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RHETORICS OF THE OBSCÆNE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2007
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Usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. That is the condition under which Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern labor, a condition in which all the world's a backstage. Taking Shakespeare's Hamlet as the “supposed to happen,” as a kind of imaginary promptbook, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead reverses theatrical perspectives to show the lives of its not-so-lead characters “off.” In one sense Stoppard's play blunts the purpose of its dramatic forebear by not keeping to the usual stuff, but then it also highlights the various regions, conversations, and actions of an offstage world that Hamlet, like most other drama, must always take for granted.
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- Copyright © The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc. 2007
References
ENDNOTES
1. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 28; emphasis in original.
2. An excellent appraisal of recent appropriations and resignifications of “theatricality” can be found in Davis, Tracy C. and Postlewait, Thomas, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; see also Sauter, Willmar, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Sturgess, Philip J. M., Narrativity: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 385Google Scholar n. 17.
4. Aristotle, , Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen, Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5.1449a31–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Subsequent citations appear in the text by chapter and Bekker numbers.
5. The Oxford Latin Dictionary offers the following: ob, prep. 1: “in the direction of, towards”; 2a: “In front of or in the way of (so as to block)” (1210). Cf. obscenus 1 (~a, ~um), adj. 2: “Exciting disgust by its unwholesomeness, filthy, polluted, loathsome” (1219); and scaena (~ae), n. 1a: “The background (representing a building, etc.) against which a play, etc., is performed” (1697). In the entry for obscenus, Harper's Latin Dictionary offers the etymological suggestion: “[perh. ob and caenum, filth]” (1240). Under ob III, it also states: “In composition, the b of ob remains unchanged before vowels and most consonants; only before p, f, c, g, is assimilation more common” (1232).
6. For discussions of narrative on the stage, see particularly Barrett, James, Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; de Jong, Irene J. F., Narrative in Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger-Speech (Leiden: Brill, 1991), especially chap. 3Google Scholar; and Pfister, Manfred, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, trans. Halliday, John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chaps. 1, 3, and 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are certainly ways other than narrative for audiences to perceive offstage action. For example, the ancient Greek theatre often employed the ekkyklema or “rolled-out thing,” which would wheel tableaux, usually of carnage, out onto the stage. Likewise, “teichoscopy,” technically a form of narration (originating in the third book of the Iliad), is used by characters in elevated positions above the stage to relay events taking place simultaneously in the distance. In recent years video has become a powerful means of mediating offstage action, as in a London warehouse production of Pericles by Cardboard Citizens: the attempted rape of Marina was staged in an enclosed structure representing the brothel, during which stage personnel led several men from the audience up to the structure's windows to peer in while a video of the interior scene was projected onto a large wall next to the brothel, creating a layered and troubling experience of voyeurism.
7. Barrett, 6. Subsequent citations are given in the text.
8. Lynn-George, , Epos: Word, Narrative, and the “Iliad” (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; qtd. in Barrett, 5.
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10. Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry, ed. Peter Burian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 25, his emphasis.
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14. Scarry, , Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 16Google Scholar.
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17. Carlson, , “Indexical Space in the Theatre,” Assaph 10 (1994): 1–10, at 4Google Scholar.
18. This is true only in a visual sense, of course: because sound carries, audiences usually acquire access to offstage noises and sound-effects much more directly.
19. Scolnicov, , “Theatre Space, Theatrical Space, and the Theatrical Space Without,” in The Theatrical Space, Themes in Drama 9, ed. Redmond, James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 11–26, at 11, her emphasisGoogle Scholar. Subsequent citations are given in the text.
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21. As do others: see, for example, “espace environnant” and “espace référé” in Jansen, Steen, “Le Rôle de l'espace scénique dans la lecture du texte dramatique,” in Semiotics of Drama and Theatre, ed. Schmid, Herta and van Kesteren, Aloysius (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), 254–89, at 265Google Scholar; “unlocalized off” and “localized off” in McAuley, Gay, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 29–32; “espace dramatique” in Pavis, Patrice, Dictionnaire du théâtre (Paris: Messidor/Éditions Sociales, 1980), 146–7Google Scholar; “macrocosme théâtral” in Souriau, Étienne, Les Deux cent mille situations dramatiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1950), 22Google Scholar; and “espaces dramatiques” in Anne Ubersfeld, Lire le théâtre I, nouv. éd. rev. (Paris: Belin, 1996), 137–41.
22. Horace, , Ars Poetica, in Horace for Students of Literature: The “Ars Poetica” and Its Tradition, trans. Golden, Leon, ed. Golden, and Hardison, O. B. Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 12–13Google Scholar, with reference to Horace, , Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. Fairclough, H. Rushton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. Subsequent citations are given in the text.
23. The idea that seeing something produces belief more readily than hearing about it certainly does not originate with Horace: see, for instance, Herodotus, , The Persian Wars, 4 vols., trans. Godley, A. D. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920, repr. 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Book 1, §8: “men trust their ears less than their eyes.”
24. I invariably use “aesthetic” not in its post-Romantic sense of the appreciation of the beautiful and the artistic but in its Greek root meaning (aisthetikos) regarding the activity of sensory perception itself.
25. Kilpatrick, , The Poetry of Criticism: Horace, “Epistles II” and “Ars Poetica” (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990), 42Google Scholar.
26. Hardison, O. B. Jr., “A Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics,” in Aristotle's Poetics, trans. Golden, Leon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1968), 114Google Scholar. In Plato and Aristotle on Poetry, Gerald Else explains that “πρα˜ξiζ [‘Things to be done’] here has not the connotation of mere activeness, stirring about, nor does it refer to physical action. From its parent word, the verb πρα´τ-τειν, it has in it the notion of a moral or intellectual program aimed at a goal; […] Action in this sense is what the plot, μν˜θoζ, imitates” (80–1; his emphasis). For Aristotle's distinction between “story” and “episodes,” see chapter 17 of the Poetics.
27. Poetics, 18.1455b24–5, my emphasis.
28. Butler, , Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge: 1993), 3Google Scholar.
29. In an instructive essay, Andrew Ford proposes a similar constitutive function for katharsis in the Poetics. See his “Katharsis: The Ancient Problem,” in Performativity and Performance, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995), 109–32. Also highly relevant here is Mullaney, Steven, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar, in which he argues that the political and cultural legitimacy that the city of London garnered to itself in the early modern period was locked in a definitional relationship with the margins or “Liberties” encircling the city, where illegitimate political and cultural forms like the Renaissance theatre found a place and voice beyond the city's limits—limits that also declared the symbolic limitations of the governing order's ability to accommodate such forms.
30. Cf. 24.1460a11–18: “In tragedy one needs to create a sense of awe, but epic has more scope for the irrational (the chief cause of awe), because we do not actually see the agent. The entire pursuit of Hector, if put on stage, would strike us as ludicrous—with the men standing and refraining from pursuit, and Achilles forbidding them—but in epic this goes unnoticed. Awe is pleasurable: witness the fact that all men exaggerate when relating stories, to give delight.”
31. Gerald Else gives an invaluable account of how Aristotle conceives of narrative and spectacle, discussing his conflicted evaluation in the Poetics of Homer's use of both modes; see Plato and Aristotle on Poetry, esp. 170–3. In his fragmentary On Poets, Aristotle curiously makes two statements that associate narrative with drama in a way that the Poetics seems at pains to avoid. Janko, Richard explains in Aristotle: Poetics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987)Google Scholar that the context for both fragments is a discussion of tragedy in relation to epic, and Aristotle would again appear to be positioning tragedy as a superior poetic form. The fragments read: “In tragedy the narrative is [done] only with messengers, and what is enacted is in the other [parts], but in epics there is narrative only”; “Narrative must be added as a part of the dramatic” (Janko, 57, frags. *3.8a and *3.8b).
32. In the ancient Greek theatre, messengers who traveled from afar were called angeloi, and those appearing from within the ske¯ne¯ were called exangeloi (Barrett, 81). For a discussion of how Plato and Aristotle use the same term, apangelia, to designate both the genre of narrative and the speeches delivered by messengers in drama, see Barrett, 69–73.
33. Plato, , The Republic, 2 vols., trans. Shorey, Paul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 3.394b–cGoogle Scholar. Subsequent citations appear in the text by chapter and Bekker numbers.
34. On this passage, Halliwell notes that “Represents,” “Mimeisthai here implies full enactment; cf. Pl. Rep. 3.397a” (137 n. b).
35. One classical critic, Philodemus, anticipates my argument that Aristotle tries both to include and exclude onstage narration within his theory. See Richard Janko, “Philodemus' On Poems and Aristotle, 'sOn Poets”, Cronache Ercolanesi 21 (1991): 5–64, at 14Google Scholar; and Greenberg, Nathanv A., The Poetic Theory of Philodemus (New York: Garland, 1990), 129Google Scholar.
36. Edited and translated by Nugent, S. Georgia, “Ancient Theories of Comedy: The Treatises of Evanthius and Donatus,” in Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Charney, Maurice (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), 259–80, at 271Google Scholar. Subsequent citations are given in the text. Nugent provides a discussion of the two treatises (259–67), English translations (267–77), and transcriptions of the fourth-century Latin texts (277–80). Note that Evanthius positions both peripeteia and anagnorisis together in the catastrophe, a conjunction that Aristotle commends as part of a successful complex plot: “The finest recognition is that which occurs simultaneously with reversal” (11.1452a31–2).
37. This view would likewise bring his divisions between the protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe into line with Aristotle's assertion that “A whole is that which has a beginning, middle, and end” (7.1450b25–6).
38. My gratitude goes to Paul D. Streufert for helping me unpack the phrase protatika prosopa.
39. Daileader, , Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
40. Enders, “Performing Miracles: The Mysterious Mimesis of Valenciennes (1547),” in Theatricality, ed. Davis and Postlewait, 40–64, at 46.
41. For this insight, I am indebted to Andrew Sofer's The Stage Life of Props, which has helped me to understand and articulate the importance of diachrony to my notion of the obscæne.