ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s plays, we have seen, did not unfold within the neutral atmosphere of polite expectancy prevailing in theatres today: our quiet, respectable audiences induced into passivity by fi xed seating, into anonymity by the darkening of the auditorium, and into silence by the raising of the curtain. Neither were the intellective conditions intended for the plays’ decipherment those of the scholar’s solitary desk. For Elizabethan drama, opening action supervened upon a loudly predisposed world: upon a sea of spirited spectators, restless and gusty, buoyed by emancipation from customary restraints of class and ideology. If the performance was delayed, they might pelt the tiring house curtain with fruit.1 It was upon that massing groundswell of festal energy, I would argue, that much in Shakespeare’s plays moved; and it is by analysis of Shakespeare’s manipulations of such in-house momentum that we can perceive his dramaturgy achieving many of its political special effects. Yet Shakespeare, Christ-like, could swiftly still the roaring waves. The boisterous sea mutated, under the spell of controlling genius, between the tone and manner of a holiday-making crowd and that of a rapt and silenced audience. Where the previous chapter emphasised Shakespeare’s strategic activation of the interactional principle, the following will focus his politicised infl ammation, channelling, or obstruction of the ready carnival surge. Shakespeare’s scripts reveal, I suggest, a distinctive repertoire of master principles of energy manipulation-carnival dynamics as I will term them-grounded in dramatic confrontation of those free waves of jubilant high spirits and truant antipathy to authority. Astonishingly, Shakespeare seems to have mastered an entire range of such manipulations
of the carnivalesque as early as The Taming of the Shrew (seemingly written c. 1590-91); and brief survey of these techniques will allow us, in effect, to chart much basic structure in that play. Such was Shakespeare’s skill, I shall argue, in turning festive auditorium responsiveness against the ideological enunciations of that play’s textual surface that generations of modern critics, raised to the page, have missed the radicalism of the stage.
