“What’s past is prologue”: negotiating the authority of tense in reviewing Shakespeare

Kirwan, Peter

Abstract

This paper, rooted in reviewing practice, engages with a little-discussed practical aspect of reviewing: the tense in which a theatre review is written. Noting that journalistic reviews use the present tense, whereas academic reviews use the past, this paper asks when a review moves into the past, and what implications the use of tense has for the review. The paper contends that the two tenses confer different kinds of authority on a review, which in turn have implications for positioning the object of review and the reviewer in relation to one another. Distinctions are made between reviewing a production or a single performance; between reviewing as a promise or as an archive; and between the omnipotent narrator and subjective spectator. The paper concludes that, in an age of increasingly cheap opinion, the past tense may be appropriated as a means for professional reviewers in all disciplines to consolidate the specificity of their reviewing authority.

Citation

Kirwan, P. (2010). “What’s past is prologue”: negotiating the authority of tense in reviewing Shakespeare. Shakespeare, 6(3), https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2010.497856

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 1, 2009
• Publication Date: Aug 23, 2010
• Deposit Date: Oct 14, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 14, 2016
• Journal: Shakespeare
• Print ISSN: 1745-0918
• Electronic ISSN: 1745-0926
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Open
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2010.497856
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/706582
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17450918.2010.497856
• Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Shakespeare on 23 August 2010, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17450918.2010.497856.