Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Mingling vice and “worthiness” in King John

Abstract

WITH THE ADVENT OF MARLOWE the aims of representation in the Elizabethan theater were sharply redefined. As the prologues to Tamburlaine suggested, the dramatist literally felt authorized to "lead" the theater to a new horizon of legitimation, one against which the hero could more nearly be viewed as a self-contained "picture." Such a portrait would "unfold" the scene "at large"; the character "himself in presence" would dominate the performance. This at least is how the Prologue to The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great proceeded to elucidate the uses of "this tragic glass" in the earlier Prologue: But what became of fair Zenocrate, And with how many cities' sacrifice He [Tamburlaine] celebrated her sad funeral, Himself in presence shall unfold at large.(1) As promised on the title page, the heroic character's "presence" continued to be felt in "his impassionate fury." As Richard Jones, the printer, assumed in his Preface to the Octavo and Quarto editions of 1590, these fruits of a literary imagination would have appealed "To the Gentlemen Readers and others that take pleasure in reading Histories." Moving easily from stage to page, these eminently readable representations, forthwith available in print, recommended themselves in terms of what "worthiness" the "eloquence of the author" could profitably deliver to a gentle preoccupation with "serious affairs and studies." The flow of authority now seemed to be not simply from text to performance, but--an even closer circuit--from the dramatic writing--via the printing--into the studies of those familiar with "reading Histories." Or so at least Jones, a not entirely unbiased observer, would have it. London theater audiences, even when hugely thrilled by Edward Alleyn's portrait of Tamburlaine, appeared to take a different view, even when what they "greatly gaped at" did not find its way into the printed text. Here, to recall the partisan position ]ones betrays in his Preface provides us with an illuminating foil against which to read the treatment, between Marlowe and Shakespeare, of how comic or grotesque "jestures" were mingled, or otherwise, with the "worthiness of the matter itself." In Marlowe's plays it was possible, at least in print, to view serious matter as incompatible with such "graced deformities" as performances on public stages entailed. Participating in the countermanding flow of authority, even snatching part of it for himself as a discriminating reader, the printer, apparently without intervention on the part of the dramatist, saw fit radically to cancel out the most gaped-at elements of performance. Since, obviously, the latter were viewed as having no authority of their own, the tragical discourse was not to be contaminated by "some fond and frivolous" traces of mere players; these needed to be refined out of existence, as befitted "so honorable and stately a history." Unfortunately, we can do little more than conjecture Marlowe's perspective on the issue of this cultural difference in question, even though, of course, we recall the dismissal of jigs and "mother-wits" in the Prologue to the first part of Tamburlaine. But then we have Shakespeare's own word that the difference between the worthy matter of history and the "unworthy" stage of its performance was perceived, and that it loomed large, in the theater of the Lord Chamberlain's men as well. Only as I have suggested elsewhere, the prologue to Henry V was designed both to expose and to appropriate the gap between noble matter and its common staging, to "digest" the use and "Th'abuse of distance." No doubt, Shakespeare, in a different manner, sought to grapple with the cultural divide--in a manner that was so much closer to the matrix in which the stamp of his own life and work was cast. There was then, in both Marlowe's and Shakespeare's theater an awareness of this "distance" between the represented locale in the world-of-the-play and the location of playing-in-the-world of Elizabethan London. …