Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance

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Author: W. B. Worthen

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE FORCE OF MODERN PERFORMANCE

Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance asks a central theoretical question in the study of drama: what is the relationship between the dramatic text and the meanings of performance? Developing the notion of “performativity” explored by J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others, Worthen argues that the text cannot govern the force of its performance. Instead the text becomes significant only as embodied in the changing conventions of its performance. Worthen explores this understanding of dramatic performativity by interrogating several contemporary sites of Shakespeare production. He analyzes how Shakespeare is recreated in historical performance, exemplified by the Globe Theatre on Bankside; by international and intercultural performance; by film; and by the appearance of Shakespeare on the internet. The book includes detailed discussions of recent films and stage productions, and sets Shakespeare performance alongside other works of contemporary drama and theatre. w. b. worth en is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance (1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (1992), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge, 1997), and of a wide range of articles on drama and performance in major journals.

S H A K E S PE A R E A N D TH E F O RC E O F M O D E R N PE R F O R M A N C E W . B. WO RT H EN University of California, Berkeley

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © W. B. Worthen 2004 First published in printed format 2003 ISBN 0-511-02970-5 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-81030-2 hardback ISBN 0-521-00800-X paperback

Contents

page vi

Acknowledgments Introduction: dramatic performativity and the force of performance

1

1 Performing history

28

2 Globe performativity

79

3 Shakespearean geographies

117

4 Cyber-Shakespeare

169

Notes Works cited Index

216 238 262

v

Acknowledgments

Writing this book, I have been blessed to have superb readers, whose own work has often been a chastening example of how to do it right: Joel Altman, Michael Bristol, Una Chaudhuri, Pete Donaldson, Tony Dawson, Barbara Hodgdon, Peter Holland, Romana Huk, Shannon Jackson, Caren Kaplan, Ric Knowles, Jeffrey Masten, Gail Kern Paster, Peggy Phelan, Carol Rutter, Eric Smoodin, Joanne Tompkins, Wendy Wall, Robert Weimann, and Frank Whigham have read, responded to, or discussed various parts of this project with me, and many have provided extraordinary hospitality as well. I have delivered nearly all of this book at annual sessions of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies, sponsored by Pirkko Koski and the University of Helsinki, and I should particularly like to thank the faculty – Pirkko Koski, Bruce McConachie, Janelle Reinelt, Freddie Rokem, and Steve Wilmer – and our students there for their keen criticism and patient forbearance with writing usually far removed from their own interests. I should also like to thank Barbara Hodgdon, Dennis Kennedy, David Kastan, and Joanne Tompkins for making unpublished writing available to me, and Peter Lichtenfels, Lynette C. Hunter, and Christopher Peak for answering a nearly endless stream of niggling questions about their production (and edition) of Romeo and Juliet, and for the privilege of discussing their work with them. I am grateful to Verna Foster (Loyola University), Margaret Knapp (Arizona State University), Michal Kobialka (University of Minnesota), Linda Morris (University of California, Davis), Celeste di Nucci (University of Pennsylvania), and Robert Weimann (University of California, Irvine) for inviting me to speak about my work; and to audiences at the American Society for Theatre Research, the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare vi

Acknowledgments

vii

Association of America, and the Shakespeare Institute for their attention and comments. My specific indebtedness to several extraordinary students is expressed below, but I should like to express my gratitude to Elizabeth Deitchman, Kathleen Gough, Katie Kalpin, Johanna Schmitz, and Don Weingust for what I have had the privilege of learning from them; I should also like to thank Johanna Schmitz, Sharon Pressburg Braden, Tate Davis, and John Rae Perigoe for muchneeded research assistance. William Rachelson generously answered my rudimentary questions about electronic technology, and I am sure I got better than I gave from sharing work on electronic technologies with Jillana Enteen. Clélia Francesca Donovan provided indispensable translations of work on Grupo Galpão, and I am thankful to Grupo Galpão for providing me with materials documenting their extraordinary work. I have also greatly benefited from the advice and support of the staff of Cambridge University Press, particularly Sarah Stanton and Jackie Warren. Shannon Steen diverted time away from more important work to read and discuss this project with me; in this, as in many other things, I am immeasurably the richer. I am grateful to the following for permission to use previously published material here in much-revised form. I first worked out some concerns with the “performative” in “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” as well as some initial thoughts on William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet that appear here in chapter 3, in PMLA 113 (1998): 1093–107. Portions of the introduction and first chapter originally appeared as “Shakespearean Performativity,” in Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, ed. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes (London: Routledge, 2001): 117–41; an earlier version of my discussion of the Globe Theatre in chapter 2 appeared as “Reconstructing the Globe, Constructing Ourselves,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 33–45; and parts of chapter 4 were published as “Hyper-Shakespeare,” Performance Research 7.1 (2002): 7–21. Finally, I would like to thank the Committee on Research and the University of California, Davis, and the Committee on Research and the College of Letters and Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, for several research grants, and for the Humanities Research Fellowship that enabled me to complete the project.

intro d u ctio n

Dramatic performativity and the force of performance

This is a book about a small slice of performance: the stage performance of scripted drama. Until fairly recently dramatic performance provided the paradigm of performance analysis; the salutary impact of the massive globalization of performance, and an energetic expansion of scholarly and critical practice in the fields of literary, theatre, and performance studies, have now displaced dramatic theatre as the paradigm of performance. This expansion of our ways of understanding and analyzing performance has had – or should have – critical consequences for our understanding of drama, both as a literary genre and on the stage. Although a corner of drama studies has usually been occupied by “performance criticism” and the stage history of plays, in the past three decades the discussion of dramatic performance has been innovated by the importing of methods from anthropology and ethnography, from the psychoanalytic semiotics of film and media studies, from critical practices derived from phenomenology, from the densely materialist consideration of performance practices in cultural studies, and even from a new attention to the ways the changing character of printed texts changes the material “performance” of writing in history. Disciplinary divisions still have an edge, of course, and the energetic expansion of the field of performance studies has sometimes framed an overly static, even simplistic understanding of dramatic performance. Despite recent enthusiasm for the idea of “performance” in literary studies, there, too, the critical gain promised by “performance” is often tacitly set apart from a sense of the banality of dramatic theatre. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance frames a discussion of the working of dramatic performance now, at the opening of the twenty-first century. I argue that dramatic performance is conditioned 1

2

Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance

not only from within the theatre, requiring an understanding of the conventional performance practices of a given culture, but also from without: the institutions of performance arise in relation to social and cultural factors, other institutions which define the categories and meanings of performance. One sign of this negotiation is the way live and mediated performance are now often implicated in one another. Much contemporary theatre work incorporates electronic media (Laurie Anderson’s Moby-Dick, for example, or the “live” videotaping of the “live” elements of the performance in Peter Sellars’s productions of The Merchant of Venice and Peony Pavilion); some “live” shows depend in other ways on mechanical reproduction (the audiotapes and videotapes critical to Anna Deavere Smith’s performances come to mind); one genre of stage performance even recreates film and television scenarios (the brilliant Zapruder sequence in Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s The Serpent, the long-running stage version of The Brady Bunch, or the various reenactments – live and as internet chat – of Star Trek episodes). Mediatized performance enforces a negotiation with the “live” along all its borders: Anuradha Kapur, a director and professor at the National School of Drama in New Delhi – a school that provides a three-year course including training both in “classical” forms of Indian performance and in “modern” acting (Stanislavskian realism) – reports that applicants to the school are sometimes asked to perform “Michael Jackson” as an audition exercise. Drama, dramatic performance, and the ways we understand them are constantly changing under the pressure of new technologies (indoor theatres, the printing of plays, stage lighting, the proscenium, film, digital media) and as a result of the shifting frontiers between genres of enactment, nontheatrical as well as theatrical. Shakespearean drama once shared the space of performance with bear-baiting, sermons, and jigs, as well as with other kinds of theatre, in a culture that was still dominated by oral forms of communication. Today it shares that cultural horizon with a wide range of live and mediatized enactments, modes of dramatic writing and of theatrical and nontheatrical performance that define what we think Shakespeare – or any scripted drama – can be made to do as performance. As the history of modern theatre attests, Shakespearean drama not only occupies the sphere of the “classic,” but also has frequently provided the site for innovation in the style, substance, and practice of modern performance.

Introduction: dramatic performativity

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Moreover, given their status as “literature,” Shakespeare’s plays enable us to consider an important but often misconceived aspect of dramatic performance: the function of writing, of the script, in the theatre. Shakespeare’s plays were written at the intersection of three institutions that continue to exert pressure on drama and performance. First, they were written as saleable commodities in a new mode of cultural and economic production, the emerging professional theatre. Although writing was used very differently in that theatre from how it is today, Shakespearean drama participated in the invention of a recognizably modern institution, in which playscripts are transformed into a different kind of commodity, dramatic performance. Second, Shakespeare’s plays also responded directly to a rich oral culture. Our understanding of language and knowledge have been forever altered by the impact of print; yet the Western stage remains an important site for the transformation of writing into the embodied discourses of action, movement, and speech. Finally, Shakespeare’s plays were also part of an emerging publishing industry. The fact that Shakespeare’s plays were printed not only saved them from oblivion, but also marked the beginning of a fundamental transformation in their status (and in the status of drama), from performance to print commodities. In the West today scripted drama is identified at once through the institutions that conceive its meanings in terms of its textual form, and through the institutional practices that transform the text into something else – stage behavior – and that lend that behavior significance, force in theatrical performance. As my use of the word force here implies, this is the interface of the “performative,” the terrain between language and its enactment suggestively explored by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words, and more broadly remapped in cultural terms by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, among others. The use of the “performative” in drama, theatre, and performance studies has become the focus of an important controversy about language, performance, and the performing subject. While this controversy reflects the disciplinary struggles characteristic of the humanities today, it also has important consequences for an understanding of the work of scripted drama and its performance, what we might call “dramatic performativity” – the relationship between the verbal text and the conventions (or, to use Butler’s term, “regimes”) of behavior that give it meaningful force as performed action. This controversy has

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three elements that I will pursue here in order to clarify dramatic performativity and the leverage it provides on an understanding of written drama and its performance: (1) how accounts of the “performative” tend to maintain a literary sense of theatrical performance; (2) how the “performative” might be refigured to model a more adequate understanding of theatrical performance; (3) how the “performative,” derived as it is from a print-inflected understanding of verbal performance, requires a careful attention not only to the practices of performance but to the divergence between the materiality of print and the ideologies of print culture. a n t i t he at ric a l pe r fo rmat iv it y The application of J. L. Austin’s approach to speech acts, working to see the “performative” function of language mediating between texts and modes of doing, has proven to be an attractive and productive line of inquiry across the humanities, animating readings of the “performative” in literary texts (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity”), in drama and theatrical performance (Elin Diamond, “Re: Blau”), and in social performance more generally (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble). At first glance, though, the use of Austin to recuperate dramatic performance seems unpromising. The extension of Austin’s performativity has tended to rehabilitate the study of performance while reiterating a familiar antipathy toward dramatic theatre. Much as literary scholars tend to see the acts of the stage as lapsed reading, derived from the proper meanings prescribed by “the text,” Austin also has a notoriously skeptical regard for theatrical performatives. For Austin theatrical discourse is peculiarly “hollow”: “performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage” (How to Do Things with Words 22), insofar as theatrical utterance is part of a special class of infelicitous utterance in which the motives of the agent (“persons having certain thoughts or feelings” 15) are either insincere or are not directly embodied in subsequent conduct; literary utterance, to be fair, can also be hollow in this sense if “introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (22). Austin famously excludes such hollow utterance from consideration precisely because he finds it “parasitic upon [language’s] normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language” (22).


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Oddly enough, while Austin’s cavalier dismissal of theatrical performatives – hollow to whom? in what sense? etiolations? – now seems to drive literary studies toward “performativity and performance,” it does so precisely by excluding a form of communication where writing bears in complex yet determinate ways on enactment: dramatic performance. Some of the ways in which Austin is seen to liberate “performance” (and performance studies) from the tawdriness of the stage are tackled by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in their introductory essay to the influential collection Performativity and Performance. Parker and Sedgwick take Austin to chart a “convergence” between literary and performance studies that has pushed performativity “onto center stage” (Introduction 1): “If one consequence of this appreciation has been a heightened willingness to credit a performative dimension in all ritual, ceremonial, scripted behaviors, another would be the acknowledgment that philosophical essays themselves surely count as one such performative instance” (2). While we may be relieved that philosophers are now performers (written in the performative mode, their essays finally have force, make something happen), it is striking to think that some literary scholars have so recently recognized the force of rituals and ceremonies, a development they assign to the new antidiscipline of performance studies: “Reimagining itself over the course of the past decade as the wider field of performance studies,” theatre studies is said to have “moved well beyond the classical ontology of the black box model to embrace a myriad of performance practices, ranging from stage to festival and everything in between” (2). This reading of Austin queers felicitous performativity, demonstrating its constitutive predication on the “etiolated” – meaning “linked with the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, the abnormal, the decadent, the effete, the diseased” (5) – theatrical performance it excludes. Nonetheless, it is revealing that Parker and Sedgwick see the black box as a synecdoche for all theatrical performance, a space (theatre) and a critical practice (drama and theatre studies) where nothing, or very little, happens, or happens with consequence, force, as performance. Given their subsequent discussion of marriage as a form of conventional theatre, it seems evident that what Parker and Sedgwick mean by “black box model” is the spatial and performance

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dynamics of modern proscenium performance, a structure of performance that emerged barely a century ago, at the juncture of the familiar social, aesthetic, and technological pressures of Western industrial modernism that is, arguably, already on the wane as the dominant form of theatre spatiality: a darkened auditorium, a bourgeois drama, performance conventions that confine the play behind the fourth wall of a box set onstage. (In contemporary theatre, of course, a black box is a small theatre space susceptible to multiple configurations and so to various ways of shaping the relationship between stage and audience: black-box theatre does not have a proscenium.) Athens’s Theatre of Dionysus, the York mystery pageants, the Globe, the illuminated Comédie Française, aquatic melodrama at Sadler’s Wells, Teatro Campesino’s flatbed trucks, even a thumbnail sketch of Western theatre – to say nothing of wayang kulit, Noh, or other non-Western theatricalities – throws the “black box” model, and the modern proscenium house, very much into question as a paradigm for the “classical ontology” of theatre. Ignoring theatre studies’ longstanding interest in dramatic, festival, and popular performance – as well as in eras of stage production typically bypassed in literary studies, such as the nineteenth century – Parker and Sedgwick enact a typically literary disciplinary investment in textually motivated forms of modern theatre as definitive of theatrical production. Confining theatre to the black box of modern stage realism, Parker and Sedgwick take performance (and performance studies) to confirm dramatic theatre (and theatre studies) as an essentially reproductive or derivative mode of production. Developing Jacques Derrida’s reading of Austin in “Signature Event Context,” Parker and Sedgwick note that Austin’s attempt to exclude theatrical discourse from ordinary performance finally predicates all performative utterance on the kind of “hollow” citationality characteristic of the stage. They deconstruct Austin’s opposition between “normal” and etiolated performance, the felicitously performative and the theatrical: performative speech cannot be distinguished from the hollow utterances of the stage on the basis of originality, as though nontheatrical speaking were more authentic, less repetitive, than stage speech. Performatives can work “felicitously” only to the extent that they, like theatrical performance, are reiterable, signifying through a process of citation; utterances perform actions only when they


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iterate familiar verbal behavioral regimes. Parker’s and Sedgwick’s sense of the relationship between theatrical and nontheatrical performance is dramatized in their canny reexamination of Austin’s reliance on marital vows (“I do”) as an instance of performative speech (illocution), of “marriage itself as theater – marriage as a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world (a heterosexual couple secure in their right to hold hands in the street), continually reorienting around itself the surrounding relations of visibility and spectatorship, of the tacit and the explicit, of the possibility or impossibility of a given person’s articulating a given enunciatory position” (11). They point out that the performative force of marriage is not enacted by the utterance, the text “I do,” but by the ways that utterance/text, performed within the ceremony, cites and so reenacts the institutions of compulsory heterosexuality. Marriage is “like a play” (11) to the extent that it is like modern realistic theatre, a theatre whose conventional “relations of visibility and spectatorship” – as Bertolt Brecht long ago recognized – mask its ideological labor behind its claims to verisimilar representation: “Like the most conventional definition of a play” – or, more precisely, like the working of modern realistic plays in a mode of production associated with proscenium theatricality that Parker and Sedgwick take to be the “conventional definition of a play” – “marriage is constituted as a spectacle that denies its audience the ability either to look away from it or equally to intervene in it” (11). Parker and Sedgwick brilliantly rethink the working of Austin’s illocutionary “I do”: the text gains its force not because the words themselves accomplish the action, but because saying “I do” in conventional rituals of wedding-theatre cites and so reproduces an entire genre of performance. That this performance – the coercive citation of heteronormativity – is epitomized as proscenium theatre typifies Parker’s and Sedgwick’s sense of theatre, and how they position dramatic and theatrical performance relative to performativity (and to the “wider field of performance studies”). They take the characteristic formation of modern theatre – the silent audience immobilized before the proscenium frame where all the action is (faked), removed from participation, from visibility, consuming the spectacle from their individual seats, a darkened throng of individualized subjects disciplined by/into the illusion of community – to epitomize dramatic theatre

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itself. Reducing theatre to the characteristic ideological apparatus of modern realism, Parker’s and Sedgwick’s stage is finally the emblem of powerful yet coercive conventionality (as, of course, much modern theatre is). This deconstruction of Austin locates the citational “hollowness” of ordinary language performatives; paradoxically, it does not seem to render the “hollowness” peculiar to Austin’s stage any more felicitous. To Parker and Sedgwick ordinary performatives signify not as words (“I do”) but through their reiteration as conventional behavior, in regimes of enactment that enable the spoken words to become meaningful as performance. Theatrical performance, though, is understood in the most conventionally “literary” terms, to signify by reiterating the dramatic text, a mode of citation that renders it peculiarly hollow. Rather than understanding theatrical performance as definitive of performativity – the conventional regimes of theatrical behavior (like ideology in this sense) exceed the text, and provide the ground for its potential meaning as performance – Parker and Sedgwick follow Austin in retaining the “hollowness” of the stage by retaining the signification of dramatic performance, its force, within its “literary,” textual form, the script of the play. “When is saying something doing something? And how is saying something doing something?” (1): as Parker and Sedgwick imply, one of the problems of modeling theatrical performance on Austinian performativity is that it reduces performance to the performance of language, words, as though theatrical performance were merely, or most essentially, a mode of utterance, the (in-/felicitous) production of speech acts. Yet even the relations of visibility characteristic of an Ibsen play will be produced in performance only if we choose to stage the play in the conventional proscenium box that Ibsen imagined: as countless thrust-stage, black-box, in-the-round, and otherwise “experimental” productions have shown, the text gains different force in alternative regimes of performance. The conundrum that Parker and Sedgwick enact here has to do precisely with the fact that they, too, regard acting much as Austin does, as the straightforward citation of the dramatic text. Nontheatrical performances like the marriage ceremony exemplify the “performative” because, far from being determined by the text, the performance is understood to frame, contextualize, and determine the possible meanings the text can have as performed action, as an act with force. Yet this account of the marriage


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ceremony sounds much like theatre, where performance continually remakes writing into something else: it is only their “literary” desire to retain the force of the theatre within the dramatic text that prevents Parker and Sedgwick, much as it prevented Austin, from seeing this account of the “performative” as an account of dramatic performance. They, like Austin (all those examples from Shakespeare!) discount the force of theatre, including its potentially disruptive, “performative” force, because they understand stage performance merely as the citation of the playwright’s script. At the same time their discussion of the performative structure of the marital “I do” seems to beg the question: is it the dramatic text that the citational performances of the theatre cite? d r a m at ic pe r fo rmat iv it y To consider dramatic theatre as an instance of the “performative” requires a fundamental rethinking of the function of writing in performance. Does stage performance operate citationally, less an iteration of texts than an engagement of the conventions of performance, conventions that accumulate, as Judith Butler puts it, “the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practices” (Excitable Speech 51)? As a citational practice, theatre – like all signifying performance – is engaged not so much in citing texts as in reiterating its own regimes of performance. Plays become meaningful in the theatre through the disciplined application of conventionalized practices – acting, directing, scenography – that transform writing into something with performative force: performance behavior. The invocation of Austin often tends to associate theatrical performance with speech, and so sees theatre’s relation to the text as akin to the ways Austin describes an utterance’s relation to language: the text grounds the potential meanings of its enactment. Yet even the act of speaking, Bruce Smith observes, is better understood as “something that happens in the body and to the body,” something apprehended “via a gestalt of force” (Acoustic World 23). Theatre goes well beyond the force of mere speech, subjecting writing to the body, to labor, to the work of production. To pursue “dramatic performativity,” then, first requires us to retrain the deconstructive logic that Parker and Sedgwick derive from Austin and Derrida back on an understanding of drama and theatre.

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Regarding dramatic performance as having force means, paradoxically enough, that we must relinquish the notion that its force derives solely or directly from the authorial text. If stage performance merely cites its text, it remains “hollow” as behavior, even as stage behavior. It also remains derivative from, and subordinate to, fundamentally literary, print-inflected notions of theatre: theatre becomes merely a clever way to reiterate writing by other means. To see dramatic performativity as a species of the “performative” – producing action with a characteristic, if ambiguous, force – we must fashion a much more dynamic understanding of the use and function of texts in the theatre, and a more vigorous sense of the consequences of theatrical behavior as well. Though most often invoked in literary and dramatic studies for her reading of the performative dimension of gender and sexual identifications, Judith Butler unpacks the relationship between language and enactment in ways that bear directly on this performative understanding of stage drama. It may seem surprising to turn to Butler here: Elin Diamond notes that “[p]erformance and theatre discourse are shunned by Butler” – much as they are by Parker and Sedgwick – “with a fastidiousness worthy of J. L. Austin himself ” (“Re: Blau” 33). Butler is fastidious about the performative potential of the stage in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter (and even in Antigone’s Claim).1 Elsewhere, though, Butler takes hate speech, pornography, and the “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy of the US military toward gay personnel to locate a contemporary politics of the performative. This work traverses the zone where speaking crosses in ambiguous and contradictory ways into the sphere of doing, the zone where behavior appears to derive its force as action from the words it performs – a zone, in other words, much akin to the zone of dramatic performance. Butler’s reading of the scene of speech again develops Derrida’s reading of Austin, the sense that illocutionary speech (“I do”) cannot perform as “illocution” if we understand it as a completely original, “sovereign” utterance. The conditions that make “marriage” happen are not under the sovereign control of the speakers or of their text, “I do”; for “marriage” to happen “I do” must be spoken within ceremonial and ritualized behaviors that cite and reiterate an entire range of heteronormative social institutions.2 Yet in a variety of public and legal contexts, and most dramatically in the case of hate speech, we


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understand words alone to have the force of action, to constitute acts in themselves (many people understand plays in this way, too, to contain the force of their legitimate stage behavior). The doctrine of “fighting words” implies that some hate speech frames perlocutionary speech acts, causing something to happen (a fist fight, a smoldering house) as a consequence of speech. But some hate speech – in the contemporary United States, the “n-word” – is also understood as illocutionary action, as committing an injury merely by the act of being spoken. To the extent that it puts its recipient “subject in a position of subordination” (Butler, Excitable Speech 26), hate speech accomplishes an illocutionary act, becoming “an unequivocal form of conduct” (23). Both senses (perlocutionary, illocutionary) of hate-speech-asaction evoke familiar models of dramatic performance, and of performance criticism of the drama: the text implies certain stage behaviors as its perlocutionary consequence; the text illocutionarily encodes stage behaviors in itself. Butler argues, though, that the absorption of conduct into the text (the literary sense of dramatic performance) mystifies the ideological character of performance. For the spoken text cannot determine its social, public significance as action: how – or whether – speech is even regarded as a performed action depends on the legislated, consensual context of its enactment. Speech is regarded as unequivocal conduct in order to proscribe homosexuality in the military (“don’t-ask-don’t-tell” implies that telling is doing, that speech is conduct, illocution). At the same time racist conduct has been regarded as the exercise of free speech: burning a cross on a black family’s lawn is not taken as illocution (hate speech as conduct), nor as perlocution (fighting words), not as conduct at all, but merely as nonperformative, protected, free speech. Still other kinds of speech are prosecuted as racist conduct “in those cases in which racial minorities come to stand for the source or origin of sexually injurious representation (as in rap)” (Excitable Speech 40). The text of the speech-act – a racist epithet, “I do,” or “I’m gay” – is incapable of determining action in itself, or of constituting a performing subject. “If agency is not derived from the sovereignty of the speaker, then the force of the speech act is not sovereign force” (39). Its meaning cannot be traced entirely to the independent authority of the text or of the speaker, but to the ways in which the act of utterance – and

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the acting of the utterance – calls into practice an available regime of social relationships. Kenneth Burke might have said that Butler privileges the explanatory force of the scene, rather than the agent in determining the motive force of speech acts, and of dramatic action more generally. Butler’s scrupulous attention to the disjunction between language and the force of its enactment enforces a critical remapping of the function of writing in dramatic performance. Speaking produces language as behavior, as action; language (“I do”) gains the force of performance through the citational character of its enactment, the social and behavioral conventions that register it as action. So, too, if “the performativity of the text is not under sovereign control” (69), dramatic writing alone cannot exert “sovereign” force on its performance. Dramatic performance becomes meaningful by deploying the text in recognizable genres of behavior, regimes that finally determine what the text can mean as performance. A “performative” understanding of drama enables us to recalibrate our understanding of the relationship between texts and performances. Dramatic performance is not determined by the text of the play: it strikes a much more interactive, performative relation between writing and the spaces, places, and behaviors that give it meaning, force, as theatrical action. Far from governing the shape and meaning of performance, writing is given its significance in performance by the range of its possible uses, by the various social and theatrical conventions that transform it from language into action, behavior. Needless to say, this view of dramatic performativity not only unsettles a literary notion of theatre, but also raises important and difficult questions about the function and identity of the playwright’s work in performance. How can we evaluate performance, particularly the performance of plays in the classical repertory, without recourse to an understanding of the perdurable text? Are all performances of Hamlet or Waiting for Godot – faithful or unfaithful, traditional or high-concept, intercultural or (fill in the blank: whatever the opposite of intercultural might be today) – equally incommensurable with the text, equally distant from it? These important concerns deserve our attention, and I will return to them several times throughout this book. Here, though, we should also note that a literary anxiety about the “performative” stripping the identity of the text from


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performance (a performance of Hamlet is not a citation of Shakespeare’s text, but a transformation of it) is reciprocated by a corollary anxiety, that the “performative” – with its origins in linguistics, language studies, and deconstructive philosophy – betrays the essentially nontextual identity of performance by conceiving performance in fundamentally literary or textual terms. From this perspective, far from displacing the force of the text, a “performative” conception of performance remains fully sustained by a literary ideology, one rooted – as modern literary culture is – in the practices, economics, and rhetoric of print. pe r f o r m ativ it y, lit e rac y, a n d prin t Can we deploy the “performative” as a way to understand dramatic performance without – despite appearances to the contrary – pulling performance back into a print-inflected understanding of drama and theatre? More to the point, how does a sense of dramatic performativity require a reconception not only of dramatic writing, but of the bearing of print and print literacy on an understanding of the identity of drama and the practices of performance? In her vivid celebration of performance at “the end of print culture,” The Domain-Matrix, Sue-Ellen Case resists the dissemination of the “performative” in precisely these terms: its implication in the ideology of print locates the “performative” understanding of performance within the familiar hegemony of textual culture. Framing a sense of the “performing lesbian at the end of print culture” (the book’s subtitle), Case entwines a challenge to Butler’s notion of the performative nature of gender and sexual identity with a critique of Austin’s “performative” as a function of print culture and its misapprehension of performance. She argues that the resistance to “essentialism” arising from “performative” conceptions of gender and sexuality is itself the effect of a fundamentally literary desire to see performance, and sexual identity, in terms susceptible to the interpretive practices of print culture, as texts. Putting print aside, away from its dominating position, what other orders emerge as metaphors for the production of meaning? If print composes a certain type of subject, created in consonance with a passing form of capitalism, what new compound of subject, body, sexuality, gender, and class is

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being constituted in cyberspace? Without the popular trope of “inscription” that has brought writing onto bodies, institutions, and social spaces, what figures manage the emerging spaces of information? (Domain-Matrix 9–10)

Insofar as the “performative” depends on a notion of citation modeled on the iterative capacities of language, especially as language is understood since the rise of print and its marked expansion of the “iterative” dimension of writing, Butler’s work dramatizes a fundamentally literary (de)valuation of performance, a sense of performance sustained by the ineffable Author (“lurking in the project to make writing active, to make theorizing a significant actor in spite of all repetitive iterations, or theoretical stomps, is the writer” 16), a figure who rapidly dissolves (and dissolves performance) into the order of writing: “The critical discourses of speech-act theory and deconstruction ultimately bring the notion of performativity back to their own mode of production: print” (17). Although her discussion of print is only a stepping-stone to an inquiry into the performance of identities (I will return to this problematic sense of the extinction of print by hypermedia in chapter 4), Case’s sense that print marks the origin and limit of the “performative” has been widely influential in performance studies. More to the point, in representing the relationship between “print” and the “performative,” Case invites us to take a keener view of the material frame of modern Western drama’s other mode of production: the printed page. The general point here, that “the body and the order of the visible have been subsumed by writing and the order of print” (22), is unexceptionable; the marginalization of drama in literary studies is one familiar consequence of this history. Much as the modern study of language is coeval with the expansion of print in the later seventeenth century, the consequences of print – the isolation and “thingification” of words, the emphasis on repeatability and regularity, the standardization of grammar and lexicon, among many others – are visible across the interface of cultural and performance studies, from Saussure to Peirce, from Freud to Lacan to Laura Mulvey, from the dramatistic rhetoric of Kenneth Burke to the social dramas of Victor Turner to the textualized cultures of Clifford Geertz, and of course from Austin to Derrida to Butler.3 At the same time “the body and the order of the visible” cannot stand in an identical relationship


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to different modes of language production. Speech, writing, print, and electronic texts are used in a variety of ways, and have been used in different ways throughout history, implying a differential range of relationships between “the body and the order of the visible” and the practices of verbal communication – speech, writing, and print. We might take our bearings on the relationship between writing, print, and the “performative” by revisiting the example that Case uses to highlight the crippling effects of print culture and the “performative” on an understanding of performance: conferencepaper performance. It’s certainly true that most academics engage routinely in two kinds of performance – teaching and giving academic papers – and that the conference paper – reading a text aloud to an audience – sustains an unacknowledged paradigm of the work of performance for many of them (well, for many of us). The sense that performance is merely a reiteration of writing is a commonly held understanding of stage drama. Deeply dependent on the iterative logic of print, it is also characteristic of the way both traditional literary studies and the newer performance studies have (mis)understood the function of texts in performance. The contemporary enthusiasm for the “performative,” Case argues, is one consequence of this model of performance: “The law, the legislated, the written, in book culture, in print culture, precedes and determines performance . . . ‘Performing’ cannot seem to inhabit any originary space – that is precisely, those critics would offer, its merit. It is posed as an after-effect, albeit a subversive one – of a stable condition” (25), the condition of print. While Case rightly assails an understanding of performance as essentially dependent on the forms and means of print, she also implies that the “performative” depends on this print-inflected conception of performance and so that the “performative” is fully emblematized by the genre of conference-paper performance, the “oral performance of print” (24). Needless to say, the “conference paper” asserts the function of the text in performance much more vividly than most dramatic performance does: the script is usually displayed; the speaker continuously performs his/her dependence on it; the physical regimes of embodiment (gesture, movement, inflection, posture, to say nothing of costume and visual design) are extraordinarily narrow. Nonetheless, even conference-paper performance has its physical conventions of vocal, gestural, and physical performance.4 While conference-paper

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performance certainly reifies a text-centered version of performance, even conference-paper theatre seems to me illustrative less of the absolute determination of performance by writing than of the disjunction between writing and enactment, the disjunction of the “performative.” Attending both to the precise material form of conference-paper writing and to the function of writing in the performative rituals of conference-paper performance points at once to the inability of writing to determine performance, and to a richer understanding of dramatic performativity. We might get at the differential relationship between writing and enactment, and so at a more fluid understanding of the “performative,” by raising what might at first appear merely a quibbling distinction: the delivery of an academic paper is never (well, nearly never) the “oral performance of print.” Although an academic paper has probably been “printed” on a printer, it has not in fact been subjected to the process of print (some people deliver papers directly from a laptop, or from notecards and Powerpoint display, using texts, in other words, that never come close to print). A conference paper has not received the influence, the labor, of other print-agents – editors, copyeditors, compositors, pressmen, proofreaders, bookbinders – each of whom transforms the private authorial text into a public document, property with public, socialized properties. As David Scott Kastan has pointed out, authors do not write books: They do write, of course – itself a complexly social act – but what they write are manuscripts or typescripts that get turned into books only with the introduction and interference of any number of new agents and intentions. Editors, censors, publishers, designers, printers, binders all interfere with the author’s text before it appears as a printed book, and their multiple and often contradictory agencies are necessarily registered in the text’s signifying surface. (Shakespeare after Theory 28)

(Case’s The Domain-Matrix is a case in point: using design and layout elements to replicate a computer screen in the early chapters, and shifting to new typefaces and layouts to reflect the concerns of later chapters, The Domain-Matrix evinces the resources and prestige of a major university press, elements of the sociology of the book that are inseparable from the “content” of the printed text.) Whereas the conference paper emanates from an individual or group creator,


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printed texts emanate from a publisher, and carry with them a range of material properties expressing that origin. This distinction applies to desktop publishing and to electronic publishing, too. Although there may be fewer intermediary individuals involved, desktop publication is nonetheless the product of several nonauthorial agents, including the designers of layout and print software, and the mechanism of distribution that renders desktop printing a meaningful form of publication. Merely creating a hard copy of an electronic document is not really the equivalent of print publication. So, too, electronic publishing – the creation and distribution of texts for readers in an electronic medium – requires the insertion of the text into a public medium such as the internet, where it again becomes subject to the influence of other agents (the advertisers who drive search engines, the designers of webpage software, the structure of digital communications).5 The text’s mode of production is surely a critical dimension of the “sociality of the academic community” (Case, Domain-Matrix 24), and points to the ways in which performativity – the lived, behavioral ethics and practices of a conventionalized regime of performance – registers its impress on the performance of writing in the materiality of the text itself, tracing the way the text becomes an object of labor and transformation by performance. The ethics of paper-giving are such that papers that have been published, subjected to print, are usually ineligible for performance at conferences, or at most other academic performances of writing (“job talks”, invited presentations, keynote addresses and the like). “Print is the very ground of intellectual property, and the reading of it as the performance of the social nature of ideas rests on their presentation as private property” (Case, Domain-Matrix 24). True enough; but in most academic performances performing from text already in print leads to an infelicitous performance, bad form, a faux pas, perhaps even what Austin terms a misfire: “When the utterance is a misfire, the procedure which we purport to invoke is disallowed or is botched: and our act (marrying, &c.) is void or without effect” (How to Do Things with Words 16). (Word to the wise: do not deliver an already published paper as a “job talk.”) Published writing can be performed for “academic” audiences, but these events are usually called “readings,” as when Toni Morrison, Robert Pinsky, or Harold Bloom “gives a reading.” The expectation that the text being performed is not already available in print suggests

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the latent ethical force of the oral dimension of conference-paper performance. Julie Stone Peters reminds us that up through the seventeenth century to publish could “mean to show something to the public by any one of a number of means, reflecting the range of what it was to make something ‘public’ ”: manuscript as well as print forms of writing, oral as well as written forms of speech, were all forms of “publishing” (Theatre of the Book 238). But since the late seventeenth century, publication has implied making a document public to the widest audience – in print. As material objects the conference “paper” and the printed “article” now occupy different positions within the sociology of academic life, have different standing as property (publishers typically hold the copyright for journal articles), and are used in different modes of performance. The closure of print implies a process of legitimation by those secondary agents of publishing that is not assigned to live performance; hence, I suppose, the general practice of assigning more “weight” to published texts than to unpublished conference papers in the academic assessment of scholarship for tenure and promotion. Within the contemporary conventions of academic performance, “the body and the order of the visible” relate somewhat differently to print and nonprint forms of writing: one is much more susceptible to felicitous embodiment than the other. For this reason, while the textually driven aspect of conference-paper performance is illustrative of a literary understanding of dramatic performance, from a slightly altered perspective even conference-paper performance might be seen to evoke the disjunction between texts and performances. Butler’s “performative” implies that the internalized, implicit, fluid, but nonetheless effective conventions, regimes, and structures of performance – structures that are necessarily and completely hors du texte – govern what a text can say as a specific kind of performance. What seems to mark the “conference paper” as a mode of production distinct from print is the way that its insertion into orality transforms the writing as a material object: conference papers work like theatrical scripts, and often look like scripts, too. I can’t speak for others, but my own conference papers are in many ways distinct from any version that reaches print, distinct in ways that reflect the performative pressures of conference-paper performance. The hard-copy text is, for instance, usually covered with


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handwriting, crossed-out passages to be deleted from performance, words underlined for emphasis, arrows to help me pick up the trail after excised material: this scrawl is, in a sense, what identifies the text as a manuscript, and links it to the aural-oral traditions of manuscript culture. This version is a kind of “bad quarto” or “Marcellus Version,” a site of inscription, written over for oral delivery, written over again as a result of questions from the audience, and written over several times thereafter, with the benefit of advice from friends and colleagues – who often make their own inscriptions on it, or in its virtual counterpart.6 Walter Ong observes that “print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion” (Orality and Literacy 132), while he takes manuscripts, “with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies)” to be “in dialogue with the world outside their own borders. They remained closer to the give-and-take of oral expression” than printed texts (132). Ong tends to see sequentiality where I see simultaneity: far from pointing to the merely residual or “secondary” element of orality in literate culture, conference-paper performance points to the dynamic character of the uses of writing in a given culture, and to the fact that the text – or the form of the text, as script, print, or hypertext – cannot determine the practices of its “literate” employment. The “performative” – in Austin, Derrida, Butler, and Case – models performance on the paradigm of verbal speech acts, and is fully informed by an understanding of language and its workings conditioned by literacy in general and by the effects of print and print culture on our understanding of what language is and how it works. It is far from clear, however, that the “performative” implies the textover-performance model of signification common in literary studies. As Ong points out, the “performative” needs to be adapted to deal with the very different status and working of illocutionary utterances (“I promise you . . .”) in nonliterate or nonprint cultures, in which the contractual nature of, say, a “promise” has not been troped by the enforcing power of writing and the facility of citation enabled by print (Orality and Literacy 170). But while the “performative” owes its sense of the nature of language to print, it does not in fact imagine an essential relation between writing – print or otherwise – and performance. Taking “print” as synonymous with “writing” or even

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“language” is to ignore the densely mediated ways in which written language gains public status, the specificity of writing as a mode of production across history, and the different ways in which institutionalized forms of language (print, among others) bear on other institutions, such as theatre. The history of drama testifies to an extremely variable relationship between forms of textuality and modes of embodiment, even in conventional theatre: the “bad quarto” Hamlet and the theatrical durability of Nahum Tate’s King Lear and David Garrick’s Catherine and Petruchio come to mind, as do more recent stage works that invoke and contest “textual” authority – Anne Bogart’s Going, Going, Gone, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, Moisés Kaufman’s Laramie Project. Authorship is variable across the range of print. Are Stan Lee (Spider-Man), Molly O’Neill (former New York Times food critic), Stuart Moulthrop (scholar and hypertext novelist), or Glenda Bendure (one of the writers of my Lonely Planet: Scandinavian and Baltic Europe guidebook) “authors” in the same sense as one another, or as Judith Butler, J. L. Austin, Samuel Beckett? So, too, the relation between authorship and dramatic writing has been extremely unsettled throughout the history of performance. There are today a large number of wellknown dramatic “writers” who are known or unknown as “authors” in the precisely Shakespearean sense that their writing is immediately consumed as performance – Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files), to name just two. The modern understanding of drama arises at the interface between two institutions emerging in the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the institution of professional theatre, which consumed writing (the playwright’s script, purchased for a fee, owned and revised by the company) to produce a theatrical commodity, dramatic performance; and the institution of publishing, which consumed writing to produce a print commodity, dramatic literature (whose property status remained unstable in copyright law well beyond that of other print products). The relationship between embodiment, orality, writing, and print – in dramatic theatre and elsewhere – is not static or essential: it is given a specific shape as performative practice. To think that “performance has traditionally perturbed the interpretive power of print” (Domain-Matrix 20) is to ignore the ways in which print has also seemed to spur new kinds of meaning in performance, or ways


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in which performance and print have seemed – say, at the origin of English professional theatre in the sixteenth century – to stand at a considerable distance from one another. Writing is dynamic and stands in a dynamic relation to other modes (oral, nonverbal, theatrical) of communication. The history of technologies of writing is not the displacement of orality by literacy, of speech by print, nor of print by hypertext: as social practices, forms of communication remain in negotiation with one another, largely through the divergent habits of their users. Moreover, forms of writing cannot determine practices of literacy or of performance. The “performative” practices that give writing meaning – as reading and as acting – arise beyond the text. An understanding of dramatic performativity in the theatre requires a close engagement with the material practices of writing and literacy as well as with the material practices of performance. Notions derived from print – or, more particularly, from the ideology of print – have long characterized an understanding of the work of dramatic performance. But while the “performative” depends (how could it not depend?) on an understanding of language that is itself a consequence of more than five hundred years of print, a more material attention to the specificity of writing and performance as sites of drama seems particularly important now, when modes of writing and enactment are undergoing such rapid transformation. Although writing is not essential to drama, it has been a critical feature of dramatic performance in the West for some time, and the pace of its projected demise has been rather excessively exaggerated: dramatic theatre, the performance of scripted plays, remains an important site of performance innovation, experimentation, and political resistance throughout the world. What is changing is twofold. First, the ways we use writing “performatively” are changing. They have always been changing: the Method, epic theatre, the Viewpoints, autoperformance, and multimedia all consume writing in different ways, transform it into significant performances of different kinds, lend it different kinds of meaning in and as performance. The performative dimension of the theatre’s work with texts is not new, or characteristic of the avantgarde: it is the condition of drama. New technologies are transfiguring both the forms and venues of performance and the forms and practices of writing. Writing is hardly

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disappearing: one aspect of contemporary technology is the way it has proliferated writing as an aspect of daily life, often in ways that both emulate and displace print. It is hard to say what kinds of impact these technologies will have over time. Understanding the work of dramatic performativity in the future will require us to avoid the mystifications of the past, particularly the misrepresentations of print culture that mistake the ideology of print – the emphasis on regularity and reproducibility – for its material history, which often tells a very different story. Print is frequently distinguished from hypertext, for instance, as closed, single, authoritarian, while hypertext is said to be open, multiple, reader-oriented. But if the history of the book tells us anything, it is that works have had an extremely difficult time maintaining their identity in print. To read Hamlet in the 1623 Folio, Pope’s Shakespeare, Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler’s sanitized Family Shakespeare, or a modern critical edition is not only to read different words on the page, but to read objects that instantiate the play in entirely different ways. The same can be said of most works in more than one edition: the material history of print constantly frames writing in social, historical, and economic contexts that structure the meaning and identity of the work. To this extent, much as two editions of the same text – Hamlet, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Yeats’s “Among School Children” – are almost certain to differ in the words on the page, so, too, they represent, perform the work very differently. Despite the claim that print irresistibly reproduces the identity of writing, what print actually does is to materialize writing in history in ways that ineluctably register its changing face. Writing on the computer is very different from print – it dances and wriggles, it is subject to instant change of format, and so on. But in another sense writing on the computer tends to lose the historical and material specificity of print: all writing on the screen is processed by the same hardware, and the same software. In this sense the screen tends to dematerialize the historical situatedness of print objects, embodying (so to speak) the lived diversity of print in a single molded-plastic shell. I raise this distinction not for nostalgic reasons, but merely to suggest that the practices of writing and the uses of literacy are forged on two fronts: as a rhetorical or ideological effect of a culture’s deployment of writing technologies, and as a diverse range of practices


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that may well use and represent those technologies in different and unanticipated ways. Neither the ideologies – of print culture, of digital culture – nor the practices are immanent in the technology: they arise in the ways we understand and use them. I’m tempted to say that they arise in the sphere of the “performative.” A more rigorous application of the “performative” should seize a more historicized relationship between the forms of writing and the practices of performance. The social meaning of any form of writing – manuscript, print, electronic – “resides in the recognition of the social implications of the production processes and in the material significance of literary artifacts. Its emphasis is not on creative processes fulfilling an ideal” – the literary understanding of drama, the closed print text determining the performance – “but on the meanings of production – its processes and its outcomes – as a social element” (Peter L. Shillingsburg, Resisting Texts 215). Texts in the theatre, even printed texts, are altered by a variety of forms of labor: by acting, to be sure, but also by inscription, as actors, directors, stage managers, and others delete, add, and alter the language, highlight individual parts, annotate blocking and movement, note personal and technical cues, and much more. Texts in the theatre are subjected, in other words, to rewriting that embodies the performative constraints and conventions of a specific mode of theatricality. Far from guiding, controlling, authorizing the performance, writing is subject in critical ways to its labor: printed or otherwise, the text of a play in production is a unique document, a site for inscription that is itself only part of a larger process of production.7 A stage performance is not determined by the internal “meanings” of the text, but is a site where the text is put into production, gains meaning in a different mode of production through the labor of its agents and the regimes of performance they use to refashion it as performance material.8 Although these theatrical practices sometimes seem – or may seem, from the perspective of print-literacy and literary culture – arbitrary, ungoverned, or undetermined, what renders them “performative” in the strict sense is their labor to lend force, behavioral force, to the text. Dramatic performativity is perhaps a special case of the performative, or perhaps the emblematic case, the place where scripted language operates at once as a kind of raw material for performance, but also as a kind of catalyst, burned off in the

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act of performing, transformed into something else rich and strange: an event, theatre. s h a k es pe a re a n pe r fo rmat iv it y This dynamic interplay between the specific identity of a text and the practices of its embodiment is the sphere of dramatic performativity. In the pages that follow, I want to pursue the performative complexity of scripted drama in a specific way: by looking at several aspects of contemporary Shakespeare performance where modern attitudes about the performative work of Shakespeare, and the work of writing in performance, come into view. Each of the following four chapters traces the performative dialogue between writing and enactment in a different way, isolating one dimension of how Shakespearean drama engages with live behavior today. Each also illustrates some of the consequences that this understanding of dramatic performativity has for our sense of the purpose, meaning, and force of dramatic performance. In the first chapter, “Performing history,” I ask what may be the most troubling question arising from a “performative” conception of dramatic theatre. If the text does not govern performance, then how – or what – does it contribute to performance? In what sense is a production of a Shakespeare play meaningfully engaged with Shakespeare? I pursue this question by reframing it in more narrowly historical terms: to what extent can we imagine performance undertaking a colloquy with the subjects – represented or actual – of Shakespeare’s era, dramatic “characters” that Shakespeare created in writing? The desire to see performance as a work of historical recovery is a powerful one, as is the desire to feel that in performance we are in some kind of dialogue with the playwright’s original act of inscription. At the same time performance always takes place in present behavior; throughout its stage history the ongoing vitality of Shakespearean drama has depended on the ability to fashion Shakespeare’s writing into the fashionable behavior indigenous to the changing tastes of the stage. Opening with a consideration of Michael Bristol’s savvy effort to preserve the material labor of writing as an aspect of theatrical practice, this chapter elaborates the ways in which “dramatic performativity” might reorient our understanding of the relation between drama and its performance as vehicles of history.


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While the first chapter develops a reading of the “performative” relative to the desire to see dramatic performance as an act of historical dialogue or recovery, the second chapter, “Globe performativity,” focuses on a specific environment, a space that appears to make Shakespearean drama function with a particularly appropriate force: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. The Globe is in many ways a monument to a writerly understanding of theatre, a “factory,” as Andrew Gurr puts it, for exploring the performances implicit in Shakespeare’s texts (“Shakespeare’s Globe” 34). The Globe also participates in practices of performance that extend well beyond the regimes of “theater,” evoking cognate regimes of performance – living-history museums, battlefield reenactments, theme parks – that have little to do with the theatrical staging of scripted drama. Although the Globe claims a unique authority in the expression of Shakespearean drama, that expression is sustained by divergent modes of conduct, expression, communication, and acknowledgment, behavior that complicates our understanding of the kind of performance – and the kinds of performativity – that animate the Globe’s stage. In this chapter I assess the terms of “Globe performativity” by placing the Globe’s performance of Shakespearean drama on this wider horizon of public performance. How is our understanding of the force of dramatic performance shaped when we understand theatre as part of this shaping continuum of popular performativity? In “Shakespearean geographies” I consider how contemporary Shakespearean performativity is at once inflected and enabled by the opportunities for global and globalized representation that appear to arise from Shakespearean drama today, and to give Shakespeare a new “intercultural” force in performance. Globalized Shakespeare expresses an underlying tension defining dramatic performativity today, the sense that dramatic texts might be performed with meaningful theatrical force through a wide array of stage behaviors, including many drawn from cultural spheres far beyond the circumstances of their original theatrical production. Shakespearean performance is sometimes even seen as a means of intervening in the national or global politics of colonialism and race, as well as providing a site of resistant, “postcolonial” representation. In this chapter I take “intercultural Shakespeare” – itself a label for a chastening variety of events – as the signal commodity-form of globalized live dramatic performance today, and explore some of the ways in which this kind

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of performance situates Shakespearean drama in the transnational discourses of travel, tourism, and (post)colonial representation. In the final chapter, “Cyber-Shakespeare,” I return to the question of the drama’s position at the intersection of writing and performance. How do hypertext and hypermedia intervene in the text/performance paradigm, altering the conditions of Shakespearean textuality and performativity? Although hypertext departs in many ways from the materiality of print, in surprising ways the rhetoric of hypertext has been troped by the rhetoric of print, most clearly in the ways “orality” and “embodiment” have been used to model (and value) hypertextual writing as a kind of performance. How is “Shakespeare” situated on the screen, as at once a body of texts and as something you do with texts, to texts, a kind of performance? Throughout this book I am concerned with how contemporary regimes of performance – the performative practices of history and historiography, of public entertainments, of globalized interculturalism – model different ways of making dramatic texts meaningful. Here I ask how cyberShakespeare – Shakespeare in a medium at once fully suffused by the emulation of print (and driven by the text of binary code) and yet that also appears to avoid the “logic” of print – might extend and alter our understanding of contemporary dramatic performativity. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance attempts to engage with the dialogue between writing and enactment across several dimensions of contemporary performance. As a result, throughout the book, I discuss performances in some detail: an “experimental” university production of Romeo and Juliet that attempted to theatricalize unspoken features of the q 2 text of that play; the disarming performance of the “mutes or audience” of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in 2000; Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, and the Grupo Galpão Romeu e Julieta, staged as part of the “Globe to Globe” series; several contemporary films; and the performance of reading hypertext online. While it has become conventional to set Shakespeare films in the rich context of popular non-Shakespearean film history, most discussions of Shakespeare in the theatre set Shakespeare performances solely against the backdrop of other stage Shakespeares. The sense that Shakespearean performativity arises not from the text of the plays, but is carved from a wider spectrum of performance can only be demonstrated by thinking about the interruptions and


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continuities between Shakespearean performativity and other dramatic and nondramatic performances. Although it may prove distracting or frustrating to some readers, seeing Shakespeare, and by extension stage drama, as part of contemporary performance is central to my understanding of the larger purposes of this project: to come to a richer understanding of the interplay between writing and embodiment in the force of dramatic performance.

chapter 1

Performing history

This theatre reminds many people of Shakespeare’s Globe; my only question is, can we use it for playing Shakespeare? Freddie Rokem, Discussion session

When Stephen Greenblatt confessed “a desire to speak with the dead” in Shakespearean Negotiations (1), he expressed a common longing, a hunger that has also shaped the most notorious theatre built in recent memory: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on London’s Bankside. The texture of the structure promises to satisfy an appetite for such discourse with the dead, or at least with the creations of the dead – Hamlet, Ophelia, Shylock, and so on. An early modern structure frames the return of early modern subjects and the force of their actions onstage. In its meticulous reconstruction of building practices and ongoing research into the use of period costumes and staging, the Globe reflects a desire to see performance releasing original Shakespearean meanings; the Globe is a monument to an understanding of dramatic performance as the embodiment of a textualized past, expectantly awaiting the chance to speak. At the same time the Globe also enacts the ineluctable presentness of performance, the ways performance speaks with a difference. Despite the oak and plaster, the Globe is everywhere traced by the passage of history: it is down the street from the original foundations; it holds fewer, bigger, and quite different people; the hair-and-lime plaster uses goat hair (cow hair today is too short); the thatch is chemically treated; the lath and plaster conceals a modern firewall; sprinkler heads dot the ridgepole; the exterior timbering is whitewashed, a concession to modern “Tudor” sensibilities; there are actresses, intermissions, numbered seats, toilets, ushers, ice cream, a restaurant, a cafe, a gift shop. The Globe 28

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epitomizes a host of attitudes toward history, not least the commodification of “pastness” within the economy of international tourism. It “works” as a theatre because it epitomizes one sense of contemporary dramatic performativity. The common understanding of dramatic performance is thoroughly informed by a sense of the “performative”: words on the page appear to cite a range of appropriate behaviors, behaviors that evoke an agent, a fictive subject, often a “character.” They also appear to summon an ensemble of theatrical behaviors, the vocal, physical, and gestural regimes of acting that enable performers and audiences to regard the text as susceptible to the force of the stage. The Globe expresses one dimension of the historically volatile ensemble of values and behaviors that I am calling “Shakespearean performativity”: the sense that a Shakespeare play can, or sometimes should, evoke the pastness of the text and what the text represents – early modern values, behaviors, subjects – in the present action of performance. Reconstructing both the material frame and the spatial and proxemic relations of Shakespeare’s playhouse, Globe performance claims a performative and historical privilege, as though the framing structure will release the behaviors that originally made the plays “work” from their captivity in the text and their inaccessibility to the trends of modern theatre. The Globe is only one index of a widely held belief about dramatic performance: that the stage can – through a variety of means, of which reconstruction is only one – reclaim the original theatrical force of a playwright’s writing. “Perfomance means: never for the first time”: Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as “restored behavior” underlines the understanding of drama sustained by the Globe (“Collective Reflexivity” 40). The Globe expresses a familiar attitude toward the proper relationship between stage and page in dramatic performance in the West, the sense that the stage echoes, repeats, or restores meanings that originate in the text. In part because of Shakespeare’s dual canonicity as theatre and as literature, Shakespearean performance is especially liable to this misunderstanding, that a performance “of Hamlet” is a reproduction of textual meanings in some relatively straightforward way. The force attributed to the text in a performance is not a stable or essential aspect of dramatic performativity; the genre of a performance determines how (or whether) a sense of “the text” emerges

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onstage, and what kind of force it has as stage behavior. Even in the relatively restricted stylistic repertoire of contemporary Anglo-North American theatre, different texts appear to exert different kinds of force: Shakespeare productions tend to interpret the text in distinctive ways, different from the approaches typically taken to Greek drama, or to Chekhov, or to Beckett. The force of texts is constituted differently again in nontheatrical arenas of dramatic performance, such as film television. Television scripts are dispensable material for the performance, as, arguably, the scripts of early modern plays were in their day. Devised by writers, not “authors,” these scripts have little value outside performance; the performance cannot be of them in the way we see a performance of Hamlet (Patrick Stewart cannot really give a faithful or an unfaithful performance of “Jean-Luc Picard”), in part because television does not operate as a repertory medium (the cast of Friends will not be reviving Seinfeld ), and also because the scripts are not often reconceptualized in another sanctioned institution – literature – that would incorporate them as “works” and lend them an independent identity outside performance. Although dramatic performativity in the West may arise at the interface between writing and enactment, the function of the text in the force of performance is extremely variable, even within a relatively discrete historical and cultural moment.1 And while the ways of attributing force to the dramatic text in stage performance change, so, too, do the ways of using performance to illuminate the text’s historicity (if that historicity is figured as part of the play’s theatrical vitality at all). In many ways this historicizing capacity is the mark of modern Shakespearean performativity, emerging fitfully in the eighteenth century and extending through the dominant theatrical innovations of the nineteenth-century theatre. The two forms of this historicizing – dramatic pictorialism, reproducing the dramatic setting in stage sets and costumes (Romans in togas, Macbeth in kilts), and theatrical antiquarianism, reproducing the physical environment of Shakespeare’s theatre, staging, and costumes (thrust stage, doublet-and-hose) – express a modern understanding of the proper force of classic drama onstage. Henry Irving’s Anglo-Saxon King Lear or the Republican Rome of the Saxe-Meiningen Julius Caesar enabled their audiences to view an authentic Shakespeare through the lens of costumes and

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sets appropriate to the dramatic setting, much as William Poel’s Elizabethan reconstructions enabled audiences to view the plays through the theatrical apparatus appropriate to Shakespeare’s historical period. When Betterton’s or Garrick’s Hamlet cast wore contemporary clothing, they were not anticipating modern-dress or eclectic staging today; their dress spoke to a sense of Shakespeare’s plays as properties of the contemporary theatre, susceptible to the usual practices of playacting. The modern-dress and eclectic design typical of twentieth-century performance also assert the historicizing force of contemporary behavior, its ability to redeem Shakespeare’s meanings from their historical moment, and preserve a historicizing tension between past styles of language and characterization and the theatrical elements of the present (design, props, acting style). Modern Shakespeare merely reciprocates the sense that the Shakespearean text is freighted with its past, a history that can be confronted onstage.2 The notion that dramatic texts might bear their historical origins into performance not only sustains projects like the Globe, but also characterizes Shakespearean performativity in the modern era. Charles Kean’s Richard II , William Poel’s picture-framed Fortune stage, the authentic underwear of the Globe’s 1997 Henry V , the armored Armani Romans of Julie Taymor’s Titus all evoke a modern confidence in the restorative power of performance, and a modern anxiety as well: the fear that much as performance operates in the here and now, it risks losing a validating connection to the past, a past located in the text that the performance is said to enact, to be of . However we understand the subjects of Shakespearean dramatic writing, can performance really make them speak to us? Shakespeare’s plays have been successfully and forcefully staged in languages, in social and performance traditions, and with technologies unimaginable to Shakespeare: we can readily sidestep the sense that Shakespearean drama, any drama, is so essentially theatrical – that there is an essential theatricality – as to determine the conditions of its stage production. The historicizing capacity of performance is better described in a more dialogic fashion. Michael Bristol’s Big-Time Shakespeare provides an unusually cogent argument for the importance of regarding performance as a means of preserving the historical character of dramatic writing. At the same time that he illustrates the attraction of this continuity with a Shakespearean past, though,

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Bristol also demonstrates the difficulty of framing that continuity onstage, of seeing the text’s past in the present of performance. Big-Time Shakespeare develops a shrewd case for the ongoing work of Shakespearean writing, a case that depends at once on the continuing renegotiation of Shakespeare’s texts by successive readers, critics, and performers, and on properties of the texts themselves, their openness as “discursive formations” that are not “limited to expressing the concerns and interests of a narrowly circumscribed historical period” (11). To frame this ongoing historical dialogue, Bristol must at once resist a “universal” or dehistoricized Shakespeare and a hermetically “localized” Shakespeare as well: Shakespeare can neither transcend the past nor be entombed within it. Instead Bristol captures the text’s potential to stage a dialogue across history – to say something determinate, while at the same time remaining open to later interrogation – in his vivid translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s bolshoe vremja as “big time” (10). Taking the uncritical celebration of textual indeterminacy and the “abolition of the author” (54) to represent a willful evacuation of the materiality of writing, its character as labor, Bristol frames literary artifacts as “the deliberate and purposeful work” of human agents (18), evoking the ethical dimension of writing-in-history. Literature provides equipment for living by enabling a continuous, dialectical understanding of the history of the subject, one that enables “the inheritors of Western modernity to understand their complex situatedness as fully as possible” (140) by enabling them – us – to engage in an ongoing dialogue with the past through the reading and performance of Shakespearean drama. While discursive openness may be a feature of Shakespeare’s texts, this historicizing dialogue is crucially enabled by the implication of Shakespearean writing in the material conditions of its production, particularly by the persistence of the two institutions that gave that writing its social presence: the professional theatre and the profession of publishing.3 Stage production and playwriting were reciprocal elements in the wholesale invention of a new mode of cultural production, which persists to the present day: the commercial entertainment industry, the big time. Theatrical entrepreneurs of the 1570s and 1580s were able to transform the “familiar performance practices” of traditional communities (both popular fairground performance and the similarly occasional performances commanded as an aristocratic

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privilege) into “cultural merchandise” (36). More to the point, theatrical enterprise transformed both “the commodities of spectacle, narrative, and conviviality” and the audience who purchased them, an audience now cast as “self-reliant consumers,” able “to enjoy cultural goods at their pleasure . . . without the time-consuming burden of direct participation” (37) implied by more traditional forms of performance. Selling performance as alienated commodity, the theatre both depended on and helped to create a new kind of subject: the “socially undifferentiated consumer of cultural services” (37). As “founding documents in the history of modern show business,” Shakespeare’s plays contribute to this “pattern of long-term continuity” (30) in the institutional formation of theatre, a business dependent both on a monetary economy and on the increasing diversification and alienation of urban life. Shakespeare’s colleagues invented a business whose product (performance) and audience (consumers) are recognizably those of the theatre industry today.4 In this view contemporary performance can use Shakespearean drama to open a historicizing dialogue with the past because stage production today participates in the institutional continuity of theatre, an industry in which Shakespeare’s plays were “founding documents.” For performance today to take up a dialogue with Shakespearean drama in this way, however, also requires a continuity between the performative function of writing in the early modern theatre and in contemporary Shakespearean performance. Bristol argues that Shakespeare’s plays were also “founding documents” of another emerging industry, dramatic publishing. He works to “analyze the complex relationship between these emerging media [theatre, print] without assigning a privilege either to a theatrical or to a bookish Shakespeare” (30). Nonetheless, in order for later theatres to perform the meaningful recovery of a past lodged in the text, the “residual” (43) printing of plays must be taken to register the integrity and identity of Shakespearean writing, writing everywhere compromised by other, disintegrating factors. This integrity is provisional at best, particularly since Shakespeare’s plays “were created not as autonomous works of literary or even dramatic art as we now understand such notions, but rather as a set of practical solutions to the exigencies of a heterogeneous cultural market” (49). The “participation of collaborators, revisers and other secondary creative agents” so inflects any understanding

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of Shakespearean writing that it is impossible to disentangle Shakespeare’s “singular creative agency” from such “derivative forms of participation in artistic production” (52). Nonetheless, by defining such participation as “secondary” or “derivative,” Bristol regularizes the relationship between dramatic writing and theatrical performance along modern lines, and so preserves the idea that Shakespearean writing – any writing – can have been a “founding document” of this theatre, a theatre whose principal commodity – performance – was not yet exchangeable with a competing “literary” valuation of drama.5 To situate the text at the origin of early modern theatre, that is, we must take early modern dramatic writing to participate in an institutionalized practice of theatrical performativity recognizably continuous with the practices of conventional modern theatre. We must also take the relatively marginal printing of plays to reflect, even to guarantee, an emerging, pervasive, and modern sense of the literary integrity of the dramatic text and of its independent value in the marketplace of literature.6 While many playwrights of the period were involved in the printing of their plays, that investment was widely variable, affected by local theatrical practices, legal and contractual obligations, and the personal predilections of individual writers: Heywood’s investment in print was very different from Lope de Vega’s, Shakespeare’s was very different from Jonson’s or Middleton’s. The identity of the dramatic work – as print literature or theatrical performance – remained contested for some time, not least in the commercial value ascribed to plays. In the early modern era, plays generated considerably greater monetary value, value as property, when they could be sold to a company that knew how to perform them than they gained when sold to a bookseller, and a great many plays never made it into print – their only value was in performance. As David Scott Kastan points out, “[i]nductions and epilogues speak regularly of the play not as the author’s but as ‘ours,’ property and product of the players,” a proprietary notion reflected both in the often garbled attribution of authorship on title pages, and the constant revision to which plays were subjected; we might also recall that Henslowe frequently paid more for individual costumes than for new plays (Shakespeare after Theory 34). Lavish folio volumes like those of Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s plays, or later folios of Beaumont and Fletcher, testify to a growing reading public for plays, as does

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the proliferation of quarto and octavo single-play volumes, the demand for manuscript fair copies of plays, and even – despite Thomas Bodley’s distaste for it – the accumulation of plays in private libraries. Nonetheless, during the first two centuries of print, the publication of plays seems less to register the literary identity of dramatic texts than to represent the “derivative” by-product of a much more valuable commodity: dramatic performance.7 Understanding performance as capable of recovering a history located in the dramatic text requires a recognizable correlation between early modern and contemporary practices of dramatic performativity, as though the early modern theatre enunciated the force of its texts, its “founding documents,” rather than merely consuming them as television and film do today. In Bristol’s view performance engages the ethical dimension of dramatic writing only if we understand it to preserve this relationship; throughout history “the longue durée of Shakespeare’s cultural authority is the product of interactions between a body of incompletely determined works and a resourceful theatrical ingenuity. Shakespeare’s works are themselves an important instance of derivative creativity highly responsive to its own moment of contemporaneity” (Big-Time Shakespeare 61). Much as Shakespeare’s “company routinely engaged in the various forms of derivative creativity” (65), so, too, “Garrick’s productions, like those of his predecessors [and successors], were a sophisticated pastiche of Shakespeare’s poetry fused with contemporary performance techniques” (69). Performance is, for Bristol, the application of an institutionally derivative ingenuity to the theatre’s founding documents, and this relationship sustains the historical development of the stage in the West (incidentally explaining the theatre’s increasingly subordinate relation to literary production), and opens the opportunity for truly Bakhtinian historical dialectic. If the performative relationship between texts and performance in the early modern theatre is continuous with our own, then every “staging of a Shakespeare play results from a dialogue between the historical moment of its creation and the contemporaneity of the mise-en-scène” (13). Big-Time Shakespeare makes a strong case for the ongoing historicity of Shakespeare’s work, one that elaborates a conventional sense of the priority of text-to-performance in the signification of the stage. Bristol accounts for the historical feel we usually expect from classical

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performance, the tension between a then attributed to the play’s language and action, and the now of performance. Despite this vivid account of the commodification of traditional performance as the instigating moment of theatrical capitalism, Bristol’s effort to redeem theatrical performance from triviality depends on taking performance as institutionally “derivative,” relying for its force on something other than the stage behavior of professional actors: the text. Although texts may have this kind of force in some kinds of dramatic performance today, often in Shakespearean performance, this use of the text is not intrinsic to the performance of drama, nor is it uniform through the institutional history of Western theatre since the sixteenth century; even the variety of forms, formats, and practices of printed drama testifies to a fluid relationship between page and stage. Nor is it entirely clear that the text had this kind of force in Shakespeare’s theatre, given the commodity status of dramatic scripts – sold as manufactured goods (like cloth or lumber) used in making a more finished product (clothing, houses, theatrical performances) – and the tenuous purchase of printed drama on “literary” identity in the period. To account for the historicity of performance as an effect of the dialectical tension between the determining force of the text and the derivative ingenuity of the theatre would require us to understand the history of Shakespearean performativity not as a record of dynamic change, but as fundamentally continuous with its dominant practice today. The unsettled identity of dramatic texts in Shakespeare’s theatre and the variety of ways in which written texts have been used in the theatre since then point instead to the necessity for a different understanding of the relation between texts and performances. “To suggest that a verbal artifact as complex as, for example, Hamlet, contributes nothing of its own to the practices of exegesis, interpretation and stage performance is to trivialize those very practices” (27): Bristol raises the stakes for our understanding of Shakespearean performativity, and of the theatrical vitality of classic drama in general. To see performance evoking a force intrinsic to its text (presuming that in the welter of early modern and modern texts we know what we mean by “its text”) defines performance as “derivative.” Yet a “derivative” conception of theatre bears with it the possibility of enacting a historical dialogue between the present of performance and the historical alterity of the text, its representation of early modern characters

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and their behavior, the significant force of their actions onstage. To see performance as an independent (though related) mode of production, fashioning texts into something else (behavior), releases the stage from a “derivative” dependence on literature, from the obligation (even from the ability) to reproduce the text, or the ways we may understand it as mere readers. Yet this understanding of performance appears to sacrifice the belief that performance can reproduce a history inscribed in the text; however much its productions smack of history, they evoke only a suspiciously modern, commodified “pastness.” While it may seem that this second alternative replicates the Disneyfication of history and identity characteristic of contemporary commodity culture, an understanding of performance as “derivative creativity” should give us pause as well. “Derivative creativity” implies that the dramatic text can supply the “lawful or pre-ordained structure” – of meaning, character, history – to the “spontaneous expressive individuality” of the stage, and that performance is capable of seizing and representing this structure (23). This is, I think, what Stephen Greenblatt has in mind when he claims that theatrical “refigurations” of the original circumstances of a play such as King Lear “do not cancel history, locking us into a perpetual present” because “they are signs of the inescapability of a historical process, a structured negotiation and exchange, already evident in the initial moments of empowerment,” of the text’s creation (Shakespearean Negotiations 6). For all its attention to the material histories encoded in the text, this understanding of historical mediation oddly dematerializes the force of theatrical performance. The “textual traces” of the social energy animating the play “were made by moving certain things – principally ordinary language but also metaphors, ceremonies, dances, emblems, items of clothing, well-worn stories, and so forth – from one culturally demarcated zone to another”(7), from Shakespeare’s social world into the texts of his plays. Yet for Greenblatt these traces are finally not moved into the theatre: “Except in the most material instances – items of clothing, stage properties, the bodies of actors – nothing is literally moved onto the stage. Rather, the theater achieves its representations by gesture and language, that is, by signifiers that seem to leave the signifieds completely untouched” (7). Greenblatt understands the force of theatre to derive directly from the written text. Rather than inserting Shakespeare’s language into the signifying force

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of the present performance, a performance that reconstitutes the signifiers of the text in its own materialized discourse and so incarnates its own unanticipated signifieds, the force of Greenblatt’s theatre is fundamentally etiolated: the behaviors of the stage merely haunt the tracings in the text, leaving its significations materially untouched. Just because “there is no direct, unmediated link between ourselves and Shakespeare’s plays does not mean that there is no link at all” (6): Greenblatt evokes our sense that classic drama – Ibsen and Chekhov as much as Shakespeare or Sophocles – encodes modes of being and acting that are at once familiar and alien, and that somehow remain accessible to performance. At the same time the notion of “derivative creativity” – more extreme in Greenblatt than in Bristol – seems to require an understanding of theatrical performance that is fundamentally literary, in which theatre is a mode of textual transmission and blind to the nature of theatrical performativity itself: how the practices of the theatre determine the forms, moods, and shapes of meaning onstage, the force of dramatic action as embodied performance. In this chapter I have narrowed the question of the impact of writing on dramatic performativity to a single dimension: can performance enable the text’s past meanings to speak? The historicizing potentiality of theatre is, in the West at least, itself a function of the increasingly literary character of drama and theatre, the ascription of a governing authority to dramatic texts that participates in print’s characteristic transformation of writing into an objectified, authorized “literature.” To assess the historicizing capacity of dramatic performance, then, I open with a consideration of the drama’s troubling position in a conventional narrative: the story of print and the oral and manuscript cultures it supposedly displaced. Dramatic writing – in Shakespeare’s era as well as our own – evokes many of the familiar problems associated with an insistently dualistic view of orality and literacy. Describing a more complex history of the uses of texts and the practices of literacy, the history of printed drama enables a more diversified understanding of the relationship between writing and “the performative,” even in the apparently text-centered theatricality of Western theatre. I then turn to a contemporary critical controversy – the nature of “the subject” in early modern drama – and its bearing on performance. Can we understand performance to restore some mode

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of early modern identity to the stage? The desire to engage with Shakespearean performativity in historical terms is visible across a wide range of contemporary performance: in films and stage productions that set the plays in their historical era (Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V ) or in Shakespeare’s (Mark Rylance’s Hamlet); that attempt to find a more familiar historical analogue to the distant past of the sixteenth century (Branagh’s Hamlet, Richard Loncraine’s Richard III and the Royal National Theatre stage production on which the film was based); that argue for the contemporary force of the play by setting it in the present (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet); or that use an eclectic design principle to implicate the play in “history” without specifying a specific moment in time (Julie Taymor’s Titus, Jonathan Kent’s Coriolanus). How does contemporary performance construct the force of the past? Does it ascribe that force to a governing text? Or is that “pastness” inevitably an effect of the performative force of present modes of acting, an elaborate effect of contemporary Shakespearean performativity? p r i n t, pe r f o rma n c e , a n d t he fo rc e o f pl ay I can see no good reason to alter my opinion, for excluding suche bookes, as almanackes, plaies, & an infinit number, that are daily printed, of very vnworthy maters & handling, suche as, me thinkes, both the keeper & vnderkeeper should disdaine to seeke out, to deliuer vnto any man. Happely some plaies may be worthy the keeping: but hardly one in fortie. Sir Thomas Bodley, Letters (221–22)

Dramatic performativity in the West – the consensus regarding the construction of meaning between inscribed texts and theatrical performance – has been decisively shaped by print and the cognate institutions of modern literacy and literate culture. Now, in the era of digitized writing, print has come increasingly to be seen as a central, perhaps the central, technology in the formation of Western culture in the past six centuries: critically enabling social and political history (the Reformation, the wars of independence, even the idea of “nation” itself ); installing a characteristic conception of language and its workings; inflecting the practices of writing and reading, and decisively shaping literacy and literature; becoming the vehicle of a

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distinctive sense of privacy, identity, and experience; and so providing the crucial vehicle of subject formation in this extended historical period. The most familiar version of this narrative – popularized by Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, among others – tends to see print and literacy exerting a crucial technological agency over the formation of language, public life, and subjectivity. In this view Gutenberg’s introduction of changeable type, a logical but by no means inevitable development from the conception of an alphabetic language, both introduced the range of formal elements associated with print culture (regularity, repeatability, standardization, synchronization, dissemination) and implied the extension of those features to practices of cultural production writ large. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial and controversial study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change outlines the consequences of print in these terms: on scientific inquiry, on commerce (standardized weights and measures, double-entry bookkeeping and accounting, advertising); on the rise of nationalism (standardized languages, newspapers, translation); on notions of privacy and private property; on education; on the development of a systematic body of law.8 Taking the “esprit de système” as the most powerful legacy of print, Eisenstein sees the format of the book as a means of ordering, controlling, and making accessible print’s information explosion, even while it enabled a host of modern institutions, and perhaps even modernity itself. In this perspective the “esprit de système” of print altered the understanding of language, its private function relative to the individual subject, and its public performance as well. More completely than scribal writing, print enabled the objectification of language as an object for sale, property, in ways that altered its social uses – the ways in which writing was performed as a social act – and so the ways in which it related to genres of oral culture, not only silent reading as opposed to reading aloud, but also the entire phenomenology of public performance. Walter Ong schematizes the differences between “orality and literacy” along similar lines: unlike writing, oral communication is “Additive rather than subordinative,” “Aggregative rather than analytic,” “Redundant or ‘copious,’ ” “Agonistically toned ,” “Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced,” distinctions that (among many others) are amplified by the advent of alphabetic writing

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and its dispersion in print (Orality and Literacy 37–57). Moreover, since words “are made out of units (types) which pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute,” then “[p]rint suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did” (118). Ong notes that the Chinese had movable type without an alphabetic language, and the Turks used their movable type, even with an alphabetic language, to cast whole words, yet these alternative uses of technology do not appear to imply an alternative narrative, a different teleology, or a less determined account of the technological imperatives of print: “Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity” (118), and fittingly enough the printing industry emerges as the first instance of modern standardized “assembly-line” commodity production.9 Print altered for ever the social functioning of writing; it also altered our understanding of the relationship between writing and performance, particularly to the degree that print came to embody features taken to be paradigmatic of language, and of the abilities needed to use language properly.10 Print also came to govern the rhetoric of theatrical performance, the sense that performance derives from the order of print. The iterative nature of print changed the understanding of theatre and its relationship to dramatic writing, giving rise to a sense of theatre as a form of printlike reiteration, and so to a distinctive sense of theatrical (in)fidelity, the notion that theatrical performance is a replaying of an artistic identity held elsewhere, within the printed text of the play. And yet, while print has changed the landscape of performance for ever, installing plays as fixed printed objects to be reiterated in another medium (performance), the first impact of print in the theatre was on a culture that used writing in a specific process of oral transmission, and printed drama remains embedded in a range of oral practices today. “Scribal culture” (Eisenstein’s term) was heavily reliant on “oral transmission” in ways that make a simple opposition between oral and literate cultures suspect. Not only were manuscripts often “copied” from dictation (a reader reads the manuscript aloud, the scribe copies what s/he hears), but “literary compositions were ‘published’ by being read aloud,” so that “even ‘book’ learning was governed by reliance on

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the spoken word – producing a hybrid half-oral, half-literate culture that has no precise counterpart today” (Eisenstein, Printing Press 11). Although he takes the oral-aural element of manuscript culture to embody only a “marginal” orality, Ong also suggests that “[m]anuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in retrieval of material preserved in texts” (Orality and Literacy 119). Much as manuscripts were transmitted through oral-scribal means, so, too, reading was not a silent activity, and many practices we now think of as being performed accurately only from an inspection of written documents, such as “auditing” financial records, were thought to be performed more accurately orally-aurally. Using manuscripts more often than printed texts, copying them out in parts or “sides,” and subjecting them to the differential literacies of its actors, the early modern theatre is perhaps exemplary of this “scribal” culture, and this sense of alternative relationship between writing and performance persists in the theatre today. One of the reasons why theatrical literacy is often impugned by literary scholarship has to do with the persistence of “oral” values – reading aloud, memorization – and of interpretive practices that stand outside the iterative “logic” of print.11 The notion that oral transmission is inferior to written transmission is common only in highly developed print cultures; cultures in which literacy and the means of literate transmission do not predominate tend not to regard oral transmission as a necessarily inferior or inaccurate mode of communication. As Leah S. Marcus suggests, “sixteenth-century speakers often viewed the production of written versions of their oral discourse as a fall into uncertainty,” lamenting that “manuscript and printed versions of a speech offered only a pale, obscure reflection, an imperfect copy, of the utterance as communicated by its author-speaker” (“From Oral Delivery to Print” 34). Our understanding that a text transmitted in part from memory is deficient, less fully authorized than a text transmitted solely through writing, may not conform to early modern ideas of authority, particularly in a form – theatre – so dependent on orality.12 In a theatre in which literacy must have been variable (it is not certain, for example, that all of the actors could read their parts, or that they needed to read to learn them), the notion that “memorial reconstruction” is a corrupting influence, rather than the dominant, appropriate, intrinsic means of transmission, may be something of an anachronism,

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our problem not theirs. After all, “memory” played a large part in all forms of Shakespearean transmission in the early modern theatre: notetaking in the theatre, copying of manuscripts, typesetting, as well as acting. To get a sense of the role of memory in legitimate, print-authorized, modern performance, Laurie Maguire watched the BBC-TV Shakespeare Plays with a copy of their published production texts in hand: all of the standard “mistakes” attributed to the corrupting pirates of Shakespeare’s day – dropped lines, substitutions, gabbled words – are committed by the stars of the RSC as part of this authoritative series (Shakespearean Suspect Texts 135–46). The “celebratory model of the printing press” – and of print itself – as “a device whose effects could be charted independently of the people who used it and the communities that promulgated its dissemination” has been searchingly challenged by a “more fragmented, materialist, and skeptical dismantling of the grand récit” (Seth Lerer, “Histories of Reading” 109). Stepping outside the technologically determined understanding of the rise of print is important, precisely because it enables us to revalue the uses of print, including the public, oral, and collaborative uses that form the practices of social literacy and social life, and of the theatre as well. Taking issue with Ong’s essentialized opposition between orality and literacy, Brian V. Street argues that “[f]rom a theoretical standpoint, it is also incorrect to conceive of ‘literacy’ in isolation from other media of communication. Literacy practices are always embedded in oral uses, and the variations between cultures are generally variations in the mix of oral/literate channels”(Social Literacies 157). The “introduction of a new technology of writing does not automatically render older ones obsolete” (Ilana Snyder, “Page to Screen” xx–xxi); nor does it extinguish other uses of written language. Far from extinguishing orality, the history of print is better characterized as a constant negotiation with enduring and emerging forms of communication, a negotiation that embodies the lived history of literacy, not its abstract reduction to the “logic” of print. The changing relationship between printed texts and their oral uses is sometimes recorded in printed texts, quite often in printed drama. One place in which to grasp the dynamic diversity of the use of writing, its susceptibility to recording and evoking different modes of behavior, is the print-inflected field of punctuation. As M. B. Parkes

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outlines the history of punctuation, students were first taught to mark separations between words, long vowels, and pauses as a way to learn written languages, and as a way to read (aloud, as was the practice) more easily. Punctuation could also help to teach effective public speaking, by marking longer semantic units, breathing rhythms, and rhetorical emphases. Parkes suggests that by the twelfth century punctuation, along with word separation and handwriting conventions, had become an intrinsic element of writing.13 As it did with spelling, grammar, and syntax, print tended to regularize and conventionalize punctuation, and the “dissemination of particular founts of type stabilized the shapes of the marks, and subsequently led to the adoption of a single graphic symbol for each sign” (Pause and Effect 87). From its inception, though, punctuation reflected a dual attitude toward the uses of writing. It visually marked conceptual and syntactic units for readers (a factor that would become increasingly critical with the rise of print and with the rise of silent reading as well); but punctuation also performed a rhetorical as well as a syntactical function, providing a potential record of and instigation for the performance of writing, what Ong dismisses as “secondary orality (an orality not antecedent to writing and print, as primary orality is, but consequent upon and dependent upon writing and print)” (Orality and Literacy 171). Although standardized punctuation contributed to the sense of the printed text as a visual field organized for silent consumption, the notion of punctuation as a prompt for oral discourse persisted as a controversial and troubling element of print, persisted for centuries after the inauguration of the press, and persists today, especially in printed drama. Writers at least as late as Thackeray used punctuation both rhetorically and syntactically, to guide readers toward the oral force of written language.14 As Bruce Smith suggests, while we now take commas and semicolons to operate as visual markers of syntactic units, earlier readers “were disposed to ‘hear’ commas and semicolons as well as read them. One could distinguish [,], [;], [:], and [.] according to how long a pause each signalled and how deep a breath it implied” (“Prickly Characters” 28–29). While this tension between syntactical/visual and rhetorical/oral punctuation has long been seen as a feature of early modern printed drama, writers often practiced both forms of punctuation at the same time. Far from seeing print as the domain of the visual, Francis Bacon “seems to have regarded

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logic as determining the method of transmitting knowledge, rhetoric as the means of illuminating it for the reader,” and used punctuation for both purposes, creating “an overlap between the pointing of the rhetorical structure and the pointing of logical relationships” (Parkes, Pause and Effect 89). It is not surprising that Thomas Sheridan’s A discourse . . . Being the Introductory to his Course of Lectures on Elocution and the English Language (London, 1769) employs “punctuation to indicate ‘declamatory’ or ‘elocutionary’ units where the speaker or reader is expected to pause for effect” (91). Benjamin Franklin – a printer by trade – also advocated a typographical system that would make “the oralization of texts easier thanks to an ‘expressive typography’ which plays with italics, capital letters added to certain words, or new punctuation marks (for example, with the introduction into English of the inverted exclamation or question marks typical of Spanish and which, placed at the beginning of a sentence, indicate from the outset how one is to pitch one’s voice)” (Chartier, Publishing Drama 21). Franklin evokes the oral use of print as critical to the democratic practice of the new American republic: print enables public orators to disseminate an important speech throughout the republic with all the force of the original performance, and of the original speaker’s speech act. Rhetorical pointing permits “the discourse of the ‘publick Orator’ ” to be “ ‘reproduced’ as if he were ‘present’ in his very absence”(21). Alphabetic print may reinforce the values of repeatability, systematicity, and linearity, but rhetorical punctuation implies that print is susceptible to alternate uses, in ways that imply an alternative, “performative” history of print. Early modern writers “wrote in a palimpsest of two different ideas about how writing is related to speech” (Smith, Acoustic World 239), and the publishing of plays – still in tension today between the expectation of formal regularity and a range of print conventions unique to drama – is one place where we might expect the persistence of rhetorical pointing and of idiosyncratic print features devised to prompt, even to direct, performance. This ambivalence is expressed in several ways in early modern printed plays. Peter Holland remarks that the pointing of “Hand D’s section of Sir Thomas More, for those who accept this section as Shakespeare’s” is “exceptionally light” (“Modernizing Shakespeare” 29), and he traces the ways that successive print editions of Shakespeare’s plays assimilated this

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rhetorically inflected logic to an increasingly print-determined understanding of the grammatical sentence, pointing the text in complex ways (commas, semicolons, colons, dashes) in order to resolve a palpable “tension between print and speech” (30). Bruce Smith has made a somewhat different argument regarding the increasingly heavy use of punctuation in printed Shakespearean drama. The twenty years that separate the First Folio from Quarto 2 [of Hamlet], as brief as they may seem in the hindsight of four centuries, in fact add up to an entire generation. The compositors who set the first folio in type might not even have been born when the speeches they were setting had first been written. It was just in these twenty years that semicolons were introduced into English printing and that syntax-based punctuation was being advocated. This shift in the ontology of print may be as much a factor as a difference in copy-texts or the idiosyncracies of Compositor B in explaining why the First Folio text of Hamlet’s first soliloquy is more heavily punctuated than Quarto 2. (“Prickly Characters” 34–35)

Although the First Folio may well retain some elements of rhetorical pointing, whatever their source, Smith suggests that the increasingly heavy pointing of Shakespeare’s plays regularizes punctuation toward grammatical norms. As might be expected, though, the relation between rhetorical and syntactical pointing is fluid, expressed in different ways in different texts. In his edition of the first quarto of Othello, Scott McMillin argues that a different – nonetheless distinctive – punctuation pattern also implies a kind of rhetorical pointing. In the “withheld period – the period reserved for the end of the speech” (Introduction 17) and the rather heavy punctuation of intermediate pauses and line endings, McMillin finds evidence for the copytext having been taken down while listening to the play, or from recitation by actors (20–25). In the later case of Molière, Roger Chartier notes that the early editions of several Molière plays are heavily pointed – “Gros, et gras, le teint frais, et la bouche vermeille” in the case of Tartuffe (1.4.233) – in ways that imply a rhetorical use of punctuation as a guide to reading aloud, even enabling readers to reconstruct aspects of stage performance. Later editions, however, tend to drop punctuation that is not grammatically correct: subsequent editions of Tartuffe read “Gros et gras . . .” (Charter, Publishing Drama 18–19). Chartier’s brilliant short study demonstrates that across early modern Europe printed

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drama provides a record not of the instant displacement of orality by print, but of an ongoing contestation of how print might be put at the service of cultural practices experienced as oral – both theatrical performance and reading. As Smith argues, for “notating dramatic speech, syntactical punctuation is frustratingly rigid and astonishingly inefficient” (Acoustic World 242), and the desire to use print both to record and to prompt a rhetorical use of writing has not disappeared: think of Shaw’s various means of indicating emphasis, of the famous ellipses and pauses that once bemused readers and actors of Harold Pinter’s early plays, of Caryl Churchill’s use of the slash-mark [/] to indicate overlapping speeches, or of Suzan-Lori Parks’s insertion of “rests” and “spells” into the action, breaks “[d]enoted by repetition of figures’ names with no dialogue. Has sort of an architectural look” (“from ‘Elements of Style’ ” 16). Today electronic, print-emulating script makes a range of fonts and points immediately available for expressive purposes. In the social space of e-mail and online chatrooms, the manners of polite sociability are figured typographically, both in the proscription of SHOUTING (typing in uppercase letters) and in the use of punctuation – emoticons – to point up the force of writing: :) . Emoticons, like language, are culturally specific, in ways that point to their rhetorical character. In Japan a different convention is used for the “smiley face” emoticon – ˆ ˆ or simply ˆ ˆ – and several emoticons correspond to a specifically Japanese sense of social propriety, such as the “smile with cold sweat,” used when one is concerned about expressing oneself too strongly: -.-; .15 Print has not extinguished orally coded, rhetorical ways of writing, nor has it entirely extinguished the distinctively dialogic practices characteristic of manuscript transmission. In the conventional narrative of authorship, Margaret Ezell suggests, “print publication takes on the heroic role of the revolutionary force, usually represented by male writers eager to seize new opportunities, while manuscript culture has the role of the villain – the elitist, snobby aristocrat, very often a woman, clinging to long-outmoded forms in a futile attempt to retain control and power” (Social Authorship 11). Ezell’s searching effort to document the persistence of a residual mode of authorship – manuscript circulation – in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brilliantly shows how class, geographical and political location,

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and gender led some writers to publish their work through a manuscript-reading network, in ways that bypassed print and that evinced a competing understanding both of the author and of the sociality of writing as well. Julie Stone Peters reminds us that aristocratic and well-to-do readers and collectors often asked playwrights for fair copies of plays or masques presented at court, and that “[m]anuscripts might be sold in the same shops and through the same advertising channels as printed books.” One manuscript copy of Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess famously announces: “ ‘This, which nor Stage nor Stationer’s Stall can showe, | The Common Eye may wish for, but ne’re knowe’ ” (Theatre of the Book 32). Many suppressed plays naturally circulated in manuscript, but manuscripts circulated for other reasons, too. Well into the nineteenth century, rival managers sent shorthand writers into the pit to take down successful plays that had been withheld from print. Sheridan’s School for Scandal was pirated in this way, and Peters notes that “Thomas Holcroft famously succeeded in taking down, in ten days’ time, the entire text of Beaumarchais’s unpublished Marriage of Figaro in 1784” (79). Print and the commerce it engendered did not immediately do away with other modes of written publication, nor was its impact on literacy uniform. Even the ability to read printed texts and the ability to read and write handwritten script were separate aspects of literacy well into (and perhaps beyond) the eighteenth century. Writing was taught as a separate skill from reading; one learned to read from print, often from a particular typeface, with the consequence that while many people could read a black-letter bible, they might not have been able easily to decipher other typefaces (such as roman) or the complex figuration of handwriting, a refined skill taught by a separate teacher, to older children of wealthy parents, which involved not only learning to cut quill pens and mix ink, but the mastery of a diversity of scripts. Given the variety and complexity of written scripts – many of which, Secretary hand among others, are illegible to untrained readers today – it is not surprising that well into the 1740s a literate European might not have equal access to “print hand” and “written hand,” a suggestive observation with regard to early modern theatres.16 If actors – sharers, hired men, boys – had different levels of access to “written hand,” the process of learning parts (handcopied, of course,

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on individual sides), and the sense of the written text’s integrity and of its relation to stage performance would have participated much more directly in the dynamics of orality, and of oral-aural manuscript transmission as well. The spoken text, even when spoken from a written script, retained an independent and important cultural authority long into the era of print. Recognizing the extraordinary variety of printed materials (refusing to reduce “print” to the “book,” in other words) is one way to resist reducing the appropriate use of print to silent, solitary reading, and to the habits of interpretation fostered by modern literary studies. In the first century or two of print production, the most popular and numerous printed documents were broadside ballads and sermons, and as Roger Chartier suggests, “[p]ersonalized reading in private by no means exhausted the possible uses of print objects,” whose “festive, ritual, cultic, civic, and pedagogic uses were by definition collective and postulated decipherment in common;” such collective practices cannot be “reduced to reading alone” nor to the order of print (“General Introduction” 1–2). Peters argues that while in the sixteenth century “ ‘publication’ could, across Europe, refer simultaneously to printing and performing,” by the later seventeenth century it was the dissemination of a text to the wider public of print that came to constitute “publication” (Theatre of the Book 238). Yet while we no longer regard reading a text aloud as “publication,” the reading of written texts remains an important form of public communication, not least in the rip-and-read newswire stories of radio news and in the institution of the television newsreader. The public “reading” given by a celebrated living author arose in the nineteenth century and it persists today, complemented by the rise of a new kind of oral performance, the poetry slam (today, Dickens’s or Dylan Thomas’s readings would also be carried on the radio, or, like Robert Pinsky’s, on television). In an academic setting the conference paper functions in this way as well: far from demonstrating the performance of print, the conference paper marks a distinct mode of publication (it does not count as much for tenure), with its own rules and regimes of legitimacy and force (reading an already published paper – one that is already in print – is widely understood to be an infelicity, a lapse in professionalism, unlike a “reading” of published poetry or fiction).

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Readers always read tactically, in Michel de Certeau’s sense, which leads to “the paradox underlying any history of reading, which is that it must postulate the liberty of a practice that it can only grasp, massively, in its determinations” (Chartier, Order of Books 23). Although stage performance and dramatic performativity have been decisively altered by print, the theatre remains a space where “print logic” is regularly turned to other purposes, deploying “concrete practices and . . . procedures of interpretation” that depart from the apparently determining order of the text (2). While these tactics have often been taken as a sign of theatrical error, of malfeasance with the identity of the printed literary work, to ignore them is merely to assent to the ideology of print culture. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the printed form of plays quickly gained a rhetorical dimension: by the mid-sixteenth century, narrative descriptions of the action had given way to directions for performing the action onstage, and speech prefixes emerged as a standard convention for identifying actors’ roles as well. Such tactical uses of early modern dramatic scripts are, it might be argued, still traced in their appearance as printed books, recorded in the “illogical” ways they resist the formal consistency of later printed drama – the awkward lineation and irregular use of act and scene divisions, spelling and punctuation, and capitalization. While these departures from print logic, a logic whose force had yet to emerge, were taken not long ago as signs of a printed text’s “badness,” they may also point in a different direction, toward an experimental sense of the ways the printed dramatic text might figure in the practice of theatrical literacy, the practice of transforming writing into a nontextual event, a dramatic performance.17 The irregular use of speech prefixes is particularly interesting in this regard, locating one point where the text meets the actor. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass note that the practice of affixing a list of dramatis personae to plays was highly variable; Rowe’s 1709 Plays of Shakespeare was the first collected edition to attach such a list to each of Shakespeare’s plays (“Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” 267). Moreover, while modern printed plays tend to assign “speeches” to individual “characters” and to denominate those “characters” consistently throughout the play, early modern editions evince a much wider range of naming practices. Sometimes they assign identical

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lines to two different characters, repeating the same passage of text under two different speech prefixes. Sometimes they give different speech prefixes to a speaker who is apparently the same “character” in different portions of the play: Ca. W., Capu. Wi., La., M., Mo., Old La., Wi., and Wife – that is, Capulet Wife (2 versions), Lady, Mother (2 versions), Old Lady, and Wife (2 versions) for Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet q 2. In his last three appearances in the Folio text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck appears as “Pucke,” “Puck,” and “Robin.” Sometimes they use the actor’s name instead of the character’s, as when “Will Kemp” enters in q 2 Romeo and Juliet. And, since speech prefixes are regularly abbreviated, not only is the “same” prefix usually abbreviated differently in one play (as with Ca. W . and Capu. Wi.), but sometimes abbreviation makes it difficult to know exactly which speech prefix/“character” is signified (as in Macbeth, where “Seyton” is abbreviated Seyt. and Sey., and “Seward” is abbreviated Syew., Syw., and eventually Sey.).18 These events have been smoothed out of the print tradition, though in many ways they seem too gross and too frequent to attribute to the mere forgetfulness, inattention, or temperament of bookkeepers, compositors, or writers: this variety may express a rhetorical sensibility toward “character” itself. In the context of the texts’ theatrical use, these shifting designations, like punctuation, may appear both to record and to prompt different registers of performance.19 Although printed texts were rarely used in making performances, printed drama is nonetheless inscribed with the ways texts were used in the theatre.20 While the prevailing ideology of dramatic performance has been thoroughly informed by a “print” sense of the identity and iterability of the literary work, taken as a whole it is difficult to see theatrical practice as print-dominated labor. (How different our sense of the relationship between print and performance might be if Willy Loman appeared on the page as Willy, The Salesman, Father?) Granted, the sense of the theatre as a “derivative” institution, belatedly reproducing literary works that have their real identity elsewhere, has, at least since Congreve’s era, become the normative understanding of this relationship, an understanding that Congreve – with his meticulous involvement in the printing of his plays – helped to shape (it is notable that Congreve left the theatre to devote his time to his famous library).21 Yet while the interpretation of stage performance has been

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infected by this print-inflected sense of the drama’s literary identity, in its working practices the theatre is hardly print-dominated: the theatre is exemplary of the ways print is transformed by the tactical literacy of its users. One aspect of oral culture preserved in theatre practice – until relatively recently, at least – is the tradition of the playwright reading the play to the cast, a social convention (and perhaps a nostalgia for its passing) documented in the famous photograph of Chekhov reading to the Moscow Art Theatre. Although it is more common today for the first reading of a new play to be undertaken by the company (again, the first encounter with the play is not private, silent reading but a public reading-aloud), from the earliest records of the modern theatre, through the practices of theatres from the Comédie-Française to the MAT, the play was first transmitted to the company through oral performance. Tiffany Stern has described the various stages of oral transmission practiced by early modern professional companies: the playwright reading to the actor-sharers; the playwright reading to the assembled company; the actors’ “study” of their individual parts, sometimes under the direct tutelage of the playwright or of more accomplished performers. As Hamlet has it, “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you” (3.2.1–2, my emphasis).22 The process of rehearsal is very different today, as actors are not encouraged to bring a fully formed performance into rehearsal as they did in the early modern theatre, but the “orality” of a play’s transmission nonetheless persists. While actors con their lines alone, in a critical sense they learn their parts in give and take with other actors (although many actors also read their parts into a tape-recorder, mechanically reproducing, so to speak, the oral-aural transmission of early modern theatre). Rehearsal is not a time for actors to retail fully developed “readings” of their parts, but to explore, embody, and negotiate the playing of the play. As Michael Goldman puts it, “[m]emorizing a part is actually a means of freeing oneself from its mere textuality” (On Drama 52).23 The work of memory is critical to the theatre – more so in stage acting than in film or television, where actors may work from cue cards, or memorize only small parts of dialogue at once, or are invited to get into the dynamics of a scene and its rough shape and then improvise dialogue – and also points to a practice of literacy that departs from

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the technological logic of print. Theatrical practice does not (as print does) claim to transmit texts at all, but uses memory to transform texts into behavior, and so ineluctably alters them: there is no text onstage, and the spoken dialogue is never identical to the words on the page, something that makes a difference only if we are following with the script in hand (common enough at Shakespeare performances). Of course, the fungibility of the theatrical text is preserved in the scandalous notion that actors and directors intentionally alter the text, marking it up with their highlighters, cutting passages, moving some and adding others, changing individual speeches to make them more comprehensible or inoffensive, and – especially in the case of stage directions – ignoring some words altogether. The work of memory as a mode of transmission adds to this complex departure from print’s rhetoric of iteration; foregrounding the work of memory seems to be the point of several of the plays of Samuel Beckett, hardly a playwright with a sense of the malleability of his text, stage directions included. From Waiting for Godot on, many of Beckett’s plays challenge actors and audiences to experience reiteration, the performance of a text once, and then, more or less identically, again. Yet this repetition seems to undermine rather than reinforce the iterative “logic” of print in the theatre. Can the second run-through of Play be an exact repetition of the first? Does it matter? Can we tell the difference? Memory is a corrupting influence on the transmission of works only if by “transmission” we have in mind an idealized understanding of the transmission of printed texts, which, as we know, are sullied – or is it sallied? – by their own reiteration in the messy materiality of print. In practice, not only are two copies of the same edition occasionally different (given the proofing practices of the early modern printshop, such differences were once commonplace), but two editions of the same text always differ in material ways (typeface, layout, binding) and often in substantive ways (the words themselves) as well. As Joseph Grigely puts it, the “notion that mechanical reproduction guarantees standardization is one of the myths of textual reproduction,” suggesting “a uniformity that does not necessarily exist” even among printed documents (Textualterity 97). Texts are subject to the tactics of their readers, tactics that necessarily obey a discursive, instrumental logic that lies well outside the text.

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Keith Thomas points out that in “early modern England oral communication was still the chief means by which technical skills were transmitted” (“Meaning of Literacy” 113), and to this day much of the practical, bodily knowledge of stage performance, the skills with which writing will be transformed into performed action, is transmitted orally. From the Greek theatre onward (Aeschylus instructing the chorus), performance has entailed the application of a specialized interpretive practice to the text, rather than the mere recognition of performance “choices” immanent in the playwright’s script. Tiffany Stern reminds us that “Aaron Hill taught Jane Cibber by marking on her part ‘every accent and emphasis; every look, action and deportment proper to the character’ ” and that “David Garrick taught Edward Cape Everard by ‘reading’ him his part with ‘Now, sir, say this after me’ ” (Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan 11). While this kind of dictation is now frowned upon, actor training remains, despite a burgeoning literature of guides and manuals, very much a field in which technical skills are thought to be transmitted person to person, and are thought to be best learned from the “master” (Uta Hagen, Cicely Berry, Viola Spolin, Tadashi Suzuki) or at least from a close disciple: actors’ resumés often list the names of the teachers with whom they have studied various aspects of their craft. While the transformation of drama into a mode of “literature” can be marked in the printed form of plays – the use of “novelistic” strategies for printing plays adopted by Ibsen, Shaw, and others in the late nineteenth century – the history of theatrical modernism might be characterized as an effort to resist the “literarization” of the theatre, to articulate relationships between writing, scenography, and embodiment that do not seem subordinate to the logic of print, and to the social logic of the bourgeois, print-consuming audience.24 William Poel’s experiments with Elizabethan stage practice, though fully motivated by a literary appreciation of Shakespeare, are part of this history: Poel resists the conventional Victorian effort to “pictorialize” Shakespeare’s dramatic settings (applying the novelistic logic of Dickens or Thackeray to the stage) by restoring the playtexts to the nonillusionistic practices of Shakespeare’s theatre. Many of the innovations of modernist theatre stem from playwriting, from texts – those of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Churchill, Heiner Müller, and Parks all come to mind – that force actors and

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directors to discover new modes of enactment; others develop modes of performance that resist conventional uses of dramatic texts (the Stanislavskian “subtext,” Meyerhold’s biomechanics, epic or alienated acting, poor theatre, the Viewpoints). Modern theatrical innovation resists “print logic,” both by refusing the rhetoric of repetition (the stage reiterates the text) and by subjecting texts to the “illogical” practices of embodiment. Antonin Artaud’s call for a theatre of “No More Masterpieces” epitomizes this rejection of the authority of print in the theatre, and does so by privileging the visceral elements of performance, sound, movement, gesture; Artaud imagines performance not as the echo of print but as a process of direct, present communication. The ritual element of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty recalls a history of efforts to ritualize the stage, linking Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilbert Murray, and T. S. Eliot to Richard Schechner, The Living Theater, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña in a common desire to imagine a theatre where “meaning” is defined as a function of immediacy, participation, presence, not the logocentric determination of a scripted play. In the modern theatre printed drama enters an institutional practice, a practical literacy, a mode of artistic production that uses texts in specific ways. The theatre’s habits of reading and interpretation often depart from properly literary practices, practices that are “proper” not because they are determined by the essential “logic” of print but because the appropriate use of print has been determined by legitimating social institutions. Theatrical performativity uses print in ways that seem illogical, improper, transgressive, but only from the perspective of literary, nonperformative strategies of reading. There are a variety of reasons to see the modern contestation between print and performance as part of a longer history, in which the relationship between writing and enactment – two dimensions of Western drama – has been framed within different institutions, different practices, even different practices of literacy from the outset. Theatrical performativity often works in opposition to print literacy outside the theatre: Stanislavksy’s notion of the subtext implies that the performance of “yes” can easily have the force of “no.” More generally, theatrical literacy involves inserting the text into a structure of performativity, a complex of coherent interpretive and behavioral practices – sometimes entailing deleting, rearranging, and

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rewriting the (printed, if it is in print) text – that, like reading, cannot be deduced or “extrapolated” from the text itself (Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology 65). Think of the well-worn accounts of Betterton, or Garrick, or Irving as Hamlet, or of the strikingly divergent film performances of Olivier, Williamson, Gibson, Branagh, and even Ethan Hawke: the text is refashioned in a gestural, embodied idiom that provides the condition of its potential to signify as performance. The function of writing at any moment in the history of performance is unique. As an institution that subjects the design of writing to performative practices outside the text, and outside the habits of nontheatrical reading, the theatre necessarily subjects print to use, to labor, in ways that render it not the container of meaning, but raw material for new meanings. Acting might be described as a highly conventional form of citational behavior, one that responds to, abstracts, and clarifies the more inarticulate “performatives” of everyday life. Contemporary Shakespearean characterization – a careful attention to how the minutiae of the verbal text can be physicalized in a single character “journey” – applies a specific tactical literacy to the text, a practice of reading, interpretation, and embodiment that determines the kind of force the text will have as live behavior on the stage. Although it is the foundation of professional “literacy” in the contemporary Shakespearean theatre – as an actor, you do not know how to read if you cannot read for, and then embody, these values – this way of performing is not implied in the text, but forms one of the ritual contexts of modern Western theatre, conventions of behavior shared by modern actors and audiences as a just representation of the Shakespearean real. The demands of early modern London playhouses for new material, and the pace with which new material had to be brought to the stage, imply a different relation between acting and writing in Shakespeare’s era. Although the data on the duration of a possible “rehearsal period” in early modern theatres are notoriously difficult to interpret, it is clear that the combination of typecasting – witnessed by the popularity of individual actors in typical roles (Will Kemp and Robert Armin as fools, Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage as tragic leading men), and in the practice of passing a corpus of roles on to a new member of the company (as when Joseph Taylor succeeded to Burbage’s parts with the King’s Men) – and the actors’ use of

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cue-scripts rather than complete playtexts enabled plays to be brought to the stage rapidly, and to remain in repertory for a considerable time without much additional rehearsal.25 Peter Thomson suggests that in such a milieu “it was by no means the priority of working playwrights to create a gathering of subjectivities – what later criticism would call ‘characters’ ” (“Rogues and Rhetoricians” 324–25). The actors expected to read a text (if they all read it) not for its detailed representation of an individualized subjectivity within a complex, ensemble-driven narrative (as modern actors eager to particularize their acting do), but for the ease and effect with which a given side could be phrased within a conventional regime of performance behavior that would show to best advantage the actor’s marketable skills as a performer: comic old man or woman, clown, fool, a lover or a tyrant or a part to tear a cat in, lines of business perhaps still visible in speech prefixes, Old Lady, Wife, Fool, King, and so on. The side provided the actor with raw material that could be transformed into a finished, reusable performance commodity. While many sides were essential to composing the performance, the function of the authorial script in the force of performance was quite different from what it is today. While adding “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines” (Hamlet 2.2.541–42) to, say, Waiting for Godot is now legally actionable, in Shakespeare’s theatre old and new plays – The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Hamlet, King Lear – were regularly revised and augmented for performance, a practice that has continued ever since. Playwrights created text to be used in the production of a saleable commodity: performance. Rather than expressing a “derivative creativity,” performance registers the application of a pragmatic reading strategy, a “performative” literacy that uses the text for its own systematic purposes.26 The circumstances of the early modern theatre imply a volatile relationship between texts and performances, one that has remained volatile through the changing history of writing, print, drama, and the stage. Much as the history of printed drama itself encodes a shifting sense of the relationship between writing and performance, so the practices of performance have historically made different kinds of claims on the text, and for the text. Although early modern plays may encode a range of alien or familiar values, it is far from clear how Shakespearean performance today can evoke these textual

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implications. Performance in the theatre is not the citation of texts, but the incarnation of texts as behavior. The text appears in performance only as it is transformed into something else, someone lying, pleading, commanding, wooing, seducing, and so on. If acting were merely “speaking,” the release of performatives fully inscribed in the text, we should all be great actors, as would anyone able to read aloud. Performing a scripted drama entails the insertion of its language – often of resistant, materially remote language and equally recondite habits of action – into the elaborate citational behaviors of the contemporary stage, much as “I do” gains its force to legitimate and legalize “marriage” only within certain legal and ritual constraints in J. L. Austin’s familiar discussion. We need only remember that for a century or more Macbeth’s witches appeared amid a corps de ballet to understand the principle that in performance a play’s apparent meanings are constituted by something outside or alongside the text: the theatrical regimes that seem to make it meaningfully performable. The text provides no instructions for its performance; these instructions are embodied in the traditions, rhetoric, and genre of performance that transform the text into performed behavior on the stage. While the organization of a text such as Hamlet can surely tell us many things about the constitution of subjects in Shakespeare’s era, what Hamlet in performance tells us will depend on how the text is embodied in the theatrical behavior that lends it force onstage. per fo rmin g c ha rac t e r If there is substantial agreement that we are now living in a postmodernist cultural period, however, it is less clear what the implications of this are for what has happened to the longperiod modern era, from the Renaissance to the present, and for the larger system we can call “modernity” formed by the interactions of power, capitalism, and scientific technology. Hugh Grady, “Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism” (32)

As anyone who has ever tried acting can attest, the modes of embodiment characteristic even of the most conventional, realistic, modern acting are hardly imaginable merely – or even principally – in terms of speech, of speaking the text. Noh theatre, a Chicano acto, a performance of Chekhov at the MAT, or of Hamlet at the Barbican

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each assert a relation between dramatic writing and the practices of theatre as part of a specialized mode and moment of performance. Performing reconstitutes the text, it does not echo, give voice to, or translate it; performance does not cite the text – printed or otherwise – any more than the force of marriage is constituted merely by “I do.” Instead, as Judith Butler remarks, performance produces the script within a system of manifestly citational behavior, such that when “a performance ‘works’ ” it does so “to the extent that it draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized” (Excitable Speech 51). Appearing to arise both from the determinacies of the text and from the unforeseeable contingencies of performance behavior,“character” is at once a site where the historical dimension of the drama is most strongly felt, and where the behavioral citationality of performance most directly challenges the theatre’s ability to recover or restore that historicity, its perceived presence in the written text. A list: (1) by inventing powerful means for representing an individual person as a dramatic “character,” Shakespeare “invented the human as we know it”; (2) the mere notion of an individualized “self ” registers an exploitative construction of Enlightenment philosophy channeled through market capitalism and anachronistically applied to Shakespearean drama; (3) the intermittencies of dramatic character model diffuse sensibilities of self-fashioning subjects struggling for position in the elusive powergrids of a now-distant culture, that may, poetically, resemble our own.27 Even a cursory overview of recent scholarship reveals that reading for the “character” of early modern subjects entails a profoundly political encounter with history. The controversy regarding early modern subjectivity is one place where we can see how a conventional understanding of Shakespearean performance deflects, even trivializes the challenges to “history” posed by dramatic performativity. For Alan Sinfield’s shrewd suggestion that “[t]hese people were very different from us, but not totally different” (Faultlines 62) poses two related lines of inquiry: how early modern people are registered as “characters” in the formal structures of Renaissance drama, and how, or whether, these people speak on the modern stage.28 How was individual identity, mental and spiritual space, interiority, experienced and understood? And was that experience, in its inward flavor, its manifestation in action, and its constraint and even

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“production” by external agencies (the state, ideology, theatre), like or unlike our own experience of ourselves? The challenges here are complex, not least the difficulties of identifying “subjectivity” itself. Katharine Eisaman Maus argues that “ ‘[s]ubjectivity’ is often treated casually as a unified or coherent concept when, in fact, it is a loose and varied collection of assumptions, intuitions, and practices that do not all logically entail one another and need not appear together at the same cultural moment” (Inwardness and Theatre 29). But while the discourse of a Foucauldian “subject” – the “placeholder for human consciousness within discourse and material relations,” in Elizabeth Hanson’s phrasing (Discovering the Subject 10) – opens the notion of a self-present “individual,” interiorized, fully autonomous agent to critique, it has hardly eliminated more traditional, romantic views of the universal, transhistorical application of Shakespeare’s “characters” to human experience. The possibility of reading Shakespearean characterization as continuous with, even as authorizing, a modern understanding of identity and subjectivity sustains the rebarbative controversy of “the subject.” Rather than intervening in this debate, my concern here is to raise a slightly different question: insofar as we regard these subjects – or characters, individuals, what you will – as inscribed in the text, can stage performance even articulate this problematic, let alone resolve it? Harold Bloom, to take a clearly polemical example, repeatedly treats “character” and “role” as synonymous terms, implying a continuity between the textual and theatrical forms with which Shakespeare registers “the human” (Shakespeare 404). Despite his loving recollection of Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff, though, Bloom’s stage is not the space where Shakespearean identities are fashioned, for two reasons: “In the theater, much of the interpreting is done for you, and you are victimized by the politic fashions of the moment” (720). The actors, director, and designers read the play, and in framing the text in stage action they put a lot into play; it might seem that performance exceeds the text, gives us more to interpret and more subtle things to interpret than reading does. Yet Bloom understands the text as a kind of illocutionary encyclopedia, a compendium of legitimate stage conduct: the theatre’s work should be to realize these performatives, and even under the best conditions a given performance can realize only a narrow range of the text’s illocutionary capacity. Bloom understands

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the stage, then, as an etiolated version of reading: its force depends almost exclusively on the text that it interprets as performance. At the same time that Bloom locates the force of performance in the text, though, the text is not forceful enough fully to determine stage behavior. For although Bloom’s Shakespearean text contains all legitimate stagings, it is nonetheless susceptible to appropriation, to being traduced by merely politic and fashionable performances. His irritation with much contemporary scholarship implies that it is possible to read “fashionably,” too, but for Bloom reading usually implies full-time access to the multiplicity of Shakespearean meanings (All Shakespeare All The Time), while performance can articulate only one Shakespeare at best. At worst the thing that treads the boards is a sad effigy of our own lapsed imagining.29 Bloom expresses a conventional, and conventionally contradictory, sense of Shakespearean performance; what he resists is performativity itself. Bloom understands performance as a derivative means of re-presenting the meanings of the text in the force of behavior; at the same time, though, the theatre’s capacity to betray the text points to something else, the relative independence of performance behavior from the meanings taken as intrinsic to the script. It is precisely this performativity that appears to prevent theatre today from gaining access to Bloom’s Shakespearean past. By taking Shakespeare to invent “the human as we know it” (my emphasis), Bloom at first appears conveniently to sidestep the materialist critique of the subject in history, the sense that, as Catherine Belsey puts it, “liberal humanism itself expresses a human nature which, despite its diversity, is always at the most basic, the most intimate level, the same” (Subject of Tragedy ix). It is not that human nature has no history for Bloom, just that we share a history initiated by Shakespeare. At the same time that Bloom takes Shakespearean writing to inaugurate this longue durée, the theatre seems oddly to stand outside it. If Shakespeare invented us, then Shakespearean drama should be continuous with our behavior, whoever we may be: our ways of enacting ourselves as human subjects in the theatre should be at least partially transparent to the Shakespearean discourse of character. But while we are Shakespeare’s inheritors, Bloom finds the contemporary theatre’s strategies for representing meaningful behavior to be only intermittently capable (if that) of registering an authentically Shakespearean

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humanity. There can be only two explanations for this failing. Perhaps we no longer understand, and no longer represent, our humanity in precisely Shakespearean terms. In Richardson’s heyday, and presumably in Burbage’s (but in Irving’s? Kean’s? Garrick’s? Cibber’s? Betterton’s? – does Shakespeare’s invention, the “human,” appear only intermittently on the Shakespearean stage?), performance was capable of deriving appropriately from the force of Shakespeare’s texts (whose text? Tate’s King Lear Irving’s tragic Merchant of Venice?). The fact that it no longer does so implies that stage (and film?) performance is now simply irrelevant to authentic Shakespearean meanings. Alternatively, perhaps the theatre is (and has always been) incapable of resolving our continuity with past modes of subjection as they are registered by texts, because performance necessarily constructs the force of the text as theatrical behavior, behavior that must appear politic, fashionable, our behavior in order to be significant. (There is, of course, a third possibility: we are simply no longer human at all, at least in the Shakespearean sense, presumably like the great majority of the world’s population.) Understanding Shakespearean performativity principally as a mode of textual transmission surprisingly limits the theatre’s capacity to evoke history – the true Shakespearean subject, like or unlike “us” – because stage acting is not a straightforward reiteration of the text and its reclaimed meanings, but uses the text to fashion meanings in the citational fashions of contemporary theatrical behavior. If performance cannot recapture a more or less modern Shakespearean subject from the text, it seems unlikely that the theatre can restore a radically different early modern subject either, a subject constituted through social and economic relations and represented through literary and theatrical means that are essentially removed from our own. For Francis Barker, to choose a second and equally polemical example, the privacy of the bourgeois subject is an invention of the revolution of capital, following hard on the English Civil War; Shakespeare’s plays embody a thoroughly alien history, more cognate with the “artisanal” apparatus of the early modern theatre than the slick business of the contemporary stage (Tremulous Private Body 18). In particular, the spatial relations of this theatre – “[t]here is no well-founded division between those who perform and those who are spectators, between the subjects and objects of communicative sight” (23) – stand

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apart from the privatizing spatiality of the modern house, in which the occluded audience looks into a manufactured space of visibility, confession, and disclosure from a privileged, reciprocating zone of psychological and social privacy. They presumably also stand apart from the reconstructed proxemics of the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, with its evident participation in the globalized, urban, and “living-history” forms of commodified experience characteristic of contemporary tourism and commodity culture. The alien subject of the Shakespearean stage may be recoverable as an object of scholarship (as in Barker’s striking reading of Pepys on Hamlet), but must remain remote from any modern performance practice: we no longer have the social structure, theatrical instruments, or performative conventions to lend those alien beings their true force onstage. We might even wonder whether the stage can restore what Hugh Grady calls the “heroes of subjectivity” – Richard II, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra – whose “unfixed or autonomous subjectivity” characterizes the “crisis of meaning” whose “continuity over four centuries is one of the defining conditions of modernity,” while at the same time preserving a sense of the different freighting of that crisis four centuries ago (“Renewing Modernity” 282). Contemporary Shakespearean performance places considerable weight on the Shakespearean text, attributing to the text a significant force in determining the meaning and value of a performance. As a result, performance that does not appear to restate textual meanings – either because contemporary theatre is stylistically (Bloom) or historically (Barker) incapable of doing so – appears to engage neither with Shakespeare nor with history. It might be argued, as Bruce Smith has suggested, that in a densely oral culture – in which “[k]nowledge about most things was, in fact, communicated in the form of speeches” – “character” itself may have been inseparable as an idea from performance: writers devise text, but the “ability to create memorable characters . . . is the province of actors,” who performed in a speech community, a social and cultural world, and an auditory and performative environment that can be described but not restored (Acoustic World 247–48, 278).30 The textually derived “force” of modern performance is innate neither to theatre nor to dramatic performance, nor is it even uniform across the spectrum of contemporary performance, dramatic or otherwise. Theatrical performance can never be “historical” in this sense, as a means

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of recovering meanings inscribed in the text, because theatre does not cite texts; it cites behavior. To the extent that the historicizing potential of Shakespearean performativity is identified with the independent force of the text, history on the stage can appear only as something else, something suspiciously beyond the text: theatre. To say that Shakespearean performance is not somehow involved with history seems odd, even trivial, even to me; for all that it is a modern kiss, surely a kiss is still a kiss (or is it?). This impasse arises, I think, from the force attributed to the text in a conventional understanding of the dramatic theatre. Is it possible, as Joseph Roach suggests, to see dramatic performance “as an alternative or a supplement to textual mediation,” rather than merely as derivative from textual transmission (“Kinship, Intelligence, and Memory” 221)? In his effort to describe a genealogy of performance in Cities of the Dead , Roach characterizes performance as a form of surrogation, an uncanny replacement-acting, an ambivalent replaying of previous performers and performances by a current behavior. An act of memory and an act of creation, performance recalls and transforms the past in the form of the present. Like Richard Schechner’s “restored behavior,” surrogation involves not the replaying of an authorizing text, a grounding origin, but the potential to construct that origin as a rhetorically powerful effect of performance. To consider the performance of a play as an act of surrogation, an act that generates “improvised narratives of authenticity and priority” that often “congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin” (Roach, Cities of the Dead 3) is to alter the conventional priority of text-toperformance. Dramatic performance becomes more like nondramatic surrogation, an act – like the performative citationality of the marital “I do” – in which an understanding of the text emerges not as the cause, but as the consequence of performance. Although Roach tends to frame performance-surrogation as a form of resistant remembering opposed to the oppressive forgetting he associates with writing, dramatic theatre, and textual transmission generally, the power of this sense of surrogation lies in the way it captures the transformative nature of the cultural transmission of meanings, textual as well as performative.31 Surrogation invites us to resist the longstanding tendency to regard the merely incommensurable relationship between writing and acting, literacy and orality, as

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an essential and “schematized opposition” (Cities of the Dead 11), an opposition inherent in conventional narratives of print and orality that massively distorts the field of human communication. The labile relationship between writing and speaking is not only contingent on factors that change across culture and history, but at any given moment – today, as much as in Shakespeare’s era – there are also “a variety of ways in which speech could be given visible form, not only in writing but in other graphic signs” (Smith, Acoustic World 120), a variety of ways to interpret those signs to produce speech and action, and a variety of ways of valuing written, spoken, and enacted communication. Theatre relies on performance practices that evolve over time and that derive their power – the scandalous sense of what “works” – from behavioral genres that embody and transmit their own dynamic of historical change. A more powerful understanding of the historicity of performance would begin by recognizing the historical contingency of onstage and offstage behavior, how acting responds more directly to changing social behavior than to changing ways of reading classical texts, and would also recognize the contingent relation between Shakespearean drama and other kinds of performance with which it shares the stage: with jigs, clowning, fencing, sermons, bearbaiting, and pageants in Shakespeare’s day; with contemporary plays, performance art, film, and other forms of live and mediatized performance today. Refusing to regard the dramatic text and its performance as “transcendent categories” means acknowledging instead “that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time,” and continue to do so (Roach, Cities of the Dead 11). Dramatic performativity today occupies a typically modern disjunction between texts and performances. Expressing pervasive Western attitudes toward language, print, and the body as modes of communication, as well as toward the institutions of literature and theatre, this tension cannot merely be thought away. At the same time this sense of dramatic performance appears to frustrate the desire to locate the historicity of performance in the stability of the text, in part because it treats the text as a stable (though interpretable) thing, and performance as a set of changing, indeterminable interpretive practices. Whether it is possible to recapture early modern subjects in contemporary performance seems to me at best an open question;

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however, to do so will require us to imagine a more interactive relationship between the history latent in writing and the theatre’s ways of producing the effect of the past in the present of performance. e n t e r w ill k e mp Stage performance for the past several decades has often worked to disentangle its work from the apparent authority of the text, while at the same time engaging with the overwhelmingly “literary” understanding of classical drama in print culture. I am not thinking here of the long tradition (dating to the 1920s) of setting classic plays in modern dress, or in alternative “historical” settings. Usually such productions merely dress conventional notions of textual authority in new clothes – we can really understand “Shakespeare’s” Henry V if we set the play in the American Civil War. Nor am I thinking of experimental productions like The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69, a landmark experimental production nonetheless deeply inscribed by its obeisance to Euripides’ The Bacchae. Instead I have in mind productions that resignify the authority ascribed to the text by visibly resituating the work of the text in the performance, through speech, gesture, physical enactment. In Robert Wilson’s production of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, for instance, the performers’ statuesque gestures, athletic tongue-gymnastics, and operatically unrealistic speech patterns prevented the assimilation of the words to a sense of psychologically motivated “character,” usually one sign of fidelity to Ibsen onstage. One of the most powerful stage performances I have seen recently, Going, Going, Gone, a work “Conceived and Directed” by Anne Bogart and “Created and Performed” by the Saratoga International Theater Institute Company, also used performance to interrogate the performative function of the text. The cast consists of an older and a younger couple whose ages, gestures, costumes, and behavior evoke Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The stage set and physical enactment reiterate Albee’s walpurgisnacht, or at least Albee via Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; the actors’ intonations, posture, and movement enact “discussion,” “argument,” “seduction,” “get the guests,” surrogating the behavioral regimes of Virginia Woolf . In place of Albee’s dialogue, though, the actors speak fragments drawn from a range of scientific (Stephen Hawking)

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and nonscientific (T. S. Eliot, William Blake) writing, a pastiche of Newtonian, quantum mechanical, and literary utterances about the physical world in its gross, subatomic, and poetic manifestations. As the director Tina Landau remarks, in Bogart’s work “the movement has been freed from the text so that each is informed by and related to the other without it being the same as the other” (“Source-Work” 25). The meaning of Going, Going, Gone cannot be ascribed to the text; the performance cannot be understood – as productions of Shakespeare or Ibsen or Beckett usually are – as a realization, translation, interpretation, or citation of (potentialities latent in) the writing alone. But while Going, Going, Gone might appear to be a special case, it is in fact the normative case of dramatic performance. Much as “I do” gains its force from the citational behaviors within which it is performed, so, too, the dramatic text of a more conventional play gains its force in performance from the behaviors that constitute it as meaningful. This interrogation of the working of texts relative to performances is not merely the province of performance theory, or of the avant-garde theatre; it is the work – often only the implicit work – of dramatic performance. Yet, with the exception of experiments in using early texts rhetorically characteristic of Neil Freeman’s methods of actor training (attending to the possible rhetorical force of punctuation, lineation, and capitalization in the First Folio), or attempts to duplicate the structure of performance undertaken by Patrick Tucker’s Original Shakespeare Company (rehearsing plays from sides rather than from full scripts), acting is not often the site of experiment with historical recovery in mainstream theatre. True, epic theatre often works to historicize the portrayal of character in social or political terms, but it does so in one of the staple modes of modernist performance. Brechtian “alienation” owes its force onstage to an explicit, ironic distancing of modern bourgeois realism, rather than to an attempt to recover the characteristic modes of impersonation of earlier actors, their theatres, or their societies. Dramatic writing can demand a refiguring of performance, and playwrights have attempted to frame action and gesture in ways that might enable embodiment to convey an interrogation of historical change. Edward Bond’s Restoration contrasts the foppish Lord Are – whose behavior literalizes the conventions of the Restoration comic stereotype as the social behavior of

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the landed classes – with the more realistic behavior of the servants and peasants who are his property. Bond’s play resignifies the character and performance conventions associated with a literary genre as the gestural register of the moral economy of aristocratic privilege. We do not see the text onstage; we see its transformation into performance. Where, then, do we locate our sense of the performance’s engagement with history? Is what makes a Shakespeare performance feel “Shakespearean,” engaged with the historical specificity of Shakespeare’s writing, a direct effect of the text at all? For much of the “long” twentieth century, modern Western theatre tended to take a verisimilar, broadly Stanislavskian realism as its privileged register of embodiment, acting that tends to naturalize “character” to a distinctively modern mode of representation. While acting tends to register the continuity of Shakespearean “character” with modern modes of subjectivity, production design is more often where the historical alterity of the play is evoked (try to imagine Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream without Sally Jacobs’s white box, or Richard Loncraine’s Richard III without its detailed settings, costumes, and sound design). Like acting, design is the application of a discourse beyond the text, one always implicated in the present of the production, part of the “performative” frame used to work the text into significant behavior. We need only view the Globe scenes at the opening of the Olivier Henry V alongside the theatre scenes in Shakespeare in Love or the 1997 Henry V at the Globe to have a sense of how even a relatively “realistic” treatment of the past is the effect of design conventions deeply enmeshed in the visual regimes of the surrounding culture, its ways of citing and understanding a given moment in history. Perhaps because of the inevitable artificiality involved in adopting a deeply historicized style of performance (attempting to reproduce the accents and rhythms of early modern English, for example), a given production’s engagement with history often opens a gap between the claims of the design and the claims of the acting. This gap between acting and design points to the difficulty of framing the text as the vehicle that bears history into performance: the absent text’s authority is often embodied in different, sometimes incommensurable ways in the visual and histrionic registers of a single production. The spectrum of recent Shakespeare films testifies to the challenge of locating the ground of history in the dynamics of

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performance. Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V sets the play more or less in the period of the drama; the familiar rhythms of modern “Shakespearean acting” – articulate speech, attention to realistic character development – seem consistent with the epic sweep that the film captures in its visual field. Henry V is paradigmatic of one kind of “straight” Shakespeare today, a production committed to using modern technology to extend and substantiate the faithful (even literal) realization of Shakespeare’s intended dramatic action. Its evocation of the historical past fully depends on the performative regimes of modern stage and screen realism: psychological acting emphasizing progressive motivation and character development, a densely verisimilar scenic and costume design that is reinforced in the film (rather than undermined, despite the brief appearances of Derek Jacobi’s Chorus) by the work of the camera. While Henry V is finely attuned to the nuances of character, and represents a dysphoric view of warfare in keeping with contemporary sensibilities (how distant are Olivier’s pristine battlefields), its application of the “performative” logic of modern historical realism does little to mark a distance between modern people and their late-medieval progenitors. Like Braveheart, Gladiator, or Zeffirelli’s Hamlet for that matter, Henry V frames “character” through performances that would not be out of place in Ibsen or Chekhov, through an approach to acting that was devised to resolve the textual ellipses of their indirect dramas with a determinate “character” found in the subtext beneath and beyond the text. As Catherine Belsey suggests, this is history less in the mode of time travel than “history as costume drama, the reconstruction of the past as the present in fancy dress. The project is to explain away the surface strangeness of another century in order to release its profound continuity with the present” (Subject of Tragedy 2). Design foregrounds the pastness of the narrative, an alterity dissolved by the present-tense realism of the acting. The most overtly “historical” Shakespeare film in recent years is, in this sense, the film that betrays the historicity of the text most completely: despite the powerful effect of Henry V ’s detailed design, the materiality of the medieval world is finally absorbed straight into the Merchant-Ivory discourse of the present. Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost fared considerably less well with critics and audiences, but in some represents a more searching ways

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effort to engage the pastness of the text through the surrogation of performance. The film is set just before the Second World War, a period setting designed to place the performance in a heroic era distant from contemporary manners, but one in which the characters’ formality will appear both consistent and legible, forceful, to a contemporary audience. Period setting is a familiar convention of modern Shakespeare, and for good reason. Setting Hamlet’s dynastic politics in the Regency period, The Taming of the Shrew’s sexual politics in the American Wild West, Julius Caesar in the Cuban Revolution, or Richard III in a wartime fascist England provides a way to encode the characters’ movements and gestures and their complex social relationships in a visual and cultural regime that lends the text force as behavior, and as behavior that actors and audiences can grasp, feel the force of, more readily. Nonetheless, most period performances have difficulty in assimilating the actors’ performances to the modes of embodiment typical of these more recent “pasts.” Rather than evoking lost regimes of performance (as though Branagh’s Hamlet were to strike the poses of Kean or Byron, evoking the behavioral style of the film’s period setting), productions tend to dress the conventions of modern Shakespearean acting in the clothes of a bygone era, marked from time to time with the trace of “period” gesture, posture, or intonation. The burden of history is borne largely by the visual field of the performance: the internalized realism of the acting tends to assimilate the language and character directly to the more subdued conventions of contemporary acting. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, though, Branagh attempted something considerably more ambitious: to find a register, even a “regime” of performance consistent with the “period” setting that would produce Shakespeare through conventions analogous to, and perhaps even derived from, the more vividly theatrical, audience-directed comedy of Shakespeare’s era – the film musical. The graphic style of the opening credits (large golden script across red satin) and the musical overture establish “Romantic Musical Comedy” as Love’s Labour’s Lost’s genre, and the sets, costumes, and other effects (the use of the “Navarre Cinetone News” newsreels to set the scene, to advance various moments in the plot, and at the end of the film to account for the action after the departure of the French princess) are well within this conception. More to the point, producing Shakespeare in the

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song-and-dance idiom of musical comedy forces the performance of “character” into another register, assimilating the rhetoric of performance to the historicizing claims of the film’s visual design. The film’s mixed results stem largely from its inability to fulfill this performative contract. With the exception of Nathan Lane, the actors seem held back, constrained when it comes to the requisite singing and dancing, tentative. Lane’s irritating, Harpo Marx (toot-tooting his horn) Costard has one of the few moments in the film – “There’s No Business Like Show Business” – in which the performance actually delivers the work of musical comedy: that blend of apparent nonchalance and evident technical mastery of voice and movement that drives films from Top Hat to West Side Story to Moulin Rouge. It is not the actors’ abilities that are at fault here really, of course, but the film’s direction. The production seems hemmed in by a desire to make singing and dancing somehow plausible, low-key, realistic, a failure of nerve that violates the gestalt of musical-comedy performativity. “Gotta Dance” – in the elated preserve of musical comedy, no one needs a reason to sing and dance up a storm. Much as Shakespeare’s clowns presumably needed little excuse for an extemporaneous joke or a jig, musical comedy creates a demand for visible virtuosity; even the familiar talents of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly must exceed our expectations. In this sense Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge provides a useful comparison with Love’s Labour’s Lost. Not only are Jim Broadbent, Nicole Kidman, and Ewan McGregor surprisingly versatile, but Luhrmann insists on – and uses the camera and postproduction digital editing to intensify – explicitly “theatrical” performances in this canny surrogation of La Bohème, acting that fulfills the extroverted demands of an extroverted genre. Broadbent’s music-hall Zidler and John Leguizamo’s Toulouse-Lautrec especially come to mind, but McGregor and Kidman, too, seem fully committed to the stagey excess required of their performance. The soundtrack also sustains the surrogation of operatic hyperbole – characteristic of nineteenthcentury melodramas such as Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias, to say nothing of Puccini – that the film brilliantly executes, in its savvy resetting of pop-music tunes to the circumstances of the drama (“Like a Virgin” and “Roxanne” are exemplary here, as is the film’s signature, “Your Song”). Less operatic than Moulin Rouge, Love’s

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Labour’s Lost nonetheless deploys similar musical conventions to surrogate the aristocratic elegance of Shakespeare’s play in a more familiar, and so potentially more forceful, regime of performance. The film’s elegant designs, to say nothing of the music of Cole Porter and many others, work to summon the play’s sublime artificiality. Yet that sense of a history emerging through performative surrogation founders in the gap between design and acting; even though an appropriate regime of performance stands ready, the film timidly shies away from it. As Stanley Kauffmann asked, “[w]hat’s the point in asking an audience to watch long dance numbers executed by people who are not, so far as we can see, dancers?” (“Well, Not Completely Lost”). In many respects Julie Taymor’s Titus exemplifies the dominant approach to performing history today: the eclectic blending of scenic and costume elements from various periods to articulate an engagement not with a specific past but with history itself. Taymor has long been celebrated as a designer, and Titus is – like Romeo + Juliet, Richard III, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado, the Zeffirelli and Branagh Hamlets – visually striking. Filmed partly in Croatia (the location of many of the exterior settings), Titus opens with a little boy playing in a Formica-and-linoleum modern kitchen, dissolves to an ancient Roman coliseum, and then moves between modern and “classical” motifs, closing with a modern audience seated in the coliseum watching the final scenes of Titus as a play. As Martha Nochimson assesses it in her review “ ‘Blending time’ describes the layering of historical eras in the scene and costume design and in the composition of the music to set the tragedy on a timeless stage. The look and feel of the film is a pentimento. Layers are scraped here and built up there, creating a mise-en-scene that places the characters on every point of the continuum between the year 1 and the year 2000” (Review of Titus). This timeless quality is achieved through a density of historicizing signifiers: the modern kitchen and the ancient ruins; modern business suits draped with “Roman” capes; Anthony Hopkins’s cardigan-andarmor attire; music that ranges from Korean drumming through jazz to circus music to – in the banquet scene – “a lilting popular song called ‘vivere’ (Live!) that flourished on the radio in Fascist Italy the week before Mussolini was killed” (Nochimson, Review of Titus). In one sense Taymor’s design seems a perfect act of surrogation: the Peacham illustration of Titus Andronicus implies a similar

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range of “design” choices, ranging from classical to “modern” (i.e., Elizabethan) costumes. The drawing illustrates the familiar anachrony of early modern theatre, a blending of past and present that seems less to mark historical change than to assert an insistent interpenetration of the classical and the modern world. Taymor’s design, I think, works somewhat differently for us, insisting on the scope of historical change at the same time as it asserts the “timeless” quality of the dramatic action. For this reason the violent excess of Titus has a surprisingly utopian quality: not so much a part of history as a motif finally unmoored from human place and time, an allegory. The ambivalent regard for the play’s historicity expressed by its eclectic design extends to its performances as well. The acting works less to register the range of ways in which people have conceptualized individual subjectivity and its manifestation in behavior throughout history than it does to claim a “continuity of human emotional life” sustained by the actors’ fundamentally realistic, modern acting (this is particularly true of Hopkins’s superbly detailed performance). “There is nothing fragmented about the progress of the inner lives of the characters which unwind along an unremitting line of suffering and perhaps some awakening knowledge . . . The medium of film, . . . with its intimate probing of facial cartography” even gives Harry Lennix, playing Aaron, “the opportunity to create against all odds an inner life that complicates the acid of Aaron’s dialog and makes sense of Aaron’s one human gesture” (Nochimson, Review of Titus).32 In the surreal Gothic postmodern of Titus, the actors’ performances provide a point of repair, one consistent with the generalizing force of the design. In a world that insists on the interchangeable significance of material histories, and so assimilates “history” itself to the signifier “Shakespeare,” human identity is similarly unfixed, readily claimed by modern ways of framing Shakespeare’s identities as our own. These fine, provocative films demonstrate the difficulty of locating a fixed relationship between meanings ascribed to the text and those that arise in performance. Even in this limited sampling, the claim to evoke a Shakespearean “history” is sustained in ways that insistently transform a textualized past into a complex performative present, a present in which the claims of history are made in different registers of representation, in complex and often contradictory ways, and in ways that necessarily invoke more that is beyond the text than might

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actually lie within it. At the same time each of these films insists on performance as a way to engage with Shakespeare, creating the effect of a dialogic encounter with the pastness of Shakespeare that is not so much compromised by the contemporaneity of its performance as it is characteristic of how performance produces the past in the behavior of the present. In each case the text disappears; the performance makes claims about the text, for the text, its history, its action through the performative conventions of contemporary film. The force of these claims – as the gap between the divergent claims of design and acting might imply – flows from the register of the performative: a socially sustained rhetoric of visual and performed significance. In his recent book Performing History, Freddie Rokem suggests that the historicizing force of theatrical performance derives less from the text of the play than from the theatre’s ability to create the effect that “something from the ‘real’ historical past has been presented on the stage,” and that the actors and their audiences have been transformed into the past’s present witnesses (24). Rokem implies, I think, something like a “performative” understanding of theatre here, in which our sense of dialogue with the past depends less on the history encoded in the text than on the event of performance itself, its rhetoric of restoration, the ways it can claim to place us before the spectacle of the past – a rhetoric that we accept as plausible, persuasive, forceful, even when we understand its purely theatrical provenance. I would like to conclude by considering a stage production of Romeo and Juliet that used a sense of acting-as-surrogation to undertake a critical engagement with a particularly theatrical trace latent in the early modern printed play that has vanished from the modern Romeo and Juliet. The second quarto text of Romeo and Juliet contains a wellknown stage direction, one that is generally eliminated from modern editions of the play: “Enter Will Kemp.”33 That editors should modify this stage direction is understandable. Although Kemp was the bestknown comic actor of his day, later becoming even more famous for his morris-dance to Norwich in 1600, “Will Kemp” is not actually a “character” in the play Romeo and Juliet, at least as we understand that term today. Directed not to the character but to the actor, the stage direction opens a hole in the text, and reminds us of what is never there in it – the performance. At the same time it also sets the text alongside a performance history (clowning), preserving an

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intersection with this tradition in the rich opacity of the unspoken line, “Enter Will Kemp.” Directing the play at the University of California-Davis in 1998, Peter Lichtenfels (a British professional stage director who is coediting the play for Arden with L. A. C. Hunter), cast a gifted comic actor with experience in stand-up comedy, Christopher Peak, in the role of Peter, Kemp’s role. It is impossible, and probably irrelevant, to imagine reconstructing Kemp’s behavior: given the specific density of Kemp’s dances, jests, and jigs in Elizabethan culture, even if the Bankside Globe Theatre could find an actor to reconstruct his performance, could it really signify to us as live behavior today?34 Peak improvised some routines during rehearsal that were more or less “set” in performance, while other routines were improvised anew every evening. Reminiscent at once of Grock, of Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, of circus, Peak’s clowning was (again to call on Roach’s terms), not an imitation of Kemp, but a surrogation of Kemp’s function, using an embodied performance to mark a history outside the text, a history also traced – just barely – within it.35 Peter was unusually prominent in this production, in part because Lichtenfels used him to introduce the play and left him onstage at other times not specified by the text. Hamlet – particularly in the 1603 quarto – was skeptical about the charismatic commodities that Peak brought into the play: “Let not your clown speak more than is set down. There be of them I can tell you that will laugh themselves to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh with them, albeit there is some necessary point in the play then to be observed. O ’tis vile and shows a pitiful ambition in the fool that useth it” (First Quarto of Hamlet 9.17–21).36 Peak disrupted the narrative, split the “focus” usually sought in modern stage productions, altered the tone of the surrounding drama, and thoroughly pleased us, his barren audience.37 Peak’s acting was a historicizing activity, although I don’t imagine anyone took it that way. What Kemp did onstage as Peter is unknown, but the stage direction marks a moment when, perhaps, we can gain access to the performativity of Shakespeare’s theatre, its quite different way of constituting texts and performances at a point in time at which drama depended on a highly developed oral culture, on the incomplete transformation of performance from a traditional

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practice to an alienated commodity, a transformation perhaps also registered in Kemp’s retirement from Shakespeare’s company and the replacement of his fluent physical comedy with Robert Armin’s facility with wordplay. To “perform” that moment – “Enter Will Kemp” – will inevitably be an act of surrogation, a performance in the idiom of contemporary behavior, whether that behavior is the modernized Elizabethanism of the Globe or, as in Peak’s case, a concentrated effort to engage in clowning, performance with a distinctive lineage and history, a genealogy that includes Shakespeare’s clowns, both actual (Kemp) and fictive (Peter). Peak’s clowning seemed less to derive from the text than to strike an “interactive” relationship between text and performance, opening a dialogue with textuality, with a contemporary “editorial” understanding of Shakespearean writing as a social practice: the sense that the texts – all of them, good and bad – respond to and record the densely pragmatic circumstances of their creation, including their use-value to performers like Kemp. This understanding of texts and performances would no doubt be unrecognizable to Shakespeare and company. Yet by using the text to instigate this aspect of the performance, Romeo and Juliet was, perhaps, doing the dialogic work of history, entering the “big time” through the means of Shakespearean performativity. No lath, no plaster, an industrial set, hip costumes (especially, in this production, for The Artist Formerly Known as Tybalt), and a clown pissing upstage: is this really history? It is neither reconstruction, nor derivation; the text inspires moments of surrogation – Peak doing Kemp – that are neither governed by the text, nor seem to restore “original” behavior. The production responded to a contemporary understanding of the material difference of early modern theatricality, perhaps not least in treating Peak’s part as one of several independent elements in the spectacle. Beyond that, it also points to an alternative understanding of Shakespearean performance, one not constituted as expressing the force of the text, but arising at the interface where texts and performances, language and bodies, engage, represent, and resist one another. Seen by several hundred people in California’s central valley, this Romeo and Juliet may not strike readers as representative: it is not the RSC, the Royal National Theatre, or even the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express. At the same time this Romeo and Juliet – directed by an accomplished professional director

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also involved in editing the play, in a university setting that enabled the freedom of experiment – could only have “worked” to the extent that it participated in the practice of a more widely understood Shakespearean performativity. Although Shakespeare performance generally encodes a restrictive, determining understanding of the text’s role in performance, Lichtenfels’s work here epitomizes a fascination with the interactions and interruptions between bodies and texts that is one of the hallmarks of performance today. “Texts” are visible everywhere in contemporary performance, although usually visible in ways that imply a very different “interaction” than is common in stage Shakespeare. In Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus, for instance, Saartjie Baartman, the Venus Hottentot, is doubly spectacular: she is embodied onstage as an object of voyeuristic inspection (and abjection), but also narrativized, in the extensive reading of historical “extracts” by the Negro Resurrectionist. The sense that the Venus has been absorbed into a textual history is emphasized, too, by the play’s repetitive dialogue, in which snatches of “speech” are rendered again and again, creating a chorus of commentary that, somehow, both describes the Venus and never touches her. Anna Deavere Smith’s performances depend on the written, audio-, and videotexts of her “informants.” Using supertitles to identify each “speaker,” Smith scrupulously reproduces the precise conduct of her subjects, their vocal and physical mannerisms – acting becomes a way to register, textualize, and even alienate the gestural regimes of everyday behavior. Going, Going, Gone; dv 8’s Enter Achilles, a dance work that develops the habitual attitudes and gestures of British pub culture as its choreographic text; Robert Lepage’s Elsinore; all of Beckett’s short works for stage and video; the striking presence of text in the visual economy of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: although these examples all express different ways of constituting the “text” relative to “performance,” they also express a shared fascination for the slippage between bodies and texts in performance, a fascination evoked in different ways by the Oxford Shakespeare, by the rise of performance studies as an academic discipline, by the controversial nature of Shakespearean performativity today, and perhaps even by the surprising return of J. L. Austin, Superstar, to the discourse of literary and social theory. Regardless of whether we can use performance

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to recover the “alien history” of early modern subjects (Barker, Tremulous Private Body 15), contemporary performance is preoccupied with concerns that bear directly on Shakespearean performativity. This friction between texts and enactment in contemporary performance might help us to find the pulse of Shakespearean performativity, the changing force of the text, and of history, in Shakespearean performance. This force must change, of course; it is always changing. In the theatre, if we want to speak with the dead we can only do so through the recalcitrant behavior of the living.

chapter 2

Globe performativity

Fakin was your Daddys callin but diggin was his livelihood. Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play (181)

Onstage Shakespearean drama foregrounds the edgy historicity of the classic theatre, though this dimension of dramatic performativity is hardly confined to plays of the past: the place of theatre in the space of history is imagined today nowhere more brilliantly than in SuzanLori Parks’s The America Play. The play opens in “A great hole. In the middle of nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of the Great Hole of History” (America Play 159). The main character, The Foundling Father (a former gravedigger, otherwise known as The Lesser Known) describes how he traveled west, and built this replica of “the Great Hole,” an eastern “theme park. With historical parades . . . The Hole and its Historicity and the part he played in it all gave a shape to the life and posterity of the Lesser Known that he could never shake” (162). Later in the play we find that “Amerigo Vespucci hisself made regular appearances” in the Great Hole of History, as well as “Marcus Garvey. Ferdinand and Isabella. Mary Queen of thuh Scots! Tarzan King of thuh Apes! Washington Jefferson Harding and Millard Fillmore. Mistufer Columbus even. Oh they saw all thuh greats” (180). The Foundling Father – played by an African-American actor – “bore a strong resemblance to Abraham Lincoln” – “He was tall and thinly built just like the Great Man. His legs were the longer part just like the Great Mans legs” (159) – and so devised a kind of “Great Man” livinghistory performance. Choosing a beard from his extensive collection – “as authentic as he was, so to speak” (160) – the Lesser Known’s act consisted “of a single chair, a rocker, in a dark box. The public was invited to pay a penny, choose from the selection of provided pistols, 79

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enter the darkened box and ‘Shoot Mr. Lincoln.’ The Lesser Known became famous overnight” (164). In the course of Act 1, the Foundling Father reenacts the scene of Lincoln’s assassination with a variety of customers; each shoots “Lincoln,” shouts some “historical” slogan – two are attributed to John Wilkes Booth as he fled the stage of Ford’s Theater, others to Robert E. Lee, Edwin Stanton, Mary Todd Lincoln – as “Lincoln ‘slumps in his chair’ ” (165). In the second half of the play, the Foundling Father’s wife Lucy and son Brazil appear on stage in the replica of the Great Hole of History, searching for the past (a gravedigger, the Foundling Father had once planned a mourning business with his family, using Lucy’s talents for “Confidence work” and hiring Brazil as a professional mourner, “a weeper” [162]). Lucy listens through an ear-trumpet for the echoes of gunshots, while Brazil digs through the detritus of the Great Hole, epitomizing, as Una Chaudhuri remarks, “the historian and archaeologist, the one listening for echoes from the past, the other digging for its remains”(Staging Place 265). Brazil turns up various documents (“peace pacts, writs, bills of sale, treaties, notices” [186]), and displays a bust of Lincoln, the Foundling Father’s beard box (“A Jewel Box made of cherry wood, lined in velvet, letters ‘A. L.’ carved in gold on thuh lid” [185]), and “Over here one of Mr. Washingtons bones, right pointer so they say; here is his likeness and here: his wooden teeth. Yes, uh top and bottom pair of nibblers: nibblers, lookin for uh meal” (185). He also unearths a television, which plays the Foundling Father’s “Lincoln Act.” Parks describes her playwriting as formally modeled on the “Rep & Rev” of jazz, the repetition and revision “in which the composer or performer will write or play a musical phrase once and again and again; etc. – with each revisit the phrase is slightly revised” (“from ‘Elements of Style’ ” 8–9). Staging and restaging the Lincoln assassination, replaying scenes from Our American Cousin, and improvising over the structure of progressive African-American theatre (the theme park recalls the design of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum), The America Play reprises the American past as Rep & Rev, staging the events of the past and their recovery as “history” as fully complicit with the dynamics of performance. As Lucy remarks, “Fakin was your Daddys callin but diggin was his livelihood” (181).


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The Great Hole of History is the stage of fakin and diggin, where history is enacted as an encounter with its signifiers, indeed “with its signifiers as signifiers,” as Alice Rayner and Harry Elam point out (“Unfinished Business” 459). In the metonymic logic of popular history, Lincoln becomes the charade props of beard and rocker, and Booth’s ill-remembered cry; Washington is the cherry tree, crossing the Delaware, and the wooden nibblers, much as Henry VIII is his many wives, or Churchill is his “cigar,” according to Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw. “The size of the hole itself was enough to impress any Digger but it was the Historicity of the place the order and beauty of the pageants which marched by them” (162). The Great Hole is a replica both of the fullness (whole)of history, and of its undoing, its absence (hole) in representation; materializing the past as object and as echo, it enacts – like that other Great Hole, the Globe Theatre – an anxious performance of the past in the present.1 The America Play is a meditation in the form of performance on the force of performance as history today: its careful phrasing of the past as entertainment, as theme-park spectacle, frames a contemporary concern about theatre as a mode of history and about our capacity to perform the past as anything other than Disneyfied pastiche. Parks’s play evokes the anxiety and the excitement driving the most visible experiment in Shakespearean performance of the last decade of the twentieth century: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The building of the Globe is in many ways a concrete – well, lath and plaster – testimony to the desire to frame theatrical performativity as a field of historical recovery. Performance at the Globe appears to cite the “original” circumstances of Shakespearean drama, and possibly even to cite those original productions themselves; the new Globe’s performances claim to be of Shakespeare in new ways, because they restore the means by which Shakespeare’s plays had their original force. Yet as everyone connected with the project is well aware, the Globe can only be a complex contemporary undertaking, one that evinces an understanding of the working of history that is fully our own, that shares our ways of understanding and performing the past. Straddling a citational commitment to an origin that it at once invokes, creates, and displaces, the Globe dramatizes the conditions of authority animating (some would say enervating, even etiolating) dramatic performance today.

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In his now-classic essay “Collective Reflexivity: Restoration of Behavior,” Richard Schechner uses a range of performance forms – from ritual, to conventional theatrical modes, to Renaissance Pleasure Faires, restored villages and other themed amusements – to outline a comprehensive account of performance. Placing the dynamics of Western dramatic theatre within a wider understanding of performance behavior, Schechner offers an incisive way into the theatrical, and extratheatrical character of Globe performativity. Arguing that “[p]erformance means: never for the first time” (40), Schechner suggests that whether the performance is shaped as conventional theatre, religious ritual, or even a staging of traditional performance forms for modern tourists (at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawai’i, for instance), what performance reproduces is not an origin, but the illusion of originary behavior: “the event to be restored is either forgotten, never was, or is overlaid with other material, so much so that its historicity is irrelevant. What is recalled are earlier performances: history not being what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection from data arranged and interpreted; it is behavior itself and carries with it a kernel of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation” (43). Performance at the Globe depends on “restoration” of this kind. The meanings of Globe performance emerge through the performative citationality of its characteristic behaviors – offstage and on – and on what (and how) they claim to “restore.” Although the Globe is in many ways a unique performance space, performance there is not confined to the paradigm of theatre. To understand the force of performance at the Globe, the force of this hole and its historicity, we must recognize that Globe performativity is shaped by theatrical and nontheatrical regimes of performing the past. The Globe participates in a continuum of familiar history-performance venues, ranging from reconstructed historical performance environments such as Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, to constructed historical sites such as the Ironbridge Gorge Museum and the Open-Air Museum at Beamish in the UK, and Greenfield Village in Michigan (villages built by reassembling old buildings taken from a variety of locations in a new place), to efforts to rejuvenate moribund industrial or agricultural towns as picturesque historical/commercial centers (on


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the model of the Wigan Pier Historical Centre, or any number of towns in New England), to their controversial – demonic, to some – avatars in the historically “themed” sections of Disneyland and Disney World; beyond that, it is also a theatre.2 What these sites share is what they sell: a participatory experience of the past in a mode of performance designed to be pervasive, incorporating the audience in a virtual society, a landscape, an engulfing atmosphere (the authentic aromas of the Jorvik Viking Centre in York). At the same time the specific activities that constitute performance in these places are quite divergent, and so construct different experiences and different visions of history as well. The Globe is a unique structure, true enough; but Globe performance works at just this juncture, at the intersection between the early modern experience of theatre it labors to restore, and the postmodern regimes of theatrical performance and of history-performance that are its means of production. The new Globe is only the latest in a long series of efforts to restore Shakespearean drama to its original mode of theatrical production. Edmond Malone’s research in the 1790s, Ludwig Tieck’s encounter with Malone’s papers on a visit to London in 1817 and his plan to build a theatre in Dresden based on the Fortune contract, and William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society at the turn of the twentieth century gave rise to a series of modern Globes – Edward Lutyens’s half-size Globe in Earl’s Court in 1912, Thomas Wood Stevens’s design for the British pavilion of the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933–34 (later moved to San Diego as the Old Globe Theatre) – as well as to theatres adapting the thrust stage and amphitheatre structure to modern technology and taste, such as the main stage of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland or the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.3 These efforts to rebuild Shakespeare’s theatre are cognate not only with parallel trends in textual criticism (the dream of the original text), but also with attempts to restore the practices of Shakespearean acting and scenography. William Poel’s use of Elizabethan costumes in a reconstructed Fortune stage – inserted in a proscenium arch – led to a crucial lineage of modern performance, visible not only in the tendency toward doublet-and-hose authenticity, but to the now-universal practice of avoiding the five-act division and heavy movable scenery in favor of rapid scene-to-scene pacing.

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Harley Granville Barker, Tyrone Guthrie, and Peter Brook are, for all their innovation and invention, part of this larger sense of “restoring” Shakespeare through modern theatrical practice.4 Nonetheless, the Globe testifies to a confidence in one mode of modern dramatic performativity: the stage can restore the force of a classic text’s original performance by accommodating its originary mode of production. Yet while it is part of this lineage, the Globe is distinctive in two respects: in its massive commitment to historical accuracy, and in the moment of its own historicity, as part of the contemporary landscape of history as entertainment. In this chapter I trace the force of Shakespearean performativity not to the text, but to the regimes that shape performance on the stage of the new Globe. The Globe participates in several paradigms of contemporary entertainment: it is a theme park, it is living history, it is a heritage site, it is urban redevelopment, it is participatory experience. And it is theatre. Such comparisons are hardly invidious. Instead they characterize the distinctive force of Globe performativity, which arises not merely from the plays performed there but in the embodied expectations, enactment, and experience of the Globe’s performers – actors and audiences. That complex performance is, like the Globe itself, at once dependent on a kind of theatrical competence and also informed by the audience’s familiarity with cognate performance forms: living-history sites, battlefield reenactments, theme parks, and themed performance in general. What does the continuity between Globe Shakespeare and this range of nontheatrical performance genres in which the Globe participates tell us about the work of restoration in and as performance, and about the role of “restored behavior” in contemporary dramatic performativity? t h e h o le a n d its his to ric it y 25 July 2000. I’m here again, at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, this time to see Hamlet. This is the fourth production I’ve seen here – following Two Gentlemen of Verona in the “Prologue Season,” As You Like It in 1998, and the Grupo Galpão Romeu e Julieta on Sunday. I’m a little concerned about standing for several hours – there’s a large blister on each foot, and running the Berkeley Hills has injured my left knee – but I’m prepared for the yard, with aspirin and antihistamines, backpack,


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Gore-Tex jacket, sweater; I’m coated with a fine sweat from the walk, even though the July afternoon is overcast and a little chilly. Waiting for the doors to open, I have an ice cream and check out the donors’ brickwork with everyone else – Nicholas Hytner and Ian Richardson rub shoulders with Michael Palin and John Cleese; Patrick Stewart – someone says, “Patrick Stewart: the bald guy in X-Men” – must be near by. The doors open, and there’s a scramble for position. One group of groundlings rushes to the stage; another heads for the back of the yard, in order to be able to lean on the gallery wall, or on the stair-rails leading into the galleries opposite the stage. The Globe crowd is sociable, noisy, having a good time. Several spry elderly women in bulky cardigans and sensible shoes stake out space leaning on the stage, reserving places for their friends, who arrive a few minutes later; someone walks up the steps into the gallery saying,“As it’s your birthday, we’re not standing.” French, German, and several other languages pass through my hearing. Outside the theatre, I ran into two groups of American students and their professors (from Arkansas and Texas), and there are several other groups inside; a few knots of Asian tourists (why do I assume they’re tourists?), but only a scattering of black or Asian faces. It’s a predominantly white crowd, casually but well dressed, in jeans and backpacks, sweaters and windbreakers, twills and the occasional tweed jacket (I’ve heard that a few enthusiasts do occasionally arrive in Elizabethan costume): the active transnational tourist look – we might have just stepped off the tour bus at Yosemite or the White House. Across the yard, sitting in the first gallery stage left, I see three former colleagues (if the center of the tiring house wall is twelve o’clock, I’m leaning against the gallery at seven; they’re at about 2:30), and a few other familiar faces here and there. The ushers are significantly more vigilant about photography than they were at Sunday’s performance of Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta (then, an usher remarked, “We turn a blind eye, they don’t seem to mind it”) but they can’t stop a few flash snapshots, even during the performance (I forgot my camera in my room; would I try to sneak a photo?). The interior has changed since I was here in 1998: the downstage pillars have been repainted, the banisters along the front of the gallery have been marblized, some of the plastering on the walls at the back of the galleries is beginning to discolor, the seats are beginning to wear, too. According to the program Hamlet was recorded in the Stationers’ Register 398 years ago tomorrow. (Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Program 9).

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The Globe occupies a performative horizon shared at one end by theme parks and at the other by a range of living-history restorations: the force of Globe performativity is shaped by expectations, modes of attention, and habits of participation learned at these venues of popular performance. In its meticulous attention to the environment of performance, the Globe is indistinguishable from the increasingly widespread use of “living history” as a form of historical education and entertainment. Although such sites vary considerably in the ways they perform history, there are a number of conventions – performative “regimes” – common to these sites that give their performances a characteristic force as “restored history,” and that inflect Globe performativity as well. Environmental sites, such as Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, deploy a range of strategies, engaged by both actors and audiences, that shape the visitor’s performance; shaping experience, these conventions of performance also define the conduct of “history” itself. Like the Globe, Plimoth Plantation is a monument to the persistence of mimetic desire. At the same time the history of the Plantation also testifies to a changing vision of performed history, and a changing sense of the potential force of the past performed. Reenacting the life of the Pilgrims can be traced to the Pilgrim tableaux performed at historical festivals in the town of Plymouth in the 1890s, through the more elaborately staged pageants of the 1920s, and through the annual Pilgrims’ Progress of costumed townspeople (each portraying an actual member of the colony) of the 1930s and 1940s. The current plantation was first imagined by Henry Hornblower ii, an amateur archeologist who encouraged his father to donate $20,000 as seed money to build a Pilgrim village in the late 1940s. Initially conceived on the model of Greenfield Village (built outside Detroit by Henry Ford, Jr. in the 1920s), Colonial Williamsburg (built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in the 1930s), or Old Sturbridge Village (a working nineteenth-century farm in central Massachusetts that opened in 1946), the Pilgrim village was to be a reconstructed version of the original settlement, and several houses were built in the early 1950s on the waterfront in downtown Plymouth, on ground that had been cleared for the Tercentenary pageants of 1921. In 1956, though, Hornblower acquired fifty acres from his grandmother, an open site on the Eel River overlooking Plymouth harbor where he began to


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reconstruct the homes of prominent colonists. When Plimoth Plantation opened in 1957 (like the Globe, near but not on the site of the original settlement), it was accompanied by a second venue: the Mayflower II . Built with some early modern shipbuilding methods, the Mayflower sailed from England (using some seventeenth-century seamanship as well), arriving in Massachusetts in June.5 The character of historical performance at Plimoth has, however, changed dramatically since the 1950s. From its opening, through to the late 1960s, the Plantation consisted of charming cottages filled with period antiques. The buildings housed wax Pilgrims, while costumed interpreters lectured, demonstrated various activities, and answered visitors’ questions. Although these guides wore costumes, the clothing was inauthentic both in design (the buckled shoes and hats traditionally, but inaccurately, ascribed to the Pilgrims) and in construction (polyester), and the guides assumed neither Pilgrim roles nor early modern English accents. In his vivid account of Plimoth Plantation, Stephen Eddy Snow – a descendant of members of the Plymouth colony who spent two summers acting as an interpreter on the Plantation in the 1980s – reports a momentous change in educational philosophy and historiographic practice that took place at the Plantation in 1969. Not only were the antiques removed from the restored village, but in succeeding years the tidy pastoral folly was rebuilt to resemble more accurately a struggling agricultural village. Under the direction of Harvard-educated anthropologist James Deetz, Plimoth was put on course to become a “living museum,” in which the material culture of the period would be reproduced and the mental and behavioral culture of the people (the ethnoi) would be re-created . . . The third-person narrative presentation of the “Pilgrim Fathers” (mythic figures) by museum guides who were frequently dressed in inauthentic period attire was replaced by a format in which the cultural life of the Pilgrims was recreated by “interpreters” dressed in well-researched historical costumes and giving, as Deetz said,“the appearance of seventeenth-century Pilgrims” . . . The next phase of this metaphrasis came in the early 1970s, when interpreters began to experiment with speaking in period dialect and in the first person . . . By 1978, this living history method was the modus operandi in the re-creation of Pilgrim life at Plimoth. Interpreters were trained to embody fully the ethnohistorical roles, to act as if they truly were seventeenth-century Pilgrims. (Performing the Pilgrims xx)

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Since the 1970s Plimoth Plantation and the Mayflower II have come to exemplify the work of living-history performance. Plimoth labors to provide a seamless performance of the plantation in the year 1627, and its reconstruction has become even more exhaustively attentive to detail: buildings are torn down and rebuilt according to precise standards (rough-hewn boards, wooden chimneys), with nails and tools manufactured by Plimoth blacksmiths; farm animals are back-bred to resemble their seventeenth-century ancestors; there is even a reproduction mousetrap under Governor Bradford’s bed, should anyone decide to look (Patricia Mandell, “Details, Details, Details” 49). The most characteristic aspect of living history at Plimoth Plantation is the performance of its “interpreters,” who are responsible both for delivering information about the colony and for embodying its ways of life as well. The actors attempt to capture, or “restore” in Schechner’s sense, the language, the dialect, the behavior, and even the episteme of seventeenth-century farmers, and as visitors move through the plantation they encounter the villagers in that lost lifeworld. Visitors eager to learn about Pilgrim life must engage Plimoth’s denizens in conversation, a dialogue across the centuries. For at Plimoth the actors no longer work as modern guides. They perform Pilgrim roles, and diligently avoid mentioning – or even recognizing – aspects of post-seventeenth-century life. Visitors no longer meet modern “instructors in Pilgrim attire, but ‘informants’ portraying William Bradford, John Billington, John and Priscilla Alden and others.”6 The performers are “acting,” of course, but the boundary between their offstage and onstage behavior is difficult to locate: they are always signifying the past, “acting” it, even when they are merely “behaving.” In this sense performance at Plimoth, and on the nearby Mayflower II , is different from the performances of the Young National Trust Theatre at various heritage sites in the United Kingdom, where the actors’ performance is more clearly bound to the quasi-historical drama they invent, script, and perform for the spectators (although there are several festivities held throughout the summer season at Plimoth that follow a generalized scenario, in which the interpreters improvise action and dialogue consistent with their individual roles). It is also different from the widespread use of costumed guides or


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craft-demonstrators, who not assume a first-person role in the past, but instead provide information about their craft from a third-person perspective that they share with the contemporary audience. At Plimoth the “restoration” extends from the landscape to the livestock to the architecture to the interpreters’ performance of carpentry or candlemaking to their mere behavior, their being in the world. Their immersion in seventeenth-century mannerisms onstage tends to make their offstage behavior also appear to restore the past – even if they are just walking across the plantation to the concealed modern toilets, or to the breakroom where they have lunch and punch their timeclocks (Snow, Performing the Pilgrims 115, 74). The characteristic “subjunctive mood” of Plimoth Plantation creates the impression that everything addresses the participant/spectator from the seventeenth century (Schechner, “Collective Reflexivity” 40). Places like Plimoth Plantation transform the past into something with “exhibition value,” what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls “Pastness” (“Afterlives” 5). For all their vitality these sites involve their visitors in the performance of “culture as dead practice”; building their characters by imaginatively blending biographical and historical information with the given circumstances of Plimoth, the interpreters’ routine use of the performance practices of Stanislavskian stage realism makes the Plantation “a kind of museum of theatre practice” as well. As performed history the animated “virtual pilgrim world” involves a museum aesthetic far removed from the display-case of artifacts (or from the site of Plymouth Rock, sunk several feet below street level in a kind of classical portico), which objectifies the material past in a mute dialogue with the present.7 Nonetheless – unlike battlefield reenactments in this regard – Plimoth is a strangely haunted place for its contemporary visitors.8 Carrying on in the various regional accents of reconstructed seventeenth-century English, the past is voluble, but the present is mute, at least to the extent that the audience is allowed to engage with the actors only in seventeenthcentury terms (hence the typical sport of Plimoth and other such sites,“Pilgrim-baiting”: trying to get the actors to break frame and allude to your sneakers, sunglasses, wristwatch, cellphone). Much as it is periodically torn down and rebuilt, so as continually to resemble, despite the Massachusetts weather, the colony in the year 1627, Plimoth Plantation resembles another living town locked in the past,

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occasionally visited by strangely ignorant, kindly specters of a time yet to come: Brigadoon. While the boundary between performer and audience at sites such as Plimoth is less visible than in a proscenium theatre, it is no less marked, especially where issues of liability, entertainment value, or cultural politics are at stake (I am thinking of the controversial slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, which was structured in such a way as to prevent “bidding” by anyone who was not an actor, as a way both to reinforce the “pastness” of this performance, and to prohibit an unsavory enactment of slavery’s continuity with contemporary racial tensions).9 Insofar as the patrons are generally limited to a spectator role, participatory venues such as Plimoth or the Blitz Experience at the Imperial War Museum in London provide a more conventionally theatrical entertainment than the experiential immersion of battle reenactors such as the Sealed Knot (which enacts battles between Roundheads and Royalists), or various Roman Army groups in the UK, or the “period rush” sought by the “hardcore” “living historians” of the American Civil War profiled by Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic.10 Nonetheless, the dynamics of reenactment – the experience of “pastness” through a detailed,“restored” performance in the present – clearly inform both the educational aesthetics of living-history performance and those of the Globe’s performances as well. The Globe’s attention to the experience of its visible, active audience suggests that Globe performance participates in this wider swath of nontheatrical historical performance. Ceremonies honoring the Civil War dead (at Gettysburg, for instance) began during the war itself, and commemorations involving participants were prominent well into the twentieth century. Like Plimoth Plantation, though, battlefield reenactment and reenactment clubs and societies developed significantly in the 1950s, and (again like Plimoth) Civil War reenactments have demonstrated an insistent drive toward greater accuracy and authenticity in performance. Members of the “hardcore” subculture – a subculture of a subculture, really, since “hardcores” comprise a tiny minority of the estimated 40,000 Civil War reenactors in the United States – use period dyes to make their uniforms (which, of course, are never washed), scrutinize photographs (and specialist merchandise catalogues) for uniform fashion details, soak their brass buttons in urine,


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sleep rough in the field holding one another for warmth (“spooning”), sometimes march barefoot, and even follow extreme, low-calorie diets (for that hauntingly emaciated, hollow-eyed, Matthew Brady look), all in pursuit of what they call “wargasm.” Women participate, too, as sutlers, camp-followers, and occasionally as soldiers, in addition to emulating – in period finery – the nineteenth-century crowds who sometimes took picnics to watch the battles. The numbers can be sizable at such events: Randal Allred reports that 50,000 people watched the 125th anniversary of the first battle of Bull Run, and nearly 13,000 participants “fought” in the reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg in 1988 (“Catharsis, Revision, and Re-enactment” 2). There are hobbyist publications (such as The Camp Chase Gazette) and catalogues for shirts and uniforms made to the specifications of particular units; and manufacturers of period firearms and sabres, of buttons and mess tins, even of horse tackle and wagons. One Mississippi company, C & D Jarnagin, even reproduces the inspectors’ stamp on leather goods and the brown thread used to sew the blue Union uniforms (“Catharsis, Revision, and Re-enactment” 5). To stroll in shorts and sneakers through Plimoth Plantation on a warm July afternoon is to engage in a very different performance from the “time-warp” experience of reenacting Pickett’s Charge, a “wargasm” that induces its own desire to rewrite history. Allred spoke “with a young Rebel re-enactor” after the reenactment of Pickett’s Charge at the Gettysburg reenactment in 1988, who said “that a large number of his fellows had made a pact to change the script and keep running, breach the Union line, and change history. Tears ran down his face as he said that it had been impossible: the sheer force and concussion of the Union rifles firing those mere blanks had literally knocked them down”(10).11 Diggin and fakin: even the most authentic restoration enacts the desire to make a difference. Historical sites and historical reenactment help to chart the landscape of cultural performance occupied by the Globe, and to frame the kinds of behavior summoned by the Globe as well. Much of the controversy surrounding the Globe – whether it is a Disneyland or not; whether this comparison is pejorative or not – concerns the “subjunctive mood” (Schechner, “Collective Reflexivity” 40) of the performances it frames, the kind of restoration, or “surrogation” to use Joseph Roach’s term, that it promises (Cities of the Dead 2–3). Like

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Plimoth Plantation, the Globe is deeply textured by efforts toward architectural and historical accuracy, as well as by the necessity to commodify a vision of the past to finance the project. Even in its first incarnation, the 1599 Globe was a kind of restoration, rebuilding The Theatre in Southwark as a “vintage instrument” for its actors; new fire laws and the rising lumber prices would shortly transform theatres in the city to brick (Smith, Acoustic World 208–09). Today the new Globe’s construction is a landmark in contemporary architecture, at once memorializing and recovering lost architectural practices – such as ad quadratum laying out of the design (see John Orrell, “Designing the Globe,” and Jon Greenfield, “Timber Framing”) – and bringing an English cottage-industry in Tudor construction methods into the public eye. In the minutiae of its construction, it implicitly demonstrates the transformation of English culture and economy over the past four centuries (the plastering is done with goat hair, because cow hair today is too short [Shakespeare’s Globe: The Guidebook 27]). It teaches new lessons about early modern building practices (how effective lath and plaster is against fire), and about how those methods could be adapted to modern requirements (the Globe is the first thatched building in London since the Great Fire; the thatching is treated with retardant and the roof is protected from fire by a sprinkler system). The Globe is a testament to the survival or reanimation of traditional crafts, but it is also a testament to the explosion of a retrofit aesthetic in the 1970s and 1980s and its attendant technologies, an aesthetic that depends, as Raphael Samuel suggests, “as much on concealing the evidence of modernity as in multiplying period effects” (Theatres of Memory 77). For while the Globe restores the past, it also operates as a living theatre; the requirement that it function as a living theatre, with living audiences, has been the signal challenge to authentic reconstruction, running afoul of fire laws, maximum theatre occupancy rules, conventions of modern theatre design (toilets), as well as of modern Tudor aesthetics, which may require anachronistic period effects (exposed rather than whitewashed exterior timbers, for instance). Although there is, as I understand it, an ongoing controversy about doing experimental productions involving Elizabethan accents, and/or reconstructed rehearsal and performance practices (Patrick Tucker’s Original Shakespeare Company has


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conducted such experiments, but not as part of the Globe season), the Globe is intended not merely as a place for the performance of the past, a place for its audiences to conjure an imagined experience of Shakespeare’s theatre. For the Globe to achieve its experimental mission, the performances taking place there have to be contemporary as well, using the structure of the Globe as a springboard to the ongoing dialogue between Shakespeare’s plays and contemporary audiences, the experience of live, contemporary theatre. Unlike at Plimoth Plantation, or even in the Gettysburg time warp, the Globe’s actors must, some of the time, speak to us, now. The historical accuracy of the physical structure reminds us that the Globe is cognate with the rise of living-history aesthetics and struggles with many of the difficulties typical of living-history performance: how to engage and control the audience’s active participation; how to conceal the modern apparatus behind the performance of the past it sustains; how to provide an authentic “living” performance rather than a moribund antiquarian spectacle. Moreover, in marketing a uniquely historical experience of Shakespearean theatre, the Globe also recalls another mode of history-performance: the theme park. From its inception the creators of the Globe have resisted the obvious similarities between the Globe and Renaissance Pleasure Faires, theme parks, or Disneyland and Walt Disney World, perhaps for good reason. For while some of this resistance may spring from marketing savvy, high-cultural pretension, or a scholarly sense that theme parks are “doubly offensive because they seem to come to us from America, and because they link history to the holiday industry” (Samuel, Theatres of Memory 268), it may also point to a deeper recognition: as a postmodern, themed entertainment complex, retailing the “experience” of history to a tourist audience, the Globe is inseparable from the conceptual (and capital) economies of theme parks and theming more generally. Theme parks witness the power of metonymy. Dean MacCannell describes theme parks as “decoys” – a decoy is a “restricted-access, large-scale (though usually not full-scale) architectural copy of an authentic attraction” in which the “tourists are the ‘ducks’” (“Virtual Reality’s Place” 17). Since theme parks offer the commodified experience of a place’s “theme” or “essence,” it is easier to build a successful theme location around a place that is not very specific or familiar,

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or that can be made to represent a larger and more complex cultural whole, in the way that Renaissance Pleasure Faires do not refer to specific historical events, but to a generalized sense of “Renaissance” festivity. As the Project on Disney notes,“[a]lthough the design of the Canadian pavilion [at Disney World] is based upon actual structures – a chateau in Ottawa, for example – these structures are not nearly as recognizable [to Americans, at least] as the Eiffel Tower in the French pavilion. One is free, therefore, to imagine Disney’s ‘Canada’ as somehow the ‘essence’ of the country without being reminded of an actual place” – confirming, it hardly needs to be said, how many Americans tend to imagine Canada anyway (Inside the Mouse 204–05). Theming is not confined to theme parks, though; it sustains the work of living-history performance, too. The interpreters of Plimoth Plantation often improvise narratives that are thematically consistent with Plimoth’s portrayal of Pilgrim life, stories that circulate among the characters and visitors in the course of a given day, and so help to create the gossipy texture of daily life.12 Theming tends to generalize and essentialize, and the principal source for thematic imagery at theme parks is typically the media, mainly film and television. In one sense what the patrons “perform” in theme parks is experience troped by the imagery, characters, and narratives previously encountered in mass-culture entertainment. The Disney World Prime Time Cafe places patrons in a set, a diner derived less from the 1950s than from television images of 1950s culture, images that are replayed on television sets in the restaurant, just as many of the rides and amusements at Disneyland and Disney World evoke Disney films (Inside the Mouse 46). Like theming itself, the theming of already commodified products and images is not found only in theme parks, but also sustains more authentic historical reenactment. Robert Lee Hodge, a “hardcore” Civil War player, and the “Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating,” not only studies photographs for the details of living (and dead) soldiers, but also yearns to see his hardcore squad of Southern Guardsmen assemble to reproduce the photograph of Confederate soldiers on the march that is displayed in the Antietam battlefield visitors’ center (Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic 8, 228). To some extent theme parks are simpler – “Disneyfied” – versions of sites such as Greenfield Village (mainly eighteenth-century American


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buildings) or Ironbridge (mainly nineteenth-century British structures), which gather period buildings from a variety of locations to form a typical “themed” town, “what Barrie Trinder, a moving spirit at Ironbridge, calls ‘a hypothetical industrial community’ ” framed by “assembling historical artefacts on a greenfield site and threading them with a narrative” (Samuel, Theatres of Memory 169). We play these sites differently, and they do have different kinds of meaning for us: living-history and open-air museums arose in Scandinavia as part of late nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism; Ford’s Greenfield and Rockefeller’s Williamsburg were built as memorials to a way of life their modern industry was helping to destroy, and to instill a conveniently capitalist ideology of American identity through the rhetoric of historical recovery; Ironbridge is a United Nations World Heritage Site. For all their differences, though, what these sites share is the aesthetics of theming; what they sell is the themed experience of the past performed. The reciprocity between the Globe and theme parks arises in part through the extension of theming throughout contemporary life. The transformation of the urban economy of “global cities” – the impact of “globally oriented financial and business service centers, demanding new office towers, luxury residences, entertainment spaces, and upscale marketplaces” – has also transformed the landscape of such cities, producing a series of restored “tableaux,” “scenic enclaves” in which architectural restoration provides the theme for an upscale service economy.13 The theming of urban public space – shopping malls and airports, even the extensive indoor downtown areas of Minneapolis and Montréal – is in part a child of the City Beautiful movement, of the rationalizing of the modernist city proposed by Le Corbusier and others, and even of Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities for Tomorrow (Michael Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland” 211–12). But the historical, even metonymic theming of urban space dramatizes the extraordinary impact of Disneyland and Disney World on the organization and signification of public space, as well as on the understanding of themed “experience” as a commodity, as a hallmark of the contemporary economy. In a recent business study directed to “those searching for new ways to add value to their enterprises,” Joseph Pine i i and James Gilmore claim that “[e]xperiences represent an existing but previously unarticulated genre of economic output”

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(Experience Economy ix).14 Theming not only adds value to goods and services (the themed hotel or restaurant, for example), but also creates “experience” as a product genre, with its own elaborate mode of production. Maurya Wickstrom argues that the interplay between the Disney Corporation’s conjunction of themed retail stores and retail theatres in New York’s Times Square does not first encourage consumers “to have commodities; they must be compelled to become them”; theming creates “environments and narratives through which spectators/consumers are interpellated into fictions produced by and marketed in both shows and stores”(“Commodities, Mimesis, and The Lion King” 285). The Globe participates in the economy of themed experience today, an economy that, for all its reliance on the technology of globalization, traces its aesthetics to the same sources that inspired Walt Disney: the World’s Fairs of the 1930s. The inspiration for Disneyland arose at the conjunction of two entertainment performances: Disney’s 1938 visit to the Chicago Railroading Fair (where he donned overalls and worked the throttle of a real locomotive) and his “disgust” at the poor hygiene and service at conventional amusement parks in the 1950s (Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland” 206). Disneyland – which opened in 1955 – is a version of the garden city themed according to the model of the technological or industrial fair, such as the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, or the 1933–34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, where Sam Wanamaker saw the model Globe in the British pavilion, the inspiration that led to Shakespeare’s Globe on the Thames (Andrew Gurr,“Shakespeare’s Globe” 32). The Globe is a tourist destination, and there are T-shirts and postcards and film and books in the giftshop (there is a giftshop). Yet the Globe most resembles theme parks in what it sells: a mediated experience of the past in the present.15 Yet performance at Disney usually evokes the totalitarian dimension of theming, for which Disney has become notorious. Theme parks choreograph and commodify all aspects of experience (where to take photographs, where to stay, what to do), regimenting their visitors as much as their famously regimented employees.16 For all their themed similarity, sites such as Plimoth Plantation, let alone battle reenactments, require the visitors’ active participation. The Pilgrim interpreters assimilate historical and biographical information, but they do not have a written script to


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follow; the effect of their highly improvised performance of Pilgrim life depends on the active agency of the visitors, their questions and comments, their desire to speak with the dead – often about seventeenth-century religion and politics. Theme parks tend to construct their visitors more passively, as consumers rather than producers of experience. Not surprisingly, visitors preferring forms of recreation in which their agency matters usually find theme parks disenchanting; in the words of one bored visitor to Disney World, “I don’t like to go somewhere where they chew the food for you” (Project on Disney, Inside the Mouse 109). In this sense the explicitly theatrical function of the Globe marks a remove from the total-institution of the theme park. Although the performance of the Globe is clearly themed, onstage Globe performances presumably work to avoid the prechewed pastiche of theme-park enactment, the performance of “performance,” so to speak. Staging performances as contemporary theatre characterizes the “restored behavior” of Globe performance, and distinguishes the work of the Globe both from sites such as Plimoth, and from that muchfeared evil twin, “Bard World” (David Patrick Stearns, “Reconstructed Globe”). Plays at the Globe, a living theatre, should be different from Renaissance Pleasure Faire antics, and from museum-performance as well. Unlike the actors of eighteenth-century plays in the theatre at Colonial Williamsburg, the Globe actors act like contemporary actors: they usually do not speak to us from the past, Mark-Rylanceas-Dick-Burbage-as-Hamlet. The performances, even the 1997 Henry V that “restored” authentic staging practices and costumes made with period technology and dyes (and, of course, the underwear), are not meant to be performances then that we overlook like the village idiots watching the Plimoth blacksmith (“duh, what’s that for, Miles?”), or like the faux-Georgians of the Williamsburg theatre, but performances now. The notion is that “The reconstruction of the Globe is as faithful to the original as scholarship, construction and craftsmanship can make it” (Shakespeare’s Globe: The Guidebook 41), and that by constructing this frame, modern performers and modern audiences will have “a working theatre, Shakespeare’s factory, to see how his plays were originally intended to work” (Gurr, “Shakespeare’s Globe” 34). While this may sound like the craftsman-performer aesthetic at work (we can watch someone shoeing a horse, we can watch a

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demonstration of early modern acting), the performances strike a distance from reconstructed Elizabethan acting. In an important sense “acting” at Plimoth consists of labor as theatre, the demonstration of labor, of work. Michael Stratton implies that these performances sometimes fail to convey the “drudgery, danger, or squalor” of early modern agricultural labor (“Open-Air and Industrial Museums” 171), but much of what the interpreters do is in fact real work, work in the living world the actors share with their audiences (several women demonstrate Pilgrim cooking by making a meal from scratch that the Pilgrims eat later in the day; the blacksmith hammers out the nails used in building the restoration). The Globe actors’ acting, on the other hand, is their performance. Rather than demonstrating Elizabethan acting (as though their performance were like the Pilgrim cooking class, or perhaps a product like Pilgrim food), the Globe actors act like modern actors acting Shakespeare; while whatever work the characters perform is purely fictive, the real-world labor of the actors is the performance itself, and whatever drudgery or danger it overcomes or excitement it creates is part of its character as work in the here and now. The audience, too, is both addressed and performs as a contemporary theatregoing public. Despite the hissing and booing, we are hardly reenactors: remember those urine-soaked buttons. The former executive director of the Globe, Michael Holden, once promised to eject any patrons arriving at the Globe in costume (“Discussion”). While Plimoth uses acting to restore the lifeways of the past, acting at the Globe seems directed toward something else, toward using the physical frame to make the persistent properties of Shakespeare’s plays visible as contemporary performance. Rather than the “period rush” sought by the American Civil War players, the Globe restores the medium of Shakespeare’s theatre to the present, in order to demonstrate that we can still discover what has been there, in the text, all along. The Globe claims a unique performative relationship with Shakespeare’s texts: only here will the rituals of modern stage performance lend Shakespeare’s writing its legitimate, originary force. At the same time, though, the meaning of the Globe and the performances it shapes arise from how this multiplex space is used. The work of restoration really takes place in the relationship between performers,


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between actors and audiences, and recovering this relationship – in which “audiences are free to choose to take part (in a positive or negative way) unless or until the actors stop them” – justifies the experimental mission of the Globe: “to discover through experience how much of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy has a practical basis – and why” (Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare 6, 7). The wooden O is, of course, not really hollow at all. Like all space – built or unbuilt, constructed or natural – the Globe space is saturated with meanings. For many audiences the Globe appears to cite not merely the conditions of Shakespeare’s theatre, but an entire vision of the past. Writing in the Sunday Times, John Peter describes the “serious, entertaining, commercially viable and classless” theatre that he thinks was destroyed when “Cromwell closed the theatres in 1642,” a theatre whose “excitement, its vigorous, classless appeal, and . . . stylistic and political audacity” the new Globe seems to recapture. Unlike what passes for political and populist theatre today – “a working-class knees-up aggressively lowbrow, and flourishing its moral and social membership card by rejecting serious argument, long words and uncomfortable ideas” – the Globe appears to restore a mythic vision of a classless, vibrant past as the ideal image of post-Thatcher British culture, a vision that Peter is unable to articulate without simultaneously enacting the persistent privileges and prejudices of class (“Where the Audience is King”). While the Globe may work to restore the workaday practice of Shakespearean playing, to its audiences the present practice of performing (in) the Globe resembles what Joseph Roach terms surrogation, in which performance reproduces “an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (Cities of the Dead 3).17 Much as the entertainment at Disneyland and Disney World depends on a familiarity with “Disney” (you do not need to have seen the films, but you do have to know who Mickey and Donald and Bambi and Pocahontas are), performing at the Globe may depend on a similar acquaintance with “Shakespeare,” not an intimate knowledge of his plays, theatre, or society, but a sense that the bustling wooden O will generate a very different – more enjoyable, more involving, more historical, more authentic, more “Shakespearean” – experience than we usually have sitting in the dark through three hours of obsolescent versified drama.

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Peter’s fantasy of the energetic classless vigor of the original Globe smacks a little of the roast-beef-and-wenches imagery of Renaissance Pleasure Faires, a nostalgic citation of absent origins that visibly animates the audience’s engagement in Globe performance. Standing in the yard is a richly interesting experience, one that has quickly become conventionalized. The “groundling groupies” have developed their own rituals, behavior that is readily played by the actors onstage. “The prommers stand merrily for three hours at a time; stand there beaming merrily up at the stage; stand like patience on a monument, smiling at grief – smiling indeed at everything, and laughing wherever possible.”18 Globe performance strikes its distance from conventional contemporary Shakespeare by involving the audience energetically in a participatory engagement with the space and with the performance. Characteristic of theme parks, of theme events (Renaissance Pleasure Faires), and of heritage performance, this aspect of Globe performativity requires the audience to bring its own notions of appropriate behavior to bear, in ways that are at once democratic and potentially disruptive of the Globe’s claims to devise and control authentic performances onstage, and so to govern the authenticity of performance throughout the great Globe itself. Like Peter’s review, this behavior typically cites a recognizably Victorian vision of Merrie Olde England; the audience’s performance – like the retrofit aesthetic, concealing “the evidence of modernity” while multiplying “period effects” – has at least as much in common with the chemically treated thatch with sprinklers inside as it has with the incendiary social realities of behavior in the early modern theatre (Samuel, Theatres of Memory 77). In the 1998 As You Like It, for example, the actors – anachronistically, of course – cleared a space in the yard for the wrestling match, in part by drawing their swords on the audience, clearly a much less volatile act than it would have been four centuries ago: presumably Renaissance actors could “carry” only while acting. What would it have meant for an actor to leave the stage armed, let alone to draw upon a gentleman? One complex version of the transformation of convention has to do with the lively hissing and booing of the villains, first widely noted during the 1997 Henry V , and now – as I heard another groundling say during As You Like It in 1998 – “what you come here for.” It is difficult to register the force of this behavior, for like all behavior


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it registers several kinds of meaning at once. Arriving in its modern “uniform” – “chic sack on back, mobile phone in pocket, and possibly lurid cycling gloves” (Penny Wark, Review of The Maid’s Tragedy) – the audience seems not quite to indulge itself in Pleasure Faire antics and yet to behave in ways (booing, hissing, etc.) that are part of a modest, buttoned-down reenactment of “Elizabethan” theatricality. The conventionality of this behavior is recognized by the Globe producers, who regard the performances as “licensing” such behavior as a necessary element in the investigation of Shakespeare’s factory. The limits of this license are enacted everywhere in the theatre: in the actors’ performances; in what the audiences are asked to do and not do; in the distinctly modern behavior of those distinctly modern performers, the ushers. For all its genteel rowdiness, the Globe is a visibly policed space; fire laws, ticket pricing, and the easy access to the gallery from the yard call for unusually active ushers, who keep people from standing or sitting on the steps in the gallery aisles, as well as occasionally preventing fatigued groundlings from sitting where they stand, which is said to disrupt the actors’ concentration much as it breaks the illusion of the happy throng in the yard. Performing in the Globe involves being given a kind of “freedom” while seeing that it is not “abused”; as Chantal Miller-Schütz points out in the first Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, “[t]here is a need to strike a balance between liberating the audience and telling them how far it is admissible to go” (5). Although this interplay between stage and audience was surely part of the entertainment at the original Globe, the slippage between theatre and theming at the new Globe also produces a slippage between the kinds of behavior appropriate to the event, its proper performativity, so to speak. As theatre, as authentic Shakespearean theatre, the Globe summons the attention associated (at least since the turn of the twentieth century) with the consumption of high art, behavior familiar from the silent symphony hall, the hushed gallery, the attentive theatre auditorium. As theming the Globe participates in – and legitimates – a more garrulous and energetic performativity, one apparently at odds with the properly contemplative attitude demanded by the modern theatre, and by modern Shakespeare. Pauline Kiernan’s sense that “[c]ontrol of the circumstances of performance then becomes, to some extent, up for grabs” betrays an anxiety about the propriety of this behavior (Staging

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Shakespeare 6), an anxiety echoing through the press’s general condescension to (and ritual skewering of ) the Globe’s foreign, tourist audience. This anxiety extends to the actors, too, who are for the most part excited by the visible public and its close involvement with the performance onstage. Pauline Kiernan reports that during the “Prologue Season” performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1996, Jack Shepherd, the director, “went into the actors’ dressing rooms in the interval to ask them to ‘calm it down’ because, he said, it was getting like the Last Night of the Proms.’ ” While the lively audience provided a “ ‘very powerful’ ” atmosphere, the spectators’ reactions “ ‘were very selfconscious, often embarrassingly so.’ ” The danger of this response – noted by Mike Alfreds of the Method & Madness Theatre Company – “ ‘can be a danger of a sort of complacent self-indulgence on the audience’s part and to treat the whole thing as a sort of jolly outing – anything goes, not really serious . . . I suppose audiences have to learn how to behave’ ” (quoted in Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare 24–25). The audience’s play undermines the producers’ control of the show and so of the properly Shakespearean experience, extending Henry V by as much as fifteen minutes, for example, and occasionally provoking retaliation, as when Mark Rylance stopped the performance of Henry V to silence a group of schoolchildren.19 For the producers what licenses the audience’s performance, and authorizes the project as a whole, is an understanding of the proper present regard for Shakespeare, a lively yet decorous responsiveness to the play that avoids too much playing around. The Globe is a hugely interesting “decoy,” much like any other experimental laboratory. Rather than sneering at the ironies of “deconstructive postmodernists,” we should recognize that the Globe can only work as “an extraordinary laboratory for analyzing Shakespeare’s drama and his age” (if that is possible) to the extent that it can accomplish what – in their very different ways – Plimoth Plantation and the Prime Time Cafe do as well: open a space where the past is engaged as present performance (Hornby, “The Globe Restored” 617). What distinguishes the Globe is not its use as a laboratory for investigating Shakespeare’s age, but the extent to which it uses theatrical performance – the audience’s as well as the actors’ – to imply that this specifically theatrical form of historical recovery is “a social


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form of knowledge,” an “ensemble of activities and practices in which ideas of history are embedded or a dialectic of past-present relations is rehearsed” (Samuel, Theatres of Memory 8). The regimes of Globe performativity are evocative of a wide range of contemporary performance; touristical, recreational, historical, everyday-life, and theatrical genres of behavior all frame its occasion of Shakespearean drama. The Globe’s performers – actors and audiences – bring these significant, signifying behaviors to bear, behaviors trained on historical sites, Renaissance Pleasure Faires, sporting events, and theme parks, behaviors increasingly refined by the marketing of “experience” throughout the service economy. They also bring expectations trained through a familiarity with Shakespeare plays, with summer Shakespeare festivals, with theatregoing, with Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean acting, and perhaps with the experimental cast of mind evoked by the project’s animators. It is sort of authentic, sort of theme park, tourist dependent, mediated, a Polonian early modern-modernistpostmodern event. In other words, it is our Globe, necessarily part of how we imagine the great (w)hole of history.

fa k in a n d dig g in If acting were a contest the game would have gone to Rylance. Stephen Fay, Review of Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City” (97)

What is the “act” that stage performance at the Globe performs? For Mark Rylance and many of the Globe’s animators, Globe performativity enables a direct expression of the Shakespearean past and its articulation in the present. The experience of playgoing at the Globe is surely framed by the regimes of restoration; at the same time playgoing there also participates in other forms of behavior that inform the performative force of Globe Shakespeare. The rhetoric of the globalized cityscape, with its tourists, museums, restored districts, and themed entertainments provides one syntax of Globe performativity, framing the activities of actors and audiences within a transnational flow of products, people, and performances (I consider this aspect

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of the Globe at greater length in the following chapter); the more widespread availablility of living-history and themed reenactments provides another; modern theatre, Shakespearean and otherwise, provides still another. The interplay between theming and theatre that lends Globe Shakespeare its peculiar force is difficult to capture, enacted in different ways by different performances, and to date only one production – the 1997 Henry V – has been conceived with a full and systematic fidelity to authentic staging, design, costumes, and performance. The 2000 season provided a different opportunity to seize the restorative theatricality specific to the Globe, with a play whose implication in the original Globe makes its revival in the new Globe a particularly challenging, and potentially revealing, act of restored performativity: Hamlet. From Lionel Abel to Maynard Mack to James Calderwood to Michael Goldman, Hamlet has been seen as an urgently metatheatrical drama, a play in which the sterile promontory of the Globe stage, its “majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” must have exerted a powerfully concretizing force on an audience’s engagement with the play. Does this theatrical reflexivity persist, and if so how is it deployed, in the modern, themed theatricality of the new Globe? How does Hamlet work the Globe, and, equally important, how does the goodly frame work Hamlet? Watching a play is an experience in time, of time. So is writing about performance. When I saw Hamlet in July 2000, I had already read widely about the Globe, theme parks, and living-history performances for a paper that I delivered in Stratford-upon-Avon two years earlier, then expanded and published in 1999; I am reworking this material yet again as part of this book. Watching Hamlet I knew that my perspective on the performance was somewhat eccentric, academic. Writing now, two years later, I am confronting the difficulty of claiming to restore even my own – admittedly partial – sense of the event with any real confidence. The competing textures of the Globe are compacted with the reading, writing, lecturing, touring (visits to Las Vegas and to the Skansen living-history park in Stockholm) that I have done since. Scrawled on my program is “18-inch rail around the stage in Hamlet – why?” Reading Jacquelyn Bessell’s notes on “Hamlet – The White Company, 2000” from the Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, I find this:


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A low rail (approx. 18 high), supported by small balustrades, ran along the edge of the stage for this production. This was designed as an experiment to encourage the groundlings to respond more freely, relieving them of any feelings of obligation to do so. The rail also contained the world of the play, and was thus an attempt to help define the “interior” feel of the play. It impacted the way the actors used the space in many ways, but perhaps the most advantageous was the way in which it allowed the actors to use the outer perimeter more. The edges of the stage were clearly defined and this encouraged the actors to play right up to the edge. (4)

A perfect datum: the material design of the theatre, the producers’ concerns, the performers’ – actors’ and audience’s – behavior gathered into a single “restored” architectural detail. Did I notice a difference in the audience’s responsiveness, or in the actors’ movements, or in the ways the fictive landscape of the drama occupied the wooden terrain of the stage?20 There’s a palpable sense of occasion, more excitement, it seems to me, than when I’ve been here before: it’s Hamlet. Standing in the yard, the occasion seems less a test of Hamlet than a kind of urgent festivity, as though there’s a conflict of expectations animating the space and its inhabitants. The play begins, and the house is hard to settle. Perhaps it’s the performance, which seems stodgy and stilted, but most of the first scene is lost, in part because people are still coming and going, talking, moving around; the rowdiness of the crowd, its desire to hiss and hoot, to talk to one another, grows throughout the performance. The production seems generally “authentic” but not rigorously so – period costumes are offset against the eerie sound of the Ghost’s entrance, and against the modern music throughout. [Later I discover that the designers contemplated modern dress for Hamlet but decided instead on “ ‘modern dress circa 1600,’ ” avoiding ostentatious authenticity – especially ruffs – to avoid making the performance feel “too remote from the audience at the new Globe in 2000.” Likewise the closing jig was composed as a “danse macabre that featured Elizabethan dance steps to Spanish rhythms, with a nod to New Orleans jazz” (Bessell,“Hamlet – The White Company, 2000” 5, 6).] Mark Rylance’s opening scenes as Hamlet use the specific theatricality of the Globe: he plays much of the second scene upstage, often with his back toward the audience, even delivering “a little more than kin, and less than kind” directly upstage to Claudius. Performances at the Globe have demonstrated, somewhat surprisingly, that

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upstage center, rather than downstage, is the position of maximum focus and power; Bruce Smith’s savvy reading of the acoustics of the original Globe suggests that this is the position of maximum vocal projection as well.21 Rylance delivers most of the first soliloquy facing away from us, turning toward the audience only at “no more like my father / Than I to Hercules.” As might be expected, the soliloquies are openly shared with the “mutes or audience” who ring the stage, warming the house to Rylance. To be fair, though, the audience seems pretty well prepared to enjoy itself. After all, it’s not clear that the quality of the stage production is what determines the value – the experiential value – of seeing a play at the Globe. While some Globe productions have seemed poorly paced and unfocused, this Hamlet frames the performance as a dialogue between Rylance/Hamlet and the public: the rest of the play is just dressing. As the play proceeds, this encounter dramatizes the sustaining function of comedy and humor in Globe performativity. Rylance’s performance is moving, versatile, and light; he’s not so much lugubrious (Nicol Williamson) or morose (Mel Gibson) as mercurial, volatile, a little nutty. A trickster Hamlet, Rylance plays the occasion without a lapse. Hamlet jokily tosses off “old mole,” and the audience – clearly waiting for the opportunity – giggles; his scenes with Polonius are played hard for comedy, with considerable mugging to the audience behind the old man’s back. “Am I a coward?” he asks us, someone shouting back, “No!”; when he arrives at “I have heard / That guilty creatures sitting at a play,” Rylance eyes us, and the audience starts to hoot and applaud. [“As he ought, since he runs the place, Rylance knows better than anyone how to milk the audience in the yard. When Hamlet says of the groundlings ‘they are, for the most part, capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows’ he lets them laugh loudly at their own expense before exclaiming ‘and noise, much noise’. How they love him, and how right they are. If acting were a contest the game would have gone to Rylance” (Stephen Fay, Review of Hamlet)]. Rylance’s energy and engagement with the public is infectious, and places him in a somewhat different relation to the audience than the rest of the cast, who seem hemmed in by the play, stuck in character, while Rylance seems to be playing them as he plays with us [his Hamlet is “both inside and outside the play at the same time” (Lois Potter, “Distracted Globe” 128)].22 Laughing with Hamlet has its counterpart, and hissing Claudius begins in earnest after the closet scene, and


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continues on his every entrance thereafter. Rylance keeps it funny, though: the graveyard scene provides Hamlet with a chance to clown around with the skull (clapping its jaws), and even in the duel, he is still joking (“chick, chick, chick” he goads Laertes), using our desire for laughter to stage our complicity with the scene unfolding before us: we, too, root for Hamlet, even knowing what must come. (Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Program 9.) Rylance’s “cinquepace of jests” was part of a brilliantly conceived and executed performance, one that adapted his earlier RSC performance in ways calculated to exercise Globe performativity.23 Rylance’s comedy recalls Hamlet’s dismissive regard for too much playing to the audience (especially in the first quarto): “There be of them I can tell you that will laugh themselves to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh with them, albeit there is some necessary point in the play then to be observed” (Shakespeare, First Quarto of Hamlet 9.26, 9.18–20). His performance perhaps engages a performative tradition obliquely marked in the first quarto; it more clearly plays the audience in ways that capitalize on the expectation of “ye olde” merriment as a crucial part of Globe performance. Reading about the production later, though, it seems that the occasion was more problematic than I had realized at the time. Not everyone has a good time at the Globe. Michael Billington notes that “[y]ou have to put up with a lot of distractions at the Globe: the mercurial weather, the officious ushers, the restless crowd. It’s hard to focus on ‘To be or not to be’ when some Yankee tourist is wrestling with his crinkly Pacamac. But it says alot for Mark Rylance’s performance and Giles Block’s production that they overcome the countless obstacles built into playgoing at the Globe” (Review of Hamlet). Benedict Nightingale, too, confesses his “deep deep doubt about the resurgent Globe”: “No, the theatre wasn’t just a theme-park for tourists or a playpen for academics. But a towering cylinder, with lots of fidgety groundlings at one end and loads of open sky at the other, hardly encouraged subtlety of voice, mind and heart. Would the Globe permit an actor to give a complete performance in a great play?” Rylance is now “playing the infinitely intricate character Burbage created 400 years ago in the original wooden O, or, to put it another way, he is setting himself and his theatre a key test” (Review of Hamlet).

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It’s not so much the play, or the performance, or even the Globe that is at issue for the professional press; it’s the audience. Much as they praise Rylance’s performance, reviewers are troubled by what it does, by its complicity with the audience’s failure to assume the decorum of theatregoing. It is a cliché of Globe reviewing to scorn the callow tourists and to lament the “characteristic obstacles to the requisite atmosphere of hushed concentration” typical of the Globe: “Ushers continue to guide noisy late-comers to their seats well into the proceedings, as though we are all sitting in front of a cinema screen rather than live drama and even minimal courtesy can be abandoned” (Paul Taylor, Review of Hamlet). While Billington more or less capitulates – “if you can’t beat the distracting multitude, canoodling and flicking through their tourist guides, the only thing to do is to join them” in the yard (Review of Hamlet) – others stand aloof, complaining about “the noisily cackling groundlings, often responding at inappropriate moments,” who “become a distinct irritant; and the man who spent the whole of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy noisily climbing into his rustling Pac-a-Mac ought to have been taken outside by the theatre’s notoriously officious ushers and tossed into the Thames” (Spencer, Review of Hamlet). I may have been lucky: it was not raining when I saw the play, as it apparently was on the press night: plenty of noisy Yankees about, but no Pac-a-Macs. Nonetheless, I do not recall being bothered by the audience: for five quid we were all out to enjoy ourselves. I am tempted to say that the reviewers – who are, after all, paid to evaluate the performance onstage – miss the point of the Globe, but they are probably just out of sympathy with the kind of performance the Globe produces. Ignoring the “restorative” mission of Shakespeare’s factory, they insist that the artistry of the stage performance should supersede other dimensions of Globe performativity: the aesthetic attitude of modern theatricality should predominate over the ebullient embodiment of living-history, theme-park (American?) enactment. Not surprisingly, the actors also evoke an uncertainty about the kind of entertainment the Globe provides, and the role of their work in it. The space itself is technically challenging, forcing actors to play to the circumference of the audience, down to the yard, up to the galleries, and even back to the lords’ rooms, and to meet the vocal demands of the Globe’s acoustics, which change with the barometer.


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Nonetheless, the proximity and visibility of the public seem to provide the most salient instrument of and obstacle to acting in the Globe. William Russell remarked after the 1997 season that “[i]t’s very, very much an actor’s space. The actors feel relaxed in it. Just as the audience is liberated, so in the same way the actors are liberated. You feel a sense of freedom and excitement which I’m sure conveys itself to the audience and seems to come back to you, so you’re double-charged all the time. This is a tremendous feeling for an actor and I’ve never felt it so vividly,” an excitement that remains even when the audience becomes “very boisterous” (quoted in Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare 133, 134). At the same time, though, the actors understandably see their performance – their professional labor – not merely as one element in the Globe’s embracing themed entertainment, but as the centerpiece of the event. James Hayes, Polonius in 2000, notes that the audience pays considerable attention to the goodly frame of the Globe, moving around during the performance to see what it is like from another place in the house. You can’t help noticing when they walk all the way around the semi-circle and then all the way over to the other, and I think it’s tough for the actors to play against those distractions. People probably think “oh this is a fascinating venue” but they must never be allowed to think that we’re just up there doing a turn as part of an exhibition. (Jacquelyn Bessell, “Interviews” 25)

Hayes resists being identified with the Plimoth blacksmith, and rightly so; yet he also points out the degree to which the audience’s performance of the Globe – embodying the syntax of Globe performativity, so to speak – is not confined to the register of modern theatrical decorum. For the price of admission, audiences see a play, but they also hiss the villain, cheer the army, and spend considerable effort in exploring their place in the spectacle. The “Hole and its Historicity” are part of the entertainment. As Victor Turner once noted, the word “entertain” derives from the Old French entretenir, meaning “to hold apart” (From Ritual to Theatre 41): the historicity is part of what holds us apart from the everyday world, and holds us together, here in the spectacle. This living-history aspect of Globe performativity is not only unavoidable, it is a constituent element of the audience’s performance of the Globe. To the degree that the Globe shares the

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performative horizon of theme parks and living-history reenactments, the stage performance must fail wholly to govern the force of Globe performativity. Tim Preece, who played both the Ghost and the Player King, complains, “[t]he only times I think the audience here gets in the way of the performances is when they’ve spent their five quid to have a quick look, and after ten minutes they feel they’ve done their Globe experience, and they go on to the Tate Modern, they don’t bother to connect. That happens, we’ve become aware of that” (Bessell,“Interviews” 54). It happens: the Globe makes it happen. The question, I think, is whether it is ever not happening. The performance onstage takes place in a deeply overdetermined venue, a place where a range of alternative performativities compete with, structure, and enable the precipitation of theatre. Globe performativity violates the proprieties of theatre with the spectacle of theming. Hamlet may be a test case, but I am not certain that it is a test of the Globe’s ability to sustain the metatheatrical tragedy of Shakespeare’s play, or that it is primarily a test of the play in those terms. Perhaps what Hamlet at the Globe offers is what might be called a “metatheming” experience, one that places the theatre in a world riven by the rhetoric of themed, commodified experience. Theming marks a decisive complication of the opposition between live and mediated enactment. Much as Philip Auslander has argued that “historically, the live is actually an effect of mediatization,” of the reproducible performance of film and television (Liveness 51), so we may wonder how Hamlet’s interrogation of the ineluctably theatrical dimension of human experience is reshaped when the theatre itself articulates with the mediated metonymies of theming. Is it possible that Hamlet at the Globe is traced not so much by a metatheatrical self-consciousness as by the habits of newer, modern genres of performative history? The force of the Globe Hamlet emerges with greater specificity against the background of a rival production, released at about the same time as the Globe’s Hamlet: the Michael Almereyda film, starring Ethan Hawke as Hamlet. It is a brief version of the text, running for just under two hours, and full of the kind of hip irony that made Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet so successful. It is a rigorously contemporary production, no doublets in sight: Hamlet is the scion of the Denmark Corporation, a New York conglomerate


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housed in the Elsinore Building; Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) gets the news of Fortinbras through the headlines in USA Today (“So much for him” [Hamlet 1.2.25], he says, ripping the newspaper in two); Hawke delivers Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy while walking through the action-film aisles at his local Blockbuster, and so on. If Shakespeare’s play is metatheatrical, Almereyda’s film is metadigital, absorbing and meditating on the uses of personal technology – the digital video camera, the computer screen, the video monitor – in reframing the theatricalized world of Hamlet as a mediated, mediatized environment. The film opens with a grainy black-and-white close-up of Hawke speaking into the camera, apparently alone: “I have of late lost all my mirth” (adapted from 2.2.296). The effect is an odd one, transforming the spectator less into the hidden voyeur of film than into someone who has stumbled upon a stranger’s home movies, or personal website. We quickly discover that Hamlet is watching this image of himself, using digital video to recall and reflect, turning the performance of soliloquy into a moment of alienated solipsism. Digital video can be readily blended with other images, and Hamlet’s speech is intercut with cartoon dinosaurs and military footage of stealth bombers destroying their targets. Hawke’s first soliloquy is prerecorded and edited, delivered to the audience as the detritus of Hamlet’s past experience and his ongoing effort to understand the present. When Hawke delivers Shakespeare’s first soliloquy (1.2.129–59, again much cut), he engages recorded performance in a different way. Hamlet’s reflections are delivered not to the camera but to the screen, which plays a long scene between Gertrude (Diane Venora) and Hamlet’s Father (Sam Shepard) and trails off into an image of Ophelia ( Julia Stiles) looking sidelong back at the viewer. Screens and cameras are everywhere in the film: Claudius’s opening speech is delivered at a press conference (Hamlet records him, too, simultaneously watching the live speech and his recording of it on his handheld digital-editing monitor), and several entrances are made amid the press-corps throng; Ophelia studies Polaroid pictures of Hamlet; video monitors – playing explosive scenes from the action film Crow II – flank Hawke’s Blockbuster “To be, or not to be.” The prominence of technology is highlighted in the film by the inclusion of a scene of Hamlet writing poems to the “most beautified Ophelia” in

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a coffee shop, an attempt at low-tech sincerity that quickly turns awry. Delivering the poems to Ophelia while she is developing photographs in her apartment, Hamlet is surprised by Polonius, and flees, leaving an old-fashioned paper trail behind. Polonius tracks him down, and the “fishmonger” scene is recorded on surveillance cameras and partly shown to the audience in that grainy, distorted perspective. Hamlet presents an arty film, not a play, to catch the conscience of the king; part of the “nunnery” speech is left on Ophelia’s answering machine; and the film’s epilogue – again recalling Luhrmann – is delivered as a news report by Robert MacNeill. While Luhrmann’s film is obsessed by the global discourse of advertising, Almereyda is more interested in the metaphorical, even epistemological force of video, the ways it reflects, injects, and projects a subject and a world. Right from the opening sequence, digital video is Hamlet’s medium, how he captures and organizes the world around him. But Hamlet is often in dialogue with his recordings, a subject created by recorded performances as much as he creates them. Fittingly enough, the residual “presence” of live theatre is absent from Elsinore. Instead Hamlet is prompted by images from the database: the brilliantly conceived “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy is actually a dialogue between Hamlet and his video screen, where the images – James Dean (“what would he do . . .”), and, perhaps inevitably, Gielgud as Hamlet (“guilty creatures”) – at once provoke and reflect Hamlet’s reflections. Similarly, Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” is preceded by a scene in which Hamlet watches an Asian mystic discussing “being” in an onscreen interview (as Hamlet toys with images of Ophelia on his handheld monitor). Video imagery anticipates the subject, constitutes it, and is apparently replayed from within by Hamlet’s soliloquy; from Almereyda’s perspective “it was fitting to make Hamlet a would-be filmmaker, someone trying to bring order to the flood of images that threatens to engulf him.”24 Hamlet’s film, The Mouse Trap, offers a digitized encyclopedia of visual-recording technology – home movies, sci-fi, cartoons, silent epics, pornography, and animation reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s work for Monty Python’s Flying Circus – and also deploys the same title-sequence graphics as Almereyda’s (white block letters on a red background. Mediated representation penetrates and identifies the subject: Hamlet absorbs and replays Dean and Gielgud


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in his own performance; his film and Almereyda’s enact an insideoutside-inside Moebius loop. Hamlet works hard to assimilate the metatheatrical discourse of Shakespeare’s play to digital culture: the screen of the surveillance camera, the television monitor, the handheld video camera, the laptop computer. Almereyda’s film itself is wound through Hamlet’s, blurring the boundaries between the container and what it contains, outside and inside, present action and its representation, reshaping Shakespeare’s meditation on the undecidable boundary between real and theatrical acting as an interrogation of the consequences of digital technology’s capacity to capture and recapture the subject and its world.25 Cutting the text, modernizing the performance, transforming the medium: nothing could be farther from the Globe’s reconstructed liveness than Almereyda’s deeply citational Hamlet. Yet the film clarifies a crucial question about Hamlet at the Globe, and perhaps about the Globe itself. Almereyda’s film appears to produce the metatheatrical inquiry of Shakespeare’s play in an idiom of contemporary performance, in the most widespread and vital idiom of contemporary performance in Western technological culture, an idiom (as Hawke’s Hamlet demonstrates) that is accessible to us, that many of us see, use, and perform, perhaps more often than we go to the theatre. Shakespeare’s play, on the sterile promontory of the reconstructed Globe, still recalls its original theatrical discourse, the power of the theatre, of this theatre to infect the name of action. But as Almereyda’s film implies, theatre is no longer – as it was, perhaps, for the Globe’s original audiences – our master trope for interrogating acting, action, performance. To see a play at the Globe is to become aware of a very different kind of performativity from the regimes of modern theatregoing. Yet while recording technologies at once sustain and subvert “liveness” as definitive of performance, theatrical “liveness” is also complicated by its place on the widening spectrum of themed performativity. Like the Pilgrims who perform at Plimoth, the Globe actors need the audience, and its provocation, to conduct their play, a contest evoking in a different sense the contestatory dimension of the Greek theatre, the agon whose principal contestants (protagonists) competed against each other, not the audience – “If acting were a contest the game would have gone to Rylance” (Fay, Review of Hamlet). Rylance’s Hamlet

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relates directly to his audience, if by “directly” we mean something like “through the dense conventionality of Globe performativity.” This is a theatrical relationship, to be sure, much like one we might share in any theatre. But the Globe is not any theatre; framing the onstage performance with a visible, festive audience, the Globe themes the space, and our performance in it, themes it as theatre and as something else. This experience is difficult to recapture. It is not quite Renaissance Pleasure Faire festivity, nor are Rylance and company “demonstrating” acting in a living-history sense. At the same time the occasion of the Globe sustains the audience’s engagement even as it locates the show onstage as only one element in the entertainment. While it may resemble the original Globe audience’s volatility, our performance as the audience is clearly something else, too. we’re cleaner, we’re visitors, we have paid for a play but also for a special “experience,” one that includes the play but is composed of much more, the experience of “Shakespeare.” Theming is where we learn to engage in this kind of event, perform it. Globe performance requires our participation, even our agency fully to take place. It brings us into the environment, the space of “history,” but calculates the limits of our performance there. Like other living-history sites, it holds the spectacle of the past before us, allowing us to engage it only in its own “reconstructed” accent (the actors appear to improvise very little with us, refusing to stray off book despite what must be a constant temptation to do so). Like both living-history and theme-park theming, the actors’ performance evokes the performance of the place itself, the event that enables us to engage in our performance of history, of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare’s Globe. The Globe renders its audience as participants in the restoration of Shakespeare, an effect of Globe performativity strikingly registered at the play’s closing; I have rarely heard an audience give so overwhelmingly positive applause – cheering, whooping, cries of Bravo – especially for what was essentially a solo turn, albeit a brilliant one. A tour-de-force performance of the Marie Jones two-hander Stones in his Pockets at the New Ambassadors I saw last night was also well received, and by a similar kind of audience; again I ran into friends from the US, I was sitting in front of a row of American college students, and Conleth Hill and Seán Campion played the audience with energy and finesse. Yet the


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Globe audience seems more excited to applaud, to show its responsiveness, to do something, engage the performance for one last time. “We came here for experience, we got it, and now we’re showing that we got it” – is that it? On my way up the dark stairs to Southwark Bridge, someone behind me says (in a British accent), “I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it, but I really enjoyed it.” I turn this comment over on the long walk back to my room. It’s disorienting, alienating testimony to the power of the Globe to attract a nontheatregoing audience, and testimony, too, to the power of cultural capital – Shakespeare, Hamlet. Of everyone I’ve heard speak about the Globe, this is the first time I’ve heard this voice: the Globe is too highbrow, intimidating, not for people like me. Like Plimoth Plantation, the Globe is not for everyone, despite its claims to a global reach. Much as the Plantation is a de rigueur school trip in the affluent suburbs of Boston, the Globe addresses an educated, well-to-do, international tourist public in the accents of “merrie olde” democracy, and the universal appeal of the great playwright (whose works, increasingly, have pushed those of his contemporaries off the Globe’s boards). The Globe deploys this theming not so much to overcome class bias and educational privilege as to expand its consumer base: as at themed historical events and theme parks, a general acquaintance with the theme – “Pilgrims,” “Disney,” “Shakespeare” – is all you need for a successful experience, to get your money’s worth: the Globe provides it all. Like everyone, I imagine, I’ve sometimes been confused by a stage production, left with the feeling that I’ve missed something, but this Hamlet didn’t work that way. Set against the background of a dull Elizabethan play, Rylance’s Hamlet told us what we needed to know. Scoring the audience’s engagement, Rylance stages the consumption of experience – boo, hiss, jeer, laugh, shout out your support – as the purpose of his playing. “You that look pale, and tremble at this chance, / That are but mutes or audience to this act” – Rylance turns to us, pointing to the heart of the mystery – “But let it be.” The complex self-referentiality of Hamlet is evoked here, though it may be difficult to feel its pulse beneath the upbeat, uplifting character of themed experience. Shakespeare’s play expresses an anxiety for the name of action in a world where all acts are indistinguishable from those that a man might play; Almereyda’s film enacts an anxious regard for the loss of the real in the abyss of technological reproduction. Rylance’s Hamlet is anxious in its own way, not so much about the power of theatre or of Shakespeare (we’ve bought into that, timbers and all), but about the

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ability of theatre, Shakespearean theatre, to occupy a distinctive place in modern life. For theatre at the Globe is complicit with the theming that constitutes the value of dramatic performance there: it’s serious, profound, Shakespeare; it’s also fun, you’ll have a good time, just like they all did back then, only you’ll stay cleaner, and now we know how great Shakespeare really is. If living-history sites commodify the past as “pastness,” the Globe seems at once to stage Shakespeare’s plays, and to sell something else, “Globeness” – though perhaps this is only another word for “Shakespeare,” after all. Shakespeare’s Globe incarnates an attitude animating many productions of classic drama today, an attitude it shares with theme parks and living-history museums from Anaheim to York: if we build the structure right, and put ourselves into it, the past – Shakespeare’s “work” – will be “restored,” both to the theatre and to us. Not to put too fine a point on it, like Plimoth Plantation, the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam, perhaps even like the Magic Kingdom itself, Shakespeare’s Globe is a field of dreams. If we build it, he will come.

chapter 3

Shakespearean geographies

What is the geography of capitalism? Neil Smith, Uneven Development (xii)

Written by an English author some four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s plays are part of a worldwide theatrical repertory, and so sustain a critical tension animating dramatic performativity today, the sense that classic plays can be successfully – meaningfully, forcefully – performed on the contemporary Western stage through performance forms drawn from traditions far beyond the original circumstances of Shakespeare’s – or even Western – theatre. From Ariane Mnouchkine to Yukio Ninagawa to Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth, Shakespearean performance raises an important question in the practice of contemporary theatre: what does the dramatic text contribute to the force of stage action? And it poses that inquiry in the idiom of an increasingly globalized performance culture, as a question of the (inter)cultural politics of theatrical representation. As opposed to a literary notion of the universality of Shakespearean writing – in which kathakali Othello is said to “work” because classical Indian dance drama somehow replicates the intrinsic dynamics of Shakespeare’s play – a “performative” sense of dramatic theatre enables a sharper, dialectical reading of the ways in which different theatrical practices transform Shakespearean writing into action and acting, into meaningful behavior onstage. Shakespeare is an unusually prominent element of globalized theatre, at once the vehicle of an international theatrical avant-garde (Robert Wilson, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Peter Stein, Yukio Ninagawa, Tadashi Suzuki), of intercultural exchange (kathakali performances of King Lear and Othello), of global tourism (Shakespeare festivals worldwide), and of postcolonial critique (Césaire’s A Tempest, 117

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Shakespeare Wallah). Given that globalized Shakespeare has become a dominant genre of Shakespeare production, how can we account for its force, and what kind of force does it have? One of the marks of globalized Shakespeare is race: racialized Shakespeare at once evokes the implicit “whiteness” of the universal poet, and at the same time registers the transformation of Western culture by alternative regimes of identity and performance. Race is deeply woven into the texture of Shakespeare’s plays and indicates the reciprocity between Shakespeare’s theatre and the global economy of its day. But for Shakespeare and his audience “race” was confined to the fictive plane of the drama: Aaron, Othello, and Caliban were played by white, English actors. Staging race as a significant element of theatrical performance frames the force of Shakespeare’s plays in the modern theatre. The controversies surrounding Paul Robeson, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, or Patrick Stewart as Othello are a familiar part of this history; so, too, is the practice of using Shakespeare to engage with racial or ethnic conflicts outside the theatre, a Shakespearean convention common (but hardly confined) to the United States and South Africa in the civil rights era and beyond. As Immanuel Wallerstein argues, notions of race (like those of nation and ethnicity) are the historical consequence of a spatialized, “axial division of labour within the world-economy,” a “core-periphery antinomy” that now appears as “constitutive of this division of labour” (“Construction of Peoplehood” 79). To this extent it would not be surprising to find an ideological tension in the staging of race and nation in moments of capital expansion, intensification, or transformation, such as Shakespeare’s era or our own. Raced Shakespeare evokes a representational crisis in the performative identity of Shakespeare: what Shakespearean performance can be made to mean and do, its value in a global market. Since the 1960s liberal notions of racial equality have generally come into play in Shakespearean performance in one of two ways, which might be called the “marked” and the “unmarked” stagings of race. The “unmarked” version, usually “race-blind” or “color-blind” casting, claims to undo racism in theatre practice by preventing racial or ethnic bias that may operate outside the theatre from operating as principles of casting or characterization. This is not to say that color-blind casting can easily sidestep the deeply racialized history and disciplinary


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conventions of “Shakespearean acting,” which – throughout the English-speaking world, at least – tend to identify a relatively narrow range of voice and movement style as effectively “Shakespearean.” As Denise Albanese has argued, this sense of a properly professional vocal and bodily decorum implicitly racializes Shakespearean acting to a norm “indistinguishable” from the behavior of “white” actors (“Black and White” 229). Color-blind casting also has ambiguous effects in the register of onstage representation, articulating race as transparent to the fictional world of the play and irrelevant in the world of the play as well. Color-blind productions, that is, refuse to thematize race: the race or ethnicity of the actors (an African-American Romeo, an Anglo Montague, and a Latina Lady Montague) is unremarked by the characters, and generally irrelevant in the action of the play. These policies, widely (though differently) practiced in the US, UK, Canada, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, represent one version of Shakespearean performativity today. In race-blind productions both acting and “character” seem to transcend race, so Shakespearean performance can appear to rectify (or at least displace for the two hours’ traffic of the stage) racism in society at large by assimilating racial diversity to the implicitly moral norms of Shakespearean drama. Raceblind casting claims to lift theatrical production out of the social milieux in which race matters. Race-blind casting echoes the antinomies of global capital: it tends to be “blind” only to “raced” actors, since as far as “white” actors are concerned, there is nothing to be blind to. In this sense raceblind casting often confirms the structures of race and nation that it claims to transcend. Many spectators find that race still “reads” in race-blind productions, as an aspect both of theatrical practice and of dramatic logic. American undergraduate students who saw King Lear and Troilus and Cressida with me as part of the RSC’s 1991 season were not persuaded that the black actor playing Oswald and Patroclus (Paterson Joseph) was cast in these roles merely because he was a younger and less experienced member of the company, nor was race insignificant in the production; they read the performances as a commentary on the stratification of the social world of those plays, and as an index of the plague of custom at the RSC as well.1 Gary Taylor registered a similar complaint about the 1998 Stratford,

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Ontario, Shakespeare Festival: Roy Lewis was “relegated to being a bare-chested Pindarus, climbing the set like a monkey. The only other black performer in the 1998 company, Sandi Ross, played two benevolent black maids, Ursula in Much Ado and Viney in The Miracle Worker. The racial stereotypes at work here are even more blatant than those that have historically governed black casting in the RSC” (“Shakespeare Performed” 342).2 Race always signifies in a racialized society: race-blind productions are “blind” to already raced identities, implying that there is something to see there, while “whiteness” is simply not visible, not imagined as race. This more subtle form of racism, the unconscious transcendence of “whiteness” above the categories of race altogether, is confirmed by audiences who resist the ameliorating rhetoric of raceblind casting, to insist that race does matter. While to some critics the utopian fallacy of race-blind casting is visible in the theatrical texture of the performance (“raced” actors confined to servile or secondary parts), to others race-blind casting violates the representational propriety of Shakespeare’s drama with the spectacle of miscegenation. Dramatizing how deeply the texture of “whiteness” is woven into the cultural identity of Shakespeare, one irate patron wrote to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the mid-1990s: “Why do you try to shove race at us by mixing family relationships which directly contradict genetic laws? Very disconcerting and we’re not racist (just jarring) . . . I don’t know about other patrons but we don’t like it and won’t be back.”3 An alternative approach engages the politics of race – and, not incidentally, also promotes actors’ careers – by clearly marking race as a signifying element in the theatrical and dramatic force of the play: productions of The Tempest treating Caliban as the member of an indigenous population; Romeo and Juliets where interracial or interethnic enmity sustains the family feud, as in a 1999 production at the University of Virginia set in the American South in the 1960s, featuring an African-American Capulet family and a white Montague clan (see Zoe Ingalls, “Casting Shakespeare’s Lovers”); racially homogeneous productions that contest Shakespearean “whiteness” by locating the plays in a nonwhite setting – the Orson Welles-John Houseman “Voodoo” Macbeth developed by the WPA Negro Theater Project in 1936, Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth.4 Other productions stage the multiplex character of race more actively


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in the globalized metropolis through “multicultural” casting; they displace Shakespearean “whiteness” by sidestepping a merely dualistic, black/white interrogation of identity politics. Peter Sellars’s 1994 Merchant of Venice, for example, developed a social setting reminiscent of Los Angeles and cast Latino actors as the Venetians, AfricanAmerican actors as the Jews, and Asian-American actresses as Portia and Nerissa; Robert Lepage’s 1992 A Midsummer Night’s Dream “featured a multicultural cast made up of British, Québécoise, AngloIndian, Anglo-West Indian, and Anglo-African performers” and used those cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences to striking effect.5 These productions take race or ethnicity to be a mobile, perhaps even a “positional” signifier in Stuart Hall’s sense, “a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature” (“New Ethnicities” 443). The rhetorical range of racialized casting points not only to emerging theatrical conventions, but to an important dimension of modern Shakespearean performativity as well. “Raced” Shakespeare reveals what Shakespeare can be used to do in contemporary performance: to engage, to reflect, to criticize, even to resolve struggles about the functioning of race in social life, not merely by idealizing them out of existence (as though Shakespearean culture were a place where race has been transcended, simply does not matter), but also by using casting to intervene in the production of racial identity as a meaningful category of agency and representation. Much as “race” is a consequence of global economic, political, and cultural systems, so “race” is a crucial signifier in an increasingly globalized discourse of Shakespearean performance. Onstage and off, race and ethnicity signify differently within different national and cultural contexts; the challenge to Shakespearean “whiteness,” and to Shakespearean nationalism, is a crucial feature of Shakespearean performance in an era of extraordinary globalization of finance and capital, of expanded opportunities for travel and tourism, and of the replacement of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models of political and industrial imperialism with economic relations characteristic of modernity, modernization, and postmodern capital. Racialized production is one of the signifiers of globalized Shakespeare: it operates as a strategic dimension of the composition of theatre companies from Peter Brook’s urgently

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multiracial company at the Centre International de Création Théaˆtrale to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; as advertising and marketing (Denzel Washington in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing); and as a signal dimension of Shakespeare as export commodity (Sellars’s multicultural Merchant was cast in New York, set in Los Angeles, opened in Chicago, and toured the UK, France, and Germany). The West’s most salable performance commodity; an author sustained by a dazzling variety of languages, stages, audiences; a vehicle at once for attractions of an exoticized familiarity, and for resisting the representational dynamics of a pervasive European imperialism: Shakespeare participates both in what might be called the commodity universalism of contemporary global capital (Shakespeare and Coke as world-historical consumer goods) and in an effort to realize the contestatory possibilities of theatrical performance. In this chapter I explore the performative dimension of globalized Shakespeare, how the commodification of Shakespearean performance within the rhetoric of globalized commerce frames the force of Shakespearean drama, what Shakespearean drama can be made to mean and do as performance. I begin by identifying the complex relationship between Shakespeare and a global performance economy: “intercultural performance” as the principal commodity-form of globalized Shakespeare, and the traction that postcolonial critique provides toward understanding this form of performance. Then I consider two examples of global, and globalized, Shakespeare. The first, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, provides a multiplex instance and allegory of Shakespearean performance in the global marketplace. Filmed in Mexico, using a “multicultural” Anglo-American cast, evoking the characteristic landscapes of economic globalization – the multiethnic urban core, the ethnicized borderland – with all their typical placelessness, Romeo + Juliet at once deploys the multicultural rhetoric of global capital as the scene of Shakespeare’s play and deftly represents the uses of Shakespearean drama within that global economy. I then turn to a production of Romeo and Juliet that places Shakespeare in a different network of global relations: the Brazilian company Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta, a brilliant street-theatre performance originating in Minas Gerais that was the


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featured production of the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Globe-toGlobe International Theatre Festival in 2000. Romeu e Julieta provides an opportunity to examine the work of globalized Shakespeare from several perspectives. Performed throughout Brazil, and at festivals in the Americas and Europe, Romeu e Julieta witnesses to the partiality of a merely producer-oriented understanding of globalization: that “global” products are homogenous, and so produce a homogenous global culture dictated by the interests of transnational capital emanating (usually) from the United States and northern Europe. While the Globe-to-Globe Festival used Romeu e Julieta to sustain something like this view of global Shakespeare, the variety of ways the company engages with Shakespeare, and with a globalized network of theatrical practice, significantly complicates this Globe-al understanding of Shakespearean performativity.

ow n in g s ha k e s pe a re Today no enclaves – aesthetic or other – are left in which the commodity form does not reign supreme. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization” (70)

Like all globalized products, globalized Shakespeare performs across a wide conceptual and material horizon, playing at once as aesthetics, culture, politics, economics, technology, and ideology. As a mark of Western modernity, though, globalization is deeply embedded in the history of colonialism, as are the typically “intercultural” performance-forms of the globalized theatrical market. For this reason we might take our bearings on globalized Shakespeare by triangulating three related terms: the globalized market for Shakespeare, the intercultural performance that is its dominant commodity-form, and the colonial and postcolonial history that is its animating critical and political context. In the past several decades, postcolonial critique has drawn attention to a particular set of issues: the place of literature, especially Shakespeare, in the educational apparatus of colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial states; the ways the forms of Shakespearean drama record the dynamics of early modern colonial expansion; how both dominant and dominated groups have used Shakespeare to stage

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ideological interests and affiliations in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. Nonetheless, while the terms of postcolonial formal analysis enable a vigorous critique of imperial representation, the generalizing power of postcolonial critique has reached a chastening moment of redefinition, one that also helps to locate the performative force of intercultural Shakespeare in a global economy. A suspicion that “postcolonial studies” is an increasingly valuable item in a globalized economy of scholarly discourse has led to an anxious concern for the reification of the term “postcolonial” in the practice of literary and cultural studies. As Aijaz Ahmad remarks: The fundamental effect of constructing this globalized trans-historicity of colonialism is to evacuate the very meaning of the word and disperse that meaning so widely that we can no longer speak of determinate histories of determinate structures . . . Instead, we have a globalized condition of postcoloniality that can be described by the “postcolonial critic,” but never fixed as a determinate structure of power against which determinate forms of struggle may be possible outside the domains of discourse and pedagogy. (“Postcolonialism” 31)

This critique of an unlocalized “condition of postcoloniality” extends to critical tropes frequently deployed in the analysis of cultural production, notably the role of hybridity and hybridization as a factor in the constitution of colonial subjects (Frantz Fanon), as a strategy of colonial interpellation and potential resistance (Homi Bhabha), and as a dynamic feature of the form and structure of a range of artforms – novels and poems, plays and performances. In fact, it is precisely the failure of these elements truly to hybridize that enables hybridity to operate as a site of critique, and critics have increasingly recognized the justice of Wole Soyinka’s impatience with the “facile tag of ‘clash of cultures’, a prejudicial label which, quite apart from its frequent misapplication, presupposes a potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous” (“Author’s Note” 5). Calling for attention to an “alternative aspect of colonial hybridity – one which highlights the multiple relationships to the dominant alien culture that can and do exist within any ‘colonised’ society” and the differential relation to power embodied in discrete representational traditions, Ania Loomba challenges postcolonial critique to resist the reification of postcolonial hybridity, the transformation of a principle


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of production (operating in certain ways at a particular historical moment and within a distinctive political context) into a merely formal category of aesthetic organization (“Shakespearean Transformations” 110). In this sense the globalizing rhetoric of late capital has not only altered the political and economic practices of colonialism, but has also transformed the sustaining social contexts of postcolonial artistic production and of postcolonial critique. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake note that globalization impels “a new world-space of cultural production and national representation which is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition, and resistance) in everyday texture and composition” (“Introduction” 1). While both postcolonial critique and intercultural performance are characteristic of what Ulrich Beck calls the “new globality” (What is Globalization? 11), the concern regarding a “condition of postcoloniality” arises from the privilege accorded to economic relations in understanding market globalization, the possible participation of radical critique in “the homogenizing effect” of the global dissemination of McDonald’s french fries, of Shakespeare, or of “name-brand critics” such as “Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha” who participate willy-nilly in the marketing of the “ethnic” and the “postcolonial” that connects The Body Shop and the “trendy markets” of Soho with the Routledge catalogue (Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism xv).6 Much as imperialism did for the discourses of modern nationalism, so contemporary globalization provides the condition of postcolonial inquiry. For this reason resistance to a generalized “condition of postcoloniality” cannot be based merely on a nostalgic sense of the particular, the indigenous, the local: for the local is not, in itself, inimical to the structure of globalization today. Although globalization creates “global” products (however strongly identified with their “national origin” – Big Mac, Bic, Benetton, Sony, Nokia, Shakespeare), it also commodifies the “local” as a feature of “global” exchange, in the various “nations” performed at tourist destinations like Disneyland, Disney World, Euro Disney, and so on, and in the fetish of the indigenous marketed by companies like Starbucks Coffee or The Body Shop (it is notable that “Starbucks” – no apostrophe-s – is in the

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spellcheck feature of Microsoft Word). On the one hand global marketing sells the “local,” often homogenizing it in the process; on the other a belief in the ubiquitous homogeneity of globalization overlooks the importance of the local, its stubborn locality. Not only do transnational corporations require differentiated local markets, but the sense that a given product – KFC chicken, Nokia cellphones, Mercedes automobiles, Othello – is the “same” in all its local meanings at once ignores the lived experience of everyday life (a Coke in Istanbul is not, in cultural terms, the same thing as a Coke in Indianapolis), and overemphasizes economic globalization at the expense of its cultural and political significance. The global and the local function differently in different registers of representation, performance, and practice; the “local” is a relative term, always layered by its relation to the larger world. As Caren Kaplan argues, “the ‘local’ is not really about a specific intrinsic territory but about the construction of bundles or clusters of identities in and through the cultures of transnational capitalism. Whether the ‘local’ is seen to be fluid and relational or fixed and fundamentalist depends upon one’s position or enunciatory situation vis-à-vis economic, political, and cultural hegemonies”(Questions of Travel 159–60). Kaplan cannily pinpoints the paradox of “the global-local nexus”: the “local appears as the primary site of resistance to globalization through the construction of temporalized narratives of identity (new histories, re-discovered genealogies, imagined geographies, etc.), yet that very site prepares the ground for appropriation, nativism, and exclusions” (Questions of Travel 160). The desire to retain the historical specificity of discrete colonialisms, to resist their solution in a pervasive, homogenous “coloniality,” is part of this global-local nexus, reciprocating the recognition that critical discourse is at once a local practice and part of a globalized and globalizing market with its own institutions, modes of production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction. This nexus also reciprocates the dominant mode of globalized theatrical production, the wide range of hybrid theatre events that fall under the general rubric of “intercultural performance.” The irreducible locality of performance has posed a problem for national and international capital throughout the industrial era, and contemporary “intercultural Shakespeare” is also a product of postcolonial globalization, sharing the stage with export products from Miss Saigon


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and Cats to Adrian Noble’s RSC A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Market Theatre of Johannesburg’s Sarafina. Many intercultural performance products are devised within (and to exploit) the resources of international capital (investment, advertising, the tourist audience), while other versions of intercultural performance clearly arise as local practice, even while exploiting a range of techniques drawn from an increasingly globalized theatrical repertoire. Still other productions – The Kathakali King Lear, perhaps, and Romeu e Julieta – arguably occupy several positions in the spectrum of globalized performance, articulating the global/local dynamics of Shakespearean performativity in different ways in the different locations in which they are performed. Postcolonial critique has struggled to define the changing shapes of colonial and postcolonial representation within and against the changing specter of globalization; locating intercultural performance raises similar challenges.7 Julia Holledge and Joanne Tompkins characterize intercultural performance as “the meeting in the moment of performance of two or more cultural traditions, a temporary fusing of styles and/or techniques and/or cultures” (Women’s Intercultural Performance 7), and since the mid-1980s – an era conveniently marked by the celebrity of Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata and Ariane Mnouchkine’s L’Indiade – intercultural performance has become a defining arena of contemporary performativity and performance. The controversy surrounding Brook’s The Mahabharata – the work of a brilliant director, relating a non-European narrative, played by a multicultural cast, and produced as a major touring event – marks a decisive moment in the practice and reception of intercultural performance, the moment when “intercultural performance shifted its grounds in Western liberal humanism and began to be recontextualized within the burgeoning critical discourse – inaugurated in 1978 by Edward Said’s book Orientalism – of postcolonialism” (Una Chaudhuri,“Working Out [of ] Place” 77).8 Nonetheless, while The Mahabharata brought the colonial inheritance of intercultural performance to a moment of critical crisis, such performance has been shadowed from the beginning by the dynamics of colonialism. Writing during the aftershocks of the Mahabharata controversy, Richard Schechner nonetheless saw intercultural performance as the sign of a new – and radical – understanding of global

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performance. Locating an “intercultural” element in the highmodernist avant-garde – Japanese shingeki, Meyerhold, Yeats, Artaud – and tracing it through the experimental theatre work of Augusto Boal and Jerzy Grotowski in the 1950s and 1960s, and of Eugenio Barba in the 1970s and 1980s, Schechner placed “intercultural performance” at the disciplinary center of an emerging conception of nontheatrical performance – and of the emerging field of “performance studies” – in the 1990s: “Performance studies builds on the emergence of a postcolonial world where cultures are colliding, interfering with, and fertilizing each other” (Future of Ritual 21). This vision of intercultural performance – what Schechner elsewhere celebrates as part of a “culture of choice” (“Interculturalism” 49) – was immediately and searchingly qualified, by Rustom Bharucha among others, in terms that echo the global/local problematic of postcolonial critique: “But what about the ‘other’ culture? Are its rituals there simply to be used in an arbitrary, personal way? Is it fair to take a ceremony from it that is part of its heritage, divest it of its original meaning, and then replay it for its ‘physical action’?” Questioning the “ethics of representation” involved in The Mahabharata, in Schechner’s aesthetic interculturalism, and in the commodification of indigenous performance forms as “intercultural” signifiers for Western audiences, Bharucha argues that the dialogic potentiality Schechner claimed for intercultural performance finally dissolves into a deeply universalist understanding of performance, one fully absorbed by the global economy: the local idiom of a given performance tradition (kathakali, Noh) evokes the essential (Western) values of “performance” (Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World 33).9 A facile interculturalism, in this sense, resonates with the limitations of a reified hybridity and with those of a “condition of postcoloniality.” Less often recognized, however, is that the globalization of performance is not restricted to the appropriation of performance style, but also involves the internationalization of performance practices. The cultural logic of globalization – international travel, state and corporate subsidies, tourism, theatre festivals, university residencies and symposia – that transforms style and ritual into salable commodities also sustains a different aspect of contemporary theatre, the globalization of working methods, which may well be incorporated into local performances in a range of ways. It is not necessary to travel


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to Brazil or Poland or Denmark or Japan or Saratoga, New York, to be trained in Boal’s theatre of the oppressed, Grotowski’s poor theatre, Barba’s theatre of roots, or the Suzuki-inflected Viewpoints of Anne Bogart, any more than the Method is still indigenous to Moscow and Manhattan. The migration of working methods provides a different register of theatrical globalization, opening the possibility that theatre practices might be deployed with different kinds of force in different locations, do different kinds of work in different local and global registers. Much as a Coke in Istanbul may not be the same thing as a Coke in Indianapolis, so a poor-theatre Lear in Pretoria is not the same thing as a poor-theatre Lear in Paris or São Paulo or Peoria. Culture is dynamic; while contemporary intercultural performance is shaped by the multiplex character of globalized economic and cultural relations, intercultural performance itself is hardly a postmodern novelty. Even within a narrow sense of intercultural performance – theatre using texts, performance conventions, and/or scenographic and costume technologies from several different cultural sources – the history of intercultural performance extends well beyond the now-conventional listing of Mnouchkine’s Shakespeare and Greek productions, Robert Wilson’s various uses of Japanese theatre elements, Brook’s The Mahabharata, or the Shakespeare of Ninagawa or Suzuki. In The Show and the Gaze of Theatre, Erika Fischer-Lichte sees performance as “the agent of mediation” between the “own culture and the foreign” (135), and locates Goethe as the inventor of European intercultural theatre, framing a “world” repertoire of Sophocles and Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Gozzi, Goldoni, Voltaire, and Lessing; the “deliberate and productive encounter of one theatre with theatre traditions of other cultures thus has a long history during which it has exposed and satisfied varying functions” well beyond Goethe’s vision (138). Intercultural performance shares the longue durée of colonialism and globalization, constants of human history subject to periodic, sometimes sudden, changes of form, practice, and expression. In the West the voyages of discovery mark one such phase, the industrial revolution and the rise of nation states another, the expansion of transnational capital in the post-Second World War period another, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of the Second World perhaps another.10

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Nonetheless, while a range of “intercultural” events can be found throughout the history of performance, the performative function of intercultural theatre today – how conventional regimes of behavior constitute the force of dramatic performance – is a distinctive part of the globalization of culture-as-commodity characteristic of modernism in general. Fischer-Lichte’s disarmingly nativist terms imply that the “foreign” and the “own” can be effectively distinguished; in so doing they prolong the segregation of intercultural aesthetics from the colonial histories that have long sustained it. Intercultural performance is not necessarily dualistic in this manner, nor is European culture necessarily its central issue: Ong Keng Sen’s Theatre Works company of Singapore has, for instance, staged a Lear involving Noh, Beijing Opera, and Thai khon dance traditions, in which each master performer plays his or her part in a distinctive performance form, and in its indigenous language (Tompkins, “Intercultural Shakespeare”).11 Even so, despite the aesthetic cast of Goethe’s “world literature,” European intercultural performance is firmly conjoined to the history of imperial expansion: the visit of four Iroquois kings to England in 1710 celebrated by a performance of William Davenant’s operatic Macbeth; the transformation of Saartjie Baartman – the Hottentot Venus – from sideshow freak to biological specimen in the first decades of the nineteenth century; the history of exotic display – of individuals and artifacts from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe – that connects commercial venues such as William Bullock’s London Museum to Wild West shows to the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 (where Antonin Artaud saw the Balinese dancers as “animated hieroglyphs” [Theater and Its Double 54]) to the spectacle of culture at Disneyland, Disney World, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.12 Although the aesthetic and political volatility of intercultural performance surely cannot be reduced solely to an economic “cause,” the globalized economy is the condition of intercultural performance today, and provides the sliding scale that connects “Disney homogenization and uniformity” to the “aestheticism of a Wilson or a Suzuki” (Pavis, “Introduction” 14). Fischer-Lichte’s sustained attention to the variety of intercultural performance evokes the problems that arise when intercultural production is contemplated in purely aesthetic terms, as in her


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description of Robert Wilson’s use of Japanese performance elements as a “theatre of pure presentation” (The Show and the Gaze 140). Fischer-Lichte carefully distinguishes Wilson’s avant-garde aesthetic from Peter Brook’s universalism or Wole Soyinka’s dialectical mediation between Yoruba and European performance forms; at the same time she protects Wilson’s theatre from the political controversies surrounding other kinds of intercultural practice. Although Wilson’s work is the product “of a thoroughly networked and interconnected postindustrial society so crisscrossed by a flood of disconnected moments of communication – pure bits of information – that it is no longer able to bring together any meaningful association of signs” (139–40), these performances are taken not to absorb and resignify “Japanese” theatricalities in a resonantly global discourse, but to embody “the renunciation of a Western cultural imperialism that tries to force its own meaning on other cultures through its own products,” absorbing “Japanese” signifiers into a performance that “avoids representation of any kind” (140). Sensitive to the different uses of intercultural performance, here and elsewhere Fischer-Lichte enacts a familiar move of intercultural aesthetics, isolating the sign systems of the theatre from their social and historical contexts, in order to see intercultural performance as a moment in the advance of a utopian world theatrical culture. Even though the starting point, program, position, method of approach, and goal of the theatre artists in Europe, Japan, China, India, and Africa are individually wholly divergent, the conscious and productive encounters with elements of foreign theatre cultures, in general, serve similar functions: to create a “universal language of theatre” and to mobilize communication between members of different cultures. The idea underlying the intercultural trend in contemporary theatre across the world is that the path of permanent mediation between the cultures will, in the many different ways described above, gradually lead to the creation of a world culture in which different cultures not only take part, but also respect the unique characteristics of each culture and allow each culture its authority. (145–46)

Fischer-Lichte wants intercultural theatre to function as part of a new, even resistant “world culture . . . diametrically opposed to the idea of a unified, one-world culture in which all differences are eliminated – in its ugliest form, a cultural monopoly like Coca-Cola, television,

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and McDonald’s” (146). Yet the notion that cultural signifiers can float free of their origins, of the political horizon in which “foreign” and “own” are consequential markers of cultural and political privilege, seems to participate in rather than to resist the notion that cultural “otherness” itself is now a powerfully commodified trope, part of Schechner’s market-identified “culture of choice” (“Interculturalism” 49). Even given the laudatory desire to resist the flattening homogenization that sells international products – Shakespeare, Daimler-Chrysler, kathakali – as elements of one’s “own” global culture, Fischer-Lichte’s “permanent mediation” between the “own” and the “foreign” seems questionable in a commercial and symbolic economy that works – often through intercultural performance – to sell the local, the “foreign” as a product, a foreign you can own. This utopia seems to open up “new spaces of groundlessness,” treating the languages of performance as so many deracinated sign systems, for sale in the marketplace of world theatrical communication (Joughin, “Shakespeare, National Culture” 286). Throughout history, though, intercultural performance has been used to erase the oppressive consequences of intercultural contact and representation, and the contemporary celebration of the intercultural forms and styles is stamped by this history of appropriation, deploying “other” performance forms to sustain dominant notions of identity and cultural centrality (in ways that recall the concern that postcolonial critique reinscribes relations of interpretive dominance between metropolitan theorists and the “margins” of cultural production). In English is Broken Here, Coco Fusco argues that the problem of cultural appropriation arises not only in the use of the traditions of dominated groups to extend their oppression, but also in the ways in which the circulation of those performances confirms cultural, political, and economic hegemony: “mass culture cyclically projects the image of an atomistic racial utopia to (white) middle-class consumers, promising individualized, and often eroticized, modes of cultural appropriation and consumption that substitute for equitable exchange or simply contain interaction among ethnic groups” (69). It is far from clear, though, that “intercultural performance” must result either in a Disneyfied appropriation of the local or a festive utopia of world theatre, alternatives that express a distinction, perhaps, but not much real difference. I think we want to retain the


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possibility that performance forms and practices can, on some occasions, retain their history, a critical ability to re-member a past that is sometimes outside the script of dominant “history.” Contrasting a kathakali production of Othello with the uses of Othello in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Ania Loomba suggests the possibility that intercultural performance can use “centuries of stagecraft to reach out and mould difference in its own image,” in part because of the different relationship between kathakali and Othello asserted by this production, and by its self-conscious interrogation of the role of Shakespeare in the identification of modern cultural elites in India. “Here,” Loomba argues, “the Fanonian model of agonistic hybridity is modified by a dualism in which one aesthetic code does not necessarily displace the other” – as the codes of Euro-avant-gardism may appear to absorb “Japanese” specificity in Wilson’s work – but enables a dialectical inquiry into the use of performance in the framing of modern subjects with a distinctive history (“Local-manufacture” 155, 159). Although the dynamics of global/intercultural/postcolonial Shakespeare are given specific – and different – force in any individual production, Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet brings these issues into a particularly useful focus. The film is not, let me be clear, “intercultural” in any significant sense. It does not produce “Shakespeare” through a performance practice “foreign” to Western theatre (such as kathakali or Noh); it uses the world’s dominant mode of entertainment production – the Hollywood film – to stage one of the West’s most familiar dramas. In Patrice Pavis’s terms Romeo + Juliet would more accurately be described as a “multicultural” film, situated among the “cross-influences between various ethnic or linguistic groups in multicultural societies,” although again its use of multicultural performance practice is relatively slight (“Introduction” 8). At the same time, though, Luhrmann’s film simultaneously evokes the performative dynamics of race in contemporary American Shakespeare (made in Mexico by an Australian director, Romeo + Juliet is nonetheless a Hollywood film), and stages Romeo and Juliet as an interracial, intercultural, global/local Shakespearean product. In its attention to the intersecting of race, place, and market in contemporary Shakespearean cultural production, Luhrmann’s film enables a critique of the work of intercultural performance in the global performance economy. Framing Romeo and Juliet within

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the allegorized landscape of globalization, Romeo + Juliet at once reflects the implication of Shakespeare in a global performance market and reflects on the distinctive force of globalized Shakespearean performativity. r ac in g / e ra s in g pl ac e In this perspective, a negative utopia lies at the root of world market discourse. As the last niches are integrated into the world market, what emerges is indeed one world: not as a recognition of multiplicity or mutual openness, where images both of oneself and of foreigners are pluralist and cosmopolitan, but on the contrary as a single commodity-world where local cultures and identities are uprooted and replaced with symbols from the publicity and image departments of multinational corporations. Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (43)

As Barbara Hodgdon has remarked, Romeo + Juliet “stridently advertises itself as a product of global capitalism” and “knowingly flaunts how that culture consumes ‘Shakespeare’ ” (“Everything’s Nice” 89). “Shakespeare” is particularly flaunted by the film’s visual field: not only does his name appear in the title sequence, but Shakespeare’s writing, the language of Romeo and Juliet (and of other plays), is rendered directly onscreen, in signs and advertisements, and on product labels. Benvolio’s “sword” in the opening scene is a pistol engraved with the manufacturer’s label, “Sword 9mm Series 5,” a logo we see repeatedly on billboards throughout the film, accompanied by the slogan “I am thy Pistol and thy Friend” (2 Henry IV 5.3.93). The abandoned Grove of Sycamore movie theatre where Romeo first appears, signs advertising the “Merchant of Verona Beach,” the Globe Theatre poolhall, and the Post Haste mailing service are all labels of this kind, and the film alludes to other Shakespearean commodities as well, notably Lady Capulet’s Elizabeth-Taylor-as-Cleopatra costume for the ball.13 Janet Maslin notes in her review of the film that Luhrmann “hurls the audience into a world where clothes, graffiti, signs and billboards become Shakespearean artifacts with a touch of camp” (“Soft! What Light?” c 12). Advertising is the language of globalization; whether subjects or citizens, actors or spectators, the rhetoric of globalization insistently frames us as consumers.


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Accept no substitutes: William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet displays Shakespeare as a registered trademark, an item in commodity culture.14 Romeo + Juliet evokes the supplementary relationship between performance and writing in the modern theatre, urging its affiliations to the text while striking a canny distance from the proprieties of “Shakespeare.” This ironic distance is latent in the mode of that citation, the instrumental rhetoric of advertising exposing the failure of language fully to transform what it sells into the language of desire, romance: sometimes a gun is just a gun. Luhrmann’s treatment of Shakespearean place is similarly mobile. Unlike Zeffirelli’s dusty Italian village (or Bernstein’s Manhattan for that matter), Luhrmann’s Verona is surprisingly difficult to locate, a locale that is somehow not local. Much as the film’s treatment of language presents Shakespeare in the lexicon of advertising, its treatment of place maps Shakespeare on the geography of global cultural production. Luhrmann had initially intended to shoot the film in Miami and adjacent South Beach, and began writing the screenplay there (Rodriguez, “Bizarre?” 28g ); in the end costs drove him to shoot the film in Mexico City and Veracruz, Mexico. Yet rather than setting his Romeo and Juliet in Mexico – on the model of resettings from Branagh’s Tuscan Much Ado to Cherr´ıe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea – Luhrmann’s Verona registers a range of locations. For example, David Ansen, writing in Newsweek, finds Verona Beach “a teeming, violent, multicultural Latin metropolis” (“It’s the ’90s” 73); it emerges in People as “a fantasy world in Latin America, with cars and lots of guns” (Review of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet); in a special issue of Shakespeare, a magazine for secondary-level teachers, it is seen as “an industrialized Cabo San Lucas in fast forward” (“After Luhrmann” 3). But while the cinematography maps Mexico City/Veracruz on to the fantasmatic topography of norteamericano fear and desire (over there, it’s all violent ghettoes or exotic resorts), the signifiers of Latin Americanness also locate Verona Beach within the United States, and within an equally fantasmatic, and racialized national geography – “Miami Vice meets West Side Story” (Johnson, “Souping Up the Bard” 74). The architectural and exterior settings – the twin downtown corporate towers, the “honky-tonk strip” (74), the superb Capulet mansion – seem to evoke both Miami and Los Angeles, places

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that – to judge by the press – are deeply ethnicized, and moralized, in the popular imagination.15 Luhrmann’s hyped-up cinematography and Catherine Martin’s saturated design are disorienting enough, but the film’s fluid geography casts place and race as reciprocal signifiers in the imagining of América.16 Whether or not Verona Beach is “a fictional resort in south Florida” with “warring Florida street gangs,” its “lurid” quality (for Anthony Lane it is a “lurid Latin dump”) seems to arise for many reviewers from the racial and ethnic complexity of the social landscape.17 The multiethnic city evokes a compact network of fear. Fantasies of miscegenation trope the cityscape – crudely enough, the cast is a “racially mixed lot” to Stanley Kauffmann (“Blanking Verse” 40) – and provide the terms that sustain Verona Beach’s “otherness”: an unlicensed, even criminal, mixing of genders, genres, substances. “This is a hip-hop, MTV, quick-cut movie filmed in a Mexico City that has been made to resemble the Miami Beach of Brian De Palma’s Scarface. We are in Verona Beach, where two rival gang families – drug kingpins, for all we know – rule the roost. Most of the characters seem Latino or black – Tybalt is a muy macho hood, Mercutio a black drag queen – except for the two pretty leads (Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo, Clare Danes as Juliet) who are, mysteriously, quite white” (Lyons, “Lights, Camera, Shakespeare” 57). The “idea of an escape from the nation-state into the cosmopolitan and polyglot city underscores most ideologies of modernism” (Kaplan, Questions of Travel 30); the modernist city evokes the principal fantasies of postmodern globalization and spatiality as well. The film’s ethnic volatility marks it as a commodified “locality” rather than an actual precinct of Miami, Los Angeles, or Mexico City, a place where the signs of race register in excessive and contradictory ways. What makes Verona Beach seem like a “multicultural borderland” is precisely its “mythic” quality, as a space that is “open to variant readings (Miami, California, Mexico)” (Hodgdon, “Everything’s Nice” 95). At the same time, though, Verona also evokes the globalized urban center, another locale that is not precisely local. The interchangeability of Miami, Los Angeles, and Mexico City in the film’s reception points in part to the film’s “neocolonial outsourcing” of cultural values characteristic of the United States’ role in the global economy (Albanese, “Shakespeare Film” 223). It also suggests an


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increasingly familiar dimension of the globalized urban landscape, in which interchangeable internationalized financial centers – traditionally New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Hong Kong, but more recently including São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Taipei, Bombay, and, notably, Miami and Mexico City, among others – operate as “global cities,” producing a “new geography of centrality and marginality,” as the downtown areas become sites for investment and are increasingly distinct from lower-income parts of the urban landscape, from the geographic region, and in some sense from the nation state (Sassen, “Introduction” xxvi). The urban space of Romeo + Juliet is part of a borderland both within the US, and between the US and Mexico. The film’s visual register also conjures a border between the globalized international urban core – the twin skyscrapers, the international and multicultural cast of actors/characters – and the surrounding but perhaps irrelevant locale, Miami, Mexico City, Los Angeles, wherever. Saskia Sassen’s description of the “large Western city of today” resonates with Luhrmann’s urban geography: “Its spaces are inscribed with the dominant corporate culture” – the Capulet and Montague towers – “but also with a multiplicity of other cultures and identities. The slippage is evident” [in Verona, as well as in Mexico City, Los Angles, Miami, Buenos Aires, London]: “the dominant culture can encompass only part of the city. And while corporate power inscribes these cultures and identifies them with ‘otherness,’ thereby devaluing them, they are present everywhere,” visible in the film, as in the world around us, as circumscribed “spaces of postcolonialism” (“Introduction” xxxi, xxx). Luhrmann’s decision to move from Miami to Mexico City is, in this sense, perhaps less surprising than it might appear: despite enormous differences both cities have become critical regional and international centers of the kind of “postindustrial production” (finance and specialized producer services) that increasingly characterizes the urban core of the globalized city (Sassen, Cities in a World Economy 22).18 These elements – multicultural, borderland – locate Verona Beach in the geography of millennial capitalism as a version of transnational urban social space, a “network of urban formations, without a clearly definable center, whose links to one another are far stronger than their

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relationships to their immediate hinterlands” (Arif Dirlik, “Global in the Local” 29). Luhrmann stages this disorienting geography, eliding the slick boundaries between geographic and ethnic positionalities, and between the advertised geographies of the global marketplace, the mythic borderland, and the actual border, with its razor wire and maquiladoras, Shakespeare’s Prince of Cats replaced by real coyotes. In the globalizing market of capital today – “a world without boundaries” is the slogan for Ralph Lauren’s Safari perfume line – “difference sells,” usually availing itself of a deftly metonymic displacement: khaki and silk for the lifestyle of Edwardian African colonials; the Kayapo Indians for the “naturalness” of The Body Shop’s brazil-nut hair conditioner (Kaplan, “ ‘A World Without Boundaries’ ” 46–48, 55–56, 50). Verona’s tendency at once to slide across the border between the First and Third Worlds and to stage the interpenetration of First and Third Worlds within the transnational city registers the film’s political unconscious. For all its dense spatiality, the multiethnic metropolis is not one space but several, at once internationalized and localized; it is also fundamentally commodified space, imaginable as part of the cycle of “delocation and relocation” that transforms the “local” into a product defined “within a global context of exchange, dialogue and conflict” (Beck, What is Globalization? 46, 47). For this reason time and place in Romeo + Juliet assume a kind of “mythic,” utopian, or atemporal quality, “a no-time that is all time, and a no-place that stands for anyplace” (Arroyo, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” 8), as the cinematography and visual design tend to dislocate both the spatial terrain of the city (how do you get from the Capulet mansion to the beach? to downtown?) and to dislocate it – emancipate it, Zygmunt Bauman might say – from the temporal terrain of embodied experience (Globalization 17).19 This mobility – Rita Kempley suggests that the gangs in Luhrmann’s film bear “a closer kinship to the Crips and Bloods than the Sharks and Jets,” drawing the film closer to the orbit of those Los Angeles-based gangs – evokes a somewhat different “world without boundaries,” a world seen without the privileges of Ralph Lauren (“Romeo and Juliet” d1). It is an “arid apocalyptic world, a` la ‘The Road Warrior’ ”; a “mythical Verona Beach,” “[s]hot in Mexico in a style that might be called retrofuturistic” or just “MTV on Midol”; a “mythical city” mixing is “unequal parts


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past, present and future.”20 Granted, Romeo’s trailer-park Mantua is desolate, the visual design of the film renders the landlocked cityscape of Mexico City (and the distant beachscape of Veracruz) illegible, and Captain Prince’s circling helicopters recall another urban allegory of middle-class racial angst, Lawrence Kasdan’s film Grand Canyon. But in an important sense the mobility of Verona Beach also points precisely to its location in the geography of capitalism, a city that reflects a particular kind of anxiety toward what Guillermo Gómez-Peña calls the “new cartography” of the border, a border in which “nation” has perhaps been superseded by other forms of demarcation: “the ThirdWorldization of the North and the First-Worldization of the South” (Warrior for Gringostroika 43). While Gómez-Peña celebrates this hybridization and the political friction it creates, in Romeo + Juliet this borderization is not the cause of tragedy, but merely its condition, a condition – the transformation of culture into commodity – that is the condition of Shakespearean performance as well. “Is this the end of Western civilization as we know it” (Morgenstern, “Film: Mod Bard” a 11)? It all depends on who we are – Fox Filmed Entertainment and its target audience of white US teenagers, fans of John Leguizamo’s solo performance work or of the Artist Formerly Known As, African-American or Latino audiences, NAFTA filmgoers north or south of the United States – and on where we are in the borderland. For as Alfredo Modenessi argues, the figuration of Verona Beach in the film also “foregrounds otherness and foreignness even to a Mexican” (“[Un]-Doing the Book” 209). Reading the film “from the receiving end” (subtitle), Modenessi notes the commodification, alienation, and resignification of the film’s shooting location. While “our monstrous capital and the iconography of Mexican life and religiousness seem to have taken a strong hold on the director’s and on the art director’s imagination,” Modenessi traces two parallel lines of the film’s treatment of space. On the one hand the film’s visual vocabulary is replete with Mexican “urban, small-town, church, and home imagery” (209), as well as with imagery drawn from folk (the adapted calavera costume for Abra) and popular culture (he notes imagery drawn from film rumberas in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and also connects Tybalt’s ball costume to T´ıvoli, a film from the 1970s) (209–12). At the same time the film seems to cite Mexico and displace it, a gesture typified by the digitalized image of Christ

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that replaces the Monument to Independence on Paseo de la Reforma (225 n.23), and by the film’s generally unreadable representation of the geography of Mexico City itself (225 n.20). This “obsessive reiteration of signs” (212) dramatizes what Mexico City (and, by extension, Latin America, Latino America, latinidad itself ) is for the film: a landscape of signifiers whose signification is determined in another discourse, that of the target market of the film – the white norteamericano imaginary. Even the Mexico City filming made its way into the US press almost entirely in the register of US phobias, usually in breathless interviews with the film’s young stars: “ ‘It was the king of Montezuma’s revenge,’ ” DiCaprio reported in People (Review of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet); Christine Spines’s interview echoes this theme (“The two young actors puked their guts out with dysentery”), and also notes a brawl involving crew members in “dirt-poor, polluted Mexico City” (“Would Die 4 U” 92). Ethnicity, Stuart Hall notes, is a positional marker: “We are all, in that sense, ethnically located” (“New Ethnicities” 447). The latinidad of Luhrmann’s film, even when it seems geographically dislocated, renders the positionality of its locale in ethnic or racial terms, drifting between and within Miami and Mexico City and Los Angeles, a space inside the national imaginary that is nonetheless not part of the (Anglo-identified) nation, Latin/America, Chicano and/or Cubano, nowhere, utop´ıa. Not surprisingly, the racial/ethnic positionalities of the characters are also difficult to place. Following the contours of the film’s groundless topography, the fantasmatic character of Verona Beach is suggested by the way in which its signifiers are read as excessive in the film’s reception. Stanley Kauffmann notes that the film takes place in “an entirely Catholic world” – “There’s a very heavy load of Catholicism; the Madonna, the crucifix, church interiors with rows and rows of candles” (“Blanking Verse” 41, 40) – an observation that has force only if we expected Shakespeare’s Verona to be anything else. In Romeo + Juliet the signifiers of Catholicism – “icons of Mexican folklore, glow-in-the-dark Madonnas and neon crucifixes are ubiquitous” (Johnson, “Souping Up the Bard” 74) – are part of the “Latinizing” dimension of the film’s visual palette, a “combustible mix of Roman Catholicism, power, politics, bottled-up sexuality and uncorked violence,” a “moral pollution” made “tactile”


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in the film’s brilliant design (Ansen, “It’s the ’90s” 73).21 Yet the Capulets’ specific ethnic affiliations are as fluid as the geography they inhabit, identifiable as part of a Cuban diaspora (which, despite conventional North American stereotypes, is not confined to Miami, but deeply affects urban cultures throughout the Caribbean basin, including Mexico City) and also with a chicanismo characteristic of the US-Mexico border from Brownsville to Tijuana. Although Catherine Martin imagined a Caribbean metropolis, with “vestiges of Cuban, Caribbean and antebellum influences” (Kempley, “Romeo and Juliet” d 7), other elements – Tybalt’s elaborate handmade vest and silvertrimmed boots in the opening scene shootout – might be described “as a derivative elaboration of basic Mexican religious iconography with a powerful Chicano overdrive . . . a sort of overwrought, because overframed, version of kitsch in the Mexico-U.S. border taste” (Modenessi, “[Un]-Doing the Book” 210). Race tropes the landscape of Verona Beach, and, like place, race in the film has also proven both controversial and illegible. Although to many reviewers most of the cast “seem Latino or black” (Lyons, “Lights, Camera, Shakespeare” 57), the cast is predominantly Angloidentified: of the three principal “Latino/a” characters, only Tybalt is played by a Latino actor (John Leguizamo); three supporting roles (Captain Prince, Mercutio, the Chorus anchorwoman) are played by African-American actors; the Montagues seem Irish (Brian Dennehy as Ted, red-haired Benvolio) and Friar Lawrence has a huge Celticcross tattoo on his back, not to mention Lady Montague, Lady Capulet and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. In another sense, though, the narrow “diversity” of the Montagues and Capulets (and of the actors who play them) resonates with the space of the internationalized urban core. The Montagues and Capulets not only resemble one another, but seem to embody the “transnational capitalist class” of “executives and their local affiliates,” “globalizing state bureaucrats,” “capitalist-inspired politicians and professionals,” and “consumerist elites (merchants, media),” who – with the possible addition of similarly internationalized criminal elites – dominate the internationalized core of the globalized cityscape (Sklair, “Sociology of the Global System” 67). The slipperiness of race in the film has partly to do with the fact that ethnic division is less significant than class and territorial division: the

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Montagues and Capulets – with Captain Prince, Dave Paris, the Chorus anchorwoman who opens and closes the film, and the actors who play them – are more different from the indigenous “locals” of the gas station, the poolhall, and the beach than they are from one another. Yet while the Montagues and Capulets are the appropriate denizens, even the extension, of the globalized urban landscape, the film also works to exoticize them within a racialized Shakespearean performativity. The force of the film at once implicates Romeo + Juliet in a deeply racialized culture, while differentiating between the fearsome exoticism of latinidad and the familiarity of blackness in Verona Beach. While latinidad conveys the geographical mobility of the film’s location, the black presence in the film is clearly identified as AfricanAmerican (as opposed to, say, Afro-Cuban), a presence that extends from the style of individual performances to the aural texture of the film as well – the choirboy singing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Leontyne Price’s Wagner, and Des’ree’s “Kissing You,” one of the signature tunes of the film. The incorporation of African-American actors and music surely “gestures toward embracing African-American experience” and “acknowledges the contributions of that culture to both popular- and high-culture art forms” (Hodgdon, “Everything’s Nice” 95); at the same time this contribution also seems tightly circumscribed in the film. For although African-American music is a prominent, even unifying element in the soundtrack, black actors remain resolutely “African-American” onscreen, isolated from the style and substance of the film’s dominant Anglo/Latin axis (it might be noted that there is very little Latin music in the soundtrack). Like Captain Prince flying above the city, or the anchorwoman confined to her box, or even Mercutio among the Montagues (is there a black gay subculture in Latin Verona Beach?), African Americans seem oddly positioned relative to the dominant social order of this multiethnic city. Music may be the universal language, but Prince, Price, and Des’ree celebrate the explicitly Anglo union of Danes and DiCaprio. While latinidad seems overdetermined in the film, a mobile marker of ethnic panic, black culture stands alongside the action, inside yet outside the dominant elite of the film – merely the soundtrack.


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Where is African-American – or Afro-Caribbean, or Afro-Latino – culture in the New World Border? Harold Perrineau’s performance is particularly revealing here, in part because of the (often unacknowledged) difficulty of reading his Mercutio. In the film’s reception Mercutio’s crossdressing tends to displace race as a meaningful signifier of his identity. He’s a “black transvestite who dances at the ball in a silver-sequined miniskirt and bra”; a “flamboyant drag queen”; a “black drag queen”; just a “black cross-dresser”; Romeo’s “crossdressing friend” Romeo’s “foul-mouthed buddy,” and “a black drag queen and quick-draw artist.” The Christian Science Monitor reports “[s]ome sexual activity between the title characters; one secondary character is a flamboyant transvestite.”22 The costuming and camerawork – the miniskirt and heels, the silky open-front shirt in the death scene (one of several critically unnoticed scenes in which Mercutio wears pants) – deftly spectacularize the masculine beauty of Mercutio’s body: Mercutio’s crossdressing is never an effort to pass as a woman, “to be real” in the terms of Jennie Livingston’s film about black and Latino gay drag performance, Paris is Burning. In the densely homosocial world of Romeo + Juliet, Mercutio’s performance does not seem to make a clearly sexualized assertion of identity, gay or otherwise. As a visual fetish Perrineau’s lithe body is treated most like that of DiCaprio in the film (if there is an icon of failed masculinity, surely it is Dave Paris, that awkward straight whiteboy bottled up in his spacesuit). Mercutio’s sexuality disappears behind its campy signifiers – José Arroyo remarks, “I am not sure that the film’s campness is necessarily a gay camp” (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” 9) – and like these empty signs of genderbending transgression, race, too, seems to be all signifier in Mercutio’s performance.23 Let me be clear: I do not mean to suggest that it is crucial to decide whether Mercutio really is gay, or really is in love with Romeo; the film’s urgent emphasis on crossdressing as “mere” performance forecloses this knowledge by foreclosing a gay Mercutio as a real possibility. Similarly, I think the film largely forecloses the force of race in Mercutio’s performance, too. Perrineau presents African-American identity not only as feminized and domesticated by the dominant culture of the play, but as a form of pure spectacle, consumed both by the dominant Anglo/Irish/Latino society of Verona Beach,

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and by the film’s audience. Perhaps Mercutio’s performance queers “race,” demonstrates that race, like gender, is signified and inhabited through the felicitous enactment of a culture’s available regimes of identification. Yet while Mercutio resonates with Judith Butler’s sense of the performative dimension of social identities – “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency” (Gender Trouble 137) – Romeo + Juliet registers that possibility in the most compromised sense. Staging Mercutio’s performance at the level of the signifier – his gayness, and his blackness, are both finally inconsequential in the action – the film treats that “identity” as merely theatrical, without performative force (disruptive or otherwise) in the social world of Verona Beach. Platinum-blond wig, white gloves, white skirt, white cape, white stockings: Mercutio’s lipsynched “Young Hearts Run Free” extravaganza at the Capulet ball signifies African-American identity (if that is what it does) as the reflex of an excessive whiteness. In Romeo + Juliet AfricanAmerican identity is, like the shimmering sequinned skirt, like Prada, a product, absorbed “straight” into the globalized spectacle of Shakespeare.24 José Arroyo remarks that “[e]ven a black Mercutio will not seem strange: we’ve become used to blind casting in Shakespeare” (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” 8). But if Perrineau’s Mercutio does not strike us as “strange,” it’s not because the production is blind to race, but because it commodifies the signifiers of African-American culture as something to sell, an element of the film’s dominant American culture both onscreen and in the theatre. To be young and hip in Verona Beach or in the film’s audience is to listen to black music (sometimes performed by white bands), and Perrineau’s Mercutio is the only performance to treat Shakespearean language in a recognizable idiom – one idiom, to be sure – of contemporary African-American English, lightly lacing the rhythms of the Queen Mab speech with the intonations of street slang.25 As music, as camp, African-American culture is absorbed into the dominant register of the film; race becomes controversial when it seems to play Shakespeare in drag. Signaling without specifying race as the issue, for example, Anthony Lane is put off by Mercutio’s “howling intonations,” which “appear to be founded on the principle that if you rap and rant with sufficient brio the meaning will somehow be sprung loose like a beast from its cage” (“Tights! Camera! Action!” 66).


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Race matters in Mercutio’s performance when it verges on racializing Shakespeare’s English.26 Racing Shakespeare is permissible, of course, provided it is done professionally. The racialized status of “professional” Shakespearean speech is underscored by the way in which the words of the Chorus are spoken in the film: first by the African-American anchorwoman (in the conventional tones of television newscasters), and then as a voiceover by Pete Postlethwaite, which appears to correct or substantiate the anchorwoman’s version in properly Shakespearean tones (Elizabeth Deitchman, “TV Screens”). Miriam Margolyes and Pete Postlethwaite are, the reviewers repeatedly remind us, experienced British stage actors, and so have a kind of “professional” comfort and facility with the language (Peter Matthews, Review of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 55). Derek Malcolm finds it “rather a relief to hear Peter Postlewaite [sic] as Father Laurence and Miriam Margolyes as the Nurse, both of whom know exactly what they are doing with the skinny material available” (“Bard’s in the ’hood”). The fact that for several reviewers Margolyes’s Nurse strikes a note of sunny latinidad rather than ethnic caricature is attributed to her Shakespearean training: her “broad Hispanic accent” (Peter Travers, “Just Two Kids” 123) and “heavy Hispanic inflection” sound “entirely appropriate” (Johnson, “Souping Up the Bard” 75). In the film the Nurse is first heard shouting “Hooolieeeeetta!,” although Craig Pearce’s and Baz Luhrmann’s screenplay simply prints “JULIET!” (William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 32). While reviewers are concerned about the “teeming, violent, multicultural Latin metropolis,” they are comforted, as David Ansen is, by her “matronly Latina spitfire”: “Every scene with the marvelous Margolyes (employing a Carmen Miranda accent) and Postlethwaite (an Irish actor doing an American accent) snaps into focus” (“It’s the ’90s” 73, 74). Margolyes’s skill at rendering this stereotype also underscores the slipperiness of place in Romeo + Juliet. As Modenessi makes clear, Margolyes’s Nurse “bears more than passing resemblance to a Mexican ‘Nana’ turned unspecified illegal alien” (“[Un]-Doing the Book” 212), a norte americano stereotype out of place in a Mexican Verona Beach. If Verona Beach were really a “Latin metropolis” – outside the United States in other words – the Nurse would not be a “Latina,” let alone speak like Carmen Miranda: to signify the

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nurse as a Latina (i.e., someone of Latin American descent living in the United States) makes the “target audience” of her performance clear – people for whom Carmen Miranda is a “zesty” icon of a Disneyfied latinidad (Maslin, “Soft! What Light?” c 12). English actors in Latina drag are zesty; “raced” American actors are sloppy, dull, brutish: “Luhrmann has encouraged his cast to give Shakespeare an American accent, but he’s also encouraged them to yell, and the combination sometimes renders dialogue unintelligible (you can barely make out anything John Leguizamo’s Tybalt says)” (Rodriguez, “Bizarre?” 28g ).27 Difference sells, but it sells Shakespeare only when it can be assimilated to the dominant values of a protected market. Black drag dematerializes Mercutio into his signifiers; Latina drag serves merely to evoke Margolyes’s training; geographical drag transforms the cityscape/borderscape into a mythic nowhere. Verona Beach, perhaps like all of Latin(o) América, represents “not a fixed geographical magnitude, not a separate place on the globe, but a transnational idea and the staging of that idea” (Beck, What is Globalization? 27). The film uses its racialized location to concretize the vague conflict between the Montagues and Capulets – which Denise Albanese aptly describes as “somehow related to capitalism” (“Shakespeare Film” 217) – while at the same time marking Verona Beach and most of its inhabitants as transgressive of “Shakespearean” meanings. Where this transgression is “unmarked,” so to speak, is in the unframed, dislocated whiteness of the film’s protagonists, Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio, who seem to stand apart both from the film’s Latin location and from its densely racialized social order – Danes “looks wrong here” (Baltake, “A Rousing Take” 21).28 The tradition of “white” principals in an “ethnicized” cast of Montagues and Capulets (or Jets and Sharks) extends at least as far back as West Side Story, and expresses the film’s effort to retain the “value” of Shakespeare: the central tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is unmarked by race, transcending the film’s overt temporal, geographical, and social context. The universalizing gesture usually associated with Shakespearean performance is, in this sense, reframed as a commodifying gesture as well, the “mainstreaming of a certain mode of cynical, ironic consumption of global difference” well within a familiar aspect of the globalized economy – “neocolonial outsourcing” (Albanese, “Shakespeare Film” 219, 223).29 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet at once


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sells the local and erases the signs of its locality, urges the significance of race in the social landscape and commodifies it as mere signification, celebrates a globalized multiculturalism that is finally reduced to the drama of its inexplicably white, American, protagonists.30 “Hegemonic power,” Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper argue, “does not simply manipulate na¨ıvely given differences between individuals and social groups, it actively produces and reproduces difference as a key strategy to create and maintain modes of social and spatial division that are advantageous to its continued empowerment” (“Space that Difference Makes” 184–85). Although William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is hardly cognate with intercultural performances such as The Kathakali King Lear, it urgently locates Shakespeare in a discourse of which intercultural performance is a part: the contemporary marketing of Shakespeare through the signifiers of ethnicity and location, of ethnicity as a marker of a fetishized locality, raced place. In its use of Romeo and Juliet, its persistent selling of Shakespeare, its “plundering of the supermarket of popular culture” (Matthews, Review of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 55), its refuge in the postmodern cityscape, and its post-NAFTA spatialization, Romeo + Juliet asks a larger question: “what is the geography of capitalism” (Neil Smith, Uneven Development xii), and where is Shakespearean performance in that landscape? Arjun Appadurai notes that “landscape” is itself a metaphor constellating a range of forces in a single, imaginary spatiality: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes, the suffix -scape pointing “to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes,” and to the fact “that they are deeply perspectival constructs” (Modernity at Large 33). No doubt a supplier of cheap labor in the maquiladoras just outside town (on one side of the border or the other), Verona is also replete – like cities in the First and Third Worlds – with last year’s outmoded, downmarket labels and logos. Baz Luhrmann typically celebrates the film’s sublimation of place and race, how the discourse of fashion marks Verona’s place in a global market: “It’s LA meets Miami meets Mexico City! It’s Hawaiian shirts and Prada and Dolce & Gabbana! It’s the Fifties and the Seventies and the future! It’s guns, pills and sex! It’s synergistic soundtrack and MTV nirvana!” (quoted in Charles Gant, “Film of the Year” 76).31 Luhrmann identifies the film’s participation in that globalizing

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rhetoric, selling Shakespeare’s Verona as a fashion statement to a teen audience accustomed to the mobile signifiers of advertising, “a very targeted campaign” (in the words of the president of Fox Filmed Entertainment), framing words “right out of the text of the play” (as the creative director of the film’s advertising agency put it) in the fast-paced imagery of “rap and car culture and gun culture and fashion and music” (Bernard Weinraub, “Audiences in Love” c 13).32 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet offers a dystopic vision of the interpenetration of intercultural performance and postcolonial critique, situating both the drama (Romeo and Juliet) and the product (Romeo + Juliet) within a globalized discourse of consumption. Outside history, outside geography, Romeo + Juliet signifies race and place as salable commodities, alongside Prada suits, Phoenix gasoline, the various wares of The Merchant of Verona Beach, Shakespeare. Absorbing Shakespeare into the market-driven rhetoric of the producers – McDonald’s, Disney – of the globalized economy, the film allegorizes the work of Shakespearean drama as an intercultural globalized commodity. Shakespearean discourse blends into advertising and fashion, and into the slippery transformations of race and place characteristic of the privileged world of the transnational elite, who are at once the film’s protagonists (both characters and actors) and also its target audience. Like Coke, perhaps, in the global market for intercultural performance, Shakespeare is simply “it.”

vag a b o n d s ha k e s pe a re A world without vagabonds is the utopia of the society of tourists. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization (97)

What is the force of intercultural Shakespeare? And where does it have force as intercultural Shakespeare? During the curtain call of Grupo Galpão’s final performance of Romeu e Julieta at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (23 July 2000), artistic director Mark Rylance joined the Brazilian actors – who “do not see themselves as part of any ‘classical’ tradition: its actors are closer to Brazil’s strong traditions of street theatre and circus performance” (Romeu e Julieta Program 12) – onstage to thank them for making the journey to London. Gesturing to Antônio Edson, who was made up to resemble a kind of clown


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“Shakespeare” (exaggerated “Elizabethan” costume, Droeshout forehead, clown makeup), Rylance remarked that the company’s energetic blending of “tragedy and comedy” was “closer to Shakespeare than we can be today” (Postperformance address). The performance of Romeu e Julieta was certainly a tour de force: from the Latinized Volvo onstage – the windows and side panels covered with decorative painting; a flat stage attached to the roof – to the entrance of the company, parading through the yard on stilts, playing instruments, singing, in half-whiteface, and “decked out in carnival-coloured cod-Elizabethan clobber,” this Romeo and Juliet struck a comic engagement with the play, its audience, and the space of the Globe (Brian Logan, Review of Romeu e Julieta). While Romeo + Juliet allegorizes the commodification of Shakespearean drama on the global market, Romeu e Julieta at the Globe exemplifies the multiple, often contradictory force of intercultural performance in fashioning a global Shakespeare. Topos or tropos: intercultural performativity dramatizes the power of place in framing the force of dramatic performance. Built with a rigorous commitment to historical authenticity, Shakespeare’s Globe fully participates in the contemporary globalization of culture, not least in its placement in the geography of millennial London. The concrete bunker Royal National Theatre complex was criticized in the 1970s for its sociospatial politics – oriented toward the City, it turned its back on the decaying, working-class London to the south and east – and the Globe’s history from the 1970s to its opening in the mid-1990s evokes the economic and geographical transformation of central London in the era of transnational globalization. Sam Wanamaker’s original plan was to develop a strip of property from the Cannon Street railway bridge to the Southwark Bridge. The first project included several hotels, conference and trade centers, an amusement park, museums, and several theatres, including a Globelike building of modern design reminiscent of the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (Barry Day, This Wooden “O” 31–32). From the outset, and throughout the project’s various permutations, Wanamaker faced opposition from members of the Southwark Borough Council and (more persistently) from the North Southwark Community Development Group: the project was elitist, it failed to restore an industrial base to Southwark (once a center of shipbuilding and other manufacturing), and it occupied space that might be

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devoted to council housing.33 But despite the power of these claims, the desire to return manufacturing to central London was increasingly anachronistic, as London’s rapid loss of manufacturing was offset by explosive growth in other sectors, particularly the financial and related “producer services” characteristic of urban globalization in the late 1980s and 1990s.34 Shakespeare’s Globe is an important part of the urban core of the new London, an active cultural corridor stretching seamlessly along the Jubilee Walk from the Aquarium (nearly opposite the Houses of Parliament) and the London Eye, past the Royal National Theatre complex, the Oxo Tower, and the Tate Modern museum (a restored powerplant), to the Globe and beyond, a corridor joining the South Bank firmly to the City across the Thames. This ribbon of development – accessible by a new, prizewinning Underground station and, less steadily, by the pedestrian Millennium Bridge – folds the South Bank into the City and is, in this sense, cognate with other mixed-use transformations of rundown urban centers: Boston’s Faneuil Market, San Francisco’s SoMa (South of Market) district, and South Street Seaport and Times Square in New York. These new urban zones are a distinctive and increasingly common part of the urban landscape, traceable to the Disneyesque “theming” of urban space – the “festival markets” concept is the hallmark of the Rouse Corporation, which built both Faneuil Market and South Street Seaport – that works to reiterate and recycle familiar symbolic codes with a newly “historical” inflection.35 Accelerated by the discovery of the Rose and Globe foundations, the decision to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe as an authentic historical reconstruction is consistent with this increasingly common trend in redeveloping (restoration as mallization) the transnational urban core, and with the extension of central London not only to the Bankside but to the Docklands as well (where the new-economy development and gentrification met with a form of resistance familiar in cognate working-class neighborhoods – New York’s East Village, San Francisco’s Mission – in other globalizing cities: muggings known as the “yuppie tax” [Neil Smith, “New City” 93]). Although the new South Bank is very much part of workaday London, its economic vitality depends on the “transnational capitalist class” evoked in Luhrmann’s film, national and international tourists, business travelers, school tours, and daytrippers with pounds,


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dollars, yen, and euros to spend. Sponsored by transnational corporations (the season sponsor for 2000 was Panasonic, with additional sponsorship from Ticketmaster and the London Arts Council), defining a local and even national center thoroughly penetrated by global commerce, the Globe’s reconstructed form evokes the “contradictory spaces, characterized by contestation, internal differentiation, continuous border crossings” that have become “emblematic” of the contemporary global cityscape (Sassen, “Introduction” xxxiv).36 Rebuilt from The Theatre’s timbers, renamed, and removed to a transpontine entertainment entrepot in 1599, the once-and-future Globe has always signified the spatial reimagining of central London and its reciprocity with the city’s place in the imagination of the great globe beyond.37 The new Globe Theatre’s contradictory temporality and spatiality – past and present, real and simulated, national and global – is in a sense typical of the contemporary Disneyfication of the globalized urban core. The new Globe’s urban spatiality locates the work of Shakespeare in the landscape of globalized performance. The Globe is in one sense a deeply “local” building, built to commemorate a bygone structure, nearly on the original site, with a massive effort to reproduce not only the dimensions, but also the material feel and flavor of a handmade early modern theatre. Yet while authentic Shakespeare is the Globe’s principal product, the theatre’s dependence on international finance, metaphorically spatialized by the new South Bank, is dramatized by a singular event in the Globe’s annual season: the Globe-to-Globe International Theatre Festival. The Festival “forms an integral part of the Globe’s mission to explore the impact of Shakespeare on other cultures. Through partnership with international communities, it investigates how differing social, cultural and political influences find expression through Shakespeare and to explore how the plays are adapted and illuminated” (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Season 2000 9). The purpose of the Globe-to-Globe season – to explore “the impact of Shakespeare on other cultures” – is, however, problematized by the Globe’s location in urban, national, and (I am tempted to say) Globe-al space. What is the force, the potential force, of intercultural performance in the oak-and-plaster frame of the globalized Globe? Although “international” Shakespeare is hardly unknown in London – touring productions directed by Peter Sellars (United States),

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Yukio Ninagawa (Japan), Robert Lepage (Quebec), Peter Brook, and many others have visited in recent years – these productions do not represent the axis of the Globe-to-Globe’s work, which stages a specific – if implicit – definition of “other cultures.” The “intercultural” materials and practices of First World theatre – of Japan, Germany, the United States, Brook’s Paris-based company – occupy a very different niche on the global performance market, more akin to multinationals like Sony or Bic or Daimler-Chrysler than to, say, The Body Shop, whose sale of the exotic, local, and indigenous resonates more clearly with the mission of the Globe-to-Globe season, and its invited productions: Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth from South Africa in 1997, Teatro Buend´ıa’s Otra Tempestad from Cuba in 1998, the Annette Leday/Keli Company The Kathakali King Lear from India in 1999, and Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta from Brazil in 2000. As Sherif Hetata remarks of Brook’s The Mahabharata, the Globe’s vision of intercultural performance epitomizes “the neocolonial obsession with materials and techniques from the so-called third world, which draw on our traditional disciplines rather than on the progress that many people in the South have made despite tremendous obstacles” (“Dollarization, Fragmentation” 287). Moreover, this use of intercultural performance reflects the distinctive character of modern colonialism, the sense of the “peripheral world” as “a passive spectator of a thematic that does not touch it, because it is a ‘barbarian,’ a ‘premodern,’ or, simply, still in need of being ‘modernized’ ” (Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism” 17). Here the metropolitan global subject’s agency is that of the spectatorial consumer – of products, entertainment, media, images, bodies, performances – drawn from that still peripheral world. This perspective is figured by the artwork of the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Season 2000 brochure. Encircled by the blueprint groundplan of the theatre, a white Hercules (shot from behind in black and white, head shaven, naked to the waist), lifts the earth, shown as the familiar color photograph from space. Hercules bears the earth, but he also observes it, gazing at the portion of the planet that is visible – central and southern Africa – through the spectral image of the new Globe superimposed on the continent. The Globe both frames the world and occupies it, embracing Africa within the view of its godlike white spectator.38


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Despite the variety of these performances – Zulu dance and storytelling, Cuban pomo pastiche, kathakali adaptation, street-theatre circus – the reception of the Globe-to-Globe events has been surprisingly uniform, foregrounding the performative force of intercultural Shakespeare on the Globe stage. In part because the productions are not in English, reviews tend to emphasize the loss of poetry as a signal aspect of the productions: Shakespeare’s global visitors are represented as energetic, technically accomplished, visually stunning yet intellectually and/or artistically stunted. Reviewers praise the “two, sweaty, exhilarating hours” of Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth (Globeto-Globe 1997) as “an exciting if strange experience” (Nick Curtis, Review of Umabatha), and frequently note the production’s emphasis on “traditional storytelling that is never particularly subtle but has a racy momentum” (Gardner, Review of Umabatha). Benedict Nightingale finds the production “well suited to a packed O open to the sky; and never more than when the cast is jumping, somersaulting, drumming its feet, banging its shields and weapons, ritually keening, or doing whatever evokes a victory celebration or state funeral. The dancing is wonderful and, it seems, unstoppable” (Review of Umabatha). Macbeth may be the play, but what is on show is “culture,” as the company’s physicality becomes a metonymy of “African culture” as a whole: “what Umabatha illustrates is the irresistible, toe-tapping, hand-clapping appeal of traditional African rhythm and dance” (Gardner); “[a] thrilling showcase for Zulu culture and a salutary example of the way other national perceptions can refresh the work of the playwright we so slavishly protect and revere as OURS” (Curtis); “the piece celebrates the domestic rhythm of African life” (Gardner). Fittingly enough, given the pretensions of the Globe, “[y]ou could say that Umabatha . . . is a piece of heritage theatre. But only in the best sense. ‘The Zulu Macbeth’ fuses two traditions with dauntless vigour” (Robert Butler, Review of Umabatha). At the Globe the force of Umabatha is a direct expression of a densely overdetermined “Africa,” at once enabled by and distinct from “Shakespeare.” Assured that the show represents Zulu “culture” in some straightforward manner, reviewers nonetheless express an anxious regard for what is lost in translation: “The plot has been hijacked as a vehicle for indigenous culture, the poetry largely abandoned” (Curtis). Yet at the same time this foreign, outlandish performance

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is familiarized by its English location. For one reviewer Umabatha chimes with the elegant simplicity of popular theatre and music hall – “Mabatha’s breakdown at the feast is brought on by a double take of Morecambe and Wise proportions on seeing Bhangane’s masked ghost while doing the Zulu equivalent of line dancing” (Gardner); for another Umabatha succeeds by recalling the comic element of the Macbeths’ domestic life – “[t]he Macbeths’ marriage always had a touch of George and Mildred ” (Butler). While Robert Hanks judiciously asks “whether things are really so straightforward. When the murderers set out to kill Banquo, is their exaggeratedly stealthy walk meant as a joke – it certainly raised a laugh on Monday evening – or is it simply a formalised expression of caution and guilt?” (Review of Umabatha). Reviewers in general tend toward a primitivizing gesture, regarding the “physical” as the register of “African” identity, and identifying it with the “popular” body of English working-class entertainment. Hanks notes that “Msoni [sic] and his athletic, dynamic cast manage to suggest vividly a warrior society, in which fighting prowess is not simply an admirable but incidental attribute, it is central to a man’s identity,” and so argues that “Umabatha is more ‘authentic’ than any modern Macbeth,” a view echoed in other terms by Benedict Nightingale: “Msomi evokes a world where magic, laughter and violence co-exist in what I’m tempted to call a Jacobean fashion. The large, bold emotions are similarly apt” (Review of Umabatha). In touch with the physical, popular rhetoric of authentic Jacobean theatre, Umabatha signifies the absolute alterity of colonized cultures while at the same time rendering that alterity comprehensible in the wooden O of the Globe. The performance is “a form of tourist theatre which invites us to celebrate the exotic and treat it as a photo opportunity” (Gardner), staging “Africa” as fully open to view, in the terms offered by Macbeth and by Shakespeare. Yet Umabatha also demonstrates that other, national (even “universal”) aspects of Shakespeare – English, poetry, psychological complexity – seem to escape contamination by these subaltern, sweaty others. Although the mission of the Globe-to-Globe season is at once to investigate “how differing social, cultural and political influences find expression through Shakespeare and to explore how the plays are adapted and illuminated” (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Season 2000 9), in practice these local purposes


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are precisely obscured by Globe performativity. At the Globe, performance tends to essentialize rather than multiply Shakespeare. The force of the Globe Umabatha is to confirm European fantasies of Africa, its people, and their cultures, reified against the whitewashed background of tourist privilege, the privilege to decide others’ meanings, the privilege of owning Shakespeare.39 These themes echo again and again in the reception of the Globeto-Globe visitors, whose use of Shakespeare tends to be read as antinomian difference rather than as sustaining an emerging dialogue. Teatro Buend´ıa’s Otra Tempestad brought a surprisingly offbeat Tempest to London, one in which Prospero’s island is inhabited by characters from other Shakespeare plays: Miranda prefers Caliban over her father’s choice, Othello; Prospero’s utopian republic is destroyed by Macbeth; Shylock – who was Romeo in his youth – interrupts the wedding demanding his pound of flesh, and so on. Again, what most impresses reviewers is the show’s physical exuberance, its “energetic irreverence” (Curtis, Review of Otra Tempestad) – notably the “trio of tricksy – and topless – Yoruban deities, the daughters of Sycorax” (Paul Taylor, Review of Otra Tempestad) – and how the “stage is filled with the sights and sounds of Cuban culture – tropical birds, drums, beasts formed out of tumbling bodies, horn-spouting masks” (Woddis, Review of Otra Tempestad). Much as the Globe Umabatha retails a Disneyfied “African culture,” so Otra Tempestad – when transferred to London, at least – appears to market the cultural and political alterity of a “New World, which we are probably meant to see as an allegory of Cuba,” although this recognition runs no deeper than the notion of parrots and “sportingly topless” women: “the show is probably a cunningly disguised act of subversion against Communist orthodoxy,” so cunning as to escape further comment (Spencer, Review of Otra Tempestad). Not surprisingly, perhaps, Otra Tempestad in London stages a vision of tourist culture that the Globe (with its own giftshop, T-shirts, and trinkets) is at pains to keep at a distance: tourist culture as tourist trash. Like travel to the sunny, swinging, poor, and finally meaningless South, Otra Tempestad “feels like tourism in reverse – a chance for London theatregoers to catch a bit of foreign exoticism on our own turf before we go back to the usual grind, where productions of The Tempest make sense and Shakespearean protagonists stick to their own plays” (Curtis).

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The reception of The Kathakali King Lear in 1999 reciprocally confirms these thematics: the rigors of kathakali are much in evidence, but the demanding discipline of the performance is not easily assimilable to notions of physical exuberance, Third World energy, or even tourist consumerism. Audiences are treated to the “[t]echnicolour costumes and mask-like make-up” characteristic of kathakali, but in a production whose slow pace and complex gestural and movement vocabulary remain recondite: “If you can find the patience, this is an exceptional theatrical experience – as sensually invigorating as it is anthropologically edifying” (Marmion, Review of The Kathakali King Lear). Unlike the low-comedy virtuosity of Umabatha or the life’s-a-beach sensibility of Otra Tempestad at the Globe, kathakali stands rigidly apart from inscription into European ideologies of the primitive. The physical discipline and evident semiotic complexity of the form prevent the ready naturalizing of its meanings to the sweaty exuberance of the unlettered body: for Lyn Gardner “[t]he faces of the actors are almost entirely without expression although every now and again somebody wiggles their eyebrows extremely fast. This is about as interesting as I imagine watching King Lear performed in semaphore would be. I wouldn’t wish that or this on anybody” (Review of Kathakali King Lear). Gardner’s review implies that the success of the Globe-to-Globe project depends on a narrow strand of exoticism, in which the physical work of the performance appears to confirm European attitudes about the Third World, in part by engaging – and transforming – the emergent conventions of Globe performativity. As Lois Potter remarks, “it was both frustrating and instructive to see [The Kathakali King Lear] in a theatre where the audience normally expects to be fully involved in the performance” (“Roman Actors” 508–10). Reviewing The Kathakali King Lear, Lyn Gardner notes that the Globe-to-Globe season proves “that removed from their social and cultural context these productions provide, at best, a darn good spectacle and, at worst, run the real risk of looking like exotica. The season has become a bit like showing off a rare animal in the zoo.” The Globe-to-Globe seasons exemplify a familiar aspect of globalization, both the “Coca-colonization” of culture – the transformation of all localities into the export regimes of centralized, US-identified multinational corporations – and its Disneyfication, local culture


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reduced to a narrow range of metonymic signs (the Eiffel Tower for “France,” dancing and drumming for “Africa,” lurid parrots and leftist politics for “Cuba”) for global consumption. The Globe-to-Globe season perpetuates the familiar relations of colonial modernity: the “other” globe provides the raw materials, the export market, and the entertaining spectacle for the metropolitan, transnational, Globe consumer. Yet as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note, this dynamic misrepresents the complexity of globalization in several ways. Finding it “simplistic to imagine an active First World simply forcing its products on a passive Third World,” they argue that “global mass culture does not so much replace local culture as coexist with it”; not only can “imported mass culture” become “indigenized, put to local use, given a local accent,” but many Third World countries, Mexico, Brazil, and India for example, also “dominate their own local markets and even become cultural exporters” (“From the Imperial Family” 149). While the Globe-to-Globe season positions its global Shakespeare through the metonymic rhetoric of Disneyfication, this practice obscures the more complex structures, practices, and relations that sustain performance in the global sphere, the specific interrelationship between global and local, the different forms of agency and identity, the different force that such performances might claim outside the wooden O. Shown locally in the province of Minas Gerais, nationally throughout Brazil, and internationally on tour, Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta (Globe-to-Globe 2000) illustrates the multivocality of global Shakespearean performativity today. Adapting a Romantic nineteenth-century Brazilian translation of Romeo and Juliet to the dialect and literary conventions of the sertão (the remote highlands of northeastern Brazil), Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta is a brilliant, comic tour de force, designed and developed for mobile street performance: the actors’ costumes are an elegant wardrobe of outdated finery and motley; they wear half-white makeup with heavily rouged cheeks; there is comic swordplay, puppetry, and physical buffoonery – all to the constant accompaniment of song and instrumental music presided over by a dignified clown Shakespeare. The centerpiece of the production is a decorated stationwagon, a Volvo in the London performances. Replacing the car the company uses in Brazil, the Volvo provides the playing area: it has a flat stage on the roof, it is framed by

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wooden staircases and balance beams, and several scenes are played by actors – and by puppets – through the side windows. Since there is nothing immediately “Brazilian” about the cast’s costumes, the decorated, outdated stationwagon provides the dominant image of latinidad onstage, visually recalling Luis Valdez’s description of the “Chicano car” in the United States: “We can start with a lowriders’ cool Merc or a campesino’s banged-up Chevi, and describe the various paint jobs, hub caps, dents, taped windows, Virgin on the dashboard, etc. that define the car as particularly Raza. Underneath all the trimmings, however, is an unmistakable production of Detroit, and extension of General Motors” (or in this case, Sweden) (“Notes on Chicano Theatre” 6). The company enters the Globe – singing, playing instruments, on stilts – through the pit, and plays the essentially comic narrative (in sertanês, the distinctive Brazilian Portuguese of the region) directly and energetically to the audience. Fernanda Vianna’s lissome Juliet (in toe shoes, frequently en pointe, with an umbrella) and Eduardo Moreira’s earnest Romeo are surrounded by an effervescent cast of characters: Chico Pelúcio’s Friar Lawrence, asking why the audience is not in church on a Sunday (“You sinners!” he says in mock disgust, and in English, sprinkling the groundlings with holy water); Rodolfo Vaz’s red-nosed Mercutio playing a hysterical wooden-sword duel on stilts with Tybalt, and returning as a musical angel, with a white nose, after his death; Teuda Bara’s low-comedy Nurse, the short, heavy-set actress wearing sugar-sack “breasts” around her neck, amplifying an already ample figure. At the final London performance, as the cast left the Globe stage (again through the pit), singing, dancing, and juggling, they were followed by the audience, and the performance continued on the plaza for some time after the show.40 Sold as a “bittersweet interpretation of Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy” in the mode of “the colourful world of Brazilian street theatre,” drawn from “the popular culture of the mining state of Minas Gerais” (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Season 2000 9), Romeu e Julieta extends the thematics of reception characteristic of the Globe-to-Globe events. Patrick Marmion notes that the short, intense, comic performance is “a theatrical pageant with a carnivalesque atmosphere,” in which the familiar narrative is sustained by its “lucidly mimed” physical action (Review of Romeu e Julieta). Since “The Globe may not


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be a place for dramatic subtlety,” it is not surprising that the “alwaysresponsive Globe audience” responds strongly to the verve of Romeu e Julieta, “a mad and manic delight, persuasively proof that Brazil really is where the nuts come from” (Charles Spencer, Review of Romeu e Julieta). Yet “street theatre” performance appears to prevent Romeu e Julieta, for the professional press at least, from fully seizing Shakespeare’s play. Predicting that “[t]his’ll bewilder the tourists,” Brian Logan precisely locates the production’s conceptual weakness in the streets of Belo Horizonte: “Sacrificing tragic impact for knockabout comedy, meanwhile, makes artistic sense in street-theatre terms; at the Globe, the result is a dramatic thinness, compounded by the language barrier. A fish out of water, then – but one with charm and talent enough to merit a peek before it returns to more familiar seas” (Review of Romeu e Julieta). The engaging populism of Romeu e Julieta capitalizes on an important performative register of the new (and old) Globe: the direct appeal to the audience. At the same time the production also reveals the limits of this popular performativity: at the Globe performance must finally evoke the artistic integrity of the written, authorial script. While Romeu e Julieta’ s reception echoes that of other Globe-toGlobe productions, Grupo Galpão hardly exemplifies the Globe’s preference for fully indigenized, local, cultural commodities. Despite the London marketing, Grupo Galpão’s participation in the globalization of theatrical practice today dramatizes the parochial force of intercultural performance at the Globe. Unlike other reviews, Michael Billington’s extended commentary surprisingly sets the production in its actual context: contemporary international theatre. Billington sees the “jokey, 90-minute circus-style production” as “a violent contrast to the Globe’s favoured style of doublet-and-hose authenticity,” a contrast that confirms the provinciality of the Brazilian company (Review of Romeu e Julieta). Recognizing that “in Brazil the attempt to incorporate Shakespeare into a street theatre would have some [unspecified] social value,” Billington argues that this Romeo and Juliet “never gets to grips with the tragic elements of the story”: “set down in the Globe, the production is simply visiting exotica: a colourful romp that induces a Last Night of the Proms audience reaction.” Yet Billington also draws Romeu e Julieta out of the localized image of Brazilian street theatre and into the discourse of contemporary global performance.

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On a global level, it also strikes me that the circus metaphor is in danger of becoming an exhausted cliche. In Brazil it may still have resonance. But in the west we have seen too many people, from Fellini, Brook and Anthony Newley to every avant-garde group you care to name, colonise it for it to have any residual life. This may seem hard on this lively Brazilian troupe who put their heart and soul into the performance and who know how to adapt to the vagaries of the space. At one point, Eduardo Moreira’s chunky-calved Romeu and Fernanda Vianna’s gracefully balletic Julieta pause in their love-making as a helicopter whirrs overhead: a novel case of coitus interruptus. The physical skills of Grupo Galpão are also beyond doubt. But, at the end of 90 minutes, I felt I had met an endearing Brazilian troupe but learned very little new about Shakespeare’s play beyond its amazing capacity for survival. Review of Romeu e Julieta

Working to keep Brazilian theatre on the cultural margins – the tired clichés of postmodern Europe are probably the latest rage down there – Billington nonetheless casts Grupo Galpão into the orbit of the modern stage. Framed as “street theatre,” the performance is fully within an important European theatre tradition, since commedia dell’ arte is indigenous to European theatre in a way that Zulu storytelling and kathakali are not. More to the point, commedia, circus, and clownery are a critical part of a high-modernist “international style” in the theatre, animating playwriting (Beckett, Barnes, Handke), design, and directing (Meyerhold, Brecht, Brook), to say nothing of a postmodern fascination with circus as multinational formation (Cirque du Soleil). For Billington, though, Grupo Galpão’s use of a modernist theatrical convention witnesses to the company’s irreducible locality: if they were really global, they would know that circus was last year’s, or last decade’s, fad. Billington attends to one sense of intercultural performance: the commodification of culture as style. Like many companies, Grupo Galpão engages with a globalized theatrical economy in several ways, and by retaining the style of their work as local, Billington at once misrepresents the company and testifies to the work of the Globe in fashioning the force of intercultural performances on its stage. Much as Brook’s early work explored Brecht and Artaud – no mere imitator, he – so Grupo Galpão is hardly engaged in superficial imitation of modernist masters. In their work on Romeo and Juliet, Grupo Galpão conducted extensive research into Brook’s theatrical writings, as well as his rehearsal and directing practice, particularly the landmark


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A Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1970.41 A living body of working theatrical practice, Brook’s theatre, like that of Artaud and Brecht, and of Grotowski, Barba, Boal, and Suzuki, is not merely a lexicon of style, but part of a global discourse of theatrical experimentation, practices that gain new force as they are adapted to new locations, new demands, new uses. While Grupo Galpão’s performance is manifestly part of the intercultural discourse of modern theatre, Billington follows the primitivizing lead of the Globe-to-Globe International Theatre Festival, seeing Romeu e Julieta merely as an instance of colonial mimicry, “almost the same, but not quite” Brook (Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” 86). It may be good enough in some Portuguese Peoria, but in London? In London the work of Romeu e Julieta is transformed by the metonymic, Disneyfying rhetoric of the Globe: the exuberant black body = Africa; exotic flora and fauna and surreal magical realism = politically mysterious Cuba; colorful but inscrutable physical discipline = India (and Asia in general); lively but untutored street performance = Brazil (think Carnaval). Yet as Mike Featherstone suggests, it is possible to point to another perspective in the work of global culture today, the “restricted sense of ‘third cultures’: sets of practices, bodies of knowledge, conventions, and lifestyles which have developed in ways which have become increasingly independent of nation-states” (“Localism, Globalism” 60). These “third cultures” need not, of course, be politically oppositional in any sense: Luhrmann’s Montagues and Capulets, and perhaps even the audiences at Shakespeare’s Globe, might be taken as privileged versions of third-culture agency, as is the “entertainment underworld” of sexperformance that, like the international traffic in high culture, is fully sustained by a globalized entertainment economy (Holledge and Tompkins, Women’s Intercultural Performance 153, chapter 5). Participating in a globalized network of performance practices, methods, and reception, Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta represents a much more complex and dynamic sense of “intercultural performance,” in which the force of performance, and of Shakespeare, is constantly in negotiation between the global and the local, enabling different kinds of force at different sites of performance. Grupo Galpão has a strong and continuous investment both in street performance and in bringing theatre to poor and remote audiences in Brazil, but its organization, structure, and history closely

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resemble those of theatre companies in North America and Europe. The company was founded in 1982 by four actors – Teuda Bara, Eduardo da Luz Moreira, Wanda Fernandes, and Antônio Edson – who, like many of their generation, were attempting to recall the effervescent Brazilian cultural explosion of the 1960s, particularly the work of Augusto Boal, Oswald de Andrade, and the Teatro da PUC of São Paulo and others after the harsh censorship of the 1970s (Carlos Brandão, Grupo Galpão 15). Even in its inception, though, Grupo Galpão evinces the transnational dimension of theatre practice: the actors had been working in conventional theatre when they began a workshop conducted by two members of the Free Theatre of Munich, George Froscher and Kurt Bildstein, experts in street performance who had been brought to Brazil by the Goethe Institute (Brandão, Grupo Galpão 18). Already familiar with Boal’s work, and – as Eduardo Moreira reports – “contaminated by the virus of street theatre” through an internationally funded workshop (quoted in Barbara Heliodora, “Grupo Galpão” 5), the company initiated the dialectical working process it has maintained ever since. Represented in London solely by the indigenous, improvisational character of its street work, Grupo Galpão self-consciously alternates between street performance and formal productions for indoor theatres: “the permanent shift from theatre houses to the street stage” is “a hallmark of the company’s career.” These “two extremes” of theatre “articulate and feed on each other.” While street theatre develops one kind of ensemble work, physical alacrity, and an alert responsiveness to an audience, Eduardo Moreira finds that “the conventional indoor stage invites more refined and detailed work. Whereas the streets belong to folk theatre, conventional stages enable the company to develop other languages” (“Grupo Galpão” 171). Intentionally drawing on a range of performance practices, Grupo Galpão complicates the constrained sense of the local, the indigenous, and the popular used to market their Shakespeare at the Globe. In 1984–85, for instance, the company devised a theatrical production of Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, working extensively with mask and physical techniques from commedia dell’ arte; this production later inspired Romeu e Julieta and several encounters with the European classical canon, including Molière (Um Molière Imaginário) and Calderón de la Barca. After Arlequim Servidor de


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Tantos Amores (1985), the company devised a Brazilian commedia for street performance, A Comédia da Esposa Muda (1986); a play about domestic violence in Brazil produced for the stage (Foi por Amor, 1987) led to a musical lampoon of evangelists for the street (Corra Enquanto é Tempo, 1988), which led back into the theatre for a celebrated production of Nelson Rodrigues’s Albúm de Fam´ılia (1988). Although Grupo Galpão maintains its rigorous commitment to street performance throughout Brazil – in 1993 it presented Romeu e Julieta across the breadth of Brazil, and it estimates that 70 percent of its audiences have never been inside a theatre (Heliodora, “Grupo Galpão” 6) – its work has also grown through a constant stream of appearances on the theatre festival circuit. By 1989, the date of its first appearance at a European theatre festival, it had already participated in well over a dozen national festivals in Brazil, and three international festivals (two in Peru, one in Brazil); by 1998 the company had performed in fifty Brazilian festivals and twenty-seven international festivals, including performances in Europe, Canada, and Latin America (Brandão, Grupo Galpão 162–63). Since that time the company has appeared at the San Antonio Theatre Festival and in Manchester, UK, as well as in the Globe-to-Globe season. Playing on the international festival circuit has shaped Grupo Galpão, and its first European tour proved decisive for the company’s identity in several ways. Meeting Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, working on physical-theatre techniques with Italian and Danish companies, and inaugurating a new exploration of the “anthropological theater” of Eugenio Barba formalized the company’s engagement with contemporary global performance (Brandão, Grupo Galpão 75; Heliodora, “Grupo Galpão” 8). The income from the tour also enabled the company to purchase a rehearsal and performance space, literally a galpão, which has become headquarters and research laboratory for its investigation of performance techniques, and the site for its archives, critical to the long-term survival of the company (Brandão, Grupo Galpão 75).42 From its inception, and increasingly since 1989, the institutional structure of Grupo Galpão has come to reflect the “third culture” of contemporary performance, in which theatrical techniques – street theatre, circus, and commedia, as well as the more experimental or avant-garde techniques of Grotowski or Brook or Boal or Barba – circulate as a common currency; in which companies

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themselves circulate through major cities, venues, and festivals, meeting and learning from one another; and in which longevity can be assured by now-familiar practices of incorporation, development, documentation, and outreach, to say nothing of the benefits of state or corporate sponsorship. Grupo Galpão is now sponsored by Mercantil do Brasil, which underwrites some of its theatrical activities, and proudly sponsored Carlos Brandão’s lavish book on the company – “For Mercantil do Brasil, being a sponsor of the Grupo Galpão book / Is being part of an unforgettable history” (Grupo Galpão title page) – sold at the Globe. As in the United States and elsewhere, corporations in Brazil can receive tax breaks for arts support, and the funding of Mercantil do Brasil also – and somewhat paradoxically – registers the degree to which Grupo Galpão participates in the “third culture” of contemporary performance. Romeu e Julieta marks this pivotal juncture in the company’s work. Throughout the late 1980s the company devised its work collectively, but in the early 1990s it began to feel the need to work with a director, in part as a result of the new recognition the company was receiving nationally and internationally for its award-winning production of Albúm de Fam´ılia. As Eduardo Moreira puts it, although Grupo Galpão “is one of the few theatre companies that are not built around the figure of a director,” the “new level of recognition was the start of something that was to be consolidated with their partnership with director Gabriel Villela in William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeu e Julieta’ ” (“Grupo Galpão” 174). Although Villela “shared the group’s passion for their common popular traditions” – traditions that were hardwon through formal workshops and training, often with European masters – the group “felt the need to stage an ‘important’ text” (Heliodora, “Grupo Galpão” 8), presumably an important European text, as it had already achieved signal success with Brazil’s most famous playwright, Nelson Rodrigues. The actors worked with Calderón de la Barca’s The Great Theatre of the World and with Romeo and Juliet, as well as with Brazilian plays, testing themselves and the plays against the rigors of traveling production – including, according to Brandão, “exploring the Veraneio” (the car/stage; Grupo Galpão 94) – before deciding on Romeu e Julieta, and on a production design consistent with the international/intercultural conventions of Shakespeare in the 1990s: “Galpão’s ‘Romeu e Julieta’ brought the bard and Minas


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Gerais cultural heritage together. The Elizabethan world blended stunningly well with Minas Gerais’ folk music and its quaint scenery, with the rich colours and textures of dirt floors and whitewash walls” (Moreira, “Grupo Galpão” 174). Adapting a Romantic nineteenthcentury translation by Onestaldo de Pennefort and the accent, songs, and rhythms of the sertão, the production not only became the company’s best known, but also helped “to consolidate the image of Galpão” at home and abroad. Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta required an extensive reworking of the text, cutting and adapting the Portuguese translation with the spoken and sung speech of the sertão. Carlos Brandão, given the task of developing the text, consulted academic Shakespeareans, as well as Guimarães Rosa’s epic novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, a cosmic, alienated frontier tale not unlike Cormac McCarthy’s novels), in order to develop new dialogue (Brandão, Grupo Galpão 100). At the same time Gabriel Villela and the company undertook extensive research, both into Brook’s writing about theatre and his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and into other productions, notably George Cukor’s 1936 film. Brook’s sense that the magic of Dream should be created through the physical magic of the actors’ performances became a crucial inspiration for the production, driving the rehearsal process. Villela stretched large rubber bands a few inches above the galpão floor, rehearsing the actors as though on a high-wire, lending their performance a bounce and helping them to find the physical “pulse” of the language and action of the play. When the rehearsals began to calcify, Villela returned to Brook for a way to destabilize the performance: “Referring back to Brook, he says the high wire exercise, in which the actors learned to project the words from a state of permanent bodily vertigo, was fading, as was the ‘gelatinous landscape’ that should vibrate in every moment of the performance.” To drive the actors offbalance, Villela installed a crossbar three meters above the floor, forcing the actors into a sense of physical danger to precipitate the elegant lightness and physical assurance of Romeu e Julieta (Brandão, Grupo Galpão 101–02).43 Finally, the company moved to a small village for a week of outdoor rehearsals. Playing in the whitewashed plaza before the Morro Vermelho church, Romeu e Julieta became, in a sense, a more local performance: the costumes were whitened, plastic flowers were

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added to the car, wooden crosses in oil cans evocative of the Morro Vermelho cemetery became the tomb. As the actors rehearsed their stiltwalking and singing, the “town crazy man,” Zé, wandered in and out of the plaza, playing among Shakespeare’s comedians of the sertão. It would be hard to find a better image of the work of Romeu e Julieta, or one less likely to find its force on the Globe’s stage. What plays at the Globe as the image of Brazil is a performance that has deep interconnections with a global order largely erased in its Globe-al reception: a moment in the career of an important theatre company; a production deeply in dialogue with the First World theatrical avant-garde; a sincere effort to use theatre on the local level in Brazil that is nonetheless part of a self-conscious aesthetic trajectory fully implicated in the “third culture” of contemporary theatre. Yet what attracted the Globe’s producers – at least as this was understood by Grupo Galpão – was “the possibility of renovating Shakespearean theatre, which is excessively dogmatized and frozen under the weight of an official tradition, submissive to its past and to the icons of its culture.” As an allegory of intercultural performance, Romeu e Julieta witnesses to the power of place in the force of performance. Acted for audiences of thousands (3,000 in the Pope plaza) in Belo Horizonte, in Correios plaza in Rio de Janeiro, in the Ipiranga Museum plaza in São Paulo, the production appeared to register both the “dialogue with the cosmos” typical of the sertão epic and a “new concept of scenographic architecture” (Brandão, Grupo Galpão 111, 112). Yet at the Globe this work is merely “exhausted cliche. In Brazil it may still have resonance. But in the west we have seen too many people, from Fellini, Brook and Anthony Newley to every avant-garde group you care to name, colonise it for it to have any residual life” (Billington, Review of Romeu e Julieta). At the time of its London performance, Romeu e Julieta was nearly a decade old, but it is not the longevity of the production that renders it provincial to Billington, but what he takes to be its belated imitation of European modernity. When European directors invoke previous productions, their efforts appear to engage or contest the animating traditions of the modern stage. Adrian Noble’s 1994 A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the RSC (which toured widely; I saw it two years later in Chicago) quoted the costumes and even physical energy of


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Peter Brook’s landmark staging, while transforming Sally Jacobs’s white squash court into a lush red chamber. As Peter Holland observes, rather than staking out new territory for the play, Noble’s production “chose instead with great boldness to confront Brook head on, allowing for the echoes but defining its own view of the play” (English Shakespeares 187). At the Globe the potential for this kind of confrontation is absorbed into a still colonial sense of how “other cultures” might “find expression through Shakespeare” (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Season 2000 9): what finally seems to be expressed to the Globe’s audiences is Grupo Galpão’s antinomian otherness, its intractable inability to do right by Shakespeare. The manifest confrontation with Shakespeare – and, often, with the European colonialism embodied by Shakespeare – is received as the reenactment of a predictable colonial mimicry. In part this reception merely reveals the power of place in theatrical performativity: without access to the language, traditions, or history of these performances, audiences rely on Shakespeare as their only point of reference. And yet Romeu e Julieta dramatizes not only the limits of that perspective, but also the way it prevents the “intercultural” work of intercultural performance from actually taking place at the Globe. Romeu e Julieta is a globalized production in several respects: Shakespeare, worked through the practice of a modern theatrical master, evoked through the extensive training of a fully professional company, blended into the local idiom of the sertão, shown in mere villages and major metropoles throughout the world. This complexity is lost, perhaps must be lost, at the Globe, where the company’s engagement with the formal and stylistic traditions of European theatre is reduced to a single image, the provincial street. What then remains of intercultural Shakespeare at the globalized Globe? Colonise: in what sense can Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Juliet be said to “colonise” its materials: commedia dell’ arte, circus, Brook, Shakespeare? Billington’s Freudian slip – attributing to Grupo Galpão the colonial power that the metropolitan audience reserves for itself – betrays the politics of intercultural representation at the Globe. Far from registering intercultural communication through Shakespeare, the globalized performativity of the Globe appears to obstruct it; the “differing social, cultural and political influences” said to “find expression through Shakespeare” are erased at the Globe, leaving behind the

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pale trace of metropolitan fantasies of that “other” globe. As Homi Bhabha’s now-classic “Of Mimicry and Man” reminds us, the “menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (88), and so “alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms” (86). This other knowledge – the knowledge of other places, of other uses of Shakespeare, of other Shakespeares – is at once invoked and occluded by the regimes of Shakespearean performativity at the Globe. Yet the anxious regard for these visiting Shakespeares perhaps signals something else, too. For all their inability to reflect an authentic Shakespeare, these productions do point to something out there, beyond the whitewashed walls. They point most immediately to the alienated character of “universal” Shakespeare, to the necessary loss of an ineffable Shakespeare in the power of the performative to reveal, rewrite, and reembody new meanings, new “Shakespearean” force. They point, that is, to “other” Shakespeares, other places where Shakespeare is made to do work, to have a different kind of force, force that is invisible, but no less palpable in the globalized confines of Shakespeare’s Globe.

chapter 4

Cyber-Shakespeare

We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1)

Think about its specifications. A book: – boots instantly – has a high-contrast, high-resolution display – is viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light – permits fast random access to any page – provides instant visual and tactile feedback on the location – can be easily annotated – requires no batteries or maintenance – is robustly packaged A laptop meets exactly none of those specifications. If the book had been invented after the laptop it would be hailed as a great breakthrough. It’s not technophobic to prefer to read a book; it’s entirely sensible. The future of computing lies back Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think (13–14) in a book.

In Shakespearean and the Force of Modern Performance, I have taken a “performative” view of some dimensions of modern dramatic performance, considering how attitudes and behaviors, formalities of space and embodiment outside the text shape what the text does in action, as performance today. A “performative” understanding of “speech acts,” especially when those acts are restricted to the scripted acts of drama, depends on an understanding of language and enactment dynamically inflected by writing, and by the technologies of print. Walter Ong pointed out some time ago that illocutionary acts “do 169

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not mean quite the same thing in an oral culture that they mean in a literate culture”(Literacy and Orality 170), and generalizing a literate, even print-based understanding of speech-acts with other forms of behavior has spurred a widespread backlash against the “performative” in the fields of theatre and performance studies, a sense that “performativity” represents an insidious extension of the regime of print: “the project of performativity is to recuperate writing at the end of print culture” (Case, Domain-Matrix 17). Since the sixteenth century dramatic performance in the West has occupied an evolving interface between two institutions, two modes of production, even two practices of literacy: literature and theatre. To the extent that a modern understanding of both literature and theatre is informed by the practices and effects of print and print culture, how will new technologies of writing alter our understanding of drama, of dramatic performativity? Modern dramatic performativity – the cultural and theatrical conventions governing how texts appear to become meaningful as behavior – arises in the West at the interface between print and performance, a relationship that is now changing through the dissemination of electronic representation, much as it was changed historically by developments in both print and performance technologies – acting from printed texts rather than handwritten sides, stage lighting, indoor plumbing, hypermedia stage design. Print has emerged not only as a central agent in the fashioning of modern individuals and economies (see Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change), but also as a decisive element in rendering the relationship between the literary and the theatrical: the theatre is an arena that uses print in nonliterary ways, ways that resist the reiterative ideology of print. Printed drama implies the use of print in another mode of production, one that not only resists the technological determination assigned to “print logic” (see Kernan, Printing Technology 48–55, and chapter 1 of this book), but that also shows print as susceptible to a range of uses, uses that fall athwart of the values typically seen as inherent to the medium of print. Textual theory has taken the insistence on a single reproducible identity characteristic of print ideology to conceal divergent potentialities, both the multiplicity of the printed work and the multiplicity of its uses, its performance in a variety of practical literacies. Is a print text an internally coherent object, the fixed vehicle of a single authorial work, or is it a performance in time

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and space, whose ink, type, paper, binding, text, publisher, mode of distribution, and readership materialize the work amid the flux of culture and history? To what extent can the printed work determine its appropriate consumption, and to what extent are the regimes of its performance – even its performance as reading – outside the text socially motivated practices of literacy that determine what, and how, any engagement with the text might mean? The transformation of an understanding of print logic is familiar enough in Shakespeare studies, where there is no longer a single Hamlet or King Lear, nor are there merely two or three relatively (im)perfect versions of a lost ideal, but instead many instantiations – q 1, q 2, f Hamlet, but also Rowe’s, Pope’s, Malone’s, Bowdler’s, Bowers’s, and Gary Taylor’s, as well as Betterton’s, Garrick’s, Irving’s, Olivier’s, Gibson’s, and even sullen Ethan Hawke’s (many of these performances resulted in printed texts, too). The ideological character of print’s apparent fixity and uniformity also animates the central controversy in contemporary bibliography and textual studies, in which the notion of the printed text as the fixed reiteration of a final artistic intention is opposed to an alternative understanding of the printed text as a discrete object in history, recording and instigating different uses of the authorial work, and so manifesting the authorial work as a locus of multiple identities. Peter L. Shillingsburg provides a convenient summary: The first [paradigm shift in editorial theory], initiated by [ W. W.] Greg’s “Rationale of Copy-Text” (1950) established the ground on which the pursuit of authorial intention (an ideal not yet achieved) was distinguished from the reconstruction of a lost archetype (a historical text to be restored) as an editorial goal. The second paradigm shift . . . established the ground on which multiple texts, versions, and processes were distinguished from single, definitive editions as editorial responsibilities. This second paradigm, however, remained authorial in orientation. The third shift has yet to be properly named. Its source, quite different from the second, resides in the recognition of the social implications of production processes and in the material significance of literary artifacts. Its emphasis is not on creative processes fulfilling an ideal but on the meanings of production – its processes and its outcomes – as a social element. (Resisting Texts 215)

Although Shillingsburg focuses on editorial protocols here, these three paradigms also reflect different perceptions of the ontology of print. In the first the work of art is assimilated to the author’s final

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intention, as registered in remaining documents (manuscripts, printed editions): the second quarto of Hamlet is interpolated with the missing bits of the Folio version, so that all of Shakespeare’s “intended” play is rendered in print, even if that play may never have existed as a single authorial text or have sustained a single performance by Shakespeare’s company. The second view takes different printed forms of the authorial work to be in fact different works – the quarto History of King Lear and the folio Tragedy of King Lear should not be assimilated to a single intention, but mark two distinct Shakespearean dramas, representing two distinct acts of authorial composition. The third view takes the material apparition of work in its social context to be a definitive act or performance of the work, part of its material existence in history. In this view the q 1 Hamlet – with its slipshod printing, short length, intriguing stage directions, and straightforward plot structure – represents a distinctive moment in the historical apparition of Hamlet, rather than a debased or corrupt form of an ideal, intentional work. From this perspective even clearly nonauthorial versions of a work are also critical to its historical identity, including those – Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler’s, for instance – using editorial protocols far removed from a contemporary sense of scholarly practice.1 Perhaps because of its technical character, and its exclusive attention to the materiality of writing, this controversy has had little impact on theatre and performance studies, which tend to regard stage performance as the sole site of the drama’s materialization. Yet the consequences of this deconstruction of the print logos not only bear directly on the character of any understanding of modern dramatic theatre, but also represent a line of thinking about textuality and performance that is everywhere visible in contemporary performance, not just in stagings of q 1 Hamlets and Folio Lears, but also in the various ways in which recent productions have foregrounded their relation to, and distance from, texts, textuality, and even print: the panoply of texts that appear on the screen of the Luhrmann William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet; the layering of textual, filmic, video, and computer-generated images in the Almereyda Hamlet; the manifest engagement with the interface between writing and performance in Anne Bogart’s work, or Suzan-Lori Parks’s, to say nothing of Beckett or Heiner Müller. This revision in the cultural

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ideology of print is deeply implicated in electronic technology as well: electronic technologies have at once facilitated the explosion of editions in both print and digital forms and have arguably provided the models for rethinking questions about the nature of writing, and its (in)stability across different media of production. As Gary Taylor points out, “[i]t is no accident that the rise of versioning, as a theory and practice among the editorial elite, has coincided with the computerisation of the writing class: computers not only make such versioning possible, they also make it seem ‘natural’ ” (“c: \ wp” 50). Granted that electronic production decisively alters print culture, its impact should be felt along the interface between print and other modes of signification, especially those – dramatic performance, for example – that have been held to be dependent on, derivative from, print in some way. Hypermedia complicate a facile opposition between orality and literacy, and between the image and the letter, the visual and the graphic; hypermedia intervene in the text/performance paradigm, altering the condition of dramatic performativity today. Throughout this book I have been concerned with how contemporary regimes of performance – the performative practices of history and historiography, of public entertainments, of globalized interculturalism – model different ways of making Shakespearean texts, dramatic writing, meaningful. Electronic media offer a site for performing (in MOOs, for example, which use writing and print-emulating text as the user’s way into the virtual “world” of performance), as well as a means for representing performance, in the various archives, illustrations, animations, and video performances available in digital form.2 Although electronic performance is already an astonishingly diverse field, here I attend to what is still – surprisingly – the dominant mode of cyber-Shakespeare performance: hypertext. In this chapter I return to a fundamental problem with the contemporary “performative,” its implication in print culture, and so in an understanding of performance typically derived from print, print literacy, and print ideology: how Shakespearean writing appears on the screen, at once as a body of texts and as something you do with texts, to texts, offering a kind of script for performance. How does the hypertextual environment of the screen alter the “logic” of print, and in so doing recalibrate the cultural understanding

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of drama as a genre between the apparent fixity of print and the presumed indeterminacies of performance? Reading and writing onscreen entail an encounter not only with a different material form of writing – pixellated, print-emulating font – but with a different rhetorical form as well, the networked linkages of hypertext (and hypermedia) documents. The “end of print culture” has met with considerable enthusiasm in the critical discourse surrounding hypertextual reading and writing. Given the active, user-oriented potentiality of hypertext, it is not surprising that the paradigms that have sustained an understanding of performance in print culture – bodies v. texts, performance v. print – exert a powerful influence on the ways in which hypertext is positioned relative to print, print culture, and performance. After tracing the migration of conventional misprisions of print into the discourse of hypermedia, I then turn to the performance of Shakespeare on the internet (the principal location of cyber-Shakespeare today), arguing that misconceiving the nature of print has important consequences when those misunderstandings are carried into new media. More to the point, I suggest the ways in which new practices of reading and writing in hypertext have the potential, a barely realized potential as yet, to engage in more exciting ways with the practices of dramatic performativity. e mb o dyin g hype rt e x t The printed book, therefore, seems destined to move to the margin of our literate culture. The issue is not whether print technology will completely disappear; books may long continue to be printed for certain kinds of texts and for luxury consumption. But the idea and the ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries. This shift from print to the computer does not mean the end of literacy. What will be lost is not literacy itself, but the literacy of print, for electronic technology offers us a new kind of book and new ways to write Jay David Bolter, Writing Space (2) and read. Again, the book is dead; long live the book. The five hundred years of the printed book now draw to a conclusion. Kathleen Welch, Electric Rhetoric (196)

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Dramatic performativity arises at the interface between writing and enactment, an interface that has undergone several transformations through the introduction of new technologies. Electronic media seem – or seem to some – to resist the power of print; electronic texts are often represented as undoing print, resisting a will to power inherent in print itself. To the extent that dramatic performance arises between writing and enactment, any transformation of the technologies of writing holds the potential to alter our understanding of dramatic performativity. I do not mean to say merely that performances will now take place on the World Wide Web, or that virtual means of production will come to inform the enactment of stage drama. These developments have already come to pass, not only in a number of performances taking place partially or entirely on the internet (see Hamnet and Hamnet Players, or Adriene Jenik’s “Desktop Theater”), but also in the pervasive impact of digital media on live performance practice. The space of modern theatre is fully digitized; theatres operate from computer interfaces, which cue sound and lighting, operate the curtain, move set elements, in some cases open and close the auditorium doors. Even theatrical productions that seem to rely most essentially on the performers’ physical and histrionic virtuosity – Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 or Bill T. Jones’s You Walk?, for instance – are fully sustained by electronic production, in the elegant projections that frame the live enactment, to say nothing of the more invasive relation between technology and the body characteristic of the performance work of Stelarc or Orlan. Stage, film, video, and digitized internet performances are far from identical in their representation of physical bodies, in their technologies, in their position on the horizon of contemporary culture, or in their characteristic ideological work in, say, North America and Europe today. Nonetheless, these spheres of activity collide, overlap, and interpenetrate one another. The space of dramatic production is not a different space from the space of electronic media: it is the same space. The consequences of electronic technology extend far beyond its impact on writing. Not only does the computer interface enable modes of action and communication that are not (or are not immediately) visualized as text, electronic technology has come to invade, alter, and redefine the space of the body and the ideology of the

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“natural” itself. No longer print cyborgs – understanding, modeling, practicing human identities through our interactions with print – we have become or are becoming digitally inflected cyborgs “in the sense that we experience, through the integration of our bodily perceptions and motions with computer architectures and topologies, a changed sense of subjectivity” (Hayles, “Condition of Virtuality” 201).3 This is a very specific “we,” to be sure: while both digital animation and conventions drawn from website layout (split screens, a mixture of graphic and verbal information, text “crawling” below or above imagery) have been generalized to television and film, as of 1998 less than 2 percent of the world’s population had used the internet.4 Yet while this technological environment daily changes the possibilities of performance, here I want to focus on one aspect of digitized performativity: the transformation of writing in electronic media. Much as dramatic performance has been shaped through its relation to print culture – deformed by the immanent “logic” of print as a vehicle for literature – so the discourse surrounding electronic writing is inscribed with its own sense of the “inherent rhetoricity of literacy” (Welch, Electric Rhetoric 10), ways of imagining and delimiting the function, purpose, and meaning of hypertext. The literature of electronic writing is obsessed with print: print is casually, but insistently, taken as the defining antithesis of electronic text. The technological explosion has put an unforeseen pressure on the history of the book, as David Scott Kastan notes: “The book, once brilliantly conceived by Elizabeth Eisenstein as ‘an agent of change,’ seems to many now a force of repression in the information age” (Shakespeare and the Book 112). The problematic contours of the “text vs. performance” dichotomy are reproduced here as well, with print playing the familiar authorizing role – for better or worse, depending on your attitude toward print – set against the louche, spontaneous, nearly bodily informality ascribed to electronic media. As I have argued in earlier chapters, print is susceptible to a disarming variety of materializing and interpretive practices, uses often at odds with the legitimating claims of print ideology: durability, stability, repeatability, authority. Rather than replaying the cognate “assumption that qualities inherent in the computer medium itself are responsible for changes in social and cultural practices” (Ilana Snyder, “Beyond the Hype” 132), it seems more plausible, and more

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politically adept, to see electronic writing in a more dynamic relation to print. This interaction between existing and emergent technologies, for example, suffuses the tense textual space of most computer screens. Most screens are replete with print-emulating writing, in various fonts, colors, and scripts; the screen on which I write has along the top edge a horizontal command menu (File, Edit, View . . .) above an iconic toolbar (text helpfully appears to remind me what the icons do when I touch one with the arrow), a set of superimposed rectangles (“windows”) on which I see bits of text peering around the edge of the rectangle in which my typing is registered, and a number of icons down the right-hand edge – hard-drive, e-mail, trash, a document called Romeu e Julieta – each identified by a written label. Walter Ong notes that “pictographic systems, even with ideographs and rebuses, require a dismaying number of symbols” (Orality and Literacy 87), and the iconic, image-decorated screen still requires extensive mediation by writing, writing that reassuringly looks a lot like print. The screen is a different medium from the page, and since binary code is now capable of representing different kinds of communication onscreen, electronic texts appear in a much more complex visual environment than they did even a short time ago.5 Electronic writing – and everything on the screen is in some sense a text, as words, sounds, and still and moving images flow from the machine’s ability to store, transmit, interpret, and represent digital code – has several formal characteristics that distinguish it from preelectronic (scribal, print) technologies, and that alter the relationship between writing and performance as well. Jay David Bolter pointed out over a decade ago that electronic writing “emphasizes the impermanence and changeability of text” (Writing Space 3): vision and revision have been made immeasurably swifter by word-processing soft- and hardware, and readers (in some formats at least) are able to intervene in their own and (sometimes) others’ writing, annotating or replacing it with new writing, which is itself subject to revision by other readers/writers. Most computer screens are chockfull of printlike letterforms – word processing, icon labels, advertising – that at once participate in the traditions of print (they do not look like script; they are extremely regular and are often based on standard typefonts), and work very differently. They are, for example, easily changed in appearance and

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size, and to this extent share in the graphic environment used by most operating systems and software. (We might recall that before Steve Jobs and Apple introduced the icon-based Macintosh systems, most computer screens were emphatically more textual, and much less graphically diversified, filled by lines of alphanumeric/punctuation command scripts.) Unlike in conventional printed books, words not only share the space of the screen with other forms of communication, but are fundamentally akin to them, as epiphenomena of the digital code of data transmission and storage. As a result of this shared identity, electronic writing has the potential not only to be fluid and changeable, but also to combine readily with any digitized dataform: with imagery, with sound, and – if you have the right equipment – with olfactory and tactile sensation as well. These formal features of electronic writing are expanded by the most pervasive form of electronic writing now in use: hypertext. Hypertext first became widely used in the 1980s in the hypercard stacks bundled into word-processing software, and it has since become more familiar from its ubiquity on the World Wide Web. Hypertext enables the linking of electronic documents, and takes specific advantage of the random-access principle of electronic memory.6 Although the codex, unlike the scribal scroll, is also a random-access device, hypertext documents are not conceptualized or materialized as a single linear sequence, but as a network of interconnectable units, each of which may be accessible from a variety of pathways, or links. Since hypertext is capable of linking any digitally stored data, it may link a variety of dataforms – words, images, sounds, smells, and so on. Although hypertext’s structuring logic is not directly apprehensible to the reader, this linking function is not entirely revolutionary. In one sense hyperlinks expand the citational aspect of writing, which deploys various markers (“See,” footnotes, the index, list of contents) to enable readers to chart various pathways through a text. What is distinctive about hypertext is that this citational reach hugely enlarges that of print, since any digitized dataform is hypothetically accessible; moreover, citations need not remain within the text, but – since most readers read hypertext on an internet browser – may well lead the reader out of the initial document and back again. While print citations can only point to other texts, hypertext documents can link directly to them, make them feel part of the document being read.

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Hypertext and electronic publishing have transformed the implicit citational potentiality of writing in ways that could never be practically realized by previous writing technologies. As in the case of print, it is important to attend carefully to the relationship between the formal elements of electronic writing and the ideological environment that naturalizes those elements to their apparently logical or proper use. In the first edition of Electric Language, published in 1987, Michael Heim analyzed three “intrinsic features of digital text: linkage, automated manipulation, and informationbased formulation”; as he points out in the 1999 second edition, the “hardware limitations of the 1980s could not support the full linkage of electronic text.” The linkability of electronic text “was there in principle,” but it “now exists in fact and with cultural repercussions. The intrinsic linkage of digital text has become embodied in the operating systems that undergird the personal computer” (“Preface” xiii, xiv). Heim’s remarks underscore the reciprocal relationship between a sense of the apparently determining features of a technology and their tactical use: the “intrinsic” features that now seem to determine the nature and proper use of the medium were only realized through later technology, technology that itself arose in an overdetermined environment of social, commercial, political, and military imperatives. Much as “print logic” seemed to determine particular uses of print and derogate others – a notion of the fixity and the appropriate use of print historically resisted by drama and theatre, and under critique in socially oriented studies of bibliography and literacy today – so, too, a kind of “hypertext logic” is summoned to underwrite how we understand the use of hypertextual media, its “embodiment” of a determining technology. Taking a functionalist view of hypertext, the rhetoricians of electronic writing surprisingly preserve and extend the conventional ideology of print as an enabling discourse. In their influential essay “They Became What They Beheld,” Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan outline the revolutionary appeal of hypertext.7 The attractions of hypertext are many (resistance is futile), seductions that stand out from the gray authority of print. For Moulthrop and Kaplan, though, the ideological revolution of hypertext is intrinsic to the technology, as new forms of writing make new practices and new social meanings of writing and reading take place.

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In print’s system of textual production and reception, textual fabrication occurs only once for each written artifact. That artifact may subsequently give rise to many remakings (of sense), because each meaning-making act begins with the fixed and stable fabrication that precedes it and that survives the readings and writings perpetrated on and against it. In hypertext’s system of textual production and reception, each meaning-making act is potentially, at least, a radical refabrication. Because textual fabrication recurs, the hypertextual writing that precedes and gives rise to interpretive reading-writing acts within it does not survive those acts intact. (“They Became What They Beheld” 235–36)

The ideological character of Moulthrop’s and Kaplan’s revolution depends on an overdetermined understanding of print, confusing “a means of cultural production (the printing press) with the historical development of a mode of cultural production,” what Carla Hesse has called “the modern literary system” (“Books in Time” 21).8 Here, for instance, Moulthrop and Kaplan envision a dematerialized, purely intentional authorial “work,” one that is fashioned in its perdurable identity in its initial printing, and is mechanically transmitted, unchanged and unchanging throughout history. Print and print’s fabrication of the author are hardly so stable. What is the “meaning-making act” that is preserved in, say q 1, q 2, and f Hamlet? Is not this “meaning-making act” – or, better understood, meaning-making event – refabricated in each of these versions of Hamlet, let alone in the Hamlets of Rowe or Pope, of Bowdler, of the Signet, Riverside, or Oxford editions, or of Classics Illustrated ?9 If we take the material sociology of texts seriously, as raising important questions about the identities of literary works, then each manifestation of the work becomes potentially a “radical” – an ontologically distinct – fabrication, much as individual annotated copies of a book – a copy of Hamlet or Waiting for Godot I have used in teaching, say – may well contain writing that elaborates, defaces, and refabricates the authorial text. This refabrication retains the shape and limits of print, its page-oriented, bounded, artifactual state; print and hypermedia do differ enormously in their ways of articulating, representing, and disseminating writing. But a facile reading of print can only misshape our understanding of new technologies of writing, and keep us subject to the ideologies of writing’s proper use to which we are already quite fully captive.

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The “[h]ypertext eschatology . . . pervasive among both detractors and supporters” of electronic writing tends to assimilate the performance to the medium of writing, and this misleading representation of the functional identities of print and hypertext extends to the understanding of electronic literacy as well (Miall, “Hypertextual Moment” 163). Historically, literary culture has tended to legitimate a relatively narrow range of interpretive practices, ignoring until recently an ambient panoply of alternative literacies. While the fluidity of hypertext might articulate literacy as a mobile category, a function of the tactical practices through which various communities engage with writing, Moulthrop and Kaplan emulate the traditions of print by conceiving hyperliteracy as a practice determined by the technology of its medium. Print’s truest products, as Alvin Kernan recently insisted, are “ordered, controlled, teleological, referential, and autonomously meaningful” (Death of Literature 141). When literacy serves the interests of individual authority, monologic discourse, and linear argument, these qualities may be essential; but they have less value as we come to define literacy in terms of communities – positing dynamic, collaborative, and associative forms of writing. (“They Became What They Beheld” 221).10

Kernan’s elegy for literature, and for the practices of reading and interpretation that he sees as a critical consequence of the “worldview of a literature based on the printed book” (Death of Literature 147), both inscribes the “author” as a “major figure in literature” (148), and argues that “literature and print both embodied in their related ways the assumptions of an earlier humanism about such matters as truth, imagination, language, and history” (151). While it is perhaps not surprising that Kernan carefully relates the practices of reading and interpretation to the formal properties of print and the sustaining beliefs of humanist culture, it is considerably more striking that Moulthrop and Kaplan – given their dynamic sense of literacy – also see print as ineluctably evocative of a single, “monologic” order of value. Relying on the ineffable order of print as a defining antithesis, they attribute to hypertext a similarly constraining – albeit differently valued – logic as well. Although reading hypertext is a different practice and a different experience from reading printed books, the medium itself is no

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more and no less determined by the discourse of authority than print. Moulthrop and Kaplan take the “buccaneering strategy of pastiche” to play “havoc with what Foucault called the ‘author-function’ ” (233). Yet it is important to recognize, as Roger Stoddard suggests, that “whatever they may do, authors do not write books” (quoted in Jeffrey Masten et al., “Introduction” 8). Books – or any print object, including those that are desktop published – emerge from a dense complex of practices, behaviors, markets, institutions, and industries. While the fashioning of the Author (or the Author-function) has been a critical consequence of print in the West, it is hardly implicit in the medium, as is witnessed by the great variety of books – handbooks, manuals, coffee-table books, dictionaries – that do not really have Authors in the literary sense, as well as by those – cookbooks are a good example – in which an Author-function has emerged relatively recently. The flamboyant buccaneers of hypertext are not immune to such functionality, although it certainly takes a different shape. Stuart Moulthrop and Michael Joyce are well-established as Authors in both print and hypertext, although the figuration of Authorship in each field is quite different; in certain communities software designers have a similar status. The Author and the Reader have reciprocal functions, arising not in the technology of writing alone but in the interaction between technologies of writing and the socially evolving sense of their proper use and meaning, their proper “performativity,” so to speak. A reader of hypertext navigates through a series of nodes, leaving behind “trails of simulated cognition” (nice phrase) that trace the multiform, nonlinear logic of hypertext documents (Emily Golson, “Cognition, Meaning, and Creativity” 155). As Roger Chartier observes, the hypertext reader “can not only subject an electronic text to numerous processes (index it, annotate it, copy it, disassemble it, recompose it, move it), but, better yet, become its coauthor” (Forms and Meanings 20). Nonetheless, Chartier also points out that “reading is never totally constraint” and so any specific reading practice (like any dramatic performance) “cannot be deduced from the texts it makes use of” (Order of Books 23): this is true of all acts of reading, including the reading of hypertext. Hypertext documents are structured in very different ways from printed books: their “pages,” or screens, exist in a state of suspended

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animation, abstract from use, capable of being summoned instantly, and in various orderings. At the same time, as Espen Aarseth has shown, it is extremely difficult to differentiate the uses of printed texts from those of cybertexts merely according to the apparent properties of the medium. Like electronic texts, a printed book “is intrinsically neither linear nor nonlinear but, more precisely, random access” (Cybertext 46); nor is it clear whether, or how, “the physical stratum of the medium” influences “the user-text relationship” (59). Since there are “paper texts that function more like some digital texts than other texts in the same physical medium” (dictionaries are designed to be used in random-access fashion, while the electronic text of this chapter, even in the searchable environment of the computer, is fundamentally linear in its conceptual structure), “the paper-digital dichotomy cannot be given analytical power as such” (59). In this sense “[h]ypertext is certainly a new way of writing (with active links), but is it truly a new way of reading? And is all that jumping around the same as creating a new text?” (78).11 “Hypertext readers not only choose the order of what they read but, in doing so, also order its form by their choices”: Michael Joyce takes a representative view of the power of technology to reshape reading practices (Of Two Minds 19, my emphasis). Nonetheless, the cultural effects of textual technologies are not determined by the medium, despite such efforts to locate them there. Most hypertext documents, for instance, are not readable in any order, as each screen is not (usually) linked to all other screens in the document. In most texts some words are chosen as links, determining which words or ideas may be pursued to another screen (as if, for instance, in the previous sentence the word authorial had been linked, but not the words choice or hypertext). The links open a finite number of pathways, and determine a fixed – if exponentially large in the case of a complex hypertext – number of journeys through the document; to the extent that not all linkages are two-way, the structure of such journeys is also constrained as well. Today hypertext documents are often “created by persons whose reasons, biases, motivations, and credibility are also almost entirely unknown,” and so the “use and placement of links is one of the vital ways in which the tacit assumptions and values of the designer/author are manifested in hypertext” (Burbules, “Rhetorics of the Web” 105).

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While hypertext might be said to replace the godlike Author of print with its own fabricating Reader, it might be more pertinent to the largely commercial use of hypertext – to the “simple, technical efficiency” demanded from corporate technologies (Johnson-Eilola, Nostalgic Angels 63), and to the industrial and military origins of the medium – to see hypertext as significantly mystifying its Authors (or Designers), abstracting their agency behind the Reader’s trails of simulated cognition and creation. If the Author-function is indeed a function, it might serve a variety of functional purposes in one medium over its history. So, too, the Author-function might function differently across a range of writing media at any one moment in time. It’s not print, but the uses of hypertext arise at the interface between its formal designs and its instrumentalizing rhetoric: the reader’s “choice” operates within an authorized design and within the socialized practices of reading itself.12 Hypertext enables a variety of reading practices, in part by linking documents (texts, images, sounds, etc.) in an apparently simultaneous network rather than in the apparently linear organization of the codex, and in part by imagining a new relationship between documents, which participate in the “radiant textuality” – Jerome McGann’s phrase – of the internet itself (Radiant Textuality). At the same time writing cannot determine the practice of reading; reading is a “performative” practice outside the text. For this reason, despite the “freedom” of reading hypertext documents, a “freedom” said to arise from the structure of hypertext itself, hypertext authors and hypertext documents oddly continue to emulate the authorizing rhetorical principles ascribed to linear, authoritarian print. Nancy Kaplan’s fine online essay “Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print” is a case in point. Kaplan’s argument in this essay is sophisticated and complex, attempting to mediate between two attitudes toward electronic writing: although both those who idealize and those who demonize the new technology seem to derive their vision of the future of writing from “the inherent technological properties of print and digital media,” in fact they implicitly locate the “ ‘logics’ of the technologies they describe” as the effect of an ideologically overdetermined sense of the essential function of writing in society – what Kaplan calls “cultural ideals” (“Politexts,” What’s At Stake).13 On the one hand hypertext

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enables Kaplan to present several elements of her argument as topics, allowing readers to visit and order them at will (this structure could easily be deployed in print, of course); on the other it also lets her link to citation pages, a massive simultaneous appendix where readers can find extensive quotations from the writings of Jay David Bolter, Richard Lanham, Neil Postman, and Myron Tuman. In a sense Kaplan’s observations, and the original arguments of the writers she discusses, are all simultaneously available to the reader, in ways that are perhaps conceivable in printed form, but so physically and economically impractical as to be realistically unachievable. While the reader controls the process of reading (the reader always controls the process of reading), Kaplan’s text nonetheless evinces a desire to retain the suasive power of incremental linear argument, a desire embodied in links titled Way In/Way Out and What’s At Stake. Kaplan’s links point to the challenge of hypertextual rhetoric, at least from the perspective of traditional space- and timebound forms of oral and written argumentation. The essay takes good advantage of hypertext, linking the various places – topoi – of the argument in a finite network of possible relationships; although readers will read the pages in a linear sequence, the order of that series is to a considerable extent up to the reader, raising the necessity (it seems) to reassert the privilege of the writer to draw us back to the point and purpose of the argument, to orient our reading. As Laurie Osborne puts it in her online essay “SAA Hyperessay on Electronic Shakespeare Criticism,” while “[t]his essay is ‘webbed’ and therefore supposedly nonlinear, . . . I bow to the linear essay model by including my conclusions, which you can access through several other pages” (Home).14 How can we distinguish the properties of hypertext from the uses we make of it? Although the “ways in which hypertext varies from print are seen by many proponents as ways of demystifying print’s operations,” most of the time the material elements of print production and the social character of print consumption are strategically oversimplified, in order to foreground – remystify might be a better word – the liberatory possibilities of hypertextual writing (Johnson-Eilola, Nostalgic Angels 22). Like the rhetoric of print logic, the rhetoric of hypertext logic powerfully naturalizes the appropriate practice of the technology to values apparently latent in the medium. The technology of electronic writing appears, that is, to determine cultural practices

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that are more collaborative, communal, embodied than those determined by print. As Moulthrop and Kaplan suggest: Every system of textuality imposes conditions on creativity and interpretation. When the defining technology is print, these conditions favor singular and definitive discourse – the production of a literature devoted to property, hierarchy, and a banking model of culture. But in hypertext, very different conditions prevail. Hypertextual writing invalidates priority and singularity. It emphasizes cooperation and community rather than agonistic struggle. Resistance in hypertext is futile; the highest value resides not in contention but in extension, not in negation but in collaboration. (“They Became What They Beheld” 236).

While print culture is deeply implicated in notions of property, the sense that hypertext is free of such values, or is a mode of value in itself, seems to deny the extraordinary, specific, and politically inflected ways in which hypertext functions in the global sphere. Moulthrop’s and Kaplan’s remarks are surprisingly distant from the most widespread experience of using hypertext: surfing the web. The World Wide Web is saturated with proprietary discourse. To enter the “internet zone” (Microsoft Explorer’s term), is to be confronted by a range of sites that are considerably less “writable” than most printed texts (at least if you read with a pencil in hand), and many that are not writable at all. There are chatrooms and interactive sites, but many sites, while navigable in a variety of ways, are not in fact open to rewriting: there is too much capital at stake. As Michael Joyce remarks in his critique of World Wide Web access, the hypertextual environment of the web most resembles another landscape of illusory choice, the TV wasteland: “Netscape’s frames promise central, supposedly ‘open’ and ‘changeable’ spaces surrounded with immutable (or at least filtering) interface structures that define and mediate the changing experience. You can change the channels but not the commercials” (“New Stories” 171). While claims for the computer’s resistance to capitalist forms of production and subjection are perhaps attractive, computer technology is fully implicated in the dispersion of global capital today: hypertext provides “a way to introduce wider groups of people more quickly and effectively into traditional structures of power” (Johnson-Eilola, Nostalgic Angels 22).15 Hypertext is a new medium, and given the rapid pace of its dispersion and of the technological advances accompanying it (my Palm

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Pilot loaded with Hamlet can already be equipped as an internetready cellphone), it is not surprising that its theorists have tended to overemphasize its distinctive characteristics in relation to those of a familiar technology such as print. But much as the assertion of “print logic” misrepresents the social character of print, naturalizing some formal properties to a sense of print’s inherently “literary” destiny, so, too, our understanding of hypermedia is blunted if we ignore the ideological contours of our own ways of understanding it, or see its functions as merely reciprocating the logic of print. Although the commercial uses of the internet are not intrinsic to the medium, they do provide the material (or is it virtual?) condition of hypertextual reading and writing today, in much the way that a secondhand Signet paperback or the Norton facsimile First Folio of Shakespeare provide different modes of access to Shakespeare as a print commodity. N. Katherine Hayles argues that computer technology enables a new “proprioceptual” relationship, a new sense of the body’s boundaries – “an experienced computer user feels proprioceptive coherence with the keyboard, experiencing the screen surface as a space into which her subjectivity can flow” (“Condition of Virtuality” 198) – that has important implications for the experience, the performance of reading and writing in electronic media. Given the popularity of the point-and-click, iconic interface developed for the Apple Macintosh and imitated in the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows software, it’s a safe bet that most readers of this book do most of their online reading through one of these interfaces. Yet these interfaces have their own material implications, much as the experience of printed writing is bound, so to speak, to the culturally specific materialization of printed objects, books and pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers. Jay David Bolter notes that the interface metaphor “gives us the world as an information processing environment – an efficient office in which documents and data are effortlessly produced and digested” (Writing Space 51). “ ‘Metaphor’ ” was “ ‘the holy grail at Apple’ ” in the 1980s (Thomas Erickson, “Working with Interface Metaphors” 65), and the desktop-human-interface metaphor rapidly led to the proliferation of iconic application commands: the envelope and paperclip icons in e-mail programs, the detective or medical imagery in antivirus programs, and so on. These interface metaphors participate in the ideologies that discipline the use of computer technology.

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As one dissenter, Theodor Holm Nelson, complained in 1990, “[w]hy is this curious clutter called a desktop? It doesn’t look like a desktop; we have to tell the beginner how it looks like a desktop, because it doesn’t (it might as easily properly be called the Tablecloth or the Graffitti [sic] Wall)” (“The Right Way to Think” 237). (Nelson, incidentally, coined the term “hypertext” in 1965; see Aarseth, Cybertext 12.) Hypertext – for most of us – appears on the screen in an environment that manifests data and operational functions in pictographic form, in which texts are represented as tidy documents to be “filed.” If metaphors “function like discursive agents who perform the actions they describe” (Hayles, “Condition of Virtuality” 185), the desktop metaphor inscribes reading in the corporate practices of information gathering, use, and storage. It also bears with it, perhaps, a “panoptical” potential, in which users – office workers, state employees, university faculty – are subject to surveillance by employers eager to discover and prevent “nonproductive” activities online, to intercept personal correspondence e-mailed on company time, to enforce morality standards, or simply to monitor the system’s performance; such surveillance capabilities are already practiced on a larger scale by most governments (using the internet to transmit child pornography or to solicit sex from minors is a crime in the United States) and may well be expanded. Like all metaphors, the human-interface metaphor insists on one kind of likeness while subordinating or eliminating other possibilities (if the moon is a balloon, it cannot be green cheese; if the screen is a desktop, it cannot be, simultaneously, a dartboard, a map, an index-card box, an encyclopedia, or a library, although it might well alternate between these functions). What if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates had decided that documents (which are represented iconographically – in Microsoft Word, at least – as little printed pages) should be stored in “book” icons, placed on virtual “shelves” (let alone as, say, “fish” swimming in different “schools” in an “aquarium” desktop metaphor)? We read hypertext through an interface that structures the performance of reading: in an important sense reading hypertext is always reading at the office. Much as the claims for print’s monovocal authority mistake the rhetoric of literary culture – the assertion of print’s mechanical transparency to the Authorial work – for print’s essential identity, so attending to the materialization of writing in both print and hypertext

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forms leads to a clearer sense of their mutual implication in performance. Bolter suggests that “[a]ll the readers of Bleak House could talk about the novel on the assumption that they had all read the same words. No two readers of an electronic book can make that assumption; they can only assume that they have traveled in the same textual network” (Writing Space 8). This vision of print accepts the rhetoric of print culture at face value: it is, in fact, relatively unlikely that readers of any printed text that has seen multiple editions do in fact read the same words, and different editions also represent those words with different typography, different formats and designs, different materials for paper, ink, and binding. Different editions are marketed to different readers, and different printed objects tend to receive different kinds of use, including different kinds of reading – is there a kind of ontological shift in the status of a paperback copy of Bleak House when you take it to the beach for summer reading? Granted, two readers of the same hypertext documents online may well read the words in two different orders, and can alter the appearance of many documents (hyperlinked or not), changing the font appearance or size, for instance, on a text file of Bleak House. Yet while the formatting of an electronic book can be altered at will by the reader, most of us read electronic texts on a small number of instruments: the point of electronic publishing is that any text can be read on a flatscreen monitor, a laptop, an electronic-book reader, or even a handheld computer. Although I do very occasionally read documents on a Palm Pilot, in my case a Macintosh G4 laptop currently provides the environment for all electronic writing (novels, plays, articles, manuscripts, e-mail, etc.) that I read at home. Print is represented as uniform and authoritarian, which of course it is in many respects, but print also enables a wide variety of material forms of the text, materializations that speak to its use by and for different publishers, different institutions, different real and imagined readers. While it may well be the case that “hypertext threatens the privileged status of canonized works by unfixing them from their physical, unalterable status and placing them in the fluid medium of computer-based text” (Johnson-Eilola, “Reading and Writing” 210), it might also be said that hypertext brings all the texts it touches into a different kind of canonicity, as something readable in (and read through) Macintosh OS or Microsoft Windows or Aportis (reading

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software available for handheld computers). The text is removed from the material traces of its apparition, its embodiment in history: it is licensed by the hardware and software of the machine, converted into yet another file. Electronic writing is a small part of a much wider horizon, where the relationship between electronic technologies and the social institutions, cultural and economic interests, and the individual minds and bodies that shape its use and its transformation into behavior are still emerging. It is not surprising that in our efforts to come to grips with this new technology we should fall back on familiar patterns and metaphors, and the rhetoric of electronic communications is finally sustained by a surprisingly familiar trope: the essentialized opposition between writing and enactment, print and performance, that informs the understanding of dramatic performance in the era of print. By undoing the “fixity and permanence that printing gave to the written word” (Bolter, Writing Space 4), electronic writing is seen to restore a kind of orality, to restore an entire vision of communal culture displaced by print. In 1962 Marshall McLuhan argued that “today in the electronic age we can understand why there should be a great diminishing of the special qualities of print culture, and a revival of oral and auditory values in verbal organization” (Gutenberg Galaxy 108). Although print has been engaged with oral culture throughout its history, McLuhan reiterates this polarity in his presentation of the new media: “all the effects of print technology now stand in stark opposition to the electronic technology” (230). This atavistic impulse – new technology enables the restoration of a vibrant, embodied, resistant, and digitized oral community opposed to the authoritarian, oppressive society of print culture – sustains the dominant thematics of electronic rhetoric today. Jay David Bolter, writing thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, argues that “the new medium more closely resembles oral discourse than it does conventional printing or handwriting,” and takes the repetitive formulae of oral poetry as “a forerunner of topographic writing in the electronic writing space. The Homeric poet wrote by putting together formulaic blocks, and the audience ‘read’ his performance in terms of those blocks. The electronic writer and reader, programmer and user, do the same today” (Writing Space 59). George Landow’s comment that “[h]ypertextuality inevitably

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includes a far higher percentage of nonverbal information than does print” (Hypertext 2.0 59) is part of this equation, as is Richard Lanham’s sense that the openness of electronic writing changes the relationship between writer and reader, restoring something like the annotated “conversation” of oral/aural scribal culture: “We will be able to make our commentary part of the text, and weave an elaborate series of interlocked commentaries together. We will, that is, be moving from a series of orations to a continuing conversation, and, as we have always known, these two rhetorics differ fundamentally” (Electronic Word 22). The technology of electronic textuality promises a return to orality, and a return to community as well: “Chaucer was an oral poet in many ways, to begin with; he read his poetry aloud to his audience. Electronic text would simply restore that vital ‘parameter of performance,’ as we might call it, to Chaucerian study. It would be a different literate/oral mix, and a different image/alphabet mix, but would it inevitably be an inferior one?” (132). Although the computer interface has massively expanded the practice of reading and writing in daily life, hypertext’s “oral,” even bodily character is taken to oppose the authoritarian structure of print, even while availing itself of the regularity of print. Electronic communications – e-mail, newsgroups, listservs – can make possible the use of writing in ways that resemble the give and take of oral conversation, although the popularity of pornographic and hate-speech chatrooms also suggests that the absence of F2F (face-to-face) speech IRL (in real life) provides the condition for certain kinds of “chat” to take (virtual) place among “communities” predicated on distance and anonymity.16 Without writing, these forms of “orality” could not take place; nor would we have the Homeric poems, even frozen as they are at a single moment in their ongoing evolution. Electronic writing is like orality in another, more dismaying sense: it is a discourse – at least in many of its current practices – bound to the present. When electronic texts change they replace earlier versions in the archive, rather than merely adding to them. Several of the websites I cite in this chapter are no longer available; others have changed several times in the period of writing this book, and will have changed again by the time you read this page. Print, in this sense, is both iterative and additive: the history traced in the quarto and Folio texts of Shakespeare’s plays, or in editions of Henry James’s

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novels or W. B. Yeats’s poems remains a material record of historical change. Print fixes a text and enables its widespread dissemination, dissemination that multiplies the chance that the text will survive, even that it will survive (and so qualify) later print editions. Digital texts – particularly texts that are published on a website – can be read from anywhere, but exist in only one functional copy: their identity and persistence depends on maintaining the text on the server, and on the persistence of the technology that renders it legible. And, of course, while internet authors can change their texts without the hassle of persuading a publisher to issue a new edition, in most cases that new text replaces its predecessor, and so erases it, consigning it – like many of the products of oral discourse, and like dramatic performance, too – to memory. It is not merely that the “dematerialization” of electronic writing “threatens to isolate electronic writing from the traditions promoted by earlier technologies” of manuscript and print (Bolter, “Ekphrasis” 253). Electronic media locate texts in a different relation to history. To this extent, as Gary Taylor worries, “unless we can develop effective social and editorial mechanisms to resist” the loss of writing through technological change, “it seems virtually certain that digitalism will eventually lead to the loss of all but a tiny, idealised remnant of the past” (“c: \ wp” 52). Finally, while the mutable character of electronic writing is said to sustain the restoration of orality and community, the fungibility of the letterforms themselves appears to situate electronic writing in a kind of metaphysical kinship with the deliquescence of the physical body. Words on the screen are “more flexible, more fluid, more akin to the flickering of light than to the fixity of print,” and they can be readily changed, made to “dilate, disappear, or dance across the screen” (Costanzo, “Reading, Writing, and Thinking” 11). Writing has always involved vision and revision, but the final product – especially in print – does have a “fixed” character, which relegates further inscription to the margins, mere annotation. And, whereas the broadsheet, the musical score, the printed book – printforms with distinctly different social identities and uses, many of them essential to oral culture – all present writing as a distinct, bounded object, “electronic texts have no set boundaries. Represented in the computer’s circuitry as movable bits of electronic data, they can always be expanded, condensed, or reassembled in new configurations”

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(12). Script and print are fixed, electronic writing is fluid; script and print are linear, electronic writing is multiply linked, accessible in various orderings; script and print preserve writing as an unchanging and isolated monument, electronic writing is constantly open to change; print is a powerfully authoritarian abstraction from the body, electronic writing – both formally and instrumentally – enacts and extends the body’s natural tendency toward polymorphous transformation (its comparable tendency toward disintegration and decay is less often celebrated). As this thumbnail sketch of the rhetoric of hypermedia may suggest, techniques of writing are fully subject to the ideological categories through which a culture understands its technologies, its forms of social life, the ways it performs itself. Embodiment is a double-edged trope, as often used to naturalize traditional values (“Women can’t/shouldn’t do . . ., because they’re physiologically . . .”), as it is to disrupt them.17 In the rhetoric of hypermedia, embodiment also conveys the subversion of the sustaining figure of print culture, the Author. Bolter argues that not only did the “printing press” encourage “us to think of a written text as an unchanging artifact,” but that such an artifact necessarily becomes “a monument to its author and its age” (Writing Space 3). Bolter’s electronic writer, Homeric in his work with the interchangeable blocks and formulae of electronic texts, resists such Authorship: “The electronic author assumes once again the role of a craftsman, working with defined materials and limited goals” (153). In its (potential) openness to writing and rewriting, its dynamic linking of “authorial” and “nonauthorial” writing, hypertext “challenges this hierarchical, book-centered model of writing and literary response”; since “no hypertextual discourse is ever formally closed,” hypertext resists the puritanical closure, fixity, identity of both scribal and print writing: it is “promiscuous (in the root sense of ‘seeking relations’)” (Moulthrop and Kaplan, “They Became What They Beheld” 227). Religious pamphlets were among the earliest of mass printed documents, and a tang of resistance to them seems to persist in the eroticization of electronic writing: “Print’s puritanical practices clearly run afoul of the wriggling, color-filled, spectacular attributes of the screen” (Case, Domain-Matrix 28). To see print v. hypertext as a “contest between two orders, previously perceived as alphabetic and visual but technologically represented by print and the screen” (27) is to sequester the

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“alphabetic” from the visual field in order to insist on a surprisingly familiar structuring dichotomy: culture/nature, text/body, print/ performance. Itself a consequence of the pervasive ideology of print culture, this dichotomy presents the authorized dominion of the printed text as intrinsic to the medium of dramatic performance. Yet this way of comprehending theatre is hardly inherent in print; it evolved gradually and is still incomplete across the spectrum of dramatic performance today (in television, a script-based medium of dramatic performance, there are very well-paid writers and editors, but very few Authors). This view of performance is widespread in literary culture, and is common in theatrical culture as well, surfacing wherever we understand performance as an illustration, interpretation, embodiment, or realization of the text. To oppose this sense of the rule of print is merely to accept the rules of the game, assigning an overdetermined power to print and an underdetermined freedom to the visual, to the body, to performance. Like “the body,” the “visual” is a charged, ideologically saturated field, a zone where cultural interests and values are evoked and legitimated, naturalized as ideology – what exists, what is good, what is possible – and represented in a visual register: what is visible (Therborn, Ideology of Power 18). As human-interface metaphors imply, screen space involves – like any mapping – the transformation of geography into geometry; not only is it suffused by the rhetoric of corporate capital, but the space of the screen itself is part of a contested and contestatory history, “a social struggle over the composition of space” (Johnson-Eilola, Nostalgic Angels 140). The nostalgia of hypertext, the sense that electronic writing reenacts communications common to oral culture, that the fluidity and freedom of electronic texts represent writing in its natural state, that electronic communication restores a bodily, natural discourse, should give us pause. For like any Author-function, the “body” in electronic discourse – for all the apparent unruliness of electronic writing when opposed to a conventional account of print – becomes a way of taming other unruly meanings.18 The virtual body – fungible in relation to race and class, gender and sexuality, age and physical ability – sharply recalls the body of advertising and evokes a constitutive fantasy of capitalism itself: a body whose only dimensions are those of desire, a body endlessly susceptible to reshaping, a body disciplined to desire continual transformation through makeup,

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haircolor, weight loss, muscle enhancement, surgery, liposuction, implants, to say nothing of the attractive attributes gained by the acquisition of new clothes, cooler cigarettes, better beer, a sleeker car, or sexier technology. This implication of the natural body in the rhetoric of the internet is perhaps best captured by a recent television advertisement for the Circuit City chain of discount electronics stores. It opens showing two conventionally “unattractive” people – a man and a woman – exchanging images and information via an online dating service, and using their software to morph the pictures they send to one another: he is transformed from a couch potato into a beachside bodybuilder, she into a fashion model. When they collide IRL at Circuit City’s digital-camera counter, they barely react to one another: the authorized body of the internet has altogether absorbed the globby, imperfect, and unruly flesh. The interpenetration of the virtual and the physical, the digital body and the meat, extends well beyond my focus on writing and performance here. Print culture has tended to use the order of language – a print-inflected understanding of language – to conceive and represent the proper relationship between bodies and texts in dramatic performance, to evoke the stage as the site of a derivative reiteration of textual meanings. But merely opposing texts, textuality, print, or the “performative” cannot undo this dichotomy, precisely because it cedes to print a power, a governing logic, that it does not and cannot have. Hypertext and hypermedia require an entire range of new literacies, combining “alphabetic literacies” with “at least a rudimentary grasp of a computer’s interface . . . and some specialized knowledge for issuing computer-readable commands to save a document, print it, send it out over a network and the like” (Kaplan, “Politexts,” Definitions, E-literacies and Elite-racies); in all likelihood internet navigation skills, the ability to compose HTML, and possibly digital audio- and video-editing may soon be incorporated into “e-literacy,” too (especially as the hardware and software supporting these activities is rapidly becoming a standard feature of new machines). These literacies and others, however, will arise in the dynamic interaction between developing features of the medium and their tactical use, their performance. Like a dramatic script, hypertext contains no instructions for its use. Much as a performative practice – having one

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actor speak all the words attached to the prefix ha mle t but not those under the prefix ho rat io; using a contrary “subtext” of desire to animate the nugatory dialogue of Chekhov’s or Mamet’s “characters” – is applied to a dramatic script, transforming the script into something else, so, too, the performance of hypertext and the mapping of hypertext’s territory relative to other technologies of writing and enactment cannot be determined from within the text, within the screen. The rhetoric of embodiment pervasive in hypermedia studies, the sense that hypertextual communication replicates orality and community, that it enables the radical performance of the body in virtual form, maintains “print” as its fixed, external other. It at once deforms an understanding of the material and social history of print and its uses, and bears the deterministic ideology of print culture as a virtual trace into the practice of hypermedia performance. c yb e r-s ha k e s pe a re The revolution of the electronic text will also be a revolution in reading. To read on a screen is not to read in a codex. The electronic representation of texts completely changes the text’s status; for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location; against the relations of contiguity established by print objects, it opposes the free composition of infinitely manipulable fragments; in place of the immediate apprehension of the whole work, made visible by the object that embodies it, it introduces a lengthy navigation in textual archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings (18)

Please feel free to take the texts from this website and use them as a resource for your own work; cut them up, rearrange them, rewrite them, throw things out, put things in, do whatever you like with them – and then, please, put your own name to the work that results. But, if you would like to perform the texts as I have written them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights . . . Chuck Mee, The (Re)making Project (About the Project)

What does cyber-Shakespeare do? How are the conditions of dramatic performativity altered, if they are altered, by a new technology of writing, a technology that readily embraces not only words, but sounds,

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still and moving imagery, and virtual reality? Much of Shakespeare online today seems to reify rather than liquefy the book, extending a familiar way of understanding performance. In a superb reading of Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, Doug Lanier takes the film to redefine “the complex phenomenological palimpsest that inescapably constitutes our Shakespearean book,” a sense of the visual textuality of performance incorporated as “painting, sculpture, record, tape, CD-ROM, videotape, telecast, film, stage performance, still photos, promptbooks, production notes, and text” (“Drowning the Book” 205). Online Shakespeare extends this insight: not only is the multimedia technology impelled to decenter print, texts, and writing, but the digital metamorphoses of the screen ought to stage an awareness of the interplay between textualities, visualities, and performances. There are new genres of performance taking place online, in MOOs and MUDs, in simultaneous web-linked performances emanating from physically dispersed locations, in “desktop theater,” even in the playing of various gamelike scenarios – no doubt karaoke VR Shakespeare programs are just around the corner. At the same time, when it comes to scripted drama, electronic media have had a surprisingly conservative effect. Online Shakespeare illustrates the extent to which new technologies, in their initial phase at least, are often imagined within the ideological structure that sustained the preceding technology; online Shakespeare tends to preserve a sense of the identity and fixity of print authorship characteristic of the most conservative view of print culture. While new technologies create the possibility for new kinds of performance, they are, initially at least, imagined within a set of performative behaviors that define – much as the performative conventions of stage behavior do for dramatic performance – what emerging technologies can mean in performance. Shakespeare is everywhere online: there are Shakespeare websites for students and professional scholars; corporate dot-com Shakespeare sites; sites retailing a range of Shakespeareana; sites of theatre companies and Shakespeare festivals; publishers hawking Shakespeare books; Shakespeare film sites; materials posted for university classes and distance-learning programs; sites devoted to specific plays; Oxfordian and Stratfordian sites; Shakespeare cartoons; and, of course, the ubiquitous pornography of the internet. Practically speaking, the list is endless: online there are millions and millions of Shakespeares served.19 Yet while a “Shakespeare” search, depending on the search

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engine, will turn up millions of sites, Shakespeare performance is relatively absent from the internet. While there are many sites advertising stage productions and selling films, some providing archival performance material or posting still imagery (Shakespeare Illustrated ), and fewer posting short audio or video snippets of famous performances (see the excellent Shakespeare and the Globe: Then and Now, Audiovisual Features), the number of sites that render performance visible, let alone enable users to engage with performance in some way, is relatively small: a few MOOs, the Scenario site (which enables users to download an electronic toy-theatre Globe stage replete with the texts of the plays, character icons for each play, props, and sound effects), a few class-project sites (Shakespeare at Swanton), and some interactive sites developed as part of the marketing of films.20 There are a number of technical and proprietary explanations for this situation; nevertheless, to encounter Shakespeare online is to encounter a densely textualized object. Texts cannot determine the performances either of readers or of actors; the behaviors that constitute appropriate performance are determined elsewhere, in the socially engaged behavior that animates these performative regimes. At the same time reading in the hyperlinked environment of the internet is a different practice from reading a book: hypertextual sites enable, perhaps even invite, readers to engage with Shakespeare, with dramatic writing, and with reading in some characteristic ways. Electronic writing locates all writing within a single material object, the computer screen; nonetheless, internet readers access texts from a wide range of sites, which are devised with a wide range of purposes, interests, and possibilities. Although Moulthrop and Kaplan argue that hypertextual writing challenges a “hierarchical, book-centered model of writing and literary response” (“They Became What They Beheld” 227) in part by resisting the “system of gates and gatekeepers” characteristic of “the worlds of publishing and academia as we know them” (223), the internet is also a gated community, protected by the economic interests that now govern – at least in the United States – the practice and purpose of the internet. Some hypermedia resources – The Norton Shakespeare Workshop – are accessible only if purchased as CD-ROM, and others can be read only by licensed users (this was to have been the plan for the Arden Online Shakespeare that has been withdrawn). Even discounting those for theatres and

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theatre festivals, a surprisingly large number of Shakespeare sites are frankly commercial, part of an economy of flexible accumulation in which “information” is both means of and commodity for exchange. One commercial site – a good one – is About Shakespeare, part of the About.com corporation. About.com provides a network of topical sites, each of which is managed by a Guide “who is carefully screened and trained by About. Guides build a comprehensive environment around each of their specific topics, including the best new content, relevant links, How-To’s, Forums, and answers to just about any question” (About.com, Our Story). In July 2002 About boasted “hundreds of Guides” whose sites cover “more than 50,000 subjects with over 1 million links” (Our Story). The “over 450 topic specific sites” are the principal inducement to the advertisers who sustain the company: advertisers are promised “Broad reach” (“About is a top 10 web property enabling you to reach over 33.2 million unique users per month”), “Customization” (“our expert sales team can create a custom advertising program that will group the right sites and Channels together for your product or service”), and “Brand Positioning” (“[y]our brand will benefit from the association with specific About Guides who understand and share the interests of your target audience”) (About.com, Advertise). About Shakespeare is managed (at the time of this writing) by Amanda Mabillard – “a free-lance writer specializing in Shakespeare, Renaissance political theory, theatre history, comparative literary history and linguistic topics in Renaissance literature” who took her BA (Hons) in English at the University of Alberta in 1997 and continued with further postgraduate study (About Shakespeare, Amanda Mabillard ).21 While there are several important differences between various commercial sites, the rhetoric of commercial sites can be distinguished from academic sites in a number of ways.22 Commercial sites place their Shakespearean “content” amid a range of advertising, which appears not only in boxes or banners on the page, but often as hotlinked buttons. The About Shakespeare homepage lists a number of “Related Sites” – Literature: Classic and the like – and a range of other links, including a site for potential applicants to About.com’s Guide program (About Shakespeare). The site delivers a superb listing of General Sites, organized to satisfy the appetite for information of a diverse target audience: guides to Films and theatre Festivals in Canada,

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Europe, the UK and USA, alongside Fun and Games (quizzes and the like). In addition to the ever-changing cast of “sponsored links” to advertisers (Find Shakespeare Books at eBay and Internet Theatre Bookshop have been featured, among many others), About Shakespeare also offers both Homework Help (links to various information sites, such as clicknotes.com) and an extensive set of critical materials, usefully divided into Criticism links devoted to the Plays, Sonnets, and Misc. These materials are an eclectic mixture of published essays, dramaturg and director notes from Shakespeare festival theatre programs, and student essays (such as “Roman Letters and Egyptian Performances in Antony and Cleopatra,” a paper written by Terence Smith for Stanford University’s Drama 301 in March 1998, “second draft”) (Plays: Criticism, Antony and Cleopatra). As Amanda Mabillard points out, the site shows students “how to cite properly the online essays, for those few students who still believe that online material is copyright free (despite both copyright notices and the authors [sic] names beside each essay)”; she quite properly notes that “if a student desires to cheat he or she will just as likely find material in books, magazines, papers from friends, etc.” (e-mail to the author). Given the proliferation of sites devoted to retailing student essays (such as the Shakespeare links of Termpapers-on-file.com), and the increasing availability of professional scholarship online, Mabillard and other commercial webmasters and webmistresses can hardly be faulted for making such material available within the confines, so to speak, of a Shakespeare site. (At your college or university there is likely to be an oncampus service that regularly invites students to submit essays written for classes to a campus database.) Many commercial sites offer a “complete works” online. How they present those texts and how those texts are articulated within the site dramatizes a different aspect of online Shakespeare: the grip of authority. Far from resisting, undoing, or dispersing print-based notions of the Author, dot-com Shakespeare sites actively extend and disseminate the reach of Authorship as a salable category of cultural production. As Dennis Kennedy has pointed out, “Shakespeare and all his works for some time have been available for commercial exploitation as signifiers of a shifting set of social values,” as forms of Shakespeare that “operate freely, untethered in the commodity pool, without any Shakespeare attached,” a “Shakespeare without

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Shakespeare” that he calls “ShaxTM ” (“Shakespeare without Shakespeare”).23 At commercial sites the texts of the plays are decidedly low-tech items, considerably leaner reading experiences than those of even a modestly ambitious trade paperback. Most commercial sites use texts based on The Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare, which is in the public domain; it offers irregularly modernized (the text of Hamlet, for instance, features “King Claudius,” “Queen Gertrude,” “Lord Polonius” – speech prefixes that occur in none of the early texts of the play), editorially obscure conflated texts, which are unannotated and internally unlinked (though there is a separate Glossary file). This situation may change, but change may be slow: publishing edited texts – such as those found at the Internet Shakespeare Editions or even on The Norton Shakespeare Workshop – will require purchasing permissions, or commissioning new editions for the commercial site. The alternative – linking the dot-com site directly to an online scholarly edition – has the disadvantage of drawing readers away from the advertising that sustains the site (some commercial sites do provide a link to the Internet Shakespeare Editions; at About Shakespeare, for instance, this link is found under the General Sites link to further resources, rather than at the Plays links, which open the onsite Moby Shakespeare texts). The About Shakespeare homepage links the reader not just to its own structure of information and to a variety of other About.com sites, but to an array of external Shakespeare sites as well; these sites often contain visual as well as textual information, and usually possess a number of point-and-click features. But at About Shakespeare – and at Shakespeare Online and Shakespeare.com, among others – the text of Shakespeare’s plays is only that: a clunky, text-only screen within a much more dynamic web of information, performance, and seduction – on some sites the Moby page is, appropriately enough, gray. Dot-com sites, for all their informational surround, maintain a surprisingly familiar view of “Shakespearean drama.” The “literary” status of Shakespeare’s texts is emphasized by the rhetoric of the Author – Kennedy’s Shax TM – that pervades these sites, and ultimately by the impermeability of Shakespeare’s texts themselves. While readers perform an engaging and dynamic exchange with the information economy elsewhere on the site, their performances become much more one-dimensional when they turn to Shakespeare’s plays,

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dull, lumpy objects found in a gloomy, gray byway at the end of a narrowing series of links: from here the only way out is back. It is difficult to say what this trajectory means, how this positioning of Shakespearean writing represents its use, its performance, its value. Is “the text” the grail at the end of the hyperlinked journey, so inherently valuable that any annotation, gloss, or link out would be superfluous, a kind of blasphemy? Or is the Shakespeare text so innately, so immanently itself that it has no identity in an economy of exchange? Not convertible into other sites, other information, other value, is the text a nearly pure principle of mystification, the inert lodestone at the heart of the information machine?24 Shakespearean drama appears in the commercialized environment of the web much as Shakespeare does in other mass media – newspapers, magazines, films, and television – where “Shakespeare” is at once identified with “greatness” of a cultivated yet inscrutable kind, and at the same time a mass-market entertainment product in an economy dependent on the diversification and multiplication of target audiences: the overlapping consumers of, say, the Branagh films, of the Luhrmann William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and the Loncraine Richard III , of Ten Things I Hate About You and O, and television responses from the Gilligan’s Island Hamlet to Frontline’s inquiry into “The Shakespeare Mystery,” to Commander Data’s performance as Henry V on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mass Shakespeare testifies to the dynamic exchange of value and identity, and between the Author and the Work in the commercial market. Placing the inert dramatic text within the centrifugal orbit of hotlinked commerce, online Shakespeare is both a datapoint in the information economy and a touchstone of cultural capital. Dot-com sites collapse a galaxy of different Shakespeares into a single constellation, in ways that tend to reinforce rather than undermine hierarchies and paradigms of cultural literacy, cultural capital, distinction, and class. Academic/research sites operate rather differently, and not surprisingly locate Shakespeare’s texts more centrally in the information structure of the site and enable a different kind of performance of the plays. Some, such as the Furness Shakespeare Library site at the University of Pennsylvania, enable readers to download digitized photographic facsimiles of Shakespeare quarto and Folio texts (among a stunning array of other early modern documents); others, like the

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Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia Library, have made transcriptions of various early texts available. A few, however, have taken a much more dynamic approach to cyber-Shakespeare, and here I want to discuss two: The Internet Shakespeare Editions and The Interactive Shakespeare Project. The Internet Shakespeare Editions is constructed as a research site, suggested by its organizing “library” metaphor. The purpose of the Editions, which is targeted at “Shakespeare scholars and advanced students at the university/college level,” is relatively narrow in scope: “to make available scholarly editions of high quality in a format native to the medium of the Internet” (Internet Shakespeare Editions, Foyer, General aims and structure of the Edition). The site is organized in four main branches – the Foyer, which explains the “aims and principles of the Editions”; the Library, where “fully peer-reviewed materials are posted”; the Theater, “devoted to records of the performance of Shakespeare”; and the Annex, “a more informal site for materials which are of general interest to Shakespeareans,” which also includes draft texts of early editions of Shakespeare plays (texts that “have not been fully edited or refereed; the current versions have been electronically compared with those of the Oxford Text Archive, where one [sic] is available, but otherwise have been proofread only against facsimile or microfilm” (Annex, Draft Early Texts). The Theatre pages include various records on individual productions (among them a fascinating set of director’s notes, promptbooks, costume designs, and photographs of a 1998 Romeo and Juliet at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada), but the Library is the heart of the Editions. The goal of the Editions is to produce full scholarly editions of each Shakespeare play in several different formats. As of July 2002 Cymbeline, Romeo and Juliet, and Troilus and Cressida are available in old-spelling editions, Divided into scenes following modern editions, Divided into pages as the play first appeared , and As a single long file; each play is edited by a separate editor. The transcripts “follow the Folio text as exactly as an Internet version permits; word spacing is normalized, and modern forms are substituted for letters and ligatures that have no modern equivalent in current browsers (for example, the long ‘s’). This transcription retains the old spelling of the original, and does not seek to correct errors of the original text”; Romeo and Juliet follows the same principles, using

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the 1599 second quarto. Although there are plans to include several features with the texts – commentary, critical materials, specific performance history, editions of relevant works, and photographic images of the Folio text – as well as to publish a modern-spelling annotated edition, at the present time all critical material is sequestered away from the texts, in another virtual place. The Internet Shakespeare Editions realizes an important dimension of contemporary Shakespeare, an element that is only beginning to make an impact outside academic literary studies: the critical, theoretical, and conceptual questions raised by the multiplicity of early print versions of many of Shakespeare’s plays, questions extending not only to the material circumstances of Shakespeare’s writing, but to the nature of authorship and to the relation between the enduring institutions of literature and theatre as well. The texts currently available in the Annex enable readers to compare early editions easily, a practice discouraged until relatively recently by the prohibitive expense of publishing such an edition in print form, and even more so by the discrimination between “good” and “bad” texts characteristic of the (old) New Bibliography. The Internet Shakespeare Editions realizes a multiple version of print authorship, enabling a rapid coordination of different texts. This facility is sustained, though, by the reduction of those texts to a uniform shape, size, and appearance, and the transformation of the material texts to pixellated images on the screen. The site realizes, in other words, a “New New Bibliography” sense of the diversity of texts while at the same time dematerializing them, perhaps even implying the coordinating presence of the virtual Author-principle (at the same time as it may also, as David Scott Kastan remarks, realize “a Barthesian conception of textuality itself, a textual environment in which any text can intersect and be intersected by an infinite number of others” [“Shakespeare and the Book” 125]). The Internet Shakespeare Editions takes advantage of a “form native to the medium of the Internet,” while reflecting some of the ways in which digitized media extend the ideological traditions of earlier technologies. Enabling the ready comparison of diverse texts – a hugely useful, laudable enterprise – the Editions also tends to flatten out some of the differences that can contribute to a more dynamic sense of the material life of writing: the texture of the paper, the size

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of the book, the quality of the binding and presswork, even the legibility of the text. This is merely to say that the Internet Shakespeare Editions provides an indispensable facsimile edition, and so preserves some of the categories of identity and interpretation that derive from the notion of a print facsimile itself: that reproducing the words is reproducing the work – here the new, more complex work embodied by the unconflated, additive text, q and q and f. At this writing, the two Shakespeare sites with the clearest commitment to using electronic media to engage with performance are Hamlet on the Ramparts, directed by Peter Donaldson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which is still in an early stage of development, posting 1.4 and 1.5 of Hamlet), and The Interactive Shakespeare Project, produced by Edward Isser, Daniel Colvin, and Edward Rocklin at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Hamlet on the Ramparts enables readers to open a two-column screen: the left-hand column contains a clearly edited conflated text (the Folger online edition) of Hamlet, while the righthand column enables readers to correlate photofacsimiles of early texts (q 1, two different printings of q 2, and f), still images, or short filmclips (the site also has an extensive pedagogical apparatus).25 The Interactive Shakespeare Project is a “multidisciplinary, multiinstitutional, initiative to use the World Wide Web to improve the teaching of Shakespeare” by creating “an active learning environment for secondary school and college students”; the site is the “first Shakespearean teaching resource on the internet that combines text, video, performance activities, and pedagogical resources with interactive elements” (Interactive Shakespeare Project, Introduction to the Interactive Shakespeare Project). Generated by a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute for college teachers, organized by the Folger Shakespeare Library and taught by Alan Dessen and Audrey Stanley in 1995–96, The Interactive Shakespeare Project embodies a “refreshed scholarly interest in the notion that the dynamics of stage (and film) performance constitute acts of criticism” (Teacher’s Guide). Although still in its prototype phase, the Interactive Shakespeare Project clearly develops from a “text and performance” approach to Shakespeare pedagogy, and so instantiates an understanding of the work of performance relative to the work of literature: the study guide for the prototype play, Measure for Measure, “using embedded

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hypertext and audio and video material, takes students on a journey of their own devising. Students are able to move easily and immediately from text to performance; additional background information is a keystroke away” (Introduction). The Project publishes a new, modernized edition of Measure for Measure, one that is fully annotated and intermittently linked to The Internet Shakespeare Editions Folio “draft” text. The site contains a range of useful information, but its most striking effect is the location of the playtext at the center of pedagogical activity. Rather than locating “information” outside the text, the practice of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, the Project’s Measure for Measure is fully networked into the pedagogical apparatus. Onscreen the text is visually complex, framed by “Study Prompts” (question-marks alongside the left margin of the text that, when clicked, open into study questions); links to “essays dealing with thematic, historical, performance and pedagogical issues,” often at the outset of the scene; “Exercise Prompts” enabling teachers and students to undertake various interpretive, editorial, and performance-oriented activities; and still photographs. The Project’s commitment to performance is most evident in its use of video: “students are able to watch key transitional moments in each scene of Measure for Measure that investigate performance choices” (based on a production by the Theatre Department of the College of the Holy Cross in 1996, directed by Edward Isser, one of the Project’s editors; see Production Credits). The site finally offers The Virtual Globe Theatre, an animation that “allows students to take a guided tour of the theatre with stops at various locations that include links to scholarly essays and information icons”; this element is not linked to the text of the plays (Introduction). The Project plans to develop the Virtual Globe to “allow student directors to move figures and furniture about the stage,” a kind of electronic toy theatre something like the Scenario site. Even in its prototype phase, the site illustrates a number of ideas not only about pedagogy but also about contemporary Shakespearean performativity, and its relation to literacy, e- and otherwise. As a pedagogical site the Project differs from commercial sites in the priority it assigns to studying the play (as both text and performance). The text is the conceptual center of the site’s network, linked out to a range of materials designed to prompt explanation and interpretation.

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Although the editorial principles governing the text of the play are not specified, the text of Measure for Measure is clearly designed for student use. Words and phrases on nearly every line are hotlinked, and clicking on these calls up a window in the margin of the page offering definition and paraphrase. If the text is a mystified fetish object at About Shakespeare, here it is the focus of critical exegesis. The site presents performance within this pedagogical framework: performance is a means of critical interpretation of the text’s internal dynamics. At Measure for Measure 5.1, for instance, the first three links running parallel to the text are an essay and two exercises. The essay – Edward L. Rocklin’s “Measured Endings: How Productions from 1720 to 1929 Close Shakespeare’s Open Silences in Measure for Measure” – traces the “open silences” of the play’s finale through its production history (Measure for Measure, Act V, Scene 1, Essay). The Essay link is followed by two Exercise links: the first, an “Exercise in Editing Measure for Measure” by Alan C. Dessen, asks students to edit a short passage from the Folio text, providing both transcribed and photofacsimile versions of the text; the second – “Kneelings, Pardons, and Other Actions: Charting Options in Act 5 of Measure for Measure,” by Edward L. Rocklin – is a classroom exercise that invites students to “explore how a playtext – this playtext – uses repeated key actions, such as kneelings and pardons, to shape and project a design,” by dividing the class into groups and assigning each group a section of the text, asking each to “mark all the places where they believe one or more of the characters kneel” as preparation for class demonstration and discussion (Measure for Measure, Act V, Scene 1, Exercise 2). Finally, running alongside the text, the “study prompt” links to open questions that invite students to imagine and interrogate performance; doing so, the links emblematize a sense of what the performance of a Shakespeare text is and does. The Duke’s first speech in 5.1 is preceded by a prompt: “How does the duke look at this point? Are we surprised at his appearance now?” (Question 2). The Duke’s praise of Angelo – “O your desert speaks loud, and I should wrong it / To lock it in the wards of covert bosom . . .” – prompts: “How would you have Angelo react to this praise? How would the audience react here?” (Question 4). Several questions are posed between the lines, so to speak; at Isabella’s entrance, well before her first speech: “What effect does Isabella’s entrance have here? Why?” (Question 6 ).

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Focused on the teaching of Shakespeare, the site (perhaps not surprisingly) tends to reify the text as an object of “exploration” and interpretation, and implicitly defines performance along similar lines. As the exercises and the series of questions suggest, performance is imagined here as a form of hermeneutic closure, reifying the determining discourse of the text in the derivative signification of its enactment. While in the NEH seminar “[e]arly inhibitions experienced by participants about ‘acting’ were soon displaced by active engagement focused on playing interpretive choices,” one has the sense that these choices were relatively limited, limited (as choices always are) by an ingrained sense of what acting is and can (or should) do. “Participants quickly learned to examine scenes in terms of the substantive cruxes reflected in presentation: qualities of performative interpretation, rather than matters of refined performance aesthetics, became the object of concern” (Teacher’s Guide). This is a salutary activity, and one that we all engage in: to the extent that Shakespearean drama lives today as performance, it can live only through the performative conventions that animate our understanding of meaningful performance, “force” onstage. Nonetheless, the questions running alongside the text of Measure for Measure 5.1 – with their emphasis on an uncontextualized “reaction” by characters or audiences – represent performance less as a means of constituting meaning than as a means of realizing it, embodying it with a technology that can be made transparent to the text, rather than a technology that is always transforming the text into something else – behavior – that cannot be found in or determined by writing. Would, for example, the audience’s presumed reaction to Angelo be affected by casting choices (what if Angelo were played by an African-American actor? What if that actor had an identifiable style – say, played Angelo like Damon Wayans’s Peerless Delacroix in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled)? What audience? Tourists at the RSC? An education-outreach audience of inner-city high-school students at a regional theatre in the US? While it is possible to articulate the structure of a performance’s claim on meaning, it is much more difficult to determine its reception, particularly from a reading of the text alone. Such questions point to one of the ways in which The Interactive Shakespeare Project illustrates the relationship between technologies of writing and performance: while the site transforms

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the text into a much more permeable object, enabling students to shuttle back and forth between both written and performance documents, the way it imagines the use of texts in performance – here classroom performance – articulates a familiar view of performance as a side effect of textually determined meanings. Although The Interactive Shakespeare Project expresses a textually driven conception of performance in the discursive relationship it poses between texts and performances, its use of Measure for Measure as an exegetical focal point can also be understood to enable alternative reading practices, a performance of reading that may run counter to the site’s representation of performance on stage and screen. The Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare offers readers an unannotated text file; The Internet Shakespeare Editions offers multiple texts – while the texts are currently not linked internally, the apparatus of the site emphasizes the unique qualities of different versions of the text and so draws scrutiny toward the material – well, immaterial – configuration of pixellated letterforms on the screen. The Interactive Shakespeare Project preserves a text that is, fittingly enough, a more interactive site. There is an important argument, though, for not tagging, hotlinking, words and phrases in the Internet Shakespeare Editions: hotlinking a word or phrase alters its appearance – it appears underlined and in color – and so actually runs counter to the Editions’ goal of facsimile transcription. Modernized print editions have struggled for some time with the problem of indicating when a word or phrase is annotated without creating an ambiguous alteration in the text; presumably underlining, boldfacing, or italicizing annotated words – an analogy to the color underlining of HTML – might be mistaken as a textual, rather than an editorial feature (the character’s emphasis, rather than a sign of annotation elsewhere on the page), so printed texts struggle with bubbles, footnote numbers and other ways to indicate an annotation marginal to the text. The HTML link provides a solution “native” to the internet: as long as we regard the signifier of linking (color) as a transparent, nonsignifying feature for the reader’s use, it provides an indication that information is available here, a click away. At the same time, though, hotlinking has the effect of making the text seem more dynamic: there is something you can do here (click), some place you can go, a trip

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through the text that might lead you away for good. In this sense the hotlinked word or phrase not only points to an explanatory discourse to be found elsewhere (the footnote or marginal gloss of printed textbooks), it also marks an intersection between the discourse of the text and that other discourse, a discourse potentially (though it is in most cases only potentially) without end. Hotlinked annotation is not a footnote, a piece of information subordinate to and dependent on its originating text; it marks the text’s participation in an interactive economy of hyperlinked relations. The Interactive Shakespeare Project’s annotations of Measure for Measure open brief explanatory passages alongside the text of the play – they are not themselves linked to other texts, documents, illustrations, or sites elsewhere. As Roger Chartier argues, texts do not compel readers: it is just as easy to bypass the hotlinked annotation as it is to ignore the footnote at the bottom of the page. At the same time, since users encounter the Project through an internet browser, additional information elsewhere on the site, or offsite, is only a click or two away. In this sense even the relatively limited scope of hyperlinking on the Project’s Measure for Measure pages implies that hyperreading may frame reading performances that depart from the “interpretive” practice legitimized by traditional literary culture. Reading the hyperlinked Measure for Measure is not like reading la texte trouée, that Swiss cheese of reader-response phenomenology. Hyperlinks do not mark an absence, a hole in the text, but the promise (often, as we know by now, a hope deferred) of something else, information, usually the decontextualized, commodified information now native to the internet. Not only does the hyperlinked text represent Shakespearean writing as riven by other writing, it enables a different performance of reading: getting that something else feels like going somewhere else, away from the text. Hyperreading is in a sense superficial, although I don’t mean that pejoratively. The screen’s ability to change, transform, and open the text emphasizes its surface, creates the text as a surface, on the surface. Unlike footnotes – located outside the text, they help us to understand what is in it – hyperlinked annotations provide the sensation of moving through the text, or of opening another discourse alongside it, of going somewhere else (forward, back) to a site that

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may explain where I have come from, but might take me farther still. Electronic writing today is forcing us all to rethink our understanding of texts and performances. At the same time one of the most fascinating elements of Shakespeare online has to do with the ways in which it participates in a much wider cultural negotiation, a negotiation with the rhetoric of technology. To take the narrowest instance, we should expect that new forms of writing will change our understanding of the practice of writing itself, of how writing is used; the proliferation of e-mail, of e-commerce, of networked chatrooms, and so on has sparked an explosion of writing and reading, and different uses and experiences of writing and reading, too. At the same time, online Shakespeare should also alert us to the persistence of the “logic” of older technologies, a “logic” not immanent in these technologies, but arising from the ways they have been represented and understood to function as part of the apparatus of culture. In Shakespeare’s era writing, print, and performance stood in a fluid relation to one another: the commodity that Shakespeare and his colleagues produced for the theatrical market was performance, performance related in elliptical and unstable ways to the economy of printed drama. Online Shakespeare presents a variety of new uses of Shakespeare, most notably the insertion of Shakespearean drama into the globalized discourse of an information economy, and the visible penetration of that economy into Shakespearean writing. It’s not surprising that most of the sites available today seem unimaginative in the ways they deploy a rhetoric of Authorship: both dot-com and academic sites eagerly appeal to a market, a market in which the Author is at once the signifier and signified of value. While it’s not possible to forecast how this technology might contribute to recalibrating an understanding of the social relationship between writing and performance – what will happen when readers (or actors) have texts available on internet-ready cellphones? – it does shift the register of reading. At the present time most writing on the internet seems vaguely authorized at best. More to the point, the commodification of “information” on the internet tends to define writing within an instrumental rhetoric: you read to get something, to do something, perhaps to make something. This instrumentality

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may – only may – exert a subtle pressure on an understanding of the relationship between writing and performance, an understanding in some ways consistent with the function of texts in theatrical performance that I have called here “dramatic performativity.” While I am suspicious of the claim to “orality” and “embodiment” made by hypertext promoters, I do think that hyperlinked texts represent writing differently, and imply different kinds of access to and different possible uses of writing, uses that arise not from the shape of the technology alone but from its place and function in an elaborate network of cultural production. The metaphoricity of the interface is, perhaps, one index of the complex embeddedness of electronic writing in cultural contexts and connotations that shape the meaning, perhaps even the force of its performance. What if, instead of Forward and Back metaphors, software designers had used In and Out, or Come Hither and Get Lost, or Appear! and Begone! (designing appropriate icons to depict these functions, of course) to express the functions by which we bring new screens into view? The experiential cast of internet use is surely troped to a considerable extent by the metaphors that govern it. Nonetheless, this sense of reading through the text, of moving from the text as container (to be reproduced by performance) to the text as a site of movement, of passage, of production, suggests that hyperreading may have the potential to legitimate other kinds of reading, reading practices that locate the text in a context of production, not interpretation – theatrical reading. This sense of the text is what David Scott Kastan has in mind when he suggests that “hypertext models a different conception of the play altogether, arguably one truer to its nature in that the hypertextual edition acknowledges in its very structure that the play is fundamentally something less stable and coherent than the printed edition necessarily represents it as being” (Shakespeare and the Book 133). While hypertext perhaps models the cultural fungibility of dramatic texts more concretely than print does, the coherence and stability of the text as a text cannot govern the practices of its performance, of any performance. Much as even reading involves a number of disintegrative practices of (think of all the vocabulary lists, outlines, and summaries that you may have been encouraged to perform as part of learning to read), theatrical performance necessarily multiplies and disperses the text; it requires actors to move through the writing, decompose and recompose

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the play in the register of speech and movement, psychology and motive, the elaborate and evanescent textuality of a meaningful social action, a theatrical performance. Rather than rendering the text less stable and coherent, hypertext in this sense perhaps approaches the performative by more openly situating the text on the permeable horizon of performance, where meanings arise from what we do to texts in order to make something from them. Of course, it’s not the discursive horizon of writing, literature, or other texts that troubles readers of Shakespeare or of drama generally: it’s that other horizon, where the script meets the apparently unregulated, fugitive practices of the stage. Kathleen McLuskie takes this “substitution effect” – reducing “the textuality of the play to abstract images,” the “move toward abstraction in design and interpretation [that] stripped the Shakespeare play of its textual specificity and historical particularity” – to be characteristic of the modernist theatre’s implication in commodity culture, its transformation of “the Shakespeare play” into “an empty vessel which could be filled with any meaning which particular markets required” (“Shakespeare and the Millennial Market” 170). Shakespeare’s plays were imagined within and responsive to the “performative” frame of his theatre, a sense of the ways in which scripted language might be transformed into significant stage action that was, as it is today, constantly changing (and that sometimes even changes in response to new demands of dramatic writing: this is the lesson of Ibsen and Beckett, and perhaps of Marlowe and Shakespeare). The premium on the “new” – each production imagined as a fresh instance, no mere repetition, of the play – surely links the aesthetics of modernism with the shaping practices of modern capital, commodity fetishism, and the appetites of advertising, and perhaps also links modern Shakespearean theatricality to the capital-driven interface of the internet as well. Nonetheless, while McLuskie’s critique of modern theatricality is telling, it is difficult to imagine an alternative, particularly an alternative arising from the “specificity and historical particularity” of the text. Perhaps electronic writing has a different kind of insight to offer here. In a provocative essay, “The World Without Cybertext,” Stuart Moulthrop suggests that gaming – not hypertext – provides a more adequate node for understanding the consequences of the shift from print to electronic media. Moulthrop argues that print structures

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the “configuration” of the literary work, consigning the reader’s performance to “interpretation.” But games operate as “cybertexts – as sign-systems using computational feedback”: games reverse “the order of interpretation and configuration,” so that “we interpret in order to configure, or more appropriately to reconfigure the system” (“World Without Cybertext” 8). Producing a play, in a sense, requires the adoption of something like this “cybertextual” perspective, remembering, as Espen Aarseth reminds us, that cybertext is “a perspective on all forms of textuality,” not confined to the medium – paper or electronic – of the writing (Cybertext 18). We read the text of a Shakespeare play in order to reconfigure the system. But what system? Performing the play is not principally a means of reconfiguring the order of the text: the text is rewritten, multiplied, memorized, and left behind. A stage production uses the text to engage with, and potentially to reconfigure, the system of dramatic performance. For this reason, I think, the “abstraction” that troubles McLuskie is the reciprocal of the theatre’s insistent materiality. The text is abstracted from its material form, reordered and rematerialized, re-membered in another configuration, one that makes its specific textuality evaporate: performance. Performance reconfigures the text in the idiom of other, nontextual discourses – acting, movement, choreography, design, architectural space – that frame its possible meanings as performance, and that change as culture, behavior, fashion, and identity change: Betterton’s teapot Hamlet, Garrick’s bewigged Macbeth, Agamemnon in a cardigan, Ophelia in a straitjacket, a black Shylock or a white Othello, Verona-Mexico City-Los Angeles-Miami-Unreal City. For this reason, perhaps, while doublet-and-hose Shakespeare – at the Globe, or at your local university, summer Shakespeare festival, or high school – may strike us as more intimately connected with Shakespeare’s moment of creation than, say, a Wild West Taming of the Shrew, a Roaring Twenties Much Ado, or a mediatized de-/re-/ un-constructed Hamlet (these stagings have all become, of course, conventional), that connection is illusory. The rhetoric of authenticity or fidelity, whatever its particular signs, is realized within our contemporary system of theatrical performance, what I have called here the regimes of contemporary dramatic performativity, a system that includes a wide range of non-Shakespearean alternatives of

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dramatic writing (Jonson and Marlowe, Sheridan and Shaw, Beckett and Müller and Churchill), that embraces a wide range of performance technologies, and that is defined in relation to other systems of cultural production (literature, film and television, electronic media). To the extent that any play – perhaps particularly classic plays, plays that are part of a repertoire – can live onstage, can still be performed with the force of contemporary performance, these alternatives are not, in fact, alternative to a licensed regime of faithful, authorized, legitimate performance: they are the system within which any performance will take place, a system that any specific performance will, in its own way, reconfigure. Adopting a cybertextual perspective, we might see hypertext to situate the Shakespearean text as open, having a permeable border with other writing and imagery, inviting an interactive literacy – the interactive literacy of performance. To read the hyperlinked text of Measure for Measure is constantly to move through and away from the text, to situate Shakespearean writing in such a way that it is both penetrated and constituted by other discourses, late modern as well as early, visual as well as typographic, diffused/disseminated/rhizomatic/networked as well as linear. In this highly provisional sense, a sense more potential than actual online today, we might be able to see cyber-Shakespeare not as the end of dramatic writing, or even as a new beginning, but as something else: as a sign of the ongoing reconfiguration of the interface between writing and its performative embodiment that is the history and the future of dramatic performance.

Notes

I NTR O DUCTI ON: D R A M A T IC PER F OR M A T IV IT Y AND TH E F OR CE OF PER F OR M A NCE 1 Both Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter helped to frame the critical reception for a wide range of performance works in the 1980s and 1990s (Caryl Churchill’s and Anna Deavere Smith’s plays come to mind, as well as Butler’s own engagements with Jennie Livingston and others). 2 “I do” is actually very rarely spoken as part of a wedding service today; this text nonetheless persists as part of the general regime that the performative dimension of weddings appears to cite. I am grateful to Carol Rutter for this timely observation. 3 This dependence has been noticed by Walter Ong, who remarks on the different configuration of “speech acts” in nonliterate cultures (Orality and Literacy 170), and also suggests that “[d]econstruction is tied to typography rather than, as its advocates seem often to assume, merely to writing” (129). Case cites none of the major works on the history or phenomenology of print, not even landmarks such as Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, or Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. 4 See Marjorie Garber, “ ‘ ’ (Quotation Marks).” 5 See Tharon W. Howard, Rhetoric of Electronic Communications 36. 6 I have in mind Roy Fuller’s poem “The Marcellus Version.” 7 As Michael Vanden Heuvel points out in a reading of my essay “Disciplines of the Text/Sites of Performance,” there is no reason to assume that performance “cannot instead act to proliferate the ways in which texts and performances can produce meaning” (“ ‘Mais je dis le chaos positif ’ ” 132). 8 Writing about “performative writing,” Della Pollock attempts to resist “an easy identification of performativity with print and the subsequent absorption of performance into textuality as ‘performativity,’ ” a notion that, citing Case, she attributes to Butler’s representation of the “performative.” At the same time she rejects “an equally easy and equally 216

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false distinction between performance and text, performance and performativity/textuality, or, for that matter, performativity and printtextuality” (“Performative Writing” 74). What is striking about Pollock’s account of performative writing is that her argument that “writing as doing displaces writing as meaning; writing becomes meaningful in the material, dis/continuous act of writing” (75) generally avoids any discussion of the materiality of the forms of writing. 1 P E R F OR M ING H IST OR Y 1 On writing and the genesis of classical Greek theatre, see Jennifer Wise, Dionysus Writes; see also Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato 20–60 and The Muse Learns to Write chapter 2. 2 For an excellent reading of the antiquarian stage as historicist inquiry, see Richard W. Schoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage; on Victorian pictorialism and on Edwardian efforts like William Poel’s, see Cary M. Mazer, Shakespeare Refashioned; on modern-dress and eclectic staging, see Ralph Berry, On Directing Shakespeare 14–23; on the impact of modern design, see Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare. 3 My focus here on Bristol’s understanding of the institutional development of theatrical performance responds to his effort to incorporate performance into a dialogical Shakespearean history; his more urgent critique of the ways in which literary scholarship both evacuates the historicity of literature and reproduces contemporary modes of commodification (of literature, subjectivity, experience) is much more central to the thrust of his excellent and provocative book. For a reading of Bakhtin and contemporary Shakespeare adaptations that complements Bristol’s, see Paul Yachnin, “ ‘To kill a king’ ” 39–40. 4 As David Scott Kastan reminds us, even antitheatrical writers such as Prynne and Northbrooke make a distinction between plays performed in private, recreational, not-for-profit settings, and the professional theatre (Shakespeare after Theory 158). 5 Margreta de Grazia notes that insofar as many early modern workers both received important forms of nonmonetary compensation and seem to have regarded wages as a means to subsistence rather than surplus wealth, the “capitalist system of equivalences” (“Soliloquies and Wages” 83) that would produce a convertible “exchange” between different commodities (such as linen and paper in Marx’s example, or perhaps between printed and performed plays) was still in the future. My thanks to Celeste di Nucci for drawing my attention to this provocative article. 6 On the precarious economics of play publication, see Peter W. M. Blayney, “Publication of Playbooks.” Noting the relative absence of published drama between 1576 and 1587, William Ingram argues that the formation

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Notes to pages 35–44 of the theatre industry preceded an interest in publishing plays (Business of Playing 241). Julie Stone Peters treats the rise of dramatic authorship in Theatre of the Book 203–18; I am much indebted to this long-overdue study of drama and print. On the collecting of dramatic texts in private libraries, including the Bodleian, in the period, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, “ ‘Rowme’ of Its Own.” While the one to two pounds that an English playwright might have received for a play from a bookseller in 1600 was less than he would have received from a successful company, that fee represents “the equivalent of three or four months’ wages for the ordinary skilled worker” (Peters, Theatre of the Book 37). For a fine critique of deterministic accounts of the history of print, see Michael D. Bristol’s and Arthur F. Marotti’s Introduction to Print, Manuscript, and Performance. Roger Chartier similarly notes a printing revolution taking place in Asia in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries without “revolutionary” consequences; he also points out that xylographic printing – engraving texts on wood, which are then rubbed – was common throughout Korea, China, and Japan after the eighth century (Forms and Meanings 14–15). Jeffrey Masten suggests that “the spelling of early modern English compositors may actually have resisted the progressive stabilization of spelling that print is said to have enacted,” in part because compositors used variant spellings – rather than variant spacing between words – as a means of controlling the length of a line of type (“Pressing Subjects” 81). Much as making printed books required the development of new skills – the “efficient planning, methodical attention to detail, and rational calculation” essential to emerging capitalism (Eisenstein, Printing Press 88) – print produced new reading habits and enforced the acquisition of new skills (such as the understanding of alphabetical ordering). On “print logic,” see Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology 48–55. Leah Marcus discusses the relationship between memory, oral transmission, and print in a provocative discussion of the versions of Hamlet in Unediting the Renaissance 132–77. M. B. Parkes develops this narrative in Pause and Effect 1–41; practices of ancient grammatici are discussed in detail on 11–13. On Thackeray, see Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing 68–74. M. B. Parkes notes that this tension between syntactic and rhetorical punctuation is not unique to print, although it becomes much more prominent there: Petrarch, writing in manuscript, systematically used punctuation to “indicate subtle logical and semantic relationships between constituent parts of the period” (Pause and Effect 83), anticipating effects usually assigned to print logic.


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15 On the relationship between Japanese and American customs for internet use, and on the use of emoticons, see Taku Sugimoto and James A. Levin, “Multiple Literacies and Multimedia” 143–46; symbols are described on 145. 16 Keith Thomas discusses reading and writing pedagogy, and the distinction between “print hand” and “written hand,” in “Meaning of Literacy” 100–03. 17 On the visual and structural transformation of playtexts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, their “experimental” character, and the standardization of the dramatic mise-en-page, see Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 23–25. In her reading of early modern actors’ use of “parts” – cue-scripts or “sides,” rather than complete texts of the plays they were acting – Tiffany Stern suggests that even the switch from prose to verse might suggest a change in the dynamics of performance (Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan 11). 18 For a reading of print conventions and character, from which most of these examples are drawn, see Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” 267–68; see also Random Cloud, “What’s the Bastard’s Name?” 19 Neil Freeman and others have applied a relatively modern, psychologically inflected, “rhetorical” schema to the irregularities of early texts as a guide for Shakespearean actors; see Freeman, Shakespeare’s First Texts, and W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance 120–25. 20 Julie Stone Peters notes the few documented occasions on which plays may have been performed from printed texts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Theatre of the Book 16, 7). 21 In Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word, Julie Stone Peters sees Congreve’s career playing a crucial role in framing a sense of the “dramatic poet,” an emphasis that “suggests an awareness of the loss of the poetic (that is, the oral) in a drama fixed in print and a desire to maintain that oral quality” (72). Congreve worked closely with Jacob Tonson in preparing his plays for print, and regularized their appearance on the page: dividing and numbering scenes, announcing characters at the opening of each scene, placing ornamental divisions between scenes; see Roger Chartier, Order of Books 53. Pierre Corneille had adopted Dutch typographic models – “ ‘j’ as the consonantal form of ‘i,’ and ‘v’ as the consonantal form of ‘u’ ” – and was imitated in this regard by Congreve, who accompanied Tonson to Holland to purchase Dutch type, as well as plates and paper, for his 1710 Works (Peters, Theatre of the Book 58). 22 See Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan 59–60, 121; Stern discusses Hamlet’s speech on 11. While Stern emphasizes the actors’ private study of their sides, her sense that actors were often taught the

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appropriate “action” by other actors leaves open the possibility that some actors may have found solitary reading of “written-hand” sides a less effective way to learn their lines than absorbing them directly from oral coaching. On the history of reading the play to the company, see Peter Holland, “Reading to the Company.” Julie Stone Peters suggests that one of the lines of demarcation between amateur and professional actors in the early modern theatre was the actors’ ability to memorize accurately rather than improvising their lines, a consequence of the dissemination of playtexts in print. To be “without book” in the period was not to be “off book” in the modern sense (having memorized the text completely enough to rehearse without the script in hand), but to require extensive and annoying prompting – the “book” hadn’t been memorized and internalized enough to permit effective performance, and so the actor is “without” it (Theatre of the Book 104). It should be noted that I am using “literarization” in a sense directly opposed to Bertolt Brecht’s use of the term in his well-known essay, “The Literarization of the Theatre (Notes to the Threepenny Opera).” For Brecht literarization “entails punctuating ‘representation’ with ‘formulation’ ” and so is a process of distancing, or alienating, the theatrical apparatus as a mode of cultural production (Brecht on Theatre 43). Tiffany Stern discusses the various estimates – ranging from three days to fifty-one days – of time available for rehearsal from the acquisition of the script to the first performance derived from Philip Henslowe’s diaries (Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan 54–55), but on several occasions – such as the ill-fated performance of Richard II at the Earl of Essex’s request – plays are known to have been performed or revived with little or no apparent time to rehearse (57); she discusses type-casting and the inheritance of roles on 71–72. In a lucid reading of the relationship between q 2 and f Hamlet, Tiffany Stern demonstrates how some kinds of revision would require the laborious recopying and reassignment of a play’s parts, while others would enable actors to retain many cues, add other cue phrases without altering their own speeches, or make cuts internal to a speech without altering the cues they would be giving to other actors (Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan 106–10). Katharine Eisaman Maus provides an exemplary summary of the controversy regarding identity, subject, and character in contemporary scholarship in Inwardness and Theater 2–3; the phrase “invented the human as we know it” is from Harold Bloom, Shakespeare 714. Hugh Grady puts this question somewhat differently: “how modern is early-modern?” (“Renewing Modernity” 278). He suggests that


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differential rates of change in different cultural, political, and social spheres make the shifting borders of modernity difficult to locate. Whether this plenitude of interpretive possibilities is ever really visible to a reader is itself questionable; see Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness 47–52. Some of this distinction may be captured in Smith’s sense that “[t]he power of public theater in early modern England lies at the intersection” of the three “scenes of speaking” that dominated the performance of “character” in the period: “oratory, conversation, and liturgy. Audiences liked it because it engendered, through sound, a subjectivity that was far more exciting – and far more liberating – than those created by oratory, conversation, and liturgy by themselves” (Smith, Acoustic World 270). “Texts may obscure what performance tends to reveal: memory challenges history in the construction of circum-Atlantic cultures, and it revises the yet unwritten epic of their fabulous cocreation” (Roach, Cities of the Dead 286). Julie Taymor’s sense of the film’s evocation of a contemporary sensibility toward violence has been widely documented; for example, in an interview with Maria De Luca and Mary Lindroth, Taymor comments that “[o]ur entertainment industry thrives on the graphic details of murders, rapes and villainy yet it is rare to find a film or play that not only reflects the dark events but turns them inside out, probing and challenging our fundamental beliefs of morality and justice” (“Mayhem, Madness, Method”). It might also be noted that the film uses what Taymor calls “Penny-Arcade Nightmares” – short, animated sequences of images – to dramatize the subjective frame of mind of her characters, a kind of Freudian dream-image brought to the screen. In the Riverside text, the stage direction occurs between 4.5.101 and 4.5.102. On Kemp’s career and performance style, see David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown; his discussion of the complex meanings of the jig in Elizabethan culture is especially illuminating (44–46). Christopher Peak describes his work in this way: “So for my part I set most of the routines in rehearsal – the piss-pot, etc. But the one place I left open to manipulation was during the Romeo-Nurse scene, when I exited the stage [into the audience]. Each night I would start working on the next evening’s production, trying to top whatever I had done the night before. [Peak went into the audience and engaged several members of the audience, sometimes bringing them onstage.] . . . A lot of these ideas did come from working in clubs [as a stand-up comedian], but they also come from my experience in theater. I know that the danger of performance isn’t as prevalent in the theater, but in clubs it’s what

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everyone is anticipating. It’s all the same people, I think, so I figured given the opportunity the house would respond, which would add a dimension to the show that I believe Will [Kemp? Shakespeare?] probably intended” (e-mail to the author). 36 Hamlet’s complaints in q 1 resonate somewhat more strongly against Kemp’s line of performance than the more familiar versions do: “And then you have some again that keeps one suit of jests, as a man is known by one suit of apparel, and gentlemen quote his jests down in their tables before they come to the play, as thus: ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ and ‘You owe me a quarter’s wages’, and ‘My coat wants a cullison’, and ‘Your beer is sour’, and blabbering with his lips and thus keeping in his cinquepace of jests, when God knows, the warm clown cannot make a jest unless by chance, as the blind man catcheth a hare” (Shakespeare, First Quarto of Hamlet 9.21–28). 37 Lichtenfels remarks that although he had not originally intended to use Peak in this role, “I was especially interested in exploring what the role of Peter might be, and how that ties into breaking up the rhythm of the play, whether it kept comedy alive (all commentators say that the comedy dies after Tybalt and Mercutio are slain).” Lichtenfels recalls how, working with Peak, beginning with “the Peter/Will Kemp reference in quarto 2,” and thinking “that the clown’s function might be to be a direct link to the audience,” he noticed that Peter’s “dialogue seemed underwritten to my ears. That may have been unfamiliarity on my part – because so many of the scenes he is in are usually cut in production. But I also began thinking whether many of the clown’s roles in [Shakespeare’s] plays are underwritten, and whether that might mean that part of the latitude a clown had/took was to be given a basic scenario (whether improvised and then scripted, or scripted) and then work with that, [like] lazzi [in commedia dell’ arte]” (e-mail to the author). My thanks to Chris Peak, Peter Lichtenfels, and L. A. C. Hunter for sharing their thoughts about Romeo and Juliet and this production with me. 2 GL OBE PER F OR M A T IV IT Y 1 On Parks, history, and writing, see W. B. Worthen, “Citing History.” 2 On Wigan Pier and the heritage industry generally, see Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry; more balanced accounts include Peter J. Fowler, The Past in Contemporary Society; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory; and the essays collected in Michael Hunter, ed., Preserving the Past. 3 I have summarized the details of the Globe’s precursors from Andrew Gurr’s “Shakespeare’s Globe” 27–32; Johanna Schmitz traces the “monumental” aspect of the Globe and its predecessors in her dissertation, “Designs for Authenticity.”


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4 On directing and the invention of Shakespearean authority, see W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance chapter 2; for the “restorative” work of Neil Freeman, Patrick Tucker, and their protégés, see 120–25. Patrick Tucker, the Original Shakespeare Company, and the successes and tribulations of their work at the Globe and with Mark Rylance are the subject of Don Weingust’s dissertation, “First Folio Acting.” 5 On the history of Plimoth Plantation, see Stephen Eddy Snow, Performing the Pilgrims 18–27. I am indebted throughout my discussion to this fine study of performance at the Plantation. 6 Snow quotes from the 1983 Plimoth Plantation Annual Report (Performing the Pilgrims 40–41). 7 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Afterlives” 5, 7. 8 The battlefield and the plantation share a disquieting lexicon; as the Plimoth interpreters are having their morning meeting in the center of the village, “David Hobbs, at six feet six inches the tallest Pilgrim, yells out, ‘In coming!’ All heads turn toward the top of the hill. The first visitors of the day have entered the top portal, about one hundred yards away” (Snow, Performing the Pilgrims 61). Snow also discusses the use of dialect at Plimoth and on the Mayflower ii (127), and “Pilgrimbaiting” (71). 9 See Bruce McConachie, “Slavery and Authenticity.” I am grateful to Professor McConachie for providing me with a copy of this fine paper. 10 Tony Horwitz describes “hardcore” behavior in Confederates in the Attic 6–13, and again in his chapter on “The Civil Wargasm” 209–81; he provides the statistics on Civil War reenactment on 126. Raphael Samuel discusses reenactment in the UK – Roman marching groups, the Sealed Knot – and mentions the National Association of Reenactment Societies and the Jousting Federation of Great Britain in Theatres of Memory 169, 174, 191–92. 11 The phrase “time warp” is from Rory Turner, “Bloodless Battles” 126; for a different, comic reenactment of Pickett’s Charge, see Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic 275–81. I am much indebted to Kathleen Gough for directing me to several studies of Civil War reenactments cited here. 12 As Stephen Eddy Snow reports, sometimes these narratives are used to cover a gap in the historical texture of Plimoth, as when a visitor asks an interpreter (playing Edward Winslow) where he might find his ancestor Richard Warren. Winslow replies that “he is ‘off wi’ the fishin’ partie, to Cape Anne, for a fortnight’ (in reality, the role of Richard Warren has not been cast for this season).” On other occasions “the interpreters get inspired and want to do a little historical playwrighting of their own,” by starting a story – say, about a fight between two of the Pilgrim girls – that

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will be elaborated “in character” by the various interpreters throughout the day (Performing the Pilgrims 63, 75). M. Christine Boyer, “Cities for Sale” 193, 190, 192. On the landscape and economy of the globalized city, see the cited works by Saskia Sassen, and the discussion in chapter 3 of this book. On the structure of effective theming, see Joseph B. Pine ii and James H. Gilmore, Experience Economy 46–68. Pine and Gilmore also adapt the metaphor of the theatre to any workspace, arguing that the transformation of the worker (the check-out cashier or the bagger at the supermarket) into a performer provides that individual with a more effective, pleasure-creating role to play relative to the consumer’s entire experience of shopping. As Dennis Kennedy notes, the claims to “authenticity” of the final project were not really part of Sam Wanamaker’s original plans, which were to build “a modern design that contained only the external features of the original” (“Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism” 181); see also Kennedy, “Shakespeare and the Global Spectator.” On employment conditions, see Project on Disney, Inside the Mouse 110–62. In some ways this “inclusive” dimension of Globe performance has now been internationalized in ways that highlight the ideological closure of Shakespearean universalism; Sam Wanamaker’s sense that “[t]he Globe will make the theatre (not only Shakespeare) once again popular, public and accessible: the working-class man will feel less constrained and inhibited there than in the plush, enclosed space of a bourgeois theatre,” is reflected in his sense that Shakespeare will be one of the “forces to bring people together whatever their language, social status, culture, educational level” (Holderness, “Sam Wanamaker” 21, 19). “The Globe players have discovered how to play this audience to perfection, if not the plays they happen to be performing. The method is simple: deliver everything like Christmas pantomime. Play broadly for laughs; wait for each laugh; invite the audience to boo or hiss the baddies; have cast members rush comically through the audience. The recipe works, only too well” (Macaulay, Review of The Maid’s Tragedy). The phrase “groundling groupies” is from Penny Wark, Review of The Maid’s Tragedy. Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare 24, 21. In the second Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, Kiernan reports: “There was a need, it was felt, for the actors to be able to ‘front them out’, speak more clearly, and learn ways of dealing with the audience, so that ‘we don’t lose a sense of the “whole”, of the story; so we don’t let a moment get pulled apart. We have to learn to control that’ ” (“Findings from the Globe Opening Season” 22).


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20 My thanks to Jacquelyn Bessell for providing me with a copy of the Bulletin in advance of its appearance on the Globe’s research website. 21 Bruce Smith discusses the original Globe’s character as a “sounding board” (209), and conducts a detailed reading of its acoustics, in Acoustic World 209–14. 22 As might be expected, Rylance seems to have developed much of this by-play himself. When the director (or “master of play” at the Globe) Giles Block “thought that it seemed a little strange that Hamlet has the idea of the Mouse Trap” at the end of the “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy, when “he appears to have set it up some time ago,” Rylance “thought this apparent contradiction might seem less strange if he used the opportunity to check in with the audience, to run the same idea by them, as it were. GB took this on board” (Bessell, “Hamlet – The White Company, 2000” 17). 23 Well before the Globe Hamlet was even on the horizon, Rylance remarked: “When I played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early nineties I was inspired by the acting work of Mike Alfreds and the Shared Experience company. Drawing in a discriminating way on the scholars’ Satan, Stanislavsky, Mike’s work was always directed at enhancing the quality of play between the actors and audience. He tried to achieve a harnessing of intentions and desires as against presenting the idea of a character, a process which at its best creates very lively and flexible play, involving and responding to an audience. The contrast between presentation and play, between showing something and playing it, is another feature that attracts me to experimental work at the Globe” (“Playing the Globe” 171). 24 Michael Almereyda continues: “There’s hardly a single scene without a camera, a photograph, a TV monitor or electronic recording device of some kind. The challenge was to merge this technology with Shakespeare’s themes, to find a visual language that can hold a candle to his poetry” (quoted in Hamlet, Press Kit 14). 25 Barbara Hodgdon has extensively compared the Almereyda Hamlet’s structure of technologized subjection to the work of characterization in two celebrated stage Hamlets: John Caird’s production, starring Simon Russell Beale, and Peter Brook’s production, with Adrian Lester in the role of Hamlet. See “Re-Incarnations”; my thanks to Professor Hodgdon for providing me with a copy of this superb paper. 3 S HAK E S PEA R EA N G EOG R A PH IES 1 For a reading of these productions, see Peter Holland, English Shakespeares 71–74. On the interplay of race and gender in the history of Antony and Cleopatra onstage, see Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body 57–103.

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2 In her superb account of Patrick Stewart’s “photonegative” Othello at the Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C. in 1997, Denise Albanese argues that despite the legacy of both stage minstrelsy and Hollywood racism, “stage and screen are asked, in effect, to model a utopian space where race doesn’t ‘matter’ any more – especially when it comes to Shakespeare, who has long been positioned as the universal property of all humanity” (“Black and White” 227). 3 This letter from a patron was received by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in response to its 1996 season, which featured a multicultural cast and raceblind casting; I quote from Alan Armstrong’s “Multicultural Casting.” Armstrong also notes a distinction between race-blind and multicultural casting: while race-blind casting tends to use a small number of performers of color in a predominantly “white” cast, multicultural casting depends on recruiting a fully multicultural cast, making it clear that this cast will not distribute roles according to a racialized “logic.” My thanks to Professor Armstrong for allowing me to quote from this fine unpublished essay, and to Susan Whitmore of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for permission to quote from the letter cited by Armstrong. 4 On race in contemporary performance, see Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, especially chapter 4. On The Tempest, see Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban. On Othello, see Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello. On “Voodoo” Macbeth, see Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns 35–40. On Umabatha, see Elizabeth Deitchman’s fine essay, “But Is this Shakespeare?”; I am grateful to Ms. Deitchman for sharing this unpublished paper with me. 5 Barbara Hodgdon, “Looking for Mr. Shakespeare” 69; on Sellars’s Merchant of Venice, see W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance 76–94. 6 Jan Nederveen Pieterse provides a useful summary of the ways globalization is framed across a range of disciplines: “In economics, globalization refers to economic internationalization and the spread of capitalist market relations . . . In international relations, the focus is on the increasing density of interstate relations and the development of global politics. In sociology, the concern is with increasing world-wide social densities and the emergence of ‘world society’. In cultural studies, the focus is on global communications and world-wide cultural standardization, as in Coca-Colonization and McDonaldization, and on postcolonial culture. In history, the concern is with conceptualizing ‘global history’ ” (“Globalization as Hybridization” 99). 7 Patrice Pavis collects a range of approaches in The Intercultural Performance Reader, subdividing articles into sections entitled “Intercultural performance from the Western point of view” and “Intercultural performance from another point of view,” a division that preserves the West as a singular perspective surrounded by nameless “others.”


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8 Françoise Lionnet has suggested “transcultural” as an improvement on “intercultural”: “the prefix ‘trans-’ suggests the act of traversing, of going through existing cultural territories. Its specifically spatial connotations demarcate a pattern of movement across cultural arenas and physical topographies which corresponds to the notion of ‘appropriation,’ a concept more promising than those of acculturation and assimilation, and one that implies active intervention rather than passive victimization” (Postcolonial Representations 13). 9 For a fuller reading of Schechner’s claims, see Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World 13–41; for a complementary account of this dialogue and its place in the contemporary politics of intercultural performance, see J. R. Mulryne, “Perils and Profits of Interculturalism” 71–81. Joanne Tompkins notes that while “interculturalism – post-Peter Brook – generally tries to balance the ‘performance powers’ of the participants, more than the specifically geopolitical or institutional power of cultures,” more recent “interculturalism tends not to overlook issues of local and global politics” (“Intercultural Shakespeare”). My thanks to Dr. Tompkins for providing me with a copy of this fine essay. 10 On the projection of economic and cultural globalization back into early modern history, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Racial Memory.” For a more refined reading of the politics of Goethe’s “world literature,” see Nak-chung Paik, “Nations and Literatures.” On the diversity and limitations of the current sense of “postcolonial,” and its possible application to the post-Soviet Second World, see David Chioni Moore, “Is the Postin Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” 11 On Ong Keng Sen, see also Helena Grehan, “Theatre Works’ Desdemona.” 12 On the Davenant Macbeth, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead 161–63. On displays of human subjects, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture. On Saartjie Baartman, see W. B. Worthen, “Citing History.” On Artaud and the 1931 colonial exhibition, see Nicola Savarese, “1931.” 13 I have discussed this element of the film in a somewhat different context in W. B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance” 1103–4. Although it is conventional to cite plays by their “standard” Shakespearean title – for a variety of reasons, no Shakespearean title can be assumed to be absolutely authoritative – Luhrmann’s title expresses a desire at once to invoke and displace the “original”: it is “William Shakespeare’s,” but it is not “Romeo and Juliet.” The film’s copyright line replaces the “and” with an ampersand, but in all of the advertising and promotional literature, as well as in the title credits, the ampersand is positioned within a large cross-shaped plus-sign (when it is not eliminated altogether), resulting in the hipper “Romeo + Juliet” that I will use here as the film’s proper – although vexing to copyeditors – title. For a rich discussion of

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the film’s invocation of textual and traditional authority, see Courtney Lehmann, “Strictly Shakespeare?” Joe Morgenstern notes that “Twentieth Century Fox calls it ‘William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.’ That’s sensible enough, given the power of brand names” (“Film: Mod Bard” a 11). As Arjun Appadurai reflects, “[g]lobal advertising is the key technology for the worldwide dissemination of a plethora of creative and culturally well-chosen ideas of consumer agency. These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser” (Modernity at Large 42). On the role of advertising, travel, and film in the globalization of English, see David Crystal, English as a Global Language chapter 4. In a fine reading of the film’s use of Mexican historical and popular cultural imagery, Alfredo Modenessi notes that the Capulet mansion is actually “the Castillo de Chapultepec, former Imperial and Presidential Residence, and currently the site of the National Museum of History (a good private joke!)” (“[Un]-Doing the Book” 225 n.22). I am much indebted here and elsewhere to this essay, and to Professor Modenessi for making it available to me. For a richly detailed reading of the film’s implication in various Hollywood genres, particularly the teen film, and of its visual design, see James Loehlin, “ ‘These Violent Delights’ ” 121–25. Descriptions are from Joe Baltake, “A Rousing Take”; Janet Maslin, “Soft! What Light?” c12; Michael Wilmington, “Shakespeare, Dude” 7h; and Anthony Lane, “Tights! Camera! Action!” 66. Saskia Sassen shows that as of 1998, Mexico City had more firms with direct banking links to London than (among others) São Paulo, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Moscow, San Francisco, and Toronto; it was tied to Seoul through eighteen such firms (Sassen, Cities in a World Economy 50). See also Sassen’s brief case study of Miami’s development in the new urban economy on 88–92. José Arroyo praises Luhrmann for transforming the “topography of that millennial urban nightmare” – Mexico City – into a “ ‘constructed’ world, one that is different enough from a ‘real’ one to allow for different ways of being and knowing, but with enough similarities to permit understanding” (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” 6). Descriptions are from Baltake, “A Rousing Take” 20; Peter Travers, “Just Two Kids” 123; and Kenneth Turan, “A Full-Tilt ‘Romeo’ ” f10. Catherine Martin comments that the social structure of Mexico City “is closer to that of Elizabethan times than anywhere else in the modern world” (quoted in Hodgdon, “Everything’s Nice” 91 n.14). Descriptions are from Brian Johnson, “Souping Up the Bard” 74; Mick LaSalle, “This ‘Romeo’ ” c3; Lyons, “Lights, Camera, Shakespeare” 57;


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Maslin, “Soft! What Light?” c12; Travers, “Just Two Kids” 124; Turan, “A Full-Tilt ‘Romeo’ ” f10; Wilmington, “Shakespeare, Dude” 7h; and the Christian Science Monitor Review of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 12. My thanks to Shannon Steen for suggesting the similarity between Perrineau and DiCaprio, and for pointing out Dave Paris’s function as the image of “failed masculinity.” She also suggests that Mercutio’s platinumblond wig forges a connection between Mercutio’s racial and sexual transvestism. Elizabeth Deitchman astutely points out that Mercutio’s costume for the ball is very different from the costume in which we first see him on the beach; adding a bigger wig, the white gloves, a sequinned cape, stockings and garters, a rhinestone choker, and much more makeup, Mercutio is significantly “whiter” in the dance sequence (“TV Screens”). My thanks again to Elizabeth Deitchman for allowing me to cite this fine essay. While most reviewers faulted Perrineau’s “Queen Mab” performance in technical terms, James Loehlin shrewdly sees it as one of many borrowings from Zeffirelli: “Harold Perrineau’s Queen Mab speech, for instance, is a clumsy copy of John McEnery’s from the earlier film, though making ‘Queen Mab’ a hallucinogenic pill on Mercutio’s forefinger is an inspired touch” (“ ‘These Violent Delights’ ” 127). Anthony Lane evokes a persistent trope in the critical reception of black actors in Shakespeare: see Albanese’s overview of African-American casting and American racial politics in “Black and White,” and Greenblatt’s discussion of Janet Suzman’s efforts to alter John Kani’s accent in her production of Othello at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg (“Racial Memory” 54–55). In her excellent discussion of the reception of the multivocal performance of Brook’s The Mahabharata, Una Chaudhuri notes Brook’s strategic decision not to homogenize the linguistic diversity of his cast, a diversity that was roundly criticized by reviewers even in places such as New York, where a range of accented “Englishes” should be familiar (“Working Out [of ] Place” 93). Richard Wilson points out the extent to which proper “ ‘articulacy’ ” has recently become connected with conservative trends generally in British theatre, particularly as enunciated by Adrian Noble at the RSC (“NATO’s Pharmacy” 58–59). John Leguizamo’s Tybalt is also a signifier of contaminated Shakespeare to many reviewers: an “oily and nervous” (Baltake, “A Rousing Take” 21); “muy macho Latino hood” (Lyons, “Lights, Camera, Shakespeare” 57); and “a volatile Latino who’s in a gang that likes to dude up and then accessorize with pearl-handle guns and silver boot heels” (Travers, “Just Two Kids” 123). In her brilliant reading of the film, Barbara Hodgdon argues that by “unmarking” the whiteness of the film’s protagonists – Danes and

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DiCaprio – the film holds out the “promise of integration into some idealized realm of ‘whiteness’ ” (“Everything’s Nice” 95–96). I am much indebted here and elsewhere to Hodgdon’s searching reading of race and ethnicity in the film, and its engagement with another often derogated audience, teens. 29 Although my sense of the film’s relation to the discourse of global capital is somewhat different from Albanese’s, I am here and elsewhere indebted to her fine discussion. 30 Perhaps in a spirit of race-blind reading, the reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle (LaSalle) and Los Angeles Times (Turan) do not mention race or ethnicity as persistent features of the film’s design (although Turan does identify the racialized aspects of Perrineau’s Mercutio); similarly, the flavor of Miami’s “So-Be” (South Beach) – “[c]onvertibles full of bikiniclad girls roam beachside streets, chest-thumping bass blasting from the radio; punks draw guns sending passersby scrambling” – is noted by the Miami Herald, but race and ethnicity are not mentioned (Rodriguez, “Bizarre?”). What is more troubling is that the film’s evident emphasis on race and ethnicity is sidestepped in the issue of Shakespeare (a magazine directed toward secondary-school teachers) devoted to the film. Although the opening page mentions Margolyes’s accent and the “industrialized Cabo San Lucas in fast forward” setting, race is otherwise avoided as a topic of consideration of potential student discussion. Chris Renino’s article “What Scarsdale High School Women See” alludes to “the Queen Mab speech delivered as a drug induced hallucination” but students in Scarsdale seem not to have “seen” – or are not able to discuss – Mercutio as a black man in drag, nor did they “see” the feud between Montagues and Capulets as inflected by race (4–5); in “What Teachers See – Symbolism and Lust,” teachers are reported to have seen allusions to Peter Greenaway, and allusions to Wagner in the Capulet ball scene, and even compared the statue of Christ to the “Christ of the Andes” statue on the border between Argentina and Chile: what they apparently did not see, or see as significant, was the role of race in the film (6). Perhaps more surprising is Frances Dolan’s article, “A Plague on Both your Fathers,” in which social history is encapsulated as a treatment of gender roles. While the “fathers, each of whom seems to be part CEO, part crime family godfather” are located relative to crime, and Roman Catholicism is noted, the racial/ethnic surface of the film is not mentioned – or is, perhaps, unmentionable. 31 After reading an earlier version of this chapter, Liz Shafer sent me the following note, which suggests the mobility of the film’s signifiers: “The sense of locale for me is certainly mixed up with Australian clichés (the beach, the Mad Max road warrior feel) – and features like the drag queen Mercutio make sense in terms of the high kitsch of Australia[n] films


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which had just come out in Australia – Priscilla [Queen of the Desert], and the annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is a huge event. Even the multi ethnic issues you mention appear – although (very deliberately) improbably represented in [Luhrmann’s earlier film, set in Australia] Strictly Ballroom . . . so for me the film is very specifically Australian much of the time” (e-mail to the author). On the film’s use of multimedia marketing, see Loehlin, “ ‘These Violent Delights’ ” 130–32; on the global youth market, see also Denise Albanese, “Shakespeare Film” 215. Barry Day provides a detailed overview of the negotiations between the Wanamaker group and various incarnations of the Southwark Council and NSCD over the twenty-year period of the Globe’s incubation (This Wooden “O” 137–43, 169–81). As Day is a champion both of Wanamaker and the Globe, his account of this history is self-evidently partial, and tends to enact the elitist condescension expected by the Globe’s workingclass neighbors. Saskia Sassen notes that despite falling employment and losses in manufacturing throughout the UK in the 1980s, “there were sharp increases in producer services in Central London between 1984 and 1987,” amounting to 40 percent of employment in 1989 (Cities in a World Economy 64). Despite a 47 percent loss of manufacturing jobs in the London area, the sharp growth in producer services appears to offset these losses to a considerable degree: the London region experienced only a 2 percent overall decline in employment (71). This globalization of the urban economy has important consequences for the kinds of employment available, and for the population of the globalized central city. Finance and producer services define the kinds of employment – and so the kinds of inhabitants – of the urban core, which becomes increasingly polarized between high-income and low-income residents. Furthermore, “[t]wo other developments in global cities have also contributed to economic polarization. One is the vast supply of low-wage jobs required by highincome gentrification in both its residential and commercial settings. The increase in the numbers of expensive restaurants, luxury housing, luxury hotels, gourmet shops, boutiques, French hand laundries, and special cleaners that ornament the new urban landscape illustrates this trend” (as does, of course, the specialized entertainment industry – nightclubs and theatres) (Sassen, Global City 9). On the relationship between Disney, the development of shopping malls, and the Rouse Corporation’s development of urban space, see Trevor Boddy, “Underground and Overhead”; M. Christine Boyer discusses the “reiteration and recycling of already-known symbolic codes and historic forms” in “Cities for Sale” (188). On the impact of Disney on indoor public space, such as airports, see Michael Sorkin, “See You in

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Notes to pages 151–163 Disneyland.” For a more extensive discussion of “theming,” see chapter 2 of this book. On the Globe’s global sponsors, see Crystal Bartolovich, “Shakespeare’s Globe” 190–96. As Michael Neill notes, even Thomas Platter observed that “a people not much given to travel could vicariously experience the wonder of unfamiliar places”; the Globe becomes “an arena, therefore, in which dreams of geographic mastery, of national consolidation and expansion, of discovery, conquest, and mercantile splendor, could be played out” (Putting History to the Question 312). Carey Marks, the brochure’s designer, reports that the image is of Hercules (not Atlas), and is meant to recall the emblem of the original theatre, Hercules bearing the globe (e-mail to the author). For an overview of the local purposes and meanings of Msomi’s work, see Rohan Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa chapter 3. I saw the performance on its final day at the Globe, and my account differs in some details from many of the reviews. Romeu e Julieta loosened the performance regimes of the Globe in some other revealing ways. Playing to the audience is now conventional at the theatre, but Grupo Galpão’s entire performance is conceived in this dialogic manner; while this aspect of “street theater” was somewhat hindered by the language barrier, in general the performance’s playful engagement with its audience was pronounced. This informality had the surprising effect of loosening up the vigilant Globe ushers, too. Picture-taking is forbidden during performances at the Globe, but once the cast entered, the ushers stopped their photo-policing activities – “They don’t seem to mind it,” one usher remarked to another standing next to me (whether in disgust at the audience’s ill-mannered flashbulbs or in disdain for the company and its style of performance was hard to say). Two days later, when I saw Hamlet, performed by the Globe company, the no-photography rules were strictly enforced. Details of Grupo Galpão’s history are taken from Carlos Brandão’s Grupo Galpão: 15 Anos de Risco e Rito (101). My thanks to Clélia Francesca Donovan for providing me with a translation of sections of Brandão’s fine study. The utility of an archive, and of outreach to a scholarly community, should not be underestimated; many of the best-known avant-garde performers and performing groups in the US have gained from the attention of – and often from dialogue and conversation with – scholars. Once the subject of books and articles by scholars who were among their first audiences, such groups (Split Britches) and individuals (Tim Miller) are often invited to university campuses for residencies, where they sometimes develop new work.


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43 Rather than taking specific rehearsal techniques from Brook, Villela seems to have absorbed Brook’s interest in physical work, and his ongoing desire to keep the rehearsal process moving forward through a series of instabilities. On Brook’s rehearsals of Dream, see David Selbourne, The Making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 4 CYBER - SH A KESPEA R E 1 On the Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare, and its implications for textual criticism and aesthetic theory generally, see Joseph Grigely, Textualterity 60–70. The “sociological” view of texts is usually associated with D. F. McKenzie, and with several books by Jerome McGann, notably The Textual Condition. 2 On the relationship between IRC (Internet Relay Chat), MUDs (Multiple-User Dimensions or Multiple-User “Dungeons”), and MOOs (MUDs with Object-Oriented programming) and their use in theatre communications, see Julie Burk, “ATHEMOO” 109. 3 On the notion of print cyborgs in the early modern period, see Jeffrey Masten, “Pressing Subjects” 93–94. On the cyborg in the practice of contemporary identity, see Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. 4 Charles Moran and Gail Hawisher cite this percentage (see “Rhetorics and Languages” 82), and also note that ASCII – American Standard Code for Information Exchange – is English-oriented, and is (or was in 1998) unable to handle various accents used in other languages. 5 As a practice electronic writing differs from earlier writing technologies in that letterforms are not its actual medium of inscription, transmission, or storage. A keystroke on the computer does not register a letter – “a,” “b,” and so on – as it does on a typewriter. Instead it operates a switch, opening a transistor gate that sends a specific voltage (0 or 3 volts) to a microcontroller that checks the status of all the keys, and sends a signal (on/off, 0 or 3 volts) serially to the computer-operating system (the primary mediation between the computer hardware and various applications). The operating system channels the keystroke signals through the appropriate application (in this case the word-processing software), which takes the signal as a command to update the appearance of the screen, and translates it into an arrangement of pixels (i.e., not a “letterform” as such, but an arrangement of dots we can recognize as a letter). The operating system can also transmit the signal to the hard-drive, where it is registered on the magnetically polarized surface of the hard-drive disk in the binary form of a bit (0 or 1); 8 bits are grouped together as a byte, and assigned to various logical units on the disk. As Jay David Bolter points out, for all its innovation in the shape, fluidity,

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Notes to pages 178–184 and changeability of textual forms, perhaps the most striking innovation of electronic writing has to do with the interface of writing itself, an interface that is, finally, “not directly accessible either to the writer or to the reader” (Writing Space 42). My thanks to William Rachelson for explaining to me the transmission of electronic text (e-mail to the author). RAM operates in principle more like a dictionary than like a novel. Although words are stored in a dictionary in a logical order (much as bytes are stored in logical units on the computer’s hard drive), the purpose of that logic is to enable the user to summon any piece of data at random, without having to read the entire field of stored data (you do not have to read the entire dictionary twice to look up two words – say “zebra” and “herbivore” – you might want to use in a sentence, provided that you have access to the otherwise arbitrary storage-logic of the medium, in this case alphabetical order). Similarly, the logic of the storage of bytes of data has nothing to do with the syntax of their combination on the screen. “Revolution” is Moulthrop’s term; see “You Say You Want a Revolution?” On the overdetermination of Moulthrop’s and Kaplan’s argument, see David S. Miall, “The Hypertextual Moment” 161; I am also indebted to this fine article for drawing my attention to Carla Hesse’s article, and for its searching reading of Moulthrop’s work, including this collaboration with Nancy Kaplan. More recently Moulthrop has remarked: “we need theoretical approaches that no longer struggle primarily against the hegemony of writing, and especially of print – a standard by which some of my own earlier work may be found wanting” (“Computing, Humanism” 5). Leah Marcus points out that this instability is not merely characteristic of the transmission process associated with print publication; see “Veil of Manuscript.” In the edition of Kernan’s Death of Literature that I am citing, the sentence quoted by Moulthrop and Kaplan appears on page 144. Despite Aarseth’s exploration of the illusory distinctions between hypertext and print, and the subtle sense in which “[c]ybertext is a perspective on all forms of textuality” (Cybertext 18), dramatic performance is understood as a straightforward mode of reiteration: “In drama, the relationship between a play and its (varying) performance is a hierarchical and explicit one; it makes trivial sense to distinguish between the two” (3). Jay David Bolter points out that “[t]exts written explicitly for this new medium will probably favor short, concentrated expression, because each unit may be approached from a different perspective with each reading. Electronic writing will probably be aphoristic rather than


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periodic. A printed book, on the other hand, usually demands a periodic rhetoric, a rhetoric of subordination and transitions” (Writing Space ix). Yet Davida Charney reminds us that “[t]he very notion that hypertext designer-writers can create meaningful, useful networks in the first place depends on a whole range of assumptions about how to divide up and relate parts of texts, including which segments constitute meaningful nodes, which types of links are meaningful and important, and which types of texts can or ought to be read nonlinearly” (“Effects of Hypertext” 241). 13 The structure of hypertext tends to resist the citational apparatus of print. Throughout this book I cite websites in the text by the title of the homepage (as here, “Politexts”), and then note the page to which I refer by the appropriate link (which appears in italics). The title of the page is often different from the link that takes you there: the What’s At Stake link on the “Politexts” page takes you to a page entitled “Stakes.” 14 Predictably enough, hypertext is said to promote a new conception of effective writing that, as Katherine Duguay argues, resists the thesisdriven “closure” inherent in print: the “open-ended” nature of hypertext requires its writers to engage with “multiple positions and viewpoints” (“Sites of Conflict” 15–16). Oddly enough, while we might think that a number of manuscript (Plato) and print (Montaigne) authors seem relatively adept at maintaining a multiplicity of viewpoints, some hypertext authors – including Nancy Kaplan and Laurie Osborne – still feel the need to evoke “What’s at Stake” in the argument, the right “Way In / Way Out,” the “Conclusions.” Beyond that, the much-maligned fixity and stability of print has one kind of advantage: printed texts tend not to disappear when they are no longer of interest to their authors, or have been superseded by later iterations. In addition to the URL given for this site in the Works Cited, readers might also consult Osborne’s homepage . 15 Aliki Dragona and Carolyn Handa list a number of ways in which Greek users of the World Wide Web are confronted by the culturally specific assumptions inscribed in internet communications: English is its preferred language; sound and color are critically important (users have color equipment); computer-equipment upgrades happen easily and often (users can run new software versions); telephone access is easy and inexpensive; electronic communication is a good thing; any and all kinds of information can be found on the web; commercial elements are culturally neutral and can be readily ignored; the visual features of web pages are not so culturally marked as to be illegible (“Xenes Glosses” 53–65). Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe point out that “the global network is portrayed as a culturally neutral medium that has been built to support a larger global community, one that transcends the problems of

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race, geopolitical borders, national interest, and cultural specific values that hinder communication, free exchange, and shared understanding” (“Introduction” 8), despite the fact that it was initially designed for military research purposes and is deeply involved in the dispersion of global capital. Like all technologies, though, it remains susceptible to alternate, even oppositional uses: the internet has become a critical instrument for mounting antiglobalization protests at various international meetings (notably of the World Trade Organization), and hosts any number of sites soliciting involvement in the subversion of individual states, and the overthrow of the military-financial-information-entertainment complex. More positive versions of such communities also exist online – support groups for isolated gay teenagers, for example – which, while they may not depend on the anonymity of the participants, are able to do their work precisely because they evade the feared consequences of unwanted “outing” from the local IRL “community.” On online “outing,” see Joanne Addison and Susan Hilligoss, “Technological Fronts.” As Ilana Snyder remarks, “[w]e need to examine very carefully how ‘embodiment’ arguments are used to support a technological determinism that presents hypertext as something that inevitably transforms both society and its education systems” (“Beyond the Hype” 138). As Harry Berger, Jr. argues in his landmark essay “Bodies and Texts,” the “author-function” is not to be found only in the sphere of writing, but operates as “a principle of closure, of semiotic inhibition, employed in the conflict of interpretations to privilege certain readings and control ‘unruly meanings’ ” (153, my emphasis). How many sites turn up depends to a considerable extent on the search engine used and search performed. A search on Excite performed on 22 November 2000 found the following: for “Shakespeare” 457,131 sites; “Shakespeare + theatre” 233,480 sites, “Shakespeare + performance” 1,039,025 sites. An identical search performed minutes later on Google had these results: “Shakespeare” 1,510,000; “Shakespeare + theatre” 123,000; “Shakespeare + performance” 139,000. Considerably fewer sites were turned up by Lycos and LookSmart. Searches performed on Google on 1 October 2001 turned up 2,150,000 sites for “Shakespeare,” 298,000 for “Shakespeare + theatre,” and 321,000 for “Shakespeare + performance.” Excite declared bankruptcy in October 2001. The Capulet Masked Ball link can be found at the site for Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet; however, the party site was sustained by an independent provider, Palace.com, which is no longer operating. Amanda Mabillard also operates a separate site, Shakespeare Online, and has been helpful and candid in answering questions about


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her work online. Her Shakespeare Online site (www.shakespeareonline.com) should not be confused with Shakespeareonline.com (www.shakespeareonline.com), which has a few links to lists of Shakespeare sites, but mainly provides links to a wide range of consumer goods and services. Another site, Shakespeare.com, provides a range of reviews of productions and a calendar of Shakespeare events including both academic (upcoming conferences) and nonacademic (a streaming version of the Royal National Theatre’s Merchant of Venice, directed by Trevor Nunn and Chris Hunt), as well as a searchable First Web Folio Edition of Shakespeare’s Works derived from The Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare. See also Five Star’s Shakespeare Collection. My thanks to Dennis Kennedy for providing me with a copy of this lively and provocative paper. It should also be noted that some sites – such as the excellent Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet – operated by educational institutions, while not containing advertising, do contain many links to commercial sites. That is, the idea that the academic and the commercial are distinct is as much a fiction in virtual space as in the material space of the “real” economy. Peter Donaldson, the director of Hamlet on the Ramparts, has deftly explored the uses of hypermedia as part of published research; see Donaldson et al. “In Fair Verona.”

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Index

Aarseth, Espen 183, 188, 214, 234 Abel, Lionel 104 About Shakespeare 199–201, 207 About.com 199 acting 49, 56, 58, 65, 68, 88–89, 96–97, 103, 119, 145, 195, 208, 212–213, 219–220, 223, 225, 229 and design 68–74 ad quadratum layout 92 advertising 134–135, 148, 177, 213, 228, 237 Aeschylus 54 African-American performance 142–144, 225 see also race Ahmad, Aijaz 124 Albanese, Denise 119, 136, 146, 226, 229–231 Albee, Edward Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 66 Alfreds, Mike 102, 225 Alleyn, Edward 56 Allred, Randal 91 Almereyda, Michael Hamlet (director) 39, 110–113, 115, 172, 225 anachronism 92 Anderson, Laurie 2 Andrade, Oswald de 162 Ansen, David 135, 141, 145 Aportis 189 Appadurai, Arjun 147, 228 Apple Corporation 178, 187 Macintosh 178, 187, 189 Aquarium (London) 150 aquatic melodrama 6 Arden Online Shakespeare 198 Armin, Robert 56, 77 Armstrong, Alan 226 Arroyo, José 143–144, 228

Artaud, Antonin 55, 128, 130, 160, 227 a s cii 233 Astaire, Fred 71 audience 21 see also Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s (new) Austin, J. L. 3–20, 58, 77 see also Butler, performativity, speech acts Author-function 14, 20, 30, 171, 180, 182, 184, 188, 193–194, 200, 202 authority 200 authorship 34, 193–194, 197, 204, 211 autoperformance 21 Baartman, Saartjie 130, 227 Bacon, Francis 44 bad quartos 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail 32, 35, 211 Baltake, Joe 228 Bara, Teuda 158, 162 Barba, Eugenio 128–129, 161, 163 Barbican 58 Barker, Francis 62–63, 78 Barker, Harley Granville 84 Barnes, Peter 160 Barthes, Roland 204 Bartolovich, Crystal 232 battlefield reenactment 25, 84, 89, 96 see also Civil War reenactment, living history, reenactment Bauman, Zygmunt 138, 148 BBC-TV Shakespeare Plays 43 Beale, Simon Russell 225 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Marriage of Figaro, The 48 Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher 34 Beck, Ulrich 125, 134, 138, 146

262

Index Beckett, Samuel 20, 30, 53–54, 67, 77, 160, 173, 213, 215 Play 53 Waiting for Godot 12, 53, 57, 75, 180 Belsey, Catherine 56, 69 Bendure, Glenda 20 Benetton 125 Bennett, Susan 226 Berger, Harry, Jr. 236 Bernstein, Leonard 135 Berry, Cicely 54 Berry, Ralph 217 Bessell, Jacqueline 104–105, 109–110, 225 Betterton, Thomas 31, 56, 62, 171, 214 Bhabha, Homi 124–125, 161 Bharucha, Rustom 128, 227 Bic 125, 152 Bildstein, Kurt 162 Billington, Michael 159–161, 166–167 binary code 177 see also digital code black-box theatre 5–6, 8 Blake, William 67 Blayney, Peter W. M. 217 Blitz Experience, The 90 Block, Giles 225 Bloom, Harold 17, 60–63, 220 Boal, Augusto 129, 161–164 Boddy, Trevor 231 Bodley, Thomas 35, 39 library of 218 body 14–15, 18–20 and technology 175, 192–195 see also embodiment Body Shop, The 125, 138, 152 Bogart, Anne 67, 129, 173 Going, Going, Gone 20, 66–67 see also Viewpoints Bolter, Jay David 174, 177, 185, 187, 189–190, 192–193, 233–234 Bond, Edward Restoration 67 book, history of 176 see also print Bowdler, Thomas and Henrietta 171–172, 191 Family Shakespeare 233 Bowers, Fredson 171 Boyer, M. Christine 224, 231 Brady Bunch, The 2

263

Branagh, Kenneth 202 Hamlet (actor and director) 39, 56, 70, 72 Henry V (actor and director) 39, 69 Love’s Labour’s Lost (actor and director) 69–72 Much Ado About Nothing (actor and director) 72, 122, 135 Brandão, Carlos Antônio Leite 163–166, 232 Braveheart 69 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 54, 67, 160–161, 220 Brigadoon 90 Bristol, Michael 24, 31–37, 217–218 Broadbent, Jim 71 Brook, Peter 84, 117, 121, 127, 131, 152, 160–161, 163–167, 227, 233 Hamlet (director) 225 Mahabharata, The (director) 127, 129, 152, 229 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (director) 68, 161, 165, 233 Bullock, William 130 Burbage, Richard 62, 97 Burbules, Nicholas C. 183 Burk, Julie 233 Burke, Kenneth 12, 14 Burton, Richard 66 Butler, Judith 3–4, 9–14, 18–20, 59, 147, 216 see also performativity Byron, George Gordon, Lord 70 Caird, John Hamlet (director) 225 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 129–130, 162, 164 Calderwood, James 104 Campion, Seán 114 Case, Sue-Ellen 13–19, 170, 193, 216 Cats 127 Centre International de Création Théaˆtrale 122 Certeau, Michel de 50, 103 Césaire, Aimé Tempest, A 117 character 24, 29, 36, 58–65, 68, 71, 220–221, 225 Charney, Davida 235 Chartier, Roger 45–46, 49–50, 182, 196, 210, 218–219 chatrooms, online 47, 186, 191, 211 Chaudhuri, Una 80, 127, 229 Chekhov, Anton 30, 38, 52, 54, 58, 69, 196

264

Index

Chicago Century of Progress Exposition 83, 96 Chicago Railroading Fair 96 Chicano acto 58 Churchill, Caryl 47, 54, 215–216 Cibber, Colley 62 Cibber, Jane 54 Circuit City 195 Cirque du Soleil 160 City Beautiful Movement 95 Civil War reenactment 90–91, 93–94, 98, 116, 223 see also battlefield reenactment, living history, reenactment Classics Illustrated 180 Cleese, John 85 Cloud, Random 219 Coca-Cola 126, 129, 131, 148 Coca-colonization 156–157, 226 College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, Massachusetts) Measure for Measure 206 Colonial Exhibition (Paris) 130 Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia) 82, 86, 90, 95, 97, 223 colonialism 25, 152, 167 see also postcolonial color-blind casting see race Colvin, Daniel 205 Comédie Française 6–14, 52 commedia dell’ arte 160, 162–163 see also street theatre conference-paper performance 15–19, 49 Congreve, William 51, 219 Corneille, Pierre 129, 219 Costanzo, William 192–193 craftsman performer 97 cross-dressing see sexuality and performance Crow II 111 Crystal, David 228 Cukor, George 165 cue-scripts 219–220 see also sides cyber-Shakespeare 26, 169–215 cybertext 214–215, 234 see also hypertext cyborgs 176, 233 print cyborgs 233

Daimler-Chrysler Corp. 132, 152 Danes, Claire 136, 141–142, 229 Davenant, William 130, 227 Day, Barry 149, 231 Dean, James 112 deconstruction 9, 13, 102, 216 Deetz, James 87 de Grazia, Margreta 50–51, 217, 219 Deitchman, Elizabeth 145, 226, 229 Dennehy, Brian 141 derivative creativity 34–38, 41, 51–52, 57, 61 Derrida, Jacques 3, 6, 9–10, 14, 19 design see acting, eclectic design, modern-dress designer function 184 desktop publishing 17 desktop theatre 197 Des’ree 142 Dessen, Alan 205, 207 di Nucci, Celeste 217 Diamond, Elin 4, 9 DiCaprio, Leonardo 136, 140–143, 146, 229, 230 Dickens, Charles 49, 54, 189 digital code 177–178 see also binary code digital culture ideology of 23 digital media 111, 175 see also hypermedia Dionysus, Theatre of 6 Dirlik, Arif 138 Disney, Walt 96 “Disney” 96, 115, 130, 148, 150, 231 Disney films 94 Disney World (Orlando, Florida) 83, 93–97, 99, 102, 125, 130 Disneyfication 37, 81, 132, 146, 151, 155–157, 161 Disneyland (Anaheim, California) 83, 91, 93–96, 99, 116, 125, 130 Dissanayake, Wimal 125 Dolan, Frances 230 Donaldson, Peter S. 205, 237 Donovan, Clélia Francesca 232 Dragona, Aliki 235 drama and authorship 218 and literary studies 14, 18, 54, 66 see also literary and theatre studies mise-en-page of 219

Index as performance commodity 3, 20, 33–34, 57–58, 75, 122, 211 see also performance as print commodity 3–25, 36 see also print studies 1, 5–8 and technology 2 dramatic performativity 3, 9–13, 21–24, 26–27, 29–30, 35, 38–39, 50, 65, 79, 117, 130, 170–175, 212, 214 see also performativity, Shakespearean performativity dramatic publishing 33–36, 38 see also print dramatic theatre 6 dramatic writing 13 Duguay, Katherine 235 Dumas, Alexandre La Dame aux Camélias 71 dv8 Enter Achilles 77 Eagleton, Terry 56 eclectic design 31, 39, 217 editing 22, 53, 76, 204 see also textual theory Edson, Antônio 148, 162 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 40–41, 170, 216, 218 Elam, Harry 81 electronic books 189–190 electronic literacy 195 see also hypertext electronic mail (e-mail) 47, 187, 191, 211 electronic performance 173 electronic publishing 17, 179 Electronic Text Center 203 electronic writing 23, 173, 176, 196, 198, 211–212, 233–234 ideology of 190 see also hypertext Eliot, T. S. 55, 67 Elizabethan Stage Society 83 embodiment 18–20, 24, 26, 38, 54, 58, 174, 212, 215, 236 see also body emoticons 47–55, 219 entertainment underworld 161 epic theatre 21, 55, 67 Erickson, Thomas D. 187 Essex, Earl of 220 ethnicity 140 see also race

265

Euripides Bacchae, The 66 Euro Disney 125 Everard, Edward Cape 54 experience commodified 95–96, 103 Ezell, Margaret J. M. 47 Faneuil Market (Boston, Massachusetts) 150 Fanon, Frantz 124, 133, 166 fashion 148 Fay, Stephen 103, 106, 113 Featherstone, Mike 161 Fellini, Federico 160 Fernandes, Wanda 162 festival markets 150 film 26, 30, 35, 62, 68–74, 175–176, 198–199, 215 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 129–132 Fish, Stanley 221 Five Star’s Shakespeare Collection 237 Folger online Shakespeare 205 Folger Shakespeare Library 205 force 3–25, 27, 29–30, 36–39, 44, 58, 60, 63, 70, 76, 81, 100, 103, 117–118, 168, 208 see also performativity Ford, Henry 86, 95 Fortune Theatre, The 31, 83 Foucault, Michel 60 Fowler, Peter J. 222 Franklin, Ben 45 Free Theatre (Munich) 162 Freeman, Neil 67, 219, 223 Freud, Sigmund 19, 221 Friends 30 Frontline “Shakespeare Mystery, The” 202 Froscher, George 162 Fuller, Roy 216 “Marcellus Version, The” 19 Furness Shakespeare Library 202 Fusco, Coco 132 gaming 214 Garber, Marjorie 216 Garrick, David 31, 35, 54, 56, 62, 171, 214 Catherine and Petruchio 20 Gates, Bill 188 see also Microsoft Geertz, Clifford 14 Gershenfeld, Neil 169 Gibson, Mel 56, 106, 171

266

Index

Gielgud, John 112 Gilliam, Terry 112 Gilligan’s Island Hamlet 202 Gilmore, Joseph 95, 224 Gladiator 69 global cities 95, 103, 136–137, 141 see also globalization, Sassen globalization 62–63, 103, 134, 143, 156, 173, 226–227 economic 125–126, 211, 226, 230, 236 of English 228 of performance 26, 112, 128, 159–167, 237 Globe performativity 25, 29, 79–116, 155–156, 159, 224 Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s (new) 25, 28–29, 31, 63, 75–76, 92, 123, 130, 148–168, 214, 222, 232 acting at 97–98, 102, 108–110, 114, 224 audiences at 99–102, 106–108, 114–115, 224 history of reconstruction 83–84 plays performed: As You Like It 84, 100 Hamlet 26, 84, 104, 223, 225, 232 Henry V 31, 68, 97, 100, 102, 104 Romeu e Julieta see Grupo Galpão Two Gentlemen of Verona 84 White Company at 104 see also Globe-to-Globe, Shakespeare Globe Theatre, The (original) 6, 68, 150–151, 159, 198, 225 Globe-to-Globe International Theatre Festival 26, 123, 151–159 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 129–130, 227 Goldman, Michael 52, 104 Goldoni, Carlo 129, 162 Golson, Emily 182 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 55, 139 Gough, Kathleen 223 Gozzi, Carlo 129 Grady, Hugh 58 Greek theatre 30, 54, 217 Greenaway, Peter 197, 230 Greenblatt, Stephen 28, 37–38, 227, 229 Greenfield, Jon 92 Greenfield Village (Michigan) 82, 86, 94–95 Greg, W. W. 171 Grehan, Helen 227 Grigely, Joseph 53, 233 Grock (Adrian Wellach) 75 Grotowski, Jerzy 128–129, 161, 163 see also poor theatre

Grupo Galpão 148–167, 232 Romeu e Julieta 26, 84–85, 122–123, 127, 148–167, 177, 232 Guimarães Rosa, João 165 Gurr, Andrew 25, 96, 97, 222 Gutenberg, Johannes 40 Guthrie, Tyrone 84 Hackel, Heidi Brayman 218 Hagen, Uta 54 Hall, Stuart 121, 140 Halpern, Richard 226 Hamlet on the Ramparts 205, 237 see also Donaldson Hamnet Players 175 Handa, Carolyn 235 Handke, Peter 160 Hanson, Elizabeth 60 Haraway, Donna J. 233 “hardcore” reenactors 90 see also Civil War reenactment hate speech 10–11 see also Butler, speech acts Havelock, Eric 217 Hawisher, Gail E. 233, 235 Hawke, Ethan 56, 110–111, 113, 171 Hawking, Stephen 67 Hayes, James 109 Hayles, N. Katherine 176, 187–188 Heim, Michael 179 Henslowe, Philip 34, 220 heritage industry 222 sites 84, 88, 103 Hesse, Carla 180, 234 Hetata, Sherif 152 Hewison, Robert 222 Heywood, Thomas 34 Hill, Aaron 54 Hill, Conleth 114 Hilligoss, Susan 236 history and performance 24, 26, 28–116, 173, 212–213, 217 Hodgdon, Barbara 134, 136, 142, 225–226, 228–229 Holcroft, Thomas 48 Holden, Michael 98 Holderness, Graham 224 Holland, Peter 45, 167, 220, 225 Holledge, Julia 127, 161 Hooper, Barbara 147 Hopkins, Anthony 72–73, 118

Index Hornby, Richard 102 Horwitz, Tony 90, 94, 223 Houseman, John 120 Howard, Ebenezer 95 Howard, Tharon W. 216 Hunt, Chris 237 Hunter, L. A. C. 75, 222 Hunter, Michael 222 hybridity 124, 226 hypermedia 14, 26, 173–174, 204, 215 ideology of 193 literacy 195, 206, 210 hypertext 21–22, 26, 173–174, 198, 212–213, 215, 235–236 designers 235 logic of 179, 181, 184–185 and orality 190–192 see also electronic writing Hytner, Nicholas 85 Ibsen, Henrik 8, 38, 54, 66–67, 69, 213 When We Dead Awaken 66 illocution 7, 10–11, 19, 60, 169 see also Austin, performativity Imperial War Museum (London) 90 imperialism 125 Ingram, William 217 Interactive Shakespeare Project 203, 205–210 Measure for Measure 210, 215 intercultural performance 12, 25–26, 117–168, 173–174, 226–227 as commodity 132 intercultural Shakespeare 126–133 interface metaphor 187–188, 194, 212 internet 2, 17, 174, 176, 178, 186, 188, 192, 195, 198, 211–213, 219, 235 internet performance 175 Internet Shakespeare Editions 201, 203–213 “internet zone” 186 Ironbridge Gorge Museum (UK) 82, 95 Irving, Henry 30, 56, 62, 171 Isser, Edward 205–206 Jackson, Michael 2 Jacobi, Derek 69 Jacobs, Sally 68, 167 James, Henry 191 Jameson, Fredric 123–126 Jenik, Adrienne 175 Jobs, Steve 178, 188 see also Apple Johnson, Brian 228

267

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan 184–186, 189, 194 Jones, Bill T. You Walk? 175 Jones, Marie Stones in His Pockets 114 Jonson, Ben 34, 215 Jorvik Viking Centre (York) 83, 116 Joseph, Patterson 119 Joughin, John J. 132 Jousting Federation of Great Britain 223 Joyce, Michael 182, 186 Jubilee Walk, The (London) 150 Kani, John 229 Kaplan, Caren 126, 136, 138 Kaplan, Nancy 179–182, 184–186, 193, 195, 198, 234–235 Kapur, Anuradha 2 Kasdan, Lawrence Grand Canyon 139 Kastan, David Scott 16, 34, 176, 204, 212, 217 kathakali 132 Kathakali King Lear, The 117, 127, 147, 152, 156 Kathakali Othello, The 117, 133 Kauffmann, Stanley 72, 136, 140 Kaufman, Moisés 20 Laramie Project, The 20 Kean, Charles Richard II (manager, actor) 31 Kean, Edmund 57, 70 Kelly, Gene 71 Kemp, William 56, 74, 76, 221–222 Kempley, Rita 138, 141 Kennedy, Adrienne Funnyhouse of a Negro 80 Kennedy, Dennis 199–201, 217, 224, 237 Kent, Jonathan Coriolanus (director) 39 Kernan, Alvin 170, 181, 218, 234 KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) 126 Kiernan, Pauline 99, 101–102, 109, 224 Kidman, Nicole 71 King’s Men, The 56 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 89, 223, 227 Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy, The 55 La Salle, Mick 228, 230 Lacan, Jacques 14

268

Index

Landau, Tina 67 Lane, Anthony 136, 144, 228–229 Lane, Nathan 71 Lanham, Richard 185, 191 Lanier, Doug 197 Las Vegas 104 latinidad 135, 140–142, 145–146, 158, 229 Lauren, Ralph 138 ´ Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret) 95 Lee, Spike Bamboozled 208 Lee, Stan 20 Leguizamo, John 71, 139, 141, 146, 229 Lehmann, Courtney 228 Lepage, Robert 152 Elsinore 77 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (director) 121 Lerer, Seth 43 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 129 Lester, Adrian 225 Levin, James A. 219 Lichtenfels, Peter Romeo and Juliet (director) 75–77, 222 links 209–210 see also hypertext Lionnet, Françoise 227 literacy 13, 19, 21–23, 48–49, 52, 55, 57, 206 theatrical 42, 50, 55 see also orality literary and theatre studies 4–5, 10, 12, 170, 195 literature and theatre 6, 15, 215 liveness 113 living history 25, 63, 84, 86–91, 93, 95, 104, 108–110, 114, 116 see also battlefield reenactment, Civil War reenactment, reenactment Living Theater, The 55 Livingston, Jennie Paris is Burning 143 local 125–126, 135, 160–161 see also globalization Loehlin, James 228–229, 231 Loncraine, Richard Richard III (director) 39, 68, 72, 202 London Arts Council, The 151 London Eye, The 150 Loomba, Ania 123, 125, 133 Lope de Vega see Vega Carpio

Luhrmann, Baz 112, 147, 228, 231 Moulin Rouge 71 Simply Ballroom 231 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 26, 72, 77, 110, 122, 133–149, 161, 172, 202, 214, 227–231, 236 Luytens, Edward 83 Lyons, Donald 141, 229 Mabillard, Amanda 199–200, 236 MacCannell, Dean 93 Mack, Maynard 104 MacLachlan, Kyle 111 MacNeill, Robert 112 Mad Max films (The Road Warrior) 230 Maguire, Laurie 43 Mahabharata, The see Brook Malcolm, Derek 145 Malone, Edmond 83, 171 Mamet, David 196 manuscript 19, 23, 41–42 culture 38 transmission 47–48 see also orality Marcus, Leah S. 42, 218 Margolyes, Miriam 145–146, 230 Mariotti, Arthur F. 218 Market Theatre (Johannesburg) Othello 229 Sarafina 127 Marks, Carey 232 Marlowe, Christopher 213, 215 Doctor Faustus 57 Martin, Catherine 136, 141, 228 Marx, Karl 217 Maslin, Janet 134, 146, 228–229 Masten, Jeffrey 182, 218 MAT (Moscow Art Theatre) 52, 58 Maus, Katharine Eisaman 60, 220 Mayflower II 87–88, 223 Mazer, Cary 217 McCarthy, Cormac 165 McConachie, Bruce 223 McDonaldization 226 McDonald’s 125, 132, 148 McEnery, John 229 McGann, Jerome 184, 233 McGregor, Ewan 71 McKenzie, D. F. 233 McLuhan, Marshall 40, 169, 190, 216 McLuskie, Kathleen 212–214

Index McMillin, Scott 46 media 2 see also digital media, hypermedia mediatization 110–113 Mee, Chuck 196 memorial reconstruction 42 memory 42–43, 52–53, 192, 218, 220 Mercantil do Brasil 164 Mercedes-Benz 126 metatheatre 110, 113 metatheming 110 Method, The 21, 129 Method & Madness Theatre Co. 102 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 55, 128, 160 Miall, David S. 181, 234 Microsoft Corporation 123–126, 186, 188 Windows 187, 189 see also Gates Middleton, Thomas 34, 48 Millennium Bridge, The (London) 150 Miller, Arthur Death of a Salesman 51 Miller, Tim 232–233 Miller-Schütz, Chantal 101 Miranda, Carmen 145–146 Miracle Worker, The 120 miscegenation 120, 136 Miss Saigon 126 Mnouchkine, Ariane 117, 127, 129 Moby Shakespeare 201, 209, 237 Modenessi, Alfredo 139–141, 145, 228 modern-dress design 31, 66, 217 modern theatre 7, 160, 217 modernism 6, 54, 121, 128, 213 Molière 46, 129, 162 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 112 Moore, David Chioni 227 MOOs 233 Moraga, Cherr´ıe 135 Moran, Charles 233 Morecambe and Wise 154 Moreira, Eduardo da Luz 158, 160, 162, 164–165 Morgenstern, Joe 228 Morrison, Toni 17 Moulthrop, Stuart 20, 179–182, 186, 193, 198, 213–214, 234 Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet 237 Msomi, Welcome Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth 117, 120, 152–155, 226, 232

269

MUDs 233 Müller, Heiner 54, 173, 215 Mulryne, J. R. 227 multicultural casting see race multiculturalism 136 multimedia performance 21 Mulvey, Laura 14 Murray, Gilbert 55 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 139, 147 National Association of Re-enactment Societies 223 National Endowment for the Humanities 205 nationalism 121, 125, 135 Neill, Michael 232 Nelson, Theodor Holm 188 Netscape 186 Newley, Anthony 160, 166 Nietzsche, Friedrich 55 Nightingale, Benedict 107, 153–154 Ninagawa, Yukio 106, 117, 129, 152 Noble, Adrian 229 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (director) 127, 166 Nochimson, Martha 72–73 Noh theatre 58 Nokia 125–126 North Southwark Community Development Group (London) 149, 231 Northbrooke, John 217 Norton facsimile First Folio of Shakespeare 187 Norton Shakespeare Workshop 198, 201 Nunn, Trevor 237 O 202 Old Globe Theatre (San Diego) 83 Old Sturbridge Village (Massachusetts) 86 Olivier, Laurence 56, 118, 171 Henry V (actor and director) 68–69 O’Neill, Molly 20 Ong, Walter J. 19, 40–44, 106, 216 Ong Ken Sen 130, 227 Open-Air Museum, Beamish (UK) 82 open-air museums 95, 98 oral culture 3, 38, 75, 192, 194 orality 18, 20–21, 26, 38, 190, 212, 219 and literacy 40–41, 43–44, 170 see also literacy

270

Index

orality (cont.) oral-aural transmission 42 and print 47 transmission 42, 52, 54, 218 Oregon Shakespeare Festival 83, 120, 122, 226 Original Shakespeare Company 92 see Tucker Orlan 175 Orrell, John 95 Orton, Joe What the Butler Saw 80 Osborne, Laurie 185 Oxford Shakespeare 77 Oxford Text Archive 203 Oxo Tower (London) 150 Paik, Nak-Chung 227 Palace.com 236 Palin, Michael 85 Palm Pilot 186, 189 Parker, Andrew 5–10 Parkes, M. B. 43–45, 218 Parks, Suzan-Lori 47, 54, 173, 222 America Play, The 79–81 Venus 20, 77 participatory experience 84, 93–96 see also reenactment parts see cue-scripts, sides pastness 29, 37, 39, 74, 89–90, 99 as commodity 92, 96, 116 Pavis, Patrice 130, 133, 226 Peak, Christopher 75–76, 221–222 Pearce, Craig 145 Peirce, Charles Sanders 14 Pelúcio, Chico 158 Pennefort, Onestaldo de 165 Pepys, Samuel 63 performance 15, 17, 21, 33, 35, 68 commodification of 36, 128, 146 see also drama Performance Group, The Dionysus in 69 66 performance studies 1, 3, 5–6, 14, 15, 77, 128, 172 performative writing 216 performativity 23, 29, 33, 38–39, 58, 60–61, 86, 101, 103, 113, 167, 169, 173, 182–184, 195–196, 213, 216 see also Austin, Butler, dramatic performativity, Shakespearean performativity

period rush 90, 98 perlocution 11 see also Austin Perrineau, Harold 143–145, 229–230 Peter, John 98–100 Peters, Julie Stone 18, 48–49, 218–220 Petrarch, Francesco 218 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 226 Pilgrim-baiting 89, 223 Pine, Joseph B. II 95, 224 Pinsky, Robert 17, 49 Pinter, Harold 47 place 135–151 see also race, globalization Platter, Thomas 232 Plimoth Plantation (Massachusetts) 82, 86–94, 96–98, 102, 109, 113, 115–116, 223 Poel, William 31, 54, 83, 217 Pollock, Della 216 Polynesian Cultural Center 82 poor theatre 55, 129 see also Grotowski Pope, Alexander 22, 171, 180 Porter, Cole 72 postcolonial critique 117, 119, 123–124, 127, 148, 226–227 performance 25–26 studies 124 Postlethwaite, Pete 145 Postman, Neil 185 postmodern 58, 102, 121, 160 Potter, Lois 106, 156 Prada 144, 148 Preece, Tim 110 Prince (also Artist Formerly Known As) 139, 142 print 3, 13, 20–21, 23, 26, 170, 174, 196, 209, 212–213 as commodity 187 culture 13–15, 19–20, 38, 40, 170, 173, 190 and drama 13, 211 and electronic text 175–196 see also hypertext emulation 26, 47, 174, 177, 209 ideology of 4–5, 21–23, 43, 50, 171, 173, 176, 179, 189, 194, 196, 204 logic of 42–43, 50, 54–55, 170, 174, 176, 179, 184–185, 187, 218 and performativity 15–21, 39–58 and theatre 10, 170

Index print hand 219 Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 231 Project on Disney, The 94, 97 Pryce, Leontyne 142 Prynne, William 217 public entertainments 26 publication, forms of 17–20, 49 publishing, early modern 32, 217 Puccini, Giacomo 71 punctuation 43–47 rhetorical vs. syntactic 44–47, 67, 218 Quince, Rohan 232 race 25, 118–121, 133, 214, 226 and gender 225 multicultural casting 121–122, 133, 226, 229 and place 134–136, 141–147 -blind casting 118–120, 226 -blind reading 230 in the US 118 in South Africa 118 Rachelson, William 226 Racine, Jean 129 racism 226 “radiant textuality” 184 random-access memory 178 Rayner, Alice 81 reader function 182, 184 reading 209, 212, 218, 220 reading to the cast 52 reconstruction 28–29, 150 of performance 31, 82, 114 reenactment 90, 104 see also battlefield reenactment, Civil War reenactment, living history rehearsal 52 Renaissance Pleasure Faires 93–94, 97, 100–101, 103, 114 Renino, Chris 230 restoration of performance 31, 82–103, 108, 151, 223 “restored behavior” 21, 64, 82, 84, 97 see also Schechner retrofit aesthetic 92, 100 Richardson, Ian 85 Richardson, Ralph 60, 62 Roach, Joseph 64–65, 75, 91, 221, 227 see also surrogation Robeson, Paul 118 Rockefeller, John D., Jr 86, 95

271

Rocklin, Edward 205, 207 Rodrigues, Nelson 163–164 Rodriguez, Rene 230 Rokem, Freddie 28, 74 Roman reenactments (UK) 24 Rose Theatre, The 150 Ross, Sandi 120 Rouse Corporation 150, 231 Rowe, Nicholas 50, 171, 180 Royal National Theatre (UK) 39, 76, 149–150, 233–237 Royal Shakespeare Company (UK) 119, 166, 208, 225 Russell, William 109 Rutter, Carol Chillington 216, 225 Rushdie, Salman 133 Rylance, Mark 97, 102–103, 114, 148–149, 223, 225 Hamlet (actor) 39, 105–108, 113, 115, 225 Sadler’s Wells Theatre 6 Said, Edward 125, 127 Samuel, Raphael 92–93, 95, 100, 103, 222–223 Saratoga International Theatre Institute 66 Sassen, Saskia 137, 151, 224, 228, 231 see also global cities Saussure, Ferdinand de 14 Savarese, Nicola 227 Saxe-Meiningen Company 30 Scenario 198, 209 Schechner, Richard 29, 55, 64, 82, 88–89, 91, 130, 132, 227 see also “restored behavior” Schmitz, Johanna 222 Schoch, Richard 217 Sealed Knot Society (UK) 90, 223 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 4, 5–10 Seinfeld 30 Selbourne, David 233 Selfe, Cynthia 235 Sellars, Peter 2, 151 Merchant of Venice, The 121–122 sexuality and performance 143–144 Shafer, Liz 230 Shakespeare, William as commodity 125, 149 editions of plays 191 festivals of plays 103, 117, 199, 214 First Folio of 191, 202, 207 online 196–215, 231, 236 online complete works 200–202, 237

272

Index

Shakespeare, William (cont.) plays as literature 34, 38 plays as performance 24 universal 117, 146, 154, 168, 224, 226 works: Antony and Cleopatra 63, 225 As You Like It 84, 100 Coriolanus 39 Cymbeline 203 Hamlet 12–13, 22, 26, 28–31, 36, 39, 52, 56–58, 63, 69–70, 84–85, 97, 104–115, 171–172, 180, 187, 201, 205, 214, 218–219, 225 see also Almereyda, Branagh, Brook, Rylance Hamlet q1 20, 75, 107, 172, 232 Hamlet q2 46, 172, 220 Hamlet f1 22, 172 1 Henry IV 60 2 Henry IV 134 Henry V 31, 39, 66, 68–69, 97, 100, 102, 104, 202 see also Branagh, Olivier Julius Caesar 30, 70 King Lear 20, 30, 37, 57, 62, 117, 119, 129, 147, 156, 171 see also Kathakali King Lear, The King Lear q1 172 King Lear f1 172 Love’s Labour’s Lost 69–72 Macbeth 51, 58, 120, 130, 153–155, 214, 227 see also Msomi Measure for Measure 205–210 Merchant of Venice, The 28, 62, 121–122, 214, 226, 237 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 51, 68, 121, 127, 165–166, 217 see also Brook, Noble, Villela Much Ado About Nothing 120, 122, 135, 214 Othello 46, 117–118, 126, 133, 136, 138, 214, 229 Richard II 31, 63, 220 Richard III 39, 68, 70, 202 Romeo and Juliet 26, 74, 120, 122, 133–167, 172, 202–203, 221–222, 227 see also Luhrmann, Grupo Galpão Romeo and Juliet q2 51, 74, 203 Sir Thomas More 45 Taming of the Shrew, The 69, 214 Tempest, The 118, 120, 155, 226 see also Teatro Buend´ıa

Titus Andronicus 31, 39, 72, 118 see also Taymor Troilus and Cressida 119, 203, 214 Two Gentlemen of Verona 84 Shakespeare.com 201, 233–237 Shakespeare at the Globe: Then and Now 198 Shakespeare at Swanton 198 Shakespeare Illustrated 198 Shakespeare in Love 68 Shakespeare Online 201, 236 Shakespeare Wallah 118 Shakespearean performativity 24, 26, 29–30, 36, 39, 62, 64, 76–77, 84, 134, 142, 168 see also dramatic performativity, performativity Shared Experience Company 225 Shaw, G. B. 47, 54, 215 Shepard, Jack 102 Shepard, Sam 111 Shenandoah Shakespeare Express 76 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 48, 215 Sheridan, Thomas 45 Shillingsburg, Peter 23, 171–172, 218 shingeki 128 Shohat, Ella 157 sides 219 see also cue-scripts Sinfield, Alan 59 Skansen 104 Sklair, Leslie 141 slave auction (Colonial Williamsburg) 90 Smith, Anna Deavere 2, 77, 216 Twilight, Los Angeles 1992 177 Smith, Bruce 9, 44–47, 63, 65, 92, 106, 221 Smith, Neil 117, 147, 150 Snow, Stephen Eddy 87, 89, 223 Snyder, Ilana 43, 176, 236 Soja, Edward 147 SoMa (San Francisco) 150 Sony 125, 152 Sophocles 38, 129 Sorkin, Aaron 20 Sorkin, Michael 95–96, 231 South Street Seaport (New York) 150 Southwark Borough Council (London) 149, 231 Soyinka, Wole 124, 131 speech 8–11, 15, 18–19, 21, 58 speech acts 8, 11–12, 19, 169, 216 see also Austin, Butler speech prefixes 50–51, 57

Index Spencer, Charles 108, 155, 159 Spivak, Gayatri 125 Split Britches 232 Spolin, Viola 54 sporting events 103 Spotnitz, Frank 20 stage directions 53, 74 Stallybrass, Peter 50–51, 219 Stamm, Robert 157 Stanislavsky, Constantin 2, 55, 68, 89, 225 Stanley, Audrey 205 Star Trek 2–3, 30 Starbucks Coffee 125 Stationers’ Register 85 Steen, Shannon 229 Stein, Peter 117 Stelarc 175 Stern, Tiffany 52, 54, 219–220 Stevens, Thomas Wood 83 Stewart, Patrick 30, 85, 118, 226 Stiles, Julia 111 Stoddard, Roger 182 Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Ontario) 119 Stratford-upon-Avon 104 Stratton, Michael 98 Street, Brian V. 43 street theatre 158, 160, 162–163 Strindberg, August 54 subject 38, 59, 112 see also character Sugimoto, Taku 219 surrogation 64, 76, 91, 99, 222 see also Roach surveillance 188 Suzman, Janet 229 Suzuki, Tadashi 54, 117, 129–130, 161 Swan Theatre (Stratford-upon-Avon) 104 Tate, Nahum King Lear 20, 62 Tate Modern (London) 150 Taylor, Elizabeth 66, 134 Taylor, Gary 119, 171, 173, 192 Taylor, Joseph 56 Taylor, Paul 108, 155 Taymor, Julie Titus 31, 39, 72–73, 221 Teatro Buend´ıa Otra Tempestad 152, 155 Teatro Campesino 6

273

Teatro da PUC (São Paulo) 162 television 30, 35, 176, 194, 215 Ten Things I Hate About You 202 Termpapers-on-file.com 200 text and performance 176 see also writing and performance textual theory 83, 99, 170–173, 233 see also editing textuality 195, 217 Thackeray, William Makepeace 44, 54, 218 theatre festivals 163 and performativity 3–5, 7–8, 55 see also dramatic performativity professional 3, 24, 33 Theatre, The 92, 151 theatre of roots 129 theatre studies 5–6 see also literary and theatre studies theatrical literacy see literacy theme parks 25, 79, 84, 86, 93–97, 103–104, 107–108, 110, 114, 116 see also “Disney,” Disney World, Disneyland theming 84, 94, 96, 101, 103, 110, 114, 116, 224 of city space 95, 103, 150 of theatre 104 Therborn, Göran 194 “third cultures” 161–164 Thomas, Dylan 49 Thomas, Keith 54, 219 Thomson, Peter 56 Tieck, Ludwig 83 Times Square (New York) 96, 150 Tompkins, Joanne 127, 130, 161, 227 Tonson, Jacob 219 Top Hat 71 tourism 26, 63, 93, 96, 102–103, 107–108, 115, 117, 121, 128, 148, 154–155, 235 “transcultural” (as term) 227 transnationalism 103 see also globalization Travers, Peter 228, 229 Tucker, Patrick Original Shakespeare Company 67, 93, 223 Tuman, Myron 185 Turan, Kenneth 228–230 Turner, Rory 223

274

Index

Turner, Victor 14, 109 Twain, Mark Huckleberry Finn 22 Twentieth Century Fox 228 Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth see Msomi University of California, Davis (California) Romeo and Juliet 75–77, 203 University of Victoria (Canada) Romeo and Juliet 203 University of Virginia Romeo and Juliet 120 urban redevelopment 84 urban space see global cities, theming Valdez, Luis 158 Van Itallie, Jean-Claude 2 Vanden Heuvel, Michael 216 Vaughan, Alden T. 226 Vaughan, Virginia Mason 226 Vaz, Roberto 158 Vega Carpio, Lope Felix de 34 Venora, Diane 111 Vianna, Fernanda 158, 160 video 112, 175 Viewpoints 21, 55, 129 see also Bogart, Landau Villela, Gabriel 164–165, 233 Virtual Globe Theatre 206 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet 176 “voodoo” Macbeth 120, 226 Wallerstein, Immanuel 118 Wanamaker, Sam 96, 149, 206, 224, 231 “wargasm” 91, 223 Washington, Denzel 122 Wayans, Damon 208 Weingust, Don 223 Welch, Kathleen 174

Welles, Orson 120 West Side Story 71, 135, 146 whiteness 120–121, 144, 146–147, 230 see also race Whitmore, Susan 226 Wickstrom, Maurya 96 Wigan Pier Historical Centre (UK) 83, 222 Wiles, David 221 Williamsburg see Colonial Williamsburg Williamson, Nicol 56, 106 Wilmington, Michael 228–229 Wilson, Richard 229 Wilson, Rob 125 Wilson, Robert 66, 117, 129–131, 133 Wise, Jennifer 217 Wolfe, George C. Colored Museum, The 80 World’s Fairs 96 New York (1939) 96 see also Chicago Century of Progress Exposition Worthen, W. B. 216, 219, 222–223, 226–227 WPA Negro Theater Project 120 writing 12, 15, 18, 20–22, 173 and performance 21, 23–24, 26–27, 30, 34–38, 40–41, 55–56, 175, 190, 195, 215 on screen 22 in theatre 3, 12, 21 written hand 219–220 X-Men, The 85 Yachnin, Paul 217 Yeats, W. B. 22, 128, 192 York mystery pageants 6 Young National Trust Theatre (UK) 88 Zeffirelli, Franco Hamlet 69, 72, 229 Romeo and Juliet 135

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