“What light through yonder window speaks?”: The Nature Theater of Oklahoma Romeo and Juliet and the Cult(ure) of Shakespeare

Abstract

For all its power in articulating the notion of a “literary dramatist, ” the “return of the author” in contemporary Shakespeare criticism extends what Michael Bristol calls “the incessant border disputes, skirmishes, and raids carried out between advocates of performance-oriented interpretation and the practitioners of more strictly and textually-based hermeneutic procedures. ” For Bristol, the “largely trivial character of this debate” has largely to do with its focus on “precedence and the allocation of authority” in an economy in which “precedence” has long been guaranteed: the assertion of the literary character of Shakespeare’s writing as motivating the force of “interpretive” performance is a nearly frictionless position both in contemporary Shakespeare scholarship and throughout the popular understanding of Shakespeare performance.2 The notion that performance has to be displaced for the author to “return” to literary studies might be paired with a pendant question: has the author ever really left the apparently unruly precincts of Shakespearean performance?