Shakespeare in 3D

Casts of ten or twelve can make Shakespeare's plays more vibrant theatrically, and more perfectly themselves, than casts of twenty. My project explores how and to what ends Shakespeare's dramatic engineering enables the "doubling" of actors--where one or more actors play two or more roles in a given play. In familiar pairings like Polonius and First Gravedigger, Cordelia and the Fool, or the Lords and Ladies of A Midsummer Night's Dream , Shakespeare orchestrates possibilities for his characters to gain extra-textual pertinences to one another through the harmonizing presence of the actors. Doubling is one among a range of ways to establish likeness between unlike things, but it makes possible much more. Shakespeare's career shows an unremitting interest in intensifying the energies of live theater by adding layers to the fundamental paradox of the actor and by imperiling his theatrical illusions by advertising their artifice. Doubling allowed him to achieve both ends simultaneously, initiating actor-centered dramas while amplifying tensions between the worlds of play and playhouse, tensions vital to the engagement and pleasure of audiences. The thesis begins with Shakespeare's efforts to exploit his audience's uncertainty about a play's continuance in order to foster its engagement. Doubling roles provided a superlative means to initiate dramas outside the narrative while destabilizing--and increasing our attachment to--those within it. Having considered the germaneness of doubling to his dramatic style, I turn to the probability that extensive doubling occurred on Shakespeare's historical stages. Based on the material record, the evolving dramatic economy of the period and the limitless capacity for representation its playwrights assumed, I discuss doubling as a convention that Shakespeare inherited and exalted. Discussions take up probable cast-sizes for Shakespeare's company and confront two cruxes in projecting them: the age and versatility of the "boy" players, and the value we place (and sometimes suppose Elizabethans placed) on verisimilitude. The historical record forces us to re-imagine staging practices and possibilities in Shakespeare's time. Throughout the project I suggest possibilities for more efficient and more pleasurable productions as they are enabled by Shakespeare's dramatic engineering, possibilities that complement a plays' efforts to achieve their own generic, thematic or theatrical ends. In sum, I argue for doubling an integral part of Shakespeare's art, and that its ability to augment the attractions of the plays has been undervalued by scholars and directors alike.