Intertheatrical Cues and Shakespearean backstories

This study addresses the boundary between the stage and lived experience by focusing on evocations of prior histories of Shakespeare’s characters. Taking the battle of wit carried out by means of commonplaces and proverbs in Henry V (3.7) as a focal case study, as well as considering other such telling moments in The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado, Hamlet, Cymbeline, and Henry V, my investigation offers a viable approach to staging the presentation of characters’ backstories. My goal is to recover and comment on a set of principles for understanding one of the chief ways in which the Shakespearean text is set up to guide both affective and expressive interpretation of characters. More broadly, this paper involves larger questions of how memory shapes identity, including the forging of memorable moments within the given performance reflecting normative stage business and other embodied forms of intertheatricality. This essay demonstrates how attention to the playwright’s well-placed and condensed seeds of discourse—like proverbs themselves—unfold to convey whole histories and thus a backlog of information that can aid in audience understanding of characters’ interactions that motivate stage activity as well as advance the plot arc. The critical insights brought out in this essay, concerning mnemotechnical cues and declamatory triggers to conjure plausible backstories leading to incipient action in the world of the play, can be used to explore more purposefully the built-in possibilities for moving a Shakespearean text from page to stage.