Description
Book SynopsisAn engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies,
Drama: Between Poetry and Performance teaches students how to read drama by exploring the threshold between text and performance.
- Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks
- Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing
- Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Preface: Drama, Poetry, and Performance xi
Introduction: Between Poetry and Performance 1
i. Shakespeare 3.0 2
ii. Images of Writing/Metaphors of Performance 8
The score 8
The blueprint 12
Information/software 13
Dramatic tools, performance technologies 20
iii. Agencies of Drama: Burke, Poetry, and Performance 22
Writing as agency: “Antony in Behalf of the Play” 29
1 From Poetry to Performance 35
i. Dramatic Performance and its Discontents: The New Criticism 39
Drama, poetry, and “interpretation” 39
“An arrangement of words” 45
Acts of speech 50
Heresy, responsibility, and performance 56
ii. Dramatic Writing and its Discontents: Performance Studies, Drama Studies 64
Antigone’s bones 64
The “theater of acting” 69
Rethinking writing 77
2 Performing Writing: Hamlet 94
i. Hamlet’s Book 97
Playing the book 97
The law of writ 101
Speaking by the card 106
ii. Corrupt Stuff; or, Doing Things with (Old) Words 112
The crux of performance 113
Enseamed beds 118
iii. “OK, we can skip to the book”: The Wooster Group Hamlet 123
Theatrofilm by Electronovision 127
(Re)playing Burton, performing Hamlet 130
3 Embodying Writing: Ibsen and Parks 139
i. Can We Act What We Say?: Rosmersholm 142
Inscribing character 147
Acting the role 150
Confession, disclosure, detour 152
Doing (unspeakable) things with words 158
ii. Footnoting Performance: The America Play and Venus 161
A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout 172
Diggidy-diggidy-diggidy-dawg 178
4 Writing Space: Beckett and Brecht 192
i. Quad: Euclidean Dramaturgies 196
ii. By Accepting This License 205
iii. What Where: Brechtian Technologies 211
Notes 216
Works Cited 239
Further Reading 258
Index 261
