Shakespeare and the Globe.

MACDONALD, RONALD R.

Stanley Wells, ed., Shakespeare and the Globe

(Shakespeare Survey, 52.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 22 pls. + 338 pp. $74.95. ISBN: 0-521-66074-2.

R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567-1642

Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. x + 35 pls. + 275 pp. $44.95. ISBN: 0-8093-2275-7.

Despite the title "Shakespeare and the Globe," the essays in volume 52 of Shakespeare Survey (1999) are not all about Shakespeare and the Globe, whether the celebrated and debated theater constructed in Southwark from the timbers of the old Theatre, or the Wanamaker reconstruction on a site not far from the original. With one or two exceptions, however, these essays do share a concern for the indeterminacy and plasticity of the Shakespearean text and a profound skepticism about reaching the grail of "original" Shakespeare, the putatively pristine product direct from the master's pen, before its embodiment, necessary modification, and inevitable compromise in a theatrical venue. Even Andrew Gurr's "maximal text" ("Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. The Globe") doesn't quite coincide with what John Webster rather wistfully called the "poem" (his own composition), as opposed to the "play" (what was performed), the maximal text being, rather, the version licensed by the Master of the Revels and often mod ified by him. But the quest for the elusive original takes many forms, including versions of "what everybody believed in those days," the kind of generalization, encouraged by temporal remoteness, that produced, some sixty years ago, the remarkably durable idea of the Elizabethan World Picture, as well as the putative "stereotype of the Elizabethan stage Jew," of which Charles Edelman sensibly remarks ("Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage") that "it is far from certain that there ever was such a thing" (100).

There are, to be sure, in this collection measured and highly intelligent suggestions about the Globe reconstruction and how it might be used to tell us something of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical experience. Yu Jin Ko ("A Little Touch of Harry in the Light: Henry Vat the New Globe"), while conceding "the enormous differences that separate us from Elizabethan audiences," still believes that "much can be learned about [Henry V] and its possible initial reception" by considering the kind of "imaginative labour" the play demands of any audience, whether Elizabethan or contemporary (107). This consideration leads to a qualified dissent from Stephen Greenblatt's notorious denial of the very possibility of subversion, for in a theatrical venue where the boundary between onstage and offstage, actors and audience, is highly permeable, and the audience's role in imaginatively constructing the spectacle palpable, there will be, according to Ko, "no end to either subversion or containment" and drama will re-enact " the circling of rule and resistance that has characterized so much of English history" (119, emphasis added).

But few contributors to this volume are even this sanguine about what is to be gained in a historical sense from the Globe reconstruction. For Marion O'Connor, whose study of William Poel's historicizing experiments toward the end of the nineteenth century shows how thoroughly Poel's efforts were entangled in Victorian assumptions ("'Useful in the Year 1999': William Poel and Shakespeare's 'Build of Stage'"), there can be no determining of the effect of variable factors without establishing constants, and yet "between the Globe reconstructed from the Theatre for Shakespeare's company in 1599 and the 'Shakespeare's Globe' reconstruction in 1999, there are only variables" (32). And W. B. Worthen ("Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves"), in discussing the different ways various historical reconstructions from Disney World to Colonial Williamsburg construct the visitor and commodify experience, points out that plays at the New Globe are not performances of performances (like the performance of actual work by pilgrim-impersonators at Plimouth Plantation, for instance) but rather (and perhaps unavoidably) contemporary engagements by contemporary means with the Shakespearean text. "Performance," Worthen observes, "is always in the present; ideologies of restoration are always rhetorical, a frictionless disciplining of the past through its embodiment in the present" (45).

Such skepticism having become something of a norm, the altogether convincing argument of R. B. Graves' Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567-1642 appears as a pleasant surprise. Graves seems less interested in theoretical limitations than in corrigible factual ones, such as that of the great Edmund Malone, who "could not imagine the Globe without two hanging chandeliers for lights," as Graves observes, "because the theater with which he was familiar -- the theater of Cibber and Garrick -- had them" (65-66). In fact, Graves wastes little time in eliminating Malone's chandeliers, but the kind of argument, richly informed by social and theatrical history, comprehensive textual knowledge, and the physiology and psychology of perception, an argument concerned with possibilities and, perhaps more important, impossibilities, is the substance of this consistently interesting book.

Graves proceeds with the assumption that we know enough about sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English theatrical venues, the public amphitheaters in particular, "to make intelligent surmises about the amount and kind of light that illuminated their stages" (86). His conclusions about the amphitheaters, in any case, are perhaps not startling, although they are meticulously argued and in at least one regard interestingly counter-intuitive. On the basis of a careful consideration of what we can know about orientation, structure, probable times of performance, and like matters, Graves concludes that direct sunlight in the outdoor venues played a minimal role in illuminating the spectacle, the high enclosing walls and the "shadow," the canopy over the stage, effectively blocking direct sunlight at most times and seasons. A flat and dispersed light of "relative uniformity" (101) was probably what was aimed for, the elimination of extreme contrasts having a range of advantages, from the fact that such light would have made it easy for the eye to adjust to the general waning of natural light as an afternoon wore on, to the fact that the neutrality of dispersed light would have been amenable to a situation in which spectators were required to imagine a range of situations from full daylight to total darkness, even as they needed to see what was taking place, regardless of the fictive conditions of the scene. The less distinct character of its own the general illumination possesses, the more "obsequious" (to use Dr. Johnson's term) it will be to the imagination. "The general picture of the amphitheaters that emerges," Graves concludes, "is one of a well-shaded stage with neither artificial light for general illumination [so much for Malone's chandeliers; property lights are, of course, another matter] nor the extreme contrasts of light and dark due to direct sunlight" (123).

And, mutatis mutandis, a very similar situation obtained in the hall theaters such as the Blackfriars, Graves argues. Here, of course, some artificial illumination was required to augment natural light from windows, particularly in winter, but it must have been limited at any time, given the scarcity and expense of the human resources needed to provide constant attention to tallow candles. And the goal was still an illumination both flat and neutral, one susceptible to being variously construed as the fiction of the dramatic text demanded, one which as far as possible tended to preclude harsh contrasts and minimize glare. Graves thus plays down distinctions between outdoor and indoor venues and the kind of supposed differences often used to argue contrasts in repertoires (productions at court, of course, with far greater human and material resources at their disposal, are a rather different matter). Artificial light in the hall theaters, as Graves plausibly argues, "served to attenuate the extremes of the fl uctuating daylight, but it made possible no major effect that could not be achieved by daylight alone" (200). In consequence, Graves sees no necessity for attributing "any shift in dramatic style solely to indoor lighting when the King's men began raking up winter residence at Blackfriars in 1609" (196).

Such thoughtful arguing and careful concluding bear ample fruit in Graves final chapter, a study of The Duchess of Malfi at both the Globe and Blackfriars. A respectful dissent from the conclusions of John Russell Brown, particularly concerning act 4, scene 1, the scene in which the crazed Ferdinand offers the Duchess a dead man's hand, produces the quietly triumphant conclusion that "the steady, overall illumination of the amphitheaters and halls, far from imposing a restriction on the actors and playwrights, meant that even in scenes of pretended darkness, the audience could see and respond to the visual media of the actors' craft" (232). With its careful research and meticulous argumentation, Graves book deserves wide attention in the relatively circumscribed field to which it makes a real contribution.