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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften - Challenges for the Humanities
- Sprache: Englisch
This book seeks to elaborate a theory of 'troping' that expands thepurview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Johnson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern and postmodern performance spaces such as the New Globe Theatre. In a dozen readings of early modern theatre it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times.
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Russell West-Pavlov
Heterotropic Theatres
Shakespeare and After
with contributions by Keyvan Allahyari, Anya Heise-von der Lippe and Pavan Kumar Malreddy
Umschlagabbildung: Yeoville ridge, Johannesburg, 2014. Photo © Lutho Mtongana, 2014. Permission to reproduce granted by the photographer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783381133222
© 2025 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen
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Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]
ISSN 2568-4019
ISBN 978-3-381-13321-5 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-381-13323-9 (ePub)
Contents
PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now?’
The cover of the book you have just opened features a photograph of a streetside wall in inner-city Johannesburg. The shot was taken by Lutho Mtongana in the district of Yeoville, on one of the ridges that rib the cityscape of the gold-reef conurbation on the highveld. That brick-and-concrete slab wall is emblazoned with a two-metre-high painted slogan: ‘How goes the world, sir, now?’ The message is boldly enunciated by an anonymous speaker – by whom, we cannot say – to an equally anonymous addressee: for the street is apparently deserted, save for the invisible photographer who has pressed the shutter release.
This apparent anonymity notwithstanding, the well-informed passer-by might realize that this line has been snipped from the script of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (2.4.21)1 – and then pasted (or painted) onto a rough-cast wall at the urban heart of this erstwhile settler-colony. Cutting and pasting is an ambivalent operation at the best of times (Compagnon 1979). It tears an inscription out of its context, cutting it loose from its original organic context, leaving torn edges and loose threads dangling in the air – but glues it into a new textile fabric where the stray tendrils may soon interweave with the warp and weft of the new tissue, however rebarbative or bland its fibres may appear. And in that process of violent displacement and grafting-back-on, surprising synergies emerge, turning the original meaning on its head and releasing hidden semiotic potentials as it undergoes an almost alchemical transmutation in the new environment (see for example Anzieu 1985: 64-5).
Just such a process can be seen at work in the apparently immobile scene that decorates the cover of this book. And in describing that process in these prefatory pages, I will summarize, in brief, the argument of the chapters that subsequently follow.
At first glance, the image on the cover appears to evince a structuralist object lesson, laying out the rudiments of semiotic structuralism on an urban whiteboard (see for instance Gadet 1990: 92-6; Hawkes 1977: 26-8; Rey-Debove 1979: 109, 143; Saussure 1981: 122-31). That lesson consists of two main precepts. First, as a speaker utters a sentence, each word must be chosen from a list of mutually substitutable possibilities: ‘I’ or ‘She’ or ‘You’, say, to start with. Second, each selection must then be successively connected in a sequence of grammatically coherent stepping-stones: ‘see’ or ‘hit’ or ‘love’, for example; then, perhaps, ‘you’ or ‘him’ or ‘the child’.
This hybrid operation of making a series of choices, and then incrementally linking them to one other as one speaks, is the double operation out of which meaningful speech is constituted. The intersection of the successive choices made on the ‘paradigmatic axis’ (the ‘axis of selection’) with the step-by-step joining-up of those elements on the ‘syntagmatic axis’ (the ‘axis of combination’) is regarded by semiotics as the fundamental process by which linguistic meaning is created in communicative contexts. Other meaningful socio-semiotic statements also work in this way: for example, sartorial expressions of selfhood are constituted by a set of choices along the paradigmatic axes of ‘headwear’ (hat, headscarf, baseball cap…), ‘neckwear’ (scarf, tie…), ‘tops’ (t-shirt, jumper, jacket…), ‘legwear’ (jeans, tights, shorts…), and ‘footwear’ (shoes, boots, sandals…) respectively, which are then assembled into fitting combinations along the syntagmatic axis of the body from head to toe (for cognate approaches see Barthes 1957b, 1967: 159-62, 182-8). Famously, Freud claimed that the language of dreams worked with a similar process of condensation (based on equivalence on the paradicmatic axis) and displacement (based on association on the syntagmatic axis) (Freud 1989 [1917]: 277-310; [1917]: 209-26).
Just such a double, intersecting process can be seen at work in this ridge-top location in Johannesburg. Two principal elements in the photo bear out this claim.
First, the line from Macbeth is isomorphic with the course of the wall, running parallel to the wind-swept, dusty street. The wall, with its segmented construction, appears to mimic the syntactic chain that constitutes the sentence. The quintessential ‘subject-verb-object’ structure of English is the ur-form of the additive construction (s+v+o) on the syntagmatic axis of the utterance – the axis of combination. On this photo, though, the syntax displays the archaic order of Early Modern English, with the subject (‘the world’) following the verb (‘goes’); there is no object, but the sentence begins with an interrogative qualifier (‘How?’), and ends with a temporal deictic (‘now’) and a marker of apostrophic address (‘sir’). Fittingly, nevertheless the respective words are assigned to successive segments of the post-and-slab wall. The segmentation of the wall gives concrete form to the segmentation of the sentence.
Second, further away in the background is the arrow-like Joburg Telkom Tower in the inner-city precinct of Hillbrow. Situated a kilometre-and-a-half away, its distance intimates the work done by the paradigmatic axis in the semiotic business of sentence-making. The paradigmatic axis is the axis of selection, the operation of choice that determines which word, of all the possible options that could be used at any given juncture of the syntagmatic chain, will be used by the speaker. This ‘vertical’ list might be thought to be figured by the respective sections of the tower, topped by the six storeys of the upper sections, including an erstwhile revolving panorama restaurant (now closed to the public). But the paradigmatic axis is a virtual list, visible only as the ghostly trace of everything the enunciator has not said. All of its elements except one are manifest exclusively in absentia. While the syntagmatic axis is directly tangible in the chain of words on the page, the paradigmatic axis consists of possibilities that have been rejected, virtualities not actualized (etymologically, the word comes from the Greek παρά, ‘beside, beyond’, and δείκνυμι, ‘to show or point’: the one visible manifestation of the paradigmatic axis points beyond itself to all that remains latent and unrealized). The Telkom Tower’s verticality, banished to the background of the photo, at the point where it vanishes into the line of the horizon, can be said to stand for this invisible list. The manner in which it recedes into the shadowy periphery of the image is a visual translation of the absence of the options potentially available but not employed, the spectral non-presence of all the possibilities excluded from the frame of what is.
The cover image from Yeoville thus offers a visual analogy for the semiotic crossing of the axes of selection and combination out of which ‘phrastic’ or ‘phrasal’ meaning emerges. Its question about the way of the world, the progress of events, can thus also be read as a self-reflexive query about the manner in which those events are represented. Via its performative instantiation of the step-by-step creation of a meaningful utterance, a played-out enunciation of the query ‘How goes the sentence?’, the inscription asks question about the way we articulate the way of the world. But the interrogative form and the honorific address also imply that such meaning-making never takes place in a vacuum. The creation of meaning is always dialogical, caught between a sender and a receiver, not to mention all the other collective actants that may be at work in such public situations of communication.
It is at precisely this juncture, however, that one might notice that the ideal semiotic crossing that appears to be manifest in the photograph is a chimera. The semiotic intersection as I’ve described it above is in fact a mirage. It radically falsifies the way the two features in the photograph really function in relation to one another.
In the context of post-apartheid urban South Africa, in fact, the wall is only superficially a ‘horizontal’ axis. In reality it’s a vertical structure that serves to keep intruders out, in a social context of extremes of poverty and wealth where violent crime is rife (Harrison, Gotz, Todes and Chris Wray, eds. 2015; Kruger 2014; Murray 2011). The wall’s primary function is to select and exclude. (This defensive function is exemplified by a part of the wall that is made of brick rather than concrete slabs, signalling a rupture and subsequent repair. Indeed, a photo of the wall taken by a Johannesburg colleague in 2021 (see page 280 below) showed that the wall had been broken through yet again by that time. The section had been refilled this time with orange bricks. The script was now interrupted: ‘How goes the …. now’). Combination is disrupted along this axis, because combination is precisely not what the wall is there to do. On the contrary, the barrier works as a negating ‘paradigm’ that vitiates potential trajectories before they have even been chosen. It says: don’t even think of stealing what you do not have, don’t even try to enter where you do not belong.
The same inversion can be seen to be at work in the vertical axis of the Telkom Tower. Why does it soar 270 metres into the sky? Precisely in order to overcome the hindrances to communication fostered by the ridges and valleys of the Johannesburg high plateau and the high-rise buildings of the CBD. Despite its verticality its role is properly syntagmatic: it relays messages, combines words and images from across the city, and indeed across the entire country. The role of the Telkom Tower is to guarantee coherent enunciations that then bring people together, via their sending and receiving devices – typified by the ubiquitous cheap mobile phone with a dual SIM-card feature pioneered on the African continent. The ‘horizontal’ function of ‘combination’ is what ensues from the putatively ‘vertical’ and ‘selective’ vector of the telecommunications tower.
What has happened through my switching of the initial opposition between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis in this Johannesburg street-scene?
One possible answer to the question might be found in the enormously influential work of the linguistic and literary polymath Roman Jakobson. Jakobson (1960: 358) famously explained the crucial role played in poetry by its multiplication of rhymes, resonances of meaning, chains of imagery taken from the same semantic field, patterns of overlaid metaphors, or neighbourly metonymies. He illuminates this proliferation of poetic devices via his notorious definition of the ‘poetic function’, which, it turns out, is highly pertinent to the working of this Johannesburg cityscape. Jakobson posits that the ‘poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the [paradigmatic] axis of selection into the [syntagmatic] axis of combination’ (emphasis in original). In other words, semantic equivalences of the sort one would find in the list of possible choices at any given point in the utterance (i.e. interchangeable, cognate options on the paradigmatic axis) are transposed into similarities, echoes, alliterations, or even, for example, into the iambic regularity of metre: ‘How góes the wórld, sir, nów.’ Thus the invisible equivalences of ‘words not spoken’ are made concrete in the visible, and above all audible equivalences of poetic devices that run parallel to and intensify the extant connections of syntactic structures.
The Johannesburg wall appears to mimic this projective process in its very material construction and visual iconicity: the vertical stacks of concrete slabs constitute the identical sequences of ‘panels’ between the concrete fence posts. The ‘paradigmatic’ piles of horizontal slabs, looking for all the world like a list, literally make up the ‘syntagmatic’ fabric of the horizontal fenceline, held in place as they are by the posts with their tongue-and-groove construction. The verticality of the layers of slabs is swivelled (or projected, in Jakobson’s turn of phrase) into the horizontality of the regularly-spaced fence-pots. Only in one panel, where the wall has been broken down and amateurishly filled in with badly-laid orange bricks, is there a hiatus in the sequence. But even this literal caesura does not disturb the run of the rhythm: ‘How góes the … nów.’ Even urban decay seems, at first glance, not to disturb the projection of the paradigmatic axis into the syntagmatic.
But as we noted above, the Yeoville image does not merely swivel the elements of the visual cartography; it flips them completely. This Johannesburg wall separates, rather than joining; and the Telkom tower forges linkages, guarantees tele-communication, rather than making choices whose alternatives exist only in absentia. So what we in fact see is not the 90-degree swivel from the axis of equivalence onto the axis of combination, but something much more powerful: a 180-degree backflip that keeps going beyond the quarter turn to a complete inversion. For the vertical stack of slabs is made of horizontally laid elements; and the vertical posts form a row of standing-stones which in concert convert the swivel of the vertical into the horizontal back into the vertical again. The 90-degree projection of the syntactic into the paradigmatic cannot be contained, so that the swing tips past the 90-degree axis, until it has gyrated round to 180 degrees, reversing the relationship.
In this Johannesburg panorama, paradigmatic and syntagmatic are now in reversed positions relative to one another. And this reversal has real cognates in the everyday urban politics of the Global South megalopolis.
The syntagmatic function (that of the fence as boundary and border) now chooses and rejects and excludes according to a paradigm of rich and poor dominated by a mode of ‘neoliberalism with Southern characteristics’ (Prashad 2014: 145). Even attempts to break down that stratified, hierarchical world of an erstwhile apartheid that has been less ‘abolished’ than ‘privatized’ (Ballard 2005) are quickly recuperated, as the knocked-down and then filled-in section of the wall attests.
Conversely, the paradigmatic axis (the axis of the Telkom tower) brings spatially separated spaces into proximity with one another. Beyond all the pre-programmed outcomes expected by neoliberal capitalism, global communication and its maverick spin-offs generate unexpected encounters, coalitions, accretions, hybridizations, rather than excluding roads-not-taken. The paradigmatic axis facilitates what AbdouMaliq Simone (2022: 9, 13) has described as the city as a space of ‘for experiencing the possibility of being exposed to something unprecedented, caring, and suggestive of new ways of moving and living’, and for ‘find[ing] […] the ability to be an accompaniment to others on their way.’
That tendency to create the new via unexpected, unprecedented proximities is why, in an entirely anachronistic, even catachrestic manner, the Shakespearean tag can only be couched in the interrogative mode: ‘How goes the world, sir, now?’ Alone an interrogative can encompass the as-yet-unknown. Such potentialities lie beyond the reach of the indicative or the affirmative, for these modes or moods are ill-equipped to take the measure of the full gyration. The inversion of paradigmatic and syntagmatic functions in the Johannesburg vista embodies what for early modern commentators was experienced as a ‘world turned upside down’ (Hill 1991 [1972]). The same epithet holds true for the megalopolis of the South (see West-Pavlov 2014).
The turbulent time of the Global South megacity is one that admits of no linear predictability. That’s why the apostrophic mode of the Shakespearean line, alongside its interrogative cast, is not inappropriate for this context. The apostrophic mode does not address an interlocutor who is already present, for all too often, that interlocutor is an impossible other: an urn, a season, a wind, or a mythic being. Rather, the apostrophic mode creates that being, conjures it up in the very act of addressing it (Culler 1977, 2001: 149-71). The ‘sir’ of the Shakespearean tag painted onto a wall in Yeoville is nowhere in sight – until a random passer-by with a camera, or a reader at several removes, wanders in its ambit. The line anticipates upon an unknown future that is of its own making, in concert with the interlocutor which it equally imagines into being. The ‘now’ that the line evokes is the very moment in which the unanticipated encounter crystallizes.
Culler (2015: 125) has pointed out the lyric poetry is closely related to performative speech acts which ‘perform the acts to which they refer’. Poetry thereby constitutes an ‘iterative and iterable performance of an event in the lyric present, in the special “now” of lyric articulation’ (ibid: 226). To that extent, he suggests, lyric poetry can plausibly claim ‘to be itself an event rather than the representation of an event’ (ibid.: 35). But because the event does not exist until it is articulated, and because that articulation will again and again happen anew, lyric poetry is also inevitably and irreducibly a futuristic genre. The line from Macbeth instantiates just such an immanent performativity, thereby bringing a ‘proximate future’ (West-Pavlov 2018: 171-2) into being, and meditating, in its very subject matter (the course of the ‘now’) upon that process of future-making.
But here an important caveat needs to be inserted, one that will inform us more fully about the future-making process evident here on the Joburg highveld. Shakespeare’s words here are not (merely) poetry: they are drama. Just as poetry carries with it its often lost origins in song and oral performance, so too drama always bears the traces of its origin (and ultimate destination) in theatrical staging. Thus, all the claims made above also hold good for theatre, which can be defined as the performance of a fiction in a real time, a real place, embodied in the selves of real actors – a fiction made real in the here and now, as it were. But the realism of theatre is also real in a way that will be new with every successive performance, making theatre too a genre of futurity. If we follow through these ideas to their logical consequences, ‘literature becomes no longer a marginal and derivative linguistic practice, a set of pseudo-assertions, but can claim a place among creative and world-changing modes of language that bring into being that to which they refer or accomplish that of which they speak’ (Culler 2015: 15).
This is, in effect, a neat summary of the modes of theatrical language that the present book describes: modes that it will name by using the notion of ‘turning’. Such language, I claim, ‘turns’ us toward the world, and ‘turns’ the world into something else, something new and unexpected, in a work that I will term ‘heterotropological’.
The idea can be parsed into its three parts: ‘hetero’, connoting the new or unexpected, and at the same-time, the centrifugal and world-centered; ‘tropo-’, meaning etymologically ‘to turn’, semantically (as in a ‘trope’ than turns a meaning into another meaning), but also spatially, that is, to shift away from something and towards something else); and finally, ‘logical’, pertaining to language (logos), and via language, to understanding (logic) as something that emerges out of the turning towards the world and never ceases to intervene in it.
In this context, Shakespeare’s line tells us more about the ways such a theatrical tag might function in the world it turns us towards. Culler’s (2015: vii) analysis, as mentioned above, begins by focusing on the rhetorical mode of ‘apostrophe’ that addresses an interlocutor that is imagined, absent, or even logically impossible. In so doing, he claims, the interlocutor is conjured up, brought into being – or at the very least, a dialogical speech-situation is created by the evocation of an addressee. In this sense, almost all poetry is, strictly speaking, oral poetry. The same would go, then, for theatre, which by nature assumes an audience, even when there is not one. Every drama, as soon as it is even opened as a literary text read by a solitary student or scholar, posits a listener-spectator and thus a context of theatrical performance. By implication, every dramatic text calls into existence a micro-society into which it speaks.
That micro-society is never a given for the drama, even though the latter may seem to pre-exist the moment at which a reader or actor activates it. On the contrary, the micro-society is precisely that which the dramatic text creates by demanding to be read or declaimed. If that micro-society must be evoked from scratch every time the play-text is activated, then that micro-society itself is to be created anew at each performance. Like the text, the micro-society is something constantly open to intervention, to change, to transformation. This transformation does not come from outside to alter something that is inherently stable. Rather, transformation is, in fact, the very condition of society’s existence – the existence of the ‘world’ of the Yeoville Shakespeare tag – as such.
In the Shakespeare text featured on the cover of this book, the fundamental worldly, dynamic ‘addressivity’ (Connor 1996: 10) that inheres in the dramatic text is embodied in the interrogative, apostrophic tenor of the line, ‘How goes the world, sir, now?’ This is manifest in several ways. First, the honorific ‘sir’ makes the presence of the interlocutor explicit, thereby staging the Other as the ratio ultime of the utterance itself. Second, the ‘now’ stages the iterability of the statement: the ‘now’ anchors the statement in a context which is ever changing, rooted exclusively in the social site where the addressee happens to stand. Finally, the ‘now’ therefore refers to the ‘world’ in which the statement is uttered, the concrete here-and-now of the dusty street and the ramshackle brick wall in Johannesburg’s Yeoville district. Indeed, the ongoing decay of the masonry, a decay that produces the lacunary ‘How goes the … now’ a decade after its initial inscription, instantiates the constantly changing nature of the ‘world’ in its successive ‘nows’.
Thus, the photo that adorns the cover of this book is in itself an event. That event cannot but be political, and thus, in aspiration at least, utopian. The event is enacted – and re-enacted, whence its incomplete, utopian dimension – before our eyes. The wall and the tower take, here, the poetic lines from the drama and make it an event in real time. In this way, in a sense, the poetry absorbs the attributes of the place. The active politics of the post-apartheid city – a politics that is ingrained in its very geography, in the very fabric of its districts and suburbs, whether leafy mansion-oases, treeless RDP-townships, or corrugated iron-driftwood-and-cardboard shacklands, and in the high broken-glass-topped walls and electric fences separating them – accrue to the dramatic line, taking it beyond simple poetry towards the performance event.
Even though the street is deserted, this performative event is initiated by the addressivity of the text. That addressivity is not simply witnessed by the photographer who clicks the shutter trigger and thus captures the inscription, nor by the reader who observes it at a second degree. Both the former and the latter are presupposed by the text, created anew, again and again by the text, as instances of a society that can be transformed because it can be addressed by theatre – and by theatrical language – as persistently-recurring, never-concluded event.
INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet)
‘I must to England’, says the protagonist of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as he drags Polonius’ body off the stage at the end of Act 3 (3.4.184). What is Hamlet doing linguistically as he exits the stage space, already departing physically for Denmark’s geographical antipodes on the other side of the North Sea?
For Carrithers and Hardy (1998), Shakespeare at this juncture verbally activates one of what they regard as the four dominant ‘tropes’ of early modern thought: the journey, the theatre, the moment, and ambassadorship. These four ‘commonplaces’ are certainly salient topoi of early modern thought (for instance, on the journey see D’Addario 2007; on emissaries see Charry and Shahani, eds 2009; for the momentary human present as an instantiation of eternity as ‘universal’ history see Raleigh 1964: II, 58). But they are not, at first glance, tropes. Rather, they are topoi. Where is the difference, and why is it important?
A topos is a frequently recurring conceit or ‘commonplace’ (life as a journey, theatrum mundi, the book of the world, and so on), whereas a trope, by contrast, is an operation on language that ‘turns’ a term away from its literal sense (from the Greek τρόπος) and makes a literary creation, a device, out of it. Carrithers and Hardy’s apparent conflation of the two is salutary because it may alert us to the vagaries of the trope over the centuries of its varied theorizations. And their choice of the term of a ‘trope’ for what at first glance appear merely to be a collection of ‘topoi’ opens up possibilities for rescuing the dynamic potential of the ‘trope’ from the debris of discursivity and representationality that has largely obscured its scope and force.
This book seeks to elaborate a theory of ‘troping’ that expands the purview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language and ideology as representation, or even by theories of performativity. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Jonson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern performance spaces such as the New Globe Theatre. In a dozen or so readings of early modern theatre and its ‘afterlives’ it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times.
But what is a heterotropology?
In the definition of Todorov and Ducrot (following Fontanier 1977 [1830, 1827]), a trope is a ‘figure où le mot change de sens’ [‘a figure in which the word changes its meaning’] (Todorov 1967: 99; Ducrot/Todorov 1979: 351). This tends, however, to reduce the work of the tropes to a semantic distinction between ‘sens propre’ and ‘sense figuré’ (literal and figurative meaing), the latter being ‘ce qui s’écarte de cette façon simple de parler’, that is what deviates from so-called plain or literal language (Todorov 1967: 2009). This ‘écart’ (gap or deviation) between literal and aberrant meanings is the main criteria for figurality (Ducrot/Todorov 1979: 349); this ‘écart’, ‘swerve’ or ‘veer’ from strictly referential, proper or conventional language use (Royle 2012; White 1978: 2; see also Serpell 2020; Serres 1977) is the domain of rhetoric. Yet rhetoric itself is a multifarious domain. Significantly, Fontanier (1977 [1830, 1827]: 271-493) qualifies as ‘non-tropes’ forms of figurative language that do not concern a semantic shift, including them as aberrant versions of troped language in his system. To this extent, however, such assessments tend to remain trapped within the realm of semantics, or content – whence for instance Todorov’s interest in the symbol (1977), which reduces the relationship between the literal vehicle and the symbolic tenor to an interval so narrow that they glue together in a relation of identity. At this juncture, the ‘swerve’ has been reduced so far as to leave only the ‘semantics’ and not the ‘morphing’ of the metaphor-like structure in view. The ‘trope’ has effectively been constrained to an immobile symbolic ‘topos’.
The ‘how’ of the various turns – the patterns of deviation, of aberration, of wandering – are what occurs in and fleshes out the nuances of the ‘écart’ that Todorov refers to above, but which in his reading, and that of many others, tends to disappear in the simple opposition between literal and non-literal. The task of this book is to map the way this nefarious process of elision of the trope under the topos has been happily reversed in recent decades – and to unpack this fortunate reversal with reference to a specific artistic and literary genre. The book’s successive chapters trace an incremental shift in the relationships between topos and trope across a series of case studies of early modern theatre, its immediate successors, and their respective afterlives. It seeks to bring the ‘how’ of the tropic turns of language back into the foreground, and, via the vehicle of theatre, which is always far more than mere language – gesture as well as word, for instance (Helbo 1983) – to reposition it at the centre of human practice more generally.
In fact, contrary to what one might initially have expected, this is exactly what is achieved, in a very curious and almost anachronistic manner, by Carrithers and Hardy’s argument cited above. Their claim (1998: 3-4) is that the journey through life from earth to heaven, the moment as an eruption of the eternal into the earthly world, the world as God’s theatre, and the ambassadorship as a spiritual mission in the service of Christ are all complex metaphorical conceits that do far more work than we can easily imagine today. The early modern period was an era deeply steeped in religious sensibilities, tinctured with magic and animism (see for instance Poole 2011), and deeply invested in a mode of concrete analogical thinking (to the point of some commentators speaking of an early modern ‘rage for analogy’: Orlin 1994: 10). This was a world in which everything was connected to everything, albeit in a hierarchical fashion, within a ‘great chain of being’ (Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan, eds 2007; Foucault 1966: 32-59; 2002 [1970]: 19-50; Lovejoy 1957). In this context, these ‘meta-topoi’ should be understood as genuinely functioning as tropes: turnings of things towards each other, and often, into each other. There are at least two reasons why this is so.
First, the ‘meta-topoi’ are cast, at the most general level, in the form of the trope of the metaphor, albeit as conceits (i.e. complex, extended metaphors) that are said to have been so widespread as to have constituted collective ‘habits of thought’ or even more ubiquitous ‘structures of feeling’ (Carrithers and Hardy 1998; Shuger 1990; Williams 1977: 128-35). Precisely because of this ubiquity, however, the extended metaphor tends to gather up into its ambit almost the entirety of domains of life. In this way, it does not merely encompass a multitude of things – it also connects them to one another. The extended metaphor, thus, is not simply a play on words in the world of analogy; rather, it expresses a deeper, perhaps hidden connection between things that transpire to be only superficially distinct or distant from one another. The extended metaphor reveals, in this way, a universe of connections that would have been everywhere visible, with the aid of those metaphors, for early modern observers. Each of the four topoi listed above is embodied, at the level of form, in the trope of metaphor, and metaphors, in this view of language and the world, genuinely physically express the mysterious but nonetheless material bonds between things: thus Puttenham (1589: 148-50) for example writes that ‘single words have their sence and vnderstanding altered and figured many ways,’ involving a ‘wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so naturall, but yet of some affinitie or conueniencie with it.’
Second, and more radically however, these conceits are also tropes in the sense that they genuinely ‘swerve’ the human life, in ways that we can only distantly appreciate, away from its normal course. The trope of the ‘moment’ for instance reroutes life’s quotidian earthly trajectory so as to immerse it in a different temporality, that of heavenly eternity. In the ‘moment’ of illumination, to stick with just one of the four tropes mentioned above, the subject ‘swerves’ from the metonymic (heavenly and earthly realms as parallel realities) to the synecdochic by being abruptly included within an eternal order of things: the earthly is part of a greater celestial whole (Carrithers and Hardy 1998: 3-4). Similarly, the extended metaphor of the theatre-of-the world is to be understood through the lens of the trope of irony (saying one thing and meaning another), as human truth reveals human deceit and vice-versa (ibid: 4): ‘one may smile and smile and be a villain,’ laments Hamlet (1.5.109); yet he himself has written ‘Doubt truth to be a liar’, in a declaration of love he later affirms and revokes in the same breath (2.2.119; 3.1.117, 121).
It would be easy to dismiss these ‘meta-topoi’ and their workings as tropes as an ideological construction embedded within structures of hierarchical rank and power relations of their time. There is doubtless much substance in such a claim. By the same token, however, this sceptical perspective can be a form of anachronism that underestimates the affective power such ‘troping’ of human existence and its experiential restructuring could have. This affective force and its capacity to mould the very texture and trajectory of lifeworlds have been well documented, for instance, in relation to early modern Protestant melancholy (see for instance Trevor 2004); similarly, the ongoing coexistence of hand-written and printed poetic production, and of silent reading and collective-coterie reading-aloud as a mode of poetic performance, testifies to a vivid awareness of and sensitivity to the affective power of poetic rhythm and literary devices (Attridge 2019: 285-310). This book seeks to recapture some of that sense of the power of troping, albeit in terms that are better suited to our own late modern sensibilities, and with a view to finding ways of gaining linguistic-artistic purchase on our own catastrophe-ridden times.
The task is not easy, but also not entirely impossible. Admittedly, some of these topoi may be more palatable to our late-modern sensibilities than others. Certainly Hamlet provides plentiful evidence for the secularization of these ‘meta-topoi’ in ways that have been instrumental in making them familiar to us. This may be the case, for example, with the topos of theatrum mundi. The religious topos of the theatre of the world, deeply embedded in clerical and liturgical performance, worked as a multiscalar synecdoche from the microcosm of the person (Hamlet speaks for example of ‘memory [holding] a seat | in this distracted globe’, 1.5. 96-7) to the macrocosm of the universe. But that religious topos was inevitably contaminated by its associations with deceit, ranging from courtly machinations, via the world of business, to Puritan diatribes: Stubbes (1584: 70v, 78v-79r), in his vitriolic catalogues of contemporary ‘abuses’, pilloried ‘[t]he fraudulent dealyng of Marchantmen’ on the market, and ‘you masking Pliaers [sic], you painted sepulchres, you double dealyng Ambodexters’ in the theatre (see also Agnew 1986; Bruster 1992; Strong 1984). Theatre may be the trope that most clearly signals a rupture in analogical thinking, and the decline of magical connectivity among all things.
Similarly, Hamlet’s voyage is a secular voyage, driven by the murderous machinations of courtly power play rather than by the religious trajectory of the pilgrimage. His journey is cast as an ambassadorship: ‘he shall with speed to England’, ostensibly ‘[f]or the demand of our neglected tribute’ (3.1.173). Hamlet is later referred to as ‘the ambassador that was | bound for England’ (4.6.9-10). But such a journey no longer effects a religious transformation of the traveller as pilgrim. In the case of Hamlet, identities are less transformed than simply swapped in a manner in which human lives are at stake (see 5.2.). The letter condemning Hamlet to death is turned upon its bearers, leading to the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in his stead.
In the same way, for Hamlet, the moment constitutes less the eruption of eternity into the mundanity of earthy life, than a grim version of the earthward pull of secularization: ‘What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?’ (3.1.129-31). The moment figures not so much as an irruption of time, than a disruption of time, now ‘out of joint’ (1.5.190) and invested with its own terrifying autonomy – ‘time as an urgent pressure’ (Quinones 1972: 349) – that exercises Hamlet (see also Grosz 2012); it is a delayed or blocked temporality triggered by the repeated irruption of a paternal ghost that demands the temporal closure of revenge that Hamlet cannot achieve: ‘enterprises[’] […] currents turn awry | And lose the name of action’ (3.1.89-90). Hamlet himself says, ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in’ (3.1.126-9). The very framework of time as a container for earthly actions is ruptured by the impossibilities of those actions – and by the protagonist’s capacity to act.
The latter citation alerts us to the fact that the only topos that really applies to Hamlet in a manner that is not disrupted by his fraught situation is that of the theatricality – not only of the court, but of all existence. This is so because theatricality is in itself a genre of disruption, where true and played action peel away from each other while remaining indistinguishable. Hamlet, separated from himself by the impossibility of a ‘passage à l’acte’ finds himself as much an actor as the players he summons to Elsinore; and as much a spectator of his own prevarication as those who are gathered in the pit and in the galleries to enjoy the drama unfolding on the early modern thrust-stage.
In sum, Hamlet’s journey (‘I must to England’) is not merely a topos, but something of far greater dimensions and weight. His journey genuinely epitomizes a major tropic ‘swerve’ away from a dynastic time of succession and an automatized sequential logic of honour and revenge, and away from the familiar habitus and subjective fabric integral to such structures. Like all tropic swerves, it also leads towards something new: towards something that evinces, albeit in sketchy form, the temporal contours and the experiential-subjective fabric characteristic of the beginnings of the modern age (compare Greenblatt 2011). The irony is that a (residual) pre-modern version of tropical language, one that will gradually fade from view to make way for mere ‘representationality’, is the medium that expresses in this particular case a ‘swerve’ towards an (emergent) proto-modern version of time, space and subjectivity. The tropical vehicle for this expression, of such interest to this project and of such relevance, we will be claiming, to our own current moment, will be swept to one side by the very trajectory it bodies forth. But like a comet returning on its elliptical flightpath after centuries of hurtling through deep space a tropological notion of language is coming back into view. We are now seeing something akin to a ‘tropic turn’ as the material-agential entanglement of language and the world begins to re-enter our field of vision.
It is of course impossible to return, in some innocent or pristine manner, to early modern analogical thinking as the basis for a tropological understanding of language – although neo-animism may be one way of re-engaging with modes of thought that have been largely marginalized within Euro-American sensibilities since the early 1700s (e.g. Bird‐David 1999; Harvey, ed. 2013; Harvey 2017; West-Pavlov 2021). But a return to tropological thinking via other routes may offer much-needed ways of rethinking our relationships to language and its creativity, and to the world in which it takes effect. Our modern sense of the trope, as the reductive equation with topoi demonstrates, has lost much of its erstwhile dynamism and energy. Perhaps it is time to revisit these neglected understandings of language and reassess their validity. It is possible that a rejuvenated reading of the creativity of language in its active swerves away from customary meanings, via a nuanced approach to the early modern theatre where such linguistic activity is abundantly in evidence, may furnish one way of reactivating a vital sense of language as tropic drive in itself.
But why has the tropicality of the trope become so immobilized in our times?
Each of the topoi mentioned above, then, involves a ‘turning’ of meaning from its literal to a figurative sense. But once that turning has taken place, the conceit remains stable – stable enough to be recognizable as a stock device and employed as a readily available resource by many users. Of course, the ‘turning’ of the trope mobilizes a formal shift which inevitably produces a new semantic effect. In other words, the ‘how’ of the trope does indeed produce the ‘what’ of the topos. Whence the danger of the reduction of the former to the latter.
Yet their frequent cohabitation should not encourage one to conflate the trope with the topos. That conflation obfuscates the complexities of ‘tropicalization’ which, it can be plausibly claimed, is possibly the very core of what makes literary and theatrical art. This book traces, via a number of case studies on early modern theatre in Britain, a long arc in theatrical studies in which the ‘what’ of theatrical ‘matter’ or ‘topoi’, or, in more technical terms, the discourses or representations that pervade the theatrical work, gradually cedes to the ‘how’ of the ‘tropics’ of theatre, with its long history of theorization (from Ingarden to Brecht or Mukařovský, through to Pavis, Ubersfeld, or Schechner; see for instance Lazarowicz and Balme, eds 1991).
Very schematically, one could say that a phase of critical work in which the techniques of theatrical performativity are said to serve the analysis of social discourse is giving way to a phase in which the techniques of performativity shift back into the foreground of the analysis, to the point where the techniques themselves become a form of non-discursive social representation – and something more than representation, and perhaps even more than performativity – in their own right (for cognate arguments about literary and cultural studies, see West-Pavlov 2021; West-Pavlov 2023). This transition evinces a widely observed shift from ‘an interest in what the plays mean to a focus on what they do’ (Yachnin and Selkirk, qtd in Robertson 2023: 22 n19). Of course this simplified and simplifying binary is a heuristic device that serves merely to take the pulse of a shifting groundswell within theatre studies, of which the respective chapters in the present book are symptomatic. In fact, the two ‘poles’ can never be entirely distinguished from one another, theatre and its analysis always necessarily eluding such reductions. Emblematic of such more complex overlays of these two heuristically constructed poles might be, for instance, Robertson’s (2023) work on the manner in which early modern theatres continually experimented with extant theatrical conventions, surprising audiences with contraventions of familiar genres, devices, plot structures and so on. Such experimentation, by the same token, reinforced the audiences’ growing expertise in recognizing and understanding the expanding repertoire of dramatic conventions – because of as much as despite the flagrant abuses of such conventions. In this way, Robertson claims, theatres offered strategies for dealing with the rampant uncertainties of a period undergoing seismic epistemological shifts: ‘The very name of the Globe, early modern London’s most famous playhouse, makes plain what the metatheatricality of the commercial theater’s representational practices imply: the playhouse was not a refuge from the world itself, but a laboratory for navigating it’ (Roberston 2023: 19). Such a thesis balances on the cusp of representations of the world and the provisions of templates for interpreting, indeed acting in the world. These templates, though, are nonetheless conceived of as cognitive patterns that model a world ‘out there’, thereby facilitating human agency. This notion of theatre as secondary modelling system (Lotman 1977: 9-10, 21, 23-4) means that though theatre is in the world, it somehow is not of the world, providing merely mediating templates for more genuine material action. Such a notion of theatre tends in the direction of the ‘tropological’ notion of theatrical agency proposed in this book, but nonetheless persist in occupying a hybrid middle ground not too far from received notions of ‘representation’. This notion of theatre thus hesitates between the poles heuristically set up for the purposes of the argument. The heuristic, then, is simply that: a device to frame a more differentiated set of trends and shifts in the shape of theatre studies.
Be that as it may, that very broad arc of shifting perspectives on the theatre in the current study also reverses an older trend with the theatre itself, in which the multidimensional daylight thrust-stage of the classic public theatres before their closure in 1642 gradually cedes to the ‘picture-frame’ model of the indoor proscenium stage in the ‘private’ theatres and their successors (see Elam 2001: 60-1; Sturgess 1987: 54). Hattaway (1982: 23-4) remarks that it was
[n]ot until 1605 when Inigo Jones constructed at Court a proscenium stage with a painted landscape behind it for Jonson’s Masque of Blackness were the audience given the impression that they were looking through into another world. The stage was, for the Elizabethans, not a remote other place but a space on which men of their own time and of their own community might play, prate, strut, laugh, and fret before their fellows.
The ‘picture-frame’ notion of theatre as representation became hegemonic via the usage of the proscenium-stage and a single audience-actor axis of viewing. It replaced the multiple axes of sight made available by the wide-apron ‘thrust-stage’ of the public theatres. The proscenium ‘framed’ an action that was increasingly seen in two-dimensions, especially as backdrops and scenery became more elaborate, and the entire theatrical action was assimilated to a perspective system of pictorial representation. This book by contrast traces the return of a notion of theatre that is not subsumed to ‘representation’, but sees theatre, and the language of theatre, as part and parcel of worldly agency. The term we will be using for such an understanding is that of ‘tropology’.
This book forms a trilogy with two earlier monographs on the representations of space on the early modern stage (West 2002), and the gendered reimagining of bodies and their shared spaces on the stage (West-Pavlov 2006) respectively. (Later work on the role of deixis in the theatre of Samuel Beckett [West-Pavlov 2010: 19-57] also informs this book, but falls outside the purview of early modern theatre.) The book takes up, in often substantially revised form, briefer excursions into various aspects of early modern theatre and its successors (e.g. Restoration theatre), not to mention a range of contemporary avatars (especially postmodern re-writings, in particular some examples from the Global South, through to popular forms such as street graffiti). These excursions have been written in counterpoint to, and in the wake of the two earlier monographs over a period of several decades. This extended time of gestation means, on the one hand, that the chapters that follow clearly manifest the successive stages of a sea-change in thinking about the nature of literary production. The chapters of the book are imprinted by the shifting paradigms that inform its incrementally accumulating critical analysis. In the space of its respective readings, that analysis swerves from an historicist ‘representational’ framework towards one that stresses the interventionist, ‘tropological’ character of both the literary work in its own moment of emergence and its successive ‘activations’ over the subsequent centuries, and of the critical response itself. It also entails, on the other hand, an extensive process of retrospective reworking, not so much because the conclusions reached in the various chapters in their original form are now seen to be erroneous – but rather, because the sheer relevance of such work has come to be recalibrated by the urgency of contemporary issues, above all global climate change.
The pressure exerted by these global ‘multi-crises’ is such that the very assumptions underpinning the work of literary criticism have undergone a slow process of transformation (e.g. Heise-von der Lippe and West-Pavlov, eds. 2018; West-Pavlov 2018, 2019b), one prefigured obviously by the work of Marxist and feminist critics, for whom the contemporary relevance of their work always framed their historicist investigations. In effect, these critics had from the outset refracted their contextualizing analyses of canonical or less-canonical literary texts through the lens of the longue durée historical structures of economic inequality or gendered oppression that inevitably culminated in their own moment. What shifted perhaps mostly clearly in the second decade of the twenty-first century was a gradually dawning sense not only of the socio-political and economic issues to be confronted, but of the imperative to respond to matters that did not merely concern the human, but enveloped the entirety of the planetary community: global climate change, the emergence of new pandemic viruses, and the re-appearance of the threat of nuclear war.
Out of these seismic shifts there ensued a set of consequences that entailed more, however, than simply an extension of the palette of contemporary issues encroaching on the putatively rarefied domain of literary studies. The effect was not merely cumulative or accretive. Rather, the pressure exerted by these emergent threats, in particular that of global climate change, triggered a reassessment of the nature of human (and non-human) agency itself. This revision of understandings of human action in turn had repercussions for a reflection upon the work of literary criticism: what did it mean to analyze literary texts if the text itself was to be seen anew within the recalibrated spectrum of forms of agency, and what did it mean to analyze these texts, if the impact of human actions was to be seen as part of scaleable and granular notions of multiplex and non-linear causalities? (West-Pavlov 2019a, 2021, 2023). Commenting on Kenneth Burke’s (1941: vii) ‘speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action’ (emphasis added) and his ‘search for more precise ways of locating or defining such action’ in The Philosophy of Literary Form, Stanley Cavell (2005: 40) notes that ‘[t]his theory has had, as far as I know, little pedagogical success (compared with the almost total pedagogical success, for periods over the twentieth century, of logical positivism, and critical close reading, and deconstruction).’ The decades following Cavell’s lament have perhaps seen a fundamental shift back to a stronger sense of the agency of literary creation. Levine’s (2015) work on literary forms sees them as one specific manifestation of a ubiquitous technology for imposing order on the world, not only by aesthetic means, but in a multiplicity of more material (often explicitly spatio-geographic, political and economic) modes that regulate the entirety of society: ‘Forms do political work in particular historical contexts’ (Levine 2015: 5), including ‘the ordering of bodies and spaces, hierarchies and narratives, containments and exclusions. All of these have mattered to us because these configurations are the stuff of injustice, and also because structures like these travel and persist, continuing to organize our lives’ (ibid.: xii). Such work is evidence of a renewed urgency in envisaging aesthetic work, and many other forms of cognate agency, as a form of societal action – a form of action that fluidly spills across borders between the aesthetic and the economic, the symbolic and the everyday-practical aspects of our collective lives.
This urgency can be usefully articulated with reference to recent work by Schüttpelz in Deutland (2023), a polemical treatise whose title puns on ‘Germany’ and the verb ‘to interpret’, thereby pillorying a national literary tradition that has emerged in tandem with institutions of literary interpretation, in particular within the framework of mass secondary education. Schüttpelz gives his work transnational validity, because the developments he traces over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries occur in distinct but parallel processes in a number of Euro-American nations; at the same time, his title places these trends within the restrictive purview of the nation-state, perhaps unintentionally suggesting that the model he parses is one that has had it moment and needs to be rethought.
Schüttpelz begins with a historical epoch in which the skills of classical rhetorical speech, ranging from the topoi (the subjects of speech) to the tropes (the figures of speech and rhetorical devices used by the speaker) are taught to an elite that is destined to use them in public life, in particular in the crafting of political speeches. This moment cedes in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the contemporary nation state and the imperative to educate its citizens in national school systems, leading to a significant scholastic retooling of classical rhetoric. Here Schüttpelz (2023: 111-30) sketches a two-way, frequently overlapping and ‘over-crossing’ (that is, chiastic) movement from ‘tools-to-theory’ (where the tropes, stripped of their elite provide a basis for a new notion of literary scholarship and above all literary pedagogy) to ‘theory-to-tools’. In the first movement, the tropes lose their significance in the education of a small aristocratic elite as mass education (above all in the ‘éducation nationale’ and the Volksschulen) appropriates these literary devices and simplifies them for a broad audience and pupils, and later undergraduate students, for whom they serve a different purpose: namely, the development of a literary sensibility within the framework of a national literary tradition. At the same time, however, these retooled tools become a body of theory based around the devices that literature uses (tropes) as immanent concepts which explain the working of literature at a metaliterary level (in the broadest sense, literature becomes a distancing metaphorical representation of society, or an embedded metonymic mode of intervention in discursive processes). Literature itself proposes, via the rhetorical devices that it mobilizes, a theory of literature as a tropic cultural activity. In this model, rhetoric seeps back into pedagogy in the form of variously strong or weak linguistic theories of experience, expressivity and ideology (e.g. Bernard-Donals 1998). This theory of literature thus gives rise, in entangled and multiply overlapping processes, to a pedagogical programme that forms the reading skills inculcated in school literary teaching, and from the mid-twentieth century onwards, in mass undergraduate university teaching (Hilliard 2012; Mulhern 1979).
But the return to ‘tools’ in the second movement (‘theory-to-tools’) brings us back to a particular sort of tool. The deployment of the rhetorical figures and tropes in the second movements serves the development of literary interpretation for everyman: the sort of literary interpretation that is taught, learnt and practiced in the secondary school or undergraduate ‘explication de text’ or ‘close reading’ whose main purpose is the writing of essays and the development of literary taste. The ‘theory’ of ‘tropical reading’ results in a theory of interpretation that is immanent to the text and tends to be anti-historicist (despite the hybrid form of new historicism that continues to hold sway in many scholarly environments today). The tropes do not return to the same place, as in all historical returns, but move in a sort of displaced circle. There is no return to rhetoric in the public sphere as in the earlier role of classic rhetoric and its teaching. This structure, Schüttelpelz (2023: 164) claims, as ‘stabilized’ literary studies. My hunch is that this ‘stablization’ has become an ‘ossification’ that has contributed, in part at least, to the increasing marginalization of literary studies within an increasingly technicist and neoliberal labour and professional environment: in an effort to prove its special value in contrast to other more practical ‘skills’-based education, literary studies has effectively manoeuvered itself into an arcane, ethereal niche where it is in danger of becoming completely irrelevant – and, more pragmatically, completely defunded (McDonald 2018).
Perhaps we need not only ‘close reading’, but something akin to what Saida Hartman (2019: xiii) calls ‘close narration’ – a form of ‘close writing’ that one could understand in a broad figurative sense. Hartman’s term refers to her mode of evocation, in the absence of a truly comprehensive archive, an interventionist mode of historical imagination. She seeks to sketch lived practices of freedom-under-duress among Black women in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA. This model of ‘close narration’ relays modes of emancipatory collective action in a world of segregation and discrimination before the civil rights movement that can serve as a model for the increasingly constrained circumstances under which democratic life can be lived in the first half of the twenty-first century (Mishra 2024). Above all, however, Hartman’s ‘close narration’ takes us out of the ‘close reading’-classroom and back into a ‘close writing’-proximity to our contemporary political moment. This is one in which so many strategies of liberation appear to be fatally foreclosed – one in which the grand teleologies of parliamentary democracy, human rights, international law, not to mention pragmatic Enlightenment reason, seem to have lost traction even in the so-called Democratic West. Under these circumstances, we urgently need to rethink the purchase of literary studies and the ways its ‘troping’ practices might offer local tactics for safeguarding democratic societies (see also the very prescient ideas of Macintyre 1984: 256-63, which were written a decade before the end of the Cold War but echo uncannily with our own present moment; see Rée 2024).
