Drama: Between Poetry and Performance

Using the work of Kenneth Burke to develop an original critical perspective on the dual identity of drama, this engaging new book offers a way to read plays between poetry and performance , exploring and contesting the threshold between text and performance. The author offers both a critical account of literary criticism and performance studies, and suggests a means for seizing dramatic writing as an instrument for performance.

Drama: Between Poetry and Performance discusses major plays, drawing on examples from playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks, and asks how they offer a critical perspective on the drama′s relation to books, to the process of embodiment, and to the mapping of space in the theatre. Exploring 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, this is an ideal text which not only teaches students how to read drama, but also explores the key questions that have occupied the earliest playwrights through to today s most distinguished literary and cultural critics.

This book will appeal both to the professional and academic audience in drama and performance studies, as well as to a wider audience of theatregoers interested in the relationship between writing and performance.

Acknowledgments.

Preface: Drama, Poetry, and Performance.

Introduction: Between Poetry and Performance.

i. Shakespeare 3.0.

ii. Images of Writing/Metaphors of Performance.

The score.

The blueprint.

Information/software.

Dramatic tools, performance technologies.

iii. Agencies of Drama: Burke, Poetry, and Performance.

Writing as agency: "Antony in Behalf of the Play".

1. From Poetry to Performance.

i. Dramatic Performance and its Discontents: The New Criticism.

Drama, poetry, and "interpretation".

"An arrangement of words".

Acts of speech.

Heresy, responsibility, and performance.

ii. Dramatic Writing and its Discontents: Performance Studies, Drama Studies.

Antigone s bones.

The "theater of acting".

Rethinking writing.

2. Performing Writing: Hamlet.

i. Hamlet s Book.

Playing the book.

The law of writ.

Speaking by the card.

ii. Corrupt Stuff; or, Doing Things with (Old) Words.

The crux of performance.

Enseamed beds.

iii. "OK, we can skip to the book": The Wooster Group Hamlet.

Theatrofilm by Electronovision.

(Re)playing Burton, performing Hamlet.

3. Embodying Writing: Ibsen and Parks.

i. Can We Act What We Say?: Rosmersholm.

Inscribing character.

Acting the role.

Confession, disclosure, detour.

Doing (unspeakable) things with words.

ii. Footnoting Performance: The America Play and Venus.

A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout.

Diggidy–diggidy–diggidy–dawg.

4. Writing Space: Beckett and Brecht.

i. Quad: Euclidean Dramaturgies.

ii. By Accepting This License.

iii. What Where: Brechtian Technologies.

Notes.

Works Cited.

Further Reading.  

Index.

W. B. Worthen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of The Idea of the Actor (1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (1992), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003), and Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (2006). He is also the editor of several volumes, including A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (with Barbara Hodgdon, Wiley–Blackwell 2005), and the Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 5th edition (2006).