Overview
Imaginary Audition responds to a major current conflict in Shakespeare studies between proponents of close reading of the academic armchair variety and proponents of what is called theater-centered (or performance-centered) interpretation. This conflict has come into focus at the intersection of several lines of reaction to the New-Critical and poetic-drama approaches practiced during the middle decades of the century: the revival of the "theater-centered" criticism that has flourished since the 60s; the rise of metatheatrical and metapoetic criticism in the same period; new developments in psychoanalysis and gender-theoretical criticism; new approaches to textual scholarship and editing; and the reorientation of social, political, cultural, and historical analysis associated with the new historicism.
Harry Berger, Jr., confronts the first two of these developments. Beginning with a sustained critique of the theoretical premises and the practice of Richard Levine and Gary Taylor, he proposes a new approach that cuts between the extremes of theater-centered reading and armchair reading, and demonstrates this approach in a radically new interpretation of Richard II. The close articulation of critique, theory, and interpretation lays the ground for a new approach to the reading of Shakespeare, one that will be more fully demonstrated in Berger's extended study of the Henriad, now in progress, and to which Imaginary Audition serves as a kind of prologue.