Drama Carnival authority the author

1. Drama & Carnivalauthority & the author Drama 226: erika paterson Wed May 14/2008

6. Drama & Carnival Theatre in Elizabethan England was not exclusively or even mainly a specialized institution of literary production. Rather, performance was ephemeral and active, and more importantly for our interest, what happened in the early theatres was carried onto the stage from the traditions of popular festive forms. These collective traditions gave rise to dramatic forms that were intensely critical and even experimental in their representation of social and political structures Festival and Carnival work to demystify or �un-crown� power and authority by virtue of celebrating and reaffirming collective and �lived� tradition.

7. For the first few decades of its existence, the public playing house of Elizabethan England was not considered distinct from the festive life, but rather as a continuation, or extension of festivals such as the �Midsummer watch,� traditional sports, and other collective events. As one observer of the day put it: �these have been continued in stage plays .. in certain public places, as the theatre, the Curtain. This account describes theatre as a continuation of popular festive activity -- much like we looked the Ancient Greek theatre as continuation of ritual ...

8. Theatre moves between the streets and inside the churches or civic arenas, until Shakespeare and his cronies build their theatres on the �wrong side� of the river; indeed, on the margins of society. It is interesting to think about the relationships between ritual & official culture and festival and popular culture; Between drama in the civic arenas and drama in the streets. I am suggesting that Shakespeare's theatre, originally, was positioned between the streets and the civic arena; between the culture of �the people� and the culture of �authority� As Turner would have it, betwixt and between: in a liminal space.

9. There is always a struggle between the culture of the people and the culture of authority: �popular culture struggles to retain its own particular and local authority over the ordering of social and economic life� (Bristol, 12). A strange contradiction existed: the earliest theatre companies and �Players� were �legitimized� on the bases of their positions as �servants� of high court officials -- �they were engaged in �service� to their aristocratic patrons� (Bristol, 112). But, the players were considered vagabonds and itinerant peddlers, the bottom of the social ladder. Somehow - the lowest had become affiliated with the highest and most privileged social spheres.

10. In a theatrical performance, writing appears in the guise of speech. An actor recites his lines in a manner that suggest that his words are spontaneous, unrehearsed and immediate. In the conditions of performance, a text recuperates the qualities of spoken utterance. Writing is re-concretized as sound; the speech is addressed to auditors who are present at the moment of utterance. The communicative space in which this activity occurs is not, moreover, an empty or uncluttered space in which a message s disseminated without interference. On the contrary, it is already full of sound and of other socially significant semiotic material. In such a state of affairs, a serious dislocation of authority is not only possible but likely, and several question must therefore be raised (Bristol, 122).

11. Consider the actor in the public playhouse who is no longer the servant to the aristocracy: unlike the consecrated word of ministers of God and the persuasive rhetoric of political leaders, the actor�s public speeches are presented in �disguise� and do not represent what the actor thinks or feels -- although spoken with full conviction and the sound of authority. The question: who is responsible ? Who has the authority ? Enter the necessity for the playwright - between 1590 and 1610 the �professionalization� of writing for the stage develops (G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare�s Time 1590 -1642).

12. The polemic against the players and the playhouses. Theatre is not the proper place for pedagogical good intentions; it is not a pulpit, a school, or a courtroom; it can only mimic and therefore diminish the authority properly allocated to these institutions And, further, theatre is a site of promiscuity! In Stubbs, view, the player is able to say things with impunity, and only one political and administrative response to this is appropriate: the complete abolition of the playing an the proscription of players. And most disturbing to Stubbs, is the mixing of Anatomie of Absues Phillip Stubbs, 1583

13. �The proposal to abolish playing is part of a larger program to restore the structure of authority by subjecting popular culture to vigilant surveillance and coercive restraint� (Bristol, 117). The theatre has a better answer: to reinvent the institution, introduce the playwright, provide for �ownership; of the text and accordingly responsibility to authorities. (Read Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Faire) Bristol argues that both propositions, abolition & legitiation through the author -- �proceed from the same critique of popular culture, and from the same anxiety over the dispersion of authority in the intensified life of the playhouses� (117).

14. With the appearance of the author, or on the stage, �the bookeholder� we see the disappearance of the popular, the remembered, and improvisation and soliloquy; and indeed, over time the audience slowly disappears completely into the dark behind an imaginary fourth wall. As Foucault reminds us: There was a time when the texts that we today call �literary� (narrative stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of the author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real of imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status.(quoted in Bristol, 121).

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