Studies in Theatre and Performance: Volume: 28 | Issue: 2

Studies in

Theatre & Performance

Studies in Theatre & Perform

ance | Volume Tw

enty Eight Num

ber Two

ISSN 1468-2761

28.2

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Volume Tw

enty Eight Num

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intellect Journals | Theatre &

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Studies in

Theatre & Performance Volume 28 Number 2 – 2008

Articles

91–110 Brecht and the disembodied actor Roy Connolly and Richard Ralley

111–126 Following the dream/passing the meme: Shakespeare in ‘translation’ Mike Ingham

127–145 Technique in exile: The changing perception of taijiquan, from Ming dynasty military exercise to twentieth-century actor training protocol

Daniel Mroz

147–159 ‘Your sincere friend and humble servant’: Evidence of managerial aspirations in Susannah Cibber’s letters

Helen Brooks

Notes and Queries

161–182 Stage directions: Valuable clues in the exploration of Elizabethan performance practice

Kay Savage

183 Aesthetic realism

Reviews

185–194 Reviews by Frances Babbage, Colin Chambers, Peter Thomson, Graham Ley and Kate Adams

9 771468 276009

ISSN 1468-2761 2 8

EditorPeter ThomsonDept. of DramaUniversity of ExeterThornleaNew North RoadExeterEX4 4LAUK+44 (0)1392 [email protected]

Associate EditorsAnuradha KapurNational School of Drama, India

Laurence SenelickTufts University, USA

Reviews EditorRebecca LoukesDept. of DramaUniversity of Exeter+44 (0) 1392 [email protected]

Printed and bound in Great Britain by4edge, UK

ISSN 1468–2761

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Studies in Theatre and PerformanceVolume 28 Number 2

Studies in Theatre and Performance is the official publication of theStanding Conference of University Drama Departments in the UK. Itincorporates Studies in Theatre Production, which had been a leadingforum for the analysis of theatrical practice, processes and performancefor a decade.

The journal is now published three times a year. We encourage thesubmission of articles which are not only descriptive of practicalresearch, but which delineate the ongoing analysis that formed a partof that research. Articles may also describe and analyse research under-taken into performance pedagogy. They are particularly welcome whenall this is related to broader theoretical or professional issues.

The SCUDD Website Home Page is at: <http://scudd.org.uk>

Editorial BoardChristopher Balme, University of Amsterdam, HollandChristopher Baugh, University of Leeds, UKDavid Bradby, Royal Holloway College, University of London, UKChristie Carson, Royal Holloway College, University of London, UKKennedy Chinyowa, University of ZimbabweJim Davis, University of Warwick, UKSteve Dixon, Brunel University, UKGreg Giesekam, University of Glasgow, UKGerry Harris, University of Lancaster, UKDee Heddon, University of GlasgowKirti Jain, National School of Drama, IndiaDerek Paget, University of Reading, UKMeredith Rogers, La Trobe University, Melbourne, AustraliaGlendyr Sacks, University of Haifa, IsraelElizabeth Sakellaridou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GreeceDenis Salter, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Advisory BoardMartin Banham, University of Leeds, UKAdrian Kiernander, University of New England, Australia Alison Oddey, University of Northampton Patrice Pavis, Université Paris 8, FranceJanelle Reinelt, University of Warwick, UKWilliam Huizhu Sun, Shanghai Theatre Academy, ChinaJulia Varley, Odin Theatre, DenmarkPhillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter, UK

STP-28-2-00-FM 4/18/08 1:19 PM Page 89

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Studies in Theatre and Performance Volume 28 Number 2 © 2008 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.91/1

Brecht and the disembodied actorRoy Connolly and Richard Ralley

AbstractThis article examines Brecht’s contribution to acting theory and the variousclaims and confusions that have surrounded this contribution when attemptshave been made to impose unity upon his ideas or to re-inscribe his theory in lightof his practice. Rather than get caught up in existing debates, our strategy is toexamine the processes that Brecht describes as a problem of action or behaviour,to look for a practical method for the actor and to interrogate this method via ref-erence to current ideas in the psychology of embodiment. In doing so, we contendthat, although Brecht’s ideas about acting are (and have been historically)employed to legitimise a range of practices, they are, in their essence, problematic,as they depend upon an over-conceptualisation of the human being and a privileg-ing of symbolic communication.

Brecht and the AcademyCan the approach to acting espoused by Brecht be practically implemented,and if so in what ways might this approach be said to differ from otherforms of acting? It might be assumed that this question is already thoroughlyexhausted, as ‘Brechtian’ acting often appears to circulate as standardcurrency for students, teachers and critics of theatre alike. The shorthandfor Brecht is certainly well known: Brechtian acting is, ‘devoid of emotion,declamatory, rooted in broad physical caricatures with no basis in reality’(Krause: 273). Alternatively, it is popularly held that, even if difficult to cir-cumscribe in their own right, Brecht’s ideas about acting can at least beelaborated through reference to their opposition with Stanislavski’s system(Zarrilli: 225) or Strasberg’s method (Krause: 273). This ‘folk’ view ofBrecht has significant prevalence, perhaps not least because it allowsBrecht’s ideas to be rendered with a neatness that facilitates their handingdown to successive generations of actors and students. However, thoughthis version of Brecht may suit the exigencies of classroom, rehearsal orassessment, the generalisation it entails will be obvious to any but themost dilettante reader. Amid some sections of the critical establishment,this version of Brecht has of course been under challenge for some time.Eric Bentley drew attention to the dangers of creating binary oppositionsbetween Brecht and Stanislavski as early as 1964 in his essay ‘AreStanislavski and Brecht Commensurable?’ (although, ironically, at thesame time, incorporating the binarism into his argument). FollowingBentley, initiatives designed to expose the flaws that underpin accounts of

91STP 28 (2) 91–110 © Intellect Ltd 2008

Keywordsacting

psychology

embodiment

emotion

consciousness

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Brecht’s ideas – as simply antithesis to mimetic acting – have been numer-ous. These studies provide a more convincing portrait of Brecht by high-lighting not only the problem of constructing binary oppositions but alsoby drawing attention to the fragmented nature of Brecht’s output. In thisregard, Peter Brooker argues against the tendency to see Brecht’s work asfixed and unchanging, or to view it as ‘revered holy writ’ (Brooker: 185);Elizabeth Wright reminds us we are dealing, not with a closed system, butwith ideas formulated over thirty years which are ‘scattered about hiswritings in the form of aphorisms, poetic fragments, working notes, andinstructions’ (Wright: 25); and John Rouse draws our attention to theabsence of the dominance of any single all-powerful acting technique, letalone the dominance of a global acting methodology (Rouse: 238), andidentifies, on the contrary, ‘the application of virtually the full range ofcustomary actor techniques’ (Rouse: 238).

These studies have addressed some problems in the ‘folk’ conception ofBrecht. In doing so, they have, however, done little to resolve the matterof what constitutes the Brechtian performer and, arguably, threaten toincrease contention. A quick review of the literature certainly discloses adiversity of opinion. We thus, at once, find Brecht co-opted to reaffirmconventional mimetic forms through a theatre founded on ‘the truth of lifeand the warmth of the presentation of the role’ (Eddershaw 1994: 262);Brecht as advocate of heightened playing and ‘a theatre of rhetoricalgesture and process’ (Baugh: 250); Brecht as rebel against self-indulgentperformance and actors who will not subordinate themselves to thedemands of the play (Hurwicz, cited in Eddershaw 1994: 262); and Brechtas the father of modern theatre, whose ideas, either alone (cf. Brooker:194) or in combination with other practitioners (usually Artaud), ‘providethe basic structure of contemporary drama’ (Wright: 115). Most recently,Brecht has emerged as the key practitioner for anti-foundationalists orproponents of postmodern theatre, for whom Brecht is seen as providing ameans of resisting, destabilising, or even dissolving Western Theatre tradi-tion (cf. Diamond 1997). In such readings Brecht’s contemporary heirsare held to lie not in ‘theatre’ but in Performance Art, ‘where interpreta-tion is banished from the stage’ (Baugh: 251) or experimental feministperformance (cf. Love 1995). As Michael Patterson points out, what wemean by Brechtian continues, then, to be variously misapplied, looselydefined and freely adapted to the point where it can seem to be renderedmeaningless (Patterson: 273). Yet simultaneously it is commonplace forthe notion of Brechtian acting to persist as a form that can be absolutisedand distinguished from customary, mimetic or historical forms of acting.Can we get beyond this confusion? As Michael Patterson has it, can we getbeyond using Brecht’s ideas as a ‘critical hold all’ (Patterson: 273) whichlegitimises all kinds of practices or as an ‘exercise in public relations’(Patterson: 275)?

This article seeks to identify the limits of Brecht’s theories about acting.We explore the models of performance that Brecht advocates and examine

92 Roy Connolly and Richard Ralley


the relationship between approach and function that he expounds. Indoing so, we address the issue of ‘Brechtian’ acting, not only as a philo-sophical problem, but also as a problem of action or behaviour, and askwhether or not Brecht provides a practical method for the actor. In con-fronting these issues, we argue that there are clear reasons why Brecht’stheory is over-interpreted and/or misunderstood, and suggest that theconfusion Brecht provokes is not, as might be supposed, merely a conse-quence of contention over his theories, but rather because of the view ofthe human being that he adopts. In this respect, we contend that Brechtinherits a dualism which divorces mind from body and privileges represen-tation over action (Clark; Dennett; Damasio 1994). Although privilegingthe mind and the human’s symbol-making capacities – and correspond-ingly underestimating physical processes – is, of course, complicit with avein in twentieth-century epistemology, we argue that in fragmenting thehuman being’s emotional, physical and cognitive processes, Brechtinscribes a disjunctive view of the actor. Thus, just as it might be arguedthat the contradictions between Brecht’s political beliefs and personalbehaviours reflect his deferral of engagement with the physical world, soBrecht’s misunderstanding of human communicative processes (his over-conceptualisation of the human and his reliance on the symbolic order)produces a considerable problem for the practical realisation of a perfor-mance style. And, consequently, though Brecht’s ideas may appear theo-retically compelling, they do little to negotiate the problem of acting as itexists in the real world. In addressing this matter, we turn to the growingliterature in psychology that argues that dualist views need to be replacedby embodied views of cognition, which emphasise that thought is a practi-cal activity (Cosmides and Tooby; Gibson; Glenberg; O’Regan and Noe),and that physical, emotional and mental capacities must be integrated ifhuman communication and interpretation (e.g. the actor-audience rela-tionship) is to be understood.1

Brecht’s theoryIt might be assumed that the inconsistencies in the reception of Brecht’stheories can be attributed to inconsistencies in the theories themselves,with these in turn attributed to the long period over which they are com-posed, a period during which Brecht steadily works his way through aseries of models for the theatre. There is some truth here, as there areundoubtedly contradictions among Brecht’s ideas, and we will return tothese later (cf. Wright: 25). Equally though, there is, in fact, very little dis-agreement about the most salient points that Brecht makes. In this regard,the same key propositions of Brecht emerge in criticism time and again.Foremost here is Brecht’s advocacy of an approach to acting and the stagethat will demystify representation. This is encapsulated by Brecht’s much-cited reference to the importance of creating a shift from a theatre basedupon emotion and catharsis to a theatre founded on critical detachment,in which ‘instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to

1. ‘A growing body ofopinion suggests thatthe view of cognitionas distinct fromperception, action,and emotion has no theoretical or empiricalfoundation . . . At the root of thesedistinctions is afundamentallydisembodied anddualist view of themind. The notion of acentral executor thatis distinct from theinformation acquiredfrom theenvironment . . . [andsuch] distinctions donot correspond to the structure of thenervous system or to how its functionsare physiologicallyimplemented’ (Barton138–9).

93Brecht and the disembodied actor


grips with things’ (Brecht: 23). Central to this is, of course, the alienationeffect, in which what is ‘natural’ will ‘have the force of what is startling’(Brecht: 71). The alienation effect promises to transform the actor from‘icon’ to signifier, with the actor no longer achieving impact by embodyinga character but instead by presenting ‘the person demonstrated as astranger’, with the character’s action placed firmly in parenthesis (Brecht:125). A concise version of this view is supplied by Elin Diamond:

In performance the actor alienates rather than impersonates her character,she quotes or demonstrates her character’s behaviour instead of identifyingwith it. Brecht theorises that if the performer remains outside of the character’sfeelings, the audience may also and thus freely analyze and form opinionsabout the play’s ‘fable’.

(Diamond 1997: 45)

Theory set against practiceThe problem of these statements begins to emerge when we examineBrecht’s practice. Here it becomes clear that the aspects of the theory cir-cumscribed above (abstract and philosophical ideas) do not square withthe exigencies of Brecht’s rehearsal room. Eddershaw, indeed, suggeststhat, in rehearsal, the ambition articulated in Brecht’s theory is put to oneside in place of pragmatism (Eddershaw 1994: 254). Weber (1994) alsosuggests that Brecht’s practice reveals an emphasis on results, and there-fore only partial engagement with the mechanics or process via whichresults are achieved. Similarly, accounts of the detail of Brecht’s rehearsal-room work pull against the theory. Though the rehearsal techniques thathave become known as Brechtian undoubtedly have utility, here, ratherthan a manifestation of ‘difference,’ we find techniques that are equivalentin many respects to, and in some cases overlap markedly with, those tech-niques developed by other twentieth-century European practitioners (suchas behavioural analysis, role-swapping, narration, and use of metonymy;cf. Rouse; Eddershaw 1994, 1996). These techniques are less a reflectionof a theoretical position than a means of textual analysis and a series ofmore or less inventive responses to the problem of staging the play. Beyondthis, Brecht’s process is documented as relying to a startling extent onphysical circumstance – what he calls the ‘taken for granted’ (Brecht:235). This is particularly the case where performance is concerned.Although Brecht’s theory is elaborated by turning, as Stanislavski does, towhat can be learnt from great actors, Brecht does not proceed from theseactors to analysis, he rather seeks to appropriate their skills to support histheory, co-opting virtuoso performers to his cause. Furthermore, ratherthan reformists, the actors he favours are those actors we might identifywith the traditions of melodrama and personality-based performance,actors marked by plangent vocal or physical characteristics or exceptionaltechnique. Here we have Frank Wedekind, Hans Gaugler, Helene Weigel,Charlie Chaplin and Charles Laughton. Laughton presents a particularly



interesting case, as Brecht depicts him as a Gordon Craig-like renaissancefigure, expresses reverence for Laughton’s ‘inimitable’, extra-theatricalqualities, and even praises Laughton for the very thing he is usually takento oppose: his command of inspiration (Brecht: 163). Brecht’s lack ofengagement with the practical problem of acting is further underlined bythe dismissiveness with which he is reported to have treated the complexi-ties of the actor’s task at various points in his career, as Thomson notes hisfailure to ‘appreciate, or even to recognise, the needs and vulnerabilities ofactors’ (Thomson: 26) and his refusal to entertain the task-based difficul-ties they might experience (Thomson: 27). Brecht’s real-world relationshipwith actors might then be variously characterised as based on pragma-tism, reverence or aloofness. Though these attitudes reveal diverse empha-sis, in all cases there is a clear ambition in Brecht’s view of acting thatdoes not find equivalence in practice. The pragmatic Brecht, concernedwith the practicalities of acting, iterates other theatre forms or draws uponthe extra-theatrical characteristics of actors to negotiate the gaps in histheory. The aloof or reverent Brecht meanwhile displays a tendency toover-regard ideal forms and to avoid engagement with the real-world com-plexities of realising a method. Bearing this in mind, it is important to treatwith circumspection the suggestion that Brecht’s ideas are ‘workable’ if, orwhen, properly understood, as it is precisely this kind of attitude thatunderlies the confusion that actors and students experience when firstintroduced to Brecht.2 To develop this point further, it is helpful to turnour attention to the historical context that informs Brecht’s attitudetowards the actor.

Brecht’s AdversariesBrecht’s theatre is founded, like most twentieth-century theatre move-ments, on the rejection of existing paradigms (cf. Zarrilli: 222): specifically,according to Eddershaw, the style of acting he observed in Germany in the1920s and 1930s (Eddershaw 1994: 254) which swamps the audiencewith emotionalism and thereby deceives or dupes them. Brecht thus con-tends: ‘We need to get right away from the old naturalistic school of acting,the dramatic school with its large emotions . . . This isn’t the kind of repre-sentation that can express our time’ (Brecht: 68). As will be evident, thereis a marked overlap with Stanislavski’s project to rid the theatre of histri-onic performance. However, as mentioned previously, whereas Stanislavskistarts with real human beings and the rehearsal room and seeks to unpickwhat is going on through observation and experiment, Brecht begins withabstraction and theory and applies this to the physical realm. Furthermore,he favours, not an attack on anything as small as the over-emotionalism ofa few German actors, but instead prefers large revolutionary language andopposition to the whole of Aristotelian theatre. This is, of course, a vagueand generalised opponent (see Brecht: 87) which conflates a range oftheatre forms (forms that Brecht subsequently both approves and disap-proves). Brecht nevertheless maintains his opposition to the Aristotelian

2. We find Rousesuggesting that thedynamic betweenpractice and theory issuch that Brechtcontinually modifiesor reconstitutes histheories on the basisof what he learnsfrom his practice(Rouse: 228), andBrooker denying anyretreat from theoryinto practice andclaiming instead thatthere is a fullymaterialist, that is tosay practical, accentto his theory: ‘thetheory of gestic actingwas a theory ofperformance’(Brooker: 197).



on the basis of its collusion with emotionalism and illusion (Brecht: 78).Brecht’s attack on the actor convincing an audience that he or she reallyis the character (see Eddershaw 1994: 255) proceeds on this basis. Brechtcharacterises this theatre as one in which the actor loses himself in therole, persuading himself and thereby others that the actor is transformedcompletely into the character (Brecht: 137, 214). In contrast, Brecht seeksa theatre in which the actor is a demonstrator. There is however, somethingrather disingenuous about all this. Brecht’s account of realistic theatre iscertainly guilty of the very thing for which he admonishes realistic theatre:conflating representation with reality. His reference to transformation –‘the actor convinces himself and thereby the audience’ – in particular mis-represents or misunderstands realistic acting. The ontological confusioncertainly stands out, for even though realism might exploit a certainiconicity, realism is never like reality. In psychological terms, the acted roleis always just that, ‘acted’. Even if the stage environment, conscious effortand emotion provide enough information to convince the actor’s physicalnature of the ‘truth’, there is still no need to think of the actor becoming,clinically, a different person. The actor may be immersed in an experience,but this does not create an independent, continuously experiencing self,free of the actor’s own ability to monitor and control events (cf. Metzinger).The enacted role is merely the ‘centre of narrative gravity’ (in Dennett’sterms). On these terms, for Stanislavski (for example) acting is a practicalskill in terms of combining sensations and memories in, crucially, veryactive and dynamically varying contexts, but this does not diminish thefact that the actor always has control over the character and knows he isacting. Piscator makes a similar point, reminding us that all acting involvesthe self-conscious regard for what is shown to an audience or, put anotherway, demonstration (see Krause: 272). Brecht then sets himself against anill-defined and highly questionable opponent. Aristotelian theatre is atonce generalised, conflated with emotionalism and presented as accom-plishing an ontological shift. Subsequently, Brecht is led into many tanglesas he is forced to qualify exactly what it is that he opposes and how histheories play out in light of this. Furthermore, in making these qualifica-tions, exactly what it is that he opposes is subject to considerable fluidity,drifting as it does between the extremes of heightened playing – the non-realistic (cf. Brecht: 213) – and illusionism – too realistic (cf. Brecht: 142).

Brecht in practiceGiven Brecht’s endeavour to work within the structures of mainstreamtheatrical practices, it is perhaps not surprising that, when we look for dif-ference in his approach to acting we find, instead, re-inscription of existingtheatrical approaches under the name of epic theatre. This is also the caseif we turn away from theoretical issues to look at famous examples ofBrechtian acting. To elaborate this point it is instructive to refer to perhapsthe most famous of all Brecht’s acted roles: Helene Weigel’s performancein the Berliner Ensemble’s 1951 production of Mother Courage. For many



critics, Weigel’s Courage is the definitive Brechtian performance and it isthus much cited as an exemplar of the Brechtian approach. Furthermore,this exemplariness is held to adhere in one sequence of Weigel’s perfor-mance in particular: her use of a heightened and elaborate, yet also silent,scream to express grief at the death of her son Swiss Cheese. On theseterms, according to Rouse, Weigel’s scream is an example of the ‘type ofcarefully elaborated physicality that the ensemble’s actors were expectedto develop’ (Rouse: 236). He argues furthermore:

The very physicality of the moment moves it beyond the level of naturalisticgrief with which an audience can empathise. We are shocked, stunned,shaken by Courage’s grief, but we are not allowed to share it on the plane ofpetty emotional titillation. The technically accomplished extremity of Weigel’sacting, in short, defamiliarises Courage’s grief through the very demonstrationof that grief.

(Rouse: 236)

This kind of elaboration of natural behaviour is thus held to captureBrecht’s idea of action formed on a large scale and ‘given a stamp thatsinks into the memory’ (Brecht: 83), or alternatively, using Brecht’s terms,this may be identified as an example of the gestic principle taking overfrom ‘the principle of imitation’ (Brecht: 86). Though this may be criticallyexigent, when we examine the detail of what is described here, we findexisting theatre technique – if not the nature of Western theatre itself - hasbeen co-opted as Brechtian. As critics such as Victor Shklovsky and PeterStockwell argue, the key feature of all literary and theatrical works is tomake the familiar world appear new to us by focusing in, re-ordering, jux-taposing, and heightening reality. Thus, all theatre might be said to involvesomething very similar to the kind of defamiliarisation Rouse identifies:that is, all fictive experimenting with human experience opens up a spacefor reflection on the world and/or critique (cf. Shklovsky; Stockwell: 14).In terms of the specifics of Weigel’s approach, it is also difficult to detectwhere her approach departs from mimetic or Aristotelian theatre. For inmimetic theatre, the emphasis is also less upon faithfully depicting appear-ances than upon distilling and heightening ‘real life’. In both approaches,the actor seeks to communicate an idea, not by producing a character intotality but by drawing on certain correspondences with reality. Furthermore,we find the clearest account of this kind of metonymic process (the highlymediated selection from life) in Stanislavski’s system, where he defines theactor’s task, not as to reproduce or capture reality, but as to distil quotidianbehaviour via ‘attention’ or ‘purpose’ of various kinds: that is, the actor mustresist ‘amateurish rubber stamps’ (Stanislavski: 28) and traits that ‘happento flash into the mind’ (Stanislavski: 30), and instead refine action, trans-forming reality into a poetical equivalent via the creative imagination(Stanislavski: 174). What we have in the practice of Brecht’s most famousactors is not an oppositional mode of performance, but rather reinscription



of existing theatre practices (Brecht: 199). If Brecht’s theory does (as Rousesuggests) follow behind practice, Brecht’s theorisation of his practice is pri-marily a reconceptualisation and redesignation of established techniques.Elizabeth Wright effectively sums up the point:

What he calls ‘epic theatre’ is not a wilful invention displacing the ‘natural’theatre, the point being that there is no such thing. Both epic and ‘natural’theatre have demonstrators who show their interests, spectators who arecaught up in the events and prepared to take the role of arbitrators. In eachcase there is an interplay of art and life: the experience is ‘repeated’ and the-atricalised, rather than imitated as if it were happening for the first time.

(Wright: 31–32)

Contemporary Brechtian performersWhat, though, if we look at the area where Brecht’s contemporary advo-cates are most likely to be found, in the field of experimental performance?Might the practices of avant-garde theatre uncover the radical potential inBrecht? As already mentioned, Brecht provides, if not a practical method,then certainly inspiration for those seeking a means to resist the ‘repre-sentational frames of conventional theatre’ (Love: 275). Here, the practicesof the actors Lauren Love and Duane Krause are instructive, as both per-formers offer reflections on their attempts to implement an ‘epic’ style.3

For each practitioner, Brecht’s appeal rests on the same proposition:

When he appears on the stage, besides what he actually is doing he will at allessential points discover, specify, imply what he is not doing; that is to say hewill act in such a way that the alternative emerges as clearly as possible, thathis acting allows the other possibilities to be inferred . . . every sentence andevery gesture signifies a decision . . . The technical term for this procedure is‘fixing the “not . . . but”’.

(Brecht: 137)

Following this idea, Krause states that, when adopting an epic approach,actors should attempt to reveal to the audience the choices they havemade in presenting their character (rather than mask these choices andmake them appear inevitable) so that alternatives may be recognised(Krause: 273). To achieve this end, Krause recommends a performancestyle based upon a pastiche of different representational forms. In addi-tion, he argues that the actor should reveal the means of representation atseveral points during performance itself by ‘dropping’ the constructedfaçade and assuming a ‘natural’ voice and posture to address the audiencedirectly. Working in this way, he argues: ‘the spectator’s view of the char-acter is constantly intercepted by the actor/subject’ (Krause: 265), and asa consequence he suggests, by way of Elin Diamond, ‘the spectator is able tosee what s/he can’t see: a sign system as a sign system’ (Diamond 1988: 90).However, despite Krause’s enthusiasm for this approach, when it comes to

3. In this regard, bothpractitioners drawheavily on theaccount of Brechtoffered by ElinDiamond in her 1988essay ‘Brechtiantheory/feministtheory: towards agestic feministcriticism’, and later inUnmaking Mimesis.However, althoughDiamond attests tothe ‘stunning’ effectsof Brechtian acting,she offers little in theway of practicalmethod, concedingthat ‘A-effects are noteasy to produce’(1997: 47).



the issue of whether or not his practical methods achieve their expressends, Krause is rather circumspect. He offers the conjecture that the per-formance is ‘no doubt “strange” as well as “surprising” for at least some ofthe audience’ (Krause: 274), but does not interrogate the viewer’s experi-ence beyond this. Thus, though Krause may successfully draw attention tothe duality of performance, he does not distinguish the duality he fore-grounds from the duality that is present in all acting (actor/role). He cer-tainly does not get as far as explicating the relationship between the actordisrupting character and the audience engaging in critique. Love’s approach ismore politically motivated than Krause. She aligns herself with a feministperformance project and seeks a performance technique which will ‘allowthe actor to point to the construction of . . . gender’ (Love: 276). For Love,the basis of resisting organic performance lies in two things. She mirrorsKrause’s desire to have the character and actor present simultaneously, asshe argues having an actor who stands beside the role, and steps in andout of character (Love: 287, 288) creates a unique tension which, in turn,opens a space for critique (Love: 282). In addition, Love’s approach is alsomarked by the endeavour to disrupt the conventional idea of female char-acter and thereby resist collusion with the male gaze (Love: 284). She thusforegrounds the importance of playing against the text’s overall image,and rewriting character through performance. However, although Loveenthuses about the possibility of resistant performance on this basis, herapproach – like Krause’s – stumbles on the point of intentional fallacy.She focuses on what is intended to be read in a highly selective manner.Furthermore, upon inspection, the resistant element in her work owesmore to Stanislavski’s notion of the superobjective than anything in Brecht’stheory (cf. Love: 286), with the performance she advocates resembling theperformance of any actor playing with an awareness of subtext, and offer-ing a reading or interpretation of a role. Giving the inconsistencies implicithere, we find Love ultimately unable to testify to the efficacy of her workand acknowledging that the outcome of her efforts is rather dubious:‘Whether or not the spectators questioned their assumptions about genderor representation is unknown to me and highly doubtful’ (Love: 288).Consequently, though placing their faith in, and weight behind, Brecht,both Krause and Love end their reflections upon their work with self-effacement, looking towards the future breakthroughs of like-minded prac-titioners rather than celebrating their own achievements. This deferral is,though, perhaps not surprising, as it mirrors Brecht’s own experience. Wemight remember that Brecht himself was circumspect about his success inrealising his theories, noting that only ‘a few connoisseurs’ were apprecia-tive of his new, cold, rational method and that, at best, this approach rep-resented a staging post on the way towards the new theatre (Brecht: 28).In the remainder of the article, we propose to show that the inability ofBrecht and these other practitioners to realise their intentions is not, asthey assume, because of the embryonic nature of their efforts, it is ratherbecause their practice incorporates an erroneous view of the human



being. In order to make this argument, it is appropriate at this point toturn to something that may appear to have been conspicuously absentfrom this article – Brecht’s politics, for it is Brecht’s politics that providethe clue to the problem with his view of the actor.

The constructed humanIt is, of course, commonplace to note the influence of Marxist epistemologyon Brecht’s thinking, so we do not propose to visit this topic in depth. Forpresent purposes (our discussion of Brecht and the actor), there are,though, two aspects of Marxism that are particularly relevant. Firstly,Marxism’s suspicion of the natural order of things and accompanyingemphasis, in league with early twentieth-century psychology, on the con-structedness of the human.4 And, secondly, Marxism’s concern with raisingconsciousness about the power relationships at work beneath social andhuman structures. Drawing on Marx, Brecht seeks to disrupt the idea ofhuman nature, natural order and ‘“universal” situations’ (Brecht: 96) andto reveal the human world – and by extension the human being’s identity –as an artificial or arbitrary construct, bound up in changeable social,political and economic factors (Brecht: 86). In doing so, Brecht petitionssubjects to become aware of their socialisation and political oppression.This view of the human as social rather than biological entity is capturedat its most extreme when Brecht speculates: ‘as in mathematics, it is onlythe series which assigns meaning. “One is no one. One has to be addressedby another”; man only comes into being via the language of a collective,by being called upon to occupy a place. Identity is not there from birth butproduced within a signifying system’ (cited in Wright: 35). On these termsthe human being is represented as narrative matter or data with his/heridentity at best unstable.

The influence of behaviourismThe depiction of fluid identity may suggest chaos at the personal level, butBrecht finds a point of anchorage amid this account of the human throughan appeal to rationality and science. Furthermore, in science he finds anatural ally for his perspective in behaviourist psychology which, likeMarxism, focuses on the social influences on behaviour.5 In this regard,behaviourist science’s aim to control clear and distinct experimental oper-ations and focus entirely on observables rather than the inner sources ofmind provides Brecht with the inspiration for a new theatre technique inwhich ‘social laws’ are subjected to rigorous rational investigation (Brecht:50, 67, 86). Under the influence of behavourism, Brecht seeks to stagenarratives which will enable a ‘radical transformation of the mentality ofour time’ with ‘theatre, art, and literature [forming] the ideological super-structure for a solid, practical rearrangement of our age’s way of life’(Brecht: 23). In this it is important to note that Brecht conceives that it is‘mental’ influence that impinges on the body of society rather than theunderlying subconscious imperatives of evolved psychological mechanisms

4. See Durkheim’sinfluential suggestionthat society is a bodyof ideas that is notconstrained byhuman nature and which providesthe mould for thecontent of the mind (Durkheim[1895]1962). For aconverse modernview see Buss (2001):‘Culture rests on afoundation of evolvedpsychologicalmechanisms andcannot be understoodwithout thosemechanisms’ (Buss:955).

5. Brecht seesbehaviourism as thesource of a new artcapable of affectingthe world: ‘We haveacquired an entirelynew psychology: viz. the American Dr Watson’sBehaviourism . . .Such is our time, andthe theatre must beacquainted with itand go along with it,and work out anentirely new sort ofart such as will becapable of influencingmodern people’(Brecht: 67).



(Brecht: 23). As a consequence, Brecht aims not merely to reflect the worldbut to lift the world onto a dialectic plain through abstraction, and to focusupon symbolic meaning and the essential aspects of social forces.

Appealing to consciousnessBrecht’s privileging of rationality and second-order or symbolic meaning isbound up with a sense of the necessity for communication to take place onthe conscious plane in order to facilitate critical detachment and analysis:that is, playing has ‘to enable and encourage the audience to draw abstractconclusions’ (Brecht: 100).6 In this respect, the play-audience relationshipis seen as being underpinned by the kind of algorithmic rules by whichmathematical problems may be solved, and the actor is inscribed as datathat can be fragmented and read in multiple fashion by an autonomousspectator. Brecht’s view here is utopian. He wishes to produce an audiencewho will confront the contradictions and flux of the social world (Brecht:76). Emphasising ideology and social change is, though, also for Brecht ameans of addressing what he sees as the covert operations of existing theatrepractice, where acceptance or rejection of actors’ actions and utterancestake place ‘in the audience’s subconscious’ (Brecht: 91). For Brecht thiskind of physical, non-mediated, non epistemised interaction is to be resistedat all costs. The body, unlike the mind, is not to be trusted, as it risksduping the audience or flooding the human system with the chaos of theorganic.7 In this regard, Brecht sees ‘flesh and blood’ not as a wellspringof human nature and communication but as site of dysfunction, i.e. thebody is the source of a cloddish resistance that stands in the way of ideas(Brecht: 46).

Disembodiment in practice/the disembodied actorA conception of the human as data rather than physicality, then, formsthe basis of how Brecht approaches the actor. He demotes the physical andfocuses on laws and that which is available to consciousness. He seeks notto exploit physical communicative capacities but to disembody the actor intothe semiotic, so that a language of metaphor stands in for direct experience,and the actor operates as a signifier (a symbol) rather than as a referent(cf. Wright: 114). This preoccupation with the symbolic order is reflectedin many aspects of Brecht’s practice. As an example, we can note Brecht’sfondness for mime, where the creation and manipulation of symbolic lan-guage rather than direct or pre-symbolic communication requires the spec-tator to work at constructing narrative meaning. Of course, more notably,this is also at the root of Brecht’s suspicion of actors’ over-identifying withthe characters they play and of iconicity in performance. In order to avoiddirect correlation (the unity of actor and role) Brecht employs a variety ofdevices to dehumanise the actor and turn the actor into a symbol (make-up, performance style etc.). His employment of a device such as the actorswitching between mimetic acting and narration also reflects this ambi-tion (as narration is also of course another means of mediating reality)


6. This, once again,illustrates the extentto which Brecht’sviews reflect the ideasof his time; a similardistrust of thesubconscious and thebody was prevalent inpsychology.

7. Brecht’s distrust ofprocesses that arebelow consciousnessleads him to warnagainst employingevolutionarycapacities as a meansof communication: forexample ‘a turn of thehead with tautenedneck muscles, willmagically lead theaudience’s eyes’(Brecht: 193).


(Brecht: 58). In all cases Brecht sees it as his task to establish new rules forthe art of acting, with devices such as the alienation effect, the gestic styleand narration operating as symbolic devices ‘designed to disrupt the imag-inary unity between producer and text, actor and role, and spectator andstage’ (Wright: 2). As Elizabeth Wrights notes, this is an enterprise whichis similar in spirit to Barthes’s project in S/Z (Wright: 2). However, asBrecht works with actors, and not as Barthes does with words, Brechtruns together organic experience (what is presented via the body) and thesymbolic (what is read).

Brecht’s ErrorIn conflating the human with the operation of the human’s consciousness,and, indeed, inferring that the body needs to be held together by con-sciousness, Brecht overestimates mental processes and correspondinglyunderestimates physical capacities, direct human communication and thebody. This misunderstanding or mistrust of the body leads Brecht todivorce information from its carrier and cut the actor adrift in a disembod-ied or post-human theatre (Brecht: 95). In seeking to transform actingfrom an organic process to the manipulation of data, Brecht overlooks theextent to which the organic and not the textual (extra-theatrical qualitiesand information from outside the play) must be drawn upon by both actorand audience (Brecht: 54). Similarly, in expecting the actor to have con-scious control of acting Brecht fails to appreciate how the actors who mustdevelop his works actually function. His acting theory is thus incompatiblewith what the actor is able to achieve. Human predispositions cannot beignored. They are central to communication. Without the human elementacting is reduced to a mechanical process. In practice, furthermore, thereality of the human will always intervene and get in the way of consciousawareness. The tension here is confirmed by practical experiences andcommentaries of actors, for whom Brecht’s theories over-intellectualiseand/or misconceive the nature of acting. This sense is effectively capturedby Alec Guinness’s contention that Brecht’s theories ‘cut right across thenature of the actor substituting some cerebral process for the instinctive’(cited in Eddershaw 1994: 265). And it is also reflected upon by AnthonySher and Charles Laughton, who, despite being renowned exponents ofBrechtian theatre, each, nevertheless, profess not to understand Brechtand thus to employ conventional acting techniques when performing inhis plays (Eddershaw 1994: 260, 265). Such testimonies help substantiatethe view that it is not sufficient to conceive of the human (and thereforethe actor) as a cultural construct; the biological dimension must also beunderstood. In order to explore this problem further it is instructive at thispoint to turn to the much debated topic of emotion.

EmotionThe role of emotion (or not) in Brecht’s theatre has generated much dis-cussion. This is because of clear tension in Brecht’s expressions. On the



one hand, he conceives of emotion as a source of disruption which induceshelpless and involuntary ‘lurchings’ (Brecht: 89) and so suggests thatactors should play against emotion (Brecht: 122) portraying incidents ofutmost passion without delivery becoming heated (Brecht: 93). He alsoclaims that demonstration can ‘lose its validity’ if emotion is reproduced(Brecht: 122); and at his most provocative asserts his disdain for ‘the scumwho want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed’ (Brecht: 14). Onthe other hand, Brecht notes that ‘neither the public nor the actor must bestopped from taking part emotionally’ (Brecht: 173) and admonishes thefrequently recurring mistake of supposing that epic production dispenseswith emotional effects (Brecht: 88). After considerable debate on this topic,most critics have abandoned the old assumption that Brecht throws emotionout of the theatre, and now accept that emotion is, in fact, very much apart of his work (cf. Meyer-Dinkgräfe: 64).

However, the various debates about whether or not Brecht permitsemotion, and, if so, the nature of this emotion, have obscured the realproblem: Brecht inscribes an emotion/reason dualism which misunder-stands the way people transmit and receive information (Brecht: 15) (formore on Brecht’s view of rational and emotional points of view see Brecht:145). Though this is consistent with much of European epistemology, it isa perspective that is problematic from the point of view of modern psy-chology. Here, the idea that cognition is skewed towards representationand abstract problem-solving is increasingly being replaced by approachesthat look at the affective nature of mind. Under such approaches, thehuman is no longer seen on the one hand as a coldly rational processor ofinformation or, on the other, as irrational and error-prone. Emotion is,rather, accepted as an integral part of thinking. This can be termed a shiftfrom cold to hot cognition. In hot cognition, motivational systems are seento drive cognitive systems, and emotion and purpose are held to be at theheart of thinking and engagement with the world. A growing number ofresearchers working from this premise thus argue that emotion helps humanbeings organise and select responses when negotiating the environmentand each other (see Brecht: 193). For Metzinger, emotion is central to thenotion of the ‘self ’. For Panksepp, emotion provides a precondition for theemergence of thought and reflective self-awareness (Panksepp: 150). ForLeDoux, the human system is an emotional system (LeDoux: 72). And forDamasio – perhaps the most significant contemporary theorist of emotion –emotion not only makes communication more efficient, it also operates asa kind of metacognition (Damasio 2003: 69), which is essential to thinking,meaning and decision-making (Damasio 2003: 121). Correspondingly,Damasio argues that judgements made in ‘emotion-impoverished’ circum-stance are likely to be erratic, or underdeveloped (Damasio 2003: 144–50).

These perspectives foreground the efficacy present in emotion. Suchviews have many advantages for explaining human interaction with theworld. They are also helpful to the analysis of theatre, as they offer a plau-sible account of how the human being engages with the experience of a



phenomenon such as a play, by giving an indication of the kind of humantendencies that need to be drawn upon if literary artefacts are to achievetheir effects (cf. Carroll 2007). In this regard, we might note the deicticmanner in which drama functions, that is, how it depends on anchoringmeaning to context. For a dramatic world to function, the spectator mustbe allowed to immerse himself in that world, and through this immersionto familiarise himself with local laws, find his way round, understand theparticipatory relationships between characters, and orientate himself inrelation to shifts in location and time (cf. Stockwell: 44–6). A hot view ofcognition suggests that emotion and empathy are the key to this kind ofdeictic engagement, that emotion and empathy bind the spectator to theplay and facilitate the identification that is essential for tracking a charac-ter’s perspective (Stockwell: 153). In addition, emotion and empathy arethe source of the ability ‘to intuit another person’s perceptions, thoughtsand beliefs’ and to envision the world from someone else’s point of view(Carroll: 641; Stockwell: 171–3). On these terms emotion and empathycannot be seen merely as unfortunate after-thoughts or side-effects of apractice such as drama, they must instead be regarded as that whichmakes drama possible: i.e. without emotion and empathy, the spectatorwould have no means of navigating a dramatic world because there wouldbe no positive or negative feelings to prompt the spectator along his course.In this regard, it follows that it is the affective, and not reflective conscious-ness, that is the source of the spectator’s ability to structure response tophenomena such as dramatic stage presentations. Correspondingly, modernviews of cognition imply that there is a binding problem with staging nar-ratives that are shaped by conscious forms rather than by the underlyingsubconscious imperatives of (evolved) psychological mechanisms. Theseaccounts suggest that, in itself, the conscious mind is unreliable and con-fabulatory and even a source of irrationality (e.g. Simons and Chabris;Metzinger: 234–7), and that what binds the human together, and to thesocial, is a warmer kind of cognition, emerging from emotion and theupwelling subconscious, part of which may be the ‘core consciousness’ ofphysical states (Damasio 2000).

Under these views, thinking is part of action, and emotion is verymuch part of thought. In contrast, Brecht explicitly maintains an ‘uncom-promising intellectualism’, deprecating emotion in favour of reason and asocio-historical approach to the human mind (for example, Brecht suggeststhat Shakespeare loses his power when the individual becomes a capitalist)and assuming that everything comes together in consciousness (Brecht:15, 20). In this, there is a preoccupation with ‘the idea of the human mindas a carefully engineered machine . . . [rather than] . . . as biological organwith an evolutionary history’ (LeDoux: 39). This may well fit the spirit ofBrecht’s time, but it has disadvantageous consequences. It prompts Brechtto underestimate the role that emotion and the subconscious play for thehuman being and the performer; human engagement with the world ismore efficient, and less abstruse than he assumes.



The subconsciousBrecht’s view of emotion inscribes a common metacognitive human error –the human being’s tendency to overestimate the ability of his/her ownconsciousness, which is tributary to an overestimation of verbal, logical,conscious intelligence, and corresponding de-emphasis of emotion, moti-vation, and context (Levin; LeDoux; and see also Dennett). Consciousnessis not, though, the kind of representational and processing summationthat it subjectively seems. In fact, even the fraction of the human’s inter-action with the world that is incorporated into consciousness is incom-pletely assembled (see Simons and Chabris). Evolutionary psychologyhelps develop this point. It emphasises that the mind is more than con-scious cognition, and that, though the human mind solves problems, itdoes not necessarily do so by dealing in abstract formulations but ratheraccording to built-in adaptations (see Cosmides and Tooby). Furthermore,as the limited evolutionary remit and capacity of consciousness makes itunable to process everything adequately for performance, subconsciousprocessing is the rule rather than the exception (LeDoux). Perceptual,motor, semantic and response processes are all regularly engaged withoutconscious awareness (Dehaene et al.; Milner and Goodale), and even speechand imagery, which appear to be bastions of the conscious manipulation ofinformation, are products of subconscious manufacture. Similarly, socialrelationships and social decision-making depend on physical functioning,as the latent activation of motor responses is needed to understand others’actions, emotions and intentions, and these motor responses occur duringthe observation of actions without ever necessarily being available as rep-resentations in consciousness (Damasio 2003; Gallese, Keysers and Rizzolatti2004; Rizzolatti and Fogassi 2007). In all respects, the mind’s naturalinclination is to distil the essence of engagement with the world. The mindsifts out useful rules about how to act, and then seeks to make these com-ponents of future responses as readily available as possible, for example, byreducing them to permanent and unconscious skills that are effortlesslyrecalled via the process that is commonly known as ‘procedural’ memory.

Consciousness and techniqueBecause he seeks to draw attention to representation and the hidden oper-ations of power, Brecht is suspicious of the notion of these kinds of naturalhuman capacities. Instead, he has a sense of the necessity of appealing toa coldly rational human for whom interaction with the world takes placeon the conscious plane. He thus seeks a means of detaching the actor andaudience from their natural biological imperatives. The actor is chargedwith developing an effortful, self-conscious kind of acting through refer-ence to symbol and consciousness rather than the subconscious and thebody (see Brecht: 128) and via this process to transform him/herself intodata. This idea of detaching the actor from character rests on the idea thatthe inner world is separable from outer expression and that human behav-iour is predicated on conscious ideas. Brecht believes that divorcing the



actor from his ‘natural’ human state aids the process of presenting theplay as a rational, perceptual problem to be solved by an audience. Brechtalso posits that this assists the spectator in becoming an autonomous makerof meaning who analyses rather than feels as his/her first imperative andfor whom consciousness rather than the body intercedes in the receptionof the play. In psychological terms, Brecht is then focused on ‘declarativeknowledge’ that is consciously reportable. However, as noted above, this isonly a subset of learned knowledge (i.e. most knowledge is unconscious,procedural and bodily). The subconscious plays a key role in interpretationand in organising activity, and it is here that most human behaviour (andcommunication) is sourced or generated. Consequently, abstractly model-ling the emergence of complex behavioural patterns of response from simpleones does not capture how directed purpose is embodied in an externalform (how the actor acts). Thus, where Brecht expresses an acting theory,this is a theory of the mind and not the body. In this he conceives of actingas a practice where ‘Knowledge is a matter of knowing the tricks’ (Brecht:96). However, employing techniques alone, without embedding the actorin emotion and the subconscious sources of action, is, as Stanislavskireminds us, a ‘senseless exercise’ (Stanislavski: 238). This might allow foran idealised actor who exists abstractly, but it does nothing for the actorwho must deal with the contingencies of the real world. Conceiving ofacting as representation and convention involves too limited a view of howthe human operates. Emotion and the subconscious also must be accom-modated, as they facilitate ‘the direct cooperation of nature itself ’ in per-formance (Stanislavski: 24) and scaffold human communication, such asthat seen in bodily mechanisms that allow a direct communicative linkbetween performer and viewer to exist without reflective mediation orsymbolic conceptualisation (Gallese et al.). Emotions, central to the trans-mission of meaningful information, cannot be freely triggered or manipu-lated, and so in particular confront the human with the mind’s physicality(see Metzinger) that through shared inheritance provides richly for thetransmission of information, if the emotional context is right. Rather thanfocusing on representation, it is therefore important to establish an organicconnection for the actor between outside and inside conditions. Intention,purpose or objective are not sufficient on their own, they must put natureto work. Without this, Brecht’s pedagogics carry more than a hint of beingarbitrary, learnable behaviours (the presumption of which was the down-fall of behaviourism). In this regard, the repeated insight from key figuresand thinkers in psychological science is that we need to study the humanas thoroughly engaged in action, with the purpose of all perception andthought being to serve action, and the human continually and activelyusing all of its capacities while interpreting and responding to the situa-tion around it (James 1890; O’Regan and Noë 2001). Developing anapproach to acting that opposes or resists some of these capacities entailsa lack of engagement with the world and an inability to construct anaccount of how the actor’s actions ‘play out’ or dramatic patterns emerge



(something we have already noted Brecht is culpable of in his variousshifts between reverence for actors, aloofness, and pragmatism – ‘the proofof the pudding is in the eating’). This lack of engagement with the reality ofthe human and the physical and affective (as well as conscious) nature ofthe actor’s task might thus be seen as the source of the competing claims,confusions, debates and deferral that surround the topic of Brecht’sapproach to the actor.

ConclusionThe embodied view of cognition is sometimes critiqued for offering areductive view of the human. This is because stressing fit-for-purposemechanisms and the natural necessities that impinge on the human riskstying the individual’s responses too closely to the external environmentsthat specify them. In this regard, emphasising the importance of bodilymechanism (subconscious, automatic, procedural processing) can appearto entail determinism or to turn human behaviour into a motorisedprocess. It is important that this kind of position is avoided, as it merelyinverts the problem of the overestimation of consciousness that we havediscussed with regard to Brecht. On these terms, Brecht’s experimentaland didactic approach to the actor is not to be dismissed as mere esoteri-cism. While acknowledging that the functioning of the human mind isconstrained by its biological nature, we can also note that a perspectivesuch as that of Brecht has a contribution to make to constructing a com-prehensive account of the human. In this regard, Brecht raises importantissues that provide a challenge to psychology. His insistence on con-sciousness foregrounds an important issue – the human’s non-contextbound capacities (i.e. how the human being is able to detach itself fromimmediate circumstance, employ counterfactual thinking (see Glenberg),and explore and evaluate alternatives [Carroll: 640]). As a consequenceBrecht makes a contribution to confronting psychologists with nothingless than the issue of how humans alter the world in which they live.Thus, while acknowledging the tensions in Brecht’s view of the human(and the actor), Brecht reminds us that not only the body and ‘naturalresponse’ needs to be at the centre of any account of, or appeal to, thehuman (and the actor) but also consciousness and all the complexitiesthat go with it.

However, while taking on board that the social laws that Brechtaddresses may vary in the extent of their subconscious and biologicalconstraints (according to the principles of evolutionary psychology; seeBoyd and Richerson; Buss), it is also important to remember that thetransmission of information about such laws cannot be understood inde-pendently of the evolved design of human social interaction. Innatehuman systems create a direct link between human senders and receiversof information and provide a suitable scaffold for social cognition (Galleseet al.), and emotion and physical action are central not only to the trans-mission and understanding of information but also to more conceptual



explanations of behaviour (Barton 2007: 138–41; Damasio 2003;Gallese 2003, 2007). Consequently, the evolved capacities of social inter-relation, action and empathy are fundamental realities that must beacknowledged if a theory of acting is to be constructed and/or the con-cepts and social laws that Brecht discusses are to be grasped8 or interro-gated by spectators.

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O’Regan, J. Kevin and Alva Noë (2001), ‘A sensorimotor account of vision andvisual consciousness’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24: 5, pp. 939–1031.

Panksepp, Jaak (2007), The neuroevolutionary and neuroaffective psychobiology of theprosocial brain, in Dunbar and Barrett (eds.), pp. 145–162.

Patterson, Michael (1994), Brecht’s legacy, in Thomson and Sacks (eds.), pp. 273–287.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Leonardo Fogassi (2007), Mirror neurons and social cognition,in Dunbar and Barrett (eds.), pp. 179–196.

Rouse, John (1995), Brecht and the contradictory actor, in Zarrilli (ed.), pp. 228–241.

Shklovsky, Victor (1965), ‘Art as technique’, in Lee T. Lemon and Marion Reis(eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress.

Simons, Daniel J. and Christopher F. Chabris (1999), ‘Gorillas in our midst: sustainedinattentional blindness for dynamic events’, Perception, 28: 9, pp. 1059–1074.

Stanislavski, C. (2003 [1936]), An Actor Prepares (trans. Elizabeth Hapgood), NewYork: Routledge.

Stockwell, Peter (2002), Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Thomson, Peter (1994), Brecht’s lives, in Thomson and Sacks (eds.), pp. 22–42.

Thomson, Peter and Glendyr Sacks (eds.) (1994), The Cambridge Companion toBrecht, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weber, Carl (1994), Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble – the making of a model, inThomson and Sacks (eds.), pp. 167–184.

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Suggested citationConnolly, R., & Ralley, R. (2008), ‘Brecht and the disembodied actor’, Studies in

Theatre and Performance 28: 2, pp. 91–110, doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.91/1

Contributor detailsRoy Connolly is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, and programme leader for the MA inContemporary Performance Practice at the University of Sunderland. His researchinterests include cultural identity, acting and directing.E-mail: [email protected]

Richard Ralley is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Edge Hill. Hisresearch and teaching interests are in cognitive psychology, especially the psychologyof perception and action, and the relationship of conscious to unconscious thought.E-mail: [email protected]





Following the dream/passing the meme:Shakespeare in ‘translation’Mike Ingham

AbstractIn this article I will investigate why Shakespeare’s plays are sites of translation-adaptation-appropriation par excellence for memetic propagation within andacross cultures. I will explore one of Shakespeare’s most famous and belovedworks, as well as one of his most adapted, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, andrefer to a number of adaptations, appropriations, variations or even evolutionarymutations, as one might call them in the terminology of gene and meme theory.What I am principally interested in, for the purpose of this article, is the questionof relevance and applicability of memetic concepts to Shakespeare, himself one ofthe most significant cultural phenomena of the last 500 years. As arguably themost influential adapting and subsequently adapted author of all time, Shake-speare is ideal for the purposes of the present study. The sheer popularity, regu-larity of performance and cultural continuity of A Midsummer Night’s Dreammakes it, along with Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet,highly representative in its universality. I will refer to a number of diachronicappropriations and adaptations, including Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen,Benjamin Britten’s more faithful operatic version of the play and George Balan-chine’s sumptuous 1962 ballet version based on Mendelssohn’s famous score. Iwill also discuss the current vogue for Asian adaptations of Shakespeare with anumber of examples, focusing especially on Jung Ung Yang’s recent appropriationof Shakespeare’s Dream into a traditional Korean theatrical idiom for Seoul-basedYohangza Theatre Company.

This exploration of literary adaptation and appropriation has had recourseat several points to companion art forms such as film and music and to thescientific domain, especially to those theories that began with Gregor Mendeland Charles Darwin in the 19th century and whose tendrils reach well intothe 21st with the ongoing debates about DNA and genetic modification.

(Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation: 156)

Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated.(A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act 3, Scene 1)

And the ‘mazed world, by their increase, now knows not which is which.(A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act 2, Scene 1)


Keywordsmemes

cultural transmission

Shakespeareanadaptation

inter-semioticperformance

musicality

Yohangza

Korea or Asianappropriations

STP-28-2-02-Ingham 4/18/08 2:37 PM Page 111

Background and meme theory

That virtue of originality that men so strain after is not newness (there isnothing new); it is only genuineness.

(John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. II)

In Michael Bristol’s book Big-time Shakespeare, the author refers to HaroldBloom’s theory of poetic cultural influence, particularly Shakespeare’s,and, extending the etymological proximity of influence and influenza,likens it to a virus, which replicates itself exponentially. In his discussion ofShakespeare’s longue durée, Bristol touches on the question of whether thecultural transmission of Shakespeare’s work has something in commonwith concepts of biological replication connected with the human brainand, by extension, digital replication

Does the principle of a self-replicating code or informational virus appear inthe domain of culture? Bloom’s theory of influence suggests that memorableliterary works are a complex form of obligate parasitism created by skilfullinguistic hackers. On this view the literary artist uses the resources of anatural language to devise the self-replicating code. This then is loaded intohuman bio-ware, where it makes copies of itself.

(Bristol: 127)

Julie Sanders contemplates a similar scenario of dynamic cultural replica-tion in her 2006 study of literary adaptation and appropriation. She sees anecessary link, rather than a loose metaphorical analogy, between biologi-cal and cultural adaptation phenomena

What begins to emerge is the more kinetic account of adaptation and appro-priation . . . . . these texts often rework texts that often, themselves, reworkedtexts. The process of adaptation is ongoing. It is not entirely unconnectedthat the disciplinary domains in which the term adaptation has proved mostresonant are biology and ecology . . . . . Adaptation proves in these examples[adaptive variation in species] to be a far from neutral, indeed highly active,mode of being, far removed from the unimaginative act of imitation, copyingor repetition that it is sometimes presented as being by literature and filmcritics obsessed with ‘originality’.

(Sanders: 24)

Richard Dawkins in his influential book The Selfish Gene (1976) introducedthe concept of the meme. It is defined as ‘a unit of cultural transmission,or a unit of imitation ([1976]1989: 192). A meme is an idea, but thelatter emphasises the stability of the entity while the former emphasisesits movements. A meme spreads and, like a gene, it replicates. Also like agene, a meme transforms itself in accordance with the conditions of thenew habitat in order to survive. The habitat of the meme is the human

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brain. Susan Blackmore discusses its fundamental characteristics in TheMeme Machine: ‘What then makes for a good quality replicator? Dawkins(1976) sums it up in three words – fidelity, fecundity and longevity. Thismeans that a replicator has to be copied accurately, many copies must bemade, and the copies must last a long time – although there may be trade-offs between the three’ (Blackmore: 58).

Dawkins’s agenda is sociobiological. He tries to represent anotherdimension of human evolution stressing the role of the brain in genetictransformation. He is careful to differentiate between the gene and thememe: ‘. . . In general, memes resemble the early replicating molecules,floating chaotically free in the primeval soup, rather than modern genesin their neatly paired chromosomal regiments’ ([1976]1989: 196).Nevertheless, Dawkins believes that memetic evolution is ‘achieving evolu-tionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind’([1976]1989: 192). With methodologies of natural science, one might goso far as to argue that memes can affect the biological function of thebrain, therefore other body functions and ultimately genetic revolution.That would be an ambitious and significant task for human beings’ self-understanding. Yet for the present occasion, I limit myself to using theconcept of the meme without exploring the biological implications (a taskfor which I am, as a non-scientist, eminently unsuited!). In any case weshould bear in mind that Dawkins’s original hypothesis of the meme is justthat: a hypothesis and an interesting postscript to his genetic theories, ashe has been at pains to point out in introducing Blackmore’s developmentof his hypothesis (1996: xvi).

Notwithstanding reservations about the demonstrability of the meme,in Dawkins’s recent best-selling broadside against revealed religion andcreationist propaganda, The God Delusion, he appears to have retained con-fidence in his original concept: ‘The meme pool is less structured and lessorganised than the gene pool. Nevertheless, it is not obviously silly tospeak of a meme pool in which particular memes might have a “frequency”which can change as a consequence of competitive interactions with alter-native memes’ (2006: 223). Speaking of the thorny issue of fidelity, ascompared to Darwinian replicators, Dawkins offers the exquisitely aptexample of master-apprentice transmission of craft skills. He concludes:‘The details may wander idiosyncratically, but the essence passes downunmutated, and that is all that is needed for the analogy of memes withgenes to my work’ (2006: 224).

The concept of the meme has been elaborated and applied in a numberof studies of different disciplines, notably Andrew Chesterman’s applica-tion of the idea to Translation Studies. In Memes of Translation: the Spread ofIdeas in Translation Theory (1997), Chesterman’s concern is translationtheories. He circumscribes a number of concepts in translation theories,calling them ‘supermemes’ (after Dawkins) of translation, and discusseswhat they mean in different theoretical paradigms. For Chesterman, theconcept of the meme ‘highlights an aspect of the translation phenomenon

113Following the dream/passing the meme: Shakespeare in ‘translation’


that I want to foreground: the way that ideas spread and change as theyare translated, just as biological evolution involves mutations. In this light,a translator is not someone whose task is to conserve something but topropagate something, to spread and develop it: translators are agents ofchange’ (Chesterman: 2). In his discussion of the Source-Target supermemein Translation Studies, he emphasises this idea as being ‘directional’, and asbeing about ‘movement along a path: cognitive linguistics would talk of a“path schema”, with the translation itself being the “trajector” moving alongthis path’ (Chesterman: 8).

This is useful for our present purpose because the metaphor of the pathoffers a special dimension in the way we think about the replication ofmemes. According to the hypothesis, a meme reproduces itself with trans-mutation involved in the process. The new meme does not replace theparent-meme. They exist side by side. If the parent-meme does not survive,it is because it does not adapt to either a changed or a new environment,never because it is replaced by the new meme. Any translator, adaptoror play director can understand this perfectly well. His/her translation/adaptation/appropriation can never replace or efface the original text,although the original might not be read by the translation’s readers orseen by spectators of the adaptation. This is true for inter-lingual transla-tion and inter-cultural transposition. I am particularly interested, in thepresent article, in what Roman Jakobson called inter-semiotic translationor transmutation – that is, translation across sign systems such as fromwords into music, from music into dance, and from dance or music intopainting (Jakobson: 147).

In his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin discusses theidea of what he terms ‘translatability’, referring to the qualities of the liter-ary text that lend themselves to translation. He goes on to say, ‘Translation,ironically, transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic realmsince it can no longer be displaced by a secondary rendering. The originalcan only be raised there anew and at other points of time’ (Benjamin: 76).It is this use of ‘anew’ that is particularly illuminating for theatrical adap-tation and translation practice. Each local production of a pre-existing play,from whatever source-culture it may derive, actively seeks to reinterpret thetext for a fresh target audience. This is true of many traditional theatrepractices, even to some extent Japanese traditional theatre, and to a largerextent traditional Chinese theatre. It is certainly true of Shakespeare, evenin the context of Globe Theatre ‘authentic’ performances. To Benjamin’sconcept of translatability I would like to append that of adaptability – theextent to which a certain source-text is apt for cross-cultural transpositionand mediation within a somewhat alien target culture. As this article willargue, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a pre-eminent example of adaptability,in addition to having achieved pre-eminence as a source of cultural replica-tion and transmission.

At the very end of his essay on translation, Benjamin’s profoundestinsight, I believe, in discussing what he calls the ‘afterlife’ of the text, is this:

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Just as in the original, language and revelation are one without any tension,so the translation must be one with the original in the form of the interlinearversion, in which literalness and freedom are united. For to some degree allgreat texts contain their potential translation between the lines.

(Benjamin: 82)

It is precisely this nebulous content contained between the lines of a dra-matic text that has inspired directors and actors of diverse cultures andgenerations to explore the vast possibilities inherent in the work, and re-encode the work for a fresh target audience, be their praxis intra-culturalor inter-cultural.

The afterlife of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – ‘How shall wefind the concord of this discord?’

‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses are themselves a fable of constant translation, of thetragic or ironic changes of identity into new form.’

(George Steiner, After Babel: 413)

The performance history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream exemplifies theview that Shakespeare’s dramatic work is protean and elastic in its perfor-mance potentiality. To quote Fischlin and Fortier: ‘As long as there havebeen plays by Shakespeare, there have been adaptations of those plays’(Fischlin and Fortier: 1). Given the huge range of adaptations and appro-priations of this play, it is therefore somewhat ironic that it is one of thefew Shakespeare plays that does not appear, as far as scholarship can tell,to have been adapted predominantly from a single original source. Datingfrom around the same time as Romeo and Juliet and probably first per-formed in 1595, the play is, in Stanley Wells’s authoritative view, ‘one ofShakespeare’s “most individual creations”’ (Wells 1967:14).

However, that is not to say that the various components of the play arewithout traceable literary sources. There are three main plot strands: thelove affairs and quarrels between the pairs of fugitive human lovers; thestrife and mischief in the fairy world of the forest; and the rehearsalsand ultimate performance of the workmen preparing a dramatic interludefor performance at the wedding of the Duke of Athens. The Theseus andHippolyta element appears to be strongly indebted to Chaucer’s TheKnight’s Tale and the transformation scene with the ass’s head to Apuleius’The Golden Ass, via Adlington’s 1566 translation. It is even more evidentthat many of the play’s mythological references, as well as the burlesquefinal-act Pyramus and Thisbe performance, come from Ovid’s mythopoeicwork The Metamorphoses, probably via Arthur Golding’s pedestrian trans-lation of 1567. There is strong speculation that the play was composedspecifically for an aristocratic wedding in the mid-1590s and first per-formed in this celebratory context, but there is equal evidence that theDream was primarily written for and played in the public theatres.



Subsequent productions of the play itself or textual variants, bowd-lerised versions and adaptations-appropriations into other art forms ormedia have tended to emphasise one or two of the above plot strands, fre-quently to the detriment of the third. It seems that, to judge by a SamuelPepys diary entry of 1662 in which the performance is described as ‘insipid’and ‘ridiculous’, the claims of spectacular mimesis over dramatic poesis inperformances of the play were already firmly established. Again this isironic considering the magically evocative quality of the language itself.Little wonder, then, that many educated commentators and cultural con-noisseurs preferred the reading mode of Shakespearean appreciation to thelive performance mode. As Wells pertinently observes, ‘Over-exploitation ofthe play’s opportunities for spectacle has too long a history’ (Wells: 8). Thatsaid, there is little doubt that among Shakespeare’s plays A MidsummerNight’s Dream is commonly regarded as one of the most visually appealingand enchanting, particularly in an open-air setting where allusions tonature in the text can be experienced not only literally, but also viscerallyand phenomenologically. The powerful synthesis of nature and mythologylies at the heart of the play’s power to regenerate its magical allure for freshaudiences from century to century and continent to continent.

Henry Purcell’s baroque entertainment The Fairy Queen (1692), basedon the quarrels of the mortal and fairy couples – ‘the forgeries of jealousy’in Titania’s memorable epithet – and especially the tussle over the ‘lovelyIndian boy’, set Shakespeare’s central plot line, but not his dramatic poetryin any distinctly recognisable form.1 To quote Peter Thomson, the work is‘a wild composite of startling songs, bursts of dialogue from A MidsummerNight’s Dream, characters who have crept in from pastoral whimsy . . . andmusical invitations to scenic spectacle’, but for all that ‘for sheer aestheticnerve this misshapen spectacular carries the hallmarks of the theatricalavant-garde’.2 In the creative adaptive process Purcell created songs andairs of exquisite, crystalline beauty in his rambling, nine-masque version ofthe play’s central themes and motifs. The Fairy Queen prioritises music –both vocal and instrumental – mime and dance over all else. The burlesqueelement provided by Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’ is retained, buttransformed into the presence of a drunken poet, somehow assimilated intothe loose narrative, and the sexually suggestive antics of the rival factions offairies. One of the more exotic and entirely extraneous impositions on thenarrative is Oberon’s Chinese-style wedding and a monkey dance, whichprefigure the human reconciliation and weddings proclaimed in ‘Sure, thedull god of marriage’ and ‘They shall be as happy’ in the final masque.

It is clear from the status of Purcell’s Fairy Queen in the classical musiccanon that this type of inter-semiotic transposition of Shakespeare’s playcan be considered great art in its own right. Consequently it may beargued that the high degree of variation in the transformed text highlightsthe musical-operatic form as an agent of change or cultural mutation.This in turn suggests a correlation between radical difference of the targettext from the source and aesthetic value/creative independence. However,

1. The libretto of TheFairy Queen is derivedfrom an anonymousadaptation ofShakespeare’s AMidsummer Night’sDream. Subsequentlyit was attributed toElkanah Settle butanother possibleauthor has beenidentified as ThomasBetterton, withwhom Purcellcollaborated onanother semi-opera,Dioclesian. See TheCambridge Introductionto English Theatre,p. 22 for a moredetailed discussionof the idiosyncraticmedley ofShakespeare’s plotdetails and thelibretto lyrics set tomusic by Purcell.

2. Peter Thomson, TheCambridge Introductionto English Theatre,1660–1900,Cambridge: CUP,p. 22.

116 Mike Ingham


a much more recent variation on Shakespeare’s source, namely BenjaminBritten’s opera, also entitled A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959) – librettoby Britten and Peter Pears after Shakespeare – undermines any such for-mulation. Britten’s opera, by marked contrast with Purcell’s, exhibits ahigh degree of fidelity to Shakespeare’s formal and poetic concept, in spiteof his inevitable abandonment of iambic pentameter and trochaic tetrame-ter. Britten’s and Pears’s libretto for the opera sets many of Shakespeare’slines, although it does take structural liberties by conflating certain scenesfrom different acts and omitting some of the more extended exchangesbetween characters. The three-act structure of Britten’s adaptation – verymuch a standard format for opera – succeeds in encapsulating all of theplot elements in an instantly recognisable form. Certain effects, such asskilfully devised synchronous duets and quartets covering severalexchanges in the original text, capture the mood of the lovers’ quarrelswonderfully well. They convey effectively, more effectively perhaps thanconsecutively delivered lines of the spoken play, the insistence of each ofthe lovers on their own emotional perspectives and their refusal to listen toeach other rationally.

Britten’s master-stroke in his operatic version of this quintessentialEnglish pastoral piece is to recreate the sound world of Shakespeare’s playin a paradoxically modern and yet ancient style. In doing so he lays to restthe ghost of Mendelssohn’s magnificent but excessively associated incidentalmusic of the romantic era, with its famous wedding march and irresistiblemotifs suggesting the antics of both fairies and clowns. The Mendelssohnmeme had predominated for more than a hundred years and becomewholly identified with Shakespeare’s play, in spite of a minor variation onit by composer Erich Korngold in a version specially re-arranged for MaxReinhardt’s 1935 film of the Dream. Britten succeeds in discovering a moreelemental soundscape to replace the romanticised world of nineteenth-century interpretation – more chromatically nuanced than the Mendelssohnscore – which harmonises perfectly with the Shakespearean text andbrings out the play’s Englishness. The hauntingly beautiful blessing refrain‘Now until the break of day’, sung by Oberon, Titania and their fairy retinue,which closes the opera, is somehow Elizabethan in its use of voices –reminiscent of Byrd, Tallis or Dowland, but at the same time modern andoriginal, not mere pastiche.

To use the meme hypothesis here seems apposite. Fecundity and longevitycan be assumed to be demonstrably applicable to Shakespeare in generaland to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in particular. What is more at issue inthe context of the present article is the antithetical claims of free variationagainst imitative likeness, or, to put it in the terminology of the arts, poeticlicence versus faithfulness. Variation and difference in the propagation ofthe ‘Dream Meme’ in a text like The Fairy Queen are offset by fidelity andproximity to the parent text in the Britten opera. The 1939 Americanswing musical Swinging the Dream – starring a youngish Louis Armstrong,incidentally, as Bottom – inclined more, not surprisingly, to the Purcell



adaptation mode. Britten, by contrast, saw something intrinsically English,pastoral and eternally magical in Shakespeare’s language, which he optedto transpose remarkably faithfully.

At the same time that Britten was composing his faithful yet indepen-dent version – and there is clear concord in the discord of this paradox –George Balanchine was conceiving his neoclassical ballet of the Dream(1962) for La Scala Ballet Company, fusing his own visions of pure dancewith Mendelssohn’s inspirational music. Balanchine jettisoned much of theburlesque element provided by Bottom and his fellow mechanicals, infavour of a two-part structure that highlights the disputes and confusion ofthe first act followed by the unifying joint nuptials of the second act.The wedding march and the various divertissements and pas de deux of thecelebratory and narratively static second act indicate unequivocally whereBalanchine’s interests lay for the purposes of his adaptation. In the firstact, apart from the slightly bizarre variant of transforming the ‘littlechangeling boy’ into ‘Titania’s cavalier’ (an excessively sexual interpreta-tion of Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘squire’, it seems), the adaptationfollows Shakespeare’s narrative quite closely. One exception to the work’sconcentration on pure dance and aesthetic harmony is the incongruity ofBottom’s dance with Titania, a brilliant compromise between artistic purityand dramatic necessity. Having dispensed with the plot detail before theintermission, the choreographer feels free to concentrate on pure danceand spectacular configurations in the second half. Perhaps, though, suchlicence is not so far from the spirit of the original as may be thought. AsHarold Brooks has pointed out, the music, song and dance elements in TheDream are an intrinsic part of the work’s plot, not merely an optional extra(see Brooks 1979). The work’s spectacle and its sound world go hand-in-hand with the lyricism of Shakespeare’s dramatic rhythms and cadences.

The recurrent meme in all of these transpositions – and in visionary,landmark stage interpretations such as Harley Granville Barker’s 1914Savoy Theatre production, Peter Hall’s 1959 Stratford production or the1970 Peter Brook Royal Shakespeare Company production – relies ontransmitting or regenerating the sound-vision balance at the heart ofShakespeare’s play. The physical sound experience of the language ofA Midsummer Night’s Dream transcends – rather as the words of nurseryrhymes or the works of Lewis Carroll fix themselves in the brain onaccount of their sonorities – reception of the performance on purelysemantic levels. The creation of variant rhythms and musical echoes andmotifs in Britten’s opera opened up the potential sound world of the play ina way that had not been explored as profoundly before. Thus, just whenconventional modes of production and reception are becoming stale withthe accretions of cultural fashion and one-time mould-breaking interpre-tation, the Dream meme is reinvigorated by a mutation or adaptation,which reasserts either the play’s rich cultural tradition or its potential forvariation and cultural alterity. As Benjamin observed, going back to thesource text and reading between the lines is the key.

118 Mike Ingham


Asian ‘Babes’ – Shakespeare’s Asian progeny and YohangzaTheatre Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

From fairest creatures we desire increaseThat thereby beauty’s rose might never die

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 1)

In recent decades there has been a proliferation of Asian adaptations ofShakespeare, whether for the stage or for the screen. Akira Kurosawa’sRan and Throne of Blood have embedded themselves in the consciousness ofShakespeare devotees world-wide and evolved a cultural life both relativeto and independent of their respective parent texts. Many Asian adapta-tions of Shakespeare are intercultural and inter-semiotic in essence, andthe most memorable succeed in transplanting the Shakespearean seed intofresh and fertile cultural soil that is culturally alien from London orStratford. Anthony Tatlow’s perception of more than a decade ago is prob-ably even truer now than when he wrote it, given the innate conservatismand resistance of the Shakespeare establishment towards any attempt to‘take liberties’ with the Bard, and the corresponding time-lapse requiredfor acceptance

A Japanese or Chinese Shakespeare no longer seems a contradiction in termsbut can open our eyes to readings we would never have associated withthose texts but which seem entirely justified and hence an enlargement ofour understanding. These performances are simply more exciting and sug-gestively defamiliarising . . . than anything currently available within apurely Western repertory.

(Tatlow: 12–13)

Tatlow’s book pre-dates new groups such as Edward Hall’s Propellercompany, and he may not have seen Théâtre de Complicité at the time, butboth companies, not to mention Mark Rylance’s high-quality Shakespeareproductions at the Globe Theatre, have done much to revitalise nativeShakespeare performance in the last ten to fifteen years. Both Complicitéand Propeller have also toured extensively to critical acclaim. Nevertheless,Tatlow’s point has often been echoed by more open-minded and acutecritics in the West, culminating, I would argue, in a greater acceptanceby western audiences of ‘foreign Shakespeares’. A further factor to con-sider is that the inexorable effects of globalisation have done much toreduce the culture gap between western audiences and Asian theatrepractitioners.

Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays appear to have a remarkable affinity withdiverse Asian theatrical forms such as Chinese xiqu, Japanese kyogen andkabuki, Indian kathakali and Cambodian Khmer classical dance. Dynamicstylised treatment can open up new perspectives on some of the tired andclichéd western production concepts of Shakespeare, and especially the



Dream, which correspond to the ‘deadly theatre’ that Brook targeted sounerringly in The Empty Space. As Jatinder Verma of London-based TaraArts, whose recent production of The Merchant of Venice was set in Cochinin Kerala, points out: ‘Shakespeare is strong on class structures and hier-archies, but these hierarchies have broken down in England. In Asia westill have strong hierarchies. I’d say the best way to do Shakespeare and betrue to him is to do it through Asian eyes.’3

One director who sees Shakespeare’s work as utterly Asian is Japanesemaster Yukio Ninagawa. Ninagawa’s epic Japanese settings of Shakespeareplays have become accepted as modern classic productions in the West aswell as in Asia, and his work has, not surprisingly, exerted considerableinfluence on fellow Asian directors. South Korea’s leading playwright, TaeSu Oh, had considerable success internationally with a highly acclaimedKorean-set Romeo and Juliet. In 2001 the Monsaku Nomura Company’skyogen adaptation of A Comedy of Errors, entitled A Kyogen of Errors, wasperformed to a rapturous reception at the Globe Theatre in London, aspart of the Shakespeare Globe-to-Globe season. The Singaporean directorOng King Sen’s Shakespeare variations, making use, for example, of multi-ple Asian performance techniques in his 1998 King Lear, have also in theirown idiosyncratic way extended the bounds of what is possible. And oneshould not overlook the multi-talented Taiwanese actor-deviser Wu Hsing-kuo, whose brilliant solo performance of all nine major roles in his modernxiqu King Lear (Hong Kong Arts Festival 2003) was a profoundly rich the-atrical experience, one which encouraged us to look at the characters ofthe tragedy afresh. Such diverse and divergent Shakespeare adaptationshave created a benchmark for excellence and innovation that intrigues anddelights all but the most conservative and closed-minded of audiences inthe West, and has in the process stimulated the creativity of directors suchas Mike Alfreds with his quasi-Japanese Cymbeline (2001).

Another UK director profoundly affected by Asian theatrical techniquesand conventions is Tim Supple. Staged in 2006 for the Royal ShakespeareCompany’s Complete Works Festival, Supple’s ambitious eight-languageDream, with a cast of 23 actors, musicians and dancers from the Indiansub-continent, offered an exciting reworking of the play for an audiencewhose familiarity with Shakespeare’s work could not be taken for granted.Many critics expressed the view that this production was of seminalimportance in the contemporary Shakespearean performance context.Michael Billington in the Guardian called it ‘a play of multiple transforma-tions all wonderfully realized in this visionary sub-continental version’,while for Nicholas De Jongh, in The Evening Standard, the Indian Dream’svitality and freshness ‘recovered that sense of magic and enchantment ofwhich the play has been purged by Anglo-Saxon directors’ (vide Tatlow).

That said, Christopher Luscombe’s Regent’s Park production, in therain-drenched 2007 summer season, of ‘a deeply English Dream’, as Time Output it, demonstrated that a more restrained form of magic is not beyondthe reach of the indigenous director and company. The reason that it was

3. Interview reported inSouth China MorningPost, 11 March 2007.

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‘impossible to withstand the shy but sure magic of this honest, determinedDream’ (Time Out) may well be an index of the play’s constant powers ofself-renewal and regeneration, and its ability to transcend specific instancesof kitsch and cliché in the production design (as was certainly the case inLuscombe’s conceptualisation – especially the ever-problematic fairies, which,to be fair, constitute a creative headache for most Anglo-Saxon directors).We may conclude that open-air productions of the Dream, whether tradi-tional Western-style or Asian, or a mixture of the two, generally succeedin discovering this pastoral play’s magical propensities more than indoorproductions, where arguably it is easier to fail. However, such a view wouldbe an over-simplification, since many Asian adaptations work equally wellin diverse and distinctly un-pastoral venues, as I have witnessed in HongKong and elsewhere. Incidentally, I would include Globe Theatre produc-tions in the category of open-air performances, and it is here that visitinggroups performing Shakespeare kathakali, kyogen, xiqu and other Asiangenres, find a natural home and audience.

It is very much in the context of this stimulating recent tradition ofAsian Shakespeare, and of the Dream in particular, that we should seethe Korean Yohangza production. ‘Yohangza’ means ‘voyager’ in Korean,as director Jung Ung Yang points out. ‘Life is a journey and through thejourney of life we meet a lot of people,’ he adds – a comment that seemspertinent to the journeys of our dream-lives and of Shakespeare’s ownDream. First staged in Korea and Japan in 2003, and later at the SeoulPerforming Arts Market in 2005, the adaptation was well placed to attractinternational attention and gain promotion and proliferation in the Asiaregion and further afield. It has been a critical success at various interna-tional arts festivals, including Hong Kong’s in March 2007. Jung UngYang professes not only great admiration for Shakespeare’s plays, but alsoparticular attraction to the tragedies, like so many other Asian directorsand adaptors. When asked during the post-performance, meet-the-audiencediscussion why he chose the Dream rather than Lear or Othello, he saidwith disarming simplicity and, one suspects, playful disingenuousness,‘because it is a very romantic play and I am a very romantic person’. Aswith Britten, Balanchine, Brook and other highly creative adaptors ofShakespeare’s play, the Korean company’s version propagates the Dreammeme by adding to it and altering it, whilst at the same time encouragingthe viewer to return to the original text as a point of reference.

One of Tatlow’s (see Tatlow: 35–50) major criticisms of conventionallyprettified and reductive readings of the Dream by actors and directors overthe centuries, and even nowadays, is that such versions are fundamentallyat odds with the Shakespearean text and subtext. For him the play attests tothe society’s unconscious and its repression of anxieties (the Elizabethansociety originally), including anxieties about female sexuality, about pater-nity and progeny, about controlling nature (human and non-human) andthe undermining of the male prerogative – all the more so in the era of afemale monarch. The comedic, burlesque elements may help to repress



those fears on one level, but they can also be used to highlight such genderinsecurities, which is precisely how Jung Ung Yang and Yohangza approachedthe text. If an Elizabethan audience, or perhaps a more reactionary maleaudience, were to see this production, their worst nightmares would seemto be realised. But perhaps we should not congratulate ourselves too muchabout our more progressive and broad-minded attitudes, since this KoreanDream never allows us to sit back secure in our cultural identities andassumptions. It is a good Dream, theatrically speaking, precisely because itis a vaguely disquieting Dream, in which one can quite literally feel targetedor even isolated amid the comic revelry. It is always edgy, and predicated,like street theatre or clowning, on what is happening now, and what mighthappen if you don’t pay careful attention.

The traditional Korean theatre setting in that respect is misleading. AsYoung Joo-Choi has commented in the article ‘Tracking Young Directors inKorea Today’, ‘what differentiates Yang from his elders is that he adaptstraditional culture without an historical or social consciousness. His purposein adapting traditional culture into his style is not so much the impliedinterest in his nation, but an interest in aesthetic images that can transcendlocal languages and communicate directly with other cultures’ (2006: 75).This translates directly into a two-way communicative aesthetic, intendedfor audience consumption and delight both at home and abroad. Thus thetheatre style is to welcome the audience into the theatrical event, as thoughinto a shrine, according to Korean traditions of hospitality. The stage itself isdesigned as more of a house or home (which picks up on the ‘bless this house’motif of the Dream’s final act), although there are strong hints of trees andnature combined with the pine-wood set. The central space is open andsemiotically flexible, at once a living room in which the actors receive theiraudience and a site of action and movement.

Dramatic action is choreographed in a fusion of dance, song, physicalcomedy and dialogue that borrows lightly from key lines and speeches ofthe original. The production idiom is folkloric and essentially traditionalKorean, as is the visual symbolism of the colour scheme – coloured robesfor the lovers’ opening and closing sequences, but off-white for both fairiesand humans for the central body of the play, signifying both the dreamstate and Buddhist purity and unworldliness. Although the actors havespecifically designated roles, they step out of them at various points tomove upstage to the music area in order to play the traditional Korean folkinstruments employed by the company. These consist of a double-headeddrum, a bamboo flute, and other gongs and percussion instruments, includ-ing a xylophone-like instrument that is used to enhance the actors’ ges-tures. The music is an integral part of the production, as it is in the variouswestern adaptations we have reviewed. Likewise, it is specially written forthe production by musical director Eun Jeong Kim, with parts adaptedfrom traditional Korean or western musical elements.

Despite the director’s avowed spirit of hospitality, the audience isgreeted by the cheekily amusing, but also slightly threatening, antics of

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the two white-faced goblins or dokkebi – mythological Korean folkloriccreatures – representing the role of Puck. They are not above frighteningor mocking the audience, or even ridiculing them with scatological tricksthat are reminiscent of Shakespearean bawdy. Among other acts of inter-action with the audience, some distinctly unsettling, the twin Pucksdistribute fluorescent wrist-bands as a sign of welcome. This splitting ortwinning of the role is not as arbitrary as it first appears; Puck is alludedto as both Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin in the same speech byTitania’s fairy in Act 2 Scene 1, and admits to all of the appellations. Thedoubling of this role works perfectly, since the two sprites play their tricksin unison and entirely in dumb-show. The duality of the Puck role actu-ally enhances the capacity of this character – in many ways the source ofthe comedic mischief in Shakespeare’s original – for monkey business. Italso facilitates the symmetry of movement in the dance-like sequencesand ensemble work that characterises the confusions and subsequentrituals of the production.

Dokkebi (goblin), when broken down, can be rendered as Dot (fire – arecurrent image for romantic ardour in Shakespeare’s text) and Gabi(father), and these are the two names given to the Titania and Oberonfigures, respectively. There is a crucial difference in their plot functions,however, because the roles are reversed. Here it is Dot (a female Oberon)who orders the Pucks to teach her philandering husband (a male Titania) alesson, rather than the other way round. One rationale for this switch isthat, in the Korean psyche, it is the women who keep the men in line, andthat the woman’s role signifies domestic harmony in the traditional Koreanorder. The transformation of Bottom, not into an ass but a pig, is likewise inconformity with Korean animal symbolism, which sees the pig as preter-naturally stupid – more suggestive of stupidity than the donkey – but also aharbinger of good fortune. Variations on the original mechanicals elementare far more radical than substitution of pig’s head for ass’s head. ‘SweetBully Bottom’ is metamorphosed by the director into a comic old womanwandering in the mountains in search of a hundred-year-old ginseng. Shehas no ‘lads’ or ‘hearts’ for company, and no play to rehearse. The visuallygrotesque Shakespearean coupling of Titania with Bottom completewith ass’s head is paralleled by the absurd sight of the Fairy King falling inlove with a gluttonous and uncouth country woman with the face of a pig.Nevertheless, in spite of her apparent humiliation, Ajumi (Bottom) eventu-ally finds the rare ginseng herb she has sought. In Yang’s conception it is ajust reward for unwittingly helping Dot to punish the lascivious Gabi, forwhom the punishment, when he awakes from his dream, definitely fits thecrime. Like Bottom, Ajumi seems only vaguely aware of what has happenedto her, as in a dream one cannot quite recall. Furthermore, in Yang’sconcept the love confusions are triggered by the scent of the herb, ratherthan the juice of the flower, illustrating the significant shift of sensory focusin the adaptation – from eyes to nose – which is very much a reflection ofthe director’s policy of creative independence.



Audience response to the production has been extremely positive. Itdoesn’t require a Korean audience to appreciate the warmth and simplicity ofYang’s approach to theatre. The theatre, for Yohangza, is a place of fun andhumour as well as a meeting-place for audience and artist, just as the bustleof the traditional market was a meeting-place for vendors and buyers. Asregards the company’s use of their own nation’s folklore and tradition, itseems well justified in view of Shakespeare’s skilful integration of nature, folk-lore and mythology in The Dream. Last but not least we are conscious of therelative de-emphasis on speech and dialogue in this production. The musical-ity of the iambic and trochaic rhythms of Shakespearean verse is transposedto the unfamiliar but effective idiom of song with music accentuating simplespeech at key moments. Like many other Asian-aesthetic Shakespeare adap-tations, this version blends indigenous cultural and aesthetic components,entirely foreign to Shakespeare’s world, with narrative, creative elements ofthe original to produce a seamless work that is both new and old.

Conclusion: ‘And the blots of nature’s hand, shall not in theirissue stand’

I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yoursBob Dylan

For a play that is, like much of Shakespeare’s festive comedy, ultimatelyconcerned with harmony, reconciliation and, in a number of clear textualreferences, regeneration and progeny, it is fitting that we should assess theplay’s success in regenerating itself. That Shakespeare was concerned withthe reception of his work is evident in many of his concluding scenes andhis verse imprecations for audience’s understanding of his intentions –A Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly being no exception. He is also con-cerned with the relationship between higher truth, dramatic illusion andpoetic imagination. The onward transmission of his imagination in theDream through various adaptations for stage and screen is indisputablysuccessful, judging by the work’s continuing popularity. The sheer diver-sity of memetic variations on Shakespeare’s original theme, from Purcellto Jung Ung Yang, is proof that this play – perhaps more than most in theShakespeare repertoire – transcends cultural boundaries. Its satisfyingdramatic design and the accomplished fusion of its hybrid interlocking ele-ments is impressive by any standards. No matter what elements of theShakespeare work are fore-grounded and what back-grounded or side-lined in any given adaptation, the Dream renews itself through the widestpossible range of authenticating dramatic conventions.

Arguing against individual consciousness in favour of the higher powerof the meme-plex, Susan Blackmore expresses the anti-essentialist-humanistview thus: ‘The creative achievements of human culture are the products ofmemetic evolution, just as the creative achievements of the biological worldare the products of genetic evolution. Replicator power is the only design

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process we know of that can do the job, and does it. We do not need con-scious human selves messing about in there as well’ (1999: 240). This con-testation is nothing if not challenging to notions of individual genius andautonomy of creation. But perhaps Theseus’ comments on the ‘seethingbrains’ of lovers and poets needs to be understood through Hippolyta’s reply:‘And all their minds transfigur’d so together/More witnesseth than fancy’simages/And grows to something of great constancy’. Like collective memory,there seems, as Hippolyta/Shakespeare acknowledges, something more atwork than individual genius in these acts of cultural transmission.

Whether one accepts or rejects what may appear to the sceptic as thepseudo-scientific explanations of meme theory, it is clear that the culturalpropagation of key cultural artefacts in the history of human culture, ofwhich A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the supreme examples, cannot beexplained by individual arbitrary acts of consciousness alone. ‘Transfiguredtogether’, the various memes propagated by Shakespeare’s hybrid play andits diverse sources amount to a remarkable achievement. Productions likeYohangza’s demonstrate the fecundity and potential in the work for regen-erating the existing meme set, if one chooses to describe the work in theseterms, and producing even more fascinating variants, without in any waydiminishing the power and capacity to please inherent in the original text.

Works citedBenjamin, Walter ([1973] 1992), Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), London:

Fontana Press.

Blackmore, Susan (1999), The Meme Machine, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bristol, Michael D. (1996), Big-Time Shakespeare, London and New York: Routledge.

Brooks, Harold F. (ed.) (1979), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, London: Methuen(Arden edition).

Chesterman, Andrew (1997), Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in TranslationTheory, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Dawkins, Richard (1976), The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— (1999), Introduction to Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine.

——— (2006), The God Delusion, London: Transworld Publishers.

Fischlin, Daniel and Mark Fortier (2000), Adaptations of Shakespeare, London:Routledge.

Jakobson, Roman (2000), ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’, in L. Venuti (ed.),The Translation Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 113–118.

Sanders, Julie (2006), Adaptation and Appropriation, London and New York: Routledge(New Critical Idiom Series).

Steiner, George (1998), After Babel – Aspects of Language and Translation, (3rd edn.),Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tatlow, Anthony (1995), Shakespeare in Comparison, Hong Kong: Department ofComparative Literature, University of Hong Kong.

Wells, Stanley (ed.) (1967), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Young Joo-Choi (2006), ‘Tracking Young Directors in Korea Today’ in Hyung-KiKim and Seon-Ok Lim (eds.), Sketching in Contemporary Korean Theatre, Seoul:Theatre and Man Publishing Company/I.A.T.C./Korea.



House ProgrammesYohangza Theatre Company, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hong Kong Arts Festival,

2007.

Teatro alla Scala, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hong Kong, 27–29 October 2006.

Websitehttp:/www.britishtheatreguide.info.

Review/ListingTime Out, July 4–10, 2007 – Open-air Theatre, p. 132.

Suggested citationIngham, M. (2008), ‘Following the dream/passing the meme: Shakespeare in

“translation”’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 28: 2, pp. 111–126, doi:10.1386/stap.28.2.111/1

Contributor detailsMike Ingham has a Modern Languages tertiary background in the UK. He nowteaches on the English Studies programme at the Department of English inLingnan University, Hong Kong. He is interested in many aspects of performing,particularly drama, poetry and music, and is a founder member of Theatre Action,a Hong Kong-based theatre group that specialises in action research on more liter-ary drama texts. As well as doing scholarly work on theatre in performance andcinema, he directs theatre in Hong Kong and writes performing arts criticism forlocal media. His books include Staging Fictions (Edwin Mellen Press, 2004) andHong Kong: A Cultural and Literary History (Signal/HKU Press/OUP, 2007).E-mail: [email protected]

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Technique in exile: The changingperception of taijiquan, fromMing dynasty military exercise totwentieth-century actor training protocolDaniel Mroz

AbstractThis article describes the development and emigration of a Chinese military exercisecomplex called taijiquan. It traces the genealogy of this practice from sixteenth-century China to twenty-first-century North American and European profes-sional and university theatre programmes. It provides a systemic description ofthe protocols of taijiquan training in order to analyse its advantages and limita-tions in the contexts of contemporary actor training. Finally, by offering concreteexamples of its application by different theatre artists, it presents a portrait ofboth its current use and future potential as a major component of actor training.

IntroductionThis article describes the development and emigration of a Chinese militaryexercise complex called taijiquan.1 I shall trace the genealogy of this prac-tice in order to shed some light on how a system of military exercises fromsixteenth-century China has become part of the training offered to NorthAmerican and European actors by many contemporary professional anduniversity theatre programmes.

Folk theory would have us believe that ‘Tai Chi’, the slow exercise prac-tised by Chinese people in the early hours of the day in parks around theworld is an ancient, holistic system of self-care created many millennia agoby the gentle practitioners of Daoism, China’s indigenous religion and phi-losophy. This view is supported by countless popular books on taijiquanand by the popular culture surrounding its transmission in contemporaryEurope and North America. Taijiquan is presented as an archaic and quasi-religious system of movement training concerned with health maintenanceand personal enlightenment. By tracing taijiquan’s evolution, from its rootsin the Ming dynasty to its present incarnation in actor training programmes,I intend to demonstrate that this perception of taijiquan is a recent one,created by a romantic nationalist movement among late nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals and furthered by the HumanPotential Movement in late twentieth-century North America. By provid-ing a systemic description of the protocols of taijiquan training I will offer


Keywordstaijiquan

contemporary actortraining

devised physicaltheatre

Battery Opera

One Reed TheatreEnsemble

1. In this article I usethe Hanyu Pinyinstandard phoneticsystem to representPitonghua (Mandarin,the official Chinesedialect) pronunciationof Chinese characters.Pinyin is usedconsistently intranslations publishedin China. Readersmay be more familiarwith the earlier systemof Romanisation, theWade-Giles, whichunfortunately did notset an internationalstandard and is fallinginto disuse.Nevertheless, olderpublications usingWade-Giles will referto taijiquan as T’ai ChiCh’uan, Daoism asTaoism and romanisesuch terms as tuishouas t’ui sho.

STP-28-2-03-Mroz 4/18/08 2:39 PM Page 127

an analysis of its advantages and limitations in the contexts of contempo-rary actor training, independent of the discourse of the spurious folk theo-ries surrounding it. Finally, by offering concrete examples of its applicationby different theatre artists, I hope to sketch an accurate portrait of both itscurrent use and future potential as a major component of actor training.

Ming dynasty rootsThe earliest written records of taijiquan indicate that it was a synthesis ofmilitary calisthenics and combative dills put together by one Chen Wangting(1600–1680). Chen was a successful military officer in charge of the garrisonof Wen County in the Henan province of China between 1641 and 1644.With the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644, his advancement through themilitary hierarchy was blocked by the change of regime and he retired tohis family home of Chenjiagou, the village of the Chen family, also inHenan province (Sim and Gaffney: 12). In the early years of the QingDynasty, Chen synthesised a new system of martial training for the militiaof his home village. It was based upon the best training techniques thathe had come across during his military career. His major source was amilitary training manual authored by a Ming dynasty general namedQi Jiguang (1528–1587). Composed in 1561, Qi’s book, Ji Xiao Xin Shu orthe New Book of Effective Techniques, is itself a synthesis of sixteen differentmilitary training systems popular in the Ming dynasty (Sim and Gaffney:15and Wile: 7).

In the Ming and early Qing dynasties soldiers were trained for battle byexecuting group manoeuvres in formation. They spent virtually no timeon unarmed tactics and their fighting training consisted of countless repe-titions of simple movements with weapons such as the spear and the sabre.Chen Wangting’s principal contribution to the story of the Chinese martialart is his development of incrementally resistant partner training. Soldierswho might be called up for active duty at any time cannot engage in train-ing that might leave them injured and unfit for combat. This meant thatthe peacetime training of Ming dynasty soldiers was limited to the roterepetition of short, set sequences of attack and defence with battlefieldweapons. As fighting techniques could not be practised with anythingapproaching battlefield intensity without the risk of injuring the troops,improvisation and spontaneity could not be sanctioned. Improvisation andspontaneity are the two qualities most needed by combatants who will befaced with the unpredictability of actual combat. The absence of improvi-sation and spontaneity in training meant that Ming dynasty Chinese sol-diers had little chance of improving their skills through safe practice.

Chen Wangting’s solution to this dilemma was a methodology by whichsoldiers could practise fighting techniques in a spontaneous and improvisedway that resembled actual combat, without running the risk of seriousinjury. This practice is called tuishou, which is usually translated as ‘pushhands’. It refers to a training game played by two partners who practisebody movements that generate force while keeping their forearms in contact.

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The goal for each player is to maintain control of their posture in the face ofperturbations provided by their partner. To the casual observer, the prac-tice looks like a kind of wrestling done standing up. Tuishou practice beginsvery slowly with minimal force and allows the players to learn how todefend against the four major types of attack found in the Chinese martialart, which are referred to as the si ji: grappling (na), throwing (shuai),kicking (ti) and striking (da). As the partners become more and more usedto absorbing or reversing the forces directed at them, they can graduallyincrease the intensity of the game until they are providing each other withsignificant amounts of resistance and impellent force.2

Thus, Chen Wangting developed a method of training for fighting thatallowed for improvisation and spontaneity and minimised the risk of injury.Importantly, it allowed older, more experienced practitioners to maintaintheir fighting form into middle age and to progressively refine it over theirlifetime. Chen Wangting also devised armed versions of tuishou based onsimilar principles (Sim and Gaffney: 16). He also synthesised a series ofsolo movement-training sequences, which are called taolu.

Taijiquan, in Chen Wangting’s lifetime and beyond, became firmly estab-lished as a training system for a rural civilian militia. It remained confinedto the Chen family village until sometime between 1799 and 1853 whenone Yang Lu Chan (1799–1871) journeyed to Chenjiagou in order tostudy martial art with Chen Wangting’s descendant Chen Changxing(1771–1853). Many legends have grown up around Yang’s studies underChen Changxing and the transmission remains mysterious for the simplereason that the taolu and tuishou of the taijiquan taught by Yang Lu Chan’sdescendants is quite different from that practised by the Chen family.

From Chen village to BeijingItemising the structural differences between the Yang style of taijiquan andthe original Chen style, and speculating on the reasons for these differences,are beyond the scope of this article. What is especially significant aboutYang’s studies with Chen is his subsequent teaching of his own modifiedsystem of taijiquan in Beijing after 1851. Because of his great skill as afighter, Yang was much sought after as a teacher. His students includedthe bodyguards of the Manchurian rulers of Imperial China. Yang, an illit-erate fighter in a society that prized literacy above all else, was suddenlyexposed to a class of people he had never met before, the upper class Chineseintelligentsia who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had a very par-ticular cultural agenda.

Late nineteenth-century China faced internal corruption and externalcolonial pressure. The native Han population had been subjugated by theManchurian rulers of the Qing dynasty, and these rulers themselves facedthe combined military and economic aggression of Russia, the UnitedStates of America, Britain and France. Prior to the nineteenth century, theliterate governing classes of China looked down on martial art. China,after all, was an empire that for hundreds of years had been governed by

2. Contemporarypresentations oftuishou vary widelyin intensity andstructure. Practicecan range fromflowing and gracefulchoreographedexchanges to intensecompetitive grapplingreminiscent of suchcombat sports asOlympic wrestling,Japanese judo andRussian sambo.

129Technique in exile: The changing perception of taijiquan, from Ming dynasty . . .

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an intellectual class to whose authority the military deferred. Fighting wasfor professional soldiers, bodyguards, peasant militias and bandits. Whatwere the upper classes of late nineteenth-century Beijing doing practisingtaijiquan with an illiterate ruffian like Yang Lu Chan? Even more curious,why did they begin to attribute all sorts of healing properties, Confucianvalues and Daoist meditative qualities to it?

Douglas Wile suggests that the disempowered Chinese élite created a‘holistic’ myth about taijiquan in response to their existential situation. Toconfirm their cultural identity, they brought together things that had pre-viously been separate and even antagonistic: Confucianism and Daoism,healing exercises and martial art were united under the banner of silentresistance to the forces that besieged them. Training was not for the purposeof actual insurrection – personal practice of taijiquan was sufficient revolutionin itself. Rather, the élite could rely on an embodied practice to confirmtheir personal and ethnic resistance to the overwhelming forces of history(Wile: xvii).

This sudden declaration of the perennial and holistic nature of taijiquanwas supported by reference to an anonymous and supposedly ancient textthat mysteriously appeared soon after Yang’s arrival in Beijing. Thesewritings are called the taiji jing, or taiji classics, and they provided theBeijing intelligentsia with textual support for their claims. These writingscould not have been produced by the illiterate Yang and are not found inChenjiagou, the home of the Chen family style. The taiji classics were likelyauthored by Wu Yuxiang (1812–1880), one of Yang’s erudite students.Wu did two retrospectively brilliant things. He wrote a text that describedtaijiquan as a synthesis of native Han philosophies and practices and hepresented it as being an ancient document of divine origin, revealed to along-dead Daoist sage in meditation (Wile: i). Indeed the prefix taiji, whichmeans ‘undifferentiated unity’ and refers to one of the phases of creationin Daoist metaphysics, was likely coined at this time, over 300 years afterChen Wangting’s original synthesis.

In the early years of the twentieth century, various students of Yang LuChan founded their own versions of taijiquan. Public policy during theearly Chinese Republican Period (1912–1918) advocated that the peopleshould take part in what was called ‘self-strengthening’, and the practiceof taijiquan spread widely due to state sanction and support (Wile: 14). Bythe 1930s, five major varieties of taijiquan could be identified: the originalChen, the Yang, the Wu, the Hao and the Sun schools. These differentschools of taijiquan served a spectrum of needs that ran from militia training,to bodyguard skills, to personal self-defence, to health enhancement, tonational identity construction, with plenty of overlap between categories.

Taijiquan and the founding of the People’s RepublicWith the establishment of the Communist People’s Republic of China in1949, the ideological and functional nature of taijiquan changed yet again.In 1956 the State Commission for Physical Culture and Sports of China

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introduced the National 24 Form of taijiquan, a radically simplified andshortened version of the taolu of the Yang style of taijiquan. Recall thattraditional taijiquan practice is composed of solo training or taolu for coor-dination training and conditioning and of tui shou, or partner training, forcombat. In constituting this new form, the Communist government ofChina made choreographic choices with ideological implications. The pos-tures of the National 24 Form do not adapt well to actual combat. Theform takes four to six minutes to execute, down from the thirty minutes ittakes to perform the traditional Yang family taolu, thereby reducing thelevel of conditioning it provides. The National 24 Form was taught not toindividuals for solo practice, but to large groups for collective training. Thepopular image of hundreds of Chinese people training outside, dressed inmatching clothes, executing exactly the same movements in unison doesnot represent the tradition of martial practice in China as much as it doesthe Communist ideals of collective unity and efficiency – it has far more incommon with Taylorism than with Daoism! Finally, and most significantly,the State Commission for Physical Culture and Sports de-emphasised thepractice of tui shou combat training to such an extent that the practice oftaijiquan became synonymous with the practice of the taolu, or solo exer-cise, for its own sake (Sim and Gaffney: 27).

The new National 24 Form of taijiquan fulfilled only one of the possiblefunctions of the earlier traditional forms. Communist style taijiquan was notuseful for training militia, bodyguards or private citizens in self-defence. Itwas too short and simple to contribute meaningfully to health enhance-ment and physical conditioning. It could no longer be related to traditionalChinese religious cosmology or Daoist meditation, as the Communistsviewed such things as primitive and reactionary. The only thing that itremained useful for was national identity construction, an identity dic-tated by the Communist party. Although the National 24 continues to betaught, practitioners of the traditional family styles are very much presentin martial arts in China today. However, during the devastation of theCultural Revolution and the period immediately afterwards, the tradition-alists practised in almost total secrecy.

Taijiquan in Taiwan and beyondIn the unrest leading up to the Communist victory, many nationalistChinese martial artists fled to Taiwan. Among them was Zheng Manqing(1900–1975) a Chinese doctor known for his calligraphy, poetry, paintingand taijiquan. Zheng studied Yang style taijiquan with Yang Lu Chan’sgrandson, Yang Cheng Fu, in Beijing from 1929 to 1936.

Zheng’s influence would likely have remained confined to the Chinesemartial art communities of Taiwan and Southeast Asia had he not attractedthe attention of Robert W. Smith (b. 1926), an American aficionado ofcombat sports. Smith worked for the CIA and was posted to Taiwan wherehe studied taijiquan under Zheng from 1959 to 1962, an unusual honourfor a foreigner in those days (Smith 1995: 51). Smith became the first


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Western writer to document the Chinese martial art in a thorough fashionand his many books and articles on the subject are considered authorita-tive (see, for example, Smith 1999).

Zheng Manqing described himself to Smith as an eccentric, or qiguai. Nota typical martial artist, Zheng felt that classical Chinese painting and taijiquanshared common principles, a seemingly dilettantish position made credible byhis unusual skill in both disciplines. It is perhaps due to this eclecticism andhis friendship with Smith that he accepted French and American invitationsto travel and show his artwork in the West. On his return from an exhibitionat the Cernuschi Museum in Paris in 1964, Zheng visited New York Citywhere he was welcomed by members of the Chinese community and byAmerican ‘artists, literati and taiji aficionados’ (Smith 1995: 61).

By 1965, Zheng had moved to America, settling on Riverside Drive inNew York City and teaching in a studio in the Bowery. Zheng welcomed all,including Americans, artists, eccentrics, dropouts, hippies and pot-smokers(Smith 1999: 278). One can imagine what a romantic figure Zheng musthave cut, dressed in traditional Chinese robes, sporting a dapper goatee andcurling side-locks, surrounded by adoring Chinese and Western students.

Along with his unusual personality and innovative choice of students,Zheng appears to have made significant choices in his presentation of taiji-quan to North Americans. Firstly, as explained in detail by American taiji-quan teacher J. Justin Meehan, Zheng’s recorded execution of the Yangstyle taolu differs significantly from the Yang style taolu demonstrated byYang family heir Yang Zhenduo (b.1926), in that Zheng’s version is farless vigorous and athletically demanding (Online Source: Meehan, J.).Secondly, as explained by American taijiquan teacher Scott M. Rodell, Zhengmay also have de-emphasised the martial partner exercises of taijiquan inhis North American teaching:

While cannily balancing the martial and civil components in his own lifeand practice, Zheng’s writings often tend to emphasize the spiritual, medita-tive, and medicinal aspects of taijiquan. Further, when teaching in New York,Zheng adopted a relatively passive attitude toward the development ofmartial skill among his students.

(Online Source: Rodell, S.)

Although Zheng was definitely a leading author of the popular perception oftaijiquan in North America, the rapid spread of taijiquan there was facilitatedby two aspects of educational and popular culture that were ascendant in the1970s, the idea of interdisciplinary studies and the experiential workshop.

Taijiquan’s North American incarnationInterdisciplinary studies and the experiential workshop became the back-bone of the Human Potential Movement, a North American cultural phe-nomenon born at an alternative educational institution called the EsalenInstitute. Located on the California coast near Big Sur, Esalen was founded

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by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962 with the goal of integratinginsights from a wide variety of traditional and marginal disciplines, Eastand West. The Human Potential Movement was a cultural and intellectualtrend that emerged during the 1960s. It combined ideas derived fromdevelopments in Western psychology with the philosophies and practicesof numerous Asian meditative and religious systems in order to developthe extraordinary abilities found in leading artists, intellectuals, athletesand religious figures both living and historical. Inspired strongly by thework of psychologist Abraham Maslow, the participants in the HumanPotential Movement sought to synthesise from contemporary and tradi-tional sources actual practices that would lead to an exceptional quality oflife, characterised not only by peak experiences but also filled with joy, cre-ativity and contentment (see Kripal: passim).

At Esalen, therapy, education and recreation were combined in experi-ential workshops that offered instruction in such Asian disciplines as hathayoga, meditation and taijiquan (Wilber: 257–8).

One of the most influential tajiquan teachers at Esalen was Chungliang‘Al’ Huang. Huang’s teaching approach emerged from the emphasis atEsalen on the potential interrelationships between diverse Asian disci-plines and the primacy of the experiential. Given the Human PotentialMovement’s concern with personal happiness, creativity and fulfilment,Huang’s presentation of taijiquan built on the holistic myth created at theturn of the century in China, and updated it for 1970s North America:

Tai ji is just a Chinese word for something that appears in many forms of dis-cipline. Yoga, in essence, is tai ji. Zen is tai ji. Tai ji is what is. No more, no less.

(Huang 1973: 11)

Furthermore . . .

Tai Ji is a universal medium for the cultivation of Body, Mind and Spirit.It is natural. It is perennial. It is for everyone, of all ages.It is easy to learn. It can be joyful and exciting to practice.It is a dance of life to be treasured.It is for you.

(Huang 1989: 7)

While reinforcing a perception that taijiquan was ‘oriental’ and ‘mysteri-ous’, by refusing to define it, Huang also de-emphasised the importance ofthe five traditional lineages and implied that taijiquan is first and foremostan individualistic expression:

[When asked] ‘What do you practice?’, I say ‘I practice the Huang style.’ Mystyle comes out of the other styles, and I have to develop it to the point thatit becomes me.

(Huang 1973: 12)


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Finally, he transformed tuishou from an exercise in combat training into apractice concerned with settling the emotional and social conflicts of par-ticular individuals:

I used this one time in a couples workshop, and I practice this with my wifewhen we feel crossed and in conflict. She’s a very headstrong woman andsometimes when we disagree I say, ‘Suzanne, let’s do t’ui sho.’ She says, ‘ Idon’t want to do t’ui sho; I’ve had enough of your encounter things.’

(Huang 1973: 70)

If Zheng Manqing brought a taijiquan that was still very much culturallyChinese to a cosmopolitan public, Huang and those who have followed inhis footsteps can be seen to have created a whole new, specifically NorthAmerican, incarnation of the art. Today, taijiquan instruction in NorthAmerica exists along a continuum. At one end are the representatives ofthe traditional five lineages, who look upon the taijiquan that they teachas a martial art with classical standards of execution and an emphasison combat training. At the other end of the spectrum are teachers whopresent a gentle exercise complex that offers students an opportunity for self-expression, contains little or no partner training and is legitimised by its sup-posed link to the exotic and archaic spirituality of Daoism. It also appearsthat the majority of North American practitioners, regardless of their orien-tation, eschew the purely martial end of this continuum, placing greateremphasis on solo taolu practice than on partner tuishou, a tendency that alsoholds true in the teaching of taijiquan in performing arts institutions.

Early use of Taijiquan in actor training programmesAs Professor Robert Dillon of Southeast Missouri State University puts it:

Since the sixties the notion of ‘martial arts for actors’ has gone from beingalternative in every sense of the word to being mainstream. Edwin Wilson, inhis introductory text, The Theatre Experience, mentions ‘martial arts’ as actortraining tools (121) and discusses tai chi [sic] in some depth (119-120); youcan’t get much more mainstream than that.

(Online Source: Dillon)

Dillon’s perspicacious essay on martial art in actor training describes,quite accurately, the state of taijiquan practice in North America:

Tai chi [sic] is almost totally a solo practice. . . . Tai chi has pretty muchlost—except in certain schools and with certain teachers—many of itscombative applications in favor of a Taoist-flavored and broadly defined‘spiritualism’; tai chi systems are mostly ‘about’ self-discovery, wellness, andself-expression.

(Online Source: Dillon)

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The section of Edwin Wilson’s The Theatre Experience that deals with taiji-quan concords perfectly with Dillon’s description:

Unlike some martial arts, tai chi [sic] is not aggressive: it is a graceful,gentle exercise regimen performed widely by men, women and children inChina. It has spread to other countries where it is sometimes practiced inconjunction with meditation or body awareness. The movements of tai chiare stylised and often seem to be carried out in slow motion. Among otherthings, tai chi requires concentration and control, both valuable qualitiesfor a performer.

(Wilson : 12)

Wilson goes on to say that taijiquan is useful to actors because it helpsthem with ‘centering’. ‘When performers are able to “center” themselves’,he says, ‘they achieve a balance, a freedom and a flexibility they couldrarely find otherwise’ (Wilson: 127).

The idea of using a combative exercise system in the training of actorsis not new. Countless traditional performance forms from around the worldderive their physical culture and choreography from martial movement.For example, Chinese jingju (‘Beijing Opera’) employs martial exercisesadapted from the bei shaolin, the northern systems of Chinese martial art,as a source of both performance choreography and performer preparation(Yao: 21). And, while such techniques as boxing, historical fencing andstage combat have been used in twentieth-century North American andEuropean actor training, they have never been described in such existen-tially portentous terms as the language Wilson uses to describe taijiquan.The perception that taijiquan solo taolu training has a profound transfor-mational outcome can be traced to both the nineteenth-century Chineseself-strengthening holistic synthesis and to the twentieth-century AmericanHuman Potential Movement.

Furthermore, the aesthetic innovations of American performing artiststhat began in the 1950s created a receptive atmosphere for taijiquan’sadoption as an actor training protocol. Arnold Aronson describes theseinnovations as being ‘a rebellion against the mainstream commercial systemand the utter rejection of the status quo’ (Aronson: 3). This new movementwas responsible for the eventual erasure of the boundaries betweentheatre, dance, art and music and, a half-century later, allows critics andtheorists to describe contemporary theatre as being characterised by a‘movement away from the dominance of the word to the primacy of themoving body . . .’ (Mitter and Shevtsova: xviii).

As theatre artists became increasingly preoccupied with the lived expe-rience and training of the body, they reached out to a host of movementdisciplines, and not least among these was taijiquan, in its multiplicity ofNorth American incarnations, from the personal expression of the HumanPotential Movement to the martial art of the traditionalists.


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The first major North American theatre training institution to employtaijiquan in its acting programme was the University of Madison-Wisconsin’sAsian/Experimental Theatre Program, founded by Professor A.C. Scott in1963 (Zarrilli 1995: 182). A pioneering scholar of Chinese performanceforms, Scott had studied a shortened version of the taolu of Wu-style taijiquanfrom an unnamed teacher in Hong Kong in the 1950s (Online Source:Zarrilli). Later, in the early 1970s, the theatre programme of the CaliforniaInstitute of the Arts, under the guidance of Herbert Blau, hired MarshallHo’o, who taught student actors a shortened version of the taolu of theYang style of taijiquan (Blau: 122). And from here, smoothly and quietly,taijiquan became an accepted part of theatre training.

Although an historical overview provides an understanding of how thecurrent perception of taijiquan was created, a systemic approach is neededto understand its actual potential in actor training.

Systemic analysis of Taijiquan trainingIn his classification of human athletic and movement activities, Russiankinesiologist L.P. Matveyev proposes three overall groupings: monostruc-tural exercises characterised by relatively stable forms, polystructuralexercises, characterised by variable forms, and complex exercises, made upof combinations of mono and polystructural exercises. Examples of mono-structural, polystructural and complex exercises are, respectively, weightlift-ing or endurance running (mono), team games or sporting combat (poly)and combined events, such as decathlons or aesthetic sports such asgymnastics and acrobatics (complex) (Matveyev 1977, cited in Siff: 432).According to Matveyev’s system, taijiquan practice is a complex exercise.Tuishou, conforming as it does to the category of sporting combat, is apolystructural exercise, while taolu practice, containing, as it traditionallydoes, virtuosic feats of coordination and motor skill, is an aesthetic sport.In combining the characteristics of both combat and aesthetic sports, taiji-quan potentially offers actors benefits in two key areas, their psychophysi-cal coordination with respect to themselves and their psychophysicalcoordination in relationship to a fellow player.

The moment where the gains of an exercise complex such as taijiquanare applied in a performance-specific venue is referred to in kinesiology asconversion (Bompa and Carrera: 24). All aspects of actor training havetheir moment of conversion, where drills and skills have to be applied incontext. The measure of a training protocol’s utility is in how effectivelyconversion takes place.

I suggest that the effectiveness of taijquan’s conversion to actor trainingprotocol be evaluated in terms of the overall psychophysiological effects ofboth taolu and tuishou training and in terms of how these effects addressthe needs of actors performing in a variety of types of theatre.

Yang Yang (b. 1961) is a teacher of the Hunyuan style of taijiquan, whichis a modern branch of the Chen style, and a doctoral candidate in kinesiologyat the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He describes the process of

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learning taijiquan taolu as being concerned with familiarising the practi-tioner with ‘natural’ movement, where natural refers to:

. . . the orientation or angle of the body joints relative to the direction ofmovement . . . If the body’s joints are not naturally aligned with the intendeddirection of movement, two outcomes are certain: the force exerted will beweak (or even non-existent), and the unnatural alignment will eventuallyresult in injury.

(Yang: 83)

It is important to understand the nuanced use of the word natural in thisexample. Because of the degree of coordination involved, natural move-ment in taijiquan will necessarily be experienced by the novice as compli-cated, uncomfortable and artificial, far from the sensations of everydaymovement that the term ‘natural’ conjures up. Taijiquan movement isdescribed by kinesiology as voluntary movement, or movement governedby learned motor programmes. Motor programmes are represented in thebrain as ‘an abstract plan (as opposed to a series of joint movements andmuscle contractions)’ (Yang: 111). Thus, in learning taolu, studentsadopt a motor programme designed to maximise their movement effi-ciency. The effects of this adoption are seen in several areas. Increasedendurance strength in the legs results in improved balance. The repeatedpractice of sophisticated movements yields improvement in the attributeof coordination. Because of the coordination of the legs with the move-ment of the torso, an apparent increase in absolute strength is also aneffect of training. Sustained taolu training also produces a phenomenonknown as relaxation response, wherein the activity of the sympatheticnervous system is reduced and the activity of the parasympatheticnervous system increases (Yang: 68). The sympathetic nervous system isdominant during perceived emergencies and ‘helps mediate vigilance,arousal, activation and mobilization’, while the parasympathetic nervoussystem mediates ‘growth, energy storage and other optimistic activities’(Sapolsky: 22–3). What is especially significant about taolu training isthat it appears to balance the relationship between the two systems, offer-ing practitioners the ability to remain alert, responsive, rational andrelaxed without entering a static, motionless and vegetative state or ahyper-aroused one dominated by fear.

Yang continues by explaining how tuishou functions in contemporaryterms:

Maintaining central equilibrium and effortless motor control is dependentupon a continuous flow of sensory information (visual, somatic, sensory andvestibular). Posture and movement are controlled by the brain’s motorsystem in two ways:

1. The nervous system monitors sensory signals and uses this informa-tion to act directly on a limb. This responsive action is called feedback.


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2. Using sensory input and experience, the mind adopts a pro-activestrategy and contracts muscles that will be necessary to maintain balanceduring an imminent disturbance. This anticipatory response is called feed-forward.

(Yang: 136)

Yang goes on to argue that sustained practice of tuishou hones the effi-ciency of the feedforward and feedback functions of the motor system.Thus, while the practice of taijiquan taolu can provide a certain amountof coordination balance and nervous-system straining, in order to fullyenjoy the potential benefits of taijquan, coordination, balance and psy-chophysical equilibrium need to be actively challenged. Actors need towork on the spontaneous and improvised partner exercises of tuishou.Tuishou teaches what the taolu is for. It brings a strong dose of objectivityto training: testing and applying one’s movements with a partner intuishou allows one to check if the taolu practice is producing any verifiableconcentration, control, balance, freedom and mental flexibility. In theabsence of partner-practice, one’s sensations of centring, power, creativ-ity, and fulfilment remain subjective, fleeting and personal. Tuishou offersthe opportunity to correlate subjective impressions with reality in orderto create a repeatable change of skill level, rather than merely anephemeral change of state.

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Figure 1: Chen Zhonghua and Daniel Mroz practising Chen-style TaijiquanTuishou on Daqingshan Mountain, Shandong, China. (Photo by Scot Jorgenson)

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Concrete applications of Taijiquan in actor trainingOver time, actors training in taijiquan can reduce their reaction time tosudden stressors in order to act proactively and appropriately due to increasedsensory input (Yang: 138). Tuishou is an incremental protocol for reducingthe degree of the stress-response, the nervous and hormonal activationthat makes the heart pound, shrinks the field of vision and inhibits finemotor control (Sapolsky: 6–8).

Much of actor training is directly concerned with de-conditioning thestress-response. Actors’ lack of physical ease, vocal projection and abilityto respond creatively to their fellow players are all caused by habituatedover-reaction to actual or anticipated stressors. This in itself is enough torecommend traditional taijiquan to any actor-training programme.

Furthermore, taolu teaches stage actors to be able to repeat a precisechoreography of actions that, due to their martial nature, contain veryclear force vectors. These not only render a body trained in their executionmore dynamic, but also the specific breathing protocols used in taijiquanallow the moving actor to support vocalisation with movement in a highlyefficient manner. Having learned the classical choreography of the taolu,actors can apply themselves to composing posture and movement whenacting in self-consciously theatrical genres. Actors creating devised physicaltheatre or interpreting classical, late-modern and post-dramatic repertoireall have need of strong compositional skills. For actors working in theseforms, tuishou training converts into the skill of being able to respond


Figure 2: Chen Zhonghua uses his advantageous position to lock Daniel Mroz inan arm-bar during the training. (Photo by Scot Jorgenson)

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appropriately, compositionally and without stress to other actors and tothe performance environment.

Sustained versus terminating trainingThe major limitation on taijiquan’s usefulness to actors is the institutionalcontext in which it is typically provided. Actor-training in North America ischaracterised by terminating training programs that move graduates into thecultural industry after three or four years of schooling. Taijiquan, by contrast,was originally conceived as a sustained training activity, involving daily workover a lifetime in order to maintain the mature fighting form of a rural militiawith a strong, pre-existing background in martial movement. Although ahigh level of competence could be achieved by novices who devoted them-selves to its daily practice exclusively for three or four years, when practisedfor only a few hours a week as part of a larger, varied curriculum, basic skillin taijiquan – the growing ability to maintain physical balance and mentalcalm when wrestling with another – may never have a chance to manifest.

Solutions in terminating training programmesThe need for intense practice has led acting teacher Phillip Zarrilli to maketaijiquan practice more central to the performance programmes he hasdirected. Formerly the head of the Asian/Experimental Theatre Programmeat the University of Madison-Wisconsin and currently Professor ofPerformance Practice in the Drama Department of the University of Exeter(UK), Zarrilli has shared a shortened form of the Wu style of taijiquan withgraduate and undergraduate students in England and America since1980. Zarrilli’s programmes are not only restricted to taijiquan, but alsoinclude training in kalarippayattu, a martial discipline from South India,and hatha yoga (Zarrilli in Zarrilli 1995: 183).

What I find most significant about Zarrilli’s curriculum is his attemptto offer students in terminating training programmes a maximum numberof hours of physical practice by placing it at the centre of their work. Thetraining programme he instituted at the University of Madison-Wisconsin’sAsian/Experimental Theatre Programme, which he inherited from A.C. Scottin 1980, proceeded as follows. For the first six months of their time in the pro-gramme, both graduate and undergraduate students would meet five days aweek to practice taijiquan, kalarippayattu and hatha yoga for 90–120 minutes.Following the six-month introductory period, daily training was reduced to a60-minute period that served as an intensive preparation for the acting thatwas a part of the students’ course of work (Zarrilli 1995: 183–4).

Zarrilli has maintained his commitment to training intensity in hismore recent work at Exeter, where students in the Physical Performance andActor Training MA and MFA degrees receive at least 150 hours of guidedinstruction each semester in physical training that includes taijiquan, inaddition to the hundreds of hours of personal practice that are expected ofthem during their one- or two-year programmes (Online Source: Universityof Exeter Course Descriptions).

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The ultimate test of a programme set up along these lines is foundin the post-graduation choices of its students and in Zarrilli’s availabilityto them for ongoing training. A two-year period can provide studentswith a decent introduction to taijiquan, or to any martial discipline, but itdoes not provide them with the experience they need to continue devel-oping their fighting or movement skills without further instruction. Forstudents in terminating programmes to fully assimilate skill in taijiquanthey will not only have to develop a personal solo and partner practice,but also seek further instruction – in other words, they will have touse the foundation they acquired in terminating training to fuel a life-time of sustained training. Given the specificity of Zarrilli’s programme,the commitment that students must have going in to such a course ofstudies must be considerable. As a result, I feel optimistic about thepossibility of this course of terminating training planting the seed of sus-tained practice.

Solutions in sustained training programsAlthough there are probably many professional actors who take taijiquanclasses for the purpose of general self-maintenance, the number of theatreartists using taijiquan as the physical basis of their creative process is small,restricted to companies creating devised physical theatre or postdramaticworks that blur the distinctions between theatre, dance and performance art.Furthermore, it would be misleading to describe their work as pure sustainedtraining. The possibilities for sustained training by contemporary performingartists are constrained, in Canada where I live and work, by arts-fundingstructures and union regulations. Theatre companies in Canada are fundedby public and private agencies at national, provincial and municipal levels.Grants are either offered for the creation and performance of an individualwork or for the administration of a more established company over severalyears. Neither project-based funding nor operating funding has in mind astable ensemble of performers who base their creative life in a shared physicalpractice. Funding theatre artists to develop their technique on a daily basis,without a pre-determined, terminating goal in sight, is viewed as a riskyinvestment, and is not sanctioned. Thus, contemporary theatre artists inCanada attempting to base their work around taijiquan training are con-fronted with two realities: training is periodic as opposed to constant, and thegroup of performers being trained is not necessarily constant.

Two Canadian groups whose attempts to create a signature style ofperformance are based on taijiquan training are Battery Opera, led by LeeSu-Feh and David McIntosh, and One Reed Theatre Ensemble, directed bymyself. Battery Opera is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, in WesternCanada while One Reed is based in Toronto, Ontario in the east. I havechosen to present the work of these two groups as I am personallyacquainted, albeit to different degrees, with their work, and thus feel ableto link my direct practical experiences of them with the historical and the-oretical material I have presented above.


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Battery OperaBattery Opera’s founding members, Lee Su-Feh and McIntosh, both trained inChinese martial arts under Xu Gong Wei (b. 1915), a teacher who exposedthem to numerous styles including chaquan, xingyiquan, baguazhang and ofcourse, taijiquan. In addition to their work with Xu, they have benefitedfrom the strong Asian presence in Vancouver, and have trained in Chineseand other martial arts with a wide variety of teachers, as well as suchAsian systems of physical culture as hatha yoga and qigong. Their descrip-tion of the role of martial arts in their process is lucid and inspiring:

A large part of the development process in any of our work involves the train-ing of the performers (ourselves included) to a point where they have theappropriate skills and fluency in the language of our physical worldview. Thebasis of this language is not only aesthetic (a certain kind of gestural lan-guage or dynamic) but also has to do with a specific use of focus, breath andmindfulness. In this state, the performer is highly in tune with her breath andhow it connects with her eyes, with her internal and external impulses. Shealso becomes highly aware of the space around her, the shape of it and thelines of energy that run through it. Often, the work requires that performersimprovise from this state. In order to arrive at this state, the company trainsin a class that is based on a number of disciplines; qigong, yoga, voice, basicmartial arts (wushu) and, particularly, Chinese internal martial arts.

(Online Souce: Battery Opera Website)

Battery Opera offers an example of a successful, if periodic, approach tosustained training. Although the two core members, Lee and McIntosh,have a sustained practice of taijiquan, they do not work with a completelystable ensemble. Their three current performances, Cyclops, Spektator andReptile Diva, use some of the same performers, but the ensemble is not exactlythe same from work to work (Online Source: Battery Opera Website). Andas the description above reveals, training for the company as a whole ispart of the preparation of an individual project, and not the daily practiceof an ensemble.

Despite the constraints that periodic training with a shifting groupimposes, I believe that Battery Opera has successfully created a signaturestyle of performance, anchored in and revealed by a way of moving thatdistinguishes them from other physical theatre and dance companies. Tothe trained observer, this way of moving clearly derives from the Chinesemartial arts, including taijiquan. The actualisation of this way of moving islikely to be dependent on the constant presence of Lee and McIntosh fromproject to project, and to their own ongoing martial training.3

One Reed Theatre EnsembleOne Reed Theatre Ensemble is a group that I co-founded with four gradu-ating students of the English Acting Section of the National Theatre Schoolof Canada. Under its current artistic director Sherrie Bie, the English

3. While living inMontréal I sawReptile Diva at EspaceTangente (1999),Spektator at theFestival Internationalde Nouvelle Danse(2002) and tooka short martialmovement forperformers workshopled by McIntosh andLee at Studio 303,a training andcreation centre forcontemporaryperformance anddance (2000).

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Acting Section has been encouraging its students to become independentartists who create their own aesthetically diverse works. As such, Canadiandevised physical theatre artists Ker Wells and Karin Randoja give a classeach year at the National Theatre School. I studied with Wells and Randojamyself when they were members of Primus Theatre, a major Canadiancontemporary theatre ensemble active in the 1990s, directed by formerOdin Teatret actor Richard Fowler. I met the four actors of One Reed,Frank Cox-O’Connell, Megan Flynn, Marc Tellez and Evan Webber, whenthey were students of Wells and Randoja. Upon their graduation in 2005,we began to work together and created what would become One ReedTheatre, and our first performance, Nor The Cavaliers Who Come With Us.

During their work with Wells and Randoja, the actors had been exposedto some of the same physical training that I had learned from RichardFowler, the Pre-Expressive Training developed by the actors of EugenioBarba’s Odin Teatret, where Fowler had worked for over a decade. Theyhad also been taught the approach to performance composition that Ihad experienced with Fowler and Primus. However, given my interest inmartial arts training, in my work as a performer and director I had largelyreplaced the physical exercises of Fowler’s Pre-Expressive Training with myown repertoire of exercises. Added to this was the fact that, while I hadtrained with Fowler and Primus periodically but intensively for four years,the actors of One Reed had worked with Wells and Randoja for only sixweeks. Thus, while we were all content to use the approach to perfor-mance composition we had inherited from Primus, I didn’t feel that any ofus had enough experience with Fowler’s Pre-Expressive Training to con-tinue with it. We were also faced with time constraints – we had securedfunding for only nine weeks of full-time work. A common physical trainingwas essential to the way in which we had elected to make a performance,but I also knew that nine weeks work on taijiquan taolu, even at threehours per day, six days per week, would yield only minimal results andtake away from the time needed to compose the performance. I decided tobreak with tradition and concentrate only on partner exercises. I sharedvarious approaches to taijiquan tui shou with the actors, in addition topartner-training games from such contemporary approaches to combatsport as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Chinese sanshou. To borrow Lee Su-Feh andDavid McIntosh’s words:

We are interested in the martial body as a body that always works in relation-ship to an immediate opponent or partner, where the space around the bodyhas weight, shape, is ‘sentient’. . . . The martial artist’s relationship to an oppo-nent with close range provides us with clues about how to address the audiencein an intimate space and how to relate to the performer’s scene partners.

(Online Source: Battery Opera Website)

This reflects my preoccupations exactly, and I felt that, by privileging partnerwork, I would be hopefully optimising my collaborators’ imaginations and


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group complicity by amplifying their feedforward and feedback responsesto movement.

It is difficult to give any kind of reasonable evaluation of one’s own work.Nevertheless, I believe that, as a short-term solution, the choice to concen-trate on free-form, improvised fighting drills created excellent responsivenessand complicity in the performers. The performance Nor The Cavaliers WhoCome With Us, which deals with the consequences of the sixteenth-centuryconquest of Mexico today, has been a popular and critical success.4

Nevertheless, I feel that, if we are to surpass ourselves for our next outing,we must now concentrate on taolu. While interpersonal response has beenhoned, it is not supported by sufficient physical coherence. Raised scapulargirdles, necks transposed forwards and excessively loose stops, the bane ofall stage performers, need to be trained out of existence through the metic-ulous application of classical technique. Classical technique also preparesthe performer’s body in a global and uniform fashion that improvisedpartner-work, which privileges personal idiosyncrasies, cannot. Withoutthe objective standard for movement quality that taolu training imposes, Ido not feel we will be able to grow in our ability to innovate formally andchallenge ourselves. We have yet to find an ideal solution to our theoreti-cal commitment to sustained training, yet I am inspired by the success ofBattery Opera to attempt a periodic approach to training as we begin towork on our next creation.

ConclusionTaijiquan is an exercise complex that has captured the imaginations andcultural agenda of a surprisingly wide variety of groups. I have endeav-oured to provide a history of its uses, both in China and North America, aswell as a systemic description of its training activities. I have discussed itspotential impact in the context of both terminating and sustainedapproaches to training. Finally, I should like to suggest that, as taijiquanenters the twenty-first century, theatre practitioners who would availthemselves of its benefits would do well to look back to its martial rootsand emphasise tui shou in their study and practice.

Works citedAronson, Arnold (2000), American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, New York:

Routledge.

Blau, Herbert (1982), Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point, Champaign:University of Illinois Press.

Bompa, Tudor and Michael Carrera (2005), Periodization Training for Sports,Champaign: Human Kinetics.

Huang, Chungliang (1973), Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain, Berkeley: Celestial Arts.

——— (1989), Essential Tai Ji, Berkeley: Celestial Arts.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2007), Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Mitter, Shomit and Maria Shevtsova (2005), Fifty Key Directors, London: Routledge.

4. Nor The CavaliersWho Come With Us,devised by One Reed,performed by FrankCox-O’Connell, MeganFlynn, Marc Tellezand Evan Webber anddirected by DanielMroz had itsCanadian Premiereat the 2006SummerworksFestival in Toronto.After a veryfavourable review,the production wenton to win theSummerworksFestival SpotlightAward. Theperformance wascited for OutstandingProduction,Outstanding Directionand OutstandingEnsemble by Toronto’sarts-weekly NowMagazine whichsubsequently declaredOne Reed to beToronto’s BestYoung Ensemble.

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Sapolsky, Robert (1998), Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, New York: W.H. Freeman.

Siff, Mel (2003), Supertraining, Denver: Supertraining Institute.

Sim, Davidine and David Gaffney (2002), Chen Style Taijiquan, Berkeley: NorthAtlantic.

Smith, Robert (1995), ‘Zheng Manqing and taijiquan – a clarification of role’, Journalof Asian Martial Arts, 4:1.

——— (1999), Martial Musings, Erie: Via Media.

Wilber, Ken (1998), The Eye of Spirit, Boston: Shambhala.

Wile, Douglas (ed. and trans.) (1996), Lost T’ai Chi Classics from the Late Ch’ingDynasty, Albany: State University of New York.

Wilson, Edwin (2004), The Theater Experience, Columbus: McGraw-Hill.

Yang, Yang (2005), Taijiquan: The Art of Nurturing, The Science of Power, Champagne:Zhen Wu.

Yao, Haihsing (2001), ‘Martial-acrobatic arts in Peking Opera’, Journal of AsianMartial Arts, 10: 1.

Zarrilli, Phillip (1995), ‘On the edge of a breath, looking’, in Phillip Zarrilli (ed.),Acting(Re)Considered, London: Routledge.

Online Sourceshttp://www.batteryopera.com/website.html. Accessed 5 November 2006.

Dillon, Robert, ‘Asian martial arts in actor training: an enthusiast’s critique’, in Journalof Martial Combatives, Deborah Klens-Bigman (ed.), http://ejmas.com/jtc/jtcart_dillon_1299.html. Accessed 24 May 2001.

Meehan, J. Justin, ‘A comparative study between traditional Yang style of YangChengfu and Cheng Manching’s style’, http://www.stltaiji.com/documents/articlecomparingyang.pdf. Accessed 11 September 2006.

Rodell, Scott, M., ‘The martial and the civil in Yang style Taijiquan’, http://www.grtc.org/articles/martialcivil.html. Accessed 25 May 2006.

University of Exeter Course Descriptions, http://www.spa.ex.ac.uk/drama/pg/theatrepractice/welcome.html, http://www.spa.ex.ac.uk/drama/pg/modules/dram034.pdf, http://www.spa.ex.ac.uk/drama/pg/modules/dram035.pdf, http://www.spa.ex.ac.uk/drama/pg/modules/dram037.pdf. Accessed 31 October 2006.

Zarrilli, Phillip, ‘Phillip Zarrilli and kalarippayattu/martial arts/performance’,www.spa.ex.ac.uk/drama/staff/kalari/zarrilli.html. Accessed 24 May 2006.

Suggested citationMroz, D. (2008), ‘Technique in exile: The changing perception of taijiquan, from Ming

dynasty military exercise to twentieth-century actor training protocol’, Studiesin Theatre and Performance 28: 2, pp. 127–145, doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.127/1

Contributor detailsDaniel Mroz teaches in the Theatre Department of the University of Ottawa. Along-term student of Chinese martial arts and physical culture, he is currentlystudying Hong Junsheng’s Practical Method of Chen Taijiquan under the guidanceof nineteenth-generation lineage holder, Chen Zhonghua. He is the director of OneReed Theatre Ensemble, a Canadian company devoted to the creation of devisedphysical theatre.E-mail: [email protected]


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‘Your sincere friend and humble servant’:Evidence of managerial aspirations inSusannah Cibber’s lettersHelen Brooks

AbstractThis article explores both the text and some of the sub-texts of Susannah Cibber’scorrespondence with David Garrick from 1745 to 1747, when she was an estab-lished leading actress and he was contemplating entering into the management ofthe Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It considers the strategies Cibber adopted in herattempts to persuade Garrick into co-management and speculates on the ‘real’reason for the ultimate dashing of her hopes.

From July 1745 to January 1747 Susannah Cibber, leading actress on theDrury Lane stage wrote a series of letters to her ‘stage lover’ David Garrick.These letters form just a small part of the extensive private correspondenceof David Garrick compiled by the noted biographer, critic, essayist and his-torian John Forster (1812–1876) and held at the National Art Library. Yetwhile these letters are just one piece in the jigsaw of David Garrick’s storythey are invaluable for the insight they provide into one of the leadingactresses of her day. With Susannah Cibber’s long-term partner WilliamSloper having destroyed part of her correspondence after her death, andhis widow Catherine Sloper having finished the job after her estrangedhusband’s death, these letters are some of the few extant sources throughwhich we can directly access Susannah Cibber’s own ‘voice’. Moreoverwith the main focus of these letters being Susannah’s attempts to convinceGarrick to join her in various theatrical ventures, they offer us a valuableperspective on this actress’s managerial aspirations and more significantly,how she sought to achieve them.

At the point at which Susannah began this correspondence withGarrick, the London theatre scene was feeling the impact of political insta-bilities threatening the country. With Charles Edward Stuart’s Scottishuprising causing national economic unrest, and runs on the Bank of Englandunsettling the London market, the bank which held the patent of DruryLane was in a tenuous position. The partnership of the bankers and paten-tees, Green and Amber, was known to be at the point of breaking, and theimpact on the Drury Lane theatre under the management of James Lacywas not going unnoticed. Lacy had already had difficulty in paying hisactors the previous season, and in mid-July 1745, with a number of salariesstill outstanding, he was attempting to negotiate salary cuts with his leading


KeywordsDavid Garrick

Drury Lane

theatre management

James Lacy

women’s rights

Theophilus Cibber

STP-28-2-04-Brooks 4/18/08 2:39 PM Page 147

actors. It was within this context, in which both Susannah Cibber and DavidGarrick were negotiating hard with Lacy to renew their contracts at theircurrent rates that Susannah wrote the series of letters in which she soughtto gain Garrick’s support in an independent managerial venture. The firstletter of the series was sent by Susannah on 18 July 1745, and she beganit by dramatically informing Garrick of the current state of their salarynegotiations:

I must write what comes uppermost; so, without father [sic] ceremony, Imust tell you that I hear we are both to be turned out of Drury Lane play-house, to breath [sic] our faithful souls out where we please. But as Mr Lacysuspects you are so great a favourite with the ladies that they will resent it,he has enlisted two swinging Irishmen of six feet high to silence that battery.As to me, I am to be brought to capitulate another way, and he is to send acertain hussar of our acquaintance to plunder me.

(Garrick 1835: 1.34)

Warning Garrick foremost that Lacy was unprepared to capitulate to theirsalary demands, Susannah also paints a vivid picture of how Lacyintended to resolve his predicament. In Garrick’s case this meant bringingin the ‘two swinging Irishmen’, whom Garrick would have known to bethe popular actors Thomas Sheridan (1719–1788) and Spranger Barry(1717–1777), as replacements. Spranger Barry in particular was Garrick’sclosest rival, the difference in their style being best exemplified byMrs. Pritchard who wrote that of the two actors’ performances in Romeoand Juliet, Garrick’s was:

so ardent and impassioned [. . .] I should have expected he would havecome up to me in the balcony; but had I been Juliet to Barry’s Romeo – sotender, so eloquent, and so seductive was he, I should certainly have gonedown to him.

(Highfill: 1.330)

Whilst the threat Susannah presented tapped into Garrick’s greatest inse-curity, in relation to herself Lacy’s intentions appear to have been far moremenacing. Asserting that the manager intended to force her to work byencouraging her estranged husband Theophilus Cibber, that ‘certainhussar’, to ‘plunder’ her property and income as he had throughout thelast ten years, Susannah presented herself to Garrick as the threatened,powerless victim of Lacy’s schemes.

Yet although the threats Susannah described might well have beenreal, her reason for painting such a bleak picture of the ‘terrifying resolu-tions’ (Garrick 1835: 1.34) which faced them was not selfless. Moreover itsoon becomes clear that Susannah actively emphasised the ‘melancholy’nature of their situation specifically in order to lay the foundations for thesuggestion that she was about to put to Garrick. In fact, the situation she

148 Helen Brooks


described did not present a substantial risk to either herself or Garrick. InGarrick’s case he was already well-established as the leading London actor,and while for Susannah there was always the potential that Theophiluswould decide to involve himself in her career, her financial position wasnow far more secure than when she had been subject to her husband’smatrimonial rights. Now that she was co-habiting with and had had adaughter by William Sloper, whose substantial inheritance had consolidatedhis social and financial position in 1743, the threat of being ‘plundered’ isunlikely to have been a great concern to Susannah. Rather, therefore, thanaiming to warn Garrick, the ‘melancholy’ picture Susannah painted func-tioned primarily to provoke Garrick’s hostility towards Lacy, to encouragehim to view Susannah as his ally, and ultimately to make him more likelyto respond positively to her following suggestion that they join together inrebelling against Lacy’s management:

What think you of setting up a strolling company? Had you given me timelynotice of your going to Buxton, I am sure the landlord of the Hall Placewould have lent us a barn, and with the advantage of your little wife’sfirst appearance in the character of Lady Townly [in Colley Cibber’s The Pro-voked Husband], I don’t doubt but we could have pick’d up some odd pence:this might have given a great turn to affairs, and, when Lacy found we couldget our bread without him, it might possibly have altered these terrifyingresolutions.

(Garrick 1835: 1.34)

While Susannah quickly made light of this idea, continuing ‘but jokingaside, I long till you come that we may consult together’ (Garrick 1835:1.34), the suggestion that she and Garrick lead a theatrical rebellion toprove their professional worth is significant. With its overt echoes of the1733 rebellion against Drury Lane’s management, and the 1695 seces-sion from the United Company,1 Susannah’s suggestion located her withina tradition of leading players who had rebelled against the managementand subsequently become actor–managers in their own right. Provoked byLacy’s refusal to recognise what she perceived as her own commercialvalue, Susannah revealed not only the extent to which she would fight toretain her professional value, but for the first time, her belief in her ownmanagerial capabilities.

While Susannah’s idea was certainly interesting, we can gatherfrom her subsequent letter just over three months later, on 24 October,that Garrick had not responded enthusiastically to this strategy for chal-lenging Lacy’s management. With a clear rebuttal from Garrick,Susannah therefore quickly backtracked, brushing her idea aside andasserting that ‘I am partly of your opinion, that the masters would refuseour proposal: the thing came into my head as I was writing to you, so Imentioned it without father [sic] reflection’ (Garrick 1835: 1.37). Almostimmediately, however, Susannah developed her second idea for becoming

1. In 1733, one yearafter buying out hisfather’s share inDrury Lane’smanagement patent,Theophilus Cibberhad fallen out withthe principle patentholder at Drury Lane,John Highmore. As aresult Theophilushad been bannedfrom participationin the theatre’smanagement. Inresponse he had led agroup of disaffectedactors away fromDrury Lane, to joinhim in a newcompany which heestablished at theHaymarket theatre.The following yearHighmore had beenbankrupted, in partbecause of thecompetition from therebel company, andTheophilus had beeninvited back to DruryLane as a leadingactor–manager. Evenearlier, in 1695,following the ‘petitionof the players’, agroup of eight‘rebels’ had gained alicence to set upindependently fromthe United Company,a move which hadresulted in AnnBracegirdle andElizabeth Barrybecoming thefirst female actor-managers ofa London theatrecompany.

149‘Your sincere friend and humble servant’: Evidence of managerial aspirations . . .


an actor manager, and this one she told Garrick was ‘a much betterscheme’:

There will be no operas this year; so if you, Mr Quin, and I, agree to playwithout any salary, and pick up some of the best actors and actresses thatare disengaged, at what salary you both think proper, I make no doubt weshall get a licence to play therefore fifty, sixty, or any number of nights youagree upon. Mr Heidegger shall pay scenes, & c. and pay those that receivewages; and deliver the overplus to some proper person to enlist men to servein any of the regiments of guards, at five pounds per man; – this is theservice [th]at St Martin’s parish puts the money to that they collect, – and Imention it, because it is thought the most serviceable to the government, ofany scheme yet proposed [. . .] if we succeed, which I have very little doubtof, I desire nothing better than us three playing at the head of any companyof actors we can get together. I believe we shall convince the whole town thatwe have not been unreasonable in the salaries we have demanded.

(Garrick 1835: 1.37)

Unlike her previous plan, which ‘came into my head as I was writing toyou’, Susannah appears to have thought this new scheme through in somepractical detail before she committed it to article. It is not, however, solelyin the fact that she laid out a clear, practical and ultimately achievablestrategy that this letter marks a significant progression in Susannah’smanagerial aspirations, nor in the fact that she used a far more assertive,definitive tone in proposing the idea. Rather, the significance of this letteris the extent to which Susannah had re-figured her scheme within thebroader political context. In her earlier proposal Susannah had sought toachieve her managerial aspirations with a direct move in competition withLacy, proving to him that they could ‘get our bread without him’. Now,however, while her goal of setting up an independent company remainedessentially the same, Susannah sought to achieve it by framing her aspira-tions not as a rebellion but as a patriotic endeavour, a move which wouldeffectively mask her fundamental desire to manage a company in oppositionto Lacy beneath a philanthropic and seemingly selfless display of nationalsupport. Moreover, by presenting the endeavour as a nationalist enterpriseand giving the profits directly to the regiment of guards, Susannah’s planwould publicly and valuably locate both herself and Garrick as active par-ticipants in the national fight against the Young Pretender who had onlyone month earlier defeated the English forces in the first major battle of theJacobite uprising.2 It was a sophisticated strategy, and as such presented aninteresting dilemma to Garrick who, immediately on receiving Susannah’sletter, wrote to his friend and confidant Somerset Draper saying:

I should not have troubled you so soon again, was it not to tell you I havereceived a letter from Mrs Cibber, who proposes a scheme for our acting withMr Quin, gratis, in the Haymarket; in order to raise a sum of money to enlist

2. One month earlier,in September 1745,Charles EdwardStuart had marchedon Edinburgh withhis Highland armyand defeated theHanoverian force ledby Sir John Cope atthe Battle ofPrestonpans. InOctober they werecontinuing to marchsouth. Publiclylocating herself as asupporter of theHanoverian thronewould be aparticularly valuablemove for Susannah,since in religiousterms, as a RomanCatholic, herallegiance might beassumed to be to theJacobite cause.

150 Helen Brooks


men for his Majesty’s service. Now although I imagine this proposal merelychimerical and womanish; yet, as I would not give my opinion too hastilyupon such an affair, I must desire you to wait upon her; and to be sure if Ican, in any way, contribute to the general good, I shall be ready upon thefirst notice, to come and give my assistance.

(Little and Kahrl 1963: 1.66)

Garrick was torn. On the one hand he perceived the idea to be ‘womanish’and ‘chimerical’, yet on the other he recognised that he might ‘turn this’to his own advantage with Lacy since, in Susannah’s words, ‘to break thisscheme he will give you any terms you will demand (Garrick 1835: 1.37).Additionally, perhaps he also recognised the significant risk of the venturegoing ahead without him, and of the public finding out that he had refusedto take part in a philanthropic and patriotic endeavour. Turning to his mosttrusted advisor, Garrick therefore asked Somerset Draper to visit SusannahCibber ‘as soon as possible, and give me your opinion on it’, making itclear that ‘if I can, in any way, contribute to the general good, I shall beready upon the first notice’(Little and Kahrl 1963: 1.66).

Three days later Susannah received a visit from Somerset Draper,3 whoswiftly resolved Garrick’s dilemma by convincing her ‘that it was best to dropthe affair I mentioned to you’ (Garrick 1835: 1.38). The means by whichDraper succeeded in quelling Susannah’s scheme are unfortunately lost,although we can speculate that the news that Garrick intended to departshortly for Ireland may have played some part. At the same time, Susannah’srecently received letter regarding the potential sale of the Drury Lane patentmay also have encouraged her to put the present scheme to one side infavour of the greater potential ahead.4 Yet, whatever the reason, whenSusannah next wrote to Garrick, on 30 October, her tone was notablycooler and even resentful of Garrick’s abandoning her at this time of changeand uncertainty. ‘I am sorry to hear you propose going to Ireland withoutcalling at London’, she wrote:

I should think it would be right to see your friends here first. You don’t knowwhat events may happen in your absence; as I have no notion the theatrecan go on in the way it now is. I should have been very glad to have had twoor three hours conversation with you before your journey; but if I have notthat pleasure, I heartily wish you your health.

(Garrick 1835: 1.38)

Having now attempted twice to gain Garrick’s professional collaborationon two separate managerial projects, and having been clearly rebutted byhim and even abandoned for another country, it would not be surprisingto see Susannah give up on her attempts to further her ambition withher stage lover. Yet only ten days later, on 9 November 1745, Susannahappears to have re-evaluated her strategy. She wrote once more to Garrick,putting forward her third and final proposal, and suggesting that she and

3. Susannah begins herletter of 30 Octoberby telling Garrick that‘yesterday Mr Drapercalled upon me’(Garrick 1835: 1.38).

4. In her letter of9 November 1745Susannah tellsGarrick that shewants to speak tohim about ‘a lettersent me a fortnightago’, suggesting thatwhen she wrote toGarrick on 30 October she mightalready have receivedthis letter regardingthe patent.



Garrick join together in purchasing the patent for Drury Lane. As in herfirst letter, Susannah opened by carefully setting the tone and laying thegroundwork for the revelation of her plan. She began:

Sir, I had a thousand pretty things to say to you, but you go to Irelandwithout seeing me [. . .] You assure me also you want sadly to make love tome; and I assure you, very seriously, I will never engage upon the sametheatre again with you, without you make more love to me than you did lastyear. I am ashamed that the audience should see me break the least rule ofdecency (even upon the stage) for the wretched lovers I had last winter. Idesire you always to be my lover upon the stage, and my friend off it.

(Garrick 1835: 1.38–39)

This wonderfully flirtatious opening paragraph was a new strategy forSusannah. Up until this point her propositions of commercial ventures hadbeen businesslike in tone, focussing primarily upon the situation, layingout plans and strategies and, perhaps most of all, being overtly enthusias-tic about the ventures proposed. Now, however, Susannah began by show-ering Garrick with praise, pandering to his ego and conversing in whatmust have seemed, from its flirtatious tone, a much more ‘feminine’ way.Whether in part simply an attempt to make up for the distant tone in herprevious letter or out of recognition that her more ‘masculine’ style of con-versing had not previously been successful in furthering her ambitions,the main function of this flirtatious opening was to reaffirm and re-estab-lish Susannah’s alliance with Garrick. Throughout this paragraph the keypoints that Susannah asserted were her professional loyalty and her per-sonal affection for Garrick. Asserting that no other actor compared as a‘lover upon the stage’, Susannah located herself as Garrick’s primary stagepartner, a relationship which would be key if she was to convince Garrickto join her as co-manager of Drury Lane. Having laid the groundworkthrough flattery and encouragement – notably the exact reverse of thestrategy Susannah had used in July when attempting to gain Garrick’ssupport with the threat of the ‘terrifying resolutions’ – Susannah thencame to reveal her final and ultimate aspiration:

What I wanted to speak to you about was, a letter sent me a fortnight ago.The purport of it was, supposing the remainder of the patent was to be sold,would you and Mr Garrick buy it, provided you could get promise of its beingrenewed for ten or twenty years? As I was desired to keep this a strict secret,I did not care to trust it in a letter, but your going to Ireland obliges me to it.After this, it is needless to beg you not to mention it to any body; but let meknow what you think of it, because I must return an answer.

(Garrick 1835: 1.39)

Having asked the key question, Susannah quickly drew the letter to a close,and the reader is left with the sense that she had neither a particular interest

152 Helen Brooks


in purchasing the patent nor in hearing Garrick’s opinion on the venture.Whilst in both earlier proposals Susannah had overtly stated her proposal,laying out her case assertively and detailing key aspects, here her approachwas almost the exact opposite. By spending only these three sentences onthe topic of the patent, Susannah appeared to simply drop it into the letter,giving no sense of her own opinion on the venture and only asking ofGarrick’s because ‘I must return an answer’. From her following letters,however, it becomes clear that, rather than reflecting Susannah’s real feel-ings, this superficial disinterest was part of a sophisticated strategy to winGarrick over. By presenting herself as a passive, reactive, and thereforefundamentally more ‘feminine’ figure, Susannah effaced any threat Garrickmight have previously felt from her assertive, dominant approach andeffectively assured him that in any partnership he would be able to take amore active and ‘masculine’ role.

The sophistication of Susannah’s strategy, however, lay not in her‘feminising’ of her role. More significant in fact was the way in which shebalanced this with a clear demonstration of those ‘masculine’ traits whichwould be essential to Garrick’s acceptance of her as a potential actor–manager. Sandwiched in between her flirtatious opening and her passivereference to the patent, Susannah included two sentences which servedexactly this purpose. She wrote:

I have given over all thoughts of playing this season; nor is it in the power ofMr Lacy, with all his eloquence, to enlist me in his ragged regiment. I shouldbe very glad to command a body of regular troops, but I have no ambition tohead the drury-lane militia.

(Garrick 1835: 1.39)

In this short announcement Susannah made a profound statement. Notonly did she overtly and proudly assert her ambition to lead the DruryLane company but she also demonstrated that she had the skill to do so.Switching on an instant from the flirtatious, ‘feminine’ style of her opening,through which she had sought to put Garrick at ease, Susannah used anotably different, and essentially ‘masculine’ tone. With her assertive, con-fident statement of her managerial ambitions, her resistance to Lacy andher use of military terms with their inherently masculine associations,Susannah emphasised to Garrick that she had the traits needed to take onthis role successfully.5 By slipping this ambitious statement into a letterdistinguished by its feminine and passive tone, Susannah appears to havebeen attempting overall to negotiate a balance between ‘masculine’ and‘feminine’ roles, a task which would be essential to any successful partner-ship with Garrick. On one hand she appears to have recognised that towork with Garrick she would need to be the more passive and dependentpartner, while on the other she also appears to have been aware of theimplicit risk that such an approach presented. As a partner, Susannahtherefore offered herself in feminine terms, whereas as a manager she

5. As well as beinginherently masculine,in the currentpolitical climate, withthe Catholic CharlesStuart about to crossinto England,Susannah’s militaryreferences would haveresonated strongly,also reiterating herearlier alignment ofstage and politics.Again, as a RomanCatholic herself, therefusal to lead a‘rebel’ company alsolocated her as asupporter of thenational forces, anddirectly in oppositionto the Stuart forces.



made it clear that she would play an equal and assertive role in the busi-ness of managing the company.

Unfortunately, with Garrick’s reply to this letter being lost, we have noidea how he responded to Susannah’s carefully crafted attempt to gain hispartnership in co-managing Drury Lane. What we do know, however, isthat Susannah’s next step in her strategy was to take action which wouldpractically demonstrate to Garrick both her ability as a manager and herprofessional value as a partner. On 7 December 1745 she published a noticein the Daily Advertiser offering to play Polly in The Beggar’s Opera for thebenefit of the Veterans’ Scheme, an offer which bore remarkable similaritiesto her earlier scheme of performing gratis for the regiment of guards.6 Theway that Susannah planned and enacted this venture is rarely recognisedas a key moment in her career, and yet, within the context of her attemptsto purchase the patent of Drury Lane, this solo staging of The Beggar’s Operawas effectively Susannah’s public and most overt demonstration to Garrickof her ability and acumen. From her choice of a controversial and provoca-tive play, to her negotiations with the theatre managers and her indepen-dent management of public opinion with her confident puffing in thepapers, Susannah ensured that every element of this production would giveher the full opportunity to demonstrate to Garrick her significant value as apartner in the management of Drury Lane.

In offering to play Polly in The Beggar’s Opera, Susannah would haveknown she was making a highly political and provocative move. Just underten years before, in 1736, she and Kitty Clive had become embroiled inwhat had been popularly known as the Polly War, a very public confronta-tion over which of the two actresses would be allowed to play the partof Polly in a production at Drury Lane. With Kitty Clive having won theoriginal battle, Susannah’s statement was a clear provocation to her rival.Moreover, with Clive being a member of the Drury Lane company,Susannah’s choice of play was also a direct challenge to Lacy, forcing himto choose between his leading actress that season and the significant ben-efits to be gained from supporting Susannah’s venture. The option ofworking at Covent Garden, however, was no less controversial, and in asimilar way forced that theatre’s manager to choose between the valueSusannah would bring and the ongoing value offered by her estrangedhusband who was already a member of the Covent Garden company.In this context, and by choosing both this role and play, Susannah wasclearly setting herself up to succeed under even the most difficult circum-stances. Deliberately provocative, Susannah’s choice prompted an immedi-ate theatrical and public tumult. As she wrote in a later letter to Garrick,on 11 December 1745:7

The morning my first advertisement came out, I wrote lacy a very civil letter,desiring to know if he consented to my proposal [. . .] I heard that night thatthe green room was in an uproar: I was cursed with all the elegance ofphrase that reigns behind the scenes, and Mrs Clive swore she would not

6. The Veterans Schemehad been set up as acharitable institutionto support Englishsoldiers.

7. In PrivateCorrespondence theyear put to this letterand the subsequentletter of 19 Decemberis 1746. Howeverthis is a clear mistakesince both lettersdirectly refer toSusannah’sproduction of TheBeggar’s Opera atCovent Garden, aproduction whichtook place inDecember 1745.

154 Helen Brooks


play the part of Lucy. The next morning Mr Rich sent me an offer of hishouse, that he would give the whole receipts to the Veteran scheme, and thathe should always esteem it a great obligation done to him; that he had sentto Mr Cibber, who promised that he would never come near the houseduring the rehearsals, or performances and that Mr Rich would answer withhis life he should keep his word: so I concluded it the same day, which wasSunday. The next morning came out the advertisement of my being a rigidroman catholic, &c. The answer I made to it might have been much betterwrote, but I had nobody to consult but myself [. . .] I send you inclosed thetrue copy of it as it was published in the London Courant.

(Garrick 1835: 1.45–46)

In the longest letter of this series, Susannah ensured that Garrick was fullyaware of all the details surrounding her venture, and, more importantly, ofthe extent to which she was acting independently and successfully in spiteof being subject to both personal and professional attacks. Enclosing theletter she had published in the London Courant as well as cutting out andincluding ‘all the advertisements for you that I could find’ (Garrick 1835:1.47), Susannah made sure that Garrick had all the information he neededreadily to hand to judge her value and skill as a potential partner. Moreover,just in case Garrick had failed to recognise her value from the fact thatTheophilus Cibber had been forced to stay away from his own theatre onher account, Susannah ensured it was overtly stated, light-heartedly men-tioning that ‘I had a letter on Monday from Lacy, in which he made freshoffers of engaging me’. Although Susannah commented disparaginglythat ‘it is a long silly letter’ and asserted that she ‘should never engage atany theatre which he had the direction of ’ (Garrick 1835: 1.46), the implicitmessage was not only that she was in demand, but that her offer to Garrickwould not be indefinite.

Having set the scene in terms of her managerial skill and ambition, herprofessional value, her continuing allegiance to Garrick and her refusal towork at Drury Lane, Susannah finally made her move. For the first time,in the most overt and assertive terms, Susannah informed Garrick of herintention to join with him as joint-patentee of Drury Lane:

I have had a visit from Mr Rich, who says, he sent you word when the patentwas to be sold, and wonders we did not buy it; it appears to me it must soonchange hands again. I wish you would let me know your intention about it;I am ready to join with you in any undertaking of that sort, and am sure, ifit can be worth any body’s buying, it must be worth ours.

(Garrick 1835: 1.46)

Garrick’s immediate response to this forthright statement is unknown, butonly eight days later, at ‘the first opportunity’ (Garrick 1835: 1.47), andafter having experienced unreserved success in her venture, Susannahwrote to him again.8 Like her letter prior to the performances of The Beggar’s

8. The Beggar’s Operawas performed on 14,16 and 17 December1745.



Opera, in this letter of 19 December 1745 Susannah’s overriding aim wasto ‘sell’ herself to Garrick as a co-manager. With an air of barely suppressedexcitement, she therefore began by informing Garrick that she had played‘to the fullest houses that were ever seen’, and that as a result ‘Mr Richhas pressed me of all things to engage there this year’ (Garrick 1835: 1.47).Consistent with her previous assertions of loyalty, Susannah of courseassured Garrick that her response had been ‘as there is no Tancred, I amresolved they shall have no Sigismunda’ (Garrick 1835: 1.47). Yet whileappreciating this apparently selfless demonstration of loyalty, Garrickcould not have failed to note the fact that, as a result of her independentsuccess, Susannah was now being courted, not only by Drury Lane, butalso by Covent Garden.

In her previous lengthy letter Susannah had already made Garrickaware of the managerial negotiations upon which her success had beenbased. Having asserted her success, she then took a further step in seekingGarrick’s partnership, offering now to put her proven skills to use for hisbenefit. In the face of a pamphlet which Susannah informed Garrick wasbeing written against both their ‘honour’, and in response to whichSusannah insisted ‘it will be absolutely necessary to write an answer to itas soon as possible’ (Garrick 1835: 1.47), she suggested the followingarrangement:

As you are not now upon the spot to defend yourself, I should think it properthat you should send over a short account of the real matters of fact [. . .] andin case there are any falsehoods inserted against you in the pamphlet, whichI imagine will shortly appear, you may desire Mr Draper to come to me, andwe will consult together about what is necessary to be said relating to you;and you may depend upon it, I shall not take the liberty of mentioning anything concerning you without his approbation.

(Garrick 1835: 1.47)

Not only was Susannah offering to defend Garrick publicly, but with thiscourse of action she would effectively place herself alongside SomersetDraper as Garrick’s close confidant. Clearly by this point Susannah hadrecognised Draper’s crucial role in Garrick’s decision making and haddetermined that, if she could work closely with him for Garrick’s benefit,their joint possession of the patent would become almost a certainty. It cer-tainly was an astute idea, and it was following this letter, in whichSusannah concluded by informing Garrick that she meant ‘to commencefrom the end of this season, and only for the remainder of the patent’(Garrick 1835: 1.48), that for the first time we have evidence of Garrickseriously considering joining with Susannah as co-patentee.

In response to Susannah’s demand to ‘know your real sentiments [. . .]upon what terms you were offered the patent, and how far you would careto go if it was now to be sold’ (Garrick 1835: 1.48) Garrick wrote toSomerset Draper:

156 Helen Brooks


Mrs Cibber [. . .] talks much of buying the patent, and thinks we may purchase itimmediately; for she is certain Drury Lane cannot possibly go on with thepresent set of actors [. . .] if anything should happen which would require mypresence, I can be in town time enough to take the benefit of a theatrical revo-lution [. . .] Mrs Cibber is a most sensible, and I believe sincerely, a well-meaning woman; pray go and see her, and I beg you will do what you please tohinder the villainy of these people taking effect. I am most heartily rejoiced ather success; and although it is intimated to me that she was not so excellent inthe character, yet I cannot think but three crammed houses are certain proofsto the contrary. I should be glad of your opinion. As to the patent, what can Isay to her? Mure, you know, is the person I have hopes of joining with; and yet,if she can procure it (as I believe he is very slow in his motions) why should notI (upon a good agreement and easy terms) be concerned with her? We oughtalways to play together; and I could wish we both settled at the same house.Pray think of this affair; and, as I know you are so much more cool and judi-cious than myself, I shall follow your advice in every thing.

(Little and Kahrl 1963: 1.71–72)

From this thoughtful letter it becomes apparent that Garrick had beeneffectively persuaded by the strategies Susannah had employed. From hiscomments on the ‘crammed houses’, and his recognition that ‘we oughtalways to play together’, to his commendation that ‘Mrs Cibber is a mostsensible [. . . .] woman’, Garrick has clearly been affected by the pointsSusannah had ensured were reiterated throughout her letters. Finallytherefore, having proven her practical abilities in a venture Garrick hadturned down, and having demonstrated her intentions towards Garrickthrough offering to defend him in public, Susannah appeared to be righton the cusp of achieving her goal.

Over the next month events progressed apace. By 26 December 1745Green and Amber were bankrupt and Garrick was writing urgently toDraper that ‘something must happen in the theatrical state, that may turnto my advantage’ and requesting that his friend visit Susannah to discussthe patent (Little and Kahrl 1963: 1.74). By the end of January, and fol-lowing that meeting, Susannah and Garrick’s partnership appeared tohave been affirmed, and it had further been proposed that ‘Mr Quin shouldbe one of the triumvirate’, an idea which gave Susannah, who was a closefriend of Quin’s, ‘great pleasure’ (Garrick 1835: 1.48). In this letter toGarrick in January, and as a result of her sense of the verbal agreement topurchase the patent together, Susannah’s tone had noticeably changed.No longer promoting her own value or shifting tones from paragraph toparagraph, now Susannah wrote to Garrick in the tone of a co-manager.When considering the idea of Quin as co-patentee, Susannah’s opinionwas therefore also inflected by her sense of her managerial position, andshe noted that ‘besides being a great actor’ Quin ‘is a very useful one, andwill make the under actors mind their business’ (Garrick 1835: 1.49).Yet it is her comment that ‘I shall take Mr Draper’s advice in every thing



relating to the scheme we have in hand’ (Garrick 1835: 1.50 my italics) whichis most suggestive. With this one phrase it becomes apparent that by January1746 Susannah felt that she had won her battle to convince Garrick tojoin with her as co-patentee of Drury Lane, and that the only battle leftwas that of actually winning the patent.

As this is the last correspondence relating to the patent, it would belovely to close the matter on this positive note and leave Susannah lookingahead excitedly to the purchase of the patent with her close friends andcolleagues, David Garrick and James Quin. Unfortunately, however, as weknow, fifteen months later, on 9 April 1747, Garrick did purchase the patentbut by this time it was not Susannah Cibber but James Lacy – the samemanager who had attacked both Susannah and Garrick the previous year –who was his partner and co-patentee. What happened in the interveningmonths has been lost. We can never know at what point Susannahbecame aware of Garrick’s negotiations with Lacy, or how Garrick brokethis news to Susannah. Over this period there are only four letters sentfrom Susannah to Garrick which exist in the collection, and significantlynone of these letters references either the patent or Susannah’s ambitions.9

In September 1746 Garrick even stayed with Susannah and WilliamSloper for a month on his return from Dublin, a stay during which hedescribed himself as ‘never in better spirits or more nonsensical in my life’(Little and Kahrl 1963: 1.86). Yet whether the matter of the patent hadbeen resolved by this date, or was even brought up in discussion, we cannever know. Moreover, with a substantial gap in Garrick’s private corre-spondence following 1747, the consequences of Garrick’s rejection ofSusannah after her long-fought attempt to convince him will never beknown.10 Perhaps all we can say with some degree of certainty is thatSusannah’s unique contract, when she joined the Drury Lane companyunder Garrick and Lacy, must have been to some extent recompense byGarrick for his treatment of her over the period.11

The final piece in the story comes in the form of a question put toSomerset Draper by Garrick in December 1745, and gives us the only evi-dence we have as to why Garrick ultimately chose to join with James Lacyrather than Susannah Cibber. On 26 December 1745, only a few daysafter he had written to Draper about the potential of joining withSusannah on ‘easy terms’, Garrick had written to Draper again:

I should be glad of your visiting Mrs Cibber, she certainly has had proposalsmade to her; but how can she be a joint patentee? Her husband will inter-fere, or somebody must act for her, which would be equally disagreeable.

(Garrick 1835: 1.74)

In this one short phrase Garrick highlighted the most fundamental problemthat Susannah encountered, and the one reason we have for why she ulti-mately failed in her bid to become a patentee. While she might have had theskills and abilities to manage Drury Lane with Garrick, and she certainly

9. These remainingletters are dated26 February 1746,8 April 1746, 8 Juneand 29 June 1746and are notablydifferent in tone fromSusannah’s earliercorrespondence,dealing mainly withnon-theatricalbusiness. In FebruarySusannah sentGarrick a glove andasked him to bringher back ‘ten dozenmade exactly of thesame size [. . .] as aparticular favour’,also mentioning her‘love to Ireland’ andthe fact that herdesire to return therewas sadly prohibitedby her being unableto ‘muster up courageenough even to thinkof crossing the sea’(Garrick 1835:1.39–40). In the finaltwo letters of this yearthe correspondencefocussed primarily onGarrick’s upcomingvisit to Woodhay,Susannah andWilliam’s countryretreat. On 8 June1746 Susannahwrote to Garrick withthe arrangements,informing him that‘the chaise shall meetyou at Reading orNewbury, whicheveryou choose’ andasking him to ‘bringfine weather, healthand spirits with you,and stay a good whilewhen you are hear[sic]’ (Garrick 1835:1.43). On 29 June,having clearlyreceived a letter inwhich Garrickproposed only to stayfor a short periodSusannah respondedirritably, ‘if you areserious about stayinghere but a few daysonly, I desire youwill not come [. . .]the farmer [Sloper]bids me tell you the

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had the ambition and drive, as a married woman Susannah Cibber hadno legal identity. At best therefore, she could only be a de facto partner.Ultimately, for Garrick this was too much of a risk, laying him open to theinterference of Susannah’s estranged husband, her brother Thomas Arne,or any other male in her life. The fact that Garrick had little time for eitherof these two male figures made it even less likely that he would take therisk of joining with Susannah. With Theophilus being, by all accounts, anunpleasant, greedy and morally corrupt man and Thomas Arne an over-bearing figure, Garrick’s reluctance to join with Susannah and give thesemen access to the patent is hardly surprising. Ultimately, however, whilstSusannah had striven to negotiate her gender identity in her letters, hadproved her managerial abilities and had almost succeeded in convincingGarrick to join with her, it was the one unchangeable aspect of her identity,her sex, and the consequences of it, which prevented her from achieving herambition and becoming the first female manager of Drury Lane theatre.

Works citedGarrick, David (1835), The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, With the Most

Celebrated Persons of His Time, Now First Published From the Originals and Illus-trated With Notes, and a New Biographical Memoir of Garrick, London: H. Colburn byR. Bentley.

Highfill, Philip, Kalman Burnim and Edward Langhans (eds.) (1973), A BiographicalDictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & other Stage Personnelin London, 1660–1800, 16 vols, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Little, David M. and George M. Kahrl (eds.) (1963), The Letters of David Garrick, 3 Vol., London: Oxford University Press.

Suggested citationBrooks, H. (2008), ‘“Your sincere friend and humble servant”: Evidence of managerial

aspirations in Susannah Cibber’s letters’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 28: 2,pp. 147–159, doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.147/1

Contributor detailsHaving completed her PhD on the changing construction of the eighteenth-centuryactress, Helen Brooks now teaches Drama at the University of Nottingham.E-mail: [email protected]

same: the onlyamends I think youcan make fordisappointing us lastyear, is the staying agood while now, andI desire you willbring your servant,and what otherconveniences youthink proper’ (Garrick1835: 1.43).

10. In 1749 there areonly two letterspublished, andfollowing this thereis a substantial gapuntil the next letterwhich is in 1754.

11. When SusannahCibber joined Garrickand Lacy at DruryLane, her contracthad some uniqueclauses. As well asbeing allowed to readall new plays andclaim any female roleshe wanted, the costsof both Susannah’sdresser and stagewardrobe, includingjewels, were paid forby the company.




Notes and Queries


Notes and Queries. English language. doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.161/3

Stage directions: Valuable clues in the exploration of Elizabethanperformance practiceKay Savage

AbstractThere is no clear consensus regarding the importance of early modern stage direc-tions in the writing, reading, or, arguably more importantly, the acting of six-teenth-century plays. It is an area of study that has been dominated, well into thetwentieth-century, by literary critics of drama. As a result, the stage directions inthis early drama have been (and, it may be argued, still are) treated as sub-liter-ary, often beneath notice or remark. But no theatrically minded critic can ignorethe importance of these stage directions to the actual staging of a play. The signif-icance of these stage directions is that they date from an early, no-holds-barredstage in the development of the English dramatic repertoire, and the plays of theoften overlooked ‘Jack of all trades’ Robert Greene (1558–1592) provide us witha rich and provocative source. Although Greene was, in many ways, a highlysophisticated Renaissance writer, he was, in other ways, a ‘primitive’ (just asMarlowe was), because he was writing for a theatre that had not yet learned tosmooth its rough edges. Greene’s ‘texts’ provide an extreme example of the textualinstability of much surviving early modern drama. The plays I treat are indis-putably ‘early’ in the evolution of Elizabethan drama, and that is important here.They offer a provocative insight into Elizabethan stage practices during the forma-tive years of the newly professional theatre. Greene was writing drama before theprofessional theatre had learned its limitations, and while it was establishing itsconventions. This gives Greene’s published texts a special value: conventions werestill being formed, rather than, as was largely the case when Shakespeare’s playscame to be published, and wholly by the seventeenth century, fully established.

Robert Greene was not a company writer; he was not in control of hisplays’ performances and so could not have used any form of shorthandin his playwriting. His plays were written to be attractive to whoever hadthe money to buy them. Like Marlowe’s and Peele’s, Greene’s is an early‘canon’, and there is a fanciful element to the stage directions in his playswhich is shared only with some of the later – and highly fanciful – plays ofDekker and Heywood. He challenged what the stage could do, and much ofmy concern is with the Elizabethan audience’s willingness to share in the


KeywordsRobert Greene

Elizabethan staging

evidence from stagedirections

theatrical conventions

audience expectation

publishing conventions

STP-28-2-05-Savage 4/18/08 2:40 PM Page 161

theatrical magic suggested by the stage directions. This article identifiessome of the questions that these stage directions raise in relation to the firstperformances of these plays and offers answers or informed speculationregarding what might have actually happened on the Elizabethan stage.

Greene was writing when the professional theatre was in formation,before the decisive creation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The stage direc-tions in his plays reflect a theatre that did not yet know what it could not(or could) do. If the printers were grappling with manuscripts from menlike Marlowe and Greene, so were the theatre companies. To some extent,then, Marlowe and Greene were setting standards. But, probably because hewas a much lesser theatre poet than Marlowe, Greene relied more on theatri-cal magic and spectacle than Marlowe did. What I have in mind are the firstand early performances of these plays, not later revivals. When Greenewas writing, the Rose (pre-1592 alterations) was the most sophisticated ofthe London playhouses, and that the early professional companies had tobe adaptable is well known. A play performed last week in one of London’sopen-air theatres must be performed this week in a provincial guildhall,the upper room of an inn and the great hall of a Tudor grandee’s mansion.Stage directions in extant early modern plays offer unique access to thekinds of staging decision that companies made ‘at home’ or ‘on the road’.And it is arguable that Greene’s ‘canon’, however frayed and ‘car-booted’,provides supreme evidence, through its stage directions, of the on-the-spotresourcefulness of the fast-learning professional companies.

During the course of this research, in order to give shape to my findings,I have attempted to categorise the disparate stage directions found in Greene’swork. There are two tiers to these categories, primary and secondary. Theprimary categories are; ‘battlefield’, ‘convention led’, ‘combative’, ‘instruc-tional’, ‘retrospective’ and ‘spectacular’, whilst ‘actorly’, ‘disguise’, ‘permis-sive’, ‘property led’ and ‘tiring-house’ are secondary categories. This divisionis used when stage directions cross over categories, the primary takingprecedence. What follows below is a description of each type of stage direc-tion in the taxonomy, accompanied by an example. The reference for all ofGreene’s stage directions is Churton Collins’s edition of the plays.

Actorly directionsStage directions of this type inform the actor’s performance in terms ofportraying character and/or emotions. They are the closest stage direc-tions to directorial comments. They do not refer to physical instructions,such as kneeling, nor to conventions of staging such as talking aside, butrather to how the actor should be performing. ‘Actorly’ directions, howeverconcise, impart information not otherwise immediately obvious from thetext. They may say what the actor does (his ‘stage business’), or they mayindicate what he is (his character ‘type’). Questions regarding provenancearise: do they represent authorial advice to the player? Or are they there tohelp the reader visualise performance?

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Enter the King of Paphlagonia, malcontent. (A Looking Glass for London andEngland, 2:1)

It is interesting that Dessen and Thomson (p. 139) list only two examplesof ‘malcontent’, both of which are from Greene’s canon, the other being,‘Enter Edward the First, malcontented’ (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 1:1:0).It is therefore arguable that this description was a favourite of Greene’sto express his intent to actors. Malcontent suggests a whole manner ofbehaviour, signalled by costume and posture. It is a type rather than anadverb/adjective.1 Malcontent suggests a form of melancholy which isdifferent from the more common mad, particularly with reference to theperformance of such conditions on stage. The 1580s saw the beginning ofa growth of interest in, and attempts to understand, mental illness; in1586 Timothy Bright published his Treatise on Melancholy and in 1621 themore widely known Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton was printed.Dessen and Thomson’s dictionary (p. 143) provides fourteen examples ofmelancholy characters, but also mentions that there are no clues as to howthis state of mind was portrayed. We should therefore look for clues in thecontemporary beliefs. Melancholy was thought to be an intellectual condi-tion, one which preyed upon man’s inner fears and sorrows and waspassive in its manifestation. Melancholy was associated with Italy in partic-ular, and English travellers returning from Italy, silent, morose and preoc-cupied, were described as malcontents. It is not unreasonable to supposethat the actor would try to recreate the accepted image of a melancholicman, that is, lean, hard skinned with dusky colouring, and with charac-teristics including insomnia, timidity and anxiety (Overholser: 343). Wemay also look for clues towards the ‘Romantic Melancholy’ trend, whichemerged in portrait painting from 1590s onwards. These paintings oftendepicted young gentlemen staring out at us from behind their self-inflicteddespair, in poses captured by the figures on the 1628 title-page of Burton’sAnatomy of Melancholy (see Figure 1). Burton supports these ideas andimages with his description of the ‘inamorato’, which seems particularlyrelevant to Greene’s Paphlagonian king:

I’ th’under Columne there doth stand,Inamorato with folded hande.Downe hanges his head, terse and politeSome Dittie sure he doth endite.His lute and bookes about him lye,As symptomes of his vanity.If this doe not enough disclose,To paint him, take thy selfe by th’nose.

Also indicative is ‘Tamburlaine all in black, and very melancholy’ (I Tamburlaine,5:1:63).

1. I draw your attentionto the play TheMalcontent (1604)by Martson.

163Stage directions: Valuable clues in the exploration of Elizabethan performance . . .


Battlefield directionsIt is difficult to contest the idea that there are stage directions that belongto and adhere to the conventions of staging battles.2 Such directions arecategorised here as ‘battlefield’. They are stage directions that either recre-ate visually or suggest aurally large-scale fights or that involve aggressiveintentions displayed by an army or two opposing armies. ‘Battlefield’ direc-tions, then, are not concerned with pugnacious individuals, but warringcountries, states or factions. They imply conventions; of the staging of march-ing armies, as seen in the notorious ‘marching over the stage’, of entering ontothe stage in mid-battle, of exiting the stage to join an unseen battle andof creating the sound of a battle taking place in the offstage world.‘Battlefield’ directions raise questions concerning the use of the stage, theblocking and movement of a large number of characters, fight choreogra-phy, the use of properties and the role of the tiring-house.

Enter Orlando, the Duke of Aquitaine, the Count Rossilion with soldiers.Sound a parle and one comes upon the walls. Exeunt omnes. (OrlandoFurioso, 1:2)Alarums. Rodamant and Brandemart fly. (Orlando Furioso, 1:3)

Sound a parle is a common stage direction which occurs when a city isunder siege and either the attackers or defenders sound a parle/parley as asignal to converse with the enemy: for example, ‘They sound a parley: Entertwo Senators with others on the walls of Corioles’ (Coriolanus, 1:4:13). It isone of the aural directions belonging to the convention of staging suchscenes. In this example, Orlando, with his French troops, is about to attackRodamant’s castle, and the dialogue suggests the threat of, rather thanactual, violence. This still requires a significant number of men onstagewith Orlando who are armed and ready to fight. Such stage directions alsopose the question of where the sound comes from and what form it takes.

2. See, for example,articles such as‘Shakespeare and thebattlefield’ (MacIntyre)and ‘Battle scenes inthe Queen’s Menrepertoire’ (Calore).

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Figure 1: Images of melancholy – An unknown young man by Isaac Oliver(Strong: 1969b: 36) and details from the 1628 title-page of Burton’sAnatomy of Melancholy (Neely: 5).


There are three possibilities; that a noise, most likely a trumpet call, ismade offstage in the tiring-house, that a musician positioned close to thestage is responsible or that it is made onstage by an actor. If the latter,which is more likely, then this convention required an actor to produce asound which was recognised by the audience as a request for conference,whilst also signalling intent.

The walls are ‘strictly speaking a fictional designation for the levelabove the main platform, . . . a technical term, usually used in thecontext of battle’ (Dessen and Thomson: 245). So the instruction that onecomes upon the walls simply means that the entrance for this character isonto the gallery, above the stage. As this scene is relatively short, 57 lines,such an entrance is both practical and effective. Hodges illustrates, if alittle fancifully, how the playhouse may have looked for such scenes (seeFigure 2).

Another example may be found in George a Greene (2:1:274), EnterJane a Barley upon the walls. Together with the preceding spoken line,‘Johnie, knock at that gate’, this stage direction represents a typical scenein Elizabethan drama. The back wall of the stage represents a fictionallocation, the outer walls or gates of a town or building, which is approachedby various characters, often in a battle or situation of conflict. Here SirJohn a Barley’s castle is approached by the King of Scots and his soldierswho make threats to besiege the castle. The characters who enter on thewalls appear either to negotiate or defend themselves. The knock at thegates is the cue for Jane a Barley to enter. Where does the actor knock?The possibilities include one of the stage pillars, on the stage floor or onthe back wall itself. It is logical for Jane to appear in the gallery above theback wall if a door on the back wall is knocked upon.

The convention of such scenes often includes a call to battle: ‘The trum-pets sound without, and an answer within; then a flourish, King Richardappeareth on the walls’ (Richard II, 3:3:61). This is no exception, as Jane aBarley defends her home, shouting defiantly ‘I am armed’ (2:1:330), afterwhich comes the direction Alarum within. As Calore (p. 396) points out, itis the direction in 1:3 of Orlando Furioso, ‘Alarums. Rodamant and Brandemartfly’, that confirms that this set of directions belongs to the category of ‘bat-tlefield’.3 After Orlando has spoken to the soldier on the walls, he gives theorder to his soldiers, ‘lets to the fight’ (1:2:417), and they exit. The battleis conducted offstage. Apart from the alarums that sound as Rodamant andBrandemart flee, defeated, there would have been other aural indicators toconvey the battle to the audience. Vocal cries and the clashing of weaponswould have needed to be effective indicators of the progress of the battle inorder to justify the flight. One way of portraying this would be by havingthe actors simply enter through one door, traverse the stage and then exitthrough the other door, whilst all the time the noise of the battle rages on.The defeat of Mycetes is comparably signalled by Marlowe in I Tamburlaine(2:4): ‘To the battle, and Mycetes comes out alone’. Convention allows thateven offstage battles have a fixed location.4

3. Calore’s articlehighlights some of theconventions of stagingbattles in plays of the1580s and 1590s.

4. The two parts ofMarlowe’s Tamburlainecontain a variety ofcomparable‘battlefield’ directions.



Convention led directionsThis heading covers the broadest range of stage directions. ‘Convention led’directions are often phrased with a certain economy, implying that the actorsand company knew what to do, what was expected from such directions. As

166 Kay Savage

Figure 2: Hodges’s interpretation of the evolution of the tiring-house façade inorder to stage ‘on the walls’. There are token gestures towards creating theillusion of battlements. However, it is difficult to imagine that these were apermanent fixture, although there may be a case for employing such detail formilitary plays, where much of the action involved the walls, for example thethree parts of Henry VI. The important, and perhaps necessary feature, is simplythe space above, which could be occupied by the actors when they were requiredto come upon the walls. (Hodges 1999: 62–5)


such, these directions were features of both staging and performance thatwere recognised by theatre companies and audiences alike. This may beillustrated by the use of the phrase ‘as you know’ which appears in thestage directions of John of Bordeaux – for example, ‘Exeunt Bacon to bring inthe showes as you know’ ( l:446–7).

The broad spectrum of ‘convention led’ directions encompasses manyaspects of Elizabethan performance. It addresses the contentious issues ofwhat resources the Elizabethan stage offered, the use of a gallery and howthe actors reached it, how curtains were employed and where they hung,and the use of stage doors. It raises questions about how the actors usedthe stage; for example, when characters are directed to ‘walk up and down’,to ‘knock’ or ‘stand aloof ’. Many entrances and exits fall into the category of‘convention led’ directions, especially those involving royal characters.These entrances rely on protocol, the convention of a definite order inwhich the characters entered the stage (Munkelt: 254).5 Other entrancesand exits that are ‘convention led’ include ‘offering’ to exit, ‘entering’ atsome form of work or place (in a bed or study) and the transition of localeonstage denoted by the phrase ‘goes into’. One means of defining a stagedirection as ‘convention led’ is simply through its recurrence throughoutthis period of dramatic history. For example, both actors and readers knewwhat was meant by references to ‘conjuring’ or ‘banquets’; and visualsignals would also guide the performance of ‘ghosts’ and ‘madness’. In asense, of course, all stage directions are ‘convention led’, but my interesthere is in those which take for granted the familiarity (of both actors andreaders) with certain modes of behaviour.

Medea does ceremonies belonging to conjuring and says (Alphonsus Kingof Aragon, 3:2)

I would like to suggest that ‘convention led’ directions like this one, ceremoniesbelonging to conjuring, demonstrate that both the actors, and to some extentthe audience, know what these are, as no further elaboration is provided. Thisis black magic, not trickery, and is distinct from white magic. Invariably asso-ciated with acts of the supernatural, in this instance to raise up Calchas, itwas a commonplace effect; compare ‘Here do the ceremonies belonging, and makethe circle. Southwell reads “Conjuro te”, etc. It thunders and Lightens terribly: thenthe spirit Asnath riseth’ (2 Henry VI, 1.4.22). (See Figure 3)

Was there some sort of set routine? Was there any way of emphasisingwhat type of magic it was, perhaps involving the drawing of or making acircle (Dessen and Thomson: 42)? What was Medea’s costume? Suchmagicians were stock characters who not only behaved in a certain waybut were dressed a particular way too; for example, ‘One in the habit of aConjurer’ (The White Devil, 2:2).

Convention also leads more commonplace stage directions, too:

Bacon and Edward goes in to the study (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 2:3)

5. Munkelt’s essayargues in favour ofthe significance ofstage directions asan integral part ofthe dramatic text.She makes someinteresting commentsregarding thisconvention andhow it often mirrorsnot only the plot ofthe play, but alsothe sub-plots.



Enter Friar Bacon with Friar Bungay to his cell (Friar Bacon and FriarBungay, 4:3)

There are five scenes set in Friar Bacon’s study or cell, 1:2, 2:3, 4:1, 4:3 and5:2. These two stage directions regarding the entry to this location are thesimplest, and also occur for scenes in which the mirror is used (this ‘magic’mirror is central to the plot and allows characters to watch what is hap-pening in various different locations of the play without being seen). Werethese scenes always played in the same onstage location? As a startingpoint, let us suppose that they were.

If Friar Bacon’s study was located consistently in the same place, then itwould have to have been on the main stage, because, in 4:3, the spectacularevent of the talking brazen head takes place there. Indicative factors, such asLambert’s and Serlsby’s sons knocking to enter the study (4:3), suggest thatthe downstage area represented the study. This also makes sense of theinstructions to go to the study. Much depends upon the actors indicating thismotion of going in to. If the actors enter upstage then pause or indeed knockon the pillar, before going in to, which is perhaps signalled by a gesture of‘motion towards’ with a head and/or an arm, then the downstage area ofthe stage is established as the study.6 This idea is supported by the differencebetween goes in to and the more frequent ‘enter in his study’, or simply ‘in hisstudy’ (Dessen and Thomson: 220). For example, compare ‘Enter devils withcovered dishes; Mephostophilis leads them in to Faustus’ study’ (Doctor Faustus,[1616], 5:1) which employs the same staging device as that under discus-sion here, with ‘Enter Soranzo in his study’ (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 2:2) whichsuggests that the character is in the study as soon as he enters the stage.

With regard to events that take place through the magic mirror, thecharacters in the study could simply move further downstage, either left or

6. Seltzer (p.31) suggeststhat the actors walkacross the stage, andthat there is nospecific area thatdenotes the study.However, such anotion renders thesestage directionsvirtually meaningless.

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Figure 3: Hodges’s vision of the staging of ‘do the ceremonies belonging, andmake the circle. Southwell reads ‘Conjuro te’, etc. It thunders and lightensterribly, then the spirit Asnath rises’ – 2 Henry VI, 1:4:23.Source: Hodges: 1999, p. 117.


right. This would not inhibit the use of the main stage for the playing ofthe ‘transposed’ scene. This also fits with the exits and entrances, as, inboth scenes, it is the characters in the study who leave the stage last, andso they are able to move back to downstage centre to finish the scene.However, it has been suggested that these entrances refer to the studybeing placed in the gallery above the stage.7 The main reason for such atheory appears to be the pleasing visual effect it produces as Bacon ‘magi-cally’ displays the distant action to his visitors through the mirror. Butthere are no signals in the stage directions that the gallery was used, and,as already pointed out, the main stage could have accommodated bothsets of characters. Using the main stage for all of the scenes set in FriarBacon’s study is not only consistent, but also gives the actors more roomto execute the action called for in the subsequent stage directions: Baconsmashes the mirror and Lambert and Serlsby kill each other. Elizabethanplayers would not have confined such events to a small gallery.

Combative directions‘Combative’ directions are those involving fighting or, more accurately, vio-lence, that do not fall into the category of ‘battlefield’ directions. Theyusually involve individuals who either engage in a one-to-one duel ordeliver self-contained, singular blows to another character withoutresponse. ‘Combative’ directions may or may not require weapons. Theyrange from the spectacular rapier and dagger fights between two charactersto the simple but effective, and often comic, ‘box on the ears’. ‘Combative’directions are identified by both action and lexical choices, for example‘stab’ and ‘beat’.8

He fights first with one, and then with another and overcomes them both(Orlando Furioso, 5:2)

Orlando Furioso is a visual feast which centres on both combat and disguise;discounting straightforward exits and entrances, stage directions involvingviolence and disguise/costume account for almost half the total number.This is one such example, which, along with the following ‘They fight a goodwhile and then breathe’, raises questions about the conventions of Elizabethanstage fighting. Edelman (p. 19) describes the scene as one of ‘colourfulcombat’, but does not discuss how it might have been executed. No weaponsare specified, but the scene is part of the climax of the play, and a duel withswords between these characters of high status would be appropriate, espe-cially as hand-to-hand combat has already featured during the play.

How was this fight choreographed? The stage direction insists thatOrlando fights with only one character at a time. Elizabethan audiencescontrasted with the realism-seeking audiences of today, hungry for com-puter-generated images, as it was accepted that characters watched fights,waiting for their turn, rather than engaging in the more realistic masspunch-up. But what this provided was the spectacle of the duel, full of

7. Lavin (p. xviii)discusses theimplications ofsetting these scenesin the gallery.

8. See Dessen andThomson, pp. 265–266. TheDictionary providesa useful list of termsthat relate to‘combative’ directionsin a list of termsunder ‘violence’ and‘weapons’.



energy and excitement. If these two fights are considered together with‘They fight a good while then breathe’, which occurs seven lines later, thenwhat is presented is two quick duels followed by a longer, more evenlymatched contest. This prolongs the thrill for the audience, and it is notunreasonable to suggest that the actors would have made the most ofthese opportunities for sensational action. Oliver and Turpin are the char-acters whom Orlando overcomes, and, as they speak later in the scene, theycannot be seriously injured. There is no direction indicating that either ofthe characters is wounded, so that overcomes must simply mean that abetter swordsman beats them, and that they submit to that.

Disguise directionsStage directions which fall into the category of ‘disguise’ directions are thosethat refer solely to the disguise, costume or appearance of the character.Along with ‘property led’ directions, ‘disguise’ directions highlight the sig-nificance of visual signals on the relatively bare Elizabethan stage. In thecase of straightforward disguises it is necessary to consider the purpose ofthe disguise and to question what the disguise’s connotations are for theaudience. However small or insignificant a change of hat or coat may seemto a twenty-first-century audience, in the sixteenth century it meant some-thing to the audience and players. Disguise plots are announced andexplained in plays in order to clarify for the reader what was alreadyapparent to the spectator, that it is a disguise and not a new character.Costume was indicative of character. ‘Disguise’ directions often haveimplications for the actor’s performance, suggesting a type of behaviour,for example ‘enter dressed like a madman’.

Changes in a character’s appearance could also signal a change intime, circumstance or status. ‘The dependence of the Elizabethan stage onthe meanings that clothes give to social groupings, setting out at a glancethe structure and potential of what we see, helps to explain the obsessionwith disguise plots’ (Hunter: 36).

Enter King Edward and King James disguised, with two staves (George aGreene, 5:1)

The two kings conceal their identity in order to travel up to Bradford andobserve George a Greene, about whom they have heard many good things.The disguise could be as simple as a change in coats, which is enhanced bydescriptions such as ‘yeomans weedes’ (1041). The title-page of A quip foran upstart courtier illustrates the difference ‘between velvet breeches andcloth breeches’, and shows us the difference in the clothes that the actorsmay have worn for portraying ‘gentlemen’ and ‘peasants’ (see Figure 4).

Instructional directionsPut simply, ‘instructional’ directions are stage directions that provideinstructions for the actor. There is somewhat of a blurred line between

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‘convention led’, ‘instructional’ and ‘actorly’ directions, but ‘instructional’directions occupy the middle ground between ‘convention led’ and‘actorly’. Where ‘convention led’ directions allude concisely to an acceptedand established way of executing a complex action, ‘instructional’ direc-tions call for specific stage business. And where ‘actorly’ directions informthe actor’s performance on an emotional level, ‘instructional’ directionsuse neutral vocabulary and refer to physical actions, for example ‘knocking’and ‘kneeling’. ‘Instructional’ directions also fulfil another function, that ofexposition, and, as such, longer ‘instructional’ directions are often foundat the beginning of scenes.

He breaks the glass (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 4:3)

Remarkably, despite the importance of the mirror to the play’s action, thisstage direction is the only one that explicitly mentions Bacon’s magical


Figure 4: Title-page of Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, 1592.Source: Foakes, p. 70.


mirror. This crucial property, along withthe brazen head, raises questions regard-ing not only the nature of the propertiesthemselves, but also the staging of them.The two scenes in which the mirror isused begin with similar stage directions;‘Bacon and Edward goes into the study’(2:3), and for this scene (4:3), ‘EnterFriar Bacon with Friar Bungay to his cell’.Relevant to discussing ‘He breaks theglass’ are the possibilities that this scenetakes place either on the main stage orin the gallery. If the scene were playedon the main stage, it would lend itself tousing a larger mirror than a scene inthe gallery. However, as the mirror issmashed it is unlikely that it would be

of any considerable size. Lavin’s assertion that a hand mirror is used is thelogical solution, and not just because of practical reasons of staging(Lavin: xvii). A mirror that could be easily carried could be brought onand off the stage by Friar Bacon, and would not raise further problems ofsetting. If the mirror is broken, a new one would be required for each per-formance, and glass was an expensive material. Perhaps a substitute wasused, such as steel glass. From what I can gather, it is unlikely that largemirrors were a feature of houses at this time, and the biggest mirrors I canfind reference to are about the size of a head (see Figure 5 – perhaps some-thing similar is used by Richard II in Shakespeare’s play: ‘Richard takes theglass and looks in it’, then ‘He shatters the glass’, 4:1:266 and 279). Anotherpossibility is that it was not made of glass at all and that nothing actuallybreaks. If Friar Bacon throws and stamps on the ‘mirror’, that, togetherwith Bungay’s line ‘What means learned Bacon thus to breake his glasse?’,would be enough to carry out the instruction ‘He breaks the glass’.

Permissive directionsThis is a particularly intriguing category, and one that is in direct contrastwith the specific nature of ‘instructional’ directions. ‘Permissive’ directions,although relatively rare, are still discernible and reflect the need for flexi-bility in Elizabethan staging. The significance of this category is confirmedby its inclusion as an entry in its own right in Dessen and Thomson’s Dic-tionary (pp. 161–2), where the definition states that ‘permissive’ directions‘leave key details indeterminate’. They are used most frequently forentrances, where an indefinite number of actors are required (e.g. the entryof a leading character ‘with others’). ‘Permissive’ directions are also employedfor actions, usually musical – ‘he plays and sings any odd toy’ – where eitherthe playwright has left the choice to the actors or the printer/compositorhas deemed it superfluous to be more specific. ‘Permissive’ directions

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Figure 5: Detail from a Frenchpublication of 1539 showing amirror, about the size of a humanhead, on a stand.Source: Melchior-Bonnet, p. 25.


occur as a result of the adaptability necessary for touring plays beyond thepurpose-built London playhouses, when companies could not be certain ofthe number of actors, or the staging resources available to them. They areidentified by the use of permissive terms.9 Consistently remarkable is thenature of the stage directions in James IV, which provides my example forthis category.

Enter Slipper with a companion, boy or wench, dancing a hornpipe, anddance out again (James IV – Chorus 2)

This immediately hints at a clown’s solo act, a chance for the performer toshow off his talents and please the crowd (a recurring feature of the play).The direction is specific about the dance and music, a hornpipe, but it seemsas if there is definite intent to vary the song-and-dance routines as much aspossible. If boy or wench is to be read literally, the suggestion that anyone willdo to play the clown’s stooge, even a girl, contains a fascinating flexibility.The obvious interpretation of this stage direction is that a young boy in thecompany joins the clown, dressed either as a boy or girl. However, Europeancompanies toured England at this time with female actors, a novelty thatsome London audiences found offensive. But was this ever more than a vocalminority? And was the growth of Puritanism as rapid in the provinces as itwas in London? Provincial playgoers, accustomed to seasonal festivities,might have been more complacent than their metropolitan counterparts.When on tour, is it possible that the clown picked out a member of the audi-ence to join him, whoever caught his eye, boy or wench? The actor has hadenough time to do some scouting. This stage direction, with its invitation tofemale involvement, may have been penned with touring in mind. Weshould be wary of assuming that London spoke for the nation.

Property led directions‘Property led’ directions, as the term suggests, are stage directions thatcentre upon the deployment of a property, used either by actors or placedonstage. Like ‘disguise’ directions, ‘property led’ directions highlight thefact that the Elizabethan stage was a visual as well as an aural experience.Properties often supply information about the character, setting or situa-tion, and this is reflected in the attention to detail often afforded to ‘prop-erty led’ directions.

Enter the Emperor with a pointless sword; next the King of Castile carry-ing a sword with a point; Lacy carrying the globe, Edward Warren carry-ing a rod of gold with a dove on it; Ermsby with a crown and sceptre; theQueen with the fair maid of Fresingfield on her left hand, Henry, Bacon,with other Lords attending (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 5:3)

This is a precise and elaborate example of a ‘property led’ direction. It isnecessary to consider the significance of these various properties.

9. Dessen and Thomson(p. 263) provide auseful list ofpermissive terms.



Dessen and Thomson (p. 167) cite this stage direction as the only exampleof a pointless sword used in a ceremony. The dialogue seems to confirm theobvious assumption; that the instruction for a pointless/pointed sword signi-fies the power wielded by the characters. This demonstrates that the visualsymbolism of characters’ status was indeed an important element ofElizabethan staging, and the phrasing of the stage direction seems to indicatethat this was also portrayed through the movements on stage. How was theeffect of a pointed and pointless sword achieved? It is worth pointing out that‘buttons’ on practice swords were often big enough to be clearly visible. Theimplication is that the sword is safe, harmless. The entrance is staggered: thehumbled character enters first, perhaps in an appropriate way with headbowed, paving the way for the next character’s entrance.

It is interesting that the globe is identified by a definite article. Lookingat the final speech of the play, with its three explicit references to England,it is difficult to resist the notion that it alludes to the power of the stateunder Elizabeth I. Henslowe’s inventory of properties includes a globe (SeeFigure 6).

Rod of gold with a dove on it: rods are associated with the supernatural,which would fit with the mood of the play, and adds to the status of theprocession.10 Why is it necessary that the rod is gold? It is another visualstatement denoting wealth, royalty and power. The dove surely has reli-gious overtones,11 thereby commenting on the divine nature of royalty.But what is the significance of the ‘fair maid’ Margaret’s being on theQueen’s left hand? Was it court etiquette? It would seem that status maybe the reason behind this particular instruction. Normally, one wouldexpect Margaret to enter behind the Queen, but the Queen is deliberately

10. It is possible thatGreene had learnt toexploit the dramaticpotential ofprocessions, whichMcMillin andMacLean (p. 130)list as an establishedfeature of the Queen’sMen’s plays. Thereis another one inJames IV (5:2).

11. Seltzer (p. 94)claims that the doverepresents the HolyGhost.

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Figure 6: Portrait of Elizabeth I by an unknown artist; note the globe under herright hand.Source: Strong: 1969a, plate 206.


defying hierarchy, and by entering with Margaret beside her, she makes astatement of equality. This is a very precise stage direction that demon-strates the clarity of movement involved in such entrances. It indicates adefinite order in which the characters enter, finishing with unnamedcourtiers. These lords perform the staging convention of attending, whichhelps establish the atmosphere of a royal court. This direction is clear andprecise regarding the entrance of characters, especially when compared toa similar processional style entrance in James IV: ‘After a solemn service,enter from the Countess of Arran’s house a service, musical songs of marriage, ora masque, or what pretty triumph you list; to them Ateukin and Jaques’ (5:2).Both are scenes in the final act of the play, both are scenes of marriage.

Retrospective directionsThis is without doubt the most contentious category in the taxonomy thatI have devised, as it encompasses all the problems and questions raised whendiscussing the provenance of a stage direction. ‘Retrospective’ directions arestage directions that, I suggest, may have been added to the play-text afterinitial performances. This does not, however, make their provenance anyclearer than stage directions under other headings. They may originatefrom the playhouse, the printing process, or even the playwright for thebenefit of readers.12 In their introduction to the Oxford Complete Worksof Shakespeare (p. xxxiii), Wells and Taylor highlight the significance of‘retrospective’ directions in terms of recovering aspects of a play’s originalperformances.

‘Retrospective’ directions are examples of descriptions of what hasalready happened in performance; they have a narrative quality. An identi-fying feature of ‘retrospective’ directions is the way in which they story-board the action, as when a disproportionately large number of stagedirections occur over a relatively short number of lines. ‘Retrospective’directions are usually superfluous to strict requirements, as the content ofthe stage direction is overtly suggested in the dialogue. They are exact,explicit and creative, often narrating the physical relationship betweenpeople, properties and the sequence of action to the readers. There is alsooften a pattern of repetition.

Another indicative feature of ‘retrospective’ directions is the use ofcertain terms; ‘say’, ‘says’, ‘speaks’, ‘and so’, ‘so’ and ‘here’. ‘Here’ is particularlyinteresting. It appears quite often in the margins of the annotated quartoof A Looking Glass for London and England, and has perhaps slipped acciden-tally into the printing of some stage directions, a slippage that wouldsupport the argument for its being indicative of a ‘retrospective’ direction.‘Here’ signals a precision of timing in performance, or clarification of whenan action happens in the printed text.

The variations of ‘say’ may be a reflection of the inexperience of boththe playwright and/or compositor (see Alphonsus, King of Aragon fornumerous examples), whereas the phrase ‘and so’ provides reasoning andjustification for the actions taking place in the dramatic narrative.

12. Ben Jonson originallyomitted stagedirections from hisscripts, adding themlater to be included inthe printed versionsfor the benefit of hisreaders.



Albinius spies out Alphonsus and shows him Belinus.Belinus and Albinius go towards Alphonsus.Belinus say to Alphonsus.Shows Belinus Flaminius, who lies all this while dead at his feet.Alphonsus sit in the chair; Belinus takes the crown off Flaminius’ headand puts it on that of Alphonsus.Sound trumpets and drums within. (Alphonsus, King of Aragon, 2:1)

Without our even looking at the accompanying dialogue these stage direc-tions are clear and informative enough to allow the reader to visualise theaction on stage. They occur over just thirty-nine lines of dialogue. It is likea storyboard, and typical of the stage directions throughout Alphonsus, Kingof Aragon. Such stage directions provide us with an idea of how the playactually looked and was performed. As readers we are able to picture themanner in which Albinius notices Alphonsus and then points him out toBelinus. We can imagine the gestures made during their exchanges, theatmosphere and mood created by the revelation of Flaminius’s dead bodyand the crowning of Alphonsus, heralded by fanfares. This happens, andindeed would happen regardless of our understanding or knowledge ofElizabethan performance practice.

The use of spies out is very specific; why is sees/finds/looks at not used?The audience was familiar with ideas of observers and spies. But this situ-ation suggests that spies out refers to the fact that Albinius and Belinusdo not see Alphonsus at first, but then Albinius suddenly spots him andpoints him out to Belinus. Other examples in James IV and Orlando Furiososuggest that there may be a theatrical convention involved here. Interestinglythere is no entry for spy in Dessen and Thomson’s dictionary, but there arefurther examples in Orlando Furioso: ‘They spy Orlando’ (3:1) and ‘He spiesthe roundelays’ (2:1). There is a difference between spying objects andspying other characters. The former is an instruction to the actor, thelatter a convention of acting and staging. Orlando is alone onstage in thisscene when two clowns enter, and the clowns are already in dialoguebefore they see Orlando. The actor playing Orlando could be anywhere onstage, as the emphasis of action and realisation is upon the two clowncharacters. As with the example of spying in James IV, the stage directionsuggests characters seeing another onstage without his realising he hasbeen seen. This implies a gesture or movement that lets the audience in ontheir discovery. Is Shakespeare using a similar convention when Poloniusspies on Hamlet, and how does that famous scene relate to ‘Lady Andersonoverhears’ in James IV (5:1)? There is an important historical resonance atwork here. The Elizabethan audience was familiar with the idea of thedangerous observer. This stage direction alludes to the audience’s appetiteand expectations, including topical allusions to court behaviour.

Shows him is a frequently used action (Dessen and Thomson: 197–8).But it is unusual to show a person to another, especially as Alphonsus isnot hiding. However, there are several actors on stage, so that it would be

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easy to stage the scene with Alphonsus not immediately visible to Albiniusand Belinus; the pillars may also be used. The question of how the scenewas blocked is also raised by the direction Belinus and Albinius go towardsAlphonsus. It suggests that Alphonsus is downstage, perhaps to the side,and that Belinus and Albinius move down to join him. Show Belinus,Flaminius, who lies all this while dead at his feet is another very precise stagedirection. To have the corpse lying at Alphonsus’s feet perhaps emphasiseshis triumph. The essence of the stage direction, however, is an instructionto the actor playing Flaminius, who has to lie dead for 86 lines before thisstage direction appears. Does this suggest that, unless otherwise instructed,it would have been customary for an actor who has been killed upon thestage to move or be moved soon after his death? Logically, the characterlies dead for the entire length of the scene. It is also indicative of the con-vention of characters not seeing what is literally under their nose, untilrequired to. The audience accepted this.

Alphonsus sit in the chair – but the puzzle is how the chair gets on stage. Alot of action and several characters are involved in this scene, and it isunlikely that the chair is pre-set. Perhaps one of the soldiers brings the chairon at an opportune moment so as not to be too noticeable; when Flaminius’sdead body is revealed to Belinus would be convenient. This moment of reve-lation is happening downstage, and takes six lines of dialogue, during whicha soldier slips offstage unnoticed, brings the chair on and places it centrestage. I suggest that not being noticed whilst scene setting is a modern pre-occupation, and, as Kiernan points out (p. 123), taking properties on and offstage during scenes at the New Globe has proved unproblematical.

Spectacular directionsInvariably ‘spectacular’ directions are the most exciting in a play. Theyreinforce Greene’s position as an exponent of the visual theatre. They arethe Elizabethan equivalent of the computer-generated images that excitecinema audiences today. ‘Spectacular’ directions call for the special effectsavailable in Elizabethan playhouses, although some ‘spectacular’ eventswould also have been performable in touring venues. They involvepyrotechnics, wondrous and grandiose properties, the use of the trap andmachinery in the ‘heavens’.

Here Bungay conjures and the tree appears with the dragon shooting fire(Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 3:2)

As we have seen, there is a theatrical convention regarding the instructionto conjure, but it is interesting that tree has a definite article here; perhapsa familiar tree property was to be used. Trees were often used in dumbshows and for special effects;13 for example, ‘Hereupon did rise a tree of goldladen with diadems and crowns of gold’ (The Arraignment of Paris, 2:2), or theapparition presented to Macbeth. Henslowe’s diary lists three trees; a bay,golden apple and ‘Tantelouse tree’.

13. See Dessen andThomson (p. 236)and Habicht (pp. 69–92).Although Habicht’sarticle is an extensiveand useful discussionof the use andmeaning of trees onthe Elizabethan stage,he does not cite thisexample in his study.Also see Reynolds (pp. 153–68).Although his article isa little dated, it arguesan interesting case forthe use of tree sceneryon the Elizabethanstage.



The pivotal word in this stage direction is appears, suggesting a suddenor unexpected event. The key question is, from where do the tree anddragon appear? The description, using the word with, implies that theyenter the stage from the same place. The possibilities are; from underneaththe stage via the trap, from above the stage via the heavens, from the backof the stage via the doors. A descent from the heavens would be slow andcumbersome and is not in keeping with a supernatural act. More practicalis an entrance from the back. However, this does not really fit the unex-pected notion of appears, especially as they have been conjured by Bungay.A sudden and spectacular appearance of the tree and dragon would bethrough the trap, and Lavin (p. xx) is not alone in supporting this idea,14

but it does present practical difficulties.Henslowe records the existence of property dragons, so they were avail-

able as a resource, but the dragon also raises numerous questions. This iswhere the use of the trap proves problematic. If both the tree and dragoncame up through the trap at the same time, then neither could have beenvery big; yet the dragon, certainly large enough to accommodate a fire-work, might well also have secreted a person – and the tree seems to havebeen bigger than the dragon.15 If the dragon was manned, then perhaps itwas constructed in a similar way to the dragons that were used inpageants (see Figure 7).

Perhaps it is this type of dragon that the Elizabethan commentatorStephen Gosson alluded to in Plays Confuted in Five Acts (1582): ‘Sometimeyou shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing fromcountry to country for love of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster

14. See also Meredith andTailby, p. 102.

15. See Butterworth,p. 86. AlthoughButterworth’s mainconcern is thepyrotechnic effect ofthe dragon, he alsoconsiders the mannerof its entrance andpoints out that thedialogue suggeststhat the tree issignificantly largerthan the dragon.Depending upon thesize of the trap, adragon coming upthrough it may nothave been largeenough to bemanned. If this wasthe case then afirework would havecreated the effect, buthow close could thiscome to creating theeffect of shooting fire?

178 Kay Savage

Figure 7: A photograph of a dragon that took part in pageants in Norwich duringthe eighteenth century, but the idea dates back to the middle-ages/.Source: Hodges 1968, plate 57.


made of brown paper’.16 Although the use of the trap is a logical solution, thepossibility of an entrance from the back should not be ruled out and doeshave merits of its own. It allows the dragon to be manned with somebodyinside controlling the fireworks. It also makes possible the very spectacularflying dragon described by Philip Butterworth (pp. 87–9) (See Figure 8).

It is unclear whether the fire comes out of the dragon’s mouth or not,but the intention was surely to convince the audience that it did.Whatever the manner of the appearance of the dragon, or the nature ofthis shooting fire, the effect had to be timed.17 The spectacular and indeeddangerous nature of such stage effects could not have failed to make animpact upon the Elizabethan audience.18

Tiring-house directionsThese are stage directions that are clearly aimed at the tiring-house. Theyprovide both instructions and cues ranging from special effects, such as‘thunder and lightning’, to costume changes and the creation of offstagesound effects like ‘alarum within’.

Strikes four o’clock (A Looking Glass for London and England, 1:3)

As the annotated quarto of the play illustrates with the inserted note‘strike’ written beside this stage direction, this is a cue for someone in the

16. Cited in Cook, p. 56.

17. Butterworth’sconclusion (p. 86)regarding this stagedirection is that thefire effect had to betimed to appear eitherwhen or just beforethe properties arrivedon stage.

18. Any suppositionsregarding theaudience reaction ofthe seventeenthcentury should beplaced within thecontext of thedestruction of theGlobe in 1613, dueto cannon fire in aperformance ofHenry VIII.


Figure 8: Illustrations of ‘flying dragons’, which also shows how the placementof fireworks may have created the ‘shooting fire’.Source: Butterworth, p. 89.


tiring-house to produce a sound effect. How was it produced? Presumablywith a bell. Was it the responsibility of a tiring-hand or possibly a musician?Numerous comparable examples show that it was a commonly employed,and therefore an easily achievable, effect. (Compare ‘Clock strikes’ in Cym-beline, 2:2:50.)

ConclusionSo what can be made of these observations? We know that Greene’s playswere written at the end of the 1580s and the first years of the 1590s. Assuch, they are among those that set the patterns for ambitious staging inthe Elizabethan theatre. The English drama dared to present on stage thekind of action that the Greeks had contented themselves with reporting.There is no clear reason why Elizabethan playwrights ignored the Greekmodel. The University Wits, who worked hardest to establish the newrepertoire, were not entirely ignorant of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.Why did the English drama develop so differently from that of seventeenth-century France? The stories of Le Cid or Phèdre would not have been aliento Greene, but he would have told them very differently from Corneilleand Racine. It is through recognition of the surprising path that Englishdrama took that the study of stage directions should begin. They providevivid evidence of an alternative way of envisioning a national drama.Explorations of the stage directions in certain plays, or indeed of individualstage directions in isolation, can reveal important clues about the play-wright’s attitudes. There are puzzles to unravel and questions that maynever be answered. Often enough, we are left wondering who actuallywrote the stage directions – and for whom.

The growth of stage direction studies is indicative of the spread throughthe academies of performative studies of Elizabethan drama. Literary scholars,long before the end of the nineteenth century, had established the poeticrichness of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, against the best of whomGreene struggles for recognition. But the professional actors, struggling toestablish their status in the busy city of London, were determined that theirplayhouses would provide a visual feast. Stage directions, alongside thewell-known concern for costume, furnish some of the best evidence of that.

Works citedBaskervill, Charles R. (1932–33), ‘A prompt copy of A Looking Glass for London and

England’, Modern Philology, 30, pp. 29–51.

Burton, Robert (1989 [1621]), The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Butterworth, Philip (1998), Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scot-tish Theatre, London: Society for Theatre Research.

Calore, Michela (2003), ‘Battle scenes in the Queen’s Men repertoire’, Notes andQueries, December issue, pp. 394–399.

Carson, Neil (1988), A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Cook, Judith (1995), The Golden Age of English Theatre, London and New York:Simon and Schuster.

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Dessen, Alan and Leslie Thomson (1999), A Dictionary of Stage Directions in EnglishDrama, 1580–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edelman, Charles (1992), Brawl Ridiculous: Sword Fighting in Shakespeare’s Plays,Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Foakes, R.A. (1985), Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642, London: ScolarPress.

Habicht, Werner (1971), ‘Tree properties and tree scenes in Elizabethan theater’,Renaissance Drama (New Series), IV, pp. 69–92.

Hodges, C. Walter (2nd edn. 1968), The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— (1999), Enter the Whole Army; A Pictorial Study of Shakespearean Staging,1576–1616, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hunter, G.K. (1980), ‘Flatcaps and Bluecoats: Visual Signals on the ElizabethanStage’, Essays and Studies, 33, pp. 16–47.

Kiernan, Pauline (1999), Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe, London: Macmillan.

Lavin, J.A. (ed.) (1969), Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, London: Ernest Benn.

MacIntyre, Jean (1982), ‘Shakespeare and the battlefield’, Theatre Survey, 23,pp. 31–44.

McMillin, Scott and Sally-Beth MacLean (1998), The Queen’s Men and Their Plays,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine (2001), The Mirror: A History (trans. K.H. Jewett), London:Routledge.

Meredith, Peter and John Tailby (eds.) (1983), The Staging of Religious Drama inEurope in the Later Middle Ages, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.

Munkelt, Marga (1987), ‘Stage directions as part of the text’, Shakespeare Studies,19, pp. 253–272.

Neely, Carol T. (2004), Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare andEarly Modern Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Overholser, Winifred (1959), ‘Shakespeare’s psychiatry – and after’, ShakespeareQuarterly, 10, pp. 335–352.

Reynolds, George F. (1907–8), ‘Trees on the stage of Shakespeare’, Modern Philology,5, pp. 153–168.

Seltzer, Daniel (ed.) (1963), Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, London: Edward Arnold.

Strong, Roy (1969a), Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, London: HM Stationery Office.

——— (1969b), The English Icon, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Plays and editionsChettle, Henry and Robert Greene (1935–6), John of Bordeaux, in W.L. Renwick (ed.),

Oxford: Malone Society Reprints.

Ford, John (2003),’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, in Martin Wiggins (ed.), London: A & CBlack.

Greene, Robert (1905), The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, 2 Vol., in J. ChurtonCollins (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. (See also Lavin and Seltzer above.)

Marlowe, Christopher (1993), Doctor Faustus, in David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen(eds.), Manchester: Manchester University Press.

——— (1999), The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, in M.T. Burnett (ed.),London: J.M. Dent.

Marston, John (1965), The Malcontent, in Martin Wine (ed.), London: Edward Arnold.



Peele, George (1910), The Arraignment of Paris, in H.H. Child (ed.), Oxford: MaloneSociety Reprints.

Shakespeare, William (1988), Complete Works, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Webster, John (1995), The Works of John Webster, in David C. Gunby et al. (eds.),Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Suggested citationSavage, K. (2008), ‘Stage directions: Valuable clues in the exploration of Elizabethan

performance practice’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 28: 2, pp. 161–182,doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.161/3

Contributor detailsAfter teaching for several years, and then trying her luck as an eternal student onthe way to her PhD, Kay Savage has settled in West Cornwall. At Truro College,she teaches Performance Arts and English and runs the higher education provi-sion in Drama.E-mail: [email protected]

182 Kay Savage



Notes and Queries. English language. doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.183/3

Aesthetic realismRobin Estill took this photograph in New York, assuming, as the Editors didwhen they first saw it, that it was a joke. It’s not! ‘Aesthetic Realism’ is a cult,founded by Eli Siegel, which offers its followers access to the beautiful life.If you find George Herbert’s belief that ‘Who sweeps a room, as for [God’s]laws/Makes that and the action fine’ a bit far-fetched, you should take a whiffof Aesthetic Realism. It has its headquarters in New York, but no longer pub-licises its capacity to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals. Having googledAesthetic Realism (and Eli Siegel), the Editors were puzzled to find EdmundKean embroiled. Jim Jones and Jonestown would be better suited.


© Robin Estill

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Reviews


Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/stap.28.2.185/5

The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal, translatedby Adrian Jackson (2006)London and New York: Routledge, 133 pp. + 10 illus.,ISBN 0-415-37177-5 (pbk), £16.99

A new publication from Augusto Boal is always something of an event.Curiosity is naturally roused when a major artist produces a text promis-ing to tell us how or why, but the Theatre of the Oppressed has instilledsuch powerful loyalty and admiration in those inspired by it that any pro-nouncements from its author are greeted with particular fervour. And TheAesthetics of the Oppressed does offer some distinctly new arguments, aswell as seeking to consolidate ideas and methods Boal has developed overthe last four decades. His exemplification is equally up to date: Iraq, the2004 Tsunami and reality TV are all included within Boal’s account ofhow we process events local and global. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed islargely a discursive, theoretical work – although it does contain a few prac-tical exercises – and in this it has more in common with The Theatre of theOppressed than with later books.

The book’s central argument is that the aesthetic imagination issupremely capable of envisioning an alternative ‘reality’ to that of conven-tional appearances and entrenched ways of perceiving; hence it is thiscapacity we must stimulate and expand in order to be creators of culturerather than its passive recipients. If true, this would by implication substan-tiate the Theatre of the Oppressed’s underlying premise: that, as ‘rehearsalfor revolution’, it leaves ‘spectactors’ productively unsatisfied by the the-atrical process and correspondingly eager to change their own behaviourand the ‘real’ world outside. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed outlines anintriguing model of the way human minds (and bodies) work: essentially,that the practice of creativity increases the capacity to imagine multiplepossibilities, and further that the encouragement of that practice stimulatesthe desire to do it. Without such exercise, the communicative networks inthe brain are liable to ‘harden, becom(e) opaque and compacted – turninginto structures which [. . .] refuse dialogue with new circuits external tothemselves, impeding the arrival of new information which conflicts withthat already existing in their own classification’ (p. 28). Such limited, pre-programmed ways of comprehending the world are reinforced by globali-sation, Boal argues, a phenomenon whose laws and effects he examinesat length: ‘to globalise it is necessary to abolish dialogue, to isolate the


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individual [. . .] so that the very differences which make him unique maydisappear’ (p. 60). Unlike the excessively market-driven, depersonalised artglobalisation privileges, Boal’s Aesthetics of the Oppressed champions thelocal and individual: this includes the rediscovery of indigenous culture, aswell as the requirement that we reject the clichés of ‘types’ to seek outqualities unique and special to each person.

The tone of The Aesthetics of the Oppressed is familiarly that of Boal’sother writings: it is lively and energetic, theoretical and anecdotal by turns.At times it is difficult to be sure how literally Boal intends his principalargument, although one never doubts the passion behind it. Significantly,he quotes the Italian proverb ‘Si non é vero, é bene trovato! – Even if it’s nottrue, it makes a good story!’ (p. 27) – and at one point acknowledges his‘poetic interpretation’ rather than scientific fact (p. 29). Yet such asidesseem to conflict with the authoritative tone he adopts. For instance, areader might blench slightly at passages like this: ‘The aesthetic neurons arethose that process, jointly, ideas and emotions, memories and imagination,senses and abstractions. When these neurons are activated by new stimuli,the creation of Metaphor is activated’ (p. 26); such formulations are aslikely to put off as to persuade.

The Aesthetics of the Oppressed is a frustrating read in some respects. It isunclear what the book as a whole seeks to achieve, as there is no introduc-tion (or index) and the structuring principles are not always apparent. Thefirst half deals directly with the ‘Aesthetics of the Oppressed’, this divided into‘Theoretical Foundation’ and ‘Practical Realisation’ – although misleadingly,in the text itself, this second section appears under the chapter heading ofthe first. (There are other, similar errors elsewhere that suggest that thebook was not as carefully proofread as it might have been.) It is also confus-ing that the term ‘Aesthetics of the Oppressed’ turns out to refer both toBoal’s general argument and to a specific project currently being carried outby Brazil’s CTO-Rio, and disappointing that we are not given any contextualinformation about the latter. The remainder of the book is comprised of anumber of essays dealing with ‘Theatre as a Martial Art’, ‘Globalisation,Culture and Art’, ‘Theatre in Prisons’ and, finally, the text of a speech Boalgave on his seventieth birthday. Some of these writings return to the themeof the Aesthetics of the Oppressed; others don’t, or not explicitly. ‘Theatre inPrisons’ is particularly engaging. Rather than an account of making theatrein prisons – interesting as that would be – the essay reflects on Boal’s experi-ence of incarceration, the roles and relationships of prisoner and guard,freedom of action versus freedom of mind, and the possibilities theatre offersin this context. This is the kind of moment where Boal is at his best as awriter: at once personal and philosophical, witty and profound, he has theability to pull orthodoxies apart and clear the way to allow fresh and liberat-ing alternatives. There is plenty in this book to relish. Equally, there is muchin its argument that is open to debate – would Boal want it any other way? –but this is part of its strength, he certainly gets you thinking.Reviewed by Frances Babbage, University of Leeds

186 STP 28 (2) Reviews © Intellect Ltd 2008


Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of thePopular Enlightenment, David Worrall, (2007)London: Pickering & Chatto, 266 pp., ISBN 978-1-85196-851-0 (hbk), £60

Romantic period drama kicks off the Enlightenment World series of mono-graphs from Pickering & Chatto in robust style in the shape of DavidWorrall’s enthusiastic and detailed account of the representation of non-British cultures on the British stage from roughly the mid-eighteenthcentury to around 1840. It is a subject of central importance to both anunderstanding of the theatre of the time and its place in the sweep of Britishtheatrical history. The sheer volume and diversity of dramatic materialportraying the ‘other’ is astonishing – as it is from the Elizabethan stage on –and Worrall wisely warns against generalisation and the tendency toread the past in terms of the present. He builds on the proselytising work hedisplayed in Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcul-tures, 1773–1832 (2006) and The Politics of Romantic Theatricality,1787–1832: The Road to the Stage (2007) by consolidating his well-foundedargument that Georgian theatre has to be seen in a twin context: that of itsregulation and the vitality of the drama presented in the network of non-patent theatres, which expanded in the face of this regulation.

Worrall identifies key texts, such as Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787),which came to be seen as a major anti-slavery vehicle, against a backdropof chapters on particular stage versions of Islamic India, the North AfricanIslamic states as seen in British and American theatres, and the theatricalappropriation of Captain Cook and Pacific encounters in general, includingthose in and around Australia. Unfortunately, his chapter on Ira Aldridge,the first black actor of note in Britain and, therefore, a pioneering figurein the assertion of self-identity from a non-white perspective, is patchy andargued from a mistaken belief that his first English performances were atthe Royal Coburg rather than the Royalty Theatre, as recent scholarshiphas shown. Despite this, Worrall’s underlying point about Aldridge’s sig-nificance stands.

Worrall’s insistence on the primacy of performance – analysing, forexample, the socio-political dimensions of the size and role of a venue, itsaudience-stage relationship, and the prevailing production practices andprotocols – is a welcome corrective to the plethora of literary texts in thisfield, and opens the book to a much wider audience than simply periodspecialists. Given his subject and his approach, it is not surprising (butnone the less refreshing) that one of the key conventions he examines isblackface. Without surrendering ground to imperial apologists, he empha-sises the complexities of interpreting its meanings at such a historicaldistance and underlines the lack of research in this area. Worrall makesthe connections between colour designation and class while underplayingthe connections of both to gender, and is at his strongest in describing and

187STP 28 (2) Reviews © Intellect Ltd 2008


analysing individual productions and the nature of the theatres in whichthey were performed.

Worrall’s account of the enactment of this plebeian Enlightenmentplaces the role of the British ‘illegitimate’ stage and its theatrical forms, likeburletta and pantomime, at the heart of the imperial cultural project buthe argues that they were challenging as well as promoting the project’sdefining ideologies.Reviewed by Colin Chambers, Kingston University

The Incomparable Hester Santlow: A Dancer-Actress on theGeorgian Stage, Moira Goff (2007)Aldershot: Ashgate, 180 pp. + 17 illus., ISBN 978-0-7546-5805-4 (hbk), £50

Hester Santlow left too faint a trace to allow the construction of a full-scalebiography. She is best known from the portrait which used to hang in theTheatre Museum (when there was one), depicting her in a harlequindress, her right hand raised and her left hand caressing a slapstick. Theartist may have been John Ellys, and the image is said to derive from herperformance as Harlequin Woman (Harlequine) in John Thurmond’sDrury Lane pantomime, The Escapes of Harlequin (1722). Any eighteenth-century woman who allowed herself to be portrayed holding a phallicobject – in this case, a clearly tumescent one – was likely to draw scan-dalous comment, and Santlow attracted her share of that. It would havebeen extraordinary if, as a dancer on the public stage, she had not. Shemade her Drury Lane debut in 1705/6 at the age of twelve or thirteen(Goff has persuasively challenged the earlier assumption, preserved in thenew DNB, that she was born in 1690), and was an established member ofthe company by 1712, when pregnancy forced her into temporary retire-ment. The father of her illegitimate daughter was James Craggs, a diplo-mat and, later, a prominent Whig politician. Interestingly, the birth didno evident damage to Santlow’s career. On the contrary, it was throughher daughter, fully acknowledged by Craggs, that she was carried fromgentility into the fringes of the aristocracy. Goff does not elaborate on thisfascinating story of social progress – her focus is, properly, on Santlow’sprofessional career – but it deserves to be noted. Actresses, even taintedones, were not necessarily outlawed from Hanoverian society. If Santlowhad been as profligate as green-room scandalmongers claimed, she would nothave been chosen as his second wife by the well connected actor-managerBarton Booth (they married in 1719), nor accepted as a mother-in-law bythe genteel Richard Eliot in 1726. (As a conjugal footnote, Eliot was thirty-two when he married the thirteen-year-old Harriot Santlow/Craggs, whobore him the first of nine children when she was fourteen.) Having retiredfrom the stage in 1733, Santlow herself lived long enough (she died in



1773) to see her great-granddaughter – the one who married the Earl ofEly – into adulthood.

Moira Goff ’s beautifully measured book is the second in the Ashgateseries on ‘Performance in the Long Eighteenth Century’. Its background isimportant. I haven’t ever sought access to the rare books at the BritishLibrary, but Goff works with them. Not only that. She has also recon-structed and danced some of Santlow’s dances. There can’t be many cura-tors of rare books with that kind of double life, and it is an experiencewhich provides a unique authority to the book’s detailed descriptions ofdance notation in the early eighteenth century. I should confess that thefive plates recording contemporary notations – by Anthony L’Abbé, LeRoussau and Mr Isaac – are, to me, as impenetrable and as decorative ashieroglyphics, but they look appropriately purposeful. It was as a dancerthat the young Hester Santlow, still advertised as a pupil of René Charrier,made her first public appearance, and her last recorded performance wasin a dancing role in The Country Revels, a ‘Grotesque Entertainment’, in1732. She probably continued into 1733, but her husband’s illness com-bined with the vicious disputes between Theophilus Cibber and JohnHighmore at Drury Lane to precipitate her retirement. Goff has done fulljustice to her extraordinary range, from the graceful sophistication of belledance to the robustly comic antics of commedia dell’arte. John Weaver,whose opinions have to be taken seriously, called her ‘the most graceful,most agreeable, and most correct Performer in the World’ (p. 114). Brieflyrivalled by Marie Sallé, Santlow was one of Drury Lane’s trump cards fortwenty-five years – the only woman, Goff suggests, to perform a full tour enl’air, to dance a solo Harlequin and a solo ‘French Peasant’, and to riskherself in a ‘Hussars’ duet (with John Shaw).

That is not, though, the whole story. From early in her career, Santlowwas employed as an actress as well, initially as a comic ingénue, but gradu-ating to witty roles and pathetic heroines in tragedy. Ophelia may havebeen just within her range. Uncharacteristically, James Thomson, nor-mally the most inert of sedentary bachelor-poets, was so overwhelmedthat he couldn’t even find breath for a comma: ‘Mrs Booth acts somethings very well and particularly Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet inimitablybut then she dances so deliciously has such melting lascivious motionsairs and postures as indeed according to what you suspect almost throwsthe material part of me into action too’ (pp. 122–3). Scopophilia was notThomson’s habitual mode, nor was his material part (whatever that was!)normally much in evidence. No wonder the Drury Lane managersfavoured Santlow in breeches parts, even allowing her the privilege of anoccasional epilogue (‘For, while you watch my Legs, you lose my Wit’, p. 27).One of the finest features of Goff ’s book is her chapter on pantomimes,those mixtures of dance, song and acting that played into Santlow’s handsduring the 1720s, when rivalry between Drury Lane and Lincoln’s InnFields was at its height. Her descriptions bring a dancer’s insights to bearon a theatrical puzzle.



It cannot have been easy to get the tactics right in composing a bookout of what must first have appeared slender material. Goff has managedto maintain her focus on Santlow without disregarding the dancers sheworked with. There are brief pen-portraits of many of them: Cherrier,L’Abbé, the mysterious Mr Isaac, John Shaw, the great innovator JohnWeaver, John Thurmond, Michael Lally. Nor does she lose sight of the actors:Robert Wilks, Colley Cibber, George Powell, Anne Oldfield and Mary Porter,as well as Barton Booth. One of the things that emerges silently from thisthoughtfully composed book is the closeness of the theatrical communityin the early eighteenth century. Santlow married Booth; her dancingpartner, John Shaw, married Wilks’s step-daughter; before her marriageSantlow lived with her mother opposite the coffee house opened by thesinger, Richard Leveridge, in Tavistock Street; the Booths lived next door toColley Cibber in 1721; their country house and estate, Cowley Grove, wassold to John Rich. It was still within the theatrical community, thoughvariegated by her daughter’s wealthy relations, that Santlow lived out herforty years of dignified retirement.Reviewed by Peter Thomson, University of Exeter

Opera From the Greek: Studies in the Poetics ofAppropriation, Michael Ewans, (2007)Aldershot: Ashgate, vii + 216 pp., ISBN 978-0-7546-6099-6 (hbk), £55

Most of us would have a dim sense that European opera has an intimateconnection to ancient Greek tragedy, but would be hard pressed to statewhat precisely it was. In fact, the curious feature of the relationship is notthat opera came into being as an attempt to recreate Greek tragedy in theItalian renaissance, but that it has repeatedly revisited a sense of Greektragic form over the centuries, far more regularly and with greater convic-tion than European drama. So it is that while, on the one hand, Wagner isassociated in our minds with Teutonic myth-making and the assertion of anational art-form, scholars have been at pains to trace an inescapable con-nection with Hellenism and Greek tragedy in The Ring of the Nibelung.

Ewans was indeed one of those scholars, and his early work was pri-marily on opera, with both Wagner and Janacek as the subjects of mono-graphs. But his profile in recent decades has been clearly in the study andproduction of ancient Greek tragedy, as a translator and director, and onewho has energetically pursued research through practice on ancientGreek performance. In this book, he turns his expertise in Greek tragedyback towards European opera, selecting eight operas from the Italianrenaissance forwards to the 1980s for an analysis of their relationship toGreek sources. These sources include not only tragedies by Sophocles andEuripides, but also the two surviving early Greek (Homeric) epics, Iliad and



Odyssey. The principal subject is inevitably that of reworking, of the strategiestaken to create a new artwork from the old text, and the format of eachchapter gives a correspondingly major emphasis to issues of dramaturgy.But the book and each chapter in turn also contain musicological analy-sis, conducted through scored examples, of the interpretations finally lentto the adaptation by the composer, to give that complex process andachievement its simplest description.

The result is a very even treatment of disparate works through exploit-ing their chosen relationship to an original source, not just in the struc-ture of the book but also in the analytical and descriptive language thatEwans deploys. We are, in other words, given a discourse that the authorkeeps stable throughout, resisting the temptation to mark originality anddifference by the flamboyance of vocabulary, and so maintaining anapproach that permits a consistent research purpose. Ewans is at pains toprovide clear accounts of the dramatic action of the originals, and to clearaway obstructive but prevalent misconceptions where necessary. This hedoes mostly by clarifying the meaning of key Greek concepts, but also byremoving the aura that can surround a play almost entirely. So he care-fully argues against the idea of determinism on a number of occasions,puncturing the appeal that words such as ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ may have forthe careless reception of both Greek tragedy (e.g. Sophocles’ Oedipus theKing) and epic.

These preambles are supported by reference to a good range of classicalscholarship, and lead in each chapter to studies of the actualities and prin-ciples of reworking adopted by the librettist. Gradually we are then led intodiscussions of the substantiation of the libretto in music by the composer.This in itself is not only very often a secondary or selective reworking ofthe ‘appopriation’, which may reveal conflicts between librettist and com-poser, but it is also a process in which an idiom is conceived that lifts theoriginal source beyond semantics and invests it with the belief-system ofthe composer. That, at least, is a large part of Ewans’s contention – thatcomposers reveal in their musical appropriations a kind of bias in whatthey wish the ‘Greekness’ of their opera to convey.

In that respect, one of the more consistent themes of the book is thewrestling that goes on between varieties of Christian convictions, tenets, orvalue-systems and the pagan qualities of the original sources, the ideas andconfigurations of feeling and expectation that are embedded in even theforms of epic and tragedy. Indeed, a different construction of this bookmight have made that the thesis. But Ewans is also concerned with theissue of successful transformation, the representation within later Europeanculture of the alarming but compelling excitement of tragedy at work. So ina number of chapters this theme predominates, as librettists and composersmay discount or dispense with prevalent assumptions and get a grip on theactual qualities of the original. In fact, Ewans is unusually clear about whathe is after in each case in the short but highly effective, final sub-section ofthe Introduction called ‘The poetics of appropriation’.



The composers and operas studied (with the sources here in brackets) inthe order they appear in the book are Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria(the Homeric Odyssey); Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (the tragedy by Euripides);Cherubini’s Médée (Euripides); Strauss’s Elektra (Sophocles); Enesco’s Oedipe(tragedies by Sophocles); Tippett’s King Priam (the Homeric Iliad); Henze’sThe Bassarids (Euripides’ Bacchae); and Turnage’s Greek (Sophocles’ Oedipusthe King). Ashgate’s production values are high, although there are oneor two minor typos and proofreading blemishes, notably ‘Biliography’ for‘Bibliography’ (p. 203), which is an interesting coinage that suggests a genreof certain kinds of reviewing instead of the helpful lists of recommendedrecordings, published scores, and secondary reading on Greek tragedy, epicand culture as well as on the composers and the operas.

Overall, the book is eminently readable without any attempt to simplifywhat is complex, and rightly requires for full satisfaction some musical edu-cation, not merely in reading short sections of scores but also in followingmusical and musicological terms. Yet it has been wisely guided away frombeing locked into exclusively musical studies, and so makes a contributionto our sense of European theatre and what is increasingly (but mislead-ingly) being called classical reception, which is more readily understood asthe classical tradition in European culture. There is a surge in interest inthis broad field, with some excellent studies in English (and notably on theEnglish theatre) coming from scholars such as Edith Hall, under the aus-pices of the Archive of Greek and Roman Performances based in Oxford.Ewans gives us close attention to dramaturgy in opera, while other studiesmay concentrate on the theatrical climate and production circumstances.Both are, in the broad picture, lively elements of performance history.Reviewed by Graham Ley, University of Exeter

Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Freda Chappleand Chiel Kattenbelt, (2006)Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 266 pp. + 53 illus.,ISBN: 90-420-1629-9 (pbk), $68

It is this book’s stated intention to examine what is intermediality in theatreand performance and it does so very successfully, combining well-formedtheoretical analysis with a wide range of examples. The book is a collabo-ration between members of Theatre and Intermediality Research WorkingGroup in the IFTR and its particular strength is the resulting coherence ofargument across collected essays. It is an original contribution to the fieldof performance research with an argument that breaks away from theassumption that intermediality or multimedia performance must necessar-ily include some form of digital technology. Although the inclusion ofdigital and screen media in theatre performance is a constituent elementof intermediality, the concept is broadened to mean a territory constituted



by the intermedial modes of perception across the arts, opening up auseful examination of theatre as a medial and hypermedial form.

The book is split into three sections with each framed by a chapter pro-viding a theoretical underpinning for analysis in the first two sections anda historical overview in the third. In the first section, entitled ‘PerformingIntermediality’, its contributors examine how intermediality is staged inthe theatre, locating it in the process of remediation and in-between themultiple media performed on a theatre stage. Kattenbelt provides a strongintroduction to this section, arguing that theatre is a hypermediumcapable of staging other media and making visible their apparatus.

The chapters that follow move forward from this point to examine theactor as a site of intermedial expression shifting between stage and earlycinema (Remshardt); to examine simultaneity, immediacy and hypermedi-acy in mixed-media theatre (Lavender); representations of time in interme-dial performance (Merx); and digital opera as intermedial stage for education(Chapple). Lavender’s chapter develops the argument particularly well, pro-viding excellent case studies to support his emphasis on the mutual depen-dency of immediacy and hypermediacy on the intermedial stage.

Section two, ‘Intermedial Perceptions’ goes on to argue a conception ofintermediality as performative territory on which multiple perceptualframeworks play out their conflicts, collisions and disruptions to transpar-ent and unified expression. This emphasis on the perceptual in the analy-sis is absolutely key to the assertion that the intermedial functions outsidethe mediatised versus live performance debate. It allows the authors toaddress the influence of screen media and new technology upon percep-tual frameworks, and also examine non-digital media as constituents ofthat ‘matrix’ (Wagner, p. 125). This is, in my view, the strongest aspect oftheir argument. Peter Boenisch’s chapter, introducing the section, pro-vides an excellent theoretical underpinning, well grounded in discoursesof media theory, theatre and philosophy, and the subsequent chaptersdraw on his analysis and refer back to it, giving the reader a strong senseof coherent argument throughout this section.

Balme looks at ‘spatial metonymy’ (p. 123) as creating perceptualintermediality where material and fictional space collide. Both Wagnerand Boenisch go on to examine corporeal mediality: the fracturing ofcorporeal frameworks through the puppet body and the disruption of cor-poreal codes of representation, respectively. Nelson in contrast, examinesthe small screen in relation to spectator shifts between immediacy andhypermediacy as modes of perception. Each of these chapters not only pro-vides a convincing account as a discrete argument, but also weaves intothe overall threads running through the book and the section.

The final section, ‘From Adaptation to Intermediality’ attempts to movechronologically through various discourses of adaptation and intermedialityand the first chapter by Kuchenbach does this successfully, presenting aclear overview of twentieth century approaches to adaptation then reme-diation between film and theatre. However, it seems very much a break



from the approach set up in the first two parts of the book. The chaptersthat follow go on to present snapshots from across the century. KlemensGruber explores the staging of writing in early twentieth century art. Callensexamines Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire as an example of a ‘theatricalframing’ and thus remediation of Murnau’s Nosferatu (p. 203), and finally,the last two chapters go on to explore intermediality in the construction ofhypertextual theatre experience made up of adapted or reinterpreted frag-ments of classic texts. Hadassi Shani’s chapter on Me-Dea-Ex was thehighlight of this section for me, presenting a fascinating analysis of how amodular structure is not only able to generate an intermedial performancebut also combine fragments of different cultures.

Overall, however, this third section did not have quite the coherence ofthe first two. Although the chapters echoed and reflected back across themesrunning throughout the book – intermediality in remediation, hypermedi-ality and modularity – they did not have an overall argument underpin-ning the examples across the section or as clear a relationship betweenthemselves as in the first and second sections. Nevertheless, the overallstructuring devices in the book are excellent, providing an unusual level ofcoherence in a collection of this kind. Partly, this is because there are cleararguments running through the book, but partly this is due to the clearsignposting of how these threads are being developed. Abstracts areprovided for each section and chapter, and Chapple and Kattenbelt’s intro-duction outlines the key themes of the book in relation to established dis-courses in media theory. Intermediality in Theatre Performance presents anengaging analysis of intermediality as the territory ‘in-between realities’(p. 11) and draws its reader to reconsider mediality and intermediality inrelation to perceptual experience of theatre performance.Reviewed by Kate Adams, University of Hull



Studies in

Theatre & Performance

Studies in Theatre & Perform

ance | Volume Tw

enty Eight Num

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ISSN 1468-2761

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Volume Tw

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intellect Journals | Theatre &

Performance

Studies in

Theatre & Performance Volume 28 Number 2 – 2008

Articles

91–110 Brecht and the disembodied actor Roy Connolly and Richard Ralley

111–126 Following the dream/passing the meme: Shakespeare in ‘translation’ Mike Ingham

127–145 Technique in exile: The changing perception of taijiquan, from Ming dynasty military exercise to twentieth-century actor training protocol

Daniel Mroz

147–159 ‘Your sincere friend and humble servant’: Evidence of managerial aspirations in Susannah Cibber’s letters

Helen Brooks

Notes and Queries

161–182 Stage directions: Valuable clues in the exploration of Elizabethan performance practice

Kay Savage

183 Aesthetic realism

Reviews

185–194 Reviews by Frances Babbage, Colin Chambers, Peter Thomson, Graham Ley and Kate Adams

9 771468 276009

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