Introduction: dramatic performativity and the force of performance 1. Performing history 2. Globe performativity 3. Shakespearean geographies 4. Cyber-performance.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/10302/frontmatter/9780521810302_frontmatter.pdf

Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance

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https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4854&context=etd

Possess His Books: Shakespeare, New Audiences, and Twenty-First Century Performances of The Tempest

Since the 1990s, two related but distinct movements have influenced the way in which scholars of early modern drama have used performance practice in their research. On the one hand, emerging from practice-based theater studies departments, is the discourse of "practice-as-research"; on the other, coming largely from the professional theater, is the "Original Practices" movement exemplified by work of the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe and the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. Though these movements had different origins, they now overlap to a considerable extent in the work of scholar-practitioners exploring the drama of the early modern period. This article traces the histories of these practices, unpicking their differences but also exploring the productive middle ground between the two. It addresses some of the commonly-held apprehensions (and misapprehensions) about PaR as a tool for theater history, makes some observations about best practice, and argues that what are sometimes held to be PaR's greatest liabilities—its indeterminacy, its open-endedness, its situatedness within the present, and its collaboration with non-academics—may in fact be its greatest assets.

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Practice-as-Research and Original Practices

This special issue concerns the joining and intertwining of practice and research in early drama. Undertaking such work brings us to a complicated intersection of disciplines and traditions, concerned variously with literary analysis, performance strategies, the materiality of space, and fleeting encounters with the past, which allow us to tell the story of the medieval and early modern stage. This special issue questions the nature of the relationship between practice and research, and asks how, between the gaps and the unknowns and the contradictions of surviving evidence, as well as the temporal distance between moderns and our forebears, the act of doing and making in the present enables us to develop informed understandings of the past. The essays presented here attempt to tease out such questions. As editors we did not wish to impose a single framework for engaging in this kind of work, but rather to bring together discussions of projects that investigate common problems across a wider range of periods and geography than is often the case. Thus we hope that what follows offers readers the chance to compare similarities and differences in methodology and interpretations, and explore the kinds of questions and claims practice-as-research (hereafter PaR) can ask and make about early drama.

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(Re)constructed spaces for Early Modern drama: research in practice

This article describes the “original-practices” movement in Shakespearean performance as contributing significantly to phenomenological understandings of present-day theatrical practice, as another in a long line of “experimental” theatrical movements since the latter nineteenth century. However, it questions whether the movement has the potential for, or is in practice undertaking attempts at, understanding more fully the practices of Shakespeare's theatre, in that the movement has all but ignored the basic structural constraints imposed by the early modern repertory schedule, and its influence upon the nature of the resultant theatrical event. It advocates adoption of the term “historically informed performance” as an alternative to “original practices”.

Authentic performances or performances of authenticity? Original practices and the repertory schedule

Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe. By Pauline Kiernan. (Early Modern Literature in History) Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 1999. xiv + 175 pp. 42.50 [pounds sterling] (paperbound 12.99 [pounds sterling]). Controversy over the attempt to re-create a 400-year-old theatre focuses a basic question of postmodernism and historiography: can the past be understood in its own terms rather than merely according to our experience and interests? By juxtaposing evidence about early modern theatrical experience with that gained as a research fellow during the new Globe's first three years of production, Pauline Kiernan makes a strong case that the re-created theatre has a great deal to tell us about the past. It allows us to explore at first hand the consequences of the early modern amphitheatre's physical conditions, and these consequences generally bear out evidence about early modern theatrical experience. The author also emphasizes that the `the shock of the old' at the new Globe can enrich contemporary theatre. This lucid and accessible book is for historians, students, theatre professionals, and anyone interested in the new Globe. It focuses on the 1995 Workshop, 1996 Prologue, and 1997 Opening seasons. The first of its three parts develops evidence, inferences, and conclusions; the second and third offer respectively an insider's chronicle of the planning and production of Henry V in 1997, and a collection of comments from actors and directors involved in Globe productions. These parts also provide supplementary evidence for the first part's conclusions. Cast lists and photographs for all the full-scale Globe productions in 1996 and 1997 are included: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry V, The Winter's Tale, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and The Maid's Tragedy. The book comprises a record of the new Globe's early seasons and an account of what that record may tell us about the Shakespearean theatre. Its bibliography provides a solid theatrical history background, especially for Globe studies. The single most important and complex topic is the interaction between players and playgoers encouraged by the Globe's structure. The Globe audience is energized, empowered, vocal, mobile, and as much performer as respondent. The author's observations and the players' comments featured throughout the book emphasize how performances are energized (though sometimes disrupted) by interaction with the audiences, how actors deal with the problem of responding simultaneously to audiences and to other actors, and how audience response lends unpredictability to individual performances and prompts productions to evolve. …

Pauline Kiernan

Papers

Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe