Princeton University

Jennifer Buckley

English and Comparative Literature

Columbia University

 

“Sprechen Streng Verboten”:

Edward Gordon Craig, theatrical anti-textualism, and print

 

Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) was either Ellen Terry’s fascist failure of a son, or the genius-father of modern mise en scène, depending upon which account of his career one reads. He is rarely described as what he was for most of his professional life: a prolific writer, an even more prolific visual artist, and the editor and publisher of an international theater journal, to which he was also the primary contributor. Theatre scholars have well explicated Craig’s promotion of the director as auteur and his crusades against naturalistic acting and scenery; less often discussed is Craig’s anti-textualism — his conviction that the theatre should dispense with written plays, and so end, it would seem, its centuries-long relationship with print. Yet Craig himself produced and circulated an impressive amount of printed material. I argue that this fact is in no way paradoxical; rather, Craig’s extensive published output constitutes a deliberate attempt to build his anti-textual “Theatre of the Future” through textual means, which, due to the relative ease of their dissemination, could most effectively spread his ideas to prominent theatre artists and potential patrons around the world.  Further, I examine several key publications to show how Craig used illustration (especially wood-engraving) to visually re-cast the printed page for his anti-textual, pro-theatrical purposes.

Like many in the early twentieth century European theatrical avant-garde — with whom he had little else in common, especially politically — Craig devoted an enormous amount of energy to the overthrow of realism and the conventional prose in which its characters speak, often at very great length (Shaw was a consistent target). His comments on “the Art of the Theatre” define the medium as a visual, aural and non-literary art — one which eschews conventional dialogue in favor of movement, and so one which renders the playwright’s script relatively useless. In his most extreme moments, Craig banishes written plays from the stage altogether: “A drama is not to be read, but to be seen on the stage. … The father of the dramatist was the dancer.”[1] When criticized for such comments, Craig insisted that he did not hate literature. Rather, he proposed that the theater render unto literature that which belongs to literature: written plays, and, ideally, words. In the new Drama Craig envisions, “We will surround the people with symbols in silence; in silence we will reveal the Movement of Things … this is the nature of our Art.”[2]

After effectively retiring from stage production around 1913, however, what Craig surrounded the people with was print — producing and circulating his theatre journal The Mask, and publishing several books of commentary on the theatre.  Focusing on the books Towards a New Theatre (1913), Scene (1923), and especially the famous Cranach Press edition of Hamlet (1929-1930), I show how Craig’s illustrated texts manifest their resistance to the visual conventions of realist theatre — and realist theatre publications. Ultimately, I argue that Craig’s distinctive wood-engravings and drawings of his stage designs begin to function as a sort of non-verbal “script” for the silent theatre he envisioned.

   

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