Preface

Summary

If I may use old-fashioned tropological language that must seem recklessly at odds with the idea of authorship as set forth on these pages, then this book is an offspring that willfully and irresistibly upset a long established order of succession. According to this order, the present study was devised as a second, contextualizing chapter to a work in progress provisionally entitled, “Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Authority and Representation in the Elizabethan Theatre.” Sharing the fate of what originally was the Introduction thereto – now available under the title Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (1996) – the present offshoot has grown up with an unforeseen dynamic all of its own. Caught up in the current upheaval in Shakespeare criticism, with its exhilarating rapprochement among textual scholarship, theatre history, and performance studies, this book owes its exposition and arrangement to an attempt to conjoin variegated perspectives on its subject. The deliberate criss-crossing between title and subtitle underlines the idea that, in Shakespeare's theatre, “author's pen” is in “actor's voice” just as players' voices and bodies, with all their contrariety, resonate in the writings of the pen.