Fragments and Theatre Flashcards
Introduction (Critical x 3, Argument x 3)
Critical:
- Jean Luc-Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue Labarthe: The Romantic fragment ‘involves essential incompletion’; it provides a ‘totalising projection that is nonetheless incomplete’
- Schlegel: The fragments ‘internal contradiction, the feature that allows it to play havoc on symbolic binaries, is both its form in the sense that it is a completed, final work and, at the same time, its formlessness that sets it apart from form
- Helena Wanning Barries’ study illustrates that the fragment as a subject of aesthetic scrutiny predates Romanticism and exists beyond poetry
Argument:
- Criticism provides temporary completion whilst asserting incompletion
- Performance provides temporary completion whilst asserting incompletion
- Intertextuality illustrates that all literature is the result of fragmentation, and theatre which relies on interpretation is even more so.
P1 - Theatrical Performance as inherently incomplete (Critical x 3, Quotes x 4)
Critical:
- Marvin Carlson: The theatrical performance ‘temporarily completes’ the written text whilst it nonetheless implies its ‘eternal incompletion for each performance is different and reinterprets the written source’
- Plato, Symposium: ‘Reproduction goes on forever. It is what mortals have in place for immortality’
- Tyrone Guthrie: ‘The ideal performance which completely realises the intentions’ of the playwright is impossible and can never be achieved
Quotes:
Garrick, A Peep Behind the Curtains (1767):
Rhod: ‘Now ‘tis all o’er’
Orpheus: ‘Tis done, I’m free’
Call and response between Orpheus and a chorus of shepherds: ‘We’re dancing too’ –> Repetition and cyclicality despite rehearsal’s incomplete nature
Author: ‘They shall dance back again directly - I intend to have the scene over again - I could see it forever’
Sheridan, The Critic (1779):
‘Well, pretty well - but not quite perfect - so, ladies and gentleman, if you please, we’ll rehearse this scene again tomorrow’
P2 - Performance as supplement (Critical x 3, Quotes x 3)
- Derrida: The Supplement ‘adds itself. It it surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It is the cumulation and accumulation of presence’
However, somewhat contradictorily, the supplement ‘adds only to replace. It intervenes and insinuates in-the-place-of. If it fills, it is as if one is filling a void’
The infinite chain of supplements, Derrida suggest, ‘ineluctably multiply the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing they defer; the mirage of the thing itself’
Quotes:
Peep Behind the Curtains:
- Prompter: ‘Tis very extraordinary thing indeed to rehearse only one act of a performance’
- Patent: ‘Pray you, Mr Glib, why did you not compleat your burletta? Tis a very new thing with us to rehearse but one act only?’
- Author: ‘I am a very spider at spinning my own brains. Always it it - spin, spin, spin.’
- -> Constant revision, reworking illustrated by the metaphor of the spider spinning
P3 - Rehearsal / Supplement highlights various critical approaches (Argument laid out: Argument x 1, Historical x 1, Quotes x 5, Critical x 3)
- The Critic split up between half debating the nature of criticism through the satire on Sir Fretful Plagiary and second half analysing rehearsals through a satire on Puff
- Increasing significance of the critic emphasised, for example, by celebrity literary figures such as Samuel / Dr Johnson
- Dangle: Notes the ‘importance’ of the ‘band of critics who take upon them to decide for the whole town, whose opinion and patronage all writers solicit, whose recommendation no manager dare refuse’
- Mrs. Dangle rejects his argument, exclaiming that ‘The public is their critic’, therefore affirming Elin Diamond’s argument on the ‘narcissistic claim of the critic’, whilst taking something more in line with the reader response theories of the 1960s and 1970s. In application to the theatre, Susan Bennet’s ‘Theatre Audiences’ is an excellent illustration of the subjective plethora of interpretative possibilities within the theatre. Fundamentally, however, it illustrates how all spectators can provide their own interpretation thus temporarily completing the text for themselves.
- Emphasises the debate around ‘true criticism’ that Fretful seeks in the first half of the play, and that is alluded to in the prologue by the combination of the ‘critic’s rage’, the ‘public eye’ and the ‘newspapers’
- Even the actors become critics and interpreters, having ‘cut out or omit whatever they found heavy or unnecessary to the plot’
- Walter Benjamin contends that criticism’s ‘true intention is not judgement’ but the ‘completion, consummation and systematisation of the work’ and its placement in relation to the conception of a text in its ‘absolute’ form.
- -> Illustrates that the text is both fragmentary and that the wider ‘absolute’ ideal of the completed text is the product of infinite fragments.
P4 - Intertextuality as fragmentation (Historical x 2, Quotes x 2, Adaptation x 3)
- The Critic directly refers to its source in the prologue: ‘When Villiers criticised what Dryden writ’, referring to Villier’s 1672 ‘The Rehearsal’
- The Spanish Armada scene also satirises Richard Cumberland’s ‘The West Indian’
- Puff: ‘I don’t attempt to strike out anything new - but take it I improve on established modes’ … ‘blending’, for example, ‘a little of the masque with my tragedy’
- Strong emphasis upon newspapers throughout Sheridan’s work
- Opens with Dangle ‘Reading Newspaper’ (S.D), and large degree of discussion on what news people should read
- Peter Wood’s 1990 adaptation of School for Scandal had programme notes depicting two individuals gossiping with balloons made out of 18th century newsprint
- the stage had a chandelier with tongues made from newspaper and the furniture was all covered in newsprint
- Opened with a dumbshow with various characters running around delivering newspapers and scandal sheets to each other
Conclusion (Quotes x 4, Critical x 1)
- Play filled with irony:
- Sir Fretful Plagiary’s name illustrates the nadir of intertextuality
- Garrick’s ‘peep’ rehearsal concludes with the author exclaiming that ‘your applause will ever be my true beaurme de vie’. Beaurme de Vie was a quack medicine produced by Cuthbert Shaw
- School for Scandal opens with Snake writing out ‘feigned paragraphs’ for Sneerwell
- However, the irony of the play, whilst seemingly attacking the causes of fragmentation, similarly affirms it. For Schlegel claims that fragmentation is inherently ironic, and draws his definition of irony from the stage itself. He claims that irony is ‘eternal parabasis’ (asides). For the asides are at once a part of the broader conceptual ‘absolute’ of the dialogue and at at the same time separated from it. Irony fragments; it is both knowing and unknowing, eternal unity and disruption.
- -> We are reminded of Puff’s request to his actors for the rehearsal of his scene: ‘O dear madam, you are not to say that to her face! Aside ma’am, aside. The whole scene is to be aside!’
