3—
Scripted Bodies:
Poetic Theater

Poetic Theater and the Work of Acting

The working-man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the work of acting; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art.
—"London Letter," Dial (December 1922)

The working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act . . .
—"In Memoriam: Marie Lloyd," The Criterion (January 1923)

Announcing a commitment to a popular, collaborative, even entertaining form of theater, T. S. Eliot's famous obituary for Marie Lloyd provides a useful point of repair from the austerities often associated with "poetic drama." Eliot seems to have tinkered with his Dial "London Letter" when preparing it for publication the following month in The Criterion , introducing a number of small changes in wording and emphasis. In both texts, Eliot mourns the loss of Marie Lloyd and marks in the passing of this "expressive figure" the decline of music hall and the more general demise of theater as a social institution. And both versions similarly describe the theater's function in society: through performance, the theater provides a form of expression for the audience it serves. Having given "artistic expression and dignity" to the life of the lower classes, the music hall emblematizes the waning of a truly popular art of theater. The middle classes, with no "independent virtues as a class," have nothing to express through the sociable arts of the stage; their characteristic mode is the solitary and "listless apathy" of the cinema spectator. It

is at this point—characterizing the audience—that Eliot seems to have hesitated. Is the working man who joins in the chorus constituted by the event, as a "part of the act," or does he create and determine the meaning of the event, perform "the work of acting"? The revision in phrasing is subtle, but it traces the dialectic that the rhetoric of realistic theater claims as an identity: the difference between the fictive "action" of the drama, and the present activity of performance. The spectator of cinema can "receive, without giving," but the theater both provides a role for the audience as "part of the act" and provides the means to render it significant, dramatic. Like the music hall, theater enables the spectators to identify themselves in and through "the work of acting."

Eliot's remarks on music hall may at first appear tangential to the project of a modern poetic theater. Its working-class affiliations, its physical virtuosity and stagey vivacity, and the ephemeral quality of its verbal "texts" all seem to lie far beyond the languid artifice of verse drama. Yet to consider the rhetoric of modern poetic drama is to return to the complicity between performer and audience that attracted Eliot to the popular stage. For the rhetoric of a poetic drama imagines the possibility of a poetic theater and invites us to rethink our understanding of poetic drama in relation to its stage production. The terms themselves are distracting. I do not mean "poetry in the theater," the kind of rhythmic recitation associated with the performance of Yeats's early plays, nor—a greater evasion—the socalled "poetry of the theater" popularized by Cocteau and others, the imagistic, visual "poetry" of the mise-en-scène. A poetic theater implies the text's direct intervention in the rhetorical ordering of realism, reclaiming the text's authority over the physical "languages" that construct the drama as theater. The plays of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Beckett are, in this sense, strategic attempts to theorize the possible relation between the dramatic text and the discourses of its production onstage. As such, the theory of a poetic theater has implications for our understanding of modern theatricality that range beyond the confining sense of a precious "poetic drama."

Modern poetic drama usually opens from a repudiation of the prosaic drama of daily life associated with Ibsen and Chekhov, and its rhetoric as theater emerges most clearly in this contrast. While the rhetoric of realism emphasizes the visual coherence of the stage

scene , poetic theater claims to replicate the verbal order of the absent text, the authority of the word , in the array of its staging. The defining moment of realism is the erasure of the productive activity of the theater, of the "work of acting" as a legitimate "part of the act." Speaking, acting, movement, gesture, costume, and design are all employed to assimilate the dramatic text to the scenic ensemble, the stage picture. The rhetoric of poetic theater challenges stage realism, but only incidentally on verbal grounds. For how the verbal order of the drama is staged as poetry depends on how it is identified with and through the activities that stage it: as characterizing acting, elocution, lyrical song, and so on. Poetic drama begins its assault on realism when it resituates the text in the mise-enscène, refiguring the authority of the word in the theatrical relationship between the drama, the spectacle, and the audience.

Only when the verbal formalities of the text are deployed in such a way as to govern the productive discourses of the stage does a poetic theater become possible, a theater in which the linguistic complexity of the text is visible throughout the spectacle. I don't mean, of course, to deny the "poetic" complexity of language in verse drama, but I do mean to suggest that when produced as theater, it may be indistinguishable from the complexity of prose, since the "poetry" emerges in performance only as an effect of its production, in the way that it is communicated through speech and acting. This definitional problem has been repeatedly recognized by the practitioners of poetic theater themselves. As Eliot suggests, the difference between a poetic theater and verse drama has to do with the theater's ability to stage the text:

A verse play is not a play done into verse, but a different kind of play: in a way more realistic than "naturalistic drama," because, instead of clothing nature in poetry, it should remove the surface of things, expose the underneath, or the inside, of the natural surface appearance. It may allow the characters to behave inconsistently, but only with respect to a deeper consistency.

Poetic drama exposes a "deeper consistency," not only through its verbal design, but also in the way it presses the performance to evade the scenic priorities of stage realism; the stage can "use any device to show their real feelings and volitions, instead of just what, in actual life, they would normally profess to be conscious of" (Intro-

duction). Indeed, Eliot's later plays, like the later plays of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, suggest how difficult this evasion can be. The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1958) all deploy a verbal order that, far from resisting realistic rhetoric, finally seems to be controlled by the scenic coherence of the realistic stage. In their interest in the evasions of "character" and their use of a heightened language that phrases this deeper consistency in terms of psychological motive, these plays finally seem not to impel a new form of theatricality, but to evoke a realism akin to that of Chekhov or Pinter. Depending on realistic procedures they invoke, parody, or subvert, Eliot's later plays dramatize the difficulty of trying to make a poetic theater without reconceiving the function of the text in the mise-enscène. The plays seem precisely like realistic plays "done into verse."^[1]

Eliot's effort to open a space for poetic drama illustrates the challenges that arise from conceiving of poetic theater solely in terms of the ordering of the text. Eliot finds himself on firmer ground when he follows the hard-won lead of Yeats's "plays for dancers," and concentrates his attention on the relation between signifying modes in the theater. Yeats, though more committed to verse drama than any of his successors, inaugurates the poetic theater's decisive area of innovation, the relation between the text, its enactment, and the audience. Speaking on the BBC in 1936, Eliot not only attributed the revival of poetic drama to Yeats but also cited Yeats's transformation of stage performance: "We have begun to see that the actor is more important than the scenery, that verse should be spoken as verse and not as prose, and that the actor should be in an intimacy of relation to the audience which had for a long time been the secret of the music-hall comedian"

[1] Critics of Eliot's plays have increasingly come to conceive of Eliot's later drama as a problematic form of realism rather than as a distinct mode of "poetic drama"; as Katharine Worth suggests, "Eliot's central characters suffer from a troubling sense of division between their real selves and their acted selves. 'Real' self is a concept that still has force in his drama—here he separates from successors like Pinter—but the performing self is very much in the foreground, uneasily conscious of its liability to be taken over by the 'speechless self,' the mute, tough one" (Revolutions 55–56). See also Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe; Kenner 280; and Goldman, "Fear in the Way" 162–63.

("Need" 994). Eliot strikes several of Yeats's characteristic themes here, while replacing Yeats's preference for an aristocratic intimacy between spectacle and spectator with the more exuberant figure of the music hall. Rather than imitating a dimly "poetical" reality, poetic theater offers a specifically theatrical event, one that negotiates the staging of "poetry" through the physical, immediate, and personalizing forms of theater.

The real innovations of the poetic theater stem from its sustained investigation of how the text is rewritten by the stage. We don't often think of poetic theater as developing a theoretical inquiry into stage acting, but the most influential aspects of this theater depend immediately on the poets' meditation on the arts of performance. In "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama," Eliot opposed the "utter rout of the actor profession," and pointedly exposed the poetic theater's sometimes febrile efforts to "'get around' the actor, to envelop him in masks, to set up a few 'conventions' for him to stumble over, or even to develop little breeds of actors for some special Art drama" (Sacred Wood 69–70). Yet the automata of Yeats, Gordon Craig, Maurice Maeterlinck, and others witness the apparent necessity to depersonalize the actor's performance in order to subordinate it to the designs of the text. The vogue for actor-automata may seem remote to us, but it has analogies in the work of Meyerhold, in expressionist and dada performance, and in the actorless theater pieces of Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, Richard Foreman, and others. Precisely because the realistic actor's "gestures and movements are not regulated by the text, but simply inspired by it" (Appia 52), poetic performance distinguishes acting from the mere reproduction of social life, performances that inscribe the text with the priorities of meaning latent in everyday behavior. If poetic theater, as Arthur Symons suggests, should evoke "the reaction of the imagination against the wholly prose theatre of Ibsen," then to perform such plays should call for a similar reaction, a marionette-like restraint, from actors who submit "passively to the passing through them of profound emotions, and the betrayal of these emotions in a few, reticent, and almost unwilling words" (Plays 77, 81). In marionettes and in marionette-like acting, the turn-of-the-century theater attempted to wrest the signification of the body from the codes of theatrical and social behavior and to engrave it instead with the regulating designs of the poet's text.

The sculptural images of the poetic theater might seem to hold little promise as models for acting, but the evident artificiality of marionettes helped to unseat the gestural authority of realistic performance, by foregrounding the gap between the drama and its stage production. Symons found the "symbolical buffoonery" of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896)—whose marionette elements were largely preserved in Aurélien Lugné-Poe's production, which Symons attended with Yeats—"a sort of comic antithesis to Maeterlinck," less the premonition of the savage god than "the excuse, the occasion for an immense satire" (Studies 236, 238). And in "An Apology for Puppets," Symons clarified the relationship between actors and marionettes:

The living actor, even when he condescends to subordinate himself to the requirements of pantomine, has always what he is proud to call his temperament; in other words, so much personal caprice, which for the most part means wilful misunderstanding; and in seeing his acting you have to consider this intrusive little personality of his as well as the author's.
(Plays 3)

Symons is a brilliant critic of the stage and has left masterful accounts of Henry Irving, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Constant Coquelin, and others. And yet even actors of such impressive variety and scope leave Symons unsatisfied, for unlike them, the "marionette may be relied upon." Symons admires marionettes because their actions seem not to interfere with the determinations of the authorial text; because they don't act , they can't be accused of representing the text, of translating the author's verbal design into the histrionic patterns of the actor's performance. The intrusion of the actor's personality, the extent to which his acting invariably identifies the author's words in the dynamics of his own self-presentation, offends Symons and leads him to an admiration of marionettes reminiscent of Gordon Craig: "Seen at a distance, the puppets cease to be an amusing piece of mechanism, imitating real people; there is no difference." On the other hand, to sit at a distance from the marionettes is to miss the point of theater entirely: "Choosing our place carefully, we shall have the satisfaction of always seeing the wires at their work, while I think we shall lose nothing of what is most savoury in the feast of the illusion" (Plays 4–5). Marionettes may be more predictable than actors, but their

chief virtue lies in the perceptual "oscillation" produced by their enactment.^[2] Although Yeats and Eliot would often deny it, the personality of the performer insistently troubles the theory of a poetic theater. Acting too easily conceals the "wires" of its art, assimilates the "personified gesture" of dramatic character to the personal style and conventional behavior of the actor. What attracts the poetic theater to marionettes is their "complication of view," the evident difference between the drama and its presentation crafted by their performance.^[3]

The "external nullity" that Symons found in marionettes and in marionette-like acting is easily regulated by the poetic text, enabling the text to exert a more complete authority over the scene itself. Yet in some respects, marionettes represent a signal evasion of the human body's complex potentiality on the theater stage. Both Yeats and Eliot found in the dance a more subtle and suggestive paradigm of the performer's relation to the text. Eliot imagines a theater in which "only that is left to the actor which is properly the actor's part. The general movements are set for him. There are only limited movements that he can make, only a limited degree of emotion that he can express. He is not called upon for his personality." In this sense, "a true acting play is surely a play which does not depend upon the actor for anything but acting" (Selected Essays 95).

Eliot echoes Yeats here, but his program for performance also refigures the expressive dialectics of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," calling for a mode of enactment that is "not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" (Selected Essays 10). Eliot finds a promising representative of this mode in the dancer Leonid Massine, for "Massine, the most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract, belongs to the future stage" ("Dramatis Perso-

[2] "Oscillation" is Anne Ubersfeld's term, "Notes sur la dénégation théâtrale" 19.

[3] Reviewers often complained of this complication with regard to Yeats's plays. Writing in the Dublin Evening Mail of the 1905 production of On Baile's Strand , for example, Oliver St. John Gogarty criticized the actors for "their apparent theory that the audience should be constantly reminded that each actor is to maintain, as an actor, an individuality apart from that of the character represented" (Hogan and Kilroy 42). Eliot rejects the idea that actors can be replaced by automata or marionettes in "Four Elizabethan Dramatists," Selected Essays 96.

nae" 305). Like the marionettes, such a dancer is "a conventional being, a being which exists only in and for the work of art which is the ballet," an art whose conventions have been entirely abstracted from those of offstage behavior. In the theater, Massine's performance emulates the catalytic mind of the poet. Subordinating his person to convention, his performance creates a fictive "personality" that becomes the audience's point of interpretation, its focus for reading the spectacle and an instance of its own activity. Massine's performance clarifies the function of "personality" in the theater, in that "the man or the woman whom we admire is a being who exists only during the performances, that it is a personality, a vital flame which appears from nowhere, disappears into nothing and is complete and sufficient in its appearance" (Selected Essays 95). Neither Massine, the "character" he performs, nor the attentive audience escape from personality—this isn't marionette theater, after all—but neither do they perform "themselves." Instead, theatrical production constructs fictive personae which articulate the experience of theater, and the experience of the self as well, the "personality" represented in our performance.

As Eliot's discussion of Massine suggests, the dance provides a figure for the operation of poetic theater. In the dance, the poetic theater finds an emblem of nonrepresentational art, as well as a mode of theatricality capable of breaking the barrier between performer and audience, of undoing the machinery of realism and replacing it with a theater that acknowledges and requires the participation of its spectator. This kind of theater is more often associated with Antonin Artaud than with the poetic drama, yet in his description of the Balinese theater, Artaud provides a glimpse of the goal sought by the poetic stage:

What is really curious about all these gestures, these angular and abruptly broken attitudes, these syncopated modulations formed at the back of the throat, these musical phrases that break off short, these flappings of insect wings, these rustlings of branches, these sounds of hollow drums, these creakings of robots, these dances of animated puppets, is this: that out of their labyrinth of gestures, attitudes, and sudden cries, out of gyrations and turns that leave no portion of the space on the stage unused, there emerges the sense of a new physical language based on signs rather than words. These actors with their geometric robes seem like animated hieroglyphs.
(Selected Writings 215–16)

Artaud's hallucinatory theater subverts the determinations of language; to that extent—and, indeed, in its repudiation of the authorizing function of the text itself—it works against the claims of a poetic stage. Nonetheless, by disrupting the authority of realistic mimesis and recentering theatrical experience on the spectator, Artaud becomes the covert ally of the authors of Sweeney Agonistes (1935), The Dance of Death (1935), Not I (1972). When Rupert Doone wrote to Auden in 1932 with plans for the Group Theatre, he had in mind a company "committed to the possibilities of a 'total theatre' particularly suited to poetic drama" (Medley 131). And as Auden wrote in the program for the Group's 1935 production of Sweeney Agonistes and The Dance of Death , if "Drama began as the act of a whole community," then—as in Artaud's theater—"Ideally there would be no spectators." That such a theater brings into a focus a drama that is "essentially an art of the body" is not surprising, for by producing the text through an acting style more closely associated with "acrobatics, dancing, and all forms of physical skill," the poetic theater actively displaces the behavioral codes of realistic performance and the analysis of character which realistic theater takes as its main dramatic problem (Sidnell, "Auden" 497).

By altering the text's place in the discourse of the stage, poetic theater undertakes a political assault on realistic theatricality, self-evidently in the Brechtian spectacles of Auden and Isherwood, more implicitly in Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) or in Yeats's aristocratic theater. By acknowledging the constitutive function of the stage in the production of the poetic text, poetic theater necessarily acknowledges the performance of the audience as well: "Because you are not moving or speaking, you are not therefore a passenger. If you are seeing and hearing you are co-operating," reads a Group Theatre prospectus from 1933 (Sidnell, "Auden" 491). Audiences were right to feel an antibourgeois edge to the performance of poetic theater, an aggression not confined to subject matter or dramatic style but extending to their own performance as well. As Michael Sayers remarked in a review of Auden's The Dance of Death , "The middle class element loathed it. Much preferable in its opinion, to be the Peeping Tom who pays for the privilege of prying through the fourth wall" (qtd. in Sidnell, Dances 127).

The production of the poetic theater, in contrast to the realistic

effacement of the audience, works to figure and thematize the audience, to enable both actor and audience to become "part of the act," to discover a "vital flame" in their mutual "work of acting." Poetic theater, then, raises a variety of problems ranging far beyond the stylistic texture of dramatic language. Stephen Spender remarked in a review of the plays of Auden and Isherwood that it "is really a question of reviving the drama itself, which has fallen into a decadent 'naturalistic' tradition, confining itself, for the most part, to the presentation of faked-up photographic vignettes of the life of a small section of the unemployed rentier class." A "play for dancers," Yeats's At the Hawk's Well (1916) explores the constitution of the text as performance and suggests how the theological authority of text over performance is compromised when the text is distributed among several competing modes of realization—as speech, song, acting, dance, spectating. This experimental distribution of textual authority is the signal innovation that makes poetic theater possible and drives the most significant innovations of this kind. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral also distributes the text among a variety of representational modes, fulfilling the promise opened by Auden's energetic example in the unstable and controversial The Dance of Death . More effectively than Auden, though, Eliot succeeds in thematizing the interpretive challenges offered by the performance in relation to the dramatic problems posed by Thomas's martyrdom. Murder in the Cathedral uses the text's production as poetry and as prose to engage the audience in the work of acting and the work of suffering that the play otherwise demonstrates on the stage. Although not written in verse, Samuel Beckett's drama might be said to address the central challenge of poetic theater most directly: the consequences of the body's marionette-like subjection to a depersonalizing text. By tracing the relations of textual authority that govern the dramatic action of Beckett's later drama, we can gain a sense of the place—and persistence—of the rhetoric of poetic theater on the contemporary stage.

The Discipline of Speech:
Yeats's Dance Drama

"I have but one art," Yeats wrote at the opening of the Abbey, "that of speech" (Explorations 218). Yet throughout his career in the

theater, Yeats sought to master the critical relationship between poetry, speech, acting, and the "discipline" of the "theatrical sense" (Autobiographies 469). This tension between the poetic text and its performance is dramatized by Yeats's most challenging plays, the "plays for dancers." The label is a provocative one: What is a "dance play"? How does it differ from narrative ballet? Or, more to the point, from an acting play? Although Yeats's search for "theatre's anti-self" often assimilates the incantatory gesture of ritual to the rhetorical patterns of the spoken word, the dance plays structure a dialogue between poetry and its incarnation in speech, song, acting, and dance (Explorations 257). Far from being theater-less drama, Yeats's plays break the realistic subordination of verbal to scenic representation and open a far-reaching investigation of how the language of the text can be inscribed in the practices of the stage.

As Pound noted in The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan , Yeats's theater is, like the Noh, "a stage where every subsidiary art is bent precisely upon holding the faintest shade of a difference" (Introduction 4). Yeats's early plays—The Shadowy Waters (1904), Deirdre (1906), even On Baile's Strand (1904)—exemplify a rhetorical strategy closely identified with the purpose of a "poetic drama": to subordinate theatrical practice to the formal and conceptual order of the verbal text. This renovation of stage practice is not confined to the mythological subjects and verbal flourishes usually associated with poetic drama. Yeats's "new kind of scenic art" systematically upsets the relation between text, actor, stage scene, and audience that sustains realistic representation, as Yeats recognized in the early essay, "The Play, the Player, and the Scene": "I have been the advocate of the poetry as against the actor, but I am the advocate of the actor as against the scenery." By situating the spoken word as the defining language of the spectacle, Yeats's early plays subordinate other theatrical enunciators—acting, gesture, movement, lighting, scene design—to "speech," indeed, to a variety of modes of enunciation prescribed by the text. The static stage tableaux, the ornamental or decorative backcloths, the marmoreal gestures and cantillated speech of these productions reflect Yeats's attempt to inscribe the pattern, rhythm, and euphony of the text in the material elements of the production: "That we may throw emphasis on the words in poetical drama . . . the actors must move,

for the most part, slowly and quietly, and not very much, and there should be something in their movements decorative and rhythmical as if they were paintings on a frieze" (Explorations 176–77). The sensibility of Yeats's early plays is a pictorial one, and the plays tend to maintain the "realistic" division between the stage and audience, much as Maeterlinck's plays were sometimes performed behind a gauze sheer. The drama is perhaps magical and unreal, but the stage retains its objectifying otherness, projecting an exquisite series of pictures before its absent public.

With his discovery of the Noh, however, Yeats found a framework for rethinking the text's place in the poetics of performance. In the dance plays, Yeats felt that he had discovered "a new form by this combination of dance, speech, and music," a form whose intercalation of stage languages not only reversed the word/scene ratio of realism, but interrupted the "poetic" hierarchy of text-to-performance, word-to-speech as well (Letters 768). The rhetoric of the dance plays distributes the signifying modes of performance—speech, song, acting, dance—rather than assimilating them to the verbal code of the poetic text. Yeats's dance plays dramatize the process of the text's staging , how each mode of performance recomposes the verbal design of the text in its own idiom. In so doing, the performance implicates the audience in a fresh form of theatricality.

At the Hawk's Well outlines many of the ways in which the text can be made to constitute a poetic theater. The rhetoric of At the Hawk's Well is first characterized by the disposition of the playing area. The play opens against a patterned screen " set against the wall of a drawing-room, and is lighted by "the lighting we are most accustomed to in our rooms "; the Musicians ("their faces made up to resemble masks ") enter, and sing the play's initial lyric as they unfold and refold the cloth (136–37). The first moves of the play evade the identifications of the realistic theater in several ways. At the Hawk's Well has been performed in theaters, but theatrical production suppresses an essential element of the play's confrontation with realism, its assertion that such a play should transpire in the midst of "life" and not be set apart within the confines of "theater." Unlike the darkened auditorium, which restricts the performance to the lighted stage and situates the spectator as an absent observer of both the drama and its theatrical presentation, Yeats's lighted room barely delineates the performance space from the spectators' living area. In this regard,

the patterned screen is a notable development away from the ornamental backdrops of Yeats's earlier plays, or the mysterious settings of Maeterlinck's symboliste dramas. The scenery of the 1903 production of The Hour-Glass , as Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh recalled, "was calculated to centre the onlookers' attention principally on the dialogue and action," and so "merged" the design of costumes and properties "into the background" (33–34). While its pattern is reminiscent of such pre-Raphaelite decoration, the screen prevents rather than encourages the assimilation of the actors to an inaccessible dramatic fiction. The screen of the dance plays is a portable, openly theatrical backdrop, set up by the performers; it creates an unlocalized performance space in "any bare space before a wall ."

The screen enables the material world surrounding the performance to spill into the play, signaling the performance without determining its distance from the audience. In a sense, the decorative patterning of the screen mirrors the artful posturing of Yeats's graceful public, "dressed in their evening best, the men immaculate in shiny sober black, the women gay and glittering in silk sonorous, and brilliant brocade." To Sean O'Casey, this self-regarding fragility typified the solipsism of Yeats's theater: the "grace" and "slender charm" of At the Hawk's Well "couldn't carry the stage to the drawing-room" (373–74); as Yeats suggests in "Certain Noble Plays of Japan," this kind of drama explicitly prevents the "disordered passion of nature"—and of the theater—from entering indecorously into our "sitting room." Yeats designs an elaborately conventional enactment, a "series of positions and movements" that imitates, intensifies, and reflects the rhythmic artifice of its elegant audience. The production relies on the actors and spectators, not on the theatrical scene and its scenery, to strike the shade of difference between drama, stage, and audience "by human means alone" (Essays 230, 221, 224).

The initial actions of the Musicians alert us to the registers of the play's performance, not to the details of the drama itself. Their masklike faces define a zone of identity midway between the various, changeable, and strongly individuated expressions of their audience and the fixed but generalized masks of the Old Man and Cuchulain. In "Literature and the Living Voice," Yeats remarks of musicians that the "minstrel never dramatised anybody but himself. . . . He will go no nearer to drama than we do in daily speech, and he will not allow you for any long time to forget himself"

(Explorations 214–15). In At the Hawk's Well , the Musicians don't act ; they perform a boundary function, articulating the difference between the play's acting and its observation. They construct the theatrical site, arranging their instruments, attending to the lights, concealing the entrance of the Guardian. Since they don't participate in the drama, their singing of the lyrics need not characterize the Musicians, interpose a fictive "character" between performer and audience. Bert States has remarked that "song does not affect identity" in the way that impersonation does, but "simply alters the composure of identity" (159). For this reason, it seems unlikely that an audience need identify the lyrics either with the fictive "character" of the individual Musicians, or with the voices of the Old Man and Cuchulain, as critics have often done in reading the play. Instead, the lyrics themselves are poised between the theatrical and the dramatic scene, much like the Musicians, directing the action without entering into it. Like the unrolling and rewinding of the cloth, the frame of lyric poetry intercedes between stage and audience, marking a threshold between the acting and the acts of attention required to see it as drama.

The Musicians' liminal function in the performance is complicated by their articulation of the text as song and as speech. James Flannery rightly notes that the Noh generally enabled Yeats to "separate completely the actor from the singer of lyric passages" (204), but Yeats also discriminates between the Musicians' speech and their singing at the play's outset, a distinct advance over his earlier vocal experiments. Despite long work with gifted and sympathetic performers like Florence Farr and Frank Fay, Yeats's ideal of poetic speech seems not to have been achieved on the stage. The vocal style of the early plays most often disintegrated into a cacophonous quartet of speech, cantillation, recitation, and song. By interrupting song with speech, however, the dance plays deliberately lend a different theatrical purpose to each mode of the voice. In speech, the Musicians describe the dramatic setting, the time of day, the dry well, the Guardian, and the sound of the wind. Unlike the opening songs, which serve the theatrical purpose of covering the Guardian's stage entrance and orienting the audience to the play, the spoken descriptions seem part of the drama, filling in the fictive setting and acting as narrative stage directions within the scene. (The rhythms of speech and song differ as well; while the repeated

triplets in Dulac's score embed a trimeter rhythm in the lyric passages, the spoken descriptions tend toward a more pronounced tetrameter.)^[4]

Moreover, in speech, the Musicians react to the scene they describe. Producing the text as speech faintly "characterizes" the Musicians, marking a greater distance between the Musicians and the observing audience when they speak than when they sing—"I am afraid of this place," the Second Musician says before resuming his song (137). It is a faint difference, perhaps, but a signal one. The Musicians' speech is identified so closely with the dramatic "scene" that it is occasionally tempting to hear them as speaking for other characters, in the voice of the Old Man in particular. In its opening moments, At the Hawk's Well discriminates between two rhetorical functions of the voice: speech coordinates "character" and "scene," providing a dramatic context and perhaps even a symbolic cause for the action; song provides an interpretive perspective for the theater audience.^[5] Although Yeats rigorously foregrounds the articulation of the word in his drama, each mode of enunciation strikes a different gestural relation between the drama and the attentive public, presents a different kind of access to the text, and raises different problems for our implication in the spectacle as a whole.

With the entrance of the Old Man, song and speech are counterpoised with acting as the play's means of presentation. Yeats's stage directions—the Old Man and Cuchulain are both masked, and both characters' "movements . . . suggest a marionette " (138)—again address the style of the actors' performance rather than specifying its "content" or "character." The actor inevitably skews performance toward a naturalistic imitation of behavior. Yeats combats this emphasis by identifying the acting with the formalized codes of expression already established by the Musicians. Yeats found a deeply symbolic meaning in the mask in his personal and poetic mythology, where the mask stands for that anti-self whose pursuit

[4] See the Dulac score in Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers .

[5] Denis Donoghue distinguishes between context and cause in The Third Voice 51. Donoghue's use of Burke to consider the scene/agent/act "ratio" of the play is exemplary; here, I am suggesting how the scene/agent/act "ratio" of theatrical performance articulates a "rhetoric" that shapes our view of the text's designs.

creates the self in action.^[6] In the theater, Yeats intended the mask to prevent the irruption of the actor's personality into the performance, to hold dramatic character "at a distance" from the actor's presentation onstage, to bring the dramatic character into focus "nearer to us, and send the actors farther off," as Maeterlinck might have remarked (99).

Yeats's dance plays repudiate acting "that copies the accidental surface of life," to insist on a style of performance that emphasizes its status as acting, rather than as naturalistic behavior (Essays 18). The mask finally prevents the spectator from identifying the actor with the character he plays, because "no matter how close you go," the mask "is yet a work of art" (Essays 226). The mask fixes a minimal aesthetic distance between the actor and the role, a distance that is paradoxically annulled by the identity between realistic acting and social behavior outside the theater. The verisimilitude of realistic acting obscures our view of the actor's histrionic surface, by so closely identifying the style of theatrical representation with the gestural codes of social performance. Modern acting, like modern drama, "has been driven to make indirect its expression of the mind, which leaves it to be inferred from some commonplace sentence or gesture as we infer it in ordinary life" (Essays 334). In this view, "realistic" spectators avoid the labor of art by reading the spectacle much as they do in "ordinary life." The actor's mask, however, prevents us from identifying our performance—the way that we "infer" this scene—with the habitual forms of attention we practice outside the theater. Through the mask, Yeats presses the performances of both actor and spectator toward an art out of nature.

Like his use of masks, Yeats's orchestration of the actors' marionette-like movements to the taps of the drum can be seen to develop—and develop away from—earlier "poetic" techniques that attempted to regulate the actors like automata.^[7] By masking

[6] See Ellmann, and Flannery 11–17.

[7] We may overemphasize the extent to which Yeats's directions really determine the actors' performances or conceal the actors from our view. During rehearsals of At the Hawk's Well in 1916, Yeats complained bitterly about his Cuchulain, Henry Ainley, to Lady Gregory: "The play goes on well except for Ainley, who waves his arms like a drowning kitten" (Letters 609).

his actors and dictating their movement, Yeats "complicates" our view of acting in At the Hawk's Well , and again marks a shift in the play's theatrical rhetoric.

Why don't you speak to me? Why don't you say: 'Are you not weary gathering those sticks?'
(138)

No doubt an inventive actor could "characterize" the Musician through his singing of the lyrics. The texts of the enacted roles, on the other hand, demand characterization. The Old Man's irritable, wheedling, and whining verse requires the performer to dramatize someone other than himself: the text itself provides a kind of mask. The text commands the actor to strike a relationship with another actor/character (the Guardian), and to express the Old Man's sensibility through a particular physical sensation (cold). The Old Man even speaks in a staccato that interrupts the verse meter. Much as lyric song sets the theatrical boundaries of the play, and narrative speech fills in the dramatic scene, acting—the impersonated word—defines the role of "character" in the drama: the actor decides the "appropriate distance from life" of the character he plays (Four Plays 87). The Old Man's querulous questions are instantly set against Cuchulain's vigorous self-assertion—"I am named Cuchulain, I am Sualtim's son" (139). Although masks and movement prevent a realistic identification between the actor's physical presentation onstage and the lineaments of his role, Yeats has keyed this part of the text to the ethical mode of acting. Through performance, the actor enables us to "infer" the dynamics of dramatic character.

Evocative song, descriptive narrative, personalizing acting: each identifies a different relation between text and performer, word and self. These relations are finally "complicated" in the play's climactic dance. The relation between word and gesture is critical to the dramatic climax of At the Hawk's Well , a point illustrated for Richard Allen Cave by a disappointing television production of the play:

On the whole, however, the production was disappointing because the roles of Cuchulain and the Old Man were mimed throughout by dancers while the musicians spoke their parts for them; the resulting effect was fussy on the eye and declamatory on the ear. There was

no silence or repose to draw the spectator imaginatively into the experience; the intrusion of a supernatural force in the Hawk embodied in the dancer inevitably lacked climactic excitement here, despite a change in dance-idiom; and the passion of the verse semed cold, consciously elocuted, because it was not seen to spring from the same muscular and psychological tension as the movement.
(139–40)

Yeats required a "minute intensity of movement in the dance of the hawk," the muscular and psychological tension that would sustain the spoken verse. In later plays such as The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Yeats would insist that the dancer's part be "taken by a dancer who has the training of a dancer alone" (Four Plays 88, 129). Perhaps because of what Symons called "the particular elegance of the dance," the "intellectual as well as sensuous appeal of a living symbol, which can but reach the brain through the eyes, in the visual, concrete, imaginative way," it is difficult not to think of the dance alone as the culminating event of the play (Studies 246). The dancer embodies an image, rather than impersonating a "character," performing skilled movements rather than dramatic actions and the ethical dimension they imply. The wordless dance is less a mode of enacted character than of symbolic possession. In this sense, the dancer's enactment is more purely symbolic, a kind of meaning incommensurate with both speech and acting. Indeed, the dance, though hardly a gap in the performance, arises from a palpable lacuna in the text: "The dance goes on for some time " (142).^[8]

In "The World as Ballet," Symons found dance to "concentrate in itself a good deal of the modern ideal in matters of artistic expression": "Nothing is stated, there is no intrusion of words used for the irrelevant purpose of describing" (Studies 246). At the moment of this dance play's climax, though, instead of suspending the other arts, Yeats brings speech, acting, and dance into a final coordination. Cuchulain continues to "act" the text, to project character through a "personated gesture." Actor and dancer are both framed by the response of the Musicians, who reassert their dual role in speech and song. Their striking lyric—"O God, protect me / From

[8] Curtis Bradford notes that Yeats cut the First Musician's description of the dance from the play, because "no doubt the dance itself made the words seem inaccurate or redundant" (211, 203).

a horrible deathless body / Sliding through the veins of a sudden" (143)—again places the Musicians on the edge of the dramatic scene as a framing chorus (though described as "singing or half-singing " in the text, this speech is spoken in the Dulac score). Their function is a complex and divided one here, for while speech places the Musicians in the dramatic scene, song draws them toward the audience: their performance presents an analogy of the audience's own oscillating relation to the events in the drawing room. At the center, the symbolic gesture of the dancer confronts the impersonated, characterizing gesture of the actor. Speech and song stand outside the frame of action, mediating between the theatrical event and its reconstruction as drama in the eye of the mind.

To characterize the "complication" of our view Yeats prescribes here, we might recall his seminal early essay "At Stratford-on-Avon." Here, Yeats suggests that modern theatrical architecture should respond to the increased importance of pictorial effect in modern drama, particularly of visual perspective:

Were our theatres of the shape of a half-closed fan, like Wagner's theatre, where the audience sit on seats that rise towards the broad end while the play is played at the narrow end, their pictures could be composed for eyes at a small number of points of view, instead of for eyes at many points of view, above and below and at the sides, and what is no better than a trade might become an art.
(Essays 99–100)

Yeats calls for a more rigorous determination of perspective, but not to reinforce the conventional techniques of realistic scene painting. Instead, Yeats describes perspective as a means of placing the spectator precisely within the semiosis of theater, in order to reshape the relationship between the various agencies of the performance. In such a theater, "we could make our pictures with robes that contrasted with great masses of colour in the back-cloth and such severe or decorative forms of hills and trees and houses as would not overwhelm, as our naturalistic scenery does, the idealistic art of the poet" (Essays 99–100). Perspective, as Yeats later recognized, is too thoroughly identified with realism to accomplish this reordering of how the audience reads the play. In the lighted, foreshortened, nonillusionistic space before the patterned screen, Yeats is able to concentrate our attention on the relationship be-

tween the various arts of the stage and on how each interdependently rewrites the text in the playing.

The drama is not identified with any one code of performance or dimension of the text, with "language," "character," or "image." Yeats might be said to give poetry the last word, by closing the play with a lyric placed on the threshold between stage and audience. Yet even the final lyric does not subordinate performed to verbal meaning. The Musicians' final song for the unrolling and rewinding of the cloth voices a variety of perspectives on the dramatic action while the stage is cleared. The voice of the lyric is problematic, not fully identified with the sensibility of Cuchulain or of the Old Man, though reminiscent in places of each. Although the Musicians, in a sense, speak for the play's principal characters, Yeats is determined not to "characterize" the final lyric: the minstrels' I can be identified with any character in the play except the Musicians themselves. The words, that is, retain their status as words, stand apart from "character," as a lyric rewriting of the scene in the timeless "music of the beggar-man, Homer's music."^[9] True, the play's final gesture is to translate the confrontation between acting and dance, character and image, into a summary verse. Yet though the word concludes At the Hawk's Well , its effect is prismatic, generative rather than reductive. To see the play through to its close, we reflect on the evocative but uncertain recapturing of the dramatic experience in poetry and on the shades of difference between the harmonies of the poetic text and the elusive incarnations of the theater.

In At the Hawk's Well , Yeats attempts to place the spectator within the process of drama; as at more formal rituals, "everyone who hears it is also a player" (Explorations 129). Yet as Eliot remarked in "'Rhetoric' and Poetic Drama," theatrical play flows from the theater's "essential" division: "that we should preserve our position of spectators, and observe always from the outside though with complete understanding" (Selected Essays 28). We tend to think (and rightly, when we are thinking of Yeats's earlier plays) that the dance plays are typical of modern "poetic drama" insofar as they

[9] See The Death of Cuchulain 439. On the difficulty of assigning characters' voices to the stanzas of the final lyric, see Vendler 212–16, and Friedman 106–10.

identify theatrical meaning entirely with the voicing of the word. The impersonality of the poetic "voice" governs an incantatory style of speaking; its rhythms inform a sculptural gestural style; metaphor and imagery are realized in an ornamental, symbolic, or abstract setting: the rhetoric of poetic drama casts the "languages of the stage" as echo, repeating or extending the design of the text. In the "plays for dancers," the text's theological authority is distributed among different means of enunciation, as lyric song, as narrative speech, as characterizing acting, as elegant ritual and symbolic dance; meaning arises at the interface between the text and its staging. By directing different registers of voice and movement in the dance plays, Yeats forces his audience to attend to the rhetoric of embodiment, the different ways in which the body can be shaped by the discipline of the poetic text. To see in this way, to suspend the habitual synthesis of word and gesture, is also to be identified by the rhetoric of the play, to be given a mask, a "second self" as spectator. Imagining "ourselves as different from what we are" (Autobiographies 469), we encounter the characteristic challenge of Yeats's poiesis, the quarrel between poetry and rhetoric that informs the rhetoric of the stage.^[10]

The Discipline of Performance:
The Dance of Death and Murder in the Cathedral

Yeats's dance plays are a special mode of theater. Their scrupulous effort to reshape the relationship between the text and its production is achieved in a scope and with materials that may still seem precious, ethereal, untheatrical. A young W. H. Auden, at least, thought as much when reviewing Priscilla Thouless's Modern Poetic Drama for The Listener in 1934:

This book is like an exhibition of perpetual motion models. Here they all are, labelled Phillips, Davidson, Yeats, some on the largest scale, some on the tiniest, some ingenious in design, some beautifully made, all suffering from only one defect—they won't go.

[10] I also have in mind Yeats's famous epigram in Per Amica Silentia Lunae: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (Mythologies 331).

Already involved in the development of the Group Theatre, Auden clearly speaks both to the limitations of the poetic stage currently in practice, and to his own sense of how a poetic theater might work. While Yeats avoids the popular in favor of the esoteric, Auden seeks to build a poetic theater that will "go," reclaiming the stage for poetry through the forms of theater "actually in use." Auden disclaims the available modes of poetic drama ("the romantic sham-Tudor," the "cosmic-philosophical," and the "high-brow chamber-music drama"), arguing that drama "is so essentially a social art that it is difficult to believe that the poets are really satisfied with this solution":

The truth is that those who would write poetic drama, refuse to start from the only place where they can start, from the dramatic forms actually in use. These are the variety-show, the pantomime, the musical comedy and revue (Miss Thouless rightly discerns the relation between the success of "Hassan" and "Chu Chin Chow"), the thriller, the drama of ideas, the comedy of manners, and, standing somewhat eccentrically to these, the ballet.

Anticipating what would become an important strategy of innovation in the poetic theater, Auden argues that the "poetic" dimension of the text can only be realized onstage through the available means of theatrical performance. In this sense, Auden clarifies and extends Yeats's practice, recognizing that the practices of the poetic stage—speech, song, acting—do not operate in abstraction from their use in other kinds of theater. To Auden, the text's staging must be accomplished by directing the theater's legitimate, theatrical voices. As his collaborator Christopher Isherwood recalled, Auden thought that the "only remaining traces of theatrical art were to be found on the music-hall stage: the whole of modern realistic drama since Tchekhov had got to go; later, perhaps, something might be done with puppets" (214–15). This attraction to popular theater—mingled with a more recondite, even aristocratic impulse—sustains Auden's theater, from the Freudian panto-charade Paid on Both Sides , through the Cowardesque revue in The Dance of Death , to the variety of effects used in the plays written with Isherwood: the morality-drama format of The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936), the radio propaganda that interrupts the symbolic journey in The Ascent of F6 (1937), the Brechtian fragmentation and satire of On the Frontier (1938). "The Music

Hall, the Christmas Pantomime, and the country house charade are the most living drama of to-day": the purpose of Auden's poetic theater is to find its voice in these popular idioms (qtd. in Sidnell, "Auden" 497).

Auden's career with the Group Theatre points to the poetic drama's central attention to the place of the spectator in the theater, an attention that emerges most clearly in the vigorous and controversial morality drama The Dance of Death . Although Auden's political vision is more pointed—to "present to you this evening a picture of the decline of a class"—the play's rhetoric owes a good deal to the perpetual-motion model of Yeats's drama.^[11] The text is fragmented among a series of performance styles, providing a less meticulous, more popular version of Yeats's practice in the dance plays. The stage is bare; an Announcer sits above the action like a tennis umpire, speaking to the decaying middle-class Chorus of their upcoming demise. The Dancer leads the Chorus through a variety of transformations—beginning as seaside bathers, they become Fascist troops, Lawrentian nature-worshippers, spiritualists—before he dies, bequeathing his kingdom to the working class in a choral ballad sung to the tune of "Casey Jones." What is important about The Dance of Death is Auden's attempt to order the text's realization through popular stage forms, rather than through Yeats's more abstract ordering of speech, song, acting, and dance. The drama of The Dance of Death is staged not only through choral odes and the Announcer's directions, but as a revue, including snatches of doggerel, a farcical onstage commentary by the veteran team of Box and Cox, an updated commedia dell' arte routine, and a finale straight out of Christmas pantomime, in which Father Christmas is replaced by a panto Karl Marx (who intones over the dead Dancer, "The instruments of production have been too much for him. He is liquidated" 107).

As an effort to make the poetic drama "go," Auden uses the text to direct forms of popular theater, and so to direct the audience attitudes and responses they conventionally shape. "While BOX and

[11] As Michael J. Sidnell suggests in his excellent study of the play in Dances of Death , Auden "was feeling his way, in fact, to the kind of juxtapositional structures that Yeats had adopted in his Plays for Dancers and Brecht in his use of lyrics to counterpoint rudimentary parabolic action" (64). See also Hynes, The Auden Generation 128.

COX are speaking, the AUDIENCE should render the appropriate noises they describe "—stamping their feet and swinging their arms, for instance. And while the spectators may balk at such calisthenics, Auden places members of the cast in the audience, who deliver a Cockney commentary on the action. The device is a clumsy one, but the planted audience's vigorous and outspoken activity suggests that Auden seeks a more lively version of Yeats's practice, enabling the audience to engage the text through its own performance of a familiar kind of theatrical behavior. Although the politics of the spectacle proved controversial, if not indeterminable, commentators on The Dance of Death agreed that the play's strongest effects emerged in performance, in the relation between stage and audience developed by the production.

It is somewhat easier to see Yeats's practice as poetic theater, in part because Yeats's text is more conventionally versified than the doggerel of The Dance of Death . Auden and Isherwood would later assimilate "bath-chairs, beer, boils, boots, calf-love, class-war, dope, egoism, farce, Fascism and fornication in a rambling theatrical entertainment," succeeding in some measure precisely "because they were concerned first, with theatrical entertainment" (Heppenstall). In the later plays, the problem is compounded, as Auden again follows Yeats in discriminating the uses of prose and verse but reserves verse mainly for thematic or atmospheric commentary. Noting that Eliot's summons to the poetic theater to learn its trade from popular arts like music hall had been carried out more completely by Auden and Isherwood, Stephen Spender nonetheless found that the "victory has not been gained without a certain number of concessions which amount perhaps to a loss to modern poetry"—namely bad verse (Auden's fault) and sketchy characterization (Isherwood's contribution). "What a relief it must have been to the undergraduate admirers of Auden's difficult Poems to discover that Mr. Auden had started writing in the manner of Cole Porter": Spender rightly charges Auden's drama with dissipating the intensity of poetic language and with wasting the poetic theater's one claim to innovation, using poetry to govern the many signifying activities of performance. The Dance of Death , like the later plays, is more cosmopolitan than Yeats's drama, more involved in European theatrical trends than Eliot's, and more popular than either. And while Auden's drama seems, finally, not to grasp the ratio between poetry and the

stage as clearly as Yeats's, or to imagine the spectator's performance as clearly as Eliot's, it may be difficult for us now to recover precisely the kind of energy that The Dance of Death seemed to generate, its special "lucidity" in performance:

In performance this piece has a lucidity which it lacks in print, and the general amusingness of the stage movement, the emphasis of the jazz band, and the singing and the dancing are aids, not hindrances, to the assimulation of the author's ideas. It all suggests an expressive and agreeable theatrical form which Mr. Auden, or some other modern poet, might some day richly load with ore.
(Rev. of The Dance of Death and Sweeney Agonistes )

Auden was, perhaps, more expressive and agreeable, but Eliot more effectively pursued this theatrical form, coordinating the discourse of the stage and his designs upon the audience in the design of the play. As poetic theater, Murder in the Cathedral participates in the dialectic between "the act" and "the work of acting," organizing the fictive "personalities" of the theater—actor, character, spectator—as the expression of the "poetic" formalities of the text. For Murder in the Cathedral is a play about its audience, who, like the play's protagonist and like the choral audience onstage, come to know that "action is suffering / And suffering action" (Murder 17). Eliot's conception of a "native popular drama" nearer "to Shakespeare than to Ibsen or Chekhov," his attraction to a "mordant, ferocious, and personal" native theater like music hall, and his "Rome, Cambridge, and Harley Street" reading of ritual are often seen to motivate his drama, but Eliot's writing about such events tends to identify the effects of performance, without clarifying how such effects are produced.^[12] Framing Eliot's plays as dramatized Frazer runs the risk of consigning them to the realm of lost ritual and forgotten theater, where poetic drama becomes simply a "conscious, 'pretty' piece of archaeology" ("The Ballet" 443). Much as in Yeats's plays for dancers, and even in Auden's exuberant moralities, the audience's engagement in suffering or acting is both

[12] On native theater and drama, see "London Letter," Dial 70 (June 1921): 687; on ritual, see "The Ballet" 442. For an excellent reading of how Eliot's emphasis on ritual and music hall has preempted the recognition of other contexts of his drama, see Everett.

shaped and signaled by changes in the mode of the text—choral ode, verse dialogue, the Knights' prose—and in the performance it directs as choral speaking, individualized acting, soapbox oratory.

"From one point of view, the poet aspires to the condition of the music-hall comedian" (Use 22). Given the vaudevillian cast of characters in his earlier poetry and his own talent for self-dramatization, it is surprising to find Eliot—in "Poetry and Drama," the major essay on poetic theater—searching for a "neutral " verse style for his play, claiming that when poets turn to playwriting they are likely to find choral verse relatively familiar. Choral delivery seems to retain the role conventionally assigned to the text by poetic drama, producing the text as a generalized "speech," a verbal order distinct from the more personalizing effects of "acting." The celebrated choruses of Auden and Isherwood's The Dog Beneath the Skin work largely in this way, as descriptions of action, character, and theme. But Eliot's Chorus is not a marionette, an automaton, or a commentator, and it occupies a much more unsettling role in the drama and in the play's performance. Something like Yeats's Musicians, though without their evident artifice, Eliot's Chorus performs both as a "character" in the drama and as a "character" in the theater.^[13] To play the Chorus requires a specifically histrionic—personalizing, characterizing, physicalizing—engagement with the text: "Here let us stand, close by the cathedral" (11). As actors have recognized, the Chorus must be conceived as a body of roles requiring individuation.^[14] In this sense the Chorus becomes a character in the drama, a real community composed of "'individual threads of character'" as Elsie

[13] Eliot was attracted to the Yeatsian mode, and wrote to Hallie Flanagan that her Vassar production of Sweeney Agonistes "should be stylised as in the Noh drama—see Ezra Pound's book and Yeats' preface and notes to The Hawk's Well ." He thought that characters "ought to wear masks; the ones wearing old masks ought to give the impression of being young persons (as actors) and vice versa. Diction should not have too much expression. I had intended the whole play to be accompanied by light drum taps to accentuate the beats (esp. the chorus, which ought to have a noise like a street drill)" (Flanagan 83).

[14] Hallie Flanagan describes the almost-Stanislavskian preparation of her students for the Chorus: "Individual actors built up their own characters, not only from the play, but from a study of the lives of women who had known 'oppression and torture, destitution, disease.' They pored over These Are Our Lives, Have You Seen Their Faces , and the drawings of Käthe Kollwitz" (129).

Fogerty put it, describing her training of the Chorus (Browne 86). Although the Chorus is composed exclusively of women, its members refer to the broader range of laborers, merchants, and others who inhabit their society, and so represent the "character" of Eliot's theater audience in general, a similar community composed of different individuals. Eliot had experimented with a more direct representation of the contemporary working classes in The Rock ; the unsatisfactory results, perhaps compounded by Auden's example in The Dance of Death , turned him in a different direction. Placed as a spectator of the action, "forced to bear witness" in a role in which "there is no action," the Chorus's characterization shapes our initial understanding of the drama, in part by representing our activity within the play. Like the Chorus we may be content to be left alone, but the action both of the drama and of the theater works to prevent such solitude.

The characterization of the Chorus begins to blur the relation between inside and outside, suffering and acting, witnessing and performing. For the Chorus's performance not only represents a fictive character in the drama, it articulates the immediate theatrical continuity between stage and audience. The Chorus's text is the most insistently "poetic" text in the play. Its formal structure, density of imagery, range of reference, contextualizing function in the drama, remoteness from realistic stage language—as well as the fact that it is produced as a chorus—tend to prevent a complete subordination of the language to characterization. The Chorus's liminal oscillation between the dramatic fiction and the present audience is signaled by one of the persistent challenges of Murder in the Cathedral in production: striking a just balance between the Chorus as "character" and as "speaker" of poetic verse.^[15] Characterizing the Chorus tends to insert it into the drama, and so to call into play familiar strategies of character interpretation: the search for motivation, for psychological integration, for social continuity, and so on. This dialectic—"women of Canterbury" or Chorus—emblematizes the theater audience's situation and creates one of the ongoing difficul-

[15] Victor Turner's discussions of liminal and liminoid genres are now familiar; see From Ritual to Theatre 41. His study of Becket's confrontation with the king at the Council of Northampton provides an interesting alternative to Eliot's "ritual" construction in Murder in the Cathedral . See Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors 60–97.

ties of the play's reception. Onstage, most efforts to characterize the Chorus as medieval peasants fail, because the quality of their language and the formality of their speech provide a constant counterweight to "realistic" characterization.^[16] This is not merely a technical flaw in individual productions but an aspect of Eliot's stage rhetoric, for the Chorus's part seems to require this instability, this dissonance. The inability to bring the Chorus fully into the drama is neither a failure of imagination on our part nor necessarily a failure of the production. Instead, much as the Chorus's represented emotions—fear, attraction—articulate the reactions of the audience, so the performance of the Chorus provides an index to the terms of the audience's enactment. Like the Chorus, to become fully complicit in the drama we also must assume a characterizing role, a fictive "personality" constructed as part of the spectacle, part of the act. Martyrdom, we are told, is "never an accident" in the design of God, never "the effect of a man's will" (33). Eliot's logos, the text revealed on the stage, similarly represents its audience at the intersection where accident and will are undecidable. The dialectics that produce the Chorus in the theater—expressed as character, constructed by the text—will, in a manner of speaking, come to shape our own performance if we are to enter into the play at all.

The acting of the verse text of Becket, the Priests, and the Tempters presents somewhat different problems, for we expect these texts to be more completely assimilated to the rhetoric of character-

[16] Robert Speaight, while complimenting Elsie Fogerty's training of the original Canterbury Chorus, thought the women "remained middle-class young women from South Kensington. Nothing more remote from the medieval poor could have been imagined" (184). Helen Gardner assigns a similar dissatisfaction to the Chorus's costumes: "The power of the poetry triumphs over the curious costumes in which the 'poor women of Canterbury' are usually draped. They are made to look like young ladies who, for a charade, have done the best they could with a set of slightly old-fashioned artistic bedspreads" (138n). And Martin Esslin, reviewing the 1972 Royal Shakespeare Company production, remarks, "In this case the seven ladies of Canterbury sound as though they were reciting poems of T. S. Eliot which they had just learnt by heart. Their voices are far too middle class, their intonations far too Third Programme to make them believable medieval paupers of Canterbury." This use of anachronism may, in a sense, be Eliot's closest approximation of the theatrical community implied by medieval morality drama in the mode of Everyman ; on the audience's role in medieval moralities, see Garner.

ization. Yet the First Priest's opening line repeats a line spoken earlier by the Chorus, a technique Eliot uses effectively throughout the play, most notably when the Fourth Tempter repeats Thomas's opening lines as his final temptation. Although each Priest is played by an individual actor, their roles are provided with relatively little definition; the Priests seem more like voices echoing a text than like characters in the conventional sense. In that they become even mildly individuated only when they engage the Chorus, it might be said that "character" emerges in the play only agonistically, only through conflict with others, or, as in the case of Thomas, with internalized others. Eliot's rhetoric of character seems to privilege this conflict by assigning to the Tempters and the Knights more clearly characterized roles than those assigned to the Priests.^[17] Unlike the Priests, each of the Tempters has a distinct verse style, and a distinct speaking style as well. Each also accords with, and so dramatizes, one of Thomas's past roles: "Old Tom, gay Tom," the "master of policy," the "rough straightforward Englishman." By filling out the lineaments of character more fully in the text of the Tempters' speeches, Eliot's play emphasizes the reality of Thomas's internal struggle. And by articulating this conflict through rhetoric of realistic character, Eliot seems to claim that such expressionistic, inner struggle has a greater reality, is more dramatic, than the external relations between characters—between Thomas and the Priests, for instance.

"From this it follows that a mixture of prose and verse in the same play is generally to be avoided: each transition makes the auditor aware, with a jolt, of the medium" ("Poetry and Drama" 133). The first such jolt provided by the play is Thomas's sermon; the sermon also jolts the performance "medium" at this point as well, recalibrating the relationship between actor, text, and audience by altering the distance between the text and the "personality" of the performer. As Robert Speaight recognized, the sermon is "theatrically speaking, the pièce de résistance of the play," as any text that allows the actor to play to the audience usually is (186). The play's central theatrical conspiracy—to stage the audience's complicity in Thomas's murder—develops a new sharpness here, for the sermon provides the actor with the opportunity to bring a

[17] See Whitaker, Fields of Play 147.

different kind of characterization to bear both on Thomas and on his audience. The sermon enacts the expected scene of Thomas's preaching to his flock on Christmas morning and provides a thematic center for the play in Thomas's oblique defense of his behavior and of the status of martyrdom. In the design of the performance, this is also the moment where the intrusive personality of the actor exerts its most palpable influence, in that the sermon provides an opportunity to act for the audience (rather than, say, to be acted upon by the Tempters), to produce "Thomas" for us through the charismatic expression of a stage personality. The colloquial prose invites both the actor and the audience to conceive Thomas through the conventions of realistic characterization, with the emphasis on motivation, cause, and origin that realistic interpretation requires.

This realism skews the performance in other ways as well. While the Chorus represents us within the drama, Thomas's "realistic" performance stages us in the scene of the drama itself, most evidently in the play's first production at the Canterbury chapter house. Through this realistic device, we engage Thomas's sermon in something closer to the unprotected immediacy of our offstage lives. The effect of this engagement is, however, to foreground Thomas's oratory as oratory, possibly as mere rhetoric. As a piece of realistic acting, Thomas's attempt to convince us that the martyr is "the instrument of God" requires the actor to persuade himself of the theatrical reality of the moment, in order to persuade us of the provisional reality of his characterization of Thomas (33). Oddly enough, by presenting the text of Thomas's sermon through the rhetoric of realistic performance, Eliot invites us to interpret Thomas in the way we interpret characters in realistic drama, and perhaps in the way we interpret others in the prosaic drama of our lives: by indirection, through the suspicion that motives are always falsified by their enactment. Is Thomas really persuaded of the role of martyrdom in God's design, or is he trying to persuade himself (and us) that he is not pursuing martyrdom in some way? As in realistic theater, we can never know, because neither Thomas nor the actor who plays him can say.

The drama becomes an instrument of community only in performance, and Eliot's uses of prose and verse tend to work differently in this regard and are more finely discriminated in their staging of the audience than the prose and verse of Auden and Isherwood's

plays. The verse establishes a theatrical continuity between the performers and the audience; the prose tends to establish a continuity between the dramatic characters and a represented audience. The Chorus's characterized verse mediates between these positions, and emblematizes the audience's situation in the theater, torn by the sometimes conflicting demands of the drama and the performance. This dichotomy in the ways in which the "vital flame" of the audience's personality is implied in performance is confirmed and extended by the Knights' apology. The Knights' direct address was perhaps Eliot's "main reason for writing the play," and despite the tang of Shaw's Saint Joan (1923), the Knights produce a very un-Shavian spectacle.^[18] The Knights work less to educate us than to offend us, arguing with us in a series of sinister yet pacifying platitudes. The Knights ask for sympathy from the audience, inviting us to treat the murder as we treat other blasphemies of modern life, as "merely a department of bad form" ("Personality" 94). This identification again arises through Eliot's use of a realistic rhetoric. For unlike the formal language of Thomas's sermon, the Knights' text is composed in a recognizable, even contemporary idiom, one that requires a more relaxed, physically nonchalant gestural style of the performer. Engaging us in our own vacant clichés ("we had taken on a pretty stiff job"), the Knights again establish a continuity between dramatic character and a represented spectator. By speaking in our tongue, the Knights claim a kinship with the conventional morality that guides our everyday lives. To play our part, to "witness" the drama of martyrdom, we must reject this identification, this construction of our performance in the theater. The play invites an ironic performance from us, one in which we learn to see differently than we do in our lives.

Without trivializing the significance of martyrdom, I would like to suggest that the process of Eliot's theater is designed to provide a kind of simulation, not of martyrdom, but of the spiritual educa-

[18] The sense in which the Knights' address forges a real community—i.e., one of diverse opinion—is perhaps suggested by another incident reported by Hoellering that occurred during the filming of Murder in the Cathedral: "When, towards the end of the play, we came to the speeches in which the three Knights justify themselves before the crowd, the sound recordist suddenly turned round to Mr Eliot and, completely forgetting his control switches, said excitedly, 'Aren't they right, sir? What do you think?' Mr Eliot, needless to say, was highly amused" (Hoellering 82–83).

tion necessary for a modern faith. Like the Chorus, perhaps, we want to have a "theatrical" relationship to events like martyrdom, to see them without having to witness them, without having to be transformed by them. Watching Murder in the Cathedral, we are urged briefly to forsake our other parts for the role of the audience, a demanding part which requires our direct engagement in the "work of acting" if we are to comprehend the play's designs on us. In this tiny figure is inscribed not only the sign of the greater revolution that the play dramatizes—Thomas's performance of the "design of God"—but also the suggestion, again in little, of what witnessing such an act might really mean for us. This is, it seems to me, partly the burden of the final chorus, the prayer that asks forgiveness both for the Chorus and for the contemporary audience, the "sightseers come with guide-books" to Canterbury (53–54). The prayer depends precisely upon the "personalities" the play has evoked throughout the performance, for as the audience is invited to assume a specific role in the drama—to raise the possibility of martyrdom by rejecting the Knights' defense—the Chorus also undergoes a change. The Chorus is converted into a community of our contemporaries, part of the community we have, through the rhetoric of the play's production, become.

"I see myself emerging / From my spectral existence into something like reality": like Lord Claverton in The Elder Statesman, the audience of Murder in the Cathedral emerges from a ghostly absence, into a "real" relation to the events of the stage (341). I have come some way from the rhetoric of poetic theater, and I would like to return to it for a moment as a way of suggesting the place of Murder in the Cathedral in the rhetoric of modern theatricality. In a review of the play published in Eliot's Criterion in 1936, Michael Sayers posed the question of the play's permanence in these terms: "It may occasion a revolution in popular thought and theatre through subsequent imitations, and by its direct influence similar to that brought about by the comedies of Shaw. Or it may go down to the popular limbo as one of the curiosities of a moribund theatre" (655). Although the experimental rhetoric of Murder in the Cathedral is "too incisive, too original, too mordant" to be ignored, Eliot's drama—like the plays of Maeterlinck, of Auden, of Auden and Isherwood, of Christopher Fry, and, to a certain extent, of Yeats as well—has indeed slipped into the limbo of "poetic drama," or pos-

sibly someplace worse. Yeats may be a more original dramatist, and certainly Yeats had a more sure sense of the stage, but in some respects Murder in the Cathedral undertakes a more radical displacement of the authority of the text than Yeats's, Auden's, or Beckett's plays do, precisely because Eliot contaminates the "poetic" spectacle with a prose that is traced by the dynamics of realistic stage production, realistic acting. Murder in the Cathedral surrenders some of the text's "poetic" authority and acknowledges that meaning in the theater arises in the necessary rewriting of "poetry" in the various, competing "languages" of stage performance.

In this regard, Eliot's poetic theater not only challenges realism, it also partly challenges the privileged status of the word in the semiosis of poetic theater. Eliot's drama strategically designs the spectator's performance as an essential part of the meaning of the theatrical event. Yeats preconceives his aristocratic audiences, and Auden seats stage-Cockneys in the auditorium, but Eliot builds a form for the audience's "collaboration." Eliot's attention to the spectator, his attempt to evoke the spectator's performance in the play's design, to provide a theatrical "escape" from the habitual "personality" with which we confront the world at large, may point surprisingly enough in a different direction, toward a theatrical rhetoric more overtly engaged in the production of the audience as "subject": the rhetoric of political theater. For like poetry, the rhetoric of poetic theater "may effect revolutions in sensibility such as are periodically needed; may help to break up the conventional modes of perception and valuation which are perpetually forming, and make people see the world afresh, or some new part of it" (Use 149).

The Discipline of the Text:
Beckett's Theater

"The text is the text."
—Rick Cluchey, reporting Beckett's refusal to incorporate production changes into the published text of Waiting for Godot (qtd. in Duckworth 185)

To begin a discussion of Beckett's relation to the rhetoric of "poetic theater," we might reflect for a moment on a relatively unpoetic play,

Catastrophe (1982). Catastrophe is hardly "poetic" in any conventional sense; the verbal texture of the play is, if anything, rather less rich than that of plays like Waiting for Godot (1953) or Rockaby (1981). Catastrophe, it seems, has more to do with the ideology of the image than with that of the word, to concern the systems of authority—textual, theatrical, and political authority—that operate in and on the body of performance. In his efforts to bare, whiten, and sculpt the body of the Protagonist, the Director produces a spectacle for us, inscribing the body of the performer with an unspoken code, the code within which we recognize "our catastrophe" (300). As Pierre Chabert suggests, the body of the Protagonist—both actor and character—becomes emblematic of the role that the body performs in much of Beckett's theater: "It is worked, violated even, much like the raw materials of the painter or sculptor, in the service of a systematic exploration of all possible relationships between the body and movement, the body and space, the body and objects, the body and light and the body and words" ("The body" 23). It is this final "working" of the body of the Protagonist that most interests me here, how the body's subjection to textual authority reveals the rhetoric of Beckett's theater.

Beckett's most punishing plays tend toward an abstract visual composition at the expense of realistic mimesis: to reduce the lively movement of the body to a grim geometry, to efface character and abandon action. In this and in other respects, Beckett's theater puts the conception of the "poetic" stage that I have been developing to the test. Of course, Beckett's plays do not appear in verse form on the page. Yet insofar as the understanding of poetic theater I have developed here emphasizes the text's function in the stage production, this aspect of the text's appearance may not be critical. Many of Beckett's plays have the densely imagistic texture we associate with "poetic" drama. More important, stylistic features of the texts govern the plays' physical articulation on the stage, as the actors and the entire mise-en-scène are used—as in the poetic theater—to present the drama as a poetic "object." The antiphonal quality of dialogue in Waiting for Godot, the interspersed voices in That Time (1976), the interaction of speech and music in Cascando (1963), the poised periods of Rockaby: many of Beckett's plays articulate the text in performance in ways that are indistinguishable from the practice of poetic theater. And when Beckett claims that the "best

possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the text" (Bair 513), he seems most the inheritor of Maeterlinck, Craig, Yeats, and of the symboliste theater of which they are a part.^[19] It is, finally, in the authority assigned to the text's verbal organization that Beckett's drama enters, and complicates, the realm of poetic theater.

Although the vitality of the poetic stage may in fact be clear to us now as the result of Beckett's theater, the process of Beckett's dramatic action emerges for us in a different cultural horizon from the poetic drama of Yeats or Eliot, and perhaps exposes more effectively the place of its rhetoric in our own culture. The aesthetics of Beckett's stage seem to contain their own Foucauldian "microphysics of power," traced both within the dramatic action and in the process of theatrical representation (26). Beckett's drama often explores the poetics of torture, and is preoccupied with the speaking of a justifying "text," words that can define an order, an explanation, and so an end to a painfully interminable spectacle. To render this text in the play often requires the rending of the protagonist. Both actor and dramatic character submit to the signifying formalities of torture, suffering "the works" until they "say it," "confess" a text that may or may not release them (What Where 312–13). The spectacle also tests our endurance, our prolonged postponement of an essentially narrative closure, the "text" of our experience rewritten as interpretation. For even though "we do not know . . . what exactly it is we are after" (Rough for Radio II 122), this "sign or set of words" promises to free us as well as our victims, to empower us to write the events of the stage as drama from our special vantage as spectators: "Audience privileged / actors tortured" as the director George Devine put it, describing Play (1963).^[20]

Where we are placed in Beckett's rhetoric is the issue I would like to consider here, how our performance is traced within the differential power ascribed to the texts of Beckett's theater. The text's interest in locating our performance both marks another fea-

[19] I am thinking here not only of the approximation of The Cat and the Moon in Rough for Theatre I and the allusions to Yeats in Godot, Happy Days, and . . . but the clouds  . . . , but also of Katharine Worth's suggestive remarks on the resemblance between Beckett's plays and Maeterlinck's "drama of the interior." See The Irish Drama of Europe, passim.

[20] Qtd. in Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: An Exhibition 91.

ture of Beckett's implication in the rhetoric of poetic theater and locates that rhetoric in the world beyond the stage. Elaine Scarry urgently reminds us that our situation as spectators of the torturous production of fictions may have an appalling likeness to other realms of torment: "In torture, it is in part the obsessive display of agency that permits one person's body to be translated into another person's voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime's fiction of power" (18).^[21] Are we subject to the text like the Protagonist, or identified with its authority, like the Director, like Godot? How does our performance expose the relations of power inscribed in the project of the poetic stage? Are we the victims of the spectacle, or, chillingly enough, the authors of the catastrophe?

Rough for Radio II, an early and relatively minor radio play first broadcast in 1976, provides a model of the differential power ascribed to texts in Beckett's theater. The play is something of a study for Catastrophe, concerning a male "Animator," who interrogates the victim Fox and supervises the transcription of the confession by a female Stenographer; we also hear the labor of Dick, who whips Fox into speech. At the opening, the Stenographer delivers a report on the previous day's unacceptable results, a report that outlines today's inquiry: to "refrain from recording mere animal cries," to "provide a strictly literal transcript, the meanest syllable has, or may have, its importance," and to "ensure full neutralization of subject when not in session, especially with regard to the gag," since the "least word let fall in solitude . . . may be it " (116). Yet as the play proceeds, it becomes difficult in some ways to decide who is the victim of the interrogation. Although the Animator confesses that "we do not know, any more than you, what exactly it is we are after, what sign or set of words," he increasingly prompts Fox to deliver a specific confession: "Someone, perhaps that is what is wanting, someone who once saw you . . . (Abating ) . . . go by. . . .

[21] The relations between theater and torture seem complex and multiple. Scarry also notes that it "is not accidental that in the torturers' idiom the room in which the brutality occurs was called the 'production room' in the Philippines, the 'cinema room' in South Vietnam, and the 'blue lit stage' in Chile: built on these repeated acts of display and having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama" (28).

Even though it is not true! . . . A father, a mother, a friend, a . . . Beatrice—no, that is asking too much" (122). Unfortunately, when Fox confesses, his narrative seems more figural than actual, resistant to the Animator's desire to plot a recognition scene. The Animator forces the Stenographer to amend her account to include the phrase "between two kisses " that would characterize the "Maud" that Fox mentions: "'Maud would say, between two kisses, etc.'" (124). Fox's oblique speech prolongs his suffering and the Animator's inquisition and encourages a frequent activity in Beckett's drama—fabulation. Providing the text with narrative coherence, the Animator hopes to placate his offstage authorities and bring an end to his own inquisitorial captivity: "Tomorrow, who knows, we may be free."

Rough for Radio II provides an instance of how the production of text as performance encodes the power relations of Beckett's drama. The body is subjected to the theater of pain in order to produce a text, a text which becomes significant only when it is inserted into the absent designs of a captor narrative. Neither Fox nor the hounding Animator knows which syllable "may be it, " might constitute their "catastrophe"; both are held within the absent text's fictions of power. To say that the protagonist is depersonalized is hardly adequate. The body becomes the instrument and container of a text which has its origin and meaning only elsewhere, as part of another's writing. The staged texts—I am thinking here of the many self-displacing narratives of Beckett's drama—betray a familiar anxiety about the ability of the stage to represent and preserve the authority of verbal art. Like the Animator torturing his foxy poet, the stage always misrepresents the poet's verbal design.

In the stage plays, the function of this master text is assumed to a large degree by another unspoken text—Beckett's directions—and it is in the relation between these two texts that Beckett most strikingly engages the formalities of the poetic stage. As a text for theater, Play anticipates the design of many of Beckett's later plays in containing two modes of textuality, words designing the structure of the performance, and words to be spoken on the stage, "in character," or at least "as character." In general, stage directions describe a possible disposition of the set, actors' movements, intonation, and expression. Yet as description they tend to convey a

texture of effects, to locate meaning in a retrospective, narrative mode rather than in the incipient mode of the theater. They tell a reader how a character behaves or reacts, informing us of the content of his behavior, rather than addressing the actor, telling him or her how to produce the text. In Play and elsewhere, however, Beckett's directions determine the conditions within which the text, the performance, and our playing will be articulated: "The source of light is single and must not be situated outside the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims," "In order for the urns to be only one yard high, it is necessary either that traps be used, enabling the actors to stand below stage level, or that they kneel throughout play, the urns being open at the back," and so on (158–59). Much like the disembodied voice in What Where (1983), emanating from beyond the pale arena of the drama, this text constructs its protagonists from outside the frame of the stage, transferring the authority of presence from the stage to the immanent region of an (unspoken) script.

The direction-text displaces the means of the actors' charismatic self-presentation: it prohibits gesture, movement, facial expression, vocal inflection, tonality and rhythm, even their uninterrupted visibility before the audience. The protagonists are sculpted, hollowed out by the text of the mise-en-scène. This functioning of the actors as images becomes invasive at the point where the text is transformed into speech: the voice. "The voice," as Helga Finter remarks, "is par excellence the 'object' of theatricalization because of its status as between: inscribed in a text, the voice indicates a carrying externality  . . . which links it to the singular body or to a disposition of the subject" (505). Proscribing expression, intonation, intentionality, Beckett's drama displaces the voice as a sign of the actor-character's subjectivity: the actors abandon expression for a "toneless, " even "unintelligible " speech driven at a "rapid tempo throughout " (147). The directions even erase "speech" as a sign of volition or spontaneity. Not only is the actors' delivery "provoked " by the spotlight, but the spotlight also controls the volume of their speaking. The only vocal quality left to their command—loudness—is produced as an effect of the mise-en-scène as well: "Faint spots " produce "Voices faint, largely unintelligible, " while "Strong spots " produce "Voices normal strength " (147–48). Finally, the power of the unspoken text of the mise-en-scène over the presentation is registered by the language of

the play itself, that stagey dialogue ("swore by all I held most sacred" 148) so relentlessly stripped of its actorly emphasis.

Emptied as a sign of the protagonist's expressive presence, speech provides an index of Beckett's exhaustion of other means of representing the text. Beckett's deconstruction of speech does not imply an implacable critique of the authority of language in the spectacle. Beckett's word retains its authority by refusing to be represented in the personalizing voice, as "language" as it is generally understood. Like the poetic theater, with its characteristic resort to marionettes and marionette-like acting, Beckett's theater attempts to preserve the authority of a kind of poetry by withholding it from representation as a "stage" language, as song, as acting, as theater. Beckett's recent video plays urgently convey the sense that the image forecloses the function of language. Martin Esslin suggests that in these dramas the television image "can embody and preserve the poet's imagery without having to rely on language as its primary medium, and, in the end, even enable him to dispense with it altogether" ("Towards" 47). The result, in plays like . . . but the clouds  . . . (1977), Ghost Trio (1977), and—notoriously—Quad (1982), is a text that violates our notions of "literature" precisely by distributing the authority of verbal language in unexpected ways, assigning it not to the dramatized speech, but to the constitutive, unspoken, offstage text of the stage directions. This sense that the theater interferes with the poetic text by representing it as acting drives the deepest dream that Beckett shares with the poetic stage, the desire for a pure "poetry" of images, scripted but unmediated by the languages of theatrical production. Rather than refiguring the text in the theater's scenic arts, Beckett's text withholds the authority of poiesis from the stage itself.^[22]

It is perhaps too easy for the "summary static images" of Beckett's theater to be taken solely as the signs of "the permanent, causeless and unchanging universal condition of mere existence,"

[22] It might be remarked that this question, the authority of stage directions over spoken text, seemed to inform some of the controversies regarding the staging of his plays in which Beckett became involved. In one case, it was not tampering with the spoken text that drew Beckett's ire, but rather tampering with the circumstances of its production: altering the setting of Endgame in the controversial Joann Akalaitis/American Repertory Theater production in 1985.

as critics have tended to do, too easy because such a reading avoids the most significant feature of this rhetoric, its likeness to the torture it represents (McMillan 99). To its protagonists, the symptoms of Beckett's theater are despair, deprivation, and breakdown. As Ben Barnes suggests, one of the principal tasks of a director is to convince "the actor to forfeit the notion of character in the service of poetic stage-images"; indeed, the actors must "accept this depersonalisation before any progress can be made" (86, 87). Depersonalizing the actor's voice is, of course, only part of Beckett's more general machining of his performers. Winnie in Happy Days (1962) is progressively earthed; in Play the actors are metaphorically disembodied, yet "trembling" with stress in their narrow urns; in Footfalls (1976), May's "walking should be like a metronome." In Not I (1972), the actress both represents and is imprisoned within an infernal speaking machine. As Billie Whitelaw reports, in "the first couple of rehearsal performances, when the blindfold went on and I was stuck half-way up the stage, I think I had sensory deprivation. The very first time I did it, I went to pieces. I felt I had no body; I could not relate to where I was; and, going at that speed, I was becoming very dizzy and felt like an astronaut tumbling into space."^[23]

This machinery of depersonalization is, in a sense, offstage, invisible in Not I, concealed as part of the productive actuality of the theater we overlook to see the fictive drama. Yet its effect both on the body and on the "self" signified by the voice is palpable: "The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it" (Scarry 49). What "position she was in!" may be of immediate concern to the actress, but it remains concealed from us in the theater audience; we receive only the fictive "confession" of the character Mouth, whose vocalizations have been erased as voicings, as signs of presence. And yet to ignore the fact that the theater operates like an instrument of torture on the protagonists, in order to concentrate our attention on

[23] Billie Whitelaw reports "trembling" in Play in "From Billie Whitelaw." Enoch Brater quotes Beckett's production notebook describing May's walk in Beyond Minimalism 71. And Billie Whitelaw describes acting in Not I in an interview with James Knowlson, "Extracts" 87.

the incomplete, fictive text of the drama, should, perhaps, give us pause. Such a deconversion of an instrument of civility and sociality into a weapon is precisely the mode of torture itself, in which all of the victim's extensions—the room, her own body, the voice—are used to destroy her, and to take the "fact of civilization" along with them.^[24]

Corps physique dépossédé par la parole: voir Artaud" (Chabert, "Samuel Beckett" 82). The desire to textualize experience and so to provide it with narrative closure is a desire that Beckett's drama cruelly withholds from its characters and seems to invite of its spectators. In Play , the characters hope for a "conceivable dark and silence in the end" (Disjecta 111), one that could be supplied by the completion of their purgatorial text, a hope endlessly deferred by the unspoken text's final direction, "Repeat play. " Although the play's visual structure suggests an inquisition, in fact it is the characters who interrogate the spotlight. As W1 remarks, there may be "Nothing being asked at all. No one asking me for anything at all" (154). And much as the spotlight represents our attention within "the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims" (158), the characters—motionless, cramped, allowed a largely visual experience—also recapitulate our situation. The characters not only narrate a conventional romantic intrigue, they also interrogate their current circumstances in order to impose a familiar shape on them, to interpret them. W2, for example, sees a rather malign capriciousness in the light, even while admitting that she may be making "the same mistake as when it was

[24] Scarry's account of this process is compelling: "The room, both in its structure and its content, is converted into a weapon, deconverted, undone. Made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed"—only weapons (41). That the theater can become, to some small degree, such a weapon inflicted upon the performers may be implied by the experience of rehearsing plays like Not I and Footfalls. Billie Whitelaw reports rehearsing Not I: "I don't know what happened. I just stood there with tears pouring down my face. And then I saw Beckett himself walking towards the back of the theatre with his head in his hands. After a while he came back and reached up and held me. 'Oh, Billie,' he said, 'what have I done to you?' He's a wonderful man, compassionate and kind" (qtd. in Cohn 200). On the machinery used for restricting the movement of the actress's mouth in various productions, see Bair 623–30.

the sun that shone, of looking for sense where possibly there is none": "Someday you will tire of me." W1, on the other hand, more often addresses the light as part of "this," as an agent in a wider context of meaning, a purgatorial environment or system: "Penitence, yes, at a pinch, atonement, one was resigned, but no, that does not seem to be the point either." W2 and W1 model familiar habits of attention for us, for they are those of the realistic audience, attempting to discover the drama of events in the disposition of character or in the determining features of an environmental process.

What does it mean to observe such a process as drama and as theater; what where do we occupy in the spectacle? At the moment that the characters most closely resemble the audience, textualizing their experience, that activity is represented as a strategy of displacement, of evasion, of placation. The authority of the spoken drama in Play is compromised by the play's final briliant direction: "Repeat play. " Regardless of whether the repeat is played in exact imitation of the first scene—as Beckett finally seemed to favor—or intentionally varied in tonality, pace, order, or illumination, "Repeat play " insists on the controlling authority of the text to govern the play.^[25] Beckett's text, not the characters' narration or our sense of impatience, determines when, how, and if the play will end. Like the poetic theater, Beckett's Play deploys the actors' bodies for their imagistic value. But the spoken words lack the authority ascribed to the text in poetic theater, those lyrics or choruses that serve to explain, rearticulate, or restate the action as "poetry." The spoken text is transformed into a kind of aural object, emptied of the rhythms, intonations, and emphases that carry much of the burden of spoken communication. Much as the actors are rendered as objects, so the words they speak are also staged as objects, "just 'things' that come out of their mouths" as George Devine commented. And yet this direction—"Repeat play "—also operates on us, the audience, placing us in our seats not as patrons, but as "things" in the spectacle. The rhetoric of Play identifies us in two incompatible and fragmentary ways: it empowers us in relation to the dramatic fiction; it objectifies us as victims of the theater.

We would expect the authority of the word in poetic theater to be paramount, that words would not be transformed into objects

[25] On Beckett's sense of the "repeat" in Play , see Blackman 103.

like the other "properties" on the stage but would retain a kind of transcendent value and meaning. And yet as Yeats and Eliot make clear, it is not the text's verbal design alone that renders it as a "poem" in the theater. Instead, it seems to be in the relationship between the text's design and the means of its enunciation that the power of "poetry" emerges onstage. I would like, finally, to return to Catastrophe as a way of suggesting some of the implications this kind of thinking about Beckett's theater has for us, both in relation to the project of poetic theater and more generally. In his obsession with a precise stage image, his minute attention to the architecture of the body, his autocratic control of the production, the Director's practice in Catastrophe is reminiscent of Beckett's own work as director, and they share a common interest in the audience as well. Like the Protagonist, the audience of Catastrophe is staged by Beckett's drama: the "Distant storm of applause " that greets the Director's final image both represents our attention to the drama—we will , in fact, soon be applauding—and displaces us, renders our performance as a figure in the design of Beckett's play. The taped applause represents our subjection to the Director's authority; our silence, like the Protagonist's fixed gaze, signals our refusal to be scripted in this manner. And yet this refusal is more apparent than actual, for our eventual applause functions in Beckett's theater in much the manner that the taped applause works in the Director's fictive one: in the end, our applause affirms the Director's staged "catastrophe," whether we approve of his inhuman designs or not. Silent, slightly conspiratorial, attentive and restive by turns, Beckett's drama captures us in an uncanny quarter by constituting each of us as a spectator , author and object, interrogator and victim, a vanishing point in the play's perspective.

To conceive of Beckett's drama in this way is to work directly against Beckett's reception in the canon of modernism. Although Beckett insists on the aesthetic autonomy of his plays—"I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern" (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 15)—the theatrical procedure of plays like Play and Catastrophe challenges the autonomy of the stage and of the drama it contains.^[26] Beckett's theater no longer displays aesthetic objects

[26] The classic statement of Beckett's "autonomous" relation to politics and culture is Theodor Adorno, "Commitment."

disinterestedly before a willing audience, if it ever did. It seems instead to assume a more rhetorical function, manifestly subjecting the public to its own mastery. In Play , and in Not I, What Where, Catastrophe , and other plays, Beckett recomposes the audience's performance in the theater, dramatizing the power of the text to evacuate, fragment, and deform its protagonists, characters, actors, and spectators. In so doing, Beckett's theatricality appears to engage a cultural field from which Beckett's drama is usually held to be distinct: a field in which representation pursues an instrumental function; in which its subjects are qualified by and painfully inspected for a "text" that invades, objectifies, replaces, and destroys them; a field that includes both the legitimate theater and the illegitimate theatricality of advertising, propaganda, pornography, and torture. To continue to read Beckett as our contemporary may finally require a complex archaeology, one that penetrates the "existential" inertia of Beckett's drama to recover the repressed complicity between the dynamics of postmodern culture and the strategies of Beckett's stage. It may, finally, require an exhumation of the field of poetic theater itself, an effort to see the relations of authority inherent in this theater as signs of a certain will to power, a power as always based on its distance from the body, from the bodies it would control as much as from those it would entertain.