Writing about the Plays in Performance

Some ten years ago I began to edit a series of Shakespeare Handbooks and wrote three of the early volumes. These book-length studies were significantly different from other existing series about Shakespeare in performance that evaluate individual productions, directors, performances and actors: they do not try to describe a few specific productions by reference to the texts, in the manner of other commentaries and extended studies. Knowing that all performances die as soon as they have been given, I concluded that a responsible attempt to understand what happened on stage involves describing productions that no longer exist and contextualising the theatrical events of which they were once a part. To describe any theatrical performance is a skilled and, ultimately, unsatisfactory task; many factors must be considered and description, at best, can only be the impressionistic and personal view of the writer.In contrast to other studies of the plays in performance, the Shakespeare Handbooks are designed to help their readers imagine the plays in performance for themselves by providing commentaries that, moment by moment, describe the tasks that the texts require all actors to undertake and, at crucial moments, to consider some consequences of the choices that they can make. A reader needs no special theatrical knowledge to understand the actors’ tasks because the plays mirror life and not theatre: the commentaries show what can be seen in that mirror once the texts come alive in performance.