Christy Desmet, Department of English
Graduate Student Association
May 16, 1997
This is a Faculty Research Grant at the University of Georgia to complete an article that was begun on a previous grant (for a different purpose!) and which needs only a few specific archival trips to complete an article. The following is the actual copy for the grant.
Within academia, we generally treat Shakespeare's plays as texts, written documents bounded within the covers of a printed book and intended for the delight and instruction of solitary readers. Critics of the theater, however insist that these documents are scripts, intended for an actor who interprets their cues to an audience. The question is: are Shakespeare's plays texts to be read with the kind of attention we give to other literature or are they road maps, indicating the practical choices of a sixteenth-century playwright and his theatrical collaborators and suggesting other choices for contemporary actors and directors? This critical debate has never been resolved: as a look at the SHAKSPER discussion list will show, critics engage in this dispute on a regular basis. The theoretical status of "reading" Shakespeare was also the subject of my first book, Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity. In a further examination of Shakespearean character, I hope to clarify some theoretical issues on the subject by examining a historical phenomenon that blurs the boundary between reading and acting in an interesting way. This phenomenon is the nineteenth-century public reading of Shakespeare, in which the plays are simultaneously texts and scripts. They are read and performed at the same time.
Specifically, I am analyzing the public readings given by members of the Kemble family. Fanny Kemble, who perfects the public reading, is the heir to a family tradition. Her actor father, Charles Kemble, not only did public readings, but also edited a reading text of Shakespeare designed for intimate family gatherings. Fanny's aunt, the famous actress Sarah Siddons, also did public readings, and after her retirement conducted private performances for friends within the intimacy of her own drawing room. But while both of the elder Kembles were important to the development of this art form, Fanny was its best practitioner and its best theorist.
Kemble's view of the act of reading involves a complex relationship between emotional
participation and dramatic performance. In a sonnet "To Shakespeare," she offers the striking
image of Shakespeare himself eavesdropping on Kemble's "rehearsal" of his text in what
seems to be a private setting. "Oft, when my lips I open to rehearse," Kemble writes,
Thy glorious spirit seems to mine so near,
That suddenly I tremble as I read--
Thee an invisible auditor I fear:
Oh, if it might be so, my master dear!
For Fanny Kemble, the act of reading Shakespeare brings private experience into the public space. Even when Kemble is sitting alone and reading to herself, Shakespeare himself eavesdrops on the performance. In an unpublished letter at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Kemble also represents herself, as a recently retired actress, eavesdropping on the reading of an amateur ladies' reading club. In both cases, the private becomes public. To put it another way, within the event of a Shakespeare reading, the individual is constructed through drama and exists only as a dramatic character--an actress in a private setting. Erving Goffman, whose Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was first published in 1959, defines the theatricality of everyday life in terms of a fluid relationship between backstage and front- stage. Life becomes theater when backstage activities come forward and are framed as "front- stage" events. While Kemble turns private acts of reading into dramatic events, she also makes public reading and acting more intimate than other performers could. Her audiences record their sense of identification with Shakespeare but also with Kemble herself. To them, Kemble becomes the (largely male) characters that she personates. This is what makes her public readings of Shakespeare significant in a theoretical way, transcending their importance as historical curiosities.
The centerpiece of this project is the multi-volume edition of Hamner's Shakespeare owned and used by Fanny Kemble, which contains Kemble's directions for trimming the plays for public performance and marginal notes addressing critical issues. This edition of Shakespeare is owned by the University of Georgia and is kept in the Hargrett Rare Books Room. Gerald Kahane, whose seminal essay on this topic provides the starting point for my own investigation, suggests that Kemble used this reading edition of Shakespeare for her 1849-50 reading tour in America (Kahane, "Fanny Kemble Reads Shakespeare: Her First American Tour, 1849-50," Theatre Survey 24 (1983): 77-98). To date, I have analyzed closely Kemble's cuts and marginal comments for Othello and several other plays and have made two conference presentations analyzing the relationship of Kemble's interpretation of Othello to prevailing critical opinion of the time and to her own discussion of racial issues in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. My preliminary research suggests that Kemble, an actress who presented Shakespeare's plays from a woman's perspective and in a woman's voice, saw the plays and their characters differently than the predominantly male critical establishment did. Kemble was more aware, for instance, of violence against women and of racial stereotypes.
Among public readers of Shakespeare, Fanny Kemble was unique in her insistence on presenting all the plays to her public. Thus, she provides not only a perspective on the development of feminist Shakespearean criticism in the nineteenth century, but a broad view of the relative status of each play within criticism during the period. Although Kemble did not mark heavily and annotate every play, she did work on and perform each of the plays. Based on my previous experience, I estimate that I will need 20 full days to read through Kemble's markings and notations in the Hargrett Rare Book Room. Examining the plays is painstaking and time-consuming work. I also need to research more thoroughly habits of reading, both public and private, in the nineteenth century. For these reasons, I am asking for salary for summer 1997. Without this support, I would not be able to finish the necessary research for this project.
I have been doing primary research on this article for some time, and in this grant ask not only for summer salary, but also for travel monies to complete my research. In the fall of 1993, I spent a quarter at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I read through the Folger's rich collection of Fanny Kemble's correspondence. (The Folger has the greatest collection of Kemble materials in the United States.) In this grant I am asking for travel funds to return to the Folger in order to fulfill four goals: 1)to review correspondence that will be incorporated into a major article on Kemble's public readings. I have read through and transcribed most of the relevant letters. However, because none of these materials can be xeroxed and because Kemble's hand is notoriously difficult, checking and correcting my transcriptions is imperative; 2)to read 75 letters that I did not have time to review in my last visit and to consult the Folger's important and unique Shakespeare Notebooks for relevant materials. I glanced through the notebooks in my last days at the Folger and I know that there are very significant and useful sketches of Kemble in various Shakespearean roles; 3)to review the cuts and annotations in Sarah Siddons's reading copy of Hamner's Shakespeare, which is also at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Folger has made for me a microfilm of Siddons's Hamner that I have been working from, but I will also need to review the original documents for the final version of this essay. In some cases the microfilm is hard to read, since Siddons's markings are in pencil. Furthermore, it is easier to tell Siddons's editorial process from the original. You can tell which cuts were made first, second, etc. Kemble modeled her own readings on those of her famous relatives, and from the available documents, it is much easier to reconstruct Siddons's mental processes than Fanny Kemble's; and 4)to read through the reading edition of Shakespeare produced by Fanny's father Charles Kemble for the consumption of families. The Folger owns an excellent copy of the book. To accomplish all of these aims, I need two weeks at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The second research trip that I need to take is to the Furness Collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Furness, the editor of the Variorum Shakespeare, was a close friend and correspondent of Fanny's. Based on the letters in the Folger Collection, the correspondence between Furness and Kemble is very relevant to my project. She discussed theoretical and theatrical issues with Furness that she did not discuss with anyone else. I need two weeks at the University of Pennsylvania's Furness Collection. I would like to take both trips in the early portion of summer quarter.
Finally, I would like to make a public presentation of my research at the University of Georgia. I have already discussed doing a lecture/performance for the Women Studies's Brown Bag series in Spring quarter, with **** in the role of Fanny Kemble. **** fee for rehearsal and performance would be $250. I think that such a lecture/performance would be of interest to both the university and Athens community, and would have the added virtue of bringing to public attention a rare book resource of our university library.
Currently, many scholars are interested in Shakespeare's cultural function, particularly within nineteenth-century Britain and America. But to my knowledge, no one else is working extensively on the public Shakespeare reading. Even the primary materials have not received the attention they deserve. For instance, I happened upon Siddons's reading copy of Hamner's Shakespeare almost by accident. The multi-volume work was listed in the "Former Owners" catalogue, but was not otherwise noted. The book was important because Siddons owned it, not because it reflects her artistry. This project also has broader significance to literary study. Because Shakespeare has always provided a cultural location for discussions of the nature of subjectivity and the cultural status of the "individual," my examination of the public Shakespeare reading is relevant to ongoing discussions about the nature of selfhood. Thus this project has both a theoretical and historical dimension. It seeks to reconstruct a specific cultural institution, the public reading, that has not been discussed adequately in the literature on drama, to make a contribution to the discussion of Shakespearean character, and to contribute as well to a broader theoretical discussion of the nature of selfhood. Finally, and perhaps most important, this project analyzes and shows the importance of a rare material owned by the University of Georgia Library.
"Saturated With Shakespeare" will be a substantial essay that I will submit to Shakespeare Quarterly. It will also constitute the basis for the first third of my next book, entitled Reading Shakespeare's Plots, which will be a companion work to Reading Shakespeare's Characters and will analyze the historical phenomena of Shakespearean readings and study groups, of forgeries of Shakespeare plays, and of adaptations of Shakespeare in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.
I would prefer to talk to people individually about how to prepare a budget. You can contact me at cdesmet@uga.cc.uga.edu.
Further developments of this project, which range beyond the American readings to a more general consideration of acting and public readings within the Kemble family, will involve archival research in England, specifically at the British Library and Covent Garden Theatre. I will be applying for these funds through the Philosophical Society and the NEH's fund for Humanities Projects in Libraries and Archives.