering of an oral medium: the live performance. While the debate over the relation between stage-centred versus text-centred Shakespeare criticism seems to be ongoing, ¹⁶ it should be recognised that the plays exist in two epistemologically incompatible, though complementary modes: (1) the logocentric literary approach that takes the written, chirographic word as the basis of its significance, and (2) the performance approach that operates within an oral medium; the epistemic basis of this mode is not the word and its meaning but social interaction with the social fact at its core. ¹⁷

The dying words of King Lear are beautiful poetry: bleak, heart-rending and humbling. However, in performance, the words take on yet another quality. They are not the be-all-and-end-all of the act of reading, but verbal action woven into a complex, hybrid tissue of gestures, movements, attitudes, breaths and affects. In the First Folio version, Lear’s last words are these:

As John Russell Brown observes, ¹⁸ there are a number of ways in which the actor playing Lear can perform this crucial moment. Let us say that Lear may be pointing at the dead Cordelia’s lips: in such a case, he would be dying with the delusional hope that she may be alive. Alternatively, Lear may be pointing at invisible lips somewhere in the distance – perhaps the most merciful and hopeful gesture to conclude the play with: there is hope of reunion with Cordelia in another world. Or, Lear may be pointing in a disenchanted way at a spectator; this, in turn, would probably be the harshest conclusion of the tragedy: a total shattering of the play’s world. It is Lear’s – that is, Lear’s actor’s – gesture that creates the propositional social reality: the behaviour that gives meaning to the ending of the play. Lear’s words – unchanged, or more or less so, if we consider translation – are counterpointing the stage action. In good performance, those words will ring true once they grow from a firm basis of the onstage action.

Zich argues vehemently that the dramatic text is no more than a component of the theatre as a whole – in tandem with scenography (set, costume, lighting, sound), acting, direction and other departments. ¹⁹ While his critics have argued the prominence of the dramatic text among the components, ²⁰ the epistemic basis of performance is non-textual but rooted in social interaction – for the purposes of staging rendered in the textual form, one that effectively fails as an objective record of the theatrical art. The script captures ‘no more than the words of the characters – that is, what they speak, but not the speech itself and how it is spoken, let alone their play, their facial expressions or the stage business’. ²¹

If we accept, in Zich’s sense, social interaction as the epistemic basis of performance – rather than the traditional logocentric view perpetuated in much Anglo-American criticism and Shakespeare studies – a novel type of hybridity emerges: predicated not only on the Shakespearean script in its endless variants (including translations and adaptations) but also, crucially, on the social gestures and propositional actions and spaces created by performers. The latter are further complicated and multiplied by the autochthonous variants of the Shakespearean myth, the artistic missions and ambitions of the theatre makers and their own myths (celebrities). ²² With this in view, Cassius’s lines that self-reflectively acknowledge the historical momentum of the assassination acquire an additional level profundity – as if aware of the hybridity of the theatrical stage:

It is the states unborn (both states as countries and states as situations and mindsets) and accents yet unknown (both languages and intonations) that open up the myriad-mindedness of the possible renderings and propositional embodiments of the Shakespearean play text. These are the quicksands of the hybrid Shakespearean stage that invokes our imaginary forces and takes for granted that on stage