The Challenges of Orpheus by Heather Dubrow

Author:Heather Dubrow [Dubrow, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2008-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

As I was drafting this chapter, a morning news program announced that Martha Stewart’s personal assistant had given “a teary performance on the stand,” thus demonstrating the multiple denotations and connotations of the term that has recently generated a whole new field of performance studies. In social and aesthetic situations, to what extent if at all does “performance” necessarily suggest deceit? In textual analyses, does it refer to theater in the more literal sense, the meaning often dubiously ascribed to Judith Butler’s influential work on performance, or should it be used primarily for the type of repetitive gestures on which her most influential work on the subject in fact concentrates? Different though they are, the several meanings of “performance” raise a number of broad issues relevant to lyric though not immediately relevant here, such as whether, and if so how, the presence of an audience is essential. It is more to my purposes, however, that performance in its several guises, particularly the specifically early modern one on which this section concentrates, involves a dialogue—often, indeed, stichomythy—between immediacy and mediation. I concentrate here on a meaning particularly relevant to questions of immediacy, mediation, and framing, that is, the creation of a material product or something analogous to it.

Other meanings of “performance” do need to be adduced in passing, if only to remind oneself that in the final decades of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, when increasingly theatrical companies focused on London playhouses rather than traveling extensively, people living outside London were at least as likely to associate performance with the recitation or singing of lyrics as with the presentation of plays. When early modern lyrics were read aloud by their own author, the situation of performance would in some important ways effect both immediacy in general and presence in particular. Indeed, as David Schalkwyk has pointed out in an important study, in many circumstances the speakers of lyric were literally embodied; lyric, he acutely insists, is performed socially through linguistic performatives.105 And if the author sang them, as not only Wyatt but many of his counterparts clearly did, the special power of such music could achieve the aural equivalent of a tactile pressing of hands: the intensity associated with song and its ability to fill a room and command the attention of the inhabitants all create the kind of heightening that contributes to an impression of presence.

Importantly, it is an impression of presence, for in other respects performance in these senses could build distance. The circulation of poems in scribal culture facilitated their recitation by animators who had not written the texts (as students of discourse analysis would put it), much as Hobbinol repeats Colin’s song in the April eclogue, thus emphasizing the distance from both the original performer and the earlier performances. “When I have done so, / Some man, his art and voice to show, / Doth set and sing my paine” (12–14) Donne complains in “The Triple Foole,” reminding us that song, or verse that could readily be turned into it, was as alienable as other forms of portable property.

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