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Carnival
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An Overview of what I want to talk about tonight
1. Turner & Dionysus 69:
2. Shakespeare's theatre --> why do we love Shakespeare's theatre so very much for so very long?
o Shakespeare stood with one foot in the Dark Ages and one foot in the Modern
o Think about the description: from the 'dark ages' into the age of 'enlightenment'
world.
Drama 226: erika paterson Wed May
Theatre is an art form; it is also a social institution.
By favoring a certain style of representation and a
particular etiquette of reception, the institutional
setting of a performance informs and focuses the
meaning of a dramatic text and facilitates the
dissemination of that meaning through the collective
activity of the audience (Michael Bristol 1985).
“The social and political life of the theatre as a public
gathering place has an importance of its own -- over
and above the more exclusively literary interests of
texts and the contemplation of their meaning”
(Bristol).
Because of its capacity to create and sustain a
briefly intensified social life, the theatre is festive
and political -- it is a privileged site for the
celebration and the critique of the needs and
concerns of the polis.
The critical intensification of collective life
represented and experienced in the theatre, and
the possibility it creates for action and initiative,”
is what we are primarily concerned about in our
discussion on Drama and Carnival.
Drama & Carnival
Theatre in Elizabethan England was not exclusively or even mainly a
specialized institution of literary production.
Rather, performance was ephemeral and active, and more importantly for our
interest, what happened in the early theatres was carried onto the stage from
the traditions of popular festive forms.
These collective traditions gave rise to dramatic forms that were intensely
critical and even experimental in their representation of social and political
structures
Festival and Carnival work to demystify or ‘un-crown’ power and authority by
virtue of celebrating and reaffirming collective and ‘lived’ tradition.
For the first few decades of its existence, the public playing house of
Elizabethan England was not considered distinct from the festive life,
but rather as a continuation, or extension of festivals such as the
‘Midsummer watch,’ traditional sports, and other collective events.
As one observer of the day put it: “these have been continued in stage
plays .. in certain public places, as the theatre, the Curtain.
This account describes theatre as a continuation of popular festive
activity -- much like we looked the Ancient Greek theatre as
continuation of ritual ...
Theatre moves between the streets and inside the
churches or civic arenas, until Shakespeare and his
cronies build their theatres on the ‘wrong side’ of the
river; indeed, on the margins of society.
It is interesting to think about the relationships between ritual & official
culture and festival and popular culture; Between drama in the civic
arenas and drama in the streets.
I am suggesting that Shakespeare's theatre, originally, was positioned
between the streets and the civic arena; between the culture of ‘the
people’ and the culture of ‘authority’
As Turner would have it, betwixt and between: in a liminal space.
There is always a struggle between the culture of the people
and the culture of authority: “popular culture struggles to retain
its own particular and local authority over the ordering of social
and economic life” (Bristol, 12).
A strange contradiction existed: the earliest theatre companies
and ‘Players’ were ‘legitimized’ on the bases of their positions as
‘servants’ of high court officials -- “they were engaged in
‘service’ to their aristocratic patrons” (Bristol, 112). But, the
players were considered vagabonds and itinerant peddlers, the
bottom of the social ladder. Somehow - the lowest had become
affiliated with the highest and most privileged social spheres.
In a theatrical performance, writing appears in the guise of speech.
An actor recites his lines in a manner that suggest that his words are
spontaneous, unrehearsed and immediate. In the conditions of
performance, a text recuperates the qualities of spoken utterance.
Writing is re-concretized as sound; the speech is addressed to
auditors who are present at the moment of utterance. The
communicative space in which this activity occurs is not, moreover, an
empty or uncluttered space in which a message s disseminated
without interference. On the contrary, it is already full of sound and
of other socially significant semiotic material. In such a state of
affairs, a serious dislocation of authority is not only possible but
likely, and several question must therefore be raised (Bristol, 122).
Consider the actor in the public playhouse who is no longer the servant
to the aristocracy: unlike the consecrated word of ministers of God and
the persuasive rhetoric of political leaders, the actor’s public speeches
are presented in ‘disguise’ and do not represent what the actor thinks
or feels -- although spoken with full conviction and the sound of
authority.
The question: who is responsible ? Who has the authority ?
Enter the necessity for the playwright - between 1590 and 1610 the
‘professionalization’ of writing for the stage develops (G. E. Bentley,
The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 1590 -1642).
Anatomie of Absues
Phillip Stubbs, 1583
The polemic against the players and the playhouses.
Theatre is not the proper place for pedagogical good intentions; it is not
a pulpit, a school, or a courtroom; it can only mimic and therefore diminish
the authority properly allocated to these institutions
And, further, theatre is a site of promiscuity!
In Stubbs, view, the player is able to say things with impunity, and only one
political and administrative response to this is appropriate: the complete
abolition of the playing an the proscription of players.
And most disturbing to Stubbs, is the mixing of
“The proposal to abolish playing is part of a larger program to restore
the structure of authority by subjecting popular culture to vigilant
surveillance and coercive restraint” (Bristol, 117).
The theatre has a better answer: to reinvent the institution, introduce
the playwright, provide for ‘ownership; of the text and accordingly
responsibility to authorities. (Read Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Faire)
Bristol argues that both propositions, abolition & legitiation through
the author -- “proceed from the same critique of popular culture, and
from the same anxiety over the dispersion of authority in the intensified
life of the playhouses” (117).
With the appearance of the author, or on the stage, ‘the
bookeholder’ we see the disappearance of the popular, the
remembered, and improvisation and soliloquy; and indeed, over time
the audience slowly disappears completely into the dark behind an
imaginary fourth wall.
As Foucault reminds us:
•
There was a time when the texts that we today call ‘literary’
(narrative stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put
into circulation, and valorized without any question about the
identity of the author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since
their ancientness, whether real of imagined, was regarded as a
sufficient guarantee of their status.(quoted in Bristol, 121).
That’s all folks .....