Before turning to Shakespeare I want to situate these analogies both in the historical debate about the Renaissance and in the theoretical one about representation.¹⁶ Let me begin by considering briefly the concept of "theatricality" employed in this discussion and to indicate some of its provenances in literary theory. In a series of books and articles on Shakespeare's theater, Robert Weimann has argued for a new kind of theatrical authority in the Renaissance centering on the tension between traditional Aristotelian mimesis and a more subjective form of imitation rooted in a general self-consciousness about representation itself, specifically the actors' representation of the act of appropriation.¹⁷ In his earlier work Weimann examines the distribution of space in the late-medieval theater inherited by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, a division that permitted players to break with the mimetic illusion of character and foreground theatrical productivity, that is, "representivity" itself, as a praxis including both actors and audience in the process of creating meaning.¹⁸ Weimann grounds his argument in his own and other scholars' researches into the material conditions of the Elizabethan theater, situated as it was on the margins of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London.¹⁹ But his theoretical model of the theatrical transaction is based on the Marxist concept of Aneignung or "appropriation," a reciprocal process whereby the modern bourgeois subject is constituted precisely in the act of making the conditions of his productive labor, in the cultural as well as the material sphere, his own. Applied to literary history, Aneignung is "both a text-appropriating … [and] a world-appropriating activity," which, "even while it precedes ideology and signification, is not closed to the acts of the historical consciousness of the signifying subject."²⁰

Appropriation in this sense clearly transcends the theater. In the fluid social conditions of Elizabethan England, Weimann argues, such acts of "self-authorizing appropriation of language and its media of circulation" reflect a crisis in the authority of traditional vehicles of representation, including literary genres. Out of this crisis is generated a revision of the "modes and aims of representation." Rising in opposition to traditional mimesis, in which actors on the stage transparently represent mythological or historical characters, or narrators in fiction operate as neutral conduits for well-established stories and their meanings, the new mode of appropriation presupposes a representation "not reducible to its mimetic dimension." Instead,"representation (in this historicizing sense) appears as an agency of production and performance, in that it involves such performative action on the level of what is representing as cannot adequately be defined as a mere 'reflection' of the historically given circumstances and ideologies which the act of representation helps to transcribe."²¹ Weimann is careful to acknowledge that such appropriative acts "do not serve the free expression of subjectivity" but are conditioned by "discursive usage."²² Nevertheless, in his quarrel with the poststructuralist tendency to deny all subjectivity in the name of a rigid synchronicity that dissolves representation in "signification" and reduces writing to a subjectless textuality, he locates the limited freedom of the author in this diachronic and "dialogic (or theatrical) dimension in discourse."²³ In the social and historical context of the Renaissance, then, theatricality may be provisionally identified with the (individual or collective) interpretive axis that intersects with language conceived as a fixed and hegemonic system autonomously producing new cultural meanings. In the context of current academic debates, it functions as a counterforce to "textuality," suggesting how appropriating agents query, contest, and sometimes subvert established ideologies, thus effecting cultural change.²⁴

This fruitful contamination of textuality by theatricality is exploited by Marie Maclean's performative approach to narrative, which stresses the function of "the reader as spectator." Tracing the traditional enmity of theater and narrative to their common origin—oral narrative at some point splits into theatrical performance and written narrative, ultimately the silent discourse of narrative in print—she identifies the "double nature of speculation, the double bind of spectatorship." By this she means that, like the play-audience, the reader is "tempted by the specularity, the mirroring of identification" with a character in the text addressed directly by the narrator, while retaining the awareness that spectatorship—that is, "the realization that one is a spectator"—entails "critical estrangement, and with it the penalties and pleasures of speculation."²⁵ For our purposes Maclean's work is most helpful when she comes closest to the psychoanalytic categories of reading, especially those of Jacques Lacan and RenéGirard. Here Maclean focuses on reading as transgression. Reflecting on the excluded reader and the enforced reader, and their various revenges on their violation by the text, she observes: "Since the reader is always an outsider to the consensus of the text, just as the audience is always an outsider to the consensus of the stage, we must ask if he or she is not always a transgressor, a breaker of boundaries and an intruder into the world of the other. Since the reader's desire is always the desire of the other, which wants what the other wants as much as it wants what the other is, and can never attain either, it must always involve the transgression implicit in the desire of the other." Citing Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, she proposes that to "understand the reader's part in the production of the text" we must analyze his/her "libidinal input," a task she undertakes with respect to Baudelaire.²⁶

The view of historians and cultural critics that theatricality is a corrective to textuality is reenforced by theater semioticians.²⁷ In the present context, what is significant about their approach is the attempt to apply the narratological theory of the récit (Propp, Bremond), and specifically actantial theory (Greimas), to the theater. Especially fruitful in this regard is the work of Anne Ubersfeld.²⁸ If Maclean posits the reader-as-spectator, Ubersfeld's anatomy of the theatrical transaction as a text foregrounds the role of the spectatoras-reader. For her, theatrical discourse is never constative: it "says" nothing about the real, only the imaginary within the mise-en-scène; hence, "the discourse of the play-wright makes sense only as theatricality." In this view theatricality implies a lack of textual subjectivity: the one who speaks is always a personage, embedded in a complex communicative network whose author is always at best a destinateur (addresser) and whose address to the spectator/reader/destinataire (addressee) is diffuse, dialogic, and plurisubjective.²⁹

Ubersfeld devotes special attention to the role of the spectator in the theatrical transaction. In a sequel to her first essay she reiterates a structuralist/semiotic "reading" of theater with a view toward the spectator, analyzing both représentation théâtrale³⁰ and représentation comme texte (ES 27) on the discursive, narrative, and semic levels (ES 37). Like the reader of written texts, the spectator is "the coproducer of the spectacle" (ES 304), both before, in that it is aimed at her response, and after, in that, even more than the reader, she has the task of making sense of it—that is, sense happens only in her (ES 305f.).³¹ As either a witness or the subject of a communication witnessed by others, the spectator is implicated in an "always triangular" relation with various combinations of actor, character, or other spectators.³² One may quarrel with these particular paradigms, but however this triangulation of theatrical discourse is configured, "the public is the guarantor at one and the same time of the reality of the scenic figuration and of the non-verity of the scenic fiction" (ES 311). Ubersfeld's semiotics supports and implements Weimann's historicism in treating representation as involving equally the represented and the representing. Her narratological analysis gives a specific theoretical spin to the way in which "the totality of the theatrical representation is inscribed in a psychosocial consensus" (ES 311).

Ubersfeld's understanding of the position of the theater spectator, like Maclean's view of the reader-spectator's role as the third party or "outsider" in reading, evokes the familiar Freudian hermeneutic. In his book on jokes, Freud's interest in the role of the "third person" is related primarily to that of the first, the aggressor in a particular kind of social transaction. Freud distinguishes jokework from dreamwork by its social dimension, but ultimately the apparently social nature of the joke triangle—sexual aggressor, target, audience—projects the internal economy of the subject: "The process in the joke's first person produces pleasure by lifting inhibition and diminishing local expenditure; but it seems not to come to rest until, through the intermediary of the interpolated third person, it achieves general relief through discharge."³³ In short, the third person is a catalyst, a cipher or instrument in a circuit of exchange. As such, it is related to the analyst in the transference, a necessary intermediary between the subject and his unconscious. Since it is axiomatic that the subject cannot directly access his unconscious—the residue of his true "self"—through the dreamwork, in the joke as in the dream the execution of the psychic economy by which the inhibitions and potential neuroses resulting from this ban may be overcome always demands this mediation by a third person. As a "reader" of his self, the subject can be constituted only by way of the circuitous interpolation of an other. He can recognize his desire only as the desire of another. His pleasure must be received at the other's hands.³⁴

It is this specular element in Freud's "theater of the unconscious" that inspires Lacan's adaptation of Freudian theatricality. In adopting the common economic element of Freud's "dreamwork" and "jokework" Lacan interprets Freud's Darstellbarkeit (representability) in explicitly theatrical terms as an "égards aux moyens de la mise en scène" (consideration of the means of staging). Emphasizing the element of distortion (Entstellung, or dis-placement), Lacan foregrounds "the intervention of a third party—which Freud calls 'censorship'—in the figuration of the dream, a party that plays the role both of spectator and of judge in the dream-representation."³⁵ Here again, the explicitly theatrical feature is the triadic structure of dreamer, third party, and addressee, in Lacan's version accompanied by a shift in emphasis from a phonetic to a "scriptural" notation of the dream. In a note explaining how Lacan's theory of enunciation goes beyond the notion of text, Samuel Weber writes: "What in Lacan's writings takes the place of textuality is theatricality, and in this respect it anticipates Derrida's own 'pragrammatological turn': each utterance localized in the text, 'in its place,' is determined, post facto as it were—and in this, very much like the dream—by addresses that it did not necessarily intend." Weber links this theatricality with Freud's comments on the third person "upon which the joke depends, and which endows it with its social character."³⁶

Psychoanalytic theory, then, supports the semiology of the subject in foregrounding the essential triangularity of both theatrical and textual representation. Both theories, moreover, usefully supplement and revise the materialism of Weimann's account of Renaissance appropriation by narrowing if not annihilating the gap between theatricality and textuality. For Weimann (as for Keir Elam), theatrical performance always transcends textuality: the "performance text" includes but supersedes the "dramatic text."³⁷ Hence the representationality of a Shakespeare play dissolves into a "posttextual future" beyond the play's closure, based on the supplantation (and supplementation) of represented authority in the text's fiction by "the authority of the actor … [which] is not that of the text but that of performance itself."

Buttressed by the findings of semiotic and psychoanalytic theorists, we may reasonably assume that in looking at nondramatic representations we can identify mediating elements of theatricality in printed texts analogous to those of Weimann's plataea-occupying mediators between fiction and audience.³⁸ Such features would serve the same function of decentering the neoclassical subject as is achieved by Shakespeare's actors as self-conscious representers, or later by Brecht's "alienation effect."³⁹ Thus Montaigne, for example, is explicitly committed to a nonrepresentational version of mimesis: the unimpeachable flow of time and corresponding multiplicity of perspectives that constitute his shifting "I" contest the representational authority based on a textual monologism parallel to the fixed perspective of High Renaissance art. Specifically, his stagings of audience intrusion into locus-like fictions break the representational illusion of textuality by shifting the reader's consciousness from the represented (fiction) to the act of representing and to the representing agent within the text. Theatricality thus challenges textuality; the dramatic-fictional text becomes a "performance text." In this respect, Montaigne's representations of representation anticipate the metatheatricality of Shakespeare less than a generation later.