The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

In several ways the most penetrating piece of book-length Shakespeare criticism in 1981 is John Russell Brown’s Discovering Shakespeare, a short, essentially modest invitation to explore the plays as texts for performance. A valuable companion to his earlier book Shakespeare’s Dramatic Style,Discovering Shakespeare is addressed to the solitary reader, who must find inadequate, for Shakespeare’s plays, those methods of literary study proper for non-dramatic texts. Brown also focuses attention on the limitations of present-day staging of Shakespeare, a no less topical issue:

The very substance of drama is changeable, and a reader must recognise this fact as much as a dramatist, even though it is more difficult to do so. It is very likely that the reader has never seen actors testing one interpretation against another in rehearsal. Most modern theatres show only productions that are carefully controlled so that they give a clear-and therefore strong-enactment of a single interpretative idea. At school or university the reader may have been trained to read a text so that he can be sure that he understands precisely what is on the page: whereas he should have been encouraged to play with conjecture and to enter imaginatively within a forever-changing image, or mirage, of another life.

(p. 9)