SHATTERING HAMLET’S MIRROR: THEATRE AND REALITY. By Marvin Carlson.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2016; pp. 160.
At one level, one always knows to expect a high degree of excellence in a new Marvin Carlson book—volume after volume has taught us that. At another level, the range of those volumes has taught us to keep on our toes, as we never know precisely whether we are being introduced to a body of work heretofore unknown to most scholars in the West (as in his recent work with Khalid Amine), being presented a new and invigorating argumentative frame to reimagine work we already know well (as in 2001’s The Haunted Stage), or being offered a comprehensive set of lessons by the most distinguished of professors (as in 1993’s Theories of Theatre or 1996’s Performance: A Critical Introduction). In this last category Carlson’s books do not so much make a pointed argument, as they let an argument emerge from the wealth of examples the author has at his fingertips. Such is this most recent book, which only fully articulates its argument in the closing pages,by which point the reader is already convinced of what Carlson will claim: that theatre has always been about the real, but that in this contemporary moment, the mimetic binary between what is real and what is theatre has essentially collapsed, leaving us with a dizzying though nonetheless artically productive moment in our theatrical and cultural history.
Although the book is brief, it covers a wide range of historical territory, from Aristotle to Rimini Protokoll.
Along the way, his five chapters address the real as it is expressed in spoken text, in character, in space and place, in objects, and in audience immersion.
In each case Carlson begins with a prototype example that demonstrates the unsettled binary between the real and the theatrical, and then moves forward through theatre history, pausing on significant examples and theories that trace the development of an argument he borrows from theatre phenomenologist Bert States: that theatre amounts to “a progressing colonization of the real world” (14).
Although his examples are diverse and typically well-known (the canon of documentary theatre, famous conflations of character and actor, landmark set designs, storied props, and so on), Carlson typically spends no more than three or four paragraphs (and sometimes only a few sentences) on each example, relying less upon close reading or thick description than the sheer proliferation of artifacts to draw out this progressing colonization. This tactic is balanced by two performances that he returns to throughout the book: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the life and performances of “Buffalo” Bill
Cody. The former play’s overt consideration of the mirror-held boundary between theatre and the real also hosts the book’s most famous prop—Yorick’s skull, often enough performed unsettlingly by a real human skull. Buffalo Bill, on the other hand, represents the thoroughgoing blurring of the real and the theatre, from the repurposing of Cody’s own stagecoach to the theatricalized frontier persona of Buffalo Bill himself. By juxtaposing two deeper case studies, referenced in both deeper analyses and brief asides, alongside a panoply of other less fully treated examples, Carlson suggests the degree to which his artifacts pervade the whole of theatre history.
This wide-angle, transhistorical approach is also reflected in Carlson’s theoretical lexicon, which is as likely to cite Denis Diderot on stage objects as to cite Andrew Sofer. If there is a critique of the book to be made, it is that the argument is perhaps less deeply referential to the protracted scholarly conversations about these concerns than might be useful to the scholar working in this particular field. Carol Martin’s work in Theatre of the Real is not mentioned at all, and major scholarly entries by Mike Pearson, Liz Tomlin, and several others are mentioned briefly, only in passing. Certainly, one cannot claim that the book is not thoroughly theorized—Carlson does not need to cite Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Bruno Latour, or Judith Butler more than once to see the inflection of those theorists on this work, and the emergence of animal studies, for example, is deeply evident in the chapter on theatrical objects. So whether the comparative lack of secondary criticism will be judged as a fault or rather an expression of purpose likely depends on the reader: a scholarly researcher will miss the rich bibliography of existing scholarship, while other readers will find that the comparative absence of scholarly citation frees up the prose to move fluidly from example to example.
Shattering Hamlet’s Mirror concludes with two paragraphs at the end of the chapter on audience immersion, but the import of those paragraphs is not to be taken lightly: “With theatre’s absorption of reality being in turn absorbed by the capitalist drive, performance seems to move ever more deeply into the domain of the simulacrum and repetition, and ever further from even the illusion of an unmediated reality to which theatre might hold up its mirror” (124). Given the ascendancy to the White House of a capitalist whose public persona is no less theatricalized that Buffalo Bill’s was, yet who has drawn thoroughly on the appeal of the authentic and the real, we find ourselves confronted with the urgency of “theatre and performance [to continue] their age-old role of serving as strategies to aid in the enrichment and understanding of the complexity of human experience” (125). I was never lucky enough to learn in one of Marvin Carlson’s classrooms, but reading this book, like so many other titles before it, I nonetheless think of him as one of my most important teachers (I am surely not alone in this sense). Those of us committed to being students of both the theatrical and the real have much to learn from this slim volume, as much from the many examples it offers up as from the picture of our presently performative reality that it reflects.
RYAN CLAYCOMB
West Virginia University
