Shakespeareans: Part 1

This past weekend, I attended the Blackfriars Conference in Staunton, VA. For those of you who are unaware or not privy to the geeky little world of early-modern studies, Blackfriars is a replication (roughly) of an Elizabethan indoor playhouse. There is, of course, a massive organization which supports it known as the American Shakespeare Center. This conference does something that seems not to happen very often: it brings together scholars in Theatre and English under one roof.

This may not seem like an overwhelming accomplishment. It is, but it shouldn't be. You see, the primary problem is that English scholars tend to focus only on text (a broadening field, but still limited) and the people in my program tend to focus on performance and history. At best, strict theatre history involves searching through primary documents to produce rich descriptive accounts of productions, theatrical movements, or historical periods. English scholars, on the other hand (all of this is based on my experience) tend to take for granted the need to look at texts that were made for performance in terms of their only purpose: performance- therefore producing scintillating analyses that lack relevant application to the theatre.

Both ideas are too narrow. English studies have a wealth of critical theory to offer theatre studies, important because it grants relevance and self-awareness to historical and textual production and analysis. No more, in my view, should we or can we be content to construct historical narratives absent the framing theoretical devices that expose the frameworks and biases by which such narratives are constructed. By the same token, English certainly has every benefit to gain from the language of performance, inclusive of theories that deal with acting, space, and live interactions that help to shape texts whose purpose has been shaped by these factors.

Additionally, I am daunted and exhausted by the narrowness by which the concept of a 'text' can be defined in both fields. We need to wake up and realize that discourses are built in a multitude of media, that performance can constitute a multiplicity of acts, and that the ignorance or inability to accept such 'truths,' as they seem to me, simply serves to keep our programs and research aloof from relevance to the society that we seek to serve. Which relevance, I do believe, is part and parcel of a process of teaching and then releasing students into the social environment. The bottom line is that our fields have all become interdisciplinary in the wake of massive (and progressive) changes in critical theory, and that that interdisciplinary quality should be embraced before our institutions finally become unable to do the one thing that they purport to do: provide the tools necessary to analyse discourses with an open and critical mind.

Critical theory, performance, and texts of all sorts, when harnessed together, represent the most powerful conjunction of critical elements and practices conceivable. To keep these disciplines artificially separated, to keep them closed off to change, will only serve to bring on the constantly impending disaster predicted by those in our fields with no ability see past their own noses. Only if we continue to share an impulse towards sharing and integrating scholarship between fields can we maintain the relevance and health of the humanities.

Finally, and this is exceedingly biased, I believe that this is also the only way to effectively combat hegemony and hegemonic impulses, to bring minoritized and oppressed groups to the table, and to effect systemic and institutional change where it is most needed. Often, our critical eyes can and should often be turned towards the endemic racism, sexism, and homophobia in our own institutions. However, if we are unwilling to expand our disciplines or definitions, how could we ever combat entrenched sexist practices, for example? If we are unwilling to engage with the stuff that constructs normative impulses, how can we begin to deconstruct or (at the very fundamental level) even become conscious of them?

Now, I am not pretending that there is not a great deal of poor scholarship on each end of the spectrum, or that this view somehow eliminates the need for the evidentiary supports on which we base our work. Absolutely not. Scholarship, in its best form, should go on. This is not an invitation to 'looseness' in the scholarly framework, but an expansion of the tools and resources that we have to draw on. Not an anarchy of definitions, but an ever more exacting and precise mode of defining. After all, the more we expand ourselves and tools, the more complex the discussion must become.