ABSTRACT
With the publication of Shakespeare and the Power of Performance (2008), it may now truthfully be said that no critic over the last thirty years – and indeed perhaps no critic ever – has done more to value the power of comic performance in drama ranging from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance than Robert Weimann. Here, with co-author Douglas Bruster, Weimann concludes a long-term project on authority and representation addressing the fraught but vital conjuncture of playing and writing, a project which has included the preparatory studies Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (1996), Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (2000), and Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre (2004, with Bruster), as well as his interest in the power of popular performance traditions, which traces back to Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (English translation, 1978). The authors announce a goal of “seek[ing] to address a renewed, or as many would say, growing rift between page and stage in Shakespeare studies”. 1 Their considerable achievement is a successful mediation between the zealous extremes of stage-centred and page-centred approaches to Shakespeare in order to allow for the myriad pleasures of reading, seeing, and hearing his plays, delights too often rendered unrecognizable to those uninitiated in either of the opposed critical sects.
