Richard Preiss: Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre.

• George Oppitz-Trotman

At one point in her magnificent (and still under-read) book Hegel contra Sociology, Gillian Rose concisely articulates the problem with Hegel’s interpretation of Hellenic art: ‘He derives the social preconditions for an art-form [...] from instances of that form’. Richard Preiss alleges the same basic circularity against many historians of the Early Modern English clown: ‘When we do theatre history through playbooks, we are looking through an artefact of theatre history, a filter biased toward the values that constructed it – and designed to make that bias undetectable, to naturalize its representation’ (p. 6). He levels a similar criticism against recent discussions of the Tudor audience: ‘Recent treatments of early modern audiences have [...] [preferred] to recover theatrical response via the very dramatic texts by which it is assumed to be already controlled’ (p. 24); and against Bruster and Weimann’s analysis of prologues (p. 61). This insight forms the basis for Preiss’ complex attempt to theorize ‘the clown’s migration into [...] textual space’ (p. 11), the recession of his ‘embattled self-possession as performer [...] into terminal textuality’ (p. 172). For Preiss, the clown ‘did not so much disappear’ – as a result of the author’s alleged emergence as the locus of theatrical authority – ‘as theoretically dis - integrate’, ‘seed[ing] the new, more sharply defined production categories around which modern theatre would coalesce: the author, and the actor’ (p. 11).