Year: 1991
Type: article
Abstract: The jacket notes for Michael Goldman's Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy advertise that the book represents a "new approach to the study of action in drama."The generally good reviews that the book has received suggest that, by and large, the critical community has accepted this assessment. 1 Harry Berger, Jr., whose work differs from Goldman's in significant ways, nonetheless asserts that he follows Goldman in employing this new critical approach, which he dubs "textual dramaturgy" (Textual Dramaturgy, 135).Goldman attempts to formulate an interpretive strategy that features textual action over semantic content.By analyzing this attempt closely, I hope to clarify both the project's importance and some of its difficulties, and to place it within a broader critical perspective.Goldman's book, published in 1985, is a paradigmatic critical document of its time.It employs a Janus-faced strategy that looks both forward and back, manifesting exciting possibilities, but at the same time resting on assumptions that prevent those possibilities from being realized.Hence, the book offers itself as a valuable case study in interpretive methodogy, one that can help illuminate the critical landscape ahead of us as we enter the '90s.The basis of Goldman's approach is simple and elegant.The approach takes as its point of departure the theatrical performance of Shakespeare's texts.Specifically, Goldman is concerned with the problems that specific roles pose to actors.Goldman's primary contention is that the difficulties an actor encounters in trying to do what the text requires reflect the difficulties that the character encounters within the text itself.As Goldman explains, "each great Shakespearean role seems to have its defining set of acting problems and rewards, and these bear a very suggestive relation to the larger business of the play.The problems which confront the actor who plays Hamlet, for example, are very similar to those which confront the Prince in making sense of life at
Author: David Z. Saltz
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2178721431