The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance 9781350080676, 9781350080706, 9781350080683

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THE ARDEN RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE HANDBOOKS The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies Edited by Lukas Erne ISBN 978-1-3500-8063-8 The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism Edited by Evelyn Gajowski ISBN 978-1-3500-9322-5 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice Edited by David Ruiter ISBN 978-1-3501-4036-3 The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama Edited by Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter ISBN 978-1-3501-6185-6 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation Edited by Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill ISBN 978-1-3501-1030-4

THE ARDEN RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

Edited by Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First publish in hardback in Great Britain 2021 This paperback edition 2023 Copyright © Peter Kirwan, Kathryn Prince and contributors, 2021, 2023 Peter Kirwan, Kathryn Prince and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xv–xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image © MyMelody / Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8067-6 PB: 978-1-3502-2516-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8068-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-8069-0 Series: The Arden Shakespeare Handbooks Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist of I llustrations N otes on C ontributors S eries P reface A cknowledgements Introduction Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince

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PART ONE:  RESEARCH METHODS AND PROBLEMS 1.1 The archive: Show reporting Shakespeare Rob Conkie 1.2 The audience: Receiving and remaking experience Margaret Jane Kidnie 1.3 The event: Festival Shakespeare Paul Prescott

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PART TWO:  CURRENT RESEARCH AND ISSUES 2.1 Original Practices: Old ways and new directions Sarah Dustagheer 2.2 Space: Locus and platea in modern Shakespearean performance Stephen Purcell 2.3 Economics: Shakespeare performing cities Susan Bennett 2.4 Networks: Researching global Shakespeare Sonia Massai 2.5 Global mediation: Performing Shakespeare in the age of networked and digital cultures Alexa Alice Joubin 2.6 Canon: Framing not-Shakespearean performance Eoin Price 2.7 Pedagogy: Decolonizing Shakespeare on stage Andrew James Hartley, Kaja Dunn and Christopher Berry 2.8 Ethics: The challenge of practising (and not just representing) diversity at the Stratford Festival of Canada Erin Julian and Kim Solga

65 82 99 114

132 151 171

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CONTENTS

2.9 Bodies: Gender, race, ability and the Shakespearean stage Roberta Barker 2.10 Technology: The desire called cinema: Materiality, biopolitics and post-anthropocentric feminism in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest Courtney Lehmann

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PART THREE:  NEW DIRECTIONS IN SHAKESPEARE AND PERFORMANCE Curated by Nora J. Williams and C. K. Ash Anne G. Morgan Jatinder Verma Judith Greenwood Dan Bray and Colleen MacIsaac Migdalia Cruz Lisa Wolpe Julia Nish-Lapidus and James Wallis Ravi Jain Emma Whipday Wole Oguntokun Vishal Bhardwaj Adam Cunis James Loehlin Denice Hicks @Shakespeare Yang Jung-ung

249 251 253 255 256 258 260 261 263 265 267 268 270 271 273 274

PART FOUR:  RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHERS 4.1 Chronology: A fifty-year history of performance criticism James C. Bulman 4.2 A–Z of key terms Bríd Phillips, with Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince 4.3 Annotated bibliography Karin Brown, Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince 4.4 Resources Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince I ndex 

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Chart of injuries in the MTC Twelfth Night, © Una Clemens. Barakah (Hisham Fageeh) in drag in Barakah Meets Barakah (dir. Mahmoud Sabbagh, El Housh Productions, 2016). Screengrab. Some goats wander into the banquet hall in the final scene of The Hungry (dir. Bornila Chatterjee, Cinestaan Film Company, 2017). Screengrab. Yvan (André Jocelyn) walking past a poster advertising Laurence Olivier’s film, Hamlet, in Ophélia (dir. Claude Chabrol, Boreal Film, 1963). Screengrab.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

C. K. Ash is an independent researcher based in Baltimore, Maryland. She has worked variously as a director, dramaturg and text coach at theatres including the Folger Theatre, Brave Spirits Theatre and the American Shakespeare Center. Her research is informed by practice, with a particular focus on the exchange of information and influence between editors and performers. She co-edited a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, 34 (1), exploring that topic. Roberta Barker is Associate Professor of Theatre at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000: The Destined Livery (2007), co-editor of New Canadian Realisms (2012) and General Editor of the series New Essays in Canadian Theatre at Playwrights Canada Press. Her edition of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women appears in the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020). Her articles on early modern drama in performance have appeared in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Early Theatre and Shakespeare Bulletin. Susan Bennett is Faculty Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her most recent work includes Theory for Theatre Studies: Sound (2019), a volume in the series she co-edits with Kim Solga for Methuen Drama, and Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, co-edited with Sonia Massai and published by Methuen Drama (2018). A current research project looks at the emergence of ‘global Shakespeare’ as a field of study and its impacts on how we understand and archive performances of Shakespeare’s plays worldwide. Christopher Berry is an actor, dialect coach, director, educator and producer. He received his BFA in Acting from North Carolina A&T (2008) and his MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity rep (2011). He serves as the Vice President of the Black Theatre Network and also serves as the Program Director of the Black Arts Institute, a partnership between the Billie Holiday Theatre and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. He most recently served as the dialect coach for the Signature Theatre’s production of Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King and the television show P-Valley (Starz, July 2020). Karin Brown is the Librarian at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her publications include ‘“Time out of joint”: Traumatic Hauntings in the Spanish Civil War Films of Guillermo del Toro’, in John Morehead (ed.), The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro (2015); ‘Professional Productions of Early Modern

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Drama, 1960–2010’, in Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today (2012); and twenty-two performance histories for the Royal Shakespeare Company Complete Works project, published in single editions of the plays (2008–11). James C. Bulman is the Henry B. and Patricia Bush Tippie Professor Emeritus at Allegheny College. A general editor of the Shakespeare in Performance Series for Manchester University Press, he has written a stage history of The Merchant of Venice (1991) and edited anthologies on Shakespeare on Television (1988), Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (1996), and Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (2007). His other books include The Heroic Idiom of Shakespearean Tragedy (1985), Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan (with A. R. Braunmuller, 1986), the Arden 3 edition of King Henry IV, Part Two (2016), and, most recently, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (2017). He is a former president of the Shakespeare Association of America. Rob Conkie is Associate Professor of Theatre at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. His teaching and research integrate practical and theoretical approaches to Shakespeare in performance. He is the author of Writing Performative Shakespeares: New Forms for Performance Criticism (2016) and The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity (2006), and the co-editor, with Scott Maisano, of Shakespeare and Creative Criticism (2019). Fingers crossed, he will be directing Cymbeline in 2021 for the SSHRC ‘Cymbeline in the Anthropocene’ project. Kaja Dunn is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and teaches acting at University of North Carolina Charlotte as well as being an actor, director and intimacy choreographer with Theatrical Intimacy Education. She has presented her work on Training Theatre Students of Color at University of London Goldsmiths, SETC and SETC Theatre Symposium, KCATF, and The Association of Theatre in Higher Education among other places. She is secretary of the Black Theatre Association. Kaja was previously a lecturer at California State University San Marcos and toured with Ya Tong Theatre in Taiwan. Other teaching credits include working with homeless and foster youth with Playwrights Project San Diego and as a teaching artist with Young Audiences. Sarah Dustagheer is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent, and a member of Shakespeare’s Globe’s Architecture Research Group. She researches seventeenth-century playwriting and theatre space, as well as contemporary Shakespearean performance. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and Blackfriars, 1599–1613 (2017). She is the co-author of Shakespeare in London (The Arden Shakespeare, 2014) and co-editor (with Gillian Woods) of Stage Directions and the Shakespearean Stage (The Arden Shakespeare, 2017). Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Literature Compass, Cahiers Élisabéthains and Shakespeare Bulletin.

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Andrew James Hartley is University of North Carolina Charlotte’s Russell Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, and the author of various scholarly books including The Shakespearean Dramaturg (2005), Shakespeare and Political Theatre (2013) and a performance history of Julius Caesar (2019). He is the editor of collections on Shakespeare on the university stage and Shakespeare in millennial fiction, and was editor of Shakespeare Bulletin for a decade. Under the pen names A. J. Hartley and Andrew Hart he is the award-winning, bestselling author of twenty-three novels in a variety of genres. Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at George Washington University where she is founding co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is co-founder and co-director of the open access Global Shakespeares digital performance archive. She holds the John M. Kirk, Jr. Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the Middlebury College Bread Loaf School of English, and was appointed Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Studies at Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick. Her latest books include Shakespeare and East Asia (2021), Race (with Martin Orkin; Routledge New Critical Idiom series, 2019), Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (co-edited, 2018), and Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (co-edited, 2014). Erin Julian is the Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Engendering the Stage project (Roehampton/King’s College London). Her research focuses on sexual violence in early modern drama, particularly as it intersects with contemporary dramatic practice. Her publications include ‘“Our hurtless mirth”: What’s Funny About Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan?’, Early Theatre, 23 (1) (2019) and The Alchemist: A Critical Reader (The Arden Shakespeare, 2014). With Helen Ostovich, she is also co-editor of The Dutch Courtesan for the forthcoming Oxford Complete Works of John Marston. Margaret Jane Kidnie is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. She has published widely on Shakespearean performance and adaptation, early modern manuscripts, textual studies and editorial practices. Peter Kirwan is Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include early modern drama on stage and screen, Shakespearean textual history and new writing. He is a general editor of the Revels Plays Companion Library and incoming editor of Shakespeare Bulletin. His monographs include Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl (The Arden Shakespeare, 2019) and Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (2015), and edited collections include Canonising Shakespeare (with Emma Depledge, 2017) and Shakespeare and the Digital World (with Christie Carson, 2014). Courtney Lehmann is the Tully Knoles Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of the Pacific, where she also serves as Director of the

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University’s premiere honours programme. She has authored and edited several books along with more than forty articles and essays on cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, with a focus on intersections of gender, race and political economy in the work of female filmmakers in particular. Since joining Pacific in 1998, she has taught courses on Shakespeare, Milton, British prose, poetry and drama, ethics and sports literature. Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London. She has published widely on Shakespeare in performance and the transmission of his works into print. Her publications include her books on Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (2020) and Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (2007), collections of essays on Ivo van Hove (Methuen Drama, 2018), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (2015) and World-wide Shakespeares (2005), and critical editions of Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (2014) and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore for Arden Early Modern Drama (The Arden Shakespeare, 2011). Bríd Phillips is Lecturer in Health Humanities at the University of Western Australia. She coordinates units in narrative medicine, health humanities and health professions education. She has published widely on Shakespeare and emotions, and on the place of literature in health humanities. She is currently working on a monograph on Shakespeare and the History of Emotions and health humanities projects. Paul Prescott is Reader in English at the University of Warwick. He has acted, adapted and taught Shakespeare in a range of countries and contexts, from Cuba to Australia. His books include the recent Arden Performance Edition of Othello (2018); Reviewing Shakespeare (2013); and, as co-editor, A Year of Shakespeare (The Arden Shakespeare, 2013) and Shakespeare on the Global Stage (The Arden Shakespeare, 2015). He is the co-founder of the annual festival Shakespeare in Yosemite in Yosemite National Park, California, and has adapted many of Shakespeare’s plays for a range of professional companies, including the National Theatre of Great Britain. Eoin Price is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University. He works on both early modern theatre history and the contemporary performance of early modern plays. He is the author of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England (2015) and his work has appeared in journals such as Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin and Early Theatre and in collections such as Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce and the Book Trade (2018). Kathryn Prince is Director of Theatre Studies (BA and MA) at the University of Ottawa. She has published widely at the intersection of early modern drama, historical and contemporary performance, and emotions, including Performing Early Modern Drama Today (co-edited with Pascale Aebischer, 2012), History, Memory, Performance (co-edited with David Dean and Yana Meerzon, 2015) and Shakespeare

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and Canada (co-edited with Irena Makaryk, 2017). She is the outgoing editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, soon to be replaced by Peter Kirwan. Stephen Purcell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on Shakespeare in contemporary performance and popular culture. His publications include Popular Shakespeare (2009), Shakespeare and Audience in Practice (2013) and numerous articles on Shakespeare on stage, television and film. He has published in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Jahrbuch and Shakespeare Survey. His most recent book is Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe (The Arden Shakespeare, 2016). He is Joint Artistic Director of the theatre company The Pantaloons. Kim Solga is Professor of Theatre Studies and English and Writing Studies at Western University, Canada. Her most recent books include Theory for Theatre Studies: Space (Methuen Drama, 2019), A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), and Theatre & Feminism (2015). Her many contributions to early modern cultural studies include ‘Shakespeare’s Property Ladder: Women Directors and the Politics of Ownership’ (in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 2017) and Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (2009). Nora J. Williams is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Essex. Her work has been published in such journals as Shakespeare Bulletin, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Humanities and Borrowers and Lenders, as well as collections edited by scholars such as Kara Reilly and Mark Hutchings. She prioritizes public-facing scholarship and writes frequently for Howlround Theatre Commons. The central concerns of her current practice-asresearch project on Shakespeare and rape culture, Measure (Still) for Measure, are also the subject of her forthcoming first monograph.

SERIES PREFACE

The Arden Shakespeare Handbooks provide researchers and graduate students with both cutting-edge perspectives on perennial questions and authoritative overviews of the history of research. The series comprises single-volume reference works that map the parameters of a discipline or sub-discipline and present the current state of research. Each Handbook offers a systematic and structured range of specially commissioned chapters reflecting on the history, methodologies, current debates and future of a particular field of research. Additional resources, such as a chronology of important milestones that have shaped the field, a glossary of key terms, an annotated bibliography and a list of further resources are included. It is hoped that the series will provide both a thorough grounding in the range of research under each heading, and a practical guide that equips readers to conduct their own independent research. The topics selected for coverage in the series lie at the heart of the study of Shakespeare today, and at the time of writing include: • • • • • •

contemporary Shakespeare criticism and theory Shakespeare and textual studies Shakespeare and contemporary performance Shakespeare and adaptation Shakespeare and social justice Shakespeare and early modern drama

While each volume in the series provides coverage of a distinct area of research, it will be immediately apparent that ‘distinct’ becomes a slippery concept: how does one define contemporary criticism as distinct from contemporary performance? Indeed, the very porousness of research areas becomes even more marked if, for instance, one explores research in Shakespeare and contemporary performance (in the volume edited by Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince) and Shakespeare and adaptation (in the volume edited by Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill). Questions of social justice permeate each area of research, for, as Evelyn Gajowski notes in the introduction to The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, ‘many of the essays … suggest the inseparability of critical practices, on the one hand, and social justice and political activism, on the other’. Even where we might be inclined to feel on safer ground about the ‘particular field’ of textual studies as distinct from other fields of Shakespeare studies, Lukas Erne disabuses that notion in his introduction to The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies:

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Textual variants and multiplicity create their own proliferation of meanings, nor can textual studies and criticism ultimately be kept apart. For the question of what the text is decisively impacts the question of what the text means. While acknowledging the artificiality of boundaries and the inevitability of some degree of overlap, we have nevertheless encouraged editors to determine the contours of their Handbook with an eye on other titles in the same series. Just as each book provides a systematic grounding for readers, the series as a whole presents an invitation to readers to delve into each volume, to find those connections and points of intersection, and to explore the related fields that ultimately will enrich their own research.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During the final stages of bringing this book together, the two industries with which it is most concerned – higher education and the theatre – were thrown into crisis by the arrival of COVID-19. Writing an academic book about contemporary theatre during a period of lockdowns and layoffs in both industries has been a challenge. This book is rooted in our conviction that university workers and theatre workers are crucial allies, both intellectually and practically, and in our love and respect for the creative work that fuels and energizes our field. Our first thanks, then, go to all those who have made the theatre that makes this book possible, and to those now ensuring that this vital work continues. We are grateful to Mark Dudgeon at The Arden Shakespeare for inviting us to propose this volume, and to all of the staff at Bloomsbury (especially the indefatigable Lara Bateman) for their work, communication and support in bringing it to completion. We have been fortunate to have such a collegiate group of contributors, and thank them all for their insights, ideas, creativity and collaboration. We’d like to thank our peer reviewers for their enthusiasm and constructive suggestions, and any remaining oversights are our own. The idea for the book emerged from our work at Shakespeare Bulletin, and we would like to acknowledge our collaborators, contributors and predecessors at that journal, many of whom have joined us for this volume. Thank you also to those friends and colleagues who have directly and indirectly influenced the book in innumerable ways: Pascale Aebischer, Mark Thornton Burnett, Josh Caldicott, Emma Depledge, Bridget Escolme, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Diana Henderson, Farah Karim-Cooper, Georgie Lucas, Hannah Manktelow, Emer McHugh, Yana Meerzon, Matteo Pangallo, Jo Robinson, Carol Chillington Rutter, Beth Sharrock, Simon Smith, Erin Sullivan, Bob White and Ramona Wray. Pete would like to thank the University of Nottingham for a semester’s research leave during which much of the editing was completed, and his colleagues (especially Svenja Adolphs, Jem Bloomfield, Chris Collins, Sarah Grandage, Joe Jackson, Stephen Longstaffe, Jim Moran, Sarah O’Malley, Nicola Royan and Lucie Sutherland) for their advice and collegiality. Closer to home, he would like to thank Marcus Nelson for helping him find the strength to work, and Susan Anderson and Peppermint for their unwavering love, patience and encouragement. And finally, thanks to Kathryn for the friendship, rigour, insight and calm that made this possible. Kathryn would like to thank her colleagues at the University of Ottawa and the University of Western Australia, each and every one of them, for intelligent conversations and sound advice. It was a long, strange journey from Ottawa to Perth and back again during the process of putting this book together, made infinitely

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easier in so many ways by friends in both places. Thanks, especially, to Alexandra Ludewig and Kevin Kee for their generous moral and material support on either side of the Pacific, and to Patrick and Sam Gargano for always being ready for an adventure – and most of all, to Pete for being the very best kind of co-editor, scholar, leader and friend. All quotations from Shakespeare plays are taken from single volumes in the third series of the Arden Shakespeare unless otherwise stated.

Introduction PETER KIRWAN AND KATHRYN PRINCE

On 29 March 2019, Adjoa Andoh stepped onto the stage of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in the role of Richard II, and in doing so rendered herself a fixed reference point within a shifting network of historical interpretive frames through which onlookers could make meaning. From one perspective, this was another Richard II in a long history of Richard IIs, both at Shakespeare’s Globe (though this was the first in the candlelit indoor space) and throughout the world, with Andoh the latest in a prestigious lineage of actors to take an old role. From another perspective, this was a groundbreaking production. Andoh was leading the first entirely women-ofcolour ensemble to perform a Shakespeare production on a major British stage; the occasion was marked by gorgeously reproduced images of the cast and crew’s mothers, aunts, grandmothers and other relatives in the form of banners hanging around the theatre, ancestors gazing down on cast and audience alike. And from yet another perspective, the UK was that day living through the first of several ghosts of aborted deadlines for leaving the European Union under a cloud of racially tinged rhetoric, prompting an audible communal reaction somewhere between laughter and a moan as John of Gaunt (Dona Croll) stood up from her wheelchair to tell us that ‘That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself’ (2.1.65–6). The interpretive richness of this moment is dependent on its multiple juxtapositions and perspectives. The performance event has a formal coherence all of its own: a story that was already old when Shakespeare reshaped it, about a medieval king, told in dramatic verse, written some 400 years ago and available for analysis in its own right. But the meanings of this moment in performance far exceed anything that Shakespeare’s Richard II can reveal on its own. These meanings inhered in the bodies of the actors (women, racially diverse) cast in the production; in the mise-en-scène of ancestors that evoked colonial histories; in the current political discourse that revealed an irrevocably changed meaning of the word ‘England’; in the conditions of a British theatre industry that made it at all newsworthy for two Black women to be directing a cast made up entirely of women of colour at the Globe; in the histories of minstrelsy and blackface acting that made the production’s audacious climactic staging coup – in which the cast whitened their faces with chalk dust and stood before a red cross to construct the St George’s flag out of their own bodies – such a powerful moment.1

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The curious juxtaposition of a production in so many ways radical and contemporary within a venue associated so strongly with the theatrical practices of early modern England is a perfect illustration of Shakespeare in contemporary performance, which is often poised between the past and the present (Cantoni 2018: 26–34; Tosh 2018: 19–42). The perennial question of Shakespeare in performance – ‘why this play now’– often triangulates what the play has meant in the past and what meanings, new or enduring, emerge with vigour in the present. Richard II itself, with its long and possibly apocryphal connection to the Essex Rising of 1601, is a play that risked topical application in its own fraught moment.2 In 2019, that topicality was found through casting choices rather than allegory, the body of the actor oscillating not between Richard and Elizabeth but between Richard and her own Black, female self. This book is concerned not only with the many meanings that can be unpacked in a production like this one, but in the processes of making meaning out of Shakespearean performance, both what is offered and what is taken. While the plays of Shakespeare have lived in performance more or less continuously for over four centuries, they continue to yield fresh interpretive potential; indeed, their endurance has only added to the complexity and depth of the intersecting histories that the plays bring to bear each time they are reinterpreted. The scope of what the field of Shakespeare Performance Studies takes as its subject can seem infinitely varied: as James C. Bulman argues, ‘[n]ew theatrical styles and techniques, often the result of intercultural exchange, have gained an authority once accorded only to the text … and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the shore from which we spectators gaze out at that turbulent sea’ (Bulman 2017: 1) as writers, directors, actors, designers, filmmakers and more continue to adapt Shakespeare. This infinite variety, however, poses its own challenges. As the plays spring from the page to the stage or screen, they acquire a vast range of codes, signification systems and points of reference that multiply the complexities of interpretation. Performance is a social medium born of collective knowledge and skill (Tribble 2017), and thus implicitly invites its interpreters to be conversant with the languages of scenography, costume and fashion, lighting and sound, movement and voice; to be literate both in the resonances of the source text and in the conventions of a production’s choice of period setting; to be fluent in the social, political and industrial conditions that have operated on a production’s creation. In 2005, Barbara Hodgdon announced ‘a move from the essentializing orthodoxy of performance criticism to the theoretical heterodoxy of Shakespeare performance studies, a more encompassing, expansive, expressive, and relational arena for rethinking performance’ (Hodgdon 2005: 7). The shift articulated in that important book, in the wake of the development of Performance Studies as a discipline (see Bulman in this collection), was designed to reflect not only the expansion of what was understood as Shakespearean performance, but also the need to expand the critical and analytical tools used to investigate it. Yet at the same time, theatre and film offer themselves for the consumption and pleasure of anyone who chooses to watch, regardless of prior expertise or interpretive bias. There is a tension, then,

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between the idea of the ‘expert’ spectator or theoretician who has privileged insight into a production’s meanings, and the dispersal of authority to all audience members encountering a performance from their own subject position. We thus begin this volume, a ‘research handbook’ for the study of Shakespeare and contemporary performance, with a caution about answers and authority. Neither Shakespearean performance nor Shakespearean performance criticism admit of right answers, especially when even the ‘facts’ of performance (as memorably illustrated in Peter Holland and Margaret Jane Kidnie’s contrasting accounts of a moment in the same production of King Lear; Holland 2006: 14–15) are subject to re-remembering, reconstructing and even (especially in the world of digital performance) re-editing. Theatre itself remains torn between impulses towards openness and accessibility on the one hand, and gatekeeping on the other (Sedgman 2018), and even asking the question of who might be qualified to speak about Shakespearean performance implies exclusivity. This handbook hopes neither to provide answers nor to mandate a particular approach to research into Shakespearean performance, but to model methods and introduce current research concerns that will continue to open up the field to new voices and invite new questions.

SHAKESPEARE IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE: A BRIEF HISTORY The term ‘contemporary’ in our title suggests, in one sense, that we are interested only in recent performances. ‘Contemporary’, as an adjective applied to Shakespeare, is inflected a bit differently than ‘contemporary’ theatre, which may claim, as synonyms, ‘experimental’ or at least ‘in contact with current theatre practices’ (Bennett 2017). In terms of Shakespeare performance, the word ‘contemporary’ perhaps most immediately evokes Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, published in English in 1964, and Peter Brook’s productions influenced by it, which suggest that a contemporary performance seeks some relevance in the present moment. ‘Contemporary’ Shakespeare is, in this sense, not museum-quality Shakespeare intended to replicate Shakespeare’s intentions for the edification of a modern audience, but rather a Shakespeare that speaks, in some meaningful way, to the moment of its production. We do intend for that meaning to adhere to the performances explored in this volume, although we would also note that (as Sarah Dustagheer explores in her contribution to this book) in our contemporary moment productions that engage with the original practices of Shakespeare’s time, and with the long tradition of performance since, can also speak to the present even if they do not participate in theatre practices that are exclusively contemporary. What does contemporary Shakespeare performance look, sound and feel like? One dominant model is enshrined in the ‘house styles’ of the major Shakespearefocused institutions of the English-speaking world: companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre in the UK and the Stratford Festival and Shakespeare Theatre Company in North America. For better or worse, wellfunded theatres such as these – often drawing on sources of public funding and/or

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major corporate sponsorship, often tied up with national and international heritage status, and with long histories and illustrious alumni of their own – dominate popular understandings of contemporary Shakespearean performance. These are the institutions that exemplify what W. B. Worthen, following Hans-Thies Lehmann, describes as ‘dramatic performance’, rooted in mimesis: ‘the purpose of dramatic theatre is to deliver this “world” to its audiences’ (Worthen 2014: 5). While not without notable exceptions, performances at these theatres offer productions of Shakespeare that deliver versions of the text broadly recognizable from printed editions of Shakespeare, and with an emphasis on language and narrative rooted in what can be drawn from the text. In addition, the roles of such institutions in actor training and development, and the influence of educator-practitioners such as John Barton and Cicely Berry (both RSC) in pioneering standards of classical performance, has reinforced the institutional dominance of ways of playing Shakespeare. Such dominance invites challenge, and while the above long-standing companies continue to exert major influence in conceptions of contemporary Shakespeare performance in the West, the latter half of the twentieth century saw several different approaches emerge, often in response to the rising significance of the figure of the director. On the one hand, the movement to construct Elizabethanand Jacobean-style playing spaces, exemplified in the projects of Shakespeare’s Globe in the UK (1997) and the Blackfriars Playhouse in the US (2001, now the home of the American Shakespeare Center), offered a radical shift away from established conventions of the dramatic theatre by foregrounding the playing space, actor–audience relations and approaches that distribute agency among a company. While productions in both have often reflected the dominant modes of the dramatic performance tradition, they have also instigated a greater sense of the role of the audience in shaping each performance as a specific event, and through experiments in ‘Original Practices’ (see Dustagheer in this volume) that included director-less productions and the creative reworking of early modern rehearsal and performance techniques, these theatres radically disrupted a received sense of Shakespearean performance. On the other hand, the dominance of the director in European theatre traditions began having a greater influence on practice in the English-speaking world. Directors with a distinctive vision were always a part of the modern RSC, as exemplified by Brook, but in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries figures such as Thomas Ostermeier, Katie Mitchell, Declan Donnellan, Ivo van Hove, Deborah Warner, Peter Sellars and Simon McBurney worked within both Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts, directing Shakespeare in combination with new and other classical works, and blurred boundaries of language and performance style. Such work often took a deliberately oppositional stance, both politically and aesthetically, as in the companies described by Carol Chillington Rutter in ‘Maverick Shakespeare’ (2005), who explicitly countered ideas of representational space (Cheek by Jowl), accent (Northern Broadsides) or conservative politics (the English Shakespeare Company). At the level of language, too, the free translation and adaptation (or ‘tradaptation’) of Shakespeare in director-led productions led not only to versions of Shakespeare

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such as those of Heiner Müller becoming as commonplace on the German stage as Nahum Tate’s King Lear had been for centuries on the English stage, but more generally and gradually admitted of the text as just one more changeable element within the theatrical milieu. The primary aim of contemporary Shakespeare performance is seldom to commune with the dead, to evoke Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase for one of the pleasures of Shakespeare scholarship (1988: 1). The pleasure of a Shakespeare production, in contrast to more literary engagements, often resides in the oscillation between the past and the present, between what is known and what is being discovered, making the experience of the performance resemble what Rebecca Schneider describes in relation to historical re-enactments as spaces ‘where then and now punctuate each other’ (2011: 2). When the past wholly dominates, the result can be something that, while happening in the present, is far from contemporary. Peter Brook’s juxtaposition between deadly theatre, seeking only communion with the past, and a living, urgent theatre communicating with the present, remains a useful framework for considering how a production is engaging with Shakespeare and with its audience. As Brook suggests in The Empty Space: The Deadly Theatre takes easily to Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way – they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring – and in our hearts we either blame Shakespeare, or theatre, as such, or even ourselves. To make matters worse there is always a deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity and even a lack of entertainment, such as the scholar who emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself, whilst reciting his favourite lines under his breath. ([1968] 2019: 10) An antidote to Deadly Theatre (though no style is inherently immune to deadliness) is often found in experimentation, immediacy and irreverence, or in what Lehmann called the ‘postdramatic theatre’ which ‘exerts a decisive pressure on the conventional paradigm of dramatic performance’ (Worthen 2014: 3). Worthen notes that ‘postdramatic Shakespeare’ might be seen as a contradiction in terms, but it is the very familiarity of Shakespeare that makes the works available as subjects for reinvention. Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare is a vivid example of this irreverence that energizes the plays through the unexpected use of object puppetry, using household objects as performers. As Lyn Gardner noted in her review for The Guardian, with a nod to Brook, ‘It’s perfectly possible to respect Shakespeare … without smothering the works in red-velvet reverence’ (2016). While it might have been possible to enjoy the rapid-fire, reduced plays without any knowledge of either the plays or their performance history, some of the pleasure, for a Shakespeare aficionado, was in the memories of both the original plays and other performances that Forced Entertainment suggested in the wistful turn of a jam jar (Juliet) or the haughty one of a bottle of rosewater (Richard II). The sheer delight

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in the creativity afforded by an irreverent approach to Shakespeare is an energizing and significant element of contemporary Shakespeare performance also evident in the work of such diverse companies as Spymonkey, The Wooster Group, Kneehigh and Punchdrunk, as discussed in Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie’s edited collection Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations (2020). These productions and others in the irreverent vein are haunted by past performances in the ways that Marvin Carlson discusses in The Haunted Stage, their meanings enriched and enlivened by the spectator’s ‘iconic memories’ of their ghostly traces (2001: 78). Greater reverence for Shakespeare is often discernible in amateur, community and student performance, which, though not unattuned to the audience’s pleasure, is also firmly focused on the actor’s experience. Performing Shakespeare remains a vehicle for personal development and empowerment, often through the rehearsal techniques developed by Augusto Boal in his Theatre of the Oppressed (1974). Even where Shakespeare is sometimes now being shunted to the side in the literature curriculum in favour of contemporary and local writers, the perceived value of performing Shakespeare is reflected in a steady number of student productions, such as those discussed by Andrew James Hartley, Kaja Dunn and Christopher Berry in their contribution to this volume.3 And the fact that Shakespeare is out of copyright and draws reliable audiences means the plays enjoy a robust amateur performance tradition (Dobson 2013). During the COVID-19 crisis of 2020, an abundance of made-for-online Shakespeare performances took the form of readings, from Patrick Stewart delivering a sonnet a day from a garden chair to the elaborate crowd-created Zoom performances of The Show Must Go Online, convened by Robert Myles. Implicit in these performances – often characterized by wit and creativity – was a sense of Shakespeare as an end in him/itself; as Myles wrote, the readings ‘will allow us to expand our appreciation of Shakespeare, and keep our classical text skills sharp’ (2020). The same global pandemic that brought amateur performances to an international global community in 2020 also saw a widespread sharing of archival Shakespeare performances from around the world that illustrated the blurred lines of national traditions of playing Shakespeare in a globalized and mediatized world (see Alexa Alice Joubin’s chapter in this book). At one time, there was a distinction between local and global traditions that made Shakespeare performances originating outside of England, and especially outside the old Empire, at least potentially distinct from the main hereditary line. These global traditions, especially German and Japanese, were sometimes brought into English Shakespeare performance through Brecht and Noh, for example, but these remained distinct, through most of theatre history, from Shakespeare performed for German or Japanese audiences. While perhaps charmed or intrigued by English Shakespeare traditions as the French had been by Garrick’s performances in eighteenth-century Paris, performances outside the anglosphere often see these English traditions filtered through local performance styles and conventions. The rise of stage-to-screen broadcast has in some ways changed that, not least by removing some of the rationale for productions that are not firmly embedded in local theatre ecologies. Thomas Ostermeier’s Shakespeare at the Schaubühne or Ivo van Hove’s at Toneelgroep Amsterdam are not the RSC’s

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or the Globe’s Shakespeare, and whether at home or abroad (both directors are well known on the international touring circuit), these represent Shakespeare through contemporary European theatrical traditions that have been, but are perhaps no longer, distinct from English-language Shakespeare. Globalized, networked contemporary Shakespeare performances today (as Sonia Massai discusses in her chapter; see also Mancewicz 2014) are in significant ways markedly different from the examples analysed in Massai’s collection World-wide Shakespeares (2005) or Dennis Kennedy’s earlier Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (1993). The mediation of Shakespearean theatre across new forms and platforms has also required the development of new literacies. From the earliest days of electronic recording technology, makers of Shakespearean theatre sought to translate theatre into new media, from the filming of early twentieth-century productions (Buchanan 2009), to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s pioneering attempts to televise its work (Wyver 2019), to the explosion in the last decade of live-streamed theatre to cinemas and computers around the world (Aebischer, Greenhalgh and Osborne 2018; Aebischer 2020). These kinds of remediation have blurred the lines between stage and screen performance, audiences receiving performances that have been shaped by the work of both stage directors and screen directors, by choices made for an audience sharing the physical space of the actors and by choices that anticipate the audience watching remotely, whether ‘live’ or asynchronously. And the development of productions created via Google+ or Zoom further blur distinctions between stage and the broadly defined ‘screen’. While this volume focuses predominantly on the theatre (The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Adaptation explores a wider range of media), the single room shared between actors and audiences is increasingly troubled as a synecdoche for contemporary Shakespearean performance, and in this book we include chapters that span film, digital video and theatre, gesturing towards the ways in which newer technologies of remediation and reception continue to shift the parameters of Shakespearean performance. The anxieties about how acts of translation and remediation affect a notion of Shakespearean value have not vanished; Kennedy and Yong Li Lan argue that ‘some worry that when his text is aggressively transformed into a new language and a radically unfamiliar performative mode, something essential in Shakespeare disappears’ (2010: 3). Contemporary Shakespeare performance is thus impossible to confine within clearly definable limits, and the critical competencies applicable to a subset of performance that transcends language, nation, style, politics and aesthetic are similarly multifarious. In his playful article ‘Romeo and Juliet Academic Theatre Review Kit*’ (2008), Alan Armstrong proposes a parodic checklist for constructing a standard scholarly review of a production of Romeo and Juliet, its boilerplate questions and stock phrases a provocative satire of the complacency of a literary-critical method as applied to performance reviewing. The article points to the role of performance scholars in constructing what counts – worse, matters – as Shakespearean performance. Approaches to criticism that catalogue whether the Montagues and Capulets wore blue and red or black and white respectively, and

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that treat performers as the vehicle for an expression of Shakespeare, reinforce the dominance of the dramatic performance tradition and the primacy of text. This is perhaps best captured in the furore over what the recently retired theatre critic Michael Billington identified as an apparent (or, we would argue, a manufactured) crisis in verse speaking among English Shakespeare actors (2020). Billington was quick to dissociate his critique from the more reactionary views in the right-wing press that verse and diversity are like the buckets that represent Richard II and Henry IV, the quality of verse speaking declining as diverse casting increases (even if the article as published online misleadingly juxtaposed a byline about ‘alienation from his [Shakespeare’s] language’ with an image of Paapa Essiedu, the first Black man to play Hamlet at the RSC). But even if race is not the central element of Billington’s argument, the conservatism that his article represents, especially with its evocation of Great Shakespeareans of the past and its conclusion that ‘we are living with a theatre increasingly cut off from its past’, puts Billington somewhat at odds with much of contemporary Shakespeare performance. Billington’s retirement perhaps is one sign of drastic changes in the ecology of theatre criticism in the twenty-first century that have already altered the ways in which performances are captured for posterity. While video recordings, promptbooks, stage managers’ notes and other materials continue to nourish the archive, in many markets, professional theatre critics, who capture the experience of the performance, have been eliminated from newspaper payrolls. Journals like Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey continue to publish scholarly reviews that contextualize productions within the history of Shakespeare in performance, but alongside this are blogs like The Bardathon (Peter Kirwan) and ‘Action is Eloquence’: (Re)thinking Shakespeare (Gemma Allred and Ben Broadribb), and online journals such as Scene and Exeunt, that have collectively emerged as important records of a wider range of productions than those captured in the limited word count of a print journal. The multiplication of voices and of different perspectives on a production is in many ways salutary, though someone like Billington, with his long tenure at The Guardian and his deep immersion in contemporary theatre, provided an informed (if often also a contentious and partial) view that is, in many markets, now lost, ceded to an online, polyvocal, more democratic but not unproblematic form of criticism.4 The questions of what contemporary Shakespeare performance is and who gets to define it remain unanswerable. In an evocative metaphor, Alexa Alice Joubin describes performing Shakespeare in global theatre as ‘a process of incorporating multiple voices into one artwork … a tug of war between competing voices across time and space’ (2017: 426), and these voices include not only those producing but those interpreting Shakespearean performance. This tug of war, however, productively foregrounds process, or what Barbara Hodgdon refers to as the ‘visible and invisible theatrical labor brought to bear on those remains in order to trace the force of performance’ (2016: 5). It is beyond the scope of this book – any book – to define what Shakespearean performance should be; it is our hope, however, that it will support scholars and students in incorporating their own voices and labour into that process of making and remembering.

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SHAKESPEARE PERFORMANCE SCHOLARSHIP: PRACTICES AND PROCESSES Although this book focuses on ‘contemporary’ performance, it draws on a long history that includes not only performances but also various ways of documenting them. Diana Taylor’s (2003) useful formulation of a performance history that exists in both archives and repertories, in both the material records of performances and the practices of actors passed down through rehearsals and anecdotes, is a way of framing how Shakespeare in performance, even when it is urgently and radically contemporary, draws on a tradition. The interplay between historical, theoretical, practical and experiential approaches to Shakespeare drives the field of Shakespeare Performance Studies, as outlined by Susan Bennett and Gina Bloom in their curated special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin on ‘Shakespeare and Performance Studies’ (2017), and in this volume we seek to highlight and reflect upon the ecology of methods and theories that situates performance scholarship in a cyclical relationship with Shakespearean performance. In an interview conducted for this volume, director Yang Jung-ung says: ‘I hope historians in the future do not watch my productions but read reviews of my works. As everything is changing, my productions practice their roles at the time when they were created.’ While Yang’s position is highly unlikely to be a universal one among directors, it is a reminder that the performance critics of today become the archival material of tomorrow. Much of the energy of Shakespeare performance scholarship goes into the documentation of performance from the point of view of the informed spectator, with ‘informed’ loosely defined. This is sometimes conceptualized as a service to future generations; for example, Stanley Wells’s foreword to A Year of Shakespeare, a volume documenting the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, acknowledges the book’s aim ‘of forming an archive of accounts of an exceptionally wide range of theatrical experiences made available within a short space of time and originating in many different cultures’ (2013). On one hand, the scholar is conceptualized as a kind of pre-emptive defender of the past, serving an important function of preserving details of stage and screen productions that (especially in the case of limited events, ephemeral digital media and/or smaller theatre companies without archival resources) may be lost to history. But Yang’s desire to be remembered through reviews also speaks to the role of critics in preserving the experience of productions: what it felt to have watched something at that moment. The performance scholar is thus often self-consciously involved in the process of writing a social history of experiencing Shakespeare in performance, which may also reflect on shifting experience, as in Kim Solga’s shifting feelings towards a 2006 production of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (2009; 2015). Reviewers are not only the recorders but also the performers of theatre history in the sense Greg Dening articulated in his influential essay ‘Performing on the Beaches of the Mind’ with the insight that historians perform history (2002); the experiences and insights of reviewers develop into the theorization and historicization of performance, and thus delimit what Shakespeare in performance means, at least for a time. James C. Bulman, introducing his landmark collection Shakespeare, Theory and

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Performance, makes this point when he argues that ‘[i]nsisting on the indeterminacy of meaning and on the radical contingencies which affect performance, critics themselves become performers who, in their acts of translation, play at constructing “Shakespeare”’ (1996: 8). W. B. Worthen’s manifesto for Shakespeare Performance Studies builds on this, seeing it now no longer as a theoretical position about the positionality of the reviewer but an imperative, arguing that the field must be shaped neither by the determinants of performance alone … nor by the figural license of ‘the text’ … Rather, its purpose is to ask what Shakespeare performance is and is for as performance historically, how the material practices of performance media speak with and through Shakespearean drama by remaking it as performance, speak as acting on stage and on large, small, and pixellated screens, speak with and through its audiences. (2014: 22) In mediating indeterminate meaning and interrogating material practices, in exploring the purpose and realization, effect and affect, politics and histories of Shakespearean performance, Shakespeare Performance Studies takes moments of performance as objects of study, reworking the raw materials of production (themselves already filtered through subjective experience) and rereading them through new critical lenses necessarily tied to the present concerns and positionality of the beholder. Performance, argues Ayanna Thompson, is ‘an event, a set of specific practices, a way of making meaning, and an historical and ephemeral moment’ and these meaning ‘only become exponentially more multifaceted when placed in conjunction’ with other critical terms such as ‘race’ (2009: 359). The materials and methods of Performance Studies are to be found in all areas of scholarship on early modern drama, from editorial gloss to illustrative anecdote, from critical theory to theatre history. Its slipperiness and refusal to be shaped by firm determinants have allowed its tools to be especially applicable to theoretical projects invested in the destabilization of fixed categories of knowledge, especially in relation to the broader definition of ‘performativity’ as applied to gender, race, queer, postcolonial, trans-, Marxist and other critical fields. Although at one time the field of Shakespeare in performance emphasized the insights that performance might contribute towards a better understanding of Shakespeare, now it is more often the case that Shakespeare is the instrument and performance the object of study, in line with Worthen’s aspiration. At the same time as performance is made to speak to new and pressing critical issues, it enters into history, with performance scholars cataloguing and organizing performances, creating or disrupting genealogies and teleologies, and arranging the materials of the field into narratives. These histories emerge in many forms. The ‘Shakespeare in the Theatre’ series (Bloomsbury) tells localized histories of specific directors, companies and venues; the ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ series (Manchester University Press) establishes a performance history for individual plays; and stand-alone monographs and articles capture micro-histories of Shakespeare operating at specific times and places. These histories are always themselves interpretive acts, as perhaps most perfectly illustrated in Barbara Hodgdon’s

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performance of reconstruction in her short monograph Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive in which she shifts from considering performance as product to focusing on performance as process, drawing on memories (mine as well as those of others), photographs, actors’ annotated rehearsal scripts and rehearsal notes, prompt scripts, prop scenarios and costumes – materials already collected as well as new ones which potentially give access to scenarios of action and behavior, to the embodied practices toward which these remains gesture, where context sutures them, each to each. (2016: 5–6) Hodgdon’s immersive account of her archival explorations is itself a process of historicization, reorganizing and retelling the stories of individual productions as preserved in the archives while emphasizing her own agency within that narrative. This is an aspect Rob Conkie picks up on in his provocative Writing Performative Shakespeares, when he asks ‘how might the archive materials of rehearsal and production be deployed in order to evocatively reconstitute performance?’ (2016: 30) and offers in response a performance of two Melbourne student productions of Romeo and Juliet and Pericles presented via pinboards. Conkie’s work is an exciting intervention into new modes of performance criticism that challenges the sufficiency of prose itself as a means of documenting, theorizing and historicizing performance, rehearsal and archives. And in making a performance out of the process of research, these authors find new ways of constructing what Shakespeare is. Finally, the research of Shakespeare Performance Studies finds its way back into the creation of performance in its traditional and more experimental forms, as scholars act as dramaturges, advisors, embedded critics, adaptors and makers of performance in their own right. The creation of permanent academic positions at theatres such as Shakespeare’s Globe (Farah Karim-Cooper and Will Tosh) and the American Shakespeare Center (Ralph Alan Cohen) has been an exciting development pioneered by reconstructed theatres seeking to operate at the forefront of scholarship and practice, and offers a formalization of processes stretching back to John Russell Brown’s affiliation with the National Theatre under Peter Hall in the 1960s and 1970s; scholars such as Russell Jackson and Judith Buchanan continue to act as scholarly advisors on new Shakespearean film. Scholars such as Rob Conkie, Tom Cornford, Bridget Escolme and Stephen Purcell have created professional and amateur productions that have informed their scholarly work, and the iterative processes of practice-as-research (surveyed in relation to Shakespeare by Purcell 2017) have yielded fresh questions by treating rehearsal and performance as process rather than product.5 And the role of scholars in then creating platforms for other artists to talk about their work, such as Carol Chillington Rutter’s Clamorous Voices (1988) and the Cambridge University Press Players of Shakespeare series, or in Kim F. Hall’s preface to the published edition of Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor (2020; a play performed at scholarly conferences as well as in public theatres) returns us full circle to the role of the Shakespeare performance scholar in creating the materials and reports of Shakespeare performance that will become the archives of the future.

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Shakespeare Performance Studies is thus characterized by its multifaceted and multisensory engagement with the contemporary performance of early modern drama at all stages of its development, production and reception. Its methods and tools are protean and multidisciplinary, responding to performance events whose meanings are unstable and which are themselves affected by the presence and participation of scholars. And the continued proliferation of new primary materials means that this is an especially responsive area of Shakespeare studies, in which the serendipity of chance encounters, the surprise of a groundbreaking new interpretation, the emotional effect of a communal experience, or the intervention of global affairs can radically change a research trajectory. At the time of writing, to take an extreme example, the COVID-19 pandemic has postponed or cancelled practice-as-research projects and traditional theatre productions, and many Shakespeare performance scholars are turning their critical skills to the analysis of digital media productions (see Alexa Alice Joubin’s chapter in this volume); drawing upon the tools of emotion and trauma studies to read archived productions through an experiential lens; or participating in fundraising projects designed to help save the theatres upon which the field depends. And as contemporary Shakespeare performance changes and adapts, so will the research that accompanies it.6

THIS BOOK This Research Handbook is designed to be a companion to the researcher attempting to situate themselves in relation to Shakespearean performance. It both models ways of approaching productions – from archival research to observing rehearsals, from close analysis of single productions to structural investigation of theatrical seasons, from specific theoretical questions to social and politically active approaches – and opens up directions for future research. The volume also includes resources designed to support researchers in shaping and designing their own investigations. While the volume cannot be exhaustive, our collective aim is to open up questions and inspire future research directions. The volume is divided into sections that are designed with the needs of users at different stages of their research in mind. Following this introduction, contemporary methodologies are the focus of the three essays in Part One, ‘Research methods and problems’. Our contributors to this section were each invited to respond to a major locus of Shakespeare performance material: the archive, the audience and the performance as event. In ‘The archive: Show reporting Shakespeare’, Rob Conkie draws on Barbara Hodgdon’s important work in Shakespeare, Performance, and the Archive (2016) and Diana Taylor’s productive theorization of the documentary archive and the embodied repertoire to argue that show reports, the documents produced to capture the distinguishing features of a particular performance, exist somewhere between the two. This rather neglected form of evidence is revealed, in Conkie’s deft reading, to be ‘an archive/repertoire hybrid, an especially embodied document’ that reveals the kinds of labour an audience-eye view of performance tends to efface. In ‘The audience: Receiving and remaking experience’, Margaret

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Jane Kidnie builds on the important foundational work of Bruce McConachie, Patrice Pavis, Susan Bennett, Helen Freshwater, Matthew Reason, Kirsty Sedgman and others to consider the semiotic and phenomenological experience of different levels of theatre spectatorship. With her attention to the nuances between a first encounter with a particular production and a recollection of that encounter in light of reviews and other forms of prompts to memory, Kidnie creates an ideal bridge between Conkie’s essay and Paul Prescott’s, which concludes the section. In ‘The event: Festival Shakespeare’, Prescott considers the role of festivals in the contemporary performance of Shakespeare, drawing on notions including Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, the globalization of theatrical touring, pilgrimage, exchange and environmentalism. Distinguishing between the aims and aesthetics of community, regional and international festivals, Prescott argues that future research could focus productively on the meaning of festivals to participants, both theatremakers and theatregoers, thus privileging the connection between the festival and its community over that between the festival and any residual notions of ‘authentic’ Shakespeare. Part Two, ‘Current research and issues’, profiles some of the areas of research currently exercising Shakespeare performance scholars, and in doing so models a wide variety of methods for doing performance research. Here again, we asked our contributors to respond to a keyword that has been a focus of activity or concern, and to reflect on the ways in which their current research (represented here in case studies) speaks to ongoing questions for both theatremakers and scholars. Since its opening in 1997, Shakespeare’s Globe has prompted some of the most significant revisions of long-held assumptions about how early modern drama works, both as a crucible for experimentation and in the debates about its purpose and value. The first two essays in this section take the Globe as their starting point. In ‘Original Practices: Old ways and new directions’, Sarah Dustagheer demonstrates the contemporaneity of original performance practices at the Globe, which remains an important site for innovative and experimental Shakespeare productions, even though these aspects are sometimes occluded by misapprehensions about the Globe’s positioning between past and present. Her analysis of the debates occasioned by changes in the Globe’s artistic leadership identifies the political and aesthetic dimensions of the role of ‘Original Practices’ as a distinctively contemporary practice. Stephen Purcell, meanwhile, in ‘Space: Locus and platea in modern Shakespearean performance’, revisits Robert Weimann’s influential proposition that Shakespearean dramaturgy draws on medieval traditions that situated onstage action according to a semiotics of space. Using productions at the Globe and the Bridge Theatre as test cases, and building on responses to Weimann by D. J. Hopkins and Erika Lin, Purcell uses the practice-based discoveries of fluid spaces to refine Weimann’s work and identifies a ‘bisociative platea’ at play in the shifting spaces of the stage. The Globe is also important to Susan Bennett’s response to the economic impact of Shakespeare in the contemporary theatre landscape, contrasting Prescott’s work on the often-rural Shakespearean festival with a focus on urban performance. In ‘Economics: Shakespeare performing cities’, she argues that the economic conditions shaping the performance of Shakespeare in cities worldwide cannot be separated

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from the financial models in which they participate, and invites the reader to attend to the ways in which Shakespeare becomes a ‘viable partner in initiating new economic models of cultural production, in fostering new patterns of occupation and use for city landscapes and, most notably, in acting as an effective engine for burgeoning cultural economies’. Sonia Massai turns to different kinds of networks in her ‘Networks: Researching global Shakespeare’, revisiting the work of her groundbreaking collection World-wide Shakespeares (2005) to consider whether her theoretical approach, imagining Shakespeare performance as a cultural field in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, remains applicable today. Responding to the emergence of new digital performance platforms, she concludes that global Shakespeare performance is perhaps best understood now as a network rather than a field. For many scholars of Shakespeare performance, ‘Shakespeare’ himself is a thorny issue, representative of hegemonic practices and colonial practices. Alexa Alice Joubin’s ‘Global Mediation: Performing Shakespeare in the age of networked and digital cultures’ reorients study of global Shakespeare away from an Anglophone centre and instead explores the site-specific meanings that emerge in different localities. Joubin’s analysis attends to the ways in which cultural meanings are mediated through the new networks created by digital engagement, outlining Shakespeare’s futures in intermedia and transnational contexts, especially in the postCOVID-19 age. Eoin Price, in ‘Canon: Framing not-Shakespearean performance’, considers the role that conventions of marketing and receiving Shakespeare play in colouring the reception of performances of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Taking the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 ‘Roaring Girls’ season as his case study, his analysis of the frames through which the productions were both presented and interpreted draws attention to the subtle mechanisms by which Shakespearean ‘value’ is reinforced, to the ongoing detriment of the fortunes of the wider drama of the period. Challenges to canonical practice are also taking place in the rehearsal room, and two of our essays – both collaboratively researched and written – explore the ways in which production processes are invested in transforming Shakespearean practices, especially in relation to questions of social justice. In ‘Pedagogy: Decolonizing Shakespeare on stage’, Andrew James Hartley, Kaja Dunn and Christopher Berry draw on their experience of creating a student production of Twelfth Night in a specific pedagogical setting, a public university in the American South, to demonstrate the nuanced processes of dismantling Shakespeare’s cultural baggage. In the rehearsal room, consciousness of the intersections between race and Shakespeare is more productive than their erasure in the form of ‘colour-blind’ casting or ‘neutral’ performances that end up privileging whiteness even when roles are played by actors of colour. Further north, Erin Julian and Kim Solga acted as observers during the development of a production of Comedy of Errors at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Their ‘Ethics: The challenge of practising (and not just representing) diversity at the Stratford Festival of Canada’ considers the ethical and practical implications of a diversity practice that, however well intentioned, can sit awkwardly within existing institutions like Stratford and that can become a burden borne disproportionately by the practitioners who are asked to ‘represent’ groups

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to which they belong by virtue of gender presentation, race or ability, often through unpaid and unrecognized work of cultural mediation. The final two essays in this section continue an emphasis on the mediation of bodies within theoretical frameworks. Roberta Barker’s ‘Bodies: Gender, race, ability and the Shakespearean stage’ explores how the bodies of Shakespearean actors, in his own time and ours, can be read in relation to the characters they represent. Drawing on the work of Joseph Roach, Valerie Traub and others, she argues that the ‘iconic’ approach, which gives rise to discussions about the rightness of fit between actor and role, may be yielding to an ‘indexical’ mode in which the actor’s body is read more abstractly, in ways that may be more reflective of early modern practice and more conducive to equality of opportunity in the contemporary theatre. And in the final essay of this section, drawing on Fredric Jameson’s formulation of a ‘desire called Utopia’, Courtney Lehmann focuses on the impact of the technologies of cinema in remediating performance. She reads Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest as a manifestation of utopian desire in Jameson’s sense of hope for a possible, more progressive future, and possibly a way of bringing that future into being. Like many of the authors in this section, Lehmann makes a claim for the high stakes of Shakespeare in performance, as far from Brook’s ‘deadly theatre’ as the play’s magical island is from the political intrigues of Milan. For Part Three of this volume, ‘New directions in Shakespeare and performance’, we wished to pass the metaphorical microphone to the makers of Shakespeare performance who, while often the subject and material of Shakespeare performance scholarship, are too rarely consulted about the questions that they think scholarship should be asking. Nora J. Williams and C. K. Ash, both scholar-practitioners themselves, solicited insights from directors, lighting designers, actors, writers, literary managers and producers from four continents. In a series of engaged, sometimes enraged, always fascinating interviews, these practitioners respond in their own voices to the challenges and opportunities of reimagining Shakespeare for contemporary performance, the kinds of research that they draw upon, and their own visions of the future. Emerging from the interviews, Williams and Ash argue, is a longing ‘for a deeper understanding of the complexity of creativity and process’ from academics. In the closing section to the volume, we return to resources designed to support researchers in navigating a complex field and in addressing the questions posed by the earlier sections. For 4.1, ‘Chronology: A fifty-year history of performance criticism’, we rely on the expertise of James C. Bulman, a foundational figure of Shakespeare Performance Studies and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (to which many of this volume’s authors contributed). Bulman’s agile survey of fifty years of Shakespeare performance criticism traces key strands in the emergence and consolidation of the field alongside the academic discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies. In telling this multi-stranded history, Bulman constructs a narrative of response and innovation that we anticipate will be invaluable to researchers at all levels. The ‘A–Z of key terms’ (4.2), by Bríd Phillips in collaboration with the editors, is intended as a handy primer for those entering the field and, since it is fully

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cross-referenced, as a wayfinder for readers who are interested in being directed quickly to the essays in this collection that relate to particular topics. The key terms in this section relate to terms and fields discussed throughout the volume that may be unfamiliar to the lay reader; for more extensive introductions to the terms and movements used within theatre studies, we recommend The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance (Kennedy 2010). For our ‘Annotated bibliography’ (4.3), we worked with Karin Brown, Librarian at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, to identify and describe the key books of the current century. This was no easy task, and we were sorely tempted to reach back into the 1990s for examples such as W. B. Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997) and James Bulman’s Shakespeare, Theory and Performance (1996) that continue to shape the field. It assuaged our consciences that both of these scholars are still active in our field and represented in the annotated bibliography by their more recent work. We note, though, that the scholarly book is only one appropriate avenue for the dissemination of Shakespeare performance scholarship, and cannot do justice to the wealth of articles, special issues, blogs, practice-as-research projects, conferences and other outputs that continue to define and diversify the field; we address many of these in 4.4, ‘Resources’, and hope that the items catalogued here offer starting points for further exploration. A field whose primary materials take the form of live theatre productions that occur at a given time and place, and whose archives are material and sometimes irreproducible digitally, can create problems of access; nonetheless, as the attention paid by our contributors to digital resources, new media and community performance makes clear, Shakespeare Performance Studies has the potential to become ever more open to researchers working around the world and on different kinds of material. In 4.4, ‘Resources’, we collect and reflect on a selection of the many resources relevant to Shakespeare in contemporary performance and the tools available for supporting researchers, focusing on those mentioned in this book and which are most likely to remain accessible for the future.

WHY SHAKESPEARE IN PERFORMANCE MATTERS We began this introduction by reflecting on Adjoa Andoh’s Richard II as a production that exemplified the intersection of many different interpretive lenses and traditions. But while we have argued in this introduction that contemporary performance draws on local and global traditions, it is also true that Shakespeare is made anew in each production. The process of rehearsal, however well informed by performance history, however strongly it connects to the archive and the repertory, is one of discovery, in which the actors make the roles their own and, between them, recreate the relationships, the hierarchies, the fictional worlds and the emotional nuances held in potentia in the Shakespearean text. Andoh’s Richard II is very much her own, informed by her experiences as an actor and as a woman of colour living in England in the twenty-first century. Equally, the spectator’s share of the theatrical experience is also subjective and individually constituted, connected only loosely to whatever

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intentions Andoh and her co-creators might have had – and even more loosely to Shakespeare’s intentions. The Scottish poet Jackie Kay, a close friend of Andoh, exemplifies this in her review-as-memoir of the production, memories of sharing life-changing events with Andoh intersecting with emotive and analytical reactions to seeing the performance, accounts of rehearsal process interwoven and inseparable from intimate biography (Kay 2019). Kay’s account exemplifies the uniqueness of the audience-performance bond, resulting in a piece beautiful on its own terms and only made possible by the combination of several different subjective experiences. Scaffolding the theatrical experience of Shakespeare in performance, and shaping audience expectations of a production like Andoh’s Richard II, is the work of many hands, from the authors of program notes and marketing blurbs to the reviewers whose responses will also inform posterity’s impressions. Teachers at all levels from primary to tertiary also have a role to play in preparing new audiences to receive productions that are not perfect illustrations of preconceived notions about what Shakespeare is and means – and in preparing student actors to find their places within the Shakespearean repertory. Thinking through what Shakespeare might mean in a diverse and globalized world, and to diverse and globalized individuals onstage, backstage and in the audience, is part of the work of this book that we hope will help to shape the discipline from a pedagogical perspective. It is, we think, a great pity when those in positions of influence prefer deadly productions on the grounds that they are truer to Shakespeare’s intentions or, as is the opinion of some of the critics discussed in Price’s chapter for this volume, because the role of a production is to provide a commentary on the past. We agree with Emma Smith, who in her extraordinary This is Shakespeare states categorically that ‘I don’t really care what he might have meant, and nor should you’ (2019: 5). Positive encounters with Shakespeare are frequently charged with the language of newness, of discovery, of liberation. The plays should be able to connect with an audience on some level – aesthetic, emotional, intellectual – if there is any purpose to performing them today, and we are persuaded by the argument that to appreciate Shakespeare performance as contemporary, alive, urgent, vital and exciting is precisely to honour those intentions. In continually pushing the boundaries of what Shakespeare performance looks and sounds like, contemporary Shakespeare performance looks to shape the world around it. Kay reports that Andoh’s Richard II was set in a kingdom made up by the cast because ‘“show me the place where women of colour are in power, and I will set it there!” Adjoa says laughing’ (2019). When Dominic Cavendish published his polemics ‘The Thought Police’s rush for gender equality on stage risks the death of the great male actor’ (2017) and ‘The woke brigade are close to “cancelling” Shakespeare’ (2020) – in the latter case, misapplying a term with specific application to racial injustice – he highlighted the ways in which contemporary Shakespeare performance is expected by some cultural commentators to resist equality or social justice, but also continued the tradition of Shakespeare becoming the flashpoint for larger shifts in society that pass without comment in the production of other works.7 If only because of the value that societies around the world continue to accord to Shakespeare, contemporary Shakespeare performance continues (for better and

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for worse) to hold up a mirror to the world and instigate discussion about what the world should look like. In continuing to champion and research the work of producing Shakespeare around the world, in all its forms, Shakespeare Performance Studies seeks to make a meaningful contribution to this project. This collection is a contribution to a conversation, neither the first nor last word on its subject. We hope that it will provide inspiration for ongoing, world-changing research in this vibrant area of Shakespeare studies.

NOTES 1. On the relationship between the history of blackface performance and Shakespeare, see Thompson 2011: 96–117. 2. On the Essex Rising and the controversy over its connection to Richard II, see Hammer 2008. 3. For a detailed account of Shakespeare on the university stage, see Hartley 2015. 4. For a more detailed discussion of the historical development of theatre reviewing in relation to Shakespeare, see Prescott 2013. On the emergence of the theatre blog as a form and its relationship to professional criticism, see Vaughan 2020. 5. See also Dustagheer, Jones and Rycroft 2017 as part of a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin on practice-as-research. 6. As we finalized this introduction, we simultaneously finalized a special section of Shakespeare Bulletin (38.3) on ‘Shakespeare in Lockdown’, co-edited with Erin Sullivan, which invited reviewers to respond to their experiences of watching recorded and broadcast Shakespeare during the enforced isolation of the COVID-19 period, often at a large physical and temporal distance from the original performance. The brief occasioned reflections on loss, subjectivity and changing relationships between art and spectator. 7. Cavendish’s second essay was prompted by the author’s knee-jerk misunderstanding of RSC artistic director Gregory Doran’s use of the plural ‘they’ (referring to multiple potential co-authors of the Henry VI plays) as singular in an attempt to de-gender Shakespeare.

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale (2020), Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aebischer, Pascale, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne, eds (2018), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury. Armstrong, Alan (2008), ‘Romeo and Juliet Academic Theatre Review Kit*’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 26 (1): 109–24. Bennett, Susan (2017), ‘Experimental Shakespeare’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 13–27, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Bennett, Susan and Gina Bloom, eds (2017), ‘Shakespeare and Performance Studies: A Dialogue’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 367–72. Billington, Michael (2020), ‘From rep to reps: can a “Shakespeare gym” solve the crisis in verse-speaking?’, The Guardian, 18 February. Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/feb/18/get-thee-to-a-shakespeare-gym-actors-notknowing-shakespeare-is-just-the-start (accessed 21 November 2020). Boal, Augusto ([1974] 1993), Theatre of the Oppressed, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Brook, Peter ([1968] 2019), The Empty Space, New York: Scribner. Buchanan, Judith (2009), Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulman, James C. (1996), ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and Performance Theory’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, 1–11, London: Routledge. Bulman, James C. (2017), ‘Introduction: Cross-Currents in Performance Criticism’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and Performance, 1–9, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cantoni, Vera (2018), New Playwriting at Shakespeare’s Globe, London: Bloomsbury. Carlson, Marvin (2001), The Haunted Stage, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cavendish, Dominic (2017), ‘The Thought Police’s rush for gender equality on stage risks the death of the great male actor’, The Telegraph, 23 February. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/thought-polices-rush-gender-equalitystage-risks-death-great/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Cavendish, Dominic (2020), ‘The woke brigade are close to “cancelling” Shakespeare’, The Telegraph, 9 February. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/ what-to-see/woke-brigade-close-cancelling-shakespeare/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Conkie, Rob (2016), Writing Performative Shakespeares: New Forms for Performance Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dening, Greg (2002), ‘Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay’, History and Theory, 41 (1), 1–24. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2303.00188 (accessed 21 November 2020). Dobson, Michael (2013), Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dustagheer, Sarah, Oliver Jones and Eleanor Rycroft (2017), ‘(Re)constructed Spaces for Early Modern Drama: Research in Practice’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (2): 173–85. Gardner, Lyn (2016), ‘King John Played by a Potato Masher? It’s Shakespeare on a plate’, The Guardian, 3 March. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ theatreblog/2016/mar/03/forced-entertainment-complete-works-table-top-shakespearebarbican-london (accessed 21 November 2020). Gerzic, Marina and Aidan Norrie, eds (2020), Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations, London: Routledge. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988), Shakespearean Negotiations, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Hall, Kim F. (2020), ‘Introduction’, in Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor, n.p., London: Bloomsbury.

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Hammer, Paul E. J. (2008), ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (1): 1–35. Hartley, Andrew James, ed. (2015), Shakespeare on the University Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodgdon, Barbara (2005), ‘Introduction: A Kind of History’, in Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 1–9, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hodgdon, Barbara (2016), Shakespeare, Performance, and the Archive, London and New York: Routledge. Holland, Peter (2006), ‘Introduction’, in Peter Holland (ed.), Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, 1–19, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joubin, Alexa Alice (2017), ‘Global Shakespeare Criticism Beyond the Nation State’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare Performance, 423–40, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kay, Jackie (2019), ‘Richard II and me: my friend Adjoa Andoh was born to play the king’, The Guardian, 30 March. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2019/mar/30/richard-ii-my-friend-adjoa-andoh-was-born-to-play-the-king (accessed 21 November 2020). Kennedy, Dennis, ed. (1993), Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. (2010), The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, Dennis and Yong Li Lan (2010), ‘Introduction: Why Shakespeare?’, in Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan (eds), Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, 1–23, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kott, Jan (1964), Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mancewicz, Aneta (2014), Intermedial Shakespeare on European Stages, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Massai, Sonia, ed. (2005), World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Myles, Robert (2020), ‘Take Part’, The Show Must Go Online. Available online: https:// docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSefebw5eBgcpVRY7ZESZDtUI45QoGdW1OQD OXogOMXqmorT3g/viewform (accessed 28 May 2020). Prescott, Paul (2013), Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purcell, Stephen (2017), ‘Practice-as-Research and Original Practices’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 425–43. Rutter, Carol Chillington (1988), Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today, London: The Women’s Press. Rutter, Carol Chillington (2005), ‘Maverick Shakespeare’, in Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 335–58, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Schneider, Rebecca (2011), Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London and New York: Routledge.

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Sedgman, Kirsty (2018), The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Emma (2019), This is Shakespeare, London: Penguin. Solga, Kim (2009), Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Solga, Kim (2015), ‘Beatrice Joanna and the Rhetoric of Rape’, in Kimberly Jannarone (ed.), Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right, 246–63, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Taylor, Diana (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Thompson, Ayanna (2009), ‘Introduction: Shakespeare, Race, and Performance’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 27 (3): 359–61. Thompson, Ayanna (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tosh, Will (2018), Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London: Bloomsbury. Tribble, Evelyn (2017), Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking With the Body, London: Bloomsbury. Vaughan, Megan (2020), Theatre Blogging: The Emergence of a Critical Culture, London: Bloomsbury. Wells, Stanley (2013), ‘Foreword’, in Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (eds), A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival, xxiii–xxv, London: Bloomsbury. Worthen, W. B. (1997), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, W. B. (2014), Shakespeare Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyver, John (2019), Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History, London: Bloomsbury.

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PART ONE

Research methods and problems

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CHAPTER 1.1

The archive: Show reporting Shakespeare ROB CONKIE

Show reports (sometimes called performance reports) record the details of an individual performance.1 They are (usually) compiled by the production’s stage manager at the conclusion of each performance. The details they (can) record include: the names of the company and the production; the time, date and venue of the performance; the timings of the performance; cast or crew injury, illness, lateness or absence; observations about the quality of the performance and the responses of the audience; errors committed by cast or crew; and repairs required to production materials, including set, props and costume (Maccoy 2004: 182–4; Kincman 2017: 221–4; Roth et al. 2017: 139, 149). The first set of items on this list – the facts and figures of the performance – are definitively archival: in Diana Taylor’s influential formulation of the ‘archive and the repertoire’ (2003), wherein the former consists of ‘documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, [and] CDs’, show reports, quite obviously, are archival documents. Taylor further observes, citing Walter W. Skeat, that the archive ‘etymologically refers to “a public building”’ (19; see also Derrida 1996: 2); the 507 show reports (from nineteen separate productions of Shakespeare staged between 1962 and 2019) consulted for this essay were accessed – sometimes in person, sometimes remotely – from a range of theatre museums, libraries and theatre company archives.2 The second set of items on my introductory list, however – the incidents and accidents of the performance – arguably reside in the latter of Taylor’s categories; that is, within the repertoire. The repertoire, explains Taylor, ‘enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, [and] singing’ (20; see also Schneider 2001: 100–5). Thus, as soon as, for example, a performer’s gesture is recorded in a show report, whilst it remains as part of the repertoire, it also passes, if remediated, from the repertoire towards the archive. I will argue in this essay, therefore, that the show report, through its archiving of the repertoire, its recording of ‘those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge’ (20), represents an archive/repertoire hybrid, an especially embodied document. Taylor writes that ‘[a]s opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same’ (20): the show report, attending to night-by-night variations in the performance season, re-enacts this kind of variability.

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Moreover, ‘individual instances of performances disappear from the repertoire’ (20): the show report preserves, even – I will argue – re-performs, such instances. If show reports might be thought of as, again, via Taylor, ‘revalorizing expressive, embodied culture’ (16), and if such ‘embodied practice’ is epistemological and ‘offers a way of knowing’ (3), this essay will explore the kinds of knowledge afforded by the archivization of embodied practices in show reports. The remainder of the essay will be divided into two halves. The first half will concern the various functions of the show report. The overriding function of the show report is to enable, after Deleuze and Guattari, the assemblage of theatrical production, the ‘ongoing process of forming and sustaining associations between diverse constituents’ (Anderson et al. 2012: 12). A specific, and vital, subsidiary of this overarching show report function is the monitoring of any maintenance requirements, either to personnel or production materials. I will attend to the function of show reports in reproducing institutional identity, which they perform through the regulation of company behaviour and through the reinforcement of company culture and ideology. The second half of the essay will concern the force of the show report. Here, I will specifically address the ways in which show reports might be thought of as re-enacting the performances they record. To conclude, I will consider the various kinds of embodied practice that show reports record, as well as how this archive/repertoire of unexpected incidents, performer-audience traversals, interjections and other ‘ephemeral [and] nonreproducible’ phenomena attest both to Shakespeare’s fundamentally playful and volatile dramaturgy – an archive/repertoire dramaturgy, if you will – and to the resulting dynamic variability of Shakespearean theatrical production.

THE FUNCTION OF SHOW REPORTS Show reports help to facilitate the assemblage of theatrical production: they intervene in a theatrical season’s ‘play of contingency and structure, organization and change’; they focus ‘the process of arranging, organizing, fitting together’; they enable ‘a becoming that brings elements together’; and they make explicit ‘the relation between th[os]e elements’ (Wise et al. 2011: 91 [italics original], 92). How, though, do these assemblage theory applications operate in show report practice? A production is in preview. The show report notes, for example: costume items needing finishing touches; an audience laugh in the right or wrong place; an actor bumping their head on a trap door; a lighting cue missed; a messy curtain call; a prop that’s not quite right. An assemblage of individuals (director, lighting operator, designer, actors, audience members), departments (wardrobe, stage management, electrics), materials (costumes, properties, lights, seats, playbills) and discourses (assumptions about the play, cultural significances of theatre-going, standards of excellence) are arranged into a relational becoming. The production is now in season, perhaps on tour. Internally, the show report continues to facilitate this ‘play of contingency and structure, organization and change’; externally, as Peter Maccoy instructs, show reports ‘should be circulated daily to the director, production manager, management and other key people’ as the most ‘effective way of monitoring the production’ (2004: 182).

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One specific and crucial element that show reports monitor is production maintenance, the two main areas of which are production materials – predominantly set, including stage technology, and costumes and props – and the actors’ bodies. Show reports demonstrate that any production with complicated stage hydraulics, such as the vertically appearing and disappearing doors from the 1994–6 RSC A Midsummer Night’s Dream, will, at some stage during the run, and especially on tour, come to a grinding halt. Peter Holland, celebrating this production’s mechanical doors, observes ‘the worlds of the play’ – those of the farcical mortals and the dream-like fairies – ‘here met’ (1997: 188): the show report illuminates the further assemblage meetings of theatrical magic and mechanical maintenance. The report for 11 November 1994 (show 45) records ‘Problems with the red door [which] doesn’t always stay closed’ and then ‘Bottom & Flute couldn’t get it open!’ Much later, during the production’s tour through the United States, ‘The grey door jammed half way down … it was not fully closed and the handle hit the floor.’ The report continues, ‘Mr Jennings kicked it closed and it fell down, breaking a cable. Major repairs tomorrow’ (22 Mar 1996, show 83 in US/237 overall). This show report moment illustrates the vulnerable contingency of the production assemblage: audience members perhaps variously experienced the failure of the magical door to disappear as an interruption of their investment in the theatrical fiction or as a thrilling demonstration of the volatility of live performance; they perhaps gasped as Oberon added to the repertoire with a toe-risking kick; the stage management team might have held their breath – how costly might such a breakage be, both in terms of time and money? To offset such unwanted instances, the 2018/19 Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) Twelfth Night, its show reports attest, was subject to ‘weekly maintenance’ of its stage machinery (which malfunctioned during the second preview and caused a four-minute delay to the production but thereafter was mostly incident free). The 1989 RSC ‘punk’ Dream show reports follow an intriguing maintenance narrative, selectively reproduced below: Ousel’s eyes haven’t been working very well this evening. David Troughton will take Ousel to Production Wardrobe on Monday to have them tested (13 May 1989, show 29) … Ousel was seen by wardrobe today and it was decided to operate tomorrow … David tells me he will visit Ousel after the ear and eye operation but he fears a sleepless night tonight (15 May, show 30) … Ousel got through her repairs OK and is in fine working order this evening. Ousel thanks everybody for the flowers (18 May, show 31) … Ousel was found to have slight splits in her skull causing the ear lines to catch and not operate properly. Tape saved the day. (20 May, show 33) Though these reports are clearly tongue in cheek, the anthropomorphizing of Ousel – seemingly the ass head Troughton’s Bottom wore – and fondness expressed towards her (why her?), as well as the material care taken for her repair, gesture at the affective interdependence of this production’s human and non-human actors. That the first issue reported should be with Ousel’s eyes perhaps speaks to this mechanical creature’s capacity to connect and communicate, both with the onstage

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actors and with the audience members. In a manner similar to the door-kicking episode above, this show report connects Ousel, members of the cast with whom she interacts, the stage management team, production wardrobe, and even the audience in the dynamic becoming of the production assemblage.3 Most commonly, in terms of maintenance, show reports log repairs needed to costumes and to those who wear them. In this instance, especially, show reports become, as Barbara Hodgdon describes of other theatre archives, ‘embodied books’ and offer ‘fleshly memories’ (2016: 42 [italics original], 89). The American Shakespeare Center (ASC) Hamlet actors, for example, are reported as ‘tired and many are focused on running lines for R&G while backstage’ (8 Feb 2018), which seems to me an extreme cognitive and physical load.4 A Bell Shakespeare Company (BSC) touring Macbeth show report requests ‘more love on stage’ (16 May 1997) after a series of production and extra-curricular accidents and injuries. And at the 2018 Royal Lyceum Edinburgh Twelfth Night one actor’s ‘knee briefly dislocated and then relocated after the scene change into the storm’. The report continues: ‘She was all right but in a lot of pain. Her knee was iced and strapped and she took a couple of ibuprofen’ (3 Oct 2018, show 20). Reproduced here for the MTC Twelfth Night – and this was a production that, in addition to its weekly mechanical maintenance, provided beds for the actors to rest on between shows and scenes, and a speech therapist to conduct a ‘midseason check’ of vocal health (13 Dec 2019, show 35 of 60) – is an approximate chart of its injury (x) and illness (o) toll.5 For thirty-five of the sixty shows there is no report of injury or illness. The reports also reveal that the treatments for the various maladies included extended rest, the application of ice and, in a further expansion of the production assemblage, visits to physiotherapists, masseuses and other health professionals. Show reports always record if one actor (or production staff member) has to stand in for another and this sometimes creates a domino effect as A covers B, C then has to cover B and so on. An RSC 1986 Dream show report explains a ‘sound op. error’ thus: ‘It has to be pointed out that Kate … is in work with a viral infection, is running a temperature and has been told by her Doctor to take a week off work.’ Moreover, ‘Mistakes are inevitable in these situations; the result of a system whereby there are no covers for DSMs’ (26 Sep, show 93). The report of the next (ninetyfourth) performance – ‘Kate still very unwell. I sat in box with her and cued about half the show. Sarah … covering me and Ian … covering Sarah’ (28 Sep) – again demonstrates how delicate and potentially vulnerable a production assemblage can be and how resourceful and resilient (and potentially politically animated) are those of its members charged with sustaining it. Show reports, as well as explicitly functioning to sustain and maintain production, also implicitly function, depending on the status of the production company, to reproduce institutional identity. Show reports are usually headed with the company’s logo and of those reports that I received directly from theatre companies (as opposed to accessing them in archives) some were redacted and others were offered as a selection. Many theatre companies, or their archive representatives, also require a signed declaration that any quotation of production company materials adhere to sensitive ethical standards, and in some cases that publication of such

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FIGURE 1  Chart of injuries in the MTC Twelfth Night, © Una Clemens.

material is contingent upon institutional authorization. These regulatory practices are contextualized by the wider assemblage of theatrical production that is regularly under-resourced and is therefore potentially vulnerable to state or sponsorship funding withdrawal. Thus, Derrida’s notion that ‘archivization produces as much as it records the event’ (1996: 17) suggests that there is a tension for institutions between the regulatory and celebratory dimensions of the daily reports. This filters at times into the construction of the reports themselves, which regulate company behaviour in significant ways. The first way, both historically and visually on the page, that show reports regulate company behaviour is by recording the timing of the production. The earliest show reports I have accessed for this essay – RSC Dreams from 1962 and 1972/3 – are predominantly concerned with the timings of the two halves of the performance, but also include brief notes about cast illnesses and replacements, set problems and actor errors. ‘Directors’, writes Laurie Kincman, ‘pay attention to the running times of individual acts – large unexplained variances from the original pace of the show will prompt concern’ (2017: 222). Of the seventeen show report timings I have consulted for the 1972/3 touring RSC Dream the running length ranges between 2 hours 31 minutes to 2 hours 42 minutes. A show report for the 1994/6 RSC Dream

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offers the following explanation for an anomalous duration: ‘Very unresponsive house; cast played swiftly, eight minutes shorter than last night’ (7 Mar 1995, show 63). Here, the abbreviated running time is explained by the poor reception, and might be read as the stage manager pre-emptively shielding the actors from criticism by company management. Show reports also record more open forms of criticism, mostly notes about errors (and very occasionally, misdemeanours) committed by cast or crew. Thus, a ‘technician constantly missing the same cue, or an actor their lines, may be subject to some form of disciplinary action’ (Maccoy 2004: 185). The show reports for the seventh and eighth performances of the 1973 NYC borough mobile tour of the New York Shakespeare Festival rock musical production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona illustrate this function as an occasional locus for ‘disciplinary action’: ‘Very poor tonight … company was spoken to’ (7 Aug) is followed by ‘Show was good and audience liked it … sloppiness in dance numbers eliminated’ (8 Aug).6 In general, though, references to stage managers redressing cast ‘sloppiness’ are, in the reports I have consulted, rare, and most stage management instruction manuals advise sensitivity in delivering such judgements. Show reports, as well as regulating behaviour, both reflect and reinforce company culture and ideology, and therefore institutional identity. Paul Menzer’s admiring, but not uncritical, assessment of ASC performance practice notes that it ‘is fundamentally constituted by a rage to connect actor and audience and to forge a community for the duration of the event’ (2017: 118) and that, evoking Lacan, ‘Audience contact, to be precise eye contact, can turn every event into a mirror stage’ (119 [italics original]). The ‘rage’ and ‘mirror stage’ that Menzer (admittedly, laconically) uses to describe ASC practice speaks to an emotional immaturity – becoming might be a better word – that is arguably characteristic of emerging, reconstructed theatres desperate to both assert mission statements and seize market shares. The show reports for the 2018 ASC Hamlet, for example, place significant emphasis on the success of actor–audience contact through the detailed recording of reception, particularly final (and standing) ovations. The production played thirty-two times (in repertory) across almost three months. Standing ovation (with three sets of bows) was its most statistically likely outcome. Here, in ascending order of audience enthusiasm, are the curtain call reports: on seven occasions the performance was ovation-less (performances 7, 10, 14, 20, 22, 25, 26); there was one ‘mixed standing ovation’ (performance 3); two ‘scattered ovations’ (16, 31); one ‘enthusiastic ovation’ (4); seventeen instances of ‘standing ovation’ (1, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30); two ‘huge’ ovations (2, 5); and two occasions on which, with four sets of bows, there was an ‘uproarious standing ovation’ (11, 32). These reports attest not only to the archive/repertoire of audience reception for this particular production at particular performances, but also, mirrorlike, to the report author’s commitment to, and participation within, the ASC’s unique community-forging. Susan Leigh Foster’s notion of ‘bodily writing’ offers a way to think through this experience of institutional identification that is produced through the authoring and archiving of show reports. Foster, later echoed by Taylor’s formulation of the

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repertoire, describes the written body thus: ‘Its habits and stances, gestures and demonstrations, every action of its various regions, areas and parts – all these emerge out of cultural practices, verbal or not, that construct corporeal meaning’ (1995: 3). Here follows an answer to Foster’s subsequent question – ‘What markers of its movement might a bodily writing have left behind?’ (4) – as applied to the daily practice of the (bodily) writing of show reports. It is half-past midnight. The stage manager, having packed down the production for the night, sits at her computer, perhaps with a less-than-healthy energy drink on the desk, and addresses each standing item of the show report template. Earlier in the day she checked props, handled them, brushed them off. She fixed a creaking door. She applied an ice pack to an actor’s bruised shoulder. Two weeks ago, she participated in the set construction. Seven weeks ago, she marked out the rehearsal floor, arranged the room, perhaps even washed the director’s coffee cup. Back in the present she consults her handwritten notes about laughs generated by the show, smiles as she transcribes them to the report, and then, at 1.00 am, emails the report to its various recipients with the details of what needs attention before the following day’s performance. Here, in the bodily writing experience of show reports, an accumulated repertoire of ‘habits and stances’, is the show report author’s literal incorporation into, and reproduction of, company culture and ideology.

THE FORCE OF SHOW REPORTS Prompted by Rebecca Schneider’s riposte to 1990s orthodoxies that performance is ontologically constituted through disappearance, Paul Clarke asks ‘How do performances remain? How do documents perform and are archives performative; what do they do?’ He answers, a few pages later, that a ‘performance continues to take place through the dissemination of its eventful documents … remaining live through research, review, re-use, remediation, re-performance and re-enactment’ (2008: 1, 4). Peter Holland and Barbara Hodgdon, Shakespearean archons, offer similar arguments.7 The former, attending to the ‘voices’ of stage management staff as they are ‘recorded’, particularly through promptbook notes and annotations, refers to ‘the archive as a site of [and an] embodiment of performance’ (2010: 15). The latter, also attending to voices, writes that ‘the work [theatre leftovers] do is neither strictly archival nor documentary but performative’ and that they provide ‘sites of re-performance’ (2016: 6). Cued by these twin descriptions of the archive as ‘site’, I propose the tropes of site-specific performance, especially those of host and ghost, as a way of understanding the performativity of archival documentation in practice. As espoused by theatre practitioner Cliff McLucas, the ‘host’ of site-specific performance is ‘that which is at site’ and the ‘ghost’ is ‘that which is temporarily brought to site’ (cited in Pearson 2010: 35–6 [italics original]); further, the ‘host site is haunted for a time by a ghost that the theatremakers create. Like all ghosts it is transparent and the host can be seen’ (cited in Turner 2004: 373–4). Applying these notions to archival performativity, the host – the ‘site’ identified by Holland

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and Hodgdon – is the archive document (and other materials) and the ghost is the researcher’s theatrical imagination (or, quite resonantly, mind’s eye). The degree to which the re-performance is forceful depends both upon the host’s description and evocation of archive/repertoire details and on the ghost’s capacity to haunt or possess them. An example: the show report for the ASC touring production of The Winter’s Tale of 18 September 2018 (performance 5): A fun moment that sent chills down people’s back: When JC was being mauled by the bear (the audience was applauding the bear’s exit). As JC fell back on stage for the final moment, the audience went silent, and a gallant (jokingly) asked ‘Are you ok?’8 Without missing a beat, JC locked eyes with the patron and took his final line ‘I am gone forever’ directly to him before being dragged off stage. It was amazing. The intensity, or force, of this archive/repertoire re-performance depends on my (and your) ghostly engagement with the host. Was I physically at this performance? No. Have I seen this production (live or recorded)? No. Have I been to the Blackfriars and experienced its unique style of community-forging? Yes. Am I in sympathy with their lights-on, actor-audience contact? Yes. Are these the sorts of affective moments I seek in my teaching and theatre practice? Yes. This moment, therefore, performs powerfully for me; I am persuaded it was ‘amazing’; I was show reported right there. Are you? The bear-mauling moment – its ‘fun’, ‘chills’, silence, jokes, ‘locked eyes’, awe – bespeaks my argument that show reports mitigate against ‘individual instances of performances disappear[ing] from the repertoire’ (Taylor 2003: 20). What other kinds of archive/repertoire hybrids – ‘vital acts of transfer’ (2) – are preserved by show reports? Attending to the differences between the archive and the repertoire – a relationship variously described as ‘in tandem’, ‘in a constant state of interaction’, ‘not sequential’, but in ‘tension’ (21–2) – Taylor writes that ‘Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it’ (20). My argument, not opposed to this notion, is that show reports, because they so regularly focus aspects of the theatrical assemblage that are in excess of the text, afford a re-performance of (bodily written) embodied memories. I will now briefly survey these kinds of show report re-enactments of embodied excess – on stage, in the audience and in between – before concluding with observations about how such reports illuminate the mechanics of Shakespearean dramaturgy and how they operate through contemporary production. Show reports record those moments when things go awry. Two Gentlemen of Verona show reports, for example, often record Crab’s unpredictability.9 Actors can be unpredictable, too: a handwritten report of the Deborah Warner-directed RSC Titus Andronicus notes some ‘Very well rec’d + new comic business. Mr Cox forgot who was who ie. Rape & Murder’ (show 7, 21 May 1987). In this instance a performance serendipity is potentially incorporated into the production history of the play; the show report functions aetiologically. Another moment of forgetfulness comes from the 219th production of the 1994–6 RSC Dream: ‘Mr Barrit [playing Bottom] forgot to wear his ass-head … Quite unbelievably, not one of the fifteen

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people in the stage right wing noticed he did not have it on’ (5 Mar 1996). Show reports also record moments of actor virtuosity (sometimes prompted by things going awry). An MTC Twelfth Night show report notes, of an especially excessive comic moment, that ‘The audience were laughing hysterically during the drunken skit and applauded when Mr Woodley finally made it through the door’ (22 Nov 2018, show 11). These reports occasionally mention improvisations, actors speaking in excess of the text, and such moments are always followed by descriptions of audience laughter. Thus, when Malvolio threw the ring to Viola/Cesario and it disappeared under the front row seating, the report notes that ‘This resulted in some quick thinking ad-libbing from Mr Dykstra, much to the amusement of the audience’ (show 7, 19 Nov 2018). As well as frequently (and assiduously) recording the places at which the audience laughs most heartily (and collectively) during a performance, authors of show reports, perhaps especially at ‘universally-lit’ theatre spaces, also often attempt to evoke the affective and intangible elements of audience experience.10 Here follow three such show report descriptions, examples, perhaps, of what Carolyn Steedman calls ‘the psychical phenomenology of the archive’ (Steedman 2001: 81): ‘The joy and captivation was hugely visible within the audience … lots of cheering, booing, applause and stamping of feet’ (Pop-up Globe Henry V, 2 Jan 2018, show 28); ‘Several patrons were SUPER creeped out by the ghost. Their reactions were fun to watch!’ (ASC Hamlet, 20 Jan 2018, show 2); ‘During the Richard Kill, one young man on the SR gallant stool had his mind blown with the fight. He gasped and covered his mouth in shock’ (ASC Richard II, 17 Feb 2018, show 9). Two specific kinds of audience response that further signal the spectator’s focused investment in the play, and which are often recorded in show reports, are vocal interjections and fainting. Of the former, there are reports of the ‘ahs’ that bespeak dawning realization and the ‘aws’ that express sympathy for a character’s misfortune. Phrases or sentences are also sometimes uttered aloud, such as the patrons observing that Barry Lynch’s Proteus was ‘“an absolute swine”’ (RSC Two Gents, 20 Feb 1992) or, as the Ghost descended from the heavens trap, ‘“Oh, there he is”’ (ASC Hamlet, Mar 15 2018, show 23). Of the latter, fainting has been most notable at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, particularly in the Lucy Bailey-directed gore-fests of Titus Andronicus (2006) and Macbeth (2010). The Globe show reports for Titus feature an ongoing fainting narrative, with statements such as ‘the first fainter’ (20 May), ‘minor fainters’ (22 May), ‘Just after an hour into the play … people started to faint’ (25 May), ‘Two nasty faints’ (26 May) and ‘A full yard with a lot of fainters’ (27 May). Interjections, like mind-blown mouth-covering, might be a sign that a spectator is so immersed within the fiction of the play that they forget themselves; fainting, too, might (partially) result from too-engaged a participation in a play’s confronting narrative.11 One specific kind of performance serendipity that show reports often re-enact is the moment when the divide between performer and audience is blurred. Practitioners at reconstructed or replica theatres often pride themselves on eradicating this divide altogether, and many of the most striking instances of performer-audience coalescence are from such theatres, but are by no means exclusive to them. There

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are reported instances of gloves (RSC Dream, 31 Jan 1996) or shoes (RSC Two Gents, 13 Apr 1992) or expectorated water (MTC Twelfth Night, 22 Nov 2018) flying into the auditorium, and of tug of wars between actors and audience members over hats, suitcases (Lyceum Twelfth Night, 18 and 19 Sept 2018) and letters (MTC Twelfth Night, 1 Dec 2018), should the actor have been brave or foolish enough to momentarily exchange their prop with a patron (these incidents, like verbal improvisation, are invariably followed by reports of audience mirth). There are also instances where patrons attempt to get onto the stage, either during the action (NYSF Two Gents, 22 Aug 1973), or at the interval (Pop-up Globe Henry V, 25 Mar 2018). This last example is from a (regularly) reconstructed theatre, one that encourages extremely playful engagement between actors and audience and seemed to delight, in a production of Henry V, in smattering the groundlings closest to the action with stage blood (14 Apr 2018). For 4.1, Chris Huntly-Turner’s charismatic young King walked through the groundlings in order to offer his ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ (Act 4 Prologue, 47). I cannot stomach Henry’s politics so I was grim-visaged and arms-folded as he passed, but I was very much in the minority:12 there are reports that ‘a member of the audience knelt for Henry’ (Auckland, 22 Mar, show 12) and that ‘a child kissed his hand and another audience member took a selfie causing lots of laughter’ (25 Mar, show 14). There are even reports of audience cosplay, the onstage cast being bolstered by an ‘additional troupe of English archers in the groundlings complete with their own bows and identical English cross tabards’ on April 14 (show 22) and, perhaps celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday, ‘a knight in full armour including an axe’ (23 Apr, show 25).13 Lastly, show reports sometimes record the world outside the play permeating the play world, such as those for outdoor productions that note the most impossibly perfect or ruinously inopportune weather conditions. At the ASC, a Hamlet performance report records that A bat started flying around in the house at the end of 4.7/start of 5.1. It was circling the stage as Chris J. and John were gravediggers. They handled it well and threw in some text to acknowledge the situation. (3 Feb 2018, performance 9) Just as atmospherically apposite, a BSC ‘Stage Management Report’ for a touring Macbeth describes the production ‘serenaded by crickets all night … [which] worked well with witches’ (29 Apr 1997, show 10). I draw three main conclusions from this collection of archival ephemera. First, show reports confirm theorizations of the playful openness of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Robert Weimann’s notion, for example, that ‘There is a performative energy exceeding representational parameters of consistency, logic, verisimilitude, reason, and compassion’ (2000: 97) – an energy erupting from the tension between author’s pen and actor’s voice – is evidenced in the several examples of verbal (and other kinds of performative) excess. The Henry V examples underline this fluid openness, first, in the person of the yard-wandering King, trying to get into the audience, and then, by the kneeling, kissing and cosplaying audience, reciprocating by trying to get into the play. Several of the examples, especially those improvising in

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order to incorporate lost rings or stray bats into the world of the play, also illustrate Jeremy Lopez’s argument that ‘the potential for dramatic representation to be ridiculous or inefficient or incompetent was a constant and vital part of audiences’ experience of the plays’ (2003: 2). Second, and following from these observations about dramaturgy, is that, irrespective of long and precise rehearsal processes, show reports affirm the dynamic variability of Shakespearean production: if promptbooks describe what should happen on any given night, show reports record what actually (if partially) happened, and the material difference from that production ideal. And third, written accounts of contemporary Shakespearean performance should resist totalizing representations and instead take this repertoire assemblage variability, perhaps via show reports, into account. A last word. The account of the audience ‘laughing hysterically during the drunken skit’ at the MTC Twelfth Night does not re-perform for me (I cannot imagine it does for you, either): the reception is captured, but nothing of the virtuoso playing. I was there, on press night, and I did laugh hysterically, almost despite myself, as Sir Andrew tried drunkenly, for what seemed like five minutes, to get his key into an imaginary door. Bridget Escolme wisely counsels thus: ‘Where full archives exist, use all their elements in dialog’ (2010: 90). The show report is not enough here. The show report + reviews + promptbook + production video recording + live memories + a bodily written account might get close, or towards, but only that. Sometimes, you just had to be there.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This essay would not have been possible without funding provided by La Trobe University’s Social Research Assistance Platform, and the generous and expert assistance of Katherine Randall, Glenn Thompson, Zoe King (Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh), Claudia Funder (Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne) and Bubbles Hall (Pop-up Globe). Text from show reports of MTC’s 2018/19 production of Twelfth Night reproduced with permission of Melbourne Theatre Company, a department of the University of Melbourne.

NOTES   1. Roth et al. compile a fascinating ‘American to English Glossary’ (2017: 157–8), a list of forty-eight variably interchangeable trans-Atlantic staging and production terms.   2. The theatre companies for which I have sets of show reports – ranging between a single report to a complete season of sixty performances – are: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (1); Royal Shakespeare Company (9); American Shakespeare Center (3); Bell Shakespeare Company (2); Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh (1); Melbourne Theatre Company (1); New York Shakespeare Festival (1); and the Pop-up Globe (1). Eight of the productions report on the details of tours, including: rural Australian (1); urban New York City (1); national US (1) and UK (2); and international (3).

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  3. Also within the archive for this production are remarkable rehearsal photographs of David Troughton wearing an unfinished and unnervingly skeletal Ousel, illustrating the becoming of production (materials).   4. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; two-thirds of the way through this season, the so-called Actors’ Renaissance Season, the actors play five plays in repertory.   5. Despite the number of recorded injuries and illnesses, no actor missed any of the sixty shows.   6. Despite this scathing assessment, the stage manager completes the report with: ‘Audience very nice and they seemed to enjoy the show.’   7. ‘The archons are … accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives’ (Derrida 1996: 2).   8. The ASC reports list how many of their onstage ‘gallant’ stools are filled at each performance.   9. Ben, an early actor of Crab in the 1991–3 RSC Two Gents, lasted only six performances owing to his habit of barking at Panthino every time he appeared. 10. Unfortunately, I have not accessed show reports for open-air Shakespeare, such as takes place in gardens or in other found, and atmospherically apposite, spaces. The show reports (if they existed) for the anarchic UK touring company The Pantaloons, for example, would detail hundreds of hilarious and poignant moments of mise en scene-ry and actor–audience interaction. 11. See Penelope Woods, Spectatorship Matters, forthcoming. 12. I did not receive this particular show report, so I cannot confirm whether my frosty gesture was noted. 13. The most bizarre show report incident goes to the man who proposed marriage at the interval of the RSC Titus Andronicus (16 May 1987, preview 4).

REFERENCES Anderson, Ben, Matthew Kearnes, Colin McFarlane and Dan Swanton (2012), ‘On Assemblages and Geography’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2 (2): 171–89. Clarke, Paul H. (2008), ‘Archival Events and Eventful Archives’, in Julie Bacon (ed.), Arkive City, 162–73, Interface University of Ulster. Derrida, Jacques (1996), Archive Fever, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Escolme, Bridget (2010), ‘Being Good: Actors’ Testimonies as Archive and the Cultural Constructions of Success in Performance’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 28 (1): 77–91. Foster, Susan Leigh (1995), ‘Choreographing History’, in Susan Leigh Foster (ed.), Choreographing History, 3–21, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hodgdon, Barbara (2016), Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive, Abingdon: Routledge. Holland, Peter (1997), English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Holland, Peter (2010), ‘The Lost Workers: Process, Performance and the Archive’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 28 (1): 7–18. Kincman, Laurie (2017), The Stage Manager’s Toolkit: Templates and Communication Techniques to Guide Your Theatre Production from First Meeting to Final Performance, 2nd edn, New York: Taylor & Francis. Lopez, Jeremy (2003), Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maccoy, Peter (2004), Essentials of Stage Management, London: A & C Black. Menzer, Paul (2017), Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center, London: Bloomsbury. Pearson, Mike (2010), Site-specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roth, Emily, Jonathan Allender-Zivic and Katy McGlaughlin (2017), Stage Management Basics: A Primer for Performing Arts Stage Managers, New York: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca (2001), ‘Performance Remains’, Performance Research, 6 (2): 100–8. Steedman, Carolyn (2001), Dust, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, Diana (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham: Duke University Press. Turner, Cathy (2004), ‘Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for SiteSpecific Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly, 20 (4): 373–90. Weimann, Robert (2000), Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wise, J. Macgregor (2011), ‘Assemblage’, in Charles J. Stivale (ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, 91–102, Florence: Taylor & Francis.

CHAPTER 1.2

The audience: Receiving and remaking experience MARGARET JANE KIDNIE

For good practical reasons, the records of theatre history typically describe a production of Shakespeare as though each performance of that staging shared a sameness. ‘Phyllida Lloyd’s Julius Caesar’, ‘Sher’s Richard III’ or the ‘2002 Twelfth Night at Shakespeare’s Globe’ are examples of a commonplace phrasing that concisely disambiguates the entire run of one show from another by foregrounding a distinguishing production feature such as the name of a director, lead actor or date and company. Forgotten lines, an unusually slow run-time, missing properties, understudies in lead roles – the range of possible contingencies, in short, that textures any single live performance – are elided from the record.1 But occasionally events such as fainting spectators or the announcement from the stage of the outcome of a hockey game intrude, reminding spectators that such elision is a habit born of convenience.2 My own memory of watching Jeffery Kissoon as Prospero in Bill Alexander’s production of The Tempest at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1994 is caught up with being asked to vacate the building. We were very nearly at the end of the performance, when I heard what sounded like a fire alarm. Although some spectators became a bit restless, nobody stood up to leave until the stage manager walked onstage to stop the show. Half an hour or so later, we returned to our seats and the actors picked up their performance at a point just prior to the stage manager’s unscripted entrance. Minutes later the show was over. The audience were immediately on their feet to offer that rare thing in England, a standing ovation, celebrating the actors’ achievement in adversity and, quite probably, the parts we ourselves had played in the role, for that one evening, of ‘audience’. A fire alarm, which would have no existence in that production’s official record apart from the stage manager’s show report, powerfully shaped that one performance, uniting actors and audience in a shared purpose. Or did it? My impression is that everyone came together in a shared experience of communality; it was certainly how I experienced that moment and how, in retrospect, I remember the performance. But I was certainly in no position even to notice, never mind gauge, every spectator’s reaction in that large proscenium space. Did we all stand up to applaud? Were there perhaps one, or more, or many, who either remained seated or stood up to be polite, who in their own minds felt the

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fire alarm in one way or another actually spoiled the show for them? How many spectators were escorted outdoors during the fire alarm and simply chose to go home rather than return for the last few minutes? Each performance has its own peculiar character, and each spectator, in turn, takes away from each of these performances her own experience of it. The challenge this fragmentation presents for live performance analysis is methodological – how one is to speak of ‘the’ or even ‘an’ audience. What is an audience? Perhaps the only factor that certainly unifies a group of people at the theatre is the fact that each of them turned up, often but not always at the right time, to see the same performance. Beyond that, one is confronted with diversity. Many spectators will have paid for admission to ticketed shows, but others may have been brought by someone else or provided with a complimentary ticket. Some spectators are professional reviewers who are at the theatre most nights in a week, while others are new to even basic theatrical conventions. A small child seated near me at a 2015 performance of the Stratford Festival’s The Sound of Music stood up to turn around and look at the ‘mountains’ at the back of the auditorium at which the onstage actors were pointing, explaining to his parent in confusion that there weren’t any mountains there at all. Seasoned Western theatregoers may experience analogous confusion watching Kabuki or Nō Shakespeare. Each spectator has a particular seat with its own (better or worse) vantage on the stage, and everyone – despite directors’ efforts to guide spectators’ eyes through such means as lighting or stage business – is free to look where they please and so to notice what they will. Bruce McConachie and others who approach the issue of audience reception through the lens of cognitive science make a strong case, however, for spectator response in a communal setting being at least partly a ‘species’ trait, inseparable from ‘cultural- and individual-specific traits’ (2008: 6, 18; see also Kemp and McConachie 2018). Audiences come to a performance, moreover, with what Susan Bennett, drawing on reader-reception theory, describes as a ‘horizon of cultural and ideological expectations’ shaped by such pre-performance considerations as planning for and travelling to the event, the theatre’s surrounding neighbourhood and the theatre program (1997: 98). To put this a different way, audiences bring to the theatre conceptual scaffolds about both a particular show and theatre in general that enable (and potentially disable, if a performance too radically challenges those expectations) interpretation and meaning. Within these potentially homogenizing influences, however, there always remains diversity. An audience is comprised of communities of spectators (characterized, for example, by education, identity politics and/or socio-economic backgrounds). Each community will have its own distinctive organizing set of expectations, with constituency overlap not only possible but likely in the person of any single spectator. To modify Herbert Blau’s well-known maxim, ‘An audience without histories is not an audience’ (1986: 34). With so many factors at play, one hesitates – even after a performance at which it seemed that at least for a moment the audience, as it were, ‘breathed’ as one – to speculate about any one spectator’s reception of the show. This is not a problem that exclusively confronts Shakespeare performance. Analysis of live performance in the field of theatre studies has been dominated by semiotics

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since the third quarter of the twentieth century, in part because semiotics offers a methodological framework grounded not primarily in spectators’ responses (which as we have seen are difficult to speak to), but in consideration of a production’s structural components. Classification systems have been devised which attempt to catalogue the range of variables that typically contribute to theatrical production, the most familiar of which is probably the ‘Pavis Questionnaire’. This checklist, compiled by Patrice Pavis as a kind of introductory user’s guide to the study of performance, is comprised of fourteen categories ranging from costumes, music and sound effects, properties and lighting, to scenography, pace and actors’ performances (including proxemic relations, gestures and quality of voice), to the handling of the dramatic text (if there is one) and storyline (1985: 209).3 It includes a category that prompts general reflection on the performance’s coherence or incoherence and its aesthetic principles, and another that considers issues of notation. There is also a section devoted to ‘Audience’ that engages with the researcher both as audience member herself (‘what expectations did you have of performance’) and as an observer of the dynamics between stage and auditorium (‘how did the audience react’, ‘role of spectator in production of meaning’). Performance scholars will likely have internalized their own versions of a performance ‘checklist’, and they will more readily intuit than the student audience for whom Pavis is writing which elements of a particular performance bear closer scrutiny. But the basic shape of the procedure remains the same. As a staging unfolds, the scholar-spectator, often jotting notes in the dark – undoubtedly a highly specialized kind of theatre audience – seeks to grasp a vast range of specific production details. These details constitute the theatrical ‘signs’ or ‘choices’ that shape a particular performance, and they often reinforce each other to create sign-systems or networks of relations. Parsing the performance in this way allows the spectator to understand better how a show guides (or seeks to guide) audience reception in the moment. It also enables, after the performance has ended, an evidence-based interpretation of performance meaning and its construction. The effort is immense, not least because live performance, which lacks a ‘pause’ or ‘rewind’ button, must be experienced in real time and at a pace determined by the actors. This practical challenge flags a potential methodological issue with semiotic analysis. Live performance, by nature of its medium, disappears as quickly as it happens. One can attend a production multiple times, but one can never see the same performance twice, and, as this essay’s opening paragraphs take pains to explain, each performance is unique. If a spectator is looking down (say, at notes) or simply at the wrong side of the stage, a piece of stage business or glance could be lost. I earlier raised only half-jokingly an implicit desire for a ‘rewind’ button, and it is the case that researchers frequently visit theatre archives to gain access to the surviving materials of production (especially the stage manager’s promptbook and in some cases a fixed-camera recording of one performance) precisely in order to recover a missed or forgotten production detail. But the very process of conducting performance analysis depends, figuratively, on hitting the ‘pause’ button: the researcher describes and lingers over a moment in order to unpack its interpretive significances. Andrew Hartley forcefully objects that this critical practice fundamentally misrepresents the work of reception, and so its agent, the audience:

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However brilliant the reading, the method used to produce it cannot be equated with audience response, since audiences do not – cannot – make their reaction to a moment on stage conditional upon this kind of microscopic scrutiny. To suggest that this method produces more or better insights than those the original audience has is not simply to move the goalposts, it is to change the ball to a puck. (2009: 234–5) Hartley’s objection that ‘close-reading performance is – on some level – at odds with the experiential nature of theatre’ (2009: 234) is undoubtedly right. And yet a process of considered reflection, whether one thinks of paintings, theatre or novels, always happens at a cognitive distance from one’s experience of the artform; one may return to a painting or novel, but never again for the first time. This point about considered reflection is more than a quibble. Theatre pays its bills by entertaining audiences, but like any artform it also has the capacity to prompt – or numb – discussion and debate. Close-reading performance, by allowing readers to think through a show again (or at least aspects of it), can contribute to, and potentially even inspire, that ongoing conversation. The ephemeral nature of performance, however, implies that often the performance scholar or reviewer is investigating a staging that not all (and potentially none) of his readers have seen. The analysis must therefore describe the action that it goes on to analyse, a circularity that implicitly positions not just the performance but the critic at the heart of the discussion. Performance criticism always operates within the constraints of what the critic, that audience of one, happened to notice during the performance, as filtered through the interpretive community and horizon of expectations (to return to Bennett’s terms) that he brought with him into the theatre. Analyses, as a consequence, are never objective or impartial since they are inevitably guided by the writer’s own priorities and biases. Why are these aspects of the show – and, it follows, not others – considered important? For whom are they important? Because interpretation is so readily caught up in perceptions of reception (Pavis Questionnaire: ‘11(c) how did audience react’), even the performance scholar who is alert to the politics of voice can therefore find herself inadvertently speaking for the entire audience’s experience of a particular moment. Hartley, providing examples from among the best critics of Shakespeare performance, illustrates how ‘the impulse to totalize audience response’ is a ‘pitfall’ of performance criticism (2009: 232–3). The challenge is how to address it. One possible way forward is to acknowledge that when we speak of performance we speak for ourselves, and to find ways to keep that realization in front of readers’ eyes. This is a writing style that as educators one tends to dissuade students from embracing because it slips so easily away from evidence-based argumentation towards opinion and assertion. A more pressing issue for scholars than any lack of evidence or argument concerns the relationship between voice and authority within the academic profession. ‘What I saw’ and ‘What I thought’ is a (deliberately) weakened rhetoric. It is vulnerable to dismissal especially if one is trying to advance a controversial or otherwise intellectually difficult position and/or seeking to revise or rethink established positions. The safer strategy is to couch one’s position and evidence within more conventional forms of objective (or at least seemingly objective)

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argumentation, and so try to shore up the thesis against rebuttal. A performance scholar, in other words, is in the tricky position of juggling, because it is the methodologically defensible choice, the foregrounding of her own subjective views on an absent performance – in the literal sense of what she saw, and the conceptual sense of what she makes of it – against the need to frame an argument according to modes of writing that the profession can recognize as scholarly, and so hear. The difficulties are immense. I want to risk at this point what might feel like a detour into the rhetoric of writing performance criticism. By doing this, I might seem to reinforce in favour of the single spectator’s response the very decentring of audience heterogeneity under discussion here, but my purpose is to reflect briefly on models of subjective positioning offered by three critics of performance (two scholars and one reviewer, although these categories are inevitably porous). In ‘Shopping in the Archives’, Barbara Hodgdon explores theatrical affect by setting specific costume pieces – a cardigan, a pair of boots – alongside landmark RSC performances that she herself either saw or read about. Performance criticism, in Hodgdon’s hands, becomes a space defined by the melancholic tension between memory and loss, a space into which she explicitly and repeatedly welcomes her reader, with his own perspectives and memories. In the essay’s closing pages, Hodgdon spins for us a now cracked Free-Ka, a toy once repurposed in Brook’s Dream to create fairy music: Like the absent sound of Alan Howard’s and Sara Kestelman’s voices, there is only a faint whirr. Can you hear an echo? Now, if I hold it just so, it becomes Bottom’s ‘mirror’, inviting theatrical – and subjective – absorption. What do you see? … Looking through memory’s mirror, can you re-dream yet another performance, your own scene of becoming? (2006: 167) Invited to look and hear for themselves, readers are nudged to share and participate in what Hodgdon calls the archives’ ‘second-order performance’, of ‘material surrogations’ (2006: 137, 147). Polyvocality, by contrast, is the theme of Rob Conkie’s experimental methodologies in Writing Performative Shakespeares. By opening up his own theatrical practice and spectatorship to kaleidoscopic perspectives and voices, Conkie implicates his reader in the (impossible) task of reconstituting live performance in another medium. In one chapter, the voices of eleven interlocutors who performed in or saw 1 Henry IV at the same matinee as Conkie crowd the margins, in places encroaching on Conkie’s prose, and occasionally taking over the page entirely. Another chapter sees Conkie representing archival materials and actor labour with a photograph of a pinboard on which are displayed fragments of text, which he subjects to ‘active reading’ (2016: 30). We all, as it were, stand in front of the pinboard with him and become active readers of its details, tracing a web of associations among these archival materials and rehearsal processes. Yet another strategy sees Conkie taking up six different vantage points on the stage and its audiences at six separate performances of the 2008 Shakespeare’s Globe production of King Lear. Writing Performative Shakespeares offers a fragmented, theoretically inflected ‘weak’ analysis that explicitly admits of other spectators, other competing views.

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Hodgdon’s essay and Conkie’s monograph were each published with a premier scholarly press, lending through peer review and the economics of academic publishing a kind of institutional and professional authority to what might be seen as experiments in subjective reading. The risks that I mentioned earlier that can come when one explicitly abandons a pretence of neutrality are captured much more visibly in my third example, which concerns the controversy occasioned by Ava Wong Davies’s review of True West (Vaudeville Theatre 2018). Davies opens with the explicitly subjective comment that she finds Johnny Flynn ‘fucking hot’, and that, despite this admitted lack of neutrality, she also considers this staging ‘not very good’ (ibid.). This review led to heated online debate about whether Davies’s objectification of Flynn is interpretively shallow and/or heedless of the sexual politics of a #MeToo world, to online trolling of Davies by an understudy who ended up deleting his Twitter account, and to calls for @truewest to publicly apologize for Davies’s harassment. Davies is a British playwright and theatre reviewer who self-identifies in her ‘Theatre Writing Etc’ blog as a woman of Asian heritage. Davies writes openly and with emotional generosity about her experiences as a female spectator and artist of colour, cultivating a frank and frequently irreverent public voice. What then is one to make both of her review of True West and of the pushback it received? Flynn is more than eye candy, as some readers were quick to point out, rejecting as irrelevant the magazine’s response that women endure this kind of objectification all the time. But as Tom Cornford responds in a pair of tweets, the issues are much more complicated than the platitude that two wrongs don’t make a right, precisely because of the way Davies is explicit about her subjective position: a) patriarchal oppression is a thing and matriarchal oppression isn’t so you can’t just behave as though men doing things and women doing things are interchangeable – they’re not. b) male critics do this all the time and … often pretend not to be, which makes all the difference. c) the review is about the fact that the production deliberately trades on the sex appeal of its stars and doesn’t have much else to offer, so that is what she writes about *completely justifiably*. (2018) As Kirsty Sedgman notes, ‘#hotgate’ raises pressing questions about how, and if, one can talk ethically about spectator (especially female) desire, a topic that intrudes into Shakespeare Performance Studies whenever a reviewer notices and passes comment on the fans who gather at (and at the stage door after) stagings starring the likes of Tom Hiddleston or Benedict Cumberbatch (2018b). The controversy further exposes, as Sedgman puts it, ‘how unveiling the subject behind the reviewing gaze (as well as breaking down ideas of “correct” critical language) is a radical act’ (ibid.). The politics of voice is one of the methodological challenges surrounding audience with which Shakespeareans continue to wrestle. One simply cannot know what other spectators think of a show, short of asking them. This is precisely the strategy that has long been advocated by Willmar Sauter (2010), and forms of quantiqualitative audience research have been extended into Shakespeare studies by John Tulloch (2005) and Matthew Reason (2006a, 2006b). Methodologies vary among

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practitioners, but tend to centre on questionnaires, forum groups and interviews, forms of feedback that researchers evaluate alongside other production-specific evidence such as the framing strategies used by particular theatres to guide audience reception. Reason additionally uses guided workshops that incorporate tasks such as collaborative note taking, spider diagrams and memory exercises structured around physical activity as a way both to validate the responses of non-specialist participants and to ease participants back into their experience of the theatrical event (see especially 2006a, 2010). Helen Freshwater, writing in 2009, expresses surprise at the relative lack of disciplinary attention to empirical method: [Cultural studies’] engagement with ‘ordinary’ members of the audience is notably absent from theatre studies. Whereas researchers working on television and film engage with audiences through surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research, almost no one in theatre studies seems to be interested in exploring what actual audience members make of a performance. (29) Theatre scholars have been slow to take up quanti-qualitative research, Janelle Reinelt argues, in part because we tend to lack training in disciplinary methodologies more readily associated with social sciences (2014: 338), and possibly also because the focus on the reception of performance among particular constituencies of spectators produces findings that are markedly different from more conventional performance analysis. Most noticeably, the crafting of a staging’s production choices often receives only fitful consideration in these studies, with emphasis placed instead on spectators’ experiences of the show as event. This might be due to diffidence or lack of expertise on the part of contributing spectators, or simply a consequence of a methodology that sets out to assemble and weigh the input of many rather than one. The landscape has shifted somewhat, however, since the publication of Freshwater’s Theatre & Audience, with the formation at Leeds University of the International Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts (iNARPA), special issues on audiences in three journals (About Performance, Participations and the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English), and a raft of new research including government-funded collaborative projects, book-length publications and ongoing works in progress. Sedgman, whose account of the field the previous sentence is indebted to, concludes that ‘it might be time to stop bemoaning the absence of theatre audience research … [T]he time seems right to consider the strengths and limitations of this approach, and to point to its potential future directions as an emergent discipline’ (2018a: 311–12). Although Shakespeare Performance Studies has remained somewhat insulated from these methodological developments, the field has recently seen important contributions from, for example, Evelyn O’Malley on spectators’ reception of environmental performance (2018), Stephen Purcell (2013) and Matthew Reason (2019), who in separate studies explore meaning-making in relation to demographics, Ayanna Thompson on coded forms of racialized reception (2017) and Penelope Woods on learned audience practices at Shakespeare’s Globe

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(2015). Quanti-qualitative methodologies remain, however, a growth area in Shakespeare studies, with clear opportunities for project development. ‘Asking the audience’ (to borrow the title of one of Reason’s articles) can offer valuable correctives to unsubstantiated theoretical claims about the impact, for example, of immersive or participatory theatre. And it can further improve our understanding of how at least some spectators process live performance; this includes any obstacles to engagement they may have encountered (Sedgman 2017: 174–6) along with their retention of the experience after (Reinelt 2014: 355–7). Other growth areas in audience research are emerging as a result of innovations in theatrecraft that reconfigure one’s sense of audience, so bringing us full circle to ask again, what is an audience? Spectators at Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies, for example, are invited to join actors onstage, from which vantage they – along with more conventionally seated audience members – shift their gaze between onstage actors and onstage projections of those actors. ‘Standing spectators’ in Nicholas Hytner’s partly promenade staging of Julius Caesar, to take another example, find themselves ‘shunted around the arena like the manipulated Roman mob’ (Billington 2018) in a manner that Andy Kesson (who was one of those shunted) describes as looking and feeling physically, ethically and politically ‘unsafe’ (2018). In both of these productions, the conventional gap between stage and audience is disrupted, so ‘foregrounding spectatorship’, as Sarah Werner puts it (2012: 174), through uses of venue and space that powerfully shape the experience of theatre as event. Elsewhere spectators don a mask to move through a warehouse, ‘encountering’ scenes from Punchdrunk’s version of Macbeth called Sleep No More, or – to move beyond Shakespeare’s plays and even live actors – they cycle alone through an urban space at night with a handheld locating device in order to find ‘hiding spaces’ in which to record a story about their lives and search out other spectator–participants’ messages (Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke; on performance walks/rides, see Harvie 2009: 56–62). As the examples above indicate, changing conceptions of the audience are not wholly driven by the kinds of interaction and engagement in a live moment afforded by new and emergent technologies. Those technologies, however, are undoubtedly a factor. The landmark innovation in this respect, especially for Shakespeareans, is still probably the launch of NT Live in 2009. NT Live permits domestic UK cinema audiences to watch a performance as it unfolds in real time in the theatre (cinema audiences in different time zones see the performance on delay). Opinion pieces debating the importance of actors and audiences ‘sharing the same air’ and anecdotes conveying shock that a performance was stopped in face of a failed satellite feed tend to conceptualize the NT Live performance event in terms of two quite separate experiences. One is either ‘there’ (i.e. in the theatre), or ‘elsewhere’ (i.e. in the cinema). This category divide asserts a homogeneous audience experience (whether ‘there’ or ‘elsewhere’) that this essay has argued is a position that is hard to support, and further speaks to assumptions about spectating that depend on a prevalent faith in live theatre as unmediated presence. New technologies occasion new questions about performance and spectatorship. Ongoing audience-oriented research prompted by the ‘livecasting’ phenomenon extends early work on ‘liveness’ as a conceptual category (Auslander 2008) towards

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a focus on spectator expectations, demographics and models of transmission (Barker 2013). The question that comes to seem even more pressing than did we see it live, is what does it mean to say we saw something live, whether in the theatre or cinema, or on a laptop or iPhone? Reminiscent of Woods’s argument that spectators at Shakespeare’s Globe ‘learn’ audience practices that are particularly suited to the space, Rachael Nicholas explores how spectators who engage in forms of ‘hybrid media’ events are finding and developing audience behaviours that accommodate and take advantage of the technologies available to them (2018: 78). Erin Sullivan attends especially to the issue of community formation to argue that audiences physically remote from the theatre in which a performance unfolds ‘have discovered other ways [often through social media] of creating a shared sense of occasion and producing aliveness through it … [A] more physically solitary viewing experience … is not necessarily a less socially involving one’ (2018: 62). Emergent behaviours such as these are likely to factor into subsequent development and outreach as theatre companies continue to expand their efforts to establish new audiences. As Geoffrey Way explains, initiatives such as Globe Player and the RSC Schools’ Broadcasts are not only about delivering performances to remote audiences, but ‘achiev[ing] a sense of liveness’ grounded in ‘interactive experiences’ designed to facilitate ‘deeper levels of engagement’ (2017: 401, 399). Ongoing practical and theoretical work into audiences and audience reception will be shaped by the complexities of theatrical ‘liveness’ even as artists, for their part, continue to create, and innovate, performance.

NOTES 1. On reviewers’ handling of the gap between performance and production run, see Kirwan 2010. 2. Dominic Cavendish orients his account of the visceral theatrical impact of Titus Andronicus around rumours of spectators fainting during performances (2014). Nora Polley describes the 1972 performance in which William Hutt as Lear announced the final score of the Canada-Russia Summit Series hockey play-off mid-show as ‘a rock concert. There I was, dazed, amidst nearly two thousand screaming fans’ (DeSouzaCoelho 2018: 61). 3. See Elaine Aston and George Savona for comparison of the Pavis Questionnaire against ‘checklists’ of performance offered by other semioticians (1991).

REFERENCES Auslander, Philip (2008), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Aston, Elaine and George Savona (1991), Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance, London: Routledge. Barker, Martin (2013), Live to Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Bennett, Susan (1997), Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Billington, Michael (2018), ‘Julius Caesar review – Hytner delivers a visceral, politically urgent tragedy’, The Guardian, 30 January. Blau, Herbert (1986), ‘Odd, Anonymous Needs: The Audience in a Dramatized Society’, Performing Arts Journal, 10 (1): 34–42. Cavendish, Dominic (2014), ‘Titus Andronicus didn’t make me faint, but shiver’, The Telegraph, 30 April. Conkie, Rob (2016), Writing Performative Shakespeares: New Forms for Performance Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cornford, Tom (2018), selected tweets, Twitter, 6 December. Available online: @TomCornford (accessed 21 November 2020). Davies, Ava Wong (2018), ‘Review: True West at Vaudeville Theatre’, Exeunt Magazine, 5 December. Available online: http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-true-westvaudeville-theatre/ (accessed 21 November 2020). DeSouza-Coelho, Shawn (2018), Whenever You’re Ready: Nora Polley on Life as a Stratford Festival Stage Manager, Toronto: ECW Press. Freshwater, Helen (2009), Theatre & Audience, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hartley, Andrew James (2009), ‘The Schrödinger Effect: Reading and Misreading Performance’, Shakespeare Survey, 62: 222–35. Harvie, Jen (2009), Theatre & the City, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodgdon, Barbara (2006), ‘Shopping in the Archives: Material Memories’, in Peter Holland (ed.), Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, 135–67, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemp, Rick and Bruce McConachie, eds (2018), The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science, New York: Routledge. Kesson, Andy (2018), ‘“I do fear the people”: Theatre and the Problem with Audiences’, Before Shakespeare, 16 February. Available online: https://beforeshakespeare. com/2018/02/16/julius-caesar-and-the-politics-of-having-an-audience/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Kirwan, Peter (2010), ‘“What’s past is prologue”: Negotiating the Authority of Tense in Reviewing Shakespeare’, Shakespeare, 6 (3): 337–42. McConachie, Bruce (2008), Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholas, Rachael (2018), ‘Understanding “New” Encounters with Shakespeare: Hybrid Media and Emerging Audience Behaviours’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne (eds), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Broadcast Experience, 78–101, London: Bloomsbury. O’Malley, Evelyn (2018), ‘“To weather a play”: Audiences, Outdoor Shakespeares, and Avant-Garde Nostalgia at The Willow Globe’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 36 (3): 409–27. Pavis, Patrice (1985), ‘Theatre Analysis: Some Questions and a Questionnaire’, New Theatre Quarterly, 40: 208–12. Purcell, Stephen (2013), Shakespeare and Audience in Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Reason, Matthew (2006a), ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre, Part 1: Methods, Participation and Memory in Audience Research’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 26 (2): 129–45. Reason, Matthew (2006b), ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre, Part 2: Perceptions of Liveness in Performance’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 26 (3): 221–41. Reason, Matthew (2010), ‘Asking the Audience: Audience Research and the Experience of Theatre’, About Performance, 10: 15–34. Reason, Matthew (2019), ‘A Prison Audience: Women Prisoners, Shakespeare and Spectatorship’, Cultural Trends: 1–17. Reinelt, Janelle (2014), ‘What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We Come to Value Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 66: 337–61. Sauter, Willmar (2010), ‘Thirty Years of Reception Studies: Empirical, Methodological and Theoretical Advances’, About Performance, 10: 241–63. Sedgman, Kirsty (2017), ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Follow Me, Please Put on Your Beards: Risk, Rules, and Audience Reception in National Theatre Wales’, Contemporary Theatre Review 27 (2): 158–76. Sedgman, Kirsty (2018a), ‘Audience Experience in an Anti-expert Age: A Survey of Theatre Audience Research’, Theatre Research International, 42 (3): 307–22. Sedgman, Kirsty (2018b), ‘How can we talk about “thirst” in theatre?’, Exeunt Magazine, 19 December. Available online: http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/thirsty-audiences/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Sullivan, Erin (2018), ‘The Audience is Present: Aliveness, Social Media, and the Theatre Broadcast Experience’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne (eds), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Broadcast Experience, 59–75, London: Bloomsbury. Thompson, Ayanna (2017), ‘(How) Should We Listen to Audiences? Race, Reception, and the Audience Survey’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 157–69, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tulloch, John (2005), Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Way, Geoffrey (2017), ‘Together, Apart: Liveness, Eventness, and Streaming’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 389–406. Werner, Sarah (2012), ‘Audiences’, in Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (eds), Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, 165–79, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Woods, Penelope (2015), ‘Skilful Spectatorship? Doing (or Being) Audience at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre’, Shakespeare Studies, 43: 99–113.

CHAPTER 1.3

The event: Festival Shakespeare PAUL PRESCOTT

I This chapter offers an introduction to a vital subfield of contemporary Shakespearean performance: the Shakespeare festival. The following pages aim to describe and define the phenomenon, provide an overview of the academic work that has been conducted on Shakespeare festivals to date and outline the intellectual and methodological directions future studies might take. But let’s start with a story.

II Date: 1960. Place: Cedar City, Iron County, Utah, USA. Population: c.18,000. Core industry: iron. Cedar City sits in a high desert valley close to the Mojave Desert, on land where once dwelt the ancestors of the present-day Southern Paiut Indigenous peoples. A few miles to the west of Cedar City lies a gargantuan vein of iron ore, the extraction and refinement of which has proved attractive to white settlers since the nineteenth century. From the 1920s onwards, iron drove the economy of the county that took its name. But, in 1960, the global market has been flooded with cheap Japanese steel, so cheap that it made little sense to mine iron then refine it into steel in Utah when you can simply buy the finished product from overseas.1 Cedar City’s refineries close and the key local employer, Geneva Steel, ceases operations there; 700 miners and their families are forced to quit the town. The tax base shrinks, jeopardizing the future of the school system and the newly built hospital. Meanwhile, the federal government commits to a large infrastructure project, the construction of Interstate 15, stretching all the way from Canada to Mexico. The new freeway is projected to skirt Cedar City, thereby linking it with major cities to the north (Salt Lake City) and south (Las Vegas, Los Angeles) and

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raising the prospect of increased motor tourism to local natural phenomena at Bryce Canyon, Zion and Cedar Breaks National Parks. It is roughly then that a thought occurs to Fred Adams, a young professor at Southern Utah University: I went to the city council and said, ‘What would you think if we did a festival of Shakespearean plays to bring people off of that proposed freeway?’ [pause] I have to say the idea went over like a pregnant pole-vaulter. I was laughed out of chamber, I was eventually laughed out of city council. (Adams 2014) Undeterred, Adams embarked on a road trip to visit and learn from successful Shakespeare festivals elsewhere in the US and Canada. In 1960, there were very few annual festivals of any note and Adams’s itinerary took him to the Old Globe theatre in San Diego, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. If you visited a Shakespeare Festival in the 1950s in North America, it was an even chance that you would be in a place called Stratford. Adams interviewed the founding artistic directors of each festival and finished by asking them: ‘If you had to do it again, what one thing would you avoid, and what one thing would you do?’ In San Diego, Craig Noel said: ‘Don’t ever touch stars. Never let film or television mediocrity come into your festival.’ Angus Bowmer, founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, advised: ‘Never separate from your university.’ He added: ‘Always retain historical value in your productions. Don’t let a director come in that knows more than the author.’ In Stratford, Ontario, Tyrone Guthrie advised: ‘Become your state’s theatre and start every year with zero base budget.’ In Stratford, Connecticut, Jack Landau said, ‘Don’t let the unions come anywhere near you. And sell popcorn’ (Adams 2014). This advice noted, Adams returned to Cedar City and, to cut this short story even shorter, founded the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 1961. Almost sixty years later, the Festival attracts in the region of 100,000 visitors annually, most of them from over seventy-five miles away (mainly reaching the city via Interstate 15). According to a 2014 study, the Festival generates an annual economic impact of $40 million. Half of that impact is indirect and represents additional economic activity created by the Festival in local businesses (restaurants, hotels, gas stations, etc.). Harder to quantify but no less important are the intangible benefits the Festival brings its city and region: civic pride, collective identity, community engagement. Cedar City’s population is currently estimated at 33,000 people, almost twice what it was in 1960 before the miners left town. Catalyzed by the Shakespeare Festival, a range of other festive events runs throughout the year, including the Red Rock Film Festival and the Utah UFO Festival. A town that might easily have dwindled into a post-industrial decline now rejoices in the nickname ‘Festival City, USA’. Two obvious points arise from this origin story: 1) Shakespeare festivals are inseparable from the economic, cultural, geographical and even geological contexts from which they emerge. Their widespread development across the US and Canada especially is related to the wider and interrelated post-war increases in leisure time,

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disposable income, car ownership (fuelled by cheap petrol), infrastructure and domestic tourism. 2) Shakespeare festivals are complicated and hard-to-sustain organisms. You may have noticed that very little of the parting advice offered to Fred Adams had anything directly to do with the works or words of William Shakespeare. With the exception of Bowmer’s caveat about directors, that advice related to casting, branding, budgeting, maintaining partnerships, avoiding unions and selling popcorn. In short, it was about creating and sustaining the conditions in which performances of Shakespeare can thrive, more to do with organizational practices than aesthetic choices or the performative interpretation of text. By extension, researching Shakespeare festivals means grappling with much more than what happens on festival stages (an idea to which I will return later). When Fred Adams took that road trip in 1960, there was barely a handful of established Shakespeare festivals in the US and Canada. Now (in 2019) there are more than 300 companies – of every conceivable size and description – dedicated in part or in whole to the secular cult of Shakespeare.2 Many of these describe themselves as festivals and (whether consciously or not) have followed Tyrone Guthrie’s advice and incorporated the name of their state in their titles (the state of Mississippi, for example, is rare in not currently having a Shakespeare festival bearing its name.) In contrast to the first wave of Shakespeare festivals (c.1930–70), many of today’s festivals and companies were not the brainchildren of white men but have been founded by and for women, actors of colour, people with disabilities and so on. While it is true that audiences and practitioners at some festivals remain overwhelmingly white and middle class, it is also obvious that the work of many festivals reaches a broad demographic spectrum including people of all class and racial backgrounds, schoolchildren, the homeless and – via outreach work – the incarcerated. This is a widespread and seriously influential phenomenon. For hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, it represents their first meaningful live encounter with the plays of William Shakespeare and, for some, the only time they see live Shakespeare – or theatre of any kind – each year. For tens of thousands of others, it’s what they do every summer, whether as actors, technicians, stage managers or volunteer stewards. For many, it is one of the most pleasurable forms of civic engagement and collaborative creativity they experience in their lifetimes. In spite of this, the Shakespeare festival phenomenon has been historically under-researched and therefore provides unique opportunities for new work by scholars interested in any of the following: localism, community, race, interculturalism, postmodern festivity, amateurism and volunteerism, activism, ‘Applied Shakespeare’, ecodramaturgy, cultural and social capital, audience reception and many other subfields of Shakespeare in performance.

III Before we survey some of the scholarly work already devoted to the phenomenon, let’s briefly pause to consider an ontological issue: what is a Shakespeare festival?

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‘Shakespeare Festival’ is an umbrella term for a very wide range of organizations, events and experiences. Some festivals run for eight months every year, others consist of a long weekend of performances. Some festivals offer a packed, immersive programme of talks, workshops, films and multiple productions from around the world, some simply offer one or two productions per annum in a municipal park. Some festivals require significant expenditure to attend; many are free. What a ‘Shakespeare festival’ means to you will largely depend on what type (if any) of festival you’ve participated in, and how that fits in to your wider experience of non-Shakespearean festivals and festivity (few Shakespeare festivals, for example, have much in common with the grungy and mind-altered hedonism typical of many music or alt-festivals). But I think it is possible to identify three broad types of Shakespeare festival: community, regional and international. All three share certain characteristics: 1) they are dedicated in whole or in part to celebrating William Shakespeare, predominantly through dramatic performances; 2) they are finite, timesensitive gatherings of audiences and artists; a permanent festival is a contradiction in terms; 3) the descriptor ‘festival’ also implies a degree of celebration; however serious or challenging some of the content, all festivals are framed by the imperative ‘rejoice!’ Community – a statistical majority of Shakespeare festivals in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia could be described as Community Shakespeare Festivals. In these festivals, most of the practitioners and a majority of the audience live locally and have not travelled a significant distance to participate in the festival. Productions will often take place outdoors in public spaces for a minimal or no admission cost. Festivals that bill themselves as ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ overwhelmingly belong in this category, offering as they do free or cheap access to arts and culture for a local audience in an informal setting. As Michael Dobson (2011) has shown, there is a long history of amateur outdoor performance of Shakespeare in the UK and elsewhere, but the ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ movement’s most influential innovator was Joseph Papp, whose free productions of Shakespeare in Central Park and in the New York City Boroughs in the late 1950s onwards provided the template and inspiration for many after him. The Heart of America Shakespeare Festival in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, was directly influenced by a dying Papp persuading its founder, Marilyn Strauss, that she could replicate his success in New York in the very different urban context of Kansas City. As the high standard of production at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival makes clear, ‘community’ does not necessarily mean small budgets or low production values. Nor is there a hard-andfast generalization to be made about the participants: casts, creatives and crews can be entirely amateur, a mixture of amateurs and professionals, or fully professional. Regional – nearly all Shakespeare festivals begin as community festivals but a few – such as those in Stratford, Ontario and (as seen above) the Utah Shakespeare Festival – aspire to be ‘destination’ festivals more or less immediately, aiming to exert a centripetal attraction on the surrounding region. Regional Shakespeare Festivals generally take some decades to establish this far-flung audience, to develop a donor and sponsorship base that allows them to build usually multiple performance venues and to employ professional practitioners from across the region and indeed nation. The largest regional Shakespeare Festivals also have strong

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international dimensions, whether by attracting practitioners from other countries, occasionally hosting overseas companies, or by pulling in a smallish number of international cultural tourists. Nevertheless, internationalism is not usually central to their mission. In the US and Canada, significant regional Shakespeare Festivals include the festivals at Oregon, Stratford (Ontario), Alabama and Utah, as well as the New York Shakespeare Festival (run by The Public Theater) and Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. In continental Europe, examples might include urban Shakespeare festivals such as those at the Silvano Toti Globe Theatre in Rome and the ‘Summer Shakespeare Festival’ that takes place in venues across the Czech and Slovak Republics every July and August – while these festivals sometimes feature guest overseas productions and undoubtedly attract some tourists, their main schedule consists of Shakespeare in Italian and Czech translation for urban and regional audiences. International – the current global craze for festivals owes much to the examples of Edinburgh and Avignon, both founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, both predicated on the idea of culture as balm and antidote to conflict. (As evocatively put by the Belgian classical musician Bernard Foccroulle: ‘Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has been covered by festivals as it was covered by cathedrals and monasteries in the Middle Ages.’3) Although neither Edinburgh or Avignon are by any means strictly Shakespearean festivals, the works of Shakespeare have been central to their histories and repertoire; both opened, for example, with productions of Richard II. International Shakespeare Festivals tend to follow the Edinburgh–Avignon model in curating an ‘official’ festival programme that showcases invited or even commissioned work from different countries, cultures and theatrical traditions. These official programmes are often themed and the job of the curator (sometimes a star auteur) is to create a schedule that is both diverse and coherent and which operates on a principle of concentrated juxtaposition. Beside or around this ‘official’ festival sits a ‘fringe’ festival, usually unthemed, generally featuring small-scale work that is crunchy, irreverent and experimental, and nearly always cheaper to produce and consume. Unlike at many US community Shakespeare Festivals, there is often an assumption of connoisseurship (which we might, in this context, call ‘Shakespearience’) on the part of the international festivalgoer: the 2010 edition of the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival in Romania, for example, consisted entirely of productions of Hamlet from South Korea, Japan, Germany, Lithuania, the US and elsewhere. Intercultural comparativism is central to the aims and effects of the International Shakespeare Festival, much as it was to the World’s Fairs and Cultural Olympiads that influenced the formation of the contemporary arts festival. This legacy is signalled by a curious tension in some festivals where an egalitarian impulse coexists with the ‘rite of competition’ (Falassi 1987: 5) in which certain artists and productions are singled out for prizes and celebration. Another interesting tension: while there is generally an expectation that featured productions will be aesthetically sophisticated, ‘cutting edge’ or even avant-garde, the sites in which these productions play are often historically loaded lieux de mémoire (examples: Elsinore Castle, the

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Honour Court at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, the seventeenth-century Corral de Comedias in Almagro and the fifteenth-century brick castle which serves as the venue for the Gyula Shakespeare Festival in Hungary). This is the dominant model of festival in most of the non-Anglophone world. Twenty-first-century Shakespeare festivals in China, Japan, Taiwan, Argentina and elsewhere almost invariably have an international component. Nearly all of the festivals in the European Shakespeare Festival Network (ESFN) are also based on this model, including those in Neuss (Germany; festival founded in 1991), Craiova (Romania; 1994), Gdansk (Poland; 1996), Gyula (Hungary; 2005), Helsingor (‘Elsinore’, Denmark; 2008) and Indjia (Serbia; 2014). (It is striking how many of these have developed in countries in the former Soviet bloc.) In some rare cases, a festival might not be designed as a Shakespeare festival but becomes one, de facto, over a number of years. The Festival de Teatro Clásico de Almagro (founded 1979) in Spain has gradually become so dominated by productions of Shakespeare that the organizers are currently trialling a temporary moratorium of non-Spanish plays (see Guerrero 2017). These three categories – community, regional, international – are neither rigid nor mutually exclusive. It is worth remembering that David Garrick’s Jubilee celebrations in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769 (by most accounts, the first ever Shakespeare festival) had elements of all three categories. It also chose not to feature Shakespeare’s words or full productions of his plays, but was more like a fancy-dress cosplay with newly written speeches, odes and oratorios. Unlike the attendees of Garrick’s festival, we tend to know what we’re getting (or letting ourselves in for) when we attend a Shakespeare festival in the twenty-first century. According to the categories established above, if we go to a community Shakespeare festival we are more than likely based in or near the venue, may know some people involved in the production, might have been coming to the same festival for many years, and have made no extraordinary logistical arrangements or financial outlay to get there. Attending a regional Shakespeare festival may not mean travelling vast distances (you might, after all, live in Cedar City or Ashland), but you will be surrounded by people who have travelled significant distances to watch fully professional productions, not only of Shakespeare but also of new writing and musicals, and who are likely paying hundreds of dollars (or equivalent currency) for the privilege to exist for a few days in a festivalized environment. Attending an international Shakespeare festival has much in common with the regional festival experience in terms of travel and monetary investment, but is usually based on a very different appetite for novelty and experimentalism; this appetite has been described as ‘advertent aesthetic cosmopolitanism … in which agents actively and consciously engage in practices of cultural consumption and production that transgress the conventional boundaries of their own ethnic or national cultures’ (Regev 2011: 111).

IV Assuming you have got this far and are still interested, your next question will be: ‘Where can I read more?’ Much of the most intriguing work on the wider

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phenomenon of festivals is published by scholars operating within and across the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, social geography and the fields of event, urban and tourism studies. This work is inspired by historians and theorists of ritual, leisure, cosmopolitanism, space, social justice, social inclusion and the public sphere (for an accessible introduction, see Duffy and Mair 2018). Many of these studies are qualitative but a significant amount of festivals research is quantitative and aimed at demonstrating economic impact. As Michelle Duffy and Judith Mair speculate, ‘the focus on quantitative research methods may be due to the positioning of festivals and events studies in business schools rather than within arts or social sciences’ (2018: 15). Either way, Shakespeareans have much to learn from and contribute to both quantitative and qualitative approaches from other disciplines, especially given the fact that scholars from these disciplines have rarely turned their attention to specifically Shakespearean festivals. Within Shakespeare and theatre studies there is much of interest (although, given space restraints, I can only – with apologies – touch on Anglophone studies of mostly Anglophone festivals). In the last sixty years or so, thousands of festival productions have been reviewed in local and national newspapers and in academic journals and websites such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Cahiers Élisabéthains and www. ReviewingShakespeare.com. These reviews will often give a strong contextual flavour of the festival but don’t tend to have the space or inclination to analyse the festival per se in any great depth. Ron Engle, Felicia Hardison Londré and Daniel J. Watermeier’s Shakespeare Companies and Festivals: An International Guide (1995) remains the only meaningful attempt to offer a quasi-comprehensive guide to the global phenomenon of Shakespeare festivals via short but penetrating accounts of c.140 festivals around the world (although roughly four-fifths of the book is devoted to US festivals). A generation later, the book is inevitably outdated – some of the profiled festivals no longer exist and many, many more have come into existence since 1995. Shakespeare on European Festival Stages (Cinpoeş‚ March and Prescott 2021) will be the first book to offer lengthy case studies of each of the major European Shakespeare festivals. A number of book-length studies are devoted to individual, long-running festivals. These are almost always celebratory, sometimes written by founders, often by experts with an embedded perspective. These include studies of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Bowmer 1975; Maher and Armstrong 2014), the Stratford Festival, Ontario (Patterson and Gould 1987), the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (Volz 1986), and the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park in New York City (Turan and Papp 2009). Shorter studies of smaller festivals include accounts of the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival (Crawford 2005), the Cambridge (UK) Shakespeare Festival (Muir 2015), the Idaho Shakespeare Festival (Copsey 2006) and Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (Minton 2020). For an excellent account of the aesthetic practices in many US festivals and companies, see Charles Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices (2016) and for a sense of how we got here, his companion volume Directing Shakespeare in America: Historical Perspectives (2019). Specific cases of festival audience behaviour and reception are illuminatingly discussed in a number of articles, including Dobson (2007), March (2012),

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Thompson and Demeter (2016) and Thompson (2017). Critical and theoretical case studies have been made relating to: access at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Amberg 2013); corporate sponsorship and the Ideological State Apparatus (Knowles 2004) and cultural tourism (Ormsby 2017) at the Stratford Festival, Canada; the links between exhibition and festival cultures (Burnett 2011); and the use of festival merchandise as audience ‘pre-conditioning’ (Londré and Wetermeier 1996). Rob Conkie’s (2017) meditation on walking to and between shows in an intense bout of theatrical activity also has applications for the phenomenology of festival-going. A final category of scholarly literature relates to a range of one-off or commemorative festivals that defy easy categorization.4 These might include fascinating geo-politically motivated festivals, such as those that took place throughout Poland in 1947 (Courtney 2017) or the ‘Elizabethan Festival’ mounted in blockaded Berlin in 1948 (Boecker 2015), both of which used Shakespeare as a soft weapon of recuperation and defiance in the aftermath of war. More obviously upbeat were the two largest Shakespeare festivals of the present century: the RSC Complete Works Festival of 2006/7 and the World Shakespeare Festival (WSF) that formed part of the Cultural Olympiad in the UK in 2012. Both have been analysed in a range of books and special issues of journals (for the WSF, see Bennett and Carson 2013; Edmondson, Prescott and Sullivan 2013; Prescott and Sullivan 2015; for critical reviews of the 2006–7 Complete Works, see Valls-Russell, Smith and Bradley 2007).

V So: Where next? While the majority of criticism in Shakespeare Performance Studies still focuses squarely on what happens on stage or during a performance, recent decades have also witnessed a partial shift of focus from art-as-object to art-as-event. This is a necessary shift to make if we are to do justice to the complexities of encounter and experience that occur during a Shakespeare festival. In closing, I’ll identify two areas that will repay further investigation in the years ahead.

1) Audience and participant experience Jean Vilar, founder of the Avignon Festival, once asked in a moment of apparent crisis: What do those summer festivals mean for the audience? Is it sheer tourism, evening pastimes, summer nights in historical precincts, beautiful costumes in adequate lighting designs, the aestheticism of petty leisure, Shakespeare galore? … Everybody’s happy and pleased, everything’s fine. (quoted in Maurin 2003: 6–7) As Isabella says, ‘And is this all?’ What do Shakespeare festivals mean to the audience? This has often been theorized in terms of pilgrimage. Dennis Kennedy writes:

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The location of festivals [at Salzburg and Bayreuth] and their calendar limitations meant that a large portion of the audiences had to travel to reach them, encouraging a sense of pilgrimage to sacred locales, presenting themselves as edifying arenas for summer holidays. The major English-speaking Shakespeare festivals fit the same pattern. (2011: 102) But most Shakespeare festivals in the UK, North America and beyond are not ‘major’ and offer a different, more civic and localized model than the one Kennedy describes. So, I would adapt Vilar’s question to ask: what do these Shakespeare festivals mean for the audience and for the people who make them? There is an assumption in much of the scholarly literature that festivals happen to people, rather than are actually made by people. Relatedly, much journalistic and academic coverage tends to fixate on only one expression of festival Shakespeare – the production – still often read for what it ‘tells us about the text’ rather than what it tells us about the people or the town that made it. We know anecdotally that participation in local festivals, over the course of years and even decades, can have a defining effect on people’s lives. Nicholson, Holdworth and Milling’s studies of the ‘ecologies of amateur performance’ (2017; 2018) are excellent attempts to listen to these people’s voices. It has been argued that the brevity of most festivals prohibits the development of affective bonds and truly meaningful experiences; but ‘this ignores the fact that a core group of festival staff (either paid staff or volunteers) work throughout the year to plan and stage a festival, and social capital can be – and, indeed, often is – nurtured and developed in all aspects of festival planning and management’ (Duffy and Mair 2018: 101); it also ignores the incrementally deep experience of rehearsals  for amateur participants. As Karl Spracklen and Ian R. Lamond point out: ‘Now that our working lives are so precarious, now that most of us have lost the social identity and solidarity of the workplace, we are floating subjects. Our leisure lives have become important sites for the construction of our identity and the preservation of our sanity’ (2016: 46). So, two sets of research questions related to participation: 1) given that many festivals’ acting companies combine amateurs and professionals, what does each learn from the other and what is the nature of this experience? Can the process be likened to rites of exchange and reversal (see Falassi 1987) that create a co-dependency between established performers and novices/amateurs? If so, to what extent does this enable festival performance to exist outside the usual competitive and hierarchical mechanisms of late capitalism, especially in a notoriously precarious and unfair vocation such as acting? 2) given how many festivals depend on voluntary and unpaid labour, how is this experienced by the people in question? Do they feel exploited? Or is ‘labour’ the wrong word when pleasure, satisfaction and sociability are involved?

2) Eco-festive Shakespeare and the political now The planet is on fire. This is an increasingly unavoidable fact for us all. The unpredictability of weather has always been a key dimension of the outdoor festival experience, but in many places this unpredictability has turned hazardous.

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In the summer of 2018, for example, wildfires in Southern Oregon and Northern California forced the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to cancel or relocate twenty outdoor performances, leading to a loss of $2 million in ticket revenue. Shakespeare festivals represent a substantial part of the theatrical ecosystem: what part are they playing in the struggle to address and contain climate change? ‘The long history of scholarship that surrounds festivals and carnivals, unlike many other fields of study, is invested with idealism about festival’s separation from the “shackles” of reality’ (Zaiontz 2018: 44). But in the current ecological crisis, how much can any festival disengage with the reality of anthropogenic climate change, or the rise of far-right populism that wears climate change denial as a badge of pride? After the Public Theater’s Trumpian Julius Caesar in Central Park in 2017, various Shakespeare in the Park festivals around the country received violent threats, threats that were misdirected but no less scary. It is hard to believe that this will be the last collision between festive Shakespeare and non-festive reality in the twenty-first century. An ecologically informed analysis of Shakespearean festivals might begin by asking: to what extent are environmental concerns at the heart of any given festival’s practices and productions? How does the festival care for the natural and built environments it inhabits? Does it consult the local and indeed Indigenous community in this work? How does it minimize waste? (e.g. are costumes, props and set pieces reused, reworked or up-cycled? Are these shared with other companies in the region?). How clean is the money it receives from corporate sponsors? How do its productions – where thematically appropriate – adapt Shakespeare’s plays to draw attention to the ecological crisis? (see Martin and O’Malley 2017). How sustainable is any festival that depends on its audience to travel long distances by air or car? The political dimension of ‘the long history of scholarship’ on festivals can be reduced to one question: it is possible to both rejoice and resist? Can we be simultaneously relaxed (by the festival) and alarmed into action (by its message)? Can the idealistic sense of community and purpose fostered by festivals survive past the Monday morning return to work? The study of Shakespearean festivals is as good a place as any to examine these tensions. Unlike many natural resources – iron in Utah, for example – Shakespeare’s works offer an open-access and infinitely renewable cultural resource. What role can these works and the people who produce them play in a green leisure economy that might, like Prospero’s miraculous ecomasque, ‘leave not a wrack behind’?

NOTES 1. Decades later, the Trump administration’s protectionist response to an analogous situation was to impose tariffs on imported steel; it has been estimated that every US job saved or created by this policy has cost the economy $900,000 (see Henney 2019). 2. I am very grateful to two excellent students for their work in compiling a database of US Shakespeare festivals: Harley Ryley for building a provisional list in 2014,

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and William Wolfgang for his indefatigable work from 2018 onwards in making the database fully comprehensive. 3. In the original French, this reads: ‘Depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, L’Europe s’est couverte de festivals comme elle s’était couverte de monastères et de cathédrales au Moyen Âge’ (Foccroulle 2008: 11). 4. The very rich and related subject of commemoration (most obviously in the observation of anniversaries such as those in 1916, 1964 and 2016) lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

REFERENCES Adams, Fred (2014), Personal Interview with author, Cedar City, UT, 16 July, The Shakespeare on the Road archives, Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Amberg, Jim (2013), ‘“Teach him how to tell my story”: Access at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 8 (2). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/957/show (accessed 21 November 2020). Bennett, Susan and Christie Carson, eds (2013), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boecker, Bettina (2015), ‘Shakespeare in Blockaded Berlin: The 1948 “Elizabethan Festival”’, Shakespeare Survey, 68: 282–93. Bowmer, Angus L. (1975), As I Remember, Adam: An Autobiography of a Festival, Ashland, OR: Oregon Shakespeare Festival Association. Burnett, Mark Thornton (2011), ‘Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, 445–63, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cinpoeş, Nicoleta, Florence March and Paul Prescott, eds (2021), Shakespeare on European Festival Stages, London: Bloomsbury. Conkie, Rob (2017), ‘Reverie of a Shakespearean Walker’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 231–49, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Copsey, Doug (2006), With Our Good Will: 30 Years of Shakespeare in Idaho, Caldwell, ID: Caxton. Courtney, Krystyna Kujawińska (2017), ‘The Cultural Role and Political Implications of Poland’s 1947 Shakespeare Festival’, Text Matters, 7 (7): 183–93. Crawford, Kevin (2005), ‘The Sun Looking with a Southward Eye upon Us: Shakespeare in South Florida’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 1 (1). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show (accessed 21 November 2020). Dobson, Michael (2007), ‘Watching the Complete Works Festival: The RSC and Its Fans in 2006’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 25 (4): 23–34. Dobson, Michael (2011), Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Duffy, Michelle and Judith Mair (2018), Festival Encounters: Theoretical Perspectives on Festival Events, Abingdon: Routledge. Edmondson, Paul, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, eds (2013), A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival, London: Bloomsbury. Engle, Ron, Felicia Hardison Londré and Daniel J. Watermeier, eds (1995), Shakespeare Companies and Festivals: An International Guide, New York and London: Greenwood. Falassi, Alessandro (1987), Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Foccroulle, Bernard (2008), ‘Au Coeur des Identités Européennes’, in Anne-Marie Autissier (ed.), L’Europe des Festivals: de Zagreb à Édimbourg, points de vue croisés, 11–19, Toulouse: Éditions de l’attribut. Guerrero, Isabel (2017), ‘Festival Shakespeare: Celebrating the Plays on the Stage’, PhD diss., Universidad de Murcia, Spain. Henney, Megan (2019), ‘Trump’s steel tariffs cost US consumers close to $900,000 per job, analysis finds’, Fox Business, 9 May. Available online: https://www.foxbusiness. com/economy/trumps-steel-tariffs-cost-us-consumers (accessed 21 November 2020). Kennedy, Dennis (2011), The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowles, Ric (2004), Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Londré, Felicia Hardison and Daniel Watermeier (1996), ‘Shakespeare Selling Shakespeare: Festival Commodities as Bait and as Pre-Conditioning’, Litteraria Pragensia, 6 (12): 51–6. Maher, Mary Z. and Alan Armstrong, eds (2014), Oregon Shakespeare Festival Actors: Telling the Story, Ashland, OR: Wellstone. March, Florence (2012), ‘Amateur Reviewing at the Avignon Festival: The “Mirror Group”’, in Paul Prescott, Peter J. Smith and Janice Valls-Russell (eds), ‘Nothing if Not Critical’: International Perspectives on Shakespearean Theatre Reviewing, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 81 (1): 133–40. Martin, Randall and Evelyn O’Malley (2017), ‘Eco-Shakespeare in Performance’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 36 (3): 377–90. Matthew, Kelly and Neil Abercrombie (n.d.), ‘Economic Impact of the Utah Shakespeare Festival’, Utah Legislature. Available online: https://le.utah.gov/interim/2019/ pdf/00001153.pdf (accessed 21 November 2020). Maurin, Frédéric (2003), ‘Still and Again: Whither Festivals?’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13 (4): 5–11. Minton, Gretchen (2020), Shakespeare in Montana, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Muir, Andrew (2015), Shakespeare in Cambridge: A Celebration of the Shakespeare Festival, Gloucestershire: Amberley. Ney, Charles (2016), Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices, London: Bloomsbury. Ney, Charles (2019), Directing Shakespeare in America: Historical Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury. Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling, eds (2017), ‘Theatre, Performance, and the Amateur Turn’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27 (1): 1–123.

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Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling (2018), The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre, London: Palgrave. Ormsby, Robert (2017), ‘Global Cultural Tourism at Canada’s Stratford Festival: The Adventures of Pericles’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 568–83, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patterson, Tom and Allan Gould (1987), First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Prescott, Paul and Erin Sullivan, eds (2015), Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, London: Bloomsbury. Regev, Motti (2011), ‘International Festivals in a Small Country: Rites of Recognition and Cosmopolitanism’, in Gerard Delanty, Liana Giorgi and Monica Sassatelli (eds), Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, 108–23, London: Routledge. Spracklen, Karl and Ian R. Lamond (2016), Critical Event Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Thompson, Ayanna and Jason Demeter (2016), ‘The Merchant of Ashland: The Confusing Case of an Organized Minority Response at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’, Shakespearean International Yearbook, 16: 49–64. Thompson, Ayanna (2017), ‘(How) Should We Listen to Audiences?: Race, Reception and the Audience Survey’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 157–69, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turan, Kenneth and Joseph Papp (2009), Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told, New York: Doubleday. Valls-Russell, Janice, Peter J. Smith and Kath Bradley, eds (2007), RSC Complete Works 2006–07, Stratford-upon-Avon: A Special Issue of Cahiers Élisabéthains. Volz, Jim (1986), Shakespeare Never Slept Here: The Making of a Regional Theatre: A History of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Atlanta: Cherokee Publishers. Zaiontz, Keren (2018), Theatre & Festivals, London: Palgrave.

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PART TWO

Current research and issues

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CHAPTER 2.1

Original Practices: Old ways and new directions SARAH DUSTAGHEER

In their use of unamplified sound, shared light, cue scripts, all-male casting or other rehearsal and performance techniques, productions that use ‘Original Practices’ (OP) seek to emulate the conditions of the early modern theatre. With the development of theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe and the American Shakespeare Center, OP has become a well-established part of contemporary performance. However, its position in the modern theatre scene remains ambiguous. For some, OP offers dynamic experimentation that is in dialogue with both academic research and modern performance; for others, an interest in the past and an academic agenda marks OP as irrelevant to contemporary theatre making. The fault lines underlying OP became painfully apparent in 2016 when the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Emma Rice, resigned after less than a year in post. In the ensuing heated debate, the media, members of the theatre community and key players on opposite sides argued around binaries: innovative/traditional, museum/theatre, conformist/experimental, accessible/elite, commercial/artistic, amplified/acoustic, artificial/natural (see work cited below including: Morrison 2016; Gardner 2016; Ellis 2016; Trueman 2016). In this way, despite its long-standing existence in modern theatre, in 2016 OP was subject to an intense public scrutiny not seen since its inception. In this chapter I want to unpick these binary assessments of OP. In doing so I will build on existing scholarship on OP to ask two interrelated questions: what value does OP have to the study of Shakespearean performance? And what place does this performance mode have in today’s theatre scene? Analysing OP, and especially its incarnation at Shakespeare’s Globe from 1997, has been the focus of important work by Conkie (2006), Lopez (2008), Carson and Karim-Cooper (2008b) and Falocco (2010). More recently, Purcell (2017a) offers an account of Mark Rylance’s tenure at the Globe; Menzer (2017) examines the American Shakespeare Center, and Cornford (2017), Worthen (2017) and Quarmby (2018) have considered the implications of Emma Rice’s tenure and resignation. My aim here is to update work on OP in light of Rice’s time at the Globe and, writing a few years on from the controversy, to place her directorship in the wider context of the movement’s history. Doing so, I suggest, will open up some of the future avenues

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for research in the area of OP. Unless stated, I should point out from the outset that I am not using OP in its strictest sense as theatre practice specifically identified by its makers as OP. Rather, I am using OP in terms of its accrued meaning: theatre that attempts to recreate or reimagine certain practices of Shakespearean performance, without necessarily defining itself as ‘OP’. The tension between these two meanings is something I will explore below. The first section of the chapter, entitled ‘Defining OP’, attempts to examine what exactly the term means, and the value of such an exercise. I begin with the press response to Rice’s directorship and the questions around OP raised by theatre critics; I then look at some specific academic and practitioner definitions, before using the Globe as a case study to unpick this vexed phrase. The second section of the chapter, ‘Contextualizing OP’, analyses the place of OP in the academy and the ways in which it intersects with Practice-as-Research (PaR), as well as with the study of theatre history. Finally, in ‘Modernizing OP’, I examine OP in the contemporary theatre landscape and suggest the very modern resonances and political meanings it has, particularly with regards to the role of the modern director and artistic director. In focussing on the Globe closely, the chapter offers an account of practice at the theatre: from Rylance’s OP, or as I describe it, ‘Original material practices’; to Dromgoole’s new playwriting policy as a form of OP; to Rice’s rejection of OP and its political implication; to Michelle Terry’s newly coined development of OP, ‘original process’. Ultimately, while OP is a nebulous phrase, exploration of it encourages a close reading of artistic intention, practice and effect, and demonstrates the ways in which those who seek to engage with the past are inevitably bound by the present.

DEFINING OP Emma Rice was appointed as Artistic Director (AD) of the Globe in 2016, following in the footsteps of the first AD, Mark Rylance (1996–2005), and then Dominic Dromgoole (2005–15). In her first season, Rice updated the lighting and sound systems at the Globe and her productions used amplified sound and lighting design in ways that exceeded her predecessors. While Rylance and Dromgoole had experimented at the theatre, neither departed from natural (not amplified) actors’ voices and shared lighting between actors and audiences (daylight or electric floodlight during evening performances). Rice’s season caused controversy in the press, and what emerged were clear-cut lines of battle about the purpose and value of the Globe, as well as what types of theatre practice it should and should not present. For Times critic Richard Morrison, Rice was ‘wrecking’ a ‘wonderful theatre’ built with ‘such scholarly attention to shape, materials and décor’; her productions showed ‘perversity, incongruity and disrespect’ (2016). The Globe, he argues, was built ‘to show that, given the acoustical properties of a round 16th-century theatre with “groundlings” only inches from the thrust stage, actors could re-establish a unique rapport with the audience and reassert the power of Shakespeare’s text without artificial aids and with minimum scenery and lighting’.

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Conversely, Lyn Gardner of The Guardian asserted that Rice had a ‘right to experiment at the Globe’. The theatre ‘is a not a museum, but a living breathing thing’, she pointed out, and not a ‘plaything for academics’ (Gardner 2016). Rice’s departure from the work of her predecessors (marked by its lack of lighting design and amplified sound) was seen as a ‘shunning of “original practices”’ for which she was ‘labelled a heretic’, Henry Hitchens (theatre critic of The Evening Standard) suggested (qtd in Ellis 2016). In this way, the debate descended into opposing forces with OP, tradition and heritage on one side and progressive, innovative and experimental theatre on the other. For Matt Trueman (What’s On Stage critic), since Rice’s season ‘[t]here’s been a small culture war waging on the South Bank’, in which ‘the sense now is that some experiments are more permissible than others’. He warned that ‘[i]f we insist on doing things as they’ve always been done – and what’s original practice if not that – nothing will change’ (Trueman 2016). Within the terms of the Rice press debate, OP constitutes dead (heritage), academic (the Globe as a plaything for the academy) and static (doing things as they’ve always been done) performance. Interestingly, the 2016 conversation echoed criticism of the Globe before its opening in 1997. Theatre critics were concerned that this new space would be simply another part of ‘the heritage industry’ (Casey 1996) and a toy for ‘academics … obsessed with analysing the Elizabethan experience as precisely as possible’ (Armistead 1996). Academics have discussed at length the ways in which the modern Globe is haunted by its predecessor, the 1599 Globe, and even the Theatre in Shoreditch. ‘Straddling two historical moments, the reconstructed Globe … relies on a double sense of ground’ (Phelan 2007: 14). Yet 2016 suggested that, rather than its early modern past, the 1997 Globe will always be haunted by its own unique modern history. Specifically, the theatre cannot seem to escape the initial criticism – such as that by Casey (1996) and Armistead (1996) – that dogged the project and the imagery of that criticism (heritage, academic, museum, dead). In other words, the actual achievements of the intervening twenty years of theatre making, the extensive body of work created for the Globe (1997–2016), are repeatedly subordinated to arguments that predate them. If scholars are to counter the weight of this received narrative, the critical and public memories of this modern theatre (such as those captured in 2008 in Carson and Karim-Cooper’s Shakespeare’s Theatre: An Experiment) need to be given serious scrutiny, especially in light of the events of 2016. It is apparent that in the press OP has become a (pejorative) shorthand for a certain type of theatre staged at the Globe which engages with the past. Nonetheless, for a shorthand that evokes such strong opinions, its actual meaning remains elusive: is it an absence of amplified sound and electronic light? Does OP mean ‘a unique rapport with the audience’ and a foregrounding of ‘the power of Shakespeare’s text without artificial aids and with minimum scenery and lighting’ (Morrison 2016)? Is it repeating what’s ‘always been done’ (Hitchens, qtd in Ellis 2016)? By who and when? It would be wrong to expect the media conversation around Rice to offer in-depth answers to such questions. And it is unsurprising that OP remains a difficult term to pin down; confusion seems inherent in its etymology. As Holger Syme argues, OP is

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a deeply vexing phrase. ‘Practice’ is a term that sounds as if it referred to something concrete, even purposive: a way of doing things adopted by a group of people. ‘Original,’ on the other hand, is teasingly ambiguous, suggesting, as it seems to, that these practices are new – inventive, revolutionary, a break with the way things have been done – although it in fact means the opposite: that these practices are a return to the origins. (2014) Syme is correct here: ‘practice’ promises something ‘concrete’ and in many ways complete. ‘Origin’ hints at the new, but marks an interest in the past and a notion that this ‘origin’ is knowable, fixed and obtainable. In fact, as other scholars have pointed out, OP covers ‘a range of (sometimes inharmonious) methodologies and critical practices’ (Lopez 2008: 303) or a ‘wide variety of theater practices, all of which draw selectively on aspects of what is known about early modern theater practice’ (Purcell 2017b: 432). Considering theatremakers beyond Shakespeare’s Globe who use the term demonstrates its multiplicity. Away from the Globe, OP exists within a wider movement: ‘the term “original practices” … has been invoked not only in London’s Bankside Globe but also in several theatrical venues in North America’ (Dessen 2008: 43). A key proponent of the movement is the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) and its reconstructed Blackfriars theatre, examined at length by Paul Menzer (2017); also of note are the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. All show a similar commitment to ‘follow the same principles that Shakespeare himself championed’ (Lord Chamberlain’s Men n.d.), to ‘the original staging practices of acting companies from Shakespeare’s own period’ (Pigeon) and to ‘Shakespeare’s Staging Conditions’ (ASC). The ‘principles’, ‘practices’ and ‘conditions’ of the past, though, remain multiple and contested. From music and costume, to doubling to all-male casts, to universal lighting to, in the case of the Pigeon Creek company, replicating the administrative structure of Shakespeare’s company (‘In Shakespeare’s time, actors …. took part in the business aspects of their acting companies as well. The actors of the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare company … are also the primary administrators of the company and producers of performances’). Pigeon Creek perhaps more embody practice – as in the OED meaning ‘method of action and working’ – of Shakespeare’s company, what the actors actually did. Broadly, we might say that OP marks work that offers practices – theatrical, material, social, cultural, administrative, etc. – which seek to emulate, engage with or recreate Shakespearean practices. While OP is a slippery term, an examination of it encourages a close analysis of theatrical practices created under its auspices, as the following brief case study of the Globe reveals. The history of OP’s emergence at the Globe is a patchwork of shifting ideas and a search for appropriate language to articulate those ideas. A selection of documents from the Globe’s archive exemplifies this hotchpotch history. A very early ‘Declaration of Purpose’ from 1973 states that the ‘theatre will stage modern interpretations of plays by Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) as well as educational reconstructions in the style and manner of the Elizabethan-Jacobean period’ (Shakespeare’s Globe

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1973: 5). By 1988 the word ‘reconstruction’ had been abandoned for ‘authentic’: a draft artistic policy states that ‘[a]t least one play each season should be presented as authentically as possible’ (Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008b: 236). Those involved in the project grappled with what ‘authentic’ might mean. At a 1995 conference, Andrew Gurr asked what should happen in performances advertised as ‘authentic’ … Should we have intervals of any kind? Should male actors play female roles? Should we try to ‘authenticate’ the audience? For example, ticketing by hats (flat-caps for artisans, bowlers of varying elevation for courtiers), which then regulate movement to boxes/galleries? (qtd in Egan 1995) Interviewed in the same year, Mark Rylance was also thinking aloud about what ‘authentic’ might mean: ‘four major productions’ every season and then twelve smaller productions ‘with short rehearsal periods and a prompter – some of the more rarely performed works’ (qtd in Robins 1995: 4). A range of possibilities are at play in the early history of the modern Globe, including experiments about rehearsal techniques, casting and audience experience. In other words, multiple ‘practices’ of Shakespearean theatre. As Rob Conkie and Stephen Purcell have examined at length, what emerged from Rylance’s directorship was the term ‘Original Practices’ and a move away from the word ‘authentic’. For Purcell, ‘[w]here “authenticity” conjures up a nostalgic image of a lost and better past, “original practices” recognizes that Globe practitioners hand-pick what is useful from historical performance in order to transform modern theatre practice’ (Purcell 2017a: 24). The concept of ‘hand-picking’ is key; OP is a process of artistic selection by modern theatremakers. OP as a term provides a useful shorthand but it also obscures the specific results of this hand-picking process. For example, under Rylance, while there were experiments with all-male casts and original pronunciation, fundamentally the artistic team paid particular attention to the materials of early modern theatre performance: costumes, properties, instruments, the visual and acoustic of early modern theatre. In collaboration with musical director Claire van Kampen and director of design Jenny Tiramani, Rylance created performances which predominantly attempted to reconstruct the visual and auditory experience of the early modern playhouse. The respective archives of Tiramani and van Kampen, held at the Globe, are testament to the intense research completed on early modern costumes and music at the theatre between 1997 and 2005. In this way, perhaps a more accurate term for the Globe’s work (1997–2005) may well be ‘Original Material Practice’ (OMP). When Dominic Dromgoole took over as Artistic Director he seemed to mark a move away from the OP, or OMP, work undertaken under Rylance. He described OP as ‘a result of the coincidence of extraordinary personalities at a particular moment in their lives’ (qtd in Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008a: 8). As Gordon McMullan argues, Dromgoole looked ‘benignly’ at OP as a ‘model of intellectual property as something external to, independent of, the Globe’ (McMullan 2008: 233). While Dromgoole’s Shakespeare work used historic costume and music to create an early

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modern aesthetic, these production choices were not rooted in the research and attempted historical accuracy of OP performances. Instead Dromgoole championed new playwriting at the Globe and specially commissioned new plays which were a key feature of each theatre season. It would appear, therefore, at this point in the theatre’s history (2006), OP at the Globe came to a dead end; these new plays appear to have little to do with attempts to emulate past Shakespearean theatre-making. The new repertory of plays staged at the Globe has received scant attention from those interested in OP, Shakespearean performance and reconstruction. Yet analyses of new playwriting at the Globe (Cantoni 2017; Dustagheer 2011: 273–87; Woods 2012: 259–319) demonstrate that playwrights, actors and audiences articulate the same agendas and responses to their counterparts from OP productions. In my own research interviewing new playwrights at the Globe, I found many responded to the building by seeking to emulate an ‘original practice’ of early modern playwriting, one different and at odds with modern writing. Jack Shepherd, writer of Holding Fire (2007), notes that the ‘challenge to the writer and director, now working at the Globe, is to try and rediscover the epic theatre of four hundred years ago not to impose twentieth century values onto an old space’ (qtd in Dustagheer 2011: 277). For Howard Brenton (In Extremis [2006], Anne Boleyn [2010] and Doctor Scroggy’s War [2014]), the Globe ‘is a Renaissance building; wit, action, argument, comic human warmth: a sense of “all the world” flourishes there’ and the theatre ‘may encourage playwrights to turn from the solipsism of individual alienation that has dominated the best new writing of the past decade’ (qtd in Dustagheer 2011: 277). Dromgoole suggests that successful plays at the Globe include features which ‘run counter to modern rules of playwriting’, like ‘clumsy exposition, cheap jokes, a warm and lovely tone, language that has pride and a sense of itself’ (qtd in Dustagheer 2011: 277). In this way, theatremakers identify characteristics of ‘original’ early modern playwriting; it is epic, comic, human, warm, has clumsy exposition, for example, and it is decidedly not modern. Once identified, writers attempt to replicate these characteristics. Of course, this ‘practice’ lacks the rigour and underpinning of early modern theatre history, and many scholars would take issue with the assessment of early modern playwriting outlined by Globe writers. Nonetheless, for me, new playwriting at the Globe functions in a similar way to OP, and its agents use similar language to OP practitioners. Like their counterparts in the ASC or the Pigeon, but perhaps with less self-consciousness, many playwrights at the Globe seek an affinity with their contemporary practice and an early modern one. New playwriting under Dromgoole, I suggest, is a form of OP, one that can be examined in dialogue with other forms of practice that seek to engage with a Shakespearean past. Future research may well wish to expand the taxonomy of OP and scrutinize seemingly non-OP work through theories of reconstructed performance and theatre. This section has attempted to push back against the understanding of OP as dead and static as it emerged in the press coverage of 2016. Tracing the phrase through academic and practitioner definitions reveals that it is embodied in multiple ways in a complex and contemporary world of artistic practice. If this is the case, how can we seek to contextualize that contemporary artistic practice in the academy? And

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how do contemporary conditions inflect the manifestations of OP? The final two sections seek to explore these questions.

CONTEXTUALIZING OP In 2008, Jeremy Lopez sought to identify how the OP movement fitted within the academy. He argued that it ‘responds to a need, or a variety of needs, in the academic community’ (Lopez 2008: 302) and that the movement was developed ‘out of and alongside resistance to new historicism’ (Lopez 2008: 316); in addition, he noted that ‘there is no scholarly treatise that amounts to a systematic statement of original practice principles’ (Lopez 2008: 303). Lopez’s argument is reasoned but perhaps now dated in its clear distinction between the practices and methods of an academic and theatre community; having said that, it is notable that Emma Rice’s resignation brought these distinctions back into sharp focus again, with comments about the Globe as an ‘academic plaything’ (Gardner 2016) seeming to place academy and theatre at odds. Nevertheless, published in the same year as Lopez’s article, Carson and Karim-Cooper’s Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment offers a more nuanced understanding of the actor and the academic and offers an aim for the book ‘to re-establish a dialogue between the scholar and the practitioner’ (2008a: 6). To this end, they point out that criticism about the Globe and its activities is ‘generated by a misunderstanding of the methods of theatre practitioners by literary scholars’ (ibid.: 7): a notable example is the vocabulary of ‘experiment’ which has been perceived as a claim to scientific empiricism but, in fact, derives from theatrical practice. There has been, Carson and Karim-Cooper argue, a misunderstanding of ‘the tradition that is under discussion’ (ibid.). Over ten years after these publications, there has been an increasing and productive collaboration between theatre and academy in the study and performance of early modern drama, and blurring of practice and research in the form of Practice-asResearch (PaR) within the academy. Like OP, PaR remains difficult to define but, broadly speaking, it concerns ‘the joining and intertwining of practice and research in early drama’ and projects that explore ‘how, between the gaps and the unknowns and the contradictions of surviving evidence … the act of doing and making in the present enables us to develop informed understandings of the past’ (Dustagheer, Jones and Rycroft 2017: 173). In considerations of the PaR movement, scholars have noted the intermingling between PaR and OP (Dustagheer, Jones and Rycroft 2017; Purcell 2017a). As Purcell argues, ‘Though these movements [OP and PaR] had different origins, they now overlap to a considerable extent in the work of scholar-practitioners exploring the drama of the early modern period’ (2017b: 425). Quarmby glosses the scholar-practitioner further: in light of ‘the burgeoning academic interest in the embodied theatrical experience … a relatively new breed has emerged in the Shakespeare academy: the scholar-practitioner’ (2018: 577). A few examples of this kind of project include ‘Staging and Representing the Scottish Renaissance Court’ (2012–14), ‘The Three Ladies of London in Context’ (2015) and ‘Cultures of Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: John Bale’s

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King John’ (2019).1 There remains no ‘scholarly treatise on OP’ (Lopez), but in light of the complexity of defining this term this seems unsurprising. Rather, I suggest, there is something more sophisticated than a ‘scholarly treatise’ emerging: an examination of OP and PaR, with scholars being self-reflective and critical about their methodologies and about the blurring between practice and research (for example, see articles in Betteridge and Walker 2005; Kesson 2015; Dustagheer, Rycroft and Jones 2017; Purcell 2017b). An avenue for future research will be to keep examining the relevance and purpose of practice to the study of early drama and Shakespearean performance. Yet it is important to sound a word of caution about PaR work. Firstly, in the academy, ‘performance is still viewed warily by some universities or university departments as too fleeting, immeasurable, or radical a research outcome’ and ‘there frequently remains an assumption that performance itself is too insubstantial to be counted as a critical scholarly output in its own right’ (Dustagheer, Jones and Rycroft 2017: 179). Thus, while distinctions between theatre practice and academia have broken down in some areas of early modern and Shakespeare studies, those engaged in PaR may face a system and colleagues who have little understanding of their scholarship. Secondly, while I have cited examples of good practice and theorizing above, recently Susan Bennett and Gina Bloom have noted the need for Shakespeare scholars to do more ‘to theorize more explicitly how they are using performance’ (2017: 369). There is a ‘need and readiness in Shakespeare Studies for a deeper engagement with theories of performance’ (368); ‘few scholars’, Bennett and Bloom suggest, ‘have, as yet, more than dipped a tentative toe into Performance Studies theories’ (369). Bennett and Bloom cite W. B. Worthen in support of their argument, pointing out his recent call ‘for the development of a Shakespeare Performance Studies whose goal is “an inquiry, not into Shakespeare but through Shakespeare into the medium of performance”’ (369). In this way, those undertaking PaR cannot rest on their laurels but, rather, need to ensure that their projects are inflected by the rigour of Performance Studies and a critically reflexive methodology. One future area of inquiry in this interdisciplinary and methodologically rich research might offer useful reflection on the idea of embeddedness in Shakespeare Performance Studies. It is significant that many scholars who work in the area of OP, PaR and reconstructed theatre – including me – have spent time working within these spaces as students, researchers, teachers and/or dramaturges. Writing about the ASC, Menzer points out he has been ‘associated in one way or another with the ASC since 1990’, as a ‘fan, then as employee, then as board member, now as the director of the Shakespeare and Performance graduate programme … which operates in partnership with the ASC’ (2017: xv). This association ‘grants [him] unusual insight’ but means that he is ‘implicated in [the ASC’s] history’, he is ‘complicit’. How does complicity, a long-held association with a theatre, affect interpretations of performance there, inflect methodology, affect one’s experience as an audience member, a critic and scholar? A closer engagement with Performance Studies, especially its roots in cultural anthropology, may well encourage further reflection on the methodologies and attitudes that embedded, complicit and close-up engagement with performance produces.

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Another area of research is the ongoing job of locating OP in the longue durée of theatre history (scholarship that has attempted this kind of mapping includes Dessen 2008; Falocco 2010; Mazer 2015; Menzer 2017), and placing Rice’s time at the Globe in this history. Conversations around Rice created a clear binary: on the one side, she was innovative, dynamic and new; on the other, OP was old, dead and static. Defenders of the Globe and/or the OP movement, though, soon suggested that Rice’s practice might not be as ‘new’ as one might think. Ralph Alan Cohen, of the American Shakespeare Center, argued that while the view of the press ‘is that this is a battle between tradition and innovation’, in fact, ‘The reverse is true. The technology that Emma Rice has installed in the Globe is the conventional lighting and sound available in every prosperous modern theatre’ (2016). Similarly, Dromgoole pointed out the conformist nature of placing electrical light at the Globe. For him, ‘shared light was the unique Globe tool, which subverted the orthodoxies of director’s and critic’s theatre … Taking away that uniqueness doesn’t strike me as radical, it strikes me as conformist. Every theatre has light and sound, the Globe didn’t’ (Dromgoole 2017). Cohen and Dromgoole highlight the fact that Rice’s technological changes to the infrastructure of the Globe (a more extensive lighting and sound system) placed the theatre in alignment with other modern theatres. A long view of theatre history that identifies technological innovation (amplified sound and electric lighting) as a feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century performance underlies Cohen and Dromgoole’s arguments. The absence of this technology, the emphasis on shared light and the connection between actors and audiences in such a space made the 1997 Globe stand apart from its earlier-built counterparts on London’s theatre scene. It becomes possible then, as Cohen and Dromgoole do, to flip the binary: Rice’s work is traditional and conformist, OP is radical and innovative. However, when we place OP back into its own long view, the binary becomes unstable again. As Menzer argues in his account of the American Shakespeare Center, OP and what we might broadly term ‘Elizabethan revivalism’ draws its inheritance from the nineteenth-century theatrical practice of William Poel. This inheritance receives little acknowledgement because ‘reproducing the staging practices of William Shakespeare looks like a revolutionary act. Reproducing those of Poel looks like a reactionary one’; however, ‘the late twentieth-century revival of Elizabethan practice owes as much to the nineteenth century as to the sixteenth’ (Menzer 2017: 79). The binary, therefore, reverts back: OP is reactionary, not innovative. My point is not to flipflop the binary of radical versus conformist theatre, but more to demonstrate its limitations and the ways in which the Rice debate has narrowed into unhelpful polarizations. Rather than a binary, we have a messy, mutable and ever-changing cycle, which requires ongoing critique. Taking us right up to date, the Globe’s new Artistic Director Michelle Terry glosses OP as follows: ‘Original practice for me has limiting or almost pejorative connotations now because it implies that women can’t be in the plays, and what’s not going to happen. The term “original process” expands it’ (qtd in Bowie-Sell 2018). Terry, then, positions herself in reaction against the legacy of OP with something new, ‘original process’. In part, this move undoubtedly allows Terry to disassociate Globe practice from the

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negative associations that emerged in the press after Rice’s resignation; perhaps this is simply a rebranding exercise for the latest iteration of OP. Yet, according to the OED, ‘process’ is a ‘continuous action’ or ‘series of actions’ – and I wonder if this sense of an ongoing and continuous action might result in something less ‘vexing’ or ‘concrete’ than practice, in Syme’s terms. Either way, it will be an interesting future task for scholars to assess how ‘original process’ plays out under Terry’s directorship at the Globe. The Globe’s future under Terry reminds us that while OP may look to the past, it is always bound up in the agents, concerns and issues of the present; my final section seeks to unpick some of these.

MODERNIZING OP In terms of the Globe, much critical attention has focussed on the impact that the theatre has had on audiences. This attention makes sense because, as scholars such as Christie Carson (2008), Stephen Purcell (2009) and Penelope Woods (2012) have demonstrated, the Globe has made a radical intervention into contemporary theatre’s actor and audience relations. Most recently, W. B. Worthen provides a definitive account of Rice’s tenure in relation to the audience, as well as values of digitalism and interactivity: As in more overtly immersive theatre, OP remediates the audience as an aesthetic resource (an unpaid resource, another instance of the penetration of neoliberal economic practice) while defining its experience as the theater’s distinctive commodity. (2017: 410) There is another crucial power structure within the theatre, though, that has received much less critical attention: the role of the director. Carson and Karim-Cooper noted in 2008, ‘Performed in their natural environment, stripped of technology, these plays present fundamental questions … The role of the director in the modern theatre is entirely undermined in this quite uncontrollable environment’ (2008a: 8). Yet writing almost ten years later, Purcell argues that ‘Despite the wealth of documentation provided in the theatre’s online archives, relatively little academic attention has been paid to the practice of directing at Shakespeare’s Globe’ (2017a: 59). Purcell offers an excellent analysis of directing under Rylance, suggesting that ‘Directing … became a radically collaborative process under Rylance’s leadership at the Globe, displacing directors from their role as the author of a production’s concept and positioning them instead as the guide, or coach, of an ensemble’ (2017a: 59–60). One of the reasons for this change in the director’s role under Rylance’s OP is, of course, that the role of the director is a modern phenomenon and not one that existed in Shakespeare’s theatre; we might note that director-less productions are a feature of other OP theatre-making (for example, the Actors’ Renaissance Season at the ASC). There remains, however, work to be done on how the role of the director shifted under Dromgoole and now under Michelle Terry. Dromgoole, for example, certainly did not continue the practice of directing established under Rylance’s reign. In

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fact, many productions under his tenure were received as an individual director’s ‘concept’ or interpretation of a play: for instance, Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus (2006; revived 2014) which swathed the stage in black cloth, darkened the openair space with a funeral awning and mixed classical and modern costumes; or Christopher Luscombe’s Comedy of Errors (2006) with its ‘Carry On’ performance style (Billington 2006). My point here is that assertions that performance conditions at the Globe inevitably undermine the modern director and produce a particularly collaborative and/or egalitarian mode of direction are overstated. For me, it is perhaps more accurate to suggest that the conditions at the Globe unsettle a style of direction that seeks to exert strict or even absolute control over the effect and reception of a production. As a researcher during Dromgoole’s time undertaking end of season interviews with directors I noticed that the words ‘control’ and ‘focus’ kept emerging in their thoughts on the space. For example, Christopher Luscombe stated: ‘I do have a problem with them [the audience] when people are coming and going in the yard, I find that hard to deal with because I sort of want to control the action.’ Asked about the playhouse’s decorative scheme, Jonathan Munby (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2008) argued ‘anything that inhibits that control of an audience, I think, shoots us [theatremakers] in the foot’. During rehearsals, Rebecca Gatwood (The Merchant of Venice 2007) worried about ‘a total lack of focus’ in the space. Lucy Bailey (Titus Andronicus 2006) suggested that ‘To keep the audience involved with the story is the most challenging thing at the Globe and it tests you as a director to the full.’2 While I would resist a conclusion that modern directors are necessarily undermined by performance conditions at the Globe, the conventions and expectations of the space – real or assumed – pose a challenge to a particular model of direction that is modelled on control. It exposes the contradiction at the heart of much modern theatre between the intensely collaborative and the deeply hierarchical practices, as well as issues of interpretative power, singular or collaborative creative visions, artistic control and audience focus. In modern theatre, at the very top of this hierarchy is the Artistic Director (AD), a role which in the context of the modern theatre is seen as the ultimate and singular artistic vision not just for a production but for a theatre. The potential unsettling of hierarchies that can be part of directing at the Globe has significant implications for the role of AD at the theatre. At the top of the hierarchy, the AD should have significant artistic freedom: a point made by both Rice and Dromgoole in letters to the Globe’s future AD published online. Explaining her decision to leave, Rice notes ‘Nothing is worth giving away my artistic freedom for … it was about personal trust and artistic freedom’ (2017). Dromgoole argues that [t]he spirit of a theatre is that it should follow the lead of its artistic director … No-one, not committees, not connivers, no-one can set this policy but the AD. Everybody wants to be Artistic Director. They can’t all be. Only you can. It is vital … that you ring-fence with iron and steel your own freedom and ability to make choices. This must be put down in black and white, and made public, and it must be adhered to. (2017)

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Dromgoole’s language here – ‘it must be adhered to’ – again suggests a very different directorship model to Rylance’s collaborative one, as identified by Purcell. One person’s freedom, of course, can be another’s tyranny. In a theatre which, for some critics, distributes power in performance; where directors express a lack of ‘control’, the AD role is similarly contested. The position of AD at the Globe, therefore, encourages us to examine the power and hierarchies of modern theatre practice and management. Rice’s departure from the Globe came in the context of a wider consideration of ADs and theatre boards. Emma Rice joins other recent high-profile sudden departures and changes in theatre management at major institutions: Sally Greene stepping down as the Old Vic’s Chief Executive and Tessa Ross leaving her role as Chief Executive at the National Theatre. Alongside these changes, there have been questions about how the boards of the Old Vic and the Actors Touring Company have handled allegations of sexual harassment in their institutions. In a recent edition of The Stage, theatre critic Amber Massie-Blomfield argued that ‘[i]n light of recent high-profile controversies, questions have been raised in the industry about what boards and their trustees actually do – and whether the current model is suited to the challenges presented by the modern theatre industry’ (2018). For supporters of Rice, there was a concern about the power the Globe’s Board and Trustees had exercised in her resignation. David Jubb, AD of the Battersea Arts Centre, asked what Rice’s experience might mean for the relationship between Artistic Directors and the Boards of theatres? And ideas around artistic freedom. If the Globe’s approach is to be any kind of benchmark for the future of theatre, then we also need to ask ourselves whether we are descending in to a world that looks more like the Premier league? In which lofty Boards hire and fire team managers with impunity. (2016) Mike Shepherd, AD of Rice’s previous theatre company Kneehigh, warned that the Globe board and ‘all theatre boards, must in the future trust their artists and give them freedom if they are to have any hope of developing as organizations – let alone if they wish to be part of developing a new generation of theatre artists’ (2016). Thus, while the artistic directorship at the Globe might have unique characteristics specific to a reconstructed theatre, it also exists and is interpreted within modern theatre (management) practice. Again, practices at reconstructed theatres that seem to look to the past are always implicated in the present. In the context of Rice’s experience and discussions beyond the Globe about theatre management, it is noteworthy that Michelle Terry chose to challenge the role of the director in her opening season. Two opening productions (Hamlet and As You Like It) were performed by a twelve-strong ensemble and had two named directors, but insisted on collaborative decisions and direction. Terry argued that the decision was an attempt to ‘dismantle the triangle of hierarchy that is part of our culture’ and initiate ‘a really collaborative process’ (qtd in Billington 2018). She did not shy away from the politics underlying this choice:

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the idea was to dismantle the hierarchy and give the actors a say. I know we’re probably not allowed to say socialist, but I do think there’s a socialist agenda. Sam Wanamaker [the Globe’s founder] had a socialist agenda. And it was a humanitarian agenda. We have a responsibility to keep going further, locally, nationally, internationally, diversity on stage, off stage, bring more people into the inclusive embrace of that wooden O. (qtd in Lukowski 2018) Terry’s ensemble theatre has a precursor in the values that emerged under Rylance (analysed at length by Purcell 2017a). This inheritance, though, remains unacknowledged and so, again, there appears to be what Menzer identifies as ‘threads’ of ‘forgetfulness’ that run through the history of the OP and Elizabethan revivalist movement. As he argues, the ‘first step in any revolution is to convince others that the best way forward is to go back. The next step is to convince your followers that you’re the first to think of it’ (Menzer 2017: 65). More than honed forgetfulness, however, these words of the new AD of the Globe situate the theatre in a particular political position: it has a ‘socialist agenda’. There is nothing early modern or OP about that. Instead such rhetoric speaks to a then very contemporary political scene where a resurgent UK Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn, and its younger followers were embracing socialism, in ways that were jettisoned under Tony Blair’s New Labour (1997–2007). Cynically, we might wonder if Terry seeks to give the Globe a new popular appeal, and to retain the type of new and younger audience member that Rice’s productions seemed to attract. Terry’s appeal to a ‘socialist agenda’ offers, consciously or not, a recalibration of the Globe’s political position after Rice’s departure. The Globe’s treatment of Rice was read by many in political terms and in the context of the UK’s recent general election and EU referendum. Editor of The Stage Alistair Smith noted (in a tweet) that the anger over Rice’s departure should be read in a political context: ‘Suspect anger at Emma Rice news amplified by fact it feeds into wider UK narrative of reactionary forces prevailing over progressive ones’ (qtd in Cornford 2017: 134). Smith alludes to the General Election which saw the Conservatives win power, again, and the choice to leave the European Union. In his analysis of Rice’s resignation, Tom Cornford notes that Theatre critics … have divided, as they often do, along roughly political lines. Those favouring experimental practice (who we would have called left-wing and identify this year as Remainers) have been united in their support for Rice …, and the cultural conservatives have, if not welcomed the news, then accepted it without significant comment. (2017: 135) A more impassioned take on Rice’s resignation and articulation of the politics many read into it was offered by director Rafaella Marcus: Like a lot of young, left-wing people, I’m getting pretty used to not getting what I want by now. A general election, a referendum, and now Emma Rice … It seems

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like exaggeration, perhaps, but the profound disappointment … is an extension of that bewilderment over decisions taken in fear, knee-jerk reactions to progress and positivity. (Marcus 2016) Rice’s tenure at the Globe has (re-)raised important questions about OP and its place within scholarship on early modern theatre and its place within modern theatre. This chapter has attempted to outline where ongoing and new avenues of research may lie, in terms of defining OP, expanding that definition and contextualizing OP. However, to end, the political aspect of responses to Rice’s resignation offers a salient reminder that OP does form part of the contemporary theatre and its current trends and debates. While OP offers a valuable tool for examinations of early modern theatre by practitioners and academics, it is also a modern theatre practice, not original or authentic. OP, as much as any other contemporary practice, reminds us that Shakespearean performance constitutes a crucial part of significant national and international political conversations.

NOTES 1. For more information on these projects, see http://stagingthescottishcourt.brunel. ac.uk/; http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/; https://research.kent.ac.uk/ performancecultures/events/, respectively. 2. All quotes taken from Shakespeare’s Globe Research End of Season Interviews. All End of Season interview transcriptions are held at Shakespeare’s Globe Library and Archives, London.

REFERENCES American Shakespeare Center (n.d.), ‘Mission, Staging, and Beliefs’, American Shakespeare Center. Available online: https://americanshakespearecenter.com/about/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Armistead, Claire (1996), ‘Global Warfare’, The Guardian Friday Review, 16 August, 2. Bennett, Susan and Gina Bloom (2017), ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction – Shakespeare and Performance Studies: A Dialogue’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 367–72. Betteridge, Thomas and Greg Walker (2005), ‘Performance as Research: Staging John Heywood’s Play of the Weather at Hampton Court Palace’, Medieval English Theatre, 27: 86–104. Billington, Michael (2006), ‘The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s Globe, London’, The Guardian, 2 August. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/ aug/02/theatre (accessed 21 November 2020). Billington, Michael (2018), ‘Michelle Terry’s plan for the Globe is democratic – but is it doable?’, The Guardian, 4 January. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2018/jan/04/michelle-terry-shakespeares-globe (accessed 21 November 2020). Bowie-Sell, Daisy (2018), ‘Michelle Terry: “Emma Rice was the best thing that happened to the Globe”’, What’s on Stage, 4 January. Available online: https://www.whatsonstage.

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com/london-theatre/news/michelle-terry-emma-rice-best-shakespeare-globe_45457.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Cantoni, Vera (2017), New Playwriting at Shakespeare’s Globe, London: Bloomsbury. Carson, Christie (2008), ‘Democratising the Audience?’, in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 115–26, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-Cooper (2008a), ‘Introduction’, in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 1–12, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2008b), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casey, John (1996), ‘Take your seat for olde worlde discomfort’, Evening Standard, 22 August, 9. Cohen, Ralph Alan (2016) ‘Director of Mission Response to the Globe’s Decision Regarding its Artistic Director’, American Shakespeare Center, 27 October. Available online: https://americanshakespearecenter.com/2016/10/director-of-mission-responseto-the-globe-decision-regarding-its-artistic-director/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Conkie, Rob (2006), The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Cornford, Tom (2017), ‘The Editing of Emma Rice’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27 (1): 134–7. Dessen, Alan (2008), ‘“Original Practices” at the Globe: A Theatre Historian’s View’, in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 45–53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dromgoole, Dominic (2017), ‘A Letter From … ’, Shakespeare’s Globe blog, 19 April. Available online: https://socialshakespeare.tumblr.com/post/159750359887/ shakespearesglobeblog-a-letter-from/amp (accessed 21 November 2020). Dustagheer, Sarah (2011), ‘Repertory and the Production of Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613’, PhD diss., King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe. Dustagheer, Sarah, Oliver Jones and Eleanor Rycroft (2017), ‘(Re)constructed Spaces for Early Modern Drama: Research in Practice’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (2): 173–85. Egan, Gabriel (1995), ‘Delegate’s Report on the Conference “Within This Wooden O” at ISGC Globe London, 18-20 April 1995’, Wooden O Conference Papers and Report, Conferences Archive, Shakespeare’s Globe Library and Archive. Ellis, David (2016), ‘Emma Rice leaving the Globe Theatre’, Evening Standard, 25 October. Available online: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/ theatre/emma-rice-leaving-the-globe-all-is-not-what-it-seems-a3378321. html?utm_source=Publicate&utm_medium=embed&utm_content=…&utm_ campaign=Emma+Rice (accessed 21 November 2020). Falocco, Joe (2010), Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Brewer. Furness, Hannah (2016), ‘Shakespeare’s Globe risk wrath after installing “sixth form disco”’, The Telegraph, 5 May. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2016/05/05/shakespeares-globe-risks-wrath-after-installing-sixth-form-disco/ (accessed 21 November 2020).

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Gardner, Lyn (2016), ‘Emma Rice is right to experiment at the Globe – art should reinvent not replicate’, The Guardian, 28 September. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2016/sep/28/emma-rice-shakespeares-globe-theatremodern-audiences (21 November 2020). Jubb, David (2016), ‘#Emma Rice’, Battersea Arts Centre blog, 26 October. Available online: https://batterseaartscentreblog.com/2016/10/26/emmarice/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Kesson, Andy (2015), ‘Acting Out of Character: A Performance-as-Research Approach to The Three Ladies of London’, The Three Ladies of London in Context. Available online: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/par/AndyKesson.htm (accessed 21 November 2020). Lopez, Jeremy (2008) ‘A Partial Theory of Original Practice’, Shakespeare Survey, 61: 302–17. Lord Chamberlain’s Men (n.d.), ‘About’, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Available online: http://www.tlcm.co.uk/about/#About (accessed 21 November 2020). Lukowski, Andrzej (2018), ‘“There’s a socialist agenda” – new Shakespeare’s Globe boss Michelle Terry on her first season’, Time Out, 23 April. Available online: https://www. timeout.com/london/news/theres-a-socialist-agenda-new-shakespeares-globe-bossmichelle-terry-on-her-first-season-042318 (accessed 21 November 2020). Massie-Blomfield, Amber (2018), ‘Theatre Boards: what do they do, and are they fit for purpose?’, The Stage, 26 March. Available online: https://www.thestage.co.uk/ features/2018/theatre-boards-fit-purpose/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Marcus, Rafaella (2016), ‘Experimentation at the Globe’, Exeunt Magazine, 26 October. Available online: http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/experimentation-at-the-globe/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Mazer, Cary, ed. (2015), Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker: Great Shakespeareans Vol. XV, London: Bloomsbury. McMullan, Gordon (2008), ‘Afterword’, in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 230–3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menzer, Paul (2017), Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center, London: Bloomsbury. Morrison, Richard (2016), ‘The Globe has been a success story – and Emma Rice is wrecking it’, The Times, 30 September. Available online: https://www.thetimes. co.uk/article/richard-morrison-the-globe-has-been-a-success-story-and-emma-rice-iswrecking-it-xrrgxz3ml (accessed 21 November 2020). Phelan, Peggy (2007), ‘Reconstructing Love: King Lear and Theatre Architecture’ in Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 13–35, Oxford: Blackwell. Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company (n.d.), ‘Performance Philosophy’, Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company. Available online: https://www.pcshakespeare.com/performancephilosophy (accessed 21 November 2020). Purcell, Stephen (2017a), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe, London: Bloomsbury.

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Purcell, Stephen (2017b), ‘Practice-as-Research and Original Practices’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 425–43. Purcell, Stephen (2009), Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Quarmby, Kevin (2018), ‘OP PC or PAR RIP?’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 36 (4): 567–98. Rice, Emma (2017), ‘A Letter From …’, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre blog, 19 April. Available online: https://www.tumblr.com/search/shakespeares%20globe%20theatre (accessed 1 July 2019; now no longer available). Robins, Nick (1995), ‘A Vision Fair and Fortunate’, The Globe: The Newsletter of the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, Winter Edition: 3–6. Shakespeare’s Globe (1973), ‘What’s it’s all about: Declaration of Purpose’, The Bankside Globe, 1: 5. Shepherd, Mike (2016), ‘The Globe and Working with Artists’. Available online: http:// www.kneehigh.co.uk/list/The-Globe-and-Working-with-Artists.php (accessed 1 July 2019). Syme, Holger (2014), ‘Where is the Theatre in Original Practice?’, 25 July. Available online: http://www.dispositio.net/archives/1942#_ftn2 (accessed 21 November 2020). Trueman, Matt (2016), ‘Emma Rice’s departure is not about lighting’, What’s on Stage, 25 October. Available online: https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/ matt-trueman-emma-rice-shakespeares-globe-lighting_42100.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Woods, Penelope (2012), ‘Globe Audiences: Spectatorship and Reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’, PhD diss., Queen Mary, University of London, and Shakespeare’s Globe. Worthen, W. B. (2017), ‘Interactive, Immersive, Original Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 407–24.

CHAPTER 2.2

Space: Locus and platea in modern Shakespearean performance STEPHEN PURCELL

Early modern theatrical space has often been theorized with reference to Robert Weimann’s model of locus and platea.1 For Weimann, these concepts, inherited from the medieval theatre, marked either end of a spectrum between representational closure and non-representational openness – broadly speaking, the ‘there-and-then’ of the fiction versus the ‘here-and-now’ of the performer. This chapter considers Weimann’s theory in detail, offering a survey of some of the critical appropriations of and responses to his work, and examining these in light of modern practice at Shakespeare’s Globe and elsewhere. It concludes by suggesting some variations on Weimann’s ideas that may take into account a mode of platea-like performance that his work does not anticipate. Weimann introduced his theory in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, which was first published in German in 1967 and then in English in 1978.2 The book analyses various forms of early English popular theatre (alongside a few continental examples) before examining some of the ways in which Shakespeare’s theatre developed this dramatic legacy. One of Weimann’s key arguments is that Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherited a ‘flexible stage’ which combined elements of the medieval locus and platea. The locus of the medieval theatre was the raised scaffold or pageant stage that Weimann argues was typically associated with high-status characters, authority and ‘a rudimentary element of verisimilitude’; the platea, by contrast, was the non-representational acting area below the platform in the neutral space of the street, a space that was shared with spectators, populated typically by lower status, comic and anachronistic characters, and which functioned as ‘a theatrical dimension of the real world’ (1978: 75–6). Weimann finds manifestations of this locus-and-platea spatial configuration in a number of different medieval staging styles, including the pageant stages of the mystery cycles, the circular layout of plays like The Castle of Perseverance, liturgical drama and performances in Tudor halls, each of them combining an elevated or otherwise spatially privileged section with a liminal space closer to the audience (ibid.: 74, 102). He often uses the

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terms ‘localized’ and ‘unlocalized’ in association with the two planes respectively, the former referring to the specific fictional locations represented in the play, and the latter invoking those more ambiguous moments when the play’s action is not firmly located within a specific fictional setting. As these spaces interacted in medieval drama, argues Weimann, the here-and-now of the audience was brought into play with the there-and-then of the fiction: not, he writes, as a ‘confrontation of the world and time of the play with that of the audience’, nor as ‘any serious opposition between representational and non-representational standards of acting’, but rather as ‘the most intense interplay of both’ (ibid.: 81). Weimann generally associates the locus with ‘illusion’ and the platea with ‘reality’. Thus, for example, the Vice characters of the morality plays ‘broke through the illusion of their role’ and ‘involved the least dignified members of the audience in the play world’ (ibid.: 103). Where Weimann considers the locus as the space of dramatic identification, then, he associates the platea with anachronism and ‘dissociation’ – though he notes that anachronism in medieval drama can ‘achieve both a specific degree of approach to, and dissociation from, the audience’s world in order to move freely between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity, selfexpression and representation’ (ibid.: 83). It is the Elizabethan drama’s interplay of ‘realism’ and ‘convention’ that Weimann identifies as its key inheritance from the medieval locus and platea. Figures in Shakespeare who occupy a platea-like position, he says, tend to develop a ‘special relationship with the audience’, functioning as ‘countervoices’ or ‘voices from outside the representative ideologies’ of the fictional worlds depicted (ibid.: 159). Thus, for example, characters like Falstaff, Launce or the gravediggers in Hamlet operate as subversive counter-perspectives to the more official ideologies of the noble characters with whom they share the stage, offering their often-satirical viewpoints directly to the audience. While Weimann tends to express this in stylistic rather than purely spatial terms, he does suggest a particular geography of the Elizabethan stage. The Elizabethan platform stage, he suggests, ‘may have used front, middle, rear, or other specific locations to produce a variety of theatrical effects’ (211), with ‘nonillusionistic’ performance taking place on those areas of the stage closest to the audience, and ‘more illusionistic, localized action’ situated in the discovery space or around a central piece of scenery such as a throne or tent (ibid.: 212). ‘Between these extremes,’ he argues, ‘lay the broad and very flexible range of dramatic possibilities so skillfully developed by the popular Renaissance dramatist’ (ibid.). Weimann coins the term Figurenposition to describe the way in which Shakespearean dramaturgy combined the actor’s position on the stage with associated modes of speech and representation. He explains that this Figurenposition ‘should not be understood only in the sense of the actor’s physical position on the stage’, but also in terms of the actor’s relationship ‘between himself and his fellow actors, the play, or the audience’ (ibid.: 230). Weimann is careful not to be too dogmatic about his conceptualization of early modern theatrical space; when he writes about platea-like characters who are ‘physically or dramatically close to the audience’, the ‘or’ is crucial (ibid.: 235), and he notes that locus- and platea-focused modes of representation are ‘thoroughly mingled’ on the Elizabethan stage (ibid.: 238).

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However, throughout his discussion of Elizabethan theatre space he uses the terms ‘upstage’ and ‘downstage’ as a shorthand for the modes of acting associated with the illusionistic locus and non-illusionistic platea respectively. He analyses specific moments in Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida in which a satirical commentator stands or sits apart from a scene that is localized by a piece of representational scenery (a banquet table and a tent respectively), arguing that from their downstage, platea-like positions, ‘Apemantus and Thersites help point out that the ideas and values held by the main characters are relative to their particular position in the play’ (ibid.: 228). Weimann’s most sustained analysis of Shakespeare’s Figurenposition is of Hamlet, in which he imagines the title character to be stepping in and out of the representational loci of the fictional world. Hamlet’s lines, he argues, ‘almost always call for a downstage position or some form of audience awareness’, though ‘this physical and intellectual proximity to the audience varies greatly from scene to scene’ (ibid.: 130–1). Weimann analyses in some detail the ‘illusion-breaking speech patterns’ employed by the character throughout the play, pointing out that his Figurenposition is ‘defined verbally as well as spatially’ (ibid.: 230). Weimann continued to develop his conceptualization of locus and platea throughout his long career, moving away from the emphasis on stage positioning towards a theory that focuses more on questions of authority. In a 1992 article, he argues that while locus-centred modes of acting ‘tended to privilege the authority of what and who was represented’, the platea dimension ‘privileged the authority not of what was represented … but of what was representing and who was performing’ (1992: 503). The scenic items associated with localized stage action were often representative of dominant ideologies – thrones of ‘privileged royalty’, for example, beds of ‘patriarchal power and female sacrifice’, or tombs of ‘family dignity and piety’ (ibid.). By contrast, the impertinent speech and performance modes of the platea dimension ‘helped potentially to undermine whatever respect the represented loci of authority invoked for the Elizabethan audience’ (ibid.: 504). Weimann develops this argument further in his 2000 book Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, in a chapter titled ‘Space (in)dividable: locus and platea revisited’. In both pieces, however, Weimann maintains the assumption that platea-like performance modes exploited a ‘downstage physical proximity to the audience’ (2000: 195), and he repeatedly refers to the ‘downstage position’ of characters like Launce, Falstaff, Parolles, Thersites, Lucio, Autolycus, Macbeth’s Porter and Apemantus (ibid.: 195, 206, 210). Weimann’s theory has had a major impact on critical thinking about Elizabethan stage space. His conceptualization of theatrical space is widely cited both in introductory works aimed at undergraduates,3 and in specialist criticism.4 Some scholars have found it useful as the model for a sustained dramaturgical analysis of the spatial functioning of particular plays in performance. In 1990, for example, Michael E. Mooney applied Weimann’s theory to a study of seven Shakespearean tragedies, working from the central assumption that ‘Renaissance drama is a theatrical transaction in which an actor may “break through” the “fourth wall” to engage the audience, alternatively standing within the play, as a participant in the drama, and “outside” the play as its commentator or presenter’ (1990: 21). Mooney

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asserts that ‘[w]ords in a Renaissance playscript are meant to be spoken from distinct stage locations’ (ibid.: 17). Thus, for example, when Richard III ‘proves himself a villain, and thereby ethically distances himself from us, he also literally moves further away from the audience’ (ibid.: 32–3); by contrast, Richard II ‘comes physically and emotionally closer’ over the course of his tragedy, ‘descending from a scaffolded locus to a downstage “place” near the spectators’ (ibid.: 51). Mooney notes that a character does not literally have to move in order to ‘create a shift in Figurenposition’ (ibid.: 19), and his analysis of Edgar in King Lear draws particular attention to the platea’s verbal dimensions (ibid.: 129–49). Like Weimann, however, he associates the platea with the ‘downstage position’ from which ‘a character could “step out” of the play’ (ibid.: 18). Michael W. Shurgot’s Stages of Play (1998) also uses Weimann’s work to analyse the dynamics of particular staging configurations in the plays, such as the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice; Shylock stands ‘downstage on the platea’, argues Shurgot, to accuse ‘these Venetians who judge from the upstage locus of secure power not only of racism and slavery but also … of complicity in the gilded abduction of his only daughter’ (1998: 95). Andrew Gurr has used Weimann’s formulation of Elizabethan theatre space in numerous studies; his 2017 book Shakespeare’s Workplace, a collection of essays spanning around twenty years, refers repeatedly to Weimann’s theory, almost always in terms of stage space. Gurr eschews the anachronistic terminology of ‘upstage’ and ‘downstage’ in favour of a distinction ‘between centre stage and stage edge’ (2017: 197), but like Mooney, he uses Weimann’s model to think about character arcs as they manifest themselves in stage positioning: Othello, for example, ‘at first speaks from centre stage, the authority position, but once he is seduced by the flirtatious Iago into taking over his own marginal role, and starts ranting about his faithless wife he does it prowling round the edges of the stage’ (ibid.). For Gurr, like Weimann, the locus was a position for characters who ‘had authority’ (ibid.: 175), while ‘the peripheral platea’ was ‘where the lower-ranked people belonged’ (ibid.: 177). It was perhaps via Andrew Gurr that Weimann’s theory influenced thinking about space in the early seasons of the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Gurr was the project’s chief academic advisor during its formative years, and conversations between theatre practitioners and academics in the immediate lead-up to the theatre’s opening in 1997 evidently anticipated a functioning of locus and platea stage space much like that suggested by Weimann. At Globe Education’s 1995 conference ‘Within This Wooden O’, participants explored ‘the relative advantages of speaking from the locus, the authority position in front of the frons, or the platea, the “subversive” position which we would now call front-stage’, trying a speech of Emilia’s from Othello both ways and agreeing that they preferred the latter (Gurr 1995). In a jointly-authored Afterword to the Research Bulletin for the theatre’s 1996 Prologue Season, Gurr and Mark Rylance, the Globe’s first Artistic Director, imagined a future production of Richard III in which the protagonist would begin the play ‘at the edge of the stage, next to the throng in the yard, on what was known classically as the platea’, from where he would ally himself with the audience; once Richard became king, however, the character would have to ‘assume the authority position at the locus, or central position next to the frons’, a

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position that would render him more ‘remote from his former intimates in the yard’ (Kiernan 1996: 24–5).5 In her book on the findings of the theatre’s first few seasons, Globe Research Fellow Pauline Kiernan likewise used the term ‘authority position’ to describe the central spot on the Globe stage just in front of the tiring house and beneath the heavens trap, identifying it explicitly as the ‘locus’ (1999: 120) and contrasting it with the platea-like downstage corners from which ‘the actor is in touch with the audience in direct and tangible ways’ (ibid.: 63). Like Gurr, Kiernan invoked Richard III – still unproduced by the Globe when her book was published in 1999 – as the play most likely to exploit the dramatic possibilities of this audience complicity (ibid.: 63). In many ways, these predictions were borne out by subsequent practice at the Globe. By the end of the Opening Season in 1997, the stage’s central ‘authority spot’ was ‘generally accepted to be the “power position” on the Globe stage because all the audience sightlines converge there’ (Miller-Schütz 1998: 10). Actor Polly Pritchett identified the stage perimeter as the best part of the space for ‘rapport with the audience’, and the central ‘hotspot’ as ‘a very strong position’ but ‘quite removed from people’ (ibid.: 32). Several seasons later, actor Alex Hassell echoed her comments: the ‘King’s spot’ was ‘the most powerful place to stand’, but ‘it would be quite difficult to stay there because the position feels so far away from everyone’, and the downstage area closest to the audience was a more ‘vulnerable’ and ‘intimate’ position (Hassell 2004). Certainly some productions used proximity to the audience for the kinds of subversive effects anticipated by Weimann: in Rylance’s 1999 production of Julius Caesar, for example, the plebeians tended to enter the stage from the yard, and wore conspicuous modern dress in contrast to the Elizabethan costumes of the Roman politicians. When four of them leapt up onto the stage to attack the doublet-and-hose-wearing Cinna the Poet, it was almost as if members of the audience were interrupting the play to assault a symbol of Shakespearean authority.6 Michael Gould’s performance as Edmund in Barry Kyle’s King Lear (2001) achieved a comparable effect, beginning the play in close physical proximity to the yard and moving away from them as the plot progressed. Kyle and Gould saw Edmund as an outsider to the world of the court, and his early soliloquies were delivered both among and to the groundlings, pointing out the ‘drunkards, liars and adulterers’ (1.2.123–4), for example, within the throng; in Gould’s words, the character was ‘almost a member of the audience who takes over’ (Gould 2001). By the end of the play, however, ‘he turns on the crowd’: ‘In the last speech when I say “[my state/] Stands on to me to defend, not to debate”, I am rejecting the audience, telling them I do not want anything to do with them because I am going to be king’ (ibid.). As Gould himself noted, this arc is very much like that of Richard III. When Dominic Dromgoole took over as the Globe’s Artistic Director in 2006, he pushed these aspects of locus/platea interplay further by regularly extending the thrust stage into the auditorium and making increased use of the yard. His inaugural production of Coriolanus (2006), for example, extended the stage with two walkways that jutted out into the audience. These walkways were primarily the province of the play’s anonymous Roman citizens; the citizens would defy their patrician rulers

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from these positions, and it was noticeable that of the patrician characters, it was only Jonathan Cake’s Coriolanus who had the boldness to traverse both the stage and the yard extensions (interestingly, even the tribunes were aloof and standoffish with the audience in this production, remaining for the most part firmly fixed within the locus of the main stage). Dromgoole’s Julius Caesar (2014) and Measure for Measure (2015) both opened with riotous carnivals in the yard and in the piazza outside the auditorium, generating a sense of alliance between the spectators and the plays’ more rebellious and hedonistic characters against the puritanical characters of the main plots. In James Dacre’s King John (2015), Alex Waldmann’s Bastard spent a large amount of time in the yard, quipping cynically about the other characters as if from outside the play, and like Gould’s Edmund, he picked out spectators to illustrate his speeches (‘old men, young men, maids’; 2.1.570). With a set on the stage that evoked a church (indeed, the production also toured to a number of churches and cathedrals), the staging emphasized the contrast between hegemonic religion and the Bastard’s frank admissions of materialistic blasphemy, aligning the audience subversively with the latter. Literally stepping in and out of the play as he emerged from and returned to the yard, he seemed to be enjoying the skirmishes between his fellow characters as pure theatre. While some of the practices at Shakespeare’s Globe seemed to confirm Weimann’s ideas, others challenged them. Kiernan observed that by the end of the run of preview performances of The Merchant of Venice in 1998, ‘[e]veryone in the cast was using the “locus” or “authority” position (a few feet before the frons scenae) more, especially Launcelot who exploited the position’s main advantage which is to help the actor include the playgoers at the sides of the stage on three levels’ (1998: 15). The passage Kiernan seems to be referring to here is Launcelot Gobbo’s standalone sequence of clowning at the start of 2.2, which actor Marcello Magni performed mostly from the central ‘authority’ spot. In both text and performance style, the sequence belonged to the play’s platea dimension: Launcelot dramatizes his internal conflict over whether or not to leave Shylock’s employment as a comic exchange between his ‘conscience’ and the ‘fiend’, and Magni delivered it as a virtuosic piece of physical clowning, inviting vocal interjections from the audience and a show of hands as to which advice he should take. The fact that he gravitated towards the ‘authority’ spot for this might indicate that perhaps this stage location is not always so much about a character’s authority within the fictional world as it is about their level of theatrical authority; a low-status clown may occupy the spot because he dominates the theatrical moment, not because he commands any social authority with his fellow characters.7 Lois Potter’s review of the production for Shakespeare Quarterly, in fact, reflected upon Weimann’s theorization of space in light of Magni’s clowning. The production opened, she noted, with a clear separation of locus and platea: black-clad choral singers were performing in the locus of the musicians’ gallery while Magni was ‘teaching the audience a ribald popular song’ on the platea of the forestage. Within minutes, though, the singers had descended to the main stage, ‘competing for the same space and for our attention’. As the play continued and the cruelty of its humour, including Launcelot’s, became apparent, Potter felt the production ‘problematized’

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the audience’s laughter (1999: 75). By the end, she wrote, she had learned ‘to rethink Robert Weimann’s now-famous identification between different parts of the stage and different social attitudes to the theater’. What mattered was not where on the stage the actors were standing, but the relative position of the spectator: ‘Because the cheapest tickets are the closest to the stage and the best seats the farthest from it, you can choose whether to be the type who stands for anything or the type who sits in judgment’ (1999: 81). Indeed, the clowning sequence Magni delivered from the ‘authority spot’ made a point of separating the groundlings from the seated spectators in the galleries, as Launcelot observed that while there were hundreds of hands up in the yard in favour of his leaving his curmudgeonly employer, there were none in the galleries: ‘That’s because you’re all rich, you are!’ (Shakespeare’s Globe 1998).8 When some audience members in the galleries raised their hands in favour of the employer-friendly ‘conscience’, Magni playfully encouraged the groundlings to boo their more privileged fellow spectators. An analysis of the Globe’s first two productions of Richard III might indicate the extent to which locus and platea performance modes rely not so much on particular stage locations as on shifts in the actor/audience relationship. As we have seen, several commentators assumed that the title character of this play would find his natural home ‘downstage’ or near the stage perimeter at the start of the play, vacating this zone in favour of an upstage locus after he takes the crown. The Globe staged Richard III in an all-female production directed by Barry Kyle in 2003, and an all-male one directed by Tim Carroll in 2012, and footage of both productions in the Globe archive shows the extent to which the lead actors – Kathryn Hunter and Mark Rylance, respectively – both realized and complicated this anticipated arc in their performances. In the 2003 production, Hunter’s Richard was left alone on the ‘authority spot’ after an opening jig by the whole cast, delivering the first few lines of his introductory soliloquy from here before moving to the front edge of the stage. Here, he presented himself to the auditorium as ‘I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks’ (1.1.14), and skipped along the front of the stage to demonstrate his inability to ‘strut before a wanton ambling nymph’ (1.1.17). Having invited the audience to observe his disabled body, he moved back to the authority spot to divulge his determination ‘to prove a villain’ (1.1.30), briefly returning downstage to show the audience his ‘disproportioned’ arm and legs (with some interpolated lines from 3 Henry VI, 3.2.153–71) and then circling the stage as he began to explain the plots he had laid. He delivered both his subsequent soliloquies in 1.1 from the front of the stage, but the first half of his next confidential speech to the audience – the one beginning ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ (1.2.230–66) – was spoken from the ‘authority spot’ again, with Richard moving towards the audience only as he meditated on his ‘unshapen’ form (1.2.253). When Richard described himself ironically as ‘a marvellous proper man’ (1.2.257), Hunter’s identity as a female actor evidently leapt to the fore for many spectators, since the video records a big laugh here; but as Elizabeth Klett has pointed out, Hunter’s conspicuous femininity also helped to emphasize the ways in which her Richard was trying and failing to perform ‘real’ masculinity himself (2008: 168). By this point, then, a pattern had

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started to emerge: Hunter’s Richard could share the details of his secret plots with the audience from virtually any stage location, but tended to use the perimeter for moments of greater vulnerability, especially those concerning his disability. Richard did indeed retreat into various fictional loci over the second half of the play, but it did not mean that he lost his connection with the audience. For the scene at Baynard’s Castle, he appeared on the balcony, Amanda Harris’s Buckingham on the stage below cajoling spectators into cheering for him to become king. While he was physically more remote from the audience here, however, he continued to generate knowing laughs from them, and the same was true when he took the throne. Interestingly, for the first part of 4.2 his throne was placed downstage centre, in front of the pillars, so that Richard’s comically murderous hints to Buckingham and revelation to the audience of his impatience with his erstwhile henchman were very much in what might be called platea space. Richard himself dragged the throne backwards into the ‘authority spot’ later in the scene, but even after this he retained his intimacy with the audience, slouching on the throne, one leg over its side, as he mockingly confided the ways in which he had disposed of his rival claimants to the throne (4.3.36–43). In the final act, Kyle’s production located Richard and Richmond’s tents in the downstage corners, so that Richard’s final confrontation with his conscience took place not in a scenic locus, but in the liminal zone of the stage that had been associated from the very start with his vulnerability. Mark Rylance’s performance in the role in 2012 bore some similarities in terms of staging. Like Hunter, Rylance started the opening soliloquy from upstage centre, but whereas Hunter’s Richard presented himself to the audience theatrically, Rylance’s began almost casually, leaning on one of the tiring house columns. He moved to the ‘authority spot’ for the following lines about the House of York’s turnaround in fortunes, circling to take in the whole auditorium – and then, like Hunter, he moved toward the front of the stage as he began to describe his own disability, skimming along the front edge and at one point taking a groundling’s hand. This was a low-status, unthreatening opening, with Rylance’s Richard laughing nervously and stuttering over his words; when I saw the production live, his lament that ‘dogs bark at me as I halt by them’ (1.1.23) was so pitiable that the audience vocalized a mock-sympathetic ‘Aah!’. He returned to the ‘authority spot’ as he dismissed ‘this weak piping time of peace’, so it was from here that he offhandedly disclosed his ‘plots’ and ‘inductions dangerous’ (1.1.24, 32), casually shushing the audience into complicit silence. Like Hunter, he was downstage for his speeches and asides to the audience over the rest of 1.1; also like Hunter, he moved back to the ‘authority spot’ for the gloating soliloquy at the end of 1.2, but unlike her, he stayed there for the whole speech. The Baynard’s Castle scene was staged similarly to the 2003 production, with Richard flanked by two monks on the balcony and Roger Lloyd Pack’s Buckingham on the forestage, Buckingham once again encouraging the audience to cry out in favour of Richard’s claim to the throne (and when I saw it, making comic mileage out of our failure to participate enthusiastically enough). As I have pointed out elsewhere, the audience both was and was not being manipulated here – we may have been cheering for Richard to take the throne like the gullible dupes that the plot required us to be at that moment, but we were also laughing at

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his feigned reluctance, acknowledging our awareness of, and complicity in, his ruse (Purcell 2013: 113–15). Within a few scenes, Richard’s relationship with the audience had shifted. The throne in Carroll’s production was much larger and more elevated than the one in Kyle’s, so Rylance spent most of 4.2 on the raised locus of this throne, right in the middle of the stage, on the ‘authority spot’. He was suddenly chilling, speaking his murderous threats and orders quite openly to those around him; he issued his instruction to ‘Rumour it abroad / That Anne, my wife, is sick and like to die’ (4.2.50–1) from his throne, mock-tearfully, as she stood right next to him, clearly terrified by the implication. This provoked gasps and laughs of incredulity from the audience. Later, as he confronted Queen Elizabeth (Samuel Barnett), his audacious dismissal of her grief for her sons (‘Harp not on that string, madam; that is past’; 4.4.364) roused similar responses from spectators. She was defiant and assertive, and exited the scene to approving applause from the audience, prompting Richard to glower at us from his position near the stage edge with a kind of betrayed fury. Upon Richmond’s entrance into the play, the audience was immediately cast as his army, addressed directly as ‘Fellows in arms, and my most loving friends’ (5.2.1). There was not much room now for any residual sympathy for Richard. As the two leaders delivered their orations to their armies – in both cases, the audience – the differences between them became apparent. Richmond (James Garnon) spoke to us from the ‘authority spot’, persuading us of the justice of his cause, whereas Richard stalked along the front edge of the stage, shaking hands insistently with groundlings over the first few lines. He seemed to ask one of them if he was ‘sleeping safe?’ (5.3.320), provoking a big laugh – we had, after all, just seen how badly Richard himself was sleeping. Over the lines that followed, however, he became visibly angry, shouting and addressing nobody in particular, alienating any affection the audience may have had left for him. It was, perhaps, a version in miniature of the arc of Richard’s relationship with the audience over the course of the whole play. As these analyses suggest, the Globe’s first two productions of Richard III both confirmed and complicated the theories of staging the play that Mooney and Gurr had derived from Weimann. Both productions to some extent gave us a Richard who fostered a close, confidential relationship with the audience over the first few acts and then began to forfeit it after taking the throne. In neither, however, did this arc map neatly onto a use of stage space in which Richard began physically close to the audience and moved further away from them; indeed, at the start of the play, Rylance’s Richard seemed most closely in cahoots with the audience when he spoke to us from the ‘authority spot’, and at the end, most out of touch with us as he desperately tried to engage us from the stage perimeter. Hunter’s Richard had just as easy a rapport with the audience from the centre of the stage, and while he certainly used the stage edge for moments of audience intimacy, these were not so much his mocking quips and secret plans as the points in the play – even towards the end – at which the character expressed his vulnerability. Some of the more recent critical reflections on Weimann have concluded that the emphasis on stage positioning often assumed to be central to his theory may be something of a red herring. Writing in 2008, D. J. Hopkins observed that locus and

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platea interplay is ‘much more than merely a relationship between “upstage” and “downstage” portions of the playing area, as these concepts are often reductively mistaken’: platea space is not merely a point ‘downstage from’ the locus; rather, the platea is a space produced by early modern actors at any time at which they acknowledged the actual event of performance while performing in relation to a representational event. (2008: 164) Thus, platea space is not so much a specific zone of the stage as a space that is brought into being by the actor’s relationship with the audience and the here-and-now of performance. Erika T. Lin makes a similar argument, objecting that ‘scholars who appropriate the concepts of locus and platea sometimes apply distinctions of stage geography too literally’ and that too much weight is given to an imagined ‘upstagedownstage dichotomy’ (2012: 27). Lin puts pressure on the very notion of particular zones of the stage allowing greater ‘proximity’ to the audience, pointing out that in an early modern playhouse with audiences surrounding the acting space on multiple levels, ‘being closer to some audience members meant being significantly farther from others’ (ibid.: 29). Like Hopkins, she prefers to use the words locus and platea ‘without implying any spatial considerations but instead as shorthand to indicate the dramaturgical dynamics that Weimann associates with each term’ (ibid.: 31).9 For Lin, ‘the more a character articulates awareness of the playhouse conventions upon which audience members relied and the more he or she can manipulate those conventions within the represented fiction, the more that character is in the platea’ (ibid.: 36). This means that it is possible, for example, for Gloucester to be in the locus while Edgar is in the platea in King Lear’s ‘Dover cliff’ scene, despite both characters occupying the same physical space on the stage (ibid.: 30).10 An example from a recent ‘immersive’ performance might illustrate how ambiguous the boundary can be. Nicholas Hytner’s production of Julius Caesar (2018) reconfigured London’s Bridge Theatre into an indoor approximation of an Elizabethan public playhouse, with multiple audience galleries enclosing a rectangular pit in which various platform stages could be raised and lowered, surrounded by several hundred standing playgoers. Spectators could thus choose to purchase either a gallery ticket or an ‘immersive standing ticket’, sitting apart from the action or participating in it. At first, the groundlings were incorporated as extras in the fictional locus. An interactive pre-show cast them as attenders at a pro-Caesar rally, in which a band were whipping up the crowd with rowdy rock songs and vendors were hawking Caesar-branded T-shirts and baseball caps. As David Calder’s Caesar made his first entrance in 1.2, entering a central platform and tossing his own cap into the crowd, we were invited to clap and cheer for him. The immersive elements meant that standing spectators were afforded privileged glimpses into the loci of the fictional world: I happened to end up right at the front edge of the crowd for this scene, where Adjoa Andoh’s Casca was putting on a false front, an apparent Caesar loyalist who was encouraging applause as warmly as anyone, while Michelle Fairley’s Cassius looked reserved, applauding cautiously. From my position nearby

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I was able to see the two women exchange a secret, loaded glance as Caesar referred to his wife’s ‘sterile curse’ (1.2.9). Caesar’s exit from this scene heralded a shift in mode. The platform on which Brutus (Ben Whishaw) and Cassius were standing was slowly raised as they began their private conversation, and the lights on the rest of the audience dimmed. Suddenly the audience was an audience again, no longer the pro-Caesar mob; the shouts from offstage were clearly recorded sound effects. We were alienated from our previous, ‘immersive’ role as we listened to their debate about Caesar’s manipulation of the people. Both characters seemed to me to be ‘out of touch’ with the groundlings, delivering their first soliloquies (1.2.301–21 and 2.1.10–58, respectively) in what I described in my review of the production as ‘a kind of self-reflexive limbo, as if they were debating themselves, or rehearsing their arguments’ (Purcell 2019: 292). A subsequent discussion with a colleague who saw the production from one of the galleries, however, revealed that my sense of this may have been conditioned by my position in the pit; he had felt, by contrast, that Whishaw’s Brutus had been sharing his arguments with the spectators in the galleries almost as if he were giving a public lecture.11 Perhaps, as in Potter’s account of the Globe’s Merchant of Venice, the production’s politics were contingent upon whether one had chosen ‘to be the type who stands for anything or the type who sits in judgment’ (1999: 81). In this instance, Brutus’s direct address had been more accessible from the detachment of the galleries than from the immediacy of the pit; perhaps this was where the character felt he would find his ideological allies. But did his direct address – serious, earnest, closely connected to events of the central plot – constitute a platea in Weimann’s sense of the word? Bridget Escolme adapts Weimann’s theory in her book Talking to the Audience (2005) to think about the interplay of critical distance and subjectivity in Shakespeare’s drama. She cites an experimental workshop in which student actors were asked to play Cressida’s first soliloquy (1.2.273–86) in two different ways, half of them performing it directly to the audience and the other half finding ways to keep it within the play’s fictional locus (or, in Escolme’s words, behind a ‘fourth wall’). When one of the Cressidas began to address the audience, the workshop participants observed a striking effect: The student spectators began to judge themselves rather than Cressida’s morality, suddenly aware of their own role in the production of meaning. They commented that they had been let into a secret by Cressida and enjoyed the sense of power that this conferred. The idea that Cressida, or the performer – and the fact that it was unclear ‘who’ is significant – was flirting with them, was enjoyable rather than reprehensible as it had been when the character had been judged a flirt within a fictional locus. (2005: 45) What is especially interesting about this is that it reverses the effects that Weimann and subsequent critics have assumed to be central to locus and platea performance modes, namely that imaginative absorption into a localized fiction will produce ‘identification’, and that foregrounding the here-and-now of the audience will

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produce ‘dissociation’. Escolme’s study shows that the opposite can be true, and she analyses Mark Rylance’s performance as Hamlet at the Globe (2000) to think in detail about the ways in which his granting and withholding of direct address to spectators was central to the production’s effects of subjectivity (2005: 62–73). As Escolme’s modification of locus and platea suggests, Weimann’s theory is an essentially Brechtian one. For Bertolt Brecht, the ‘illusion’ of early twentieth-century naturalistic theatre was an effect by which the bourgeoisie normalized and made to appear ‘natural’ the dominant ideologies that helped to maintain the political status quo; Brecht therefore famously advocated a Verfrumdungseffekt (or estrangement effect) by which an audience would be distanced from the illusion and made to ‘adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism’ (1977: 136). That Weimann understood the platea register as something like an early modern version of this Verfrumdungseffekt is evident from his dedication of Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater to Brecht’s apprentices and successor directors at the Berliner Ensemble, Benno Besson and Manfred Wekwerth, whom Weimann called ‘my friends in the theater who have come closest to a modern Shakespeare in the popular tradition’ (1978: v). Indeed, in a shared interview in 1989, Wekwerth made clear that he understood Weimann’s characterization of platea figures as ‘“corrupters of words” from below’ to be ‘exactly what Brecht in his Organon was looking for’ (Guntner et al. 1998: 230), while Weimann described Brecht as ‘a fundamental inspiration in my rethinking of Shakespeare’s theater’ (ibid.: 231). The problem with this is that it roots Weimann’s conceptualization of locus/platea interplay in an anachronistic paradigm in which ‘illusion’ is understood to be the baseline mode of dramatic performance, and any departure from this as an aesthetic disruption. Weimann is cautious in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition to warn against both ‘the bias of the theater of illusion’ and ‘a more modern preoccupation with distance and alienation’ (1978: 224), but it is not altogether clear that he manages to avoid this trap. For Weimann, as we have seen, platea performance modes are those that break (or at least distance themselves from) the ‘dramatic illusion’. The fool and his descendants ‘break through the “fourth wall”’ (ibid.: 12); the Elizabethan stage is characterized by its interplay of ‘both illusionistic and nonillusionistic effects’ (ibid.: 216). We have already noted Weimann’s regular use of the terms ‘upstage’ and ‘downstage’, terms which derive from (and imply) the raked stage of the proscenium arch theatre, and he sometimes seems to forget that on a thrust stage a character cannot simply ‘face’ the audience from a ‘downstage’ position (ibid.: 225). In a contrast which seems to me to be rather too binary, he distinguishes between ‘the illusion of soliloquy’ – in which characters are simply ‘thinking out loud’ in solitude – and ‘unpretentious direct address’ (ibid.: 221, 227), as if the difference between the two were somehow coded into the written text. His more recent work on locus and platea makes its assumption of an illusion/distancing paradigm even clearer: in Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice (2000), he reads the overhearing scene in Troilus and Cressida in fundamentally Brechtian terms, contrasting the ‘upstage illusion’ and ‘self-contained action’ of Cressida and Diomedes’ dialogue at the locus of the tent with the ‘downstage disillusionment’ and ‘presentational gestus’ of Thersites’s satirical commentary (2000: 67).12 As we have seen, the concept of a ‘fourth wall’

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which may be broken in order to facilitate a stepping away from the ‘illusion’ of the play world is also central to Mooney’s adaptation of Weimann’s theory. But what if we are not dealing with a theatre of ‘illusion’ at all? A broadly naturalistic production performed on a proscenium stage might be able to construct an illusionistic locus behind an imaginary ‘fourth wall’; such a production might then ‘break’ this frame by having characters come downstage to address the audience. But as the reader will have noticed, the examples from modern productions in this chapter were all performed in flexible spaces where no such demarcation of space exists, at least not in any fixed arrangement. The stage figures who speak to the audience in these plays generally do so from within a fictional world that has already acknowledged and incorporated the presence of the audience; Richard III, for example, cannot really be said to be breaking through any sort of ‘illusion’ when direct address is the mode in which he begins the play. As Lin has observed, ‘[i]n Weimann’s work, the locus constructs an invisible line separating actors from spectators, whereas the platea dissolves it, but the ontological status of that line remains unchanged’ (2012: 27). Clare Wright has similarly questioned Weimann’s implication ‘that dramatic characters and events occupy a time and space (a reality) ontologically separate from that of the audience’ (2017: 187), pointing out his model’s ‘rootedness in post-naturalist ontologies and representational practices’ (ibid.: 191). Though Wright’s article focuses on medieval practices, it begins with a quotation in which Mark Rylance cites the necessity at the Globe of ‘thinking of the audience as other actors’ (Rylance 2008: 107). In modern performance, of course, it is entirely possible that audiences will interpret platea modes of performance through the Brechtian paradigm that Weimann describes. Audiences accustomed to naturalistic performance styles may well find themselves ‘dissociated’ from the presentation of a fictional world when the rules governing its presentation appear to be suddenly broken; indeed, it is noticeable that many of the instances cited in this chapter of a disruptive platea at the modern Globe have been occasions when a more rigid binary between ‘stage space’ and ‘audience space’ has been constructed and then transgressed using modern, rather than Elizabethan, staging practices, as in the anachronistic stage invasions of the 1999 Julius Caesar or the Bastard’s stepping in and out of the yard of the 2014 King John. But more often, I think, the stage figures who produce a liminal platea space at the Globe do so not in the ‘dissociative’ manner anticipated by Weimann, but in what might be called a ‘bisociative’ fashion.13 As we have seen, the downstage corners at the Globe tend to be used by actors for moments of intimacy with spectators; they are sites of vulnerability just as often as they are of satire. The stage figures who occupy them tend to want things from the audience: as Escolme suggests, ‘to listen to them, notice them, approve their performance, ignore others on stage for their sake’ (2005: 16). Such figures inhabit the worlds of both play and audience at once, both actor and character, real and fictional. As we have seen, Hunter’s Richard was both male and female at once; when we cheered for Rylance’s Richard to take the crown, we both were and were not being duped. Again and again, actors at the modern Globe have observed this phenomenon: Jasper Britton, for example, finding that he had to share his soliloquies with the

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audience, ‘staying inside of the character but stepping out of the play’ (Bessell 2001: 17); Paul Shelley noting that the audience was visible to both actor and character, and remarking ‘I don’t particularly feel I have to distinguish between actor and character on this point’ (Bessell 2000: 29). Rylance discovered that he could ‘be in the story and in the audience making fun of myself in the story at the same time’: ‘if we are all in the story, audiences and actors alike, then I found I could flip between these two seemingly contrary realities as if they were one’ (2008: 109). Lois Potter described Rylance’s Hamlet as being ‘both inside and outside the play at the same time’ (2001: 128), and Escolme’s account of the same performance records a similar doubleness, slipping between ‘Hamlet’, ‘Rylance’ and ‘Rylance/ Hamlet’ to describe the liminal stage figure who was speaking to (and with) the audience (2005: 62–73). Weimann’s theory provides a deeply useful set of conceptual tools with which to discuss and think about the doubleness of early modern theatre: the way in which the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries brought the ‘there-and-then’ of their fictional worlds into a variety of dramaturgical relations with the ‘here-andnow’ of their audiences, and the ways in which modern productions can continue to do something similar with theirs. The platea is, of course, more than simply the ‘here-and-now’, as Weimann himself noted: it is not ‘the real world’, but ‘a theatrical dimension of the real world’ (1978: 76, my emphasis). The platea does not encompass (at least not usually) the front of house staff, exit signs and sprinkler systems, but rather those aspects of the theatrical presentation that seem to belong at once both to the world of the present and the world of the fiction. It is not, as we have seen, a zone of the physical space of a theatre so much as it is a space that is produced by performance – not only by the actor’s acknowledgement of the audience, but also potentially by costume, set, lighting and movement choices. This practised space may, of course, be coded in a number of ways, and its relationship with the fictional locus of the play is not necessarily one of dislocation, irony and objectivity but can also be one of immediacy, intimacy and subjectivity. One might object that the ‘bisociative’ platea I have begun to outline here is so distinct from Weimann’s Brecht-inspired ‘dissociative’ platea that it is an altogether different phenomenon, and needs a separate term to describe it. But I am not sure that in practice, these two aspects of platea performance are so neatly separated. When Brutus tries to persuade us of the validity of his reasoning; when Edmund spurns us because he no longer needs us; when Hamlet shares his self-loathing at his failure to be an adequate tragic hero; when Richard III discloses his insecurities to us; these are moments when the stage figure before us can command a complex range of relationships with the audience, sometimes all at once with different parts of the auditorium, shifting between subjectivity and critical distance.

NOTES   1. Weimann died in August 2019, and I learned of his death shortly after I completed the first draft of this chapter. I hope this chapter is an adequate tribute to the

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transformative and far-reaching impact of his work upon the field of early modern drama studies.   2. The latter was in a revised version, edited by Robert Schwarz.   3. See, for example, Wallis and Shepherd (1998: 165–7), or Knowles (2014: 64–5).   4. Several examples are cited in this chapter; for a wider list, see Lin (2012: 24–7 and 174).   5. These points are repeated almost verbatim in Gurr’s essay ‘Metatheatre and the Fear of Playing’, first published in 2000 as part of Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics, eds Wells, Burgess and Wymer, 91–110, and reprinted as Chapter 9 of Shakespeare’s Workplace (2017: 149–50). Mooney, of course, suggests something very similar in his chapter on Richard III in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Transactions.   6. I analyse the stage/audience dynamics of this production, and those of the Dominic Dromgoole productions of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar cited in this chapter, in Purcell (2018a).   7. These observations echo some of Erika Lin’s (2012: 24, 37).   8. Globe actors have frequently exploited an imagined distinction between the groundlings and the seated playgoers; see Purcell (2013: 110–15).   9. A small but perhaps important difference between Lin and Hopkins here is that Hopkins considers space to be produced by what Lin calls ‘dramaturgical dynamics’. 10. Mooney makes the same point in his chapter on King Lear. 11. I am grateful to Andrew James Hartley for this useful counterperspective. 12. ‘Gestus’ is, of course, a Brechtian term. 13. I borrow the notion of ‘bisociation’ from the philosopher Arthur Koestler, who describes it as ‘the perceiving of a situation or idea … in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’ (1976: 35). I have expanded upon the idea of bisociation as a conceptual model for the effects of metatheatre, drawing upon other examples of performance at the Globe, in an article for Shakespeare Bulletin (2018b).

REFERENCES Bessell, Jaq (2000), ‘Interviews with the Red Company: 1999 Season’, Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, 15b. Available online: https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/ CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2FED%2FRE S%2F2%2F5%2F20 (accessed 21 November 2020). Bessell, Jaq (2001), ‘Actor Interviews 2000: Red and White Companies’, Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, 18. Available online: https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/ CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2FED%2FRE S%2F2%2F5%2F24 (accessed 21 November 2020). Brecht, Bertolt (1977), Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett, London: Eyre Methuen.

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Escolme, Bridget (2005), Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self, London and New York: Routledge. Gould, Michael (2001), ‘Edmund played by Michael Gould’, Adopt an Actor, Shakespeare’s Globe. Available online: https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/ CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLR N%2f2%2f10%2f2+ (accessed 21 November 2020). Guntner, J. Lawrence, Manfred Wekwerth and Robert Weimann (1998), ‘Manfred Wekwerth and Robert Weimann: “Brecht and Beyond”’, in J. Lawrence Guntner and Andrew M. McLean (eds), Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theater Practice in the German Democratic Republic, 226–40, London: Associated University Press. Gurr, Andrew (1995), ‘Staging at the new Globe: a 1995 view’, Shakespeare’s Globe. Available online: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/globe/Articles/GurrArt.htm (accessed 17 June 2004). Gurr, Andrew (2017), Shakespeare’s Workplace: Essays on Shakespearean Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hassell, Alex (2004), ‘Claudio played by Alex Hassell’, Adopt an Actor, Shakespeare’s Globe, 11 May. Available online: https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/ Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2FED%2FLRN%2F2%2 F20%2F1 (accessed 21 November 2020). Hopkins, D. J. (2008), City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Kiernan, Pauline (1996), ‘Findings from the Globe Prologue Season 1996’, Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, 5. Available online: https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/ CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2FED%2FRE S%2F2%2F5%2F5 (accessed 21 November 2020). Kiernan, Pauline (1998), ‘Findings from the Globe 1998 Season: The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, 7a. Available online: https://archive. shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+331 6+SGT%2fED%2fRES%2f2%2f5%2f7 (accessed 21 November 2020). Kiernan, Pauline (1999), Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Klett, Elizabeth (2008), ‘Re-dressing the Balance: All-Female Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, 166–88, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Knowles, Ric (2014), How Theatre Means, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Koestler, Arthur (1976), The Act of Creation, London: Danube. Lin, Erika T. (2012), Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The Merchant of Venice (1998), [Archive Recording] Dir. Richard Olivier, Shakespeare’s Globe, London: Globe Archive. Miller-Schütz, Chantal (1998), ‘Findings from the Globe Opening Season: The Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, 3. Available online: https://archive. shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/GetMultimedia.ashx?db=Catalog&type=default &fname=21%5Cf54904-d2b2-4b89-ac57-df77100f8ff8.pdf (accessed 21 November 2020).

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Mooney, Michael E. (1990), Shakespeare’s Dramatic Transactions, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Potter, Lois (1999), ‘A Stage Where Every Man Must Play a Part?’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1): 74–86. Potter, Lois (2001), ‘This Distracted Globe: Summer 2000’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (1): 124–32. Purcell, Stephen (2013), Shakespeare and Audience in Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Purcell, Stephen (2018a), ‘Performing the Public at Shakespeare’s Globe’, Shakespeare, 14 (1): 51–63. Purcell, Stephen (2018b), ‘Are Shakespeare’s Plays Always Metatheatrical?’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 36 (1): 19–35. Purcell, Stephen (2019), ‘Shakespeare Performances in England, 2018: London productions’, Shakespeare Survey, 72: 284–305. Richard III (2003), [Archive Recording] Dir. Barry Kyle, Shakespeare’s Globe, London: Globe Archive. Richard III (2012), [Archive Recording] Dir. Tim Caroll, Shakespeare’s Globe, London: Globe Archive. Rylance, Mark (2008), ‘Research, Materials, Crafts: Principles of Performance at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 103–14, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shurgot, Michael W. (1998), Stages of Play: Shakespeare’s Theatrical Energies in Elizabethan Performance, Newark: University of Delaware Press/London: Associated University Presses. Wallis, Mick and Simon Shepherd (1998), Studying Plays, London: Arnold. Weimann, Robert (1978), Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwarz, Baltimore/ London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Weimann, Robert (1992), ‘Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare’s Theater’, PMLA, 107 (3): 497–510. Weimann, Robert (2000), Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Clare (2017), ‘Ontologies of Play: Reconstructing the Relationship between Audience and Act in Early English Drama’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (2): 187–206.

CHAPTER 2.3

Economics: Shakespeare performing cities SUSAN BENNETT

In the twenty-first century, performance has become a vital instrument in service of urban development and especially so in processes that involve the repurposing of place or the renewal of a neighbourhood. Remarkably, in this context, the plays of William Shakespeare, now more than 400 years old, have played a particularly effective role in delivering on the value that culture increasingly offers to the economic and reputational benefit of cities. At the same time, the places where Shakespeare’s plays are performed impact our experience of a particular performance and, more than this, our perception of who Shakespeare is and what his works mean. This is what Tim Cresswell suggests more generally when he asserts that ‘places must have some relationship to humans and the human capacity to produce and consume meaning’ (2004: 7). To explore this symbiosis between place and performance, I will look first at the changing history of Shakespeare in cities during the twentieth century. Then I will turn to the new economic conditions of many twenty-firstcentury urban-based productions of his plays that cannot be separated, I suggest, from the financial models in which they participate. In studies of the early modern period, we recognize Shakespeare as a city playwright: that while London is only seldom directly referenced in his plays, Shakespeare wrote with a keen sense of London’s theatres and acting companies as well as the diverse audiences attracted to the city’s still-new commercial entertainment business. If Shakespeare was a playwright of London, however, he has perhaps been better remembered as a man of Stratford-upon-Avon, something the Midlands town has converted, over the centuries, into a robust and highly profitable tourism industry: the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) boasts of more than a million visitors to its stages each summer, theatregoers who provide a boost to Stratford’s local economy estimated at £600 million (Woodings 2017). Indeed, the prestige, appeal and importance of RSC theatres and their production seasons in the setting of Stratford-upon-Avon have significantly benefitted from the long history of the company’s struggles to secure a permanent and year-round London base. For twenty-one years, RSC shows were seen in London’s West End, the city’s famed commercial theatre district, at the Aldwych Theatre (through the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s). This was followed by a move to the newly opened Barbican Theatre

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where RSC productions still enjoy a ‘season’ each year (Royal Shakespeare Company n.d.). Not that the relationship with the Barbican has been either continuous or always happy: in 2001, then Artistic Director Adrian Noble terminated a twentyyear history in favour of ‘a roving presence designed to “find the venue to suit the play”’ (Morrison 2003). This saw the company try the Donmar Warehouse and the Almeida Theatre, among other London locations, for particular productions, but there has never been, nor is there today, a dedicated theatre recognized as the city’s RSC venue. Moreover, it is tempting to see the RSC’s long-held attachment to Stratfordupon-Avon (the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre there opened in 1879) as having overdetermined the disposition around the world to house major Shakespeare festivals outside the largest urban centres (for more on the development of these festivals, see Prescott in this volume). The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is located in Ashland, a town with a population of little over 20,000, whose theatre programming brings more than 380,000 visitors each year (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ‘2017 Annual Report’ 2017). The City of Ashland must by now be delighted with its initial $400 investment when, in 1935, it offered this amount as a grant to Southern Oregon Normal School teacher Angus Bowmer to build a stage for the performance of two Shakespeare plays; in 2017, the Festival’s economic impact was recorded as $128 million (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ‘Our Mission and Values’ n.d.). In Canada, Tom Patterson persuaded the town council in Stratford, Ontario to give him a stipend of $125 so he might seek artistic advice on establishing a festival that might trade on the most famous citizen of its English namesake (Stratford Festival n.d.). Hoping that a themed theatre festival might compensate for the loss of the railway industry in the town’s economy, the first performance of a Shakespeare play – Richard III, directed by Tyrone Guthrie – took place on 13 July 1953 (Stratford Festival n.d.). Annual attendance at Stratford now exceeds half a million people each year with local economic impact exceeding C$130 million (Stratford Festival n.d.). Whether in Stratford-upon-Avon, Ashland or Stratford (Ontario), Shakespeare in contemporary performance is, then, an active contributor to place identity – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally – and a vital engine for the host town and surrounding area. Perhaps because of the successes of these small-town, largely rural settings for performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many of the best-known and best-attended performances in cities have not happened in a traditional theatre space, but outdoors. Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London staged its first production in 1932 with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (it was one of only two London theatres to offer performances during World War II). It now attracts 140,000 people to its eighteen-week season, although recently their repertoire has generally relied on non-Shakespearean productions to attract audiences (Open Air n.d.). Nonetheless there is still always at least one Shakespeare play in the season’s rotation. In New York, Joseph Papp launched The Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park programme in the 1960s with an early notable production of Othello featuring James Earl Jones in the lead role (1964). Today Shakespeare in the Park boasts ‘one of the largest and most diverse audience bases

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in New York City’ with its free tickets eagerly snapped up as soon as they are made available (The Public n.d.). Elsewhere in the world’s cities, outdoor performances have long been produced in many different and decidedly non-Shakespearean locales: The Shakespeare Festival of Dallas has existed since 1971, Belgium’s Brussels Shakespeare Society since 1976 and Toronto’s The Dream in High Park since 1983. Seattle’s GreenStage has offered pay-what-you-can park performances for more than thirty years and in that time the company has staged all of Shakespeare’s plays. In Germany, the Bremer Shakespeare Company’s Bürgerpark performances have a more than twenty-year history, and the trend for cities to prefer their Shakespeare performances set in green and leafy environments continues with more recent, twenty-first-century entries such as Shakespeare by the Lakes in Australia’s capital city, Canberra (2017). Taimus Werner-Gibbins, Founder and Executive Producer of the company, notes: While free Shakespeare outdoors is a good idea that works a treat in cities all over the world – most spectacularly in New York’s Central Park with Shakespeare in the Park – Canberra’s version is unique in Australia. Shakespeare by the Lakes aims to make the bard more accessible – it is (risk) free, and more fun – it is a lovely summer evening of quality theatre in a community park with food trucks, live music and english [sic] literature’s greatest hits. (Shakespeare by the Lakes n.d.) In other words, this Festival is aspirational: the hope is that these performances will not only feed a local appetite for a Shakespeare that is easier to digest, but also attract patrons via a show’s contextual entertainment offerings. Thus, Shakespeare by the Lakes not only creates jobs directly related to the theatrical performance but also sustains other artists and local food entrepreneurs. This is a model that fits neatly with Richard Florida’s influential paradigm for a creative city: ‘Creativity must be motivated and nurtured in a multitude of ways, by employers, by people themselves and by the communities where they locate. Small wonder that we find the creative ethos bleeding out from the sphere of work to infuse every corner of our lives’ (2002: 5). There is prolific evidence, then, that when it comes to staging Shakespeare in a city, audiences very often expect to see the show performed in the open air – a history seemingly forged of an odd hybrid of the conditions of production in Shakespeare’s own time and the bucolic settings of Shakespeare’s festival towns. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, these outdoor performances of Shakespeare’s plays in city parks continue to flourish as fail-safe crowd-pleasers, designed to provide pleasant (and often free or inexpensive) entertainment in the height of the summer months. Notwithstanding the continued success of Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as the other well-known Shakespeare festival towns, and the hundreds of outdoor performances that take place in cities worldwide, the late twentieth century witnessed a new urban turn in Shakespeare’s performance history: the opening of Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s South Bank in 1997, a germinal event in the revitalization of the London Borough of Southwark and the launch pad for the conversion of this area into one of the city’s most culture-dense and popular visitor destinations.

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Of course, even as Southwark was in Shakespeare’s time an entertainment hub, it had been anything but in the years since then. When, in 1660, the theatres reopened after the Civil War, they were relocated to what is now London’s West End, and Southwark was no longer a site of leisure options but, instead, became much better known for warehouses, factories and prisons – as Peter Ackroyd suggests, ‘a poor and disreputable appendage’ to London proper (2000: 692). Southwark’s return to its Renaissance role has its origins in the 1951 Festival of Britain and the building of what is now called the Southbank Centre, but it was a replica of Shakespeare’s theatre that eventually emerged as the pre-eminent context for the area’s remarkable regeneration in the 1990s and since. The completion of the Globe Theatre project in 1997, on more or less the same site as the sixteenth-century original, is generally, and deservedly, cited as decisive in the development not just of Bankside (the immediately contiguous area to the Globe) but also of the larger Southwark neighbourhood. Despite postwar attempts at revitalization under the aegis of the Festival of Britain, the south side of the Thames continued to have a difficult time shaking off its long and enduring history of identification, for a whole host of reasons, as the ‘wrong’ side of the river. In the second half of the twentieth century, development of cultural venues including the Royal Festival Hall (1951), Hayward Gallery (1968) and National Theatre (1976) had reasserted the area’s entertainment credentials and brought in visitors, but typically ‘just’ for a particular cultural event/performance, and hardly surprisingly so, as the vicinity offered few reasons to linger. When plans to break ground for the Globe were put before the London Borough of Southwark, the local council first argued against approval, rather wishing to reserve that site for later social housing development. But eventually the go-ahead was granted and, by the time construction was completed, the council had rewritten its policy to encourage ‘arts, cultural and entertainment and visitor facilities’ in the borough and had committed, too, to allow conversion of part of the nearby Bankside Power Station (by then only partially used for its original purpose of electricity generation) as the home of the new Tate Modern art museum.1 Certainly the opening of the Globe Theatre for ‘Original Practices’ performances of Shakespeare’s plays brought significant numbers of theatre patrons and tourists (sometimes, of course, that population is one and the same) to the neighbourhood in those last years of the twentieth century, but as it had been for the National Theatre and other cultural venues to the west opened in the decades before, there was little to keep people in the area beyond the occasion of their Globe-based activities. On offer were stage performances in the ‘summer’ season (late April until mid-October) and the Globe exhibition and tour that presented some details of Shakespeare’s life and times along with historical information about the playhouses and playing. As well, like the Festival of Britain venues, the Globe offered in-house residual commerce – a Shakespeare-themed restaurant and bookstore. Nonetheless, the building of this theatre is rightly considered to have been the crucial agent of change in Southwark as a whole and it provided an important geographical landmark that delimited the eastern end of the entertainment district development (although Thames-side commercial activity continues to develop eastwards past Hay’s Galleria

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towards Tower Bridge) (Bennett 2019: 76, 89). To the west, construction of the Coca-Cola London Eye, initially the Millennium Wheel, had started around the time of the opening of the Globe and took its first passengers in 1999; it quickly emerged as the opposite-end marker for the promenade of attractions. Punctuated by the cultural infrastructure established earlier (Royal Festival Hall, Hayward Gallery, National Theatre), the in-between spaces along the pedestrian-only river pathway have now been fully filled in with a wide variety of commercial and cultural ventures. A peripatetic audience moves between formal and informal theatre, from Shakespeare’s Globe, to street buskers, to pop-up venues to the National Theatre complex. Southwark is by now, definitionally, a place of performance. Arguably, a second millennium project was equally important to animating the space of the Thames’s south side, and especially so for the profile and accessibility of the Globe Theatre: the Norman Foster-designed Millennium Bridge. The London Borough of Southwark ran a competition, initiated in 1996, for architects to imagine the first bridge to be built across the Thames since the iconic Tower Bridge (completed in 1894 as part of an earlier turn-of-the-century celebration). The prize-winning £18.2 million pedestrian bridge was, indeed, completed in time for celebrations marking the start of the new century but, as many may remember, unfortunately closed two days after its opening (and until February 2002), after a combination of an unanticipated large number of pedestrians and high winds led to what was thought a dangerous level of sway. Its importance was not so much in the beauty of its design (although I think most would agree that it is a fine addition to the city’s repertoire of crossings) but in its practical purpose of joining the City of London to Bankside. The new bridge made possible a spatial connection between the significantly sized workforce in the City (London’s banking and finance district) and the Globe Theatre – in effect, a revival of the original route, although seventeenthcentury theatregoers of course crossed from the City to Southwark by boat rather than by foot. For today’s tourists already headed to St Paul’s Cathedral, immediately to the north side of the river and always high on the ‘must do’ list for London visitors, it was suddenly easy to include the Globe specifically, and Southwark more generally, on their itineraries. The opening in 2000 of the former Bankside Power Station as the Tate Modern further added to the sense of Southwark as a concentration of cultural activities and a new economic engine for London’s tourism industry. Visitor numbers for Tate Modern have shown steady growth year after year, with a record total in 2018 that pushed the British Museum off top spot in the country’s most visited attractions (BBC 2019). In a similar vein, the owners of the London Eye report that it is now London’s most popular paid-for visitor attraction (around 3.75 million tickets each year) and that, as required by the terms of their original planning permission, 1 per cent of all revenue is returned to the community for charity projects that benefit the local area (London Eye n.d.: 12). Attendance figures are not available on the Globe’s website, nor is there any indication of explicit economic benefits for the surrounding area, but the theatre does address the importance of local community in its 2018 Annual Review: a co-production with three nearby schools and support for the Southwark Teachers’ Alliance in a two-year project (Shakespeare’s Globe 2018: 17).

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All, then, are keen to demonstrate the value they add to the place of which they are now a part. For Southwark broadly, the presence of Shakespeare’s Globe and the Tate Modern has fostered new commercial development including clusters of new hotels, restaurants, shops and offices along with numerous residential projects. The Shard, the ninety-five-storey, Renzo Piano-designed skyscraper which was opened in 2012, is visible from anywhere in the city, drawing the eye towards a neighbourhood that in the years before the opening of Shakespeare’s Globe had been ignored by Londoners and tourists alike. The story of Southwark renewal is, by almost all measures, one that heralds all kinds of successes and it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s Globe would seize the chance to capitalize on the growth of interest in the neighbourhood and reassert their key place in that recent history: the addition, in 2014, of an indoor theatre space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, achieved just that. While Shakespeare’s Globe has its devotees (and it certainly does have its devotees), the theatre recognized the benefits of expanding its attractions beyond a repertoire of plays in the open air, a challenge that equally faces the smaller scale Shakespeare-in-the-city-park companies. Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, for example, has transferred its most successful shows to the Barbican Theatre, the Chichester Festival Theatre and to various North American sites including the Public Theater’s venue in New York’s Central Park, the Delacorte. The addition of a second space at Shakespeare’s Globe has allowed for a full twelve-month season rather than one that shuts down in October and it also added the potential for a more diverse repertoire, including events that seem more suited to the intimacy of an enclosed space. In their introduction to Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper note that the building of the new indoor theatre represents ‘the completion of a project first envisaged by Sam Wanamaker in the 1980s’ and ‘is meant to add what the Shakespeare company wanted as early as 1594, a winter playhouse to accompany the outdoor playhouse they already possessed’ (2014: 1). Moreover, the new addition functions as a ‘refresh’ to its tourism profile: for the visitor who has been to London before and seen a Shakespeare play at the Globe’s open-air space, the Sam Wanamaker Theatre offered something new that might motivate a repeat visit. The Globe has even capitalized on this variety as a marketing strategy, transferring some productions in its 2014/15 ‘Outside In’ season between the two venues, indoors and out, asking audiences to see both and consider which one they prefer. Will Tosh notes that this experiment required ‘productions to rapidly adapt their performances’, in particular toning down the volume when addressing spectators indoors (2018: 73). Shakespeare has been fundamental to the area’s remarkable revival in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and an effective prompt in reminding everyone of Southwark’s historic roots. Both the contemporary performances of his plays and the iconic presence of ‘his’ theatre serve to connect a revitalized and contemporary entertainment district, nostalgically perhaps, to the heyday of Renaissance England. Specifically with Shakespeare’s Globe, as the building that initiated a rebranding of the neighbourhood, there is little doubt that the theatre’s

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success has much to do with the illusion that it is uniquely qualified to bring us closer to Shakespeare’s London and, indeed, to the playwright himself – that ‘we’ (whether expert or tourist spectator or even simply passer-by) are, too, connected to the past through this place that is a replica of the early modern original. Thus, at the same time as we recognize the theatre is in fact not actually on the correct (authentic) site, it serves to act as if it were. In this context, it was striking how many of the visiting companies for the Globe-to-Globe Festival – a complete works festival staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2012 where all of the plays, except for the Globe’s own Henry V, were performed in languages other than English – commented that it was their honour to perform on the stage where Shakespeare had himself performed; this was not, I think, a demonstration of a simple naivety but rather an articulation of the palpable pleasure in a perceived connection to a spatial theatrical past. As Shakespeare’s Globe insists, much as the RSC in Stratford does, on its privileged place in the long history of Shakespearean performance, it is nonetheless true that the theatre can take much credit for making Southwark a thoroughly twenty-firstcentury destination. Shakespeare also has a role in urban transformation in the Western world’s other great theatre city, New York. The story of how Disney’s hit musical The Lion King (which, like Shakespeare’s Globe, opened in 1997) rehabilitated New York City’s traditional theatre district, Times Square/Broadway has been frequently cited as an explanation for the transformation of an area that tourists were advised in the preceding years to avoid (dangers from the rampant sex and drugs trade in the area) back to its theatrical roots and extraordinary profitability (see, for example, Wickstrom 1999 and Wollman 2002). The Lion King has since become the top boxoffice title of all time (earning an impressive $6.2 billion) and in 2018/19 Broadway recorded its largest-ever audience numbers and box office earnings (14.77 million and $1.83 billion respectively) (McPhee 2019). This is a renaissance every bit the equal of Southwark’s. But Shakespeare’s role in a twenty-first-century transformation of a neglected New York neighbourhood takes place in a much less well-known part of the city. Punchdrunk’s production of its Macbeth adaptation, Sleep No More, opened in West 27th Street in Chelsea in 2011. Its venue was not a traditional theatre space, of course, but a group of warehouses converted into the ‘McKittrick Hotel’. Initially advertised as a limited season, the production quickly became a runaway success: premium-priced tickets were in high demand and fans obsessed on social media about their experience in the immersive environment of the show, particularly when successful in achieving a ‘secret’ one-on-one engagement with one of the Sleep No More actors. Danielle Drees has discussed the effects of this Punchdrunk show on its participants, activated from its first moments: Spectators enter the Sleep No More performance via an elevator ride that sells them on the value of approaching the performance as an avid, restless consumer. When the elevator reaches the top floor of the McKittrick Hotel, the bellhop appears to send everybody out. After the first spectator exits, however, he thrusts out his arm to keep the remaining passengers inside. ‘It’s better if you go alone’, he

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leers, or, perhaps, ‘Fortune favours the bold’. This elevator sequence dramatizes the value of Sleep No More’s demand that spectators traverse the building in masked, silent solitude, without companions or mobile phones. (2016: 101) Part of the joy of Sleep No More is, the performance suggests, the participant’s liberation from the neatly ordered five acts of Shakespeare’s play so as to experience the thrill of discovery of a scene (whether recognized for its place in Macbeth or not) and the excitement of agency in engagement with the narrative (or not – the audience member is free to simply wander the many floors of the McKittrick Hotel, examining the detailed properties that each room offers). Drees’s analysis of Sleep No More turns away from what she rightly identifies as a common critical strain – that its appeal comes in its offer of ‘a liminal break from the quotidian world’ (2016: 102) – to argue that ‘the process of entering the performance is crafted not to take spectators away from their everyday lives but to draw out and intensify the consumerist impulse they already feel’ (2016: 102). As well, she points out how Emursive, the production company responsible for Sleep No More, has supplemented the sell-out show’s box-office revenue by way of a variety of paratheatrical elements: the usual programme and other memorabilia sales (indeed, not so very different from what might be found in the shops of traditional Shakespeare venues like the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe), but – and aptly geared to their younger audience demographic – they have created a range of bar and club spaces that will significantly amplify Sleep No More’s income. Performances have always ended in the Manderley Bar (home of the $16 cocktail), but since 2011, other areas of the McKittrick space have been developed. The upper level has been styled as ‘The Club Car’, ‘featuring dining experiences, musical varieties, train cars, and an ever-changing roster of NYC’s most mesmerizing evening and late-night performances’ (McKittrick Hotel, ‘The Club Car’ n.d.). In the summer, the rooftop affords an open-air destination, the Gallow Green bar (something of an equivalent to the Shakespeare-in-the-park experience), although the production team has worked out how to monetize this space year-round as in the winter months it becomes ‘The Lodge at Gallow Green’ (McKittrick Hotel, ‘Gallow Green’ n.d.). All of this consumerist activity prompts Drees to conclude of Sleep No More that ‘the reigning body at the end of the night is capitalism’ (2016: 105), a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. But this Shakespearean performance – like the development of Shakespeare’s Globe before it – has had a much more far-reaching impact on its home neighbourhood of West Chelsea. When Punchdrunk’s show first opened, there was almost nothing in the immediate area: only more of the early-twentieth-century redbrick warehouses like the three that had lingered empty until the McKittrick conversion (there was never a hotel there, although the show pretends that there was and it was somehow boarded up with all its furniture and accessories intact some years after its opening in 1939), a sports bar and, a block or two away, parking lots and storage units. In 2019, the McKittrick Hotel of Punchdrunk’s immersive Shakespearean performance is itself immersed in another experience – one of urban gentrification. At the end of the block is a

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Lamborghini dealership and on the next block, West 28th Street, stands a new Zara Hadid-designed condominium building where a two-bedroom apartment sells for $5 million or rents for $15,000 a month. In 2012, the year after Sleep No More opened, the City of New York acquired a half-mile of elevated and unused railway track to allow the wildly popular High Line Park to be extended past both West 27th and 28th Streets and on to the Hudson Yards development that opened in 2019 to great fanfare by its developers and more cynical review from New Yorkers. One thing that the High Line has reliably delivered to Chelsea neighbourhoods is, of course, tourism. As Jeremiah Moss wrote in the New York Times soon after the park’s opening, ‘The High Line has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history’ (2012). Now that West Chelsea is a ‘destination’ for Sleep No More audiences and a much larger tourist population, we might conclude that Shakespeare appears to have seamlessly crossed the Atlantic from London’s Southwark as a prompt for the repurposing of another under-utilized city neighbourhood and the production of remarkable capital growth. Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More has not confined its version of the Scottish play to English-speaking environs, either: the show opened at the McKinnon Hotel in Shanghai in 2016. The production there, on West Beijing Road in Jing’an (a neighbourhood that is home to some of Shanghai’s most luxurious if ubiquitous recent redevelopment), has again been a sell-out success, drawing both local and international audiences. Like its New York City antecedent, the McKinnon Hotel has a Manderley Bar, here shaped to recall the mythic glamour of 1930s Shanghai, a nod to the history of its Chinese setting. Unlike the New York production, there is no nudity in the witches’ scene with the actors confined to the performance of only a rather chaste kiss (Cheung 2018) and, unlike New York’s McKittrick Hotel, the ‘owners’ of the McKinnon Hotel have discovered ‘Room 802’, ‘a previously forgotten room on the eighth floor of the building. Inside, a number of clues await to be uncovered, revealing the identity of two Hotel residents. This unique accommodation can be booked for $743 (including the cost of two tickets to Sleep No More Shanghai)’ (Punchdrunk n.d.) – another instantiation of what Drees called ‘the consumerist impulse’ threaded into the show. Another, and very different, adaptation of the Shakespeare prompt for cultural revitalization in a city’s centre took place elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, in New Zealand, where in 2016 – the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death (an occasion that was celebrated across much of the world) – a ‘Pop-up Globe’ was constructed in Auckland’s CBD (Central Business District) (see Manning 2018). Its site was an empty car park sandwiched between the Town Hall and the Aotea Centre (the city’s main performing arts building). This Pop-up Globe project was the vision of Artistic Director Miles Gregory, a chance, as he put it, to give his ‘fellow New Zealanders and others the chance to see Shakespeare’s work alive and kicking in a space which he and his colleagues built and in which many of his plays were performed: the second Globe’ (Pop-up Globe n.d.). The building, designed and built by New Zealand companies, is the world’s first full-scale replica of the 1614 Globe, built in Southwark after the first Globe had been destroyed by fire.

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The construction of the Auckland Pop-up Globe was ambitious: it required a hundred tons of scaffolding and an equal amount of concrete ballast along with massive amounts of plywood and timber (Whiteside 2016) for a completed building that accommodated 300 spectators in the yard and 600 seated. Visually, it attracted immediate notice in the city because of its duplication of the distinctive ‘onion dome’ seen in Wenceslas Hollar’s 1634 drawing of the original. The Pop-up’s 2016 Shakespeare anniversary season ran from February to May and recorded over 100,000 tickets sold in the twelve-week period; the in-house company produced Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet as well as hosting six visiting productions of other Shakespeare plays. Gregory aimed for carefully edited versions of the plays that could be realized in a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute performance, noting ‘That’s why Shakespeare at Pop-up Globe isn’t dusty old Shakespeare. It’s now. Alive. Like a party’ (Pop-up Globe n.d.). The ‘party’ comparison proved apt as audiences described their experience of the performances as ‘like attending a sports match or stadium concert’ and was realized in their vociferous appreciation that could be heard up to 200 metres away from the theatre (Pop-up Globe n.d.). Perhaps this particular reinvigoration of the city was a little too party-like for the business district milieu, as the Pop-up Globe was resituated the following year to the Ellerslie Racecourse, a short car or transit ride from Auckland’s centre, a displacement to the more traditional park-like setting for city performances of Shakespeare. Incidentally, the Pop-up Globe project also had a chance connection to the London neighbourhood of Shoreditch – the site in the sixteenth century of the first commercial theatres and, for a while, Shakespeare’s home – as, in 2011, Shoreditch hosted Boxpark, the world’s first pop-up mall, a destination fashioned out of shipping containers: ‘Boxpark is a retail revolution that has spawned many imitators but no equals’ (Boxpark n.d.). Working with repurposed shipping containers in a similar way to the Shoreditch ‘mall’, another 2016 anniversary-inspired project looked to build a Container Globe in a city park in downtown Detroit. Construction plans were on display in an exhibition at New York’s ORA Gallery in February 2017 and a concurrent crowdfunding campaign launched on Patronicity, but the project does not appear to have progressed since that time. Unlike the Shoreditch Boxpark that was intended to have a five-year lifespan before it would be dismantled (although in 2019 it is still operating on its original site and has expanded to two other locations in London), the Pop-up Globe has been disassembled, moved and rebuilt several times. As well as its transfer after the quatercentenary celebration season from the CBD to Ellerslie Racecourse, the theatre has since travelled to three Australian cities: Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. This commitment to portability is both remarkable and demanding: the company travels ‘with a total personnel of 90’, a wardrobe of ‘500 bespoke costumes’ and ‘a relentless schedule replicated in the physical construction of the theatre itself; the whole Pop-up is assembled in just over six weeks and packed down in less than three’ (Badham 2017). After the 60,000 tickets available for the planned September/ October 2017 season in Melbourne sold out, the Pop-up’s stay was extended into November and further tickets released. With this success and the previous sell-outs in Auckland, it was hardly surprising that Pop-up Globe headed to Sydney the following

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year, occupying the Entertainment Quarter site of the city’s old Showground. As Jack Teiwes wrote in a review of the first of the Sydney productions, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Much like the trade-off between the highly authentic-looking wooden stage and tiring house/backdrop with the unadorned modernity of the temporary building materials used to erect the surrounding ‘Wooden O’ structure, the production techniques for the actual plays mounted at the Pop-up Globe are a mixture of authentic and pragmatic. These are not attempts to create a ‘theme park’ of historically-accurate shows that seek to recreate Shakespeare’s plays exactly how scholars think they may have been performed, but rather are modern productions that take liberties with the text and a creative approach as would any good contemporary theatre company, such as Bell Shakespeare. In doing so they are seeking to make their performances alive and vital for today’s audiences. (2018) In 2019, Pop-up Globe travelled to Perth in Western Australia where it was assembled in a parking lot on the Crown Perth property in the area of Burswood Park, directly across the Swan River from the city’s CBD. Crown Perth is a casino, hotel, restaurant and entertainment complex that first opened in 1985. It was, at that time, a revitalization of a neighbourhood that had previously languished as a post-industrial site just as Southwark and West Chelsea had done (Burswood Park had been used as a landfill as well as home to a cement works). The Pop-up Globe season at Crown Perth opened on 9 October 2019, running for six weeks with four productions in the repertory (Hamlet, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure). As the theatre headed out to Perth, Gregory – who remains the theatre’s Artistic Director – announced that this Australian tour would be followed by a farewell summer season in Auckland comprising two productions, a new Romeo and Juliet and a repertoire favourite, their Pacific Islands-themed production of Much Ado About Nothing. Notice that the Pop-up Globe would then be done with Auckland performances came surely as a surprise: ‘After 1206 performances and New Zealand ticket sales of 350,000, the pop-up theatre – a replica made of scaffolding of Shakespeare’s second Globe theatre – has decided to pop off’ (Christian 2019). Dionne Christian, writing in the NZ Herald observed: ‘While Gregory won’t reveal its international plans, a partnership with global entertainment giant Live Nation means the company is now more able to travel far and wide. However, Pop-up Globe’s production base will remain in Auckland where shows will be cast, rehearsed and designed before being exported’ (ibid.). Her article ends with a summary of the Pop-up Globe’s accomplishments ‘in numbers’ – among them, 212 acting roles employing 125 actors, 17 original productions and total ticket sales across Australia and New Zealand in excess of 650,000 (ibid.). In other words, the context for the company’s departure to international cities is carefully communicated to the New Zealand readership in terms of its history of job creation, the promise of production continuity in Auckland and expanded contributions to the nation’s export economy.

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It would seem, then, that what started as a more literal incarnation of the ‘popup’ phenomenon – the planned single season that would contribute to celebrations of the Shakespeare 400 anniversary – became a beta-test for a much more ambitious enterprise. Pop-up Globe looks to transmute into a global brand or, at least, into a new performance strand in the already dominant global brand that is Live Nation Entertainment. Live Nation boasts 500 million ticket sales each year across 30,000 shows and more than a hundred festivals, requiring a worldwide staff of more than 40,000. In their mission statement, they claim to ‘live for artists’ and particularly musicians since events in this genre comprise the mainstay of the Live Nation brand: ‘Artists are the heart of what we do and we have deep reverence and respect for their creativity. We believe live music is vital to art and culture which is why in 2018, we paid artists $6 billion, making Live Nation by far the largest financial supporter of musicians’ (Live Nation n.d.). At first glance this might suggest an unlikely fit for the Pop-up Globe with a supersized entertainment production company best known for rock concerts and music festivals. It might, too, beg the question not only of how the labour-intensive building and rebuilding of the theatre might be profitable (for Live Nation ‘products’ must certainly be that), but also how this new direction might affirm my thesis here – that contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s plays in city settings often contribute to more elaborate initiatives of revitalization and economic stimulus. Although a distinctly different kind of company, Cirque du Soleil offers what I think is a useful and relevant comparison: Cirque is avowedly committed to its Montreal home base just as Miles Gregory has assured New Zealanders that Pop-up Globe will not abandon Auckland. Furthermore, Cirque du Soleil has proven over decades – its first American tour took place in 1987 and its first European tour in 1990 (Cirque du Soleil 2019b) – that cities around the world welcome, indeed compete for, the arrival of the company’s grand chapiteau. And, in those cities, the signature blue-and-yellow tent is often situated on a brownfield site ahead of the area’s redevelopment. I have argued that Cirque du Soleil performances ‘are implicated in the business of creating and maintaining place identity’ for the cities they visit and are instrumentalized as ‘key stimuli that provoke the return of middle-class populations to inner-city neighbourhoods where previous industrial activity has ceased and where a new service economy is anticipated’ (Bennett 2016: 85, 86). The considerable success of the Cirque du Soleil touring model thus suggests that Pop-up Globe could likely play a similar role through its international excursions and that its participation in the Live Nation network will provide access to the same kinds of city locations that Cirque has long enjoyed. This hypothesis gains strength from the October 2019 announcement that Cirque du Soleil and Live Nation will co-produce the circus’s first permanent European venture, a new production for the Theater am Potsdamer Platz in the centre of Berlin (Cirque du Soleil 2019a). Potsdamer Platz, of course, is a much-cited example of urban renewal as cultural spaces, shopping, hotels, restaurants and public space were built in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall (in 1989). Whether with Shakespeare or circus, Live Nation appears to have identified potential (and potential profit) from city-based partnerships.

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In the context of contemporary performance, no other playwright appears in as many places – and in as many different kinds of spaces within those places – as Shakespeare. I have endeavoured here to illustrate patterns and trends in the city appearances of his works and argued that often these performances serve to change the shape and perception of a neighbourhood, to increase its (cultural) value and to render it a sought-after destination for stakeholder populations (see also Bennett 2016: 86). Moreover, as Shakespearean performances appear in cities, so the places where the plays are staged within those cities influence how audiences engage with the productions, framing and reframing what audiences think of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Globe, particularly with its ‘Original Practices’ performances, can pass as evidence of the playwright’s past histories, just as it identifies Southwark as one of the most contemporary of London destinations. Even more of a surprise, perhaps, is that Shakespeare, even 400 years after his death, proves a viable partner in initiating new economic models of cultural production, in fostering new patterns of occupation and use for city landscapes and, most notably, in acting as an effective engine for burgeoning cultural economies in cities worldwide.

NOTE 1

This history is taken from my chapter ‘Universal Experience: The City as Tourist Stage’ (Bennett 2008), an essay that, with the rapidity of development in the area, quickly became woefully out of date! The quotation from the London Borough of Southwark’s ‘The Unitary Development Plan’ (1995) can be found in Newman and Smith 2000.

REFERENCES Ackroyd, Peter (2000), London: The Biography, London: Chatto & Windus. Badham, Van (2017), ‘Globe-trotting replica theatre pops up in Melbourne with rare Shakespeare experience’, The Guardian, 13 September. Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/sep/13/globe-trotting-replica-theatre-pops-up-inmelbourne-with-rare-shakespeare-experience (accessed 21 November 2020). BBC (2019), ‘Tate Modern overtakes British Museum as top UK visitor attraction’, BBC News, 27 March. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainmentarts-47711540 (accessed 21 November 2020). Bennett, Susan (2008), ‘Universal Experience: The City as Tourist Stage’, in Tracy C. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, 76–90, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Susan (2016), ‘Circus and Gentrification’, in Louis Patrick Leroux and Charles R. Batson (eds), Cirque Global: Quebec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, 85–96, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bennett, Susan (2019), ‘Audiences: The Architecture of Engagement’, in Fiona Banks (ed.), Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences, 76–96, London: Bloomsbury. Boxpark (n.d.), ‘About’, Boxpark. Available online: https://www.boxpark.co.uk/about/ (accessed 21 November 2020).

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Cheung, Rachel (2018), ‘Chinese audience’s novel approach to immersive theatre – mob tactics and mini stampedes’, South China Morning Post, 8 September. Available online: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/2163193/chinese-audiences-novelapproach-immersive-theatre-mob (accessed 21 November 2020). Christian, Dionne (2019), ‘Pop-up Globe farewells Auckland’, NZ Herald, 29 August. Available online: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_ id=1501119&objectid=12262152 (accessed 21 November 2020). Cirque du Soleil (2019a), ‘Press Release: First Cirque du Soleil European resident show in Berlin World premiere at Theater am Potsdamer Platz November 2020 co-produced with Live Nation’ Cirque du Soleil, 14 October. Available online: https://www. cirquedusoleil.com/press/news/2019/first-cirque-du-soleil-european-resident-show-inberlin-novembre-2020 (accessed 21 November 2020). Cirque du Soleil (2019b), ‘History’, Cirque du Soleil. Available online: https://www. cirquedusoleil.com/about-us/history (accessed 21 November 2020). Cresswell, Tim (2004), Place: A Short Introduction, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Drees, Danielle (2016), ‘The Sleeping Spectator: A Sleep Cultures Critique of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More’, Performance Research, 21 (1): 101–5. Florida, Richard (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books. Gurr, Andrew and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2014), Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Live Nation (n.d.), ‘Life’, Live Nation. Available online: https://www. livenationentertainment.com/life-at-ln/ (accessed 21 November 2020). London Eye (n.d.), ‘All you need to know about the Coca-Cola London Eye’, London Eye. Available online: https://www.londoneye.com/media/1ksm3ac2/coca-cola-londoneye-press-pack.pdf (accessed 21 November 2020). Manning, Michelle (2018), ‘Globe-al dominance: the rise in reconstructed Globe theatres’, Shakespeare & Beyond blog, 27 March. Available online: https:// shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2018/03/27/rise-in-reconstructed-globe-theatres/ (accessed 21 November 2020). McKittrick Hotel, ‘The Club Car’ (n.d.), McKittrick Hotel. Available online: https:// mckittrickhotel.com/the-club-car/ (accessed 21 November 2020). McKittrick Hotel, ‘Gallow Green’ (n.d.), McKittrick Hotel. Available online: https:// mckittrickhotel.com/gallow-green/ (accessed 21 November 2020). McPhee, Ryan (2019), ‘Broadway Ends 2018–2019 With Highest Gross and Attendance in Recorded History’, Playbill, 28 May. Available online: http://www.playbill.com/ article/broadway-ends-20182019-with-highest-gross-and-attendance-in-recordedhistory (accessed 21 November 2020). Morrison, James (2003), ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber in secret talks to save ailing Royal Shakespeare Company’, Independent, 19 January. Available online: https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/andrew-lloyd-webber-in-secrettalks-to-save-ailing-royal-shakespeare-company-124913.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Moss, Jeremiah (2012), ‘Disney World on the Hudson’, New York Times, 21 August. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/opinion/in-the-shadows-of-thehigh-line.html (accessed 21 November 2020).

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Newman, Peter and Ian Smith (2000), ‘Cultural Production, Place and Politics on the South Bank of the Thames’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24 (1): 9–24. Open Air (n.d.), ‘About Us’, Open Air Theatre. Available online: https://openairtheatre. com/about (accessed 21 November 2020). Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ‘2017 Annual Report’ (2017), Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Available online: https://www.osfashland.org/-/media/pdf/Company/Financials/2017Annual-Report.ashx?la=en&hash=66C67DDF952BC183D8EC892AB4DEEF7EAE1 67B02 (accessed 21 November 2020). Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ‘What is OSF?’ (n.d.), Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Available online: https://www.osfashland.org/en/company/mission-and-values.aspx (accessed 21 November 2020). Pop-up Globe (n.d.), ‘Welcome’, Pop-up Globe. Available online: https://popupglobe. co.nz/about/welcome/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Punchdrunk (n.d.), ‘Keyholder Priority Booking for Sleep No More, Shanghai’, Punchdrunk. Available online: https://www.punchdrunk.org.uk/sleep-no-moreshanghai (accessed 15 May 2020). Royal Shakespeare Company (n.d.), ‘The RSC in London’, RSC. Available online: https:// www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/history/the-rsc-in-london (accessed 21 November 2020). Shakespeare by the Lakes (n.d.), Twelfth Night e-program, Shakespeare by the Lakes. Available online: https://www.sbtl2019.online/ep (accessed 21 November 2020). Shakespeare’s Globe (2018), ‘Annual Review’, Shakespeare’s Globe. Available online: https://cdn.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/2019/05/Annual-Review-2018.pdf (accessed 21 November 2020). Stratford (n.d.), ‘Economic Impact’, Stratford Ontario. Available online: https://www. stratford.ca/en/inside-city-hall/resources/48-Water-Street/4.-Stratford-FestivalEconomic-Impact-extract.pdf (accessed 21 November 2020). Stratford Festival (n.d.), ‘Our Timeline’, Stratford Festival. Available online: https://www. stratfordfestival.ca/AboutUs/OurHistory/Timeline (accessed 21 November 2020). Teiwes, Jack (2018), ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream/Pop-up Globe’, Australian Stage, 8 September. Available online: https://www.australianstage.com.au/201809078820/ reviews/sydney/a-midsummer-night%E2%80%99s-dream-%7C-pop-up-globe.html (accessed 21 November 2020). The Public (n.d.), ‘History’, Public Theater. Available online: https://publictheater.org/ programs/shakespeare-in-the-park/history/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Tosh, Will (2018), Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London: Bloomsbury. Whiteside, Andrew (2016), ‘Pop Up Globe’, YouTube. Available online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=iVVoFayJfwg (accessed 21 November 2020). Wickstrom, Maurya (1999), ‘Commodities, Mimesis, and The Lion King: Retail Theatre for the 1990s’, Theatre Journal, 51 (3): 285–98. Wollman, Elizabeth (2002), ‘The Economic Development of the “New” Times Square and Its Impact on the Broadway Musical’, American Music, 20 (4): 445–65. Woodings, Simon (2017), ‘Shakespeare draws in record visitor numbers’, Stratford-uponAvon Herald, 8 January. Available online: http://www.stratford-herald.com/64183shakespeare-draws-record-visitor-numbers.html (accessed 21 November 2020).

CHAPTER 2.4

Networks: Researching global Shakespeare SONIA MASSAI

The field of ‘global Shakespeare’ has grown and developed significantly since the turn of the twenty-first century. Like other disciplinary approaches to global studies, global Shakespeare has faced methodological and ideological challenges linked to the size of its object of study – the globalization of culture – and the charged position of Shakespeare within it. How does one begin to gauge the significance and impact of any intervention – a Shakespearean production; a cinematic adaptation; a festival or event linked to a Shakespearean anniversary – in the context of increasingly interconnected world cultures? Understandably, scholars working in the field of global Shakespeare are especially aware of the importance of this key research question, which is however relevant to any line of scholarly enquiry, given the speed at which knowledge is becoming networked. And predictably, global Shakespeare is the disciplinary area within Shakespeare Studies that is most alert to, but also most well equipped to confront, the challenge of ensuring that our research methods are fit for purpose. As sociologist and global studies scholar Jan Nederveen Pieterse has memorably put it, ‘each of the social sciences holds a different perspective on globalization’, so ‘even a multidisciplinary approach to globalization still resembles eating soup with a fork’ (2009: 14). In light of Nederveen Pieterse’s warning, how does a global Shakespeare researcher avoid ‘eating soup with a fork’? This essay considers how methods and objects of studies, as well as resources, have evolved and grown since global Shakespeare became established as a disciplinary field in its own right. I shall focus specifically on global Shakespeare in contemporary theatrical performance not only to fulfil my remit as a contributor to this research handbook, but also because the increasing availability of online and digital resources that document, support and complement live performance across national, language and cultural borders has led to a ‘shift [of] focus from text-based teaching’ and research to a greater ‘engagement with the practices of performance’ (Grandage and Sanders 2014: 79). §

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Initially, and unhelpfully, ‘global Shakespeare’ was used as a byword for ‘nonEnglish Shakespeare’, that is, theatrical productions performed in languages other than English or in theatrical languages other than the text-centred approach to Shakespeare in performance that has traditionally informed the English-speaking stage. Dennis Kennedy’s pioneering collection of essays, Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (1993), while drawing attention to the need to find out how other (performance) cultures were using Shakespeare, did not challenge the distinction between the theatrical reception of Shakespeare in English-speaking regions and in the rest of the world. It thus reinforced the notion that the best that global Shakespeare can offer is access to and familiarity with a rich variety of alternative performance styles and critical interpretations. There was undoubtedly, at the time, the need to survey non-English or nonWestern theatrical approaches to Shakespeare, especially, though not exclusively, in post-colonial contexts. Even Kennedy’s forward-looking collection was still strongly Euro- and Anglocentric. So the subsequent proliferation of studies of Shakespeare in major world regions and theatrical cultures served an important purpose.1 Worldwide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (2005), the collection of essays I edited roughly a decade after the publication of Kennedy’s Foreign Shakespeare, was still responding to the need ‘to devote sustained attention to appropriations from a mixed range of geographical locations’ and to the ‘growing awareness that the field of Shakespeare Studies [had] been radically transformed by the emergence of significant world-wide localities, within which Shakespeare [was being] made to signify anew’ (Massai 2005: 9, 8). A much-needed critical survey of theatrical traditions beyond Europe and North America, World-wide Shakespeares had the immediate effect of provincializing ‘English Shakespeare’ and of showing that Shakespeare, while a vast cultural field, was by no means universal, and not only in terms of its meaning, but also in terms of its relevance.2 World-wide Shakespeares also challenged the distinction between ‘English’ and ‘foreign’ Shakespeare as an essential difference between normative and alternative theatrical traditions or between a dominant locality and an infinite variety of global Shakespeares. My decision to use Pierre Bourdieu’s category of the ‘cultural field’ to discuss the interplay between ‘English’ and ‘foreign’ Shakespeare stemmed from the realization of a fundamental analogy between the cultural forces studied by Bourdieu and how the field of Shakespeare in (global) performance was developing at the time. Most fitting was Bourdieu’s proposition that the boundaries of the cultural field as he theorized it are permeable and that ‘new entrants’ can have a profound impact on it, because, even while engaging with established traditions and conventions, the outcome of their interventions is unpredictable and can change the structure of the field as a whole, including what is perceived as ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’ within it. World-wide Shakespeares accordingly urged the scholarly community to consider how the interventions of new ‘foreign’ entrants were radically restructuring our understanding of what ‘Shakespeare’ had come to stand for and how ‘Shakespeare’ was being used in an expanded and fast-expanding cultural field. Since World-wide Shakespeares, more scholars have become aware of the risks involved in adopting an ‘area-by-area’ approach to global Shakespeare. Global

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Shakespeare scholars are also increasingly wary of juxtaposing dominant and marginal localities as if they were essentially disconnected and self-contained traditions, which grow and develop either in isolation or in an oppositional relation to each other, as is indeed the case in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Susan Bennett, for example, while surveying recent developments in Shakespeare and Performance Studies, has highlighted the drawbacks of this approach: our aim, she explains, should be not to make the argument for yet more diversification of geography in describing the production and reception of [global] Shakespeare, but to understand better how fields of study expand yet remain within inscribed knowledge narratives, how certain geographies and histories ‘naturally’ support those narratives, and how, as a result, assumptions become sedimented and thus normative. (2010: 216) Similarly, Sandra Young has critiqued the ‘region-by-region framework familiar within the field of Global Shakespeare, in which individual studies focus on colourful local translocations of Shakespearean drama’ and thus ‘remain tangential to the larger critical preoccupations within Shakespeare Studies more broadly’ (2019: 3). Even more worryingly, as Young continues, this framework ‘follow[s] a logic that positions Shakespeare as the dominant figure in the creative partnership of, say, “Indian Shakespeare” or “Shakespeare in Africa”’. As a result, ‘Shakespeare remains the dominant figure – the noun – and the region under focus is positioned as a colourful variant, qualifying the primary’ (ibid.). Worse still, Young contends, this approach to global Shakespeare ‘becomes simply an opportunity to affirm, uncritically, the extent of the extraordinary reach of Stratford’s Shakespeare’; at best this approach ‘bring[s] into view the racisms that have structured global relations since early modernity’ (ibid.: 13).3 It is, however, worth stressing, as mentioned above, how the sheer effort to chart, document and describe uses of Shakespeare within non-Western theatrical traditions did increase familiarity with a wider range of practices, which in turn informed creative approaches and prompted fresh critical thinking across the field as a whole. In other words, while at times under-theorized or ideologically problematic, the rise of global Shakespeare produced an accumulation of previously unavailable knowledge and new competencies across the scholarly community, which in turn triggered a cross-fertilization of theatrical practices and, inevitably, the need to readjust the critical lenses through which changes in practice are interpreted by audiences and critics alike. Symptomatic of the benefits of an increased familiarity with uses of Shakespeare across a wider range of theatrical traditions were the responses to two major festivals in the UK: the Complete Works Festival, hosted by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) between April 2006 and March 2007, and the World Shakespeare Festival, also organized and led by the RSC in 2012. Ten out of the fifty-four productions included in the Complete Works Festival were performed partly or entirely in languages other than English by companies ranging from major national theatres with an established international profile, like the Berliner Ensemble, to smaller, experimental companies,

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like Song of the Goat. The Complete Works Festival marked the most sustained international collaboration undertaken by the RSC since its inception in 1961. And yet, some felt that companies performing in languages other than English and within non-Western or Continental European and experimental theatrical traditions were sidelined. Katherine Duncan-Jones, for example, pointed out how ‘these companies often appeared for barely a week, and sometimes for only a couple of days’ and that ‘[t]he brevity of such appearances severely moderated the apparent generosity of their inclusion in the larger Stratford season’ (2007: 359). Even so, other scholars felt that the Complete Works Festival contributed to produce a heightened sensibility to the different sounds and rhythm of Shakespeare performed in languages other than English and had a lasting impact on subsequent productions staged on national and regional stages across the country. Peter Kirwan, for example, linked the vocally experimental quality of Conall Morrison’s 2007 RSC production of Macbeth to lessons learned during the Complete Works Festival: ‘the legacy of the Festival continues’, he observed, noting how this production featured ‘a cast drawn from around the world’ and that it ‘play[ed] with accent and multiculturalism within Shakespeare’ (2007: 102). The World Shakespeare Festival nearly doubled the number of non-English Shakespeare productions staged in England since ‘foreign’ Shakespeare started to be performed more regularly on the English stage from the mid-1960s:4 over a period of about six months, Shakespeare was performed in eleven African languages, thirteen Asian languages and sixteen European languages other than English (including Welsh), as well as in Māori, Mexican and Argentine Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.5 The unprecedented range of non-English Shakespeare on offer during the Festival was, however, still presented in ways that limited and contained its potential impact on predominantly English-speaking audiences. The rich offerings were, for example, still promoted as proof of Shakespeare’s worldwide appeal, and the Festival was hailed as an opportunity for Shakespeare ‘to come home’.6 The runs for each show performed during the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, were even more limited than at the 2006/7 Complete Works Festival, with each company performing only twice over a threeday residency. Besides, the organizers’ instruction to the companies who performed on the Globe stage during the Festival to use no English artificially reinforced the distinction between ‘English’ and ‘foreign’ Shakespeare, despite the fact that several of those companies routinely perform in English in their own countries of origin or while on tour. Ultimately, though, the sheer number of non-English productions presented over a relatively short period of time to predominantly English-speaking audiences had the opposite effect. As Bennett and Carson pointed out, while reviewing the impact of the Globe to Globe Festival, ‘[c]ertainly there were resistant spectators and critics’: It was not unusual to hear a few voices grumbling in the intermission about the injustices being done to Shakespeare – non-naturalist theatrical practices and often irreverent approaches to the texts were sometimes too much for audience members raised in the English performance tradition of the plays that depends on

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naturalism and textual fidelity. For the more adventurous theatre-goer, however, there was the cumulative effect of Festival performances: over a six-week period, repeat customers simply got better at working with different languages and different performance styles. (2013: 7–8) More generally, Bennett and Carson also remarked on the fact that increased access to and familiarity with non-English Shakespeare over the two decades prior to the Globe to Globe Festival had ‘explicitly and implicitly prepared’ English-speaking audiences to read between the lines of the apparent ‘“foreignness” of the experience’ (2013: 8). Increased exposure to a wider range of languages and theatrical traditions within which Shakespeare is made to signify anew was not the only, nor the main, benefit of international mega Shakespeare events like the Complete Works Festival or the World Shakespeare Festival. Individual productions within these larger events inflected the narratives, expectations and presentational protocol imposed by the organizers or associated with major venues, like the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres in Stratford-upon-Avon or the Globe stage on the South Bank in London.7 Some productions, in other words, exposed the inadequacy of the critical lenses through which global Shakespeare had been approached up to that point. Among all the productions I managed to attend during the Festival, three Globe-to-Globe productions – Titus Andronicus performed by the Tang Shu-Wing Theatre Studio from Hong Kong, Pericles performed by the National Theatre of Greece and The Merry Wives of Windsor performed by Bitter Pill and the Theatre Company of Kenya – prompted me to consider whether global Shakespeare could still be understood as a cultural field, even when, courtesy of Bourdieu, the field is understood as a fluid social universe. For all the fluidity ascribed by Bourdieu to it, the cultural field still encourages us to think about cultural production in terms of central and peripheral practices. These three productions, even within the Festival as a whole, seemed to demand a different set of critical categories. These three productions originated from three different continents, and one of them, Titus Andronicus, pre-dated the Festival, but they all shared several distinctive features: most prominently, they all used minimal props and a presentational style of delivery that activated the performance space on the Globe stage in non-naturalist ways; they also streamlined the source text while following it quite closely. All actors in Act 1 in Tang Shu-Wing’s production sat on or stood around black chairs arranged to face the audience downstage and continued to look at the audience even while addressing each other. The blocking emphasized the relentlessly public quality of the long opening sequence and, in turn, the brutality of the Roman ethos when enforced by Titus on his and on Tamora’s children. Similarly, the continuous presence of all the actors on stage in Pericles worked well to underline the importance of the communal, convivial ethos repeatedly evoked by a play which can otherwise come across as fragmentary because of its episodic structure. The doubling of Anne Page’s suitors, who were all played by Neville Sanganyi in The Merry Wives of Windsor, showed how interchangeable the three suitors are and how their number reflects the

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comic quality of the fictive world of the play rather than distinctive character traits or their respective desirability.8 Also worth stressing is the fact that, although two of these productions were developed with the Festival in mind, they originated on different continents as part of very different and unrelated theatrical and cultural contexts. Shakespeare, for example, features prominently in the repertory of The National Theatre of Greece, including The Taming of the Shrew in 2008/9 and Titus Andronicus in 2010. Tang Shu-Wing, who is renowned for using the conventions of minimalist and physical theatre to adapt canonical works, had first adapted Titus Andronicus in 2008, when it premiered at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. The Theatre Company Kenya had first workshopped The Merry Wives of Windsor at HIFA, the Harare International Festival of Arts, and then revived it at London’s Oval House Theatre in 2009. It would therefore make little sense to try and understand these three productions as originating from the same cultural field. Besides, Shakespeare is not a dominant element or tradition in any of the theatrical contexts within which these three productions originated. Their shared presentational styles, in light of their different points of origin, suggested the extent to which not only global Shakespeare but also an increasingly globalized theatre marketplace were becoming networked. In his influential and popular studies about the impact of digital media and communication on how we produce and manage knowledge, David Weinberger, who is a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, has repeatedly explained the need to understand the globalization of culture as a networking of knowledge: As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it. It is not that the network is becoming a conscious super-brain. Rather, knowledge is becoming inextricable from – literally unthinkable without – the network that enables it. Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms. (2012: 3) Weinberger’s understanding of how cultural production is affected by the networking of knowledge can help us grasp and respect the fact that a Titus Andronicus from Hong Kong, a Pericles from Athens and a The Merry Wives of Windsor from Nairobi did not share comparable strategies in their reworking of the source text because they were trying to mimic the conditions of theatrical production on the Globe stage, but because theatre companies increasingly engage with Shakespeare within globalized (or networked) theatrical cultures. While obviously inflected by local traditions and performed in different languages, these three productions seemed somehow connected and to be tapping into ideas, influences and ways of performing Shakespeare which have become unmoored from place and are therefore not immediately recognizable as central or peripheral. Similarly, creativity and cultural production are no longer, if they ever were, conceived as rooted in and stemming from individual affect or local practices.

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Adopting Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of ‘the violence that surrounds identity politics around the world’, I would say that the production of global Shakespeare on the contemporary world stage is similarly implosive, that is, triggered by ‘large-scale interactions … [that] cascade … through the complexities of regional, local, and neighborhood [contexts] until they energize local [practices] and implode into various forms of [creativity and cultural production]’ (1996: 164). Reconceptualizing the production of global Shakespeare as an implosion of influences, images and ideas increasingly shared by artists and practitioners transnationally no longer implies that Shakespearean productions that originate across the globe should be understood in relation to English Shakespeares, especially in light of the fact that the British stage itself is not immune from these influences, as shown by the work of recent British companies and directors, including Cheek by Jowl, Headlong, Rupert Goold and Robert Icke. Weinberger and Appadurai, in other words, can help us reconceptualize the globalization of culture and of Shakespeare within it as a complex, volatile and discontinuous network connecting practitioners and their audiences, live and virtual, across the globe. An important consequence of this reconceptualization of global Shakespeare is that it can no longer be associated with specific geographical localities, or languages, or theatrical styles and traditions. As I first suggested in a seminar discussion hosted by the European Shakespeare Research Association in Montpellier in June 2013, global Shakespeare could by then be more helpfully and more accurately be thought of as a ‘methodology’, rather than being simplistically associated with any given language, locality, or theatrical culture. When I used the phrase ‘global Shakespeare as methodology’, I was encouraging a shift of critical attention and emphasis from the rich diversity of products (or theatrical artifacts that fall under the category of global Shakespeare) to creative practices that are imbued and energized by an implosion of multiple influences and that affect both production and reception within thoroughly networked cultures. The phrase has since moved into public discourse. Alexa Alice Joubin, for example, used it in her essay ‘Global Shakespeares as Methodology’ later that year (2013: 273–90), but she interpreted it differently, actually reinscribing global Shakespeare into established models of appropriation. As Marcel Alvaro de Amorim has recently pointed out, the approach Joubin proposed in this essay still ‘lexically hing[ed] on a cordial understanding of the appropriation process, whereby global Shakespeares “incorporated” [other] traditions [and] established themselves as “hybrid performances”, and Shakespeare himself … “enable[d] the subaltern to speak”’ (2019: 141–2). My use of the phrase suggested a different direction of travel, which is now even more timely and ripe for exploration than it was back in 2013. Since then, I have been repeatedly struck by the need to tend to the implications associated even with more expansive and less hierarchical reconceptualizations of global Shakespeare. Reconceptualizing global Shakespeare as thoroughly networked, thus making both localities traditionally regarded as central and as peripheral intricately and inevitably interconnected, should not be taken to suggest that all localities, because networked, are automatically or necessarily endowed with the same access to resources, mobility or visibility within the network.

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The same caveat should apply to other recent reconceptualizations of global Shakespeare, which also aim to take into account the way in which current theatrical practice can (and has indeed started to) deconstruct notions of what constitutes a cultural centre as opposed to a cultural periphery. Among others, Douglas Lanier has, for example, proposed using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘rhizome’. Contrasting Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the terms ‘arboreal’ and ‘rhizomatic’, Lanier explains how the latter concept can help us think of ‘Shakespeare’ as a decentred, nonhierarchical structure: An arboreal structure … traces its ideas and forms back to a single source: a master author, a classic text, a foundational idea, an historical reality. Its various transformations … are organized into homogenous, vertically hierarchical schema and historical genealogies. In an arboreal structure, meaning is conceived in terms of a single root and myriad branches. … To extend this metaphor to Shakespeare, an arboreal conception of adaptation encourages one to trace back Shakespeare’s cultural authority ultimately to the original Shakespearean text. A rhizomatic structure, by contrast, has no single or central root and no vertical structure. Instead, like the underground root system of rhizomatic plants, it is a horizontal, decentered multiplicity of subterranean roots that cross each other, bifurcating and recombining, breaking off and restarting. (2014: 28) Albeit visualized as a ‘subterranean’ structure and borrowed from botany, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘rhizome’ strikes me as conceptually related to Weinberger’s concept of ‘network’, which is instead more immediately associated with the disembodied, diffuse and unlocalized quality of digital environments. Both metaphors are useful because they help us understand how decentred Shakespeare has become in contemporary, globalized (theatrical) cultures. However, as already mentioned above, neither concept accounts for old or new inequalities, which make some sections of the network (or some shoots or roots in the rhizome) more likely than others to gain our attention and to determine what we mean and how we mean by Shakespeare in contemporary performance. How can research in global Shakespeare account for such inequalities in ways that prevent them from becoming reinscribed in our scholarship? Important work towards answering this question has already been done by colleagues in other disciplines. Cultural anthropologist and Global Studies scholar Ulf Hannerz has, for example, written copiously and persuasively about a lack of correlation between ‘asymmetries of culture’ and ‘asymmetries of economy, politics, or military might’ (1992: 219). According to Hannerz, world cultures have ‘a much more intricate organization of diversity’ than is conceivable within ‘a center/periphery structure’. He nevertheless warns us that ‘present cultural influence’ is still predominantly associated with ‘old-style colonial powers’ (ibid.: 221, 220). A recent development in global Shakespeare Studies has aimed to redress these kinds of inequalities and imbalances by looking at historically marginal localities not as sources of a richer variety of Shakespeares in performance but of critical categories that can help us rethink about the aesthetics and politics of the field as

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whole. For example, in Shakespeare in the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation, Sandra Young invites scholars to be more attentive and responsive to ‘the surprising solidarities Shakespeare’s plays have evoked in non-traditional staging contexts’ (2019: 1). Young defines ‘non-traditional staging contexts’ as originating from the ‘Global South’ – from ‘Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia and the Indian Ocean world’, as well as from ‘pockets of vulnerability and disempowerment or what one might call “southerliness” in the North’ (ibid.: 2). She also stresses that the work of the theatremakers and the filmmakers she discusses in her book ‘complicates the dichotomies of earlier cultural histories that embed Shakespeare within a forbidding colonial canon’ (ibid.:  1). Instead of imposing critical categories devised by scholars in the Global North, Young allows the creative intersections and multiple influences at work in the output of these theatremakers and filmmakers to suggest ways in which we could and should revisit key categories used by earlier scholars, including creolization, indigenization, localization and Africanization. In Young’s own words, the ‘insights generated from the “undersides” of mainstream global culture [do] not only complete an incomplete picture’, but they can also ‘generate the theory from which the North … might take its bearings’ (ibid.: 19). In Young’s scholarship, the Global South is not a passive object of study but a key section of ‘Shakespeare’ as a networked or rhizomatic structure, which is not only producing alternative Shakespeares but also the critical categories that can help scholars identify and appreciate their significance. Other scholars are similarly considering how critical categories that originate in the Global South can address and redress older and newer inequalities and asymmetries, which affect not only cultural production but also its critical reception. Particularly effective is the notion of cultural cannibalism first theorized by Oswald de Andrade in early twentieth-century Brazil and re-proposed by Anne Sophie Refskou, Marcel Alvaro de Amorim and Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho in Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology. As the editors of this new collection explain, cannibalism as practised by the Tupi tribe in sixteenthcentury Brazil ‘was not a dietary condition, nor a form of religious sacrifice, nor, strictly speaking, an act of revenge’. ‘Instead’, they continue, it was a complex physical and metaphysical way of incorporating otherness. A captive from an enemy tribe would be eaten if he was deemed to have attributes worthy of acquisition – such as strength or bravery – and, importantly, he would be assimilated into the tribe before being eaten, often living over a year with his captors and receiving a wife as an additional form of integration. (2019: 4) From a cultural perspective, this practice suggests a selective and empowering assimilation of the most appealing and nurturing qualities of the dominant culture. Neither ‘mechanical imitation’ nor rejection (ibid.: 5), cultural anthropophagy also ‘liberat[es] native cultural products from expectations to represent ethnographic authenticity’ (ibid.: 6). An interesting provocation, which prompts further unpacking of this critical category, comes from Diana Henderson, in an interview included in the same

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collection. In this interview Henderson points out an important risk involved in redeploying critical categories that originate in the Global South to reassess how we research and write about Global Shakespeare. ‘What is different here’, Henderson asks, temporarily taking on the role of the interviewer, ‘in using Cultural Anthropophagy … from rethinking a metaphor that Bacon used in regard to reading books, or that Montaigne more directly cited and transposed to reflect on European conflicts?’ (2019: 124). Henderson’s question is an astute reminder that people and ideas have long travelled across language, national and cultural borders. The risk highlighted by Henderson alerts us to the fact that categories and ideas, as much as other cultural artifacts, have important legacies of their own and so she urges us to ‘build upon our awareness that these inherited stories have been diversely, even contrarily reinterpreted to new ends’. In turn, she concludes, this awareness ‘can help us break down simpler distinctions based on region or location, that a work [or critical category] is “from there” or “from here”’ (ibid.: 215). With Henderson’s salutary caveat in mind, I want to end this essay by considering how the recent developments in the methodologies discussed above have changed the way in which we organize the archival resources that support and facilitate research in global Shakespeare. § The advance of digital technologies and their impact on cultural production has not only encouraged new ways of thinking about global Shakespeare, as discussed above, but also new ways of thinking about how we gather, share and use digital archives when we research and teach global Shakespeare. The increased availability of online resources that are relevant to those working on Shakespeare in global Performance Studies does not necessarily translate into better research opportunities for all the scholars, practitioners and students who have access to them. As Carson has pithily put it, ‘access to information … is not the same as knowledge’ (2014: 10). And I would add that, in turn, knowledge is not the same as access to the scholarly communities within which that knowledge is produced. So while I agree with Eric Johnson that virtual and free access are the two fundamental preconditions for creating genuinely global resources (Dapkiewicz and Johnson 2018), I want to stress why it is also important that we reflect on who gets to organize the virtual archives that are becoming more central to global Shakespeare Studies and how we tackle this crucial task. Although there are many other digital resources, often attached to projects that do not prioritize either global Shakespeare or theatrical performance,9 I will focus mainly on two archives, ‘The Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive’ hosted by MIT under the directorship of Alexa Alice Joubin and Peter Donaldson and ‘Performance Shakespeare 2016’ hosted by ‘Shakespeare400’ and curated by Susan Bennett and by myself as project leaders. These two projects have responded to changes in methodologies associated with global Shakespeare in interesting, if different, ways. The MIT Global Shakespeares website is one of the most established, performance-focused resources in the field. Users can access performance video

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materials ranging from trailers and promotional videos to longer clips and full recordings. Individual productions, searchable by Shakespeare play, language and region, are linked to a standardized, easy-to-navigate entry that includes a brief description of the production and information about the company, cast and creative team and the venue, language and date of the production, with hyperlinks inviting users to look up other productions of the same play, by the same company or in the same language. The selection of video materials is impressive, although coverage is better when it comes to smaller companies, who actively need to spread the word about their work, as opposed to larger companies, who are bound by stricter copyright regulations. The site encourages browsing in ways that do not obviously reinstate older notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. However, some of its features reinforce them. The use of a map of the world to show users where the productions captured by the video materials on the website originated from can, for example, strengthen a traditional belief in Shakespeare’s ability to reach out to other cultures across the world, or it can give a misleading impression of where Shakespeare is most often produced. An editorial note does warn that the map, as much as the uploading and curation of materials, is a work ‘in progress’ (Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, n.d., ‘Regions’). However, maps are notoriously ideologically oriented themselves, as the pioneering work of innovative map publishers like Hobo-Dyer has so effectively demonstrated. Listing regions in alphabetical order (as they already are next to entries of individual productions, when users select ‘All Productions’ under ‘Videos’ (Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, n.d., ‘Productions’), would therefore seem to be a better, because more neutral, way of guiding users across the site. Similarly, short critical introductions to specific regions or countries, while offering guidance for users with no prior knowledge about the theatrical reception of Shakespeare in any given region or country, tend to give a teleological account of local traditions, which are typically presented as evolving from mimetic and derivative (if not entirely colonial) uses of Shakespeare to more creative (if not altogether irreverent or oppositional) modes of appropriation. These narratives, while informative, inevitably reinforce an older ‘region-by-region’ approach to global Shakespeare, eliding the hybridizing potential of intercultural performance and stopping short of encouraging users to think of global Shakespeare as networked, expansive and rhizomatic. More useful is the sheer contrast between, and dissonance produced by, interviews with scholars and practitioners made available to users on this site. Two interviews featuring Ing K, director of Shakespeare Must Die (Kennedy 2013) and James Shapiro, Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (Leão 2013) are a good case in point. Although both were conducted in 2013, these two interviews could not be more different in format, length and, crucially, in the type of critical discourse that they present to users. Shapiro’s interview is a short video clip recorded in a study or office lined with books. The setting suggests the academic calibre of the speaker. Shapiro, on this occasion, is invited to comment on the World Shakespeare Festival; using critical commonplaces widely popular and routinely used by Shakespeareans and literary

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commentators at the time, he describes 2012 as an historic attempt to bring in Shakespeare from around the world and how the year has marked a shift from the centre to the periphery of the world of Shakespeare in performance, as a result of which Festivalgoers have gained fresh insights into Shakespeare. I am not passing judgement on Shapiro’s views per se. They are (or were) views widely held at the time. However, they are placed right next to Ing K’s interview, which, in being a long, eloquent attack on such views, makes the dissonance between these two positions all the more productive and exciting. A few short extracts from Ing K’s interview will suffice to illustrate the ideological abyss that divides these two interventions. In this interview, Ing K explains how her cinematic adaptation of Macbeth, the first feature-length film of a Shakespeare play in Thai, was first sponsored by the Thailand Ministry of Culture under an antiThaksin government in 2010, only to be banned by the same Ministry when Thaksin Shinawatra’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, came to power in 2011.10 Ing K is also outspoken in opposing academic assumptions and international festival policies that continue to exoticize non-English or non-Western Shakespeare, reinforcing an older dichotomy whereby the periphery offers colourful, local uses of Shakespeare for the enjoyment of English-speaking and international festival going audiences and critics, while the centre continues to consume and subsume other Shakespeares within a unitary cultural field. In her film, Ing K used conventions drawn from likay (Thai folk opera) and from contemporary TV melodrama to rework the play in a way that emphasized its relevance, both aesthetic and political, for a Thai audience. Stressing that Thai audiences can be assumed to have no prior knowledge of Shakespeare, except as a ‘name, a “high-end brand”, like Gucci or Chanel’, Ing K goes on to explain that she ‘tried to be as free of preconceptions from existing Shakespearean cinema as possible, and did not show any Shakespearean film to [her] cast and crew’. She did not want them to try to sound ‘Shakespearean’ (Kennedy 2013). Equally, she did not want her film to look or sound entirely folkloristic either. All, and I mean all, Asian cinema presented at the world’s great film festivals are controlled by the same small group of curators. They send scouts to our third world countries on film selection trips. Such scouts even tell people how to cut their films. If you don’t obey the dictates of their tastes, you do not ‘go international’. That is why East Asian films shown at festivals are of the same type. This wouldn’t be so bad if local critics, colonially shackled and lacking confidence, didn’t take their cue from these festivals. Thus entire national cinematic cultures are sacrificed at the altar of the festival circuit. I refuse to do this, so I do have this monolith against me as well as the Thaksin machine. If I had made my witches screechy ‘lady boys’, a Thai cliché, life might’ve been easier. Users who listen to or read these two interviews are bound to detect the irony produced by the fact that they are presented as contiguous and contemporary resources, while in fact they belong to different stages or two distinctive modes of critical discourses within the field of global Shakespeare in performance. While even minimal curation of these materials might provide useful guidance for users who are new to global Shakespeare, the sheer contrast of views and ideological positions

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put forward in these two interviews is to be celebrated as a powerful and effective point of access into, and case study about, the diversity of theories and practices that inform the field. My direct involvement in setting up Performance Shakespeare 2016, the second digital resource that I want to discuss here, makes me a partial appraiser of its aims and objectives and presentational strategies. I do, however, wish to highlight some features which attempt to respond to the critical and methodological challenges and opportunities discussed in the first section of this essay. Unlike the MIT Global Shakespeare website, Performance Shakespeare 2016 is not a live archive, because it was conceived as a snapshot of what Shakespeare in Performance looked and sounded like in the quatercentenary year. Supported by Shakespeare400, a consortium of cultural institutions set up and led by Gordon McMullan at King’s College London to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Performance Shakespeare 2016 gathered examples of Shakespeare in performance from across languages, regions and cultures. One of the main drivers behind this initiative was the imperative to make Shakespeare400 less London-centric. The cultural institutions who participated in Shakespeare400 are all world leaders in their own cultural sectors and are all British, many based in London. Understandably, they had no appetite for Shakespeare400 to be more inclusive, regionally, nationally or internationally.11 Also important to us was the legacy of the tercentenary, which was led by another King’s College Londonbased scholar, Sir Israel Gollancz, in 1916. The most influential by-product of the 1916 anniversary was The Book of Homage, a monumental collection of tributes gathered and edited by Gollancz himself. Recent scholars have described The Book of Homage as uneasily trying to encompass and contain hegemonic assumptions about the place of Shakespeare in early twentieth-century world cultures and the productive dissonance produced by the rich variety of contributions, languages and positions included in it.12 Our main aim was for Performance Shakespeare 2016 to represent a viable twenty-first-century alternative to The Book of Homage, and, crucially, in a format that would foreground diversity without replicating older narratives associating Shakespeare with Englishness and cultural supremacy. We tried to achieve this aim by inviting contributors to upload examples of Shakespeare in performance from their own region, without imposing any parameters of ‘value’ on what is worth remembering. We started off by approaching fellow scholars, our students and their students, companies we knew and companies our contributors knew. Our initial list of contacts inevitably imposed our familiarity with and understanding of global Shakespeare on the project, but we also encouraged contributors to cover productions they had not seen and to recruit contributors among communities beyond our own, striving for maximum coverage. Though of course not exhaustive, by 31 December 2016 the site included 435 entries from across eighty-three countries. We also decided to use a basic template to ensure that each entry would have a similar amount of basic information in English about company, venue and original language of performance, but any other materials supplied by contributing companies – video clips or full recordings; reviews and/or promotional

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materials – were included in their original language(s) in order to ensure maximum usability to relevant communities of students, scholars and practitioners. Bearing in mind Adele Lee’s sense that ‘non-Western scholars within Shakespeare Studies are at risk of becoming “native informants” … valued primarily for their ability to provide insiders’ scope’ (2018), we hope that Performance Shakespeare 2016 will continue to serve as a time capsule for future communities of scholars, students and practitioners, whatever region or language they happen to operate in. Of course, our ability to secure a long-term open-access home for Performance Shakespeare 2016 will prove crucial in achieving this aim. Our ability to do so depends on our own access to funding and resources that may not be available to artists and scholars who would have set up this project, or a similar resource, differently, if given a chance. However, it is with a keen awareness of our own position within the field that we set out to make Performance Shakespeare 2016 as representative, fluid and decentred as possible. Only future use of this resource will determine whether it delivers our vision for it. § To conclude, I would like to stress how recent attempts to reconceptualize the study of Shakespeare in contemporary global performance have foregrounded, first and foremost, the need to acknowledge not only the complex and connected quality of our object of study, but also the profoundly contextual nature of our point of access to it. Context really is all, and even more so in Shakespeare in contemporary global performance cultures than in other disciplinary areas, because our object of study signifies in highly different ways, depending on how, where and by whom it is produced and who (and when and where) gets to see it. The contextual quality of any act of interpretation is something that Reader and Audience Reception Studies have made us all well aware of. But it seems even more urgent to stress its importance when it comes to discussing global Shakespeare in (theatrical) performance. Being aware of one’s point of access to global Shakespeare in performance does not necessarily mean that non-English Shakespeare in performance should be the exclusive concern of non-English scholars. Anecdotally, I remember being asked by an MA student of mine whether she could work on Ing K’s film, since she had not had a chance to watch it. This student asked for my advice before Ing K’s interview was posted on the MIT Global Shakespeares website and before another live interview, filmed after the screening of the film at the Singapore Art Museum in 2014, was posted on YouTube. Had these resources been available, I would have encouraged this student to work on Shakespeare Must Die, not because she knew Thai or because she was hoping, somehow, to get to watch the film, but because she could have researched the exceptional circumstances of production and reception of this film, which make for an exemplary case study in what Shakespeare meant to the director, to her censors and to the international critics and scholars who have written about it. Although normally undertaken by scholars who can speak the original language of performance, non-English Shakespeare does not have to be regarded as the default

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remit of non-Western scholars. The same logic that used to appreciate non-English Shakespeare as an ‘indigenized’ form of cultural production must not apply to the production of critical discourse. It is not only possible, but important, for more scholars to consider the global implications of their critical assumptions, whether they are applying them to non-English theatrical performance or to the close analysis of a textual artefact. What matters is not only one’s language or cultural expertise, but also a keen awareness of one’s perspective and its implications, in ways made more explicit and hopefully more open for discussion by the kind of research I have discussed in this essay.

NOTES 1. For some of the most helpful contributions of studies from the period, see, for example, Hattaway, Sokolova and Roper (1994); Cartelli (1999); Stříbrný (2000); Ryuta, Carruthers and Gillies (2001); Shurbanov and Sokolova (2001); Li (2003); Trivedi and Bartholomeusz (2005). 2. Shortly after the publication of World-wide Shakespeares, Rustom Bharucha, in the run-up to the keynote he gave at the Local/Global Shakespeares conference I organized at King’s College London in partnership with Globe Education in 2009, pointed out to me that, while inspiring recent Indian filmmakers like Vishal Bhardwaj, Shakespeare was losing some of the prominence that his works had had in India’s colonial and post-colonial theatrical traditions. 3. Young also argues that approaches that ‘accord agency to local cultural forms which are imagined as powerfully reshaping the original into a form that is locally recognizable’, that is ‘indigenized’, are similarly ‘double-edged’: ‘There is an implicit dichotomy within the idea of indigenized cultural forms … what is understood as “indigenous” can be contrasted to the purportedly “high” culture of an established canon’ (2019: 52). Young therefore detects a problematic and unfortunate tension between the recent ‘legal recognition’ at long last ‘afforded to … indigeneity’ and the ‘longer and more troubling history of this term [and] the identification of indigeneity [that] can be traced back to attempts by nineteenth-century colonial administrators to categorize rural territories, the better to control them’ (ibid.: 54). 4. Robert Shaughnessy presented a statistical and critical survey of ‘foreign’ Shakespeare productions performed on the English stage up to 2009 in a paper he delivered at a roundtable event held at the Barbican on 21 November. Shaughnessy has kindly shared this as yet unpublished paper with me, for which I am deeply grateful. 5. For a full list of World Shakespeare Festival productions by language, see ‘Appendix 1: Productions by Country and Language’, in Edmondson, Prescott and Sullivan (2013: 271–4). 6. ‘Shakespeare’s coming home’ was the tagline for the Globe to Globe Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe, which ran from late April to early June 2012. 7. I have written extensively elsewhere about the one production that most explicitly and most effectively challenges the restrictions, practical and ideological, which were

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wittingly or unwittingly imposed on participating companies; for more details, see Massai (2017) and Massai (2020).   8. I have written at greater length about this production in Massai (2014).   9. See, for example, the Shakespeare in Performance database attached to the Internet Shakespeare Editions. This database lists productions and materials linked to productions, ranging from ‘director’s notes, images of stage and costume design, performance stills, posters and information about a particular company or festival and the actors involved’ in them, by ‘Plays’, ‘Theaters’, ‘People’, ‘Characters’ and crucially, among other search tags, ‘Countries’. 10. For further details, and a discussion of Ing K’s film, see Lei (2015). 11. I should stress that the British Council was emphatically not one of the Shakespeare400 partners, though there were significant overlaps between activities set up by the two organizations. 12. See, for example, McMullan – ‘the Book of Homage underlines the hegemonic status of Shakespeare in the early twentieth century as an icon of Englishness and Empire, yet it also serves as a precursor of the contemporary role of Shakespeare as a figure of global culture’ (2016: xvi) – and Kahn: I interpret the Shakespeare summoned up by Homage to be the signifier of an autochthonous English identity, an Englishness that is self-authorized and racially pure. In these pages, English society ‘performs’ a certain past with Shakespeare in the lead role. As the 166 tributes accrue, however, this bardic version of English imperial history – a history in all probability envisioned by those distinguished men as the controlling narrative of the book – shifts from the autochthonous to the diasporic. To borrow the title of a well-known anthology, the empire writes back, and some altogether surprisingly multicultural Shakespeares emerge that – always respectfully but in any case ironically – stage the contradictions of empire. (2001: 457)

REFERENCES Amorim, Marcel Alvaro de (2019), ‘Devouring Shakespeare Translocally’, in Anne Sophie Refskou, Marcel Alvaro de Amorim and Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho (eds), Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology, 136–54, London: Bloomsbury. Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press. Bennett, Susan (2010), ‘The Presence of Shakespeare’, in Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson (eds), Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, 210–28, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carson, Christie (2014), ‘Introduction to Part I: Defining Current Digital Scholarship and Practice; Shakespeare Research in the Digital Age’, in Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (eds), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, 10–13, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Carson, Christie and Susan Bennett (2013), ‘Introduction: Shakespeare Beyond English’, in Christie Carson and Susan Bennett (eds), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, 1–11, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cartelli, Thomas (1999), Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations, London and New York: Routledge. Dapkiewicz, Claire and Eric Johnson (2018), ‘Preparing “Shakespeare Documented” for the World’, seminar paper presented at the ‘Rethinking the Global in Global Shakespeare’, led by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai at the Shakespeare Association of America annual symposium in Los Angeles, 28–31 March. Duncan-Jones, Katherine (2007), ‘Complete Works: Essential Year? (All of) Shakespeare Performed’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 58 (3): 353–66. Edmondson, Paul, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, eds (2013), A Year of Shakespeare: ReLiving the World Shakespeare Festival, London: Bloomsbury. ‘Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive’ (n.d.), MIT. Available online: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu (accessed 21 November 2020). Grandage, Sarah and Julie Sanders (2014), ‘Shakespeare at a Distance’, in Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (eds), Shakespeare and the Digital World, 75–86, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1992), Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press. Hattaway, Michael, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper, eds (1994), Shakespeare in the New Europe, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Henderson, Diana and Koel Chatterjee (2019), ‘De-centring Shakespeare, Incorporating Otherness: Diana Henderson in Conversation with Koel Chatterjee’, in Anne Sophie Refskou, Marcel Alvaro de Amorim and Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho (eds), Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology, 121–35, London: Bloomsbury. Joubin, Alexa Alice (2013), ‘Global Shakespeares as Methodology’, Shakespeare, 9 (3): 273–90. Kahn, Coppélia (2001), ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (4): 456–78. Kennedy, Colleen (2013), ‘Interview of Ing K, director of Shakespeare Must Die’, Global Shakespeares, 2 September. Available online: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/extra/ interview-of-ing-k/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Kennedy, Dennis, ed. (1993), Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirwan, Peter (2007), ‘“Eke Out Our Imperfections with Your Minds”: The Festival’s Impact on Audience Expectations and Involvement’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 71: 99–102. Lanier, Douglas (2014), ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’, in Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin (eds), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, 21–40, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Leão, Liana de Camargo (2013), ‘James Shapiro: “The rest of the world is showing its insights into Shakespeare”’, Global Shakespeares, 1 September. Available online: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/extra/james-shapiro-the-rest-of-the-worldisshowing-its-insights-into-shakespeare/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Lee, Adele (2018), ‘“How do you solve a problem like China?”: “Global Shakespeare” and the Limitations of the “Cosmopolitan Model”’, seminar paper presented at ‘Rethinking

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the Global in Global Shakespeare’, led by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai at the Shakespeare Association of America annual symposium, Los Angeles, 28–31 March. Lei, Bi-qi Beatrice (2015), ‘Betrayal, Derail, or a Thin Veil: The Myth of Origin’, Shakespeare Survey, 68: 168–82. Li, Ruru (2003), Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Massai, Sonia (2005), ‘Defining Local Shakespeare’, in Sonia Massai (ed.), World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, 3–11, London and New York: Routledge. Massai, Sonia (2014), ‘Ms-Directing Shakespeare at the Globe to Globe Festival, 2012’, in Gordon McMullan, Lena Cohen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds), Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance, 313–22, London: Bloomsbury. Massai, Sonia (2017), ‘Shakespeare With and Without Its Language’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 475–94, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massai, Sonia (2020), Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMullan, Gordon (2016), ‘Introduction’, in Israel Gollancz (ed.), A Book of Homage, v–xxxiii, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan (2009), Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange, Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield. ‘Performance Shakespeare 2016’ (n.d.), Shakespeare 400. Available online: http:// performanceshakespeare2016.org/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Refskou, Anne Sophie, Marcel Alvaro de Amorim and Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho, eds (2019), Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology, London: Bloomsbury. Ryuta, Minami, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies, eds (2001), Performing Shakespeare in Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ (n.d.), Internet Shakespeare Editions. Available online: https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Theater/dbindex.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Shaughnessy, Robert (2009), ‘Accents yet unknown’, paper delivered at the Barbican Centre, 21 November. Shurbanov, Alexander and Boika Sokolova (2001), Painting Shakespeare Red: An EastEuropean Appropriation, New York and London: Associated University Presses. Stříbrný, Zdeněk (2000), Shakespeare and Eastern Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trivedi, Poonam and Dennis Bartholomeusz, eds (2005), India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Weinberger, David (2012), Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge, New York: Basic Books. Young, Sandra (2019), Shakespeare in the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation, London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 2.5

Global mediation: Performing Shakespeare in the age of networked and digital cultures ALEXA ALICE JOUBIN

Performing Shakespeare in modern times is an act of mediation between characters and actors, creating channels between geocultural spaces and time periods. Adaptations in the age of global and digital cultures are often hybrid in style and do not have one single point of cultural origin. The multiplicity of the plural term ‘global Shakespeares’ helps us push back against deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare’s ubiquitous presence. Adaptations accrue nuanced meanings as they move through physical and digital spaces, gaining cultural significance by paying homage to or ‘remediating’ previous interpretations (Bolter and Grusin 2000). Global Shakespeares on stage and screen, therefore, constitute an artistic space for embodied identities to take shape and be contested. As a transhistorical and intermedial practice, global Shakespeares have been deployed to revitalize performance genres, resist colonial appendage and exemplify social reparation. This chapter investigates methodologies for transhistorical inquiry into culturally fluid, contemporary adaptations of early modern texts in relation to digital cultures. In juxtaposing the ways in which localities create site-specific meanings, and the ways in which cultural meanings are dispersed and reframed through ever-evolving forms of digital engagement, this chapter outlines the future challenges and opportunities for contemporary global performances. Here are a few examples that bear contrasting cultural coordinates and yet share important things in common. Set in modern Iran, the political play HamletIRAN (dir. Mahmood KarimiHakak, Siena College, 2011) takes place around a pool, the centrepiece in traditional Persian gardens. Despite his ardent wish to set things right, the tormented hero does not act rashly for fear his country may fall into chaos. Under an image of Mount Damavand, courtiers in turbans scheme while other characters sing Persian folk

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songs. ‘Something is rotten’ in the country where the Green Movement arose in the wake of voting fraud during the 2009 presidential election. While HamletIRAN exemplifies political theatre, other Middle Eastern works eschew politics. Barakah Meets Barakah (Baraka Yua’abil Baraka, dir. Mahmoud Sabbagh, 2016), a rare romantic comedy film from Saudi Arabia, portrays the heterosexual love story between its middle-class male protagonist Barakah (Hisham Fageeh) and wealthy feminist fashion vlogger Barakah (nicknamed Bibi, played by Fatima AlBanawi) and their struggle against strict social conventions. When not issuing citations of minor offences as an ‘ethically conflicted’ municipal functionary (Hennessey 2018: 309), Barakah participates in amateur theatre in Jeddah. As the scene in theatre fades in, Barakah is heard reciting rather stiffly: ‘They bore him barefaced on the bier, and in his grave rain’d many a tear’. A dejected, thickly bearded Barakah appears in drag, in a blonde wig and green teal ball gown, chest hair poking out of an Elizabethan bodice. The scene serves both as comic relief and a sombre reminder of Saudi law that prohibits women from performing with men. The camera follows Barakah as he moves laterally on a small stage handing out flowers, telling an off-camera audience: ‘That’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember’. Improvising and interspersing the otherwise stylized lines with modern language, he continues stage right: ‘And you, take this, I would give you some violets, but they withered all when he died’. Barakah may be awkward and uncomfortable on stage, but he has a dream in which he plays Hamlet alongside his lover who plays Ophelia. Whereas HamletIRAN is designed and billed as an adaptation, Barakah Meets Barakah has not been recognized even as having any relationship to Hamlet (Hennessey 2018: 306–7). Set against the backdrop of the 1955 insurgency in Kashmir, the Hindi-language crime drama Bollywood film Haider (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2014) follows the studentpoet Haider Meer’s (Shahid Kapoor) return from university to search for his missing father. Frustrated by state secrecy around civilian disappearance, Haider gathers a crowd in a market square and gives a motivational speech. A boombox with cassette player in hand, he puts a hangman’s rope around his neck to serve as an imaginary

FIGURE 2  Barakah (Hisham Fageeh) in drag in Barakah Meets Barakah (dir. Mahmoud Sabbagh, El Housh Productions, 2016). Screengrab.

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microphone, alluding to his dire situation. He urges the crowd to reflect on the political crisis: ‘Do we exist or do we not? Chutzpah is our problem!’, referring to Kashmir’s precarious position against India. Likewise, a father’s mysterious death brings his son home to the royal Tibetan court in the period drama film Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006). Prince Lhamoklodan (Purba Rgyal) weighs his option of exacting revenge without inflicting emotional turmoil in his mother who has married his uncle. In contrast, the whodunit thriller The Hungry (dir. Bornila Chatterjee, 2017) takes place almost entirely within the walls of a private estate. A riveting feature film by one of India’s rising female directors, the narrative is set in the mansion and extended family of business tycoon Tathagat Ahuja (Naseeruddin Shah) in contemporary New Delhi. The film builds toward a gory dénouement, a wedding feast where widow Tulsi Joshi (Tisca Chopra) – bent on revenge for the murder of her son – meets Tathagat’s cruelty, with a menu featuring human flesh. After all of the characters die, a group of black goats wander into the banquet hall to devour what is left on the table and to cleanse the sins. The grotesque gives way to a cyclical process of natural turnover. The idea of family as citadel and a source of doom also informs other adaptations, such as the melodramatic Mexican film Huapango (dir. Ivan Lipkies, 2004). Otilio (Alejandro Tommasi), the richest man in Huasteca Tamaulipeca, falls in love with Julia (Lisset), the lead ballerina of a huapango (folk music) troupe. Souring the bond between the couple is Julia’s dance partner, Santiago (Manuel Landeta), a stocky man who secretly loves her. Santiago sees Julia as part of the dancers’ ‘family’. In the final scene, before Otilio kills Julia, the camera moves back and forth between dead silence in the private realm and lively festive music in the public plaza. As the folk music of huapango ‘flaunts its deeply macho discourse’, the film turns ‘the lord’s into the lady’s tragedy’ (Modenessi 2012/13). Family takes on sinister meanings of oppression, too, in postwar films. In Europe, nouvelle vague (New Wave) film director Claude Chabrol uses his Ophélia (Boreal Film, 1963) to comment on France’s postwar identity and economic crisis. Son of

FIGURE 3  Some goats wander into the banquet hall in the final scene of The Hungry (dir. Bornila Chatterjee, Cinestaan Film Company, 2017). Screengrab.

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the factory owning family Lesurf, Yvan (André Jocelyn) wanders the mansion and its grounds reciting poetry. When he stumbles upon Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet in a local cinema, Yvan sets out to become a Hamlet himself – parallel to how James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister embody aspects of Hamlet. An equally melancholic and self-righteous figure also appears in Lao She’s (pen name of Shu Qingchun) 1936 novella New Hamlet. Tian Liede is a posturing, self-proclaimed revolutionary. Like Yvan, Tian disdains his father’s family business. Similar to Yvan, a chance encounter with Shakespeare changes the course of Tian’s life. He is inspired by John Everett Millais’s 1851 oil painting, Ophelia, to become the new Hamlet of modern China – a model brooding intellectual. Performances can be allegorical on screen as well as onstage, but overworked political allegories may lose their impact. In South Africa, John Kani’s landmark performance of Othello in a 1987 production (dir. Janet Suzman) at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg received critical acclaim. Kani is one of the most prominent South African actors today.1 As the very first Black Othello in South Africa, Kani drew on the image of Xhosa warrior chiefs in his portrayal of the Moorish general (Seeff 2018: 154). In the apartheid context, Kani’s presence alone was a milestone in selfrepresentation and equality, similar to Ira Aldridge’s first Black Othello in London in 1825 when exclusively white casts were the norm. The significance of Kani’s and Aldridge’s performances, obviously, is diametrically opposed to Laurence Olivier’s blackface Othello in Stuart Burge’s 1965 film version, which, in turn, inspired Ma Yong’an’s performance in Aosailuo (Beijing Experimental Jingju Theatre, 1983), the first blackface Othello in Beijing opera and the first Chinese operatic adaptation of

FIGURE 4  Yvan (André Jocelyn) walking past a poster advertising Laurence Olivier’s film, Hamlet, in Ophélia (dir. Claude Chabrol, Boreal Film, 1963). Screengrab.

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a Western play after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Blackface performances signified differently in South Africa, the UK and China, due to variances in social discourses about race. In contrast, Kani’s performance of Caliban in a 2009 pan-African Tempest (dir. Janice Honeyman) received uneven reception depending on performance venues. Coproduced by the RSC and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre, the adaptation featured Antony Sher as a Prospero who kept Kani’s Caliban on a tether. Caliban’s costumes and make-up bore traces of a South African shaman. Within South Africa, the production was not as successful as Othello because by 2009 the idea of decolonization was no longer politically revolutionary. However, it received much more favourable reviews when it toured to Britain, where the postcolonial allegory helped white audiences justify enjoyment of the African carnival (Bosman 2010: 109; 113). Neither Africa nor Shakespeare has an intrinsic, unified identity without context.

SITE-SPECIFIC EPISTEMOLOGIES, NETWORKS AND POLYPHONY This brief sampling of global Shakespeares shows that despite their divergent features, adaptations are deeply constituted by and actively shape: 1) site-specific epistemologies; 2) a dense network of cross-references; and 3) a polyphony of voices. First, central to many of these works is the dramaturgically constructed locality – setting, performance venue and cultural reference points of the performers. Directors and performers need to find a new space between fiction and reality in which actors, characters and audiences interact. Once a new locality is constructed, Shakespearean motifs and contemporary aesthetics are deployed to structure a new narrative, sometimes with a straight face, sometimes with parody. The concept of locality encompasses a number of related ideas, including the setting of a drama, the city and venue of a performance, the cultural coordinates of the adaptation and its audience and all the meanings derived from these physical and allegorical sites. Site-specific epistemologies – the production and dissemination of locationbased meanings – inform global performances. Location-specific narratives in the adaptations unfold alongside their intricately crafted mise-en-scène with ethnographic details, revealing the physical, fictional and geocultural dimensions of the cultural work being carried out in the name of Shakespeare. Representations – performative or otherwise – signify relationally, and each locality is further constructed by interactions between local histories embedded in and superimposed on the performances. In the process of adapting Shakespeare, multiple localities are brought together to craft a new narrative. John Kani’s Caliban accrues divergent meanings in Cape Town and London, leading to uneven reception. HamletIRAN and Prince of the Himalayas address topics sensitive to their locality through the floating allegorical structure of Hamlet, while Haider – set and shot in Kashmir – reconstructs local histories of insurgence through a Hamletian, existential crisis for reconciliatory and reclamatory purposes. The Hungry, Huapango and Barakah Meets Barakah

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reference Titus Andronicus, Othello and Hamlet in cursory but creative fashions while mapping the politics of public affairs in Shakespeare onto domestic spaces and aesthetics in Indian, Mexican and Saudi cinemas. Site-specific networks reveal that the transhistorical connections between Shakespeare and ‘us’ are articulated both on the epic scale (such as Haider) and on a personal scale (as in the case of John Kani). Site-specific ideologies also manifest themselves through censorship of or local aversion to particular plays. Japanese censors banned Hamlet in the 1930s due to the theme of regicide. Japan was preparing to challenge European and US dominance in international affairs. The tragedy was banned on the ground of its potential to incite rebellions against the rightist government. Around the same time, Stalin also banned Hamlet along with other tragic plays, for he had declared that life was more joyful for the communist state in 1935. But censorship is not the only reason that a play is not performed. For example, Henry V had never been staged in French in France until 1999 despite a long history of French engagement with Shakespeare including all three parts of Henry VI. As renowned actor Philippe Torreton (recipient of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) puts it, French producers cannot imagine ‘Napoleon being invited to attend a representation of this triumphal English epic in the land of France’ (my translation; 2016: 117–18), especially its portrayal of the French humiliation during the Battle of Agincourt. However, in the post-Brexit context, Henry V is gaining traction as it evolves from ‘a patriotic, partisan drama’ into ‘one of healing and reconciliation’ (March 2019). When Torreton starred in Jean-Louis Benoît’s 1999 La Vie du Roi Henri V in the prestigious venue of the Honour Court of the Palais des Papes during the Festival d’Avignon, he rejoiced at the absence of French predecessors: ‘there is no one between Shakespeare and me, four hundred years since 1599’ (2016: 118), alluding to actors’ typical struggle to differentiate themselves from previous performances of the same roles. Previous productions of the same play haunt the present one by triggering some form of theatrical déjà vu in audiences’ memories, as explored by Marvin Carlson in his The Haunted Stage (2003). Translator Jean-Michel Déprats muses further that another factor hindering the French acceptance of Henry V is its mingling of epic, comedic and tragic modes, which goes against French imaginations of Shakespearean history plays (Lemonnier 2000: 302, 305). Secondly, there is a dense network of cross-references. Adaptations relate more frequently to one another than to Shakespeare as sanctified source material. These examples show that non-Anglophone Shakespeares are not antithetical to Englishlanguage performances; both must negotiate pathways to contingent meanings through transhistorical and cross-cultural axes. Adaptations of Shakespeare in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa are sometimes regarded as distinct colonial or national projects with little connection to one another. For example, Shakespeare’s reception history in South Africa is often characterized as ‘a conduit for Empire’ (Seeff 2018: 1) and Shakespeare’s presence in the Indian education system and culture is commonly regarded as a result of colonial imposition. In fact, there are more aesthetic and ideological connections among global adaptations than first meet the eye, and not all adaptations are routed through cultural hegemony. When Latin American, North American and East Asian directors connected to one another

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through Akira Kurosawa’s canonical film Throne of Blood (1957), Shakespeare’s Macbeth receded into background noise. Alwin Bully’s Dominican short, McB (1997), and Macbett, Aleta Chappelle’s Caribbean film (long in development by Moon Shadow Films since 2013) spoke to Kurosawa’s take on the supernatural, while an English-language stage production paid homage to Kurosawa by retaining key visual elements and even the title from Kurosawa. Throne of Blood (dir. Ping Chong) was staged at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2010. The Asian-American play Shogun Macbeth by John R. Briggs (Pan Asian Repertory, New York, 1985) featured a blind narrator who embodied visual elements from Kurosawa’s mountain spirit and Macbeth’s line ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ (5.5.24): ‘Life is a lying dream, he only wakes who casts the world aside’. Even canonical adaptations traditionally regarded as Anglophone carry crosscultural residues. Peter Brook’s production of Titus Andronicus (1955) in Stratfordupon-Avon (starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh) replaced conventional, naturalistic portrayals of horror with Asian-inspired stylization (such as scarlet streamers signifying Lavinia’s blood after her rape and mutilation) and an abstract, minimalist set. Brook’s work anticipated the use of red ribbons to symbolize blood in Yukio Ninagawa’s production of the same play in 2006 as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works festival. Ninagawa treated the play as myth, because recurring ritual in a cycle is best understood through symbolism. The mostly white stage set contrasted strongly with the red streamers. In Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s campy film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), North American Protestantism is pitched against Latin American Catholicism, which is mapped onto cinematic interpretations of Protestant, Elizabethan England’s anxiety about Catholic Italy, the setting for Shakespeare’s play. Mexico City and Boca del Rio in Veracruz, the film’s primary shooting locations, are dressed up as a fictional American city called Verona Beach. The fictional and geocultural localities, attitudes toward Latinity in the film and Elizabethan English fantasies about Spain and Italy are meshed together to create new localities where youthful exuberance, religious sentiments and early modern and postmodern notions of feud and hatred play out. Likewise, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (double A Films, 2000) appropriates the trope of despondent urban youths and Asian spirituality. Although set in twentyfirst-century New York City, the film contains multiple references to Buddhism, including a clip from Ulrike Koch’s documentary about a pilgrimage, Die Salzmänner von Tibet (The Saltmen of Tibet, 1997), which appears on the backseat video monitor of Claudius’s (Kyle MacLachlan) limousine as he prays. Asian spirituality is appropriated in other scenes beyond this reference to Tibet. One of Almereyda’s ‘to be or not to be’ scenes features footage of Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on ‘interbeing’. He is heard saying: ‘We have the word “to be”, but I propose the word “to interbe”. Because it is not possible to “be” alone. We must “interbe” with everything and everyone else’ on a small television. Half listening, Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) replays a video loop of himself reciting the half-line ‘to be or not to be’ while pointing a pistol at his temple. Global Shakespeares inhabit a post-national space where multiple cultures converge. While the media studies

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theory of convergence culture describes transmedial flow of content (Jenkins 2006: 18), multiple performance styles, genres and platforms converge to form the backbone of global and digital Shakespeares. Hamlet may be the pretext in Chabrol’s Ophélia and Almereyda’s film, but it is merely one of the many nodes the films’ narratives pass through. Other adaptations (Olivier’s earlier film) and extratextual material (Buddhism) are recruited to establish a global (English, French, American, Vietnamese) framework of intertexts. Shakespeare is neither an originary point for linear transmissions of the canon nor an authorizing presence for modes of storytelling. Artists often work across several cultural locations, some of which lie at the crossroads of fiction and reality. The fact that global Shakespeares have become an aggregate of overlapping localities gave rise to the universalist misconception that Shakespeare is everywhere in all localities with equal valence. The local is not always the antithesis to the global or an antidote to the hegemonic domination that has been stereotypically associated with the West. Shakespeare’s plays are repositioned beyond traditionally configured colonial authority. More and more global Shakespeare performances straddle several cultural locations. Films such as Life Goes On (dir. Sangeeta Datta, 2009) and As You Like It (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2006) create cultural locations that are neither here nor there. The British-Asian film Life Goes On follows the disintegration of a BritishIndian family of Hindus in London. The film alludes to King Lear through the family’s redemptive arc in which the father struggles to reconnect with his three daughters after his wife passes away. The youngest daughter Dia (Soha Ali Khan) plays Cordelia in a student production and finds echoes between Lear and events in her family. While Bengal, where the family emigrated from, is referenced, the actions are anchored in London. Branagh’s Japanesque film, As You Like It, dresses up Wakehurst Place with a Zen garden, shrine gate and trappings of a nineteenthcentury Japan torn between samurai and European merchants. Both the motifs in As You Like It and the dream of Japan are deployed ornamentally in the filmmaker’s signature visual romanticism. Similarly, Desdemona Chiang’s stage production of Winter’s Tale with an Asian-American cast (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2016) set the romance in premodern China and the US Old West, combining both Asian and Asian-American senses of place. Such works compel us to reconsider fixed notions of locality. The cultural setting of a dramatic narrative, the geopolitical site of performance and the trajectories of the artists (where they are from, where they are going) are the primary vectors of a work’s cultural and political significance. Thirdly, location-specific meanings are governed by the polyphony of contrasting voices. While polyphony is a well-known concept in musicology, it was introduced to literary studies by Mikhail Bakhtin in his analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels. I use polyphony in both the literal and the metaphorical senses to discuss the synthesis of different voices, accents, body language and music on stage, as well as contrasting voices in reception of touring productions. Part of the pleasure of watching adaptations lies in recognizing allusions. Even the faintest echoes of Shakespeare constitute what Kathleen McLuskie calls ‘attenuated’ allusions (2015: 334). Ophélia echoes Daedalus, Wilhelm Meister and Lao She’s New Hamlet across history and

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culture, deploying the archetype of Hamlet to capture the figure of the despondent in distinctively local contexts. Ophélia also references Olivier’s film version of Hamlet as part of a non-linear network of cross-references. In the play-within-afilm in Barakah Meets Barakah, one hears echoes of familiar lines by Ophelia and sees references to – despite Barakah’s clumsy performance – the iconic scene where the mad Ophelia hands out flowers. The themes of jealousy and domestic violence link Huapango to Othello. Viewers familiar with Hamlet would hear echoes of the tragedy in Haider despite divergences in plot and characterization. Beyond the archetypal narrative of a son avenging his father, there are other parallels and echoes between the two works: talented journalist Arshia Lone (Shraddha Kapoor) is pushed by her father and brother onto a path leading toward Ophelia’s tragic end; the figures of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern morph into the video-store owners Suman and Suman; Haider’s uncle, a Claudius figure, is depicted as corrupt and cunning. Intertextual echoes take a different form in Almereyda’s Hamlet, morphing from Hawke’s Hamlet’s footage of his brooding self into Thich Nhat Hanh’s lecture, trivializing Hamlet’s self-indulgence while offering the Buddhist teaching of interconnectedness as a nobler model. The echoes pitch the individualistic, existential question of being against the Buddhist, community-oriented mode of interbeing. As Terence Hawkes argues, phrases and ideas from Hamlet have been so deeply embedded in everyday speech that it operates simply as ‘a web of quotations’. Several of the works cited above exemplify polyphonic echoes. As a ‘universal cultural reference point’, Hamlet functions as ‘a piece of social shorthand’ (2012: 4). The ‘to be or not to be’ speech is familiar enough to most audiences to allow for recognition even when rewritten as ‘interbe’. The fragmentary allusions to Shakespeare are part of a process of ‘Shakespearization’, the formation of social shorthand (Ridden 2013/14). Site-specific polyphony is also deeply constituted by actors’ accents and cadence ‘[i]n states unborn and accents yet unknown’ to Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, 3.1.113). Accent is as important as racialized and gender differences in global performances in shaping embodied identities. As Sonia Massai observes, accents as ‘markers of social identity’ are often used in performances to ‘activate a different interpretation of the fictive worlds of the plays and to challenge a traditional alignment of Shakespeare with cultural elitism’ (2020: 3). In many of the cases analysed so far, accents are obscured by subtitles, while other adaptations thematize dialects and accents as key vectors of difference in their aural landscape. Accents and other sonic registers such as intonation – along with audiences’ listening habits – collectively form a repository of racial and ethnic identities. Indeed, listening is far from a passive or neutral act. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s research reveals that ‘listening operates as an organ of racial discernment, categorization, and resistance’ (2016: 4). Audiences may listen attentively and selectively to their preferred accent while mishearing unfamiliar accents. In the Singaporean romantic comedy Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah [CheeK], 2000), the stylized language of Romeo and Juliet is heard from an ironic distance as some characters recite their lines with Singaporean accents in a college

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production within the film. When not involved in the play-within-the-film, the characters speak local dialects. Fenson, a dialect-speaking local student, competes with Nick, an English-speaking mixed-race Eurasian, for the role of Romeo. As a son of working-class parents, Fenson’s identity is diametrically opposed to that of Nick, who represents Westernized modernity. Through rote memorization of Romeo’s lines, Fenson eventually wins the role. The play-within-the-film is staged in front of the students’ families. Echoing the actors’ offstage life, the production has the low-ranking characters – such as Tybalt and Benvolio – speak in Cantonese, while Romeo and Juliet use Shakespeare’s lines. As Fenson and Audrey, in a mix of English and Cantonese, perform the ‘balcony’ scene, in which Romeo and Juliet meet after the masked ball, their offstage parents become more and more impatient with their public display of affection, mirroring the behaviours of Romeo’s and Juliet’s parents. The older, parental generation is emotionally detached from and intellectually excluded by the younger generation’s Anglophone education, symbolized by their enactment of Shakespeare. The inter-generational gap is also marked linguistically. Despite their rivalry, the parents of Fenson and Audrey share the same dialect: Cantonese. The younger generation speak Singlish. In the film’s multilingual terrain, racialized differences between the mixed-race Eurasian and local characters of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian descents are coded linguistically: accents, mannerisms and code-switching between different dialects. In Singapore as in the film, standard British English is regarded as superior to Singlish, which, in turn, is superior to other languages and dialects. Singlish is a colloquial creole based on words and grammatical features taken from vernacular English, Malay and Mandarin. In the context of Singapore’s policy of multilingualism, this polyphonic universe rubs against the government’s slogan that Singapore is the ‘New Asia’ and the ongoing ‘Speak Good English’ campaign backed by the state. Adaptations are nurtured by competing and even conflicting voices, and polyphony includes differing and sometimes contradictory voices. The relative significance of artistically constructed echoes in the polyphonic ecosystem is dependent on audiences’ site-specific knowledge. The echoes an audience hears, however, depend on their reading habits and theatre-going history. The Shakespeare polyphony sustains multiple voices of the directors and critics without subordinating any one perspective. As global Shakespeares are quoted in and out of context in a wide range of accents, the meanings of the polyphony fluctuate, because they depend on the site-specific knowledge and experiences of the observers.

GOING VIRAL DIGITALLY DURING COVID-19 In tandem with global tourism, digital videos have facilitated the circulation of disembodied, site-specific meanings of Shakespeare. The rise of global Shakespeares is inseparable from the prevalence of digital video on commercial and open-access platforms, because these platforms provide inter-connected, instantaneous forms of communication for site-specific epistemologies. Distinct from analogue media such as photography, digital video – as a non-linear, non-sequential medium – can

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support instant access to any sequence in a performance, as well as the means to reorder and annotate sequences, and to bring them into meaningful conjunction with other videos, texts and image collections (Joubin 2011: 43). As Alvin Lim notes, the ‘site-specificity’ of digital archives parallels the site-specific reenactment of live performances (2017: 201). Viewing digital Shakespeare as an asynchronous, performed event can help us connect live performances to the concepts of rehearsal and re-play. The outbreak of the global pandemic of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) in early 2020 closed live theatre events and cinemas worldwide, but the crisis – during which global travel and national borders were shut down – also ushered in a new phase of globalization fuelled by digital videos as at-home audiences took to streaming to engage with Shakespeare. The pandemic has led to a proliferation of born-digital and digitized archival videos of Shakespeare in Western Europe, Canada, the UK and the US. Digital streaming – live or pre-recorded, synchronous or asynchronous – has helped Shakespeare go viral on a global scale, and the pandemic is accelerating that process. Like any virus, global Shakespeares adapt quickly to their new, digital host environment. In tandem with the spread of coronavirus, there is a global viral spread of Shakespeare via digital videos that carry site-specific meanings with them in disembodied forms. An idea or motif goes viral when a large number of people share within a short period of time ‘a specific information item … within their social networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own networks to different, often distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number of people who are exposed to the message’ (Nahon and Hemsley 2013: 16). In the twenty-first-century, this process is fuelled by digital tools of networking, and what becomes viral on ‘sociotechnical networks’ is exactly what performances of Shakespeare provide: ‘contagious affect, feelings, and emotions’ (Sampson 2012: 3). The lockdown and stay-at-home orders – measures to contain spread of the virus – have accelerated digital globalization, redefining liveness along the way. As Pascale Aebischer suggests, as a ‘chronological order’ (2020) that seems to slow down time, the lockdown motivates at-home audiences to transcend their temporality by engaging in escapism. Equally important are the spatial constraints of the viral containment measure. Mobility – even within one’s neighbourhood – is severely limited. Audiences who are now ‘bounded in a nutshell’ (Hamlet, Folio 2.2.252) seek virtual connections that transport them beyond their now fixed geographic locations to an alternative universe. If digital broadcasting in the past few years has diversified ‘liveness as a temporal and spatial entity’ (Sullivan 2018: 62), asynchronous digital videos do not so much replicate theatrical experiences as they enable experiential and affective quality on the small screen. Detached from the palpable bodily presence of actors, viewers’ own subjectivity is also disembodied (Aebischer 2020). During the crisis, ongoing at the time of writing, Western European and North American amateur and professional groups from school projects to New York’s Public Theater performed live using video conference tools such as Zoom and social media platforms such as TikTok, making all the world their digital stage. Some of them had a global, multilingual audience in mind. The Public Theater’s online

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initiative, Brave New Shakespeare, posted their actors reading Romeo and Juliet 2.2 in multiple languages and invited the general public to share their own. Actors and audiences also flocked to participatory events (The Tempest, ‘live, interactive, and in your living room’, hosted by Creation Theatre Company and Big Telly Theatre Company) as well as virtual discussion of streaming to overcome the isolation of physical, social distancing in the era of COVID-19 (as in Fundación Shakespeare Argentina’s play readings on Facebook). Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, hosted weekly virtual events entitled ‘Shakespeare Hour LIVE!’ which featured STC’s artistic director Simon Godwin in conversation with actors (Liev Shreiber, F. Murray Abraham, Stacy Keach and others) and scholars (Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Bate and James Shapiro). The episodes were free for members and $10 for non-members. Despite their efforts, the STC was forced to lay off a third of its full-time staff and cut its budget by 44 per cent starting July 2020 (Marks 2020b). To maintain or increase their visibility, and as part of their fundraising campaigns during COVID-19, theatre companies broadcast live or asynchronously to audiences around the world. Professional companies released pre-recorded videos on a timelimited basis at pre-scheduled intervals, replicating the ephemerality and limited availability of live theatre. The pressured – though asynchronous – schedule drummed up excitement and upped the ante of competition against other companies who had also gone digital. A majority of these events were free, while others sold tickets at a fraction of the price for live shows. The Blackfriars Playhouse of the American Shakespeare Center sold tickets to shows in their 2020 season on BLKFRSTV, a new streaming platform, which ‘bring[s] the Playhouse to you, since audiences can’t come to the Blackfriars’ (ASC 2020). Other key players in digital video broadcasting during the pandemic included the Berliner Ensemble, La Comédie-Française, Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Stratford Festival in Canada and the Folger Theatre. Despite the challenges that the pandemic has brought to live theatre, it has also helped a few companies reach mass global audiences on an unprecedented scale. As of 18 May 2020, the Globe’s YouTube channel had attracted 1.9 million viewers for all of their videos (Neil Constable qtd in Dam 2020), while the Donmar Warehouse’s Coriolanus, starring Tom Hiddleston, on National Theatre Live garnered more than half a million views and raised US$ 20,691 between 4 and 11 June 2020. The number of views far exceeds the number of audiences a live production could ever reach within the same one-week period (the Donmar auditorium has only 251 seats; even the National Theatre has a total of only 2,417 seats across its three venues). Since an entity can only earn at most around $1,000 from advertisement revenue for a YouTube video with even half a million views (Zach 2020), financial gains remain ancillary to these online projects. Further, not all productions translate well to the streaming format on the small screen (Marks 2020a). Digital broadcasting is deployed as a symbolic means to maintain connection with the companies’ current and future patrons and, more importantly, to encourage donation. It is a crucial tool to help theatre companies remain relevant in a time of crisis. In its bid for support from the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the London Globe

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has cited the large number of views of their free YouTube channel as evidence of the ‘huge appetite for culture at a time of national crisis’ (Dam 2020). Largely supported by self-generated revenue and with a predominantly international tourist audience, the Globe is unusual among major UK theatres in not being funded by Arts Council England, leading to concerns early in the crisis about its financial precarity. As comforting, familiar go-to-material for uplifting the spirits (W. B. Worthen qtd in Soloski 2020), Shakespeare skyrocketed to the top of the list of digital performance events during the pandemic in the forms of memes (e.g. Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the plague), quotable quotes, performances of select scenes and full productions. The MIT Global Shakespeares open-access digital performance video archive (co-founded and codirected by Alexa Alice Joubin and Peter S. Donaldson), for example, saw a dramatic fourfold growth in internet traffic of 403.23 per cent between January 2020, just before COVID-19 became a global pandemic, and late April 2020, when 54 per cent of the global population (4.2 billion people) were subject to complete or partial lockdowns (WHO 2020). This was a fivefold growth in traffic compared to the same period in 2019. The increase in number of unique visitors to the peer-reviewed, vetted open-access site was particularly evident from South America, Europe, India and East Asia.2 The MIT project provides free online access to performances from many parts of the world as well as peer-reviewed essays and vetted metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field. As a curated and crowd-sourced archive, MIT Global Shakespeares suggests videos of potential interest based on the user’s history. There are also several educational modules that are built upon a database of videos. The site’s traffic data further suggests that visitors tend to sample and compare pivotal scenes across productions (such as the division-of-the-kingdom scene in contrasting adaptations of King Lear) rather than lingering to watch performances in their entirety. ‘Distracted concentration’ (Aebischer 2020) – variegated pathways through multiple performances – is as much a feature of piecemeal consumptions of global Shakespeares as it is a function of the global Internet economy. Akin to the practice of channel surfing on television, distracted concentration propels the consumption of digital videos in a fragmentary manner. In contrast to cinema or live theatre, asynchronous digital videos – networked and non-linear in nature – do not require audiences to sit through an entire show in one go. Uses of Hamlet’s soliloquy of ‘to be or not to be’ in a wide range of films are a prime example of how Shakespearean motifs and language circulate globally in attenuated allusions and fragmented citations. While the part cannot stand in for the whole, there are unique advantages to distracted concentration as an intellectual exercise. Viewing a clip of Cordelia’s silent protest from Peter Brook’s existentialist 1971 film of King Lear and a clip of Lear’s reaction from Grigori Kozintsev’s Korol Lir (1971) may give partial or false impressions of the aesthetics and overall agendas of these directors. However, viewing performances in this ‘distracted’ fashion helps to resist the tyranny of the few canonized adaptations and their privileged interpretations. Consuming performances through arbitrary as well as curated pathways sheds new light on performances that do not tend to be discussed side by side, such as Brook’s and

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Kozintsev’s films of Lear, Akira Kurosawa’s contrasting tragic vision in Ran (1985) and the aforementioned Buddhist-inflected Hamlet by Almereyda. When new pathways – enabled by digital tools – open up, so do new interpretive possibilities. Juxtaposing the clips of the division-of-the-kingdom scene, for example, allows us to re-examine the critical tendency to explain Lear’s problems away as part of a perceived ethical burden. The scene in Brook’s film version is dominated by close-ups of Lear and other characters, framing Paul Scofield’s Lear as a solemn statue. In contrast to Laurence Olivier’s Lear in the made-for-television film (dir. Michael Elliott, 1983), who laughs off Cordelia’s initial response, Scofield’s Lear speaks methodically and remains stern throughout the scene, which ends with him calmly banishing Cordelia. Cordelia’s aside is cut, thereby diminishing the weight of a potentially revelatory moment as well as Cordelia’s self-discovery. Placed side by side with Ran and other versions that contain elements of merriment, this scene in Brook’s film sets a much more sinister and nihilistic tone for the entire narrative. Drawing on one single line by Goneril (‘When he returns from hunting / I will not speak with him’, 1.3.8–9), Kurosawa presents a lavish, extended opening scene of boar hunting. It has become a critical commonplace to read Lear’s story as the devolution of a man with privileges to an unaccommodated animal. The wild boar is a metaphor for Hidetora’s (Lear) degeneration from the hunter to the hunted. However, the film’s Buddhist framework hints at Hidetora’s reincarnation in the form of a boar after death. Drawing on Shinto Buddhism that posits porous lines between humanity and the natural world, Ran places its characters firmly among the animals and in an epic natural landscape. Hidetora frequently asks where he is rather than who he is. Scofield’s Lear suffers from a similar identity crisis, but he is at the same time firmly planted in his solitude and tragic immobility. External, sartorial signs of regality are largely absent in Scofield’s Lear. In contrast to Elliott’s film, this scene in Brook’s film does not treat the division of the kingdom ceremonially. Bingewatching different versions of the same play leads to new research questions that do not seek to explain Lear’s problems away or legitimize the characters’ suffering. Are Lear’s daughters implicated as a source of the tragedy of King Lear that has been said to be coded masculine? Does Cordelia’s hanging enhance the tragic pathos surrounding her journey, or does it help to highlight the senseless male suffering? How does Lear speak to cultures far removed politically and historically from early modern England, and make certain themes of contemporary cultural life more legible, such as the generational gap, filial piety, loyalty and duty? Three observations can be made of the current, digital phase of global Shakespeares in relation to: 1) a user-centric culture; 2) the rise of Shakespeare on the small screen; and 3) digital ghosting. First, the current, digitally enhanced wave of global Shakespeares has turned audiences into users of the Shakespearean canon and motifs, prioritizing user participation as ‘the central tenet of [the] organizational structure’ of Web 2.0 (Fazel and Geddes 2017: 3). User-centric tools empower and disseminate usergenerated content in equitable forms globally. Students have been re-envisioned as users in digital cultures in recent years (Carson and Kirwan 2014: 244), and now the pandemic has converted the general public into users of global Shakespeares.

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User-centric interactions with Shakespeare’s plays supplant the reader-centric mode of engagement, which in turn replaced the oral culture of Shakespeare’s times. Digital videos, obviously, are not a magic bullet, as they require substantial bandwidth and resources to access. However, despite the challenge of maintaining net neutrality and equal access, generally speaking, in a decentralized model of networked, digital culture, the users have more direct engagement with, if not control over, multimodal representations of events. Secondly, the rise of performances on the small screen has important implications for global Shakespeares. The duality of text and performance is no longer a problem to be diagnosed, but rather an opportunity to be explored. Shakespeare on the small screen operates with ‘an individuated integrity while also engaging in shifting relationships’ with other media such as the codex book and digitized facsimile of an early modern text with marginalia (Desmet 2017). As opposed to cinematic Shakespeare and live-broadcast Shakespeare on the big screen, Shakespeare on the small screen is inherently global in its mobility and reach. Small-screen Shakespeare includes films intended for the multiplex but reformatted for home consumption either in their afterlife or out of necessity during the pandemic; curated, digitized videos of productions; the often Quixotic, parodic, ad hoc videos of YouTube (which are inherently unstable and ephemeral); and films on DVD for personal use. In addition to personal computers and televisions, small-screen Shakespeares appear on mobile phones, tablets, handheld devices, apps and other forms of archival and pedagogical experience that actively encourage and even obligate user curation and interaction with the cultural records. Big-screen Shakespeares support a more communal viewing experience, while small-screen Shakespeare gives the users more control. In W. B. Worthen’s words, the ‘technologies of performance’ put playtexts and performances – whether text-based or not – to work in an interactive environment (2010: xvi and 34). Shakespeare on the small screen combines the workings of the technologies of representation and the literary foundation of performance behaviours. Thirdly, dynamically co-constituted by the technologies of representation and a repertoire of evolving, shared knowledge, digital Shakespeares destabilize and expand the repertoire, leading to the phenomenon of digital ghosting. In a media-rich environment, different versions of the same play would haunt a user’s experience with the story. As Danielle Rosvally theorizes, when users are able to pause an encounter with an iteration of a Shakespearean theme, multiple ‘activation points for knowledge economies’ become more easily accessible. Users can put one video on hold while opening another video to gather more information before resuming the encounter (2017: 151). They can mesh the contrasting versions or view them side by side. Small-screen Shakespeares redistribute the power of collecting, rearranging and archiving cultural memories away from a centralized authority to the hands of users (Derrida 1995: 3). The repertoire of global Shakespeares thus expands to include not only performative kinetic energy but also the rich networks of instantaneous cross references. While in the 1990s one typically encountered global Shakespeare for the first time through film or theatre, in our times the initial encounters occur predominantly

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on digital platforms in the form of video clips, memes or quotes. It has become more common for non-professional readers and audiences to encounter global Shakespeares in fragmented forms, such as the Ophelia scene in Barakah Meets Barakah. Global Shakespeares thrive in hybrid cultural and digital spaces, moving through and beyond such traditional and emerging metropolitan centres as London, Craiova, Edinburgh, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo. Global Shakespeares are a transhistorical phenomenon rooted in variously articulated cultural and digital locations, because site-specific epistemologies carry weight ideologically when art is produced in post-national spaces where cross-cultural borrowings are the norm. There are multiple non-hierarchical entry points for motifs to flow through disparate cultural spaces and through genres of stage and screen. To further our understanding of Shakespeare in a post-national and post-pandemic era, it is important to engage with the hybrid cultural themes that inform many adaptations.

NOTES 1. Recipient of the Order of Ikhamanga, John Kani is recognized for his contributions to ‘theatre and … the struggle for a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa’ (South African Government 2005). The main venue in Johannesburg’s Market Theatre was renamed John Kani Theatre in his honour. Globally Kani is celebrated for his performance of T’Chaka in the blockbusters Captain America: Civil War (dir. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, Marvel Studios, 2016) and Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, Marvel Studios, 2018). He also voiced Rafiki in The Lion King (dir. Jon Favreau, Walt Disney Pictures, 2016). 2. In contrast to visits or ‘hits’, ‘unique visitors’ refers to the number of people who visit a given website. A unique visitor is a distinct individual who may visit a site once or multiple times; the individual is counted just once.

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale (2020), ‘Viral Shakespeare: Binge-watching Hamlet in Lockdown’, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, virtual lecture on Zoom, May 20. ASC (2020), ‘BLKFRSTV’, American Shakespeare Center. Available online: https:// americanshakespearecenter.com/ (accessed 12 June 2020). As You Like It (2006), [Film] dir. Kenneth Branagh, UK and USA: BBC and HBO. Barakah Meets Barakah (2016), [Film] Dir. Mahmoud Sabbagh, Saudi Arabia: El Housh Productions. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bosman, Anston (2010), ‘Cape of Storms: The Baxter Theatre Centre–RSC Tempest, 2009’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61 (1): 108–17. Carlson, Marvin (2001), The Haunted Stage The Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Carson, Christie and Peter Kirwan (2014), ‘Conclusion: Digital Dreaming’, in Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (eds), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, 238–57, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chicken Rice War (2000), [Film] Dir. Chee Kong Cheah [CheeK], Singapore: Mediacorp Raintree Pictures. Dams, Tim (2020), ‘Shakespeare’s Globe Could Close Permanently due to Coronavirus, U.K. Legislators Warn’, Variety, 18 May. Available online: https://variety.com/2020/ legit/uncategorized/shakespeares-globe-theatre-risk-closure-coronavirus-1234609264/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Desmet, Christy (2017), ‘Alien Shakespeares 2.0’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 35. Available online: https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3877 (accessed 21 November 2020). Derrida, Jacques (1995), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Die Salzmänner von Tibet (The Saltmen of Tibet) (1997), [Film] Dir. Ulrike Koch, Germany: Bayerischer Rundfunk. Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes (2017), ‘Introduction’, in Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (eds), The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Haider (2014), [Film] Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, India: VB Pictures. Hamlet (2000), [Film] Dir. Michael Almereyda, USA: double a Films. Hawkes, Terence (2012), Meaning by Shakespeare, London: Routledge. Hennessey, Katherine (2018), Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula, Global Shakespeares series, ed. Alexa Alice Joubin, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Huapango (2004), [Film] Dir. Ivan Lipkies, Mexico: Vlady Realizadores. The Hungry (2017), [Film] Dir. Bornila Chatterjee, India: Cinestaan Film Company. Jenkins, Henry (2006), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Joubin, Alexa Alice (2011), ‘Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive’, Shakespeare Survey, 64: 38–51. Joubin, Alexa Alice and Peter S. Donaldson, eds (2018), MIT Global Shakespeares. Available online: http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu (accessed 21 November 2020). King Lear (1971), [Film] Dir. Peter Brook, UK: Filmways. King Lear (1983), [Film] Dir. Michael Elliott, UK: Granada Television. Korol Lir (1971), [Film] Dir. Grigori Kozintsev, Soviet Union: Lenfilm. Lao She (2004), ‘Xin Hanmuliede [New Hamlet]’ (1936), in Lao She xiaoshuo quanji [Complete Collection of Lao She’s Novels], 12 vols, vol. 10, 443–59, Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe. Life Goes On (2009), [Film] Dir. Sangeeta Datta, UK: SD Films, 2009. Lim, Alvin Eng Hui (2017), ‘Thinking Virtually in a Distracted Globe: Archiving Shakespeare in Asia’, in Toni Sant (ed.), Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving, 189–202, London: Bloomsbury. Lemonnier, Delphine (2000), ‘Rencontre autour d’Henri V: Phillippe Torreton et JeanLouis Benoit.’ Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 18: 301–7.

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March, Florence (2019), ‘The Problematic Reception of Henry V in France: A Case Study’, in Sujata Iyengar and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (eds), Focus on Henry V: Navigating Digital Text, Performance, and Historical Resources, Scalar Institute. Available online: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/henry-v/the-problematic-reception-ofhenry-v-in-france-a-case-study-by-florence-march (accessed 21 November 2020). Marks, Peter (2020a), ‘In the Midst of the Virus, Theatre Migrates to the Web. The Results Are Spotty’, Washington Post, 10 April. Available online: https://www. washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/in-the-midst-of-the-virus-theater-migrates-to-theweb-the-results-are-spotty/2020/04/09/fdf81004-78d1-11ea-a130-df573469f094_ story.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Marks, Peter (2020b), ‘Shakespeare Theatre Company sheds a third of its staff’, Washington Post, July 15. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ entertainment/theater_dance/shakespeare-theatre-company-sheds-a-third-of-itsstaff/2020/07/14/957f6706-c54e-11ea-8ffe-372be8d82298_story.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Massai, Sonia (2020), Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLuskie, Kathleen (2015), ‘Afterword’, in Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (eds), Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, 323–38, London: Bloomsbury. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel (2012/13). ‘“Is this the Noble Moor?”: Re-viewing Othello on Screen through “Indian” (and Indian) Eyes’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7.2 (Fall 2012/Winter 2013). Available online: www. borrowers.uga.edu/490/show (accessed 21 November 2020). Nahon, Karine and Jeff Hemsley (2013), Going Viral, New York: Polity Press. Ophélia (1963), [Film] Dir. Claude Cabrot, France: Boreal Film. Public Theater (2020), [Online Reading] Brave New Shakespeare Challenge. Available online: https://publictheater.org/news-items/buckets/Features/brave-new-shakespearechallenge/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Prince of the Himalayas (2006), [Film] Dir. Sherwood Hu, China: Hus Entertainment. Ran (1985), [Film] Dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan: Toho Studios. Ridden, Geoffrey M. (2013/14), ‘The Bard’s Speech: Making it Better; Shakespeare and Therapy in Film’, Borrowers and Lenders, 8 (2). Available online: http://www. borrowers.uga.edu/1015/show (accessed 21 November 2020). Rosvally, Danielle (2017), ‘The Haunted Network: Shakespeare’s Digital Ghost’, in Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (eds), The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, 149–65, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sampson, Tony D. (2012), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Seeff, Adele (2018), South Africa’s Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity, Global Shakespeares series, ed. Alexa Alice Joubin, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Soloski, Alexis (2020), ‘Is This a Livestream I See Before Me?’, New York Times, 13 May. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/theater/shakespeare-online. html (accessed 21 November 2020).

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South African Government (2005), ‘Bonisile John Kani’, South African Government. Available online: https://www.gov.za/about-government/bonisile-john-kani-1943 (accessed 21 November 2020). Stoever, Jennifer Lynn (2016), The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, New York: New York University Press. Sullivan, Erin (2018), ‘The Audience is Present: Aliveness, Social Media and the Theatre Broadcast Experience’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osbourne (eds), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, 59–75, London: Bloomsbury. Throne of Blood (1975), [Film] Dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan: Toho Studios. Torreton, Philippe (2016), Thank you, Shakespeare!, Paris: Flammarion. WHO (World Health Organization) (2020), Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. Available online: https://covid19.who.int/ (accessed 21 November 2020). William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), [Film] Dir. Baz Luhrmann, USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Worthen, W. B. (2010). Drama: Between Poetry and Performance, Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Zach (2020), ‘How Much Does YouTube Pay for 1 Million Views?’, Looxcie, 15 January. Available online: https://looxcie.com/million-views-youtube-money (accessed 21 November 2020).

CHAPTER 2.6

Canon: Framing not-Shakespearean performance EOIN PRICE

In a characteristically playful essay, Terence Hawkes reflects on the relationship between the beginning and the ending of Hamlet, questioning when, exactly, the play can be said to start: We can even ask, as amateurs in playhouse dynamics, and in respect of the experience of a live audience in the theatre, when does the play effectively begin? Is it when the first sentry walks out on to the stage? Or has the play already begun in our mind’s eye as we enter the theatre, leave our house, get up on that morning, buy our ticket some days/months ago? In our society, in which Hamlet finds itself embedded in the ideology in a variety of roles, the play has, for complex social and historical reasons, always already begun. And on to its beginning we have always already imprinted a knowledge of its course of action, and its ending. (1986: 94) Underscoring the point, Hawkes gives his essay the title Telmah, defamiliarizing Shakespeare’s famous play by reversing its name. As the above quotation indicates, Hawkes chose Hamlet as his subject because of its canonical centrality, its embeddedness in the ‘ideology’. But not all of Shakespeare’s plays are as socially entrenched as Hamlet. The point Hawkes makes would not have worked in the same way if he had chosen a different play as his subject, if he had entitled his essay Selcirep. Perhaps it would be stretching things to claim that Pericles is ‘always already begun’ or that it is ‘imprinted’ on its audiences in the same way as Hamlet. But while audiences might not necessarily have a play like Pericles firmly in their mind, Shakespeare’s cultural status affects the way audiences approach his plays. As Stephen Purcell notes, ‘ideas about Shakespearean spectatorship circulate widely in culture more broadly, and audiences will inevitably arrive at a Shakespearean performance with certain preconceptions about what their role is likely to involve’ (2013: 147). These preconceptions can take many forms, for many reasons, and

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may be undeclared or unexamined, but they begin to form before the lights go down or the actors enter. So, while Hawkes imagines that Hamlet may begin when the theatregoer buys their ticket, perhaps that point is much earlier. In her work on Shakespearean playbills and posters, for example, Carol Chillington Rutter argues that ‘the Shakespeare play begins on the street, when the bill – or poster – smacks you right in the face’ (2007: 269). Early modern plays not by Shakespeare might also begin before they have begun. Theatregoers come to any play with preconceptions, regardless of how well they know the play they are seeing. Drawing on Hans Robert Jauss’s reader-response theory of the ‘horizon of expectation’ (1982), Susan Bennett develops the idea of inner and outer theatrical frames to account for the process by which audiences develop preconceptions and through which theatre companies might cultivate expectations. For Bennett, the inner frame is constituted by the performance and its playing space; the outer frame is ‘concerned with theatre as a cultural construct through the idea of the theatrical event, the selection of material for production, and the audience’s definitions and expectations of a performance’ (1990: 1–2). Shakespeare’s privileged status in elite and popular culture imbues him with cultural meaning in a way that other dramatists and plays do not enjoy, but audiences can build impressions of any play they go to watch, whether it be Hamlet or Henry Chettle’s Hoffman. My aim, then, is to expose some of the cultural assumptions that attend the performance of early modern plays not by Shakespeare and to show how attempts to frame such productions can affect audience responses. Ironically, one of the main ways in which audiences are invited, or compelled, to anticipate not-Shakespearean drama is through the ghostly presence of Shakespeare himself. The terms often used in academic writing and media reviews, ‘not-Shakespeare’ or ‘Shakespeare’s contemporaries’, figure early modern drama specifically in relation to Shakespeare. Some scholars and theatre practitioners have found the category of the not-Shakespearean productive, using it to challenge ingrained, conservative ideals about culture enshrined in Shakespeare’s canonical identity. In her influential discussion of the ‘Jacobean’, Bennett argues that the revenge tragedies and city comedies of early modern England transgress social expectations, offering ‘disruptive and occasionally emancipatory’ (1996: 95) possibilities. Extending this work, Pascale Aebischer argues that filmmakers like Derek Jarman draw upon the Jacobean aesthetic Bennett details to ‘communicate an alternative cultural memory’ (2013: 4) that contrasts with conventional, Shakespearean modes of performance. Peter Kirwan also addresses the oppositional potential of not-Shakespearean performance modes, focusing not only on plays which ‘react explicitly against the canonical edifice’ (Kirwan 2017: 89) by embracing their not-Shakespearean status, but also gesturing towards the utility of the Jacobean aesthetic for Shakespeare producers seeking to jolt Shakespearean performance out of a perceived conservative malaise. In these readings, ‘Jacobean’ performance can subvert the expectations of Shakespearean performance. But embedded within Bennett’s argument about the transgressive power of the not-Shakespearean is an acknowledgement that Jacobean modes of performance risk collapsing into ‘radical chic’ (1996: 83), offering only the veneer of dissidence. Jem

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Bloomfield addresses this concern in his discussion of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the archetypal ‘Jacobean’ tragedy. Bloomfield observes that The Duchess of Malfi has become a safely canonical play, which offers ‘comfort’ (2013: 38) rather than disruption. Over several decades, he argues, scholars and practitioners have enabled the play’s canonization by situating it in opposition to Shakespeare, but what once seemed like a fruitful frame of reference may have come to feel staid. While Kirwan’s essay points towards the continued power of the Jacobean aesthetic, he, too has reservations about what (following Marvin Carlson) he calls the haunting of the not-Shakespearean by Shakespeare. The habitual and perhaps inevitable comparison of the early modern and the Shakespearean can result in enjoyable burlesques of Shakespearean authority, as Aebischer and Kathryn Prince note in their discussion of the RSC’s 2011 Swan production of Philip Massinger’s The City Madam, which ‘good-humouredly sen[t] up its own conferral of royal status on Shakespeare’ (2012: 10) through cross-casting and cross-marketing. But it can be restrictive and unhelpful too, forcing not-Shakespearean plays to conform to a supposed Shakespearean standard. In this chapter, then, I aim to call attention to some of the other frames of reference which may inform the performance of not-Shakespearean plays. It may not be possible (and it may not even be completely desirable) to avoid the kind of Shakespearean haunting Kirwan describes, but it is possible to identify other competing influences and to investigate what these alternative frames might afford to producers and consumers of early modern drama. Focusing in particular on the RSC’s 2014 Roaring Girls season of early modern plays, I examine the frames through which the productions and their advertising materials explicitly or implicitly invited their audiences to look, and the professional reviews by mainstream theatre critics which both interpreted the productions through those frames and constructed new frames for their readers. Finally, I turn to the more ephemeral media of blogs, tweets and newspaper comments to gauge a sense of how audiences responded to the productions, in some cases corroborating and, in some cases, challenging the verdicts of prominent professional reviewers. As not-Shakespearean plays are, on the whole, much less regularly performed than Shakespeare plays, their framing seems especially important, and the terms used to frame them peculiarly adhesive. Given the relative infrequency with which most not-Shakespearean plays are performed, expectations cultivated for a production of an early modern play and the judgements made about that production can come to define the play for decades. Jeremy Lopez laments that the canon of early modern dramatic texts ‘subject to and available for scholarship, pedagogy, and appreciation has shrunk considerably since the eighteenth century’ (2014: 14). This point is also true of the theatrical repertory. Those noncanonical plays that are performed may be subject to damaging criticism. Massinger’s The City Madam, which the RSC produced at the Swan in 2011, and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, which was performed at the same theatre in 2015, were judged harshly by some newspaper critics. In The Guardian, Michael Billington declared that Massinger was a ‘scattergun satirist’ and that The City Madam ‘falls well short of a masterpiece’ (2011); Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph condemned Ford’s ‘crude dramatic contrivance’, while the review’s

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headline described the play as ‘second-rate Shakespeare’ (2015). Not all reviewers agreed with these negative assessments, but what is striking is that critics frequently make judgements not about (or not only about) the success of the production, but the quality of the play. Judging a play is of course, part of the job of a critic reviewing a newly written play, but rarely performed not-Shakespearean plays are placed in a particularly invidious position because they are liable to be judged in Shakespearean terms, rather than being treated on their own terms. Perceived faults in productions of rarely performed early modern plays are usually attributed to playwrights when they may as well be the cause of direction, acting or audience expectation. A small band of plays by better-known authors such as Christopher Marlowe have had more fortune on contemporary stages, but they too fall victim to the frames which are created for them. Dido, Queen of Carthage, for example, has received mainstream attention for productions at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003, the National Theatre in 2009 and the RSC’s Swan Theatre in 2017, but was advertised by the RSC as a ‘rarely told story’.1 The rarely performed marketing tag casts the RSC, and their audience, as intrepid adventurers, rediscovering a lost classic, but it also elides a rich recent theatrical history, reinscribing the play as marginal. The ‘rarely told’ claim was in turn reiterated by several reviewers. Billington argued that ‘one of the joys’ of Dido, Queen of Carthage ‘lies in discovering a virtually unknown play’ (2017). Billington made this argument by referring to the ‘dreadful’ 2003 Globe production which, he thought, completely misjudged the play. Thus, the 2017 RSC production seems effectively an entirely new play when, to the reviewer’s mind, performed properly. This reading, however, entails a convenient omission of information about the intervening production at the National Theatre, a production that Billington favourably reviewed, noting it was ‘inspiring to see a forgotten dramatic landmark rendered with such style and dignity’ (2009). Billington’s review is not merely an oversight, but rather a reiteration of one of the production’s explicit frames. The marketing and reviewing of Dido, Queen of Carthage therefore collaborate, intentionally or otherwise, in the marginalization of the play. Even though several reviewers deemed both the play and its production a success, the terms used to frame them have had an arguably injurious impact on the play. But these terms also serve as an example of the power of the outer frame and the importance of attending to its effects on not-Shakespearean drama. In what follows, I will consider the varying frames applied to not-Shakespearean plays performed alongside each other in a single season at the RSC’s Swan Theatre.

ADVERTISING THE RSC ROARING GIRLS SEASON In 2013, the RSC announced that its 2014 summer season would include a special programme of early modern plays, thus creating a set of expectations long before the plays had been cast, let alone performed. In her introduction to a special issue on the 2014 season, Kate Wilkinson quotes some of the salient details of the announcement (2015: 242), but the full press release is worth further consideration (Broadway World Newsdesk 2013). The document begins by detailing the summer productions

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in the company’s main house, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, focusing for its first two paragraphs on Gregory Doran’s dual productions of the two parts of Henry IV. The announcement lists the main cast members, Antony Sher (Falstaff), Alex Hassell (Hal), Jasper Britton (Henry IV) and Paola Dionisotti (Mistress Quickly), situating all four actors in relation to their previous RSC roles. The second paragraph reveals that these two productions will be cross-cast and that they will transfer to the Barbican, in London, ‘after runs in Stratford, Newcastle upon Tyne’s Theatre Royal and a five week UK tour of Number One theatres’. The press release takes particular care to stress the significance of the Barbican transfer (which gave the RSC a regular London home for the first time since 2002) and its related activities which include collaborations between the RSC Education and Barbican Guildhall Creative Leaning ‘to engage new and existing audiences with events, workshops and special projects in east London schools and communities’. These opening statements confer canonical precedence on the Henry IV productions: they are the headline news as suggested by their performance on the main stage, on tour and in a special ‘Live from Stratfordupon-Avon’ screening, broadcast throughout the world and free to UK schools. The other RST production, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, directed by Simon Godwin, is implicitly secondary. It occupies the third paragraph in the press release, which is itself briefer than the previous two paragraphs. The announcement describes the play as ‘Shakespeare’s early exuberant romantic comedy’ and it is possible to read the word ‘early’ as an implicit comment on the play’s artistic naivety. This sense of aesthetic immaturity was remarked upon in several reviews. In The Financial Times, Ian Shuttleworth commented explicitly on the play’s earliness, noting that ‘it has its full share of tyro flaws’ (2014a), while in The Evening Standard, Fiona Mountford wrote that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is ‘packed with all sorts of devices that Shakespeare would go on to employ more profoundly elsewhere’ (2014). The press release then moves from the noteworthiness of the play’s earliness to its comparatively sparse performance history. The main selling point seems to be that Godwin’s production is the first on the RST stage for forty-five years. David Thacker directed the play in a 1991 Swan production that transferred to the Barbican, Edward Hall directed the play at the Swan in 1998 and Fiona Buffini directed it at the Swan in 2004 ahead of a national tour, but the decision to emphasize the fact of its being performed on the main stage underscores the canonical importance attached to the RST while also hinting at the play’s canonically fringe position. The Two Gentlemen of Verona had a shorter run of performances than the Henry IV productions and did not tour, but it was nonetheless played at the main house and received a live screening that broadened its audience significantly. It therefore occupies a liminal position between the canonically central Henry IV plays, directed by the company’s artistic director and starring the celebrated Sher in the role of the ‘infamous’ Falstaff, and the obscurer works performed by the RSC at their other venues. Having detailed the Shakespearean productions at the RST, the press release turns its attention to the Swan’s Roaring Girls season of ‘three rarely performed Jacobethan plays’. This season is already, then, framed by Shakespeare, and this framing is reiterated by the marketing statement that the Swan Theatre was returning ‘to its original purpose as a home for the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries’.

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The three advertised plays, The Roaring Girl, Arden of Faversham and The White Devil (at this point The Witch of Edmonton had not been announced) are explicitly linked to and therefore ripe for comparison with Shakespeare. At the same time, the Swan was presented as a not-Shakespearean space. Unusually, given the readiness of marketing departments to promote dubious Shakespearean connections, Arden of Faversham was not marketed as Shakespearean, despite claims in the 2013 RSC collection William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays that Shakespeare had a hand in its authorship. Moreover, the theatre was also figured as a female space, given that the season was led by Deputy Artistic Director Erica Whyman and that the plays, each directed by a woman, are said to contain ‘some of the great parts written for and about women’. Drawing on Bennett’s theory of the radical potential of the ‘Jacobean’, Emma Whipday notes that the Roaring Girls season was presented as a transgressive ‘alternative’ to the cultural prestige of the male-directed Shakespeare plays in the main house (2015: 282). In fact, Shakespeare was not entirely absent from the Swan Season, which also featured a production of The Rape of Lucrece, adapted for the stage by Elizabeth Freestone and Feargal Murray and performed by Camille O’Sullivan. But this production was afforded a more marginal position within the press release, a point underscored by its very limited run. Its femalecentred story, coupled with its status as a Shakespearean poem, which required adaptation for the stage, arguably made it easier for the advertisers to present it as not-Shakespearean (or not-fully Shakespearean) and therefore suitable for inclusion in the ‘alternative’ space of the Swan. But while the RSC’s programming and marketing decisions celebrate the performance of not-Shakespearean drama, and the representation of female experience, while providing a platform for female directors and performers, they also frame the season as ultimately secondary to the main, male, Shakespearean business at the RST. The marketing materials, therefore, strike an uneasy balance between promoting their subjects and presenting them as marginal or marginalized. The Roaring Girl, Arden of Faversham and The White Devil are described as rarely performed, but the press release seeks to situate each play in relation to its previous RSC productions. Each earlier production authorizes the current production. Arden of Faversham is publicized as having ‘only been performed twice by the RSC’, but those productions were each directed by RSC grandees. The document notes that Buzz Goodbody produced the play in 1970 at the Roundhouse and Terry Hands directed it at The Other Place in 1982. Arden of Faversham’s history is figured here as both curiously marginal and yet illustrious. Similarly, The Roaring Girl is advertised as having only been performed once before at the RSC, but the fact that Helen Mirren, a well-known and highly regarded actor, played the role of Moll serves as an endorsement of the play. This dual instinct to balance the attractions of obscurity (which promises a new theatrical experience) and canonicity (which reassuringly affirms the quality of the dramatic material) encapsulates the challenge of advertising early modern plays. The RSC marketing department apparently invite audiences to encounter the Roaring Girls season through these two ostensibly contradictory frames.

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The initial RSC announcement reveals how the company’s marketing department first publicized the 2014 season, but once the announcement was made it was left to other media groups to decide how best to disseminate and frame that information. Some outlets published the announcement in full, while others summarized the press release, reordering the announcements to suit whatever story the reporter thought might appeal most to their readership. The BBC (2013), for example, ran with the story about the RSC’s three-year deal with the Barbican, highlighting the previously announced transfer of Doran’s production of Richard II, starring David Tennant (who was also the subject of the article’s photograph). The forthcoming Henry IV productions were thus presented as secondary, in turn pushing the Roaring Girls season further into the single sentence of the antepenultimate paragraph. But if the BBC presentation of the season managed further to marginalize the notShakespearean productions, Hannah Furness in The Telegraph capsized canonical expectation by leading with not-Shakespeare, relegating Henry IV to the final paragraphs (2013). The canonical politics of this decision were vexed further by the decision to additionally foreground the RSC’s gender-reversed The Taming of the Shrew. Directed by Michael Fentiman, and aimed at eight- to thirteen-year olds, the production did not occupy a particularly prominent position in the RSC’s announcement, but Furness, linking it explicitly to the Roaring Girls season, perhaps drawing on the frisson of gender controversy, thought it was of greater interest to her newspaper’s readers. The article draws on the pulling power of Shakespeare’s name, but its focus is the Swan season: the not-Shakespearean plays are the main subject under discussion. The already complex framing of the season was made even more complicated by the changing nature of the RSC’s programming. When the first press statement was released, The Witch of Edmonton was yet to be announced, while the ‘Midsummer Mischief’ festival of new plays by and about women, at The Other Place, existed only in embryonic form. Whyman’s Artistic Director Statement near the bottom of the press release gestured towards the fortieth anniversary of the recently reopened theatre and a planned celebration of its founder, Buzz Goodbody. At the time of this statement, Whyman was not able to provide specific details about the focus of this celebration, but when the Midsummer Mischief season was announced in February 2014 she stated that it ‘responds directly to the Roaring Girls season’ (RSC 2014a) by exploring the feminist politics of dissidence. This new frame carried with it the potential to alter audience expectations about the Swan season. As Kirwan observes, the Mischief Festival rendered more explicit the otherwise more ‘diffuse’ feminist principles of the Roaring Girls plays (2015: 251). The addition of The Witch of Edmonton extended the season further into the autumn, offering another version of a ‘roaring girl’ in the form of the titular witch, Elizabeth Sawyer, and employing the same core cast as the other plays in the season, although as the only play directed by a man (Doran), it departed from one of the season’s principal advertised practices. These additional frames, however, ultimately serve to enshrine the season’s feminist motivations, perhaps also implicitly coding Shakespeare as male-centred and nonfeminist.

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In addition to the broader framing of the Swan season, the individual productions came advertised with additional material, much of it online. The Roaring Girl, Arden of Faversham and The White Devil had two teaser trailers each, plus short director and/or lead actor interviews and brief videos of audience responses.2 These materials tended to stress the subversive Jacobean chic of the productions. Maria Aberg’s The White Devil was the most obvious exponent of this, and the online adverts emphasized its bloody excesses. A trailer, which came with a warning that viewers may find some scenes ‘disturbing’ (RSC 2014f), consisted of a close-up of Vittoria (Kirsty Bushell) and Bracciano (David Sturzaker) locked in an intimate embrace, smearing each other in a glutinous gold substance which then turns to the claret of blood. The image of the gold-smeared pair also served as the cover for the programme and was the main promotional poster. These images stressed a relationship between violence and decadence which aligned the production with stylishly violent films and television shows. In one of the production’s promotional videos, Aberg likens the play to The Sopranos and Natural Born Killers, emphasizing its messiness, bloodiness and sexiness (RSC 2013a). Aberg reiterated her sense of the play’s contemporaneity in another interview, explaining that she chose to set her production in a ‘luxury, harsh, wealthy, contemporary world’. The filmic references resounded throughout the production, which made extensive use of video projection to accentuate ‘the theme of performance’ in Aberg’s words, but also to point up comparisons between the seventeenth-century world of Webster’s play and the production’s twenty-first-century context. Neither Polly Findlay’s Arden of Faversham nor Jo Davies’s The Roaring Girl drew quite as readily on the Jacobean framing of the Aberg production, but both plays were presented as subversive challenges to gendered and/or generic expectations. In one video, Findlay describes Arden of Faversham as ‘a bit like a kind of Coen Brothers movie set in the 1590s. There’s that same sense of a completely bewildering, slipping moral framework’ (RSC 2013b). Other videos seek to identify the play not as a domestic tragedy but as, in the words of an audience member interviewed for a promotional video, a mix of ‘comedy and murder mystery’ (RSC 2014e), which seems in keeping with the Coen Brothers aesthetic. Indeed, the production itself most vividly recalled the woodchipper scene in Fargo when Arden’s body was suspended above the stage in a makeshift coffin. The production’s performance choices, and the terms used to market it, mixing murder and humour, tied in with the broader Jacobean approach of the season. The Roaring Girl advertising materials also displayed a hint of the Jacobean chic, perhaps most strongly in the representation of Moll (Lisa Dillon) as a character ahead of her time. While the production was set in the Victorian era, Moll wore modern clothes. In the production’s poster, she is shown wearing a rolled-up shirt and tie, with a tattoo on her forearm, while in another online trailer she is seen playing an electric guitar before turning to the camera and roaring (RSC 2014b). The RSC used a different set of tactics to advertise The Witch of Edmonton. The production aimed to capitalize on the star status of its lead performer, Eileen Atkins, whose face, displayed in close-up, adorned the programme and production poster. Atkins gave two interviews with The Guardian newspaper in the lead up to the production’s opening and, although neither explicitly focused on The Witch of

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Edmonton, both advertised the production. Susannah Clapp opened her 18 October 2014 interview with Atkins by asking her whether being cast in an RSC title role was ‘typical casting for a mature actress?’, but the line of questioning moved away from the specifics of the production and towards a broader discussion of Atkins’s life and career, traversing such topics as paedophilia, social class, rapping and sex (Clapp 2014a). In another The Guardian piece, published on the production’s opening night, Atkins recounts a humorous early-career story of the time she had to escape a knife-throwing act who wanted her to ‘dance enticingly’ to get people in to see their show (2014). The implicit suggestion of both pieces is that The Witch of Edmonton will be worth watching because Atkins is in it and because Atkins is not only an exceptional actor but also an exceptional person. The articles (and the production they advertise) present Atkins as an abnormally interesting and publicly intimate figure, of the type described by Joseph Roach in his work on theatre and celebrity (2005: 16–17). Although The Witch of Edmonton was not as insistently advertised as a Roaring Girls play, Atkins effectively acts as a modern roaring girl (or perhaps, roaring woman) able to transcend ordinariness. The production’s most public-facing materials focused largely on its most bankable performer, but Atkins was not the production’s only framing device. While the Guardian interviews historicized Atkins’s career, offering insights into her extraordinary life, the programme for The Witch of Edmonton set about historicizing the play, emphasizing its real life genesis and implicitly justifying Doran’s decision to set the play in an early modern context, unlike the other productions in the Roaring Girls season. As Lucy Munro notes, the production invited spectators ‘to historicize their experience of the Dog’s invasion of Edmonton’ (2017: 76) by including in its programme an extract from an early modern pamphlet about the appearance of a black dog at Bungay. The production therefore asked its audiences to balance an understanding of the play’s early modern origins with an awareness and enjoyment of contemporary celebrity. Combining historical intrigue with a gesture to contemporary relevance, the programme in this regard arguably followed the lead of the other Roaring Girls plays. The ‘Roaring Girls’ tagline then provided an overall frame for the season, but the individual productions were marketed in several ways, drawing out different interpretations of the broader season’s themes. My intent is not to try and capture all of their potential resonances, but to suggest that, in addition to the inevitable Shakespearean haunting described by Kirwan, the RSC sought to highlight the perceived contemporaneity of the female-centred plays they performed, while also drawing attention to the real-life stories which inspired each play’s creation. The various materials, produced in a range of different media, grapple with the challenges of advertising not-Shakespearean drama, in the process inviting their audiences to experience less immediately familiar plays through familiarizing frames. Whether the frames offered by the promotional material accurately reflect the productions themselves and whether the frames open productive new ways of encountering drama, or close down potential meaning by forcing the plays to fit particular paradigms, is ultimately a matter to be decided by their audiences. It is to one of those audiences that I now turn.

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REVIEWING THE ROARING GIRLS The marketing materials used by the RSC to advertise its Roaring Girls season show how the company attempted to frame its productions, but, as we have seen, agencies beyond the RSC reframed the productions for their audiences. Nowhere is this more evident than in theatre reviews. Helen Freshwater rightly notes that reviews do not reliably record audience reception and that studies which privilege theatre reviews often end up simply relaying the opinions of reviewers (2009: 36). But while reviews cannot stand in for audience experience, they can help to create the conditions by which audiences experience theatre, consolidating the existing frames offered by the productions themselves or constructing new ones for their readers. Recent interest in Shakespeare reviewing, perhaps best encapsulated by the work of Paul Prescott, has shown that journalists ‘have the potential to exert a strong influence on contemporary theatregoing and production’ (2013: 16). There is no reason to think this is any less true of not-Shakespearean plays. In this section, then, I focus on newspaper reviews of the productions in the 2014 Swan season, examining the ways in which reviewers accept, challenge or augment the frames offered by the RSC’s marketing department. I will then consider the potential consequences of the reviews, not merely for the productions, but for the reputation of the plays themselves. Reviews become part of the official record of productions. They are the most visible and easily locatable traces left by ephermal performances. What critics say about rarely performed plays therefore has significant ramifications for later generations, as well as contemporary theatregoers. Peter Holland observes that scholars frequently occlude the circumstances of consumption for which reviews are written. Theatre reviewers write for particular audiences; they are not a homogenous group. Holland even notes that, despite seeing each other regularly at press nights, reviewers rarely talk to each other in anything other than politely reserved conversation (2010: 297). The varying political and cultural sensitivities of theatre review audiences is demonstrated in reviewer responses to the Roaring Girls season. Reviewers for more politically conservative newspapers tended to question the value of a female-centred season of plays. Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail displayed a subtly dismissive attitude to the idea; his audience can read between the lines of his relatively benign statements to access a more cutting subtext. For example, his review of Arden of Faversham claims that the production fails despite its ‘topicality and interest to feminists’ (2014). The point of such comments is to mark the feminist leanings of the productions as trendy, ephemeral, niche concerns; when Letts says that Findlay’s production will interest feminists, the obvious implication is that it will not interest anyone else. Charles Spencer in the Telegraph similarly trades in coded barbs about the feminist framing in his review of The Roaring Girl. His claim that ‘gender politics are also at work’ (2014a) makes the word ‘work’ do a lot of work. His sentence acts as an eye roll to the regular reader who understands and perhaps shares his distrust of feminist ‘positive discrimination’ as his review goes on to call it. In contrast, Cavendish, Spencer’s colleague at the Telegraph, takes a more receptive stance on what his review of The White Devil terms ‘challenging feminist-framed questions’

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(2014a). Cavendish’s review offers an important reminder that reviewing practices can differ even among reviewers writing for the same audience. In general, reviewers of the Roaring Girls season tended to avoid the more disdainful attitude expressed by Spencer and Letts. The execution of the feminist politics was a frequent topic of concern for several critics, but the concept of a womencentred season often generated praise or seemed at least a potentially worthwhile endeavour. Billington’s reviews for The Guardian are a case in point. In his review of The Roaring Girl he praised the ‘bright idea’ (2014a) of the Swan season even as he queried the logic of its modern updates, and reiterated his enthusiasm for the season concept in his review of Arden of Faversham, the second production in the Swan season. By this point, however, Billington allowed a greater note of frustration to creep into his review: ‘Much as I welcome the idea of a Swan season devoted to female protagonists, I am increasingly puzzled by the approach’ (2014b). Once again, he took issue with the decision to set the play outside of the early modern period. Strikingly, however, these reviews are at pains to suggest sympathy for the feminist project of the season. By registering the value of the project, Billington can make criticisms of individual productions without seeming unenlightened. But the feminist framing of the RSC season is a clear barrier for him, forcing him constantly to hedge his critiques. What Billington sees as directorial decisions (the setting of the productions) are not so easily extricated from the feminist rationale he claims to admire. Billington begins his review of The White Devil by quoting Aberg, implying that her ‘strong agenda’ – ‘to explore and explode ideas of misogyny, power and female identity’ – results in a production that is ‘high-concept, director-driven theatre’ (2014c) which muddies and confuses Webster’s decidedly seventeenthcentury artistry. Billington’s gripe is not with the notion of feminist theatre per se (unlike Spencer’s criticism of The Roaring Girl) but his objection to the production’s ‘agenda’ (a loaded word) is perhaps more telling than he might like to imagine. At once welcoming and sceptical, Billington’s Guardian reviews offer an ambivalent perspective on the feminist-framing of the Roaring Girls season. Although his approach is different to that of Spencer and Letts, Billington forms part of an old guard of influential, mostly white, mostly male theatre critics. This older generation of reviewers is not necessarily the ideal audience for the declaredly dissident approaches of the Roaring Girls directors, so the nature of their criticism is perhaps unsurprising. In 1994 Penny Gay noted that the ‘male, white, middleclass Oxbridge-educated bias’ (11) of newspaper theatre reviews underscores much mainstream theatre criticism and this remains the case decades later. Indeed, mainstream female reviewers express similar reservations about the efficacy of the Roaring Girls productions. In The Guardian, Susannah Clapp offered a withering assessment of the ‘sloppiness’ of the RSC Roaring Girl, which she saw manifested in the desire to ‘put anything female together’ (2014b). In her review of The White Devil, Clapp claims that Aberg ‘undermines her feminist message – making it look imposed not innate – through anxious updating and overemphasis’ (2014c). Kate Bassett of The Times found Aberg’s casting of Laura Elphinstone in the role of the male character Flamineo ‘confusingly strained’ (2014) and worried that the production lost the sense of the play’s hierarchy of political power. In the Financial

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Times, Sarah Hemming was more positive, praising the production’s ‘bold approach’ and the ‘peculiarly disturbing’ (2014) effect of the Flamineo casting although, like Bassett, she worried that the production was less strong on its representation of social stratification. Taken together, mainstream reviews of the Roaring Girls season show that while critics acknowledged the RSC’s feminist framing, they did not necessarily think that it served the productions well. Similarly, reviews of The Witch of Edmonton regularly commented on the celebrity casting of Eileen Atkins, but in ways that arguably backfired on the production. Cavendish is among several critics frustrated by the ‘marginal’ (2014b) nature of the character Atkins plays. In the Daily Mail, Patrick Marmion praised Atkins for her performance but said that her role was ‘not much of a part’ (2014) while in the Financial Times, Ian Shuttleworth lamented that Atkins was ‘too seldom’ on stage (2014b). The production’s advertising arguably set the play up for a fall, encouraging it to be judged against unreasonable expectations, promising a fuller part for Atkins than the play, or the production, was able to allow. Margaret Jane Kidnie observed a similar strategy at play in Doran’s 2003 Swan Theatre production of All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s less frequently performed and celebrated plays: the casting of Judi Dench as the Countess generated a response similar to that of The Witch of Edmonton (2009: 49–50). Perhaps this is one reason for the generally poor response the play received from mainstream reviewers. While some critics took issue with the production’s staging choices – Henry Hitchings of the Evening Standard called it ‘unadventurous’ (2014b) – most reviewers turned their ire towards the play rather than the production. The success of the role of Mother Sawyer was attributed entirely to Atkins, rather than to the playwrights, and Atkins’s brilliance was seen by many reviewers to emphasize the comparatively poor quality of the rest of the play. In The Guardian Kate Kellaway praised the ‘outstanding’ Atkins (2014) but concluded that the play is ultimately a bit of a mess. Billington similarly commended a ‘richly textured performance’ from Atkins while condemning the play as a ‘rum piece’ (2014d). The performance of Atkins became a stick with which to beat the play, but it was not the only stick. The Witch of Edmonton is a collaborative play, as promotional materials made clear, and reviewers seized upon this fact to make grander pronouncements about the play’s quality (or lack thereof). For Kellaway ‘too many playwrights spoil the plot’ (2014) resulting in generic confusion. Shuttleworth similarly reckoned that the collaboration is ‘obtrusive’ and that sections of the play are ‘overwritten’ (2014b). Michael Arditti of the Sunday Express accounted the play ‘a gallimaufry’ (2014) because of its co-authorship, while Marmion termed it a ‘mongrel’ (2014) and Billington claimed that its ‘mixed authorship gave it a strange switchback quality’ (2014d). Reviewers of other collaborative plays in the Swan season sometimes made similar judgements in their reviews. Reviewing The Roaring Girl, Henry Hitchings observed that the ‘collaborative efforts of Middleton and Dekker weren’t exactly seamless’ (2014a). In a related vein, reviewers of Arden of Faversham frequently referred to the play’s uncertain authorship to explain perceived problems with the production even though the RSC chose not to emphasize potential Shakespearean connections when advertising Arden. Letts

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compared the play unfavourably to ‘proper Shakespeare’ (2014), Spencer found the blank verse ‘too workaday’ (2014b) for a writer like Shakespeare or Marlowe, and Dominic Maxwell in the Sunday Times attributed his favourite parts ‘where good ideas coalesce and matter’ to Shakespeare but thought the play overall to be distinctly ‘middling’ (2014). Authorship evidently mattered to a significant degree to many critics. Authorship matters to reviewers of infrequently performed early modern plays because it offers a means by which they can ground their assumptions, making them seem more convincing or factual. It is a fact that The Witch of Edmonton is a collaborative play; it is an opinion that it is a poor one. But the format of the newspaper review, which neither requires nor allows the reviewer to offer a detailed explanation of their statements, makes opinions that are linked to facts appear more convincing. Using a similar strategy, Clapp casts aspersions on the quality of The White Devil by noting the fact of the play’s poor reception when first performed (2014c). Clapp draws on the authority of the historical archive to bolster her opinion that the play is not particularly good: it failed then, no wonder it fails now. It is a highly debatable point, but it is a pithy and entertaining one. Claims based on authorship or historical evidence give critics a handle on unfamiliar material, a way of succinctly explaining oddities. Reviewers sometimes attribute perceived faults to theatre producers – in his review of The Roaring Girl, for example, Spencer suggests that a different directorial approach ‘might have yielded richer rewards’ (2014a) – but unfamiliar early modern plays are easy targets for arch critics, skilled in the art of the uncompromising putdown, and they bear the brunt of criticism in many reviews. Reviewers commonly invoke received knowledge, or common assumptions, which can very easily override whatever set of expectations a theatre production attempts to offer its audiences. Theatre critics occupy a privileged position of authority. But they do not get to speak for everyone, and while their words can carry weight with their readerships and in the theatre industry more broadly, their writing is increasingly subject to public critique. Eleanor Collins has argued that the kind of reviewing discussed in this essay, which showcases the singular voice of its author and which is ‘vested in the authority of print’ is ‘now outmoded’ (2010: 335). Prescott writes that blogging and below-the-line comments in reply to theatre reviews pose a ‘challenge to the authority of the critic’ (2013: 177). Online responses can undercut the apparently confident assertions made by reviewers while also allowing critics brave enough to read below the line further space to clarify their remarks or to engage in the kind of debate that print newspapers cannot foster. The Guardian review of Arden of Faversham generated one such discussion, with some readers taking exception to Billington’s claim that the play ‘reeks of documentary realism’ and should be treated as a ‘fascinating historical document’ (2014b) rather than modernized, as in Findlay’s production. One commenter, Bressy, asked ‘Why criticise the contemporary setting of Arden when this criticism is not extended to the vast majority of Shakespeare plays?’ before adding ‘This is a play not a documentary’. Billington replied: ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, such as Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy, are domestic dramas originating in relatively recent, real-life events. They are also

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rarely seen and gain from being treated as localised studies of the threat to middleclass security. Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies … transcend time and place and are susceptible to multiple interpretations’. Billington did not explicitly engage with the suggestion that the play is nonetheless not a documentary and although some commenters agreed with him – Favershamian called the play ‘something of a documentary’ – several more contested the point. One respondent, rorycalvadez, had their reply deleted by a moderator for violating The Guardian ‘community standards’, but various replies to that comment, including one by Billington, make clear that it aggressively rejected Billington’s claims about documentary realism. A reader, jamesharthouse, endorsed the basic point of the response, if not the tone, adding while [Billington] and I may disagree about whether the play should or shouldn’t be clothed in the ‘fashionable present’, I couldn’t see why the director had done something wrong or against the text in her handling of the play. She’s just done something that Michael Billington and Kinewald [another commenter] apparently personally don’t like (for no terribly obvious reason). (Billington 2014b) The comment by jamesharthouse appeared nine days after Billington’s response to rorycalvadez. By this point Billington had, not unreasonably, moved on to other things, so this remark did not lead to a debate, or occasion further reflection from The Guardian’s chief theatre critic. But it is a useful riposte to the authority of the reviewer and a tantalizing glimpse of an alternative audience reception not covered in the printed pages of The Guardian.

CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that the framing of a production can have a significant effect on the ways in which not-Shakespearean early modern plays, generally much less frequently performed than Shakespeare plays, might be understood by their audiences. The fact that not-Shakespearean plays are much less well known than Shakespearean drama arguably makes the framing even more important. Many audience members watching the RSC productions of The Roaring Girl and The Witch of Edmonton were likely to have been seeing the play for the first and last time. For many audience members, their impressions of the play are likely to be lasting. Framing a play is a difficult and skilful task. The RSC’s primary objective when advertising their productions is to appeal to potential audience members, to persuade them to pay money to see the production. In that respect, making The Witch of Edmonton a celebrity vehicle was probably a smart business decision. But while the casting and marketing of the production brought with it benefits, it arguably led to problems too, and the play bore the brunt of these criticisms in theatre reviews. How much theatre reviews influence or reflect wider audience opinion is uncertain: tweets, blogposts and below-the-line comments attest to a variety of audience responses, many of which challenge or complicate the judgements of professional critics. But

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it would be naïve to think that theatre critics do not have power when it comes to the construction of the theatrical canon. Their judgements do matter: they are able to frame or reframe plays, productions and authors. Reviewers are, of course, entitled to dislike any given production, or play (not everyone needs to share the same taste for early modern theatre as the author of this chapter) but the terms they use to articulate their complaints reveal a wider problem about framing the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Such critical pronouncements can negatively affect the fortunes of rarely performed plays, making it less likely that they will be revived again or perhaps discouraging theatremakers from taking on plays by the same author, or of a similar dramaturgical style. But in addition to affecting not-Shakespearean plays, the critical approaches documented in this chapter also do harm to Shakespeare by endorsing a particular idea of Shakespeare against which the implicitly inferior not-Shakespearean drama can be set. The authorial status of several plays in the RSC Roaring Girls season was used as a justification for a negative review: reviewers commented unfavourably on the anonymously authored Arden of Faversham and the collaborative Roaring Girl and The Witch of Edmonton. These observations help prop up the old-fashioned idea of Shakespeare as a solo-author of singular genius. Authorship studies have debunked this notion, detailing the varying ways in which Shakespeare collaborated throughout his career, but mainstream reviewers still gravitate towards outdated assumptions about Shakespearean singuarlity (as, on occasion, do theatre marketers: for example, the poster for the 2012 National Theatre Timon of Athens advertised it as sole authored). Reviewers often comment negatively on Shakespeare’s collaborative plays: Billington, for example, wrote that the 2010 Shakespeare’s Globe production of Henry VIII ‘lacks stylistic unity’ on account of Shakespeare’s collaboration with Fletcher (2010). Another frequent tactic, exemplified by Spencer’s review of the same production, is to blame the perceived faults on the not-Shakespearean collaborator (2010). When Shakespeare’s collaborative drama is well received it is often because it is treated as solo-authored, as in Clapp’s review of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse production of Pericles, which makes no mention of George Wilkins’s involvement in the play (2016). The uninterrogated (and, given the length of theatre reviews, impossible to interrogate) assumptions of mainstream reviewers are subtly dismissive and damaging, but in fairness to these critics, their claims are not totally out of kilter with some Shakespearean scholarship. Scholars cannot be expected to change the reviewing practices of established critics, who, as arbiters of theatrical taste, have more influence and cachet than an academic can conventionally muster. But it is incumbent on those working on Shakespeare in performance not to propagate the kinds of dismissive claims detailed in this chapter. In future work, scholars might aim to identify methodologies for discussing plays that are not regularly performed, helping to articulate more clearly an alternative to mainstream approaches. Shakespeare performance scholarship has engaged in greater critical examination of fringe critics, bloggers and social media responses: not-Shakespearean performance scholarship would benefit from a similarly close and serious engagement with such voices. For as this chapter has argued, not-Shakespearean plays are in a particularly

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vulnerable position. The ways in which they are framed (by theatre companies and theatre reviews, but also by scholarship) matter. An unsuccessful framing can have a long-lasting detrimental effect that plays without Shakespeare’s cachet and centrality may never overcome.

NOTES 1. The play also received a site-specific performance at the House of St Barnabas in central London in 2006 and was performed by the Globe Young Players at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2015. On the site-specific performance, see McCutcheon and Thom 2012. 2. The Witch of Edmonton had no such additional video material.

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale (2013), Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aebischer, Pascale and Kathryn Prince (2012), ‘Introduction’, in Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 1–16, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arditti, Michael (2014), ‘Eileen Atkins is glorious in obscure Jacobean drama The Witch of Edmonton’, The Sunday Express, 2 November. Available online: https://www. express.co.uk/entertainment/theatre/530219/The-Witch-Of-Edmonton-Swan-Stratford (accessed 21 November 2020). Atkins, Eileen (2014), ‘Eileen Atkins: how I ran away from the circus’, The Guardian, 23 October. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/23/eileenatkins-how-i-ran-away-from-the-circus (accessed 21 November 2020). BBC (2013), ‘RSC and Barbican announce three-year deal’, 10 September. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24029388 (accessed 21 November 2020). Bassett, Kate (2014), ‘The White Devil at Swan, Stratford upon Avon’, The Times, 11 August. Available online: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-white-devil-atswan-stratford-upon-avon-d9w0frdbcm9 (accessed 21 November 2020). Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds (2013), William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennett, Susan (1990), Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, London: Routledge. Bennett, Susan (1996), Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past, London: Routledge. Billington, Michael (2009), ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’, The Guardian, 25 March. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/mar/25/dido-queen-ofcarthage-cottlesloe-london (accessed 21 November 2020).

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Billington, Michael (2010), ‘Henry VIII’, The Guardian, 25 May. Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/may/25/henry-viii-review (accessed 21 November 2020). Billington, Michael (2011), ‘The City Madam – review’, The Guardian, 12 May. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/may/12/the-city-madam-review (accessed 21 November 2020). Billington, Michael (2014a), ‘The Roaring Girl review – “A spirited start to the RSC’s heroines season”’, The Guardian, 16 April. Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2014/apr/16/roaring-girl-review-dashing-lead-performance (accessed 21 November 2020). Billington, Michael (2014b), ‘Arden of Faversham review – Elizabethan tragedy goes modern’, The Guardian, 7 May. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/may/07/arden-of-faversham-swan-theatre-review (accessed 21 November 2020). Billington, Michael (2014c), ‘The White Devil review – putting the patriarchy on trial’, The Guardian, 7 August. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/ aug/07/the-white-devil-review-rsc-swan-stratford (accessed 21 November 2020). Billington, Michael (2014d), ‘The Witch of Edmonton review – superbly textured lead performance’, The Guardian, 30 October. Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2014/oct/30/the-witch-of-edmonton-review (accessed 21 November 2020). Billington, Michael (2017), ‘Coriolanus/Dido, Queen of Carthage review – Shakespeare and Marlowe do battle’, The Guardian, 23 September. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/stage/2017/sep/23/coriolanus-dido-queen-of-carthage-review-rscstratford (accessed 21 November 2020). Bloomfield, Jem (2013), ‘Two “Jacobean” Malfis: Controversy and Reception in 1892 and 2010’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 31 (1): 29–40. Broadway World Newsdesk (2013), ‘Royal Shakespeare Company Announces 2014 Season’, Broadway World, 10 September. Available online: https://www. broadwayworld.com/westend/article/Royal-Shakespeare-Company-Announces-2014Season-20130910 (accessed 21 November 2020). Cavendish, Dominic (2014a), ‘The White Devil, RSC Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon, review: “searing”’, The Telegraph, 7 August. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11018611/The-White-Devil-RSC-Swan-Stratford-uponAvon-review-searing.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Cavendish, Dominic (2014b), ‘The Witch of Edmonton, RSC Stratford, review: “frustrating”’, The Telegraph, 30 October. Available online: https://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11198283/The-Witch-of-Edmonton-RSC-Swanreview-frustrating.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Cavendish, Dominic (2015), ‘Love’s Sacrifice, RSC Stratford, review: “second-rate Shakespeare”’, The Telegraph, 21 April. Available online: https://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11549460/Loves-Sacrifice-RSC-Stratford-reviewsecond-rate-Shakespeare.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Clapp, Susannah (2014a), ‘Eileen Atkins: “Even today there’s a resentment of old people”’, The Guardian, 18 October. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/

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culture/2014/oct/18/eileen-atkins-interview-q-and-a-woody-allen-witch-of-edmonton (accessed 21 November 2020). Clapp, Susannah (2014b), ‘The Roaring Girl; Henry IV Parts I and II – review’, The Guardian, 20 April. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/apr/20/ roaring-girl-henry-iv-parts-i-ii-rsc-review-stratford (accessed 21 November 2020). Clapp, Susannah (2014c), ‘The White Devil review – splashy rather than searing’, The Guardian, 10 August. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/ aug/10/the-white-devil-review-splashy-searing (accessed 21 November 2020). Clapp, Susannah (2016), ‘Pericles review – moments of intense psychological insight’, The Guardian 10 January. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/ jan/10/pericles-review-dominic-dromgoole-sam-wanamaker-playhouse (accessed 21 November 2020). Collins, Eleanor (2010), ‘Theatre Reviewing in Post-Consensus society: Performance, Print and the Blogosphere’, Shakespeare, 6 (3): 330–6. Freshwater, Helen (2009), Theatre and Audience, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Furness, Hannah (2013), ‘Women centre stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company with gender-reversed Taming of the Shrew’, The Telegraph, 10 September. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-shakespeare/10299508/Womencentre-stage-at-the-Royal-Shakespeare-Company-with-gender-reversed-Taming-of-theShrew.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Gay, Penny (1994), As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women, London: Routledge. Hawkes, Terence (1986), That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process, London: Routledge. Hemming, Sarah (2014), ‘The White Devil, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK – review’, Financial Times, 7 August. Available online: https://www.ft.com/content/ aea796c8-1e28-11e4-ab52-00144feabdc0 (accessed 21 November 2020). Holland, Peter (2010), ‘Critics and their Audiences: The Rhetoric of Reviewing’, Shakespeare, 6 (3): 292–304. Hitchings, Henry (2014a), ‘The Roaring Girl, RSC Swan – theatre review’, Evening Standard, 16 April. Available online: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/ the-roaring-girl-rsc-swan-theatre-review-9263750.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Hitchings, Henry (2014b), ‘The Witch of Edmonton, RSC Swan – theatre review: “Eileen Atkins radiates intelligence and scepticism”’, Evening Standard, 30 October. Available online: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/the-witch-of-edmonton-rscswan-theatre-review-eileen-atkins-radiates-intelligence-and-scepticism-9827969.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Jauss, Hans Robert (1982), Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bathi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kellaway, Kate (2014), ‘The Witch of Edmonton review – is it a comedy or a tragedy?’, The Guardian, 2 November. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/nov/02/the-witch-of-edmonton-review-rsc-eileen-atkins (accessed 21 November 2020). Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2009), Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, London: Routledge. Kirwan, Peter (2015), ‘The Roared-at Boys? Repertory Casting and Gender Politics in the RSC’s 2014 Swan Season’, Shakespeare, 11 (3): 247–61.

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Kirwan, Peter (2017), ‘Not-Shakespeare and the Shakespearean Ghost’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and Performance, 87–103, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Letts, Quentin (2014), ‘Rough justice of a 16th century sort: QUENTIN LETTS reviews Arden of Faversham’, Daily Mail, 7 May. Available online: https://www.dailymail. co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2622000/QUENTIN-LETTS-reviews-Arden-Faversham.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Lopez, Jeremy (2014), Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marmion, Patrick (2014), ‘Hellish hound, but the play’s a dog’s breakfast: PATRICK MARMION reviews The Witch of Edmonton’, Daily Mail, 31 October. Available online: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2815185/Hellish-hound-plays-dog-s-breakfast-PATRICK-MARMION-reviews-Witch-Edmonton.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Maxwell, Dominic (2014), ‘Arden of Faversham, The Swan, Stratford’, The Sunday Times, 8 May. Available online: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/arden-of-faversham-theswan-stratford-bs2zbg0ktk8 (accessed 21 November 2020). McCutcheon, Rebecca and Sarah Thom (2012), ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’: Site-Specific Marlowe’, in Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 104–20, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mountford, Fiona (2014), ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon – theatre review’, Evening Standard, 23 July. Available online: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/the-two-gentlemen-of-verona-royalshakespeare-theatre-stratford-upon-avon-theatre-review-9622369.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Munro, Lucy (2017), ‘Introduction’, in Lucy Munro (ed.) The Witch of Edmonton, 1–104, Arden Early Modern Drama, London: Bloomsbury. Prescott, Paul (2013), Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purcell, Stephen (2013), Shakespeare and Audience in Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roach, Joseph (2005), ‘Public Intimacy: The Prior History of “It”’, in Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (eds), Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, 15–30, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. RSC (2013a), ‘Interview with Maria Aberg’, YouTube, 10 September. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QHsE-oj-A0 (accessed 21 November 2020). RSC (2013b), ‘Interview with Polly Findlay’, YouTube, 10 September. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpKpdk3Fbg (accessed 21 November 2020). RSC (2014a), ‘Erica Whyman introduces the RSC’s new season’, YouTube, 4 February. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi87kQuZTvU (accessed 21 November 2020). RSC (2014b), ‘Trailer: The Roaring Girl’, YouTube, 28 March. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpoTeTE4XU (accessed 21 November 2020). RSC (2014c), ‘Exploring the character of Moll Cutpurse’, YouTube, 9 April. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWVHRSxw8ds (accessed 21 November 2020).

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RSC (2014d), ‘Trailer: Arden of Faversham’, YouTube, 2 May. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdSFXj0BbQQ (accessed 21 November 2020). RSC (2014e), ‘What the audience thinks: Arden of Faversham’, YouTube, 21 May. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDiH3G77ndo (accessed 21 November 2020). RSC (2014f), ‘Trailer: The White Devil’, YouTube, 21 July. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6U2_UuvSV4 (accessed 21 November 2020). RSC (2014g), ‘Maria Aberg Interview’, YouTube, 29 July. Available online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_9xSHNUrkFY (accessed 21 November 2020). Rutter, Carol Chillington (2007), ‘Shakespeare’s Popular Face: From Playbills to the Poster’, in Robert Shaughnessy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, 248–71, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shuttleworth, Ian (2014a), ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK – review’, Financial Times, 23 July. Available online: https://www.ft.com/content/75bb24e4-124b-11e4-93a5-00144feabdc0 (accessed 21 November 2020). Shuttleworth, Ian (2014b), ‘The Witch of Edmonton, Swan Theatre, Stratford-uponAvon – review’, Financial Times, 2 November. Available online: https://www.ft.com/ content/4fe9d9b4-60f1-11e4-b935-00144feabdc0 (accessed 21 November 2020). Spencer, Charles (2010), ‘Henry VIII at Shakespeare’s Globe, review’, The Telegraph, 25 May. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatrereviews/7764638/Henry-VIII-at-Shakespeares-Globe-review.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Spencer, Charles (2014a), ‘The Roaring Girl, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, review: “over-the top and underwhelming”’, The Telegraph, 16 April. Available online: https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10770708/The-Roaring-GirlSwan-Theatre-Stratford-upon-Avon-review-over-the-top-and-underwhelming.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Spencer, Charles (2014b), ‘Arden of Faversham, Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon, review: “comically sublime”’, The Telegraph, 7 May. Available online: https://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10813946/Arden-of-Faversham-Swan-Stratfordupon-Avon-review-comically-sublime.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Whipday, Emma (2015), ‘“The picture of a woman”: Roaring Girls and Alternative Histories in the RSC 2014 Season’, Shakespeare, 11 (3): 272–85. Wilkinson, Kate (2015), ‘Girls and Boys: The Royal Shakespeare’s 2014 Summer Season’, Shakespeare, 11 (3): 241–6.

CHAPTER 2.7

Pedagogy: Decolonizing Shakespeare on stage ANDREW JAMES HARTLEY, KAJA DUNN AND CHRISTOPHER BERRY

‘It should be one of my complexion …’ (Twelfth Night, 2.5.23) The history of Shakespeare as a tool for performing white cultural superiority is so weighty and insidious, so central to present marginalizations, that the very presence of actors of colour in Shakespeare productions today generates anxiety and outrage. ‘Colour-blind’ casting creates as many problems as it solves, often hinging on a denial of race as a signifying factor on stage, as Ayanna Thompson (2011) has argued. Worse, such approaches are frequently justified by claims to a ‘universality’ or ‘common humanity’ to the plays which privilege and essentialize white norms and cultural history. Can such a legacy be circumvented or – better yet – rewritten, and what means might be attempted to accomplish this decolonizing process? Can Shakespeare become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem? To put it another way, to whom does twenty-first-century Shakespeare belong? This essay will attempt some tentative and exploratory answers to these questions using both macro approaches (a consideration of the critically neglected history of Black Shakespeare theatre) and the micro, the examination of a recent university production of Twelfth Night on the University of North Carolina Charlotte campus – a US-based Bachelor of Arts Theatre Program with a strong Performance concentration – studied in terms of rehearsal and classroom dynamics. In rejecting colour-blind approaches to Shakespeare, we embrace a notion of culturally conscious production, and will attempt to show both why this is a preferable approach and what strategies might make it feasible. The purpose of this analysis is not to offer hard solutions, but to explore some strategies which seemed to work better than others in the same department. They include the navigation of complex power dynamics in rehearsal and various forms of empowering actors, particularly through deconstructing the idea of a universal vocal neutral and valuing the way in which clarity might be manifested by the individual student. We will discuss tailoring the production to our specific communities (onand offstage) and casting in ways that represented those communities. We will

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consider what happens when actors of colour are not marginalized in number or the scale of their parts in the Shakespearean rehearsal room and are encouraged to take ownership of material from which they have typically felt excluded. The essay will consider the many strains of colour and ethnicity present in our cast as a way of resisting the reduction of non-white cultures to monoliths, and serving as a corrective to white scholars who – often with the best of intentions – fail to consider the specifics of race and culture. The chapter is, incidentally, an attempt to model scholarship in the same collaborative spirit, the same shared diversity of backgrounds, experiences and skill sets, which we attempted to bring to the production itself. While our actors were students at an undergraduate institution rather than graduates or members of a conservatory programme, they consider themselves – and are treated as – trainee professionals specializing in performance. As such, we believe the case study presented here is – with some modification – transferable to other institutions, theatre and drama courses or actor training programmes.

PART 1: THE PROBLEM – MACRO PERSPECTIVE When, as faculty directors, we cast actors of colour in Shakespeare productions, what do we think we are doing, what assumptions about Shakespeare, about theatre in general and about race, undergird our projects, and how might those assumptions be interrogated in productive and progressive ways concurrent with the work of the production? Such an inquiry expands and refines W. B. Worthen’s simple but exacting demand, ‘What is Shakespeare performance for?’ (1997: 274), reframing it in terms of rehearsal room work that reaches beyond the superficial or tokenistic in matters of casting, so as to genuinely remake Shakespeare in the image of those who play him. How, in other words – in theory and practice – do we decolonize that most colonially weighted of dramatists? Decolonization has to happen at various levels of the theatre world, not least in those crucial years of undergraduate training, and it is those on which our practical research focuses, though much of what we assert here might be modified for use at different institutions. Productions which take place on college and university campuses in which the cast are students pursuing BA or BFA degrees, as has been argued elsewhere (Hartley 2014), provide an especially fruitful space to engage with these issues because for the actors these are more than usually formative years and their work on stage and in class reshapes not just their craft as performers but their sense of who they are. The undergraduate experience can challenge old ideas and refashion the self, consciously and unconsciously, never more so than during the intense preparation for a theatrical production. As Rob Conkie says of student actors in campus Shakespeare, [t]he period of play, or of role rehearsal, the participation in both the world of the play and the world of the production, results in players, not just characters, emerging perhaps wiser, perhaps humbler and perhaps with a clearer sense of who they are and what they value. (2014: 157)

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Let us begin with the refinement of Worthen’s question, rephrasing it thus: from the perspective of an actor of colour, what is Shakespeare performance for? As Ayanna Thompson has made clear, claims to Shakespeare’s universality are fraught with contradictory assumptions, some privileging emotional veracity, some longevity, translatability or simple marketability, and they are all complicated by a colonialist mindset which asserts that white, early modern values can and should be read as universal standards of quality, taste, political outlook and so forth (2011: 21). In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin assert, [t]hrough the literary canon, the body of British texts which all too frequently still act as a touchstone of taste and value, and through RS-English (Received Standard English), which asserts the English of south-east England as a universal norm, the weight of antiquity continues to dominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial world. This cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonical assumptions about literary activity, and through attitudes to postcolonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shoots of English literature, and which therefore relegate them to marginal and subordinate positions. (1991: 7) Shakespeare’s value as a cultural object, one whose power to elevate and instruct, is taken for granted, even if there is little agreement about what the plays actually embody or suggest. One need not look far to see it used as cultural philanthropy and self-improvement. For example, the Detroit Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in Prison (SIP) works extensively in both men’s and women’s facilities. Their online promotional materials state that ‘Shakespeare in Prison empowers incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to reconnect with their humanity and that of others; to reflect on their past, present, and future; and to gain the confidence, self-esteem, and crucial skills they need to heal and positively impact their communities’ (Detroit Public Theatre n.d.). While there is evidence that this programme benefits the prisoners, its invocation of the almost magical power of the nature of the colonial assumptions implicit in the programme leaves unscrutinized whether the benefits of SIP derive from a well-structured theatre or from the fact that the theatre is producing Shakespeare. Would not, for example, August Wilson also employ heightened language in historical context while addressing the more pressing issues of incarceration and American racism? In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith contends that ‘[t]he struggle to assert and claim humanity has been a consistent thread of anti-colonial discourses on colonialism and oppression … imperialism’s dehumanizing imperatives which were structured into language, the economy, social relations and cultural life’ (1999: 26). Smith uses the work of Franz Fanon and Ashis Nandy to assert that colonialism functions to ‘bring disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world’ (1999: 28). Countering this status quo requires a restructuring of power dynamics, not just an acknowledgement by well-meaning white allies that their perspective is inadequate

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and is unlikely to be aware of certain nuances which fall outside their own range of experience. This is difficult to achieve because white people are historically and institutionally conditioned to assume that such laborious measures are unnecessary. Drawing on years of racial awareness research and training white people to recognize the effects of their largely unconscious racism, Robin Diangelo breaks down those assumptions, some of which are prevalent in the theatre and classroom: Racism is simply personal prejudice I will be the judge of whether racism has occurred. Racism can only be intentional; my not having intended racism cancels out the impact of my behavior. If I am a good person, I can’t be racist. (2018: 121) The list continues, becoming more clearly insidious (‘It is unkind to point out racism’, ‘Racists are bad individuals, so you are saying I am a bad person’), leading to the passive-aggressive disruption of any attempt to alter the current racial power dynamic via the self-protective strategies of what she calls White Fragility. The unspoken goals of that fragility include: Maintain white solidarity Hijack the conversation Protect a limited world view Trivialize the reality of racism, Rally more resources to white people. (2018: 122) This last is, of course, especially damning, doubly so when it is done not by avowed racists, but by self-styled allies who want to be seen to be on the right side of a political issue (which is to say the left side) so long as their own power and privilege are not challenged.

PART 2: DECOLONIZING SHAKESPEARE How then to proceed where Shakespeare is concerned? His works have been used by governments to subjugate marginalized populations and bring about cultural hierarchy (see Burt 2006). Concurrently, as Celeste Jennings notes, ‘Shakespeare has often been used by African Americans as a way of proving worthiness’ (Sheir 2019). Defying such assumptions, August Wilson gave an address to the Theatre Communications Group Conference in 1966 titled ‘The Ground On Which I Stand’, a speech which has since become a touchstone for the discussion of equity in the theatre and arts funding. In it, Wilson calls out an imperialist value system, saying: Theatre is part of art history in terms of its craft and dramaturgy, but it is part of social history in terms of how it is financed and governed. By making money available to theatres willing to support colorblind casting, the financiers and

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governors have signaled not only their unwillingness to support Black theatre but their willingness to fund dangerous and divisive assaults against it. Colorblind casting is an aberrant idea that has never had any validity other than as a tool of the Cultural Imperialists who view their American culture, rooted in the icons of European culture, as beyond reproach in its perfection. It is inconceivable to them that life could be lived and enriched without knowing Shakespeare or Mozart. Their gods, their manners, their being, are the only true and correct representations of humankind. They refuse to recognize Black conduct and manners as part of a system that is fueled by its own philosophy, mythology, history, creative motif, social organization, and ethos. The idea that blacks have their own way of responding to the world, their own values, style, linguistics, their own religion and aesthetics, is unacceptable to them. (1996) Jennings says that Wilson created [his] work as a gift for African American actors, to be bigger through his text, and to tell our stories. And I think his anger about black people still doing Shakespeare, not to put words in his mouth, my perception of it, ‘Why are you still trying to do this [Shakespeare] work when this [plays written by and for African Americans] is here?’ I think it’s his way of saying, ‘Don’t keep knocking on the door, when the door is locked’. (Sheir 2019) Much has changed since 1966, of course, and Wilson’s position – essential in its political moment – no longer dominates the discourse around this subject as the availability of other theatrical voices, voices more clearly tuned to Black actors and other actors of colour, have made Shakespeare an optional asset for non-white actors. Jennings thus adds that students of colour who are training to be actors need to think of Shakespeare as ‘currency’, a way for them to assert not just their skills and range but their value, their ability to perform material some directors might assume they cannot do: When you audition, when somebody says to you ‘Do you have a classical piece?’ If you want to be in this business, you’ve got to be able to say ‘Yes, I have several.’ Why would you knock yourself out of the box, purely because you’re intimidated by it or it makes you angry or whatever … Take it, own it. It doesn’t mean that you have to make friends with it, but it is currency. It’s a way to get your foot in the door, and, like it or not, people will think of you differently. (Sheir 2019) This strictly utilitarian approach has a second tier: that the various nuances and complexities of the Shakespearean text demand a verbal attentiveness which is less insistently apparent in more contemporary material. It’s Shakespeare’s words that actors find so intimidating. But if actors can master those words, the skills and habits acquired along the way become applicable to other work whose linguistic richness may have been less superficially daunting and foreign, but which benefit from the

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performer’s expanded skillset. These practical reasons for the actor of colour to engage with Shakespeare should be added to whatever value we believe intrinsic to the Shakespearean text, not as a marker of universal value but still as something worthy of actorly study, which are beyond the scope of this essay. The re-engagement of Shakespeare by actors of colour, however, in no way relieves the pressures and problems of the plays’ colonial legacy. These must be tackled head on. If, as Jennings says, the Shakespearean door has been locked to actors of colour for so long that it’s not worth knocking on, it isn’t enough to crack the door open; those actors have to want to go through, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to be themselves on the other side. In order to make those new meanings with Shakespeare, we must meet head on the cultural legacy that we wish to deconstruct. Central to the problem of Shakespeare’s colonial valences on stage is the persistence of white power at the heart of the enterprise, and this has to be countered at all levels. For instance, it is not the engagement of Shakespeare with othered populations per se that creates reasons for concern. Rather, it is when Shakespeare is positioned as the redeemer of people of colour and marginalized populations, when it is marketed to funders as a panacea for cultural ills, or when – on college and university campuses – it dominates the theatre and the classroom to the exclusion of less traditional alternatives, that it becomes a problem. This is doubly the case when Shakespeare is separated from issues of race and ethnicity as if somehow transcending them. As Thompson observes, many actor training programs segregate the training for the performance of race and culture from the training for the performance of the classics. They simply do not address how an actor of color who is interested in the classics should approach them in his/her own skin and racial/cultural identity. (2011: 88) This may be countered through alterations to curriculum so that, instead of relying solely on Shakespeare, ostracized populations can be ‘empowered’ and ‘find their humanity’ through the works of, say, Josefina Lopez, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange and other playwrights of colour. But decolonization is not merely about adding to or minimizing the influence of those things that have had the most colonial power. It is also about radically remaking those culturally influential products in the image of the present, assuming – of course – that we think there is still something of value and relevance to be made in the process. In the right hands, the very position of marginalized societies can enrich a production in ways that are deep and nuanced. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin argue that [m]arginality [is] an unprecedented source of creative energy. The impetus towards decentering and pluralism has always been present in the history of European thought and has reached its latest development in post-structuralism. But the situation of marginalized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this position much earlier and more directly. (1991: 12; emphasis added)

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Everything said to this point assumes the domination of classroom and rehearsal room by representatives of white cultural power, still the structural norm on both American and British campuses. But what if that power were challenged or sidestepped by, for instance, hiring a director who knows more about the cultures of his or her non-white actors, or by having a white director work alongside a person of colour in order to bring greater cultural nuance and expression to the experience of rehearsal and performance?

PART 3: EMPIRICAL SOLUTIONS AND THE PROBLEMS OF ‘NON-TRADITIONAL’ CASTING If we concede that there is indeed value to having actors of colour perform Shakespeare, value which does not inhere in claims to Shakespeare’s improving universality, then we must navigate the ways in which such performance might be best effected. Ayanna Thompson presents the four approaches to non-traditional casting outlined in the 1980s by the Non Traditional Casting Project (NTCP, renamed Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts in 2007). In the interests of brevity, we will repeat her definitions here: Colorblind Casting: a meritocratic model in which actors are cast without regard to race; the best actor for the best role Societal Casting: a socially informed model in which actors of color are cast in roles originally conceived as being white if people of color perform these roles in society as a whole Conceptual Casting: a conceptually conceived model in which actors of color are cast in roles to enhance the play’s social resonance Cross-cultural Casting: another conceptually conceived model in which the entire world of the play is translated to a different culture and location. (2011: 76) Of these, the one which is most frequently invoked is among the most problematic. ‘Colorblind’ casting hinges on the extent to which race, colour or ethnicity are visible on stage and, by extension, the extent to which they are read or intended as semiotic factors in the performance. In its most extreme form, colour-blind casting denies any signification to race, allowing, for instance, a production’s family members to be cast from different races without explanation, the audience being expected to see past their apparent racial difference. Though sometimes championed as being inclusive, this approach is clearly more about denying racial difference than embracing it. To put it another way, in repudiating the relevance of race on stage, colour-blind casting asserts a brand of universality delineated by white history and embodies, therefore, the same impulse as that which claims universality to Shakespeare. The benign reading of such a production is that it invites actors of colour (and therefore audiences of colour) to partake of cultural sophistication, extending the umbrella as an act of generosity to all peoples, so long as they check their racial identities at the door. A more critical reading sees colour-blind Shakespeare as enacting Othering,

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cast and audience both being invited to pretend that the actors of colour are really white, since that is the only way they can participate in such elevated cultural activity. Less absolute an approach permits the casting of actors of colour in roles in which their race appears to be a non-factor – Hamlet’s gravedigger, say – a performance where the audience might be unsure if what they are seeing is intended to be colour blind. Of course, such ambiguity is enabled in this case by class, and by the sense of separateness from the main plot. Casting a Black Claudius or Polonius does not merely necessitate thinking through the racial casting of their surrounding family members: it makes a political point about race and power in the production, in ways a Black gravedigger sidesteps, albeit problematically. If actors of colour only appear in marginal, comic or servile roles, then the production is not colour blind at all, but Societal Casting of the kind which, in Thompson’s model, draws on and perpetuates negative stereotypes in ways confining many Black actresses in Macbeth to the role of witch. While the Conceptual and Cross-Cultural casting models offer more positive approaches to the issue, they both have the tendency to make the production fundamentally about race in ways which can also be confining. Thompson cites a production of Macbeth in which the title character is the only person of colour as an instance of the former, and Orson Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth as one of the latter. Cross-Cultural and Conceptual casting may be the opposite of tokenism, but they are still potentially reductive, denying the actor of colour a role which is not ultimately symbolic. While some of the four approaches are more clearly problematic than others, the larger problem Thompson articulates is the core binary in which race is either effaced, or embraced as the sole signifier, often in ways which are broadly symbolic, rather than individually tailored to the identities of individual actors/characters. How do we find a middle ground, in which actors of colour can play Shakespeare with integrity in a manner which embraces their race/ethnicity but is not limited or entirely defined by it? How, in other words, can we facilitate a production which allows actors of colour to be fully and three-dimensionally themselves?

PART 4: THE ALTERNATIVE: COLOUR/CULTURE CONSCIOUS PRODUCTION AND THE BLACK SHAKESPEAREAN VOICE Justin Emeka says when it comes to inviting the Black aesthetic into theatre there is still a cultural rigidity that imposes strange limitations on audiences’ imaginations. I have found it odd that theatre companies, producers, and directors are likely to think it more possible that a Black actor could play the blood relative of a white actor, yet not have any faith that audiences might actually accept the possibility of Black cultural traditions existing in the world of the play. (2016: 10)

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Speaking after his experience in a race-specific, all-Black (and Black-directed) production of King Lear, Emeka had the following revelation: [R]ace neutrality in ‘classic theatre’ usually implies a cultural hegemony that denies a Black actor access to their own cultural memory, one of an actor’s greatest resources. Culture is an important lens that allows us to process and respond to the world, so it can be difficult to create character without the specificity of how race and culture define norms, values, and behavior in the world of a play. (2016: 89) Such an assumption underscores what might be called a ‘culturally conscious/ competent’ approach to performance. In Towards A Culturally Competent System of Care, Terry Cross et al. describe cultural competence as: a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enable that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations. The word ‘culture’ is used because it implies the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values and institutions of a racial, ethnic, religious or social group. The word competence is used because it implies having the capacity to function effectively … Five essential elements contribute to a system’s, institution’s, or agency’s ability to become more culturally competent [valuing diversity, cultural self-assessment, dynamics of difference, institutionalization of cultural knowledge, adaptation to diversity]. Further, each of these five elements must function at every level of the system. Attitudes, policies, and practices must be congruent within all levels of the system. (1989: 13, 18) Adding to the literature, in 1993 Diana Denboba and the US Department of Health and Human Services said that cultural competency ‘refers to the ability to honor and respect the beliefs, language, interpersonal styles and behaviors of individuals … Striving to achieve cultural competence is a dynamic, ongoing, developmental process that requires a long-term commitment’ (Denboba and USDHHS 1993; emphasis original). In theatrical terms, cultural competence includes the way that production comes into being, utilizing staff who are deeply versed in the given culture(s), allowing the cast to practice competence through recognizable elements of voice, gesture, attitude and other authentic markers of a specific ethnic culture or cultures. White professors and directors must recognize when working with actors of colour that their cultural competence with Shakespeare is not the only competence that matters. Incorporating Emeka’s call, Berry and Dunn view Shakespeare as a tool, emphasizing not his false universality, but how his work can assist in training a focus on character rooted in complex language. In their classroom training, Black students are taught to respect the rhythm and language of dramatic texts, with Black Bards such as Morisseau, Shange, Wilson, Hughes and Hall, as well as Shakespeare, understood as having their own complex language, rhythms and culture.

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In 1992, Kristin Linklater asserted that ‘Shakespeare no longer rings true when presented only by a white cast speaking homogenized English’ (1992: 201), but two decades later many Black actors still feel constrained to speak Shakespeare’s words in a register other than their own, rather than being able to ‘free his/her voice from inhibition and limitation [in order to] marry Shakespeare’s words to the roots of African American English [thereby liberating] Shakespeare from the shackles of a narrow Anglo Saxon tradition’ (ibid.: 202). For instance, Daron Oram quotes a young Black working-class actor in a UK Drama School: I feel since coming here my native accent is not good enough. This line between clarity and RP is so blurred for me that when I’m approaching text I try to tell myself to use my native accent and I can’t use it because I fall into a pattern of trying to speak RP. That scared me a lot because it feels like now I don’t have a voice … I don’t have a voice! (2019: 283) As the above indicates, the genesis of a Black actor’s relationship with Shakespeare’s language can substantially affect their willingness to participate in Shakespearean productions, particularly if those first encounters are not handled with respect and trust. When actors feel restricted, when they don’t feel ownership of the language they are to speak and have no sense of belonging within the play/production, their ability to utilize a fully expressive vocal mechanism is hindered. There are numerous voice and speech pedagogical approaches that yield positive results, such as the work that is happening at Black Arts Theater Intensive, a collaboration between the Billie Holiday Theatre and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. But success depends upon an actor who, at stasis, feels empowered and affirmed that their perspectives, experiences and sensibilities are welcomed into the rehearsal room, even if the director is not altogether familiar with them. Students cannot experience true growth within a rehearsal process if they are forced to see their experience and culture as somehow deficient.

PART 5: TWELFTH NIGHT, UNC CHARLOTTE 2018 While there is a sense in which all theatre is local, university theatre grows out of a particular form of locality defined by the parameters of the academic community, its populations and cultures. The production of Twelfth Night that forms the case study for the remainder of this essay took place in 2018 in the Theatre department at UNC Charlotte, directed by Hartley and Berry, the department’s new voice and acting coach. While there are conservatories in the US (similar to RADA or LAMDA in the UK), there are also several types of theatre programmes including BFA conservatory programmes within colleges and universities, and BA programmes which are part of a liberal arts education but also train students to perform professionally. Our programme falls in the latter category and our season is therefore tied to our curriculum. While the conditions of undergraduate institutions vary tremendously, there is significant common ground in macro terms that the specifics of our host

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institution might be extrapolated as fairly representative of US colleges and institutions where student actors are pursuing a liberal arts degree (a Bachelor of Arts, in our case) but whose futures vary considerably. Some of those students see themselves as acquiring a non-vocational qualification, while others – more – see themselves as en route to being professional performers, whether their path will go through graduate school or straight into the workplace. UNC Charlotte is designated High Access, so entry requirements are minimal, and theatre majors who focus on acting do not need to audition to qualify for the programme (though they do to be cast in shows). We currently have ninetysix majors, of which over a third are people of colour (nineteen Black, seven Latinx, two Asian or Pacific Islander, six identifying as having two or more racial components). The department’s record on racial casting was mixed. On the one hand we had attempted to be as inclusive as possible in our previous Shakespeare productions (most recently a Q1 Hamlet and a rough cut of Merry Wives), but the results had been uneven. In the Hamlet production, the team initially set out to avoid a ‘colourblind’ approach while remaining committed to casting actors of colour, but by giving key roles to actors he thought best suited to them, the director unravelled any racial logic to the show, resulting in a ‘colour-blind’ production (white Hamlet, Ofelia, Corambis and Gertrud; Black Ghost, King and Laertes). The result was inclusive but unspecific and semiotically blank, so (based on subsequent informal feedback) that the audience tended to look past the racial casting as something which did not – or was not intended to – signify. The Merry Wives production attempted a more racially conscious grouping, presenting Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol and Nym as people of colour in an otherwise white world, but the subversive intent backfired, seeming to poke fun where it was not intended. This problem was compounded by a theatrical approach which eschewed realism in favour of a broader, more commediaesque stylization that was executed unevenly. Some of the actors of colour who had seemed content with their roles in rehearsal reported being upset by friends and family members in the audience accusing them of playing stereotypes. Importantly, in neither show were people of colour involved in the faculty artistic team, save for the Merry Wives movement coach who was Latinx. Both previous productions struggled in part because actors of colour within the department often chose not to audition for Shakespeare, so while design decisions for Twelfth Night were made in the summer (a vaguely contemporary New Orleansesque unit set), casting decisions were left unmade until the beginning of the fall semester.1 In the meantime, Berry championed the idea of the show to our actors of colour and Dunn encouraged the students in her African American theatre class to audition, with a result that the casting pool turned out to be remarkably diverse. Self-evident though it may seem, the point is worthy of emphasis: the engagement of faculty of colour in the project directly facilitated the production that resulted, a production in which 75 per cent of the roles were filled by actors of colour. The praxis of cultivating actors of colour and the decentring of traditional (white) authority in our show was thus partly the result of culturally competent mentorship and advocacy.

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Early conversations between Hartley and Berry about racial casting led to a modification of what Hartley had considered best practices, namely the insistence on a visible and literal logic to casting (contrary to the aforementioned Hamlet in which the racial element of the families was not realist), as well as the rejection of a ‘colour-blind’ approach. Berry pressed for the above described ‘culturally conscious’ approach which would permit non-realist castings (Black children to white parents, say) but still allowed the race of the actors to signify. In other words, he wanted to circumvent one of the core problems of ‘colour-blind’ productions by suspending disbelief as to the characters’ race/ethnicity but seeing the actors for what they were. The result effectively added a fifth category to Thompson’s list, one which fuses colour-blind and conceptual approaches to casting in ways that treated the play itself less literally, but embraced the truth of the performer. Thus armed with a certain flexibility of approach, and with the assumption that we could make our choices play in ways which were sensitive and productive, we were able to actually do what directors frequently claim to: we cast the best actors for the roles regardless. That said, we were still attentive to how such an approach would play on stage, and our shared resistance to the ‘colour-blind’ approach led to adjustments; our first casting gave us a Black Viola, a white Sebastian and a Black Antonio, but at the end of the table read we decided to switch our Antonio and Sebastian, thereby making the production more literally coherent. We did so specifically so that the audience would not think themselves in a ‘colour-blind’ production, thereby eliminating the semiotic ambiguity Thompson identifies as inhering in many non-traditionally cast shows. The final cast was three quarters people of colour and broke down thus: Orsino, Viola, Sebastian, Olivia, Sir Toby, Feste, Fabian and the Sea Captain (who also played a servant) were all African American. Maria and the priest (who also played a servant) were Latinx, while the actor playing Valentine identified as Caucasian Hispanic. White actors played Malvolio, Curio, Sir Andrew and Antonio, characters (largely) excluded from the play’s happy ending. While most actors were aligned by gender with their roles as written, Feste, Fabian and the priest were all played by women. Though putting Black actors in socially powerful roles in keeping with the show’s vaguely New Orleans setting overturned the practice common to Societal Casting, it did not clearly ascribe a single meaning to race in terms of rank: Orsino was Black, but so was Olivia’s lowest ranked servant; Orsino’s staff were white, but so were the upwardly mobile Malvolio and the wealthy knight, Sir Andrew. While we were satisfied with the way that race was being incorporated in terms of casting, we were still faced with the problem outlined above concerning the cultural paradox of actors of colour navigating, owning the Shakespearean text with all its colonial associations. This was not something that could be solved from within the rehearsal room alone. We were able, however, to draw on one of the features that make college and university production unique: the intellectual support of concurrent classes. Immediately before Twelfth Night went into rehearsal, Kaja Dunn was developing and teaching the theatre department’s inaugural course on African American Theatre. Despite the vastness of the topic, and only having a semester to dedicate to it, Dunn

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decided to include a section on ‘African Americans in Shakespeare’ to coincide with the production schedule. Early in the semester a student in the production, a young Black man, reached out to express how nervous and uncomfortable he was tackling his role in Twelfth Night. He stated he had never done anything like this, and he had used a pseudo British dialect in his audition. He was told to use his own voice, but he could not reconcile how his own voice made sense in the play. Dunn and the student discussed how Shakespeare’s speech was closer to his own Southern dialect than to RP.2 This exchange helped to inform the materials that would be used in the classroom on the history and legacy of Black and specifically African American association with Shakespeare. It was important to this pedagogic strategy to utilize Black-authored scholarship. A key resource for this section of class was Gregory Carr’s paper on the African Grove theatre and the following ‘incident’: On August 10, 1822, Stephen Price, the Park Theatre manager hired ‘ruffians’ to attack the African Grove actors during a performance … [W]hen the New York Police arrived, the actors from the African Grove Theatre were arrested and not the rioters who instigated the disturbance. The judge overseeing the case agreed to release the actors on condition that they promise to not perform Shakespeare in the theatre anymore. (2016) After reading this work, the class also listened to The Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast on ‘African Americans and Shakespeare’ (Sheir 2019) in which the assault on the actors is mentioned but underplayed, their arrest explained as the result of ‘noise violations’. The students picked up on the discrepancy right away, leading to a discussion of how Shakespeare is perceived based on who is describing his work and how it was produced. One impediment in teaching this topic was the continued erasure of current and historical African American engagement with Shakespeare, something Dunn sought to counter. She emphasized the long and convoluted history of Shakespeare in the African American community, its performance history by Black actors and its use by enslaved people to mock slave owners and subvert power (Jennings in Sheir 2019). That information had not made its way into many of the high school or college classrooms where the students are introduced to Shakespeare, so Black students in the class originally felt an ambivalence, intimidation or disconnection from the material. Many of the students expressed frustration at not having learned this history previously, further reminding the Black faculty of the need to advocate for the students in the production process in ways allowing them to bring their full selves to their work in an empowering way. Our Twelfth Night production had been preceded the previous semester by a troubled production of The Wiz3 in which many of the African American actors believed that they were performing Blackness that had been dictated from a white perspective. This manifested in various behavioural choices but was especially notable in the voice work. When asked about how this process affected them as

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African American actors at a predominantly white institution, many of the actors had a profound emotional response. Several said that they felt robbed of the right to equitably explore who they were seeking to become as young adults and as artists in training. They felt robbed of the ability to explore the commonalities they might find in the roles given to them. One actor felt as if this previous process had made him ‘erase my culture, and perform blackness through a white lens’.4 This is what happens all too often when there is no institutional consequence for cultural insensitivity disguised as an allied behaviour. Handling ignorance is common to the African American academic theatrical experience, and the aftershock of that ignorance framed the initial days of rehearsal for Twelfth Night. The resultant fracture was palpable and intensified the distance which the Black actors already felt from a Shakespeare they saw as outside, even hostile to, their culture. The combination threatened to stifle the growth of both the actors and the theatre program. From the beginning of rehearsal, the goal set by the directorial team was not to right the previous wrongs, but to allow each individual student to experience the play through language and dynamic behaviour, bringing their whole selves to the project. There were several moments early in the production process when the cast (who were clearly unsure of how they were supposed to sound) were reminded to utilize their own individual voices, rather than attempting a faux English/White Southern US dialect they thought ‘appropriate’ for performing Shakespeare. In so doing, Hartley and Berry sought to avoid a further separation from self, particularly since Black actors are often told that they cannot be understood when they talk. This was an opportunity for Hartley and Berry to step in and reassure the actors that the concept of ‘sounding classical’ was useless, and that what they wanted instead from the cast inhered in their own individual, dynamic and expressive vocal mechanism. This was a moment of affirmation, one in which the students had been expecting criticism and a process that potentially further distanced them from the characters that they were playing. It is standard procedure in some actor training programmes to remove regionalisms and idiolectic characteristics from actors’ voices to produce a more neutral or socalled ‘standard sound’. For example, the ACTING UP REPORT, Labour’s Inquiry into Access and Diversity in The Performing Arts includes this recollection by actress Cush Jumbo: I nearly left at the end of my first year (of Central Drama School) because I felt so uncomfortable, so working class. I remember being told by the teacher who I was studying received pronunciation with that my accent was lazy, that South Londoners had lazy mouths and lazy accents. (2017: 12) The authors of the paper report numerous ‘instances of exclusionary practices – where students were asked to suppress their regional accents, play stereotyped parts’. In UNC Charlotte’s Twelfth Night we pursued the opposite. We continually reminded the actors that it was their voices, their intonations and their idiolectic qualities that would make this production unique and successful. Berry reinforced

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the idea that Black actors should not alter their voices to suit what an audience might find ‘acceptable’ or think of Shakespeare as material that couldn’t sit naturally in their mouths. Throughout the process the refrain from the directing team was ‘We want you!’ We strove to reassure each actor that they were enough. This is not to say that there weren’t notes given on clarity and vocal energy, but the goal throughout was to ensure that the actors felt able to bring to the show their own unique presence and sensibilities as manifested by their own natural voices. Early in the rehearsal process we ran into an issue when Sebastian says ‘Belike you slew great number of his people?’ (3.3.6). When the scene was rehearsed the actor was clearly uncomfortable vocally, trying to sound grander and more formal than he was in ways that made him stiff and artificial. The voice coach said to him: ‘It is you we wanted, so we want to hear you deliver this line.’ This reiterated affirmation was more powerful than any acting or vocal technique that would be utilized. Similarly, when we came to Sebastian’s line ‘This pearl she gave me, I do feel’t and see’t’ (4.3.2), the actor, DeAndre Sanders, pronounced ‘feel’ so like ‘fill’ that the director thought he had misread the script. In fact this sound change, a shortening of the vowel, is found in many southern regions and was the actor’s natural pronunciation. Hartley and Berry explored how asking the actor to extend the vowel sound would affect his acting. What was immediately clear was that the actor was not comfortable making a sound change in the moment, and when he tried it felt like a stripping of self, the opposite of what the company had been focusing on throughout the process, and in the attempt the acting was suffering. This was one of many small moments in the process where the directorial team committed to whatever repercussions there may be from their audience or colleagues in pursuit of the actors feeling comfortable and in control. What became evident, however, was that the regional sound did not supersede the work the actor did on clarifying the text and bringing specific intent to the scene. Indeed, complaints about the actors not being clear or not seeming to understand what they were saying – a common audience critique of student Shakespeare – were practically non-existent, and Hartley had to remind himself that for this audience Sanders’s pronunciation was clearer and more real – which is to say more clearly inhabited by a thinking, feeling person – than would have been the case if his dialect had been somehow replaced with something more conventionally generic. The clarity and specificity that came from such moments demonstrated that an African American can utilize a voice that is authentically their own without having to augment how they sound to satisfy a limited perspective on the depth and beauty of African American culture. In talking about the rehearsal process after the fact, Sanders stated that ‘It allowed me to be free onstage’, a position diametrically opposed to his sentiments on the process he had been in the semester before, about which he said ‘I felt like I had strings on’. Another actor, Marcus Fitzpatrick (Orsino), was thoroughly surprised that he was allowed to bring his identity into the role, saying that ‘Initially I didn’t think, as a black man, I could perform Shakespeare until Kaja Dunn referred me to Andrew Hartley’. Fitzpatrick went on to say ‘I was intrigued by the initial concept, being set in New Orleans, but I was worried that the language would be changed to sound broken, or urban’. The remark is telling because it suggests both an anxiety

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about not being able to perform an ‘authentic’ Shakespeare and an anxiety about not being able to perform the actor’s own authentic Blackness (as opposed to a media stereotype of ‘broken’ or ‘urban’), both concerns rooted in familiarity with white assumptions and power. The trepidation that a director might modulate the text and dictate the actor’s approach to it in order to generate a prior (which is to say white) notion of Blackness, would never allow an actor to feel empowered to bring their full self and sensibilities to the process. Fitzpatrick said that, until this process, he had only looked to deepen his understanding of language and the African American experience through plays specifically written for Black actors by African American playwrights. Reflecting on his experience portraying Orsino, however, feeling as if he had been able to bring his sensibilities as an African American man to the role, Fitzpatrick said that he felt that the August Wilson position – eschewing white, classical theatre in favour of material written exclusively by and for African Americans – would limit the scope of the Black experience in the theatre. In his approach to Orsino, by contrast, he worked to push the boundaries of what is viewed as the normalized African American experience on stage. Fitzpatrick’s insight is a helpful one in that it reminds us that while Black actors may feel limited by directorial assumptions about Shakespeare, they can also feel limited by assumptions about what kinds of non-Shakespearean roles they are suited to. Our African American students have a variety of different backgrounds; they look and sound different, they have different attitudes, ideas and tastes. The idea that African American culture can be limited to a monolithic perspective restricts the expressive range of an actor looking to build an extensively compelling and complex character. Vocally, such limitation hinders the actor from bringing a voice that is authentic to the room, so when we talk about freeing the Shakespearean voice, as Kristin Linklater (1992) does, we must embrace the idea that the nature of that freedom is both different for Black actors and plural rather than singular. In the training process, actors are looking for affirmation and permission to discover their character by marrying technique with their life experiences, but creating constricting circumstances out of cultural ignorance does not foster the necessary trust for this exploration to happen. The expectation of a monolithic Blackness has perpetuated problematic stereotypes and tropes resulting in an assumption that all African American people have the same point of view, opinions and feelings towards a given subject. In this instance, Hartley and Berry were keenly aware that this was a moment to heal, not exacerbate the damage that had been done the previous semester. Rather than reducing the production to a singular sound, the actors were encouraged to use their natural dialect, inflection, intonation and vocal quality to enable a tapestry of varied tones. Amberlin McCormick (Viola), who had played the lead in the troubled production of The Wiz the semester prior, had the strongest emotional response when speaking about her parallel experiences. McCormick stated that in the previous show she had felt ‘manipulated, like I was a puppet’ in a process which did not allow her to feel as if her journey as an African American woman was valid based upon expectations of what Black actors should bring to the table. She said she had

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felt ‘not black enough’ during rehearsals for The Wiz, and went into Twelfth Night thinking ‘I didn’t think it [i.e. Shakespeare] was for me’. After the fact, however, she felt that she had been allowed to explore Viola as she wished, vocally and physically. Instead of feeling that there were limits or expectations put on the actors based upon the behaviour of other African American actors in the cast, McCormick stated ‘I was allowed to be Amber’ (her nickname). This may seem like a minor achievement, but that is to assume that African American actors are empowered in predominately white environments in ways that, in many cases, they are not.

PART 6: CONCLUSIONS The Twelfth Night staging was the department’s most diverse Shakespeare production to date, a fact that significantly altered the rehearsal room dynamic and shaped elements of the onstage story. For the first time, in terms of simple numbers, people of colour dominated the rehearsal process. Previous productions had not been tokenistic in their employment of non-white actors, but whiteness had set the tone and, consciously or otherwise, had reinforced certain notions of a default ownership. This time, the energy in the rehearsal room was different. Once the actors of colour got comfortable with the idea that the rug was not going to be pulled out from under them, they began to ad lib around the lines, found bits of business (playful elaborations on greeting handshakes, for instance), flashes of eye contact, posture adjustments, moments of personal grooming and other naturalistic flourishes that were absolutely them. Importantly, that them was plural, not singular. Theirs was not, in the case of the African American actors, a univocal representation of Blackness (whatever that might be), not an idea of What Black People Are, but something nuanced and individuated. Thanks to Berry’s persistent encouragement that they incorporate Shakespeare’s text into themselves, rather than put on something they thought suitably elevated, those nuanced distinctions started to come through, affirming the multiplicity of Black identities in ways that tend to be flattened out in white critical discourse (including that which attempts to champion a liberal perspective on race in Shakespeare studies). The process by which the actors grew into their roles and vice versa was never directed in racial terms. The cast were never told to be more ‘street,’ more ‘urban’, or more (God help us) ‘ghetto’. What they found, they found through a sense of mutual support, and if the director had any hand in that at all it’s because he shut up, got out of the way and let them be themselves. In this, the sheer ratio of actors of colour to white actors cannot be overemphasized. What ownership the actors developed over the material grew out of not feeling like a minority presence. The Black actors’ comfort transferred from the rehearsal room dynamic to the characters in the show. As we suggested above, our initial casting was somewhat arbitrary, and it wasn’t immediately clear that it would be the white characters (with the exception of Feste, who we’ll get to in a moment) who were largely left out of the play’s happy ending. When we were working the letter-reading scene and we heard our (white) Malvolio say that our (Black) Olivia had confessed that if she were

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to love, it should be one of his complexion, we realized how that line was going to play. We discussed the matter and decided that we did not want to make the moment about race and – by extension – about racism, and opted to change ‘complexion’ to ‘character’. Too often racial dynamics are reduced to issues of conscious racism, and we didn’t want Malvolio to become that kind of villain. That said, it was clear that what bothered Malvolio about Sir Toby and co. was connected to issues of race, but it was less clear that he was fully cognizant of that. Malvolio resented Sir Toby’s playful flouting of authority, his raucous, self-parodying snatches of song (improvised snatches running the gamut from church hall to jazz bar and James Brown). That resentment was directed at the onstage band as well, but it grew out of a sense that Malvolio’s rightful place – his privilege, if you like – was constantly being eroded, but as with a lot of privilege the assumption was unanalysed and largely unconscious. His dislike of Viola wasn’t because she was Black, but her Blackness clearly accorded with his sense of her as instigator and nuisance. Malvolio’s gut-level resentment of the Black community around him was balanced by Sir Andrew, who desperately wanted to be part of that community, as manifested by his puppy dog fawning over Toby and his delighted (and doomed) attempt to replicate the easy manner in which Toby and Feste interacted. Though he didn’t do anything as crude as attempt to copy their dress (though in hindsight, perhaps he should have), Andrew clearly saw his drinking and singing buddies as infinitely cooler than he was (the only thing he was right about), and it was a part of his personal tragedy that he couldn’t find a way in. The more he tried, the more his sprezzatura failed him. That Toby – always fun, but not terribly pleasant – turned on him at the end merely confirmed a separateness which had always been apparent, reminding the audience, perhaps, of the dangers of fetishizing Black entertainers in ways which reinforce a sense of white dominance. Of course, the point of that separateness in our show was its inversion of one common in the stage history of Shakespeare in which actors of colour are kept on the sidelines, and we don’t want to overly schematize it here. But it was clear that even Malvolio’s irritation with Sir Toby stemmed from his separateness from the largely Black world around him in ways inverting what often happens when Black actors are involved in (but not central to) Shakespeare production. As with the adjustment of the word ‘complexion’, the show was not intended to be about race in political terms, but was intended for actors of colour to play in the Shakespeare sandbox in the ways their white counterparts generally do, as leaders, as those who set the tone of the show and the process which produces it. Our Black Sebastian didn’t reject our white Antonio because of race, but because of Olivia; but Sebastian’s Blackness was allowed to play as Blackness, neither as something to be looked past, nor as a political signpost in support of a directorial agenda. What we think we achieved was something close to what is usually claimed disingenuously when Black actors are cast in Shakespeare in roles other than Othello, Aaron in Titus and a few other racially inflected roles: that the actors were able to play their humanity without denying their colour or culture, affirming a version of humanity – in fact – which is symbiotically bound to their culture.

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In our production, Maria’s insertion of the previously unheard-of Fabian into the box tree ruse was played as a snub against Feste which she felt for the rest of the play, and which informed her joining those other characters left out of the happy ending – Malvolio, Sir Andrew and Antonio – on the reconstructed boat that left Illyria during the final song. The final image of the production was thus one of community and of the people leaving it, but the community that remained – the three married couples and their staff – was predominantly Black. Malvolio was storming out in anger, Sir Andrew was leaving disappointed, Antonio was resigned but accepting of his need to go and did so without bitterness toward Sebastian, but all were white. Feste, who was Black, circled the boat as she sang and finally stepped up onto it, as if determined to say farewell to Illyria and join with those who had not found harmony in the story’s plot. It was a potent, but emotionally conflicted moment and prompted a lot of audience reflection. As well as making individual psychological sense of the characters, the reappearance of the boat was not so much a repudiation of whiteness as it was a standing up for a new demographic of Shakespearean actors who had, over the course of the past couple of hours, demonstrated their chops and, more importantly, their ownership of material from which they have been all too frequently marginalized. As the sound of rain and waves returned and the lights dimmed the show seemed to promise, if only for this community in this moment, a sea change.

NOTES 1. This is normal practice in our department because our students’ lives are subject to various forces and, given also the high number of transfer students who enter our programme from other institutions, our student body can vary significantly from the end of one academic year to the start of the next. 2. See, for example, an interview with Ben Crystal (McElhearn 2014) in which he discusses original pronunciation’s links to Scots Irish and (in modified forms) their US descendent accents common to Appalachia and other parts of the south, and his desire that actors find their own voice for Shakespeare. 3. The ‘super soul’ musical by Charlie Smalls and William F. Brown based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. 4. All comments from students involved in the production come from group interviews conducted by Berry and Hartley in November 2019, a couple of weeks after the production closed.

REFERENCES Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1991), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge.

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Brabin, Tracy, Gloria De Piero and Sarah Coombes (2017), Acting Up Report: Labour’s inquiry into access and diversity in the performing arts, London: The Labour Party. Available online: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/campaigncountdown/ pages/1157/attachments/original/1502725031/Acting-Up-Report.pdf?1502725031 (accessed 21 November 2020). Burt, Richard (2006), ‘Civic ShakesPR: Middlebrow Multiculturalism, White Television and the Color Bind’, in Ayanna Thompson (ed.), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, 157–85, London: Routledge. Carr, Gregory S. (2016), ‘Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Exploring the Performativity of the African Grove Theatre as the Most Revolutionary Theatrical Space of the 19th Century’, Symposium on Performance in the African Diaspora as Social Change, Milledgeville, GA. Conkie, Rob (2014), ‘Holofernes, Peregrine and I: Australian Campus Shakespeare’, in Andrew James Hartley (ed.), Shakespeare on the University Stage, 153–67, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cross, Terry L., Barbara J. Bazron, Karl W. Dennis and Mareasa R. Isaacs (1989), Towards A Culturally Competent System of Care, Volume I, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Child Development Center, CASSP Technical Assistance Center. Denboba, Diana and USDHHS (US Department of Health and Human Services, Health Services and Resources Administration) (1993), MCHB/DSCSHCN Guidance for Competitive Applications, Maternal and Child Health Improvement Projects for Children with Special Health Care Needs, Bethesda, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services. Detroit Public Theatre (n.d.), ‘About Shakespeare in Prison’. Available online: www. detroitpublictheatre.org/shakespeareinprison (accessed 21 November 2020). Diangelo, Robin (2018), White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Boston: Beacon Press. Emeka, Justin (2016), ‘Seeing Shakespeare through Brown Eyes’, Black Acting Methods, 89–104, London: Routledge. Hartley, Andrew James, ed. (2014), Shakespeare on the University Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linklater, Kristen (1992), Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice: The Actor’s Guide to Talking the Text, New York: Theatre Communications Group. McElhearn, Kirk (2014), ‘How Was Shakespeare Pronounced? Ben Crystal Discusses Original Pronunciation’, 1 July. Available online: https://kirkville.com/how-wasshakespeare-pronounced-ben-crystal-discusses-original-pronunciation/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Oram, Daron (2019), ‘De-Colonizing Listening: Toward an Equitable Approach to Speech Training for the Actor’, Voice and Speech Review, 13 (3): 279–97. Sheir, Rebecca (2019), host, ‘African Americans and Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Unlimited, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2 April. Available online: https://www.folger.edu/ shakespeare-unlimited/african-americans-shakespeare (accessed 21 November 2020). Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (1999), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: University of Otago Press.

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Thompson, Ayanna (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, August (1996), ‘The Ground On Which I Stand’, American Theatre, 20 June. Available online: www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/20/the-ground-on-which-i-stand/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Worthen, W. B. (1997), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2.8

Ethics: The challenge of practising (and not just representing) diversity at the Stratford Festival of Canada ERIN JULIAN AND KIM SOLGA

THE CHALLENGE1 What does it mean to ‘practise’ diversity in Shakespeare production in the twentyfirst century, specifically in an Anglo-American context? How is ‘practising’ diversity, from devising and directing to work in the rehearsal hall and on audience engagement, materially different from the now-familiar (but still important) goal of ‘representing’ diverse bodies on stage? In the last twenty years, debates about what the diversification of Shakespeare performance – along racial lines, gender lines, the lines of age and ability – means or could mean, and the simultaneous interrogation of what ‘Shakespeare’ signifies, for whom, and to whose benefit, have become increasingly urgent issues for scholars and artists (see Worthen 1997; Thompson 2006 and 2011; Thomas 2014; Smith 2016; Solga 2017; Cartelli 2019). If theatre companies across the Anglosphere increasingly share the assumption that diversity and inclusion, in both the casting and creation of Shakespeare in performance, is necessary and good for ethical and artistic reasons, what tools, resources and attitudinal shifts are required in order for those companies to move beyond representations of difference on stage, and toward engaging deeply with equity and diversity as conditions of theatrical production and reception?2 In this chapter, we frame our exploration of ‘ethics’ around these questions.3 We take a case study, mixed-method ethnographic approach that centres on the 2018 production of Comedy of Errors at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Director Keira Loughran (who is a third-generation Chinese-Canadian, heterosexual, cis woman) planned a Comedy that followed her ongoing interest in

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diversity practice as a working artist of colour. She ‘envisioned Ephesus, the play’s world, as an inclusive haven for gender-fluid and non-conforming people’, ‘a story of a reunion’ in a ‘society of former persecuted outcasts, whose unique perspective on the world … challenges, frightens and ultimately liberates them’ (Loughran 2019b). The twins were fraternal; the Syracusan pair were played by women of colour Jessica Hill and Beryl Bain, while male actors Qasim Khan (Persian-Canadian) and Josue Laboucane (Métis) played the Ephesian pair. The cast was consciously assembled, and saw diversity in age, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The experiences of trans folk were incorporated into rehearsal work through the labour of two paid consultants on the show, trans artists Sunny Drake and Cassandra James. Loughran gave actors the important freedom to determine for themselves how their characters identified in terms of gender identification, providing support for this work through the rehearsal process, and in discussions with herself and Drake and James. In all of these ways, Loughran achieved diversity in both practice and representation with Comedy: she fostered an inclusive working environment in rehearsal; she placed a wide range of bodies, in terms of colour, age, sexual orientation and lived experience, onstage; she actively sought to stage gender inclusivity as normative and positive for audiences made up of school-aged children, older adults and many in between. However, even within this open working environment, and even given the Festival’s many resources on which Loughran was able to draw to realize her inclusive vision, our research revealed that Stratford’s larger aesthetic attitudes and working practices placed key structural limits on what she was ultimately able to achieve. We began our research with two guiding questions: 1) what resources exist to make a thoroughgoing diversity practice possible at Stratford?; and 2) what obstacles exist for artists seeking to work in a practicably diverse way at Stratford? In our explorations of these, we also uncovered a third, key question: what does diversity presently mean at Stratford, and what more could it mean in order for the Festival to practice greater levels and degrees of inclusivity both in its processes and in representation at all levels of the organization? We shadowed Loughran’s production for approximately six months, from just after it was cast (in late 2017), up to and including dress rehearsal (May 2018). We observed three separate rehearsals at three different stages, including a workshop on trans experiences led by Drake and James; after each rehearsal we compared our observations in a recorded discussion that we later transcribed. We saw a dress rehearsal, and two performances much later in the commercial run. We interviewed cast members, recording and transcribing those interviews; we also interviewed (and recorded/ transcribed) Loughran on three different occasions. Finally, Loughran read drafts of this chapter, and fed back thoroughly and generously to us. In the discussion that follows, we draw on this qualitative data (Julian and Solga 2018a, 2018b, 2018c; Gough et al. 2018) in order to map the reasons why this production, despite its commitment to inclusion in the shaping and telling of its story, did not fully succeed in staging Shakespeare inclusively, and we chart key changes that Stratford and other similar companies could make in order to better enable future productions to do that important work. After examining some

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of the contexts into which this production’s tensions fit, we reflect on our key observations. We wonder: can institutions like Stratford achieve full diversity of practice if they remain primarily committed to the notion of Shakespeare’s texts as ‘universally’ meaningful? How does Stratford’s very organizational structure, from its repertory model to its hierarchies of power, impede diversity work in a production’s development? And, who is being asked, right now, to do Stratford’s diversity work, and on what terms?

CONTEXTS: SHAKESPEARE, DIVERSITY, RACE AND GENDER Stratford is the largest repertory theatre in North America; founded in 1952 and in operation since 1953, it was designed as an informal national theatre, grounded in British-influenced, elite Shakespeare performance. Stratford’s roots are premised on the notion that Canadian culture could and should be synonymous with traditionally English ‘high’ art (Knowles qtd in Parolin 2009: 215). Stratford’s development over the last sixty-five years, however, has seen the Festival become increasingly commercially reliant; it is funded by an uneven mix of government grants, box office sales and corporate and private donors to sustain its significant size (twelveplus shows per season) and high production standards. While Shakespeare remains the ‘name draw’ at Stratford, today his work is less prominent in seasons filled with musicals, modern plays and ‘family’ shows, a trend that began with Richard Monette’s tenure as Artistic Director (1994–2007) and continues today under Antoni Cimolino. Stratford has long been aware, for reasons both economic and socio-cultural, that it must diversify its artistic base, and particularly that it must include more artists of colour in a wider range of roles if it is to accurately reflect the intercultural nature of twenty-first-century Canada, particularly the region surrounding the Greater Toronto Area.4 It has made significant recent strides in this direction. As of the 2019 season, for example, 33 of 128 performers in the acting company were visibly identifiable as artists of colour (‘Cast and Creatives’ 2019). During the 2017 season, Martha Henry directed two Black Canadian actors, Sarah Afful and Michael Blake, in leading roles in Twelfth Night and Jillian Keiley directed a race-, age- and sizediverse cast of women in Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’s Bakkhai. The Festival worked with Inuit performing arts organization Qaggiavuut to develop The Breathing Hole, a new play commissioned from Colleen Murphy, about exploitation of the Arctic, that featured an Inuk director and a substantial number of Indigenous performers. After Stratford hosted the 2016 National Arts Centre ‘Summit’ on disability, the 2017 season also featured Deaf actor and director Elizabeth Morris in The Madwoman of Chaillot. In the summer of 2019 Stratford hosted a series of events initiated by Loughran in her capacity as curator of the Laboratory, ‘a dedicated space for experimentation and research in artistic processes’ (Loughran 2019b), inviting a range of artists, including UK-based trans practitioner Emma Frankland, to develop work with members of the acting company. In January 2019,

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Loughran left the Festival as a full-time employee, choosing to explore other artistic avenues, but the 2019 Lab series ‘Beyond the Western Canon’ ran as programmed, under Stratford’s Assistant Creative Producer, ted witzel.5 This brief overview suggests, on the surface, a large, storied theatre organization committed in equal measure to Shakespeare’s legacy and to race and gender diversity. Below the surface, however, the picture grows more complicated. While in 2019 a full quarter (almost exactly 25 per cent) of the Stratford acting company were of colour, only two of those performers occupied leading roles: Michael Blake as Othello and Baraka Rahmani as the Arab-Canadian Wahida in Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s Birds of a Kind.6 Only one of ten directors in the 2019 season was a person of colour (Nigel Shawn Williams, directing Othello), and while fully half of the directing cohort were women, all of the latter were established Festival associates, entrenched in Stratford’s working culture. While numerous Stratford company members identify as queer, no artists in 2019 openly identified as trans, nor has Stratford ever featured an openly trans performer on its stages. Morris is thus far the only Deaf performer to appear at Stratford. Putting these two Stratford snapshots together allows us to look closely at the material differences among three related but distinct forms of diversity practice. Diversity and inclusivity as a cultural and artistic commitment at every level of a work’s development is an ideal for which many companies strive in theory, but which continues to face numerous obstacles in practice. Before this ideal can be reached, diversity may take the form of increased access and opportunity for artists often marginalized in mainstream theatres; literally being included, in more than token ways, in creation and decision-making processes helps such artists to break through entrenched forms of privilege both on- and backstage. Finally, diversity can appear on stage as image: this happens when ‘non-normative’ (i.e. of colour, disabled, queer, non-binary) bodies are present in a production primarily to signal a company’s awareness of diversity as ‘a good thing’, and may or may not feature inclusive ways of developing a show. At its best this form of diversity demonstrates a theatre’s intentions toward future diversity practice; especially when a large theatre company such as Stratford relies on box office for significant funding, radical shifts in the look and feel of a company need to be carefully calibrated and adjusted over time. Relying too much upon diversity as image, however, also risks hobbling the goal of inclusivity over time, because diversity as image alone cannot ensure that all bodies in a rehearsal room have the same access or opportunity to share their stories (and to do so safely), or to participate evenly in the process of story creation. For Loughran personally, diversity labour means first and foremost increasing opportunity by creating working spaces where historically marginalized artists can share in artistic authority and participate in theatrical creation from the ground up. She notes that this sort of diversity work challenges companies to ‘tak[e] opportunity away from things that are familiar, reliable, and known’ (Loughran 2019b) – the dramatists, plays, and actors that are reliably saleable – and offer their space to new stories and perspectives. Loughran’s commitment to this kind of diversity practice is evident in Stratford’s Laboratory and Forum, spaces where creators, directors and educators from within the company and around the world meet to debate the

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limits of current practice and explore new methods of working. Loughran also, however, understands crucial diversity work to happen in the rehearsal hall when actors imagine themselves into another’s body and try to make sense of experiences radically unlike their own; this is the kind of work she encouraged her cisgendered ensemble in Comedy to do, for example, as they learned from Drake and James and sought to establish their characters’ preferred gender identifications. While there is much to praise and support in this inclusive thought work, it also sits uncomfortably with Stratford’s status quo, in which emotional realism is the preferred acting practice (more on this below), and in which white and male perspectives still dominate the shaping of story in most productions. While we point above to signs that Stratford’s casting (and some commissioning) is increasingly and visibly diverse, overall non-white, non-male, disabled, or otherwise differently oriented artists in lead roles or directing gigs still represent a comparatively small percentage of Festival labour. The stock-in-trade of large companies like Stratford is the argument that Shakespeare’s plays are ‘universal’ in theme and appeal, filled with stories to which all humans can relate, but whose interpretations of Shakespeare are counted and valued most by this argument? Whose stories are most likely to be reflected, embodied, told, and how? In a world of ideal diversity practice, where a range of voices and perspectives work together on a production’s creation from the ground up, the imaginative inclusivity Loughran champions is both welcome and necessary – it might, for example, lead to a performance of a Shakespeare comedy featuring a trans artist playing a cis character, opposite a cis artist playing trans. In a world where this inclusive ideal remains some way off, however, access of opportunity for underrepresented perspectives needs to take precedent over imaginative representations of those perspectives whenever possible.7 Here, the challenges Loughran and her team faced in navigating the different elements of their diversity practice find an important antecedent in the issues surrounding casting diverse races and genders. So-called colour and gender ‘neutral’ casting8 ‘assumes one can and should be blind to race’, as Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson argues, but it also insists therefore that ‘an actor’s color has no semiotic value onstage unless it is invested with one by the director’ (2011: 77). ‘Neutral’ casting may seem a valuable representational goal – a key means of imaging diversity on stage – but its meritocratic basis (‘the best actor for the best part’ [2011: 77]) also masks the systemic racism influencing the society in which it operates. In practice, ‘neutral’ casting means that directors or artistic directors from dominant race, gender, ability or culture perspectives enjoy the freedom to determine what colour or gender will or will not signify in their performances, or who can pass as white, abled, heterosexual or cis on their stages (that is, as not visibly too different from their expectations of what a part ‘looks’ like). ‘Neutral’ casting can also mean dissonance in role preparation for actors from different backgrounds. African American theatre scholar Brandi Wilkins Catanese remembers playing Rosalind in a scene study in college; when her Orlando swore on Rosalind’s ‘white hand’ (As You Like It, 3.2.355–6), she became acutely aware of her hand as not white, not Rosalind’s. She writes: ‘I took it as my responsibility to demonstrate my awareness of my nonnormative performing body, and to diminish its significance by laughing

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it off. I was, as David Wiles put it, “trying to live in the ‘world of the play’ while performing in the world of race”’ (2011: 10).9 In some important ways, Loughran’s Comedy of Errors represented the opposite of the situation Thompson and Catanese describe, but in others it risked replicating the problems that trail ‘neutral’ casting and its primary goal of diversity-as-image. Loughran describes her own rehearsal practice as ‘colour-conscious’: ‘creating space for an actor to bring their personal background and experience to the table insofar as they see it relating to the character, and [creating] a world where they can be in their own skin and in the world of the play [at the same time]’ (Loughran 2019b). Her concept for Comedy was intended as an ‘homage to the history, insights, and accomplishments of transgender and gender-fluid communities’, exploring ‘what it might take to establish, in the face of persecution, a community that is fiercely committed to inclusion, self-determination, and non-conformity’ (2018a). While informed to some extent by trans creators like Drake and James, the production was never intended to be about trans persons. It took inspiration from these communities and wished to honour them, but Loughran well understood that it was able neither fully to include trans and non-binary artists in its development, nor to represent them in their own skins on stage. It was marketed (independent of Loughran’s input) as gender-fluid, as edgy and diverse, as something other than Shakespeare-as-usual, but it was also every inch a product of the Stratford system, dependent on its repertory casting model and its expectations about Shakespeare’s universal value for currency. Loughran’s Comedy thus could not fully disrupt the in-built, white and patriarchal biases on which Stratford’s cultural capital rests. We turn now to our ethnographic observations to explore in detail why.

EVERYBODY’S SHAKESPEARE? Many of the challenges facing diversity work at Stratford are rooted in the material realities that shape the Festival: in core aesthetic practices brought over (along with Shakespeare) during the European – and particularly British – colonization of Canada, as well as in the labour structures that help to perpetuate those practices. Stratford’s signature aesthetic features a style of acting known as emotional realism (see Solga 2010: 418), in which actors disappear into character, performing a version of Shakespeare’s world as real world in a slightly heightened manner that prioritizes clear, elegant verse speaking. This style is typical of other mainstream Shakespeare companies in the Anglosphere such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it arises in part from the belief that Shakespeare’s texts are the benchmark of human artistic achievement, that they can speak to everyone, and that they have something important to tell us about our world today. Emotional realism is also, however, a historical style grounded in European modernism: to become skilled at the work of emotional realism allows actors to gain elite status and currency on colonized terms. (High modern art revelled in ‘exotic’ colonial inspiration; Shakespeare was a key British colonial export.) At theatres like Stratford and the RSC, emotional realism and the elite cultural capital it signals on stage are traded with audiences

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for the price of their tickets; offstage, this currency is replicated through centralized casting practices and internal training programmes like Stratford’s Birmingham conservatory, where first-year actors are mentored by seasoned company veterans as they learn to recreate the Stratford aesthetic. The Stratford aesthetic was crucial to the development of the Festival as a home for high theatrical art from its founding in 1952–3 to the end of the twentieth century. Under former Artistic Director Richard Monette in the late 1990s, Shakespeare began to wane in favour of more box-office friendly, ‘populist’ fare at Stratford, and that shift proved quite controversial (Parolin 2009: 203). When Monette’s critics lamented the loss of Stratford’s ‘classical mandate’ in favour of ‘shameless populism’ (ibid.), however, they ignored his parallel interest in cementing Shakespeare as the pedagogical core of Stratford’s drive to ‘improve’ audiences culturally. Monette argued for Shakespeare to become ‘a touchstone figure who helped Stratford audiences’ – and especially economically lucrative tourist audiences – ‘measure their own development’ (ibid.: 201; see also Ormsby 2017: 30), even as they enjoyed the range of entertainments on offer. Common to both Monette and his critics, then, was the belief that Shakespeare is great art that is good for everybody, regardless of our lived differences. How does a company like Stratford square this circle, turn Shakespeare simultaneously into ‘great art’ and art ‘for everybody’? The origin story behind Loughran’s production of Comedy suggests one answer. Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino offered Loughran the play for the 2018 season; because it is customary that specific Shakespeare titles are pre-chosen and offered to directors, Loughran’s choice was to accept or decline Comedy, rather than to choose between it and another play (Loughran 2018b; 2019b). Loughran was not a fan of Comedy, and explained to Cimolino her ‘artistic dilemma’ (Loughran 2019b) in taking on a play that she could not ‘buy into’ (Loughran 2018b); she struggled to see herself or her way of working in a slight play that features slave characters (the Dromios) and slapstick violence against them. Not wanting to decline the opportunity, however, she read the text over and over again until she could begin to see ways to locate herself in it. With ‘encouragement and support from Cimolino’, she developed her ‘inclusive ethos of Ephesus that allowed for the diversity of casting I wanted and made the story exciting, contemporary and relevant to me’ (Loughran 2019b). This trajectory reveals how Loughran’s production was rooted in her commitment to inclusive practice at the Festival, yet also constrained by the requirement that Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (the play as offered, more or less faithfully rendered) be the dramatic vehicle for that inclusion. As Loughran recounted, ‘declining the gig would have meant declining both desired artistic and economic opportunity. Accepting the contract meant delivering a production that I could get behind artistically and morally while also successfully engaging the Stratford audience and hopefully [its] critics’ (Loughran 2019b). While Loughran firmly asserts that the decisions she makes about assignments are all her own (agency she claims proudly as a woman of colour), in order to arrive at this one she had to take on a significant amount of extra labour: she had to find textual, material and performative ways to make Comedy support the opportunity and diversity work she insists upon. This

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extra labour was an unspoken (and likely unconscious) requirement of Cimolino’s offer, and it is a requirement many of-colour, female and queer directors face routinely. Loughran told us that the idea of questioning Cimolino’s choice of Comedy didn’t seem feasible to her at the time; as an artist of colour she did not see herself as privileged to press him very hard, despite their positive relationship (Loughran 2018b). Opportunities to direct Shakespeare in mainstream venues are rare and coveted for women (see Solga 2017), and Loughran’s remarks suggest a clear-eyed awareness of the power structures that constrain many non-white, nonmale directors who are privileged to receive a Shakespeare offer at all. We might here productively place her comments in contrast to the experiences of prominent white and male directors like Robert Lepage, who directed Coriolanus at the Festival in the same season as Comedy. Part of the ‘auteur’ identity ascribed to Lepage (or to Ivo van Hove, or to Thomas Ostermeier) means that he is free or even expected, by virtue of international reputation and accrued cultural power, to approach a venue like Stratford confidently, and with a wish list. Comedy is a challenging play to make inclusive: it opens with the potential execution of a foreigner for the crime of being a foreigner, builds its twin-reunion story on the backs of violence against slave characters, and yet is meant to be funny. Often in rehearsal we noted awkward dissonances arising from this challenge; they were especially tangible to us as the cast worked on staging the violence between the Antopholi and the Dromios on which so much of the play’s comedy hinges. At one point, for example, Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus ended up in a BDSMstyle sequence featuring complex choreography based around a whip; although the sequence was shaped (by a fight director, in consultation with Loughran) to be light-hearted and executed with virtuosic skill by Khan and Laboucane, it resonated uneasily with us as spectators. We worried about the whip being misread by audiences unaware of the complexities of BDSM, reinforcing rather than undermining stereotypes about non-dominant sexual practices. Similar awkwardness arose for us in the fat jokes made continually at the expense of the kitchen maid Luce, performed cross-dressed by Stratford veteran Rod Beattie in a costume that played up Luce’s girth for comic effect. In notes on an early draft of this chapter, Loughran asserted her belief that Shakespeare holds the power to speak across cultural, class and gender lines – not because his texts are ‘universal’ but because their very specificity contains the capacity to explore a range of contradictory human emotions and experiences. Her work on Comedy demonstrates her commitment to unpacking such contradictions: violence appears alongside acts of care between master and servant (especially where Hill and Bain were concerned); xenophobic laws rear up despite widespread gender inclusivity (Juan Chorian’s Duke exuded a strong hand but also a thoughtful empathy throughout). But the extra labour that Loughran had to undertake simply to get Comedy onto the stage in a way that she could ‘get behind’ also demonstrates a contradiction rooted in the assumption that it is always part of the job of a ‘diverse’ director to locate themselves and their divergent experiences ‘in’ Shakespeare’s words, because those words are ‘good’ for us all, indeed are understood to be better than us all. Loughran recalls that Cimolino advised her to address her initial

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resistance to Comedy by ‘look[ing] beyond the superficial’ in the text to make it work (Loughran 2019b). But what if, rather than requiring directors like Loughran to make the ‘superficial’ in Shakespeare work for her, powerful institutions like Stratford gave her the full (and fully resourced) freedom to interrogate the contours and limits of Shakespeare’s presumed greatness instead?10

BEYOND THE REPERTORY MODEL The paradoxical romance of Shakespeare’s simultaneous elite and populist power aside, the largest obstacle for diversity work at Stratford is its repertory model. This model enforces a top-down structure of artistic authority, and is closely linked to the Festival’s economic viability as it prioritizes efficiency of time, money and labour. At Stratford, where over a hundred actors are working in several shows over the course of the season, performers are organized into ‘tracks’ and guided by equity contracts that protect actors’ time and ensure their regular availability across all shows in which they are cast. Rules protecting workers’ health and guarding against discriminatory casting practices are crucial, but one of the consequences of the repertory rehearsal model is that casts experience disjointedness in their work together as a team, making it at times challenging to build a shared and inclusive vision for a production. The scenes worked at the rehearsals of Comedy we visited were governed by who was available when, with members of the cast coming in and out of the rehearsal space while they fit in work with their track’s other shows as well as costume fittings. The cast had few opportunities to work holistically as a group with the show’s trans consultants, Sunny Drake and Cassandra James, and were also limited in the time available to work together on the complex ethical questions at the heart of Loughran’s vision for the play. What does it mean to ‘play’ with gender? What are the stakes involved in taking on a role that does not belong to your own identity or lived experience? Because individual members of Loughran’s cast approached these questions with various levels of understanding of trans and non-binary experience, we observed several times a sense of actors’ unease at not being quite sure how to do this work, how to get the non-binary components of the story-world right while also doing the jobs they were hired for: acting ‘well’ at the prestigious Stratford Festival. For Loughran, the very process of actors working through discomfort when taking on aspects of identities that are unfamiliar to them is an example of diversity practice at work – and it is something she, as a woman artist of colour, has experienced from both sides. During their workshop, Drake and James specifically invited the cast to perform this kind of sympathetic imagining of otherness by making connections between their own experiences of difference and trans experience; the cast undertook this work thoughtfully, sharing with one another vulnerable experiences and also the limits of their understanding. However, this mode of working with another’s identity as a kind of metaphor, of finding the other ‘in’ the self and the self in the other, brings risks. It assumes that every performer approaches this work on a level playing field, and that every identity can be appropriated with care and

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thoughtfulness by those outside. In theory – perhaps. But in practice, certain actors are required much more than others to locate themselves in those others’ stories (think back to Catanese’s experience playing Rosalind, above). In practice, this work requires significant invisible labour, a struggle to reconcile the ask with lived experiences (consider again Loughran’s preparatory work on Comedy). Meanwhile actors who are white, cis or able-bodied are inherently privileged by the Shakespeare industry to adopt a range of identities on stage, secure in the knowledge that their own experiences of selfhood are well and consistently represented in public spaces, in the media and across the canon. Stratford continues to implicitly overvalue the latter kind of imaginative inclusion; its ‘track’ system ensures that the most malleable and secure actors – actors who can shift across a range of productions and identity experiences apparently seamlessly – will be preferred over those who may be perceived as ‘stuck’ in the ‘politics’ of their own identities, or unable to read as ‘not different’ much of the time. Loughran was, in the end, able to organize only one workshop on trans experience for the entire cast, which we attended in March 2018. The labour accomplished at this workshop may have been limited in scope, but it also set an important tone for the rest of the rehearsal process: it defined Loughran’s directorial practice as one based on shared vulnerability. We consistently observed her capacity to make space for multiple points of view during rehearsals, and her willingness to share artistic authority with her actors, which stood out as unusual within the Stratford system. But for this very reason, Loughran’s practice also chafed against that system in revealing ways. One particular observation from our research brings this tension between Loughran’s way of working and the norms supported by Stratford’s repertory model into stark relief. On our third rehearsal visit, we watched the cast work with one of Stratford’s fight directors, who was choreographing some of the play’s slapstick comedy scenes. As is typical in large repertory companies, the fight director had not been present for the production’s entire rehearsal process, but came only periodically. We observed that this particular fight director was keen to assert his authority over the room: plainly comfortable in a position of power he had inhabited many times before, he referred to the female actors in the cast by pet names (love, dear), and did not shy away from touching them. His emphasis throughout the afternoon was on how to make the violence between the Antipholi and the Dromios funny, without paying attention to how certain kinds of humour (for example, burlesque pantomimes using BDSM-style whips and chains) might not be appropriate for this production, or indeed funny for all actors or spectators. With his body centred on stage, in sharp contrast to Loughran’s more inclusive and supportive style of directing from the gutter, the fight director repeatedly spoke over her direction, including at moments where she tried to intervene in his commands.11 The fractured nature of rehearsal under the repertory system means these kinds of fly-in sessions are common; that same system also directly shapes a tightly regulated production schedule that leaves little room to make major changes during rehearsal. Loughran noted to us that many key decisions (for example, about setting, costuming, larger production ‘story’) for each show at Stratford must be made

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before rehearsals even start; even a well-intentioned, generous and open director like herself will thus ultimately have to make executive decisions for the show long before the actors arrive. If these decisions do not sit well with any of the actors once rehearsals begin, it is often too late for the system to address their issues in a thorough or satisfying manner. Younger actors or those newer to the Festival rank lower in the repertory hierarchy than many senior creative team members, and because actors in a repertory setting must appeal to multiple directors in order to be cast in a season, actors may not always feel comfortable expressing their unease over specific directorial choices. In Comedy, we observed this tension particularly regarding costuming. Comedy’s costumes were planned long before the cast began their work, by costume designer Joanna Yu in consultation with Loughran; again, this is typical of repertory production lines. Actors had limited power to request changes to costumes in process, which in turn had an effect on Loughran’s foundational choice to invite cast members to explore and define for themselves their characters’ gender identities. The costumes for the Duke and the Courtesan offer a case in point: featuring a tailored jacket and long, arresting silk skirt for the Duke (Juan Chorian), and a RuPaul-esque ensemble for the Courtesan (Sébastien Heins), they strongly influenced the character choices Chorian and Heins might adopt. As the cast expressed in Drake and James’s workshop, the social, political and emotional stakes of performing identifications across sex and gender lines are high; they bring anxieties about taking on trans or non-binary roles and potentially offending queer community members, as well as anxieties about alienating more conservative audiences. We observed that Heins, the junior performer, was rendered especially vulnerable by his costume and the role to which it was attached. Trans women experience the figure of the ‘trans prostitute’ as a stereotype, as James and Drake made very clear to the cast; the Courtesan in both character and costume was coded as one. In rehearsals we attended in March 2018, we observed Heins working with Loughran, James and others to try to find the Courtesan’s power as an independent economic agent and to convey that on stage, in contrast to the stereotype. As a young actor of colour still quite new to Stratford, however, it appeared to us that Heins was limited in his capacity to question the Courtesan’s representation openly. This is partly a result of the constraints placed upon him by the costume’s vivid look, partly a result of his perception of his own agency within a hierarchy in which he ranked relatively low, and partly a result of the primacy of Shakespeare’s text at a theatre company where the bottom-line job is to stage works with as much fidelity as possible to a perceived original. The Courtesan spoke the text of the Courtesan, as written in Comedy; the costume was the costume, decided before Heins arrived on the scene. His job, then – not unlike Loughran’s in her initial text work – was always going to be a matter of finding ways to reconcile his lines, role and costume with a diversity practice it necessarily clung to awkwardly. Finally – and most importantly – the structural exigencies of the repertory model best account for the lack of trans and non-binary performers in Loughran’s production. During our March 2019 interview, Loughran explained fully why her repeated attempts to audition trans and non-binary performers for Comedy were

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unsuccessful. To join the Stratford company, an actor must first be on the radar of Stratford’s casting director and then chosen by several directors, each with a different vision for their work and different working practices; some may have no interest in diversity as a goal, or may be unwelcoming toward those who do not present as ‘a good fit’ for Stratford’s signature aesthetic (see Solga 2010: 439–40, n19). For trans or gender non-conforming actors, for example, the likelihood that an identifiably trans or non-binary person will be welcomed onto a ‘track’ at Stratford is much less than for a cis actor. As both Drake (2016) and Frankland (see Masso 2018) have argued, opportunities remain thin on the ground for trans actors to perform in trans roles, let alone cisgendered roles. Actors will also need to relocate to Stratford – a relatively conservative small city that has not historically been welcoming to difference – for the season. Actors must thus be willing to leave networks of labour and/or emotional support behind, as well as potential opportunities to be cast in more fully inclusive productions elsewhere. For historically vulnerable and marginalized performers, there may be far less to be gained from a season at Stratford than lost in the sacrifice of community protection, meaningful work and income elsewhere. What constitutes meaningful work will, of course, change depending on individual actors’ career and artistic interests, and it is crucial to acknowledge that not all marginalized actors are interested in taking on roles purely based on their ability to explore ‘diversity’, which often leads to harmful tokenism. Moreover, as with Loughran, actors working at Stratford exercise open-eyed agency when navigating the complex gains and losses involved in taking on any job. For some, the potential costs – leaving support networks behind, accepting limits on living situations for a season – are outweighed by the gains: long contracts, professional mentorship within a widely respected theatre network, and the opportunities to explore a variety of texts and roles in an environment supported by strong union standards. However, our various conversations with artists throughout this project have also reinforced for us that marginalized actors with fewer or smaller ‘own communities’ inside Stratford’s festival ecology can be more vulnerable to isolation and less willing or able to refuse requests that they perform unpaid diversity work (for example, teaching others ‘about’ their communities as part of the rehearsal process, or supporting other vulnerable actors) alongside their acting labour, and thus end up more exhausted than anticipated. This returns us again to the potential conflicts among representing diversity on stage as image, imagining inclusivity through identity-as-metaphor and developing a full diversity practice rooted in access for all to resources, artistic opportunities and the structural supports needed to ensure that vulnerable actors and team members are protected and mentored in a way that allows them to focus on the work they came to Stratford to do – acting – while recognizing that those supports will need to be different, and potentially more robust, than for other artists already well represented in the company. For a company like Stratford, opening up such access and opportunity more fully may begin with this rehearsal room question: when we ask our actors to take on others’ identities, on what terms do we assume this work to be possible? Whose perspectives will this work inherently privilege? What investments would it take to bring those whose perspectives are elided by this very work properly

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into the room? And: how can we better foster communities for marginalized creators so that they can do their work safely?12

A SEASON AT STRATFORD: WHO DOES THE LABOUR OF ‘DIVERSITY WORK’? Carrying out deep diversity work rests upon the capacity to value that labour distinct from the commercial profit it promises. We begin to comprehend the material value of diversity work when we start to ask the question of who is actually doing the bulk of its labour – and why. Unsurprisingly, the people tasked with taking on the most onerous diversity work tend to be those who are most vulnerable to the often invisible violence that is routinely permitted in non-diverse spaces: queer and trans people, women, people of colour, Indigenous persons, disabled people (see Ahmed 2017: 89–160; Hirsch 2019). In our post-show interviews with the cast of Comedy, the actors who had the most to say in response to questions about representations of race in the text and the production were invariably actors of colour; these same actors – along with Loughran herself – were also the most likely to raise questions in rehearsal about the intersections of race, slavery and violence in the play.13 Our data here accords with remarks made by Quelemia Sparrow at the 2019 conference of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research in Vancouver. In her candid remarks during a plenary panel on Indigenous matriarchy in performance practice, Sparrow spoke of her experience working at the Festival in summer 2017, stating that she took on a significant amount of what she characterized as unpaid ‘consulting’ labour on The Komagata Maru Incident. She described her experience of this work as ‘traumatic’, explaining that she had come to Stratford to gain experience and status as one of its actors, but found herself instead having to carry the heavy weight of representing her entire culture on her shoulders (Sparrow 2019). Sparrow’s comments offer another reminder of the problematic nature of imaginative inclusion: good intentions may generate material harm for members of minority populations who have not been offered full access to creative processes that concern them. This experience of harm can also extend to audience members from those same communities: when we saw Comedy of Errors with a group of trans and non-binary audience members in September 2018, some of these audience members spoke of the harm they felt as they observed the production inadvertently turning unwelcome stereotypes into comic fodder. As Kara Raphaeli has noted in another context, ‘traditional mainstream representations of transgender characters have largely been damaging, treating the trans character as an object of curiosity, a punchline, a freak, a criminal, a tragic figure, and/or as a metaphor to better understand normative gender’ (2017: 3). While Loughran actively sought to resist these representations, some visual elements and choices made by her and her cisgendered cast brought their echo unhappily back into the room. That echo returns us to one core challenge faced by artists seeking to build inclusive practices of Shakespeare production under the specific institutional and

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historical circumstances laid out by companies like the Stratford Festival. On one hand, Loughran’s production accomplished critical diversity work in the sheer range of bodies (in terms of colour and age) it presented as normative: visibly diverse actors worked together to create an image of a shared world that was inclusive and open to a wide range of gender expressions. They drew on their own experiences, as well as those they learned from and about during the rehearsal process. For audiences, especially school-aged audiences, to see such expressions normalized and treated as joyful on a mainstream stage goes a long way toward normalizing those expressions elsewhere. On the other hand, because very few non-binary perspectives had access to the rehearsal room as this production evolved and its fine-grained choices were made, in several impactful ways it ended up alienating some audience members whose perspectives it wanted to honour as part of its mandate of inclusion. This paradox reminds us that representations of difference, even when crafted carefully, can only take us so far down the road. Who is on the stage matters, but who is in the room – who has some say in the narrative, including in the all-important narrative about who ‘looks’ what part – matters a good deal more (see also Frankland 2018). Loughran hired Drake and James as paid consultants on her production explicitly to bring their non-binary perspectives into her rehearsal room; she offered them as much creative influence as she had to give, and she told us that ‘Sunny and Cassandra were pivotal in supporting the actors and myself in small choices moment to moment that pushed past stereotype and, we hoped, gave more status to any character who was trans or non-binary’ (Loughran 2019b). But the amount of time Drake and James could spend with the cast was limited as a direct result of the constraints of Stratford’s repertory model, and because they were hired in consulting rather than core creative roles their influence was necessarily partial. Loughran has told us (2019b) that she was clear with both Drake and James about the fact that no trans performers would appear in the show, which at that point had already been cast, and that she would fully understand if that meant they declined to consult on it; both chose to work with her and the cast nevertheless. We should remember, though, that despite this goodwill and honest protocol, Drake and James still found themselves in a Catch-22 position: willingly supporting a gender-inclusive production that continued to exclude trans actors from trans roles and opportunities, something Drake has written about with passion (2016). In the end, Loughran was this production’s primary diversity worker. She made Comedy ‘work’, and made it work inclusively, despite her initial reservations. She initiated outreach with Drake and James, knowing that, as a cis woman, she could not ethically realize her gender-inclusive vision alone. She ensured they could be paid and supported within the Stratford model so that the artistic and emotional labour they expended for Comedy was properly recognized and compensated. She consistently provided space for her cast to ask questions, and we witnessed her protect her actors when they experienced racialized or gendered microaggressions from outside. While it is possible to identify this production’s limits with regards to equity, diversity and inclusion as stemming in part from Loughran’s approach to the text as a cis person, the production’s many successes stemmed directly from her

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knowledge and experience gleaned through years of performing and directing as a visible woman of colour at Stratford. Exhaustion is a common experience for those doing diversity work in the theatre. It is exhausting to fight for a place in the overdetermined canon of Shakespearean text and production, exhausting to create one’s own new space for marginalized communities and narratives, exhausting to constantly experience racial, gendered, or ableist aggression along the way. It is exhausting to be the sole person to represent an entire, diverse community on stage and in the rehearsal room, and exhausting to educate those from dominant culture communities – often without enough support or adequate compensation. As Loughran noted to us in our March 2019 interview (2019a), much as she applauds the commitments of her colleagues in senior management roles at the Festival to champion diversity initiatives, much of the work of initiating those initiatives and ensuring their proper follow-through has, in the recent past, fallen on her shoulders. No wonder she was tired enough to need a break. *** This chapter is about ‘Shakespeare and Ethics’; in it, we have explored the difficult choices surrounding the process of diversifying Shakespeare in performance, including the tension between ‘doing’ diversity at the many levels of creative practice that go into building a show, and staging diversity in order to ‘represent’ a more inclusive vision of our world. While exploring this tangle of issues, we have also spent time thinking through the differences between diversity as a guiding principle for artistic practice, as Loughran experiences it in the context of imagining characters and stories beyond her own, and diversity as a matter of access – of granting space in the development or rehearsal room to artists from marginalized communities whose own stories have never accurately or respectfully been told in mainstream spaces, and whose artistic survival has long depended on their capacity to imagine themselves into dominant-culture frameworks, on the dominant culture’s terms. Diversity work – the work of building more inclusive, equitable practices in relation to staging Shakespeare, talking about Shakespeare, and even writing about Shakespeare – is hard work, for all involved. To get to this moment in our chapter, we have experienced that hard work first hand. In our discussions with Loughran we have struggled to comprehend one another’s perspectives on diversity and inclusion, to respect the differences between them, and to articulate the evidence from our copious data as fairly as possible in order to represent both. We have sought to address students and colleagues reading this book, in an effort to help them understand the difficulty and urgency of the issues at stake; we have also sought to address readers working at the Stratford Festival, in an effort to help them recognize some of the structural problems still standing in the way of the inclusive practices they intend for their theatre company. Above all, we have sought to recognize the artists whose diversity work goes unseen every day; this chapter is an effort to let their work be seen.

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NOTES 1. We owe enormous thanks to Keira Loughran for her generosity in opening her rehearsal spaces and her directorial process to our observation; she has been central to the crafting of this chapter and has pushed us all along the way to see our divergent perspectives in thoughtful counterpoint. 2. For more on practising diversity in theatre and performance contexts, see Alvarez et al. (2018). 3. For a thorough introduction to ethics in relation to the theatre, see Ridout (2009). 4. As of the 2016 Census reporting period, the population of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) was more than 51 per cent visible minority and 47 per cent foreign-born; this compares with 29 per cent (Ontario) and 22 per cent (Canada as a whole) for both markers. Statistics Canada (2017) provides a detailed demographic breakdown. 5. ted’s role at the Festival includes helping review the first half of the ten-year mandate Cimolino developed for Stratford at the beginning of his Artistic Directorship, and to shape the Festival’s diversity development for the next five years (witzel 2018). 6. During the production process of this chapter, the playbill for the 2020 season – subsequently aborted owing to the COVID-19 outbreak – became available, with initial creative team information. Amaka Umeh was slated to play Hamlet on the Festival’s main stage, as well as Anne Boleyn in the same season’s production of Wolf Hall, which included Black performers in the roles of Henry VII and Cranmer. Stratford legend Colm Feore – a non-disabled actor – was cast as Richard III. Loughran was announced to direct Wendy and Peter Pan in the Avon theatre in a production featuring actors of colour as both Wendy and Peter, and a female Captain Hook; Jessica Carmichael (mixed, non-status Abénaki/Euro) would direct an allIndigenous cast in Tomson Highway’s Rez Sisters in the Studio Theatre; and Alisa Palmer (white, queer) would direct Hamlet – 911, an original play by her and partner Ann-Marie MacDonald, also in the Studio. 7. This inclusive ideal can already be seen, for example, in Ravi Jain and Why Not Theatre’s 2017 Prince Hamlet (Why Not 2019) – notably, an adaptation of the Shakespeare text rather than a ‘faithful’ version – and Soulpepper Theatre’s 2019 all-Indigenous-led production of Daniel David Moses’s Almighty Voice and His Wife, under the new artistic directorship of Black Canadian artist Wenyi Mengasha. 8. Responding to recent calls from disability scholarship and activism to use language around disabled experience with increasing thoughtfulness, we here employ the term ‘neutral casting’ in place of the commonly used ‘blind casting’. We also recognize the crucial body of work by artists and scholars of colour under the term ‘blind casting’ around accessible stage practice, and will continue to use the term when directly citing the work of those scholars. As Thompson’s (2011) and Catanese’s (2011) work addresses, ‘blind’ casting is far from neutral. Our use of the term ‘neutral casting’ assumes a similar reflexive scepticism. 9. For more on the repercussions of specifically ‘colourblind’ casting models, particularly in the UK context, see Rogers (2013); Hyland (2015); Espinosa (2016).

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10. Ric Knowles (2004a; 2004b) has consistently raised important critiques of Stratford’s resistance to taking this kind of risk. For an alternative take on the Festival’s relationship to risk-taking, see Solga (2010). 11. The Festival has now begun to factor diversity-forward practices into rehearsal labour by hiring intimacy directors (for the first time in Bakkhai in 2017, and again for Othello in 2019). Loughran has had some intimacy training (Loughran 2019b), and we observed clearly her capacity to support and check in with her cast, especially during this fight choreography session. 12. As this article went to press, a group of Black artists spoke to the struggle of working at the Festival and in the larger Canadian theatre industry on YouTube as part of the official ‘Meet the Festival’ program of talks. The honest, generous and raw discussion reflected much of what we heard elsewhere during our research (Stratford Festival 2020). 13. In accordance with our ethics protocol, and in order to protect company members from any potential economic or social harm, we have fully anonymized all actor comments and feedback and refrained from quoting actor-interviewees directly. This is standard ethics practice when working with potentially vulnerable subjects.

REFERENCES Actor 1 (2018), Interview with Erin Julian, 13 December. Actor 2 (2018), Interview with Erin Julian, 11 December. Actor 2 (2020), Interview with Erin Julian and Kim Solga, 26 May. Actor 3 (2018), Interview with Erin Julian, 8 December. Ahmed, Sara (2017), Living a Feminist Life, Durham, NC: Duke. Alvarez, Natalie, Ric Knowles, Sue Balint and Peter Farbridge (2018), ‘Cultural Diversity as Theatrical Practice’, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada, 39 (1): 96–114. ‘Cast and Creatives’ (2019), Stratfordfestival.ca. Available online: https://www. stratfordfestival.ca/AboutUs/Company/CastAndCreatives/Actors (accessed 24 May 2019). Cartelli, Thomas (2019), Re-enacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment, London: Palgrave. Catanese, Brandi Wilkins (2011), The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. The Comedy of Errors (2018), [Theatre production] Dir. Keira Loughran, Stratford, ON: Stratford Festival. Drake, Sunny (2016), ‘Transitioning the Theatre Industry’, Canadian Theatre Review, 165: 55–9. Espinosa, Ruben (2016), ‘Stranger Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 51–67. Frankland, Emma (2018), Public lecture, Western University, London, Canada, 25 September 2018. Gough, Melinda, Erin Julian and Kim Solga (2018), Post-Dress Rehearsal Discussion [Transcription], 11 May.

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Hirsch, Afua (2019), ‘Expecting me to explain racism is exploitative – that’s not my job’, The Guardian, 22 May. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/may/22/racism-tv-debate-exploitative (accessed 21 November 2020). Hyland, Nicola (2015), ‘Young Hearts/White Masks: Leading the (Color)Blind at Shakespeare’s Globe’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 9 (2). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1663/show (accessed 21 November 2020). Julian, Erin and Kim Solga (2018a), Post-Rehearsal Discussion [Transcription], 14 March. Julian, Erin and Kim Solga (2018b), Post-Trans Workshop Discussion [Transcription], 28 March. Julian, Erin and Kim Solga (2018c), Post-Fight Rehearsal Discussion [Transcription], 20 April. Knowles, Ric (2004a), ‘From Nationalist to Multinational: The Stratford Festival, Free Trade, and the Discourses of Intercultural Tourism’, in Ric Knowles (ed.), Shakespeare and Canada: Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation, 29–47, Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang. Knowles, Ric (2004b), Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loughran, Keira (2018a). ‘From the Director’, Comedy of Errors (dir. Loughran), Programme Notes. Loughran, Keira (2018b), Interview with Erin Julian and Kim Solga, 8 January. Loughran, Keira (2019a), Exit Interview with Erin Julian and Kim Solga, 1 March. Loughran, Keira (2019b), Personal correspondence with Erin Julian and Kim Solga, June. Masso, Giverny (2018), ‘Performance maker Emma Frankland: “We shouldn’t be casting people who are not trans in the very few parts that are”’, The Stage, 17 July. Available online: https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/features/performance-maker-emma-franklandwe-shouldnt-be-casting-people-who-are-not-trans-in-the-very-few-parts-that-are (accessed 21 November 2020). Ormsby, Robert (2017), ‘Intercultural Performance and The Stratford Festival as Global Tourist Place: Leon Rubin’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night’, in Irena R. Makaryk and Kathryn Prince (eds), Shakespeare and Canada: Remembrance of Ourselves, 35–56, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Parolin, Peter (2009), ‘“What Revels Are in Hand?”: A Change of Direction at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60 (2): 197–224. Raphaeli, Kara (2017), ‘TF Casebook: Transgender Performance [Special Section]’, TheatreForum, 52 (3). Ridout, Nicholas (2009), Theatre & Ethics, London: Palgrave. Rogers, Jami (2013), ‘The Shakespearean Glass Ceiling: The State of Colorblind Casting in Contemporary British Theatre’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 31 (3): 405–30. Smith, Ian (2016), ‘We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 104–24. Solga, Kim (2010), ‘Realism and the Ethics of Risk at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 28 (4): 417–42.

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Solga, Kim (2017), ‘Shakespeare’s Property Ladder: Women Directors and the Politics of Ownership’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 104–21, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sparrow, Quelemia, Kim Senklip Harvey and Lindsay Lachance (2019), ‘Rematriarting Indigenous Theatre Through Our Minds, Bodies, and Spirits’, Plenary Address, CATR Annual Conference, University of British Columbia, 4 June. Statistics Canada (2017), ‘Immigration and Ethnocultural Diversity’, Focus on Geography Series, 2016 Census, Statistics Canada, 19 June. Available online: https://www12. statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/fogs-spg/Facts-CSD-eng.cfm?TOPIC=7& LANG=eng&GK=CSD&GC=3520005 (accessed 21 November 2020). Stratford Festival (2020), ‘Black Like Me, past, present and future: Behind the Stratford Festival Curtain’, YouTube, 6 June. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xJK85IRtzYM (accessed 21 November 2020). Thomas, Sita (2014), ‘“The Dog, the Guard, the Horses and the Maid”: Diverse Casting at the Royal Shakespeare Company’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 24 (4): 475–85. Thompson, Ayanna, ed. (2006), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. London: Routledge. Thompson, Ayanna (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Why Not (2019), ‘Prince Hamlet’, Why Not. Available online: https://whynot.theatre/ work/prince-hamlet/ (accessed 21 November 2020). witzel, ted (2018), ‘stories from the professional theatre training program: ted witzel’, Theatre Ontario’s Blog, 25 January. Available online: http://theatreontario.blogspot. com/2018/01/stories-from-professional-theatre_58.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Worthen, W. B. (1997), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2.9

Bodies: Gender, race, ability and the Shakespearean stage ROBERTA BARKER

THE BODY OF AN ACTOR

At 8.40 am on 7 July 1599, a young man visited the London astrologer Simon Forman. In his casebook, Forman noted that his patient was suffering from an excess of ‘melancholy and cold flem’, adding: he is ferfull & tymorouse and moch gnawing in his stomak stuffing in his lunge a certain Faintnes wth all and a rising up in his throt redy to stop his wind [–] reumatike (Kassell et al. n.d.a.) On 1 December, the same patient visited Forman again, and this time was diagnosed as suffering from ‘moch collor and Reume’. Forman describes the young man, whose complaints he treated with purges, as ‘Nicholas Tooly of 17 yers’ (Kassell et al. n.d.b.). For anyone interested in the bodies that have performed Shakespeare’s plays across time, these entries are enticing. The name of Forman’s patient squares with that of a member of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s (later the King’s) Men, who appears in the list of ‘Principall Actors’ in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 as ‘Nicholas Tooley’. Mary Edmond has argued that the actor Tooley was born in Antwerp in 1582–3 (1996: 36–7); if she is right, then not only his name but also his age in 1599 match those of Forman’s patient. For much of the 1590s, the actor Tooley seems likely to have been a boy player with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Kathman 2004: 29). If this Tooley is indeed the same one who visited Forman as an ailing seventeen-year-old in 1599, then Forman’s casebook may bring us as

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close as any early modern document can do to the body of one of Shakespeare’s earliest actors. As evidenced by such recent works of scholarship as Disability, Health and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016) and Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (2017), the body is crucial to contemporary Shakespeare Studies. As Valerie Traub notes in her introduction to the second of these volumes, embodiment – defined as ‘that which assumes or is given corporeal form’ – brings together ‘the material and the discursive, the experiential and the analytical, the sensory, the affective, and the cognitive’ (2016: 32). Drawing upon a number of these strands, this chapter strives to consider the questions raised by the unique bodies of particular Shakespearean actors living in time and space. What happens when these bodies take on the imagined bodies of Shakespeare’s characters? How do these meetings help us to understand broader categories of embodiment, such as health, disability, gender, sexuality and race? ‘Traditionally, the actor’s body has been taken for an icon, something that resembles a body in the real world’, writes Sujata Iyengar; yet she reminds us that ‘the actor’s body is not only icon but index and symbol as well’ (2006: 65). Building on her insight, this chapter draws upon recent research to show how the careers of early modern actors such as Nicholas Tooley reflected a symbolic logic of signification in which the performer’s body was expected to represent the body of the character it portrayed via agreed-upon social and aesthetic codes. Since the Restoration, by contrast, the norms of Shakespearean performance have shifted increasingly toward the logic of iconicity, in which the actor’s body is expected directly to resemble that of the character it performs. After examining some of the strengths and weaknesses of the iconic approach, I suggest that we may now be witnessing a turn toward an indexical mode of Shakespearean performance in which the actor’s body points toward that of the character it portrays while also retaining its difference from its referent. Each of these signifying relationships between an actor’s body and a Shakespearean character is inflected by the medical, philosophical and aesthetic discourses of its time and place; each brings with it a powerful set of social, cultural and artistic implications. By unpacking them, we can better understand how the histories of Shakespearean performance have always, inevitably and profoundly, been histories of the body.

THE EARLY MODERN ACTOR AS SYMBOLIC AND SPECIFIC BODY As Simon Forman’s notes on the case of Nicholas Tooley underline, the conceptions of the human body that shaped Shakespeare’s age were very different from our own. In the first note, he chalks Tooley’s symptoms up to ‘melancholy and cold flem [phlegm]’, while in the second he ascribes them to ‘moch collor [choler]’. His diagnoses follow dominant early modern Western medical theories of the body, which rested upon the four essential humours posited by classical physicians: blood,

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phlegm, yellow bile (or choler) and black bile (or melancholy). In this system, ‘Every person had an individual mixture of humours, their constitution, temperament, or complexion, in which normally one humour was dominant and shaped their physical and psychological predisposition’ (Wear 2009: 37–8). When this balance of humours was disturbed, excesses of one or another could cause physical and emotional disorder, which expressed itself in outward symptoms that transformed the body and its behaviours. Hence, Forman believes that Tooley is ‘ferfull & tymorouse’, feels faint and is troubled by lung congestion because he is suffering from an excess of phlegm and black bile: cold humours associated with fear, grief and immobility. In his groundbreaking 1985 book The Player’s Passion, Joseph Roach argues that the early modern period saw actors like Tooley as particularly prone to humoural imbalance. The actor’s art, after all, was the art of simulating the passions. This art was risky, for passions ‘derive[d] from the humours and in turn influence[d] their quantity, disposition, and destination’ (1985: 40). By impersonating the gestures and other bodily movements associated with passions and their attendant humoural states, actors could affect the composition of their own bodies. In the exercise of their profession, actors had to depict ‘the most vehement of the passions’, which were ‘also the most unhealthy’ because they had the most extreme effect upon humoural balance (ibid.: 47). It must have seemed small wonder to Simon Forman, then, that a young player like Nicholas Tooley was subject to anxiety, stomach pains and breathing trouble. Where health was concerned, to be an actor was to play with fire. The rewards, however, warranted the risks, for a good actor could change not only his own body, but his spectators’ bodies, too. When the King’s Men visited Oxford in 1610 and Henry Jackson wrote to a friend about their performances, he described The Alchemist and Othello without ever mentioning the names of their playwrights, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Instead, he described the bodies of the actors and their effect on the audience. He comments, for example, on the performance of one of the Anabaptists in The Alchemist: Our theatre never rang with greater applause than when that hypocritical buffoon made his entrance, who, to hold up the false sanctity of the Anabaptists before the spectators as an object of derision, impiously and monstrously sullied scripture. They also had tragedies, which they acted with decorum and fitness. In these they elicited tears not only with their speaking but also with their physical action. (Sutton 2002) Jackson’s report may recall an appearance by Nicholas Tooley himself, who was likely in his late twenties in 1610 and who is noted on a surviving cast list for The Alchemist as having played the role of the Anabaptist Ananias (Riddell 1969: 290–1). The character’s ridiculous ‘entrance’ is specifically identified as having elicited enthusiastic applause. Turning to the tragedies performed, Jackson similarly credits the ‘physical action’ of the King’s Men’s bodies with evoking such affect that spectators wept. In a famous passage, he elaborates on this point by paying tribute to a performer who, in Shakespeare’s Othello, moved the audience to the passion of

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pity without speaking a word: ‘But that Desdemona, murdered by her husband in our presence, although she always pled her case excellently, yet when killed moved us more, while stretched out on her bed she begged the spectators’ pity with her very facial expression’ (Sutton 2002). Strikingly, Jackson never mentions that the actor he watched playing Desdemona would almost certainly have been identified by his spectators as a boy (Kathman 2005: 220). Writing in Latin, Jackson refers to the actor in the feminine, conflating the performer with the character; any difference between their bodies seems not to matter to him in the least. Many critics have asked why this might have been – why, as Stephen Orgel put it in an influential 1989 essay, the English stage took boys for women. Locating the answer in the era’s fluid conceptions of gender, Orgel cited the anxieties of Puritan opponents of the early modern stage, who worried that boys’ bodies – and the desires of their spectators – would be corrupted or transformed by the act of putting on women’s clothing and personae (1989: 14–15). Recent scholars of early modern gender and sexuality, such as Will Fisher and Simone Chess, have drawn upon this scholarly tradition, emphasizing that in Galenic medicine male and female bodies were ‘viewed along a continuum’ (Fisher 2006: 6) and arguing that ‘what a person wore and how he/she acted had the potential to actually change his/ her/their sex’ (Chess 2016: 6). Recently, however, another strand of scholarship has stressed another side of the boy actor’s art. As Evelyn Tribble argues, ‘[t]he boy player may have been an object of desire, but he was equally a skilled subject’ (2016: 629). Defining ‘skill’ as a ‘property of biological, neurological, social, historical, and material forces’ (2017: 5), Tribble sees the skilled body as both object and subject, inscribed by physical, social and ideological determinants that lie beyond its control, but also learning to manage those forces through ‘kinesic intelligence, built upon a foundation of training and practice’ (ibid.: 11). The training and practice of an early modern English boy actor like Nicholas Tooley, for example, would have been shaped by the social discourses of femininity that informed the female roles in his repertoire. When he was successful, his audience must have noted and enjoyed his mastery of the gestures, movements and tones that helped to materialize the feminine body onstage. Arguments like Tribble’s find support in early modern sources that distinguish between the bodies of skilled boy players and those of the characters they portrayed onstage. In his 1612 Apology for Actors, for instance, Thomas Heywood asks, ‘To see our youth attired in the habit of women, who knowes not what their intents be? who cannot distinguish them by their names, assuredly knowing, they are but to represent such a Lady, at such a time appointed[?]’ (1612: C3v). In Heywood’s construction, actors neither resemble nor are transformed by the characters whose ‘habits’ they don; rather, both they and their spectators remain aware that they merely ‘represent’ those characters during the two hours’ traffic of the stage. Such sources portray the body of the early modern English actor as maintaining a symbolic, rather than an iconic, relationship to the parts it plays onstage. In the terms established by semiotic theorist Charles Sanders Peirce, an iconic sign is one that denotes an object ‘by virtue of some common ingredient or similarity’

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between them (1931–66: 2.254). A symbolic sign, by contrast, denotes its object ‘by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object’ (ibid.: 2.292). To signify clearly and successfully, the symbol need only be accepted by its receivers within a given interpretative context as representing such an object, at such a time appointed. Awareness of the ‘artistic aim of symbolism’, Christie Carson argues, helps us to understand the stream of metatheatrical references to the gap between the actor and his role that runs through the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (2012: 81). When Shakespeare placed Cleopatra’s contemptuous refusal to ‘see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness’ (5.2.218–19) in the mouth of the actor who played her, he recognized that his spectators were not only aware of, but actively accepted, the difference between the Egyptian Queen and the English actor. The body of the boy actor needed to engage the audience in a theatrical contract based upon a shared ‘association of ideas’, but to achieve this goal it did not need to match that of the character it portrayed. A return to Simon Forman’s casebook notes about young Nicholas Tooley may serve to underline this point. Tooley has often been surmised to be the ‘Nick’ who appears in connection with two noblewomen’s roles in the surviving plot for The Seven Deadly Sins, Part Two, which was probably created for a performance by the Chamberlain’s Men in 1597–8 (Kathman 2004; 2011). The messy body described in Forman’s casebook of a year later, wracked by excesses of melancholy, phlegm and choler, seems to have little in common with the aristocratic ladies it likely played onstage. But then, a society whose audiences routinely accepted maleidentified, adolescent, merchant-class actors in the roles of female-identified, adult, noble characters likely cared little about whether the player they saw onstage was melancholy or choleric, or whether he suffered from stomach pains. Then again, the thought experiment of imagining this particular body on this stage at this time yields some interesting questions. If, with Tribble and Carson, we imagine the early modern actor’s body as one skilled in symbolic performance, then any physical factor that might disrupt its ‘kinesic intelligence’ and its contract with the audience must have been a worry. If Tooley’s humoural excesses changed his energy and affect as a player, this surely would have had an impact on his performances. Perhaps it was to eliminate such problems that he chose to consult Simon Forman. Perhaps there was also a period during which the company who had invested in the boy had to work around, or even with, his physical state. If Tooley was one of the main players of female roles with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins suggests, then he is very likely to have appeared in women’s parts in such Shakespearean plays as Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–9) and Twelfth Night (c. 1600–1). Is there a chance that Beatrice’s seemingly gratuitous allusions to her cold in Act 3 of Much Ado – including the line ‘I am stuffed’ (3.4.58) – archive an effort to accommodate an actor suffering from ‘stuffing’ and ‘rheum’ in the period of its first performance? Is it possible that one of the numerous melancholy characters Tooley might have played in Twelfth Night – such as the mourning Olivia, or Viola/Cesario, who describes

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their alter-ego sister as afflicted with a ‘green and yellow melancholy’ (2.4.113) – was written deliberately to build upon the young actor’s surplus of black bile? We will never know. Nevertheless, the jeu d’esprit of linking Tooley’s appearances in Forman’s casebook with his possible roles on the Elizabethan stage reminds us that these roles were written for a specific actor’s body: a body whose unique strengths, weaknesses and vicissitudes Shakespeare, himself a working player with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, must have known well. ‘Who cannot distinguish [the boys] by their names’, asked Heywood (1612: C3v), directly linking the symbolic nature of the early modern player’s art to the audience’s recognition of the player’s individuality. Known ‘by their names’, the signifiers do not disappear into their referents, but remain recognizable as subjects whose skills, limitations and physical constitutions attract the attention, affection or censure of the theatrical audience.

THE ICONIC SHAKESPEAREAN BODY With the closure of London’s public theatres in 1642, this relationship between the actor’s body and the plays it performed began to shift. By the time the playhouses officially reopened in 1660, all of the actors who had played alongside Shakespeare were gone, and few of those who had trained under them survived to carry their practices into the new theatrical age. In James Wright’s 1699 Historia Histrionica, one of the first attempts to offer a history of the early modern English stage, the character Lovewit links this loss of tradition directly to the problem of embodiment. He declares that ‘when the question has been askt, Why [our] Players do not receive [sic] The Silent Woman, and some other of Johnson’s plays … they have answer’d, truly, Because there are none now Living who can rightly Humour those parts, for all who related to the Black-friers (where they were Acted in perfection) are now Dead’ (Wright 1699: 2–3). Lovewit identifies the bodily practice of the early modern playing company as the cornerstone of the ability to ‘rightly Humour’ the roles written for them. In the terms established by influential performance theorist Diana Taylor, the Restoration theatre had retained some of ‘the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e, texts, documents, buildings, bones)’ from the theatre of Shakespeare, but had lost that theatre’s ‘repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge’ (Taylor 2003: 19). If they were to revive the famous characters of the early modern stage for the new age, Restoration actors needed to find new ways to do it. Among the strategies they used was a turn toward iconicity. The most obvious example of this iconic turn was, of course, the triumph of female-identified actresses on the Restoration stage. Although cisgender women had appeared in many forms of performance on both public and private stages in early modern Britain, the 1660s saw their earliest appearances as professional actresses, with the casting of a woman as Desdemona in a production of Othello at the Vere Street Theatre often cited as the first documented instance of the practice (McManus 2013). A prologue written for the occasion by Thomas Jordan constructs resemblance between actor and character as a sine qua non of theatrical success. ‘In this reforming age’, the prologue declares,

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We have intents to civilize the Stage. Our women are defective, and so siz’d You’d think they were some of the Guard disguiz’d; For (to speak truth) men act, that are between Forty and fifty, Wenches of fifteen; With bone so large, and nerve so incomplyant, When you call Desdemona, enter Giant[.] (Jordan 1664: 21) In this passage, the supposed bodily unsuitability of male-identified actors for femaleidentified roles is offered as the pivotal argument in favour of women’s appearance in them. The male actor Jordan imagines is physically incompatible with Desdemona in a number of ways: too old, too big and of ‘incomplyant’ nerves. This last criticism is particularly revealing, for it reflects an ongoing shift in late seventeenth-century medical theory away from an emphasis on the humours and towards a focus on nerves as key agents of health and disease. In the same decade as the first female actresses were appearing on the English stage, the English physician Thomas Willis was delving into the physiology of the nervous system, arguing that good health depended upon the ‘animal Spirits’ that moved through its tubes and fibres (Willis 1681: 126). Women’s particularly pliant, responsive nerves were believed to make them more emotionally labile and physically fragile than men (Bell 2014: 95). Hence, when Jordan describes the male Desdemona’s nerves as ‘incomplyant’, he implies that an essential biological characteristic of the male body – its relatively tough, hardy and inflexible nerves – renders it fundamentally unsuited to female roles. The logic of iconicity, in this case, is inseparable from the logic of gender essentialism. Once cisgender women had gained the English-speaking stage, the symbolic art of the boy player rapidly disappeared from view. Other forms of symbolic signification were much longer lived. For example, until the second half of the twentieth century, Shakespeare’s Othello was played predominantly by white actors in blackface. The move away from such casting, and its social implications, have been the focus of much contemporary research on Shakespeare, race and performance. As Virginia Mason Vaughan argues, by the mid-nineteenth century cultural assumptions ‘based on pejorative categories of racial difference’ had ironically ‘made the debut of a black actor as Othello possible, if not inevitable’ (1994: 81). In 1833, the great American actor Ira Aldridge became the first performer of African descent to play Othello on the London stage. His performance occasioned considerable debate as to whether a Black actor could play Shakespeare’s Moor as well as a white actor could, with one London critic remarking of Aldridge that ‘in point of physical appearance, [he] has nothing to recommend him for the part of Othello but his complexion’ (‘Covent Garden’ 1833: 3). By the late twentieth century, that complexion had become almost a requirement for the role. Many scholars have identified Paul Robeson’s hugely influential performances as Othello in London (1930) and New York (1943) as turning points in the history of the part; one critic at the time asserted that ‘no white man should

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ever dare presume to play Othello’ after Robeson (Elie 1942: 1). In 1987, Ian McKellen declared ‘that he had no plans to essay the role of Othello, and that in our time, no white actor should’ (Vaughan 1994: 197). Profoundly influenced by such perspectives, late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Englishlanguage productions of Othello have almost all featured Black actors in the title role. The fact that this is so, like the fact that cisgender women have consistently played Shakespeare’s female roles in the English theatre in the years since 1660, demonstrates the crucial social and cultural impacts of iconicity upon the Shakespearean stage. As Dympna Callaghan stresses, the symbolic logic of the early modern England theatre was founded upon a series of social exclusions; boy actresses practiced their art because patriarchal convention barred women from playing on the public stage, and ‘Othello was a white man’ (Callaghan 2000: 96), an English representation of an imagined Moorish Other. By taking on the roles created within this theatre, cisgender women and actors of colour have laid claim to Shakespeare’s cultural, social and economic capital while also asserting the value of their own identities, histories and lived experiences. When the African American writer Playthell Benjamin argues that ‘black actors relate to the role [of Othello] in a way unavailable to white actors’ (1996: 103), he makes a powerful case for the value of iconicity as a practice that has opened up the Shakespearean stage to bodies whose absence lay at its very foundations.

THE PERILS OF ICONICITY As performance scholar Natalie Alvarez notes, however, iconicity is not a simple boon within frameworks that strive to redress historical inequities and exclusions. ‘On the one hand’, she writes, for minoritized subjects, iconicity provides a vocabulary for identifying what is wrong when, for example, a heterosexual woman plays a lesbian or a white actor plays a Latino … On the other hand, the appeal for continuity between actor and character in the logic of iconicity runs the risk of re-entrenching essentializing representations and obfuscating difference. (2012: 155) The movement toward iconicity, notes Alvarez, reflects ‘a desire for correlation and continuity that enables one to speak’ (ibid.: 160). However, ‘iconicity and proper authorization’ often ‘succeed on the basis of a reaffirmation of the familiar’ (ibid.). ‘[I]n the scene of recognition that iconicity allows’, asks Alvarez, ‘what does this “horizon of normativity” obscure from our vision?’ (ibid.: 161). This question is rendered particularly urgent by dominant contemporary Western constructions of the body. Today’s bodies are managed by social, scientific and medical systems that strive to explain their workings by quantifying, measuring and categorizing them. In the doctor’s office, patients’ ages, heights and weights are noted, and they are asked to self-identify by gender and race. Meanwhile,

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contemporary political and philosophical analysis focuses attention upon the ways in which these processes materialize broader social discourses of identity, power and difference. In a formulation hugely influential for recent waves of feminism, Judith Butler has argued that ‘gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express’ (1993: 314), suggesting that gender is not an essential attribute of the body but rather is ‘created and re-created in the doing, citing, and re-citing of it within a determinate system of constraints’ (Traub 2016: 5). Butler’s notion of performativity has been applied to many categories of identity, including race (Thompson 2006: 15) and disability (Sandhal and Auslander 2005: 2). It has also been roundly critiqued for its perceived denial of the body’s corporeality and materiality (Thompson 2006: 15). No matter which side of this debate one espouses, the question of iconicity remains crucial. If one believes that identity categories are essential to the body, then iconic casting becomes a vital assertion of embodied truth, matching the actor’s essence to the character’s. If, on the other hand, one views identity categories as performative, then each act of iconic performance helps to keep normative constructions of the body in place, citing and re-citing the rightness of certain bodies and identifications while relegating others to the realm of invisibility and silence. These processes of affirmation, citation and exclusion are everywhere visible in our era’s dominant practices of Shakespearean performance. Hence, Clive Barnes comments that some actors now embrace the role of Macbeth because they are ‘too old to play Hamlet, too young to play Lear, or too light-skinned to play Othello’ (Barnes 2000). Not only the gender, age and race, but also the size and shape of actors’ bodies are routinely judged in terms of their iconic suitability to the Shakespearean character. When Simon Russell Beale played Hamlet in 2000–1, Bence Olveczky wrote that ‘[m]any critics feared he would be too old and pudgy to play Hamlet’ (2001). The actor himself described his choice to play Shakespeare’s Danish Prince as the result of complex calculations about the limits of his physical suitability, remarking, ‘I seriously think that this is my last chance of doing Hamlet. I’m 39. I’m not a dashing Alan Rickman figure who can do Hamlet at 45 and get away with it’ (Gardner 2000). Apparently, one can be ‘dashing’ and over forty, or ‘pudgy’ and under forty, and still play Hamlet, but one can no longer be – as many have guessed the first Hamlet, Richard Burbage, may have been (Levy-Navarro 2014) – both plump and middle-aged. When and how did the body of a slender, glamorous, young cisgender male come to be identified as the ‘correct’ body of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? The answer clearly does not lie in the text of the play, whose only potential allusion to Hamlet’s weight is Gertrude’s notorious remark, ‘He’s fat and scant of breath’ (5.2.269). Rather, Elena Levy-Navarro has argued (2014), a cultural understanding of Hamlet’s body as a young, thin, active one emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to Romantic images of masculinity and moralizing views of obesity as the sign of a lazy, self-indulgent character. The constant measurement of bodies like Beale’s against this standard is a symptom of Hamlet’s ascent to the position of a modern cultural archetype. Shakespeare’s Prince is no longer just a role to be enacted by a sequence of unique, individual actors, but an icon to whom

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his players are expected to conform. To reproduce the icon, they must resemble it – iconically. Meanwhile, some bodies continue to be invisible on the Shakespearean stage even when the logic of iconicity would seem to demand their visibility. As Katherine Schaap Williams notes, Richard III has been much analysed by recent scholars as a key example of a ‘disabled’ character in the Shakespearean canon, but few actors who identify as disabled have appeared in the role on the contemporary stage (2013: 769). Instead, Williams argues, ‘a robust theatrical tradition has taken Richard’s “descant” as an invitation to stage extraordinary bodily features’ (ibid.: 768), and the spectacle of an able-bodied actor imitating a range of disabilities has remained not only culturally acceptable, but popular. When disabled actor Mat Fraser played Richard for Northern Broadsides in 2017, he called upon the logic of iconicity to showcase his suitability for the role, remarking, ‘I don’t have to start performing my own impairments. … I can just be, in my body’ (Youngs 2017). Though his appearance made headlines, it does not yet appear to have become the norm as other examples of iconic casting have done. Here again, the established cultural image of the character, rather than the individual body of the actor, appears to be the final arbiter of iconicity. As Erin Julian and Kim Solga’s essay in this collection underlines, in most major contemporary Shakespearean theatres the barriers facing actors of colour, Indigenous actors, transgender actors and many others in gaining access to roles for which they are viewed as physically inappropriate are real and painful. Those who do get cast in such roles are often forced to disavow aspects of their own identity and lived experience. This effect can occur, for example, when actors are cast in a version of ‘colour-blind’ or ‘gender-blind’ casting that encourages the audience to forget about or disregard those aspects of the actor’s embodied presence that seem to clash with or contradict received images of the character. As numerous authors in Ayanna Thompson’s edited collection Colorblind Shakespeare stress, this invocation of ‘blindness’ can help to challenge some of the most exclusionary aspects of iconic casting, but can also create profound difficulties and contradictions. Hence, Lisa M. Anderson reminds us that ‘many situations of colorblind casting’ ask the audience to ‘mentally erase three centuries of images that have shaped and continue to shape the racial sign system in which we live’ (2006: 92). Even if bodies of colour are cast under the regime of iconicity, Anderson suggests, their lived experiences are often elided, excluded or used ‘merely to reinscribe the racist controlling images that we, as artists and scholars, have worked so diligently to eradicate’ (ibid.: 101). One of the most celebrated reflections upon this danger is offered by Hugh Quarshie’s ‘Second Thoughts on Othello’, delivered as the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1998 and later published in a revised form by the International Shakespeare Association. In this essay, Quarshie admits that, as one of Britain’s leading Black actors, he has been asked to play Othello on numerous occasions. He expresses reservations, describing the play as the product of a racist early modern English society and arguing that its subsequent long stage history has done little more than confirm negative images of Black masculinity. This being the case, he argues, ‘If a black actor plays Othello does he not risk making

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racial stereotypes seem legitimate and even true? … Of all the parts in the canon, perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor’ (1999: 5). Much cited by later critics and artists, this passage challenges the very foundations of iconic logic in casting. I was present at Quarshie’s first delivery of his meditation on the strengths and dangers of iconic casting at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in April 1998. More than twenty years later, I can still remember the ripple of horror in the room when Quarshie answered a blunt question at the end – ‘Are you saying that Shakespeare was a racist?’ – with a simple affirmative. The questioner responded, in effect, that Quarshie’s own personal experiences of racism must have so embittered him that he could no longer grasp the universality of Shakespeare’s insights. The actor’s embodied knowledge of racism and racialization was surely among the key qualities that had led to his being courted to play the role of Othello. Nevertheless, when these experiences were mobilized to question the authority of Shakespeare’s text and the current ‘horizon of normativity’ associated it, they were branded illegitimate and irrelevant. If Quarshie were truly to understand Shakespeare’s bodies, his interlocutor implied, he might need to forget about some of the lives his own body had lived. In response, as I recall, Quarshie only smiled.

MIND THE GAP: THE SHAKESPEAREAN BODY AS INDEX Though Quarshie’s reflections on Othello express his reservations about the iconic logic through which his body might be used to ‘personify … a caricature of a black man’ and thus to ‘giv[e] it credence’ (1999: 18), they also acknowledge the possibility of other approaches to the play. For instance, Quarshie states that he would not be opposed to participating in a production in which Othello ‘behaves as he does because he is a black man responding to racism, not giving a pretext for it’ (ibid.: 21). In 2015, he did indeed appear as Othello in Iqbal Khan’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the first in the company’s history to feature a Black actor (Lucian Msamati) as Iago. In this context, Quarshie wrote, ‘[t]here was no possibility of suggesting that a clever and cunning white man could easily dupe a credulous black man because … both Othello and Iago were black’ (2016). Here, as Angela C. Pao has argued of previous productions where Iago’s Black body disrupted culturally established images of him as a white man, ‘after decades or even centuries of a circumscribed range of possible characterizations, an entirely new set of interpretative possibilities has been opened up by the casting’ (2006: 38). For Quarshie, these new interpretative possibilities were inextricably linked to his, Msamati’s and Khan’s own embodied lives as British men of colour. ‘We … made sense of it’, he writes, ‘by bringing the play closer to our experience. But in so doing, did we take it away from Shakespeare? And does it matter?’ (2016). These questions point beyond the specificities of Khan’s production to wider issues in mainstream English-language performances of Shakespeare today. Forms of ‘nontraditional casting’, as Thompson describes them (2006: 7), in

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which the audience is encouraged to recognize (rather than be ‘blind’ to) noniconically cast bodies onstage, have become increasingly prominent. Alongside the strategic casting of racialized actors discussed by Thompson, one might also mention important all-female Shakespeare productions like Phyllida Lloyd’s hugely influential ‘trilogy’ at the Donmar Warehouse, London, between 2012 and 2016, as well as the rise of Shakespeare productions showcasing transgender and nonbinary casts (Power 2016). What is at stake when the bodies presented onstage resist iconicity, overtly marking their difference from dominant cultural images of Shakespeare’s characters? One case study in this question was offered by Sam Gold’s staging of King Lear, which opened at the Cort Theatre on Broadway on 3 April 2019. When I saw Gold’s production on the afternoon of 14 April, playbills outside the theatre reminded all those entering that it would feature a very famous, non-traditional thespian body as Lear: ‘Glenda Jackson! Glenda Jackson! Glenda Jackson!’ one screamed. Many reviewers read Jackson’s casting as ‘gender-blind’ (Rooney 2019), suggesting that the audience was meant to forget or ignore the difference between her identification as a woman and Lear’s culturally established masculinity. Jackson’s gender ‘quickly comes to seem irrelevant’, declared Ben Brantley (2019). Alexis Soloski agreed, opining that Jackson ‘doesn’t play Lear as a woman or even as a man particularly, but as every inch a king’ (2019). Even if she is not iconically cast, such evaluations imply, a truly great Shakespearean actor can make one forget difference altogether. Other members of Gold’s cast did not receive such affirmation. ‘The supporting performances are all over the place’, declared Marilyn Stasio in Variety, ‘and the fidelity to fashionable race/gender/age-blind casting sometimes requires work to figure out who’s who’ (2019). Hilton Als objected to the wide range of accents offered by Lear’s three daughters: Goneril (Elizabeth Marvel, overreaching as usual) has an American twang, while Regan (Aisling O’Sullivan) speaks with an Irish brogue, and Ruth Wilson, doing her very best as Cordelia, and later as the Fool, has clear, British stage diction. Wouldn’t Lear’s daughters have grown up and been educated in the same place? (2019) Ben Brantley expressed similar mystification, declaring, It seems fitting that in this version, Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall (Russell Harvard), is deaf. Is Cornwall’s aide (Michael Arden)—who conspicuously interprets speeches into vigorous sign language—perhaps meant to signify the difficulty of disparate souls communicating? Oh, I don’t know. (2019) One should know, such reviewers seemed to suggest. The director’s vision, and the actors who give it life, should offer direct, unmediated – that is, iconic – access to Shakespeare’s bodies. Chalking the production’s refusal to meet this standard up to ‘the current tide of inclusion of crossover casting’ (Seff 2019), they took it as a clear sign of aesthetic failure.

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Without wishing to claim too much for Gold’s production, which often struck me as uneven and overstuffed, I want to suggest an alternative reading of his Lear and the bodies who populated it. More than failed icons, many of these bodies performed in such a way as to draw overt attention to the gaps between themselves and normative cultural images of Shakespeare’s characters. Brantley’s confusion notwithstanding, the performances of Russell Harvard as Cornwall and Michael Arden as his aideinterpreter offered a particularly powerful instance of this approach to Shakespeare. Harvard’s fiery, kilt-clad Duke did not simply rely upon Arden’s earnest aide-decamp to translate the dialogue around him into and out of ASL. In the early scenes of the drama, he also conducted animated signed conversations with the aide while other characters delivered themselves of Shakespearean verse. Enacting a kind of embodied paratext to the Shakespearean text, these conversations often seemed to critique, question or undermine the words that were being spoken aloud. Rather than concealing the unique physicalities of Harvard and Arden, moreover, they emphasized skills honed by their respective experiences as a Deaf actor and a longtime collaborator with Deaf performers. Moments like this introduced what Alvarez describes as an ‘indexical’ mode of signification into Gold’s King Lear. The indexical sign is defined by Peirce as a ‘pointing finger’ that ‘forces the mind to attend to [its] object’ (1931–66: 2.14). For Alvarez, the indexical mode in performance is closely related to the techniques of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre, in which the actor ‘never forgets, nor does he allow it to be forgotten, that he is not the subject but the demonstrator’ (Brecht 1964: 125). Indexicality, she argues, offers an approach through which ‘visible minorities’ can participate in dominant forms of representation ‘without having to render themselves “illegible” …, but also without ceding to a referential system that always already governs the scene of recognition’ (Alvarez 2012: 161). Pointing to their fictional referent without having to meld into it, performers need not disavow their own material reality. Harvard’s and Arden’s performances in Gold’s King Lear underlined the potential benefits of this approach. When the scene of Gloucester’s blinding arrived, the aide took on the role of the servant who strove to dissuade Cornwall from his worst instincts. ‘Hold your hand, my lord’, he cried, the phrase ringing with a new poignancy since Cornwall’s hands had so often been used to communicate with him (3.7.71). This advice was not accepted; screaming with rage, Harvard’s Cornwall abandoned signed conversation in favour of physical violence. The aide fell dead, silenced forever, and Cornwall himself was wounded. Bleeding apace, he signed desperately to a hysterical Reagan, but had no friend to translate his thoughts into verse. By striving to silence his detractor, he had lost a part of his own voice. As Brantley stressed, this sequence was not standard ‘Shakespeare’. Nevertheless, it pointed toward deeper themes and patterns in King Lear, echoing Lear’s rejection of the daughter who truly loves him and Gloucester’s proscription of his faithful son. Dependent upon the bodies of Harvard and Arden in all of their irreducible specificity, it would have been impossible in a more iconically cast production.

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SHAKESPEARE’S ONCE AND FUTURE BODIES The logic of iconicity, which laminates the character’s body onto the actor’s, has had many positive ramifications for the history of Shakespearean performance, ensuring points of entry into the powerful system of Shakespearean signification for identities that had previously been debarred from it. At the same time, iconicity has perpetuated exclusions of its own. Indexical approaches to performance offer one strategy by which the bodies thus sidelined can seize the Shakespearean stage and point spectators toward new meanings for old plays. In the process, they may help us to revisit – albeit in a new and different light – certain key aspects of the bodies that first performed Shakespeare. The bodies of Harvard and Arden, like the bodies of early modern boy actresses, performed their roles through committed, skillful action without fleeing or disavowing the points of difference between themselves and the characters inscribed in the Shakespearean playtext and/or the cultural imaginary. In embodying their parts, they also embodied their own strengths, struggles and histories. As recent scholarship stresses, the bodies that have played Shakespeare have both submitted to and resisted his authority, simultaneously reflecting and transforming the fortunes of his plays across time and space. In our continuing research into these complex processes, we must acknowledge the ways in which ‘Shakespeare’s bodies’ are inscribed and circumscribed by his titanic reputation and the powerful personae of his characters. But we must also recognize their great cultural value as the unique, complex, historically situated bodies that – now as in the age of Nicholas Tooley – constantly make and remake ‘Shakespeare’ in and through their own image.

REFERENCES Als, Hilton (2019), ‘Sam Gold’s Self-Serving Version of “King Lear”’, The New Yorker, 15 April. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/samgolds-self-serving-vision-of-king-lear (accessed 21 November 2020). Alvarez, Natalie (2012), ‘Realisms of Redress: Alameda Theatre and the Formation of a Latina/o-Canadian Theatre and Politics’, in Roberta Barker and Kim Solga (eds), New Canadian Realisms, 144–52, Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Anderson, Lisa M. (2006), ‘When Race Matters: Reading Race in Richard III and Macbeth’, in Ayanna Thompson (ed.), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, 89–102, New York: Routledge. Barnes, Clive (2000), ‘Macbeth: The Kiss of Death?’, New York Post, 25 June. Available online: https://nypost.com/2000/06/25/macbeth-the-kiss-of-death/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Bell, Matthew (2014), Melancholia: The Western Malady, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Playthell (1997), ‘Did Shakespeare Intend Othello to be Black? A Meditation on Blacks and the Bard’, in Mythili Kaul (ed.), Othello: New Essays by Black Writers, 91–104, Washington: Howard University Press.

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Brantley, Ben (2019), ‘Glenda Jackson Rules a Muddled World in “King Lear”’, The New York Times, 4 April. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/theater/ king-lear-review-glenda-jackson.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Brecht, Bertolt (1964), ‘The Street Scene’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre, 121–9, New York: Hill and Wang. Butler, Judith (1993), ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 307–20, New York: Routledge. Callaghan, Dympna (2000), Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, New York: Routledge. Carson, Christie (2012), ‘Visual Scores’, in Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (eds), Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, 69–87, London: Red Globe Press. Chess, Simone (2016), Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations, New York: Routledge. ‘Covent Garden Theatre’ (1833), Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser, 11 April: 3. Edmond, Mary (1996), ‘Yeomen, Citizens, Gentlemen, and Players: The Burbages and their Connections’, in R. B. Parker, and S. P. Zitner (eds), Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, 30–49, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Elie, Rudolph, Jr (1942), ‘Robeson gives “Othello” Great Power’, Variety, 12 August: 1 and 63ff. Fisher, Will (2006), Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, Lyn (2000), ‘Would it really have mattered if I’d never played Hamlet?’, The Guardian, 30 August. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/ aug/30/artsfeatures2 (accessed 21 November 2020). Heywood, Thomas (1612), An apology for actors, London. Iyengar, Sujata (2006), ‘Colorblind Casting in Same-Sex Shakespeare’, in Ayanna Thompson (ed.), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, 47–67, New York: Routledge. Iyengar, Sujata, ed. (2015), Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, New York: Routledge. Jordan, Thomas (1664), ‘A Prologue to Introduce the first Woman that Came to Act on the Stage in the Tragedy, Call’d the Moor of Venice’, in A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie, London. Kassell, Lauren, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues and Natalie Kaoukji, eds (n.d.a.), ‘CASE5641’, The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edition. Available online: https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/cases/CASE5641 (accessed 21 November 2020). Kassell, Lauren, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues and Natalie Kaoukji, eds (n.d.b.) ‘CASE6408’, The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edition. Available online: https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/cases/CASE6408 (accessed 21 November 2020). Kathman, David (2004), ‘Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins’, Early Theatre, 7 (1): 13–44. Kathman, David (2005), ‘How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?’ Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005): 220–46.

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Kathman, David (2011), ‘The Seven Deadly Sins and Theatrical Apprenticeship’, Early Theatre, 14 (1): 121–39. Levy-Navarro, Elena (2014), ‘“He’s fat, and scant of breath”: The Rise of a Modern Fatphobia in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Commentary on Hamlet’, Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 25 August. Available online: https://upstart. sites.clemson.edu/Essays/navarro_hamlet/navarro_hamlet.xhtml#t9 (accessed 21 November 2020). McManus, Clare (2013), ‘The Vere Street Desdemona: Othello and the Theatrical Englishwoman, 1602-2660’, in Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds), Women Making Shakespeare: Essays on Text, Reception and Performance, 221–31, London: Bloomsbury. Olveczky, Bence (2001), ‘Hamlet: The British are Coming!’, The Tech, 20 April. Available online: http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N19/Hamlet.19a.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Orgel, Stephen (1989), ‘Nobody’s Perfect; Or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1): 7–29. Pao, Angela C. (2006), ‘Ocular Revisions: Re-casting Othello in Text and Performance’, in Ayanna Thompson (ed.), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, 27–45, New York: Routledge. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931–66), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Power, Terri (2016), Shakespeare and Gender in Practice, London: Red Globe Press. Quarshie, Hugh (1999), Second Thoughts About ‘Othello’, Stratford-upon-Avon: International Shakespeare Association. Quarshie, Hugh (2016), ‘Playing Othello’, Discovering Literature, British Library. Available online: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/playing-othello (accessed 21 November 2020). Riddell, James A. (1969), ‘Some Actors in Ben Jonson’s Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 5: 284–98. Roach, Joseph R. (1985), The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Rooney, David (2019), ‘King Lear: Theater Review’, Hollywood Reporter, 4 April. Available online: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/king-lear-theaterreview-1199652 (accessed 21 November 2020). Sandhal, Carrie and Philip Auslander, eds (2005), Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Seff, Richard (2019), ‘On and Off Broadway: Shakespeare’s King Lear with Glenda Jackson’, Shoreline Times, 30 April. Available online: http://www.shorelinetimes. com/lifestyle/on-off-broadway-william-shakespeare-s-king-lear-with-glenda/article_ d6c57458-8ca0-5260-b6d6-1d5981f51ab7.html (accessed 21 November 2020). Soloski, Alexis (2019), ‘Glenda Jackson Dominates Flawed Broadway Show’, The Guardian, 5 April. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/apr/04/ king-lear-shakespeare-glenda-jackson-broadway (accessed 21 November 2020).

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Stasio, Marilyn (2019), ‘Broadway Review: “King Lear” Starring Glenda Jackson’, Variety, 4 April. Available online: https://variety.com/2019/legit/reviews/king-lear-reviewglenda-jackson-broadway-1203180018/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Sutton, Dana F., trans. and ed. (2002) ‘Henry Jackson, Letter of September 1610’, The Philological Museum, 31 July. Available online: http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/ jackson/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Taylor, Diana (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural History in the Americas, Durham: Duke University Press. Thompson, Ayanna, ed. (2006), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, New York: Routledge. Traub, Valerie, ed. (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tribble, Evelyn (2016), ‘Pretty and Apt: Boy Actors, Skill and Embodiment’, in Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, 628–40, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tribble, Evelyn (2017), Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body, London: Bloomsbury. Vaughan, Virginia Mason (1994), Othello: A Contextual History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wear, Andrew (2009), Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Katherine Schaap (2013), ‘Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity’, English Studies, 94 (7): 757–72. Willis, Thomas (1681), The Anatomy of the Brain and the Description and Use of the Nerves, in S. Pordage (ed.), The Remaining Medical Works of That Famous and Renowned Physician Dr. Thomas Willis, London. Wright, James (1699), Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage, London. Youngs, Ian (2017), ‘Mat Fraser on Playing Richard III and TV’s “Pathetic” Disabled Casting’, BBC News, 4 May. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/news/ entertainment-arts-39749041 (accessed 21 November 2020).

CHAPTER 2.10

Technology: The desire called cinema: Materiality, biopolitics and postanthropocentric feminism in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest COURTNEY LEHMANN

Mirroring millennial anxieties, a flurry of film scholarship emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century announcing, in the wake of digital film, ‘the end of cinema as we know it’ – as one fin de siècle book title goes. For example, in a 2001 essay titled ‘Twenty-five Reasons Why It’s All Over’, Wheeler Winston Dixon warns of a time when ‘Film will reside only in the domain of archives, museums, and specialized revival houses’ (2001: 362). Anne Friedberg, in her 2000 essay on ‘The end of cinema: multimedia and technological change’, similarly observes that ‘as new technologies trouble the futures of cinematic production and reception, “film” as a discrete object becomes more and more of an endangered species, itself in need of asserting its own historicity’ (2000: 448). The digital, Friedberg fears, could displace film history altogether, as if it could be reduced to a series of algorithms or binary code. Indeed, where computational practices prevail ‘a certain idea of cinema’, as D. N. Rodowick laments in The Virtual Life of Film, ‘is already dead’ (2007: 93); for once film is digitized, it ‘can never be truly returned to a state of non-discreteness. The process of quantification or numerization is irreversible’ (ibid.: 119). Nevertheless, digital production is now the industry standard, while celluloid – cinema’s material record of a once-physical presence – has been relegated to the world of indie cinema and the art film. To an extent, then, millennial gloomand-doom predictions have come to pass. But the question is: what is truly lost in the move from the cinema and celluloid to digital production and distribution? Are

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we guilty of fetishizing the incidental flash and flicker of ‘real film’ in the age of CGI, nostalgic for the grainy quality born of celluloid’s precarious photochemical properties? What is it, exactly, that is being mourned? At stake in these questions, I would suggest, is not so much an elegy for film as an expression of ‘the desire called cinema’. In Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), Fredric Jameson explores how narrative forms, and science fiction in particular, engage the utopian impulse, becoming registers of cultural fantasies and political experiments for imagining collective alternatives to capitalist futures.1 So, too, ‘the desire called cinema’ is a compensatory response, but rather than being genre-specific, like science fiction, it is a medium-specific phenomenon which, I would argue, is the result of a perceived loss of ‘materiality’ in the age of digital film. In his recent book, The Insistence of the Material, Christopher Breu reads rampant digitalization as the inaugural moment of a capitalist future in which the laboring, material body is systematically erased from the mode of production: In an era in which the dominant ideology of digitalization is the virtual imagined as a process of dematerialization, it becomes especially important for reasons both political economic and ecological to attend to the material resources and still very material forms of production that underpin these fantasies of virtuality. (2014: 19) Operating at the level of cultural production and in film in particular, what I am referring to as ‘the desire called cinema’ is another way of thinking about the insistence of the material and, more specifically, about the ‘irreducible materiality of the body’ (Breu 2014: 6). This preoccupation, in turn, betrays a subtle anthropocentrism which, as I hope to demonstrate, reflects an effort to recuperate something irreducibly human in the digital age. Human, that is, ‘as we know it’. Shakespeare’s early science fiction play of The Tempest revolves around Prospero’s management of ‘the human’, especially as it pertains to his enslavement of the indigenous islander Caliban. Yet, with its emphasis on magic and spectacle, Shakespeare’s play also subscribes to ‘fantasies of virtuality’ in the form of Ariel, the indentured spirit. In fact, I would suggest that The Tempest foreshadows the ontological tango of embodiment, dematerialization and economic capture that troubles the digital turn. In what follows, I offer a close reading of Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of The Tempest, which allegorizes the broader cultural transition from ‘the desire called cinema’ – as a mode of imagining the human – to the digital and decidedly post-human realm and, in the process, becomes a profound register of the ways in which the idea of ‘cinema’ and ‘the cinematic’ engage larger questions of embodiment and representational justice in a field that remains oddly entrenched in the fidelity debate. The study of Shakespeare on screen is far better served by approaches that embrace considerations of the ideological, cultural and material conditions of filmmaking in an industry which, like the early modern stage, is both dictated and constrained by capital. In this context, political economy, which is chiefly concerned with the relationships between markets, the state and social welfare, coupled with perspectives drawn from materialist feminist scholarship

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and critical race theory, can tell us much about the ways in which different bodies come to matter in the late Anthropocene. By way of conclusion, I will explore why these matters are ‘worldly urgencies’, in Donna Haraway’s phrasing, for women filmmakers in particular, and how ‘cinema’ – as Jean-Louis Comolli argued more than sixty years ago in ‘A Morality of Economics’ – is above all an ‘instrument of social reform at both the production and consumption stage; it is even, apart from direct political or revolutionary action, one of the rare and perhaps only effective means of reform’ ([1967] 1986: 292).

I The post-human or post-Anthropocentric turn invokes the brave new world of distributed cognition, AI, machine learning, ‘smart’ technologies, the Internet of Things and biomedical breakthroughs. This is a world, for materialist feminists like Donna Haraway, in which ‘people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines’, nor are they ‘afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ (1991b: 154). In both her earlier Shakespeare film, Titus, and in The Tempest, Taymor engages this post-Anthropocentric theme at the level of the aesthetic, as her characters emerge from what she refers to as a ‘metamorphic flux of the human, animal and … divine’ (2000: 183). But Taymor goes one step further in reimagining The Tempest: she converts Shakespeare’s Prospero to Helen Mirren’s Prospera. What makes this gambit so interesting is the fact that the story of the Anthropocene – the age of distinctly man-made disasters such as climate change, mass extinction, forever wars and the reduction of life itself to information – is indeed, in Haraway’s words, ‘a tragic story with only one real actor, one real worldmaker, the hero, this is the Man-making tale of the hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the terrible bounty’ (2016: 39). In other words, the Anthropocene is the domain of Man – and of men – alone. The re-creation of Prospera as a woman is a threat to this order, as are the alliances and battles she engages in as part of her personal war against gender oppression. In fact, despite Taymor’s disavowals of the film’s status as ‘a feminist tract’, the director highlights Prospera’s precarity as a female ruler from the very beginning of the film (Radish 2010). First, Taymor establishes that Prospera’s claim to the dukedom is tenuous, having passively inherited the title from her dead husband, who graciously enabled her to spend ‘long hours in pursuit / Of hidden truths, of coiled powers contained / Within some elements to harm, or heal’ (2010a: 37). Though Taymor represents Prospera’s character as more of a scientist than a sorceress, she includes an interpolated verse passage in which Prospera explains to Miranda that she narrowly escaped pursuit by an angry mob of men, set on by her brother, who claimed that she was ‘a practicer of the black arts!; / A demon; not a woman, nay – a witch!’ ‘And’, she adds, with incredulity, he did so ‘full-knowing others of my sex / Have burned for no less!’ (2010b: 39). This backstory fosters a curious, if unacknowledged, sisterhood between Prospera and the witch Sycorax, the ‘blue-eyed hag’ from Algiers (1.2.269), representing another displaced female ruler who was banished to the island based

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on accusations of witchcraft. Through these opening moves, Taymor announces her interpretation of the geopolitical drama that The Tempest dramatizes in light of its biopolitical implications. Terms coined by Foucault, biopower and biopolitics refer to the phenomenon whereby the material, human body becomes the privileged object of management and control, to be optimized for profit – or ‘monetized’ – and disciplined as the subject of social regulation. Slavery, supported by racism, might be considered the founding act of biopolitical regimes; and indeed, as Patricia Clough writes, ‘Biopolitics depends on a certain deployment of racism’ (2008: 3). In The Tempest, Prospero has, effectively, three slaves: Ariel, who carries out his special effects; Caliban, who engages in material labour; and Ferdinand, who replaces Caliban as Prospero’s preferred minion in his stilted efforts to woo Miranda. But in Taymor’s film, Prospera’s management of Caliban’s flesh is indeed the power that she wields most carelessly, egregiously indifferent to the ways in which his body, feminized by abjection, is a living emblem of the economic exploitation, objectification and social regulation to which women have been historically subject. But the lessons that Prospera has taught Caliban he will imitate. For his alleged plot to usurp Prospera’s authority, rape Miranda, and, in so doing, ‘peopl[e] / This isle with Calibans’ (1.2.351–2), functions as a disturbing reminder that the tyranny Prospera executes can be reversed with a vengeance. Ultimately, the biopolitical relationship between Prospera and Caliban culminates not in the reification of the master–slave dynamic but rather in the ineluctable precarity of their material bodies.

II Although The Tempest is a digital film, we may read the persistence of ‘the desire called cinema’ in the tensions between Taymor’s approach to the actual shoot in the Hawaiian Isles and her use of digital manipulation during post-production. The tension between these competing modalities, and their respective affinities with naturalism and artifice, are implied in Taymor’s observation that ‘I had an opportunity to act on these two impulses: to combine the literal reality of location – its natural light, winds, and rough seas – with conjured visual effects that subvert the “natural” and toy with it’ (2010a: 14). To reconcile these impulses, she decided to adopt, on the one hand, a ‘pure cinema’ approach to The Tempest that features location filming, exclusively natural lighting, periodic intrusions of the elements and conspicuous in-camera techniques, and, on the other hand, to exploit the highly controlled realm of digital manipulation that permits her to ‘toy’ with the very concept of the ‘natural’ during post-production. The latter virtue soon became a necessity when Taymor learned that the actor whom she had cast to play Ariel in the film (Ben Whishaw) was on contract for another project and could not be present for the on-location shoot; hence, the majority of his scenes were performed in front of a green screen and then digitally inserted into the film in the editing suite. ‘This limitation’, Taymor writes, ‘was an invitation … to invent an entirely new way of combining a live actor’s performance with CGI’ (2010a: 16).

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Quite distinct from Ariel’s literal virtuality, Caliban, as a figuration of outsourced work, labour extraction and slavery is the site, in Breu’s terms, of the ‘insistence of the material’ (2014). Caliban is, in a sense, a reflection of Taymor’s own material investment in ‘the desire called cinema’, for she aligns him with the literal matter of the island and the on-location shoot. Caliban’s bodily make-up, Taymor explains, took four hours per day to apply and is meant to evoke Hawaii’s ‘cracked red earth and black lava rock, with raised scars of obscenities he had carved into his flesh … All in all, this Caliban, both beautiful and grotesque, is the island; Nature personified’ (2010b: 17–18). But Taymor’s glib rhetoric is an example of what Haraway characterizes as ‘imperialist ecological discourse’ (2008: 176); for such assertions of a reified or essentialized ‘Nature’ also single Caliban out as the subject – and object – of various forms of social inequality and bodily discipline. As a female subject who lacks the automatic legitimacy of Shakespeare’s Prospero, Prospera, I will argue, pursues strategic relationships and unlikely alliances with Ariel and Caliban, who vie for the soul of her biopolitical regime. In Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest, what we might think of as Prospera’s ‘two bodies’ instantiate two distinct orders of life in the late Anthropocene: bios, or human life, and zoe, also known as non- or posthuman life, inclusive of animals. Whereas Ariel invokes the fantasies of dematerialization and bodily transcendence associated with digital production and the realm of zoe, Caliban is a figuration of bios; indeed, although Taymor describes him as the symbol of ‘Nature personified’, Caliban is more accurately described as human nature personified – as the subject of the man-made phenomenon of racism. An example of what Judith Butler refers to as ‘precarious life’, Caliban represents the body that invokes questions such as ‘what is human … what is injurable’ (2006: xviii). By contrast, Ariel, born of a cross between a human actor and CGI, constitutes a compelling representation of zoe. Importantly, he also suggests its dystopian applications, for Ariel is routinely figured as a weaponized version of Prospera’s imagination, a gleeful virtual accomplice to her revenge against an all-male battalion of intruders. Hence, despite his status as Prospero’s ‘delicate’ spirit (1.2.272) in Shakespeare’s play, in Taymor’s film, Ariel is frequently mammoth in appearance and sinister in action. Following his orchestration of the opening storm, Ariel regales Prospera with his account of a deed well done through a flashback sequence with a driving electric guitar soundtrack, which shows him rising up – gigantic – from the sea and tossing the tiny boat carrying Prospera’s enemies from stem to stern. Completely disconnected from the violence of the storm and fire, Prospera deploys Ariel as an example of what Breu calls ‘avatar fetishism’ (2014: 22). Tasked with performing his master’s dirty work, Ariel is an example of the fetishized virtual self that enables Prospera to supersede her own body in favour of deploying ‘smart’ weaponry. In keeping with the logic of exceptionalism that governs remote warfare, Prospera remains an armchair warrior, untouched by her own ‘rough magic’ (5.1.50) as an avatar fights her battles. If fantasies of dematerialization, bodily transcendence and virtuality constitute ‘one of the central ideologies of our digitalizing present’ (Breu 2014: 18–19), then the danger of this condition lies in overlooking the material realities that inhere in bodies as they are often violently differentiated along the biopolitical axis of

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race, class, sexuality and gender. Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest raises these issues not only through its conversion of Prospero to Prospera, but also through its treatment of Caliban. Unlike the electronic music featured in Ariel’s first appearance, Djimon Hounsou’s entry as Caliban is announced by the presence of djembe and the didgeridoo, instruments that derive from Africa and aboriginal Australia, respectively. Thus, even before Caliban – the island’s only Indigenous subject – declares ‘This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother’ (1.2.332), his status as colonized other is implied by the scene’s instrumental cues. At first glance, Caliban’s animal-like features suggest his status as zoe, or non-human life. He has, for example, claw-like fingernails and a bizarre skin deformity whereby his Black skin is disrupted by bovine-like blotches of white, and his one blue eye is encircled by a perfect white full moon – a cosmetic flourish that identifies him not only as Stefano’s ‘mooncalf’ (2.2.105) but also as the progeny of Sycorax, the ‘blue-eyed hag’ (1.2.269) and alleged witch who was purported to ‘control the moon, make flows and ebbs, / And deal in command without her power’ (5.1.270–1). But Caliban’s enslavement is very much a human condition – a product of bios and the racist assumptions that motivate reductionist assertions of ‘natural’ biological difference. Moreover, as a character who is referred to as a ‘slave’ no fewer than seven times in his first scene with Prospera and Miranda, Caliban is the literal embodiment of financial ‘capture’ or, in J. Paul Narkunas’s wording, the reification of a system that ‘captures life (human and otherwise) and reconfigures it as a medium of exchange, as a speculative site for capital formation and monetization’ (2018: 3). Used for his knowledge of the island’s resources and then enslaved, Caliban completes the cycle of biopolitical exploitation as the site of human ‘capture’. As I have suggested, in Taymor’s film, ‘the desire called cinema’ is aligned – and not unproblematically – with Caliban, who serves as a kind of living synecdoche for the location shoot, as well as the character for whom Taymor reserves many of the film’s most conspicuous in-camera or, broadly speaking, ‘cinematic’ techniques. For instance, Taymor often employs a hand-held camera to capture Caliban’s sudden and erratic movements; in a film that relies so heavily on CGI, this historically avant garde technique tethers our perspective to the incidental tremors of the material, human hand. In Caliban’s first scene with Prospera and Miranda, for example, the unsteadiness of the horizon in the background literally skews the viewer’s perspective, causing the audience to question the veracity of Prospera’s version of events as Caliban chronicles his journey from sole proprietor, to land surveyor, to slave. In Taymor’s shot vocabulary, the held-held camera works in conjunction with her use of the close-up for many of Caliban’s scenes, often framing him through uncomfortably tight shots that exclude part of his face or head from view, as if to underscore his partial humanity. His character is further distinguished by the camera’s efforts to track the highly unnatural, stylized and abrupt postures that he assumes throughout the film – movement that is modelled, based on Taymor’s direction, on Butoh dance – a genre that emerged in post-World War Two Japan known as the ‘dance of death’. Created in response to the horrors of the nuclear Holocaust, Butoh draws special attention to the materiality of suffering by featuring a virtually naked male figure who, like Caliban, wears a loincloth, and whose body

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is chalked up with ghostly white patches. The genre employs an agonizingly slow tempo to highlight the body-in-pain, as the dancer moves in ways which suggest that each gesture is accompanied by acute physical and psychic duress. For Hounsou, who comes from Benin – the country from which the last slaves were kidnapped and brought to the US – the tortured poses of Butoh invoke the concomitant terrors of the Middle Passage. If Ariel represents the avatar fetishism that permits Prospera’s detachment from the material consequences of her actions, then he also represents the monstrous merger of the human with the non- or posthuman realm. As N. Katherine Hayles argues, the human-digital interface often effaces ‘essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulacrum’ (1999: 3), effectively ‘reunit[ing] the enacted and the represented bodies into a single gender’ (ibid.: xiii). Hence, in Ariel’s next two incarnations, ‘he’ emerges as a hermaphroditic creature – first as a merman and second as a harpy, playing on fears of the ‘monstrous feminine’ and the related castration anxiety that Prospera, as a woman in power, implicitly embodies. Singing in the high voice of a choir boy – or a castrato – Ariel floats on his back, surfacing as a gargantuan merman with female breasts and a fish tail that obscures any hint of gender differentiation. A literalization of distributed cognition, Ariel’s massive, partially translucent body is superimposed over the island’s jagged shoreline and shallow eddies of water; but the information he provides Ferdinand is incorrect, furnishing him with false intelligence of his father’s death by drowning. Here we see an example of what happens, in Hayles’s words, when information ‘loses its body’; in ‘the leap from embodied reality to abstract information’ (1999: 12), information ‘is conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded’ (ibid.: 2) and, therefore, can miscarry. Whether the lie is of Prospera’s or Ariel’s own making, we discover that ‘the distributed cognition of the posthuman complicates individual agency … not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will’ (ibid.: 4). As the holographic extension of Prospera’s consciousness, Ariel is ‘not unfree’ but he is not ‘free’ either, reflecting the dialectic between binary code and the potential for randomness, noise or ‘an other-will’ that disembodied information can propagate, while inaugurating a nightmarish vision of the posthuman condition as the monstrous elision of binary sex/gender distinctions. More than a synecdoche for the island and its indigenous subjects, Caliban is the material site of Prospera’s abuse of biopower as well as the unmistakable object of Taymor’s own ‘desire called cinema’. Subject to constant disciplining through corporeal punishment, clad in only a loincloth, and covered in raised scars that spell English curse words, Caliban’s body acquires a sexual dimension in Taymor’s film – a phenomenon that Hortense Spillers calls ‘pornotroping’.2 In the context of this ocular economy, Caliban’s spectacularly wounded flesh, feminized by domination, is titillating – if even in grotesque form. Thus, what Alexander Weheliye argues of cinematic depictions of slavery more broadly may be applied to Taymor’s treatment of Caliban in particular: ‘Since cinema cannot give a first-person account of the horror of torture, its testimony remains suspended between the cinematic apparatus

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and the tortured body, which, in turn, when it encounters slavery, produces a sexual surplus: pornotroping’ (2014: 98). Pornotroping is an example of ‘the desire called cinema’, albeit unacknowledged by Taymor, for into the gap between the cinematic frame and the historical experience of slavery, Taymor inflects the representation of Caliban with a sexual surplus that makes the body-in-pain the subject of a libidinal investment which, on some level, seeks to commodify the figure of the branded slave. Indeed, though never clarified in the actual film, in her screenplay, Taymor notes that it is Caliban who inscribes the master’s language all over his body, engaging in the kind of self-harm and ‘cutting’ that often accompanies sexual abuse. Curiously, despite their deliberate casting of Hounsou as Caliban, both Taymor and script advisor Jonathan Bate seek to avoid what Bate describes as ‘a politically correct reading’ of the actor’s Beninian origins (2010: 10). Yet both Taymor and Bate are quick to traffic in Hounsou’s ‘exotic’ – and commodifiable – ‘Africanness’ when it comes to Western fantasies of ‘black magic’, asserting – in classic Orientalizing rhetoric – that, for Hounsou, ‘witchcraft is still real’ (ibid.). Ariel’s subsequent appearance as a giant harpy returns us to the topos of zoe, the digital and the posthuman as the province of the monstrous feminine. With the exception of Prospera’s backstory, this is the only other scene in which Prospera is shown working in her subterranean laboratory – a clarifying shot that positions Prospera not as a sorceress but as a female scientist who, working covertly ‘to harm or heal’, prizes her experiments ‘above [her] dukedom’ (1.2.168). Hence, in the very instant that Prospera drops a single raven’s feather into a beaker, the glass shatters violently and Ariel, now a virtual body mingled with bird DNA, bursts onto the banquet table in the form of an enormous harpy, mortifying Prospera’s unsuspecting guests. Landing squarely in the midst of the feast, Ariel lurches and contorts his body, revealing the sagging breasts of a crone while rolling his red eyes and speaking in a demonic, digitally altered voice to impute the ‘men of sin’ gathered there in the name of consumption (3.3.53). Preying on the misogyny that drove Antonio to usurp Prospera’s dukedom in the first place, Ariel proceeds to unfurl his cumbersome wings to release hundreds of ravens in a nightmarish spectacle of female parthenogenesis. And indeed, the fact that Ariel’s wings and Prospera’s cape are made of the same leaden, obsidian-like material suggests that, at least at this point in the film, they are cut from the same technocratic cloth, compelled to manipulate nature in order to terrorize the island’s incidental and Indigenous inhabitants. Moreover, as jet black oil spills carelessly out of his mouth, Ariel’s indictment of Prospera’s enemies alludes to the environmental degradation and devastating oil spills that identify the Anthropocene – embodied by these ‘men of sin’ – with the destruction of organic life and the reduction of human life to a site of ‘surplus extraction, economic polarization, and more intense political control’ (Fortier 2001: 28). In an interpolated scene, Taymor directly identifies Prospera with the accumulation-oriented gluttony of the Anthropocene, or, what Donna Haraway has more appropriately dubbed the ‘Capitalocene’ in her recent book, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). As Caliban is shown traversing vast expanses of the island with wood strapped to his back, he grumbles

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as he strains under the burden: ‘Prosper. Prosper’. This interpolation testifies to the economic determinism and profit motive implicit in Prospera’s name as well as in her exercise of biopolitical control, for the burden Caliban bears resembles the sharp contours of sugarcane, the cruellest crop traditionally left to slaves to harvest. Hence, in the accretive layers of earth, injury and insult that inhere in his flesh, Caliban, in Taymor’s adaptation, reflects a world in which capital ‘has begun to accumulate within the very viscera of life’ (Clough 2008: 14). Indeed, into the viscera of Caliban’s compromised flesh, the colonial legacy of naturalized racism makes its wicked way, perhaps explaining why Caliban all too easily reinserts himself into another master–slave relationship with Trinculo and Stefano. In the film as in the play, the fact that Caliban’s tortured, unevenly eroticized flesh can be monetized is implicit in Stefano and Trinculo’s respective remarks that tie Caliban’s otherness to the production of capital back on the mainland; whereas Trinculo likens him to a ‘piece of silver’ (2.2.29), Stefano sees Caliban as ‘a present for any emperor’ (2.2.68–9) that will ‘pay’ (2.2.76). In his material, quantifiable difference from his captors, then, Caliban embodies the truism, in Sylvia Wynter’s provocative formulation, that ‘domination precedes accumulation’.3 But the fact that the clownish triumvirs’ planned overthrow is doomed from the start is alluded to in another expression of ‘the desire called cinema’. When Caliban, upon hatching his revenge plot, bursts into a rendition of ‘Freedom, high-day; high-day, freedom’ (2.2.182) as though he were, in fact, no longer a slave, his tragic misrecognition is implied in a conspicuous moment of cinematic intertextuality, as the camera captures the conspirators’ beautifully silhouetted frames dancing on a precipice – an unmistakable allusion to the iconic ‘dance with Death’ featured in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) – and a tableau that underscores the futility of their revolt.

III Central to the construction of both utopias and revolutions, Fredric Jameson argues, is an educational process of ‘reprogramming’ that ‘substitute[s] new habits for those of the past and the old order’ so that ‘the educators must themselves be educated or reeducated’ (2005: 50). Prospera’s reprogramming from colonizer to colonized may be read in the distressed folds of Caliban’s flesh, which, I would argue, chart a cartography of struggle and allegorize this educational process. Describing Hounsou’s Caliban, Taymor highlights the symbolic nature of his markings, referring to Caliban as having ‘maplike patches of white on black skin that add to the “otherness” of this unique racial mash-up’ (2010a: 18). Covered in the baked clay and lava rock of the island, Caliban’s maplike patches of skin suggest the footprint of the Hawaiian Isles, invoking the fatal imprint of the white colonizers who systematically subordinated the islands’ indigenous peoples by exploiting their land, resources and human labour. Recalling Taymor’s somewhat patronizing, even nostalgic classification of Caliban as ‘Nature personified’, Caliban is the figure whose rebellion initiates Prospera’s re-education, ultimately forcing her to recognize the

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urgency of a post-Anthropocentric effort to ‘find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation, and nostalgia’ (Haraway 2008: 158). The privately owned island of Lanai is the perfect location for this ‘Man-making tale’ of the Capitalocene, as a living monument to the equation between private ownership and personhood. In addition to suggesting the footprint of the Hawaiian Isles, Caliban’s skin deformity resembles leprosy, a disease that reached epidemic proportions in Hawaii as labour conditions on its vast sugarcane plantations deteriorated. In fact, the criminalization of leprosy, in turn, provided the US with an excuse for the biopolitical control of native peoples, who were subject to quarantines, imprisonment, premature death and monetization at the hands of the US ‘civilizing’ mission. Finally, the story of Hawaii is also about the overthrow of the nation’s first, last and only female ruler, Queen Lili’uokalani, who was deposed by US businessmen without the approval of Congress in 1893. Hence, Prospera’s re-education begins with the understanding that Caliban, not Ariel, is the real index of her power – especially its limitations – for in the shadow of his failed revolution she will see her own failure to remain ‘[her] own king’ (1.2.345). This future is foretold by one of the rare static frames in the entire film, which opens onto a medium shot of Prospera’s gowns hanging lifelessly in her chamber. Though eerily disembodied now, they represent the only shape that she will be permitted to assume upon her return to Milan, where she will become a femme covert – legally and literally, a ‘covered woman’ – or, property of her male kin. Hence, when Prospera commands Ariel to fetch her ‘skirt and bodice’ rather than Prospero’s ‘hat and rapier’ (5.1.84), the difference between these accessories makes all the difference in the world. A sartorial swap with ontological implications, Prospera’s change of costume from cape to corset confirms her ‘reprogramming’ as a femme covert. Cinched up tightly by Ariel, the suffocating clothing causes Prospera to wince – a painful reminder of her imminent loss of power over her own material body, let alone her efforts to wield biopower over others. Ariel, having learned his master’s tyranny, smiles sardonically at her discomfort. Significantly, then, whereas Ariel becomes more monstrous, continuing to assume a variety of disturbing, selfreplicating forms – from frogs to bee swarms to hell hounds and, even, a semitranslucent trail of identical, naked, ambiguously gendered versions of himself – Caliban becomes more human, as Prospera must learn to identify more with ‘this thing of darkness’ (5.1.275) than with her diligent spirit. The climax of the film is thus not Prospera’s conjuring acts for or chastisement of her usurping brother’s party but, rather, when she identifies with Caliban as a fellow traveller who, like herself, is forever in pursuit of the restitution of lost power. Provocatively, Taymor cuts Prospera’s final exchange with Caliban, in which she castigates him and he apologizes servilely, swearing obedience thereafter: ‘I’ll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace’ (5.1.295–6). Subsequently, after dismissing the royal entourage, Prospera seems aware, despite having her back turned to him, that Caliban has not heeded her final command: ‘Go to, away’ (5.1.298). Rather, his body remains frozen in expectation of harm. But in this scene ‘the desire called cinema’, expressed in classic film grammar, asserts their common – but not shared – precarity. Using a series of eye-line matches and shot-reverse-shot moves, Taymor not only

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posits an equanimity of looking relations between Prospera and Caliban but also implies their literally level footing. However, as if to call Prospera’s bluff, Taymor destabilizes this relationship by reasserting Prospera’s phallic power. Creating a triangulating shot in which Prospera’s staff appears in the extreme foreground, Taymor shows Caliban looking up at Prospera, then down to the staff he assumes she’ll use against him, and then up to meet Prospera’s gaze. What follows is a beat of sheer inertia where the otherwise smooth shot-reverse-shot sequence is disrupted by the camera itself as it lingers briefly on Caliban’s eyes, which pause when they meet Prospera’s gaze for the final time, to instantiate what Taymor describes as ‘a silent moment of communion between them’ (2010b: 171). Although I will ultimately interrogate this conclusion, there is no denying that the palpable inertia which characterizes Caliban and Prospera’s wordless exchange forces us to contemplate the irreducible materiality of both of their bodies. Indeed, it is as if Prospera recognizes for the first time the prisons they share in a scene that takes place in what Taymor describes, all too appropriately, as ‘Prospera’s cell’. Just as Caliban’s flesh holds lessons for Prospera, so, too, does Ariel’s – especially in his final incarnation in Taymor’s film. After murmuring the lines about returning for her daughter’s nuptials to Milan, where ‘every third thought shall be [her] grave’ (5.1.312), Prospera releases Ariel. The prosthetic embodiment of her conjuring staff and the agent of her phallic power, Ariel self-replicates and ‘falls away from Prospera into a never-ending abyss, his translucent form dividing and multiplying into a kaleidoscope of rushing waters until he finally dissolves into the sea’ (2010b: 171). This time it is Ariel’s turn to personify ‘Nature’; subsumed by ‘rushing waters’, Ariel subdivides and self-replicates geometrically and linearly, as though he weren’t in fact, entirely set free, remaining locked in the compulsory symmetry of binary code. This scene thus demonstrates the tensions that inhere in zoe, the posthuman and machinic power that Prospera leverages against nature and her human enemies, while highlighting its ontological limitations. For ‘Nature’, Haraway writes, ‘is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine … nature is not matrix, resource, mirror, or tool for the reproduction of that odd, ethnocentric, phallogocentric, putatively universal being called Man. Nor for his euphemistically named surrogate, the “human”’ (2008: 159). Thus, with her tenuous lease on the powers of zoe now dissolved, with Ariel, into water, Prospera appears in the very next moment at a cliff edge, where she launches her staff into the churning sea below. Splintering violently on the jagged outcroppings of volcanic rock, the staff, we suddenly realize, was made of glass all along – a painful allusion to the glass ceiling that punishes those women who seek to shatter it and a reminder the that term ‘human’ is indeed a ‘euphemism’ for those who still lack full personhood. Hence, upon releasing her staff and relinquishing her powers of zoe once and for all, Prospera becomes – in strange solidarity with Caliban – all bios. Although The Tempest is a romance, Taymor’s adaptation more closely resembles a tragedy, based on the significant deletions the director makes to Act 5. Cutting Alonso’s request to hear ‘the story of [Prospera’s] life’ (5.1.305), Taymor wipes Prospera’s twelve-year regime from historical memory and proceeds to eliminate  her  final act of magic, deleting her promise to Alonso of ‘calm seas,

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auspicious gales / And sail so expeditious that shall catch / Your royal fleet far off’ (5.1.315–17). Adding insult to injury, Prospera is denied her epilogue as Taymor awards Ariel the last line in the film proper, making his words resonate with deep irony as he sings the song ‘Merrily, merrily, shall I live now’ from much earlier in Act 5 (5.1.93). That Prospera will not live merrily now or ever after is especially evident when Taymor resigns the epilogue to the credit sequence and assigns it to the disembodied voiceover of singer Beth Gibbons, whose deeply melancholy rendition suggests an act of mourning irreversible losses. But Taymor goes even one step further to delete the epilogue’s reference to the restitution of Prospera’s dukedom, cutting the line ‘Since I have my dukedom got’ (Epilogue 6); instead, the song repeats the word ‘assault’ three times after each verse, as if to underscore Prospera’s status as the subject of potentially violent biopolitical regulation upon her return to civilization. Then, in one final expression of ‘the desire called cinema’, the camera captures, in agonizingly slow motion, the shards of Prospera’s staff as they cascade into the murky depths beneath the water’s surface. The material remnants of her borrowed power, they sink, Gibbons’s dirge begins and the credits roll; in this instance, the words resound not so much as an epilogue as an elegy for what might have been.

IV This is the point at which Taymor’s insistence that Prospera is a scientist rather than a sorceress is especially salient. ‘[F]eminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge’, writes Haraway, are produced by ‘an active acknowledgement of unequal personal and historical pain’, fostering the recognition that science, in the broadest sense of the term, is concerned with ‘knowledges of the marked bodies of history’ (1991a: 23). As a female scientist working in a world oddly situated between the seventeenth century and our own time, Taymor’s Prospera is nothing if not a ‘marked body of history’. So, too, is Caliban, and by way of conclusion, I wish to return to the provocative ‘racializing assemblage’, in Alexander Weheliye’s terms, between Prospera and Caliban in the film’s penultimate scene wherein, according to Taymor, they share ‘a silent moment of communion’. Establishing a continuum between racial and gender-based violence, this tableau suggests Prospera’s entry into a certain relationship with Caliban’s ‘blackness’ which, as Alexander Weheliye argues, ‘designate[s] a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which human cannot’ (2014: 3). Although Taymor seems to disbelieve the conclusion of her own film, explaining that it is ‘almost inconceivable’ to Caliban ‘that the punishment and torture do not come’ (2010a: 171), her film parts ways with Shakespeare’s play by giving Caliban the last ‘word’ in his final, visual exchange with Prospera. An affront to the certainty that he ‘shall be pinched to death’ (5.1.276), Caliban turns his back on Prospera and ascends the stairs; backlit by a sliver of daylight that frames him in the doorway, he pauses at the top to flex his broad shoulders and back and then closes the doors behind him. Caliban’s refusal to look back on his oppressor resonates as a rejection of both the camera’s pornotropic gaze and, simultaneously,

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the exonerating look that Prospera seeks – now that she, too, can no longer ‘lay claim to full human status’. Writ large in this interpolated scene is the final stage of Prospera’s ‘reprogramming’. For it is at this juncture that she recognizes not only that she and Caliban are ontologically entangled in a dance of dispossession, but also that her control of his flesh has not prepared her for the biopolitical regulation of her own body that awaits her in Milan. Hence, Taymor’s decision to represent Prospera as a scientist who is disposed to ‘harm’ but learns to ‘heal’ is important because it calls the bluff of historical reparations. In other words, in this final ‘racializing assemblage’ between Caliban and Prospera, there is no healing nor ‘communion’ of any kind that can instantiate a ‘human’ where there once was chattel; Caliban does not exit Prospera’s cell to receive his ‘forty acres and a mule’ settlement any more than Miranda – were Caliban to act on his alleged threat of sexually assaulting her – can be un-raped. In what is therefore a silent moment of Eisensteinian collision rather than communion, we are reminded, as Rosi Braidotti contends in her manifesto on post-Anthropocentric feminism, that ‘epistemic violence acquires ruthless connotations for real-life people who happen to coincide with categories of negative difference: women, native, and earthly Others’ (2017: 23–4). The question thus remains: how do we inhabit the Anthropocene, this ‘age of the human’, without reducing it to the age of men? With the certainty of mass extinctions, epic sea level rise, the forever war on ‘terror’ and the commodification of life itself in the Capitalocene, feminist approaches to scientific and other ways of knowing are needed now more than ever to mitigate the abuses of biopower against the world’s only majority minority. In her own expression of ‘the desire called cinema’, Haraway appropriates a cinematic metaphor in the observation that ‘Woman is a projection of another’s desire, who then haunts man as his always elusive, seductive, unreliable Other. Woman as such is a kind of illusionist’s projection, while mere women bear the violent erasures of that history-making move’ (2008: 176). Despite Haraway’s reference to the ‘illusionist’s projection’, the ‘mere women’ whom she invokes are real women, whose lives are a reflection of this epistemic and material precarity. Indeed, it is not a ‘projection’ that experiences the full force of the biopolitical regulation of the female body that occurs in ever more insidious forms in the late Anthropocene. Be it the ongoing failure of the United Nations to confront the pandemic of sexual violence and to prosecute rape as a political weapon, the alarming ‘personhood legislation’ that presently criminalizes abortion and miscarriage in parts of the US, or the rising wage exploitation and sexual trafficking that thwarts economic justice and upward mobility for women within the global economy – these instantiations of biopower are insidious reminders, as Judith Butler argues in Precarious Life, that ‘the bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only ours’ (2006: 26). What, then, is the way forward toward a post-Anthropocentric feminism? In thinking about constructions of the human in this age of Man, perhaps there is something to be said for a ‘relational ontology’ which, as Rosi Braidotti, Haraway and other materialist feminists define it, privileges neither Being (the fetish of Western metaphysics) nor becoming but, rather, the practice of ‘becoming-with’ – with other ‘marked bodies of history’ and, indeed, with the Other – be it bios or zoe. Becoming-with, in Haraway’s terms, is both a de-territorializing and history-making

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practice that ‘transmutes and reconstitutes all the partners and all the details’ in the story, with all the ‘difference, hopes, and terrors’ that implies, for to become-with is to become relational in all the complex and multidimensional ways that threaten the sanctity of the story of Man as sole protagonist in a world of his making (2008: 16). Ontologically entangled with Caliban, Prospera recognizes, in the end, the urgency of making kin in a world that is less than kind.

V [W]ho shall measure the heat and violence Of the poet’s heart tangled in a woman’s body? (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 1929: 48) In her anxious question, Woolf asks us to consider the precarious ontology of Judith, Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister. Born with the same gifts as her brother but without any means of publicly proclaiming the poet’s heart trapped in her woman’s body, Judith Shakespeare, Woolf concludes, ‘would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at’ ([1929] 1981: 49). Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of The Tempest epitomizes Judith’s dilemma in the figure of Prospera, who is at once king of the island as well as a mother, alleged witch, scientist – and, lest we forget, slaveholder – who, in the end, sacrifices her cherished autonomy to secure a better future for her daughter in Milan. Taymor’s film engages this theme at a meta-cinematic level as well. For perhaps the ultimate, self-reflexive instance of ‘the desire called cinema’ in Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest intersects with the director’s own ongoing outsider status in an industry that remains remarkably hostile to women directors. Though lauded for her theatrical adaptation of The Lion King and her first feature film Titus (1999), Taymor’s career ever since has been dogged by critics, culminating in her humiliating firing from the Broadway set of Spiderman: Turn off the Dark. But these two facts alone – that women constitute a total of 4 per cent of directors working in Hollywood today, and, as we saw in the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, historically, only 5 per cent of the nominations for the grand prize known as the Palme d’Or have gone to films directed by women – are startling reminders that, with a few notable exceptions, a woman’s place in the seventh art is intractably familiar to us in front of, rather than behind, the camera. In his 1967 Cahiers du Cinema essay ‘A Morality of Economics’, Jean-Louis Comolli argues that cinema is ‘one of the languages through which the world communicates itself to itself’ (1986: 160). More than a half century after this prescient announcement, we are confronted with the possibility that film may be the last truly ‘global’ medium through which the world communicates itself to itself – as the only sphere of aesthetic representation that hinges on deeply fraught but evolving negotiations between the interests of culture and commerce, public and private, multinational and personal, as well as the relationships between technological innovation and social change – and one that speaks in the common language of images. But for far too many women filmmakers, ‘cinema’ remains a foreign tongue in a world that communicates in an

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echo chamber of familiar, man-centred dialects. Hence, if I began with the assertion that ‘the desire called cinema’ is a mode of theorizing materiality and imagining the human at the digital turn, then I would like to end with the self-consciously Anthropocentric argument that only humans can write history. To return us to our opening concerns about the rise of digital film and the so-called death of cinema, it is neither film per se nor film history that is in danger of being overrun by our digital present but rather the role of women filmmakers in that history, which has been occluded since the end of the silent era. This material, historical precarity is especially the case with women directors of Shakespeare films. Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest is important not just as a contemporary, and compensatory, political allegory but also – as has always been the purview of science fiction– as a barometer of the possible. Echoing Jameson’s assertion of the relationship between science fiction and the utopian impulse, Haraway observes that ‘[Science fiction] is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds gone, here, and yet to come’ (2016: 31). Cinema, too, is a site of cultural dreaming, for it ‘is concerned’, Deleuze reminds us, ‘with a thought whose essential character is not yet to be’ (1989: 168). Although Taymor’s film ultimately suggests that, at least in 2010, a female Prospera was not fully thinkable (just as, six years later, a female President of the United States proved ‘not yet to be’), feminist epistemologies of the Shakespeare film make legible those ‘marked bodies of history’ that remain unremarked in history, by engaging with the material-semiotic worlds they bring to life on screen. In this case, then, the medium truly is the message, for in the end ‘the desire called cinema’ engages – and stages – the intractable question of how to matter in the late Anthropocene, so that today’s science fiction becomes tomorrow’s history.4

NOTES 1. Cinema has long been a trope for and the topos of the utopian impulse. See, for example, early French filmmaker Abel Gance’s rapturous reflections on cinema’s capacity to bring together all the arts – as well as great artists – in 1927, when he prophesied in the journal L’art cinématographique that ‘Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films … all legends, all … await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate’ (1927: 94–5). Bela Balazs (1952), with equal passion, explores how cinema can expose the most intimate of facial movements, which he referred to as a ‘silent soliloquy’. 2. Spillers coins the term pornotroping in ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ ([1987] 2003); Alexander Weheliye appropriates this concept in Habeas Viscus (2014). 3. See Walter D. Mignolo’s explanation of how the ‘mode of production is a subset of the mode of domination’ (2015: 115) in ‘Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean To Be Human?’. Wynter’s work is foundational to Black feminist and critical race theory. 4. ‘The medium is the message’ is Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation, first published in 1964 in his book Understanding Media and the Extensions of Man.

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REFERENCES Bate, Jonathan (2010), ‘Enter Ariel, Invisible’, in The Tempest: Julie Taymor, Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare, 7–11, New York: Abrams. Balazs, Bela (1952), Theory of the Film, trans. Edith Bone, London: Dennis Dobson. Braidotti, Rosi (2017), ‘Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism’, in Richard Grusin (ed.), Anthropocene Feminisms, 21–48, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Breu, Christopher (2014), The Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith (2006), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Clough, Patricia (2008), ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies’, Theory Culture & Society, 25 (1): 1–22. Comolli, Jean-Louis ([1967] 1986), ‘A Moral Economy of Film’, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinema: 1960–1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood, 290–3, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dixon, Winston Wheeler (2001), ‘25 Reasons Why It’s All Over’, in Jon Lewis (ed.), The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, 356–66, New York: NYU Press. Fortier, Francois (2001), Virtuality Check: Power Relations and Alternative Strategies in the Information Society, London and New York: Verso. Friedberg, Anne (2000), ‘The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change’, in Christine Glendhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies, 438–52, London and New York: Oxford University Press. Gance, Abel (1927), ‘Le Temps De L’Image Est Venu!’, L’art cinématographique, 2: 83–102. Haraway, Donna J. (1991a), ‘The Actors are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere: Postscript to “Cyborgs at Large”’, in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds), Technoculture, 21–6, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna J. (1991b), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna J. (2008), Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics, Local Terms’, in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms, 157–87, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press. Hayles, N. Kathleen (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric (2005), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York: Verso. McLuhan, Marshall ([1964] 1994), Understanding Media and the Extensions of Man, Cambridge: MIT University Press. Mignolo, Walter D. (2015), ‘Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean To Be Human?’, in Katherine McKittrick (ed.), On Being Human as Praxis, 106–23, Durham: Duke University Press.

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Narkunas, Paul (2018), Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition, New York: Fordham University Press. Radish, Christina (2010), ‘Interview with Julie Taymor’, in Collider, 8 December. Available online: http://collider.com/julie-taymor-interview-the-tempest/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Rodowick, D. N. (2007), The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. The Seventh Seal (1957), [Film] Dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden: Svensk Filmindustri. Spiller, Hortense ([1987] 2003), ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, 203–29, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taymor, Julie (2010a), ‘Rough Magic’, in The Tempest: Julie Taymor, Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare, 21, New York: Abrams. Taymor, Julie (2010b), ‘Screenplay’, in The Tempest: Julie Taymor, Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare, 23–174, New York: Abrams. Taymor, Julie (2000), Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay, New York: Newmarket Press. The Tempest (2010), [Film] Dir. Julie Taymor, USA: Clear Blue Sky Productions. Weheliye, Alexander (2014), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham: Duke University Press. Woolf, Virginia ([1929] 1981), A Room of One’s Own, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

PART THREE

New directions in Shakespeare and performance CURATED BY NORA J. WILLIAMS AND C. K. ASH

We are excited, in this section of the Research Handbook, to offer a collection of interviews with a range of theatre practitioners: from playwrights to lighting designers, operating in venues from Shakespeare’s Globe to Twitter.1 By way of introduction to the interviews themselves, we wanted to take a moment to contextualize the project, frame the questions we used to shape the discussions and set up our editorial methodology, as well as highlight some key themes woven throughout the interviews. Part of our aim for this collection of interviews was to open up a two-way dialogue between academics and theatre practitioners. Too often, practitioners are on the receiving end of scholarly criticism, left to digest an academic’s interpretation of their work in isolation and without an opportunity to speak as part of the critical process themselves. Some of the comments recorded here reflect a perception of antagonism from the academy toward practitioners: for example, Migdalia Cruz, a playwright working as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s controversial Play On! Translation project, says that she is ‘always prepared for a fight’ when speaking to scholars, because ‘[t]here is so much resistance to touching these texts’. While attention to and inclusion of professional theatre practice in Shakespeare research is growing – and Shakespeare’s Globe and the American Shakespeare Center, in particular, have long been at the forefront of this change – there is clearly still resistance in certain corners of the field to the idea that understanding gained through performance practice is valuable and important. In addition, we wanted to create a space for voices that might otherwise be missing from the picture: by including smaller, regional companies such as The Villains

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Theatre (Halifax, Canada), we hope to emphasize that Shakespeare happens beyond the hallowed walls of heavy-hitters like the Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company. These smaller-scale practitioners are an integral part of the ongoing story of Shakespeare performance practice, and their perspective is as valuable as the names that tend to dominate these cross-disciplinary conversations. As a rule, we looked for practitioners whose perspectives you might not hear regularly on national radio programmes, in major newspaper thinkpieces or in other popular venues (not to mention in academic contexts). We were particularly interested in how practitioners understand the intersection between research and performance. After much discussion, we agreed on ten guiding questions that we hoped would facilitate practitioners’ reflections on the role of research in their practice, and the ways in which the scholarly community might help or hinder those efforts. We divided the questions into three areas of inquiry, outlined below:

RESEARCH AND ACCESS These questions addressed broad concerns about the nature of research, its role in the creative process, and the problem of access: 1. What does ‘research’ mean to you? 2. How and where does research fit into your creative process? 3. How do you conduct research for a new production? a. What types of academic writing (if any) do you turn to when preparing for a new production? b. How do you find and access relevant scholarly criticism? 4. What makes research accessible to you (either in terms of physical access like journal subscriptions or in terms of language/jargon and approach)?

HISTORY These questions encouraged the practitioners to think about their role in the trajectory of Shakespeare and performance, from two different perspectives: 5. How do you envision Shakespearean performance in the future? What role do you see research playing in this version of the future? 6. If a historian from the future was looking at your current practice, what would you want them to see? How would you hope to be represented?

SHAKESPEARE ACADEMICS These questions were designed to address directly the academic study of Shakespeare in relation to industry practice:

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  7. How (if ever) do you interact with the scholarly Shakespeare community?   8. What scholarship (if any) has been most influential in your creative work?   9. What would you like scholars to address next? 10. What do you wish scholars understood about your work? While these questions provided a skeleton for the interviews, we allowed the conversations to progress organically: returning to the questions to move things forward, but otherwise allowing our interlocutors to drive the discussion. In editing the interview transcripts, we have removed the questions and our own interjections in order to allow the practitioners’ voices to take centre stage (as it were). Interspersed with the long-form interviews are shorter, pithy Q&As that we called the ‘hot takes’. These are leaner but no less vital, and follow a number of strands of practice that fall outside the traditional professional theatre. This includes hybrid scholar-practitioners such as professional playwright and English lecturer Emma Whipday and the long-running social media ‘performance’ of Shakespeare’s persona by Twitter account @Shakespeare. The inclusion of James Loehlin, director of UT Austin’s performance-as-research training programme Shakespeare at Winedale, nods to the role of pedagogy in bridging academic research and (professional) performance practice. The cross-section of practitioners represented here necessarily reflects our own professional networks, to a certain extent. The group is not meant to be comprehensive, or even representative, but rather a snapshot of exciting and forward-thinking work from a range of practitioners working in a range of contexts. This means, inevitably, that there are gaps. We hope, however, that the voices highlighted here give a plurality of perspectives that can shed some light on the opportunities and challenges of all research that interacts with performance practice. Our interviewees, though speaking only for themselves, hit upon a number of recurring themes. Perhaps most significant are the repeated calls for more voices at the table: the practitioners press for performances of Shakespeare to become more open to interventions from multiple accents and languages and histories, abilities and genders and colours. As director Ravi Jain notes, this openness can act as a challenge to the saccharine refrains of Shakespearean exceptionalism that still surround us: rather than simply accepting that his works are inherently universal – ‘not for an age, but for all time’, and for all places, too – Jain suggests that Shakespeare becomes relevant through interaction with diverse voices, bodies and backgrounds in theatre practice. In this way, his much-touted universality becomes processual rather than innate. Many of these interviews brim with generosity and invitation but, equally, express a level of anxiety about the exclusivity of scholarship. These concerns are not entirely focused on physical access to publications, though the expansion of open-access publishing would surely serve each of these practitioners. A number of the practitioners say quite clearly that they welcome academic views throughout the creative process – as long as they are both physically accessible and intellectually humble, recognizing that the studio, fundamentally, is not the library. Denice Hicks, Artistic Director of the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, is uncommonly open,

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welcoming scholars into her rehearsal rooms on a regular basis. Still, she emphasizes the differences between research questions and rehearsal questions: not everything that makes sense in an essay plays well on stage. In matters of the clichéd mistrust between myopic scholar and holistic artist, we hear more anxiety about being misunderstood than a need to assert one’s field as the superior form of interpretation. In answer to the question ‘What do you wish scholars understood about your work?’ most practitioners replied in simple but profound terms: they long for a deeper understanding of the complexity of creativity and process from the academics who, often, are critiquing a commercial product. Just as an academic output goes through multiple drafts before publication, artistic outputs are made and remade many times in rehearsal studios, tech rehearsals and press nights – and, as dramaturg Anne G. Morgan points out, often in second or third productions – before they are considered complete. This fundamental truth of the creative process necessitates a nuanced understanding of theatre as a practice as well as a commercial industry, cultural product and object of academic study. Finally, the practitioners are virtually unanimous in their understanding of research as an embodied process. While they all reference internet searches and library dives as part of their methodology, they also affirm the importance of bodies in a room, trying things out, as crucial to their research. Director Yang Jung-ung clearly articulates this dynamic in his description of a seven-hour improv exercise that helped his actors to better understand and interpret Hamlet. What can be learned in a studio that cannot be found in scholarly editions or critical companions? What can multiple brains and bodies discover, working together, that the solitary scholar cannot? Together, these interviews demonstrate both the astonishing breadth of approaches to research in performance contexts and a rich depth of knowledge and appreciation for Shakespeare’s works and their afterlives. In their own ways, each of these practitioners works at the cliff-edge of Shakespearean performance, ushering us toward important and necessary changes both in the theatre industry and in our scholarship.

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Anne G. Morgan is the Literary Manager/Dramaturg leading the Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries initiative2 at the American Shakespeare Center, in addition to providing dramaturgical support for all ASC productions. I want to preface everything with acknowledging that I don’t really think of myself as a Shakespearean. I come from a new play background of working with living writers on texts that are still changing. And so my entry point into Shakespeare has been through this Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries project, which is discovering, developing and producing new plays that are inspired by and in conversation with Shakespeare’s work. So when I think about research, a core principle for me is about making it useful and making it practical. If I don’t see a way that what I have learned can be applied to a theatrical product, in some way, I’m not sure what the value of it is. With new plays in particular, the scripts are changing so much, so I’m very reluctant to do a deep research dive until I feel very confident that that’s not going to change. And with Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries, I think about being a resource, a connective tissue between Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s staging practices and our living writers, who are trying to continue to hone the scripts that they are actively developing. Shakespeare’s been around for 400 years, and people have been reading and analysing and thinking critically the whole time. I tend not to do a lot of academic or scholarly research around new plays, in part because there just isn’t the same depth there. And in fact I think that’s one of the really exciting things about a new play: if we’re doing a production of Hamlet, we have all this production history and all of this research – and, yes, I think that’s an amazing resource – but on the flip side of that, there are pressures and expectations and assumptions. With a new play, we don’t know how anyone else has done it because no one has done it before. So we can’t look to other scholars or artists to help us out when we encounter problems, but it also means that we’re going to be the reference when people do these plays later on. There tends to be a dryness with academic writing that I find really challenging sometimes, and I struggle with assumptions scholars make about who is reading their work and what knowledge they already have. Like I said, I’m still at the very beginning of my Shakespeare learning curve, so if I’m reading something that starts referring to a really specific moment in one of the more obscure Shakespeare plays, I may not understand all of it. So that has been a challenge for me. But it’s not necessarily that I think they should be writing differently. I don’t think I’m the primary audience for a lot of what I’m reading, so that’s okay. I just have to do that translation work in my brain. The very act of Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries is research in practice: we are researching what it means to bring a living playwright into a rehearsal process in a theatre company that is very much trying to explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays were made. So, what do we learn about a repertory company of actors by bringing a writer into that process? Does that shed new light on our thinking about how Shakespeare and his company made plays?

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I think one of the things that I would want a future historian to appreciate is not just the impact that the project is having on the Shakespeare field, but the impact that it is having on the new play field. What we are asking playwrights to do is radical. We are asking contemporary playwrights to write for a company of ten to twelve performers, to write for universal lighting. It is actively changing the way writers are approaching the craft and the structure. Right now we’ve opened the first play of the project, and we’re about to go into rehearsals for the second, and I can see, as I look through those drafts, the impact that understanding Shakespeare’s staging conditions has had on how they structure scenes, how they deal with audience contact. My hope is that those tools that they have are not just going to be applied to these plays that they’re writing for us, but will actually feature in future work as well. I think for folks who don’t consider themselves Shakespeareans, the ASC community can feel a little overwhelming to step into, and so with our playwrights – most of whom know Shakespeare or studied him in school but don’t spend a ton of time thinking about him – I can be a helpful ‘no, it’s okay, I don’t know Shakespeare either, we’re gonna figure it out’. The ASC has so many experts that it frees me up to be more open and curious, and I’m not expected to be a Shakespeare expert. The biggest thing I want scholars to understand right now is that plays are not ever finished. That’s been a learning curve not just in the couple scholars that I’ve been speaking to about my work, but also within the institution. We pick a play, and it’s going to change a lot before we produce it, and then it will probably continue to change. Most contemporary plays in America get three or four productions and continue to change the text before they’re published and licensed. Writers are rewriting constantly, and with a project like Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries, they are (even more so than in other circumstances) making rewrites in response to our company of actors and our space and our production conditions – all of which is really, really exciting, but it means that there’s not a stable text.

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Jatinder Verma is Artistic Director and one of the co-founders of Tara Arts, an awardwinning multicultural theatre in London. In 2017, he was awarded an MBE for his work with Tara Arts and services to diversity in the arts. He is well known for his intercultural productions of Shakespeare. What I’ve found with production after production is that research allows me to build this scaffolding, this framework around the text, and opens up various sorts of choices. From the moment that I decide, okay, this is the text I’m going to do, research becomes very critical. And this is well before getting into rehearsals. So it’s the kind of doodling phase, in that I think what research essentially does is that it exercises your muscles before you actually meet the actors. I think research comes from two sources. One is, you rely upon your synapses, and all I mean by that is that you’ve chosen a particular text, and it sort of reminds you of, possibly, other texts. But the second part is where there’s a lot of researching on the web. Now, partly because I trained also as a historian, there are a number of texts or scholars that I know of. But what I find important about that is for it to take me beyond what I know, particularly when I’m looking at other contexts in which this particular text may have been done, and specifically other cultural contexts. And amongst the academic sources, the ones that I’m finding very, very useful are not just the things that are in journals, for example, Theatre Research Quarterly or Journal of Asian Studies and so forth, but also the research papers by students. Now, one of my sources is academia.edu. The other is just academics I know in various universities, or, certainly, drama departments, who fairly often have students who accidentally may have something I’m interested in. That’s a very useful source just to keep you in touch with current thinking and approaches. I think there certainly is an issue in being able to get a range of research papers, because we are not an academic institution, and I feel theatre companies or arts institutions should be able to have access to things like JSTOR. Whereas at the moment, I have to balance the fact that every time I have to pay to subscribe to this thing. It’s a little bit of an irritation. I don’t think that live performance will ever disappear. [Theatre] survived 5,000 years, whatever, and more. It will continue to survive because there’s something about the live transaction which is a basic human need. But I do envisage, over the next twenty years, at least as far as that, that we will be able to and will be needing to access the classics, let’s just take Shakespeare, in a handier way. So I can imagine, that on your wrist you just press, and this speech comes alive. And that you can then move around that speech, and you might hear it in another language, or see it in another dress. Now, for me, as we develop and as technology develops, people are going to be more and more curious as to how someone else might take on this text or something that is familiar to you. I think that what that’s going to do over time is that, rather than lessen our appreciation of (particularly) the classics, that’s actually just going to increase it. We’re going to be coming to live shows having our own intimate sense of familiarity with that text. I would hope that a future historian would be able to see that stories crafted by humans intrinsically have connections with other works, other stories, and that

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that’s not to the detriment of it. But it seems to me that, up to now, we’ve ended up valourizing writers, particularly the classic writers, to the exclusion of others. Shakespeare’s genius lies as much in seeing him echoed in all sorts of other writers around the world. And I’m not saying that one is influencing the other, but that this search for the nature of humanity through stories is a universal search. And this notion that any text connects you with all sorts of other texts is what I hope future scholars may see in my work. Apart from the ones that I’ve already mentioned, there are two other things that I find myself going back to over and over. Jan Kott3 may not be considered to be a scholar, but by now has taken on that kind of status of a scholarly text, so I find his writing very interesting to keep revisiting. The others are the introductions in the Arden Shakespeares, which I find fascinating. What I find really interesting is to take up whatever the latest one is, but then travel thirty years further back. So having that scholar’s approach, and what were they picking up – to me that’s really, really important, because rather like I was saying about student scholars, you begin to see different ways of looking at this text. And then you begin to wonder why does one emphasize this, and why not that, and so in this debate that you’re having in your head, you’re finding your own self. I’m not seeing enough of cross-cultural references. I think the other area that is not quite being examined, particularly in performance studies of Shakespeare, is how does the rhythm of a non-English language interface with the essential iambic pentameter of Shakespeare? And what happens in that collision? What are the gains? What are the losses? That marriage is in many ways fundamental to any kind of crosscultural approach, or where you are seeking to relocate, or adapt the text to another culture. Even in English, you see – as we’ve become more and more aware, certainly in England – a Yorkshire rhythm does something else to the received pronunciation of English. American English does something else as well. And Australian English does something else. It’s got intonations which are not quite the ones you would expect with a pentameter. And it seems to me that not enough has been done about that level of cross-cultural research. It is this thing about connections. I think that, in this world today, it is becoming more and more urgent that these are all connected texts. It’s inevitable that as a scholar, if you’re looking at a particular writer, you would valourize that writer. But I think it’s equally valid in this world, and urgent, to recognize that writer and that writer’s work as sitting in the stream of other writers, that it’s connected with others. And that’s how we appreciate this world of stories. I said to students recently, ‘Stories don’t belong to any culture. They’re everyone’s human right’. And that’s how we should approach it.

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Judith Greenwood is an Associate Director of Cheek by Jowl and, since the early 1990s, has designed the lighting for most of their productions. She has written plays on the subjects of Ellen Terry’s work with Henry Irving, Charles de Gaulle’s war record and a celebration of the life of Joseph Priestley, which have been performed by amateur dramatic and youth theatre companies in West Yorkshire. She reflects here on her work as a lighting designer and playwright. Research to me means having a great time. It means that I have a chance to study something in depth – usually, this will be a play I am lighting for a production, or a play I am starting to write. When I need to research something, it’s a task I approach with enthusiasm. Research is vital: I read books and study paintings to focus my mind on the play I am about to light or to write. Research kick-starts my thinking process and it gives me ideas and images to work with. All aspects of an academic approach to theatre are of interest to me, but I put most faith in those scholarly writers who understand that plays are meant to be performed, not merely studied and analysed on the page. In this respect, I trust the Arden and the Cambridge University Press editions of Shakespeare. For modern plays, I look for editions which give practical insights into the play’s performance history. I access scholarly criticism in books via libraries. It is rare that I research on the internet. I prefer to go to printed sources, because I trust them more than internet ones. I like to research in libraries, where there is a wealth of material in books and journals. Sharing a library’s atmosphere of calm with other people who are working studiously aids the thinking process, too. In terms of language, I seek out academic writers who start from the understanding that a play’s purpose is performance and whose approach to theatre is practical. Shakespeare’s plays are always found to be relevant to every age. So I envision performances which take the universal truth of his plays and apply that to the contemporary world. I hope the medium will always be the actor, but technical developments will doubtless allow plays to be expressed in ways no one has thought of yet. Wherever the planet might be headed in the future, humankind will always need theatre. It is our unique medium for expressing and explaining ourselves to each other. If there is one writer on the planet who transcends cultural limitations, it is Shakespeare. So it would be wonderful, if idealistic, to think that his plays might bring about a more cohesive world. Research could help this process by demystifying the study of Shakespeare and making public as much information as possible about how his plays are performed in other cultures. I hope a future historian would see that my lighting design work is part of a collaborative process. The lighting’s contribution is one of many arts which go to make up a show. I would like them to observe how the lighting contributes in a unique way to the telling of the story onstage, whilst being inseparable from all the other elements of the production. I would hope to be represented as a team player who contributed to the realization of the play onstage for the audience’s benefit.

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By that I mean I would like my work to be seen as contributing to the storytelling, supporting the actors in conjunction with all the other elements onstage. I am lucky to have friends who are Shakespeare scholars, and so we exchange views in conversation and by email about shows which I am currently working on. I always turn to scholars whose academic perspective is informed by the fact that they are also theatre practitioners. I have been taught by some brilliant academics and theatre practitioners in my time and so I turn to them first: Emeritus Professor Peter Thomson of Exeter University and Emeritus Professor Martin Banham of the University of Leeds. I wish scholars understood and could share in the exciting intensity of the collaboration which putting on a show requires. The teamwork involved in bringing words on a page to life in front of an audience is a perfect blend of academic insight and practical expression. In this way it is theatre’s unique contribution to our lives and it would be a positive development if scholars really understood this role. The academic and the practical have always been seen as mutually exclusive in British culture. There is a snobbery which values academic knowledge more than practical skills and this prejudice has dominated education in the UK since the Industrial Revolution. But theatre is the perfect blend of academic and practical work: it is a profession where academic insight and technical skill are intertwined. So I would like scholars to learn about and begin to value the practical skills involved in stagecraft. If the academic world could acknowledge that theatre is an exciting blend of mental and manual skills, of artistic practice and technical proficiency, this might be of great significance for education policy.

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Hot Take: Dan Bray (Artistic Director) and Colleen MacIsaac (Artistic Producer) The Villains Theatre, Halifax, Nova Scotia What does ‘research’ mean to you? Gathering as much qualitative and quantitative information as possible/necessary about a certain subject, idea, topic, item, work or person. How and where does research fit in to your creative process?  Research often comes up early on in the creative process – it can be a trail of interest that gives spark to a new idea, or unlocks a new facet of a topic that can lead to new discoveries creatively. Though there are some projects that don’t require a research-led approach, researching a topic that is within a play or connected to a play can help with the play’s development. When accuracy is important, research can contribute to the creation of a believable world. How do you conduct research for a new production?  The bulk of research for new productions is done on the internet, or with access to books or materials available at the local libraries. No specific attempt is made to seek out certain types of academic writing, necessarily, but depending on the project we may seek out accessible academic writing (i.e. readable in layman’s terms).  If something is not free or online it’s unlikely that we will be able to access it, unless the play is specifically research-heavy or related to a specific topic where seeking out scholarly criticism is essential to the project. How do you envision Shakespearean performance in the future? What role do you see research playing in this version of the future?  More adaptation, more reinterpretation, more reworking. Researching the past is important so we can learn from it and move forward; to that end, I see research playing a role in ensuring that creators are aware of what has come before so they can choose to repeat or break away from past habits with open eyes. If a historian from the future was looking at your current practice, what would you want them to see? How would you hope to be represented?  We would want to see us creating timely work, using texts from the past to comment on relevant, current issues rather than simply being a re-creation of historical pieces. We would hope to be represented as making artistically and socially interesting work that was very much of its time, using the past to look to the future.

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Migdalia Cruz is an award-winning playwright who has written more than sixty plays, operas, screenplays and musicals. In this interview, she reflects specifically on her translations of Macbeth and Richard III for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which asked contemporary playwrights to create ‘modern’ English versions of Shakespeare’s plays.4 Beginning with Macbeth, I wanted to act as if it were a new play. So I’d think, ‘this is my new play’, and somehow I’m shadowing this other writer, and I’m going to try to take the same journey. Research took me down many different roads. I must’ve read fifteen books that were dense and difficult, and then I still had to find the character, and I had to spend time discovering who is the man Macbeth? To that end, I did my own research. Something I do with all my plays – and now I’ve written about sixty plays – is create altars to my characters, some kind of spiritual place. It’s not necessarily something with crosses or any kind of religious symbols. It’s about sacred objects that belong to characters, or a time in my life, or a place that is important to the character or to the story. To find items, thoughts, photographs for my Macbeth altar, I travelled to the Isle of Iona in the Hebrides to find his grave and pay my respects. In a way, it was also a spiritual journey to my own thoughts on who he was and what he meant to Scotland as [Shakespeare] wrote about him for James I. Macbeth for me is about the witches. What are they and what do I want them to say? For me they are women of colour surrounding this world, contextualizing it in order to recreate it. Their power comes from their sexual attraction – that is scary and powerful and alluring – in particular to men who think they hold the power, right? I don’t want old hags in the forest. That witch idea died decades ago. So what does a modern witch look like? What do powerful women look like? Or women who understand fate and destiny. I wanted to play with them and contextualize the play through them, so I added words for them. But Shakespeare also added words for them – or somebody added words for them; they added songs from Thomas Middleton in the middle of Shakespeare. So if he’s stealing from other people, he might as well steal from Cruz, so I’ll just put some stuff in that makes it sound more like a play of mine, and begin to construct the play in a way that I understand it. It was important to choose words that might resonate with a modern audience. There was an openness to the witches, who are outside the play, so there’s a way to use them to modernize the play. So that’s what I did. And I thought, ‘oh, everybody’s gonna hate this’. But people liked it! I don’t know how it looks on the page, but people who saw the play really liked it. And I made the witches musical, so they sing soul songs from the sixties. To me that was the point: if you choose a specific playwright to do this kind of work, they’re going to bring themselves to it. For Richard, I went to Bosworth Field to see where he died and then to Leicester to see where they found his body – in a car park that was once a Catholic church – and then visited his official tomb at Leicester Cathedral. Next, I went through videotapes from the RSC of classes in how to speak iambic pentameter – those John

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Barton tapes.5 They’re kind of ridiculous, from the seventies or something. Everyone is smoking, it’s like they’re talking in a fog. But it’s funny, and it’s interesting to see how everyone struggles with the language. And part of the struggle with the language is that it’s not always clear, and we’ve forgotten the context for all that language. So we make up context all the time, that’s what humans do to make sense of the world. That gave me further permission to refine the text and define it and give it context that was both historical and personal to both Richard III and Shakespeare and Migdalia. There is so much resistance to touching these texts, particularly from the American Shakespeare community, as if you are blaspheming a sacred text. Because of this resistance in academia to the Play On! project, I’m always prepared for a fight or some kind of discussion that’s such a waste of time in a lot of ways. Scholars in general need to open their minds to different directions that work can go in. They need to be open to the different avenues their scholarship might go, and stop trying so hard to make everything fit their theories. Maybe their theories need to move or transform with each production. And we need to understand why people are making certain choices, as opposed to just, ‘wow, that was a bad choice’. Maybe it was, but why? Why did they make that choice? What were they trying to do? Why does it have to be negative if it doesn’t fit your theory? And that’s the kind of scholarship that’s just tedious because it’s reductive. It’s important that scholars understand that this is a different approach. It’s not just some reductive No Fear Shakespeare. I already have a sensibility that is theatrical and unique. I have a specific voice that I’m applying to this translation that means it’ll have a different kind of resonance than a literal translation or a translation from a grad student in Shakespeare Studies or Shakespeare semiotics. I’m looking at these plays as a dramatist would – not a scholar – thereby enhancing the drama with modern language, but not detracting from it. Shakespeare isn’t going away. He will survive all of us, no doubt. His plays have lasted four hundred years and will persevere. I think people need to keep translating and keep adapting so that he can remain present and pertinent in a way that isn’t archival, dry and academic. When Shakespeare was writing, he was writing for all the people who were there, from queens to groundlings, to hear good stories enacted by wonderful players in a poetic form that was easy to remember and repeat because of its rhythms. He wasn’t writing to be studied. Now we treat his plays like they’re ancient museum pieces, fun to visit, but you don’t walk away feeling like his words speak directly to your own human experience. Good plays should resonate in your soul. I think there needs to be a way to open the field for Shakespeare to continue to be lively and interesting and resonant to society. I would want a historian not to put me in a category that’s just about women, or just about women with long brown hair, or just about ‘Nuyorican’ women, or just about Latinx women. I would love to be in a group of world writers, where they’re talking about my work as part of a canon of new writing. Writing needs to matter. And all writers need to ask questions that fiercely explore and reveal the human condition. Even translators.

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Lisa Wolpe, an actor, director, teacher and producer, is the Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, an award-winning all-female, multicultural theatre company that she founded in 1993. Here, she reflects on the role of research and international communities in her theatrical legacy. Every time I open a play there will be a word, or a theme, or a take that I’m spelunking into, and usually that results in more specific playing choices, more specific directing choices. There’re plays I’ve directed five, or six, or seven times, and no one production is like the others because of my research. Sometimes that’s personal research, like casting a Black actor as Cassio [in Othello] and talking about race within the Black community. Or gender politics: if I’m talking to someone who’s a survivor of domestic abuse, I might learn something about why Emilia [in Othello] behaves the way that she does. And, of course, Hamlet’s been done millions of times, so if you’re not going to do research, how is your production any different? When I was a kid I would just look at the editor’s notes at the bottom of the page because I wanted to get an A in the class. Y’know, ‘what is the correct interpretation of the blind bow boy’s butt-shaft’? Oh, it’s Cupid. But as an actor, I’m really looking at the gay relationship factor between Mercutio and Romeo. Why is that coming up? Why is Mercutio talking about pressing these women to the ground, and why is he so angry? Does he have syphilis? He went to the war; syphilis was treatable with mercury; his name is Mercutio; mercury makes you crazy. So I just think when you look into a word as an actor or director you’re trying to find out all the levels of meaning, because you’re playing for an audience who, if you know what you’re saying, they’ll get it. It’s like a tuning fork, they’ll get that vibration. Research like that makes my work clearer, it makes me more successful on stage. And it makes the work endlessly interesting because I never pick up any Shakespeare play where I’m not enlightened and uplifted and challenged. I’m directing As You Like It for the fifth time, and I’m thinking Oh! Oh, oh! Y’know? Little things pop out that didn’t pop out the first time. So research is everything. It means you’re a lifelong learner. And it means this material is rich enough to merit your time. I’m not sure we’ll be around a hundred years from now. We have serious climate change problems. If anybody really listened to Shakespeare in that Titania speech [from A Midsummer Night’s Dream]: ‘the human mortals want their winter’! There’s a lot of disorder as a result of a lack of harmony in the Shakespeare plays. We have matured a lot in a lot of ways, as technological beings, but we have eradicated 60 per cent of the species on the planet in the last forty years. But hopefully people will say I made a difference. I know I made a difference in terms of gender parity in the United States. I’ve had an all-female multicultural company since 1993, and I was able to get it on PBS and CNN and go to all the conferences, and keep showing our numbers. It’s good for box office to have smart women on stage. It’s not bad for box office. It’s actually an advantage. I’m an advocate for social change, really, and meanwhile I’ve become very good at Shakespeare, but not because there was a path laid out for me. I had to make a path. And also I did all this before there was internet, so we didn’t know what anybody else was doing. I could read the paper, but there was very little – even though we had an arts section

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in the New York Times, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, you’d get maybe a two-inch column every few months on what women were doing. And if you missed it, you would have to go to a library and find it on microfiche. Now we can hook up internationally, in like an hour. Women have been playing Hamlet for hundreds of years. But people don’t do their research, and then they go, ‘WHAT? Maxine Peake is playing Hamlet?!’ And I’ve played Hamlet several times myself. Colorado just had a female punk Hamlet, who played it as a woman, which is actually unusual. And it broke all box office records. My point is: it broke all box office records, produce it more often! Women have played Hamlet forever, but the fact that people keep forgetting that is ridiculous. I just went to a Shakespeare conference in Prague, and one of the younger people there had his head in his hands worrying about how to approach cross-gender casting. It was written for cross-gender casting! What’s wrong with you? And also, I came to this same conference twenty-five years ago telling you that my Romeo and Juliet was a breakout success – all female, multicultural – we did it every year for twenty-three years. We’re one of the top respected companies in LA. Why didn’t you look this up? Did you think Shakespeare was written for handsome men with curly hair and girls with big boobs to play Petruchio and Kate? It wasn’t! Think about it: it was never written for that, for verisimilitude. My friend Sonia Massai, who teaches at King’s College, just wrote and said, ‘oh, you know we were going to have coffee, well Eric Rasmussen’s coming’. And I know Eric from Prague. So these are people who have written a lot of books and done a lot of research, and I can sit with them and speak as a colleague because I’ve played for forty years and done my own kind of research. They have their own expertise, and so do I. So then we have this great human conversation. I think it’s great to go to conferences and find out what people are thinking about. Peter Holland is a keynote speaker often, and he’s really funny and smart. He’s a great speaker. He’ll wear cool socks and great jackets, and his great smile. And then when he talks he’s got some brilliant idea, that I’ll go, ‘wait, what?!’ So I can think about it and dream about it and stay up awake about it, because it’s so interesting to me. Because I’m a geek, I just love this niche. I think breathing and interacting with other beings that are not only living in their heads is important. It’s why I think people should be in the rehearsal room, or take an acting class, or go dancing, or go for a walk outside, or go for a swim. Life experience has to be added to book learning because there’s a deprivation of oxygen and sensuality and associative learning that can keep people within a bubble just talking to each other. Reading and writing is brilliant, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I just don’t think it’s everything. That’s why I keep going back to Prague, and Berlin, and England: it’s international communities with different foods, different rhythms, weather and political histories. If I just stay in Southern California, which is one of the wealthiest economies on the planet with amazing weather – there’s a certain kind of self-satisfaction and a limitation of experience that comes with that, because why would we go anywhere, ever? Unless you have an appetite for learning.

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Hot Take: Julia Nish-Lapidus and James Wallis Co-Artistic Directors, Shakespeare BASH’d, Toronto How do you conduct research for a new production? We always start with the big three Shakespeare publications: the Arden, the Oxford and the Cambridge. We also use the more ‘pocket’ editions published by Penguin, and other fringe editions. Also, we try to find relevant articles through scholarly journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey and others. In addition, we try to find the most relevant writings about the play, which can vary from historical writings on the play, stories and history, to new writings both commercially and academically published. If a historian from the future was looking at your current practice, what would you want them to see? How would you hope to be represented? We hope that we would be seen as people working to make Shakespeare fun and exciting for audiences; projecting clarity, intention and pace as the main components of speaking verse. Our goal by presenting these plays in a bar setting is to demystify the experience of Shakespearean performance through accessibility, energy and simplicity. We would hope that we would be seen as lovers of the work, who helped actors and audiences further their understanding and passion for the plays as they are written, exploring and illuminating the modern relevance of the stories and their ambiguous nature. We don’t want to pacify the audience’s experience, but give them a fully realized text through performance, so that they can interpret and criticize the play in any way they choose. What scholarship has been most influential in your creative work? Scholarship that is geared towards bold and passionate conclusions. We love work that is intriguing but text based, and/or built on a structure of detailed research involving questions of historical, social or artistic theory. We have a special interest in performance-based scholarship, either about historical productions or how the plays work and were likely dramaturged. What do you wish scholars understood about your work? Our work is highly investigated and researched, in order to bring Shakespearean performance to a place of ambiguity and entertainment through the original means of expression: the theatre. Though scholars have a ton of benefits to their interpretive work, theatrical performance is enough of a democratic experience (or we hope it is) to allow multiple understandings of the given work. We hope to coexist and cohabitate in our shared Shakespeare experience.

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Ravi Jain is a playwright, director and actor, based in Toronto, Ontario. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Why Not Theatre. In this interview, he responds to research and critique of his ASL-integrated production Prince Hamlet, originally staged by Why Not Theatre and Soulpepper Theatre in April 2017, restaged by Canadian Stage in February 2019. Research means a couple of things to me. It means gathering information, learning about a subject and investigating it. I think there’s an academic side to it, which is reading, and books, and searching for articles and information. And then there’s a more experiential side of it, which it to actually explore something through people, through experiences. I think that’s a big part of research – to try to observe something, and to understand something, but without judgment. Another part of that word for me that I think is important is, literally, ‘to search again’, and constantly be looking at the thing you think you know and just keep interrogating it. I would say research for me, fundamentally, is questions. I try to read as many different versions as possible. I don’t tend to get too deep in scholarly articles. A lot of the stuff that I’ve read forgets the performance aspect of it. Or it theorizes the performance aspect of it, rather than actually experiencing the performance aspects of Shakespeare. I watched a lot of productions of Hamlet on videos. I did research through other peoples’ adaptations, but it wasn’t the scripts of them, it was the productions of them. I gravitate to things where the production and the text are integrated. The production is the text, for me. I was living in New York [when I started the research for Hamlet], and I got to go to the NY Public Library, which has this amazing archive of all these shows, and I saw so many different productions and just looked at their different cuts and texts, and saw what they were trying to do. And it really influenced how I came to the text that I came to. I’ve been into – and it’s not scholarly – rehearsal books. Complicité has a lot of them – these photos and process books that show you a little bit about what they’re into. Shakespeare in the future: in Canada in particular, we’re in an interesting philosophical context which is the Indigenous conversation and this idea of decolonizing process, decolonizing systems, which for a lot of folks is a very new idea and is something we’re all working through, and I think aspirationally, we want to do that: to address that real history. And so if we’re actually going to do that, then hopefully Shakespeare goes away, and we recognize that he’s just one of many writers, and there are many other stories that we could focus on. I just want to decentralize the conversation around it. I think the plays are good, I think the writing is good, I just don’t think he’s the only guy. But having said that, if we don’t get rid of him, I would say what I’m excited about with the Hamlet that we have on now is that we’re changing who gets to tell the story. And I think that what’s tied into Shakespeare, he’s part of the history of theatre, or one story in the history of theatre, which has been totally colonized and excluded a whole shitload of people for so long. Women are excluded completely. Different races are excluded completely. Different abilities have been excluded. So how can we reimagine these stories, who they’re for, and who gets to tell them? And in the process of doing that, risk losing them. I think that’s important, because if we

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risk losing them, then we will re-find them. And we will re-find the relevance as to why we need to be doing them. That to me has been a great lesson from this Hamlet. It’s a fully integrated ASL and English production; it centres around a female Hamlet and a Deaf artist together, who play Hamlet and Horatio, and it just reveals a whole entire new humanity to the experience of the play. And then we have Black people, brown people, Asian people. Men playing women, women playing men. It’s a predominantly female cast – seven women out of nine. It just changes how you listen, and how you see, and what the resonance of this piece actually is. I think we challenged the text, and the history of the performance of the text in a really exciting way that was fearless and illuminating. We challenged who gets to tell the story, and how it’s told. I would say it was free, it took risks, it was reckless in its perspectives. It is reckless in its desire to have intersectional perspectives. I’ve always found this idea that Shakespeare is universal to be a real bullshit thing. But I’ve finally found the universality of it by including more perspectives at the table. It does encompass all these experiences. But you have to let those people with those experiences encounter the text. In a lot of the reviews [for Hamlet], let’s say the majority of the reviewers have been hearing people. And they’ll say, oh, the sound design is too loud, there’s too much sound. What they don’t recognize is, it’s purposefully done because a D/deaf audience, who’s a big part of our audience, enjoys feeling vibrations. And so there are constant pulses, and there are speakers under your seats, so that a D/deaf audience can be feeling a different experience. In the way that music amplifies an experience for a hearing audience, the rumble does for the D/deaf audience. And people just completely miss that. Hearing people miss that. My response to the question is: just go deeper. Have more perspective to your world – to your understanding of the thing. So, I don’t know. I don’t know, other than to say to go deep, to talk to me. Maybe that’s it: talk to me. Ask questions.

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Hot Take: Emma Whipday Playwright, Director and Academic What does research mean to you? Research is exploration: reading (and indeed, finding) texts that might shed light on the culture in which early modern drama was produced and received; close reading plays; and situating what I’ve discovered in relation to the discoveries and readings of other critics. But research doesn’t begin and end in the library or the archive. For me, theatrical practice is also research: staging rarely performed early modern plays in full productions or staged readings; exploring dramaturgical features of both canonical and less canonical plays in performance workshops; and experimenting with performing other kinds of archival materials, from ballads to witch trial accounts and church court records. My research and close reading enhanced by experiencing these texts in performance, and performance, in turn, influences the kind of research questions I ask. How do you conduct research for a new production? I find immersing myself in scholarly conversations really helpful in planning a new production. But after a certain point, I put all this to one side – I need to be thinking in broad strokes when directing, as well as paying attention to minutiae, so at some point it’s useful to step away from critical debates and work with actors to play with the text, and see what adding voices and bodies does to the ideas I think I have in place when I first arrive in the rehearsal room. How do you envision Shakespearean performance in the future? I’m excited by the use of new technologies and audience experiences in works like Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies; by cross-gender casting used in inventive ways, as in Phyllida Lloyd’s Shakespeare Trilogy at the Donmar; by international collaborations rooted in ensemble physical theatre, like those of Cheek by Jowl; by professional/amateur collaborations like Erica Whyman’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation for the RSC; and by the range of interactive approaches to Shakespearean (and early modern) drama, from immersive experiences like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More to small-group theatrical experiences like Oneohone. I hope that all this creativity will continue in the future staging of Shakespeare, with new work building on these kinds of innovative examples, as well as developing in new directions. I also hope that work informed by (and itself feeding into) theatricalhistorical research, whether ‘Original Practices’ at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Actors’ Renaissance Season at the American Shakespeare Center or something new and as yet unknown, will continue to develop; I worry when these kinds of experimental work that challenge models of directors’ theatre and the necessity

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for electronic lighting and sound design, can too easily be characterized as staid or backwards looking, when in fact they can be at once historically informed and radical, in challenging the prevalent models of twenty-first century theatricality. I hope this kind of work continues, and continues to surprise. What do you wish scholars understood about your work? That my ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ work are inextricably linked; in institutional/ disciplinary terms, the two are often seen as separate (and I’m very lucky to be in an institution that supports work combining the two). My creative interests and practice-based approaches inform my academic work, and my academic work, in turn, inspires the settings, subjects and structures of my playwriting.

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Wole Oguntokun is a Nigerian producer, director and writer. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the Theatre Republic, an arts hub in Lagos, as well as the Artistic Director of Renegade Theatre. In this interview, he reflects specifically on his production of The Winter’s Tale for the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe. Research is background information, I think, looking at the back story to any topic one was treating. Sometimes people are very touchy about you telling history a different way. So you want to get it right. I’ll tell you something: I might have an advantage over you in the matter of dualizing the story of Polixenes and Leontes. Because I know the story, I grew up on the stories of Ogun and Sango6 and so I was able to recognize the similarities. I was able to understand the fiery temper and the warlike nature of Ogun because it’s where I come from. It’s where I come from. So that’s what I would call an advantage: the fact that I’m fairly versed in the tradition here, and what I don’t know, I can ask easily. I can ask other writers, I can ask traditionalists here. I can ask practitioners. I spoke to the most fearsome people when I was going to do The Winter’s Tale, because I had to research on Sango, who was Leontes, and I had to research on Ogun, the God of War. Here, the worshippers of Ogun, they kill dogs to worship Ogun. It’s a strange thing, but it happens. So I had to read up on things like that. I suppose that’s the point of storytelling, isn’t it, where sometimes you use a writer’s license? Not to distort the story, but sometimes to emphasize the story. I felt that in The Winter’s Tale, the backstories of Oya and Ogun and Sango were very much like Leontes and Polixenes and Hermione. That’s how it looked to me. I had time on my hands, so y’know, I was looking at the story one day and thought, ‘this is the story of these men before they became gods here’. I see parallels in things. I spoke to a class at Emory University recently, in Atlanta, about The Winter’s Tale, and this student asked what my opinion was about Shakespeare and those who say Shakespeare must be kept pure. Y’know, you don’t bastardize it and put in Yoruba gods in place of revered characters. I don’t know what happened to me that day, but I spoke strongly. I spoke strongly. Because Shakespeare was introduced to civilize our literature. That was the intention in the beginning: to civilize our literature. To show us what proper literature should be. And then we took it and made it decadent. Well, I did. I made it decadent. What’s gonna happen to Shakespeare in the future? We will do anything to it. Shakespeare belongs to everyone now. I went with a Nobel Laureate to Rome, about a year ago. He was given the Europe Theatre Special Prize, Wole Soyinka. What struck me was, Wole Soyinka, no matter how much we say, ‘he’s Yoruba, he’s one of us’, he actually belongs to the world. Shakespeare is like that, too. Shakespeare belongs to everyone now, and we will make Shakespeare what we want him to be. My hope would be that a future historian would think that even though I wrote locally – even though I wrote from where I was, my place on the face of the earth – I would like them to think I also had a global view, a universal view. Humans are the same. We have so many universal truths. Of course I speak with a voice, but still it’s

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all the same world that we live in. It’s all the same things we’ll see. I tell stories to make the world a happier place, I think. It’s not a very nice place, particularly now, so I tell stories. I would like people to think in 300 years, 400 years, ‘there was a writer, from a certain part of the world, and he tried to show the universality of mankind and womankind. He tried to show people who were the same’. So, for example, in The Winter’s Tale, the themes of love, of jealousy, of irrationality, they are the same all over the world. Sometimes, of course the environment emphasizes some things. But they’re the same all over the world. Goodness is the same all over the world. So is evil. I just cause as much havoc as I can in the world of Shakespeare. I don’t go looking for academics. Because, basically it’s the written word, it’s what I interpret it as, y’know? And, unfortunately for them, I can interpret. There were some academics, though, who reviewed our play [The Winter’s Tale]. Shakespeare Beyond English, I think, was where they reviewed it, and they were quite complimentary.7 They actually saw things I didn’t believe they could see. The Globe actually instructed us not to do adaptations. I just didn’t care. I thought, ‘it’s too late now’. So I think the Globe allowing people to come with their own perspectives of Shakespeare was a really, really beautiful thing. And I think academics have to make room for that because it’s legitimate. It’s viable. And it’ll continue to keep that name going because the core is there. The kernel is there. We know the root source of it. Even though I wrote a play in which I used Yoruba gods and all that, it was still Shakespeare I was telling. What I was showing was the universality of Shakespeare. And so the academics have to open their minds, have to free their minds. They have to make room for people who don’t tell the story like it ‘should be told’. In the beginning, I thought, okay, maybe there’s something I’m missing here. Maybe there’s something I don’t have from not being formally trained in theatre. I lost that after a short while. I thought it didn’t matter. I’ll tell the stories anyway.

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Hot Take: Vishal Bhardwaj Film Director, Screenwriter, Producer and Composer What does ‘research’ mean to you? Research helps to root the imagination into reality. It brings authenticity, opens more doors for drama and surprises you with facts which are often stranger than fiction. How and where does research fit in to your creative process? After the idea comes to me, and before I realize it on paper. What types of academic writing (if any) do you turn to when preparing for a new production? I read different critical analyses of Shakespeare’s plays for most of my research. How do you find and access relevant scholarly criticism? I look up various websites, read scholars’ viewpoints and evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses and then make my own assessment of it. What make research accessible to you? Easy availability on the internet, either through websites or online journals. Furthermore, research that delves into the deeper lives of the characters, their background and also how relationships change and develop over the story. How do you envision Shakespearean performance in the future? There will be a lot of adaptations and performance methods and mediums will change as society develops. Shakespeare is timeless and his stories are absolutely human, so as long as humans exist, so will Shakespeare. Research will play an extremely important role in the future – since the core of the stories, the human relations and emotions do not change – and hence understanding and analysing the past will allow for stronger and more impactful adaptations. If a historian from the future was looking at your current practice, what would you want them to see? Shakespeare’s soul in my work. I have adapted the plays to my culture and given them my own voice. I have always stayed true to the soul if not the text of the book.

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Adam Cunis is an actor based in London, and a practitioner and workshop leader with Shakespeare’s Globe. Here, he reflects on his practice as an actor working within the Globe’s unique institutional structure. I guess research is any homework that is done for an actor, so figuring out stuff that maybe is extra-textual or inferred or anything that other characters are saying. I would classify that as research, so finding out about your characters, and then the broader part of that, of course, is finding out what other people have thought over the years. And the clearer we can be, the more fun the audience will have, and the easier an experience it is for an audience. So it encompasses everything. The Research Department at the Globe helps out massively, but not in a way that allows actors to be lazy. They provide the information, and then you have to action it. If I’m working on my own show, or I’m employed in a play, I tend to go back to source. So I make sure I have two or three different editions of a play. I generally compare what would be in the First Folio. I find David and Ben Crystal’s ‘Shakespeare’s Words’ app very useful, and prior to that I used their lexicon exhaustively. Even just picking up little quotations about people and about how it was done leads you to kind of go, okay, this is what it was like in performance, and are there elements of that that are still relevant to how we’re trying to make this work with a production? And sometimes, you have to go, okay, that’s how they did it 400 years ago, but that’s not going to be relevant to my audience of twelve-year-olds from Peckham. The other thing I should mention in terms of the Globe is that Research in Action is a thing that happens, and is increasingly popular, particularly with the Read Not Dead series.8 I find it hilarious turning up to do a Read Not Dead, say it’s the Birth of Merlin [by William Rowley] or whatever, and you get on stage, you’ve had the script since like 10.00 am. And then the audience are laughing at jokes that you haven’t understood, and you’ve said them, because they’ve had access to a Rarely Seen symposium in the morning. We’re now at the stage, five years on from the [Sam] Wanamaker [Playhouse] opening, that you’re able to programme stuff in two spaces that perhaps is less likely to sell out but is still going to make enough money to justify itself to a commercial theatre. Which I think is really, really important, particularly in terms of the Wanamaker being a new space, and a new kind of architectural or archaeological idea where it’s not a replica of the Blackfriars, it’s its own theatre. The research of learning about that space by doing active, practical stuff is really valuable, and you know Farah [Karim-Cooper and Andrew Gurr]’s book on Moving Shakespeare Indoors talking about candlelight and that sort of stuff is really quite exciting.9 There’s always been amazing research done, and it’s always been very, very brilliantly conveyed to the actors and through the performances, but I think increasingly there’s public access to that kind of information. I’d encourage everyone to listen to The Guilty Feminist podcast episode called The Oratrix, with Susan Wokoma, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Farah Karim-Cooper, as well as Adjoa Andoh who’s currently playing Richard II in the first all-female, allBAME Shakespeare ever on a British stage – and everybody backstage is a woman

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of colour as well.10 So that podcast is amazing in terms of where theatre is going in general, but of course they’re specifically talking about productions of Emilia,11 and Richard II as well. I think representation is the key thing. But also the acknowledgement that the Globe in particular, it’s in Southwark, and the Borough of Southwark has a very high percentage [of] BAME [people]. And although it may be a recognized theatre around the world, you have to recognize and represent and include your key demographics, ultimately. I mean, a) that’s smart business sense, which won’t have escaped anyone at the Globe’s notice, but b) it’s reflective of the inclusive theatre that Sam [Wanamaker] wanted to set up. I’m still really excited just by the simple fact that the Curtain Theatre that’s being excavated at the moment is a square building and the prologue [from Henry V] refers to ‘This Wooden O’. You know as a performer, I’m already going, well even if that doesn’t affect how I’m saying it, and even if I’m playing it in a circular building, it’s just further credence to the idea that these plays were living texts, in the way that any playscript is today. It’s super exciting to have that kind of stuff because it gives you the opportunity to be wrong – or rather to take ownership over choices that you’ve made that maybe aren’t ‘traditional’ or ‘right’, but they suit what you’re doing with that story for whatever your audience demographic is or whatever your aims are with the production. One of the things that’s sometimes lost in translation of companies taking research and using it in practice is, you can become slightly less easy to access, shall we say, than if you take the research and go, ‘okay, that’s going to inform the decisions that I’m making, but ultimately we have to be aware that this production is for this audience’. I would hope to be considered an actor who’s interested in process. But it’s also increasingly clear to me how important it is, having gone through that process, to make sure that the choices you’ve made are as clear as possible for an audience because our responsibility for them is to assume that they’ve not seen this show before, and if they’ve seen, let’s say Macbeth before, they haven’t seen this Macbeth before and that has to leave a different impression with them. Even if they saw the same production yesterday, you have to be alive with it.

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Hot Take: James Loehlin Director of Shakespeare at Winedale, a University of Texas programme dedicated to bringing Shakespeare to life through performance How and where does research fit into your creative process? When I am planning a season or thinking about how I will approach particular plays, whether in performance or in teaching, I like to have a sense about where the critical conversation is about those works – whether or not that has a direct effect on how I end up approaching them. How do you envision Shakespearean performance in the future? I imagine that a lot of it will be the same, though I suppose new technologies may come into play (as in the motion-capture hologram Ariel in the RSC’s recent Tempest). I hope that there will be an increase in diversity both of practitioners and audiences, and I hope that younger people continue to be interested in Shakespeare. We certainly need new audiences and supporters of Shakespearean performance for it to continue the significant growth of the past half-century or so. If a historian from the future was looking at your current practice, what would you want them to see? How would you hope to be represented? I hope they would see that Shakespeare’s language could still be communicated with power, clarity and immediacy to twenty-first-century audiences, and that Shakespearean performances could respond to a changing world while still functioning with the basic theatrical and narrative engines that made them work 400 years ago. What scholarship has been most influential in your creative work? Probably performance history, as well as the performance criticism of people like W. B. Worthen. I still draw a lot on some old-school stuff like Northrop Frye (in relation to genre) and J. L. Styan (in relation to performance), but I am also excited by the work of contemporary critics like Farah Karim-Cooper, Bridget Escolme, Stephen Purcell and others who are writing with a real awareness of performance. What would you like scholars to address next? Maybe it’s time for some new work on where Shakespeare performance pedagogy is today, and is going?

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Denice Hicks has been working for The Nashville Shakespeare Festival since 1990, and has held the position of Artistic Director since 2005. Here she talks about the community of practitioners, scholars and audience building a future for Nashvillians to enjoy Shakespeare Research to me means a great dramaturg and a great scholar at table work time. So I, personally, don’t do a lot of research. What my brain latches onto are essences of things, and if something connects with what I need, I’ll grab onto that. I have a wonderful professor friend who frequently gives me books of critical essays, but unless I’m needing to answer a specific question in a play that I’m working on, those essays just don’t mean much to me. My mind needs to connect information directly to problem solve, or for very specific uses. I always use the Arden when I prepare to direct or act in a play, and I appreciate the Arden because they have a variety of notes. I know Leah Marcus, and she’s always quoted in there, and that’s fun, to come across, well ‘Dr Marcus says … ’! She was here in Nashville for so many years, and her husband served on our board. So there’s a personal connection when Arden editions use Leah’s thoughts, and I love that compilation of notes in connection directly with a text. The [Nashville] Shakespeare Festival has a different scholar do a lecture before every performance. In the wintertime, it’s just for our VIP guests, and in the summertime the scholars lecture before every show for anyone. It’s a free talk about all things Shakespeare. They all prepare in different ways, and it’s always so interesting to see what they bring, where their research has led them. The head of our board right now is Dr Marcia McDonald, a Shakespeare professor at Belmont University, and she has created this fantastic group of scholars from every university in this area. I love that the historians and the scholars can remind us of the real history that Shakespeare was looking at, or his sources. And how those stories read to him. And then, it’s always encouraging, I think, and inspiring, that he made certain changes based on his times, and although we always maintain Shakespeare’s poetry, we definitely make changes, we make edits – gender switching and things – that help contemporary audiences relate more specifically to any given play. My research is based in the text. I hope that our scholars continue to be involved in our process, and come to our rehearsals and see how actors, most specifically, process the information and apply it. I never want a scholar to get their feelings hurt, or feel like their work’s not appreciated because an actor isn’t using something that they provided. I really hope that the scholars understand that their work is valuable to us, whether or not we use it this time. A lot of times in rehearsal actors will come up with a great idea, and I’ll say, ‘that’s fabulous! We’ll put that in the next show!’ As prep to direct Hamlet, I met at Belmont with Dr McDonald and Dr Jayme Marigza-Yeo, and said, ‘what do you think students are into right now about Hamlet?’ because they’re teaching Shakespeare on a daily basis. They spoke about Polonius’s abuse of Ophelia, but we went a different way with the Polonius relationship. Still, I would hope that the scholars always understand that their input is valuable to us.

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Casting makes a big difference. The actor auditioning for Polonius, when he walked in, might not have been the Polonius I was thinking of, but in his callback read he convinced me he was the best one we had. So things do change because the medium in theatre is the humans. It’s a very unpredictable medium. You can only give it good, strong parameters, and then watch the medium make the art. And I’m not sure scholars always understand that. They say, ‘well, can’t you tell them …’ and I’m like, ‘no, I really can’t’. I love open rehearsals. People’s opinions are welcome throughout my process, from the very first read, all the way through to the end of the run, actually. When I can get people to come back and see a show, I’m very interested in what they noticed: did things grow in a direction that helped them? For me, theatre being a collaborative art, the collaboration is with everyone. I really love the ongoing process of creation. I’ve been in Nashville almost forty years. What I have noticed in the two generations that I have experienced here is there is a tradition of Shakespeare that is building in families here that would not be if it weren’t for us doing free Shakespeare in the summertime. It has become a tradition, and their children are now coming to the show, and in high school auditioning for our apprentice company – this past summer, one of our technicians was the son of somebody I had in a Scout troop twenty years ago, and she said, ‘you inspired me to love theatre, I’ve pursued a career in stage management, I got married, I had a child, and now he wants to be a lighting designer’. I love that, if, in four or five more generations, there are still people who are practising theatre, and attending theatre, and appreciating theatre, [it will be] because of the work that we have done here with Nashville Shakespeare Festival. That’s community. I don’t think that I’m going to be remembered much for my art, but I hope that my art has an effect on the community that continues.

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Hot Take: @Shakespeare Twitter persona What makes research accessible to you? Access is not a problem. Our constraint is what the Twitter audience is able or willing to recognize, because jokes need to pivot off some recognizable fact. One tweeter has worked doggedly for years to establish Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert as an ongoing character, but he’s too far outside the general knowledge base. We’ve stopped trying to make Gilbert happen. How do you envision Shakespearean performance in the future? The question is always how much longer this project can keep going, so it’s hard to think about the future in the abstract. Will the account be around in five years? Will Twitter? How doth this project end? We have no idea. More generally, we expect online media to keep evolving, with evolving competition in those interactive environments. And we think there’s a crucial need for human performers. A medium that’s entirely dominated by bots, or by corporations hiring ‘content providers’ dies. But the bots and paid content providers, by their nature, want to expand to suck up all the oxygen. It’s important for the academic community to engage in these performative spaces. If no one ever learns anything, or anything true, in these spaces, that’s a disaster. If a historian from the future was looking at your current practice, what would you want them to see? How would you hope to be represented? That something positive happened on Twitter? That new media were sometimes used to share knowledge instead of dumbing everything down? We’d probably want a future historian to have to explain what Twitter was. There’s no aspiration to become part of a historical narrative here. We’re focusing on educating the present about the past. If the account is remembered by future scholars, we hope it would be by scholars whom the account helped get interested in Shakespeare or the early modern period. Maybe some of the high school students who grumble at Shakespeare and get a smartass answer back. What would you like scholars to address next? We think researchers should keep working on what interests them, which is the only way good work gets done. We’re researchers ourselves. But we’d also love to see more researchers engaging in projects like ours, and trying to engage the public through new media. And we mean engage as in ‘Be engaging’. For years, our account has done a narrative thread in which Shakespeare takes an Oscarsweekend trip [to Los Angeles] with Marlowe, Jonson and Donne. In the last year or two, Twitter accounts for all three of those writers, each clearly written by academics, also tweet along, which is a nice feeling for us. What do you wish scholars understood about your work? Comedy ain’t easy.

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Yang Jung-ung is an award-winning South Korean theatre director. He is the founder and artistic director of the Yohangza Theatre Company, which tours globally and was the first Korean company to perform at the Barbican (2006) and Shakespeare’s Globe (2012) in London. He is also known for directing the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. This interview has been translated into English by Boram Choi. To me, the meaning of ‘research’ is not academic alone; rather, it is more related to intuitive experiences and creative methods that I explore with my actors. For instance, while I was producing Hamlet, my actors improvised a performance of Shakespeare’s play – several times if necessary – from the beginning to the end, which took about seven hours. In this way, they ‘researched’ the text through their bodies, a process of intuitive experiences. Also, I often get inspired for making a production by watching, reading and listening to various sources such as video recordings, playscripts and music, which were created by other artists. While I was staying at residences for artists in other Asian countries such as Indonesia, I studied their traditional theatre forms. Based on the knowledge of traditional theatre that I learned there, I often think of new combinations between traditional elements and modern forms. I have studied traditional Korean performance forms such as Pansori12 before they were influenced by Western culture, particularly realist theatre. I want to perform Shakespeare’s plays by combining them with what I found in this kind of research, as Shakespeare’s works can also be understood within the concept of theatricality, which can be observed in traditional Korean ritual and some other Asian theatre forms. Although I would not emphasize the similarities, I think the theatrical archetype, which might be seen from the ritual performance of the Shaman, can be found even in modern theatre. In other words, developing a performance is a process of exploring our cultural unconscious. For example, I used some elements of Korean Shamanism in Hamlet. Also, I studied the information and images of wildflowers in Korea for Twelfth Night, and how colour and meaning influences character development. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I researched constellations, stories of dokkaebi,13 their pictures and folk tales. In Hwan (an adaptation of Macbeth), I studied the Chinese zodiac, old Korean histories and cultural atmospheres of Mahan or Jinhan, and reread The Heritage of the Three States.14 I was also interested in stories containing prophecies and ghosts coming from a well, which helped me to develop my imagination. For Hamlet, I helped my actors to learn different types of Gut (exorcism) such as Seoul Gut and Hwanghaedo Gut not only by reading books about it, but also by inviting a shaman, or expert, who had been studying and practising traditional Guts. Since the expert knew every Gut in Korea, my actors and I could learn the nuances of Gut in depth. In the process of making a performance, I always listen to other people. I like to discuss a production with my actors and Professor Lee Hyon-u, who has been helping me as a dramaturg. I respect the actors’ intuitive findings and attempts. I

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love to understand academic essays through the eyes of Lee, and also I respect the perspectives of my actors because they are the ones who will express what they understand. I am thrilled to get some results, which were never imagined before, through the work of collecting various ideas and interpretations. I hope historians in the future do not watch my productions but read reviews of my works. As everything is changing, my productions practice their roles at the time when they were created. I want scholars to imagine my works by reading reviews or academic essays. I enjoyed the process of imagining Peter Brook and Ninagawa Yukio’s productions; however, when I actually watched their works, I was a bit disappointed. I hope that my productions are imagined and after that disappear into thin air. Soon after A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed, the Shakespeare Association of Korea asked me for a special lecture to share my experiences. I met Professor Shin Jeong-ok and other scholars, which was my first time interacting with scholars to talk about my productions. Since then, I have been working with Professor Lee Hyon-u, who is now helping me to access useful materials for my new productions. While I was working with scholars, I realized the importance of subtitles, particularly when I perform my work abroad. Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written in poetic form with old expressions and connotative words, I tried to help the British audience to understand my work easily, so I intentionally used easy expressions in the English translation. As a result, the critics criticized the quality of my performance because of the subtitles. Since then, I have begun to interact with scholars to ask for their help in understanding the aesthetics of Shakespeare’s plays. When I produced Pericles in 2015, I worked with Professor Lee and tried to include my understandings of Shakespeare criticism. While I was following my intuitive decisions and interpretations before 2015, after the moment that I met Korean scholars, I have studied and reflected how scholars understand Shakespeare’s plays, major criticism, scholarly approaches and research for my productions. Professor Lee gives me great inspiration. I met him in a forum about Korean Shakespeare at City of London Festival in 2014. He was one of the panellists. We talked about my recent production, Hamlet, and he recommended that I select Pericles for my next work. I was fascinated by the story. I could see the connection between Pericles and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which I performed previously. I really enjoyed the process of developing the production and also the reviews were good. I even won a prize for Pericles in ‘The 4th Korea Shakespeare Awards’ in 2015. Since I met Lee, I have become curious about Shakespeare’s intention, which of course nobody knows. Before I worked with Lee, I wanted to know about myself as a director, but now I am more interested in how the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays can be discovered and expressed through me. In the past, I was curious about my own artistic value and how Shakespeare’s plays help me to express my intuitive sense. But now I feel that I become a bridge through which Shakespeare’s works can be accessed by modern audiences. In other words, Shakespeare uses me in certain ways. This is possible by studying and following critical research and ideas by scholars, which are mostly introduced to me by Lee.

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Although I choose some creative ideas among various suggestions and information, I like to be inspired by the studies of scholars.

NOTES   1. We wish to acknowledge and thank the following people who generously facilitated contact with the practitioners: Devansh Agarwal, Thea Buckley, Sarah Enloe, Letty Garcia, Lee Hyon-u, Peter Kirwan, Adele Lee, Kathryn Prince and Peregrine Whittlesey.   2. Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries is an American Shakespeare Center initiative that is ‘discovering, developing, and producing a new canon of 38 plays that are inspired by and in conversation with Shakespeare’s work’ (emphases original). The project launched with a call for new plays responding to The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Winter’s Tale in 2017. Additional details can be found at: https:// americanshakespearecenter.com/new-contemporaries/ (accessed 21 November 2020).   3. Verma refers here to Jan Kott’s influential 1964 book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, which we consider an important (if controversial) text in both the professional theatre and academia.   4. The Play On! commissioning process began in 2015, when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it would seek thirty-six playwrights to ‘translate’ Shakespeare’s plays. The project culminated in a festival of staged readings of the full corpus of thirty-nine plays in June 2019. Additional details can be found at: https:// playonfestival.org/ (accessed 21 November 2020).   5. Cruz refers here to John Barton, Trevor Nunn and the RSC’s two-part televised acting workshop, Playing Shakespeare, first broadcast in 1982. This was later revised by Barton as an acting handbook of the same name.   6. Ogun, Sango and Oya are Yoruba deities that were linked with characters in The Winter’s Tale for Oguntokun’s 2012 Globe to Globe production.   7. See Sanders (2013).   8. Research in Action, Read Not Dead and Rarely Seen are Globe initiatives that aim to bridge gaps between theatre practice and research in various ways.   9. Gurr and Karim-Cooper (2014). 10. The acronym ‘BAME’ refers to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people, and is typically used (not without controversy) by government bodies and large institutions in the UK when discussing equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives. See FrancesWhite and Wokoma (2019). 11. Emilia is Malcolm’s play on the life of Emilia Bassano, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2018 before transferring to the West End. 12. A Korean genre of musical storytelling with a singer and drummer, thought to have originated in the seventeenth century. 13. Korean nature deities or spirits, similar to Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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14. Mahan and Jinhan are two of the three confederacies that emerged in the first century BCE in the central and southern parts of the Korean Peninsula. The Heritage of the Three States, or Samguk Yusa, was written by Buddhist monk Il-yeon in the late thirteenth century.

REFERENCES Barton, John (1984), Playing Shakespeare, London: Methuen. Frances-White, Deborah and Susan Wokoma, hosts (2019), ‘Episode 142: The Oratrix’, The Guilty Feminist, 25 March. Available online: https://guiltyfeminist.libsyn. com/142-the-oratrix-with-susan-wokoma-and-guests-adjoa-andoh-morgan-lloydmalcolm-drfarah-karim-cooper (accessed 21 November 2020). Gurr, Andrew and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2014), Moving Shakespeare Indoors, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kott, Jan (1964), Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Sanders, Julie (2013), ‘Creative Exploitation and Talking Back’, in Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (eds), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, 241–50, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER 4.1

Chronology: A fifty-year history of performance criticism JAMES C. BULMAN

1. TEXT, AUTHORITY, RECEPTION By the 1980s, performance criticism was poised to leap into the lap of literary theorists. In the preceding decades it had established a foothold in Shakespeare studies, with works by Bernard Beckerman (1962), John Russell Brown (1966, 1974), and John Styan (1967, 1977) insisting that Shakespeare wrote ‘playscripts’ – the term was coined by Philip McGuire (1985) – whose potentials for honoring Shakespeare’s intentions were best realized in performance; for, in Styan’s words, ‘the meaning is in the experience’ (1977: 9). And although these critics debated whether the plays can speak for themselves or need the shaping hand of a director, they were hemmed in by the literary formalism in which they had been trained, sharing a conviction that Shakespeare’s texts are stable and authoritative, and that actors and directors are therefore interpreters, rather than makers, of meaning. Simultaneously, however, Continental theorists were arguing for ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes 1967) and questioning ‘What Is An Author?’ (Foucault 1969), thus disposing of authorial intentionality and displacing the centrality of a Shakespeare whose texts had undergirded writings about performance. Anticipating the theatre director’s emancipation from the ‘presumed tyranny of the playwright,’ director Antonin Artaud had argued decades earlier that ‘No one has the right to call himself author, that is to say creator, except the person who controls the direct handling of the stage’ (1938; cited by Rabkin 1985: 143), which became a manifesto for avantgarde theatre companies in the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by Barthes and Foucault as well as by Mikhail Bakhtin, whose The Dialogic Imagination (1975) emphasized the ‘primacy of context over text’ in the creation of meaning, semioticians posited that the performance text, no longer simply a literary text, should be ‘conceived of as a complex network of different types of signs, expressive means, or actions’ (De Marinis, 1987: 100; see also Carlson 1990). The ‘dramatic text’, therefore,

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should be regarded as but one element of the performance text (Elam 1980: 2) and is itself subject to historical inscription, the result of a process Patrice Pavis calls its concretization, wherein ‘signifier (literary work as thing), signified (aesthetic object), and Social Context … are variables … which can be more or less reconstructed’ (1992: 27). This idea of text as process, as an interweaving of variable elements, reflects a post-structuralist desire to replace the logocentric idea of theatre with one in which performance becomes the site of cultural and aesthetic contestation, not merely, as it was for performance critics such as Beckerman, Brown and Styan, ‘an incidental transcription, representation and explanation’ of the literary text (Pavis 1992: 32). One of the first Shakespeare critics to embrace post-structuralist theory, W. B. Worthen (1989, 1996, 1997), urged that allegiance to the ‘author function’ had unnecessarily constrained the work done by performance practitioners (actors, directors, designers) and performance critics alike. The meaning of a Shakespeare production, he suggested, is not immanent in the text, but radically contingent on a host of factors, from the material conditions of performance, to the medium for which the play has been adapted, to the impact of political, economic and social forces on audience reception. In other words, any performance involves a complex negotiation between cultural determinants and a decentred, though still present, ‘Shakespeare’. Worthen’s focus on those aspects of performance that made the ‘performance text’ (i.e. the theatrical event) fundamentally different from the dramatic text was also deeply informed by a movement that adopted the name ‘Performance Studies’ to advance a broader, more inclusive understanding of performance as cultural practice. Pioneering scholars such as Victor Turner (1982) and Richard Schechner (1977, 1985), whose work was rooted in cultural anthropology, offered a definition of performance that encompassed a wide variety of social practices in which spectators were also players. In Schechner’s words, the term performance embraced a ‘“broad spectrum” or “continuum” of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles’ (2006: 2). Just as cultural studies has borrowed from an ever-expanding array of ideological perspectives, so too Performance Studies has gradually absorbed the methodologies and discourses of many disciplines – gender studies, queer studies, race studies, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, ethology, semiotics, and a number of politically inflected ‘isms’ – to create ‘a more encompassing, expansive, expressive, and relational arena for rethinking performance’ (Hodgdon 2005: 7). Continental theorists also lay the groundwork for assessing the importance of audience reception to Shakespearean performance. As late as 1989, Marvin Carlson complained that performance criticism had largely ignored the pioneering work on reception aesthetics by Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss in the 1960s, work that helped to explain ‘the means and mechanisms whereby all texts … may be “productively activated” during what is traditionally, and inadequately, thought of as the process of their consumption or reception’ (Tony Bennett 1983: 214). While a few earlier critics had broached the importance of reception to the study of

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Shakespearean performance (e.g. Goldman 1972), too little attention had been paid to the contribution of the audience to this process, Carlson lamented, and still less to the factors which contribute to the formation of their ‘reading’ of performance (1989: 86). As if in answer to Carlson, critics during the following decade, armed with new ideological perspectives, strove to refashion performance criticism. Herbert Blau (1990) and Susan Bennett (1990) both wrote searching explorations of the forces that influence reception. Two years earlier, Jill Dolan had proclaimed a crucial role for women in The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988); Jean Howard historicized reception in her study of ‘Women as Spectators, Spectacles, and Paying Customers’ (1991); and Barbara Hodgdon, in a series of essays published throughout the 1990s, tested the applicability of reception theory to audience response, and especially how such response is informed, if not fully determined, by disparate conceptions of gender, ethnicity, race and social class. She considered the performance text as an event constituted by the concrete conditions of its spectators; for, she argued, ‘it is in the “discursively saturated materiality” of the historical circumstances in which a performance is seen that it makes its demands for narrative intelligibility’ (1996: 69). Implicated in the study of material conditions of performance is, inevitably, the playing space itself. Early twentieth-century Shakespeare directors realized this when they sought to return the plays to the original conditions of their performance. William Poel’s experiments with Elizabethan staging sought ‘to legitimate the interplay between scholarship and theatre through academic trappings’ (Werner 2010: 1; see also Shaughnessy 2002), and Poel’s disciple Harley Granville-Barker in 1927 published the first of his Prefaces to Shakespeare, an exploration of how modern theatre could use Elizabethan practices – an open platform stage, swift and fluid action and delivery, direct address to the audience, and symbolic rather than representational scenery – to unearth potentials of the plays that had long been buried under the weight of ornately pictorial Victorian stagings. A half century later, performance critics such as Beckerman, Brown and Styan – and to a degree, even director Peter Brook in The Empty Space (1968) – were led by the same impulse to try to recover Shakespeare’s intentions through the use of uncluttered playing spaces. Since then, of course, Turner and Schechner’s work has complicated our understanding of the cultural significance that particular types of spaces have for performing Shakespeare, and of the impact they have on spectators. Theatre historian Andrew Gurr made signal contributions to our understanding of how Elizabethan stages and other performance spaces affected both Renaissance actors’ methods and spectators’ responses (1987, 1992); Alan Dessen has explained how Elizabethan stage conventions have often been (mis)interpreted by modern directors (1984, 1995); and a recent collection edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (2013) has detailed how early modern theatres affected spectators’ sensory experiences of the plays. In our own time, the surprising popularity of London’s replica of the original Globe Theatre, now called Shakespeare’s Globe, has also earned critical scrutiny for its attraction of widely diverse audiences, for its influence on spectators’ behaviours, and for the impact of the space on acting styles, including its experimentation

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with what are called Original Practices (Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008; see also Purcell 2017b and Worthen 2017). Shakespeare festivals, particularly those in North America, have elicited some fascinating anthropological studies of the burgeoning industry of cultural tourism; of the ways in which ‘destination’ Shakespeare festivals merge high and low culture; and of how performances of Shakespeare outdoors (in parks, on college campuses, on beaches, even on city streets), often free, appeal to audiences comprising unusually diverse social groups (e.g., Holderness 1988; Knowles 1994; Kennedy 1998; Susan Bennett 2005). Alternatively, the experimental use of non-theatrical urban sites for Shakespearean performance, long a practice of European directors, has lately gained ground in the UK, North America and Australia, yielding site-specific performances that often become interactive or even immersive, offering performance critics opportunities to discover new relationships between playing spaces and reception (e.g., Worthen 2014: 80–147; Conkie 2017: 231–49; Prince 2017: 250–63). Dennis Kennedy’s The Spectator and the Spectacle (2009) provides perhaps the most anthropologically inflected analysis of how Shakespearean spectatorship has been influenced by different sites of performance, by different cultural practices, and by advances in media and modes of production.

2. ACTORS’ BODIES: CROSS-DRESSING, GENDER AND RACE The body of the actor emerged as a central preoccupation of performance critics in the late 1980s. Given impetus by Continental and American cultural historians and literary theorists, materialist Shakespeare critics borrowed ideas from Foucault (1977), Bakhtin (1965) and Laqueur (1990) to construct the performing body as a discursive site of struggle or appropriation, arguing that meanings, as summarized by Keir Elam (1996), are inscribed on the body of the actor, which therefore becomes a site of textual signification. Wary of such discursive readings of the body, Anthony Dawson reminded readers that the actor’s body is not only an abstract signifier, but a physical presence for spectators whose ‘participation’ in the performance ‘requires a way of thinking about the actor’s body that invests it with the rhetorical power to move, to affect the physical bodies of the spectators and to signify as the person who both represents and is represented’ (1996: 43). If male critics dominated conversation about the signification of the actor’s body, female critics in the 1990s soon registered how crucially gender played a role in such work. Judith Butler’s formulations of gender as inherently performative (1990, 1993) had a profound impact on feminist and queer studies. In them, she asserted that there is no fixed, essential nature of maleness or femaleness: rather, gender identification depends on performativity, a term she borrows from J. L. Austin and redefines as ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Butler 1993: 2). While theatre scholars have sometimes used ‘performativity’ simply to mean gender as performance, the cultural and discursive significance accorded it by Butler is of greater value in explaining how cross-gender

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casting works in the theatre. Her formulations helped to reinforce – and complicate – the work of historicist theatre scholars such as Laura Levine, who analysed links between theatrical transvestism and anti-theatrical tracts (1986); Jean Howard, who argued that the early modern theatre was ‘a site where there was considerable fluidity and multiplicity in the channeling of sexual energies’ (1994: 111; also 1988); and Stephen Orgel (1989, 1996) and Michael Shapiro (1994), who explored the ways in which cross-dressing male actors on the Elizabethan stage, both boys and men, might have been ‘read’ as women and might therefore have elicited desirous responses among male spectators. Speculation about how cross-dressing actors functioned transgressively in an Elizabethan culture which had strict gender norms eventually spurred interest in how cross-dressed performances by actors today – men and women both – might work just as potently to undermine essentialist beliefs about gender. This revolution in the way gender is viewed in Western societies today, born of the feminist movement but soon embracing the identity politics of LGBTQ and its ‘queering’ of gender roles, has inspired so many permutations of cross-dressing in Shakespeare productions – men playing women’s roles, women playing men’s roles, both playing roles regendered for the opposite sex and, most recently, characters played by actors whose gender is fluid – that they have become commonplace. Alisa Solomon suggested in 1997, ‘there’s a radical synergy between theater that displays its performance conventions and makes the fact of theater part of its subject, and the real-life, theater-like conventions of gender roles’ (5): transvestism in the theatre, therefore, mirrors the cultural constructedness of gender identity and thereby reveals to spectators the instability of a gender identification they may have taken as biologically determined, a revelation which can breed discomfort and opposition. A collection of essays a decade later took up Solomon’s invitation to explore how cross-gender casting in contemporary performances of Shakespeare – a number of them staged at Shakespeare’s Globe, where Original Practices prompted directors to experiment with using all-male, and eventually all-female, acting companies – both challenges and discomforts spectators (Bulman 2008); and Elizabeth Klett (2009) analysed the gender dynamics of several recent productions in the UK which featured well-known actresses in iconic male roles. Other performance critics have focused more acutely on the affective work that women’s bodies do in contemporary stagings of Shakespeare. In a series of provocative case studies inspired in part by Dawson’s insistence on spectators’ affective response to the physical body of the actor, Carol Chillington Rutter, intending them ‘as a corrective to feminist criticism’s preoccupation with discursive bodies,’ writes about performance ‘in a body-conscious language attentive to feeling, to the itch and pleasures of desire, and to pain’; attentive, too, to ‘theatre’s “feminine” unruliness and the unpredictable … theory-resisting effects performance generates,’ and ‘fixing scrutiny on the woman’s body as bearer of gendered meanings [that] do not disappear when words run out or characters fall silent’ (2001: xiv–xv). In a similar vein, Roberta Barker evaluates whether contemporary performances of tragedies by Shakespeare and others, with their insistent focus on ‘female suffering, madness and

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death,’ work to clarify spectators’ struggle to ‘re-negotiate gender identities after the impact of Second Wave feminism’ (2007: 2); and Pascale Aebischer marginalizes the ‘white male subject of tragedy’ in order to foreground ‘gendered and racial Others’ – almost always women – whose bodies are ‘silenced, stigmatised, mutilated, [and] erased’ in Shakespeare’s playtexts but ‘fill the empty spaces of our stages and screens, their textual absences compensated for by their physical presence,’ performance allowing them to provide spectators with ‘alternative narratives, viewpoints, and protagonists’ (2004: 5). Performing the ‘racial Other’ has been a subject of even more recent critical debate. In the wake of the Civil Rights era, several historicist scholars – Eldred Jones (1965), Anthony Barthelemy (1987), Ania Loomba (1989), Kim F. Hall (1995) – laid the groundwork for future performance criticism by examining how race was constructed and performed in Renaissance England. Errol Hill (1984) filled a gap in theatre history in his account of Black Shakespearean actors on nineteenth- and twentieth-century stages (1984); Dympna Callaghan’s feminist exploration of how gender and race were performed on the Shakespearean stage (2000) focused more squarely on theatrical practices such as cross-dressing and ‘blacking up’; and Virginia Mason Vaughan (2005) added considerably to our understanding of how race was variously conceived over three centuries of Shakespeare productions. Critics have also singled out particular plays and characters to illustrate ways in which more recent performances of race on stage and film have involved complex negotiations among actors, audiences, and cultural biases. For example, Alden and Virginia Vaughan (1991) detail how Caliban has been variously appropriated to reveal not only the systemic oppression of the non-Western Other (as in the enslavement of Black Africans or the suppression and dispossession of Native Americans) but also the resistance of the Other to hegemonic cultural norms (as in the histories of rebellion among Caribbean or South African populations of color). Virginia Vaughan’s study of Othello and contextual history (1994) likewise examines how the play in performance has shaped and reflected cultural attitudes towards Blackness at different times. Through a more cultural materialist lens, Barbara Hodgdon has analysed how performances of race and other types of ‘otherness’ have increased Shakespeare’s cultural capital in case studies of Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and Midsummer Night’s Dream (1998), while Francesca Royster has analysed performative gestures of race in Titus Andronicus (2000) and the evolution of how constructions of Cleopatra’s racial identity have evolved in performance in Becoming Cleopatra (2003). Volumes devoted to the performance history of individual plays, such as Lois Potter’s on Othello (2002) and Carol Chillington Rutter’s on Antony and Cleopatra (2020), provide fascinating accounts of how even in contemporary performances, characters identified as Other have had their race occluded (Cleopatra), or been played by white actors in blackface (Aaron the Moor, Othello), and been used to highlight or exacerbate contemporary cultural anxieties about racial identity. In a wide-ranging essay that explores the ontological history of race and racial ‘passing’, Margo Hendricks (2005) does for race what Judith Butler has done for gender: argues that race is ‘a performative act … founded upon behavior, biophysicality, and spectacle’ (524) and dependent on inherently unstable and culturally

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mutable signifiers. Furthermore, she argues, passing for white or Black, as actors regularly do on stage, renders any ‘search for authentic performances of blackness in Shakepearean performance’ futile (525), for racial passing is ‘a self-conscious “performative enactment” of those very norms’ – social, political, juridical – that it presumes to violate (516). Other critics dealing with the semiotics of race and performance have spoken more directly to contemporary theatrical practice. ‘Colour blind’ or nontraditional casting, for example, has a long theatrical history which only recently has been addressed by Shakespeare critics, most passionately by Ayanna Thompson, whose edited collection (2006) debates whether in fact there is any such thing as colour blind casting: whether, like African American playwright August Wilson, one objects to the practice of disregarding racial difference in casting – assuming that spectators will be blind to race – ‘as a tool of the Cultural Imperialists’ (1996; cited by Thompson 2006: 1), or, on the contrary, whether casting actors of colour in roles not traditionally associated with race, colour or ethnicity encourages spectators to read the actors’ bodies discursively and to attach contemporary cultural and political meanings to the characters’ outsider status, social class or subjection in an attempt to combat systemic racism. In a later work which builds on Margo Hendricks’s assessment of ‘passing’ as a factor that destabilizes any certainty of racial identity, Thompson (2011) assesses how race, and race in Shakespeare, has been used for various and often conflicting purposes in contemporary American discourse. Understanding performance in ways that extend beyond theatre and film to embrace the broader definitions advanced by Schechner and Turner, she uses the cultural capital of ‘Shakespeare’ to elucidate the social and political controversy over what constitutes race and racism in America today. Her chapters examine, among other things, multicultural casting in classical theatre companies, legal cases involving the use of blackface in Othello, the inclusion of Shakespeare in arts programs for at-risk Hispanic youth in inner-cities, and amateur Shakespeare performances by Asian Americans that were uploaded to YouTube – all of which, in different ways, have helped to ‘deconstruct regressive racial politics of Shakespearean performance history’ (18). In expanding our understanding of performance to include the uses to which Shakespeare is put in popular culture and among diverse populations, Thompson draws attention as well to cross-cultural linkages that intersect with the power dynamics displayed in post-colonial, and what are variously called intercultural or global, performances of Shakespeare.

3. THE POWER DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL SHAKESPEARE Non-Anglophone performances of Shakespeare, commonly referred to in the past as ‘foreign Shakespeare’, sharpen the issue of Shakespearean cultural appropriation, because translation of the plays into another language is always a form of cultural adaptation: it liberates directors from the original text and thus from the (oppressive) authority of ‘Shakespeare’. Unsurprisingly, non-Anglophone productions have introduced experimental styles of performance to challenge

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the more entrenched aesthetics of Anglophone Shakespearean productions. New theories of acting and staging that emerged on the Continent during the second half of the twentieth century (by such seminal figures as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba and Jacques Lecoq) continue to have some bearing on UK and North American productions, although their influence has been far greater on contemporary European directors such as Peter Zadek, Giorgio Strehler, Patrice Chéreau, Liviu Cuilei and others whose productions, reviewed in a special issue of Cahiers Élisabéthains (Cinpoeş and Valls-Russell 2018), have embraced the aesthetics and politics of avant-garde theatre with far more conviction. Recently, the practices of Asian theatre, seen especially in work by celebrated directors such as Yukio Ninagawa and Lin Zhaohua whose productions have toured internationally, have made a considerable impact on European and North American directors such as Ariane Mnouchkine and Robert Lepage. This exposure to the theatre aesthetics of other cultures has had a liberating influence on Anglophone productions of Shakespeare. But a debate has arisen over the direction in which cultural influence moves: whether there is a reciprocity of influence between, for example, Asian and European theatre aesthetics – a genuine intercultural exchange that leads to a greater mutual understanding of difference – or whether a growing homogeneity of styles is symptomatic of Western imperialism, with European and American theatre companies appropriating elements of Asian theatre as a form of post-colonial theft and exporting their own productions as a form of cultural hegemony, making ‘global’ a term connoting geo-political power. A number of scholars have considered the theoretical implications of global theatre over the past three decades (e.g. Bharucha 1993, Pavis 1996, and Knowles 2010); and building on such work, Alexa Alice Joubin has recently surveyed the multiple ways in which global Shakespeare defies conventional geo-political conceptions of nationhood, arguing that ‘Global Shakespeare needs … maps that are based on mobile cultures and can account for the liminality of the aesthetics and politics of performing Shakespeare,’ since intercultural performances, by ‘unmark[ing]’ their own ‘cultural origins … work against assumptions about politically defined geographies’ (2017: 432–3). Questions about the value of global Shakespeare inform discussions not only of the translation and adaptation of the plays into non-Anglophone cultural performances, but also of recent international festivals in which ‘foreign’ companies have been invited to perform in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, such as those sponsored by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe. The international performances of the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012, a celebratory event hosted in the UK which coincided with the International Olympic Games in London that summer, are richly detailed in three anthologies, edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (2013); Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (2013); and Prescott and Sullivan (2015). Essays in these collections ask – some explicitly, others implicitly – what political or cultural function such festivals serve, what they reveal about performance as an intercultural exchange, and how they come to terms with residual issues of a colonial past: with issues of power, privilege, subjugation and cultural identity.

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Recent groundbreaking work on ‘foreign’ Shakespeare has challenged the work of earlier performance critics who regarded intercultural aesthetics as important only in so far as they inform Anglophone productions. The study of non-Anglophone productions as significant in their own right began to gain legitimacy more than twenty-five years ago with Dennis Kennedy’s anthology Foreign Shakespeare (1993) in which, symptomatic of that period, all but a couple of essays focused on European stagings. Since the millennium, the most remarkable proliferation of new work on performance has turned its gaze on Asia: Performing Shakespeare in Japan (Ryuta, Carruthers, Gillies 2001); Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (Li 2003); World-wide Shakespeares (Massai 2005); Chinese Shakespeares (Joubin 2009); Shakespeare in Asia (Kennedy and Lan 2010); and Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (Trivedi and Ryuta 2010). Crucially, these works abandon the totalizing discourse that has often marred discussions of post-colonial theatre. Instead, they draw important distinctions among the ways Shakespeare is performed and understood in India, Japan, China and other nations whose power, both economic and cultural, is becoming more insistently felt in the West. Critical interest has begun to be expressed, too, in the cultural import of Shakespearean performances in African and Latin American countries. Symptomatic perhaps of the relatively slower economic development of these countries, the impact of their ‘Shakespeare’ has been seeping only gradually into Western theatre, and major directors whose productions are invited to urban centres such as London and New York have yet to emerge. Recent collections such as Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Dymkowski and Carson 2010) and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (Bulman 2017; see Fischer 2020), however, include significant coverage of contemporary stage and film adaptations in African countries, including those that were performed at the World Shakespeare Festival, and have assessed the cultural authority of performing Shakespeare in, for example, South African educational and prison settings (see Goddard 2015, Gordon 2017, Massai 2017 and Seeff 2017). In addition, the foremost translator and adaptor of Shakespeare’s plays for Latin American theatre and film, Alfredo Modenessi from Mexico, has in several collections written perceptively about what is lost and gained in translation (e.g. Modenessi 2004, 2016, 2017). Such work invites further exploration not only of the ways in which African and Latin American cultures are shaping ‘Shakespeare’ to their own purposes, but also of their potential impact on the global Shakespeare community.

4. MEMORY, COGNITION AND THE ARCHIVE In the past few years, performance critics have also turned their gaze inward, upon their own work, to investigate how they themselves ‘recreate’ performance in their writings, and to what end. This investigation of their own critical practice becomes especially vital when one considers that often criticism is written in response not to performances witnessed (the experience of recording one’s immediate responses to an event that is never the same, and never fully recoverable), but to performances

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recalled through aids such as reviews, interviews, essays and memoirs by actors and directors, and theatrical remains (costumes, sketches, rehearsal photos, prompt scripts, programs, stage properties) – the materiality of performance enshrined in archives. Scholars such as Joseph Roach (1996), Peggy Phelan (1997) and Marvin Carlson (2001), influenced by Turner’s and Schechner’s work on anthropology and theatre, have discussed performance as loss and performance criticism as an act of cultural mnemonics, an attempt to recapture what is lost through an imaginary reconstruction facilitated by material leftovers. If such criticism cannot capture the experience of live theatre with the urgency of eye-witness responses, then how does it differ from traditional stage history? Peter Holland’s anthology about memory and the reconstruction of Shakespearean performance (2006) and Barbara Hodgdon’s richly documented discussion of performance and Shakespeare archives (2016) address this question by mapping the roles that theatrical remains play in histories of performance culture. They interrogate the archival work that performance critics do, re-conceiving that work as itself a type of performance which not only draws on ghostly traces of stage productions, but also manifests the persistence of performance processes which are by nature transient, spectral and, some would argue, unrecoverable. Critics themselves, in other words, become authors of the performances they write about. Yet sceptics counter that such critical self-consciousness is symptomatic of a recognition that their post-structuralist agenda has played itself out: that, in an attempt to decentre ‘Shakespeare’, performance critics have substituted themselves as the central players. Is performance as unrecoverable as is sometimes claimed? Is there no value in the persistence of theatre historiography? What forces may determine reception and recovery? Such questions have recently been deepened by scholars who have used theories of cognition to explain how memory shaped the way in which actors learned their roles for the Elizabethan stage, how it affected reception among audiences then, and how it continues to shape acting and affect reception today. The groundbreaking work of scholars such as Bruce McConachie (2008), Lina Perkins Wilder (2010) and Evelyn Tribble (2011) on the neurological functioning of actors and audiences has demonstrated how cognitive science, judiciously used, can help to reveal the complexities of performance and reception.

5. DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SHAKESPEAREAN PERFORMANCES Advances in digital technology have had a bracing impact on what Shakespearean performance – its reception, its recuperation – means today: what it is and what it does. The internet provides ready access to a nearly infinite variety of recorded performances of Shakespeare, even to fragments of performance. Websites offer interactive programs that allow users to view and review, combine and recombine elements of performance – often using multiple versions of a play – to produce a new work and to make their own ‘Shakespeare’, thus realizing in digital form what performance critics of stage productions have relied on memory and archival

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prompts to achieve. As Alan Galey has cogently analysed in his study of how advances in information technologies over four hundred years have shaped the Shakespearean archive and media history (Galey 2014), digitalization has fundamentally altered how we view Shakespeare today, what we view as Shakespeare, how performances are disseminated and how we understand the cultural work they do. While much has been written about how the internet is changing the ways in which viewers access Shakespeare, most comprehensively in a collection edited by Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (2014), speculative questions arise with increasing frequency. How, for example, is digital technology altering the nature of what is understood by performance? How are interactive media influencing live performances of Shakespeare – in theatres and other venues – and re-shaping both spectators’ expectations and the roles they are invited to assume? As Aneta Mancewicz discovers in her study of the increasingly complex interconnectedness of digital media and more conventional theatrical practices in European productions of Shakespeare (2014), and as Thomas Cartelli explores more theoretically in his book on recent experimental productions by avant-garde directors in Europe and North America (2019), intermediality (as this phenomenon has been termed) has revolutionized twenty-first-century Shakespeare performances and redefined reception. When live theatre incorporates new digital technologies, as it has done to wide acclaim in Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies, deemed by Cartelli ‘the most thoroughly mediatized production of Shakespeare on record’ (2017: 267), what sort of hybridity results? Just as interactive websites, video games and social media have foregrounded the agency of the spectator as player, requiring each person to respond to textual and visual prompts, to pursue different links, and to construct his or her own narrative trajectories, so theatre companies have embraced this new role for the audience not as a collective, but as individuals responsible for shaping their own experience. These companies have found ways to fragment the play, allowing spectators to move about the playing space, choose which scenes to watch, and dip into performance much as they might surf the internet. Such practices are radically redefining what experiencing a theatrical performance of Shakespeare means. They are redefining, too, the ethics of spectatorship, as Pascale Aebischer details in her account of individuals who watch ‘live’ performances streamed online, in private, some of which have empowered them to become players and even to affect the outcome of a performance (Aebischer 2017). What happens, she asks, when digital media ‘facilitate the fragmentation of Shakespearean narratives and the audience’s ability to encounter Shakespearean characters in their moments of crisis and respond to them individually, immediately, and directly … while remaining protected from the embarrassment caused by the reverse gaze in the theatre’? (318). What happens when digital media ‘empower spectators to become co-producers of plotlines that were only implicit in the plays’? (318) What then is the spectator’s ethical responsibility to Shakespeare? What becomes of the plays, and of Shakespeare as an authoritative presence? Is the Shakespearean script just the starting point, the inspiration for an immersive event in which one participates in one’s own performance, the endpoint for a self-absorption towards which one’s involvement with social media inevitably leads?

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In a radical shift from what once was understood by ‘live’ performance – ‘liveness’ being a basic tenet of Performance Studies – digitalization has altered our understanding of what the term means. Philip Auslander has argued that ‘liveness’ is a historically contingent concept that evolved only when the reproduction of a ‘live’ performance in another medium such as film became possible (2008: 56). The internet has further broadened what ‘live’ means by offering users a virtual reality in which they may participate; and digital relays for audiences in cinemas around the world of ‘live’ productions originating at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the Stratford Festival of Canada and an increasing number of other companies, render ‘liveness’ a problematic concept which has broadened to include a sense of co-presence among internet users or a connectedness to others afforded by social media (61–2) – an issue of current critical interest, as is evident in Stephen  Purcell’s essay on ‘Reformulating Liveness’ (2017a) and in an edited collection on Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Broadcast Experience (Aebischer, Greenhalgh and Osborne 2018). Even more radically, advances in digital technology have decentred the actor (in ways analogous to how post-modern performances are said to decentre the text) so that what in live theatre might be considered the fundamental fact of the aesthetic experience – the actor’s body – is displaced by a digitalized simulacrum. If what remains is only a simulation of the theatrical performance, what has theatre become, and what is the actor’s function in it? This ontological crux is similar to that discussed by D. N. Rodowick (2007), who argues that the photographic ontology of the cinematic experience has been degraded and finally made absent by digitalization. When a stage actor’s ‘liveness’ is no more ‘live’ than the ‘live’ broadcast in which the absent actor appears, then irony itself becomes, like reality, a virtual concept. In a final irony, digital technology has raised the question of whether the plurality of responses to any given performance written by ordinary spectators and made instantly available online and among social media – blogs, Twitter, Facebook – will eventually replace traditional critical reviews with something far more democratic but less discriminating (Prescott 2013), thereby challenging the role of the specialist performance critic and, to a degree, making obsolete the kind of criticism whose history over the past fifty years has been recounted in the previous pages. This is a possibility with which any Shakespeare performance critic must come to terms, and it is a sobering note on which to conclude my account of the impact of digital technology on Shakespearean performance.

6. SHAKESPEAREAN PERFORMANCE ECOCRITICISM The term ‘ecocriticism’ was coined in 1978 by William Rueckert in an essay called ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ to signify a growing body of work devoted to exploring literature that deals with the natural world, with environmental concerns, and with ecosystems. While early examples of such work tended to focus on non-fiction or on fiction with a scientific grounding, ecocriticism increasingly borrowed methodologies from other disciplines and ideological

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approaches – political, philosophical, feminist, anthropological, poststructuralist – to study literary representations of how human activity has been the dominant, and often deleterious, influence on changes in climate and the environment in our current geological age, appropriately termed the Anthropocene. Ecocriticism began to infiltrate Shakespeare studies only after the millennium, in works such as Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare (2006), Sharon O’Dair’s review essay ‘The State of the Green’ (2008), Steve Mentz’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009), Rosemary Gaby’s Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (2011), Laurie Shannon’s The Accommodated Animal (2013), Vin Nardizzi’s Shakespeare’s Wooden Os (2013), Simon Estok’s Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (2015) and Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche’s Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (2017). These works have sought for the most part to uncover how Shakespeare’s plays addressed environmental issues or ecologically disruptive practices in the early modern world that speak with even greater urgency to readers today: among them, climate change and extreme shifts in weather patterns; the impact of civilization on biodiversity; improper land use and resulting food shortages; overpopulation and the unregulated exploitation of natural resources. Such historicist work achieved its most meticulously researched expression in Randall Martin’s Shakespeare and Ecology (2015), which explored in fascinating detail how, for example, concerns with deforestation and the use of fossil fuels inform Merry Wives; concerns with land-use and convertible husbandry, As You Like It; or concerns with the disruption of agriculture by militarization and the production of gunpowder, Henry IV Part Two and Macbeth. But what has all this to do with performance criticism? Tellingly, only in an epilogue does Martin suggest that ‘Shakespeare’s greatest possibilities for becoming our eco-contemporary … lie not in academic discourse but in performance’ (167). To illustrate how theatre companies can use physical spaces to influence ‘the bodily interactions’ of actors, characters, and audience members in order to create ‘an environmentalist ethos’ (167), he analyses how Rupert Goold’s production of The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2006 radically relocated the play from a Mediterranean island to ‘a harsh polar and/or postcatastrophic landscape’ – the landscape itself becoming ‘an active character’ – to dramatize in the stories of Prospero and Miranda, Ariel and Caliban, the power of ‘adaptive survival against environmental adversity’ (168), thereby offering audiences a model for dealing with their own ecological crises. But the use of Shakespearean performances to foreground current environmental concerns or to raise ecological awareness has not caught on quickly, and perhaps for this reason, ecological performance criticism of Shakespeare is still in its infancy. The boldest intervention to date has been Jennifer Mae Hamilton’s ‘This Contentious Storm’: An Ecocritical and Performance history of King Lear (2017), which traces how Lear’s storm has been variously read as a providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, or another type of phenomenon, then explores how performances of the play, from the Jacobean stage through today, have used the storm to comment on the interaction of human beings with nature, yoking the moral universe of the play to human need in an era of growing environmental awareness. Even more recently, a special issue of Shakespeare

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Bulletin edited by Randall Martin and Evelyn O’Malley (2018), acknowledging the paucity of contributions by ecocritics to Shakespearean performance criticism, offers six case studies in hopes of pointing the way to future scholarship. Four of the six analyse site-specific (and typically open-air) productions that enhance ‘all participants’ awareness of living in environmental uncertainty, risk, improvisation, and possible (re-)enchantment’ (379). All four discuss local, small-budget and (to a degree) community-based performances which present an alternative ‘to forms of resource-heavy mainstream theatre’ (382). The two essays that flank these four deal with productions by more mainstream theatres and are methodologically closer to Martin’s ecological interpretation of Goold’s production of The Tempest: one offers an ecofeminist reading of the Princess of France and her companions’ domestication of the King’s park in Love’s Labour’s Lost at Shakespeare’s Globe (2009); the other, an ecopolitical reading of how death is performed in Blasted, a dystopian play by Sarah Kane (1995, revived in 2010) that revises King Lear’s affective aversion to dying. Neither of these essays, however, is as overtly concerned with environmental issues as the other four are: neither addresses the failure of ‘larger and more cityoriented companies’ (383) such as the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe, or of major Shakespeare companies in North America – those with big budgets, government subsidies and/or corporate sponsorship, and a conspicuous consumption of resources – to take the lead in ecologically aware or environmentally sustainable productions. These six essays, in the view of the editors, model how ‘twenty-first century productions engage with the critical and staging opportunities afforded by today’s rapidly changing environmental relations’, even if only ‘in preliminary ways’ (387). In doing so, they urge Shakespeare companies to take more seriously the opportunities to raise pressing ecological concerns through performance and to implement more sustainable practices in their productions. Other theatre companies are doing so; and some, in their commitment to environmental activism, reveal how vigorously major Shakespeare companies need to be shaken from their complacency. The internationally renowned touring company Complicité, for example, founded in 1983 and based in London, recently announced that it had joined more than two hundred cultural organizations and artists (the number now stands at over 600) to declare a Climate and Ecological Emergency as part of a new environmentalist initiative called Culture Declares Emergency, launched in April 2019, which seeks to explore how arts organizations can ‘act collectively and individually to shift paradigms’(Complicité 2019). In making that announcement, Complicité’s Artistic Director Simon McBurney warned that The world is on fire. Those with no voice are the most at risk … Countries and continents, peoples and habitats, animals and ecosystems. ‘Culture’ is the story with which we shape the world and give meaning to our lives. So what does it mean when those who feed the fire control the narrative? To survive we must tell different stories and drown out the tired old tales of culture as economic growth with profit its only outcome. (Complicité 2019)

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Statements such as this challenge Shakespeare companies to become more environmentally aware and to promote such awareness through performance – in essence, to ‘tell different stories’. And in this endeavour, Shakespearean ecocriticism could play a crucial role. It could encourage theatre companies to stage productions that educate audiences to consider the causes of, and to take responsibility for, the deepening Anthropocene crisis that – without swift remedial action – will eventually consume us all.

NOTE In different form, some portions of this chapter first appeared in my introductory essays to three anthologies I edited – Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (1996), Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (2008) and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (2017) – which are listed in the references.

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale (2004), Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aebischer, Pascale (2017), ‘Technology and the Ethics of Spectatorship’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 302–20, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aebischer, Pascale, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne, eds (2018), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury. Artaud, Antonin ([1938] 1958), The Theatre and Its Double, trans. M. Richards, New York: Grove Press. Auslander, Philip (2008), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965), Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Islowsky, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Bakhtin, Mikhail ([1975] 1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. Barker, Roberta (2007), Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard (1987), Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Barthes, Roland ([1967] 1988), ‘The Death of the Author’, Aspen, 5–6; in Stephen Heath (ed. and trans.), Image-Music-Text, 142–8, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Beckerman, Bernard (1962), Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599–1609, New York: Macmillan. Bennett, Susan (1990), Theatre Audiences, London: Routledge. Bennett, Susan (2005), ‘Shakespeare on Vacation’, in Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 494–508, Oxford: Blackwell. Bennett, Susan and Christie Carson, eds (2013), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bennett, Tony (1983), ‘Text, Readers, Reading Formations’, Literature and History 9: 214–27. Bharucha, Rustom (1993), Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London: Routledge. Blau, Herbert (1990), The Audience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brook, Peter (1968), The Empty Space, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Brown, John Russell (1966), Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance, London: Edward Arnold. Brown, John Russell (1974), Free Shakespeare, London: Heinemann. Bulman, James C., ed. (1996), Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, London: Routledge. Bulman, James C., ed. (2008), Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Bulman, James C., ed. (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Abingdon: Routledge. Callaghan, Dympna (2000), Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, Abingdon: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin (1989), Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carlson, Marvin (1990), Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Carlson, Marvin (2001), The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carson, Christie and Peter Kirwan, eds (2014), Shakespeare and the Digital World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2008), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cartelli, Thomas (2017), ‘High-Tech Shakespeare in a Mediatized Globe: Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies and the Problem of Spectatorship’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 267–83, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cartelli, Thomas (2019), Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cinpoeş, Nicoleta and Janice Valls-Russell, eds (2018), ‘Europe’s Shakespeare(s): A Special Issue’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 96. Complicité (2019), ‘New trailer, 3 new Complicité productions & Artistic Directors of the Future’, Complicité. Available online: https://mailchi.mp/complicite/new_trailer_3_ new_complicite_shows?e=a8b45b8f8d (accessed 21 November 2020). Conkie, Rob (2017), ‘Reverie of a Shakespearean Walker’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 231–49, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawson, Anthony B. (1996), ‘Performance and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault, and the Actor’s Body’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, 29–45, London and New York: Routledge.

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De Marinis, Marina (1987), ‘Dramaturgy of the Spectator’ (trans. Paul Dwyer), The Drama Review, 31 (2): 100–14. Dessen, Alan C. (1984), Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dessen, Alan C. (1995), Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dolan, Jill (1988), The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dymkowski, Christine and Christie Carson, eds (2010), Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edmondson, Paul, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, eds (2013), A Year of Shakespeare: ReLiving the World Shakespeare Festival, London: Bloomsbury. Egan, Gabriel (2006), Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism, London: Routledge. Elam, Keir (1980), The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, London: Methuen. Elam, Keir (1996), ‘“In what chapter of his bosom?”: Reading Shakespeare’s Bodies’, in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 2, 141–64, London: Routledge. Estok, Simon C. (2015), Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory, London: Bloomsbury. Fischer, Susan L. (2020), ‘Review Article: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance’, Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 101 (1): 121–36. Foucault, Michel ([1969] 1979), ‘What Is an Author?’ (lecture), in Josué V. Harari (ed. and trans.), Textual Strategies, 141–60, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Gaby, Rosemary (2011), Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Galey, Alan (2014), The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goddard, Lynette (2015), ‘“Haply for I am black”: Shifting Race and Gender Dynamics in Talawa’s Othello’, in Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson (eds), Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, 248–63, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldman, Michael (1972), Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gordon, Colette (2017), ‘Open and Closed: Workshopping Shakespeare in South Africa’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 512–30, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Granville-Barker, Harley (1927–1947), Prefaces to Shakespeare, five series, London, Sidgwick & Jackson. Gurr, Andrew (1987), Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew (1992), The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Kim F. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Hamilton, Jennifer Mae (2017), ‘This Contentious Storm’: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear, London: Bloomsbury. Hendricks, Margo (2005), ‘Visions of Color: Spectacle, Spectators, and the Performance of Race’, in B. Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 511–26, Oxford: Blackwell. Hill, Errol (1984), Shakespeare in Sable, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hodgdon, Barbara (1996), ‘Looking for Mr. Shakespeare After “The Revolution”: Robert Lepage’s Intercultural Dream Machine’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, 68–91, London: Routledge. Hodgdon, Barbara (1998), The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hodgdon, Barbara (2005), ‘Introduction: A Kind of History’, in Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 1–10, Oxford: Blackwell. Hodgdon, Barbara (2016), Shakespeare, Performance, and the Archive, Abingdon: Routledge. Hodgdon, Barbara and W. B. Worthen, eds (2005), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, Oxford: Blackwell. Holderness, Graham (1988), ‘Bardolatry: or, The Cultural Materialist’s Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon’, in Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth, 2–15, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holland, Peter, ed. (2006), Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, Jean E. (1988), ‘Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (4): 418–40. Howard, Jean E. (1991), ‘Women as Spectators, Spectacles, and Paying Customers’, in David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, 68–74, London: Routledge. Howard, Jean E. (1994), The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, London: Routledge. Jones, Eldred D. (1965), Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joubin, Alexa Alice (2009), Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange, New York: Columbia University Press. Joubin, Alexa Alice (2017), ‘Global Shakespeare Criticism Beyond the Nation State’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 423–40, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karim-Cooper, Farah and Tiffany Stern, eds (2013), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, London: Bloomsbury. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. (1993), Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, Dennis (1998), ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism’, Theatre Journal, 50 (2): 175–88. Kennedy, Dennis (2009), The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, Dennis and Yong Li Lan, eds (2010), Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Klett, Elizabeth (2009), Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knowles, Ric (1994), ‘Shakespeare, 1993, and the Discourses of the Stratford Festival, Ontario’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (2): 211–25. Knowles, Ric (2010), Theatre and Interculturalism, London: Red Globe Press. Laqueur, Thomas (1990), Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levine, Laura (1986), Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization 1579–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Li, Ruru (2003), Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Loomba, Ania (1989), Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mancewicz, Aneta (2014), Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, Randall (2015), Shakespeare and Ecology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Randall and Evelyn O’Malley, eds (2018), ‘Eco-Shakespeare in Performance: Introduction’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 36 (3): 377–90. Massai, Sonia, ed. (2005), World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, Abingdon: Routledge. Massai, Sonia (2017), ‘Shakespeare With and Without Its Language’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 475–94, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McConachie, Bruce A. (2008), Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McGuire, Philip C. (1985), Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences, Berkeley: University of California Press. Mentz, Steve (2009), At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, New York: Continuum. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel (2004), ‘A Double Tongue Within Your Mask: Translating Shakespeare in/to Spanish-Speaking Latin America’, in Ton Hoensalaars (ed.), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, 240–54, London: Thomson. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel (2017), ‘“Victim of Improvisation” in Latin America: Shakespeare Out-Sourced and In-Taken’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 549–67, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel and Margarida Gandara Rauen (2016), ‘Shakespearean Tragedy in Latin America and the Caribbean’, in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, 864–80, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munroe, Jennifer and Rebecca Laroche (2017), Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, London: Bloomsbury. Nardizzi, Vin (2013), Shakespeare’s Wooden Os, Toronto: University Press of Toronto. O’Dair, Sharon (2008), ‘The State of the Green: A Review Essay on Shakespearean Ecocriticism’, Shakespeare, 4 (4): 459–77. Orgel, Stephen (1989), ‘Nobody’s Perfect, Or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1): 7–30. Orgel, Stephen (1996), Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pavis, Patrice (1992), Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger, Abingdon: Routledge. Pavis, Patrice, ed. (1996), The Intercultural Performance Reader, Abingdon: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy (1997), Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, New York: Routledge. Potter, Lois (2002), Othello, Shakespeare in Performance Series, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Prescott, Paul (2013), Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prescott, Paul and Erin Sullivan, eds (2015), Shakespeare on the Global Stage, London: Bloomsbury. Prince, Kathryn (2017), ‘Intimate and Epic Macbeths in Contemporary Performance’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 250–63, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Purcell, Stephen (2017a), ‘“It’s All a Bit of a Risk”: Reformulating Liveness in TwentyFirst-Century Performances of Shakespeare’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 284–301, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Purcell, Stephen (2017b), ‘Practice-as-Research and Original Practices’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 425–44. Rabkin, Gerald (1985), ‘Is There a Text on this Stage? Theatre/Authorship/Interpretation’, Performing Arts Journal, 9 (2/3): 142–59. Roach, Joseph (1996), Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia University Press. Rodowick, D. N. (2007), The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Royster, Francesca T. (2000), ‘“White-Limed Walls”: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (4): 432–55. Royster, Francesca T. (2003), Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rueckert, William (1978), ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’, Iowa Review, 9 (1): 71–86. Rutter, Carol Chillington (2001), Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage, London: Routledge. Rutter, Carol Chillington (2020), Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare in Performance Series, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ryuta, Minami, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies, eds (2001), Performing Shakespeare in Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schechner, Richard (1977), Essays on Performance Theory 1970–1976, London: Routledge. Revised and expanded as Performance Theory (1988). Schechner, Richard (1985), Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, Richard (2006), Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Seeff, Adele F. (2017), ‘Indigenizing Shakespeare in South Africa’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 531–48, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Shannon, Laurie (2013), The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespeare’s Locales, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shapiro, Michael (1994), Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shaughnessy, Robert (2002), The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Solomon, Alisa (1997), Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender, London: Routledge. Styan, J. L. (1967), Shakespeare’s Stagecraft, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Styan, J. L. (1977), The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Ayanna, ed. (2006), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, Abingdon: Routledge. Thompson, Ayanna (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tribble, Evelyn (2011), Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Trivedi, Poonam and Minami Ryuta, eds (2010), Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia, London: Routledge. Turner, Victor (1982), From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan (1991), Caliban: A Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaughan, Virginia Mason (1994), Othello: A Contextual History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaughan, Virginia Mason (2005), Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werner, Sarah, ed. (2010), New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilder, Lina Perkins (2010), Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, August (1996), The Ground on Which I Stand, New York: Theater Communications Group. Worthen, W. B. (1989), ‘Deeper Meanings and Theatrical Technique: The Rhetoric of Performance Criticism’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (4): 440–55. Worthen, W. B. (1996), ‘Staging “Shakespeare”: Acting, Authority, and the Rhetoric of Performance’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, 12–28, London: Routledge. Worthen, W. B. (1997), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, W. B. (2014), Shakespeare Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, W. B. (2017), ‘Interactive, Immersive, Original Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 407–24.

CHAPTER 4.2

A–Z of key terms BRÍD PHILLIPS, WITH PETER KIRWAN AND KATHRYN PRINCE

This A–Z offers brief definitions and overviews of key terms used throughout this book. Words in bold cross-reference to other entries; at the end of each entry we cross-reference to chapters of the book where these concerns are explored further.

ACTING The practice and profession of performing in drama. Shakespeare acting traditions are globally diverse and allow for a wide range of autonomy on the part of actors. The influence of Konstantin Stanislavksi’s ‘system’, emphasizing rehearsal and the inner life of characters, has been profound on Western traditions (especially realism) that privilege the connection between actor and character. The centrality of Shakespeare to much classical actor training (especially in the US and UK) has resulted in a wealth of literature on methods of performing Shakespeare, exemplified by the work of directors such as John Barton (Playing Shakespeare, Anchor Books, 1984), Declan Donnellan (The Actor and the Target, Nick Hern, 2002) and Peter Hall (Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, Oberon, 2003), voice practitioners such as Cicely Berry (Voice and the Actor, Harrap, 1973) and Patsy Rodenburg (The Actor Speaks, Methuen Drama, 1997) and text coaches such as Giles Block (Speaking the Speech, Nick Hern, 2013). See Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Barker.

ACTOR This is now the preferred (albeit not universal), gender-neutral term for cast members of all genders, replacing earlier binary divisions between actors and actresses. While much contemporary Shakespearean theatre privileges the director as the primary creative figure of a production, most actors shape the interpretation of their given role or roles. Some actors specialize in Shakespearean drama, developing extensively researched and practically tested understandings of roles across the course of a career. There is a large market for books by established Shakespearean actors recounting specific productions or career overviews; some examples include Antony Sher (Year of the King, Nick Hern, 1985), Harriet Walter (Brutus and Other Heroines, Nick Hern, 2016), Oliver Ford Davies (Shakespeare’s Fathers and Daughters, Bloomsbury,

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2017), Paterson Joseph (Julius Caesar and Me, Bloomsbury, 2018), and collections of interviews by scholars including Carol Chillington Rutter’s Clamorous Voices (Routledge, 1988). See Barker.

ADAPTATION Adaptations of Shakespeare’s dramatic works take many forms, as do the terms used to categorize adaptations. Julie Sanders, in Adaptation and Appropriation (2nd edition, Routledge, 2016), defines adaptation as a process of fitting a text to new audiences and readerships, often with the offering of commentary on a source, and often involving transposition or translation into a new genre; appropriation may make a more decisive break with the text on which it is based, and will not always advertise its relationship to its source(s). Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006) emphasizes the pleasure inherent in ‘repetition with variation’, leading to ‘the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ (2006: 4). She is particularly interested in adaptation between different media, tracking the movement of cultural capital in a way that, though not specific to Shakespeare studies, is certainly recognizable within this discipline. ‘Adaptation’ is sometimes used to apply to any production of Shakespeare which is by necessity a retelling; in other contexts, the term implies a more conscious break with tradition and form. The study of Shakespeare in adaptation requires attentiveness to the conventions of genre, audience, language and form governing the new work. See also The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation (Bloomsbury, 2021). See Joubin.

APPLIED SHAKESPEARE Applied Shakespeare uses the techniques of rehearsal and performance as a method for pedagogy, activism and change, often grounded in the approach developed by Augusto Boal in his Theatre of the Oppressed (Pluto, 1979). Boal’s more recent book, Games for Actors and Non-Actors (Routledge, 1992), discusses his engagements with Shakespeare in more detail. Among many ‘applied’ approaches to Shakespeare, Prison Shakespeare is perhaps the most developed in terms of practise, praxis and theory, creating a space for inmates to express themselves emotionally in ways that lie outside the routine. Projects such as Shakespeare Behind Bars (founded by Curt L. Tofteland), The Gallowfield Players (founded by Rowan Mackenzie) and Clean Break (founded by Jenny Hicks and Jacqueline Holborough) work with current and former inmates, aiming both to support members and to create change in the wider community. See Hartley, Dunn and Berry.

APPROPRIATION See adaptation.

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ARCHIVE AND REPERTOIRE According to Diana Taylor, performance history exists in an archive of material objects and also in a repertoire of embodied memories. Traditionally, theatre historians have consulted promptbooks, stage managers’ records, designers’ sketches and, sometimes, preserved props and costumes in archives. Alongside these, however, scholars of performance can also analyse actors’ gestures; seeing in Hamlet’s gaze into the skull’s empty eye sockets a lineage of Hamlets making, or not making, this iconic gesture, which evokes that history, if it is made, or signals its absence, if it is not made. More generally, major archives of Shakespeare in contemporary performance are held at producing theatres such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the National Theatre, and also at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Shakespeare Institute. Often, producing theatres outside of the UK have more latitude to disseminate archival materials including archival videos; in the UK, these must generally be viewed in situ. See Conkie; Resources.

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR As distinct from ‘director’, the Artistic Director of a theatre or company acts as a guiding force for that organization. The role is sometimes distinct from the Executive/Managing Director, who takes overall responsibility for the operational side of the organization. The Artistic Director is usually a practising director or actor who continues to create their own work within the organization (and may work outside it as well), and who has a major role in appointing associate artists, shaping the season and overseeing the organization’s overall artistic agenda, both as a figurehead and through day-to-day oversight. See Dustagheer; Williams and Ash.

AUDIENCES The audience is most easily understood as the primary receiver (real or anticipated) of the performance event. Especially in the twenty-first century, the audience has become a major focus of both qualitative and quantitative research, especially in reconstructed theatres using shared light where the role of the audience in impacting upon the performance is more explicit. Much theorization of audiences concerns the question of how far a given audience is understood as a singular entity that offers collective or aggregated response, and how far it is understood as a collection of individuals with very different experiences of the same event. The dangers of generalizing about audiences pose serious ethical issues (as discussed in the work of Paul Prescott). Critics are a subset of audience members who offer an articulation of their experience. See Kidnie.

AUTHENTICITY Contemporary Shakespeare performance is often compared, sometimes disparagingly, to ‘authentic’ Shakespeare, an imagined style that is linked to Original Practices

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and draws on research about early modern theatre practice as well as, sometimes, assumptions about what Shakespeare ‘intended’ or ‘would have wanted’. Authenticity is a vexed term in Shakespeare Studies, especially in relation to Original Practices as used in performances at Shakespeare’s Globe and the American Shakespeare Center. Tiffany Stern’s Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford University Press, 2000) has sometimes had the status of an instruction manual or bible in Original Practices, along with John Orrell and Andrew Gurr’s important theatre history work that influenced architecture and practice at Shakespeare’s Globe. A separate enduring conviction among some practitioners is that the punctuation and orthography of the 1623 Folio provides a key to ‘authentic’ performance and original pronunciation, as in the work of Graham James Watt or Neil Freeman. See Dustagheer.

BIOPOLITICS Biopolitics is a field of study that examines the intersection between the material human body and broader structures of power and authority (influenced, especially, by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Gallimard, 1975). It has been a valuable theoretical tool in interpreting histories of slavery, and Luna Dolezal’s 2016 review essay ‘Considering Performance as Biopolitical Critique’ (Performance Research, 21 (4): 140–1) identifies it as a key future direction for Performance Studies. See Lehmann.

BLOCKING Blocking is the theatrical term used to describe the arrangement of actors during a production. Blocking is normally determined in rehearsal and may be more or less fixed depending on the predilections of a director and the style of a company. Where blocking is more rigidly determined and expected to be replicated in each performance, details are often preserved in promptbooks. For more specialist forms of blocking relating to scenes of violence or sex, productions often employ specialist fight choreographers and intimacy directors. See Conkie; Julian and Solga.

CANON In theatre terms, canonical texts are those that enjoy an institutional privilege that allows them to be disproportionately studied, read, performed and referenced in relation to their peers. Shakespeare’s canonical position is an ongoing source of contention for many reasons including his use in colonial projects across the world; the crowding out of new work through the disproportionate platforming of older texts; the risks of conservatism and monotony in repeated re-production; and the use of Shakespeare as a vehicle for undesirable values. The reciprocal relationship between educational institutions and theatres reinforces the predominance of Shakespeare in the contemporary repertory. Shakespeare’s canonical status has been

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challenged by decolonization and appropriation practices that often use Shakespeare to combat dominant ideological structures. Within early modern drama, and even within Shakespeare’s own work, some plays enjoy more canonical status than others, resulting in a disparity in performance histories. See Price.

CASTING, NON-TRADITIONAL Casting is the practice of choosing actors to play roles, and has been a major source of activism, change and controversy in recent years. Conventions of realism tend to assume that an actor’s body will closely resemble that of the character that they are playing; as Shakespeare’s plays predominantly feature white European men as characters, this approach leads to a predominance of white male actors in Shakespeare productions. In recent years, as Barker discusses in her contribution to this volume, the alignment between actor and character along lines of gender, race, dis/ability, language and other identity markers has increasingly been challenged. The Non-Traditional Casting Project, as outlined in Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange (Oxford University Press, 2011), identified several useful models of casting for diversity, including ‘colourblind’, societal, conceptual and cross-cultural casting, outlined in Hartley, Dunn and Berry in this volume. See also Barker; Julian and Solga; Hartley, Dunn and Berry.

CELEBRITY Because of Shakespeare’s longstanding cultural capital and economic value, his plays attract celebrity casting, both as a way for an actor to demonstrate mastery of an iconic role such as Hamlet and as a strategy to ensure commercial success. Celebrity casting is most common in commercial theatres (especially in the theatre districts of Broadway and the West End), but also in major subsidized theatres across the world. Anna Blackwell’s Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2018) and Joseph Roach’s It (University of Michigan Press, 2007) consider the ways in which Shakespeare and celebrity intersect, as do analytical biographies including those in the Great Shakespeareans and Shakespeare in the Theatre series. See Bennett.

CHARACTER Characters are a key organizing principle of early modern drama, the dramatis personae whose choices and relationships form the drama. Character criticism, focusing on dramatic characters as complete constructs with inner lives, had its heyday in the early twentieth century commensurate with the practice of Konstantin Stanislavski, and is best represented in the works of earlier critics such as A. C. Bradley. Recent work including Cary M. Mazer’s Double Shakespeares: Emotional

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Realist Acting and Contemporary Performance (Routledge, 2015) considers the losses and gains of this approach to character, while Kim Solga’s Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) considers its ethical side. Character-based approaches persist in much acting training and scholarship, especially in dominant Western traditions where the character is the actor’s primary responsibility, and the process of discovering and determining character is a central concern of actors’ memoirs. See Williams and Ash.

COGNITIVE APPROACHES Cognitive theory is a branch of scholarship that posits a framework through which the operations of memory in plays can be understood. Evelyn Tribble in particular has used cognitive theory, most recently in Early Modern Actors & Shakespeare’s Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2017) to understand how Shakespeare’s plays anticipate acting  skills  including gesture, fighting, song, dance and more in addition to the traditional literary focus on speech. W. B. Worthen’s recent work Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2014) applies cognitive approaches to emerging forms of character criticism. See Kidnie.

COLOUR-BLIND SHAKESPEARE See casting.

COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE This volume focuses primarily on professional productions, but rehearsing and performing Shakespeare remains a major form of engagement among children, university students and amateur theatre groups of all sorts, as well as in applied theatre. Much community theatre takes place within the context of festivals and open-air performance, explored by Michael Dobson in Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Much practice-as-research and many experimental productions take place in the context of university rehearsals and productions of Shakespeare, and Andrew James Hartley’s collection Shakespeare on the University Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a rare volume to give this community attention. See Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Prescott.

COMPANIES Theatre companies can be either temporary or permanent, and represent the primary organizing principle for a given production. While some companies own or have permanent residency in a theatre, most companies operate without a permanent

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playing space and represent an informal or formal grouping of practitioners, usually under the leadership of an artistic director. ‘Company’ as a word is treated variously as both singular and plural, the latter more associated with companies whose ethos is built around collaboration and collective agency. Companies are often defined by a consistent creative agency (e.g. Cheek by Jowl, which exists as a vehicle for the work of co-artistic directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod), by a distinctive style (Propeller Theatre’s all-male Shakespeare productions) or by an ethos (Northern Broadsides’ commitment to producing work spoken using the accents of Northern England). Many Shakespeare-focused companies also produce work by other authors as part of their repertory. The word ‘company’ is also used to refer to the group of actors in a given production: see ensemble. See Williams and Ash; Price; Prescott.

CONTEMPORANEITY Since Jan Kott’s groundbreaking Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964 in English; 1961 in Polish), the issue of contemporary relevance has been explicitly linked to Shakespeare in performance. Historically, all Shakespeare productions have responded to their own era, particularly in terms of their aesthetics but also sometimes their correspondences to current events, especially in the adaptations of the Restoration and subsequent eras. In current criticism, the term is often juxtaposed with ‘heritage’ or ‘museum’ Shakespeare, which looks to the aesthetics of the past for inspiration; ‘contemporary’ Shakespeare speaks to its present moment, in its practices and/or its aesthetic. The term is often applied to a broad, non-specific aesthetic of modernism, though is often used more precisely to align a production with the time and place of its performance.

COSTUME Understood as the clothes worn by actors to signify a character, costume forms an important subset of the work of designers, with many practitioners specializing as costume designers. At one level costume is a visual signifier suitable for semiotic analysis, communicating to audiences details about a production’s setting and about a specific character’s identity and status, especially in how that changes throughout a production. Barbara Hodgdon’s important essay ‘Bride-ing the Shrew: Costumes that Matter’, Shakespeare Survey, 60 (2007): 72–83 offers a detailed case study in examining costumes through archives. Costume changes are usually key to communicating doubling to audiences. The effects of costume on an actor’s performance are often a concern of practice-as-research and Original Practices, especially in explorations of how historically specific costumes affect movement, gesture and speech. Many archives contain costume swatches (samples of fabric) and designs, and large theatres often offer costume hire facilities. See Barker; Julian and Solga.

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CRITICAL RACE STUDIES Critical Race Studies is the branch of scholarship that explores the representation and interpretation of race and racism across culture. Within early modern studies, and especially influenced by Kim F. Hall’s landmark study Things of Darkness (Cornell University Press, 1996), the #ShakeRace network has worked to develop resources and expand the exploration of race across Shakespeare and other early modern drama. In relation to contemporary performance, Critical Race Theory has been especially productive in analysing the politics of casting and representation of race (in relation to both actors and characters), decolonization of the stage and classroom, and reception of Shakespeare by critics and audiences. The intersections between Critical Race Studies and Shakespeare Performance Studies have been especially explored by Ayanna Thompson in ColorBlind Shakespeare (Routledge, 2006), Passing Strange (Oxford University Press, 2011) and special issues of Shakespeare Bulletin 27 (3) and Borrowers and Lenders 4 (1) and in the work of Farah Karim-Cooper at Shakespeare’s Globe. See Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Joubin; Massai; Barker; Lehmann.

CRITICISM/CRITICS Most of what we know about Shakespeare in performance before the advent of video recording technology is thanks to theatre critics. The term in this context refers to the writers who describe and interpret performance, resulting in a body of work that is both dependent on the original performance and a form of creation in its own right. For much of the last two centuries, theatre criticism was predominantly preserved in newspapers and other periodicals, though the explosion of theatre blogs and more dispersed forms of reviewing in the twenty-first century has challenged traditional gatekeeping. Paul Prescott’s Reviewing Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2013) captures the nuances of theatre criticism from the days of the gentleman critic to today’s bloggers, and Rob Conkie’s Writing Performative Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores experimental modes of theatre criticism. See Price; Kidnie; Dustagheer; Resources.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Cultural anthropology is one of the primary critical fields out of which Performance Studies developed. Particularly exemplified by the work of Richard Schechner, Performance Studies uses the tools of traditional anthropology, examining the social practices and rituals that shape human behaviour and reading them as performances, and conversely reading dramatic performance as a variation on social practices. Anthropological approaches to theatre continue to focus on the methods and attitudes that shape the performance event, especially in relation to audience experience. James Bulman’s ‘Chronology: A fifty-year history of performance criticism’ in this volume offers a fuller account of the development of Performance Studies. See also performativity. See Dustagheer; Bulman.

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CULTURAL CAPITAL Shakespeare is a valuable commodity, in terms of what he represents culturally and, as a consequence, economically. Pierre Bourdieu’s influential theory of cultural capital was developed as a way of understanding the value accrued by cultural objects and practices, especially as attached to education and knowledge. Understanding Shakespeare as a ‘brand’ that bestows value has been a useful framework for interpreting both institutional Shakespeare performance (especially as represented by dedicated Shakespeare companies and theatres) and performance that has deliberately aimed to counter Shakespeare’s cultural authority. Shakespeare’s perceived value has been used cynically to impose colonial and classist values and idealistically to undo oppression (see Kathryn Prince, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals, Routledge, 2008, and applied Shakespeare). The movement to decolonize Shakespeare attempts to decouple Shakespeare’s value to individuals from the oppressive functions he has served. See Julian and Solga; Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Bennett; Price.

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY Cultural geography is the subset of human geography that traces the histories and practices of social and cultural groups, especially in an aim to understand the underlying structures that shape the experience of space and place and of the landscape. In relation to Shakespeare Performance Studies, cultural geography offers a useful set of critical tools for interpreting the relationships between Shakespeare theatres and festivals and the communities they are situated within, especially in urban renewal projects and in tourism destinations such as Stratford-upon-Avon. See Bennett; Prescott.

DECOLONIZATION Decolonization refers to the series of practices of destabilizing colonial values and practices, both through challenging power structures that shape cultural capital and in promoting diversity and heterogenous perspectives on the world. Shakespeare’s canonical status is a regular flashpoint in discussions of decolonization in performance and education, both as representative of a dominant value system and as a tool (especially through adaptation) to challenge those value systems. Within Shakespearean performance, decolonization is also referenced in relation to casting practices and other methods to decentre traditional ways of performing and interpreting Shakespeare. See Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Price; Julian and Solga; Barker.

DESIGNERS Designers, along with directors, are among the key creative figures in many contemporary Shakespeare productions. Designers take responsibility for the environment of the stage; some designers specialize in sound, lighting, costume

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or set, which can appear as separate creative roles or which may be combined. In most cases, designers work closely with directors to develop a production’s overall environment, though the level of relative agency depends on both company and director. Practitioners have increasingly called for critics to develop literacy in distinguishing and appropriately addressing the labour of different design roles. See Williams and Ash.

DIASPORIC SHAKESPEARE As a subset of global Shakespeare performance, diasporic Shakespeare generates intercultural Shakespeare performance specific to diasporic communities. The word ‘diaspora’ comes from two ancient Greek words which, taken together, mean ‘the scattering of seeds’, and most commonly refers to groups of people with a similar heritage who have had to move from their homeland across the globe. The idea of homeland, both symbolically and geographically, is a defining characteristic of diasporic groups. Diasporic communities are often generators of multicultural Shakespeare performance, which draws on the influences between ethnic, linguistic or cultural groups within a multicultural society, often giving voice to specific local concerns. See Joubin; Massai.

DIGITAL RELAYS See live theatre broadcasts.

DIGITAL THEATRE Not to be confused with recordings and live theatre broadcasts, digital theatre for the purposes of this volume refers to productions created within digital environments. Produced both for free and as ticketed events, digital theatre uses communications technology such as Google+, Twitter and Zoom to create unique, often intermedial, tailored experiences that occur in virtual space. During the COVID-19 pandemic when theatres were closed globally, many small companies created productions and readings of Shakespeare using Zoom and YouTube, experimenting with the interface and display conventions to allow actors and audiences to interact from a distance. See Shakespeare Bulletin (2020), 38 (3), which collates reviews of a range of productions designed for and experienced in the digital realm. See Joubin.

DIRECT ADDRESS Direct address is the most common term used for acknowledgement of the audience by an actor/character during a performance. Within Robert Weimann’s influential work on locus and platea (see Stephen Purcell’s chapter in this volume), direct address is conceptualized as a moment in which an actor steps outside of the fictional

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world of the play and addresses the present audience, whether in scripted moments such as soliloquies or as improvisation. For certain forms of Shakespeare such as the one-person shows of Tim Crouch, direct address is the default mode of performance for the entire production. Bridget Escolme’s Talking to the Audience (Routledge, 2004) offers a full-length consideration of how direct address shapes representations of selfhood in character. See Purcell; Dustagheer.

DIRECTORS The dedicated role of the director developed from earlier practices in which a governing figure – usually the actor-manager – took responsibility for the overall artistic vision of a production. In most forms of contemporary Shakespeare performance the director is the primary ‘authorial’ figure, taking overall responsibility for shaping and developing the collective labour of the actors and creative team. Levels of directorial agency vary from auteurs, a term developed from French film theory that characterizes directors with a distinctive style and a greater level of overall control over all elements of the production, to artistic collectives where the director is one voice among many, and some companies continue to work without a director as in the American Shakespeare Center’s ‘Actors’ Renaissance Season’. Directors sometimes also act, design, compose and take on other roles. See Dustagheer; Julian and Solga; Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Williams and Ash; Lehmann.

DISABLED AND D/dEAF SHAKESPEARE The growth of disability studies as a field has been accompanied by a rise in the representation of D/deaf and disabled artists in the production of Shakespeare. This ranges from the increasingly common casting of D/deaf and disabled artists in both fringe and mainstream productions of Shakespeare, to the formation of companies devoted to creating work by practitioners from those communities such as Graeae and Deafinitely Theatre, both of which have produced Shakespeare. Alongside this, theatres around the world are under increasing scrutiny for their accessibility measures for patrons, including video captioning, touch tours, live sign language interpretation and the redesign of theatres to enable physical access. Currently, ‘Deaf’ is the preferred team used to refer to those who are culturally Deaf, with sign language (most often in this collection American Sign Language [ASL] or British Sign Language [BSL]) as their first language, while ‘deaf’ refers to the medical condition of hearing loss. See Barker.

DIVERSITY Diversity, in its most literal sense, refers to the acknowledgement of difference. As a political tool and institutional practice (as set out by Sara Ahmed in On Being

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Included, Duke University Press, 2012), diversity celebrates individual difference across a range of characteristics including, but not limited to, sex, gender identity, age, race, religion, disability, nationality, sexuality and class. In the context of contemporary Shakespeare performance, questions of diversity occur most regularly in relation to casting and representation in creative and administrative roles such as artistic directors, directors and designers, and in relation to the development of productive, creative environments for work of all kinds to be generated. Much scrutiny is placed on institutional barriers to diversity and the labour placed on diversity practitioners, as Erin Julian and Kim Solga’s contribution to this volume explores. See Julian and Solga; Barker; Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Williams and Ash.

DOUBLING Doubling is the practice of an actor taking on multiple roles within a single production. Given the number of characters in most early modern plays and the economic constraints of large casts, doubling is a standard practice in contemporary Shakespeare performance, allowing for ensembles of varying size to mount productions. Many companies use doubling to interpretive effect, allowing audiences to trace the ghosted body of a performer across multiple conceptually linked roles. The principles of doubling are sometimes extended to repertory seasons where significance may be drawn from actors performing roles in multiple plays running simultaneously. Brett Gamboa’s Shakespeare’s Double Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explores the doubling possibilities of all of Shakespeare’s works, and many critical editions include doubling charts to support productions. See Price.

DRAMATURGY Dramaturgy is a term that means several things in the contemporary theatre. Unlike the ‘dramaturg’ in German theatre (a member of the creative team alongside the director) or the ‘dramaturge’ (playwright) in French theatre, the dramaturge in North America and England may be, among other things, a script reader, a script doctor, a textual advisor, a mediator between the play and its actors, or a mediator between the production and the audience. In this volume, the process of dramaturgy is discussed in terms of textual adaptations and directorial choices that support a particular vision, such as eco-dramaturgy. See Amy Kenny, ‘Dramaturgy as Training: A Collaborative Model at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Magda Romanska (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, 208–12 (Oxford University Press, 2015). See Prescott.

ECO-SHAKESPEARE To date, ecocritical studies have explored the relationships between environmental studies (both early modern and contemporary), ecology and the textual criticism of

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the plays. The connection between ecology and Shakespeare Performance Studies is a newer area of research focus, exemplified in a 2018 special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin edited by Randall Martin and Evelyn O’Malley. Activity in this area is often focused on open-air theatre such as the Willow Globe in Wales, and festivals and community theatre such as the Shakespeare in Yosemite project run by Katherine Steele Brokaw and Paul Prescott. Part of an ecocritical performance is being responsive to the vacillations offered by the environment in which it is performed. See Prescott; Lehmann.

EMBEDDED CRITICISM Embedded criticism is the practice of critics spending time in rehearsals, workshops and development and responding to the overall creative process, as opposed to writing a review of a single performance. While many Shakespeare companies allow occasional observation of rehearsal, and even hold open rehearsals for the public, embedded critics usually have a more formalized role, perhaps tracing a production from conception to completion and writing a wider range and number of critical responses than traditional reviews. Embedded criticism is a recurring focus of Megan Vaughan’s anthology Theatre Blogging (Bloomsbury, 2020) for the innovations it offers to both the form of theatre criticism and to changing conceptions of the relationship between critic and production. Shakespeare theatres with attached research departments and education programmes such as Shakespeare’s Globe are enabling increasing opportunities for long-term engagement between critics and production processes. See Dustagheer; Julian and Solga.

EMBODIMENT In Valerie Traub’s landmark collection The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Oxford University Press, 2016), she describes the word as a critical concept that ‘offers a spacious and commodious analytic’ encompassing the physical body, identity and ability, corporeal acts, and our practices of reading, writing and performing (2016: 32–3). Studies of embodiment in performance often draw on the tools of feminist criticism, but with an increasing focus on the intersections with Critical Race Studies, disability and other fields, with a particular focus on the material, corporeal meanings generated when the plays are presented via the real bodies of actors. Increasingly, criticism of Shakespeare performance has also sought to explore embodiment in relation to the response of playgoers; see also emotions. See Barker.

EMOTIONS The ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ turn in the humanities more broadly has found particular resonance with the study of Shakespeare in performance. From projects that aim to unearth emotions in historical contexts to the study of affect in modern

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performances, there is a wealth of scholarship to support this burgeoning field. The study of emotions invites critics to ask how Shakespearean performances resonate with our emotions and not just our intellect, often in combination with theories of embodiment. Theatre has always aimed to connect with the hearts of its audience but in modern scholarship this performative aspect has become a central preoccupation. Bridget Escolme’s Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage (Bloomsbury, 2013) is one of the most recent explorations of how the relationship between early modern and contemporary understandings of emotion impacts on contemporary performance as well as on readings of the extant texts. See Kidnie; Barker; Julian and Solga; Hartley, Dunn and Berry.

ENSEMBLE The word ‘ensemble’ is often used interchangeably with company to refer to the group of actors cast in a particular production. ‘Ensemble’ is especially used by theatres that wish to emphasize an ethos of long-form collaboration, whether through the recruitment of a pool of actors contracted for long or multiple seasons (as at the Royal Shakespeare Company under Michael Boyd), or through the development of a collaborative production process that emphasizes collective agency (as at Shakespeare’s Globe under Michelle Terry). Dominant commercial theatre models in the English-speaking world often make the sustainability of long-term ensembles more difficult, whereas practices in parts of Europe and elsewhere often allow ensembles to form and work together for years on end. See Julian and Solga.

EPHEMERA The working practices of theatre create a large number of ephemeral documents that form the primary evidence of a production process. These include promptbooks, show reports, rehearsal notes, financial documents, posters and marketing materials, online blogs (sometimes including reports by actors or embedded criticism), interviews, rehearsal footage and more. These traces are often invaluable to theatre historians seeking to understand the choices made in a production and the experiences and labour of participants (see Rob Conkie’s essay in this volume) and are often held in archives. One of the challenges for researchers into contemporary Shakespeare performance is the disappearance of information about productions once the production has closed, especially those materials whose primary purpose was marketing, and many researchers work with companies to explore methods for archiving these materials for future research. See Conkie; Kidnie; Price; Resources.

ETHNOGRAPHY Ethnography is a qualitative research method based on observation and interaction. While it emerged as a key tool of anthropology, it is a key technique in embedded

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criticism such as that practised by Erin Julian and Kim Solga in this collection. Ethnography seeks to develop narrative accounts of an experience or phenomenon, which may take account of observations (especially in rehearsal rooms), interviews, embodied experience and other forms of evidence. Autoethnography, in which the researcher’s own responses and reflections contribute to the qualitative data, is often an important aspect of practice-as-research. See Julian and Solga.

EXPERIMENTAL SHAKESPEARE ‘Experimental’ is a term used freely to characterize innovative creative and critical practices in relation to Shakespeare. These can take many shapes and forms that deviate from the conventions of the theatre community in which they take place. Shakespeare’s Globe was regularly characterized as a theatrical experiment from its inception, treating the space as a laboratory to try out new/old ways of performing Shakespeare via Original Practices. The term is regularly used in relation to director-led Shakespeare that takes a striking or distinctive interpretive approach; to postdramatic productions such as those of the Wooster Group that respond to new possibilities with technology; and to adaptations and appropriations that freely rework Shakespeare to address specific concerns, as in Malthouse Theatre’s The Shadow King, a reworking of King Lear exploring the effects of a conflict over mining rights on an Indigenous community. See Purcell; Bennett; Joubin; Massai.

FEMINIST SHAKESPEARE Feminist criticism in relation to Shakespeare developed in the latter half of the twentieth century and has had a major impact on Shakespeare Performance Studies, especially in relation to questions of embodiment, casting, representation and the diversity of responses to Shakespeare in performance. While feminism is multifaceted, its focus on the exposure and interrogation of unequal power structures that systematically act against the interests of women has been taken up by mainstream and fringe companies, often reviving interest in plays such as Measure for Measure and Titus Andronicus as sites for performative exploration of the treatment of women. The growth of companies dedicated to exploring early modern drama focusing on female artists and intersectional feminist perspectives, such as Brave Spirits, has also aligned with moves to decolonize Shakespeare and give a platform to marginalized voices. See Barker; Julian and Solga; Williams and Ash; Lehmann.

FESTIVALS Shakespeare ‘festivals’ are a global phenomenon and one of the primary forms of engagement with Shakespeare, as explored by Paul Prescott’s contribution to this

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volume. Established festivals such as the Stratford (Ontario) Festival and Oregon Shakespeare Festival produce lavish productions on a large scale annually; others such as the travelling Montana Shakespeare Festival are seasonal examples of openair Shakespeare. A different type of festival is the one-off event such as the Globe to Globe Festival hosted by Shakespeare’s Globe in 2012. Shakespeare is a regular fixture in major international theatre festivals such as Avignon, Edinburgh and Festival TransAmériques. The European Shakespeare Festivals Network and the Shakespeare Theatre Association are useful resources listing dozens of small and large festivals. See Prescott; Bennett; Julia and Solga; Williams and Ash; Massai.

FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY AND INTIMACY DIRECTORS Fight choreographers and intimacy directors are specialist variants on directors who take specific responsibility for sequences of physical movement that may pose risks to actors. Rather than directing full productions, fight and intimacy directors usually work for short periods within a rehearsal process to support productions at a local level. A primary responsibility of these directors is the safety of actors. While the role of fight directors is more established, especially within Shakespeare plays that contain extensive sequences of violence and swordplay that need specialist training, intimacy directors – whose responsibility is the safe choreography of sex scenes – have more recently come into regular use with the growing awareness of sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. See Julian and Solga.

FILM The study of Shakespeare on film is intertwined with contemporary Shakespeare Performance Studies, especially with the blending of media in live theatre broadcasts and other forms of digital theatre. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the medium of film has allowed the recording and reworking of theatrical performance, as particularly traced by Sarah Hatchuel in Shakespeare, From Stage to Screen (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Judith Buchanan in Shakespeare on Silent Film (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and John Wyver in Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company (Bloomsbury, 2019). Shakespeare on film has been a major medium for the transmission of global Shakespeare, as well as often reinforcing the predominance of celebrity. See also The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation (Bloomsbury, 2021). See Lehmann; Williams and Ash; Joubin.

FRAMES The work of Susan Bennett in Theatre Audiences (Routledge, revised edition 1997) introduced the critical tool of ‘inner and outer frames’ as a way of conceptualizing audience experience. The inner frame is characterized as the signs within the dramatic

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production, including text, design, acting, narrative and so on. The outer frame is the series of interpretive lenses through which an audience member is primed to interpret the production from before the production starts, from initial advertising to ticket cost, location of theatre, prior knowledge and more that shape the individual audience member’s horizon of expectations. The multifarious experience of outer frames has contributed to a growing understanding of audiences as heterogeneous, and impacted by embodiment and emotions. See Price; Bennett; Kidnie.

GESTUS ‘Gestus’ is a theatrical technique specifically associated with the practice of Bertolt Brecht, in which an attitude is captured through clear gesture or movement by an actor. Rather than representing realistic emotional or psychological processes, the gestus reveals an aspect of character, usually in social terms, and might be understood via semiotics as an indexical rather than iconic form of representation. See Barker.

GHOSTING AND HAUNTING In the influential work of Marvin Carlson (The Haunted Stage, University of Michigan Press, 2001), theatre is understood as being ghosted or haunted by memories of past events and characters. His theory applies to both production and reception, seeing the relationship between performance and audiences as a collective recycling of past experience. In relation to Shakespeare performance, the extensive re-performance of the same plays and the specialization of many actors in early modern performance has allowed Carlson’s theories to be applied extensively, especially in terms of reading the memories of actors’ previous performances (especially those of celebrities) onto their latest ones, and of seeing recurring patterns in the production of particular plays. See Price; Williams and Ash.

GLOBAL AND LOCAL The terms ‘global’ and ‘local’ are used to attend to the shifting parameters of global Shakespeare in a globalized and diasporic world. The use of these terms calls for attention to different modes of intercultural performance and the ways in which global Shakespeare is transmitted through film and touring, but also to the specific conditions of production and reception in the venues where Shakespeare is performed. Alexa Alice Joubin’s important work establishes the parameters for methodology in this area (‘Global Shakespeare Criticism Beyond the Nation State’ in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 423–40, Oxford University Press, 2016). Major festivals such as the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, as explored in Susan Bennett and Christie Carson’s Shakespeare

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Beyond English (Cambridge University Press, 2013) have acted as a flashpoint for developing work on the local reception of global Shakespeare. See Massai; Joubin; Bulman.

GLOBAL SHAKESPEARE The idea of global Shakespeare has, until recent times, most often been mobilized as cultural hegemony in an Anglo-centric conversation. In the 1990s it often went under the heading of ‘foreign’ Shakespeare, using postcolonial frameworks. While a post-colonial lens has substantial merit, globality is now often seen as having more fluid and permeable boundaries, as in Sonia Massai’s use of Bourdieu’s cultural fields in her important edited collection World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (Routledge, 2005) and more recently network theory in her essay for this volume. Increasingly, global Shakespeare is understood less as those productions made outside of Westernized theatres, and more in relation to the mutuality of influence of cross-cultural elements in intercultural performance, as explored in Alexa Alice Joubin’s work. The MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive directed by Joubin and Peter S. Donaldson is a major resource for gathering archive material enhancing the study of global Shakespeare performance. See Joubin; Massai; Bulman.

HORIZON OF EXPECTATIONS Drawing on the work of Hans Robert Jauss, Susan Bennett introduced the concept of a horizon of expectations to reception studies in theatre in conjunction with her work on frames. The horizon of expectations is constructed by the cultural moment of an audience and establishes the terms on which the experience of a production is shaped by both public and personal factors. Among other things, it has been a productive framework for discussions of the ways in which marketing materials and pre-announced production choices (such as celebrity casting) prime audiences to receive a production in a particular way. See Price; Bennett.

ICONICITY See semiotics.

IMMERSIVE THEATRE Immersive theatre (a term sometimes used interchangeably, though incorrectly, with promenade theatre) places emphasis on the experiential, phenomenological and embodied quality of the performance, normally asking participants to take a

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more (inter)active role in the creation of the performance event. In contemporary performance, immersive experiences are sometimes contained within the usual structures of narrative dramatic theatre, such as the use of promenading spectators in productions at theatres such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Bridge Theatre to create theatrical effects and stand in as ‘extras’ in the performance. More experimental forms of immersive theatre dispense with coherent sequential narrative progression. The productions of Punchdrunk, most famously Sleep No More (a version of Macbeth), operate as live installations which allow audiences to roam a series of rooms and interact with actors to create a unique experience. Other companies draw on videogame narrative techniques to allow audience members to interact with and shape the form of a production. See Bennett; Purcell.

IMPACT Impact is the increasingly common term used by funding bodies and government agencies to detail the relations between cultural activities and the wider communities to which they relate. As a metric of influence, it attempts to quantify and explain the ways in which the economic and cultural capital of stakeholders is affected by research and performance. In Shakespeare Performance Studies, ‘impact’ is often connected to questions of access and dissemination, with both research and practice judged on the ways in which they have reached new audiences and affected ongoing practice and cultural activity. See Bennett.

INTERCULTURALISM Intercultural is one of several terms used to describe global Shakespeare, along with multicultural and diasporic. Patrice Pavis distinguishes intercultural performance as a self-consciously hybrid form in which the original versions may often no longer be clearly distinguishable; this is in contrast to multicultural performance that draws on the cross-influences existing within a multicultural society. Shakespeare’s presence in many global cultures has made his work a popular focal point for both intercultural and multicultural contemporary Shakespeare performance, often celebrated at Shakespeare-focused festivals. See Joubin; Massai; Prescott; Bulman.

INTERMEDIALITY The term ‘intermedial’, a development of ‘intertextuality’, refers to the intersection of different forms of media, often in deliberate and self-conscious ways. It has become an important term for the discussion of experimental Shakespeare performance, especially in contemporary European practice, that integrates film/video into theatrical performance, as in the work of the Wooster Group, Ivo van Hove, Katie Mitchell and many others (see Aneta Mancewicz, Intermedial Shakespeare on European Stages, Palgrave, 2014). It is also an important lens for interrogating

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digital theatre which combines the techniques and conventions of multiple media. See Joubin; Bennett.

INTERVIEWS Interviews are a primary research method for Shakespeare performance scholars, allowing for reflection and documentation in relation to rehearsals and productions. Interviews with theatre practitioners take the form of both integrated commentary into larger research work (see Julian and Solga in this volume) and stand-alone pieces that profile the voices of the practitioners (see Williams and Ash in this volume). The interview format often allows for dialogue between critics and practitioners, and can be used to explore intention as well as choices made. The method is crucial to embedded criticism, ethnography and other qualitative approaches. See Julian and Solga; Williams and Ash.

INTIMACY Intimacy is a value that has a great deal of currency in embodied experiences of theatre productions. While it is sometimes connected to physical proximity, Sarah Dustagheer (‘Intimacy at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (2): 227–46) theorizes it as an effect of technology in spaces such as the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, where a combination of lighting design, theatre layout and acting practice (including direct address) can create the experience of close communion between audiences and production. Intimacy is also a feature of immersive theatre in which boundaries between actor and audience are less clearly demarcated. See Dustagheer; Purcell.

INTIMACY DIRECTORS See fight choreography and intimacy directors.

JACOBEAN While the term Jacobean traditionally refers to the period between 1603 and 1625 when King James VI/I reigned, the term has gained purchase in Shakespeare performance scholarship as an aesthetic and politics applied to the performance and interpretation of not-Shakespeare. As set out in Susan Bennett’s Performing Nostalgia (Routledge, 1996) and Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince’s collection Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the ‘Jacobean’ label has become associated with the performance of plays by Middleton, Webster, Ford and others (regardless of the date of the plays) that fuse sex and violence, and which are regularly performed within a contemporary aesthetic. ‘Jacobean’ productions

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are often discussed in implied or explicit relation to a conservative Shakespearean aesthetic. See Price.

KINESICS Related to cognitive approaches, kinesics interpret the communicative faculties of the body, concentrating especially on movement, gesture and expression. Scholars such as Evelyn Tribble have used this as a framework to consider the learned skills of actors. The emphasis on bodily relations has also been important in disability studies, especially in working with and exploring the performances of actors who communicate predominantly through gesture. See Barker.

LANGUAGE Shakespeare’s language has regularly been a flashpoint in discussion of contemporary Shakespeare performance. While Shakespeare’s cultural capital and the preservation of his works in a textual form has often led to movements to preserve the text, the relative unfamiliarity or obsolescence of terms and images leads to regular adaptation and editing, prioritizing the assumed needs of a production’s audience. Several resources exist to support actors developing confidence in Shakespeare’s language: the Arden Shakespeare Performance Editions, for instance, include pronunciation guides and accessible glosses, and the work of David and Ben Crystal has helped actors explore the value of original pronunciation (see also acting). The translation of Shakespeare into both modern English and other languages is a widespread practice in global Shakespeare. See Joubin; Massai; Williams and Ash.

LIGHTING Lighting design is a major component of contemporary Shakespeare production, and usually falls under the responsibility of a specialist lighting designer. As well as allowing actors to be seen, lighting performs a number of interpretive functions across different forms of contemporary Shakespeare performance, including managing transitions in space and time, communicating shifts between character viewpoints or between locus and platea, and even performing the roles of supernatural characters such as fairies and ghosts. Judith Greenwood discusses her role as a lighting designer in this volume. The use of shared lighting in reconstructed theatres and open-air theatres has been a major source of academic research in relation to Original Practices, immersive theatre and community theatre. See Williams and Ash; Purcell; Dustagheer.

LIVENESS Liveness is understood as a quality or value attached to the experience of copresence, whether in shared physical space or in shared (synchronous) activity in

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temporal terms. Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 1999) appraises this quality in relation to the development of technology including recording technology, television and music. Liveness has become an important framework in interpreting digital theatre and live theatre broadcasts where the audience does not necessarily share co-presence in time or space with the performance event, but where a quality of liveness is still part of the experience. See Kidnie.

LIVE THEATRE BROADCASTS Also referred to as digital relays, live theatre broadcasts are remediations of theatre productions to a screen audience. These range from productions broadcast in real time as the production is performed, often to cinemas (as in the National Theatre Live and Live From Stratford-upon-Avon programmes) or online; or productions edited together from multiple performances but still presented as a continuous performance that maintains the qualities of liveness. While the presentation of such broadcasts normally plays down the technical scaffolding and role of remediation, scholarship has increasing focused on the unique aesthetics of live broadcasts and explored the agency of the screen director, often a specialist role distinct from the production’s director. Erin Sullivan’s 2017 article ‘“The forms of things unknown”: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (4): 627– 62, and the edited collection Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Broadcast Experience (eds Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne, Bloomsbury, 2018) offer important surveys of the research questions generated by this form.

LOCAL See global and local.

LOCUS AND PLATEA Robert Weimann’s influential book Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) introduced the terms of locus and  platea as a way of conceptualizing the use of stage space in medieval and early modern performance; terms he revisited in Actor’s Pen and Author’s Voice (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The locus, or scaffold, was imagined as a centre of power that shapes the represented world of the fiction. The platea, or non-defined space, was understood as the space of presentation, inhabited by the audience. This has been a particularly productive framework for understanding direct address, in which a character steps out of the represented world and addresses the audience within the platea space. Weimann’s work insists on the porousness between the two spaces, which has been a feature of productions at reconstructed theatre. More recent work on digital theatre has extended the use of these terms to virtual space

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as a way of understanding the relationship between a mediated production and the activities of spectators in digital space. See Purcell.

MEMORY The role of memory in theatre has been extensively theorized, most notably by Marvin Carlson in The Haunted Stage (see ghosting and haunting). Peter Holland’s collection Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006) expands the definitions of memory into Shakespearean performance. Much Shakespearean performance, especially that utilizing site-specificity, draws on collective memory to allow audiences to associate the meanings of a current performance with the cultural memories associated with its space of performance; this is also a feature of reconstructed theatres. Recollection of theatre as an ephemeral art form is an anxiety integral to the discipline, and the practices of criticism, interviewing and archiving can be seen as efforts to preserve and shape the collective memory of performances. See Conkie; Kidnie; Williams and Ash; Price.

METATHEATRE The term metatheatre was first coined by Lionel Abel in 1960, and refers to theatre that exhibits a self-conscious interrogation of its own status as theatre. Sarah Dustagheer and Harry Newman curated a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, 36.1 (2018), which defined metatheatre as the blurring or disruption of the boundaries between the world of the play and the world of its reception, and is an effect often produced by the interplay between locus and platea. As a political tool, metatheatre can produce alienation effects (see verfremdungseffekt) that invite audiences to consider the purpose and implications of performance. Metatheatrical effects can be enhanced by the presence of ghosting and site-specificity which draw the attention of spectators to the conditions of performance. See Purcell; Dustagheer.

MULTICULTURAL SHAKESPEARE See interculturalism.

MUSIC Music was an essential part of early modern dramatic performance, and composers and musical directors remain key creative roles in the production of contemporary Shakespeare performance. Music in contemporary Shakespeare performance can be broadly grouped into three categories. (1) Original Practices work often draws on the research of the Early Music Movement to reconstruct the sounds and styles in which the songs and interludes of early modern drama were originally performed. (2)

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New scores composed for specific productions, in a wide range of styles determined by their fitness to the direction and design. (3) The use of popular music and existing songs, whether appropriate to a specific setting (e.g. flapper music for productions set in the 1920s) or to deliberately postmodern effect. Bill Barclay and David Lindley’s collection Shakespeare, Music and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2017) offers an overview of approaches. See also The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation (Bloomsbury, 2021). See Williams and Ash.

NATIONALISM The long-standing association of Shakespeare with English nationalism and patriotism has shaped much work on Shakespeare in contemporary performance. The deployment of Shakespeare in the ceremonies and festivals accompanying the 2012 London Olympics crystallized ongoing concerns about the role of Shakespeare in a distinctively English national identity on one hand, and about his role in global culture as a result of colonialism, on the other. Collections by Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare on the Global Stage, Bloomsbury, 2015) and Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (Shakespeare Beyond English, Cambridge University Press, 2013) used the 2012 events as a way of thinking about Shakespearean performance’s role in nationalist projects. Global Shakespeare regularly appropriates Shakespeare to consider both the nationalist projects of producing countries and the politics of national identity in a post-colonial age. See Joubin; Massai.

NETWORKS Network theory develops patterns between nodes or social actors, allowing structures to be analysed from multiple entry points. In relation to Shakespeare Performance Studies, network theories have been especially useful in considering global Shakespeares and appropriations more broadly, placing less emphasis on a source or cultural centre and more on the multifarious points of interaction between users, ideas and texts. Douglas Lanier borrows the idea of the ‘rhizome’, a structure with no central pillar, from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as an influential model for decentring the relationship between Shakespeare’s cultural capital and adaptations. See Joubin; Massai.

NOT-SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare wrote in a vibrant community of dramatists who worked as both competitors and collaborators. Because of Shakespeare’s dominant cultural capital, his contemporaries are often relatively neglected on the stage and/or presented in relation to him. ‘Not-Shakespeare’ has emerged as an alternative critical term in the work of Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince, Susan Bennett, Peter Kirwan and Eoin Price, exploring this corpus in performance (often described as Jacobean)

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as a source of political resistance, aesthetic experimentation and canon-busting. See Price.

OPEN-AIR PERFORMANCE Open-air performance is a dominant strand of contemporary Shakespeare performance, especially in community theatre and festivals, and is explored by Michael Dobson in Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2011). There are many permanent theatres devoted to open-air performance, including the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and the iconic Minack Theatre in Cornwall, both founded in 1932, both of which regularly host Shakespeare productions, and the modern Shakespeare’s Globe. The performance of Shakespeare in temporary spaces created in parks around the world is often designed to allow for cheap or free access to Shakespeare, the most famous of which is the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park in New York’s Central Park. Open-air Shakespeare often allows for a high level of interaction with audiences, a high level of improvisation in response to weather events and mobile audiences, and local reference. See Prescott; Bennett.

ORIGINAL PRACTICES ‘Original Practices’ is the term coined by practitioners at Shakespeare’s Globe in the late 1990s to describe attempts to explore, utilize and in some cases recreate elements of early modern stage practice. Original Practices methods vary across different theatres and include experiments with early music and costume, shared lighting, single-sex casting, cue scripts, working without a director and exploration of the relationship between actors and audiences. Much research conducted in reconstructed theatres focuses on the discoveries formulated in these spaces, as in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper’s Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Stephen Purcell explores the relationship between Original Practices and practice-as-research in ‘Practice-asResearch and Original Practices’, Shakespeare Bulletin 35 (3) (2017): 425–43. See Dustagheer; Purcell; Conkie.

ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION There are a few modern proponents of Shakespearean drama performed in ‘original pronunciation’. The modern movement was initiated by David Crystal in collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe in 2004, and continues particularly in the work of Ben Crystal and his company Passion in Practice, an ensemble of actors who have worked extensively in original pronunciation. Original pronunciation uses a combination of sociolinguistic and historical reconstruction practices to understand

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the principles and possibilities of original pronunciation. David Crystal’s Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespeare Pronunciation (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an invaluable resource for actors exploring this practice. See Resources.

PEDAGOGY Pedagogy is the theoretical and practical discipline of teaching, a primary focus of research for education practitioners and a daily practice for educators in all fields. The discipline of pedagogy is often closely linked to practice-as-research in its methods of practical exploration and reflection, and many Shakespeare performance scholars combine research and teaching in the mounting of Shakespeare productions and the development of research projects using student actors and directors. Student theatre is an important subset of amateur and community theatre. See Hartley, Dunn and Berry.

PERFORMANCE See play.

PERFORMANCE EDITIONS Among the wide range of critical and popular Shakespeare editions are several series and stand-alone editions devoted to the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. The Arden Shakespeare Performance Editions are designed, both in format and content, with use by actors in mind, and prioritize information about pronunciation, verse speaking and glossing. The Cambridge University Press Shakespeare in Production series takes the standard layout of a critical edition but is dominated by notes of choices made in past productions, along with extensive performance histories. Much work has gone into a range of digital performance editions that allow actors and directors to edit texts, share notes and establish a form of promptbook for a production, though at the time of writing none of these has yet come to dominate. A subset of performance editions are those created as souvenirs to accompany a particular production, containing the text as developed in rehearsal; see Peter Holland, ‘Theatre Editions’ in Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (eds), Shakespeare and Textual Studies, 233–48 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). See Resources.

PERFORMATIVITY Performativity is a wide-ranging theoretical concept developed from the philosophy of language that has had multiple impacts on contemporary performance. Informed

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by J. L. Austin’s work on performative language including speech acts, performativity has come to be understood as the ways in which action and identity are constructed through discourse. One of the most influential developments of this was in relation to gender by the feminist theorist Judith Butler, understanding gender as a constructed performance rather than as something inherent; this has been a useful framework to explore queer and transgender performance, especially in relation to single-sex or non-traditional casting. See Barker; Bulman; Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Julian and Solga.

PLAY (PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE) The terms ‘play’, ‘production’ and ‘performance’ are often used interchangeably, but are importantly distinct from one another. We follow Christopher B. Balme in The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2008) in distinguishing them as follows according to their relative stability. The ‘play’ is a relatively stable textual phenomenon that may exist in published form and be reproduced; while several early modern plays were originally published in variant forms, these variant forms themselves exist in stable forms. The ‘production’ is a particular staging of a text that functions as an adaptation of the play into a specific interpretation, and which has a reasonably stable structure in relation to its various elements including text, cast, design, blocking etc. The production might be characterized as the aggregate of all performances of that production. A ‘performance’ is a specific iteration of the production, taking place in real time before a specific audience, and while a performance may be recorded it is itself an unrepeatable event. Most criticism takes a given performance as exemplary of the production, though work by Rob Conkie in Writing Performative Shakespeares (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and for this volume draws attention to the variability of performance events as experienced in multiple viewings and preserved in archives. See Conkie.

POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE Postdramatic theatre is a particular interest of W. B. Worthen in Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The term, first developed by Hans-Thies Lehmann in Postdramatic Theatre (trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Routledge, 2006) is designed to distinguish between dramatic performance – understood as text/speech-oriented, in which the role of the theatre production is to produce a version of the text – and more experimental modes of performance that are better understood through a conceptual leap to reading theatre as event. Companies which disrupt conventional narrative form such as Punchdrunk, or which experiment with new forms of event via technology, are often understood through a postdramatic lens. See Bennett.

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POSTHUMAN The ‘posthuman’ is a conceptual framework that reimagines the bodily existence of humanity, as most famously characterized in the work of Donna Haraway on the cyborg. In relation to Shakespearean performance, the posthuman most often emerges as a concept in productions that explore the relationship between human beings and technology, especially in digital theatre; and in ecocritical and biopolitical approaches that treat the human in relation to their ecological environment. See Lehmann.

PRACTICE-AS-RESEARCH Practice as research (or performance as research, or PaR [with or without hyphens]) is a dynamic field in Performance Studies that seeks to develop understanding through the practical work of workshops, rehearsals and production. Stephen Purcell, in his 2017 article ‘Practice-as-Research and Original Practices’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 425–43, offers an extensive overview of the development of the field and a range of Shakespeare PaR projects. Such work tends to be interdisciplinary, drawing on the expertise as appropriate of archaeologists, literary scholars, theatre practitioners, historians and other specialists. While PaR projects may result in a traditional production, they are characterized by their exploration of defined research questions and an openness to practical discovery, and an emphasis on process rather than end product. See Dustagheer; Purcell; Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Williams and Ash.

PRODUCTION See play.

PROMPTBOOKS Promptbooks, sometimes referred to simply as a production’s ‘book’ or colloquially as the ‘Bible’ for a production, are working documents designed to track and inform the development of a production during rehearsal and as a reference point for maintaining the production throughout its run. Typically, a promptbook will include the text of the play with details of additions, cuts and alterations to the dialogue and marked up entrances and exits; depending on the complexity of the promptbook it is likely to also include directions for blocking, props, set, lighting cues, stage management notes, research notes and other information designed to support the production. In archives, especially for productions that were not recorded, promptbooks are often the fullest means of reconstructing the details of a production, especially in the traces of changes made during a production’s run. See Conkie; Resources.

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QUANTITATIVE/QUALITATIVE AUDIENCE RESEARCH Research into audiences can be broadly categorized into two major types. Quantitative research using statistics, income, surveys and other forms of data collection seeks to explore trends and patterns in data, and is particularly valued by theatre marketing departments. An important element of quantitative research is to track impact on particular demographics, especially with regard to participation in theatre by disadvantaged groups. Qualitative approaches may be closer to ethnographic or embedded approaches, and include observation, interviews, focus groups, anecdotes and other media that concentrate on individual narratives and experiences. Many Shakespeare audience researchers, such as Rachael Nicholas and Penelope Woods, combine these approaches in their work. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies react against assumptions or generalizations concerning audience behaviours and experiences. See Kidnie.

QUEER SHAKESPEARE Alongside feminist theory, queer theory seeks to explore the social construction and fluidity of sexuality. Early modern drama, written for all-male companies and deploying cross-dressing, has lent itself to queer readings, especially in relation to homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender approaches. Several Shakespeare companies, including those explored by the contributors to James C. Bulman’s Shakespeare Re-Dressed (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008) and by Terri Power in Shakespeare and Gender in Practice (Macmillan, 2015), have explored queer issues in productions, both through casting choices that explore queer sexualities within the plays’ narrative frameworks, and through more radical adaptation practices that have queered the form and content of plays. See Barker; Julian and Solga.

READER-RECEPTION THEORY Reader-reception theory is the broader framework in literary critical studies for understanding the role of the reader in making meaning through their individual engagement with the text, as opposed to meaning inhering in the text. Audience studies is a development of reader-reception theory, insisting on the practices by which individual audience members can experience the same event in different ways. See Kidnie.

REALISM Realism is a movement within theatre that achieved dominance in the latenineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is closely associated with dramatic theatre. Realism is concerned with creating a representation of life that broadly accords

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with what is experienced in ‘real life’, and with psychological plausibility and development for characters. The relative dominance of realism in mainstream Western theatre in the twentieth century often leads to its conventions being treated as a standard for Shakespeare performance, despite Shakespeare’s plays not being written in a realistic mode. Critics such as Benjamin Fowler and Roberta Barker have undertaken detailed study of acting practices in contemporary Shakespeare performance that have attempted to reproduce early modern drama through realism. See Barker.

RECONSTRUCTED THEATRES Much contemporary research in Shakespeare Performance Studies has focused on the work of reconstructed theatres, such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London and the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. Rather than being precise replicas, reconstructed theatres adapt the designs and aesthetics of early modern playhouses into venues that can serve both as commercially viable modern theatres and as laboratories for experiments in Original Practices. While reconstructed Shakespeare theatres privilege Shakespeare in their repertories, they regularly produce new and classic works by other writers as well as different kinds of performance events. The success of theatres such as the Globe has influenced the redesign of other Shakespeare-focused theatres, with many increasingly adopting versions of a thrust stage. While such venues often serve important economic purposes for their regions as tourism destinations, they often include dedicated research departments and are major centres for new research into Shakespearean performance. See Dustagheer; Purcell; Bennett.

RECORDINGS (ARCHIVAL) Archival recordings are one of the most important ways, alongside promptbooks, that researchers can access historical performances. Recording practices are variable around the world, and many legendary Shakespeare productions do not survive in a recorded version. For much of the twentieth century, archival recordings were usually captured by a single fixed camera, sometimes during a dress rehearsal. In the twenty-first century, an increasing number of companies capture their Shakespeare productions using multi-camera set-ups professionally edited together, and the advent of live theatre broadcasts means that recordings distributed commercially often serve as archival recordings. Traditionally, archival recordings have limited distribution for contractual reasons and must be viewed in a physical archive, though increasingly recordings are being made available digitally; during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, many theatres began streaming archival recordings while closed. The dominance of Shakespeare in the canon means that high-quality recordings of Shakespeare productions tend to be much higher in number than those of his contemporaries. See Conkie.

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REHEARSAL Rehearsal is a major part of the development process of a production. Much practice-as-research and embedded criticism takes rehearsal as its main subject, as the venue in which directors, actors and other members of the production’s creative team gel as an ensemble and collaborate in the exploration and refinement of a production. Depending on company practices, a rehearsal process may range from implementing a vision pre-determined by a director to the collaborative development of a production from scratch. The Shakespeare in the Theatre series published by Bloomsbury offers detailed discussion of the rehearsal practices of specific directors and companies. See Julian and Solga; Williams and Ash.

RELAXED PERFORMANCE Relaxed performance (RP) is a particular kind of performance designed to be comfortable and accessible for audiences with specific needs, including people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and other forms of neurodiversity, and also for young children and carers. Relaxed performances often include less intense sound and lighting effects, shared lighting, and fewer restrictions on sound and movement among the audience. Flute Theatre, led by Kelly Hunter, is a Shakespeare company devoted to relaxed performance for neurodiverse individuals, using her Hunter Heartbeat Method to connect iambic pentameter and the human heartbeat as a form of applied theatre.

REPERTORY In relation to theatrical performance, a company’s repertory is the specific set of works that the company currently has in production or which it has available to remount. For Shakespeare companies in the English-speaking world, the repertory is usually specific to a given season, and may include a number of plays being performed in rotation for a given period of time, often sharing an ensemble of actors. In theatre cultures where actors enjoy long-term employment such as Russia, a repertory may remain stable for years, with productions being remounted over the course of a theatre’s lifetime. Repertory casting often allows for thematic connections to be made across productions, allowing actors to rehearse and explore roles simultaneously in relation to one another. See Price; Julian and Solga; Prescott.

RITUAL Ritual was a central focus of analysis for early theorists of cultural performance, especially Richard Schechner. For anthropology, ritual serves as a way of articulating learned societal practices that are consciously performed and carry significant meaning. Ritual is a term often utilized to describe practices of performance,

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especially concerning festivals and Shakespeare sites associated with tourism. Studies of audiences also discuss the practices, habits and even superstitions of theatregoing. See Prescott; Kidnie.

SEASON In its usual definition, a season is a fixed period of performance during which a company will stage a selected repertory of plays. Many Shakespeare theatres operate on a strictly seasonal basis, most obviously open-air theatres which often only operate during late spring and summer. Major producing theatres often organize seasons around a specific theme, such as the Roaring Girls season discussed by Eoin Price in his contribution to this volume. See Price; Julian and Solga.

SEMIOTICS Semiotics, in drama, refers to a methodology that understands the elements of a play and its performance as signs to be interpreted. Keir Elam and Patrice Pavis are two semioticians whose work has been prominent in Shakespeare Studies. Pavis’s 1985 checklist for theatre criticism, discussed by Margaret Jane Kidnie in this volume, represents a semiotic approach to performance criticism designed for the benefit of his students. Charles Sanders Peirce’s influential model of icon (in which a sign bears similarity to its intended meaning), index (the sign points a connection towards its object) and symbol (which bears a more abstract connection to its object) informs Roberta Barker’s chapter in this book. The actantial model also arises from semiotics. According to this way of understanding drama, character and even some non-human elements of a play can be understood according to their function in relation to each action of the plot, as the subject, object, helper or blocker of that action. Even nonhuman actants such as Yorick’s skull in Hamlet or the ring in Romeo and Juliet can be seen to contribute to the action as actants. Kathryn Prince (2019) treats memory as an actant (‘Misremembering Hamlet at Elsinore’, in Paul Megna, Bríd Phillips and R. S. White (eds), Hamlet and Emotions, 253–70, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). See Kidnie; Barker.

SHAKESPEARE While William Shakespeare was a historical playwright and actor, the term in Shakespeare Performance Studies often stands as a metonym for the body of works traditionally associated with his name, often eliding collaborators in deference to his canonical status and cultural capital. More broadly, Shakespeare is often used as synecdoche for all early modern drama, which is both a problem of canonical status and an honest reflection of the overwhelming dominance of early modern drama studies by a focus on Shakespeare’s plays. While this volume is titled The

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Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, the theoretical and methodological practices discussed as ‘Shakespeare’ throughout the volume regularly apply to all early modern drama. For explicit approaches to notShakespeare in performance, Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince’s Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is a valuable starting point. See Price.

SHARED LIGHTING Shared or ‘universal’ lighting is the term given to productions that do not use lighting to demarcate between the performance and the audience, but instead allow everyone in the theatre to ‘share’ the same light. This is most commonly true of open-air theatres and/or reconstructed theatres such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Blackfriars Playhouse in Virginia. Shared lighting often allows for audiences to take a more active role in a performance, and is often a feature of immersive performance and other varieties of performance that seek to create an effect of intimacy for audiences. See Dustagheer; Purcell; Williams and Ash.

SHOW REPORTS Show reports are an example of theatrical ephemera. Usually written by the stage manager, the show report compiles information about the details of a specific performance including running time, audience size and behaviour, programme sales, deviations from usual practice and variations in actors’ behaviour. They provide a revealing account of the development of a production across all performances in a run. While these are ephemeral working documents, they are often preserved in company archives. See Conkie.

SITE-SPECIFICITY In the visual and performing arts, site-specificity refers to the practice of creating works designed for and experienced in specific venues. While the local conditions of all theatres inflect the performances that take place in them, site-specificity is usually taken to imply a unique set of meanings that the performance intends to draw from its site. This is typical of immersive theatre productions such as those of Punchdrunk, open-air performance, and other kinds of performance in found spaces such as those performed in the cavern of the Rose Theatre, Bankside, as discussed by Sally Barnden in ‘Site-Specificity, Archaeology, and the Empty Space at the Contemporary Rose Playhouse’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (2) (2017): 207–26. The unique performance conditions enabled at reconstructed theatres have prompted critics including Vera Cantoni (New Playwriting at Shakespeare’s Globe, Bloomsbury, 2017) and Will Tosh (Playing Indoors, Bloomsbury, 2018) to read performance at the Globe as sitespecific. See Bennett; Dustagheer; Joubin.

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SONG See music.

SPACE/PLACE The ‘spatial turn’ of the late twentieth century was an interdisciplinary movement interested in how culture could be read through a close attention to spatial relations. While the terms place and space have fluid meanings, Yi-Fu Tuan’s definitions of ‘place’ have been influential: ‘place’ is a socially constructed convention that is shaped by agreed purpose and human experience, and tends to serve particular functions; while ‘space’ is a more malleable concept lacking fixed meaning that may be constructed in different ways or ‘produced’ to take on local meaning. These concepts have had a major impact on Performance Studies in general, and Shakespeare performance in particular, in several ways. Literary and urban geography has invited increasing attention to the place of theatres in relation to their surrounding communities and regions. At a more specific level, the construction of place from undefined space has been central to the spatial theories of Robert Weimann (see locus and platea) and to conceptualizing the ways in which productions create imagined environments for audiences. See Bennett; Purcell; Joubin.

STAGE MANAGERS Stage managers (along with deputy stage managers and assistant stage managers) are the broadly defined roles that take charge of ensuring the smooth running of a production, both in overall realization and in the specific requirements of individual performances. In modern productions, a stage manager will often be the primary user of the promptbook and will carry out various duties from management of technical effects to cuing actors. Stage managers are usually the authors of show reports, and may take on greater responsibility in touring productions (larger companies may have dedicated tour managers, and Assistant Directors sometimes accompany productions, though for smaller productions the stage manager may assume this function). While stage managers are often invisible during performance, they are often made visible by unexpected events that require onstage intervention, and Shakespearean metatheatre wishing to draw attention to working practice sometimes deliberately draws attention to their presence. In archives, the work of stage managers is often the dominant voice in ephemera. See Conkie.

STAGE TYPES The types of stage used in contemporary performance are as diverse as the world’s theatres. The dominance of realism in the twentieth century was most often served by a proscenium stage with audience sat directly in front of the stage area viewing

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action which largely took place behind a proscenium arch, framing the stage and allowing for pictorial effects. A more recent trend in the twenty-first century, propelled by reconstructed theatres, has been a return to thrust stages inspired by early modern amphitheatres, in which the audience surround the stage on three sides, whether seated or standing. Theatre in the round places actors in a central performance area, while traverse theatre places the audience on opposite sides of an elongated gallery-like space. Many studio productions use a black box which allows easy conversion into different layouts. Immersive theatre often dispenses with fixed theatre space and allows audiences to promenade in free or directed ways through a bespoke performance environment.

STAGED READINGS Staged readings are performed with minimal or no rehearsal, usually with actors ‘on book’, still reading from a script. Readings may be more or less elaborate; the long-running Read Not Dead series at Shakespeare’s Globe mounts fully blocked readings rehearsed in a few hours, often with quite elaborate choices, while other readings may be static and serve to explore language and voice. Staged readings are a valuable tool in pedagogy and other contexts working with amateur actors, allowing exploration of the text without the training of memory, and are also used in practice-as-research to explore specific questions that are not dependent on development into full productions.

SURTITLING Surtitling is the practice of including textual captions as part of a live theatre production, usually above or to the side of the stage (the practice is called subtitling in screen performance, where subtitles are usually placed at the bottom of the screen). Surtitling is a common practice in intercultural performance and touring global Shakespeare, where a production is being presented in a language other than the dominant language in the space of presentation. The politics of surtitling are contentious, especially if a theatre chooses to use Shakespearean text to represent a production being spoken in a modern dialect of another language (see translation). Surtitling is also a key tool in accessibility for D/deaf audience members, displaying the text being spoken on stage (though Deaf audience members may require Sign Language interpretation instead). Some theatres have experimented with paraphrased or summary captions in surtitles rather than full dialogue in order to avoid distraction from the action on stage. See Joubin; Massai.

TECHNOLOGY Much contemporary Shakespeare performance experiments with technology as both form and aesthetic, and has had a major impact on what we think of as performance.

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W.  B. Worthen in Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Pascale Aebischer in Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2020) provide discussions of the ways in which performance utilizes existing and new technologies to innovate (see also intermediality). The development of live recording/broadcasting technology has had a particular impact in the twenty-first century, with many productions incorporating live filmed footage into theatre works. See Dustagheer; Lehmann; Joubin.

TELEVISION Shakespeare performance has been a staple of television performance for the medium’s existence, tending to favour the aesthetics of naturalism and realism. Philip Auslander identifies liveness as a key characteristic feature of television, and many early television productions of Shakespeare were broadcast live without archival retention. John Wyver’s Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company (Bloomsbury, 2019) traces the long-standing relationship between that company and television adaptation of its own productions. While television Shakespeare in the late twentieth century was often studio-bound and restricted by budget (as in the BBC/Time Life Shakespeare Collection of the 1970s and 1980s), in more recent years the advent of prestige television has led to large-budget television productions such as The Hollow Crown (2012; 2016) and more radical appropriations such as the BBC’s Shakespeare Re-Told (2005), while increasing intermedial uses of television include live-streaming partnerships with theatres and overlap with digital theatre. See Joubin.

TEXT The texts of contemporary Shakespeare performance take many forms. While some companies use the early quarto and folio witnesses (especially productions using original pronunciation), many companies start with modern critical editions, performance editions or free online texts, sometimes working with a dramaturge to establish a text. The text of the production will usually be preserved in the promptbook after editing, adaptation and rehearsal. References to the ‘production text’ may refer not only to dialogue but also to the other languages of the stage available to semiotic analysis. The specifics of Shakespearean text speaking are a key part of guides to Shakespearean acting. See also translation. See Joubin; Massai; Conkie; Hartley, Dunn and Berry.

THEATRES The word theatre usually refers to the permanent or temporary venues designed for performance, though is also often used interchangeably with company. Theatres remain the dominant spaces for Shakespearean performance, and act as crucibles for cultural memory that are often ghosted by histories of prior performance.

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The theatre industry takes many different forms globally, from purely commercial operations to state-sponsored and publicly funded theatres, the latter of which may have more extensive remits for community work and education. Theatres may be ‘producing’ spaces that create their own work, ‘receiving’ houses that host touring productions, or a combination of both. See Prescott; Dustagheer; Bennett; Julian and Solga; Williams and Ash.

TOURING While much Shakespeare production is concentrated in urban centres, touring theatre remains an important part of contemporary Shakespeare performance. Many Shakespeare-focused companies including Cheek by Jowl, Northern Broadsides, Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and others work on an exclusively touring model, with occasional residencies. Other companies with their own permanent theatres (including the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe) offer limited tours of selected productions to theatres around their home nation and globally. The costs of touring theatre often occasion smaller ensembles and more flexible designs in order to enable adaptation to different venues, though larger companies often take lavish productions on tour. The rise of live theatre broadcasts was initially anticipated by some to pose a threat to the practice of live touring, though in practice touring has continued alongside broadcasts. Tours are not to be confused with transfers, in which a regional theatre company may move a production to a major metropolis (often London or New York). See Prescott; Bennett; Williams and Ash.

TOURISM Contemporary performance is often associated with the rituals and economics of tourism. Out-of-town Shakespeare festivals attract large tourist audiences, and performance at major Shakespeare theatres in small towns such as Stratford-uponAvon and Staunton, Virginia is interwoven with the tourist economics of those locales. Reconstructed theatres and other venues associated with heritage often have a higher proportion of tourist patrons, which can lead to biases in criticism as discussed in Paul Prescott’s ‘Inheriting the Globe: The Reception of Shakespearean Space and Audience in Contemporary Reviewing’ in Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 359–75 (Blackwell, 2005). Robert Ormsby’s work further explores the relationship between tourism and Shakespearean performance. See Bennett; Joubin; Prescott.

TRANS/TRANSGENDER STUDIES Transgender studies (or trans studies, understood to encompass all forms of trans identity) is a subfield of queer studies that has developed more recently, with a particular focus on the intersections and fluidity of sex and gender in relation to

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broader cultural studies and performativity. This is an emerging area in relation to Shakespeare Performance Studies, being pioneered by scholars such as Alexa Alice Joubin, Sawyer Kemp, Robin Craig, Andy Kesson and Simone Chess, and in performance and practice-as-research by practitioners including Emma Frankland. Trans studies offers productive frameworks for exploring cross-gender performance (including the long-standing tradition of women playing Hamlet, explored by Tony Howard in Woman as Hamlet, Cambridge University Press, 2007), the representation of trans actors and characters in Shakespeare performance, and theorization of gender performance. See Barker; Julian and Solga; Joubin.

TRANSLATION The translation of Shakespeare’s works into other languages is a centuries-old practice that underpins much work in global Shakespeare. Productions in languages other than English use a range of translations from established versions that are classics in their own right (such as the Tieck-Schlegel German-language Shakespeare of the 1820s and 1830s) to freshly commissioned adaptations designed for specific use by directors. Translations are usually mediated in intercultural performance via surtitles. In recent years, more attention has been paid to translation both into other forms of English, including in the Play On! project of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and into non-verbal languages such as sign language (see disabled and D/ deaf Shakespeare). See Joubin; Massai; Barker; Williams and Ash.

UNIVERSALISM Claims to the universality of Shakespeare’s work have largely been downplayed in scholarship in recent decades over concerns of cultural imperialism that would impose a dominant reading on all peoples regardless of local experiences; though Kiernan Ryan’s Shakespeare’s Universality (Bloomsbury, 2015) makes a case for the radical potential of the concept. Claims to Shakespeare’s universality regularly recur in Shakespeare performance, however, as a marketing tool to appeal to diverse audiences, as a way of articulating the connections unearthed in intercultural and global Shakespeare, and in claims for the importance of Shakespeare performance more generally. Shakespeare performance scholarship tends to exercise caution about universalizing observations drawn from specific performance and audiences, in acknowledgement of the variability of experiences; however, claims based on assumptions of ‘universal’ persist in the discipline’s primary materials. See Joubin; Massai.

URBAN STUDIES See cultural geography.

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VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the ‘alienation’ or ‘distancing effect’ was designed to disrupt the identification of audiences with characters and the fictional world of a production, and provoke cognitive and political responses to the performance in the awareness of a play’s artifice. In relation to Shakespeare Performance Studies, verfremdungseffekt is associated with postdramatic and metatheatrical forms of Shakespeare performance that draw attention to the nature and form of the theatrical event, as well as to techniques such as direct address that implicate audiences in the action. See Purcell.

WORKSHOPS As distinct from rehearsals, workshops are forums for experimentation through practice, and cover a wide range of events. Workshops often occur ahead of the rehearsal process as a form for development and initial exploration of ideas for a production. Within practice-as-research and education, workshops often function as stand-alone events or series for researchers and/or practitioners to explore specific questions, either with select participants or with an audience (as in Shakespeare’s Globe’s Research in Action series). While workshop events often have no immediate objective beyond the event, their findings often contribute to the development of both performance events and academic publications. See Purcell; Dustagheer; Julian and Solga; Hartley, Dunn and Berry; Williams and Ash.

CHAPTER 4.3

Annotated bibliography KARIN BROWN, PETER KIRWAN AND KATHRYN PRINCE

In his chapter ‘Chronology: A fifty-year history of performance criticism’, James C. Bulman provides a detailed critical survey of the field of Shakespeare Performance Studies from the 1980s onwards. In this complementing section, we document major books in the field published in the twenty-first century, as a guide to newer interventions in the field (while recognizing our indebtedness to the criticism that predates the inclusions here). We provide bibliographic details and a brief summary of content and contribution to the field; our aim is to help interested readers locate research pertinent to their interests. Recognizing the fluidity of the parameters of Shakespeare Performance Studies, especially in an age of increased mediatization of performance, our selections here cannot be exhaustive; conversely, a number of books not primarily focused on contemporary performance nevertheless model methods and resources that are of interest to the field. As such, alongside books on contemporary Shakespeare theatrical performance, we include a selection of studies about film, adaptation and appropriation, new media performances, twentieth-century theatre history and recent books by actors.

MAJOR SERIES

ARDEN PERFORMANCE EDITIONS (BLOOMSBURY) The Arden Performance Editions series, edited by Abigail Rokison-Woodall, Michael Dobson and Simon Russell Beale, re-presents the text of the Arden Shakespeare series in a format designed to fulfil the needs of the rehearsal room. Facing-page annotations offer guidance on pronunciation, metre, rhetorical devices and staging options. Current titles include: Katherine Steele Brokaw, ed. (2019), Macbeth Anna Kamaralli, ed. (2018), Much Ado About Nothing Paul Menzer, ed. (2017), Romeo and Juliet Gretchen E. Minton, ed. (2020), Twelfth Night Paul Prescott, ed. (2018), Othello

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Abigail Rokison-Woodall, ed. (2017), Hamlet Abigail Rokison-Woodall, ed. (2017), A Midsummer Night’s Dream

GREAT SHAKESPEAREANS (BLOOMSBURY) This series, overseen by series editors Adrian Poole and Peter Holland, includes profiles of a broad range of influential critics and practitioners. Volumes especially pertinent to Shakespeare in contemporary performance are 15 (Poel, GranvilleBarker, Guthrie, Wanamaker, edited by Cary M. Mazer), 16 (Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Dench, edited by Russell Jackson), 17 (Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli), and 18 (Brook, Hall, Ninagawa, Lepage, edited by Peter Holland).

SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD (BLOOMSBURY) This project, a collaboration between the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Arden Shakespeare, analyses key postwar productions of six plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company drawing on the SBT’s archives, focusing on topics rather than a chronological presentation: Gillian Day (2002), Shakespeare at Stratford: King Richard III Miriam Gilbert (2002), Shakespeare at Stratford: The Merchant of Venice Russell Jackson (2003), Shakespeare at Stratford: Romeo and Juliet David Lindley (2003), Shakespeare at Stratford: The Tempest Robert Smallwood (2003), Shakespeare at Stratford: As You Like It Patricia Tatspaugh (2002), Shakespeare at Stratford: The Winter’s Tale

SHAKESPEARE IN PERFORMANCE SERIES (MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS)) This long-standing series, overseen by series editors James C. Bulman and Carol Chillington Rutter, situates contemporary performances within the longer performance history of a play, identifying particular performance challenges, tendencies and reception. Recent and revised titles are: Carol Chillington Rutter (2020), Antony and Cleopatra Judith Dunbar (2010), The Winter’s Tale Michael Friedman with Alan Dessen (2019), Titus Andronicus (2nd edition) Jay Halio (2003), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2nd edition) Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter (2009), The Henry VI Plays Andrew Hartley (2019), Julius Caesar Bernice Kliman (2004), Macbeth (2nd edition) Alexander Leggatt (2004), King Lear (2nd edition)

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Robert Ormsby (2019), Coriolanus Lois Potter (2002), Othello (2nd edition) Robert Shaughnessy (2019), As You Like It Virginia Vaughan (2015), The Tempest

SHAKESPEARE IN PRACTICE (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN) Edited by Bridget Escolme and Stuart Hampton-Reeves, this innovative series places emphasis on the processes of making theatre. Following on from Escolme and Hampton-Reeve’s Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre (2012), each book takes a different aspect of theatrical practice and explores the methods and practices attendant upon it. Titles in this series currently include: Kevin Ewert (2018), Shakespeare and Directing in Practice Andrew James Hartley (2013) Shakespeare and Political Theatre in Practice Terri Power (2015), Shakespeare and Gender in Practice Stephen Purcell (2013), Shakespeare and Audience in Practice Darren Tunstall (2016), Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice

SHAKESPEARE IN PRODUCTION (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS) Overseen by series editors J. B. Bratton and Julie Hankey, the Shakespeare in Production series presents the New Cambridge Shakespeare text of an individual play with glosses drawn from the play’s performance history. Illustrating the text with local choices made by productions, contextualized by a historical overview in the introduction, these editions offer a wealth of detail from performance. Titles in this series, all recently re-released as e-books, include: John F. Cox, ed. (1998), Much Ado About Nothing Christine Dymkowski, ed. (2000), The Tempest Charles Edelman, ed. (2003), The Merchant of Venice Trevor R. Griffiths, ed. (1996), A Midsummer Night’s Dream Julie Hankey, ed. (2005), Othello (2nd edition) Robert Hapgood, ed. (1999), Hamlet James M. Loehlin, ed. (2002), Romeo and Juliet Richard Madelaine, ed. (1998), Antony and Cleopatra Cynthia Marshall, ed. (2004), As You Like It Elizabeth Schafer, ed. (2003), The Taming of the Shrew Elizabeth Schafer, ed. (2009), Twelfth Night Frances A. Shirley, ed. (2005), Troilus and Cressida Emma Smith, ed. (2002), King Henry V John Wilders, ed. (2004), Macbeth

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SHAKESPEARE IN THE THEATRE (BLOOMSBURY) Each book in this series, overseen by series editors Bridget Escolme, Farah KarimCooper, Peter Holland and Stephen Purcell, analyses and contextualizes the contribution of an important individual practitioner or theatre company. Each book covers rehearsal practices and key productions, and volumes on more recent practitioners often feature new interviews. Current titles in the series include: Dominique Goy-Blanquet (2018), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Patrice Chéreau Stuart Hampton-Reeves (2019), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Hall Conor Hanratty (2020), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Yukio Ninagawa Russell Jackson (2020), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Trevor Nunn Peter Kirwan (2019), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl Paul Menzer (2017), Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center Lucy Munro (2020), Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men Stephen Purcell (2017), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe Abigail Rokison-Woodall (2017), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Nicholas Hytner Robert Shaughnessy (2018), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare and the National Theatre, 1963–1975: Olivier and Hall Ayanna Thompson (2018), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars

SHAKESPEARE ON SCREEN (PRESSES UNIVERSITAIRES DE ROUEN ET DU HAVRE/CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS) This ongoing series generates dedicated volumes of critical essays on screen adaptations on single plays or clusters of themed plays. Each volume develops from seminars held at international Shakespeare conferences and features an international group of scholars. As well as canonical film adaptations, the series is notable for the sustained attention to lesser-known texts and to adaptations in diverse media, including live-streamed theatre and web-based film. The volumes also host José Ramón Díaz Fernández’s extensive bibliographies of Shakespeare on screen criticism. The series was originally published by Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, and has since moved to Cambridge University Press. Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne Guerrin, eds (2019), Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds (2008), Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds (2009), Shakespeare on Screen: The Roman Plays Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds (2011), Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds (2017), Shakespeare on Screen: Othello

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Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds (2017), Shakespeare on Screen: The Tempest and Late Romances Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin and Victoria Bladen, eds (2013), Shakespeare on Screen: Macbeth

Pascale Aebischer (2003), Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge University Press). Aebischer is a persuasive interpreter of performance, combining close, detailed analyses with a strong ethical and theoretical framework that, with this book, changed the conversation about the mistreated women in Shakespeare’s plays, silenced, mutilated, violated, murdered and erased. Focusing on Titus Andronicus, King Lear, Hamlet and Othello, Aebischer draws attention to characters sometimes textually absent but fiercely present, inspiring many feminist performance analyses in this vein that cite this book as a key source. Pascale Aebischer (2013), Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press). Developing Aebischer’s previous work on ‘Jacobean’ performance, Screening Early Modern Drama explores the canon of filmed versions of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. With a particular focus on avant-garde cinema and the foregrounding of technology, Aebischer offers fresh theorization of the queer, preposterous and remediated work done to plays by Marlowe, Webster, Middleton and others, and positions this experimental work in relation to a more mainstream tradition of Shakespearean screen adaptation. As well as being the first extended study of this corpus of work, the book includes an exhaustive appendix of all screen adaptations of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Pascale Aebischer (2020), Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge University Press). Aebischer has emerged as one of the leading scholars of Shakespeare in mediated performance, including ‘live’ broadcasts. Here, she makes the connection between our latest technology for experiencing Shakespeare and other technological innovations including the candlelight available to Shakespeare’s company when they began to use an indoor playhouse, the Blackfriars, in addition to the outdoor Globe; and now a possibility open to spectators at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor theatre within the Shakespeare’s Globe complex. As in her previous work, Aebischer is concerned with the ethical position of the spectator, here tracing a connection between technologies and the questions they raise for the spectator, for example about where to look and how to respond to what is seen. In this way, Aebischer is also writing back to a body of scholarship that responded to her own earlier work. Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale, eds (2003), Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres, and Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan). Originating from the 2001 Scaena conference, Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance, the ten essays in this collection are concerned in various ways with

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Shakespeare remade in different genres, locations and times. Taking their cues from textual, performance and cultural studies, the essays examine retextualized and recontextualized Shakespeare in media and genres from sign language to soap opera. Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie Osborne, eds (2018), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (Bloomsbury). Exploring the relatively new genre of the ‘live’ theatre broadcast, these essays provide an examination of the economics, marketing and various functions of a live recorded theatrical experience. With an international remit, the collection explores the cross-media transmission of live theatre through cinematic, televisual and web streams. Questions of how this hybrid experience informs and alters audience behaviours, affects performers, expands the dissemination of performance and fulfils educational and archival functions are also considered. Taking in companies such as the RSC, National Theatre, Cheek by Jowl, Talawa and the Comédie-Française, this is one of the first volumes to analyse this emerging genre. Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince, eds (2012), Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge University Press). Redressing the paucity of material on the performance of early modern nonShakespeare plays, this volume provides close analysis of productions on stage and screen that challenge preconceptions of the works’ emotional complexity, playability and impact. Early chapters explore the ideas and theoretical context behind productions in revival, defining genres and subgenres which facilitate discussion. Innovations and experiments in performance (and marketing) by major UK and US companies are explored along with the impact on theatre practitioners, audiences, scholarship and education. The volume contemplates the niche popularity of early modern non-Shakespeare plays in repertoire, film-making and scholarship, academia and education, and amateur performance. Fiona Banks, ed. (2019), Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences (Bloomsbury). An innovative intersection between theory and practice, Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences is split into two halves that seek to recentre the audience in the understanding of Shakespeare in performance. Seven critical essays theorize the role of the audience, both in Shakespeare’s own time and in current practice, and frame the methodological issues that affect audience research. A curated series of interviews then passes the microphone over to actors and audiences of productions of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night from 2016 and 2017, inviting them to reflect on their experience of the theatrical event. Bill Barclay and David Lindley, eds (2017), Shakespeare, Music and Performance (Cambridge University Press). A rare scholarly book to attend to the complex and multifaceted role played by music in the performance of Shakespeare, edited by two musicians, Shakespeare, Music and Performance is a unique book. The work shifts back and forth across periods, drawing on the work of the Early Music movement in supporting

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Original Practices experiments, and features interviews with actor-musicians and composers. The book includes several chapters on contemporary film and theatre, as well as a wealth of historical insight into the work of early modern musicians. Roberta Barker (2007), Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984– 2000: The Destined Livery (Palgrave Macmillan). Taking nine productions as her focus, Barker analyses the cultural and political significance of the performance of gender through a feminist lens, exploring the ideological transgressions, reiterations and subversions of early modern drama on stage and film. Her inquiry into ‘why audiences are still willing to assist in the reproduction of four-hundred-year-old plays that feature female suffering, madness and death, generally inflicted by men’ is informed by the extent to which modern audiences can be defined as a ‘politically engaged spectators’. As well as analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Titus Andronicus, Barker’s is one of the first texts to offer performance studies of mainly non-Shakespearean early modern tragedies, including Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Marlowe’s Edward II, Ford’s The Broken Heart and Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness. Sally Barnden (2019), Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance (Cambridge University Press). A truly original study, Barnden’s Still Shakespeare explores the role of theatrical photography in documenting, interpreting and performing Shakespeare. With detailed (and richly illustrated) readings of both staged art images and snapshots of performance, Barnden theorizes the iconographic work done by photography across history, profiling the work of particular artists and, in the book’s second section, connecting photography to Hamlet’s interests in memorialization and remembrance. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, eds (2013), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (Cambridge University Press). This collection of essays responds to productions at the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, part of the Cultural Olympiad, which included thirty-seven plays (as well as the sonnets and the poem Venus and Adonis), staged in over forty languages. Reviews variously explore production and adaptation choices, along with cultural and historical content, audience reception and interpretation. The ideals of a crosscultural, decentralized and ‘global’ Shakespeare are tempered with a simultaneous questioning of the validity of the project around issues of neo-colonialism, nationalpolitical hijacking and audience division. Anna Blackwell (2018), Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation (Palgrave Macmillan). Blackwell examines the definition of ‘Shakespearean’ as represented and constructed on Twitter and YouTube, and in memes, blogs, chat-spaces and websites. She seeks to provide shape to the amorphous and transient content of the digital world and the ways in which it now ceaselessly integrates Shakespeare into popular culture. By examining star actors and the impact of fandom through digital media on the

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creation of their persona as ‘Shakespearean’, Blackwell defines new modes of audience interaction, imaginative creative responses and political assimilation of Shakespeare beyond more traditional performance venues. John Russell Brown, ed. (2008), The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare (Routledge). Analysing the contributions of thirty-one theatre directors covering over a hundred years of performance, Brown’s edited collection is extensive and international in its scope. Arranged alphabetically rather than chronologically, it lends itself to insightful contrasts, juxtapositions and comparisons of individual theatrical style, approaches to rehearsal, use of specific theatrical space, collaborations and inspirations. Although the style, tone and content of individual chapters varies widely, Brown, through his curation, has sought to illuminate the interconnection of the subjects as well as their unique contribution to the field of Shakespeare in performance. Entries are followed by a biography, chronology, bibliography and videography. John Russell Brown and Kevin Ewert, eds (2012), The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare (Routledge). This collection of essays focuses on twenty present-day actors with substantial experience of performing Shakespeare. The contributors explore acting styles and techniques, interpretative approaches and engagement with the text, as well as significant performances. Each entry provides a useful chronology of performances, a bibliography for further exploration of the actors’ work and a note about each author’s approach and relationship with the subject. Judith Buchanan (2005), Shakespeare on Film (Pearson Education). Buchanan’s rigorous archival work makes this book in the Inside Film series an invaluable companion volume to the study of Shakespeare in the cinema. With close attention to historical production contexts, Buchanan surveys a wide range of Shakespeare films (including two chapters on silent film that allow her to devote considerable space to European cinema) and develops connections across space and time. She gives extended focus to films of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and to the work of Kenneth Branagh and Akira Kurosawa. The filmography and bibliography are especially helpful for their discussion of archival holdings and locations of rare films. Judith Buchanan (2009), Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge University Press). Drawing on Buchanan’s extensive work on the hundreds of silent Shakespeare films released between 1895 and 1927, Shakespeare on Silent Film offers a detailed account of the industry practices and changing technologies that shaped the birth of Shakespeare on film. With close readings of both filmed theatre productions and made-for-cinema films, Buchanan’s book is an invaluable guide to this neglected period, and a companion to the British Film Institute’s DVD collections Silent Shakespeare (2004) and Play On! (2016), which feature commentaries by Buchanan.

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James C. Bulman, ed. (2008), Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). The performance of gender in modern cross-dressed productions of Shakespeare is the focus of this collection. The emphasis is primarily on Western productions, with several essays covering Cheek by Jowl’s landmark all-male As You Like It (1991) and the Globe’s all-male Twelfth Night (2002). Gender and identity politics, British state-sanctioned homophobia, queer theory and other cultural concerns inform the analyses. Definitions of cross-dressing, drag and passing by Jennifer Drouin add important distinctions to the dialogue on cross-dressed productions and the performance of gender. James C. Bulman, ed. (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford University Press). The successor to Hodgdon and Worthen’s Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (2005), Bulman’s monumental Oxford Handbook tackles the changing nature and definition of performance and performance criticism in the twenty-first century. The impact of ‘live’ broadcast/digital relays, social media, projection and other immersive technologies informs many of the essays. The changing nature of the archival record and its impact on scholarship, the subjectivity of performance criticism and the intrusion of selfhood into the recreation of the theatre moment distinguish this from earlier anthologies. Sections on inter-cultural and global Shakespeare cover southern Africa, Latin America and south-east Asia. Mark Thornton Burnett (2007), Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Palgrave Macmillan). The first of Mark Thornton Burnett’s major interventions into the global work of Shakespearean cinema, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace takes globalization itself as its subject of enquiry. Exploring production practices in the context of late capitalism, Burnett’s case studies consider film as commodity, negotiating issues of adaptation and context as inflected by the packaging and transmission of cultural products. Burnett’s sophisticated theorization establishes important and influential frameworks for understanding the effects of a global marketplace on the loadings of the regional. Mark Thornton Burnett (2012), Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press). Covering some seventy-three non-Anglophone Shakespeare films, Burnett’s book is one of the most important resources for assessing the scope and range of global Shakespeare cinema. The book responds to a changing critical field that has increasingly decentred the mainstream films of the Western world, and approaches its wide corpus through the prism of auteurs, regions (with particular attention to Latin America and Asia) and selected plays (Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet). Burnett’s work finds juxtapositions and contrasts between the films, many of which have received little critical attention, and addresses issues of access and resource for studying films that have not received widespread distribution.

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Mark Thornton Burnett (2019), ‘Hamlet’ and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press). Building on his previous work in Shakespeare and World Cinema, Burnett contributes to the subfield of monographs on Hamlet’s afterlives with a study of Hamlet’s cinematic fortunes according to region. Again decentring Anglophone Shakespeare, the book features work on Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, Brazil, China and Japan, India, Turkey and Iran, continuing to expand on his earlier work understanding local contexts as presented and encountered in a globalized world. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray, eds (2011), The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press). This large companion volume features thirty chapters organized according to different major art forms. An unusual focus of the volume is music, with chapters covering opera, classical and popular music, musical theatre and dance. Sections on stage and film are arranged chronologically, with chapters by Christie Carson, Andrew James Hartley, Ramona Wray and Stephen Purcell covering contemporary stage, film and television performance. The particular interest in a wide range of media – including the visual arts and books as well as performance – locates Performance Studies within broader cultural fields. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose, eds (2003), Shakespeare the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD (Routledge). Following on from their 1997 collection Shakespeare the Movie, Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose’s ‘sequel’ combines six retained or revised essays with ten new chapters. As implied in the subtitle, popular adaptation is a key concern of this volume, with essays exploring parody, celebrity, documentary and animation as well as mainstream and arthouse Shakespeare film, and essays on race and global/ transnational film cultures. The theoretical and methodological rigour, both in the local historical analyses and especially in treating emergent media, makes this an important precursor to later books on Shakespeare in digital media. Maurizio Calbi (2013), Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the TwentyFirst Century (Palgrave Macmillan). Drawing heavily on the theories of Jacques Derrida, Calbi explores the fragmentary presence of Shakespeare that haunts adaptations of Shakespeare in new media, from film and television to the RSC’s Twitter production ‘Such Tweet Sorrow’. Avoiding well-trodden ground, Calbi selects relatively less-explored adaptations for his case studies. His deft analyses treat Shakespeare’s status in these performances as hauntological, allowing for an uncanny overlapping of place, space, time and medium. Vera Cantoni (2018), New Playwriting at Shakespeare’s Globe (Bloomsbury). While the focus of this book is on new plays, Cantoni’s deft study of plays written specifically for the reconstructed Globe theatre develops an important theorization of the workings of this unique space. Considering the ways in which the space

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is haunted by memories and expectations of Shakespearean performance, and attending to the site-specific architectural features and relationship between performers and audiences, Cantoni uses the plays developed in the space (especially those of Howard Brenton) to draw attention to features of the Globe as a working playhouse. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2008), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge University Press). This collection of essays by theatre practitioners and researchers charts the first decade of the Globe while simultaneously setting out an ethos for the company under the artistic directorship of Dominic Dromgoole. The collection is aimed at a broad readership of practitioners, teachers and scholars, including the theatre artists whose creative energy fuelled the initial ‘experiment’. The collection explores the nature of the Globe ‘experiment’ with regards to materials, space, music, audience dynamics and educational programmes, divided into overlapping sections on ‘original practices’, ‘education and research’ and ‘research in practice, practice in research’. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan, eds (2014), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice (Cambridge University Press). The first book dedicated entirely to this rapidly growing and evolving field, Shakespeare in the Digital World predominantly focuses on new media, social networks, digital publishing, pedagogy and scholarly practice. The current situation of Shakespeare in Digital Humanities sets the scene in early chapters, followed by discussion of the possibilities of dissemination, collaboration and scholarly interaction on research projects. The book's final section focuses on performance, with chapters considering the digital brands of Shakespeare institutions and the advent of live theatre broadcasts. Thomas Cartelli (2019), Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment (Palgrave Macmillan). Heroically resisting the temptation to use either ‘contemporary’ or ‘experimental’ in his title, Cartelli analyses productions, mainly contemporary and experimental, focusing on the push and pull of intermediality and embodiment – that is, how technological incursions and ‘gross but undeniable materiality’ (294) intersect in these productions. Alongside new readings of more familiar examples like the very different Hamlets of Heiner Müller, The Wooster Group and Thomas Ostermeier, Cartelli also introduces some peculiar but fascinating productions otherwise disregarded by Shakespeare scholarship. This is an important development of earlier work by Aneta Mancewicz (2014) and by Cartelli himself. Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe (2007), New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Polity). This state-of-the-field co-authored book maps out the critical vocabularies for interpreting the post-1990 resurgence of Shakespeare on screen, focusing on cinema

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and television adaptations. Their interest is in what is innovative, particularly privileging films and approaches that are critically self-reflexive in their encounters with Shakespeare. The book offers robust critiques and theoretically rigorous close analyses of a range of screen adaptations, primarily drawn from the UK and US, and establishes the trends that define this body of ‘new wave’ Shakespeare. Rob Conkie (2006), The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity (Edwin Mellen Press). This is an early assessment of Shakespeare’s Globe focusing on the years 1996–2004 and the vexed term ‘authenticity’ as it relates to the theatre’s emerging experiments in ‘Original Practices’ and in the unique encounters between performances and audiences in the Globe space. Of particular value is his capturing of discourses around the Globe, both those generated by the theatre itself and those of observers, in the early years of its operation, and informed consideration of its early productions. Rob Conkie (2016), Writing Performative Shakespeares: New Forms for Performance Criticism (Cambridge University Press). Interested in fostering a more creative and engaged approach to writing about performance, Conkie proposes different inventive formats that are, themselves, performances, modelling bold, theoretically informed, ambitious new ways of encountering different kinds of performance and their archival remains. Sudoku, comics and pinboards are some of his solutions to the stiffness of traditional performance criticism. Neil Corcoran (2018), Reading Shakespeare’s Soliloquies: Text, Theatre, Film (The Arden Shakespeare). This consideration of the soliloquy as a literary and dramatic form offers an exploration of the development and formal qualities of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, before turning to how they operate in performance. Alongside close readings of pertinent passages in Richard III, Henry VI, Romeo and Juliet and Othello, Corcoran includes contributions from eight UK-based Shakespearean performers. Jonathan Croall (2018), Performing Hamlet: Actors in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury). Using examples from postwar English productions, and where possible the actors’ own words, Croall provides an overview of how the character of Hamlet has been interpreted and performed in modern times. The last section of the book offers a diary focusing on the rehearsal, performance and reception of Simon Russell Beale’s performance for the National Theatre’s 2000 production directed by John Caird. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, eds (2019), The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Routledge). Dedicated to the memory of Christy Desmet, this field-defining collection builds on the editors’ significant work on global Shakespeare appropriation (including in the

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journal co-founded by Desmet and Iyengar, Borrowers and Lenders). The thirty-nine essays are innovatively grouped by region and by medium. Ranging between trans/ inter-cultural productions, regional/local approaches, decolonizing/decolonized Shakespeares, and pedagogic and new media approaches, the essays here give voice to a diverse set of approaches that interrogate the ethics, politics, histories and futures of Shakespeare performance and reception around and across the world. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, eds (2014), Bollywood Shakespeares (Palgrave Macmillan). This important collection interrogates the role played by Shakespeare both as part of an elite Western tradition and as a cultural product in a post-national Indian cinema. Despite the title, the essays span a range of cinematic and theatrical traditions, with a cluster focusing on Vishal Bhardwaj’s films and case studies including British film and the pre-histories of Bollywood in Indian theatre. The interrogation of the interpretive challenges of Shakespeare in juxtaposition with local cultures has implications for adaptation theory beyond Bollywood Shakespeare. Michael Dobson (2011), Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press). Offering the first detailed academic consideration of amateur productions, Dobson’s cultural history considers the moral, political, dramaturgical and technical dimensions of staging Shakespeare in different times, places, and spaces by different kinds of actors. Dividing the book into domestic, civic, expatriate and outdoor productions, he analyses examples from aristocratic private amusements, amateur dramatic companies, productions in internment camps in the First and Second World Wars and post-war outdoor performances in varied spaces. Sophie Duncan (2019), Shakespeare’s Props: Memory and Cognition (Routledge). This innovative study applies cognitive approaches and theories of memory to the study of Shakespeare’s stage objects. With especial interest in the ways props create transhistorical resonances and the function of props as an extension of characters’ minds, Duncan draws on archives of modern performance to unpack the loadings that props carry, as well as drawing welcome attention to the work of prop-makers and underexplored theatrical archives. SarahDustagheer(2017),Shakespeare’sTwoPlayhouses:RepertoryandTheatreSpaceatthe Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613 (Cambridge University Press). Dustagheer offers interpretations of recent productions at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in light of her close analyses of plays written as the King’s Men began to exploit the features of both an outdoor playhouse, the Globe, and an indoor one, the Blackfriars. Pursuing the argument that the shift to playing in two spaces affected the nature of playwriting for the King’s Men, Dustagheer explores the sensory and affective implications of the two playhouses’ social, urban, sensory and historical characteristics.

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Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods, eds (2017), Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre (Bloomsbury). In this essay collection, contributors consider the work that early modern stage directions do for actors, readers and theatre historians, and question the extent to which they can serve as records of practice, spurs to imagination and guides to reading. While the emphasis is on historical performance, the focus on the theatrical work anticipated by the playtexts and the discussion of the textual representation of stage action makes the book invaluable for those approaching the plays as performance pieces. Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson, eds (2010), Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge University Press). This collection of essays explores largely unfamiliar individual productions within their cultural, socio-political and ideological contexts. Divided into three thematically linked parts, the book focuses on issues of authenticity, attitudes towards sex and gender and questions of identity. Each section is arranged chronologically, and although the examples are largely Anglophone, interesting international and regional examples suggest a wide and diverse scope across time and location that challenge distinctions of centre and periphery. Paul Edmonson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, eds (2013), A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival (Bloomsbury). As a record of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012, which saw a festival of performances by international companies in the UK, A Year of Shakespeare is a book of reviews and a book about the changing nature of reviewing. Developed from blogs originally published hours after the performances, the resulting book offers lively and precise accounts with an immediacy not often found in academic work. The records of UKwide screen and stage performance captured in this book are further theorized in Prescott and Sullivan’s Shakespeare on the Global Stage (2015). Bridget Escolme (2005), Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (Routledge). Escolme’s monograph explores what happens, emotionally, cognitively, aesthetically and practically, when an actor/character addresses the audience. With a focus on recent productions of Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet and Richard II (including Trevor Nunn and Michael Boyd’s 1999–2000 productions of Troilus and Cressida; Hamlets by Red Shift, the Globe and Peter Brook; contrasting performances by Samuel West and Ralph Fiennes as Richard II; and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s productions of Julius Caesar and Hamlet) she considers the effectiveness of meta-theatrical versus naturalistic acting, illusion and character, and their moments of elision and conflict with this dramatic device. Through these examples she analyses how characters within the context of the play and performance orchestrate a dramatization of selfhood and assert their subjectivity.

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Bridget Escolme (2014), Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (Bloomsbury). Escolme considers emotional excess in Shakespeare from a perspective that includes both the humours as understood in the early modern period, well described in her introduction, and a more contemporary approach focused on performance practice, suggesting that in the space between early modern and contemporary might be an opportunity for actors to consider different avenues for approaching how emotions are understood and depicted. She explores how passionate states are represented in Coriolanus (anger), The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling, The Honest Whore and Twelfth Night (laughter), All’s Well That Ends Well and Antony and Cleopatra (love) and Richard III and Hamlet (grief). Joe Falocco (2010), Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (Brewer). Falocco’s book provides the necessary context for understanding the upsurge of interest in reconstructions of early modern theatres and playing practices in the twentieth century. Surveying key innovators from William Poel to Sam Wanamaker, the book examines the ideological underpinnings of projects to recreate Shakespeare’s practices, and makes an influential argument for the progressiveness and experimental nature of these explorations. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, eds (2017), The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (Palgrave Macmillan). Fazel and Geddes’s pioneering work offers a sustained retheorization of Shakespeare reception in an age of digital media and networked cultures. The model of the ‘user’ as opposed to ‘reader’ or ‘audience’ recognizes the interactive and self-constructing nature of Shakespeare end users, and offers an especially productive model for performance scholars working on new forms of digital performance. The essays collectively blur the boundaries between different kinds of Shakespearean end user, complicating notions of disciplinarity, creative agency and value in the twenty-first century. Rosemary Gaby (2014), Open-air Shakespeare: Under Australian Skies (Palgrave Macmillan). Charting the history of outdoor performances in Australia since the early twentieth century, this monograph covers the first productions mounted in stately homes, touring companies from the 1950s and 1960s, the impact of Shakespeare on the arts festival circuit, the rise of the Australian Shakespeare Company in the 1980s and the development of community-based theatre companies in relation to the global Shakespeare in the Park movement. Gaby’s work demonstrates the importance of connecting audiences and communities to Shakespeare in various significant locales, changing attitudes to Shakespeare and the interaction between place and performance.

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Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie, eds (2020), Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations (Routledge). With a focus on more irreverent treatments of Shakespeare, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations builds on earlier work on parody, play and popular adaptation across media. By paying serious attention to playful texts, including those that parody Shakespeare himself, the book collectively retheorizes the ways in which humour and concepts of relevance and relatability intersect with Shakespeare’s cultural capital. The book also includes a section with contributions by film- and theatremakers. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2014), Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (Cambridge University Press). The opening of the Sam Wanamaker playhouse provided a catalyst for the research behind this collection. Divided into three sections on evidence, materiality and notions of fashion, Moving Shakespeare Indoors examines the use of indoor performance spaces, particularly the Second Blackfriars, on early modern drama and theatre practice. From issues around the construction of the indoor theatre, to what effect moving indoors had on performance, theatrics, audience response and on the playwrights themselves, this work is an important document of the current thinking about indoor playhouse practices that underpins the work of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Jennifer Mae Hamilton (2017), ‘This Contentious Storm’: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear (Bloomsbury). An important innovation in the use of ecocritical theory to interpret Shakespeare performance, ‘This Contentious Storm’ reads the storm at the heart of King Lear across history, considering the ways in which it has been made to signify from the apocalyptic to the providential, the emotional to the cosmological. The book’s second half traces a long performance history from the play’s earliest stagings, with the final chapter recounting the work of productions up to 2016, noting the slow shift away from the reading of the storm as just a psychological metaphor towards something more significant. Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme, eds (2012), Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan). This edited volume, drawing on the work of the Shakespeare in Practice scholarly network, takes a series of elements of dramaturgy or stagecraft and explores the implications of each for Shakespeare, both in the plays as written and as contemporary performance. The close focus on performance elements allows for a rigorous methodological unpacking of the practical work of making performance, and sets up the aims of the Shakespeare in Practice monograph series. Andrew James Hartley, ed. (2015), Shakespeare on the University Stage (Cambridge University Press). This collection of essays attends to the material conditions, institutional contexts, rehearsal practices, cultural and ideological cross-currents and, sometimes, the

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aesthetic, pedagogical and personal value of performing Shakespeare on a variety of campuses worldwide. Along with Michael Dobson’s Shakespeare on the Amateur Stage, this is one of a few books to take non-professional Shakespeare performance seriously, seeing campus Shakespeare as a site for experiment and innovation, and includes contributions from makers of university Shakespeare. Sarah Hatchuel (2004), Shakespeare, From Stage to Screen (Cambridge University Press). Hatchuel’s monograph takes a historical approach to the understanding of Shakespeare’s cinematic aesthetics, beginning with a history of the development of realism in Shakespearean theatrical production before tracing the development of Shakespearean cinema. Chapters isolating particular filmic techniques for creating meaning, and case studies of specific scenes across a number of stage and screen adaptations, make this a useful book for students and newcomers to the field as well as scholars. Diana E. Henderson, ed. (2006), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Blackwell). This inspiring collection of essays is packaged as a companion, with a helpful chronology to situate readers within the field, but its essays are cutting-edge interventions rather than surveys. The focus is predominantly on cinematic film, but the essays adopt a range of critical approaches from auteur theory to parody, globalization to remediation, and offer deep interrogations of screen acting, cultural politics and film authorship. With attention to the interconnections between theatre, film and scholarship, and a recurrent interest in the politics of adaptation, the book transcends its textbook framing in its significant theoretical innovation. Katherine Hennessey (2018), Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula (Palgrave Macmillan). Part of Palgrave’s Global Shakespeares series, Katherine Hennessey’s book surveys a fascinating range of twenty-first-century productions of Shakespeare in the countries of the Arabian peninsula. Hennessey’s detailed account includes campus productions, tours and local productions, and draws on her own observations as an audience member as well as interviews and contextual examination of the contexts of production and reception. Shakespeare, for Hennessey, becomes an opportunity for creating communities across the region’s divides and for exploring contentious issues. Barbara Hodgdon (2015), Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive (Routledge). This final monograph by Hodgdon, a leading scholar of Shakespeare in performance, draws on a rich vein of theatre studies in the wake of Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (Duke University Press, 2003) to consider, in her characteristically evocative close analyses, how the material remains of performances can serve as sites of re-performance. Hodgdon, a brilliant performer of archival research, brings to vivid life the messy stuff of theatrical remains.

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Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, eds (2005), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Blackwell). This massive, discipline-defining edited collection captures some of the best scholarship on Shakespeare and performance, starting with Hodgdon’s erudite, incisive introduction and ranging through more than thirty contributions that demonstrate an engagement with Shakespeare ‘and’ (rather than ‘in’) performance, a distinction they emphasize in order to move away from the analysis of individual productions and to focus, instead, on what is at stake, intellectually, theoretically and pedagogically, when the two terms intersect. Ton Hoenselaars, ed. (2012), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (Bloomsbury). Operating at the intersection of text and performance, this collection concentrates on the work of translators in a wide range of global and post-colonial contexts, including British Sign Language and Scots as well as languages spanning five continents. The work discussed ranges from literary translations to versions created for specific productions, and considers the local politics and pressures that inveigh on the work, as well as industry issues such as copyright. As such, the book is an important resource for scholars of global Shakespeare seeking insight into the processes of choosing and commissioning translations. Peter Holland, ed. (2006), Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge University Press). Part of the outpouring of interesting work engaging with Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (Duke University Press, 2003), this collection considers the intersection of its title’s three terms from various perspectives including mnemonic techniques and what happens when an actor’s memory fails in performance, intertextuality as a way a performance remembers other performances, memorial reconstruction in Shakespeare editing, and the role of various material remains and bodies, including critics and spectators, in remembering. Jonathan Holmes (2004), Merely Players? Actors’ Accounts of Performing Shakespeare (Routledge). Holmes focuses on the actor’s view of performing Shakespeare, particularly how an actor writes about the experience. Divided into four chapters, the book covers the problems of modern Stanislavskian approaches to the early modern period; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings; preconceptions of actors approaching Hamlet; and an appraisal of the interviews conducted by Carol Rutter in Clamorous Voices (Routledge, 1998). Holmes provides an insightful study into the dynamics of theatre practice and performance criticism. Tony Howard (2007), Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge University Press). There are records of more than 200 female Hamlets. Howard’s book explores how this performance history relates to the character and the play, considering aspects

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such as the purportedly androgynous nature of the character, the social and political contexts in which these performances have emerged, and the development, in cinema and literature, of the female Hamlet as a character type that escapes the text to become part of cultural and intellectual history. International in scope, it delves into staging and performance choices but also the cultural and political significance of productions, offering numerous new examples but also shining new light on even the most well-known performances of Hamlet’s ‘feminine sorrow’. Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Whetmore, Jr and Robert L. York (2006), Shakespeare and Youth Culture (Palgrave Macmillan). This co-written book (with authors taking responsibility for different chapters) focuses on the role of Shakespeare in contemporary American culture as a consequence of the breakdown of traditional barriers between high culture and mass entertainment. Attending to the cultural and economic exchanges of the contemporary marketplace, and to the role of Shakespeare in education, the book explores toy theatres such as the Tiny Ninja Theatre, teen Shakespeare film and the use of rap and rock music in Shakespeare theatre productions. Russell Jackson, ed. (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press). Revised and updated from the 2000 first edition, Jackson’s collection is an accessible textbook with dedicated essays on major Shakespeare directors and on trends in the adaptation of plays organized by genre. The primary focus is on canonical Shakespeare cinema, with particular strengths in contextualized close reading, and a closing section on ‘Critical Issues’ brings in a wider range of allusions and appropriations. Christa Janson and Dieter Mehl, eds (2015), Shakespeare Jubilees: 1769–2014 (Lit Verlag). This impressively international collection of essays offers a history of commemorative projects of Shakespeare, both as case studies in their own historical context and as connected points in a history of Shakespeare celebration. While there is no framing methodological or theoretical material, the miscellany of essays covers Asia, Latin America, New Zealand, North America and Europe, and offers contextualized accounts of Shakespeare performance presented as part of national and international Shakespeare festivals. Delia Jarrett-Macauley, ed. (2016), Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard (Routledge). The fourteen essays in this collection explore the intersections between race and Shakespearean performance. Combining scholarly essays and reflections by practitioners, the collection interrogates key issues such as institutional diversity, casting and multicultural performance through theoretical, practice-led and pedagogic lenses. The book’s insights into institutional practices, and its profiles of the work of directors and actors of colour on the British stage, inform the important work undertaken here.

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Paterson Joseph (2018), Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play (Methuen Drama). This work traces the intensely personal journey of an actor, Paterson Joseph, in his relationship with Shakespeare during the making of the RSC’s notable 2012 production of Julius Caesar. Providing unique insights into the rehearsal process and his depiction of Brutus, Joseph guides us step-by-step as the production takes shape, including an exploration of the filmed version for the RSC and its reception on tour. Joseph also discusses his feelings about director Gregory Doran’s choice of an African setting. As part of Methuen Drama’s Theatre Makers series, this book offers a practitioner’s point of view; an actor’s invaluable sense of what Shakespeare means and how his words make the transition from page to stage. Alexa Alice Joubin (2009), Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press). The plural ‘Shakespeares’ of this book’s title is important, with Joubin using the two-way traffic between Shakespeare and China as a focus for a retheorization of global Shakespeare methods that privileges localities rather than Shakespeare’s texts as sites for analysis. The broad historical range, explored through case studies, extends the scope of what is traditionally thought of as Chinese Shakespeares, taking in silent and contemporary film, fiction, traditional Chinese opera and theatre. The book thus makes an important intervention both in Chinese cultural studies and in a theoretical understanding of the multidirectional processes that shape conceptions of the local and the global. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds (2014), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Palgrave Macmillan). Responding to the festivals of global Shakespeare produced as part of the 2012 London Olympics, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation brings together scholars to interrogate the ethical issues raised by the word ‘appropriation’ with its loadings of possession and challenges to agency. As well as Douglas Lanier’s influential essay on the rhizome as a framework for treating Shakespeare adaptation (see Massai in this volume), the collection includes international collaborators responding to a range of appropriations across media and nations, with an emphasis on the fraught ethical concerns of cultural appropriation. It also includes an interview with director Sulayman Al-Bassam. Anna Kamaralli (2012), Shakespeare and the Shrew: Performing the Defiant Female Voice (Palgrave Macmillan). Casting her eye beyond The Taming of the Shrew, Kamaralli considers the ‘Bitch, hag, nag, crone, virago, harridan, harpy, scold’ across Shakespeare’s work, using genre as an organizing principle. She argues that these epithets signal women who insist on their right to speak, and on their status as subjects rather than objects. Offering an alternative performance history made up of detailed readings and attention to the gendered implications of decisions, Kamaralli reveals the tensions between

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contemporary practice and historical texts, and between the agency of actors and directors in recasting Shakespeare’s women on the modern stage. Farah Karim-Cooper (2016), The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Bloomsbury). Karim-Cooper’s cultural history unpacks the multivalent resonances of the hand in Shakespeare’s work. Drawing on current practice at Shakespeare’s Globe, KarimCooper reconsiders the work done by the hand both as part of the actor’s body and as a prop, and contextualizes this within a deep historical reading of the uses, languages and semiotics of the hand in the early modern period. Across the book, the meanings of the hand for both identity and communication emerge as critical to an understanding of the body’s performative work. Dennis Kennedy (2001), Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of TwentiethCentury Performance, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press). This expanded edition of Kennedy’s lavishly illustrated performance history includes a new chapter, ‘Century’s Close’, analysing performances in the 1990s from a starting point of visual (rather than, say, textual) evidence. Elements of scenography are therefore prioritized, but within the aesthetic and cultural contexts relevant to each production’s period and international location. Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan, eds (2010), Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge University Press). With thirteen chapters by Asian and non-Asian contributors, including an introduction jointly written by the editors offering a valuable history and theorization, this collection offers a range of perspectives, sometimes in direct opposition to each other, on stage and screen productions as well as Shakespeare’s presence in Asian popular cultures. The coverage is primarily of China, Japan, Singapore and India, with a particular focus on the work of directors familiar to the West because of their presence on the international touring circuit. There is a healthy scepticism, in some of the essays, about the functions Shakespeare might be serving in Asia. Margaret Jane Kidnie (2009), Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Routledge). Introducing some helpful ways of thinking about performance beyond the question of what should be classified as a production vs an adaptation, Kidnie uses concepts from adaptation studies that, after a useful survey of existing approaches to Shakespeare, productively situate performances of many types as parts within a whole. A particularly useful approach, following Richard Wollheim, suggests that a production of Hamlet is a ‘token’ of the play, and so is the Folio version, or a quarto, or an adaptation. The thing itself, the ‘type’, is merely the aggregate of these. Freed of cumbersome hair-splitting, Kidnie analyses these and other tokens, ultimately seeing Shakespeare as being co-created across time. Among a wealth of engaging production analyses, her close reading of critical responses to two RSC

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productions, focusing on authenticity, most clearly demonstrates the strength of her approach. Elizabeth Klett (2009), Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Flag (Palgrave Macmillan). With debates around cross-gender casting in Shakespeare still making headlines, Elizabeth Klett’s contribution to the analysis of women playing major male roles in Shakespeare productions remains timely even if its examples are from the 1990s and early 2000s. Across seven productions, all of which originated in or transferred to London, Klett produces deep analyses of the choices made, combining archival work on the design intentions with Klett’s own audience-eye interpretation of the work done by female actors in roles traditionally played by men. The book is an important document of a period when cross-gendered performance was gaining traction on the British stage. Ric Knowles, ed. (2004), Shakespeare and Canada: Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation (Peter Lang). Published as part of a series on ‘Dramaturgies’, Shakespeare and Canada gathers together Knowles’s previous essays on Shakespearean performance and adaptation in Canada, using studies of a number of key directors, actors, writers and other artists to explore the role of Shakespeare in developing notions of Canadian national identity. The span of time covered by the essays allows it to intervene in several areas of interest in Canadian theatre scholarship, as well as advancing a state-ofthe-field argument about Canada’s unique multi- and intercultural experiences of Shakespeare in rewriting and performance. Douglas Lanier (2002), Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford University Press). Part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, Lanier’s book is an accessible overview of the intersections between Shakespeare and contemporary media. It acts as both an entry point and a manifesto for the importance of Shakespeare’s appearances in modern popular culture to an understanding of his ongoing cultural significance. The book’s examples of allusions and references to Shakespeare demonstrate the pervasiveness of his cultural presence, and Lanier connects these to the draw of Shakespearean ‘authenticity’ as embodied in tourist destinations and reconstructed Elizabethan theatres. Courtney Lehmann (2002), Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Cornell University Press). In an ambitious, theoretically informed work, Lehmann uses film theory as a way of exploring why Shakespeare’s authorial presence retains such weight even after the poststructural death of the author. Recasting him as an auteur, she re-reads Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet for their performance of an auteur-effect (both in writing and in the fiction), before revisiting the work of

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contemporary cinematic Shakespeare auteurs such as Baz Luhrmann and Kenneth Branagh in the light of her findings. Recasting Shakespeare as a singularity rather than a controlling figure, her work has important implications for treatments of Shakespearean authorship as well as performance. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, eds (2002), Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Contributing to the wave of new work on Shakespeare and popular cinema in the current century, Spectacular Shakespeare focuses predominantly on mainstream ‘new wave’ Shakespeare films by Richard Loncraine, Baz Luhrmann, Kenneth Branagh, Franco Zeffirelli and others, with particular interest in the pedagogic value of new forms of Shakespeare performance. Recurrent throughout the essays is a concern with the self-reflexivity of film, and the deployment of Shakespeare as cultural icon. See also Starks and Lehmann (2002), The Reel Shakespeare. Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby, eds (2017), The Shakespearean World (Routledge). This expansive collection surveys Shakespeare’s afterlives across media, nations, cultures and time, with a particular focus on performance and appropriation. Two opening sections deal with stage and film respectively, each adopting a geographic focus to examine regional trends. A particular innovation is the focus on ‘Shakespeare in everyday life’, taking in amateur performance, radio, television, young audiences and more. The emphasis on survey approaches and lists of further reading make this an ideal starting point for exploration of a diverse range of areas. Li Ruru (2003), Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (Hong Kong University Press). Li Ruru’s book is an indispensable study of Shakespearean production in mainland China during the twentieth century. The thick descriptive approach to analysis of eleven productions, along with extensive contextualization of the productions’ backgrounds and appendices featuring glossaries and archival materials, makes this a particularly helpful introduction to Chinese Shakespeare performance for scholars from other regions. Li draws on anecdotes from her own family’s theatre connections as well as new interviews and her first-hand spectatorship of productions to provide a vivid account of recent work. Irena R. Makaryk and Kathryn Prince, eds (2017), Shakespeare and Canada: Remembrance of Ourselves (University of Ottawa Press). Responding to the Shakespeare commemorations of 2016, Shakespeare and Canada explores the roles of memory and commemoration in forming identity. With several essays profiling the Stratford Festival (including two essays on its fictionalized presentation in the television series Slings and Arrows), and others focusing on Québécois and Indigenous performance, the authors collectively consider how Shakespeare enables Canada to tell new stories about itself.

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Aneta Mancewicz (2014), Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages (Palgrave Macmillan). Some of the most exciting Shakespeare productions of the current century have come out of Europe. Mancewicz’s detailed, perceptive analyses situate them within a rich context of both theoretical approaches and aesthetics, understanding them as sites of negotiation and encounter where the Shakespearean materials are refashioned. The book’s particular focus on productions that incorporate digital media into live performance charts exciting new directions in the intersection of Shakespeare and technology. Aneta Mancewicz and Alexa Alice Joubin, eds (2018), Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (Palgrave Macmillan). Transcending Shakespeare reception studies, this collection considers how Shakespeare has attained a mythic status and what that means in terms of his afterlife. Considering productions originating in Japan, the former Yugoslavia, Brazil, Korea and many others, the thirteen chapters (with an introduction by the editors and an afterword by Michael Dobson) contribute new examples to the field of Shakespeare in contemporary performance. Sonia Massai, ed. (2005), World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (Routledge). In this important contribution to the study of global Shakespeare in performance, Massai defined the field by situating it within Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the cultural field. In sections considering ‘Local Shakespeares for Local Audiences’, ‘Local Shakespeares for National Audiences’, and ‘Local Shakespeares for International Audiences’, the nineteen essays (including an afterword by Barbara Hodgdon) illustrate, in various ways, Massai’s assertion that the paradigm of centre and margin, of English and nonEnglish Shakespeare, is not applicable to contemporary Shakespeare performance. Sonia Massai (2020), Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (Cambridge University Press). The first major study of accent and voice as a central identity marker in Shakespearean performance, Shakespeare’s Accents makes an important intervention in understanding the politics and resonances of the way in which Shakespeare’s words are spoken. Working backwards through time, Massai navigates deftly between regional, foreign, mimicked and other distinctive accents as they are embedded in the plays and as they are reproduced and remade in performance, and includes an important section on the practice of original pronunciation. Massai’s attention to a wide range of both mainstream and fringe companies allows her to consider race, institutional politics, festivals and more. Cary M. Mazer (2015), Double Shakespeares: Emotional-Realist Acting and Contemporary Performance (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Emotional realism in the Stanislavkian tradition has had a complicated legacy in Shakespearean acting, resulting in the doubleness of Mazer’s title, which refers to

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the spectator’s simultaneous awareness of the character and the actor, the latter never totally subsumed within the former. Mazer explores this doubleness as a productive, rather than a lamentable, element of performances, focusing especially on techniques such as cross-dressing and distancing devices that treat doubleness as a feature rather than a flaw. Lynsey McCulloch and Brendan Shaw, eds (2019), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (Oxford University Press). The first collection of this size to examine the relationships between Shakespeare and global forms of dance, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is a landmark volume that synthesizes a research area often neglected by Shakespeare performance scholarship. As well as offering historical analyses of dance within Shakespeare’s plays, case study chapters cover international forms of ballet, contemporary dance, musical theatre, physical theatre and more, exploring the work of choreographers and dancers in a range of contexts. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan, eds (2013), Women Making Shakespeare: Essays on Text, Reception and Performance (Bloomsbury). This wide-ranging collection pays tribute to the work of Ann Thompson with a series of thirty-four short essays to capture the significant work of women in Thompson’s main areas of Shakespeare scholarship: text, reception and performance. The final section of the book treats performance from the seventeenth century to the present, and contemporary work is represented by a sequence of chapters on The Taming of the Shrew, consideration of key female roles and an interview with the film editor Helga Keller, among other work that foregrounds the contribution of female practitioners and scholars to an understanding of Shakespeare. Paul Menzer (2015), Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History (Bloomsbury). For most of Shakespeare’s afterlife, anecdotes have been synonymous with theatre history, though more recently they have been devalued as a weak, subjective and unreliable form of evidence. In this provocative and engaging rehabilitation of the anecdote focused on five plays (Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Macbeth), Menzer argues that these tales, even the fantastical and apocryphal ones, are rich sources of evidence from the people most closely involved in performances, including, often, actors, and that the details around which anecdotes accrue relate an alternative history of theatrical value. Gemma Miller (2020), Childhood in Contemporary Performance of Shakespeare (Bloomsbury). Arguing that Shakespeare’s work features more child characters than that of any other early modern dramatist, Miller’s book investigates the semiotics of the child on stage and in film, troubling notions of how childhood is conceived of and interpreted in the present day. With case studies concentrating on Richard

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III, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus and The Winter’s Tale, Miller’s astute performance analysis and retheorization of childhood through a number of disciplinary lenses make this a rewarding follow-up to Carol Chillington Rutter’s Shakespeare and Child’s Play (2007). Gretchen Minton (2020), Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer (University of New Mexico Press). As dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, Minton is well placed to write a history of the state’s complex relationship with Shakespeare. With a focus on the role of Shakespeare in different communities throughout the state’s history, the book’s achievement is to create a micro-history of amateur and professional US Shakespeare production that develops a broader narrative about the citizenry of Montana. Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, eds (2010), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan). Part of the ‘Signs of Race’ series, Weyward Macbeth is one of the few books to explicitly centre on race as a focus of analysis in Shakespearean performance. The focus here is on Macbeth’s fortunes in America, with a particular strength in lesserknown adaptations and appropriations as well as several essays devoted to Orson Welles’s unavoidable Harlem production. Framing Macbeth as a play whose own weyward nature has appealed to artists working outside the mainstream, the book’s many voices across short essays – including those of practitioners – makes for an eclectic and interrogative collection, covering history, music, casting, new media, new writing and more. Charles Ney (2016), Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices (Bloomsbury). This is a fascinating comparison of different approaches to Shakespeare from a very broad range of American directors. After an opening chapter distinguishing American from British practices, the second introduces each of the directors and their approaches. Ney then uses the rehearsal process as a scaffold for productive comparisons between them focusing on, for example, casting, table work and language. This complements Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America: Historical Perspectives (2019). Charles Ney (2019), Directing Shakespeare in America: Historical Perspectives (Bloomsbury). With chapters covering early American directors from the nineteenth century to the 1940s, directors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the American Shakespeare Festival, the New York Shakespeare Festival and other main sites of Shakespeare production, Ney’s study sifts the personal and production archives with an emphasis on understanding the individual approaches and intentions of major directors. This is a detailed work of both performance history and cultural history that complements Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices (2016).

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Stephen O’Neill (2014), Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (Bloomsbury). This innovative study is the first full-length study of the impact of YouTube (and similar video-sharing sites) on the adaptation and reception of Shakespeare. Offering a deep exploration of the forms and technologies that shape YouTube Shakespeare film, and of the participatory culture that governs reception and interaction, O’Neill establishes the opportunities and challenges presented by this emergent mode of Shakespeare adaptation, as well as setting out important methodological principles. Stephen O’Neill, ed. (2017), Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media (Bloomsbury). Offering a broad snapshot of ‘Shakespeare’s media ecologies’, Broadcast Your Shakespeare places especial emphasis on modes of transmission in producing the effects of Shakespeare. As well as more traditional media including radio, television and cinema, the book offers sustained consideration of web ecologies that blur the boundaries between theatre and film, and between producers and audiences, tracking the changing Shakespeare performance cultures produced by vlogging, Tumblr, Twitter and other forms of social media. Shormishtha Panja and Babli Moitra Saraf, eds (2016), Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures (SAGE). Part of the important work being done to shift global Shakespeare from older understandings of ‘foreign’ productions as marginal and England as the centre, this collection considers, instead, how Shakespeare contributes to Indians’ sense of what Indianness is and can be. With sections on visual culture, stage, screen, translation, identity and politics, and exploring intersections with icons of Indian culture, this wide-ranging collection offers an introduction to both historical and contemporary Shakespeare performance in India. L. Monique Pittman (2011), Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation (Peter Lang). Pittman’s monograph explores the negotiations between Shakespearean authority and the interpretive authority of adaptors and directors. Pursuing the question across case studies drawn from mainstream film and popular television, Pittman considers how her selections negotiate issues of authority and struggle both within the source plays and in the new contexts of the adaptations. Paul Prescott (2013), Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge University Press). Across centuries of Shakespearean performance, the review has often been the primary source of knowledge about a past production. As Prescott argues, reviews offer key insights, though these are often more about the cultures in which they were written, or the reviewers themselves, than about the productions they purport to review. As gatekeepers of what is permissible in performance, and occasionally instigators of change, reviewers, from Garrick’s commentators in the eighteenth

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century to those responding to the World Shakespeare Festival of 2012, have taken a major role in the shaping of Shakespearean performance and reception. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, eds (2015), Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year (Bloomsbury). Following the editors’ work on A Year of Shakespeare (Edmondson, Prescott and Sullivan 2013), Shakespeare on the Global Stage offers more sustained reflection on the implications of the 2012 Shakespeare festivals timed to coincide with the London Olympics. The eleven chapters include creative responses as well as critical essays that challenge and interrogate the framing of 2012 in relation to questions of nation and region, colonialism and commemoration. Stephen Purcell (2009), Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage (Palgrave Macmillan). While the twenty-first century has seen a wealth of studies of ‘popular’ Shakespeare adaptation, Purcell’s influential book takes the question of popularity itself as a subject for analysis, interrogating the loadings of cultural authority and subversion in performance. Importantly, Purcell shifts attention from the work itself, suggesting that ‘popular’ is a quality of attitude among audiences. Drawing case studies primarily from UK performance, and interspersing his more traditional theorization with experiments in more informal subjective anecdote, Purcell offers a compelling account of the changing registers of Shakespeare theatrical performance. Anne Sophie Refskou, Marcel Alvaro de Amorim and Vinicius Mariano de Varvalho, eds (2019), Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology (Bloomsbury). This formally inventive collection advances the methodology of ‘cultural anthropophagy’ as a means of displacing global Shakespeare methods that retain Europe as a geographical and cultural centre. Using cannibalism as a metaphor for an approach that incorporates and assimilates otherness, the volume develops its methodology across a series of case studies from film and theatre productions and appropriations. Of particular note is the volume’s use of dialogues, with scholars and practitioners in conversation with one another to present a more collaborative form of analysis. Paige Martin Reynolds (2018), Performing Shakespeare’s Women: Playing Dead (Bloomsbury). Reynolds is an actor and scholar, and this book treads a line between memoir and critical study, focusing on the experience of playing the roles of women – who invariably end up dead – in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Drawing on experience as an evidence base, the book delves into the embodied experience of what it means to ‘play dead’, and situates the experience within an ongoing culture of gender inequality and ethical questions of contemporary performance practice.

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Abigail Rokison-Woodall (2009), Shakespearean Verse Speaking: Text and Theatre Practice (Cambridge University Press). This monograph anticipates the work of the Arden Performance Editions series that Rokison-Woodall co-edits with Michael Dobson and Simon Russell Beale, outlining some of the principles that went on to inform that series. With sections considering historical approaches, textual evidence and editorial practices, and drawing extensively on Rokison-Woodall’s own expertise as a practitioner, the book offers practically oriented approaches and solutions for handling, investigating and performing Shakespearean verse. Abigail Rokison-Woodall (2013), Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Versions and Adaptations (Bloomsbury). Rokison-Woodall’s book offers critical analysis of the relative strengths of Shakespeare adaptations aimed at younger audiences, from widely disseminated film, prose and animated retellings to studies of live theatre productions. The book is particularly significant for the serious attention paid to stage productions designed with young people in mind, both full length and abbreviated, raising critical questions for Rokison-Woodall about the assumptions made regarding children’s ability to handle thematic complexity and language. Drawing on interviews with actors, directors, teachers and children, the range of overlooked material covered here makes this an excellent resource for critical work on Shakespeare adaptation. Carol Chillington Rutter (2001), Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (Routledge). Rutter’s project in this book is to interpret the women’s bodies that populate Shakespeare’s plays, focusing both on these character’s female bodies within their fictional worlds and female actors’ bodies in contemporary productions of King Lear, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida and Othello. Structured around close readings of performance, Rutter’s thick descriptions capture the ‘excessive’ performative work done by the body on stage, both in the work of the actor and in the production work that creates a designed body. Carol Chillington Rutter (2007), Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen (Routledge). Asserting that Shakespeare wrote more than fifty parts for children, Rutter brings her expertise in contemporary performance to bear on the role that children play within Shakespeare’s plays. Although the book is grounded in history, interrogating what these children mean in their original context, Rutter’s case studies of contemporary film and theatre productions – including deep reads of Julie Taymor’s Titus and Penny Woolcock’s Macbeth on the Estate, as well as comparative analysis of the RSC’s work on The Winter’s Tale – insist on the continuously haunting presence of the child in contemporary performance.

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Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies, eds (2001), Performing Shakespeare in Japan (Cambridge University Press). Capturing the perspectives of Japanese and non-Japanese scholars and practitioners, this collection offers a wide range of case studies from Japan’s earliest engagements with Shakespeare to more contemporary adaptations. The emphasis on local meanings is complemented by essays considering performance as part of Japan’s construction of a national identity. The volume includes a closing section of interviews with contemporary Japanese actors and directors including Suzuki Tadashi and Ninagawa Yukio. Julie Sanders (2007), Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Polity). Extending Sanders’s important work on adaptation and appropriation, Shakespeare and Music draws on Terence Hawkes’s use of jazz as an analogy for literary criticism in order to advance a series of studies of Shakespeare across form and period. Individual chapters offer case studies across ballet, opera and film scores, but the book’s value transcends the individual analyses in the development of a critical methodology for adaptations intertwining literary criticism and approaches drawn from musicology. Elizabeth Schafer (2000), Ms-directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare (St. Martin’s Press). The three sections in this overview of women Shakespeare directors serve different, complementary purposes. In the first part, Schafer introduces the nine directors whose productions are analysed in the second: Joan Littlewood, Jane Howell, Yvonne Brewster, Di Trevis, Jules Wright, Helena Kaut-Howson, Deborah Paige, Jude Kelly and Gale Edwards. Next, drawing on interviews with the directors as well as other materials, she compares multiple productions of sixteen Shakespeare plays that pose particular challenges from a feminist perspective, constructing an alternative performance tradition of Shakespeare focused on women practitioners. Contextualized within a broader ‘herstory’ of women directors, Schafer’s book is an important corrective to a male-focused history of Shakespearean production. Adele Seeff (2018), South Africa’s Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan). As Seeff demonstrates in this persuasive account, part of Palgrave’s Global Shakespeares series edited by Alexa Alice Joubin, the history of Shakespeare in South Africa is also a history of language and politics. Innovatively combining approaches from sociolinguistics with exploration of the shifting politics of South Africa, Seeff offers broad coverage of productions from 1801 to 2008, covering a wide linguistic range from productions in the European languages of colonial history to versions in Afrikaans, Setswana, Kaaps and Xhosa. This broad-ranging account concludes by addressing the future of Shakespeare, language and performance in a decolonizing South Africa.

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Robert Shaughnessy (2002), The Shakespeare Effect: A History of TwentiethCentury Performance (Palgrave Macmillan). What would it mean to rewrite theatre history through the lens of recent theoretical approaches that have changed how we view contemporary performance? In these case studies, amounting to Shakespeare by flashes of lighting, Shaughnessy demonstrates how theatre history would be utterly transformed. More attuned than traditional histories to the contingencies affecting performance choices, Shaughnessy’s new history eschews the view that performance reveals the full meaning of the text. Instead, the ‘Shakespeare effect’ is tracked in the work of the directors William Poel, Terence Gray and Tyrone Guthrie – and in Edward Bond’s play Bingo, which features Shakespeare as a character, as well as Forced Entertainment’s version of King Lear. Robert Shaughnessy, ed. (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press). While performance only plays a small part in this wide-ranging collection’s interest in popular culture, the methods demonstrated by the contributors have broad applicability. Shaughnessy’s introduction positions the volume as responding to the shift from popular culture as an object of ephemeral and anecdotal study to something worthy of more sustained and interdisciplinary analysis in a postmodern age. Through case studies across different media and periods, the book offers introductory approaches to the examination of Shakespearean celebrity, site, marketing and technology, as well as coverage of radio, television and musical performances. Erica Sheen and Isabel Karremann, eds (2016), Shakespeare in Cold War Europe: Conflict, Commemoration, Celebration (Palgrave Macmillan). Part of a growing critical interest in cultural memory and commemoration, Shakespeare in Cold War Europe brings together scholars of mid-twentieth-century Europe to examine the impact of Cold War politics on Shakespearean production. The essays focus on different regions – Germany, Poland, the USSR, France, Spain and Hungary – and importantly insists on the local historical forces that shaped production and interpretation throughout this complex period. Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova (2001), Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation (Associated University Presses). The primary value of Painting Shakespeare Red is its documentation of Shakespeare production and reception in Bulgaria in the twentieth century. With a particular interest in theatrical practice (mostly at Bulgaria’s National Theatre) post-World War II, the authors discuss the loadings and political implications of Shakespeare both under and following a Communist regime, arguing that Shakespeare in the theatre emerged as a significant voice of opposition and subversion. Catherine Silverstone (2011), Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance (Routledge). Silverstone’s nuanced, rigorous study uses methods derived from trauma theory to explore the effects of violence as manifest in Shakespearean performance. Her

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key case studies – the Market Theatre/National Theatre Titus Andronicus, Philip Osment’s This Island’s Mine, the National’s 2003 Henry V and the film The Maori Merchant of Venice – explore the effects of colonialism, homophobia, war, racism and more. The local moments and contexts of performance allow for subtle close readings with methodological implications for ethical performance criticism. Kim Solga (2009), Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Palgrave Macmillan). Choosing to perform – or not perform – scenes of rape, spousal abuse and other forms of violence against women in early modern plays has ethical implications in the present. Solga probes contemporary productions of several early modern plays, including Titus Andronicus, The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling and A Woman Killed With Kindness, emphasizing the ethics of placing the spectator or the female performer in the position of having to make sense of these violent acts, especially within the framework of acting techniques grounded in emotional realism. Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann, eds (2002), The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). A companion volume to the editors’ Spectacular Shakespeare (2002), The Reel Shakespeare looks outside the mainstream to consider avant-garde and fringe Shakespeare films. Threaded throughout the essays is a unifying sense of challenges to cultural hegemony as represented both by Hollywood and by Shakespeare, and the contributors apply a range of theoretical approaches to the films (including those of Gus van Sant, Peter Hall, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway and others) for their value in putting Shakespeare to radical and experimental uses. The book includes a bibliography by the indefatigable Jose Ramón Díaz-Fernández. Tiffany Stern (2007), Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford University Press). Although explicitly unconcerned with contemporary performance, this detailed study of early modern rehearsal practice based on extensive archival research and textual analysis of abundant dramatic and non-dramatic sources has been influential on Original Practices, particularly (though by no means exclusively) at the American Shakespeare Center. Zdeněk Stříbrný (2000), Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press). Part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe provides a survey of Shakespeare productions across a large region, privileging the larger picture of major political shifts and ideological movements. The long historical focus, large geographic range (with especial strengths in Russian and Czech responses to Shakespeare) and coverage of criticism and response across multiple media make this a valuable orienting introduction for others pursuing sustained study on the localities covered.

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Miranda Fay Thomas (2019), Shakespeare’s Body Language: Shaming Gestures and Gender Politics on the Renaissance Stage (Bloomsbury). Thomas’s study, influenced particularly by the work of Evelyn Tribble and Farah Karim-Cooper on early modern playing practices, offers the first full consideration of early modern shaming gestures. While the focus is predominantly historical, offering a detailed contextualization of early modern gestural theory, Thomas draws on research events at Shakespeare’s Globe and contemporary productions to understand the social work that shaming gestures continue to do in social and theatrical performance today. Ayanna Thompson, ed. (2006), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge). With fourteen chapters, including the important theoretical framing of Thompson’s introduction, this landmark collection offers a variety of perspectives on the practice of ‘not seeing race’ in casting. Although ‘colourblind’ casting, pioneered by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1950s, in principle has the beneficial effect of opening a range of ‘white’ roles to actors of all races, this plus comes with many minuses, not least of them a reification of ‘universality’. Surveying historical practices and giving a voice to contemporary practitioners, this book offers new theoretical frameworks for understanding and interpreting the semiotics of race in Shakespeare productions. Ayanna Thompson (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press). Constructions of race in America and constructions of Shakespeare in America are not easily disentangled. Drawing on a wide range of examples drawn from stage, film, YouTube adaptations and education programmes, and contextualized by treatments of race in a much wider range of cultural media, Thompson asks provocative and crucial questions about the relevance and value of Shakespeare in contemporary America. Avowedly polemical, this book, along with her edited collection Colorblind Shakespeare (2006), changed the conversation about colourblind and cross-racial casting, whitewashing and ‘blacking up’ white actors to play Othello or Aaron. Will Tosh (2018), Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Bloomsbury). This volume captures some of the practice-based research conducted during the first three years of productions in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Drawing extensively on the wealth of materials produced by the Globe in its end-of-season interviews, Tosh curates a discussion among directors, actors and audience members that speaks to the challenges and opportunities of playing in the SWP, the affordances of light and music, and the experiments carried out to explore the space. Two concluding chapters report on the Research in Action workshop events that interrogated specific research questions in the space.

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Valerie Traub, ed. (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Oxford University Press). This field-defining collection seeks to revitalize feminist approaches to Shakespeare with an intersectional consideration of race and ethnicity, sexuality, disability, animal studies and other forms of embodiment. While the volume’s contents focus predominantly on historical and literary readings, a closing section on ‘Cultural Performances Past and Present’ foregrounds performance, with several essays focusing on global Shakespeare performances across screen and stage, and work on embodied performance practice in the classroom. Evelyn Tribble (2017), Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking With the Body (The Arden Shakespeare). Building on the notion of the skilled early modern actor developed in Cognition in the Globe (2011), Tribble here further develops her argument that training developed the ‘kinesic intelligence’ of early modern actors, described by the title’s notion of ‘thinking with the body’. With particularly valuable insight into lessstudied practices of dance, fencing and movement, Tribble’s attention to the broader skills anticipated by the work of early modern writers has important implications for Original Practices and practice-as-research in the present. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz, eds (2005), India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance (University of Delaware Press). Attuned to the colonial legacy that can make Shakespeare seem something of a tricky proposition in modern India, this varied and theoretically sophisticated collection considers Shakespeare translated, interpreted and performed – the three sections of the book – in Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Urdu and Parsi, in forms from puppet shows and folk tales to Bollywood cinema. The question of centre and periphery, so productively destabilized in modern work on global Shakespeare, is here wonderfully complicated through an exploration of the various languages, regions and cultures that, within India, have used Shakespeare as a way of asserting specificity and difference. Poonam Trivedi and Paromita Chakravarti, eds (2019), Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: ‘Local Habitations’ (Routledge). This collection establishes the scope and range of Indian Shakespearean film, with a particular commitment to showcasing more neglected work in languages other than Hindi. Bringing together an international range of contributors, the volume features essays on the technologies, critical interventions, industry contexts and recurring trends of Shakespeare cinema across India. The book also features interviews with contemporary filmmakers and an extensive filmography that is the first to establish a ‘canon’ of Indian Shakespeare film across all of India’s regional language cinemas. Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryuta, eds (2010), Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (Routledge). This collection considers, in various ways, the intercultural negotiation that occurs when Shakespeare is adapted into the aesthetics, theatrical conventions, languages

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and cultures of Asian countries: Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. While Trivedi’s introduction focuses on Asia as a whole, providing a useful overview, a significant strength of the volume is the specific local engagements analysed in its sixteen chapters. John Tulloch (2005), Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception (University of Iowa Press). Drawing on research conducted over a decade in Australia, the UK and the US, John Tulloch’s study uses the work of Shakespeare and Chekhov – deliberately chosen for their frequent re-performance in new local contexts – as a focus for detailed audience research, producing a number of ethnographic case studies of production and reception that explore different approaches to the performance event. Drawing on questionnaires, interviews, observation, thick description and theories of audience research, Tulloch’s work is as useful for its interrogation of methodology as it is for its insight into experiences of Shakespeare and Chekhov. Harriet Walter (2016), Brutus and other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women (Nick Hern). Harriet Walter, Shakespearean actor and avowed feminist, has had the extraordinary experience of playing most of Shakespeare’s great female roles – and several of the male ones, as well, in the Donmar Warehouse’s all-women productions of Henry IV, Julius Caesar and The Tempest. Her insightful memoir draws on this wealth of experience and her feminist perspective to provide a unique insider’s account of Shakespeare in contemporary performance. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, eds (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge University Press). This introductory volume, especially valuable for students or newcomers to Shakespearean theatre history, offers a long historical overview of Shakespeare in performance. Organized chronologically, its later chapters offer snapshots of regional Shakespeare performance cultures in North America, Asia and Africa, as well as overviews of twentieth-century performance cultures. Sarah Werner (2001), Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (Routledge). Werner considers how institutional and societal structures shape the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays can be received in contemporary performance, emphasizing the role that the conditions of performance, much more than textual authority or authorial intention, play in shaping its underlying ideologies. Werner’s particular focus, as part of the ‘Accents on Shakespeare’ series remit to give a platform to radical scholarship, is the institutional gender politics of the RSC, critiquing the company’s treatment of its revolutionary female artists, and the book culminates with a detailed case study of Gale Edwards’s production of The Taming of the Shrew.

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Sarah Werner, ed. (2010), New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies (Palgrave Macmillan). In this edited collection, contributors call into question some of the most sacred cows of early modern drama in performance: that its purpose is to reveal insights about the plays, that it is inherently edifying, that the role of the reviewer is to capture moments otherwise lost in time and that comparison to Shakespeare is a helpful way of considering the performance of plays by other playwrights. By decoupling performances from textual authority and from a theatre history obsessed with venues as an organizing principle, and decentring Shakespeare himself in the case of other early modern plays, the essays offer provocative new directions for the discipline. W. B. Worthen (2003), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge University Press). Building on his influential Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Worthen, having articulated a value for performance separate from the Shakespearean text, now develops a related argument about the ‘force’ of a given performance, its meaning or power or significance in the present. Offering comparative study across media – arguing that these simply offer different sites for dramatic performativity – Worthen applies his thesis to case studies including Shakespeare’s Globe (a simulacrum of authenticity, in his view), multicultural and multiracial productions, and cyberspace. W. B. Worthen (2014), Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge University Press). Worthen’s state-of-the-field monograph outlines the parameters of what Shakespeare Performance Studies takes as its object of focus, introducing the tensions between dramatic and postdramatic performance and reframing Shakespearean performance not as elucidation of the text but as ‘a vehicle of cultural critique’. Building on his earlier work in Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003), Worthen accompanies his rich theorization with case studies of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet, Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, which illustrate his approach in moving away from a textually oriented critique to consider the work of the production in its own right. Ramona Wray and Mark Thornton Burnett, eds (2006), Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh University Press). Distinctive among the wealth of early twenty-first-century Shakespeare on screen collections for its exclusively contemporary focus, Wray and Burnett’s collection (a follow-up to their 2000 Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle) puts especial pressure on questions of globalization, authenticity and postmodernity. The more constrained period of focus makes for some off-centre subjects, including essays on Shakespeare documentaries and television films as well as intercultural productions.

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John Wyver (2019), Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company (Bloomsbury). As both the producer of RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon and a theatre historian, Wyver is especially well placed to analyse the history of the RSC’s broadcasts to television and cinema from intellectual, aesthetic and institutional perspectives. Revealing a much broader history than is generally realized, Wyver covers a full century’s worth of screened productions from Frank Benson’s 1911 Richard III to the start of the RSC’s current live broadcast programme. The archival detective work and descriptive analyses of rare productions make this a unique institutional history of the RSC, as well as a significant complement to the ongoing work on screened theatrical productions. Sandra Young (2019), Shakespeare in the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation (Bloomsbury). Taking as her starting point the understanding that we are living in an increasingly unequal world, Young’s book is an important counternarrative to histories of Shakespeare appropriation focused on the Western world and global North. With a focus on the Shakespeares found in the Indian ocean and South Atlantic regions, Young organizes her analysis according to the critical vocabularies developed to respond to regions with legacies of slavery and dispossession: creolization, indigenization, Africanization and diaspora. Emphasizing the solidarities that emerge in Shakespeare’s appropriation for local and political concerns, Young’s study is a necessary intervention in a neglected area of study.

CHAPTER 4.4

Resources PETER KIRWAN AND KATHRYN PRINCE

A reader who has made it this far in the book has encountered many examples of resources in action, whether supporting the summaries in the A–Z, fuelling the discussion in the chapters or connecting to major tendencies in the Chronology. We intend for this section to be read as a complement to those and to the Annotated bibliography that precedes it. Here, we collect these fugitive pieces together in order to point researchers towards resources that may help them to develop their own projects. We begin by outlining access to the primary objects of Shakespeare performance, surveying the current platforms that allow access to recordings of Shakespeare on stage and screen and the key specialist archives that contain production materials. We then survey a range of the resources that gather and produce theatre reviews, before moving onto a range of online resources and projects, and key journals, which offer interventions into the discipline.

SHAKESPEARE STREAMING One of the major revolutions in Shakespeare performance scholarship in the twenty-first century has been the proliferation of online resources allowing access to recordings of productions. These resources enjoy varying levels of stability, especially in regard to fluctuating funding levels and to changing industry partnerships, and most are aimed at educational institutions able to afford large overheads for digital resource subscription. However, the aggregate availability of an increasing number of high-quality Shakespeare recordings has enabled much wider at-home access to Shakespeare productions. Key resources include: The Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A), directed by Yong Li Lan, is a free-to-use database that collates detailed information about Shakespeare performances and adaptations in East and South-East Asia from the twenty-first century. The website is multilingual (English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and contains more than sixty full productions with accompanying metadata. Yong (2017) gives an instructive overview of the underpinning work of the archive. Box of Broadcasts: an educational subscription resource for the UK market, Box of Broadcasts has an archive of over 2.2 million radio and television broadcasts with a permanent archive from major UK terrestrial channels. Its archives of Shakespeare

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radio programming (both productions and documentaries) are particularly valuable, and the archive contains a wide range of Shakespeare films and a small range of theatre productions. Digital Theatre+: aimed at educational institutions, Digital Theatre+ boasts of being able to ‘provide 3 million students in over 2,000 schools, colleges and universities across 65 countries with unlimited access to over 1000+ full-length productions and educational resources’ (Digital Theatre+ n.d.). It includes a wealth of stage and television productions of Shakespeare, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford (Ontario) Festival, the BBC/Time Life Shakespeare Collection, the television films produced by Illuminations (including the Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy), a limited selection from Shakespeare’s Globe and a range of rarer productions (the Moscow Satirikon Theatre’s 2018 King Lear). The resource also includes a wide range of documentaries and short films, interviews with practitioners and academics, and other learning resources designed to support the productions. Drama Online: the educational platform of Bloomsbury hosts several collections of recorded theatre, including the RSC Live Collection (all main-house Shakespeare productions from 2016), the National Theatre Collection (featuring most Shakespeare productions broadcast via NT Live), Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen (see Globe Player), Stage on Screen and the Donmar Trilogy. Different subscription levels to Drama Online (which also includes Bloomsbury’s extensive catalogue of playtexts and critical books) allow access to different productions. Globe Player: Globe Player makes a range of Shakespeare’s Globe’s productions available for rent or ownership by individual customers. The resource includes the majority of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival productions, as well as a wide range of main-house productions (many also available on DVD) and a selection of supporting materials including downloads of audio recordings from Globe Music. MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive: This invaluable openaccess resource catalogues over 300 productions of Shakespeare representing a remarkable geographic range. Over 100 of the entries include full-length videos, either feature films or archival recordings, and many more feature extensive clips. The metadata for entries is curated by performance scholars from around the world, and the archive also includes essays, interviews, scripts and teaching resources. The Shakespeare Performance in Asia resource continues to exist as a linked site (also hosted by MIT) featuring twenty-five full productions and many more clips, although much of its content has now been migrated to the Global Shakespeares site. Theatre in Video, an educational resource aimed at the US market, includes a wealth of contemporary theatre from the Broadway Theatre Archive, Globe, Stratford Festival, BBC and others, as well as supporting educational materials. For more time-limited purposes, Shakespeare performance is regularly hosted on video sharing sites and television channel websites including BBC iPlayer, PBS, The Space, Vimeo and YouTube, often in partnership with the resources already listed, though films hosted in these venues tend to only be available for short periods. The website BardBox, curated by Luke McKernan (2008–16), was a bold attempt to curate Shakespeare videos designed for distribution on YouTube and Vimeo. Several major theatres also make their productions available for purchase via streaming sites

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such as Google Play and Amazon Prime, or on DVD/Blu-Ray, including the Stratford (Ontario) Festival, Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe, although availability is affected by region. Growing attentiveness to the aesthetics of recorded performance and the role of the screen director has led to calls to treat archived/streamed performance as a distinct form. Erin Sullivan (2017), in an important article, outlines the aesthetics of filming stage Shakespeare as they pertain to some of the main Shakespeare broadcasters, and provides an excellent starting point for researchers interested in the form of recorded theatre (see also Aebischer, Greenhalgh and Osborne 2018).

SHAKESPEARE COMPANIES AND ARCHIVES Many Shakespeare companies, especially those with more substantial funding, host their own archives with varying policies about what gets preserved and catalogued. These archives normally include viewing facilities to watch archival recordings; dossiers of material relating to particular productions including promptbooks, design materials, rehearsal notes, show reports, publicity material, reviews and other ephemera; and other materials related to the company’s history. Larger companies, such as those surveyed in this section, may have formal staffed archives with dedicated research space; much work remains to be done on the holdings of smaller companies, which would benefit from the support of researchers and institutions to preserve and catalogue. The Shakespeare in the Theatre series published by Bloomsbury makes extensive use of these individual archives. For a more thorough listing of international theatre collections, we recommend the Resources section of The Methuen Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography (Cochrane and Robinson 2020: 338–49); here, our focus is on specific Shakespeare-focused holdings. Shakespeare’s Globe has an extensive library and archive, based on the Globe premises. It includes three major collections. The Performance Archive holds extensive documentation of all production materials for all of its productions, including an archive of costumes developed as part of its Original Practices work and extensive interviews with practitioners (Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008 and Tosh 2018 both demonstrate the value of this archive). Uniquely, the Globe records its productions several times from different vantage points, allowing researchers to explore a wider range of a production’s life. The Globe also houses an Institutional Archive, which focuses particularly on the original vision for and development of the theatre, and the Collected Archives which gather papers deposited by individuals and organizations associated with the Globe. The research library – which includes several rare books as well as a large collection of Shakespeare-focused secondary material – is an especially welcome resource for scholars working in the archives. More recently, the publishing company Adam Matthew has created the electronic resource Shakespeare’s Globe Archive: Theatres, Players & Performance which digitizes an enormous range of the physical holdings from 1997–2016, and is available for institutional subscription.

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The Royal Shakespeare Company has its official archives at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, next to the Birthplace itself. At the time of writing, it boasts of ‘6933 museum items, 28746 books and 171556 archive records … as well as information about 4052 RSC performances’ (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust n.d.). The archive is updated on a regular basis, though holdings for productions from the last one to two years tend to be in flux. The RSC Performance Database (which also covers performances at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre before the official formation of the RSC) offers a useful online catalogue that allows the user to easily access cross-referenced information about productions, plays and personnel, and many of the collection’s images can be viewed online. Other UK-based companies have useful resources, including The National Theatre, whose comfortable archive room on the South Bank is a comfortable venue for research, with large production files pertaining to all of their productions and an extensive back catalogue of recordings. Many smaller companies have limited archives, but Cheek by Jowl offer a highly unusual example of a small company that has invested in more thorough digitization than most: the Sophie Hamilton Archive is open access and includes not only production information and archival photography, but also selections of show reports, rehearsal notes, promptbooks, publicity materials and more. Its education packs for selected productions also allow home access to archival recordings. The Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archives are some of the most important holdings in the UK. Available onsite only, the archives are a repository for the holdings of many small theatres and commercial productions, as well as documenting the history of performance in the country. It also holds The National Video Archive of Performance, which at the time of writing includes forty Shakespeare productions, and hosts Theatre Voice, an open-access web resource of interviews with journalists and practitioners concentrated on the British theatre industry. More specifically for Shakespeare performance scholars, the library of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham in Stratford-upon-Avon holds several collections including those of the Renaissance Theatre Company, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, the Actors’ Script collection and a wealth of holdings relating to Shakespeare film. The Shakespeare Institute also hosts the ‘Touchstone’ database, including a regularly updated listing of Shakespeare-related productions taking place in the UK. The British Film Institute archives scripts, posters, correspondence and other materials connected to the estimated one million British film and television productions it has collected, restored and made available to researchers. These productions include full films and television broadcasts of Shakespeare’s plays, but also documentaries, interviews and short clips of productions otherwise unavailable, many of which can be viewed in the BFI Southbank Mediatheque. North American Shakespeare companies tend to be more outwardly focused on resources for education and outreach than research, though certain companies curate their archives. The American Shakespeare Center has an online production archive that includes photographs, cast and creative team lists, repertory information and programme notes. At the time of writing it is developing its BlkFrs TV programme

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as an educational resource to allow productions to be streamed alongside a range of curated resources. Archival recordings and production materials can be accessed on site, and the theatre’s connection to Mary Baldwin University ensures a lively research and event programme around the theatrical seasons. The Stratford Festival, Ontario has a dedicated Archives department based in Stratford, which includes a number of rare artefacts (including a chair reputed to have been owned by Shakespeare) and archival recordings, as well as costumes and images. The Folger Shakespeare Library has a dedicated ‘Performance History’ collection, including some 250,000 playbills and 2,000 promptbooks. While these tend to focus on historical productions, their film and recording collection includes many more recent productions. The Adam Matthew resource Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library digitises many of the library’s prompt book holdings, and is available for institutional subscription. The websites of Shakespeare companies are an increasingly important publicfacing resource, generating extensive materials designed to support productions such as those discussed in Eoin Price’s contribution to this volume. These resources tend to be removed from the public-facing section of company websites following the completion of a production’s run, though larger Shakespeare-focused companies often offer a limited introduction to the company’s history of productions. Most companies archive their digital data in some form, and these data may be accessed through archive or media departments.

REVIEWS Reviews provide a major resource for scholarship, especially in cases where archival recordings are unavailable or difficult to access. Reviews, especially in ephemeral publications such as local newspapers or unfunded blogs, are especially susceptible to being lost, though increasing attempts are made to archive these materials. Theatre companies (especially those with dedicated publicity departments) often hold copies of reviews of their own productions, accessible via the archives listed in the previous section. Newspaper reviews are an important primary resource, and are now usually published online as well as in print copies, with many newspapers (especially The New York Times and The Guardian in the UK) having extensive back catalogues of reviews on their websites. The Shakespeare Institute Library at the University of Birmingham hosts a comprehensive scrapbook culled from major UK newspapers of Shakespeare-focused articles which is especially useful for its collection of local reviews. There are also a wide range of web-only theatre review sites (for example, Exeunt in the UK and Onstage in the US) which often offer more creative approaches to the form of the review. The three-volume A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance series (edited by Katharine Goodland and John O’Connor [Palgrave MacMillan, 2007]) logs major productions in the UK, USA and Canada between 1970 and 2005, and includes review excerpts alongside production information.

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Shakespeare-focused review sites are more limited in number. Peter Kirwan’s The Bardathon (2006–present) is the longest-running blog devoted to Shakespeare performance, though it is limited in range of coverage by its sole-authored remit. Holger Syme’s dispositio and Eoin Price’s Asidenotes occasionally feature performance reviews; more recently, ‘Action is eloquence’: (Re)thinking Shakespeare, edited by Gemma Allred and Ben Broadribb, focuses on contemporary performance and adaptation of Shakespeare, with a particular interest in film and digital theatre. Reviewing Shakespeare, run by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and University of Warwick, has been in operation since 2013 and features an extensive archive of reviews from around the world, though at the time of writing was last updated in January 2020. More informally, PlayShakespeare.com is a public-facing resource that includes an extensive back catalogue of Shakespeare productions, with particular strengths in North American performance. Several Shakespeare journals focused on historical and contemporary performance have extensive performance review sections with dedicated editors, most importantly Borrowers and Lenders (with a focus on appropriations), Cahiers Élisabéthains, Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare, all covering performance from around the world alongside new research into Shakespeare in performance. Shakespeare Survey features annual review essays of Shakespeare in England, and The Shakespearean International Yearbook and Shakespeare Studies are annual journals which often feature substantial special issues focusing on performance. Scene (2017 to present) is a new online journal emerging from the Internet Shakespeare Editions project, dedicated to performance reviews. Other journals include large back catalogues of performance reviews, such as Early Modern Culture and Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, the latter of which is especially strong in reviews of non-Shakespearean early modern drama.

ONLINE RESOURCES Online resources for the study of Shakespeare and contemporary performance often have limited lifespans, according to institutional needs and ongoing funding; however, the ones we detail here continue to be available and offer important opportunities for research, and are generated by research projects seeking to capture information that is not routinely gathered by theatre companies. The British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database was developed by the Multicultural Shakespeare in Britain project at the University of Warwick to trace  the representation of Black and Asian practitioners in Shakespeare productions in the UK, and continues to be updated at the time of writing. This important resource, maintained by Jami Rogers, does the work of creating theatrical biographies for members of underrepresented groups, and includes new interviews and links to further resources. The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) was founded by University of Guelph professor Daniel Fischlin in 2004 to capture the many ways in which Shakespeare has been performed in Canada. It was later expanded to include

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multimedia, pedagogical and critical content alongside its extensive anthology of playtexts from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Designing Shakespeare: An Audio Visual Archive, 1960–2000, curated by Christie Carson, focuses on contemporary Shakespeare designers and includes new interviews, sketches, production materials and 3D models. Only some elements of this resource are currently available at the time of writing, though we include it here for the value of those elements and in the hope that it will become more fully available through future funding. Internet Shakespeare Editions hosts an extensive Shakespeare in Performance database featuring materials from over a thousand film and stage productions. The holdings are eclectic but especially good for images of playbills from a much wider range of festivals and small North American companies than are otherwise accessible. ISE also hosts the theatre review journal Scene. ISE’s sister site Digital Renaissance Editions aims in due course to host a similar range of materials for productions of non-Shakespearean early modern drama. Performance Shakespeare 2016, discussed by Sonia Massai in her contribution to this volume, contains details of 435 performances that took place in 2016 across eighty-three countries, and will be archived by the Folger Shakespeare Library from 2022. Organized as blog posts, the archive contains details of a wide range of mainstream and fringe productions, with links to further information where available. Shakespeare in Prisons Network (SiPN), hosted by Shakespeare at Notre Dame, is a global forum for practitioners working with currently and formerly incarcerated people, and includes a directory of organizations specialising in this area of Applied Shakespeare performance.

PERFORMANCE-AS-RESEARCH A growing number of scholarly projects have built in performance elements, illustrating both the subject of the project in question and the potential for performance as research. Stephen Purcell (2017), in an important article, surveys a wide range of practice-based research projects focused on early modern drama, with a particular focus on those associated with Original Practices, and his article provides an invaluable resource for further reading on methodology and theory around practice-based work. The nature of practice-based research on process rather than a necessary output means that many projects have not produced lasting resources; however, a number of projects (especially focussing on Shakespeare’s contemporaries) have created long-term performance-based resources, often in conjunction with textual editions and with the aim of enabling further study. Some resources act as platforms for full productions generated by research projects. The Dutch Courtesan Online is a website hosted by the University of York that includes student productions of both The Dutch Courtesan and A Mad World, My Masters directed by Michael Cordner, along with new academic essays about the plays as well as interviews and production materials. Staging the Scottish Renaissance Court, hosted by Brunel University, documents a major research project that culminated in performances of David Lyndsay’s A Satire of the Three Estates in

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2013, and the website contains the full five-hour production as well as an extensive range of supporting materials. Other projects have utilized performance in conjunction with digital editions, experimenting with how the use of performance can enhance the study of lesser-known canons. Queen’s Men Editions, hosted by the University of Victoria, is an ongoing project using the Internet Shakespeare Editions platform that aims to have full ‘performance editions’ of plays performed by the Queen’s Men. Three of the editions are complete at the time of writing and include full productions of selected plays by student actors; more are scheduled to be posted at a future date. Richard Brome Online, hosted by the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, is an open-access resource containing diplomatic and modern-spelling editions of many of Brome’s works. The editions are accompanied by short scriptin-hand videos keyed to the text, designed to illustrate staging possibilities, as well as comprehensive stage histories for Brome’s plays in performance. Unpinning Desdemona, hosted by the University of Warwick, records a detailed investigation into the use of costume on the early modern stage, exploring Othello 4.3 in detail with actors on the Globe stage.

CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS As Susan Bennett and Gina Bloom note in their introduction to a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin on Shakespeare and Performance Studies, the two fields have historically had limited overlap, ‘missing opportunities for exchange and engagement’ (2017: 366). A key part of the work in recent years, therefore, has involved establishing and expanding the field, and this section navigates through some of the key interventions and staging posts for this dialogue, with a particular focus on special issues of the major Shakespeare performance journals that have acted as state-of-thefield addresses for methodologies and research areas in Shakespeare and performance. We survey recent books in the Annotated Bibliography, but wish especially to highlight two of the largest single-volume anthologies collating current work on Shakespeare Performance Studies, to which we are indebted: Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen’s A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Blackwell, 2005) and James C. Bulman’s The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2017). Both books feature a wide range of essays covering methodology, practice, history and theory. A smaller, accessible collection especially useful for teaching is Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme’s Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), which develops a series of Performance Studies approaches to different elements of theatre as they pertain to Shakespearean performance, historical and contemporary. Bennett and Bloom’s special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, 35.3 (2017), is one of a number of special issues in that journal designed to shift the field of Shakespeare Performance Studies in a new direction, with articles focusing on embodiment, technology, practice-as-research and other methods. Other special issues which offer important methodological interventions into Shakespeare Performance Studies include 27.3 (2009), edited by Ayanna Thompson, on ‘Shakespeare, Race,

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and Performance’, which examines the intersections between theatrical practice and critical race studies; 34.1 (2016), edited by C. K. Ash, José A. Pérez Díez and Emma Smith, on ‘Reanimating Playbooks: Editing for Performance’, which explores the ways in which practice-based research and performance-focused editions can influence one another; 35.2 (2017), edited by Sarah Dustagheer, Oliver Jones and Eleanor Rycroft, on practice-based research, with a particular emphasis on sitespecificity and the intersections of space and place; and 36.1 (2018), edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Harry Newman, on metatheatre. An international group of scholars participated in a series of conferences in 2004, 2006 and 2009, resulting in three collections: Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006), edited by Peter Holland; Shakespeare Bulletin, 25.3/4 (2007) on ‘Watching Ourselves Watching Shakespeare’, edited by Barbara Hodgdon and Peter Holland; and Shakespeare Bulletin, 28.1 (2010) on ‘Shakespeare and the Archive’, edited by Carol Chillington Rutter. As a sequence, these collections stimulate new thinking about archival work, reviewing practice, memory and technology. A similar series of international conferences focused especially on the theory and practice of Shakespeare performance criticism, leading to special issues of Shakespeare, 6.3 (2010), on ‘Reviewing Shakespearean Theatre: The State of the Art’, edited by Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Peter J. Smith, and Cahiers Élisabéthains, 81.1 (supplement, 2012) on ‘International Perspectives on Shakespearean Theatre Reviewing’, edited by Paul Prescott, Peter J. Smith and Janice Valls-Russell. As well as offering self-reflective examinations of the practices of theatre reviewing, these special issues devote a great deal of space to local contexts and media. Cahiers Élisabéthains hosts regular themed issues, with a special focus on European Shakespeare performance, as exemplified in issue 96 (2018) on ‘Europe’s Shakespeare(s)’, edited by Nicoleta Cinpoeş and Janice Valls-Russell, and issue 99 (2019) on ‘Shakespeare and European Theatrical Cultures’, edited by Pierre Kapitaniak and Aleksandra Sakowska, alongside an impressive international array of performance reviews. The journal of the British Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare, has also featured several special issues with a focus on contemporary performance, including 9.4 (2013) on ‘Shakespeare and Japan’, edited by Dominic Shellard and David Warren; 10.4 (2014) on ‘Shakespeare, Authenticity and Performance’, edited by Abigail Rokison-Woodall; and 11.3 (2015) on the RSC’s 2014 Roaring Girls season, edited by Kate Wilkinson (see also Eoin Price’s chapter in this volume). Borrowers and Lenders, founded by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, has the distinct advantage of being an open-access journal. The journal’s remit of exploring adaptations and appropriations of all media makes for diverse reading, and alongside several issues focusing on social media and screen adaptation, important volumes intersecting with the concerns of this handbook include: 3.1, ‘Canadian Shakespeares’ (edited by Daniel Fischlin, 2007); 4.1, ‘Shakespeare and Actors of Color’ (edited by Ayanna Thompson, 2008–9); 7.2, a special section on Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (edited by Matt Kozusko, 2012–13); 8.2, ‘Service Shakespeare’ (edited by Michael P. Jensen, 2013–14); 10.2, ‘Shakespeare and Dance’ (edited by Elizabeth Klett, 2017); and 11.1, ‘Global Shakespeares in World Markets and Archives’ (edited by Alexa Alice Joubin, 2017).

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The annual journal Shakespeare Studies has a themed forum in each issue, and while earlier volumes of the journal focus more on historical material, several special issues in more recent years have been important focal points for interventions into Shakespeare Performance Studies, often with a focus on adaptation and/or new audiences and media. These include: volume 38 on ‘After Shakespeare on Film’, edited by Greg Colón Semenza; volume 43 on skill, edited by Evelyn Tribble; volume 46 on ‘Shakespeare, Translation, Culture’, edited by Rui Carvalho Homem; and volume 47 on ‘Shakespeare for Specialized Performers and Audiences’, edited by Sheila T. Cavanagh, with an emphasis on Shakespeare in the context of neurodiverse audiences, prisons, veterans, D/deaf/Blind theatremakers and more. Similarly, the ‘special sections’ of The Shakespearean International Yearbook are an important resource with especial strengths in global Shakespeare performance and current directions in Shakespeare studies more generally. Pertinent special issues for this volume include those on global adaptation (edited by Tetsuo Kishi, 2007); European Shakespeare (edited by Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo, 2008); South African Shakespeare (edited by Laurence Wright, 2009); Shakespeare in India (edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, 2012); digital Shakespeare (edited by Brett D. Hirsch and Hugh Craig, 2014); site-specific performance (edited by Susan Bennett, 2016); and Soviet Shakespeare (edited by Natalia Khomenko, 2020).

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne, eds (2018), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury. Bennett, Susan and Gina Bloom (2017), ‘Shakespeare and Performance Studies: A Dialogue’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 367–72. Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2008), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cochrane, Claire and Jo Robinson, eds (2020), The Methuen Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography, London: Methuen Drama. Digital Theatre+ (n.d.), ‘About Us’, Digital Theatre+. Available online: https://www. digitaltheatreplus.com/education/about-us (accessed 21 November 2020). Purcell, Stephen (2017), ‘Practice-as-Research and Original Practices’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (3): 425–43. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (n.d.), ‘Discover Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Available online: http://collections.shakespeare.org.uk/ (accessed 21 November 2020). Sullivan, Erin (2017), ‘“The forms of things unknown”: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35 (4): 627–62. Tosh, Will (2018), Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London: Bloomsbury. Yong, Li Lan (2017) ‘Translating Performance: The Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 619–40, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

INDEX

Aberg, Maria 158, 161 Ackroyd, Peter 102 acting 1, 10, 68, 82–4, 180–7, 194–97, 200–4, 245–76, 283, 284–8, 302, 306–7, 321, 330–1 Actors Touring Company 76 Adams, Fred 50–1 adaptation 4, 6, 7, 105–7, 125, 132–41, 144–52, 256, 261–2, 265–6, 274–5, 286–9, 303 Aebischer, Pascale 7, 142, 144, 152, 153, 286, 291, 292, 321, 323, 325, 334, 337 Afful, Sarah 194 African Grove 183 African Shakespeare 122, 135–6, 286, 289 Ahmed, Sara 204, 312 Alabama Shakespeare Festival 53, 55 AlBanawi, Fatima 133 Aldridge, Ira 135, 217 Aldwych Theatre 99 Alexander, Bill 38–9 Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts 177 Allred, Gemma 8, 383 Almereyda, Michael 138–40, 145 Alvarez, Natalie 218, 223 Almeida Theatre 100 Als, Hilton 222 amateur performance (see community) American Shakespeare Center 4, 11, 28, 32, 35 n.2, 65, 68, 73, 143, 245, 249, 257, 263, 305, 331, 334 Actors’ Renaissance Season 263, 312 Blackfriars 4, 32, 68, 143, 245, 249, 331, 334 Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries 249 American Shakespeare Festival 50 Amorim, Marcel Alvaro de 120, 122 Anderson, Lisa M. 220 Andoh, Adjoa 1, 16–17, 91, 268

Aosailuo 135 Appadurai, Arjun 120 applied theatre 303, 307, 332 archive 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 25–37, 40–2, 68–9, 74, 88, 123–7, 142, 144, 163, 216, 289–90, 290–1, 304, 308, 315, 319, 328, 329, 331, 334, 335 Arden, Michael 222–3 Arden of Faversham 156, 158, 160–6 Arditti, Michael 162 Armstrong, Alan 7, 55 Artaud, Antonin 281, 288 @Shakespeare 247, 273 Ashcroft, Bill 173, 176 Asian Shakespeare 117, 124–6, 137–9, 140–1, 144, 274–6, 288–9 Atkins, Eileen 158–9, 162 Austin, J.L. 284, 328 authenticity 69, 122, 267, 304–5 Avignon Festival 53–4, 56, 137, 317 Bailey, Lucy 33, 75 Bain, Beryl 193 Bakhtin, Mikhail 139, 281, 284 Barakah Meets Barakah (Baraka Yua’abil Baraka) 133, 136, 140, 147 Barba, Eugenio 288 Barbican Theatre 99–100, 104, 155, 157 Barker, Roberta 15, 285, 331 Barnett, Samuel 90 Barthelemy, Anthony 286 Barthes, Roland 281 Barton, John 4, 256–7, 302 Bassett, Kate 161–2 Bate, Jonathan 143, 235 Battersea Arts Centre 76 Baxter Theatre Centre 136 BBC 103, 157, 337, 379 Beale, Simon Russell 219 Beattie, Rod 199

INDEX

Beckerman, Bernard 281, 282, 283 Bell Shakespeare Company 28, 35 n.2, 109 Benjamin, Playthell 218 Bennett, Susan 3, 9, 13, 39, 41, 56, 72, 103, 111, 117–18, 123, 152, 156, 283, 284, 288, 317, 318, 319, 321, 325 Bennett, Tony 282, Benoît, Jean-Louis 137 Berliner Ensemble 93, 116, 143 Berry, Cicely 4, 302 Besson, Benno 93 Bhardwaj, Vishal 128 n.2, 133, 267 Bharucha, Rustom 128 n.2, 288 Big Telly Theatre Company 143 Billie Holiday Theatre 180 Billington, Michael 8, 45, 75, 76, 153, 154, 161, 162–5 biopolitics 231, 305 biopower 231, 234, 237, 240 Birmingham Repertory Theatre 38 Bitter Pill 118 Black Arts Theater Intensive 180 Blackfriars Playhouse (see American Shakespeare Center) Blake, Michael 194, 195 Blasted 294 Blau, Herbert 39, 283 blocking 118, 305 Bloom, Gina 9, 72, 385 Bloomfield, Jem 152–3 Boal, Augusto 6, 303 Bourdieu, Pierre 14, 115, 118, 310, 319 Bowmer, Angus 50–1, 55, 100 Braidotti, Rosi 240 Brantley, Ben 222–3 Bray, Dan 255 Brecht, Bertolt 6, 93, 94, 95, 223, 288, 318, 340 Bremer Shakespeare Company 101 Brenton, Howard 70 Breu, Christopher 229, 232 Brexit 137 Bridge Theatre 13, 91, 320 Briggs, John R. 138 Britton, Jasper 94, 155 Broadribb, Ben 8, 383 Brook, Peter 3, 4, 5, 15, 42, 138, 144–5, 275, 283

389

Brown, John Russell 11, 281, 282, 283 Brussels Shakespeare Society 101 Buchanan, Judith 7, 11, 317 Buffini, Fiona 155 Bully, Alwin 138 Bulman, James C. 2, 9, 15, 16, 285, 289, 309, 318, 330 Burge, Stuart 135 Bushell, Kirsty 158 Butler, Judith 219, 232, 240, 284, 286, 328 Cake, Jonathan 87 Calder, David 91 Callaghan, Dympna 218, 286 Canadian Stage 261 canon 14, 119, 122, 128 n.3, 138, 139, 144, 145, 151–70, 173, 201, 206, 220, 221, 257, 263, 305–6, 310, 385 Cantoni, Vera 2, 70, 334 Carlson, Marvin 6, 137, 153, 281, 282, 283, 290, 318, 324 Carr, Gregory 183 Carroll, Tim 88, 90 Carson, Christie 56, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 117, 118, 123, 145, 215, 284, 288, 291, 318–19, 325, 326, 380, 384 Cartelli, Thomas 192, 291 Carvalho, Vinicius Mariano de 122 casting 2, 14, 65, 118, 153, 159, 161–2, 164, 171–82, 187, 192, 196–7, 203, 207 n.8, 207 n.9, 216–18, 218–24, 235, 258, 259, 272, 285, 287, 306, 308, 310, 312–13, 316, 326, 328, 330, 332 colour-blind 2, 14, 171–82, 207 n.9, 220–1, 287 diverse/inclusive/non–traditional 8, 14, 159, 171–82, 187, 192, 196–7, 198, 203, 207 n.8, 235, 287, 306, 310, 312–13, 316 doubled/doubling 118, 308, 313 gender-swapped/single-gender 2, 65, 161–2, 196–7, 216–18, 222, 258–9, 263, 285, 326, 328, 330 iconic/indexical 218–24 Catanese, Brandi Wilkins 196–7, 201 Cavendish, Dominic 17, 18 n.7, 46 n.2, 153, 160–1, 162 celebrity 159, 162, 164, 306, 317, 319

390

Chabrol, Claude 134, 135, 139 Chappelle, Aleta 138 Chatterjee, Bornila 134, CheeK (Chee Kong Cheah) 140 Cheek by Jowl 4, 120, 253, 263, 308, 338, 381 Chee Kong Cheah (see CheeK) Chéreau, Patrice 288 Chess, Simone 214, 339 Chettle, Henry 152 Chiang, Desdemona 139 Chichester Festival Theatre 104 Chicken Rice War 140 Choi, Boram 274 Chong, Ping (see Ping Chong) Chopra, Tisca, 134 Chorian, Juan 199, 202 Cimolino, Antoni 194, 198–99 cinema 7, 15, 45, 46, 114, 125, 132–50, 228–44, 292, 323 City of London Festival 275 Clapp, Susannah 159, 161, 163, 165 Clarke, Paul 31 climate (see eco-criticism) Clough, Patricia 231, 236 Cobb, Keith Hamilton 11 cognition 230, 234, 289–90 Cohen, Ralph Alan 11 Collins, Eleanor 163 colour-blind casting (see under casting) Comédie-Française 143 community 6, 12, 13, 16, 30, 32, 39, 46, 50, 52–3, 54, 58, 188–9, 197, 202–3, 303, 307, 314, 326, 327 Comolli, Jean-Louis 230, 241 Complicité 261, 294, Conkie, Rob 11, 12–13, 42, 56, 65, 69, 172, 284, 309, 315, 328 consumerism 105–7 Container Globe 108 Cornford, Tom 11, 43, 65, 77 Cort Theatre 222 COVID-19 6, 12, 14, 18, 141–4, 207 n.6, 311, 331 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival 53, 54, 147 Creation Theatre Company 143 Cresswell, Tim 99 Croll, Dona 1

INDEX

cross-dressing (see casting, gender-swapped) Cross, Terry 179 Cruz, Migdalia 245, 256–7 Cuilei, Liviu 288 cultural anthropology 72, 282, 290, 309, 315–16, 332–3 cultural anthropophagy 122–3 cultural capital 197, 286–7, 303, 306, 310, 320, 322, 325, 333 cultural competence 179 cultural geography 310 cultural hegemony 137, 173, 179, 288, 319 Cunis, Adam 268–9 Dacre, James 87 Datta, Sangeeta 139 Davies, Ava Wong 43 Davies, Jo 158 Dawson, Anthony 284 deaf/Deaf studies 194–5, 222–3, 262, 312, 336, 339, 387 decolonization 171–91 Dekker, Thomas 156–70 with William Rowley and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton 156–70 with Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl 156–70 Deleuze, Gilles 27, 121, 242, 325 Denboba, Diana 179 Dench, Judi 162 Dening, Greg 9 Déprats, Jean-Michel 137 Derrida, Jacques 25, 29, 36 n.7, 146 Dessen, Alan 68, 73, 283 Detroit Public Theatre Shakespeare in Prison 173 Diangelo, Robin 174 diaspora 311 Die Salzmänner von Tibet (The Saltmen of Tibet) 138 Dionisotti, Paola 155 direct address 92–4, 283, 311–12, 321, 323–4, 340 disability 194, 207 n.8, 212, 219, 312–13, 314, 322 Dixon, Wheeler Winston 228 Dobson, Michael 6, 52, 55, 307, 326 Dolan, Jill 283 Donaldson, Peter 123, 144, 319

INDEX

Donmar Warehouse 100, 143, 222, 263, 379 Donnellan, Declan 4, 302, 308 Doran, Gregory 18 n.7, 155, 157, 159, 162 doubling (see casting) Drake, Sunny 193, 196, 197, 200, 202, 203, 205 dramaturgy 13, 26, 32, 34, 35, 51, 83, 174, 313 Dream in High Park, The 101 Drees, Danielle 105–7 Dromgoole, Dominic 69–71, 73, 74–6, 86–7, 96 n.6 Duffy, Michelle 55 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 117 Dustagheer, Sarah 3, 4, 13, 18 n.5, 70, 71–2, 321, 324 eco-criticism 292–5, 313–14 economics 13, 99–113, 338 eco-Shakespeare 292–5, 313–14 Edinburgh Festival 53, 316–17 Edmondson, Paul 56, 288, 386 Egan, Gabriel 293 Elam, Keir 284, 333 Elphinstone, Laura 161 embodiment 211–27, 229, 238, 314, 315, 316, 318, 385 Emeka, Justin 179 emotional realism 196 Engle, Ron 55 English Shakespeare Company 4 ensemble (see also Berliner Ensemble) 1, 76–7, 196, 263, 313, 315, 332, 338 ephemera 9, 25–37, 41, 143, 146, 153, 160, 315, 324, 334 Escolme, Bridget 11, 35, 92–3, 94, 95, 270, 312, 315, 385 Essiedu, Paapa 8 Estok, Simon 293 ethnography 44, 122, 136, 192, 197, 315–16, 321, 330 European Shakespeare Festival Network 54 European Shakespeare Research Association 120 Fageeh, Hisham 133 Fairley, Michelle 91 Fanon, Franz, 173

391

feminism 133, 157, 160–2, 219, 228–44, 268, 283, 284–7, 293, 294, 314, 316, 328, 330 Fentiman, Michael 157 Festival de Teatro Clásico de Almagro 54 Festival of Britain 102 fight choreography 199, 317 Figurenposition 83–5 film (see cinema) Findlay, Polly 158, 160, 163 Fisher, Will 214 Fitzpatrick, Marcus 185–6 Florida, Richard 101 Forced Entertainment 5 Ford, John 153, 156–70 Love’s Sacrifice 153 with William Rowley and Thomas Dekker, The Witch of Edmonton 156–70 foreign Shakespeare (see global Shakespeare) Forman, Simon 211–15 Foster, Susan Leigh 30 Foucault, Michel 281, 284, 305 Fraser, Mat 220 Freestone, Elizabeth 156 Freshwater, Helen 13, 44, 160 Friedberg, Anne 228 Furness, Hannah 157 Gaby, Rosemary 293 Galey, Alan 291 Gardner, Lyn 5, 65, 67, 71, 219 Garnon, James 90 Garrick, David 6, 54 Gatwood, Rebecca 75 Gay, Penny 161 gender-swapped casting (see under casting) Gerzic, Marina 6 gestus 93, 96 n.12, 318 ghosting 145–6, 318, 324 Gibbons, Beth 239 Global Shakespeares (MIT) 123–8, 144, 319 Globe (see Shakespeare’s Globe) Globe Player (see under Shakespeare’s Globe) Globe to Globe Festival 117–18, 128 n.6, 265, 317–18, 379

392

Godwin, Simon 143, 155 Gold, Sam 222 Gollancz, Israel 126 Goodbody, Buzz 156 Goold, Rupert 120, 294, 294 Gould, Michael 86, 87 Granville-Barker, Harley 283 Greenblatt, Stephen 5, 143 Greenhalgh, Susanne 7, 292, 323, 380 GreenStage 101 Greenwood, Judith 253–4, 322 Gregory, Miles 107, 110 Griffiths, Gareth 173 Grotowski, Jerzy 288 Guattari, Félix 26, 121, 325 Gurr, Andrew 69, 85–6, 90, 96 n.5, 104, 268, 283, 305 Guthrie, Tyrone 50–1, 100 Haider 133, 136–7, 140 Hall, Edward 155 Hall, Kim F. 11, 286, 309 Hall, Peter 11, 302 Hamilton, Jennifer Mae 293 HamletIRAN 132–3, 136 Hannerz, Ulf 121 Haraway, Donna 230, 232, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 329 Harris, Amanda 89 Hartley, Andrew James 6, 14, 18 n.3, 40, 41, 96 n.11, 172, 307, Harvard, Russell 222–4 Hassell, Alex 86, 155 Hawke, Ethan 138, 140 Hawkes, Terence 151–2 Hayles, N. Katherine 234 Headlong 120 Heart of America Shakespeare Festival 52 Heins, Sébastien 202 Hemming, Sarah 163 Henderson, Diana 122–3 Hendricks, Margo 286 Henry, Martha 194 heritage Shakespeare 4, 67, 308, 338 Heywood, Thomas 214, 216 Hicks, Denice 247, 271–2 Hiddleston, Tom 43 Hill, Errol 286 Hill, Jessica 193

INDEX

Hispanic Shakespeare (see Latinx Shakespeare) Hitchens, Henry 67 Hitchings, Henry 162 Hodgdon, Barbara 2, 8, 10–11, 12, 28, 31, 32, 42–3, 282, 283, 286, 290, 308, 338, 385, 386 Holderness, Graham 284 Holland, Peter 3, 27, 31, 160, 259, 290, 324, 327, 386 Honeyman, Janice 136 Hopkins, D.J. 13, 90, 96 n.9 horizon of expectations 41, 318, 319 Hounsou, Djimon 233–5, 236 Howard, Jean 283, 285 Hu, Sherwood 134 Huapango 134, 136, 140 humours 212–13, 217 Hungry, The 134, 136 Hunter, Kathryn 88–9 Huntly-Turner, Chris 34 Hytner, Nicholas 45, 91 Icke, Robert 120 Idaho Shakespeare Festival 55 immersive Shakespeare 45, 74, 91–2, 105–6, 263, 284, 319–20, 321, 322, 334, 336, 349 Ing K 124–5, 127, 129 n.10 interculturalism 2, 51, 53, 124, 194, 251, 287, 288–9, 311, 318, 319, 320, 336, 339, 378 intermediality 132, 291, 311, 320, 337 International Network for Audience Research in Performing Arts (iNARPA) 44 intimacy 89, 90, 94, 95, 104, 208 n.11, 305, 317, 321, 334 Iser, Wolfgang 282 Iyengar, Sujata 212 Jackson, Glenda 222 Jackson, Henry 213 Jackson, Russell 11 Jain, Ravi 207 n.7, 247, 261–2 James, Cassandra 193 Jameson, Fredric 15, 229, 236, 242 Jarman, Derek 152 Jauss, Hans Robert 152, 282, 319

INDEX

Jennings, Celeste 174–6, 183 Jocelyn, André 135 Johnson, Eric 123 Jones, Eldred 286 Jones, James Earl 100 Jonson, Ben 213, 216 Jordan, Thomas 216 Joubin, Alexa Alice 6, 12, 14, 120, 123, 142, 144, 289, 318, 319, 339 Jubb, David 76 Jung-ung, Yang (see Yang Jung-un) Kane, Sarah 294 Kani, John 135–6, 137, 147 n.1 Kapoor, Shahid 133 Kapoor, Shraddha 140 Karim-Cooper, Farah 11, 104, 268, 270, 283, 309, 326 Karimi-Hakak, Mahmood 132 Kay, Jackie 17 Keiley, Jillian 194 Kellaway, Kate 162 Kennedy, Dennis 7, 56, 57, 115, 289 Kesson, Andy 45, 339 Khan, Iqbal 221 Khan, Qasim 193 Kidnie, Margaret Jane 3, 13, 162 Kiernan, Pauline 86–7 kinesics 214–15, 322 Kirwan, Peter 8, 46 n.1, 117, 145, 152–3, 157, 159, 291, 325 Kissoon, Jeffery 38 Klett, Elizabeth 88, 285 Kneehigh 6, 76 Knowles, Ric 56, 96 n.3, 194, 208 n.10, 284, 288 Koch, Ulrike 138 Korol Lir 144 Kott, Jan 3, 252, 276 n.3, 308 Kozintsev, Grigori 144 Kurosawa, Akira 138, 144–5 Kyle, Barry 86, 88 Laboucane, Josue 193, 199 Lacan, Jacques 30 Landau, Jack 50 Landeta, Manuel 135 Lanier, Douglas 121, 325, 360 Laqueur, Thomas 284

393

Laroche, Rebecca 293 Latinx Shakespeare 181–2, 257 Lecoq, Jacques 288 Lee, Adele 127 Lee Hyon-u 274–5, 276 n.1 Lehmann, Hans–Thies 4 Leigh, Vivien 138 Lepage, Robert 199, 288 Letts, Quentin 160 Levy-Navarro, Elena 219 Life Goes On 139 Li Lan, Yong (see Yong Li Lan) Lim, Alvin 142 Lin, Erika T. 13, 91, 96 n.7 Linklater, Kristin 180, 186 Lion King, The 105, 147, 241 Lipkies, Ivan 134 Lisset 134 liveness 45–6, 142, 292, 322–3, 337 Lloyd, Phyllida 38, 222, 263 locus and platea 13, 82–98, 311, 322, 323–4, 335 Loehlin, James 247, 270 Londré, Felicia Hardison 55–6 Loomba, Ania 286 Lopez, Jeremy 35, 65, 68, 71–2, 153 Lord Chamberlain’s Men 68, 211, 215–16 Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company 258 Loughran, Keira 192–210 Luhrmann, Baz 138 Luscombe, Christopher, 75 MacIsaac, Colleen 255 MacLachlan, Kyle 138 Magni, Marcello 87–8 Mair, Judith 55, 57 Mancewicz, Aneta 7, 291, 320 Marcus, Rafaella 77–8 Market Theatre 135, 147 n.1 Marlowe, Christopher 154, 163, 273 Dido, Queen of Carthage 154 Marmion, Patrick 162 Martin, Randall 293, 294, 314 Marvel, Elizabeth 222 Massai, Sonia 7, 14, 115, 129 n. 7, 8, 140, 259, 289, 327, 384 Massie-Blomfield, Amber 76 Massinger, Philip 153

394

INDEX

networks 1, 7, 14, 40, 114–31, 132, 136–7, 140, 142, 144, 146, 203, 247, 281, 309, 319, 325, 384 New York Shakespeare Festival 30, 35 n.2, 53 Ney, Charles 55 Nicholas, Rachael 46, 330 Ninagawa, Yukio 138, 275, 288 Nish-Lapidus, Julia 260 Noble, Adrian 100 non-traditional casting (see under casting) Non Traditional Casting Project 177, 306 Noel, Craig 50 Nora, Pierre 13 Norrie, Aidan 6 Northern Broadsides 4, 220, 308, 338

Maxwell, Dominic 163 McB 138 McBurney, Simon 4, 294 McConachie, Bruce 13, 39, 290 McCormick, Amberlin 186–7 McGuire, Philip 299 McKellen, Ian 218 McLucas, Cliff 31 McLuskie, Kathleen 139 McMullan, Gordon 69, 126, 129 n.12 Melbourne Theatre Company 27, 35 Mentz, Steve 293 Menzer, Paul 30, 65, 68, 72, 73, 77 metatheatre 96 n.5, 324, 335, 386 Middleton, Thomas 9, 162, 256, 321 with Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl 156, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 with William Rowley, The Changeling 9 Midsummer Mischief (RSC) 157 Mirren, Helen 156, 230 Mitchell, Katie 4, 320 Mnouchkine, Ariane 288 Modenessi, Alfredo 134, 289 Monette, Richard 194, 198 Montana Shakespeare in the Parks 55, 338 Mooney, Michael E. 84–5, 90, 94, 96 n.5 Morgan, Anne G. 248, 249–50 Morrison, Conall 117 Morrison, Richard 65, 66, 67 Mountford, Fiona 155 Msamati, Lucian 221 Müller, Heiner 5 multiculturalism (see interculturalism) Munby, Jonathan 75 Munro, Lucy 159 Munroe, Jennifer 293 Murray, Feargal 156 Myles, Robert 6

O’Dair, Sharon 293 Oguntokun, Wole 265–6 Old Globe, San Diego 50 Old Vic 76 Olivier, Laurence 135, 138, 139, 140, 145 O’Malley, Evelyn 44, 58, 294, 314 open-air Shakespeare 36 n.10, 75, 100, 101, 104, 106, 294, 307, 314, 317, 322, 326, 333, 334, 381 Oram, Daron 180 Oregon Shakespeare Festival 50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 100, 138, 139, 245, 256, 276 n.4, 317, 339 Orgel, Stephen 214, 285 Original Practices 3, 4, 13, 65–81, 102, 111, 263–4, 285, 304–5, 308, 316, 322, 324, 326, 329, 331, 380, 384 original pronunciation 69, 189 n.2, 305, 322, 326–7, 337 Osborne, Laurie E. 7, 292, 323, 380 Ostermeier, Thomas 4, 6, 199 O’Sullivan, Aisling 222 O’Sullivan, Camille 156

Nandy, Ashis 173 Nardizzi, Vin 293 Narkunas, J. Paul 233 Nashville Shakespeare Festival 247, 271–2 National Theatre of Greece 118–19 National Theatre (of Great Britain) 3, 11, 76, 102, 103, 143, 154, 165, 292, 304, 323, 379, 381

Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival 55 Pan Asian Repertory 138 Pao, Angela C. 221 Papp, Joseph 52, 55, 100 Pavis, Patrice 13, 40, 41, 46 n.3, 282, 288, 320, 333 pedagogy 14, 153, 171–91, 247, 270, 303, 327, 336

INDEX

Peirce, Charles Sanders 214 performativity 10, 31, 219, 284, 309, 327–8, 339 Phelan, Peggy 290 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 114 Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Theatre Company 70 Ping Chong 138 Poel, William 73, 283 Pop-up Globe 33, 34, 35, 107–10 pornotroping 234–5, 242 n.2 postdramatic 5, 316, 328, 340 posthuman 232–5, 238, 329 post-structuralism 176, 282, 290 Potter, Lois 87, 92, 95, 286 Prescott, Paul 13, 18 n.4, 55, 56, 100, 125 n.5, 160, 163, 288, 292, 304, 309, 314, 316–17, 325, 386 Prince of the Himalayas 134, 136 Prince, Kathryn 153, 284, 310, 321, 325, 333, 334 Pritchett, Polly 86 promptbooks 8, 31, 35, 40, 304, 305, 315, 327, 329, 331, 335, 337, 380, 381 Public Theater, The 53, 55, 58, 100, 104, 142, 326 Punchdrunk 6, 45, 105–7, 263, 320, 328, 334, 386 Purcell, Stephen 11, 13, 44, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 90, 92, 96 n.6, n.8, 151, 270, 284, 292, 326, 329, 384 Qaggiavuut 194 quantitative/qualitative research 55, 255, 304, 330 Quarmby, Kevin 71 Quarshie, Hugh 220–1 queer studies 10, 195, 199, 202, 204, 282, 284, 285, 328, 330, 338 Raphaeli, Kara 204 Reason, Matthew 13, 43, 44 Refskou, Anne Sophie 122 Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre 100, 104, 326, 381 rehearsal 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 31, 35, 42, 57, 65, 69, 75, 142, 171, 172, 177, 180–7, 192, 193, 195–6, 197, 199, 200, 201–2, 204–5, 206,

395

207 n.1, 208 n.11, 248, 249, 250, 251, 259, 261, 263, 271–2, 290, 302, 303, 305, 307, 314, 315, 316, 317, 321, 327, 329, 331, 332, 336, 337, 340, 380, 381 Reinelt, Janelle 45 relaxed performance 332 Renegade Theatre 265 repertory 16, 17, 30, 70, 109, 119, 153, 194, 197, 200–4, 205, 249, 305, 308, 313, 332, 333, 381 Rgyal, Purba 134 rhizomatic analysis 121–2, 124, 325 Rice, Emma 65, 66–7, 71, 73, 76–7, ritual 55, 138, 256, 274, 282, 303, 309, 332, 338 Roach, Joseph 15, 159, 213, 290 Roaring Girls season (RSC) 151–70, 333, 386 Robeson, Paul 217–18 Rodowick, D.N. 228, 292 Ross, Tessa 76 Rosvally, Danielle 146 Rowley, William 9, 156–66, 268 Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 28, 34, 35 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 3–4, 7–8, 14, 18 n.7, 27–30, 32–4, 35 n.2, 36 n.9, 42, 46, 56, 99–100, 105, 106, 116–18, 136, 138, 143, 151–70, 197, 221, 246, 256, 263, 270, 276 n.5, 288, 292, 293, 294, 315, 317, 337, 338, 379, 380, 381, 386 Complete Works Festival 56, 116–17 Royster, Francesca 286 Rueckert, William 292 Rutter, Carol Chillington 4, 11, 152, 285, 286, 303, 386 Rycroft, Eleanor 18 n.5, 71, 72, 386 Rylance, Mark 65–6, 69, 74, 76, 77, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94–5, Sabbagh, Mahmoud 133 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (see under Shakespeare’s Globe) Sanders, DeAndre 185 Sanganyi, Neville 118 Sauter, Willmar 43

396

Schaubühne 6 Schechner, Richard 282–3, 287, 290, 309, 332–3 Schneider, Rebecca 5, 25, 31 Scofield, Paul 145 Shakespeare Association of Korea 275 Sedgman, Kirsty 3, 13, 43, 44, 45 Seeff, Adele 137, 289 Sellars, Peter 4 semiotics 13, 39–40, 46 n.3, 177, 181, 182, 196, 214–15, 242, 257, 281, 282, 287, 308, 318, 333, 337 Seven Deadly Sins, Part Two (The) 215 Shah, Naseeruddin (134) Shakespeare BASH’d 260 Shakespeare by the Lakes 101 Shakespeare Festival of Dallas 101 Shakespeare in the Park (New York Public Theater) 52, 55, 58, 100, 101, 326 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 100, 381 Shakespeare Must Die 124, 127 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra 286 As You Like It 76, 139, 196, 258, 293 Comedy of Errors 14, 75, 192–210 Coriolanus 86, 87, 96 n.6, 143, 199 Hamlet 8, 28, 30, 33, 34, 53, 76, 83, 84, 93, 95, 109, 132–40, 142, 144– 5, 151–2, 178, 181–207 n.6 and n.7, 219, 248, 249, 258, 259, 261–2, 271, 274–5, 304, 306, 333, 339 Henry IV plays 8, 42, 155, 157, 293 Henry V 33, 34, 105, 137, 269 Henry VI plays 18 n.7, 88, 137 Henry VIII 165 Julius Caesar 38, 45, 58, 86, 87, 91, 94, 96 n.6, 140 King John 72, 87, 94 King Lear 3, 5, 42, 85, 86, 91, 96 n.10, 139, 144, 145, 179, 222–3, 293, 294, 316 Love’s Labour’s Lost 294 Macbeth 28, 33, 34, 45, 84, 105, 106, 117, 125, 138, 178, 219, 256, 269, 274, 293, 320 Measure for Measure 87, 109, 316 The Merchant of Venice 75, 85, 87, 92 The Merry Wives of Windsor 118, 119, 181, 276 n.2, 293

INDEX

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 27, 75, 109, 258, 263, 274, 275, 276 n.13, 286 Much Ado About Nothing 109, 215 Othello 85, 100, 135–6, 137, 140, 188, 195, 208 n.11, 213, 216–18, 219, 220–21, 258, 286, 287, 385 Pericles 11, 118, 119, 151, 165, 275 The Rape of Lucrece 156 Richard II 1–2, 5, 8, 16–17, 18 n.2, 33, 53, 85, 157, 268–9 Richard III 38, 85, 86, 88–90, 94–5, 96 n.5, 100, 207 n.6, 220, 256–7 Romeo and Juliet 7, 11, 108, 109, 140–41, 142–3, 259, 333 The Taming of the Shrew 119, 157, 308 The Tempest 15, 38–9, 136, 143, 228–44, 270, 293, 294 Timon of Athens 84, 165 Titus Andronicus 32, 33, 36 n.13, 46 n.2, 75, 118, 119, 137, 138, 188, 230, 241, 286, 316 Troilus and Cressida 84, 93 Twelfth Night 14, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 38, 100, 108, 109, 171–91, 194, 215, 274 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 30, 32, 155 The Winter’s Tale 32, 139, 265–66, 276 n.2 Shakespeare’s Globe 1, 4, 7, 11, 13, 33, 35 n.2, 38, 42, 43, 46, 65–81, 82, 85–90, 92, 93, 94, 96 n.8, 101–6, 111, 117–18, 119, 128 n.2, 143, 144, 154, 165, 166 n.1, 245, 246, 263, 265–6, 268–9, 274–6, 276 n.11, 283, 285, 288, 294, 304, 305, 309, 313, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 321, 326, 331, 334, 336, 338, 340, 379, 380, 385 Globe Player 46 Globe to Globe Festival 117–18, 128 n.6, 265–6, 276 n.6, 317, 318–19, 379 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse 1, 104, 165, 166 n.1, 268, 321, 331 Shakespeare in Prison (Detroit Public Theatre) 173 Shakespeare Theatre Company 3, 143

INDEX

Shannon, Laurie 293 Shapiro, James 124–5, 143 Shapiro, Michael 285 Shaughnessy, Robert 128 n.4, 283 Shelley, Paul 95 Shepherd, Jack 70 Shepherd, Mike 76 Sher, Antony 136, 155, 302 Shin Jeong-ok 275 Shogun Macbeth 138 show reports 25–37, 38, 334 Shuttleworth, Ian 155, 162 Silvano Toti Globe Theatre 53 site-specific 14, 31, 132, 136–41, 141–2, 147, 166 n.1, 284, 294, 324, 334 Smith, Emma 17, Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 173 Solga, Kim 9, 14, 208 n.10, 220, 307 Solomon, Alisa 285 Soloski, Alexis 222 Soulpepper 207 n.7, 261 Sparrow, Quelemia 204 Spencer, Charles 160, 161, 163, 165 Spillers, Hortense 234, 242 n.2 Spymonkey 6 Stasio, Marilyn 222 Stella Adler Studio of Acting 180 Stern, Tiffany 283, 305 Stewart, Patrick 6 Stratford Festival (of Canada) 3, 14, 39, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 100, 143, 192–210, 292, 317, 382 Strauss, Marilyn 52 Strehler, Giorgio 288 Sturzaker, David 158 Styan, John 281 subtitles 140, 275, 336, 339 Sullivan, Erin 46, 56, 128 n.5, 142, 288, 323, 325, 380 Summer Shakespeare Festival (Czech and Slovak Republics) 53 surtitles (see subtitles) Suzman, Janet 135 Syme, Holger Schott 67–8, 74, 383 Tang Shu-Wing Theatre Studio 118–19 Tara Arts 251–2 Tate, Nahum 5 Taylor, Diana 9, 12, 25, 216, 304

397

Taymor, Julie 15, 228–44 television 7, 44, 50, 138, 144–6, 158, 276 n.5, 323, 337, 378, 379, 381 Tennant, David 157 Terry, Michelle 66, 72–7, 315 Thacker, David 155 Theatre Company of Kenya 118 Theatre Republic 265 Thompson, Ayanna 10, 18 n.1, 44, 56, 170–78, 182, 193, 196, 197, 207 n.8, 219, 220, 221–2, 287, 306, 309, 385, 386 Tiffin, Helen 173 TikTok 142 Tiramani, Jenny 69 Tommasi, Alejandro 134 Toneelgroep Amsterdam 6 Tooley, Nicholas 211–16, 224 Torreton, Philippe 137 Tosh, Will 2, 11, 104, 334, 380 trans(gender) studies 193–7, 200–5, 220, 222, 284–7, 327–8, 330, 338–9 translation 4, 7, 10, 53, 137, 245, 256–7, 274–5, 287–9, 303, 322, 336, 387 Traub, Valerie 15, 212, 219, 314 Tribble, Evelyn 2, 214–15, 290, 307, 322, 387 Trivedi, Poonam 128 n.1, 289 Troughton, David 27, 36 n.3 Trueman, Matt 65, 67 True West controversy (#hotgate) 43 Tulloch, John 43 Turner, Victor 282, 283, 287, 290 Utah Shakespeare Festival 49–51, 52–3 van Hove, Ivo 4, 6, 45, 199, 263, 291, 320 van Kampen, Claire 69 Vaughan, Alden 286 Vaughan, Megan 18 n.4, 314 Vaughan, Virginia Mason 217, 218 286 Vere Street Theatre 216 Verma, Jatinder 251–2, 276 n.3 Vie du Roi Henri V, La 137 Vilar, Jean 56, 57 Villains Theatre, The 245–6, 255 Waldmann, Alex 87 Wallis, James 260

398

Warner, Deborah 4 Watermeier, Daniel J. 55 Way, Geoffrey 46 Webster, John 153, 156, 158, 160, 161, 163, 321 The Duchess of Malfi 153 The White Devil 156, 158, 160, 161, 163 Weheliye, Alexander 234, 239, 242 n.2 Weimann, Robert 13, 34, 82–95, 311, 323, 335 Weinberger, David 119–21 Wekwerth, Manfred 93 Welles, Orson 178 Wells, Stanley 9 Werner, Sarah 45, 283 Werner-Gibbins, Taimus 101 Whipday, Emma 156, 247, 263 Whishaw, Ben 92, 231 Whyman, Erica 156, 157, 263 Why Not Theatre 207 n.7, 261 Wilder, Lina Perkins 290 Willis, Thomas 217 Wilkinson, Kate 154, 386 Wilson, August 173, 174, 176, 186 Wilson, Ruth 222

INDEX

Wolpe, Lisa 258–9 Woods, Penelope 36 n.11, 44, 46, 70, 74, 330 Wooster Group 6, 316, 320 World Shakespeare Festival 9, 56, 116–18, 124–5, 128 n.5, 288, 289 Worthen, W.B. 4, 5, 10, 16, 65, 72, 74, 146, 172–3, 192, 282, 284, 307, 328, 336–7, 338, 385 Wright, Clare 94 Wright, James 216 Wynter, Sylvia 236, 242 n.3 Wyver, John 7, 317, 337 Yang Jung-ung 9, 248, 274–6 Yohangza Theatre Company 274 Yong’an, Ma 135 Yong Li Lan 7, 378 Young, Sandra 116, 122 YouTube 127, 143, 146, 208 n.12, 287, 311, 379 Yu, Joanna 202 Zadek, Peter 288 Zhaohua, Lin 288

399

400