Eating air, feeling smells: Hamlet's theory of performance

Renaissance Drama

Volumn 35, Issue , 2006, Pages 145-168

  Sale, Carolyn ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61949370545     PISSN: 04863739     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/rd.35.41917445     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. This and all other references to the play are, unless otherwise noted, to The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Penguin, 2001)
2. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 13-14. Patterson seeks to mediate between opposing views of the Shakespearean theater as represented by the work of Ann Jennalie Cook and Walter Cohen, Cook arguing that Shakespeare wrote for a "privileged" educated audience and Cohen that the Shakespearean theater catered to a "social heterocosm" that included "artisans and shopkeepers" and was in turn shaped by their desire for a populist and nationalist theater (15-17). She also resists Stephen Greenblatt's theory of containment ("We need to return to a less impersonal, less totalitarian account of how Shakespeare's theater probably functioned"[25]). To do this, she argues that Hamlet, a transgressive and radical character, speaks in a "mocking, dynamic, subversive, popular, and 'general' voice" (98), and that the play opposes "academicism," then and now (29-31), and that with this voice, and its critique of certain ways of thinking, the play speaks simultaneously to "the judicious few" and the "underprivileged many" (100). She posits that the play displaces philosophical speculation to restore to playgoers "the ground, the trust in material reality, that philosophical speculation had excavated way" (118). Here I pursue the means by which it does so
3. See Steven Mullaney, "Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607," Shakespeare Quarterly 45:2 (1994): 139-62, esp. p. 144
4. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1587), STC 12098, 50
5. For one discussion of culinary metaphors in antitheatrical rhetoric, see Jeremy Lopez Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27-31
6. For Anthony Dawson's discussion of the ways in which Shakespeare's theater offered Shakespeare's first audiences an experience related to and perhaps a substitution for their experience of Christ's real presence in the Mass, see chapter 1, "Performance and Participation," 11-37, in Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
7. P. A. Skantze recapitulates Dawson's arguments in terms of a "secular transubstantiation" in Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2003), 15
8. Those who wish to argue that Hamlet offers its audience an experience of breath or air that is spiritually or religiously inflected could argue that it extends a Catholic theatrical tradition of creating an experience of the divine in the form of the Holy Ghost through appeals to the senses that is best epitomized in the medieval drama in the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene
9. In " 'A History of the Air': Shakespeare and the Evaporating Self," a paper delivered to the Shakespeare Association of America in March 2002, Carla Mazzio discussed the toxicity or noxiousness of the air that playgoers had to breathe in Elizabethan and Jacobean London in relation to texts by Shakespeare, Bacon, and Donne. In that paper, she raises the possibility that the Shakespearean drama may have offered a "restorative poetics"; through weeping, she suggests, audience members may have brought about an "elemental alteration, self-evaporation, a 'clearing of the air' of the self, soul and environment."
10. Robert Weimann's suggestion that "air" puns on "heir" puts another political aspect of the statement into play. Hamlet is left eating air as the heir, that is, as someone whose own claim to the throne has been preempted, at least temporarily, by Claudius's. Weimann discusses the kinetic energies that are embodied and released in Hamlet, but not the implications of this statement for the play's theory of performance. See Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 176-77
11. Francis Bacon, Sylva Silvarun, qtd. in Bruce R. Smith, "Hearing Green: Logomarginality in Hamlet," Conclusion, Early Modern Literary Studies 7.1 (May, 2001): 5.1-7 , 4
12. John Webster, qtd. in Joseph Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 32
13. See chapter 1 of The Player's Passion, especially 44-45
14. See Bruce Smith, "Hearing Green: Logomarginality in Hamlet," Physical Frame. Early Modern Literary Studies 7.1 (May 2001): 2.1-4 , 2
15. See also Smith's more recent essay, "Hearing Green," in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
16. See Smith, "Hearing Green: Logomarginality in Hamlet," Physiological Frame. Early Modern Literary Studies 7.1 (May 2001): 3.1-3 , 2
17. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 168
18. Ibid
19. See Gail Kern Paster, "Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body," 106-25, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Carla Mazzio and David Hillman (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 116
20. Gail Kern Paster, "Roasted in Wrath and Fire: The Ecology of the Passions in Hamlet and Othello," 25-76, in Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 34-40
21. The word is Robert Burton's translation of a passage on air in the work of Levinus Lemnius, as quoted in Paster, "Roasted," 41
22. Wright, Passions, 170
23. OED, entry for "scent" v. . The obsolete meaning is the third definition that the OED offers: "3. To exhale an odour, to smell. [So F. sentir.] Now rare or Obs." (October 27, 2004)
24. OED, entry for "scent" v., (October 27, 2004)
25. See Weimann, Author's Pen, 123
26. Jane Tylus, "'Par Accident': The Public Work of Early Modern Theater," 253-71, in Reading the Early Modern Passions, 269
27. Stephen Orgel, "The Play of Conscience," 129-42, in The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), especially 133-34
28. Faster, "Roasted," 41
29. Paster, "Nervous Tension," 110
30. "Hamlet's Cause," in Shakespeare and the Law, ed. Karen Cunningham and Constance Jordan (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming)
31. See chapter 3 of W. D. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Worthen quotes the actor Simon Callow on the experience of acting as the "incomparable feeling" of having "another person. . . breath[e] through your lungs" (144)
32. The line "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space - were it not that I have bad dreams" occurs only in the Folio. See the Riverside Shakespeare, 2.2.254
33. The process of "feeling smells" therefore works to a very different end from civilizing processes that work to establish various kinds of propriety, inculcate certain forms of behavior, and uphold the integrity of the individual. In "Acting with Tact," Mazzio discusses how civilizing processes give rise to the mode of behavior we call "tact," which encourages sensitivity to "a kind of vulnerable air in the space between persons." Tact, we could argue, treats the "vulnerable air" between bodies as a body in its own right to discourage contact or make any move toward contact through touch tentative; the process of "feeling smells" breaks "tact" down, as it involves intimate contact between bodies at a remove. See Mazzio, "Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance," 159-86, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), esp. 186
34. Robert Weimann also writes of the economic exchange that takes place in terms of some kind of return to the audience: "that audience, which had not come empty-handed, did not leave empty-minded. Their contribution, a profitable commodity, was rewarded with a volatile sense of 'imaginary puissance.' " His emphasis falls, however, on what Shakespeare's company gets rather than what it gives: "What remained in the theatre was the sum total of all the pennies paid, together with the desire and the need to have more of them from returning audiences." See Author's Pen, 216-17
35. Here I extend Bruce Smith's notion of the dispersals that take place in the Globe. In "Hearing Green," Smith offers a descriptive formula by which sound leads to "spiritus," which is in turn dispersed through the entire space. He may write of sound, and I, of breath, but clearly the phenomena of which we write, though they differ crucially, are very intimately related. See Smith, "Hearing Green," Physical frame, 1. Weimann's discussion of digestion in relation to the prologue to Henry V and the Globe's space is also a useful point of reference here. I extend his discussion of the ways in which the Globe's space digests things by applying it specifically to the dispersal of breath. See Weimann, Author's Pen, 75
36. Both Smith and Weimann write of the Globe's "canopy," Smith focusing on the actual canopy above the stage and Weimann the canopy of the air to which Hamlet refers. Smith focuses on the actual canopy to explain how the shell of the Wooden O contributes to the acoustical properties and experience of plays in performance: "the presence of a canopy, however, meant that sounds originating under that canopy were reflected from top to bottom as well as from side to side, producing a more diffuse, harder to locate sound," he writes. See "Hearing Green," Physical frame, 2. Weimann suggests that Hamlet's reference to the canopy of the air "conjoins the global circumference of this 'goodly frame the earth' with the protruding place of the stage as a 'promontory' jutting out into the pit... ." (Author's Pen, 215). Imagining the canopy as a mouth through which the air outside the theater is ingested and then released again gives us another way of talking about Hamlet's claim that "excellent plays" offer up matter that is "well digested."