ABSTRACT
Robert Weimann's work on the relation between popular traditions and professional playing in early modern England has in many ways involved the study of contrasting forms and qualities: high and low, ancient and new, audience and player, actor and author, presentation and representation, locus of course, and platea. Among Weimann's various fruitful studies of theatrical opposition has been the relation between an actor's playing and an author's text. This chapter traces the uses of Shakespearean theatricality, particularly noting the kinds of contests and collaborations to which Weimann has called our attention, in a text that was produced long after Shakespeare's day. In Paradise Lost, that monumental meditation on the ethics and the politics of the poet in a period that saw immense shifts in the structures of authority, the figure of the actor does complicated work. The chapter argues that the Milton in Shakespeare's work saw a deeply productive tension between self-contained authority and the audience-courting, self-presenting world of improvisation.
