Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Response

2007; Indiana University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.2007.49.2.268

1527-2052

Tracy C. Davis,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Drama in Practice:Response Tracy C. Davis (bio) "Drama," in performance before an audience, is a complex historical utterance. This point was made repeatedly by literary scholars at the 2006 NASSR/NAVSA conference but then ducked. This ritual of affirming then dodging the analytical challenges of scholarship about theater performance has become a characteristic gesture at multi-disciplinary meetings: scholars avow the validity of their self-appointed task at exactly the moment when they disavow their responsibility for it. Sometimes this is meant to guard against accusations of "getting it wrong." Sometimes it is a blatant expression of preference for textual studies, an affiliation with the cloister of the library rather than the archive, the book rather than the performance. And sometimes it is sheer laziness, a stopping short just when the potential for wider reception insists that more is at stake than a single reader's critical perspective. Ours is an awkward moment for theater historians: we are simultaneously complimented for carving out a valid area of inquiry and reminded of the rest of academe's distaste for precisely this set of concerns (Jackson 151). The three papers that prompt this response exemplify some of the reasons why performance is so complex—and so often ducked. Together, they briefly suggest three strategies for addressing it in a manageable way, focusing on taste and offering ways that scholars may demonstrate a dramatic work's exhibition, influence, and reformulation before and during live performance. None of the essays provides a complete view of the topic—not even a theater historian could aspire to that in so few pages—but all deal in good faith with elements of both performance and reception. Two are predicated on romantic era stage productions: one explicates a mode of observation taken as gospel truth in the dramatic theory of the entire nineteenth century, while the second exemplifies an approach frequently taken in Victorian scholarship. The third paper, which nudges into the Victorian period, concerns a backstage story with roots at the end of William IV's reign. [End Page 268] In 1747, at the initial performance of David Garrick's tenure as Drury Lane patentee, Garrick delivered a prologue written by Samuel Johnson. The prologue surveys a golden age that commenced with Shakespeare, declined after Behn and D'Urfey, and fell into a long lag when, in tragedy, "Intrigue was plot, obscenity was wit. / Vice always found a sympathetic friend; / They pleas'd their age, and did not aim to mend" (201). Johnson, through Garrick, bids his mid-eighteenth century audience exercise more discerning taste, thereby creating the conditions that would bring forth a new renaissance of dramatic writing. Switching suddenly from a third person historicist voice to the persona of the theater professional, Garrick utters both an excuse and an apology: Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice, The stage but echoes back the public voice. The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live. (202) The latter part of this quotation, which peppers subsequent dramatic commentary, lays responsibility for the condition of the stage on the public. Without a discerning and demanding public, what can authors—or actors, managers, or patentees—do? The question of what kinds of drama succeed and why implied by Johnson's prologue plagued generations of commentators. Byron thought that Maturin's play Bertram, which he nurtured into production at Drury Lane in 1816, would "either succeed greatly, or be damned gloriously" (Hayter 19), but he did not stake his reputation on either outcome. Browning believed that his play A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, which he pestered William Macready to produce, was "a sort of compromise between my own notion and yours" (qtd. in Crochunis 260), in which he bent his own aesthetic principles to accommodate Macready's pressing needs as an actor and commercial manager at Covent Garden. George Colman the Younger, author of the perennial afterpiece Blue-Beard, or Female Curiosity! (1798), had no such scruples: he wrote for money, and, though he claimed "I am far from endeavouring to vitiate the taste of the Town, and to over-run the Stage with Romance, and Legends...