Owning Ephemerality

Abstract

In the early scenes of Richard Eyre's 2004 movie Stage Beauty, a period piece about the mechanics and gender politics of the Restoration stage, the fictionalized characters of Maria Hughes and Edward Kynaston engage in a telling debate. What would happen to male actors such as Kynaston, who were most celebrated for playing female parts, if and when it became legal for women to act women's parts onstage? Could a woman, such as Hughes, act the part of Desdemona with as much charisma, artistry, and beauty as Kynaston had shown in the part? While these questions form the warp and woof of the entire movie, the dinner scene debate is more precise. “No, Kynaston, Desdemona is yours alone!” pronounces an ebullient Rupert Everett as King Charles II, challenging the possibility that any other actor—man or woman—could perform Kynaston's signature role. Maria Hughes begs to disagree: “But, a part doesn't belong to an actor,” she states, channeling a sentiment that Kynaston had previously shared: “An actor belongs to a part. Don't you agree?”In the context of the movie, Rupert Everett doesn't know what to think. Billy Crudup, as Kynaston, looks down at his dinner plate, falsely modest, and evades. Still, the idea of whether or not an actor could “own” a part, or any part of performance, or who and how one could “own” anything that transpired onstage, forms a conceptual question that animates, equally, eighteenth-century theater and Jane Wessel's lucid, engaging new book. As Wessel articulates, ownership of intellectual property was a newly important category in the eighteenth century, thanks in large part to the 1710 Copyright Act. This piece of legislation allowed authors now to own the rights to their works, and to understand themselves as the owners of the same. As it did so, “authorship” expanded in the eighteenth century to mean the same thing as “ownership”—with the significant caveat that the only forms of authorship protected under this new law were print based.What then, Wessel asks, of forms of authorship that were not geared toward publication? What then of the manuscript culture that flourished in the theater, and which produced work that was often circulated and consumed in performance but never on the page? Did playwrights “own” the words they produced, even if these words were never put into print?Wessel's main point is that our studies of literary property, theater, and authorship have failed to ask these questions, and that in failing to ask these questions, we have missed key aspects of how theatrical culture developed in the eighteenth century, and how intellectual property was understood. She's right. Her book, in equal measures fascinating and conscientious, walks the reader through a new literary landscape in which an authorial resistance to publication emerges as a complementary strategy to establish literary ownership, one running in parallel with the ideas of authorial ownership established via copyright over printed works. This is a literary landscape in which the ephemerality of performance becomes a counterintuitive opportunity for the playwright. Keeping one's dramatic work out of print, and only circulated on the stage, allowed the playwrights to lay sole claim to ideas or creations that existed only in the moment of performance, or to the complete manuscripts that they hid jealously from the press, or to the characters they had written and idiosyncratically performed. An actor may not “own” a part in the manner that Rupert Everett, as King Charles, would suggest—and historically an actor was never legally able to possess a role—but eighteenth-century actors who were also playwrights often crafted parts that they would then perform in a manner so personalized, so unique, that to separate their particular bodies from those creations would be to do away with the creation altogether.Dramatic authorship may not thus have had any legal standing, but, as Wessel puts it, “Dramatists performed the ownership they lacked in law” (4). Precisely because dramatists of this period lacked legal protection, she argues, they gravitated toward performance as a quality that made their work “less accessible and less reproducible,” and therefore less apt to be pirated or borrowed by others (4). This proprietary interest in one, or one kind of, performance may well sound counterintuitive when read against now familiar theoretical definitions of performance, such as Richard Schechner's idea of “twice-behaved behavior,” that is, behavior designed to be reappropriated and reproduced. Taken to the extreme, a work of intellectual property isolated in any medium, and protected in this manner, ceases to exist. But as Wessel's chapters demonstrate, dramatists, actors, and later theater managers of the period understood performance as that which, because it was ephemeral and at times hard to recreate, could “protect” one's authorial relationship to a work.There is a cult of celebrity, and of ego, here in play: many of performers in Wessel's case studies have a high and sometimes misguided sense of their centrality to a part or production, and of their own abilities to patrol the boundaries of where and when this part would be performed. Case in point is the actor-playwright Charles Macklin, the leadoff example in Wessel's book. Macklin, an energetic individual, who has as much time to spend performing his own work as he has to monitor and prevent others from doing the same, can create the conditions for one individual to “own” the dramatic content that he crafts. Walking the reader through Macklin's decades-long “ownership” of the part of Shylock, and his obsessive and proprietary handling of his unpublished farce Love à la Mode, Wessel exposes Macklin's strategy as dependent on much independent work. He would take his manuscript copy of the farce home with him every night after a performance, tucked into the breast pocket of his coat; he allowed transcribers to copy out individual actors’ parts but forbade them from making a full copy of the script; he rigorously monitored unauthorized reconstructions and performances of his farce and took those involved in any pirated productions to court. He didn't always succeed in preventing all such productions, and reading these accounts, one realizes that Macklin must have put as much energy into maintaining the boundaries of his farce as he did into performing it. Still, through his litigiousness, his desires for ownership over his work became visible and well known. As a result, “He put the question of performance copyright at the forefront of theater professionals’ minds” (44).Reading this chapter, I wondered how many people would have the time, energy, and desire to do what Macklin had done. Was Macklin an anomaly in this regard, or a model to be copied and revered? But as Wessel explains, performance describes a set of behaviors to be emulated, even when the behaviors in question advertise a proprietary ownership of the same. One person who had Macklin's ideas very much in mind was his contemporary Samuel Foote, the subject of Wessel's second chapter, who was the master of occasional and strategically advertised gatherings—performances that were described very purposefully not as performances at all, but as casual social gatherings for a “dish of tea.” Most scholars have read these gatherings as attempts on Foote's part to avoid the rigorous theater censorship laws of the period, which would prevent him from circulating the types of political satire that he organized these gatherings to perform. Wessel's point, instead, is that Foote's performances, existing as one-off productions with no script, were just as much about him establishing authorial control over what he did. A celebrated mimic, who performed his political satires with impressionistic flair, Foote, and only Foote, could produce the type of “tea parties” that audiences came to watch; audiences in turn learned that it was only by attending such a tea party that one could have the experience of Foote. What Wessel calls the “strategic ephemerality” of Foote's displays meant that he could evade censorship, but this ephemerality also meant that he would be recognized as the key artistic component for whatever he produced. Without him, the tea party could not exist, whereas a Foote that lived beyond himself, in publication and in print, could be co-opted, pirated, censored, sold.And yet, a Foote that lived within himself could also meet this fate. The ironic result of Foote's performances mirrors in some ways the irony I feel in Macklin's strategic attempts to claim any performance, a medium designed for reproduction and reappropriation, as his and his alone. To redefine performance as the province of one threatens to eliminate the category that these actor-playwrights, and later theater managers, seek to embrace. Indeed, in the case of Foote, his reliance on mimicry suggests to others the very strategy that they could use to appropriate the behaviors he wants to claim as his. The other, in this case, would be Tate Wilkinson, actor, playwright, and theater manager alike. Inspired by Foote's use of mimicry to establish a model of ownership outside of print, Wilkinson, also a talented mimic, would adopt this same strategy to bring Foote's projects from London to the provinces, thereby showing the power of mimicry to travel from body to body, and to continue to strut and fret its hour upon the stage.Before turning her full attention to Wilkinson, Wessel spends an interlude on an emerging eighteenth-century custom, by which theater managers began “buying copyrights” from the authors who wrote for the stage. This move would mark a power shift, from dramatists to managers, in terms of who controlled, or sought to control, intellectual property onstage. The terminology is deceptive here: since a work didn't technically have a copyright until it was printed, what theater managers were actually buying were the printing rights from dramatic authors for their work, and they did so specifically so that they could keep the play out of print. Doing so would prevent authors from printing their works independently and so having them performed elsewhere; it would also prevent another manager from buying the play to have it performed. Theater managers believed that “buying copyrights” allowed them to claim both “the right of first print publication” and also “the right to exclusive performance of the work” (83). This was a common-law belief that initially had no legal backing; however, theater managers who owned the printing rights for unpublished plays increasingly took other theaters associated with performing these same plays to court. Theater managers thereby established that to own the printing rights to a play did, legally, give one exclusive performance rights. This notion of ownership benefited the managers directly, with the underlying idea that the one able to keep a performance from publication—the one able to ensure that a play will only ever exist when it appears onstage—is the one who owns the play.In this new climate, playwrights who were also theater managers (Foote, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Wilkinson) had a distinct advantage, and Wessel ends her study by charting the response of playwrights frustrated by this shift. Her two final case studies are the actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, and the Irish actor and playwright John O'Keeffe. Inchbald, in recognition of this new power struggle, chose not to sell her printing rights to theaters. Instead, and in a shift away from Macklin's strategies, she chose herself to print her most popular works. O'Keeffe was perhaps not so savvy. He did sell his printing rights, but then used performance to castigate those who had purchased what he believed was his. Performing himself on stages as an exploited author, he brings Wessel's study full circle by using a medium outside of print to promote the idea that he was the rightful owner of the words he had written for the stage.Wessel conveys all these insights in clear and captivating prose. Her book is a pleasure to read, with the depth of her scholarship revealing a true joy in her work. Her discussions are offset with beautiful reproductions of some of theater's “ephemera,” and her own archival discoveries—such as her analyses of Tate Wilkinson's playbills and of the way he used them to reflect upon dramatic property rights—prove a version of her main point: that the ephemerality of theater could be understood as a strategy for communicating to audiences that something that vanishes can nonetheless be owned. In studying theater from the past, we need to be aware of the same. As Wessel explores in her epilogue, even the playwrights of the early nineteenth century who espouse a decline in drama do so not at face value, but as a strategy to fight for a better acknowledged relationship to their work.Reflecting appreciatively on her book, I'm left with a few questions that I'll bring to future conversations with colleagues in the field. Leading off her study with two cases of prominent actor-playwrights, Wessel sets up an idea of “ownership” over unpublished intellectual property as something established by dramatic authors who would then perform the words they wrote. These dual roles allowed figures such as Macklin and Foote to have multiple levels of control over their unprinted words: they could determine both what the characters would speak and do onstage and, in the case of certain characters, how they would speak and do it. Theater managers then worked to wrest these same abilities from those in their employ. For Wessel, “control” is a word that throughout this study is often interchangeable with “ownership,” an interesting association given that dramatic performance is a necessarily collaborative, and therefore unpredictable, art. Wessel addresses the collaborative nature of performance early in her work: “The playwright,” she acknowledges, “is not the sole creator of the performed work” (38). That Macklin and Foote both seem to strive against this reality is a perverse desire in keeping with their known personality traits. That theater managers, such as Thomas Harris, attempted to boss around playwrights like Inchbald aligns with gender politics of the time. Still, the pushback that those who sought to control performance encountered—pirated editions of Macklin's farce, Wilkinson's appropriations of Foote's imitative techniques, Inchbald's strategies of resistance and independence—remind me of other examples of unauthorized, collaborative authorship from throughout theater history: everything from the “bad” quarto of Hamlet, long believed by some scholars to be based on an actor's or actors’ memorial reconstruction of the play, and now believed by Tiffany Stern to be a note-taker's reconstitution of the script, to the stage directions of George Bernard Shaw, obsessive instructions that to me always indicate awareness of an audience and actors who can never be guaranteed to play along. What does “ownership” mean over something that is collaboratively produced? How did dramatic authors balance the unpredictability of live performance with their desire for control? For those figures in this study who wanted to “own” their performances, what aspect of it, exactly, did they want to possess?