Review

Author(s): Brooks McNamara

Review by: Brooks McNamara
Source: Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Mar., 1975), pp. 134-135
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3206360
Accessed: 11-06-2015 12:42 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Educational
Theatre Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 84.246.29.132 on Thu, 11 Jun 2015 12:42:57 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

134

EDUCATIONAL

THEATRE

JOURNAL

of human existence." From the other side of the

world as if in counterpoint, Brandon gives us a
glimpse of modern oriental theatre. "In 1942 Mao
Tse-tung stressed that art was a means of 'uniting
and educating the people.' This philosophy has
been carried out in the People's Republic of China
since its establishment in 1949, with two chief
results: dance and theatre are highly valued and
strongly supported by the government; and content and form of dance and drama are decided by
appropriate government organs."
The article "Western Theatre" continually
stresses the influences of government, trade and
social organization, as well as religion and literature, on the history of theatre, giving this brief
survey a firmer context than any comparable work
I know. Its clear, succinct writing covers much
ground swiftly and easily until it reaches the
twentieth century, when the extent and great
diversity of theatre almost reduces it to mere
cataloguing. Until then, however, the piece is rife
with stimulating insights that really help one to
follow the processes of theatrical change.
Equally nourishing are "Theatre and Stages"
(George C. Izenour), "Theatrical Production"
(Bernard Beckerman), "Staging and Stage Design"
(Howard Bay, Maureen Heneghan, Ralph Holmes,
Stanley Dufford) and a long list of shorter articles
on more specific topics: even to suggest them
would involve me in "mere cataloguing." But
mention must be made of the comparable clusters
of long articles on the other arts-"'Dance," "Motion Pictures," "Opera," and so on, as well as
"Criticism of the Arts." Again the aim is to
establish connections.
The need to synthesize knowledge of the
theatre and relate it to the other arts in a unified
view is evident throughout; it is the intellectual
analogue of the syncretism and the fusion of the
arts that have marked the revolution of the last
two decades. Britannica 3 seems well aware of the
artistic revolution in process, but cautious about
acknowledging the work of many directly engaged
in it. It ventures to make value judgments, but they
are mostly implicit and free of controversy or
contentiousness in spirit or tactics. Its function, 1
conclude, is to record and relate, not to advocate
or predict.
THEATRICALITY: A STUDY OF CONVENTION
IN THE THEATRE AND IN SOCIAL LIFE. By
Elizabeth Burns. New York: Harper & Row,
1972; pp. 246. $6.00 cloth; Harper Torchbooks, 1973. $3.75 paper.

In the past, much of the writing about the

history and theory of theatre has borrowed the
familiar tools and techniques of the literary critic.
The result has usually been an emphasis on the
performance as an extension of the script rather
than as an event in its own right and on the
so-called "great periods" of theatre-meaning, for
the most part, "great periods" of dramatic literature. Over the years, however, a small group of
scholars and writers from the social sciences have
begun to suggest quite different approaches to the
study of theatrical performance, approaches less
concerned with traditional judgments about
theatre as art than with the connections between
script, audience, and actor, between various performance forms, and between performance and the
society that produces it.
Some of the most innovative studies of theatre
in recent years have been by sociologists. Most of
these studies are in French and are little known in
the United States. With the appearance of Elizabeth Burns's Theatricality, however, a major sociological work on theatre in English has become
readily available to American students and
scholars. Theatricality, subtitled A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life, represents

an intriguing and important application of

sociological technique to the study of perform ance.
Specifically, Burns creates her approach by
borrowing from three disciplines: the history of
theatre and drama (using especially the historical
writing of Glynne Wickham, M. C. Bradbrook, and
Richard Southern); micro-sociology or the
"Chicago school tradition," of which Erving Goffman is perhaps the exponent best known to
students of theatre; and the field within microsociology known as the sociology of theatre, an
area in which Jean Duvignaud's La Sociologie du
Theitre and L'Acteur are the most familiar works.
Against this background Miss Burns explores
the idea of theatricality, both in the theatre itself
and in the broader society that produces theatre.
As the subtitle of the book suggests, she places at
the center of her study the conventions of performance and of everyday life, investigating their
similarities, their differences, and their interconnections, using as her chief source material the
development of the English theatre and English
society from the Middle Ages to the present day.
The first half of Theatricality is devoted to a
view of the evolution of dramatic convention out
of ritual and ordinary social life and to an

This content downloaded from 84.246.29.132 on Thu, 11 Jun 2015 12:42:57 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

135

/ BOOKSIN REVIEW

exploration of what Burns feels to be the two

major-and closely related-conventional forms. By
"rhetorical" conventions,
she suggests, the
audience is persuaded to accept the validity of
theatrical characters and situations, and by
"authenticating" conventions performers create an
illusion of verisimilitude on stage.
So-called rhetorical conventions, Burns says,
"cover both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication, including the demeanor, gestures and
movements of the actors as well as staging, settings
and timing-all those things that contribute to
understanding of the whole dramatic situation."
From the beginning, she says, rhetorical conventions
have been used for the purpose of "defining a play
as a play, of separating it from the current of ordinary life by what amounts to proclamation-a ceremonially composed pronouncement introducing
this special sort of event." Authenticating conventions, on the other hand, are "those which prevail
for the interaction of the actors as characters in the
play. They "model" social conventions in use at a
specific time and in a specific place or milieu. The
modes of speech, demeanour, and action that are
explicit in the play have to carry conviction and
imply a connection with the world of human
action of which the theatre is only a part. These
conventions suggest a total and external code of
values and norms of conduct from which the
speech and action of the play are drawn. Their
function is, therefore, to authenticate the play."
Taken together, these two kinds of conventions
create a series of constraints-constraints which
amount to a "code of rules for the transmission of
specific beliefs, attitudes and feelings in terms of
organized social behavior."
Having established the two-part nature of
theatricality, in the second half of the book Burns
explores the way in which rhetorical and authenticating conventions are used both by the actor and
by the individual in ordinary life. In the light of
her earlier conclusions, she also considers such
aspects of performance as the function of the
audience and the drama critic, and the nature of
acting as an occupation. Her approach to the study
of the actor presents a clear example of Burns's
uncommon and important method of examining
performance. The actor is studied not so much as
artist as "the living embodiment of shared social
typifications... a player of socially determined
roles, and thus a repository of the reifications of
symbolic types into which we thrust ourselves and
others in order to dispose of unwanted social
realities, a public performer and utterer of acts to
which different private meanings may be attached,
and thus a modeler of self images and a revealer of

possible reactions to them, an interpreter of

archetypal cultural representatives, and thus an
audience-critic of the identity we seek to establish."
The language of the passage is difficult, but the
point of view about the function of the actor
demands our attention. In much the same way the
whole of Theatricality is difficult and sometimes
opaque. But it is an extremely important book,
well worth the serious attention of American
theatre students and scholars for its conclusions
and, perhaps more importantly, as a model for
fresh approaches to the study of performance by
theatre theorists and historians.
BROOKS McNAMARA
New York University

THE

COMPLETE COMEDIES OF TERENCE:

MODERN
VERSE
TRANSLA TIONS.
By
Palmer Bovie, Constance Carrier, and Douglass
Parker. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U.P.,
1974; pp. xxi + 398. $12.50.

Terence remains, and probably will remain, one

of the great unproduced dramatists. In his lifetime
he enjoyed the dangerous blessing of independent
means. As a subsidised playwright, he was able to
stand aloof from the hurly-burly of the commercial
theatre; and although this prevented him from
falling to the level of hack writing that characterizes Plautus at his worst, it also cut him off
from the vivid, immediate theatricality of Plautus
at his best. He was treasured by later Romans as a
stylist, by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as
a moralist, and by later centuries as a schoolbook-until
Victorian morality supervened, substituting Caesar's Gallic Wars for the Andria and
Phormio; and this rarefied atmosphere has continued to surround his plays, as if he were on the
fringe of the theatre rather than at its heart, a
by-product rather than a contributor.
Terence contributed to his own fate by leading
the Roman theatre in a direction in which it was
not naturally inclined to go. He took the stock
personae and gave them hearts and consciences.
Sons still fool their fathers, in Terence as in
Plautus, and seduce young women, and marry
socially improbable partners; but they worry about
it, and are tormented by their consciences. There is
an almost Chekhovian sense of tears amid the
laughter. Sensibility replaces vitality. We have had
our musical based on Platus. What, one wonders,
would such a work based on Terence be like?

This content downloaded from 84.246.29.132 on Thu, 11 Jun 2015 12:42:57 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions