Parallel Practices, or the Un-Necessary Difference

Nearly fifteen years ago, at the interval of a performance of Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I overheard a spectator (who happened to be a scholar-critic) say, “Of course, it’s marvelous theater, but it simply isn’t Shakespeare’s play.” Admittedly he spoke of a landmark production that, at the time and for some years thereafter, divided Shakespeareans as well as the general public into polar camps; since then, the dialogue over whether Brook’s interpretation was or was not Shakespeare’s play has moved toward more level ground. Nevertheless, that spectator’s comment introduces the powerfully felt schism between critical and theatrical interpretation. In a recent essay, Harry Berger prescribes the territory: “The Shakespearean intention constituted by the reader and the interpreted text will differ from the one constituted by the spectator and the performed text” (my emphasis).¹ For Berger, performance limits the “true nature” of the text, concealing its verbal constructs and the connotative, metaphorical, and psychologically associative connections they potentially induce in readers. Whereas a reader can abstract words from speaker/speech assignments—thus, in Berger’s view, generating a “free text”—the performance reattaches these words to actual and highly individual speakers and constricts their occurrence in time. The readerly spectator cannot stop the text of a performance, manipulate it, and rearrange it according to his or her own desires.

I summarize Berger’s almost narcissistic position as an extreme. Even though, in my view, the Yale “Decon” system he uses doesn’t allow for the easy freedom he seems to think it gives him, his statements do highlight the issue I want to address: What distinguishes a scholarly or critical interpretation of a play from an actorial / directorial interpretation? One significant factor concerns the economics of reading versus watching performances. Once purchased, a play text is literally “free” for repeated rereadings, whereas seeing one particular production more than once (a practice that allows a spectator to reexamine, if not to stop, the performance text) costs the spectator quite a bit of money. But the most basic difference between the final products of these interpretative forms is that between a self-individuated private project—resulting in a text, the critical reading, that replaces the play with another text—and an ensemble, collectively understood and individuated performance text—a public project that re-places the play within a theatrical space. Yet how different are the practices that mold these forms of interpretation? In what follows, I shall examine several specific instances of so-called differences in interpretation-cutting the text and adding to the text—primarily in order to demonstrate that both practices share similar methodologies and processes of selection.