Theatre Histories

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of the innovative

and widely acclaimed Theatre Histories: An Introduction offers a
critical overview of global theatre and drama, spanning a broad
wealth of world cultures and periods. Bringing together a group of
scholars from a diverse range of backgrounds to add fresh
perspectives on the history of global theatre, the book illustrates
historiographical theories with case studies demonstrating various
methods and interpretive approaches.
Subtly restructured sections place the chapters within new
thematic contexts to offer a clear overview of each period, while a
revised chapter structure offers accessibility for students and
instructors. Further new features and key updates to this third edition
include:

A dedicated chapter on historiography

New, up-to-date, case studies
Enhanced and reworked historical, cultural, and political
timelines, helping students to place each chapter within the
historical context of the section
Pronunciation guidance, both in the text and as an online audio
guide, to aid the reader in accessing and internalizing unfamiliar
terminology
A new and updated companion website with further insights,
activities and resources to enable students to further their
knowledge and understanding of the theatre.

Tobin Nellhaus is an independent scholar and former Librarian for

Performing Arts, Media and Philosophy at Yale University. He writes
mainly on the relationship between theatre and communication
practices, and on critical realism in theatre historiography.
 Bruce McConachie is Chair of Theatre Arts at the University of
Pittsburgh, where he also directs and performs. He has published
widely in American theatre history, theatre historiography, and
performance and cognitive studies, and is a former President of the
American Society for Theatre Research.
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre and
Performance Studies and former Vice Chair for Graduate Programs
at UCLA and former Research Fellow in the Institute for Theatre
Studies at Berlin’s Free University. She is a scholar, translator,
playwright, and director focusing on Japanese and cross-cultural
theatre.
Tamara Underiner is Associate Dean for Research for the
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State
University, and director of the Ph.D. program in Theatre and
Performance of the Americas.
Praise for this edition:
“When the first edition of Theatre Histories appeared in 2006 it set a
new standard in the field for breadth of geographical coverage, for
exploring the inter-relation of theatre with social and cultural history,
and for its in-depth presentation of historical methodology. The new
third edition further excels in all of these areas as well as being tied to
an excellent online supplement.”
Marvin Carlson, Distinguished Professor, City University of New
York
“The third edition is a bold reworking of an already revolutionary
text. The major restructuring of the chapters, case studies, and
theoretical frames give the text laser clarity and make it easier to
integrate into the curriculum. The diverse range of case studies
makes this text deeply engaging. The authors of this volume present
us yet again with a brilliant and provocative examination of the study
of theatre history with its ambitious range and innovative critique of
the historical narrative. Through Theatre Histories, the third edition,
McConachie, Nellhaus, Sorgenfrei, and Underiner strike that rare
balance, simultaneously teaching the historical metanarrative while
interrogating and subverting the concept of metanarratives. The book
provides a dynamic platform for students and instructors alike to
engage thoughtfully with the history of the theatre.”
E.J. Westlake, Associate Professor of Theatre and English,
University of Michigan
Praise for previous editions of Theatre Histories: An Introduction
“This book will significantly change theatre education.”
Janelle Reinelt, University of Warwick, formerly University of
California, Irvine
“A work that more than any other currently available suggests the
range and richness of theatre and performance history study today.”
Marvin Carlson, City University of New York
“An extraordinary undertaking … From the start Theatre Histories
challenges us to think about the construction and framing of theatre
history, and the intellectual assumptions and models which we bring
to the analysis and interpretation of its primary materials.”
Katherine Newey, University of Birmingham, in Theatre Research
International
“Globally ambitious in its scope, innovative in design, and open-
ended in its challenge to the received histories, this new grand
narrative will engage scholars and students at every level, whatever
their particular interests in past performance.”
Jacky Bratton, Royal Holloway, University of London
Theatre Histories:
An Introduction

Third Edition
General Editor: Tobin Nellhaus

Bruce McConachie, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Tamara

Underiner
 Third edition published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2016 Tobin Nellhaus, Bruce McConachie, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
and Tamara Underiner
The right of Tobin Nellhaus, Bruce McConachie, Carol Fisher
Sorgenfrei and Tamara Underiner to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2006
Second edition published by Routledge 2010
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theatre histories: an introduction / general editor: Tobin Nellhaus;
Bruce McConachie, Tobin Nellhaus, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and
Tamara Underiner. — Third edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Theater—History. 2. Performing arts—History. I. Nellhaus, Tobin,
editor.
PN2101.T48 2016
792.09—dc23
2015026618
 ISBN: 978-0-415-83797-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-83796-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-78871-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714
Typeset in Bembo and Frutiger
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
Additional materials are available on the companion website at
www.theatrehistories.com
Contents
List of figures
About the authors
Preface to the third edition
Acknowledgments
General introduction
The goals of Theatre Histories
Historiography: Thinking about history
Theatre and the history of communication
The structure of Theatre Histories
PART 1 Performance in Oral and Manuscript Cultures
Part I timeline
Introduction: Speech, writing, and performance
1 From oral to literate performance
Performance in oral cultures
CASE STUDY: Yoruba ritual as “play,” and “contingency” in
the ritual process
Performance in oral cultures with writing
Performance in a literate culture: Theatre in the city-state of
Athens
Summary
2 Pleasure, power, and aesthetics: Theatre in early
literate societies, 500 BCE–1450 CE
Ancient Roman performance: From the Republic to the
Empire
CASE STUDY: Plautus’s plays: What’s so funny?
Drama and theatre in early India
Early Japanese performance and the development of nō
CASE STUDY: The nō play Dōjōji
Summary
3 Commemorative drama and carnival
Carnival and the carnivalesque
Commemorative performances
 Commemoration and the carnivalesque in the Jewish Purim
shpil
Commemorative performance in medieval Christian Europe
CASE STUDY: Christians and Moors: Medieval
performance in Spain and the New World
Islamic commemorative mourning dramas: The Ta’ziyeh of
Iran and beyond
CASE STUDY: Playful gods: The Ramlila in north India
Summary
Part I: Works cited
PART II Theatre and performance in early print cultures
Part II timeline
Introduction: Performance, printing, and political
centralization
4 Secular and early professional theatre, 1250–1650
Developments in Chinese drama, theatre, and performance
Early secular performance in Europe
The commedia dell’arte in Italy and its influence in Europe
Urban growth and the new business of theatre in Europe
The establishment of permanent theatre spaces
The social occasion of theatre
Increasing importance of women in theatre
Popular Japanese theatre in a time of cultural seclusion
CASE STUDY: Realer than real? Imaging “woman” in
kabuki
Summary
5 Theatre and the print revolution, 1550–1650
Social and cultural upheavals in early modern Europe
Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in England, 1558–1642
CASE STUDY: Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Golden Age theatre in Spain, 1590–1650
French theatre before the triumph of neoclassicism, 1550–
1637
Neoclassicism, print, and the controversy over Le Cid
Scenic perspective in print and on stage
Early print culture reaches a watershed
 CASE STUDY: Early modern metatheatricality and the print
revolution
Summary
6 Theatres of absolutism, 1600–1770
The rise of absolutism
Entertainments at court
CASE STUDY: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the perils of
print culture in New Spain
Realizing absolutism in stage design
Louis XIV and Molière
CASE STUDY: Molière and carnival laughter
Absolutism and neoclassicism in France and England,
1660–1700
Reforming Baroque opera
Absolutism and neoclassicism in the German states and
Russia, 1700–1770
The limits of neoclassicism and absolutism in France, 1720–
1770
Summary
Part II: Works cited
PART III Theatre and performance in periodical print
cultures
Part III timeline
Introduction: Theatre for bourgeois civil society
7 Theatre and sentiment: newspapers, private lives, and
the bourgeois public sphere, 1700–1785
Sentiment and periodical print culture
Sentimental drama in England
Pantomime, satire, and censorship in England
CASE STUDY: Censorship in eighteenth-century Japan
Sentiment and satire on the continent
Changes and challenges in sentimentalism
Acting in the eighteenth century
CASE STUDY: Theatre iconology and the actor as icon:
David Garrick
Performers and the public
Theorizing acting
Summary
8 Nationalism in the theatre, 1760–1880
Print, theatre, and liberal nationalism, 1760–1800
CASE STUDY: Friedrich Schiller’s vision of aesthetic
education and the German dream of a national theatre
The French Revolution, melodrama, and nationalism
European cultural nationalisms, 1815–1848
Nationalism in Russia and Italy, 1848–1880
Wagner and racial nationalism in Germany, 1848–1880
Liberal and racial nationalisms in the Americas
CASE STUDY: Imagining a white nation: Minstrelsy and
U.S. nationalism, 1840–1870
Summary
9 Performing “progress”: From imperial display to the
triumph of realism and naturalism, 1790–1914
Modern imperialisms
Performing imperialism and Orientalism at the great
expositions
Distorting science to justify imperial entertainments
Imperialism and Orientalism in British theatre
Variety theatre and music hall
“Internal imperialism” and the origins of jingju (“Beijing
Opera”)
Western artists appropriate non-Western imagery
CASE STUDY: Inventing Japan: The Mikado and Madama
Butterfly
New media and new ideologies: Photography, science, and
positivism
The rise of realist staging
Naturalism on stage
Realism and the rise of producer-directors
Ibsen and Romantic idealism
Chekhov undermines nineteenth-century theatre
Ibsen, Chekhov, and the critique of photography
 CASE STUDY: Ibsen’s A Doll House: Problems in Ibsen’s
problem play
Summary
10 New media divide the theatres of print culture, 1870–
1930
Spectacular bodies on popular stages
CASE STUDY: Retailing glamor in the Ziegfeld Follies
Print culture for stars and playwrights
Audiophonic media after 1870
The emergence of avant-garde theatre
Symbolism and Aestheticism
German Expressionism
CASE STUDY: Strindberg and “The Powers”
Expressionism in the United States
Institutionalizing the avant-garde
Summary
Part III: Works cited
PART IV Theatre and performance in electric and electronic
communication culture
Part IV timeline
Introduction: Theatre and the unceasing communications
revolutions
11 New theatres for revolutionary times, 1910–1950
War and the movies
Revolutionary predecessors
Theatricalizing the Russian Revolution
CASE STUDY: Lenin’s Taylorism and Meyerhold’s
biomechanics
Revolutionary theatres West and East
CASE STUDY: Brecht and the science of empathy
Theatres of anti-imperialism, 1910–1950
Theatrical modernism
Yeats, Pirandello, and the modernist legacy
Theatricalizing modernism
Summary
12 The aftermath of the Second World War: Realism and
its discontents in an increasingly shrinking world, 1940–
1970
The impact of the Second World War on the victors and the
defeated
Postwar theatre and the Cold War
CASE STUDY: Cultural memories and audience response:
A Streetcar Named Desire in the 1940s
CASE STUDY: Social drama in Kerala, India: Staging the
“revolution”
Happenings, protest, and the growth of alternative theatre in
the U.S.
Summary
13 Art, politics, or business? Theatre in search of
identity, 1968–2000
The 1960s: A historical crossroads
Theatre and electronic media
Theatre, politics, and cultural change
CASE STUDY: Athol Fugard: Theatre of witnessing in South
Africa
Questioning the author(ity)
Performance art
The growth of non-commercial theatres
Summary
14 Theatres of local roots and global reach, 1970–
present
Local roots, global reach, hybrid play, and social change in
“Shakespeare”
Global theatre culture
Theatres of cultural differentiation
Theatre as a zone of contact
CASE STUDY: Imagining contemporary China
The global reach of theatre for social change
Summary
15 Theatre in networked culture, 1990–present
New players
 CASE STUDY: Online role-playing games as theatre
Changing platforms for theatre and performance
New performance structures and processes
CASE STUDY: Hip Hop theatre
Summary: Thinking through theatre histories
Part IV: Works cited
Pronunciation guide
Glossary
Index
Figure
Part I Introduction: The Rosetta stone
1.1 Zoumana hunter
1.2 Map: The Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin, West Africa
1.3 Mask worn to represent the character of Gorilla
1.4 The sacred barque of Amun-Ra in a relief from a temple
of Seti I
1.5 Fragment from a relief from a tomb at Sakkara (c.1250
BCE)
1.6 Map of Egypt c.1850 BCE
1.7 Map of the Mayan and Aztec empires in Mesoamerica
1.8 Rabinal Achi, or the Man of Rabinal
1.9 Map of the eastern Mediterranean during the fifth century
BCE
1.10 Theatrical figures on the Pronomous Vase
1.11 Aerial photo of the Theatre of Dionysus and the
Parthenon
1.12 Model of the early classical Theatre of Dionysus at
Athens
1.13 Model of the Theatre of Dionysus after its expansion in
the fourth century BCE
1.14 The Hellenistic theatre at Epidaurus, 340–330 BCE
1.15 Theatre mask dating from the fourth or third century
BCE
2.1 Menander, with three masks of Greek New Comedy
2.2 Roman marble relief showing a performance of masked
characters typical of Roman comedy
2.3 Statue of a masked slave character from Roman comedy
2.4 Ground plan of the Theatre of Pompey (55 BCE), Rome
2.5 The Bhagavan or Hermit in a kutiyattam production of
The Hermit/Harlot in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, 1977
2.6 The Bhagavan or Hermit’s wayward student, Shandilya
in a kutiyattam production of The Hermit/Harlot in
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, 1977
2.7 Floor plan of a playhouse for Sanskrit theatre in India
2.8 Temple theatre, known as a kuttampalam, built for
kutiyattam in the Lord Vadakkunnathan (Siva) temple in
Trissur, central Kerala
2.9 Cross-section of the interior of the theatre in a temple in
Trissur
2.10 The Progeny of Krishna, Scene 2
2.11 A Japanese no stage
2.12 No stage plan, indicating locations of musicians,
chorus, and attendants
2.13 Zo-onna mask
2.14 Aka-hannya (“red demon”) mask
2.15 Performance of the nō play Dōjōji at the Kanze Theatre,
Tokyo, 1962
2.16 Abbot and priests attempting an exorcism in Dōjōji
3.1 Battle of Carnival and Lent (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the
Elder
3.2 Performers of the Guatemalan Rabinal Achi wearing
masks
3.3 Purim celebrations
3.4 The Three Marys at the Tomb (1425–35), altarpiece by
Jan and/or Hubert van Eyck
3.5 Prayer book illustration of an early Corpus Christi ritual
(c.1320)
3.6 Detail from a painting of a city procession honoring the
visit to Brussels in 1615 of Spain’s Archduchess Isabella
3.7 Scene from the medieval play The Martyrdom of St.
Apollonia, from the Livre d’Heures pour maître Etienne
Chevalier (c. 1452–1456)
3.8 Setting for a Passion play in Valenciennes, France, 1547
3.9 Plan of the mansions and playing area for the morality
play The Castle of Perseverance, c. 1400–1425
3.10 Scissors dancer from Peru
3.11 Map showing extent of Christian and Moorish territories
in 1490
 3.12 Stonework depicting a sexualized Lucifer tempting
Christ
3.13 Drawing made in 1942 of a Native American as a
Spanish Christian saint on a horse in a moros y cristianos
production on Christmas Day at San Felipe Pueblo
3.14 Qur’an fragment
3.15 A nineteenth-century performance of Ta’ziyeh
3.16 A Ta’ziyeh commemorative performance
3.17 Effigy of Ravana, the ten-headed demon-king
3.18 A Ramlila svarup on Hanuman’s shoulders
Part II Introduction: A woodblock print of a Western European
printing shop
4.1 Thirteenth-century (Song dynasty) music drama (zaju)
4.2 “Mountebank distributing his wares on the stage”
4.3 Scene from the 1457 French farce, La Farce de Maître
Pierre Pathelin
4.4 Late sixteenth-century engraving showing three stock
characters from the commedia dell’arte
4.5 Artist’s impression of the interior of the seventeenth-
century Spanish playhouse, El Corral del Principe (c. 1697)
4.6 A plan of the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
4.7 A 1596 drawing of the interior of the Swan Theatre,
London
4.8 Detail from a painting showing Okuni, the dancer who
originated kabuki
4.9 Japanese bunraku puppets
4.10 A performance of the popular kabuki play, Shibaraku
(Wait a Moment!), in Tokyo’s Nakamura Theatre in the mid-
nineteenth century
4.11 Danjūrō XII as Sukeroku in the kabuki play Sukeroku:
Flower of Edo
4.12 18_ch4.xhtml">Onoe Baikō, in the onnagata (female)
role in Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden)
4.13a and b Tamasaburō as the courtesan Agemaki in the
kabuki play Sukeroku, and as Lady Macbeth
5.1 Faustus (played by Edward Alleyn) conjures a devil on
the title page for a seventeenth-century edition of The
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
5.2 Interior of the reconstructed Globe Theatre, London
5.3 Sketch of a set by Laurent Mahelot for Pierre Du Ryer’s
Poliarque et Argénis
5.4 The “Mousetrap” scene from the 2008 production of
Hamlet by the RSC
6.1 Political map of Europe, c.1730
6.2 Setting for a comic scene by Sebastiano Serlio, from De
Architettura, 1569
6.3 Costume designed by Inigo Jones for The Masque of
Queens (1609)
6.4 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in 1666 as a lady-in-waiting for
the viceregal court in Mexico City, and as a nun in the Order
of San Jerónimo
6.5 Cut-away drawing by Gustaf Kull of the chariot-and-pole
machinery for changing flats at the Drottningholm Court
Theatre in Sweden
6.6 Giacomo Torelli’s setting for Act II of Pierre Corneille’s
Andromède at the Petit-Bourbon Theatre, 1650
6.7 Plan of the Salle des Machines, designed by Gaspar
Vigarani
6.8 Scena per angolo stage setting designed for a chariot-
and-pole theatre by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena
6.9 Detail from the painting Village Festival in Honor of St.
Hubert and St. Anthony by Pieter Brueghel the Younger
(1564?–1637)
6.10 Orgon and Tartuffe in Molière’s Tartuffe
6.11 The stage of Dorset Garden Theatre, London
6.12 Aphra Behn
6.13 Portrait of Carlo Broschi (Farinelli)
6.14 Margrave’s theatre in Bayreuth, Germany
6.15 Touring players on their temporary stage before an
audience in a market square in Munich in 1780
Part III Introduction: The first page of the first issue of The
Spectator, 1711
7.1 A Scene from The Beggar’s Opera (1729) by William
Hogarth
7.2 Kabuki actor
7.3 Scene from The Quarrel of the Theatres
7.4 Scene from Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s The Twins
7.5 “Terror.” From J.J. Engel, Ideen zu Euer Mimik (1812)
7.6 Mr. Garrick in the Charakter of Richard the 3rd (1746),
engraving by Charles Grignion
7.7 Mr. Garrick in Hamlet, James McArdell, 1754
7.8 Mr. Garrick in the Character of King Lear, James
McArdell
7.9 Garrick and Hogarth, or The Artist Puzzled. Color print
by R. Evan Sly, 1845
8.1 The Weimar Court Theatre interior in 1798
8.2 A scene from Pixérécourt’s The Forest of Bondy (1843)
8.3 Henry Irving in his production of The Bells at the Lyceum
Theatre, London, 1871
8.4 Political map of Europe in 1820
8.5 James Robinson Planché’s antiquarian design for the
king’s costume in Charles Kemble’s 1824 production of
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1
8.6 Contemporary illustration of the Hernani riots
8.7 Tommaso Salvini as Othello
8.8 Political map of Europe in 1880
8.9 Floor plan for Wagner’s Festival Theatre at Bayreuth
8.10 Political map of South America in 1825
8.11 Henry Johnson posed as Barnum’s “What Is It?”
(c.1872)
8.12 Cover for sheet music performed by Bryant’s Minstrels
in an 1862 minstrel show in New York City
9.1 A view of the buildings and grounds for the Paris
Exposition of 1867
9.2 George Leybourne (c.1867)
9.3 Jingju actor as Xiangyu, the king of Chu in The King’s
Parting with His Favourite
9.4 Ruth St. Denis performing Egypta, one of her “Oriental
dances”
9.5 a and b Examples of Japonisme in art (Van Gogh and
Monet)
9.6 English actor/singer George Grossmith in The Mikado
(1885)
9.7 Scene from Thomas W. Robertson’s Caste, at the Prince
of Wales Theatre, 1879
9.8 Kei Aran performs in the Takarazuka theatre’s production
of The Rose of Versailles
9.9 Emile Zola’s The Earth, Théâtre Antoine, Paris, 1902
9.10 Moscow Art Theatre production of Maxim Gorky’s The
Lower Depths, 1902
9.11 André Antoine in the Théâtre Libre’s 1892 production of
Hauptmann’s The Weavers
9.12 Crowd scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at Drury
Lane Theatre, 1881
9.13 V.S. Simov’s 1898 naturalistic design for Act I of the
Moscow Art Theatre’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The
Seagull
9.14 Scene from Gundegowdana Chaitre, an Indian
adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Rangayana Theatre in
Mysore, 1995
9.15 Final scene of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Lyttelton
Theatre, London, 1982
9.16 Premiere production of A Doll House at the Royal
Theatre Copenhagen, 1879
9.17 Trading card depicting the final scene from Ibsen’s A
Doll House
9.18 Ibsen’s A Doll House at Center Stage, Baltimore,
Maryland, 1991
10.1 U.S. vaudeville star Eva Tanguay
10.2 Dolores (Kathleen Mary Rose Wilkinson)
10.3 Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier, 1880
 10.4 Poster of Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of the young
male poet in Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzacchio
10.5 Adolphe Appia’s design for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s
opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1913
10.6 Scene from the 1919 Expressionist production of
Transfiguration (Die Wandlung), 1918, by Ernst Toller
10.7 Old Cabot, Abbie and Eben Cabot in O’Neill’s Desire
Under the Elms, 1924
10.8 Karl Walzer’s design for a scene from Reinhardt’s
production of Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (1906)
Part IV Introduction: A transistor and a vacuum tube
11.1 Political maps of Europe before (1914) and after (1922)
the Great War
11.2 Photograph from the 1905 production of Shaw’s Major
Barbara at the Royal Court Theatre, London
11.3 Alfred Jarry’s lithographed program for the 1896 Paris
premiere of his play Ubu Roi (King Ubu), at the Theatre de
l’Oeuvre, staged by Aurélien Lugné-Poe
11.4 Lyubov Popova’s Constructivist set for Meyerhold’s
1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand
Crommelynck
11.5 The “meat mincer” setting, designed by Varvara
Stepanova, for Meyerhold’s 1922 production of The Death of
Tarelkin, by Alexander Kobylin
11.6 Image from Triple-A Plowed Under, a 1936 “living
newspaper” production by the U.S. Federal Theatre Project
about the Agricultural Adjustment Act
11.7 Helene Weigel singing as Mother Courage in the first
scene of Brecht’s staging of Mother Courage and Her
Children in Berlin, 1949
11.8 Katrin in Scene 11 of the 1949 production of Brecht’s
Mother Courage
11.9 The Old Vic production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
1934
11.10 Stage of the Vieux-Colombier, designed by Jacques
Copeau, as adapted for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
12.1 Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a 1970 revival
directed by Roger Blin
12.2 Paris premiere production of Samuel Beckett’s
Endgame (Fin de partie) in 1957 at the Studio Champs-
Élysées
12.3 Peter Hall’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming for
the Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre,
London, 1965
12.4 Jo Mielziner’s setting for Arthur Miller’s Death of a
Salesman, 1949
12.5 Scene from the Broadway production of Tennessee
Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955
12.6 Okhlopkov’s production of Hamlet, Mayakovsky
Theatre, Moscow, 1954
12.7 A 1993 production of Memories in Hiding by Tooppil
Bhaasi, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala
12.8 The jailed Paramu Naayar in Memories in Hiding
12.9 A 1970 production of Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship,
directed by Gilbert Moses at Theatre-in-the-Church
13.1 Poster for a production of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death
of an Anarchist, at Wyndhams Theatre, London, 1980
13.2 Woza Albert!, Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South
Africa, 1982
13.3 Philippine Educational Theatre Association’s 1896,
performed in 1995 and 1996
13.4 Ryszard Cieslak in Jerzy Grotowski’s production of
Akropolis at the Polish Laboratory Theatre, Wroclaw, 1962
13.5 Premiere production of Weiss’s Marat/Sade, at the
Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1964
13.6 Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed
by Peter Brook with the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1970
13.7 Euripides’ The Bacchae, directed by Klaus-Michael
Grüber, Schaubühne Theatre Company, Berlin, 1974
13.8 The Crucible sequence from the Wooster Group’s
L.S.D. (… Just the High Points …), directed by Elizabeth
LeCompte
13.9 26_ch13.xhtml">“Spaceship” section of Einstein on the
Beach (by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass) at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House,
Brooklyn, New York, December 8, 1984
13.10 Final scene of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part
One: Millennium Approaches from the 1992 production of
the Royal National Theatre, London, directed by Declan
Donnellan
13.11 Peter Hall’s 1984 production of Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus at the National Theatre
14.1 Touring production of Romeu & Julieta by Grupo
Galpão in 2000
14.2 The cast of the musical The Lion King performs at the
62nd Annual Tony Awards in New York, 2008
14.3 A scene from the Colombian Carnival of Barranquilla
14.4 A tourist photographs the performance work Two
Amerindians Visit
14.5 Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata: the archery
tournament for the young cousins, in Part I: The Game of
Dice, from the 1986 production at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris
14.6 Dancing chorus members in Euripides’ Iphigenia in
Aulus, in the Les Atrides cycle as staged by the Théâtre du
Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine at the Cartoucherie,
Paris, 1990
14.7 Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in the Les Atrides cycle of
the Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine,
Cartoucherie, Paris, 1990
14.8 The grandmother in Eréndira, an adaptation from
Gabriel García Márquez’s short novel, directed by Amal
Allana, New Delhi, 2004
14.9 Cover image from playbill for eXtras, Mexico City, 2003
14.10 Butoh dancer Akaji Maro
14.11 Backstage of a wayang kulit shadow-theatre in the city
of Yogyakarta, Indonesia
14.12 A SEKA performer in a large mask clowns for Zambian
villagers
15.1 Australian performance artist Stelarc in Amplified Body
15.2 Les Frères Corbusier’s Heddatron
15.3 The Realm of Mystara, a role-playing region in Second
Life
15.4 Scene from Arthur Kopit’s Wings, University of
Kansas’s Institute for Exploration of Virtual Reality, in 1996
15.5 Oedipus Rex as performed in Second Life by the Avatar
Repertory Theater, 2010–2011
15.6 A scene from Robert Lepage’s Zulu Time (2001)
15.7 Scene from Sleep No More
15.8 British playwright Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis
15.9 Impossible Theater’s [missed connections]
15.10 B-boys breakdancing in San Francisco, 2008
15.11 Aya de León’s Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming
of Hip-Hop (2003)
About the authors
Bruce McConachie is Professor and Director of Graduate Students
at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs and performs.
He has published widely in U.S. theatre history, theatre
historiography, and performance and cognitive studies. Some of his
major books include Interpreting the Theatrical Past, with Thomas
Postlewait (University of Iowa Press, 1989); Melodramatic
Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (University of
Iowa Press, 1992, awarded the Barnard Hewitt Prize in Theatre
History); American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War (University
of Iowa Press, 2003); Performance and Cognition, with F. Elizabeth
Hart (Routledge, 2006); Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach
to Spectating in the Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and
Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (Cambridge University Press,
2015). Professor McConachie is also a co-editor of the Cognitive
Studies in Literature and Performance series for Palgrave Macmillan
and a former President of the American Society for Theatre
Research.
Tobin Nellhaus is an independent scholar and former Librarian for
Performing Arts, Media and Philosophy at Yale University. He has
published mainly on the relationship between theatre and
communication practices, and on critical realism in theatre
historiography. He is the author of Theater, Communication, Critical
Realism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and co-editor (with Susan
Haedicke) of Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on
Urban Community-Based Performance (University of Michigan
Press, 2001). His articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, Journal
of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of Critical Realism, Journal
for the Theory of Social Behaviour, the collections Performance and
Cognition (ed. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, Routledge,
2006) and Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance,
and Philosophy (ed. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz, University of
Michigan Press, 2006), and elsewhere. He was a Fulbright fellow at
the University of Helsinki, and received a fellowship from the
American Council of Learned Societies.
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA
and was recently a Fellow at the Institute for Theatre Studies’
International Research Center on Interweaving Performance Cultures
at Berlin’s Freie Universität. In 2014, she was honored by the
Association for Asian Performance as one of the Founding Mothers
of Asian Theatre Studies. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: The
Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan
(University of Hawaii Press, 2005), translations from Japanese, and
many articles and essays on Japanese and intercultural
performance. Her sixteen original plays include the award-winning
Medea: A Noh Cycle Based on the Greek Myth, the kabuki-flamenco
Blood Wine, Blood Wedding, and (with director Zvika Serper) the
Japanese-Israeli fusion The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds. Her
newest play Ghost Light: The Haunting (with director Penny
Bergman) fuses the kabuki Yotsuya Kaidan and Macbeth. She is
Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and Editor of the
Newsletter of the Association for Asian Performance.
Tamara Underiner is Associate Dean for Research for the
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State
University, and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Dance and
Theatre, where she directs the Ph.D. program in Theatre and
Performance of the Americas. She is the author of Contemporary
Theatre in Mayan Mexico: Death-Defying Acts (University of Texas
Press, 2004), and has published on indigenous and Latina/o theatre
and critical pedagogy in Theatre Journal, Signs, Baylor Journal of
Theatre and Performance, TDR, and critical anthologies from
academic presses in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. She is active in
the American Society for Theatre Research, the Association for
Theatre in Higher Education, and the Hemispheric Institute for
Performance and Politics.
Preface to the third edition
The third edition of Theatre Histories constitutes a major revision. Our
overarching aims for the book are the same, including global
coverage, case studies on particular developments or issues in
theatre history, discussions of historiographical approaches, and a
focus on communication practices. For this edition, however, we
sought four particular goals that proved transformative: to address
the connections between communication and theatre more sharply;
to reexamine the narratives or themes of each chapter; to rebalance
the amount of discussion on some topics; and to keep the book at
roughly the same length to control costs.
As a result, material has been extensively reorganized and re-
thought. The chapters of this edition seldom match those of the
second – most of them differ in their chronological coverage and
sometimes their themes. The material in the second edition’s lengthy
Part introductions has moved into regular chapters, and each Part
now has a brief introduction which establishes overall contexts and
keynotes. Similarly, we decided that instead of a chapter on popular
entertainment, we would distribute those topics among other
chapters. The second edition’s Preface, which addressed some of the
functions of a book introduction, has been replaced with a fuller
General Introduction that explains several central issues in
historiography and orients students to the book’s goals, focus, and
structure. To accommodate expanded discussion of some topics,
material that we felt was useful but no longer central was transferred
to the website, to keep it available to instructors. The substantial
percentage of the book that was absorbed by bibliographies has
been much reduced, to allow more space for the chapters: we include
the media resources and the works actually cited within the book, and
we list other consulted works on the Theatre Histories website.
We reshaped Part I of Theatre Histories most substantially. Topics
that were in three different chapters now appear in one, and coverage
of ritual has been greatly reduced. There were several reasons for
these changes. We wanted to move to discussions of theatre sooner,
and in the process, sharpen the focus on how theatre is affected by
changes in communication. In addition, although the material on ritual
was meant to illuminate the sorts of performance appearing in oral
cultures, due to its quantity it seemed to offer inadvertent support for
the now much-doubted theory that ritual (or alternatively, religion) is
theatre’s origin. However, instructors who want to address ritual and
the development of language in more detail will find those
discussions on the website.
The apparent quieting of the “theory wars” within theatre studies
and our desire to give instructors more flexibility when addressing
topics in theatre history led us to loosen the relationship between
case studies and theoretical approaches. In this edition, some case
studies introduce a specific approach, but others do not. Likewise,
some of what we previously called “Interpretive approaches” are now
independent of a case study; but between expanding the range of
topics that the “Interpretive approaches” sections could encompass,
and realizing that the phrase “interpretive approaches” could be
misconstrued as meaning the analysis of theatre history consists
merely of opinions, we decided to rename those segments “Thinking
through theatre histories.” They now discuss not only
historiographical methods and perspectives, but also narrative
strategies and particular historiographical problems. Readers may
notice that there is no section explicitly on feminist approaches (of
which, of course, there are many). However, women’s activities and
gender issues (including feminist and queer theory) are addressed
throughout the text and in some of the case studies.
The third edition provides several new case studies; we moved
others to the website (corrected as needed) so instructors who want
to use them can do so. In several instances, the new edition has a
condensed version of a case study and we have put the full version
on the website. In the course of Theatre Histories’ revisions and
online resource development, we aim to build a repertory of case
studies and other materials which instructors can select in order to
shape their courses in a manner that is both flexible yet consistent
with the overall approach taken in this book.
 Readers of Theatre Histories’ first and second editions will notice a
different roster of authors for the third. Such turnover was intended
from the book’s beginnings. Gary Jay Williams and Phillip B. Zarrilli
took the opportunity to step down; Tobin Nellhaus and Tamara
Underiner came on board. The new team adopted two connected
goals for our revision process: more collaboration and greater
coordination. Toward the former, we took numerous steps. All of the
authors had a voice in major content and organizational decisions.
Rather than have a single author take sole responsibility for one of
the book’s Parts, each author was assigned chapters in at least two
Parts. Nearly every chapter became the product of combined
authorship, bringing new perspectives throughout. The contributors
are shown in each chapter’s byline. And once all of the chapters were
near their final form, we all read and commented on each other’s
work. To provide unity within this extensive collaboration, we
established the role of General Editor.
In the midst of our collaboration, however, we of course have our
individual outlooks. We agree on the main principles of theatre
historiography, but we have differing views on how to weigh the many
factors that shape theatre at any particular time, and we have our
own interests within theatre history. We believe that these differences
in themselves help this book achieve its goals. Thus the plural in
“theatre histories” refers to several things: the multiplicity of
performance practices in the world, both geographically and
chronologically; the diversity of theories, facets, emphases, and goals
in theatre historiography; and the mix of perspectives and
personalities that contributed to the making of Theatre Histories’ third
edition.
All of us, however, owe a deep debt of gratitude to the authors who
are no longer involved in the book. Specifically, Phillip B. Zarrilli’s
contributions are embedded in Chapters 1–4 and 12, and work by
Gary Jay Williams appears in Chapters 6–9 and 12–15. In addition,
both of them wrote materials in the previous editions that are now
available on the website. Readers will continue to hear their voices in
this new edition of Theatre Histories.
Bruce McConachie
 Tobin Nellhaus
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Tamara Underiner
Acknowledgments
The authors want to express again our gratitude to Routledge’s Talia
Rodgers, Publisher, for her belief in and long support of this project,
from conception through this third edition. Talia’s support of this new
approach to creating a theatre history text has been an act of faith.
We also want to thank Suzanne Richardson, Development Editor,
who assisted us through the numerous complexities of producing this
new edition, and the rest of Routledge’s textbook production staff.
A history of this scope is possible in great part, of course, because
of the specialized works of many dedicated scholars. We are
indebted to them; we have drawn on them often and happily. Their
works are cited in this text and in the extended bibliographies on our
website.
Many of our colleagues have been especially supportive. We
especially wish to thank for their advice and encouragement Jay Ball,
Daniel Banks, Jason Bush, Claire Conceison, Dave Escoffery, Faye
C. Fei, Lance Gharavi, Richard Hornby, David Jortner, Margaret
Knapp, Marianne McDonald, David Mayer, Paul Murphy, Stuart
Sillars, Julia Walker, Andrew Weintraub, E.J. Westlake, Gary Jay
Williams, S.E. Wilmer, W.B. Worthen, and Jiayun Zhuang. Simon
Williams was initially involved in this project and provided valuable
contributions at an early stage. We have listened to and benefited
from the external reviewers of our work, including our critics; they
have helped us serve our readers better. We look forward to future
conversations with our readers.
We are grateful to our students, who have been there at every
stage of the journey, helping to shape what we think is a necessary
new step for thinking about theatre and performance history. We
have each benefited also from the long-term research support of our
universities: the University of Exeter, the University of Wisconsin –
Madison, the University of Pittsburgh, the Catholic University of
America – Washington, DC, the University of California – Los
Angeles, and Arizona State University.
 We have also had the strong, enduring support of families and
partners. Their considerable sacrifices made it possible for the work
to get done, and we express our heartfelt thanks to all of them,
including Gerry Magallan, Stephanie McConachie, and Richard
Hornby.
Routledge would like to thank all those archives and individuals
who have given permission to reproduce images in this textbook. In a
few rare cases, we were unable, despite the utmost efforts, to locate
owners of materials. For this we apologize and will make any
corrections in the next reprint if contacted.
Bruce McConachie
Tobin Nellhaus
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Tamara Underiner
General introduction
Tobin Nellhaus
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-1
The goals of Theatre Histories
Theatre Histories aims to introduce the history – or as we will explain,
histories – of theatre, drama, and performance. The meaning of that
sentence may seem obvious: the book presents information about
people, plays, and performance practices such as acting, costumes,
and staging. But we also have two other goals. One is to consider
theatre’s relationships with some of its many social contexts. The
other is to raise questions about the meaning of evidence and events,
and discuss different ways of interpreting them. Raising such
questions often entails “unpacking” facts and statements because
they contain more (or perhaps less!) than meets the eye.
For example, as the first sentence of this introduction shows, we
will often use two or three terms, sometimes in combination, to
describe our focus: “theatre,” “drama,” and “performance.” The three
terms overlap each other, but one can distinguish them reasonably
clearly.
“Drama” is generally used to describe plays, collectively or in the
singular. Occasionally it’s used more broadly in order to refer to what
is performed (fictional characters and actions, even if based on
historical people and events), as distinct from how it is performed; the
drama might not be a script at all, just ideas and character types in
the performers’ minds. For some people, “drama” carries the
narrower sense of plays as literary works, printed texts to be read as
“dramatic literature,” apart from performance; however, for the
authors of this book, the connection to performance is essential.
By “theatre” we usually mean live performances by skilled artists
for live audiences, usually of drama or something drama-like. Such
performances engage the spectators’ imagination, emotion, intellect,
and cultural perspectives, at varying levels. They may or may not
take place in buildings built specifically for theatrical performance.
Sometimes the audience members are also the performers. In
theatre, everyone involved is aware that the performance presents a
fiction. True, occasionally people use “theatre” to describe
performances which attempt to lead observers into thinking that what
they are watching is not fictional, or situations in which spectators
observe other people as though (unbeknownst to them) they are
fictional characters; but for the purposes of this book, these cases
apply the term “theatre” metaphorically.
The term “performance” generally refers to embodied presentation
on stage (or with surrogates for the body, such as puppets). However,
the term has a special meaning today in the field of performance
studies to include all the ways in which humans represent themselves
in embodied ways. Scholars apply that sense of “performance” not
only to the staging of plays but also to religious rituals, state
ceremonies, carnivals, political demonstrations, athletic contests, the
customs of a family dinner table, the ways people portray themselves
in social media, and many other activities. In that sense, theatre is but
one of many kinds of performance.
Occasionally Theatre Histories employs this broader sense of
“performance.” We think it is natural and enlightening to make
connections between theatre and other types of performance. For
that reason, even though Theatre Histories is not a performance
studies textbook, we consider a wide range of performances – from
Japanese puppetry to productions of plays by Samuel Beckett, from
the dance-dramas of India to early twentieth-century high-fashion
musical revues, and from ancient Greek drama to the Hip Hop plays
created globally. We believe the juxtapositions among these will
attune the reader to appreciate better the wide spectrum of theatre
and performance in many cultures.
The scope of “theatre history” in Theatre Histories must also be
unpacked. Knowing about theatre globally is vital today. For example,
it is not unusual for playwrights, directors, and designers to be
inspired by the theatre of other cultures (possibly ancient ones), and
sometimes actors are expected to know or quickly absorb foreign
acting methods. In addition, cultures today are constantly crossing
national borders and influencing each other, such as the importation
of K-Pop music and Bollywood movies into Western countries, or the
performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in China and the
adoption of rap music across the planet. For those reasons we strive
to provide an understanding of theatrical performance around the
world, throughout its known existence. We also believe that isolating
the study of Western from non-Western theatre does not serve
students well. For that reason, most chapters in Theatre Histories
include theatre from various parts of the world, with a few exceptions
where thematic or other reasons made it unfeasible.
In our view, the history of theatre involves more than actors,
performance spaces, plays, and staging. Theatrical performances
occur within society. Thus Theatre Histories often discusses political,
cultural, economic, and other social issues, and how they affected
theatre, drama, and performance. The relationships among these
various social dynamics, and between them and theatre, are
extremely complex. However, Theatre Histories will pay one element
special attention: a society’s communication practices (its uses of
speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics). We discuss this focus
in more detail below.
Writing theatre history involves more than accumulating facts.
Historians have to make decisions about what information is most
important, and develop an understanding of how events are related.
In other words, the process of writing about history – historiography
– always involves interpretations of the past. One of the goals of
Theatre Histories is to provide not just information about theatre, and
not just our own interpretations of that information, but also an
understanding of how interpretations come into being – how history is
written – in order to enable students to evaluate historical writing. The
remainder of this introduction surveys some of the core issues in
historiography, the approach adopted by the authors, and its
influence on our discussions and even the organization of the book.
Historiography: Thinking about history
If historiography involves interpreting the past, then we need to
consider what it means to “interpret.” One view frequently
encountered today is that any claim that “X is true” is really “just an
interpretation” – a complete matter of opinion. According to this
perspective, there is no way to choose between them_ all opinions
are equally valid, and whatever is “true for me” is inherently
unassailable.
As a general theory, this notion doesn’t stand up to analysis, since
it is logically self-defeating (the idea that every claim is merely an
opinion must itself be merely an opinion), and it cannot account for
actual practice. Nobody has ever actually stopped gravity by not
believing in it; Western science hasn’t explained (in its own terms)
how the Asian medical technique of acupuncture works, but it has
generally accepted that acupuncture can successfully treat pain and
nausea. Beliefs about these things do not alter their efficacy. In
addition, although many of those professing this theory intend well by
trying not to impose their views on others, they open the door wide for
arguments that are incorrect, misinforming, and/or malignant. The
denial that during the Second World War the Nazi’s extermination
programs murdered 11 million people – Jews and non-Jews – is not
an “equally valid opinion,” it is a falsehood.
Nevertheless, the notion that every claim is “just an opinion” does
sound a useful cautionary note for historiography, because
interpretation is a necessary part of it. Determining exactly what, how,
and why things happened is often extraordinarily difficult or even
impossible; frequently evidence is fragmentary and ambiguous; and
innumerable events are always happening simultaneously. One
cannot perform experiments on history, and it is difficult to perceive
one’s own mistaken assumptions about the meaning of historical
evidence. Although history is often imagined (and occasionally
taught) as a simple, plodding path of dry facts, people experience
history as a realm of fierce argument. We know what happened in
history, until we realize we don’t or we discover that someone else
knows it differently. Even at the personal level, when talking with
someone about a shared event, we all encounter moments when we
say: “I don’t remember it that way!” There clearly are facts, but even if
we agree on them, we can fit them together in different ways, bringing
out different perspectives, illuminating different connections, or
formulating different explanations. To give one example of the role of
perspective in historiography, the U.S. view of the American
Revolutionary War is often that the British government was
increasingly imposing itself on local governance, and demanded
oppressive taxes to pay for the French and Indian War (1756–63, also
called the Seven Years’ War) in which many colonists had lost their
lives; in contrast, to the British Parliament the Americans were
ingrates refusing to pay their fair share for a war that had secured the
colonies’ very existence, and the Parliament’s deliberations on
managing the rebellion were based on assumptions drawn from prior
(but inapplicable) experience, leading to serious miscalculations.
Interpretation is intrinsic to historiography, and our understanding of
history is necessarily always open to revision.

Social context and cultural relativity

A theatre historian could try to evade the problem of interpretation by
writing a history that simply looks at what happens within theatrical
practice: the eighteenth-century kabuki stage had such-and-such
shape and size, during the late sixteenth century Isabella Andreini
was an important commedia dell’arte actor in Italy and Christopher
Marlowe was a major English playwright, the philosophy espoused by
Auguste Comte shaped nineteenth-century realist theatre in Europe,
and so forth. A theatre history like that would present no particular
reason for theatre’s changes or for the direction of change, such as
why X was influential instead of Y. What happens in the society at
large (such as economic transformations, religious conflicts, new
ideas, and political rivalries) might be mentioned as the “larger
context,” but the larger context has little real bearing on theatre
practices – it explains little and stays “outside the building.”
Few theatre scholars today would accept such an approach to
theatre history. In fact it could never achieve its goal, because the
idea that theatre can be divorced from its social context is itself an
interpretation. Theatre Histories is particularly emphatic that what
happens inside the theatre is deeply connected to what happens
outside, not just as a matter of the topics playwrights present on
stage, but also how plays are performed, who performs them, who
attends them, and what social developments produced changes in
cultural ideas that were manifested in stylistic shifts. For instance,
approaches to acting can be rooted in scientific developments; the
sorts of characters one sees in a play can be connected to the way
people use the printing press; whether plays are written at all (rather
than improvised or orally transmitted) may be the result of the
society’s political and economic configuration. The theatre’s doors
are always open to the world, and the world always enters. In fact the
world is already part of theatre itself.
Just as theatre is thoroughly embedded in society, perspectives on
history and society are often connected to particular cultures and
their values. We can see how ideas can be relative to a specific
society in an example drawn from theatre history. In Europe during
the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, people believed
there was a hierarchy among all things in the world, starting with
rocks at the bottom and rising through plants, animals, humans,
angels, and ultimately God. Humans themselves were ranked from
the lowliest beggars, up through serfs, knights, earls, dukes, and
finally the king. (Actors, incidentally, were lumped with prostitutes.) All
told, this vertical understanding of the world was called the Great
Chain of Being, and people acted on that understanding by (for
instance) passing laws regarding what clothes people could wear.
But in the late seventeenth century another view began to emerge,
which slowly consolidated into a more horizontal concept of society
expressed in statements such as “All men are created equal,” and
people acted on that belief (at least to some extent) by establishing
nations with democracies.
Such vertical and horizontal concepts are evident in theatre
architecture. In the early 1600s, theatre buildings in Europe usually
allowed only one person, such as the king or duke, to have a perfect
view of the perspective scenery; everyone else’s view was
fragmented and distorted. In the late 1800s a new building design
gave everyone a more equal view of the stage. Is either the vertical or
the horizontal concept of society “true”? Most historians today would
answer that each view is “valid” – acceptable – within some societies,
but neither one is valid for all societies: their validity is culturally
relative.
The point is important because historians can unwittingly project
their own perceptions, assumptions, and beliefs (which may seem
like common sense in their own culture) on to earlier and foreign
societies, leading to severe misunderstandings. For instance,
scholars may believe that religion involves the same type of concepts
in other cultures as it does in their own, not realizing that there can be
significant differences. There is also a long, unpleasant history of
historians projecting their ideas and values in a way that implies (or
states outright) that their own society is superior to others. We will
discuss examples of this practice at several points in Theatre
Histories.
For certain purposes, however, historians apply their perspective
intentionally and for good reasons, particularly when they pursue
questions such as “Who gains?” and “Who is harmed?” These
concerns frequently arise in analyses of economics, gender, race,
and politics. Capitalism is one such topic often discussed in terms of
gain and harm. Some people argue that capitalism is good because
competition and the search for profit have led to innumerable
innovations that have benefited people around the globe, and allow
individuals to improve their economic standing. Others hold that
capitalism is bad because it makes working people dependent on
companies and corporations that prioritize profit over people’s needs,
and because the system suffers drastic cycles which can suddenly
throw millions of people into poverty. Still others believe that
capitalism doesn’t exist: there are only free markets in which
employers and employees are on a level playing field and meet to
conduct a fair exchange of labor for payment, so the entire question
is moot. Each perspective leads to different ways of writing history, as
does an approach that seeks to “balance” the pros and cons rather
than say that one side outweighs the other. (Notice that one can ask
not only whether these claims are true, but also who benefits or is
harmed by the claim itself!) Questions of gain and harm also arise in
theatre history: for instance, as we will see, in the past many cultures
allowed only men to perform in plays, which historians deemed
insignificant until some argued that the practice was mis ogynistic,
and others that it was homoerotic. (Its treatment as insignificant is
itself often considered misogynistic.) Further interpretations emerged
in response. Such debates force scholars to reexamine evidence and
their own attitudes, and they have deepened our insight into theatre’s
complexity.
Clearly, however, there is tension between the desire to avoid
projecting our own society’s views on to others, and the desire to
criticize inequality. There may be no completely satisfactory solution
to that tension. In Theatre Histories our goal is to introduce both,
since both bring much of value (and important values) to theatre
history. We present some examples of historical critique. At the same
time we also strive to consider what performances meant to their
original audience; we recognize, however, that we can seldom be
certain that we’ve succeeded – the people of third-century India, for
instance, aren’t around to tell us whether we got things right, and their
judgments would be colored by their own perspectives.

Evidence–theory connections
Evidence, then, is often subject to interpretation due to the historian’s
assumptions, values, and informational contexts. A historian’s social
position, need to justify one side’s actions, and sometimes even
wishful thinking can also surreptitiously slip into historiography. One
topic where historians’ projections have strongly influenced their
interpretations is the question of theatre’s origins, especially in
ancient Greece. In the early 1900s, Gilbert Murray and other classical
anthropologists contended that Greek tragedy evolved from religious
rituals. The hypothesis was surrounded by just enough apparent
evidence to be taken as proved.
By the late 1920s, however, classicists showed that the logic behind
Murray’s theory was flawed, much of the evidence it presented was
misconstrued, and contrary evidence had not been considered. The
problems with Murray’s thesis are so acute that the classical scholar
Gerald Else asserted that Murray had not accumulated evidence
which he then realized could be explained by the “ritual origins”
theory, but instead was driven by “the determination at all costs to
find the origin of tragedy in religion, and therefore in ritual” (1965: 4) –
in other words, that Murray selected and interpreted his evidence in
order to fit the theory he already had in mind.
Although ancient Greek theatre may have had some sort of
relationship to ritual, it was not the evolutionary one that Murray
proposed. But the “religious ritual origins” theory captured many
people’s imagination, and still appears in one form or another to this
day, including among some classicists. (Some writers dub refuted yet
tenacious theories “zombie ideas.”) One reason it persists is that
some theatre practitioners and scholars feel that the theory offers an
inspiration for vitality in performance and a way to comprehend that
vitality. Inspiration is always “true” in the sense that a lived
experience cannot be falsified (if you feel excited, I can’t demonstrate
that you’re actually bored), and in a sense, the inspiration is more
valid if one believes that the theory of “religious ritual origins” is
correct. In other words, if an inspiration is true then its source must be
as well. For these practitioners and scholars, theatre’s factual origin is
not the most important truth: its “origin” as a belief or subjective
experience is. (Note, however, that rejecting ritual as the origin of
theatre does not exclude other possible relationships between them.)
In this example we see that there can be different perspectives on
“what actually happened,” but these different perspectives are not
equally valid, nor are they impervious to criticism. We can also see
that for some people there are different “kinds” of truth (a position that
itself can be interpreted in various ways), and that not everyone
thinks the different kinds have the same level of importance; for
others, there is only one kind of truth. We will return to the question of
theatre’s origins in Chapter 1.
In contrast, a historian may make an argument based on both
strong argument and solid evidence . . . and then the evidence
changes. In one case of “facts” changing, the first known theatre
building – the Theatre of Dionysus, in Athens, Greece – was long
thought to seat 15,000–17,000 people; but in light of recent
archaeological evidence, classical scholars now believe the theatre’s
initial capacity was closer to 3,700–6,000 spectators, and the larger
figure refers to a later expansion (Roselli 2011: 64–5). As a result of
this change in the evidence, an excellent theory about the role of
theatre in ancient Athens based on the previous estimate might need
to be revised or even rejected. People may discover that a piece of
evidence about theatre is more recent than was thought, or that the
evidence believed to demonstrate something true everywhere
actually pertains only to one city, or that evidence was misinterpreted,
or that other pieces of evidence must be considered, or that a facet of
theatre (say, the significance of the actors’ gender) was left out of the
picture entirely, or that the source isn’t reliable.
Although historians usually strive to avoid forcing evidence into a
predetermined theory, or at least to be aware that there may be
contrary evidence, historical evidence is always sought, chosen, and
interpreted. Evidence doesn’t “speak for itself,” the historian makes it
speak to us. Because historians must select and interpret, they can
misunderstand or misrepresent historical events; but by the same
token, new interpretations can reveal aspects of history that weren’t
recognized before – “historical discoveries” may arise by
understanding preexisting evidence in innovative ways. In either
case, whether one thinks the selection and description of evidence is
a problem or an advantage, it is a necessary part of historiography,
and the condition under which writing history must occur.

Intelligibility, plausibility, and narrative

Historians do more than select and interpret evidence: they also
organize the evidence in order to create an intelligible (and, they
hope, persuasive) narrative. Chronological order is generally part of
making history plausible, especially when the causes of change are
central, although in practice much historical writing must go back and
forth in time in order to pick up various threads of a complex story.
Historians also make events understandable by casting them in a
particular light or giving their narrative a particular tone. For example,
a historian might highlight historical ironies, such as the way
President George W. Bush once criticized “nation building,” in which
the U.S. rebuilds a country’s economic and political structure when its
government fails; but later, as a consequence of launching a war in
Iraq, Bush had to attempt exactly that. Historians can also
romanticize events, as did those who described John F. Kennedy’s
term as President as “Camelot,” alluding to a Broadway musical
about the gallant King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Similarly, one historian may view a certain chain of events as
improvement, while another may perceive it as a decline. These are
just a few of the ways historians may make narrative sense of history.
Of course, although historians strive to present a plausible
narrative, “plausible” is not a synonym for “true.” To take just one of
the many complexities, discussions about historical causes can run
into a logical problem that’s often hard to detect. Imagine that the
President of the United States made a speech about the stock
market, and later that day the stock market indexes fell. It’s easy to
infer that the President’s speech worried stock traders and led to the
sell-off. But even though that interpretation is very plausible, it might
not be correct: the traders might have actually been reacting to bad
news coming from abroad. One would need additional evidence to
show what really caused the market decline. (This error, in which one
thinks that one event must have caused another event because it
preceded the second, is called a post hoc argument, short for the
Latin post hoc, ergo propter hoc, translated as “after this, therefore
because of this.”) To avoid such mistakes, historians have to think
carefully about what evidence is required to support their analysis –
and sometimes no further evidence is available, or at least known to
the historian. Plausibility may be the best we can get. This is yet
another reason why history is often subject to debate.
Causes of historical change
Narrative is intrinsic to any discussion of how and why societies
change. True, to some observers societies don’t fundamentally
change at all: “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
A less cynical and more truly historiographical view is that social
changes operate in regular cycles such as rise and fall. A related idea
is that social change consists of swings of a pendulum (say, between
permissiveness and conformism). In contrast, sometimes history is
depicted as consistent progress toward some definite goal, at times
perhaps delayed but ultimately inexorable – the “march of reason,”
for instance.
A problem facing all of these views is that they don’t provide any
reason why there would be cycles, pendulum swings, or progress, or
why they should apply to the particular matter of interest: these things
just happen on their own, guided by an invisible hand. One answer to
this question is that there is no “why,” or even things like cycles and
progress. Instead, history is a matter of happenstance, contingency,
and accident, without any particular direction or pattern: the only
agent of change lies in personal interactions. And certainly at the
micro level, little more than chance may explain why one person
became a historical figure rather than another. But this view misses
the “big picture” of historical developments. For instance, it is striking
that during roughly 1550–1650, there were substantial changes in
theatrical practices throughout Europe, not always in synchrony but in
the same basic direction. Performance spaces increasingly moved
indoors and used more realistic scenery; characters became more
psychologically driven. What drove this “change in taste”? Why had
large numbers of people come to prefer it? How and why had the
concept of “realistic” changed? Surely more than coincidence or
personal influence was involved.
Those questions raise others. If there were large forces behind
cultural changes, one must ask what those forces were, or which of
many forces was the most important. Various answers have been
proposed, most of them boiling down to three kinds. One kind points
to material activities, for example the production and exchange of
goods and services (economics), relationships between and among
women and men (the sex/gender system), technological
developments, or the methods of communication. Another answer
focuses on institutions, such as political systems, religious
organizations, or family structures. The third view assigns primacy to
ideas – theology, philosophy, science, or other sorts of worldview.
One can of course also see the three factors as interacting, although
in the end, usually one has the greatest weight. Earlier we explained
how the Great Chain of Being was supplanted by a more horizontal
concept of the world, an example of idea-driven history; but a
historian might then ask what caused that change in ideas, and point
to some material activity. Historians’ views of the main type of force
that drives society, as well as the specific force they consider, lead to
very different historical narratives.

Theories of society
A key element of historians’ interpretations and narratives is their
general concept of how individuals and society are related. Their
concept may be difficult to detect, since it is seldom explicit (even to
the historian) and sometimes several different concepts seem to be
invoked. As we will see, a particular concept of society directly
shaped Theatre Histories. Understanding these different theories
helps explain some of this book’s organization and themes.
Sociologist Margaret S. Archer (1995) identifies four basic concepts
of the relationship between individuals and society. One is that
society boils down to individuals. Nothing happens in a society unless
individuals do things; further, on this view the most important things
about individuals – their personal traits, abilities, experiences, and
achievements – are independent of any social context. According to
this view, known as “methodological individualism,” talk about social
groups, institutions, power relationships, and society as a whole is
problematic or erroneous because such things cannot be perceived:
all that can be perceived are individuals’ behaviors. “Social
relationships” are simply interactions between individuals – family
ties, buying and selling, being someone’s boss, and the like. But
racism, economic systems, and political power are abstractions about
things that individuals do, nothing more. History is essentially about
individuals: “great men (and a few great women).”
Methodological individualism breaks down when one realizes that
much of what describes individuals is determined by society, such as
economic class, race, age group (“generation”), citizenship,
language, and so forth, and these things regulate what people do (or
may do). One example is that laws, institutions and/or customs
establish whether two people are married, unmarried, or not
permitted to marry. Even personal interactions involve social
frameworks: to understand, say, what happens between a store clerk
and a customer, you need to know what “shopping,” “store clerks,”
“customers,” and “money” are, all of which require a concept of
society as a whole.
The second theory of society acknowledges this by focusing on the
rules and systems that govern social activities, continue a society’s
existence, and keep it functioning as smoothly as possible (and so
one version of this theory is called “functionalism”). The rules and
systems are embodied in systems such as a society’s larger political
and economic structures, and people just follow their roles within
them. People don’t have to be conscious that they’re maintaining
social structures: it happens by default, in the same way that
speaking English keeps the English language alive. Individuals and
their activities are determined by their position within the social
systems that they’re part of.
The first theory suggests that individuals live in virtually unfettered
freedom and are wholly responsible for their personal fates, as if
larger social conditions don’t exist or have no power to limit or
eliminate choices; the second theory describes people as having
practically no control over the world in which they live, to the point
where they may be simply “cogs in the machine” or “victims of
society.” A third position proposes that the difficulty behind these
extreme positions lies in seeing individuals and society as wholly
different things. But rules and resources don’t exist independently –
they depend on the existence of people and their ideas about what
they are doing. Equally, what individuals do is always within the
context of a society. At every moment, individuals are constructing
society, and society is constructing individuals. The two are
inextricable. Thus, like the sides of one coin, if you look at an activity
from one perspective, you’ll see individuals going about their daily
lives; look at it another way, you’ll see rules and resources
comprising social structures. The two are conjoined in a single, active
process, and once a moment in history has passed, what remains are
but the traces it leaves in memory. Society operates the same way as
language does: speaking English draws on one’s knowledge of the
rules that make up the English language, and simultaneously
continues the language’s existence; but the language only exists
when we speak, read or write it. Thus society exists only through
individuals’ acts of repeating the rules, in the present. However,
individuals can introduce small changes, which can accumulate. All
told, institutions, ideas, and individuals always have a social nature,
and they have a fluid, ever-changing quality. One version of this
theory is termed “social constructionism.”
The final view agrees that individuals and society mutually shape
each other, but it maintains that the two remain different things, not
flip sides of one thing. Individuals and society each have features that
are largely independent of the other, such as physical bodies for the
one and economic systems for the other. But because they’re
different things, they aren’t in sync, and society doesn’t exist only in
the present. Time and the causes of social change snap into focus as
aspects of society’s existence. People can’t wake up one day with
new ideas about social roles and resources, and instantly transform
the society they live in; conversely, social rules may alter, yet some
individuals will behave just as they did before (e.g., some people
discriminate even after it becomes illegal). People can change
society, but only within the preexisting circumstances that society has
placed upon their actions. We live in(side) the past: society depends
on people’s activities for its existence, but principally on the activities
of people who lived previously. Some of their legacy has been swept
away, some of it remains but has been reshaped, some of it
continues largely unaltered. (For instance, the latest hit song in
Western countries probably uses the notes of the twelve-tone scale
that began taking shape in ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, rather
than a pentatonic scale like those of Asia and Africa.) Thus one
historical era may begin long before the previous one has come to a
close, and incremental adjustments can suddenly spark radical
upheavals. Likewise, a world phenomenon like globalization may
seem to bulldoze everything in its path, yet its impact on different
countries varies drastically. In short, under this theory (which has
been called a “transformational” model of social activity), history is
messy.
Although the authors of Theatre Histories have somewhat varying
positions, on the whole we take the last view. Theatre history’s
messiness is reflected in every chapter, because cultures don’t
change at the same rate or in the same manner, and their genres of
theatrical performance vary widely. We make one aspect of theatre
history’s untidiness particularly conspicuous through our
periodization. Chapters always overlap chronologically, sometimes
in complicated ways: for instance, Chapter 4 covers roughly 1250–
1650, Chapter 5 addresses 1550–1650, and Chapter 6 examines
1600–1770, which overlaps even Chapter 4. Many different factors
came into play regarding our decisions about where to draw the
dividing lines (which are necessarily a bit arbitrary), and we often had
to wrestle with questions about where to place certain topics. In fact
among historians generally, periodization is often disputed. Was there
a Renaissance in Europe, and if so, when, where and for whom? It
depends on what countries and social groups one has in mind, what
activities one thinks distinguish that period, and whether one thinks
“Renaissance” is even a valid description. Similarly, how does one
periodize when developments in (say) East Asia and Western Europe
follow different paths? Sometimes themes tell us more than
chronology.
History as the construction of truth
The need to focus on particular aspects of historical events, the
collection and interpretation of evidence, the development of a
narrative, and the historian’s perspective and concept of society can
be summarized by the sentence “History is constructed.” We piece it
together and build an argument. However, even though any
understanding of history is a construct, and a range of interpretations
may be supported by evidence and logic, neither the notion that all
perspectives are equally true nor the idea that they are all merely
opinions (lacking a distinctive validity) holds up to scrutiny. In short,
interpreting the past is not a free-for-all. It possesses objective as well
as subjective facets. Not all interpretations are valid, historians can
make mistakes, and some theories are flat-out wrong, no matter how
insistently they might be espoused. We may never know with
absolute certainty that certain claims are correct. But absolute
certainty isn’t required in order for us to be confident that a statement
is true: truth is more like “certainty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Theatre and the history of communication
The interpretation of history adopted in Theatre Histories appears in
the way we perceive an interplay between individuals and society; it
is also manifested through how we handle social structures. Society
has numerous structures, including the economic system, political
power relations, sex/gender relationships, race and ethnicity, religion,
education, transportation, agriculture, health care, international
relations, and so on. Changes in one structure often affect the others,
and several may be involved in a single historical change. The
relative importance or weight one should give to a particular structure
depends partly on what one is discussing, and the perspective one
brings to it. To take one example, the history of American popular
music might pay special attention to the role of race. Theatre, we
believe, was most deeply affected historically by communication
practices, by which we mean the way a society develops and uses
one or more means of communication, such as speech, handwriting,
printing, and electric/electronic media.
Why communication? The principal reason is “the primacy of
practice,” a theory about the formation of knowledge, which holds that
many of our ideas and thought processes arise through ordinary
practical activities rather than abstract reasoning; at a larger level, it
also means that testing ideas in the real world provides better
evidence for truth claims than logic alone – as the saying goes, “the
proof of the pudding is in the eating.” The “primacy of practice” theory
has a long pedigree in such fields as philosophy and child
development. Lately it has received additional support from cognitive
science and linguistics, which have shown that much of human
thought is structured by metaphors derived from experiences
interacting with the world. For instance, by putting objects into a
container and taking them out again, we form the conceptual models
or “schemas” of inside/outside and container/contained. These
schemas become the basis for metaphors that help us interpret the
world we live in, through expressions like “Andy felt out of place,”
“Lucinda ran in a marathon on Saturday,” and “They’re within their
rights to insist on a refund.” Similarly, crawling on a floor as an infant
teaches us the schema source–path–goal, which is expressed in
statements like “Carol is headed for trouble,” “Dana and Drew have
been going out together for months,” and “Marcus started working as
a systems analyst.” All sorts of objects, conditions, and activities can
be the source of metaphors: “He’s hot but he’s got a cold heart”
(temperature is attractiveness), “She’s in it for the long haul”
(commitment is lengthy travel), “I think Professor Merrimack has a
screw loose” (the mind is a machine), and so forth. We use most of
these metaphors without being aware of them.
If our everyday interactions with the world provide metaphors for
understanding it, then some of those metaphors must come from our
communication practices. How we communicate – through speech,
handwritten notes, text messages, etc. – is clearly different from what
we communicate. But how we communicate is also more than the
means of communication themselves, because as we will see, it
involves the ways in which people in a particular society actually use
the means of communication. Communication practices provide ways
of understanding the world that help define a culture. The point is
extremely important for the study of theatre, because in its most
commonplace, paradigmatic form, theatre involves the oral
performance of a written script, thus combining the two fundamental
modes of communication. That blend forges a strong bond between
theatrical performance and communication practices.
Even though one can’t separate the means of communication from
its social usage, the historical development of communication
technology is still important. One can periodize the history of
communication in various ways. The most obvious approach is to
distinguish between oral cultures, manuscript cultures, print
cultures, and electric and electronic cultures. But there are other
possibilities. For example, one could argue that there are really only
two major eras: first, oral cultures, which have no form of writing
whatsoever; then, the era of literate cultures, which has numerous
sub-periods. But this simple dividing line turns out to be not quite so
simple. On the one hand, there have been cultures which had writing
but gave it a minor role culturally, so in a technical sense they may
have been literate, but for most practical purposes, they remained
oral; on the other hand, oral communication is hugely important in
even the most technologically sophisticated society with nearly
universal literacy. Another approach to periodizing communication
history might hold that there is a significant shift between the
electronic culture of the television, radio, and telephone, vs. the
socially networked culture of the computer, the internet, and
especially mobile devices; in other words, one could break down the
history of communication into shorter periods.
For Theatre Histories, we are using four periods, which are
represented in the four parts of the book. Our focus, however, is on
the connection between changes in a society’s communication
practices, and the shifts and commonalities in performance and in the
culture at large. For that reason, the book’s parts don’t match the
technological changes. First, after considering performance in oral
culture, we examine theatre in various types of early literate and then
manuscript cultures, when all writing had to be done by hand; but in
all of these cultures, to a greater or lesser extent the spoken word still
played a major cultural role. The next period hinges on the
introduction of the printing press, which radically transformed the way
books were produced and disseminated, and made writing culturally
dominant throughout Europe. Our third period arises from a change
that occurred not in communication technology, but in the way an
existing technology was used: publishing on a recurrent, periodical
basis became logistically viable, leading to the creation of
newspapers, magazines, and journals of various sorts. Finally, we
address the rise of electric and electronic modes of communication,
which have undergone numerous technological transformations that
have not ended to this day. Although there’s reason to think that
electronic communication is not yet dominant in the sense of
structuring thought and there are numerous explorations in how to
use it (some successful, some not), that seems to be the direction
world culture is taking.
But it’s vital to remember that the dominance of any mode of
communication is always relative to other modes of communication,
and specific to particular societies. What emerges in North America,
Europe, Japan, Australia, and similarly developed parts of the world
can’t be extrapolated elsewhere. The reality is that in 2015, about 15
percent of the world’s population had no access to electricity, let
alone computers; roughly 55 percent had no access to the internet.
Although mobile technologies are making rapid inroads, the digital
divide between the connected and unconnected will be extremely
difficult to overcome, and might never be eliminated. As for the
developed world, assuming online communication becomes
dominant, the older means of communication – speech, handwriting,
and printing – will nevertheless continue to be used in one form or
another. Their techniques and functions may change, as they have
for handwriting: it used to serve all purposes, but today the only
activity that requires it is writing signatures (and increasingly, not
even that); signatures were once written on parchment, which was
replaced by paper, and now paper is being replaced by an electronic
pad and stylus. However, whatever else changes in the face of
electronic communication, the older communication media will not
vanish.
The continuing role of older modes of communication touches on
questions of how quickly and completely changes occur. There is a
tendency to view or at least present changes in communication as
revolutionary and total – a sudden, radical shift from an oral culture to
a literate culture, thoroughly dominated by writing; a quick, wholesale
change from a print culture to an electronic culture. This idea suffers
many problems, one of which is how one should define “literate.”
Historically, many people have been able to read but unable to write:
is that an acceptable definition of literacy? Scholars don’t all agree.
Similarly, scholars who believe “literate” means “able to write” have
varying opinions on whether the ability to write one’s name but little
else suffices for literacy. The problem in defining written literacy has
its parallel in “computer literacy”: for instance, even “digital natives”
are often unable to code, are unfamiliar with the sophisticated tools
available in their word processor, and have very poor online search
skills. A further difficulty is determining the threshold at which a
society is “literate”: are there times when 1 percent is high enough
because it includes the people in power, or 75 percent too low
because it excludes too many people with little power? The problems
in defining “literacy” and selecting a good threshold, together with the
fact that there are long periods of overlap, make it attractive to reject
“revolution” in favor of a slow “evolution.” On the other hand, “slow” is
vague: given that writing has existed for roughly 5,600 years, is 50 or
even 100 years slow? To many historians, that’s quite rapid. The
position taken in Theatre Histories is that on the whole, change is
evolutionary and uneven, but there are some periods that really can
be described as revolutions in communication.
The key question, however, is how – or whether – changes in
communication affect culture. There are three basic views. One is
that communication technologies affect everything that pertains to
communication and culture, and their impact is the same everywhere
– they’re the only factor one needs to consider. This view is called
“technological determinism,” and it is probably the most widespread.
A contrasting argument is that actually, technologies have no
particular effects or tendencies: instead, only social activities such as
education have any role. Theatre Histories takes the view that both
technological and social aspects are at play. Technologies present
various possibilities, but they aren’t infinitely malleable – they can
only do a certain range of things, they are better suited for some
purposes than for others, and they may serve or promote certain
uses more than others (possibly inadvertently). Which specific
possibilities become reality depends on things that people do in
society at large. YouTube, for example, started as an online dating
site, but within weeks its creators discovered that people were
uploading all sorts of videos, and mere months later corporations
were posting ads. Some people use YouTube as a sort of online radio
with videos displaying a static image, but that’s a weak usage of its
capabilities. However, the technology behind YouTube renders it
incapable of supplanting Skype.
What happened to YouTube is a good demonstration of the only
indisputable law of history: the law of unintended consequences.
People may believe that the intentions of great leaders and
innovators are foremost in the “march of history,” but at most that’s
only partly the case, and often not true at all. When the printing press
was invented in Europe, nobody could have anticipated that it would
facilitate a cultural renaissance, a scientific revolution, and the most
savage religious schism the continent ever endured. Those effects
and more had fundamental connections to the simple experience of
using printed books, and the mental habits and metaphors that those
experiences fostered. In the future too, history will have complex
overlaps, multiple timelines, interweavings, lurches, and surprises.
Theatre will trace a similarly unpredictable path as people absorb,
respond to, act upon, and think within changing communication
practices.
We will describe in more detail the specific ways in which
communication shapes theatre and drama within each of Theatre
Histories’ four parts. Here, however, we need to observe that theatre
not only has powerful ties to communication, it is also strongly
affected by other social structures, such as economics, political
structures, and the sex/gender system. The different factors
influencing the stage interconnect in various ways and further
complicate the history of theatre. To reflect that fact, within the larger
context of communication that established this book’s parts, the
individual chapters often pay special attention to other social
structures.
The structure of Theatre Histories
Theatre Histories has three primary types of material: the main
text, boxes titled “Thinking through theatre histories,” and case
studies. There are also a few boxes concerning particular points or
information that readers should be aware of, and we have a range of
additional resources on the Theatre Histories website.
The main text describes the principal developments in theatre
history, which broadly speaking we’ve organized chronologically.
However, as we’ve observed, historical periods have no clear-cut
boundaries, and so every chapter overlaps others. Within each
chapter, we usually adopt either a geographic or a thematic
approach. From continent to continent, theatre often develops
independently, but within a continent, sometimes conditions are so
similar or there is so much traffic – instructions on how to
demonstrate religious devotion, touring theatre companies that
display “how it’s done,” and other types of intercommunication – that
a country-by-country approach would distract from the overall
pattern. On the other hand, seeing the similarities and dissimilarities
between theatre traditions during a single time frame can help
readers think about performance comparatively.
But more often the chapter is organized thematically. The topics
necessarily vary from chapter to chapter, but frequently the chapter
begins with the historical context and the forces driving the events
that shape theatrical performance. Chapter 4, for instance, observes
that the growing cities in Europe and Asia were increasingly able to
support theatre as a vocation. As a result, theatre was no longer
tethered to festivals, aristocratic courtyards, and similar venues.
Professional theatre troupes developed in China, Europe and Japan,
dependent initially on touring, but in Europe and Japan they
eventually resided in buildings built for play-going.
As noted above, we have grouped the chapters into four parts,
characterized by the developments in communication practices.

Part I briefly addresses performance in oral cultures, and then

turns attention to theatre when writing could only be produced by
hand, and the cultures in many respects remained oriented
around orality. Several societies developed major theatre
traditions during this period, among them Europe, India, Japan,
and China; and everywhere, there were forms of celebratory and
commemorative performance.
Part II surveys theatre during the first 250 years or so of print
culture in Europe, and contemporaneous developments in Asia.
First, we consider the rise of professional theatre companies,
which occurred in many parts of the world, mainly as the result of
growing prosperity and urbanization. Our examination of the print
revolution in Europe highlights the cultural changes and conflicts
that arose out of it, and then the formation of highly centralized
monarchies, which often utilized print as a way to shore up their
power. These developments strongly influenced concepts of
character and plot, and theatre professionals started seeking
artistic realism in one sense or another.
 Part III concerns theatre in the next three centuries of print
culture, distinguished by the development of the periodical press.
This new use of print fostered new roles for theatre in European
society, through which theatre contributed to and was influenced
by the political structures that were emerging from capitalism,
particularly nationalism. The trend toward globalization began,
and the resulting intercultural contact had both innovative and
oppressive effects. Realism became increasingly well-defined
and established in Western theatre, and also spread to Japan.
Toward the end of this era, entirely new media based mainly on
electricity started to shatter print culture’s modes of thought,
promoting a new phenomenon: non-realistic, avant-garde
theatre.
Part IV picks up the thread as electric and then electronic
communication played an increasingly prominent cultural role.
On the one hand, various forms of realism dominated in
mainstream theatre (except for musicals); on the other hand,
avant-garde genres were constantly being invented. Avant-
gardes challenged nearly every aspect of theatre, such as the
importance of the dramatic text versus performance, what
counted as a performance space and how it could be used, what
performance consisted of, and who could be a performer. In
addition, within both the mainstream and the avant-garde, some
forms of theatre sought to challenge the political ideologies,
institutions and forces of their society. Often electronic
communication provided models or tools for these
developments.

Each part opens with a short introduction that summarizes what that
part will cover, and raises philosophical issues stemming from the
broad developments in theatre’s history.
The “Thinking through theatre histories” sections present subjects
in historiography, such as theories and methodologies (for instance,
queer theory, and the ideas of literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin);
particularly topical questions (e.g., the notion of “origins,” and
theatre’s connection to concepts of national identity); and the
strategies historians use to obtain evidence, communicate their
interpretations, or convince readers of their validity (such as how
extreme examples can reveal larger trends). These sections aim to
help the reader grasp the problems theatre historians face and the
choices they make when studying historical events. Of course, these
segments hardly exhaust the enormous variety of historiographical
theories, questions, and strategies – they cover only the tip of the tip
of the iceberg.
Finally, each chapter has one or two case studies, which look in
depth at a performance genre, play, or dramatist, or some other
aspect of theatre. Some case studies involve an explicit
historiographical approach or issue, which is described in a “Thinking
through theatre histories” box, enabling students to see how a theory
or strategy might be applied in practice. In other instances we do not
present any specific theory, allowing students to consider (on their
own or with their instructor) what sorts of ideas and techniques guide
the case study.
We close this introduction by returning to our starting point. We
began by discussing some major terms: theatre, drama, and
performance. There has been and continues to be enormous
diversity in the theatrical performance practices of the world, both
geographically and chronologically. Diverse forces have shaped
theatre’s development throughout its history. And there is a diversity
of theories, facets, emphases, and goals in theatre historiography. In
writing this book, our aim has been to introduce all of these
dimensions of writing about theatre in history. That, then, is the
meaning of the plural in the title, Theatre Histories.

A Note On Resources And Conventions

Additional resources
We offer many resources beyond the text itself. At the end of the book’s four
parts, we list the books and articles that we cited in the text. That section also
lists selected audiovisual resources, including recordings of performances,
short documentaries, and websites, which are marked in the margin with a
camera icon. Routledge’s companion website for this book
(www.theatrehistories.com) offers texts drawn from previous editions of this
book, including case studies and short essays on various topics. These are
indicated in the margin with a Companion Website icon. We include
pronunciation guidance for many foreign terms within the text (in square
brackets) and at the back of the book, with online recordings flagged with a
headphone icon. Terms printed in blue are briefly defined in the Glossary
toward the end of the book; other terms can be located by using the Index.
The companion website lists further online resources, and the many books
and articles that we used in writing Theatre Histories but didn’t specifically
cite in the text or that a reader wanting more information would find useful.

There is one caveat about online

resources. The internet can be an astonishingly rich source of valuable
information, thoughtful analysis, and videos of brilliant performance. On the
other hand, anyone can put up a website with information and opinions that
represent no special expertise, present outdated scholarship, or even
intentionally misrepresent facts. It is best to use websites in conjunction with
current scholarly books and articles, which have been vetted by experts and
often represent new research and ideas not reflected in websites.

Diacritics, spellings, names, and capitalization

We have followed common scholarly usage in diacritical markings and
Romanized spellings of terms from the many languages used in this text.
Japanese and Chinese names place the family name first (e.g., Suzuki
Tadashi), which we follow unless the person has adopted Western usage.
Scholarly practices for capitalization vary. To the extent possible, we
capitalize the names of movements, reasonably identifiable groups, and
geographical regions. Some examples are Romanticism, the Romantics,
Realism (as an artistic movement), Symbolism, Asian, and Western. We
leave in lower case the terms for ideas, theories, and styles, when they are
not necessarily connected to a particular movement or group of people: for
instance, positivism, positivists, realism (as a set of ideas and stylistic goals),
and symbolism (the use of symbols in general). Occasionally this convention
leads to seemingly odd combinations, such as when we discuss “realism and
Naturalism,” but the reason should be clear from the text.
Works cited
Other consulted resources and additional readings are listed on the
Theatre Histories website.

Archer, M.S. (1995) Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic

Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Else, G. (1965) The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy,
New York: W. W. Norton.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New
York: Basic Books.
Nellhaus, T. (2010) Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Roselli, D.K. (2011) Theater of the People: Spectators and
Society in Ancient Athens, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Performance in Oral and Manuscript
Cultures
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-2

Part I: Timeline
1 From oral to literate performance
CASE STUDY: Yoruba ritual as “play,” and “contingency” in the
ritual process
2 Pleasure, power, and aesthetics: Theatre in early literate societies,
500 BCE–1450 CE
CASE STUDY: Plautus’s plays: What’s so funny?
CASE STUDY: The nō play Dōjōji
3 Commemorative drama and carnival
CASE STUDY: Christians and Moors: Medieval performance in
Spain and the New World
CASE STUDY: Playful gods: The Ramlila in north India
Part I: Works cited
Part 1 Timeline

Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and

Performance Communication Economics

200,000– Beginnings of
190,000 modern
CE humans
100,000– Beginnings of
60,000 language
CE
C.5500- Ancient
C.4000 civilization in
CE Sumer
(southern Iraq)
c.3800 Ancient
CE civilization in
Crete
c.3200– Earliest South
1800 CE American
civilization
(Peru)
c.3150– First dynasty,
2686 CE Egypt
C.3000 Performance,
BCE-[?] festivals,
Mesoamerica
c.2700 Sumerian epic
CE Gilgamesh
Egyptian
hieroglyphs
C.2070- Xia dynasty,
C.1600 China
CE
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

c.2055 Abydos “Passion

BCE-[?] Play,” Egypt
C.2000- Earliest Mayan
C.1000 civilization
CE
C.1600- Chinese writing Shang dynasty,
C.1046 China
CE
C.1180 Trojan War
CE
C.1050 Phoenician script
CE
C.1000 Hopi
CE performances,
North America
Celtic rituals,
bardic festivals,
Europe
C.850 Greek alphabet
CE
C.800 Homer and bardic Written Sanskrit
CE performance,
Greece
776 CE Olympic games,
Greece
753 CE Founding of
Rome
C.600 Writing in
CE Mesoamerica
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

c. 563– Siddhartha
483 CE Gautama (Buddha),
India
551–478 Confucius, China
CE
534 CE Early form of
Greek tragedy
performed by
Thespis
c.525- Aeschylus,
c.456 playwright
CE
509–27 Roman
CE Republic
499–479 Greco-Persian
CE wars
c.497- Sophocles,
c.405 playwright
CE
c.480– Euripides,
406 CE playwright
460–429 Periclean age,
CE Athens
c.448- Aristophanes,
c.387 playwright
CE
431–404 Peloponnesian
CE War
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

c.400 Mahabharata and

Ramayana,
Sanskrit epics,
India
C.380 Plato, The Republic
CE
356–323 Alexander the
CE Great, Europe
and Asia
C.342- Menander,
C.291 playwright
CE
C.330 Aristotle, The
CE Poetics
323 Hellenistic
BCE-31 period, Europe
CE
c.254– Plautus,
184 CE playwright
206 Han dynasty,
BCE- China
220 CE
204 Roman drama
BCE-65
CE
200 Bharata writes
BCE- Natyasastra, India
200 CE
196 CE Rosetta stone
C.190-C Terence,
159 CE playwright
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

27 BCE- Roman Empire

476 CE
27 BCE- Caesar
14 CE Augustus, first
emperor of
Roman Empire
C.4 Jesus of Nazareth,
BCE-29 Middle East/
CE Europe
C.4 Seneca,
BCE-65 playwright
CE
50–150 Buddhism enters
CE China
250–710 Yamato period,
CE Japan
250–900 Mayan classical
CE period, Yucatan
peninsula
476 CE Western
Roman Empire
falls; Eastern
(Byzantine)
Empire
continues
533 CE Last known
theatre
performance
within the former
Roman Empire
570–632 Mohammed, Middle
CE East
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

618–907 Tang dynasty,

CE China
790– Viking
1066 CE exploration
800– Trans-Sahara
1100 CE trade routes
c.900 Chinese story
CE recitation
Kutiyattam temple
theatre, India
900– Mayan post
1550 CE Classic Period,
Yucatan
peninsula
c.925 Catholic liturgical
CE tropes
c. 1040 Movable type,
CE China
1066 CE Normans
(Northern
French)
conquer
England
1095– First Christian
1099 CE crusade against
Muslims
c.1100 Development of
CE carnival, Europe
1254– Marco Polo, Italian
1324 CE merchant traveler
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1266– Giotto, artist

1337 CE
1279– Yuan dynasty,
1368 CE China
1279– Zaju, China
1654 CE
C.1300- Ramlila, India
C.1400
CE
C.1300- Renaissance era
C.1600 begins in Italy;
CE spreads throughout
Europe in the
sixteenth century
1313- Passion plays,
C.1600 continental
CE Europe
1343– Geoffrey Chaucer,
1400 CE English writer
c. 1350– Cycle plays,
1569 CE England
1363– Zeami, actor-
1443 CE playwright
1368– Ming dynasty,
1644 CE China
1368– Zaju and kunqu,
1644 CE China
c.1374 No, Japan
CE
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1428– Aztec Empire,

1521 CE Central
America
c.1440 Rabinal Achi, Movable type
CE Mesoamerica (printing press),
Europe
1452– Leonardo da Vinci,
1519 CE artist
1453 CE Ottomans
capture
Constantinople
1456 CE First printed Bible
1468– Spanish
1834 CE Inquisition
1475– Michelangelo, artist
1564 CE
1492 CE Spanish
encounter with
the Americas
1492– Spanish
1898 CE colonization of
Western
Hemisphere
c.1500 Professional
CE theatre companies
begin to appear in
various European
countries
c.1500– Kathakali dance
1600 CE drama, India
Introduction: Speech, writing, and performance
Tobin Nellhaus
The focus of Part I is the transition from purely oral culture to
literate culture. Its three chapters cover roughly 2,000 years of
theatre history, from the fifth century BCE to the sixteenth century CE,
in order to discuss performance in the context of oral culture and
several different literate cultures. The importance and functions of
writing varied across the world, and changed over time; as a result, its
relationship with oral culture varied, as did its cultural impact. In most
of the world, writing’s usage and significance were quite limited.
However, due to several unusual circumstances, in the fifth century
BCE writing attained widespread importance in the city of Athens,
Greece. The repercussions could not have been predicted, but they
were vast.
Because of the importance of oral culture, we begin Chapter 1 by
considering storytelling and ritual, two primary types of performance
for over one hundred millennia before writing even existed. Writing
first appeared some time around 3,500 BCE in a region of the Middle
East. A few centuries later, hieroglyphic writing developed in Egypt. It
was learned by portions of the society’s upper echelons; the culture as
a whole remained predominantly oral. As early as the nineteenth
century BCE, a mass religious ceremony in Egypt may have had
elements characteristic of theatre. Next we leap forward
chronologically in order to discuss performance in Central America
and southern Mexico, where conditions of literacy were similar to
those of ancient Egypt. Some time during the fifteenth century CE, the
Mayan people created a performance which commemorated a
historical event and appears to have been more like theatre as we
know it. We then return to the ancient world to examine the rise of
theatre in Athens, where literacy gained a far larger cultural role than
ever before. Like Mayan performance, its topics drew from myths and
known history, but (perhaps uniquely for the ancient world) it
addressed these topics primarily as a way to focus on issues of civic
life. In addition, Greek drama was strongly oriented around texts.
When classical Greek plays became available in the West again 2,000
years later, they were highly influential, and they are performed even
today.
Chapter 2 continues our study of early theatres. Rome in the second
and first centuries BCE sought to imitate the culture of Greece, but its
tragedies turned from civic commentary to sensationalism, and the
comedies shifted from satires toward domestic issues. Eventually
interest swung toward violent spectacles such as gladiatorial combat,
presented to a mass audience in huge arenas. In classical India
(roughly the first through the eleventh centuries CE), theatre was
intended to be both popular entertainment and a source of good
counsel, and the early plays often drew on two major epics for their
narratives. Theatre practitioners in classical India paid exceptional
attention to qualities of performance rather than the dramatic text. In
the fourteenth century CE, a Japanese troupe offering variety
performances came under aristocratic influence and developed a
genre of serious drama, which spread across the country. In the
course of this development, early Japanese theatre absorbed religious
and philosophical ideas. As in India, theatre artists were keenly aware
of performance.
The Rosetta stone displays a decree of 196 BCE in three scripts: ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and ancient Greek.
 Source: © AKG-images, London.
The developments in these diverse parts of the world show the
highly varied interactions and combinations of literary work and
entertainment on the one hand, and elite and popular performance on
the other. Those interactions were rooted in the complex interactions
between oral culture and literate culture, which played out differently
depending on the particular social circumstances.
In Chapter 3, our attention turns primarily to performance in the
context of a significant change in literate culture: the rise of religions
founded on a set of holy scriptures. Judaism was based on the Torah;
Christianity used the Bible, comprising the Torah as the “Old
Testament” and many later texts called the New Testament; and
Islam’s holy book was the Qur’an, a work which assumes knowledge
of the Jewish and Christian biblical literature but is a separate set of
texts. Unlike spiritual documents in other major religions, these books
are considered holy in themselves – unalterable, doctrinal, and even
thought to be dictated or revealed directly by God. As a result, these
texts occupied extraordinary positions within their cultures and played
a crucial role in the cultures’ histories. That situation added to the
complexity of the relationship between oral culture and literate culture
in these societies.
Although the three religions all had a set of holy writings, both
literacy and performance developed differently in each. Judaism and
early Islam considered literacy part of religious practice, although in
some contexts as a support to their oral traditions rather than an
independent mode of communication. Jews were an oppressed
minority within Europe who had limited opportunities to develop
performance practices, but even so, evidence indicates that some
Jews acted, and a play was based on a biblical text. Islam reversed its
stand on education during the eleventh century and (to a greater or
lesser extent) it condemned all representations of people, in theatre
and elsewhere; but important types of performance arose
nevertheless, such as puppetry. Unlike Judaism and Islam, medieval
Christianity had no imperative toward widespread literacy. As in Islam,
however, the Church long prohibited theatrical performance. But in the
fourteenth century the Church began to find theatre useful, and
allowed other types of performance as well. As a result, theatre
developed furthest in Christian Europe. Many of the performances
within all three religions commemorated events within each religion’s
sacred literature, honored major events in the religion’s history, or
enacted the religion’s ideas and values. Within Europe there were also
important types of wholly secular performance such as farce, and
several occasions for boisterous public celebration, feasting, and
release, sometimes involving masks and/or role-play.
The prohibition against theatre throughout the history of Islam, for
over a millennium in Christianity, and occasionally in Judaism raises a
puzzling question: why would a type of performance closely related to
the rise of literacy be banned in cultures that depended on writing?
The hostility toward theatre was occasionally venomous. For example,
a few decades after the medieval Church began encouraging religious
drama in England, an unknown author wrote an almost hysterical
diatribe against it. It is as though theatre’s adversaries found
something fundamentally unnerving and disruptive about acting itself.
Theatre was too deeply tied to the body and a notion of personal
falsity, and so actors were eventually associated with licentious sex
and considered similar to or the same as prostitutes. Such
disapproval, which surrounded theatre for much of its existence,
seems unfamiliar today.
But this antitheatricality is quite old. In Part I we consider the
beginnings of theatre; however, when we speak of the birth of theatre,
it’s important to realize that in the Western world, theatre wasn’t an
only child: antitheatricality was its sibling. Despite its frequent
association with religion, antitheatricality isn’t strictly a matter of faiths
and holy books: it arose soon after the creation of literary theatre itself,
in a polytheistic culture without scriptures. In ancient Athens, the
philosopher Plato (c.428–c.347 BCE), writing at a time when Greek
drama was at its height, strongly condemned theatre, along with
painting, sculpture, poetry, indeed anything that smelled of what he
called mimesis (imitation). In fact, he decried writing as inferior to
speech. Yet paradoxically, despite his distrust of writing, Plato wrote
books, and stranger still, he wrote his books as dialogues – as near to
drama as one can get without actual performance. Most ironically of
all, according to classical scholar Eric Havelock (1963), Plato’s
antagonism toward theatre arose from the way literacy shaped his
concept of rationality. And as Jonas Barish (1981) has shown, these
are not the only peculiarities in Plato’s antitheatrical arguments.
Plato’s prosecution of theatre was based on the belief that true
reality is to be found in abstractions, not in the embodied material
world. From this assumption, Plato staged two fundamental attacks on
the stage. On the one hand, philosophically, Plato construed theatre’s
fictions as lies, or at best, feeble imitations of the truth. Thus theatre
trades in illusions and falsehoods, and the actor in particular violates
personal identity by pretending to be someone else. On the other
hand, moralistically, if truth resides in abstractions, then the mind as
the seat of reason sharply contrasts with the body as the realm of
unreason, passion, pleasures, and desires. Theatre, then, wrongly
encourages audiences to enjoy unruly emotions and improper ideas
instead of conducting rational thought.
Plato’s antitheatrical ideas passed down through the centuries
within Christianity, and they may also be the origin of antitheatricality
in Islam. To a greater or lesser extent, mimesis was seen as an affront
to God. The philosophical and moralistic strands did not always have
the same importance – in fact the moralistic stance was usually
expressed more vigorously – but they were always intertwined.
But why did Plato’s antitheatrical prejudice arise in the first place,
and why did later cultures accept it? Most likely several factors lay
behind the sometimes panicky assaults on theatre in the Western
world. According to Havelock, one reason for Plato’s animosity is that
when writing developed in ancient Greece, it created a break with oral
culture and reshaped the reasoning process. Plato was creating an
analytical, “objective” mode of thought based on literacy, and opposed
to the more “subjective,” participatory oral culture, and mimesis was
intrinsic to orality’s participatory nature (1963: 36–49). It appears that
not only is there a connection between theatre and writing, there is
also a connection between antitheatricality and writing.
Yet as we noted, in Plato’s opinion speech is superior to writing and
more closely aligned with truth and nature. At first glance, Plato seems
to be contradicting himself, opposing oral culture on one hand but
supporting it with the other. However, his opposition was not to all
parts of oral culture, but to its embodied, performative element. In
contrast, for Plato writing was intrinsically objectionable because the
written word is secondary, an imitation (mimesis) of speech sounds –
living speech bore truth. The philosopher Jacques Derrida uses the
term “phonocentrism” to describe this view of writing as mimetic, and it
has persisted even to the present. The logic of phonocentrism, Derrida
observes, leads to antitheatricality, because it construes theatre as
fundamentally mimetic as well. Thus both phonocentrism and anti-
theatricality derived from the phonetic nature of alphabetic writing
(1974: 304–7).
The embodiment necessary to communication in oral cultures
seems to have long been distasteful or outright abhorrent to thinkers
who believed that writing allowed the mind to become disembodied,
creating a sharp body/mind division. However, this aversion arises not
only when thinkers take a phonocentric position, but also when they
prefer the written word. Some people have maintained that drama is
best read as literature, unconnected with performance. The earliest
instance is also from ancient Greece. Despite Plato, theatre remained
popular there, and as a result it wasn’t long before a more positive
view of drama appeared in philosophy: Plato’s former student Aristotle
(384–322 BCE) argued that mimesis and the pleasure we take in it are
vital to human learning, and based on this perspective he wrote the
first dramatic theory in history. But notably, Aristotle preferred the
dramatic text over its performance, reiterating a form of
antitheatricality.
Today, when actors are among the greatest celebrities and can
even become presidents, antitheatricality may seem utterly foreign
and archaic. Closer examination shows otherwise. We saw in the
General Introduction that both “drama” and “theatre” are sometimes
applied metaphorically. Some of those uses are decidedly derogatory.
For example, a person who behaves over-emotionally might be called
a “drama queen.” Public events or statements meant mainly to
impress people are occasionally described as “theatre,” such as in
“The candidate’s demand for a recount was just political theatre” or,
deplorably, “kabuki theatre,” insinuating that a Japanese genre is
especially devious. The modern meanings of “hypocrite” and
“histrionic” have antitheatrical roots as well. (The looser term
“performance” generally has more positive associations.) The
common view that drama should be studied strictly as literature, not in
connection with performance, denigrates theatre as well.
Even in the history of Western theatre, key figures such as the
seventeenth-century English dramatist Ben Jonson and the early
twentieth-century French performer and writer Antonin Artaud have
been sharply conflicted about theatricality. Performance art, a genre
which emerged in the late twentieth century, has always spurned
theatre. Strangely enough, antitheatricality can appear within
theatricality itself.
Thus the history of theatre in the West is shadowed by an
antitheatricality founded on the history of writing. In contrast, generally
speaking, non-Western societies seem to have taken much more
straightforward pleasure in performance. Although people in classical
India, China, and Japan sometimes scorned actors and classed them
with prostitutes just as in the West, they seem to have done so out of a
fear of social disorder or class mixing, not a deep-seated suspicion of
theatre as such. Why they didn’t develop an antitheatrical prejudice is
an open question. The absence of Plato’s influence was undoubtedly
one factor, but probably there were other reasons – perhaps a more
fluid relationship between oral and literate culture. We do not yet
know. But as we begin surveying theatre’s histories, we should be
aware that it has always been dense with complexities rooted in
fundamental communication practices.
*
From oral to literate performance
Tobin Nellhaus
Contributors: Phillip B. Zarrilli, Tamara Underiner and Bruce
McConachie
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-3
Nobody knows for certain how theatre began. Probably nobody ever
will. But we do know some things about the earliest forms of theatre
and about types of performance that preceded theatre. One
increasingly evident element is that performance is shaped by
communication practices. For tens or hundreds of millennia, the
primary mode of communication – and the only one for language –
was speech, usually accompanied by gesture. In oral cultures, the
major forms of performance are ritual and storytelling. As we will see,
characteristics of these performance genres are affected by the nature
of live speech, which fosters certain strategies of thought. Writing first
appeared around 3600–3400 BCE in Mesopotamia (a region within the
Middle East), and slowly spread or was separately invented
elsewhere. However, for thousands of years writing was so embedded
within oral culture that it had few if any cognitive effects. Eventually
new ways of thinking did arise, and with them a new form of
performance: theatre.
But oral modes of performance are by no means “primitive” or solely
part of the past: they are dynamic and adaptable practices that
continue to shape people’s personal and social identities, plus many
other aspects of human thought and culture. Ritual and storytelling in
particular remain important to this day. Likewise, the introduction of
literate culture did not create a form of performance that was utterly
separate from oral culture. The relationship between spoken and
written communication is complex and varies depending on its social
context, and it can be marked by a degree of tension, which
sometimes is visible in performance itself, particularly during the
transition from an oral to a literate culture. The presence of oral
culture in literate culture is one of the primary reasons for discussing
ritual and storytelling when examining the earliest forms of theatre.
 In this chapter we will focus on how the introduction of writing
affected performance, by considering four different communication
contexts. First we will discuss ritual and storytelling in oral cultures.
Then we will turn to a possibly theatrical ceremony in ancient Egypt,
and a play-like performance in Mayan society (located in Central
America and southern Mexico) – two cultures which used writing but
restricted it to a small number of people. Finally, we will look at theatre
in ancient Greece, the earliest society where literacy was relatively
widespread and figured in everyday life. Surveying these four contexts
will suggest how the role and importance of writing varies from culture
to culture, affecting numerous facets of performance. Even though we
may not be able to identify theatre’s origins, these social and cultural
differences can help explain some of early theatre’s known and likely
characteristics.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

The problem of beginnings
Nothing in human society ever sprang from thin air, and so historians often
want to learn how an activity began or what led to it. Starting in the 1870s,
many people have asked that question about theatre, and in particular about
Greek tragedy, for which we have more evidence than any other kind of
ancient theatre. The question has three sides: identifying theatre’s
predecessor; explaining the process of change; and describing the
relationship between theatre and its predecessor.
What was theatre’s predecessor? There have been many answers, most of
them anthropological. Probably the most popular answer has been religious
ritual. One reason for this theory is that, as we will see, Greek tragedy had
some sort of connection to the cult of the god Dionysus in the city of Athens
(exactly what has been disputed). Other people have suggested that theatre
originated in choral songs. But by the 1960s classical scholars had debunked
the original forms of both of these theories because of major problems or gaps
in their supporting evidence, the presence of contradicting evidence, and
significant logical flaws. However, revised versions continue, and we will
discuss a few ideas connected to them. Another answer has been hero
worship, in which people honored dead heroes and kings by imitating events
in their lives. This view has a somewhat stronger basis, but it doesn’t have a
firm grounding in our historical and archaeological knowledge about ancient
Greece. A very different theory came from classical scholar Gerald Else, who
argued that the major precedent for tragedy was a speech by Athens’ leader
Solon, in which he impersonated another man, a precedent that was
developed further by others (Else 1965: 39–45). The evidence here is less
speculative than in the other theories – but what makes Else’s theory work
well for Athens makes it less applicable to other places, which has limited its
acceptance. Other theories have also been proposed.
The second side of any question about predecessors is the process of
change and its possible implications. For example, if we accepted the popular
(but dubious) “religious ritual” theory of theatre’s inception, we should clarify
how the one developed into the other. Did the development occur in a smooth
or incremental progression of a more or less evolutionary nature? If so, then
religious ritual and theatre probably existed (and perhaps still exist) along a
continuum. In contrast, Else’s view involves individuals taking distinct,
innovative steps in order to accomplish something that couldn’t be achieved
with the existing forms of performance. Accordingly, religious ritual wouldn’t
be theatre’s ancestor or origin, merely an antecedent. Theatre could be
fundamentally different from ritual – a revolutionary cultural form. (Some
scholars dismiss the process of change altogether, more or less saying “First
there was religious ritual/choral songs/hero worship, then there was theatre,
therefore there must be a connection even though we don’t know how the
former became the latter” – a version of the post hoc argument discussed in
the General Introduction.)
Finally, one must consider the relationship between theatre and its
predecessor. For example, what does it mean to say that X is the “origin” of
theatre? Is that the same as saying it’s the “earliest type” of theatre? One claim
is that theatre’s origin remains the essence of theatre itself (e.g., “theatre is
fundamentally a religious ritual”). A converse view is that the origin was just
the starting point: theatre was the goal or the final form of the previous activity
(“ritual is fundamentally theatre”). A related position is that the origin of theatre
is what caused it to develop. The validity of this idea depends on what the
origin is thought to be: for example, if religious ritual is the origin of theatre,
clearly it didn’t drive theatre to become a more vigorous form of religion, so it
probably didn’t cause theatre to develop; a type of performance that strove for
(say) social self-reflection would be more likely to generate what we now
recognize as theatre. Theatre’s predecessors could also be the “raw material”
– the familiar activities – that people reworked when they created theatre.
There are still further possibilities. Different ideas about the beginnings of
theatre aren’t mutually exclusive: much depends on what one is examining,
and even on how one defines theatre. For instance, one can reject the ritual
theory of theatre’s origin yet believe that ritual and theatre exist on a
continuum, so that each has qualities of the other. Likewise, one can hold that
certain features are essential to all theatre, including the very earliest, but
something else caused theatre to arise.
Theatre Histories focuses on the connections between the development of
theatre and changes in communication. It seems likely that the activities
involved in writing fostered methods of thinking that conflicted with oral
culture’s typical cognitive strategies, which appeared in cultural forms such as
ritual and storytelling. In some societies the tension between the two modes of
communication grew great enough to require new cultural forms, one of which
was theatre – a fusion of oral performance and written text. But because some
of oral culture’s practices were adapted in order to create theatre, many of its
features continued. Depending on how writing was used in a particular
society, those elements of oral culture either remained more or less central to
culture, or faded over several centuries until the spread of literacy made them
unnecessary or possibly even undesirable. Although we cannot say that this
theory has been definitively proven, understanding oral culture does help us
understand several characteristics of early theatre. As we will see throughout
this book, subsequent changes in communication practices similarly seem to
have led to alterations in later forms of theatre.
Performance in oral cultures
For anyone silently reading this book (and for its authors too), it is
difficult or impossible to completely grasp what oral culture is like
because our own manner of thinking is already shaped by literacy.
People unfamiliar with oral culture sometimes assume it is simply a
relative of literate culture, or view it is a primitive form of thought
devoid of abstraction and logical reasoning. However, studies
conducted in Africa by cultural anthropologists, analyses of epic
poetry from places ranging from ancient Greece to modern Serbia,
and various other types of research have demonstrated that neither
view is correct. Oral cultures can be sophisticated, but their methods
of conceptualizing the world and people’s relationships to it are very
different from those common in highly literate societies. The research
helps us to imagine what life and performance were like in cultures
without writing and reading, and to see that some forms or features of
oral culture exist in every culture today.
Many of oral culture’s characteristics arise from practical aspects of
speech. A living person has to be present to speak, and another there
to listen. Words use tones and rhythms, they can create rhymes or
assonance, they can be spoken softly or loudly. Speech uses not only
the mouth, throat, and chest, but also facial expressions and usually
gestures and other movements, potentially involving the whole body.
One learns from others primarily by listening to them, so the sense of
hearing has special importance. And crucially, speech only exists in
the moment: after that, there is only memory. Consequently, in oral
cultures, knowledge, historical legend, religious beliefs, mythology,
and all other aspects of culture must be passed on by elders and by
“cultural specialists” such as shamans and storytellers.
Memory aids in oral cultures

If knowledge in oral cultures can only be stored in memory

and transmitted through speech, how is that done? Although people in
wholly oral cultures relied on their memories more than people in
literate cultures and excellent memory was often prized, it was
unusual to need verbatim recollection. Sometimes verbatim
memorization did occur; for an example, see the discussion of the
Indian Vedas in the “Primary Orality” essay on the Theatre Histories
website. But in most circumstances, such precision was unnecessary.
The essential goal was to express ideas in a way that made them
easily remembered and easily learned.
Various techniques can aid memory, as we can see from a scene
from the ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey (eighth century BCE),
which was composed orally. The Odyssey recounts the warrior
Odysseus’s lengthy travel home from the Trojan War (which occurred
between Greece and a part of modern Turkey probably during the
thirteenth century BCE; The Iliad tells that story). In this scene,
Odysseus’s son Telemachos is travelling with the goddess Athena in
search of his long-missing father. They arrive at the town of Pylos, and
Athena advises Telemachos to ask Nestor (who knew Odysseus) if he
has heard anything about his father’s fate.
Then the thoughtful Telemachos said to her in answer:
“Mentor, how shall I go up to him, how close with him?
I have no experience in close discourse. There is
embarrassment for a young man who must question his elder.”
Then in turn the gray-eyed goddess Athena answered him_
“Telemachos, some of it you yourself will see in your own heart,
and some the divinity will put in your mind. I do not
think you could have been born and reared without the gods’ will.”
So spoke Pallas Athena, and she led the way swiftly,
and the man followed behind her walking in the god’s footsteps.
They came to where the men of Pylos were gathered in session,
where Nestor was sitting with his sons, and companions about him
were arranging the feast, and roasting the meat, and [skewering]
more portions.
These men, when they sighted the strangers, all came down
together
and gave them greeting with their hands and offered them places.
First Peisistratos, son of Nestor, came close up to him
 and took them both by the hands, and seated them at the feasting
on soft rugs of fleece there on the sand of the seashore
next to his brother Thrasymedes and next to his father.
(Homer 1967: 51–2)
This single excerpt provides examples of many of the strategies that
oral cultures use to preserve and transmit ideas:

Verbal patterns, such as rhyme, rhythm, and formulas. Ancient

Greek oral poetry did not use rhyme, but it did use rhythm, usually
called “meter” (not replicated in the translation). Verbal patterns
may also appear in everyday speech. Maxims, for instance, often
use parallel phrases that can be memorized almost immediately
(e.g., “Early to bed, early to rise”). By putting words to music, a
bard or “singer of tales” patterns language further, which can
increase the retention of cultural knowledge. Set phrases or
“formulas” serve a similar role. In The Odyssey and The Iliad, for
example, one finds recurrent formulas such as “said to her in
answer,” “the gray-eyed goddess Athena” and “rosy fingered
dawn.”
Stereotypical characters, scenes, and stories. Epithets such as
“thoughtful Telemachos” and “resourceful Odysseus” highlight the
fact that characters in oral cultures tend to be character types: the
wise, the evil, the innocent, the furious, and so forth. Character
types do not have personalities in the modern sense: they are not
“deep” or inwardly complex, they do not possess intricate private
lives, nor do they mature with experience. They are “flat” because
their nature is outward and publicly defined – which they must be,
in order to communicate something memorable that can be
passed down through the generations as a tale. Similarly, there
are “type scenes”: standard events such as holding a feast or
receiving a guest (in this excerpt, both), which can be adapted as
needed.
Strong, strange, and symbolic imagery. Character stereotypes
such as those indicated by epithets condense personal traits
down to one or two strong qualities that are readily remembered.
Even more memorable than character types are strange and
unnatural images, such as the many-armed Hindu goddess Kali,
and Greek mythology’s multi-headed monster Scylla. Although
the excerpt above does not involve strange images, many appear
elsewhere in The Odyssey, including Scylla. Such images may
possess symbolic aspects: for example, Scylla probably
represented a geographical location, since she is associated with
the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily; Kali’s arms and
what each hand holds all have religious meanings. Symbolic
elements make it possible for an image to pack a vast amount of
knowledge, which one can recall by decoding the image’s parts.
Narrative development through episodes. Typically, long oral
narratives consist of many episodes strung together. One event
follows another without a necessary causal or logical connection,
just an (actual or implied) “and then.” As a result, one could skip
Telemachos’s visit to Pylos or the Cyclops episode in The
Odyssey without radically harming the overall story of Odysseus.
A narrative constructed from independent modules is easier to
work with than a plotline having a closely knit causal sequence
where skipping a scene could render the story incoherent.
Episodes also allow storytellers to adapt tales to the occasion, the
audience, and the time available. However, sometimes stories
follow a standard structure – another example of patterning to
simplify the work of memory and communicating thoughts. One of
the most common narrative structures involves three steps, often
distinguished by the major characters (such as the “Three Little
Pigs”), personal interactions (lovers meet, separate, and rejoin),
or objects (porridge that’s too hot, too cold, and just right).
Codified gestures, actions, and bodily movements. Customary
physical actions can mark an event as memorable, identify
relationships among people, and enact a culture’s understanding
of relationships among people or between people and the rest of
the world; often they accomplish all of these things at once.
Examples of customary behaviors range from a bow upon
meeting or a handshake that seals an agreement, to the use of
beads (such as a rosary) to repeat prayers a set number of times,
to welcoming ceremonies, to ritual performances involving
 chants, dances, offerings to gods or ancestors, contests, and
other sorts of activities. Inviting a stranger to a feast and giving
them pride of place, as happens in the passage above, is a “type
scene” laden with moral and religious values regarding the
treatment of guests, teaching the audience the culture’s mores.
Our embodied interactions with the world also give us ways of
understanding it. For instance, human bodies are symmetrical,
providing the opposition between left and right, and our sense of
balance, which we apply elsewhere. Other contrasts include night
and day, male and female, hot and cold, and so forth. Thus in oral
culture, ideas and expressions often involve pairing one thing
against another.

The techniques described above are only some of the

features of oral communication, but they show that in order to
preserve ideas, the structure of thought in oral culture must be very
different from its structure in literate culture. But the difference does
not lie simply in how one phrases language or constructs a story. Oral
techniques orient an understanding of the world itself. Characters, for
example, are not simply flat or externally oriented because that’s the
easiest way to transmit them through history: people are actually
understood as being psychologically flat or outward. In Europe, people
only start to have psychological “depth” at the close of the Middle
Ages and particularly during the Renaissance. We will recount that
history in Chapter 5. (To read more about how oral cultures interpret
the world, see the essay “Ritual” on the Theatre Histories website.) Yet
despite these crucial differences, verse, three-step narratives, codified
behaviors, and other features of oral culture continue to play a role in
human culture to the present. This is one example of the way that
cultural elements connected to one mode of communication may
endure when a new mode of communication arises.
Oral cultures vary in all sorts of ways, because many different social
structures play a role in cultural development: economic systems,
gender relations, political structures, religions, and more. But all oral
cultures develop two major types of performance: storytelling and
ritual. Whether they are the “origins” of theatre or part of its “raw
materials,” storytelling and ritual are part of the background of oral
culture that fed into the development of theatre.
Storytelling and ritual in oral cultures
Storytelling occurs in all cultures throughout history. Most tales are
brief, but some can be quite lengthy. Many ancient cultures produced
extended epics, such as Gilgamesh (Sumeria, eighteenth century
BCE), Mahabharata (India, eighth or ninth century BCE), Beowulf
(England, seventh century CE), The Epic of King Gesar (Tibet, twelfth
century CE), and Popol Vuh (Central America/southern Mexico, date
unknown). In an oral culture, everyone would be familiar with many of
the stories that occurred in an epic and probably could link several
together, but in some societies a few people learned numerous stories
and made storytelling their vocation. Often these “cultural specialists”
delivered their stories with musical accompaniment or in song.
Storytellers could become highly skilled not only in recounting tales,
but also in selecting episodes to suit the audience and occasion,
improvising stories, and even commenting on current events.
However, other societies did not develop the specialized role of
storytellers; possibly their economy could not support even itinerant
bards, or the shorter tales in their cultural repertory were sufficient for
their needs.
An example of storytellers today is a notable group in western Africa
(mainly in what is now Mali) known as griots (Figure 1.1). Griots could
be male or female. The earliest reference to them was in 1352 CE, but
they undoubtedly existed much earlier. “Storyteller” hardly begins to
cover their numerous roles: sometimes described as bards or
wordsmiths, they also served (and to some extent continue to serve)
as historians, genealogists, praise-singers, advisors, spokes-persons,
diplomats, mediators, interpreters, musicians, composers, teachers,
and other social functions. While any adult can perform most of a
griot’s general activities, professional griots are more skilled,
knowledgeable, and engaging. They also tell lengthier stories, some
exceptionally long. The longest recorded has almost 8,000 lines of
verse; for comparison, Beowulf has roughly 3,200 lines, and The
Odyssey has about 12,000 lines. The griots’ epics have features
shared by epics around the world – the requirements of this genre are
very consistent, following the techniques described above (Hale 1998:
18–58, 135, 137).
Figure 1.1Mali: this Zoumana hunter is also a fetisher and griot.

Source: © Hemis/Alamy.
Notably, storytellers usually present characters’ dialogues not by
enacting the characters, as an actor plays roles, but via quoted
speech. For instance, in the scene from The Odyssey that we
excerpted above, there are the phrases “the thoughtful Telemachos
said to her in answer” and “Then in turn the gray-eyed goddess
Athena answered him.” The storyteller quotes what the characters
said, rather than speaking as them. Sometimes the quoted speech is
lengthy, such as when Odysseus recounts his voyage. Within his
story, Odysseus himself quotes others’ speech in the same manner.
Only occasionally do storytellers directly speak as a character. Since
the 1970s theatre has occasionally used quoted speech, but normally
actors speak as the character. This is a significant distinction between
storytelling and theatre. However, theatre shares storytelling’s focus
on narrative.
Along with storytelling, a crucial form of oral culture is ritual. Ritual is
a form of performance that draws participants’ minds to ideas and
feelings that have special social (often religious) importance. Rituals
are essential for preserving a culture’s memory of its identity,
character, and beliefs. Both oral and literate cultures have rituals;
literate societies can accomplish many of the same ends in other
ways, but they still have rituals. Rituals can honor spiritual beings such
as gods, spirits, or ancestors; conduct a rite of passage to mark an
important life change such as puberty, marriage, or death; affirm or
create a relationship toward someone (e.g., to a king or a guest) or a
social commitment (an oath, an agreement); spiritually purify a space,
object, or person; demonstrate power; confer political office; and serve
many other purposes.
There are varying interpretations of ritual’s primary social function,
such as building cohesion within a society, hiding or justifying
oppressive social relationships by giving them supernatural
explanations and meanings, or creating opportunities to negotiate and
sometimes transform social relationships. Whichever function(s) ritual
serves, most societies require cultural specialists to lead them. At one
end of the spectrum are shamans, who mediate between humans
and the spirit world, heal people, and know most of the culture’s
mythology and history – but often live like everyone else in the village.
(Occasionally most of the villagers can perform some shamanic
duties, so the degree of specialization can be slight.) At the other end
of the spectrum, a distinct priestly class arises with high entrance
requirements demanding years of preparation through chants and
other practices.
Ritual interests many people who study theatre because of its
performative, “theatrical” character. In contrast to storytelling, rituals
may involve the impersonation or embodiment of deities, which is
similar to the enactment of character in theatre; however, unlike both
storytelling and theatre, rituals usually present or refer to very brief
narratives, such as a single incident from a lengthy story already
known to the participants. Rituals usually involve a special set of
symbolic objects, words, or sounds (such as drumming), which create
an element of spectacle. Often there are well-established rules of
procedure or behavior, but sometimes the rules are loose, and ritual
events can even provide a license to playfulness and misbehavior.
The case study on Yoruba ritual presents an interpretation of the
Egúngún masquerade highlighting the importance of play. As we will
see, Egúngún also incorporates many of the discursive techniques of
oral culture.
Case Study Yoruba ritual as “play,” and “contingency” in
the ritual process
Phillip B. Zarrilli
Aiyé l'ojà, òrun n'ilé.
("The world is a market, the otherworld is home.")
(Drewal and Drewal 1983: 2)
If this world is a market, and one’s permanent residence is the
otherworld, then life in this world is contingent and transitory. For the
Yoruba, life in this world is a constant process of balancing or “playing”
with and between opposing forces. The term “Yoruba” has been used
only since the nineteenth century to identify a large, socially and
culturally diverse set of subgroups speaking many dialects of Yoruba.
The Yoruba peoples are spread across the coastal region of West
Africa (Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria) (Figure 1.2). They are also in
diasporic communities in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.
Figure 1.2Map: The Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin, West Africa.
 Balance and symmetry (which, as we have noted, frequently appear
in oral cultures) are central to Yoruba religion and are embedded in all
aspects of Yoruba life – dance, speech, and ritual. Traditional Yoruba
deities who have boundless energy and provoke action are classified
as “hot,” and must be counterbalanced by those who are “cool” –
“whose strength is in the patience and gentleness they radiate” (Ajayi
1998: 38). Ésù, the capricious trickster god of the crossroads, and
Orúnmìlà, the god of fate, are two opposites who complement one
another, as reflected in the Yoruba’s primordial creation myth. Dances
of all types are informed by an aesthetic of balance and symmetry – in
practice, a constant process of shifting between right and left. Indeed,
Yoruba society does not expect rigid conformity, but “appreciates
occasional lapses and personal idiosyncrasies” (Ajayi 1998: 29). This
is also evidenced in the delight people take when engaging in both
èdà-òrò (inverted discourse) and in the indirect handling of the “truths”
of riddles and proverbs – a trait some Westerners ethnocentrically
deride as “never straight forward” (Ajayi 1998: 31).
Some rituals are highly prescriptive in form, inviting absorption of
ritual specialists in the intricacies of the repetition of highly codified
scores. While all rituals have a structure, not all ritual structures
possess a rigid score. Indeed, Yoruba ritual practices are founded on
the transformative possibilities of ritual becoming a “journey” for its
participants. Through ritual, deep learning may occur by “playing” in
the moment.

The concept of Yoruba ritual (ètùtu) encompasses

“annual festivals (odún), weekly rites (òsè), funerals (ìsinkú),
divinations (idafa), and initiations and installations of all kinds” (Drewal
1992: 19). As Margaret Thompson Drewal explains, Yoruba say they
go to “play” ritual, that is to say they spontaneously “improvise” dance
steps or rhythmic patterns, and improvise through parody, elaboration,
or invention. Some forms of improvisation are obvious, such as when
the Yoruba incorporate in their Egúngún [EH-goon-goon] masquerade
festival (described below) parodies of Western behavior or dress,
using tuxedos or Second World War gas masks, for example.
Journey as a metaphor for this contingent life is embedded in all
Yoruba ritual, as reflected in the final two lines of these verses by
diviner Kolawole Ositola:

We are going in search of knowledge, truth, and justice . . .

We are searching for knowledge continuously.
(Ajayi 1998: 33)

This is not a journey from predetermined point A to point Z, but rather

a life-long processual journey of exploration and discovery through
which consciousness is to be transformed.

Egúngún masquerade spectacle

The masquerade spectacle Egúngún, which honors the spirits of
ancestors, is one of the many forms of Yoruba ritual. On publicly
announced dates set by diviners, Egúngún festivals are organized by
Egúngún societies and held in the open air in villages or towns
annually, biannually, or on the occasion of a funeral. Each occasion is
unique, with great variation in the numbers and types of masked and
unmasked performers that appear, in the order of performance, and in
the type, range, and quality of audience engagement. During
performances, the spectators’ attention is drawn to what is happening
in particular (often improvised) moments rather than to “repetition of a
stock formal segment” (Drewal 1992: 93).

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Theories of play and improvisation
In her study of Yoruba ritual, Margaret Thompson Drewal asserts that “playing
is the power Yoruba actors exercise in transforming ritual itself, and indeed it
may be more precise to say that ritual structures, or strategies, have no
existence apart from the tactics, or play, of actors. It is in play that ritual’s very
efficacy resides” (Drewal 1992: 28). Here Drewal is counteracting many earlier
anthropological accounts of ritual that overemphasize structure, convention,
rigidity, and the role that “rules” play in the efficacy of ritual.
 Drewal adopts an “actor-centered approach” focused on “the relationship
between actors and the forms they operate on” (Drewal and Drewal 1983: xvi).
She locates the “power” of ritual not in the structure, but in the active
engagement of the individual “actor” within the experience of the structure as
it is performed/practiced. Drewal emphasizes the way in which the Yoruba
people situate the contingency of “playing” and improvisation as central to
both their worldview and their engagement of ritual structures. Her analysis
relates to the general theories of play as developed by sociologists Johan
Huizinga (1970), Roger Callois (1979), and Brian Sutton-Smith (1997). Theories
of play emphasize the enjoyment of engaging, stretching, and breaking rule-
governed activities. Given its ephemeral mode of engagement “in the
moment,” this idea of “play” is usually lost in the writing of theatre histories.
But the joy of “playing” or “attending to play” is central to the moment of both
ritual and theatrical performance. An “actor-centered” approach to the study of
performance histories necessarily will mean attempting to understand and
interpret what cultural actors experience and how they engage in the moment
of performance/practice.

Egúngún begins at night in the center of the town when a spirit (Agan)
“brings the festival into the world” (Drewal and Drewal 1983: 2).
Egúngún society members invoke the elusive Agan into the world by
using percussion instruments to simulate the “actual dynamic
qualities” Agan possesses. He is likened to the “[small, quick, light,
drizzling] . . . early night rain” (1983: 2–4). It is forbidden that anyone
see Agan’s entry into the world; therefore, all non-members must lock
themselves in their houses as Agan is beckoned. The first rhythms
played on the bata drum summoning ancestors or deities for this and
other festivals are called alùwási, literally “drums come into the world.”

Egúngún is an opportunity for the unseen ancestral

spirits to visit. Performers are understood to possess àse, the
“activating force or energy” (Drewal and Drewal 1983: 5), with “the
power to bring things into existence” (Drewal 1992: 90). Egúngún
performances weave together a series of equal, but quite different
stylistic and thematic segments (modules), each of which has its own
independent origin myth.
Figure 1.3The masks worn in Egúngún are called idan, literally meaning
“miracle.” The “miracle” depicted here represents Gorilla, a character that figures
significantly in Egúngún origin myths. Egbado area, town of Imasai, December
23, 1977.

Source: Margaret Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, p. 161, by kind permission

of Indiana University Press.
These myths are available to the performance as source traditions,
but each occasion of performance is a completely unique negotiation
of that past with the present. Drewal witnessed the appearance of four
maskers in a performance in the Nigerian town of Imasai, one of
whom appeared as the Gorilla (Inoki ), with “naturalistically carved
wooden testicles and a penis painted red on the tip” (Drewal 1992: 93)
(Figure 1.3). He represented a character that features significantly in
the Egúngún origin myth in which a gorilla rapes Iya Mose, who
thereby gives birth to a half-human, half-monkey child. The child
eventually grows up to be “‘One-Who-Brings-Sweetness’ to the
community” (Drewal 1992: 92). At this performance, Gorilla “sneaks up
behind unsuspecting women in the performing space, raising his penis
as if he is going to rape them” to the sound of the drums (sabala-
sabala-sa-o) simulating the sounds of Gorilla’s sexual movements.
Because the attention of spectators was focused elsewhere, the
Gorilla masker was able to catch out women in the audience, much to
the amusement of the other spectators.
We can see the underlying creativity and sense of play informing
Yoruba ritual in many other examples of improvisational intervention,
especially when a segment of Egúngún is a competitive performance
where individual skills and techniques are tested. So fluid is an
Egúngún masquerade that master performers “continue to refine their
skills,” while “neophytes learn in plain sight of everyone” (Drewal 1992:
89). At the end of the festival, a spirit known as Aránta or
Olodúngbódún “carries the spectacle back to the otherworld” (Drewal
and Drewal 1983: 4). The playful improvisation at the heart of Yoruba
practice points to an important dimension of many historical forms of
ritual. It has allowed the Yoruba to creatively interact with and respond
to neighboring peoples by creating items such as the mask of the
Hausa Meat Seller, or to changing historical circumstances, such as
the introduction of Islam and European colonialism. The modern play
Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) by Nigerian playwright and
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka (discussed in Chapter 13) incorporates
Egúngún as part of his critique of European colonialism.

To read more about ritual and shamanic performance,

see the essay “Ritual Places and Performances” and the case study
“Korean Shamanism and the Power of Speech” on the Theatre
Histories website.
Key references
Ajayi, O.S. (1998) Yoruba Dance, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Apter, A. (1992) Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of
Power in Yoruba Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Callois, R. (1979) Man, Play, and Games, New York: Schocken
Books.
Drewal, M.J. and Drewal, M.T. (1983) Gelede: Art and Female
Power Among the Yoruba, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Drewal, M.T. (1992) Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Huizinga, J. (1970) Homo Ludens, New York: Harper.
Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Performance in oral cultures with writing
Writing has a complex history and has taken a variety of forms. The
basic systems are logograms, syllabaries, and alphabets. Logograms
use a simple image or (frequently) an abstract symbol to represent a
whole word, the way that ☼ means “sun” and the emoticon ;-) means
“wink.” Syllabaries utilize a character for each syllable, phonetically,
such as ba and ta. And alphabets give each individual speech sound
its own letter, like t and u. We will discuss a few of these below, and
we offer a more detailed discussion of the history of language and the
invention of writing in the essay “Human Speech and Early Writing” on
the website.

In societies where writing developed, it stimulated

economic and cultural growth. In many cases, eventually it also
transformed people’s thinking processes and their methods of
preserving knowledge. The extent, character, and rapidity of that
transformation differed according to the context. In some societies,
writing fostered new forms of performance such as theatre or
something similar to it, providing distinctive ways of encountering
myths, epics, or narratives. This section examines performance in two
ancient societies which used writing but kept it restricted to a small
group of people (generally rulers, scribes, and priests), often for
limited purposes. Important as those individuals often were, their
literacy had little significant impact on people outside the courts and
temples. Our first example of performance in such a culture is the
“Passion Play” of Abydos, Egypt, which may or may not have been
theatre. The second is the Maya’s Rabinal Achi, which in many
respects seems to be a play. At the end of the chapter we will discuss
performance in a society where writing was relatively widespread and
used for numerous purposes: classical Greece.
The sequence of our discussion (Egypt, the Mayan Empire, Greece)
does not signal progress or evolution. For example, there is no
evidence that ancient Greek theatre had once been similar to the
Abydos “Passion Play”: clearly it had a different path of invention.
Instead, we are looking at forms of performance in connection with the
relationship between literacy and orality in three societies. Both Egypt
and Mesoamerica used forms of writing that were difficult to learn, and
literacy extended only to a small elite. In Athens, however, because
Greece used the more assimilable alphabetic script, literacy spread
far more widely than was possible anywhere else at the time. The
differences between these societies’ uses of writing had
consequences for their development of performance.
The ancient Egyptian and Mayan societies had the strongest
commonalities. Public life was organized around elaborate annual
religious festivals featuring commemorative celebrations, rituals, and
other performances, held on specific dates in the sacred calendar.
Some of these performances were highly choreographed and were
believed necessary for maintaining social, civic, and cosmic cohesion.
The idea that performances could have such power is related to the
nature of religion in these early societies, which was less a matter of
personal faith than the duties and actions which the gods or spirits
required in order to receive their due and keep the universe in
balance. To the religions of oral cultures, voice and gesture –
especially in ritual – are themselves powerful, a view that could extend
to other types of performance.
Many early forms of drama or quasi-dramatic activities were part of
commemorative religious ceremonies that celebrated or re-enacted a
fundamental mythological, cosmic, or historical event, or a source of
power. Commemorative ceremonies sometimes provided dramatic
means of encountering a religious power or a past event in the
present, reminding a community of “its identity as represented by and
told in a master narrative . . . making sense of [its] past as a kind of
collective autobiography” (Connerton 1989: 70). Commemorative
dramas may be enacted to honor appropriate deities; to pacify cosmic
or natural forces; to enhance communication with the divine; or to
commemorate mythic, quasi-historical, or historical moments in the
society’s history.
 Although great artistry and imagination may be involved in the
creation of commemorative ceremonies, artistic merit usually isn’t the
primary goal. Rather, these works are performed to enhance the
relationship of the community or the individual to the divine, or to
achieve a ritual purpose. Nevertheless, some early types of formalized
performance are highly sophisticated works of art, combining
enactment, music or song, and dance or movement. They employ
non-realistic modes of representation in acting, staging, and
costuming (including masking and makeup) in order to depict larger-
than-life figures, such as epic heroes, gods, and ghosts, and the
boundaries between spectating and participating may be blurred. We
will see additional examples of commemorative performance in
Chapter 3, most of them in cultures more affected by literacy; here we
will consider two that arose in the context of highly restricted literacy.
Commemorative ritual “drama” in Abydos, Egypt
The religious background
By 3000 BCE, Egyptian civilization had evolved a highly complex set of
religious practices and beliefs. For well over 3,000 years, Egyptian
religious and cultural life exhibited a tolerant polytheistic openness to
the worship of a spectacular array of many deities – gods and
goddesses both old and new, local and foreign. Their myths and
legends were often contradictory. Three distinct but interconnected
accounts of creation existed, each focusing on a different group of
deities and each considered equally valid.
As typical of oral cultures, dualities were fundamental to the
Egyptian worldview, within which chaos was balanced by order. Life
was associated with day and death with night. Their regular alternation
demonstrated how the gods controlled the cosmos. The god Ra was
both the lord of time and the sun-god who ruled the day. His
counterpart was Osiris, ruler of death and the underworld. Death and
life were not two different states, but two aspects of one state;
therefore, life balanced death. The afterlife – an idealized version of
Egyptian daily life – was an underworld (or in some versions, the sky)
where the dead lived as eternally blessed spirits, transfigured both by
their difficult journey to the afterworld and their final judgment by the
great god, Osiris. The daily rebirth of the sun mirrored the constant
rebirth of the dead in the afterlife. In the afterworld, Ra and Osiris
became one. According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead (a text used
for funerals) “Osiris is yesterday and Ra is tomorrow.”
Arguably the most important Egyptian myth is that of Osiris and his
sister and consort, Isis. Before human-time, when Osiris and Isis ruled
the world, prosperity and peace reigned. But Osiris’s brother, Set,
became jealous. He killed Osiris by sealing him in a coffin and
drowning him in the Nile at a location near Abydos, thereby bringing
conflict to the world. When Isis recovered Osiris’s body, Set took the
body from her, dismembered it, and scattered it over the far expanses
of Egypt. Isis and her sister Nephthys (protectors and restorers of the
dead), taking bird form, scoured the kingdom in order to reassemble
Osiris’s body. After Isis located every piece, with the help of other
deities and fanning him with her wings she revived him. From their
union was born their son, Horus, raised to avenge his father’s death.
Osiris left to become ruler of the afterworld.
This legend was central to Egyptian belief in the rebirth of the dead
into an afterlife. In the Egyptian view, Set represented chaos and
Horus the divine nature of kingship, always to be reborn. Osiris, the
god who died and was restored to life, was associated with the annual
flooding of the Nile, agriculture, and fertility.
The commemorative ritual of Osiris at Abydos
Cosmic equilibrium could be maintained only through the cooperation
of the gods and goddesses. Chaos was kept at bay by the earthly
representative of the gods – the pharaoh. As the intermediary
between divine and mortal worlds, the pharaoh (male or female)
possessed the inherent dualities of the cosmos. Only the pharaoh was
empowered to intercede on behalf of humankind; therefore, s/he was
considered the main priest of every Egyptian temple. The pharaoh
was at first regarded as a servant of the gods, but later was
considered divinely conceived and equal to the gods. While alive, the
pharaoh was considered an incarnation of Horus, son of Osiris. When
a pharaoh died, s/he was then identified with Osiris.
The elaborate ritual life of Egyptian temples was based on making
offerings that nourished the gods: food, libations, song, dance,
incense, and annual festivals. Before conducting daily worship or
public ceremonies, priests and priestesses purified themselves by
bathing, chewing mineral salts, and removing body hair. Song and
dance were especially central to worship of Hathor, the goddess of
music, motherhood, and beauty. One hymn describes how even the
king danced and sang before the goddess while wielding a sacred,
golden rattle:
He comes to dance,
comes to sing,
Hathor, see his dancing,
see his skipping!
. . . O Golden One,
how fine is the song
like the song of Horus himself,
which Ra’s son sings as the finest singer.
He is Horus, a musician!
(Fletcher 2002: 83)
Figure 1.4The sacred barque of Amun-Ra in a relief from a temple of Seti I.

Source: Joann Fletcher, The Egyptian Book of Living and Dying

(London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2002), 103.
The Egyptian calendar featured numerous annual festivals,
astrologically determined, during which statues of gods and
goddesses were housed in sacred barques (boat-shaped shrines)
(Figure 1.4). These barques usually were hidden from sight and were
the subject of secret rituals inside temples. When they were taken in
procession by land and water to visit other temples or burial tombs,
the barques were carried out of the temple on the shoulders of priests
and accompanied by dancers and musicians (Figure 1.5), making that
deity’s power present for the people.
Figure 1.5Fragment from a relief from a tomb at Sakkara (c.1250 BCE) showing
women and young girls playing tambourines and clapsticks and dancing at a
festival procession (right), led by a baton-carrying official and other male
officials, their arms raised in rejoicing.

© Cairo/Jurgen Liepe, Berlin.

The deity most honored with great public ceremonies was Osiris,
especially at the main center of his worship in Abydos during the
period of the Middle Kingdom (roughly 2055–1640 BCE). Middle
Kingdom rulers lavished patronage on the cult. Osiris’s statue was re-
housed in a new “everlasting great barque,” constructed of “gold,
silver, lapis lazuli, bronze, and cedar.” Annually, the barque containing
Osiris processed from the temple to the desert site of his tomb and
back again. At the center of this liturgy, lasting days if not weeks, was
a commemorative re-enactment of dramatic moments of Osiris’s story.
The way in which Egyptians understood their place within the world
and cosmos was informed by two suppositions: the assumption that
society was organized around “high centers,” headed by divinely
ordained monarchs, and the assumption that cosmology and history
were indistinguishable. Both assumptions are evident in the
commemorative ritual for Osiris at Abydos (Figure 1.6).
 All that is known about the quasi-dramatic ritual often called the
Abydos “Passion Play” is the information inscribed on a single stele (a
flat stone), dating from the rule of Senusret III (1870–1831 BCE). It
provides a description of the dual roles of the chief priest/organizer of
the festival, Ikhernofert, who was both overseer of the ceremonies and
a participant/actor playing the role of the “beloved son of Osiris.” The
stele reads:
I arranged the expedition of Wepwawet when he went to the aid of
his father. I beat back those who attacked the Barque of Neshmet. I
overthrew the foes of Osiris. I arranged the Great Procession and
escorted the god [Osiris] on his journey. I launched the god’s ship . . . I
decked the ship with gorgeous trappings so that it might sail to the
region of Peker [near Abydos]. I conducted the god to his grave in
Peker. I championed [avenged] Wenn-nefru [Osiris as the re-risen
god] on the day of the Great Combat and overthrew all his adversaries
beside the waters of Nedit. I caused him to sail in his ship. It was laden
with his beauty. I caused the hearts of the Easterners to swell with joy,
and I brought the gladness to the Westerners at the sight of the
Barque of Neshmet.
Figure 1.6Map of Egypt c.1850 BCE.

(Gaster 1950:41–2)
This text is thought not to have been a speech, but rather an outline
of events that were performed over the course of eight days. Other
major “roles” were taken by priests and priestesses, supported by a
large group of “extras” who represented the warring factions of Set
and Horus/Osiris. The “Great Combat” was a spectacular occasion,
with thousands of participants on the two sides. The Greek historian
Herodotus, writing fourteen centuries later, recorded that the massed
armies at a similar event engaged in “a hard fight with staves . . . they
break one another’s heads, and I am of the opinion that many even
die of the wounds they receive; the Egyptians however told me that no
one died.”
Hieroglyphic texts as mnemonic records
Egyptians borrowed the idea of writing (but not the system) from
Sumer around 3400 BCE, before the establishment of the first dynasty
of the pharaohs. They developed a mixed form of writing using
hieroglyphs (“sacred carvings”), a system of logograms which
possessed some phonetic elements. Writing was considered a sacred
gift of the god Thoth, the healer, lord of wisdom, and scribe of the
gods. Egyptians first used hieroglyphs for accountancy and then as a
bureaucratic tool; eventually colorful hieroglyphic inscriptions
decorated tombs and temples and were elaborated with special
symbols and images of animals, birds, and humans to “activate” the
scenes. There were thousands of hieroglyphs, and with less than 1
percent of the populace literate, scribes were a learned, specialist
community. Learning was highly respected, and papyrus texts
devoted to astrology, law, history, mathematics, medicine, geography
and sacred liturgy were stored in great libraries attached to temples.
The reign of Senusret III during the Middle Kingdom “was a time
when art, architecture, and religion reached new heights, but, above
all, it was an age of confidence in writing” (Shah 2000: 183). Many
literary forms flourished. Narratives such as The Story of Sinuhe and
The Shipwrecked Sailor were composed. “Wisdom texts” recorded
maxims on how to gain well-being in life, while “dream books” guided
priests in their interpretation of dreams. Manuscripts such as All
Rituals Concerning the God Leaving His Temple in Procession on
Festival Days recorded sacred words and the correct performance of
rites.
No specific manuscript has been located for the rites of Osiris at
Abydos. If any manuscript had been used, most likely it would have
recorded the sacred words used to animate and honor Osiris; there
would have been no “dialogue” specially authored for the figures
central to the re-enactment. The focus of the performance would have
been on the processional spectacle and re-enactment manifesting the
presence and power of Osiris in his annual going-forth, his conquering
of death, and rebirth. Perhaps the contemporary focus on narrative in
literary works of the Middle Kingdom helped create a climate within
which dramatizing parts of the Osiris story was an obvious means of
enhancing the efficacy of the annual commemoration.
The “drama” of Osiris was like many rituals, and may have
incorporated impersonation of gods as some rituals did. Unlike most
rituals, it probably also possessed the lengthy narrative we find in
storytelling. However, there isn’t adequate information to help us judge
whether it was a type of theatre. Great caution is advisable when
applying modern terminology to ancient forms of performance,
especially when evidence is scarce, in order to avoid
misinterpretation, anachronism, and perhaps ethnocentrism.
Nevertheless it is clear that writing played a role in conceptualizing
and organizing the Abydos “Passion Play.”
Writing seems to have enabled a lengthening and standardization of
ritual through a fusion with narrative, but still within the basic outlines
of oral culture. Even though ancient Egyptian society possessed
writing, and writing was crucial to the elite, ultimately writing was not
the dominant mode of communication. Taken as a whole, it is better to
describe ancient Egypt as an oral culture with writing, rather than a
literate culture.
Mesoamerican performance
The early indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica – a region stretching
from Central America up to southern Mexico (Figure 1.7) – provide not
only another instance of performance in conditions of restricted
literacy, but also powerful examples of the complexity of interpreting
evidence noted in the General Introduction. The Maya and Mexica
(Aztecs) ruled in parts of Mesoamerica until the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries CE, when the Spanish invaded the Americas and
conquered the indigenous peoples. The Mayan Empire reached its
zenith during the Classic Period, 250–900 CE, and writing almost
certainly contributed to its political control and economic growth.
Various writing systems were invented in Mesoamerica. The Mayan
system, which most likely arose around 500 BCE, combined
characteristics of logograms and syllabaries. But Mayan writing has
only been partly translated, and we know little about its usage and the
extent of reading and writing skills in Mesoamerica. The symbols
changed over time and some had only local usage, but it seems that
during any one place and time, scribes probably needed to know
around 250 signs. As in most ancient societies, only the scribes could
write with much facility, although occasionally non-elites may have
acquired some writing ability as well. Writing was read aloud, and
most of Mayan culture and knowledge was transmitted orally. The
scribes often sought to demonstrate their virtuosity, yet the
pictographic aspect of Mayan writing may have made it interpretable
(if unpronounceable) to a much larger population – highly
advantageous in a multilingual region like Mesoamerica. In this
manner Mayan writing may have unified a large region within a single
political and administrative control.

Figure 1.7Map of the Mayan and Aztec Empires in Mesoamerica.

Performance was integral to Mesoamerican societies. Evidence

from pyramid walls and the few extant sacred books point to a
vigorous Mesoamerican performance culture before the Maya had
writing (Tedlock 1985: 151–2). Rigorous training in music and dance
was normal for boys and girls from ages 12 to 15 and took place in
“houses of song.” Rulers performed “a ‘princely dance’ on special
occasions,” and priests “embodied god-figures” (Tedlock 1985: 358).
Performances could involve thousands of highly skilled performers
who “used elaborate and highly colorful costumes, masks, body make-
up and, at times, puppets and stilts. The sets were lavishly adorned
with arches, flowers, animals, and all sorts of natural and artfully
designed elements” (Taylor 2004: 357). Performances were usually
outdoors in public spaces (courtyards and temples), although some
were in private patios.
The religious imperative for performance in Mesoamerica
Mesoamerican public celebrations always combined religious and
theatrical elements. Performances in the festivals were set against the
great architectural spaces of Mesoamerican cities, which included
massive pyramids. These temples were regarded as the “navel of the
world” and “the human-made equivalent of nature’s mountains . . .
forming a living link that conjoined the heavens above, the earth, and
the underworlds below” (Tedlock 1985: 364). Public ceremonies were
synchronized with the movement of heavenly bodies, making cosmic
time palpable and elaborate calendar-keeping essential. The
performances were not entertainment, but offerings to the gods.
Mesoamerica’s highly theatricalized ceremonies fulfilled a key
purpose: to keep the lines of communication open between humans,
their ancestors, and the gods they worshipped.
In many cultures the world over, an essential component of such
communication has involved sacrifice, usually of animals. Among the
Aztecs and occasionally among the Maya, these ceremonies could
include human sacrifice. Recently scholars have begun to wrest an
understanding of the meanings and purposes of this fact – human
sacrifice – away from the perspective of the Spanish military and
missionaries, and attempt to grasp what it might have meant to the
peoples themselves. According to performance studies scholar Diana
Taylor, human sacrifice
reflected the belief that there was no firm division between life and death.
. . . The sacrificial victims would be joining the gods, at times taking
messages from those on earth, while the victims’ energy and force would
be transferred to others on earth through the donning of the skin. Notions
of continuity and constantly recycling life forces, rather than cruelty or
revenge, sustained these practices. The Mayas, for example, referred to
certain forms of sacrifice as ahil (acts of cre ation).
(Taylor 2004: 361–2)

Religious rites create a synergy between the divine and human

realms. If the gods sacrificed themselves for humans as the world was
formed, then the gods require similar sacrifices in return. Sacrificial
rites performed by divinely ordained priests or kings maintained the
social and cosmological orders mandated by the gods at the time of
creation. Human sacrifice was therefore considered a necessity.
Taylor’s reference to “the donning of the skin” suggests how some
Mesoamerican peoples understood such theatrical concepts as
“embodiment” and “representation” in ways that are both similar to
and different from European understandings. When the Aztecs
wanted to honor their creator-deity Quetzalcoátl (the feathered-
serpent god who gave his own blood in order to usher in the current
incarnation of the human race, and the inventor of books and the
calendar), they purchased a slave, who for 40 days was fêted, feasted,
and worshipped as the god. At the end of the 40 days, the slave/god
would be sacrificed in a public ceremony, in which his heart would be
cut out and his body rolled down the temple steps. The body would
then be skinned and the flesh donned by various onlookers, who
became Quetzalcoátl while in the skin of the slave/Quetzalcoátl.
According to Adam Versényi, the ritual accomplished several things at
once; first, it re-enacted the god’s original sacrifice on behalf of
humanity; second, it performed a real sacrifice of human blood in
honor of the same god; and finally, it allowed the
spectator/participants to be at once themselves, their fellow
(sacrificed) man, and their god. As Versényi describes it, this rite and
many others represented “a conflation of the entire matrix of
actor/character/audience” (Versényi 1989: 219).
At the same time, as Taylor points out, “The massive performance
festivals . . . made visible the very real economic and military power of
a state that could afford to sacrifice hundreds – even thousands – of
victims. . . . These spectacular synchronized acts were fundamental to
maintaining power” (Taylor 2004: 364). Taylor’s comments suggest that
by describing sacrifices as “acts of creation,” Mesoamerican rulers
rationalized their use of violence, undoubtedly believing the
rationalization themselves. In this example we see how evidence can
have multiple meanings and reveal multiple social purposes.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

The multiple meanings of evidence
Mesoamerican performance and the complexities of writing its history provide
rich examples of the ways a single piece of evidence is frequently embedded
with multiple meanings and can serve as evidence about a variety of social
practices and concerns. There is nothing unusual about the presence of
multiple meanings, known as polysemy: in fact there are several ways in
which evidence and activities can be polysemous.
The example we have just seen, in which the concept of ahil (acts of
creation) simultaneously played a role in the Maya’s religion and cosmology,
but probably also helped Mayan rulers justify their use of violence and horror,
illustrates one sort of polysemy. The function of ideas as part of a society’s
understanding of itself and its world, and also as an expression of power and
self-justification, is scarcely limited to the Maya: in fact it is prevalent in most
societies. It is common, for instance, in the expansion of national power
through imperialism. The Spanish conquerors of South and Central America
used the claim of Christianity’s superiority over indigenous religions in just
such a manner: they truly believed in Christianity and its preeminence, but
they also saw it as a rationale for killing Mayan people, suppressing Mayan
religious practices while imposing their own, and censoring Mayan culture, all
of which secured the conquerors’ power. The term ideology points to such
connections between ideas and power. (Later chapters will discuss
imperialism and its ideologies in more detail.)
Another type of polysemy involves ambiguity. One of the chief problems in
understanding Mayan performance is the fact that much of our evidence
comes from descriptions by the invading Spaniards, who were unfamiliar with
the cultures of the people they conquered and described what they saw in
terms of their own concepts and values. In addition, they generally weren’t
interested in learning about the indigenous people’s culture – in fact the
conquerors destroyed as much of Mayan culture as they could. Consequently
the Spaniards’ descriptions may be distorted and biased; they may tell us
more about the Spanish than they do about the Maya. At the same time the
descriptions cannot be written off. Some (possibly even all) parts may be
substantially accurate, and they are almost all we have to guide us. As a result
of these complexities, the documentary evidence about Mayan performance
has uncertain meaning and value.
Activities can have multiple meanings in other ways. One of them is familiar
to anyone who pays attention to politics. Proposed legislation (say, to cut
taxes or to expand access to education) aims to address policy concerns – it
strives to move the government and sometimes the entire society in a
particular direction. At the same time it often seeks partisan goals, by
advancing one political party’s standing with the electorate, or placing its
opposition in an awkward position. Sometimes, which of these goals is
foremost is an open question. As a result, one cannot take the legislation at
face value: there may be hidden agendas behind it. A variant of this type of
polysemy can be seen in consumer culture. A car is a means of transportation
– but one’s choice of car (say, a Porsche versus a Volkswagen) can be partly
a matter of obtaining a status or sex symbol. In short, an artifact or document
may be polysemous because it can serve multiple practical and social
functions.
Finally, every cultural object is the product of numerous processes. A
book’s text, for instance, can tell us many things about a culture’s ideas and
beliefs. In addition, however, its physical characteristics hint at the society’s
manufacturing capabilities, and its design may suggest what the society
considers attractive (or whether it sees attractiveness as necessary for that
object). Thus a piece of evidence can tell a historian a variety of things, or be
used for a range of historical investigations.
These are only some of the ways in which evidence often has manifold
significance, and offers historians a wide variety of investigative opportunities,
complexities, and interpretations.
Sung dance-drama: Rabinal Achi

While sacrificial rites performed by priests or kings

maintained the social and cosmological orders mandated by the gods,
more secular forms of performance were also common in
Mesoamerica, entertaining the people and maintaining their collective
memory. Farces ridiculed those who were ethnically different. In a
“dramatic interlude” from central Mexico entitled “Song of the Little
Women,” several concubines debate the pros and cons of living a life
devoted to satisfying male prerogatives. Sung dance-drama, which
incorporated music, song, and dance, celebrated collective and
individual histories and glories. One important Mayan song-dance-
drama, Rabinal Achi [drah-vee-NAHL ah-CHEE], commemorated
certain political and military events in the history of the town of
Rabinal. The history of its performance is also an example of the
suppression of indigenous systems of belief and cultural
performances that came with Spain’s conquest of the New World.
Rabinal Achi is a K’iche’ (also spelled Quiché) language song-
dance still performed today in the highlands of Guatemala. It is known
both as Rabinal Achi, meaning “The Man of Rabinal,” and Xajoj Tun,
“Dance of the Trumpets” – a reference to the fact that during parts of
the performance characters dance to the playing of trumpets. It is one
of few extant plays with Mayan rather than Spanish dialogue. It relates
the story of conflict between the noble warriors and leaders of two
Mayan city-states, K’iche’ and Rabinal, that reached a climax in the
early fifteenth century, before the arrival of the Spanish.

The primary historical incident around which the

performance score for Rabinal Achi evolved is the story of a famous
king, Quicab – a member of the lineage of the house of Cawek of the
Forest People. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Quicab ruled
a confederation of the Rabinal, Cakchiquel, and Tzutuhil nations in
what is now Guatemala. While Quicab was away on a military
campaign expanding his kingdom, there was a revolt at home. One of
those involved was his fifth son, who may have been the historical
figure on whom the character Cawek in the drama is based.
In the play, the main characters are Lord Five Thunder, ruler of the
mountaintop fortress of Rabinal; the Man of Rabinal (serving at his
behest), who upholds the traditional order; and the renegade who
disrupts that order, Cawek, the son of the Lord of K’iche’. All three
wear distinctive helmet-masks and carry axes and shields, symbols of
royal power (Figure 1.8). Cawek’s father was a noble who fought
alongside the neighboring city-state of Rabinal. Rabinal’s boundaries
are guarded by Eagle and Jaguar, priests in the service of Lord Five
Thunder, whose names are taken from the source of their spiritual
power to protect. At Lord Five Thunder’s court reside his wife and his
unmarried daughter, “Mother of Quetzal Feathers.” Cawek becomes a
renegade warrior when he betrays the people of Rabinal, causing
much suffering. As the drama opens, Cawek has already betrayed his
father’s former allies and been captured by Man of Rabinal. The
drama presents the confrontation between Man of Rabinal and Cawek
in the context of Cawek’s trial. Cawek remains defiant toward his
captors throughout, but accepts death by beheading at the end of the
drama. Before dying, he is allowed to view aspects of the world he will
leave. He is shown the lovely daughter of Lord Five Thunder and
shown dances depicting the beauty of nature.
Everything we know about Rabinal Achi derives from evidence
dating after the Spanish conquest of the Mayan Empire during the
sixteenth century. Some of the evidence comes from accounts of
performances seen through the Spanish colonizers’ eyes. Most
Spanish missionaries were wholly uninterested in the Maya’s own
views, but they recognized that the participation of the people in
annual cycles of ceremonial performances (at which dramas like
Rabinal Achi were performed) had great meaning for the Maya, and
they attempted to suppress and/or alter the performances by a variety
of means. They insisted that Christian hymns be substituted for Mayan
songs, and as early as 1593 and as late as 1770, they issued bans
against indigenous plays, “warning that representations of human
sacrifices would lead to real ones” (Tedlock 2003: 5). The bans,
however, were never wholly successful. The Spaniards also
introduced Christian biblical theatre from medieval Europe, possibly
affecting indigenous performance.
The Maya never used their own system of writing to record what
performers spoke in their performances. It was only under the
influence of Christian missionaries that the Maya wrote down “texts”
like Rabinal Achi in their own language, using the Roman alphabet.
The missionaries had created handwritten scripts for the European
Bible and saint plays that they introduced, translating some speeches
into local Mayan languages. These alphabetic texts contained details
and content never included in the older Mayan hieroglyphic texts.
Anthro pologist Dennis Tedlock attributes these differences not to
alphabetic writing per se, but to the fact that indigenous authors were
responding to the missionary suppression of their performances and
“the destruction of hieroglyphic texts.” In order to save Rabinal Achi
from complete censorship, the Mayan scribes separated the words of
their play from its music, and removed “all but the main outlines of the
original religious content from public view” (Tedlock 2003: 2). The
Mayan scribes “sought to conserve the audible words of endangered
performances for which those books provided prompts” (2003: 158).
Figure 1.8Rabinal Achi, or the Man of Rabinal, a conjectural image similar to
that of an eighth-century lord found in the Mayan Temple of the Inscriptions at
Palenque (not depicted). He wears a feathered headdress, mask, short cape,
and kilt, and he carries an upraised axe and a small round shield.

Drawing by Jamie Borowicz. © Dennis Tedlock.

Their “texts” of the sixteenth century were, then, written as records
of oral performances and, according to Tedlock, are more like “a set of
program notes than a libretto” (2003: 158). They are not single-author
works but collectively created, mnemonic records of performance,
which participants would have elaborated upon in the moment of
performance.
The available evidence does not provide a fully accurate picture of
pre-conquest Mayan performance, and we may never be able to
apprehend the full scope, nature, and content of their drama.
Nevertheless, the performances of Rabinal Achi in Guatemala today
hint at what Mayan drama might have been like before the Spanish
conquest. Today and probably historically, the theatrical conventions
of Rabinal Achi are presentational – not representational or realistic.
The audience is located on four sides of the playing space. “When the
actors dance, they move around the perimeter of a square, and when
they promenade they move in a circle. These pathways locate them all
in one world” (Tedlock 2003: 14). The distinctive rhythms of the Mayan
calendar are suggested in the counter-clockwise movements within a
square, together with their temporal marking of the 260 days of the
divinatory calendar during which Cawek says farewell to his homeland
by moving “on all four edges/in all four corners.” The overtly religious
aspects of the performance today are the primary responsibility of the
play’s “Road Guide” – the native ritual specialist or priest-shaman
whose prayers and offerings circumscribe and punctuate the
performance. The actors deliver lengthy speeches as solos, similar to
the renderings of ancient Mayan court songs. The main characters
narrate more events from the past than they re-enact in the dramatic
present. There is no fast-paced, realistic dialogue, and actors never
attempt a conversational tone. When the Man of Rabinal captures
Cawek with the rope he wears around his waist, he does not
realistically lasso him, but rather, the two remain still and a stage
assistant appears and ties the end of the rope carried by the Man of
Rabinal around his prisoner.
Rabinal Achi never adopted the convention used in the later
Spanish missionary plays, in which enemies are depicted in costumes
indicating two different worlds – one “evil” and the other “good.”
Instead, the antagonists dress alike, and their arguments are shaped
by a shared, rather than opposite set of values. One of the opponents
may be misguided or wrong but he is not, as in the later dramas of the
Christianizing missionaries, “evil” or living in “falsehood.”
At the end of the drama, Cawek is executed, which is depicted in
modern performances as a beheading. To show this, the captive
kneels, and other characters dance around him. In a simple and
unhurried manner, those with axes simply bring them toward but not to
the prisoner’s neck. Immediately following his “beheading,” the
performer stands, and joins the other dancers in a final collective
dance. Shoulder to shoulder, they dance westward until they reach the
foot of the steps leading to the door of the cemetery chapel. There the
actors all kneel, and the Road Guide leads them in a prayer to their
ancestors (Tedlock 2003: 19).
While contemporary performances of Rabinal Achi seem to bear
strong traces of pre-conquest practices, there also is evidence that the
drama has changed over time. For example, anthropologist Ruud van
Akkeren (1999) has suggested that originally Cawek was likely put to
death by arrows rather than by beheading. When and why it changed
in performance is unclear.
Rabinal Achi seems to have different representational goals than
the “drama” of human sacrifice described above. It commemorates a
historic military conquest that resulted in a consolidation of power. In
the Mayan Empire, such conquests featured ceremonial executions,
which served as proof of their power. According to Tedlock, today’s
Mayan actors are speaking to and for their ancestors as much as to
and for anyone else, including all those who ever acted in the play.
Acting in this play, then, is not so much a matter of impersonating
historical individuals – as if their lives could be relived in realistic detail
– as it is a matter of impersonating their ghosts (Tedlock 2003: 14–15).
 As a representation of Mayan royalty and culture, Rabinal Achi does
reflect some pre-conquest local history. But its impulse is less toward
full historical accuracy and more toward commemoration of the town
of Rabinal’s triumphal origins and ongoing cultural survival, as
symbolized in its ability to withstand an internal threat to its cohesion.
Instead of portraying an actual battle between ancient enemies, the
enactment presents a montage of fragments of royal stories from
across six different generations, gathered into the singular
confrontation between the Man of Rabinal and the traitor Cawek.
Generic character names allow the story and its examination of the
power negotiations between rulers and city-states to remain open to
interpretation.
Episodes from the history of royal lineages were the subject of
many other pre-Spanish Mesoamerican dramas. In all such plays, the
actors represented the main characters through costuming and
dancing, while dialogue was sung or chanted by separate choruses
(group performers) to musical accompaniment.
Rabinal Achi shares certain features with commemorative dramas
elsewhere, of which we will present several more examples in Chapter
3. Like most commemorative dramas, Rabinal Achi tells a story that
has been carefully preserved both orally and in written form; it
celebrates a moment in the past that is of great contemporary
importance for the audience in the present who witnesses it; and it is
meant to be staged on a regular basis as an aid against the loss of
that heritage in social memory. In addition, however, commemorative
performances in Mesoamerica were understood not as
representations but as doing something fundamental in the world.
Whether Mesoamerican commemorative performances constitute
theatre is, according to Taylor, a matter of dispute among Latin
American specialists (Taylor 2004: 366), but clearly it shares many of
theatre’s features.
Although Rabinal Achi was heavily censored in the early days of the
Spanish conquest by missionaries suspicious of its “pagan” content, it
survived and is meant to be staged every year on January 25 (the
feast day of the town of Rabinal’s Catholic patron saint, Paul). Its
importance beyond the Mayan world is evidenced in the fact that in
2005, UNESCO officially proclaimed it a “masterpiece of the oral and
intangible heritage of humanity.”
Performance in a literate culture: Theatre in the city-state
of Athens
We have seen the divine god-kings of Egypt locate authority in a
single person and produce festivals honoring gods like Osiris. In
Mesoamerica, scattered kingdoms shared a culture and religion, and
produced commemorative dramas such as Rabinal Achi, constituting
something close to theatre, although (unlike Western theatre)
addressing the gods and understood as an actual intervention in the
universe. A very different way of negotiating the relationship between
divine and civic authority, and between the cosmos and history,
developed in Athens, Greece during the fifth century BCE, where
distinctive forms of literary drama and theatre flourished. The forms of
drama that developed in Athens may be said to have been “dialogic.”
That is, they represent conflicts over cultural issues that would have
invited social, political, and aesthetic debate.
Figure 1.9Map of the eastern Mediterranean during the fifth century BCE.

We have far more information about theatre in classical Athens than

any other early theatre: documents, the remains of buildings, pottery,
engravings, and over 40 plays. One reason we have so much
information is the spread of literacy itself: documents provide much of
our evidence. Yet there are many tantalizing and frustrating gaps in
our knowledge. For instance, we know who did something important
for the development of theatre and the year in which they did it, but
only vaguely what they did. We do know, however, that Greek theatre
emerged during an era of major changes in political structures,
economic systems, and communication methods.
Alphabetic writing and Athenian democracy
In the eighth and ninth centuries BCE, epic bards like Homer recited or
sang their own versions of lengthy stories of the gods and epic heroes
of bygone eras, such as The Iliad and The Odyssey. Their
performances gave life to the deeds of a heroic aristocracy, populating
a murky, distant, quasi-mythic, quasi-historical past. By the end of the
fifth century BCE, however, the most important storytelling no longer
appeared in solo oral epics or lyric poetry: instead it was composed in
tragedies or comedies in which multiple actors performed characters
and spoke dialogue, and the chorus, with choreographed dancing and
singing, played a central but slowly diminishing role. How and why did
this revolution occur? The nature of Greek alphabetic writing and the
creation of an early form of democracy both played a part.
The alphabet started developing when, around 1200 BCE, the
Phoenicians began to use a letter to indicate the initial consonant
(somewhat like a syllabary) but let the appropriate vowel be inferred
by context. This approach radically reduced the number of characters
needed to represent speech to just a couple dozen, making the script
almost alphabetic. Thus unlike logograms, with thousands of
characters which could only be learned through long study (frequently
by priests and scribes alone), or even syllabaries which commonly
had two or three hundred (still requiring significant need as well as
time), alphabets and proto-alphabets had few enough symbols to be
quickly learned by anyone – a great advantage for a trading people
like the Phoenicians. However, because vowels had to be inferred,
Phoenician script sometimes created ambiguity, which was resolved
by inserting an extra consonant symbol to indicate the correct vowel.
The Phoenicians traded throughout the Mediterranean, bringing
their script with them. Probably around 850 BCE, the Greeks adopted
Phoenician script. However, Greek has a large number of initial
vowels, consonant clusters, and combined vowels (such as the a, mn,
and ia in amnesia). Those weren’t easily represented by the
Phoenician script, even with its ad hoc approach to indicating vowels,
so the Greeks introduced letters specifically for vowel sounds and
used them systematically. That created the first full alphabet, which
breaks speech into individual vowels and consonants. Although the
script wasn’t perfect, writing became more or less unambiguously
phonetic.
However, many features of modern writing weren’t invented for
centuries. There was no spacing between words, no upper and lower
cases, little or no punctuation, not even clear indications when the
speaker in a play changed. Just as in other early cultures with writing,
reading aloud – even in private – was both a cultural norm and a
practical necessity.
The social contexts of the alphabet’s development gave it
advantages beyond clearly representing speech. The socio-political
structures of ancient Greece were radically unlike those of its major
neighbors (see Figure 1.9). The lands to the east belonged to the vast
Persian Empire, Greece’s adversary in many wars. To the south lay
Egypt, by then ruled by the Persian Empire, but which still rang with its
own history as a 3,000-year-old centralized empire. In contrast,
Greece consisted of autonomous city-states, including Athens, Sparta,
Thebes, and Corinth, that vied with one another for ascendancy and
occasionally joined forces in alliances to face a common external
threat, such as when they fought the Persians in 479 BCE.

The small-scale political structure and independence of

the ancient Greek city-state (polis [POH-lis]) probably worked against
the restriction of literacy to an educated bureaucracy; for instance,
literacy seems to have been relatively high in Sparta, even though
writing was disdained and relegated to just a few uses. Moreover,
struggles for land redistribution had been endemic throughout Greece,
during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. In many cities, an
autocrat (tyrannos) took control and implemented some of the
demands. Athens, however, attempted to stave off autocracy by
appointing Solon as a mediator during 594–591 BCE. Solon
established a constitution that reduced aristocratic power, and he
encouraged commerce and artisan manufacture – an approach that
ultimately affected the prevalence of literacy in the polis. This history
factored strongly in the development of theatre.
Despite Solon’s work, beginning in the 560s a general named
Pisistratus seized power. He was ousted several times, but in 546
BCE, he began an enduring rule. He strove to tilt power from the
aristocracy to the state by helping the lower classes, supporting
popular religion and festivals, and promoting mercantile activity.
Pisistratus was succeeded by one of his sons, who was deposed in
a coup in 510 BCE. After further tumult, Cleisthenes gained leadership
in 507 and led the polis down a unique path. In order to distribute
power and prevent autocracy from ever rising again, Cleisthenes
abolished the hereditary tribes, replacing them with ten civic tribes
based on place of residence. He also established legislative bodies
and courts with members chosen by lottery. Athens became the first
democracy.
Two aspects of Athenian society contributed to the rise of literacy
there. Merchants and shopkeepers, although disparaged, were
exceptionally important to Athens’ economy, and they found the
simplicity of the alphabet enormously useful. Even more important
was the democratic structure. Citizenship in the new democracy was
restricted to male Athenians, excluding slaves; at its founding,
perhaps 20,000 citizens in all. But all citizens were called upon to fulfill
civic obligations as soldiers or sailors, athletes, participants or
spectators at annual religious festivals – and crucially, as legislators,
debaters, judges, or jury members, which encouraged literacy.
Athenians grew increasingly interested in skillful public debate and
oratory. At the same time, the legal and legislative need to consider
issues from varying perspectives fostered diversity of ideas, which
extended to all areas of thought – such as the view that the world is
not governed by the whim of the gods but instead by natural,
intelligible forces (although atheism per se was rare). Newly
developing modes of education emphasized persuasive argument and
eloquence, and some teachers, known as Sophists, expounded on
their innovative and sometimes unconventional views. Instructors
wrote manuals on persuasive oratory, called the art of rhetoric (technē
rhētorikē, “speech art”). In this sense, writing in fifth-century Athens
enhanced some forms of oral communication since speeches were
given extemporaneously – no orator would ever speak from a
prepared text, but by studying rhetorical techniques he could become
a masterful speaker.
 The interaction of speech and writing was so essential a part of the
city’s democratic life that in the fifth century BCE, boys were required
to attend school, where they learned writing, music, and mathematics.
By the fourth century BCE, writing had attained further cultural
dominance. Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) Art of Rhetoric demonstrates
how the invention of writing led to an organized, abstract analysis of
speech itself.
Although in most of Greece probably no more than a few percent of
the population was literate, in Athens it spread more broadly, possibly
over 10 percent, and found many new applications. The cultural
impact was profound, and according to classics and theatre scholar
Jennifer Wise, by the fifth century BCE there was a literacy revolution
in the city. “Everyday life was so overrun with books . . . that cheap
editions of philosophy could be picked up from the bookstalls for a
drachma” (Wise 1998: 21). The first literate culture was born. The
circumstances in which that happened tell us much about the meaning
of performance there.
The creation of democracy spurred not just literacy, but also theatre.
As we will see, Greek drama drew from the same well of debate over
civic matters as did the democracy. And as part of their civic duties,
the wealthiest citizens were expected to undertake major
responsibilities such as maintaining a warship, equipping a religious
procession – or financing a chorus, which meant underwriting the
production of a set of plays at the annual theatre festival honoring the
god Dionysus.
The religious background
We mentioned that Pisistratus promoted popular religion in Athens. As
in Egypt and Mesoamerica, ancient Greek religion was polytheistic.
Within the Greek pantheon, a complex host of anthropomorphic gods
and goddesses vied for power, prestige, and influence. The gods all
had their own spheres of influence, and embodied a complex set of
ways in which the Greeks understood their world. Greek gods
behaved and misbehaved much like people, and they were often in
conflict. However, each needed to be appropriately honored,
propitiated, and worshipped to access their potential beneficence or
prevent their wrath.
Panhellenic gods (such as Zeus and Apollo) were recognized
throughout Greece, while other gods had narrower local significance.
Most cities had patron gods, often panhellenic: in Athens’ case it was
Athena, goddess of wisdom, justice, military and heroic achievement,
and art and artisanal skills. But another god figures prominently in the
history of Athens and its theatre: Dionysus, the god of wine. He was
said to have dwelled in Athens for a time, and the cult of Dionysus was
highly popular there. As David Wiles puts it, Dionysus “is associated
with darkness, with nocturnal drinking bouts, and the loss of mental
clarity in moments of collective emotion, with the loss of boundaries
around the self experienced in a crowd.” Dionysus plays music on “the
haunting double oboe which can whip up wild dances” (Wiles 2000: 7–
8). He was strongly associated as well with freedom and intoxicated
abandon – in fact the full name of the amphitheatre built in his honor is
the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus, “Dionysus the Liberator.”
Athens’ democratic government officially sponsored the cult of
Dionysus and established festivals in tribute. These festivals became
occasions for theatrical performance.
Drama in the context of the Dionysian festivals in Athens

The theatrical performance of tragedy and comedy in

ancient Athens also needs to be understood in the context of the
civic/religious ceremonies and festivals of which theatre was a part.
Fifth-century Greek theatre was woven into the fabric of civic/religious
discourse. Greek festivals typically included processions, sacrifices,
celebrations, feasting, and the performance of choral laments – group
singing and dancing. Some also included competitions, particularly
athletic contests; later, especially in Athens, there were also
competitions in what we now call the arts (in classical Greece, the arts
weren’t separate from religion and other aspects of the culture as they
are today).
 Starting in 566–565 BCE under Pisistratus, every four years the
Panathenaia festival honored Athena. Following a great procession, a
new dress was presented to clothe the image of the goddess. Athletic
contests were included, and a team event called the pyrrhic – a martial
dance in which the dancers wore the full armor of the ancient Greek
foot soldier and executed military movements. Additional competitions
eventually included solo recitations of works by Homer, and musical
contests.
There were four major Dionysian festivals annually: the Rural
Dionysia, which was the oldest; the Lenaia; the Anthesteria; and the
largest, the City (or Great) Dionysia, which was second only to the
Panathenaia in importance.
The City Dionysia was crucial in the history of Greek drama. It has
an uncertain history: it was long thought that Pisistratus established it
to curry favor with the populace, that competitions in tragedy were
instituted in 534 BCE, and that the first winner was Thespis, who is
also said to be the first known actor. Now, however, many classical
scholars believe that the City Dionysia and the cult’s state
sponsorship were established later, probably 503–501 BCE – after the
Athenian democratic state was formed. According to this theory, the
City Dionysia was part of a program to celebrate and strengthen the
new democracy by taking advantage of Dionysus’s association with
liberation. If so, Thespis’s performance in 534 BCE must have
occurred elsewhere, possibly at a rural Dionysia (Connor 1989). In
either case, the City Dionysia hosted the major drama competitions.
Eventually all of the Dionysian festivals included dramatic
performances.

The City Dionysia In Fifth-Century Athens: Probable Order Of Events

Day 1 Procession of the statue of Dionysus
Dionysus’s arrival in Athens from the nearby town of Eleutherae was re-
enacted. After a ritual sacrifice, Dionysus’s statue was brought from a temple
near Eleutherae in a procession to his temple in Athens, at the base of the
Acropolis. The procession was probably conducted by a group of young men
(ephebes) in the midst of their military training. They offered another sacrifice
at the base of the Acropolis, within the sacred precinct of Dionysus’s temple.
Afterwards, the playwrights and their choruses who were competing in the
tragic competition were introduced to the public and the subject of their plays
announced.
Day 2 Dithyramb competitions
Dithyrambs [DIH-thih-ram] were performed – choral songs and dances in
honor of Dionysus, first regularized in Corinth around 600 BCE. Dithyrambic
competitions started in Athens in 509 BCE, before the establishment of the
City Dionysia itself. Each of Athens’ ten civic tribes sent performers with a
poet who composed/choreographed the year’s entry. These works were
danced and sung by two choruses of 50 – one of younger boys, and a second
of mature men. Although the verses were originally dedicated to Dionysus, the
contest was eventually opened up to honor other deities.
Day 3 Comedy competition (added in 486 BCE)
Five different playwrights competed with comedies that offered keen satirical
commentary on current socio-political matters, such as war, education,
politics, the legal system, or even tragic poetry. The comedies of Aristophanes
freely caricatured well-known individuals, including Socrates the philosopher,
Cleon the politician, and even the greatest of the fifth-century writers of
tragedy, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. (We discuss all of these
playwrights below.)

Days 4, 5, and 6 Tragedy and satyr play competition

Important civic-religious ceremonies were held before the assembled public
on the day of the opening of the tragedy competition. These included the
display of tributes by outlying cities under Athenian rule and the appearance
of young men in full military dress, whose training was provided by Athens
after their fathers had died in battle in service to the state. Citizens who had
benefited the polis that year were honored as well.
The playwrights then presented their sets of four plays (three tragedies and
a final satyr play, described below), probably one set by each playwright per
day. Each set was an original interpretation of a Greek heroic narrative or
historical event.
Probably on the last day, the judges announced the winners of the tragedy
and comedy competitions and awarded prizes. At the end of the festival,
officials held an open public assembly to receive any criticism of the
proceedings, including complaints about the plays selected or the judging.

The City Dionysia began with a raucous procession, celebrating the

coming of the god Dionysus to Athens. This was followed by sacrificial
rituals, civic ceremonies, and competitions in choral songs and
dances, and competitions of tragedies and comedies. The procession,
which began just outside the geographical boundary of the polis,
incorporated the citizens of Athens as well as visitors. It opened with a
complex series of events, civic and religious, and the theatrical
performances are best understood within the fullness of this civic and
religious context. The probable order of events is described in the box
above.
The City Dionysia had not only religious significance, but
tremendous economic, military, and political meaning as well. At its
height in the fifth century, Athens was the leader of an alliance of
cities, which turned into an empire. The member cities paid their
tributes during the City Dionysia, and the Athenians made a show of
their military prowess. For example, the second-year cadets put on a
public demonstration in the theatre of their “hoplite military
manoeuvres [combat exercises in battle dress] and close-order drill,”
while at least 36 of those in their first year were selected to perform as
the chorus members in each of the three sets of tragedies (Goldhill
1990: 22–3). The philosopher Chameleon described choral dancing as
“practically a manoeuvre in arms and a display not only of precision
marching in general but more particularly of physical preparedness.” It
is these young “citizen soldiers in training” who are depicted on the
famous Pronomos Vase (Figure 1.10) as members of the chorus in a
satyr play.
The degree of direct civic participation as performers is staggering.
Some 2,500–3,000 citizens took part in the processions, ceremonies,
rites, or dramatic competitions constituting the festival. For the choral
dithyrambs alone, each of ten tribes organized 50 boys under 18, and
50 men aged 20–30, totaling 1,000. The three days of tragedies utilized
between 36 and 45 young men (at first 12 and later 15 in each chorus)
and nine mature men to play the speaking roles (three for each
playwright). These facts are in keeping with the view that the City
Dionysia celebrated Athenian independence, democracy, and empire.
Figure 1.10This Greek vase for mixing wine, dating from the late fifth or early
fourth century BCE, is famous for its theatrical figures, perhaps a company who
performed a trilogy and satyr play. Called the “Pronomos Vase” after Pronomos,
the aulos player seated at lower center, it shows (top center) the god of theatre,
Dionysus, Ariadne (his wife), a muse, and to the sides, mature actors holding
their masks – one costumed as a king, one as Herakles (with club), and the third
as Silenus (leader of satyrs). Below left, is a playwright (with scroll) and a choral
trainer (with lyre). The young beardless men (ephebes) are costumed as satyrs
with erect phalluses.

Drawing by E.R. Malyon from the Pronomos Vase. © Museo

Nazionale, Naples.
Space and performance in the Theatre of Dionysus
The civic, political, and religious importance of the City Dionysia is
emphasized by where the plays were performed. Originally the
performances were given in the marketplace at the foot of the
Acropolis, the promontory at the center of Athens that served as both
a stronghold and center of public life, on top of which stands the
Parthenon. Later, the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus – a large
outdoor amphitheatre – was built at the base of the Acropolis on the
downward slope near the temple of Dionysus (Figure 1.11).
 During the fifth century, the theatron [THAY-ah-trohn]
(“seeing place”) was roughly divided into three sections, according to
classics scholar David Kawalko Roselli (2011) (Figure 1.12). The
theatron itself provided seating for 3,700–6,000 people. Each tribe’s
Council sat in a special section at the front, along with generals,
foreign dignitaries, priests, and other honorees. In the rest of the
theatron, spectators paid to sit on wooden benches behind them. But
outside the official seating area, at least a thousand more people –
including poor citizens, resident foreigners, and probably some slaves
and women – found free seating on the hillside, in trees, and
elsewhere. Many foreign visitors attended as well, increasing the
festival’s prestige.
Figure 1.11Aerial photo of the Acropolis showing the Theatre of Dionysus (lower
left) and the Parthenon (top).

Source: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Figure 1.12Model of the early classical Theatre of Dionysus at Athens.

Photograph after Hans R. Goette, in E. Pöhlmann, Studien zur

Buhnendichtung und zum Theaterbau der Antike: Studien zur
Klassischen Philologie 93, ed. M. V. Albrecht, 1995. Model: © Christian
Schickel by order of the Deutsches Theatermuseum, München.
Photograph: © Christine Sandt by order of the Deutsches
Theatermuseum, München.
In 430 BCE, 40,000–60,000 men were citizens of Athens, during a
period when the entire population was around 300,000. If one assumes
somewhat conservatively that between the theatron and the hillside
seating, 6,000 people attended each performance, then at least a tenth
of Athens’ citizens and about 2 percent of its residents attended the
City Dionysia each day – not counting the performers. (A similar
percentage would total around 165,000 residents of present-day New
York or London.) The audience’s size is another measure of the
intense civic engagement in the festival.
The audiences responded vigorously to the quality of performance.
Good shows received enthusiastic applause and accolades – but
spectators in ancient Athens had no patience for poor performance or
playwriting, and sometimes reacted with hissing, clucking, stomping,
and prolonged noise-making. Occasionally actors and dramatists
were driven off stage. Putting plays in a competition required
audiences to judge the performances’ artistic quality as well as their
content. Unlike performance in a more ritual context, aesthetic merit
most needed to please not the gods, but ordinary people.
But as theatre’s popularity climbed, insufficient space created so
many problems and even fistfights that in the fourth century BCE, the
hillside was reshaped and benches were extended up the slope,
allowing 14,000–17,000 people to attend (Figures 1.13 and 1.14). As
classicist Rush Rehm notes, the theatron became “less a building than
what we would call landscape architecture” (Rehm 2002: 37).
However, because all seats now required payment, far fewer poor
citizens and non-citizens could attend, until a fund was established to
assist them.
Figure 1.13Model of the Theatre of Dionysus after its expansion in the fourth
century BCE.

Photograph: Hans R. Goette.

All performers in Greek theatre were male, including those playing
female characters. The earliest form of tragedy, probably created by
Thespis, consisted of a single actor before a chorus. It wasn’t until
some decades later that the playwright Aeschylus added a second
actor, and possibly the third as well, each of whom would play several
roles. Three actors became the maximum permitted.
 The Pronomos Vase (Figure 1.10) shows several actors for a satyr
play holding masks. Masks were an essential part of classical Greek
theatre. None of the original masks from the classical era still exists,
but vases, later masks, and other evidence suggest that tragic masks
had formalized, expressionless faces. Comic masks, however, could
present caricatures, grotesques, or even animal or bird heads. The
mask in Figure 1.15, although later, is probably representative. Comic
costuming was probably based on everyday wear, occasionally
altered for amusing effect, and included a phallus. We have little
information on tragic costumes, except that they included a tunic and
sometimes a long or short cloak.

Figure 1.14The Hellenistic theatre at Epidaurus (340–330 BCE), showing the

theatron, orchestra, and parodoi (see double gates right and left at the ends of
the theatron). At the top of the circular orchestra, archaeologists have laid out
remaining fragments of the rectangular skene. The extant Greek stone theatres
were built in the fourth century and after, although they likely derived some
features from fifth-century theatres.
 Photo © Gary Jay Williams.
Music was a constant part of all performances. Played on a double
pipe called an aulos that sounded somewhat like an oboe, music was
essential for dancing the choral odes and probably accompanied
individual speeches. Other instruments, such as the harp shown on
the Pronomos Vase, were occasionally played as well. Musical styles
may have had specific emotional associations for ancient Greek
audiences, deeply shaping their responses to performances.

The case study “Classical Greek Theatre:

Space in Oedipus the King” on the Theatre Histories website offers
more details on staging in fifth-century Athens.
Figure 1.15Theatre mask dating from the fourth or third century BCE. On display
in the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens, housed in the Stoa of Attalus. This
mask was created after the death of the major Greek playwrights.

Source: AKG-images/John Hios.

The plays and playwrights
Only 44 plays survive from the classical era, written by Aeschylus
(c.525–c.456 BCE), Sophocles (c.497–c.405 BCE), Euripides (c.480–
406 BCE), and Aristophanes (c.448–c.387 BCE). They constitute a tiny
fraction of the 2,100 or more plays performed between the
establishment of Athenian democracy and Aristophanes’s death; we
have titles for about a quarter of them, but most are now unknown. A
vast number of them were destroyed during a disastrous fire at the
Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, probably around 274 CE. The
extant plays exist only as copies dating from the Middle Ages.
During the City Dionysia, on each of the three days designated for
tragedy, a playwright presented three dramas (initially, complete
trilogies; later, separate tragedies) followed by a satyr play; on the day
for comedy, five playwrights competed with one play each. The
playwrights staged their own dramas and thus had no need to write
out separate stage directions or other directions for the performers.
The actors probably learned their lines from the author reading the
text aloud.
Greek tragedies weren’t plays that end with a terrible event.
Although they have a tragic situation at their heart, some close on an
affirmative note. Many address the history and character of Athens
itself. The Oresteia by Aeschylus – the only complete trilogy to survive
– drew on one of the stories about the aftermath of the Trojan War,
and culminated with a new (and chronologically impossible)
mythology of how Athens replaced cycles of vengeance with a
superior, democratic judicial system. In Sophocles’s Oedipus at
Colonus (probably the conclusion of another trilogy), Athens takes
Oedipus under its protection as an act of mercy, and his death
sanctifies a cave near the city. Euripides’ The Bacchae shows
Dionysus’s terrifying power as he exacts vengeance on the king of
Thebes for having disregarded him. Dionysus works his female
followers into a frenzy in which they rip the king’s body limb from limb.
Although the play concludes with this horrific (off-stage) event and
other punishments, its subtext points in another direction: according to
one legend, originally Dionysus came to Athens from Thebes, so
Euripides implicitly honored Athens’ success at giving the god his due.
The Bacchae is unusual in one respect: it is about Dionysus.
According to classical scholar Scott Scullion (2002), we have titles for
about 500 Greek tragedies, but less than 4 percent concerned the
wine god, and the extant plays seldom refer to him. Nearly all Greek
tragedies, including the earliest ones, are about secular personages.
When Dionysian ecstasy arises in the action or language, which
occurs only occasionally, it is usually treated ironically, as premature
or misguided joy. Sometimes Athenian audience members at the City
Dionysia scoffed that the plays had “nothing to do with Dionysus,” but
evidently that was not a problem to most spectators or to the
supervising authorities, otherwise more plays would have made him
their subject.
There are considerable differences between the vision, structure,
and poetic style of the plays of Aeschylus, written in the first half of the
fifth century, and those of Euripides, written in the latter half.
Aeschylus was clearly very religious, but not doctrinal, and he
staunchly supported Athens’ democratic institutions. His work is also
clearly indebted to the Homeric epic tradition. Euripides was
influenced by the development of Sophism, the philosophical
movement that brought disciplined processes of critical thinking to
Athens. Athenians associated Euripides with the philosopher
Socrates, and the poet was a controversial figure. His tragedies
critiqued traditional values and religion, no longer showing reverence
for the heroes and gods of the myths. Yet his plays were highly
popular, especially after his death.
The satyr plays were send-ups of incidents from the same
narrative as the tragedies performed earlier in the day. These farcical,
ribald pieces were named after the satyrs – the half-horse, half-human
wine-drinking companions of Dionysus who constituted the chorus of
these plays. Their costumes (see Figure 1.10) included a horse’s tail,
an erect phallus, and a head-mask with pointed/equine ears, snub-
nose, and wild hair and beard. Only one satyr play survives: Euripides’
Cyclops. The satyr plays were characterized by broad physical sight-
gags and scatological humor.
Fifth-century Greek comedy was no less concerned with public
affairs than tragedy was. The only extant comedies are by
Aristophanes, but his plays seem to have been typical of the genre:
highly satirical, and sometimes bawdy, obscene, fantastical, or absurd.
The targets of its lampoons included politicians, militarists, “oracle
mongers,” and similar figures. Aristophanes caricatured Socrates in
The Clouds, and in The Frogs he made fun not only of Euripides, but
also of Dionysus himself.
Beyond Athens, an independent comic tradition also developed in
Syracuse during the fifth century, but since none of the comedies have
survived, it is impossible to characterize them with any accuracy.
However, the city was a second major center of performance; for
instance, Aeschylus premiered some of his plays there.
Despite the fact that only men could be citizens of Athens, the plays
include many strong female characters. In the surviving tragedies,
they range from Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia to the
protagonists of Sophocles’s Antigone and Euripides’ Medea. The
women in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata protest against war by
refusing to sleep with their husbands. These memorable female
characters are, as Helene Foley has observed, quite surprising in a
patriarchal society in which women were largely restricted to the
domestic sphere (Foley 1981: passim), although some scholars
suspect an underlying misogyny because the characters were
authored by men and played by male actors (Case 1989: passim).

Performances of Greek drama were not simple acts of

affirmation of the values of an ideally homogeneous community.
Rather, the dramatists frequently addressed issues of concern to the
polis, often reworking myths and epic narratives to do so. As such,
they often provoked debates about the polis of the playwrights’
present. Aeschylus’s The Persians (472 BCE), his prize-winning
tragedy on the recent Battle of Salamis, could have been written either
to praise the victorious Athenians or to express sympathy with the
defeated Persians (Harrison 2000: 16–18). In one year, the playwright
Phrynicus (who wrote between 511 and 475 BCE) was heavily fined for
dealing with the painful subject of the Persians’ destruction of Miletus,
a city Athens had pledged to defend but did not. Its fall precipitated the
Persian invasion of 492 BCE.
The ceremonies preceding the performances reinforced the
connections between drama and the polis. The sons of fathers who
died in battle processed in military dress into the same theatre where
Sophocles’s Antigone was played, with its central conflict between the
rules of a state at war and the interests of the individual. Generals
from each of the ten tribes offered ritual libations to Dionysus in the
theatre where Euripides’ The Trojan Women was played. In that
tragedy, Euripides used the story of Greece’s conquest of Troy to
focus on the brutality of war and the suffering it brings to the innocent.
Throughout the fifth century, there was almost no year without an
Athenian military engagement, and the festival ceremonies would
have prompted the citizens of Athens to reflect upon state decision-
making (Winkler 1990: 21).
All of these examples show that Athenians expected their theatre to
stage contemporary cultural issues in its dialogic process, stirring
debate. The subjects of Greek drama ran the gamut: war, justice,
politics, public life, fate, sanctity, and more. The theatre’s roots in
Athenian civic powers and responsibilities were ultimately more
fundamental than whatever linkage it may have had to Dionysus. One
might well call Greek drama political theatre – theatre of and for the
polis.
Greek theatre after the fifth century BCE
Meanwhile, the Sophists were refining methods of argument,
mathematics, and intellectual analysis. History, once the preserve of
tales and epics, began to be written. Some thinkers (Euripides among
them) cast doubt on traditional religious beliefs or even upon religion
itself. Such views indicate that at least among a literate portion of
classical Athenians, a profound change had occurred in their
understanding of themselves and their agency in the world,
specifically concerning the idea that gods played a direct role in their
destinies. The philosopher Plato (c.428–c.347 BCE), on the other
hand, vigorously opposed the Sophists and promoted older
aristocratic values (including, paradoxically, scorn for writing); in The
Republic (c.380 BCE) he imagined an ideal city where philosopher-
kings ruled – and playwrights were expelled, launching a long history
of antitheatrical prejudice in Europe.
At either the City Dionysia in 449 BCE or the Lenaia in 442 BCE, a
competition among tragic actors was introduced, marking public
recognition of the actor’s art. An actor could win despite appearing in a
losing tetralogy. Actors were celebrated or critiqued on the basis of
their day-long performances. By the fourth century BCE when, instead
of new plays, previously authored plays were re-staged and/or toured
other cities, the emphasis shifted further toward celebrating actors
rather than playwriting. Reportedly, the famous late fourth-century
Greek actor Polos performed in the title role of Sophocles’s Electra,
and in the scene when Electra takes the ashes of her brother Orestes
from his tomb, Polos used the ashes of his own recently deceased son
in his performance. According to the story, he “filled the whole place,
not with the appearance and imitation of sorrow, but with genuine grief
and unfeigned lamentation” (Gellius 1927: II, 35–7).
Following Euripides’ death in 406 BCE, Greek tragedy tended to use
somewhat melodramatic plot devices. Only one play from this period
survives. The satyr play seems to have declined, but comedy thrived.
The satiric, smutty, and issue-oriented comedies of Aristophanes’s
time – Old Comedy – gradually gave way to comedies about private
life, such as family, domestic slaves, prostitutes, and love. This more
genial genre was called New Comedy; we will look at it more closely
in Chapter 2.
Nearly a century after the peak achievements of Athenian theatre,
Aristotle gave lectures that have come down to us as the Poetics
(c.330 BCE). He focused on the formal attributes and proper aesthetic
effects of tragedy. Drawing on plays that had won City Dionysia
competitions, he discussed the kinds of plots, characters, and
language appropriate to achieve the effects of a genre he considered
a “natural” form. Sophocles’s Oedipus the King often serves as
Aristotle’s prime example.
Probably Aristotle’s most enduring idea is that mimesis – imitation
or representation of action and characters – is the core of drama.
Aristotle believed there were six constituent elements of tragedy: plot,
characters, verbal expression, thought (the characters’ analyses or
debates), song, and visual elements such as masks and costumes –
in descending order of importance. Plots should be structured in a
linear manner in which one event plausibly or necessarily follows from
another. The best plots, he claimed, involve peripety (a turning point,
such as a reversal of circumstances or a dramatic irony) and/or the
recognition of some hidden fact. Finally, plots should have pathos, a
destructive or painful action. Bad fortune that befalls the protagonist
should not be caused by wickedness but by a serious mistake
(hamartia).

One of tragedy’s chief elements, Aristotle believed, was

catharsis [kah-THAHR-sis], a term that has generated controversy
due to its multiple meanings. Aristotle is frequently understood as
saying that the audience is “purged” of fear, pity, or other emotions.
But he might have meant that the events that caused the emotions
were “clarified,” or that the dramatic action “cleaned” the wrongdoing
that caused the tragedy. His phrasing is too ambiguous for us to know
for sure. In fact there are numerous difficulties in translating the
Poetics; many misunderstandings and much debate have followed in
its wake.
The Poetics is the first known work of literary analysis, and it is
clearly the product of a literate culture – one in which writing is
culturally dominant. Aristotle’s focus is on plays as a genre of
literature, not on theatrical performance (which he considered
secondary or even unnecessary), still less on the plays’ civic and
religious contexts. Although he does take the audience into account
and mentions performance, his attention is largely on literary
structures such as plot and character. Nevertheless, the Poetics
provides clues about the performance context and early history of
Greek tragedy.
The Poetics was unknown in Europe until the late 1500s, but after
that, Aristotle’s ideas were highly influential, and are sometimes drawn
upon even today. As we will see in Chapter 5, Renaissance scholars
portrayed the Poetics as rigidly prescriptive rather than a description
of what Aristotle believed made for effective drama, and it came to be
used pervasively as a model for European dramatic writing and
analysis. Objections to Aristotle’s theories have also been frequent,
beginning in the early 1700s, but increasingly from the end of that
century on. Most of the criticism has been leveled against his views
about plot structure and his indifference toward performance, but all of
his ideas, including the role of mimesis, have come under fire at some
point. Even so, because of its historical role the Poetics is usually the
starting point for studying dramatic theory.
Between the appearance of early tragedy around 540 BCE and the
Poetics two centuries later, Greek culture changed considerably. In
particular, the rise of literacy shaped the development of tragedy, and
of comedy as well. The chorus, which retained many characteristics of
oral culture, slowly lost its dramatic function. Individual characters, in
contrast, were given more “prose-like” and ordinary language as they
increased in prominence. Instead of the episodic, modular narratives
of epics, the drama focused on a single event, and plots were
structured in a linear manner.
We can identify some key changes in narrative resulting from
literate culture as it developed in Athens:

Reduced dependence on verbal patterns. Versification remained;

however, in the characters’ speech (as distinct from the chorus’s),
language became increasingly colloquial and prose-like.
Reduced dependence on formulaic phrases.
Linear, causally oriented narrative structure focusing on a single
event.
A shift in the function of strange imagery to serve the plot rather
than mnemonic needs, as seen for example in the monstrous bull
 that bursts from the sea to kill Hippolytus in Euripides’ Hippolytus.

However, for decades clear elements of oral culture continued in

tragedy, most notably in the choruses whose performances included
dance and song.
Of conquerors and refugees
Classical Greece is often fetishized as the cradle of Western
civilization. The facts, however, are more complicated, because
Athens’ massive cultural influence was not wholly of its own making.
Between 431 and 404 BCE, the Greek city-states of Athens and
Sparta and their allies fought a series of devastating battles called the
Peloponnesian War. The war occurred because Sparta (an oligarchy
focused on military prowess) feared that Athens was growing too
strong and imperialistic. Athens’ defeat was hastened by poor military
strategy and a disastrous plague. The city was never again the
dominant power in ancient Greece.
In 338 BCE, King Philip II of Macedon (then part of northern Greece)
subdued several of the Greek city-states, including Athens, placing
them under his rule. His son Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) –
once Aristotle’s pupil – widened his power over Greece, and then
began a military campaign in which he conquered much of the
Mediterranean region, as well as Egypt, Persia, and parts of India.
Seeking to make non-Greek lands more like Greece
(“Hellenization”), Alexander introduced Athenian culture, including
theatre, throughout the area. Actors became powerful, sometimes
wealthy public figures, and some served as political negotiators or as
ambassadors. At the end of the fourth century, a state official called
the agonothetes – “arranger of contests” – oversaw the choruses and
their budgets, ending the old Athenian tradition of wealthy citizens
supporting theatre as a civic duty. Tragedy fossilized, but New
Comedy grew highly popular.
After Alexander’s death, his empire was divided and eventually
weakened. During the Hellenistic era (317 BCE–27 CE), Rome arose
as the major Mediterranean power. In 148–146 BCE, Rome formally
annexed Greece. Roman authors sought to emulate the glory that was
Macedonia, particularly its culture – that is, Athenian culture.
Eventually Romans lost interest in Greek literature, and after the
city’s fall in 476 CE, little of ancient Greek culture was known in the
West until the twelfth century, when Aristotle commanded attention.
However, it continued to be studied all across the Mediterranean, the
Middle East, and Persia (today, Iran). It might have remained an
“Eastern” subject – but when Constantinople (now Istanbul) was
sacked in 1453, its scholars fled to Europe, bringing numerous
manuscripts with them. Thus the culture of ancient Greece became
part of the West’s Renaissance construction of a classical heritage.
Ancient Athens had a long legacy, but one riddled with lengthy gaps
and many losses, reinterpretations, and misunderstandings. And its
legacy arose when it was no longer powerful. Classical Greek culture
was spread by others, as conquerors’ spoils of war, and the treasured
belongings of refugees.
Summary
For most of humankind’s existence, the spoken word was the
dominant mode of communication. When writing was invented, its
significance and impact varied from society to society, and changed
over time. In some cultures writing served for little more than
bookkeeping and remained thoroughly subordinate to speech.
Elsewhere, such as in Egypt and Mesoamerica, writing played a
significant administrative and (to a greater or lesser extent) cultural
role within the narrow elite of scribes, priests, and/or rulers, but it was
seldom learned among people beyond that group. These were
essentially oral cultures with restricted literacy. In Greece, the
alphabet made it possible for a significant fraction of the population to
learn how to read and write, vastly expanding the uses of literacy. In
Athens, oral and literate communication practices vied for dominance,
leading to numerous interactions, fusions, and juxtapositions as
writing slowly gained the upper hand.
With these changes in communication practices came changes in
performance. The capabilities of oral communication, including the
strategies it requires to preserve knowledge, closely affected the
features of oral culture’s main types of performance: storytelling and
ritual. Among the most notable contrasts between the oral and the
literate strategies were the shifts from modularity to causality or
probability for structuring narratives, and from verse and formulas to
prose-like writing. Oral culture offered principally the collective
performance of ritual, and the solitary performance of the storyteller
before an audience; in ancient Athens, in the very earliest form of
tragedy a single actor stood separate from a chorus (combining
features of both ritual and storytelling), but then additional actors were
added and the chorus slowly declined. The narrative structure and
performer/audience distinction of storytelling were blended with ritual’s
enactment of personages.
But perhaps the most fundamental difference between ritual and
theatre was that performance was no longer viewed as an offering to
propitiate the gods or an act that preserved the balance of the
universe: drama – even if it honored the gods or portrayed their
influence in human life – primarily served as an intervention in human
society. Plays approved or criticized human actions and sometimes
challenged people’s thought, even about the gods themselves.
Although we have no information on how theatre arose outside of
Greece, as we will see in Chapter 2, India, China, and Japan similarly
made theatre a vehicle for human enjoyment and edification. As
writing obtained an increasing social and cultural role, many
characteristics of oral culture continued within theatre (and continue to
this day), but new cultural genres emerged and orality’s role in
performance and in society itself irrevocably altered.
*
Pleasure, power, and aesthetics: Theatre in
early literate societies, 500 BCE–1450 CE
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Contributors: Phillip B. Zarrilli
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-4
As noted in the previous chapter, orality does not end with the
development of written language. Rather, oral traditions not only
continue alongside newer, written texts, but influence (or sometimes
even determine) how these texts are performed. In this chapter, we
will continue the discussion of how written theatre and aesthetic taste
developed in relation to local politics, economics, and cultural
imperatives such as gender and social status. We will look at major
genres in a wide variety of cultures: the Roman Republic (509 BCE–27
BCE) and Roman Empire (27 BCE–476 CE), India (primarily c.200
BCE–c.200 CE), and fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Japan. We will
see that, despite local differences, in each case the intended audience
was not exclusive, and the values and tastes of disparate classes
often mingle.
We begin by showing how some forms of Greek performance were
adapted by Roman playwrights and how Roman comedy and
spectacular entertainments catered to the desires of the masses. We
will see how, as the political and economic situation changed, Roman
tragedy and aesthetics, although intended for a more elite audience,
retained the popular emphasis on spectacle and extreme violence.
We then turn to theatre in ancient India, looking at how significant
cultural epics and the power of local political and religious leaders
created several disparate genres. These culturally distinct genres
mutually influenced each other, arriving at significant new forms. We
will delve into the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa and bhava, which
also has important similarities to contemporary understandings of
audience reception and the actor’s psychology.
The Hindu culture of ancient India gave birth to Buddhism, which
spread rapidly throughout Asia. In Japan, the ruling samurai adopted a
version of Chinese Buddhism, as well as the Chinese writing system
and Chinese Confucian ideology. Theatre artists mingled these
elements with native Shinto thought and with both local and imported
performance practices, creating new genres that pleased both elite
and non-elite audiences. For the samurai rulers, performance was
used to mark their recent victories over other clan leaders as well as to
help legitimate new political and economic realities (including those
that shifted power away from women).

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Roadblocks, detours, and U-turns
In reading any kind of history, most people would prefer a clear narrative with
logical development – a fast lane taking us from point A to point B. However,
as we will see throughout this book, the routes of theatre history are
sometimes tangled, reversed, and not always logical. For example, it doesn’t
seem to make sense, as we shall see below, that the culture of ancient Rome
became more barbaric and bloodthirsty as the centuries passed. Nor does it
seem logical that the samurai culture of medieval Japan should prefer plays
about tragic women to plays about heroic warriors, or that ancient India’s
aesthetic theories should so closely resonate with some of the West’s most
recent ideas. Similarly, a reader might well wonder why the theatres and
cultures of ancient Rome, ancient India, and medieval Japan are included in a
single chapter.
The driving themes of this chapter are the similarities and differences in
social, political, and economic structures of these intensely hierarchical, early-
literate cultures. These forces are not stable, yet in their often twisting,
bending, or forked ways, they – and other forces – influence the course of
theatre’s multiple histories. As we look around these corners, we will search
for possible answers to questions such as how and why theatre develops in
varied ways in different times and places, what forces cause these shifts to
occur faster or more slowly, and why some cultures seem to stop or even go
backwards in a “U-turn” rather than moving forward.

In all three of these cultures, the narration and/or enactment of

performative events continued, whether members of the audience
were literate or not.
Ancient Roman performance: From the Republic to the
Empire
To understand Roman performance, we must consider its debt to the
widespread influence of Greek civilization, even as the brilliance of
Greek theatre declined. Rome, however, was a very different society.
The Roman Republic was divided between two classes, the patricians
(wealthy aristocrats) and the plebeians (ordinary, lower-class citizens).
The classes were strictly segregated, and intermarriage was
forbidden. Only males (eventually including freed slaves and even
non-Romans under Roman jurisdiction) were citizens. The most
powerful branch of the Republic was the Senate. Senators were
almost always patricians who were skilled in the arts of rhetoric and
verbal persuasion. Although plebeians gained political power in the
late Republic, the patricians retained control – sometimes by using
their wealth to buy influence and votes. By the time of the Empire,
however, the political clout of the Senate and its patrician members
had been diluted.
Every Roman institution operated as a sacred patriarchy, and each
family was a state in miniature. The male head of each family (pater
familias) legally held absolute power over members of his household.
For example, in 340 BCE, Manlius Torquatus had his son executed for
disobeying orders during the Great Latin War, even though his son’s
unauthorized attack resulted in military victory. Two types of behavior
shaped and constrained Roman males during the Republican period:
pietas and gravitas. Pietas is usually translated as “respect for elders,”
but also implies respect for authority, loyalty of wife to the husband,
and devotion to the gods. Gravitas (a word related to “gravity”) is
usually translated as “dignity,” and it implies seriousness.
Very few people in ancient Rome (perhaps as few as 10 percent)
were able to read and write. Thus, the spoken word was a crucial
element of performance. Romans remained deeply sensitive to the
power of verbal language that the patrician orators had perfected. In
describing the funeral of Julius Caesar, the Roman historian Plutarch
gives an account of a speech which used rhetorical skill to subtly shift
the audience’s point of view. For an imagined version of this event,
see Mark Antony’s famous eulogy beginning “Friends, Romans,
countrymen, lend me your ears. . .” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
(Act III, sc. 2). All Roman playwrights (even those who wrote
comedies) exhibit such skill with language. Similarly, actors were
valued partly because of their skill in oral presentation.
Early Roman performance: Festivals, games, and mimes
The Romans adapted many aspects of Greek culture. For example,
the Olympian gods were transformed into Roman gods, with Zeus
becoming Jupiter, Aphrodite becoming Venus, and so on. One popular
type of performance adapted from Greece was mime. Mime (not to be
confused with wordless pantomime) was a verbal and physical form of
theatre that originated in Syracuse, a town in Sicily. Mime was
performed as early as the fourth century BCE in Athens. Unlike plays,
which used only masked male actors (cross-dressed if depicting
female characters), both males and female actors (without masks)
performed mime. Some scholars suggest that because the face of the
unmasked mime actor (Greek: mimos; Latin: mimus) was so
expressive, mime fostered the development of a relatively more
realistic acting style than a masked actor might use. Mimes used
monologue, dialogue, dance, song, and skills such as acrobatics to
elaborate on often sexually explicit scenes, political satire, everyday
life, or farcical portrayals of incidents derived from mythology. While
comedy and tragedy could rely on plot devices and the
characterization of masked actors to sustain interest, the unmasked
mime performer relied on his/her expressive physical abilities. In some
ways, mime might be compared to the variety shows, striptease, and
slapstick of vaudeville.

Public holidays in ancient Rome were of two kinds. Those

called feriae were primarily religious and serious, while others were
called ludi [LOO-dee] – “games,” a term meaning both the holiday and
the actual games, sports, and performances that were included along
with religious observances.
 Many ludi were held throughout the year. Some honored various
deities while others were held for secular reasons (such as dignitaries’
funerals or birthdays) or to celebrate military victories. The largest
public ludi, the Ludi Romani (“Roman Games”), was held early in
September to honor the god Jupiter. Although originally celebrated on
a single day, after 220 BCE it expanded, until by 51 CE the Ludi
Romani took place over a period of 14 days, supported primarily by
public funds.
The Ludi Romani far surpassed the Greek Panathenaea in diversity
of events. Chariot and horse racing, boxing, singing, and parades
were joined by bloody spectacles that resulted in the deaths of the
participants. These included gladiatorial combats, staged animal
hunts, and even mock sea battles (naumachia [naw-MAH-khee-ah])
which are discussed below.

Dramatic performances (ludi scaenici, meaning “stage

games”) were first included in 240 BCE. These first Roman plays were
written by Livius Andronicus (c.284–c.204 BCE), a former Greek slave.
Although only fragments of his works survive, we know about his plays
from descriptions written by other Romans. All of his comedies and
tragedies were adaptations or translations of Greek plays, written in
Latin (the language of ancient Rome).
Popular comedy in the Roman Republic
In the decades following Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War, the
broad socio-political satire of Old Comedy, which had lampooned
generals and politicians (exemplified by the plays of Aristophanes),
was replaced by domestic comedies (New Comedy), such as those
written by Menander (c.342–c.291 BCE). Of the more than 100 plays
written by Menander, only two complete or nearly complete New
Comedies survive – The Bad-Tempered Man (also translated as The
Grouch) and The Woman of Samos – and fragments of others (Figure
2.1). Their plots focus on love affairs and family relationships, with
somewhat generic characters defined by gender, age, or class. Rather
than the pointed political messages of Old Comedy, Menander’s plays
reflected everyday events.
Greek New Comedy was reinvented in Rome as fabula palliata –
“plays in Greek dress” and Greek locations. Two Roman playwrights
of note adapted Greek New Comedies from the previous 200 years for
their Roman audiences: Titus Maccius Plautus, known as Plautus
(c.254–184 BCE) and Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terence
(c.190–c.159 BCE).
Plautus transformed Greek New Comedy with his first production,
Stichus, in 205 BCE. Plautus wrote about 130 plays. Of these, 21 are
extant. His adaptations are characterized by a taste for fast-paced,
pun-filled, bawdy, and almost slangy Latin. Parts of his plays are in a
meter designed to be sung to music, making some contemporary
scholars suggest they are actually an early form of musical comedy.
Plautus’s plays also use certain conventions of indigenous Italian
performance, especially Atellan farce (fabulae atellanae) from
southern Italy. Atellan farces were improvised from simple core
narratives, with easily recognizable stock characters weaving together
jokes and comical stage business. For example, the audience would
expect an old man to oppose his son’s amorous adventures and a
slave to cleverly thwart his old master. Both early Atellan farces and
Plautus’s dramas were performed on temporarily constructed wooden
stages set up for each ludi. This simple playing space was not bound
by a realistic depiction of locale or space; it could represent a harbor
front or a street. A scene building backed the playing space, and the
three openings in it serviced many different plots. Since none of these
wooden structures has survived, we do not know if the scene building
behind the ludi stage was temporary or permanent.
Figure 2.1An image probably of the popular Menander, with three masks of
Greek New Comedy: the mask of a young man (in his hand), and masks of a
young woman and an older man or a comic slave. Marble relief sculpture of the
first or second century BCE, after a third-century BCE work.

© 2004 The Trustees of Princeton Museum. Photo: Bruce M. White.

Because dramatic performances took place in the context of public
games, Roman playwrights had to write plays that captured the
attention of a popular audience. This is exemplified in the prologue to
Plautus’s Poenulus. An actor steps on the stage and directly
addresses the raucous audience. In comical language, he orders them
to be silent, to sit still, to stop eating, and to wake up. He forbids
prostitutes from sitting on the stage, old men from clomping around,
and everyone from blocking the audience’s view of the actor. And
because he wants to have a paying audience, he says:

Keep slaves from occupying the seats, that there be room for free men,
or let them pay money for their freedom. If they can’t do that, let them go
home and avoid a double misfortune – being raked with rods here, and
with whips at home if their masters return and find they haven’t done
their work.
(Duckworth 1942: I, 727–8)

Figure 2.2This Roman marble relief shows a performance of masked characters

typical of Roman comedy, including the two older men at left and the young man
at right with a scheming servant at his side. Between them, a musician plays the
double-reed aulos, suggestive of the use of music and song in some of the
comedies. Behind the actors is a door in the façade backing the stage and a
small curtain (siparia), perhaps concealing a painted panel not relevant to this
particular scene.

© Museo Nazionale, Naples.

This prologue reveals how the Roman state/religious festival
context was in essence a “marketplace” where the increasingly wide
variety of popular entertainments had to vie for the short attention
span of its mass public.
Plautus’s comedies, known primarily for the fast traffic of their comic
plots and low antic business, turn the traditional Roman values of
patriarchal order and gravitas on their heads. Those with the least
power in the Roman hierarchy – slaves, wives, and sons – are often
those who win out (albeit the stakes are not large). The reference to
the rod and whippings for slaves in the prologue to Poenulus cited
above reflects the reality that Roman slaves were the lowest among
the low in Roman society – objects with no rights who could be
tortured or killed. In Plautus’s plays, the clever slave often outsmarts
his master. This is an example of “comic inversion” (discussed in the
case study below) or the carnivalesque (discussed in Chapter 3). The
plays depicted silly or impossible events and were not meant to
criticize society (see Figure 2.2).
The later comedies authored by Terence were more constrained
than those of Plautus. Because Terence had been a slave brought to
Rome from northern Africa and educated by a wealthy family, some
scholars suggest that he may have been black or Arab. From his first
production in 166 BCE, Terence followed the model of the Greek New
Comedy, with four of his six extant plays based on Menander’s. He
often combines plots and characters from several Greek sources into
one play. Compared with Plautus’s stock characters, the characters in
Terence’s plays are somewhat more complex. Terence’s language is
often elegant and witty, and less bawdy than Plautus’s.
Despite or perhaps because of these characteristics, Terence at
times had trouble holding the attention of his Roman audience. At the
first performance of Hecya, written for the Ludi Megalenses in 165
BCE, the audience left to go and see the rope dancers. At a second
staging, they left to see the gladiators fight. These examples suggest
that not all of his plays successfully competed with other, more
popular entertainments in the Roman marketplace. Nevertheless, in
terms of the history of European theatre, his plays are crucial. They
became key texts in Latin education during the medieval period, and
they influenced the development of drama and performance during
the early Renaissance.
Case Study Plautus's plays: What's so funny?
Gary Jay Williams, with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Comedy has always been difficult to define. As soon as you explain
why a joke is funny, it stops being funny. In addition, critics and
theorists throughout the world have tended to value “serious” drama
and literature over comedy; however, it is comedy that audiences
more often prefer.
There are various types of comedy, not all of which can be
considered here. Satire, for example, often has a serious or even
political purpose, since it uses exaggeration to point out the flaws,
foibles, and even the corruption of powerful people or institutions.
Parody takes on familiar artworks or their genres and twists the
originals to make fun of them. Farce focuses on wildly improbable
characters and situations, fast-paced action and dialogue, and often
involves mistaken identity and sexual situations. Some forms of
comedy are only comic to specific audiences but are deeply offensive
to others. An example is comedy that uses sexual, physical, or racial
stereotypes. Some people find such comedy liberating and harmless
(“Can’t you take a joke?”), while others feel that it is hurtful to both
individuals and to society (“That’s mean [or racist, sexist, etc.]. It’s not
funny.”).
Aristotle’s Poetics (c.330 BCE), which focuses on Greek tragedy,
only briefly mentions comedy. Nevertheless, what he did say about
comedy has influenced subsequent Western criticism.
Aristotle’s critical method was inductive, reasoning from a number of
specific Athenian examples toward what he believed to be general
principle of drama. Distinguishing between tragedy and comedy, he
reasoned that comedy will be populated by “characters of a lower
type,” while tragedy’s chief characters will be from great and
“illustrious” families (nobility or ruling families) (Else 1957: 376;
Aristotle 1984: 2319, 2325). Aristotle suggests that comic characters,
not unlike their tragic counterparts, are obsessed by some all-
consuming idea that leads to their downfall, but in comedy, this defect
is neither painful nor destructive. Comedy’s home, it follows, is not the
court but the domestic household or neighborhood street. Comedy’s
plots usually involve food, money, sex, or social status. For the Greeks
and Romans, all comedies had a happy ending.
Most comedies share at least some of the following elements:
incongruity, reversal, repetition, misunderstanding, and mistaken
identity. Some of these elements also appear in tragedies, but in
comedy, potentially tragic events are reversed into happy results,
leading to laughter and emotional release (and psychological health)
for the audience. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939) is among those who have written about how laughter and
comedy can have beneficial psychological effects. In the mid-twentieth
century, critic Northrop Frye observed that many comedies end with
some festive ritual, such as a dinner or wedding, signaling the
formation of a stable, new society.
Following Aristotle’s mode of formal analysis, later Western
theorists made distinctions between high and low comedy. High
comedy, also called comedy of manners, generally concerns (and
appeals to) aristocrats or the economically privileged, and it features
clever ideas and witty language. In low comedy, such as farces and
the plays of Plautus, the humor derives from fast-developing events
and physical action, with the body being a major player. The erect
phallus is a standing joke in the oldest of Western comic forms – built
into the costumes of the characters in the Greek satyr plays.
In 1900, French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
summarized various theories of comedy. Many of his examples still
seem to make sense. His main idea was that comedy results from
incongruity – especially when our expectations differ from reality.
Bergson wrote that the comic character is usually comic in proportion
to his ignorance of his own faults, and noted that the comic character
continually repeats his mistakes in a mechanical way. For example,
the central character of Plautus’s The Braggart Soldier (Miles
Gloriosus, 205 BCE) is totally infatuated with himself, bragging about
his victories, his strength (he says he killed an elephant with his fist),
and his sexual prowess. His slave, who struggles to carry his master’s
oversized shield, feeds his ridiculous appetite for flattery, describing
his master as “Destiny’s dashing dauntless debonair darling” (Plautus
1963: 9). Late in the play, the vain soldier flatters himself
preposterously and demonstrates his ignorance of Roman religion by
saying that he was born only one day after Jupiter and that he is the
grandson of Venus. His servant’s scheme, and the play’s whole
purpose, is to wind him up to strut like this. When a collaborating
servant girl greets him with “Hail, you gorgeous creature! / Oh, man of
every hour, beyond all other men / Beloved of two gods –” he
interrupts her to ask, “Which two?” (1963: 90).
Another character who behaves mechanically (which, according to
Bergson, is always comic) and who is unaware of his faults appears in
Plautus’s The Pot of Gold. Here, the miserly old Euclio is obsessed
with money. He so fears that someone will steal the pot of gold he has
hidden that he suspects everyone, including the rooster he finds
scratching near it, which he instantly kills. The clever slave of his
daughter’s suitor manages to steal Euclio’s gold, resulting in Euclio
giving the suitor permission to marry his daughter, but only because
that means he will get his pot of gold back. By ending in a marriage,
this play conforms to Northrup Frye’s idea of the festive. The play also
demonstrates how serious issues (the cruelty of a father who refuses
to allow his daughter to marry for love, or how excessive greed can
destroy life’s pleasures) can be twisted from potential tragedy to
comedy.
According to Bergson, we laugh when “the history of a person or of
a group . . . sometimes appears like a game worked by strings, or
gearings, or springs” (Bergson 1956: 116). Plautus’s The Menaechmi
fits this description. It features another typical aspect of comedy –
mistaken identity – by focusing on identical twin brothers (a happily
practical idea for a theatre in which all characters wore masks). Long
lost to each other by misfortune, neither knows for sure if his brother is
alive, or where he might live. The plot of The Menaechmi is a calculus
of complications set off by the presence of the twins. Menaechmus II,
who is from Syracuse, has been searching the world for his brother.
(In grief over the loss of one of the twins when the boys were seven
years old, his family had renamed the remaining boy Menaechmus,
the name of his missing brother.) He happens to arrive in Epidamnum
where his brother, Menaechmus I, lives. The mistress of Menaechmus
I, Erotium, mistakenly invites Menaechmus II into her house,
supposing him to be her lover. So, too, the angry wife and all the
servants of Menaechmus I mistake Menaechmus II for Menaechmus I.
Each twin concludes that the world around him has gone mad.
Everyone else believes the twins to be mad, including the doctor who
is called in by Erotium’s father. In exasperation at one point,
Menaechmus II feigns madness to be rid of them all.
Plautus multiplies the confusions by repeatedly having one twin exit
by one door just as the other enters by another. All the characters
revolve in and out of the doors of the houses of Erotium and
Menaechmus I like figures on a mechanical clock gone haywire. The
audience is always in on the joke because Plautus is always careful to
have the entering twin identify himself clearly. At the play’s climax, the
twins finally meet at center stage, mirroring one another, and to the
relief of everyone, they sort out the confusion. Since these characters
are not nobles, and their main preoccupations seem to be sex and
food, we can see a connection to Aristotle’s concepts of comedy.
Like his plots, Plautus’s dialogue is full of comic devices. Near the
end of The Rope, Daemones and the slave Trachalio, who serves the
suitor of Daemones’s daughter, have a rapid-fire exchange of lines in
which the response “All right” is repeated seventeen times. After
Trachalio exits, Plautus caps the sequence:
GripusWill it be all right [Daemones jumps] if I have a word with you, sir?
DaemonesAll right, all right, nothing but “all right.” He’ll find all right’s all
wrong one of these days, I hope.
[Enter Gripus, another slave]
(Plautus 1964: 145–6)

A moment later, Trachalio has a series of exchanges with his young

master, Plesidippus, who is in love with Daemones’s daughter:
TrachalioI do. PlesidippusDon’t you think you could think for yourself?
TrachalioI do think what you think. PlesidippusYou do think what?
TrachalioI think. PlesidippusYou do what? TrachalioI do. PlesidippusAnd
what do you think? TrachalioI do. PlesidippusAnd the mother? TrachalioI
do. PlesidippusDo you think I should congratulate the old man on finding
her? TrachalioI do. PlesidippusDo you think we shall be betrothed today?
(Plautus 1964: 147–8)
In both cases, the robotic responses of the slave, Trachalio, produce a
comic momentum that threatens to unravel language itself. Once
again, we see an example of Bergson’s idea that comedy results
when humans act like wind-up mechanical dolls rather than living
beings. Bergson called this type of momentum “the snowball effect,”
which occurs when some tiny thing (in the plot or even in dialogue)
gets totally out of control and becomes a gigantic problem. (Compare
Abbot and Costello’s famous skit “Who’s on First?” in which the two
men are using simple words and names to mean very different things,
producing comic frustration over a simple baseball game.)

Plautus also employs parody and irreverence. He uses

theatre to mock its own conventions, and makes fun of supposedly
“superior” types of performance and even of the gods. Consider the
following lines in Plautus’s prologue to Amphitryo, which is delivered
by the god Mercury in disguise as a lowly servant:
But I still haven’t told you
About this favor I came to ask of you –
Not to mention explaining the plot of this tragedy.
I must get on . . .
What’s that? Are you disappointed
To find it’s a tragedy? Well, I can easily change it.
I’m a god after all. I can easily make it a comedy . . .
(Plautus 1964: 230)
Overall, this prologue suggests Plautus’s familiarity with comic
performance, a fact that would support the speculation that Plautus
was himself a comic actor. The middle name that he took, Maccius,
may be derivative of Maccus, the name of a clown figure in the ancient
Atellan farces who was greedy and gluttonous, the type of character
that Plautus might have played (see Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3Statue of a masked slave character from Roman comedy, leaning
casually on a pillar. Archaeological Museum, Istanbul.

Photo: © Gary Jay Williams.

Plautus’s plays have had staying power. One century after his
death, the critic M. Terentius Varro put together a collection of 20 of his
21 plays that survived. Since Plautus borrowed many stock characters
and plots from the prolific Greek comic playwright Menander, he is
responsible for the survival of many classical prototypes. Among the
many descendants of Plautus’s The Braggart Soldier (Miles
Gloriosus) are the Capitano and Scaramouche of the commedia
dell’arte (see Chapter 4) and Shakespeare’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Part
1 (1598). Plautus’s The Menaechmi is the source of Shakespeare’s
Comedy of Errors (1598), to which Shakespeare added a second set
of identical twin slaves from Plautus’s Amphitryon. The Comedy of
Errors was the source for Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s musical
comedy The Boys from Syracuse (1938), with a script adapted by
George Abbott. Amphitryon was the source for no fewer than 38
versions down to Jean Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 (1929), and
Plautus’s The Pot of Gold was the source of Molière’s The Miser
(1668). The 1962 American musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum (by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, and
Steven Sondheim) was a long-running concoction derived from
Plautus. If we look at even the most contemporary comedy, we will
find themes and devices that remind us of this ancient comic master.

Key references
Aristotle (1984) Poetics, trans. I. Bywater in J. Barnes (ed.) The
Complete Works of Aristotle, rev. edn, vol. 2, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Bergson, H. (1956) “Laughter,” in Comedy, Garden City, NY:
Doubleday Anchor Books.
Else, G. (1957) Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Frye, N. (1957) Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
 Janko, R. (1984) Aristotle on Comedy, Toward a Reconstruction of
Poetics II, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Plato (1942) Symposium, in Plato, Five Great Dialogues, trans. B.
Jowett, Roslyn, NY: Walter J. Black.
Plautus, T.M. (1958) The Pot of Gold, trans. Peter Arnott, New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Plautus, T.M. (1963) The Braggart Soldier, trans. Erich Segal, New
York: Samuel French.
Plautus, T.M. (1964) Amphityro, in The Rope and Other Plays, trans.
E.F. Watling, Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Plautus, T.M. (1974) The Twin Menaechmi, trans. Edward C. Wiest
and Richard W. Hyde, in O.G. Brockett and L. Brockett (eds) Plays for
the Theatre, 2nd edn, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Slater, N.W. (1985) Plautus in Performance, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Seneca's tragedies and Horace's Ars Poetica (The Art of
Poetry)
It is perhaps surprising that so few Roman plays, other than the
comedies, have survived. What little we know of serious or tragic plays
comes primarily from the works of Seneca and Horace.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 BCE–65 CE) was born in Spain and
educated in Rome. He became a well-known politician, philosopher,
and teacher who authored nine tragedies loosely based on Greek
originals, including Medea, Phaedra, Oedipus, Agamemnon, and
Thyestes. Unlike popular comedies, Roman tragedies were not
performed in the marketplace. In fact, it is not clear if Seneca’s
tragedies were actually staged; they may have been merely recited at
small, elite gatherings. Seneca’s tragedies reflect the philosophy of
Stoicism, which taught self-sufficiency and the avoidance of high
emotion. Nevertheless, his plays are characterized by sensational
violence and horror, far more than the Greek originals. This apparent
contradiction may suggest a desire to condemn excessive emotion by
demonstrating its horrific consequences. Alternatively, the gruesome
violence depicted in Seneca’s plays may suggest that even high-
minded patricians enjoyed the bloody spectacles beloved of the
plebeians, showing how the tastes of lower classes influenced those
of the upper class.
Like Terence, Seneca had a great impact on the Renaissance. His
philosophical essays influenced the French humanist and essayist
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), who is often cited as the “father of
modern skepticism” and who himself influenced many later writers,
including French philosopher Réné Descartes (1596–1650), American
essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and American science
fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920–92). As we will see in Chapter 5,
Seneca’s plays were the only Roman tragedies to survive the Middle
Ages. As such, they were carefully studied as models of drama by
scholars in the early Renaissance, since the language of learning in
Europe was Latin. Consequently, Shakespeare and other English
playwrights of the period were greatly influenced by Senecan tragedy
and its often gruesome sensationalism.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, generally known as Horace (65–8 BCE),
was an important poet whose Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry, published 18
BCE, also known as Letters to Piso) makes several demands on
playwrights that have come to represent what we call “neoclassicism”
in Western drama. While generally agreeing with Aristotle in most
matters, his work is prescriptive while Aristotle’s is descriptive. In other
words, Aristotle looked at existing plays and tried to figure out what
worked; Horace imagined unwritten plays and told playwrights what
they should do. He set down some of what came to be known later as
“the rules.” (For sixteenth/ seventeenth-century misunderstandings of
Aristotle and Horace, and the controversies regarding “the rules,” see
Chapter 5.) Among other things, Horace maintained that the five-act
structure was the only correct one for tragedy and insisted that drama
should entertain and educate, ideally simultaneously. Drama should
not mix styles or genres (for example, no comic relief in a tragedy) and
characters must be both consistent and recognizable (for example,
playwrights should not deviate from the traditional image of well-
known characters, such as Medea or Oedipus). Horace said that
dramas should begin in medias res (“in the middle of things”), that is,
not at the beginning of the story but closer to the climax. He
disapproved of Plautus’s bawdy language and plots, maintaining that
drama must adhere to socially acceptable propriety, language and
what he termed “decorum.”
Like the structure and style of Senecan tragedy, the principles of
drama explicated in Horace’s Ars Poetica (although often
misinterpreted) had a profound impact on subsequent playwrights and
theorists. Because learning to read Latin was considered significant
for educated Westerners until the mid-twentieth century, it may not be
an exaggeration to suggest that the history of Western playwriting and
dramatic theory owes at least as much to the influence of these two
Roman authors as to the ancient Greeks.

Imperial spectacles: Performance during the Empire

During the late Republic, dramatic performances had been sponsored
by wealthy men who sought to enhance their reputations, but by the
end of the first century BCE, both comedy and tragedy had ceased to
be viable dramatic forms. Rather than new plays, popular
entertainment focused on spectacular re-stagings of extant dramas
and on other events such as bloody contests.
The powerful patriarchy operating throughout the Roman Republic
eventually gave way to a centralized authoritarian state with the
establishment of the Roman Empire in 27 BCE, when Caesar
Octavian (63 BCE–14 CE) received the honorific title of Augustus.
Absolute power was surrendered by noble/landed families to a now
all-powerful emperor, later called the father of the country (pater
patriae). The service due to one’s family was now to be extended to
the state. As we will see, the values and tastes of the masses had
effectively replaced the older ideals that the patricians had once
hoped to spread throughout the Roman world.

Rome’s first permanent theatre was not built until 55 BCE

by Pompey the Great (106–48 BCE) (Figure 2.4). This grand building
sat 20,000 spectators and featured a stage 300 feet in width, backed by
an architecturally elaborated three-story façade (scaenae frons),
decorated with statues. It was constructed less to serve the art of
drama than to be a highly visible platform where Pompey (and
subsequent rulers) could preside over the gathered populace,
displaying the ruler’s authority and the grandeur of Rome. Although a
large temple was incorporated into the outer wall of the auditorium
(cavea) for Venus Victrix, it seems evident that the ludi had lost almost
all connection to religion.
Mime continued to be popular, as well as a relatively new art called
pantomime. In pantomime, a chorus and/or musicians accompanied
a solo, masked, non-speaking actor who played all the roles in a
lavishly staged myth or the re-staging of a drama. In the second
century CE, Lucian wrote of the pantomime actor:
You will find that his is no easy profession, nor lightly to be undertaken;
requiring as it does the highest standard of culture in all its branches,
and involving a knowledge not of music only, but of rhythm and meter,
and above all of your beloved philosophy, both natural and moral. . . .
The pantomime is above all things an actor; . . . success, as the
pantomime knows, depends . . . upon verisimilitude . . . : prince or
tyrannicide, pauper or farmer, each must be shown with the peculiarities
that belong to him.
(Nagler 1952: 28–9)

Like actors, pantomime and mime artists were often controversial

figures denied citizenship but who nevertheless gained a large public
following and were treated as stars. When Julius Caesar served as
dictator of Rome (48–45 BCE), the noted producer and actor of mime,
Laberius, was called out of retirement by Caesar himself to celebrate
Caesar’s victories. When Laberius appeared as a beaten slave in one
mime performance, he dared to say on stage, “Henceforth, O citizens,
we have lost our liberty!” And when Laberius said, “He must fear
many, whom many fear,” it is reported that the entire audience of
20,000 turned to see Caesar’s reaction to the words. While Caesar
awarded the palm of victory for acting to Laberius’s rival, Publilius
Syrus, he nevertheless treated Laberius genially and tolerantly. Not all
performers were so lucky. It is said that the Emperor Nero, who loved
to perform, became so jealous of the skill of a pantomime dancer
called Paris that he ordered the young dancer’s execution.
Figure 2.4Ground plan of the Theatre of Pompey (55 BCE), Rome, as
reconstructed in the Renaissance. Connected to the rear of this theatre was an
enormous public plaza with open colonnaded structures, which the Greeks had
called a stoa.

Source: Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman

Theater, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1961, p.181.
Increasingly popular and bloody spectacles took place in specially
built circuses. The word “circus” in this context means a large, oblong
or rectangular stadium-like building with open-air seating used for
entertainment. Rome’s Circus Maximus was originally built during the
second century BCE. Julius Caesar expanded it to 1,800 feet long and
350 feet wide, with wooden seating over arched stone vaults for
around 150,000 spectators. Although destroyed by fire, when
reconstructed in 200 CE, it had a seating capacity of 250,000.
Spectacles included chariot racing, animal fights (venationes),
gladiatorial contests (munera), and naumachiae – the staging of sea
battles in the flooded circus, based upon episodes from Greek history,
and performed by slaves, prisoners of war, or criminals condemned to
death. They were schooled in specialist forms of combat – some
heavily armed wearing helmets, others lightly armed with sword and
shield, and still others with net, dagger, and trident – usually with all
fighting to the death. One of the sea battles (naumachia) staged in 46
BCE and commissioned by Julius Caesar re-enacted the battle
between Tyre and Egypt on an artificial lake in Rome. In 52 CE,
Claudius staged a fight between Rhodes and Sicily using 19,000
prisoners.
In some naumachiae – as in some gladiatorial contests – those who
had demonstrated great courage might be saved from death. It is
estimated that about 50 percent of all human participants in these
events were spared. Those who lived often became “stars.” Some
gladiators were in fact volunteers who craved the spotlight and, if
victorious, were rewarded for their bravery and military skill. Female
gladiators, often as highly trained in arms as the males, sometimes
participated in the games. However, they were not always taken
seriously and might be pitted against dwarves. The games were free –
all citizens had a right to attend.
Animal fights included animals in combat with armed men, animals
fighting animals, and condemned men and women exposed to
animals that had been starved – such as individuals tied to a stake
who were wheeled into an arena in which a hungry lion had been set
loose to devour them. During the reign of Augustus Caesar, 3,500
animals were killed in the course of 26 different festivals. To celebrate
the completion of the Colosseum in 80 CE, 9,000 animals were killed in
such games.
Roman society at this time was deeply divided between wealthy
aristocrats and the rest of society, many of whom were very poor.
Although legislation and official and semi-official educational
propaganda attempted to constrain behavior and encourage a return
to ancient virtues founded on “the way of the fathers” during the mid-
Republic, the bawdy plays of Plautus and bloody, public spectacles at
the amphitheatres remained popular. Spectacular entertainments
such as those noted above may have helped to keep the poorer
members of society occupied. Such events may have been seen as a
way for the populace to “let off steam,” since Romans were typically
expected to subordinate their individual personalities to the larger
social good. Although virtues such as honor, dignity, and uprightness
were valued, the writer Pliny the Younger (c.61–c.113 CE) complained
that the uneducated mob lived only for “bread and circuses.”

Debating the ludi: Did violent spectacles serve a purpose?

Historian Paul Plass’s analysis of the Roman games can help us
understand how and why such massive public bloodshed with its
“hideous damage done to men or animals” had both social and
symbolic meaning. He makes several key points:

1. The games and their bloody entertainments permitted daily

“routines to be routinely broken” at festival time.
2. The “intensity and scale” of violence made the games seem
extraordinary.
3. The public nature of the games allowed extreme violence to
become the norm.
4. Since they were mass public events, probably no individual felt
responsibility for the lethal spectacles taking place. Rather, all
citizens present participated in a new and separate “mass
identity” that gave them a sense of “power and gratification at
survival.”
5. The spectators were as important as the spectacle in that “their
attendance in great numbers at a public event was the show in a
political and social sense” (Plass 1998: 43). Therefore, the games
proclaimed the fruits of building the Empire, the breadth of its
world conquest, and the extent of its prosperity.
6. The very extravagance of the games demonstrates an excess of
“conspicuous consumption” that was fed by “copious supplies of
[human and animal] blood.” They indicated the “unrestrained
power” of the emperor and the state (Plass 1998).
(For a view of how another culture used such displays, see the
discussion of Mayan human sacrifice in Chapter 1.)
However, not everyone supported these events. The games and the
theatre had long been opposed by the growing Christian community,
not only because Christians condemned to death had sometimes
been thrown to wild animals. By the end of the second century, the
Christian writer Tertullian (c.160–c.240) had urged Christians to avoid
theatre and the spectacles at the amphitheatres. He objected because
the ludi were dedicated to pagan deities, were filled with unchaste and
inhumane activities, and did not offer viewers a chance to practice
Christian virtues. Attending them, he maintained, would pollute the
viewer.
In 312, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and in
313, the practice of Christianity ceased to be a crime in the Empire. A
decade later, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. In
398, the Church decreed excommunication for anyone going to the
theatre rather than church on holy days. Actors were forbidden the
sacraments unless they renounced their profession, a decree that
remained in force into the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Roman
ludi continued, with festivals in the fourth century lasting as long as
100 days. By the early fifth century, there was some decline in the
more excessive blood spectacles. With the economic and political
decay of the Empire and its division into independent parts ruled by
Rome and Constantinople, a weakened Rome fell to the Visigoths in
476. The last record of a Roman theatre performance is dated 549 CE.
As we will see in Chapter 3 and subsequent chapters, many
religions continued to have conflicted attitudes toward theatre. The
apparent contradictions (such as medieval Christianity’s embrace of
performance as a key element of certain religious observances versus
the disdain for theatre by the reformers who created Protestantism)
are examples of the twisting roads theatre historians must navigate.
Drama and theatre in early India
Although the Roman Empire was huge, it did not reach as far as India.
However, Alexander the Great had previously extended Hellenic
influence to the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, and mutual
influences can be discerned in Greek and Indian sculpture and
painting during the Hellenic period. The Roman Empire traded
extensively with India and China, importing luxuries such as spices
and silk. Sanskrit (a language of ancient India) is linguistically related
to Greek, Latin, and most European languages. To some theatre
historians as late as the mid-twentieth century, such facts suggested
possible connections between ancient Greek and Indian performance.
However, with the exception of some stories that traveled between
cultures, there is no evidence of influence in either direction in this
early period.
When we speak of Sanskrit drama, we are referring to a specific
style of performance that originally used the Sanskrit language. The
Sanskrit word for “story,” katha, also means something “which is true”
– that is, a story involving consequences that reverberate throughout
cosmic history. It can also be translated as “telling or narration”
(Lutgendorf 1991: 115). The performance of Sanskrit storytelling – and
later, of Sanskrit drama – was always concerned with teaching moral
lessons.
The great pan-Indian epics, both of which are sacred to Hinduism
(the major but not the sole religion of India), are the Mahabharata and
Ramayana. Both are important examples of katha. They began as
narrated tales, and both have various written versions. The most
respected Sanskrit version of the Ramayana dates from between 200
BCE and 200 CE. When regional languages developed, this version
was replaced with easily accessible vernacular versions. The same is
true of the Mahabharata, which dates back to at least the mid-first
millennium BCE. Many other compendiums of stories exist, forming a
storehouse of sources for drama.
All traditional forms of Indian theatre (that is, everything prior to the
importation of European-style spoken drama) include complex
dances, music, and detailed, conventionalized eye and hand gestures
(mudra) that can be “read” almost like sign-language. Most also
feature colorful, elaborate, non-realistic costumes and makeup.
The Natyasastra

The Natyasastra [NAH-tyah-SHAS-tr] – an encyclopedic

work on all aspects of drama (natya) – dates from between 200 BCE
and 200 CE. The author or authors are unknown. The Natyasastra
relates the story of how the gods created drama as a pastime for
humans, to give them visual and auditory pleasure. According to the
Natyasastra, there were originally only four Vedas (books of hymns
sacred to Hinduism), but the god Brahma created the Natyasastra as
the fifth Veda. This Veda of drama is thus considered a holy book of
Hinduism. According to the origin tale, Brahma gave the Natyasastra
to the human sage Bharata, and also gave Bharata’s hundred sons
the task of putting it into practice.

The Natyasastra maintains that drama was to represent

people from all walks of life and be accessible to all. Its aim was to
teach by offering “good counsel” and “guidance to people” (Ghosh,
intro. to Bharata 1967: 2–3, 14–15) using interesting stories of life in all
its diversity, from war to sexual sensuality. The audience would “taste”
(rasa [RAH-seh]) the states of being/ doing (bhava [PHAH-vuh])
conveyed by the characters.

The Natyasastra is composed of 36 chapters. It traces the

origins of drama and explains how to construct an appropriate theatre
building. It explains how to worship the gods prior to performance,
discusses types of plays, playwriting, costuming and makeup,
character types and behavior, movement, gesture, and internal
methods for acting the moods and states of being of characters. Even
today, the Natyasastra continues to be honored as a divine gift, like a
respected elder, but not slavishly imitated.
Early Sanskrit dramas
The scripts of Sanskrit plays reflect the social hierarchy of the period.
Thus, only high-status male characters speak Sanskrit, while all
women, children, men of inferior status, and a stock comic character
(the vidusaka) speak in various dialects evolved from Sanskrit. The
most common types of plays are heroic dramas, such as Sakuntala
(sometimes written Shakuntala) by Kalidasa (c. late fourth century–
early fifth century CE), a seven-act play based on well-known epic
sources; invented dramas such as The Little Clay Cart by Sudraka
(active sometime between the third and sixth century CE); along with
one-act farces (for example, Hermit/Harlot) and other minor forms. All
Sanskrit dramas begin with an invocation, followed by a prologue, and
conclude with a benedictory prayer. Since the early nineteenth
century, translations and adaptations of Sanskrit plays (for theatre,
ballet, and opera) have been performed in Europe and North America.
Sakuntala is the name of the heroine of the play of that name. The
original story appears in the Mahabharata. A king who is out hunting
meets her by chance and falls in love. They marry, and he gives her a
distinctive ring. He leaves for the palace, promising to return for her.
However, a curse has been laid upon them and he forgets all about
her. She decides to go to the palace herself, but during the journey,
the ring slips off her finger and falls into a river. Because of the curse,
the king does not recognize her without the ring. Many years later, a
fish with the ring inside its belly is caught. When the king sees the ring,
the evil spell is broken, and the lovers are reunited.
In The Little Clay Cart, a poor but generous man, although happily
married with a son, falls in love with a courtesan. At one point, she
piles rich jewels on his son’s humble toy cart made of clay. Through a
series of complications and misunderstandings, her lover is accused
of her murder. Just as he is about to be executed, it is revealed that
she is not dead. The actual murderer of the real dead woman is
arrested, the poor man and his lover are reunited, and the man’s first
wife and son happily welcome her into the family.
Figure 2.6The Bhagavan or Hermit (Figure 2.5), and his wayward student,
Shandilya (Figure 2.6), played, respectively, by Raman Cakyar and
Kalamandalam Shivan, in a kutiyattam production of The Hermit/Harlot in
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, in 1977. From a reconstructed staging based on
traditional acting and staging manuals, under the supervision of Ram Cakyar of
the Kerala Kalamdalam. Shandilya's costume is the traditional one worn in
kutiyattam by the stock comic character, the vidusaka, who plays Shandilya
here.
Photo © Phillip B. Zarrilli.
 The one-act farce The Hermit/Harlot contains much witty dialogue
and slapslick comedy. It was written by King Mahendravarman in the
seventh century (see Figures 2.5 and 2.6). The plot revolves around a
learned and austere yogi (the hermit) who attempts to teach his
comically wayward disciple correct yogic practice. But the disciple can
never learn correctly. In order to make his points, the yogi substitutes
his own soul for that of a recently deceased prostitute (the harlot) with
whom his disciple has fallen in love. Unbeknownst to the yogi, the
harlot’s soul had been mistakenly taken by the bumbling servant of the
God of Death. The plot turns on farcical mistaken identities, ending
with the souls being returned to their proper bodies.
More than 500 Sanskrit dramas exist today, composed in alternating
simple prose and ornate verse, and chanted and/or sung to musical
accompaniment, though some small prose sections may be spoken.
The verse passages allow reflection, commentary, and a deepening of
the state of mind of the main character(s) rather than forwarding the
narrative.
Highly professional companies were composed of families that
included male and female performers specializing in specific role-
types, led by a male manager/actor (sutradhara). As described in the
Natyasastra, actors followed a rigorous training regime that included a
special diet, full body massages, yoga, and extensive training in
“dance postures, physical exercise . . . [and] rhythm” (Kale 1974: 57–
8). Their regimen included training in body movement, the language of
hand-gestures, voice, emotional expression, and costumes and
makeup. Actors learned physical vocabularies for representing both
the ordinary things in nature, such as a deer or a flower, and for
abstract concepts. Actors moved from one part of the stage to another
to indicate a shift in locale. This convention also allowed the action to
shift back and forth between two groups of actors on stage. Scenery
was minimal.
Figure 2.7Floor plan of a playhouse for Sanskrit theatre in India, as described by
Bharata in the Natyasastra, to be constructed on a consecrated piece of land on
an east–west axis, and divided into equal halves for dressing room and acting
areas. The audience is to be seated on the floor or a raked bank of seats in the
east half.

Source: Line drawing. After Sketch No. 3, p. 47 in Tarla Mehta,

Sanskrit Play Production in Ancient India (1995) New Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass.
Performances took place either in specially constructed theatres
near temples as part of religious festivals (see Figure 2.7), or in small,
intimate halls at court for other special occasions. The oldest outdoor
spaces devoted solely to theatre were built between 300 and 50 BCE.
Although they resemble Greek theatre architecture, their locations (in
central and eastern India) are well beyond the areas invaded by
Alexander the Great in 325 BCE. Consequently, the similarity may be
coincidental, and later theatres did not follow this pattern. Rather,
theatres for Sanskrit drama were built according to descriptions in the
Natyasastra, and were either square, rectangular or triangular.
Because none has survived, we don’t know how many viewers these
theatres held, but we do know that audiences came from all castes.
A person’s caste indicted his or her hereditary place in society,
including profession and level of ritual purity. Some contemporary
scholars maintain that prior to British colonization, it was relatively
easy to move between the castes, but that the British solidified the
system for their own political ends (Dirks 2001). Such an interpretation
would accord with our knowledge that people of all castes attended
theatre. Audience members included experts in various fields (such as
archers, grammarians, actors, courtiers, kings, musicians, and
courtesans) who were seated at the front of the stage. They gave
criticism and awarded prizes based on their area of expertise.
Kutiyattam_ A new way to stage Sanskrit drama

After the tenth century CE, the

Sanskrit language became increasingly restricted to members of the
priestly castes. New forms of regional performance using local
languages appeared. One of these, kutiyattam (“combined acting”)
[KOO-tee-ah-TAHM], emerged in Kerala (in south India). The
kutiyattam version of the Sanskrit play The Hermit/Harlot (discussed
above) is one of the oldest plays in the kutiyattam repertory. For more
information on staging and performing this play, see “The
Hermit/Harlot as an Example of Sanskrit Drama” on our website.
It is said that King Kulasekhara Varman became the patron of
kutiyattam. He was actively involved in the performances and
introduced several controversial innovations to the staging of Sanskrit
dramas:
 1. the use of the local language, Malayalam, by the main comic
character (the vidusaka) to explain key passages;
2. the introduction of each character with a brief narration of his
past;
3. permission for the performance to deviate from the script in order
to elaborate the meaning and/or a character’s state of
mind/being; and
4. the development of manuals for staging and acting in this
emergent style.

Although it was written in the local dialect, kutiyattam was

originally not “popular” drama meant for ordinary audiences. Instead,
kutiyattam during this period was exclusively performed within a small
number of high-caste temples in Kerala; the performance was a
“visual sacrifice” to the deities of these temples (see Figures 2.8 and
2.9). Other changes included performing only sections of the full play.
These sections have become dramas in and of themselves, with
lengthy preliminaries and elaborations of the story featuring one of the
main characters on each night. Performing a single scene of a drama
in the kutiyattam style can take from 5 nights to as many as 41. During
the final one to three nights, all the actors come on stage to perform
the act or scene. The term “combined acting” (kutiyattam) derives from
this group appearance.
Figure 2.8A temple theatre, known as a kuttampalam, built for kutiyattam in the
Lord Vadakkunnathan (Siva) temple in Trissur, central Kerala. The temple
compound containing this one is set apart from the outside world by high walls
and massive gates. The main shrine housing Vadakkunnathan is to the right.

© Phillip B. Zarrilli.
Not everyone approved of these innovations. Sometime in the
fifteenth century, for example, a highly educated local
connoisseur/scholar, writing in Sanskrit, attacked the “unfounded foul
practices” of male and female kutiyattam actors. In his “Goad on the
Actors,” the unknown author wrote:
Our only point is this – the sacred drama [natya], by the force of ill-fate,
now stands defiled. The ambrosial moon and the sacred drama – both
are sweet and great. A black spot mars the beauty of the former;
unrestrained movements that of the latter. “What should we do then [to
correct these defilements]?”
Listen. The performance should strictly adhere to the precepts of
Bharata [author of the Natyasastra]. Keep out the interruption of the
story. Remove things unconnected. Stop your elaboration. . . . Reject the
regional tongue. Discard the reluctance to present the characters.
 . . . Always keep the self of the assumed character. This is the essence
of acting. One follows the principles of drama if things are presented in
this way.
(Paulose 1993: 158–9)

Figure 2.9Cross-section of the interior of the theatre in a temple in Trissur,

central Kerala. Inside the high-ceilinged kuttampalam, the audience sits on the
polished floor, facing the roofed stage. A drummer sits upstage, behind the
actor. The dressing room is through two entry/exit doors behind the drummer.

Source: Line drawing No. 14 located on p. 79, from Kuttampalam

and Kutiyattam by Goverdhan Panchal. New Delhi: Sangeet Natak
Akademi, 1984. The author indicates that “most of the drawings in this
book are based on my own drawings and sketches” and then
rendered by Shri Ajit Parikh and Shri Ajit Joshi of the School of
Architecture, Ahmedabad.
Despite such attacks, kutiyattam survived, and continues to be
performed today.
Rasa-bhava aesthetic theory and the actor/audience
relationship
The Natyasastra states, “nothing has meaning in drama except
through rasa” (Bharata 1967: 105). Rasa means “taste.” The analogy to
tasting or savoring a meal explains how a theatrical performance is
experienced by the audience. “The ‘taste’ of the various ingredients of
a meal is both their common-ground and organizes them as its end”
(Gerow 1981: 230). The “various ingredients” include each character’s
state of being/doing (bhava), which is specific to the ever-shifting
context of the performance and the specific actor. As each bhava is
embodied and elaborated in performance, the accompanying rasas
are “tasted” by the audience.
The Natyasastra identified eight permanent states of being/doing,
each with its accompanying rasa (see diagram). These basic states
are enhanced by many other transitory and involuntary states.
Rasa theory operates simultaneously on two levels:

1. the audience’s experience of the various states or moods arising

from the actor’s embodiment of the character; and
2. the process of aesthetic perception of the whole. Playwrights and
composers structure their work around those modes most useful
for elaboration, and the actors bring these modes to life.
Although the emotions we experience in everyday situations
(becoming angry or guffawing with laughter) form the basis, they differ
from the ultimate aesthetic experience of rasa. To understand this
dimension of rasa theory, we must go beyond Bharata’s Natyasastra,
which focuses pragmatically on the means for evoking rasa.
The most influential later theorist is the Kashmiri philosopher
Abhinavagupta (tenth to eleventh century). For him, the ideal
spectator is one whose heart/mind is “attuned” to appreciate the
performance. He wrote that rasa is
[b]orn in the heart of the poet, it flowers as it were in the actor and
bears fruit in the spectator.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Responding to theatre
Dramatic theories derived from Aristotle generally assume that the skillful
playwright (rather than the actual performance) controls audience response.
Such a view means that the written word (“the text”) is the most important
thing. However, as we will see in later chapters, many avant-garde theatre
artists in the twentieth century rebelled against this concept.
Until the mid-twentieth century, theatre criticism and dramatic theory was
considered to be a subset of literary theory. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s,
literary theorists began to consider the relationship of the reader or viewer to a
work of art. Canadian scholar Susan Bennett is generally considered to be the
first to apply these ideas to theatre (Bennett 1990).
Audiences (like readers, viewers of art or architecture, or people trying to
interpret history) who share a common cultural background will interpret
(receive) the art or event based on that shared background. If the artist and
the audience (or reader, viewer, or interpreter) don’t share a cultural or social
heritage, then the cues for understanding meaning may be lost. Similarly, two
audience members from divergent cultural backgrounds will react differently
to the same performance (or artwork or historical event).
Unlike reading or going to a museum, where the individual reader’s or
viewer’s imagination creates meaning from a fixed text or painting, viewing a
performance involves both the imagination of the viewer and the contributions
of actors, designers, choreographers, dancers, singers, composers,
musicians, and directors in addition to playwrights. The “text” is expanded
from the written script to include all elements of the specific performance. The
so-called “original meaning” put into it by the playwright is transformed first by
 the artistic team in performance, and then by the audience who receives it.
Thus every play has multiple potential meanings, depending on the
performance elements, the audience, the historical moment, and the location
of performance. This concept is especially important in thinking about theatre
or other arts that originated in a culture very different from one’s own.
The shift from trying to understand the intent of the originating artist to what
the audience perceives transforms the audience from passive observer to
active participant (or “agent”). However, the audience can only interpret what
is offered on stage. Thus the artistic team (who are by definition active agents)
are responsible for one half of the interpretation; but each audience member
is responsible for the other half by being an active observer.
Rasa-bhava theory shifts our attention away from the written text and
toward the role of the actor and the elements of performance; however, unlike
contemporary theories, it assumes that if the actor fully embodies a specific
bhava, then the attuned audience will inevitably “taste” a specific flavor.

If the artist or poet has the inner force of the creative intuition, the
spectator is the man of cultivated emotion, in whom lies dormant the
different states of being, and when he sees them manifested, revealed
on the stage through movement, sound and decor, he is lifted to that
ultimate state of bliss, known as ananda.
(Vatsyayan 1968: 155)
The birth of kathakali

Although Sanskrit drama died out in most of

India, its legacy is evident in regional genres that appeared between
the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of these is Kerala’s
kathakali [kah-TAHK-ah-lee] dance-drama, which is performed in a
highly Sanskritized form of the local language, Malayalam – the same
language used for kutiyattam. Kathakali developed from several
earlier genres in the mid-1700s under the patronage of local rulers and
wealthy landholders; performances were held in temporarily defined
public spaces just outside local Hindu temples during annual festivals,
making them accessible to a broad-based, popular audience. Over the
years, kathakali was further refined until it became the form that is
seen today.
The actor-dancers of kathakali, accompanied by vocalists and
percussionists, create their roles using choreography, a complete
gesture language to visually “speak” their character’s lines, and
expressive use of the face and eyes to communicate the characters’
internal states (bhava). Performances begin at dusk and last all night.
Costuming and makeup begin the process of transforming the actors
into idealized, archetypal character types, each of which is
individualized by the dramatic context and the actors’ choices. An
example of green (pacca) makeup, used for divine characters or epic
heroes, appears in Figure 2.10.
While not an ancient genre, kathakali demonstrates many
characteristics typical of Sanskrit performance. Since the 1960s,
kathakali has participated in many international cultural exchanges.
Controversial experiments have included a play about Adolf Hitler at
the end of the Second World War and leftist kathakali dramas such as
People’s Victory (1987). A kathakali King Lear was performed
throughout Europe and at international theatre festivals such as
Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1989 and at Shakespeare’s Globe (London) in
1999.
For further information on kathakali, see the case study “Kathakali
Dance-Drama: Divine ‘Play’ and Human Suffering on Stage” on our
website.
Early Japanese performance and the development of nō
Until the fourth century CE, Japan had no system of writing, despite
having a sophisticated culture. Compared with many areas of the
world, this is exceptionally late. All aspects of life – including law-
making, religion, commerce, and art – had to be memorized and
passed on via one-to-one personal teaching. Some scholars feel this
helps explain the continuing dominance of the oral tradition in
Japanese performance.
After Japan invaded Korea in 370 CE, Korean scholars fluent in
Chinese writing and literature were brought to Japan to educate the
Crown Prince. Since Japanese and Chinese are not related
linguistically, Japanese scholars were forced to learn Chinese in order
to read and write. However, Chinese ideograms did not permit the
voicing of grammatical changes, which are crucial in understanding
Japanese. Therefore, they also created a system of phonetic symbols
that made Japanese grammar clearer. Eventually, a complex system
of writing developed that combined Chinese characters and two types
of Japanese phonetic writing.
Figure 2.10The Progeny of Krishna, Scene 2. With the body of his eighth son
lying before him, the Brahmin (M.P. Sankaran Namboodiri) pours out his tale of
woe at court. Arjuna in green (pacca) makeup observes in the background.

Photo © Phillip B. Zarrilli.

Japan’s native religion was Shinto, in which it is assumed that
everything – trees, birds, seas, animals, mountains, wind, and thun
der, etc. – has its own soul or spirit, called kami. Kami are the natural
energies and agents understood to animate matter and influence
human behavior, and are sometimes identified as gods or goddesses.
Chinese Buddhism became the official religion of Japan during the
mid-sixth century, but it did not displace Shinto; rather, Buddhas and
kami were and are often worshipped side by side. Interaction with
China also brought the influences of Confucianism and Taoism (also
called Daoism). Confucianism is not a religion, but a philosophy and
system of ethics emphasizing maintenance of social harmony through
hierarchical relationships in which the subordinate person (such as a
child, wife, or servant) remains obedient and loyal to the higher-ranked
person (such as a father, older brother, husband, or master) who
behaves beneficently to the individual below. By 645, Japan had
established a Confucian-based central administration. Taoism is a
mystical religion that emphasizes harmony and balance in the
universe. The ideologies of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism
joined with Shinto belief systems, and all can be found in various
aspects of Japanese life and art. In theatre, we see their combined
influence in stories, costumes, masks, makeup, theatre architecture,
and staging.
In Japan, many ancient theatrical and proto-theatrical genres are
still performed. Every December in Nara, a festival that lasts for
several days is devoted to presenting these early types of
performance, as well as related martial arts such as sumo wrestling
and horseback archery. The oldest performance genres are Shinto-
inspired, shamanistic ceremonies and dances intended to harness
kami. Various proto-theatrical court performances, including masked
dance-dramas such as bugaku and gigaku that were originally
introduced from mainland Asia in the sixth century, are also performed
at this festival and in special concerts. Masks dating from the Nara
period (710–84) that depict warriors, gods, and semi-mythical beasts
are preserved in temple collections.
Probably the greatest flowering of Japanese art and literature
occurred during the Heian period (794–1185), after which the
emperors, while still rulers in name, were gradually replaced by
powerful warriors (samurai), and eventually by a single military leader
called the shogun. Historical tales about the warring clans during the
Heian period (such as The Tale of the Heike) were often chanted by
blind musicians traveling the land. Such narrated stories joined literary
fiction written by court ladies (such as The Tale of Genji by Murasaki
Shikibu), folk tales, religious stories, and even contemporary events,
as key sources for playwrights in subsequent eras.
Zeami and nō

After 1185, the rulers were brash samurai warriors rather

than elegant aristocrats, and they soon realized how important it was
for them to demonstrate their legitimate right to rule. With this in mind,
they moved the seat of government from Kamakura back to the old
imperial capital of Kyoto, where the emperor still lived, and began to
adopt the tastes and practices of the aristocrats they replaced. Thus
their rule gradually reunified the cultural and political centers.
However, this transformation did not happen overnight. As we will see,
the creation of nō [noh] demonstrates some of the ways that the arts
are intertwined with political power.

The once-powerful aristocrats feared dispossession. One

of these, the court poet Nijō Yoshimoto, tried to retain power by
transforming the military court into a bastion of cultural refinement. In
1374, he encouraged the 16-year-old shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu
(1358–1408; ruled 1367–1395) – famous for his wild excesses and
vulgar taste – to attend a performance of popular sarugaku [sah-roo-
gah-koo] (“monkey music”). The troupe he took the shogun to see was
headed by Kan’ami (1333–1384) and featured Kan’ami’s talented, 11-
year-old son Zeami (1363–1443). Nijō hoped to wean his master from
dengaku [dehn-gah-koo] (“field music”), the more shocking type of
performance he usually patronized.

By Zeami’s time, masked dengaku was performed by

both males and females. It had become associated with political
turmoil and recurring bouts of mass hysteria called “dengaku
madness.” People of all classes would commit acts of larceny or
lewdness, dance semi-naked in the streets for weeks on end, and
dress in clothing forbidden to their class or gender. Dengaku actors
were accused of being animal spirits disguised as humans. An
eyewitness to a 1349 dengaku performance described golden curtains,
exotic animal skins, and actors dressed in embroidered, silver
brocade. The huge audience caused the wooden stands to collapse.
The eyewitness wrote:
The number of those who died among the great piles of fallen timber is
past all knowing. In the confusion thieves began stealing swords. . . .
Cries and shouts rose up from people who had had limbs broken or
slashed; from others, stained with blood, who had been run through with
swords or halberds . . . and from others still who had scalded themselves
with the boiling water used for making tea. . . . The dengaku players, still
wearing devil masks and brandishing red canes, gave chase to thieves
escaping with stolen costumes . . . Young servants unsheathed their
weapons and went after men who had carried off their masters’ ladies. . .
. It was as if Hell’s unending battles and the tortures of its demons were
being carried out before one’s eyes.
(O’Neill 1958: 75–7)

Because dengaku had originated in native Shinto fertility dances, it

was also tied to supernatural female powers and unbridled female
sexuality. In contrast, sarugaku’s origin is connected to calm Buddhist
burial rites. Nijō and others hoped the samurai could be weaned away
from the irrational by associating it with female madness and the
agony of the dispossessed, and made to embrace rational,
“masculine” values, so that they would become less of a threat to the
status quo that the aristocrats embodied. As we will see in the case
study that follows, sarugaku (and eventually nō) would suggest victory
over unruly, emotional female forces by calm, “rational” Buddhism and
stoic male warriors.

Asian names
Chinese, Korean, and Japanese names (as well as names in some other
languages) are written with the family name first. Although some publications
 in Western languages (especially newspapers) use only Western name order
regardless of the original language, we will use the original name order unless
the person has chosen to use Western order – usually because she or he was
born and raised in a Western country and is considered to be Western.
As in the West, it is most common in scholarly writing to refer to people by
their family name. However, some famous Japanese artists and historical
individuals are routinely referred to by their given name only or even by a well-
accepted nickname (similar to the way we might say “Elvis” or “Beyoncé”). For
example, the kabuki actor Bandō Tamasaburō V is generally called
Tamasaburō, because there are many actors in the Bandō family but only one
Tamasaburō in any generation.

When Yoshimitsu saw Zeami perform, he was so overwhelmed by the

young actor’s beauty and skill that he invited the entire troupe of rough
and tumble, wandering, outcast performers to live in his court. Since
sexual relations between males were not uncommon, Zeami became
the shogun’s lover.
Seeing the power of Zeami’s position as the shogun’s favorite, Nijō
took Zeami under his wing and tutored him in the aristocratic arts,
which were often associated with Buddhist meditation. He hoped his
efforts would result in imbuing aristocratic tastes in Zeami, who might
be able to influence the shogun. Nijō understood that Yoshimitsu and
the other samurai felt culturally inferior to the aristocrats, but wanted to
learn how to behave like them; he also understood that the aristocrats
felt threated by the samurai, so they wanted to become indispensable
to them. At the same time, the actors, due to their outcast status,
needed to find a way to please both of these masters if they were to
remain at court. Therefore, this project could ultimately benefit
everyone.
Under Nijō’s guidance, Zeami gradually altered the popular street
entertainment sarugaku, into the stately, poetic, all-male, Buddhist-
oriented genre later known as nō. After his father’s death, Zeami
continued to refine artistic practice. As he matured, he wrote many nō
plays and a series of sophisticated treatises on acting and playwriting.
These were meant for his descendants, and only came to public
attention in the early twentieth century. Today, Zeami is acknowledged
as one of the world’s most important dramatic theorists.
Performing and staging nō
Nō was originally performed in circular spaces similar to those used in
sumo wrestling. As the nō stage evolved, it began to be modeled on
the architecture of Shinto shrines (see Figure 2.11). In contrast, much
of the philosophy in the plays is Buddhist.

The stage is a raised wooden platform covered by a roof

held up by four pillars, even when indoors (see Figures 2.11 and 2.12;
see also Figure 2.15). The main acting area is about 15 feet on each
side. Beneath the floorboards, ceramic jars enhance the sound of the
actors’ stamping feet. The only décor is a painted pine tree on the
back wall and a bamboo clump painted on the side. There are no
special settings or lighting, and only minimal stage properties. A
bridgeway (hashigakari [hah-shee-gah-kah-ree]) connects the stage
with the curtained “mirror room” where the actors prepare; the
hashigakari is seen as a passage from this world (the realm of the
audience) to the world of spirits (embodied by the actor who crosses
this bridge). The audience, usually about 400 people, sits on two sides
of the stage. Steps lead from the stage into the auditorium, a vestige
of the Tokugawa era (also called the Edo era, 1603–1868) when actors
would descend them to receive valuable gifts from the shogun and his
entourage. The steps are not used today.
Figure 2.11A Japanese nō stage. It achieved the shape shown here by the
sixteenth century. At first a separate structure, located in a courtyard, as seen
here at the Buddhist temple of Nishi Honganji in Kyoto, it was housed within a
larger building by the late nineteenth century. The stage proper remained
covered by its own roof and linked to the green room by a raised passageway
(hashigakari).

Source: Figure 1.9, p. 14 in Dance in the Nō Theatre: Volume One.

Dance Analysis by Monica Bethe and Karen Brazell. Cornell
University: China-Japan Program. Ithaca, 1982. The Cornell East Asia
Papers series. Published with permission. © Monica Bethe and Karen
Brazell.
Figure 2.12Nō stage plan, indicating locations of musicians, chorus, and
attendants. The painted pine and bamboo on the upstage wall and the three
pine trees arranged along the passageway reflect the outdoor origins of the
theatre. Stage and passageway are separated from the audience by a strip of
sand or gravel.

Source: Bethe and Brazell (as in above) Figure 2.11, p. 151. ©

Monica Bethe and Karen Brazell.

Since Zeami’s time, almost all

professional nō actors have been male, training from childhood with
older relatives. The main character, called the shite [sh-teh] (literally
“the doer”), and the secondary character, the waki [wah-kee]
(meaning “the listener” or “sideman”), may have companions called
tsure [tsoo-reh]. In reading nō plays, you will notice that some
translators use the characters’ names to indicate who is speaking, but
others use only the traditional titles of shite, waki, or tsure.

Three musicians (flute and two drums) and eight to fifteen

chorus members enter in full view of the audience. The chorus kneels
on the stage at the audience’s right (opposite the hashigakari). Unlike
the Greek chorus, they do not dance and have no specific identity.
The musicians sit upstage, in front of the painted tree. They vocalize
rhythmical sounds (kakegoe) as part of the musical score. Stage
assistants (kōken [koh-kehn]) handle props, straighten costumes, or
prompt actors. They are unobtrusive but clearly visible to the
audience.
In most plays, after the chorus and musicians are in place, the waki
enters on the hashigakari and establishes the situation; then the shite
enters. The shite dances while retelling and reliving past woes; the
waki is often a traveling Buddhist priest who is asked to pray for the
release of the shite’s suffering soul. While the shite dances, the chorus
chants his words.
When masks are used, they are worn only by the shite (and
sometimes the shite’s companion). Smaller than the adult male face,
they allow the audience to see simultaneously the role portrayed by
the mask and the actor’s living flesh. Nō masks, carved of light wood
and carefully painted, are valued works of art handed down through
the generations (see Figures 2.13 and 2.14). Costumes are elegant,
costly, and conventional rather than realistic – even beggars are
dressed in silks. The scripts are in an archaic language, using a
“brocade style” that weaves together well-known stories, poetry, and
Buddhist references.
 Zeami maintained that actors should gauge
the style of performance to please the audience, changing it as
needed. However, during the Tokugawa period, nō became a state
ritual rather than entertainment, and no variations were permitted.
Because nō was slowed down to satisfy ritual requirements, it is now
performed about three times slower than it was during Zeami’s day. In
the past, a performance consisting of five nō plays with four short,
comic plays (kyōgen [kyoh-ghen], literally “crazy words”) in between
them lasted all day. Today, most programs last two or three hours, and
have one or two nō plays and one kyōgen.
Kyōgen actors belong to their own schools, and like nō actors, are
traditionally male. Even today, only a few professional nō and kyōgen
actors are female. In addition to performing entire comedies, kyōgen
actors also perform minor roles during the interlude between two-part
nō plays. Kyōgen plays emphasize comic inversions of social roles
and stereotypical behavior. Unlike nō, kyōgen uses everyday speech,
few masks, no chorus, and reserves song and dance for comic effect.
Short, simple plots depict comic situations that are common to many
cultures: powerless characters, such as women, thieves, servants, or
sons-in-law, outwit masters, husbands, priests, or gods. They play
practical jokes and are carried away by song, dance, and uncon
trollable urges (for wine, food, prestige, mischief, or even cruelty). For
example, in Tied to a Pole (Bōshibari), the master ties up his two
servants to prevent them from drinking his wine. In a complex,
physically comic sequence, they cleverly help each other get drunk
anyway. Many of the Roman comedies discussed above feature a
similar topsy-turvy world. As we will see in Chapter 3, such plots exist
throughout the world, and are often called “carnivalesque.”
Although the period of Ashikaga rule (1336–1573, also known as the
Muromachi period) was created by samurai warriors, the nō plays they
preferred seldom depicted military victory. Rather, in keeping with the
tastes of the aristocrats they had displaced, the new rulers preferred
plays dealing with tragic love affairs, unrequited passions, the agony
of defeated warriors, the elegance of old age, or supernatural events.
Most of the approximately 240 nō plays still performed were written
during the Muromachi period.
Supernatural beings, ghosts, and traces of shamanic practices can
be seen in many nō plays. An example is Aoi no ue (Lady Aoi), one of
many nō plays derived from The Tale of Genji. It deals with the life-
threatening attack on the pregnant Lady Aoi by another woman’s
jealous spirit that is so powerfully demonic as to require exorcism.
The body of Aoi is represented by an empty kimono laid flat on the
stage floor. Another famous nō play, Dōjōji, demonstrates similar
concerns and is the focus of our case study.
Figure 2.13Each shite chooses the precise mask to wear from several possible
ones. This zo-onna mask of a beautiful young woman is typical of what might be
worn in the first part of Dō jō ji.
© kvap/iStock.
Figure 2.14This aka-hannya (“red demon”) mask is typical of what might be
worn in the second half of Dō jō ji.

Source: De Agostini/G. Sioen/Getty Images.

Case Study The nō play Dō jō ji
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Dōjōji is one of the most popular and theatrically flamboyant nō
plays. The author is unknown; it was formerly attributed to Kanze
Kojirō Nobumitsu (1435–1516). It has a prop used only in this play: a
huge, silk-covered bell. Prior to the beginning of the play, stage
assistants rig the bell to the roof of the stage. The action begins when
the waki, the male Buddhist Abbot of Dōjōji (Dōjō Temple), calls the
priests of the temple together. He announces that although there has
been no bell in this temple for many years, today a new bell will be
raised and dedicated. He leaves, forbidding the priests to admit
women. The shite – an elegant woman – appears, and convinces the
foolish priests to let her enter in order to perform a celebratory dance
at the dedication (Figure 2.15).
Figure 2.15In a performance of the nō play Dō jō ji at the Kanze Theatre, Tokyo,
1962, the ghost of the maiden, dressed as a beautiful shirabyōshi dancer,
approaches the bell at Dō jō Temple. Here, the actor moves from the hashigakari
(bridgeway) toward the main stage, symbolizing her passage from the spirit
world to this world.

Photo © Gary Jay Williams.

Figure 2.16The ghost maiden dances around the bell which then descends over
her and then is raised to reveal, as seen here, the differently costumed and
masked actor (who has done a quick change inside the bell) as a horned,
demon serpent which is the true form of the ghost maiden. The abbot and the
priests, standing, are attempting an exorcism.

Photo © Gary Jay Williams.

She dons a special hat normally worn only by male courtiers. Her
dance gradually becomes chaotic and animalistic, entrancing the
priests. The music, used only in Dōjōji, is a secular version of the
music of a Shinto demon-quelling ritual. Her feet move in triangular
patterns, mimicking the fish-scale triangles we will later see on the
actor’s inner robe. Finally, the dancer knocks the hat from her head,
stamps her feet, and looks at the bell as she stands directly beneath it.
She swings her fan back and forth like the ringing hammer of a bell, as
the chorus sings: “This loathsome bell, now I remember it!” (Brazell
1998: 199). She leaps up, and the giant bell falls crashing to the ground
around her.
In the interlude, the priests discover that the bell is red hot. When
the Abbot returns, he angrily explains why women were forbidden.
Long ago, a girl’s father told her that a priest who often visited would
be her husband. One day, she asked the celibate priest when they
would marry, and he fled in horror. She chased him by transforming
herself into a serpent and swimming across a river. On the other
shore, she followed him to the temple called Dōjōji, where he had
hidden beneath an unraised bell. The serpent-woman entwined her
body around the bell. The heat of her passion was so intense that the
bell metal became fiery hot, burning alive the priest inside. The Abbot
now explains that the dancer is this woman’s furious ghost.
During this interlude, the shite remains inside the giant bell and
changes mask and costume. When the bell rises for the second part of
the play, we see a female snake-demon, the dancer’s true form (see
Figure 2.16). The Abbot and priests battle her, attempting an exorcism,
but they cannot overpower her; they can only chase her off. As the
play ends, the chorus chants:
Again she springs to her feet,
the breath she vomits at the bell
has turned to raging flames.
Her body burns in her own fire.
She leaps into the river pool,
Into the waters of the river Hidaka,
And there she vanishes.
The priests, their prayers granted,
Return to the temple,
Return to the temple.
 (Brazell 1998: 206)
In order to interpret this play, we must consider its cultural and
historical context. Zeami did much to develop nō theatre, but he did
not create it from thin air.
Zeami and the female origins of nō
Japanese performance is said to originate in the shocking dance of
the goddess Uzume, a female Shinto deity. According to the myth,
because the sun-goddess Amaterasu – the direct ancestor of the
emperor and thus of the Japanese people – was angry with her
trickster brother, she hid herself in a cave. Deprived of the sun’s light
and fertility, the world would have died. In desperation, the goddess
Uzume leaped on to an overturned rain barrel, stamping her feet in
dance and lifting her skirts to reveal her genitals. The other deities
roared with laughter. The curious Amaterasu peeked out. The laughter
caused by Uzume’s sexy dance had saved the world from eternal
death. In his secret treatises, Zeami wrote that this myth proved nō’s
divine origin and relationship to the royal household. But is that all the
myth tells us today?
Amaterasu is a female identified with the life-giving sun. Her
emotional, irrational response to the bad behavior of an unruly male
dangerously disrupts the balance of nature. She cloaks her body in
darkness. In contrast, Uzume intentionally displays her body in a kind
of divine striptease. She uses explicit nakedness to create a sexual
spectacle that makes the gods laugh. She is in control of how she is
viewed, and is in control of her passions. These two female deities are
reverse images that complement each other: light and dark, anger and
laughter, life and death. Females have the power to give and to
withdraw life.
In the sixth century, Korean emissaries introduced the patriarchal
religion of Buddhism to Japan, challenging the dominance of female-
oriented Shinto. Powerful leaders allied themselves with these
opposing religions, vying for political control. Many sects combined
aspects of both religions. Eventually, Shinto rituals became
associated with the female realm and with life-affirming acts (fertility,
marriage, sex, and birth), while Buddhist rites were tied primarily to the
male realm, death, and the afterlife.
Nō theatre reflects this history. The texts are primarily Buddhist,
emphasizing that actions in one lifetime determine how a soul is
reincarnated in the next. They also emphasize salvation in the
afterlife. In contrast, performance elements derive from aspects of
Shinto (or Shinto-Buddhism). These female-oriented elements include
demon-quelling dances, stamping feet, ritual purifications, possession
by gods, the stage architecture, and most importantly, the presence of
spirits and ghosts.
Nō also incorporated elements of earlier female dances. Shinto
shrine maidens (miko) performed sacred kagura dances as well as
ritual dances meant to pacify angry ghosts. Female prostitute-
entertainers performed Buddhist funeral rituals for the imperial family
and entertained aristocratic male clients on river boats. Their outcast
status diminished as their religious importance grew. Zeami’s family
may have belonged to their clan (Kwon 1998).
Dances called kusemai and shirabyōshi were popular, secular
entertainments mainly performed by women dressed in male clothing.
Critics feared that their unconventional, disturbing musical rhythms
and dance styles were contributing to “an age of turmoil” and were a
sign of “a nation in ruins” (O’Neill 1958: 43–4). Like Uzume, these
female ritualists and performers disrupted notions of social and
religious stability.
Zeami praised and valued his female predecessors. He wrote that
his father, Kan’ami, had trained with Otozuru, a female kusemai
dancer. The shite’s main dance is still termed kusemai, and many
plays, including Dōjōji, feature characters who are female shirabyōshi
or kusemai dancers.
The aesthetics of nō

Two of Zeami’s most important aesthetic

concepts are monomane [moh-noh-mah-neh] and yūgen [yoo-ghehn].
Monomane is the imitation of character. By imitating “the three roles”
(male, female, or old person), the actor reveals the fictional
character’s invisible body. For Zeami, a mask allows the actor to
become another character; his body becomes a vessel inhabited by
another’s “essence,” which resides in the mask. According to Steven
T. Brown, “Underneath the actor’s costume and mask is the body of
the actor transformed into the virtual body of the other” (2001: 26).
Yūgen is a deep, quiet, mysterious beauty tinged with sadness. Zeami
expands its meaning to refer to both text and performance,
emphasizing the fleeting, melancholy nature of human existence. The
greatest yūgen appears in plays about aged, dispossessed, or
formerly beautiful women who are reduced to poverty, madness, or
regret.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Symbolic capital
Steven T. Brown, an expert on medieval Japanese culture, has revised the
definition of yū gen to include the idea of “symbolic capital,” a term coined by
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). Like material or financial capital
(such as money), symbolic capital has value, but in this case, the value is
something that can enhance a person’s political or cultural status. For
example, a war hero might use his symbolic capital to run for political office.
Brown maintains that by representing characters in a way that appealed to
powerful patrons, medieval nō actors used their symbolic capital to enhance
their political position. Such a situation is almost always at work when actors
or other artists accept positions of patronage, as we will see in later chapters.

Symbolic capital in nō plays

When samurai warriors displaced the aristocrats, they needed to
foster legal changes to centralize their military power and weaken the
noble branch families. Among the new laws were those that shifted
inheritance rights away from female aristocrats and toward first-born
sons. Suddenly, a divorced or abandoned woman found herself
dispossessed both financially and emotionally. Her fury at an
unfaithful spouse would be intensified by the loss of property she
would previously have retained. Many people believed that the angry
spirits of such dispossessed females (along with those of the
dispossessed male rivals of the ruling Ashikaga clan) were
responsible for a century of natural disasters (earthquakes, plagues,
typhoons, droughts, famines, fires, and floods) that devastated Kyoto.
Many nō plays, including Dōjōji, center on the anger or madness of
dispossessed spirits (dead or alive). The great majority of shite are
agonized females. Although Zeami’s main patrons were male samurai,
they preferred plays about emotionally distraught women. These
characters probably reminded them of those formerly haughty
aristocrats who were now poor and powerless. For the same reason,
when nō plays deal with warriors, they focus on the agony of loss and
defeat rather than the glory of victory. By displaying aristocratic female
bodies in exquisite emotional agony, Zeami and his troupe could
please all members of the shogun’s court (Brown 2001: 30–3). By
combining yūgen with monomane in plays about often Shinto-
identified females in need of male Buddhist healing or exorcism,
Zeami consolidated the position of formerly outcast actors in a
changing court and paved the way for the creation of mature nō plays
(Sorgenfrei 1998).
Conclusion
In Dōjōji, the body of the male actor portraying a female dancer
“enacts a complex double masquerade of both masculine and
feminine” (Klein 1995: 118). The male nō actor’s body stands in for the
absent female body of the shirabyōshi dancer, which stands in for the
absent male monk as well as the invisible demonic snake. By leaping
into the bell, the shirabyōshi dancer imitates what happened to the
male. However, instead of being burned to death, she is revealed in
her true form. The climax of the play becomes a cosmic battle
between demonic, female forces and holy, male forces, but it is not
conclusive – the demon will continue to lurk in the river, able to
resurface at any time. Female sexual power (or the potential power of
the defeated and dispossessed aristocrats) can be contained but not
destroyed.
The fear of women displayed in Dōjōji reflects the historical fact that
“the position of women at the elite levels of Japanese society was
taking a distinct downward turn” (Klein 1995: 117). The ambiguous
ending suggests that chaos could erupt if the rulers failed to guard
against all those (male as well as female) they had dispossessed.
Key references
Brazell, K. (ed.) (1998) Traditional Japanese Theater, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Brown, S.T. (2001) Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of
Nō, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Klein, S.B. (1995) “Woman as Serpent: The Demonic Feminine in
the Noh Play Dōjōji,” in J.M. Law (ed.) Religious Reflections on the
Human Body, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Kwon, Y.-H.K. (1998) “The Female Entertainment Tradition in
Medieval Japan: The Case of Asobi,” Theatre Journal 20: 205–16.
O’Neill, P.G. (1958) Early Noh Drama, London: Lund Humphries.
Sorgenfrei, C.F. (1998) “Zeami and the Aesthetics of Contemporary
Japanese Performance,” in B. Ortolani and S.L. Leiter (eds) Zeami
and the Nō Theater in the World, New York: CASTA.
Summary
In this chapter, we continued our discussion of the interactions
between oral tradition, writing, and factors such as politics and social
conditions in three early literate cultures. We noted that not all cultures
transform at the same speed or in the same way, and that depending
on one’s perspective, certain historical transformations may even
appear reversed.
Roman theatre, especially during the Republic, valued the skills of
rhetoric and oratory that were important in political and social life. The
literate classes created both comedies and tragedies inspired by the
theatre of ancient Greece. Although the upper classes valued
decorum in theory, theatre tended to reflect the less-refined tastes of
the lower classes. As the Republic declined and Rome became an
empire, performance began to emphasize visual spectacle, including
violent, bloody “games.” In contrast, the Sanskrit theatre of India
always retained a balance between aural and visual pleasures, and
theatre expressing elite values dominated. The Natyasastra, a holy
book of Hinduism, states that theatre and drama should be available
to all people, but most Sanskrit plays were written by members of the
upper classes and were often performed to exclusive audiences inside
temples. Finally, we discussed the fact that literacy came very late to
Japan, and first only in the form of Chinese. Nō developed as an art
that could please both the dispossessed aristocrats and the brash,
relatively uncultured samurai. It also combined elements of the native
belief system (Shinto) with imported ideologies (Buddhism, Taoism,
Confucianism). In the next chapter, we will continue our discussion of
how theatre works to please various types of audiences. As we will
see, even in highly literate societies, orality does not vanish.
*
Commemorative Drama and Carnival
Tamara Underiner
Contributors: Phillip B. Zarrilli and Tobin Nellhaus
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-5
Virtually every society finds some way to keep its history alive by
means of performance. In the theatres discussed in Chapters 1 and 2,
such performances were drawn from events recorded in their great
epics, the stories of their predecessors, and recent important events in
the society’s history. While these events may also have been passed
down orally and in written form, performance helped to ensure the
continuity of social memory and played an extremely important role in
cultural preservation.
After writing becomes well established in a society, its relationship
to oral culture can and often does change. In Chapter 2, we
considered forms of performance that developed when writing had
become socially prominent, even if it was still often limited to scribes,
priests, and the elite. In the period we cover here, however, writing
was attaining an even more central role in society – in fact, one or
more texts had become fundamental to religion, and all people were
expected to know their content, whether or not they could read. These
were now manuscript cultures, in which handwritten texts (generally
on parchment or paper, often bound into a book rather than a scroll)
were critical for much of the society’s functioning and culture.
Nevertheless, there was considerable interaction between manuscript
cultures’ oral and literate realms. For that reason, performance played
an extremely important role in cultural preservation. This chapter
focuses on two genres of performance – commemorative drama and
Carnival – that have helped to impart such cultural knowledge in
Europe, the Americas, India, and the Islamic world.
Commemorative drama refers to a wide range of performance
practices that share certain characteristics, all aimed at preserving
and promoting some aspect of a society’s heritage. While much
commemorative drama is meant to promote deep reflection in a spirit
of devotion or civic pride, another form of performance elicits a
different kind of spirit: that of release from the constraints of civil and
religious propriety, if only for a day or week. Such performances can
be broadly grouped under the category of the carnivalesque, in which
human nature is explored through the mingling of the sacred with the
profane, often to hilarious and spectacular effect. (Recall our Chapter
1 discussion of the Egúngún ritual, which combines ancestor worship
with improvisational play of a distinctly earthy nature – including
Gorilla’s sexual pursuit of women in the crowds.) Many of the
commemorative performance traditions we discuss below incorporate
and combine both devotional and carnivalesque aspects, revealing
the multi-faceted nature of human and divine relationships.
We begin with a discussion of Carnival, a public celebration that
may pre-date Christianity. Here we consider not only its history but
also its spirit, asking what it is about “the carnivalesque” that seems to
transcend time and place, and how its energies are constantly
channeled anew into different forms. We then turn to a discussion of
commemorative drama, a term which encompasses a variety of forms
that can be formal and devotional, or can blend the serious with the
carnivalesque. What they share is a commitment to preserving and
performing the cultural and/or religious legacies of a society. Our
discussion of commemorative drama centers on the dramas of
Christianity, which gave birth to a plethora of performance forms,
some of which persist today. But of course other religious and cultural
traditions, before and after Christianity, also use performance to some
degree. Thus we frame our discussion of Christian commemorative
drama between two other traditions of such drama: the Jewish Purim
play, which features both commemorative and carnivalesque aspects,
and the Islamic Ta’ziyeh, a mourning ritual central to the Shi’ite faith.
Our case studies consider how commemorative drama functions both
to solidify and to challenge prevailing norms of belief and custom. One
examines a dramatization of the historic conflict between Christianity
and Islam, staged both as a straightforward commemoration and as a
kind of allegory for more recent examples of cultural conflict. The other
considers a commemorative drama based on a Hindu epic – the
Ramlila of northern India.
Carnival and the carnivalesque
Carnival is a centuries-old tradition of lively, often rowdy public
performance featuring deliberate misbehavior by masked characters
in elaborate costumes. It may trace back to the Greek and Roman
festivals of antiquity (e.g., the Dionysian celebrations in Greece, and
the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia in Rome). By the twelfth century in
Europe, this tradition came to be associated with the Catholic season
of Lent preceding Easter. But we can detect aspects of a
carnivalesque spirit in other traditions, such as Roman comedy and
kyōgen (discussed in Chapter 2). Rooted in oral culture, the
carnivalesque appears in all societies, including manuscript and print
cultures (a matter taken up in more detail in the “Thinking through
theatre histories” box).
Within Christianity, Easter marks the highest holy day, on which
Jesus is believed to have risen from the dead. In order to properly
prepare for this momentous day, every year early Christians were
asked to observe a fast for a period of time, which by the fourth
century had become known as the season of Lent. To inaugurate this
40-day period of self-denial and deprivation, they celebrated what has
come to be known as “Carnival,” which some say comes from the
Latin carnem-levare or carne vale, both of which refer to a “farewell to
flesh (or meat)”; other explanations suggest it is a reference to the
elaborate floats (carrus navalis, or floating cars) of an ancient Roman
festival, floats being a signal feature of Carnival then and now.

Before entering their season of self-denial, folks feasted

heartily on meat and other good things, and began to stage their
“farewells” to it in increasingly public fashion, especially just before the
official start of the season (Ash Wednesday). The culmination of this
period – known as Shrovetide in English, Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) in
French, and Fastnacht (Fasting Eve) in German – is still a time of
highly theatrical celebration in Europe and throughout the Americas,
and has itself been extended into its own season in some parts of the
world. The famous Carnaval of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the largest in
the world. In Brazil and the Caribbean, as in the Mardi Gras of New
Orleans in the United States, Carnival has been transformed by the
influence of African music, dancing, costuming, masking, and
puppetry traditions that arrived in the Americas with the slave trade.
Carnival in Europe likely began in the urban centers and at court, in
response to the increasingly stringent rules of Lent, later spread to
rural areas, and then spread again across the Atlantic with the arrival
of the Catholic colonizers. In each of these regions, Carnival was
flexible enough to incorporate the existing festival traditions of the
local populations. There were differences as a result from place to
place, and also within the various strata of society within a particular
place. For example, among the European aristocracy and urban elite,
Carnival included masked balls, comical theatrical performances, and
public competitions. In the countryside events were organized by
groups of friends, clubs, fraternities, and guilds, and often featured
parades of peasants costumed as royalty. The well-known parades of
today’s Carnival celebrations have their roots in this period, which saw
processions of costumed people on foot and on floats, performing
masquerades in which they poked fun at certain segments of society.
Figure 3.1This painting of the Battle of Carnival and Lent (1559) by Pieter
Bruegel the Elder illustrates the worldly and “world-turned-upside-down” aspects
of Carnival, as revelers prepare to say their farewell to meat and other pleasures
in the Lenten season of abstinence.

Source: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

In both rural and urban settings, Carnival was a time when normal
social strictures were suspended: aggressive and promiscuous acts
were permitted, and reversals of social standing were enacted – with
men and women cross-dressing, or masquerading as members of a
different social or professional class. Carnivalesque humor reveled in
life’s fecundity, in sexuality and all the irrepressible life forces of the
material body; its humor was full of images of copulating, defecating,
dying, and birthing, always expressive of life’s regenerative processes.
Images of excessive eating and drinking were common (the clowns of
early German farces, Hanswurst and Pickelhering, are named after
folk foods). Images of the body, from nose to phallus, and lower bodily
functions were writ large and grotesquely in Carnival folk humor; such
representations, argued Mikhail Bakhtin, were not about the individual
body/ego but about the irrepressible and regenerative body of the
people. (See Figure 3.1 and the “Thinking through theatre histories”
box.)

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque

One of the most important theorists of Carnival is the Russian literary critic
Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote between 1919 and the early 1970s, barely escaping
Stalin’s infamous purges in the 1930s. His concept of Carnival folk humor was
developed in his analysis of the evolution of the novel, but it is useful to
theatre studies as well. Bakhtin sees Carnival as an elemental force, nurtured
by a 1,000-year tradition of folk humor, from satyr plays to medieval fools,
liberating language and literature from the “official” ecclesiastical and feudal
cultures and surging into the Renaissance. The culture of folk humor finds
opportunities for expression in popular festivals all over the world.
Bakhtin based his theories on the Carnival traditions of Christian Europe. At
the center of such celebrations, he argued, was the false coronation and later
deposing of a Carnival king (usually a slave or clown). His coronation is full of
pomp and circumstance, his dethroning full of shame and disgrace. For
Bakhtin, this duality, or embrace of contradictions, is what characterizes a
“carnivalesque” view of the world: one in which the sacred mingles with the
profane, the new with the old, the high-born with the low-born, the wise with
the foolish, and so forth. All of this is meant to reveal the hidden sides of
human nature – and thereby to expose how social structures are relative, and
social orders contingent rather than natural or God-given.
Bakhtin argued that the “carnivalesque” was central to medieval
consciousness up until the end of the sixteenth century, allowing Christians of
the time to break free, for a time, from the many restraints upon their
comportment that Church dogma demanded. As Carnival began to lose
traction (at least in Europe) in the Enlightenment period, its dualistic impulses
were channeled away from the public streets and into the realm of literature,
formal theatre, and other forms of art and popular culture – extending to our
own day, where it might be argued that some popular reality TV shows do the
work of Carnival – conferring fame and glory on everyday people, if only for an
episode or a season. Of course, the carnivalesque also wears its public face
in the ongoing traditions of pre-Lenten Carnival and Mardi Gras parades; in
gay pride parades; in public New Year’s Eve celebrations; in the parades
 accompanying sports bowl games; and in Halloween parades and parties
where disguise affords the possibility of experimenting with alternate
identities. Often, civic parades combine solemn patriotism with boisterous
clowning and plenty of spectacle; just as commemorative drama can include
the carnivalesque, so can Carnival contain commemorative elements.

These “rites of reversal” or “rites of misrule” were not confined to the

Lenten season; the Church calendar also accommodated, if uneasily,
other festivals in which social expectations were temporarily turned on
their heads. For example, during Christmas time in many European
countries a “Feast of Fools” (sometimes called “Feast of Asses”) was
held in which the lower clergy mockingly impersonated their superiors
(as well as women), played dice on the altar during the celebration of
the Mass, and processed through town singing lewd songs. They may
also have appointed a “Boy Bishop” from among the ranks of their
choirboys, who performed a burlesque of the official Church service.
Not surprisingly, Church authorities were none too pleased with
these annual celebrations of misrule, and Church records show
numerous attempts at banning them, and Carnival as well (which
serve as proof of their enduring popularity). This happened in some
European cities, and frequently in the Spanish and Portuguese
colonies of the Americas. Scholars speculate that in the Americas,
Carnival was an upper-class event until after the various wars of
independence from Spain and Portugal; this may explain why so
many revelers in today’s Brazilian Carnaval, for example, don the
attire of eighteenth-century aristocracy.
Although the Church’s concern about Carnival’s excesses is well
documented, many latter-day researchers of Carnival suspect that the
Church needn’t have worried. They argue that the chance to
temporarily reverse the social order was in fact an important
component for keeping it intact. Others want to see it for its
imaginative and liberatory potential, as a rehearsal for a new world
order rather than a safety valve that keeps the old one in its place, as
discussed in the “Thinking through theatre histories” box.
Commemorative performances
While commemorative drama may contain carnivalesque elements, it
always shares certain basic elements that fulfill a more serious
function: that of helping participants and observers learn and
remember something important about their religious, civic, or cultural
heritage. Recall, for instance, Rabinal Achi, the Mayan drama
introduced in Chapter 1. It is a performance of local history, but not in
strictly chronological terms. Rather, it is more like a montage of many
different historical events gathered into one central conflict between
two rival warriors from the distant past. Its yearly staging is meant to
commemorate the origins and resilience of the town of Rabinal over
the centuries, which is one reason why UNESCO proclaimed it a
masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity. Both in its
local meanings and in its more global UNESCO designation, Rabinal
Achi highlights the notion of cultural heritage and continuity. As social
anthropologist Paul Connerton argues in How Societies
Remember(1989), such performances have in common a key element:
“they do not simply imply continuity with the past by virtue of their high
degree of formality and fixity; rather, they have as one of their defining
features the explicit claim to be commemorating such a continuity”
(48).
Rabinal Achi shares many features with commemorative drama in
general:

it tells a story that has been carefully preserved both orally and in
manuscript form;
it celebrates a moment in the past that is of great contemporary
importance for the drama’s audience;
it is meant to be staged on a regular basis to preserve that
heritage in social memory; and
its aim is not necessarily a full realistic representation in
historically accurate detail, but more a symbolic portrayal of
people and events important to the community’s sense of cultural
continuity.
Commemorative performances often offer participants the chance to
represent themselves and their present concerns within the
performance, in order to show how their present relates to their past.
In these kinds of performances the carnivalesque can make a
memorable appearance. An example is the centuries-old tradition of
the Mexican Pastorela, or Shepherd’s Play. Annual Pastorelas offer
latter-day communities the opportunity to inaugurate the Christmas
season with a performance that both recalls the journey of the
shepherds to the infant Christ’s birthplace, and comically treats and
often satirizes local events of politics and popular culture of the
previous year. In doing so these communities demonstrate that
“continuity” can both accommodate, and actually depend upon,
change. Seen this way, it is not surprising that the Mayan characters
in contemporary productions of Rabinal Achi wear the masks of
sixteenth-century Spaniards (see Figure 3.2). We consider another
example of performance that foregrounds both continuity and change
in our case study on the Moors and Christians.
Figure 3.2Latter-day performers of the Guatemalan Rabinal Achi wear masks
suggesting the features of sixteenth-century Spaniards, even though the
characters they portray are pre-Columbian Mayans. As such these latter-day
performances register both cultural continuity and change.

Photo: Photonica World/Holly Wilmeth/Getty Images.

Commemoration and the carnivalesque in the Jewish
Purim shpil

One remarkable example of how commemorative drama

can blend both the past and the present, and the serious with the
carnivalesque, is the Jewish tradition of the Purim shpil [shpihl] (or
play). This is a tradition that emerged to commemorate a great victory
in a people’s past, and is performed in the present with great joy and
much laughter. Its source is the Book of Esther (a part of Judaism’s
central religious texts), which tells a story of a Jewish victory over
religious persecution, when the Jews were in exile in Persia in the fifth
century BCE. The spirit of this victory – of a religious and ethnic
minority over a hostile majority – is what is commemorated in Purim
shpiln (plays).
The Book of Esther is indeed rich in dramatic possibilities. The
Persian King Ahasuerus (in Greek, Xerxes) orders his wife to display
her beauty to his banquet guests. When she refuses, he makes a
lesson of her to all women who would dare to disobey their husbands,
and sets out on a search for a young and beautiful woman to replace
her. The orphaned Esther is the one who catches his eye, but to keep
his favor she must hide her own Jewish identity. Later, her guardian,
Mordechai, saves the king from an assassination plot – a fact which is
recorded, but not known to the king. On another occasion, Mordechai
had refused to bow to the king’s prime minister, Haman. As a result,
when Haman later learns that Mordechai is Jewish, he hatches a
genocidal plot, with the king’s approval: on a certain day, everyone in
the kingdom has the right to murder and pillage the Jews and their
property. Eventually, two events transpire to mitigate the slaughter.
First, King Ahasuerus discovers Mordechai’s life-saving service to
him. Second, in order save her people, Esther takes the risk of
revealing her identity to her husband – and the threat to her life that
Haman’s plot represents. The king leaves her in a rage, but later
returns to see Haman pleading with Esther to spare his life. Thinking
Haman is assaulting her, the king orders him to be hanged – on the
very gallows Haman had intended to be used for executing
Mordechai. But the decree against the Jews cannot be rescinded, so
the king allows the Jews to defend themselves. The result is that the
Jews slaughter some 75,000 Persians, including Haman’s ten sons.
Readings of the Book of Esther are meant to commemorate the
events of that day (which usually corresponds to a date in March). As
early as the 1400s, these readings were accompanied by what we
might now call “audience participation,” with congregants hissing and
booing at every mention of Haman’s name, and collateral
performances of humorous monologues and skits loosely based on its
events. Over time, the repertoire expanded to include carnivalesque
elements in order to parody contemporary events in the local
community, often relying on bawdy jokes and profanities. Troupes of
Purim players would travel from home to home, collecting alms to
support themselves and those less fortunate (Figure 3.3). Some towns
supported only one troupe; larger towns, several. The actors, typically
young, unmarried men and boys, might perform year after year, often
disguising themselves in order to “protect their freedom to be
licentious” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1980: 6). In the eighteenth century,
biblical content returned to the Purim shpil, and in some parts of
Eastern Europe the form expanded to full-length dramas with musical
accompaniments and large casts (often featuring professional
entertainers).
Figure 3.3Because Esther had to live in disguise as a non-Jew, Purim
celebrations that commemorate her story often feature costumes and masks to
hide one's identity – thus granting revelers license to behave in ways they
normally would not at any other time of year.

Source: Courtesy of the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art.

According to performance scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Purim shpiln took place in both
private homes and public settings, and a single play could last up to
five hours. In homes, where they were performed during the festive
meals, they were often abbreviated so the troupes could reach as
many homes as possible and collect more alms (1980: 6).

For Jews around the world, the Purim shpil is still known
for its entertainment value, allowing a commemoration of hope and
humor in the face of adversity – not only the trials of the distant past,
but all the tribulations faced by Jews between then and now. Today,
video has become a new outlet for the mocking spoofery of Purim, and
many “videoshpiln” have found their way to YouTube. Purim is often
described as the “Jewish Carnival,” for its ability to overturn the normal
rules of acceptable behavior for a time.
Commemorative performance in medieval Christian
Europe
Because the early Christian Church opposed the popular
entertainments of ancient Roman times, viewing them as sinful and
the work of Satan, by the fifth century CE theatre had been banned
outright; actors were excommunicated and denied Christian burial and
the Christian sacrament of marriage. Drama as literature, however,
was not equated with the excesses of theatrical spectacle during the
days of the Roman Empire. This is exemplified in the dramatic work of
Hrotsvitha (c.935–73), a noble lay member of the all-female Abbey of
Gandersheim, in Saxony (within what is now Germany). Her writings
in Latin included six plays, based on the comedies of the Roman
playwright Terence (discussed in Chapter 2). Her adaptations put
them to use for the personal discipline of young Christian women,
encouraging them to suppress their sexuality in favor of maintaining
their virginity. The plays may well have been intended for reading,
reflection, and semi-dramatic recitation, rather than performance.
Although a few small groups of traveling performers continued,
theatre essentially ceased between the sixth and tenth centuries in
Europe. When, where, and why it re-emerged at that point is a matter
of debate. Some scholars see it as a re-emergence of older, pre-
Christian rituals and performances, some co-opted by the Christian
Church. Others have argued that it emerged under the auspices of the
Church as a part of the monastic worship service – but have
disagreed about whether it developed organically out of the worship
format, or was deliberately introduced in order to restore a faith in
decline due to the Church’s increasing power as a private landlord and
broker of medieval social relations. And others have argued for a
parallel emergence in the public realms of courtrooms of law and
chambers of rhetoric, where the performance of forensic oratory took
on highly theatrical forms. These “origin stories” suggest a complex
interplay between textual authority and embodied performance.
Considering the function of writing in Christian Europe in the
centuries before the invention of the printing press, Elizabeth L.
Eisenstein (1979: 271) notes an interesting dilemma, one that has
particular relevance for the study of theatre and performance: if
knowledge of the Church’s most sacred mysteries was the domain of
an exclusive society of literate scribes and priests, how then was it
able to bring its doctrine to a population that was largely illiterate?
Among the principal means were the “oral and visual propaganda” of
sermons, stained-glass windows, and sculptures within the church
buildings. But starting in the late fourteenth century, the Church also
encouraged laypeople to perform religious drama. In the “age of
scribes” and well into the era of the printing press, oral culture and its
embodied enactments remained (and remain) lively and important,
ultimately resulting in what theatre historian Ronald W. Vince has
called a “bewildering array of performances of one kind or another that
we find in medieval Europe” (1989: ix).
Turning first toward the religious aspects of such performance, we
begin with the Christian ritual of the Mass, itself a performative
commemoration, and continue with a discussion of the principal types
of religious drama that emerged within Christendom_ cycle plays or
“mystery plays” based on the Bible; Passion plays devoted to the last
days of Christ’s life, his death, and resurrection; saint plays
(sometimes called miracle plays) that commemorated the life and
works of the Christian saints and martyrs; and morality plays that
used allegorical devices to explore the human condition in terms of
Christian values.
A brief overview of developments in Christianity and Christian ritual
will help the reader understand the function of commemorative
performance in both ritual and drama.
The Christian Mass as a performance of commemoration
When Jesus of Nazareth (4? BCE–29? CE) began to carry out his
public ministry in Galilee (Palestine), he was one of a number of
Jewish prophets declaring the imminent arrival of a “new” Kingdom of
God, in territory then under Roman rule. His followers proclaimed him
to be the Christ (“anointed one”) or the new “messiah.” When he
arrived in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish Passover at a feast
(seder) with his followers, he extended his teaching and healing into
an aggressive public protest by driving traders and moneychangers
out of the main Jewish temple. He was arrested by the Roman
authorities, put on trial, condemned to death, and crucified – a
common mode of execution.
To the authorities of the period, whether Roman or Jewish, Jesus
was a minor figure, the leader of a band of superstitious followers, and
his crucifixion as an “enemy of mankind” was only one of many similar
public spectacles of execution under Roman law. To his followers, the
period immediately after Jesus’s death was fraught with uncertainty.
Was the new “Kingdom of God” imminent? Thrown into turmoil by
Jesus’s death, his small group of disciples gathered to share a
memorial meal that recreated their last supper with Jesus and
commemorated his crucifixion and resurrection. Similar memorial
meals were established among converts as the new religion was
brought to Greece. The meal also featured communal singing,
perhaps a commentary by an elder in the community, and the blessing
and distribution of bread and wine, as Jesus had at his last supper
with his disciples. These activities are still part of the Christian Mass.
The conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity
in 312 CE ended the persecution of the Christians and made
Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. There were
separate forms of Syrian and Greek Orthodox worship in the East; by
the fifth century, when the vast Roman Empire itself was beginning to
crumble, the Latin Mass had come to prevail in the West. Perhaps it
was in the face of the collapse of world order as they knew it that
Christian leaders formalized the order of the Mass and their symbolic
vestments over the subsequent two centuries.
Figure 3.4The Three Marys at the Tomb (1425–1435), an altarpiece by Jan
and/or Hubert van Eyck, depicts the events commemorated in the Quem
quaeritis tropes during the Easter service of the early Christian Mass.

© Corbis
The liturgy (or order of the Mass) began as a manifestation and
commemoration of the sacrificial aspects of Christ’s life; by the tenth
century, inventive clergy in monasteries – the main centers of learning
and the arts – began elaborating on key moments of biblical history
during the Mass. Many biblical passages were sung or set to music,
and eventually, further small pieces of text were added to expand a
melody through chant-and-response singing; these were called
“tropes.” Over time, the tropes became increasingly dramatic,
providing for the characterization not only of the emotional tone of the
text being presented, but also of the personages being
commemorated in the text.
Early troping practice in the tenth century set to music one biblical
passage of key importance to Christians, for it commemorated the
central event in Christian history: Christ’s resurrection. It begins,
“Quem quaeritis in sepulchre, Christicolae,” meaning “Whom do you
seek in the tomb, followers of Christ?” The words are those of an angel
greeting three such followers, all of them women, who had come to
Jesus’s tomb in order to properly anoint his body (Figure 3.4). The
women (performed by men or boys) reply, “Jesus of Nazareth who
was crucified, heavenly one.” The angel’s reply is of supreme
importance for Christians, then and now: “He is not here. He is risen.”
This is the first confirmation of Christ’s resurrection from the dead,
which for Christians carries with it the possibility of redemption for all
humankind. Many versions of the sung text exist.
In the tenth century, the Bishop of Winchester wrote out detailed
instructions for performing this scene in the all-male Benedictine
monasteries. Tropes were soon used for other holy seasons, including
the celebration of Christ’s birth. While moving and dramatic, tropes
were not plays as such, but were designed for a heightened
experience of personal/collective worship and devotion
commemorating Christ. It was not long, however, before a few stories
associated with Christ’s birth were being dramatized in Latin within
churches, but perhaps not as part of the liturgy proper.
Biblical dramas in Latin
Throughout the Middle Ages, literacy was confined to the learned
language of Latin, and reading itself was dominated by one important
text: the Christian Bible. The elite, empowered to access its wisdom,
found much to appreciate and interpret on both religious and formal
grounds. Medieval readers, trained to look for signs and symbols
everywhere in God’s creation, applied this to their reading of the Bible
as well, looking for connections between the Old and New Testaments
in the stories and characters presented in both. They remarked on the
similarities, for example, between the sacrifice of Isaac by his father,
Abraham (a patriarch of the Old Testament), and that of Christ by his
heavenly father in the New Testament, and came to see Isaac as an
early “figure” for the later Christ. This figural turn of mind led readers to
look for other kinds of patterns, such as symbolism, allegory, and
analogy. In turn, these figurative devices informed literature, art,
political thought, theology, oral and written sermons based on that
theology – and dramatic performances, in both Latin and the
vernacular.
Early biblical plays in Latin dramatized the visits to the manger to
see the newly born Christ, by both shepherds and Magi (the wise men
or Three Kings who bring gifts to the Christ child); they were
performed respectively on Christmas morning and January 6, the feast
of the Epiphany. By the end of the eleventh century, the Procession of
the Prophets was being performed, based on a popular sermon from
the fifth or sixth century. After the initial spectacle of a musical
procession, costumed priests playing Old Testament prophets
stepped forward to deliver their prophecies of the coming of Christ.
The monastery of Benediktbeuern in Germany combined this so-
called prophets play with its Christmas plays from the New Testament
(which told of the life and works of Jesus and his earliest followers).

One of the most sophisticated examples of Bible music-

drama is The Play of Daniel, derived from the Old Testament story of
Daniel in the lion’s den. It was performed during the Christmas season
in the Cathedral of St. Peter of Beauvais in northern France, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here the Old Testament prophet
Daniel prefigures the New Testament Messiah. In this play, there are
at least nine opportunities for processions through the cathedral,
making use of harps, zithers, and drums to accompany chant singing.
Daniel sings a musically compelling passage in which he deciphers
the mysterious handwriting on the wall that predicts the fall of King
Belshazzar. (The Play of Daniel and The Play of Herod, another Latin
music-drama based in scripture, were staged and recorded by the
New York Pro Musica in the mid-twentieth century.)
 The scenes in The Play of Daniel and other early music-
dramas were staged on elevated platforms set up near the altar in the
open spaces of the cathedral normally used by the priest and choir
(there were no fixed pews). These platforms, sometimes designated
as mansions (“stations”), were bare platforms with symbolic scenic
devices rather than realistic settings. Actors moved freely from one
mansion to another, using the common floor area, or platea [plah-
TEH-ah] (“open space”). This was, in effect, a neutral, unlocalized
playing area, with mansions bordering it. The platea could be
whatever the text required at a given moment; the actor’s lines
identified the locale and atmosphere for the audience. The idea of the
platea carried over into the later vernacular Bible plays staged outside
the church (see Figure 3.7). The fluid, open stage that Shakespeare
later wrote for was somewhat indebted to this staging tradition.
Christian drama in the vernacular
Over the centuries, regional dialects of Latin formed the precursors to
the modern languages of Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese;
English developed from Celtic origins into a new language combining
Latin and Germanic roots. While Latin remained the official written
language of Christendom, the “Word of God” came to the vast majority
of laypeople not via reading the Bible but through performative acts of
worship and other activities. Homilies and visual iconography within
the churches encouraged congregants to reflect on key events in the
life of Christ, and worshippers participated in prayerful processions to
the “stations of the cross” – depictions of episodes in the sequence of
Christ’s suffering (called his Passion), such as Christ carrying the
Cross, his being nailed to the Cross, his death, and the removal of his
body for burial.
By the late twelfth century, innovative plays based on these and
other biblical events began to be written in vernacular languages and
performed outside churches. An important early example is The Play
of Adam (c.1150) from northern France. It dramatizes the Old
Testament story of the expulsion of the two first humans, Adam and
Eve, from the Garden of Eden, and of the rivalry between their sons,
Cain and Abel. The detailed stage directions make clear that it was
performed adjacent to a church or cathedral, and they provide many
details about scenic décor, costuming, and acting.
The fourteenth through sixteenth centuries saw a flowering of
vernacular religious drama in towns throughout England and the
European continent, whose themes were drawn from the Bible and
from Christian doctrine. Such drama flourished for three reasons: (1)
the institution of the new Feast of Corpus Christi; (2) the growth of
towns and municipal governments as entities independent of feudal
lords; and (3) the gradual development within towns of the medieval
trade guilds. These were associations of tradesmen, such as bakers,
tailors, and goldsmiths, who trained apprentices and eventually
regulated wages and working conditions – and who sponsored the
staging of certain plays. Alan E. Knight asserts that while on the
surface the dramas of the period re-enact biblical history, behind that
surface late medieval social structures, values, and political realities
were being mirrored (Knight 1997: 1–2). Indeed, the staging of late
medieval dramas was thoroughly urban, bourgeois, and informed by
constant trade and transaction between continental Europe and
England.
Christian feast days and biblical dramas
Key to the development of vernacular drama in the Middle Ages was
the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi – Latin for the “body of
Christ.” The sacrifice of Christ’s body is centrally commemorated in
the climax of the Mass, when the Eucharist is celebrated: the priest
raises bread and wine, and pronounces, as Jesus did during his last
supper with his apostles, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.”
With these words, the bread and wine are believed to be
transubstantiated into the actual body and blood of the risen Christ.
Pope Urban IV instituted the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1264 in order to
celebrate the redemptive power of this sacrament and the presence of
Christ in the world in general; by 1350 it was widely observed, between
late May and late June of every year. Because this festival celebrated
the body of Christ, it invoked the theological doctrine of Incarnation.
For Christians, the Incarnation refers to God being made flesh in the
person of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of Incarnation also extends to the
Word of God, known through the Bible, as well as embodied in Jesus.
Thus the Feast of Corpus Christi is a celebration of a text turned into a
performing body. Figuratively speaking, the Feast of Corpus Christi
can be seen as a figure for theatrical performance itself, which also
turns words (scripts) into flesh (actors acting).
In a common Corpus Christi ritual, priests processed through the
city displaying the “Host,” a consecrated wafer encased in an
elaborate vessel that signified the real (not symbolic) presence of
Christ in the world (Figure 3.5). The procession of the Host was often
accompanied by tableaux of biblical scenes representing Christian
sacred history and testifying to the humanity of Christ. In Paris in 1313,
actors began to recite the story of the Passion as part of a living
tableau. Short speeches were introduced in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1391
with the appearance of Adam, Eve, and the twelve disciples of Jesus.
Meanwhile, in England and elsewhere on the continent, sets of
plays based on key biblical episodes providing a whole history of
salvation were being performed; these were known as cycle plays
(see Figure 3.6). Among the Bible stories dramatized in the cycle plays
were those of the creation of the world; the building of Noah’s Ark;
Abraham’s sacrifice of his son; the Nativity, with the visits of the
shepherds and the Magi; Herod’s attempt to slay the new child-king by
dispatching his army to slay all newborn children; Christ’s raising of
his friend, Lazarus, from the dead; and Christ’s crucifixion and
resurrection.
Not being attached to the liturgy as such, vernacular Bible dramas
of all types combined instruction with dramatic freedom, often
incorporating carnivalesque elements, creating local characters, and
providing comic relief. In some plays God talks like one’s neighbor; in
others, shepherds suffer from oppressive landlords; and in at least
one other, Noah’s wife seriously doubts her husband’s big ark project.
The plays are unlike Greek and Roman drama: episodic, mixing
comedy and tragedy, and held together by the frame of God’s plan of
salvation rather than chronology. They abound in seeming
anachronisms, introduced to make contemporary points. For example,
at Christ’s birth, King Herod can swear by “the Trinity,” referring to God
the Father, Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit, a concept not possible until
after Christ’s death – but useful to show how even a pagan tyrant like
Herod can inadvertently pay homage to Jesus and God. Here
anachronism links the present to the past as a strategy for showing
the eternal truth of what is being commemorated. In a less sanguine
version of such an alignment between past and present, some plays
reflected the anti-Semitism common at the time; Jews were routinely
blamed for Christ’s death.

Figure 3.5In this prayer book illustration of an early Corpus Christi ritual (c.1320),
the priest holds high the Host toward the figure of Christ on the Cross. It is
designed to illustrate the miracle of transubstantiation, whereby the bread of the
Host becomes one with the body of Christ (here, shown bleeding on to the
bread). Note the witnesses to this miracle are laypeople, demonstrating the
message of this high holy day: Christ's redemptive sacrifice is available to all
humankind.
 Source: Michael Camille (1996), Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (New
York: Abrams). Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Because of the later censorship of religious drama during the
Protestant Reformation (see Chapter 5), the manuscripts of only four
complete or nearly complete English cycles are extant: 48 individual
plays in the York Cycle, 32 of the Towneley (sometimes called
Wakefield) plays, 25 in the Chester Cycle, and 42 in the “N-Town”
(unknown city) manuscript. We know an exceptional amount about the
earliest of the four, the York Cycle; the evidence tells us much about
its staging, the degree of civic involvement in performance, and the
social and economic background to its production.

The first record of the York Cycle’s performance is from

1376, but by then it was already a well-established part of York’s civic
and economic life. The extant scripts were written sometime between
1463 and 1477. The plays were performed on pageant wagons, which
held the setting (such as Eden or the Nativity manger) and sometimes
incorporated special effects. The wagons were pulled along a path
starting from the outskirts of York and ending in the city center,
stopping at “stations” to perform each play (or “pageant”) before the
audience gathered there. The number of stations isn’t known for
certain and probably changed now and then; estimates range from 8
to 16, but 12 seems the most likely. While a play was performed at a
station, the subsequent wagon was queued up. Then when the
performance was over, the first wagon was pulled to the following
station and the next play was brought in. With 48 pageants (and
possibly as many as 51), the York Cycle probably took around 20
hours to perform, though possibly not all plays were performed every
year.
Usually the action was set on the wagon, but it’s likely that once in a
while an actor performed in the street in front of the wagon or strode in
through the audience. Devils and evil characters were often played
with masks, helmets, or frightening makeup; God and angels may
have had their faces painted gold. Music accompanied the
performances.
 With a few exceptions these plays were sponsored and performed
by one of the city’s craft guilds; women did not perform. Often the guild
had a connection to the biblical episode it performed: for example, the
Shipwrights were responsible for “The Building of the Ark,” the Fishers
and Mariners performed “Noah and His Wife,” and the Bakers
dramatized “The Last Supper.” Sometimes the connection lay deep in
the play’s production or symbolism_ for instance, the reason the
Armourers produced “The Expulsion from Eden” may have been that
in medieval art, the archangel Michael typically wielded a sword when
driving Adam and Eve out of Eden. In France, and later in England,
these plays were also known as “mystery plays,” mainly because of
their spiritual character; however, another explanation may be that
craft guilds often treated their methods and tools as trade secrets,
referred to as “mysteries” that were carefully guarded.
Figure 3.6Detail from a painting of a city procession honoring the visit to
Brussels in 1615 of Spain's Archduchess Isabella, then Governor of the Spanish
Netherlands. This pageant wagon carries a scene of Christ's Nativity with actors
in tableau. Joseph and Mary hover over the Christ child at the corner of the
stable; the scene includes admiring shepherds, animals, and apparently a
blacksmith. This wagon was one of nine in the procession that represented
subjects both religious and secular. The painting is an important source for our
knowledge of medieval pageant wagons, although they are in use here to
display tableaux rather than as stages for the performance of plays.

Source: Painting by Dennis Van Alsloot. © the Board of Trustees of

the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Inventive means were used to stage religious plays, at York and
elsewhere. Where pageant wagons were used, they provided stages
for the tableaux in the processions and/or for performances at certain
stations along the way in the processions (“processional staging”).
Occasionally, some of the wagons might have been moved into (or
next to) an open area such as a city square, a green, or even a large
platform that would have provided a neutral playing space. (The
overall arrangement, in which a platform or wagon with a set
representing a relatively specific location is surrounded by a general
playing area, is usually called locus [LAW-koos] and platea staging.)
Some Corpus Christi cycles evidently used no wagons; others
included pageants so elaborate that two wagons were needed.

Our only visual record of a medieval play in performance

shows fixed, raised scaffolds – mansions – bordering the platea. A
hand-painted illumination in a fifteenth-century French prayer book
shows a scene from the lost saint play The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia,
with actors in the platea and up on the scaffolds, possibly along with
audience members (see Figure 3.7, and the discussion of saint plays
below).
The production of cycle plays was far more than a side activity or
entertainment for the trade guilds that sponsored them; the annual
cycles were highlights of a festive season that attracted numerous
visitors and provided a major economic boost for the community. Their
staging was a major undertaking that required considerable financial
resources and planning, organizational support and supervision by
city officials. The York Cycle, for example, featured some 300 speaking
parts. Due to the financial burden, sometimes two guilds had to
combine their resources in order to produce one of the pageants. Why
they chose to sponsor them at all is a matter of debate. Certainly piety
played a role. But other pressures may have also been a factor. While
the Feast of Corpus Christi and the cycles of plays appealed to all
sectors of society, what emerges from recent studies of the historical
records is the sense that it was the merchant/entrepreneurs who
controlled, sponsored, and even initiated these great “annual feat(s) of
corporate ritual within their cit[ies]” (Dobson 1997: 105). Probably a
combination of civic authority, economic motivation, civic pride, and
religious devotion compelled the guilds to underwrite these major
annual productions.
Figure 3.7A scene from a lost medieval play, The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, as
represented in an illumination by Jean Fouquet in a French prayer book, the
Livre d'Heures pour maître Etienne Chevalier (c.1452–1456). According to
legend, Apollonia was once tortured by the extraction of her teeth. Among the
scaffolds around the platea or playing area are those representing heaven (left)
with its angels, and hell (right) with its devils and a hellmouth into which the
damned were to be shepherded. The king's throne is at the rear, and the figure
with book and baton may be the director, in ecclesiastical dress. The raised
scaffolds seem to form a semi-circle around the platea, but in this and other
details we may be seeing the painter's compositional strategies for
representation in a book.

Source: © Musée Condé, Chantille, France. Photo RMN.

Outside England, Passion plays were popular during the Lenten
season. These plays treated the life of Christ in the days leading up to
and including his crucifixion and resurrection. Some of these plays
were performed over several days on fixed stages in which all settings
were visible at once (a convention known as simultaneous staging).
The illuminations and stage directions of the text for the 1547
performance of the Mystère de la Passion in Valenciennes, France,
indicate elaborate fixed stage arrangements that allowed complex
scenic spectacles, including the descent of an angel, flying devils, and
the ascension of Christ into the clouds with angels (see Figure 3.8).
The late sixteenth-century Passion play at Lucerne, Switzerland, was
performed in the city’s Weinmarkt over two days. The three-part
Cornish play known as the Ordinalia used mansions in a circular
arrangement, perhaps within a circular earthen embankment, and it
played over three days.
In the face of disasters or the horror of a plague like the “Black
Death” so common at the time, some towns organized Bible plays to
give thanks for their deliverance. The Catholic community of
Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps began to perform its Passion
play in 1634 in fulfillment of a pledge to God that if the plague would
cease, they would perform a play on Christ’s sufferings every ten
years. This the village has done, with few exceptions, until the present,
with various script changes since the 1960s to remove anti-Semitic
passages.
Figure 3.8The setting for a Passion play in Valenciennes, France, in 1547, as
depicted by the production's designer, Hubert Cailleau, in 1577. Note heaven on
one side of the stage, and the hellmouth on the other.

Source: Elie Konigson, La Représentatcion d'un mystère de la

Passion à Valenciennes en 1547 (Paris, 1969). Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
Saint plays, morality plays, and autos sacramentales

There were various other types of vernacular Christian

dramas in this period. One was the saint play (also called miracle
play), devoted to the lives of the saints, especially their miraculous
works. One Spanish saint play, El Misterio de Elche, dates from the
late fifteenth century, and is still performed annually in the Basilica de
Santa Maria in Elche (Spain), to celebrate the miraculous Assumption
(ascent) of Jesus’s mother, Mary, into heaven. This event allows us
both a glimpse into medieval European performance traditions, and a
sense of how they have changed over time. The play is divided into
two parts; the first, La Vespra, is performed on August 14, the eve of
her feast day, and commemorates the death of the Virgin Mary
surrounded by the apostles. It begins when Mary (still played today by
a haloed boy in a curly wig, and accompanied by a wind band)
progresses through the church door and announces that she is about
to die. Not long after, high above the congregants gathered below, the
dome of the church – painted to represent the sky and heavens –
opens as if by magic, allowing five angels (two boys, three men) to
descend to Mary. The apparatus transporting the angels is known as
la magrana (pomegranate). It dates in its present form from the
sixteenth century and is similar to other simple but effective theatrical
mechanisms utilized during the period in Spain. On the following day,
Part II, La Festa, commemorates the coronation of the Virgin after
both her body and soul arrive in heaven. The body of the silk-clad
Virgin is transported heavenward in “the pomegranate,” surrounded by
four of the angels. As she rises toward heaven the trap door opens
once again, allowing the Holy Trinity (played by two boys and a man)
to descend on a separate apparatus to the Virgin, so they may fix the
crown of heaven upon her head. Witnessing the performance in 2006,
David Ward describes how
[b]oth contraptions then rise and are steered carefully through the
skycloth... The audience holds its breath until the delicate double docking
manoeuvre is complete. Then all heaven breaks loose: golden rain falls
from paradise and again the organ plays, bells ring, fireworks bang and
the audience claps and cheers.
There are cries from all around the church of “Long live the mother of
God!” and everyone shouts “Viva!”
The apostles sing a Gloria of thanksgiving and we stagger out into the
square, amazed.
(Ward 2006)

When amateur congregant singers took over the performance from

the priests and choirboys in the nineteenth century, they preserved the
all-male performance tradition. As performed today, El Misterio de
Elche is a montage of religious as well as secular performance
elements which have accrued over the centuries. Its music ranges
from medieval plainsong to Renaissance and Baroque musical styles.
Melveena McKendrick observes how this major Church feast
combines the procession of the penitents, fireworks, and other secular
revelry to create a “potent mix of public fiesta and religious piety”
(1989: 239) for the local congregants and numerous tourists who
attend each year.
Morality plays developed widely during the fourteenth century, and
probably derived from sermons given by the clergy to elaborate
important points from the day’s scriptural readings. They were locally
produced by groups of citizens, sometimes elaborately. Allegorical in
nature, they usually focused on an “everyman” figure who faced a
choice between good and bad behavior. Since God had given
humankind free will to choose good or evil, the individual who chose
badly would suffer the consequences – damnation and the fires of
hell. Often the entrance to this place was represented by a monstrous,
fanged, mechanical “hellmouth” which would consume the fallen and
the damned during the course of a play, and was meant to frighten the
audience into choosing virtue (the place of “Paradise” at the opposite
end of the playing space) over vice (see Figure 3.8). (Often a
hellmouth was included in the Corpus Christi cycles as well.)
One of the earliest morality plays was authored by Hildegard of
Bingen (1098–1179), a gifted Benedictine mystic, abbess, healer, and
author. Like the dramas of Hrotsvitha, Hildegard’s musical morality
Ordo Virtutum (or “Play of the Virtues,” c.1155) was probably intended
to be read or recited by nuns within her convent, not for a general
public. It featured the battle for a human soul between the forces of
evil (the Devil) and 16 personified virtues like Humility, Charity, Fear of
God, Obedience, and so forth.
Figure 3.9Plan of the mansions and playing area for the morality play The
Castle of Perseverance (c.1400–1425), possibly for a performance in an ancient
earthen round. Mankind's castle is at the center, the location of the five
mansions is indicated outside the circle, and the direction within the double
circles reads: “this is the water about the place [platea], if any ditch be made
where it shall be played, or else let it be strongly barred all about.”

Source: The Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved.

Perhaps the most famous morality plays in English are The Castle
of Perseverance (c.1400–1425, Figure 3.9) and Everyman (c.1495,
likely based on an earlier Dutch version that was itself inspired by a
Buddhist fable from a millennium earlier). In The Castle of
Perseverance, the main character, Mankind, is seduced by the Bad
Angel who tells him there will be time in old age to be virtuous.
Mankind then encounters a wide range of allegorical characters who
attempt to influence him. They include the Seven Deadly Sins (Wrath,
Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony); the figures of
Conscience, Confession, and Penance; and the Virtues, including
Meekness, Patience, Charity, and Chastity. At Mankind’s trial before
God, Mercy and Peace plead for him against Righteousness and
Truth. God judges mercifully in the end. In Everyman, the title
character is faced with his impending death. Fearful of going to
eternity alone, he asks one worldly character after another to
accompany him; in the end, only Good Deeds can do so, thereby
providing justification for Everyman’s entry into heaven.

Within Spain, a new theatrical form, the auto sacramental

[OW-toh sahk-rah-men-TAHL], began to develop once Spain became
a unified Christian nation in 1492. Prior to that year, Spanish territory
had been divided among separate kingdoms, and large portions had
been inhabited by Muslims and Jews. When Isabella I, queen of the
Spanish kingdom of Castile, married her cousin Ferdinand II of Aragon
in 1469, they set about unifying Spain under Catholic rule, aided both
by military campaigns and by the Spanish Inquisition. In 1492, they
defeated the Moors at Granada, and passed a law requiring all Jews
to either convert to Christianity or be expelled from Spain. Many Jews
would decide to follow in Christopher Columbus’s wake, once the
Americas began to be settled.
As it had in other parts of Europe, theatre in Spain played its part in
extending and solidifying Christian power. A unique form developed
around the celebration of Corpus Christi that combined elements of
the cycle plays and the morality plays; these one-act plays became
known as autos sacramentales (“sacramental acts”). Like the cycle
plays, the autos dealt with important stories from biblical history to
culminate in a celebration of the mystery of the Eucharist. But they
also bore traces of earlier morality play devices, which had been
popular in non-Islamic Spain from the thirteenth century.
Mounted on portable, wheeled stages called carros, the plays were
presented several times in different locations throughout the principal
cities of Spain. Sometimes the city commissioned so many that
performances took place over several days, for the benefit of the king,
various governing councils, and the general public. The carros
themselves were included in the Corpus Christi processions, where
they were pulled along by bulls whose horns had been dipped in gold
for the occasion.
Thousands of autos sacramentales were commissioned, to be
staged and re-staged over the course of the centuries. As in England,
they were under the control of trade guilds until the middle of the
sixteenth century; after that, the city councils hired professional
troupes to stage these plays, which were written by the peninsula’s
foremost dramatists, among them Gil Vicente, Juan del Encina, Lope
de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca; these professional playwrights will
be discussed further in Chapters 4 and 5. The most important of the
auto authors was Calderón, who penned some 200, of which 76
survive. His work is remarkable not only for its quantity, but for its
quality: Calderón is widely noted for his keen insights into human
nature, which he viewed with great compassion, as well as his ability
to blend serious religious philosophy and poetic language with
inventive dramas embodying moral lessons. A fascinating example
from his body of work is The Great Theatre of the World (1635), in
which God is viewed as a kind of cosmic stage director, putting the
characters of King, Beauty, Rich Man, Peasant, Beggar, and Child
through their paces, noting that each has but one entrance and one
exit from this particular “stage.”
Interest in the autos began to wane after Calderón’s death in 1681,
but their influence was felt across the Atlantic as well. Perhaps the
most famous is one that may never have been staged: the Loa to the
Divine Narcissus by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun who
was also a celebrated philosopher, poet, and dramatist in the
seventeenth century (see the case study in Chapter 6). “Loa” means
an act of praise, and Spanish loas evolved from short monologues
and dialogues that preceded a given work to a longer form resembling
a one-act play in its own right, used to introduce a longer play with
similar thematic material. Sor Juana’s 1689 loa tells the story of the
conversion to Christianity of the indigenous Mexicans by Spanish
warriors and missionaries, and features such allegorical characters as
Occident and America (a native prince and princess), Zeal (a Spanish
soldier), and Religion (a Spanish lady), who argues that the “God of
the Seeds” worshipped by the natives is an allegorical prefiguration of
Christ himself.
Although the religious messages in the cycle plays and these other
types of drama were strong, it is important to stress the entertainment
value of these plays as well. The plots may have been familiar or
didactic, but often carnivalesque elements of farcical and topical
humor crept in to keep the telling fresh. The characters may have
been non-human abstractions, but the allegorical figures were fully
fleshed and often disarmingly human in their characterization. The
sets may have been limited by pageant wagon constraints, but clever
costumers devised ways to hold audience interest, including leather
bodystockings meant to suggest nakedness (for the plays about Adam
and Eve), and others rigged so as to shed blood, as in the case of a
play from the Chester cycle about the risen Christ. In France, because
the reputation of the guilds depended in part on the quality of their
productions, a “mixture of personal showmanship and the desire to
dress the sacred characters as icons could lead to extravagances of
silk, satin, and jeweled embroidery which we might find more
appropriate to the Follies than to sacred drama” (Vince 1989: 69). For a
population not yet literate in their own spoken language, all of these
elements worked together to ensure an experience of Christian
doctrine and values they hoped literally never to forget. However, the
Church’s approval of religiously oriented performance did not
necessarily extend to theatre generally: suspicion continued, and
particularly after the Reformation, the Church again condemned
actors and denied them sacraments.
Dramas of Christian crusade and conquest
While the Christian Church in Europe was busy reaffirming its central
tenets for believers through drama, it was also busy both at home and
abroad trying to win new souls for the Christian God, with means both
military and theatrical. When medieval Christian power was eventually
concentrated in Rome and in the figure of a pope, the Church
constructed the idea of the “Holy Land,” an area comprising the
locations in which sacred history had unfolded (present-day Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan). Soon, the Holy Land became
a site of Christian pilgrimage. From the eleventh century, it also
became a site of bitter, bloody struggles for power and ascendancy in
a series of militarized engagements eventually described as the
“crusades,” or holy wars. (The term, which means “marked with a
cross” – the key symbol of Christianity – first appeared in Spain in the
thirteenth century.)
There were holy wars against Muslim infidels [for the liberation of
Jerusalem]; against heretics like the Albigensians of Provence; against
recalcitrant Christian monarchs; even against humble towns that failed to
toe the papal line. But the first category, war against the Muslim infidel,
was always popularly regarded as the true war “for and by the Cross.”
Sanctified war was an innovation within the Christian Church, which had
for centuries struggled to impose the peace of God upon adversaries.
(Wheatcroft 2004: 187)

When Christian kingdoms began to colonize the world, a variety of

dramas of conquest resulted. In some, Western Christian modes of
performance were imposed on indigenous populations, as happened
in Mesoamerica. In their American colonies, the Spaniards introduced
all manner of Christian biblical theatre from medieval Europe, in
service of teaching and converting the natives. The first European play
performed in the Americas was a morality play: Juicio Final (Final
Judgment), attributed to the Franciscan friar Andrés de Olmos, staged
in Tlatelolco (c.1531–1533, in what is now Mexico City). Written as a
warning against local customs of concubinage, it threatened natives
with eternal damnation if they did not marry within the Christian
Church.
It is impossible to know exactly how the indigenous peoples of the
Americas understood these theatrical representations. Most scholars
agree, however, that theatre played a strong role in the conversion
project. As we noted in Chapter 1, early Spanish conquerors were
quick to adapt existent forms of indigenous theatricality to their own
ends. Plays were performed in local languages, and indigenous
performers were recruited to fill the roles. The Crusades themselves
were a frequent topic of such drama, as noted in the case study below,
about the Moors and the Christians.
Figure 3.10A scissors dancer from Peru. Some scholars trace this performance
practice to a sixteenth-century “dancing sickness” performed as part of a
resistance movement against Spanish occupation of Peru.

© Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters/Corbis.
Mexican theatre scholar Maria Sten once noted that “theatre was to
the spiritual conquest of Mexico what the horses and gunpowder were
to its military defeat” (1982: 14). But other scholars have noted that
indigenous peoples living in the early period of the Spanish conquest
did not uncritically accept new performance forms and content, nor
abandon completely their own, as we saw with Rabinal Achi, and as
our case study on the Christians and Moors suggests. In the Andes,
for example, a Spanish “extirpator,” charged with stamping out idolatry
in the 1560s, was outraged to report that followers of an indigenous
resistance movement known as taqui onqoy (or “dancing sickness”)
had hidden an image of one of their local deities on the very vessel
that displayed the Host during a Cuzco Corpus Christi celebration.
Scholars of this resistance movement, which had at its center a form
of deity-possession of dancing bodies, have suggested that its
impulse to reclaim local cultural identity has never disappeared and
may be visible in contemporary performance of the famous Andean
danza de las tijeras, or scissors dance (see Figure 3.10).
Case Study Christians and Moors: Medieval performance
in Spain and the New World
Bruce McConachie, with Tamara Underiner
To celebrate their conquest in 1598 of what is now the American
southwest, Spanish conquistadores threw themselves a week-long
party, which included a variety of performances. According to one
participant, there were: “Tilts with cane-spears, bullfights, tilts at the
ring, / A jolly drama, well composed, / Playing at Moors and Christians,
/ With much artillery, whose roar / Did cause notable fear and
marveling, / To many bold barbarians . . .” (Harris 1994: 145).
How might we understand this important historical document? Many
Spanish-speaking cultures continue to enjoy bullfights, of course, and
“tilts with cane-spears” is easily explained as jousting matches on
horseback with breakable lances (so as to avoid injuring the riders).
Similarly, “tilts at the ring,” another game dating from medieval
tournaments, challenges the rider to thrust his lance through a small
ring. But what was the “jolly drama” with “Moors and Christians” that
involved noisy “artillery”? And why might a drama about Moors, the
Spanish term for Muslims living in northern Africa, be performed to
celebrate the conquest of land in North America?
At first glance, the answer to this last question might seem to be a
simple one: why not? As we have suggested in this chapter, Spain
carried the crusades to the Americas, where it sought to convert souls
to Christ before the end-times came; the natives of the Americas, like
the Muslims, can be seen as the “enemies” of Christianity who had to
be defeated.
But upon closer examination, this explanation cannot account for
the variety within and remarkable persistence of the tradition of the
Moors and Christian dramas, both in Spain and in the New World,
where the first record of such a performance dates back to 1538. At
that performance, staged during a Corpus Christi procession in the
town of Tlaxcala in central Mexico – by an all-native cast, in their
native tongue of Nahuatl – the enemy “Sultan” was not an indigenous
ruler but the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés himself, played by a
native actor dressed as a Turk. At the end of the “play,” he, along with
all the other natives on stage and in the audience, were baptized in an
act of compulsory conversion. What, exactly, was going on, and how
do we understand such a performance?
To begin to answer it, we will cover the history of this genre of drama
in both Spain and its colonies, and suggest an approach that will help
to explain how this ancient dramatic form has survived half a
millennium and more, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Historic background
By the time Spaniards in the New World crossed the Rio Grande to
claim New Mexico, Christian kings, princes, and counts in Spain had
been staging moros y cristianos spectacles for popular and
aristocratic audiences for over 300 years. These choreographed
battles typically pitted two groups of knights against each other –
blackfaced Moors in exotic silk gowns and Christian crusaders in
shining armor. Following exchanges of verbal abuse from both sides,
the Moors usually won the initial battles, but the Christian knights
always triumphed in the end, sometimes returning with facsimiles of
Moorish heads on their lances. In other performances, the Moors
would recognize the error of their ways, convert to Christianity, and
bow down before a symbol of Catholic power.
Real battles between Christians and Moors began before Spain was
even a country. At first of the Moors won most of them, in the early
Middle Ages establishing a society in what is now Portugal and most
of Spain that was more advanced and tolerant than Christian Europe.
Over time, Christian forces prevailed; warfare lasted until 1492, when
the Moorish port city of Granada fell (Figure 3.11). In that momentous
year, as noted above, all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity
were also expelled from the peninsula, and Columbus set sail under
the flag of the new Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella.
Figure 3.11Map showing extent of Christian and Moorish territories in 1490.

This 700-year crusade left an indelible impression on Spanish

history and culture. Hardened by constant warfare, a newly united
Spain forged a culture of religious fanaticism and military valor that
shaped the Catholic Inquisition at home and conquest abroad. After
1492, the rulers of Spain expelled all infidels from the peninsula,
tortured thousands of moriscos (Christians of Moorish background)
and marranos (Christians of Jewish background) suspected of un-
Christian belief, and extended their crusade of conversion or
extinction to the natives of the New World. When the conquistadores
of New Mexico performed the “jolly drama” of moros y cristianos, they
were honoring a tradition of militant Christianity that had brought them
victory for hundreds of years. There can be little doubt that the
Spaniards rejoiced in the “fear and marvelling” that the spectacle
produced among the Native Americans who were watching the show.
 As in the Mexico and New Mexico productions of 1538 and 1598,
performances of moros y cristianos in medieval Spain normally
occurred in the midst of a festival. In 1461, for example, Count Miguel
Lucas de Iranzo, the Castilian ruler of Jaen, threw a party for his town
that lasted for 21 days. In addition to celebrating his wedding, the feast
was designed to shore up his power and prestige in the wake of a
recent plague and frequent attacks by the Moors. The count and his
retinue claimed the blessing of God by dressing themselves in images
of Christian power. Lucas transformed the entire town into a stage
using an array of torches, symbolic tapes tries, and musicians to
heighten the effects of the processions, games, dances, and plays.
Mock battles between Christians and Moors occurred in the midst of
other dramatic spectacles. Like many of his subjects, Lucas appeared
both as himself, a magnanimous ruler, and as a performer, enacting
one of the kings who visited the Christ child in Bethlehem in a nativity
play that was part of the celebration.
The “low other” in medieval performance
Performances in medieval festivals and religious holidays often
defined proper Christian behavior by denigrating and defeating its un-
Christian opposite. Because vertical relations of authority and belief
were so important in medieval Christian culture, stereotypes of “low
others” proliferated in European performances from the twelfth
through the sixteenth centuries. Mummers plays, early Christianized
versions of pagan rituals designed to ensure the return of spring after
the winter solstice, often featured a blackened Turk as the antagonist
of a white Christian knight. Another winter solstice performance, the
Sword Dance, symbolically sacrificed a hairy wild man or a
“greenman” from the forest to incite the resurrection of the springtime
sun (and the Christian Son of God). In the cycle plays, Jews, Romans,
and infidels were often characterized as buffoons, villains, or other
“low” types. Characters associated with vice in morality plays – the
female temptress, Sloth, Gluttony, Pride, the rest of the Seven Deadly
Sins, and Lucifer himself – were typically costumed and played in
ways that aligned them with dirt, feces, and rampant sexuality (Figure
3.12). In medieval Spain, Moors and Jews became the primary
symbols of the “low other” in festival performances. Medieval writers
often characterized Moors as treacherous and cowardly in moros y
cristianos plays, especially after 1492.
Figure 3.12Stonework depicting a sexualized Lucifer tempting Christ. Carved on
a capital of Autun Cathedral in France in the twelfth century by Gisilbertus.

Source: © Abbé Denis Grivot, Autun, France.

Moros y cristianos in New Mexico today: Conquest and

re-conquest
The legacy of Spanish medieval theatre continues to shape popular
and religious celebrations in Spanish-speaking countries today. For
example, every year during a June fiesta about two dozen men and
women of Chimayó, New Mexico dress in medieval costumes, mount
horses, wield swords and scimitars, and engage in a symbolic battle.
To create the illusion of darker skin, the Latinos playing Moors also
wear black veils. As during the days of Spanish imperialism, the
ideology of militant Christianity continues to shape the ending of the
play. Convinced by the outcome of the battle that their own religion is
false, the Moors convert to Christianity, and all performers join
together in a hymn of praise to the Holy Cross.
Some Native Americans living in Mexico and the U.S. southwest
also perform versions of moros y cristianos, partly to honor their
conversion to Christianity under Spanish rule but also to gain a wry
revenge against their historical persecutors. These performances
typically involve Native Americans on hobby-horses playing, as they
did in Tlaxcala in 1538, both groups of antagonists, with historic Native
Americans on one side and Spaniards and “white” Americans on the
other (Figure 3.13). Instead of dramatizing conquest and conversion,
however, the performance points to the foolishness of the “whites,”
who, in this revised version of moros y cristianos, flee a symbolic bull,
portrayed by a Native American.
Figure 3.13Drawing made in 1942 of a Native American as a Spanish Christian
saint on a horse in a moros y cristianos production on Christmas day at San
Felipe Pueblo. Anonymous artist.

From Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters.

© The Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Reading for the “hidden transcripts”
Religious theatre scholar Max Harris has studied a wide variety of moros y
cristianos dramas, both historical and contemporary, and offers a way to
explain them in terms of both their resistance and their persistence. Drawing
on James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Harris compels
us to consider two kinds of “transcripts” at work in performances in which
power imbalances figure strongly, as they do in this case study: the “public,” or
official message of the performance, its stated intent; and the “hidden”
transcripts that both powerful and powerless might employ to critique the
public transcript, behind its back, either consciously or unconsciously. In the
case of the American variants on this drama, from the beginning – and despite
how the Spaniards in Europe and New Mexico might have meant it – the
moros y cristianos have been staged with multiple hidden transcripts that
allow performers both to toe the official line of Christianity’s triumph, and to
stage its own critique of that victory. Today, in situations in which Native
Americans control and perform the dance, the drama of the Moors and
Christians is no longer a “military theatre of humiliation” (Harris 2000: 27);
instead, they have turned white soldiers, saints, and traders into the “low
others” that they themselves once had been.

Key references
Glick, T.E. (1979) Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle
Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Harris, M. (1994) “The Arrival of the Europeans: Folk Dramatizations
of Conquest and Conversion in New Mexico,” in C. Davidson and J.
Stroupe (eds) Early and Traditional Drama: Africa, Asia and the New
World, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications.
Harris, M. (2000) Aztecs, Moors and Christians, Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
 Holme, B. (1987) Medieval Pageantry, London: Thames and
Hudson.
Scott, J.D. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden
Transcripts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Shergold, N.D. (1967) A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval
Times until the End of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Stallybrass, P. and White, A. (1996) The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stern, C. (1996) The Medieval Theatre in Castile, Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 156, Binghamton, NY: Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Wickham, G. (1987) The Medieval Theatre, 3rd edn., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Islamic commemorative mourning dramas: The Ta'ziyeh
of Iran and beyond

Just as the life of Christ and biblical events played a central

role in the development of commemorative liturgical and biblical
dramas within Christianity, a major historical event in the history of
Islam became the central inspiration for the development of the
Islamic commemorative drama, Ta’ziyeh [TAH’ zee-YEH].
“Islam” is an Arabic word meaning submission to God, or Allah. In
the Islamic tradition, Allah revealed his message to Muhammad in a
series of visions from 612 CE. Muhammad said he merely transmitted
the message of Allah, adding and removing nothing. For Muslims the
Qur’an (often rendered as “Koran”) is nothing less than the
transmission in simple, clear Arabic language of a divine archetype
that is kept in heaven for eternity, and is graven on the “guarded
Tablet.” It was that archetype that was directly revealed to
Muhammad. Muhammad, a merchant living in the city of Mecca,
probably did not read and would have transmitted what he received
orally. The word “Qur’an” is from a verb originally meaning “vocal
recitation”; it was only after 622 that some of Muhammad’s disciples
began to inscribe fragments of what they heard on to bits of leather.
After the Prophet’s death, the Qur’anic revelations were gathered into
a set of texts, collected by the first Caliph, Abu Bakr.
Figure 3.14Qur'an fragment, showing the heading for Chapter 32, “The
Prostration” (al-Sajda). Arabic text in kufic script on vellum. Ninth century CE,
Near East, possibly Iraq.

Source: © The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

For several centuries, written versions provided little more than a
guide to memory for repeating aloud a text already memorized. The
writing of the Qur’an grew in significance, becoming a sanctifying act
and done in elaborate calligraphy, the most esteemed art in Islam
(Figure 3.14). Islam generally prohibits pictorial representation of the
living or dead (people and animals) in order to maintain a clear
distinction between the Creator and the created, but the Qur’an and
other texts can be illuminated. Texts are often decorated with
geometric and plant-like patterns. Each of the Qur’an’s 114 chapters
can be marked by a decorative heading, and special marks to guide
one’s reading, indicating places for required ritual prostration.
Sultans, shahs, princes, and members of the aristocracy or wealthy
merchants throughout the Islamic world have also valued secular
Islamic books and manuscripts highly. From at least the ninth century
onwards, two attributes of royalty in Iran were maintaining a library
and patronage of the making of fine manuscripts. Persian princes
themselves were often artists or calligraphers. Other arts such as
poetry, music, dance, storytelling (Naghali); shadow puppet theatre
(Khayal al-Zill in Egypt, Karagoz in Turkey); storytelling in front of an
illustrated backdrop (Pardeh-khaani and Pardeh-dari); and puppet
theatre (Aragoz in Egypt; Abderrazak in Tunisia) also flourished under
the patronage of Islamic rulers.
Commemorative mourning rituals and the development of
Ta'ziyeh
When Muhammad died in 632, the Muslim community faced a crisis
over his successor (or Caliph). Some of his followers believed that the
Prophet passed special, divine knowledge to his son-in-law and
cousin Ali (d. 661), as well as to his direct descendants, to serve as
imams (prayer leaders and religious guides); these followers were
called Shi’ites (members of the Shi’i sect). Others (members of the
Sunni sect or Sunnis) held that the succession should fall to the best
person, not necessarily to a direct relative of Muhammad. The two
main branches of Islam
– Sunni and Shi’i – reflect this historical and theological struggle
over succession of the Prophet. The fundamental disagreement
between Sunnis and Shi’ites was accentuated by both political and
theological differences, which led to divergent legal and ritual
practices. Most followers of Shi’i Islam live in present-day Iran, Iraq,
Yemen, and Bahrain, with smaller communities in India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. The Sunnis constitute about 85–90
percent of the world’s Muslim population and live throughout the
Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, Indonesia, and the Americas.
Among Shi’ites, a form of commemorative performance known as
Ta’ziyeh (which in Arabic means expressions of mourning, sympathy,
or consolation) became central to their version of Islam. The roots of
today’s Ta’ziyeh lie in the violent struggle over succession to the
Prophet. When Ali’s father and older brother were murdered, Hussein
(Ali’s son and the grandson of the Prophet) led a rebellion to regain
control. But Hussein, his family, and followers were surrounded by the
opposing army on the plain of Karbala (in present-day Iraq). On the
tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic year 61 (October 10, 680), after
ten battle-filled days without water in which all the males save a single
small boy were massacred, Hussein himself was killed and the women
taken captive. The battle became a source for most Shi’ite rituals
because all those martyred modeled the ideal behavior in the struggle
to follow the right path toward Allah.
The first month of the Muslim lunar calendar, Muharram, soon
became a period for Shi’ites to perform mourning rituals to
commemorate the moment when Hussein, his family, and followers
were martyred. Since at least the tenth century, ritual processions in
Baghdad have featured mourners with black-painted faces and
disheveled hair, singing songs of lamentation and beating their chests
in mourning. (Acts of self-flagellation have remained a central part of
participants’ identification with the martyred Hussein to the present
day.)
Shi’ite practices were consolidated during the sixteenth century with
the establishment of the Safavid dynasty on the Iranian Plateau. The
popular orator, Hussein Vaiz Kashefi, composed Rawzat al-shuhada
(The Garden of Martyrs) – a work which synthesized “various
historical accounts, elegiac poems, theological tracts, and
hagiographies into a chain of short narratives that together formed a
much larger narrative” and which stressed “the courage, piety, and
sacrifice of Hussein and his followers at Karbala.” Reading it aloud at
religious gatherings, orators improvised sermons based on the text
whose intention “was to move the audience to tears through his
recitation of the tragic deaths of the Battle of Karbala” (Aghaie 2005:
45–6).
Eventually, the events surrounding Hussein’s martyrdom came to
form the narrative core of an even more elaborate ritual performance
called Ta’ziyeh, created during the Qajar period (1796–1925). A cycle
of ten Ta’ziyeh plays is performed during the first ten days of
Muharram, one each day (for a translation of one play, see Pettys
2005). Each chronicles a single episode of the brutal events, or
focuses on the heroic deaths of specific members of Hussein’s family
and followers. The only prescribed play is the death of Hussein –
always performed on the tenth day. Observances often continue
through the remainder of the month of Muharram and into the month
of Safar, specifically to mourn the torment of Hussein’s female
relatives taken as captives to Damascus. Some communities produce
less ornate Ta’ziyeh performances throughout the year that are not
necessarily about the events of Karbala.
Non-representational “reading” and representation in
Ta'ziyeh
Ta’ziyeh was originally performed at a crossroads or in other outdoor
areas. By the early nineteenth century, special performance spaces
(takiyeh) were built for Ta’ziyeh. Some staging elements may be
remnants of pre-Islamic entertainments and rituals, including a
mourning ritual for the legendary Iranian prince Siyâvash, a sinless
hero unjustly killed, like Hussein.

Ta’ziyeh is performed in the round, with a raised central

platform surrounded by a huge circular, sand-covered space used for
spectacular effects, such as equestrian events and foot battles.
Additional raised stages erected around the edges of the circular
space are used for subplots, enemy camps, or special scenes. These
often extend into the audience area. Corridors stretch from the central
stage through the audience so that messengers and processions of
horses, camels, and vehicles can pass. Battle scenes can surround
the entire audience. Audience and performers alike are immersed in a
whirling, centrifugal experience of tumultuous action, songs, music,
recitations, and battles (see Figures 3.15 and 3.16). Props and
costumes are simple and some times symbolic. A basin of water
represents the Euphrates River. Protagonists wear green or white and
sing in lyrical Persian chants, while the antagonists wear red and
declaim in a fierce, uncouth manner. Women’s roles are played by
veiled males dressed in black. Some characters, such as demons, are
masked. Ta’ziyeh participant-performers are not “actors” who
represent characters. They do not memorize lines. Rather, they are
“readers” who sing or recite in a non-realistic manner from segments
of the script held in hand. Like many forms of commemorative ritual-
drama, Ta’ziyeh has all the trappings of “theatre,” as Westerners
would understand the term, but in its most traditional form it is not
theatre. Rather, it is a participatory, epic re-enactment of an historical
event that makes the past present for Shi’ite participants and
spectators.
Figure 3.15A nineteenth-century performance of Ta'ziyeh. In the 1870s, the
Takiyeh Dowlat shown here was erected in Tehran in the royal compound. Its
walls, canvas ceiling, and circular stage were copied in takiyeh and husseinyeh
(performance structures) all over the country.

Source: Photograph, Tehran 1976, of an original painting by

Kemalal-Mulik. © Peter Chelkowski.
Figure 3.16In a Ta'ziyeh commemorative performance, Nabiollah Habibabadi
(on horseback) is seen in the role of Shemr, the general who beheads Imam
Hussain. In the background is Yazid, the Umayyid Sultan who ordered the killing.
In Habibabad near Isfahan, Iran.

Source: © William O. Beeman. All rights reserved.

To participate in Ta’ziyeh is to participate in a deeply religious event
filled with intense grief, mourning, and lamentation. For his followers,
Hussein’s martyrdom at Karbala exemplified supreme self-sacrifice,
human suffering, and a profound act of divine redemption. The pain
participants inflict on themselves is the pain of Hussein.
Ta’ziyeh ties contemporary Shi’ites to their complex past, reminding
them of their intimate connection with Hussein and the Shi’a battle of
resistance against a powerful, alien invader. For those who
participate, Ta’ziyeh brings the past into the present, and the site of
performance becomes the physical locus of martyrdom. Ta’ziyeh
remains of central importance in Iran, but is also performed today in
South Asia, other parts of the Arab world, and the Caribbean. Secular
versions of the Ta’ziyeh were performed at theatre festivals in Avignon
in 1991, Parma (Italy) in 2000, and in New York in 2002 at Lincoln
Center.
Case Study Playful gods: The Ramlila in north India
Phillip B. Zarrilli, with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Tamara Underiner

In this case study we consider the Hindu commemorative

devotional drama Ramlila [rahm-lee-lah] of north India. Unlike India’s
kutiyattam, considered in Chapter 2, which is patronized by relatively
small, elite audiences interested in enhancing their aesthetic
experience of performance, Hindu commemorative dramas are
performed for mass, popular audiences. These dramas allow
devotees immediate access to an encounter with one of many specific
manifestations of the divine – an experience sometimes described as
bhakti rasa (bhakti means devotion) – an aesthetic experience of deep
devotion that is a creative interpretation of the rasa aesthetic
considered in Chapter 2.
North India’s Ramlila is an enormously popular, pluralistic form of
open-air performance that re-enacts episodes from the life of Ram
(also called Rama). Ram is considered to be one of the ten
incarnations of the Hindu deity Vishnu (the preserver of the universe).
Lila literally means an act of cosmic or divine “play”; that is, a moment
when the divine interacts with the human world. In the case of Ramlila
and its earlier quasi-dramatic precursors, the divine’s vehicle for this
interaction is Ram. The present form of the text used for the
performance is called the Ramcharitmanas (“The Lake of Deeds of
Rama,” c.1577), attributed to the poet Tulsidas (c.1532–1623) or one of
his disciples. Its plot is based on the main elements of the much
earlier Sanskrit epic Ramayana (fifth to fourth century BCE). Ramlilas
occur every year, usually in September and October. All Ramlilas
involve role playing and the re-enactment of specific events from
Ram’s life. Some are brief, while others are elaborated at length.
Origins of Ramlila
Since its first telling, the Ramayana has been a source for
performance. Norvin Hein (1972) postulates that the earliest
forerunners of today’s immensely popular Ramlila were
dramatizations of parts of the Ramayana under royal patronage. One
early source, the Harivamsa (no later than 400 CE) relates how part of
the Ramayana was sung by a background chorus while actor-dancers
in the foreground enacted the story. Hein suggests that this early form
of dance-drama eventually died out in north India under Muslim rule
(1200–1500), but that elements of the early performance were still
reflected in the rebirth of devotional drama during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, when the popular Bhakti devotional movement
swept across north India (Hein 1972: 124). The Ramlila makes a
connection between performance and creation itself. The text of the
most revered version of the Ramayana, that written by Valmiki
(probably sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE), makes it clear
that the universe is a dramatic performance and that God is the writer,
director, star, and even the audience:
The world is a show and you are the viewer.
You make Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva dance.
...
Putting on a man’s body for the sake of gods and saints,
you talk and act like a natural king.
Ram, when they see and hear your acts,
the foolish are bewildered, the wise feel joy.
(Quoted in Hess 2006: 130)
What happens at Ramlila?
Ramlila is a highly participatory form of drama in which the devotee
enters into “the fabric of mythic narrative” (Lutgendorf 1991: 251). It
draws millions of pilgrim-devotees from across India – especially the
north and central regions. In the very geographical location where it is
assumed that Lord Ram was born (Ayodhya) and lived in the distant
past, Ramlila re-enacts the trials and tribulations of Ram. Some
performances last three to five days and others for over a month.
Audiences can exceed one hundred thousand – including not only
Hindus, but (depending on the political climate) also minority Muslims
and Christians. Performances culminate with the festival of Dussehra
in which an effigy of the evil ten-headed demon-king, Ravana, is
burned – a spectacular celebration of the victory of good over evil (see
Figure 3.17). The performances are put on by amateur casts under the
sponsorship of wealthy patrons.
In contrast to the highly decorative mode of composition of Sanskrit
poetry still in use at the time he wrote, Tulsidas authored his version of
the Ramayana in accessible language. In performance, Tulsidas’s
version of Ram’s story is mapped on to the specific geographical
locations understood to be dear to Lord Ram, so in effect, “the
pageant came to express notions of cosmography and pilgrimage that
aim at reclaiming and transforming the mundane world” (Lutgendorf
1991: 255). The entire performance becomes “a series of pilgrimages
that re-enact the Lord’s own movements and bring worshipers to the
sites at which they reexperience his [holy] deeds” (1991: 250).
Therefore, for the celebration of Ram and Sita’s wedding anniversary,
the ideal site is Mithila (Janakpur) in Nepal, the birthplace of Sita and
the location of their wedding. Pilgrims who are able to travel there
“identify themselves as members of Ram’s . . . wedding party, and
they trade humorous insults with the people of the bride’s hometown”
(1991: 250). For worshippers in Ayodhya, the birthplace of Ram, there
are also festivities. According to scholar Philip Lutgendorf,
On the marriage day in Ayodhya . . . wedding processions mounted by
major temples wind through the city for hours. They consist of
lampbearers, drummers and shehnai players, “English-style” marching
bands (all requisites of a modern North Indian wedding), and of course
the bridegrooms – Ram and his three brothers – astride horses or riding
in ornate carriages. The grooms are usually svarups – young Brahman
boys impersonating deities, but a few processions feature temple images
borne on palanquins [see Figure 3.18]. After receiving the homage of
devotees before whose homes and shops they briefly halt, the
processions return to their sponsoring establishments, where a marriage
ceremony is performed. The crowds of devotees attending these rites
are not merely spectators; they are encouraged to take the roles of
members of the wedding party.
(Lutgendorf 1991: 251)
Figure 3.17Ravana, the ten-headed demon-king as an effigy as part of the
Ramnagar Ramlila.

Source: Photo © Richard Schechner.

The Ramnagar Ramlila
Although hundreds of Ramlilas take place all over north India, the
most famous (and the one that we will focus on) occurs in Ramnagar,
which is across the River Ganga (Ganges) from the holy city of
Varanasi (Benares). After a special set of offerings is given, Tulsidas’s
version of Ram’s sacred story is chanted/sung in its entirety by a
group of twelve men, known as Ramayanis, who are accompanied by
a drum. A prescribed number of couplets are sung daily. Only on the
tenth day of recitation do the Ramayanis arrive at couplet 175, when
the Ramlila re-enactment of scenes per se begins. Their singing is
then incorporated into the larger context of the lila, and continues until
they reach the last book of the epic poem, when the lila ends. But the
recitation of the full text is not complete, so the Ramayanis continue
their quiet reading until each word of the text has been read, so that
the final ritual passing of a flame is held in Ayodhya, closing the full
performance of 30–32 days.
Figure 3.18A Ramlila svarup on Hanuman's shoulders. Such young pre-
pubescent boys play the holiest roles of Ram and Sita in performances where
they are worshipped as the gods.

Source: Photo © Sam Schechner.

Since the text is chanted, the actors do not simply recite the text of
the drama, but rather, like the dancers of old, they “bring to life and . . .
interpret the words of the recitation” (Hein 1972: 124). All actors are
males, with the roles of Sita, Ram, and his brothers taken by
prepubescent boys. They are worshipped as divine embodiments of
those they impersonate (see Figure 3.18). Other characters such as
Hanuman (the monkey king who helps Ram), and the ten-headed
demon-king Ravana, wear masks, and all the performers are
amateurs. Some actors of a specific Ramlila claim that their roles are
inherited within their families. The performance style is a combination
of wordless tableaux and processional drama, in which actors move
from place to place with occasional dialogue that most of the devotees
will not hear. Some locations are specially constructed for a lila while
others are actual landmarks in the town.

The Ramnagar Ramlila is considered by many

participants to be the most powerful. Why is this so? Among the
reasons for this distinction is the belief that in Ramnagar, Lord Ram,
his three divine brothers, and his wife (the goddess Sita) are literally
present in the bodies of those who enact them, five boy actors,
spectacularly attired, who are carried around (either by grown men or
in palanquins), because the gods’ feet must never touch the ground.
At Ramnagar, the entire poem is presented, whereas some of the
other productions used shortened texts. Another reason for the
dominance of the Ramnagar version is the presence of thousands of
sadhus (wandering, mendicant holy men) who camp out in Ramnagar
for the entire month.

Pilgrims as participants, not spectators

What do the non-actor participants do? There are many ways that
devotees can participate, but among the most common are some that
are described by religious studies scholar Linda Hess (2006):

1. When major characters begin to speak, the thousands of

participants shout a set cheer. For example, when Ram speaks,
they shout out “Bol! Raja Ramchandra ki jai!” (“Say it! Victory to
King Ramchandra!”)
2. Many people carry the entire text with them and read it aloud
along with the actors.
3. At specific times in the performance, they sing out holy praises of
the names of God in repetitive melodies.
4. They offer flowers, sweets, fruits, or sacred basil leaves to the
gods, touch the gods’ feet whenever possible, and worship in
other ways.
5. They travel – by bike, boat, bus, horse cart, rickshaw, car,
motorcycle, or on foot – both to Ramnagar every day and
following the performers as the story unfolds. Each day’s events
 may take four to twelve hours, and the most devoted participants
follow along on foot, ideally barefoot.
6. They act out the drama, playing the roles of crowds and wedding
guests, or reciting poems of praise from the rooftops. As Hess
recounts:

Again and again, the audience and citizens of Ramnagar act out
what Tulsidas narrates. They drop their work and rush to gaze at
the gods as they pass through town or village. They move with
processions or climb on roofs to see. They illumine triumphant
fireworks from their balconies as Ram’s chariot returns slowly from
exile. Some climb onto the chariot to make offerings. Others
decorate their homes and shops just as the citizens of Ayodhya are
said to have decorated theirs.
(119)

7. People create special roles for themselves, such as making and

donating flower garlands every year.
8. While most people come on and off, there is a core group who
attend every day, basically taking a holiday (which may be part of
every day, several days in a row, or even an entire month, if they
can afford it). They come dressed in special costumes, wear
distinctive holy makeup (red and yellow on their foreheads), carry
special staffs, and so on.

Varieties of participant experience

A deep, personal piety and devotion is at the heart of the Ramlila, and
motivates devotees to participate annually. In the past, the local
Maharaja (the high king who sponsored and supported the
performance) and Rama were considered “mirror images of each
other, the twin heroes of the Ramnagar Ramlila” (Schechner and Hess
1977: 74). In modern, secular, democratic India the identification of the
Maharaja as upholder of the cosmos is a vestige of the past. Since
Indian independence in 1947, kings no longer have any political power
at all.
The staging of Ramlila for mass audiences is, however, not simply a
devotional experience. Given the thousands of pilgrims who inundate
locales where the Ramlila is staged, the area of its staging becomes
an economically important marketplace for traders and vendors.
Wherever festival performances are held, and whoever patronizes
such performances, pilgrim/devotees must be fed and provided for.
Local merchants are more than happy to accommodate the influx of
pilgrims.
Many participants have posted videos on YouTube, or have written
about their experiences at the Ramnagar Ramlila. Hess, who has
participated in several Ramlilas, notes that
the Ramlila is what you make of it. If you come with devotion, you will see
God. If you come with cynicism, you will see little boys in threadbare
shorts. If you come looking for snacks, you will see refreshment stands. If
you come for a spectacle, you will see fireworks. If you come with
hostility or fear, that will also color what you see. “According to the
feeling within, each one sees the Lord’s form”: such a statement admits
the psychological nature of the Ramlila darshan [“vision” of the holy]. But
it is not, as it might be in a different culture, “merely psychological.” It is
gloriously, cosmically psychological. Every witness-participant creates
the drama in her own mind, and in this drama is at once creator, actor
and viewer. Thus the Ramlila teaches by experience that our realities are
mind-made.
(2006: 135)

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Resurrective aspects of commemorative drama
Hess’s description of the experience of the Ramlila for participants is
interesting to consider in light of other commemorative dramas like the
Catholic Mass, Rabinal Achi, and the Ta’ziyeh – all of which understand
themselves to be, in some important way, re-enactments rather than
representations of the past.
For believers attending the Catholic Mass, the priest does not represent the
historical Jesus as would an actor in a realistic drama; rather, he serves as the
agent for bringing the living Christ back to material presence in the form of
bread and wine, miraculously transubstantiated into the actual body and blood
of Christ. In Rabinal Achi, the audience is understood to include the ghosts of
the individuals portrayed in the action, as well as those of all the performers
who ever played them in the past; these ghosts are conjured forth by the
staging of the drama. And in Ta’ziyeh, participant-performers do not
understand themselves as actors representing characters; rather, they are
literally making the past present, through the embodied experience of the pain
of the slain Hussein.
For readers of this text who are accustomed to more secular or
psychologically realistic kinds of performances, it may be difficult to
understand the powerful effects of such performances on their participants,
who would have no question that this is “only a play.” For them, such
performances – perhaps not quite literally but not merely symbolically either –
have the power to raise the dead, and to bring the living face to face with their
God.

Key references
Hein, N. (1972) The Miracle Plays of Mathurā, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Hess, L. (2006) “An Open-Air Ramayana: Ramlila, The Audience
Experience,” in J. S. Hawley and V. Narayanan (eds) The Life of
Hinduism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 115–39.
Lutgendorf, P. (1991) The Life of a Text: Performing the
Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schechner, R. and Hess, L. (1977) “The Ramlila of Ramnagar,” The
Drama Review 21(3): 51–82.
Summary
Paul Connerton suggests that “if there is such a thing as social
memory, we are likely to find it in commemorative ceremonies” (1989:
71). As we have seen in this chapter, these ceremonies often take the
form of theatrical performance – and these performances often
combine elements of the serious and the comic, the devotional and
the carnivalesque, the historic and the contemporary. They were
particularly important in the medieval period, before literacy was
widespread. We have focused primarily on religious observances that
lend themselves to commemorative performances: the Jewish Purim
shpil, the Islamic Ta’ziyeh, and the many forms of Christian ritual and
drama designed to help followers of Jesus learn their religion’s most
important traditions and moral lessons. Of course, there are also many
secular occasions for performances that honor a people’s national or
cultural heritage, some of which will form the basis of our discussion of
theatre in Part II.
Throughout Part I, we have considered a number of performance
traditions that depended for their continuance on oral and embodied
“acts of transfer,” even when a written text served as a basis, a
referent, or a result. In so-called “traditional” or culturally
homogeneous societies, the repetition of common values through
regular, repeated performances serves a key purpose in fostering
ongoing cultural cohesion. In the performances discussed in this Part
of our textbook, the relationship between religion, power, and
performance has been strong, with stagings occurring within sacred
and shared civic spaces, under the watchful eye of authorities. Even
so, the enthusiastic “amateurs” (lovers of the art) charged with
maintaining and preserving cultural values in performance have
always also appreciated its potential for transformation and critique.
In more Westernized societies, for which life is not necessarily seen
as a “structure of celebrated recurrence,” the urge to commemorate
may arise out of a sense of nostalgia for a lost past (Connerton 1989:
64). For such societies, commemorative performances not only
provide compensation for this loss, but keep the past in its proper
place, so that the unfolding future can continue to be embraced.
 The invention of the printing press will capture some of the energies
formerly reserved for preservation and dissemination by means of
performance, and the social energies thus released are channeled
into an increasingly professionalized class of theatre makers, as we
shall see in Part II.
*
Part I Works cited

Other consulted resources and additional readings for Part

I are listed on the Theatre Histories website.
Audio-visual resources
Yoruba performance
Drewal, M.T. (1992) Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A video-tape companion to
this book includes sequences from Agemo, Egúngún, and Jigbo
masking and dancing; divination rituals; an Osugbo elder’s dance; and
a Muslim Yoruba celebration.
Awo Chief Ifakunle (2009) “Egúngún: Baba O, Yeye O!” Egúngún
masquerade and procession during the 10th Annual Ile Eko
Sàngó/Osun Milosa Rain Festival 2009 held in Santa Cruz, Trinidad.
Procession led by Awo Oluwole Ifakunle Adetutu of NYC. Online.
Available <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGqCDExp4IM>.
French Egúngún video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Kb1TngCu0gc>.
Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University (n.d.) Page of
masks, costumes, and very brief video of the Egúngún masquerade.
Online. Available
<http://www.carlos.emory.edu/ODYSSEY/AFRICA/AF_rit_cerem_mas
k_egungun.html>.
Rabinal Achi
YouTube videos: search for (1) Relato de Rabinal Achi; (2) Rabinal,
Baile de la Conquista; (3) Baile del Rabinal Achi Feria de Rabinal.
Smithsonian Folkways sample recording at
<http://www.folkways.si.edu/>: “Rabinal Achi: (a) Son del Quiche Achi;
(b) Son del Rabinal Achi.”
Audio recordings by P. Socub et al. Visit:
<http://www.folkways.si.edu>. Recorded in Guatemala.
Greek and Roman theatre
Athens: The Dawn of Democracy, featuring historian Bettany Hughes,
produced by the Public Broadcasting System, U.S.A., 2008. DVD 120
minutes, available from the PBS online shop:
<http://www.shoppbs.org>. Click on the listing for all video titles.
Beacham, R. and Denard, H. “The Pompey Project,” a paper, with
computer graphic illustrations, on the digital research and
reconstruction of Rome’s first permanent theatre, the Theatre of
Pompey. Online. Available HTTP:
<http://www.pompey.cch.kcl.ac.uk/>.
Hines, T.G. (2003/2009) The Ancient Theatre Archive: A Virtual
Reality Tour of Greek and Roman Theatre Architecture. Includes
photos of the ruins and data on the later stone theatres of the Roman
Empire: <http://www.whitman.edu/theatre/theatretour/home.htm>.
An excellent video, running 4:47 minutes, called The Greatest
Theatre (produced by Discovery TV) about the history and acoustics
of the ancient theatre at Epidaurus is available on YouTube at
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVO9Vd067U>.
Japanese theatre
The best single online source for nō, kyōgen, kabuki, and bunraku –
video clips (nō and kyōgen), photos (kabuki), historical prints, and
other materials – is provided by the National Theatre of Japan at:
<http://www.ntj.jac.go.jp/english>.
Video introductions to these traditional forms are also available at:
<http://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/unesco/noh/en/>.
All U.S. Japanese Consulates (and the Embassy) have cultural
attaché offices which lend out for free a wide selection of videos and
DVDs about Japan, including excellent videos on nō, kabuki, bunraku,
and modern theatre. The selection at each consulate varies. Contact
the one closest to your physical location several weeks before
planning to show the videos; they will ship them to you or you may
pick them up personally. There are consulates in New York, Chicago,
Los Angeles, and San Francisco as well as the Embassy in
Washington, DC.
Many videos, including the brief sampling below of titles we
recommend, are for sale from Insight Media: <http://www.insight-
media.com>.

Bunraku: Classical Japanese Puppet Art (28 minutes) #9AF905.

Kyōgen classic: Poison Sugar (Busu) (28 minutes) #9AF733.
The Tradition of Performing Arts in Japan (30 minutes) #9AF350.
Overview of nō, kabuki, and bunraku: Theatre in Japan:
Yesterday and Today (53 minutes) #9AF1899. Dated, but includes
interviews with performers including Suzuki Tadashi on modern
and traditional Japanese theatre.

Japanese Theatre 1: Nō <https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=_T5RqW8TWWY>. After a short general introduction to three
classical forms, nō, kabuki, and bunraku, the video offers excerpts of a
nō play with excellent commentary. The video is about 15 minutes.
A complete resource of factual material about nō is available at:
<http://www.the-noh.com/>.
A 3 minute sequence of a fast-paced climactic dance:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu5Vn1vQ5i4>.
Many videos of complete plays, in Japanese, without subtitles, are
available online. For example:

Hagoromo: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaFjFGrqMJ0>;
starts at 2 min., 29 sec.
Aoi no ue: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hI8edPXNS0>
Adachi ga hara: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5j87foiwY0>

Kutiyattam
The following videos are available at <www.keralatourism.org/video-
clips>. See the following videos on the kutiyattam temple-theatre
tradition; enter the site and look for the complete list of clips.

1. Kutiyattam
2. Koothiyattam (a variant spelling of kutiyattam)
3. Chakyarkoothu (solo performance of the vidusaka or clown-like
comic figure)
 4. Nangyarkoothu (solo performance of the Nangyars or women
who perform the female roles).

Kailasodharanam (Ravana: The Lifting of Mount Kailasa). On

YouTube, search kutiyattam and then scroll for this title. This is a
famous kutiyattam scene in which the actor playing the ten-headed
demon-king, Ravana, mimetically enacts his tremendous power by
“lifting” Mount Kailasa.
Richmond, F. (1999) Kutiyattam_ Sanskrit Theater of Kerala, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press (CD-ROM). Audio and video clips.
(See the University of Michigan Press listing online for computer
requirements.)
Carnival
To “visit” carnivals from around the world, tour the New Mexico
Museum of International Folk Art’s excellent exhibition at
<http://www.carnavalexhibit.org/>.
European medieval theatre
The Play of Daniel, New York Pro Musica, Noah Greenberg, musical
director. Music transcribed by Bishop Rembert Weakland. Charles
Bressler as Daniel and Russell Oberlin as the angels. Decca Records,
DL 79402 (1958).
The Play of Herod, New York Pro Musica, Noah Greenberg, musical
director. Scored by Noah Greenberg and staged by Nicholas
Psacarpoulos. Brayton Lewis as Herod. Decca Records, DL 710,095–6
(1964).
Mystery of Elche (Misteri d’Elx), YouTube videos: (1) “Misteri d’Elx”
(Part I: descent of the angels from heaven to Mary); (2) “Coronation of
the Virgin Mary” and/or “Coronación Elche” (the conclusion of Part II);
(3) “Misteri o festa” (series of images from Parts I and II).
There is an online simulator showing the path and the sequence of
plays in the York Corpus Christi Cycle at
<http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/PSim/applet/>.
For links to online resources, such as medieval play texts and
bibliographies; to databases of research projects such as Records of
Early English Drama; and to various groups devoted to research on
and production of medieval plays, see:
<http://www.netserf.org/Drama/>.
Ta'ziyeh
YouTube video: see “Persian Passion Play” at
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aKAPL9Fkz4>, which includes
commentary. There are others as well; search for “Ta’ziyeh.”
Purim shpiln
There are numerous YouTube videos that show homegrown versions
of this “Jewish carnival” tradition. Enter the search term “Purim
Shpiel.”
Ramlila
There are many YouTube videos covering Ramlila performances, in
Ramnagar and elsewhere, as well as other kinds of art inspired by
Ramlila. For a compilation, visit
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnfMG94dQa7URGbE6bj8W8g>
, or enter the search term “Ramlila.”
Books and articles
Aghaie, K.S. (2005) “The Origins of the Sunnite–Shi’ite Divide and
the Emergence of the Ta’ziyeh Tradition,” TDR: The Drama
Review 49(4): 42–47.
Ajayi, O.S. (1998) Yoruba Dance, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Akkeren, R. van (1999) “Sacrifice at the Maize Tree: Rab’inal Achi
in its Historical and Symbolic Context,” Ancient Mesoamerica 10:
281–295.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed.
M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Barish, J. (1981) The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Bennett, S. (1990) Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production
and Reception, London: Routledge.
Bharata (1961, 1967) Natyasastra, 2nd edn, trans. and ed. M.
Ghosh, vol. I, Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1961; vol. II,
Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1967.
Case, S.E. (1985) “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female
Parts,” Theatre Journal, 37: 317–427.
Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Connor, W.R. (1989) “City Dionysia and Athenian Democracy,”
Classica et Mediaevalia 40: 7–32.
Derrida, J. (1974) Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Dirks, N. (2001) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of
Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dobson, R.B. (1997) “Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins
of the York Mystery Plays Reassessed,” in A.E. Knight (ed.) The
Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe,
Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 91–105.
Drewal, M.J. and Drewal, M.T. (1983) Gelede: Art and Female
Power among the Yoruba, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Drewal, M.T. (1992) Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A video-tape companion
to this book includes sequences from Agemo, Egúngún, and
Jigbo masking and dancing; divination rituals; an Osugbo elder’s
dance; and a Muslim Yoruba celebration .
Duckworth, G.E. (1942) The Complete Roman Drama, vol. I, New
York: Random House.
Eisenstein, E.L. (1979) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Else, G. (1965) The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, New
York: W.W. Norton.
Fletcher, J. (2002) The Egyptian Book of Living and Dying,
London: Duncan Baird Publishers.
Foley, H.P. (1981) “The Concept of Women in Athenian Drama,” in
H.P. Foley (comp.) Reflections on Women in Antiquity, London:
Gordon and Breach.
Gaster, T. (1950) Thespis, Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient
Near East, New York: Henry Schuman.
Gellius, A. (1927) The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, trans. J.C.
Rolfe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gerow, E. (1981) “Rasa as a Category of Literary Criticism,” in R.
van M. Baumer and J.R. Brandon (eds), Sanskrit Drama in
Performance, Honolulu: University of Hawaii.
Goldhill, S. (1990) “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” in J.J.
Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin (eds) Nothing to Do with Dionysus?
Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Hale, T.A. (1998) Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and
Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Harris, M. (1994) “The Arrival of the Europeans: Folk
Dramatizations of Conquest and Conversion in New Mexico,”
Comparative Drama 28: 141–165.
Harris, M. (2000) Aztecs, Moors and Christians, Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Harrison, T. (2000) The Emptiness of Asia, London: Duckworth.
Havelock, E.A. (1963) Preface to Plato, Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press.
Homer (1967) The Odyssey of Homer, trans. R. Lattimore, New
York: Harper and Row.
Kale, P. (1974) The Theatric Universe, Bombay: Popular
Prakashan.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1980) “Contraband: Text and Analysis of
a ‘Purim Shpil,’” TDR: The Drama Review, 24(3): 5–16.
Knight, A.E. (ed.) (1997) The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in
Late Medieval Europe, Cambridge: D.S. Grewer.
Lutgendorf, P. (1991) The Life of a Text: Performing the
Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
McKendrick, M. (1989) Theatre in Spain 1490–1500, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Murray, P. and Dorsch, T.S. (trans.) (2000) Classical Literary
Criticism, rev. ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Nagler, A.M. (1952) A Source Book in Theatrical History, New
York: Dover Publications, citing The Works of Lucian of
Samosata, trans. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, III, 249–63.
O’Neill, P.G. (1958) Early Noh Drama, London: Lund Humphries.
Paulose, K.G. (ed.) (1993) Natankusa: A Critique on Dramaturgy,
Tripunithura: Government Sanskrit College Committee
[Ravivarma Samskrta Grathavali–26].
Pettys, R.A. (2005) “The Ta’ziyeh of the Martyrdom of Hussein,”
TDR: The Drama Review, 49(4): 28–41.
Plass, P. (1998) The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena
Sport and Political Suicide, Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Rehm, R. (2002) The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in
Greek Tragedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Roselli, D.K. (2011) Theater of the People: Spectators and Society
in Ancient Athens, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Scullion, S. (2002) “‘Nothing to Do with Dionysus’: Tragedy
Misconceived as Ritual,” Classical Quarterly 52: 102–137.
Shah, I. (2000) The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sten, M. (1982) Vida y muerte del teatro náhuatl, Veracruz,
Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana.
Taylor, D. (2004) “Scenes of Cognition: Performance and
Conquest,” Theatre Journal, 56: 353–372.
Tedlock, D. (1985; 2nd edn 1996) Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of
the Dawn of Life, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Tedlock, D. (2003) Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and
Sacrifice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vatsyayan, K. (1968) Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the
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Vatsyayan, K. (1996) Bharata: Natyasastra, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi.
Versényi, A. (1989) “Getting under the Aztecs’ Skin: Evangelical
Theatre in the New World,” New Theatre Quarterly 19: 217–326.
Vince, R. (1989) A Companion to the Medieval Theatre, New York:
Greenwood Press.
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Christendom and Islam, New York: Random House.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Winkler, J.J. (1990) “The Ephebes’ Song: Tragoidia and Polis,” in
J.J. Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin (eds) Nothing to Do with Dionysus?
Athenian Drama in its Social Context, Princeton: Princeton
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Theatre and Performance in Early Print
Cultures
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-6

Part II: Timeline

4 Secular and early professional theatre, 1250–1650
CASE STUDY: Realer than real? Imaging “woman” in kabuki
5 Theatre and the print revolution, 1550–1650
CASE STUDY: Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
CASE STUDY: Early modern metatheatricality and the print
revolution
6 Theatres of absolutism, 1600–1770
CASE STUDY: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the perils of print
culture in New Spain
CASE STUDY: Molière and carnival laughter
Part II: Works cited
Part II Timeline

Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and

Performance Communication Economics

1266– Giotto, artist

1337
1279– Yuan dynasty,
1368 China
1279– Zaju, China
1654
C.1300- Ramlila, India
C.1400
C.1300- Renaissance era
C.1500 begins in Italy
1313- Passion plays,
C.1600 continental Europe
1343– Geoffrey
1400 Chaucer, English
writer
c. Cycle plays,
1350– England
1569
1363– Zeami, actor-
1443 playwright
1368– Kunqu, China Ming dynasty,
1644 China
c.1374 No Japan
1400– Rabinal Achi,
1500 Mesoamerica
1428– Aztec Empire,
1521 Central America
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

c.1440 Movable type

(printing press),
Europe
1452– Leonardo da
1519 Vinci, artist
1453 Ottomans
capture
Constantinople
1456 First printed
Bible
1468– Spanish
1834 Inquisition
1475– Michelangelo,
1564 artist
1492 Spanish
encounter with
the Americas
1492– Spanish
1898 colonization of
Western
Hemisphere
c.1500 Professional theatre
companies begin to
appear in various
European countries
c.1500– Kathakali dance
1600 drama, India
c.1500- Classical humanist
c.1650 drama in
universities, Europe
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

c.1500- Renaissance era

c.1650 spreads
throughout
Europe
1517– Protestant
1648 Reformation
1530s- Ottoman-
1790s Habsburg wars
1540– William Byrd,
1623 composer
1545– Catholic
1648 Counter-
Reformation
c.1545- Commedia dell’arte,
c.1800 Europe
1548–
1783
C.1 Kunqu
550-
C.1 Spanish Catholic
550- drama
C.1765
C.1 Court spectacles
550- and masques
C.1750
1558– Reign of Queen
1603 Elizabeth I,
England
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

C.1560- Bourgeoisie
become
increasingly
significant
1561 Julius Caesar
Scaliger, Poetics
1562– Lope de Vega,
1635 playwright
1564– William
1616 Shakespeare,
playwright
1567 Red Lion, earliest
English theatre
building
1567– Claudio
1643 Monteverdi,
composer (some
operas)
1570 Lodovico
Castelvetro, The
Poetics of
Aristotle
C.1 Alexandre Hardy,
572- playwright
C.1632
1571 London Stock
Exchange
founded
1572– Ben Jonson,
1637 playwright
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1576 The Theatre,

England
1577– Peter Paul
1640 Rubens, artist
1585 Teatro Olimpico,
first perspective
stage scenery, Italy
1588 English defeat
the Spanish
Armada
C.1590- Baroque era in
C Europe
1720s
1598– The Globe Theatre,
1613; England
1614–
1642
c.1600 Okuni’s
performances begin
kabuki, Japan
1600– Pedro Calderón de
1681 la Barca, playwright
1602– First newspapers
1702 – none are daily
until 1702
1603– Reign of James I,
1625 England
1603– Tokugawa (Edo)
1868 period, Japan
1606– Rembrandt,
1669 artist
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1606– Pierre Corneille,

1684 playwright
1607 Jamestown, VA:
First permanent
English
settlement in
North America
1618– Thirty Years’
1648 War, Europe
1618– Madeleine Béjart,
1672 actor
c.1620 Beginnings of
neoclassicism in
drama
1622– Molière, playwright
1673
1625– Reign of Charles
1642 I, England
1631– John Dryden,
1700 playwright
1632 Galileo Galilei,
Dialogue
Concerning the
Two Chief World
Systems
1632– Jean-Baptiste Lully,
1687 composer (many
operas)
1633– Mlle. Du Parc, actor
1668
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1635– Thomas Betterton,

1710 actor
1637 Le Cidd controversy René Descartes,
establishes Discourse on the
neoclassicism in Method
France
1639– Jean Racine,
1699 playwright
1640– Aphra Behn,
1689 playwright
1640– William Wycherley,
1715 playwright
1642– Suppression of English Civil War
1649 theatre in England
1643– Reign of Louis
1715 XIV, France
1644– Qing dynasty,
1912 China
c.1650 Introduction of
chariot-and-pole
scenery system
C.1650- Enlightenment
C.1800 era in Europe
1651 Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
1653– Michel Baron, actor
1729
1653– Chikamatsu
1724 Monzaemon,
playwright
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1656– Ferdinando Galli

1743 Bibiena, scenic
designer
1658– Elizabeth Barry,
1713 actor
1659– Henry Purcell,
1695 composer
1660 English
Restoration;
reign of Charles
II (to 1685)
1660– Alessandro
1725 Scarlatti,
composer (some
operas)
1662 Re-opening of
theatres in England;
women begin to
play female roles
1662- Neoclassicism in
C.1800 England, Germany,
Russia
1668– François
1733 Couperin,
composer
1670– William Congreve,
1729 playwright
Introduction: performance, printing, and political
centralization
Tobin Nellhaus
Part II covers the years from roughly 1250 to 1770. In the Western
world, this era is sometimes called the “early modern” period,
encompassing the Renaissance, the Baroque, and the
Enlightenment. It was an age of massive economic, political, and
cultural transformations. The system of agricultural production
conducted by serfs laboring under a lord’s power began to break
apart, and the small-scale capitalist activities conducted by
merchants living in the urban areas grew to economic and political
dominance. The feudal political structure of the Middle Ages, which
was structured around the lords’ military duties and allegiances to
kings and queens, was undermined as the royalty wrested power
away from the nobility and placed legal, administrative, and
sometimes religious functions into its own hands, establishing
absolutist monarchies. To achieve both political and economic
expansion, several of the absolutist regimes initiated explorations of
the rest of the world, ultimately conquering huge parts of other
continents and consolidating them within imperial power. A major
schism arose in Christianity, followed by proliferating religious sects.
The invention of the printing press around 1440, a means of mass-
producing writing by using movable type (pieces with a single letter or
word), facilitated or even provoked many of these upheavals, along
with a variety of others.
In Asia too, the period was notable for political centralization and
cultural flourishing. Economically and politically, the historical
trajectories of Japan and China were long comparable to Europe’s.
Japan was in its own late medieval period in the mid-fifteenth century,
similarly pairing a political structure founded on a hierarchy of
warriors with an economic system based on peasant labor. Following
over a century of social turbulence, the Tokugawa period (1603–1868)
ushered in strengthened military political power and substantial
governmental centralization, while merchants began to thrive.
Japan’s cultural activity centered on entertainment and leisure aimed
at the merchant class (rather than the aristocracy), and some of its
best-known cultural forms (including woodblock prints, the geisha,
and kabuki) were born during this era. Japan had significant contact
with Western merchants and missionaries, and it continued a practice
of absorbing foreign elements into its culture rather than having them
forced upon it. But troubled by the possibility of military incursions
and ideological contamination, Japan’s leaders decided to close off
the country from most foreign contact.
A woodblock print of a Western European printing shop.

Centralization, coupled with expansionism, began even earlier in

China, during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Unlike Europe and
Japan, the massive state administration, staffed by highly cultured
scholar-bureaucrats, possessed greater social esteem than the
military. The earliest known Chinese theatre arose during this period
as a kind of variety show, combining story with music and dancing.
Many of these popular shows were written by scholar-bureaucrats
who had lost their positions when the Mongols invaded China. State
centralization continued further under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644),
which is renowned as one of the finest periods of Chinese art and
literature. However, the government grew increasingly dependent on
the prospering merchant class. A peasant rebellion brought the
dynasty to its knees and in 1644 it was replaced by the Qing dynasty
(1644–1912), but China’s economic and bureaucratic structures
continued on roughly the same path as before.
 China and Japan, like Europe, had printing with movable
type. In fact movable type was first invented in China, around 1040
(the technique was developed further in Korea), and it was used
extensively for bureaucratic functions; but for most other purposes,
woodblocks were more practical – even money was printed using
woodblocks. In Japan, there was some experimentation with printing
with movable type during the early seventeenth century, but
afterwards woodblock printing again became standard. In neither
case, however, did printing with movable type instigate the sort of
upheavals it brought to Europe. There are two basic reasons. First,
Chinese and Japanese scripts utilize a large number of characters,
since they are are logographic rather than alphabetic (Japan has two
syllabic scripts as well). Thus printing with movable type required
tens of thousands of type pieces, entailing a considerable financial
investment. Printing with woodblocks was often more sensible
because one needed to carve only the characters actually used.
Second, all stages of printing in Asia were performed manually: paper
was pressed on to the inked type or woodblock by hand, and
sometimes rubbing was necessary in order to fully copy the page. In
Europe, however, pages were printed by using a machine to press
the inked type on to the paper, which involved less time and less
labor. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan observed, printing
probably gave Europe “the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the
first assembly-line, and the first mass-production” (1962: 124). Printing
in Europe may well be the earliest type of industrial capitalism.
Within theatre, the era covered by Part II is marked by three major
transitions. One was the shift from performances connected with
special events (such as festivals and commemorative occasions) or
performed by touring companies, to professional theatre companies
playing on a regular basis at permanent sites. Such companies arose
in Europe, Japan, and China, often in connection with urbanization,
which brought a large enough potential audience that permanent
residence could make touring supplementary or supplant it
altogether. By the end of the seventeenth century, theatre in many
parts of the world had ceased being performed in the open air and
moved indoors, partly to increase exclusivity, and partly because
theatre-going became an ordinary leisure activity: during the daytime
people worked, took care of their business, or tended to other duties,
leaving the night free for entertainment. Chapter 4 provides an
overview of these developments.
The two other major changes discussed in Part II occurred only in
Europe. As we saw in Chapter 3, in the Middle Ages characters
tended to be stereotypes, such as allegorical figures or simplified
personages from religious history. Starting in the late sixteenth
century, that approach to character construction began to be
replaced by the creation of characters with a personal history and
interior life – the bare bones of psychological realism. (Some kabuki
“domestic” and historical plays had similar qualities.) Likewise, the
tradition of having actors play multiple roles was superseded by
having each actor perform only one role. Scenery shifted away from
generalized or stylized settings, and became more elaborate and
took major strides toward the lifelike depiction of places. In France, a
dispute on dramatic form arose, and when the royal administration
intervened, the resulting decision set “the rules” for dramaturgy
throughout the European continent and to some extent in England as
well. As Chapter 5 explains, these changes were closely tied to the
formation of print culture.
Finally, during the seventeenth century, in tandem with their
centralization of power in other areas, the absolutist monarchs of
France and England began to wield control over theatre, in ways that
reverberated through the following century. They licensed two or
three specific companies, giving them not just favor but even
exclusive rights to perform in the capital. Theatre buildings were
designed to give the ruler special treatment – not just a particularly
favorable view of the stage, but also well-positioned to be seen by the
other spectators. The fact that the chief minister/cardinal who
managed the reins of power in France interceded in a quarrel over
dramatic structure sharply demonstrates the extent to which
absolutism shaped theatre. Although the Japanese and Chinese
governments also licensed theatres and imposed restrictions, these
were generally meant to prevent disruptions in society, rather than to
control aesthetics and ideology. Thus even though monarchs in
Europe, China, and Japan all centralized power, only in Europe did
the theatre become both controlled by and an actual instrument of the
state. Yet, at the same time that the French state set the rules for
good theatre in Paris and beyond, within its palaces the king and his
retinue blithely ignored those rules for their own flamboyant
entertainments, including opera. Chapter 6 discusses these
developments and more.
The notion that plays should follow certain strict rules for
dramaturgy and staging may seem odd from a modern perspective,
when originality is prized and “breaking the rules” is occasionally
touted as essential to art itself. But even though the rules were
purportedly derived from Aristotle, his authority didn’t automatically
secure playwrights’ obedience – in fact the rules were controversial
until royal power stepped in. So something more was afoot when
playwrights debated the rules.
The development of the rules was connected to the new approach
to creating dramatic characters, acting a single role, and illusionistic
scenery. At the heart of these trends was a new concept of realism –
or rather, of reality – and how one obtains knowledge. This was the
age of the “scientific revolution,” which emphasized direct, individual
observation of nature as the source of knowledge. Such observations
eventually disproved various classical theories of nature, many of
which derived from Aristotle. However, when the rules were first
articulated – in Lodovico Castelvetro’s commentary on The Poetics,
published in 1570 – Aristotle’s authority was still almost wholly
unquestioned. But how Aristotelian were the rules?
Aristotle aimed mainly to describe drama, employing some “best
examples” sometimes leading to recommendations. It was
Castelvetro and his followers who contorted those descriptions into
requirements, often twisting Aristotle’s words in the process. But
there is more to the difference than that. Castelvetro’s argument has
three striking features. First, it declared that the purpose of literature
is to delight “the crude multitude and the common people”
(Castelvetro 1570: 109). Second, it insistently constricted the
imagination; for example, it asserted that it’s impossible to write
tragedies about a fictional king, only a real one, for a tragedy about a
fictional king would “sin against the manifest truth” (Castelvetro 1570:
112). Third, it justified the rules by claiming that the ignorant
commoners would never accept the notion that (say) several days
had passed when the performance lasted merely a couple of hours
(Carlson 1993: 48–9). As we can see, the rules’ justification had
nothing to do with Aristotle, who hadn’t said any of these things.
Instead, the basic theory was that drama (or at least serious drama)
must only encompass what an individual can perceive or read from
concrete reality.
Thus even though the rules claimed their authority from Aristotle, in
actuality their underlying logic was founded on the same transformed
concepts of knowledge and truth, hinged on the notion that reality
must be observable and observed, that drove the scientific revolution
– a revolution that included social conflict as well as ideas. The
blatantly elitist emphasis on spectators’ ignorance assumed that the
upper classes possessed a superior type of knowledge, even though
paradoxically the rules were necessitated by the lower classes’ lack
of knowledge. In other words, the elite required its own imagination to
be restricted to what it believed the lower classes could understand,
as classical authority ostensibly required. Both the rules’ elitism and
their prescriptiveness reveal an upper-class determination to
establish those ideas throughout the culture. The alterations in
characterization, acting, and staging arose from the same basic
concepts. As Chapter 5 will explain, those shifts emerged from the
changes in communication practices brought by printing.
The early modern period was not the first time Europeans wrestled
with the connection between theatre and truth. As discussed in the
introduction to Part I, the connection lay at the heart of Plato’s
antitheatricality, because in his view theatre purveys falsehoods and
illusions. The issue would arise again repeatedly, such as in the
nineteenth century with the movement known as Naturalism (to be
discussed in Chapter 10). And Europe was not the only land where
the question was ever considered important. For instance, as we
pointed out in Chapter 2, the rasa-bhava aesthetic theory of early
Sanskrit theatre relied on a particular understanding of reality, and nō
had firm foundations in Buddhist philosophy. In fact, many theatre
scholars today would agree that all theatre and drama – no matter
where, when, or how performed – invoke concepts of reality,
knowledge, and truth. Part II presents the history of theatre during an
era when the use of printing in European society radically changed
those ideas, but the issues are ever-present under the surface of
performance.
*
Secular and early professional theatre,
1250–1650
Tamara Underiner
Contributors: Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Tobin Nellhaus
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-7
From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, theatre outside of
religious festivals, churches, temples, courts, and universities grew in
popularity, eventually coming to serve as a livelihood for playwrights,
performers, and theatre managers. In this chapter, we focus on the
kind of theatre in Europe and Asia for which entertainment was at
least as important as moral instruction, and for which troupes
increasingly had to compete for audiences. To attract them, theatre
artists deepened and extended their craft into new genres of drama
and performance, for which new performance skills were required, and
new buildings designed and constructed; women’s roles were
showcased more (even if women themselves were often still excluded
from the stage); and enterprising managers developed new business
models to sustain their companies. As we shall see, everywhere a
secular and professional theatre developed, so too did suspicion
about its power; we will also discuss how these developments were
often accompanied by legal or religious edicts against theatre in
general and actors in particular, by censorship of plays, and by
numerous regulations and other forms of repression.
European societies that developed professional theatre during this
period tended to have populous, concentrated urban centers. Of
course, the introduction of the printing press played a key role in
European theatre developments: theatre scholar Julie Stone Peters
observes that “after print, performance was never the same” (2000: 4).
As more books became available and literacy increased, so too did
material available for adaptation into stage plays. The possibilities for
dramatic exploration of secular topics, in plays written mostly by men
who were university-educated or self-taught and eager to draw on
literary sources, began to multiply. In Europe, the forms these plays
took eventually would group themselves into recognizable genres that
drew on classic notions of tragedy and comedy but also expanded into
tragicomedy, pastorals or romances, and farce – as well as in various
combinations of each in individual dramas.
Print had a different impact in East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan).
Even with movable type, printing was done by hand – a laborious and
expensive process; perhaps that is why few plays were printed. To
enjoy drama, Asian audiences needed to attend live performances.
The lack of widely distributed play scripts may help explain why the
actor remained the primary theatre artist throughout Asia, while in
Europe, by the end of the seventeenth century, the playwright’s
prestige and power began to increase.
The period covered in this chapter overlaps with those of the
chapters before and after it. This calls attention to an issue facing all
writers of history: that of chronological periodization, a topic we
explore in our “Thinking through theatre histories” box. The key
differences among these three chapters are thematic rather than
chronological. Chapter 3 focused on theatre and performance that
was tied to some special occasion in the religious or civic calendar, or
was used for the purpose of religious or moral instruction. Chapter 5
will focus on the development of print culture and its effects on the
aesthetics and theories of theatre in the European Renaissance. In
this chapter, we are more concerned with the “business” of the
theatre, the various strategies undertaken to ensure its success –
including the development of permanent playing spaces and an
increased presence of female characters, actors, and audience
members – and various countermeasures taken to restrict, regulate,
and sometimes censor it. We also consider the opportunities the
theatre provided for creating new social occasions and relations, and
the plethora of new performance forms that emerged. We pay
particular attention to Chinese Yuan drama and later kunqu opera, the
commedia dell’arte of Italy (a physical form of comedy which
influenced theatre throughout Europe), and the bunraku puppet and
kabuki theatres of Japan. Our case study considers the essential
kabuki role of the onnagata, a male specialist in female roles, and a
boxed section discusses how European plays treated basic dilemmas
facing women of the time.
Thinking Through Theatre Histories
The problem of periodization
One way to tell the story of theatre’s past is to trace the key moments of its
transformation and innovation as an art form. In such historiographies, various
national traditions gave the world different signal contributions. For example,
in France the contributions of this period in theatre history included the
refinement of the ballet, and the advocacy of a tightly written form of drama
that obeyed strict rules of structure, tone, and topic (the neoclassical drama
discussed in the next chapter). In England, the great contribution of the age
was Elizabethan theatre and its exemplar, William Shakespeare (the name of
the era refers to its political ruler). In Spain, it was Golden Age drama
(discussed in the next chapter as well). And most historians agree that this
frenzy of innovation in Europe began in the courts of Italy, where an increased
interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture led to the various “renaissances”
both there and throughout the European continent; the specific and longest
lasting contributions from Italy were in the opera and in the commedia
dell’arte, discussed in this chapter.
Acknowledging these key moments, which are addressed in various ways
by other theatre historians, we have turned our focus in this textbook more
toward how they are related to changes in communication practices – in this
period most notably the use of the printing press – and also in a shift in
cultural dominance from orality to literacy enabled by it. In this chapter, for
example, we focus on the theme of professionalization of the theatre and how
it was informed by the wider circulations of texts available for staging – in
Europe. But from a more global perspective, this approach ultimately rubs up
against another problem in telling the stories of theatre history: that of dividing
history into discrete periods based on more local developments. When we
consider the histories of theatre throughout the globe, we must not assume
that key historical moments of European (or Euro-American) performance are
“normal.” Rather, we must acknowledge that theatre exists in various cultures
in various ways, that these cultures (and their theatres) change according to
various timelines, and that each culture’s theatre tradition is normal in its own
context. Although changes in modes of communication did occur throughout
the world in basically the same order, these changes often took place at
different times in different cultures. For example, China and Korea developed
movable print long before Europe. However, Europeans began using the
mechanical printing press long before East Asians adopted the process. In
Japan, writing was introduced centuries after it appeared in other parts of the
world, and was largely used by the elite and administrative classes; this may
be one reason that so many Japanese plays continue to include oral
narration.
Developments in Chinese drama, theatre, and
performance
Sometime between c.1545 and 1500 BCE, China, a vast nation
comprising many different spoken languages, developed a system of
writing based on ideograms that could be read and understood by all
these varied language speakers. Nevertheless, literacy remained the
prerogative of a small, highly educated group of elite males. As the
Chinese state solidified, literacy became more important for courtly
success. Those elite males appointed to serve the imperial
government needed to pass a difficult written exam based on
Confucian ideology. Confucian philosophy (created by Confucius,
551–478 BCE) is a system of ethics that values righteousness,
propriety, and mutual obligations to group and family. Many Confucian
scholars also wrote poetry, fiction, history, and philosophical or
scientific treatises.
Musical, sung, and acrobatic performances of all kinds had always
been popular in China. During the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE),
Emperor Xuanzong (685–762), commonly known as Emperor Ming
Huang, had even founded a royal academy called the Pear Garden to
train male and female actors, dancers, and singers to entertain at
court. Even today, Chinese actors and actresses, especially those
involved in traditional musical genres, are sometimes called “children
of the Pear Garden.” Such highly skilled, courtly performers were quite
different from the low-status performers who entertained non-elite
audiences.
When the Mongols, a non-Chinese people, invaded and conquered
China, they founded the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). These foreign
military rulers distrusted the classically educated Confucian scholars
and deprived them of their court positions. Some of these displaced
scholars, seeking a means of employment, joined popular theatrical
troupes as playwrights. Although doing so lowered their social status,
the plays they created formed China’s first significant dramatic
musical performance with an extended narrative.
 Yuan dramas (zaju [zah ju]) are popular variety plays
featuring song, dance, monologues, and even farce, typically
consisting of four acts, and sometimes including a shorter interlude
called the “wedge” (occasionally two “wedges”) (Figure 4.1). Each
formal act features a single lead singing role with songs composed in
a single musical mode based on standard patterns, though these
modes might change for each of the four acts. In contrast, the
“wedges” feature a secondary singer and may have alternative
musical patterns. Wedges are placed either at the beginning of the
play or between the acts. The songs in the wedge develop the plot.
Male and female actors performed roles of either gender.
Performances took place as part of temple or court ritual occasions,
as well as in large urban theatres or public teahouses as commercial
enterprises.
Figure 4.1Thirteenth-century (Song dynasty) music drama (zaju). The period is
just before the Mongol invasion that ushered in the Yuan dynasty. From a
thirteenth-century tomb sculpture.

Source: William Dolby, A History of Chinese Drama. NY: Barnes

and Noble, 1976, Figure No. 1 facing p. 100. Original source: Shao
Jingshen, Xiqu bitan, Peking: Zong-hua Shuju Publishers, 1962, p. 234.
In composing their dramas, Yuan playwrights drew on literary tales,
dynastic histories, and popular oral narratives in which Confucian
values were embedded. Yuan zaju contain both highly literate and
highly entertaining elements, including crusading bandits fighting
corrupt officials, romantic adventures, and supernatural rescues.
Many deal with lawsuits and justice (including murder cases),
suggesting that the ousted scholars harbored and tapped into an
undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the Mongol rulers.
One of the best plays to suggest distaste for the Mongol
government is Injustice Done to Dou E (Dou E Yuan, also known as
Snow in Midsummer) by Guan Hanqing (active in the late thirteenth
century). It concerns a chaste young widow who is framed for murder
by a man she refused to marry. At her execution, she calls on heaven
to exonerate her, and indeed, the three miracles she prays for occur.
After several years, her ghost appears to her long-lost father, now a
righteous judge who is investigating corruption. The actual murderer is
punished, and the girl’s name is posthumously cleared. The play may
be implying a connection between the corrupt government in the
drama and the current Mongol rulers, as well as praising the moral
superiority of the Confucian-trained, Chinese judge.
After the Mongols lost control of the country, plays seldom
contained the kind of hidden political protest that characterized much
of Yuan drama. Nevertheless, this type of music drama continued to
be popular even after the Yuan dynasty ended in 1368, influencing the
style of newer genres.
The growth of kunqu

One of these new genres was kunqu [kwin chu] (“kun

opera”), the dominant form in China from the late fourteenth to the
mid-eighteenth century. Kunqu remains highly popular today and is
even often performed outside China. Kunqu focuses on beautiful
singing but also includes dance and dialogue. In the mid-sixteenth
century, kunqu was performed at public venues such as temples,
teahouses, and brothels, as well as privately in the homes of wealthy
aristocrats. Each aristocratic family supported its own troupe of about
twelve actors, often buying children and training them. These private
troupes maintained a higher level of sophistication and artistic skill
than those performing in public venues.
 Kunqu was originally performed on a square carpet,
sometimes on a raised platform, with the audience on one side or
surrounding the actors. While there was little or no set, kunqu plays
featured lanterns and off-stage sound effects, as well as both real and
symbolic props. For example, a real sedan chair might carry an actor,
but horseback riding was mimed by an actor holding a riding whip.
Both males and females performed. The most popular plays were
romantic stories, often combining military, supernatural, judicial,
historical, or other subjects. Comic and serious elements generally
appear together in a single play.
Probably the most famous kunqu is The Peony Pavilion (Mudan
Ting), written in 1598 by Tang Xianzu (1550–1617). The Peony Pavilion
focuses on a young woman named Du Liniang who literally dies of
love for a young man she has only seen in a dream. After her death,
the dream lover – who is actually a real person – sees her self-portrait
and immediately falls in love. With the intervention of the gods, he
travels to the land of the dead and succeeds in having her resurrected,
but her father refuses to believe in the miracle and has the young man
beaten and imprisoned. In the meantime, there are political upheavals
and military invasions. Eventually, the emperor intervenes, the lovers
triumph, and harmony is restored. The play has 55 scenes and lasts
about 24 hours when performed in its entirety. Typically, only selected
scenes are produced at any one time, although in 1999, a “complete
and traditional” 24-hour version, directed by Chen Shizheng (1963–),
was presented over three days outdoors at New York’s Lincoln Center.
Other recent, internationally prestigious productions were a 1998
“contemporary opera” version, adapted and directed by Peter Sellars
(1957–) with music by Tan Dun (1957–), and a nine-hour, three-
evening “Youth Version” directed and adapted by Kenneth Hsien-yung
Pai (also known as Bai Xianyong, 1937–) in 2004.
Early secular performance in Europe
There has probably never been a time in European theatre history in
which people did not make a living as professional entertainers,
offering their singing, dancing, or storytelling talents in return for coin,
plying their trades on street corners and at village fairs, in princely
banquet halls and in local pubs. Some scholars consider the
precursors of the modern professional actor and actress to be the
street mountebanks – men who sold remedies on street corners, often
accompanied by a musician, and sometimes by a female accomplice
as well, who helped to demonstrate the effectiveness of the remedies
for sale (Figure 4.2). They enticed buyers through storytelling and
theatrical devices such as feats of magic and physical prowess,
making a living year-round as much from their performing talents as
from the dubious health benefits of their products. (For a lively
theatrical introduction to such a character in a play from this period,
read Ben Jonson’s Volpone [1606].)
But it was not possible to make a living through the more complex
arts of the theatre, involving larger casts acting out plots that were
either scripted or improvised, until the middle of the sixteenth century.
It was then that theatre companies began to form, often under royal or
ducal patronage, and permanent theatre structures were built to
showcase plays all year long, and not just during religious occasions.
The roots go a bit deeper back into the fifteenth century, when secular
themes began to be introduced into religious and moral drama.
Religious plays such as the Corpus Christi cycles remained very
popular well into the sixteenth century, especially in Catholic countries
like Spain, Italy, and France. But over time, theatre began to be
developed for occasions outside of the Church calendar from 1517
forward, when the Protestant Reformation began in Europe. This
religious movement, discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, ushered in
new varieties of Christianity that opposed the representations of
divinity in any form; some were led to oppose theatre altogether
(notably the Puritans and the Quakers). In England, religious and
political controversy was the order of the day; as a result, Elizabeth I
(born 1533; reigned 1558–1603) issued decrees constraining plays with
religious and political subjects, ultimately succeeding in suppressing
the cycle plays during the 1560s and 1570s. (Nevertheless,
Shakespeare seems to be remembering a performance of a religious
play – the Play of Herod – in Hamlet’s advice to the players.)

Figure 4.2“Mountebank distributing his wares on the stage.” Some scholars

speculate that men who hawked remedies on street corners and, later, stages,
were the forerunners to modern professional actors. Artist unknown.

Source: From The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular

Antiquities (published in the 1880s, with several reprints). Hulton
Archive/Getty Images.
The morality plays, lacking representations of God and Jesus, could
more readily be converted to post-Reformation purposes, and
contributed to the development of secular plays, written by individual
authors for professional theatres, well into the Elizabethan era.
Because morality plays were not tied to the Bible, they could explore
moral themes in an adaptable, even non-sectarian manner that can be
considered more or less secular. By the early sixteenth century, there
were plays on frankly secular themes such as the importance of
learning, nature, and so forth. For example, John Heywood’s The Play
of the Weather (published 1533) features a series of petitioners asking
the Roman god Jupiter to provide the weather best suited to their
needs. While such a plot may seem rather trivial, medieval studies
scholar Pamela M. King (2012) argues that the play was actually a
political satire about a tense moment in the reign of Henry VIII. Other
morality plays were used to expose the alleged hypocrisies of the
Catholic Church. But even in strongly Catholic countries, secular
theatre developed in response to both increasing urbanization and
new discoveries about the classical past, made possible by the rise of
print culture.
In northern France and the Netherlands, “chambers of rhetoric” offer
an example of a more clearly secular genre of performance we might
call “pre-professional.” These were societies devoted to the literary
and dramatic arts, originally associated with the Church, which were
pressed into service to help organize religious festivals, the entries of
royal personages into the cities, and the performance of plays on
festive occasions. Located in the urban centers, the chambers drew
their members from the professional, merchant, and artisan classes,
who were literate in French, Dutch, and/or Flemish. They originally
met to exchange work; soon they began to hold literary competitions
among themselves and, eventually, among different chambers, which
led in turn to dramatic contests for public performance. There were
prizes across a number of categories, including best play, best farcical
entertainment, best actor, best singer, etc., suggesting an increased
attention to the quality of the craft associated with theatre
performance and production.

In Dutch-speaking countries these competitions were

called landjuweelen [LAWHNT-yu-vay-lehn] (“jewels of the land”); the
earliest of these was recorded in 1413, among six societies performing
plays about the Holy Sacrament. They were typically held in large
halls or public squares, to enthusiastic crowds; today, the village of
Ruigoord in the Netherlands has revived the practice in an annual five-
day
landjuweel festival. Over time, the organization and artistry of these
societies became ever more professionalized, with administrative and
theatrical duties being differentiated among directors, writers,
promoters, costumers – and fools, who could be counted on to
entertain the crowds in processions and to perform in a chamber’s
farces. Few full-length scripts remain, but one features a husband
whose wife is seduced by the local priest; other more serious dramas
took on higher themes of the day, including the newer forms of
Protestant theology sweeping through Europe. Such elements caused
the plays to come under the scrutiny of Church authorities, especially
during the Counter-Reformation (the period in which Catholic
authorities sought to suppress the Protestant reforms, between 1545
and 1648). Some chambers were more radical than others in this
regard, but historian Gary Waite (2000) suggests a connection
between the chambers of rhetoric, theatre, and the growth of
Protestant activism in the Low Countries.
Farces were another common form of secular performance,
particularly in France. One of the most popular was La Farce de
maître Pierre Pathelin (The Farce of Master Peter Pathelin), from the
mid-fifteenth century (Figure 4.3). Like most medieval farces, it
features a small cast of characters, in this case focusing on a lawyer
and a merchant. Often the farces centered on professions,
relationships (among family members, neighbors, servants, and illicit
lovers), and various stereotypical figures who are driven by some
basic need or desire, such as money, sex, or a cure for a disease. (Of
course these weren’t unique to medieval French theatre; recall our
Chapter 2 discussions of ancient Roman comedy and Japanese
kyōgen.) Medieval theatre scholar Alan E. Knight suggests that,
although the world of such farce in France seemed “governed by
sensual desires and unconstrained by the requirements of reason” at
its heart, even the bawdiest of farces functioned within a larger
perspective of Christian morality, demonstrating “what the real world
would be like without the guiding rudder of reason” (1983: 59).
Figure 4.3Scene from the 1457 French farce, La Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin
(The Farce of Master Peter Pathelin), in which the self-proclaimed lawyer
Pathelin cajoles a clothier into selling him six yards of cloth on credit, with no
means of paying him back. Pathelin will eventually face the clothier in court,
defending a shepherd who has been stealing the clothier's sheep, but his clever
defense backfires on him.

Also important for the development of theatre in France were the

traveling troupes, who often performed indoors at the Hôtel de
Bourgogne (described in more detail below), and maintained a
repertory dominated by farces with a smattering of serious plays
mixed in. Some of the farce-actors became famous in their own day
but usually performed under stage names such as Gros-Guillaume
(Fat William) (Robert Guérin, 1554–1634), Jodelet (Julien Bedeau,
c.1590–1660), and Valleran le Conte (?–1613). This group, under
Valleran’s leadership, became the first known comédiens du roi
(King’s Players) in 1598.
The commedia dell'arte in Italy and its influence in Europe

The scripted farces had much in common with

another form of traveling professional theatre that emerged in this
period from Italy, the commedia dell’arte [kohm-MAY-dee-ah dehl-
AHR-tey]. In the commedia, however, the action was largely
improvised, by troupes of professional actors highly trained in
movement. Their performances were based on a repertoire of
scenarios revolving around stories of love and money. The influence
of these troupes was felt throughout Europe and made its way into the
scripted drama of the other theatre capitals; even today, there are
commedia troupes whose practice and rigorous training regimes are
based in techniques developed some four centuries ago.
There is no exact English translation of the term commedia dell’arte,
a form which most scholars trace back to the middle of the sixteenth
century. (The term first appears in print some two centuries later, in
Carlo Goldoni’s 1750 play Il Comico.) The term arte, in Italian as well
as in older English, can refer to a professional level of craft or
technique, so it is usually left untranslated. Commedia dell’arte is
distinguished by a number of features:

Improvised playing based on a repertory of

standardized plots, mostly having to do with matters of love and
intrigue.
A combination of stock characters, masked and unmasked
according to type.
The use of lazzi [LAH-dzee], or highly physical stage routines and
comic bits that were often associated with the particular prowess
of individual performers.
 Mixed-gender casts and companies.
Professional companies with increasingly formal operations,
providing the principal livelihood for their members, who
performed year-round throughout Italy and Europe.

Origin theories
Although the form would have great influence on virtually every other
European theatre tradition (and indeed, is still performed by
specialized troupes in Europe and the Americas), no one can say with
complete certainty where commedia dell’arte came from – or if indeed
it had a single, linear genealogy. More likely a number of factors
contributed to its development: the masked, improvised comedy of the
Roman Atellan farces (discussed in Chapter 2) kept alive by traveling
mimes; the jugglers, acrobats, singers, dancers, charlatans, and
mountebanks of public life in medieval Europe; the circulation of plots
and characters of ancient Roman comedies that were often also the
subject of the learned Italian drama (commedia erudita [kohm-MAY-
dee-ah eh-roo-DEE-tah]); and the farces of the earlier sixteenth
century (which flourished in Italy as elsewhere throughout Europe
from 1500 to 1550).

If its deeper origins are disputed, many scholars pinpoint

the date of February 25, 1545, as the official “birthday” of the
commedia. That was the date, in Padua, Italy, when director/ manager
Ser Maphio signed a letter of incorporation establishing his troupe of
performers as the first known commercial theatre company, organized
under a sharing system. Until then, there was, literally, no business
like “show business” as we know it today. February 25 is still
celebrated internationally as “Commedia dell’arte Day.”
Conventionalized plots, individualized lazzi
Because the commedia was an improvised form, it relied on standard
scenarios that were adapted in virtually limitless ways to
accommodate topical themes and local realities, as well as to
capitalize on the talents of individual performers. Once professional
actresses took the stage – the first documented one, Vincenza
Armani, appeared in 1566, but it is likely she had predecessors – these
scenarios turned from conflicts between masters and servants to
those of romantic intrigue.

A typical commedia scenario, like the Roman

comedies that may have inspired it, featured two lovers who were
prevented from being together, usually by a parental figure,
sometimes inadvertently by the innamorato (m.; f. -a; pl. -i) [in-nah-
moh-RAH-toh, -tah, -tee], or young male lead. To overcome this
obstacle, comical servants (called zanni [ZAHN-nee]) are enlisted, or
sometimes the innamorata in disguise enacts a plot of her own. This
general plot outline was often complicated by subplots that could
themselves be “dizzyingly complex, involving disguises,
misunderstandings, plots within plots, impersonations, and magical
deceptions” (Henke 2003: 14).

In addition to the masked servant characters and the

young lovers (who played their parts unmasked), the other masked
characters of the commedia included their parents and a variety of
conspirators or unsuitable lovers who provided the central obstacles
to their happiness. Isabella Andreini (1562–1604), of the Gelosi troupe,
was the most famous of the innamorati; over time, young female leads
came to be called, simply, “Isabellas.” Of the zanni, the most famous
was Arlecchino, introduced by Tristano Martinelli (c.1555–1630), whose
characteristic motley costume would later be codified as “Harlequin” in
seventeenth-century France. The elder characters were called vecchi
[VEHK-kee] – usually men but sometimes their ambitious wives as
well. They included Pantalone, a wealthy merchant with a healthy
appetite for food and conversation, who was quick with advice, jealous
of his fortune, and often after an inappropriately younger woman;
Dottore, a learned, lustful philosopher given to propounding feats of
virtuosic, if fatuous, punning, alliteration, and other forms of wordplay;
Capitano, the soldier type whose arrogance outstripped his
achievements (but who could, at times, be seriously in love);
Pulcinella, the crafty beak-nosed and hump-backed clown who
became “Punch” in the British “Punch and Judy” shows; and
courtesans and procuresses who served as temptations and
distractions for the innamorati. (See Figure 4.4.) A variety of
supernumeraries drawn from other genres like the pastoral,
tragicomedy, and even tragedy rounded out the cast, which could
represent a dozen characters or more.
The various plots and subplots of the commedia can be considered
scaffolds upon which to display the physical and verbal virtuosity of
the most popular players, which they cultivated as their particular
repertoire of lazzi. These bits often bore little relationship to the main
action (indeed, they frequently interrupted it, but audiences loved
them). One actor, for example, was known for his ability to do a
somersault while carrying a full glass of wine, without a spill. Another
could do whole scenes while standing on his hands. Acrobatics of all
sorts, pantomimes, juggling feats, and elaborate word play were the
order of the day in the commedia.
Figure 4.4Late sixteenth-century engraving showing three stock characters from
the commedia dell'arte – from left, Arlecchino, Zanni the cuckold, and Pantalone
– serenading an unseen lady in her house on the right.

Source: National Museum, Stockholm.

Verbal improvisation in relation to literacy
Within the basic situations provided by the plot scenarios, all the
actors knew very well the relationships between their characters and
the others in the troupe, and could draw upon repertoires of praise and
compliments for some of them, insults, threats, and curses for others,
depending upon the nature of those relations. It is important to
remember that, although improvised, these speeches were
themselves very formulaic and rhetorically coded, based on materials
carefully recorded in the actors’ commonplace books. These books
were compendiums of important passages from longer works that
literate people compiled and consulted for personal edification and as
inspiration for writing essays and speeches in this period. Thus,
although the commedia was and is known as an art of improvisation
rather than textual interpretation, it was not because the actors
couldn’t themselves read. They were, in fact, highly literate, often
more so than their audiences, and they drew on a variety of written
and printed sources, everything from the commedia erudita to the
latest jokes circulating in the city-state. One actor-manager of a
commedia troupe, Flaminio Scala (1547–1624), published his troupe’s
scenarios – a risky venture for the time, since that meant any other
troupe could appropriate them. His collection of 50 scenarios,
published in 1611, tells us much about the state of the commedia in his
time.
So, although the commedia seems to be a type of performance
based in physicality and orality, in fact its relationship to literacy and
textuality was strong; it was a form that combined low comedy with
literary aspirations. Over the course of the seventeenth century, “a
shortage of sufficiently educated innamorati and a large number of
very talented servants and their prominence in performances tipped
the scales in favor of the servants,” and by the eighteenth century
commedia had grown somewhat stale (Erenstein 1989: 133). As a
result, the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni tried to “elevate” the
commedia by bringing the lovers back to center stage, reducing the
number of comic masked players to four – and scripting the action in
full. (We discuss Goldoni further in Chapter 7.)
Making a living through commedia
Commedia historian Robert Henke (2003) identifies a continuum of
business models through which commedia performers made their
livings. Most enjoyed some form of patronage by a ducal sponsor.
Some individual performers may originally have performed regularly in
the same designated time and spot, but without a formal contract with
their patron; many others were part of commedia troupes established
as fraternal societies under the seal of a duke. (Such seals functioned
as passports and protected performers from imprisonment as
vagabonds when they toured in Europe.) Troupes performed at courts
and, often, in customs houses, where their audiences came from the
growing merchant classes. Eventually, the most successful
companies began to operate more independently and
entrepreneurially; they were often headed by a capocomico
responsible for both the business and artistic aspects of the
companies, who came to epitomize the troupe itself. The famous
Gelosi and Fideli troupes are examples; the former was headed by
Giovan Battista Andreini (father-in-law to Isabella); after Isabella’s
death, her son and his wife left the Gelosi company to form Fideli.
So popular was the commedia throughout Europe that playwrights
of scripted drama – notably Shakespeare and Molière – incorporated
many commedia elements into their dramas, including character
types, masked performances, and plot devices.
Urban growth and the new business of theatre in Europe
As social and political life came increasingly to be organized in the
capitals of London, Paris, and Madrid, and in the Italian city-states (the
largest being Florence, Milan, and Venice), so too did theatrical activity
come to be centered there. The growing popularity of theatre led to
several new developments, among them the professionalization of the
various specializations associated with the theatre (actor, wardrobe
manager, prompter, etc.); the increasing commercialization of theatre
companies; and the development of permanent structures to house
their work. These developments in turn had an effect on the social
status and occasion of theatre, particularly as related to the
participation of women on and off stage.
Legal records of English theatre companies show that as early as
1574, playing was referred to as an “arte and facultye,” with “arte”
signifying a level of technique necessary for belonging to a craft or
profession. In 1581 this activity was called a “trade,” and in the
following year a “profession.” It became increasingly possible to make
something of a living in the theatre, albeit a difficult one. Audiences
could demand a certain standard of craft and technique from
performers, but this did not always translate into social respect, a
carryover from the days when actors’ legal status was “vagabond.”
Although the professions of playwright, actor, and actor-manager
emerged during this period in Europe, theatres were not a strictly
entrepreneurial affair. In England, they depended reputationally, if not
financially, upon sponsorship by the crown or the nobility or both, as
actors without patrons were subject to severe penalties. In Italy, ducal
patronage was important to the commedia troupes; in France and
Spain, religious charities first ran the theatres as a way to raise money
for their good works, and later the various cities took over the public
theatre spaces. Almost everywhere, theatre companies needed official
licenses to perform. In England, only two companies were granted
direct royal patents; all others had to be licensed by the “Master of the
Revels,” an officer of the crown charged with authorizing the
production of all plays. In Spain, his counterpart was called, simply,
the “Protector.” Three charitable organizations dominated public
theatre in Spain until 1615, when entrepreneurs began to be granted
leases for four years at a time; this practice lasted until 1638, when
cities began to take over the licensing of theatres to companies.
Typically only the largest cities had more than one officially licensed
troupe. Meanwhile, France did not permit permanent theatre
companies until well into the seventeenth century; after that, the
companies at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Théâtre du Marais
competed against each other.
Not only were authorities rather stingy in granting licenses, they also
exerted some control over what could and couldn’t be staged, and
where. In England, for example, theatrical performances were banned
inside the city limits in 1576, effectively removing public theatre to
entertainment districts in the various “liberties,” areas outside London
proper which belonged to the city, but over which it exercised no real
control. In Spain and England, there are numerous records of plays
being banned or suspended on the very day of performance: in
England, the reasons had often to do with suspicion of political
sedition, while in Spain, the Inquisition, an office established to
suppress religious heresy and subversion, cast its shadow over the
Protector’s shoulder, sniffing for more secular matters of scandal,
indecency, and profanity as well. In France, a number of semi-
professional troupes comprising student members performed primarily
for the elite, but seized every opportunity to play for the common
people as well. They generally had relatively easy access to
performance spaces in town, but city authorities were often suspicious
of the French and Italian professional troupes and sometimes forbade
performance, or allowed it only under tight restrictions (not always
obeyed).
England and Spain provide the best-documented examples
illustrating how the business of theatre was conducted in this period in
Europe. Two companies dominated London theatre at the end of the
sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Theatrical
entrepreneur Philip Henslowe (c.1555–1616) backed the Admiral’s
Men, initially headed by the actor Edward Alleyn (1566–1626) and
based at the Rose Theatre; the Burbage family, which owned The
Theatre and later the Globe, ran the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
(Theatre companies were named after the noblemen who sponsored
them.)
Both companies were founded in 1594, but along very different
business models. While the Admiral’s Men relied from the outset on
Henslowe and Alleyn to underwrite the company’s activities, the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men was run according to the sharing system, by
which actor-managers, leading actors, and financiers shared in the
profits of a given run or theatrical season. Sharing systems were a
common way of organizing theatre companies throughout Europe.
Playwrights typically did not share in the profits but were paid on a
per-play basis. In recognition of the importance of the English
companies, King James I (b. 1566, ruled 1603–1625) put the Admiral’s
Men under the patronage of his son (renaming them Prince Henry’s
Men) and elevated the Chamberlain’s Men to royal patronage (which
changed them to the King’s Men). Both companies, together with
several minor ones, competed for plays and mounted them in outdoor
and indoor playhouses as well as in “great rooms” at schools and
courts. Rivaling the two companies in popularity during the first
decade of the 1600s was the Children of the Queen’s Revels (earlier
known as the Blackfriars Boys), which produced a full range of
dramatic genres performed entirely by boys whose voices had yet to
change.
While the Admiral’s Men produced Marlowe’s popular tragedies, the
Chamberlain’s Men counted playwright William Shakespeare among
its shareholders and controlled the rights to most of the successful
plays co-authored by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Co-
authorship was a common practice in the 1590–1625 period; Fletcher
probably collaborated with Shakespeare on the last three plays
attributed to the “Bard of Avon” – Henry VIII (1613), The Two Noble
Kinsmen (1613 or 1614), and the now lost Cardenio. Playwrights often
wrote for several companies, crafting plays with specific actors in
mind. Ben Jonson, for example, provided plays to all three of the major
performing groups.
Most companies paid top dramatists up front for their work and
divided the profits from any subsequent publication among their
shareholders. The average payment per play until about 1603 was
roughly 6 pounds sterling, a figure that had increased to 10 or 12
pounds by 1613 – or, by today’s standards, approximately £2,600 to
£3,200 (roughly U.S. $4,000–5,200).
The public appetite for dramatic variety was healthy, despite the
competing attractions of other entertainment options such as sporting
events (e.g., bear-baiting and cockfighting in England, bullfighting in
Spain). The English companies maintained a repertory of up to 70
plays to satisfy this demand, with a different play being performed
every day of their six-day week, repeated only once every month or
so. Because plays weren’t published until after they’d been
performance-tested, and in many cases only when no longer being
performed, actors were given only their own parts to memorize (on
long strips of paper called “scrolls”), and must have worked hard
between shows to refresh their memories for the next day’s
performance. In Spain, plays rarely ran for more than a half-dozen
performances, and yet the theatres were never closed, except during
Lent. As a result, Spanish playwrights like Lope de Vega (1562–1635)
had to be prolific in order to keep up with the demand, since (as
throughout Europe) they generally did not share in the profits unless
they also acted. Lope de Vega, however, earned about twenty times
what a lead actor would have earned for one day’s work, and was the
only Spanish writer to make his living exclusively in theatre; even so,
Lope de Vega depended on private patronage to supplement his
income and wrote until his death. In contrast, French playwrights
received meager pay until the 1630s. Throughout Europe, when plays
were eventually published, this often occurred without the playwrights’
consent or compensation, and there were no copyright laws to
protect their interests.
As companies grew more experienced in their day-to-day
operations, professionalization may have led to certain modest
economies such as the reuse of props, costumes, and scripts, which
made it financially feasible to produce a season of plays, or to tour.
While for playwrights and actors of principal roles it was possible to
make a decent living in the theatre, that living was dependent on many
factors that were outside anyone’s control. For example, theatres were
often closed due to weather, plague, and periods of royal mourning. In
addition, in both Spain and England, anti-theatre sentiment
occasionally forced the theatres to shut down.
The establishment of permanent theatre spaces
Noble, royal, and religious patronage may have given acting
companies protection from being labeled vagabonds, but these
sponsors only gave money to the troupes when they played before the
monarch or at a private event such as a wedding. The rest of the time
the companies were dependent on the box office. Thus some
companies sought the benefits of having a permanent space in which
to produce a full season.
Even though the ancient world had permanent theatres, in early
Renaissance Europe and some parts of Asia, theatrical performance
often took place in spaces originally created for other purposes (such
as public squares, courtyards, tennis courts, or temple porches).
When permanent structures devoted specifically to theatre were built,
certain attributes of the original spaces remained. Theatre spaces
were either converted from existing structures, or purpose-built to
house professional touring companies.
While permanent theatre spaces are recorded as having been built
in Italy as early as 1531, it is likely they were associated with private
court more than public performances. An exception was the Teatro
Olimpico (built 1580–1585 in Vicenza). Its interior was modeled on
ancient Roman theatre and meant to stage classical Greek and
Roman revivals. The Teatro Olimpico opened in 1585 with a production
of Oedipus Rex to an audience of academics and nobility. Such
productions, however, were mostly occasional, amateur undertakings
intended for pedagogical, honorific, celebratory, and scholarly
purposes. Renaissance academic theatre might employ professional
actors, especially in Italy, but it never challenged the professionals’
popularity with the public. Nonetheless, the literary resources of the
academic theatre offered substantial opportunities to the early
professional troupes. As we have already seen, two major theatrical
traditions – commedia dell’arte and dramatic, text-based theatre –
flowed from the intersection of amateur and professional theatre in the
mid-sixteenth century. Teatro Olimpico remains a material
manifestation of the age’s fascination with the classical past; although
it was abandoned soon after it was built, it is still standing after almost
half a millennium, and since the mid-1990s has been active again in
housing theatre productions.
The earliest of the permanent, public theatres in Europe was built in
Paris in 1548, inside the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Its design followed the
form of the tennis courts in which visiting troupes to the French capital
were accustomed to perform, with seating arranged in galleries and
boxes along three interior walls, for more than 1,000 spectators. As in
Spain and England, multiple stage settings were conveyed more
through language than set or scenery design.

Permanent theatre structures soon appeared in all the

major European capitals. In England and in Spain, early theatres – like
the Red Lion (built 1567 in London) and the first Spanish corral [kohr-
RAHL] (Seville 1574) – were built to imitate the spaces that had earlier
been used for theatrical performances. Whereas in France the model
was the indoor tennis courts, in England and Spain they were outdoor
innyards or courtyards enclosed by the exterior walls of adjacent
buildings (see Figure 4.5). Risers along three sides of the Red Lion
allowed audience members to follow the stage action at one end of
the space. In Spain, wealthy patrons used to rent the upper floors and
balconies of the buildings surrounding the courtyards, making for a
mixture of public and private seating; when designated theatres were
built in the latter quarter of the sixteenth century, the custom of
dividing the seating by class or occupation and gender carried over
into the purpose-built structures, still called corrales. Between 1574
and 1628, eighteen such theatres were built in Spain and four in its
American colonies; in England, between 1575 and 1623, thirteen new
outdoor theatres were built.
One of the most important London theatres was called simply The
Theatre, built in 1576. Unlike the Red Lion and its French and Spanish
counterparts, which featured a stage at one end of a rectangular
audience space, The Theatre’s house was polygonal in shape. It
included three galleries where some members of the audience stood
or sat, an unroofed yard where others called the “groundlings” stood, a
stage extending into the yard, and a “tiring house” (backstage area) –
the first example of the distinctive architecture of the Elizabethan
public theatre. The design harked back to the Roman amphitheatre,
which gave it some degree of classical cachet. But it also maintained
some characteristics of the medieval locus and platea arrangement,
with the audience surrounding a generalized acting area, and location
suggested through words (“this is the forest of Arden”) or context (a
conference with the king might be in the great hall inside a castle),
with an occasional set piece (like a throne). The Theatre eventually
became home to several important theatre companies. In 1598, it was
dismantled, rebuilt near the River Thames, and renamed the Globe.
The Globe was home to the Chamberlain’s Men (later called the
King’s Men), the company most associated with Shakespeare’s plays.
(See Figure 4.6 for a recent reconstruction.)
Figure 4.5Artist's impression of the interior of the seventeenth-century Spanish
playhouse, El Corral del Principe (c.1697).

Source: Drawing by Carlos Dorremochea in John Allen, The

Reconstruction of a Spanish Golden Age Playhouse (1983). ©
University Press of Florida.
Figure 4.6A plan of the new Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, completed in 1997,
which sought to replicate the Globe of Shakespeare's day (with additional exits
for safety reasons). See Chapter 14 for more information on the new Globe.

Source: Design by Pentagram Design Ltd. Reprinted in A

Companion to Shakespeare, David Scott Kastan, ed. (1999, Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell), 370.
 In England, The Theatre and the Globe were structures
open to the air and known as “public” theatres. There were other
theatres housed indoors which, although also open to the public,
became known as “private” theatres, perhaps in order to skirt
requirements that plays be licensed and their companies officially
sponsored by the Crown. These theatres were most active in London
during the 1570s and 1580s. After 1608 Richard Burbage, lead actor
and manager of the King’s Men company, took over Blackfriars
Theatre, which soon became the company’s winter home and the
most important English theatre of its day. Although no illustrations or
plans survive, contemporary accounts suggest the space was a large
indoor hall, with a stage and tiring house at one end, benches for
those seated in the pit, galleries on three sides above the pit, and
boxes near the stage. Blackfriars, unlike the Globe, was an elite
venue, intended for the most refined work of the best playwrights – but
other more popular plays were staged there, and it wasn’t unusual for
spectators to sit or stand on the stage, perhaps showing themselves
off. Also unlike the Globe, it was used in the evening, probably with the
entire room illuminated by candles.
The growing popularity of theatre made it start to seem like a good
business proposition, and this in turn made indoor theatres
increasingly valuable: they allowed companies to perform, and
therefore support themselves year-round. In an age increasingly
dependent on selling theatre tickets, a dedicated theatre space
allowed the companies to control the audience’s entrance, thus
assuring they paid the price of admission.
The social occasion of theatre
Early modern audiences in London could attend an outdoor, public
playhouse most days of the year, except during the Lenten season
and periods of intense heat (and possible plague) in the summer
months. For Londoners, a trip to the Globe took them across the River
Thames beyond the reach of a city government dominated by Puritans
and into an area filled with taverns, brothels, bear-baiting arenas, and
other playhouses. The theatres south of the Thames, like others north
of the city, drew audiences of all classes. Apprentices, journeymen,
soldiers, and others paid a penny (roughly the cost of a loaf of bread)
for admittance into the yard of the playhouse, where they could stand
to watch the show on the thrust stage, roughly four to six feet high
(Figure 4.7). For an additional penny, merchants and their families,
courtiers of both genders, foreign travelers, and others might purchase
a bench seat in one of the galleries. If the Lord Chamberlain himself
came to enjoy the troupe he sponsored, he and his retinue might sit in
a lord’s room behind and above the stage platform, an excellent
location to see and be seen. Although the Globe could hold perhaps
2,500 spectators, the average crowd for most performances was
probably around 600.
Daytime performances and the configuration of the theatre houses
– rectangular as in Spain and France, or the polygonal “wooden O” of
the English Globe – meant that audience members had as good a
view of each other as they did of the stage action. In France, this view
was probably better than that of the stage; perhaps that is one reason
people tended to refer to “hearing” rather than “seeing” a play.

Audiences and seating in Paris during the early 1600s

were roughly similar to London’s. Theatregoers came from all social
classes, but since ticket prices were linked to viewing privileges,
seating became segregated by class and other social factors. Most
spectators were male, but upper-class women began attending plays
in the 1630s, when decorum in drama was becoming more important;
however, women from the lower classes probably attended in small
numbers long before then. The parterre [PAH(r)-tehr] (pit) was
crowded mostly with spectators from the lower classes, who were
often scorned by the elite for being noisy and quarrelsome.
Nevertheless people from the upper classes could be found in the
parterre as well, especially writers wishing to be closer to the stage.
The boxes were as usual more expensive and reserved for the elite.
When Le Cid was performed in 1637, it was so popular that well-to-do
audience members were allowed to sit on the stage itself, beginning a
tradition that the theatres were unable to end for over a century.
However, most playwrights of the early 1600s felt it was important to
appeal to all tastes. That too began to change during the 1630s.
In Spain, the corrales similarly divided the audience by social class
and therefore viewing privilege. Male and female audience members
were strictly segregated, and women were not allowed to stand with
men in the patio, or ground-floor area. Instead, they occupied an
upper gallery called the cazuela, or “stewpot,” where men were not
allowed; women were, however, allowed to sit with male relatives in
the aposentos, or boxes. Other galleries called tertulias were reserved
for members of the clergy and intelligentsia.
Audiences in the public theatres were vocal and rowdy; theatre as a
place of genteel sociability took some time to develop, as will be
discussed further in Chapter 7. People ate fruit, nuts, pastries, and
possibly fish and meat pies, and drank beer or ale. There were no
restrooms. In England, “orange wenches” – young women who eked
out a living selling oranges (and, often, themselves) – roamed among
the spectators. Inter-act and post-show performances often featured
highly physical song-and-dance routines.
Because both men and women attended, the theatre of this time
afforded an opportunity for the public mingling of sexes outside the
sanctioned religious holiday seasons, a matter of no small anxiety to
the moral authorities. Throughout Europe, both official and self-
appointed watch-dogs inveighed against what they saw as the
licentiousness and immorality of the stage. Actors themselves –
whether male as in England or male and female every where else in
Europe – were not held in general respect. Further, limited licensing
opportunities made for a kind of hierarchical social ladder for actors
everywhere: those associated with permanently licensed companies
were at the top of this social schema; actors with touring companies
lower down; and individual street performers who worked in the
streets the lowest of all. But even actors associated with licensed
companies were not granted full social esteem. They were banned
from London’s city limits in 1575; in Spain they were deemed “public
sinners” and denied Christian sacraments.
Figure 4.7A 1596 drawing of the interior of the Swan Theatre, London, probably
generally similar to the nearby Globe Theatre. Note the figures in the gallery
above the two stage doors; this area may have been used as a lord's room and
as an acting space. The only picture of the interior of an Elizabethan public
theatre, it is a copy by Arend von Buchell of a lost original drawing by his Dutch
friend, Johannes DeWitt, who had visited London.

Source: E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923). Buchell's

drawing is in the Bibliotheek der Rijkuniversiteit, Utrecht.
Increasing importance of women in theatre
When a French theatre troupe featuring both male and female players
toured to Blackfriars in 1629, they caused such a stir – being “hissed,
hooted and pippin-pelted from the stage” – that the Master of the
Revels reimbursed some of their license fees (Prynne, quoted in
Adams 1904: 13). Although women frequently appeared in lavish royal
court masques throughout Europe, their appearance on public stages
was a more controversial matter. The reasons are complicated, and
had much to do with a widely held belief that a woman’s place was in
the home, away from the gaze of men who had no legal claims on her
– unless she was a prostitute. Nevertheless, despite widespread
misperceptions of their virtue, women began to appear on stage
throughout the continent: the first documented professional actress
appeared in Italy, with the commedia troupes in the 1560s; in Spain in
1587 (although by 1599 actresses had to be the wives, widows, or
daughters of company members); and in France in 1592. In England,
boys and young men continued to play all female roles until 1662,
when Charles II issued a royal warrant that only women should play
women’s roles (although there is some evidence that women started
appearing on stage in 1660, and men still played older women for a
time).
According to theatre historian Eric A. Nicholson, writing about the
European context overall,
Regardless of the country, period, and prevailing religious outlook,
female roles distinguish both the drama and society of these centuries.
Insofar as the postmedieval and preindustrial world categorized women
almost exclusively in terms of their relationship to men, both normative
roles – the virginal maid, chaste wife, and celibate widow – and
transgressive ones – adulteress, prostitute, courtesan, and procuress or
“bawd” – gave prominence to sexuality and the female body, precisely
those entities that most demanded – and most threatened – patriarchal
domination.
(1993: 296)

The limited roles laid out by Nicholson nevertheless provided an

opportunity for play-wrights (predominantly men) to expose, explore,
exploit, and critique unequal social relations between the genders.
Nicholson goes on to trace a number of European plays that treat the
contradictory position of women in society in complex ways – at times
rehearsing their limited social roles, at others reversing and
transforming them (see “Women’s roles in European drama” below).
In addition to having men playing the parts of women, Elizabethan
England seemed particularly fascinated by the prospects of further
cross-dressing within the action of the plays. In more than 80 plays,
young male actors, playing the parts of women, cross-dress back into
male clothing in order to pursue their female characters’ various goals.
Examples include Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, As You
Like It, and Twelfth Night, where cross-dressing proves central to the
dramatic action. These performances offered audiences the chance to
witness the complicated representation of ambiguous sexual tension –
between a male character and a female character dressed as and
played by a male. A case study in Chapter 5 will discuss the issues
raised by cross-dressing further.
Off-stage, however, sumptuary laws restricted clothing choices to
their “proper” gender or social class, although some women chose to
cross-dress in order to travel alone or pursue a trade. In Spain,
prohibitions against cross-dressing extended to the stage as well. For
parts requiring a young woman to dress as a man, actresses were
required to wear male clothing above the waist, and a skirt below.
In Japan, as we will see below, female performers were at first
central to kabuki, but they were eventually outlawed from performing
in public. Similarly, cross-dressing (both across genders and across
social classes) was banned. Even today, female roles in kabuki are
played by males. The onnagata (female-role specialist) – one of the
best-known features of kabuki – is discussed in more detail in our
case study.

Women's Roles In European Drama

The dilemmas of social life for women in Renaissance society provided rich
territory for dramatic exploration. Here we consider three common dilemmas
facing women of the time, as they appeared in stage drama (adapted from
Nicholson 1993).
The dilemma of the “fallen” woman
Some plays compelled audiences to respect and admire certain prostitutes,
bawds, and courtesans whom society told them they should only despise.
Fernando de Rojas’ The Tragi-comedy of Calisto and Melibea (1502) (also
known by the name of the principal character, “La Celestina”) was translated
from the original Spanish into every major European language between 1515
and 1530. Based on the scheming madam stock character of ancient Roman
comedy, in de Rojas’ treatment her character is deepened to combine both
“demonic corruption and versatile self-determination” (Nicholson 1993: 298).
La Lena (1528) by Ludovico Ariosto takes the Celestina character even
further, to offer both a critique of contemporary double standards in Italy, and
a defense of learning and education for women. The Alchemist (1610) by Ben
Jonson features a prostitute, Dol Common, bent on transforming her
“common” status into royalty. Although Jonson does not expect the audience
to admire this character, he does ask us to consider the theatricality of her
profession and, by extension, Nicholson suggests, that of gender itself.
Some plays feature fully developed prostitute figures who are punished for
their immorality, but whose characters are so well drawn that their choices
seem justifiable, even when the playwright seems also to be judging against
them. Examples include Thomas Heywood’s How a Man May Choose a Good
Wife from a Bad (1602) and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605). La
Cortigiana (1533) by Pietro Aretino, The White Devil (1612) by John Webster,
and Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton (1621) all feature as
secondary characters independent women of “ill fame” whose talents
nevertheless are undeniable in aiding the more virtuous principal characters.
Writing slightly after the period discussed in this chapter, Aphra Behn (1640–
1689) was England’s first professional female writer. Her The Rover (1677)
features a lead character, Angelica, who self-transforms from “an artful
courtesan to a constant lover” (Nicholson 1993: 301). However, the object of
her affection (Willmore) is not so constant, choosing a chaste heiress over
her. Four years later, Behn wrote a sequel, in which another courtesan, La
Nuche, this time wins Willmore from the more conventional Ariadne.

The dilemma of the “honorable” woman

Many plays featured maidens, wives, and widows who nevertheless find ways
to transgress the limitations of these roles, often by resorting to disguise and
transvestism.
At least two plays feature the attempts of an honorable widow to pursue her
own love interests against the wishes of her jealous brothers. John Webster’s
The Duchess of Malfi (1614) does so at the cost of her own life, while Pedro
Calderón de la Barca’s La dama duende (The Phantom Lady, 1629) fares
better.
Many more plays feature younger women who must disguise themselves as
boys or men in order “to slip past a constrictive role model while appearing to
obey it” (Nicholson 1993: 303). Examples include Dovizi da Bibbiena’s La
Calandria (1513), which later would influence William Wycherley’s The Plain
Dealer (1676); both plays feature heroines who cross-dress to escape the
confines of maidenhood, pursuing love objects who seem hardly worth the
effort. Calderón’s Rosaura in Life is a Dream is another example, pursuing her
honor after it has been ruined by a young man making false promises of
marriage. The difficulties of her pursuit in turn become the key upon which the
salvation of the principal “dreamer,” Segismundo, depends. Shakespeare also
used this device frequently, for the same purposes: examples include Portia in
Merchant of Venice (1605) and Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.1590).
Rosalind in As You Like It (1600) and Viola in Twelfth Night (1601) both cross-
dress for defensive purposes, to travel alone in safety.

The dilemma of the unhappy marriage

In theory, patriarchy demands that husbands maintain control over their wives’
bodies, since women themselves couldn’t be trusted to do so. In practice, that
rarely works, as these plays show.
Numerous plays explore what befalls a virtuous wife who, through no fault
of her own, is accused of infidelity, often with tragic results. Perhaps the most
famous is Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello (1604). Other examples with
happier, if ultimately not more satisfying endings, include Celia in Volpone
(1605) by Ben Jonson, Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610),
Imogen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1611), and Margery Pinchwife in William
Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675).
The figure of the cuckold – the betrayed husband whose inability to control
his wife was publicly symbolized by the horns growing out of his forehead –
was a common figure in early modern drama. Whereas this figure appeared
most frequently in satires, the specter of its particular kind of humiliation
haunted more serious dramas, in which women paid dearly for choosing love
outside their marriages. Examples of plays more seriously treating the double
standard of sexual morality included Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s
Tragedy (1611), Lope de Vega’s Castigo sin venganza (Punishment without
Revenge, 1631), and Calderón’s El Médico de su honra (The Doctor of his
Honor, 1635–1637).
Popular Japanese theatre in a time of cultural seclusion
Civil wars wracked Japanese society from 1467 until 1590. During this
chaotic period, only nō could be considered professional, although not
all nō troupes were connected to the court and many toured the
country. Various other types of theatrical performance occurred as
part of Shinto or Buddhist rituals, or at local festivals, but these were
generally performed by the villagers themselves, as part of civic life.
There were also troupes of itinerant entertainers – actors, dancers,
storytellers, musicians, magicians, acrobats, and puppeteers – who
roamed the land, but they were considered outcasts (officially
classified as “non-humans”) and were forbidden to reside in settled
villages or towns.
Around 1590, one clan of samurai (professional warriors) gained
military power and the long period of civil wars began to subside. In
1603, the Japanese emperor conferred the title of shogun (supreme
military ruler) on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the leader of this victorious clan.
This act established the Tokugawa shogunate, which enforced the
peace until 1868. The period from 1603–1868 is therefore called the
Tokugawa era. It is also sometimes referred to as the Edo era,
because the seat of military government was moved away from Kyoto,
where the emperor and many aristocrats resided, to a distant,
unsophisticated town called Edo. Today, the city formerly named Edo
is called Tokyo, the capital of Japan and a thriving metropolis.
The Tokugawa rulers, guided by neo-Confucianism, insisted on
having an unchanging society divided according to hereditary class.
As we saw with the sumptuary laws of Europe, each of the four social
classes was permitted garments and adornments appropriate to them
and forbidden to others. For example, only the topmost samurai could
wear the double swords. Next in the hierarchy were the farmers,
followed by artisans and craftspeople. At the bottom were the
merchants, thought to contribute nothing to society, because they
merely traded items grown or made by others. The three lower
classes wore only cotton garments of blue and brown, with little or no
pattern. In addition to these four classes, there were those who were
outside and above all classes: the imperial family, the nobility, and
Buddhist and Shinto priests. They could wear colored silks,
embroidered and elaborately patterned. Similarly, there were others
who were outside and below the class system, including hereditary
outcasts, sorcerers, prostitutes, beggars, and actors. They were all
forbidden to wear the trappings of those “inside society.”
However, this supposedly inflexible hierarchy was turned upside-
down in reality during the long period of peace of the Tokugawa era.
Suddenly, money could be spent on leisure instead of war. The
daimyō (feudal lords of the samurai class) actually became poor
because they were forced to maintain two households: to prevent
rebellions, they were required to have residences both in their home
province and in the new capital of Edo. They, their families, and their
retainers made the long journey back and forth several times a year, a
very expensive and time-consuming practice.

Unemployed samurai (rōnin) sometimes

became bandits or lived secretly among the merchants. In contrast,
the despised merchants became rich. They secretly defied the law by
wearing extravagant silks and bold colors beneath their simple cotton
kimono. As many kabuki [kah-boo-kee] and bunraku [boon-rah-koo]
plots demonstrate, the merchants embraced the virtues and values
once appropriate to the samurai and feudal lords but which they no
longer possessed.
The shogunate also feared foreign influences that might undermine
their authority. European traders and Christian missionaries
threatened to introduce new types of weapons, popular foreign goods
(such as eyeglasses and clocks), and new ideas. To stem the flow of
foreign influence, beginning in the early 1600s, the government
enacted a series of laws forbidding contact with foreigners. By 1651,
Japan had almost totally isolated itself from the outside world. This
isolation (with the exception of a few Dutch traders who were limited to
a settlement on the tiny island of Dejima, near Nagasaki in southwest
Japan) continued for over 200 years, ending officially in 1868. It was
during this period that kabuki developed and flourished.

The birth of kabuki

Around 1600, a female dancer named Okuni (d. 1610) and her mixed-
gender troupe appeared in Kyoto, performing Buddhist dances in a dry
river bed to raise funds for a temple. In addition to religious dances,
they performed short skits – early plays that were vulgar, irreverent,
and often lewd. Their performances became hugely popular, partly
because the performers (both male and female) were also prostitutes.
Okuni and her troupe ignored the laws against cross-dressing, with
men playing women and women playing men. They defied rules
against proper clothing, wearing forbidden foreign costumes and even
Christian crosses. Woodblock prints from around 1600 depict Okuni
dressed outrageously in male Portuguese garb, with a Christian cross
around her neck and a samurai’s double swords at her waist (Figure
4.8).
Like these outcast actors, wild young people also flouted the laws.
They joined unruly gangs and sported outrageous costumes, shocking
hairdos, large and extravagantly decorated swords, and four-foot long
tobacco pipes. Like Okuni, they resisted legal dress codes and
behaved in anti-social ways. All these counter-cultural people were
termed kabuki-mono. The word kabuki derives from an old verb
kabuku: “to tilt or slant dangerously to one side.” In its origins, kabuki
was shocking, off-balance, and inappropriate. As long as people
performed and dressed outrageously, whether on stage or off, order
could not be maintained. Today, however, kabuki is considered a
“classical” art form, and the word itself is now written differently, using
Chinese characters meaning “song-dance-skill.”

Soon after Okuni’s appearance, copycat kabuki troupes

appeared, many composed of all women. At least as early as 1612,
male prostitutes also formed kabuki troupes and competed with the
women. By the 1620s, kabuki managers had established theatres
linked to brothels in all of the major cities of Japan, an entrepreneurial
strategy for boosting revenues from both endeavors. The government
began to fear that the strict division of classes was breaking down as
more and more people attended these outdoor performances and
sought out the sexual services of the actors. However, it was not
prostitution itself that concerned the neo-Confucians who ran the
government. Nor did they suggest that stage acting, cross-dressing, or
imitation were inherently evil, as many Europeans opposed to theatre
did. Rather, they feared class mingling and social rebellion.
Figure 4.8Detail from a painting showing Okuni, the Japanese female temple
dancer/prostitute who originated the performance style eventually called kabuki,
probably in the late sixteenth century. Note the Christian cross and double
samurai swords. Other images show her in male Portuguese garb.

Source: © Tokugawa Reimeikai Foundation.

The popular success of kabuki annoyed the samurai rulers, but also
confirmed what they took to be their innate superiority to the rowdy
culture of the cities. Although the regime could have stamped out
kabuki when it first emerged, the shogun and his warriors chose to
allow it to continue within limits, fearing that a total ban would lead to
worse troubles. In a revealing document, one samurai official stated:
“Courtesans, dancers, catamites, streetwalkers, and the like always
come to the cities and prospering places of the country. Although the
conduct of many is corrupted by them, if they are rigorously
suppressed, serious crimes will occur daily” (Shively 2002: 41). This
point of view, which underlay the Tokugawa shogunate’s policy toward
kabuki theatre for 250 years, rested on class disdain for merchants
and city culture. The combination of traders and workers in wealthy
towns, the samurai believed, would always breed criminality. Better for
such potential criminals to be distracted by theatrical entertainment,
they reasoned, than for these people to turn to “serious crimes.”
At the same time, the samurai rulers worried that kabuki, if
completely unregulated, would corrupt the soldiers and young men of
their own class. Although samurai and aristocrats, including high-born
women, were forbidden to attend, many flagrantly broke the law.
Sometimes they came in disguise; in some periods, they were forced
to sit behind screens where they were “invisible.” Complaints against
the kabuki performers in the 1600–1670 period centered on drunken
fights and tales of young samurai losing their fortunes and ruining their
reputations by chasing after a kabuki prostitute. In 1629, the
government banned females from performing in kabuki. Despite the
ban, similar laws were reissued in the 1630s and 1640s, indicating that
it took several years for the shogunate to eliminate this popular form of
kabuki. After 1652, young males were also prohibited from performing
kabuki, again in an effort to prevent class mingling due to love affairs
and prostitution. Henceforth only older males who shaved the
forelocks of their hair were allowed to perform in the plays. It was
assumed that the male actors would be less sexually appealing (to
both males and females in the audience) without their forelocks.
Eventually, the actors were required to use scalp coverings and wigs
in an ongoing contest of regulation and innovation between the
Tokugawa shogunate and the kabuki managers. The issue of hair is
just one example of the kinds of restrictions and rules that the
government tried to enforce.
Although this conflict between the samurai and the theatre
managers continued until the end of the Tokugawa regime in 1868,
kabuki troupes gradually won enough grudging legitimacy from the
regime to allow them to elaborate an art form out of this sexually
enticing entertainment. After 1652, audiences in Kyoto, Osaka, and
Edo began to find more enjoyment in the extended performances by
the mature male actors, who now played all the roles on the kabuki
stage. Onnagata [ohn-nah-gah-tah], men who specialized in female
roles, gained particular popularity among the merchant spectators
(see our case study).

As star actors in the major cities sought better material,

kabuki playwrights emerged to provide it. Many of the most famous
kabuki plays began as puppet plays and were later adapted for actors.
Many playwrights worked in teams, but a few, such as Chikamatsu
Monzaemon (1653–1724), gained recognition for their singular
excellence. Chikamatsu preferred writing for puppets rather than for
actors who might mangle his words.
Blurring performance genres: Puppets and actors
Japanese puppet theatre (also called ningyō joruri, which means doll
theatre) has a long history, including connections to religious ritual.
However, the most representative style, generally known as bunraku,
is purely secular. Unlike much puppet theatre in the West, bunraku is
not meant as children’s entertainment. The histories of kabuki and
bunraku are closely allied, and the two genres have many
performance and script elements in common. Both reached their high
points and solidified their most typical characteristics during the mid-
seventeenth century, as entertainment for the newly wealthy merchant
class. Since both were highly popular, each tried to out-do the other.
For example, the puppets became more and more like humans, while
the actors tended to mimic puppet movements.

Lifelike puppets can do things that living actors on stage

cannot do as believably, such as cutting off heads, gouging out eyes,
being eaten by a tiger, or walking to the stars on a rainbow. These
effects charmed and thrilled audiences. Consequently, kabuki actors
sometimes sought to rival the puppets by creating performance skills
that were amazing because they seemed almost magical in showing
off the actor’s versatility. For example, to imitate puppet movement,
the actor would perform ningyō-buri, a kind of dance in which black-
robed stagehands (kōken [koh-kehn] or kurogo) acted as puppeteers,
literally manipulating the actor as though he were a puppet.
Kabuki soon developed quick on-stage costume changes (such as
costumes that seem to turn inside out or that fly off to reveal another
costume beneath) that instantly transformed the character right in
front of the audience’s eyes. Doubles cleverly substituted for star
actors so that the star could appear to play multiple roles in a single
performance, even apparently acting with himself in the same scene.
Special effects developed, such as an actor flying over the audience
or appearing magically from a lantern, or a stage set depicting a
rooftop that opened to reveal an interior. In response, bunraku
puppets became more and more lifelike and believable, seeming to
breathe, to cry, and to perform delicate, complex dances or activities
such as sewing.
Figure 4.9Japanese bunraku puppets. The head manipulator, without mask,
controls the doll's head and right arm. The secondary manipulator, with face
covered, controls the left arm. If needed, a third controls the feet.

Source: Bunraku, The National Theatre of Japan (Tokyo: Japan Arts

Council, 1994), 7.
Today, bunraku puppets are three to four feet tall and highly
realistic, with many movable parts – not only arms, legs, and bodies
but individual fingers, eyes, and mouths. The puppet for a major
character is manipulated by three operators who must work in perfect
harmony. The main puppeteer manipulates the head and right arm;
the secondary puppeteer manipulates the left arm; and the third
puppeteer works the feet and legs. A puppeteer usually spends ten
years working the feet and legs, then ten more years working the left
arm. Only after 20 years is a puppeteer ready to manipulate the head
and right arm (Figure 4.9). Minor puppets may only have a single
puppeteer.
The puppeteers do not speak. A single narrator (the joruri or gidayū)
voices the dialogue for all the characters, as well as all spoken and
sung narration. The joruri is seated on a stage extension to the
audience’s right. He is accompanied by a shamisen (a three-stringed
instrument). The musician sits next to the narrator, and both are in full
view of the audience. In kabuki plays derived from bunraku scripts, a
joruri narrator sometimes chants during certain parts of the play.

The bunraku stage is designed so that only the upper

portions of the puppeteers’ bodies are visible. The front screen
covering their lower bodies sometimes serves as a floor for the
puppets. The puppeteers often wear black hoods, unless the main
puppeteer is especially famous. Even when the audience sees the
puppeteer’s face, he is considered to be “invisible” – the audience’s
attention is focused on the puppets and/or the joruri narrator.
Generally, all manipulators are male; today, a few females perform as
joruri, and both males and females play the shamisen.
Kabuki and bunraku in performance

Early kabuki was performed outdoors in dry riverbeds.

Later, it began to use a variation of the nō stage. After 1724, when
indoor theatres became popular, the roof and pillars typical of the nō
stage were eliminated, and the hashigakari (bridgeway) was moved to
extend through the audience. The kabuki bridgeway, called the
hanamichi [hah-nah-mee-chee], is used for major entrances and exits.
Unlike its counterpart in nō, the hanamichi brings the actor into (and
above) the audience, creating a highly theatrical and immediate effect.
Some plays used two hanamichi, one on either side of the auditorium.
Originally, the audience sat on the floor on tatami mats (woven from
rice straw), either in two levels of galleries or in ground floor boxes
(Figure 4.10). Soon, a front curtain of green, orange, and black stripes
was added to hide scene shifts (although there had never been a front
curtain in nō); today, at the play’s opening, this curtain is pulled back
to the sound of wooden clappers beating faster and faster. Still later,
complex mechanical devices for spectacular effects appeared,
including revolving sets, devices to fly actors, and traps in the stage
floor and the hanamichi. Such machines were common in kabuki
nearly a century before European theatre attempted to use them.
Today, kabuki theatres can generally seat several thousand
spectators.

There are several types of kabuki

and bunraku plays: historical, domestic (about contemporary urban
life), and dance plays lacking dialogue. The stories are usually derived
from existing sources (legends, epics, novels, or nō and kyōgen
plays), real or imagined history, or current events. Some of the most
beautiful and poetic bunraku and kabuki dramas are Chikamatsu’s
double-suicide plays. These and other serious plays often focus on an
impossible, ultimately tragic conflict between the demands of duty or
loyalty to family or lord (giri) and personal, human feelings (ninjō). All
plays are highly choreographed, often including dance or battle
sequences and even acrobatics. The two main performance styles in
kabuki are aragoto [ah-rah-goh-toh], or rough-house (popular in Edo),
and wagoto [wah-goh-toh], or soft-style (popular in Osaka and Kyoto).
The aragoto style features striking, non-realistic makeup, hugely
exaggerated costumes, extreme vocal patterns, and powerful
gestures that are based on images of the god Fudō, the patron deity of
a Buddhist-Shinto sect of mountain ascetics, whose rituals include
terrifying demon-quelling dances. At climactic moments, an aragoto
actor may toss his head, raise his leg and stamp his foot, pose with
open, outreached hand, grunt, and freeze his face in a cross-eyed
grimace. Such “punctuation” in acting is called mie [mee-eh] (Figure
4.11). In these moments, the expressive body of the outcast actor
incorporates both the Buddhist-Shinto deity and the samurai warrior,
suggesting to the merchant audience that they, themselves, partake of
both identities.

Figure 4.10A performance of the popular kabuki play Shibaraku (Wait a

Moment!), in Tokyo's Nakamura Theatre in the mid-nineteenth century. On the
rampway (hanamichi) leading to the stage at left, an actor in the robes of the
Danjū rō line of actors portrays a commoner who enters to challenge the
imminent execution on stage of innocent people by a powerful lord, uttering his
famous fierce cry, “Shibaraku”. The woodcut triptych by Utagawa Kunisada
shows the traditional auditorium (note the seating arrangements) and stage, but
with an additional hanamichi at right.

Source: Courtesy Gary Jay and Josephine S. Williams.

Music and sound effects are important elements. The vocalization
of kabuki is unique. The language is old-fashioned and sometimes
poetic, and the style of enunciation is highly elaborated and often
artificial. Onnagata, the female-role specialists, speak in a rolling
falsetto voice; villains often use a guttural, rough voice.
Makeup and costumes are stylized, colorful, and some times
fantastic, especially in the aragoto style. For example, the hero of the
play Shibaraku (Wait a Moment!) wears a kimono with gigantic, stiff
square sleeves. A high-ranking courtesan may wear many layers of
colorful kimono, a wide, heavily brocaded and complex obi (broad
sash) tied around her waist, an elaborate wig decorated with hairpins,
jewels, and flowers, and tall, platform-style, lacquered sandals. In
aragoto plays, everything is bigger than life. In wagoto plays, both
costumes and makeup are closer to reality. (Chikamatsu’s double-
suicide plays are examples of the wagoto style.)
All actors in professional kabuki today are male. Most come from
kabuki families and begin training and performing as children. Those
who are not born into an acting family usually begin training at a
special school at the National Theatre. If they exhibit sufficient
promise, they will apprentice with an established actor and eventually
will be adopted into the family. Actors are awarded new personal
names as they progress in skill. Unlike most Japanese people, actors
in kabuki and bunraku are known by these professional, personal
names rather than their family name.
Many now-typical elements of kabuki came about as the result of
attempts to stifle the art. For example, the onnagata developed
because both women and boys were banned from the stage. Visual
elements became more stunning to attract audiences. Scripts became
more interesting and acting became more polished when the main
reason for attending theatre was no longer finding an attractive
prostitute. Keeping actors segregated from the rest of society meant
that the children of actors would be forced to learn their craft at an
early age. Ironically, official disapproval of kabuki actually contributed
to its becoming more professional.
Figure 4.11Danjū rō XII as Sukeroku, the commoner who is an aristocrat of the
past in disguise, in the kabuki play Sukeroku: Flower of Edo. Here, Danjū rō is
seen striking a typical mie pose.

Source: Kabukiza program, Tokyo, January 1995, p. 20.

Case Study Realer than real? Imaging “woman” in kabuki
One of the most immediately recognizable features of kabuki is the
onnagata (male actor specializing in female roles). In contemporary
Japan, female actors perform in many types of theatre (even
occasionally in nō), but kabuki remains an all-male genre. This case
study will consider some of the historical and aesthetic arguments for
and against female actors in kabuki.
Gender, visuality, and the onnagata
After 1868, when Western ideas such as feminism began to take hold,
social and some theatre reformers wanted to replace the onnagata
with actresses, while traditionalists were opposed. In 1914, a male
Japanese theatre scholar wrote:
in Japan, males are superior to females in every way – from the shape of
the face, eyes, nose, and mouth to body type and size. Females can be
beautiful too, but they usually have some flaw: for example, a lovely face
but a short body. Since these flaws do not allow an actress to
complement a male lead, it is only obvious that males should continue to
perform women onstage.
(Quoted in Robertson 1998: 57)

On the opposite side, early Japanese feminists and their supporters

felt that, as one put it, “Although the onnagata has the weight of history
and tradition on his side, all I see is a middle-aged male wearing face
powder trying to play the part of a young woman. It is in bad taste and
wholly unconvincing. He doesn’t even try to hide his Adam’s apple!”
(quoted in Robertson 1998: 58).
A great onnagata does not need to appear “beautiful” or even
typically “feminine.” Rather, he must be a skillful performer, creating a
pleasing staged image of “woman.” Some kabuki connoisseurs
actually prefer onnagata who are physically unattractive, such as the
extraordinarily talented Nakamura Shikan VII (1928–2011), because
they feel that an actor’s beauty distracts from his skill. One of the
twentieth century’s most beloved onnagata, Onoe Baikō VII (1915–
1995) (Figure 4.12) was rather stout, not especially good looking, and
behaved in a typically masculine way off stage. Others, such as the
internationally renowned Bandō Tamasaburō V (1950–) (Figure 4.13),
are quite beautiful on stage and off. Tamasaburō not only excels in
kabuki, but portrays realistic, believable women in stage and film roles,
such as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named
Desire or Lady Macbeth.

Although all professional onnagata today are male, until

the early twentieth century, some actresses – including female
onnagata – did perform on stage, both in private mansions and in
public theatres. Previously, scholars often dismissed them as
amateurs, but feminist scholars have shown that this designation is
inaccurate (Edelson 2009). One of the most famous female onnagata
was Ichikawa Kumehachi I (c.1846–1913), who played both male and
female roles in kabuki. In 1898, critics wrote that “on stage, nobody can
tell that she is not a man. When she plays [female] roles. . ., she
immediately transforms herself into a blooming beauty or a graceful,
virtuous princess” (quoted in Isaka 2006: 111). Being indistinguishable
from a man meant that her body performed in the “authentic” kabuki
tradition, using the aesthetic ideals developed by male onnagata.
Regardless of the biological sex of the performer, “the roles have been
polished to the point where the mere pointing of a finger, swaying of a
kimono sleeve, or exclamation of surprise has eliminated everything
inessential to the communication of what is conventionally recognized
as a womanly presence” (Leiter 2012: 118).
Figure 4.12The well-known Japanese male actor Onoe Baikō in the onnagata
(female) role in Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden). He was considered one of
the finest onnagata of the twentieth century.

Source: Program for Grand Kabuki Theatre, Los Angeles,

September 1993.

Figure bThe onnagata actor Tamasaburō (left) as the courtesan Agemaki in the
kabuki play Sukeroku, and as Lady Macbeth (right).
Source: 4.13a: Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images.
Historicizing onnagata aesthetics
However, some contemporary theatre scholars (both Japanese and
non-Japanese) maintain that only a male onnagata can portray the
“essence of femininity” and can seem more feminine than a “real”
woman. Their comments often echo the 1939 Japanese scholar who
maintained, “onnagata imparted a flavor that actresses could not hope
to produce” (Robertson 1998: 58). In analyzing such comments,
theatre historian James R. Brandon reminds us that:
We should not forget the historical reason the onnagata became part of
kabuki theatre . . . The onnagata was a political expedient and did not
need justification on artistic grounds until the ban on actresses was
repealed in the late nineteenth century. Then theatre scholars,
performers, and culture managers were required to come up with
reasons why the onnagata should continue. The result was the creation
of unsubstantiated myths: only a male actor can suggest the essence of
a woman, only a man possesses the physical strength to wear a heavy
wig and multiple kimono, and so on. These are not really artistic
explanations; they are rationalizations for why the social institution of
male-playing-female should continue undisturbed in the modern era
when it was no longer needed or required.
(Brandon 2012: 122)

Although the onnagata’s origin was political and not aesthetic, actors
and other kabuki theatre artists did develop concepts of artistic beauty
to justify their art. The great onnagata Yoshizawa Ayame I (1673–
1729), maintained that the successful onnagata must behave like a
woman both on stage and in real life, even in private and even if he is
married with children. In daily life, he must practice a female’s outward
behavior and inner thoughts by eating, walking, and gesturing just like
a perfect woman – but never copying any specific person. If someone
mentions his wife and children, he should really blush in modesty.
Even at the public bath, it is said that Ayame would use the women’s
section. No one objected, and no one was fooled.
According to Ayame, the onnagata is not “a male acting in a role in
which he becomes a ‘woman,’” but rather “a male who is ‘a woman’
acting a role” (quoted in Robertson 1998: 54). In other words, before
playing a particular female role on stage, the male actor must
transform his gender to “woman” (that is, to what society imagines
“woman” to be, regardless of biological sex and regardless of specific
circumstances). Because an actual woman would not be able to
escape her own biological body, only a male, who was not hindered by
biology, could hope to represent the ideal.
Ayame’s ideas are related to certain Buddhist concepts of
transformation (henshin), which state that females are inherently
impure and can only reach enlightenment if their physical bodies are
eliminated and they are reborn (after several reincarnations) as male
bodies (Robertson 1998: 54). Women were in this view incapable of
representing or becoming themselves; they were imperfect copies of
an imagined ideal.
Official doctrine of the time concurred. For example, male educators
and philosophers encouraged women to follow the Confucian
precepts expressed in books such as Greater Learning for Females
(Onna daigaku, 1672) which stated that possessing female sex organs
and genitalia actually impeded the ability to be rational and to behave
in an appropriately “chaste” fashion. As Jennifer Robertson points out:
Given the Kabuki theater’s mixed reception by the Tokugawa Shogunate,
and the low, outsider status of actors during the Edo period, basing the
construction and performance of femininity on Greater Learning for
Females quite likely added a modicum of legitimacy to the urban theatre.
. . . An onnagata, then, according to Ayame, was . . . the embodiment of
patriarchally inscribed, state-regulated “female” gender. The actor was
unequivocally Woman, a model for females offstage to emulate and a
sex object for males offstage to proposition.
(1998: 54–5)

Even today, contemporary Japanese women (who seldom wear

kimono except for formal occasions) sometimes view the onnagata as
“a model to emulate” – but only in terms of how to properly wear (and
move gracefully in) kimono. However, even this emulation is not
precisely photographic. In Ayame’s time, real women performed a
half-kneel with the right knee raised while men raised the left knee.
Ayame noted that on stage, “it depended upon the look of the thing,
and one should not raise the knee that is on the side of the audience.
If one only went by consistency, it would not be kabuki”(Dunn and
Torigoe 1969: 52).
Chikamatsu agreed. He maintained that “art is something that lies in
the slender margin between the real and the unreal.” When confronted
with the argument that absolute realism was desirable, he asked,
“would it prove entertaining if an actor, on the grounds that real
[samurai] retainers do not make up their faces, were to appear on the
stage and perform with his beard growing wild and his head shaven?”
(Keene 1960: 389). He felt too much realism was repulsive; audiences
would prefer the tension created by the actor’s doubleness, an
awareness of opposites in the same body (actor/character,
male/female). In other words, aesthetic pleasure is more important
than realism.
Some contemporary scholars suggest that the appeal of the
onnagata results not from transformation into an ideal, but from the
apparent incorporation of both genders within a single body by
manipulating (usually visual) cultural gender codes, such as
costuming, wigs, makeup, and movement patterns. The audience then
“reads” the outer, clothed body as “woman” while simultaneously
experiencing an acute awareness of the male/boy “body beneath”
(Stallybrass 1992; Mezur 2001).
Although this perspective is both valid and helpful, one cannot help
but ask why it doesn’t work in reverse. In other words, why aren’t male
kabuki characters performed by biological females? To answer this
question, we need to remember that we are speaking of a genre that
originated in a time when the power to dictate artistic values – like
other aspects of power – was controlled by males. Although kabuki
has changed much over time, most fans think of it as a relatively
unchanging historical treasure. Such fans agree that shifting the
gender balance would destroy artistic pleasure. However, as we will
see in Chapter 9, those who desire to view female bodies performing
male roles have a brilliant outlet in the all-female Takarazuka Revue,
established in 1914.
Conclusion
Like all vital arts, kabuki continues to grow and transform in response
to changing times. Over the centuries, it has shifted from a
disreputable come-on for prostitution to a classical, national form.
Similarly, gender roles and identification differ widely depending on
the specific time period and locale. Debates about kabuki’s onnagata
can open diverse avenues to discuss gender and the position of
women in various cultures throughout history.
Key references
Audio-visual resources
Tamasaburō talks about being an onnagata, in the interview and
excerpts of several performances, in this 10 minute clip from the 1995
documentary The Written Face: <https://search.yahoo.com/search?
fr=mcafee&type=B210US0D20110423&p=tamasaburo+interview>.
A 10 minute excerpt of Tamasaburō’s performance of the kabuki
dance Sagi-Musume (The Heron Maiden), with excellent commentary
and example of hikinuki, quick on-stage costume change for character
transformation: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1MPwD7zCI>.
A 10 minute excerpt from a classic kabuki dance by Tamasaburō,
Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden):
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPgtX-ljHi4>.
Books and articles
Brandon, J.R. (2008) Kabuki’s Forgotten War 1931–1945, Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press. Brandon, J.R. (2012) “Reflections on the
Onnagata,” Asian Theatre Journal 29(1): 122–5.
Dunn, C. and B. Torigoe (ed. and trans.) (1969) The Actors’
Analects, New York: Columbia University Press.
Edelson, L. (2009) Danjūrō’s Girls: Women on the Kabuki Stage,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Episale, P. (2012) “Gender, Tradition, and Culture in Translation:
Reading the Onnagata in English,” Asian Theatre Journal 29(1): 89–
111.
Isaka, M. (2006) “Women Onnagata in the Porous Labyrinth of
Femininity: On Ichikawa Kumehachi I,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal
30–31: 105–31.
 Keene, D. (1960) Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the
Earliest Era to the Mid-Ninetheenth Century, New York: Grove Press.
Leiter, S.L. (2002) “From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the
Creation of Kabuki’s Female Characters,” in Samuel L. Leiter (ed.) A
Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
211–29. Leiter, S.L. (2012) “Is the Onnagata Necessary?” Asian
Theatre Journal 29(1): 112–21.
Mezur, K. (2001) “Undressing the Onnagata: Kabuki’s Female Role
Specialists and the Art of Costuming,” in S. Scholz-Ciona and S.L.
Leiter (eds) Japanese Theatre and the International Stage, Leiden:
Brill, 193–212.
Robertson, J. (1998) Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular
Culture in Modern Japan, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Sorgenfrei, C.F. (2007) “Countering ‘Theoretical Imperialism’: Some
Possibilities from Japan,” Theatre Research International 32(3): 312–
24.
Stallybrass, P. (1992) “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath,’” in S.
Zimmerman (ed.) Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage,
London: Routledge, 64–83.
Summary
The four centuries between 1250 and 1650 saw a tremendous
expansion in the kinds and quality of theatre in Asia and Europe, as
theatre grew ever more professionalized, secular, and independent of
religious and civic cycles of performance. The “business” of theatre
was born in this period, and was made possible in part because of the
increasing urbanization of both Europe and Asia. Theatre first
occupied outdoor public spaces that had often been designed for
other purposes. Eventually purpose-built structures came to replace
them, and then moved indoors to accompany a year-round calendar of
performances.
An increasing demand for theatre resulted in a proliferation of
theatre forms and thematic explorations. Increasing literacy meant
actors were up to the demands of longer scripted drama, and some
playwrights wrote their plays with specific actors in mind. Even in the
commedia, an improvised form, the scenarios were often based on
literary sources.
While in all periods in Europe, theatre had included female
characters, it was not until this period that actual women began to take
the stage and, in some cases, serve as managers of theatre
companies. Educated women may have written plays for their own
amusement and reading, but as we saw in the case of Hildegard of
Bingen in Chapter 3, very little of their work was seen in public.
Meanwhile, in Japan, actual women were forced off the stage and
replaced by male onnagata.
Everywhere, theatre was held to be a powerful force in shaping
public mores and values, and therefore was subject to careful scrutiny.
The presence of actual women on stage, coupled with a growing
sense of theatre as a rather rowdy social occasion, made theatre a
matter of some concern to the authorities in both Europe and Japan.
As a result, there were numerous attempts by authorities to control the
theatre through regulations, censorship, and licensing restrictions. As
in England, the Japanese shogunate segregated the theatre from
other urban activities, and kept the official status of actors near that of
thieves and prostitutes. The fact that women were either a principal
attraction (as they were in the French, Spanish, and Italian stages) or
forbidden from treading the boards at all (as they were in England and
Japan) shows how these anxieties frequently were focused on the
bodies of women.
And yet, these restrictions did not have a chilling effect on theatrical
innovation, as professional troupes and actors found ever more
inventive ways to circumvent or work within them. As we move to the
next two chapters, we will deepen our exploration of the effects of a
burgeoning print culture on both theatre and society. We will also
consider the attempts of monarchs to influence or control drama and
theatrical production. Whether theatre was constrained for its
purported corruptive influence, or harnessed to legitimize the national
interest and values (as was the case in neoclassical France), it could
be argued that, without the restrictions of monarchy and shogunate,
neither Renaissance/neoclassical theatre nor kabuki would have
developed as they did.
*
Theatre and the print revolution, 1550–1650
Tobin Nellhaus
Contributors: Bruce McConachie and Tamara Underiner
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-8
The political, religious, economic, and cultural upheavals of
Europe’s Renaissance often placed theatre in contradictory
circumstances. It drew support from monarchs and even religious
authorities, often honored royalty, and sometimes partook in religious
conflicts. But particularly where professionalization allowed theatre
greater financial and intellectual independence from the aristocracy
and clergy, sometimes it also clashed with the political structures or
with religious doctrines, and it faced renewed opposition and even
outright suppression. European drama during this period also fed off
the influxes of knowledge about classical Greece and Rome in ways
that shaped it for two centuries.
In this chapter we will focus on the impact of a fundamental change
in communication in Europe, the invention of the printing press around
1440. As we will see, however, that development was closely entwined
with the other changes transforming Europe. We begin by sketching
the major transformations affecting Europe, including humanism and
the Protestant Reformation, and the ways they were connected to the
burgeoning print culture. We then look at how these changes affected
theatre in England and Spain. Professional theatre in France got off to
a later start, but during the 1600s the French developed a
neoclassical approach to drama that came to dominate European
playwriting for well over a century. Concurrent with all of these
changes was the formation of new scenic practices, primarily in Italy,
that shared many of the ideas behind neoclassicism. Our discussion
includes case studies on sexuality in Shakespeare’s play Twelfth
Night, and on theatrical self-reference in the late Renaissance.
Social and cultural upheavals in early modern Europe
The rise of a commercial economy, which included international trade,
was one contributor to the transformations that shook Europe. Global
colonization was initially undertaken by monarchies, but it soon
became the pursuit of private, profit-seeking companies. For example,
the massive Dutch East India Company (established in 1602) obtained
military, judicial, and diplomatic powers to support its mercantile
ventures in Asia, including the establishment of colonies. It was also
the first business in the world to issue stock, initiating the modern
stock market. The profits from these colonial adventures fed the home
economies. Domestically, a growing class of people drew their income
from their business activities such as manufacturing,
entrepreneurship, international trade, and banking, slowly forming the
modern bourgeoisie – a “middle class” composed of businesspeople,
property owners, professionals, and their families. And most
importantly for theatre, in the wake of these economic changes came
rapid urbanization, as cities became business centers and the source
of work for former peasants: for instance, London and Paris more than
doubled their populations. Establishing a permanent theatre became
much more financially viable and led to the developments discussed
in Chapter 4.
Another important change occurred in several countries’ power
structures, particularly after 1600: the monarch strove to wrest power
from the nobility and place it directly in his or her own hands, and in
the administrative, legislative, judicial, and sometimes even religious
institutions that he or she controlled. Under this system, known today
as absolutism, monarchs frequently claimed that their unilateral
power was legitimate because they possessed a divine right to rule.
Absolutism had important consequences for theatre, which we will
touch on in this chapter and explore more fully in Chapter 6.
A third major force behind the social upheavals of this period was
the rise of print culture. The printing press with movable type was
invented in Germany around 1440. However, printing didn’t have a
substantial impact on social life for over 50 years. Printing was also a
major commercial activity, which historian Benedict Anderson (1991)
has called “print capitalism,” and the organization of work in a print
shop may have been the first production line. Although initially a
printed book was quite expensive, it was less expensive than one
copied by hand (a process that could take months or a year), so
printing houses were able to serve the demands of a readership that
was already beginning to grow during the late Middle Ages. Many of
printing’s effects would take centuries to develop, and they varied
depending on social contexts and the ways in which people used print.
Two of the first effects, however, were the broad dissemination of
Greek and Roman classical texts, and of the Bible, especially in
vernacular translations. Both of these had direct and indirect
consequences for theatre and drama.
Printing, Renaissance humanism, and drama
During the fourteenth century, Italian authors began to view classical
Roman texts as the epitome of literary style and elegance intended for
the pursuit of moral good. Poet Dante Alighieri (c.1265–1321)
exemplified this attitude toward Roman authors when he chose Virgil
(70 BCE–19 BCE) as his guide in his trilogy The Divine Comedy.
These admirers of classical culture were called “humanists.”
But when the Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire in 1453,
scores of scholars fled from the empire to Italy, bringing with them
numerous classical Greek manuscripts. Among these writings were
several works by Plato and Aristotle that were previously unknown in
Western Europe – including a Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics (see
Chapter 1), which until then was available only as a Latin translation of
an Arabic translation and was virtually ignored.
Printing soon made these and other classical works widely
available, not just in Italy but throughout the continent. Classical
Greece and Rome became everywhere esteemed as the Golden Age
of culture and political glory. The wealthy and powerful often adopted
imagery from those societies, and references to classical literature
and art became a staple of European writing. During the century after
the printing press was invented, the renaissance of classicism that
began during the 1300s in a few Italian cities bloomed into a European
Renaissance.
 By 1520, editions of Aristotle’s Poetics, the major plays of
Sophocles, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, and the illustrated
discussions of theatre buildings and scenery by the Roman architect
Vitruvius (first century BCE) were available in print. Fired by an
interest in these ancient texts, Renaissance scholars and their
aristocratic patrons began writing plays imitating the classics, and
soon they sought to produce them. In Italy, Gian Giorgio Trissino
(1478–1550) wrote and published the first classical-style tragedy,
Sofonisba (1515). Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–
1527) borrowed the form of classical comedy to write The Mandrake
(La Mandragola, c.1518). Like Machiavelli, university-trained Nicholas
Udall (c.1504– 1556) in England leaned heavily on Plautus to shape his
Ralph Roister Doister sometime in the 1530s. Earlier in the century,
classically based entertainments for Iberian royal courts were written
by Juan del Encina (c.1468–c.1529) and Gil Vicente (c.1465–c.1536).
Because of the religious strife that wracked France during these
years, classically inspired plays and performances developed
somewhat later in Paris, with the first of them coming to the French
court in the 1550s.
However, playwrights were caught between the cultural value of
printing and the drawbacks of the economic environment. On the one
hand, along with classical drama, printers published local and foreign
tales, myths, legends, chronicles, and histories which inspired many
playwrights. Also, by increasing the number of texts available to read
and learn from, printing helped to make education more affordable.
This in turn meant more actors were available who could read and
memorize lines for large numbers of plays.
On the other hand, playwrights had little incentive to see their own
works in print. Philosophically, many considered the art of theatre to
be something to be heard and seen, and not necessarily read on the
page. More practically speaking, by the late sixteenth century,
Europe’s printers were keen to satisfy a growing public eager to read
plays they had seen or heard about; but the playwrights themselves
had reason to view the practice with some trepidation. There was no
copyright protection or royalty system, so playwrights were paid only
once: when they sold a play to a theatre. Theatres had a profit motive
to guard their plays from piracy by other theatre companies and by
publishers, and they seldom allowed a play to be published until it
ceased to attract audiences. At that point they might sell the play to a
printer in order to squeeze the final drop of money from it, none of
which went to the playwright. But once a printer had his hands on a
script, he reaped all the profit – which could be substantial. So
unscrupulous printers stole or suborned the copying of prompt-books
(the only “official” record of an entire play in performance, including
stage directions), or published the remembered lines of actors that
were not necessarily faithful to the playwright’s intent. Thus printing
under early capitalism threatened playwrights’ demonstrations of their
literary skill. Controversies over the “true” versions of Shakespeare’s
plays arise from the piracy that this business and legal environment
encouraged. Only over the course of the seventeenth century did
playwrights start to gain anything – whether money or status – by
publishing their works.
Printing and the Protestant Reformation
In the Middle Ages, few people read the Bible, not least because it
was normally in Latin, and Latin was the language of advanced
education; in addition, Bibles were highly expensive. Ordinary priests
in local parishes were themselves often ill-educated and lacked Latin.
Most people received their religious knowledge primarily through
sermons. But even among the elite, the most common religious books
were breviaries, psalters, and similar materials for everyday
devotional purposes.
Printing changed all that. Not only could a copy of the Bible be
easily obtained, it was increasingly translated into the vernacular.
Translations were highly desirable to a deeply religious laity: the book
was the heart of Christianity. With a translation in hand, laypeople’s
beliefs were released from the interpretations and authority of the
Church, and their practices took shape more nationally due to the
connection with the vernacular – a tendency that gained strength with
geographical distance from Rome. Some laypeople began feeling that
individual and small-group Bible-reading could replace the ritual of the
Mass.
 Starting in 1517, Martin Luther (1483–1546) began to challenge the
authority of the Pope. He protested against various Church practices,
and taught that the Bible alone was the source of divine knowledge.
Luther was not the first to have such ideas or instigate a popular
movement to reform the Church: what most distinguished Luther’s
attack was that his words were rapidly printed throughout Europe, and
thus reached a large discontented laity keen to read them. Within a
few years a massive schism within Christianity ensued, known as the
Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church responded with
a Counter-Reformation (1545–1648) that sought institutional reforms
but also aimed to revive Catholic faith. Both faiths quickly became
intransigent.
Religious conflict became pervasive. It was central to the
tumultuous succession of monarchs in England from Henry VIII to
Elizabeth I, integral to England’s frequent battles with Spain (including
its defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588), and a factor in the English
Civil War that broke out in 1642. In Central Europe, the Thirty Years’
War erupted in 1618 primarily on religious grounds, continuing non-
stop until 1648. Conflict was not limited to Protestant vs. Catholic:
Reformation Christianity promptly spawned numerous (and often
antagonistic) denominations such as Lutherans, Calvinists, Puritans,
and Anabaptists. This sectarianism was itself a product of print
culture, as people developed their own interpretations of religious
texts. The discord slowed the development of theatre in France, and
as we will see, had an almost cataclysmic effect on English theatre.
Major characteristics of early European book culture
Due to the way books were used in early modern Europe, print culture
developed a number of particular traits. One of them can be seen
most clearly in religious practices. In the Middle Ages, people’s
relationship to the Bible was mediated by the Church through priests,
pictures, and other avenues, which treated the Bible in piecemeal
fashion as a compendium of stories. The mystery cycles and Passion
plays, although generally organized independently from the Church,
followed the same pattern. But under Protestantism, religiosity was
exercised first and foremost by reading the scriptures oneself.
Believers developed a personal relationship to the Bible, and read it
whole. For Protestants, reading the Bible provided direct access to
God’s revealed truth, and their creed was that faith alone was
sufficient for salvation.
People who intensively read books (whether scriptures, scholarship,
or literature) tend to develop their interior life, and to define
themselves in terms of their ideas, feelings, and beliefs. This is
strikingly different from the classical era and the Middle Ages, when
people were defined primarily by their outward relationships, such as
social role or type (e.g., soldier, peasant, or merchant). Completing the
shift from outward to inward conceptualizations of personhood took
two centuries, but one can see it emerging as allegorical and stock
characters such as Everyman, Avarice, and wily servant were
replaced by more individualized figures such as Shakespeare’s
characters Hamlet and Viola.
Changes occurred in law too. Before print started gaining
importance, contracts relied on oaths to guarantee validity. That was
typical of oral culture, and in fact documents were often viewed with
suspicion because of possible forgery. But with the rise of print culture,
documents became more important, and lawyers sought written
precedents in case law. In short, people began to assume that truth
was to be found not in a person’s word, but in writing.
In Protestantism these two tendencies – individuals’ greater inward
development and a strengthening view of writing as the embodiment
of truth – tended to run hand in hand because faith was tied to reading
the Bible and regarding it as the ultimate truth, although the linkage
between the tendencies facilitated sectarian splits. In Catholic
countries, however, the combination’s impact was highly complex, and
contradictory trends eventually came to a head in the 1630s when
playwriting held Aristotle aloft, science rejected Aristotle in favor of
direct perception, and philosophy turned instead to pure reason.
During the period covered by this chapter, then, theatre throughout
Europe developed in the midst of enormous cultural, religious,
scientific, and philosophical ferment and conflict, profoundly shaping
society to the present day.
Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in England, 1558–1642
When Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the English throne in 1558, the
trends that would lead to a remarkable era of literature and
performance were already beginning to coalesce – in particular,
humanism fused with popular performance.
To help students learn their Latin, the universities and grammar
schools had a 50-year-old humanist tradition of performing the works
of Roman playwrights and eventually writing new plays in Latin. These
plays, along with singing and other types of performance, were often
presented for elite audiences, normally indoors. (Similar private
performances date back to medieval times.)
Writing new plays in Latin led to new plays in English. Comedies in
English had already begun to appear with Ralph Roister Doister in the
1530s. In 1561, school performances yielded the first blank (unrhymed)
verse tragedy in English: Gorboduc, by Thomas Sackville and
Thomas Norton. Modeled on Senecan tragedy, it foreshadowed the
revenge tragedies that would frequent the English stage a few
decades later.
Increasingly, university-educated playwrights turned to the
professional theatres to have their plays performed. During the 1580s,
most of the prominent Elizabethan playwrights came from the
universities. One “university wit” was Thomas Kyd (1558–1594), whose
The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587) opened the floodgates to murder-heavy
revenge tragedies on the English stage. In this highly influential play, a
man uses a play-within-a-play as cover to avenge the murder of his
son. Another university wit was Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), who
mastered episodic plotting in such popular tragedies as Tamburlaine,
Parts I and II (1587–1588), and Doctor Faustus (1588) (Figure 5.1), in
which a scholar takes up magic and makes a deal with the devil. The
1590s brought the first plays by the two greatest playwrights of the era:
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Ben Jonson (1572–1637).
Unlike their best-known predecessors, neither of them was university-
educated: they began their careers as actors. Nevertheless, their
grammar school education included Latin and possibly Greek. Thus
the humanist tradition and the popular professional tradition merged in
Elizabethan theatre.
Figure 5.1Faustus (played by Edward Alleyn) conjures a devil on this title page
for a seventeenth-century edition of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by
Christopher Marlowe. Rumors that “one devil too many” had responded to
Alleyn's black magic probably drew audiences to this popular play at the Fortune
Theatre.

© Victoria and Albert Museum of Theatre History.

According to historian Jeremy Lopez, during the English
Renaissance most spectators, like television audiences today, cared
little about who wrote the play as long as it met their expectations
(Lopez 2003: 3–29). Spectators wanted dramas stuffed with sexual
allusions and characters disguised as someone else. They expected
frequent direct address, as in asides and soliloquies. The plays they
applauded sometimes included such lurid (and Senecan) plot
developments as incest and physical mutilations – in comedies as well
as tragedies. Not disturbed by low comedy within tragedies (like the
porter scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, 1605) or mortally serious
moments in comedies (such as the “Kill Claudio” scene in his Much
Ado about Nothing, 1598), spectators enjoyed plays that jumped
abruptly among scenes of lyricism, suspense, heroics, and
grotesquerie. A good play, from their point of view, should also include
several self-reflexive moments, in which the actors acknowledged the
make-believe of their actions. Lopez argues that, to meet audience
expectations, most comedies ended in marriage and/or reunion and
tragedies ended with a stage full of dead bodies and order restored.
For instance, in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It (1599–1600),
marriage piles upon marriage as four couples take vows in the final
scene; Hamlet (1599–1601) concludes by killing four characters.
The growing prestige of well-written drama altered acting. In the
past, talented performers had been known to go “off-script” because
they had been accustomed to a more improvisatory form of theatrical
performance. A frustrated reference to this continuing practice is
made by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in his famous speech of advice to the
players. (The problem was scarcely limited to England: for example,
as we noted in Chapter 4, the popular Japanese playwright
Chikamatsu Monzaemon is said to have become so angry at kabuki
actors mutilating his scripts that he stopped writing for living actors
and shifted to writing plays exclusively for bunraku puppets. Similar
complaints go back to the Hellenistic age.) By the 1580s, however,
performers who might have improvised their way through an evening’s
entertainment a generation before were increasingly expected to play
“by the book.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–1596),
Shakespeare has even the “rude mechanicals” of his subplot
memorize their lines before they mount their performance of “Pyramus
and Thisbe” in the play-within-the-play. The expectation of the
audience and actors that a script would be played as written led, in
turn, to higher standards of playwriting. Better for actor-managers and
their companies to memorize and perform several plays of high quality
than to have to purchase and learn many mediocre scripts that would
enjoy only limited popularity.
Although few contemporary plays were in print by 1600, humanists
were convincing the literate public that dramatic theatre connected
their own tastes with the superior culture of the ancients. After 1600, as
more contemporary plays reached publication, acting companies and
eventually playwrights reaped more direct benefits from the emerging
print culture. By 1618, the shareholders of the Children of the Queen’s
Revels had published all of the extant plays performed by the boys’
company, for example. Jonson, who won applause for satirizing the
follies of the time through a strong dose of classical precepts and wit,
was the first English playwright to edit and publish a collection of his
own plays, in 1616. This was a major step toward recognizing newly
written plays as having literary merit, like the classics. It was the
crucial precedent for the publication of the “First Folio” in 1623, in
which many of Shakespeare’s plays, in authorized versions, were
presented as literature. By the 1640s, it was increasingly common for
companies and professional playwrights to arrange for the publication
of their dramas. In addition, more dramatists were striking deals with
their companies to maintain control of their publication rights.
When King James I (1566–1625) began his reign in 1603 – the
Jacobean era – the countries of England and Scotland both came
under his rule; English laws had been formally extended to Wales over
50 years earlier and Ireland had been ruled by the English king for
about a decade longer than that, and so for the first time, the British
Isles had a single monarch. Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), in which
the king divides up his kingdom with disastrous results, alludes to King
James’s unification of the island. James, a firm believer in absolutism,
had frequent conflicts with Parliament over financial matters, and he
dissolved Parliament several times.
During James’s and his Charles I’s rule, drama continued to flourish.
But tragedy became more sensationalist, dark, cynical, sometimes
obsessed with (and terrified by) women’s sexuality, but sometimes
sentimental too. Revenge tragedies became more popular than ever.
Strongly influenced by Seneca’s morbid plays, they were often filled
with gore and broken taboos, and almost specialized in body counts.
One of the best known is The Duchess of Malfi (1612–1613) by John
Webster (c.1580–c.1634), in which one of the Duchess’s brothers has
her murdered, along with her children, for marrying beneath her and
sharing the siblings’ inheritance; but then his spy turns the tables and
avenges her death. Ten die in all. (Hamlet is considered a revenge
tragedy.) Comedy tended toward satire, often turning toward London
for its subjects. In Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), for instance, a trio
performs preposterous con games that play on their marks’ gullibility.
Tragicomedies abounded too. John Fletcher (1579–1625) wrote many,
including A King and No King (1619). In it, a young king and his sister,
long separated, each feel intense incestuous desires which they
struggle against, but all is resolved when they learn that actually they
are unrelated.
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – especially the plays by
Shakespeare and Jonson – left long but shifting legacies. During the
1600s and early 1700s, although Shakespeare was much admired and
performed, Jonson had greater influence on new plays. But during the
eighteenth century Shakespeare’s reputation as the world’s greatest
playwright began solidifying and Jonson passed out of favor.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s preeminence did not create many
imitators.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many
Protestant sects arose in England. One of them, the Puritans, slowly
developed considerable clout within the Church of England,
educational institutions, and city governments – and they abhorred
theatre. Their religious objections to it were partly linked to Protestant
print culture, in which morality was tied to reading the Bible. The
Puritans feared that imitation and spectacle would turn people away
from the biblical path to salvation, and thus corrupt their morals and
reason, and teach them to delight in illusion and debauchery. Ordinary
people (already inherently depraved, according to the Puritans) would
be tempted to commit sinful behaviors such as robbery, sodomy, and
even murder if they watched such activities or simply heard them
discussed on the stage. Further, the Bible forbade transvestism, which
was a regular part of English Renaissance theatre because (as we
saw in Chapter 4) all female roles were played by boy actors, and
many plot and character devices involved gender bending. In fact,
panicked by the very notion of sexuality outside procreation, the
Puritans damned every element of theatre as infested with deviance
and effeminacy.
Playwrights returned the Puritans’ animosity by poking fun at them.
For example, the character Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is
depicted as “a kind of Puritan,” and other characters play a few mean
practical jokes on him. The Puritans’ objections to cross-dressing
became the target of Jonson’s satire Bartholomew Fair, in which a
Puritan vehemently censures a hand puppet for wearing women’s
clothes, and loses the argument when the puppet lifts its skirt to reveal
it has no sex at all. In the case study on Twelfth Night we discuss
Elizabethan theatre and sexuality further.
However, deep trouble was brewing. When England’s Charles I
(1600–1649) succeeded James I in 1625, he married the youngest
princess of France – a Catholic – raising fears that the Church of
England might reunite with the Roman Catholic Church. Despite
Charles’s support for the Protestants during the Thirty Years’ War,
some of his actions seemed to justify those fears. Thus the Puritans
began to conflict directly with the monarchy. Meanwhile, Parliament
repeatedly clashed with the king, principally over financial matters,
leading Charles I to dissolve it. In the late 1630s his religious measures
provoked a rebellion in Scotland. To finance his battles with the Scots,
Charles recalled Parliament, which refused to provide money except
under its own terms. Conflict arose in Ireland as well, and ultimately
spread to England. The English Civil War broke out in 1642. Led by
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), opponents of the monarchy beheaded
King Charles I in 1649 and declared a Commonwealth that lasted until
1660.
At the start of the Civil War, Parliament, controlled by Puritans,
came fully into power in London and the surrounding areas. One of its
first acts was to suppress all stage plays. The Puritans initially
imposed the ban as a temporary safeguard against civil strife, but they
later broadened and extended it. Some theatres managed to continue
anyway, even as the Puritans tore down the Globe and all other
playhouses. But by the end of the 1640s, theatre in England had
effectively stopped.
Case Study Sexuality in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
Bruce McConachie
Sexual desire has been a perennial subject of theatrical
performance. Even during periods when only actors of a single sex
appeared on the stage, audiences have applauded plays in which the
anxieties, illusions, and expected pleasures of sexual desire took
center stage. During the early modern period in England (1590–1642),
cross-dressed boys between the ages of 8 and 18 performed all the
female characters. The comedies, satires, and tragedies of numerous
playwrights featured boys playing women involved in a range of
sexual relationships, including conventional romance and marriage,
potential lesbian affairs, prostitution, and even incest. The
performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre in
London allowed audiences to explore, enjoy, and agonize about a
range of sexual desires, including the desire for same-sex love.
The homoerotics of patriarchy
Most people in early modern England judged sexual urges and
actions by patriarchal standards. Patriarchal ideology, the belief that
males in superior social and political positions had an inherent right to
their authority, generally elevated the expression of male over female
sexuality. In this situation, a man’s desire for a woman or for another
man could be more ennobling than a woman’s hetero- or homosexual
desire. Patriarchy, however, needed women as a means of cementing
alliances and accumulating property through marriage, as well, of
course, as ensuring male heirs. The result was a social system and a
dominant ideology that tied sexuality to class hierarchy and allowed
for homoerotic acts that solidified or did not challenge the patriarchal
order.
Within some early modern institutions – the Church, the school, the
household – same-sex love initiated by men (and sometimes by
women) in superior social positions was not uncommon. Male
teachers might form liaisons with male students, and a master might
act on his desire for a male apprentice living in his household without
raising the neighbors’ eyebrows. Likewise, powerful women might
form homoerotic relationships with ladies-in-waiting or servants in
their households. When these relationships threatened the
procreation of patriarchy, however, society persecuted them. Although
few instances of lesbianism ever came to court, occasional
convictions for “sodomy” led some men to be imprisoned or hanged.
In most of these instances, “sodomy” seems to have been broadly
understood as an act that threatened the social order – not just sexual
morality, but the hierarchy of class and gender.
Homoerotic desire and the boy actors
The convention of boy actors cross-dressed to play women’s roles
had been the norm in play productions throughout medieval Europe.
This changed on the continent during the sixteenth century with the
widespread touring of commedia dell’arte troupes, the first
professional theatres to cast women in female roles regularly. Slowly,
other continental theatres also began employing female actors, but
English companies did not.
Historians and critics have suggested several reasons for the
continuation of cross-dressed boys on the English stage. Fear of
female sexuality may have played a part, as some historians allege,
although powerful men on the continent would have been no less wary
of a woman’s desire and procreative ability than the patriarchs of
England. Then, too, few commedia troupes crossed the channel to
perform in London; English audiences, consequently, had little
familiarity with the possibilities of women on stage. Further, the
practice of boys dressing as women was a theatrical convention of
proven and continuing effectiveness. Even after the banning of all
religious plays in 1559 and their complete suppression in the 1570s,
boys continued to play female roles in fairground performances as
well as in grammar school productions. In fact, plays written
specifically for and performed by all-boy troupes were enormously
popular in London after 1576. From 1600 to 1608, the all-boy Queen’s
Revels company at the Blackfriars Theatre did better business on
average than any of the adult companies in London.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Queer theory
Homoerotic activity sometimes endangered the social order, yet the historical
evidence also shows widespread acceptance of homoerotic love in early
modern England, a fact that raises significant questions for contemporary
readers and critics. Most Westerners today draw a sharp distinction between
hetero- and homosexuality and understand sexual orientation as key to a
person’s identity. Shakespeare’s contemporaries, however, did not think about
sexuality in these ways. For most Elizabethans, as for many people in other
pre-modern cultures, there was nothing unnatural about a man desiring both
women and other men; if he acted on these desires, he was not a
“homosexual,” a confused “heterosexual,” or even a “bisexual,” since identity
was not tied to sexual expression. Of course there were many people then, as
now, who preferred same-sex or opposite-sex intimacy and practiced it
exclusively, but they did not classify themselves according to their sexual
orientation. Most social and literary historians recognize that the homo-hetero
binary used to categorize modern sexuality derives from the late nineteenth
century and should not be read back into the sexual practices of early modern
England.
Such insights help us today to better understand what we might call the
homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s England. Work by historians and critics in
the field of “queer studies,” so named to alter a formerly negative term into a
positive one, has explored our critical assumptions about sexual desire and its
expression. Much of this scholarship rests on the ideas of Michel Foucault,
whose three-volume History of Sexuality developed the contention that
sexuality varies from one culture to another. Following Foucault, Bruce Smith
argued that we can distinguish between sex, the biochemical urge
experienced by all humans, and sexuality, the cultural expression of that urge:
“Sexual desire animates human beings in all times and places, but the forms
that desire assumes, the objects to which it is directed, change from culture to
culture, from era to era” (Smith 1991: 3). According to Smith and Foucault,
sexual expression is tied to culture, not nature. Critics of this approach,
however, argue that clear distinctions between nature and culture are
impossible to make; both are thoroughly intermingled with each other where
sexuality is concerned. Nonetheless, it is clear that all societies channel male
and female sexual desires toward a hierarchy of approved subjects and away
from subjects deemed inappropriate or immoral.

The popularity of the boy companies suggests a fourth reason for the
continuation of boy actors in female roles: they may have provided a
safe, conventional means of exploring the pleasures and anxieties of
homoerotic desire on the stage – safe in most ways, at least. The
Master of the Revels, a censor appointed by the royal household to
guard against religious and political subversion in all dramas
performed by licensed troupes, did not forbid plays on the basis of
sexual suggestiveness, homoerotic or otherwise. Puritan critics of the
stage, however, repeatedly pointed to the dangerous eroticism of
beautiful boys. Opposed to any public displays of sexual desire, homo
or hetero, Philip Stubbs, for example, singled out the “whoredome &
unclennes” induced by the boy players in 1582:
[For proof], but marke the flocking and running to Theatres and curtens .
. . to see Playes and Enterludes, where such wanton gestures, such
bawdie speaches; such laughing and fleering; such kissing and bussing;
such clipping and culling; such wickinge and glancinge of wanton eyes,
and the like is used, as is wonderfull to behold. These goodly pageants
being done, every mate sorts to his mate . . . and in their secret
conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomits, or worse.
(Brown 1990: 250)

Although their fear of the theatre made the Puritans biased reporters,
Stubbs’s description, echoed in less overheated phrases by more
objective observers, does suggest that the boy actors were trained to
make themselves objects of sexual desire on the stage.
The adult companies of Renaissance England generally employed
four to six boys, both for female roles and for roles of their own age
and sex. As in other master–apprentice relationships in early modern
England, the boys lived in the household of the company member
under whom they served, and the company paid the master a small
fee for the boys’ services. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men probably
employed four boys in the early 1600s, when they produced Twelfth
Night at the Globe.
Historians know little about the acting style of adults on
Renaissance stages and less about the techniques used by boys to
impersonate women. The skimpy evidence does suggest that the
boys playing major female roles attempted to fully embody the voice,
movements, and emotions of their characters rather than merely
indicate them. That Shakespeare wrote such complex psychological
portraits as Juliet (Romeo and Juliet, 1594–1595), Rosalind (As You
Like It, 1599), and Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra, 1606–1607) also
suggests that his company had boy actors who could play these roles
believably. For their part, spectators probably focused on either the
female characters or the boy underneath during different moments of
the performance. And Shakespeare, like other Renaissance
playwrights, frequently reminded his audience of the sexual
incongruity between the two.

Twelfth Night at the Globe

When Twelfth Night began near two o’clock in the afternoon, the
audience heard the musicians – probably six instrumentalists in an
elevated gallery – playing melancholy music as Duke Orsino and his
court entered through the two doors at the rear of the stage. Music
would have played a significant role in establishing the various moods
of the comedy and the listeners’ attitudes toward its major characters.
No doubt the spectators also noted the lavish costumes worn by the
duke and his court, costumes which gave important information about
the social class and gender of these and other characters (including
the cross-dressed boys) at their entrance. A throne-like chair, placed
center stage for the duke, was all the scenery needed to establish the
setting of the first scene.
Figure 5.2Interior of the reconstructed Globe Theatre, London, which opened in
1997. Shown is a scene from an all-male production of Twelfth Night, with Mark
Rylance as Olivia and Michael Brown as Viola/Cesario.

Photo by John Tramper, © Shakespeare's Globe Picture Archive.

Twelfth Night tells the story of shipwrecked twins, a brother and
sister, stranded in the fairy-tale land of Illyria. They eventually find their
rightful, aristocratic place by marrying into the two powerful
households of the country. In order to secure her livelihood, the female
twin Viola dons male attire and apprentices herself to Duke Orsino as
his page. Unknown to Viola, Sebastian, her twin brother, survived the
wreck and also is seeking his fortune in Illyria. He is initially helped by
Antonio, whose apparent homoerotic desire shapes their relationship.
The plot focuses on Viola, who is soon caught up in the romantic
intrigues of the two households. Duke Orsino is trying to gain the hand
of the Countess Olivia, who disdains his love. When Viola, in male
disguise as Cesario, goes to woo her as the duke’s agent, Olivia falls
in love with “him,” not realizing Cesario/Viola’s sex (Figure 5.2). Viola,
meanwhile, is longing for the duke.
 The character relationships in the secondary plot reflect the sexual
“madness” of the major characters. Olivia’s uncle, Sir Toby Belch,
tricks Sir Andrew Aguecheek into believing that Olivia loves him.
Knowing that Olivia’s steward, Malvolio, also loves the countess, Sir
Toby and his friends induce Malvolio into believing that she wants to
marry him. Malvolio’s attempts to confirm Olivia’s love land him in
prison for his “madness.” After Viola (costumed the same as her twin
brother, Sebastian) refuses to help Antonio, he also falls into a kind of
“madness.” Next, Olivia assumes that Sebastian is Cesario and
promptly marries the amazed lad. In the end, the twins finally appear
together on stage, the mistaken identities are resolved, and Viola
reveals her male disguise. The countess reaffirms her marriage to
Sebastian, and the duke, affectionate throughout with Cesario/Viola,
pledges to wed her.
Staging homoeroticism
The double marriage at the end of Twelfth Night is a conventional
comic ending that satisfies patriarchal values, but it does not resolve
the homoerotic relationships hinted at and, arguably, even established
during the play. The ending promises that both family households,
once threatened by the narcissistic self-love of their heads and by
eventual, childless dissolution, can flourish in the future. Threats to the
aristocratic position of both families, such as Malvolio’s desire for the
countess, have been averted or punished. In the case of Orsino’s love
for Viola, however, the duke remains attached to the image of Viola as
a boy. He even calls her “Cesario” in his final speech, perhaps
reflecting his ongoing attraction to Viola’s boyish role.
The marriage of Olivia to Sebastian may be based on a firmer
heteroerotic desire, but ambiguities remain here as well. Olivia’s
former love for Cesario, a female character in boy’s clothing, continues
to shadow her attraction to her new husband, costumed identically to
his sister. Her suggested desire for another woman is now channeled
into a marriage with Viola’s twin. And Sebastian’s implied past
homoerotic relation with Antonio may influence his marriage to Olivia.
Sebastian’s greeting to Antonio when they are reunited is: “How have
the hours racked and tortured me/ Since I have lost thee” (5.1.211–2;
all citations are from Greenblatt 1997). This might suggest that Antonio
would be a welcome guest in Sebastian’s new household. In short, the
ending guarantees the reproduction of patriarchy, but it does not rule
out the continuation of homoerotic desires and alliances. The finale
puts potentially disruptive homoeroticism under the control of
patriarchy.
Considered from a theatrical, rather than a simply dramatic point of
view, the action of Twelfth Night allowed the audience even more
opportunities to identify with homoerotic attractions. While
dramatically the ending presents two opposite-sex couples united in
wedlock, theatrically an adult male actor (who played Orsino) held the
hand of a cross-dressed boy actor (Viola), while near them on stage
two boys (Olivia and Sebastian) also posed as a heterosexual couple.
Shakespeare frequently reminded his audience that boy actors were
playing all the female roles by having Viola disguise herself as
Cesario. This triple-level gender confusion entailed a boy actor playing
a girl playing a boy. Shakespeare gave Viola several lines of dialogue
that underscored these multiple layers of sexual identity: “I am not that
I play” (1.5.164) and “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness” (2.2.25), for
example. The script also required the boy actor playing Viola/Cesario
to change his voice in order to separate his two roles. Thus, every time
the actor shifted from high-voiced Viola to boy-voiced Cesario
(probably the boy actor’s natural intonation), audiences were
reminded of the boy actor underneath Viola and behind all the other
female roles.
The intimate scenes between Viola/Cesario and Olivia – they are
alone together on stage three times – consequently carried multiple
homoerotic charges that may have created anxiety and pleasure in
Shakespeare’s audience. (For a modern all-male production of Twelfth
Night, see the photograph in Figure 5.2.) Dramatically, Olivia’s love for
Cesario hinted at same-sex desire between two women, because of
audience knowledge of Viola’s disguise. Theatrically, one boy actor
(Olivia) flirted with another boy actor, while the second boy
(Viola/Cesario) demurred to profess his love for a man (Orsino). How
could the need for patriarchy to reproduce itself find a way through the
maze of homoerotic possibilities presented in the drama and theatre
of such scenes? Shakespeare set up the situation and then relied on
the comedy of “time” – “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I” (2.2.39)
– to untie the knot, resolving in the end only the dramatic anxieties
about the fate of these patriarchal families.
Some of this interpretation is speculative. What Elizabethan
audiences made of these homoerotic possibilities can never be known
with certainty, of course. Some may have understood but ignored the
homoerotic enticements of the performance while a few of both sexes
may have come to the theatre chiefly to be aroused by them. Given
their familiarity with both homo- and heteroerotic desire, most early
modern spectators probably feared for and enjoyed the performance
of both sexualities. Clearly, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men put both on
stage in their Globe production of Twelfth Night in the early 1600s.
Key references
Brown, S. (1990) “The Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines: Notes on
Gender Ambiguity in the Sixteenth Century,” Studies in English
Literature 30: 243–64.
Casey, C. (1997) “Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night,” Theatre Journal
49 (May): 121–41.
Greenblatt, S. (gen. ed.) (1997) The Norton Shakespeare, New York
and London: W.W. Norton and Company.
Howard, J.E. (1988) “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender
Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39: 418–
40.
Jardine, L. (1992) “Twins and Travesties: Gender, Dependency, and
Sexual Availability in Twelfth Night,” in S. Zimmerman (ed.) Erotic
Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, New York and London:
Routledge.
Shapiro, M. (1994) Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage:
Boy Heroines and Female Pages, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Smith, B.R. (1991) Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A
Cultural Poetics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Thomson, P. (1992) Shakespeare’s Theatre, London: Routledge.
Golden Age theatre in Spain, 1590–1650
The volume and variety of dramatic output during Spain’s Golden Age
was enormous, numbering in the tens of thousands of plays. In turn,
Spanish drama of this period influenced numerous European
playwrights of the time, many of whom borrowed its plots and themes.
While the presentation of religious drama (autos sacramentales)
remained strong throughout the period, and despite Spain’s reputation
for being an overly zealous Catholic country, the drama of its Golden
Age treated many themes central to a humanist understanding of the
world. In such drama, the decisions made by everyday men and
women – not God, not saints, not allegorical figures – drive the action
of the play, as they face conflicts in love, honor, duty, valor, social
standing, political power, and so forth.
In Spain as elsewhere in Europe, it took some time for theatre to
separate itself from religious themes and contemporary issues to
create a world apart from reality, or what Spanish Golden Age scholar
Melveena McKendrick calls “a self-contained world of its own, a world
of the imagination” (1989: 11). Most scholars credit playwright Juan del
Encina (c.1468–1529) with the beginnings of this movement, especially
in his later plays introducing secular themes. Encina was a
shoemaker’s son who studied law, and his experiences at court in
Spain and Rome likely influenced his later work.
Perhaps the principal inaugurator of a truly humanist impulse in
Spanish theatre was Bartolomé de Torres Naharro (c.1485–c.1520). He
consciously looked back to ancient models from Italy and Greece to
derive principles for writing effective drama, both technically and
thematically – principles meant to serve as guidelines, in contrast to
the ways they became hardened into strict rules and regulations in
places like France (discussed below). According to McKendrick,
Naharro’s plays may never have been staged in Spain, but they were
widely read in printed editions and re-editions up until 1557, when they
were banned in their entirety by the Spanish Inquisition (which
enforced Catholic orthodoxy) for their irreverent themes. His popularity
inspired many imitators in print, but it is not clear whether these
dramas were ever performed.
 As we saw in Chapter 4, once permanent
theatres began to be established in the urban centers of Spain,
especially in Madrid, the demand for new plays on all kinds of subjects
was insatiable. Just as the public theatres accommodated popular and
aristocratic spectators, so too did many of the new comedias [sing.
comedia: koh-MEY-dee-ah] (plays) merge the tastes and values of
both groups. (The Spanish term comedia refers to a wide variety of
plays, both serious and comic, and should not be confused with
commedia dell’arte.) The history plays and romantic dramas
successfully fused these traditions, and are characterized by their
blending of serious and comic elements, usually in a three-act
structure. Frequently they featured plots in which a man’s or woman’s
honor was at stake, and which often turned on such devices and
developments as mistaken identity, the use of disguises, and
swordfights. In fact, swordfights, or the threat of them among men of a
certain social rank, were so common as to constitute a subgenre of
comedia called the capa y espada [KAH-pa ee es-PAH-thah] (cape
and sword) plays; other recognizable types included pastorals,
comedies of manners, “noisy” plays featuring lots of spectacle and
stage effects, and dramas based on myth and history.
The illusive nature of reality itself was a frequent preoccupation of
Spanish Golden Age playwrights. Theatre and theatricality offered
tempting ways for them to explore this theme, in works that staged
plays-within-plays, or were themselves about plays, or in some other
ways showed life itself to be highly theatricalized. Scholars refer to this
as metatheatre, metadrama, or metatheatricality. So frequently was
this device employed in Spanish Golden Age drama that some
scholars claim it as a characteristic convention of such drama. In fact
metatheatricality was commonplace throughout European drama
during this era; we discuss it further in the second case study in this
chapter.
 Writing about Spanish Golden Age drama, Alexander A. Parker
suggests that the plays operated on five basic principles:
(1) the primacy of action over character drawing; (2) the primacy of
theme over action, with the consequent irrelevance of realistic
verisimilitude [appearance of truth]; (3) dramatic unity in the theme and
not in the action; (4) the subordination of the theme to a moral purpose
through the principle of poetic justice [where good is rewarded and evil
punished], which is not exemplified only by the death of the wrongdoer;
and (5) the elucidation of the moral purpose by means of dramatic
causality [i.e., all the principal events in the play follow a chain of cause
and effect that culminates in the distribution of poetic justice].
(1971: 29)

Of the voluminous number of plays written and produced, the canon of

Golden Age plays in English translation is small, but indicative and
provocative. Perhaps the most famous plays of this canon are the
historical play Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega; The Trickster of
Seville by Tirso de Molina (which first introduced to the stage the
legendary lothario, Don Juan); and the philosophical drama Life is a
Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (who you will recall from
Chapter 3 was also the most famous author of autos sacramentales in
Spain).
The most prolific and renowned playwright of the Golden Age, Lope
Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), wrote many capa y espada dramas
among his more than 800 plays. Although a favorite of the aristocracy,
Lope de Vega came from an artisan family, worked to gain more
education throughout his life, and eventually became a priest. Two of
Lope de Vega’s history plays, The Life and Death of King Bamba
(1597–1598) and Fuenteovejuna (1612–1614; the title refers to a town
itself named after a watering hole for sheep), provide illustrative
examples of how the comedias blended secular and religious
elements. Both alter the historic record for dramatic effect, contrasting
peasant wisdom, valor, and humility, backed by Catholic faith, against
the foolish and villainous objections of a fractious nobility; both call on
the Spanish nobility to draw on history and popular tradition to change
their morality. The latter play is still frequently re-staged, for its view of
community solidarity against a tyrannical overlord: when this overlord
is assassinated, and the royal investigators come to ask “who did it,”
each community member proclaims, “Fuenteovejuna!” (In Spanish,
the answer can become a play on words that further frustrates
authority, for if the first syllable is drawn out, “Fue” also means “It was.
. . . ”)
On one occasion, at the invitation of a learned contemporary, Lope
de Vega also concerned himself with theorizing drama as well as
writing it; the result was his New Art of Writing Plays for Our Time
(1609), originally delivered in verse as an address to a literary
assembly. An informal defense of popular taste as a valid measure of
a drama, Lope de Vega’s ideas, like Torres Naharro’s before him,
stand in contrast to the stricter neoclassicism of Italy and France
(discussed below), and many scholars view his dramaturgical
approach as more aligned with Shakespeare’s than with his other
European contemporaries.
The role of printing in this period was especially important to female
writers, who only rarely, if ever, saw their plays staged, but who
nevertheless wrote numerous and worthy dramas that circulated in
print and have recently become fertile grounds for scholarship. These
playwrights include Ana Caro Mallén de Soto (1590–1650), Leonor de
la Cueva y Silva (1611–1705), Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán (1569–
1644), and María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–1661). What their plays
share most strongly, writes Teresa Scott Soufas, “is an emphasis on
male irresponsibility with regard to social mores and gender
ideological demands” (1997: ix). These plays seem to ask of their
readers: if Spanish society depends upon strict adherence to
gendered categories of proper behavior and codes of honor, what
happens to its women when the men don’t hold up their end of the
bargain? According to Soufas, most of these playwrights followed the
principles of Lope de Vega’s comedia nueva (new comedy), but
Enríquez’s work was consciously concerned with following the form of
classical drama, and was meant to appeal to a more learned
audience. The verse prologue to her Tragicomedia de los jardines y
campos sabeos (Tragicomedy of the Sabean Gardens and Fields,
1624) called for a return to the formal unities of time and place in
drama (as defined by neoclassicism).
 During the reign of Philip IV (1621–1665), the Spanish monarchy
asserted more control of its kingdom and colonies and also called
more frequently on the theatre to bolster its absolutist claims to power.
Calderón succeeded Lope de Vega as Spain’s most successful
playwright, but his energies were split between the public theatres and
the court. Writing primarily between 1622 and 1640, Calderón
continued and improved upon the previous genres, often blending
religious and secular themes. His best-known secular play, Life is a
Dream (c.1636), presents the absolute power and agency of kingship
as the necessary answer for a royal prince who was imprisoned his
whole life and does not know if his return to court has been a dream.
After 1640, Calderón mostly abandoned writing for the public theatres
so that he could create autos and devise entertainments with lavish
spectacles to glorify Philip IV and his court.
When Spain began to colonize the Americas, learned men and
women there also wrote plays in the tradition of the Golden Age.
Perhaps the most important of these American playwrights were Juan
Ruiz de Alarcón (whose work was less prolific but more consistently
fine than those of his Peninsular counterparts) and Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz, whose importance for theatre history is discussed in a case
study in Chapter 6.
French theatre before the triumph of neoclassicism, 1550–
1637
As we saw in Chapter 4, theatrical performance in France began in
much the same way as it had in Spain and England: traveling troupes,
attracted by the rising population of Paris, eventually established
permanent homes in existing buildings or even in purpose-built
theatres. Broadly speaking, French playwriting charted a similar
course, with the parallel development of popular and humanist plays,
a significant number of them written by university students. But from
there they diverge. The development of French theatre was slowed by
the political and religious turmoil endemic in the country during the last
third of the sixteenth century and continuing sporadically well into the
seventeenth century. In addition, unlike England and Spain, popular
performance was dominated for decades by Italian commedia dell’arte
companies, often invited into France by the royalty itself. Touring
troupes from other countries came to France as well, including some
from England. Due to this competition, French popular drama was
strongly shaped by commedia dell’arte, and its influence remained
visible in French comedy past the middle of the seventeenth century.
Drama for the elite, as elsewhere, was mainly affected by humanism
and its more exacting successor, neoclassicism; however, the latter
increasingly pushed out popular approaches. By the mid-sixteenth
century the schools and colleges began to generate plays imitating
Roman drama but in French vernacular. The first humanist play in
France was Cléopâtre, a tragedy by Étienne Jodelle (1532–1573),
which appeared in 1552. It was a resounding success when performed
before King Henry II. Comedies and tragicomedies followed, as did
plays written in the classical mode but on biblical subjects. Sometimes
students toured these plays to towns across France, where they were
also warmly received. French humanist drama was spread throughout
France through printed editions, which were usually read aloud.
However, play-writing was a relatively minor literary activity in France
until the 1630s, when it rapidly grew in both importance and quality.
The professional players customarily performed a serious play
followed by a comedy or a farce, but the farces – often laden with
coarse humor or outright obscenity – were by far the most popular
with general audiences and at times dominated the repertory until the
1630s, when they fell from favor. In Paris, professional companies
were occasionally summoned to perform in the palaces and estate
houses, bringing exactly the same plays they staged at the Hôtel de
Bourgogne. But in the early 1600s, the aristocracy began to turn away
from farces and instead preferred serious drama and more tasteful
comedy.
During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the playwright
who dominated the stage was Alexandre Hardy (c.1572–c.1632).
Hardy was extraordinarily prolific, claiming authorship of at least 600
plays, although only 34 have survived (having been permitted
publication by the acting companies). He wrote mainly for a popular
audience, but increased characters’ psychological depth. Although he
adopted some of the Senecan style, he combined it with the multiple
settings of medieval theatre. His plays frequently mixed genres and
have often been disparaged. Nevertheless, as the first professional
playwright he paved the way for the neoclassical playwrights who
emerged in the coming decade; their works continue to be performed
today.
During the 1630s, French theatre developed rapidly. Professional
acting companies became increasingly well established in Paris. The
Comédiens du Roi (King’s Players, led by the actor Bellerose [1592–
1670] after Valleran’s death in 1613) secured permanent residence at
the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1629. In 1634, Montdory (Guillaume de
Gilleberts, 1594–1654), who had been one of the leading actors of the
Comédiens du Roi but left that company to start his own, settled his
troupe in a new permanent space, the Théâtre du Marais – the first
significant challenger to the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Tastes became more
sophisticated; audiences probably became less mixed as class
divisions took root in French theatre. And most importantly, humanist
approaches to drama, which had continued since the mid-1500s,
adopted a new, more rigid form now known as neoclassicism.
Neoclassicism, print, and the controversy over Le Cid
Italy – birthplace of the Renaissance humanism that printing helped
sweep across Europe – also spawned neoclassicism, an effort to
follow the drama theories of classical Greece and Rome as strictly as
possible. Its main theorists were Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558)
and especially Lodovico Castelvetro (1505–1571), who set out to
update and improve upon the discussions of drama found in Aristotle’s
Poetics, with some additions from Horace’s Ars Poetica (see Chapters
1 and 2, respectively). But Aristotle’s authority was appropriated to
justify a dogma that actually drew rather little from the text of the
Poetics.
Aristotle derived his recommendations from actual examples of
what he considered excellent and lesser plays. Scaliger and
Castelvetro reversed Aristotle’s inductive method to create
prescriptive requirements, or “rules,” for future plays. The most
fundamental requirement was Aristotle’s concept of imitation
(mimesis), which the neoclassicists developed into the concept of
verisimilitude: the quality of appearing true to life, realistic, or
dramatically probable.
From the concept of verisimilitude flowed further rules. Relying in
part on several misunderstandings (and even willful distortions) of
Aristotle’s notoriously difficult text, Scaliger and Castelvetro required
playwrights to maintain three unities – of action, time, and place – in
constructing their dramas: a play should encompass only one major
plot, its fictional time should last no more than a single day, and its
scenes should occur in a single location.
The unity of action – the only one that actually came from Aristotle’s
text – prohibited multiple plots, such as those common in English
Renaissance and Spanish Golden Age drama. Scaliger and
Castelvetro devised the unity of time out of Aristotle’s observation that
the action in most tragedies occurs within a single day, although
sometimes longer. Castelvetro not only made this comment an
absolute rule, but also urged that 12 hours would better serve
verisimilitude. The “ignorant multitude” attending a play, said
Castelvetro, would not believe “that several days and nights had
passed when their senses tell them that only a few hours have
passed” (Carlson 1993: 48–9). Similarly, the unity of place was
necessary because spectators would be bewildered if the stage in
front of them portrayed several locations.
One further precept formed the main rules: decorum (or propriety),
a rule which the neoclassicists took from Horace. It required that
playwrights follow the tastes and morals of the day, and it slowly
restrained all material that might shock audiences. Decorum
preserved class lines by specifying behavior appropriate for each
class: for example, in serious drama only lower-class characters could
act foolishly. As we will see, one more requirement of neoclassicism
would eventually descend from decorum_ the principle of poetic
justice.
Neoclassicism radically underestimated spectators’ imaginative
capabilities and flew in the face of most people’s actual experience in
the popular theatres. But the prejudices of early print culture, plus the
current beliefs about social hierarchy, supported Scaliger and
Castelvetro. Supposedly, only educated scholars and aristocrats
whose imaginations had been stretched and tested by books might be
able to understand plays that violated verisimilitude, whereas the
“ignorant multitude,” with merely their “senses” to guide them, would
be lost. Ironically, it was the popular drama that freely presented
multiple places, events covering sometimes years, and subplots along
with main plots; the upper classes instead demanded plays that
carefully narrowed imaginations.
In practice, moreover, the unities often conflicted with the goal of
verisimilitude. It is extremely unlikely that the volume of action in most
plays could actually happen in a single day, and that it would all occur
in a single room or even building. Consequently, plays frequently
stretched the rules and glossed over any contradictions. Today the
rules are usually viewed as straightjacketing dramaturgy, and they are
seldom considered, let alone obeyed.
However, as historian John Lough points out, the rules had a crucial
result: neoclassical tragedy subordinated physical action to
“psychological conflict portrayed at a moment of crisis” (1979: 106).
Thus they were part of a general movement in Western drama – and
print culture as a whole – toward a focus on personal internal
struggles. Because it was tied to print culture, this orientation became
a permanent part of mainstream theatre (and some outside the
mainstream), leading for example to the psychological realism of the
1950s to be discussed in Chapter 12.
During the early 1600s, the impact of neoclassicism varied across
Europe. Most French and Spanish scholars agreed with the Italian
theorists, at least in principle, but several popular playwrights voiced
objections from the start. As we have seen, Lope de Vega, for
example, acknowledged the validity of the rules advocated by the
Italians and admitted that his plays violated them, but he forthrightly
stated his intention of continuing to please his audiences rather than
bowing to the theorists. Alexandre Hardy also sought the vindication of
public applause over scholarly praise. In England, playwrights almost
completely ignored neoclassicism until after the ban on theatre was
lifted in 1660. Overall, however, neoclassicism solidified a class
division between types of performance: the rule-bound drama of the
highly literate elite, and the popular drama which ignored most or all of
the rules.
Eventually print culture developed to the point where some of the
educated began believing that reading printed plays was superior to
watching a live performance. Although that view had been directly
contradicted by early neoclassicists like Castelvetro just a few
decades previously, some elites developed an antitheatrical prejudice,
claiming that the stage was, in effect, the place of bodies and
mortality, while the page could attain immortality in the realm of the
spirit. Even some dramatists writing for the popular stage supported
this view.
The dispute between the popular stage and the academic theorists
came to a head in France with the production of Le Cid, by Pierre
Corneille (1606–1684), in 1637. The play concerned a soldier who, in
order to defend his father’s honor, is forced to kill the father of the
woman he loves. But following victories in battle and a duel, he and his
love will probably marry. The play generally accorded with the unities,
but numerous actions were crowded into a single day and the
locations were spread across the city, so that it was more like a
popular play. Controversy arose quickly, and when it threatened to get
out of hand, Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) called on the French
Academy to settle the dispute.
Richelieu, who effectively ruled France in the 1620s and 1630s
behind the throne of Louis XIII, used the controversy over Le Cid to
position the monarchy as the final judge of French culture. Although
the French Academy had originated as a private organization of
scholars, Richelieu pressured its members to adopt state support and
to take as its primary goal the codification and regulation of French
language and culture. Like the publication of dictionaries and
grammars that attempted to standardize Western European
languages in the 1600s, the French Academy was itself a product of
print culture. By referring the debate over Le Cid to the arbitration of
the Academy, Richelieu ensured that the French state had control
over the future of French theatre and culture, which became a pillar of
French absolutism.
Six months later, Richelieu’s appointee Jean Chapelain (1595–1674)
delivered the Academy’s verdict. Chapelain took issue with some of
the criticism leveled against Corneille, but condemned the play for
breaching verisimilitude and for its lack of ethics. Even though Le Cid
observes the unity of time, Chapelain complained that Corneille had
packed too many incidents into 24 hours to sustain the play’s
probability. The Academy argued that the play was particularly
offensive because a young woman consents to wed her father’s killer
(a trumped-up charge: in actuality, she protests the marriage, which
the king has decreed), and so the play transgressed the neoclassical
precept of decorum. In his decision, Chapelain had vindicated the
unities, upheld decorum, and went beyond the Italian critics in firmly
tying the purpose of dramatic theatre to the ideal of poetic justice –
evil characters should be punished and good ones rewarded – which
became part of the neoclassical rules. The rules drove the older
approaches to dramaturgy off the elite Parisian stage. In subsequent
years, Richelieu and later Louis XIV built France into the main political
and cultural force in the continent, and the neoclassical rules soon
regulated drama across Europe, not to be toppled for nearly two
centuries.
Scenic perspective in print and on stage
Print-influenced neoclassicism altered theatre architecture and scenic
conventions as well as playwriting. In the early seventeenth century,
scenic practices on the stages of public playhouses remained
indebted to the platea and mansion arrangements of the medieval
theatre (described in Chapter 3). Parisian theatre troupes continued to
use small mansions or “simultaneous scenery” visible throughout the
performance on an unframed stage into the 1630s, when for example it
was used for Le Cid. The French scene designer Laurent Mahelot
included many drawings of such settings in his memoirs (Figure 5.3).
And in the open-air theatres of England and Spain, the platea-like
platforms, backed with doors and perhaps an upper level, provided a
fluid, unlocalized playing area that could be whatever the characters
said it was. These scenic practices gradually gave way to a series of
single settings that localized the dramatic action – settings that were
organized according to the laws of perspective. This convention for
staging appeared first in Italian courts and gradually altered public
performances throughout Europe.
Figure 5.3Sketch of a set by Laurent Mahelot for Pierre Du Ryer's Poliarque et
Argénis. This example of simultaneous scenery shows a cave (left), an altar
(center), and a ship (right).

Bibliothèque nationale de France.

There are many reasons for the rise and eventual triumph of
perspective scenery. One was the emergence of perspective in
painting. European interest in perspective began in the fourteenth
century as part of the Italian humanism discussed earlier in this
chapter, stirred by an Arabic treatise on optics. Perspective became
highly popular among Italian artists by the middle of the fifteenth
century, when the printing press would carry their ideas across
Europe. By 1500, Italian painters had perfected the geometry and
graphics of single-point perspective. Soon this mode of illustrating
depth on a canvas or on walls began to influence Italian
scenographers. By the mid-seventeenth century, perspective scenery
had become magic on stage.
But the move toward perspective was also part of a change in
perspective. Medieval art often portrayed people and objects in terms
of their religious significance (for example, by making them larger), or
gathered them together primarily for allegorical or spiritual purposes,
rather than for a naturalistic representation. An example of the
medieval approach in theatre is locus and mansion staging, which
presents many locations simultaneously. In a sense, this artistic
strategy answers the question, “How do things appear in God’s eyes?”
But perspective painting is more concerned with how things look in a
human’s eyes – specifically, one’s own. It is much more
individualistically oriented. That orientation fits well with the
interiorized individualism that print culture fostered. Print culture gave
perspective painting a new meaning and importance.
Finally, perspective scenery began to appeal to dukes and
monarchs for reasons other than their illusionistic and individualistic
representations of reality: they noticed that perspective scenery also
had a political meaning, since only one person in the theatre could sit
where perspective scenery lined up perfectly. This and the techniques
of perspective scenery will be taken up in Chapter 6.
Early print culture reaches a watershed
To paraphrase historian Elizabeth Eisenstein’s observation about the
impact of printing upon religion (1979: 366–7), print’s effects on art and
scholarship during the Renaissance pointed in two opposite
directions: toward orthodoxies that leveraged their power by claiming
the authority of ancient texts; and toward critical thought willing to start
afresh, without the chains of classical views. Orthodoxies made a few
books the foundation for all else. The trend toward critical thought was
no less dependent on texts, but its dependence was in the form of
collecting and comparing them, allowing thinkers both to discover
errors and conflicts, and to gather resources and build on the work of
others.
In the 1630s these trends reached a tipping point. Neoclassicism
began its trek toward dominance in the 1560s with Scaliger, and it
became orthodoxy in 1637 through the debate over Le Cid.
Concurrently, paths within critical inquiry were being cut elsewhere in
higher learning. In 1632, the Italian scientist Galileo (1564–1642) –
arguably the greatest figure of the scientific revolution, and a frequent
critic of Aristotle – published his major book on the heliocentric model
of the universe, and in 1638, a pioneering treatise on physics and
mechanics. His method of basing knowledge on the observation of
nature is called empiricism. Along with the triumph of neoclassicism,
1637 saw a decisive text by French philosopher René Descartes
(1596–1650), who held that reason is the sole means of producing
truth, and that only absolute, mathematical certainty was acceptable.
Part of his effort to establish knowledge independent of ancient
opinion was his dictum, “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum): the
proof of my existence is that I think. Descartes’ rationalism was
central to much philosophy in subsequent centuries.
Despite their disagreements on the value of ancient texts and the
roles of observation versus reasoning, these developments had
commonalities. One is the mathematical element in each. This is
obvious in Galileo; Descartes was himself an important
mathematician, and his desire for absolute certainty had mathematical
laws as its model. Neoclassicism’s rules are law-like in their apparent
clarity (despite any breaches in practice), and the very term “unity”
conveys a desire for invariance and the elimination of multiplicity and
ambiguity. Although perspective painting arose earlier, its
mathematical methodology accorded with these other cultural
developments. Perspective organized art around individual perception
– and here we find another commonality among these cultural
developments. We observed in the Introduction to Part II that the
neoclassical unities constrained drama to represent what an individual
can perceive, and in this chapter we mentioned how they made
psychological conflict the fulcrum of drama. Rationalism and the
scientific revolution likewise depended on individual thought and
experience as the means for producing knowledge. Print culture was
at the heart of new reliance on individual consciousness and the
orderliness of knowledge – two of the hallmarks of the next era of
Western culture, the Enlightenment. Empiricism, rationalism, and
neoclassicism would all become cornerstones of that epoch.
Case Study Early modern metatheatricality and the print
revolution
Tobin Nellhaus
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written around 1600, is famous for
its play-within-a-play, “The Murder of Gonzago” (which Hamlet jokingly
called “The Mousetrap”) (Figure 5.4). His Midsummer Night’s Dream,
written sometime during 1590–1596, includes the playlet “Pyramus and
Thisbe,” performed (poorly) by a group of lowly artisans. Ben Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair (1614) includes a puppet show.
Plays-within-plays are just one type of metatheatricality: theatrical
performance that refers to or represents theatrical performance. It is a
broad category that includes characters (or even actors) who talk to
the audience, characters who observe that they’re in a theatre, plays
about actors, characters who play roles within the play, conversations
about plays, and much more. During the Renaissance,
metatheatricality was extraordinarily common – some scholars
estimate that around 10 percent of the plays written in England during
that period involved metatheatricality.
Figure 5.4The “Mousetrap” scene (Act III, sc. 2) from the 2008 production of
Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with David Tennant as Hamlet.

Source: Getty/BBC Motion Gallery.

The interest in metatheatricality wasn’t restricted to England, either.
Numerous Spanish Golden Age plays had metatheatrical elements.
Lope de Vega’s The Great Pretenders (c.1608) has a play-within-a-
play during which a Roman actor ridicules Christians on stage only to
be converted while acting the role of a Christian. In Calderón’s
religious drama The Great Theatre of the World (1649), God is an
author for whom the world is the stage for human actions. That play is
also a prime example of the metaphor “All the world is a stage,” which
was a commonplace for centuries, yet never so salient as during this
period.
In France too there were plays-within-plays, such as in Pierre
Corneille’s The Theatrical Illusion (1636) and Jean Rotrou’s The
Genuine St. Genest (1645), the latter on the same subject as The
Great Pretenders. More frequent in French drama were
“performances within plays,” in which characters create scenes to
dupe another character, often to reveal truths about the dupe. A
famous example is in Molière’s Tartuffe (1664), in which a woman
pretends to be attracted to the ultra-religious Tartuffe in order to show
her husband that Tartuffe is a lecherous con-man. (We will discuss
Molière more fully in Chapter 6.)
Why were so many plays across Europe metatheatrical during this
time? Metatheatrical techniques are available to all playwrights in
every era, and one can find examples throughout theatre history. Yet
only in a few eras has it been so frequent. The richest periods are
those spanning roughly 1575–1675, and the period from around 1920 to
now (although different metatheatrical techniques were often used).
Perhaps these periods indicate no more than a passing fad – or
perhaps there are deeper explanations about what makes
metatheatricality exceptionally valuable during a time period. Given
that people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were wrestling
with or even fighting over urgent questions about God, nature,
thought, and knowledge, one suspects that large social and cultural
forces had to be in play.
The years 1550–1650 saw numerous radical social changes – in
political structures, economic systems, religious beliefs, and more. But
as we have observed throughout this book, none of society’s basic
structures strikes so close to the inner workings of theatre as changes
in communication practices. Theatre is, after all, a form of
communication, so it makes sense that when printing became the
dominant mode of communication, theatre would be strongly affected.
It took generations for printing to become dominant, and in fact its
dominance was never a foregone conclusion – China and Korea had
forms of printing, but printing didn’t become dominant there in the way
it did in Europe. For any number of reasons the older mode of
communication may remain dominant, and it can take many years
before a new mode of communication has a significant cultural impact,
because people must explore and absorb its possibilities (they may,
for example, stop exploring its possibilities early, or never stop at all).
In the case of the printing press, however, much evidence indicates
that roughly 1550–1650 was the period when printing became culturally
dominant in most European countries.
As we have seen, not long after the printing press became
commonplace, it made the Protestant Reformation possible. Just a
few decades later, a print-based scientific revolution unleashed new
ideas about the world, particularly in such fields as astronomy,
mechanics, mathematics, human physiology, and scientific
methodology. Thus, between the Middle Ages and the early modern
era, there was a radical shift in ideas about God and nature. In fact,
both the old and the new ideas were active at the same time. Not only
did different groups of people perceive things in different ways, but
even single individuals could think about religion one way but
understand nature in another, or see both perspectives on these
subjects.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Critical realism
When culture and society change, the natural question should be, why? Why
was there a change, why did the change occur during one time span rather
than another, and why was the change from A to B rather than A to D? Was
something happening during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that
made metatheatricality so frequent?
Critical realist historians approach these issues in a particular way. Critical
realism is a movement in philosophy which in its current form began in the
work of Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) during the late 1970s. Since then it has
attracted scholars in such diverse fields as philosophy of science, ethics, and
especially the social sciences. (The phrase “critical realism” has also been
used in entirely different fields, such as theology and aesthetics.) Two of
critical realism’s tenets are particularly important here. First, what is real isn’t
limited to what we can perceive (whether directly through our senses or
through instruments such as a radio telescope): instead, something is real if it
has the power to cause changes. That includes social relationships and
thoughts, even though they aren’t physical. Second, according to critical
realism, reality is stratified. Most people are acquainted with this notion in the
natural sciences: atoms can combine to form molecules, certain molecules
create life, living beings evolved to a point where some animals can walk on
land, and so forth.
According to critical realism, society is stratified too. It identifies three main
“planes.” One plane consists of social structures, such as the economic
system. The second consists of agents, that is, people acting within society.
Finally, there are discourses, a term encompassing ideas, values, words,
images, and sounds. Society can’t be boiled down to just one of these layers:
all three are necessary, because history consists of their development and
interplay. Distinguishing and untangling these planes helps to provide
extensive explanations for historical events. In practice, many historians follow
this approach, even if they are unaware of critical realism; but the philosophy
establishes the theory behind the practice.
This case study uses critical realism to explore three questions about
metatheatricality. One is how to explain why, even though metatheatrical
techniques are always available, they’re heavily used during some times,
much less so in others. Next, since metatheatricality is particularly common
during only certain eras, what is it doing then – what “cultural work” does it
accomplish – that isn’t as urgent in other periods? Last, there must be a
reason why metatheatrical techniques are particularly effective for this work,
otherwise they wouldn’t be employed. Such questions concern complex,
multi-leveled interactions and changes in society.
Consequently knowledge itself became a crucial issue, full of
questions: questions about whether there can be any certainty or
truth, and if so, what form it would take; questions about who has (or
should have) knowledge; questions about whether the medieval or the
early modern approach to knowledge is correct, or if neither one of
them is; and many more. An example of the struggle can be seen in
Descartes’ effort to achieve absolute certainty, leading to his
aphorism, “I think, therefore I am”: to Descartes, an individual’s own
consciousness and self-awareness is all that someone can be
categorically sure about. In theatre, doubts about knowledge
appeared in the neoclassicists’ belief that the lower classes could
understand neither multiple plots and locations, nor plots that cover
more than a day – a belief that in actuality shaped playwrights’ ideas
of what upper-class audiences could understand.
But there is only one way people can think about problems in
thought and knowledge: in thought and knowledge themselves. In
other words, during a crisis in knowledge, thought has to be self-
consciously reflexive, so that people are aware that they are thinking
through problems of thought through the medium of thought itself.
“Thought,” in this case, means any kind of intellectual activity, be it
philosophy, religion, fiction, painting, dance, or theatre. The need for
reflexivity is one reason behind the explosion of metatheatricality at
the moment when print culture was becoming dominant.
There is another reason, too, but in order to understand it we need
to consider some things about society. Imagine that you want to be an
actor, and start auditioning for roles. When the economy is good, there
may be lots of roles to audition for; but when the economy is poor,
there may not be so many. Also, you may find yourself often being
considered for certain kinds of roles, but not others. You might be a
“character actor,” a “romantic lead,” a “heavy,” or some other standard
type, sometimes whether you like it or not. So you develop your career
dealing with the economics of theatre on the one hand, and on the
other, people’s ideas about you and about what theatre should be.
The situation for actors is also true for every other person, no matter
their age, sex, ethnicity, social class, or any other category. There is
an important philosophical point here: people necessarily live within
certain social preconditions for their actions. Some of these
preconditions consist of the economy, political systems, gender-based
social relationships, race relations, and so forth: generically, we refer
to them as social structures. Other preconditions consist of ideas,
beliefs, values, images, and the like that circulate in society through its
various communications media; generically, these are called
discourses. And then there are people themselves, managing their
lives amid these circumstances. These are the three planes of society
noted in the “Thinking through theatre histories” box. According to this
view of society, people are social agents, who attempt to achieve their
goals under the preconditions of whatever social structures and
discourses surround them – and sometimes, in the process of
achieving their goals, social agents change the surrounding social
structures and discourses.
Theatre, from this perspective, is very similar to society. On the one
hand there is the actor/audience relationship, which is shaped by the
physical space of the performance, the existence or absence of an
imaginary “fourth wall” preventing the actors from addressing the
audience, and various other factors. This is theatre’s structural level.
On the other hand, there is either a script, a scenario, or at least a set
of improvised character types or situation ideas that actors come up
with while performing. These make up theatre’s discursive level. The
actor (the agent producing performance) is situated between these
two elements. Theatre is actually more complicated still, because
characters (“virtual” agents) act within their own (fictive) structural and
discursive preconditions. Because the constituents of theatrical
performance are so similar to what constitutes society, theatre can be
described as a model of social agency.
Modes of communication such as printing are among society’s
structures. When com munication structures change, however, it
becomes deeply unclear what it means to take action in the world and
to be situated in society – not only is knowledge thrown into crisis, but
agency is too. New ways of thinking arise. In medieval society, people
understood themselves as occupying a position along a vertical Great
Chain of Being, which placed their existence and action in relationship
with God, then to the monarch, the clergy, and continuing on down to
lords of the manor, peasants, and serfs. But print culture brought a
reorientation: relationships strictly among humans started to be
foremost. Religious plays such as the mystery cycles and moralities
were replaced by intrigues of murder, power, and romance. Hamlet
struggles over the questions of whether, how, and when to act, and
when he ponders whether to take his own life, what stops him is the
fear of death: if hell is meant, it’s only in the background.
Theatre, which is a model of social agency, is a vital arena in which
to wrestle with the nature of social agency. That entails reflexivity
about agency. But we can engage in reflexivity not just as individuals:
we can also do it as a group, in a social or collective manner. That is
what plays-within-plays achieve: a group of people watch a group of
fictional people in a play, who watch another fictional group of people
in a play. Often the inner play is a poorer form of theatre, for example,
dumb shows (silent plays) like the ones in The Spanish Tragedy and
Hamlet, the puppets in Bartholomew Fair, and clumsy performances
like the one by the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. The outer play usually presents a superior kind of social
agency. Some of the other metatheatrical techniques mentioned
earlier can also accomplish reflexivity about agency, but plays-within-
plays present the clearest, most forthright approach.
According to this argument, then, behind the extraordinary increase
in metatheatricality in Western drama around the year 1600 were the
radical shifts brought about by print culture. Those shifts created a
crisis in how to define knowledge and agency. Theatre’s connections
to communication practices and its multilayered structure made it an
especially dynamic medium for embodying and working through this
crisis through reflection, which took the form of metatheatricality.
Key references
Nellhaus, T. (2010) Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Summary
Western Europe in the late 1500s and early 1600s experienced
enormous social transformations and upheavals. One of the most
important changes was in communication. The printing press made
books far more available and far less expensive than they were
before. As a result, people of moderate means could afford to
purchase Bibles in the vernacular for their religious practices. Reading
itself altered, and fostered a new sense of interior selfhood, seen most
clearly in the new Protestantism, but also evident in secular areas,
such as the natural sciences and philosophy.
Printing also disseminated classical works, which became the
foundation for most education. As a result, new plays were often
written on classical models. In England, Spain, and France, university-
educated playwrights began writing for professionals in the popular
theatre. Simultaneously, acting troupes produced major writers, and
because even grammar schools had a humanist curriculum, they too
were influenced by the classics. Print culture affected playwriting in
much the way it altered other areas of secular culture: dramatic
characters became less like “types” and more like individuals, and
plots focused on human activities, not on salvation. Playwrights
sought to please a popular audience, but kept an eye on the tastes of
their substantial aristocratic audience as well.
In England and Spain, playwrights often alluded to classical
literature, and Roman drama frequently inspired their own plots. In
France, humanism played an even deeper role, eventually pushing the
popular tradition almost to the sidelines. The views of Aristotle and
Horace were transformed (with considerable distortion) into strict
neoclassical rules. Backed by the increasingly powerful French state,
neoclassicism came to dominate playwriting throughout the continent
for nearly two centuries. That story continues in the next chapter.
*
Theatres of absolutism, 1600–1770
Bruce McConachie
Contributors: Tobin Nellhaus
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-9
As we will see in this chapter, neoclassicism was linked to the
political ideology of absolutism, as well as to print culture, as noted in
Chapter 5. Those who believed in absolutism advanced the new idea
that the rightful monarch must monopolize the rule of law and the use
of force within the lands that he (or she) controlled. This chapter will
examine the rise of absolutism in Europe during the 1600s, its
immense power on the European continent in the 1700s, and the kinds
of theatrical entertainments that supporters of absolutism enjoyed. By
the mid-eighteenth century, absolutism flourished throughout
continental Europe. For more than 150 years, until the 1770s, the
aristocracy and most of the rich merchants and professionals followed
European monarchs and their courts in applauding festive
entertainments, masques, operas, and finally neoclassical plays in
court theatres and public playhouses. With few exceptions, these
performances legitimated the values and beliefs of absolutism.
Nonetheless, as we will see, there were significant tensions
between neoclassical entertainments and two other kinds of
performances. The splendors and enchantments of Baroque opera
regularly overwhelmed the rational strictures of neoclassicism in
performances at court until the early 1700s. And carnivalesque
entertainment, its low delights more popular in fairground theatres
than in aristocratic playhouses, also subverted the didactic claims of
neoclassicism. In the next chapter, we will discuss a third challenge to
neoclassical forms and ideas – the sentimental theatre of the
eighteenth century. Partly in response to these alternatives,
neoclassicism became so intertwined with the ideology and
institutions of absolutism by the 1770s that its theatrical genres would
not survive the French Revolution of 1789, which beheaded the French
king and threatened absolute monarchies throughout Europe.
The rise of absolutism
To some observers at the time, absolutism was a necessary response
to a widespread political and ideological crisis during the early modern
period of European history. From medieval times through the mid-
1600s, several overlapping and competing centers of power co-existed
within most countries in Europe. Kings and queens might assert their
right to rule their kingdoms, but their actual powers were typically
limited by local customs, traditional medieval privileges, strong
regional noblemen, and occasionally by powerful churchmen. Most
kingdoms (and dukedoms and church states) in Europe were little
more than bundles of territories held together by allegiance to a ruler.
This arrangement had worked well enough before 1500, but it came
under pressure and sometimes fell apart during the religious wars
caused by the Protestant Reformation, the economic shift from
medieval guilds and serfdom to early capitalism, and political turmoil
in Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century.
Rebellions marked the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in England,
where a Puritan revolution finally ended in civil war. When the French
king tried to exert more direct control in the provinces, French
noblemen rebelled twice against the crown in the 1640s and 1650s,
even calling in Spanish troops to support them. In the present areas of
Germany, Poland, and Scandinavia, the Thirty Years’ War, fought
mostly among Protestant and Catholic rulers, devastated populations,
towns, and regional economies. It took much of northern and central
Europe another 80 years to recover after the peace treaty of 1648,
retarding the growth of theatre and other arts until the 1720s.
By the 1620s, many sovereigns and their ministers recognized that
monarchy needed a firmer base of recognized authority to survive and
flourish. The Catholic Church, which had mounted a Counter-
Reformation (1545–1648) to fight the rise of Protestantism in northern
Europe, provided a traditional source of legitimation by reviving the
ideology of the divine right of kings. According to the Vatican, Catholic
kings aligned with the teachings of Rome provided their subjects with
a beneficent and infallible source of justice. Catholicism strengthened
absolutist rule in Spain and Portugal and also aided the Austrian
Empire. Cardinal Richelieu, who spoke for the French monarchy in the
1620s and 1630s, linked the crown to the power of the Catholic Church
and paved the way for the absolutism of Louis XIV later in the century.
Although Protestantism had made inroads in France, the Vatican
could rejoice that Richelieu’s policies had won another Counter-
Reformation victory for Rome.
Among Protestants, the English political philosopher Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679) provided one of the best justifications for
centralizing all power in the hands of the crown in his 1651 book,
Leviathan. Hobbes pointed to recent history and the danger of
continuous anarchy unless state power were vested in a centralized
government that could override all customs, traditional immunities,
and even the authority of what some churchmen might claim as the
will of God. His treatise provided part of the justification for the
Restoration, so called because it restored the institution of monarchy
to England (in 1660) after the Commonwealth period of the Civil War.
The ideas of Hobbes were influential, as well, in Protestant
Scandinavia and northern Germany.
Absolutism reached its zenith in France during the reign of Louis
XIV (1643–1715) and became the model (and the envy) of other
monarchs in Europe. King Louis reputedly boasted, “L’etat, c’est moi”
(“I am the state”) and he set about elevating himself as the symbol and
embodiment of France. Using the power of print, the king’s ministers
extended centralized rule into the French provinces through
standardized weights and measures, new tax codes, and a disciplined
royal army. Until the late seventeenth century, raising an army had
been left to local noblemen, but Louis excluded the fractious
aristocracy from that traditional right, made officers dependent on his
government, and effectively mobilized the army as an extension of the
state. To house his much enlarged civilian government and to bind
provincial noble families more closely to himself, Louis built a new city
in the village of Versailles, about ten miles from Paris. The centerpiece
of Versailles was the king’s new palace, intended to embody the
grandeur of his reign through neoclassical façades, extensive
gardens, Baroque statuary and paintings, and the sheer size and
extravagance of its public spaces and ballrooms. While holding court
at Versailles, Louis XIV divided his daily routines into a series of
ritualized acts to elevate his royal body and keep his noblemen
envious of each other’s privileges; one gentleman, for example, was
accorded the honor of holding the right sleeve of the king’s nightshirt
as he took it off in the morning. The king’s propagandists for
absolutism advanced the Catholic belief that kings were God’s
representatives on earth. But they also wrote and preached that royal
power, though necessarily absolute, was inevitably reasonable and
just, because the king embodied God’s will as well as his symbolic
power. Because the French monarchy was the most powerful and
influential in Europe from the mid-1600s through the 1770s, much of
this chapter will center on French political and theatrical practices.

Figure 6.1Political map of Europe, c.1730.

 Recognizing that the theatre could influence rebellious aristocrats
and wealthy merchants in their kingdoms, absolute monarchs usually
sought to control theatrical expression. They used patronage,
monopolistic regulations, state censorship, and sometimes personal
interference to support and shape the kinds of theatre that would
legitimate their regimes. In addition to paying directly for performances
at court, some absolute monarchs provided subsidies to their favorite
theatrical companies to finance their public performances. Absolutist
governments also granted monopolies to some companies, giving
them exclusive rights for the production of certain kinds of theatre;
Louis XIV’s bureaucrats, for example, restricted operatic, dramatic,
and commedia dell’arte performances to three different companies
and attempted to prohibit other troupes from producing these genres.
Finally, believing these restrictions were not sufficient, European
absolutists also censored their regulated theatres. Companies
performing dramatic theatre had to submit their scripts for approval
and even operatic and commedia troupes performed their shows
under the pricked-up ears and watchful eyes of censors, who attended
to make sure that their pieces offered no offense to the crown.
Nonetheless, as we will see, some approved authors managed to
suggest subversive ideas and occasionally entire companies found
ways to effectively challenge the monopolistic practices of absolutist
regimes.
Entertainments at court
Despite the print-based victory of neoclassicism, most cultured
opinion by the 1650s exempted monarchs and their court
entertainments from neoclassical standards. This was a major tension
in the theatre of absolutism. As we have seen, Louis XIV and other
absolute monarchs endorsed neoclassicism – even to the point of
censoring artists and theatres that did not meet its rigorous standards.
Nonetheless, their major forms of entertainment at court mostly
avoided its strictures. For their sumptuous performances, many royals,
especially those in the Catholic courts of southern Europe, preferred
the Baroque aesthetic of playfulness, allegory, metamorphosis,
power, and sensuality to the rules of neoclassicism. Despite the
extravagant and even voluptuous nature of much Baroque visual art,
architecture, and performance, the Catholic Church was one of the
most enthusiastic supporters of the Baroque, seeing in its emotional
and public appeal a possible counter to the ascetic and private claims
of Protestant ism. After 1600, the Vatican paid many painters,
sculptors, and architects to immerse Rome in the new Baroque style
and it sponsored the operas of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643),
whose lush music initiated Baroque opera with Orfeo in 1607.
Baroque aesthetics returned court life to the centrality of visual and
oral culture that had predominated in Europe before the rise of print
and the new standard of verisimilitude. Although our last chapter
focused on the effects of print culture on European theatre from 1550
to 1650, it is important to emphasize that earlier forms of
communication continued to instruct and delight court spectators
during these years. Baroque performances borrowed from several of
these traditions to flourish in absolutist courts during the 1600s and
continued to undercut state-sanctioned neoclassicism into the 1700s.
Our discussion of Baroque theatre for the first half of this chapter
culminates in a study of the public career of Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, who was writing Golden Age-style dramas inflected by Baroque
playfulness in Spanish Mexico in the 1680s.
Typically, when a new medium of communication is introduced and
gains cultural power, the old media, though generally less influential,
continue to shape many cultural practices, often gaining new niches of
authority. This was the case with Baroque spectacles at court,
especially performances of seventeenth-century opera. Certainly the
technologies of perspective scenery and the libretti and music for the
new operas benefited from print culture; both circulated much more
widely in print than would have been possible in a culture that rested
on copying manuscripts. But the visual tropes and transformations
that linked the power of a king or queen to the magnificence of a
Christian God depended on a mode of visual allegory that derived
from the manuscript cultures of ancient empires and can be easily
traced from Roman times to the courts of medieval Christianity. Music,
important to all cultures but diminished in the theatre with the rise of
print, reasserted its centrality in the festivals and masques presented
at court. As we will see, the values of playfulness and sensuality that
the rules of rationalist, neoclassical thinking had shunted to the wings
moved center stage in the spectacular performances of Baroque
opera after 1650.
Indeed, similar kinds of delights had been a part of court-sponsored
festive entertainments in Europe since the late medieval period and
into the Renaissance. In addition to weddings and other dynastic
events, late medieval rulers celebrated visits of foreign dignitaries, the
signing of peace treaties, and the feast days of particular saints with
dances, games, and performances throughout their capital cities.
Medieval towns returned the favor, staging huge welcoming
ceremonies when the monarch paid them a visit. Renaissance
innovations in Italy, however, began moving European court
entertainments from late medieval practices towards the Baroque era.
Florentine artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), for
instance, designed a glittering revolving stage that featured moving
planets, fabulous beasts, and Roman gods and goddesses to
welcome a new duchess to the court of Milan as part of a wedding
ceremony in 1490. Called the Festa del Paradiso, the spectacle used
visual symbols, poetry, and song to suggest that the rulers of Milan
descended from a classical version of paradise. Da Vinci’s Festa
mixed pagan with Christian symbols and emphasized lavish display.
 As in Milan, most pre-Baroque festivals opened the court to the
populace of the city. The counts, dukes, and others who sponsored
these events usually took an active part in several of the
performances, demonstrating the stability and justice of their rule by
the symbolic roles they played, as well as by their clothing,
horsemanship, and retinue. In the largest of these festivals, the
celebrations spread throughout the town, temporarily transforming its
squares, churches, and palaces into festive spaces. Although usually
centered on the ruler-sponsor, Renaissance festivals were public in
the sense that they were accessible to most of the populace and their
performances embodied mythic symbols and social relations that all
understood to be necessary for the welfare of the whole.
After 1500, however, these festivals began to move indoors, into
ducal and royal palaces that were off limits to the populace. Because
European rulers had to impress a fractious aristocracy with their
power, the audience for court festivities gradually changed from the
populace as a whole to the nobility living at court. The shift to indoor
spectacles also led court designers to turn increasingly to the wonders
of Italianate perspective scenery in order to glorify the duke or
monarch. By the middle of the century, scenographer Sebastiano
Serlio (1475–1554) had designed several Italian court entertainments
in large palace ballrooms and banquet halls. When Serlio depicted a
series of tragic, comic, and pastoral stage settings using perspective
in his Architettura (1545), this type of scenery had already been in use
for performances at Italian courts for some years. To realize Serlio’s
conventional designs in production required a painter and carpenter to
construct and hang a painted backdrop at the rear of the playing
space and flank the drop with three sets of angled wings, each with
two painted sides that receded symmetrically from the front of the
stage (Figure 6.2). To contribute to the perspective effect, the upstage
floor was sharply raked (sloped upward toward the backdrop). The
actors had to perform far downstage on the level flooring, because if
they performed within the upstage scenery, their bodies would appear
out of proportion to the converging lines of perspective and spoil the
illusion.
 When the Teatro Olimpico (mentioned in Chapter 4) was opened in
1585, it integrated perspective scenery into its architecture. Its primary
architect, Andrea Palladio (1518–1580), based much of his design on
the architectural drawings of the Roman writer Vitruvius (first century
BCE), from whom Palladio borrowed the look of the scenae frons from
the Roman theatre (see Chapter 2) for the Olimpico’s scenic façade.
After Palladio’s death, architect Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552–1616)
completed the building’s design. Behind each of the five entrances on
the façade and two more on either end of the stage, Scamozzi placed
perspective scenery. In effect, Palladio and Scamozzi had merged an
ancient, Vitruvian design with the Renaissance innovation of
perspective painting. However, this approach to putting perspective on
stage was not pursued further; Serlio’s approach remained
predominant.
Figure 6.2The setting for a comic scene by Sebastiano Serlio, from his De
Architettura, 1569 edition.

Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

By the 1610s, court entertainers and musicians in Paris were using
modified versions of Serlio’s designs to mount lavish ballet spectacles
– amateur performances featuring the king and court as powerful
mythological and allegorical figures. From 1605 until 1640, Inigo Jones
(1573–1652) designed Serlian scenery for the court masques of
English kings, first for James I, then Charles I – entertainments similar
to the expensive ballet spectacles in France. In these court masques,
Jones typically positioned the king as the pivot around which the
costumed courtiers danced (Figure 6.3). Jones convinced Charles I to
convert two rooms at his court palace for masquing, an extravagance
that angered the Puritans and helped to lead to the overthrow of the
king and the English Civil War in 1642. Court entertainments in the
Catholic countries of Europe, however, faced no such popular
impediments and Baroque musical spectacles flourished in Madrid,
Paris, and Vienna during the middle decades of the seventeenth
century.
While royal families had continued to perform in many of the
masques and ballet spectacles in London and Paris, they gradually
withdrew from active participation in the festivities and into positions
where they could appear as beneficent overlords to watch the
performances of others. To ensure that the glorification of kingship
continued to maintain its central focus, however, many Baroque court
spectacles placed a symbolic representative of the monarch on stage.
When Philip IV of Spain enjoyed The Greatest Enchantment is Love in
1635, he watched a symbol of himself as the protagonist of the
entertainment. The musical extravaganza, penned by Golden Age
playwright Calderón and produced by an Italian engineer, featured the
temptation of Ulysses by the enchantress Circe, with characters and
dramatic situations based on Homer’s Odyssey. The lavish spectacle,
intended to celebrate a saint and honor the opening of the king’s new
pleasure palace, placed ship-wrecks, triumphal chariots, and volcanic
destruction on an island in the middle of a small lake within a garden
of the new palace. From their seats on gondolas, the court could
watch the king enjoy the show or attend to the songs and actions of
his representative (Ulysses, in this case) in the entertainment.
Baroque aesthetics also influenced art and architecture in the
Americas. As on the European continent, where the expansive visual
culture of the Baroque allowed for the mixing of Spanish and Moorish
elements, so in the Americas did artists mingle Spanish and Native
American elements – not only in art and architecture, but also in
music, theatre, and court entertainments. Among the American
playwrights of this period, perhaps the most Baroque in sensibility was
the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51– 1695). She was
known for her voracious intellectual appetite, unusual for a woman of
her time – a matter the absolutist Mexican Church came to view with
great suspicion. But before she laid down her pen for the last time,
these appetites found outlets in virtually every literary form, including
drama.
Figure 6.3Costume designed by Inigo Jones for The Masque of Queens (1609),
an antimasque written by Ben Jonson to celebrate heroic women. Intended to
turn social norms upside down, antimasques often involved suggestions of
cross-gender dressing. In this case, the costuming and the dialogue praise the
female character of Penthesilia, partly dressed as a male warrior, for her
masculine strength and virtue.

Source: © AKG-images, London.

Case Study Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the perils of
print culture in New Spain
Tamara Underiner
Hardly anything about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s life was
conventional, and much of it was controversial. Born in the mid-
seventeenth century as Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana
to an unwed mother and self-educated in the classics she found in her
grandfather’s library (at a time when only boys received formal
education), by the time she was 16 she was as famous at the New
Spanish court for her learning as for her beauty. Four years later, she
took the vows of a Catholic nun in order to pursue a life of the mind – a
profession impossible for married women in her day. (It is by her
religious name, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz – “Sister Juana Inés of the
Cross” – that she is known.) While at the convent of San Jerónimo,
she produced hundreds of written works in all literary genres, and
wrote numerous philosophical, theological, and scientific essays. She
earned a reputation for independent thought, rooted solidly in her
understanding of canonical texts. Her cleverness with language and
her fearlessness in the face of textual and religious authority both
impressed and threatened her Church superiors, who eventually
worked to silence her.

Figure 6.4Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in 1666 as a lady-in-waiting for the

viceregal court in Mexico City (left), and later in life as a nun in the Order of San
Jerónimo (right).
Left: Juana de Asbaje, c.1666, signed J. Sánchez. © The Art Archive/Alamy
Stock Photo. Right: Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Miguel Cabrera,
c.1750 (Museo Nacional de Historia, Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico).
 Sor Juana’s work is important for students of theatre history in two
ways. First, her plays are late examples of Spanish Golden Age and
Baroque drama. Although she herself never went to Spain, she was
familiar with the conventions of that form, and her works are notable
for their gendered inversions of those conventions, as well as for her
openness to incorporating elements of non-Spanish culture into her
work. Second, she worked under what many scholars refer to as “the
shadow of the Inquisition,” an institution that, in Spain and its colonies,
forged its own particular brand of absolutist authority. The central
paradox of her life, which has perplexed scholars for more than 300
years, was her apparent capitulation to that authority when she was at
the height of her fame and powers. This surrender was the
culmination of a number of events that had caught Sor Juana up in a
complex web of oral, written, and print culture.
Sor Juana's dramaturgy
For theatre history, Sor Juana’s output is relatively small – three autos
sacramentales, three comedias (two co-authored), and numerous
short plays, some devotional, some farcical. Most of these were
staged, if they were staged at all, behind convent walls or for the
viceregal court in Mexico City. Nevertheless, her work for the stage,
even if never realized on one, is noteworthy for its theatrical potential
as well as its philosophical qualities. In Chapter 3 we briefly discussed
Sor Juana’s Corpus Christi auto, The Divine Narcissus, and its loa
(one-act prologue, c.1688). Meant for performance in the court at
Madrid, both play and loa combine the depth of medieval allegory with
the height of the Baroque court masques described in this chapter.
The loa, for example, opens with Native American song and dances in
honor of the God of the Seeds. It features four elaborately costumed
characters: the European Zeal and Religion and the Mexican Occident
and America, who debate finer points of Christian and native theology;
the characterization of Zeal as a blustering Spanish soldier suggests
the playwright’s opinion on the merits of force in the matter of religious
conversion. The play proper reconfigures the Narcissus myth, with
Christ as Narcissus falling in love with his own image in Human
Nature, dying for that love and being resurrected in the sacraments;
Echo is a fallen angel, jealous of that love. In loa and play together,
Sor Juana figuratively aligns Christ with both the pagan Greek figure
of Narcissus and the heathen American God of the Seeds – no small
feat artistically, philosophically, and theologically. At the same time,
she raises a subtle question about the actual success of the Spanish
religious conquest of indigenous Americans.
If the subject of religious conversion sounds appropriately pious for
a nun to have undertaken in an auto sacramental, her secular
comedias were another matter entirely. Sor Juana was familiar with
the conventions of the “cape and sword” plays of the Spanish Golden
Age, which both circulated in print in Mexico and were staged at court.
(In fact, both The Divine Narcissus and her most famous comedia
seem to be directly inspired by Calderón’s works.) But in her hands,
the convention was transformed from capa y espada into what
Mexican dramatist and scholar Guillermo Schmidhuber calls “falda y
empeño” (“petticoats and perseverance”), wherein the perspectives of
female protagonists are privileged, as are their “efforts to bettering the
condition of women as thinking and social beings” (2000: ix).
The first comedia credited to her was actually begun by the Spanish
Golden Age dramatist Agustín de Salazar y Torres to celebrate the
birthday of the queen of Spain in 1676, but he died before it was
completed. Schmidhuber has found evidence that it was Sor Juana
who polished and completed the play. It is based on characters from
the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea by Fernando de Rojas, but
whereas in the original Celestina (a woman versed in the arts of love)
is murdered and the true lovers die, in this version Celestina survives,
and the play ends with a triple marriage – an ending engineered
through the cleverness of Celestina and, presumably, Sor Juana
herself. Her third comedia was also co-authored, this time with the
Mexican lawyer and intellectual Juan de Guevara: Love is the Greater
Labyrinth (written in 1689, first published in 1692). It was an adaptation
of the Greek tale of the Labyrinth of Crete, inspired by her reading of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sor Juana was responsible for the first and
third acts, while Guevara wrote the second. It features the
metatheatricality discussed in Chapter 5, as well as a hint of Sor
Juana’s autobiography in the complex character of Ariadna.
 But it is Sor Juana’s solo-authored comedia that is best known
among theatre scholars and producers, for it is still being written about
and staged: Los empeños de una casa, translated literally as Pawns
of a House, and more figuratively as House of Trials or House of
Desires. It appears to be a take-off of or response to Calderón’s Los
empeños de un acaso (Determinations of a Chance Happening,
c.1631).
Like the best of the Golden Age dramas, Sor Juana’s features the
familiar devices of mistaken identity, love triangles, and plenty of
swordfighting, by candlelight. The low light of the candles serves at
first to mask, and then reveal, a clever plot twist: the person the rivals
are fighting over is not the beautiful Doña Leonor, but the clownish
manservant Castaño, dressed in her clothes. The men are the
“pawns” of the title, masterfully manipulated by the mistress of the
house, Doña Ana, for the benefit of Leonor. The language of the scene
is full of double entendres meant for the pleasure of the knowing
audience. It is not clear who actually acted these parts in the original
production, but had it been staged in Spain, it would have presented a
spectacle of mistaken same-sex desire that reversed the usual set-up
for cross-dressing on the Spanish stage, where normally it was
actresses who dressed as young men in order to move freely through
the world of the play. Scholar Julie Greer Johnson suggests that in
Los empeños de una casa, Sor Juana argues theatrically that “a
woman is suited to other social and cultural roles than the ones she
currently occupied, and she demonstrates this by testing,
transgressing, and transforming the skewed, conventional spatial
boundaries on stage” (Johnson 2001).
Sor Juana herself was a transgressor of social norms – cloistered
as a good nun should be, but working as a public intellectual by virtue
of her writings. Her relations with her superiors were often fraught, but
for a time she enjoyed the protection of the viceregals for whom she
wrote this play: the Marquis of la Laguna and his wife María Luisa,
countess of Paredes, to whom Sor Juana also addressed many
poems of gratitude, admiration, and love. During their term in New
Spain (between 1680 and 1688), Sor Juana produced the majority of
her work, and they were responsible for its eventual publication in
Spain – two volumes of her collected works during her lifetime, and
one after her death, as well as numerous individual works, some of
which circulated in Mexico as well. (The strict censorship of books in
New Spain would have made their publication there impossible, but
copies found their way to the Americas with Spanish travelers.) Under
the protection of the viceregals, she was relatively safe from the
Inquisition in New Spain. When they left for Spain in 1688, she came
under the increasing scrutiny of Church authorities at home. Dorothy
Schons (1949) has suggested that one of her “crimes” was that she
was a dramatist at all – let alone a published one who happened to be
not just a woman, but a nun – in a period when Mexico City was ruled
by an archbishop who did his best to prevent the publishing and
staging of theatrical works in Mexico.
A sermon, two letters, and a famous Reply
The story of the end of Sor Juana’s life and career revolves around
tensions between oral, written, and print cultures. In 1690, at the
request of her friend, the Bishop of Puebla, Sor Juana hand-wrote a
private letter formalizing comments she had made in conversation
with him, about an oral sermon delivered at the Portuguese court and
published some 40 years earlier by a Portuguese Jesuit priest. Without
her knowledge or permission, she later claimed, the bishop
transcribed and printed her letter as a pamphlet entitled Carta
Atenagorica (Letter Worthy of Athena), introducing it with a letter of his
own under the feminine pseudonym “Sor Filotea de la Cruz.” The
bishop’s intentions in printing the letter were, ostensibly, to
acknowledge Sor Juana’s intellectual gifts in a public way. But hiding
behind his pseudonym, he actually spent much of his own letter
warning her of the dangers to her soul, as a woman, for pursuing
humanist learning, and urged her to focus more on the study of
religious works in a manner more befitting her vows of obedience as a
devout nun.
Within three months, Sor Juana had composed a response, the
famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea, or Reply to Sor Filotea, in which she
defended the rights of women to knowledge and learning, in the
process writing her own spiritual and intellectual biography. Hailed by
some as the first feminist manifesto in the New World, it was not
published until after she died (and then only in Spain). But her prior
work had already brought her under the scrutiny of Church authorities
in New Spain, and the Archbishop of Mexico began to issue public
calls in support of “Sor Filotea’s” position that Sor Juana abandon her
worldly studies.
In 1693 she came under investigation by the Church authorities. In
1694, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of her vows, she signed
certain documents that may have been conventional acts of
repentance, or may have been deliberate renouncements of her past
life, made under pressure. While her motives may be opaque to us
now, it is certainly true that, with the departure of her patrons, her
public voice was effectively silenced, since it would have depended
upon access to print. We know that she stopped writing in 1694, sold a
great number of her books and scientific instruments to help the poor
who had suffered through three years of floods, famine, and disease in
Mexico City, and devoted her last year of life to nursing ailing nuns in
the convent. In 1695, she herself succumbed to the plague that had
swept the city.
Feminist scholars have long appreciated the sophistication of Sor
Juana’s rhetorical strategies in negotiating the various levels of
Church and civic power with which she regularly had to contend. As a
result, it is difficult to interpret the events of her final year: was she
forced by these authorities to abandon all she had once valued, or did
she do so of her own choice? Perhaps a clue is in her “Reply”:
But in truth, my Lady, what can we women know, save philosophies of
the kitchen? It was well put by Lupercio Leonardo [sic] that one can
philosophize quite well while preparing supper. I often say, when I make
these little observations, “Had Aristotle cooked he would have written a
great deal more.” And so to go on with the mode of my cogitations: I
declare that all this is so continual in me that I have no need of books.
(De la Cruz 1999: 75)

Not content merely to argue for women’s place at the table of learning,
Sor Juana suggests that Aristotle himself could have learned and
written more had he ventured into the kitchen, that primal domain of
women. In this context of her life and work, her claim now to “have no
need of books” is a complex statement indeed. For it can be argued
that her life and career were both made possible and undone by print
culture itself, in a period of religious absolutism.
Key references
Bemberg, M.L. (2003 DVD, dir.) I, the Worst of All/Yo, la peor de todas,
First Run Features.
De la Cruz, J. (1997a) Poems, Protest, and a Dream, trans. M.S.
Peden, New York: Penguin Books.
De la Cruz, J. (1997b) House of Trials/Los empeños de una casa,
trans. D. Pasto, New York and Oxford: Peter Lang Press.
De la Cruz, J. (1998) The Divine Narcissus/El divino Narcisso, trans.
P.A. Peters, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
De la Cruz, J. (1999) The Answer/La Respuesta, 2nd edn, trans. E.
Arenal and A. Powell, New York: Feminist Press.
De la Cruz, J. (2005a) House of Desires/Los empeños de una casa,
trans. C. Boyle, London: Oberon Books.
De la Cruz, J. (2005b) Los empeños de una casa/Pawns of a House,
trans. M. McGaha, Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review Press.
Johnson, J.G.(2001) “Engendered Theatrical Space and the
Colonial Woman in Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa,”
Ciberletras 5 (August). Online. Available HTTP:
<http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v05/johnson.html>
(accessed Dec. 5, 2015).
Merrim, S. (1999) Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Paz, O. (1990) Sor Juana: or, The Traps of Faith, trans. M.S. Peden,
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Schmidhuber de la Mora, G. (2000) The Three Secular Plays of Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz, trans. S. Thacker, Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky.
Schons, D. (1949) Book Censorship in New Spain, Austin: University
of Texas.
Realizing absolutism in stage design
Writing late in the Baroque era, Sor Juana intended her plays for a
proscenium stage. The proscenium arch, a conventional feature of
many theatres today, provides a formal barrier between the area for
the spectators and the stage and backstage areas for the actors and
technicians by providing two side walls and a horizontal wall that joins
them above, creating an opening through which spectators may enjoy
the stage action. Because court spectacles before 1640 generally
involved scenery in a room used for other purposes, prosceniums
were a late addition to the perspective stage. Serlio’s angled wings, for
example, usually stood alone on temporary platforms without a
downstage proscenium to frame them. The move from temporary to
architectural prosceniums began in 1587, when the ruler of Florence
approved a permanent proscenium for his spectacle room at the Uffizi
Palace. After that, as Baroque opera designers and librettists invented
more opportunities for elaborate scenic display – such as lavish
throne rooms that could be quickly transformed into a scene of
pastoral bliss and Olympian gods perched in a cloud machine that
gradually descended to the stage – they increasingly relied on
permanent proscenium arches to hide and house the machinery that
could produce these magical effects.
Theatre historians have examined several reasons for the gradual
incorporation of proscenium arches into stage productions at court,
among them the suggestiveness of printed illustrations. More quickly
than on the stage, the organization of space on an illustrated page in a
book shifted historically from the simultaneous representation of
several images on a manuscript page to a unified image on a printed
one that could take advantage of the discoveries of single-point
perspective. Like printers, scenographers thought about space in
graphic terms; they shaped the vision of the viewer through unity,
symmetry, and the illusion of depth. By the 1540s, printers were using
tall arches, modeled after the triumphal arches of Roman times, as a
common motif to organize the title page in a book. And even when no
printed symmetrical frame dominated the page, the sides of its paper
created a visual frame that established every page as a quasi mini-
proscenium. By the 1640s, literate Europeans had been looking for 100
years at the pages of books and pamphlets that organized their vision
according to a framed perspective. How “natural,” then, to expect that
a proscenium arch framing perspective stage scenery should mirror
this reality.
The proscenium arch formalized an aspect of the Baroque stage
that linked the aesthetics of perspective scenery to absolutism. When
Serlio and other designers drew and painted three-dimensional
scenery on to two-dimensional flats, they needed to fix a vantage point
in the auditorium to figure out the mathematics from which it would
appear that the perspective on stage was correct. Soon after
perspective was applied to scenery, designers began using the
vantage point of the ruler, seated in the center of the auditorium (later,
at the rear center), to organize the visual scene. That is, the designer
figured out where in the auditorium the ruler’s eyes would gaze on the
scene and drew his perspective lines for painting the scenery from
that single point toward the vanishing point. This meant that only one
person seated in the auditorium had a “perfect” view of the scenery;
from every other point, the painted perspective looked skewed. For
those seated on the side, the perspective was completely awry. The
implicit visual demand on the other spectators in the auditorium, of
course, was to imagine how the scene looked from the ruler’s point of
view. This visual power play suited the political dynamics of ruling
Italian families in northern Italy, where it was first introduced. As the
proscenium arch and single-point perspective scenery spread from
Italy to the rest of Europe, this practice also served absolutism at the
royal courts of Spain, Austria, and France.
One reason for the relatively quick adaptation of proscenium and
perspective staging was the success of the chariot-and-pole system
of scene changing, invented by Giacomo Torelli (1608–1678), dubbed
the Great Sorcerer for his scenic wizardry. Working in Venice, the
center of operatic innovation in Europe, Torelli was hired in 1641 to
design the stage machinery for the Teatro Novissimo, the only
Venetian theatre at the time built solely for operatic production. Torelli
got the idea for his new technology from the complex rigging in use by
Venetian sailors on their ships. In brief, the chariot-and-pole system
involves flat wings mounted on the downstage side of long poles,
which pass through slots in the stage flooring to small two-wheeled
wagons, or “chariots,” that run on tracks under the stage. Through a
series of ropes, pulleys, winches, and counterweights, all of the
chariots under the stage – perhaps as many as ten on both sides for
each pair of five wings – could be made to move simultaneously. As
one flat moved into view, the flat behind or in front of it receded off
stage. The counterweighted flats and drops were linked, as well, to
painted borders hanging from the flies. Chariot-and-pole rigging could
also include special upstage effects in perspectival miniature and the
descents of deities on cloud machines from the heavens. Much as
sailors could reorient the sails of a large vessel by turning a few
master winches on board, so stagehands could effect a complete
scenic transformation from one setting to another in less than a minute
through hidden ropes, pulleys, and winches. Cut-away line drawings
of Sweden’s Drottningholm Court Theatre, built in 1774 and still in use
today, provide a good illustration of the workings of the chariot-and-
pole system (Figure 6.5).
Figure 6.5Cut-away drawing by Gustaf Kull of the chariot-and-pole machinery
for changing flats at the Drottningholm Court Theatre in Sweden. From Per
Edstrom, “Stage Machinery,” in Ove Hidemark et al. (1993), Drottningholm Court
Theatre.

© Gustav Kull, Jr.

In 1645, Cardinal Mazarin brought Torelli from Venice to Paris to
transform the scenic and playing spaces of French court theatres into
fully-rigged machines for the production of Baroque opera. Knowing
the spectacular marvels that Torelli’s accomplishments had facilitated
for opera in Venice, Mazarin expected the Great Sorcerer’s scenic
wonders to glorify the new French king, Louis XIV, and to make
French theatre the envy of absolutist Europe. Torelli remodeled two
royal theatres in 1645 and 1646 and gradually won over the French
court to the new mode of scene shifting and design (see Figure 6.6).
By the early 1700s, court and public theatres throughout Europe were
struggling to catch up with the French mode.
Among the successes of chariot-and-pole staging was the Baroque
opera Hercules in Love, performed in 1662 for Louis XIV at the new
Salle des Machines theatre, built especially to house single-point
perspective scenery changed through Torelli’s ropes, winches,
chariots, and counterweights. Cardinal Mazarin had helped to
orchestrate the defeat of those aristocrats who mounted uprisings
against royal absolutism between 1648 and 1653. To celebrate this
triumph of the king, his recent victories over the Spaniards in war, and
his impending marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria, Mazarin spent
several years organizing the production of Hercules in Love (Figure
6.7). The opera celebrated the suffering of a lustful hero (a stand-in for
Louis), who must sacrifice the love of his mistress for the good of the
state. According to historian Kristiann Aercke, the court had no
difficulty reading Mazarin’s allegory as a congratulatory commentary
on the well-known political and amatory machinations of the cardinal
and the king (Aercke 1994: 165–220). By featuring the changeable
qualities of nature through the spectacle of moving scenery – raging
storms at sea, the fires of passion, and frequent interventions from
classical gods – the production highlighted the changeable
characteristics of the sovereign. Although several viewed the
production of this six-hour opus as an artistic failure, Aercke argues
that Hercules in Love helped to vivify Louis XIV’s growing reputation
as the Sun King, the embodiment of heavenly power and natural
majesty.
Figure 6.6Giacomo Torelli's setting for Act II of Pierre Corneille's Andromède at
the Petit-Bourbon Theatre, 1650, in which Torelli's chariot-and-pole scene-
shifting machinery was used. Engraving by François Chauveau.

© Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

The Baroque aesthetics of Hercules in Love massively contradicted
the neoclassicism that French absolutists had embraced in the
controversy over Le Cid just 25 years earlier. As noted in the last
chapter, Cardinal Richelieu’s new French Academy severely criticized
Corneille’s play on the basis of the neoclassical principles of the three
unities, verisimilitude, decorum, and poetic justice. Arguably, Hercules
ensured justice through its glorification of monarchy and preserved
some decorum by insisting that the king’s rule was absolute in the
bedroom as well as in matters of state, but it trashed the rest of
neoclassicism. Hercules ignored the unities of time, place, and action;
most of its allegorical scenes were set in no particular time or place
and the opera featured the character of Hercules in a variety of
suffering situations and noble deeds that defied any cohesive plot or
logic. Whereas neoclassicism had endorsed veri similitude, the notion
that dramatic scenes should generally mirror situations that could
occur in real life, music pervaded the action of Hercules, cuing the
songs of characters and choruses and the descent of gods from stage
machines. Hercules broke the neoclassical rules, but (unsurprisingly)
no one from the French Academy stepped in to correct the cardinal or
the king. Absolutism allowed the monarchy to make theatrical rules for
everybody else, but also to violate them when Baroque aesthetics
suited their propagandistic goals better than neoclassical restraint.

Operatic scenery on the continent gained more Baroque

grandeur and monumentality in the eighteenth century. This was due,
in part, to the pan-European success of an extended family of
architects and designers, the Bibienas. Patriarch Ferdinando Bibiena
(1657–1743) gained initial success in Italy and rose to fame in
Barcelona and Vienna, where he designed theatres and the scenery
for several operas after 1711. His brother Francisco (1659–1739) also
enhanced the family’s reputation through his international architectural
and design work. Three second- and third-generation Bibienas
continued the family business: Giuseppe (1696–1757), Antonio (1700–
1774), and Carlo (1728–1787). By the time of Carlo’s death, the
Bibienas had planned theatres in Italy, Austria, and France and had
worked as designers with major opera companies in Vienna, London,
Paris, Lisbon, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Dresden, and Stockholm.
Perhaps the Bibienas’ most famous innovation was angle perspective
(scena per angolo [SHAY-nah pehr AHN-goh-loh]), which visually
opened up the operatic stage by creating diagonal vistas on the sides
of the stage rather than restricting the vista to a central alley, a
requirement of single-point perspective. By using two (or more)
vanishing points, Bibiena designs could suggest that the palace
interiors and garden exteriors of European rulers continued forever.
The vertical thrust of the architecture painted on their flats and drops,
which might fly upwards beyond the proscenium arch, also increased
the magnificence of their designs. In theatres that were still lit by
candles and mirrors, diagonal vistas and vertical columns or arches
could appear to recede and tower into infinity (Figure 6.8). What better
way to tie the absolute will of the monarch (or even the desires of a
local duke) to the will of God!
The chariot-and-pole system deployed by the Bibienas and other
designers remained the European standard among premier theatres
on the continent until the late nineteenth century. These new
technologies allowing for easy and flexible scene changes were a
triumph for Baroque opera over neoclassical drama. According to
neoclassical rules, plays were supposed to occur in one place; one set
of stage flats that could suggest a single room or outdoor space was
all that was needed. There was little point in putting neoclassical
dramas on stages that were built for elaborate and magical
transformations. For much of the eighteenth century, however, many
European spectators watched neoclassical plays on the same stages
that also housed lavish operatic productions. Although most probably
grew accustomed to the contrast in production styles and values, the
possibilities for more elaborate scenic display put pressure on
neoclassical staging that could not be accommodated within the rigid
rules of the aesthetic. It was not until the early nineteenth century, with
the rise of melodrama and romantic theatre, that non-operatic drama
would enjoy the full scenic possibilities of chariot-and-pole staging.
Figure 6.7Plan of the Salle des Machines, designed by Gaspar Vigarani (1586–
1663) for the 1662 Baroque opera Hercules in Love, an allegorical tribute to Louis
XIV. The stage, 140 feet deep, accommodated six sets of side flats and flying
machines. At one point in the opera, the entire royal family and attendants were
flown in on one machine, 60 by 45 feet wide. The settings, organized around a
single, central vanishing point, offered monumental images of a rationally
ordered world, seen to fullest advantage by the king seated in his throne front
and center.

From L.P. de la Guepière, Théâtre et Machine (1888).

Figure 6.8Scena per angolo stage setting designed for a chariot-and-pole

theatre by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena. The flats and drop were initially used for an
opera produced to celebrate a betrothal between members of the ruling families
of Saxony and Poland in 1719.

© AKG-images, London.
Louis XIV and Molière
Nonetheless, despite its paucity of stage scenery, neoclassicism for
spoken drama thrived in France in the 1660s and 70s. One of Louis
XIV’s most reliable court entertainers was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
(1622–1673), better known by his stage name, Molière. Molière and his
company had been performing in the French provinces when a
message from the king’s younger brother brought them to Paris in
1658 for their debut at court. Their success with a farcical afterpiece
won them permission from Louis XIV to share a Parisian theatre with
an Italian commedia troupe. Other farces and comedies followed, both
at court and in their public theatre, and soon Molière had established
himself and his troupe as a royal favorite. But the king kept his popular
actor-playwright on a short leash. From 1661 until his death 12 years
later, Molière devised, directed, and performed several court
entertainments, mostly comedy ballets (which alternated scenes of
dialogue and dance), to please his royal patron and ensure the
continuing employment and success of his company. Molière’s
relations with the Sun King cooled over the years, however, especially
during the long controversy that surrounded one of his most famous
plays, Tartuffe (1664–1669).
Case Study Molière and carnival laughter
Gary Jay Williams, with Bruce McConachie
Carnival laughter . . . builds its own world versus the official world, its
own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official
state.
Bakhtin (1984)

This case study uses the concept of carnival folk humor proposed by
Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) to suggest a deep connection between
the comic and the controversial sides of Molière’s theatre. (For
previous commentary on Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, see
Chapter 3.) In addition to reading Tartuffe, students using this case
study may also wish to read one of Molière’s short plays, such as The
Precious Damsels (1659) or Love’s the Best Doctor (1665), and one of
his other five-act verse comedies, such as The School for Wives
(1659), The Miser (1668), or The Imaginary Invalid (1673).
Molière’s full-length verse plays are regarded as the cornerstone of
French comedy. They have been staples in the repertoire of the
Comédie Française, France’s national theatre, for over three centuries
and are revived often in the Western world. Molière served Louis XIV
as playwright, actor, and courtier for 15 years, but his middle-class
background and profession as an actor set him apart from the court in
important ways. He excelled in the leading roles of his own comedies,
but also suffered the social stigma attached to the profession.
Although the Parisian literati characterized his plays as trifles, some of
his satires on the fashionable and foolish made him powerful enemies.
In general, it is not difficult to understand Molière’s later five-act
plays as comic examples of neoclassicism and many critics have
noted his adherence to decorum and the neoclassical unities. Yet,
surely as important is the fact that Molière never abandoned the kind
of disruptive comic elements that are in the spirit of the carnivalesque.
Especially important for this study, his plays and performances were
strongly influenced by the popular comic theatre traditions of (1)
French farce, which had roots in medieval comedy; (2) commedia
dell’arte, which had plots and character types similar to French farce;
and (3) the kind of street medicine show that Molière knew well, in
which hawkers sold potions they bragged could cure anything.
In previous chapters we have already noted that the traditions of
medieval farce, commedia, and medicine shows have strong links to
what Bakhtin calls the spirit of the “carnivalesque” (Figure 6.9). This
case study argues that, despite Molière’s ties to an absolutist
monarchy, the subversive qualities of the carnivalesque spirit are at
work in many of his plays. As we have seen, folk festival
entertainments often “marked the suspension or inversion of
hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions,” according to
Bakhtin. In the case of Tartuffe, there are key instances of such
challenges and inversions. From this point of view, it is not surprising
that the French Catholic Church, allied with the absolutism of the
monarchy, believed it had to suppress a play that was so close to the
seat of power in France.
Elements of carnival humor deriving from oral culture are present
throughout Molière’s work – early, middle, and late. Molière’s early
one-act farce The Precious Damsels (Les Précieuses ridicules, 1659),
for example, has many attributes of the carnivalesque. It is a broad
parody of the affectations of the salons of fashionable court women
(précieuses) who were setting the protocols for aristocratic manners,
courtship, language, and literature. Two affected young women turn
away two potential suitors for lacking faddish manners and language.
The young men then contrive a hoax. They send their valets,
Mascarille and Jodelet, to visit the young women in the guise of
fashionable courtiers, and the foolish women take them to be genuine.
According to a surviving account of the performance, when Molière
entered as Mascarille in marquis disguise, he wore a hyperbolic
parody of a courtier’s apparel. His powdered wig (topped by a tiny,
fashionable hat) was so large that it swept the area around him every
time he made a bow. His lace collar was huge and so were his
breeches, the pockets of which sprouted colored tassels. He wore six-
inch heels on his beribboned shoes and was carried on stage in a
sedan chair by porters, whom he tried to avoid paying (Dock 1992: 53;
Molière 1971: I, 1008). Molière’s scale of exaggeration here is beyond
satire; it has the overflow of the carnivalesque about it. It is a festive
undoing, a parodic uncrowning of established order writ large on the
body. Molière’s performance as Mascarille made him a larger-than-life
comic icon who bursts the seams of both salon decorum and the
neoclassical rules for plays that required the restraint of verisimilitude.
While his marquis represents an original departure from the stock
characters of the commedia dell’arte, he functions in the same iconic
way: the bold extravagance of the figure testifies to a force of
elemental comic energy that explodes the world of over-rationalized
drama. Without this kind of elemental comic force, without the
precedents of the commedia dell’arte and old French farces, it is hard
to imagine this performance.

Figure 6.9In this farce at a country carnival, a husband is being cuckolded by a

monk. Detail from the painting Village Festival in Honor of St. Hubert and St.
Anthony by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564?–1637).
 © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University/ Bridgeman Art
Library.
In the original production of The Precious Damsels, a comic icon
descended from the carnivalesque world was also on stage with
Molière. Jodelet (Julian Bedeau), Paris’s most famous actor of old
French farce and Italian comedy, played the other valet, a character
who impersonated an old viscount. Known as a good-natured clown,
Jodelet always wore clown-white face makeup (probably a vestige of
the flour-faced millers of old farce). Mascarille tells the young women,
“Don’t be surprised at the Viscount’s looks. He just got out of bed from
an illness that left him so pale” (Molière 1957: 23). Jodelet had recently
left a rival theatre company, and Molière jumped at the chance to hire
him. Jodelet would have brought with him plays written for him by Paul
Scarron (1610–1660), whose parodies Bakhtin cites often, and who
influenced Molière. The two comedians go through some ribald jokes
involving sexual anatomy under the guise of talking about old war
wounds and then they call in musicians for a dance – both typical bits
of commedia business. Their masters enter to put an end to the
deception and the play, beating and stripping their valets of their
aristocratic clothes. Bakhtin speaks of thrashings and clothes-
changing as a part of the cycle of crownings and uncrownings in
carnivalesque fun (Bakhtin 1984: 197). No one gets to lord it for long in
festive humor.
Such analysis could be extended through most of Molière’s
comedies, but a sampling must suffice here. Two obvious instances of
the parodying of “official” language occur in The Bourgeois Gentleman
and The Imaginary Invalid. In the first, a servant dupes Monsieur
Jourdain into believing that a long, burlesque ceremony, conducted in
an amalgam of pseudo-Latin and pseudo-Turkish, is conferring on him
the noble title of “mamamouchi.” In The Imaginary Invalid, in which
Molière satirizes the medical profession (as he does in at least five
other plays), an elaborate ceremony ends the play that parodies the
granting of degrees to medical doctors. In this case, the profession’s
Latinate language grants a dunce of a new doctor the right to slash,
purge, bleed, and kill his patients at will. The mocking of the “official”
language suggests that it has no more truth-value than any other
language.
Carnival humor’s uncrownings of authority also take the form of
cuckoldry. A wife’s sexual deception of her husband uncrowns his
domestic authority, while at the same time parodically crowning his
head with horns (Bakhtin 1984: 241). A commonplace in medieval
farces and commedia, cuckoldry or near-cuckoldry is a feature of
several of Molière’s plays, notably The School for Wives, Don Juan
(1665), and Amphitryon (1668). In The School for Wives, the foolish
Arnolphe has had his prospective young wife raised in the country in
convent captivity on the theory that she will be too ignorant to know
how to be unfaithful to him, a proposition the play gaily unravels.
Carnivalesque sexuality often erupts in this play. Arnolphe, justifying
to a doubtful friend his expectation of success in his training of Agnes,
says he was delighted when Agnes once came to him much troubled
to ask, “In absolute and perfect innocence,/ If children are begotten
through the ear!” (Molière 1957: 37). Earlier in the same scene, when
the zealous Arnolphe is fantasizing about his control of his prospective
young wife, a crème tarte figures as a salacious sexual reference
(Molière 2001: 5; 1971: I, 548). These and several other such moments
have the comically subversive merit of suggesting that very powerful
sexual forces are surging just below the surface of Arnolphe’s selfish,
rational social engineering. Predictably, such bawdiness disturbed
decorous court audiences. But Molière went on to mock them further
in his Critique of the School for Wives (1663), one of several episodes
in a year-long controversy over the play.
In another variation on carnival humor’s upside-down world, the
servants in Molière are often wiser than their masters and mistresses
(much like those in Plautus’s comedies, from which Molière borrowed
directly for his Amphitryon and The Miser). Dorine in Tartuffe and
Toinette in The Imaginary Invalid challenge their masters’ delusions to
a degree that borders on comic domestic anarchy. Similarly, in Don
Juan, Sganarelle directly challenges the right of his master to seduce
women. Street-smart underclass characters in Molière are frequent
foils to the self-deluding bourgeoisie. In many of the plays, folk wisdom
comes from the servants in the form of proverbs as Molière mines
another vein of popular culture.
Finally, let us look through the carnivalesque lens at Molière’s
Tartuffe, in which a clergyman preaches holiness but practices
seduction, almost with impunity. It was his most controversial play
and, ultimately, the most profitable in his lifetime. Molière first staged it
as part of Louis XIV’s lavish entertainments at Versailles in 1664, in a
version now lost. The king enjoyed it but suppressed it in deference to
the outrage of a sect of zealously devout Catholics. The play has
many strains of popular folk humor inherited from farce and
commedia, including Tartuffe’s near sexual overpowering of Orgon’s
wife on top of the table under which Orgon is hiding (Figure 6.10). But
let us focus here on one profound example of carnival humor in the
play.
In the comic spectacles of popular festivals, travesty – the mocking
appropriation of the costumes and insignia of authority and identity –
was typical. Travesty suggests a slippage between the ideal and the
real, between symbol and truth, between the sign and what it signifies
– an effect which, for Bakhtin, nourishes positive social change.
Molière’s plays are full of imposters and poseurs, such as his affected
courtiers, his bourgeois would-be gentleman, and all of his mock
doctors. Disguised in the vestments and language of authority, such
imposters create comic havoc. Tartuffe, as a sexual predator in the
guise of a devout, creates more. Molière’s play, like theatrical art itself,
raises the question of whether we can ever know where the
performance of the self ends and a true self begins. Taken seriously, a
question about the stability of our knowledge of truth is not one an
absolutist church or state can long entertain. Molière’s play could be
seen not only as irreverent but as a strike at the heart of the Church’s
authenticity. It is this, perhaps more than the sexuality, that would
account for the deep wrath of the powerful conservative cabal that
insisted that the king, who had been Molière’s protector in
controversies up to this time, suppress the play. One Catholic curate
raged in print against Tartuffe, saying the author was “a demon . . .
dressed like a man,” that Molière had held Christ’s Church in
contempt, and that he should be burned at the stake as a foretaste of
what he would surely suffer in hell (Molière 1971: I, 1143–4). When
Molière tried to produce a revised version in 1667, the Bishop of Paris
closed it down, threatening the excommunication of anyone who
performed or read it.
Figure 6.10Orgon catches Tartuffe (standing at left) in the act of trying to seduce
his wife in Act IV of Molière's Tartuffe. Engraving by François Chaveau from the
1669 edition of the play.

© Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

A very persistent Molière finally got his play to the public

stage in 1669 in the version that survives today. The ending probably
represents his revising process and has been the subject of much
debate; it features the last-minute intervention of an emissary from
Louis XIV to save Orgon and his home from Tartuffe’s grasp. This
scene may be understood as a conventional, obsequious compliment
from Molière to the king, represented in the emissary’s speech as
Orgon’s omniscient, all-wise sovereign. But some in the original
audience may have read this last-act dénouement as an ironic deus
ex machina [deh-oos ex MAH-khee-nah], which is to say as a
carnivalesque parody of power. At the very least, two language zones,
as Bakhtin would call them, were in play in the ending – the official and
the unofficial – each offering different reception possibilities. The result
would have been the kind of dialectic celebrated by Bakhtin that
promotes ambivalence and subverts orthodoxy.
In their ribald humor and theatrical artifices drawn from street
theatre traditions, Molière’s plays, at least momentarily, critiqued
decorum and absolutist control. Whether instinctively or consciously,
Molière persisted in deploying carnivalesque humor throughout his
career, as if his integrity as an artist depended on it. Molière, the
carnivalesque comic actor and writer, was never elected to the
classically rigorous, decorum-conscious French Academy, guardian of
French language and literature, a fact that the Academy never has
lived down.
Key references
Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
 Dock, S.V. (1992) Costume and Fashion in the Plays of Jean-
Baptiste Poquelin, Molière, Geneva: Editions Slatkine.
Gaines, J.F. (ed.) (2002) The Molière Encyclopedia, Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
McCarthy, G. (2002) The Theatres of Molière, New York and
London: Routledge.
Molière (1953) Molière, Five Plays, trans. J. Wood, Baltimore:
Penguin Books.
Molière (1957) Eight Plays by Molière, trans. M. Bishop, New York:
Modern Library.
Molière [Poquelin, J.B.] (1971) Oeuvres completes, ed. G. Couton,
Paris: Gallimard. (Scholarly French edition of all the plays and related
documents referred to in this study.)
Molière (1993) Tartuffe, trans. R. Wilber (1961) in W.B. Worthen (ed.)
The HBJ Anthology of Drama, Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
(Includes English translations of Molière’s important preface and other
documents.)
Molière (2001) The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays, trans. M.
Slater, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scott, V. (2000) Molière, A Theatrical Life, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Absolutism and neoclassicism in France and England,
1660–1700
By 1660, the French crown was providing financial assistance to four
theatre companies that primarily performed neoclassical plays. This
practice had begun in the 1630s when Cardinal Richelieu initially
arranged subsidies for the acting troupe at the Théâtre du Marais and
then extended similar treatment to the other major troupe in Paris
performing at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. As other troupes in Paris vied
for royal support with the ascension of Louis XIV to the throne in 1643,
the new king and his ministers took advantage of the monarchy’s
position in French culture to continue to tie theatre to the power of the
crown. A commedia dell’arte company from Italy under the
management of Tiberio Fiorillo (1608–1694), which enjoyed the
support of several influential courtiers, gained a subsidy in the mid-
1640s that was renewed from 1653 onwards. As we have seen, the
king also lavished financial assistance on Molière and his company in
the 1660s.
Royal support of French neoclassical theatre was capricious and
haphazard, however, leading both theatre artists and state
bureaucrats to attempt to regularize the arrangements. When Molière
died in 1673, rivalry among the Paris acting troupes created a period of
flux, with several actors leaving one company to join another. In 1679,
the crown forced an end to the conflicts by ordering the two remaining
major acting troupes in Paris to combine into one – the Comédie
Française. Further, the king’s edict also granted a monopoly over
spoken drama in French to the new company. (An exception was soon
made, however, when Fiorillo’s commedia troupe won the right to
continue to use French in their performances.) Louis XIV’s 1679
decree continued the traditional organization of French acting
companies, by which the actors shared in the profits of the troupe, but
he fixed the number of shares so that no new members could be
admitted to the Comédie Française until an old one retired or died.
The edict also regulated how actors might be elected as sharing
members and the authority the members possessed in selecting plays
for production. Finally, the king took control of the internal affairs of the
troupe; his decree established his First Gentleman of the Chamber as
the arbiter of disputes within the company. Later, in 1701 and 1706, the
king imposed censorship on the troupe; the new rules mandated that
all scripts be read and approved by a censor in the police department
before a public performance in Paris would be allowed. Although
members of the Comédie Française enjoyed state support and might
benefit from generous pensions on retirement, they had become
bureaucrats of the monarchy.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the triumphs of French neoclassicism in
playwriting came before the absolutist consolidation of French
dramatic theatre in the Comédie Française. During the 1660s and
1670s, the counterpart in tragic playwriting to Molière’s success in
comedy and farce was Jean Racine (1639–1699); both were popular in
public theatres and at the court of Louis XIV. Following several
successes beginning with Andromaque in 1667, Racine penned what
most critics agree was his masterpiece, Phèdre, in 1677. Like several
of Racine’s tragedies, Phèdre plays out the consequences of a maxim
by the philosopher René Descartes: “Our passions cannot be directly
aroused or removed by the action of our will” (quoted in Sayer 2006:
258). Proposing a strict separation between human emotions and
rational thought – between the needs of the body and the logic of the
mind – Descartes and the other rationalists of his day believed they
could offer little help to men and women in the grip of “passion.” In
Phèdre, based on an ancient Greek myth, Queen Phèdre is
passionately in love with her stepson Hippolyte. Nonetheless, in
accordance with neoclassical decorum, Racine spares Phèdre the
loss of dignity evident in his play’s sources. But the moral code of
neoclassical decorum prevents her from acting on her desire.
Following the constraints of the three unities, Racine constructs a
tightly woven, psychologically driven plot in which Phèdre struggles to
express and finally to extricate herself from her passion, only to bring
on the wrath of her husband, the death of Hippolyte, and her own
shame and suicide. As in Phèdre, the precepts of neoclassical rules
and Cartesian rationalism provided sharp conflicts between duty and
desire in many tragedies of the seventeenth century. Long a favorite
of French audiences and female tragedy actors, Phèdre continues to
thrill spectators today.
In England, regular performances by professional companies did
not return until 1660, after the Civil War, with the Restoration of
Charles II to the throne. While living in exile at the court of the French
monarch, Charles had come to appreciate the control that Louis XIV
and his ministers were exercising over French performance. Charles
did not want to pay the direct theatre subsidies that allowed the
French throne to enjoy entertainments that reflected its absolutist
goals, but he did believe that he needed to control the stage to
legitimate his fragile hold on power. Consequently, Charles awarded
royal patents to two playwright-impresarios, making them the only
men allowed to produce plays in London, an unprecedented theatrical
monopoly in England. Thomas Killigrew (1612–1683) became the
manager of the King’s Company, which soon floundered. A better
theatrical manager, William Davenant (1606–1668), supervised the
Duke’s Company more closely until his death in 1668, when the actors
Thomas Betterton (1635–1710) and Henry Harris assumed artistic
control. With the imminent failure of Killigrew’s company, the king
allowed the two troupes to merge in 1682.
During the reign of Charles II, which lasted until 1685, the London
companies generally performed at two indoor theatres, Drury Lane
and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Both play houses accommodated small
audiences of mostly aristocratic spectators, who enjoyed bawdy
comedies and heroic plays featuring royalist propaganda. Built for
wing-and-drop scenery with side flats that slid in grooves on the floor
and painted drops lowered from the flies above (the wing-and-groove
system), these proscenium theatres did not deploy the more
expensive chariot-and-pole rigging of many continental playhouses.
When the king decided he needed a theatre in which he could
entertain foreign dignitaries, he advanced funds from the royal
treasury for the completion of a new playhouse in Dorset Garden,
which was equipped with a modified version of the chariot- and-pole
system for the staging of European opera (Figure 6.11). For ten years
after its opening in 1671, the king used Dorset Garden as an extension
of his royal power, even though it remained primarily a commercial
operation.
Until 1685, the desires and values of King Charles and his
aristocratic favorites dominated the English stage. Soon after his
return to power, the king had decreed that English companies should
now employ women as professional actors, a casting convention he
had enjoyed while watching French theatre. Called the “merry
monarch” for his sexual affairs, Charles extended his royal
prerogatives to taking actresses of his choice as his bedmates. The
new female actors were an instant hit on stage (and the convention of
men playing young women soon died out). Several women achieved
artistic stature, including comedy actor Nell Gwyn (1650–1687), who
became Charles’s mistress, and tragedian Elizabeth Barry (1658–
1713). Although a new law (passed as a sop to the Puritans) made it
illegal to produce plays that offended “piety and good manners,” many
Restoration productions paraded lusty actions and explicit sexual
innuendos.
Figure 6.11The stage of Dorset Garden Theatre, London, with the setting for Act
I, sc. 1 of The Empress of Morocco, by E. Settle, produced in 1673. King Charles
II's coat of arms is at the center of the proscenium arch. Designed by
Christopher Wren, the theatre featured London's best-equipped stage at the
time. Engraving by William Dole in the 1673 edition of the play.

© Gary Jay and Josephine S. Williams.

Playwriting between 1660 and 1680 generally reflected royalist
values. John Dryden’s (1631–1700) Indian Queen (1664) and his two-
part The Conquest of Granada (1669–1670) followed neoclassical
patterns and focused on competitive royal heroes and heroines
caught in conflicts between romantic love and duty to the state. Like
Racine, his contemporary in France, Dryden attempted to reconcile
the philosophy of Descartes with the morality of his heroes and their
tragic decisions. Influenced by his correspondence with political
philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Dryden celebrated the rational and even
contemptuous power of absolute rulers in his early plays.
In the 1670s, however, he began to search for a dramatic vehicle
that would allow his spectators to understand greatness through the
standard of “generosity,” as Descartes had defined it in his writings.
According to Descartes, a king could attain “generosity” when he
resolved “to undertake and carry out what he judges best” (quoted in
Fletcher 2011: 105). The playwright believed, with Descartes, that such
self-esteem allowed the virtuous ruler to rise above his contempt for
lesser mortals and judge them with compassion. Dryden reworked
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to express these Cartesian
values, changing the title (and emphasis) of the tragedy to All for Love
(1677). In Dryden’s neoclassical version of the final days of these two
heroes from Roman times, Antony gradually forsakes the competitive
masculinity of Shakespeare’s character and eventually finds
“generosity” in his continuing concern for Cleopatra, even when both
are near their deaths. States critic Angus Fletcher, “[Antony] discovers
a greatness that takes others into account but does not depend upon
them, that is grounded in the self but does not devolve into solipsism.
Following Descartes’ own progression, he discovers generosity”
(Fletcher 2011: 111).
 Restoration comedies, such as William Wycherley’s (1640–1715)
The Country Wife (1675), George Etherege’s (c.1634–1691) The Man
of Mode (1676), and Aphra Behn’s (1640–1689) (Figure 6.12) The
Rover (1677), featured witty language and titillating sexual intrigue
among the beautiful and privileged. At the center of The Rover, for
example, are four “Banish’d Cavaliers” (the subtitle of the play), who
have traveled to Naples for pleasure and adventure. The subtitle sets
the play in the 1650s, when many royalists moved to the continent to
escape Puritan rule during the English Civil War. Chief among them is
Willmore, who pursues many women, two of whom – Hellena and
Angelica – fight for his affections. Behn weaves two more love plots
into the action, which involve an English colonel and Florinda,
Hellena’s sister, and a foolish Cavalier who falls for an Italian
prostitute. Because Behn’s female characters are nearly as sexually
voracious as her male Cavaliers, a disguised Florinda is nearly raped
and Angelica almost shoots Willmore in a jealous rage. In the end, the
prostitute robs the Cavalier, the colonel gets Florinda, and Willmore
reluctantly agrees to end his roving and marry Hellena.
Figure 6.12Aphra Behn, the first woman in England to earn her living as a writer,
wrote several plays during the Restoration period, featuring women as central
characters. She also wrote novels, poetry, and translations, and served as a spy
for Charles II. Sketch by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost.

Other comic writers followed the example of Molière, whose

neoclassical comedies provided models on both side of the English
Channel. These and other dramatists wrote for a coterie audience that
usually mirrored the king’s taste for heroic grandeur and salacious
sexuality. While a few playwrights, including Nahum Tate (1652–1715)
in his adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Richard II,
attempted to articulate anti-absolutist positions through allusive
language, most bolstered royalist prejudices. By 1680, it seemed to
many that the English theatre was going the way of its French
absolutist cousin.
The political crisis of the 1680s, however, cut short the drift toward
absolutism in England. Anti-royalist factions in London took to the
streets to perform massive Pope Burning pageants and other
demonstrations that linked royal absolutism to the power of Rome.
These and other political actions led in 1688 to increased power for
Parliament and less overt support and control by the crown over the
theatre. The two patent companies continued to dominate theatrical
production in London for another ten years, even though they lacked
the legal authority of the Comédie Française to enforce their apparent
monopolies. When in 1695 the legal validity of the patents expired, the
English throne, which no longer claimed absolute authority, did not
revive them. After 1700, although the crown continued to license
theatres, it did so unevenly, with the consequence that many kinds of
theatre flourished in England in the early eighteenth century. Soon,
neoclassical comedies and tragedies were living, cheek by jowl, with
satires and ballad operas as the popular theatres at the Hounslow,
Southwark, and Bartholomew fairs competed with the regular London
playhouses catering to aristocrats and wealthy merchants.
Reforming Baroque opera
As we have noted, Italian librettists and composers in the 1600s
favored the extravagance of the Baroque over the restraints of
neoclassicism for their operas. This began to change in the 1690s,
however, as many Italians turned away from the Counter-Reformation
ideology of the Vatican, which had pushed the emotional and
flamboyant style of the Baroque for over a century, to embrace the
Cartesian rationality that Racine, Dryden, and other Europeans had
explored and advanced in neoclassical literature and drama. Led by
the Arcadian Academy, a group of intellectuals and wealthy patrons in
Rome set on modernizing Italian culture, the reformers drew on
Aristotle and Renaissance ideals to restore older modes of artistic
expression and to urge that artists take up more rational and simplified
forms as models for their work. One later Italian critic, looking back on
Baroque opera from the perspective of the 1780s after the Arcadian
reforms were complete, painted a sharp contrast between the
enlightened qualities of present opera and the musical contraptions of
the previous century. Baroque opera, he said, presented “an
enormous chaos, a concoction of sacred and profane, of historical and
fabulous, of mythology, ancient and modern, of true and allegorical, of
natural and fantastic, all gathered together to the perpetual shame of
Art” (quoted in Kimbell 1991: 182). As we shall see, however, this critic
exaggerated the differences between seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century opera.

The reformers of Italian opera began by

separating serious from comic opera, establishing two major genres
that would endure for the next 80 years – opera seria [OH-peh-rah
SEH-ree-ah] and opera buffa [OH-peh-rah BOOF-fah]. Opera buffa
drew much of its energy, many of its plots, and most of its stock
characters from commedia dell’arte, which remained popular among
all classes of Italians during the eighteenth century. Our next chapter
traces major changes in commedia dell’arte during the 1700s, changes
that were also reflected in the libretti and music of opera buffa.
Although reformers also altered opera seria (serious opera), the
changes were less substantial, primarily because this genre was
dominated by one man, Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), for much of his
career as a librettist. Metastasio gained initial fame as a poet in Rome,
where he soon turned to writing libretti for operas under the initial
sponsorship of the Arcadian Academy. In response to the increasing
popularity of opera seria among royals and aristocrats in the Austrian
empire, Metastasio moved to Vienna in 1730 and produced several of
his most famous libretti, including the words for Olympiade and
Clemenza di Tito.
Bowing to some of the constraints of neoclassicism, Metastasio’s
libretti reduced the spectacular and allegorical elements of Baroque
opera and emphasized intrigues and mistaken identities among
historical rulers that turned on conflicts between duty and expediency
or virtue and passion, much as the plots of Racine and Dryden had
earlier. Unlike their tragedies, however, Metastasio resolved most of
his dramatic conflicts comically, often through a change of heart by the
hero and the general reconciliation of the principal characters. His
libretti suggested that the world of his virtuous aristocrats and royals
was more benign than cruel or tragic, if looked at through an
enlightened perspective. From the 1730s into the 1770s, many
composers found Metastasio’s poetic libretti so elegant and
captivating that they returned to several of them again and again to re-
set them to different music. Opera seria in the form and style of
Metastasio took much of the pomposity and religiosity out of Baroque
opera, but his lyrical libretti departed significantly from the
verisimilitude and rational rigor of the neoclassical plays of Racine and
Dryden. Regarding the difficulties of European absolutism for its rulers
and subjects, the pleasant endings of opera seria made these
problems seem resolvable. Metastasio’s neoclassical libretti may have
simplified the plot contortions of Baroque opera, but most of the
operas based on his words were performed against the soaring
magnificence of Bibiena-designed or -inspired scenery.
 Metastasio also regularized the scene structure of opera
seria by moving most of the action between characters to recitative
(dialogue sung in the simple rhythms of natural speech with only slight
melodic variation) and leaving the arias of his major characters to
mark the ends of scenes. Given this placement of their arias, it was
probably inevitable that operatic stars would push composers to
lengthen and elaborate their difficulty. The primary stars of opera
seria, inspiring devotion in many as well as contempt in a few, were
castrati [kahs-TRAH-tee], male singers who had been castrated in
their youth to preserve the purity of their boyish voices in the hope that
their adult bodies could deliver opera seria arias with supreme
virtuosity. Once castrated, a boy’s voice does not deepen by an
octave, as normally occurs in males in early adulthood, but usually
stays in the soprano range, with a tonal quality half-way between a
child’s and a woman’s. The Catholic Church had been practicing the
castration of vocally promising boys (following the dubious consent of
their parents) to produce singers for the Papal Choir since the 1500s
and castrati sang in Baroque opera in the 1600s.
Figure 6.13Portrait of Carlo Broschi (Farinelli), soon after the king of Spain made
him a Knight of the Order of Calatrava in 1750. Farinelli proudly displays the
insignia of the Order on his coat.

Painting by Jacopo Amigoni, c.1750–1752.© Classic Image/Alamy

Stock Photo.
During the eighteenth century, as opera seria spread through Italy
and north into the rest of Europe, the practice of castration increased
and several more castrati moved from church choirs to operatic
stages. Although less than one in a hundred castrati gained a career
as a singer, operatic fame meant substantial wealth and aristocratic
connections. Among them, Carlo Broschi (1705–1782), who took the
stage name Farinelli, was the most popular (Figure 6.13). Following his
debut in Naples, Farinelli performed throughout Italy, then toured
Europe in the 1720s and 1730s, with stops in Munich, London, and
Paris and extensive stays in Vienna, where he befriended Metastasio.
Like other castrati, Farinelli primarily performed the masculine heroes
of opera seria, endowing their arias with intensity, tenderness, force,
and passion. While most audiences fawned over castrati opera stars,
their few critics pointed to the hypocrisy underlining the fact that an
elite that called itself “enlightened” believed in the need to castrate
boys to enable their operatic enjoyment. The critics also noted that
castrati performing the roles of powerful rulers were an affront to
neoclassical verisimilitude.
For the aristocrats, royal ministers, wealthy merchants, and famous
professionals who purchased a box at the theatre for the season,
however, opera-going was primarily a social rather than a musical or
dramatic occasion. The regularities of opera seria and the fact that so
many of its stories were repeated enabled spectators to ignore much
of what was happening on stage (usually until a castrato began an
aria) and to focus, instead, on social interests and desires. Eighteenth-
century architects built opera houses to emphasize the dominance of
the boxes, which generally ringed a “U”-shaped auditorium and might
be stacked four high, allowing the elite of a city to view the social
hierarchy at a glance, to parade their wealth and family, and to use
their opera glasses to get a good look at each other’s affairs (Figure
6.14). Most opera houses featured a royal or ducal box, much larger
than the others, at the “bottom” of the “U,” from which the king (or the
local duke, count, or margrave) might watch his subjects and set the
social tone for the evening. The best boxes, usually placed on the
lower levels of the “U” near the royal box, were actually small parlors,
built to accommodate socializing, card playing, and even dining during
the performance. (When not serving their masters, servants might
stand in the pit area below the boxes, which sometimes doubled as a
ballroom, or perch on a bench in a cramped balcony above the royal
box, if such a gallery had been built for them.) In Italy and in many of
the small states of Germany, wealthy merchants shared the social
ostentation of the opera with local rulers. In eighteenth-century Lisbon,
Vienna, Madrid, and Paris – the capitals of empires – absolute rulers
made sure that operatic spectacle and sociality reflected and
enhanced their power.
The Paris Opéra in the 1750s provides a good example of the link
between absolutism and opera-going. As music historian James H.
Johnson notes, “At mid-century, the Opéra . . . was a royal spectacle,
tailored to fit the tastes of the king’s most distinguished subjects: his
closest relatives held their boxes in the most visible rows, royal
administrators and palace functionaries seldom missed performances,
and Louis XV himself came with some regularity” (Johnson 1995: 10).
Despite the drone of conversations during performances, critics
complained that the court etiquette of Versailles prevailed, with many
spectators watching the king to see how they should respond. Indeed,
in his examination of the records of annual subscribers for first-level
boxes over an eight-year period, Johnson found that over 90 percent
of them were aristocrats and most of those held high positions in the
regime. During the 1750s, Louis XV took a personal interest in the
affairs of the Opéra, which, like the Comédie Française, had lost most
of its artistic freedom to gain monopolistic privileges. The king
established budgets, interfered in personnel decisions, selected
operas for performance, and occasionally gave advice during
rehearsals. In addition to opera seria, the king enjoyed opera ballets
(which featured more dancing than singing), pastoral operas (which
idealized rural peasant life), and revivals of the lyrical operas of Jean-
Baptiste Lully (1633–1682), who had turned Baroque opera away from
Italian modes toward French tastes soon after the establishment of
the Paris Opéra. Because these operatic genres were royal favorites,
they dominated the repertoire in the 1750s. When they were not
socializing or watching fights among drunken servants in the area for
standees in front of their boxes, the aristocrats might occasionally turn
their attention to the stage to enjoy what the king had chosen for them
to see and hear.

Figure 6.14The Margrave's theatre in Bayreuth, Germany. Designed by

Giuseppe and Carlo Galli Bibiena and built in 1748, this small Baroque opera
house features the typical “U” shape for its auditorium with a large opera box for
the local ruler at its apex. The chairs in the pit below the boxes were added in
the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the pit probably
accommodated temporary benches for servants and others.
 © Theatermuseum, Munich

Figure 6.15Touring players on their temporary stage (left) before an audience in

a market square in Munich in 1780. From a painting by Joseph Stephan.

© Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich. Photo Courtesy of the

Deutsches Theatermuseum.
Absolutism and neoclassicism in the German states and
Russia, 1700–1770
While some of the larger courts among the German states and cities
in the early 1700s could afford to subsidize regular operatic
productions, most of the dukes, counts, princes, and others who ruled
in Germany got by with occasional visits from traveling operatic
troupes. With regard to public performances, small commedia dell’arte
companies toured the area and home-grown fairground troupes set up
temporary stages for seasonal performances. Still recovering from the
devastations of the religious wars, most of German society could
afford little more than such offerings, which were nonetheless enjoyed
by peasants, workers, burgers, and a few aristocrats (Figure 6.15).
Although these troupes performed a variety of genres, the star of most
of them was a carnivalesque clown, who generally enacted a
character called Hanswurst. This fun-loving, hard-drinking, and often
devilish figure combined attributes from several previous clown-
figures seen in Germany, including medieval fools, Falstaffian
characters (introduced by English actors who played in Germany
during the English Civil War), and Harlequins (known to German
audiences from commedia tours).
Despite these difficult circumstances for neoclassical theatre, two
reformers, Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) and Caroline
Neuber (1697–1760), used their combined companies to introduce
several neoclassical innovations into the German theatre after 1727.
Gottsched translated and adapted French plays into German, and
Neuber staged them and polished their troupe’s performance style.
Although the Gottsched–Neuber company made some allies among
the German aristocracy, the troupe never found a large audience for
their neoclassical plays in Leipzig and Hamburg, their primary sites for
performance. Both had hoped to banish Hanswurst and the kind of
theatre he represented from the stage, but Hanswurst plays at
fairground theatres remained popular when their troupe broke in two
in 1739. Once again, as in the theatre of Molière, the carnivalesque
had successfully undermined neoclassical restraint – at least with
popular audiences, if not with many German aristocrats, educated to
believe in the superiority of French culture.
Folk and fairground theatrical traditions existed in Russia as well
and continued throughout the eighteenth century. But neoclassical
ideals, if not direct subsidies for theatrical production, had received a
boost during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great (1682–1725), who
campaigned to Westernize Russia. By the 1740s, the Russian court
was enjoying Italian opera seria and French neoclassical plays,
produced by troupes of Italian singers and French actors on a chariot-
and-pole court stage in St. Petersburg. During the next decade,
Alexander Sumarokov (1717–1777) was writing successful Russian
tragedies and comedies on the French neoclassical model and the
empress established and subsidized a state theatre for Russian plays
and actors. Russian neoclassical theatre expanded substantially
during the reign of Tsarina Catherine II (1762–1796), with more
Russian dramas, better subsidies, and the establishment of an acting
school. French theatre remained the ideal, however, with translations
of neoclassical French plays dominating the repertoire and the French
crown’s rules for the regulation of the Comédie Française serving as
the model for the tsarina’s control of the state-supported theatre and
opera companies. By 1770, public as well as court theatres had gained
a foothold in Russia, but the policies of Catherine II, as well as the
domination of theatrical life by the aristocracy and court, ensured that
upstart theatre companies would not use their performances to
challenge her absolute rule.
The limits of neoclassicism and absolutism in France,
1720–1770
Theatrical neoclassicism spread from Paris throughout France in the
1700s, as large and medium-sized French cities competed with each
other to build playhouses that could support touring and eventually
permanent companies. About 20 cities enjoyed public performances at
their theatres by 1750 and that number jumped to 71 by 1790. By 1789,
the date of the French Revolution, France could boast more public
theatres outside its capital than any other country in Europe. Funded
mostly by local aristocrats and entrepreneurs, these theatres usually
housed operatic as well as spoken performances and might also
include commedia dell’arte troupes and fairground entertainers. Their
managers primarily served local nobles, merchants, regional
representatives of the crown, and other provincial elites, who
socialized and conducted business at the playhouse. Not surprisingly,
they looked to Paris for their models of acting, staging, and dramatic
or operatic repertoire, which meant in practice that the traditional
neoclassicism of Corneille and Racine in playwriting and Lully in opera
pervaded the French provinces. Although some Parisian artists
challenged neoclasssical restraints, the power of the French Catholic
Church, the French Academy, and the direct control of Parisian
theatre and opera exercised by the French monarchy silenced or
sidelined much of the opposition. Officially, all of France was
becoming more neoclassical during the 1700–1789 period, even
though, in retrospect, neoclassical forms could no longer contain the
energies and concerns of the time.
In the 50 years between 1720 and 1770, the most renowned and one
of the most popular playwrights of the period was Voltaire, the pen-
name of Francois-Marie Arouet (1694–1778). Dramatist, pamphleteer,
novelist, historian, and cultural gadfly, Voltaire corresponded with
many of the rich and powerful throughout Europe to urge reforms in a
range of areas, from established religion to absolutist government.
Although his plays occasionally took liberties with the three
neoclassical unities and with class-bound notions of decorum, Voltaire
defended the rules of neoclassicism in several essays. Historian
Bettina Knapp calls Voltaire “an innovative theater traditionalist”
(Knapp 2000: 80); she recognizes the tension between Voltaire’s push
for reforms in staging and costuming (plus his campaigns against
arbitrary rules in many areas of French life) and his continued support
of neoclassicism.

In part, this tension resulted from the peculiar public

position of Voltaire and the other French philosophes [fee-loh-zohf],
those journalists, encyclopedia writers, and cultural critics of the
period who were advocating for reform, but who also believed that
they must work within the present absolutist system of government
and culture to achieve it. As a leading philosophe, Voltaire hoped to
influence the powerful to change French life from the top down, and
part of this campaign involved a commitment to preserving what he
took to be the high moral ground of elite French culture. In addition to
attacking the Church, the academy, and other bastions of reactionary
power, Voltaire and the other philosophes criticized those whom they
accused of trivializing the culture of France. This included the popular
playwright Pierre Marivaux (1688–1763), whose love comedies, the
philosophes believed, appealed to the vain and frivolous. Hoping to
educate the public through elite networks of patronage and sociability
and also recognizing that French neoclassical taste was becoming
European taste, Voltaire clung to the ideas and forms of neoclassicism
and shunned what he saw as the decadence of newer, more popular
artistic movements. While a few of the philosophes, such as Denis
Diderot, believed that some new dramatic genres could be
encouraged without compromising traditional standards, all of the
reformers saw themselves as the guardians of superior culture. By
writing plays for the elite, the philosophes ensured that theatrical
neoclassicism would stay wedded to the politics of absolutism.
Voltaire’s point of view about the need for elite power to effect top-
down reform is evident in many of his dramas. Although his essays
and histories were often didactic and ironic, most of his 52 plays were
packed with emotion, often concerning conflicts involving absolutist
power and religion. Voltaire understood that emotional appeal was
probably the best way to convince the audience at the Comédie
Française and local elites in the provinces of the reasonableness of
his ideas. In Zaïre (1732), one of his most successful tragedies, for
example, Christian intolerance leads a Moslem Sultan to kill the
Christian heroine, Zaïre, whom he loves, and then to take his own life.
Voltaire’s critics correctly saw his Mohammed, or Fanaticism (1741) as
a veiled attack on all religions, including Christianity, that spread their
gospel through the sword. He had to withdraw this play from
production at the Comédie Française after three performances in
order to avoid censorship. Both Zaïre and Mohammed demonstrate
the need for rulers to separate religion from the power of the state; the
plays suggest that only a virtuous monarch might be able to free
humanity from the thrall of religious intolerance.
Like other philosophes, Voltaire believed that the rational and
progressive values of the French Enlightenment could lead all of
humankind out of superstition and misery. Indeed, many educated
people in Europe spoke of the eighteenth century as an “Age of
Enlightenment” and foresaw inevitable progress – in the economy,
science, religion, the law, and even in governance – for the future.
They based their hopes on the scientific and philosophical advances
from the previous century, the appearance of rational discourse in
public affairs, and on the growing prosperity for some Europeans in
the 1700s.
Voltaire’s confidence in Enlightenment values helped him to
succeed as a dramatist and polemicist, but they also left several of his
plays open to the charge of ethnocentrism. With little interest in
Chinese theatre, Voltaire adapted a Yuan zaju (see Chapter 4),
translated initially by a Jesuit missionary, as The Orphan of China for
the French stage in 1755. Although hailed as the first Chinese play to
appear in any European language, The Orphan of China deleted the
songs, changed the verse structure, and telescoped the plot sequence
to comply with neoclassical rules. In Voltaire’s play, Genghis Khan has
recently conquered China, but has also fallen in love with a beautiful
Chinese woman. Through her influence, the conqueror decides to
spare the life of a royal Chinese orphan, despite the political risks,
because nature has taught him tolerance and love. Voltaire believed
that established religion undercut morality; in the absence of
Christianity and other religions, he held that natural morality would
triumph. In The Orphan of China, Voltaire altered a traditional Chinese
play to preach what he believed was a universal human value.
The philosophes hoped that such plays and similar reformist efforts
could convince European rulers to set aside many of their policies and
abide by rational notions of public morality. In brief, Voltaire and the
philosophes tried to use the power of print and performance to turn the
absolutist rulers of their day into enlightened monarchs. Voltaire had
lived in London as a young man and admired the limited monarchy
that was beginning to emerge in Great Britain. He tried to advance
these and other reforms at the court of Louis XV in the 1740s, but the
king and his ministers ignored him. Soon after, Voltaire accepted an
invitation from King Frederick II of Prussia to join him in Berlin. Voltaire
had corresponded with Frederick over the years and hoped that
Prussia might become a model of enlightened monarchy. Again he
was disappointed; King Frederick sponsored the arts and sciences
and supported religious toleration, but refused to give up any of his
power. Undaunted, Voltaire continued to write to the royals of Europe
with ideas for reform. He corresponded with Catherine II of Russia in
the 1760s, even after it was obvious that she was using him (and
Diderot) as convenient press agents for her consolidation of power
and for Russian expansion in Europe. In short, the Enlightenment
principles of Voltaire and the other philosophes did little directly to
change the political realities of European absolutism, at least before
the French Revolution in 1789.
Between 1789 and 1792, French revolutionaries turned many
Enlightenment principles into national laws, including the
disestablishment of the Catholic Church in France, which Voltaire had
fought for nearly all of his adult life. Although theatrical neoclassicism,
including the plays of Molière, enjoyed a brief resurgence in the 1790s,
the turmoil of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars that followed
rechanneled the broader cultural energies that had sustained
neoclassicism from the 1500s to the 1720s.
Summary
The absolute monarchs of Europe encouraged two very different
styles of dramatic theatre and opera between 1600 and 1770 –
Baroque aesthetics and neoclassical restraint. Initially a product of the
Renaissance and print culture, neoclassicism had helped many artists
to move past the legacies of medieval entertainments and to
reimagine how theatre might better serve the needs of elite cultures
eager to embrace a new orderliness in their lives. Nonetheless,
European rulers favored the power and playfulness of Baroque
masques and operas for most of the 1600s. Despite challenges from
Baroque allegories and carnivalesque entertainments, theatrical
neoclassicism reached the pinnacle of its cultural success in the plays
of Molière, Racine, and Dryden between 1660 and 1680. Later, in the
hands of the Roman Academy and Metastasio, neoclassicism
mustered enough cultural prestige to reform some the excesses of
Baroque opera. If we can speak of a tragic flaw in the history of
neoclassicism, however, it was its marriage to political absolutism.
After 1720, despite the continuing power of neoclassicism in the
reformist plays of Voltaire and others, theatrical neoclassicism was
doomed to go the way of absolute monarchy in Europe.
*
Part II Works cited

Other consulted resources and additional readings for Part

II are listed on the Theatre Histories website.
Audio-visual resources
Commedia dell'arte
The National Theatre offers a series of informational and instructional
videos on the history, art of, and training for commedia performance.
Visit <http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/backstage/commedia-
dellarte> for more information.
Kunqu
“Kunqu: The Mother of All Chinese Drama” short introduction and
except from Peony Pavilion <https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=qNGUhRTfBhE>.
Japanese theatre
See listings in Part I for overall material on classical Japanese theatre
(nō, kyōgen, kabuki, and bunraku). Many of these include all or
several of these genres. Specific material for kabuki and bunraku
follows.
Kabuki
Japanese Theatre 3: Kabuki: 13 minute introduction with excellent
excerpts from plays and commentary
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3IHdm2Tf8g>.
Ennosuke III: Kabuki Actor: a brilliant documentary, made in 1984,
about an important and innovative kabuki actor (now retired), including
backstage scenes as well as excerpts of plays
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEUQNvn8EJQ>.
Bunraku
Titled “Japanese Theatre 2: Bunraku”: an introduction to bunraku with
excerpts from plays and excellent commentary, total running time 9.5
minutes: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TKt67ouaqM>.
Another excellent introduction to bunraku with excerpts and
excellent commentary, with a total running time of 4.45 minutes:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEUQNvn8EJQ>.
Printing press
The Atlas of Early Printing has animations showing how the printing
press worked and the spread of printing during the fifteenth century:
<http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu>.
There is a brief video on the history of the printing press at
<http://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/videos/mankind-the-
story-of-all-of-us-the-printing-press>, and a demonstration at
<http://youtu.be/ksLaBnZVRnM>.
Renaissance and Baroque theatre
Scene design and machinery: The Development of Scenic Spectacle:
<http://spectacle.appstate.edu/>. Dr. Frank Mohler provides reliable
explanations and basic demonstrations, with virtual moving models
(using Quicktime) of scene-changing machinery. Click “Scene
Changes” for Florimene.
Molière’s Tartuffe, video recording of the Royal Shakespeare
Company production, directed by Bill Alexander, with Antony Sher as
Tartuffe (1984).
The original Globe Theatre: informational website about its history
and design, with interesting excerpts from primary sources:
<http://www.shakespeare-online.com/theatre/globe.html>.
Books and articles
Adams, W.D. (1904) A Dictionary of the Drama, Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott.
Aercke, K.P. (1994) Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances
as Rhetorical Discourse, Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, London: Verso.
Carlson, M. (1993) Theories of Theatre, expanded edn, Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press.
Castelvetro, L. (1570 [2000]) The Poetics of Aristotle, selections, in
D. Gerould (ed.) Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts
from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel, New York:
Applause.
Eisenstein, E.L. (1979) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Erenstein, R.(1989) “The Humour of the Commedia dell’Arte,” in
C. Cairns (ed.) The Commedia dell’Arte from the Renaissance to
Dario Fo, Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press,
118–141.
Fletcher, A. (2011) Evolving Hamlet: Seventeenth-Century
English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural Selection, New York:
Palgrave.
Henke, R. (2003) Performance and Literature in the Commedia
dell’Arte, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, J.H. (1995) Listening in Paris: A Cultural History,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kimbell, D. (1991) Italian Opera, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
King, P.M. (2012) “John Heywood, The Play of the Weather,” in T.
Betteridge and G. Walker (eds) Oxford Handbook of Tudor
Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Knapp, B.L. (2000) Voltaire Revisited, New York: Twayne
Publishers.
Knight, A.E. (1983) Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French
Drama, Manchester: Manchester University Press
Lam, J.S.C. (n.d.) “Kunqu: The Classical Opera of Globalized
China: A Long Story Briefly Told.” Online. Available HTTP:
<http://www.confucius.umich.edu/uploads/HcHLEQLsVE6yBvqVb
726.pdf>.
Lopez, J. (2003) Theatrical Convention and Audience Response
in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lough, J. (1979) Seventeenth-Century French Drama: The
Background, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford
University Press.
McKendrick, M. (1989) Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Nicholson, E.A. (1993) “The Theater,” in N.Z. Davis and A. Farge
(eds) History of Women in the West, Vol. III: Renaissance and
Enlightenment Paradoxes, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 295–
314.
Parker, A.A. (1971) The Approach to the Drama of the Spanish
Golden Age, London: Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils.
Peters, J.S. (2000) Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text,
and Performance in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sayer, J. (2006) Jean Racine: Life and Legend, Bern: Peter Lang.
Shively, D.H. (2002) “Bakufu versus Kabuki,” in S. Leiter (ed.) A
Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, Armonk, New York:
M.E. Sharpe.
Soufas, T.S. (ed.) (1997) Women’s Acts: Plays by Women
Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.
Waite, G. (2000) Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and
Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515–
1556, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Theatre and Performance in Periodical
Print Cultures
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-10

Part III: Timeline

7 Theatre and sentiment: newspapers, private lives, and the
bourgeois public sphere, 1700–1785
CASE STUDY: Censorship in eighteenth-century Japan
CASE STUDY: Theatre iconology and the actor as icon:
David Garrick
8 Nationalism in the theatre, 1760–1880
CASE STUDY: Friedrich Schiller’s vision of aesthetic
education and the German dream of a national theatre 294
CASE STUDY: Imagining a white nation: Minstrelsy and
U.S. nationalism, 1840–1870
9 Performing “progress”: From imperial display to the triumph of
realism and naturalism, 1790–1914
CASE STUDY: Inventing Japan: The Mikado and Madama
Butterfly
CASE STUDY: Ibsen’s A Doll House: Problems in Ibsen’s
problem play
10 New media divide the theatres of print culture, 1870–1930
CASE STUDY: Retailing glamor in the Ziegfeld Follies
CASE STUDY: Strindberg and “The Powers”
Part III: Works cited
Part III Timeline

Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and

Performance Communication Economics

1644– Qing dynasty,

1912 China
c.1650 Introduction of
chariot-and-
pole scenery
system
c.1650- Enlightenment era in
c.1800 Europe
1653– Chikamatsu
1724 Monzaemon,
playwright
1656– Ferdinando
1743 Galli Bibiena,
scenic
designer
1660 English
Restoration;
reign of
Charles II (to
1685)
1662 Re-opening of
theatres in
England;
women begin
to play female
roles
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1662- Neoclassicism
c.1800 in England,
Germany,
Russia
1670– William
1729 Congreve,
playwright
1670s Beginnings of
the aragoto
style of kabuki
acting, Japan
c.1675- Height of
c.1800 Atlantic slave
trade
1680 Comédie
Française
founded,
France
1685– Johann Sebastian Bach,
1750 composer
1694– Voltaire,
1778 playwright and
writer
1697– William Hogarth, artist
1764
c.1700- Sentimental
c.1750 drama in
England and
France
1702 First daily newspaper,
Daily Courant, England
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1705– Farinelli, singer

1782
1707– Carlo Goldoni,
1793 playwright
1709– The Tatler and The
1712 Spectator, English
periodicals
1712– Jean-Jacques
1778 Rousseau, writer
1717– David Garrick,
1779 actor
1729– Gotthold
1781 Ephraim
Lessing,
playwright and
dramaturg
1732– Pierre-Augustin
1799 Caron
Beaumarchais,
playwright
1737 Licensing Act
imposes
censorship on
drama in
England;
censorship
continues until
1968
1741– Ichikawa
1806 DanjiïoV, actor
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1749– Johann
1832 Wolfgang von
Goethe,
playwright
1756– composer
1791 (many operas)
1759– Friedrich
1805 Schiller,
playwright
c.1760- Industrial
c.1830 Revolution
c.1760- Rise of
c.1880 nationalism in
Europe,
North
America, and
South
America
1767– Hamburg
1769 National
Theatre
1770– Ludwig van Beethoven,
1827 composer
1775– American
1783 Revolutionary
War
c.1780- Romantic era
c.1870
1781 Immanuel Kant, Critique
of Pure Reason
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1789 French
Revolution
c.1790 Beginnings of
jingju (Beijing
Opera)
c.1800 Ta’ziyeh,
Muslim
performance
c.1800- Melodrama in
c.1900 Europe and the
U.S.
c.1800- Development of steam-
c.1900 powered railways and
ships in Europe and
North America enables
faster trans- and
intercontinental
communication
1807 Georg W.F. Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit
1813– Richard
1883 Wagner,
composer
(many operas)
1826– Georg II, the
1914 Duke of Saxe-
Meiningen,
producer-
director
1828– Henrik Ibsen,
1906 playwright
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1830 U.S. begins

removing
Native
Americans to
western parts
of North
America
1830– French
1962 colonial rule
in North and
West Africa,
Southeast
Asia, and
elsewhere
c.1830 Beginnings of modern
photography
1833 U.K.
abolishes
slavery
1833– Edwin Booth,
1893 actor
c.1835- Minstrel shows
c.1940
1837 Commercial telegraph
1840 Modern
women’s
suffrage
movement
begins
1844– Friedrich Nietzsche,
1900 philosopher
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1844– Sarah
1923 Bernhardt,
actor
1845– Major U.S.
1853 expansion
westward
1848– Revolutions
1849 throughout
Europe
1848– British rule in
1947 India
1849– August
1912 Strindberg,
playwright
c. 1850 Rise of realist
stage settings,
directors, and
playwrights
c.1850 Copyright laws begin to
be passed; enforcement
difficult
c.1850- Rise of realism
c.1900 in drama, stage
design, and
directing
c.1850- Variety shows
c.1960 (e.g., music
hall, vaudeville,
revues)
1851 First World Fair
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1854 External and

internal
pressures
force Japan
to open to
foreign trade
1856– George
1950 Bernard Shaw,
playwright
1858– André Antoine,
1943 director
1859 Charles Darwin, On the
Origin of Species
1860– Anton
1904 Chekhov,
playwright
c.1860- Impressionism in
c.1925 painting
1861– U.S. Civil War
1865
1862– Adolphe Appia,
1928 stage designer
1863– Konstantin
1938 Stanislavsky,
director
1864– Kawakami
1911 Otojiro actor-
playwright
1867 Karl Marx, Capital vol. I
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1867– Luigi
1936 Pirandello,
playwright
1868 Meiji
Restoration in
Japan
c.1870- Rise of the
c.1900 director
1871 Charles Darwin, The
Descent of Man
1872– Kawakami
1946 Sadayakko,
actor
1872– Edward
1966 Gordon Craig,
theatre theorist
1876 Electric telephone
Phonograph
1877– Isadora Duncan, dancer
1927
1879 Electric light bulb
c.1880- Avant-garde
c.1900 theatre, first
generation
1880– “Scramble for
1914 Africa”:
European
powers divide
Africa among
themselves
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1881- Naturalist
C.1914 movement
1881– Pablo Picasso, artist
1973
1882– Igor Stravinsky,
1971 composer
1884– First Sino-
1885 Japanese
War
1885 Automobile
1886– Matsui
1919 Sumako, actor
1887– Théâtre Libre
1896
1889- Symbolist
C.1930 theatre
1895 First public motion
picture screening, France
1895 Radio
C.1895- Shimpa
C.1930
1898 Spanish-
American
War
1898- Moscow Art
Theatre
(various name
changes after
1932)
1900 Sigmund Freud, The
Interpretation of Dreams
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1903 First successful airplane

1904 Vacuum tube: beginning
of electronics
1904 Sigmund Freud, The
Psychopathology of
Everyday Life
1909- Shingeki
C.1910- Cubism in art
C.1925
C.1910- Avant-garde
C.1930 theatre, second
generation
1914– The Great
1918 War (aka the
First World
War)
1914- Takarazuka
Revue
c.1915- Jazz
Introduction: Theatre for bourgeois civil society
Tobin Nellhaus
During the period spanning roughly 1700–1930, the Western world
underwent profound transformations. For two millennia, merchants,
tradesmen, manufacturers, and various types of professionals had
only modest social and economic power and virtually no cultural
influence. Often they were the butt of humor, such as the
unintelligible lawyers and quack physicians of commedia dell’arte
(see Chapter 4) and the ridiculous would-be aristocrat of Molière’s
The Bourgeois Gentleman. Because they lived mainly in the urban
centers, this social class was called the bourgeoisie, derived from a
French word for “city.” (The term “capitalists” refers to part of the
bourgeoisie: the owners of assets used to create private profits, such
as industrialists and financiers.) But starting in the seventeenth
century, the bourgeoisie became increasingly affluent and started
exercising political power. In England, their rise to power was
achieved by Parliament progressively whittling away at the monarch’s
rule via legislation, starting in 1689; elsewhere it occurred violently,
most conspicuously in the American Revolution of 1775– 1783, and
the French Revolution of 1789–1799. By the nineteenth century the
bourgeoisie was politically ascendant throughout Europe and North
America. Absolutism reached its end, and the nation-state came into
being.
A development within print culture played a pivotal role in this
upheaval. During the seventeenth century, there were various efforts
to establish regular newspapers (published weekly or every few
days), but these attempts were short-lived. Around 1700, the growth
of business and transportation networks made daily newspapers
sustainable. As Chapter 7 explains, the development of reliable
periodical publication had deep cultural, social, and political effects.
The most salient was the formation of what philosopher and social
theorist Jürgen Habermas (1989) described as the social and political
“public sphere” and historian Benedict Anderson (1991)
conceptualized as the “imagined community”: the unification of a
people, or more precisely a country’s bourgeoisie, into a political
identity – a nation. Anderson described nations as “communities”
because within their borders, their members were portrayed as
equals; but they were “imagined” communities because individuals
could never know or even hear about everyone in the nation.
Newspapers built nationhood because they put a country in
conversation with itself and provided an image of the country as a
whole.
The first page of the first issue of The Spectator, 1711.

Source: Hulton Archive/Culture Club/Getty Images.

The shift from purely oral to literate culture and the later rise of print
culture involved new technologies; this time, however, dramatic
changes in politics and culture arose through a change in how the
existing technology was used. Print culture now possessed two main
forms: the book and the periodical. Chapter 7 describes how theatre
in the Western world participated in these eighteenth-century
developments. Sometimes the theatre satirized people and activities
which threatened to undermine the premise of equality within the
public sphere. But more often, it sought to foster a sense of fellow-
feeling (termed “sentiment”) among people – the spirit of the public
sphere’s opposite, the private sphere. Together the public and private
spheres define bourgeois society. Theatre was increasingly
recognized as a profession, and actors could be lionized as public
figures and their techniques studied. Yet “low” forms of entertainment
also thrived, much to the consternation and scorn of the bourgeoisie.
Nationhood was quickly, often simultaneously, accompanied by
nationalism. Nationalism asserts that only those people born within a
geographic region have the right to govern it, and they must be
independent of “foreign” powers. Nationalism is complex, and
Chapter 8 distinguishes between three kinds. The earliest, which
expanded the ideas guiding the early eighteenth-century public
sphere, emphasized Enlightenment ideals of equal rights and rational
discourse. Ironically, these genial ideals became fodder for two
revolutions. The American Revolutionary War joined separate British
colonies to produce the United States under a constitutional
democracy. (Interestingly, one of the revolution’s leaders was a
newspaper publisher and editorialist: Benjamin Franklin.) However, in
the French Revolution, years of political turmoil culminated in a coup
led by Napoleon Bonaparte, who soon proclaimed himself emperor
and launched a series of wars in a quest to rule Europe. The second
form of nationalism focused on the supposed native characteristics of
the land and its people’s spirit, which were shaped by their history –
both its glories and tragedies. This cultural nationalism rebuffed the
universality claimed by the Enlightenment in favor of each country’s
uniqueness. But in some cases it putrefied into racial nationalism, the
third type, which replaced unity through shared territorial history with
unity through shared genealogy or “blood.” Implicitly undermining the
nation-state itself, racism denied the rights of some of the country’s
residents and sought to unite members of a “ruling race” within an
imagined community of common racial descent. As a result, the
pursuit of equal rights that had fueled eighteenth-century revolutions
was sometimes ousted by an ideology of superiority which, well into
the twenty-first century, could erupt into state-sanctioned genocides
and racial or ethnic civil wars. Chapter 8 traces the rise of these three
nationalisms and theatre’s place within them, such as national
theatres, Romanticism, melodrama, and minstrel shows.
Napoleon’s campaign to conquer Europe was a form of
imperialism. Imperialism – the formation of empires controlled by a
central power – has been part of history for millennia. In modern
Europe it began in earnest with the absolutist monarchies discussed
in Chapter 6. The Spanish conquest of the Americas during the
sixteenth century is an example. Starting in the eighteenth century,
imperialist expansion was increasingly tied to capitalism; in the
nineteenth century, driven forward by industries’ demands for raw
materials and foreign trade, European imperialism massively
intensified. Ideologies of bestowing civilization upon “backward”
people played a role as well. By the early twentieth century, the
British Empire ruled about a fifth of the world’s population and a
quarter of its land. With these expansions of power came complex
attitudes toward foreign cultures, including paternalism, fear, and
exoticism. Chapter 9 describes some manifestations of the West’s
imperialist fascination with (and terror of) foreign cultures, such as
World Fairs which exhibited “specimens” of non-Westerners, and
theatrical performances which showcased the sometimes frightening,
sometimes appealing character of foreign peoples.
During the same period, in China – another huge but much older
empire, with a quite different social structure – this process was
inverted. Far from being intrigued by the provincial cultures, the upper
classes in the urban centers at first disdained them. The lower
classes, however, were captivated by the unfamiliar performances
brought by touring companies. Eventually several genres of
provincial performance fused and established an enduring form –
jingju, often called Beijing Opera – that slowly gained upper-class
acceptance.
While the modern nation came into being in the late eighteenth
century, an Industrial Revolution also began. Steam-powered
machines increasingly replaced the hands that produced
commodities. Over the course of the nineteenth century, industrial
capitalism expanded throughout the Western world and became the
dominant economic system. Railways connected cities within and
between countries; steamers shipped goods, raw materials, and
people all over the world; electric power started to light the cities.
Industrialists profited handsomely while also bringing significant
improvements to urban life – but the working class found themselves
stripped of control over their existence and lived hand to mouth,
working 12 or more hours a day, six or seven days a week. Whole
families, including children, had to work for their meager living, amid
highly dangerous conditions where even death was not uncommon.
Not surprisingly, the bourgeoisie’s industrial revolution was soon met
with workers’ labor unions and efforts at political revolution. Many
workers sought a socialist economy, in which manufacturing would
be taken over by the laborers and would produce goods to serve
needs rather than profit. German philosopher and economist Karl
Marx, a major advocate of socialism, developed highly influential (and
to the bourgeoisie, highly subversive) analyses of how capitalism
operated and how economic classes struggled for power across
history. In the early twentieth century, the pressures of nationalism,
capitalism, and imperialism exploded into a world war, followed by a
revolution in Russia (eventually creating the Soviet Union) and a
failed one in Germany.
These economic and political developments form the background
to late nineteenth-century European theatre and its two major
legacies. One was the producer-director, who wrested financial and
artistic control from the actors. This was the first version of the
modern director, who determined how (and often, by whom) a play
would be performed, and insisted that actors and designers adhere to
those ideas. Although the theatre was certainly no factory, such
rigidity and centralization of decision-making was similar to the
control that factory bosses had over their workers.
From the beginning, producer-directors pursued aesthetic realism
– the second major legacy of the nineteenth century, which was
already developing at the middle of the century. Realism fit well with
the concept of a public sphere that was rooted in periodical print
culture. It also dovetailed with the scientific objectivity needed in
designing machinery and pursuing profits. Before long, realism was
adopted in North America and Japan. Chapter 9 discusses the major
varieties of nineteenth-century realism; more would develop in the
twentieth century.
At the end of the century, alternatives to realism began to arise.
They substituted the objectivity assumed by realism with subjective
or spiritual perspectives (a good fit with the private sphere), and they
rejected realistic aesthetics. Realism and the early “avant-gardes”
overlapped chronologically so closely that some realist playwrights
also wrote in the alternative genres. Chapter 10 surveys the highly
diverse first-generation avant-garde movements that developed in
the early twentieth century. A cultural separation between
mainstream and avant-garde theatre began to take shape, an early
twentieth-century legacy continuing today.
The proliferation of stylistic genres had its roots in both book and
periodical print culture, and also (as Chapter 10 observes) in the
impact of photography, telephones, and phonographs – heralds of
new forms of communication. Yet the diversity didn’t reflect unfettered
imagination: the fact that playwrights could readily switch from an
objective to a subjective style hints that there were hidden
connections between realism and its opposition. As discussed in
Chapter 5, early print culture positioned the individual as the source
of perception and knowledge. The seventeenth-century scientific
revolution was founded on individuals taking the evidence of their
own senses or their own reason as the source of verifiable truth. By
the late seventeenth century, science’s use of sense experience had
ripened into a philosophy called empiricism; Descartes’ focus on
reason developed into rationalism. However, both philosophies had
an objective cast: objects are perceived and logic is conducted by
individuals, but they are independent of individuals as such – anyone
else can check their accuracy.
But as we’ve noted, periodical print culture – an organ of bourgeois
society – created a division between a public sphere and a private
sphere. The latter was the realm of the individual’s home and heart,
faith and feeling, and only the individual could attest to his or her own
emotions and beliefs. With this division, a true contrast between the
objective and the subjective arose – a polarity founded on the
bedrock of individualism. The notion that individual experience was
the foundation for all knowledge (whether that experience consisted
of objective observations or subjective perceptions) provided the
fundamental contrast between the realisms and the avant-gardes.
This polarity suggests one reason why a dramatist might readily
switch from writing highly realist plays to symbolically oriented drama:
in many ways, they are the sides of a single coin.
Both the realistic and the avant-garde styles arose out of efforts to
define and represent truth, whether that truth was objective or
subjective. For example, in 1881 French playwright Émile Zola wrote
that “environments, the study of which has transformed the sciences
and humanities, must inevitably assume an important place in
theatre,” because “environment should determine character” (Zola
1881: 365). Likewise, the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, considered a
Symbolist, wrote in 1896 that “in the ordinary drama, the
indispensable dialogue by no means corresponds to reality; and it is
just those words that are spoken by the side of the rigid, apparent
truth . . . that conform to a deeper truth” (Maeterlinck 1897: 112).
There is yet a third characteristic shared by the realists and the
avant-gardes, closely tied to their concern with the presentation of
truth on stage: a strong ambivalence toward theatricality, and
sometimes even outright antitheatricality. One advocate of realism
held that the goal of presenting environments in minute detail is to
replace theatrical artifice with “a near-perfect reality, in other words,
to drive the ‘Theatre’ gradually from the theatre” (quoted in K.
Williams 2001: 285). Within the early avant-gardes, hostility to
theatricality was sometimes equally strong. In 1907, avant-gardist
Edward Gordon Craig complained that the actor’s inescapable,
unreliable body and emotions eliminated the possibility of exact
reproduction and perfection, and so he proclaimed, “The actor must
go, and in his place comes the inanimate figure – the
Übermarionette,” which he described as a “symbolic creature” (1911:
81, 84). Citing Plato, he criticized the actor as merely “an imitator” who
“cannot convey the spirit and essence of an idea,” but only “a
facsimile of the thing itself” (63). The premises born within literate
culture two thousand years earlier about the nature of truth and
representation still generated misgivings about theatre.
The director, realism, avant-gardes, and antitheatricality within
theatre are still with us. As we will see in Part IV, during the twentieth
century all of them would undergo alterations, sometimes putting into
question the idea of individualism and the supposed opposition
between theatre and truth. Nevertheless they persist, shaping the
majority of theatre today. The path from sentimentalism to realism
and avant-gardes presented in Part III is the story of contemporary
theatre’s beginnings.
*
Theatre and sentiment: newspapers,
private lives, and the bourgeois public
sphere, 1700–1785
Tobin Nellhaus
Contributors: Bruce McConachie
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-11
As the Introduction to Part III observed, European print culture
began to change around 1700 with the publication and wide
dissemination of newspapers, magazines, journals, and other
periodicals. Unlike books, which were printed “for the ages,”
periodicals were “of the day,” like blogs and Twitter, intended to bring
current news to a broad readership with common interests. Where
early book culture generally helped to legitimize absolutism,
periodical print culture after 1700 enabled the new bourgeoisie to
solidify its values and to enlarge the arena of public discourse.
Periodical culture also promoted a sense of private life that helped to
underwrite a “sentimental” theatre embracing the morality and
feelings of the emerging middle class. We open this chapter by
discussing the connection between the periodical press and
sentiment, which will allow us to explore the development of
sentimental drama.
That was not the only type of theatre to thrive during the eighteenth
century. Particularly in England, satire played an important role in both
the theatrical offerings and the political discourse of the day. In
addition, throughout Europe forms of performance arose that attracted
all classes, especially the lower ones. Many of these popular genres
involved music and song, which heightened their appeal and, perhaps
more importantly, sometimes allowed the theatres to escape the
stranglehold that the officially sanctioned theatres had through their
monopolies over tragedy and comedy. In England, however, popular
performance often included political satire so biting that a system of
censorship was imposed which lasted until 1968.
 In Japan, too, theatre was continually scrutinized by the shogunate.
In our first case study, we discuss how the shoguns regulated kabuki
as a way to control its potential for social disruption. There were strict
limits on intermingling between actors and the public, sometimes
attended by harsh punishments for infractions, as well as censorship
on the political and moral content of kabuki performances.
By the last third of the eighteenth century, sentimentalist thought
developed an extreme form more deeply opposed to rationalism,
especially the Enlightenment rationalism that dominated continental
thought and drama. These ideas particularly influenced German
drama.
Most of the plays of eighteenth-century Europe did not survive the
test of time, even if they were enormously popular in their own day.
Often what captured the audiences was the power of the acting.
Although to us, eighteenth-century acting seems stylized and
presentational, to the audiences of the time it broke new ground in
realism. Many actors became renowned not only in their own
countries, but throughout Europe.
The most famous of all was David Garrick, the premier English actor
of the mid-eighteenth century. In the second case study, we explore
how Garrick encouraged the use of prints and even commissioned
paintings in order to strengthen his standing as a lead actor of the age
and make him a popular star.
Sentiment and periodical print culture
Although “sentiment” bears negative connotations today, many
eighteenth-century playwrights, actors, and spectators in Europe
valued sentiments for the refinement, knowledge, and moral uplift they
might provide. Sentiments were not the syrupy emotions that today we
associate with “sentimentality”: the term invoked a view of human
nature and cultured behavior. A sentimental play (or poem or novel)
could evoke feelings of sympathy, joy, and sorrow for worthy others
that allowed genteel spectators (and readers) to test the depths of
their own emotional responses and to broaden the reach of their moral
concerns. Those who embraced sentimental culture believed that
humans were innately good, and that personal and social bonds would
thrive if individuals were true to their “natural” virtues. As we shall see,
a significant school of philosophy endorsed this moral and aesthetic
point of view in the eighteenth century. Bourgeois sentimentalism
helped to drive Baroque culture out of favor and challenged
aristocratic neoclassicism in the theatre throughout Europe during the
1700s.
The culture of sentiment did not appear out of thin air: it was created
and fostered by a new type of print culture based in the periodical
press. Efforts to publish periodicals began as far back as 1600, but
most of the earliest newspapers struggled to survive and did not last
long. Generally they were published once a week or every few days,
and offered only business information or official government records.
It wasn’t until the early 1700s that urbanization, business demands,
political activity, cultural desires, city and inter-city postal systems, and
growing maritime trade made it financially and logistically feasible to
sustain daily publication, and to expand coverage to include topics
with broad appeal.
One thing periodicals did not require was any change in technology:
periodical print culture arose because people utilized the existing
technology in a new way. The development of periodical print culture
is an example of how important changes in communication practices
are not always tied to changes in communication technology.
Economic, political, and other factors play a role in changing
communication practices and ways of thinking. For their financial
survival, periodicals needed a method for sustaining interest. Books
are generally read by solitary individuals at whatever day and time is
convenient. A single printing of a book may satisfy reader demand for
decades. But newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals are
meant to be read by many people throughout a significant
geographical area, more or less at the same time, and with each new
issue. The challenge in publishing a periodical is ensuring that readers
return for subsequent issues. One way a periodical can achieve that
goal is by concentrating on a particular subject, such as ever-changing
business news, fashion, or celebrity activities; or conversely, by giving
a picture of the entire society by covering all subjects. Another way is
to create a sense of narrative, so that the reader wonders what will
happen next.
England was at the forefront in developing daily periodicals. Among
the reasons were politics and economics. In 1688 and again in 1714,
problems of religion and royal succession led Parliament to install
kings of its own choosing from the royal lineage, making absolutism
on the French model impossible. Merchants, traders, and investors
gained more power in England. The top tier of the English bourgeoisie,
who were growing rich on colonial domination, expanding domestic
markets and the international slave trade, sought a government that
would protect and expand its interests. They required daily
newspapers with important business and political news; and as their
public roles advanced, they demanded intense partisanship as well.
They and other middle-class men and women sought periodicals that
would keep them up-to-date on social affairs and culture in London,
and justify their emerging cultural values.
Social life, family, fellowship, and culture were the subjects of two
early periodicals: The Tatler, published three times a week during
1709–1711 and edited by Richard Steele (1672–1729); and The
Spectator, a daily edited by Steele, and Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
from 1711 to 1712. Despite the brief spans of their existence, they were
enormously important: often distributed in coffeehouses, issues of The
Tatler and The Spectator were read by perhaps 80,000 Londoners and
many beyond London, and frequently they were read aloud for others’
enjoyment. The two papers present superb examples of how a
periodical can unite readers across space and time, creating a social
ambience by focusing the papers on the readers themselves,
encouraging them to share the paper and eagerly anticipate what
might come next. The editors strived to create the sense of a
benevolent community among their readers. Addison and Steele
published essays advocating mutual trust and self-disclosure within
circles of families and friends, and they invited letters to the editor to
foster such a circle of affection within their readership. In contrast to
aristocratic culture, which emphasized a hierarchical order and the
public projection of social status, Addison and Steele underlined the
importance of social bonds and fellow-feeling in public
communications. Unlike today’s Us Weekly, which celebrates
celebrities, The Tatler and The Spectator were truly about “us.” As the
models for hundreds of subsequent periodicals, The Tatler and The
Spectator broadcast the principles of sentiment in the early eighteenth
century. The form as well as the content of the new periodicals thus
underwrote the legitimacy of bourgeois sentimentalism and
broadened its reach.
English sentimental culture drew on the principles of “moral sense”
philosophy, which was closely tied to Enlightenment values. Liberal
thinkers of the age distinguished their ideas from those of previous
philosophers, who had advocated absolutism. For example, in 1651
Thomas Hobbes had written that a strong monarchical government
was necessary to control the problems created by rapacious individual
interests. In contrast, in 1690 John Locke (1632–1704) – one of the
luminaries of the Enlightenment – urged that free individuals in a state
of nature might form civil governments that could channel competing
interests toward socially beneficial results. Locke, immersed in print
culture, also believed that people were like blank pieces of paper
when they were born, awaiting the “imprint” of their parents and
society.
Locke’s ideas about the association of free individuals became a
concrete reality through papers such as The Tatler and The Spectator.
These periodicals relegated politics to the margins, contained little or
no news (they even ridiculed “newsmongering”), and focused instead
on human foibles and promoted a culture of politeness. Their efforts to
form a polite society founded on personal character and sensibility
helped to create a bourgeois distinction between the public sphere
(where issues of politics, economics, and culture are debated) and the
private sphere (the realm of the home, family, and friends). The
distinction was brought into sentimental drama, and as we will see, it
was not the only theatrical genre that contributed to separating the
public and private spheres.
Later moral sense philosophers built upon Locke’s premises to
argue that humanity had an inherent sense of right and wrong and
would generally choose the right for its natural beauty and worth. A
bad environment, however, could “impress” other values on children,
they believed. According to moral sense philosopher Adam Smith
(1723–1790), all people had within them an “ideal spectator of our
sentiments and conduct” (Kramnick 1995: 287), who, awakened by
social pressure, would ensure that each person does his or her moral
duty. Like friendly conversation and the sight of strangers in distress,
watching the right play could awaken that “ideal spectator” in the mind
and steer the playgoer toward affection and beneficence. For the
moral sense philosophers, morality was inherent and natural; doing
the right thing flowed from emotional sensitivity, not abstract reason.
Sentimental drama in England
Just as periodical publication flourished earliest in England, so too did
sentimental theatre. It was in part a response to criticism of the often
racy Restoration plays. Early advocates of sentiment found temporary
allies among the Puritans. Puritan attacks on the wickedness of the
London stage increased in the 1690s, culminating in Jeremy Collier’s
(1650–1726) A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the
English Stage in 1698. Beginning with the neoclassical precept that
“the business of plays is to recommend virtue and discountenance
vice,” Collier castigated several comedies from the aristocratic
Restoration era for “their smuttiness of expression; their swearing,
profaneness, and lewd application of Scripture; their abuse of the
clergy; and their making their top characters libertines and giving them
success in their debauchery” (Collier 1974: 351–2). Collier’s attack
aroused indignation in some, struck home for others (a few
playwrights even apologized), and garnered public support that
altered playwriting. For example, one of Collier’s targets was William
Congreve (1670–1729), who published an impassioned retort; but
stifled by the changed atmosphere, after writing The Way of the World
(1700) – considered a jewel of Restoration comedy – Congreve left the
stage. Both Collier’s reproach and the playwrights’ reactions were
motivated by the rise of bourgeois culture throughout Europe. Even
before Collier’s Short View, some playwrights were already softening
Restoration cynicism and arranging sentimental endings for their
plays. In Love’s Last Shift (1696), for instance, actor-playwright Colley
Cibber (1671–1757) celebrated several characters for their inherent
goodness and featured a rakish hero, Loveless, who gladly repents of
his compulsive woman-chasing in the last act. While Cibber was
writing popular variations on this formula in the first decade of the
eighteenth century, playwright George Farquhar (1678–1707) took
several of his dramatic characters and conflicts out of London into the
more sentimental air of the English countryside.
Steele often campaigned in The Tatler and The Spectator to replace
the wittiness and eroticism of Restoration comedy with sentiment. His
play The Conscious Lovers (1722) demonstrated what he had in mind.
Its plot centers on young John Bevil, Jr., who has ensconced a
mysterious female stranger in rooms that he is paying for. However,
he promised his father that he will wed a girl of his father’s choosing.
Although Bevil loves the beautiful stranger, Indiana, whom he treats
with courteous respect, he obligingly prepares to marry his father’s
choice, Lucinda. Lucinda’s father, a rich businessman, suspects Bevil
of duplicity and investigates the relationship between Bevil and his
mysterious beauty. This sets up a recognition scene in which the
businessman discovers that Indiana is his long-lost daughter. Bevil
can now marry Indiana, who is suddenly rich, and still meet his father’s
approval. (Steele’s plot conveniently provides a suitor for Lucinda.)
Eleven years before in The Spectator, Steele had announced his
belief that “A man that is temperate, generous, valiant, chaste, faithful,
and honest, may, at the same time, have wit, humor, mirth, good
breeding, and gallantry” (The Spectator, April 28,1711, in Dukore 1974:
392). He created Bevil partly to prove his point. The Conscious Lovers,
which was wildly successful, drew sympathetic tears as well as
laughter from English audiences for the rest of the eighteenth century.
Notions of sentiment affected tragedy as well as comedy during the
1700s. Early in the century, Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) wrote several
tragedies featuring pathetic heroines that partly broke the mold of
neoclassical tragic form. With The London Merchant (1731), however,
playwright George Lillo (1693–1739) crafted a tragedy that dispensed
completely with the idealized aristocratic heroes and constraining
unities of neoclassicism. Its naïve protagonist, the apprentice George
Barnwell, is enthralled by the prostitute Sarah Millwood, who entices
him into stealing money from his bourgeois master, Thorowgood, and
later into murdering his rich uncle as well. Throughout the play, Lillo
contrasts the optimistic and benevolent sentiments of the merchant,
with Millwood’s deep-rooted resentments (based, interestingly, on her
misuse by men, providing the audience with a moment of
psychological understanding). Despite Thorowgood’s attempts to save
him, a repentant Barnwell dies on the gallows – but not before Lillo
props him up as an example of the destructiveness of unbridled
sexual passion that threatens the social stability that the merchant
economy has built. The London Merchant achieved immense
popularity and inspired several imitations. Real-life London merchants,
who expected the morality of the play to produce wholesome and
profitable results, sent their own apprentices to see the show during
the Christmas season for a century.
Watching The Conscious Lovers, The London Merchant, and other
sentimental plays, spectators generally expected to immerse
themselves in the feelings of sentimental heroes and those with whom
they sympathized. The objects of sympathetic concern in sentimental
plays ranged from slaves, to the poor, to distraught maidens, all the
way to general pity for suffering humanity. According to sentimental
aesthetics, exposure to such feelings on stage would spark a
sentimental response in the genteel viewer, who might then use this
response to improve his or her own sensitivity and morality. Like The
Tatler and The Spectator, sentimental plays sought to evoke a
benevolent community in the audience. In this manner, sentimental
drama contributed to the establishment of the bourgeois private
sphere, which along with the public sphere was a major byproduct of
periodical print culture. Book-oriented neoclassicism instead generally
kept spectators at a greater emotional distance and involved them
more typically in feelings of awe, disdain, and suspense rather than
sympathy, sorrow, and generous good humor.
The helpless heroines of sentimental drama were a far cry from the
smart, urbane women sparking the stage just a few years before. They
reflected the etiquette of the bourgeois private sphere, which
restricted women to the domain of gentle domesticity. Similarly,
women effectively vanished again from the ranks of new playwrights.
In the first decades of the 1700s, a few women had stood as
successors to Aphra Behn (discussed in chapters 4 and 6), such as
Susanna Centlivre (c.1667–1723); but after 1725, new plays by women
were rarely performed, and none would achieve popular success for
another 50 years.
In contrast with neoclassical drama, sentimental drama chose
middle-class figures rather than aristocrats as its heroes, endorsed
benevolent paternalism instead of royal absolutism for its ethics, and
emphasized empathetic responses over judgments. By the mid-
eighteenth century, the ethos of the private sphere had reconfigured
the traditional forms of tragedy and comedy on the London stage. The
neoclassical tragedies that had dominated the repertory were fading in
popularity for new tragic performances that featured more pathos and
tears, and comedies featured sententious moralizing and few laughs.
Bourgeois sentimentalism had become firmly entrenched in the
dominant culture of England.
Pantomime, satire, and censorship in England
English sentimental drama, including both comedy and tragedy,
supported the values of the rising merchant class and the minor
aristocracy, the prime constituents of the public sphere. Other types of
performance sought to entertain a broader audience, including those
at the margins of the bourgeois public sphere, such as tradesmen,
workers, soldiers, small-scale shopkeepers, and others from outside
the elite. Dances and pantomimes were the most important during the
early eighteenth century, but there were also songs, performances of
instrumental music, acrobatics, and other entertainments. Most of
these diversions were performed between acts of a play; the
pantomimes usually appeared as afterpieces.
Pantomime had originated during Roman imperial rule (see Chapter
2). It re-emerged in fifteenth-century Italy as part of the commedia
dell’arte tradition. When illegal fairground performances of commedia
were suppressed in Paris in 1702, a number of performers from the
commedia tradition sought work in London. Some of commedia’s non-
verbal comic scenes were set to music and dance, and performed with
a few of the key commedia characters in a transposed English context
as “Italian night scenes.”
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, pantomimes often had a
serious intent or segment. In 1717 the dance master at London’s Drury
Lane Theatre, John Weaver, created The Loves of Mars and Venus
featuring dancers impersonating Roman gods. It was advertised as a
“new Entertainment in Dancing after the manner of the Antient [sic]
Pantomimes” (of Rome). Rivaling it, John Rich (1692–1761), dancer,
actor, and manager at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, created his own
pantomime with characters from Roman mythology, who were
magically transformed in the second part of the performance into
characters in a knock-about comedy. Rich, known by his stage name
Lun, further developed and popularized this earliest form of British
pantomime as “harlequinades” – spectacular performances in which
the commedia character, Harlequin, magically underwent self-
transformation, or transformed the scenery with a touch of his magic
sword or wand. In the 1720s spectacle and farce became increasingly
prominent. But to appeal to every type of audience, serious scenes
based on mythology came to alternate with episodes of farce, fantasy,
or intrigue, with plenty of spectacle to go around.
The pantomimes became enormously popular, often more popular
than the plays, and they elicited plenty of complaints from the upper-
class audience, who felt they degraded the dignity of the stage. The
pantomimes also stirred intense competition between the foremost
theatres, Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Some pantomimes enjoyed long runs, and they became

a staple of London’s theatrical offerings. Although scorned by critics,
who described them as “irrational entertainments,” the pantomimes
were a major source of revenue for the theatres. In the middle of the
eighteenth century the eminent actor David Garrick (1717–1779), who
distanced himself from pantomime and even sought to undercut
Harlequin’s appeal, nevertheless produced his own pantomimes at
Drury Lane, primarily at Christmastime. It was in Garrick’s productions
that Harlequin first began to speak. His costume of various colored
patches also became a literal map for portraying his emotions.
Touching red meant love, blue was truth, yellow indicated jealousy,
and, to become invisible, Harlequin pointed to a black patch and
“disappeared” in order to work his magic. The popularity of
pantomimes never abated, and they continue in England to this day.
(To read about the later history of pantomime, see the case study
“British Pantomime” on the Theatre Histories website.)
Pantomime arose in part because theatrical licensing was allowed
to slide, allowing four unlicensed theatres to operate in London in
1730, openly competing with the two major theatres, which were Drury
Lane and (after 1732) Covent Garden. Aside from pantomimes, the
patent theatres had little interest in innovation, and the most exciting
developments were at these unlicensed theatres. The English
merchant class, which was replacing the aristocracy as the dominant
group both in the government and at London playhouses, approved of
the fairground theatres no more than the monarchy had, and tried to
shut them down, without success. By the middle of the decade, there
was regular traffic between the fairs and the London theatres. London
actors performed frequently at the fairs, and theatre managers
borrowed rope dancers and jugglers for entr’acte entertainments and
incorporated into their plays the political jibes that were common at the
fairs.
In fact political satire appeared frequently at the unlicensed
theatres. The taste for it became especially strong with the production
of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay (1685–1732). In an era
when opera meant imports from Italy, The Beggar’s Opera achieved
popular appeal by setting new words to popular songs, creating a
genre called “ballad opera.” Gay’s play also parodied sentimental
comedy, in part by up-ending the sort of characters it presented:
rather than wealthy merchants, honorable shopkeepers, and urbane
aristocrats, The Beggar’s Opera was peopled by thieves, beggars,
and prostitutes. Gay’s travesty had a political point: by inverting the
social pyramid, he implied that the upper classes were no better than
robbers, mobsters, and other social leeches. Chief among his targets
was the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole (1676–1745).
Walpole was at the opening night performance and seemed to take
the digs with good humor. But he had the play’s sequel Polly
(published 1729) banned from the stage, and later, after almost a
decade of increasingly savage theatrical attacks on his political
manipulations, he lowered the boom and rushed the Licensing Act of
1737 through Parliament. The act strengthened the censorship
exercised by the Lord Chamberlain (to whom the Master of the Revels
reported) by requiring companies to submit all scripts for approval
before performing them. It also limited to two the theatres authorized
to perform plays: Drury Lane and Covent Garden in London (which
paid sizable fees for the privilege). Requiring prior approval for all
plays put an end to these attacks on Walpole, and it also ingratiated
him with the royal family, whose troubles had led to some theatrical
jabs as well. Limiting the number of theatres had an even more drastic
effect on performance in London, since it removed all incentive for the
licensed theatres to present almost anything but tried and true older
plays and farcical afterpieces.
 Although the 1737 act drove overt satire off the stage, its restrictions
also forced some playwrights to couch their criticisms in subtler and
more psychological forms. For the most part, though, the Licensing
Act transformed London playhouses from arenas of debate and
political dissension into models of decorum and false consensus.
Walpole had succeeded in pushing the bill through primarily because
others in the governing classes also preferred censorship to derisive
laughter. English theatre’s participation in the public sphere through
satire effectively ceased until the Licensing Act was repealed in 1968.
Derisive laughter was nevertheless part of the new distinction
between the public and private spheres. As one of the main sites
where people gathered, theatre was embedded in the public sphere
and played an active role in the political discourse of the time, no less
important than the partisan editorializing that crowded the era’s
newspapers. William Hogarth (1697–1764), one of the leading artists of
the eighteenth century, was especially well known for his satirical
engravings caricaturing the politics and morals of the time. Hogarth,
who was friends with Gay, even depicted a scene from The Beggar’s
Opera in one of his paintings (Figure 7.1). Walpole showed that
although politics in the theatre can have a particularly powerful impact,
it is much easier to censor than the press. But sometimes suppression
creates interest, as Gay found when the banned Polly became a top
seller when published. Satire off stage contributed to the vitality of the
British public sphere.
Despite its short-term success, the 1737 act proved unwieldy over
time. Designed to protect Walpole and the monarchy, the act made no
provisions for theatre outside of London. Troupes and towns in the
rest of the country simply ignored its strictures. Its numerous
loopholes also allowed fairground managers and other theatre
entrepreneurs to produce plays for lower-class patrons that
encouraged a range of antisocial behavior. This led the governing
classes to pass the Disorderly Houses Act of 1751, a new strategy in
social control that lay responsibility for restraining the masses on
those who owned and operated theatres. After 1751, all places for
entertainment of any kind within a 20-mile radius of London had to
display a license that certified that the managers were liable for the
good conduct of their patrons. The local constabulary might revoke the
license if order were not maintained. Intended to cut down on the
rioting that sometimes accompanied lower-class theatre, the 1751 act
implicitly acknowledged that the Licensing Act of 1737 had not
restricted all forms of theatre in the London area. The 1751 law
admitted that it would be more effective to make managers
responsible for the behavior of popular audiences than to try to dictate
the form and content of their entertainments.

Figure 7.1A Scene from The Beggar's Opera (1729) by William Hogarth. The
painting depicts a moment in Act III, sc. 11.

Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Case Study Censorship in eighteenth-century Japan
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
If a historian of Japanese theatre with no prior knowledge of the
West suddenly discovered eighteenth-century English theatre, she
might be amazed by its uncanny parallels to kabuki of the same
period. Kabuki historian Samuel L. Leiter has noted the following,
among others. In England and Japan, theatre was a successful,
commercial business controlled primarily by actor-managers but
under strict government surveillance, including licensing only a limited
number of theatres. Theatre in both countries relied heavily on print
media to advertise – in Japan, this included both woodblock prints of
famous actors and critical commentary on kabuki (see Figure 7.2). The
repertories in both nations were non-religious, popular plays, including
many revivals, and audiences were both male and female, primarily
from the urban, merchant class with some aristocrats also attending.
Some spectators sat on the stage in both cultures; others observed
from boxes, galleries, or a pit. Both kabuki and English stages had a
front curtain, an apron extending into the audience, and complex
machinery for rapid, sometimes spectacular scene shifts. Actors in
both countries were highly paid, hugely popular stars who nonetheless
were considered socially inferior. Acting was modeled on tradition and
actors performed specialized role-types. Music and dance were often
important elements in plays. In Japan as in England, all theatres had
fairly recently been allowed to reopen after government closure, albeit
subject to careful scrutiny and censorship (Leiter 2002: 297–8).
Such parallels would remind the scholar of a key issue often noted
in this book: throughout the world, different cultures and different
theatres develop in various ways, sometimes in tandem, sometimes
sharply diverging. Of course, she would also note many factors
specific to each, such as kabuki’s hanamichi and England’s (still
relatively new) use of female actors.
Figure 7.2A kabuki actor, from an ukiyo-e woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada
(1786–1865), a pupil of Toyokuni and famous for his prints of actors and
courtesans.

© AKG-images, London.
In this case study, we focus on one aspect of Japanese theatre
history: government control and censorship of eighteenth-century
kabuki scripts. As we will see, the political and cultural situation in
Japan led to somewhat different results from those in England.
As noted in Chapter 4, kabuki’s relation to the authorities was
fraught from the start. Kabuki had always been a counter-cultural
enterprise. The government had made many attempts to suppress or
destroy it, primarily to discourage upper-class samurai and aristocrats
from mingling with lower-class merchants and virtually outcast actors.
Those who violated the laws were punished severely. An extreme
example occurred in 1714, when a raucous theatre party revealed the
nine-year love affair between the popular, handsome actor Ikushima
Shingorō (1671–1743) and Ejima, a high-ranking lady in the women’s
quarters of the shogun’s castle. Everyone who participated in the party
or the love affair was punished. Ikushima was banished to a remote
island for 18 years. Ejima was banished to another locale and her
brother (who it was felt should have controlled her) was executed. The
theatre where the party took place – the most popular of the four
licensed theatres in Edo – was demolished and its assets and those of
its owner were auctioned off. The other theatres were closed for three
months, and major actors and managers were required to state in
writing that they would abide by all laws. For the remainder of the
Tokugawa period, there were only three licensed kabuki theatres in
Edo.
Despite such measures, many samurai and aristocrats secretly
attended kabuki, sometimes in disguise. The authorities understood
that they could not completely destroy theatre. As pragmatic neo-
Confucianists, they believed that limited access was preferable to a
total ban. The government felt that “kabuki was, like prostitution, a
necessary evil. These were the two wheels of the vehicle of pleasure,
useful to assuage the people and divert them from more serious
mischief” (Shively 1955: 41). Ironically, many of the attempted
suppressions forced actors and managers to find creative ways to
circumvent the laws, ultimately enhancing the art. Examples are the
1629 ban on female actors and the subsequent 1652 ban on
handsome young males portraying females, both of which encouraged
the creative development of the onnagata. Similarly, sumptuary laws,
including restrictions and requirements for hair, wigs, and clothing/
costumes (both in and out of the theatre), were partly responsible for
the kabuki actor’s distinctive visual style. Playwrights, too, found
imaginative ways to avoid censorship.
In eighteenth-century Japan, scripts were censored only after the
play opened, since there was no equivalent to England’s Walpole or
his 1737 Licensing Act. ( Japan created an office similar to that of Lord
Chamberlain, including the power of prior restraint, in 1875.) Japanese
theatre of the time, unlike British theatre, did not attempt to satirize or
critique the government. When Japanese authorities sought to censor
scripts, it was because they presented content that was deemed
socially unacceptable or politically dangerous. For example, in 1723,
love-suicide plays (often based on actual events) were banned
because it was felt they glorified and encouraged such behavior.
Despite the ban (which lasted only a few years) and harsh
punishments for survivors of attempted love-suicides, such works
continued to be written, and actual love-suicides continued to occur.
Other forbidden subjects were overt sexuality (despite the many
references to both same-sex and heterosexual love), using the real
names of living samurai or aristocrats, and dramatizing actual events
after 1600 that involved samurai.
One method for circumventing the law was to substitute the facts
and character names in a contemporary event with those from a well-
known historical or legendary “world.” Such substitution is called
mitate. An example of how playwrights used mitate to avoid
censorship is the play Sukeroku: Flower of Edo (1713). Sukeroku is a
rowdy commoner in love with a gorgeous courtesan who refuses the
advances of an evil samurai named Ikyū. The action takes place in
Yoshiwara, Edo’s “pleasure district,” where theatre, teahouses, and
brothels were located. In Sukeroku’s danced entrance on the
hanamichi, he wears a purple headband (a color permitted only to the
upper classes), suggesting disdain for society’s rules. (For a photo of
Sukeroku’s entrance, see Chapter 4, Figure 4.11.)
Like the merchants’ ideal self, Sukeroku is brave, clever, funny, and
a great lover. However, the contemporary surface is revealed as false.
He is in disguise, and the time is not the present. He is actually one of
the Soga brothers, historical samurai who avenged their murdered
father in 1193. He typifies both the pluck of the Edo townsman and the
samurai class’s abandoned ideals. Sukeroku comically insults and
picks fights with various samurai; when the evil Ikyū finally draws his
sword, Sukeroku recognizes it as his father’s, proving that Ikyū is the
murderer. His character seems to suggest that common people, not
actual samurai, possess the values and behaviors of bushido (the
traditional “way of the samurai”) which, due to a century of peace,
seem to have been discarded by the upper classes.
Mitate is crucial in the period’s most significant example of script
censorship. The actual events took place between 1701 and 1703 and
show how deeply the public revered the concept of bushido. A young,
untutored samurai failed to bribe an elegant superior samurai, who
mercilessly taunted him until the younger man drew his sword while in
Edo castle, wounding the bully. In punishment, he was ordered to
commit seppuku (suicide by disembowelment), his lands were
confiscated, his retainers became rōnin (masterless samurai), and his
family line was to be stamped out. On January 30, 1703, his former
retainers, who had secretly plotted to avenge his death, attacked and
murdered their lord’s tormentor, aware that for this act of loyalty, they
would be executed.
Their deeds polarized society. Numerous poems and essays
glorified their act as an example of loyalty to their master and a heroic
demonstration of apparently lost ideals. Others expressed more
complex feelings. The Confucian philosopher Ogyū Sorai wrote that
because they pursued the vendetta to avenge their lord’s shame, and
because

they have followed the path of keeping themselves free from taint, their
deed is righteous. However, this deed is appropriate only to their
particular group; it amounts therefore to a special exception of the rules. .
 . . [T]hey deliberately planned an act of violence without official
permission. This cannot be tolerated under the law. . . . If [they] are
pronounced guilty and condemned to commit seppuku, in keeping with
the traditions of the samurai, the claim of the [wronged] family will be
satisfied, and the loyalty of the men will not have been disparaged.
(Keene 1971: 2–3)

Seppuku, unlike simple execution, was an honorable death. The 46

who were ordered to commit seppuku (plus the 47th, admitted to the
group posthumously after proving his loyalty) were buried in the same
graveyard as their master; their burial place remains to this day a
venerated pilgrimage site.
The rapid publication of materials dealing with the incident and
subsequent trial ensured a well-informed population. Twelve days
after the mass suicide, the first play based on the vendetta was
staged, set (like Sukeroku) in the medieval world of the Soga brothers.
Despite the substitutions, the government closed it after only three
performances. Three years later, in a new third act tacked on to an
existing play, Chikamatsu set the events in yet another historical era.
Probably because it was staged in Osaka, this production was not
closed down. It provided the standard “world” for later versions of the
tale, including the one that became definitive: the 1748 puppet play
Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, subsequently adapted
and performed as kabuki. Between 1706 and 1748, new versions were
staged almost yearly, some with differing interpretations of the
characters’ motivations, others using new, spectacular staging. As
long as the outer form did not violate the law, clever playwriting and
staging could appease the censors while pleasing the audience. Even
today, new versions continually appear, not only on stage, but as films
and even year-long television series.
Key references
Brandon, J.R., ed. and trans. (1975) Sukeroku: The Flower of Edo, in
Kabuki: Five Classic Plays, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 49–
92.
Keene, D., trans. (1971) Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal
Retainers, New York and London: Columbia University Press.
 Leiter, S.L. (2002) “From the London Patents to the Edo Sanza: A
Partial Comparison of the British Stage and Kabuki, ca. 1650–1800,” in
Frozen Moments: Writings on Kabuki, 1966–2001, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University East Asia Program, 297–320.
Shively, D.H. (1955) “Bakufu versus Kabuki,” Harvard Journal of
Asiastic Studies 18 (December), reprinted in S.L. Leiter, (ed.) (2001) A
Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
33–59.
Shively, D.H. (1978) “The Social Environment of Tokugawa Kabuki,”
Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music and Historical Content, Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1–61.
Sentiment and satire on the continent

Sentimentalism emerged on the European continent as well

as in England. French playwright Pierre Marivaux (1688–1763) injected
subtle expressions of feeling into his love comedies, most of which he
wrote in the 1720s and 1730s, although his heightened prose style kept
his plays much less sentimental than Steele’s. Nonetheless, beginning
in the 1730s French sentimental comedy, called comédie larmoyante
[koh-meh-dee LAHR-mwah-yawnt] (tearful comedy) became popular,
such as with The False Antipathy (1733) and other plays by Pierre
Claude Nivelle de la Chaussée (1692–1754). Some of these plays
were often performed for the rest of the century. The phrase “tearful
comedy” was literally true: throughout the 1700s, French audiences
loved to cry at both comedies and tragedies, and plays that failed to
elicit tears seldom received favor. Anne Vincent-Buffault observes that
the audience’s weeping served not only emotional purposes, but also
a socio-political one:
Tears shed in company sealed a kind of social pact of sensibility which
turned the theatre into a sort of political assembly. . . . In this unanimous
assembly of tears, the man whose eye remained dry . . . [was thought to]
hold himself outside not only the rules of society but those of humanity.
(1991: 68)

In the 1750s, philosophe Denis Diderot (1713–1784) urged the adoption

of “middle” genres between comedy and tragedy that would
encompass sentimental notions of morality and domesticity. As editor
and chief writer of the Encyclopédie, the first modern compendium of
knowledge and a triumph of Enlightenment culture (which valued
individual liberty and rationality), Diderot won many readers
throughout literate Europe. He argued for a type of comedy
emphasizing tears and virtues, domestic tragedy centered on
bourgeois family problems (drame), and more realistic dialogue in all
plays. Diderot’s interest in realism extended to staging as well: he was
the first to propose that there should be an imaginary fourth wall
separating the actors from the audience, requiring the actors to
perform as though there were no spectators peering in; but this idea
was not put into practice for over a century. A few drames based on
Diderot’s ideas saw production in some French theatres, but the
actors at the Comédie Française saw little in the new genre that would
advance their careers, and interest in it faded in France. Although the
country had a large bourgeoisie by the middle of the eighteenth
century, state monopolistic theatres retarded the growth of a
sentimental, bourgeois theatre in France until after the Revolution.
Consequently, despite the emergence of sentimentalism and drame,
neoclassicism and its absolutist values remained firmly entrenched in
France’s official theatres until the 1789 Revolution.
But, as in England, the royally approved theatres did not go
unchallenged. A variety of alternative genres and performance venues
began developing late in the seventeenth century at the fairgrounds in
Paris. Originally the fairs were known for coarse farces, jugglers,
pantomimes, dancers, puppeteers, and similar entertainments (the
sort of carnivalesque entertainments discussed in Chapter 6), but
theatre became increasingly popular. When the Comédie Italienne
was expelled from Paris in 1697, some of its actors probably began
performing at the fairgrounds; it’s clear that commedia dell’arte was
adapted for performance there. Soon plays were being performed in
theatre buildings fully equipped with stage machinery for scenery and
special effects.
The fairground theatres posed strong competition to the monopoly
theatres. The Comédie Française and the Opéra succeeded in closing
them down from time to time, usually by imposing restrictions against
spoken drama or the use of music. (However, when the Opéra needed
money, it lifted restrictions in exchange for payments.) The fairground
theatres soon found ways around the proscriptions, such as using
mime, monologues, marionettes, invented languages, and even by
having characters pretend to whisper into the ear of an actor, who
would then say aloud what the character had said. Perhaps the most
striking method of evading the monopoly theatres’ prohibitions aimed
to circumvent the ban on actors singing: when a song was supposed
to occur, placards were lowered from the flies with lyrics set to a
popular tune, and the audience sang the songs. The stratagem soon
developed into a new genre, opéra-comique (comic opera), which
became the most popular type of fairground theatre offering (see
Figure 7.3). The adversarial relationship with the official theatres also
formed part of the repertory: the fairground theatres produced
numerous plays about their difficulties with their rivals, and they
parodied nearly every production at the Comédie Française and the
Opéra, sometimes just days after their openings – which could only
work if much of the audience had seen the original shows. Voltaire’s
plays were skewered repeatedly, and he disdained the theatres of the
fairs. However, despite the popularity of the plays engaged in the
battle with the monopoly theatres, the majority of the plays at the
fairground theatres were fantasies, often with characters from
commedia dell’arte.
Figure 7.3Scene from a Parisian fair theatre play, The Quarrel of the Theatres,
which satirized two state-supported theatres for stealing from the fair theatres:
the Comédie Française, represented by the player on the right, and the Comédie
Italienne, represented by the player on the left, which performed the commedia
dell'arte repertoire and a mix of other works.

From Alain René Le Sage and Jacques Autreau d'Orneval, Le

Théâtre de la Foire l’Opéra Comique (1723). © Bibliothèque Nationale
de France.
The conflict between the conventional and the alternative theatres
did not lead to completely polarized encampments: like the audiences,
actors and genres crossed over between them, and several
playwrights, including Marivaux, wrote for both. Even so, the
fairground theatres held a special attraction for their audience. Their
incessant attacks on the Comédie Française and the Opéra
established the fairground theatres as contributors to a burgeoning
public sphere. There were few explicit criticisms of the monarchy and
its government, but as Derek Connon points out,
One of the pleasures for audiences in supporting the underdogs lies in
the frisson of danger in doing something that is almost illegal (and may
slip over into illegality), in getting one over on the authorities and,
ultimately, the monarch who is the source of the laws which are being
bent to breaking point. Hence, even if the original reasons for the ban on
these theatres is not fundamentally political, the reaction of audiences to
it certainly is.
(2012: 191)

In the mid-1700s, Paris’s fairgrounds started to decline, and the

theatres began seeking alternative locations. In the early 1750s a new
area for popular entertainment developed in the north of Paris on the
Boulevard du Temple, closer to the fairground theatres’ audience. The
locale arose with cabarets, cafés, and marionette booths; soon trained
animals, acrobats, and other types of street performance arrived as
well. Eventually full-length plays were performed there. In 1759, a
permanent theatre was built on the Boulevard; many more soon
followed. Over the course of the eighteenth century, these boulevard
theatres became home to middle-class dramas of various types.
 Italian theatre in the early eighteenth century was in a contradictory
state. On the one hand, Venice (the center of theatre in Italy) was able
to sustain more theatres than either London or Paris. On the other
hand, theatrical performance was still dominated by commedia
dell’arte, which had long fed theatre everywhere else in Europe, but
had deteriorated at home, unable to create new situations or lazzi.
Sentimental drama did not arise in Venice, although French
sentimental plays eventually reached there in translation during the
1770s. But two major playwrights – who were mutual antagonists –
brought new life to the Venetian stage. Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793)
accommodated commedia in some respects (he was employed by
various commedia companies), but at a fundamental level he
transformed it. His early play The Servant of Two Masters (1745),
perhaps his best-known work outside Italy, is in the commedia style
and was initially written as a scenario. But breaking from commedia
traditions, Goldoni later eliminated improvisation and insisted that the
actors work from the script. These changes switched priority from the
actor to the playwright. In pursuit of a more intimate acting style, in
1754 he eliminated masks from his plays altogether. Like reformers
elsewhere in Europe, he also banished spectators from the stage.
Most of Goldoni’s work centered on middle-class characters and
values. His greatest innovation was his attention to everyday life,
introducing a sense of realism and observation. Many of his plays
focused on a new, bourgeois sense of morality which sometimes
challenged his audience. An unusual number of his lead characters
were female.
Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) vehemently resisted Goldoni’s innovations
and passionately defended the older approach to performance. His
earliest play, The Love for Three Oranges (1761), used a fantastical
fable in order to satirize Goldoni. Placing fantasy on stage also
contrasted with Goldoni’s turn toward everyday life, so Gozzi’s next
several plays continued in that vein. Yet despite his reactionary
approach to theatre, soon even Gozzi adopted some of Goldoni’s
reforms, such as requiring actors to work from the script and (at his
actors’ insistence) removing some of the masks. Gozzi’s plays
outstripped the popularity of Goldoni’s for a time, which probably
contributed to Goldoni’s decision to leave Italy in 1762, but they soon
faded from fashion. Several, however, were later adapted into operas
and new scripts. In the early twentieth century Gozzi’s plays inspired
many anti-realist playwrights and directors.
The turn to sentimentalism in Germany came with the popularity
and influence of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). Lessing was
one of the first writers in Germany to make his living from his pen and
he gained success as much from his criticism as his plays. Influenced
by Diderot, he advocated domestic tragedy in his writings in the 1750s
and used these ideas for his middle-class play, Miss Sara Sampson
(1755). By 1759, Lessing was attacking Gottsched (see Chapter 6) and
French neoclassicism, and advocating Shakespeare as a better model
for German theatre. The literary advisor for the Hamburg National
Theatre (discussed in Chapter 8, where we address nationalism),
Lessing used his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–1769) to offer a non-
neoclassical interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics and to urge the writing
and production of more sentimental plays. He put this criticism into
practice with Minna von Barnhelm (1767), a romantic comedy that
unites lovers from two sides of a recent war that divided Germany.
Like his model, Diderot, Lessing was critical of aristocratic privilege
and morality and attacked both in his next influential drama, Emilia
Galotti (1772). Although Lessing did not intend Nathan the Wise (1779)
for the stage, his dramatic demonstration of the wisdom of tolerance
and understanding among representatives of Judaism, Islam, and
Christianity became one of his most widely produced plays in the
German theatre. Together with other playwrights and companies after
1750, Lessing had helped to ensure that German drama would
gravitate more toward sentimentalism than neoclassicism for the rest
of the century.
A German composer, Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714?–1787), was
primarily responsible for turning opera seria away from the
neoclassicism of Metastasio and toward European sentimentalism.
Like many composers of his time, Gluck traveled to Italy to learn the
rudiments of operatic dramatic form and used the libretti of Metastasio
for several of his early operas. Influenced by French opéra-comique
and by a desire to free serious opera from the weight of recitative,
Gluck broke with Metastasian tradition in 1762 with the production of
Orfeo ed Euridice. When composing for the Paris Opéra in the 1770s,
Gluck also challenged the domination of operatic castrati, writing lead
roles for tenors instead of castrati in a few of his works. According to
several Parisian operagoers, Gluck’s gloomy and intense operas
caused a flood of welcome and sentimental tears, affecting everyone
from the king to the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Although generally more neoclassical than sentimental in his style,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) benefited from the freedom in
operatic composition that Gluck’s reforms had effected. Born in
Salzburg, Mozart worked there as a court musician for most of the
1770s, finally fleeing to Vienna in 1781, where his operatic career took
off. His first production at the court of Emperor Joseph II, The
Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), an opera buffa with a German
libretto, was an enormous success. Mozart began collaborating with
court librettist Lorenzo da Ponte in 1786; two of their works together,
The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787), continue to be
enjoyed by operagoers today for their compelling drama and
emotional range. Through his travels as a child prodigy, his amazing
musical memory, and his fluidity and daring in composition, Mozart
was able to weave into his mature operas a range of styles from the
eighteenth century – the Baroque power and contrapuntal techniques
of Bach and Handel, the optimism and charm of Metastasio and his
composers, Haydn’s astringent clarity and sinuous surprises, and the
emotional fervor of Gluck and his imitators – that was unsurpassed in
its time. Mozart’s final opera, The Magic Flute (1791), demonstrated
that he could also use German folk tunes and fairy tales to brilliant
effect.
Changes and challenges in sentimentalism
In the last third of the eighteenth century, some English playwrights
grew impatient with sentimentalism’s tepid humor and began to write
“laughing comedies,” the first significant departure from
sentimentalism’s velvet grip. Nonetheless, even comic playwrights
who disliked sentimentalism still bowed to most of its precepts. Oliver
Goldsmith (c.1730–1774), for example, provides much robust humor in
She Stoops to Conquer (1773), but arranges a sentimental ending for
his lovers. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), parliamentarian,
theatre manager, and playwright, tweaks the excesses of sentiment
and derides those who pose behind a sentimental mask in The School
for Scandal (1777). But he comes down firmly on the side of
paternalistic benevolence and morality in wedlock. A few women were
finally able to provide plays that proved highly popular, such as
Hannah Cowley’s (1743–1809) The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), which
joined the drive for “laughing” romantic comedies.
Although the French Revolution would shatter genteel
sentimentalism irreversibly in Europe, there were several deep cracks
in the sentimental vase before 1789. At one extreme of eighteenth-
century sentimentalism was the cult of sincerity that drew its ideas
from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In his writings, Rousseau
criticized Enlightenment rationalism and celebrated an image of
natural, sincere, authentic humanity, unencumbered by social masks.
These ideas eventually led Rousseau to damn the theatre because
acting necessarily trades in what he took to be duplicitous role-
playing. Despite Rousseau’s antitheatrical prejudices, his ideas
carried wide influence in the theatre and culture of his time, both
before and after the Revolution, and shaped the work of several
playwrights.
Rousseau’s extreme version of sentimentalism fired the imagination
of a young generation of German playwrights, loosely grouped
together as the Storm and Stress movement. Friedrich Maximilian
Klinger’s (1752–1831) Sturm und Drang (1776), which posed
Rousseau’s natural, sentimental humanity against the restrictions of
rationality, gave the movement its name (Figure 7.4). Not all in this
rebellious generation of playwrights embraced Rousseau, but most
rejected Lessing’s synthesis of sentimental and Enlightenment values
and challenged conventional social norms. Recognizing the natural
sexual desires of young soldiers, for example, Jakob M.R. Lenz’s
(1751–1792) The Soldiers (1776) advocated state-sponsored
prostitution. Although many Storm and Stress plays, including The
Soldiers, never made it past German censorship into performance,
several circulated in print. Three plays from this movement, however,
gained some productions and are still in the standard German
repertory: Goetz von Berlichingen (1773) by Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749–1832); and The Robbers (1782) and Fiesko (1783) by
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). We will discuss Goethe and Schiller
further in Chapter 8.
Rousseau’s ideas were important to several of the Storm and Stress
playwrights, but their plays also reflected the political situation in
Germany – which was that there was no “Germany” at this time. There
were over 300 German-speaking principalities, autonomous cities, and
bishoprics, but they lacked the political unity that defines a nation.
“National” theatres such as Hamburg’s strove to create a nation or the
idea of a nation, not to represent it. Under King Frederick II (called
Frederick the Great, 1712–1786), Prussia began seizing large swaths
of German-speaking lands, many of them scattered about toward the
west. Frederick both militarized and bureaucratized his lands,
beginning the formation of a modern state. His rule did not extend to
most of what is now Germany: Hamburg, for example, was not in
Prussian control. Prussia was not the nation “Germany,” it was one of
many German lands. Despite his support for Enlightenment values
and his personal military valor, Frederick didn’t embody an ideal to the
Storm and Stress playwrights: most of them despised his despotism,
regimented governance, and power politics. Storm and Stress plays
often sought to develop German nationhood as a feeling (not as a
state), with a culture that didn’t imitate French neoclassicism, but
instead developed on its own terms. Rousseau’s ideas of
untrammeled genius dovetailed with these goals; in drama, the
protagonist’s strength of character and underlying freedom were
essential.
 Another German playwright, August Friedrich von Kotzebue (1761–
1819), avoided the dramatic and social excesses of the Storm and
Stress movement, but popularized its rejection of rationalism and its
general embrace of Rousseau. Kotzebue’s first hit, Misanthropy and
Repentance (1787) – a pot-boiler stuffed with Rousseauian
sentiments, pathetic situations, comic relief, romantic love, and moral
didacticism – set the formula for his later successes. Several of
Kotzebue’s more than 200 plays retained popularity for the next 70
years in translations and adaptations in Russia and the United States
as well as in Western Europe. Among his most successful plays were
The Stranger, Pizarro in Peru, and Lovers’ Vows. Kotzebue explored
the democratic potential of Rousseau’s philosophy in theatrical terms.
Where most previous sentimental plays had invited middle-class
audiences to test their sentimental feelings and ethics within a genteel
and rational framework, Kotzebue’s dramas appealed to a wider
audience by encouraging spectators to believe that all people, with or
without enlightened reason, were already natural, ethical, and
authentic human beings. By downplaying rationality and
democratizing sentiment, Kotzebue’s plays anticipated a significant
aspect of nineteenth-century melodrama.
Figure 7.4A scene from Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's The Twins, a Storm and
Stress play, in a contemporary engraving by Albrecht.

© Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

Acting in the eighteenth century
Most of eighteenth-century European drama has dropped into
obscurity. Tearful comedy and moral sentiment lived on, but in other
genres. However, in performance, sentimental characters’ inward
feelings and experiences needed to take outward form. Acting
became one of the great attractions of the theatre. With it, actors
increasingly played a role in public life as representatives of a nation’s
culture – a function which rapidly developed into star power. Although
actors performed both sentimental and neoclassical plays during the
century, and necessarily adapted their playing styles to suit each type
of production, progressive changes from grand rhetoric toward
everyday speech and from heroic to more homely emotions occurred
between 1700 and 1790. Acting remained idealized and presentational
from today’s perspective, with performers striking poses, playing
directly to the spectators, and inviting applause in the middle of
scenes. Nonetheless, the new emphasis on affecting audience
emotions gradually pushed the playing style toward more intimacy and
vulnerability.
Print played an important role in turning acting styles toward
sentimental culture. Actors continued to rely on their voices to express
the dialogue, of course, but after about 1660 they paid as much or
more attention to the poses and gestures that made them visually
expressive and interesting to spectators. Since the arrival of printing,
speech had gradually declined as the culturally dominant mode of
communication in Western Europe; sight became more significant
than sound. Where previously music and voice had been the path to
spiritual transcendence, critics now feared that mere sounds could too
easily seduce the other senses. Further, many commentators were
laying more emphasis on the importance of gestures in human
communication. One treatise written in 1644, for example, suggested
that human gestures were a kind of universal alphabet of nature;
preachers, actors, and orators must know this alphabet to
communicate effectively. Increasingly in society, people were
“reading” the appearances of others in addition to listening to their
voices to understand human behavior and emotion. To be legible, a
character on the stage (like a print “character” on the page) had to
look right.
By the eighteenth century, actors were striving to please a print-
soaked public eager to read the gestures and poses of their
performances. Many treatises and manuals instructed actors in the
proper embodiment of their characters’ “passions” (emotions).
Perhaps the most systematic of these in England was The Art of
Speaking (1761), by James Burgh. For Burgh, speaking was a whole-
body activity that included gestures. The manual offered a series of
illustrated “lessons,” some of them drawn from plays, demonstrating
which pose should accompany each passion so that the audience
could understand the desired “affect.” By reading books like The Art of
Speaking, actors learned how to register the progression of poses
involved in “Awe – Horror – Fear,” for example, with their spectators
(Figure 7.5). In addition, the theatre-going public praised actors who
could hold these poses believably for an extended moment. Not only
was it important for actors to model the right attitude, they also had to
manage a believable transition from one to the next. As Lessing
explained in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, the actor must prepare for
each of his poses “gradually by previous movements, and then must
resolve them again into the general tone of the conventional” (Roach
1985: 73). The result in performance was a kind of garlanded effect
that alternated between static poses and graceful movement as the
actor used a character’s lines and emotions to transition from one
tableau to the next. It was crucial that each pose make an
“impression” on the minds of the spectators before the actor moved on
– a printing metaphor widely used in the eighteenth century to
describe theatrical communication.
Several significant performers after 1740 embodied the audience’s
increasing interest in sentiment. On the London stage, for example,
Charles Macklin (1699–1797) altered the traditional clownish
interpretation of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice to emphasize the
character’s domestic affections and fierce ambition. In the 1770s,
Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816) performed the major plays of
Lessing and Shakespeare with his company in Hamburg, Germany,
with greater attention to his characters’ emotions than had been
common in the past. At the Comédie Française in the 1750s,
Mademoiselle Clairon (Claire-Josèphe-Hippolyte Léris de la Tude,
1723–1803) challenged the traditional rhetorical force of French heroic
acting by adopting more conversational tones for her tragic roles.
Lekain (Henri-Louis Cain, 1729–1778) followed in her footsteps in the
1760s and garnered applause for his more restrained style in
neoclassical tragedy. Because leading actors usually chose their own
costumes during this time, Macklin, Schröder, Mlle Clairon, and Lekain
also won acclaim for their costuming innovations, which generally
shifted stage dress from lavish toward domestic. Together with
Macklin, David Garrick revolutionized acting on the English stage by
discarding the oratorical style of the past and introducing a more
natural style (although still with stylized elements). Garrick rapidly
became the most renowned actor of his era, and we discuss him in
depth in the case study that follows.
Figure 7.5The passions classified: “Terror.” From J.J. Engel, Ideen zu Euer
Mimik (1812).

© P.M. Arnold Semiology Collection, Washington University

Libraries.
Case Study Theatre iconology and the actor as icon:
David Garrick
Gary Jay Williams
Theatre is a transitory art that thrives in the immediacy of the
cultural moment that performer and audience share, most especially, it
seems, at times of dynamic cultural change. Past performances
cannot be hung in a museum or replayed from a score. To appreciate
performances of the past, theatre historians turn to several kinds of
primary sources – among them, pictorial representations. These pose
both intriguing opportunities and problems. This case study offers
examples of iconological analyses of such images. We will discuss
four pictorial representations of the famous English actor David
Garrick, emphasizing the relation between these images and two
culturally important issues for eighteenth-century England:
sentimentalism, and England’s reinvention of its national identity.
Garrick was a significant – and richly signifying – figure in England’s
construction of itself.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Cultural studies and theatre iconology

Theatre iconology is the interpretive analysis of theatre and performance-
related pictorial representations, such as prints, paintings, and photographs,
to better understand the cultural work the images were doing and so to better
understand the theatre of the past. We use “iconology” here, following Erwin
Panofsky (1955), rather than “iconography,” a term that is often associated
with the work of documentation, such as the thematic cataloging of paintings.
Recently scholars have used pictorial sources aware that any representation
of performance will itself be the product of many forces at play in the culture of
the time. Such images tell us much about the social formations in which actor
and audience, painter, and viewer participated, often more than they provide
literal depictions of performance.
Analyzing images in this way will involve, as Christopher B. Balme notes,
the interpretive task of “uncovering the semantics of a painting’s ‘sign
language’ and its relation to the larger social formation” (Balme 1997: 193).
Doing so means approaching the image as a system for making meaning
within a particular culture that operates with both explicit and tacit conventions
and codes. Pictorial representations are always embedded with value choices
(Barthes 1973: 117–74). The cultural historian’s task may involve some
demystification in order to understand the cultural forces at work in an image.
Among the sign-systems in a painting to be considered are the usual
compositional ones: choice, size, and placement of the main figure and its
spatial relation to other figures, the relation between the figure(s) and their
environment, or their clothing, gestures, or postures – but as matters not just
of form but as revealing social relations. (The discussion that follows of
Hogarth’s Mr. Garrick in “Richard III” offers examples of this kind of analysis.)
Such analysis draws on the field of semiotics, the study of signs, which began
with linguistics but expanded to consider how meanings inhere in all kinds of
human endeavor, from the use of colors in military uniforms to the rules for
social rituals or athletic games. Not only the painting or print itself, but also the
circumstances of its production and distribution can tell us what cultural work it
was doing. For example, the analyses here point to the fact that the Garrick
images were produced in response to a new market for accessibly priced
prints of popular actors. This is a symptom of middle-class economic
development to which enterprising artists responded, a variation on print
capitalism.
The analysis of a painting and print representing a performance may also
involve examining it in relation to all the other theatrical primary sources on
the performance, such as eyewitness accounts and promptbooks (play texts
annotated by those involved in the production), or other related paintings and
prints. The analysis of such visual resources requires some understanding of
the conventions of the art. For example, portraits of actors in Garrick’s day
reveal more about individual personalities than did those in the preceding
period, which were in the French neoclassical mode that monumentalized
actors. To take an eighteenth-century example from Japan, the study of
kabuki theatre using the contemporary color prints of kabuki actors would
need to consider the conventions of this special genre of ukiyo-e woodcuts.
Also, artists derive some of their compositional vocabulary from the works of
other artists, as will be seen below in the discussion of Hogarth’s composition.
Artists of Garrick’s time drew on a widely known illustrated book that offered
a science of archetypal facial expressions of emotions (horror, anger,
surprise, grief), Methode pour apprendre à dessiner les Passions (A Method
for Learning to Delineate the Passions) by Charles Le Brun (1619–1690),
President of the French Academy. Both Hogarth and Garrick knew the work.
In Hogarth’s painting, Mr. Garrick in “Richard III” (Figure 7.6), Garrick’s
expression of horror and amazement is closer to Le Brun’s sketch of an
archetypal expression of horror than to a likeness of Garrick. Denis Diderot
 described Garrick doing a demonstration of Le Brun-like expressions when
Garrick visited Paris in 1764 (Diderot 1957: 32–3) (compare Figure 7.5).
Iconological studies may also look at scenery, costumes, and staging
arrangements. Pierre-Louis Ducharte’s The Italian Comedy (1929) draws on
259 prints, paintings, and drawings as sources for the costumes, properties,
and poses typical of each of the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte.
Martin Meisel’s Realizations (1983) explores relations between nineteenth-
century fiction, painting, and drama.

As a gifted actor, manager, and playwright, Garrick dominated the

British stage and became a focal point in British culture across the
mid-century. In his debut, he astonished London as Shakespeare’s
Richard III in a small, unlicensed theatre in 1741. His first biographer,
Thomas Davies, wrote: “Mr. Garrick shone forth like a theatrical
Newton; he threw new light on elocution and acting; he banished
ranting, bombast, and grimace, and restored nature, ease, simplicity
and genuine humor” (Davies 1780: I, 43). All of fashionable London
turned out to see him; poet Alexander Pope went three times. Garrick
became the leading actor at Drury Lane Theatre, where, within a few
years, he won extraordinary acclaim for his performances in his
signature roles, tragic and comic, including Hamlet, King Lear,
Macbeth, Archer in George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707),
and Abel Drugger in Garrick’s own adaptation of Ben Jonson’s The
Alchemist (1743). As artistic manager of Drury Lane from 1747 to 1776,
Garrick was especially dedicated to Shakespeare, staging 26 of the
plays and playing leading roles in 14. With his 1769 Shakespeare
“Jubilee,” he made Stratford-upon-Avon a site for literary pilgrimages,
capping his long promotion of Shakespeare as the national poet. In
effect, this dedication to Shakespeare and to Enlightenment England
was framed as one and the same.
His successes derived from his genius in the performance on stage
and off as the new “natural man” of reason and moral sensibility. Easy
and graceful in motion, with a quick intelligence, Garrick offered a
nimble, fluent model of the century’s ideal of the rational mind and
natural sensibility in the confident governance of the self. He planned
his performances meticulously, blending physical and vocal grace with
the virtuous responses of the Lockean “natural man,” which is to say,
the self-possessed man of vital moral sympathy, in whose bosom was
the potential for the virtue and the benevolence toward others that the
new social order required. Garrick, who had been born of a relatively
poor family, thus offered the persona of a gentleman by nature more
than by class, a persona seen in some of the key plays of the period,
such as The Beaux’ Stratagem, and promoted by the periodicals The
Tatler and The Spectator. This made the actor an appealing figure for
an England still negotiating its transition from an old social order,
which had its roots in the concept of a divinely ordained, absolutist
monarchy, toward a relatively democratized monarchy and a new
social order based on civic and personal virtue across the middle
class. The middle, merchant class saw itself as the keeper of the
moral and economic foundation of a stable society.
Garrick is an ideal figure for iconological studies; portraits of him
have been the subject of many articles and exhibitions. The number of
engraved portraits of Garrick in the British Museum is exceeded only
by those of Queen Victoria. The painting of him as Richard III by
William Hogarth is probably the most famous portrait of a Western
actor ever done (Figure 7.6 is the engraving). But many other major
English artists painted portraits of him, in his roles or in private life,
including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Johann Zoffany,
Benjamin Wilson, Nathaniel Dance, and Angelica Kauffmann. Louis
François Roubiliac created busts of Garrick in marble and bronze, and
images of him appeared on porcelain dishes, silver tea caddies,
enameled boxes, and medallions. Garrick was arguably the West’s
first modern, commodified celebrity.
He himself did much to bring that about. He commissioned many
paintings and prints of himself in his most successful roles, the prints
being intended for wide circulation. Visiting Paris in 1764 as England’s
most famous actor, he wrote back urgently requesting prints for
distribution to friends and fans. He also commissioned portraits of
himself in his off-stage role of the natural gentleman, a role that
straddled old and new ideas of class.
Moreover, he conceived his performances with a visual acuity that
intersected perfectly with trends in English art. Garrick was among the
first of a younger generation of actors with a freer physical style and
more appeal for the eye than had been the case in the older,
declamatory school, which emphasized classical, rhetorical music for
the ear. He was, as Michael Wilson has suggested, well aware of the
visual lexicon of painters of the time for portraying the passions.
Applying this knowledge to his acting, Garrick aligned his
performances with the legitimacy of art. Hogarth expert Ronald
Paulson makes an acute point about Hogarth’s painting of Garrick as
Richard III: “If Hogarth tended to make his painting look like a play,
Garrick made his play look like a painting” (Paulson 1992: III, 250).
Garrick might be described as an iconic actor in his use of visually
arresting poses, which he planned carefully – his acting choices being
influenced by his media consciousness, as we shall see. He then had
these images popularized through paintings and prints – the visual
media of his time. In so doing, he advanced his career and inscribed
his performances on the national social consciousness.
Figure 7.6Mr. Garrick in the Charakter of Richard the 3rd (1746), engraving by
Charles Grignion, after a painting by William Hogarth. This popular image of
Shakespeare's version of the English king served several narratives of English
national identity in the mid-eighteenth century.

Source: © liszt collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

Four Richards III
In Hogarth’s Mr. Garrick as “Richard III,” there is Garrick and more.
Garrick debuted in 1741 in the Shakespearean role, as compelling a
protean character as any in Western drama. Plotting his ascent from
Duke of Gloucester to King of England, Richard vows (in an earlier
Shakespeare play that includes him) to deceive everyone like a good
actor and to kill anyone between himself and the throne:
Why I can smile, and murder while I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
 And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
[. . .]
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.
(Henry VI, Part 3, Act III, sc. 2: 182–95, in Greenblatt 1997)
His deception and murders bring him to the throne, but they finally
result in his overthrow and death in battle at the hands of the decent
Earl of Richmond, Henry Tudor.
Hogarth’s painting represents the moment when, on the night
before the battle, Richard wakes in his tent from a dream in which he
has been visited by the ten souls of those he killed, including his king,
his brother, his two young nephews, and his wife. Awaking terrified, he
cries out, “Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds! / Have mercy,
Jesu! – Soft, I did but dream. / O coward conscience, how doest thou
afflict me?” (Richard III, Act V, sc. 5: 131–3). The adaptation of the play
by Colley Cibber that Garrick used stressed Richard’s villainy heavily,
and, in this scene, Cibber added the ghosts’ demand that Richard
“wake in all the hells of guilt,” which he does, though he goes on to
fight to his death.
For a mid-eighteenth-century English audience, this anguished
recognition of his sins by this, the most evil of men, would have been a
critical moral turn, and Garrick turned it into a moral awakening of
great visual power, meticulously arranged. Arthur Murphy, a
contemporary playwright and Garrick biographer, wrote, “His soliloquy
in the tent scene discovered the inward man [italics added],” a code
phrase in England’s age of moral sensibility signifying the natural,
inner potential for good in humankind. Hogarth renders Richard’s
expression of horror in the wide eyes that stare out over the shoulder
of the viewer of the portrait and in the outstretched arm and extended
fingers. However, Hogarth does not render Garrick’s face with
individualized particularity, nor are the figure and costume in the more
natural mode of that in his earlier theatrical paintings of The Beggar’s
Opera (Figure 7.1). Rather, the painting of Garrick as Richard III is
rendering the theatrical moment in the grand manner of history
painting, a genre in which Hogarth had worked in the previous decade.
Hogarth took his general composition from Le Brun’s Tent of Darius;
the voluminous flowing robes and other fabrics were painterly strokes
to convey nobility. The painting’s huge size – over eight feet long and
six feet high – is in the mode of history painting, and here it magnifies
and ennobles the figure of King Richard. This Richard is, then, a
combination of four Richards III: the Richard of Garrick – meticulous
master of the morally iconic moment for the age of sensibility; the
Richard of English history; the Richard of Shakespeare, the great
national poet (whom Garrick was promoting in his playhouse); and the
Richard of Hogarth, by then the great English artist. Each presence
complements the other. Together they constitute a national narrative
aspiring to the status of myth. The buyer, Thomas (William?)
Duncombe, paid 200 pounds sterling for the painting, more than had
ever been paid to an English painter for a portrait (Paulson 1992: 3,
256–7). The engraving that followed shortly after served the interests
of both Garrick and Hogarth. Analyzing the work and its cultural
valences today, we can see not only a vestige of Garrick’s iconic
performance but the ways in which the image was speaking from, and
to the English people’s construction of their national identity in the
eighteenth century.
Two rivals, two prints
Many of Garrick’s other performances resulted in images suitable for
framing, including those of his Hamlet and Lear, considered briefly
here (Figures 7.7 and 7.8). James McArdell did mezzotints of him in
these roles. Published in 1754 and 1761, respectively, they were based
on paintings (both lost) by Benjamin Wilson (1722–1788). (Zoffany also
painted the same scene from Hamlet.) Both images seem to aspire to
the effects of Hogarth’s hugely successful portrait of Garrick as
Richard III. Both advance Garrick’s moral agenda. Collaboration
among actor, painter, and printmaker on both is very probable.
The very method of these prints – the mezzotint – represented a
new media technology. A special engraving tool was used to create
surface texturing on the paper that allowed inking in gradations of
shading and subtle chiaroscuro effects. This allowed the capturing of
subtler, more emotional facial expression or more emotionally charged
landscapes. Both prints also served Garrick’s media campaign.
Spranger Barry, the “silver-tongued” actor who was a close competitor
of Garrick, was playing these same roles at the rival theatre, Covent
Garden, at about the time that these Garrick images were published –
likely in order to imprint Garrick’s triumph in these roles in the public
mind.
Garrick had taken special visual care with both scenes. He was
proud of the scene from Hamlet, performing it in private for friends. He
reportedly used a mechanical wig that he could manipulate to make
his hair rise in fright, the better to capture Hamlet’s horror, as
Cartesian mechanics said it should. The effect seems to be apparent
in McArdell’s print (Figure 7.7). The print is corroborated by a detailed
description of the scene by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who saw a
performance. Garrick’s sentimentalized Lear, seen in Figure 7.8, is frail
and vulnerable in the storm scene. Consistent with the Nahum Tate
adaptation that Garrick used, his Lear is the sentimentalized father of
the family whose demise is tragic in the domestic sphere, that sphere
where eighteenth-century Britain had now relocated its national moral
center. Tate has Cordelia live to marry Edgar, assuring succession to
the throne and a stable future for kingdom and family more than
Shakespeare’s play does. Both of McArdell’s prints were among those
Garrick sought supplies of for distribution to friends in Paris.
Figure 7.7Mr. Garrick in Hamlet, mezzotint print by James McArdell, 1754, after
a painting by Benjamin Wilson, depicting Garrick at the moment of Hamlet's
encounter with his father's ghost.
 © The Folger Shakespeare Library.® All rights reserved.

Figure 7.8Mr. Garrick in the Character of King Lear, hand-colored mezzotint by

James McArdell, after a painting by Benjamin Wilson. With the mad Lear are
Kent behind him (Astley Bransby) and Edgar (William Havard). The Fool is
missing because the role was eliminated in Nahum Tate's sentimental
adaptation. Neoclassicism dictated that comedy and tragedy should not be
mixed.

© Gary Jay and Josephine S. Williams.

Thirty Garricks
 A century after his Hamlet, Garrick still figured prominently
in the British imagination. One comic color print made in the mid-
nineteenth century serves both as an amusing index to the Garrick
image industry and as an insight into the long English fascination with
him. Garrick and Hogarth or The Artist Puzzled (1845) by R. Evan Sly
was based on an amusing anecdote about a Hogarth–Garrick
skirmish that had appeared in a London newspaper several years
after Garrick’s death (Figure 7.9). Reportedly, every time Hogarth
thought he had captured Garrick’s likeness in a painting session, the
actor mischievously changed his expression; by all accounts,
Garrick’s expressive face was famously mobile, never at rest, even off
stage. Discovering the trick, Hogarth drove Garrick from his studio in a
hail of brushes (Paulson 1971: 285–6). Sly used a clever mechanical
device to capture the mercurial Garrick face. He placed a rotating
wheel on the back of the print so the viewer could change the face of
Garrick on Hogarth’s canvas and also the face on the seated actor,
bringing into view 30 different likenesses of Garrick. These likenesses
are, in fact, caricatures of other artists’ portraits of him. The faces in
the sketches on the floor – caricatures of other Hogarth works – also
change with a turn of the wheel. (You can see all the 30 likenesses on
the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website by visiting www.folger.edu
and searching for “Thirty Different Likenesses.”) The dog on the left,
whose knowing look at the viewer heightens the joke on Hogarth, is
borrowed by Sly from a Hogarth self-portrait with his own dog, Pug
(1745).

Figure 7.9Garrick and Hogarth, or The Artist Puzzled. Color print by R. Evan Sly,
1845. The face on Hogarth's canvas and the face of the seated David Garrick
can be changed by rotating a wheel on the back of Sly's print, bringing into view
30 different likenesses of Garrick. The print is based on an eighteenth-century
anecdote about Hogarth painting the actor which is evidence of the public
fascination with the protean Garrick.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
 The tale on which this print was based was probably an embellished
one; its construction and repetition (there was a Gainsborough
version) suggest some complexity in the fascination with Garrick.
Behind the tale and the print was a paradox that began in his own
time: the figure who had become an exemplar of a natural gentleman
was an actor, a very adroit member of a profession that was
historically suspect, morally and socially. Eighteenth-century English
audiences with a hunger for outward signs of interior moral sincerity
were enthralled with a talented professional who was skilled in
creating meticulous semblances of sincerity. Could an actor adroit
with images be a national model of the sincere, natural, virtuous man?
Horace Walpole seems to have been aware of the problem when he
warned his friend Sir Horace Mann, the British Envoy in Florence, “Be
a little on your guard, remember he is an actor” (Shawe-Taylor 2003:
11).
 In summary, this case study provides examples of theatre iconology
that reads pictorial representations not only for what they might tell us
as depictions of performance but for what they tell us about the social
formations in which the actor and audience, and painter and viewer all
participated. Garrick’s performances and the making of the theatrical
images of him are parts of a large historical picture, albeit one in which
his uses of the media of his time are very recognizable today.
Key references
Audio-visual resources
For many images of David Garrick from the Folger Shakespeare
Library exhibit, “David Garrick (1717–1779) A Theatrical Life,” go to
<http://www.folger.edu> and search for “Garrick.”
Shakespeare Illustrated. Website in progress by Harry Rusche on
nineteenth-century paintings, criticism, and productions, listing and
reproducing illustrations by play:
http://shakespeare.emory.edu/illustrated_index.cfm.
Books and articles
Aliverti, M.I. (1997) “Major Portraits and Minor Series in Eighteenth
Century Theatrical Portraiture,” Theatre Research International 22:
234–54.
Balme, C.B. (1997) “Interpreting the Pictorial Record: Theatre
Iconography and the Referential Dilemma,” Theatre Research
International 22: 190–201. (This issue is devoted to articles exploring
different possibilities and problems in pictorial analysis.)
Barthes, R. (1973; 1st edn 1957) Mythologies, London: Paladin.
Davies, T. (1780) Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq. (2 vols),
London: Thomas Davies.
Diderot, D. (1957) The Paradox of Acting [c.1778], trans. W.H.
Pollock, New York: Hill and Wang. Ducharte, P.-L. (1929) The Italian
Comedy, London: Harrap.
Greenblatt, S. (1997) The Norton Shakespeare, New York and
London: W.W. Norton and Company.
Highfill, P., Jr. and Burnim, K.A. (eds) (1978) A Biographical
Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and
Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, Vol. 6, Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press. (The Garrick entry includes an
annotated iconography of Garrick portraits.)
Lennox-Boyd, C. and Shaw, G. (1994) Theatre: The Age of Garrick,
London: Christopher Lennox-Boyd. (English mezzotints from the
collection of the Hon. Christopher Lennox-Boyd, published in
conjunction with an exhibition at the Courtauld Institute Galleries.)
Mander, R. and Mitchenson, J. (1980) Guide to the Maugham
Collection of Theatrical Paintings, London: Heinemann and the
National Theatre. (Somerset Maugham’s collection, which he gave to
London’s National Theatre, includes several important Garrick
paintings.)
Meisel, M. (1983) Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical
Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Panofsky, E. (1955) “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to
the Study of Renaissance Art,” in E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual
Arts, New York: Garden City.
Paulson, R. (1971) Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (2 vols), New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Paulson, R. (1992) Hogarth (3 vols), New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Shawe-Taylor, D. (2003) Every Look Speaks, Portraits of David
Garrick, Bath: Holbourne Museum. (Catalog for the Exhibit at the
Holbourne Museum of Art, Bath, England.)
Wilson, M.S. (1990) “Garrick, Iconic Acting, and the Ideologies of
Theatrical Portraiture,” Word and Image 6: 368–94.
Performers and the public
Few Europeans thought of acting as a profession until print helped to
elevate it in public esteem. When the public could read about actors in
weekly newspapers and monthly journals and began to understand
the difficulties of actor training, the past mystery and opprobrium
surrounding their work began to dissipate. The press began its long
love affair with actors. In addition to theatre reviews and manuals,
actors’ pictures appeared in printed plays, in theatre almanacs and
books of anecdotes, and in collections of engravings and illustrations,
where performers often posed in costumes in evocative moments of
their most characteristic roles. Soon after the press began to use
actors, actors found ways of using the press – to puff their latest role,
to create printed programs that boosted their reputations, and to write
articles and memoirs that shaped their recollections of “great”
performances. Without the actor–press mutual admiration society,
theatrical “stars” could not have been “born.”
One of the first things that actors did with their newfound authority
was to remove spectators from the stage. At various times throughout
Europe, the audience sat on public stages and occasionally
interrupted the performers – a legacy of the easy flow between
spectators and actors in medieval festivals. From the 1600s into the
late 1700s, this was an elite practice. Male aristocrats eager to display
their wits or wigs often chose to sit among the performers and draw
occasional focus from their efforts. With help from the actors, Voltaire
pushed for architectural reforms at the Comédie Française that
removed Parisian spectators from that stage in 1759. Garrick effected
this reform at the Drury Lane Theatre in London in 1762.
The relative ease with which performers were able to claim the
stage as their own space reflected their increasing social status in
Europe. In subsequent centuries, aided by improved transportation,
imagery in printed publicity helped actors become local, national, and
ultimately international stars.
Theorizing acting
The eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, many of them new to the
pressures of social performance, welcomed actors as models for
enacting their own emotions in public life. Their social anxiety
prompted a wide range of investigations into all manner of public
performances, the first general outpouring of interest in the topic since
classical times. Given the broad interest in acting, it is not surprising
that some writers pushed beyond generalities to analyze how actors
accomplished their artistic work. Among the most significant writings
were reflections by Aaron Hill (1685–1750), an English playwright and
critic who published them primarily in his theatrical journal The
Prompter (1734–1736), and The Paradox of the Actor, written by
Diderot in 1773 (published posthumously in 1830). Both dealt creatively
with problems that still concern actors today.
Hill examined the process used by actors for producing emotion and
based his conclusions on the mechanistic assumptions about the
body that Cartesian philosophy had made popular among many
literate Europeans. For Descartes, the body was a machine, following
the laws of mechanics. Denouncing those who advocated mere
rhetorical technique, Hill depicted a three-step process that involved
the will operating the body almost as though it were a computer game.
First, the actor’s imagination was to generate an image of the body
expressing a specific emotion. Or, as Hill put it in a poem in The
Prompter (where he deployed a print metaphor to capture his
Cartesian idea): “Previous to art’s first act – (till then, all vain) / Print
the ideal pathos, on the brain . . .” (Roach 1985: 81, Hill’s italics). Next,
the actor was to allow the “impressions” of the emotion in his mind to
play out in his face. Third, facial expression would impel what Hill took
to be the “animal spirits” of the mind and nerves to affect and shape
the muscles, so that the actor would fully embody the emotion he had
first imagined and thus could speak and act accordingly. In the end,
wrote Hill, “the mov’d actor Moves – and passion shakes” (Roach
1985: 81, Hill’s italics). Hill’s ideas are similar to modern theories that
assume that the actor’s mind can trick the body into automatically
producing the necessary emotions for a role.
 Diderot also built his ideas upon mechanistic Cartesian
assumptions, but broke with Hill (and most other acting theorists of his
time) to argue that emotion actually got in the way of good acting
technique. Like Hill, Diderot believed that the actor must use
observation, imagination, and rehearsal to create an inner model of
the character, but this preparation provided the basis for enacting an
illusion of that character, not embodying the figure’s actual emotions in
performance. From Diderot’s point of view, actors who relied on
spontaneity and emotion rather than study and technique reduced the
character to themselves, undercut the illusion of the character’s
emotional life for the audience, and compromised the range of
characters they could create. In The Paradox of the Actor, Diderot
praised performers who could marry a flexible vocal and physical
technique to a perfect conception of the role and its emotional
dynamics, thus enabling them to present their character in exactly the
same way at every performance. Aware that enacting even the
illusions of various emotions would tend to involve the actors in
experiencing them directly, Diderot drew on Enlightenment science to
argue that actors could effectively separate their minds from their
bodies and control themselves on stage, much as a puppeteer
controls a puppet. As we will see in Chapter 11, Diderot’s cool-headed,
self-manipulative actor might be compared to the ideal actor of
Meyerhold and Brecht in the twentieth century.
Diderot held up Mlle Clairon and David Garrick as exemplars of his
theory. He had watched Garrick perform a parlor entertainment in
which the great actor shifted his facial expressions instantly to
embody a wide range of characters, much to the amazement and
delight of his Parisian hosts. Diderot published his Observations on
Garrick in 1770, and it is clear that the English star significantly
influenced his thoughts on acting.
Public interest in acting continued well into the nineteenth century.
For example, the elocutionary movement of the mid-1800s in Britain
excited numerous lectures and publications that engaged a range of
professions from lawyers and merchants to preachers and politicians.
In general, the advice given to these budding public speakers was the
same as that given to actors: coordinate your words with your
gestures, express emotions through the attitude of your body as well
as your voice, and pause to “impress” your listeners. Attentive readers
and listeners also learned to avoid accents and affects that would
mark them as Scottish or Irish and how the voice and body could be
pressed into the service of marking oneself as a member of a higher
social class.
Summary
In early eighteenth-century Europe, the development of the periodical
press led to profound changes in print culture. Periodicals played a
key role in creating the bourgeois division between the public sphere
that concerned politics, economics, and cultural interests such as
fashion and entertainment, versus the private sphere where family,
friends, and feelings abided. Popular magazines established the
concept of sentiment, through which refined members of society
experienced fellow-feeling, sympathy, and moral improvement.
Sentimentalism oriented drama throughout the century. In England,
where the public sphere was able to develop with little interference
from the monarchy, satire became prominent as well, until it was
suppressed by the government. Censorship was also imposed in
Japan, but there the motives concerned class intermingling and
morality rather than political control. Both there and in Europe,
audiences’ imaginations were captured by actors and acting. In
Europe, this interest was configured according to the public/private
distinction as the visual, public enactment of private sentiments.
Theatre stars fascinated the nation – or more precisely, the emerging
nation-state.
*
Nationalism in the theatre, 1760–1880
Bruce McConachie
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-12
Nationalism is relatively new in world history. The idea that a
people, a nation, loosely united by a common language or culture, has
an inherent right to its own geographical and political state would have
seemed absurd to most of humanity before 1700. Most people owed
allegiance to distant rulers or local chiefs and their cultural lives were
bounded by spoken, topographical, and regional differences. As
historian Benedict Anderson notes, the imagined fellowship that
undergirds nationalism has to be invented and continuously
reaffirmed. Nations, as gatherings of strangers, must both build upon
and surpass the affiliations that draw people together as families,
townspeople, and social classes. According to Anderson, a nation is
“an imagined political community – and imagined as both limited and
sovereign” (Anderson 1991: 6). That is, the nation, with its
accompanying political state, is imagined as limited with regard to its
territorial expanse and sovereign in terms of its ability to take
independent political action within its boundaries and against other
countries.
Citizens in France, England, and the Netherlands were the first to
successfully transform their states into national “imagined
communities,” and this development gave their bourgeoisie a decided
advantage in international politics and economics over other countries
after 1760. As we have seen, King Louis XIV facilitated this process in
France and the middle classes consolidated nationalism in England
after 1688. In the towns and villages of the Netherlands, the Dutch
began to embrace nationalism in 1609, after winning independence
from Spain. In 1760, however, these nation-states remained the
exception in Europe and throughout the world. Despite some
commonalities of language and culture, Italy and Germany were
divided into small states, and the Austrian Empire encompassed a
patchwork of national cultures, including Polish, Hungarian, and
Czech. Absolutist emperors or monarchs, together with landed
aristocrats, ran things in Russia, Spain, and Portugal, where the
bourgeoisie were second-class citizens and enjoyed little economic
power. People in the rest of the world mostly owed their loyalty to
distant monarchs, emperors, war lords, and tribal chiefs, not to an
“imagined community” of other people that they assumed were like
themselves.
Much of this would change in Europe by 1880. During the nineteenth
century, Italian politicians and patriots brought most of Italy under one
rule (in 1861) and the Chancellor of Prussia, together with the Prussian
army, united most German-speaking lands within the German Empire
(in 1871). Meanwhile, in the Americas, the United States established
nationhood in the late eighteenth century and most of what is now
Latin America had gained independence from Spain and Portugal by
1825. While the push for freedom from colonial rule in the Americas
was not based initially on nationalism, it led to the creation of nation-
states that became nationalistic in the nineteenth century. The primary
matches that lit the flames of nationalism in Europe were the French
Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars that followed until 1815.
Unlike earlier European wars, much of the combat after 1795 involved
citizen-soldiers who believed they fought to defend people like
themselves, not to advance the interests of a king or emperor. As in
subsequent wars involving nation-states, the bloodshed of the
revolutionary era required justification, and the ideology of nationalism
provided ready answers.
This chapter primarily examines the kinds of theatre that helped to
legitimate Western nationalism between 1760 and 1880. Unlike today,
the theatre participated directly in debates about nationhood and
occasionally influenced the rise and fall of governments. Specifically,
we will examine three varieties of nationalism and the types of theatre
intertwined with each that flourished during these 120 years. The first
is liberal nationalism, which began in the eighteenth century and
involved a commitment to the Enlightenment ideals of individual
liberty, private property, and constitutionalism. Although its legitimacy
suffered from the wars of the revolutionary era, liberal nationalism
continued to inform bourgeois notions of the nation-state during the
nineteenth century. The basic idea of cultural nationalism may also be
found in the Enlightenment, but it only emerged politically after 1800 as
a defensive response to Napoleon’s universalizing claims of a
benevolent French empire. During the war years of the revolutionary
era, roughly 1775–1815, many European and American peoples
adopted a version of cultural nationalism, a belief in the uniqueness
and greatness of one’s language-based culture. It flourished, for
disparate reasons, in all Western countries for the rest of the century.
As we will see, racial nationalism mixed traditional notions of racial
superiority with cultural nationalism to produce a brew that was
particularly potent in Germany, Brazil, and the United States. Although
our chapter ends at 1880, it will be evident that these three varieties of
nationalism played significant roles in the twentieth century and
continue to shape theatre and politics today.
Print, theatre, and liberal nationalism, 1760–1800
Before the French Revolution, print periodical culture helped some
bourgeois Europeans to envision themselves as a potential governing
class. As literate Europeans read more about current affairs and
shared ideas for improving their societies, they developed a sense of
themselves as a public, with interests separate from the dukes, kings,
and emperors who ruled most of them. As explained in Chapter 7, the
news press was especially important in forming this notion of a “public
sphere,” but so was the theatre. By 1760, many of the same people in
Paris, Vienna, London, Hamburg, and other large cities went to the
theatre, read plays, and gathered in coffeehouses and salons to
discuss developments in science, the arts, and current events. As the
press and the theatre influenced each other, both helped to shape an
emerging public sphere in their countries.
After 1760, these publics increasingly thought of themselves as
national audiences, with rights that all theatrical spectators could
expect to exercise. Royal and aristocratic patronage had waned,
especially in England and Germany, and the bourgeoisie had partly
taken its place. As theatrical benefactors, they strove to cultivate a
theatrical public that might rise above the petty emotions of the
aristocracy to sustain a theatre that could explore many of their new,
enlightened ideas. Most of the literate bourgeoisie looked to the power
of rational public opinion expressed in print to regulate behavior in the
theatre. Stung by the response of a small group of critics to his The
Barber of Seville in 1775, lawyer-playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron
Beaumarchais (1732–1799), for example, addressed a “Temperate
Letter” to the reading public of France. “I recognize no other judge
than you,” wrote Beaumarchais, “not excepting Messieurs the
spectators, who – judges only of first resort – often see their sentence
overturned by your tribunal” (Peters 2000: 249). Although
Beaumarchais might distrust, he knew he could not dismiss theatrical
spectators. Nonetheless, he believed that the reading public, with
more time for rational reflection, could gradually educate the theatrical
public. Although the state might be mired in royal monopolies, such as
the Comédie Française, the public sphere of the nation could support
a kind of theatre that could move France toward the political ideals of
the Enlightenment. Beaumarchais’ views were shaped by the rise and
influence of periodical print culture. As we saw in the last chapter,
newspapers and other periodicals were leading to the standardization
of national languages, which facilitated communication among groups
within that nation. In effect, print allowed the literate classes in Europe
to imagine the existence of other nationals like them as they read their
books, newspapers, and journals. Liberal nationalism, with its
commitment to freedom of the press and other Enlightenment values
at this time, rested on the imagined coherence of a reading nation.
Influenced by this belief, German critic Johann Friedrich Löwen
(1729–1771) published his hope that his new theatre in Hamburg could
help to unify the German-speaking-and-reading nation. In the
eighteenth century, most Germans lived outside of Prussia and the
Austrian Empire, in small states, duchies, and principalities. Löwen’s
manifesto called for a theatre that would “raise the dignity of German
drama” and “inspire the nation’s authors to [the writing of] national
dramas” (Sosulski 2007: 16). The Hamburg National Theatre opened
in 1767. Löwen induced critic-playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to
join his troupe as a literary advisor. Lessing thereby became the first
dramaturg in Europe, an in-house critic in charge of recommending
plays and advising the company on artistic matters (see Chapter 7 on
Lessing and sentimentalism). In effect, the German tradition of
dramaturgy grew out of the eighteenth-century bourgeois goal of
educating a rational theatre public for national responsibilities;
dramaturgy was initially a part of liberal nationalism.
Löwen and Lessing’s repertoire did not change Hamburg audience
preferences for farces and ballets, however. Attendance declined and
the idealistic enterprise closed after two seasons. Although Lessing
had rejected French neoclassical plays as models for German drama,
major problems of audience education and taste remained. Lessing’s
final essay in his Hamburg Dramaturgy expressed his deep
disappointment that the public had not supported the theatre. More
importantly to Lessing, the public apparently had no desire to create
something distinctly German (Lessing 1962: 262). Nonetheless,
Lessing’s dramaturgical memoir provided an inspirational model for
the more than a dozen “national” theatres that flowered in other
German-speaking cities before 1800.
Friedrich Schiller, a celebrated historian as well as a playwright and
director, shared many of Löwen’s and Lessing’s hopes for an
enlightened national theatre. Following his early plays and his tenure
as a professor of history at the University of Jena, Schiller returned to
the theatre in 1799 in the German principality of Weimar. Like the poet
and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the director of the
Weimar Court Theatre, Schiller had reassessed his earlier embrace of
Storm and Stress anarchy; his late plays reflect an interest in classical
restraint and Enlightenment morality. Indeed, many Germans would
later celebrate the “Weimar classicism” that Schiller and Goethe
achieved in their productions at the Court Theatre as models of
enlightened nationalism in opposition to the xenophobia that more
fervent German nationalists expressed during the nineteenth century.
Our first case study for this chapter tests the Weimar experiment
against Schiller’s concept of a transformative aesthetic experience
that could help to shape his ideal of a German nation.
Case Study Friedrich Schiller's vision of aesthetic
education and the German dream of a national theatre
Gary Jay Williams
. . . if we had a national stage, we would also become a nation.
Friedrich Schiller (1784)

In recent years, theatre historians have been exploring the relations

between theatre/ performance and national/cultural identity. This has
been fruitful because of theatre’s conspicuous place as a mirror of
culture in the public sphere. German-speaking peoples, more than
most, have pursued aggressively the idea that theatre and the other
arts are necessary to the health of a society. In fact, the effort may be
rightly characterized as having become an attribute of German
culture.
The ideas of playwright, historian, and theorist Friedrich Schiller are
significant in that pursuit. This case study explains Schiller’s vision,
advanced in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), in
which he proposes that aesthetic experience can contribute to the
social good in its power to better integrate human sensibility. Basing
his ideas on Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) Enlightenment philosophy
of art, Schiller argued that dramatic art could heal the eighteenth-
century division between reason and feeling. His proposition is located
in the context of the efforts of other German artists, including Löwen
and Lessing, to create a theatre that would be both a voice of German
culture and a force in shaping it. This case study speculates on
whether Schiller’s tragedy for the Weimar stage, Mary Stuart, probably
his finest play, contributed to the kind of aesthetic education he hoped
would make humankind whole. In doing so, it raises one of the
questions that studies in theatre and national identity often do: Did
Mary Stuart fulfill the mission of a theatre that aspires to form the life
of a nation?
Schiller's vision and its context
Dreaming of a theatre that would be a voice of German culture and a
force in shaping it, Schiller wrote in his 1784 essay, “The Stage as a
Moral Institution”: “If all our plays were governed by one principle, if
our poets were agreed and allied to this end, if a rigorous selection
guided their work and their brushes were dedicated only to national
matters – in a word, if we had a national theatre, we would also
become a nation” (Schiller 1985: 217–18).

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Studies in theatre and national identity

The scholarly work in this field is related to the larger issue of how nations
define themselves, an interest spurred by many contemporary developments.
Among them have been the struggles of once-colonized nations to reshape
their identities, “ethnic cleansing” in Europe and Africa, the long, violent
antagonism between Israelis and Palestinians, and, of course, globalization,
which implicitly challenges notions of national identity. Studies in theatre and
national/cultural identity draw on a range of late twentieth-century works in
cultural history and philosophy. For example, Raymond Williams and Fredric
Jameson articulated the implications for literature and the arts of the classical
Marxist critique of capitalism and the oppressive social structures it creates, in
which nation-states have been complicit. Eric Hobsbawm and others have
shown how nations reinvent their “traditions” to try to produce a coherent
national narrative. And Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991),
much used by theatre historians, offered the concept of nations as imagined
political communities.
Scholarly investigations of theatre and national/cultural identity often carry
contemporary significance. Patricia Ybarra, for example, has shown how the
excavated ruins of Mesoamerican civilizations in Mexico have been used in
performances for Mexican audiences of tourists to suggest an imaginary
national heritage (Ybarra 2005). Loren Kruger’s The National Stage: Theatre
and Cultural Legitimization in England, France, and America (1992) shows the
contradictions between the pretexts and the actual practices of three distinct
twentieth-century national theatres. In the process, Kruger raises important
questions about the funding of theatres in democracies. In 1988, the Royal
National Theatre in the U.K. won the crown’s permission to describe itself as
“Royal” as well as “National.” But what is the cost of their tickets today, who
attends their productions, and how else are they funded?

Dismayed by the French Revolution, especially its Reign of Terror that

guillotined thousands of French citizens in 1793–1794, Schiller
believed that the savagery of the masses after the Revolution showed
that the Enlightenment had failed to touch the heart and make
humankind whole. In his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man
(1795), Schiller looked to the potential of art to heal what he believed
to be the fragmented psyche of modern humankind, to restore the
once natural balance between reason and feeling, between intuitive
and rational processes. This harmony, he asserted, would never be
restored by political means or by revolution. Only through aesthetic
experience can modern man become whole: “it is only through Beauty
that man makes his way to Freedom” (Wilkinson and Willoughby 1967:
9, Letter 2; Sharpe 1991: 146–8). Kant’s philosophy provided the
credible base for this theory, and Schiller, working especially from
Kant’s Critique of Judgment, hoped to make a case that art could
renew the social order.
In Kant’s quest to articulate the first principles of human
understanding (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), the philosopher
argued that through the use of reason any individual will be able to
understand and can live up to the basic principles of knowledge and
moral action, without recourse to any metaphysics or the divine.
Rather, it is through the data of our experience that our reason derives
the laws of nature and human conduct. In his Critique of Judgment
(1791), Kant argues that our aesthetic judgments, though free
expressions of individual autonomy, must also be based in cognitive
capacities we share with others if such judgments are to have any
claim on their assent (Kant 1971: Sections VII, VIII). Yet this
pleasurable exercise is not constrained by rules. It involves “free play”
between the imagination and understanding in a process in which, as
Paul Guyer summarizes it, “the imagination satisfies understanding’s
need for unity by presenting a form [to us] that seems unitary and
coherent” (Guyer 2004: section 12). The aesthetic work of artistic
genius cannot properly be judged by how well it conforms to external
standards (such as neoclassical rules). Nor can art be judged by
whether it fulfills some external, pragmatic purpose (moral instruction).
The aesthetic object has an internal purposiveness, stated Kant, a
“purposiveness without purpose” (Kant 1971: xv, 386–7).
 Schiller wanted to take this idea further and attempted to show that
high art had the potential to do work in the world, that the aesthetic
experience could reintegrate reason and feelings. Schiller certainly
agreed with Kant that art should not attempt direct moral instruction.
He and Goethe disapproved of the domesticated moralizing of
eighteenth-century sentimental drama, and his plays of the 1780s,
such as Passion and Politics and Don Carlos, have a complexity that
does not allow them to be reduced to simplistic lessons. Schiller
believed the theatre should have the poetic dimension of
transcendent, classical art; this would give theatrical productions
social efficacy, but of a higher order. Influenced by Kant’s notion of the
“play-drive” in humankind, Schiller contends that the ultimate form of
play is the contemplation of beauty. “Man only plays when he is in the
fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human
being when he plays” (Wilkinson and Willoughby 1967: 107, Letter 15).
It is this “play,” this contemplation of the beautiful, that will restore in
humankind that lost unity of sensibility. Schiller’s reference point here
was an idealized vision of ancient Greece that had allowed for the
development of the balanced individual.
Schiller joined Goethe at the Weimar Court Theatre in 1799 for their
legendary artistic partnership (Figure 8.1). They made “an open
declaration of war on naturalism in art” and sought to create a poetic
theatre where spectators could have the kind of aesthetic experiences
that would refine and educate their audiences (Sharpe 1991: 253).
Their plays and their carefully disciplined production style became
known as “Weimar classicism.” Schiller wrote five historical verse
dramas for Weimar: Wallenstein’s Camp (1799), Mary Stuart (1800),
The Maid of Orleans (1801, his St. Joan play), The Bride of Messina
(1803), and William Tell (1804). “For only great affairs will have the
power / To stimulate mankind’s first principles,” wrote Schiller in his
prologue for the reopening of the remodeled Weimar with his
Wallenstein’s Camp (Schiller 1991: 9). Goethe staged all of these
history plays with historically accurate settings and costumes, the
better for audiences to contemplate the magnitude of the issues.
Schiller’s vision for German nationhood was probably best
expressed in Mary Stuart, one of his most enduring works. The
playwright creates his tragedy out of the conflict between the famed
queens of English Renaissance history, depicting Mary’s final days
leading up to her execution by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. He
invents a one-on-one meeting between them for his capstone scene
and renders Mary younger than she was in the 1580s. He
characterizes Elizabeth as the woman who has a clear understanding
that the throne will often require her to sacrifice herself in order to rule
with an iron will. Schiller’s Catholic Mary is a charismatic and
sometimes impetuous woman who, following her strong passions, has
inspired devotion in her followers but also made profound moral
errors. Taking the queens symbolically, as Schiller surely intended –
which points to his high expectations of spectators in a theatre – the
women might be said to exemplify Schiller’s view of the modern
splintered psyche. Neither character is whole – Elizabeth, the rational,
political pragmatist or Mary, the emotionally alive, charismatic spirit.
Mary, confronting the inevitability of her execution at Elizabeth’s hand,
achieves grace and serenity at the end. Schiller attempts to embody
this spiritual transcendence by having Mary receive the sacraments
from a priest before going to her death. At the end of the play,
Elizabeth, victim of the necessity of being the guardian of order and
power, is left on stage alone. Her elder counselor, Shrewsbury, says to
her before he leaves, “I could not / preserve the better part of you . . .
Your rival’s dead. You have from this day forward / no more to fear,
and no more to respect” (Schiller 1998: 615).
Figure 8.1The Weimar Court Theatre interior in 1798. Prosperous bourgeoisie
sat on red-covered benches in the orchestra, poorer spectators upstairs in the
side galleries, and the duke in the rear center of the gallery. On this stage
(approximately 38 feet wide), Schiller and Goethe staged their plays with
historical period settings and costumes, an innovation that had wide influence.

Drawing by Alfred Pretzsch in Philipp Stein, Deutsche Schauspieler,

Eine Bildnissammlung, Berlin, 1907, reproduced in Michael Patterson,
The First German Theatre, Routledge, 1990.
The tragedy was reported to have been successful at Weimar, as
were all of Schiller’s plays. But if we are to hold Schiller to his vision,
we must ask if his theatre produced the kind of transformative
aesthetic experience for spectators that he envisioned would result in
the healing of the divided modern sensibility. German theatre historian
Erika Fischer-Lichte thinks this unlikely, arguing that few audience
members at Weimar would have been able to resist emotional
identification with the major characters. This would have prevented
them from achieving the kind of distance that is implied in Schiller’s
characterization of the contemplative aesthetic experience from which
a balanced self would emerge (Fischer-Lichte 2004: 197–9). To this, we
may add that Goethe’s occasional autocratic scolding of Weimar
audience members from his box and his heavy fining of actors for
“extemporizing” and for unrefined comic business in violation of his
stringent Rules for Actors suggest that audiences were not always
experiencing aesthetic contemplation (Schwind 1997: 100, 98). In
addition there is the fact that during Goethe’s administration of the
theatre until 1826, pieces by August von Kotzebue and A.W. Iffland
(1759–1814), plus melodramas, comedies, and other lightweight works,
were staged twice as often as plays by Lessing, Goethe,
Shakespeare, and Schiller (Sosluski 2007: 27–8). The idealistic
Weimar theatre had to offer popular fare to make its budget, only a
third of which was covered by its patron, the duke.
Schiller’s dream of an aesthetic experience that could heal the
modern psyche probably was never realizable. Nonetheless, many
Germans today see a vital connection between the productions of
their government-funded theatres, whose work is often challenging
and controversial, and their lives as engaged citizens.
Key references
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, 2nd edn, London: Verso.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2004) History of European Drama and Theatre,
trans. J. Riley, London and New York: Routledge.
Guyer, P. (2004) “Kant, Immanuel,” in E. Craig (ed.) Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge. Online:
www.rep.routledge.com/article/DB047 (accessed May 12, 2009).
Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (eds) (1983) The Invention of
Tradition, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1971) Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (1931), in H.
Adams (ed.) Critical Theory Since Plato, New York: Harcourt Brace
Janovich.
Kindermann, H. (1961) Theatergeschichte Europas, Vol. IV,
Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag.
Kruger, L. (1992) The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural
Legitimization in England, France and America, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
Lessing, G.E. (1962) Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Helen
Zimmerman with a new introduction by Victor Lange, New York: Dover
Publications.
Patterson, M. (1990) The First German Theatre, Schiller, Goethe,
Kleist and Büchner in Performance, London and New York:
Routledge.
Schiller, F. (1962) Love and Intrigue, English version by Frederick
Rolf with an introduction by Edmund P. Kurz, Great Neck, NY:
Barron’s Education Series.
Schiller, F. (1971) Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in H.
Adams (ed.) Critical Theory Since Plato, New York: Harcourt Brace
Janovich.
Schiller, F. (1985) “Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution,” trans.
J. Sigerson and J. Chambless, in Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom,
New York: Schiller Institute, New Benjamin Franklin House. Schiller, F.
(1991) Wallenstein and Mary Stuart, ed. Walter Hinderer, trans. C.E.
Passage, New York: Continuum Publishing.
Schiller, F. (1998) Schiller: Five Plays, trans. R.D. MacDonald,
London: Oberon Books.
Schwind, K. (1997) “‘No Laughing!’ Autonomous Art and the Body of
the Actor in Goethe’s Weimar,” Theatre Survey 38 (Nov. 1997).
Sharpe, L. (1991) Friedrich Schiller, Drama, Thought, and Politics,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sosulski, M.J. (2007) Theater and Nation in Eighteenth Century
Germany, Williston, VT: Ashgate Publishing.
Wilkinson, E.M. and Willoughby, L.A. (eds) (1967) Friedrich Schiller:
On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ybarra, P. (2005) “Staging the Nation on the Ruins of the Past: An
Investigation of Mexican Archeological Performance,” in K.
Gounaridou (ed.) Staging Nationalism_ Essays on Theatre and
National Identity, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.
The French Revolution, melodrama, and nationalism
Before the Revolution of 1789, many looked to France as the most
prosperous and civilized country in the world. The Revolution and the
chaos that followed in France during the 1790s, however, shocked the
European bourgeoisie. The civil strife and international wars of the late
1790s brought more bloodshed and confusion, and many Europeans
were relieved when Napoleon Bonaparte emerged as a strong leader
in 1799. Although Napoleon’s rule ensured stability in France, his
imperial ambitions soon brought parts of the Revolution to the rest of
Europe and the Americas. The turmoil engulfed the entire Western
world in intermittent warfare until 1815 and lasted through 1825 in Latin
America. We will examine the ramifications of the revolutionary era for
the Americas later in this chapter.
These political transformations reconfigured the predominant
genres of Western theatre. Pre-revolutionary aristocrats and
bourgeoisie in France, Great Britain, and Germany had been
applauding neoclassical and sentimental comedies and tragedies,
together with several minor genres. Twenty years later, by 1810, most
European theatregoers in these countries were thronging to see
nationalistic spectacles, gothic thrillers, and melodramas. In theatres
where heroic virtues or genteel pathos had inspired neoclassical or
sentimental responses, the emotions of rage, fear, and panic now
stirred audiences. For spectators who had weathered the turmoil of
the Revolution, either directly or vicariously, the temperate values of
pre-revolutionary times seemed quaint and uninteresting. Some pre-
1789 plays continued to be performed, of course, but few dramatists
after 1800 wrote popular plays within the old conventions. In short, the
revolutionary era had transformed the dramatic genres of European
theatre. How had this happened?
We need to focus primarily on the shattered expectations of
theatregoers in Paris during the Revolution to understand this
transformation. According to historian Matthew S. Buckley, several
events occurred between 1791 and 1794 that alienated Parisian
playgoers from the kinds of enjoyments that they had come to expect
from the old genres. Consequently, the Revolution, says Buckley,
“became a nightmarish, originary drama of modernism, a material,
historical experience of [traditional] drama’s failure that could be
neither reversed nor banished from cultural awareness” (Buckley
2006: 6). By the start of 1791, many in Paris (including several
revolutionaries) expected that the antipathy between the people and
the French crown would soon play out like a sentimental comedy, with
the king and the revolutionaries agreeing to a constitutional monarchy.
After all, the first stages of the Revolution had witnessed the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, the abolition of state monopolies,
and attempts to separate the French Catholic Church from the power
of Rome. In line with such progress, it seemed to many Parisians that
King Louis XVI might decide to accept a limited role in ruling, much
like the king of Great Britain.
Instead of a reconciliation involving tears of gratitude from the
people and smiling beneficence from his majesty, however, King Louis
attempted to flee the country with his family in June of 1791. This
revealed to many Parisians that the hope of a sentimental ending had
been a seductive fiction all along and it set the stage for the king’s
execution, which followed in 1793. During the so-called Reign of Terror
in 1793–1794, when the revolutionary leader Maximilian Robespierre
and his Committee of Public Safety were attempting to purge the
Revolution of its enemies, many Parisians looked upon this lawyer-
turned-politician as an “incorruptible” hero in a neoclassic tragedy and
they cheered his attempt to form a republic of virtue. But again their
hopes were dashed. Instead of sacrificing himself to establish an era
of peace and goodness in the neoclassical mode, Robespierre’s
Terror petered out and his botched attempt at suicide revealed him to
be more of a fool than a tragic hero. Further, the Terror, in which
Enlightenment ideas were deployed to justify the legal execution of
over 40,000 citizens in France, led many Parisians to conclude that the
enlightened principles behind many sentimental and neoclassical
plays could only end in chaos and horror.
In Buckley’s interpretation, then, crucial events in the Revolution
radically undercut the believability of two of the major genres that had
sustained French culture in the decades leading up to 1789:
sentimental comedy and neoclassical tragedy. Throughout his
discussion, Buckley emphasizes that these traditional genres were not
simply abstract devices of literary discourse. For literate Frenchmen,
they were narratives about the shape of events that rested on reliable
historical knowledge and evoked deep-seated expectations for the
future. When the events of the Revolution spun away from the
reassuring contours of these narratives, many citizens could no longer
give form to their experiences. Similar to the events of September 11th
for many U.S. citizens, the events of 1791–1794 unhinged their
worldview. With their old dramatic genres rendered unreliable and
irrelevant, Parisians sought new ones.
Many traumatized by revolution, terror, and war found a hopeful
replacement for the old plays in the genre of melodrama. This genre
stirred up the memorable emotions that Parisians had experienced
during of the Terror but provided a safe and moral resolution.
Melodrama as a distinct genre emerged in 1800 with the production of
Coelina, Or the Child of Mystery, by Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773–
1844). Soon, several other playwrights were writing melodramas and
the new genre was all the rage in the boulevard theatres of Paris for
the rest of the decade.
For evidence of the connection between the experience of the
Revolution and the new genre, theatre historian Buckley cites an
introduction to the published plays of Pixérécourt written by his friend,
Charles Nodier:

The entire people had come into the streets and the public space to
perform the greatest drama in history. Everyone had been an actor in
this bloody play, everyone had been a soldier, a revolutionary, or an
outlaw. To its solemn spectators who had smelled gunpowder and blood,
there was a need for emotions analogous to those from which they had
been cut off by the re-establishment of order. . . . There was [also] a
need to be reminded anew of the framework, always uniform in its result,
of this great lesson that comprehends all philosophies, supports all
religions: no matter how low, virtue is never without recompense, crime
never without punishment. . . . This was the morality of the revolution.
(Nodier, quoted in Buckley 2006: 66)

Buckley recognizes that the narrative of early melodrama as

described by Nodier provided a form of cultural wish fulfillment.
Nodier’s belief that the “morality of the revolution” proffered a kind of
poetic justice experienced by many between 1789 and 1799 was far
from the truth, however. Melodrama may have reassured a
traumatized people, but it could never fully allay the gut-wrenching
fears or soothe the moral panic undergone by many Parisians.
Had it not been for the network of periodical print culture in Europe,
the traumas of the revolutionary decade in Paris might have remained
relatively isolated. Most of Europe, however, still looked to Paris as the
center of the enlightened world. Journalists, poets, travelers, and
others soon spread the word about the events of the Revolution, first
to the French provinces and then to all of the capitals of Europe.
Although print was slow by today’s standards of instant reporting, the
news stories in London, Berlin, and elsewhere (which included many
exaggerations and rumors) swept up many literate Europeans in the
emotions and politics of the Revolution. For them, too, reading about
the events in Paris in the early 1790s produced the feeling that the
bottom had dropped out of their world. After such vicarious
experiences, many European playgoers, like their counterparts in
Paris, also sensed that the older forms of comedy and tragedy could
no longer accommodate what they were reading about in their
newspapers. In the wake of the Revolution and especially during the
European and American wars that followed, melodrama claimed more
and more adherents.
Although few of the early melodramas were overtly nationalistic,
most undercut the rational and ethical basis of liberal, enlightened
nationalism. The Revolution, coupled with the Rousseauian thinking of
the previous decade (see Chapter 7), had induced a desire for utopia,
the conviction that naturally good people might create a society in
which evil could be banished from the world. Coelina and other plays
in the new genre often depicted such a utopia, typically finding it in
idealized visions of traditional peasant life (Figure 8.2). Lessing,
Schiller, and other liberal nationalists had been more politically
realistic; they knew that utopian nostalgia for the old order ignored the
problems of absolutist rule and blind religious faith. Similarly, the early
melodramas enjoined Europeans to make firm distinctions between
hero and villain, French and Prussian, “us” and “them.” Such black-
and-white morality might be the ethics of fairy-tale allegories and
simplistic nationalisms, but it avoided the kinds of hard choices that
Schiller dramatized between his two queens in Mary Stuart.
Enlightenment nationalists believed that all peoples needed national
theatres to elevate their nations; they did not assume that some
national peoples had already arrived at the pinnacle of Kantian
morality. Revolution and war also degraded the value of enlightened
reason, which many believed had led to the trauma of the Terror. Like
the plays of Kotzebue, melodrama elevated nature and intuition over
reason as better guides to morality and possible utopia. This
assumption, of course, contradicted much that Schiller and other
liberal nationalists held dear. Without rationality, the liberals believed,
humankind might never heal the breach between reason and feeling.
Figure 8.2This print depicts a scene from Pixérécourt's The Forest of Bondy, still
popular in 1843 when this illustration (known as a “penny character print”) was
published. For this exciting melodrama, a dog was trained to jump at the throat
of the actor playing the villain, the killer of the dog's master. Penny character
print, Mr. Cony-Landri-Webb.

HTC 28, 321. © Harvard Theatre Collection.

Melodrama flourished on European and American stages for the
rest of the nineteenth century, reshaping much of Western theatre.
Because audiences enjoyed melodramatic spectacles, the genre
helped to transform the two-dimensionality of chariot-and-pole staging
into more realistic scenic illusions. As the size of stages expanded to
accommodate the increased demand for spectacle, playwrights called
for more three-dimensional scenic units – fortresses that could
collapse in an explosion and a mountain which a horse and rider could
ascend to near the top of the proscenium, for example. By the 1880s,
melodramatic ice floes, steaming trains, and galloping horses – the
last done with treadmills and revolving scenery – were stretching the
ingenuity and endurance of technicians and stagehands. The wide
appeal of melodrama also broadened theatrical audiences. In addition
to the middle class, which continued to provide the core audience for
melodrama, working-class spectators began attending the theatre in
increasing numbers after the 1820s, enjoying plays like The Carpenter
of Rouen (1837) that pitted plebeian avengers against decadent
aristocrats. Moral reform melodramas such as The Bottle (1847) and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) even converted some sober, antitheatrical
Protestants to playgoers. After 1840, many star-struck spectators
enjoyed their favorites in melodramatic spectacles. English star Henry
Irving’s (1838–1905) most famous melodramatic role was Mathias in
The Bells, for example, a haunted figure who robbed and murdered to
gain success early in his career (Figure 8.3). Melodrama organized the
dramatic plots of many nationalistic war plays and also mixed easily
with Romantic drama, as will be seen.
Figure 8.3Henry Irving in his production of The Bells at the Lyceum Theatre,
London, 1871.

© V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

European cultural nationalisms, 1815–1848

After 1815, versions of cultural nationalism flourished in

most European countries (Figure 8.4). When Enlightenment thinkers
looked at history in the eighteenth century, they tried to deduce
universal principles about human behavior from the past that they
could apply to all nations in the present and future. Historian Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), however, denied that this was
possible. In his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind
(1784), Herder argued that everyone’s understanding of the past was
necessarily subservient to a Volksgeist [FOYLKS-gahyst], a German
word that means the spirit of a national people. Not even well-trained
historians could transcend their particular Volksgeist to write universal
history because the history of each national people was unique, said
Herder, and historical interpretation was necessarily tied to the ideas
and values of the volk, the nation. Although Enlightenment notions of
the potential universality of historical interpretation remained dominant
in much of the West during the eighteenth century, modifications of
Herder’s ideas shaped most discussions about cultural nationalism
throughout the nineteenth. Napoleon’s armies had conquered in the
name of universal Enlightenment principles, and Europeans
oppressed by the French looked to Herder and his followers to justify
their nation’s opposition to French imperialism. Although Herder
himself never argued that one nation or racial group might be superior
to others, several of his later disciples claimed that his historicism
justified their sense of national and/or racial superiority. In general,
Herder’s legacy animated historians and others to search for the
origins of their nation’s Volksgeist, to explore what they took to be the
unique features of their “imagined community,” and to celebrate their
own national heroes. Many of Herder’s ideas continue to be influential
today.
Figure 8.4Political map of Europe in 1820.

Depending on the national political context, cultural nationalism

based on a version of Herder’s ideas played out differently in various
European countries. In Great Britain, victorious in the fight against
Napoleon, conservative cultural nationalists mostly relived past
glories. On the London stage in the 1820s and 1830s, for example, star
actor T.P. Cooke (1786–1864) presented the manly and sentimental
virtues of an idealized English seaman. Cooke had actually served in
the British navy against the French and used this experience to
promote his image as the archetypal British sailor. Among his favorite
starring roles were Long Tom Coffin and Harry Hallyard in two nautical
melodramas. As the beleaguered seaman hero in Douglas Jerrold’s
Black-Ey’d Susan (1829), Cooke found his most popular vehicle,
performing it 785 times in his long career. Jerrold’s melodrama, awash
with nautical metaphors, led to several other plays featuring heroic
sailors – and eventually to W.S. Gilbert’s brilliant parody of the
character type in the operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (1878).
 Also in the 1820s, British theatre artists began working with
historians to mount more accurate productions of national historical
plays, principally the dramas of Shakespeare. This was a part of the
movement known as antiquarianism, which aimed to immerse
spectators in the spirit of past and exotic cultures through an accurate
rendering of their details. Under antiquarianism, Shakespearean
productions in England became a means of honoring the genius of the
national poet and a conservative understanding of the national past.
English antiquarianism began with Charles Kemble’s (1775–1854)
production of King John in 1824.
James Robinson Planché (1796–1880) based his costuming of
Kemble’s actors on scrupulous research into medieval dress, an
innovation welcomed by Kemble’s bourgeois audience. Planché, a
leader in antiquarianism, costumed subsequent Shakespearean
productions with attention to historical detail and provided managers
with extensive information on the banners and insignia of medieval
heraldry (Figure 8.5). William Charles Macready (1793– 1873), who
dominated the English stage from the 1830s into the early 1840s,
popularized the goals of antiquarianism by aiming consistently for
historical accuracy in costuming, props, and painted scenery for his
major productions. Eighteenth-century nationalists like Beaumarchais
and Löwen had hoped that nationalism would teach their countrymen
rational deliberation and liberal values. Later cultural nationalism in
England, however, pushed conservative values and emotional
attachments to historical artifacts and ancient customs.
In contrast, most French cultural nationalists split into radical,
conservative, and reactionary factions, with each group claiming to
represent the true identity of France. In addition, liberal nationalists
hoped to revive the French constitutionalism of the first three years of
the Revolution. After 1815, these factions clashed in several areas of
French culture, including the advent of Romanticism on the French
stage. Romanticism had already triumphed in England and Germany,
and even penetrated Austria and the Italian states, but political
opposition impeded its realization in France. In brief, Romanticism
celebrated artistic genius and ambitious action. In the music of
Beethoven and the poetry of Wordsworth, Romanticism marked a new
point on the continuum of cultural modes for gaining knowledge about
the self. In medieval and early modern times, Western culture taught
people to look primarily to external entities – the feudal order, the
Church, the logic of absolutism – for self-understanding. Beginning
with the Protestant Reformation and moving to the Enlightenment, to
sentimentalism, and then to Romanticism, Western culture
increasingly invited humans to discover purpose and understanding
from within. Most French radicals and liberals supported Romanticism,
although the liberals were skeptical that heroic action could provide
much of a basis for political legitimacy. French reactionaries, however,
yearned for a return to a Catholic and absolutist Europe and modeled
their hopes for French theatrical culture on the neoclassical era of
Molière and Racine.
Figure 8.5James Robinson Planché's antiquarian design for the king's costume
in Charles Kemble's 1824 production of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.

From Planché's Costume of Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Parts I

and II (1824). © Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
 Leading the liberals was novelist and playwright Victor Hugo, who
had announced the goals of a Romantic theatre in his preface to the
play Cromwell in 1827. He and others pointed out that a few Romantic
productions had already achieved some success at the Comédie
Française. The French reactionaries took their stand in 1830 at the
Comédie’s production of Hugo’s Hernani. Hugo had added some
political conservatives to the liberals among his supporters for
Hernani, a play that intentionally violated many of the rules of
neoclassicism and incorporated several scenes of melodramatic
action. After an initial three nights of calm, a shouting and shoving
match raged for the remaining 36 performances between the
Romantics and the reactionaries in the audience, drowning out the
actors (Figure 8.6). In the end, most of the Parisian press hailed the
Romantics as the victors, chiefly for outlasting their opponents.
Following the riots, French Romanticism, with frequent injections of
melodrama, achieved widespread success in the 1830s and 1840s.
These included the generally liberal plays of Hugo and the
conservative costume dramas of Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), such
as Henri III and His Court and his adaptation of The Three
Musketeers.
There was also a radical side to French cultural nationalism,
exemplified in the theatre by the career of actor-playwright Frederick
Lemaître (1800–1876). Through the roles he played, Lemaître came to
embody the revolutionary values of heroic freedom and working-class
grit denied to most French citizens by a conservative French state
between 1815 and 1848. Whereas most liberal and conservative artists
and critics understood the state and the nation as one, Lemaître’s
vehicles implicitly divided the French state from the nation of French
people in order to criticize the repressive regime installed in Paris after
Napoleon’s defeat. Lemaître played a wide variety of melodramatic
roles between 1825 and 1850, the era of his greatest renown. These
included a moody and violent gambler, a scorned lover who throws
himself into the Seine River, and the English star Edmund Kean
(1787–1833), played by Lemaître as an erratic and tempestuous
melodramatic actor. Many critics favorably compared Lemaître to the
English celebrity. Novelist Victor Hugo, for instance, praised Lemaître
as “capable of movements, utterances, cries that could cause an
audience to shudder violently, and of astounding flashes which
transfigured him and made him appear in the dazzling halo of absolute
greatness” (Hemmings 1993: 221).
Figure 8.6Contemporary illustration of the Hernani riots, showing the audience
and the final scene of Hugo's play on stage at the Comédie Française in 1830.

Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Lemaître gained fame initially in 1823 when he played the dashing
thief Robert Macaire. Although he used the character to parody the
style of early melodrama, he also aimed some pointed barbs at the
current French state for its graft and greed. Lemaître worked with the
authors of the original piece to fashion a new play in 1834, called
simply Robert Macaire. In this vehicle, Lemaître’s anti-hero attacked
the villainy and hypocrisy of the wealthy, especially those who had
profited from the short-lived and largely futile Revolution of 1830 in
Paris. Not surprisingly, the authorities eventually banned all
melodramas about Macaire, including several other plays that only
hinted at the character type. This censorship, of course, helped the
star to seal his image as the defender of France’s revolutionary
heritage. In the 1840s, Lemaître chose several vehicles that also
positioned him as a champion of the poor. He appeared, for instance,
in a feature role in a stage adaptation of The Mysteries of Paris in
1844, an exposé of Parisian poverty. Like the Macaire plays, these and
several other melodramas performed by Lemaître mixed cynicism
about wealth and exploitation with popular notions of revolutionary
outrage and hope. Lemaître inspired cultural nationalism in many of
his spectators by contrasting present corruption with the remembered
glories of 1789.
In Germany and Eastern Europe, nationalism tended to unite radical
cultural nationalists and liberal constitutionalists in plans for
transforming groups of language-based peoples into nation-states.
Earlier German attempts to establish national theatres and write
national history plays set the precedent for later cultural nationalists
among the small German states and within the Austrian and Russian
empires. Polish nationalists throughout the nineteenth century also
pushed for a return to independence of their native lands. Several
Hungarian-language plays in the 1840s dramatized the plight of
Hungarian peasants under the rule of Austrian aristocrats. In Prague,
cultural nationalists published articles, books, and plays arguing for
the independence of Czech lands from the Austrian Empire.
These and other national aspirations exploded in the revolutions of
1848. In that year, radicals demanding constitutional rights, the
independence of national groups, and an end to remaining feudal
privileges staged revolts in Paris, Copenhagen, Budapest, and
Palermo (Sicily). Revolution spread to other cities, gained support
among many liberal groups, and soon much of Central and Eastern
Europe was in turmoil. In France, Parisians rallied to the barricades to
oust an unpopular king, but ended up with the nephew of Napoleon for
an emperor. Although Polish, Czech, and Hungarian nationalists
threatened for a short time to pull apart the Austrian Empire, the
emperor’s army routed the rebels and suppressed calls for separate
constitutions and independence. An assembly of liberal German
delegates met for nearly a year in Frankfurt to form a unified,
constitutional German state and offered to make King Frederick of
Prussia its constitutional monarch, but he refused, dashing hopes for a
liberal German nation. By 1850, serfdom had been abolished
throughout Europe (except in Russia) and a few small states had
gained more liberal constitutions. None of the stateless European
national groups had gained independence, however, and many of
their leaders were dead or in prison. Only after the Great War, also
known as the First World War (1914–1918), and the dissolution of
several European empires would cultural nationalists climb to political
power within the new nation-states of Ireland, Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Finland, and several others. Although the radicals and liberals
of 1848–1849 mostly failed to achieve their goals, they did validate the
continuing desire for popular liberty and equality and also
demonstrated the political power of cultural nationalism
Nationalism in Russia and Italy, 1848–1880
Despite their defeat, most cultural nationalists in Central and Eastern
Europe went underground and vowed to fight on. Many disappointed
liberal nationalists, however, abandoned their hopes in the wake of
1848 or traded in their Enlightenment values to side with the cultural
nationalists. Meanwhile, some in Italy began looking for more direct
political and military ways to unify their disparate people.
Before turning to developments in Italy, however, we should focus
briefly on Russia. Although this most economically underdeveloped
and politically repressive of European empires had been nurturing
pockets of cultural nationalism, both among the majority of Russian-
speaking peoples and within its many ethnic minorities, Russia was
virtually untouched by the revolutions of 1848. This was partly due to
poor communication among rival minority peoples, but also the result
of the regime’s censorship of all printed material. With regard to the
theatre, Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825) clamped down on performed as
well as printed drama and mandated a monopoly on theatrical
production, which lasted until 1882. As such laws had done in France
before the 1789 Revolution, Russian censorship severely restricted
theatrical expression, fostered cynicism about the regime, and
spawned numerous ways to evade imperial regulations. For most of
the nineteenth century, the theatre continued to be enjoyed primarily
by aristocrats and the imperial court; few in the Russian bourgeoisie
thought of themselves as constituting a possible public sphere with
their own theatre and an imagined national community.
Given these circumstances, traditional beliefs and loyalties – to a
local nobleman, to the aristocratic class, to the tsar, to the Russian
Orthodox Church – remained stronger than the pull of Russian
nationalism for most theatregoers until the 1870s. From 1815 into the
1830s the court and the aristocracy cheered a spate of conservative
and reactionary plays in the wake of the tsar’s victory over Napoleon’s
invading army in 1812. Still influenced by French fashions, however,
Russian theatregoers applauded conventional melodramas and
historical pageants in the middle decades of the century. But the
regime did not allow playgoers to see the work of many Russian
Romantic playwrights. Like the French Romantics, Russian poet
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) turned to history for inspiration, but
the radical politics of his play Boris Godunov (1825), a sprawling
masterpiece, kept it out of publication until 1831 and off the stage
entirely until 1870. Censorship eased somewhat in the 1850s, allowing
the staging of Mikhail Lermontov’s (1814–1841) Masquerade, inspired
by Shakespeare’s Othello. However, his play The Spaniards (1830) –
exposing the similarities between Tsar Nicholas I’s reign (from 1825 to
1855) and the Spanish Inquisition – was published but not performed
during the nineteenth century. Russian comic satirists A.S.
Griboyedov (1794–1829) in Woe from Wit (1824) and Nikolai Gogol
(1809–1852) in The Inspector General (1836) had more success with
their attacks on individual bumblers, embezzlers, sycophants, and
hypocrites, in part because their generally conservative politics offered
little offense to the ideology of the regime.
With the loosening of censorship, the freeing of the serfs in 1861,
some modest reforms, and the playwriting of Alexander Ostrovsky
(1823–1886), Russian theatre began to change in the 1860s. Ostrovsky
wrote in a variety of genres, but found his greatest success in dramas
of domestic realism for and about the Russian middle class. The
Thunderstorm (1859), for example, explores the tragic results of a
parent’s oppression, while Enough Stupidity for Every Wise Man
(1868) follows the comic success of a man who manipulates the
foibles and stupidities of others. Ostrovsky, whose often ironic tone
and focus on domestic situations influenced the plays of his
countryman Anton Chekhov (discussed in Chapter 9), encouraged
other realist writers to turn to the stage. Given the constraints of tsarist
absolutism, Ostrovsky steered clear of politics, including the
exploration of possibilities for Russian nationalism. But by welcoming
the emerging Russian bourgeoisie into the theatre with his plays,
Ostrovsky ensured a wider, more public audience for future dramatic
discussions about Russia. This conversation began to occur with
productions of the historical dramas of Aleksei K. Tolstoy (1817–1875),
second cousin to Leo, the great novelist. In his trilogy of plays about
three Russian feudal monarchs, The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1864),
Tsar Fyodor Ivannovich (1868), and Tsar Boris (1870), Tolstoy focused
on the psychological and ethical ramifications of political rule. Most
historical plays, however, like many operas and ballets popular with
the regime, continued to conflate tsarist rule, Christianity, patriotism,
and imperialism until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
In significant ways, southern Italy and Sicily were just as tradition-
bound as Russia at mid-century; as a result, few Italians in Naples or
Palermo had any interest in nationalism. But patriots in the north were
agitating for Italian unification and insurrections broke out in 1848 in
several northern cities and in Rome, where a constitutional republic
lasted for three months. After the failures of 1848 in Italy, patriots
looked to the king of Piedmont, in the northwest corner of Italy, as a
potential standard-bearer for the military unification of the country. Led
by the Piedmontese prime minister and aided by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s
rag-tag army in the south, the state of Piedmont unified most of Italy in
1861, later adding Venice and Rome to its territory. Italy in 1870 was a
nation in name only, however. Culturally, socially, and economically,
the north and south had few interests in common and centuries of
warfare had kept alive regional fears and antagonisms that mere
political unity could not erase. Lacking a common language, written or
spoken, most Italian subjects could not easily communicate across
regions; what is now standard, modern Italian only emerged and
began to spread in the twentieth century. These divisions undercut
Italian nationalism and hobbled the development of all of the arts,
including the theatre.
Despite their divisions, Italians in all regions did share a love for
opera and many nationalists celebrated the works of Giuseppe Verdi
(1813–1901) for their apparent endorsement of national unity.
Ironically, though, Verdi’s operas actually had very little to say about
Italian nationalism. Verdi was a patriot, but he stayed in Paris during
the uprisings of 1848 and for most of the 1850s; despite his reputation
in Italy, he never considered himself “the maestro of the revolution.”
Most of his operas center on love triangles among historical
characters. His one vaguely nationalistic opera was The Battle of
Legano (1849), set in the twelfth century, which did praise Italy as “a
single people of heroes” in its opening chorus and featured a second
act that heaped scorn on Austria (Gilmour 2011: 170). Perhaps
because the opera was staged in Rome during its short-lived days as
a republic, Italian nationalists seized on Legano as a symbol of Italian
independence and unity. It would not be the first (or last) time that
nationalists imagined more patriotism and glory for their communities
than their national symbols could sustain.
Star tragedian Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915) provided a more
genuine nationalistic symbol of Italy than Verdi. In 1849, he fought the
Austrians in defense of the Roman Republic and later welcomed
Garibaldi and his army into Naples when they overthrew the
Neopolitan kingdom. Salvini’s political and cultural nationalism
remained a part of his public image and colored his international
reputation. After performing in Italy for most of the 1860s, Salvini
embarked on a series of tours in the 1870s and 1880s to South
America, the United States, England, France, and even Russia (where
a young Konstantin Stanislavsky, to be discussed in Chapter 9,
marveled at his power). In addition to a few Italian vehicles, Salvini
played Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and other Shakespearean tragic
heroes, performing them all in Italian. Salvini’s Othello (Figure 8.7)
overwhelmed American novelist Henry James:
His powerful, active, manly frame, his noble, serious, vividly expressive
face, his splendid smile, his Italian eye, his superb, voluminous voice, his
carriage, his tone, his ease, the assurance he instantly gives that he
holds the whole part in his hands and can make of it exactly what he
chooses, – all this descends upon the spectator’s mind with a richness
which immediately converts attention into faith and expectation into
sympathy. He is a magnificent creature, and you are already on his side.
(quoted in Carlson 1985: 61)

For James and for many other spectators around the world, Salvini’s
Othello, his most popular role, was more Italian than African. Cultural
nationalism was in the business of propagating positive stereotypes
and Salvini’s passionate, tragic Othello fit the bill. If the new Italian
nation-state could produce such a combination of pathos, passion,
and power, admirers, both in Italy and abroad, believed that its
national pride was surely justified.
Wagner and racial nationalism in Germany, 1848–1880
Nineteenth-century nationalism in many German-speaking areas
turned toward racism. To some extent, racial nationalism exaggerates
a major tenet of cultural nationalism; it proposes that the dominant
cultural group in a nation is not only different from, it is also superior to
minority groups. Racial nationalism breaks with cultural nationalism,
however, to claim that the essence of a volk is in the blood. By
conflating culture with a racist notion of biology, the full assimilation of
minority Others as equal citizens into the nation becomes impossible.
Racism, according to the comparative historian George M.
Fredrickson, “has two components: difference and power. It originates
in a mindset that regards ‘them’ as different from ‘us’ in ways that are
permanent and unbridgeable. This sense of difference provides a
motive or rationale for using our power advantage to treat the
ethnoracial Other in ways that we would regard as cruel or unjust if
applied to members of our own group” (Fredrickson 2002: 9).
Figure 8.7Tommaso Salvini as Othello. Despite his darkened skin and Moorish
headdress and costume, Salvini retained his own Italian-style moustache for the
role, perhaps to emphasize his Italian heritage.

© Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC.

Although in general Herder’s cultural nationalism was neutral about
the superiority of one culture over another, Herder himself hoped that
Jews and other minorities would alter their identities when Germany
became a state and seek to assimilate to what he believed was
superior German culture. This prejudice against minority cultures in
German-speaking areas in Europe festered and grew in the
nineteenth century; many Germans attacked the arid rationalism of
the “French people” as inherently inferior, for example, or sought to
elevate the essence of “Germanness” over “Jewishness.” Opera
composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) shared these prejudices and
advanced them in his political and artistic attempts to facilitate
German unification. Like many other German Romantics, Wagner
imagined a unified, utopian Germany based in traditions of language,
mythology, and ethnic origin and these ideas shaped his operas. As
Wagner scholar Hannu Salmi asserts, “Wagner’s national thinking
became a unity fusing art and politics” (Salmi 1999: 195).
Although several of Wagner’s operas before 1848 celebrated
German tradition, they did not push cultural into racial nationalism.
Wagner set The Flying Dutchman (1843) in Nordic legend, for
example, and Tannhäuser (1845) featured Wartburg castle, a
celebrated site for German nationalistic pride. Involved in the idealistic
attempt to forge a German nation during the uprisings of 1848–1849,
Wagner wrote patriotic poetry, edited a radical newspaper, and aided
others in the fight against Prussian domination. Barely escaping
arrest, Wagner fled Germany and spent the next eleven years in exile.
In 1864, Ludwig II, the new king of Bavaria, which was then the
second-largest state in Germany, invited Wagner to join his court and
the composer accepted. Both men understood the German Volksgeist
as an unchanging essence and a possible force in history, if only the
right political opportunity combined with musical genius to inspire the
nation.
 Despite the later political friction between them, King Ludwig’s
support of Wagner allowed him to envision and complete several
operas, facilitated the realization of a national theatre for the
production of his works, and also encouraged Wagner to shift his
nationalism from a cultural toward a racial definition of the German
people. During his exile, Wagner had begun The Ring of the
Nibelungen, his immense tetralogy of operas, which would be
completed in 1874. Pushed and pulled by various influences over the
years, especially by the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, the
vast work nonetheless attempts to distill the destiny of the German
people in what Wagner believed was a truthful fusion of myth and
history. The final opera, Götterdämmerung, stages the destruction of a
decadent order of states, forces, and laws so that a new, utopian
Germany might emerge. Throughout, Wagner distinguishes between
superior German characters and others who represent corrupt, non-
Germanic influences. In one scene in Siegfried (1871), the third opera
in the cycle, for instance, Wagner signals his rejection of what he had
termed “Jewishness in Music” by having his hero, Siegfried, turn away
in contempt from a dwarf characterized as a Jew. At other points,
blood purity plays an important role in the plots of the four operas.
Wagner finished The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (1868) at a
crucial time in the push for German unification. Under the leadership
of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Prussia had won a short war against
the Austrian Empire in 1866 and was poised to unite Germany under
Prussian leadership. Wagner, despite his previous alliance with the
king of Bavaria and antipathy toward Prussia, now sought to gain
influence with the stronger power. While composing The
Mastersingers, Wagner wrote a series of periodical articles that
attacked the French people for their effete and imitative nature; at one
point, Wagner calls them apes in contrast to the inventive Germans.
Similarly, in the opera, Wagner depicts a medieval master singer in
Nuremberg fighting against foreign influences and winning the singing
contest (and the girl) in the end. After the success of The
Mastersingers in Munich, Wagner toured the opera to Berlin in 1870
and scored a triumph in the Prussian capital. In effect, Wagner’s
nationalistic opera helped to fan the flames for the Franco-Prussian
War (1870–1871).
The Prussian victory in that war established a German Empire that
facilitated the incorporation of Bavaria and the smaller German states
under Prussian rule (Figure 8.8). In response, Wagner composed the
“Kaiser March” and conducted it in Berlin, hoping for an appointment
in the new regime. But Bismarck had no interest in identifying the
German Empire with Wagner’s visions, and the composer turned his
attention to fundraising for his Festival Theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria.

Although announced to open in 1867, the first festival did

not occur until 1876. Wagner designed the Festival Theatre to achieve
his aesthetic and nationalistic goals. Believing that his epic music-
dramas could transport his listeners to a spiritual realm of imagined
aspiration and unity, Wagner aimed for the total immersion of his
audience in his fictions. Accordingly, he attempted to weave together
music, drama, singing, scenery, lighting, and all of the other theatrical
arts into what he called a Gesamtkunstwerk [ghe-ZAHMT-koonst-
vehrk], a totally integrated and unified production. Interested in
solidifying the unity of the volk, Wagner designed a proscenium
theatre that did away with architectural social distinctions in the
auditorium, such as private boxes and an upper gallery, and arranged
all seats facing the stage (Figure 8.9). In his attempt to ensure that all
spectators would sit in rapt attention to the stage illusion, Wagner
even eliminated the sight of the pit orchestra, placing it well below the
lip of the Bayreuth forestage. In other ways, though, Wagner
continued mid-nineteenth-century staging conventions. His theatre
relied on painted flats and backdrops, trap doors, gas lighting, and
spot lights. After the composer’s death in 1883, Bayreuth became a
pilgrimage site for ardent Wagnerians for the next hundred years.
Wagner’s auditorium design, though not his staging practices, would
continue to influence the Western theatre well into the twentieth
century.
Figure 8.8Political map of Europe in 1880.
Figure 8.9Floor plan for Wagner's Festival Theatre at Bayreuth. Notice the fan-
shaped seating, with side entrances, the forestage, and the ample depth of the
stage area for scenic illusion.

From E. O. Sachs, Modern Opera Houses and Theatres (1896–

1898).
Wagner staged Parsifal, his final opera, at Bayreuth in 1882. While
The Ring and other of his operas were based on pagan myths,
Wagner imported specifically Christian ideas and images into Parsifal,
apparently to support his claim that belief in Germanic nationalism
should be understood as a mode of spiritual redemption. In Parsifal,
religion merges with racism through a plot in which the racial
degeneration of the German people must be countered by racial purity
so that Germany may be saved from interbreeding and decline.
Wagner mixes images of the blood of Christian sacrifice with the blood
of racial exclusivity. Even as he was composing his opera, Wagner
was writing articles in anti-Semitic periodicals that sounded the alarm
about “racial miscegenation.” With Parsifal, Wagner made the
complete shift from cultural to racial nationalism. As is well known, the
Nazis adopted Wagner and his operas as cultural avatars of the Third
Reich; Hitler himself was particularly fond of Parsifal. While this does
not mean that Wagner would have approved of Nazi Germany’s policy
of racial extermination, it should alert us to the long-term political
effects that popular theatrical works can unknowingly help to
legitimate.
Liberal and racial nationalisms in the Americas
The new nation-states of North and South America emerged during
the revolutionary era when notions of liberal nationalism, based on
principles from the Enlightenment, predominated. These ideals
continued to shape the United States and the countries of Latin
America through the 1870s. Herderian cultural nationalism played a
small role in the American nation-states. Racial nationalism, however,
though substantially different from the German version, developed
throughout the Americas and became predominant for a short time in
Brazil and for much longer in the U.S.
Late medieval Spain and Portugal had practiced a version of racist
Christianity that carried over into their colonies in the New World.
Officially, Catholicism recognized that Christ had died for the sins of all
humanity and that all people might be saved. In practice, however,
many Spaniards believed that those Jews and Moors who had
converted to Christianity were actually incapable of becoming true
Catholics; only those who could claim limpieza de sangre (purity of
blood) through Christian family descent might gain salvation. When
they took this belief to their new colonies, the Spaniards and
Portuguese usually distinguished between the native populations, who
were deemed capable of salvation, and the slaves imported from
Africa, who, like the Moors before them, became racialized Others. In
addition to blood purity, the pigmentation of the Africans signified to
many Catholics that they were descended from the biblical Sons of
Ham and therefore, as in the Bible, destined by God for slavery.
Despite other factors that slowed the development of racism in Latin
America, Frederickson concludes, “What we have here, therefore, is a
quasi-racialized religious nationalism and not a fully racialized secular
nationalism of the kind that arose in Germany” (Fredrickson 2002: 41).
Napoleonic imperialism in Europe ignited the Latin American
patriotism that led to the wars of independence. Following Napoleon’s
invasion of the Iberian peninsula, the king of Spain abdicated in 1808.
Latin American creoles, those white Americans of direct Spanish
descent, rebelled against the Spanish-born viceroys and bureaucrats
sent by the king to rule the Spanish colonies. A series of patriot
victories and political arrangements, some involving mestizos (those
of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage) and Native Americans,
eventually gained freedom from Spain for nearly all of its former
American colonies by 1825 (Figure 8.10). In contrast, the white
population of Portuguese Brazil, united but vastly outnumbered by
African slaves and Native Americans, welcomed the king of Portugal
and his court, who had fled from Napoleon’s armies. In 1822, the
prince regent of Portugal, in alliance with the white Brazilian elite,
declared Brazil an independent monarchy. Creole Brazilians had won
independence without bloodshed and also without disturbing white
rule.
After independence from Spain, the white elites in most of the new
countries established liberal constitutions based on the principles of
the Enlightenment and the early French Revolution. With the
exception of Brazil, most of the new states gradually abolished slavery
soon after independence. The new constitutions typically granted
universal suffrage to all males in the country, but in practice few
people of indigenous, African, and mixed descent participated as
citizens. Until the 1850s, the politics in most of the new nations veered
between ineffective republican assemblies and strong-man
dictatorships. Nonetheless, the creole elites in most countries
continued to honor the principles of liberal constitutionalism, a
commitment that would eventually open a path to fuller citizenship for
the non-white majority.

Regarding the theatre, traditional songs and dances

continued unchanged among Native Americans and Africans, while
the creoles, as they had done during colonial times, primarily looked to
trends in European theatre as the model for their entertainments.
Despite the turmoil of the early national years, Spanish and French
companies were touring to major Latin American cities with some
regularity to entertain mostly white audiences by the mid-1830s. In
Mexico City, the most populous and liberal of the post-colonial
capitals, entrepreneurs built several new theatres in the 1840s and
1850s to accommodate these companies, as well as for local Mexican
troupes and their occasional playwrights. Like Manuel Eduardo
Gorostiza (1789–1851), who wrote neoclassical plays and satirized
Romanticism, several of these Mexican dramatists continued the
traditions of the past. Others turned to penning sketches for the
musical and variety entertainments that were growing in popularity.
Manuel Ascensio Segura (1805–1871) gained a reputation for his
popular comedies of manners among the more conservative creoles
of Lima, Peru. Segura was one of several Latin American dramatists
who worked in the general style of costumbrismo [kos-toom-BREES-
mo], plays that featured picturesque places, exotic peoples, and
curious customs. Although costumbrista theatre – popular in
Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, and Mexico as well – encouraged the
elite to patronize their less fortunate countrymen, it generally paraded
social rather than racist stereotypes.
Figure 8.10Political map of South America in 1825.

According to historian Will Fowler, “the rise of a neo-colonial order”

marked the 1850–1880 period in Latin America. Great Britain, and later
the United States, folded the economies of these countries into the
emerging global order of nineteenth-century imperialism (Fowler 2008:
59–83). In exchange for bank loans, transportation, communication,
and manufactured goods from the industrialized countries, whites and
mestizos in Latin America supplied raw materials, mining and farm
products, cheap peasant labor, and willing consumers to foreign
capitalists. Many Latin American landowners and merchants worked
to integrate their operations with the Europeans and North Americans.
After 1850, some of this new wealth was flowing to mestizos and
others of mixed descent. These groups joined with some of the rich
creoles to push for more stable societies based on liberal constitutions
and, by the 1870s, liberal versions of nationalism flourished among
participating citizens in most of the former Spanish colonies.
Neo-colonialism, however, also created vast disparities of wealth. In
each country, the rich enjoyed privileged lives at the expense of the
majority of Native Americans and peasants, most of whom had lost
control of their lands to the huge farms, mines, and oil fields that
dominated the land and politics of each nation-state. These new elites
purchased extravagant houses in their capital cities, adorned
themselves with the latest European fashions, and, says Fowler, built
“lavish theatres and opera houses” for their enjoyment (Fowler 2008:
74). For the most part, this shift in the economic and political basis of
Latin American life produced more European theatrical imports,
especially operas, but left relatively unchanged the comedies, variety
entertainments, and costumbrista productions of the past. By 1880,
most Latin American theatre reflected the values of liberal nationalism
and imperialistic capitalism, but it would not begin to critique the social
and political realities of its nation-states for another 20 years.
Although foreign capital reshaped the economy of Brazil as well, its
society and politics remained more traditional than most of the rest of
Latin America during the nineteenth century. The emergence of Brazil
as a monarchy after independence and its relative stability compared
with the rest of the continent sparked a surge in conservative
nationalism among the court and the group of white creoles who ruled
the country in the 1830s. Proponents of nationalism, however, had to
justify or ignore Brazil’s huge investment in slavery, which at the time
constituted roughly half of the population (not counting the indigenous
tribes in the Amazon interior). Portuguese colonial policy had turned
Brazil into a sugar plantation dependent upon slave labor and the
growing industries of coffee and rubber, which were also labor-
intensive, increased the demand for more slaves. While Catholicism
had long supported African slavery, the new monarchy and its
plantation elite, despite its continuing ties to Portugal, needed to
believe that an independent Brazil was somehow different from and
superior to its colonial past.
They found such justification in the conservative Romantic works of
Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811–1882) and his circle,
which included several other Brazilian poets and playwrights as well
as supporters in the monarchy. The Brazilian Romantics promoted a
mix of Catholicism and indianismo, a Rousseau-inspired belief in the
primitive simplicity and natural virtue of Brazil’s many indigenous
tribes. Magalhães wrote plays and poetry in a neoclassical style and
argued for the creation of a Brazilian national theatre. In his most
famous play, Antonio José or the Poet and the Inquisition (1838), still
celebrated as the first Brazilian tragedy, Magalhães took on the purity
of blood prejudice that prevented some Jews and Moors in Portugal
from becoming full Catholics. The historically based tragic hero of the
piece is a converted Jew who, though tried and condemned by the
Portuguese Inquisition, nonetheless affirms his Catholic faith in the
end and dies a martyr for the more open kind of Catholicism endorsed
by Magalhães. Along with other Brazilian Romantics, Magalhães
affirmed that the Catholic faith in Brazil could embrace Jews and
natives – especially those idealized tribes in the interior that might
inspire Brazilian nationalists to similar virtues. Although the play is not
directly racist, it ignores slavery in order to celebrate a notion of
Catholicism that is marginally more liberal and might be fused with
essential Brazilian qualities for the future of the nation. By idealizing
the Amazonian peoples, Magalhães and the Romantics embraced a
kind of cultural nationalism, but one that could have no political
consequences for the elite. In the 1840s, the emperor of Brazil officially
endorsed these ideas and awarded Magalhães with a series of
prestigious diplomatic appointments. Conservative Romanticism
allowed the Brazilian elite to turn its back on the racist basis of its
power.
Brazil’s conservative Romantics, however, could not paper over
other problems in the monarchy. A lost war with Argentina, economic
disarray, and fragmentation within the ruling elite opened up some
political opportunities for Brazilian liberals and led to the abdication of
the first emperor. Fearing massive slave revolts, the elite finally closed
ranks and backed a new emperor in 1840. Meanwhile, British warships
were dramatically curtailing the slave trade. Great Britain had
prohibited the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and stepped up its naval
patrols after 1834; Brazil finally ended the slave trade in 1853. Although
most elite Brazilians favored the continuation of slavery, a few
Brazilian dramatists and poets, including Castro Alves (1847–1871),
advanced the cause of abolitionism through their work. By the mid-
1870s, the neo-colonial order had brought a new generation of liberals
to power in Brazil who sought to modernize the nation and viewed
slavery as a reactionary holdover from the old days. It was not until
1888, though, that slavery itself was finally abolished; the republican
movement ended the Brazilian monarchy the next year. Brazil had
joined the other Latin American nation-states in basing most of its
nationalistic values on liberal rather than racial principles.
In contrast, it took the United States a bloody Civil War (1861–1865)
to reverse its slide toward racial nationalism and, even after that, white
racism would continue to the present day. U.S. racism was partly due
to its colonial legacy. In contrast to most of Latin America, the British
encouraged their subjects to emigrate to their American colonies to
begin agricultural and (later) commercial ventures that could profit the
mother country through trade. Nor did British culture condone racial
intermarriage. Unlike the Spanish and Portuguese, British imperialists
did not set out to exploit natural resources and force the natives to
work for them, even though all three colonial powers encouraged
African slavery. Although British settler colonialism proved much more
stable and profitable than the Iberian model of European imperialism,
its success also made slavery more difficult to eradicate in the
nineteenth century.
The society and culture of the new United States reflected its origins
as a settler colony. The nation-state inherited slavery, white male
supremacy, bourgeois capitalism, and Western expansionism from its
imperial past. In addition, the legacy of Puritanism, which preached
that America might separate itself from the decadence of Europe and
lead the world to salvation, reinforced American self-righteousness
and the claim of moral exceptionalism. Given this perspective, few
Americans for most of the nineteenth century understood their
conquest of other peoples as imperialism. Although the U.S. was
continuing to practice settler colonialism in its western territories, most
citizens believed that the incorporation of new lands into their nation-
state expanded freedom and democracy, even when these
acquisitions and wars increased the reach of chattel slavery and
deprived Native Americans of their homelands. Although the
Revolution and the Constitution had been fought and ratified primarily
on the basis of Enlightenment values, liberal nationalism vied for
dominance with racial nationalism in the beliefs and major institutions
of many citizens, especially after 1830.
Until about 1800, many Americans, North and South, believed that
slavery would gradually fade away. On stage, citizens of the new
country saw both sympathetic and buffoonish characterizations of
black slaves and free people of color and they applauded some plays
that endorsed slavery and others that opposed it. Outside of a few
elite groups in the South, however, white racism, though often a
personal prejudice, was not a widespread nationalistic ideology. In
1800, most northern states in the U.S. were gradually abolishing
slavery and individual manumissions were increasing in the South.
The rising profitability of cotton, however, encouraged many southern
planters to double down on their commitment to slavery. A series of
southern presidents who held slaves and professed racist views,
including Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, also increased the
legitimacy and spread of racial nationalism.
 British pressure to end the slave trade, attacks by northern
abolitionists, and Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia (1831) led many
southerners in the 1830s to reframe their defense of slavery; what had
been understood by many as a necessary evil they now proclaimed as
a positive good. Many southern ideologues proclaimed that black
people were biologically incapable of rational action, and ought to be
thankful that they had been brought to the U.S., where they could
learn civilization from a superior race. Some workers in northern cities
resented competition from free black people for scarce jobs and a
series of riots occurred in the 1830s that pitted working-class racists
against black citizens and abolitionists, scorned by many as
advocates of racial mixing. Racial nationalism was making inroads in
the North, motivated as well by capitalists who depended upon
southern cotton for their profits. The popular genre of Yankee theatre
during the 1830s, which often featured a droll New England character
in comic opposition to a free black figure (always played in blackface
by a white actor), also increased racial nationalism.
Divisions among groups of liberal and racial nationalists increased
dramatically in the 1850s. The so-called Compromise of 1850, which
guaranteed slavery in several western territories, also included a
Fugitive Slave Act. This allowed southern masters to pursue their
runaway slaves in the free states of the North, partly nationalizing the
rights of slave owners. Outraged by this attack on black slave families,
Harriet Beecher Stowe penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was quickly
adapted for the stage after its appearance as a complete novel in
1852. Although an early adaptation preserved Stowe’s abolitionist
views, most stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin compromised her
religious and sentimental depiction of slave families; some
adaptations even endorsed slave holding as a paternalistic institution.
Abolitionist objections to slavery were winning more converts in the
1850s, but few commercial theatres in the North were willing to risk
their profits to stage abolitionist dramas. In the infamous Dred Scott
decision of 1857, the Supreme Court gave southern slaveholders the
right to take their “private property” with them anywhere in the U.S.;
the decision implicitly countermanded the ability of Congress to
restrict the spread of slavery at all. The rise of the new Republican
Party, which opposed extending slavery in the West as a threat to
white male farmers who could not afford slaves, divided the country
and alarmed the South. Believing that a Republican presidential
victory could limit slavery’s national expansion, several southern
states seceded from the United States to form their own white
supremacist nation after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The
new Confederate States of America, which began the Civil War in
1861, had shredded liberal principles to embrace racial nationalism.
As we will see in the case study on blackface minstrelsy that ends
this chapter, there were plenty of racists in the North, as well.
Abolitionism remained a small political movement with little clout at the
start of the war; very few northerners joined the Union army to free
black slaves in the South. Knowing that many conservatives in his
party feared abolition, President Lincoln initially fought the war on
narrow constitutional principles. As the casualties mounted, however,
it became apparent to many that abolishing slavery in the ten rebel
states would shorten the war and Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation (1863). In 1865, with the end of the war in sight, Lincoln
and the Radical Republicans pushed the Thirteenth Amendment
through Congress, abolishing slavery forever in the U.S. The
amendment did not kill racism, of course, but it ended one of its
institutional bulwarks. The failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s led to
new forms of racial nationalism, which continued to insist that the U.S.
should guarantee whites preferential treatment over non-white citizens
because of their race. Racial nationalism would continue into the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Case Study Imagining a white nation: Minstrelsy and U.S.
nationalism, 1840–1870
Bruce McConachie
As is evident throughout this chapter, nationalism depends upon the
imaginations of its citizens. Those nationalists who lived in a nation-
state could usually validate their feelings of patriotism and community
by invoking the glories of their national past, whether real or mythical.
People without a national state but who shared a language and some
culture, such as Germany for much of the nineteenth century, had a
more difficult time finding imagined common ground and sometimes
turned to racial difference as a means of invoking in-group sameness.
The question of who rightly belongs within a national community could
be especially problematic for diverse groups that shared the same
geography and some past traditions but were riven by deep internal
divisions legitimated by long-standing institutional practices, such as
slavery. As we have seen in Brazil and the United States, imagining
others in your nation-state as inherently inferior and unqualified for
citizenship has been a strong incentive for excluding them from full
participation in your nation.
Minstrel shows, the most successful form of popular entertainment
in the northern cities of the U.S. in the decades before and after the
Civil War, provided apparent “evidence” that black people, freed or
enslaved, could not participate as the equals of white citizens in a
liberal and democratic United States. This case study investigates
minstrelsy as a significant source of racial imagining and white
nationalism in the northern United States during the middle decades
of the nineteenth century. Popular culture studies provides a good
approach to the history of blackface entertainment in the U.S.
Although blackface minstrelsy emerged as a cross-class
entertainment in the 1850s, it never lost its working-class roots.
Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1806–1860) was performing minor roles in
the frontier theatres of the Mississippi valley when he invented or stole
from a slave – the historical record is unclear – the song and dance
that would make him famous:
Come listen all you galls and boys,
 I’m just from Tuc-ky hoe;
I’m goin’ to sing a leetle song,
My name’s Jim Crow.
Weel about and turn about,
And do jis so;
Eb’ry time I weel about,
I jump Jim Crow.
(Lott 1994: 23–4)

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Blackface entertainment as popular culture

For most historians, definitions of “popular culture” depend upon the audience
for this form of entertainment and the means used to gather and communicate
with them. In this sense, live performances that appeal to cross-class
audiences in complex societies through commercial means are “popular”
ones. They reach a broader audience than “elite” or “working-class”
entertainments and rely on marketing strategies that “folk” theatre cannot
employ. Entrepreneurs pushing popular shows may draw on these older
traditions, but they transform them in the attempt to generate as big an
audience as possible. The period between 1820 and 1920 was the “golden
age” of popular culture on stage, after print media could be used to generate
big audiences and before films and the radio changed many live, popular
entertainments into mass mediated images and sounds.
Historians usually credit English circus entrepreneur Philip Astley (1742–
1814) with two key innovations that began popular entertainment. In 1768,
Astley required attendees to pay an entrance fee to enable them to watch his
feats of horsemanship, instead of hoping that they would drop money into a
hat before they wandered away. Second, Astley advertised his skill. He and
his wife dispersed handbills around London and paid for ads in the press to
lure the crowds. Circus acts had long been popular at fairs in Europe, but
Astley’s innovations transformed the circus from a series of folk practices into
a commercial business. Following his success in London, Astley added
several more acts, housed his circus in an amphitheatre, and opened similar
shows in Dublin and Paris. By the 1820s, Astley’s Amphitheatre was mounting
grand equestrian dramas such as The Battle of Waterloo, a nationalistic
celebration of the British victory over Napoleon that ran for 144 performances
in 1824.
In the U.S., P.T. Barnum (1810–1891) followed Astley’s example of
commercializing entertainment and also strived to elevate his popular
performances to respectability. Although now chiefly remembered as a circus
impresario, Barnum was best known in the 1850s as the tireless promoter of
his “museum,” the American Museum in New York City. Before museums
were public institutions, private businessmen owned and operated them. In
addition to featuring several exhibits of natural history, fine art, circus animals,
and mechanical wonders, Barnum also touted such “freaks” of nature as the
“Feejee Mermaid” and the “What Is It?”, a black man presented as an
evolutionary “missing link” to his astonished customers (Figure 8.11). He
outfitted the dwarf Charles Stratton in bourgeois elegance as the gentleman
“Tom Thumb” and even arranged for Tom’s introduction to Queen Victoria.
Through such humbugs and self-aggrandizing strategies, Barnum succeeded
in making his exhibits and performances respectable as well as popular.
In his Inventing Popular Culture (2003), historian and cultural theorist John
Storey draws on the British tradition of cultural studies to analyze popular
culture. In general, scholars in cultural studies such as Stuart Hall and
Raymond Williams revised orthodox Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s to
enable them to understand how relations of class, race, gender, and ethnicity
were structuring all kinds of cultural production, including popular culture.
Storey is particularly interested in applying Williams’ notion of cultural
hegemony to understand the experiences of audiences while they are
enjoying popular books, visual arts, and performances. In brief, historians who
view popular performances through the lens of cultural hegemony attempt to
understand how such entertainments position spectators to accept or reject
prevailing arrangements of power in their historical societies. In applying this
approach to the popular entertainments of Astley or Barnum, for example,
Storey would ask what these businessmen did to induce people to attend their
performances, what social categories of people (according to class, race,
gender, etc.) enjoyed them, and how did their engagements with these
performances probably shape their beliefs and practices? Finally, which
significant ideologies and institutions did these beliefs and practices support
or undermine?
While Storey does not look specifically at blackface shows in the U.S., other
historians have provided copious insights into minstrelsy that encourage
scholars to pursue a popular culture approach to study them. These, plus
Storey’s Inventing Popular Culture, will serve as our primary guide in the
following case study on blackface minstrelsy and racial nationalism in the U.S.
between 1840 and 1870.

Dressed in rags with burnt cork covering his face, neck, and hands,
Rice performed several verses of the song, jumping with agility and
variety on each chorus. When he danced as part of a comic afterpiece
at the New York Bowery Theatre in 1832, the young, mostly male
working-class audience gave him a tumultuous reception. Rice wrote
several one-act plays that featured his Jim Crow character and his
famous dance and performed them successfully at the end of a
regular evening’s entertainment for the next 20 years.
The verses of his song, which were taken up by mobs destroying
symbols of elite privilege during urban rioting in the 1830s and 1840s,
celebrated white working-class victories over their social and
economic oppressors. Rice’s rough-music and violent gyrations likely
reminded his spectators of their own raucous parades through town
during holidays, when they blackened their faces to entertain and
alarm friends and enemies with scurrilous antics and the noise of tin
kettles and cow bells. This European tradition of blackface dated from
medieval mummers plays at Christmastime and continued into the
nineteenth century; it encouraged traditional male forms of
merrymaking and celebrated the rights of the common man. When
Rice began jumping “Jim Crow,” most of his spectators no doubt
thought about holiday fun and working-class freedom; initially, despite
the blackface, the antics of “Jim Crow” were about political and
physical liberation, not race.
Figure 8.11Henry Johnson posed as Barnum's “What Is It?” Photograph by
Mathew Brady (c.1872).

From Robert Bogdan's Freak Show, University of Chicago Press

(1988).
By the early 1850s, however, blackface performance had grown
from occasional afterpieces by Rice and others into full evenings of
entertainment presented by an all-male minstrel troupe of four to ten
performers. Dozens of minstrel companies played throughout the
urban northeast, paying top salaries to their headliners and
composers, among them the popular songwriter Stephen Foster.
White performers borrowed some of their material from slave
festivities in the South, including musical instruments (the banjo and
bones), slave dances (“patting juba”), and the comic exchanges
typical of corn-shucking rituals on plantations. They also relied on the
musical traditions of Irish folk songs and grand opera, which they
parodied with abandon. Minstrel shows usually featured jokes and
musical numbers, specialty acts, and a concluding one-act comedy,
parody, or farce. While Rice’s “Jim Crow” afterpieces were not overtly
racist – some of the verses of his song even called for the abolition of
slavery – most minstrel troupes of the early 1850s pandered to groups
of poor white urban workers who needed to be assured of their racial
superiority. These were frequently Irish immigrants escaping from the
potato famine and newcomers to city life fresh from the farm. To
please these spectators, minstrels generally portrayed black
characters as inept fools, grotesque animals, or sentimental victims.
By the end of the 1850s, minstrel entrepreneurs had increased their
audiences to include a substantial number of middle-class males, plus
some female and elite spectators. Minstrel troupes were also touring
beyond northern cities into medium-sized towns and parts of the
South. Looking for topics that could appeal to and further broaden this
mixed, cross-class audience, the troupes settled on the southern
plantation as an idealized site for white enjoyment; its sentimental
Old-Folks-at-Home masters and humorous black folks, from sly
tricksters to foolish Jim Crows, could provide a soothing contrast to
the violence, crowding, and confusion of northern city life and national
politics in the 1850s. In addition, the image of the happy plantation
featured Earth Mother mammies, feminized old uncles, and “yaller
gals” (played by a male in drag), a light-skinned slave whose beauty
and allure motivated incidents of victimization and sentimentally
mournful songs.
Not surprisingly, mid-century minstrelsy parodied abolitionism and
anti-slavery productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. One typical version,
titled “Happy Uncle Tom,” depicted Stowe’s exemplar of self-
sacrificing morality and vigorous spirituality as a decrepit old uncle
meant to be laughed at for his grotesque jigs and foolish dialogue.
Minstrel plantation skits and musical numbers avoided the realities of
slavery – exhausting work, the forced separation of families, and the
ever-present threat of violence and death – to deliver its audience to a
never-never land of domestic warmth, sentimental love, and easy
power in which whiteness provided the ticket to security and fun. For
many northerners on the eve of the Civil War, the minstrel depiction of
black people, white southerners, and slavery was all they knew about
the South. From this perspective, it was difficult to see what could be
so bad about the extension of slavery in the west. Why fight a war
about that?
Minstrel shows had always professed a generalized, flag-waving
patriotism, but the outbreak of war in 1861 forced the minstrel troupes
to choose racial over liberal nationalism as the key to national unity.
White performers in blackface praised the bravery of Union soldiers,
anguished over the suffering of the wounded and women on the home
front, and pushed for a compromise that might end the fighting – a
compromise with southern advocates of slavery that would restore the
Union to the racial basis of U.S. nationalism in the 1850s. “To go in for
de Union,” observed one performer, “ain’t nigger abolition” (Toll 1974:
113). Accordingly, minstrels continued to attack abolitionists, but
generally avoided the topic of emancipation after Lincoln’s
proclamation. When the North began recruiting and training black
soldiers, minstrelsy portrayed the black troops as buffoonish dandies
and ignorant cowards, unfit for fighting next to their white superiors
(Figure 8.12).
 After the war ended in 1865, minstrel skits demanded that the newly
freed slaves stay in the South, as wards of their former masters. The
failure of Reconstruction to educate black people and find them good
jobs was a foregone conclusion in minstrelsy, which also mocked the
black quest for political and economic equality in the post-war South.
Despite the end of slavery, minstrelsy found new strategies for
relegating black people to second-class citizenship and maintaining
the racial basis of nationalism. Imagining a U.S. nation-state in which
blacks and whites could work and prosper together in the same
community was not an option in the racist world of minstrelsy.
Minstrel shows were gradually incorporated into American
vaudeville, but individual minstrel acts continued to amuse white
audiences into the 1950s, when African-American activism and cold
war concerns exposed the racism under the burnt cork for most
citizens. Until then, though, some of the premier performers of popular
and mass entertainment on stage and screen paraded their talents in
blackface – including Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Mickey Rooney, and
Judy Garland. Further, there are some who would argue that the
continuing rumors concerning the true citizenship of President Barak
Obama may be traced to the legacy of racial nationalism in the United
States.
Figure 8.12“Raw Recruits.” This cover for sheet music performed by Bryant's
Minstrels in an 1862 minstrel show in New York City mocks the presumed
incompetence, foolishness, and fear of newly enlisted black soldiers.

Library of Congress.
Key references
Adams, B. (1997) E. Pluribus Barnum_ The Great Showman and U.S.
Popular Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cockrell, D. (1997) Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels
and Their World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frick, J.W. (2012) Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and
Screen, New York: Palgrave.
Jones, D. (2014) The Captive Stage: Performance and the
Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Lott, E. (1994) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class, New York: Oxford University Press.
McConachie, B. (1992) Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre
and Society, 1820–1870, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Mahr, W.J. (1999) Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface
Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Nathans, H. (2009) Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage,
1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Roediger, D. (1991) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making
of the American Working Class, London: Verso.
Storey, J. (2003) Inventing Popular Culture, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing.
Toll, R.C. (1974) Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-
Century America, New York: Oxford University Press.
Summary
In Europe and the Americas, numerous theatrical performances
reflected and legitimated varieties of nationalism from 1760 to 1880.
Liberal nationalism began with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth
century and continued to animate peoples who regarded (or hoped to
regard) their country as the home of individual rights and constitutional
government. Schiller’s plays can stand as a good example of liberal
nationalism on stage. The basis for cultural nationalism, which
inspired many Europeans after 1800, was pride in the distinctiveness
of their heritage, language, and customs. Cultural nationalists
celebrated their traditions through such varied fare as nautical
melodramas, comic operas, and antiquarian revivals. Racial
nationalists, especially numerous in Germany, Brazil, and the United
States, emphasized the superiority of their ethnoracial group; they
believed that their inherent greatness was a biological gift which
elevated them over other groups within their nation-state and over
rival nations outside of it. In the theatre, racist nationalism ranged from
Wagnerian opera to blackface minstrelsy. All three of these fusions of
nationalism and performance helped to shape the theatre and general
culture of several nation-states during the nineteenth century. After
1880, these forms of nationalism influenced historical developments in
parts of the world beyond Europe and the Americas, such as Japan
and other sovereign countries. In the twentieth century, varieties of
nationalism and nationalistic theatre swept the globe, as many nations
gained independence from the empires that had dominated them.
*
Performing “progress”: From imperial
display to the triumph of realism and
naturalism, 1790–1914
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Contributors: Bruce McConachie and Gary Jay Williams
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-13
When the “imagined communities” called nation-states (as
discussed in Chapter 8) forcibly transform or absorb other peoples or
geographical areas into colonies through military and/or economic
force, the result is imperialism. In other words, nation-states
transform into imperial empires through the practice of colonialism.
Empires see themselves as the locus of truth, rationality, science,
civilization, maturity, and the life of the mind; the rest of the world as
the realm of ignorance, child-like naivety, mystical forces, irrationality,
and sensuality (all of which can be desirable, especially with the
lingering Romantic imagination typical of Rousseau, discussed mostly
in Chapter 7). In this chapter, we examine the rapid, profound shifts in
theatrical expression that resulted from modern imperialism, guided by
this perception of “rational self” vs. “irrational Other.” The “rational/
irrational” dichotomy extends to race/ethnicity, class, philosophy,
science, and artistic expression. In Chapter 8, we saw how theatre
bolstered the development of a sense of self for the nation-state; in
this chapter, we will discover how artistic practices from colonized or
alien areas (“irrational Others”) impacted performance in the “rational”
imperial heartland.
After a discussion of imperialism, we will explain and expand the
concept of Orientalism. We consider how international expositions
and world fairs showcased overseas colonies and imperial wealth
while introducing new visual and aural experiences. In the West and
Japan, artists began to incorporate foreign imagery in their work,
creating new genres. At the same time, consumers saw and desired
exotic items that were formerly available only to the wealthy. In
contrast, Chinese imperial expansion resulted in a new genre
incorporating the “irrational” performance styles of internal “Others”
that were initially outlawed but eventually replaced older, aristocratic
styles. In all imperialist nation-states, the middle and upper classes at
first disdained “irrational” lower-class entertainment, but in each case,
these popular genres were eventually embraced, as were “irrational”
experimental or alien forms.
Modern imperialism developed side-by-side with new concepts and
technologies, including the invention of photography, the philosophy of
positivism, and scientific innovations such as the theory of evolution,
enunciated in Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) On the Origin of Species
(1859). Such innovations and inventions challenged long-held religious
and spiritual beliefs (seen as “irrational”), fostering an emphasis on the
material world. Progressive theatre artists in Europe, the U.S., and
Japan advocated these new ideas, but many religious and
government leaders feared change and attempted to censor the
resulting plays. Aesthetic realism and the Naturalist movement, which
grew from these concepts, often featured unorthodox or shocking
material. Daring European theatre managers such as André Antoine
(1858–1943), stage designers, and playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen
(1828–1906) and Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) embraced these new
modes of perception, foreshadowing the kinds of dramatic structures
and theatrical practices that would dominate much of the twentieth
century.
Modern imperialisms
Imperialism has existed in many periods of history, including the
ancient Roman Empire, the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the
Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, various Chinese dynasties, the
Aztec Empire, the Ethiopian Empire, and many others. In contrast to
these earlier empires, modern types of imperialism flourish partly due
to technological advances in travel and communication, the
development of international capitalism, and more powerful military
resources.
By the late nineteenth century, British and other European imperial
expansion, which had begun in the 1600s with state-supported private
investment by entities such as the British and Dutch East India
Companies, had reached its peak. In addition to parts of Africa and
Asia, Britain had occupied Afghanistan and other areas to prevent
Russian expansion. In 1894–1895, European imperial nations (Britain,
Germany, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and others) organized
the Berlin Conference to divide the colonized world (especially Africa)
into zones to lessen economic competition. They imposed artificial
linguistic and cultural boundaries without consulting African or other
colonized peoples.
The reasons for imperialism are complex, but overall there are three
basic rationales that often overlap.

1. Economic or commercial gain: the previously foreign areas have

something valuable that the imperialists desire. Examples include
spices, gold, minerals, oil, water, land, slaves, cheap laborers, or
a convenient route to other parts of the world. Usually, large
businesses or corporations work hand-in-hand with the imperial
government to maintain economic control and to obtain wealth,
often preventing colonized areas from achieving further economic
development.
2. Military advantage: the imperialists may want to gain military
advantage over the foreign country, or fear it as a potential enemy
or the ally of enemies. They feel a need to protect themselves or
to prevent future attacks. In such cases, military forces remain in
 the colonized areas, often controlling or “advising” the local
government, or acting as emissaries of the imperium.
3. Ideological arrogance: the imperialists believe their culture,
religion, language, and/or way of life is superior to that of the
colonized people. They may believe they have a “destiny” to rule
others. They may try to convince their own population and the
colonized foreigners that incorporation into the imperial whole
(and elimination of cultural differences) will offer the colonized
peoples opportunities for “modernization” or other advantages,
such as material gain, spiritual or religious enlightenment,
advanced scientific education, or access to artistic or cultural
treasures. In such cases, the imperialists often impose their
language and culture on the colonized. However, belief in the
imperialists’ superiority sometimes translates into hatred of the
colonized, resulting in racism, massacres, or even attempted
genocide.

One example of these overlapping rationales occurred in the mid-

1800s, when European nations and the U.S. used their military power,
desire for economic advantage, and belief in their cultural superiority
to force Japan to end its long isolation, allowing Western access and
trade. The result, however, was not colonialism. Rather than being
colonized, Japan rapidly learned from the West how to be an
imperialist nation.
A different example is the U.S. concept of “manifest destiny.” Many
white settlers in the United States argued that they were fulfilling
“manifest destiny” by expanding the nation westward, even though
expansion entailed exterminating Native Americans and extending
areas of African-American slavery. Partly believing that the U.S. had
an inevitable right to expand, and partly to end economic depression,
the U.S. militarily took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines,
and Guam in the Spanish-American War of 1898.
In the three decades between 1868 and 1900, Japan had
incorporated nearly all of the scientific, technological, social,
economic, artistic, and other innovations that had occurred in the West
since the 1600s (when Japan had begun to close itself off from the
world). Japanese imperialism began in earnest when Japan gained
control of Taiwan from China in 1895. In the Russo-Japanese War of
1904–1905, Japan decisively defeated Russia – a European nation –
shocking the West. In 1904, Japan made Korea a protectorate and
formally annexed it in 1910. That same year, the Japanese play
Korean King suggested that all Asians would welcome Japanese
imperial conquest as progress. By the 1930s, the Japanese Empire
included a large number of Asian and Pacific colonies, under the
euphemistic heading of “The Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Orientalism
In 1978, Edward Said (1935–2003), a professor of comparative literature,
published a landmark study of primarily British and French imperial practices,
focusing on how intellectual traditions about the “Other” are invented and
transmitted. The book, titled Orientalism, reconsiders the underlying meaning
of visual, aural, literary, and theatrical imagery. Although most people today
think of “the Orient” as meaning Asia, in earlier eras the term referred primarily
to the Islamic Middle East.
Said defines Orientalism as:

the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it,
ruling over it: in short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient.
(1978: 3)

Orientalist representations take two basic forms. The first is to represent the
Other as weak, childlike, uneducated, naïve, submissive, and sexually
available. In this view, the Other needs (and even wants) to be saved,
educated, uplifted, or seduced by a morally, spiritually, and physically superior
power. Often, the Other is depicted as female, childish, or feminized, while the
Self is envisioned as male, mature, or masculinized.
The second type of representation portrays the Other as uncivilized,
barbaric, powerful, sexually terrifying, scheming, and intellectually
incomprehensible. Here, the Other threatens to devour, attack, murder, rape,
or destroy the Self. He does not value human life, is a crazed killing machine,
and, in contrast to the first version, is usually seen as male. This version of the
Other needs to be dominated, controlled, and prevented from undermining the
civilization of the Self. Fear and hatred of this version of the Other can lead to
war, mass murder, or attempted extermination of the Other.
Often, both versions of Orientalism exist simultaneously in regard to a
specific culture.
Non-Western cultures can also harbor Orientalist views about the West,
about neighboring countries, or about minority populations within their own
lands. Nor is Orientalism only a modern phenomenon, as Euripides’ The
Bacchae demonstrates. In that play, a Greek leader fears and hates the
“Eastern” or “Asiatic” god Dionysus, whom he views as both feminized and
dangerously powerful. He is simultaneously repelled and fascinated by this
exotic Other.
Orientalism should not be confused with racism, although often these two
ideologies go hand-in-hand. Racism is defined as prejudices against, and
practices aimed at, a specific group of people, defined as “inferior” due to their
genetic characteristics. Although racism certainly exists, most scientists today
deny the biological validity of distinct races. The targets of Orientalism, on the
other hand, may include people of one or of many so-called “races” who share
some other characteristic in common, such as nationality, gender, or religion.
Orientalist representations can be found in educational, historical, political,
or artistic works. According to Said:

The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices,
historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation or its
fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the representation is always
governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it
would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de
mieux, for the poor Orient.
(1978: 21)

Although Said’s book dealt exclusively with Euro-American images of the

Islamic world, Orientalist attitudes are not confined to works produced in the
past, or to images of another country. An understanding of Orientalism can be
a valuable tool for unearthing subtle prejudices or underlying attitudes about
ethnicity, gender, disability, class, and so on in a play’s script, costumes,
settings, style of acting, musical score, or other aspects of performance, or in
the way these things have been analyzed by critics or scholars.
Performing imperialism and Orientalism at the great
expositions
The London Exhibition of 1851 was the first of many world fairs and
expositions presenting the non-Western world as a marketplace for
Western tourists and capitalists. Between this exhibition and 1920,
world fairs and expositions attracted more spectators than any single
genre of popular diversion, including the circus. At such events,
imperial nations celebrated their conquests by showing off the riches
of colonial goods and people, and demonstrated their architectural
and technological prowess by erecting mammoth buildings and
fabulous arcades. The Eiffel Tower, for example, was built for the 1889
Paris World’s Fair.
At the Great Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, 1851, millions of
visitors gasped at wonders such as huge steam engines, Indian
miniatures, giant lumps of coal, classical sculptures, and the interior of
a palace identified as a “Nubian Court.” Housing many of these
spectacles was the Crystal Palace itself, covering almost 19 acres in
Hyde Park. The Great Exhibition’s success led other imperial nations
to present their own events. The Paris Exposition Universelle took
place in 1855. The Philadelphia Centenary of 1876 celebrated one
hundred years of U.S. independence. Although originally organized to
glorify the progress and superiority of their nation-states, world fairs
and expositions soon settled into promoting national empires. For
example, in reaction to the loss of two French provinces after the
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the French increasingly turned to
imperial glory abroad and expositions at home to emphasize their
greatness (see Figure 9.1).
Figure 9.1A view of the buildings and grounds for the Paris Exposition of 1867.
Note the nearby barges in the River Seine for popular amusements. From the
Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Universal Exhibition.

Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, Manchester University Press,

1988, .
In fairs from 1889 to 1914, entire “villages” were erected, in which
colonized peoples from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific
Islands and the Americas were displayed like animals in a zoo. They
wore native costume and demonstrated local crafts, traditional
dances, food preparation, and so on in carefully recreated
surroundings, supposedly presenting a “realistic” image of daily life. Of
course, it was all a performance. The imported natives were seldom
offered decent pay or housing, they did not speak the language, and
many suffered severe culture shock and terrible homesickness.
At the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, colonial subjects from
the British and French empires were housed in 17 native settings near
the Midway Plaisance, an area that also featured “freak” shows and
other carnival acts. At the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY in
1901, Native and African-Americans were exhibited along with other
“primitive” peoples of the world. Native Americans performed war
dances in traditional attire, and African-Americans were hired to
portray happy antebellum slaves in a popular exhibit called “The Old
Plantation.”
The organizers claimed that these events offered educational
opportunities and promoted international understanding. Indeed, most
of those attending were simply out for an enjoyable day, hoping that
they or their children had learned something about distant lands. They
probably thought that the native peoples on display were benefiting
from being part of the imperial whole.
Although these expositions and fairs were sponsored by and took
place in Western empires, other nations often participated. Japan had
been exhibiting its success as a modernizing nation in U.S. and
European fairs since the 1860s. After its takeover of Taiwan, its defeat
of Russia, and its annexation of Korea, Japan mounted an impressive
display of its imperial possessions at the Japan-British Exhibition of
1910. At that time, the Japanese believed that their imperial conquests
demonstrated their superiority over other Asian peoples, because
Japan had never been conquered or colonized by the West. In
addition, a common ideology held that Japan preserved the artistic
and cultural treasures of once-powerful Asian nations such as China
and India which were now laid low by Western imperialism. Japan
clearly desired to control its neighbors and their resources, but it also
saw itself as the savior of all Asian civilization.
In addition to touting the superiority of their nation, race, and empire,
the British deployed strategies solidifying their imperial hold around
the globe. Between 1851 and 1914, Britain organized 33 major
expositions in India, Australia, and Great Britain. India, symbolizing
British subject colonies, usually provided traditional performers,
craftspeople, and models of ancient monuments. Australia,
symbolizing all white settler societies, celebrated its progress under
the empire through its rising cities and manufacturing. As the “mother
country,” Great Britain displayed its noble traditions, royal
munificence, ships, armaments, and its imperial leadership.
 All these identifiably British events cemented the interconnections
made possible through empire. As one historian notes,
Participation at the exhibitions as visiting tourists and actors in pageants
was part of the process of building [national and imperial] communities.
This was not fantasy as escapism, but the fantasy which integrated
experience and imagination, thereby linking citizens and subjects
together in a seemingly viable, tangible way.
(Hoffenberg 2001: 243)

Such events were the forerunners of the mass spectacles and rallies
that would sweep millions into the political enthusiasms of the
twentieth century.
Distorting science to justify imperial entertainments
Charles Darwin and others who had examined scientific evidence
concluded that humans evolved from and are related to animals, and
that evolution results from successful adaptation to the environment.
Darwin found that the forces driving evolution were complex and
mostly due to variations that arise from generation to generation and
their suitability to the natural environment. Although today his theories
are widely accepted, they were, and continue to be, controversial
because they conflict with biblical accounts. They were also adopted
and twisted to support ideologies such as Social Darwinism, with
which Darwin sharply disagreed.
Social Darwinism argues that all human life is a ruthless
competition for material goods, leading to “the survival of the fittest.”
From a Social Darwinist point of view, white Westerners had proven
themselves to be the most “fittest,” but their morality also instructed
them to save more “primitive” peoples from extinction. British poet
Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” had insisted
that Euro-American imperialism would help “civilize” colonial subjects.
The poem obliges the world’s “white men” to assist “Your new-caught,
sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child.” (Because non-Western
peoples were supposed to be inferior, Social Darwinists were
impressed and surprised by Japan’s rapid modernization and military
prowess.)
In the U.S., the St. Louis World Fair of 1904 featured several tribes
of Philippine villagers “scientifically” classified as representing
different stages of civilization. Fresh from their victory in the Spanish–
American War, U.S. imperialists could now boast that they had joined
Great Britain and France to shoulder “the white man’s burden.” (No
mention was made of the ongoing military campaign to suppress
factions of rebellious Filipinos.) While a number of prominent
Americans had actively opposed the trend, by 1900 the United States,
a former settler colony which built a nation through slavery and the
acquisition of aboriginal lands, had joined the ranks of imperialist
nations.
 Other popular events such as the “Ethnological
Congress” at P.T. Barnum’s circus encouraged a “scientific,” Social
Darwinist view of non-Western peoples as savages in need of imperial
civilizing. (For more information on Barnum and the circus, see the
website.)
Social Darwinism is related to “Orientalism” because both see the
“rational Self” as a positive, forward development from a lesser or
“irrational Other.” Both buy into the idea of inevitable progress. As we
will see below, these ideas are crucial to the philosophy of positivism
and the development of Naturalism.
Imperialism and Orientalism in British theatre
The English actor Edmund Kean starred in many plays set in the
Middle East. During the 1810s and 1820s, Kean performed Turkish
kings, Saracen warriors, Arab princes, and half-Greek, half-Turk
heroes, as well as an exotic, Moorish Othello, and what critics termed
an “Oriental” Shylock, the Jewish money-lender in Shakespeare’s The
Merchant of Venice. Several of Kean’s star vehicles, including The
Bride of Abydos (1827) which was adapted from a poem by Romantic
poet George Gordon Byron (generally known as Lord Byron, 1788–
1824), featured scenes in a harem. Watching such scenes permitted
male viewers the pleasure of seeing skimpily clad actresses;
simultaneously, male and female viewers could imaginatively
participate in the Western imperialist dream of rescuing exotic
maidens (symbolizing feminized, weak “Others”) from the control of
evil, “irrational,” Muslim rulers. Just as romantic, pictorial, scenic
antiquarianism was reshaping London’s Shakespearean productions,
Orientalist scenery helped unify English audiences in regard to British
imperial conquests in the Middle East.
Melodramas such as these also celebrated the technology that
made imperialism possible. For example, Freedom (1882) depicts the
British invasion of Egypt as a quest to end the slave trade and save a
British financier’s daughter from sexual slavery in a harem. Such plays
suggest that introducing steamships, railroads, and international trade
to Egypt more than made up for the unfortunate deaths of a few
Egyptians. In Khartoum (1885), a newspaper reporter uses the
telegraph and other new modes of communication to tell English
imperialists about the dire circumstances in that Sudanese city. The
melodrama actually reversed the loss of Khartoum to rebelling Islamic
tribesmen the year before. Like later adaptations of Around the World
in Eighty Days and other plays, these melodramas presented British
domination as the forward march of white progress and civilization.
Such works were patronized by the middle-class and higher.
Variety theatre and music hall
While such plays explored the exotica of foreign lands, new types of
popular entertainment developed, catering to a predominately
working- and lower-middle-class audience. To these audience
members, imperial expansion was less important than making it
through everyday life. In some ways, they were “internal Others,”
perceived by the upper classes in the same negative terms as colonial
aliens. Sometimes, members of the upper classes would “go
slumming” and patronize lower-class entertainments; consequently,
aspects of popular entertainment seeped into more aristocratic styles,
just as foreign elements had done. At the same time, lower-class
audiences both aped and made fun of aristocratic passions.

One major form that proliferated after 1850 was variety

theatre. Variety is simply a series of light entertainments unconnected
by any overriding theme, story, or major star. Since the Renaissance,
theatre in Western cultures had often incorporated singers, acrobats,
performing animals, and other diversions between the acts of a
regular drama. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, showmen
strung together a series of such “numbers” without providing a regular
play as the main attraction. Variety took numerous forms after 1850.
One was the blackface minstrel show, which began in the U.S. (as
discussed in Chapter 8) but quickly spread to Europe and to European
colonies.
Another form of variety was the burlesque show, which began with
female performers doing a parody, or “burlesque,” of a popular play or
work of literature. Eventually the parodic elements dropped out, and
by 1900 the typical burlesque show in England and the U.S. featured a
male comic, several comic sketches, dance acts, and musical pieces,
plus scantily clad females in all of the numbers. The striptease, now
identified as the central act of a burlesque show, did not make its
appearance in the U.S. until the 1920s.
 Concert saloons, which peddled beer and food along
with entertainment, appeared in industrializing cities in Britain during
the 1850s. They led to the most resilient and significant form of popular
variety theatre, the music hall. Although “music hall” is an English
Victorian term, it may designate any series of unconnected
entertainments on an indoor stage. Music hall entertainment, lacking
the coherence of “blacked-up” white performers or the presence
throughout of a male comic and pretty girls, typically had even less
aesthetic unity than a minstrel or burlesque show. In the U.S., this
form of variety was called vaudeville.
In England, the music hall lasted longer than variety in other
countries and probably had a more enduring effect on the national
culture. In 1866, London had over 30 large music halls and more than
200 smaller ones; a few of the larger halls seated over 3,000
spectators. Most English music halls in the 1870s provided
entertainment, food, and drink to a predominately working- and lower-
middle-class audience. During the 1880s, some music hall
entrepreneurs, seeking higher profits through increased respectability,
opened new halls in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. The
halls reached their high point of popularity around 1910, when
competition from silent films began to erode their numbers, which
further declined in the 1930s and 1940s as the radio brought
entertainment into homes. In the 1950s, television delivered the
deathblow to the English music hall. However, aspects of music hall
performance found their way into the plays of authors such as Samuel
Beckett (1906–1989) and Harold Pinter (1930–2008), both discussed in
Chapter 12.
Until the 1890s, the English music hall provided an alternative, both
in its environment and its entertainment, to the strictures of Victorian
life for many working-class families. While many music hall songs
sentimentalized romantic love, others delighted in sexual pleasure, a
taboo subject for proper Victorians. Several songs also derided the
entanglements of marriage. Policemen, government clerks, and other
figures of authority provided frequent butts for music hall humor.
Nonetheless, the music hall generally remained culturally
conservative. Entertainers might poke fun at factory discipline and
lambaste politicians caught up in scandals, but they usually applauded
English victories in war and the racism that accompanied English
imperialism. Amidst the acrobats, magicians, performing animals, and
human “freaks,” early music hall variety preserved aspects of
traditional English customs that provided workers and others with
strategies for enduring and occasionally countering a culture that
oppressed them.
By the 1890s, many halls, even in working-class neighborhoods, no
longer allowed patrons to eat and drink while watching the show. They
also featured more homogenized acts that would not offend Victorian
tastes. Although gentrification and standardization drained the class-
based vitality from music hall entertainment after 1890, its anti-
Victorian legacy had wide ramifications in the twentieth century – from
satiric popular songs and a scandal-mongering penny press to the
electoral success of socialism in English politics.

For a discussion of another form of British popular

entertainment, pantomime, see the case study on the website.
Figure 9.2George Leybourne, a lion comique of the music hall stage, who wrote
and sang “Champagne Charlie” (c.1867).

© V&A Images. Victoria and Albert Museum.

“Internal imperialism” and the origins of jingju (“Beijing
Opera”)
Modern Chinese imperialism focused on expanding into areas already
within China’s sphere of cultural and linguistic influence. The Chinese
Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799; reigned 1735–1796) consolidated
power and wealth, expanding his hegemony by using military force
and by massacring and/or incorporating several minority ethnic
groups, including Tibetans, Uyghurs, Kazhaks, Mongols, and others.
During the late eighteenth century, toward the end of his reign, local
or regional styles of performance favored by peasants and/or recently
colonized groups began to replace the dominant Chinese genre of
kunqu (see Chapter 4). Roving troupes of low-status performers (all of
whom were male) had begun to cater to the tastes of a far-flung
population composed of ordinary people, rather than the elite literati,
scholars, and aristocrats of big cities. At first disdained and ignored by
the upper classes, hundreds of local and regional performance styles
developed throughout China, often using stories derived from novels
and earlier types of performance such as zaju and kunqu. These local
styles used local languages in performance, which (although all
written the same) when spoken are often mutually incomprehensible.
Among the most important regional styles at this time were “clapper
operas” (bangzi qiang).
Clapper operas feature musical instruments such as stringed
fiddles, side-blown flutes, drums and cymbals, and blocks of wood
(clappers) called bangzi that the players strike with a stick. The rhythm
is fairly constant regardless of the region of origin. All clapper operas
divide the music into “happy sounds” and “weeping sounds.” Like
other forms of traditional Chinese music theatre, clapper operas are
divided by content into “civilian” plays (often love stories) and “military”
plays (about heroic actions and battles).
In 1779, Wei Changsheng (1744–1802), a famous clapper actor from
Sichuan Province (but who was born in Shaanxi Province), brought his
troupe to Beijing, hoping to participate in upcoming celebrations for
the emperor’s seventieth birthday. Wei was a dan (male actor
specializing in female roles) who was also an accomplished acrobat
skilled in male martial roles. He was the first to use “false feet,” stilted
shoes tied to the feet of actors playing female roles, in order to mimic
the appearance and walk of women with bound feet. His troupe’s new,
exotic style of performance captured people’s imagination. They
remained in Beijing for six years despite official attempts to censor
them. In 1785, they were banned from the stage due to Wei’s
excessively bawdy acting style. Nevertheless, scholars have called
the troupe’s arrival and impact “the prelude to the birth of Beijing
opera” (Mackerras 1983: 103).

In 1790, additional actors from far-flung corners of the

empire came to Beijing for the emperor’s eightieth birthday. Like the
celebrations a decade previously, events were held in public locales –
they were intended not for the emperor to see or hear, but to keep the
general populace occupied. The court and other aristocrats disdained
these popular genres and patronized the more elegant kunqu.
Troupes from Anhui Province performed in two distinct styles.
Eventually, elements of each were combined into a new genre
uninfluenced by non-Chinese sources. The new genre became
extremely popular, and is known as jingju [jing ju] or jingxi. Both terms
mean “drama of the capital.” In English, the genre is generally termed
“Beijing Opera.”
Seventy years would pass after jingju’s inception before an emperor
would invite a performance at court (in 1860). In 1884, the Empress
Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) requested jingju performances for her own
birthday. Subsequently, jingju – once a lower-class, alien genre –
began to enjoy imperial patronage.
During the first half of the twentieth century, jingju became an
internationally acclaimed genre, primarily through the world tours of
Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), a dan actor. Mei’s performances influenced
the ideas of Western theatre artists, including Bertolt Brecht (see the
discussion of Brecht in Chapter 11). At that time, all roles were still
performed by males, although prior to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644),
both male and female actors had performed either gender. With the
exception of specially trained girls who performed in private mansions,
female actors did not perform publicly in Chinese traditional genres
until the mid-twentieth century.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China’s empire
was ravaged by both Western and Japanese imperialists, as well as
by civil war. Mei’s tours helped increase awareness of China’s
complex situation and rein forced the significance of Chinese
performance.
Figure 9.3Jingju actor as Xiangyu, the king of Chu in The King's Parting with His
Favourite. Costume and makeup denote character type.

The Image Bank/Tuul and Bruno Morandi/Getty Images.

Western artists appropriate non-Western imagery
In the West, the popularity of world fairs, exhibitions, and Orientalist
plays increased demand for exotic items. While the wealthy continued
to collect Asian art and antiques, the middle class desired inexpensive
objects such as ceramic tea sets, decorative fans, wall hangings,
folding screens, paper lanterns, rattan furniture, and “native” costumes
to be worn as lounge wear at home or at “fancy dress” and
masquerade balls. In an earlier craze that began in the seventeenth
century, Westerners collected Chinoiserie, that is, items that looked
Chinese or were supposedly of Chinese origin. Voltaire’s The Orphan
of China, discussed in Chapter 6, is an example of Chinoiserie in
theatre.
Both popular entertainers such as magicians and serious artists
rushed to add Orientalist imagery to their acts. For example, seeing an
advertisement for cigarettes depicting an Egyptian dancer inspired
Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968), one of the pioneers of modern dance, to
create her “Oriental” dances (Figure 9.4).
Despite their infatuation with the exotic, most serious artists did not
harbor imperialist or Orientalist goals. Instead, many were rebelling
against rapid industrialization/modernization, wishing to “revitalize”
what they saw as a dying Western culture by an infusion of something
new. They felt non-Western art had more sensual beauty than
Western art, and were often drawn to an imagined “purity” or
“spirituality” that resonated with older, Romantic ideas celebrating a
lost “Eden.” Although in hindsight some of their work may seem naïve
or even racist, in the context of their time and place, their art was both
innovative and influential, planting the intellectual and artistic seeds
for the emergence of later twentieth- and twenty-first century avant-
garde and intercultural artists.
Figure 9.4Ruth St. Denis performing Egypta, one of her “Oriental dances.”

Source: New York Public Library.

Case Study: Inventing Japan – The Mikado and Madama
Butterfly
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Japonisme is a French term used by art historians to

discuss the influence of Japanese art on Western art beginning in the
1850s, after Japan began to trade (however reluctantly) with the West.
Painters such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude
Monet, and Édouard Manet first encountered Japanese art by seeing
ukiyo-e (woodblock prints). Although today these prints are highly
valued, when Japan began to modernize, the prints were used as
wrapping paper or packaging (as we use newspaper today) for
shipping inexpensive souvenirs to the West. These Western artists
became excited about Japanese artistic style. Elements such as
asymmetry, irregularity, lack of perspective, lack of shadows, use of
flat, empty space, bright colors, and contrasting patterns were in direct
opposition to traditional, academic Western design (Figures 9.5a and
9.5b).

Figures 9.5bTwo examples of Japonisme in art: Vincent Van Gogh's La

Courtisanne, after Eisen (1887), and Claude Monet's Madame Monet in a
Japanese Costume (1885).
9.5a: © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo and 9.5b © 2015
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved/Bridgeman Art Library.
 Unlike Orientalism, Japonisme does not attempt to represent,
control, or authorize the Other. Rather, Japonisme is an artistic
strategy by which artists incorporate or borrow elements of Japanese
origin into their own art, often creating entirely new styles. Japanese
art historian Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913) applauded Japonisme as
proof of Japanese art’s international significance. Okakura’s opinions
were later distorted by ultranationalists to support their view of the
superiority of Japanese culture.
All artistic borrowing (sometimes called “appropriation”) has the
potential to become problematic. For example, if an artist appropriates
aspects of another culture that are sacred to that culture’s religion, or
that represent things the other culture feels should not be shown in
public, the result may be offensive. Critics and historians of the arts
must understand what elements were borrowed from other cultures,
what those elements mean in their original context, and how they are
understood in the new context. Part of the theatre critic or historian’s
task, then, is to accept the possibility that even great art might contain
aspects of Orientalism or even racism. At the same time, she must be
able to determine when and why artistic appropriation enhances art
without insulting or harming the original culture.
In an 1891 essay framed as an imaginary discussion, playwright,
novelist, and essayist Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) archly wrote:
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would
cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know you are
fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese
people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? . . . The
Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain
individual artists. . . . In fact the whole of Japan is pure invention. There is
no such country, there are no such people.
(1969: 315)

For this case study, we consider two of the most enduring examples of
an invented “Japan” in Western performance. One, the comic
operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado (1885), “straddles the
porous boundary between art and popular entertainment” (Lee 2010:
xiv). In contrast, many people consider Puccini’s tragic opera Madama
Butterfly (1904) one of the pinnacles of Western “high art.” Both works
remain hugely popular, despite critiques that they perpetuate
Orientalist practices.

The Mikado, or The Town of Titipu

Opening in March 1885 at London’s Savoy Theatre, this ninth comic
operetta by librettist William S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and composer
Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) played for 672 performances – up to that
time, the second longest run of any musical theatre piece produced in
London. By the end of 1885, over 150 companies in Europe and North
America had performed it. The Mikado has been translated into many
languages and continues to be performed all over the world.
All Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are comedies, usually set in some
fantastic “topsy-turvy” world filled with absurdities. The Mikado is a
satire of British politics and culture set in an imaginary, exotic time and
place called “Japan.” Like other Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, it
includes many clever “patter songs” satirizing British society. In the
play, the Mikado (another name for Japan’s emperor) has made flirting
a crime punishable by death. To sidestep this decree, his counselors
have appointed a poor young man, originally sentenced to die for
flirting, to be Lord High Executioner. Since they know he will not
decapitate himself, they assume that everyone is safe. Meanwhile,
Nanki-poo, the Mikado’s heir, has been traveling in disguise to avoid
marrying an ugly, mean woman. He is in love with a schoolgirl named
Yum-Yum, who is engaged to the Lord High Executioner. Further
complications arise when the Mikado demands at least one execution.
After many satirical jibes at corrupt politicians and absurd plot twists –
including letting the young lovers marry for one month, after which the
husband, Nanki-poo, will have his head cut off – true love triumphs.
The visual aspects of the production demand familiar Japanese
commodities, such as Japanese costumes, makeup, swords, wigs,
fans, parasols, scenery, and so on. The operetta opens with the
following stage directions and lyrics:
Scene: Courtyard of Ko-Ko’s palace in Titipu. Japanese nobles
discovered standing and sitting in attitudes suggested by native
drawings.
 Chorus Of Nobles:
If you want to know who we are,
We are gentlemen of Japan;
On many a vase and jar –
On many a screen and fan,
We figure in lively paint:
Our attitude’s queer and quaint –
You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!

The audience is alerted from the start that the play is only
as real as the painted images on fans and vases. This is not Japan,
and the actors are not Japanese. The action and even the names of
the characters are so comical that no one could possibly imagine that
the play was meant to represent Japan. Nevertheless, the original
production took pains to be “authentic” by having Japanese people
from a “native village” in Knightsbridge, London teach the actors how
to gesture and walk “like real Japanese.” Some of the music was
inspired by Japanese tunes, and the actors dispensed with corsets
(normally worn on stage by both males and females), instead wearing
the looser Japanese kimono. Such uncorsetted costuming was
considered quite shocking.
Despite the obviously comic exaggerations that were evident to the
original audience, some late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
Asians and some scholars find the work offensive and Orientalist.
They point to the repetition of negative Japanese stereotypes, such as
numerous vows to commit suicide, childish, vulgar, or silly women,
foolish men, and incomprehensible, primitive behavior. Even more
disturbing is the practice of Caucasian or other non-Asian actors
performing in “yellowface” makeup (Figure 9.6).
Yellowface performance is related to American minstrel shows of
the same period, which involved white performers “blacking up” to
embody childish images of African-Americans (see the case study in
Chapter 8). The minstrel show spread from the United States, where it
originated in the 1840s, throughout the British Empire. In many
instances, minstrelsy helped to confirm the racism that justified
imperialist oppression. In 1853, when the American Commodore
Matthew C. Perry’s ships (with their superior cannons) arrived in
Japan to force trade with the West, white crew members performed
blackface minstrelsy for the Japanese court. The Japanese assumed
that blackface performance was a “normal” practice by Western
imperialists. Even today, Japanese actors “black up” when performing
African or African-American roles, and some Japanese rappers and
hip-hop musicians have been accused of wearing darkening makeup.
In contemporary China and Japan, actors portraying Caucasian
characters typically don red or blond wigs and use pale makeup. Do
such practices mean that the Japanese and Chinese are racist,
imperialist – or merely naïve? Scholars disagree about how to
interpret such facts.
Despite the negative connotations, many famous Caucasian actors
have performed in yellowface for the sake of greater realism. For
example, Marlon Brando (1924–2004), who was strongly opposed to
racism, spent two hours each day donning prosthetics and makeup to
portray an Okinawan in the film Teahouse of the August Moon (1956).
David Carradine (1936–2009) wore yellowface makeup and prosthetics
in his Kung Fu TV series (1972–1975 and 1993–1997), in various
martial arts films, and in Crank: High Voltage (2009).
Yellowface remains a controversial practice. Asian actors and those
of Asian descent feel they – not Caucasians – should be cast as Asian
characters. In 1991, protests erupted over the choice of a Caucasian
actor to portray the half-Vietnamese narrator in the Broadway musical
Miss Saigon, a contemporary retelling of Madama Butterfly. David
Henry Hwang, a Chinese-American playwright who led the protests,
wrote about the controversy in his Obie-winning play, Yellow Face
(2007).
Madama Butterfly
In contrast to the clearly invented, comical, and commodity-laden
Japan of The Mikado, Puccini’s opera strikes most viewers as
believable, moving, and beautiful. Nevertheless, some contemporary
people are troubled by the opera’s depiction of Japan, and especially
of Japanese women. In its own time, however, the opera was
controversial for a very different reason: because it pushed the
boundaries of the art.
Composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) wrote his early operas in
the style of nineteenth-century Romanticism, but later became a
passionate advocate of operatic realism (in Italian, verismo). Verismo
stressed violent, sometimes sordid aspects of life, often depicting
lower-class characters. Although it remains one of the world’s most
widely produced and popular operas, Italian audiences booed the first
performance. Both score and libretto were modified several times over
the next few years, until the opera’s initially “unconventional structure
was replaced by the more usual framework of Italian opera of the
period. The uncompromising, harsh, moral view of the original version
was diluted until a soft-grained, sentimental atmosphere pervaded the
opera” (Smith 1984: 18).
Figure 9.6English actor/singer George Grossmith in “yellowface” makeup, as
Ko-Ko in the original 1885 production of The Mikado.

© Victoria & Albert Theatre Collection.

Madama Butterfly (two-act version, 1904; revised three-act version,
1907) was based on an American play by David Belasco (1853–1931),
which had been inspired by John Luther Long’s short story, and
possibly by a novel by Pierre Loti. There is some evidence that all
versions may have been based on actual events in Nagasaki, Japan,
in the early 1890s (Groos 1994: 169–201).

A fifteen-year-old Japanese woman named Cio-Cio-san

(pronounced “chōchō,” Japanese for “butterfly”; “san” is a Japanese
suffix used with names) is about to marry American Navy Lieutenant
Pinkerton. She is in love, has renounced her family, and has secretly
converted to Christianity. For Pinkerton, however, this “marriage” is a
sham. He merely wants a mistress while he is stationed in Japan.
When his ship sails away, Cio-Cio is convinced that he will return
someday. She gives birth to his son and faithfully waits for three years,
refusing marriage to a worthy Japanese suitor. When Pinkerton does
return, he brings along his American wife, who has agreed to raise
Cio-Cio and Pinkerton’s son in the U.S. Cio-Cio agrees to give up the
child only if Pinkerton comes to see her. She believes the boy will
have a better life in America. Before Pinkerton arrives, she offers
Buddhist prayers, blindfolds the child, puts an American flag in his
hand, and then uses her father’s knife to cut her own throat in a ritual
suicide. Pinkerton arrives too late.
What are we to make of her passionate actions? Is she merely the
victim of cruel American imperialism, a noble child-woman who dies
for love and for the benefit of her child? The question becomes more
complicated as we learn about the opera’s history. In addition to the
Western sources noted above, Puccini was influenced by the Italian
tour of the Japanese Kawakami acting troupe, especially by
Sadayakko’s depiction of ritual suicide. (Kawakami and Sadayakko’s
tour is discussed later in this chapter.) The Japanese actress’s death
scenes impressed him so much that he referred to them in justifying
his revisions (Groos 1999: 53). On the one hand, Cio-Cio and
Sadayakko’s other roles repeat the Orientalist stereotype of the
victimized, self-sacrificing woman, an image the Japanese actors
fostered in order to please a Western audience. At the same time,
these women’s brave decision to die reinforces the willpower
associated with Japanese bushido, the code of the samurai.
Kawakami’s troupe intentionally stressed these contradictory images
in order to remind the West of Japan’s imperialistic triumphs and
patriotic fervor. In Puccini’s opera, Cio-Cio is a complex contradiction
who embodies the imperial fantasies of both Japan and the West.
Joshua Mostow, an expert on Japanese culture, calls her

the tragic artefact of a traditional Japan sacrificed on the altar of

masculine modernity. And yet, women are by this sacrifice mobilized . . .
and become the exemplars of self-abnegation, a model for patriotic
bushido. . . . We miss a great deal then, if we see Cio-Cio-San’s
destruction by Pinkerton as nothing more than the heartless exploitation
of a woman of color by a white male. The woman’s self-destructive
sacrifice is overdetermined by both the Western imperialist and the
Japanese imperialist subtexts, despite the fact that those subtexts are at
cross-purposes, the one defending the Western subjugation of non-
European sites, the other an expedient means to avoid such subjugation.
(Mostow 2006: 193–4)

Unfortunately, many reviewers miss this complexity. Consider the

career of the great Japanese soprano Miura Tamaki (1884–1946), who
performed Cio-Cio-san throughout the world starting in 1915. She
began a tradition of “attempts at realistic casting, by using Japanese
singers in the lead” (Groos 1989: 182). Ironically, ethnically correct
casting was not appreciated by the early critics. One wrote, “though
there is an ethnographic truth in some details, Mme. Miura had to
divest herself of most of the artistic traditions of her own land before
she could impersonate the character imagined by an American
novelist and set to music in Italy” (Browne 1996: 232). Is the critic
suggesting that only a non-Japanese singer can “realistically” portray
a Japanese character? How might such ideas relate to concerns about
yellowface?
Conclusion
When The Mikado and Madama Butterfly were created, audiences
were relatively unfamiliar with, but intrigued by, Japan and its culture.
Gilbert and Sullivan used this lack of familiarity to create a “topsy-
turvy,” satirical portrait not of Japan, but of England. They employed
Orientalist imagery that was popular at the time, when the British
Empire was at its height. They also used the styles and forms of
popular British entertainment to satirize aspects of British society. In
contrast, the depiction of the arrogant Pinkerton and the tragic Cio-Cio
in Puccini’s opera appears to critique U.S. imperialism. However, the
controversies over its musical form and libretto demonstrate both an
artist’s desire to move toward realism and Naturalism, and the
audience’s preference for a less strident style. By analyzing these
works historically, we see some of the differences between what
viewers in the past saw and what those in the present see. We
discover that the Other is continuously being reinvented.
Key references
Browne, N. (1996) “The Undoing of the Other Woman: Madame
Butterfly in the Discourse of American Orientalism,” in D. Bernadi, ed.,
The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 227–56.
Groos, A. (1989) “Return of the Native: Japan in Madama
Butterfly/Madama Butterfly in Japan,” Cambridge Opera Journal 1(2):
167–94.
Groos, A. (1994) “Lieutenant F.B. Pinkerton: Problems in the
Genesis and Performance of Madama Butterfly,” in W. Weaver (ed.)
The Puccini Companion, New York: Norton.
Groos, A. (1999) “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko: Japanese Music
Theatre in Madama Butterfly,” Monumenta Nipponica 54(1): 41–73.
Lee, J. (2010) The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Mikado, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mostow, J. (2006) “Iron Butterfly: Cio-Cio-San and Japanese
Imperialism,” in J. Wisenthal, S. Grace, M. Boyd, B. McIlroy, and V.
Micznik (eds) A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of
Madame Butterfly, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
 Smith, J. (1984). “Tribulations of a Score,” in N. John (ed.) Opera
Guide 26: Madam Butterfly/Madama Butterfly, London: John Calder
and New York: Riverrun Press, in association with English National
Opera.
Wilde, O. (1969) “The Decay of Lying,” in R. Ellmann (ed.) The Artist
as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, New York: Vintage.
New media and new ideologies: Photography, science,
and positivism
While Western and Japanese imperialists, driven by the need for raw
materials and new markets, were conquering native peoples around
the world, their photographers were publishing images of “primitive”
peoples from distant lands. Photography was as much a tool of
imperialism as were print media, steamships, high explosives, and
machine guns. For example, numerous photographs depicting a
supposedly corrupt and backward Korean people in need of Japanese
civilization preceded the Japanese annexation of Korea.
Henry Fox Talbot invented photography in Britain in 1839, and by the
1860s photographic studios were flourishing throughout Western
Europe and North America. By 1900, photography was ubiquitous in
Japan as well. While people immersed in a world of orality, writing, or
print could easily imagine spiritual and mental realities without
material form, viewers of un-retouched photographs were encouraged
to believe that the real world “out there” was limited to what they could
see with their eyes or capture on film. In other words, photography
helped shift many people’s perspective of the world, from an emphasis
on the immaterial (or “irrational”) to a new focus on the material (or
“rational”).
The widespread experience of taking and viewing photographs
suggested an “objective” and materialistic understanding of reality that
helped move mainstream playwriting, acting, and design toward
aesthetic realism. In contrast, non-visual new media (telegraph,
telephone, and phonograph) gradually excited an interest in the
“subjective” and spiritual side of reality that sharply conflicted with the
photographically inspired realism, a trend in twentieth-century avant-
garde performance that will be considered in Chapter 10.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Positivism
Positivism is a philosophy introduced by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) that
insists that only those things that are experienced by the senses and can be
measured are real; intuition and subjective feelings are not external behaviors
and cannot be measured, and thus they cannot provide truth. This concept
was expanded to include the idea that societies are also subject to natural
laws that work in a way similar to scientific laws, such as the law of gravity.
Positivism maintains that human intellectual development progresses to a
high point that is defined by scientific knowledge. It implies that humans can
(and will) ultimately understand everything. Clearly, imperial nations with
superior weapons and advanced technologies imagined themselves to be
closer to knowing the “truth” than those they conquered. Critics of positivism
point out that universal understanding is impossible to achieve, since each
new scientific breakthrough leads to others, without end.
For the theatre historian, the most important aspect of positivist philosophy
is the way that it ties ideas of “truth” and “reality” to a narrow view of science.
The aesthetics of Naturalism and realism could only develop in an intellectual
climate that supported such ideas. Positivism and theatrical realism continue
to be influential – even dominant – in much of the world today.
The rise of realist staging
After 1850, Western theatre artists gradually adapted their techniques
to incorporate the new interest in photographic realism. For example,
in American Dion Boucicault’s (1820?–1890) The Octoroon (1859), a
photograph taken by accident reveals the murderer of a slave boy. In
England, the plays of Thomas W. Robertson (1829–1871) revealed
character through the actors’ handling of realist stage properties.
Robertson’s “cup and saucer plays” (as they were called), such as
Society (1865) and Caste (1867), also suggested a less romantic style
of acting (Figure 9.7). In Vienna, Ludwig Anzengruber (1839–1889)
turned the peasant play, formally a romantic piece meant to evoke
nationalistic pieties, toward realist purposes in the 1870s. As noted in
Chapter 8, in Russia, Ostrovsky’s The Thunderstorm (1859) and
Enough Stupidity for Every Wise Man (1868) demonstrate a realist
handling of melodrama and comedy, and keen attention to the details
of middle-class life. Because early nineteenth-century actors usually
chose and purchased their own costumes (a costly expense for
female actors especially), productions usually lacked a unified
appearance. By the 1880s, however, most producers provided
costumes for their entire casts to ensure a measure of uniformity
and/or authenticity.
After encountering the “box set” in continental Europe,
producer/manager, actress, and opera singer Madame Vestris (Lucia
Elizabeth Vestris, 1797–1856) introduced it to London in 1832. The box
set permitted greater photographic realism by creating the illusion of
three walls (with the audience peering in through an imaginary fourth
wall), real doors and windows, and actual furniture.
Figure 9.7An 1879 print illustrating a scene from Thomas W. Robertson's Caste,
at the Prince of Wales Theatre, 1879. Notice the stage properties on the central
table.

© Enthoven Collection, V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

When electrical stage lighting began to be used in the late 1870s,
the unreal appearance of painted, two-dimensional scenery became
evident. Consequently, improved methods of shifting three-
dimensional units and real props and furniture were developed. In
1879, for example, Madison Square Theater in New York rigged
elevators for two complete stages, one above the other, to allow one
stage to be changed while the other stage served as the playing area.
At Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London, workers ripped out the
grooves for sliding flats to allow for the “free plantation” (ad hoc
placement) of scenic units. Less commonly, theatre architects and
managers began to abandon the older systems of scene changing,
dominant in the West since the seventeenth century, to offer
increased off-stage storage space for furniture and three-dimensional
units, and clear access from the wings.
Other innovations followed. For example, by 1914, technicians
lighted concave, plaster cycloramas in the upstage area to create a
variety of outdoor realist illusions. Several German theatres had
installed elaborate revolves to wheel on the cumbersome materiality
of stage realism. Despite all the interest in Asia, European technicians
were unaware that in Japan, revolving stages and other mechanical
devices for creating sophisticated stage illusions had been common in
kabuki since the 1750s.
The American actor William Gillette (1857–1937) performed his star
vehicle Sherlock Holmes (1899) using realistic properties, costumes,
and scenery that looked as though they had been whisked from
Victorian London into the United States. British star actor Herbert
Beerbohm Tree’s (1853–1917) London production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream in 1900 featured real flowers, mechanical birds, and
fairies with battery-operated glow lamps. For its revival in 1911, Tree
added live rabbits. In Boucicault’s The Vampire (1852), thrilling
melodramatic staging included a supernatural, instantaneous rescue
of the heroine by the use of a “vampire trap” from which actual red
flames and smoke spewed, along with the evil vampire himself.
In Japan, realism had never been of interest to artists. However, the
shock of superior Western technology and fear of potential
colonization forced attitudes to change. Accepting the ideology
inherent in positivism, Japan embarked on massive and rapid
modernization, including attempts to make Japanese theatre more like
Western theatre. Although Japan had been forced to trade with the
West, the West had not imposed its own aesthetics on Japan, as it
typically did in colonized areas. Rather, the Japanese themselves
chose to adopt realism and other Western artistic modes in order to
“join” the modern world. Experts in science, technology, education,
government, and the arts were sent all over the world to learn the
latest Western ideas.
Simultaneously, some theatre artists and managers tried to make
kabuki more realistic. In 1872, kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjūrō IX (1839–
1903) appeared in formal Western attire (white tie and tails) instead of
traditional Japanese kimono to inaugurate a new theatre that he
promised would cleanse kabuki of bawdiness and – in a move that
paralleled Western antiquarian Shakespearean performance – would
present kabuki history plays with authentic-looking costumes,
properties, and scenery. Nō, in contrast, did not attempt to modernize
or to add realistic elements, and was almost extinguished due to its
connections with pre-Meiji feudalism. However, when former United
States president Ulysses S. Grant visited in 1879, he recognized the
value of this ancient genre and successfully urged his Japanese hosts
to preserve it without change.
The Japanese government soon embraced the practices of
capitalist imperialism perfected by the West. Like the West, Japan
rationalized its imperialistic ventures by telling its own people and
those it colonized that Japanese expansionism was a positive force
that would improve lives by offering the benefits of modern science,
technology, and so on. As we will see, Japanese imperialism was
closely tied to the development of realism.

Among Japan’s first imperialistic ventures was the

invasion and defeat of northern China in 1894–1895. This invasion
offered a pretext for a group of brash young theatre reformers, led by
Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911), to sidestep attempts to alter kabuki
and instead, to create something entirely new, more closely allied to
Western models of playwriting and production. They produced shimpa
[sheem-pah] – literally “new style” – dramas that adapted aspects of
nineteenth-century Western dramatic forms to Japanese tastes, but
continued the use of an all-male cast. The acting was a cross between
highly stylized kabuki gesture and vocal patterns, and the
comparatively realistic Western acting of the period. One of the
earliest shimpa plays was The Sublime, the Delightful Sino-Japanese
War (1894), which was presented like a series of journalistic reports
from the front. Like popular historical melodramas in Europe,
Kawakami used photographically authentic military uniforms and
makeup to depict realistic battle scenes, including heroic re-creations
of actual battles.

The introduction of female performers in Japan

After shimpa’s successes, the Japanese government sent

Kawakami’s troupe on a fact-finding and performance tour of the
West. While touring the United States, the lead onnagata in The
Geisha and the Knight (1900) became ill. Although women were still
not permitted to perform professionally in Japan, the desire of U.S.
audiences to see females playing women’s roles prompted Kawakami
to allow his wife, Kawakami Sadayakko (1872–1946), a former geisha
[gheh-sha] and thus a trained dancer, to perform instead. Audiences
adored her, and she continued to play the female lead in subsequent
tours of Europe, to great critical acclaim.
The content of plays and dance-dramas such as The Geisha and
the Knight – and especially the critical and popular praise heaped on
Sadayakko – helped create simultaneous and apparently
contradictory images of Japan, as suggested in the case study of The
Mikado and Madama Butterfly. These plays presented Japan as part
of the exotic Orient filled with sexually alluring women and fierce male
warriors; at the same time, however, they offered the vision of a
successful, modern nation that should be considered the military,
economic, and cultural equal of the West. In this way, Kawakami and
his troupe helped transform Western Orientalist perceptions to
Japan’s advantage, presenting a revised image of a new, modern
Japan to the West. In 1908, Sadayakko founded the Imperial Actress
Training Institute, Japan’s first acting school for women. Shimpa
eventually incorporated female actors performing on the same stage
as onnagata, a practice that continues when shimpa is performed
today.
One indicator of the growing acceptance of female actors – as well
as an example of how aspects of Western realism supported
Japanese imperialism and were transformed to conform to Japanese
tastes – was the creation of the all-female Takarazuka Revue. In 1914,
a Japanese entrepreneur, hoping to lure tourists to his spa in
Takarazuka City (near Osaka), offered the first performance of a
family-friendly “all-girl opera troupe” attached to a music school.
Eventually, the music school became a kind of finishing school for girls
who were taught not only singing, dance, and music, but how to
become “good wives, wise mothers.” The phrase indicated women’s
preferred role in Japan’s growing imperialist ventures. They would
give birth to and raise strong, patriotic Japanese citizen-soldiers.
At first, the school presented operettas deemed suitable for family
entertainment. Later, musical plays often based on Parisian revues
(and, after the Second World War, on Broadway musicals) and exotic,
Orientalist tales were joined by elaborately costumed and be-
feathered chorus lines, something like a cross between a non-
sexualized Las Vegas Revue and the Radio City Music Hall’s
Rockettes. The word “Takarazuka” now indicates both the city and this
unique, all-female performance genre that originated there.
Today, the Takarazuka Revue’s school is one of Japan’s most
competitive and professional performance training institutions. The
students, carefully selected young women, are trained in almost
militaristic fashion as professional singer-dancer-actors. In addition, as
originally envisioned, the school teaches skills such as house
cleaning, patriotism, and proper etiquette. The Takarazuka Revue is
wildly popular with teenage girls, housewives, and lesbians. Actors
specialize in either male or female roles, but male impersonators are
the biggest stars. Spectators enjoy the gender ambiguity and
idealization of masculinity embodied in the performance of male
characters – an idealization that is as much a female fantasy of ideal
masculinity as kabuki’s onnagata is a male fantasy of ideal femininity.
In the Takarazuka Revue, the entire world is transformed into an
exotic image, an alien world of Otherness that rejects photographic
realism and embraces the irrational.
Figure 9.8Kei Aran performs as Oscar François de Jarjayes, a female captain of
the royal guards of French Queen Marie-Antoinette during the Takarazuka
theatre's The Rose of Versailles final rehearsal in Tokyo. The rigorously trained
company, which has performed for nearly a century starring young single
women, has drawn generations of devoted, yet decidedly mild-mannered, fans.

Source: Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty Images.

With few exceptions, Takarazuka Revue actors do not perform for
more than a few years after graduation. Consequently, almost all are
young, usually under 30, enhancing the fantasy element of the
performances. Former Revue stars have gone on to successful
careers in film and music; most, however, follow the traditional path to
marriage. Some men believe that having played males on stage, the
male impersonators make ideal wives, because they have learned to
“understand” the male psyche.
 Scripts, which often foreground gender disguise, range from
historical romances set at the time of the French King Louis XIV to
spectacular productions of Broadway musicals, original works, and
adaptations of Western and Japanese novels, including a musical
based on Gone With the Wind. Shows are seldom overtly political, but
often convey subtle suggestions of Japanese cultural superiority,
including the ability to perform “the West.” The Takarazuka Revue
maintains two major theatres (in Takarazuka City and Tokyo), six
permanent touring companies, and its own TV station (Figure 9.8).
Naturalism on stage
The gradual shift toward theatrical realism after 1850 reached its apex
in the West in the movement known as Naturalism. While absolute
distinctions between realism and Naturalist aesthetics are probably
impossible, realism may be understood as a general style that
remains pervasive today, while Naturalism can be seen as a
movement that influenced theatre between 1880 and 1914, but then
disbanded. Committed Naturalists joined Émile Zola (1840–1902), their
leader, in asserting that heredity and the social-economic environment
are the primary causes of human behavior. Zola argued in Naturalism
in the Theatre (1881) that play productions must demonstrate the
effects of these visible causes (Figure 9.9). In the theatre, stated Zola,
“[W]e would need to intensify the illusion [of reality] in reconstructing
the environments, less for their picturesque qualities than for dramatic
utility. The environment must determine the character” (Zola 1881:
369). Further, photography provided reliable, objective evidence about
a character’s social-economic environment: “You cannot claim to have
really seen something until you have photographed it,” wrote Zola in
1901 (Sontag 1977: 87). Zola and the Naturalists were well-educated
writers, privileged members of the middle and upper classes. Zola’s
manifestos insist on the use of “rational” or “scientific” methods
(including photography) to depict characters who were decidedly
Other and “irrational”: women forced into prostitution, beggars afflicted
with incurable diseases, the uneducated and unemployed, or
homeless, hopeless characters addicted to drink or drugs. Although
such plays may seem to suggest social protest and calls for reform,
viewing the plays, their authors, and their audiences in historical/
social context suggests that, instead, they may have been exploitative
fantasies.
As we have noted, photography helped push realism toward
positivism, the claim that scientists could discover an objective reality
by dispassionately observing nature. Naturalism joined positivism and
photographic realism to Social Darwinism. The Naturalists believed
that an accurate rendition of objective, external realities was required
to explore positivist and Social Darwinist causation, which, as we saw,
has ties to notions of the rational Self and irrational Other.

Figure 9.9Emile Zola's naturalistic The Earth, directed by André Antoine at the
Théâtre Antoine in Paris, 1902.

© Biliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Although Zola strove to meet his goals by dramatizing his novels,
the plays of Henri Becque (1837–1899) were more successful on
stage. Becque’s The Crows (1882) and La Parisienne (1885) nearly
abandon conventional plotting to present everyday situations in which
greedy characters prey on the weak, and a “respectable” wife sleeps
with other men to advance her husband’s career. The German
playwright Gerhart Hauptmann’s (1862–1946) influential The Weavers
(1892) focuses on the exploitation and rioting of German workers in
1844.
Like Hauptmann, an increasing number of theatre artists urged
moderate or even radical reform, often focusing on liberalism or
socialism. Many of them saw Naturalism as the most powerful genre
for impressing their views on their audiences. However, neither
liberalism nor socialism meant what most Westerners understood by
these terms after 1917. Liberalism – defined as the right of individuals
to pursue their interests unrestrained by aristocratic privileges or state
regulations – had been the banner of reformers since the French
Revolution. The bourgeoisie throughout Europe had largely secured
these rights by 1850. From the liberals’ point of view, the laws of the
marketplace and individual effort, if unimpeded, should guarantee
economic progress and social justice. However, it had become evident
(partly through photographs of slums) that social reforms were
needed. Some liberal, Naturalist plays after 1880 railed against social
injustice. A Man’s World (1910) by U.S. playwright Rachel Crothers
(1878–1958) critiques the double standard that condemns women for
sexual behavior that is accepted in men. In Britain, John Galsworthy’s
(1867–1933) Justice (1910) pleaded for more humane prisons. In
Damaged Goods (1902), French playwright Eugene Brieux (1858–
1932) campaigned against the ignorance and fear that led to the
spread of syphilis.
In contrast, socialism argued that social needs and equity, rather
than private interests, should drive economics. By the late 1800s,
many socialists throughout the world had turned to the economic
ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883), who maintained that although
capitalism might produce some forms of progress, exploitation of the
working class was intrinsic to capitalism. However, large numbers
disagreed with his call to revolution; the revolutionaries became
known as communists. The dramas by Russian socialist Maxim
Gorky (1868–1936) include The Lower Depths (1902), which centered
on tramps and impoverished workers living in a Moscow flophouse.
Like most Naturalist plays, The Lower Depths dramatized a
photographic “slice of life,” with all of its banality, cynicism,
sentimentality, and violence (see Figure 9.10).
Women, whether socialists or not, were demanding more equality,
including the right to vote, the right to wear less restrictive clothing,
safer working conditions, and even the right to birth control. One of the
earliest and most radical socialist feminists was Finnish playwright
Minna Canth (1844–1897). Her Children of Misfortune (1888) depicted
the diseases, drunkenness, crimes, and death that degraded the lives
of the unemployed, especially women and children.
Figure 9.10The Moscow Art Theatre production of Maxim Gorky's The Lower
Depths, 1902, with Stanislavsky as Satin (center).

© Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies, London.

State censorship throughout much of Europe before 1914 prevented
the production of many Naturalist plays. The authorities objected to
the plays’ offensive language and feared their political implications. To
avoid censorship and produce Naturalist plays, independent (or
private) theatres appeared in several countries, offering subscriptions
to members. In Paris, André Antoine began the Théâtre Libre (Free
Theatre) in 1887 when the censors denied permission for a short
season of new plays, including an adaptation of a Zola novel (see
Figure 9.11). One of Antoine’s early productions was Ibsen’s Ghosts
(1881), forbidden by the censors because it depicts previously taboo
subjects, including sexually transmitted disease. The Théâtre Libre
also produced several of Becque’s plays, The Power of Darkness
(1886) by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Miss Julie
(1893) by Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849–1912).
Antoine’s theatre provided a model for other free theatres in Europe,
and eventually in Japan. For example, the Freie Bühne (Free Stage) in
Berlin produced predominantly Naturalist plays by Ibsen, Becque,
Tolstoy, and others and created the first audience for Hauptmann’s
dramas. London’s Independent Theatre, modeled on the other “free”
theatres on the continent, opened in 1891 with a production of Ghosts.
It continued until 1897, mostly showcasing Naturalist plays. Because
the Freie Bühne and the Independent Theatre used professional
actors who were simultaneously involved with other productions, they
could not mount the kind of fully integrated productions that marked
the success of the Théâtre Libre, where Antoine relied on trained
amateurs. Nonetheless, all three theatres played a significant role in
introducing Europe to the possibilities of stage Naturalism.
Realism and the rise of producer-directors
In Central and Eastern Europe, where subsidized theatrical institutions
predominated, a few strong producers championed realism in state-
and city-supported theatres. In Western Europe and the United States,
by contrast, some producers gradually wrested economic control of
commercial theatrical production from the stars, which allowed them
to shape both the economic and the artistic fortunes of their theatres.
By 1900, both routes had led to the emergence of a new figure who
specialized in staging realism_ the producer-director. In Japan, the
producer-director appeared a few years later, and his appearance
highlighted the struggle between those who advocated a
contemporary, literary, playwright’s theatre and those who wished to
modernize kabuki’s actor-driven theatre.
The first producer-director to exercise near total control over his
productions was Georg II (1826–1914), the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen
(an independent duchy in Germany before 1871). The duke designed
all of the costumes, scenery, and props, even insisting on genuine
materials and period furniture for historical authenticity. When the
company toured throughout Europe between 1874 and 1890, it set new
standards for the aesthetic integration of realist productions,
especially in ensemble acting. Most members of Saxe-Meiningen’s
company played both leading roles and supernumeraries; there were
no stars. For the first time on a European stage, mob scenes featured
individuals with their own character traits speaking intelligible lines,
and the mob itself was choreographed to move with a level of reality
and power that audiences had never witnessed before (Figure 9.12).
The duke achieved these effects by rehearsing for several months,
frequently with full sets and costumes, until he believed his
productions were ready for the public. By 1890, the troupe had given
over 2,500 performances of 41 plays and the duke had demonstrated
how an authoritarian producer-director could integrate realist
productions.
Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) saw the Meiningen troupe
perform in Moscow in 1890. The ensemble acting and realistic, off-
stage sound effects especially impressed him. As he developed his
own mode of directing, he would recall the highly disciplined control of
this company, and would merge that discipline with an emphasis on
non-egotistical, creative, emotionally honest acting that contrasted
with the more typical strutting and posturing of the day. The desired
result would be a fully organic production (Benedetti 1999: 40–2).
Along with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), Stanislavsky
brought high standards of realist production to Russia after founding
the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in 1898. He insisted on long rehearsal
periods and the presence of all actors. Although somewhat less
powerful than similar producer-directors, he carried substantial
authority due to his membership in the Moscow business elite,
connections to wealthy patrons, and growing eminence as an actor
and director. The MAT produced the four major plays of Russian
playwright Anton Chekhov (1860–1904): The Seagull (1896), Uncle
Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904).
Stanislavsky paid scrupulous attention to the realities of Russian
provincial life on which these plays are based, encouraged ensemble
acting, and used a “fourth wall” performance style (Figure 9.13).
Figure 9.11André Antoine as old Hilse next to his loom in the Théâtre Libre's
1892 production of Hauptmann's The Weavers. Color lithograph by Henri-
Gabriel Ibels (1893), on the cover of a portfolio for Antoine's Théâtre Libre
programs, all of which featured prints by Parisian avant-garde artists.

© Gary Jay and Josephine S. Williams.

After 1906, Stanislavsky began working on a “system” to help actors
develop commitment to their characters’ realities – work he would
continue for the rest of his life. Today, most scholars agree that his
system combines devotion to finding the character’s (not the actor’s)
personal, emotional truth with intense, physical control of the voice
and body. In Chapter 12, we discuss how American interpretations
sometimes shifted emphasis away from Stanislavsky’s insistence on
physical control and toward the actor’s (rather than the character’s)
emotional truth.
In France, for productions at the Théâtre Libre, André Antoine’s
actors observed the realist convention of the imaginary “fourth wall,”
occasionally delivering lines with their backs to the audience. Antoine
also used the conventions of realism for a different effect in later
productions of French classical plays at the state-subsidized Théâtre
Odéon. For example, to re-create historically accurate productions of
Molière’s comedies, he placed costumed actors playing spectators on
the stage and hung chandeliers over them. Antoine’s productions
toured widely in Western Europe and, like Saxe-Meiningen’s, shaped
a generation of theatre artists.

Emotional and physical truth were also important in

Japan. Sadayakko’s success challenged the exclusion of women from
female roles and professional actor training. Some traditionalists
feared that replacing onnagata would destroy aesthetic pleasure and
encourage female sexual promiscuity. Even Osanai Kaoru (1881–
1928), whose production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (1909) is
considered the first shingeki [sheen-gheh-kee] (“new theatre,” i.e.,
modern, Western-style theatre), urged onnagata to learn to play
modern women. Nevertheless, Osanai’s Free Theatre (Jiyū gekijō),
named after Antoine’s Théàtre Libre, sought to emulate its ideals.
In contrast, literary critic Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) argued that
realist representation demanded women on stage. In 1906, he founded
a Theatre Institute to train actors and mount private shingeki
productions. His 1911 Hamlet featured his student Matsui Sumako
(1886–1919), Japan’s first professionally trained female actor. Later
that year, Matsui performed her most famous role, Nora in Ibsen’s A
Doll House, with another shingeki troupe. The content of the play,
Matsui’s performance, and her personal life shocked the country,
seeming to crystalize the fears of the traditionalists. However, women
acting in realistic plays could not be stopped. Although shimpa
continued to use both female actors and onnagata, by 1930 women
routinely performed female roles in shingeki. Today, shingeki is
virtually indistinguishable from contemporary Western theatre.
Figure 9.12A crowd scene in the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen's staging of
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at Drury Lane Theatre, 1881.

© V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Figure 9.13V.S. Simov's 1898 naturalistic design for Act I of the Moscow Art
Theatre's production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Note the painted
backdrop.

© The Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies,

London.
In China, the humiliations of European imperialism and military
defeat to Japan encouraged a shift toward Western culture (“The May
Fourth Movement”). Wishing to modernize, progressive Chinese
students studying in Japan discovered Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The theme of freedom and the style of modern
Western drama (as they imagined it) resulted in the creation of The
Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven (Heinu yutian lu, 1907), the first huaju
(Chinese spoken drama). Many important Chinese authors wrote for
huaju, including Cao Yu (1910–1996), whose influential Thunderstorm
(Leiyu, 1934) is a psychologically based family drama.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Ideology, realism, and the well-made play
How “real” is realism? With its selective focus, its unobtrusive exposition, its
appearance of real time, its linear sequences of cause-and-effect actions that
lead (seemingly) to a third-act crisis, and its careful construction of credible
character psychology, realism tries to hide the fact that it is a carefully crafted
fiction designed to keep the viewer inside the ideology of the middle-class
world it represents. Because it emphasizes individual character psychology, it
is not well suited to showing how social formations are constructed or how
they might be dismantled. In other words, realism encourages an acceptance
of things as they currently are.
Raymond Williams has shown that modern realist tragedy, from Ibsen’s A
Doll House through Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), tracks the
struggle and ultimate defeat of the individual who attempts to fulfill her or his
desire, but who is ultimately the victim of social formations that are never
addressed (Williams 1966: 87–105; 1969: 331–47). Williams shows the inherent
contradictions between all the talk of social reform in such plays and the
invisible limitations of realism. Williams’ one-time student, Terry Eagleton,
summarizes the argument:

The discourse of the play [the liberal tragedy] may be urging change, criticism,
rebellion; but the dramatic forms – [that] itemize the furniture and aim for an exact
“verisimilitude” – inevitably enforce upon us a sense of the unalterable solidity of
this social world, all the way down to the color of the maid’s stockings.
(Eagleton 1983: 187)

Consequently, realist plays – even those that appear to be highly critical of

society – ultimately support the status quo. The form itself implies that
revolutionary change is not possible.
In many ways, realist play structure derives from the very “unreal” structure
of “the well-made play,” a suspenseful genre that had proven its believability
for bourgeois audiences since the 1820s, when French playwrights Eugène
Scribe (1791–1861) and, later, Victorien Sardou perfected it. Although the term
is usually used in a derogatory sense, the well-made play’s structure is central
in every significant playwriting and screenwriting textbook in English today.
The well-made play derives from French neoclassicism. The plot results
from events happening prior to the play’s beginning, demanding much
exposition. The plot must follow a strict cause- and-effect pattern, including a
series of escalating complications with a final reversal (and/or revelation) that
returns the world to a state of order. Well-made plays typically use devices
such as letters or other props that are at first misunderstood, but are later
revealed as proof of a character’s true identity or as a way to unravel plot
complications. This structure is also typical of farce. As we will see later in this
chapter, Ibsen’s plays use techniques derived from farce and the well-made
play, but they refuse endings that return the world to a socially acceptable
order.
Ibsen and Romantic idealism
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen published his first play in 1850, and
remained active in the theatre until his death. His career can be seen
as a microcosm of the shifting genres of theatre during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of his early dramas
were written in verse and set in the Scandinavian past. With Pillars of
Society in 1877, Ibsen altered the form and style of his plays from
Romanticism to realism, while retaining strong philosophical ties to
Romantic idealism. During the 1870s and 1880s, Ibsen was often
considered either a realist critic of contemporary society or even a
Naturalist, intent on revealing the ways in which heredity and
environment determined human fate. As noted earlier, many
independent theatres, including Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, produced his
Ghosts (1881) as a demonstration of Naturalism. But Ibsen’s theatre
consistently moved beyond the limitations of realism and the ideology
of Naturalism. Rather, Ibsen was drawn to Romantic idealism, a
worldview directly influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), especially The Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807). For Hegel, natural and human existence consisted of the
process of self-governing and self-developing reason; in humans
(both individually and socially), reason seeks self-fulfillment and free
spirit. Hegel’s view is called idealist because it places ideas as the
fundamental element or driving force of reality. (Many other thinkers,
such as Plato and Kant, are also idealists.)
Two Romantic plays of Ibsen’s mid-career, Brand (1865) and Peer
Gynt (1867), endorse Hegel’s commitment to the individual’s search
for transformational self-fulfillment. Brand is a symbolic Everyman who
struggles to transcend earthly fragmentation and live up to the idealist
claims of his imagination. Peer Gynt is the comic opposite of Brand, a
figure who prefers indirection and compromise to Brand’s direct
pursuit of perfection. In effect, Peer’s foolish, futile life confirms the
superiority of Brand’s flaming idealism (Figure 9.14). In both plays,
Ibsen recognized that self-fulfillment was necessary to strive for but
impossible to achieve. As we will see in the case study of Ibsen’s A
Doll House (1879), he merged Hegel’s idealism with a notion of liberal
tragedy.
Despite the surface realism of Ibsen’s later plays, they continued to
affirm Hegelian idealism and (as we will see) attacked the limitations
of photographic realism. In doing so, they also questioned the
representational basis of the theatre. The plot of Hedda Gabler (1890),
for example, rests on several clichés that had come to be associated
with melodramatic versions of the well-made play: a femme fatale
(Hedda herself, who threatens to lure two good men to their doom), a
pair of sensational pistols (which spectators know will be fired), a
Mephistophelean figure (who attempts sexual blackmail on Hedda),
and the evils of drink, leading to a misplaced manuscript (which nearly
drives one man to suicide). Ibsen invites his spectators both to enjoy
the operation of these mechanical contrivances of character and plot
and to look through them to his language for the more essential action
of the play. Mostly through its imagery, Hedda Gabler suggests an
idealist battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
Figure 9.14A scene from an Indian adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt called
Gundegowdana Chaitre, directed at the Rangayana Theatre in Mysore in 1995
by Rustom Bharucha. Hulugappa Kattimani as Peer, in the white suit, and
Manjuatha Belakere, as an Indian folk version of the Button Moulder. The Button
Moulder, a messenger of Yama, god of death, in the adaptation, warns Peer of
his approaching mortality. Partly because of its universal implications, Peer Gynt
continues to be performed around the world.

Source: Kennedy, D. (ed.) The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and

Performance, Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2003, p.615.
In contrast to most realist playwrights’ emphasis on photographic
reality, Ibsen relied on language rather than spectacle to express his
ideas. In The Master Builder (1892), he traces the spiritual
regeneration of Halvard Solness, a disillusioned middle-aged
architect-builder. Solness is urged on a quest for spiritual awakening
by Hilde Wangel, a girl in her twenties who shares in his drive for self-
perfection. At the end, Solness climbs to the top of an off-stage tower
that he built, symbolizing his quest for transcendence, but once there,
he falls to his death.
Ibsen was interested in dramatizing the conflict between
imaginative vision and practical reality, the spiritual needs that drive
individuals and the limitations of material possibility that constrain and
can finally kill them. The problem with staging this conflict in the 1890s
(and a problem that remains today), however, is the impossibility of
realizing purely spiritual realities on a materialist stage. During the era
of classical Greece or Baroque opera, writers could lower gods on to
the stage to represent spiritual needs and possibilities. But Ibsen,
writing for a more realist theatre, can only arrange for his characters to
talk about their spiritual yearnings. Consequently, The Master Builder
is necessarily dense with dialogue.
Ibsen wrote in many styles. His late, non-realistic plays seem to
foreshadow such twentieth-century experiments as Expressionism.
This aspect of his career will be considered in Chapter 10.
Chekhov undermines nineteenth-century theatre

Anton Chekhov, while studying to become a medical

doctor, wrote sketches, short stories, and one-act plays – several of
which were performed in the popular variety theatres of Russian cities.
Despite a growing reputation as a dramatist, Chekhov almost
abandoned the theatre after the failure of The Seagull in 1896.
However, Stanislavsky convinced him to allow the Moscow Art
Theatre to mount a revival of the play and, following its success,
Chekhov composed three more full-length pieces for the MAT. Despite
his small output, Chekhov’s plays are second only to Shakespeare’s
as the most produced in the world.
Chekhov, who was interested in the materiality of psychology and
history, generally looked with amusement or compassion on people
who professed to believe in spiritual realities. Unlike Ibsen, Chekhov
relied on dramatic action and gesture, rather than on speech, to reveal
characterization and to undermine the usual genres of nineteenth-
century theatre. In the third act of Uncle Vanya (1899), for example,
Chekhov has his middle-aged protagonist enter a room intending to
present a bouquet of flowers to a married woman he is desperately in
love with, only to find her in the arms of his best friend. Later in the
same act, Vanya chases the woman’s husband (an ailing, selfish
professor) around the house with a pistol, finally corners him, then
shoots at him and misses, twice. Earlier in the play, though, Chekhov
paints a sympathetic portrait of Vanya as a man who has wasted his
youth and happiness to help others by managing a country estate.
Uncle Vanya combines the genres of French farce and realistic
psychological melodrama, making the character of Vanya both
ridiculous and pathetic for much of the play (Figure 9.15). Where
Ibsen’s dramas might use nineteenth-century dramatic genres to
indirectly criticize the representational possibilities, Chekhov’s plays
radically rework and sometimes parody them. For Chekhov, the usual
dramatic frames for representing reality could not probe the major
psychological and historical conflicts of the modern age.
 In The Cherry Orchard (1904), Chekhov subverts both tragic and
comic expectations. The play asks its spectators to respond to a
family of aristocrats who return to their debt-ridden estate, waste their
time when they should be saving the family legacy, then lose and
finally abandon the estate. Should they be understood as tragic or
comic figures, or both? Chekhov provides ample possibilities for either
interpretation and directors have chosen both extremes, as well as
mixing them together in various combinations. Despite Chekhov’s
objections, for example, Stanislavsky staged the play as a tragedy.
Whatever the tone of a production, Chekhov’s works undermined
conventional dramatic forms of representation to theatricalize the
downfall of the Russian aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Figure 9.15Sonja (Patti Love) comforts Uncle Vanya (Michael Bryant) in the final
scene of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in the 1982 production in the Lyttelton Theatre,
the National Theatre, London, directed by Michael Bogdanov.

Photo by Laurence Burns, courtesy National Theatre Archive.

Ibsen, Chekhov, and the critique of photography
Although theatre historians hail the influence of photography on the
development of realism in the theatre, both Ibsen and Chekhov – two
of the most significant play wrights identified with early realism –
believed that photography had little to reveal about human
experience.
Chekhov sets up photography for ridicule in the first act of The
Three Sisters, when a minor character, Fedotik, has everyone pose for
a photograph. Of course, photos freeze the flow of life in a static pose,
and Chekhov uses this fact to explore the changes that actually occur.
The happy faces frozen in the Act I photograph are no longer possible
by the play’s end. In Act III, a fire burns up all of Fedotik’s photos, and
by Act IV, taking photos has become a sour joke.
Similarly, Ibsen sets much of The Wild Duck (1884) in a
photographer’s studio, but his photographer, Hjalmar Ekdal, is a fool
who cannot see beyond the surfaces of his photos. Like many
photographers in the 1880s, Ekdal’s clients want him to retouch his
photos to conform to their sentimental self-images. His clients actually
reject the documentary evidence of photography, wanting the images
to be more like idealized paintings. Ekdal gives much of this
retouching work to his adolescent daughter, even though the strain on
her eyes is gradually blinding her. The implications are clear: those
who believe that photographs are truthful may lead themselves and
others into sentimentality and moral blindness. Thus, while working
within the conventions of realism, both playwrights questioned the
psychological effects and social uses of photography.
Case Study Ibsen's A Doll House: Problems in Ibsen's
problem play
Gary Jay Williams, with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Although often heralded as a play about women’s liberation at a
time when that concept was still very new, Ibsen himself denied that
such was his intent. Rather, he said the play was about the struggles
of all humankind. Nevertheless, when the play premiered in 1879, its
story of a wife abandoning her husband and children shocked
audiences in Scandinavia, Germany, and England.
The controversy over A Doll House even caused Ibsen to write an
alternative, sentimental ending for the German premiere. In this
version, Nora, after looking in on her children one more time, falls to
her knees, unable to leave. Ibsen despised this ending but wrote it to
insure the play’s production. This ending, emphasizing the power of
“mother love,” was also used in Japan when the play was first
translated and performed there in 1911. Revisions that softened the
ending were being made throughout the world as late as 1976.
But the play has continued to present serious problems of its own
making. Actors playing Nora struggle to make credible the journey of
the obedient Victorian wife of the first part of the play to the
independent woman at the end. In addition, many critics see a still
more profound question, one that Ibsen did not really allow his
audiences to dwell on: will Nora’s leaving her home result in her
liberation in the society she lives in?
Ideology and A Doll House
Although Ibsen unfolds with sophisticated craft the economic, cultural,
and social forces entrapping Nora, the play does not consider what
might happen to her if she actually left her husband and children.
Rather, Ibsen presents us with Nora’s miraculous transformation from
a child-like wife, imprisoned in a Victorian culture where she has long
been infantilized by her father and husband, into a budding, self-reliant
woman.
 As the play opens, we see Nora as a homemaker, blissful
shopper, and practiced manipulator of her husband – using the only
powers and making the only choices that she has within her culture.
Nora still seems emotionally childlike at times, secretly eating her
macaroons. Torvald refers to his wife in trivializing diminutives, as “my
little squirrel,” and his “little lark” (Ibsen 1978: 125–6). Nora, however,
uses her sexuality and takes advantage of the inconsequentiality men
assign to her, as she does when she manipulates her husband to get
the extra money that she will use to pay off her secret loan. She takes
pride in having secretly saved Torvald’s life when his health broke
from overwork. However, since married women were not permitted to
get such loans without their husband’s signatures, she had planned to
ask her father to sign for it. When her father died, she forged his
signature – a criminal act.
Figure 9.16Nora (Betty Hennings), dancing the tarantella for her husband,
Torvald (Emil Poulsen), with Raphael's portrait, Madonna and Child, in the
background (above the piano) in the premiere production of A Doll House at the
Royal Theatre Copenhagen, 1879, directed by H.P. Holst. At the piano, Dr. Rank
(Peter Jerndorff), with Mrs. Linde (Agnes Dehn) in the doorway.

© Teatermuseet i Hofteatret, Copenhagen.

Nora may believe she has “worked the system,” but like many
women, she is working around ideologies long in place that she
cannot change. Her husband is sovereign in the household; on his
side are the full force of tradition, state law, and Christian religious
passages on wifely obedience by St. Paul (Ephesians 5: 22–33). What
marginal power Nora has she derives from the ways in which a male-
dominated culture constructs her: she is sexualized on the one hand
and idealized on the other, subject in both to the pleasure and
convenience of men.
The play takes place during Christmas, a traditional Christian family
feast day. In the setting of the premiere production in Copenhagen in
1879, a copy of Raphael’s portrait of the Madonna and Child hung over
the fireplace, reinforcing the “natural” order of things (Figure 9.16).
The disgraced lawyer Krogstad knows her secret and knows how to
ruin Nora. When first confronted with the question of illegality, she
naïvely assumes that the law would understand her motives. Once
she realizes the seriousness of her situation, she becomes desperate
in the face of Krogstad’s blackmail. She briefly considers suicide but
lacks the courage. She resorts to sexually tantalizing the dying Dr.
Rank, trying to extract money from him (the silk-stocking scene in Act
II – once omitted by some translators who felt it was too blatantly
sexual). Beneath the painting of the Madonna and Child (the religious
and social framing of woman in her acceptable role), she raises her
tambourine and wildly dances the exotic, wild tarantella in an attempt
to prevent Torvald from seeing Krogstad’s incriminating letter (Figure
9.16).
When Torvald finally learns the truth of the forged signature, he
shatters Nora’s last desperate illusion. Rather than realizing that her
action was for his sake, Torvald explodes in rage about the loss of his
honor. The “miracle” Nora hoped for did not happen and never could
have.
While Ibsen has revealed a great deal about Nora’s material
circumstances, he also gives Nora her famous exit. He asks us to
believe that Nora evolves in this crucible of three days and three acts
to the point that she can sit her husband down and begin her
discussion with three shattering insights: “I’ve been your wife-doll
here, just as I was Papa’s doll-child. And in turn the children have
been my dolls” (Ibsen 1978: 191) (Figure 9.17). This, in effect,
deconstructs her social identity.
However, such a transformation would never have been possible in
the real world. True, as feminist critic Annelise Maugue writes, Ibsen’s
play had important symbolic value for women. Late nineteenth-century
feminists predicted that the play would have reformative effects.
However, Maugue adds that Nora’s leaving “is precisely the step that
real women could not imagine, let alone take” (Maugue 1993: 523).
Figure 9.17In the mid-1890s, a canned food company in Paris, the Compagnie
Liebig, offered this pocket-size trading card depicting the final scene from
Ibsen's A Doll House, with the purchase of one of its products.

Courtesy Gary Jay and Josephine S. Williams.

Material conditions in the real world
Had Nora been a real woman in nineteenth-century Norway, it would
have been very difficult for her to have supported herself on the other
side of Torvald’s door. Job prospects for real Noras were very poor.
Census data for four French cities at the end of the nineteenth century
show that one out of every two women was single, widowed, or
divorced, and therefore seeking employment. In England in 1851, 40
percent of the women who were working were domestic servants; 22
percent were textile factory operatives. A London shirt-maker told an
interviewer in 1849 that her normal hours were from five in the morning
until nine at night, and in the summer she often worked “from four in
the morning to nine or ten at night – as long as I can see.” Still she
was barely able to support herself (Yeo and Thompson 1972: 122–3).
The low wages – not the hard work – drove many such women to
prostitution.
Ibsen briefly focuses on the material circumstances of two other
women in his play. Mrs. Linde married her husband not for love (which
astonishes Nora) but because she needed to support her bedridden
mother and two younger brothers. Now widowed, she seeks a clerical
job, which she gets only through Nora’s strenuous intercession with
Torvald. Anne-Marie, the children’s elderly nurse (who years ago had
been Nora’s nurse), had to give her own illegitimate child away in
order to get employment: “A girl who’s poor and who’s gotten into
trouble is glad enough for that” (Ibsen 1978: 155). Nora hears this
when she is glimpsing the unspeakable consequences of Krogstad’s
blackmail. But when she walks out the door, she will be subject to the
same employment conditions. In the late 1870s, courageous women
were leading movements in Europe and the U.S. to improve women’s
working conditions and change the laws, but Nora would not have
benefited from them for another decade. A real Nora in Japan would
have had to wait even longer for such changes. Ibsen’s Nora has no
ties to a feminist sisterhood, nor would she have thought to seek them.
Ibsen based Nora’s situation on real life. However, Laura Kieler (the
inspiration for Nora) did not slam the door. Like Nora, she had secretly
obtained a loan to save her husband’s life by financing a trip to a warm
climate, but was unable to repay the interest, so she forged a check.
After her forgery was revealed, she had a nervous breakdown and her
husband committed her to a mental asylum. Later, she begged him to
take her back for the sake of the children, which he grudgingly did.
When he was forced to change the ending to “soften” it, Ibsen was
actually going back to what happened in the real world. Not to
examine the ideology embedded in the play is to risk perpetuating it.
Ibsen’s American translator, Rolf Fjelde, preferred the title A Doll
House to the more common A Doll’s House as the translation of
Ibsen’s title, Et Dukkehjem. He believed the title without the
possessive points not just to Nora, as the doll, but to the entire
household – husband, wife, servants, and the whole set of social
formations to which all are subject (Ibsen 1978: 121) (Figure 9.18).
Figure 9.18In this 1991 staging of Ibsen's A Doll House at Center Stage,
Baltimore, Maryland, the child-like Nora (Caitlin O'Connell) has just returned
home from her Christmas shopping spree to be treated patronizingly by her
husband, Torvald (Richard Bekins). In the final act, both were in anguish when
the newly strong Nora determined that she must leave their home. Directed by
Jackson Phippin and designed by Tony Straiges.

© Center Stage.
In the late 1970s, Austrian playwright and Nobel Prize winner
Elfriede Jelinek (1946–) offered her own dark answer to the question of
whether Nora will be a liberated woman once she leaves her home.
Jelinek wrote a sequel to Ibsen’s play, entitled What Happened after
Nora Left Her Husband, or Pillars of Society. In it, Nora works in a
factory after leaving home, marries an industrialist, is eventually forced
to become a high-class prostitute, and then turns to anarchism, which
fails. At the end, she is back in her stifling home with Torvald, who
clearly will soon become a Nazi.
Ibsen was a pioneer reformer in bringing substantive ideas to the
theatre. It is not to detract from his historical achievement to
understand how the ideologies of his plays (which continue to have a
powerful presence even today) and the complicit mode of realism
work in A Doll House.
To read a longer version of this case study, including a discussion of
the theory of cultural materialism that guides it, please see the Theatre
Histories website.
Key references
Audio-visual resources
A 1973 Paramount film of the play, directed by Patrick Garland with
Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins, is available in a video recording.
The opening scene (highly recommended) of this film is available on
YouTube: search “Ibsen Hopkins Bloom.”
Books and articles
Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory, an Introduction, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1969) “What is an
Author?” in H. Adams and L. Searle (eds) (1986) Critical Theory since
1965, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York:
Pantheon Books.
Ibsen, H. (1978) A Doll House, trans. R. Fjelde, in Henrik Ibsen, The
Complete Major Prose Plays, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
Marker, F.J. and Marker, L.L. (1989) Ibsen’s Lively Art, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Marx, K. (1950) “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Maugue, A. (1993) “The New Eve and the Old Adam,” in G. Fraise
and M. Perrot (eds) Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World
War, Vol. 4 of G. Duby and M. Perrot (gen. eds) A History of Women in
the West, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Meyer, M. (1971) Ibsen, a Biography, Garden City, NY: Doubleday &
Company.
Shepherd-Barr, K. (1997) Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890–
1900, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
 Williams, R. (1966) Modern Tragedy, Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Williams, R. (1969) Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Yeo, E. and Thompson, E.P. (eds) (1972) The Unknown Mayhew,
New York: Schocken Books.
Summary
In the West and Japan, imperial expansion joined forces with new
ideologies to create the notion of inevitable progress. In order to justify
this concept, nation-states and their upper classes needed to see
themselves as rational and mature, while seeing those they colonized
and their lower classes as irrational and childlike. The concept of
Orientalism clarifies how these distinctions are made and how they
function in works of art, theatre, and historical writing. International
fairs and expositions demonstrated imperial power and progress,
while exposing artists and audiences to the unfamiliar and exotic,
creating desire for new material goods and new theatrical imagery.
Imperialism and Orientalism were aided by the development of new
technologies such as photography, new philosophies such as
positivism, and new scientific discoveries such as Darwin’s theory of
evolution. Social Darwinism developed as a distortion and
misinterpretation of Darwin’s ideas. Positivism encouraged
imperialists to believe that colonization led to progress, which included
not only economic or military advantage, but spreading “civilization.”
Even in areas like China, untouched by such ideologies and
technologies, an internal form of imperialism created distinctions
between Self and Other. Such distinctions include economic class,
gender, disability, etc. as well as race and ethnicity. Throughout the
world, modern imperialism resulted in new theatrical genres. Realism
(the most widespread new genre) developed simultaneously with
imperialism, and the two are closely allied.
At first, Western and Japanese theatre reflected and gloried in the
biases of imperialism. As economic and social disparities grew wider
and the plight of the poor and marginalized became more visible,
theatre artists began to create works reflecting the changes in reality.
Theatre staging and design developed methods to enhance the
photographic reality of plays, and powerful stage directors emerged
who championed these new ideas. For example, Stanislavsky worked
to make acting more believable by de-emphasizing the actor’s
performance of herself, and emphasizing instead performance of the
character’s inner life through vocal and physical means. Naturalism,
created by middle- and upper-class authors, emphasized perversions,
poverty, and other dark aspects associated with “irrational” or
unfortunate Others. Naturalists embraced Social Darwinism, believing
that the ills of the world are the result of one’s inborn nature and
environment. In contrast, realism offered a more balanced perspective
and remains the dominant genre today. Realist authors (including
early feminists) who depicted life’s ills suggested that these might be
mended if the causative economic or social factors improved. In
Japan, debates about Westernization resulted not only in the creation
of the new genres of shimpa and realistic shingeki, but in the gradual
acceptance of women on stage. The great masters of realism, Ibsen
and Chekhov, wrote plays demonstrating the complexities and
confusions not only of society, but of theatre in a process of
transformation.
*
New media divide the theatres of print
culture, 1870–1930
Bruce McConachie
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-14
As we saw in the last chapter, the cultural effects of photography
pushed Western theatre toward the embrace of positivism, which
validated visibility and materiality as the defining features of the real.
This communication process within print-based culture led many to
the practice and enjoyment of theatrical realism, and, for a few, to the
embrace of Naturalism. In this chapter, we will first explore some of
the ramifications of these positivist effects on mainstream theatre
around 1900, including the emergence of musical comedy and
theatrical revues and the influence of performances featuring
international stars. In addition to positivism, these trends reflected the
triumph of industrial capitalism, evident in the fashion shows in the
new department stores that joined the glamor of revues to consumer
desires. Then we will look at the rise of avant-garde movements that
opposed realism and Naturalism by countering their positivist
assumptions. Instead of upholding an “objective,” materialistic
understanding of reality, the avant-garde artists of the new
movements – Symbolism, Aestheticism, and Expressionism – told
audiences that reality was actually “subjective,” spiritual, and more
immaterial than photography seemed to show. This embrace of
subjectivity had emerged earlier in Romanticism, but the influences of
positivism and industrialism heightened its importance. Finally, this
chapter will examine playwrights, directors, and other theatre artists
who took themes, styles, and theatrical forms from both sides of this
division in Western theatre. Playwrights like August Strindberg and
Eugene O’Neill, plus directors such as Stanislavsky and Max
Reinhardt (1873–1943), attempted productions that borrowed from
realism and from the new avant-garde movements to acknowledge
both the “objective” and “subjective” sides this ongoing theatrical
conflict.
 Western theatre makers who clung to the forms and traditions of
print-based theatre could not resolve this division, however. As noted
in the last chapter, this tension was already apparent in the final plays
of Ibsen, who had embraced the apparent objectivity of realism in the
middle of his career with A Doll House and Ghosts, but moved to the
subjective spirituality of Symbolism of When We Dead Awaken at the
end of it. Driving the objective/subjective conflict was the underlying
tension between the effects of print, now broadened to include
photography, and the newer effects of telephones and phonographs
on perception. As we will see, these audiophonic (i.e., sound-based)
media, increasingly influential after 1900, validated realities that could
not be photographed – sounds, voices, and music. Inventive
dramatists and directors might offer productions that explored both
“objective” and “subjective” realities, but as long as Western culture
insisted that philosophers, scientists, and thinkers must choose
between one or the other – that both versions of reality could not,
ultimately, be true – traditional modes of making theatre could not
overcome the division. By bringing this conflict to a kind of boiling
point, however, many theatre productions between 1890 and 1930
undermined the believability of both the “objective” and “subjective”
traditions of print-based theatre.
As often occurs in history, cultures and their theatres do not usually
resolve such problems. Instead, they put them aside when other
difficulties thrown up by circumstances that no one anticipated grab
their attention and demand action. As we will learn in the next chapter,
the cultural fragmentations caused by the immense popularity of film
and by the catastrophe of the Great War (1914–1918) sparked new
insights and innovations that no one could have predicted before 1914.
(Many Europeans continue to call the First World War the “Great War,”
the name given to it initially, because they have come to understand
that the conflict was a significant turning point in world history and not
simply the first of two similar disasters for Western culture.) Film, the
first mass medium of the twentieth century, was almost as culturally
disruptive as the war, though for different reasons. Together with radio
and other electrically powered media, it helped to catapult the theatres
of the twentieth century toward the use of multi-media in theatres
today. Print-based theatre would continue throughout the twentieth
century and into the next – Western culture was too steeped in its
assumptions, procedures, and protections for it to disappear quickly –
but as we will see, the 1920s mark the beginning of its decline.
Spectacular bodies on popular stages
Audiences have always enjoyed spectacular bodies – bodies that are
meant to be looked at – but the proliferating photographs of these
bodies excited this interest even more so. Strongmen, burlesque
queens, contortionists, exotic dancers, “freaks” of all kinds, and other
spectacular bodies peopled the variety stages, circuses, and festivals
of all the major cities in the world (see Figure 10.1). As we saw in the
last chapter, these types of entertainment drew vast audiences into
huge auditoriums at world fairs, music halls, and other forms of variety
theatre in the urban centers of the industrializing world.
Photography also advanced musical theatre, which featured
spectacular female bodies and handsome male stars, in addition to
hummable music. Although musical theatre traditionally meant opera
in the West, light operatic entertainment (operetta) emerged in the
mid-nineteenth century in Vienna, Paris, and London to amuse mostly
bourgeois spectators. In London in the 1890s, musical comedies
challenged and soon replaced operetta in popularity – including the
delightful, “topsy-turvy” concoctions of William S. Gilbert and Arthur
Sullivan, discussed in the last chapter. While there is no firm
distinction between operetta and the musical, pre-1910 musicals
typically featured a script with a girl-gets-boy love story, songs that
could be marketed by the new popular music industry, and a chorus
line of beautiful women. Indeed, the first important impresario of
musicals was George Edwardes (1852–1915), who made his initial
reputation through shows highlighting the Gaiety Girls chorus at his
theatre in London. Audience interest in the chorus girl rose with the
influence of photography and by 1900 her sexual allure was a chief
feature of the musical stage. Not surprisingly, perhaps, photographs of
chorus girls and other spectacular females of the theatre, in various
states of undress, were popular pornographic items after 1870.
A variety of musicals flourished on U.S. and European stages from
1895 to 1930. An outgrowth of print-based theatre, musicals were built
upon the same economic foundation as spoken-language dramas;
musical composers joined writers and occasionally other authors to
claim copyright and production privileges. Several U.S. musicals, such
as Victor Herbert’s (1859–1924) Babes in Toyland and the first of
several versions of The Wizard of Oz (both 1903), mixed whimsy and
fantasy with light satire. Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehar’s
(1870–1948) The Merry Widow (1905 in Vienna and 1907 in London)
reminded audiences of the soaring musical tones of operetta. Others,
like George M. Cohan’s (1878–1942) Little Johnny Jones (1904), made
a splash with catchy tunes (“I’m a Yankee-Doodle Dandy,” for
example), wise-cracking humor, and polished dancing. London saw a
run of musicals with “girl” in the title – The Earl and the Girl, The Girl in
the Taxi, The Shop Girl, and The Quaker Girl, for instance. In New
York, African-American artists wrote and performed in several
successful musicals, from A Trip to Coontown in 1898 to Shuffle Along
in 1921. These London, Viennese, and New York musicals, as their
titles suggest, accommodated contemporary beliefs about racial and
gender roles to win popularity.
Theatrical revues also flourished on Western stages for mostly
bourgeois audiences between 1900 and 1930. This genre mixed
chorus girls with the musical, comic, and sketch traditions of the
variety stage. As in many other forms of variety, Paris led the way with
spectacular revues at the Folies-Bergère and elsewhere in the 1880s
that involved dancing girls and glamorous tableaux. By 1900, high-
priced variety shows in Germany and Austria typically ended the
evening as spectacular revues. Florenz Ziegfeld (1869–1932)
popularized revues in the United States with his lavish Follies, staged
yearly between 1907 and 1931. The “follies,” “shows,” “scandals,”
“vanities,” and “revues” of these years in U.S. entertainment typically
featured top talent, from Eddie Cantor (1892–1964) to Bert Williams
(1874–1922), and exciting music by the likes of George Gershwin
(1898–1937) and Irving Berlin (1888–1989). The legacy of these
spectacular revues may be seen today in the night club acts at Las
Vegas and on the Takarazuka stages of Japan. Our first case study in
this chapter examines the intersections of the Ziegfeld Follies with
pictorial magazines, high fashion, and the growth of consumer culture
in the U.S.
Figure 10.1U.S. vaudeville star Eva Tanguay, in a publicity photo for a 1908
performance in Kentucky.

© Special Collections, University of Iowa Library, Iowa City.

Case Study Retailing glamor in the Ziegfeld Follies
Bruce McConachie
Florenz Ziegfeld and his Ziegfeld Follies, produced almost every
year between 1907 and 1931, had enormous influence on American
society, especially in forging a link between female beauty and
consumer culture. Miss America pageants, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day
Parades, Busby Berkeley film musicals, Playboy Magazine, baton
twirlers at football games, fashion shows in department stores, and
many other institutions and events in American life between the 1920s
and the 1960s – all owe much of their popularity to Ziegfeld’s success
in promoting high fashion and glamorizing what he called “the
American Girl.” This case study will primarily focus on fashion shows
in department stores and their similarity to Ziegfeld’s staging of
women in his revues. Together, fashion shows and the Follies
changed American culture.
Much of the initial influence of the Ziegfeld Follies rested on the ties
between periodical print culture, touring Broadway shows, and
department store marketing that had emerged in U.S. cities by 1900.
Publishers of high-gloss photo magazines had discovered that
pictures of star actors and expensive shows could attract readers to
their journals. The new department store capitalists needed to reach
high-end consumers with their magazine advertisements. And
Broadway producers knew their productions could make more money
on the road (i.e., outside of New York) if they arranged for tie-ins with
local businessmen. This network of mutual needs took shape as U.S.
capitalism began to require a mass market of consumers. The
merchandisers who organized some of the world’s first department
stores, together with their allies in journalism and showbiz, were
leading the transition toward consumer capitalism, a gradual change
that would utterly transform the economy of the United States by 1990.
After 1900, some already understood that consumerism demanded a
new ideology. In 1912, for example, a merchant admitted that the
department store “speaks to us only of ourselves, our pleasures, our
life. It does not say, ‘Pray, obey, sacrifice thyself, respect the King, fear
thy master.’ It whispers, ‘Amuse thyself, take care of yourself.’ Is not
this the natural and logical effect of an age of individualism?” (Leach
1993: 3). For many U.S. consumers around 1900, the desire to amuse
and take care of yourself, animated by photo magazines and
Broadway musicals, now seemed to be within easy reach, a mere
trolley ride away at a downtown department store.
The notion that shopping could lead to happiness – a truism for
many living in the West today – was a novel idea for most Americans
in 1900. Traditional culture had preached that hard work, sacrifice,
family attachments, and civic and religious commitments were the
roads to salvation, in this world as well as the next. After 1880,
however, writes historian William Leach,

American capitalism began to produce a distinct culture, unconnected to

traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional
sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business- and market-
oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods
at the foundation of its aesthetic life and of its moral sensibility. . . . The
cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the
means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization
of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in
society.
(1993: 3)

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Linking causalities
Many theatrical events have helped to cause later developments within the
same culture. Because theatrical performances usually worked with similar
activities that were popular with many of the same spectators, theatre
historians often seek to demonstrate how these activities were moving the
culture in the same direction. Had the run of the Follies existed in a cultural
bubble off by itself, it probably would have had little influence on the future of
U.S. culture. Because the productions were similar to fashion shows, beauty
contests, parades, and other entertainment and journalistic events, they
promoted many of the same desires and values. The Ziegfeld Follies joined
with these other events to change American culture during the first three
decades of the twentieth century.
In 1900, these pleasures were unavailable in farming villages and
small towns; to enjoy them, you had to move to the city.
In addition to better access to print journalism and touring shows out
of New York, U.S. cities after the turn of the century could offer hotels,
dance halls, restaurants, amusement parks, and new department
stores. Most middle-sized cities had at least one such store – a retail
outlet that concentrated merchandise from several departments
(children’s clothes, furniture, kitchen goods, ladies’ fashions, etc.)
under one roof. Most of the major department stores that would
dominate U.S. retail sales in cities for the next 70 years were founded
between 1890 and 1910: Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Marshall
Field’s and Carson, Pirie, Scott in Chicago, Filenes’ in Boston, Macy’s
and Bloomingdale’s in New York, Hudson’s in Detroit, and the Lazarus
store in Cincinnati, for instance. (In contrast, most European
department stores opened after 1920.) U.S. department stores
increasingly used shop windows, sumptuous surroundings, print
advertising, and fashion shows after 1900 to draw people into their
environments, where their images and events could serve up visions
of an ever-new Land of Oz for consumers. As Leach explains,
“Cultures must generate some conception of paradise or some
imaginative notion of what constitutes the good life. They must bring to
life a set of images, symbols, and signs that stir up interest at the very
least, and devotion and loyalty at the most” (1993: 9).
“Fashion!” wrote one store display manager, “there is not another
word that means so much to the department store as Fashion” (Leach
1993: 91). The modern fashion show – female models parading the
latest clothes up and down a runway to the admiring gaze of buyers
and shoppers – probably began in 1903, although varieties of the ritual
had flourished before. The larger department stores had special
theatres, equipped with electric lights and stylish décor, built solely for
the fashion parades which typically attracted thousands of spectators.
Hooking American consumers – especially women – on fashion was
becoming a capitalist necessity after 1900. The clothing trade was
America’s third largest industry by 1915 and one of the best ways to
move garments off the racks was to declare last year’s fashions
obsolete. Fashion awareness persuaded consumers to buy new
clothes, wear them a few times, and throw them out when they were
no longer à la mode. This is not to say that all women could afford to
purchase the latest in Parisian gowns. Through yearly marketing
campaigns, however, department stores succeeded in getting millions
of consumers to buy mass-market versions of the upper-class French
trade. As a part of these campaigns, fashion shows participated in the
cult of the new, inducing feelings of restlessness, envy, and desire in
the minds of fashion-conscious Americans.
Merchandisers of fashion typically accorded a unifying theme and
style to their shows. The “lure of the Orient” (discussed in Chapter 9)
provided a tantalizing topic for several fashion shows in department
stores before 1915; its themes of primitivism, luxury, and immediate
self-gratification also spoke directly to American consumerist
fantasies. After the Wanamaker family opened a department store in
New York City, for example, they staged a Garden of Allah fashion
show in their store theatre in 1912. The show was based on a 1904
popular novel of the same title by Robert Hitchens that had spawned a
successful Broadway show and national tour in 1907. The plot of both
features a young, unmarried woman aching for a connection to the
supposedly primitive passions of the Muslim natives of North Africa.
Wanamaker decided to adopt the Garden of Allah name for his show
soon after a revival of the lush musical appeared in New York. The
merchandiser’s director and designer staged the spectacle against a
star-lit African sky. According to press reports, they recruited six “Arab
men and two women” from the Broadway show (Leach 1993: 110) for
their afternoon production, decorated the theatre in Oriental motifs,
and hired a string orchestra to play appropriate music. Thirty-six
models sashayed to the alluring music as they paraded down the
promenade, showing off U.S. adaptations of Parisian fashions based
on Algerian originals. Wanamaker’s Garden of Allah attracted
thousands of women, many of whom (according to the press) gawked
from the back of the auditorium or did not get in at all. The New York
Wanamaker’s was not the only department store to “tie in” its products
to the theatrical popularity of Garden of Allah; Marshall Field’s also
borrowed some cast members and the title of Hitchens’ show from the
touring production in 1912 in Chicago. The Garden of Allah invited
Americans to connect the consumer-capitalist dots joining
department-store fashion shows to commercial Broadway
productions.
By 1912, Florenz Ziegfeld had been popularizing this marketing
strategy in his revues for five years. For his first Ziegfeld Follies in
1907, Ziegfeld secured a “tie-in” to the image of “the Gibson Girl,”
Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings of upper-class young women who
enjoyed civilized sports and respectable fun. Ziegfeld staged his
Follies girls in bathing suits of the era in exchange for advertisements
drawn by Gibson for his revue. A song in the show featured the girls
pleading with Mr. Gibson to take them out of their elegant clothes and
draw them instead in bathing suits to display their “dimpled knees . . .
and plenty of rounded limb” (Mizejewski 1999: 77). Even before his
1907 Follies, Ziegfeld the impresario understood the lure of flesh. His
first successful promotion featured “Sandow the Magnificent” (1867–
1925), a weight lifter, who displayed his well-muscled body in little
more than a leopard skin loincloth. Sandow’s physical feats on stage
provided the initial titillation for the real act that followed, when
audience members, including women, were invited backstage and
encouraged to touch the arm muscles of the strong man. His next
promotion was Anna Held (1872–1918), a music hall comedian
advertised by Ziegfeld as a naughty Parisian singer. Ziegfeld hyped
her arrival in New York City, dressed her in suggestive and expensive
attire, put her in intimate theatres in close proximity to the audience,
and encouraged her to flirt with the spectators in such songs as “Won’t
You Come and Play Wiz Me.”
Ziegfeld continued to mix flesh and fashion for his 22 revues
between 1907 and 1931. Typically, he opened most of his Ziegfeld
Follies on Broadway in the summer time to garner New York reviews,
then took his productions on the road in the fall, touring to the best
theatres in major American cities. His “front men” preceded the show,
scouting for publicity and tie-ins with local journals and department
stores. Initially, Ziegfeld’s emphasis on high fashion earned him the
reputation in New York of refining the image of the low-class chorus
girl, whose general social status was barely above that of a prostitute.
Several New York reviewers noted with approval that Ziegfeld’s girls
often looked more like department-store mannequins than typical
chorines. And several similarities were apparent: all of Ziegfeld’s
showgirls were white, of Nordic-looking ethnicity (no Jews or Eastern
Europeans allowed), and they usually performed a number in which
they showed off fashionable gowns. In the “Palace of Beauty” show-
stopper of the 1912 Follies, for example, spotlights picked up each
dress as the women paraded them across the stage to the tune of
“Beautiful, Beautiful Girl.” The effect, however, was to turn the models
into the same kind of objects as the gowns. The notion that the
costumes were just as important as the bodies underneath had
already been a feature of Ziegfeld’s 1910 Follies. In a number entitled
“A Woman’s Necessities,” the showgirls’ bodies were outfitted with
corsets, furs, jewels, and even lingerie. As feminist scholar Linda
Mizejewski points out, this conflation of women and clothes was an
early version of what another scholar has called “The Girl,” an image
that confuses “the abstract consumable and the abstract consumer”
(Mizejewski 1999: 97).
With his 1915 Follies, Ziegfeld pushed the image of showgirl-as-
mannequin even further. He hired trend-setter Lady Duff (“Lucile”)
Gordon (1863–1935) to design his fashionable costumes and
choreographer Ned Wayburn (1874–1942) to teach his performers how
to walk in them. The 1915 show depended on a clear distinction
between the tall, languid fashion models, some of whom had worked
for Gordon in department store shows, and the smaller chorines, who
performed the dances and acrobatics. Wayburn taught the showgirl
models a mode of erect posture and slow gait that came to be called
“the Ziegfeld Walk” (Figure 10.2). From the 1915 revue onwards, the
fashion mannequins generally paraded down a steep, curved
staircase, moved to the down-center area of the stage where they
turned on their charms for the spectators, and then moved to the side
to make way for the next model. As Wayburn explained it, the women
needed to practice a difficult thrust of the hip and shoulder in order to
avoid falling over; “the Ziegfeld walk” could cause broken bones.
Although Duff Gordon was known for her erotic fashions, her
designs for Ziegfeld apparently balanced the sensual with the refined.
One reviewer of the 1915 Follies credited Ziegfeld’s set designer,
Joseph Urban (1872–1933), with creating an environment in which the
mannequin models could, as he said, “titillate the senses in really
artistic fashion” (Glenn 2000: 162). The reporter concluded that the
show avoided “blatant, obvious display of nudity” by placing the
women in the midst of “a cleverly designed back ground for the
pulchritude on view.” On the whole, Ziegfeld was probably more
interested in marketing fashion to women than he was in inflaming the
desires of men. Despite his later reputation for female sexual display,
Ziegfeld’s revues never featured erotic exhibition for its own sake nor
the dangerous sensuality of a salacious dancer. As feminist historian
Susan A. Glenn concludes, female eroticism in the Ziegfeld Follies
“was understood to be artfully managed by men, and in the place of
the passionate abandon of female self-expression, revue
choreography emphasized impersonality, control, and repetition”
(2000: 162).
Those models who could master the Ziegfeld walk to become the
masters of impersonal glamor appeared in photos in national and local
fashion magazines. They also served as social models for thousands
of ordinary women who were invited to dream of marrying millionaires.
Although few Ziegfeld models actually married wealth, press releases
perpetuated the myth of the gold-digging chorine who trapped a rich
man’s son into marriage. “Mr. Ziegfeld has difficulty keeping his
beauties because the millionaires persistently carry off and marry
them,” was a typical by-line in the press (Mizejewski 1999: 102). By
joking about it, American culture refused to face the kind of
objectification that the image of woman-as-mannequin entailed. In her
study of department store practices in the first three decades of the
twentieth century, Rachel Bowlby notes the importance of well-
dressed mannequins in shop windows for the average consumer. The
mannequin in the display window, says Bowlby, was intended to
reflect “an idealized image of the woman . . . who stands before it, in
the form of the model she could buy or become. . . . [T]he woman sees
what she wants and what she wants to be” (Bowlby 1985: 32).
Most of the women in Ziegfeld’s audiences were not average
consumers, of course; tickets for the Ziegfeld Follies cost more than
the average couple usually spent on entertainment. Nonetheless, the
message was the same: regardless of wealth and social class, women
should aspire to dress with the taste and expense of a Ziegfeld
mannequin. For the men in the audience, the Ziegfeld Follies may
have made such mannequin women more sexually desirable, but they
also set an impossible standard of beauty, elegance, and cool reserve
for their girlfriends and wives. For both sexes, the Follies led them to
believe that sophistication, class, and glamor could be acquired
through money and enjoyed at leisure. Ziegfeld positioned the women
and men in his audience as consumers of beauty; like shoppers
watching a department store fashion show, his spectators saw woman
and costume as one in the Follies, a single object of envy and desire.
Figure 10.2Dolores (Kathleen Mary Rose Wilkinson), originally a Duff Gordon
mannequin model, who became a Ziegfeld star. In “The Episode of Chiffon,” one
of Ziegfeld's most celebrated spectacles, Dolores portrayed the Empress of
Fashion.

Billy Rose Theatre Collection. New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts.
Key references
Bowlby, R. (1985) Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing,
and Zola, London: Methuen.
Davis, L. (2000) Scandals and Follies: The Rise and Fall of the
Great Broadway Revue, New York: Limelight Editions.
Glenn, S. (2000) Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern
Feminism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Leach, W. (1993) Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of
a New American Culture, New York: Random House.
Mizejewski, L. (1999) Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and
Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mordden, E. (2008) Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show
Business, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Print culture for stars and playwrights
As we saw in the case study, photographs worked in conjunction with
other printed materials to sell department store fashion and Ziegfeld’s
Follies. Within the theatre, international stars and popular playwrights
also benefited from this mode of marketing performances.
Photography widened the appeal of theatrical stars and the prestige of
print helped to win playwrights international copyright protection.
After 1870, it was common for stars to arrange for the sale of small
pictures of themselves in their performances, typically costumed in the
roles of their favorite characters. By 1900, photographic images
splashed on posters and throughout newspapers told the public that a
star had hit the town. Photos helped make possible the great era of
international stars that toured from Tokyo to New York to St.
Petersburg from the 1870s into the 1920s. National-turned-
international stars Tommaso Salvini and Eleanora Duse (1858–1924)
from Italy, Henry Irving (1838–1905) and Ellen Terry (1847–1928) from
England, Kawakami Otojirō and his wife Kawakami Sadayakko from
Japan, and Edwin Booth (1833–1893) and Richard Mansfield (1857–
1907) from the United States performed (in their native languages)
before millions of fans. International starring on this scale had not
been possible before telegraphs, railroads, and steamships allowed
agents to schedule theatres, plan mass publicity campaigns, and
transport their precious cargoes to the desired site on the right night
with efficiency and economy. Photography and newspaper stories,
among several other technologies, helped make the international star
a possible and very profitable commodity.
From among these luminaries, most critics around 1900 would likely
have ranked Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) at the top of the firmament
(Figure 10.3). Following her success at the Comédie Française and
elsewhere, Bernhardt quit the Comédie at the height of her popularity
in 1880 to form her own company for a series of international tours,
primarily to England and the U.S. During a career of more than 60
years, Bernhardt performed over 130 characters, nearly half of them
written specifically for her. Twenty-five of her 130+ roles were male,
Hamlet among them, her cross-gender role-playing facilitated by her
thin body and flexible, yet powerful voice. Novelist Anatole France
suggested some of the chief reasons for her magnetic attractiveness
in male roles in a comment about her performance as a young poet in
Alfred de Musset’s (1810–1857) Lorenzacchio (Figure 10.4):
We know what a work of art this great actress can make of herself. All
the same, in her latest transformation, she is astounding. She has
formed her very substance into a melancholy youth, truthful and poetic.
She has created a living masterpiece by her sureness of gesture, the
tragic beauty of her pose and glance, the increased power in the timbre
of her voice, and the suppleness and breadth of her diction – through her
gifts, in the end, for mystery and horror.
(quoted in Gold and Fizdale 1991: 261)

Bernhardt, who played more male roles later in her career, once said
that a woman was better suited to play roles like Hamlet than a young
man who could not understand the philosophy or an older man who
does not have the look of the boy. “The woman more readily looks the
part, yet has the maturity of mind to grasp it” (Ockman 2005: 41–2).
Her millions of devoted fans returned often to enjoy la divine Sarah,
not only for her latest physical and vocal transformations, but also for
her conscious sculpting of self and role into a “living masterpiece” of
art. Further, Bernhardt found numerous ways of sharing her emotions
with the audience, inducing them to feel the same “mystery and
horror” experienced by herself as the character. Due to a backstage
accident, Bernhardt had to have her right leg amputated in 1915, at the
age of 70. Nonetheless, she continued to perform, often seated or
completely static, still thrilling spectators with her vocal power, range,
diction, and emotional expressiveness. Despite her many photogenic
qualities, Bernhardt may be best remembered for her voice. In many
ways, she was the perfect star for a culture that was becoming more
aware of the potential mystery and luminescence of the human voice.
While Bernhardt and other international stars could hire and fire
directors, designers, and promoters at will, by 1900 they had to pay for
the right to perform the plays of living dramatists upon which their
stardom depended. Around 1870, most dramatic authors, like other
self-employed writers, had gained legal copyright protections for the
publication of their plays. Control over performance rights, however,
remained elusive. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, stars and acting companies could purchase plays outright
from their authors, perhaps paying them an additional sum after the
third night of its opening performance if the play were a success. After
that, the performance rights normally belonged to the company or star
and the playwright received no royalties.
Figure 10.3An 1880 photograph of Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier in
The Lady of the Camellias, one of her greatest romantic roles.

© V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

This began to change in the 1850s, when powerful playwright-
producers such as Dion Boucicault secured some legal protection for
future performances of their plays. Nonetheless, it remained a
common practice for managers to pirate published and unpublished
plays from other theatres, make a few minor alterations, and pay
nothing to the original playwrights when they produced the piece
under a different title. The international traffic in pirated plays was
even higher because, prior to 1886, no treaties protected the rights of
non-national authors. By 1900, although Western dramatists continued
to have difficulties collecting payments due from theatre managers,
they had won the cultural and legal battle for full copyright protection.
The prestige of print had trumped business-as-usual in the theatre. As
a result of these developments, which by the turn of the century were
a part of the general victory of liberal capitalism, dramatists after 1900
had the right to claim a share of the profits from performances as well
as from the publication of their plays.
Authorship would continue to be a significant keystone of theatrical
power. Despite the rise of star actors, producers, and directors after
1870, the playwright, designer, and choreographer could claim legal
protection for his or her work, but actors and (until very recently)
directors could not copyright their work. Under print-based theatrical
capitalism, authored plays became the metaphorical “land” upon
which stars and producers could build their shows by investing capital
and hiring labor. This sense of the economic utility of copyrighted
plays survived in the lingo of Broadway; stars and producers buy
“options” on “properties” they are considering for future
“development.” In addition, most playwrights in the West extended
their authority over producers by retaining a veto power over the
choice of a director and sometimes over the casting for their plays.
Despite their increasing artistic importance during the twentieth
century, stage directors in the West could not challenge the legal
power of dramatic authors. When a U.S. director around 1900 tried to
claim copyright protection for a bit of stage business he had invented,
for example, the courts did not allow it. As we will see in Part IV, the
power of authorship continued as an important economic foundation
of the theatre, even as new media began challenging the
persuasiveness of print-based theatre.
Figure 10.4Poster of Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of the young male poet in
Alfred de Musset's Lorenzacchio. Bernhardt played 25 male roles during her
career, including Hamlet and the Hamlet-like Lorenzacchio. The poster is by
Alphonse Mucha, the Czech artist whose distinctive style heralded Art Nouveau.
Bernhardt signed a six-year contract with Mucha for a now-famous series of
posters.

Courtesy of FulcrumGallery.com.
Audiophonic media after 1870
Despite this triumph of print in the theatre, other media were beginning
to alter, narrow, and divide older modes of dramatic communication.
Two audiophonic (sound-based) media, the telephone and
phonograph (invented in 1876 and 1877 respectively), initially
appeared to complement and extend the power of print-based theatre.
Before 1900, from the point of view of most theatre makers, telephone
conversations and the ability to record the human voice simply made it
easier to produce, manage, and publicize all theatrical productions.
But telephones and phonographs did more than serve practical
purposes. The new audiophonic media excited an interest in the
“subjective” and spiritual sides of reality and began to challenge the
implicit positivism of photography. The telephone and phonograph
separated the human voice from the materiality of the body. Apart
from their wires and machinery, these media carried the intimacy and
immediacy of music and the human voice on sound waves that lacked
the visibility and concreteness of previous media. In the past, “hearing
voices” had been a sign of religious possession or mental instability,
and these traditional attributes clung to the affects (and the socio-
cultural effects) of these new media. Conversing on the phone and
listening to music and voices from strange new machines revived an
interest in religion, altered musical composition, and played on age-old
fears of alien “others.” It also tended to validate belief in the new
psychoanalytic techniques of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his
followers. Freud, in fact, understood phonographic recording as a
metaphor for part of the work of the analyst. Convinced that sound
revealed the realities of the unconscious mind, Freud urged the
accurate recording of patient vocalizations as the first step in a
psychoanalytic session. He advised psychoanalysts to transcribe all of
the vocal mistakes of the patient in order to understand her or his
psychological problems. Freud’s view of vocalization was part of a
wider notion that, as we will see, would have a formative influence on
the early avant-garde movement known as Symbolism.
The emergence of avant-garde theatre
As we saw in the last chapter, stage realism generated many of the
innovations of late nineteenth-century theatre in the West and altered
theatrical practices in countries touched by imperialism in Asia and
Africa. With its ability to focus attention on the mundane realities of
everyday life, the spread of photography helped to generate
enthusiasm for the realism of Ibsen, Chekhov, and other playwrights.
Likewise, photography influenced producers, directors, and designers
to transform Western stage technology and adopt realist conventions
for costumes, décor, and stage properties. By 1900, even the
spectacular theatres of musicals, revues, and star-centered
performances had adopted a patina of realism to acknowledge
popular expectations concerning the photo-like look of what most
people understood as “the real.” Bernhardt, for example, insisted on
photographically accurate costuming and props for her historically
based productions and the latest fashions, lavishly displayed in
magazine photos after 1900, for her contemporary shows. And the
Naturalists, of course, pushed beyond realism, demanding that reality
be limited to positivism and Social Darwinism. Not surprisingly,
perhaps, this narrowing of possible contents and styles in print-based
theatre led to a reaction. In the 1890s, a small minority of artists began
demanding that the theatre must not ignore the spiritual and
subjective qualities of reality most evident to them in poetic and aural
symbols. These artists called themselves Symbolists and many
theatre historians point to Symbolism as the first movement of the
avant-garde.
“Avant-garde” was originally a French military term referring to the
forward line of soldiers – those leading the charge into battle.
Likewise, avant-garde artists thought of themselves as marching in
the front ranks of artistic progress, fighting bourgeois propriety to
expand the boundaries of the possible. Avant-garde movements
proliferated in the theatre between 1880 and 1930. Both first- and
second-generation avant-garde movements began in small groups of
artists and spectators who reinforced each other in their rebellion
against established cultural institutions and their desire for change.
They published manifestos to proclaim their ideology and elevate their
work over that of conventional artists and rival avant-garde groups.
While some of these movements flamed out within a few years, others
burned for two decades or longer and exerted a significant impact on
twentieth-century theatre.
Avant-garde theatre did not exist before the end of the nineteenth
century. Innovative theatre artists in earlier times might have rejected
the prevailing norms of artistry, but they did not form movements, write
manifestos, and attempt to set the terms by which their art should be
understood. Avant-garde movements began to flourish in all of the arts
after 1870, partly as a result of industrial capitalism, but also due to the
traditions of revolutionary Romanticism, still a usable past for artists in
the West. In earlier decades and centuries, most artists had worked
directly for rich patrons, whose interests partly sheltered them from
direct competition for survival. Nineteenth-century capitalism forced
many artists to compete in the marketplace, however, where they
found a bourgeoisie eager to purchase “art” but unsure of its own
artistic taste. This situation and their newfound freedom, by turns both
liberating and terrifying, led many artists to mine the legacy of
Romanticism for sensibilities, values, and roles, including the role of
the Romantic rebel.
Avant-garde innovators in the theatre after 1880 exploited a brand
new technology to alter stage production – electricity. Electrical
illumination allowed for the full dimming of house lights during
performances, which left audiences, for the first time in theatre history,
in the dark. When spectators could no longer communicate visually
with each other during performances, theatre-going shifted from a
generally social to a much more individualistic experience.
Increasingly, modern audiences after 1880 no longer started a riot if
the show displeased them; nor did they often interrupt the show to
applaud star actors after an impressive speech. Musical performers
still gained applause at the end of a song or dance number, but
musicals, too, kept the house lights turned off except during
intermissions. This more private mode of spectating generally suited
the goals of the Naturalists, as we have seen, and also heightened the
kinds of effects sought by the Symbolists and by other movements in
the first generation of the avant-garde. (We will examine second-
generation avant-garde movements, which roughly spanned the years
from 1910 to 1930, in Chapter 11.)
Despite significant differences between the two generations of the
avant-garde, they shared a common cultural situation. With the
questioning of traditional religious faith and the rise of positivism,
some Westerners were beginning to suspect that all values might be
relative. The influential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
held that all ethical truths were illusory and that modern people had
progressed no further than savages in moral understanding. Perhaps,
as some linguists, anthropologists, and philosophers were beginning
to affirm after 1900, this cultural relativism extended to all claims of
truth; maybe there was no position beyond human language and
culture that allowed for objectivity. Complementing this cultural
relativism was the recognition that human subjectivity was much more
complex and irrational than people had realized. Could it be that
humans were chiefly animated by a “will to power,” as Nietzsche
thought? Or perhaps an unconscious sexual drive motivated humanity,
which meant that bourgeois society was little more than a clanking,
ridiculous machine for sexual repression? This, in more scientific
language, was the pessimistic conclusion of Freud’s Civilization and
Its Discontents (1930). Maybe Westerners needed to cut loose from
their restraints and gain liberation through war, the electric dynamo, or
even “primitive” (usually colonized) peoples! Avant-garde innovators
would explore these and other possible paths for the next 40 years.
Most of the avant-garde movements could claim some legitimacy
for their work within their national cultures. Since the eighteenth
century, French culture had provided public forums for debates among
the intelligentsia (a recognized elite of artists, academics, critics,
philosophers and others) on topics ranging from the nature of art to
the nature of being. This tradition spread to other national cultures
strongly influenced by France or containing a significant level of public
debate about the arts – notably Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia.
England and the U.S., in contrast, lacked a recognized intelligentsia,
with the consequence that theatre artists did not have an established
public forum in which to discuss new work. Although avant-garde
artists were active in all of the major cities of the West between 1880
and 1930, avant-garde movements tended to flourish best in cities that
supported an influential intelligentsia.
On the European continent, the intelligentsia often gathered in
cabarets. “Bohemians,” typically university-educated members of the
urban youth culture, plus artists and other intelligentsia, constituted
the primary participants and spectators for cabaret entertainment,
which emerged in Paris in the 1880s. After 1900, cabarets in several
major European cities – the Mirliton in Paris, Motley Stage in Berlin,
The Green Balloon in Krakow, The Stray Dog in St. Petersburg, and
The Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich – hosted artists in many of the avant-
garde movements of the twentieth century. Performances at these
venues might include puppet shows, poetry readings, political skits, art
songs, satirical and literary tableaux, and occasionally one-act plays.
In general, cabarets provided a hot-house environment where avant-
gardists could explore new performance ideas with little risk before
sympathetic audiences.
Symbolism and Aestheticism
Exulting in what they took to be subjective experience, the Symbolists
urged viewers to look through the photo-like surface of appearances
to discover true realities within – spiritual realities that they believed
the realists and Naturalists had ignored. Seeking to advance a theatre
of immanent spirituality, Gustave Kahn (1859–1936) wrote the first
manifesto of theatrical Symbolism in 1889. Other manifestos followed.
According to Symbolist Pierre Quillard (1864–1912) in 1891, “The
human voice is a precious instrument; it vibrates in the soul of each
spectator” (Schumacher 1996: 87). Quillard advised artists to avoid the
trap of material décor on the stage, so that the chanting of verse could
be “freed to fulfill its essential and exclusive function: the lyrical
expression of the characters’ souls” (90). The early Symbolists, who
also included the French poet Stephane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and
Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), drew inspiration
from the gothic mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe, German idealist
philosophy, the imagistic poetry of Charles-Pierre Baudelaire (1821–
1867), and the myth-laden music-dramas of Richard Wagner. Many
Symbolists praised Wagner’s aesthetic goals (discussed in Chapter 8)
and attempted to mount similarly integrated works of art in their own
productions.
The Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, begun in Paris in 1893 and run by Aurélien
Lugné-Poe (1869–1940), became the center of Symbolist performance
in Western Europe. (Lugné-Poe added the “Poe” to his name in honor
of the American author.) Lugné-Poe opened his theatre with
Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande, written in 1892. Like other of his
early plays, Pelléas and Mélisande evokes a mood of mystery through
multiple symbols, eerie sound effects, and ominous silences. With little
overt action, Pélleas and Mélisande relies as much on sound as sight.
Following Quillard’s advice to avoid realist décor, Lugné-Poe
produced Maeterlinck’s play on a semi-dark stage with gray
backdrops and gauze curtains separating performers and spectators.
In accord with the Symbolists’ desire to foreground the aurality of
language, the actors chanted or whispered many of their lines, and
they moved with ritual-like solemnity. Maeterlinck’s Symbolist plays
mystified and irritated some spectators, but they also fascinated
others. In his theatre, Lugné-Poe also experimented with synesthesia
(the combination of distinct senses, as in “hearing green”) in an
attempt to engage all of the senses in the theatrical experience.
Although the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre produced plays in many styles and
from many periods (including translations of Sanskrit dramas from
India) until its demise in 1929, it continued to be known for its
Symbolist experiments.
The Parisian Symbolists influenced two centers of Symbolist
production in Russia. In Moscow, Valery Bryusov (1873–1924) argued
that the naïve lyricism of Russian folk drama made it appropriate for
the Symbolist stage. Viacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) led the St.
Petersburg Symbolists with manifestos calling for a theatre in which
actor-priests would facilitate the creation of mythic dramas with
audience-congregants, primarily through the chanting of archaic
language. Although Stanislavsky produced several Symbolist pieces
at the Moscow Art Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) had
more success with Symbolism in St. Petersburg. Meyerhold’s
production of Hedda Gabler, for example, ignored Ibsen’s realist stage
directions and deployed bold colors and sculpted, repetitious
movements to evoke the claustrophobia of Hedda’s world.
Although Ibsen never endorsed the principles of Symbolism, his
final four plays of the 1890s investigated many of the interior and
spiritual themes of the Symbolists. The first of these, The Master
Builder (1892), discussed in Chapter 9, uses a variety of symbols to
contrast vaulting spirituality with earthly cowardice, old age, and
death. Despite its realistic settings, the overt symbolism of the play
moves it sharply toward a dream-like allegory. When We Dead
Awaken (1899), the last drama of the playwright’s career, depicts the
evolution of human spirituality through the works of a sculptor, Rubek,
who began by crafting half-human, half-animal shapes and finally
created an idealized nude of a young woman. After many years, the
artist and his former model meet again when both are much older, with
Rubek weighed down by guilt and Irene, the model, now looking like a
corpse. Nonetheless, the statue they created together, “Resurrection
Day,” continues to inspire others with its universal sublimity, a sharp
contrast to their shattered lives. The play, which ends ambiguously,
opposes spirituality to physicality, art to life, without embracing either
side.
Two theatrical visionaries, Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) and Edward
Gordon Craig (1872–1966), borrowed many of their ideas from the
Symbolists. Both urged a radical break with the pictorial illusionism of
the past through the innovations made possible by electricity. They
understood that the new lighting could add dynamism to the image of
the actor moving within sculpted scenery rather than pasted against
stage flats. Eager to perfect a scenic equivalent to the soaring music
of Wagner’s operas, Appia published The Staging of Wagner’s
Musical Dramas in 1895 and Music and Stage Setting in 1899. In these
and later works, Appia agreed with Wagner that the aesthetic unity of
opera depended on synthesizing all of the stage elements – crucially
the music, scenery, lighting, and the performers. This led him to
recommend steps, platforms, vertical columns, and other non-realist,
three-dimensional units in scenic design (Figure 10.5). Appia
emphasized musical rhythm as the key to aesthetic coherence,
following the ideas of the “Eurhythmics” movement. Eurhythmics,
begun by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), trained musicians and
dancers to learn music through movement. For Appia, audiophonic
communication was the proper basis for artistic unity and the key to
true reality. Most theatre practitioners ignored Appia’s ideas before
1910, but his precepts exerted significant influence after the Great
War, when German Expressionist experiments with sound, scenery,
and light gave his ideas new cogency.
Figure 10.5Adolphe Appia's design for Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera,
Orpheus and Eurydice, 1913, at Hellerau, as realized through computer-assisted
design.

© 3D Visualization Group, School of Theatre Studies, University of

Warwick.

Craig’s visionary statements about the need to

revolutionize the stage were harder to ignore than Appia’s, primarily
because Craig never ceased to publicize them. In a series of books
beginning in 1905 and in a periodical, The Mask, which he edited
sporadically between 1908 and 1929, Craig argued for aesthetic and
atmospheric coherence through designs that integrated the actor with
three-dimensional, abstract set pieces through the bold use of light
and sound. Unlike Appia, Craig favored a single setting for an entire
performance to evoke the spirit of the play, with minor changes
effected through the movement and lighting of towering, vertical
screens. Craig also urged that the theatre – which he believed was an
individual, not a collective art – must bow to the control of a master-
artist. Influenced by Wagner’s call for stage production as a
Gesamtkunstwerk and by Nietzsche’s desire for a superman who
could bear the burden of life’s contradictions, Craig sought a total
artist of the theatre who could combine playwriting, designing, and
directing. At one point, Craig proposed that this directorial superman
might even control the acting during performances. Despairing of the
intransigence of stars and the materiality of actors’ bodies, he
suggested that live performers should be replaced by large puppets –
Übermarionettes [EW-behr-marionettes] he called them – that could
evoke spiritual realities and would be easier to control. Like Appia,
Craig prefigured the film era of theatrical art. Both advocated abstract
scenery and flexibility in lighting, and pushed the stage director toward
the role of an auteur [OH-tur], a figure (like some film directors) who
takes author-like control of all the elements of a production.
Appia and Craig shared some commonalities with the Aestheticist
movement, which also praised the artistic unity achieved by Wagner in
his music-dramas. In general, though, Aestheticism turned its back
on the spiritual yearnings of the Symbolists; the Aestheticists
attempted stage productions that encouraged spectators to escape
the workaday world and revel in heightened aesthetic sensations.
Believing in “art for art’s sake,” they often chose contents and styles
from the theatrical past to inspire new emotional responses. In his
Aestheticist drama Salomé (1893), for example, Oscar Wilde hoped
that his imagistically charged dialogue and tension-filled stage
pictures would move his audience to experience the anger, lust,
cruelty, and revenge of his major characters from the biblical story.
Aestheticism also shaped the neo-romanticism of Hugo von
Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) in Germany. The playwright and poet
invited a meditative response from audiences with a group of short
plays in the 1890s, including Death and the Fool (1893) in which
allegorical characters speak a poetic language. The French dramatist
Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), best known for the lyrical poetry of his
Cyrano de Bergerac (1898), also embraced the goals of the
Aestheticists early in his career. Sarah Bernhardt lent her soaring,
lilting voice to the lead character in Rostand’s La Samaritaine (1897), a
biblical drama inspired by the story of a woman from Samaria.
Aestheticism traveled under the name of Retrospectivism in
Russia. Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921), earlier hailed as a major
Symbolist poet and dramatist, came to reject Symbolism for what he
took to be its empty mysticism. Meyerhold, too, moved beyond
Symbolism after 1905. His 1906 production of Blok’s tragi-farce, The
Puppet Show, combined commedia dell’arte comic techniques with
grotesque effects to underline Blok’s poetic and absurdist vision. In
addition to its satirical intent, the aim of this production, and of cultural
Retrospectivism in general, was to recover older forms of theatre as a
means of transporting audiences into heightened aesthetic
experiences. Like the Aestheticists, the Retrospectivists believed in
immersing themselves in artistry for relief and enjoyment. Nikolai
Evreinov (1879–1953) became the major proponent of Retrospectivism
in Russia. He drew on Nietzsche’s praise of the aesthetic life to
propose that the artist-hero transform his own life into a work of art. In
a series of manifestos, essays, and plays, Evreinov urged the
production of monodramas – monologues about the self – to
externalize the consciousness of the artist-protagonist. He co-founded
a theatre in St. Petersburg to explore his ideas and later served as
artistic director at the Maly Theatre in Moscow, where he directed
harlequinades, pantomimes, and monodramas.
German Expressionism
While German Expressionistic theatre has its roots in the first
generation of the avant-garde, it also extends into second-generation
concerns centered on utopian hopes and social transformation. For
ease of comprehension, we will present an overview of the complete
movement in this chapter and then refer back to several key elements
of Expressionism after 1918 in Chapter 11. As will be apparent,
German devastation in the wake of the Great War substantially altered
the movement.
The term “Expressionism” was initially used by François Delsarte
(1811–1871), who attempted to systematize the actor’s physical and
vocal expression of ideas and emotions related to what he conceived
to be the physical, mental, and spiritual parts of the performer’s body.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Delsarte’s system had become
the basis for many programs of actor training. The theatre artists in
Germany who began calling themselves Expressionists around 1910
were especially interested in the spiritual dynamics of Delsarte’s
system. After 1900, art critics also used the term to denote a non-
realist painting suffused with the subjective emotions of the artist; this
general connotation also applied to the new theatrical movement.
The late plays of August Strindberg (1849–1912) provided several
significant models for Expressionism as well. Following such
Naturalistic dramas as Miss Julie and a difficult period of mental
instability the dramatist called his “inferno,” the Swedish playwright
strove for a theatre that he hoped might synthesize the objectivity of
Naturalism with the spirituality of the Symbolists. His post-inferno
plays, notably To Damascus, a trilogy (1898–1901), A Dream Play
(1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907), attempted to embody the
experiences of mythical journeys and spiritual dreams. Strindberg’s
interests in spirituality, strong emotions, the tricks of perception, and
grotesque sounds and images were given fuller rein in theatrical
Expressionism.
Early German Expressionist plays called for such anti-realist
techniques as grotesquely painted scenery, exaggerated movement,
and “telegraphic” dialogue, so named because it copied the
abbreviated, mechanistic quality of a telegraph message. These
features were evident in several Expressionist plays, including Walter
Hasenclever’s (1890–1940) The Son (1914), and From Morn to
Midnight (1916) by Georg Kaiser (1878–1945). While both plays invite
spectators to view the distorted dramatic action through the fevered
eyes of the protagonist (who also represents much of the author’s
point of view), neither drama ignores the very real material factors that
constrain the protagonist’s spiritual longings. The younger
generation’s revolt against the restraints of bourgeois society in The
Son, in fact, acknowledges that the title character cannot realize his
ecstatic hopes without killing his father, a symbol of conventional order
and repression. Like Strindberg, the early Expressionists explored the
tensions between spiritual desires and material constraints.
Although censorship before and during the Great War prevented
most Expressionist plays from reaching the stage, Expressionism
flourished in German theatre immediately after the war. Optimism
about the imminent overthrow of conventional German society after
Germany’s defeat and the 1917 revolution in Russia turned some
Expressionists toward utopian socialism. When The Son finally
reached the stage in 1918, the director’s statements about the
production summed up the goals of the movement for the public.
Expressionism, he said, was “the exteriorization of innermost
feelings,” a “volcanic eruption of the motions of the soul”; it involved
“the boundless ecstasy of heightened expression” (Berghaus 2005:
85). Georg Kaiser’s vision now embraced pacifism in his anti-war play
Gas (1918), which took the poison gas used by troops in the Great War
as a metaphor for the spread of social corruption. In the same year,
with some Germans still inspired by the news of the Russian
Revolution, Ernst Toller (1893–1939) advocated a revolution in
Germany in Transfiguration (1918) (Figure 10.6). Other Expressionists
combined the generational rage that had fueled several prewar plays
with a more general call for the spiritual and material regeneration of
German society. To model their hoped-for utopia, several productions
sought to forge a spiritual union between actors and spectators by
abolishing the proscenium arch, eliminating illusionistic scenery, and
mounting direct calls for a new world. Ecstatic acting often powered
Expressionist performance with revolutionary urgency. According to
one review praising actor Fritz Kortner, for example: “Words coagulate
and dissolve in a rhythmic fashion. Screams erupt and vanish again.
Movements surge back and forth. . . . Kortner’s playing pushed himself
beyond the limits of the stage and made him burst into the auditorium”
(Berghaus 2005: 87).

Figure 10.6Contemporary print of a scene from the 1919 Expressionist

production of Transfiguration (Die Wandlung), 1918, by Ernst Toller.

C. Oskar Fischel, Bildernerische der Scene (1931), Abb. 125. Photo

courtesy of the Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich.
Revolutionary fervor was short-lived in German Expressionism,
however. Kaiser ended Gas II (1920), his sequel to the 1918 play, with
the apocalyptic destruction of the world to indicate his growing despair
with politics. Toller, initially a more politically radical writer than Kaiser,
used irony to express his disillusionment with socialism in Hurrah, We
Live! (1927). The uneasy fusion of subjective vision and revolutionary
politics in postwar German Expressionism quickly faded in the theatre
after 1924. More so than Symbolism or Aestheticism, German
Expressionism had explored the relativity of extreme perceptions and
emotions on the stage. At the same time, however, most
Expressionists tried to claim that the objective, material world was just
as real as inner, subjective feelings. Although today we might say that
these two realities actually met in the bodies of Expressionist actors,
such a synthesis seemed fleeting or even impossible to most
Germans in the 1920s. Pulled between the effects of audiophonic and
photographic media, most Westerners believed that they must
ultimately choose between what they took to be objective and
subjective realities. These competing perceptions generated by the
new media fatally undermined the coherence of German
Expressionism and narrowed possibilities for the future of print-based
theatre.
Case Study Strindberg and “The Powers”
Bruce McConachie
As noted, several of the late plays of August Strindberg were
forerunners of German Expressionism. Strindberg – essayist, painter,
novelist, photographer, and playwright – was among the most
tormented of artists by what he and his contemporaries understood to
be the divisions between objective and subjective realities.
Scholars have examined Strindberg’s many plays from several
points of view – as experiments in avant-garde playwriting that
challenged his theatrical contemporaries, as probing analyses of the
inequalities and class conflicts of his era, as testaments to his
difficulties with the women he knew and to his personal misogyny, as
intended affronts to the Victorianism of late nineteenth-century
Swedish life, and as points of crisis in his psychological and religious
journey. While each of these approaches to Strindberg’s drama has
been rewarding, this case study will focus on his personal beliefs, both
secular and religious, as an important key to two of his most famous
plays, Miss Julie (1888) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Although these
dramas rest in very different belief systems – atheism and Social
Darwinism for Miss Julie, and theism mixed with the “theosophy” of
H.P. Blavatsky for The Ghost Sonata – both also display Strindberg’s
unchanging assumption that “powers” beyond human control
invariably intervene to shape our actions. Strindberg generally
explained these “powers” in “objective,” positivist terms before 1896
and switched to “subjective,” spiritual explanations after that date.
Strindberg’s change in belief occurred in the middle of his “inferno”
period. Most biographers and critics divide Strindberg’s life and work
into two periods – pre- and post-inferno. Between 1895 and much of
1897, Strindberg suffered a series of psychotic attacks that disabled
his playwriting, led him to experiment with alchemy and the occult, and
finally drove him to write The Inferno, an autobiographical novel that
helped him to resolve many of his torments. Although raised in a strict
Christian home, Strindberg proclaimed himself an atheist when a
Swedish court tried (and acquitted) him for blasphemy in 1884. From
that date until 1896, Strindberg published several Naturalist plays and
novels, including Miss Julie. Then, with the onset of his inferno period,
Strindberg returned to a kind of Christianity. Between 1896 and his
death in 1912, he wrote stories and plays, such as The Ghost Sonata,
that attested to his faith in theism, but his was a god that had made it
impossible for humans to find happiness. Two quotations from The
Inferno indicate not only Strindberg’s shift in belief, but also his
continuing sense that “unseen Powers” remained in control.
Commenting on his pre-inferno life, he remarked, “The fact is, that in
the course of years, as I came to notice that the unseen Powers left
the world to its fate and showed no interest in it, I had become an
atheist” (Malekin 2010: 18). Later in The Inferno, these “unseen
Powers” became “an intelligence superior to our own”: “It is the earth
itself that is Hell, the prison constructed for us by an intelligence
superior to our own, in which I could not take a step without injuring
the happiness of others, and in which my fellow creatures could not
enjoy their own happiness without causing me pain” (Malekin 2010:
20). Whether because of an amoral nature or caused by a malevolent
god, humanity for Strindberg was doomed to unhappiness and pain.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Exploring extreme examples

Historians always hunt for salient examples to demonstrate the main points of
their narratives, whether they are writing detailed historical studies or broad
textbook histories. As we have seen, Chapter 10 is about a crisis in belief in
Western culture, a crisis that was particularly acute in the theatre between
1880 and 1920. More than most theatre artists, Strindberg suffered
psychologically from his inability to resolve this crisis between “objectivity” and
“subjectivity” and the two plays chosen for this case study demonstrate his
vacillation. Consequently, Strindberg’s changing beliefs provide us with an
excellent possibility for exploring one key example that is relevant to the main
content of this chapter.
It is important to emphasize, though, that Strindberg was not a typical artist
of his era; no person who excelled in a variety of professions, hated several
women, delighted in causing so many of his fellow countrymen to fear him,
and suffered a nervous breakdown will ever be “typical” of his time. As in all
historical periods, most people living in Europe around 1900, including
theatrical artists, led humdrum and predictable lives; they were the typical
 ones. Theatre historians can and do focus on typical people, often when they
write about the social dynamics of the theatrical past. We must pay attention
to representative artists and spectators in every period because these
average people sustained the major theatrical institutions of their day. But this
is not a usual strategy for historians who are interested in exploring avant-
garde artists and events. Because the theatrical past often best reveals the
tensions and conflicts within a culture through its non-mainstream
productions, theatre historians sometimes look for unique, even extreme
playwrights and their dramas to write about to explore those cultural fissures.
The example of Strindberg points to the tension between what historians can
learn about the theatrical past from extreme examples versus more
representative artists and spectators.

Miss Julie focuses on the degeneration and eventual suicide of a

young aristocrat during Midsummer Eve festivities on her father’s
estate in rural Sweden. Attracted to Jean, the Count’s handsome
valet, Julie flirts with him and he reciprocates until the approach of
dancing peasants drives them out of the downstairs kitchen and into
an adjacent bedroom. Following their off-stage intercourse, Jean
plans for their escape from the estate while Julie remains paralyzed
with guilt and shame. The sudden return of Julie’s father (who is heard
upstairs but never seen on stage) forces a resolution. In a kind of
stupor, Jean scurries to answer the Count’s demands while Julie, her
will hypnotized by Jean, takes his razor and walks slowly to the barn to
kill herself. Miss Julie caused a minor scandal in Sweden when it was
published in 1888; although staged in Paris in 1887, it was not
produced in Strindberg’s home country until 1906.
In a preface written after he finished the play, Strindberg aligned
Miss Julie with Naturalism. According to the preface, “an abundance
of circumstances” led to Julie’s fate, including
her mother’s “bad” basic instincts; her father’s improper bringing-up of
the girl; her own nature; the festive occasion of Midsummer Night; her
father’s absence; her period; her preoccupation with animals; the
intoxicating effect of the [peasants’] dance; the light summer night; the
powerful aphrodisiac influence of the flowers; and finally chance that
drives these two people together in a room.
(quoted in Szalczer 2011: 76)
In Zola’s manifesto for Naturalism, the French author made it clear
that playwrights and other authors should depict characters that have
very little control over their behavior. According to the Naturalists,
heredity, environment, and immediate circumstances should drive a
character’s actions. Although modern readers would reject
Strindberg’s reduction of female sexuality to instincts, bad genes, poor
nurturing, animality, the smell of flowers, and menstruation, many
scientists (and probably Zola) would have agreed with this list of
causes in 1888.
While Strindberg’s exposition for the drama does make it clear that
the factors mentioned in his preface are at play in determining Julie’s
behavior, Julie is also engaged in some conscious role-playing with
Jean. Both, in fact, enjoy pretending to be people of a different class
while they are flirting with each other – Jean the servant plays at being
an aristocrat while Julie the mistress occasionally comes on like a
sexually available peasant. It is difficult to read Miss Julie without
concluding that their conscious role-playings, as much as unconscious
factors related to heredity and environment, helped to produce their
sexual attraction. Consequently, the reasons behind the events of the
play are more complicated than Strindberg’s preface allows for and
than the Naturalists would have favored.
Nonetheless, two other aspects of the plotting of Miss Julie keep the
play firmly within the orbit of Naturalism. Many Naturalists, following
tenets of the Social Darwinists, believed that certain powers were built
into nature; so did Strindberg in 1888. One was the inevitability of a
“battle between the sexes,” a battle that men were naturally more “fit”
to win. Jean and Julie battle frequently in Miss Julie, both before and
after intercourse, but Jean alone survives, even though his survival
returns him to his status as a servant. Second, the ending of the play
asks the audience to believe that Jean, who has violated all of the
rules of the patriarchal Count through his behavior with Julie, will
suddenly be paralyzed by his master’s voice upstairs in the estate.
They must also believe that Jean, despite his weakened state, can
hypnotize a weaker Julie to kill herself. Interested in many scientific
topics, Strindberg also studied hypnotism; he, like other scientists of
the time, believed that hypnotism could compromise the individual will
of another person. Both of these plot devices combined – male victory
in the battle of the sexes and, in the end, through hypnotic power –
reveal Strindberg’s belief in “unseen Powers,” powers that might be
explained objectively as natural, but that generally lay beyond the
exercise of human will.
André Antoine directed Miss Julie at the Théâtre Libre in Paris. As
with his other Naturalistic productions, Antoine filled his stage with the
details specified in the playwright’s script – a large basement kitchen
on a rural Swedish estate with upstage doors leading to the outside
and entrances on both sides of the stage. Placing the mutual
seduction of a mistress and her servant in the middle of an
environment of work, food, and sweat underlined Julie’s degradation.
The actors, even the peasant dancers who break into the kitchen
midway into the play, observed the convention of the “fourth wall,”
never acknowledging the presence of the audience. Although few
details about the production survive, Antoine’s amateur actors
apparently performed the play successfully for the conventional three-
night run at the theatre; the production enhanced Strindberg’s
reputation among the Parisian Naturalists.
By 1907 when he wrote The Ghost Sonata, Strindberg was linking
“unseen Powers” to the work of a malicious god, rather than to nature.
One of his initial titles for the play was “Kama-Loka: A Buddhist
Drama” (Malekin 2010: 131). And on a draft page for Ghost Sonata,
Strindberg wrote, “Maya = the World-weaveress, the Spider, the
Illusion, the Folly, Matter” (Malekin 2010: 134). These notes reveal that
Strindberg had been reading some of the works of H.P. Blavatsky,
whose “theosophical” ideas in the 1880s mixed together Buddhist and
Platonic beliefs in ways that many turn-of-the-century thinkers found
convincing. In brief, Blavatsky taught that humankind inhabited what
she thought the Buddhists called “Kama-Loka,” a kind of limbo or
Hades, in which human desire forever doomed people to continued
cycles of reincarnation. The power of Maya, who wove the illusions of
the world like a spider, made sure that humanity remained trapped in
Folly and Matter. In contrast, believed Blavatsky, perceiving true
reality, which was spiritual and immaterial, could only occur when
humanity forsook desire and allowed its spirit to draw the mind to
transcendence.
In Ghost Sonata, the material world is indeed a place of illusions,
where webs and traps ensure that humanity cannot escape from the
pull of its desires until death brings peace. Near the start of the drama
the audience meets a young male student who is attracted to a girl he
sees in the window of an elegant mansion. Like the student, the
audience is led to believe that the people inside must lead happy and
enlightened lives. Visions of the material world are deceiving,
however, especially when prompted by desire, and Act II reveals that
the family within is enmeshed in webs of crime and deceit that are
poisoning them. Hummel, a vampire-like villain whose power
represents the workings of a malicious universe, brutally unmasks the
lies and crimes upon which the reputation and wealth of the family
have been built and effectively drives the family patriarch to suicide.
By the end of the act, however, Hummel himself has been killed by an
aging woman that he had earlier seduced. As new agents of evil
replace previous powers of wickedness in the play, the vengeance
that Hummel pursued finally traps him as well. Through these
repetitions, Strindberg is suggesting that malevolence is recycled
through never-ending reincarnations.
Act III begins with the student expressing his ardent love for the girl
in the Hyacinth Room, which also contains a harp and a prominent
statue of Buddha. Both complain that the odor of the enveloping
hyacinths, a symbol of the couple’s blooming sexuality, is suffocating
their senses. Despite the girl’s interest in him and her apparent
beauty, she tells the student she is dying because a vampire cook is
robbing the family of life-giving food. When the audience meets the
cook later in the act, it is apparent that the cook and her masters are
locked in a situation of mutual exploitation; both are sucking the life
out of each other. While the girl is dying, the student ends the play with
a long poetic monologue which begins as a denunciation of the
deceptions of the world and then shifts to become a kind of ritual
chant. At this point, the student takes on the role of a priest who
blesses the dying girl and attempts to mediate between the illusory
world of the living and the approaching world of the dead. Strindberg’s
final stage directions indicate that the room fills with white light and
then vanishes, replaced by distant harp music and a painting called
“Isle of the Dead” revealed on a backdrop. According to critic Theo
Malekin, Strindberg probably intended the elements of his ending,
especially the statue of the Buddha, “to open up a level of reality, or
rather a level of the self beyond egoic [i.e., egocentric] identification
with life’s surfaces . . .” (2010: 143). After two acts of crimes and
illusions, the ending of the third act is meant to point the way toward
possible transcendence.
Strindberg had written The Ghost Sonata, along with several other
plays, for production in his Intimate Theatre, a company of actors in a
small playhouse that he had helped to start in Stockholm in 1907. The
director and actors could not manage the complexities of the script,
however, and the 1908 premiere production was not a success.
Strindberg had partly modeled his Intimate Theatre on director Max
Reinhardt’s Kammerspiele, a small playhouse in Berlin where the
German director had already staged several successful productions.
Strindberg hoped that Reinhardt would direct some of the plays he
had written for his Intimate Theatre at the Kammerspiele and sent
copies of them (translated into German) for his perusal. Although the
author and director corresponded, Reinhardt would not direct The
Ghost Sonata until four years after Strindberg’s death.
Reinhardt’s 1916 Ghost Sonata, staged initially at the Kammerspiele
and then in Stockholm and elsewhere in Sweden, came as a
revelation to the German and Swedish theatre-going public. In
Germany, Reinhardt’s Expressionist-style production caused more of
the Berlin public to investigate this still new avant-garde movement,
while many Swedes recognized belatedly that “their” Strindberg had
been a theatrical genius. Reinhardt’s production of five of Strindberg’s
post-inferno plays between 1913 and 1921 led to a burst of
international fame for the Swedish playwright, aligned Strindberg’s
goals in the public mind with those of the Expressionists, and drew
particular attention to the dramatist’s post-inferno experiments.
Produced amidst the horrors of the Great War, Reinhardt’s Ghost
Sonata enthralled audiences with its nightmarish evocation of evil and
grotesquerie. Following his understanding of Expressionism,
Reinhardt staged the play as though the audience were seeing and
experiencing it through the eyes of the student protagonist. He ignored
Strindberg’s initial stage directions, for example, and began the
performance in total darkness, which only gradually eased into a dim
grey dusk when the student (the only figure on stage in full light)
began to see figures around him slowly coming to life. In keeping with
this style, the vision of the student guided the actions of the other
characters, which often caused the student-as-dreamer to pass his
hand over his eyes or to shake his head in disbelief. Reinhardt
characterized the family inside the house as a group of half-human
marionettes, whose voices and actions confused and terrified the
student. The actor playing Hummel began his portrayal as a shrunken,
crumpled old man who gradually gained in size and demonic power as
he fed on the strength of others before exiting to his death. As have
most subsequent directors of The Ghost Sonata, Reinhardt did not
display the “Isle of the Dead” at the end of the performance, as per
Strindberg’s stage direction. Instead, he had the student throw open a
window to cut through the hyacinth room’s claustrophobia and reveal
a star-studded night, suggesting to some the possibility of eternity and
peace after death.
Strindberg remains a popular playwright in his native Sweden as
well as throughout the German-speaking world. Some of the most
daring productions of his works in recent times have been directed by
Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007), well known in Europe for his theatrical
as well as his filmic productions.
Key references
Brandell, G. (1974) Strindberg in Inferno, trans. B. Jacobs, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Carlson, H. (1996) Out of Inferno: Strindberg’s Reawakening as an
Artist, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Chothia, J. (1991) André Antoine, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ekman, H. (2000) Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in
Strindberg’s Chamber Plays, New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press.
 Malekin, T. (2010) Strindberg and the Quest for Sacred Theatre,
Amsterdam_ Rodopi.
Marker, F. and Marker, L. (2002) Strindberg and Modern Theatre:
Post-Inferno Drama on the Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Robinson, M. (ed.) (2009) The Cambridge Companion to August
Strindberg, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sprinchorn, E. (1982) Strindberg as Dramatist, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Strindberg, A. (1955) Six Plays of Strindberg, trans. E. Sprigg, New
York: Anchor Books. [Includes Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata.]
Szalczer, E. (2011) August Strindberg, New York: Routledge.
Expressionism in the United States
In the 1920s, playwrights and directors in the U.S. embraced a more
conservative version of Expressionism than in Germany and
Scandinavia. Within the goal of combining “subjectivity” and
“objectivity” on stage, it had always been possible for playwrights to
organize their plots and characters so that some of their on-stage
episodes recognized and emphasized external, objective realities,
while other moments allowed them to explore the subjective
psychology of their protagonists. This dramatic strategy would
encourage spectators to validate their photographic sense of a visible,
material world, while also permitting them to understand that world
from the main character’s subjective point of view. This was
essentially the compromise that several U.S. playwrights and their
directors arrived at in the 1920s. Although never a radical, avant-garde
movement, Expressionism moved U.S. theatre away from traditional
realism and established the foundation for a general style that later
playwrights could build upon. Psychological realism, as that style
came to be called in the 1940s, did not settle the larger question about
the nature of reality, but it did speak to the needs of artists and
audiences eager to explore what they understood as both the
objective and subjective worlds of a play. As we will see in Chapter 12,
several varieties of psychological realism flourished in the works of
Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and their contemporaries in the
1940s and 1950s.
The Provincetown Players (probably the closest before the 1950s
that the U.S. theatre ever got to an actual avant-garde group)
launched the careers of two of these Expressionist playwrights,
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) and Susan Glaspell (1876–1948). The
Province-towners started an artists’ colony in New England during the
Great War in 1916 and drew their energy from a mix of American
pragmatism, the politics of anarchism, and the philosophy of
Nietzsche. By 1922, when the group disbanded, they had produced
nearly a hundred plays, a few of them by Glaspell and O’Neill. Glaspell
wrote The Verge (1921) in an Expressionist style that merges feminism
with a Nietzschean will to power in order to explore a female artist’s
attempts to push beyond convention to true innovation. Like the work
of other U.S. Expressionists, The Verge places the protagonist in a
recognizably objective social world, but also finds ways of exploring
her subjective, psychological sides. By the 1920s, O’Neill had moved
from the realism of his early one-acts to write two Expressionist plays,
The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1921). The first is a
peeling-away of the layers of civilization in the mind of a black man
and the second focuses on a working-class loner struggling to find a
group where he feels he “belongs.” Both gained artistic and box office
success in New York, where the Provincetowners had opened a
commercial theatre.
U.S. Expressionism in the early 1920s was mostly a home-grown
style. Before American artists and audiences had seen much of it from
Germany, playwrights O’Neill and Elmer Rice (1892–1967) apparently
used the term “expressionism” to point to similarities between their
dramas and the expressive culture movement, a broad-based
program in the U.S. that sought to counter anxieties about the modern
world by drawing on the performing arts. Rice’s best-known play, The
Adding Machine (1923), depicts the recycling of an alienated office
worker, Mr. Zero. In this Nietzschean grotesque comedy, Zero refuses
possible freedom and floats from a pointless job adding up figures,
through death and finally to eventual reincarnation as another
cowardly office worker. The short scenes of the play tend to build
cinematically, partly a result of Rice’s earlier work as a screenwriter in
Hollywood. Sophie Treadwell (1885–1970), another U.S. Expressionist,
demonstrated the need for a middle-class woman to rebel against her
robotic life in Machinal (1928). Treadwell’s protagonist murders her
husband, an act which eventually sends her to the electric chair.
Although O’Neill left Expressionism behind in the early 1920s, he
continued to draw on the “subjective” side of the objective/subjective
divide in the West for his themes and dramatic forms. In Desire Under
the Elms, for example, he explores Freudian unconscious desire as
the primary motivation for an adulterous affair between the young wife
(Abbie) of an old man and her mature stepson (Eben) (Figure 10.7).
The 1924 production shocked many proper theatregoers in the U.S.
because the play effectively excuses the young couple’s immoral
behavior as inevitable. If “desire” is unconscious and powerful, as
Freudian psychoanalysis seemed to suggest, how could society
blame Abbie and Eben for their crime, which also included the murder
of their newborn child? O’Neill’s plot sends the couple to jail in the end,
but the play’s sympathies lie with them as victims of a force beyond
their control. As we have noted, the new audiophonic media
influenced Freud’s understanding of the unconscious mind as well as
subjectively oriented theatre. Psychoanalysis and its spinoffs in
popular psychology would continue to shape the American theatre for
the next 40 years.
Like many other Western playwrights, O’Neill continued to draw
from both sides of the objective/subjective dichotomy. The Great God
Brown (1926) emphasizes this division through the device of masks;
the social masks worn by the actors depict the constrictions of
“objective,” external reality, while their unmasked monologues
directed at the audience reveal their “subjective,” psychological selves
underneath. Like Strindberg, O’Neill vacillated between plays that
affirmed an objective, positivist view of reality and others that explored
subjective vision through such Symbolist and Expressionist devices.
Although he concluded his career with A Long Day’s Journey Into
Night (written 1939–1941, produced 1957), a piece that emphasizes the
“objective” side of psychological realism, O’Neill came no closer than
Strindberg to resolving the subjective/objective problem of modern,
print-based theatre.
Figure 10.7Old Cabot (Walter Huston) looks down on Abbie, his young wife
(Marry Morris), who is comforting Eben Cabot (Charles Ellis) in O'Neill's Desire
Under the Elms. The Experimental Theatre, an outgrowth of the Provincetown
Players, produced the drama in 1924.

© Museum of the City of New York.

Institutionalizing the avant-garde
A few directors involved in first-generation avant-garde groups, such
as Antoine and Meyerhold, worked in both avant-garde and
mainstream theatres. Others, like Stanislavsky, who produced several
Symbolist as well as Naturalist works at the Moscow Art Theatre,
temporarily embraced one or another of the avant-garde movements.
Although most avant-garde artists had declared their independence
from conventional theatre, this did not stop those directors committed
to mainstream theatres from borrowing from the avant-garde to shape
their own productions. These successful directors and their institutions
helped to popularize first-generation avant-garde styles with a wider
audience.
As we began to explore in the Strindberg case study, the German
director Max Reinhardt was one of the most influential mediators
between the early avant-garde movements and the bourgeoisie during
the first third of the twentieth century. Believing that no single style
suited all plays and theatrical occasions, Reinhardt directed Naturalist,
Symbolist, and Expressionist plays in Germany and Austria in a
variety of spaces, often to wide public acclaim. As we saw in the case
study on Strindberg, Reinhardt honed his Expressionist style during
and immediately after the Great War by directing several of
Strindberg’s post-inferno plays. He incorporated the innovations of
Appia, Craig, and others in lighting and design and sought out new
training techniques for his actors. Reinhardt was able to embrace such
eclecticism because he worked closely with his collaborators while
insisting on final artistic control. He also maintained a significant
degree of stage realism in his productions; his actors generally used
realist props and costumes and typically did not acknowledge the
presence of the audience. Reinhardt’s production of Frank Wedekind’s
Spring’s Awakening in 1906, for example, featured frilly transparent
curtains (of the kind that proper bourgeoisie used to dress their
windows) over much of the stage opening and created innovative
lighting effects, but kept his actors behind the proscenium frame
(Figure 10.8). After the Great War, Reinhardt staged many of his
productions in churches and other non-theatre settings, such as public
squares. Reinhardt’s success exerted an immense influence in
German-speaking theatre between 1910 and 1925.

Figure 10.8Karl Walzer's rendering of his design for a scene from Reinhardt's
production of Wedekind's Spring's Awakening (1906). Wedekind's play about
adolescent sexuality and the repressiveness of German culture created a
scandal when it was published.

Max Reinhardt Archive, State University of New York, Binghamton.

Several other pre-1930 directors followed Reinhardt’s lead, adapting
relevant avant-garde techniques to their mainstream productions. As
director of the Odéon in Paris, Firmin Gémier (1869–1933), an early
proponent of bringing theatre to all of the French people through tent
productions, produced and directed an eclectic mix of conventional
and avant-garde styles in the 1920s. In Germany, Leopold Jessner
(1878–1945), director of the Berlin State Theatre from 1919 until 1933,
incorporated several Expressionist design principles into many of his
productions. These often featured Appia-inspired flights of stairs, non-
realist lighting, and symbolic costuming. In the U.S., the Theatre Guild,
which enjoyed a broad subscription base of spectators, brought a few
avant-garde productions to audiences from 1919 into the 1930s. Phillip
Moeller (1880–1958), who generally worked in a style of modified
realism, was the Guild’s chief director. Through the influence of these
directors and their institutions, plus the adoption of similar innovative
practices elsewhere, the early avant-garde gradually altered the
expectations of mainstream audiences throughout the West.
Like Reinhardt, however, these directors were generally careful not
to push their mostly middle-class spectators too far or too fast into the
worlds of avant-garde theatre. In this conservative approach to
change, the directors were actually helped by the general orientation
of all first-generation avant-garde movements to their artistry. Taking
their cue from Wagner’s commitment to a total work of art, the early
avant-gardists sought to reconstitute theatrical representation on the
basis of their own beliefs, but did not question theatrical
representation itself. That is, they assumed that the theatre must
attempt to create a separate world that was a truthful representation of
the actual one. The Symbolists, for example, sought to immerse
spectators in a sound-surround of mythic belief and fate, but their
images generally remained behind the proscenium and their actors
never violated the representational basis of characterization. Even the
Expressionists understood the angst and ecstasy of their actors as
representing the true inner feelings of real people. This generally
shared acceptance of the representational nature of theatre, which
many second-generation avant-gardists would dispute, created an
unspoken common ground between much of the early avant-garde
and the bourgeois theatres they were loudly rejecting. It also provided
an aesthetic basis for Reinhardt and other directors to graft avant-
garde innovations on to their own, more mainstream productions.
Summary
This chapter concludes Parts II and III of our textbook, both of which
focused on the causal relations among print culture, historical
contexts, and the theatre. Looking back, it is clear that the
objective/subjective divide that structured many of the conflicts in
Western theatre by the 1920s was partly due to a division that
emerged with periodical print culture around 1700 in the distinction
between the public and private spheres. Newspapers, treatises, and
many other public print media propagated “hard” facts and often
partisan contention, while the private sphere of confessionals, novels,
and most popular magazines thrived on “soft” psychological insights
and domestic affairs. While the objective/subjective divide in the
theatre that provided the focus of this chapter was not altogether new,
it is clear that specific historical pressures from photographic and
audiophonic media helped to intensify it and brought it to a kind of
crisis in the 1920s.
As we have seen, that division resulted in two very different kinds of
theatrical expression, perhaps best exemplified in the extreme
contrast between European Naturalism and Symbolism in the 1890s.
Instead of depending on the external, material realities of biological
evolution and industrial capitalism to undergird their theatre, the
Symbolists looked to the evanescence of sound and the inner
promptings of religion and psychology to shape dramas that called
forth universal yearnings wrapped in gauze and half-light and
performed through poetic evocation and ritual chanting. The
Aestheticists and Expressionists pushed this subjective faith in new
directions – the former idealizing artistic experience as a realm apart
from the workaday world and the latter exploring emotional extremes
animated by generational hatreds, war-soaked fears, and
revolutionary hopes. Despite their rejection of conventional society,
first-generation avant-gardists helped to shift conventional Western
theatre away from the constraints of stage realism and toward the
possibilities of theatrical modernism. This was especially apparent in
work of many mainstream directors, such as Reinhardt, who borrowed
from the techniques and designs of the avant-garde theatres to shape
productions that spoke more directly to the needs of their mostly
bourgeois spectators.
In retrospect, however, the nineteenth century’s photographic and
audiophonic media probably did as much to extend the life of print-
based theatre as to undermine it by demonstrating its internal
conflicts. Most historical peoples have lived relatively untroubled for
centuries with such inherent contradictions in their culture. When
severe crises arrive, however, such divisions make it easier to
abandon old ways of thinking and believing in the search for new
meanings and solutions. This is what happened, over time, with the
problem of “objectivity” and “subjectivity” in the theatre and culture of
the West; what had seemed immensely important to many people
between 1900 and about 1930 gradually faded in significance. The
Great War and moving pictures fragmented many of the assumptions,
beliefs, and procedures upon which Western culture had been based.
We are still picking up the pieces from the after-effects of the Great
War, and film was only the first of many media shocks to the system –
shocks that would proliferate with increasing speed into the twenty-
first century. Part IV of our book brings the story of media, history, and
the theatre up to the present.
*
Part III Works cited

Other consulted resources and additional readings for Part

III are listed on the Theatre Histories website.
Audio-visual resources
German Expressionism
<http://Everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=166783> (2009), website (on
German Expressionism, with many links to other sources).
German Expressionism Collection (2008), DVD-video (4-disc set,
includes Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other films).
Variety theatre
Vintage Variety Stage and Vaudeville Film Collection (2009), DVD,
Bestsellers in Movies and TV.
Blackface minstrelsy
“Stephen Foster,” American Experience Series (Public Broadcasting
System, 2000)
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy.html>.
“Blackface Minstrelsy, 1830–1852”
<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/minstrel/mihp.html>. “The Legacy of
Blackface: National Public Radio”
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1919122> .
Japonisme
“Curator’s Perspective: Vincent Van Gogh and Japan” – excellent
illustrated lecture by art historian (1 hour, 2 minutes)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mnBo87-T80>
The Mikado
Excellent full production by D’Oyly Carte Opera, 1992 (2 hours, 22
minutes): <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TW90OEU-U>
Full-length feature film Topsy-Turvy by Mike Leigh detailing the
partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan, specifically the creation of The
Mikado. Includes many scenes replicating the original production,
costuming, and rehearsals as well as other aspects of Victorian life
and theatre: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxqTaIdpvCs>
Madama Butterfly
Filmed version, filmed realistically in Japan (not on stage) with English
subtitles (2 hours, 14 minutes): <https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=dhGZMPMJuTg>
Books and articles
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, 2nd edn, London:
Verso.
Benedetti, J. (1999) Stanislavski: His Life and Art, 3rd edn,
London: Methuen.
Berghaus, G. (2005) Theatre, Performance, and the Historical
Avant-garde, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Buckley, M. (2006) Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French
Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Carlson, M. (1985) The Italian Shakespearians: Performances by
Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi in England and America, Washington,
DC: Folger Books.
Collier, J. (1974) “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness
of the English Stage” (1698), in B.F. Dukore (ed.) Dramatic Theory
and Criticism, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Connon, D. (2012) “The Theatre of the Parisian Fairs and Reality,”
Romance Studies 30(3–4): 186–192.
Craig, E.G. (1911) On the Art of the Theatre, London: Heinemann.
Dukore, B.F. (ed.) (1974) Dramatic Theory and Criticism, New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Fowler, W. (2008) Latin America since 1780, London: Hodder
Education Press.
Fredrickson, G. (2002) Racism_ A Short History, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Gilmour, D. (2011) The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its
Regions and their Peoples, London: Penguin.
Gold, A. and Fizdale, F. (1991) Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah
Bernhardt, New York: Vintage.
Habermas, J. (1989) The structural transformation of the public
sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, trans T.
Burger, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hemmings, F.W.J. (1993) The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-
Century France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoffenberg, P.H. (2001) An Empire on Display: English, Indian,
and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great
War, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kramnick, I. (ed.) (1995) The Portable Enlightenment Reader,
London: Penguin.
Lessing, G.E. (1962) Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. H. Zimmerman,
intro. V. Lange, New York: Dover.
Mackerras, C. (ed.) (1983) Chinese Theatre from its Origins to the
Present Day, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Maeterlinck, M. (1897) “The Tragical in Everyday Life,” in The
Works of Maurice Maeterlinck (1913–1914), New York: Dodd,
Mead.
Ockman, C. (2005) “Was She Magnificent? Sarah Bernhardt’s
Reach,” in C. Ockman and K. Silver (eds) Sarah Bernhardt, The
Art of High Drama, produced for the Bernhardt exhibit of the
Jewish Museum, New York, 2005–2006, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Peters, J.S. (2000) Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text,
and Performance in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roach, J.R. (1985; reprint 1993) The Player’s Passion: Studies in
the Science of Acting, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage.
Salmi, H. (1999) Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National
Utopia, New York: Peter Lang.
Schumacher, C. (ed.) (1996) Naturalism and Symbolism in
European Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography, New York: Delta Books.
Sosulski, M.J. (2007) Theater and Nation in Eighteenth Century
Germany, Williston, VT: Ashgate Publishing.
Vincent-Buffault, A. (1991) The History of Tears: Sensibility and
Sentimentality in France, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Wichmann, S. (1999) Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on
Western Art since 1858. London: Thames and Hudson.
Williams, K. (2001) “Anti-Theatricality and the Limits of
Naturalism,” Modern Drama 44(3): 284–299.
Williams, R. (1966) Modern Tragedy, Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Williams, R. (1969) Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Zola, É. (1881) “Naturalism in the Theatre,” in E. Bentley (ed.) The
Theory of the Modern Stage, London: Penguin, 1968.
Theatre and performance in electric and
electronic communication culture
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-15

Part IV: Timeline

11 New theatres for revolutionary times, 1910–1950
CASE STUDY: Lenin’s Taylorism and Meyerhold’s
biomechanics
CASE STUDY: Brecht and the science of empathy
12 The aftermath of the Second World War: Realism and its
discontents in an increasingly shrinking world, 1940–1970
CASE STUDY: Cultural memories and audience response: A
Streetcar Named Desire in the 1940s
CASE STUDY: Social drama in Kerala, India: Staging the
“revolution”
13 Art, politics or business? Theatre in search of identity, 1968–
2000
CASE STUDY: Athol Fugard: Theatre of witnessing in South
Africa
14 Theatres of local roots and global reach, 1970–present
CASE STUDY: Imagining contemporary China
15 Theatre in networked culture, 1990–present
CASE STUDY: Online role-playing games as theatre
CASE STUDY: Hip Hop theatre
Part IV: Works cited
Part IV Timeline

Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and

Performance Communication Economics

1856–1950 George
Bernard
Shaw,
playwright
1858–1943 André
Antoine,
director
1859 Charles Darwin, On
the Origin of Species
1860–1904 Anton
Chekhov,
playwright
1861–1941 Rabindranath
Tagore,
playwright
1863–1938 Konstantin
Stanislavsky,
director
1867 Karl Marx, Capitalvol.
1
1867–1936 Luigi
Pirandello,
playwright
1872–1946 Kawakami
Sadayakko,
actor
1872–1966 Edward
Gordon
Craig, theatre
theorist
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1876 Electric telephone

1876–1948 Susan
Glaspell,
playwright
1877 Phonograph
1877–1927 Isadora Duncan,
dancer
1879 Electric light bulb
C.1880- Avant-garde
C.1900 theatre, first
generation
1880–1914 “Scramble for
Africa”:
European
powers divide
Africa among
themselves
1881-c.1914 Naturalist
movement
1881–1973 Pablo Picasso, artist
1882–1971 Igor Stravinsky,
composer
1884–1885 First Sino-
Japanese War
1885 Automobiles
1887–1896 Théâtre Libre
1888–1953 Eugene
O’Neill,
playwright
1894–1961 Mei Lanfang,
actor
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1894–1991 Martha Graham,

dancer-
choreographer
1895 First public motion
picture screening,
France Radio
C.1895- Shimpa
C.1930
1896–1948 Antonin
Artaud, actor
and theorist
1898 Spanish-
American War
1898–1948 Sergei Eisenstein,
film director
1898–1956 Bertolt
Brecht,
playwright
1898- Moscow Art
Theatre
(various
name
changes after
1932)
1900 Sigmund Freud, The
Interpretation of
Dreams
C.1900- Modernist Modernism in art and
C.1970 stage design literature
1903 First successful
airplane
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1904 Vacuum tube:

beginning of
electronics Sigmund
Freud, The
Psychopathology of
Everyday Life
1906–1989 Samuel
Beckett,
playwright
1907- Huaju
1909- Shingeki
C.1910-C Cubism in art
1925
C.1910-C Avant-garde
1930 theatre,
second
generation
1911–1983 Tennessee
Williams,
playwright
1914–1918 Great War (aka
First World War)
1914- Takarazuka
Revue
C.1915-C Expressionist
1930 theatre in the
U.S.
C.1915- Jazz
1915–2005 Arthur Miller,
playwright
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1917 Russian
Revolution
C.1918-C Harlem Renaissance
1935
1918–2007 Ingmar Bergman, film
and theatre director
C.1920- Musical
theatre
1922–1991 Soviet Union
1923 First public screening
of sound film
1925–1970 Mishima
Yukio,
playwright
1926- Dario Fo,
performer-
playwright
1930- Great
C.1940 Depression
worldwide
1930–1965 Lorraine
Hansberry,
playwright
1930–2008 Harold Pinter,
playwright
1930- Stephen
Sondheim,
musical
theatre
composer-
lyricist
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1931–2009 Augusto
Boal, theatre
creator and
theorist
1932- Athol Fugard,
playwright
1933–1945 Nazi
concentration
and labor
camps in
Germany and
Eastern Europe
1933–1999 Jerzy
Grotowski,
director
1934–2014 Amiri Baraka
(aka LeRoi
Jones),
playwright
1934- Wole
Soyinka,
playwright
1935–1939 Federal
Theatre
Project, U.S.
1935–1983 Terayama
Shuji,
playwright
and director
1936 Television
broadcasting
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1937- Tom
Stoppard,
playwright
1938- Caryl
Churchill,
playwright
1939–1945 Second World
War
1939- Suzuki
Tadashi,
director
C.1940- “Golden Age”
C.1970 of Broadway
musical
theatre
1940- Gao Xingjian,
playwright
Luis Valdez,
playwright-
director
1941- Robert
Wilson,
director-
designer
1942 All-electronic
computer
1945 Nuclear bomb
used on
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki,
Japan
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1945–2005 August
Wilson,
playwright
1947 Transistor: basis of
all modern electronic
equipment
1947–1991 Cold War: the
U.S. and its
allies vs. Soviet
Union and its
allies
1947- Living
Theatre, U.S.
1949 Berliner People’s
Ensemble Republic of
founded China
(Communist
China)
established
1950–1953 Korean War
1951–1980 African
independence
movements
c.1955 Television becomes
an important medium
1955–1975 Vietnam War
1956- Tony
Kushner,
playwright
1957 Sputnik 1
(Soviet satellite)
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

1957- David Henry

Hwang,
playwright
1959 Beginning of butoh
dance
1959- Happenings
C.1990
c.1960 Beginnings of
civil rights era
theatre
movements
c.1965- Main period
c.1975 of political
theatre
c.1960- Performance
art
c.1962- Angura
c.1962- Rock music
1963- Suzan-Lori
Parks,
playwright
1964 Communications
satellites
1964–1971 Worldwide
protests against
the Vietnam
War
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

c.1965 Beginnings of
feminist,
Latino, gay,
and lesbian
theatre
1966–1976 Chinese
Cultural
Revolution
c.1966- Yangbanxi
(Chinese
revolutionary
opera)
1967 Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology
1967- European
Community
(starting point of
the European
Union)
1968 U.K. ends May 1968
theatre events in
censorship France Martin
Luther King
assassinated,
U.S.
1969 Moon landing First
network of computer
networks (beginning
of the Internet)
c.1970- Birth of Hip Hop and
c.1980 rap
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

c.1970- Nuevo Teatro

c.1985 Popular
1974 U.S. President
Richard Nixon
resigns
1976 Satellite television
Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality
1977 Mass-market
personal computers
c.1980 AIDS crisis
begins
1983 Commercially
available mobile
phones
1989 Berlin Wall falls,
Germany
Tiananmen
Square
protests, China
c.1990 Commercially
available digital
cameras
1991 World Wide Web Break-up of the
Soviet Union
1993- European Union
1994 Web-based social
networking
2000 Smartphones
Date Theatre and Culture and Politics and
Performance Communication Economics

2001 September 11th

attacks on the
World Trade
Center and
Pentagon, U.S.
2001–2014 Wars in
Afghanistan and
Iraq
2003–2011 Iraq War
2007-? Great
Recession
worldwide
2010–2012 Arab Spring
Introduction: Theatre and the unceasing communications
revolutions
Tobin Nellhaus
The twentieth century was a period of upheaval and invention.
There were two world wars, several genocides, a massive economic
depression, plus several smaller versions of each. Some major
countries had political revolutions; many more achieved
independence from imperialist control, but sometimes only to plummet
into dictatorships or civil wars. Liberalizations of cultural values and
the creation of social support programs were followed by conservative
reactions, and back again. Much like the 1600s, religious faith could
reverse into a fanaticism that led people to repress and even kill
others. Cars and planes transformed transportation, and rockets
landed men on the moon. Globalization knotted national economies
together, and enabled people around the world to talk with each other.
Simultaneously, it highlighted the uniqueness of the local, although
occasionally fragmenting societies.
One of the key forces behind those constant sea changes was the
industrialization of electricity. One technology after another
manipulated electricity with ever-greater sophistication; each day
brought it further into people’s lives, to the point that without a source
of electrical power, nearly all devices and machines today would be no
better than rocks. Communication media in particular were radically
and repeatedly altered or invented. Political, economic, and social
events strongly affected theatrical developments, especially topically –
but the unending innovations in communication played a fundamental
role in changing the styles and methods of performance. These
developments are the focus of Part IV.
A transistor and a vacuum tube.

Fuse/Getty Images.
Already in the nineteenth century, numerous new communication
technologies had changed people’s lives, including telegraphs,
photography, typewriters, telephones, phonographs, radios, and silent
films. Most of them utilized electricity as a source of power to move
mechanical parts, but also – as electromagnetic radiation, namely light
– as a catalyst for chemical reactions (which is how photography
worked). In these ways, electricity became an element in the very
production and transmission of words, sounds, and images – culture
itself.
We described in Chapter 10 how some of these early electricity-
based communication media influenced theatre in multiple and
sometimes opposite ways, especially the contrast that emerged
between Naturalism and Symbolism. By the close of the nineteenth
century, theatre had divided into two major artistic branches:
mainstream realism and the avant-garde. The contrast and even
antagonism between them rapidly intensified. The avant-garde,
already split from the mainstream aesthetically, began to produce
plays that aimed to subvert bourgeois culture. At the same time, some
Naturalist playwrights began to incorporate political critique within
their plays. These varying approaches soon also appeared in theatre’s
rapidly growing relative, the movies.
The era covered by Part IV started with two developments that in
different ways shook the world, as Chapter 11 explains. One was the
Great War (aka the First World War, 1914–1918) and its aftermath,
which accelerated theatrical movements against bourgeois society.
Anti-capitalist playwrights increasingly joined the avant-garde in
rejecting Naturalist styles, and a number of second-generation avant-
gardists rejected capitalism. A third branch of theatrical performance
also emerged: political theatre with a non-realistic style. Nevertheless,
realism (whether or not political) and the apolitical avant-garde
remained stronger than the political theatre. The impulses behind
these two branches were conjoined in modernism, a form of theatre
that utilized some avant-garde techniques, but aimed not to challenge
bourgeois society, merely to transcend it through abstraction and
idealism.
The other development was a technological innovation. In 1904, the
vacuum tube was invented, which made it possible to control
electricity in highly refined ways. It was the first electronic technology.
By 1930, vacuum tubes had dramatically improved and
commercialized radios and phonographs, and allowed images and
sound to be synchronized on film. As Chapter 11 shows, radio and
especially sound film (the “talkies”) had major effects on the theatre of
the time, sometimes to be used, sometimes to be resisted. However,
the applications of vacuum tubes did not end there: they could
manipulate light waves, and they could be combined into complex
switches. The former led to television, and broadcasting to the public
began in 1936. The latter resulted in the first wholly electronic
computer, which was built in 1942. One generation later, these devices
would upend the world.
 The Second World War (1939–1945) involved nearly every country
around the globe, and was even more devastating than its
predecessor. As Chapter 12 observes, few of the second-generation
avant-gardes survived the war; some had faded away even before
then. Nevertheless, to varying extents in each country, theatre in the
postwar era continued the three rough types from before:
psychological or social realism, which sometimes adopted elements of
avant-garde styles, and sometimes had a politically critical edge;
avant-garde genres with varying relationships with bourgeois culture;
and political non-realism. Theatre in the U.S. predominantly focused
on psychological realism, sometimes within a naturalistic setting,
sometimes in a more abstract style similar to modernism or
Expressionism. Even plays critical of mainstream politics tended to
employ psychological realism. Soviet state policy locked theatre into
“socialist realism,” which stylistically differed little from bourgeois
realism. Political theatre became an important trend in South Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. Europe and Japan contended with both the
destruction left by the warfare, and the political and moral legacies of
fascism, genocide, and the atomic bomb. Thus the war raised
profoundly disturbing questions and disillusionment with
Enlightenment ideas of truth, reason, and progress, which was often
reflected in non-realist drama. However, in the midst of the recovering
economy of the late 1950s, alternative forms of performance arose in
the U.S., Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, some of them tied to protests
against postwar conformism and political inequities, and some of them
wholly unlike theatre itself.
One element in both the recovery and the emergence of non-
conformism in the 1950s was yet another transformative technology:
the invention of the transistor in 1947. Transistors did the same things
vacuum tubes did, but they were more reliable, smaller – and soon,
cheaper. They revolutionized all of the previous devices, found new
applications, and enabled whole new technologies. The vacuum tube
had introduced a few electronic devices to people’s homes; the
transistor made electronics utterly ubiquitous. In the mid-1950s, the
transistor radio became the first mass-produced mobile device. We
began to enter the era of electric and electronic communication
culture.
Now largely transistorized, televisions started residing in most living
rooms, reshaping culture and influencing politics. By the mid-1960s,
about 94 percent of homes in the U.S. and Japan, 86 percent in the
U.K., and the majority of households in other industrialized countries
owned television sets – and millions of viewers saw the war in
Vietnam. The protests against the war were part of a turning point in
world history: throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, a wide range
of political and cultural clashes erupted worldwide, some of them in
opposition to global politics, some of them in opposition to domestic
authoritarianism and lack of political equality. Chapter 13 shows how
theatre often participated in the activism of the last third of the
twentieth century, whether directly in political theatre, or through
challenges to theatre’s traditional hierarchies, such as the authority of
the dramatic text.
The 1960s launched the current era of accelerating globalization, in
which national economies – driven by multinational corporations,
international trade agreements, supranational organizations such as
the World Trade Organization, worldwide transportation systems, and
global telecommunications – have become deeply interdependent, to
some extent making nationalism moot. But this has had complex
effects. Globally, treaties unify world economies and legal frameworks,
businesses in one continent decide what farmers should grow in
another, and McDonald’s and Hollywood cover the planet. Locally,
many people find declining self-governance, the disappearance of
regional culture, environmental damage caused by import and export,
and other effects. Sometimes the local and global have blended, for
instance in regional versions of rap music. In Chapter 14 we discuss
how these forces and concerns have been manifested in theatre, in
everything from musicals, to the preservation of indigenous
performance genres, to borrowing from foreign traditions. Theatre for
social change has also been affected by the combined pressures of
the global and the local.
The past fifty years has also been marked by the rampant growth of
consumer electronics. A staggering list of devices permeated life in
the industrialized countries, and increasingly in the developing world
as well, including music players, cameras, video recorders, mobile
telephones, and most importantly, computers. Devices that fit on a
desktop became portable, portable became hand-held, hand-held
became pocket-sized – and the pocket-sized packed together an
increasing array of unrelated devices, such as phones with cameras.
The most fundamental advance occurred during that same turning
point. In 1969, two computers were linked by telephone. A few more
were soon added, forming a network. In 1971, the first email was sent,
heralding the coming expansion of computers from advanced
calculators to a new communication medium. Meanwhile, other
computer networks were created. The networks swelled and
interconnected, and in the early 1980s, the internet was born. Then in
1990, a standardized way to link electronic documents via the internet
was developed; it was named the World Wide Web. Internet usage
grew spectacularly. As early as 1995, 0.5 percent or so of the world’s
population used the internet, facilitated by the Web. In 2000 it
connected about 7 percent of the world, around 400 million people. By
2010, that figure had leapt to 2 billion, around 30 percent. Just five
years later, the number surpassed 44 percent – over 3.2 billion people.
Increasingly they connected through sophisticated and affordable
smartphones, integrating a large number of electronic devices
(including a telephone, camera, Web browser, multimedia players,
and geographical positioning system) into one hand-held unit. These
devices’ core purpose is not calculation, but data transfer – that is,
communication.
The internet established a mode of communication with several
crucial differences from print and most previous electric/electronic
communication technologies. Those largely conducted one-way
communication to large numbers of people, whether through the
dissemination of physical books, recordings and photographs, or
through on-air broadcasts. For most people, only the telephone
allowed person-to-person communication. The internet, however,
combines two-way communication with broadcasted communication.
In principle, any individual can get in touch with any other individual.
But also, in principle anyone can present whatever thoughts, pictures,
or videos they choose before the entire world – and in principle,
anyone can respond back. And all of that happens instantly. Thus the
internet not only networks computers, it networks people. In addition,
digital media provide new textual, mechanical, and visual tools.
Chapter 15 explores a number of these issues as they emerge in
performance. It focuses first on changes in the performer, such as her
representation through projections, augmentation by electronic
equipment, replacement by robots, and re-embodiment by avatars.
Next it looks at new types of performance spaces – not just virtual
realities, but also textual realms such as Twitter, and uses of public
spaces. The chapter concludes by considering how concepts and
practices derived from the virtual world are manifested in real-world
performance genres and methodologies.
Networked culture is generating social changes. What they will be
in the long run, we don’t know. In Part III we saw the pivotal role
periodical print culture played in establishing the distinction between
the public sphere and the private sphere within bourgeois society; in
the overthrow of absolutism and the creation of nation-states, usually
with some type of democracy; and in transforming the audience’s
emotional response to dramatic characters. It is becoming
increasingly clear that as networked culture begins, it is likewise
presenting threats and changes to the established political, economic,
and cultural order, particularly due to its potential for expanded
democratic practices. Potential, however, does not equal actuality.
The governments of China, Iran, and elsewhere attempt to prevent or
impede dangers to their power by censoring, restricting, or even
shutting down their country’s internet, and sometimes even its phone
network; the U.S., U.K., and other governments had or have programs
to collect data on the personal communications of everyone in the
country. In fact, when it comes to information – both its content and its
ownership – the very concepts of public and private are now the
subject of fierce arguments and legal battles. Businesses, seeking
sales, extensively mine personal data; they also aggressively protect
their copyrights, sometimes even subverting the right to fair use. At the
same time, private property is challenged by the view that books,
music, and films are or should be publicly available for free and
without permission – a view some people hold unconsciously, others
take as permission for what is currently theft, and still others propose
as a fundamental principle based on a recognition of the importance of
information and culture in society.
Far less clear is how networked culture may alter two concepts: the
nature of knowledge and personhood. Both concepts directly affect
theatre and performance. As we observed at several points in this
book, arguments about truth have been wielded as a weapon against
theatre, whether to condemn it as a hotbed of falsity and sham, or
dismiss it as an empty distraction from wiser pursuits. Such
antitheatricality, we have noted, has even appeared within theatre.
Late twentieth-century “experimental” theatre might be either the last
gasp of the insistence that theatre justify its existence by becoming a
kind of laboratory, or the opening round in a new struggle to make
performance a fully legitimate part of global culture. It could be the
forge of performance methods that will become the theatrical norm
expressing a new consensus about knowledge and theatre’s relation
to it.
The concept of personhood, in turn, directly shapes the portrayal of
dramatic character, which in turn influences the stories theatres are
likely to tell. As we saw in Part II, psychological interiority was born
with print, and in Part III we described how periodical print culture
ripened that interiority as part of the public/private distinction. If that
distinction is now an area of conflict and change, the idea that a
character should reveal a private self must surely become dubious as
well. Some forms of theatre described in Part IV – such as those
which discard the traditional division between actor and audience in
favor of the participant, or abandon linear plot development for
episodes, pastiche, simultaneity, and/or associative connections –
make one wonder if such explorations in personhood have already
begun.
In an era of unceasing communications revolutions when our
everyday choices about how to communicate can have unexpected
long-term consequences, we can be sure that such explorations will
be ongoing. As we have seen throughout this book, changes in
communication practices affect theatre on fundamental levels; but
those changes are seldom immediate, and often lead in directions no
one could predict.
*
New theatres for revolutionary times, 1910–
1950
Bruce McConachie
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-16
This chapter begins with a focus on two major causes of change in
the theatre of the early twentieth century: the Great War and the
movies. Both fragmented Western bourgeois culture, animating some
theatre artists to demand radical change and leaving others to search
for new forms of aesthetic order. The war led to the Russian
Revolution in 1917, which had been preceded by socialist theatre and
avant-garde movements calling for opposition to the cultural status
quo. Following the Revolution, new models of political theatre from the
Soviet Union (which included most of the former Russian Empire)
proliferated in Europe, the U.S., India, and China. Film destabilized
conventional notions of the self and society and directly challenged
mainstream theatrical practice in the West. Theatre artists who
professed modernism, alarmed by both film culture and the war,
sought to transcend the fragmentations of Western culture through the
invocation of ancient myths and universalizing philosophies; some
playwrights in Japan adopted modernism as well.
War and the movies
The Great War (1914–1918) was a catastrophe for mainstream
Western culture. Most immediately, it wreaked unprecedented
devastation on lives, wealth, and established political power. The war
broke apart four major European empires – the German, Austro-
Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires – and left many new
nations – including Finland and Poland in northern Europe and
Hungary and Bulgaria further south – to struggle for independence
and national coherence in the 1920s and 1930s (see Figure 11.1). The
Great War was a direct cause of the Russian Revolution and civil war
(1917–1921), which led to the first anti-capitalist regime in modern
times. The upheavals of the Russian Revolution, especially when
joined with earlier revolutions in China (1911–1912) and Mexico (1910–
1921), animated widespread desire for radical change. Indirectly, the
1914–1918 war precipitated the decline of Western imperialism around
the world, contributed to the rise of European fascism in the 1920s,
and helped to cause the worldwide economic Depression of the 1930s.
In these and other ways, the Great War fractured Western bourgeois
culture and introduced new realities and possibilities undreamed of
before 1914.
Figure 11.1Political maps of Europe before (1914) and after (1922) the Great
War.

The war and its aftermath altered all of the major areas of theatrical
activity in the West. In political theatre, the Russian Revolution
undermined the deterministic side of Naturalism and sparked
widespread theatrical activism. The initial success of the Revolution
converted many avant-gardists in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere to
communism and they began to experiment with a variety of forms
and styles to move people to political action. Before 1914, all of the
significant avant-garde movements had been international, with artists
freely trading ideas and performances across borders. After the war,
the international characteristics of the avant-garde gradually
disappeared, as political differences splintered avant-garde networks.
By the mid-1930s, with Europe preparing for another war, the avant-
garde was dead.
The international popularity of silent films after the Great War
radically altered popular entertainments at circuses, world fairs, and
on variety stages – never more popular than in the decade before
1914 – and drove some out of business. All forms of live entertainment
declined after 1918, a trend accelerated by the arrival of the “talkies” in
1927. The telephone and phonograph, much more widespread in the
1920s than before, increased their challenges to print culture and
photography, which dominated theatrical representation before the
war. In addition to these older audiophonic media, radio listening
rapidly gained in popularity from the late 1920s through the 1930s,
despite the Depression. Among all media, however, it was the movies
that offered the most provocations to pre-1914 culture in the West. The
cultural fragmentations caused by the war and the popularity of film
animated radical theatre artists to question the older premises of
theatrical representation and it gave rise to a conservative movement
known as modernism, discussed in subsequent sections of this
chapter.
Powering some of the optimism about possibilities for revolutionary
change was electricity. Following inventions by Thomas Edison,
Nikola Tesla, and others in the late nineteenth century, economic and
political elites used electrical power to illuminate their businesses and
public buildings and to run their factories and theatres by 1910. In
Chapter 10, we noted that electric lights made possible more realistic
effects and a more private viewing experience for theatrical
audiences. But coal and gas continued to heat the homes and shops
and to illuminate the dwellings and streets of most Westerners. After
the war, the rapid electrification of cities in the West transformed the
everyday lives of many citizens. In addition to illumination, electricity
powered heating, hot water, and an increasing range of appliances,
from vacuum cleaners and irons to refrigerators and toasters, in the
homes of many urbanites by 1930. The power generated to run the
new phonographs and movies (initially shot and projected by hand-
cranking) was a part of the general electrification of Western culture.
Following France in 1895, the first public exhibition of a film in the
U.S. occurred at a New York vaudeville house in 1896. Soon
“nickelodeons” (so named because the entry fee was a nickel) sprang
up in major urban centers in the U.S. By 1914, most variety theatres
had integrated silent films into their entertainments, a trend that
undermined the presentation of live acts and eventually doomed the
vaudeville stage. Early French and U.S. film-makers borrowed
extensively from the theatre, taking variety acts, scenic conventions,
modes of storytelling, acting styles, and musical underscoring (played
by musicians during the screening) from the popular stage. French
film director George Méliès (1861–1938), for example, built a
proscenium stage at his film studio, equipped with the machinery and
two-dimensional scenery of a typical Parisian theatre, so that he could
provide the kinds of illusionistic pleasures in his films, such as A Trip
to the Moon (1902), that delighted popular theatrical audiences.
Director D.W. Griffith (1875–1948), who had largely failed as an actor
and playwright, brought with him a strong taste for melodramatic stage
scripts, conventional acting styles, and paternalistic control as a
director when he switched from live theatre to the moving picture
business in 1907. He based one of his most successful and notorious
films, The Birth of a Nation (1915), on earlier stage performances of
The Clansmen that celebrated the rise of the white-supremacist Ku
Klux Klan in the American South after the Civil War. Until 1915, most
theatre artists looked down on film as a lower-class entertainment of
little artistic worth. By the end of the Great War, however, when better
technology had led to a much wider range of shots, locations, and
editing possibilities and when mass distribution was attracting the
middle classes for feature-length films starring Charlie Chaplin (1889–
1977) and other international stars, the balance had shifted. From the
1920s onward, film had more of an influence on the stage than the
other way around.
As an extension of photography, film seemed to uphold an
“objective,” positivistic view of the world, even though the subject
matter of most films was clearly imagined and “subjective.” But
shooting and editing for film also cut up the perceived world into
various points of view; no moving picture could be reduced to a single
photograph, “objective” or not. As well, the pieced-together nature of
films, despite Hollywood editing techniques that suggested a
seamless flow of images, underlined the fragmented nature of human
perception. Sometimes, it seemed, people saw reality in close up,
while at other times, they perceived the world in long perspective or
even as a whirling nightmare; the movies heightened the suspicion
that reality might be inherently unstable. Because film was able to take
viewers from what appeared to be a clear-eyed view of the real in one
moment and into a dreamy vision the next, it largely erased the
objective/subjective dichotomy of photographic and audiophonic
perceptions prevalent in late print culture, without, however, providing
a synthesis of these different modes of understanding reality.
Nonetheless, by the mid-1920s, the largely unconscious effects of
the movies were less important for many Westerners than the
expectation that film offered a revolutionary potential for altering
modern life. It was clear to all that the movies had vastly increased
human agency in the age-old quest to effectively persuade others of
important values and ideas. During the 1920s, revolutionary
movements around the globe were using the new medium, along with
the theatre, to challenge the political and ideological status quo.
One result of the ubiquity of film after the war was to popularize
some of the innovations that avant-gardists had been pushing since
the 1890s. Many of the Symbolists and Expressionists had explored a
wide variety of locales in their productions, a fluid use of space
impossible to achieve in realist and Naturalist productions. Film could
easily take spectators into numerous places, and audiences began to
expect the same kinds of flexibility while watching a play on stage.
Appia, Craig, and others had anticipated filmic effects in their
suggestions that lighting instruments could be used to heighten an
actor’s presence, gain design flexibility, and speed playing time. Many
directors and designers in the 1920s, taking advantage of darkened
house lights, effectively turned follow-spots into cameras. Before film
scripts demonstrated the power of short scenes with little dialogue and
heightened action, playwrights Strindberg, Kaiser, and Blok had
already explored these possibilities.
Because film had aroused cultural awareness of a fragmented
world, its perceived effects challenged playwrights and directors after
1920 either to explore the fragments or to present a vision that might
unite them – or to attempt both. German Expressionism in the 1920s
largely focused on the shattered bodies and psyches left by the war,
although it also offered some believable utopian visions to heal them.
Even as the theatrical side of the movement was in decline, however,
the Expressionist films of Fritz Lang (1890–1976), especially Dr.
Mabuse (1922) and Metropolis (1927), and of other film directors, kept
Expressionist acting and design before the public. As we will see,
most of the politically oriented theatre artists under discussion in this
chapter struggled both to acknowledge the fragmented nature of
society and to suggest a unifying vision that might unite humankind.
Also influenced by filmic perceptions, the modernists adopted a
different position. Turning their backs on politics, they sought to
transcend a broken reality by invoking idealized truths and/or ancient
myths. In the process, they championed the apparent stability of print-
based insights against the fractured world suggested by film.
Revolutionary predecessors
As noted, three major revolutions rocked the bourgeois world of the
1910–1920 decade. In 1910, revolutionaries in Mexico ousted a corrupt
dictator with ties to U.S. imperialists, established a constitution in 1917
in the midst of a civil war, and continued to fight for radical change into
the 1920s. Revolution against European and Japanese imperialism
began in China in 1911 and won some limited reforms in 1912; it would
continue intermittently until the Communists were able to claim victory
in 1949. Led initially by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the Nationalist Party
fought primarily against Western-backed warlords during the first
decade of the revolution in an attempt to unify China under one
government. Secretly transported back to Russia by the Germans
during the Great War, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) helped to transform
an uprising against tsarist rule in Russia into the Communist
Revolution in 1917. By the early 1920s, Communists under Lenin and
others had consolidated their power in most of the former Russian
Empire and embarked on a campaign of political agitation and
upheaval in much of Europe and Asia that would last for the next 30
years. As we will see, this revolutionary decade spawned worldwide
theatrical developments.
Before 1910, however, there were already political and theatrical
signs of the radical challenges that might lie ahead. Since the 1890s,
many Europeans believing in socialism had warned that the
increasing disparities in power and wealth between capitalists and
workers could lead to revolution. Socialists pointed out that market
forces caused frequent depressions and argued that unimpeded
capitalism would lead to long-term misery for most of the population.
By 1890, socialist political parties with a base in the working class were
electing representatives in all industrial countries that had a modicum
of democracy. Socialists throughout the world drew on Marx’s
arguments about the inherent class conflict between workers and
capitalists, but often differed on the question of revolution. Most
argued that political and economic reform might alter the capitalist
system to produce more economic justice, while a minority believed
that only violent revolution could truly transform the system.
 As we noted in Chapter 9, before the Russian Revolution most
socialist playwrights and audiences gravitated to Naturalism. (Lenin’s
wife later proclaimed Hauptmann’s The Weavers, about a worker
rebellion, one of her favorite plays.) For some socialists concerned to
effect change, however, a major problem with Naturalism was its
deterministic point of view. Naturalism could examine the brutalities of
capitalism with photo-like acumen, but its basis in Social Darwinism
and positivism suggested that the masses, once degraded by heredity
and their social-economic environment, rarely roused themselves
from their situation to take control of their lives. Or, if they started a
revolt, the authorities would quickly intervene to restore order, as
related by Hauptmann in his historically based play. Most socialists
continued to write Naturalist dramas that exposed the problems of
capitalism, but there was a tension between their pessimistic plays
and their hopeful politics. Later socialists and communists, such as
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin Piscator, and Bertolt Brecht, would reject
Naturalism for this reason.
George Bernard Shaw’s (1856–1950) response to the deterministic
tendencies of Naturalism made him the most outspoken socialist
playwright of the 1890–1914 period. Shaw became a socialist in 1882
and soon after joined the Fabian Society, a group of British journalists,
professionals, and others who campaigned to end capitalist
oppression by gradualist, political means. Shaw’s first plays in the
1890s carried Fabianism into the London theatre by attacking slum-
landlordism, capitalist profits from prostitution, and the foolishness of
armies and war.
In Man and Superman and Major Barbara (both performed in 1905),
Shaw dramatized a political philosophy that joined socialism to
vitalism, the belief in a “life force” that could make it possible for
people to control evolution. With these plays, Shaw discarded the
Social Darwinist side of Naturalism to emphasize that human agency
could work through evolution to effect progressive change. In Major
Barbara, Shaw’s audience learned that social conscience without
economic power is useless and, finally, unethical (Figure 11.2).
Further, Man and Superman demonstrated that all the political power
in the world cannot alter material reality unless it works in conjunction
with evolution. Shaw’s Fabian vitalism, his conjuring of a life force that
could animate individuals to push humanity toward evolutionary
progress, trumped the pessimistic conclusions that many Social
Darwinists predicted for humankind. (Shaw’s interest in vitalism and
evolution also led him to embrace eugenics, the attempt to shape the
future of humankind by manipulating the gene pool.) While Shaw’s
philosophy and the plays that embodied it may no longer seem
politically relevant, Fabian vitalism did change political discourse in
England before 1914. Shaw’s efforts helped to lay the groundwork for
the eventual political triumph of the Labour Party after the Second
World War and its commitment to democratic socialism in Great
Britain. His comedies from this period continue to startle playgoers
with their combative debates and acute social analyses.

Figure 11.2Photograph from the 1905 production of Shaw's Major Barbara at the
Royal Court Theatre, London. Louis Calvert played Undershaft and Granville
Barker (with drum), who also directed, performed Cusins. The photograph
appeared with others from this production in the Illustrated Sporting and
Dramatic News (January 20, 1906), one of several news magazines in Europe
and the U.S. after 1900 that regularly ran photographs of current events.

In addition to the socialists, several second-generation avant-garde

movements also attacked bourgeois society, warned of possible
chaos to come, and proposed utopian alternatives to conventional,
middle-class life. As Peter Bürger (a celebrated theorist of the avant-
garde) insists, avant-garde artists could not break their ties to the
dominant culture until they attacked “the status of art in bourgeois
society” (Bürger 1984: 49). Accordingly, second-generation avant-
garde movements stopped treating “the arts” as a separate arena of
practice within bourgeois society and began to reconfigure their
artistic work as the genuine basis for a utopian society. Instead of
producing individual works that might (or might not) have some limited
effects on the dominant culture, as the Naturalists and Symbolists had
done, avant-gardists started to use their own theatres to explore the
possibilities of new modes of experience and social organization. We
saw this change in some of the productions of the German
Expressionists after the war. The Futurists and Dadaists took the first
tentative steps toward realizing this challenge.

Most of these second-generation movements also

undercut the representational basis of the theatre. As noted in Chapter
10, the shared assumption that the theatre should somehow imitate
and represent “reality” (whatever that might be) had united many
professional artists in mainstream theatre with the early avant-garde,
allowing them to incorporate many avant-garde experiments into their
commercial productions. As early as 1896, however, one avant-garde
production had already attacked the mimetic basis of the stage – Ubu
Roi (King Ubu), by Alfred Jarry. The play satirized a bourgeois anti-
hero as a gross, ambitious, and murderous boob; Ubu simply
slaughters others for pleasure and power. Jarry combined characters
and situations from Macbeth with conventions from rural French
puppet theatre (where he had worked), put them on the stage of the
Théâtre de l’Oeuvre with deliberately crude and highly stylized
scenery, and instructed his actors to perform mechanically, like
marionettes (Figure 11.3). As this description suggests, Ubu did not fit
within any of the representational commercial or avant-garde
movements of the day; it mocked realism and Naturalism and avoided
the principles and beliefs of Symbolism and Aestheticism. Instead of
representing reality, the production of Ubu was forthrightly
presentational; spectators always knew they were in a theatre
watching actors present a (strange and disturbing) piece of fiction.
Despite the production’s cancellation after only two performances,
Ubu gained a kind of mythic notoriety for shocking the bourgeoisie and
causing a riot that fed the imaginations of second-generation avant-
gardists through the 1920s. The facts of its production, however,
contradict the myth. According to the evidence, there were some
calculated confrontations of support and opposition among the invited
intelligentsia at the preview performance. Many of these spectators
had read previously published excerpts of the play and planned to
demonstrate, as had vocal claques at other Parisian performances
throughout the century. But there was no riot among a scandalized
bourgeoisie. Such theatregoers did attend the official opening on the
second night and some may have been shocked, but the performance
passed without incident. Why the myth of scandal and riot? Part of it
was apparently the result of Jarry’s self-promotion, but its perpetuation
also stems from the need for later avant-garde artists and their allies
to create an us/them situation of persecuted Romantic artists vs. a
foolish and angry bourgeoisie. (Unfortunately, most historical accounts
of Ubu have continued to recount this myth.) More important in the
production of Ubu, however, was its radical break with the
representational basis of nearly all theatre in the 1890s.
Figure 11.3Alfred Jarry's lithographed program for the 1896 Paris premiere of his
play Ubu Roi (King Ubu), at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, staged by Aurélien Lugné-
Poe. It was published by the journal La Critique, with other programs for the
theatre's season. The corrupt Ubu carries the "pshitt sword" he refers to in the
play and a bag of money. The burning house probably depicts the home of one
of Ubu's subjects who did not pay his taxes.

The Spencer Museum of Art, Museum purchase: Letha Churchill

Walker Memorial Art Fund, 1990.0085.

Perhaps hoping for similar alleged shock effects, Filippo

Marinetti (1876–1944) began Futurism in Italy with the publication of
“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in 1909. The manifesto
damned the art of the past, including museums, concert halls, and
conventional theatre, and, in a slap at Symbolism, called for artistic
forms that would exalt the speed and dynamism of the machine age.
Earlier than other avant-garde artists, Marinetti embraced the
revolutionary potential of film to transform the theatre. More
manifestos followed, and soon Marinetti was producing “Futurist
evenings” in large auditoriums that included lectures, poetry readings,
art displays, and theatrical skits. Some skits were little more than
conventional variety sketches, but others explored themes and
conflicts that were anti-positivist, alogical, and abstract, as well as
occasionally thrilling and visionary. Marinetti also experimented with
performer–spectator dynamics, usually in an attempt to outrage
bourgeois audiences. As a presentational trickster, Marinetti never let
his audience forget that they were watching a performance that rarely
attempted to represent “reality.” Because Marinetti glorified warfare as
a necessary source of modern dynamism, Futurism declined in Italy
with the mounting devastations of the Great War.
Nonetheless, the utopian possibilities of second-generation avant-
gardism flourished after 1914. Interest in the potential of Futurism to
inspire a machine-age heaven-on-earth blossomed in Russia,
perhaps because the Russian Empire, one of the most backward
areas of Europe, was in need of vast transformation. The Russian
Futurists, like their Italian counterparts, scoffed at the idealizing
mysticism of the Symbolists and looked to the machine and to film as
engines for utopian change. Soon after the 1917 Revolution, Vladimir
Mayakovsky (1893–1930), leader of Futurism in Russia, aligned the
movement with communism and worked to create effective
propaganda for the struggling regime. With Meyerhold, Mayakovsky
co-directed his play Mystery-Bouffe (1918), which depicts the
establishment of a futurist paradise. As we will see, this production
helped to move Meyerhold away from Aestheticism and toward his
eventual embrace of Constructivism, the major avant-garde
movement to emerge from the Russian Revolution.

Artist-refugees, most of them French, initiated Dada in a

cabaret in neutral Zurich in Switzerland during the Great War. The
Dadaists (who apparently chose their name randomly by opening a
dictionary) rejected the rationality that they believed had led to war.
Partly inspired by the myth of Ubu Roi, as well as by Marinetti’s
Futurist experiments, the Dadaists played with satire and anarchy in
their cabaret performances. Unlike the Futurists, however, the
Dadaists leavened their oppositional anger against bourgeois art with
greater experimentation and a wider range of playful visions. Several
Dadaist musicians included a variety of everyday sounds in their
compositions, for example. Moving beyond the Futurists, the Dadaists
also questioned the causal connections between sensations and
behaviors that provided the basis for representational theatre. During
and after the war, some of the Zurich Dadaists attempted to live
according to the notions of chance, fragmentation, and simultaneity
that they were exploring in their art.
Theatricalizing the Russian Revolution
The victory of communism in Russia in 1921 sharply altered the
dynamics of political theatre in the West. Only later would democratic
socialists discover that the Russian Communist Party generally had
little use for democracy and would soon institute many forms of
political oppression. In the afterglow of the Revolution, however, the
short-term sacrifice of some democratic rights seemed to many
European socialists a small price to pay for the opportunity to
transform an entire economy and society. Despite the setbacks
caused by the Great War, eager socialists renewed revolutionary
action in Eastern and Central Europe and nearly toppled some
postwar liberal regimes, including the fragile German state opposed
by some of the radical Expressionists. Although liberal governments
were soon established in the nations of the former German and
Austro-Hungarian empires, a new, revolutionary form of Russian
theatre soon spread from the Soviet Union to socialists around the
world.
To teach peasants and workers the basics of communism, the
Communists organized Blue Blouse troupes, named for the color of
workers’ shirts, and fostered their establishment around the country. A
collection of short skits legitimating the radical changes brought by the
Revolution, many of these Blue Blouse revues were called “living
newspapers”; through speech, music, gestures, and spectacle, their
primary aim was to instruct the many Russians who could not read. In
style and ideology, the Blue Blouse revues were anti-capitalist and
anti-Naturalist. Through presentational skits that directly
acknowledged the presence of the audience, they asserted that
workers and peasants could take control of their lives and effect
radical change. Many Russian vaudeville performers, mostly
unemployed since the war and Revolution, joined the Communist
Party to write sketches and participate in the Blue Blouse movement.
By 1927, more than five thousand Blue Blouse troupes were active in
the Soviet Union.
 Inspiring some of the Blue Blouse innovations was the
work of avant-garde artist Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold had
journeyed from Naturalism to Symbolism and into Retrospectivism by
1907. From 1907 to 1917, Meyerhold had directed operas, plays, and
entertainments at the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg, while also
working under a pseudonym to stage more than twenty experimental
pieces in little theatres, private apartments, and cabarets around the
city. By 1917, he had also been teaching regularly and directing short
films. Meyerhold welcomed the Revolution and led members from
several factions of the Russian avant-garde into active collaboration
with the Communists. While holding several leadership positions in
the new government, Meyerhold also continued his theatrical
experiments, which included a system of actor training known as
biomechanics and the elaboration of Constructivism, the final avant-
garde movement of his career.
Partly a synthesis of Retrospectivism and Futurism,
Constructivism sought to energize audiences with actors and
designs that demonstrated how human beings could use their bodies
and machines to produce engaging art and a more productive life.
Meyerhold collaborated with Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) on a
Constructivist set for The Magnificent Cuckold (1922), for instance,
that used platforms, ramps, slides, ladders, and three moving wheels
to suggest a mill that had been transformed into a huge mechanical
toy (Figure 11.4). As the actors performed, the wheels of the mill
turned to complement their timing. In effect, the production fused the
clowning of Retrospectivism with the mechanical rhythms of Futurism.
During the 1920s, Meyerhold applied his presentational Constructivist
style to several plays that advocated Communist propaganda, to
Mayakovsky’s grotesque Futurist dramas, and to a range of Russian
classics. In one scene of his Constructivist production of Gogol’s The
Inspector General in 1926, 15 officials popped out of 15 doors around
the stage to offer a bribe to the man they took for an inspector.
As these examples suggest, Meyerhold drew direct inspiration from
filmic techniques. “Let us carry through the ‘cinefication’ of the theatre,
let us equip the theatre with all the technical refinements of the
cinema,” he wrote in 1930 (Meyerhold 1969: 254). His work also
influenced the great Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–
1948), best known for his Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ivan the
Terrible (1944). Eisenstein, a student of Meyerhold’s, claimed that he
learned the filmic technique of montage from Meyerhold’s inventive
sequencing of stage actions for his productions.
Increasingly out of favor with Joseph Stalin (who ruled the Soviet
Union from 1924 until his death in 1953) and tethered by the dictates of
socialist realism, an official policy that required artists to celebrate
the victories of the Communist state in a mode of heroic realism,
Meyerhold lost his theatre in 1938. In retrospect, it is clear that Lenin,
Stalin, and other Communist leaders needed Meyerhold and the
Russian avant-garde in the early 1920s to stabilize their regime
internally and to give it credibility and influence outside Russia,
especially since the initial foreign policy of the Soviets was to foment
international revolution. After the mid-1920s, however, when hopes for
worldwide revolution had dimmed, Stalin and his bureaucrats began
tightening the funding and freedoms of the avant-garde. They
squeezed out and eventually executed Meyerhold and others who
would not conform to the narrow political and aesthetic constraints of
socialist realism. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the 1956 “thaw” in the
Cold War, however, the ideas and images of Meyerhold’s
Constructivist theatre and his biomechanical training for actors began
to emerge. They influenced theatrical practice throughout the world,
especially in England, Germany, and Eastern Europe.
Figure 11.4Lyubov Popova's Constructivist set for Meyerhold's 1922 production
of The Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand Crommelynck. The ramps and
machinery provided a practical playground for biomechanical acting.

© Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies, London.

Case Study Lenin's Taylorism and Meyerhold's
biomechanics
Bruce McConachie
History abounds in ironies. One of the more fascinating is the fact
that the Russian Communists, soon after attaining power in the early
1920s, borrowed extensively from the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor
(1856–1915). Taylor, the American originator of “scientific
management,” had helped to make U.S. capitalism more efficient and
profitable. Although the Communists despised capitalism, they also
realized that they had to adopt systematic management techniques as
well as new technologies if they were to pull the Soviet Union out of its
traditional Russian backwardness and into the twentieth century.
Lenin had read essays about Taylorism, as Taylor’s principles had
come to be called, and he was impressed by Russian engineers who
had studied some of Taylor’s publications, including The Principles of
Scientific Management (1911). A few Communist engineers had also
witnessed the wonders of Henry Ford’s assembly-line manufacturing
and believed, as did many Americans and Russians, that Ford and
similar modern industrialists had simply translated Taylor’s “time-and-
motion” principles into industrial practice.
Soon after the Revolution, Lenin spoke publicly about the
transformational possibilities of Taylorism. His 1918 address, one of
several that invoked Taylorism as a light for the future, encapsulated
several of the prominent features of “scientific management” that
Meyerhold would soon adopt to train his actors. “The Taylor system,”
said Lenin,
is a combination of the subtle brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a
number of its greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing
mechanical motions during work. The elimination of superfluous and
awkward motions, the working out of correct methods of work, the
introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet
Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements
of science and technology in this field. . . . We must organize in Russia
the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out
and adapt it to our purposes.
 (Hughes 1989: 256)

Lenin correctly understood that Taylor had observed and tested the
physical motions of workers in factories to discover how they might
streamline their tasks, that Taylor believed there was one best way to
perform all factory jobs and all workers should conform to that ideal,
and, finally, that a top-down approach – from knowledgeable
managers to compliant workers – was the correct way to increase
efficient production. Lenin surely knew that Taylorism had also
encountered stiff resistance from U.S. workers, but he apparently
believed that the benefits to be gained for all Soviet citizens
outweighed the problem of the loss of worker control on the factory
floor.
Soon after Lenin’s early death in 1924, Joseph Stalin celebrated the
synthesis of American Taylorism and Russian energy as the primary
legacy of their fallen leader: “American efficiency is that indomitable
force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles . . . and without
which serious constructive work is inconceivable. . . . The combination
of the Russian Revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the
essence of Leninism” (Hughes 1989: 251). Needless to say, such
proclamations were an embarrassment to both the Russians and the
Americans during the Cold War a few decades later, when neither side
wanted to admit that it had accepted or given aid to its enemy.
Although other efficiency experts in the U.S. were already improving
on Taylor’s principles by 1924, Taylorism would help to transform
industrial production in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.
Under Meyerhold’s leadership, Taylorism would also help to
transform a significant segment of post-revolutionary theatre in the
new Communist nation. Soon after the October Revolution of 1917,
Meyerhold had been the first major theatre artist to meet with the
Communists to discuss the future of theatre and culture in the new
nation; in contrast, most of his colleagues at the Imperial Theatres
were horrified by the Revolution. Meyerhold severed his links with
those artists, managed to mount significant productions during the
difficult days of 1918, and staged theatricals for the Red Army in the
midst of civil war. By 1920, when the regime summoned him from St.
Petersburg to Moscow, Meyerhold was one of the most accomplished
and politically radical theatre artists in the new Soviet Union. He was
also ready to reimagine and rebuild Russian theatre practice in
accordance with the revolutionary ideas of Lenin.
Whether Meyerhold fully shared Lenin’s faith in the revolutionary
possibilities of Taylorism for training actors cannot be known. But it is
clear that he took Lenin’s advice to “adapt” much of Taylor’s system
when he began workshops for his company in 1921. In addition to the
kinds of exercises Meyerhold had used before to train young actors,
he required all of his performers to participate in a one-hour activity
called biomechanics. Although the term was new, the notion that
actors should seek to fuse the biology of their bodies with the motions
of machinery was straight out of Taylorism. The term “biomechanics”
also included a nod to the psychology of Ivan Pavlov, who had
discovered that animals could be trained to behave in certain ways
through positive conditioning. Introducing his ideas to the public in
1922, Meyerhold directly compared biomechanics to the “scientific”
principles of Taylor. He also stated:

In the past the actor has always conformed to the society for which his
art was intended. In future, the actor must go even further in relating his
technique to the industrial situation. For he will be working in a society
where labor is no longer regarded as a curse, but as a joyful vital
necessity. In these conditions of ideal labor, art clearly requires a new
foundation. . . . Art should be based on scientific principles; the entire
creative act should be a conscious process. The art of the actor consists
in organizing his material; that is, in his capacity to utilize correctly his
body’s means of expression.
(Braun 1995: 172–3)

By invoking conformity, industry, the joy of labor, a new foundation,

scientific principles, and a correct way of movement, Meyerhold knew
he was speaking a Taylorist discourse that would please the new
Soviet intelligentsia.
Several of Meyerhold’s workshop exercises practiced the Taylorism
that he preached. Underlying Meyerhold’s concept of an “acting
cycle,” for example, was Taylor’s notion of a “working cycle.” Following
Taylor’s language, Meyerhold instructed his actors to think in terms of
three “invariable stages” (Braun 1995: 174) when they performed a
task on stage – intention, realization, and reaction. Meyerhold
developed what he called “études” to give his actors practice in
working through a complete acting cycle. In his “Shooting a Bow”
étude, for example, the actor pantomimes a series of rhythmic
movements that suggest running toward a quarry, shooting an
imaginary arrow, and celebrating the kill. The exercise involves a
thorough workout of the pursuit of an “intention,” the various muscular
tensions involved in its “realization,” and the release (or “reaction”) the
actor feels when the task is complete. Central to this kind of work is
the actor’s ability to manipulate him/herself as a physical object, the
same kind of control that Taylor required of workers under his
supervision (see Figure 11.5). The études, like several other of
Meyerhold’s physical exercises, trained actors in the efficient use of
their bodies.

Figure 11.5The “meat mincer” setting, designed by Varvara Stepanova, for

Meyerhold's 1922 production of The Death of Tarelkin, by Alexander Kobylin.
Stepanova referred to her set pieces as “acting instruments,” designed to enable
vigorous biomechanical performance.

© University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

On the other hand, Meyerhold gave his actors much more freedom
than Taylor allowed his factory workers. As a teacher and director,
Meyerhold sometimes gave direct orders to students and actors, but
he preferred to encourage their own decision-making. Knowing they
had to make hundreds of choices to put together a performance, he
praised the brains of his students and actors as well as their bodies.
Meyerhold also understood that an actor’s movements invariably
triggered emotional states within the performer. In contrast, Taylor had
neglected the emotional side of physical labor, a problem that
sometimes led him to misunderstand worker complaints.
As Meyerhold developed biomechanics during the 1920s, he
devoted more attention to the complex dynamics linking physical
activity to emotional stimulus and response. In 1934, when asked
about his training under Meyerhold, Russian actor Igor Ilinsky (1901–
1987) emphasized the comprehensive nature of biomechanics:
People think that essentially biomechanical acting is rather like
acrobatics. . . . But not many realize that the biomechanical system of
acting, starting from a series of devices designed to develop the ability to
control one’s body within the stage space in the most advantageous
way, leads on to the most complex questions of acting technique. . . . The
emotional state of the actor, his temperament, his excitability, the
emotional sympathy between the actor as artist and the imaginative
processes of the character he is performing – all these are fundamental
elements in the complex system of biomechanics.
(Braun 1995: 176–7)

By 1930, Meyerhold had expanded biomechanics to include more

freedom for his actors and a firmer link to their emotional lives on
stage.
Biomechanics had also proven its practical applicability. One of
Meyerhold’s first successes with his biomechanically trained actors
was The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). In Fernand Crommelynck’s
(1886–1970) tragi-farce, a village miller, Bruno, is infatuated with his
lovely young wife, Stella, but so doubtful of his own sexual appeal that
he believes Stella must have a lover. So he forces her to sleep with
every man in the village to discover who the lover is. Maria Babanova
(1900–1983), a small, energetic actor, played Stella as a series of
related character types. According to one eyewitness report,
[Babanova’s] performance is based on rhythms, precise and economical
like a construction . . . . The role develops, strengthens, matures without
restraint – violently, yet according to plan. One moment, she is talking
innocently to a little bird, the next she is a grown-up woman, delighting in
the return of her husband; in her passion and devotions, she is tortured
by his jealousy. And now she is being attacked by a mob of blue-clad
men, furiously fending them off with a hurricane of resounding blows.
(Braun 1995: 182)

Although this report is not precisely worded, it is clear that Babanova

moved quickly among several character types, dropping one to
embody another, often without transition. Igor Ilinsky, quoted above on
biomechanics, also deployed several types to depict Bruno. He even
undercut his most prominent characterization of the miller with
clowning. As a fellow actor stated,

Bruno . . . stood before the audience, his face pale and motionless, and
with unvarying intonation, a monotonous declamatory style, and identical
sweeping gestures he uttered his grandiloquent monologues. But at the
same time this Bruno was being ridiculed by the actor performing
acrobatic stunts at the most impassioned moments of his speeches,
belching, and comically rolling his eyes whilst enduring the most
dramatic anguish.
(Braun 1995: 183–4)

By all reports, the workers who enjoyed The Magnanimous Cuckold

often burst into raucous laughter. Avoiding psychological
characterization, Meyerhold’s use of biomechanics with his actors
helped them to induce a more direct and contagious response from
his audience.
By training his actors to physicalize social types for the stage
through biomechanics, Meyerhold wanted to call attention to the kinds
of physical and social transformations necessary to build the new
Soviet Union. From his other writings, it is clear that Meyerhold
conceived of spectators as similar to a group of filmgoers whose
physical responses to his productions would help to transform the new
nation. For Meyerhold, these were not Hollywood consumers, as
movie audiences would later become, but self-conscious viewers
aware, like him, of the construction of a film and its potential
meanings. Rather than creating an illusion on the stage, Meyerhold
sought to invent a kind of carnival in the entire auditorium, and he
often had his actors breaking the illusion of the fourth wall or even
running through the playhouse to engage spectators directly. During
the 1920s, Meyerhold believed that his theatre could help to move
Russia toward a communist utopia by providing new social models
trained and energized with physical efficiency. Ironically, he drew on
the work of an American capitalist to do it.
Key references
Banta, M. (1993) Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen,
and Ford, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Braun, E. (1995) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, Iowa City, IA:
University of Iowa Press.
Hughes, T. (1989) American Genesis: A Century of Invention and
Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, New York: Viking.
Leach, R. (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Meyerhold, V. (1969) Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. and ed. E. Braun,
New York: Hill and Wang.
Revolutionary theatres West and East
As we have seen, the Russian Revolution transformed aspects of
German Expressionism. The failure of postwar revolutionaries in
Germany to establish a communist state, however, led to the rapid
decline of theatrical Expressionism and to a counter-reaction. In the
mid-1920s, German socialists began experimenting with more
dispassionate means of inducing audiences to alter their society.
When in 1927 a Russian Blue Blouse company visited Germany,
German troupes had been performing the Russian-inspired revues for
several years. At Berlin’s Volksbühne (People’s Theatre), director
Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) expanded on the techniques of the Blue
Blouse troupes to teach straightforward lessons about socialism that
emphasized that the working class could exercise power. Piscator
used situations of class conflict, film clips of historical scenes, and a
panoply of on-stage technological devices to create presentational
history lessons in socialism. Piscator termed his plays documentary
“montages,” in recognition of his debt to the artistry of film.

Dramatist and director Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) also

worked in film as well as the theatre. Influenced by his experience as a
medical orderly in the Great War and by the failure of Expressionist
utopianism in Germany, Brecht gained commercial success with his
cynical The Threepenny Opera in 1927 and then turned his back on
bourgeois theatre to embrace communist politics in 1928. Convinced
that German communists needed to discipline themselves for the long
fight against capitalism, Brecht wrote a series of presentational
“learning plays” in the early 1930s before fleeing the rise of Nazi power
in 1933. In exile in Scandinavia and the United States until 1947,
Brecht expanded his vision of what he called his “epic theatre” to tell
historical and allegorical tales that encouraged spectators to look at
the present world of capitalism and fascism from the point of view of a
future communist utopia. Aware firsthand of the persuasive charisma
of politicians, the dangerous emotions of nationalism, and the callous
manipulations of the economically powerful, Brecht sought to educate,
entertain, and empower his audiences. Several of the plays he wrote
while in exile – which often mixed representational scenes with
presentational performance modes – have been celebrated as
masterpieces of the twentieth-century stage, including The Life of
Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of
Setzuan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (all four written 1937–1945;
first produced 1941–1948).

In addition to playwriting, Brecht’s epic theatre forged

several innovations in production and performance. To prepare his
spectators to accept his Marxist understanding of the economic
circumstances of the twentieth century, Brecht generally wanted them
to view the actions of his main characters as odd and unusual. Brecht
interrupted the story of The Good Person of Setzuan, for example,
with songs and poetry to encourage his audience to perceive the
strange circumstances of Shen Te, the good prostitute of the title, who
is forced to invent an evil male cousin (Shui Ta) to save her from the
consequences of her desire to love others and share her wealth. As
the play points out in several ways, acts of goodness under capitalism
can only lead good people into economic ruin. Brecht called his
technique Verfremdungseffekt [fehr-FREHM-dungs-eh-fehkt], a term
he coined to indicate his interest in arousing audience curiosity about
his characters and their situations for the purpose of revolutionary
change. Sometimes mistranslated as “alienation effect,”
Verfremdungseffekt is better understood as the effect of making
something on stage “strange” or “distant,” so that it arouses audience
interest and curiosity. Brecht meant the term to stand as the German
translation of a Russian word used by the aesthetician Victor
Shklovsky to describe the Russian director’s similar interest in making
stage events “strange” to spark audience interest.
 In addition to using music and poetry to comment on
character actions in his plots, Brecht usually deployed
metatheatricality (explored in Chapter 5) to keep his spectators aware
of the inherent doubleness of all actor/characters on his stage. In
Good Person, for instance, the audience always knows that Shen Te
and Shui Ta are the same person, even though that insight is not
available to the other characters in the drama. Brecht also instructed
his actors to emphasize the social position rather than the inner
psychology of their characters, so that spectators could better
understand how economic circumstances shaped their actions. In
keeping with this idea, he asked his actors to underline the difficult
kinds of social and economic choices their characters must make,
which he understood as a part of the actors’ gestus [GHE-stoos], a
term which refers both to the individual gestures made by an actor and
to the general movement of all of the actors on stage that embody
social attitudes and relationships. At one point in Good Person, Shen
Te must decide whether to marry for love or to transform herself into
her businessman cousin so that he can call off the wedding. Brecht
has the actor playing Shen Te use gestures to weigh both possibilities;
she finally adopts the mask of Shui Ta, the businessman, who abruptly
cancels the wedding to avoid economic calamity. In his comments
about how to stage Good Person and other of his plays, Brecht urged
directors to pay close attention to the groupings of his actor/characters
so that the audience could read the economic relations among them
from the stage picture. Overall, Brecht sought to induce his audiences
to respond rationally rather than emotionally to productions of his
plays. Our second case study at the end of this section examines
Brecht’s understanding of empathy and emotions.
Other radical theatres flourished in France in the wake of the
Russian Revolution. Russian Blue Blouse troupes traveled to France
in the 1920s and helped to turn Surrealism, the last major European
avant-garde movement of the interwar years, toward communism.
André Breton (1896–1966) and other Parisians had been
experimenting with “automatic writing,” in the belief that chance,
spontaneity, and the unconscious might lead a writer into a dreamlike
state in which he or she could discover the source of aesthetic truth.
For a short time, a group of French Dadaists returning from Zurich
joined Breton and his circle, but in 1924 Breton issued a manifesto
proclaiming his allegiance to “Surrealism,” which isolated the Dada
anarchists from the psychoanalytic aims of Breton’s followers. Breton
took the new name from Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), who had
subtitled his fanciful 1903 play, The Breasts of Tiresias, a “drame
surrealiste.” Although the 1924 manifesto was heavily indebted to
Freud and mostly apolitical, Breton’s next manifesto in 1929 embraced
communism. Suspicious of theatre and eager to make Surrealism
more militant, Breton denounced many former colleagues after this
manifesto, including all of those who wished to use Surrealism on
stage. Breton had appointed Antonin Artaud (1896–1949) his first
director of research for Surrealism in 1924, but then kicked him out of
his coterie two years later. In response, Artaud and others staged
Surrealistic productions in a space they named the Théâtre Alfred
Jarry. (Artaud had swallowed the myth of Ubu and hoped to outrage
bourgeois spectators.) He wrote manifestos and struggled to start new
theatres until psychiatrists institutionalized him for insanity in 1937.
Despite his mental problems, Artaud’s manifestos, published in 1938
as The Theatre and Its Double, gained substantial influence among
other theatre avant-gardists after his death in 1949. Writing in the
tradition of Rousseau, who believed that civilization had corrupted
humankind, Artaud argued for a theatre that would return modern
humans to primitive mysteries through their bodies. He urged theatre
artists to reject the dramatic masterpieces of the Western tradition – in
fact, to throw out all text-based theatre – and embrace performances
involving music, dance, and spectacle. Artaud conjured what he called
a Theatre of Cruelty, a kind of production that could unite actors and
audiences in a collective purgation of their rational restraints and
individual freedoms. Critics have noted similarities between his
Theatre of Cruelty and the fascist rallies that were occurring in France
and the rest of Europe in the 1930s. Although The Theatre and Its
Double had little influence on theatrical practice during Artaud’s life,
avant-garde theatre artists unfamiliar with Artaud’s attraction to
fascism would be inspired by his visions in the 1960s and 1970s, as we
will see in Chapter 13.
Breton broke with Artaud over the theatre, but he embraced the
revolutionary potential of film for Surrealism. Indeed, Surrealists
Salvador Dali (1904–1989) and Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) had already
made Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) in 1928, on the eve of
Breton’s second manifesto. One unforgettable sequence early in this
influential film juxtaposes the apparent slicing of a human eyeball by a
razor together with the similar “slicing” of an image of a round moon by
a cloud passing in front of it. Breton and his followers believed that
such dream-like filmic experiences could help them to accomplish
their psychoanalytic and social goals. By the mid-1930s, several
French Surrealists were working again in the theatre as well as film.
Socialist Jean Cocteau (1892–1963), for example, directed seven
feature films in addition to his copious work as a playwright and
director for the stage.
Socialism and communism gained many theatrical adherents
among English-speaking artists and spectators as well. In Great
Britain, Canada, Australia, and the U.S., amateur workers’ theatre
groups performed Blue Blouse-like revues in union halls and at factory
strikes. Called agit-prop plays – short for agitation and propaganda –
these short pieces generally involved stereotypical characters and a
chorus of workers in class-conflict situations. Relying on bold
gestures, mass chants, evocative tableaux, and emblematic props and
costuming, agit-prop performances helped workers to organize
politically and motivated their economic demands. Amateur agit-prop
theatre proliferated during the early years of the Great Depression.

In addition to amateur theatre, international communism

influenced many left-wing theatre artists and groups after 1920. In
Ireland, Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) wrote socialist plays for production
at the Abbey Theatre. His Dublin trilogy, The Shadow of a Gunman,
Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars (1923–1926),
presents incidents in the Irish fight for independence from the anti-
heroic view of people living in the Dublin slums. Even in the U.S., there
were a few socialist plays, such as John Howard Lawson’s (1895–
1977) Processional (1925) and Internationale (1928), which departed
from the generally conservative politics of the country in the 1920s.
Socialist hopes also shaped some of the many productions of the
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the United States. Under President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the government organized
and funded the FTP in 1935 to create jobs for out-of-work theatre
professionals during the Depression. FTP “living newspapers,” which
derived from the Blue Blouse form and dramatized such social and
economic problems as housing, agriculture, and electrical power
through large-cast shows, were among the organization’s most
distinctive productions (Figure 11.6). However, the U.S. Congress,
fearing the influence of communism in the nation, shut down the FTP
in 1939.
Figure 11.6Image from Triple-A Plowed Under, a 1936 “living newspaper”
production by the U.S. Federal Theatre Project about the Agricultural
Adjustment Act.

From Mordecai Gorelik, New Theatres for Old, (tenth printing,

Samuel French, 1952).
Revolutionary theatres emerged in those Latin American countries
that would allow them following the Mexican Revolution. Several leftist
theatres and avant-garde groups began performing in Mexico City
after the Constitution of 1917. Enthusiastic Mexican revolutionaries
mounted huge outdoor performances, primarily colorful pantomimes
with music, to celebrate the nation’s Aztec roots and its new
independence from U.S. and European imperialism. Mexicans
modeled some of their later performances on The Storming of the
Winter Palace, the dramatic re-creation of a crucial episode during the
Russian Revolution enacted by nearly a thousand workers in St.
Petersburg in 1920 to celebrate the triumph of the people. Many other
festivals, however, fused Mexican festive traditions with leftist politics.
Influenced by Piscator’s work in Germany, Mexican dramatist Juan
Bustillo Oro’s (1904–1989) Masses put the audience in the midst of
political rallies and strikes with film clips and loudspeakers to tell the
story of a corrupt revolutionary leader’s fall from power. In Argentina,
different groups of theatre artists debated the merits of European-
inspired political theatre in journal articles and stage productions
during the 1930s. One theatre collective in Buenos Aires, the People’s
Theatre, produced and toured a range of productions to diverse
audiences and engaged them in often heated post-performance
discussions. Their most renowned dramatist was Roberto Arlt (1900–
1942), whose 1930s plays critiqued contemporary fascism, brought to
Argentina by Italian expatriates loyal to Benito Mussolini, the dictator
of Italy during the decade.
Marxist shingeki (Western-style) dramas were also written in Japan.
One of the best was The Land of Volcanic Ash (1938), by Kubo Sakae
(1900–1958), also an important translator of German drama. In Kubo’s
celebrated play, an agricultural scientist tries to reclaim land polluted
by volcanic ash on the island of Hokkaido. The six-hour, two-part play
portrays the difficult lives of many social groups in this rural
environment and also features the hero’s inner conflict over his
growing commitment to communism. Due to the play’s Marxism and
Kubo’s communist beliefs, the Japanese government prohibited
production of the play and sentenced Kubo to house arrest or jail for
much of the war. Until its defeat in 1945, imperial Japan closed Marxist
shingeki theatres, censored all theatrical productions, and even turned
performances of traditional nō plays to patriotic purposes. Some leftist
theatre artists such as the director Seki Sano (1905–1966), who had
studied with Meyerhold, were forced into exile. Sano left Japan in
1930, eventually settling in Mexico in 1939, where he had a profound
influence on a generation of Mexican theatre artists.
Case Study Brecht and the science of empathy
(Brecht 1964: 73)
Bruce McConachie
Bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an
artist without the use of one or two sciences.
The ideas of Bertolt Brecht continue to guide theatre artists and
critics today, especially those committed to politically progressive
theatre. Brecht read widely in many sciences, including psychology,
during the 1920s and 1930s and believed that he was creating a
theatre that could intervene to shape a more just society based on
scientific Marxism. After Brecht’s death in 1956, however, new
psychological sciences emerged to study cognition and emotion, and
some of their findings undermine the assumptions upon which Brecht
based parts of his early theories. In particular, recent insights into
empathy contradict the conclusions that Brecht reached before 1940
about audience response in the theatre.
If Brecht were alive today, would he turn his back on recent science
because it undermined his old ideas about empathy? Or would he
embrace the insights from cognitive psychology and use them to
advance the goals of his revolutionary theatre? This case study is
based on the assumption that Brecht would take the latter path.
Science – indeed, Brecht’s entire body of theatrical theory – was
primarily a means to an end for him. After he turned to Marxism in the
late 1920s, Brecht believed that the plays and essays he was writing
could help to create a socialist utopia in Germany. Had Brecht carried
his ideas about science and politics into the twenty-first century, there
is little doubt that he would have used the best science available about
empathy to move his spectators toward a Marxist revolution.

Brecht inherited his ideas about empathy, called

Einfühlung [AHYN-few-lungk] in German, from the nineteenth-century
German Romantics. The Romantics used the word and its cognates to
mean the ability of individuals to project themselves into the soul of
another person or into nature. They were trying to understand how a
poet might temporarily merge his identity with a famous classical hero
or how a painter could come to feel what it is like to be a blasted tree
on a mountaintop. From the Romantics’ perspective, this notion of
identification and mystical merging involved conscious projection and
the temporary loss of the self in another person or object.
Philosophers of aesthetics continued to use the concept of Einfühlung
in this way, while other Germans in the early twentieth century applied
it more broadly to mean losing yourself in any reality outside of the
self. As late as 1909, there was no English word for the German term.
Although E.B. Tichener first translated Einfühlung as “empathy” in that
year, the English meanings of “empathy” have never been stable.
Following the Great War, Brecht began writing, directing, and
occasionally performing in Berlin during the height of postwar German
Expressionism. From Brecht’s point of view, Expressionist actors too
easily lost themselves in the characters they performed and German
audiences were immersing themselves in stories that allowed them to
forget about social and economic realities. Although Brecht agreed
with the radical political goals of some of the artists, he came to see
Expressionism as Einfühlung run amok. After embracing Marxism,
Brecht rejected Romantic identification and mystification for what he
understood as Marxist science. From 1928 until 1933, when he left
Germany following Hitler’s election, Brecht sought to build his theatre
on the basis of rational, rather than empathetic response. He feared
that empathy would cause spectators to lose themselves in the point
of view of the dramatic characters they were watching. Assuming a
dualism between reasoned response and empathy, Brecht argued
that Einfühlung “wears down the capacity for action” in the audience
(Brecht 1964: 37). Also, under the spell of empathy, said Brecht,
“nobody will learn any lessons” (26) about politics and the economy.
Believing that the German Romantic understanding of Einfühlung was
correct, Brecht assumed that spectators had the ability to choose or
reject empathy as a mode of spectatorship and that they would turn
away from Einfühlung if induced to enjoy performances in other ways.
 Scientific approaches to empathy
If empathy were what Brecht believed it to be, his strategies to counter
empathetic identification might have been effective. No current definition of
empathy in cognitive science, however, assumes that audiences can control
their responses in the way that Brecht proposed. Nor do most recent
definitions of empathy suggest that it involves the loss of the self and its
mystical merging with some other person or object. This is not to say that
psychologists agree on a definition of the term, however. In a 2009 survey of
contemporary understandings of empathy, C. Daniel Batson found eight
related but distinct uses of the term. Some psychologists, recognizing the
fraught history of “Einfühlung” and “empathy,” have decided to abandon both
words for a term that carries a more specific meaning. Most cognitive
scientists, however, continue to use “empathy” to indicate, as Batson says,
how one person tries to “know what another person is thinking and feeling”
(Batson 2009: 3). Batson is clear that empathy is not the same as sympathy.
Although empathy is often used in casual conversation as a synonym for
sympathy (“I empathize with your pain”), most scientists distinguish between
the two. From their point of view, empathy is a cognitive operation, not an
emotion, that provides a means of “reading the minds” of other people.
Emotional responses such as guilt, happiness, embarrassment, and sympathy
may result from empathetic “mind reading,” but it is important to keep the two
distinct.
Citing several empirical studies, biologist Evan Thompson distinguishes
among four different levels of empathy, the first two of which are foundational
for audience response in the theatre. The first level, termed “sensorimotor
coupling” (Thompson 2007: 393–5), is based on the recent discovery of mirror
neuron systems in monkeys and humans. In brief, groups of neurons in the
brain are equipped to “mirror” intentional motor activity produced by other
humans. When one person watches another grasp a can of soda, for instance,
the same group of neurons is activated in the observer as if the observer had
grabbed the soda for him or herself. In this way, we can begin to know
“intuitively” what that other person is experiencing. In a good theatrical
production, too, spectators probably “mirror” the same groups of neurons and
muscles as some of the actors, although this response has yet to be tested.
For this reason, Vittorio Gallese, one of the first to investigate mirror neuron
systems in monkeys, and his co-workers have identified the mirror system as
“the basis of social cognition” (Gallese et al. 2004: 1–8). This makes
sensorimotor coupling, Thompson’s lowest level of empathy, the physiological
basis for the other levels above it.
“The second type of empathy is the imaginary transposition of oneself to the
other’s place,” states Thompson (2007: 395). This is akin to “putting yourself in
 another person’s shoes.” Imaginary transposition builds on sensorimotor
coupling; using their memories of “resonating” with others, humans can recall
what it was like to experience others’ motoric responses. Then, through
imagination, people can attempt to see the world through another’s eyes,
even when that other person is not present. Thompson emphasizes that this
form of empathy can range from simple emotional agitation in the presence of
another to a rich understanding of that other person’s situation. Imaginary
transposition, which develops in children at about nine to twelve months of
age, requires more active and higher-level cognition than sensorimotor
coupling. At both levels, however, empathy is natural, spontaneous,
commonplace, and mostly unconscious. This does not mean, of course, that
empathy always produces correct assumptions; people misunderstand the
thoughts and feelings of others all the time. In the controlled situation of a play
performance, however, the author, actors, and other theatre artists have
usually tried to make the intentions and emotions of the characters and their
situations transparent enough to allow spectators’ attempts at imaginary
transposition to work most of the time. Although empathy is not an emotion in
itself, sensorimotor coupling and imaginary transposition often call forth
various emotional responses.

None of the science about empathy was available to Brecht when he

began working against the lures of Einfühlung for his spectators in the
1920s. Concerned that audiences might lose themselves in the
actor/characters they were enjoying on stage, Brecht typically peopled
his early plays with grotesque characters with whom spectator
identification was difficult. The premiere of Brecht’s Baal in Leipzig in
1923, for instance, created a scandal by confronting the audience with
a poetic protagonist consumed by a voracious appetite for liquor and
women and a disgust with normal social conventions – the intentional
opposite of the idealistic poet type depicted in many Expressionist
plays. The Threepenny Opera (1928), Brecht’s most popular
production in the 1920s, effectively dared spectators to identify with his
main character, nicknamed Mack the Knife, a bank robber and
murderer. The success of this cynical masterpiece with Berlin
theatregoers, however, also convinced Brecht that simply placing
grotesque characters in decadent situations was not enough to inhibit
audience identification; too many spectators enjoyed the vicarious
pleasures of putting themselves into the roles of pimps, gangsters,
and prostitutes to attach much significance to the political critique that
Threepenny also intended.
After his turn to Marxism, Brecht found additional ways of keeping
his spectators distanced from his primary characters and their
situations. Several of his “learning plays” of the early 1930s, for
example, challenged spectators with metatheatricality and multiple
casting in an attempt to induce them to grapple with his Marxist
parables. In The Measures Taken (1930), for example, two dramatic
stories intersect throughout – a present narrative involving the report
of four Communist agitators to a Chorus of judges in Moscow and a
past story acted out by the four agitators. The agitators use role-
playing to demonstrate to the judges their reasons for killing a fifth
agitator who accompanied them, a Young Comrade who bungled their
attempt to incite revolution in China. Unfortunately, from the point of
view of the four agitators and the judges, the Young Comrade showed
too much sympathy for the Chinese peasants and this emotion got
him involved in situations that endangered their overall mission in
China. Through this use of metatheatricality, Brecht sharpened his
attack on colonialism and heightened his call for Communist Party
discipline. Through multiple casting and the creation of collective roles
(the agitators and the Chorus of judges), The Measures Taken also
invited the audience to watch each actor in several different roles,
another way of inhibiting spectator identification with a specific
actor/character. At the conclusion of the play, the Chorus of judges
decides that the four agitators were right to kill the Young Comrade;
the “measures taken” were necessary for the larger goal of communist
revolution in China.
Another technique Brecht used in several plays to diffuse
Einfühlung and spectator identification was to split his major
characters in two. We have already discussed the Shen Te/Shui Ta
split in The Good Person of Setzuan. In The Causasian Chalk Circle,
as well, Brecht depicts Azdak, the judge who must make the most
important decision of the play, as a liar and drunkard and also as an
upstanding and moral citizen. Brecht reasoned that spectators would
have difficulty identifying with someone who is so full of contradictions.
 As he does in most of his other late plays, Brecht frequently breaks
the conventions of realistic illusion to exploit presentational
possibilities in Good Person. Narrators speak directly to the audience,
a functional setting avoids realism to present only what is necessary
for the action, and songs sung by individuals and groups of actors
generalize the lessons of a particular scene. Brecht took ideas for
staging his Marxist parables from several sources, including the
Constructivism of Meyerhold, the presentational clowning of Charlie
Chaplin, Piscator’s socialist documentary theatre, and the efficient
acting of Mei Lanfang, a Chinese actor he had applauded in Moscow
in 1935. From the 1930s to his work at the Berliner Ensemble in the
1950s, Brecht employed direct address to the audience, documentary
film footage, songs to put across a political point, agit-prop choric
speaking, projections of statistical material, knock-about clowning, and
simple political placards, as well as short realistic scenes to advance
his plots. Instead of fusing these and other elements into an organic
whole, in the mode of stage realism or musical comedy, Brecht
separated these elements, so that each could be understood and
appreciated for itself without the force of the whole dramatic illusion
immersing the audience in an emotional bath. The sheer variety of
these staging techniques and types of theatrical involvement invited
spectators to connect many kinds of insights and construct larger
meanings for themselves.
As a frequent director of his own plays, Brecht also worked to clarify
his political intentions through arresting stage pictures and strong
emotional reversals for his spectators. In the first scene of his play
Mother Courage and Her Children, as he directed it in Berlin in 1949,
Brecht kept the four actors playing the mother and her three adult
children in a tight circle center stage near the wagon they had been
pulling, as two army recruiters circled them, trying to lure one of the
sons into joining the army (see Figure 11.7). Brecht set Mother
Courage in the midst of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) in Germany,
partly as a means of providing some historical distance for his postwar
Berlin audience as they struggled to come to terms with what they had
done under Nazism. By selling supplies from her wagon to the troops
on both sides of the Thirty Years’ War, Mother Courage profits from
the killing. To expose this contradiction, Brecht blocked the actors to
show how capitalism and warfare could divide a family and lead to its
eventual ruin. In his staging, one of the actor/recruiters moved
actor/Mother Courage around to one side of the wagon to bargain with
her over a belt buckle while the other actor/recruiter lured her strong
son, actor/Eilif, away from the rest of the family to offer him a bonus for
joining the army. At the end of the scene, Courage has sold a belt
buckle, but the once tight-knit family has been divided and one of her
sons has left (and is eventually killed). While Mother Courage haggles,
the war takes her children – a motif that would be repeated several
times during the play, until she is left with no children at all.
While in exile from Nazi Germany, Brecht began to modify his ideas
about Einfühlung. Although he still believed that empathy could get in
the way of learning, he also recognized that some strategic uses of
Einfühlung might be useful in sparking sympathy as a means of
advancing spectator understanding. And he wrote several scenes in
his major, post-1937 plays that invited spectators to temporarily
identify themselves with the situation of one of his characters. Mother
Courage’s loss of her third child, Katrin, involves such identification
and is also placed at the emotional climax of the play. To warn the
townspeople and save their children from an imminent, pre-dawn
attack, Katrin climbs on to the roof of a peasant’s house near the town
and begins beating a drum (Figure 11.8). The attacking soldiers, who
cannot reach her (she pulls the ladder up after her), try to bribe her to
stop the noise. They even begin destroying her mother’s supply
wagon, left in Katrin’s care, but she continues drumming to alert the
town. Finally, the soldiers bring on a large musket, set it up on its
forked holder, and shoot her. As Katrin is dying on the roof, the sound
of cannon and alarm bells from the town indicate that she has
succeeded and the children of the town will survive.
Figure 11.7Helene Weigel singing as Mother Courage in the first scene of
Brecht's staging of Mother Courage and Her Children in Berlin, 1949. From the
Willy Seager Archive.

From the Willy Saweger Archive. © The Deutsches

Theatermuseum, Munich.

Figure 11.8Katrin, Mother Courage's daughter, beats her drum to warn the
townspeople in Scene 11 of the 1949 production of Brecht's Mother Courage.

© The Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich.

Brecht’s use of rhythm and spatiality made this a powerful scene for
his Berlin audience in the 1949 production. Actor/Katrin’s intermittent,
but progressively louder and longer drumming provided the scene’s
empathetic key for spectators, much as extended drumming in a
musical concert will tend to draw most spectators into the drummer’s
rhythm. In Thompson’s terms, the drumming established
“sensorimotor coupling” between actor/Katrin’s muscles and the
muscles of the spectators, allowing them to resonate with her
movements. Her drumming also encouraged spectators to involve
themselves in Thompson’s “imaginary transposition,” temporarily
putting themselves “in her shoes” so that they, too, could imagine
themselves saving children through their heroic action. Brecht did not
write about this scene in terms of evoking empathy, but in retrospect
we can see that empathy led spectators to sympathy for Katrin.
The impact of the scene provided an emotional climax for
spectators at the 1949 production of Brecht’s anti-war, anti-capitalist
play. In fact, according to contemporary reviewers and reports, the
Berlin spectators were emotionally shattered by their experience of
Mother Courage. There was audible sobbing throughout most
performances and long, appreciative cheering at the curtain calls.
Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel, performed the title role with grit and
determination, but seemed utterly exhausted at the end, when, after
burying her daughter, she was forced to pull her battered, near-empty
wagon by herself to catch up with some departing troops in the hope
of making a sale. (To make herself look even more gaunt and hollow-
cheeked for the last scene, Weigel removed her false teeth.) The
success of Mother Courage with the Berlin audience in 1949 led to the
founding of the Berliner Ensemble under the leadership of Brecht and
Weigel – a company that soon emerged as a leader in postwar
European theatre.
Brecht understood that the emotional involvement of the audience
had ensured the success of the production and even helped in the
creation of the Ensemble. When asked about the drum scene in
Mother Courage, he said, “Spectators are permitted to identify with
Katrin in this scene. They may identify with this being and note with
pleasure that they have such powers even within themselves” (Fuegi
1987: 125). In this statement, Brecht recognized that spectators often
delight in imaginary transposition, even though he did not call it
empathy. But the statement also indicates that Brecht, like most
others at midcentury, continued to credit the German Romantic view
of Einfühlung as good science. Engaging in empathy is not a matter of
“permission,” allowed by the self or by some other person, because
empathy is not fully controlled by the will. At the level of sensorimotor
coupling, empathy is almost entirely involuntary. And even imaginary
transposition, which involves some initial choice, relies on a
combination of emotion and reason. From a contemporary scientific
perspective, Brecht’s strict division between emotion and reason – a
misperception he shared with most of the Western world in the middle
of the last century – undermined his ability to alter his understanding
of empathy.
On the other hand, Brecht’s plays indicate that he had a clear,
intuitive sense of the importance of what some scientists today would
call empathetic identification. The plays invite audiences to resonate
with what his actor/characters are doing on stage and many of them
involve spectators in complex negotiations with regard to character
identification. Most audience members, for example, will put
themselves in the shoes of Mother Courage many times and this will
lead them, alternately, to admire her in some scenes and despise her
in others. And that spectator response, which tracks when Courage
acts either as a mother or as a capitalist, fits very well with Brecht’s
political intentions for the play. Brecht was certainly right to worry that
the German Romantic sense of Einfühlung would compromise his
political goals. But if that notion of empathy is incorrect, we need to
look again at the plays and productions to measure them by a different
yardstick for empathy. Ironically, as the 1949 production of Mother
Courage suggests, spectator sensorimotor coupling and imaginary
transposition probably enabled rather than inhibited Brecht’s Marxist
goals throughout his career.
Key references
Batson, D. (2009) “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but
Distinct Phenomena,” in J. Decety and W. Ickes (eds) The Social
Neuroscience of Empathy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 3–16.
Brecht, B. (1964) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an
Aesthetic, ed. and trans. J. Willet, New York: Hill and Wang, 26–9, 33–
42.
 Brecht, B. (1972) Mother Courage and Her Children, in R. Manheim
and J. Willett (eds) Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, vol 5, New York:
Random House.
Fuegi, J. (1987) Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gallese, V. et al. (2004) “A Unifying View of the Basis of Social
Cognition,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8: 1–8.
Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the
Sciences of Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Theatres of anti-imperialism, 1910–1950
In addition to its influence in the West, the Russian Revolution also
speeded revolts against imperial domination. By 1914, the imperial
powers – chiefly England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, the
United States, and Japan – had occupied crucial islands in the
Caribbean and Pacific, solidified their control in most of South Asia,
extracted sizeable chunks from the Ottoman and Chinese empires,
and carved up nearly all of Africa. Although rebellions against foreign
capitalists had occurred before 1914, nationalistic movements in India,
China, and elsewhere gained more leverage against the imperial
powers during and shortly after the Great War, when the combatants
in Europe needed their help. The war in Europe, however,
emboldened Japanese imperialists, who saw the decline of European
power in China and the Pacific as a chance to expand their
hegemony. The triumph of the Communists in Russia inspired
nationalists in the colonized countries, in part because they too
identified imperialism with capitalism. If workers in one country had
destroyed capitalism, nationalists might destroy imperialism in their
own.
Many educated colonials also worked against imperialism after 1914
because they saw widening differences in standards of living,
democratic rights, and literacy between the populations of their own
countries and those in Japan and the West. In per capita income
alone, the developed countries surpassed the rest by 2:1 in 1880. By
1914, the ratio was 3:1 and it rose to 5:1 by 1950. While most
Westerners enjoyed some individual and political rights, slavery and
various forms of serfdom persisted in many parts of the colonial world.
Literacy increased rapidly among both sexes and all classes after
1850 in Europe, Japan, and North America, but remained a privilege of
the social and economic elite in most areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. Although the imperial powers generally believed they were
civilizing and improving their subjects, the realities of empire bred
Orientalism, racism, exploitation, and degradation.
Revolution against the imperialists had begun in China in 1911 and
continued through the 1920s. As noted, Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist
Party fought to unify the nation. Sun’s politics, like those of many anti-
imperialists, mixed liberalism and socialism, but emphasized
nationalism above both. For a few years during the 1920s, the
Nationalists collaborated with Russian-based Communists to purge
China of foreign imperialists, an alliance that was revived in 1937 when
China refused further Japanese demands and declared war on Japan.
The defeat of Japan in the Second World War finally ended a century
of foreign domination. The Chinese Communists, who won the civil
war against the Nationalists in 1949, benefited throughout this period
from the perceived alliance between communism and anti-
imperialism.
The development of Chinese theatre between 1914 and 1950
followed the political fortunes of the country. As in Japan, Western
realist theatre had been introduced before the Great War and began
to flourish in the 1920s with the founding of modern theatres, an
increase in translations and performances of Western plays, the
establishment of new training centers for actors, and the eventual
casting of women in female roles. As noted in Chapter 9, jingju (Beijing
Opera), however, remained the dominant genre throughout China.
Several Communist troupes emerged in the 1930s to protest Japanese
imperialism; their “living newspapers,” modeled on the Soviet
example, appealed to thousands in the countryside and in cities
unoccupied by the Japanese. Following China’s declaration of war in
1937, Chinese Nationalists and Communists used theatre to rally
patriotic support against the Japanese.

Within Communist-controlled areas

of the country, Chinese artists developed a new form of theatre called
yanggeju [yahng guh ju] based on the fusion of folk songs, local
theatre and yangge, traditional Spring Festival celebrations. Featuring
20 to 30 dancers accompanied by drums, flute, and other instruments,
yanggeju formed part of the basis for the emergence of a new national
drama called geju [guh ju], or song drama. Geju was designed as the
Chinese equivalent of Western opera, based on Chinese music, folk
songs and musical elements from traditional theatre. Originally
developed in the 1920s, it flourished after the Communist victory in
1949. Geju typically involved disputes among villagers over abusive
social practices and village ethics, performed in a question-and-
response pattern. Hugely popular, The White-Haired Girl (1945) is
considered a milestone, inspiring later geju glorifying communist
heroism. By the 1960s, other types of state-sponsored performances
featured thousands of professional and amateur performers and
integrated the music and dance traditions of several minority groups
within China. The performances both embodied and propagated the
ideology of strength through collective effort put forward by Mao
Zedong (1893–1976), the revolutionary leader and political dictator of
China until 1976. More than a thousand performers staged The East Is
Red in 1964, for example, a nationally famous spectacle.
In India, the introduction of Western-style, spoken drama had
spawned two closely related theatrical movements in the nineteenth
century. The first type was social drama, which criticized the
inequalities of India’s traditional socio-economic system and argued
for liberal reform. By the late 1800s, some British and Indian writers
were attacking traditions that relegated most Indians to low caste
status, kept many peasants working in compulsory positions on huge
landed estates, and trapped numerous young women in arranged
marriages. Reformers in southern India began mounting protest plays
in 1929 with the production of From the Kitchen to the Stage, by V.T.
Bhattathiripad (1896–1982), which opposed polygamy and the
marriage of high-caste old men to young girls. A later play, Rental
Arrears, focused on the eviction of a tenant farmer from the land and
its effects on his family. Some social dramas drew thousands of
spectators in open-air, rural theatres during the 1930s and 1940s.
Though aimed primarily at social and economic arrangements, these
plays occasionally attacked the Raj (as British imperial rule in India
was termed) for supporting traditional customs.
In contrast, anti-colonial drama directly resisted English culture and
British authority. An 1872 production of Indigo Mirror (Nil Darpan), by
Kolkata playwright Dinabendhu Mitra (1830–1873) began this
movement; the play focused on the plight of peasant workers
oppressed by British indigo planters. The British banned a later anti-
imperialist play, Sirajuddaula by Bengali playwright Girish Chandra
Ghosh (1844–1912), in 1905 for inciting Indian nationalism. Anti-
colonialism intensified in India after the Great War and the Russian
Revolution and reached a peak during the Second World War. In 1943,
the Communist Party of India founded the Indian People’s Theatre
Association (IPTA), which established regional centers throughout the
country to produce anti-colonial plays. Perhaps its best-known
production was Bijon Bhattacharya’s (1917–1978) New Harvest in
1944, which incited anger against British failures to help the starving
during a Bengali famine that killed more than three million people. The
IPTA fragmented in 1947 following India and Pakistan’s independence
from Britain.
Internationally, the most famous playwright and theatre artist to
emerge in India in the 1910–1950 period was Rabindranath Tagore
(1861–1941). Tagore was acclaimed for his lyrical plays, mystical
poetry, paintings, and songs and for his insightful short stories and
essays on subjects ranging from educational reform to nationalism,
which he denounced in favor of universal humanism. Tagore’s poetry
and prose won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913; he was the
first non-European so awarded. Although Tagore denounced the
British Raj, he was best known as a social and educational reformer in
Bengal, in northeastern India. Several of his many plays, including
Sacrifice (1890) and The Post Office (1912), achieved Indian and
international success. In Sacrifice, Tagore used historical events to pit
a devout Maharaja against a fanatical head priest in order to
denounce cruel and superstitious rites. The more mystical Post Office
focuses on a sick boy who falls asleep (and probably dies), according
to Tagore, to gain spiritual release from “the world of hoarded wealth
and certified creeds” (Tagore 1961: 123–4). Contemporary Indian
theatre artists continue to venerate Tagore for his imaginative fusion of
traditional forms and modern ideas.
Theatrical modernism
In addition to animating Western and international political opposition
to capitalism and imperialism, the cultural fragmentations caused by
the Great War and the movies led other theatre artists to search for
principles of cohesion and transcendence. Most critics and historians
begin their definitions of theatrical modernism by noting that this
twentieth-century orientation to the arts emphasized the vision of the
dramatist as the primary carrier of meaning in the theatre. Modernism
was not a movement, in the sense that avant-garde artists consciously
organized themselves into exclusive groups, published manifestos,
and adhered to a specific style. Indeed, modernist playwrights and
others generally worked within the conventional arrangements of the
commercial theatre. Perhaps the primary difference between the
modernists and most avant-gardists was their interest in crafting
productions that could provide an alternative to the excesses of the
modern world. Instead of trying to alter or to create a utopian
alternative to the status quo, the modernists looked to new modes of
aesthetic order that could help people to transcend the fragmentation
and chaos of modernity.
In their drive to constitute a formal aesthetic sphere, separate from
commerce, politics, and other areas of practical life, the modernists
revived the aesthetic ideas of Immanuel Kant. This Enlightenment
philosopher had distinguished aesthetic experience and judgment
from the realms of science and morality. Kant limited aesthetics to
bodily feeling and further rarified it by insisting that feeling was
subjective and private, with no connection to conceptual thought. With
Kant, the modernists insisted that the activities of producing and
responding to a work of art had to be understood on their own
autonomous terms; like the avant-garde Aestheticists, the modernists
believed in “art for art’s sake.” In judging art, including theatrical
productions, the modernists instructed critics to look for those aspects
in the work itself that gave it meaning and aesthetic unity. From this
formalist point of view, questions about a production’s relations to its
audience or to its social context were mostly irrelevant. Politically,
modernism was a conservative retreat from the challenges of
twentieth-century revolutions.
Like the Symbolists and Aestheticists before them, the modernists
aimed to induce readers and listeners to climb into their imaginations,
but they did not adhere to the representational goals of those earlier
avant-garde artists. That is, they did not want spectators to interpret
the sounds and images on stage as depicting objective, subjective, or
spiritual truth. The theatrical modernists relied on two major
techniques to separate the imaginations of their spectators from the
mundane realities of the stage: focus audience attention on voice and
language and transport them to a unified aesthetic world. First, they
resorted to metatheatricality, which (as discussed in Chapter 5)
typically frames the fiction of the theatrical illusion within another
fiction to create a play-within-a-play. By calling attention to the
artificiality of the stage, metatheatricality interrupts the flow of a
performance and temporarily undercuts its representational effects.
Spectators frequently reminded of the fictive nature of a play cannot
immerse themselves in a Wagnerian Gesamt kunstwerk or any other
representational performance. Second, the modernists tried to get
spectators to separate the actors’ bodies from their characters’ words.
More interested in their written dialogue than in the usual fusion of
actor and character in a theatrical representation, modernists
attempted to minimize the physical presence of actors on the stage
and to reduce the actors to their voices. Like metatheatricality, this
attempt temporarily under mined representational believability and
also troubled conventional modes of spectator identification with
actors as characters.
Yeats, Pirandello, and the modernist legacy
Although the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, and other realists are
sometimes included in discussions of modernism, most early
modernists rejected the photographic surfaces of realism to focus on
transcendent values communicated primarily through language.
Further, many modernist playwrights looked as much to publishing as
to performance for the success of their writing. William Butler Yeats
(1865–1939) mostly wrote poetry, Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) turned
to drama after a career as an Italian novelist and short-story writer,
Paul Claudel (1868–1955) and Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) published
in a variety of genres, and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) made his primary
reputation as a poet and critic. While these authors hoped that their
plays would be staged and enjoyed by spectators, they also
celebrated their encounter with the reading public. Modernists relied
on the continuing prestige and power of print to shape their theatre. To
a significant degree, they wanted to attract audiences in the theatre
who would respond to their plays like readers.
To emphasize his imagistic poetry, Irish writer and theatre manager
William Butler Yeats tried to alter the actor’s embodiment of a
character, the basis of theatrical representation. As a young man,
Yeats saw several Symbolist productions at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre
and returned to Dublin convinced that Ireland needed a poetic stage.
Intrigued by Craig’s interest in substituting marionettes for actors,
Yeats experimented with some of the actors at the Abbey Theatre to
see if he could minimize their physical expressiveness and turn them
into mouthpieces for his words. He wrote that actors “must not draw
attention to themselves at wrong moments, for poetry and indeed all
picturesque writing is perpetually making little pictures which draw the
attention away for a second or two from the player” (Puchner 2002:
129). Yeats realized, in other words, that the physical presence of the
actor would interfere with the “little pictures” that he hoped his poetry
would spark in the heads of his audience members. Although his
experiments to turn spectators into readers were initially unsuccessful,
Yeats bragged that he had “been the advocate of poetry against the
actor” and vowed to keep trying (2002: 129).
 Yeats had more success with a Westernized version of Japanese
nō drama (discussed in Chapter 2). In 1915, the poet Ezra Pound
introduced Yeats to Itō Michio (1892–1961), a dancer from Japan who
had studied eurhythmics and performed dances in a style that
combined European and Japanese traditions. Yeats had been reading
translations of some Asian plays, including Tagore’s The Post Office
and several nō dramas, and was eager to adopt nō as a partial model
for his poetic theatre. With two other Japanese performers, Itō
introduced an already Europeanized version of nō dancing to Yeats.
Yeats revised the script of At the Hawk’s Well (1914–1916) for Itō, who
choreographed and performed a major role in the production in 1916.
As described in Chapter 2, nō uses musical accompaniment behind a
chorus of voices, sometimes speaking the words of the main
character, to tell a story, while other performers dance the action.
Likewise, At the Hawk’s Well separates much of the spoken narrative
from the embodied action. A chorus of three “musicians,” as Yeats
calls them, frames the entire performance by introducing the
characters, narrating the action, and occasionally adding their own
commentary. In addition, they set the scene by appealing to the
imagination of each spectator. Instead of looking at actual scenery on
the stage, the audience is encouraged by the narrator-musicians to
envision “A well long choked up and dry / And boughs long stripped by
the wind” in their imaginations (Yeats 1952: 399). Even after the actors
enter playing specific characters, Yeats’s musicians comment on their
actions, effectively reducing them to marionettes who must
pantomime exactly what the musicians report. Yeats wrote several
more plays based, like Hawk’s Well, on a mythic Irish past and
evocative language. He recognized that his poetic theatre would never
be popular, but hoped to inspire a coterie audience with his poetic
visions.
Luigi Pirandello did not directly attack the representational link
between actors and characters, but rather subverted the believability
of the conventional theatre through metatheatricality. Although he had
written a few plays during 20 years of publishing poetry, novels, and
short stories, Pirandello turned more frequently to drama during the
Great War, when Italy (though on the winning side) began to slide
toward social and political disorder. The postwar period added
wrenching economic problems and, like many Italians, Pirandello
sought order in the midst of this apparent chaos. He found it in the
philosophies of Hegel and Kant that he had studied as a student in
Germany and that had anchored much of his previous writing.
Pirandello believed that the ideal forms of art championed by Kant and
others were more enduring and ennobling than the paltry, ever-
changing lives of modern people. Attempting to dramatize this conflict
between the reality of art and the illusory qualities of lived experience,
Pirandello soon crystalized this insight in the play that would make him
famous, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). Despite a
scandalous opening, Six Characters succeeded in Milan in 1922, then
Paris, and eventually throughout the world.
Six Characters contrasts the lives of actors – Pirandello’s symbols
of people with no firm identity – with those of fictitious characters
whose identity has been written for them. Apparently abandoned by
their author, however, the six characters cannot escape from their
melodramatic conflicts, and they seek a resolution to their ongoing
drama from the actors. The result is a play within a play, as the actors
put aside the production they have been rehearsing and attempt to
enact the roles and relationships of the six characters before them. By
showing how the actors utterly fail to embody and perform the reality
of these characters, Pirandello critiques the general failure of the
stage to represent ideal reality. A larger point, though, is that authors
writing literature can approach the enduring truths of idealized
character types, but the attempt at truth on the stage will always be
compromised by the imperfect and mortal bodies of the performers.
Only an author can help the six characters, implies Pirandello; the
stage will always fail them. To emphasize the unchanging truths of art,
Pirandello instructed the actors playing the six characters to wear
masks. Although the play seems to throw up its hands about the
nature of truth and illusion, Pirandello does not endorse relativism; art
is true and life is illusory.
Pirandello’s search for order through art led him to explore the
themes and techniques of Six Characters in several subsequent
plays. These included Naked (1922), Each in His Own Way (1924),
Tonight We Improvise (1930), and Henry IV (1922), in which Pirandello
worked through the problem of time and art, touched on in Six
Characters, through the situation of a man pretending to be insane.
These plays, too, relied on metatheatricality to interrupt and
undermine theatrical representation, challenging spectators to
question their own illusions. Perhaps hoping that Mussolini could bring
some of the order of art to the chaos of Italian life, Pirandello joined
the Fascist Party in 1924 and remained a Fascist until his death in
1936.
Whereas Pirandello relied on German philosophy and Yeats
invoked the pagan myths of an Irish past in their attempts to gain relief
from the fragmentations of the modern world, other modernists turned
to Christianity, the traditional road to transcendence in the West and
another arena for Kantian aesthetics. Like Pirandello and Yeats, the
Christian modernists looked back to the spirituality of the Symbolists
and, before them, to nineteenth-century Romanticism. French
diplomat, poet, and playwright Paul Claudel celebrated the mysteries
and saving grace of Catholicism and the Catholic Church in several
plays over a long career. His most famous work, The Satin Slipper, a
seven-hour epic written between 1919 and 1924, is set in the Spanish
Golden Age. In formal, elevated language, Claudel’s stately pageant
explores the religious fervor that drove the Spanish conquest of the
New World and the need to sacrifice earthly passions for the sake of
divine salvation. The Satin Slipper received an influential production at
the Comédie Française in 1943, which led to a Claudel revival in the
postwar period.
Although U.S. novelist and dramatist Thornton Wilder was less
insistently religious than Claudel, his faith in a benign American
Protestant God is evident in many of his plays. In Our Town (1938), a
folksy, God-like Stage Manager calls forth actors who demonstrate
that people are destined to repeat universal patterns designed by “the
mind of God” without knowing that they are doing so. Our Town
illustrated Wilder’s belief that the theatre was uniquely suited, as he
said, “to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and
type and universal” (Bigsby 1982: 262).
 T.S. Eliot generally attempted to bridge poetic and realist theatre,
with mixed results. A convert to Catholicism, Eliot wrote Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) in verse to engage his spectators in the experience
of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom in medieval Britain. Eliot relies on a
chorus of women in the ritual-like tragedy to lead his audience toward
an understanding of the design of God and return them to Catholic
faith. Most of Eliot’s later plays, such as The Cocktail Party (1949) and
The Confidential Clerk (1953), continue to use verse to reach for
Catholic and sometimes Buddhist universality, often by contrasting the
shadow world of contemporary society with the spiritual substructure
that informs what he took to be its true reality.
Many of Japan’s theatre artists had embraced Western concepts
such as Christianity and Hegelian idealism, and some became
modernists. One of the most significant was Kishida Kunio (1890–
1954), a member of the Tsukiji Little Theatre who studied in France
with Jacques Copeau in 1921 and 1922. Like many European
modernists, Kishida attempted to evoke humanistic idealism through
his plays. Their apparent lack of political content protected Kishida
during the Second World War, when more outspoken (often Marxist)
playwrights, actors, and directors who criticized the militarist
government were jailed. Kishida insisted that the playwright is the
primary theatre artist, whereas traditional Japanese performance
modes celebrated the actor and his movement, speech, and
costuming. In contrast to the stylized, non-realistic (and sometimes
incomprehensible) vocal delivery of nō or kabuki, Kishida insisted,
“The theatre must depend on the words of the play. Surely the theatre
will come to demonstrate the essential importance, not of ‘plays for the
eye,’ but of ‘plays for the ear.’ A playwright, more than anything else,
must now be a ‘poet’” (Rimer 1974: 137–8).
Theatricalizing modernism
Many directors and designers also looked to the authority and
language of dramatists as the basis of theatrical meaning and stability
in a fractured world. Before 1910, a few scholars and artists in England
had advocated a return to Elizabethan playing conventions for
Shakespeare’s plays, but Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s (1852–1917) style
of pictorial realism for the Bard held the commercial stage. Near the
turn of the century, scholar-director William Poel (1852–1934)
produced Shakespeare on an Elizabethan-like stage (placed behind a
regular proscenium, however) and effected the continuous playing
that Shakespeare had intended without the long pauses for the scene
changes that were typical of the period. In a few productions before
1914, H. Granville Barker (1877–1946), who directed many of Shaw’s
plays, used suggestive scenic pieces, draped curtains, and
metaphorical props and costumes to keep the Shakespearean action
moving in performances that emphasized simplicity and poetry. Most
critics scoffed at Poel and Barker, but their ideas undergirded many
later reforms.
After the Great War, pictorial Shakespeare seemed cumbersome
and unbelievable, mostly because of the movies. A succession of
directors at London’s “Old Vic” Theatre incorporated several
modernist innovations that moved Shakespearean performance away
from the clutter of realism. Chief among them was Tyrone Guthrie
(1900–1971), artistic director of the Old Vic from 1937 to 1945. Guthrie
deployed Appia-like settings of ramps and platforms, mostly realist
props and costumes, rapid movement and speech by the actors, and
quick lighting changes to lend Shakespearean production the
speedier rhythms and heightened contrasts of the cinema (Figure
11.9).
Working with modernist directors, actors John Gielgud (1904–2000),
Sybil Thorndike (1882–1976), Laurence Olivier (1907–1989), and others
developed energetic playing styles that emphasized the psychology of
their characters rather than their realist situations. Olivier’s success in
filming several Shakespearean plays – notably his Henry V (1944) and
Richard III (1955) – confirmed the popularity of a more cinematic
acting style for Shakespeare on the stage. For spectators attuned to
the perceived effects of the movies, Guthrie’s and Olivier’s modernist
staging and acting rejuvenated Shakespearean production in the
1930s and 1940s. Like other artists committed to the tenets of
modernism, Guthrie and the others believed they were scraping away
realist encrustations on the plays to reveal transcendent, Kantian
truths embedded in the language. For these modernists,
Shakespeare, rightly staged, could elevate spectators to appreciate
and enjoy universal meanings.

Figure 11.9The Old Vic production of Shakespeare's The Tempest, 1934, with
Charles Laughton as Prospero and Elsa Lanchester as Ariel.

© V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

The fragmentations of the modern world also troubled many
theatrical modernists in France. In the 1930s and 1940s, several
directors and playwrights drew on their heritage of Racinean tragedy
and the comedy of Molière to fashion a distinctive theatre of lyric
abstraction, which emphasized the lyricism of the French language in
often minimalist and allegorical settings. Even before then, the work of
Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) turned the French stage toward
modernism. Like the Shakespearean modernists, Copeau, a critic
turned producer-director, eliminated realist details to emphasize the
work of his actors in the French classics. At his small theatre, the
Vieux-Colombier, Copeau produced several plays before 1914 with
minimal realism for audiences of only 400 people (Figure 11.10). He
resumed productions at the Vieux-Colombier for a short time after the
war and later directed at the Comédie Française, the prestigious
national theatre, from 1936 until 1940. Copeau and his successors
enlivened the character types and generalized themes of the French
classics with a fresh, lyrical energy. He applied this style to
Shakespearean productions and modern plays as well. Directors who
modeled their artistry on Copeau’s – a group that included Louis
Jouvet (1887–1951) and Charles Dullin (1885–1949) – emphasized
adherence to the language and rhythms of the script and strove to
invest their stylized costumes and minimalist scenery with symbolic
significance. After the Second World War, two of Dullin’s students,
directors Jean-Louis Barrault (1910– 1994) and Jean Vilar (1912–1971),
continued to refine and extend this tradition.
Figure 11.10Stage of the Vieux-Colombier, designed by Jacques Copeau, as
adapted for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Redrawn from Theatre Arts Magazine, 1924.

French playwrights influenced by lyric abstraction tended to write
allegories in which the general problems of humanity predominated
over historical or psychological concerns. The first major playwright to
work in this style was Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944), who collaborated
closely with Jouvet to stage his plays. These included The Trojan War
Shall Not Take Place (1935) and The Madwoman of Chaillot (1945), an
amusing attack on the excesses of French capitalism. Similarly, Jean
Anouilh (1910–1987) wrote light comedies with fairy-tale-like
resolutions, such as Thieves’ Carnival (1938), and dark allegories, the
most famous of which was Antigone, composed in 1943 during the
German occupation of France. Anouilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors (1952)
provides a ready example of the lyric abstraction that demonstrates its
faith in universal truths and its ties to French modernism. Like Molière,
Anouilh uses the structure of farce to explore a serious theme – the
depredations of time on romantic love in the case of Waltz. The play’s
chief representative of foolish old age is a French general still in love
with a mistress who returns, after many years, to discover that she
would rather fall in love with the general’s young male secretary. The
general is upset, but finally resigns himself to the triumph of fiery
passion over cooling embers. Emblematic characters, a universal
theme, an appeal to an imagined past, intimate staging, and an action
that verges on allegory helped to mark this confection as a product of
modernism.
Summary
The revolutionary decades between 1910 and 1950 spawned immense
political and theatrical changes. The Great War and the Russian,
Chinese, and Mexican revolutions shattered the old order and
generated demands for radical political changes that played out in the
theatres of Meyerhold, Brecht, and other revolutionary theatre artists
and reshaped the theatres of many European and American
countries, as well as generating anti-imperialist theatres in India and
China. Filmic fragmentation – the recognition that the movies could
take apart and reassemble reality in innumerable ways – ensured that
most practitioners of the new political theatre would not return to the
kinds of representational theatre offered by the realists, Naturalists,
and Symbolists of the past. Instead, these radical artists forthrightly
acknowledged the theatrical basis of their presentational work. Even
the modernists, who rejected the political radicalism of the
revolutionary artists in an attempt to return to Kantian universals, had
lost faith in representational realism, primarily because it mandated
the fusion of actors and characters, leaving little room for an author’s
voice. Nonetheless, as we will see in the next chapter, the comforts of
bourgeois realism on the stage enjoyed a resurgence after the
Second World War.
*
The aftermath of the Second World War:
Realism and its discontents in an
increasingly shrinking world, 1940–1970
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Contributors: Bruce McConachie
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-17
As we saw in Chapters 10 and 11, the shock of the Great War and
the widespread use of radio and film deeply affected society and
theatre. In this and the following chapter, we will consider similarly
profound responses to the Second World War.
The origins of the Second World War lay in the end of the Great
War. Germany had been forced to accept concessions and blame. In
response, the fascist Nazi Party formed, attaining power in 1933; it
then strived to dominate Europe. Meanwhile, Japan sought control
over Asia, and its invasion of Manchuria (China) in 1937 foreshadowed
the war. The League of Nations (a predecessor of the United Nations)
lacked the force to counter these aggressions. Germany’s 1939
invasion of Poland instigated the Second World War in Europe.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) in December, 1941 forced the
United States to join the conflict.
Only 21 years separated the 1918 Armistice ending the Great War
and the outbreak of the Second World War. Between them lay the
worldwide Great Depression. Often soldiers who had fought and
survived the Great War as 20-year olds were called back into service
in their 40s – sometimes along with their own sons. By 1945, when the
Second World War was ended by atomic bombs that devastated the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had spent much of
their lives in battle; civilians had suffered decades of destruction and
deprivation; and around 11 million people had been murdered by the
Nazis. Refugees from the war-ravaged lands sought new lives, but
many could understand neither the language nor the culture of their
newly adopted homes. In much of Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa
– where the brutal battles of the Second World War had been fought –
cities were wrecked and food remained scarce. Rebuilding ruined
lives and ruined cities was costly, time-consuming, and emotionally
difficult. All these survivors (soldiers and civilians, the victors and the
defeated) desired a world of calm.
Because the United States had escaped such physical devastation,
it emerged from the war far richer than the rest of the world. This fact,
combined with the desire to solidify its military and political position as
the main opponent of communism, meant that the U.S. became the
central purveyor of money and goods for rebuilding the postwar world.
With the end of the Second World War, hostility between two
superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union, former allies
who had been victorious over the Nazis – hardened into an ideological
struggle between “free market” capitalism and authoritarian
communism. This conflict, which lasted over 40 years, was named the
Cold War because it never broke out into direct combat: nuclear
warfare would lead to mutually assured destruction. But other nations
were pressured to align themselves with Russia or the U.S.; although
a few like India remained neutral, most succumbed through military
might, economic power, coups, and/or diplomatic leverage. China’s
rise as a major world power widened the scope of the Cold War. All
three superpowers engaged in various “proxy wars,” injecting their
influence and sometimes their troops into regional and civil conflicts in
countries such as Korea and Vietnam. By the 1960s, most politicians
and much of the population of the superpowers viewed all
international and even domestic conflicts – whether nationalist, anti-
imperialist, ethnic, racial, or even gender-based – through the “us-
versus-them” lens of the Cold War.
Nevertheless, anti-imperialist sentiment and nationalist political
action (often including violent revolutions) grew in the colonized areas.
As colonies became independent countries, the old empires began to
crumble. Although decolonization had been encouraged by the
League of Nations following the Great War, little actually took place
until after the Second World War. When the Great War began in 1914,
there were more than 120 colonized territories in the world; in contrast,
by 2013, the United Nations listed only 17 non-self-governing
territories. Africa exemplifies these rapid changes. As noted in
Chapter 9, the Berlin Conference of 1894–1895 had divided Africa into
numerous European colonies. By 1905, the only non-colonized areas
in Africa were Liberia (founded by former African-American slaves)
and Ethiopia (which had successfully resisted Italian colonization). By
the start of the Second World War, a total of only five African nations
were independent. However, between 1951 and 1960, 25 African
nations gained independence. From 1961–1980, they were joined by
26 more, with another three following by 1993.
But conflict seemed both ubiquitous and unending. Not only were
many decolonizing nations embroiled in rebellion and war as they
fought for independence, but after winning independence, internal
fighting for political power often ensued. As each proxy war was
fought, another seemed always around the corner. The threat of
nuclear annihilation loomed over battle. Thus, the end of the Second
World War saw initial relief at international peace gradually shift to
concerns over ongoing warfare throughout the world.
Conflict also grew within the industrialized world. With their common
enemy, the Nazis, defeated, the victorious countries began to question
their own value systems. Economic growth nourished desires for
greater democracy, which were blocked by the conservative values of
anti-communism. Although the focal point varied from country to
country, around the world there were mounting efforts to achieve
political, legal, social, cultural, and even economic equality.
During the 1950s, television became affordable for many. However,
it brought not only entertainment into people’s living rooms, but also
news of distressing world events, many of them the direct result of
Cold War politics. In the mid-1960s, students, minorities, and others
throughout the world rebelled against the status quo, demanding an
end to war, poverty, racism, sexism, colonialism, and authoritarian
university policies. The dramatic changes and upheavals across the
world led to a global crisis often marked by the year 1968.
This chapter is divided into three parts. We first consider the
devastating impact of the Second World War on Europe and Japan,
noting how a new postwar understanding of reality altered theatrical
styles. We then turn to theatre during the Cold War. The World War
had produced sharp differences between the U.S. and the rest of the
world. The U.S. was relatively unscathed and became obsessed with
communism and the Cold War. Most other countries, in contrast, were
either still deeply disturbed by the meaning of the war or were
attempting to extract themselves from imperialist power. As a result,
theatre in the U.S. differed from theatre elsewhere. During this time,
film and radio continued to influence approaches to theatre and
drama. Finally, we take a first look at the alternative theatres that
developed in the U.S. just before the turning point of 1968, as the
anger simmering over the previous two decades, international
awareness of social and political injustice, and anti-colonial
movements created by the growing power of television, set the stage
for the momentous transformations of the next era. Thus, this chapter
traverses the tension between realism and its intensifying discontents.
The impact of the Second World War on the victors and
the defeated
In Europe and Asia, where the war had devastated many cities and
created massive civilian suffering, theatre artists turned increasingly to
new philosophical or political systems in order to make sense of the
world. For many, neither prewar modernism, revolutionary theatre, nor
the old avant-gardes seemed adequate to express contemporary
reality. New approaches appeared, including variations of Brecht’s
political theatre, revisions of the surrealist ideas of Artaud, a revised
modernism, and plays that have been (somewhat questionably) called
“Theatre of the Absurd.”
Beckett and the end of high modernism
One of the key theatrical and literary voices in the early postwar period
was Samuel Beckett (1906–1989). Although born in Ireland, Beckett
lived in Paris from 1922 to 1930, intermittently from 1931–1937, and
permanently from 1937 to his death in 1989. He wrote many of his
plays in French. He felt that using his second language forced him to
constantly be aware of the precise meaning of every word. Beckett’s
stage plays kept film’s insistent realism at bay by a poetic minimalism
that tightly controlled what his actors could do and what his audience
experienced as reality. At the same time, he experimented with film,
radio, and tape recording.

Beckett’s plays may be seen as transitional, because

they contain aspects of both prewar modernism and the sense of
futility and lack of meaning that characterized many postwar plays.
They also have elements that were later adapted by postmodernism.
However, Beckett’s modernism differs from that of his predecessors.
Modernists from Ibsen to Eliot had built their theatrical “castles in the
air” on the premise that there was another reality, idealist or religious
(or both), that transcended the modern, material world. Beckett’s
theatre, in contrast, was more in line with Chekhov’s strand of
modernism. Like Chekhov’s characters, Beckett’s figures can find no
relief in a spiritual realm from the mundane tedium of their very
material lives. How to pass the time, a problem for many of Chekhov’s
characters, becomes an obsession for many of Beckett’s. Time is a
fundamental concern in the action of two of Beckett’s early plays,
Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957) (Figures 12.1 and 12.2).
Beckett’s theatrical ideas and practices extend and complicate
techniques typical of high modernism. For example, his use of
metatheatricality differs from that of his predecessors. In performance,
Beckett’s plays find subtle ways of insisting that they are constructed
artifices, while avoiding Pirandello’s sometimes cumbersome
metatheatrical structures. In Endgame, for example, when one
character asks another what keeps him “here,” a reference to the
room that the two characters occupy, the other answers, “The
dialogue” (Beckett 1958: 58); “here” has changed from a represented
place in the drama to suggest the stage on which the two actors
perform. Beckett’s theatrical mini malism and precisely crafted action
rarely allow spectators to forget that they are in a theatre. In Ohio
Impromptu (1981), Beckett places two men, dressed identically, sitting
across from one another at a table with their heads bowed, in a
precise mirror image of each other. There is nothing else on stage to
suggest a theatrical illusion; the two are surrounded by darkness.
They sit nearly motionless for the 15 minutes of the play, while one
reads the “sad tale” of the other’s life from a book. At the end,
Beckett’s stage directions specify that the two “[s]imultaneously . . .
lower their right hands to table, raise their heads and look at each
other. Unblinking. Expressionless. Ten seconds. Fade out” (Beckett
1984: 288). Beckett gives us no illusion to get lost in. This performance
style – like that of Breath (1969), a stage play with no actors, no
dialogue, and no visual action – is nearly as far from an enveloping
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk as the theatre can take its spectators. In
terms of philosophy, Beckett’s theatre is a clear statement of the
disillusionment and sense of helplessness felt by many people in the
postwar era. Beckett emphasizes the concrete “here” and offers no
religious or spiritual alternatives to the apparent meaning lessness of
existence.
 Like earlier high modernists, Beckett attacked the mimetic basis of
acting. He severely restricted the freedom that actors usually have to
interpret and embody their characters. As Beckett director Alan
Schneider once noted, “Actors feel like impersonal or even
disembodied puppets of his [Beckett’s] will” (Puchner 2002: 159), a
remark that recalls Craig’s and Yeats’s interest in substituting large
puppets for live actors. Beckett placed actors in barrels (Endgame),
encased them up to their necks in dirt (Happy Days, 1961) and
entombed them in urns (Play, 1963). This practice not only restricts the
actors’ movements, but visually expresses the idea of the futility of
action. Sometimes he reduced the actors to mouthpieces for his
words, as in Not I (1972), where all of the words spoken during the
minimal action of the play emanate from a female character named
Mouth. The actor playing Mouth must stand on a platform behind a
painted black wall or curtain with a small hole in it and place her head
against a padded frame behind the hole so that only her lips can be
seen by spectators as she speaks. In rehearsing Not I, the actor Billie
Whitelaw (1932–2014) reported extreme “sensory deprivation.” She
said, “The very first time I did it, I went to pieces. I felt I had no body; I
could not relate to where I was; and, going at that speed [in speaking
Beckett’s monologue], I was becoming very dizzy and felt like an
astronaut tumbling into space” (Worthen 1992: 138). Critic W.B.
Worthen compares the rigors of Beckettian acting to physical torture.
Beckett insisted that other directors follow his printed scripts precisely
– including all stage directions – and he actually sued the American
Repertory Theatre over their 1984 production of Endgame because he
objected to casting women in male roles and to setting the action in a
realistic underground train station that was being used as a shelter
following a nuclear war, rather than the abstract time and place that
the printed script specified. Beckett’s position was that as long as he
was alive, directors should respect his scripts’ words and stage
directions. This point is crystalized in Act Without Words I (1956) and
Act Without Words II (1956), stage plays totally lacking dialogue. The
scripts consist entirely of stage directions that the actors and
technicians must follow as precisely as choreography for a ballet.
Figure 12.1Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in a 1970 revival directed by
Roger Blin (seated), setting by Mathias. Company Renaud-Barrault at the
Théâtre Récamier. Actors, left to right: Marc Eyraud (Estragon), Michel Robin
(Lucky), Lucien Raimbourg (Vladimir), and Armand Meffre (Pozzo).

Photo: Roger Pic © Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des ASP.

Figure 12.2Clov (Jean Martin) pushes Hamm (Roger Blin) in his chair in the
Paris premiere production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame (Fin de partie) in 1957
at the Studio Champs-Élysées. Beckett preferred the simpler costumes and
staging of this production to the one in London earlier in the same year.

Photograph by J.-P. Mathevet, in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, a

Biography (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978,
pp. 370–1.
 Such power over actors and directors corresponds to Beckett’s
worldview, in which unknowable forces and seemingly arbitrary events
control our lives. In Waiting for Godot, for example, strangers come in
the black of night, kicking and beating the two tramps for no reason; a
character who once had sight is inexplicably struck blind; and day
after day, Godot keeps sending word that he is delayed.
Beckett was also intrigued by new modes of communication. He
realized that electric and electronic media could control what the
audience – and the characters – experience. In Krapp’s Last Tape
(1958), Krapp listens to his recorded voice from the past, almost as
though it is a stranger’s voice lacking meaning, and repeatedly fast-
forwards just before a major revelation that the audience never hears.
Beckett wrote several plays for radio, including All That Fall (for the
BBC, 1956) and Nacht und Traume (for German radio, 1982). Unlike
theatre or film, radio plays deprive the audience of vision, forcing them
to use imagination. In contrast, Film (1965) is a silent movie starring
Buster Keaton. By eliminating the sense of hearing, the audience must
focus on the visuals. He also wrote several works for television,
including Eh, Joe (1965) and Quad I+II (1981).

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Existentialism and the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd”
Historians in every field frequently debate the validity and application of
commonly used terminology and periodization. For example, the usefulness
and specific meanings of terms such as “the Renaissance,” “the modern
period,” “the Elizabethan age” or even “the Sixties” (as discussed in Chapter
13) are hotly contested. Many historians now use terms such as “the long
eighteenth century” (1688–1815 or 1660–1830, in reference to Britain), the “long
nineteenth century” (1789–1914) or “the short twentieth century” (1914–1991).
Because change is a gradual process, some artists and thinkers are said to be
“ahead of their time” or “behind the times.” Similarly, geographic boundaries
are porous and changeable. Is Samuel Beckett an Irish writer or a French
one? What is the precise definition and where are the boundaries of “Asia?”
Style and genre can also become overly generalized. For example, is
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot a comedy, a tragedy, or something else entirely?
One of the historian’s problems is how to use commonly accepted but often
misunderstood or deceptive terms. “Absurdism” offers an example.
 Absurdism is frequently associated with existentialist philosophy. Søren
Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is usually said to be the first existentialist
philosopher, but Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Albert Camus (1913–1960)
are often viewed as its main exponents, although Camus denied being an
existentialist.
Existentialism came into its own during and after the devastation and
horrors of the Second World War, and was in many ways a response to that
war. According to this philosophy, “existence precedes essence.” Each
individual is responsible for her own actions. Her own consciousness dictates
who she is – her choices define her concrete “existence.” There is no eternal
“essence” outside the individual – no identity based on concepts such as the
soul, truth, beauty, God, politics, race, gender, and so on. To become oneself,
one must act “authentically,” that is, according to a deep understanding of
one’s personal needs and desires, not according to some outwardly imposed
code (such as religious or civil law). However, authentic action is not simply
self-interest. Rather, it demands that each person respects the existential
needs and realities of others, implying a kind of innate or natural morality.
Sartre’s philosophical treatises are often dense, but he also wrote plays that
he hoped would make his philosophy accessible to ordinary people. For
example, in No Exit (1944) he uses a realistic dramatic style and structure to
demonstrate the terrifying results of living an inauthentic life. In this play, the
dead confront neither God nor the devil, but instead must live eternally with
others in whose eyes they are defined. In the play’s most famous line, they
realize that “Hell is other people.”
Such ideas conflict with many traditional worldviews. For example, Plato
and his followers insisted that only abstract ideas exist, and that what we see
and experience are merely imperfect reflections of the true reality. Most
religions and many political ideologies share such ideas, offering hope of a
better future in which justice prevails, with the good being rewarded and the
evil punished.
In contrast, existentialism suggests that the universe is random and lacks
purpose, as demonstrated by the horrors of both the Great War and Second
World War. Only human actions and how we interpret those actions define
and create meaning. Consequently, the cruelties and injustices of life appear
absurd. In this sense, “absurd” does not mean comical but simply
incomprehensible, arbitrary, and meaningless.
Albert Camus, who was born to a poor family in French Algeria,
passionately advocated Algerian independence and an end to poverty. Like
Sartre and Beckett, he was active in the French Resistance (an underground
movement in the Second World War that fought against the Nazi Occupation
of France). His philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942) is often
cited as the first clear depiction of “Absurdism.” In this essay, Camus
compares modern life to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to
push the same rock eternally up a hill, despite the fact that each time he
almost reaches his goal, the rock rolls back to the bottom of the hill. Camus
maintained that contemporary humans, lacking religion or some other eternal
truth, strive vainly to find logic in an apparently illogical universe. Rather than
reacting with despair and suicide, however, Camus suggests that humans
must rebel against this meaningless absurdity; for him, passionate opposition
to absurdity and the freedom to rebel against it create meaning, even though
the rebellion is doomed to failure.
The term “Theatre of the Absurd” was created in 1961 by the Hungarian-
British critic Martin Esslin (1918–2002), whose book of that title noted certain
philosophical and stylistic similarities in diverse postwar plays. It is a good
example of how a commonly used term can foster historical
misunderstanding. One objection to the term “Theatre of the Absurd” is that,
unlike avant-garde artists prior to the Second World War, these playwrights
did not intentionally create a new genre and they were not part of a conscious
movement. Rather, each artist, working independently (and often unaware of
the others), happened to develop plays with shared characteristics. They were
responding in the only way they could to an incomprehensible reality. As critic
David Pattie notes, “[T]o say that Absurdist Theatre was a coherent
movement with clearly defined aims and goals, was to simplify what was in
practice a rather disparate collection of plays and playwrights, unified
(apparently) only by a common rejection of the world run on rational
principles” (Pattie 2000: 114).
Unlike existentialism, the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd” is generally
unconcerned with individual choice and authenticity; however, it shares with
existentialism a focus on the meaninglessness of action, the cruelty or
arbitrariness of fate, and an emphasis on the here- and-now. Playwrights
usually considered “Absurdist” include Samuel Beckett (generally considered
to be the most significant writer), Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), Harold Pinter
(1930–2008; early works only), Sławomir Mrożek (1930–2013), Abe Kō bō
(1924–1993; also known as Kō bō Abe – Abe is his family name), Edward
Albee (1928–; early works only), and many others. In addition to
meaninglessness, arbitrariness, and inaction, their plays are often
characterized by apparently nonsensical dialogue coupled with black comedy
or an uncanny feeling of menace.
Despite the fact that these playwrights never defined themselves as
“Absurdists,” and that some, such as Albee, actually refused the label, various
critics and historians have found the concept useful. For example, in his
influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), Jan Kott (1914–2001) read
 Shakespeare from the perspectives of existentialism, Absurdism, and his own
experiences as a Pole in war-ravaged Europe. Others have suggested that,
because the dialogue and action are so often illogical or dreamlike,
“Absurdist” plays are descended from Surrealism. Still others dispute such
ideas or make different connections.
The authors of this book acknowledge that the term “Theatre of the Absurd”
is a widely used but highly problematic designation. Because students will
inevitably come across the term (or may have already encountered it), we feel
that it is important to clarify the debates surrounding it. Understanding that
common concepts and terms may be misleading – and that meanings can
change over time – helps us to be more precise in our usage, and to avoid
generalizations that may lead to confusion.

Transforming modernism in Europe

Ever since the first generation of modernism, modernists in the theatre
had struggled against the constraints of photographic realism. As a
moving “picture,” film continued photography’s ties to the literal,
material world. Because the high modernists had privileged the
representational validity of print, they had also regarded film (but not,
usually, the radio) with suspicion. But film had been transforming the
expectations of theatre audiences and artists since the 1920s. Postwar
theatre would employ filmic techniques to create several new models
of modernist theatre in the West during the 1940–1970 era.
Many playwrights after the Second World War had grown up
watching the movies, and this affected their perception of reality and
how it might be enacted on stage. Luckily for these later dramatists, an
earlier generation of directors and designers had also been
experimenting with filmic ways of streamlining their national classics,
primarily Shakespeare and Molière, to keep them popular on the
stage.
One such director in England is Peter Hall (1930–). Although well
known for directing Shakespeare, in 1955 Hall mounted the first
English-language production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at his Arts
Theatre in London. Even after becoming artistic director of the new
Royal Shakespeare Company (previously called the Shakespeare
Memorial Theatre) in 1961, he continued to alternate contemporary
and classical productions. By the mid-1960s, Hall had developed a
distinctive style for all of his projects, a heightened realism that mixed
close attention to the language of the play, a generally spare but
distinctive use of design elements, and carefully crafted, often forceful
movement. It was a modernist style that worked as well for the plays
of Harold Pinter as for those of William Shakespeare.
At first Pinter’s darkly comic plays mystified but intrigued the British
public with their strange oppressors, panic-stricken artists (The
Birthday Party, 1958), and garrulous drifters (The Caretaker, 1960).
When Hall directed a Royal Shakespeare cast in Pinter’s The
Homecoming in 1965, some British theatregoers and critics were
outraged by the dramatist’s send-up of conventional family values, but
the play ran for 18 months. Initial appearances of the characters to the
contrary, The Homecoming gradually reveals a working-class family
as a group of animal istic thugs and pimps and shows the home-
comers of the title – a seemingly abstracted academic and his
attractive middle-class wife from America – to be as heartless and
bestial as the rest of the family (Figure 12.3). The success of the U.S.
production in 1967 (with most of the same cast) confirmed the play as
a modernist classic.
The rhythms of Pinter’s dialogue, including its many pauses, reveal
an ear attuned to the bleak comedy of Beckett’s early plays and also
show the influence of radio, for which Pinter had written several one-
acts. Like many of his plays, The Homecoming explores the dynamics
of dominance, exploitation, and victimization, themes that Pinter first
dramatized in personal and psychological terms and which he would
later treat in more directly political ways. In his Nobel Prize
acceptance address in 2005, Pinter spoke of the compulsive but
never-completed search for truth in the language of the drama, and he
then criticized the U.S. for its calculated language of deception in
foreign policy since the Second World War. With that language and
those policies, said Pinter, the U.S. engendered brutal dictatorships
and created justifications for brutal wars and torture, notably in the war
in Iraq.
The Polish playwright Sławomir Mrożek began as a newspaper
humorist and cartoonist. His early one-acts set up ironic models of
political power and undercut them through their own logic. The Police
(1958), for example, depicts a perfect but radically dysfunctional police
state. In Out at Sea (1961), three starving characters on a raft
establish a socialist republic, then proceed to define justice and
freedom in such a way that two of them are able to eat the third, who
agrees with the logic of his sacrifice. Mrożek fled Poland in 1963, but
continued to write plays that barely skirted censorship and delighted
Polish audiences. Critics Martin Esslin and Jan Kott placed Mrożek in
the tradition of Polish political Surrealist dramatists Stanislaw Ignacy
Witkiewicz (1885–1939) and Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969). Like
Pinter and Beckett, Mrożek was introduced to London audiences by
Peter Hall. Mrożek’s most important play, Tango (1965), was produced
by Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 at the Aldwych Theatre
in London. Tango is a black comedy that satirically deploys the tired
form of domestic family comedy to examine the failure of ex-radicals
to stop Europe’s slide into totalitarianism. In Mrożek’s parable family,
each of the three generations represents a different political view, from
the 1920s to the 1960s. Perhaps the most foolish are the grandparents,
who prattle on in the language of the Dadaists and Surrealists while
raw power takes over the household. The irony is that the victory of
the idealistic but conservative Hamlet-like son over his bohemian
family results in stifling totalitarianism. Tango was one of the first
works directed by Trevor Nunn (1940–), who later served as artistic
director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company (1968–1986) and the
National Theatre (1996–2003) in the U.K., and as stage director of
numerous plays, including international mega-musical hits such as
Cats (1981) and Les Misérables (1985). The translation of Tango by
Nicholas Bethell was further polished by the then-unknown playwright
Tom Stoppard (1937–), who gained fame the following year with the
National Theatre production of his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead (which, like Tango, eerily reflects and reconsiders Hamlet).
Figure 12.3Peter Hall's production of Pinter's The Homecoming for the Royal
Shakespeare Company which opened at the Aldwych Theatre in London, 1965.
From left to right: Michael Bryant (Teddy), Terence Rigby (Joey), and Ian Holm
(Lenny).

Photo © Zoë Dominic.

Other playwrights from this era – especially those from Eastern
Europe – also wrote politically inflected works. For example, Eugène
Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959) depicts a society where all the citizens,
except one man, blindly rush to transform into wild beasts. The
memory of wartime horror was seldom far from the surface in major
plays of this period.
Postwar theatre in a defeated Germany
The advent of Nazism in 1933 closed left-wing and avant-garde
theatres in Germany, silencing or exiling many of Germany’s best
theatre artists. After the war, the defeated nation was divided into two.
The DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, also called the German
Democratic Republic or East Germany) became a communist nation
aligned with the Soviet Bloc, while the BRD (Bundesrepublik
Deutschland, also called the Federal Republic of Germany or West
Germany) was a capitalist nation aligned with Western Europe and
the U.S. The former capital city, Berlin, which was fully within the
borders of East Germany, was itself divided into East Berlin (a part of
East Germany) and West Berlin (which, despite its location, was
legally a part of West Germany). Germany would not be reunited until
1990. In East and West Germany after 1945, local governments quickly
rebuilt their playhouses as a matter of civic pride, but a national
German theatre emerged more slowly.
Until the mid-1950s, the Berliner Ensemble (in East Berlin) was the
only German theatre with an international reputation. Soon after
Bertolt Brecht and his wife, actress Helene Weigel (1900–1971),
established the Ensemble in 1949, it became the most influential
socialist theatre of the postwar era. Working as both playwright and
director, Brecht exposed the contradictions of capitalism and explored
theatrical means of animating audiences to political action. (See
Chapter 11 and its case study for further discussion of Brecht’s
theories and practice.)
In the 1960s, a new generation of German theatre artists also looked
to the documentary tradition of the German stage to examine the
Holocaust and the Nazi past. Several socialist playwrights, including
Rolf Hochhuth (1931–) and Peter Weiss (1916–1982), used
documentary devices to expose the extent to which thousands of
ordinary Germans, not just the Nazis in command, had been
responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews, Slavs, Romani,
homosexuals, and other minorities. A firestorm of controversy swirled
around Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, when it opened in 1963. The
play drew on written evidence to suggest that many German Catholics
and even the Pope himself had condoned the slaughter of European
Jewry. In The Investigation (1965), Peter Weiss used dialogue taken
directly from official transcripts of the investigations into the Auschwitz
extermination camp. In their lack of spectacle, both The Deputy and
The Investigation suggest that emotion-laden pictures of the
Holocaust, whether photographs or films, would detract from the
necessity of probing Germany’s guilty past. The assumption was that
understanding an event of such magnitude and preventing a
recurrence of the attitudes that fostered it requires close attention to
the logic and morality of its perpetrators. Other German documentary
plays of the 1960s used similar minimalist methods to focus audience
attention on British war crimes, European imperialism, the
development of the hydrogen bomb in the U.S., and the U.S. war in
Vietnam. This socialist “theatre of fact,” as it was called, generally
shunned complex media effects to rely on the theatre’s oldest
weapons, the actor’s voice and the moral imagination of the audience.
Although some of the techniques of the “theatre of fact” departed
from the general aesthetic approach of the Berliner Ensemble,
Brechtian and documentary German theatre shared the same general
moral and political point of view in the 1960s. Even though the Berliner
Ensemble was located in East Berlin, many socialist artists in both
East and West Germany looked to the Ensemble’s productions as
models for their work. In addition to Brecht’s plays, the Berliner
Ensemble regularly produced the dramas of Shakespeare and the
German classics. Brecht’s death in 1956 and the assumption of the
Ensemble’s leadership by Helene Weigel did not diminish the
influence of Brechtian theatre (and may even have enhanced it). In
East Germany, the work of playwright Heiner Müller (1929–1995) and
director Peter Palitzsch (1918–2004) (who began with the Ensemble
and later moved to West Germany) derived from, but went beyond,
Brecht. Müller’s later works, such as Hamletmachine (1977), have
been crucial in defining postmodernism (considered in Chapter 13).
Brechtian theatre also crossed the Cold War divide. For example,
West German play-wright Tankred Dorst (1925–) and the Austrian
Peter Handke (1942–) joined Hochhuth and Weiss in their embrace of
Brechtian politics. Similarly, the Swiss Freidrich Dürrenmatt (1921–
1990), who wrote in German, combined Brechtian techniques with
other styles to critique both totalitarianism and capitalism in his best-
known work, the macabre black comedy The Visit (1956).
Japanese theatrical responses to defeat in the Second
World War
Like much of Europe, Japan’s cities and infrastructure were in ruins by
the end of the war. Japan surrendered only after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs. The Japanese and the
world gradually learned that these new, incomprehensibly powerful
weapons could not only kill (and even evaporate) all living beings near
the blast’s epicenter, but that nuclear fallout could contaminate the
land, cause cancer in survivors, and create genetic mutations in the
unborn for generations to come. The Japanese people would also
learn about the brutal war crimes inflicted by their own soldiers and
military leaders on enemy combatants and women.

In the wake of such unspeakable horrors, how can art find

an appropriate language? One solution is to abandon words
completely. Turning to the body, some postwar Japanese
choreographers created butoh [boo-toh] (also romanized as butō), a
non-verbal performance genre that rejects both traditional Japanese
and Western aesthetic concepts. Originally called ankoku butoh
(“dance of darkness”), the first public performance took place in 1959.
The creators of this movement offered divergent approaches. Hijikata
Tatsumi (1928–1986) choreographed and performed intentionally
crude, contorted movements that derived from his childhood
memories of poverty in rural, northeastern Japan. In contrast, Ōno
Kazuo (1906– 2010) created gentle, nostalgic, often mystical works
that emphasized the feminine. Many variations followed. Butoh’s
extreme physical and mental rigor achieved international notoriety in
1985 when a dancer from the troupe Sankai Juku, performing hanging
upside down outside a building in Seattle, fell to his death. Regardless
of the specific style, butoh is generally characterized by dead-white,
full-body makeup, grotesque or contorted physical gestures, extreme
slowness, and a suggestion of the forbidden and taboo. Using various
styles that sometimes fuse butoh with local popular culture, butoh
troupes now exist throughout the world. The genre has powerfully
impacted modern dance worldwide.
In contrast, only a few playwrights attempted to probe the meaning
of the nuclear holocaust and of Japan’s role in the war; until the 1960s,
the majority seemed to want to forget the traumas of war and defeat
by writing non-political plays in the traditions of prewar modernism or
psychological realism.
After the war, the Japanese government was forcibly transformed
by the imposition of Western-style institutions. From 1945 to 1952, the
United States military essentially ruled Japan in what is called the
Occupation. The goal of the Occupation was to turn a former enemy
into a permanentally by substituting American-style democracy for
traditional Japanese values. However, long-held cultural practices and
traditional beliefs were not eliminated.
To curb the possibility of rebellion and to encourage the growth of
constitutional democracy in Japan, the Occupation practiced
censorship. Because many kabuki plays celebrated the values of
revenge, feudalism, emperor worship, and the subjugation of women,
kabuki theatre in general was suppressed, while Western-derived,
realist shingeki plays flourished. Thus, Japan’s first postwar
production – just four months after the surrender – was a revival of
Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Many characters in The Cherry
Orchard are nostalgic for a vanished past. They also fear a rapidly
transforming present and a future they cannot comprehend. Such
emotions resonated deeply with the audience in a devastated,
postwar Japan.
Despite the Occupation’s efforts to prevent the return of militarist
ideology, one of the most popular shingeki playwrights of the postwar
era was Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), also well known outside Japan as
Yukio Mishima, the Western order of his name. Although Mishima was
an ultranationalist who despised Westernization and longed for a
return to samurai values, he preferred Western clothing, Western
housing, and often wrote Western-style shingeki plays. He also
adapted the stories of nō plays into shingeki, using modern settings
and psychology, and was an important author of new kabuki plays,
including one inspired by Racine’s Phèdre. Japanese critics and
audiences consistently name his all-female Madame de Sade (1965)
the best Japanese postwar play. Madame de Sade has had several
important English-language productions, including one at London’s
Donmar Warehouse in 2009, starring Judy Dench (1934–).
Another key shingeki playwright, Kinoshita Junji (1914–2006),
sometimes moved beyond the constraints of realism. His Twilight
Crane (1949), based on folklore, remains the most produced play in
Japan. In this play, Kinoshita turned to his nation’s mythic past to
create a new artistic genre, reliant on a fresh vernacular dialect and a
notion of “pure Japanese essence” uncontaminated by the West. In
contrast, his realist Between God and Man (1970) is one of the few
dramatic attempts to come to terms with Japanese war crimes.
Many younger Japanese artists came to believe that shingeki’s
realist, materialist conventions could not adequately explain their
nation’s defeat or the shock and devastation of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Beginning primarily in the 1960s, shingeki split into various
subgenres, several of which experimented with new ways to
incorporate traditional Japanese performance.
 Anti-shingeki artists began to appear around the time that
Japanese radicals and workers staged mass protests in 1960 against
the ratification of the United States–Japan Mutual Security Treaty. The
treaty, still in effect in 2014, essentially places Japan under the military
protection of the United States. The protestors were demanding a
return to Japanese autonomy and an end to the use of Japan as a
base for American soldiers and nuclear submarines. During the 1960s,
some of these artists wrote and directed plays that fused traditional
Japanese and international modernist elements. Betsuyaku Minoru’s
(1937–) The Elephant (1962), for instance, deals with the horrors of
nuclear contamination in a style inspired by kyōgen and Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot. It is generally considered the first angura [ahn-goo-
rah] play (from the Japanese pronunciation of “underground”).
Akimoto Matsuyo (1911–2001), one of Japan’s first modern female
playwrights, wrote Kaison, the Priest of Hitachi (1965), which features
a young man who escapes from his historical burden of war guilt into
mythic time to become Kaison, a twelfth-century warrior. By the late
1960s new companies, such as Tenjō Sajiki, the Situation Theatre, and
the Black Tent Theatre, were experimenting with forms of staging and
actor–audience relationships that greatly diverged from the realist
conventions of shingeki.
Postwar theatre and the Cold War
As we described in the introduction to this chapter, the Second World
War had left massive destruction and dislocation in its wake,
especially in Europe and Japan, profoundly affecting their view of the
world. In the U.S., on the other hand, cities (except for Honolulu, site of
Pearl Harbor) and most civilians had not experienced battles or
bombardments. For those who had not served in the military, the
horrors of the war remained distant. As the Cold War settled in, this
difference strongly shaped the theatre.
Psychological realism in the United States
Although the United States remained physically intact, families had
suffered and soldiers had been killed or maimed. Many women who
had discovered their value as paid workers during the war found
themselves replaced by returning male soldiers. They were forced into
less satisfactory or lower-paying jobs or, more often, retreated to their
prewar roles as wives and mothers. Similarly, minority soldiers –
especially African-Americans, who were still subject to legal
segregation, and Japanese-Americans, who had voluntarily joined the
military to demonstrate patriotism in light of the forced internment of
west-coast Americans of Japanese descent – returned to find that
their service abroad had not changed their second-class status at
home. Nevertheless, since disruptions had been far less drastic than
in much of the rest of the world, it was easier for theatre artists and
audiences in the United States to maintain a relatively unchanged
view of life. In addition, American fears of communism stifled overtly
political theatre and sent “un-American” war refugees such as Bertolt
Brecht, who had settled in California, back to Europe. Consequently,
theatre in the U.S. initially continued to emphasize positivist values
and psychological realism.
Unlike modernism in Europe, modernist theatre in the U.S. did not
begin with theatrical innovators eager to reinvigorate a hallowed
national tradition. Political and economic pressures, a legacy of realist
theatre, a self-flattering notion of popular psychology, plus the
emphatically realistic quality of film and radio, had encouraged the
adoption of psychological realism in the United States. Although the
roots of this style date from the late nineteenth century and include
many of the plays of Eugene O’Neill, the kind of theatre that O’Neill’s
plays hint at could not have flourished on the stage without the
necessary acting, directing, and design practices to support it.
During the 1930s, Lee Strasberg (1901–1982) and other members of
the Group Theatre in New York had applied what they took to be
Stanislavsky’s precepts about acting to their work on realist plays.
Although their understanding of Stanislavsky was inaccurate, the
actors and directors of the Group had forged various acting “systems”
that helped actors to empathize deeply with their stage characters.
After the war, Strasberg’s version – usually called “the Method” –
trained a generation of actors. Unlike Stanislavsky’s System,
Strasberg’s Method emphasized the actor’s memory of her personal
experiences and emotions, in order to connect to the character. Stella
Adler (1903–1992), also an original member of the Group, briefly
studied with Stanislavsky himself. Her work with Stanislavsky
convinced her that Strasberg’s Method was flawed. Instead of the
actor’s personal emotions, she focused on “the given circumstances”
of the drama as written – including historical period, location, culture,
and so on. Thus Adler stressed what the character in the play (not the
actor) experienced. She trained actors such as Marlon Brando (1924–
2004). Other notable actors trained in some version of the Method or of
Stanislavsky’s System include Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), Robert De
Niro (1943–), and Johnny Depp (1963–). By the 1950s, Method Acting
and its variations dominated theatrical performance in the U.S. This
acting style, psychologically attuned directing, and fluid scenography
had produced a theatre of psychological realism that became a
distinctive national style.
While the influence of Appia and Craig on the New Stagecraft
Movement during the decade of the Great War had moved some U.S.
stage design away from the dictates of literal realism, most scenic and
lighting designs for dramatic productions in the 1920s and 1930s
continued to emphasize the massiveness of realist rooms and
exteriors. However, Jo Mielziner (1901–1976) and a few other
designers of Broadway productions drew on European ideas to
discover more abstract solutions for staging realist plays. At the same
time, the pressure from film to create quickly shifted scenic locales
was also moving realism away from three-dimensional units toward
more lightweight, lyrical designs. This led Mielziner, especially, toward
a visual poetic realism with the use of color and soaring vertical lines
in scene designs that left rooms without ceilings and substituted
transparent walls made of painted scrim for the material solidity of
regular stage flats.
Consequently, when Mielziner designed Tennessee Williams’ The
Glass Menagerie in 1945, he knew he could regulate the flow between
the scenes of narration in the present and the scenes of memory in
the past through the manipulation of scrim and lighting. When lit from
the front, scrim can give the illusion of a solid wall. Illuminated from
behind as well, the wall of scrim becomes transparent, allowing
spectators to see objects and actors through a gauzy grain.
Mielziner’s painterly, soft-edged designs nicely complemented the
psychological realism of Williams’ plays. He designed seven
modernist productions for Williams between 1945 and 1963, including
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).
Although Mielziner’s use of lighting and scrim to shift between
locales or atmospheric effects permitted the kind of scenic
transformation that film editing could accomplish, the lighting- and-
scrim shift also borrowed from the sound transition that radio drama
producers called a “segue.” By the 1940s, many popular radio serials
used a musical or vocal bridge that faded in and out to move from one
scene to another. At times, the segue moved the listener inside the
narrator’s head, sharing intimate thoughts, daydreams, or flashbacks.
The principle of the radio segue shaped playwriting as well as
design on the postwar American stage. “Inside of His Head” was
Arthur Miller’s initial title for Death of a Salesman (1949), which
deploys several radio-drama techniques to tell the story of the dreams
of material and capitalistic success that push salesman Willy Loman
to suicide. Mielziner’s design for Salesman used lighting-and-scrim
shifts to move spectators inside Willy’s head, where they could see the
world from the perspective of Miller’s Everyman character (Figure
12.4). Audiences familiar with the “voice-over” convention of radio
drama – a narrator taking the listener directly to a new episode in the
plot – had no difficulty following Willy’s vocal transitions from present
time and place into his daydreams located in the past. Many radio
plays divided the internal psychology of the protagonist into different
voices and sounds so that the split desires of the main character could
be dramatized. Miller, who had written radio plays in the early 1940s,
achieves a similar effect in Salesman by dividing the voices “inside of
his [Willy’s] head” among several characters. Directly shaped by the
techniques and effects of radio drama, Death of a Salesman was a
milestone in American psychological realism.

Figure 12.4A rendering of Jo Mielziner's setting for Arthur Miller's Death of a

Salesman, 1949.

Photo: Peter Juley & Son. © The Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C.
Salesman was directed by Elia Kazan (1909–2003), the premier
director of psychological realism in the U.S. from the late 1940s
through the 1950s. During those years, Kazan also enjoyed a
successful career in Hollywood and brought several of the techniques
of film directing to his work in New York. Kazan had been a member of
the Group in the 1930s and, like several of his cohort, continued to use
Method Acting and its variations with actors in stage productions such
as Miller’s All My Sons (1947) and Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959), and in such films as On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden
(1955). Kazan directed both the stage and film versions of Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947, 1951). He carefully coached his actors
and used their edgy, high-strung psychological rhythms to shape their
stage movements and his camera shots. Kazan’s success helped to
ensure that psychological realism would unite the film screens and the
theatrical stages of modern America. Given the widespread influence
of film on the postwar imagination in the West and Japan (and the
power of Hollywood’s distribution system), it is not surprising that filmic
images of psychological realism achieved international renown.
In the U.S., theatre artists generally thought of themselves as
apolitical. Nevertheless, most productions supported capitalist notions
of individual success, consumer choice, and corporate power, while
accepting limits on democracy and on the ability of the government to
change patterns of economic inequality and traditional racist behavior.
These basic values were apparent in most musical comedies,
especially those by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and in the intense
psychological dramas that relied on Method Acting and its variations
for their success.
A few mainstream playwrights dissented from the consensus.
Lorraine Hansberry’s (1930–1965) A Raisin in the Sun (1959) managed
to offer a mostly white audience a realistic view of the daily lives of
African-Americans and the problems they faced due to racial
inequality, which the burgeoning civil rights movement had begun to
contest. Hansberry was the first African-American woman play wright
to have a Broadway production, and the play’s director, Lloyd
Richards (1919–2006), was Broadway’s first African-American director.
Tennessee Williams attacked homophobia and consumerist values in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) (Figure 12.5), while Arthur Miller’s The
Crucible (1953) equated U.S. anti-communist hysteria and black-listing
(specifically the activities of the Congressional hearings led by
Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, also called HUAC) with the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693.
HUAC forced many theatre and film artists to testify, asking them “Are
you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Those who refused to answer or who were merely named by others
(even if they had only attended a single rally or meeting prior to the
Second World War) were subsequently “blacklisted,” which meant that
they were forbidden to work in the film industry. Many never recovered
their careers. A few blacklisted screenwriters, however, were able to
survive by secretly having their non-blacklisted friends take credit for
scripts they had written. Others found that they could still work in New
York theatre. Fear of communism fueled many Hollywood films,
especially science fiction films which often presented the threat of
alien invasion and mind control.
Figure 12.5Scene from the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, with Ben Gazzara as Brick and Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
 Photo by Fred Fehl, courtesy of Gabriel Pinski. Supplied by New
York Public Library Photographic Services.
Despite the powerful anti-communism of this period, most plays –
and most members of the audience – were not overtly political.
Audiences tended to be more concerned with their personal lives and
with improving their economic conditions. Our first case study
examines audience reception of the initial Broadway production of A
Streetcar Named Desire.
Case Study Cultural memories and audience response: A
Streetcar Named Desire in the 1940s
Bruce McConachie
American writer Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), complaining about
Northern U.S. stereotypes of the South, noted that “[A]nything that
comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the
Northern Reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be
called realistic” (O’Connor 1961: 40). When A Streetcar Named Desire
premiered on Broadway in 1947, most New York critics badly
misinterpreted the play and its performers in the way that O’Connor
feared. Today, critics and historians generally recognize Southern
playwright Tennessee Williams’ drama as a masterpiece and nearly all
spectators sympathize with his protagonist, Blanche DuBois. Driven
from her teaching position and family plantation in Mississippi,
Blanche struggles to make a place for herself in New Orleans, where
she goes to live with her sister Stella and brother-in-law, Stanley
Kowalski. Sexual tensions soon erupt between Blanche and Stanley,
however, and he rapes her near the end of the play, driving the
already mentally unstable Blanche into insanity.
In a letter concerning the Hollywood film version of Streetcar
(released in 1951), Williams recognized that Stanley would draw some
sympathy from viewers but characterized his rape of Blanche as “the
ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage
and brutal forces in modern society” (quoted in Cohan 1997: 318). In
1947, however, although the critics praised Williams’ play, admired
Elia Kazan’s directing, and celebrated Marlon Brando’s depiction of
Stanley, a majority found Jessica Tandy’s Blanche unsympathetic
(Kolin 2000: 1–33). In fact, several newspaper critics branded Blanche
as a drunk, a Southern decadent, a home-wrecker, and a neurotic
nymphomaniac. Critic Howard Barnes, for example, identified Blanche
as a “boozy prostitute,” while Robert Coleman typed her as a
“paranoic-nymphomaniac.” Seven of the nine critics who wrote
reviews also explained Blanche’s actions in the play by referring
negatively to her Southern heritage. According to Richard Watts,
Blanche represented “a long line of decadent Southern aristocrats,”
while for Ward Morehouse, she was simply “the faded, shattered
daughter of the South.” Most reviewers also felt Blanche was
delusional. John Chapman noted that Blanche “shuns the reality of
what she is and takes gallant and desperate refuge in a magical life
she has invented for herself.” Louis Kronenberger flayed Blanche as
“the most demonically driven kind of liar – the one who lies to the
world because she must lie to herself.” In sum, most of the reviewers
in 1947 saw Blanche as a sexual predator or a lying tramp, whose
Southern past had left her deluded and neurotic (New York Theatre
Critics Reviews 1948: 249–52). Because Streetcar invites spectators to
sympathize with both Blanche and Stanley at different times during
most of the play, the critics invariably took sides between the two in
their reviews. However, most spectator-journalists tilted sharply
toward Stanley. While none of the reviewers applauded Stanley’s rape
of Blanche, most ignored it or used euphemisms to evade its
implications; the word “rape” occurred in none of the New York
reviews. For these critics, Blanche was predestined to end up in a
mental institution even before Stanley laid a hand on her.
Why did these critics withdraw their sympathy from Blanche and
avoid the implications of her rape by Stanley? Most of these critics had
seen and reviewed thousands of plays; they were professionals, hired
by some of the best papers in the theatrical capital of the nation, not
cub reporters unaccustomed to challenging new plays. Although Elia
Kazan had knowingly directed Jessica Tandy to create a shrill and
nervous Blanche in the early scenes of the play, while coaching
Brando to work for spectator interest, he expected audience
sympathies to shift away from Stanley and toward Blanche midway
through the play. For many reviewers, however, that shift never came
(Kolin 2000: 10). Why did they misread Williams’ play?
One way for the theatre historian to approach this problem is to
focus on the mindset of the New York audience, including the critics,
who brought certain cultural memories with them when they went to
the theatre. While such collective memories are never monolithic,
some may be widely shared and these invariably shape audience
expectations and initial responses in all dramatic productions. This
case study singles out five of these clusters that appear to have been
important in 1947: the American South, female sexuality, heterosexual
marriage, the moral status of male veterans, and female mental
health.
From the perspective of postwar New Yorkers, the South of Blanche
DuBois was a foreign country. The inheritor of plantation-era traditions
and sensibilities, Blanche and her kind probably represented the
faded gentility, aristocratic pretenses, and emotional extremes of the
Old South that spectators associated with romantic novels and
Hollywood films such as Gone With the Wind (1939). For Northerners,
the most popular guide to such traditional character-types in the 1940s
was W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941), which presented the
South as culturally distinctive, resistant to change, willfully
individualistic, and extravagantly romantic (Reed 2003: 15–27). Most
New Yorkers could define themselves as more cosmopolitan, more
accepting of progress, more cooperative, and more rational than
Blanche.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Cultural memories and audience response

Students of theatre often hear from professors and friends that they should go
to see a new play with “an open mind.” But of course our minds are never truly
“open” and have not been since before we were born, because they are
shaped by personal habits, family customs, acquired language, and cultural
memories – nearly all of which operate unconsciously in our daily lives.
Although education and “openness” can help us appreciate new experiences,
we can also misinterpret significant theatrical events for which we are
unprepared. Among the most important reasons for spectator
misunderstandings are cultural memories, which can sway audience
perceptions, holding even professional critics in their grip.
This case study demonstrates how Americans in 1947 translated their
recent memories and experiences of the Second World War (both actual and
those manufactured by Hollywood) and their long-held cultural assumptions
about gender and the American South, into misinterpretations of a play that
would become one of the great classics of psychological realism.

According to historian Elaine Tyler May, most Americans after the war,
including women, believed that a woman’s “normal” place was in the
home. These memories and beliefs, says May, resulted in a domestic
version of containment (the politics of keeping communism outside the
U.S.) from the mid-1940s into the 1960s: “Within [the home], potentially
dangerous social forces of the new age might be tamed. . . . More than
merely a metaphor for the Cold War on the home front, containment
aptly describes the way in which public policy, personal behavior, and
even political values focused on the home” (May 1988: 14). The
postwar consensus embraced heterosexual marriage and a happy
home as the answers to containing the sexual desires of men and
women.
Blanche’s presence in the Kowalski household presents a direct
threat to the norms of domestic containment. Most audience members
would have seen Blanche as a potential home-wrecker and blamed
her for the heightened tensions in the household. From this
perspective, it is understandable that the male critics in 1947 could not
bring themselves to call Stanley’s attack on Blanche a rape. Her
presence in the house, her flirting with Stanley, and her apparent
sexual availability, from their point of view, had simply caused the poor
boy to explode.
The image of Stanley as a heroic veteran also played a role in
spectator response. The popular mythology surrounding “the good
war” (a common term for the Second World War, since Nazism was
seen as an evil that only America could destroy) tended to conflate
“our boys” – all veterans were implicitly “boys” regardless of their age
– with America itself. Hundreds of war films in the 1940s delivered
characterizations of innocent, valiant soldier boys and none of these
movies showed American soldiers raping local women. In Hollywood
mythology, if a veteran sexually molested a woman, he must have
been driven to it. Consequently, many New York spectators would
have understood the sexual tensions between Stanley and Blanche
and the eventual rape as a case of “she was asking for it”
(McConachie 2003: 56–61).
Freudian psychiatry had long warned that women were more
vulnerable to psychological problems than men. Further, postwar
psychiatry preached that rebellion against normative social roles could
lead women to psychological distress and neurosis; social conformity,
in other words, was the key to personal mental health, as
demonstrated in many Cold War Hollywood films. Blanche’s presence,
her past, and her demands that she had a right to find a place for
herself were an affront to the norms of Cold War American life as they
were emerging in 1947.
Such cultural ideas, images, and prejudices in the memories of New
Yorkers helped to shape their perception of the drama. A brief
discussion of the play’s first four scenes will illustrate this point.
In scene 1, an exhausted Blanche, under extreme duress, drinks
compulsively to quiet her nerves, careens between extremes of
affection and combativeness in her interactions with her sister Stella,
and sinks into depressed memories of death when she recalls the
recent parade of funerals at the family plantation, now lost to creditors.
While it is possible to sympathize with Blanche because of what she
has been through, spectators who already believed that the South
housed neurotic women could also define Blanche as another
grotesque victim of Southern tradition and female psychological
weakness. Apparently, many of the critics chose the latter response.
The next scene begins with an argument between Stanley and
Stella about demanding a share of the profits from the sale of the
plantation (even though no profits exist) and leads to Stella’s angry
exit. Then Blanche emerges from the bathroom in a slip and red satin
robe and begins to flirt with Stanley, presumably because she heard
parts of their argument and seeks to win him over. Spectators who
had stereotyped Blanche as a potentially neurotic and decadent
Southerner in scene 1, however, might easily have understood
Blanche’s flirtation as an attempt to seduce Stanley. She then sends
Stella off to the drugstore to buy her a coke so that she can speak to
Stanley alone. Although Williams is clear later in the play that Blanche
has often relied on playful flirtation to control her relations with men, at
this point the audience could have believed that she had gotten rid of
her sister in order to continue her seduction.
Convinced that there was something psychologically wrong with this
faded Southern belle, audience members could begin to explain
Blanche’s behavior as an attempt to wreck her sister’s marriage in
order to steal Stanley. This interpretation weaves together many of
Blanche’s significant actions, grounds them in the actual
circumstances of what the audience understood so far about her past
and present, and tracks her life in terms of an overall goal – to get a
husband – that would have seemed believable and even necessary to
many 1947 spectators. The story also explains why so many
spectators in 1947 attributed the trait of nymphomania to Blanche’s
personality.
In scene 3, Blanche finds a group of men playing poker in the
Kowalski kitchen and singles out Mitch, an awkward bachelor, for
flirtatious engagement. Spectators already alarmed at Blanche’s
sexuality would also note that she lies about her age and dims the
bedroom light to shade her wrinkles. At this point, viewers might be
divided on seeing her as a home-wrecker and nymphomaniac, or
more charitably, as a lonely woman exploring the possibility of Mitch
as a potential husband.
Scene 4, however, likely revived and validated the interpretation of
Blanche as a home-wrecker. Repulsed by Stanley’s attack on Stella at
the climax of the poker party scene and by their subsequent
lovemaking, Blanche urges Stella to run away with her. Blanche
fantasizes about an old beau who could rescue them, tries to call
Western Union to send him a telegram, and argues with Stella about
the brutishness of her marriage – all actions that probably revived the
stereotype of Blanche as a neurotic Southern belle and confirmed the
suspicion that Blanche wanted to wreck the marriage of this potentially
happy couple. At the end of scene 4, the final scene before the first
intermission in 1947, Stanley enters and Stella embraces him fiercely,
signaling her decision to stay with her husband. As the houselights
came up in the theatre, many spectators must have wondered how
this loving couple could ever manage to get rid of Stella’s crazy, lying,
and predatory sister.
Ironically, audience misunderstanding probably increased the
financial success of A Streetcar Named Desire in the late 1940s. The
Broadway production ran for over two years and a successful road
show followed. Spectators evidently enjoyed what they took to be a
play about grotesque Southerners, female neurosis, and decadent
nymphomania. Cultural memory always shapes spectator response
and sometimes produces ironic results.
Key references
Cohan, S. (1997) Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the
Fifties, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kolin, P. (2000) Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Plays in
Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McConachie, B. (2003) American Theater in the Culture of the Cold
War: Producing and Contesting Containment, Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press.
McConachie, B. (2014) “All in the Timing: The Meanings of Streetcar
in 1947 and 1951,” in B. Murphy (ed.) The Theatre of Tennessee
Williams, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 181–205.
May, E. (1988) Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War Era, New York: Basic Books. New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews
(1948) Vol. 8, New York: Critics’ Theatre Reviews, 249–52.
O’Connor, F. (1961) “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern
Fiction,” in S. Fitzgerald and R. Fitzgerald (eds) Mystery and Manners:
Occasional Prose, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Reed, J.
(2003) Minding the South, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.
A Streetcar Named Desire: The Original Director’s Version (1993)
DVD, Warner Brothers.
Williams, T. (1951, 1975) A Streetcar Named Desire, New York:
Penguin Putnam.

The Cold War and theatre outside the U.S.

The situation was different elsewhere in the world. As we have
observed, the frequently complacent realism that dominated theatre in
the U.S. was contrasted by social and theatrical discontent in other
countries. Brechtian theatre often provided a model. For example,
following the influential European tour of the Berliner Ensemble in
1956, English playwrights John Arden (1930–2012) and Edward Bond
(1934–), director Joan Littlewood (1914–2002), and others were
inspired to use Brechtian style to improve the democratic socialism
that had begun to flourish in the United Kingdom after the war. Italian
Giorgio Strehler (1921–1997) also directed productions of Brecht’s
plays. For these and many other artists, Brechtian theatre emerged as
an alternative response to conforming to the ideology of either
superpower.
In Latin America, long dominated by U.S. interests, Brechtian
theatre was especially influential during the 1960s. Argentinean
playwright and director Osvaldo Dragún (1929–1999) modeled many of
his short plays in the 1950s and 1960s on Brecht’s dramas to point up
the sacrifice in human dignity demanded by capitalist economics.
Brechtian theatre influenced several Mexican playwrights and
directors, such as Luisa Josefina Hernández (1928–). Her Popul Vuh
(1966) dramatized the traditional sacred book of the Mayan people. In
Colombia, Enrique Buenaventura (1925–2003) led the charge, staging
Brechtian productions, writing plays with revolutionary messages, and
helping to reorganize the university theatre movement in the country
for radical purposes. Although the authorities suppressed the
collective theatre movement Buenaventura had helped to begin, its
legacy continued in Bogotá and other major cities, with radical street
theatre and plays that dramatized Colombia’s oppressive history. In
São Paulo, Brazil, the Arena Theatre modified Brechtian techniques to
search for a specifically Brazilian stage language for social criticism.
International activist Augusto Boal (1931–2009) joined Arena in 1956,
wrote and directed several politically radical plays, and began
experimenting with participatory forms of theatre, which later found
expression in his 1974 book Theater of the Oppressed, discussed in
more detail in Chapter 14. Along with Buenaventura, Boal would have
enormous influence in the New Popular Theatre (Nuevo Teatro
Popular) movement in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s (see
Chapter 13).
More significant than Brecht for Mexican oppositional theatre was
the legacy of Surrealism, which Mexican playwrights began to
transform for their own uses soon after the Second World War. The
leading dramatist of the postwar generation, Emilio Carballido (1925–
2008), freely mixed reality and fantasy in a wide range of genres, from
film scripts and children’s theatre pieces to over 100 works written for
the professional stage. A critic of traditional Mexican culture in his
opposition to patriarchy, the divisions been rich and poor, and his
focus on serious socio-political concerns (often under the mask of
farce), Carballido also engaged the positive possibilities of
Catholicism and celebrated some of Mexico’s founding national
myths.
His most famous play, Yo tambien hablo de la rosa (I, Too, Speak of
the Rose) (1966), has been identified as a surreal allegory, a Brechtian
parody, and a postmodern paradox, to note only a few of the critical
tags it has evoked. Through popular storytelling and songs, send-ups
of Freudian and Marxist rhetoric, news accounts and poetic
metaphors, and even occasional snip-pets of dramatic realism, the
play depicts multiple representations of the same train derailment, as
well as several versions of the events that led up to it and the
responses that followed. Even as this multi-layered pastiche invites
several interpretations, it also makes fun of the act of interpretation
itself. At the same time, a rough populist energy animates the play;
marginal members of Mexican society pushed the powerful train off its
tracks and proceeded to loot it when it was down. This oppositional
and possibly revolutionary action remains a potent fact during the
performance, despite the ridiculous attempts of others in Mexican
society to explain what happened. Whatever else it is, I, Too, Speak of
the Rose seemed to be a warning to those who controlled the public
discourses of Mexican society that the poor will not be ignored.
Figure 12.6Okhlopkov's production of Hamlet relied on a triptych-like design to
suggest the prince's imprisonment in traditional culture. Produced at the
Mayakovsky Theatre in Moscow in 1954, soon after the death of Stalin.

© The Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies,

London.
In contrast, the Soviet Union’s ideology of socialist realism, plus
censorship and control, kept most Soviet theatre within the boundaries
of Cold War communism, even after the death of Stalin in 1953. A few
directors, however, including Nikolai Okhlopkov (1900–1967), were
permitted to experiment with new ideas and forms (Figure 12.6). While
approving of Brecht’s Marxism, the Soviets kept Brechtian theatre at
arm’s length; they recognized that its antimilitarism and democratic
socialism subverted their authoritarian power.
 Our second case study focuses on some of the ways that theatre
and politics intersected in this period.
Case Study Social drama in Kerala, India: Staging the
“revolution”
Phillip B. Zarrilli, with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
There once was a time like this. A time when human lives burned in the
“test fires” of social change.
Tooppil Bhaasi, playwright and director, Kerala

Indian theatres of decolonization

Anti-colonial nationalism intensified in British-ruled India after the
Great War and the Russian Revolution, reaching a peak during the
Second World War. After Indian independence in 1947, many leftists
joined with some of the liberal reformers to begin new theatre troupes
in Indian cities. Among the most influential was the Group Theatre in
Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata), which challenged the dominant,
Western-style commercial theatre of the city. Where the old imperial
theatres had featured British plays, occasional hybrid shows written by
Indians, and the latest hits from London, the Group produced
modernist European classics (Chekhov, Pirandello, and Ibsen, for
example) and several politically radical plays by Brecht and others. By
performing canonical Western plays in an Indian context, the Group
hoped to cultivate an audience of serious theatregoers who would
reject the frivolous entertainments of imperial times for politically
engaged drama. Director Sombhu Mitra (1914–1997) worked briefly
with the Group and then founded his own company, Bohurupee. Mitra
directed a localized version of Ibsen’s A Doll House for Bohurupee in
1958 and successfully adapted several plays by Rabindranath Tagore
(1860–1941), one of the leading writers of the early twentieth century,
whose plays had resisted modern modes of staging until that time.
Mitra’s modernist vision for his theatre led him to stage productions of
Oedipus the King and Tagore’s Rājā on consecutive nights in 1964.
Far to the south, in the state of Kerala, a very different form of
grassroots, anti-colonialist theatre developed.

Tooppil Bhaasi and the Kerala People's Arts Club

Tooppil Bhaasi (1924–1992) was born in Vallikkunu, a typical
agricultural village in south central Kerala, India. He received his lower
school education in a Sanskrit school, and went on to pass his
examination in traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda). However,
Bhaasi never pursued a career in medicine. Rather, like many other
young men receiving an education during this turbulent period, he
became a student activist and leader, working in the student congress
movement as part of the national drive toward independence from
British colonial rule. He later joined the Communist movement. By
Indian Independence Day (August 15, 1947), he was temporarily in the
Allappuzha jail. He had been arrested for his activities of organizing
low-caste agricultural workers, protesting against the hoarding of food
grains and black-marketeering by wealthy landholders, for the
cultivation of waste land, and for attempting to overturn the
hierarchical caste system. The ultimate goal of this movement was to
replace the old social and economic order with progressive social-
democratic models that would gradually and peacefully move from
capitalism toward socialism by creating extensive governmental
support systems.

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Politics, ideology, history, and performance
Janelle Reinelt raises several important questions about writing histories of
theatre when she asks, “what is the relationship of politics [and ideology] to
culture? How does social change result in cultural change – or can various
cultural practices initiate or precipitate change?” (Reinelt 1996: 1).
Throughout this book, we have attempted to locate various types of theatre
within their specific historical, political, cultural, and ideological frameworks.
We have emphasized how ideologies change over time, and how specific
social or political realities are reflected in – or even brought about by – local
theatre. In the current chapter, for example, we suggest that understanding
various responses to the traumatic events of the Second World War and the
subsequent Cold War can clarify the emergence of certain styles and genres
of performance.
Cultural theorist Terry Eagleton maintains that “there is one place above all
where . . . consciousness may be transformed almost literally overnight, and
that is in active political struggle” (Eagleton 1991: 223–4)
 This case study examines the interconnections between theatre and
political struggle in the state of Kerala in a newly postcolonial India.

Between 1946 and 1952, the Communist Party of India was advocating
active and sometimes violent revolutionary struggle against the new
Indian government. As a Communist, Bhaasi and other activists were
forced to live in hiding because some of their activities were declared
illegal. While in hiding, in 1952 he wrote his first play, You Made Me a
Communist, and the Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC) almost
immediately produced it. Founded in 1950 by a group of student
activists at the Law College in Ernakulam Town, KPAC began to
produce dramas as one means of raising socio-political issues. The
group first used shadow puppets and then staged the political drama
My Son is Right. But it was their production of Bhaasi’s You Made Me
a Communist that launched KPAC on to the path toward becoming
Kerala’s most visible contemporary theatre company.
You Made Me a Communist enacts the struggles of agricultural
laborers and poor peasants for a better life by focusing on how
Paramu Pillai, a conservative farmer, makes the decision to become a
Communist. The play focuses on his change in socio-political
consciousness and calls for the revolutionary overthrow of
landlordism. With its very loose structure, and with characters who
burst into song at unexpected moments during the course of the story,
You Made Me a Communist swept across the length and breadth of
Kerala. Dr. Radhakrishnan of the Gandhi Centre, New Delhi, recalled
his experience of it:
Even though a child, I could sense the excitement! There were nights
when KPAC had more than four performances. From one place, they
went on moving for months on end. . . . KPAC became a very powerful
social inspiration for people to fight against social injustice and for their
rights. It gave them the feeling that anybody, irrespective of their low
birth [could be] equal.
(Radhakrishnan, personal communication)

There can be no doubt that attending a performance of You Made Me

a Communist in 1952–1953 was a special event. It was not simply a
dramatic representation of a fictionalized story and its characters, but
part of an unfolding and evolving socio-political revolution as it was
happening. Journalist, essayist, playwright, and activist Kaniyapuram
Ramachandran explained both the timeliness and excitement
generated by this interrelationship between stage and life in Bhaasi’s
early social dramas, and in You Made Me a Communist in particular:
The fourth element of drama is the audience; and the audience is the
fourth character. That dividing line between stage and audience was
simply erased! What they saw there was their real lives! The workers,
agricultural laborers, people coming on stage and speaking their own
dialects and ordinary language – not literary language. The ultimate aim
is to make the audience part of the experience. There is no detachment,
but attachment. So with the social issues in the play – it was all so
relevant. At the end of a performance the entire audience would come to
its feet. So, You Made Me a Communist wasn’t a drama at all! The social
relevance of the play made people forget everything when they saw it. It
was a drama for the people, by the people. It gave people what they
wanted to see at the right time. It was a magic wand. The audience was
like a mental vacuum that sucked up what was given. . . . In 1951 it was
so apt! It was the medicine that the patient was waiting for. People were
ready for that message of social change.
Bhaasi always wanted the audience to first understand his plays. They
should be clear and straight. He was speaking to the heart, and not the
intellect. He used to talk to the emotions, and through the emotions,
people would change their thinking.
(Ramachandran 1993)

The impact of the production of this play on the Malayalis was

remarkable. So important was it for the spread of the Communist point
of view from 1952 to 1954 that some commentators have suggested
that without it the emergence of the first democratically elected
Communist government to the newly established state of Kerala in
1957 would never have happened.
Since 1952, You Made Me a Communist has been performed well
over 2,000 times and continues to be part of KPAC’s active repertory of
social dramas. Bhaasi went on to become one of Kerala’s most
important playwrights, providing KPAC with a series of highly popular
social dramas, including The Prodigal Son (1956), in which a wayward,
selfish rowdy is transformed into a champion of the low castes. His
Aswameetam (1962) explores the social stigma of leprosy. His political
satire, Power House (1990), focuses on the irresponsible behavior of a
government institution – the Kerala State Electricity Board. Memories
in Hiding, which won the Kerala Best Play Award in 1992, was his final
play. In Memories in Hiding, a tenant-farmer, whose family has for
generations devotedly served a landlord as virtual slaves, realizes that
the landlord will not step forward to aid the tenant-farmer’s falsely
arrested son. The tenant-farmer then courageously declares his
independence and walks out (Figures 12.7 and 12.8).

Figure 12.7In a 1993 production of Memories in Hiding by Tooppil Bhaasi, in

Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, the Landlord (right, with scarf) forces Teevan to
yoke together his father, Ceenan, and Paramu Naayar to plough a paddy field.

Photo © Phillip B. Zarrilli.

From its nineteenth-century realities as a hierarchically ordered,
feudal social system ridden with caste and class conflicts, with high
birth and infant mortality rates, Kerala was gradually transformed into
a turn-of-the-twentieth-century social-democratic state with radical
reductions in population growth and infant mortality rates. Illiteracy
was virtually eradicated, many previously dispossessed peasants and
communities were enfranchised, and there was extensive land reform,
with the redistribution of considerable amounts of land to the landless.
This trans formation of Kerala in just over 100 years into a new model
of social development has taken place peacefully within a democratic
framework and without the outside assistance of global institutions
such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank (Parayil
2000: 1–15).

Figure 12.8In Memories in Hiding, the jailed Paramu Naayar shouts defiantly
near the end: “Our voices will be heard even after we die. They are the voices of
revolution.”

Photo © Phillip B. Zarrilli.

 Spoken drama and theatre, together with numerous modes of public
performance, have clearly played an essential role in redefining
individual, social, and political awareness in contemporary Kerala.

A more detailed version of this case study, including

additional historical, political, and cultural background, can be found
on our website.
Key references
Bhaasi, T. (1996) Memories in Hiding, trans. J. George and P.B. Zarrilli,
Calcutta: Seagull.
Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso.
Handelman, D. (1990) Models and Mirrors: Towards an
Anthropology of Public Events, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Namboodiripad, E.M.S. (1976) How I Became a Communist,
Trivandrum_ Chinta Publications.
Parayil, G. (ed.) (2000) Kerala: The Development Experience,
London: Zed Books.
Ramachandran, K. (1993) Interview with the author.
Reinelt, J. (ed.) (1996) Crucible of Crisis: Performing Social Change,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Happenings, protest, and the growth of alternative theatre
in the U.S.
Some of the most radical political performance during the 1960s
flourished on the margins of mainstream theatre in the United States.
The agit-prop tradition, a significant part of working-class theatre in the
U.S. during the 1930s, blossomed again in the mid-1960s, as small
groups on college campuses and elsewhere sought to protest the war
in Vietnam. Vietnam had become a pawn in the Cold War, and the
U.S. gradually ramped up its military commitment to prevent what it
feared would be a communist takeover of the country.
Theatre and other artists also practiced new tactics to destroy
audience complacency. Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) was a painter and
aesthetic theorist who popularized concepts such as performance art,
environmental art (including theatre), and Happenings. A typical
Happening might involve spectators at an art gallery who would
encounter not only paintings and sculptures, but actors engaged in
unrelated, random activities. Happenings could occur anywhere,
sometimes without the audience realizing they would be involved.
Participatory and interactive, Happenings aimed to destroy the fourth
wall between actor and audience. Kaprow first used the term
“Happening” in a 1958 essay; by the early 1960s, they had become
significant in the art world.
Related to Happenings was an avant-garde movement called
Fluxus, a loose international alliance of musicians and performers
dedicated to continuing the experiments of composer John Cage
(1912–1992) with chance events, mundane sounds, and the
embodiment of everyday rituals in performance. Fluxus began in 1948
when Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) worked
together at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Like the
Futurists and Dadaists, Cage had been experimenting with everyday
sounds and chance occurrences to expand the range of “music,” while
Cunningham explored modes of movement that might correspond
with Cage’s mix of unconventional sounds. Both objected to the
modernist removal of aesthetics from everyday life and the utilitarian
narrowness of Cold War American society. An untitled performance of
theirs in 1952 included reading a Dadaist poem, showing a film on the
ceiling, and pouring water from one bucket into another.
Cage’s class in experimental music at the New School for Social
Research in 1958 generated several Fluxus events, as did his
international travels and collaborations in Europe and Japan during
the 1960s. One event, Snowstorm No. 1 (1965), put together by Czech
Fluxus artist Milan Knížák (1940–), simply instructs the facilitators to
distribute paper airplanes to the expectant audience and invite them to
fly them around the auditorium. For Knížák, the point was to enjoy the
beauty of the gliding paper and the fun of exchanging the planes with
others. At a time when many real airplanes carried atomic bombs,
however, some saw the Fluxus event as a demonstration for peace.
Cage also influenced the Living Theatre, a group begun by Julian
Beck (1925–1985) and Judith Malina (1926–2015) in 1951. In 1960, they
produced a theatre piece that played with his combinations of sounds,
props, and actions. The year before, Beck and Malina had produced
The Connection, a play by Jack Gelber (1932–2003) that purposefully
invited audience confusion about whether the drug addicts and jazz
players on stage were real people or fictional characters. Their
Pirandellian experiments with reality and illusion soon combined with
an interest in the ideas of Artaud after the initial publication in English
of his The Theatre and Its Double in 1958. Following tours to Europe,
the Living Theatre returned to the U.S. in 1968 with a group-created
production entitled Paradise Now that called for the realization of
utopia through Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and a fusion of life and art.
Artaud’s influence on the Living Theatre and other groups after 1968 is
discussed more fully in Chapter 13. Like several first-wave avant-
gardists, the Living Theatre collective strove to live its artistic practices
through its everyday life.

Less strident in its demands but no less utopian in its

politics was the Bread and Puppet Theater, founded by Peter
Schumann (1934–) in 1961. Schumann began aligning his puppet
pageants and street shows with anti-war demonstrations in 1964. For
the rest of the 1960s, the oversized puppet heads of his peasants,
washerwomen, and workers, plus his bad guys like King Herod and
Uncle Fatso (a capitalist-exploiter dressed like Uncle Sam), were
marching against the war, homelessness, and nuclear arms.
Schumann and his loose collective of puppet animators also mounted
parable-like productions, such as The Great Warrior (1963) and The
Cry of the People for Meat (1969), that explored mostly timeless
problems of peace and justice through slow-moving puppets that were
sometimes 30 feet tall.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe also used a traditional form,
commedia dell’arte, to satirize the U.S. war in Vietnam and push for
social justice. Begun in 1959 by actors interested in exploring the
traditions of commedia, the group moved toward Marxist politics in the
1960s and formed itself into a collectively run theatre in 1970. The
Mime Troupe denounced the war in their adaptation of a traditional
commedia script by Carlo Goldoni, L’Amant militaire (1967). In later
productions, the company used comic-book stereotypes and fast-
action farce to demand women’s rights and expose the lies of local
politicians. Today, over half a century after being formed, the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, the Living Theatre, and the Bread and
Puppet Theater all continue to perform vital, provocative, political
theatre.
Enraged by the slow pace of civil rights progress and continuing
racism in the U.S., the Black Theatre Movement (BTM) called for
revolutionary action in the 1960s. Scorning moderate black artists and
religious leaders in the U.S., the BTM artists allied themselves with the
Black Power movement of the late 1960s and called for the cultivation
of black consciousness and the political overthrow of white regimes. In
manifestos, plays, and performances, leaders Amiri Baraka (formerly
LeRoi Jones, 1934–2014) and Ed Bullins (1935–) demanded the
abolition of mainstream white culture and the immersion of black
audiences in ritual-like experiences to enable them to gain a physical
understanding of their past. In an article originally commissioned in
December 1964 by The New York Times, but which that paper
subsequently refused to publish, Baraka (still called LeRoi Jones)
called for a “Revolutionary Theatre” that would
 force change . . . . The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up
the insides of these humans, look into black skulls. White men will cower
before this theatre because it hates them. Because they themselves
have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Theatre must hate them
for hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of
the Spirit. . . . It should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting,
preaching, spitting craziness – but a craziness taught to us in our most
rational moments. . . . The Revolutionary Theatre is shaped by the world,
and moves to reshape the world. . . .
(Jones 1965: 1–3)

One of Baraka’s most compelling works is Dutchman (1964), a play

about the birth of black consciousness in a mild-mannered subway
rider killed by white vigilantes. Baraka started the Black Arts Repertory
Theatre in Harlem in 1965 and premiered his ritualized historical
pageant Slave Ship in 1967 at Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey
(Figure 12.9). After 1970, Baraka devoted most of his energy to social
action rather than theatre, and Bullins, who produced his plays with
the New Lafayette Theatre Company in Harlem, came to prominence.
Bullins used ritualistic, often jazz-inspired structures for his plays, such
as In the Wine Time (1968), which explored the limitations and
possibilities for black revolutionary action. Bullins’s plays were
sometimes criticized as languishing in despair. Other playwrights
chose to focus on the quiet heroism of ordinary black people, rather
than Baraka’s active revolution or Bullins’s victimhood and despair.
For example, Alice Childress (1916–1994) wrote Wedding Band: A
Love/Hate Story in Black and White (written 1962, premiere 1966),
about a forbidden, interracial love affair. The play was considered so
shocking that it was not produced in New York until 1972. When it was
filmed for TV, some stations refused to air it.
Figure 12.9Photograph from a 1970 production of Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship,
directed by Gilbert Moses at Theatre-in-the-Church, New York, NY. Photo: Bert
Andrews. Permission given by Marsha Hudson, executrix of the estate of Bert
Andrews.

Photo courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the NY Public

Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.
Summary
In this chapter, we explored the postwar conflict between
psychological realism and rebellions against it. Because the U.S. had
experienced far less damage than the rest of the world during the
Second World War and had emerged as a wealthy superpower,
theatre in the U.S. at first continued to rely on psychological realism.
However, new developments in Europe reflected the devastation of
the war. Such developments included the philosophy of existentialism
and the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd.” In the defeated nations of
Germany and Japan, playwrights found various ways to come to terms
with their nations’ past and present. While some of the innovations
and responses to the war did impact theatre in the United States, most
mainstream U.S. theatre continued to reflect psychological realism.
Nevertheless, the politics of the Cold War impacted U.S. theatre and
theatre throughout the world, creating various tensions and
discontent.
One of the forces driving discontent that soon would become so
prominent was access to information. During the 1950s, television
became more common. Events in distant areas became more
significant, and protests against unpopular wars or social injustices
occurred sooner, with more people becoming involved. Television also
altered the way theatre was made. Especially in the U.K. and the U.S.,
television permitted more people to see great actors performing in
important plays, broadcast live (not pre-recorded) from the studio.
Although highly popular in its heyday, live theatre on commercial TV
fell out of favor after the 1970s (although it began to reappear after
2000).
Arguably, the tipping point for television’s rise to cultural dominance
was around 1968. We will begin Chapter 13 with a brief discussion of
the invasion of the living room, through television, by the momentous
events of the mid- to late 1960s – including anti-war and civil rights
protests, racial and political riots, police and military crackdowns, even
the first man on the moon. These events, which previously would have
been read about in newspapers, heard on the radio, or seen in movie
newsreels days or weeks after they took place, were suddenly
broadcast live or within hours of happening. Careful editing and
censorship certainly occurred, but the events themselves often carried
incredible shock value. How did audiences and theatre makers
respond to this unprecedented assault on their senses and their
intellects?
*
Art, politics, or business? Theatre in search
of identity, 1968–2000
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Contributors: Gary Jay Williams, Tamara Underiner and Bruce
McConachie
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-18
The era called “The Sixties” established radically new ways of
being, thinking, and performing – and reactions against them – that
continue to this day. That period launched a series of upheavals in
every area of life, particularly politics, economics, sexuality, culture,
and of course the media. While many important theatre artists of the
early twenty-first century began their careers in (or were deeply
influenced by) the political/cultural upheavals of the 1960s, others
rejected connections with the period. The 1980s–1990s saw a growing
emphasis on theatre as part of a globalized, money-making
entertainment industry, but there was also major growth in theatre
having little or no profit motive. At the same time, some artists insisted
that their goal was solely one of personal fulfillment or artistic
transformation. For them, both political/cultural change and financial
gain were beside the point.
To accommodate the discussion of all these transformations, this
and the subsequent chapters have considerable chronological
overlap. Here we will focus on the period from the 1960s to the 1990s,
although we will occasionally go beyond because many of the issues,
theatres, and people of the time are still quite active today. The next
chapter is centered on the complex impact of globalization, including
intercultural contact and a renewed exploration of the local. Chapter
15 closes the book by examining new types of performance
associated with the rise of networked culture and its social effects.
We begin this chapter with a historical overview of the 1960s, and
next consider some of the effects that changes in the media were
having on theatre. Then we will address three major topics. First,
escalating political tensions in the early 1960s led to an explosion of
sometimes controversial theatre advocating or participating in political
and cultural change. At the same time, as the subsequent section will
show, many theatre artists were challenging the primacy of the text
within performance. Last, we will consider the changing circumstances
of subsidized national theatres and the development of non-profit
theatres.
The 1960s: A historical crossroads
Historians sometimes define “The Sixties” as lasting from c.1958 to
c.1974. Major cultural shifts occurred throughout the world. Focusing
on Europe and the U.S., Arthur Marwick notes specific characteristics
of this crucial period, including: criticism of established society;
individualism; youth power; technological advances; public
spectacles; international cultural exchange; improvements in material
life; upheavals in race, class, and family relationships; sexual
permissiveness; new modes of self-presentation; rock music as a
universal language; original developments in elite thought and culture;
growth of progressive ideology in institutions of authority; reactionary
and violent responses by police and some religious bodies; increased
concern for civil and personal rights; and awareness of
multiculturalism. The concepts “counterculture” and “underground”
defined developments in theatre and the arts (Marwick 1998: 16–20).
To this list we must also add the widespread, increased use of illegal
and psychedelic drugs.
Outside Europe and the U.S., the changes might be different but
were no less significant. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) attempted to eliminate all vestiges of
traditional Chinese culture and capitalist influence. Artists, physicians,
academics, landowners, and other “elitists” were sent into the
countryside and forbidden to practice their skills; Buddhist temples
were shut down; Communist orthodoxy was rigorously enforced. The
result was economic and political stagnation. The Cultural Revolution
only ended when China’s dictator Mao Zedong died and his major
supporters (dubbed “The Gang of Four”) were imprisoned.
In Africa, Latin America, and other areas, nations were breaking free
of colonial subjugation or partition, resulting in political and economic
instabilities that were often accompanied by wars, bloody coups,
terrorism, mass killings, poverty, and starvation, all of which provoked
migrations. The continuing Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet
Union exacerbated these problems.
The year 1968 is often chosen as the dividing line between the more
complacent “Fifties” and the radically transforming “Sixties.” A few key
events of 1967–1969 will demonstrate the cataclysmic nature of the
cultural shift, and the complex, ever-changing emotions of people
throughout the world.
On January 14, 1967, the first “Human Be-In” took place in San
Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. This self-described “gathering of the
tribes” was populated by “hippies,” anti-establishment youth rejecting
conformity, war, and materialism, and advocating communal sharing.
The Human Be-In inspired Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock
Musical (1967; book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni,
music by Galt MacDermot). It was at the Human Be-In that Timothy
Leary (1920–1996), a former Harvard professor who advocated the use
of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, first urged the world’s youth to
“turn on, tune in, drop out.” The Human Be-In gave rise to 1967’s
“Summer of Love,” when about 100,000 “flower children” gathered
peacefully in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, openly taking
psychedelic drugs, enjoying music, and engaging in uninhibited sex.
The imagined idyll of the Summer of Love was followed by the
harsh brutalities of 1968. In France, Japan, Italy, the U.S., the U.K.,
Germany, Mexico, and elsewhere, protests by students and workers
against the Vietnam War, authoritarian governments, social/racial
inequality, and educational practices resulted in violent police and
military responses. Historians often cite May 1968 in Paris as the
defining moment. Following extensive student protests, the closure of
universities, and violent military responses, over 11 million workers
(more than one fifth of the population of France) went on strike
(including spontaneous “wildcat” strikes) for two weeks, virtually
shutting down the French economy and threatening to topple the
government. Repercussions are still felt, nearly half a century later.
In Poland, strikes by university students and intellectuals were
harshly suppressed by Russian-backed security forces. Soon after, an
anti-Semitic campaign forced the mass emigration of Polish Jews. In
what was then Czechoslovakia, a movement for political change (“the
Prague Spring”) was crushed by the invasion of Soviet and Eastern
Bloc troops. Police brutality in Northern Ireland signaled the beginning
of a long-lasting insurrection against British rule (“The Troubles”). In
Japan, students and intellectuals had been protesting the
government’s policies, including support of the Vietnam War, since
autumn 1967, resulting in brutality by the riot police. By early 1968,
demonstrations and police actions were widespread and many
universities had been shut down.
In the U.S., 1968 was traumatic as well. Both black civil rights leader
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and probable Democratic presidential
nominee Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; riots, looting, and
arson erupted in 110 poor, black, urban ghettos, eliciting police and
National Guard brutality. Partly because the government was drafting
college-age males to fight, the war in Vietnam aroused massive
protests on college and university campuses, especially between 1968
and 1971. The authorities responded violently to student
demonstrations and strikes at the University of California at Berkeley,
Columbia, and other universities, and to anti-Vietnam War
demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Agit-prop groups, calling themselves guerrilla theatre companies (after
jungle-fighter revolutionaries in Latin America), staged cartoon-like
skits at rallies and elsewhere to protest the war. For example, some
anti-war protesters mocked society with guerrilla theatre, including
nominating a pig (called Pigasus the Immortal) for U.S. president. By
1970, there were probably 400 student guerrilla troupes in the U.S.
Students in Western European cities formed similar troupes to protest
American militarism in Vietnam.
Despite the violence and despair, there were important advances in
social welfare, civil rights for African-Americans, science, and
technology. An estimated 530 million television viewers watched the
U.S. astronauts land on the moon in July 1969, planting the nation’s
flag on its surface. As a technological triumph and landmark media
event, it symbolized a new era, a new global consciousness and a
U.S. public relations victory in the Cold War. A few years later, the
U.S.’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
released its famous “blue marble” color satellite photos, showing the
planet earth floating in space. Circulating on global television, the
images of a beautiful, fragile earth reinforced the hope that humankind
might cease its destruction of itself and its home.
 Between the 1950s and the 1990s, radio, film, television, satellite
television, video cassettes, and compact discs, and finally the internet
brought an increasing number of ordinary people into new cultural
negotiations daily. The violent events of the 1960s were all broadcast
globally on television. So too were international sports and cultural
events such as the Olympics or the Oscars. The end of the Cold War
in 1989 was viewed worldwide when television carried images of
people tearing down the wall separating East and West Berlin and
toppling statues of Lenin. Such dramatic gestures continue to be
broadcast on television and the internet. For example, in early 2011,
mobile cellphones and television cameras captured shocking images
of Japan’s devastating earthquake, tsunami, and resulting damage to
a nuclear power plant, as well as the anti-government protests and
armed rebellions throughout the Middle East that were dubbed “The
Arab Spring.” The immediacy of televised and internet news far
surpassed the power of newspaper accounts. As we will see in the
next chapter, the technology of computers and satellites that made the
moon landing possible would stimulate the new processes of
globalization, further challenging traditional boundaries.
Theatre and electronic media
Media technologies have had obvious impact on the forms, styles, and
techniques of the theatre. As we saw in Chapter 12, Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman had its roots in radio, and Jo Mielziner’s setting
offered a film-like fluidity. By the 1970s, verbal language no longer
always occupied a central, dominating place, and less linear dramatic
structures began to be more common. By the 1990s, digitized visual
sequences allowed thematic or symbolic associations and multiple
readings. Scenic spectacularism had become a star performer in big-
budget American and British musicals, such as The Phantom of the
Opera (1984). Musicals and some non-musical plays began to equip
actors with wireless microphones and to digitally balance and
distribute blends of singers and orchestras, creating soundscapes that
differ greatly from traditional (non-amplified) live performance. Stage
musicals were recycled into films, CD soundtracks, DVDs, and touring
shows for international audiences. Large-scale musicals are further
discussed in Chapter 14.
The borders between all media and genres were growing
increasingly permeable. These shifts, plus increasing use of
computers and video games, suggest a change in cultural sensibilities
– more interest in non-verbal emotional expression, less confidence in
the truth-value of verbal language or linear continuities, greater visual
sophistication, and interest in alternative, interactive realities. One
result was that many serious theatre and performance artists moved
away from the dominance of the once-primary, sacrosanct verbal play
text in search of a greater expressive range – a topic we will explore
below.
Theatre, politics, and cultural change
During the turbulent 1960s, many people in theatre asked how theatre
might be an advocate in political change and cultural controversies.
The uprisings of 1968 had awakened a generation of theatre artists
eager to help the oppressed. These radical artists recognized the
power disparities caused by class, racial, gender, and/or regional
differences and hoped to forge an alternative culture to help workers,
peasants, and others to oppose capitalist power. They typically
performed in parks, community centers, popular demonstrations,
village squares, churches, and similar gathering places. As noted in
Chapter 12, the U.S.’s Living Theatre, San Francisco Mime Troupe,
and Bread and Puppet Theater appeared before 1968, and as of 2014,
all are still flourishing.
In Provence, France, the Lo Teatre de la Carriera emphasized
southern France’s unique culture by using the Occitan dialect and by
decrying the region’s industrialization by Parisian “imperialists.” In
Berlin, the West German Grips Theater produced radical plays for
children and youth. In Spain, despite rigorous censorship, several
theatres opposed dictator Francisco Franco and his repressive regime
during the early 1970s. These included Barcelona’s Els Joglars,
agitating for Catalan independence in northern Spain, and Madrid’s
Tabaño, which mocked Spanish consumerism, authoritarianism, and
the Catholic Church.
In 1971, British playwright/theorist John McGrath (1935–2002)
founded 7:84, a theatre company named for a statistic published in
1966 in The Economist stating that 7 percent of the population of Great
Britain owned 84 percent of the capital wealth. His productions, using
broad humor, catchy tunes, and identifiable locations, were performed
in working-class halls and pubs throughout the 1970s. His The
Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973) demonstrated how
capitalists’ desire to profit from North Sea oil was simply one more
episode in the long exploitation of the Scottish poor by the English
rich.
In 1968, Italian playwright-performer Dario Fo (1926–) and his
playwright-actor wife, Franca Rame (1929–2013), broke from the
commercial theatre to establish a theatrical cooperative, which soon
produced Mistero Buffo (1969), a one-person show (with Fo as court
jester) that satirized Catholicism. Accidental Death of an Anarchist
(1970) was a farcical attack on police corruption (Figure 13.1). During
the 1970s and 1980s, Fo explored Italian folk drama, including
commedia dell’arte, wrote several more plays, and expanded his
repertoire of theatrical clowning. Rame wrote and performed feminist
pieces, such as All Bed, Board, and Church (1977), which excoriated
Italian patriarchy. Fo and Rame performed at many rallies for
progressive causes and in culturally deprived zones, often donating
the proceeds to radical political movements. These proceeds might be
quite substantial; in the mid-1980s, Fo often attracted over 10,000
spectators per performance. In 1997, he was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature.
Despite such successes, the radical theatre movement as a whole
had little impact on Western society. Critics have suggested two
reasons. One was that Cold War ideology, perpetuated by Western
nation-states and the commercial media, limited options for change. It
was one thing to cheer the radical socialist vision of the San Francisco
Mime Troupe or 7:84 at a weekend performance, but quite another to
act on those beliefs in the union hall or at the voting booth. Another
reason was that with increasing globalization, workers and others
began to define themselves primarily as consumers, undercutting their
commitment to radical politics. Although many theatre troupes in the
West clung to the utopian hopes of the late 1960s, their audiences
were moving towards other values and identities.
In contrast, radical theatre in many parts of Africa, the Philippines,
and Latin America found responsive audiences. Some theatre
companies chose active opposition and helped their oppressed
countrymen toward better lives and political liberation.
Social activism and theatre in postcolonial Africa
As previously noted, the end of colonialism in Africa often resulted in
poverty, political instability, and ethnic wars. After independence,
some indigenous theatre artists began to reclaim tribal myths and
performance practices and, at the same time, develop new, often
politically themed works that assessed the damage or critiqued the
new regimes, sometimes leading to the artists’ imprisonment. This
section presents only a small sampling of work to suggest the breadth
of postcolonial African performance.
Figure 13.1Poster for a production of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an
Anarchist, at Wyndhams Theatre, London, 1980.

© V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Nigeria, which became independent from Britain in 1960, includes
several distinct ethnicities and languages. This diverse culture offers a
wide spectrum of theatrical styles and perspectives. Hubert Ogunde
(1916–1990) founded the Ogunde Concert Party, Nigeria’s first
professional theatre company, in 1945. Both his anti-colonial plays
before independence (many of which were banned) and his post-
independence Yoruba Awake! (1964) drew on Yoruba myths. During
Nigeria’s civil war, Wole Soyinka (1934–), Nigeria’s best-known
playwright and winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, was
detained without trial and subsequently went into exile. His Madmen
and Specialists (1971) is a bitter, enigmatic play inspired by those
events. As noted in Chapter 1, Soyinka’s Death and the King’s
Horseman (1975) uses the Egúngún masquerade to critique
colonialism. After returning from exile, Soyinka staged Opera Wonyosi
(1977), a Nigerian amalgam of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John
Gay (see Chapter 7) and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928). It
satirizes a self-proclaimed African emperor and the Nigerian middle
class. Fellow Nigerian Femi Osofisan (1946–), influenced by Marx and
Brecht, looks unfavor ably on Soyinka’s sometimes abstruse
metaphysics. Osofisan’s plays reflect both his own aesthetic interests
and his passionate advocacy of social justice. His Once Upon Four
Robbers (1980) satirized the Nigerian military government, and his
adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General (1836) mocks the
ruling elite. Osofisan uses traditional dance, music, myth, and folklore
to explore modern class polarities in The Chattering and the Song
(1976). His Tegonni: An African Antigone (1999) deconstructs both
colonial and patriarchal authority by juxtaposing the classical Greek
character with a nineteenth-century Yoruba princess.
The choice of language is often a significant issue in postcolonial
societies. In Sierra Leone, independent since 1957, Thomas Decker
(1916–1978) promoted theatre in Krio, an urban, English-based Creole
language that developed in the interchange among freed slaves in
Freetown, their European colonial masters, and the indigenous people
of the region. Krio theatre serves a wide cross-section of society and
has inspired a number of playwrights, including the radical Yulisa
Amadu Maddy (1936–2014). His play Big Berrin (1976) – the title
means “big death” – is critical of the plight of the urban poor and
resulted in his imprisonment.
South Africa became an independent state in 1934, but a legacy of
Dutch and then British colonial practices remained. Part of this legacy
was apartheid (a Dutch and Afrikaans word meaning “apartness”), a
policy that relegated black people to separate, inferior living and
working conditions. Despite being the minority, white descendants of
the colonialists controlled the government. In 1948, they formally
instituted apartheid as a legal system. After four decades of organized
resistance, apartheid was abolished in 1990.
In the 1960s, resistance to apartheid by both black and white theatre
artists fueled the creation of politically dangerous works. The anti-
apartheid, multiracial Serpent Players (further discussed in the case
study below) was founded in 1963 by initially untrained actors,
primarily service and industrial workers, led by Norman Ntshinga
(1933–2000). Its name derived from the locale of its first production: the
snake pit at a former zoo in Port Elizabeth. The Serpent Players’
productions included Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island
(1973), collectively created through improvisation by Athol Fugard
(1932–), John Kani (1943–), and Winston Ntshona (1941–). Sizwe
Bansi Is Dead is about a man who obtained a “pass,” a document
necessary for black men to work in South Africa, by taking on the
identity of a dead man. It had wide success in Africa, the U.S., and
elsewhere. It inspired other collectively created works, including Woza
Albert! (1980) by Barney Simon (1932–1995), Mbongeni Ngema
(1955–), and Percy Mtwa (1954–). Woza Albert! is a political satire in
which Jesus’s return to Earth occurs in South Africa (Figure 13.2).
Under the artistic direction of Barney Simon, Johannesburg’s Market
Theatre (founded 1976) came to be known as the “Theatre of the
Struggle.” By 2014, it had won 21 international and over 300 South
African awards for excellence.
Figure 13.2Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema in the “pink-nose” mimicry scene
in Woza Albert!, by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, directed
by Barney Simon, at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1982.

Photo © Ruphin Coudyzer, The Market Theatre.

Our first case study explores how some South African theatre artists
actively fought apartheid.
Case Study Athol Fugard: Theatre of witnessing in South
Africa
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Athol Fugard (1932–), a white South African playwright, actor, and
director, spent the years prior to the end of apartheid in 1990
collaborating with black theatre artists in order to “bear witness” to,
and protest, apartheid. Such collaborations were internationally
applauded but semi-legal; at various times Fugard was placed under
government surveillance or had his passport revoked, and he and his
family endured threats and police raids. Many of the black actors he
worked with were arrested. In 1962, he used his growing international
fame to lead playwrights throughout the world in refusing to allow
segregated theatres to produce their work. However, in 1968, he
changed his mind and urged (unsuccessfully) that the boycott be
lifted. Since the end of apartheid, he has continued to write
internationally acclaimed plays, often of a more personal and
sometimes autobiographical nature. A documentary about his
struggles during apartheid was released in 2012.
Fugard’s plays usually focus on a few individuals who are closely
tied – by blood, love, or friendship – and the complex, private agonies
they inflict upon each other. Several of his realist plays are well known
outside South Africa, including Boesman and Lena (1969), and Master
Harold and the Boys (1982), an autobiographical play about how a
white boy destroys his relationship with his black fellow-worker due to
biases the boy learned from apartheid. Although critic Loren Kruger
suggests that Fugard’s international success may have compromised
his integrity, many others feel that his plays reveal the political evils
and personal suffering caused by apartheid. By “bearing witness,” the
plays focus attention on how personal traumas are embedded in (and
exacerbated by) political reality.
Life under apartheid
Apartheid classified people according to four racial groups – “black,”
“white,” “colored” (mixed race), and “Indian” – with the last two having
further subdivisions. Everyone had to carry identification cards
specifying their race. It was illegal to marry or have sexual relations
with a person of a different race, and the races had separate public
facilities such as restrooms, swimming pools, restaurants, hospitals,
theatres, and schools. The so-called tribal homelands had separate
governing bodies. All political protest or opposition to the government
and its policies was outlawed. Blacks were forcibly “resettled” in an
attempt to create whites-only areas. Despite international protests, in
1955 at least 60,000 blacks were removed by armed soldiers from
Sophiatown, an area in Johannesburg. Sophiatown was demolished
and its former residents were forced to live in the newly created black
suburb of Soweto, an acronym for South Western Townships. Where
Sophiatown once stood, a new white town called Triomf (Triumph)
was built. Although focused on blacks, forced resettlement was also
practiced on other non-whites, such as Indians and Chinese. It has
been estimated that over three and a half million people were forcibly
removed.
In 1960, 69 peaceful protesters were massacred in Sharpeville
(followed by the arrest of 18,000 people) and three years later the UN
implemented an embargo on arms sales to South Africa. The year
1977 saw shocking police brutality against the people of Soweto. By
the 1980s, there was virtual civil war in South Africa, and most of the
world participated in political, economic, and cultural boycotts of the
nation. In 1990, the ruling National Party renounced apartheid, and in
1994 Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), who had been a political prisoner
from 1963 to 1990, was elected the nation’s first black president. In
1995, the government established the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to permit victims of human rights violations to speak out
and to consider amnesty for perpetrators.

Athol Fugard and theatre under apartheid

South African theatre is rich and varied. The experiences of apartheid,
however, clearly molded the development of recent drama. As Dennis
Walder perceptively notes:
If there is one common impulse, it has been the urge to tell a story; and
not just to tell a story, but to bear witness. The idea of witness, with its
overtones of truth and sacrifice, has particular power in the face of the
 darkest events of our times. It is an idea that suggests the potential of art
to respond to such events, and to reach across the boundaries of class,
race, gender and nation, without descending into facile universalism.
(Walder 2003: 1)

In 1958, Fugard joined the interracial Union of South African Artists,

and soon after he helped create the African Theatre Workshop.
Fugard’s play Blood Knot (1961, originally titled The Blood Knot) was
groundbreaking. It was written partly in response to the horrific
Sharpeville massacre. Directed by the author, it starred himself and
black actor Zakes Mokae (1934–2009) as brothers who had the same
mother but different fathers. One appears white-skinned and the other
appears black-skinned. Although they love each other, the realities of
racial discrimination cause conflict. For example, the light-skinned
brother could choose to live as a white man (although risking arrest if
caught) whereas his dark-skinned brother will never have such a
choice, and must always suffer. When the light-skinned brother
dresses up “white” to meet a white woman, he begins to treat his
brother as an inferior. In turn, the dark-skinned brother reveals
submerged fury, even hatred. Eventually, they remain together as
blacks, but the brothers clearly signal complex feelings for each other.
When the play opened, a South African newspaper noted:
Theatre history was made in Johannesburg this week when a White man
and a Black man acted together publicly in the same play. . . . Municipal
by-laws purport to prohibit racially mixed performances, but . . . producer
Leon Gluckman has taken a chance and “The Blood Knot” opened in the
Y.M.C.A.’s intimate theatre on Wednesday night before a fashionable
and wildly applauding (White) audience. . . . The authorities have taken
no action (yet) to stop the performance, possibly because the legal
aspect has been delicately avoided so far.
(Wertheim 2000: 18)

Productions in London and New York signaled the start of Fugard’s

international recognition, and helped prevent censorship at home.
However, the day after The Blood Knot was broadcast on British
television in 1967, Fugard’s passport was taken away, supposedly for
reasons of national security.
Collaborative creation and witnessing
In 1963, Fugard and a group of inexperienced black actors founded
the Serpent Players. Their first productions were adaptations of works
such as Georg Büchner’s (1813–1837) Woyzeck and Brecht’s
Caucasian Chalk Circle, setting them in a South African township to
emphasize their relevance to daily life. In late 1966, they presented
their first collaborative, improvisationally developed work, Fugard’s
The Coat. Fugard was influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of
“poor theatre” that relies on actors’ bodies and voices, not spectacle.
(We will discuss Grotowski below.) Fugard has said that reading
Grotowski helped him realize new ways to work. He sought
techniques for releasing the creative potential of the actor. . . . The basic
device has been that of Challenge and Response. As a writer-director I
have challenged, and the actors have responded, not intellectually or
merely verbally but with a totality of Being that at the risk of sounding
pretentious I can only liken to a form of Zen spontaneity.
(Fugard et al. 1974: xi–xii)

Fugard’s collaborative works emphasize the actors’ personal

experiences. In a 1973 interview regarding the creation of Sizwe Bansi
is Dead, he said, “[O]bviously, I did a hell of a lot of actual writing. But
I’ve not been allowed inside a black township in South Africa for many
years, so I am very dependent on the two actors for a basic image, a
vitality, an assertion of life” (quoted in Wertheim 2000: 80).
The Serpent Players’ productions – including Sizwe Bansi is Dead
(1972), The Island (1973), and Statements After an Arrest Under the
Immorality Act (1974) – were often performed in secure locations such
as garages or private homes to evade the police, and the actors did
not take home written scripts in order to avoid being arrested for
keeping “subversive materials.” Their collaborative process – blacks
and whites together, regardless of the consequences – shows how
“witnessing” can create art, encourage social justice and political
change, and enable audiences to more fully understand the past and
present.
A longer version of this case study may be found on the website.
Key references
Cima, G.A. (2009) “Resurrecting Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972–2008):
John Kani, Winston Ntshona, Athol Fugard and Postapartheid South
Africa,” Theatre Survey 50: 91–118.
Clark, N.L. and Worger, W.H. (2004) South Africa: The Rise and Fall
of Apartheid, Harlow, UK: Pearson Education.
Davis, G. and Fuchs, A. (eds) (1996) Theatre and Change in South
Africa, Amsterdam_ Harwood.
Fugard, A. (1983) Notebooks: 1960–1977, ed. Mary Benson,
Johannesburg: Ad. Donker.
Fugard, A. (1987) Selected Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fugard, A. (1992) Playland . . . and Other Words, Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press.
Fugard, A., Kani, J., and Ntshona, W. (1974) Statements: Three
Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gray, S. (ed.) (1982) Athol Fugard, Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill.
Hauptfleish, T. (1997) Theatre and Society in South Africa, Pretoria:
J.L. van Schaik.
Hutchinson, Y. and Breitinger, E. (eds) (2000) History and Theatre in
Africa, Bayreuth: African Studies Series and South African Theatre
Journal, Bayreuth University.
Kruger, L. (1999) The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and
Publics since 1910, London: Routledge.
McDonald, M. (n.d.) “Space, Time, and Silence: The Craft of Athol
Fugard,” unpublished ms.
McDonald, M. (2006) “The Return of Myth: Athol Fugard and the
Classics,” Arion 14(2): 21–47.
McDonald, M. and Walton, J.M. (eds) (2002) Amid Our Troubles:
Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, London: Methuen.
Price, R.M., and Rosberg, C.G. (eds) (1980) The Apartheid Regime:
Political Power and Racial Domination, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Walder, D. (1987) “Introduction,” in A. Fugard, Selected Plays,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walder, D. (2003) Athol Fugard, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House.
 Wertheim, A. (2000) The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South
Africa to the World, Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of
Indiana Press.

Figure 13.3The Philippine Educational Theatre Association's 1896, performed in

1995 and 1996. Libretto by Charley de la Paz; music by Lucian Leteba; directed
by Soxie Topacio.

Photo © PETA.
Theatre and resistance in the Philippines
Perhaps the most successful political theatre in the developing world
has been the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), a
network of community-based theatres that opposed the dictatorship of
Ferdinand Marcos from 1967 until its fall in 1986. During the 1970s,
PETA members combined improvisational exercises, values from
Catholic liberation theology, and the radical educational ideas of
Brazilian Paolo Freire (1921–1997) to train themselves in theatrical
skills and community organizing. Core groups of facilitator-organizers
moved from Manila and other cities into the countryside, helping locals
to create scripts analyzing their social, economic, and political
conditions, and suggesting solutions. By 1986, nearly 300 local
theatres, run by fishermen, peasants, students, industrial workers, and
others, comprised the PETA network.
After 1986, PETA shifted its emphasis from socialism and anti-
imperialism to examining and protesting the effects of local, national,
and global policies on everyday lives. In addition to many touring
shows, PETA mounts large productions in the courtyard of a former
Spanish fort in downtown Manila. In 1995, PETA collaborated with the
San Francisco Mime Troupe on a musical satire about elections in the
Philippines. Its play 1896 was staged in 1996 to mark the centennial of
the Filipino revolution against Spain (Figure 13.3). PETA’s 2011
musical Care Divas portrayed Filipino transgender health-care
providers working in Israel. Most of PETA’s financing now comes from
external NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and from local
contributions and fees.
Theatre and resistance in Latin America
In the Americas, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the
United States played itself out in revolutions and rebellions (as in
Cuba and Colombia) and in dictatorships and dirty wars seeking to
quell all opposition (as in Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, and
Peru), often with the support of the superpowers interested in
protecting both ideological and business interests.
Soon after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, leader Fidel Castro
(1926–) and his deputies began to use a type of theatre for
development (further discussed in Chapter 14) to transform Cuba. In
1969, they sent a professional theatre company into the Escambray
region, where counter-revolutionary groups had been active in the
early 1960s, to prepare the traditional small farmers and peasants for
collectivization. Mixing revolutionary propaganda with participatory
techniques and developmental strategies, Teatro Escambray became
a model for Cuban revolutionary theatre by the mid-1970s.
 The combination of radical political theatre and theatre for
development exemplified by Teatro Escambray exerted wide influence
in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. Some companies
pushed for a Cuban-style revolution, but many more worked toward
versions of democratic socialism. In Mexico, where over 200 theatres
joined socialist politics to community development, this movement
was called Nuevo Teatro Popular (New Popular Theatre), a term that
can be applied to the movement as a whole.
Throughout Latin America, Nuevo Teatro was nearly as various as it
was huge, embracing amateurs and professionals, performing in agit-
prop and realistic styles, drawing urban intellectual and village
peasant audiences, and ranging widely among aesthetic and political
priorities. Nuevo Teatro helped to empower peasants and workers in
Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, worked against repressive dictatorships
in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and supported democratic socialist
regimes in Chile and Nicaragua.
Although varying widely in style, radical Nuevo Teatro troupes drew
from a common tradition of Brechtian theatre and politics. The troupes
often shared actors, directors, and playwrights, sometimes because
exile from one country would force a theatre artist to work in another.
The major troupes met regularly in festivals and conferences to
compare productions and to workshop new strategies. Not
surprisingly, Cuba took the initiative, promoting significant hemispheric
meetings of theatre artists and troupes in 1964 and 1967.
After 1990, with the end of the Cold War, the decline of Cuba, and
the fall of most dictatorial governments in Latin America, the Nuevo
Teatro movement lost momentum. Nevertheless, many troupes made
a successful transition to the globalization era. The Yuyachkani
company in Peru, for example, began moving away from Marxist
theatre in the 1980s in response to the mass killings of indigenous and
rural mestizo populations by Maoist revolutionaries known as The
Shining Path. In such pieces as Contralviento (1989) and Adios
Ayacucho (1990), Yuyachkani – the name translates roughly as “I am
remembering” in Quechua – memorialized the victims of these
genocides and affirmed the need to understand their traumas.
 Brazilian director Augusto Boal (see Chapter 12) was a key
influence on the Nuevo Theatro movement. Boal recognized that
theatre could oppose, from the ground up, the imposition of capitalist
ideologies and the social inequities they produced. His methods
continue to be utilized by grassroots movements throughout the world.
After adapting international classics for the Arena Theatre in São
Paulo, he began working with Brazilian playwrights. However,
beginning in 1964, his cultural activism made him a target of Brazil’s
military dictatorship. He was kidnapped, tortured, and in 1971, he was
exiled to Argentina. While in exile, he developed his influential
“Theater of the Oppressed,” described in Chapter 14.
Politics meets globalization: Theatre and media in China
Political theatre’s goals need not be confined to overturning an
oppressive regime. In main-land China, artists (often carefully
controlled by the government) have used theatre to foster patriotism,
encourage a revised ideology, and more recently, to support a limited
embrace of capitalism. Thus, political theatre is not necessarily distinct
from the business of theatre – the entertainment industry.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in

the People’s Republic of China (PRC), traditional Chinese theatre,
translations of Western plays, and Chinese-written spoken drama
(huaju, which first appeared in 1907 and was heavily indebted to
Western realism) were forbidden by Maoist extremists who considered
them to be decadent and counter-revolutionary. Instead, they fostered
a new form of musical theatre called yangbanxi [yahng bahn shih]
“revolutionary model drama”). Yangbanxi combines jingju and
Western performance traditions. Some are based on traditional plays,
rewritten to eliminate “feudal” elements and to emphasize their version
of Communist ideology. The first yangbanxi was Taking Tiger
Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihu Shan, 1969), based on a novel
inspired by an actual 1946 incident from the Chinese civil war. It is
filled with patriotic fervor and revolutionary propaganda. In 2014, a
Hong Kong studio released a 3D film with the same title, based on the
original novel.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, China began to gradually
embrace capitalism and globalization. Many theatre artists
experimented with non-illusionistic and Brechtian styles, often
attempting to combine Chinese “tradition” and Western “modernity.”
They were led by theorist/director Huang Zuolin (1906–1994) who had
introduced a version of Stanislavsky’s acting method to China in 1938–
1940. Beginning in the 1960s, he also advocated including acting styles
derived from Brecht, Piscator, Meyerhold, and Chinese kunqu and
jingju in actor training. Prominent playwrights and directors
experimented with his ideas, but the government censored work
satirizing or criticizing the Communist Party, including Sha Yexin’s
(1939–) What If I Were Real (Jairu wo shi zhende, 1979) and Gao
Xingjian’s (1940–) Bus Stop (Chezhan, 1983). (For more on Gao, see
the case study in Chapter 14.)
Fearing rapid Westernization, in June 1989, the PRC government
took military action against pro-democracy student demonstrators at
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The media and arts were severely
censored. Censorship has lessened in recent years; nevertheless
internet communications unfavorable to the Chinese government
continue to be suppressed. Although the content of theatre and film is
carefully monitored, stylistic experimentation in theatre is often
encouraged.
Meng Jinghui (1966–) is an influential experimental stage director
who often explores intersections among theatre, architecture, music,
installation, and multimedia. He directed Shen Lin’s (1958–) Bootleg
Faust (Daoban fushide, 1999) which satirized Chinese popular
consumer culture by intermingling elements from Goethe’s Faust with
Chinese slang, classical Chinese poetry, Greek mythology, and
Chinese television.
Also encouraged are selected films for export. Hong Kong has long
produced popular Chinese-language films that exploit international
fascination with martial arts. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000),
directed by Taiwanese Ang Lee (1954–), was a cooperative production
involving China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States – a global
enterprise. Despite content that many critics argue demeans women
and exoticizes China, the film won more than 40 international awards
and was at the time the highest grossing foreign language film in
American history. In 2008, the internationally televised Beijing
Olympics, with the epic-scale performances of its opening
ceremonies, signaled China’s status as an economic superpower.
Questioning the author(ity)
One of the most characteristic slogans of the 1960s was “Question
authority.” In literary criticism, the questioning turned toward the
authority of authorship and texts themselves. For example, in 1967,
literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) wrote an essay titled “The
Death of the Author.” Barthes argued that meaning arises only through
the interaction between the reader and text, not through an author’s
intentions or personal/historical circumstances. Intellectual historian
Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) article “What is an Author?” (1969)
analyzed the author as an effect of society and language use – a kind
of symbol. And in Of Grammatology (1967), philosopher Jacques
Derrida (1930–2004) “deconstructed” texts to show the instability of
their meaning and their self-contradictions. Doubts about the position
– even meaningfulness – of writers and writing were very much in the
air.
In theatre circles, the author was being similarly questioned. Scripts
no longer seemed quite so central and unassailable; other aspects of
theatrical performance were perhaps more important. To some, the
key element was the performer, especially the performer’s body and
embodied encounter with the audience. To others, the director’s vision
was uppermost. The play text – or any text – could be used as mere
raw material, to be manipulated or uprooted for performance. Possibly
texts were unnecessary: observation, personal interactions, and
staged imagery could constitute performance. In short, many theatre
artists decided that the play was not the thing: performance was.
Occasionally, displacing the text suggested powerful cultural or
political critiques.
Performing in the flesh
One of the most urgent and influential theatre voices decrying the
limits of conventional, text-bound theatre was that of Antonin Artaud.
As discussed in Chapter 11, his The Theatre and Its Double posited a
cleavage between spirit and body and between civilized culture and
the mysterious, dangerous forces at the heart of existence. To restore
unity, he claimed, the theatre must directly access these forces,
without the obstacles of indirect representation, including written
language. He called for a Theatre of Cruelty that would liberate
audiences from linear storytelling, from keyhole realism with its
character psychology, and from the masterpieces of the past (Artaud
1958: 7–13, 33–47, 84–92). The famous title of one chapter is “No More
Masterpieces.” Artaud envisioned a primal, non-verbal theatre
affecting the whole organism, with performances enveloping the
spectator using incantation, ancient musical instruments, rhythmical
dance, symbolic gestures, masks, mannequins, and ritual-like
costumes. Inspired by his brief experience with Balinese dance
theatre, Artaud wrote mystically of the need for the actor to access a
realm of passions through the body (1958: 89–100).
“We shall not act a written play,” he wrote, but “make attempts at
direct staging, around themes, facts, or known works” (1958: 98). He
suggested, for example, performing an erotic tale by the Marquis de
Sade, staging incidents about the conquest of Mexico, Elizabethan
plays “stripped of their texts,” and romantic melodramas – any
material that would allow “a passionate and convulsive conception of
life,” and correspond to “the unrest characteristic of our epoch” (1958:
89–122).
Artaud’s influence was modest until the 1960s, when his ideas
suddenly caught fire. His mystical jeremiad against a text-based
theatre opened a path for experiments seeking more sensuous
performances and challenging the limits of illusionistic representation.
His enthusiasts were probably unaware of his fascist leanings – most
believed the Theatre of Cruelty was liberating and revolutionary. The
Living Theatre’s collectively created Paradise Now (1968) was
probably the most Artaudian of their productions. The performance
was structured around rituals, outcries against oppression, and calls
for audience participation, including joining a nude quasi-orgy on
stage. It concluded with a procession out to the streets. The goal was
to break down the boundary between performers and audience as a
step toward political freedom.
 Similarly, Dionysus in ’69 (1968), a rendering of Euripides’
The Bacchae by Richard Schechner (1934–) with his Performance
Group (1967–1980), combined narrative and extra-textual, faux-ritual
scenes. It pitted Dionysian sexual freedom against repression, but
also hinted at the dangers of unrestrained freedom. Like Paradise
Now, it was notorious for orgiastic nude scenes that included audience
members; and like the Living Theatre, the Performance Group hoped
to have a political effect – in this instance, to somehow influence the
1968 US presidential election. Dionysus in ’69 also demonstrated
Schechner’s ideas of “environmental theatre”: no demarcation
between actor and spectator space; multiple events competing with
each other to diffuse any single focus; and actors interacting with
audience members in character and personally (Aronson 2000: 97–
102). Although Schechner is often credited with creating
environmental theatre, it clearly derives from the ideas of Allan
Kaprow (see Chapter 12).
The Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s (1934–1999) approach to
performance was less ecstatic but similarly body-oriented. His “poor
theatre” would be stripped of elaborate production elements typical of
the commercial stage. Scripts would emphasize archetypal human
dimensions and productions would be forged in collective collab
orations. The “holy actor” would be an ascetic athlete of the soul,
physicalizing the sufferings and ecstasies of the human spirit, uniting
psychic and bodily powers to achieve “translumination” (Grotowski
1968: 15–59). The actor would become theatre’s chief poet, creating
“his own psychoanalytic language of sounds and gestures in the same
way that a great poet creates his own language of words.” The actor
would sacrifice personal psychology and eliminate bodily resistance to
full expression through a via negativa: a holy path of eradication of the
self to expose primal truths.
Grotowski limited his audiences to 100 to assure immediacy and
intimacy. His theoretical language was sometimes obscure and
mystical, redolent of both his Polish Catholic background and
existentialist despair. But clearly, performance itself was the authentic
center, the object and subject of performance, rather than a realistic
representation of another thing. Grotowski’s sources included
Stanislavsky’s method of physical actions, Meyerhold’s biomechanics,
Indian kathakali, Chinese jingju (Beijing Opera), Japanese nō, and
Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes that activate the collective
unconscious.

Grotowski’s productions in his Laboratory Theatre in

Wroclaw included Akropolis (1962), a free adaptation of a work by
Polish playwright Stanislav Wyspian´ski (1869–1907). The original play
was set in the Royal Palace at Krakow (a Polish version of the
Athenian acropolis – the height of civilization), where figures from its
tapestries come alive and are led by the resurrected Christ to redeem
Europe. In Grotowski’s dark, ironic conception, the acropolis was the
Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz (not far from Krakow). In this
symbolic cemetery of Western civilization, Jewish prisoners labored to
build cremation ovens and fantasized about love and happiness. In
this production and Apocalypse cum figuris (1969), Grotowski’s key
actor, Ryszard Cieslak (1937–1990), reportedly achieved a trance-like
state. His interpenetration of actor and role realized Grotowski’s vision
of externalizing inner suffering – the actor becoming both subject and
object (Figure 13.4).
Grotowski’s productions toured the world, and together with his
writings and workshops, influenced many directors. In the late 1970s,
he renounced this phase of his work, believing his ideas had been
misunderstood, especially in America, and that he had not broken
through theatre’s division between actor and spectator.

The focus on the body was not limited to the West.

Japanese director Suzuki Tadashi (1939–), sometimes known in the
West as Tadashi Suzuki, developed a physical training method for
actors (the Suzuki Method) now used internationally. The Suzuki
Method posits a constant tension between the upper body (seen as
the origin of the conceptual and the conscious) and the lower body
(seen as the origin of the physical and the unconscious). His acting
exercises, influenced by nō, kabuki, kathakali, and Japanese martial
arts, help the actor create a powerful stage presence by using highly
energized but restrained physical motions. These include slow
movements, rhythmic foot stamping, crouching, and tension-informed
stances, sometimes combined with vocalizations (Carruthers and
Takahashi 2004: 70–97). The exercises have become expressive parts
of his productions. In 1992, Suzuki and American director Ann Bogart
(1951–) founded SITI (Saratoga International Theatre Institute) in New
York state to train performers using both the Suzuki Method and
Bogart’s own method, called Viewpoints.
Figure 13.4Ryszard Cieslak as Esau, one of the Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz,
dreaming of the freedom of the life of a hunter, in Jerzy Grotowski's production
of Akropolis at the Polish Laboratory Theatre, Wroclaw, 1962.

Photo © The Grotowski Centre, Wroclaw.

Performance art
In the mid-1960s, some artists in other fields were also questioning
authority. However, rather than rebelling against the power of the
author, they challenged the power of the usual modes of art
production and of how and where art is displayed or performed. For
example, some visual artists rebelled against traditional painting and
sculpture, venues such as museums, and aesthetic norms. Like many
innovative theatre artists, they often presented their works to
unsuspecting audiences in unusual locales. In addition, they rejected
the strict division of the arts into self-limiting categories, preferring
instead to blur the boundaries between, for example, theatre and
sculpture or dance and painting.
Contemporary performance art (sometimes called “live art” in the
UK) clearly descended from Kaprow’s Happenings. However, unlike
spontaneous, intentionally disruptive Happenings, performance art is
usually sponsored by an authorizing institution, such as an art gallery,
museum, or university. Performance art – like Dada and other avant-
garde movements of the early twentieth century – questions how art is
classified, or framed, as art. It seldom uses a clear narrative line or
linear script. Often, it aims to demystify high art and call attention to
the social processes that “confirm” art as art. Whether solo work or
large spectacle, performance art always seeks to destroy the
boundaries between art and life.
Performance artists often use their own bodies as performance
instruments and their own lives as subjects. They are interested in
embodied expression, not written dramatic texts. They may use video,
dance, sculpture, painting, or music, and often perform outside of
theatres: on roofs, in shop windows, in airports, in lobbies, or on street
corners. Early performance artists associated themselves with the
visual arts, not theatre. A few performed works only once, creating a
never-to-be-repeated experience between artist and spectator which
could not be purchased or commodified. In contrast, most
performance artists today repeat the event and charge admission, and
sometimes perform in theatres. Well-known performance artists
include Carolee Schneemann (1939–), Chris Burden (1946–2015),
Marina Abramovic´ (1946–), and Laurie Anderson (1947–). Each is
unique in style, vision, and goal.
Some performance artists, like Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1955–),
raise social issues in their work. Born in Mexico and coming to the
United States in 1978, he calls himself
a nomadic Mexican artist/writer in the process of Chicanization, which
means I am slowly heading North. . . . I make art about the
misunderstandings that take place at the border zone. But for me, the
border is no longer located at any fixed geopolitical site. I carry the
border with me, and I find new borders wherever I go.
(Gómez-Peña 1996: 5)

Working solo or in collaboration with Coco Fusco (1960–) and Roberto

Sifuentes (1967–), his works focus on the Latino experience in the
United States to highlight how national and cultural identities are
constructed. For example, he had an online “performance photo
essay” that used an interactive test to demonstrate the dangers of
ethnic profiling in the post-9/11 era.
In 1994–1996, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes collaborated on the
Temple of Confessions, in which they became exhibits in Plexiglas
booths, like archaeological relics or scientific specimens. They were
advertised as the last living saints from a “border region.” Spectators
were invited to confess their “intercultural fears and desires” to them.
The “confessions” ranged from guilt to anger to sexual desire. Richard
Schechner suggests the performance revealed people’s “sense of
resigned desperation” regarding the inevitability of globalization and
their need for human interaction to counter its alienating and
homogenizing effects (Schechner 2002: 261).
Performance art and similar alternative, anti-text-based
performances form part of the experimental scene throughout the
world. For example, in the People’s Republic of China, the all-female,
Shanghai-based Niao Collective performs multimedia dance-theatre
pieces. Tongue’s Memory of Home (2005) challenged traditional
Confucian and patriarchal values, socialist ideology, and the
dominance of spoken theatre. “[A] tongue, once stripped of language,
has other ways of remembering – tasting, touching, feeling. Stripped
of language, it is no longer a mouthpiece for ideology and is in fact
more free than human beings themselves” (Borneoco n.d.). In China’s
recent past, such performances would have been highly provocative.
The director as auteur

“Auteur” is a French word meaning “author.” An auteur

director (a term borrowed from film criticism) sees herself – not the
playwright or the actor – as the primary “author” of the performance.
Many auteur directors, especially ones working in mainstream theatre,
direct written plays, but they de-emphasize the text or subordinate it to
their vision. In this way, they shift authority from the playwright to the
director. Auteur directors produce their own interpretations by exerting
total control of the mise en scène [meez on sehn] (a French term
denoting all visual aspects of a production, from set design, costumes,
makeup, and lighting to the placement and movement of actors and
use of new technologies).

By the late 1960s, the idea of the director as the primary

artist, or at least a coequal with the playwright, was emerging. It was
becoming commonplace to speak not of Shakespeare’s but Peter
Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970), not of Molière’s but
Roger Planchon’s Tartuffe (1962, 1973), not of Euripides’ but Suzuki
Tadashi’s The Trojan Women (1974). We will look at these directors’
work in turn.
British director Peter Brook (1925–) is perhaps the foremost auteur
director in the English-speaking world. His wide array of theatrical
experiments across 40 years have established him as one of the most
innovative, sometimes controversial, directors in twentieth-century
theatre. He brought Artaud, Brecht, and Beckett to bear on his 1962
King Lear with the then-new Royal Shakespeare Company. His
production sought to emphasize an existential vision of a cruel,
godless universe; he eliminated lines that countered that vision. When
the elderly Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out, Brook located the scene
downstage close to the audience. He also brought up the house lights
to strip away any comfort that theatrical illusion might have afforded.
Brook conducted Theatre of Cruelty experiments in 1964,
culminating with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed
by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the
Marquis de Sade (usually called Marat/Sade) by German-born
playwright Peter Weiss (1916– 1982). Weiss’s verse text, about the
assassination of a leader of the French Revolution, rendered a morally
chaotic world in grim corporeal imagery, graphically physicalizing the
inmates’ madness in a claustrophobic acting space where they
perform their play within the play. Charlotte Corday’s murder of Marat
in his bath was performed in a ritualistic manner, visually echoing
Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting The Death of Marat. A courtier’s
speech filled with pompous but ironic platitudes about the glories of
France and of Enlightenment rationalism agitated the inmates into a
frenzied attempt to overtake the asylum. The play closes with an
indictment of complacency towards poverty and political repression –
an echo of Marat’s own deepest concerns (see Figure 13.5).
In his manifesto The Empty Space (1968), Brook called for a “holy
theatre” marked by sincerity and authenticity to replace the pre-
packaged “deadly theatre” of a consumer society. His Royal
Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1970) used bright, contemporary theatricality to replace the play’s
romantic stage traditions. With fairies on trapezes, non-illusionistic
white box setting, flower-children young lovers, and playful eroticism,
the production seemed to offer the promise of a new age of authentic
young love born out of the youthful social revolution against an older
order (see Figure 13.6). Although Brook did not tamper with
Shakespeare’s language, the performance itself became the ground
of authenticity, coequal to the text.
Figure 13.5The premiere production of Weiss's Marat/Sade, at the Schiller
Theatre in Berlin in 1964. Influenced by Brechtian theatre, this widely produced
play about the political failure of the French Revolution was directed by Konrad
Swinarski and designed by Weiss.

Photograph: Heinz Köster.

Figure 13.6Oberon (Alan Howard) casts a spell on Titania (Sara Kestelman) in

her “bower,” assisted by Puck (John Kane), in Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream, directed by Peter Brook with the Royal Shakespeare Company,
1970. Setting by Sally Jacobs.

Photograph © Thomas F. Holte, courtesy Shakespeare Centre

Library, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Brook’s Dream toured internationally for three years. Such
mainstream visibility in an era of social upheaval made it a reference
point for performance practice of Shakespeare and other classics by
suggesting that productions of classical plays are transactions
between past and present, bound to generate new meanings
(Williams 1997: 213–33; Worthen 2003: 28–58). By the end of the
century, this practice had reached mainstream film. Julie Taymor’s film
Titus (1999), based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Baz
Luhrmann’s film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)
juxtaposed the plays’ Elizabethan verse with a contemporary, fast-
paced filmic language of images. Costumes and settings were literally
layered with conflicting remnants of the historical past and bold
swatches from the contemporary world. In all, performance and text
critiqued one another.
French director Roger Planchon (1931–2009) viewed the director as
equal to the author. Influenced by Artaud, Brecht, and Marx,
Planchon’s politically committed productions utilized what he called
“scenic writing,” that is, vivid stage images that conveyed his vision of
a play (Bradby and Williams 1988: 51–6). For many years, he headed
the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) in Villeurbane (a suburb of
Lyon), desiring to bring theatre to the working classes outside of Paris.
Although clearly an auteur director, Planchon did not radically alter the
written text.
For his 1962 staging of Molière’s Tartuffe, Orgon’s home was a kind
of mini-Versailles palace. Orgon’s devotion to the bogus cleric Tartuffe
suggested unconscious homosexual yearning, adding sexual
confusion to blind religious devotion. When Orgon is saved at the last
instant, the staging evoked a chilling demonstration of Louis XIV’s
absolute power. Directing the same play in 1973, Planchon had
Orgon’s house dismantled room by room. Orgon and his family were
herded into a dungeon beneath the stage floor before being released.
There have been many interpretations of the original ending of
Molière’s play (see the case study in Chapter 6); Planchon apparently
was suggesting that the bourgeois Orgon was being stripped of far
more than his delusions about Tartuffe.

Suzuki Tadashi’s radical adaptation of The Trojan Women

in 1974 was the first time a Japanese director had not imitated
Western staging conventions for a Greek classic. From its opening in
Tokyo in 1974 through its final performance in Helsinki in 1989, The
Trojan Women played in 34 cities around the world, and some
compared its importance to Brecht’s Mother Courage and Brook’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream (Carruthers and Takahashi 2004: 124).
Suzuki’s production combined a Japanese translation of Euripides’
play with newly commissioned poetry. Resisting conventional ideas of
a noble, classical world, Suzuki created images evoking war’s
brutality: memories of the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki combined with condemnations of military atrocity in general.
In the premiere version, three main actors performed together in three
distinct styles: nō, shingeki, and Suzuki Method. Major characters
were presented in a kabuki-style dumb-show (danmari [dahm-mah-
ree]). They were led on stage by Jizō, Buddhist guardian deity of
children, who then watched impassively, unable to intervene in the
horrors of war. The chorus women were homeless survivors of both
Troy and Hiroshima/ Nagasaki; the Greek soldiers were kabuki-like
samurai who violently raped Andromache and dismembered her son
(a doll) on stage. At one point, the chorus of Trojan women circled in a
slow, rhythmic dance, defiantly stamping their feet, lifting their knees
to their chests.
Over the years, Suzuki experimented with various endings that
disrupted any easy consolations. In the premiere, a group of Japanese
tourists (including a giant Japanese soldier) appeared on a guided
tour of the battlefield at Troy. In the 1979 touring version, the cast
exited, abandoning the old homeless woman who in her fantasy had
become Hecuba. Watched over by the powerless Jizō, she sorted
through her few belongings and tried to sleep, somewhat reminiscent
of a character from Beckett (Carruthers and Takahashi 2004: 124–53).
In all versions, Suzuki’s Trojan Women presented a vision of Japan as
both defeated victim and militaristic victimizer. It ultimately condemned
all wars.
Suzuki is very clear about his role as an auteur director. Speaking of
his freedom with Shakespeare’s text in his Tale of Lear (1988), he said:
“[T]he first responsibility of a director is to define what interests him
the most, what resonates with his current concerns” (Mulryne 1998:
84).
 Challenging an important premise of modernism, many auteur
directors no longer viewed the classics as self-enclosed, timeless, and
universal. Productions began to emphasize the contemporary
encounter with classic texts, often insisting that the fissures between a
play from the past and the culture of the present be exposed. In this
view, any performance will generate new meanings alongside the old;
performance is seen as the theatre’s authentic work. Dionysus in ’69,
discussed above, is an early example. A different kind of auteur
production – also taking off from Euripides’ original – is Klaus-Michael
Grüber’s 1974 production of The Bacchae at the Berlin Schaubühne.
The production used Euripides’ script but went beyond any attempt
either to “recover” the ancient play or to reinvent Euripides as a
postwar existentialist. Grüber’s production instead critiqued such
projects, staging a never-ending process of stitching and restitching
ancient fragments together, with the result open to varying readings
(Fischer-Lichte 1999: 16–17). The performance began with the
weakened Dionysus, god of the theatre, being rolled out on a hospital
gurney, barely able to speak his name in the opening line, “I am
Dionysius, the son of Zeus” (Euripides 1959: 155) (see Figure 13.7).
Figure 13.7Dionysus (Michael König) on a hospital gurney in the opening scene
of Euripides' The Bacchae, directed by Klaus-Michael Grüber, Schaubühne
Theatre Company, Berlin, 1974.

Photograph © Helga Kneidel.

 Thinking Through Theatre Histories
The impact of literary criticism

The new directorial approaches were sometimes congenial with,

or even influenced by, developments in twentieth-century literary theory, as
noted earlier in this chapter. Many theorists pointed out that human
constructions, such as languages, literature, or gender, are embedded with
particular ideologies – local value systems and social practices. The term
“text” began to be used for any symbolic system a culture might construct, be
it a religious ritual, clothing fashions, or the script of Hamlet.
One key theatrical development that dovetails with literary criticism is
postmodernism. Grüber’s production of The Bacchae may be described as
postmodern. Postmodernism is a much-debated term that has had many
applications and many theorists (we include references to many of them on
the companion website). It can signal liberation from modernism as well as an
apocalyptic collapse of all meaning. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard
suggests that postmodernism implies “a deep incredulity toward
metanarratives” – that is, toward descriptions of human history presenting
grand, all-encompassing truths (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). Many postmodern theatre
productions feature non-linear narratives, pastiches or samplings of pre-
existing but unrelated texts, and an ironic perspective toward those texts.
In contrast to traditional and modernist approaches to drama, which
seemed to hold out a promise of eternal, redeeming truths lying behind the
plays, postmodern performance offers only the “empty presence” of the here
and now (Connor 1989: 140–1). It refuses to allow a singular, comfortable,
stable meaning or value. Not all postmodern theatre is as radical as Grüber’s
The Bacchae, which foregrounded the process of performance to question
what representation can accomplish. But generally postmodern performance
aims to provoke the viewer/reader to be aware of, and to critique, the very
strategies of representation.
Postmodern and other theoretically derived critiques help remove literary
and theatrical works from their exclusive status as self-enclosed high art,
instead viewing them as products of particular historical cultures. In addition,
they offer opportunities to incorporate fresh ideas and practice derived from
disparate fields of study (such as anthropology, neuroscience, or gender
studies) into theatre practice. Nevertheless, some scholars have expressed
concern that over-dependence on literary theory – or on theories derived from
 other non-theatrical disciplines – could undermine the legitimacy of theatre as
a discrete area of academic inquiry. Such scholars warn that theatre must
develop theoretical and critical practices of its own.

Creating “performance texts”

Not all directors were auteurs. Some actually went further down the
Artaudian path by eliminating the traditional playwright and devoting
themselves to collective creation, text collages, chance encounters, or
visuality.
In Paris in 1968, Jean-Louis Barrault (1910–1994) staged a three-
hour adaptation of writings by sixteenth-century French author
François Rabelais, and Ariane Mnouchkine’s (1939–) Théâtre du Soleil
(founded 1964) assembled a collage of sketches on the French
Revolution titled 1789. Both emphasized the relation of French history
and culture to the then-current spectacle of student uprisings and the
desire to free body and spirit from traditional restraints. The Serpent
(1969), created by American director Joseph Chaikin (1935–2003) with
his Open Theatre company, was a collage of material from the Bible
and scenes from the recent assassinations of U.S. President John F.
Kennedy and black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Suzuki
created several collages in his own hybrid style. He titled these On the
Dramatic Passions (1969), and included scenes from the
bunraku/kabuki classic Kanadehon Chūshingura (The Treasury of
Loyal Retainers, 1748), the highly romantic French play Cyrano de
Bergerac (1898) by Edmond Rostand (1868–1919), and the somewhat
Beckettian Zō (The Elephant, 1961) by Japanese playwright
Betsuyaku Minoru (1937–). Polish director Tadeusz Kantor’s (1915–
1990) The Dead Class (1975) combined his own writings and works by
other Polish authors. The “text” of Peter Brook’s Orghast (1971) was
an arrangement of musical phonemes and fragments of ancient
languages compiled by poet Ted Hughes, intoned by the actors along
with ancient music. Performed in the ruins of Persepolis at the Shiraz
Festival in Iran, it opened with the Prometheus myth. (Brook’s 1985
epic Mahabharata is discussed in Chapter 14.)
Romanian director Andrei Serban (1943–) brought new rigor in the
early 1970s to the American experimental scene at Ellen Stewart’s
(1919–2011) La Mama Experimental Theatre Club (founded 1961).
Artaud’s ideas inspired Fragments of a Trilogy (1974), composed of
portions of Euripides’ Medea, Electra, and The Trojan Women, which
Serban developed over a three-year period. Serban had worked with
Peter Brook on the non-verbal Orghast in Iran in 1970–1971. Like that
project, the goal here was to create a non-verbal, aural score to
communicate the power and passion of the Greek plays. Fragments of
Senecan Latin, Greek, and English, were woven together with
primitive vocalizations and Elizabeth Swados’s (1951–) original score.
Trilogy was staged throughout an empty, rectangular, galleried hall,
and the audience moved to follow the action. The basic emotions of
the plays – fear, love, hate – were communicated powerfully. The work
achieved nearly legendary status and was revived in 1999.
The Wooster Group developed from Schechner’s Performance
Group beginning in 1975, taking its formal name in 1980. It continues to
emphasize radical reworkings of canonical plays, developing its
pieces in collective improvisations, from which director Elizabeth
LeCompte (1944–) shapes the final collage product. Departing from
the quest for communal authenticity that was characteristic of the
1960s, the Wooster Group performs deconstructive, skeptical critiques
of the processes of meaning-making in a postmodern, mediatized
culture. The Wooster Group frequently uses technology – videotaped
segments, microphones, recorded music or voices – calling attention
to how technologies affect meaning, and to the audience’s processes
of interpreting a performance. Such self-reflexive strategies short-
circuit any continuities in Wooster works.
In the 1980s, the group deconstructed both Our Town (1938) by
Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) and The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller.
Route 1 & 9 (1981) juxtaposed portions of Our Town with a re-creation
of a routine called “The Party,” recorded in 1965 by black artist
Pigmeat Martin, and a sexually graphic film. The intent was to explode
Wilder’s picture of an all-white, small-town America as an embodiment
of universal human experience. The routes in the title referred to the
film’s scenes of sexually explicit behavior during a van ride on
highways running not through Wilder’s Grover’s Corners but through
the industrial sites and oil refineries of urban New Jersey.
 In L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) (1984), the Wooster Group
critiqued The Crucible, which, as noted in Chapter 12, draws parallels
between the Salem witch trials and anti-communist hysteria. The four-
part production used various devices to create a discontinuous collage
of scenes. In “Part Two – Salem,” portions of the dialogue were read at
a table with microphones, seeming to evoke and query both the
infamous televised McCarthy hearings and Miller’s play itself as
processes leading to truth (Figure 13.8). The women were dressed in
historical costumes, suggesting their traditional, gendered position.
The men, by contrast, wore contemporary clothes and, unlike the
women, were given microphones, tools of authority. This and other
devices pointed to the limits of Miller’s play, which as Philip Auslander
writes, seems “unable to represent the persecution of witches as the
effort of a patriarchal society to suppress independent women”
(Auslander 1992: 92). The formidable white actress Kate Valk played
the black slave girl Tituba (Miller’s invention), in minstrel-style
blackface, with a fake “darky” accent. By invoking an American theatre
tradition of racist representation in minstrel shows and Aunt Jemima
figures (Rouse 1992: 148–51), the performance sought to probe the
authority of Miller’s representation of race in America.
More recently, the Wooster Group has used simultaneous video,
film, and other unconventional tactics to explore or challenge such
canonical works as Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1993 and
2006), Hamlet (2007 and 2012), Racine’s Phèdre in To You, The Birdie!
(staged as a tennis match, 2002), and Tennessee William’s Vieux
Carré (2011).
Figure 13.8The Crucible sequence from the Wooster Group's L.S.D. (. . . Just
the High Points . . .), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. Left to right: Matthew
Hansell, Ron Vawter, Nancy Reilly, Peyton Smith, Elion Sacker, Kate Valk, and
Anna Kohler.

Photograph © Nancy Campbell.

In Japan, the raw materials for theatre productions were

less the classic texts than the performance traditions themselves.
Among a new generation of Japanese theatre artists who sought to
revitalize their theatre, especially important were the
playwright/director Terayama Shūji (1935–1983) and directors Suzuki
and Ninagawa Yukio (1935–). (Ninagawa’s work is discussed in the
case study on “Global Shakespeare” on the website.) All emerged
during Japan’s Little Theatre movement (angura – underground) in the
1960s in which many directors and playwrights rebelled – in various
ways – against the Western-derived drama and theatre practices in
Japan (shingeki). Many were also involved in radical anti-Vietnam War
and anti-government demonstrations. Overall, their work reflects
Japan’s vexed negotiations with its own past and its cultural longings
to be a modern presence on the global stage after its defeat in the
Second World War. How would it remain connected with its own pre-
Western traditions and still find, after the American occupation, its own
new identity? As Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei has noted, Japan’s theatrical
innovators attempted variously to destroy, redefine, or reinvent the
nation’s traditional theatre forms such as nō, kyōgen, bunraku, and
kabuki. “Some aligned themselves with, or set themselves against, the
Western avant-garde; and some searched for totally new modes of
expression and identity” (Sorgenfrei 2005a: 131).
Terayama Shūji, playwright, poet, director, film-maker, and essayist,
led his experimental company, Tenjō Sajiki, from 1967 until his death at
47 in 1983. He created fresh, eclectic work that challenged theatrical
conventions and left a reputation of legendary proportions. Early
works written and directed by Terayama, such as The Hunchback of
Aomori (Aomori-ken no semushi otoko, 1967), The Dog God (Inugami,
1967), and Heretics (Jashūmon, 1971), featured surreal evocations of
Buddhist superstitions and old-time side-shows, coupled with
psychedelic music and the discontent of postwar youth.
Some of Terayama’s works might be characterized as metatheatre.
All of his works suggest a desire to shake audiences out of
complacency. Plays such as Opium War (Ahen sensō, 1972),
Blindman’s Letter (Mōjin shokan, 1973), and A Journal of the Plague
Year (Ekibyō ryūkōki, 1975) were described by Terayama as “invisible
theatre” that plunged audiences into terrifying total darkness or
forcefully separated them into private, curtained rooms. The assault
on the audience’s senses sometimes led to claustrophobia, hysteria,
violence, and even police intervention. In one case, a fire-breathing
actor severely burned an audience member’s face. German reviewers
damned Heretics as “the madness of Faust combined with karate
chops” and a “bad epidemic from Japan.” One article was titled “Hitler
Was Better” (Sorgenfrei 2005b: 18).
Theatres of observation and images
The furthest possible questioning of authorship is its complete
elimination. In Chapter 12, we saw one example of this in Happenings.
Another approach is to create theatre “in the moment” by observing
chance events. Terayama provides a good example. From the early
1970s, he created outdoor “city dramas” that often involved
unsuspecting citizens as audience or even as actors. For example,
Knock (Nokku, 1975) consisted of sites and events spread across 27
locations throughout a district of Tokyo, to which spectators could
journey over a 30-hour period. Critic Senda Akihiko wrote of following
a map leading him to various sites, including a clock shop with an
array of broken clocks lined up in front, a pile of broken toys in the
window, and no one inside. Had it been so arranged for this event, or
had it always looked that way? When Senda and others followed a
married couple arguing their way loudly through the streets, what did
bystanders make of the spectacle? Who were the actors? Who were
spectators? What was Senda to make of the four people emerging
from a manhole, swathed in bandages? Although the work may seem
akin to Happenings, Terayama insisted that, unlike his “city dramas,”
Happenings lacked dramaturgical structure. He wrote, “Drama that is
dragged into the streets will be instantly systematized,
institutionalized, and placed in a museum unless it is based on a
dramaturgical structure that sucks in and manipulates the continuum
of time called everyday reality” (Sorgenfrei 2005b: 143–4). Terayama’s
“city dramas” aim to provoke a reassessment of how theatres and
spectators construct meaning (Senda 1997: 56–60). Other unorthodox,
subversive works written and staged by Terayama included the sado-
masochistic Directions to Servants (Nuhikun, 1979) and Lemmings
(Remingu, various versions 1979–1983). Some Terayama plays
incorporated a series of visually striking scenes in which the walls
around people imprisoned in private pursuits of individuality dissolved,
exposing them to random, sometimes violent experiences.
 In the 1970s, some theatre artists, dancers, and
choreographers began to create multimedia performances using
visual and aural landscapes that defied conventional concepts of
artistic order, continuity, and time. These came to be known as
“Theatre of Images.” The term was first applied to the theatre
productions of the American Robert Wilson (1944–). His works present
surreal landscapes of discontinuous, dream-like images,
encompassed by music and sound; often, the few spoken words are
part of a trance-inducing aural score. Meticulously choreographed
performers slowly move in and out of tableaux, often in front of giant
projection screens on which may float clouds or everyday items in
iconic size (such as a huge shoe).
Spectators of Wilson’s productions are to make whatever
associations they please, meditate among half-remembered
archetypes, or perhaps reflect on their own perceptual processes. A
refined visual aesthetic governs the formal, modernist images,
working hand-in-glove with an earnest postmodern indeterminacy and
irony. As Arnold Aronson notes, Wilson’s spectacles demand “a new
kind of watching” (Aronson 2000: 125).
Wilson’s Life and Times of Joseph Stalin at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music in 1973 was a 12-hour “opera” in seven acts, requiring 140
actors. Einstein on the Beach (1976), written with composer Philip
Glass (1937–), presented Einstein as dreamer and scientist. Its
repeated images of a train, a spaceship, and a trial seemed to raise
issues about scientific progress. But it was the overall orchestration of
images, trance-like music, and hypnotic movement that audiences
found compelling (see Figure 13.9). Wilson’s monumental the CIVIL
warS: a tree is best measured when it is down (1984) was more
thematic though no more linear. It dealt generally with human conflict
at many levels through evocative images and icons, among them
battlefield gunfire and a pageant of historical and fictional figures that
included King Lear, Marx, Abraham Lincoln, and a Native American
tribe.
 In contrast, some of Wilson’s more recent work is very accessible to
general audiences. In 2004, he collaborated in the creation of The
Temptation of St Anthony with Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942–),
scholar, civil rights activist, and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a
widely admired all-female, African-American a capella group. They
adapted Gustave Flaubert’s 1874 French novel exploring Anthony’s
troubled journey to faith in a spectacular and musically rich production
that combined African-American gospel and jazz with elegant scenic
images by Wilson. In 2005, he collaborated with the Comédie
Française, designing a wry, amusing staging of Jean de la Fontaine’s
The Fables. He frequently directs operas and has collaborated with
performing artists as diverse as ballet dancer/actor Mikhail
Baryshnikov (1948–) and pop singer Lady Gaga (1986–). Wilson now
lives in Germany where state sub-sidies support his technologically
advanced imaging and his meticulous lighting. Among his productions
at the Berliner Ensemble are Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (2007,
continuing in repertory and on international tour) and Shakespeare’s
Sonnets (2009, continuing in repertory).
Figure 13.9Performers in the “Spaceship” section of Einstein on the Beach (by
Robert Wilson and Philip Glass) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard
Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, New York, December 8, 1984.

Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images.

Théâtre de Complicité is a London-based company which began in
1983 as a collective of actors trained in the methods of Jacques Lecoq.
It specializes in a Theatre of Images based on “extreme movement,”
mime, and clowning techniques. They achieved international acclaim
with the 1992 The Street of Crocodiles, based on the life of Polish
writer Bruno Schulz, in which the poetic and surreal aspects of
Schulz’s memoirs were theatricalized by the collective in music,
image, rhythm, movement, and action.
Some works of Chinese-American director Ping Chong (1946–)
might also be described stylistically as Theatre of Images. Chong’s
productions of the 1970s and 1980s were collaboratively developed,
plotless, carefully choreographed, sometimes meditative works. They
often involved themes of cultural and spiritual dislocation, deriving
from Chong’s own experiences as an outsider in America. In his
amusing production Noiresque: The Fallen Angel (1989), an Asian-
American girl, a modern Alice in Wonderland, boards a train bound for
an Orwellian technocracy that is inhabited by dehumanized,
mechanized residents. Chong’s A.M./A.M – the Articulated Man (1982)
took up the Frankenstein legend and featured a robot who, unable to
become socialized, kills and flees into the city. In what seems to be a
clear reference to the sense of spiritual dislocation of many Asian-
Americans, Chong said of this production, “When human beings in a
society fail to have a rich psychic life, then it’s ripe for fascism” (Leiter
1994: 62). His Nosferatu (1985) alternated portions of F.W. Murnau’s
early vampire film with scenes from the lives of a soulless yuppie
couple in Manhattan who confront a vampire.
The non-death of the author
Despite the radical questioning of the author, playwrights never
disappeared. Some of the most important theatre after 1968 involved
new plays. For example, Angels in America (1992), the two-play,
Pulitzer Prize-winning epic by American playwright Tony Kushner
(1956–), combined rich language with almost cinematic scenic
collages to juxtapose scenes such as an angel bursting through the
bedroom ceiling of a gay man suffering from AIDS, a political
conservative’s discovery of his homosexuality, a Cold Warrior’s
visitations by a ghost from his past, and an agoraphobic Mormon
woman’s hallucinatory friends (Figure 13.10).
Although psychological realism was still dominant, more and more
mainstream playwrights and directors found ways to depart from it.
Even in relatively realistic drama, playwrights such as Harold Pinter,
Sam Shepard (1943–), and David Mamet (1947–) probed the
emotionally volatile and destructive forces beneath the surfaces of
language. For many, language no longer seemed to represent thought
and feeling.
Documentary plays influenced by film and television also
proliferated. African-American writer/actor Anna Deavere Smith’s
(1950–) one-person shows on urban unrest in the U.S., Fires in the
Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), focused on
language but drew from film and video documentary techniques.
Smith interviewed people involved in the events and performed their
actual words and gestures, selecting the “shots” and editing the
results.
Some playwrights defended the primacy of the text on legal
grounds. The Wooster Group’s production of The Crucible drew
Miller’s wrath. Insisting his copyright had been violated, Miller
threatened legal action, which forced the closing of L.S.D. (. . . Just the
High Points . . .) even after the Wooster Group had eliminated Miller’s
actual words. A similar argument against directorial meddling in 1984
resulted in the lawsuit filed by Samuel Beckett and Grove Press
threatening legal action against the American Repertory Theatre at
Harvard University over director Joanne Akalaitis’s (1937–) production
of Endgame (see Chapter 12). Especially after the early 2000s, the
Dramatists’ Guild of America (a professional association for U.S.
playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists) energetically
advocated legal action against directors and/or theatres that cut or
changed scripts (including stage directions and casting requirements)
without the playwright’s approval. Although upheavals in
communications were altering attitudes, print culture’s concept of
copyright was still very much alive.
The growth of non-commercial theatres
Starting in the 1960s, many countries developed extensive networks of
theatre outside the commercial arena. Several new national (i.e.,
government-subsidized) theatres were created, while older ones
occasionally found themselves in complex circumstances. Numerous
small theatre companies arose, either to provide traditional theatre,
produce “experimental” plays, or serve a particular “niche” audience.
Once stabilized, those companies that did not aim to make profit often
sought a special tax status allowing them to accept donations and
operate without paying taxes. Here “profit” means earnings beyond
those needed to pay reasonable salaries and expenses. (Not-for-profit
is a U.S. federal tax category of organizations exempt from taxes; the
U.K. equivalent is a registered charity.)
In the United Kingdom, the Royal National Theatre (known as “the
National” or NT) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) vied for
government funding. Both have relied on Shakespearean productions
to promote the theatrical prestige of Great Britain at home and to the
larger world, as does Shakespeare’s Globe (opened 1997; see
Chapter 14). The National opened in 1963 under the artistic direction of
Sir Laurence Olivier, with a production of Hamlet starring Peter
O’Toole. In 1976, it moved to its current home, a three-theatre complex
on the south bank of the Thames in London that cost over £17 million
(GBP) ($28 million U.S.) to construct. The National continues to
produce and simulcast its productions of plays by Shakespeare and
other classics, as well as contemporary works. In 1982, the RSC,
which makes Shakespearean production central to its mission and
had been producing Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1961,
added two performance spaces at London’s Barbican, making it the
world’s largest theatrical institution. By the mid-1980s, both companies
needed big budgets.
Figure 13.10The appearance of the angel in the final scene of Tony Kushner's
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches (1990). From the 1992
production of the Royal National Theatre, London, directed by Declan
Donnellan, with Stephen Spinella as Prior Walter and Nancy Crane as the
Angel.

Photograph: Lebrecht Music and Arts.

At stake in the success of both companies was the international
theatrical prestige of the United Kingdom as well as financial gain from
tourism. Both theatres strived to produce the best of classical and
contemporary theatre and boasted world-class companies and artistic
directors. Trevor Nunn (1940–) managed the RSC from 1968 until 1986,
and Peter Hall, who had resigned from the RSC, replaced Laurence
Olivier as director of the National in 1973 (Figure 13.11).
However, controversy surrounded the London operations of both
theatres from their inceptions. Opponents, especially outside London,
argued that the tax-generated sums spent on constructing the
National should have been spread among many smaller groups.
Hostility increased when the government revealed that a quarter of the
Arts Council’s drama budget in 1975–1976 had gone to the National,
much of it for operating costs. Critics also attacked the poor design of
the impenetrable Barbican Centre, used by the RSC for its London
shows, especially its huge main stage and inadequate second space.
This and other factors led the RSC to abandon the Barbican in 2002,
returning in 2013. Both the RSC and the National struggled to meet
their massive budgets, often by resorting to smaller shows, shorter
seasons, and extensive touring and residencies. In addition to
producing plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the RSC
mounted large money-makers, including Nicholas Nickleby (1980) and
Les Misérables (1985). In the face of shrinking subsidies and smaller
audiences, in 1999 the Arts Council for England required more
educational initiatives and innovative productions. The National and
the RSC were caught between national budgetary constraints and
international expectations.
A somewhat similar conflict faced the major theatres of Berlin.
During the Cold War – before German reunification in 1990 – East and
West Germany lavished subsidies on several theatres in East and
West Berlin. They became international showplaces for the two
superpowers’ rival cultures. In West Berlin, the Schiller Theater
offered bourgeois classics and contemporary plays from Western
Europe and the United States. The city hosted yearly festivals to
display the best West German productions to the world. In East Berlin,
the Berliner Ensemble, the Volksbühne, and the Deutsches Theater
(once the center of Max Reinhardt’s theatrical enterprises) flourished
during the 1970s and 1980s.
But after reunification, Germany could no longer afford to support all
these world-class theatres in Berlin, partly because state subsidies in
Germany typically covered about 80 percent of all operating costs. The
competition for spectators and subsidies, plus major reorganization in
several companies, forced some, including the Schiller Theatre, to
close. The Berliner Ensemble lessened its ties to the traditions of
Brechtian production – offering a variety of plays, including those of
Brecht, directed in a variety of styles. To enhance the reputation of
Berlin as a center for global performances, Theatertreffen, the festival
that showcases the year’s best German-language productions, added
a few international productions and now offers English supertitles for
selected shows. Like London, Berlin remains a center of globalized
theatre.
Figure 13.11Peter Hall's 1984 production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the
National Theatre, starring Ian McKellen and Irene Worth. Hall resigned from the
National in 1988 to found his own company.

Photograph John Haynes/Lebrecht Music and Arts

National theatres were created in many parts of the world. For
example, the National Theatre of Japan opened in 1966, followed by
the National Nō Theatre in 1983, and the National Bunraku Theatre in
1984. Mexico’s National Theatre Company was founded in 1977.
However, there is no national theatre in the United States.
In the “not-for-profit” world, markets are often defined in terms of
values and purposes, but the practice of seeking a specific audience
is essentially the same. In the United States, for example, regional
not-for-profit theatres aim to attract upscale, educated, and “cultured”
audiences in urban areas outside of New York, audiences whose
season subscriptions would support them. Many were created starting
in the early 1960s, first with support from private grant foundations,
and later with the help of government grants. These theatres see
themselves as non-commercial alternatives to the broadly popular
entertainments of film and Broadway musicals and comedies.
Unlike commercial star-centered productions imported from “out of
town,” large and mid-size regional theatres catering to local audiences
often use a combination of local actors supplemented by the
occasional well-known star. A few smaller companies retain semi-
permanent ensembles. Although regional theatres define themselves
as artistically independent of Broadway, the transfer of a regionally
developed production to Broadway has often been a source of pride.
Another development in the 1970s and 1980s was the construction
of performing arts centers (containing both theatres and concert halls)
in regional urban areas, modelled on venues such as New York City’s
Lincoln Center or London’s South Bank Centre.
Most experimental theatre in the United States during this period
originated in New York City. To distinguish their work from commercial
performances typical of large theatres on or near Broadway, these
new, smaller companies came to be known as “Off-Off-Broadway.”
Today, the term defines theatres that have 99 or fewer seats, or which
employ non-Equity actors (Equity is the trade union to which
professional actors belong). “Broadway” refers to large, mainstream
theatres in a specific area of Manhattan. “Off-Broadway” theatres may
or may not be in that same area, but they are designated “Off-
Broadway” because they have 100–499 seats or, if fewer than 100,
they employ Equity actors. Thus the designations refer more to the
business of theatre (How large is the audience? How much money are
the actors paid?) than to the content or style of production. Today,
many newer, small, or experimental groups prefer the term “Fringe
Theatre.”
The Japanese Little Theatre movement (discussed above) is the
equivalent of Fringe Theatre. Its origin dates from 1966 when director
Suzuki, playwright Betsuyaku, and several actors founded the
Waseda Shōgekijō (Waseda Little Theatre) in Tokyo. By 1970, Suzuki
had become the sole director and was constructing collages of texts
and performances that privileged no single author. From 1976 to 1999,
much of Suzuki’s work was done in the rural, mountain village of Toga,
six hours from Tokyo, to which he moved seeking greater artistic
freedom. With the help of government subsidies, Toga Art Park
became a large complex of theatres and rehearsal halls, providing a
laboratory for experimental collaborations with international visiting
artists and a pilgrimage destination for the tourists who came to its
festivals. Suzuki renamed his troupe the Suzuki Company of Toga
(SCOT). From 1996–2007, he served as artistic director of the
Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC), which is only an hour from
Tokyo. The international theatre festival is now held at SPAC, while the
theatres and laboratories at Toga are devoted primarily to training
young theatre artists, especially directors. Suzuki’s international focus
is further represented by the creation of the BeSeTo (Beijing-Seoul-
Tokyo) Festival, meant to foster cultural awareness and greater
understanding between China, South Korea, and Japan. Suzuki’s
career demonstrates how an initially experimental, privately funded
theatre company sometimes metamorphoses into a national or global
phenomenon.
Targeted “niche” theatres
Many industries engage in niche marketing: the capitalistic,
competitive process in which sellers identify and pursue potential
consumers in a well-defined segment of the population identified by
factors such as age, gender, family size, levels of income, education,
ethnic or racial self-identification, uses of leisure time, and geographic
location. It proliferated in media and theatre in the late twentieth
century. Radio stations in the United States, for example, target
specific audiences with rap, Latin American music, sports,
commentary (both right- and left-wing), jazz, rock hits from the 1950s,
classical music, religious programs, and so on. By the late 1990s,
cable television offered hundreds of channels for every possible
interest, including multiple languages. These offerings reflect
increased cultural diversity within “national” boundaries.
From the mid-1960s onwards, theatres and theatre companies
developed in many countries dedicated to audiences defined by their
interests in issues of race, ethnicity, gender, or unorthodox political
views. Some of these niche theatres provided the first homes for
playwrights who later met with success on Broadway or in London’s
West End. Most not-for-profit (and some commercial) theatres today
also attempt to reach diverse audiences through a combination of
their own “brand” of plays and selected other works targeting non-
traditional audiences. Professional resident theatres housed at
universities often present difficult or experimental shows targeting
niche audiences more tolerant of artistic risk.
As noted in Chapter 12, African-American theatres developed in the
U.S. following the civil rights movement. Among the most notable were
the Free Southern Theater (1963–1980), the Harlem-based New
Lafayette Theatre (1967–1973), and the Negro Ensemble Company,
founded in 1968. These helped pave the way for the wide critical
interest in the works of black playwrights, both experimental and
relatively traditional in form. Two who are especially notable are
Suzan-Lori Parks (1963–), who writes in an often experimental style,
and August Wilson (1945–2005), whose plays are largely in the form of
modern American realism. As a young man, Wilson also started an
African-American theatre. Parks’ Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer
Prize for drama in 2002. Wilson’s Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson
(1990), both Pulitzer Prize winners, are parts of his ten-play cycle on
the African-American experience. Both playwrights have been
produced on Broadway and by major regional theatres.
Following the lead of African-American theatre, other theatres for
specific U.S. audiences developed. El Teatro Campesino was founded
in 1965 by Luis Valdez (1947–) to dramatize the exploitation of Mexican
farm workers and has continued to nourish plays reflecting Mexican-
American experiences. Latin American theatre groups representing
intersections of U.S. cultures and Cuban, Chicano, and Puerto Rican
cultures proliferated in the 1980s. Intar Theatre in New York, under the
direction of Eduardo Machado (1950–), is devoted to producing new
plays by Latino writers – many of them taught by Cuban-born María
Irene Fornés (1930–). Her emotionally compressed works, including
Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and Conduct of Life (1985), highlight the
subjugation of women, appealing to both feminist and Latin American
“niche” audiences. Fornés’s And What of the Night? was a 1990
Pulitzer Prize finalist.
 Plays on the Asian-American experience are the specialty of the
East-West Players, founded in Los Angeles in 1965. In 1998, it moved
from a 99-seat theatre to a newly built 240-seat Equity house in the
Little Tokyo area of downtown Los Angeles. In Seattle, the Northwest
Asian American Theatre grew out of earlier Theatrical Ensemble of
Asians, founded in 1974 at the University of Washington. New York’s
Pan Asian Repertory Theatre emerged in 1978. Among Asian-
American playwrights, the best known is David Henry Hwang (1957–),
whose M. Butterfly (1988) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It investigates
Orientalist perceptions by combining the opera Madame Butterfly (see
the case study in Chapter 9) with a fictionalized account of a real love
affair between a French diplomat and a jingju actor. All of Hwang’s
plays deal with some aspect of Asian-American identity, and their
mainstream success is a matter of Asian-American pride. Los
Angeles’ East-West Players’ main stage is now named the David
Henry Hwang Theatre, and its program to develop Asian-American
writers is the David Henry Hwang Writers’ Institute.
Another major set of niche theatres is oriented on gender issues.
The Ridiculous Theatre Company, founded in New York in 1967 by
actor/playwright Charles Ludlam (1943–1987), created comic, campy,
pastiche-gothic plays that had special appeal for the gay community.
Split Britches, co-founded in 1980 in New York by performer/writers
Peggy Shaw (1946–), Lois Weaver (1951–), and Deb Margolin (1953–),
uses a broadly satirical, gender-bending style to highlight lesbian and
feminist issues. Founded in 1982, the Celebration Theatre in West
Hollywood, California, offers a wide range of plays exploring gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues.
The Lilith Theatre in San Francisco and the Women’s Project of the
American Place Theatre in New York promote the work of female
writers and directors. Founded in 1976 as a feminist collective, the
performance group Spiderwoman evolved into a company that
primarily showcases the experiences of Native American women.
Similar patterns exist in other nations with multicultural populations.
In the U.K., for example, immigrants (or their children) from former
colonies in South Asia such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh
created theatre companies to address their specific concerns and to
help “mainstream” South Asian theatre artists. Key British South Asian
theatre companies include Tara Arts (founded in 1977) and Tamasha
(founded in 1989).
Britain’s former colonies are often multicultural themselves. In
Australia, the first work by an indigenous playwright to break into
mainstream theatre was The Cherry Pickers (1968) by Kevin Gilbert
(1933–1993), a member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations. The
Noongar playwright Jack Davis (1917–2000) combined traditional
Aboriginal visual and performance culture with historical and
contemporary stories in plays such as The Dreamers (1982). Canada’s
best-known First Nation playwright is probably Tomson Highway
(1951–), a Cree. Among his works are the multiple award-winners The
Rez Sisters (1986) and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989).
Singapore, a former British colony that is now a multicultural,
multilingual nation, is home to both small and large theatre
companies. Among them is TheatreWorks, founded in 1985 by the
innovative director Ong Keng Sen (1963–). Singapore also hosts an
international festival of the arts, which includes many theatre offerings.
Local and international festivals are considered in greater detail in
Chapter 14.
Summary
The 1960s brought momentous political, social, cultural, and
technological changes. People all over the world were suddenly able
to witness historical events as they happened, transforming how they
thought of themselves and the universe. The tensions that had started
to emerge in the early 1960s erupted into demonstrations, riots,
sometimes even revolutions, and decolonization movements. Theatre
groups worldwide explored ways in which performance could
contribute to social, political, and cultural change. At the same time,
there was a significant shift from the primacy of the written script to
that of the auteur director, and from the power of words to the power of
images. No longer was there a clear distinction between live and
mediatized genres. The institutional landscape was transfigured too,
as non-commercial venues became commonplace, some producing
mainstream drama, others producing theatre for particular
communities. By the end of the twentieth century, a “new normal” had
become established, in which the non-commercial and the
commercial, the experimental and the mainstream, and the political
and the staid all found opportunities to flow into each other. But these
processes, as we will see next, were also entangled in larger worldly
developments, as the local and the international increasingly crashed
into each other through the forces of globalization.
*
Theatres of local roots and global reach,
1970–present
Tamara Underiner
Contributors: Bruce McConachie, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and
Gary Jay Williams
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-19
In 1962, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan suggested that
“the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image
of a global village” (1962: 31). Indeed, his prediction of a shrinking
world has in many ways been realized. Migrations to urban centers
have meant that the populations of the world’s cities have become
much more culturally and ethnically complex than they were half a
century ago. International travel by the middle class of wealthier
nations has become a major industry. In developed nations,
international concert tours have become commonplace, as have
educational exchanges. Above all, as McLuhan predicted, the
electronic media – television, radio, video and audio recordings, and
the internet – have become key factors in negotiations of cultural
change, even though the effects, positive and negative, remain
unevenly distributed.
As a result, it is common to speak of this time in history as the era of
globalization: an age characterized by the interaction and integration
of the world’s peoples through processes driven largely by economic
systems and aided by information technology, with effects on
everything from individual wellbeing to the environment. The first
trans-continental trade route or trans-oceanic crossing centuries ago
may have initiated the process we now call globalization, but today the
speed of information and its ability to connect peoples who otherwise
might know nothing of each other distinguishes the current era of
globalization from previous periods of global exploration and
exploitation. Neither governments nor the corporate electronic media
are wholly in control of the social, economic, and political relations that
result.
 The focus of this chapter is the effect of globalization on culture –
particularly theatre culture – and in turn the way theatre culture might
affect these processes. (We will return to communications
technologies as a central focus of our final chapter.) Responses to
globalization move in different and often opposed directions, as the
title of this chapter suggests. They range from an embrace of the
global reach of “world culture” in music, fashion, cuisine, and
consumer products, to the promotion and assertion of resolutely local
roots in resistance to the pressures of global conformity on local ways
of living. Falling somewhere between these two extremes – of cultural
homogenization on the one hand, and cultural differentiation on the
other – is the phenomenon of cultural hybridity, or the fusion of
material from two or more cultures. Some type of hybridity results any
time cultures come into contact with each other and intermingle for
any length of time. The recent coinage of the word “glocal,”
popularized by sociologist Roland Robertson, attempts to capture this
sense of the push-pull between globalizing and localizing processes.
(An example is how even McDonald’s, perhaps the symbol of
globalization, has begun to adapt its menus to local norms and
customs, offering shrimp burgers in Japan and Singapore, “Vegemite
McMuffins” in Australia, and “McAloo Tikki” vegetable burgers in
India.) Now more than ever, individuals and societies take the stuff of
culture – theirs and others’ – and make of it something new.
The general themes and movements we have identified as being
important for understanding “theatres of local roots and global reach”
offer a kind of compass for pursuing four major directions taken by
theatre after 1968. The first is global theatre culture, as exemplified in
the increasing importance of international theatre festivals and the
emergence of the mega-musical in the United Kingdom and North
America. The next is theatre of cultural differentiation, which
celebrates local heritage and national patrimony, often in touristic
settings, and offers a site for the critique of globalization’s more all-
encompassing tendencies. Third, we explore theatre as a zone of
contact within and between cultures, often resulting in hybrid or newly
“glocal” forms. Finally, we will consider theatre for social change, a
term given to theatre that has some kind of social aim at its heart, and
is manifest in both local and global (and sometimes local-to-global)
forms. Our case study considers in more detail how cross-cultural
artistic experimentation in China helped to redefine nationalism,
through Nobel Prize-winning Chinese-French playwright Gao
Xingjian’s play The Wild Man.
We open with an examination of Shakespeare’s iconic status as an
international presence, which offers a point of entry into discussing the
four strains of globalization that we will focus on in this chapter –
cultural homogenization, cultural differentiation, cultural hybridity, and
theatre for social change. Our Shakespearean examples also
demonstrate some of the tensions and overlaps among these
categories.
Local roots, global reach, hybrid play, and social change
in “Shakespeare”

Into the first quarter of the twenty-first century, William

Shakespeare remains the most performed playwright on the planet.
His plays have been translated into every major language, and many
less widely spoken ones as well; they are produced in theatre venues
all over the world; and many have been adapted into popular films for
markets far away from his native England. As Gary Jay Williams
points out in his online case study, “All of this could be claimed as
evidence of Shakespeare’s universality, of the ease with which his
plays (ostensibly) leap all historical, linguistic, and cultural
boundaries.” However, as Williams also observes, Shakespeare’s
stature as an international writer has been the result not only of the
power of his writing, but also of the economic and cultural power it
might confer on those who produce it. Seen this way, writes Williams,
“globalized Shakespeare has become a marketable prestige
commodity, a Shakespeare™ ready to be packaged and distributed by
global capitalism through all its technological platforms. Global
Shakespeare is exemplary of a Western modernity to which
developing nations aspire, a problematic byproduct of colonialism.”
When we put quotation marks around “Shakespeare,” as we have in
the heading to this section, it is to highlight his status as a global icon
or industry.
At the same time, “even in the West, each age and nation has, to a
considerable degree, reinvented the Shakespeare it needed,” argues
Williams. Thus, productions of Shakespeare’s plays also function
within the other paradigms we discuss in this chapter: as examples of
cultural or nationalist differentiation (through heritage promotion); as
examples of cultural hybridity, in which artists adapt Shakespeare’s
plays to local and contemporary norms and customs; and even as
theatre for social change, as our final example of this section will
show.
England’s National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company
(discussed in Chapter 13) are examples of theatre for nationalist
differentiation. In 2012 the RSC sponsored the World Shakespeare
Festival to coincide with the London Olympics, which both showcased
England’s national heritage and, through the presentation of
international work, emphasized (as well as further constructed) the
notion of Shakespeare’s universality. The RSC’s ambitious world
touring schedule over the years, garnering regular reviews by the
world’s leading theatre critics, represents another point of intersection
between the national and the international.
While both the National and (to a lesser degree) the RSC produce
works outside the Shakespearean canon, the newer Shakespeare’s
Globe (which opened in 1997, see Figure 5.2) trades more overtly on a
notion of authenticity related to Shakespeare’s relationship as house
playwright for the Globe Theatre.
The brainchild of American actor/director Sam Wanamaker (1919–
1993), under the patronage of Prince Phillip, the new Globe was
intended to be as scrupulous a replica as possible of the original
“wooden O.” It was built on the south bank of the River Thames, close
to the site of the original Globe. Shakespeare’s Globe considers itself
to be a laboratory for the ongoing exploration of Shakespeare’s plays
in performance, pursued through the close approximation of
architecture and stage conventions based on the company’s
meticulous research. Over the years it has broadened its agenda to
include reconceptions of Shakespeare’s plays and the commission of
new work.
The new Globe’s original attention to historical authenticity troubled
some critics, for a variety of reasons. Some doubt the possibility of
such a re-creation at all, given the scarcity of evidence available about
the old Globe, gleaned from one sketchy drawing of another theatre of
the time, some incomplete archaeological evidence, visitors’ accounts,
and whatever evidence the playtexts themselves might yield. As a
result, scholars are still debating some of the decisions made. For
example, some question the choice to feature permanent, highly
decorated painted décor inside the new Globe, maintaining that the
wood of the original interior had been left plain and temporary
decorations hung for each play. Since the facts of the Globe’s history
will always be elusive, other critics are suspicious of the motives
behind and effects of the desire for production authenticity. One
concern is that, even if one could find all the necessary facts, a
museum-quality attention to details may not speak across the ages
and might stifle the drama. Another is that this desire serves to
uncritically reinforce the idea of Shakespeare as the world’s most
important playwright. Still other critics have fretted that the attention to
architectural and stage detail has come at the expense of the
contributions of the actor’s voice and body, and of the Shakespearean
text itself. Despite these concerns, Shakespeare’s Globe has thrived,
drawing tourists from all over the world. In recent years it has
expanded its focus on original practices to include new adaptations –
such as Henry VIII as seen from the Spanish point of view – and
premieres of new work. In 2013, a new indoor playhouse opened,
allowing for year-round programming.
Thus, although the National, the RSC, and Shakespeare’s Globe all
began as national(ist) ventures to celebrate English theatre for
English-speaking audiences, a combination of international tourism,
global criticism, and high aesthetic expectations have put all in the
world’s limelight.
Across the pond in Canada, the annual Stratford Festival has come
to represent a flashpoint in ongoing conflicts between national and
international priorities over the figure of Shakespeare in the arena of
cultural heritage. Begun in 1953 in a town named after Shakespeare’s
birthplace in the province of Ontario, the Stratford Festival is now the
largest repertory company in North America and is heavily subsidized
by the Canadian government.
In his Shakespeare and Canada, Canadian theatre historian Ric
Knowles points out several ironies that have dogged the Stratford
Festival since its beginnings. Many Canadians understood the initial
success of the Festival as a marker of Canada’s maturity as a nation-
state, despite the fact that Stratford rested on the authority of a
famous English playwright and borrowed most of its actors and its first
artistic director (Tyrone Guthrie) from the country that had once ruled it
as a colony. Thus, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, Stratford
struggled to find a more “Canadian” identity; its board appointed a
Canadian artistic director and more Canadian actors were hired. In the
late 1970s the word “Shakespeare” was dropped from the official title
of the festival in response to these pressures. During the 1980s and
into the 1990s, many Canadian playwrights and directors targeted
“Shakespeare” at Stratford for satiric attack and re-appropriated the
Bard’s plays for their own uses, which might be described as culturally
hybrid approaches. Black Theatre Canada produced a “Caribbean” A
Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1983, for instance, while Skylight
Theatre set The Tempest (1987) in aboriginal Canada, and Theatre
Under the Bridge staged an urban Romeo and Juliet (1993), literally
under a bridge in downtown Toronto.
By the 1990s, the Stratford Festival had begun to look to
multinational corporate sponsors, international consumers, and global
criticism for its legitimacy and prestige. Knowles examined Stratford
during the 1993 season and concluded that globalization had
triumphed over national priorities, with a full 14 pages of the souvenir
program devoted to listing the individual and corporate donors for the
season. The subsequent history of the Festival reveals ongoing
ambivalences in the strategic use of “Shakespeare” for the Festival’s
purposes. In 2007, “Shakespeare” was returned to the title of the
Festival as part of a new branding strategy for it. In 2012, facing a
shortfall of $3.4 million (Canadian), and under new artistic direction,
“Shakespeare” was removed once again from the Festival’s name, his
plays confined to a third of the 2013 season.
Whatever one’s personal views of Shakespeare’s plays and stature
as an icon of prestige, it is difficult to deny the important role of that
influence in contemporary theatre production. But it would be a
mistake to think of “Shakespeare” as a theatrical juggernaut,
absorbing all things unto itself in its global reach. Our next example
shows how strategic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays can serve
quite powerful local purposes, resulting in interesting hybrid versions.
In 1990, a company of Mexican indigenous performers based in the
western state of Sinaloa, with a cast comprising actors whose original
languages were Maya, Mayo, and Spanish, staged a tri-lingual
production of Romeo y Julieta in New York’s Central Park, as part of
Joseph Papp’s Festival Latino of the Public Theatre. Under the
direction of Maria Alicia Martínez Medrano (1937–), El Laboratorio de
Teatro Campesino e Indígena (Indigenous and Farmworker Theater
Lab) set the story of two doomed lovers on a debt-slavery plantation
on the Yucatán peninsula in the early twentieth century. This move
allowed them to explore a combination of Mexican political history and
interethnic conflict, in the process also redefining what “Shakespeare,”
“Mexican theatre,” and “indigenous theatre” all might signify to New
York audiences.
The Maya of southeastern Mexico and the Mayo of the northwest
are two of more than 50 indigenous groups in Mexico. The Maya and
Mayo do not share a bloodline, language, or customs, and would likely
never have encountered much of each other had the latter group not
actively opposed the Mexican government under Porfirio Díaz (1830–
1915; in office 1876–1880 and 1884–1911). Díaz’s policies against
indigenous groups had led to rebellion and guerrilla warfare; his
response in turn was to displace and deport large groups of insurgents
within and outside of Mexico. Many Mayo were rounded up from the
northwest and sent to work as slaves on the Yucatán plantations in
southeastern Mexico. The local Maya, themselves working in serf-like
conditions, did not welcome them. Martínez Medrano used this history
to set the stage for a Mayo Romeo to fall in love with a Maya Julieta.
Of course, Romeo and Juliet seems meant for adaptations that
explore interracial or intercultural conflict, and many theatre
companies have done just that over the years. The LTCI production is
unique, however, in its exploration of a little-known aspect of pre-
Revolutionary Mexican history. More importantly, by situating the
conflict between two indigenous groups within that history – and by
casting indigenous actors, speaking “Shakespeare in tongues he
surely never heard,” as one New York Times critic put it – LTCI
expanded the horizon for understanding Mexican theatre in general
and its indigenous cultural history in particular. By incorporating
indigenous languages, it suggested that that history is not over. By
having those languages translate Shakespearean English, it subtly
reminded audiences that indigenous cultures are not somehow
removed from Western history either, but participant within it. Finally,
the Mexican setting allowed audiences to reflect on the role the
indigenous peoples have played within Mexican history and politics –
and not always as a unified front.
“Shakespeare in tongues he surely never heard” appears all over
the world, as the online case study shows. Interestingly, in those
places where English is not the principal language, there is far more
latitude of adaptation than we see where the English of Shakespeare
may not be spoken, but is nevertheless revered.
His plays have also appeared in places he surely never would have
imagined, as our final example illustrates. Since 1992, the
“Shakespeare Behind Bars” program has worked with correctional
facilities in Kentucky and Michigan to produce Shakespeare’s plays
with casts of incarcerated and post-incarcerated adults and youths.
The program operates according to the belief that “[p]articipation in
the Shakespeare Behind Bars program can effectively change our
world for the better by influencing one person at a time, awakening
him or her to the power and the passion of the goodness that lives
within all of us” (Shakespeare Behind Bars 2014). Participants explore
personal and social issues through their work on Shakespeare’s
plays, and build important life skills that help them in their return to
society. While national re-arrest rates range between 60 and 75
percent, the rate for participants in Shakespeare Behind Bars is only
5.8 percent (Shakespeare Behind Bars 2014).
Taken together, these examples of “Shakespeare” the icon suggest
that a global phenomenon can also catalyze local and “glocal”
creativity. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we will look in turn
at individual instances of these overlapping categories.
Global theatre culture
While the electronic media have contributed to the spread of
knowledge about theatre in the world, two developments in global
theatre culture still depend on live, real-time interaction between
players and audiences: the growth of international festivals, and the
increasing popularity of the mega-musical.
Our discussion of “Shakespeare,” for example, shows that many
local productions of such plays would not have been visible to the
historical record if they had not been included in international theatre
festivals, like Stratford in Canada or Papp’s Festival Latino in New
York City. We turn our attention now to such festivals, which represent
another way some theatre has achieved a kind of global reach.
International festivals
Since the middle of the last century, the growth of transnational
festivals – invited gatherings of several theatre companies in a limited
area for a limited time – has become a key factor in theatrical
globalization. Such festivals tend to internationalize aesthetic trends
and provide an important showcase for directors with global
reputations. For producers, festivals are a chance to re-mount their
best shows, usually with low production costs and excellent publicity.
Because many festivals invite small companies as well as large ones,
some marginalized and experimental troupes can gain more
international exposure. For theatregoers, festivals typically offer the
opportunity to see a number of critically acclaimed productions in a
few days.
Two notable festivals, both founded in 1947, have been the Avignon
Festival, led by director Jean Vilar (1912–1971), and the Edinburgh
Festival, directed by civic and cultural leaders. Both were established
to bring high culture to the common people, featuring theatre as an
instrument for international understanding, and both were eventually
challenged by alternative (“fringe”) festivals that have come to rival
the originals in attendance. These fringe festivals also provide a
chance for some troupes to emerge as globally known companies.
 By 1963, Avignon was attracting over 50,000 spectators for French
theatre. Vilar added new spaces and brought in younger directors.
Although several of Vilar’s productions and the ones he championed
at Avignon had challenged the French status quo, the radical Living
Theatre from the U.S. (see Chapters 12 and 13) led demonstrations in
1968 against what they called his “reactionary” leadership of Avignon
and demanded that the Festival open its doors to all comers at no
admission charge. The next year, several French-language troupes
began offering fringe performances at Avignon, outside of the official
program. These unofficial groups proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s –
amateur and professional troupes performing everything from edgy
minimalism to fully staged classics – and gradually created a second
Festival, called “Avignoff.”
In 1994, the official Festival began to internationalize its own
offerings, although French-language productions still predominated.
Avignon/Avignoff now boasts over 500 productions throughout the
month of July, with most of them at the Avignoff. French subsidies and
corporate sponsorship, however, have elevated the official Festival to
the status of global culture. There, jet-set playgoers, the French elite,
and international critics can enjoy high-priced theatrical fare at
Avignon that some contend does little to challenge audience values.
Although the fringe continues to dominate in sheer number of
performances, by a ratio of about 10:1, few fringe productions are
attended by these global players.
Most view the Avignon Festival as a success, but its two-track
festival – the official Avignon for the international elite and the Avignoff
for others – clearly was not what Vilar (or the Living Theatre) had in
mind. A similar phenomenon emerged at the Edinburgh Festival in the
U.K., whose Fringe is now the largest annual arts festival in the world.
Its origins were humble: eight theatre companies organized their own
separate event in the first year of the International Festival. The larger
Festival officially recognized its fringe festival as a separate operation
much sooner than did the organizers of the Avignon, and its openness
to alternative selection criteria has resulted in an explosion of more
than 25 parallel festivals, organized by different sponsors but
understood as part of one big summer-long arts festival in the city,
visited by hundreds of thousands of international visitors each year.
Using theatre for greater international understanding has been a
key strategy of UNESCO – the United Nations Education, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization, which formed in 1945 with the aim of
promoting world peace and preventing another world war through a
variety of initiatives, among them the preservation and promotion of
cultural expressions. In 1948 UNESCO launched the International
Theatre Institute, which in 1957 sponsored the first of many annual
“Theatre of the Nations” festivals in Paris. The Festival showcased the
theatre of 10 different countries, including jingju (Beijing Opera),
kabuki, and dramatic work from the Moscow Arts Theatre and the
Berliner Ensemble. Starting in 1972, the Festival began to be hosted
by other participating cities, which helped to confer on them a certain
status as international theatre capitals. Thus, according to Latin
American theatre scholar Juan Villegas, 1993 marked an important
moment in the internationalization of Chilean theatre, for that was the
year the Theatre of the Nations Festival came to Santiago. Not only
did this bring a large roster of international theatre companies to
Chilean audiences, it also registered the power of theatre to function
as an instrument of cultural and political legitimation in the country’s
return to democracy after the military dictatorship (1973–1990) ended.
Chile has since then maintained an active international theatre
presence, between 2005 and 2013 exporting more than 500 works to
festivals around the world.
The notion of “exporting” suggests that the internationalization of
theatre, whatever laudable nationalist purposes it may also serve on
the stage of international visibility, runs the risk of becoming too much
like a “product” in an international marketplace. Thus, Villegas and
other theatre scholars have examined the costs to cultural specificity
such commodification might exact, as the plays are selected (and
perhaps developed) with audiences in mind who may otherwise know
very little of local realities. Perhaps the biggest drawback of
international festivals is the decontextualization of their performances.
Most productions at festivals have originated in a different city and
with a local audience, one that might not share the interests and
concerns of the national and international spectators attending the
festival. Many directors and companies get around this problem by
mounting well-known plays for festival spectators – the plays of
Shakespeare, Beckett, and Chekhov, for example. Perhaps that is
why, when the DuMaurier World Stage festival in Toronto invited
Brazil’s Grupo Galpão, a street theatre troupe, to perform in 1998, the
results were disorienting for most of the audience. Few Toronto
spectators could understand the conventions of the neo-medieval
biblical pageant that the Grupo Galpão had reshaped for their radical
political purposes. The production, thrust out of its normal context in
the streets of Brazil, became mostly an exercise in exotic tourism (see
below on theatre and tourism). Not all festival productions suffer this
level of decontextualization, of course, but those that veer very far
from the expectations of international audiences risk the most (Figure
14.1).
Figure 14.1A touring production of Romeu & Julieta by Grupo Galpão in 2000,
which met with more success among global spectators than some of their earlier
work. Here the company is performing at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in
London.

Photograph by Sheila Burnett.

Despite such tensions between the local and the global,
international festivals have increased. The Vienna Festival in Austria,
begun soon after the Second World War like the Avignon and the
Edinburgh, has long featured companies from Russia and Eastern
Europe. Its popularity, coupled with the ongoing success of the
Bayreuth music and opera festival and the Salzburg music and drama
festival, both of which date from before the war, has helped to foment
the international festival spirit in other German-speaking areas. The
Bonn Biennale, for example, got underway in 1992, and the Ruhr
Triennale began in 2002. Many other cities around the globe now
sponsor one or more international festivals. As nation-states have lost
power in the globalization process, large cities have gained it, and
hosting an important festival boosts a city’s international reputation.
These cities include Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, Miami, Cádiz,
Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Wellington (New Zealand), Sydney,
Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Athens, Rome, Paris,
London, and Dublin, to name some of the most prominent. In addition,
large cities have been hosting the International Theatre Olympics, a
festival lasting over two months, which has staged more than 150
productions between 1995 and 2010.

Mega-musicals
International theatre festivals are one way that theatre both reaches
global audiences and runs the risk of assimilating to a homogenized,
international aesthetic. The global mega-musical is another. Such
musicals feature technologies of reproduction that not only extend
their global reach but also make them the closest thing theatre has to
being mass-industrialized (Rebellato 2009: 40). Producing musicals is
now a global business. Composers, directors, and producers design
musical spectaculars as franchise operations that several companies
can run for years in all the major cities of the world, in English and in
translation; an early and well-known example is Andrew Lloyd
Webber’s (1948–) The Phantom of the Opera.
Phantom and its offspring have been called mega-musicals for their
spectacular visual and aural effects, enormous investments, high
ticket prices, and potential for huge profits. They are sometimes
disparagingly referred to as “McTheatre” because, as Dan Rebellato
writes in Theatre and Globalization,

There is something very distinctive and unusual about the way these
shows have proliferated around the world. When you buy the rights to
put on Phantom of the Opera, you’re not given a score and a script and
told to get on with it; you buy the original productions: sets, costumes,
direction, lighting, the poster, and all the merchandise. This means that
all productions of The Phantom of the Opera are, to a very significant
extent, identical.
(2009: 41)

This homogenization not only works on the level of individual play

productions, but over time has come to represent a certain aesthetic
dominated by lavish production values and songs that cross over into
popular music. After two years in New York and with the “Broadway”
label affixed to its price tag, a mega-musical can be exported to the
international market; The Lion King has not stopped touring since
1998. With very few exceptions, its audiences go to see not the latest
new conception of The Lion King, but the original production they’ve
already heard so much about, without any risk that this particular
production might be a flop. They attend in large numbers, paying high
ticket prices, a quarter or more of which goes directly back to the
financial investors (see “Anatomy of a Broadway ticket price,” below).
In mega-musicals like The Lion King, the show itself is the star,
rather than a particular celebrity. Investors prioritize its development
(for example, throughout-of-town tryouts) over its talent, so that, once
a musical is up and running, operational expenses are relatively low.
This helps to contribute to the musicals’ seemingly infinite
reproducibility.
 In the past, producers typically formed short-term
corporations. Today, global corporations, long-standing firms with
investments in a range of products, are coming to take their place. The
transition to risk sharing and corporate production for mega-musicals
began in the 1980s. When London producer Cameron Mackintosh
(1946–) teamed up with Lloyd Webber to produce Cats in 1981, the
lush pop music and grand spectacle of this dance-based production
outclassed most of the other musical offerings in London and New
York. The show began an international run that lasted more than 20
years. Mackintosh followed with other musical hits in the 1980s – Les
Misérables (1985), Phantom of the Opera (1986), and Miss Saigon
(1989). Following his work with Mackintosh, Lloyd Webber formed a
corporation, Really Useful Group, to produce his subsequent
musicals, which have included Sunset Boulevard (1993), Bombay
Dreams (2002), and the sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never
Dies (2010).
More corporations entered the mega-musical business in the 1990s.
In Toronto and New York, Livent produced two musical splashes,
including Ragtime (1996, Toronto), before ending in bankruptcy. The
Walt Disney Corporation began producing on Broadway in 1994 with
Beauty and the Beast; it renovated a theatre on 42nd Street to house
The Lion King (1998) and future productions (see Figure 14.2). In
London’s West End, Disney co-produced Mary Poppins with
Mackintosh in 2004. Clear Channel Communications, a corporation
with major investments in radio and television, also began developing
mega-musicals (usually with other producers), but its major interest, in
corporate lingo, was “feeding the road”: creating musical products that
supplied its road companies with profitable fare. To ensure these
profits, both conglomerates primarily featured “family entertainment,”
such as Rugrats – A Live Adventure (1998).
As costs and investment time continue to rise, Disney and other
producers have found ways to share their risks with non-commercial
theatres in the U.S. When the non-profit regional theatre movement in
the U.S. began in the late 1950s, companies in Chicago, Minneapolis,
San Francisco, and elsewhere looked primarily to European theatres
and classical plays for their models, not to commercial Broadway. Few
even produced musicals on a regular basis until the 1980s. The
success of A Chorus Line (1975) at the New York Public Theatre
(NYPT) and its transfer to Broadway for a 15-year run, with the
resulting infusion of millions of dollars to the NYPT, however,
permanently altered the non-profit landscape. The La Jolla Playhouse
in San Diego has transferred several musicals to New York, including
The Who’s Tommy (1993) and many revivals. Disney opened an initial
version of its Aida (1998) at the non-profit Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
Even the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the model of the classically
oriented regional theatre, has played the mega-musical game: in 1999,
Mackintosh took his production of Martin Guerre to the Guthrie to
prepare it for a Broadway opening. Once indifferent to each other’s
fortunes, the non-profits and the commercial theatres of the U.S. are
now cooperating in the hope of milking musical cash cows.
Figure 14.2The cast of the musical The Lion King performs at the 62nd Annual
Tony Awards in New York, Sunday, June 15, 2008.

Source: AP Photo/Jeff Christensen.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, a mega-musical in
New York cost about $10 million to produce and roughly half a million
per week to run. With a possible weekly gross of around $800,000,
most musicals must play for a year and a half before they break even.
Ticket prices are therefore high; in 2013 the average was $101 a seat.
The accompanying box shows where that money goes, using the hit
musical Mamma Mia!, playing at the 1,500-seat Winter Garden, as an
example, and rounding the ticket price down to $100.

Anatomy of a Broadway ticket price

$1.25 Theater facility fee, not to be confused with

$6.70 Theater rent (A Broadway house costs about $15,000 per week,
plus 5 to 6 percent of the show’s gross sales.)
$11.20 Advertising/marketing
$5.30 Salaries (cast)
$6.90 Salaries (crew)
$2.00 Salaries (musicians)
$1.40 Salaries (other – press agents, ushers, box office)
$4.10 Box-office commissions (paid to group sales and theater party
ticket brokers)
$4.50 Theater utilities and miscellaneous expenses
$1.00 Insurance/accounting
$4.10 Rentals (lighting, sound equipment, etc).
$9.90 Union benefits/payroll taxes
$1.20 Upkeep of costumes
$15.70 Royalties
$24.75 Return of capital to producers

Source: Jesse McKinley, New York Times, May 19, 2002

In 2003, the musical Wicked opened on Broadway, and became the

top-grossing musical of the twenty-first century, earning upwards of $2
million per week ten years later. Based on the 1995 best-selling novel
by Gregory Maguire, Wicked tells the story of how the Wicked Witch of
the West came to be both wicked – or so she seems – and green.
While in some ways it can be considered a mega-musical – for its
spectacular effects, musical themes, and global marketing and
distribution – musical theatre scholar Stacy Wolf argues that in other
respects, it follows the more traditional conventions of the “integrated
musicals” of the mid-twentieth century, with a few important twists.
Whereas these other musicals tend to uphold white, heterosexual
norms, Wicked emphasizes the bonds of female friendship between a
green witch who is “wicked” and a white one who is “good” (or at least,
“popular”), inter-species solidarity between humans and animals, and
a love story that breaks with the usual happily-ever-after protocols of
musical romances. For Wolf, Wicked’s distinction lies in “how it uses a
very traditional musical theatre formula, but infuses the formula with
newly gendered and queered content and relationships that are in
large part responsible for its enormous theatrical and financial
success” (Wolf 2008: 6).

Many of the stage musicals of the mid-twentieth century

(e.g., Oklahoma!, South Pacific) were made into movie musicals,
bringing something of the experience of seeing them within affordable
reach. Following in this tradition, in 2012, Les Misérables became an
Oscar-nominated film. In recent years, the relationship between stage
musicals and film and other media has become increasingly
intertwined. Of course, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast were
animated films before they were Broadway mega-musicals.
Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark (2011) was based on the Marvel comic
book series and film franchise. More and more film studios are
becoming theatre producers on Times Square; in addition to Disney,
the list includes Sony Pictures, MGM, and Warner Bros. And 20th
Century Fox recently announced plans to develop at least nine of its
film releases into stage musicals in a partnership that includes film,
theatre, and entertainment executives. A relatively recent trend is the
musical without original music. Examples are Mamma Mia! (1999),
based on songs by ABBA, and Jersey Boys (2005), based on those of
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (For some background on how
Broadway became the launching pad for mega-musicals and similar
entertainments, see “The Vortex of Times Square,” our online case
study examining the history of Broadway and Times Square.)
Of course, Broadway wouldn’t be Broadway today without the
significant presence of international tourists, who descend upon Times
Square not only to attend the theatre, but also to shop at the various
emporia devoted to American mass culture that surround the Square.
Tourists seeking different kinds of experiences from those they can
find in their own countries help to fuel another aspect of theatrical
globalization – cultural tourism, in which witnessing local
performances is a key draw. Their desire to experience “other”
cultures often intersects with a desire on the part of local performers
and cultural authorities to assert local cultural expression in the face of
globalization’s homogenizing pressures. The next section looks at
these strategies of cultural differentiation both as celebrations of local
roots and as negotiations with international spectatorship.
Theatres of cultural differentiation
Home becomes “home” in a different way once a visitor walks through
the door and starts looking around, inevitably making value judgments
based on his or her own ideas of home. So too with cultural
encounters represented by conquest or colonialism; by the imposition
of foreign values exported via film and other media; or by the
incursions of foreign tourists and their money.
In this section, we pursue the second direction of theatrical activity
within globalization, exploring several examples in which theatre and
performance are used to assert cultural differentiation. The examples
cover three principal trends: (1) theatre for the preservation and
articulation of local culture meant principally (but not only) for local
audiences; (2) the emergence of theatre meant to restore and
promote cultural heritage, also for both local and wider audiences; and
(3) the increasing type and variety of performances aimed at satisfying
tourist curiosity about local culture. In all three, the local and the global
intersect; what distinguishes them from the more “glocal”
performances described later on in this chapter is the degree to which
cultural differentiation is held up as a key virtue. In its own way, each
also illustrates that even the most local of celebrations and theatrical
explorations of culture can enter into complicated and often
contentious relationships with national and international interests.
Theatre for cultural assertion and preservation
Two examples from southern Mexico reveal how theatre has been
used to assert local know ledge, even (and especially) under pressure
of national and global processes of homo genization. In the middle of
the last century, many cultural observers became concerned about
the erosion of indigenous languages in Mexico in the wake of national
programs of modernization and Spanish-language literacy. Teams of
cultural and linguistic anthropologists thus traveled to the southern
state of Chiapas in order to record as much as possible about Mayan
languages and customs there, before they disappeared. For their part,
a small group of their Mayan informants was concerned that this
knowledge, heretofore passed down from generation to generation in
the form of storytelling, would live on only in the dusty tomes of foreign
libraries in works published by the visiting anthropologists in their own
foreign languages, and therefore inaccessible to the Mayans about
whom they wrote. The group’s solution was to form a multi-lingual
writers’ collective in 1983, which published works in local Mayan and
Spanish languages; by 1985 they added a puppet theatre company
called Lo’il Maxil (Tzotzil Maya for “Monkey Business”). Eventually the
troupe grew to incorporate live performances to supplement the
collective’s Mayan-language literacy workshops and publishing
endeavors. Two members of the troupe – Isabel Juárez Espinosa and
Petrona de la Cruz Cruz – went on in 1994 to form La Fomma (an
acronym for the Spanish “Strength of the Mayan Woman”), a collective
devoted to exploring and improving the lives of local Mayan women,
also using theatre as part of their multilingual programming.
Both troupes began as attempts to preserve local culture and
languages through the recuperation of local legends and the staging
of local realities; both received significant Mexican and international
support for cultural heritage preservation. In contrast to the Rabinal
Achi in neighboring Guatemala, which is more a “performance of
patrimony” of the sort described below, the new Mayan theatre in
Mexico is also concerned with problems of pressing contemporary
concern, exploring them through theatre techniques they have
appropriated from other performance traditions, which they study
through collaborations with visiting artists and participation in
international theatre festivals.
For example, in 1994 Lo’il Maxil explored the roots of indigenous
unrest that had led to the Zapatista uprising earlier the same year.
This indigenous-led action took the name of a national hero of the
earlier Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata, invoking his legacy to
take the Mexican government to task for its failure to consider
indigenous perspectives in its rapidly globalizing economic policies.
The play De todos para todos (From All, For All, 1994) examined the
situation of a rural Mayan community robbed of its lands and banished
to the jungle. Although the people take up arms to reclaim their
heritage, the ending of the play recommends negotiation with the
Mexican government, not the continuation of armed rebellion. La
Fomma has also looked closely at national issues, with particular
attention to their effects on women and children. In addition to
producing plays aimed at assisting women with a variety of new social
problems, their dramas target the economic policies that have forced
the separation of Mayan family members. Other plays, such as
Échame la mano (Lend Me a Hand) (2001), explore the dangers for
women of participating in the international tourist trade.
Performances of patrimony
With the dawn of the new millennium, we are witnessing the rise of a new
paradigm_ a veritable wave of “patrimonialization” is sweeping the
entire world. The list of acts and displays declared to be cultural heritage
over the past 10 years – the Argentine tango and the Mediterranean diet,
Mongolian chants and human pyramids in Spain, the nō theater of Japan
and the carnivals of Colombia, just to name a few – reads more like a
poem by Borges than the official program of a supranational
organization. It is, in sum, a politically correct and updated expansion of
the Seven Wonders of the World.
Paolo Vignolo (2012: 4)

There’s a lot at work in Colombian performance studies scholar Paolo

Vignolo’s observation here. First, he suggests that the ephemera of
culture – notably, performance culture – have now become
monumentalized as cultural patrimony, testaments to the unique
contributions of a given nation, ethnic group, or region to the larger
world. Whereas at one time, natural and human-made structures were
what made a place a destination, a “wonder of the world,” now it is
more likely some kind of performance tradition of song, dance, or
theatre that merits special consideration. (The UNESCO proclamation
in 2005 of the Guatemalan Rabinal Achi as a “Masterpiece of the Oral
and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” is an example of this trend.)
Second, he points to the contingent nature of this wave – that is, that
there are no generally enforceable standards about what constitutes
patrimony that some “supranational organization” (not even UNESCO,
which is Vignolo’s referent here) can impose, because culture is so
heterogeneous. Finally, his reference to political correctness suggests
a discomfort with the phenomenon in general. On the one hand, it may
be laudable to move away from a classical, old-world sense of what is
wondrous in the world to incorporate heretofore under-recognized
“wonders.” On the other hand, somebody (or some political body) will
still be making decisions about what is included and what is excluded
from a given people’s “patrimony” – and such a process is never
agenda-free.
Vignolo is concerned specifically with the particular Colombian
carnival tradition of Barranquilla – claimed by Colombia’s tourism
bureau as “The Most Colorful Carnival in the World,” second in scale
only to that of Rio de Janeiro. For more than a century the Carnival
was sponsored by political patrons seeking to gain the favor of the
electorate; in 1991, it was privatized and is now owned by a company
of local elites, who installed seats and stages, sold advertising space,
and began to charge admissions and fees. Writes Vignolo, “In short, a
collective festival was transformed into an economic engine for profit”
(2012: 2). Ironically, in 2003 UNESCO designated the Carnival as a
masterpiece of world heritage, precisely to reduce “cultural alienation
produced by commercialization” (quoted in Vignolo 2012: 2). While the
aim of most patrimonial policies is to preserve heritage and to
strengthen cultural identities, the support of the state often makes
them more attractive to economic interests as well. In the case of
Barranquilla, what started out as a local celebration soon became an
important international tourist attraction that, in order to perpetuate
itself, must work harder at “preservation” than at presenting changing
notions of identity – ethnic, gender, sexual, etc. – within Colombia (see
Figure 14.3). As a result, some groups have begun to stage their own
dissident parades a few streets over from the main parade route.
Figure 14.3A scene from the Colombian Carnival of Barranquilla. Here, a local
tradition begun in 1888 has come to draw thousands of international tourists,
especially since its designation in 2003 by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral
and Intangible World Heritage.

Photo by Federico Rios.

“Performing patrimony” can take place anywhere. For

an extended discussion of a small Wisconsin town’s annual staging of
its own Swiss roots, see our online case study, “Backstage/
frontstage: Ethnic tourist performances and identity in ‘America’s Little
Switzerland,’” by Phillip B. Zarrilli.
Performances of (and against) “authenticity”
The desire to explore other lands and know other cultures is evident in
the travel literature and travel pictures of many cultures over many
centuries, which record pilgrimages to capital cities, religious shrines,
and scenic natural wonders. By the end of the seventeenth century in
Europe, the “grand tour” to sites of classical monuments and to
museums and galleries became a regular rite in the education and
maturation of the sons of aristocracy and gentry. Over the next two
centuries the development of a middle class with increasing leisure
time led to an increase in tourism. In turn, tourist destinations
responded with improved presentation of sites and added attractions.
Today, national and international tourism is a major industry, serving a
large middle class in developed nations. Sites once remote have
become more accessible through air travel and package tours.
Whether travelers are seeking historic sites or different cultures,
they seek their own sensuous confirmation of the existence of the
world they have imagined and anticipated. Further, as mediated
experience comes increasingly to structure contemporary life, many
tourists also travel in search of an experience of authenticity. Often,
local performances of various kinds are an important part of their
experience. As we have discussed, theatre festivals have become
destinations for pilgrimage audiences, as has Shakespeare’s Globe.
Tourism companies and state agencies have also helped develop
performances or exhibitions for travelers that draw on the music and
dance traditions of local and indigenous cultures. In Seville, for
example, tourists may cap a visit to the Museum of Flamenco with a
Museum-sponsored flamenco dance exhibition, or choose another
tourist package that features an evening of dinner and flamenco
without the educational contextualization. Kathakali continues to draw
tourists to Kerala, India, as does jingju in Beijing, and kabuki and nō in
Japan. These examples illustrate that, while theatre that relies for its
impact on verbal communication may find it harder to attract tourists
who don’t share the language, language difference is not always an
obstacle.
In some parts of the world, everyday life itself has been
theatricalized and consciously staged for tourist consumption,
sometimes under the rubric of education and cultural exchange,
sometimes as frankly commercial ventures. Such ventures allow local
communities to participate in global trade, offering aspects of their
cultural distinction as commodities for exchange in the international
marketplace. These kinds of performances have in turn raised
questions about the desire for and pursuit of authenticity as a function
of privilege, unevenly distributed across the world, a question taken up
by artists in performances that challenge this desire.
In India, for example, Jaipur’s Rex Tours arranges for urbanized
Rajasthanis and foreign visitors to observe “authentic” rural Indian life
in a specially built village, where they watch craftsmen work and enjoy
traditional food, dance, and music. The tour company brochure invites
the traveler to “take a peek into the lives of rural folk, their abodes,
social setup [sic], religious beliefs, and innovative cuisine” (quoted in
Schechner 2002: 236). In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a company called “Be
a Local Tours” (with the slogan, “Don’t Be a Gringo, Be a Local!”)
offers insider tours of the city, including not only Rio’s famous Carnival
but also its infamous favelas, inviting tourists to “really experience
what it means to be a Carioca” (bealocal.com). In Ireland, the Bunratty
Folk Park functions as a “living reconstruction” of a nineteenth-century
Irish village – complete with school, shops, post office, and pub,
worked by costumed personnel who demonstrate their various
occupations – located conveniently near Shannon Airport.
Another set of tourist performance examples comes from the
relatively recent phenomenon of “dark tourism,” where tourists visit
sites of death, disaster, or tragedy. Theatre intersects with tourism in
those cases where tourists take on the roles of the historical
participants. Sometimes referred to as “immersive tourism,” examples
include simulated experiences of the Underground Railroad in the
United States; illegal border crossing in Mexico; and “Escape from the
U.S.S.R,” a simulated prison break in Latvia.
In those contexts where ethnic or economic “Others” are the
principal attraction for tourists, such performances raise ethical
questions. When are these performances meaningful examples of
cultural exchange and sustainability, and when do they become
demeaning exhibitions for the consuming gaze of tourists? At the
same time as historical villages and heritage tours are creating jobs
and keeping a local economy going, are they also an appealing
“eternal past” that spectators can view with comfortable detachment,
even nostalgia, a past unconnected to any problems in the past or in
the present? Is the tourist seeking escape, or will she/he have any
opportunity to be active rather than passive and to ask questions
about such issues?

Some performance artists have devised presentations

for tourist settings that confront tourists with the very issue of the
touristic gaze. Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo
Gómez-Peña (see Chapter 13), collaborating with the Cuban-
American performance artist Coco Fusco (1960–), arranged such an
event in 1992 in Madrid’s Columbus Square on the 500th anniversary
of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America. It was designed to
help spectators recognize the ways in which “exotic peoples” have
been exploited and conceptually colonized. The artists set up a 12-foot
square golden cage in which they portrayed two recently discovered
“primitive” native residents of the entirely fictive “Guatinaui” people,
supposedly from an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The couple was
dressed exotically, spoke gibberish, watched TV, and posed for
photos (Figure 14.4). Ethnographic handouts described the
“specimens” and their typical behavior. Over the next two years, the
exhibit toured to art galleries and museums in the United States, and
spectators’ responses varied widely. Some believed they were seeing
rare natives; some complained that the display was inhumane; some,
especially patrons of elite art galleries, saw the performance as a
performance (Schechner 2002: 261). Whatever the interpretation and
ethical ramifications (for example, some questioned the wisdom of
allowing school-age children to interact with the “natives”), the notion
of humans on display was not itself completely foreign to visitors to the
installation. The 1993 documentary Couple in the Cage, produced by
Fusco and Paula Heredia, captures the sense of these varying
interpretations.
Figure 14.4A tourist photographs the performance work Two Amerindians Visit.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco played fictive “Amerindians” as caged,
exotic specimens in this performance piece, created in 1992 in Madrid's
Columbus Square on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's
“discovery” of America.

Source: Photo © Coco Fusco.

For the Vienna Festival in the summer of 2000, German director
Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) created a performance work that
scandalized Austria, the more so for being set up next to the Vienna
State Opera, a prime site for the tourists it was designed to reach.
Entitled Please Love Austria, it employed a “residential container” in
which 12 actual (though unnamed) refugees from different countries
who were seeking asylum in Austria stayed awaiting their fate. They
were guarded and their daily routines filmed and shown on television
screens in the plaza. Over the container was a slogan representative
of the extreme right-wing politics of Austria’s Freedom Party and its
leader, Jörg Haider (1950–2008), “Ausländer raus” (“Foreigners out”).
Schlingensief shouted extreme right-wing slogans from a nearby
rooftop and shocked tourists in the plaza below by welcoming them to
Austria, “the Nazi factory.” As Gitta Honegger explains, “The container
installation was the simulation of a culture that had absorbed Haider’s
extremist rhetoric” (Honegger 2001: 5).

Thinking Through Theatre Histories

Doing theatre history in a local/global world
Cross-cultural conversations are not new in theatre history. Japan was
importing masked dance forms from Korea, China, and India between the
sixth and eighth centuries CE. Roman drama and theatre architecture were
the godchildren of Greek forms. When the Italian humanist academies of the
sixteenth century attempted to resurrect Greek tragedy, it resulted in the
fusion we know as opera. Some later Renaissance playwrights borrowed from
the plays of ancient Rome. The kathakali dance-drama was woven from
strands of several indigenous performance traditions, including the Sanskrit
temple dance-drama, kutiyattam. Japan’s shingeki (new theatre) movement in
the late nineteenth century brought the influence of Western drama and acting
to Japan. Irish playwright William Butler Yeats was influenced by Japanese nō
drama. Bertolt Brecht’s theories of acting were based in part on his
observation of the Chinese actor Mei Lanfang. These could be considered
early examples of “intercultural” theatre, latter-day examples of which we’ll
discuss more below.
Such historical perspective reminds us that cultures are never completely
uniform nor unchanging, and it would be a mistake to suppose that traditional
theatre genres (kabuki, for example) exist today in pure and unchanging form.
Nor does culture tend to fit neatly within national borders. Some nations have,
at least in theory, built their identities on the mixture of cultures and linguistic
traditions they comprise. (Consider India, a nation in which there are 18 official
languages and more than 1,500 different languages spoken.) Others are
continuing to work out the relationships between aboriginals and European
settler/colonizers. Uneven development even within nation-states has also
contributed to internal migration from the countryside to the cities, changing
the nature of urban culture as well as the lived experience of rural emigrants.
The theatre that emerges from these realities is called multicultural theatre.
But when they appear before the word “cultural,” prefixes like “inter” and
“multi” almost force us to view cultures as rather stable, even when we know
they are not. This can be a hindrance to tracking the movements of people
and objects (including theatrical practices) in zones of contact, but it can also
serve as an important caution. There are legitimate reasons both to celebrate
the new forms that emerge when different cultures meet each other, and to be
wary of cultural “borrowings” that are really (sometimes violent)
appropriations; therefore, it is important to approach a given instance of inter-
or multicultural theatre with careful attention to its historical and contemporary
contextual pressures.

In this section we have examined touristic performance as a zone of

contact between cultures. The theatre itself has always been such a
zone, offering artists and audiences the opportunity to “visit” other
times, places, and peoples. The next section explores some of the
issues involved in these cross-cultural encounters.
Theatre as a zone of contact
Although they may to some degree engage both local and global
influences and effects, the examples we have been discussing so far
have tended to move in one or the other of our first two directions:
either toward global theatre culture, or toward a more local theatre of
cultural differentiation. In this section, we explore a third direction of
theatre in globalization: theatre as a zone of cultural contact, where
the local and the global influence each at a fundamental level. We
focus here on three broad types of theatrical activity: multicultural,
intercultural, and hybrid theatres, in several different contexts. Our
case study discusses a multicultural Chinese play that also features
intercultural and hybrid elements.
Multicultural theatre
Multicultural theatre combines performance modes from different
cultural traditions or communities within nation-state boundaries,
rather than across them (which we discuss below as “intercultural”
theatre). Jingju, as discussed in Chapter 9, is an example because it
draws on various performance traditions from within China. At its most
ideal, such theatre has inclusion at the heart of its mission, staging
both form and content understood to represent the variety of cultural
contributions to the society in which the theatre finds itself. An early
example of such a theatre is the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which
began in 1959 as an avant-garde company devoted to exploring
alternative theatrical forms, eventually becoming a multiracial
collective exploring politically charged themes. Its roots as a touring
company began in 1965 with A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a
Cracker Barrel, which used the exploitative form of nineteenth-century
minstrelsy to stage a critique of twentieth-century racism.
Whereas for the San Francisco Mime troupe multiculturalism is a
practice, for Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it is the
point. Founded in 1976 by artistic director Jack Reuler (1954–), Mixed
Blood’s mission is to promote “cultural pluralism and individual
equality through artistic excellence, using theater to address artificial
barriers that keep people from succeeding in American society”
(Mixed Blood Theatre 2015). Mixed Blood’s seasons thus typically
explore a range of American lived experiences and social issues, both
historical and contemporary, native and immigrant; nearly half of its
more than 175 productions have been American or world premieres.
Some of its plays are presented in both English and the relevant
immigrant language. While most of its productions feature characters
and themes reflecting the changing face of America, the company has
also staged plays written by non-American playwrights about their
local perspectives on global issues. (Its current website extends a
“Welcome to Our Global Village.”) Mixed Blood’s commitment to
inclusion and access extends beyond season selection: its program of
“Radical Hospitality” donates half of its house, every night, to
customers who cannot otherwise afford to pay the $20 ticket charge.
In the small city of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, Chilean
émigré Lina de Guevara (1933–) has developed another model of
multicultural theatre. In 1988, she founded PUENTE Theatre; its name
means “bridge” in Spanish, and its mission is to “build bridges
between cultures.” In the 1970s, many emigrants from Central and
South America fled the violence and political strife of their countries,
seeking new beginnings in Canada, with its open territory and similarly
open immigration policies. In Canada, however, they met with a
rhetoric of multicultural inclusion that didn’t seem to play itself out in
daily life. PUENTE was formed as a way for new Latina/o Canadians
to come together to devise theatrical works based on their
experiences and adjustments to their new Canadian realities. Their
works, developed collectively, explored issues of racism, workplace
discrimination, human rights abuses, sexual harassment, and other
forms of oppression. Today, second and third generations of
participants are exploring their mixed legacy, under the new artistic
direction of Guevara’s successor, Mercedes Bátiz-Benét (1977–).
In other contexts, “multicultural theatre” has not been so successful,
and has been critiqued as a form of tokenism that keeps intact the
privilege and prioritization of the dominant culture. This can be seen,
for example, in attempts by some large non-profit theatres to “diversify
the season” through the inclusion of one or two [name the minority]
plays per cycle; or in the choice to “colorblind cast” canonical works
rather than to stage lesser-known but deeper explorations of local
experience, for fear of losing the subscriber base. Such considerations
and constraints reveal the need for theatre to remain fluid and
responsive to changing social contexts – not always an easy matter
once it has become institutionalized. In India, for example, a major
movement known as “theatre of roots” developed in the 1950s and
extended into many cities. It sought to draw on rural Indian folk forms
and performance styles for contemporary, cosmopolitan Indian
theatre. Director K.N. Panikkar (1928–) of Kerala was a major figure in
the movement. In recent years, it has declined, however, criticized for
decontextualizing the traditions it has borrowed and reducing them to
exotica. A similar phenomenon is considered in our case study,
“Imagining contemporary China.”
Case Study Imagining contemporary China
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
After the disastrous, anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution in mainland
China (the People’s Republic of China, or PRC), during which many
people were brutalized or killed (1966– 1976), China underwent rapid
economic and social Westernization. Today, especially in major cities
such as Beijing, Shanghai, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region, there is an active theatre scene, despite selective government
repression and cautious self-censorship.

A number of recent dramas feature Western characters

and deal with cross-cultural themes. For example, Sun Huizhu
(William Sun, 1951–) and Fei Chunfang (Faye C. Fei, 1957–), who are
both Chinese-born but now living both there and in the U.S., co-author
plays interrogating Chinese identity. Their China Dream (Zhongguo
meng, 1987) and Swing (Qiuqian qingren, 2002) chronicle the complex
dilemmas, dreams, and memories plaguing Chinese women living in
America, including what it might mean to marry a foreigner. Taiwanese
playwright/director Lai Shengchuan (Stan Lai, 1954–) was born in
Washington, D.C. and has spent his life shuttling between Taiwan and
the West. His Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (Anlian
Taohuayuan, 1986; film, 1992) questions Taiwanese identity in relation
to the PRC by showing two theatre companies – one jingju, one huaju
– crossing paths when both are scheduled to rehearse plays at the
same time and place. The stage play has been performed many times
in both Taiwan and the PRC. In 2007, Lai directed his own English
translation at Stanford University.
Such works demonstrate what Una Chaudhuri calls “geopathology,”
that is “the characterization of place as problem” and “negotiation with
the power of place” (Chaudhuri 1995: 213). What does it mean to be
Chinese if you no longer live in China? Or if the country you grew up in
is fundamentally changed? This case study will consider these issues
by focusing on the controversy sparked by the 2000 Nobel Prize for
Literature, which was awarded to playwright/novelist/painter Gao
Xingjian (1940–).
Gao left China in 1987 and has lived as a self-defined exile in Paris
since 1988 (taking French citizenship in 1998). He is the first Chinese-
language author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rather than
celebrating this achievement as a national victory, however, Chinese
newspapers were reluctant to carry the news. Many Chinese officials
and intellectuals assumed the award was politically motivated, noting
that no play by Gao had been produced in China since 1986, when his
The Other Shore was banned, and that Gao had abandoned China
the following year. They suggested that authors still residing in China
had been ignored. Their discomfort reflects two issues of
“geopathology”: what does it mean to be Chinese, and where exactly
does China exist?
China(s), Chineseness, and Gao's theatre
As noted in previous chapters, by the mid-twentieth century, foreign
colonization and imperialism had eroded Chinese domination and
independence. Both the Nationalists (led by Chiang Kai-shek) and the
Communists (led by Mao Zedong) supported reinventing “China” as a
“modern nation” and both fought Japanese and European colonialists.
However, they also fought each other for control of China. Eventually,
the Nationalists retreated to the island of Taiwan, establishing the
Republic of China. The mainland PRC (established in 1949 by the
victorious Communists) sees Taiwan as a Chinese province. The
issue is further complicated by divisions within Taiwan, where some
residents want to form a separate nation unrelated to the mainland,
and others seek reunification.
Both “Chinas” created national narratives to support legitimacy. For
example, when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, they took many
priceless works of art. These are displayed in the National Museum in
Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. To some, this act suggests the
government’s concern for protecting the ancient Chinese cultural
heritage from wanton destruction; to others, it represents the act of a
bandit regime that plundered national treasures. This issue continues
to be highly sensitive on all sides.
 As noted in Chapter 13, during the Cultural Revolution in the
People’s Republic of China, professional jingju and huaju actors, as
well as doctors, intellectuals, teachers, and others, were beaten,
imprisoned, or sent to the countryside to be “re-educated.” Among
these was Gao Xingjian, who spent six years in southwestern China
after “volunteering” to destroy a suitcase filled with his early
manuscripts.

Gao’s forced sojourn in the provinces, where many

minorities reside, exposed him to the multicultural nature of China.
Despite Communism’s official atheism, many rural peoples practiced
the ancient wu religion – pre-Confucian shamanism featuring spirit
possession, exorcism, and ritualized, theatrical performances using
brightly painted wooden masks, dance, drama, and song (for more on
shamanistic performance, see the online case study “Korean
shamanism and the power of speech”). Such influences – as well as a
deep concern for the welfare of the environment and a strong,
nostalgic connection to a specific place – are evident in Gao’s 1985
play Wild Man (Yeren).
Wild Man is about an ecologist assigned to teach forest
conservation to peasants in a remote river valley. Deforestation and
the resulting severe flooding are consequences of China’s rapid
industrialization. The play features conflicts between ecological
conservation and local economic/social realities, and between
“factual” science and “superstitious” belief. The play has 41
characters, plus singers, musicians, and 12 separate groups of
crowds. Each actor portrays many characters. Scenes flow into and
are juxtaposed against each other; time is not chronological. Multiple
scenes are performed simultaneously, and locales shift through
creative use of sound, lighting, and other theatrical or cinematic
effects. A traditional singer and his assistant “narrate” the action.
Ancient wu rituals are performed, including the sacrifice of a live
rooster, and local styles of ethnic minority performances alternate with
psychologically motivated acting.
 Prior to Wild Man, Gao’s most famous work had been Bus Stop
(Che zhan, 1983), inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Unlike Beckett’s play, Bus Stop offered a social message, suggesting
that people must actively take charge of their own lives, not passively
wait for a savior. The play was criticized as being “too Western” and
contributing to “spiritual pollution.” Although the excesses of the
Cultural Revolution were over, the government dictated (and
continues to dictate) approved ways for theatre to represent the
nation. Playwrights wishing to experiment were ordered to turn to
Chinese – not Western – models. Wild Man combines Chinese
minority performance genres with Chinese modifications of Brechtian
devices, making it something of a hybrid of these influences.
Gao and others who have reinvented Brecht for use in China
maintain that they have avoided Brecht’s tendency to exoticize Asia
by employing traditional Chinese performance styles. However,
because most Chinese academics suggest that these traditional
performance genres are dead (or nearly dead) “museum pieces” in
need of preservation, it can be argued that plays incorporating such
practices perpetuate the stereotype of ethnic minorities as “primitive,”
further marginalizing the rural population (Sorgenfrei 1991). Such
concerns can be applied to Wild Man. At the same time, the play’s use
of a Chinese response to Brecht (who creatively appropriated what he
mistakenly imagined to be Chinese tradition) and of minority
performance genres means that we can analyze it as multicultural
theatre, as an example of “geopathology,” or as intercultural
performance (further discussed in the next section).
Claiming Gao: Chinese or French? Political or non-
political?
Even after Gao left China, events in China affected his work. Following
the mid-1980s campaign against “spiritual pollution,” a new period of
political openness and artistic experimentation ensued. However,
fears that this openness was excessive led to another government
crackdown. On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent troops and
tanks into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to clear students and
intellectuals who were demanding greater democracy and artistic
freedom. Public protests began in April and persisted until June 4, at
times reaching numbers exceeding one million citizens. The events
were watched on global television by millions. The concluding military
attack resulted in an as-yet unspecified number of fatalities, though
some estimates were in the thousands. Some dissidents fled the
country, fearing a return of totalitarianism.
Gao had already emigrated to France, partly due to negative
government reactions to his work. Nevertheless, some foreign
advocates of human rights viewed him and other Chinese exiles as
exemplars of the need for changes in the Chinese government. Gao’s
1990 play Escape (Taowang, 1990) was a direct response to Chinese
politics, specifically the events at Tiananmen Square, and it sealed the
ban on Gao’s works in China. However, since 1993, Gao’s plays have
not dealt with China or Chinese politics.
Let us, then, return to China’s lukewarm reaction to Gao’s Nobel
Prize in 2000. The reason may well be that official China sees the
award as a Western attempt to influence internal Chinese policies.
Gao may be seen as having successfully manipulated Western
intelligentsia for his own benefit. From this perspective, Gao’s work
fails to represent current Chinese concerns and even current artistic
strategies. To those who hold this view, Gao Xingjian’s plays (some of
which were written in French) are no longer imagined as part of
China’s quest for a sense of nationhood in the contemporary world.
Rather, they are seen as products of a primarily European
imagination.
Gao’s case brings up several questions of place and identity: what
does it mean to be Chinese? What does it mean to be French? What is
the meaning of home: is it where I was born, or where I currently
reside? What does it mean to write in a foreign language? While there
are no easy answers, such questions are crucial in the current world of
globalization.
Key references
Audio-visual resources
Performance Workshop: http://www.pwshop.com/en/about_us/stan-
lai-lai-sheng-chuan/. Many excellent articles and excerpts about Stan
Lai, from the website of his Taipei-based Performance Workshop.
Books and articles
Anderson, B. (1983; rev. 1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso.
Chaudhuri, U. (1995) Staging Place: The Geography of Modern
Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chen, X. (2002) Acting the Right Part: Political Theatre and Popular
Drama in Contemporary China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Chen, X. (2003) Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of
Contemporary Chinese Drama, Honoulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Cheung, M.P.Y. and Lai, J.C.C. (eds) (1997) An Oxford Anthology of
Contemporary Chinese Drama, New York: Oxford University Press.
Conceison, C. (2004) Significant Other: Staging the American in
China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Fei, F.C. (1999) Chinese Theories of Theatre and Performance from
Confucius to the Present, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Feugi, J., Voris, R., Weber, C., and Silberman, M. (eds) (1989)
Brecht in Asia and Africa: The Brecht Yearbook XIV, Hong Kong: The
International Brecht Society, Department of Comparative Literature,
University of Hong Kong.
Gao, X. (1990) “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken
Drama,” trans. B. Roubicek, Asian Theatre Journal 7: 184–249.
Kruger, L. (1992) The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural
Legitimation in England, France and America, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
Lilley, R. (1998) Staging Hong Kong: Gender and Performance in
Transition, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Lovell, J. (2006) The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a
Nobel Prize in Literature, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
McKerras, C. (ed.) (1983; paper, 1988) Chinese Theatre from Its
Origins to the Present Day, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Phillips, H. (2009) “The Yellow Earth Becomes the Yellow Dragon:
Eco-Consciousness in Chinese Theatre of the 1980s,” Asian Theatre
Journal 26(2): 135–47.
Sorgenfrei, C.F. (1991) “Orientalizing the Self: Theatre in China after
Tiananmen Square,” The Drama Review (Winter): 169–85.
Sun, W.H. and Fei, F.C. (1996) “China Dream: A Theatrical Dialogue
between East and West,” in P. Pavis (ed.) The Intercultural
Performance Reader, London: Routledge.
Tian, M. (1997) “‘Alienation-Effect’ for Whom? Brecht’s
(Mis)interpretation of the Classical Chinese Theatre,” Asian Theatre
Journal 14: 200–22.
Tung, C. and McKerras, C. (eds) (1987) Drama in the People’s
Republic of China, New York: State University of New York Press.
Yan, H. (ed.) (1998) Theatre and Society: An Anthology of
Contemporary Chinese Drama, Armonk, NY and London: M.E.
Sharpe.
Yu, S. (trans. and ed.) (1996) Chinese Drama after the Cultural
Revolution, 1979–1989, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Yu, S. (2009) “Cry to Heaven: A Play to Celebrate One Hundred
Years of Chinese Spoken Drama by Nick Rongjun Yu,” Asian Theatre
Journal 26(1): 1–53.
Zhao, Z. (2009) Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier
Zhou Ziyang, trans. and ed. Bao Pu, Rene Chiang, and Adi Ignatius,
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Intercultural theatre
Intercultural theatre may be defined as the practice in which theatre
artists use the texts, acting styles, music, costumes, masks, dance,
and/or scenic vocabularies of one culture and adapt and modify them
for audiences of another culture, across national boundaries rather
than within them. Since the 1970s, productions of this kind have
developed in the context of globalization, with its imbalances of power
and wealth, and against the backdrop of historical colonialism. Some
productions have toured internationally, often to festival venues, their
spectacle and music playing a large role in the endeavor to make
them accessible to audiences of different cultures and languages.
Many have been especially designed for such venues. Intercultural
theatre is both filled with the promise of cultural exchange and fraught
with the possibility of cultural appropriation, depending on the
relationship between the source material and the production results
and contexts. We consider four different combinations to illustrate the
key issues involved in international theatre production.
Productions in which Western artists have borrowed (some have
said “kidnapped”) East and South Asian performance modes have
been of keen interest and hotly debated. Two examples illustrate the
contours of concern over such productions, and it may be useful to
think about them in light of Chapter 9’s “Thinking through theatre
histories” discussion about Orientalism. The first involves the staging
of a non-Western text, the Indian epic the Mahabharata, within a
Western mode of theatrical production. The second considers the
staging of four Greek tragedies using non-Western theatrical
conventions. Do these examples represent latter-day “Orientalist”
approaches that demonstrate the West’s belief in its own superiority,
or is something more complex at work?

British director Peter Brook (1925–) collaborated with

French writer Jean-Claude Carrière to create a French-language
adaptation of the Mahabharata, which premiered at the Avignon
Festival in 1985. It was then adapted into English and toured to six
countries in 1987–1988 (Figure 14.5). The production was monumental
in scope, and generated much critical conversation.
Vijay Mishra’s favorable review, for example, found the production
added a new dimension to the Mahabharata texts that would “radically
challenge (if not alter) the Indian regimes of reading” (D. Williams
1991: 204). Indian critic and director Rustom Bharucha (1988) was not
convinced, however, arguing that the reworking of an Indian religious
text for insertion into a secular Western theatre mode represented an
insensitive use of the source material. Here, intercultural theatre may
be said to mirror some of the problems and opportunities inherent in
globalization: on the one hand, the forced encounter between
powerful and less powerful cultures has the potential to overrun the
cultural identities of the poorer cultures of the world as they are
absorbed into more dominant forms; on the other hand, it also
presents an opportunity to break down problematic Western attitudes
of superiority to these cultures.

Figure 14.5In Peter Brook's The Mahabharata, the archery tournament for the
young cousins, in Part I: The Game of Dice, from the 1986 production at the
Bouffes du Nord, Paris.

Source: Photo © Gilles Abegg.

Our second example illustrates a different relationship between
source text and theatrical modality: Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1990–1993
staging of four Greek tragedies in Paris, presented in a non-traditional
theatre space and relying extensively on Asian performance
conventions. Reconstructing the glories of ancient Greece – the usual
Western humanistic mode of production – was not the goal here. For
Mnouchkine (1939–) and her Théâtre du Soleil company, the staging
of the tragedies (under the collective title Les Atrides – House of
Atreus) was an experiment in recovering them as works to be acted,
danced, and sung, in this case using kathakali dance and Chinese
costume influences. She hoped to liberate the Greek tragedies from
text-oriented, literary scholarship and Western staging conventions,
and additionally to introduce a feminist point of entry and reflection in
the work (see Figures 14.6 and 14.7).
For Les Atrides, one entered the auditorium of the hangar-like
building that houses the Théâtre du Soleil by crossing a bridge over a
simulation of the site of a recent archaeological dig in China. It had
uncovered thousands of life-size Chinese soldiers in terracotta
protecting the burial chambers of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi
Huangdi (247–210 BCE). The costumes of the principals in the Greek
tragedies were influenced by those worn by the Chinese figures. Each
production began with a long crescendo from a large tier of ancient
percussion instruments located on a large platform above stage left.
Drums propelled the chorus on stage and drove the plays forward
thereafter. The chorus dances were derived mostly from Indian
kathakali dance-drama, as were their costumes of black tunics and
white skirts over pantaloons and elaborate headdresses. Their faces
were whitened and their eyes dramatically highlighted. Individual
chorus members hovered around the action, peering over the walls
and around panels in front of the enclosing walls.
Figure 14.6Dancing chorus members in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulus, in the Les
Atrides cycle as staged by the Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine
at the Cartoucherie, Paris, 1990.

Source: Photo © Martine Franck/Magnum Photos.

Figure 14.7Orestes (Simon Akarian) dances around the dead bodies of
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, in the Les Atrides
cycle of the Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, Cartoucherie,
Paris, 1990.

Source: Photo © Martine Franck/Magnum Photos.

Mnouchkine’s production was successful with audiences in France
and on tour in Vienna, Montreal, and New York. It was less criticized
than Brook’s Mahabharata, perhaps because Mnouchkine had not
reworked an Eastern text. For some, her production’s exotic, fable-like
milieu sometimes seemed a remote cultural fantasy; for others
Mnouchkine’s vision was transcultural and epic, offering a god-like
view of the human condition. As with other intercultural productions, its
global touring life – with its Asian visual vocabulary and its
performances always in French – raises the question of what it meant,
or could have meant, for its various audiences. In order to make
themselves available to international audiences, intercultural theatre
productions must rely on labor-intensive translations, or on the non-
verbal languages of the theatre – scenic spectacle, music, and dance.

Intercultural productions have not been limited to those

originating in Western cultural capitals, as numerous adaptations of
Shakespeare attest (again, see our online case study about global
Shakespeare). Two final examples illustrate this point. In New Delhi in
2004, director Amal Allana (1947–) staged Eréndira, an adaptation of a
story by Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (1928–2014), who won
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The New Delhi company
adapted his early short novel The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent
Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother into the Rajasthani dialect of
Hindi. It is a tale which blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. A
grandmother who was once a prostitute and who has pretensions to
grandeur is served, hand and foot, by her granddaughter, Eréndira
(Figure 14.8). Blaming Eréndira for a fire that destroys their home, the
evil grandmother prostitutes her. She takes her, chained to her bed,
on an epic journey lasting years, with men lining up for miles to enjoy
the legendary Eréndira. The New Delhi company of six women and
one man staged the journey in a sequence of striking visual images
intended to correlate with Márquez’s verbally rich narrative. They used
music, dance, and masks, drawing on Indian and American sources,
including Rajasthani folk music and Colombian carnivals. Eréndira
toured in India and played in Singapore and London, always using
supertitles in English.
Figure 14.8The grandmother in Eréndira, an adaptation from Gabriel García
Márquez's short novel, directed by Amal Allana, New Delhi, 2004. In this scene,
several actresses play the granddaughter, Eréndira, bathing the grandmother.

Source: Photo © Kaushik Ramaswamy.

Whereas the example of Eréndira shows how local traditions can be
used in dialogue with a foreign text, our final example shows how a
foreign text can be more fully “transplanted” into local soil, this time to
make a critique of globalization. Mexican playwright Sabina Berman
(1955–) saw fascinating intercultural possibilities in the Irish playwright
Marie Jones’s 1999 play, Stones in His Pockets, which won the Olivier
Award for Best Comedy in London and was subsequently produced
throughout Europe and finally on Broadway. Berman is known
internationally herself for her theatrical explorations of the seams and
tears of gendered, cultural, and cross-cultural identifications; in 2003
she translated, produced, and directed Jones’s play in Mexico City
with the new title of eXtras, which enjoyed a run of several years there
(Figure 14.9).
 The original play features two characters – Jake Quinn and Charlie
Conlon – who play extras in a Hollywood movie being filmed in their
hometown in County Kerry, as well as extra roles in the play proper.
The title refers to the fate of a young local whose dreams of stardom
are crushed by the filmmakers; he fills his pockets with stones and
drowns himself. In response to this tragedy, the villagers rise up
against the foreign producers and the threat they represent to the
erosion of local culture and values. In the end, the two principals, now
playing themselves, decide to make their own film, casting the dead
boy in the lead role and Hollywood stars as extras.
Jones intends their story to represent “the whole disintegration of
rural Ireland” (quoted in Bixler 2004: 431). Given the similarity in
economic conditions between rural Ireland and rural Mexico, Berman
saw possibilities in a close adaptation. Jake and Charlie become José
and Charlie, County Kerry becomes Chiconcuac, a poor pueblo in the
state of Morelos, and the shoes that were used to represent character
and identity changes become red bandannas, a familiar symbol of
Mexican revolution from the original time of Zapata (a native of
Morelos) to the more recent Zapatista movement. According to
scholar Jacqueline Eyring Bixler,

Berman recognized that the acts of adaptation and translation

themselves convey what is perhaps the most important message of
Stones in His Pockets, which is that U.S. culture – particularly that
produced and marketed by Hollywood – has a pervasive and pernicious
effect on the rural, impoverished, desperate, and brainwashed masses,
not only in Ireland but throughout the world. In other words, the act of
translating the play is itself a form of intercultural performance, or what
[Marvin] Carlson calls “the weaving of complex patterns of contact with
other cultures or other cultural performances.”
(2004: 432)
Figure 14.9Cover image from playbill for eXtras, Mexico City, 2003, starring “two
of the three Bichir brothers” – popular Mexican movie stars – on any given night.
Part of the appeal of this production was metatheatrical, as the audience waited
to see which two would star in the production as the extras heading to
Hollywood, and which would actually be an extra in this production.

Source: Photo by Jacqueline Eyring Bixler in Theatre Journal 56(3)

(October 2004): 438.

“Glocal” performance: Where the local and global

influence each other
The performances described above are among the many
manifestations of the cultural hybridity that has resulted from the
movements of people, ideas, and art forms in the era of globalization,
whereby different systems of beliefs, social practices, or aesthetics
are merged together. The resulting fusions may represent
disproportionate influence by the dominant power, as historically has
happened in eras of colonialism, with its military conquests, religious
evangelism, settlement, and commerce. They can also represent an
integration or interpenetration by the less powerful; Roman Catholic
masses are often celebrated with indigenous music. Music itself offers
numerous examples of cultural fusion. In 1977, for example, the British
rock group Queen (whose lead singer Freddie Mercury was of Iranian
descent) recorded “We Will Rock You,” known to millions as a
thundering victory chant performed at athletic events worldwide. What
may be less well known is that its beat was derived from the rhythms
of a Muslim rite of self-flagellation practiced by Iranian males.
Hybridity of form and practice in theatrical performance is also quite
common. The Japanese dance theatre form of butoh, introduced in
Chapter 12, provides an example. Having declined in Japan, it
experienced a resurgence outside that country beginning in the 1980s,
when troupes began to tour. Perhaps the best known of those
performances was by the group
Sankai Juku, when they performed in Seattle, Washington in 1985.
Their performance required troupe members to hang from ropes
attached to tall buildings; one of them broke, and a dancer fell to his
death in front of a live audience and video cameras, thus propelling
butoh into a more international spotlight.
Since the 1980s, butoh has gained in global awareness not only as a
form in and of itself, but also as a training technique for performers
preparing for non-butoh work, incorporating aspects of it into other
types of dance and theatrical performance. In fact, it is now better
known abroad than it is in Japan. Many of these international
performers are of Japanese descent, but many more are not. In
Europe, Canada, and Africa new butoh or butoh-inspired troupes have
emerged, their work ranging from the minimalist to the spectacular. In
West Africa, Eseohe Arhebamen (1981–) combined butoh with
elements of traditional Nigerian dance styles, mixing them with song,
speech, gestures, sign language, spoken word poetry, and
experimental vocalizations in a very hybrid new form. While in some
cases the darkness of butoh’s Japanese origins seems to be erased
by its abstraction into pure style, others maintain its original intent to
have the dancing body bear the enormous burden of history; the 2003
piece Fagaala, a collaboration between Yamazaki Kota (1959–) and
Germaine Acogny (1944–) of the Senegalese company Jant-Bi, used
butoh to explore the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s (Figure
14.10).
Figure 14.10Butoh dancer Akaji Maro performs during the dance festival in
honor of Kazuo Ohno in Yokohama.
 Source: © Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters/Corbis.

Another example of glocal adaptation comes from

Indonesia, and illustrates the interplay of influence between
patrimonial assertion, globalization, and electronic media culture: the
wayang golek [wah-YAHNG goh-lek], a centuries-old tradition of
puppetry in West Java, which has in recent years adapted itself to the
medium of television. An expanded discussion of this example
appears on the website.

In wayang golek, three-dimensional, carved,

and painted wooden puppets tell stories in the Sundanese language.
(In contrast, the Indonesian shadow puppets of the wayang kulit [wah-
YAHNG koo-lit] are two-dimensional silhouettes and transparencies.
Both, however, draw on the Hindu epics of the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana, and probably arrived in Indonesia with Hinduism and
Buddhism during the first century CE. See Figure 14.11.) In its original
form, wayang golek performances are extremely social occasions,
drawing large crowds and lasting for hours. The puppets represent a
metaphysical view of the human condition, and are manipulated by
artists adept at improvising based on audience responses, as the old
tales may take on some contemporary resonance. As Indonesia
modernized and entered the global economy, wayang golek artists
created hybrid forms that took advantage of the new communication
technologies, beginning with audio cassettes in the 1970s and moving
to national television in the 1980s. These new technologies resulted in
changes to the form, as they had to fit a shorter time frame, and could
take advantage of multiple camera perspectives. However, these
studio productions lacked live audience responses – a factor which
suited the Suharto government then in power (1967–1998).
Figure 14.11Backstage of a wayang kulit shadow-theatre in the city of
Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where a dalang (puppeteer) manipulates his puppets
behind the screen, accompanied by musicians, in a performance of a play about
the Pandava brothers derived from the Mahabharata.

Source: Photo by J. Highet/Lebrecht Music & Arts.

This began to change in 1996, when one well-known puppeteer,
Asep Sunandar Sunarya (1955–2014), developed a new wayang golek
derivative for television, a hybrid comic form featuring the traditional
puppet character Cepot. This simple, country bumpkin figure’s earthy
lifestyle served as a foil for the excesses and corruptions of the
Suharto regime, then in its last years in power, in new versions of the
old tales. The Asep Show thus harnessed contemporary media to a
traditional puppet theatre form, in order to make targeted critiques of
the contemporary national situation in Indonesia.
Such strategies illustrate the fluidity and adaptability of traditional
theatre practices within globalization, and help to ensure their
continuance without becoming exoticized museum pieces. As the
global village becomes ever smaller through the electronic media, the
unequal distribution of its resources becomes harder and harder to
ignore. Our fourth route through theatre in globalization illustrates how
local communities the world over are using theatre to address some of
these issues.
The global reach of theatre for social change
“Theatre for social change” is an umbrella term that captures several
related movements – among them, “Theater of the Oppressed,”
“theatre for development” and “community-based theatre” – that have
as their aim the use of theatre to explore and solve pressing social
problems. While all theatre has the possibility to affect and effect
social change in any number of ways, and certain manifestations of
what we describe below can be found in earlier periods, “theatre for
social change” began to emerge as a distinct category of theatrical
practice during the 1970s. It is a broad and generous category,
encompassing a variety of forms, working methods, and performance
settings. In general, “theatre for social change” is distinguished from
commercial, for-profit theatre that occurs in a formal theatre building;
its workers are professionals who perform with participants and
audiences who are, in the main, non-theatre professionals; and, as its
name suggests, it aims to address, if not solve, social problems of
concern to its participants. In this section, we focus particularly on
those kinds of theatre for social change in which the local and
international intersect in some way.
Theater of the Oppressed
Many of these movements draw on the theories and techniques of
Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed,
mentioned in Chapters 12 and 13. Strongly influenced by the ideas of
educational theorist Paulo Freire in his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, Boal developed a series of theatrical innovations and
interventions designed to raise awareness of the causes of
oppression, identify key problems facing a given community, seek
collective solutions to them, and implement them not only on stage,
but in societal and political venues. In later years, working in exile in
countries where the forms of oppression were less overt than those
exercised by dictators, Boal developed his ideas into what he called
“The Rainbow of Desire,” which helped participants to become aware
of “the cop” in their own heads – in other words, the subtle ways
oppressions can become internalized.
 In such theatre, trained practitioners work with groups – usually
communities coming together around a specific cause, within an
identified system of oppression, or within zones of ethnic or
intercultural conflict – to explore collectively solutions to that cause or
conflict. Practitioners affiliate through such organizations as Pedagogy
and Theater of the Oppressed, Inc., a global forum for “people whose
work challenges oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and
social justice through liberatory theatre and popular education”
(ptoweb.org).
Key characteristics of Theater of the Oppressed are the inclusion of
a facilitator (or “difficultator”) called “The Joker,” and an understanding
of the audience as “spect-actors” rather than “spectators,” called upon
to propose and enact the contours of and solutions to the problem
being explored. Forms and techniques of Theater of the Oppressed
include:

Image theatre, where participants use their bodies to form

wordless images of a situation under discussion;
Forum theatre, whereby different solutions to a given problem are
proposed by the spect-actors, who then test them by acting them
out in improvised scenarios;
Newspaper theatre, drawing on an early form of documentary
theatre to offer techniques for groups wishing to explore
contemporary issues in their world;
Invisible theatre, where spect-actors trained in Theater of the
Oppressed techniques publicly enact a scenario that calls
attention to some form of social injustice, in the context where the
injustice regularly occurs, without calling attention to itself as
theatre;
Legislative theatre, a type of forum theatre that takes place in
town halls and houses of legislature, where a given law, policy, or
statute is being debated.

Boal’s ideas have become internationalized in a variety of movements

that draw on his Theater of the Oppressed techniques to serve
particular glocal purposes.
Theatre for development
The term “theatre for development” (TFD) originated in Botswana,
Africa, in the mid-1970s to describe performances intended to help
communities address their difficulties with health, agriculture, literacy,
and similar problems. The basic model, as it emerged in a series of
conferences and workshops, involved theatre activists researching a
community problem, creating a play through debate and
improvisation, presenting the piece to the community, and following
the performance with discussion and community planning. Well-
funded by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), themselves often
based in powerful countries far away, this model spread throughout
English-speaking Africa in the 1980s. Many theatre and community
leaders, however, criticized the early phase of TFD for its crude
modernization ideology, its failure to involve community participants,
and its blindness to local customs and political power struggles.
Most present versions of TFD have taken these criticisms to heart
and have remained an important strategy for activists seeking
theatrical means to improve the lives of many Africans. The Nigerian
Popular Theatre Alliance (NPTA), for example, through its Theatre for
Development [training] Centre, works in the areas of adolescent
health and education, democratic citizenship, economic
empowerment, and conflict resolution, an important concern for many
Nigerians because of the bitter history of civil war in that country.
Affiliated with a local university, the Centre also educates future
leaders in the problems and possibilities of TFD.
Figure 14.12A SEKA performer in a large mask clowns for Zambian villagers.
 Source: Photo © Miranda Guhrs of Seka. <www.seka-educational-
theatre.com>
In Zambia, SEKA, the acronym for Sensitisation and Education
through Kunda Arts, works through university teachers, community
activists, and theatre artists to tackle many of the problems of village
life in central southern Africa. Among these are child labor, rampaging
elephants, and HIV/AIDS, particularly rife in rural Zambia. To involve
the villagers in their programs, SEKA relies primarily on interactive
theatre that uses stories and songs from local life to demystify
problems and create collective solutions (Figure 14.12). Partly to fund
their major programs, SEKA also creates customized productions for
conferences and performs traditional Zambian culture for tourists.
SEKA’s stated goal is an appropriate summary of the aims of many
TFDs: “We believe in changing circumstances by changing minds and
changing minds through the arts – theatre and stories in particular.”
Community-based theatre
Though not a coordinated movement, community-based theatre is
something of a worldwide phenomenon. It overlaps with theatre for
development initiatives in Africa and India, and is sometimes referred
to as “theatre for community cultural development” in the U.S.,
“community theatre” and “community plays” in the U.K. and Canada,
and teatro comunitario in Latin America. Not to be confused with that
form of “community theatre” in the U.S. that restages mainstream
theatre with non-professional actors, community-based theatre draws
on the legacy of Theater of the Oppressed, Nuevo Teatro Popular (see
Chapter 13), and other socially engaged work that mixes political
agitation and developmental strategies. Community-based theatres
also depend upon ongoing dialogue between artists and spectators,
and explore ways of maximizing the agency of a local audience.
Unlike the radical theatre movements of the 1960s, however, the
political beliefs of artists committed to community-based work are not
necessarily oriented to revolutionary action or democratic socialism,
but grow out of their commitment to a local community or social group.
Although most espouse liberal political values, some are motivated by
a conservative desire to preserve the past, or to pursue notions of
community development that align with the global development
initiatives that have also inspired theatre for development movements.
Not surprisingly, these political differences often translate into
competing definitions of the term “community,” which can serve one or
more groups identified by a sense of regional, ethnic, or social class
belonging. Community-based theatre’s commitment to a “community”
has been both a strength and a weakness, energizing some groups
for self-improvement and progressive change, and limiting the social,
political, and aesthetic reach of others. For those communities caught
up in problems related to globalization, community-based theatre has
primarily led to smart tactics and long-term adjustment or resistance,
but at times also to parochialism and nostalgia.
There are thousands of community-based theatres around the
globe. In Western Europe and North America, community-based
artists and facilitators have focused much of their attention on
empowering marginalized groups, celebrating the useable past of a
community, and helping people to energize communities that have
been damaged or destroyed. For example, Stut Theater in Utrecht, the
Netherlands, devised a production involving Dutch, Turkish, and
Moroccan young people and their parents to recognize the needs of
the two marginalized groups and encourage intercultural
understanding. In England, playwright and facilitator Ann Jellicoe
(1927–) has helped several communities to celebrate their histories.
Swamp Gravy, located in a small town in Georgia in the U.S., draws
on local tradition and African-American Christianity to bridge the racial
divide in the American South. The LAPD (the Los Angeles Poverty
Department, not an official agency of the city, but use of its initials
draws ironic attention to the failures of the city’s safety nets) seeks to
generate a sense of community among the residents of Skid Row in
Los Angeles.
Several companies work toward all of the goals noted above. In the
United States, one of the more established such groups is
Cornerstone Theater. Now based in Los Angeles, Cornerstone began
in 1986 as a traveling ensemble working with rural communities in the
United States to bring their stories to the stage, and including
members of the communities in the productions. Since 1992 they have
focused more on urban issues and collaborations. Their model of
theatre utilizes community-based, peer-to-peer education methods,
based on gathering stories from community members and creating
plays inspired by those stories. These plays are organized around
themes and staged in multi-year cycles; since 1992 they have included
the Watts Cycle (building bridges between African-American and
Latino residents of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles); the Faith-
Based Cycle (exploring the city’s communities of faith); the Justice
Cycle (exploring the relationship of law to community); and the Hunger
Cycle, around issues of food justice. Cornerstone has also partnered
with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to help launch the
Teatro Jornalero Sin Fronteras (Day Laborer Theater Without
Borders), an ensemble of day laborers who use Cornerstone
methodologies to educate immigrant workers about their rights and to
humanize the immigration debate for the larger community.
Community-based theatres sometimes combine theatre work with
social and economic transformation. In Brazil, Nos do Morro (Us from
the Hillside) produces theatre for the poor citizens who live in the hills
above the wealthy beach areas of Rio de Janeiro. While the theatre
space also serves as a local community center that provides
participatory entertainment, the company members engage in various
interventions to help the workers, street children, and dispossessed of
the area. In the Philippines and the Marshall Islands, respectively, the
Philippine Educational Theatre Association (discussed in Chapter 13)
and Jodrikdrik ñan Jodrikdrik ilo Ejmour (Youth to Youth in Health)
train squads of young people to lead outreach programs using
theatrical techniques that help other youth adjust to the many
problems that globalization is bringing to the islands, including AIDS,
increasing alcoholism, and the disruption of traditional culture. In
Kenya, the Kawuonda Woman’s Group shows the continuing
influence of theatre for development programs in a small village.
When the women dramatize one of their stories for the village, they
typically rehearse them in the midst of doing the laundry or picking
coffee beans, and they perform their short scenes within a circle of
dancers and singers to demonstrate their female solidarity.
 Many of the artists involved with these community-based theatres
have adopted strategies to moderate or resist some of the effects of
globalization that are changing the lives of the populations they assist.
Global media, especially from the U.S., now saturate the lives of
young people around the globe and are fast replacing traditional
cultures as a common point of reference in most societies. Jodrikdrik
recognizes this fact and encourages their participants to mix island
traditions with popular songs and media genres from the U.S. in their
annual talent show, called, appropriately, Showtime! In Rio, Nos do
Morro has found film and television work for several of the young
actors who have performed on its stage. Other community-based
theatres, including PETA, La Fomma, and Aguamarina, have helped
their participants to organize collectives to maintain the economic
viability of traditional crafts in competition with international
corporations.
The pressures of globalization are also changing the organizational
strategies of community-based work. Yuyachkani in Peru maintains its
company identity, but also facilitates the work of individual members to
pursue projects related to company goals. Ground Zero in Toronto has
abandoned the notion of a theatre company altogether. Its founder,
Don Bouzek, now works with temporary alliances of funders, clients,
and artists to produce theatre pieces that will advance progressive
causes and alliances in Canada. In the United States, Michael Rohd’s
Sojourn Theatre, based in Portland, Oregon, operates on a similar
model. Two scholars of contemporary interventionist theatre, Alan
Filewod and David Watt, argue that such “strategic ventures” involving
like-minded artists and activists collaborating together on specific
projects, provide the best strategy for transforming communities in the
global future (Filewod and Watt 2001: passim).
Summary
Theatre has always been a site for cultures to come into contact with
each other, materially and imaginatively. With the advent of the “global
village” since the middle of the last century, the possibilities for such
contact have been both broadened and deepened.
In this chapter, we have seen how theatre culture in the era of
globalization has taken a variety of forms, ranging from the rather
homogenized aesthetic of the mega-musical to the radically local and
culturally specific performances of everyday life offered for tourists.
Many theatre artists, seeking to advance and reanimate their practice,
have looked to other traditions for inspiration, or have found new ways
to reach international audiences for their work. At the local level, many
performance traditions like the wayang golek puppet theatre have
proven themselves adaptable to new media, in the process achieving
a new political life. The processes of globalization have prompted
theatrical responses that both preserve patrimony and urgently
question its contours in contexts of international spectatorship. Finally,
we have discussed a variety of instances and types of theatre that
have as their heartbeat an impulse to change the world, community by
community.
The notion of theatre as a “zone of (inter)cultural contact” carries
with it the full gamut of possible outcomes, ranging from embrace of
the foreign to active resistance against its incursions. One result is
that much theatre in the era of globalization operates under the new
norms of formal and cultural hybridity. Like any other social institution,
theatre operates within power relations that are often highly
imbalanced. An important task of the critic and historian, therefore, is
to pay careful attention to how that power, a matter of cultural as well
as political and economic capital, is flowing.
*
Theatre in networked culture, 1990–present
Tamara Underiner
DOI: 10.4324/9780203788714-20
“Give me four trestles, four boards, two actors and a passion,” Lope
de Vega reputedly said, “and I will give you a play.” A favorite adage
among theatre people, it calls attention to theatre’s most basic
elements and alludes to its infinite possibilities. As we have seen
throughout this book, theatre artists have frequently experimented
with these elements. We have also seen how developments in theatre
history have always been in conversation with changes in the culture
that surrounds them; new technologies, communications and
otherwise, have both enabled innovation and, on occasion, spurred
the desire to get “back to basics.” Now is no different.
As brick-and-mortar theatre spaces continue to produce work for
live audiences, with live actors performing scripted drama on three-
dimensional sets, other movements are afoot. Today, the “four trestles
and four boards” may be a smart stage, in which actors trigger
sensors that in turn trigger lights and sounds, or a virtual stage
altogether. Of the “two actors,” one might be a robot, or appear on a
screen to interact with the other actor. The “passion” or driving force
behind a theatrical experience may not be the vision of a single
playwright or director, but arise instead from the collective
experiments of a theatre ensemble. And the “plays” that result from
these new combinations produce new audience experiences,
including live and virtual interaction, in which audience contributions
influence the action.
In this chapter, we discuss the interaction between networked
culture as a whole and performance practices on and off the formal
stage. While in a fundamental sense human history is itself a history of
networked culture, over the past two decades new media technologies
have made it easier than ever for people to connect with each other,
and to remain aware of personal and world developments in real time.
In North America, Europe, and Australasia, internet usage has begun
to challenge and in some cases has surpassed television viewing.
These new technologies, so central to everyday life, are also
becoming increasingly integral to performance on stage, going far
beyond their potential as special effects. At the same time, off-stage,
social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube create
opportunities for people to “stage” themselves, whether they see
themselves as performers or not.
But “networked culture” does not refer only to the computational
technologies that make real-time connectivity possible. It also refers to
the way these technologies have influenced the ways we are or can
imagine being social together. In this culture “the network” is not
merely a technologized byproduct of social relations, but is fast
becoming the dominant organizational paradigm for society itself,
extending deeply into social, cultural, and political conditions. The
results reach down to the level of the individual him- or herself, who is
now conceived, increasingly if not exclusively, as a node in a network
composed of both humans and objects (the “internet of things”). The
category of creative expression has similarly become more
decentralized, as audiences for art have become more and more
participatory in its creation. Increasingly, new works are being
developed by appreciators of visual and performing arts, who adapt
and mix together elements from other works, and post the results via
open platforms like YouTube. This kind of borrowing, mixing, and
adaptation in order to make something new has itself borrowed a term
from the music industry – the remix – and has become the prevalent
aesthetic of networked culture.
Therefore, while much theatre being produced today continues
earlier practices, in this chapter we focus particularly on theatre that
registers network culture’s varied (but ever-changing) influences and
interactions. To organize the fluid array of ideas and examples
available, we divide our coverage into three broad sections, roughly
reminiscent of Lope’s adage. Our first section considers the
performers, human and otherwise, whose work calls attention to new
technologies of the self in networked culture. Our second section
covers some of the changing platforms for their performances, both
virtual and real-world (although those distinctions tend to blur in
networked culture). Finally, we will consider how the new logic of the
network has contributed to a variety of performance types and styles,
produced or accelerated different models for the collaborative aspects
of the theatre-making process, and led to experiments in form and
structure of a new kind of theatre called “postdramatic.” Our case
study on online role-playing games considers what happens when the
platform is a virtual one, the players manipulate avatars, and their
passions might be invented or reflect what’s going on in their offline
lives – all in an ever-evolving plot. The case study on Hip Hop theatre
considers how this art form, called by Daniel Banks the “theatre of
now,” nevertheless serves as a register of a centuries-old heritage of
theatrical practices.
Since this chapter is also the culmination of this particular theatre
histories textbook, we take this as an opportunity to look not only at
“theatre in networked culture,” but also through it to examine how
theatre (perhaps the original “social medium”) has changed over time
as a forum for reflection about society. Along the way, we should keep
in mind that some of the characteristics of “networked culture”
represent differences in kind from earlier forms of culture, and some
are better understood as differences of degree. Distinguishing
between the two is not always a simple matter. Consider, for example,
what the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle considered to be the key
to effective dramatic plotting: the careful selection and arrangement of
incidents from stories already in circulation and well known to the
culture for whom the classic Greek playwrights wrote. Were those
playwrights early aggregators and remixers, or is there something
essentially different about the ways today’s artists are re-assembling
the raw materials of story as circulated by the media and social
networks?
Or consider the matter of time and space in dramatic action and
theatrical performance. While the neoclassicists may have insisted on
preserving the unities of time, place, and dramatic action, theatre
artists in all other times and places have taken great liberties with all
three aspects of drama, and audiences have managed to follow along.
But until very recently in theatre history, the performance of most
stage plays – no matter how long their action was presumed to take, in
however many locales – has unfolded in real time before their
audience, and in a shared physical space. Do today’s technologies of
connectivity, and the subsequent experiments they allow in
performance, represent a new phase in an ongoing evolution of
temporal and spatial experimentation on stage, or a radical departure
into a philosophical examination of theatrical time and space itself?
The examples we follow in this chapter are meant to raise and shed
light on such questions, rather than to definitively answer them.
New players
As we’ve seen in previous chapters, the role of the actor in society –
whether elevated as celebrity or denigrated as vagabond – derives
from the power actors are believed to have in shaping human values.
Their larger-than-life significance is due, in part, to the double reality
they inhabit on stage, a reality that borders on the virtual. They
transform and extend themselves through both external means
(costume, makeup) and internal means (physical, psychological, and
emotional training and preparation), all the while remaining present to
their audiences both as themselves and as their characters. They are
both real and unreal; or, as Richard Schechner has elaborated, they
are both “not me,” and “not not me” (1985: 112).
Until very recently, however, actors have always been co-present
with their spectators, sharing physical proximity with them in real time.
In fact, for many it is this property of “presence” that has distinguished
theatre from other forms of narrative and representational media.
However, we can and often do experience this sense of presence with
and through media as well, as when we watch a “livestream” of a
performance or communicate with an online chatbot (and we notice it
keenly when our devices “die”). Understood this way, “presence” has
moved away from being seen as inherent to the theatrical form, and
has taken up residence in the audience’s experience of the form, if not
in the technology itself. And that form has increasingly come to
entangle live and media “performers.”
Experiments with live and virtual actors

Perhaps the earliest performance pairing a live actor with a

virtual performer was in a 1914 vaudeville act by Winsor McCay, who
interacted with a film animation of Gertie the dinosaur. Since then,
experiments have grown in complexity and sophistication. In the early
days of the internet, performance artists and theatre companies were
quick to explore the question of live/virtual performance. In 1995,
Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes (see Chapter 13)
collaborated with James Luna (1950–) on an installation/performance
called The Shame Man and El Mexican’t Meet the CyberVato. Over
the course of five days at an art gallery at Rice University, Luna as
Shame Man and Gómez-Peña as “El Mexican’t” performed various
incarnations of how “Native Americans” and “Mexicans” should look,
behave, and perform in the 1990s, based on suggestions posted by
visitors to the performance’s website, which also appeared on
monitors in the performance space. Meanwhile, the character
CyberVato (Sifuentes), an exaggerated Chicano gang member
decked out in techno-gadgetry, captured images of his collaborators’
transformations and transmitted them daily to the Web via video
teleconferencing. The intent was “to politicize the debates around
digital technologies and to infect virtual space with Chicano humor
and linguas polutas (such as Spanglish)” (Gómez–Peña 2003: 38).
The following year, the San Francisco-based troupe George Coates
Performance Works premiered Twisted Pairs, whose characters were
based on personality types making early appearances in online
chatrooms and bulletin boards; its action was structured according to
the associative logic of internet surfing. (The title refers to the way
electrical wires are twisted together to cancel out electromagnetic
interference from other sources, key to clarity in telecommunications.)
The plot, similarly convoluted, revolved around an Amish farmgirl who
discovered a laptop by accident, and went on to become an internet
celebrity calling herself “Annette Diva.” Other characters were
developed out of recognizable online personas and the live actors
interacted with video projections and telecasts. At the time, such
technologies were new enough that a glossary of internet terms was
necessary for audience members – many of whom were not
sufficiently literate in internet lingo to get many of the jokes.
In 2000, Steve Dixon, Paul Murphy, and Wendy Reed of
Chameleons Group developed Chameleons 3: Net Congestion, which
experimented with combinations of live actors with remote audiences,
and with recorded characters. Actors performing on three separate
stages in a black box studio interacted with pre-recorded characters
projected on screens behind them, while the audience – none of
whom was there in the studios, but watching over the internet – typed
in suggestions for the performers to use or play with. Dixon writes,
“Whilst a ‘high-tech’ project, the stage configuration itself harked back
to the pageant wagon staging of Medieval Mystery Plays” (Dixon n.d.).
While technology has allowed actors to connect with audiences
across time and space, new advancements in medical and cyber-
technology have prompted many theatre and performance artists to
explore the limits of “the human” itself in their work.
Exploring and expanding the limits of the human
The theatrical stage has always been a site for magic, where the
supernatural and the superhuman can appear to have tangible reality.
Today, a performer can do more than amplify the sound of her voice
with a wireless mike; she can also manipulate other elements of the
theatrical environment that previously had been run by crews behind
the scenes. For example, her costume can be a smart one, outfitted
with movement sensors that trigger sound, music, lights, and so forth,
at her command. In one sense, this is an extension of centuries of
experimentation with theatrical illusion and special effects. In another
sense, the new possibilities for extending human powers through
technology have raised compelling questions about where the human
ends and the machine begins. Human–machine interactions have
produced new ideas about being human in this digital, mediatized –
some say posthuman – age. Theatre scholar Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
refers to a “cyborg theatre” (2011), which explores this merging of
human and technology, both literally and figuratively, toward moving
past traditional notions of biology-based humanity.

For example, some artists have undergone extreme

modifications of their own bodies in work that calls the “givenness” of
that body into serious question as they experiment with body type,
gender stereotype, and even human/animal hybridity. (Many of these
experiments have come through the work of individual performance
artists; for more information on “performance art” itself, see the Box in
Chapter 13). For example, the work of the Australian digital/live
performance artist Stelarc (1946–) has included both cybernetic
performance and body modification. In the 1990s Stelarc created a
series of live/internet performances in which his body was remotely
controlled through interfaces with remote viewers and with the internet
itself, resulting in his body being, literally, jerked around by remote
controllers. More recently, Stelarc has been experimenting with more
extreme and permanent body modification. In 2006, for example, he
began work on an ongoing project in which he is growing an ear on his
left forearm; it has been fitted with a microphone and wireless
transmitter that allows remote listeners to hear what his arm/ear is
“hearing” (through its built-in microphone) in real time over the internet
(see Figure 15.1.) As a result of his experiments and speculations,
Stelarc has come to consider the body increasingly obsolete – at least
in terms of its former physiological limitations.

Figure 15.1Australian performance artist Stelarc in his 1994 work, Amplified

Body.

Photo: Jan Sprij.

Actors and robots, robots as actors
 Still other artists have experimented with humanoid robots
to question our confidence in how special we humans might really be.
Japanese playwright Hirata Oriza (1962–) collaborates with robot
designer Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University to stage humans and
android robots together. Their 2010 play Sayonara is about a young
woman with a terminal disease whose parents hire an extremely
human-looking android to care for her, so that they can then abandon
her. The voice and gestures of the android, “Geminoid F,” were
created off stage by an actress in a soundproof chamber, fed to the
android via camera and replicated on stage. In 2012 Sayonara II
featured a defective robot reading poems to comfort a girl dying of
radiation exposure from the damaged nuclear power plant at
Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake. Another collaboration resulted
in the 2011 I, Worker, which features two non-humanoid robot maids.
All have at their center an exploration of what it is to be human, forced
into stark relief by robots (a frequent theme of science fiction, not yet
fully realizable on stage).
Not every experiment with robotic performances has profound
philosophical questions as its inspiration. In 2006, the Les Frères
Corbusier production of Elizabeth Meriwether’s Heddatron also
featured live actors sharing the stage with radio-controlled robots,
their operators off stage (Figure 15.2). Designed by Cindy Jeffers and
Meredith Finkelstein of Botmatrix, an art robotics collective, the robots
in Heddatron entice an unhappy housewife from Ypsilanti, Michigan, to
the jungles of Ecuador, where they force her to perform the title role of
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890). They in turn perform the supporting
roles, and that of Ibsen himself – who is, like his heroine, portrayed as
suffering within a stifling marriage. Originating in New York, Heddatron
has been produced in several other theatres across the United States,
to generally enthusiastic reviews. Interestingly, these reviews tended
to focus as much on the show’s premise and themes – the
identification of a contemporary woman with a character written over a
century before her birth, and the redemptive possibilities of theatre
itself – as they did on the fact that more than half the cast were robots.
 One reviewer called attention to the robots’ perfect comic timing,
which raises an interesting point for theatre history. Unlike fully human
actors, robots are able to achieve exact repetition from performance to
performance, a fact which recalls certain other moments in theatre
history. On the one hand, live theatre’s unrepeatability is, for some,
what makes it uniquely attractive. On the other, theatre history has
also been marked by frequent demands to deliver fidelity to the
playwright’s text, and consistent, if not identical, performances along
the course of a show’s run. In the Hellenistic age, for example,
proscriptions against actor improvisations were common. Also recall
our discussion in Chapter 7 of Denis Diderot’s eighteenth-century The
Paradox of the Actor, in which the French philosopher praised
performers who could separate their emotions from their actions, their
minds from their bodies, so that they could present their character in
exactly the same way at every performance. Diderot argued that, to
effectively move an audience, the actor must remain him/herself
unmoved. This idea was later expanded upon by Gordon Craig (see
Chapter 10), who longed to replace actors entirely with large puppets,
or Übermarionettes, because they would be easier to control than live
human beings. Theatre artists who share Craig’s aims might envision
robots as the new “superactors” of the theatre.
Figure 15.2Robots inhabit both the domestic and forest world in Les Frères
Corbusier's Heddatron, with scenic design by Cameron Anderson.

Photo: Cameron Anderson.

The replacement of actors on stage by robots may be unlikely, but
there is a growing area within networked culture in which virtual
bodies take center stage – and the stage itself is also a virtual one.
Our first case study takes a closer look at the phenomenon of online
role-playing games as a new form of theatre.
Case Study Online role-playing games as theatre
Tobin Nellhaus
Digital culture has made games a regular part of many people’s
lives, and scholars have begun to recognize their cultural importance.
Online role-playing is a game that is also a type of performance. Some
of its features are very similar to theatre as traditionally understood;
other aspects, however, are quite different. How should we
understand this sort of performance – as a game with only a
superficial resemblance to theatre, a performance genre with theatre-
like elements but (like performance art) not actually theatre, or in fact a
new type of theatre? Also, if online role-playing truly is a new type of
theatre, do its differences from traditional theatre have any special
social or cultural significance?
Online role-playing games and virtual worlds
Modern role-playing games arose in the 1970s. In tabletop games,
such as Dungeons & Dragons, players simply talk through their
characters’ actions. In live action role-playing games, players play
their roles in person, perhaps re-creating a historical battle or staging
an event in an imagined medieval world. The first online role-playing
games were conducted in text only, but in the 1980s they gained
graphics and soon developed virtual worlds.
Virtual worlds can depict any place imaginable, from a historical
location such as 1920s Chicago, to a fictive but naturalistic setting like
a small town in a valley, to an interstellar battlefield, to a fantasy world
with elves and orcs. Players interact in the virtual world through
avatars, which can also take any form – a human, an animal, a
machine, or a creature from a fantasy or alien universe. Most players
write text to “speak” in character; voice, if used, is usually for team
coordination or for commentary (although some people do use it for
role-playing).
In virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings
Online – known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games
(MMORPGs, or often simply MMOs) – the narrative, the setting, the
possible avatars, their weapons and clothing, and all of the other
elements are provided by the game company, although some
companies allow or even encourage modifications. Many players in
these games don’t role-play; instead they pursue individual quests
and battles with computer-generated opponents as they strive to build
up points, weapons, and skills. Sometimes the MMO simply allocates
a few regions for role-play.

Figure 15.3The Realm of Mystara, a role-playing region in Second Life.

© Tobin Nellhaus
MMOs are primarily intended for gaming. There are also open-
ended (or platform) virtual worlds such as Second Life, Metropolis,
and InWorldz where people mainly socialize (and shop) without role-
play. However, because everything in open-ended virtual worlds is
user-created – the settings, avatars, clothing, accessories, and all else
– some users create role-playing regions following their own tastes
and interests, including the region’s backstory, its natural and/or
architectural environment, and the eligible avatar types. Some regions
are inspired by a movie or TV show, such as Avatar or Game of
Thrones, but most are original (see Figure 15.3). The players exercise
considerable freedom in designing settings, avatar types, costumes,
and equipment. Role-playing in open-ended virtual worlds can involve
armed combat, like the MMOs, but often the focus is on character
interaction and group activity, without scoring points or even using
weapons: enjoyment lies in the role-playing itself.
Performance techniques in online role-playing
To determine online role-playing’s performance genre, we should start
by exploring its performance methods. At a very general level,
obviously people play characters and use them to enact a storyline or
narrative events. If there are large events such as battles, the location
and overall direction is generally planned. But the specific encounters
are devised on the fly, wherever the players happen to be. Broadly
speaking, then, online role-playing is similar to improvisational theatre.
However, unlike improvisational theatre, numerous scenes occur
simultaneously in various locations within the role-playing region,
usually with little or no connection with each other. Another difference
from improvisational theatre is that players don’t use their own body,
but instead choose their appearance, social type, species, and gender
from the options offered (or invented) within the virtual world.
There are also similarities with dramatic literature. For example,
players often provide their character with an extensive backstory.
Sometimes the backstory is quite particular, providing the character
with a history, a set of motivations, attitudes, fears, desires, and other
traits. In this way the character can become roughly as detailed and
individual as most dramatic characters (similar to the way some stage
actors envision a complex backstory for their character).
One of online role-playing’s performance techniques is highly
distinctive: role-play is generally conducted through writing – not voice
or movement. To overcome the extreme limitations of avatars’ actions
and the lack of vocal tone, these elements are described in sentences
called “emotes.” Almost all social interactions use emotes. Players
may combat each other using weapons, but they can also employ
emotes, and in some regions that’s the only possibility.
The following example, drawn from Second Life, shows how this
works. Its setting is a city riddled with crime and corruption. Cassie
Manga, an arsonist, has set fire to a building; Murk23 Oh is a cop.
(Names have been changed; genders have not.) The emotes are
italicized, and the character name at the beginning of each sentence
shows who wrote it.
Murk23 Oh sighs, “Now you pesky little firebug, what will we do with
you?” He begins to pat her down, searching for her lighter.
Cassie Manga feels him pat her down and tries to kick him back off of
her. “Leave me alone ya ass, I didn’t do nothing wrong.”
Murk23 Oh gets a kick to the shin and growls, “I saw you on the camera,
now where’s that lighter?” He steps back a little.
Cassie Manga smiles a bit. “What lighter, I don’t smoke, if ya need a light
I smell smoke somewhere, go get a light off of that.”
Murk23 Oh grumbles as he leans down and attempts to grab her guns.
Cassie Manga feels him take her guns. “Dammit, give them back, I paid
good money for them ya ass, if ya want a set go get ya own.”
Murk23 Oh smiles as he begins to move away from her with her guns in
hand. “See you soon!”

The exchange follows the “best practices” of online role-play. Two

rules are foremost. First, emotes should be written from an onlooker’s
perspective: in the third person, without access to the character’s
thoughts or feelings. “Cassie Manga smiles a bit, knowing Murk23
won’t find anything” would be a faulty emote, because an outside
observer can’t read Cassie’s mind. We’ll call this the rule of objectivity.
In practice, casual players seldom take umbrage at “subjective”
emotes, and sometimes they’re necessary in order to convey the right
tone to the other players, such as when a snarl is playful, not
threatening. Even highly skilled players occasionally disregard the
objectivity rule; “searching for her lighter” is borderline (and Cassie’s
player ignores it). Nevertheless, objective emotes are recommended.
In contrast, breaking the second rule can be a serious violation of
role-play etiquette. Each player should allow the other players to
decide the result of any particular action. Murk23 attempts to grab
Cassie’s guns, but his player leaves open whether he succeeds –
Cassie’s player decides that he did. “Murk23 Oh grabs Cassie’s guns”
would be objectionable because his player takes over the scene, not
allowing Cassie to perhaps dodge and draw her weapons (which
might have been what Murk23’s player expected). Letting Cassie’s
player decide the outcome of Murk23’s grab makes the role-play much
more interactive, surprising, and fun. We will call this the rule of
reciprocal player agency. Together these two rules make the role-
playing highly collaborative, requiring players to be both spectators
and performers sharing a scene – eliminating the traditional division
between actor and audience.
From one perspective, emotes look novelistic, not dramatic –
especially when they’re paragraph length. But several elements bring
them much closer to theatre and drama. For one thing, the rule of
objectivity, including its use of the present tense, makes emotes
similar to stage directions or blocking notes. In addition, the rule of
reciprocal player agency, which leaves outcomes open, is effectively
equivalent to a technique in improvisational theatre. Keith Johnstone,
author of an improvisation textbook, describes the technique as
“offering and accepting”: one performer establishes a situation or even
the bare beginning of a situation (the offer), which the other performer
accepts and builds upon through another offer; the first performer
accepts this offer and in turn develops the scene further. Johnstone
gives this example:
BMy God! It’s spreading to the furniture! BYes. We’ll have to remove it
before it spreads to the rest of you. (A’s chair collapses.) ANot
wormwood, Doctor! BYou know what this means? AYes, Doctor. BYou
mean you’ve got a pain in your wooden leg? AIt’s the one you amputated
last time, Doctor. [. . .] BThis looks nasty. I shall have to amputate. AIt’s
my leg, Doctor. BWhatever is it, man? AAugh! (Johnstone 1979: 96)

In most cases, online role-playing is already heavily structured by the

virtual world’s setting and available roles, as well as any relationships
the players already established (e.g., boss and employee). As a result,
unlike Johnstone’s improvised scene, players seldom have to create a
situation from whole cloth. Still, the principle of offering and accepting
is the same. It is the foundation of collaborative performance.
Embodiment, presence, and agency
The differences between theatre and online role-playing need to be
addressed next, because they point to many people’s concept of
theatrical performance. Two are closely related: presence and
embodiment. Both are connected to how agency is exercised in online
role-playing.
“Presence” – also called “immediacy,” “aura,” and sometimes
“liveness” – is often viewed as theatre’s most distinctive feature (albeit
not by all scholars). It is usually understood as involving the actual
proximity of living, breathing, embodied actors and spectators. But if
so, then online role-playing simply isn’t theatre: the players are usually
physically isolated during play, sometimes by continents.
However, the concept of presence has numerous aspects, and
nearness and human bodies aren’t necessarily viable criteria. For
example, large auditoriums place back-row spectators hundreds of
feet from the stage, yet they may feel presence. Likewise, if
performers must use their own bodies, then puppetry (such as
bunraku) cannot be theatre. In fact, under the standard definition of
presence, one might doubt that blind people can experience theatrical
performance.
Another definition of presence escapes those shortcomings by
focusing on how people share not so much a physical space, but
rather a meaningful space (Mennecke et al. 2011). This interpretation
suggests that online role-players do experience presence with other
players, regardless of distance, because their avatars immerse the
players within a meaningful space, meaningfully shared. This concept
of presence focuses on its social character. Virtual worlds are highly
social environments that create social presence, in a mediated form
that can be as lively and electric as physical presence. In some ways
the sense of virtual presence can be stronger than in traditional
theatre, because players always interact with other players directly,
whereas in most theatre the spectators’ interaction with actors is
indirect or vicarious.
The sense of presence in virtual worlds (as in the material world)
involves not only an awareness of other people, but also a feeling of
one’s own presence within the virtual environment, mediated by a kind
of body, an avatar – and players are usually quite particular about their
avatar’s appearance, which is an abstract form of embodiment. But
“being present” through one’s personalized avatar doesn’t entail
identifying with the character. Experienced players recommend
keeping some psychological distance between oneself and one’s
character in most types of role-playing; otherwise, one might (for
example) misunderstand insults aimed at one’s character as intended
for the player, which can ruin the game play. Players should, however,
understand and feel their character enough that they can act
appropriately. In a way, the avatar is a role-player’s second body, and
role-playing in a virtual world via an avatar is akin to the embodiment
of a character that an actor performs in theatre using all the tools
available, including costumes, mannerisms, speaking style, and
makeup. One’s sense of self-presence is not identification, but rather
immersion as a virtual body within the virtual space shared with
others.
Constructing a narrative within a shared virtual space requires
players to be conscious of each other’s presence and enable their
participation. In online role-playing, “shared” means that when players
enter a virtual space, they implicitly promise to collaborate with others.
Disputes do occasionally arise, and usually someone has the authority
to adjudicate between players, but overall, by promoting collaboration
that eliminates the distinctions between actor, audience, playwright,
and director, role-playing games foster an egalitarian performance
process – all the more so because players can freely choose the
“body” in which they perform. Such egalitarianism might even be
described as democratization, because the online environment allows
vastly more people to become performers. (Some role players’
behavior is far from egalitarian, but that is distinct from the structure of
role-playing itself.)
The rules described earlier define collaboration in online role-
playing. The rule of reciprocal player agency protects other players’
ability to participate. When players use emotes, the rule of objectivity
helps to ensure that other players have material their characters can
respond to, keeping the narrative in motion. Thus the players
recognize that they and the other players are agents in the material
world, and that their characters are agents in the virtual world. Both of
these create presence in the sense of participation within a shared,
meaningful space.
 So far, then, online role-playing seems similar to theatre, because it
too engages presence during the performance of characters.
Online role-playing and the structure of theatre
To say X is like Y is not the same as saying it’s a type of Y. For
example, although salamanders look like lizards, they are not actually
lizards. So is online role-playing just highly similar to theatre, or is it in
fact a type of theatre?
Another element of online role-playing exposes a further reason for
viewing it as a type of theatre. As we saw in the arsonist/cop scene,
the direction that a scene takes can be decided on the fly.
Alternatively, players can discuss what will happen before launching
their scene. In addition, sometimes players need to alert the other
players about something happening in their material world, such as
having to take a phone call, or they want to note some other non-
scenic issue. In these situations, the player must communicate out of
character, which they often do by surrounding text with double
parentheses. Here are two examples from observed online role-
playing (names have been changed):

Meeroo Milan: mhmm, what he said

Meeroo Milan: she*
Meeroo Milan: ((sorry))

Meeroo’s player corrects a typo (flagging the correct text with an

asterisk), and writes out of character to apologize for any confusion or
inadvertent insult. In the next excerpt, a player teasingly remarks on
the fact that even though the characters are together in a virtual world,
the players themselves are scattered about in the material world.
Liz Bennett: Why someone gotta be shooting in the morning?
Greg Samsa: ((It’s afternoon here :) ))

Out-of-character communication underscores the fact that the two

realms of player activity – the material world and the virtual world – are
not “worlds apart”: they exist simultaneously and they continually
interact, although they remain distinct.
 Beyond their straightforward difference, however, is a similarity. In
the case study “Early modern metatheatricality and the print
revolution” (Chapter 5), we saw a definition of theatre that involves a
parallel between the strata of society and the strata of theatre. Each
possesses three levels: (1) structures, consisting of resources and
conditions such as the space and the social system (including the
presence or absence of an audience/actor division); (2) agents
(people) in real-life activities, and fictional agents (characters) in
dramatic action; and (3) discourses (words and images expressing
ideas and values) that affect the agents’ activities and responses.
When we examine the two worlds of online role-playing, we find that
they both have these three levels as well.
In online role-playing’s material world, the first level consists of
physical circumstances, resources, and real-world social
relationships; these include the internet itself, the game company’s
business needs, the degree of player creativity they provide, player
demographics, and so forth. These are the structural preconditions for
online role-playing. The second level of the material reality
encompasses the players as agents who decide to engage in role-
playing, select which online role-playing game to use, bring certain
skills, etc. and their actual activities (typing and moving images on a
computer screen). The third level comprises the images, situations,
and scenarios borrowed from movies and TV, improvised texts and
other ideas that the players use to create characters and actions, and
the attitudes players bring into their role-playing activities, all of which
are discourses.
In the virtual world, in contrast, the first level consists of the actual
activity of role-playing, including the states of being in character and
out of character, and the players’ relationships with each other (mutual
awareness, teamwork, conflict, etc.). Second, there are the characters
themselves, as imaginary persons, along with their relationships,
alliances, and opponents and the fictional environment in which the
activity is set. The third level covers the virtual world’s overall
narrative, themes (such as honor and criminality), powers, restrictions,
and typical character-types.
 Our closer look at online role-playing shows that its two realms – the
material world and the virtual world – each have three levels in the
same way theatre does. On this definition, then, online role-playing
games aren’t merely like theatre, they are theatre.

Conclusion
Online role-playing, despite involving players who are physically
distant from one another and use avatars to serve as their bodies,
involves presence and embodiment, just as theatre does. It is also
structured the same way theatrical performance is. Thus online role-
players’ game-play is play-making, in a new, online form of theatre
that makes every participant a performer.
Key references
Johnstone, K. (1979) Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, New York:
Theatre Arts Books.
Mennecke, B.E., Triplett, J.L., Hassall, L.M., Conde, Z.J., and Heer,
R. (2011) “An Examination of a Theory of Embodied Social Presence
in Virtual Worlds,” Decision Sciences 42: 413–50.
I would like to thank the anonymous role-play gamers I interviewed,
who were highly informative.
Changing platforms for theatre and performance
Online role-playing games are but one example of another change
brought about by networked culture: an expansion of possible
platforms for performance beyond the material “four trestles” and “four
boards” once required of the formal stage. Sometimes the new
platforms are digital, in full or in part: theatre increasingly houses
digital sets and scenic elements, or is being presented on wholly
virtual platforms. But theatre is also taking place off the formal stage
and in the “real” world, in ways that are themselves enabled by social
media, used to attract both live and remote spectators.
Digital platforms
Live theatre has utilized film and electronic media for decades; as long
ago as 1898, playwright Lincoln J. Carter (1865–1926) designed filmed
scenery as backdrop to his stage action. Performances have long
used closed-circuit television, motion-controlled projections, or online
streaming media to add characters or create a setting on stage. In
1996, for example, the University of Kansas’s Institute for Exploration
of Virtual Reality staged Arthur Kopit’s Wings (1978), using a
completely electronic set design, which audience members accessed
through virtual reality headsets. (The play, which explores the effects
of stroke on the language and mental processes of its victim, was
originally written as a radio play. See Figure 15.4.)
Figure 15.4An early experiment combining live and virtual performance
elements, by the University of Kansas's Institute for Exploration of Virtual
Reality, in 1996. This scene is from Arthur Kopit's Wings, about a woman
recovering from a stroke. Audience members watched the play through head-
mounted displays, which allowed them to see through the computer graphics
and live video being projected on their devices to the production's live actors and
digital projections. (Director Ronald A. Willis, Designer/Technologist Mark
Reaney, and Video Director Lance Gharavi.)

Source: Photo: Mark Reaney.

Today, projections are commonly employed both as virtual scenery
and as interactive elements in stage plays. Online, whole plays have
been performed within a virtual world (often designed for the event),
with the actors’ lines expressed through voice, typing, or even icons.
For instance, in Second Life people are able to create custom
animations to make avatars move in a programmed way (walk, dance,
hug, etc.). This capability was used in a performance of Sophocles’s
Oedipus Rex staged by the Avatar Repertory Theater in 2010–2011.
The audience’s avatars sat on cushions while they watched the play.
Then, when the performance reached the play’s choral odes, the
cushions triggered animations that made the spectators move and
gesture, often in unison, so that they became part of the performance
itself – a new way to break down the actor/audience division (see
Figure 15.5). The Australian performance artist Stelarc, mentioned
above, has created performances within Second Life as well.

Figure 15.5Oedipus Rex as performed in Second Life by the Avatar Repertory

Theater, 2010–2011. The spectators' avatars move and gesture through
animations programmed into the cushions they sat on, and triggered by a
member of the theatre company.

Photo courtesy of Mary Linn Crouse.

Downloadable podplays, the descendants of the radio plays of the
mid-twentieth century, now let listeners access a variety of plays,
some meant to be experienced anywhere, some custom written for
specific places and experiences.
Other artists have experimented with simultaneous stage spaces
via network technology. For example, media artist Adriene Jenik’s
2007 Open_Borders: Improvisation Across Networks, Distance, Time
Zones, used Skype technology to unite 41 artists from 12 countries in
11 time zones, in a single performance. Jenik’s work highlighted not
only questions of how liveness operates through technology, but also
questions about how technology serves to collapse and stretch both
time and space.
Finally, no discussion of new digital platforms for theatrical
presentation would be complete without mentioning Twitter, the online
social networking service that allows subscribers to post messages
limited to 140 characters per post. These “tweets” are available to
anyone to read, allowing for real-time updates on everything from
personal conversations to political revolutions. When it debuted in
2006, theatre companies were quick to see its potential for generating
interest in productions that could be instantly reviewed by Twitter
users and artistic staff. Twitter’s impact on theatre extends beyond
building an audience base and into theatrical production, however,
and has led to innovations in both staging and dramaturgy. Audience
tweets in response to a production can be projected on to screens on
stage, a strategy perhaps most effective for theatre in which full
absorption into the characters’ dramas is less a priority than audience
engagement with the issues at hand. Some companies have used
audience tweets as prompts for improvisation, or to develop the plot of
the drama itself in participatory forms of theatre.
There have also been a number of experiments in playwriting,
leading to a burgeoning body of “Twitter plays.” Theatre scholar John
H. Muse has identified two broad categories encompassing four types
of twitter plays: short-form “nanodramas,” plays consisting of a single
tweet; and long-form plays tweeted as a series of updates among the
characters over the course of several days or weeks. Within the longer
form are three subgenres: original works, impersonations of famous
people (historical or fictional), and adaptations, all of which are
performed in real time but in virtual spaces, and which take advantage
of the conventions of Twitter to provide additional insight into
characters’ motivations and emotions (Muse 2012).
Many nanodramas have been inspired by challenges posed by the
New York Neo-Futurists, a collective devoted to staging non-
illusionistic theatre that foregrounds an awareness and inclusion of the
actual world; their work often appears on material stages but
embraces electronic platforms as well. In 2009 they began issuing
calls for single-tweet plays that had to contain or be constrained by
certain elements – e.g., at least three characters, the use of a certain
prop, or particular action such “a big kiss.” Within two years, some 800
Twitter playwrights responded, with more than 4,000 plays.
The first long-form Twitter play was created by Jeremy Gable; his
140: A Twitter Performance followed four fictional characters from
Idaho, whose story unfolded over the course of some 300 updates
during a two-month period in the summer of 2009. Two years later, the
Reorbit Project was launched as an experiment in social media
“[c]alling all writers to inhabit a historical or fictional character in real-
time over Twitter” (Reorbit 2010). The principal criterion, apart from the
140-character limit, is fidelity to the original character’s persona;
hence, tweets from a teenaged “Samuel Beckett” such as this:
“Writing this way, writing in bits, has an appeal, has a pleasing brevity,
the momentary pause discovered between dry heave and stomach
cramp” (quoted in Muse 2012: 47). The most popular long-form Twitter
plays have been adaptations, a prominent example being Such Tweet
Sorrow, a 2010 co-production of the Royal Shakespeare Company
and the Evanston, Illinois-based Mudlark Theater. Set in modern-day
London, this version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had the
actors playing the six principal characters post updates about their
characters’ dilemmas over the course of five weeks.
For Muse, Twitter plays, with their combination of compression and
concision, and their appearance (in the longer form) of transpiring over
the course of real character time, offer an opportunity to reflect on the
nature of theatre itself. Can a play really be expressed in 140
characters? Is Twitter drama a new form of closet drama (meant to be
read, rather than staged)? Or does the fact that it is “performed” via
text in real-time updates make a significant difference? Is it more
similar to serialized radio drama, or does the fact that it is “seen” and
not heard significant? Thinking back to the case study above, and to
Chapter 13’s discussion about how the primacy of the text and author
have been questioned since the 1960s – does Twitter theatre, with its
actor/improvisers and audience interaction, represent a new phase of
this democratizing creative impulse, or perhaps its ultimate fulfillment,
at least among those with access to social media? And what does the
evolving nature of the # hashtag – originally a search mechanism, now
increasingly used to make meta-commentary on the tweet itself –
suggest about the way the tweeter performs him- or herself? “To
examine the ways artists are enlisting Twitter for theatrical ends
reveals not only that playwrights are colonizing Twitter,” Muse writes,
“but also the extent to which social media are making playwrights,
performers, and spectators of us all” (2012: 43), a point well illustrated
by online role-playing games as well.
Socio-spatial performance experiments in the material
world
For many artists and activists, social media and online archiving has
turned the world literally into a stage for their artistic and political
agendas. Their work ranges from runs of full productions taking place
in a designated extra-theatrical space, to “pop-up” performances that
come and go very quickly. At both ends of the spectrum, the
performance and the space in which it happens are in conversation
with each other, and are enhanced, if not enabled, by social media.
In the days before the construction of purpose-built theatre spaces,
theatre was performed in and arguably conditioned by the particulars
of the spaces in which it had to appear, be they tennis courts or city
streets. The York Cycle’s pageant wagons, for example, provided a
near backdrop for the plays, and the city’s buildings a further one; the
staging of the cycle plays turned the entire city into something of a
holy site once a year. Today, theatre artists sometimes specifically
choose sites outside of existing theatre structures, for particular
purposes and to make particular points. An example from 2007 is Girls
Just Wanna Have Fund$, commissioned by the arts arm of the World
Financial Center in New York City. This was a series of six 10-minute
plays, developed by writers and directors associated with the
Women’s Project Theater Lab, which were presented 13 times over
the course of four days in various public areas of the World Financial
Center. The plays explored different aspects of women’s relationship
(or lack of relationship) to wealth. No one could buy a ticket for the
performances, but audiences grew over the course of the three
weekdays and one Saturday as word spread through social media.
 Free theatre offered in public spaces is not new; since
the middle of the last century, such performances have usually been
subsidized by theatre companies in partnership with arts granting
organizations and municipalities. (A prominent example is the Public
Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park, in New York City.) But networked
culture is further democratizing the experience, changing our
expectation of who might appear on these new platforms, and who
might be invited to the “show.” The flashmobs of the past decade or so
are one illustration. Here, organizers count on social media as well as
the power of a seemingly spontaneous performance to gather
audiences in the moment – and to ensure the performance has a
virtual life afterwards on platforms such as YouTube. One of the
earliest and most frequently imitated such performances is based on
Michael Jackson’s 1982 song Thriller, which has not only motivated
dozens of Halloween performances every year, but has also been
used to make political statements. In 2011 hundreds of Chilean
students, angered by the fees charged by their increasingly privatized
school system, choreographed a performance of Thriller outside the
presidential mansion to protest their plight. The videos taken on
personal cellphones soon went viral, subverting the “official coverage”
and censorship of the Chilean news corporations.

GPS technology has inspired new forms of theatricality in

unexpected places. For example, in 2008, Pittsburgh artists Robin
Hewlett and Ben Kinsley created “Street with a View,” a simulated
street scene including both actors and local residents, who staged
scenes specifically for the moment when the Google Street View
vehicle was passing through their Northside neighborhood in May of
that year. Their scenes included a parade, a garage band practice, a
cat being rescued by firemen, and even a swordfight in seventeenth-
century costume. Thus, for a time, when Google Map users later
sought street views of those locations, they were treated to specially
staged dramatic tableaux.
New performance structures and processes
As these experiments and innovations suggest, social media and the
logic of networked culture within globalization have inspired new forms
of staging and more democratized relations of theatrical production. In
this section we will expand the focus to examine how this logic, if not
the technology itself, has worked its way into dramatic structure. We
will also consider how these influences have affected how plays come
to be, with a closer look at recent developments in postdramatic and
devised theatre.
Cultural critics often point to data mining and aggregation as key
characteristics of networked culture, features that distinguish its
conventions of information organization from those of prior periods.
Whereas in the past, information archiving depended upon some kind
of ordering principle – even if only as simple as “keep” vs. “toss” –
nowadays everything that can be turned into data is – and is storable
as such. The organization of all of this information depends not on a
priori selections, but on the search preferences of the end user. The
vast amounts of information now instantly available to searchers have
contributed to the prevailing aesthetic of the remix we identified in the
introduction to this chapter.
In 2011, the New York City-based theatre ensemble Elevator Repair
Service incorporated both the technology and the logic of data mining
and remixing into their work Shuffle, produced in collaboration with
installation artist Ben Rubin and UCLA statistician Mark Hansen. The
company had been working with adaptations and inventively staged
readings of the novels The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925),
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner, 1929), and The Sun Also
Rises (Ernest Hemingway, 1926). Taking these sources as both
inspiration and data, in 2011 they did a mashup of all three in the New
York Public Library. Scripts were generated by digital algorithms
drawn from the novels’ “data”; the performers from the past
productions now improvised upon the new remixed scripts in this one.
Audience members were free to wander among the performers, as
though they themselves were browsers, while they improvised. The
point was not to preserve original plot lines and intentions but to call
attention to the ways data mining and creative data analysis can
produce startling juxtapositions and new, far-from-intended,
meanings.
Social media has also highlighted the pliable nature of time and
space in globalization, with its tendency to increase speed and shrink
distance. What is the human experience of time in such
circumstances? One notable theatrical response to this question was
Robert Lepage and Ex Machina’s 2001 Zulu Time, a “techno-cabaret”
collaboration with musician Peter Gabriel (see Figure 15.6). The title
refers to what the military and civil aviation call Greenwich Mean Time
(GMT), the central – if somewhat arbitrary – point of reference for
setting time across the world. The piece was divided up into 26
sections, one for each letter of the alphabet used in aviation radio
transmissions (from A for Alpha to Z for Zulu). Each section featured a
setting where time seems suspended – in waiting areas, airport
restaurants and bars, hotel rooms, terminal walkways, and so forth,
most having to do with travel and the in-between state that travel
produces (neither here/home nor there/away). The stage set design
was multi-level and dynamic and included film and video projections;
the acrobatic actors moved between levels and interacted with flying
insect- and animal-like robots. Each vignette was distinct and not
overtly connected to the others in terms of character, plot, or even
dramatic tone. Theatre scholar Patrice Pavis describes the production
this way:
Characters talk in different languages; a lounge singer croons and tells
jokes in Spanish and German, which no one understands; a woman
listens to her erotic messages in a hotel room; we watch a screen display
of a pregnant woman’s unborn baby as she undergoes a hospital scan.
Though characters do meet (and even dance and make love) the
vignettes are generally far more about isolation and disconnection. The
flight attendants, terrorists, drug-traffickers, and other dazed, time-lagged
travelers are misplaced, lonely, and predominantly alone. . . . [I]n the
sleepy somnambulance of transatlantic flight, each abandons his or her
body to become “a machine that defies time, catches up with it, or at
least neutralizes it, a short moment of eternity”
(quoted in Dixon 2007: 521).
Figure 15.6A scene from Robert Lepage's Zulu Time (2001).

Source: Photo: Emmanuel Valette

In Zulu Time, air travel becomes a symbol of globalization’s ability to
collapse time and space together, producing at once the opportunity
for high-level connectedness and extreme isolation. One of the
scenes was eerily prescient of an event that would itself indelibly mark
a certain day as a watershed moment in recent world history: in the “K
for Kilo” section, a “bearded, turban-wearing Arab finishes his prayers,
wires up a bomb in his briefcase, and puts on a pilot’s uniform. The
stage area suddenly transforms to the inside of an aircraft, complete
with flight attendants” (Dixon 2007: 519). This scene caused the
cancellation of the show’s North American premiere in New York City,
scheduled for 10 days after September 11, 2001.
That date has indeed become a pivotal point in world history. There
is now a new world, marked “post-9/11,” and theatre has registered its
effects.
 Theatre In Response To 9/11
The post-9/11 world has produced new challenges for performance, as
theatre artists have grappled with the question of representing the enormity of
such an event. Some, like Michael Simon Hall’s multimedia performance
Pieces of Paper (2010) have focused on the stories of rescue volunteers who
worked in the rubble in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the World
Trade Center towers. The title refers to the many pieces of paper that have
since become historical records of the events – handwritten signs seeking
missing persons, notes volunteers posted for each other, inventory lists, and
so forth.
Other plays, such as Sarah Tuft’s 110 Stories (2003), explore the
experiences of others directly affected – first responders, nurses, journalists,
homeless eyewitnesses. The title refers to the number of floors in the World
Trade Center Towers 1 and 2, and has been used in other contexts – including
an augmented reality app that allows the Twin Towers to be drawn into a
smartphone photograph taken when the phone is oriented toward the Trade
Center; photographers can then post their pictures and 50-word captions to a
website that serves as a “global repository of memories.”
The memories of those ostracized by narrow interpretations of the roots of
9/11– notably, Muslims and people mistaken for Muslims – have been the
subject of other works. For example, Rohina Malik explored the female
experience of this perspective in her one-woman show, Unveiled (2009), in
which she played five Muslim women living in the West, post-9/11. And still
other works, such as Sean Farrell’s 2002 Life Separates Us, take up what
happens to everyday people who try to live normal lives in a new high-security
world.
This world has produced new audiences for theatre as well, including the
kinds who are hidden behind surveillance cameras. There are artists who
create performances especially for the security cameras now proliferating in
street corners and city buildings, with the intention of motivating spectators
and passers-by to contemplate and question the increasing role surveillance
plays in their lives. One of the principal groups associated with this activity
actually pre-dates 9/11: in 1996, the Surveillance Camera Players of New York
City staged Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi at the subway station at 14th Street and
Union Square. Most of their work since then has been the performance of
various plays, in silence, for surveillance cameras in places such as
Rockefeller Center, Washington Square Park, and Times Square.

Immersive theatre
In the second decade of this century, immersive theatre has been a
prevalent trend. In this theatre, audiences play some kind of a role in
the action of the play in performance, whether as witness or as
character. Often, as in the case of Shuffle, they are allowed to roam
freely around the performance space, choosing the order of their
experience much as surfers on the internet move from point to point
on the web. At times they may be invited by the performers to take a
more active role in the action.
Immersive theatre seems to be inspired by a number of factors in
networked culture: the associative logic of browsing, the increasingly
immersive environment of “choose your adventure” online and video
games, and possibly a sense of wanting to get out and interact with
live human beings, albeit in the kind of impersonal way conditioned by
social media, which can produce a sense of isolation despite its being
all about connectivity. At the time of writing, two of the better-known
examples of immersive theatre are Punchdrunk’s production of Sleep
No More (2003), based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Third Rail
Projects’ Then She Fell (2012), inspired by Lewis Carroll’s life and
writings, including his Alice in Wonderland.
Originally developed in London in 2003, Sleep No More has been
restaged in Boston and New York. In Boston the playing space was an
old school building; in New York, three abandoned warehouses were
converted for the purpose into the fictional “McKittrick Hotel,” featuring
nearly a hundred different playing spaces distributed among five
floors. The rooms in this hotel (named after the hotel in Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1958 film, Vertigo), are not typical hotel rooms; rather, they
range from indoor spaces such as shops, padded cells, and doctor’s
offices to outdoor spaces such as a cemetery. After entering the first-
floor lounge, audience members are given masks to wear, then move
on to other floors and rooms, where they witness the actions that take
place within them – all silent, all inspired in some way by the
Shakespearean original, but in style not historically accurate, as the
unmasked performers wear makeup and costume evocative of the
style of film noir. Audience members are free to follow the actor/action
of their choice, or to move around from place to place, in groups or
alone, or to explore the other areas of the “hotel,” for up to three hours,
and are also free to leave whenever they wish. (Figure 15.7).

Figure 15.7Masked audience members surround a silent actor performing alone

in a room/scene of Sleep No More, New York production.

Source: Sleep No More/Yaniv Schulman.

A number of factors make the experience of Sleep No More
something like a live version of a video or online role-playing game.
The masks worn by the audience members protect their anonymity,
also enjoyed by players in such games. As in immersive online
environments like Second Life or World of Warcraft, they are free to
explore the space as they wish, and to follow their curiosity where it
may lead them – or not. Because there is no spoken language or
prescribed order to the scenes a given audience member might
experience, it is up to individual audience members to create for
themselves any narrative throughline. Far from having any kind of
“unified action,” Sleep No More gathers audience members at the
beginning of the night in the lounge and then sends them off to
different floors, and doesn’t bring them back together until the very
end of the performance when everyone watches the banquet scene.
And yet, the choices are not infinite and completely open-ended, and
neither are audience members meant to do more than witness the
action; they do not influence it or direct it in any way.
Although there are some similarities to Sleep No More, Third Rail’s
Then She Fell is a very different type of immersive theatre. Like Sleep
No More, it is based on other work – in this case, the life and work of
Lewis Carroll, familiarity with which helps to situate the spectator in its
otherwise dreamlike landscape. Audience members are encouraged
to rummage through the cabinets, trunks, and drawers containing
Carroll’s writings and other items. It too is staged in a found space, this
time the Greenpoint Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, with rooms set up
as individual performance spaces that audience members move into
and out of. But Then She Fell allows only 15 (unmasked) audience
members at a time to participate, breaking them up into increasingly
smaller groups as they travel through the spaces, their routes
controlled by company members. They may end up alone with one
actor by the end of the evening. As a result, Then She Fell makes for a
more intimate experience than Sleep No More.
As social networking technology can lead to both expansive
socializing and increased isolation, so can immersive live theatre work
in both directions. The actors may interact more with the audience
members, but only as their characters or personae. Sleep No More
audience members stay safely behind their masks, while individual
Then She Fell audience members grow increasingly separated from
the other 14 members. In this sense, is immersive theatre radically
different from theatre that has come before? To some degree, theatre
has also always produced this tension, functioning both as a social
space that can generate dialogue, and as an event experienced
differently from audience member to audience member, each of whom
arrives with individual sets of desires and expectations, and leaves
with independent personal reflections.
Postdramatic theatre
The work of Punchdrunk and Third Rail Projects, which is developed
collectively and compels audiences to be more active than traditional
spectators, calls attention to another hallmark of networked culture:
interaction and collaboration. Such work often relies more on the
pleasures of the immersion and discovery within the performance
event, than on absorptions into ordered plots and character dramas.
Theatre that emphasizes experience over narrative, plot, or character
has been coined “postdramatic theatre” by German performance
scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann (1999). Lehmann includes a variety of
performance forms in his study, ranging from visual and performance
art to stage plays and from single-authored works to collective
creations. What characterizes this work is another kind of
immersiveness, in which the dramatic text – if there is one – is
subsumed to the other meaning-making elements of the production,
including the acting, design, direction, and audience (see Figure 15.8).

Figure 15.8British playwright Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis, an exploration of

depression, features no character attribution or stage directions, and is one
example of a postdramatic theatre. Shown here in the U.S. premiere are, from
left, Jo McInnes, Marin Ireland, and Jason Hughes.

Source: © Sara Krulwich/New York Times/Redux/eyevine.

 Experiments with form and against narrative in drama were certainly
taking place in the various avant-garde periods of theatre history
described earlier in this book. Lehmann argues that recent
postdramatic theatre marks a paradigm shift away from the centrality
of dramatic action, and toward a more interactive experience both
among the elements of production and between the production and
audience. For Lehmann, the point of such theatre is expressly not to
communicate something; rather, it is about proximity of and to the
various elements involved in the theatre experience – in other words,
a privileging of presence and aggregation over ultimate
communicative effect. While multiple factors in theatre history have
contributed to the emergence of postdramatic theatre, some aspects
may seem familiar to students of networked culture, with its
decentered, non-hierarchical approach to meaning-making, and the
freedom it allows users to make their own connections and
conclusions.
Collaborative theatre devisement
Throughout much of theatre history, hierarchies have tended to
prevail, with companies and productions centering themselves on a
playwright, a playtext, a star performer, or more recently, a director
held to be the key person responsible for the overall experience. But
since the 1960s there has been a trend toward collaborative theatrical
devising by an ensemble or theatre collective. (Some historians trace
the devising impulse back to commedia dell’arte – see Chapter 4.) An
early commercial example was the dark musical comedy Oh, What a
Lovely War! (1963), developed by the Theatre Workshop under Joan
Littlewood’s direction. Drawing on the tradition of the English music
hall, the piece was meant to expose in an ironic mode the horrors and
vulgarity of war. It was performed by actors in Pierrot costumes,
wearing First World War helmets and singing tunes originally meant to
glorify the war. Much of the work in theatre for social change
discussed in Chapter 14 has considered the democratic process of
devisement to be as important as the end results, when that process
adopts a consciously egalitarian approach. Networked culture has
accelerated this trend.
 Increasingly, work is being brought to the stage that has not been
authored by a single playwright but rather devised by a group of
actors, sometimes with, sometimes without a director. While collective
creation does not necessarily result in non-linear plot structures, much
devised theatre of recent years does tend to resemble scenic
variations on a theme – which are often developed through ensemble
improvisation – than a straightforward development of plot, navigated
by recognizable characters portrayed by actors trained in
psychological realism or Method Acting.
Devised theatre today often starts with an idea or an inspiration,
which the group explores together to bring to the stage. For example,
in 2012 Washington DC’s Impossible Theater Company began a
project simply with the idea of “missed connections.” The company
members’ widely varying ideas were discussed, debated, and
improvised upon over the course of six months before being
condensed into an 80-minute piece called [missed connections]
(Figure 15.9), which revolved around the question: “If you had one
chance to be the person you always wanted to be, what would you
do?” (Desaulniers 2012).
Figure 15.9Roommates Penny (Heather Carter) and Dawn (Ava Jackson)
prepare for the end of the world in Impossible Theater's [missed connections],
conceived and directed by Nick Jonczak and devised by members of the
company.

Source: Impossible Theater/Paul B. Jones.

The company’s six-month rehearsal schedule would be a luxury for
most commercially oriented theatre. Devised theatre does not fit easily
into existing producing structures, and for Equity houses especially
such theatre would be extremely expensive. Still, Vanessa Garcia of
the Florida-based ensemble touring troupe The Krane considers how
“going mainstream” for devising companies might benefit theatre in
general:
Technology, which so often aids and abets devised theater, is trying to
obliterate surface, after all. Our computers are getting thinner and
thinner, inching towards a kind of space where there will be no surface,
only a digital projection in air. And so, how do we make art in a world that
seems obsessed with surface – a surface that is, technologically, and,
 ironically, about to disappear? The answer for theater, I believe, lies in
devised theater – an art form that plays upon multiple surfaces in flux
(the human body for one), and multimedia – all in order to reinstate a
kind of underground. In a world in which surface is fetishized, devised
theater tells the viewer, now you see surface, now you don’t, playing with
the appearance and disappearance of said surface and echoing back,
always, towards something deeper.
(Garcia 2013)

Our final case study considers a particular form of theatre in which the
interplay between surface and depth – not to mention modern and
ancient, technological and human, aesthetic and political, and local
and global – all feature prominently: Hip Hop theatre.
Case Study Hip Hop theatre
Tamara Underiner
In 2004, Regina Taylor’s Drowning Crow premiered on Broadway,
three years after its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre in
Chicago. An adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, it was set in the
present-day Gullah Islands of South Carolina, with an African-
American cast. Like the original, it featured a main character suffering
from unrequited love, and struggling with his desire to forge a new
form of theatre, one that would depart from the tired, “sold-out”
traditions of the stage to capture the sensibility of a new age. In
Chekhov’s play, the new form was Russian symbolism. In Taylor’s, it
was Hip Hop theatre.
For many in the theatre world, Hip Hop theatre indeed represents a
contemporary and necessary break from a mainstream theatre culture
perceived as elitist and entrenched in outmoded themes and means of
production. For others, it is mainstream theatre’s best hope for the
future. Practitioners understand that Hip Hop theatre emerges from
within a larger international culture of the same name, one with its own
worldview, ethics, and aesthetics, and that this culture has ancient
roots. Born of political struggle and creative urgency, this culture
represents not only a rupture with mainstream culture – which often
works to commercialize and absorb it – but also a continuity with
African-derived performance traditions that are themselves thousands
of years old.
In this case study, we examine Hip Hop theatre both as an
emergent performance form and as a historiographic practice in itself
– that is, as a way of telling history. We cover its own history,
aesthetics, worldview, and relationship to culture – both ancient and
contemporary – paying particular attention to its innovative use of
communication technologies. For every form of communication is
present in Hip Hop theatre: from oral and written expression through
highly mediated production and distribution technologies, with stylized
vocabularies of movement and gesture added to the mix.
Hip Hop history, worldview, and aesthetics
Most narratives of Hip Hop culture situate its origins in the economic
collapse of New York City in the early 1970s, particularly in the Bronx,
but similar expressions arose in other urban centers as well at the
same time. As white flight to the suburbs left behind unsaleable
properties in the urban cores, absentee landlords found it more
profitable to burn their holdings to the ground and collect the
insurance money than to convert them to affordable housing;
meanwhile, municipalities created policies of “planned shrinkage” that
resulted in dispossession, unemployment, reduced social services,
and increased poverty. Many responses to this situation were violent,
as rival gangs fought over shrinking territory. The first artistic
responses were made by visual artists, using inexpensive materials
like aerosol paint, sprayed on available surfaces like building walls
and subway train cars – these were the precursors to the aerosol art
form known as Hip Hop writing. Of course these artistic expressions
were not seen as such by building owners and transit authorities, but
that was part of the artists’ point: to assert a creative presence in the
face of forced displacement, marginalization, and accelerated urban
“decay.”
With ever-decreasing opportunities to gather together, some young
people with good record collections and the right equipment – among
them Cindy Campbell and her brother Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash,
Grand Wizard Theodore, and Afrika Bambaataa – began playing
recorded music in public parks and basketball courts (DJ’ing). Before
long they had developed a particular technique of playing records on
more than one turntable, enhancing and combining them with digital
synthesizers (sampling and remixing), and incorporating spoken word,
rhythmically delivered (rapping, MC’ing). The gathered young people
soon developed new dance styles in response to the sampled and
repeated breakbeat manipulated by the DJs’ techniques, including
breakdancing, locking (and eventually on the West Coast, popping).
Soon, B-boys and B-girls began to engage in competitions of dance
moves or improvisational spoken wordplay – battling, where two
contestants face each other from within a circle formed by their
communities of supporters (the Hip Hop cipher). These forms came
before the advent of Hip Hop culture and then were integrated and
innovated within it (see Figure 15.10).
The content of these performances is both explicit and coded. Many
spoken word performances and rap songs call specific attention to the
histories of oppression, police brutality, and economic exploitation that
have produced the pervasive disenfranchisement of economically and
culturally marginalized young people in some urban areas. They do so
through recourse to a new vocabulary that has worked its way into
mainstream culture, a vocabulary of word, movement, fashion, and
gesture that calls members into a growing, global community. This
community is networked through Hip Hop academies, workshops, and
theatre festivals now appearing in many world capitals. Cultural
historian Jeff Chang calls Hip Hop “one of the big ideas of this
generation, a grand expression of our collective creative powers”
(2006: x). As such, this “big idea” encompasses a worldview that
extends beyond the form’s aesthetic elements, even as those
elements have come to influence virtually every genre and form of
artistic expression.
Figure 15.10B-boys breakdancing in San Francisco, 2008. As Hip Hop has
become more popular, the cipher has expanded to include tourists and passers-
by.

Hip Hop has generally followed two different (but sometimes

overlapping) trajectories over the past three decades. One path
encompasses the commercialization of “urban black culture” in music
and fashion that is sold, in large measure, to white consumers; rap
music’s excesses of strong language, provocative sexuality, and
(hetero)sexist perspectives have been widely decried by both sides of
the conservative/liberal spectrum. The other path is a more grassroots
movement that connects practitioners globally from the ground up,
and understands itself as both a culture and an art form that proclaims
unity, peaceful resolution of conflict, democratic participation, and
targeted social analysis and critique, and can serve as an “effective
organizing tool for reaching youth and disenfranchised populations”
(Uno 2006: 300).
Hip Hop theatre: Roots, functions, structures, and themes
To understand Hip Hop theatre’s emergence and importance, it is
important to keep the distinction between the two trajectories in mind,
focusing less on the commercial lifestyle and more on the deep
traditions upon which the more grassroots movement draws.
According to Danny Hoch, founder of the New York Hip-Hop Theater
Festival, the aesthetics that inform Hip Hop theatre have as much to
do with New York’s demographics as they do with the socio-economic
circumstances that produced so much urban blight and bleakness:
Southern blacks living alongside Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Jamaicans
and a handful of working-poor whites, all of whom drew upon both
inherited and appropriated cultures in the face of urban decay and
accelerated technology – created a legacy of art forms and language
that would wind up being inherited by various races, colors and classes
around the world.
(Hoch 2004)

Like the indigenous and diasporic African and American cultures from
which it draws, Hip Hop theatre has shown itself to be a capacious
form that can absorb many influences and in turn influence many
other forms. The “inherited cultures” include those of the African and
Caribbean continuum of storytelling and art, manifest in the
“polycultural traditions of immigrants and migrants” (Hoch 2004). The
“appropriated cultures” include European traditions, amplified through
Japanese audio-visual technologies.
In its insistence on the power of the live, spoken word, artists and
scholars see parallels between the MC and the storytelling traditions
of Africa – specifically, the griot or griotte storyteller of West Africa
(described in Chapter 1), and the djeli of Mande, the person who
carries culture in stories, song, dances, riddles, and proverbs, oral
traditions from which Hip Hop derives its status as a “method of
sustenance and sustainability” (Banks 2011: 12). While in its rhythmic
wordplay there are parallels with a variety of other performance
traditions and types, including Djelyi, kabuki theatre, R&B, opera
recitative, and the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, in most cases
the content of Hip Hop theatre is of urgent social, community, or
spiritual concern. Poet/playwright/head Marc Bamuthi Joseph has
spoken of the DJ’s function as a community historiographer, telling the
stories from the perspective of the people s/he represents, particularly
young people.
Like Hip Hop, spoken word reflects American diversity and engenders a
community of young artists who reach across demographic boundaries
toward self-exploration and growth, providing a platform where conflicts
are resolved on the page or the stage, rather than on the street.
(Joseph 2006: 17).

Among others, scholar/Hip Hop theatre artist Daniel Banks has

argued that Hip Hop theatre exits on a historico-cultural continuum
that includes epic poetry and the classic tragedy of ancient Greece:
“Within a Hip Hop Theatre audience, there is a spectrum of trauma,
oppression, and marginalization, and Hip Hop Theatre, perhaps like
Athenian tragedy, is a safe space in which to express concerns,
rehearse empowerment, and imagine solutions” (Banks 2010: 242). As
Banks points out, there are some distinct theatrical predecessors as
well – among them, the non-linear poetic and political drama of the
Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and later work that
incorporated text, music, and movement, often in a non-linear plotline,
specifically to tell the stories of the disenfranchised. Some appeared
on Broadway; many more in communities far from its “Great White
Way” – such as through the work of Junebug Productions in New
Orleans and Cultural Odyssey in San Francisco.
From these diverse yet intertwined roots, Hip Hop theatre emerged
in the early 1990s. Multidisciplinary performance and visual artist Holly
Bass was the first to use the term “hip-hop theatre” in print, in 1999, in
reference to its status as a special category of performance in the
National Black Theatre Festival that year in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. Jeff Chang situates its debut on stage seven years earlier
with GhettOriginal Production Dance Company’s 1992 production of
So What Happens Now? at PS 122 in New York City, about the rise
and fall of 1980s-style B-boying. This production inspired Hoch, Clyde
Valentin, Kamilah Forbes, and others to establish the first Hip-Hop
Theater Festival in New York City in 2000.
 Playwright/poet Eisa Davis, who is credited with popularizing the
term among practitioners, speaks to this theatre’s capacity for both
specificity and inclusion:

I like the name “hip-hop theatre,” because when it’s ascriptive, voluntary
and utilized by a self-described hip-hop generation that speaks through
theatre, we are found in translation. Finally, a form that describes and
comprises our multi-ness. When U.K.-based artist Benji Reid dances his
monologues, it’s new, and it’s the best kind of new – the kind that plays
with conventions and serves up their permutations. And we’ve got all
kinds of historical precedents. Art forms progress when they mimic other
art forms, whether it’s Langston Hughes writing the blues on the page or
Aaron Copland building symphonies from folk tunes or Lee Strasberg
bringing the therapist’s couch into acting. The purists shriek, the open-
minded are jazzed, and the culture follows.
(Davis 2004)

Further, Hip Hop theatre allies political urgency to ritual function,

which as we’ve seen, has long been associated with theatre in many
times and places:
Like any culture’s ritual theater, Hip Hop Theater is where members from
within the culture come for reassurance, to find the values of the culture
reiterated, to hear the history retold, and to locate ourselves inside of our
own cultural frame. It is not just about information. Equally important is
the cultural mind-set and logic. In terms of form, a Hip Hop head will,
most likely, feel at home in a poetic, nonlinear, fragmented narrative with
multiple ethnicities represented on the stage and multiple languages
spoken. And the storytelling would almost certainly need to be
interdisciplinary.
(Banks 2011: 11)

The theatrical expression of this mindset and logic has manifested

itself in a wide variety of original works and classical adaptations.
Banks’s comments appear in the introduction to his edited anthology
of Hip Hop plays, Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater (2011),
which organizes its nine plays according to the formal categories
“Spoken Word Theater,” which focuses on heightened, poetic
language; “Hip Hop Theater Plays,” which both reference and include
specific elements of Hip Hop culture; and “Solo Performance,” which
Banks argues manifest the links to a long tradition of oral culture and
storytelling. A haunting example of the first category is Rickerby
Hinds’s Dreamscape, based on a true story of a 19-year-old African-
American woman who was shot to death by a policeman while she
was sleeping in her car. As the DJ/coroner attempts to categorize
each of the 12 bullet wounds that led to her death, the young woman
dances scenes of her childhood and more recent past. By the end of
the play, her line, “You know me,” challenges the audience to move
past viewing her as yet another unfortunate statistic. “Hip Hop Theater
Plays” feature characters in plotlines aimed at recovering Hip Hop
history, dealing with contemporary issues of self-expression in what is
often viewed as an illicit art form, or, as in the case of Zakkiyah
Alexander’s Blurring Shine, provide a blistering critique of the larger
cultural industries that exploit young men in Hip Hop culture. The
section on solo performances includes the link to a storyboard and
script of a beatbox theatre piece, From Tel Aviv to Ramallah, by
Rachel Havrelock with Yuri Lane and Sharif Ezzat, which tells the
story of two young men living on either side of the border between
Israel and Palestine. This piece illustrates the scope of Hip Hop’s
reach and speaks to its “ethic of inclusion” (Banks 2011: 1).
This scope and ethic is also manifest in dramaturg Kim Euell and
playwright Robert Alexander’s 2009 anthology, Playz from the Boom
Box Galaxy, whose ten works are organized according to their content
rather than their form. The plays collected under the theme
“ruminations on identity” focus on the playwrights’ search for individual
self-formation within and against institutional archetypes and
stereotypes of race, class, and gender. Whereas these plays tend to
focus on personal and internal struggles, those in the next section,
“cautionary tales,” target the institutions themselves and the ways that
capitalism intersects with racism and sexism to produce many forms
of social violence. The plays in the final section, “transformationals,”
deepen the relationships and tensions between self and society,
marshaling spirituality and creativity as key conditions for cultural
survival.
Figure 15.11Aya de León's Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming of Hip-Hop
(2003) is a one-woman show that critiques sexism in Hip Hop. Among other
characters, she plays a DJ with a form of Tourette's syndrome that forces him to
reveal his sensitive side, and a blonde sex object on the verge of a nervous
breakdown.

Many writers refer to Hip Hop theatre as a “genre,” which suggests

a similarity of form, style, structure, or subject matter across its
productions. What makes Hip Hop theatre recognizably “Hip Hop,”
however, is not so easy to pin down. To be sure, most plays explore
some aspect of contemporary Hip Hop culture in their subject matter,
even as they may draw on sources deep in African history, and most
feature language drawn from well inside Hip Hop culture. Most also
include one or more of Hip Hop’s four principal elements (DJ’ing,
MC’ing, breaking, and writing graffiti), but that is not required. For
example, Ben Snyder’s 2001 In Case You Forget is about a young
graffiti writer’s awakening to both love and political commitment; but
its form is straightforward realism, no music or dancing is called for,
and its action unfolds over two tightly structured acts covering the
days before the main character will be sentenced to serve time. In
general, however, Hip Hop theatre favors other styles over straight
realism. Many plays follow a more epic, Brechtian structure, in which
the action is episodic and interspersed with song and dance numbers
or parodic interludes, and the fourth wall is broken (if it is even there to
begin with) by DJs and MCs and choruses, which function much as
they did in ancient Greece.
While many Hip Hop plays deal with tragic events and their
aftermath, others have employed rollicking comedy. Kristoffer Diaz’s
2002 Welcome to Arroyo’s, for example, uses the DJ/rapper duo of
Trip Goldstein and Nelson Cardenal (aka the “Tripnel Cartel”) to
narrate, interrupt, comment on, and sometimes even rewind and
replay the action developing over the play’s 39 short scenes. These
scenes combine two love stories with a mystery about a Latina DJ,
and point to Latina contributions to early Hip Hop culture.
Whereas some Hip Hop plays experiment with dramatic structure
(e.g., Dreamscape), others are distinguished for their experiments with
character and language. Chadwick Boseman’s 2005 Deep Azure
includes the allegorical character of “Street Knowledge,” described as
a “Duo angelic chorus” comprising Twin Lovers: Street Knowledge of
Good (SK Good) and “Street Knowledge of Evil” (SK Evil), who
transform into other characters in a play exploring the aftermath of a
wrongful death by police – a common Hip Hop thematic (Banks 2011:
93). Deep Azure is written almost completely in verse that sounds both
like spoken word and like Shakespeare. In the following passage, SK
Evil ponders the truth behind the killing (“prince” refers to the victim,
Bloods and Crip to rival gangs who wear red and blue, respectively):
Sk Evil: To what set and name falls the blame of this heinous deed?
Witnesses saw no Bloods, ’cept blood the prince did bleed
And though that boy was of blue, he showed no signs of Crip
But hear this lie, more true than truth from my very lips.
T’was an officer of “peace” that waged war on our warrior of light
How this brutality came to a fatality one night, that is the question.
What had he done? Possession?
No gun. No boat. No bud. No crack. No transgression.
The poetic rhythms here invoke two cultures – Hip Hop and
Elizabethan – and, for Banks, serve to decenter Shakespeare’s place
in the history of dramatic storytelling, placing him on a continuum
between oral culture and Hip Hop. Perhaps this shift is also registered
in the fact that Hip Hop theatre and spoken-word open mikes have
begun to appear in a number of Shakespeare festivals around the
world. While clearly there is an audience-development component to
this phenomenon, it is also worth pointing out the growing scholarship
on the similarities between spoken word and Shakespeare, which
notes affinities of lyrical and rhythmic complexity, and in the demands
on the listener made by both. A 2014 study by designer/coder/data
analyst Matt Daniels determined that some rap music artists’
vocabularies and new word coinages are, in fact, larger than
Shakespeare’s over a similar body of work.
Hip Hop theatre is also known for its “remixes” of the classics, as
suggested in the example of Drowning Crow above, with Greek
tragedy and Shakespeare as frequent sources. While Hip Hop has the
potential to create vibrant new interpretations of classic texts, Hoch
and others are concerned that such remixings will be taken simply as
bids for legitimacy, casting Hip Hop elements as adornment rather
than serious artistry, or sacrificing opportunities to stage stories
emerging from Hip Hop culture itself. (All of these are possible
interpretations of Drowning Crow, an adaptation of one of Chekhov’s
most open-to-interpretation plays.)
Thus, content and intent matter as much as form and structure. For
Hoch, what makes a Hip Hop play a Hip Hop play is not that it includes
all or even any of Hip Hop’s four principal elements of DJ’ing, MC’ing,
breaking, or writing graffiti. It is instead that it must be “by, about and
for the Hip Hop generation, participants in Hip Hop culture or both”
(Hoch 2004, original emphasis). Finally, Hip Hop playwright Will Power
argues for a “fifth element” of Hip Hop culture as important as the first
four: collective knowledge production. Seen this way, Hip Hop theatre
serves for today’s performers and audiences much the same function
discussed in Part I: as a key preserver of social memory for a culture
not content to allow larger narratives to constrain or co-opt it.
 Theatre historians and critics play a role in documenting and
preserving this form of social memory as well, but have some catching
up to do. As Roberta Uno, founder of the New World Theater in
Amherst, reminds us,
Hip-hop artists state that critics lack a genre exposure. . . . They may like
what they see without knowing breaking from B’boying; popping from
locking; or toprocking from uprocking – the point is that even when hip-
hop forms are noticed, they are not understood or critiqued from within
the discipline vocabulary. This type of technical knowledge is as
important as historical, cultural and self-knowledge. At the end of the
day, it is this fifth element, glaringly absent from the marketplace, that
may provide the space where art can flourish.
(Uno 2006: 305)

The immensely popular Broadway production of Hamilton (2015)

illustrates Uno’s point. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s (1980–) musical
prominently features elements of Hip Hop music and dance in an
otherwise period piece, set in the quarter century following the
American revolution of 1776. Widely acclaimed by audiences and
critics, it has been praised for its deft homage to, and reimagining of,
America’s past, through the lens of a multi-racial present. But not
every reviewer acknowledges Hip Hop’s contributions, because they
have not been trained to recognize or critique it in the same way they
would other elements of theatrical production. Hamilton’s popularity
may be the incentive for critics to “get real.”
Daniel Banks calls Hip Hop theatre the “theater of now” (2011: 20). It
will be interesting to see if future historians, with their penchant for
assigning labels that characterize an era, will look back at this period
of theatre history and call it something like the “age of Hip Hop.” Or,
considering the success of Hamilton as evidence of Hip Hop’s
capacity to absorb and influence other forms, perhaps it will always be
known as the “theatre of now.”
Key references
Banks, D. (2010) “From Homer to Hip Hop: Orature and Griots, Ancient
and Present,” Classical World 103(2) (Winter): 238–45.
 Banks, D. (ed.) (2011) Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bass, H. (1999) “Blowin’ Up the Set,” American Theater 16(9)
(November): 18–20.
Chang, J. (ed.) (2006) Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-
Hop, New York: Basic Civitas Books.
Davis, E. (2004) “Found in Translation: Hip-Hop Theatre Fuses the
Thought and the Word, the Rhythm and the Rhyme, the Old and the
New,” https://www.tcg.org/publications/at/JulyAugust04/translation.cfm
(Accessed May 31, 2014).
Euell, K. and R. Alexander (2009) Playz from the Boom Box Galaxy,
New York: Theatre Communications Group Books.
George, N. (1993) “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth,”
The Source (November): 44–50.
George, N. (2005) Hip Hop America, New York: Penguin Books.
Hoch, D. (2004) “Here We Go, Yo . . . A Manifesto for a New Hip-Hop
Arts Movement,” http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/dec04/go.cfm
(Accessed May 31, 2014).
Joseph, M.B. (2006) “(Yet Another) Letter to a Young Poet,” in J.
Chang (ed.) Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, New
York: Basic Civitas Books, 11–17.
Uno, R. (2006) “Theatres Crossing the Divide: A Baby Boomer’s
Defense of Hip-Hop Aesthetics,” in J. Chang (ed.) Total Chaos: The
Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 300–5.
A special shout-out to Daniel Banks for his insights in the
development of this case study.
Summary: Thinking Through Theatre Histories
In this chapter, we have considered how theatre has registered the
influence of networked culture on the most basic elements of
performer, stage, and performance type. More than ever, the
experience of a play has come to depend not on the meanings “held”
in a pre-written script authored by a single playwright, but in the
complex interplay among a variety of factors, including collective
devising and audience participation, that are manifest both on stage
and online. We have seen how theatre’s manipulation of new social
media and other technologies has called attention to received notions
of time, space, bodies, and theatre itself. The adage that opened this
chapter situated theatre as a special event which takes place on “four
trestles and four boards” established for the purpose – but networked
culture has come increasingly to blur the lines between theatre and
everyday life, taking advantage of other platforms originally designed
for other purposes.
Some of this is new, to be sure, and some an extension of theatre’s
historic adaptability and responsiveness. Throughout this chapter and
this text, we have considered how communication practices shape
social structures and cultural dynamics, and how these cultural
dynamics in turn shape theatrical activity. Thinking through this
centuries-old interaction, we might ask ourselves the following
questions:

Throughout this book, we have seen theatre play a variety of

roles in society: as a way to convey religious knowledge and
values, especially in Chapter 3; as an instrument of state or
political control such as in chapters 2 and 6; as a form of political
activism in chapters 11 and 13; and of course in all periods, as a
form of entertainment. How and why does theatre change its
social role, and how does that affect its meaning and impact?
In Chapter 5, we discussed the way print culture fostered a sense
of personal interiority, and ultimately, individualism. How do
communication practices alter our understanding of selfhood and
the way we engage with the world?
 We saw in Chapter 7 that periodicals were crucial to the
development of the public and private spheres and the concept of
the nation-state. The larger question we can ask, then, is how do
communication practices affect the way we interact with each
other, and thereby influence the way we imagine and shape
society?
Chapter 9 considered photography’s role in the rise of positivist
philosophy, which portrays the world as wholly understandable
through sense perception and objective facts. In what ways do
communication practices shape our understanding of reality and
truth?
And how, finally, are such transformations manifested in
performer/audience relationships, acting styles, stage design,
character qualities, plot construction, and other aspects of
theatrical performance?

The sky has been declared to have fallen on theatre many times over
the period covered in Part IV, as communication technologies have
proliferated the possibilities for storytelling by other means. Yet the sky
remains above, where it now might share cloud space with Twitter
plays, and theatre continues to transform in response to these
evolving technologies. Some theatre artists have incorporated them
into the formal performance space, be it stage, gallery, or street;
others have engaged with it at the very level of its logic, exploring at a
fundamental level what theatre might be, do, and become in an
increasingly networked age. As it always has, theatre in this age
continues to offer us a distinctive glimpse of who we are, where we’ve
come from, and what we might become.
*
Part IV Works cited

Other consulted resources and additional readings for Part

IV are listed on the Theatre Histories website.
Audio-visual resources
Second-generation avant-gardes
“Futurism” website, including Marinetti’s manifesto and other
documents: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/.
“MoMA Dada”:
http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/dada.
“Russian American Dramatic Arts Theatre: Meyerhold’s Production
of The Fairground Booth”:
https://sites.google.com/site/arttheatrestudio/meyerhold-s-production-
of-the-fairground-booth. This site has information about the
production, a few pictures, and a YouTube video at the bottom of the
page about Meyerhold, theatre, and the Russian avant-garde.
“Surrealism” websites include http://surrealism-plays.com/ and the
British Research Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies
site: http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk.
“UbuWeb: Historical,” a resource for the historical documents and
manifestos on Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism, is at
http://www.ubu.com/historical/.
“Federal Theatre Project Collection,” website (Library of Congress),
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/.
Chinese theatre
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. Film version of the play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyvXeQCQpCU (without subtitles).
For a 2-minute video with English voiceover about the 2015 Oregon
Shakespeare production, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=6hmQvd-radI.
The White-Haired Girl (1950), website with film_
http://archive.org/details/the_white_haired_girl.
 Yang Ban Xi: The Eight Model Works (2006) can be watched on
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/114648184.
Postwar theatre
The Samuel Beckett On-Line Resources and Links Pages
(http://samuel-beckett.net/) contains an impressive number of links to
reviews of Beckett plays, audio recordings of performances, links to
articles from the Journal of Beckett Studies, biographical information,
listings of video and audio recordings, critical essays, interviews, and
more.
Jerzy Grotowski: A recording of Akropolis is availbale through
Arthur Cantor Films in New York. The film Training at Grotowski’s
“Laboratorium” in Wrocław in 1972 can be purchased from
http://www.artfilms.co.uk. In addition, search YouTube for “Grotowski”
for clips of performances and training sessions.
The Living Theatre: Some clips of Paradise Now can be viewed on
YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ef51VmIWf8. There
is also a montage of excerpts from major productions: “A Video
Retrospective: The Living Theatre”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=KVeuNhmaTEQ.
Suzuki Tadashi: A film of his The Trojan Women (Toroia no Onna) is
in vol. 2 of The Theater Goer’s Collection, The Classics of
Contemporary Japanese Theater, DVDs published by Kazumo Co.,
Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. In addition, search YouTube for “Suzuki training”
for clips of training sessions.
Robert Wilson: There are numerous excerpts of his work on
YouTube, plus a two-part documentary called Einstein on the Beach:
the changing face of opera.
Globalized, localized, and political performance
Augusto Boal and Theater of the Oppressed: YouTube has several
videos demonstrating exercises and applications of Boal’s methods,
and a short 2-part interview from 2007.
Bread and Puppet Theater: A three-part documentary called Ah!
The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet can be found at
https://archive.org/. Excerpts of shows are available on YouTube.
 Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s production has been made into a film
and TV mini-series; visit IMDB. Excerpts also appear on YouTube.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: A 30-minute documentary called Two
Amerindians Visit is available from Data Bank in Chicago. See also
the documentary “Couple in a Cage”: http://vimeo.com/79363320.
The Hemispheric Institute
(http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/hidvl) has an extensive
collection of online performance videos including:

Latin American theatre such as Yuyachkani and FOMMA

Social-group focused theatre such as Split Britches and El Teatro
Campesino
Performance artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Hip Hop performers such as Danny Hoch

Mega-musicals: There are many YouTube videos offering flavors of

(and in some case full) productions of mega-musicals such as
Phantom of the Opera and Hamilton.
Theatre in networked culture
Chilean Students “Thriller” Protest: see
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/chilethriller-protest-
students-michaeljackson-dance_n_884531.html>.
Gertie the Dinosaur and Winsor McCay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmVra1mW7LU.
George Coates Performance Works:
http://stevemobia.com/WriteSubPages/George_Coates.htm.
Hirata Ozira interview:
http://performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/0703/1.html.
Stelarc: A clip of “Amplified Body” is at http://v2.nl/events/amplified-
body. He explains “Ear on Arm” at http://stelarc.org/?catID=20242.
Street with a View: http://benkinsley.com/street-with-a-view/.
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Drama: Ten Plays. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Rouse, J. (1992) “Textuality and Authority in Theater and Drama:
Some Contemporary Possibilities,” in J.G. Reinelt, and J.R.
Roach (eds) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Schechner, R. (1985, rpt. 2011) Between Theater and
Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Schechner, R. (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction,
London and New York: Routledge.
Senda, A. (1997) The Voyage of Contemporary Japanese
Theatre, trans. T. Rimer, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) (2014) “About SBB: Mission &
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(Accessed September 28, 2015).
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Singularities, New York: Random House.
Sorgenfrei, C.F. (2005a) “Remembering and Forgetting: Greek
Tragedy as National History in Postwar Japan,” in K. Gounaridou,
(ed.) Staging Nationalism, Jefferson, NY: McFarland and Co.
Sorgenfrei, C.F. (2005b) Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde
Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan, Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
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Williams, D. (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and The Mahabharata:
Critical Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge.
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Dream in the Theatre, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
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Musical Wicked,” Theatre Journal 60(1): 1–21.
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Pronunciation guide
Tobin Nellhaus
Pronunciations use common English spellings to approximate
foreign sounds; compare with the online pronunciations. “Gh”
represents the hard G as in get. Capitalized syllables are stressed.
Japanese is unstressed, but to avoid mispronunciations you may
lightly stress the first syllable. French normally stresses the last
syllable, although in some contexts the first syllable sounds stressed.
Term Pronunciation

Augura ahn-goo-rah
Aragoto ah-rah-goh-toh
Auteur OH-tu(r)
Auto sacramentai OW-toh sahk-rah-men-TAHL
Bhava PHAH-vuh
Bunraku boon-rah-koo
Butoh boo-toh
Capa y espada KAH-pa ee es-PAH-thah
Castrato, -ti kahs-TRAH-toh, -tee
Catharsis kah-THAHR-sis
Comedia koh-MEY-dee-ah
Comédie larmoyante koh-meh-dee LAHR-mwah-yawnt
Commedia dell’arte kohm-MAY-dee-ah dehl-AHR-tey
Commedia erudita kohm-MAY-dee-ah eh-roo-DEE-tah
Corral kohr-RAHL
Costumbrismo kos-toom-BREES-mo
Danmari dahm-mah-ree
Dengaku dehn-gah-koo
Deus ex machina deh-oos ex MAH-khee-nah
Dithyramb DIH-thih-ram
Egüngün EH-goon-goon
Einfühlung AHYN-few-lungk
Geisha gheh-sha
Geju
Gesamtkunstwerk ghe-ZAHMT-koonst-vehrk
Gestus GHE-stoos
Hanamichi hah-nah-mee-chee
Hashigakari hah-shee-gah-kah-ree
Term Pronunciation

Innamorato, -ta, -ti in-nah-moh-RAH-toh, -tah, -tee

Jingju jing ju

Kabuki kah-boo-kee
Kathakali kah-TAHK-ah-lee
Koken koh-kehn
Kunqu kwin chu
Kutiyattam KOO-tee-ah-TAHM
Kyogen kyoh-ghen
Landjuweelen LAWHNT-yu-vay-lehn
Lazzi LAH-dzee
Locus LAW-koos
Ludi LOO-dee
Mie mee-eh
Mise en scène meez on sehn
Monomane moh-noh-mah-neh
Natyasastra NAH-tyah-SHAS-tr
Naumachia naw-MAH-khee-ah
Nō noh
Onnagata ohn-nah-gah-tah
Opera buffa OH-peh-rah BOOF-fah
Opera seria OH-peh-rah SEH-ree-ah
Parterre PAH(r)-tehr
Philosophe fee-loh-zohf
Platea plah-TEH-ah
Polis POH-lis
Purim shpil POO-rehm shpihl
Rabinal Achi drah-vee-NAHL ah-CHEE
Ramlila rahm-lee-lah
Term Pronunciation

Rasa RAH-seh
Sarugaku sah-roo-gah-koo
Scena per angolo SHAY-nah pehr AHN-goh-loh
Shimpa sheem-pah
Shingeki sheen-gheh-kee
Shite sh-teh
Shpil (plural, shpiln) shpihl
Ta’ziyeh TAH’ zee-YEH
Theatron THAY-ah-trohn
Tsure tsoo-reh
Übermarionette EW-behr-marionette
Vecchi VEHK-kee
Verfremdungseffekt fehr-FREHM-dungs-eh-fehkt
Volksgeist FOYLKS-gahyst
Wagoto wah-goh-toh
Waki wah-kee
Wayang golek wah-YAHNG goh-lek
Wayang kulit wah-YAHNG koo-lit
Yangbanxi yahng bahn shih
Yanggeju yahng guh ju
Yùgen yoo-ghehn
Zaju zah ju
Zanni ZAHN-nee
Glossary
Absolutism
The concentration of all political authority and state power in the
person of the monarch. It is primarily associated with
seventeenth-century France and Spain, although historical
monarchies in China and Japan had features of absolutist rule.
In drama it is associated with neoclassicism.
Absurd, Theatre of the
See Theatre of the Absurd.
Actor-managers
Actors, often ones playing lead roles, who also owned and
managed an entire theatre company. They emerged in Europe
during the 1550s, as potential for producing commercial theatre
expanded during the Renaissance. One of the first actor-
managers was Lope de Rueda of Spain.
Aestheticism
An avant-garde movement between 1890 and 1910 whose
followers attempted to stage productions that encouraged
spectators to escape the workaday world and revel in
heightened aesthetic sensations. Believing in “art for art’s sake,”
Aestheticists often chose contents and styles from the theatrical
past to inspire new emotional responses.
Agit-prop theatre
Shortened from “agitation-propaganda,” this term specifies a
type of didactic theatre that originated in the Soviet Union. As
performed by touring ensembles such as the Blue Blouse
troupes, these were anti-naturalistic revues designed to instruct
illiterate peasants and workers in the basic ideas of communism.
The term “agit-prop” is also employed more broadly to identify
(often pejoratively) overtly ideological types of performance.
Angura
The Japanese pronunciation of “underground,” this experimental
genre developed in the 1960s as a reaction to both realistic
 shingeki and to political and cultural turmoil.
Antiquarianism
The practice of staging plays with (ostensibly) historically
accurate scenery and costumes. It is primarily associated with
nineteenth-century British productions of Shakespeare by
Charles Kemble, William Macready, and Charles Kean, who
attempted to immerse spectators in the spirit of the English
national past. Antiquarian staging practices also informed
Orientalist melodramas set in the Middle East and other exotic
locations of the British Empire after the 1880s. See Orientalism.
Antitheatricality
Opposition to theatrical performance. It can take many forms,
such as religious expulsion of actors, or their vilification as liars,
corruptors, or sexual deviants, and the use of theatre terms to
denigrate someone or something. Antitheatricality is most
common in the Western world. Although theatre everywhere has
occasionally been banned or prohibited, the reasons have
usually been to prevent social unrest or intermingling between
social classes. In contrast, the antitheatricality one finds in the
West involves fear or contempt for performance itself.
Aragoto
The “rough-house” style of kabuki acting typical of Edo (current
Tokyo). These actors often wear striking, non-realistic make-up
and greatly exaggerated costumes while also employing
powerful gestures, such as the mie. Compare with wagoto.
Audiophonic media
Any media of communication that predominately features sound
rather than one of the other sensory modes. In the modern era,
these media include the telephone, the phonograph, and the
radio.
Auteur director
A figure who takes author-like control of all the elements of stage
or film production.
Auto sacramental
A sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Spanish one-act play on a
religious topic. Many are about biblical events; others are
 allegorical, like morality plays.
Avant-garde
Borrowing a French military term referring to the forward line of
soldiers in battle, various groups of artists since the 1880s have
likewise thought of themselves as marching in the front ranks of
artistic progress, fighting the propriety of the bourgeoisie, and
inventing new aesthetic strategies in the service of utopian
change. Examples of avant-garde movements are Symbolism,
Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and Surrealism.
Ballet
A dance with musical accompaniment characterized by precision
of movement and an elaborate formal technique conventionally
used to convey a story. In the 1500s and 1600s, European
aristocrats performed in lavish ballet spectacles at royal courts.
See also masques.
Baroque aesthetics
A late seventeenth-century orientation, especially popular in the
Catholic courts of Europe, that celebrated allegory, grandeur,
metamorphosis, sensuality, playfulness, and emotional
extremes. In contrast with neoclassicism, it reasserted the
centrality of visual and oral culture.
Beijing Opera
See jingju.
Bhava
The actor’s embodiment of a character’s state of
mind/being/doing. A key element of Indian aesthetic theory. See
rasa.
Biomechanics
A mode of training actors originated by the Russian director
Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) designed to produce
performers who could combine the arts of charac terization,
singing, dancing, and acrobatics with precise physical and vocal
expression.
Blackface
A long tradition of Western performance in which masks,
cosmetics, or other forms of makeup are used to give white
 performers the appearance of being street rowdies, circus
clowns, and, in nineteenth-century American minstrel shows,
African-Americans. Although often racist in intent, blackface has
also served a variety of other purposes. See also yellowface.
Bourgeoisie
A socio-economic class consisting of property owners,
merchants, bankers, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, professionals,
and similar figures. In Western Europe, during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, the bourgeoisie gained political power,
supplanting the rule of royalty and landed aristocrats.
Industrialists, merchants and commodity brokers, and financiers
are the most powerful portion of the bourgeoisie and as a group
are called capitalists. See also capitalism.
Box set
A stage setting that consists of the interior of a single room,
usually under a proscenium arch, with an imaginary fourth wall
facing the audience through which the audience watches the
action.
Box
A private, enclosed seating area either adjacent or facing the
stage.
Bunraku
Also known as ningyō jōruri, this is the traditional puppet theatre
of Japan. In its current form, it is distinguished by the use of dolls
that are expertly manipulated by a trio of visible puppeteers and
voiced by a single chanter, accompanied by the shaminsen (a
three-stringed instrument).
Burlesque
A form of variety theatre, particularly in the United States, that
featured male comics, comic sketches, dance acts, musical
pieces, plus scantily clad females in all of the numbers. It
achieved the peak of its popularity in the early twentieth century.
Butoh
A genre of Japanese dance-drama that first appeared in
between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and which has had a
major impact on modern dance worldwide. It typically employs
 grotesque gestures, slow movement, facial distortion, all-white
body makeup, and extreme or even painful physicality. There are
many varieties. Also spelled butō.
Capitalism
A complex system of economic organization based on the
private ownership of property and other assets, the production of
commodities for profit, and the loose regulation of supply and
demand by market forces. Capitalists are part of the
bourgeoisie. Capitalism also functions as an ideology (which
may be believed by people who aren’t capitalists) that is usually
hostile to socialism and communism.
Carnival
In medieval Europe, a festival preceding the Catholic season of
Lent. Lent is a pre-Easter period of self-denial and deprivation,
whereas Carnival celebrates excess, pleasure, and humor. See
carnivalesque.
Carnivalesque
As theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, a type of humor that originated
in the European Carnival tradition and similar cultural
performances. Its chief characteristic is concern with the material
base of reality, such as daily labor or the functions of the body. It
also often involves reversals in social status.
Castrati
Male singers whose testicles have been removed to preserve
the boyish pitch and purity of their voices. A few of them
flourished as operatic stars during the eighteenth century.
Chariot-and-pole system
Stage machinery for quickly changing scenic “flats” riding on
substage trolleys, invented by Giacomo Torelli in the 1640s.
Chorus
An organized group of performers who may either sing, dance,
and/or speak dialogue. Examples of choric performance are
those of ancient Greece (the dithyramb, tragedy, and Old
Comedy) and the Japanese nō theatre.
Cognitive science
 The sciences that study how the mind/brain consciously and
uncon sciously processes perceptions, engages emotionally with
the world, and makes meaning from these experiences.
Comedia
A term originating in the Spanish Golden Age to describe the
predominant form of secular drama in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries: a three-act play combining serious and
comic elements, in complex plots involving love, intrigue, and
honor. Most often associated with the playwrights Félix Lope de
Vega (1562–1635) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681).
Comédie larmoyante
Literally, “tearful comedy.” The French version of sentimental
comedy. See sentimentalism.
Comedy
A term covering an extremely wide variety of humorous plays.
The earliest extant written comedies were written in ancient
Greece during the fifth century BCE, and usually involved topical
satire (see Old Comedy). Later comedies focused on domestic
matters such as love (see New Comedy). Many other comedic
genres exist.
Commedia dell’arte
A form of street theatre that originated in Italy during the 1540s.
Professional troupes of between eight and twelve actors
specialized in performing stock characters (indicated by
grotesque half-masks and specific dialects), pre-arranged comic
business (lazzi), and improvisations based on scenarios
primarily drawn from the plays of Plautus and Terence.
Commedia erudita
Sixteenth-century European academic comedies for aristocratic
patrons based on the texts of Plautus and Terence.
Commemorative drama
An umbrella term given to performances which have as their
focus the memorialization of religious or civic events in a
community’s history. They can include a mixture of pious and
carnivalesque elements.
Communism
 A radical form of socialism initially developed by Karl Marx
(1818–1883) that advocates the overthrow of capitalism in order
to create a classless society. With the success of the Russian
Revolution (1917), the political and economic theory of
communism was soon conflated with the policies of the
Communist Party (by both its supporters and opponents).
Historically, governments controlled by a Communist Party have
eschewed democracy in favor of single-party rule and state
control over all social spheres, from the economy to the arts.
Community-based theatre
(in the U.K. and elsewhere, called community theatre). Theatres
dependent upon ongoing dialogue between artists and
spectators, usually for the purpose of exploring ways in which
the social agency of a local audience can be maximized.
Constructivism
The artistic synthesis of Retrospectivism and Futurism
achieved by Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s. It
incorporated his acting experiments with biomechanics, and is
best represented by Lyubov Popova’s set designs consisting of
elaborate ramps, slides, ladders, and moving wheels that
allowed actors to demonstrate how human beings could use
their emotions and machines to produce engaging art and a
more productive life. Stalin censored these techniques during the
1930s in favor of promoting socialist realism.
Copyright
A legal protection extended to authors giving them control over
the publication and performance of their work. The first
comprehensive copyright law was enacted by France in 1790.
Corpus Christi cycle
See cycle play.
Corral
An enclosed, open-air theatre in Spain during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, originally the courtyard of an inn and later
purpose-built.
Counter-Reformation
 The years 1545–1648 in which the Catholic Church sought to
suppress the Protestant Reformation through various reforms,
new religious orders, and spiritual movements. It included the
encouragement of Baroque art.
Cultural hybridity
A term used to describe the results of intercultural encounter, in
which elements of each original culture combine to create
something new, which nevertheless bears traces of the original
separate contributions.
Cycle play
A series of short plays dramatizing key episodes from the Old
and New Testaments, performed in medieval England during the
Feast of Corpus Christi. The plays were produced and performed
by trade guilds.
Dada
An avant-garde movement initiated in Switzerland during the
First World War that employed cabaret sketches to experiment
with the chance ordering of sounds, simultaneous poetry, and
movements that mocked the absurdity of Western notions of
logic and harmony.
Decorum
The precept of neoclassicism that plays should uphold the
standards of taste and morality, and that there are behaviors
appropriate for different social classes.
Devised theatre
Theatre or drama developed collectively by a group, usually of
actors, starting from improvisations.
Dithyrambs
Choral songs and dances in honor of Dionysus performed at
Athens’ major theatre festival (the City Dionysia) and elsewhere
in ancient Greece.
Drame
French domestic tragedy, comparable to sentimental drama. See
sentimentalism.
Electric and electronic culture
 A culture which utilizes electromagnetism (in forms such as
electricity, radio waves, and visible light) for communication
media. Electrical media include telegraphs, film projectors,
photography (using photochemical reactions), and early
telephones, phonographs, and radios. With the invention of the
vacuum tube and later the transistor, media such as television,
computers, mobile phones, and digital cameras became not only
practical, but widespread and increasingly portable. When
distant computers were connected, the internet was born,
providing the foundation for networked culture, a subtype of
electronic culture. Because of electronic media’s usage level, it
has already begun to have cognitive effects.
Elizabethan era
The period when Queen Elizabeth I reigned in England (1558–
1603). It is often considered the high point of the English
Renaissance. It was followed by the Jacobean era.
Empathy
A cognitive operation that has been defined in various ways. As
we use the term, empathy is a relationship to another person that
involves an attempt to take the perspective of and understand
the emotions of that other.
Empiricism
The theory that knowledge is only or mainly derived from
individual sense experience, such as the direct observation of
natural phenomena and scientific experiments.
Enlightenment
An eighteenth-century European intellectual movement that
asserted that human progress could only be achieved on the
basis of political liberty, individual freedoms, and the rights of
private property. See empiricism and rationalism.
Environmental theatre
See immersive theatre.
Evolution
The theory established by Charles Darwin and others that plants
and animals flourish, mutate, or become extinct over time based
 solely on the process of natural selection, that is, their success
within their environment based on the species’ variations.
Exorcism
A ritual performance, common to many cultures, that addresses
and expels demonic forces in order to heal an individual or a
community.
Expressionism
An avant-garde movement that flourished in Germany after the
First World War (1914–1918). Expressionist plays called for such
anti-realist techniques as gro tesquely painted scenery,
exaggerated acting, and “telegraphic” dialogue. They frequently
invited spectators to view the distorted dramatic action through
the fevered eyes of the protagonist.
Farce
A type of comedy focusing on ridiculous and unlikely situations
rather than character development. Often it includes confusion,
slapstick, and absurdities.
Fascism
An extreme form of nationalism that emerged in Europe after the
First World War (1914–1918). This ideology rejected
Enlightenment universalism and liberal democracy in favor of
racial purity and violent authoritarian rule.
Fourth wall
The realist convention of an imaginary “wall” across the
proscenium opening enclosing an interior room in a box set. The
spectators observe the action through this imaginary wall, and
the actors perform as if they were unaware of the audience’s
presence.
Fringe theatre
Often small and experimental troupes that perform in the same
cities hosting major international theatre events, but are not on
the official program. The most famous sites for fringe theatre are
the Edinburgh and Avignon festivals.
Futurism
An avant-garde movement that was launched in Italy in 1909
with the publication of a manifesto by F.T. Marinetti (1876–1944)
 damning the art of the past and advocating new forms exalting
the dynamism of the machine age. Russian Futurists, led by
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), attempted to align this
movement with the Soviet revolution until the onset of Stalinist
persecution. See Constructivism.
Gallery
A balcony seating area. A theatre often has several levels of
galleries.
Gesamtkunstwerk
Richard Wagner’s (1813–83) influential term for a total,
synthesized art work in which all elements of a theatrical
production are controlled by the vision of a single master-artist.
See auteur director.
Gestus
Bertolt Brecht’s term for the expressive means an actor can
employ – such as a way of standing, or moving, or a pattern of
behavior – that indicates to the audience the social position or
condition of the character that the actor is playing. See
Verfremdungseffekt.
Globalization
The ongoing and accelerating process of widespread
transnational engagement, driven largely by economic systems
and aided by information technology, in which interaction among
cultures has become commonplace.
Glocal
A term combining “global” and “local” to describe the ways global
culture influences local culture, and vice versa.
Guilds
Medieval European associations of artisans or merchants that
regulated wages and trade, trained apprentices, and undertook
charitable projects such as the sponsorship of cycle plays.
Happenings
Performance events designed to blur the boundaries between
the experience of art and commonplace experiences that were
first created in New York and elsewhere in the 1960s.
High modernism
 An orientation to the European stage prominent between 1910
and 1940 that emphasized written dialogue and frequently
employed metatheatricality and the minimization of the actor’s
physical presence to create a theatre that would move people to
transcend the material realities of the modern world. Exemplary
figures were William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Luigi
Pirandello (1867–1936). See modernism.
Historiography
The theories, methodologies, techniques, and narrative
strategies involved in writing history. Also used to refer to the
products of historical research, such as books and websites.
Huaju
Chinese spoken drama, originally based on Western models of
realism. The first play in this style was written in 1907.
Humanism
Central to Western thought since the Renaissance, humanism
arose during the fourteenth century as the study and emulation
of classical Roman (and later, Greek) writings in order to return
to the cultural heights of antiquity. It became a core of education
throughout Europe, and its methodologies underlie what is now
called “the humanities.” In the sixteenth century humanism
began to mean an emphasis on human experience and potential,
rather than Christian faith. Today humanism is fundamentally the
assumption that all people everywhere, in all times, share a
common essence.
Iconology
The interpretive analysis of images to understand the cultural
work the image was doing in its time. Among other things, such
analysis considers visual vocabularies and conventions,
inherited or innovative, and the cultural forces surrounding the
artwork.
Ideology
The implicit and explicit ideas, theories, and assumptions about
the social and natural world that inform people’s interpretation of
their individual and collective condition. An ideology often
 validates the status quo, in support of the interests of the most
powerful social group(s).
Immersive theatre
(a recent expansion of “environmental theatre”). Staging in which
there is no demarcation between actor and spectator space,
multiple events compete with each other to diffuse any single
focus, and actors interact with audience members both in
character and personally.
Imperialism
The ideology and action of creating and maintaining empires.
Imperialism can be political, economic, military, religious,
cultural, or a combination. Imperialist countries typically take
control over conquered peoples and land by establishing
colonies – subordinate political entities that are often subjected
to ruthless exploitation. Imperialist countries usually justified this
by claiming that “civilized” nations have the right (and moral
obligation) to rule over “inferior” cultures (see Orientalism).
Modern imperialism often consists of economic dominance over
other countries, without direct political control.
Industrial Revolution
The late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century process of rapidly
expanding capitalism, urbanization, and technological
breakthroughs, particularly in the areas of manufacturing,
transportation, and communications.
Inquisition
Institutions within the Roman Catholic Church which combated
heresy through censorship, forced conversions, torture,
execution, and other means, starting in the twelfth century and in
most areas ending in the early nineteenth century. It was
particularly aggressive in Spain, Portugal, and Mexico.
Interculturalism
The practice in which theatre artists use the texts, acting styles,
music, costumes, masks, dance, or scenic vocabularies from
more than one culture in a single production. Although
intercultural artworks have always developed whenever one
culture encounters another, consciously intercultural productions
 have proliferated during the past three decades in the context of
globalization.
Internet
A system interconnecting many computer networks into one
extremely large global network, in principle allowing any
computer or similar digital device to communicate with any other
via established protocols. One portion of the internet is the World
Wide Web (“Web” for short), which features content that has
been specially encoded to allow users easy access, interaction,
and navigation of material on the Web.
Jacobean era
The period when King James I reigned in England and Scotland
(1603–1625). It is considered the final part of the English
Renaissance.
Jingju
The Chinese term for what is known elsewhere as “Beijing
Opera.” Created in 1790, it is a form of musical theatre that
relates historical, romantic, and melodramatic stories through a
mix of song, stylized speech, spectacular dance, pantomimed
action, acrobatics, and orchestral music consisting of stringed
and percussive instruments. Also known as jingxi.
Kabuki
A still-popular form of traditional Japanese theatre noted for its
lavish use of scenic display, costumes, and makeup; the physical
and emotional style of its actors; and its repertoire of plays, often
involving painful complications between duty and emotion. It
originated around 1600 as a mode of dance-drama that reflected
an outrageous disdain for acceptable social behavior. Various
restrictions eventually resulted in kabuki troupes being
composed only of adult males. See onnagata, aragoto, and
wagoto.
Kathakali
Literally “story” (katha), “dance” or “play,” this form of south
Indian dance-drama is distinguished by a highly physicalized
style of performance based on traditional martial arts and its
 complex use of both gesture and expression to communicate the
emotions/ actions of a character.
Kōken
In both the Japanese nō and kabuki theatres, these are stage
assistants who visibly, but unobtrusively, handle props,
straighten costumes, and prompt actors. When dressed all in
black, they are called kurogo.
Kunqu
A type of Chinese musical drama favored by elite Confucian
audiences during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
Kusemai
Secular entertainments mainly performed by women dressed in
male clothing that were popular in fourteenth-century Japan.
Also the main dance in nō.
Kutiyattam
A style of staging late-Sanskrit drama that originated in the
Indian state of Kerala, that employs Sanskrit and Pakrit as well
as the local language, and takes place within a specific type of
temple architecture.
Kyō gen
Short, often farcical interludes or entire short comedies
performed with Japanese nō plays.
Lazzi
Comic, often physical stage actions performed in commedia
dell’arte.
Liberalism
As political orientation, belief in the right of individuals to pursue
their own interests as equals, unrestrained by aristocratic
privileges or state constraints. As an economic orientation,
support for individuals’ pursuit of “free market” capitalism under
minimal government regulation. Classical liberalism is also
meritocratic, emphasizing the necessity of individuals to earn
their social and economic security through their own efforts.
Literate culture
A culture in which the dominant means for verbal communication
is writing. By itself, the presence of writing in a society doesn’t
 necessarily make it a literate culture: cf. oral culture. Instead,
writing must be dominant. This does not refer to the percentage
of the population who can read and write, which can in fact be a
small minority. Writing is dominant when it is considered more
authoritative than speech or memory for political, legal, and
cultural purposes, and has had significant cognitive effects upon
those who use it. There are four main types of literate culture:
manuscript culture, print culture, periodical print culture,
and electric and electronic culture.
Locus
Latin for “place.” In medieval theatre, a single stage, often an
elevated platform or a pageant wagon, which is partly or totally
surrounded by an open space (see platea). It is used to
represent a specific location, such as a manger or a house. The
dramatic location may be identified only by language, or the
stage may have a setting or special effects scenery. See also
mansions.
Ludi
“Games” to mark the observance of Roman public holidays as
well as great funerals, military victories, and other state
occasions. These eclectic festivities presented chariot racing,
boxing, and gladiatorial contests as well as dramatic
performances. The most important of these events were the Ludi
Romani in honor of the god Jupiter.
Mansions
From a Latin term for “station” or “house.” Elevated platforms
representing different scene locations in medieval Christian
dramas, and spectators generally move from one mansion to the
next (see simultaneous staging). Arranged around an open
space within a cathedral (see platea), or perhaps outdoors in
ancient earthen rounds, mansions offered allegorical, rather than
illusionistic, depictions of places within the Christian imagination,
such as Eden and Hell. See also locus.
Manuscript culture
A type of literate culture in which writing can only be
accomplished by hand. This includes inscriptions on wood, wax,
 stones, pottery, etc. Although writing has a significant place in
manuscript cultures (in some of them, anchored by one or more
sacred texts), the oral culture continues to be vibrant throughout
the society, including among the literate elite.
Masques
Lavish court spectacles, often employing perspective scenery,
which celebrated the nobility of seventeenth-century England,
France, and Spain as powerful mythological figures. These
expensive entertainments allegorically supported the
prerogatives of absolutism.
Melodrama
A form of theatre that dramatizes social morality: it names “good
guys” and “bad guys,” helping audiences to negotiate such
problems as political power, economic justice, and racial
inequality.
Metatheatricality
Theatrical self-reference. Metatheatrical techniques include
plays-within-plays (e.g., Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of
an Author), production techniques and characters’ comments
pointing out that the current activity is a play performance (the
former occurs in Brechtian productions, the latter in Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot), characters’ discussions of plays and
performance (like Hamlet’s advice to the itinerant players), plays
about actors or playwrights (such as a play about Molière), and
more. The purpose of meta theatricality can vary. Metatheatrical
plays are sometimes called “metatheatre” or “meta drama.”
Method acting
A twentieth-century style of American acting that marries the
personality of the actor to the character she or he is playing
through psychological techniques of extreme empathy. It is
often part of psychological realism.
Mie
A fierce pose struck by a kabuki actor. At climactic moments of a
play, he may toss his head, raise his leg and stamp his foot, pose
with open, outreached hand, grunt, and freeze his face in a
cross-eyed grimace. See aragoto.
Mimesis
Aristotle’s term in the Poetics (c.380 BCE) for the imitation or
representation of action and characters.
Minstrel show
A form of racist blackface performance popular in the United
States from the 1840s until the rise of vaudeville in the 1880s. A
form of variety show, minstrel acts consisted of white male
performers imitating slave festivities in the South, musical
numbers, and parody.
Mise en scène
A French term denoting all visual aspects of a production,
including set design, costumes, makeup, lighting, and the
placement and movement of actors.
Modernism
A general orientation to the stage that emphasized the written
texts of the playwright, questioned the representational basis of
the theatre (often through the use of metatheatricality), and
often posited the existence of an ideal realm that could
transcend the anguish of material conditions, such as the
perceived chaos of the modern city. In Europe and the U.S.,
modernism in the theatre lasted from 1920 to about 1975.
Monomane
A key aspect of Zeami’s aesthetic theory, it refers to the nō
actor’s revelation of the fictional character’s “invisible body” or
essence. Sometimes translated as “imitation.”
Morality plays
Late medieval Christian allegories usually focused on an
“everyman” figure faced with a choice between good and bad
behavior.
Moros y cristianos
A Spanish play of the fifteenth or sixteenth century pitting
“Moors” (Muslims) against Christians.
Multiculturalism
A term describing works combining performance modes drawn
from different cultural traditions within nation-state boundaries,
 rather than across them. Often critiqued for a tendency toward
tokenism of minority cultures within a larger dominant one.
Mummers plays
Christianized versions of pagan rituals designed to ensure the
return of spring, often featuring a white knight combating a
blackened Turk.
Music hall
Although an English Victorian term, it may be used to designate
any type of variety theatre that features a series of unconnected
entertainments on an indoor stage.
Mystery cycle
See cycle play.
Nationalism
A political ideology based in the belief that a nation – a group
loosely united by territory, language, and/or culture – has an
inherent right to live and flourish within its own geographical and
political state. Nationalism began in Europe in the seventeenth
century and has taken several historical forms. Liberal
nationalism involves a commitment to the Enlightenment ideals
of individual liberty and constitutionalism. Cultural nationalism
centers on a belief in the uniqueness and greatness of one’s
language-based culture. Racial nationalism mixes notions of
racial superiority with cultural nationalism to produce the belief
that a nation’s superiority is based on racial purity.
Naturalism
An avant-garde movement, which flourished between 1880 and
1914, that portrayed heredity and environmental factors as the
primary causes of human behavior through the accurate
rendition of external realities.
Natyasastra
An encyclopaedic work on all aspects of drama attributed to the
sage Bharata, authored or collected between 200 BCE and 200
CE. See Sanskrit drama.
Naumachiae
Sea battle re-enactments based upon episodes from Greek
history that were staged as lavish public spectacles in ancient
 Rome.
Neoclassicism
A development in the Renaissance recovery of classical ideals
and practices in art and literature and the rationalist elaboration
of them, especially in the service of the absolutist monarchy in
France in the mid-to late seventeenth century, when
verisimilitude, decorum, and poetic justice were emphasized.
See the rules.
Networked culture
A culture in which the internet is a major mode of
communication, which people access using personal computers
and mobile devices. Although it can be considered a type of
literate culture because to some extent it uses text, it is also
similar to oral culture because the same medium can be used
both for communication between individuals, and for
communication to a very large audience that includes the
possibility of responses back.
New Comedy
A form of ancient Greek comedy, focusing on domestic (rather
than political) issues. Its period is typically considered to be 323–
260 BCE. The only extant plays are by Menander. Adapted by
the Romans Plautus and Terence as fabula palliata, it became
the model for Western comedy up to the present. Compare with
Old Comedy.
Nō
A traditional form of Japanese theatre that was developed in the
fourteenth century with multiple origins including Shinto ritual,
Buddhist philosophy, and kusemai dance. Among its distinctive
features are its stage architecture, finely wrought masks, delicate
movement and dance, onstage musicians, and the use of a
seated chorus who vocalize narration and dialogue. The
dramatic texts of its greatest playwright, Zeami (c.1363–1443),
often borrow plots from historical epics or novels and usually
feature ghosts or characters of supernatural origin. Also spelled
noh.
Old Comedy
 Satirical commentaries on socio-political problems, sometimes
employing bawdy humor and costumes, that were performed in
ancient Athens. The only surviving examples are the comedies
of Aristophanes (c.448–c.387 BCE). Compare with New
Comedy.
Onnagata
A male kabuki actor who specializes in female roles.
Opera
A form of dramatic musical theatre in which the performers sing
all their lines in the script. Opera began in Europe in 1607 and
remains popular in the West today. Following the reign of
Baroque opera in the seventeenth century, European opera split
into two primary strands. Opera buffa (comic opera) drew much
of its energy, many of its plots, and most of its stock characters
from commedia dell’arte. In contrast, opera seria (serious opera)
dealt with serious subjects and became an arena for the
performance of castrati singers.
Opéra-comique
Eighteenth-century French comic opera in which the audience
sang lyrics printed on a placard and set to a popular tune.
Operetta
Light operatic entertainments that emerged in the nineteenth
century in Vienna, Paris, and London to amuse mostly bourgeois
spectators.
Oral culture
A culture in which the dominant means for verbal communication
is speech. Oral cultures may have writing, but it plays a relatively
minor and subordinate cultural role and has few if any cognitive
effects. Cf. literate culture.
Orientalism
Edward Said’s term for the way Western countries represented
the East, a vast territory that was imagined to stretch from the
modern Middle East to Japan, and which was largely subjected
to European imperialism in the nineteenth century. “Orientals”
were depicted as weak, cunning, inscrutable, culturally
backward, feminine, dangerous, and, above all, exotic. Today,
 the term is widely understood to refer to any culture that is seen
as incomprehensibly “Other.”
Pageant wagons
Mobile stages that were used in processional routes and
sometimes gathered in fixed arrangements in a playing area for
the performance of medieval cycle plays. A wagon usually
provides the locus for a play, and the street around it is the
platea.
Pantomime
A genre that developed in ancient Rome, consisting of solo
performances to musical accompaniment that silently enacted all
of the characters of a drama using a series of costumes and
masks. A form of it re-emerged in eighteenth-century England,
which became enormously popular and long-lived.
Passion play
Dramas depicting Jesus’s sufferings that originated in medieval
Europe and, in some places, remain in production, such as the
Oberammergau Passion Play.
Patent
A license granting a company or an individual the privilege to
pursue an activity that is otherwise subjected to restriction.
Historically, governments, such as that of the English King
Charles II (1630–1685), have made theatrical performances
subject to a patenting process as a form of censorship.
Patrimonialization
The socio-political process by which certain traditions are turned
into treasures of cultural, national, or international heritage.
Patronage
Support extended by a powerful individual or an elite to an arts-
producing entity. Examples include legal permission to perform,
financial subsidy, and protection from competing social groups.
See patent.
Performance art
A contemporary expression of the avant-garde consisting of
either solo works or larger spectacles that always seek to break
through the separation of art and life. Often taking up social and
 political concerns, performance artists typically use their own
lives as subjects and their own bodies as instruments.
Periodical print culture
A type of print culture is which periodicals – publications that
appear on a recurrent cycle (often annually, monthly, weekly, or
daily) and are distributed across a region (ranging from a city to
the world) – play a significant social role. The transportation
systems that enabled regular mail delivery were crucial to
making periodical publication feasible. Periodicals provided a
major practical basis for the public sphere.
Periodization
In writing historical narratives, the strategy of organizing human
events and practices into shared categories of time, or “periods.”
Perspective scenery
Scenery that depicts a landscape, urban location, or large
building in a realistic manner by using the principle of
perspective, in which objects appear to recede into the distance
in a mathematically accurate manner.
Pit
The ground level of an English Renaissance theatre, usually
below the stage, where spectators stood to watch the play. In
France it was called the parterre; in Spain, the patio.
Platea
Latin for “plaza” or “broad street.” In the staging of medieval
European drama, an open space such as the nave of a cathedral
or a city street, used as a neutral, unlocalized playing area that
could be whatever location the text required at a given moment.
See mansions and locus.
Poetic justice
A precept in neoclassicism, and a common plot device in
general, that evil characters should be punished and good ones
rewarded. Often poetic justice occurs through an ironic twist.
Poor theatre
Jerzy Grotowski’s (1934–1999) conception of a theatre stripped of
elaborate production elements and dedicated to the performance
 of “holy actors” athletically embodying the sufferings and
ecstasies of the human spirit.
Positivism
The philosophy that scientific knowledge derives solely from
measurable sensory experience, allowing for the detection of
invariant general laws of both nature and society.
Postdramatic theatre
A term coined in 1999 by theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann,
to describe experimental or avant-garde theatre appearing after
the 1960s in which the dramatic text and/or dramatic action are
subordinated to a ruling idea, or sometimes eliminated entirely,
with the aim of producing an effect upon the audience that is not
dependent upon text or plot.
Postmodernism
A much-debated concept that was prevalent during the late
twentieth century. Within philosophy, it is generally associated
with a critique of the possibility of establishing and/or
communicating stable meanings, e.g., the idea that binary
oppositions can be clearly maintained, and often raises the
connection between knowledge and power. Postmodern theatre
and performance artists tend to emphasize a deep skepticism
toward modernism’s desire to wrap experience in a single,
unified, pleasingly cohesive vision, and often take an ironic view
of society and culture.
Print culture
A type of literate culture in which texts can be reproduced
quickly, precisely, and in large quantities by mechanical means.
The earliest form of printing used woodblocks on which were
carved whole pages, but the production scale was small enough
that the societies remained manuscript cultures. Machines that
composed pages using small pieces for each word or letter were
invented separately in China (c.1040), Korea (1234), and Europe
(c.1440), but their use became far more widespread in Europe.
Thus China and Korea continued to be manuscript cultures, but
in Europe printing gained dominance over manuscript. In print
cultures, oral culture takes a subordinate position, strongest in
 religion and the arts, but weak in most other realms. Handwriting
assumes an even narrower role. Print culture began with books,
but eventually periodical print culture became feasible.
Private sphere
The facet of social life consisting of personal matters, such as
family, the home, friendship, religious feelings, and emotions. For
many years, women were confined to activities in the private
sphere. It is contrasted with the public sphere.
Proscenium arch
First created in the Renaissance, a visible and often highly
ornate frame around the stage that is a permanent architectural
element of some theatres.
Protestant Reformation
The schism in Western Europe in which Christianity split into
Roman Catholicism and various types of Protestantism. It is
often dated 1517–1648, although some scholars place the end
either in 1555 or around 1750.
Psychological realism
An orientation to playwriting and staging that strives to present
characters’ thoughts, feelings, and psychological development in
a realistic manner. Its hallmarks are psychologically attuned
directing and (particularly in the U.S.) variations on Method
Acting Scenography can be somewhat flexible, rather than
wholly realist It effectively became the national style of the
United States during the 1950s.
Public sphere
The facet of social life in which people discuss politics,
economics, laws, and similar matters which (in theory) are open
to debate by all people. It is contrasted with the private sphere.
Although the terms “public sphere” and “private sphere” were
developed in the twentieth century, the distinction itself dates
from the eighteenth century with the political rise of the
bourgeoisie and the formation of periodical print culture.
Purim shpil
A humorous, often satirical, play presenting the events
commemorated in the Jewish holiday of Purim. The play is
 accompanied by enthusiastic audience involvement, such as
hissing and noise-making.
Ramlila
An Indian commemorative drama that allows its participants
immediate access to an encounter with the Hindu god Ram
(sometimes called Rama). It is celebrated as a pluralistic, open-
air event that features re-enactments of episodes from Ram’s
life. “Lila,” in the word Ramlila, is the Hindu concept of “divine
play” or joyful intervention of the gods into the human sphere.
Rasa
An ideal aesthetic experience in Sanskrit drama, compared to
the various “tastes” savored at a meal. The concept, along with
bhava, is central to Indian aesthetic theory.
Rationalism
A philosophy deriving from the ideas of René Descartes (1596–
1650) that proposed that reason alone, independent of
experience, is the source of truth. It seeks absolute,
mathematical certainty in knowledge. See Enlightenment.
Realism
In theatre, a stage orientation that originated partly in response
to the emerging technology of photography. It is also referred to
as “stage realism.” Its hallmark was the presentation of
scrupulously observed material realities, and typically used
historically accurate costumes, the fourth wall, and box sets.
Initially employed in the commercial theatre by producer-
directors who appealed to the public’s desire for antiquarianism
and melodrama, this style was later adapted for use by the
Naturalists. It is still the dominant style in the West. See also
psychological realism.
Remix
A term originally applied to a musical work that combines audio
elements from other recordings, recently expanded to refer to
any work of art or media that creates something new by adding,
removing, or changing elements of one or more other works.
Some use it to describe the dominant aesthetic of networked
culture.
Renaissance
Literally “rebirth,” this is a traditional category of periodization
for European history from, roughly, the fourteenth century to the
seventeenth century, but the period varies from country to
country. The word reflects the growing interest taken by
European elites in the “classical” cultures of the ancient world,
such as Greek and Roman drama. This period also produced the
ideologies of humanism and absolutism.
Restoration
The period in English national history (after the Civil War) that
began in 1660 with the restoration of King Charles II to the
throne. Most historians date the end of the Restoration period at
1688. The Meiji Restoration in Japan refers to the downfall of the
Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and the supposed return of
authority to the emperor.
Retrospectivism
A stage orientation that arose in pre-revolutionary Russia that
incorporated many of the elements of Symbolism.
Retrospectivists like Nikolai Evreinov (1879–1953) aimed to
recover older forms of theatre as a means of injecting their
playful energy into contemporary life.
Rituals
Performances (often ceremonies) that occur on special
occasions that form and reform self and social identity, and are
viewed as efficacious, i.e., their participants conceptualize these
events as having real consequences, such as curing a disease
or maintaining cosmological balance. Masking, costuming,
impersonation, dance, music, narrative, and humor are all
recurrent features of ritual performance.
Romanticism
A European aesthetic movement (1790–1840) that prized the
subjectivity of genius, looked to nature for inspiration, elevated
strong emotions above reasonable restraint, and often sought to
embody universal conflicts within individual figures.
Rules, the
 A set of requirements that, according to neoclassicism, plays
must meet in order to be considered good drama. They include
the unities, decorum, poetic justice, and verisimilitude.
Saint plays
Medieval European plays about Christian saints.
Sanskrit drama
An umbrella term for a rich variety of Sanskrit- and Prakrit-
language theatre practices that date back at least to 300 BCE in
what is modern-day India. See Natyasastra.
Satyr plays
Farcical renditions of Greek myth performed at ancient Athens’
major theatre festival after a day’s program of tragedies.
Sentimentalism
During the eighteenth century, this was a positive term for a
social philosophy in which the intellect, emotions, and morality
were harmoniously integrated. Sentimentalism emphasized
virtuous decision-making and tearful reconciliations in drama,
and shared many of the moral ideas of rationalism. Not to be
confused with “sentimentality,” which involves indulgent or
mawkish emotions.
Shaman
The Siberian Tungus word for “one who is excited, moved,
raised.” The term can be applied broadly to a range of traditional
specialists in rituals. Shamans are usually attributed with
possessing specific powers (curing illness, counteracting
misfortune) and they are typically able to access the spirit world
after entering a trance.
Sharing system
The business model upon which many Elizabethan and
European theatre companies were run in the sixteenth century.
In this system, actor-managers, leading actors, financiers, and
sometimes playwrights shared in the profits of a given run or
theatrical season.
Shimpa
Literally “new style,” the term refers to the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century fashion of adapting Western dramatic
 forms, such as the “well-made play,” to Japanese tastes. It is
sometimes seen as a transitional form between kabuki and
shingeki. Both actresses and onnagata sometimes portray
female roles in the same play.
Shingeki
Western-style Japanese theatre, originated in 1909. At first
referred only to spoken plays, but now includes musicals as well.
After the Second World War, young theatre artists rebelled
against shingeki and created alternative and experimental
genres, such as angura.
Simultaneous staging
A medieval theatre convention in which the various scenes of a
play were set on individual fixed stages (mansions) that were all
visible at the same time. The actors (and spectators) progressed
from set to set as the scenes changed and the dramatic action
proceeded.
Social Darwinism
The discredited assumption that cultures, like species, have
evolved, and can be viewed hierarchically from the “primitive”
cultures on the bottom to the “great civilizations” at the top.
Socialism
A political and economic orientation that arose in the early
nineteenth century that aims to have social needs and benefits
prioritized over profits by establishing public or collective
ownership of industry and public services. The socialist
economist and philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883) argued that
there is an inherent class conflict between workers and
capitalists. Unlike communism (and Marx), socialists have
historically sought to promote economic justice through reform
rather than violent revolution.
Socialist realism
The official aesthetic policy of the Soviet Union from 1930 to
1953, instituted by Joseph Stalin, which favored idealistic and
heroic images of and plays about workers and Communist
leaders to advance the aims of the state. This art was “realistic”
only in so far as it was not abstract. The dictates of socialist
 realism were used against Communist artists such as Meyerhold
who practiced other styles and forms.
Surrealism
A 1920s avant-garde movement that emphasized spontaneity,
shock effects, and psychological imagery based in dreams.
Symbolism
An avant-garde movement flourishing in the 1890s that rejected
Naturalism in order to concretize the unseen spiritual realities
that the artists believed shaped human fate.
Ta’ziyeh
An Islamic/Persian commemorative mourning drama dedicated
to Hussein ibn Ali, who was martyred at the Battle of Karbala
(680 CE). Ta’ziyeh plays chronicle each episode of the event
over the course of ten days.
Theatre of the Absurd
An expression coined by the critic Martin Esslin in 1961 to
categorize plays by Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett, Eugene
Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Relating them all to the existentialist
philosophy of Albert Camus (1913–1960), Esslin presented these
playwrights as unified in their portrayal of the human condition as
meaningless. Once influential, this interpretation of certain post-
Second World War drama is in declining usage.
Theatre of Cruelty
Antonin Artaud’s (1896–1948) title for a theatre that would “break
through language” to access the mysteries and darker forces of
life left untouched by literary masterpieces.
Theatre for development
A kind of theatre used in the so-called “developing world” as a
tool for community problem-solving and empowerment.
Theater of the Oppressed
A type of theatre developed by Brazilian director Augusto Boal,
based on the pedagogical theories of Paulo Freire, which aims to
raise awareness of the roots of oppression and rehearse
responses to it.
Theatre for social change
 An umbrella term for a variety of theatre activities aiming for
improvements in political, economic, cultural, medical, or other
conditions. Three major types are theatre for development,
Theater of the Oppressed, and community-based theatre.
Tragedy
Originally, a form of drama created in ancient Athens, Greece,
performed by three actors and a chorus of 12–15 men. An early
form had been developed by 534 BCE. Greek tragedy was
serious and sometimes involved misfortunes and terrible
mistakes, but plays could also end on a positive note. When
ancient Roman authors emulated Greek tragedy, it became
more focused on awful and even horrific events. In modern times
the term generally refers to drama with an unhappy ending in
which the protagonist(s) suffers a major personal loss or even
death.
Tropes
Bits of dialogue sung by the choir during parts of the medieval
Mass, especially during the Easter observance, where they
dramatized the story of the visitors to Christ’s tomb. Some argue
for the tropes as an early form of Church drama.
Übermarionette
Large puppets that, according to Edward Gordon Craig (1872–
1966), should replace live performers because they would be
easier to control than actors and more effective in evoking
spiritual realities. Also see Gesamtskunstwerk.
Unities
According to neoclassicism, drama must meet the three
“unities” of time, place, and action. The unity of time demanded
that the dramatic action take place within one day. The unity of
place required plays to be set in only one location. The unity of
action prohibited multiple plots.
Variety theatre
A major form of popular performance that proliferated after 1850
that consisted of light entertainments unconnected by any
overriding theme, story, or major star. See Vaudeville.
Vaudeville
 A form of variety theatre that gradually replaced (and absorbed)
the minstrel show in the United States during the 1880s.
Representative acts included skits, comics who specialized in
ethnic humor, trained animals, singers, dancers, and acrobats.
Vaudeville declined during the 1920s as many of its performers
began working in the new media of radio and film.
Verfremdungseffekt
Bertolt Brecht’s term for the process of providing spectators of
his productions with some distance and insight by rendering their
past and present worlds strange and unusual for them, thus
preparing them to accept his own vision of events. The term is
sometimes mistranslated as “alienation effect.”
Verisimilitude
The quality of appearing true, realistic, or probable which
neoclassicism held to be a prime requirement of drama. In
order to achieve verisimilitude, plays needed to obey the three
unities of time, place, and action. See the rules, decorum.
Virtual
A term generally meaning “in effect, but not actually,” by the end
of the twentieth century it frequently referred to a computerized,
non-physical environment or an item or activity within it. Although
initially “virtual worlds” were wholly textual, today the term
usually means a visual, onscreen depiction of a three-
dimensional location, often the setting for a game; people are
represented in this environment through avatars. Some times
“virtual world” is misapplied to communication platforms such as
Facebook and Twitter.
Volksgeist
Literally meaning the “spirit of the nation.” The German historian
Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) employed this
Romantic belief to affirm that all nations possess highly distinct
identities to counter Enlightenment notions of the potential
universality of historical interpretation. Herder’s ideas about
history shaped most discussions about cultural nationalism
during the nineteenth century.
Wagoto
 A style of kabuki acting with more-or-less realistic voice,
gestures, and costumes. Compare with aragoto.
Wayang golek
The Sudanese-language puppet theatre of West Java. Since the
1970s, a hybrid comic form of it has been regularly performed on
Indonesian television.
Wayang Kulit
The traditional shadow puppet theatre of Java.
Well-made play
A form of drama pioneered by French playwright Eugene Scribe
(1791–1861) that cleverly manipulates plot to reveal a secret
whose disclosure in an “obligatory scene” is key to resolving the
play’s central conflict.
Wing-and-groove system
The British counterpart to the continental “chariot-and-pole”
system for rapidly changing perspective scenery during the
early eighteenth century, it operated by using flats that slid in
grooves built on the stage floor and in supporting tracks behind
the borders above.
World fairs
Urban carnivals that became potent entertainments to legitimate
the capitalist-industrial (and often imperialist) order in the pre-
1914 era, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United
States. The first world fair was the Crystal Palace Exhibition in
London in 1851.
Yangbanxi
“Model revolutionary opera,” a genre of Chinese performance
created during the Cultural Revolution, that combines aspects of
jingju and Western performance.
Yellowface
The practice of using makeup and/or facial prosthetics to mimic
Asian features (such as shape of eyes or skin color) by an actor
who is not of Asian descent. It is the equivalent of blackface.
Yūgen
A deep, quiet, mysterious beauty tinged with sadness produced
by nō dramas. A crucial aspect of Zeami’s aesthetic theory.
Zaju
A Chinese variety theatre consisting of song, dance,
monologues, and farce popular during the Ming dynasty (1368–
1644).
Zanni
Servants in commedia dell’arte. They are usually smart and wily,
and often try to fool their masters.
Index
4:48 Psychosis (Kane) 571
7:84 481
9/11, theatre response 568
110 Stories (Tuft) 568

Abbott, George 76
Abe Kōbō 452
Abhinavagupta 88
absolutism 147, 149, 186, 191, 201, 213 –46, 291, 256, 593
absurdism see Theatre of the Absurd
Abu Bakr 126
Abydos “Passion Play” 37 –43
Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Fo) 481, 481
Acogny, Germaine 540
Act Without Words I (Beckett) 449
Act Without Words II (Beckett) 449
actor-centered approach 35
actor-managers 161, 163, 269, 593
actors and acting: audience relationship 87 –8
boys 193 –8
gestures 30, 177, 178, 278 –9, 602
Greek theatre 63
“holy” 491
immorality 168, 264, 486
Method acting 458, 460, 602
mie 177, 178, 602
networked culture 551 –5
stars 371 –3
theorizing 288 –90
troupes 158, 161, 172see also professionalization of theatre
The Adding Machine (Rice) 388
Addison, Joseph 263
Adler, Stella 458
Admiral’s Men 162 –3
Aercke, Kristiann 227
Aeschylus 59, 61, 62
aesthetic realism 258, 326 see also realism
Aestheticism 363, 376 –9, 391, 437 –8, 593
Africa: Berlin Conference 326, 446
griots/griottes 31 –2, 31
Hip Hop parallels 576
social activism 481 –2
theatre for development 543 –5
Yoruba ritual 32 –7, 36
African Americans 322, 327, 330, 338 –9, 365, 446, 457, 460, 479,
502, 504, 509, 573 –81
agit-prop plays 426, 472, 479, 488, 593
agonothetes 65
Ajayi, O. S. 34
Akalaitis, Joanne 504
Akihiko Senda see Senda Akihiko
Akimoto Matsuyo 457
Alarcón, Juan Ruiz de 201
Albee, Edward 452
The Alchemist (Jonson) 170, 191
Alexander the Great 65, 81
Alexander I, Tsar 307
Alexander, Robert 578 –9
Alexander, Zakkiyah 578
All Bed, Board, and Church (Rame) 481
All That Fall (Beckett) 450
Allana, Amal 538 –9, 538
allegorical drama see morality plays
Alleyn, Edward 163
alphabets 37, 48, 66
Greek 51 –3
Alves, Castro 316
Amaterasu 97
American Place Theatre 510
American Revolution 3, 256, 580 –1
Amphitryon (Molière) 232
Amphitryon (Plautus) 75 –6
Anderson, Benedict 186, 256, 291, 295
Andreini, Giovan Battista 161
Andreini, Isabella 159, 161
Ang Lee see Lee, Ang
Angels in America (Kushner) 504, 505
angle perspective (scena per angolo) 228, 229
angura plays 457, 501 –2, 593
animal fights, Roman 80
ankoku butoh 456
see also butoh
Anouilh, Jean 443
Anthesteria festival 54
antiquarianism 304, 593 –4 see also authenticity
antitheatricality 22 –4, 63, 204, 259 –60, 276, 407, 594
Antoine, André 326, 348, 349 –50, 350, 351, 354, 384 –5, 389
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 195, 237
Anzengruber, Ludwig 343
Aoi no ue (Lady Aoi) 95 –6
apartheid 482 –6
Apollinaire, Guillaume 425
Appia, Adolphe 377 –8, 378, 379, 389, 390, 412, 441, 458
appropriation 337 see also intercultural theatre
“Arab Spring” 480
aragoto 177 –8, 252, 594, 600
Arcadian Academy 238
Archer, Margaret S. 8
Arden, John 465
Arena Theatre 465 –6, 488
Argentina 465
Arhebamen, Eseohe 540
Ariosto, Ludovico 170
aristocracy: in Chekhov 356
 Chinese 154, 325, 334
European 103, 105, 123, 185, 187, 199, 202, 203, 213, 214 –15,
217, 226, 236, 238, 239, 242 –3, 262, 263, 264, 265 –7, 275, 288,
291, 293, 299, 302, 306, 307, 332, 525
Greek 51, 52, 63, 73
Islamic world 127
Japanese 91 –2, 93, 95, 98, 99 –100, 172, 174, 178, 270
Miss Julie 383 –4
Molière 230, 232, 256
and opera 240 –2
Roman 68, 80
in Shakespeare 196, 197
A Streetcar Named Desire (Blanche) 461 –3
Aristophanes 55, 61, 62, 63, 70, 223 –4
Aristotle 24, 53, 63 –4, 65, 73, 77, 89, 149 –50, 186 –7, 189, 202 –3,
206, 238, 275, 550
Poetics 63 –4, 73, 149 –50, 186 –7, 202 –3
Arlt, Roberto 428
Armani, Vincenza 159
Aronson, Arnold 502
Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry – Horace) 77 –8, 202 see also Horace
The Art of Speaking (Burgh) 278 –9
Artaud, Antonin 24, 426, 472 –3, 490 –1, 499 see also Theatre of
Cruelty
Arts Council England 506
As You Like It (Shakespeare) 169, 171, 190, 195
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 91 –2
Asian Americans 503, 509
Asimov, Isaac 77
Astley, Philip 318 –19
Aswameetam (Bhaasi) 470
At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats) 439
Atellan farces 70 –1
atomic bomb see Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Les Atrides (House of Atreus) (Théâtre du Soleil) 536 –7, 536 –7
audience response 462
audiophonic media 363, 374, 378, 391 –2, 411, 594 see also
phonograph; see also radio; see also telephone
Augustus Caesar 80
aulos 60, 71
Auslander, Philip 500
Australia 330, 512
niche theatres 510
Austria 113, 365, 389
Empire 306
Vienna Festival 518, 528 –9
auteur director 379, 493 –7, 498, 510, 594
authenticity: historical 338, 343, 344, 345, 350 –1, 513, 525 –8
as truthfulness 276, 278see also antiquarianism
see also truth
authority: directorial 494, 495
textual 373, 490, 501
see also auteur director
auto sacramental 119 –20, 198, 200, 221, 594
automatic writing 425
Autun Cathedral 124
avant-garde 258 –60, 363, 374 –6, 391, 403 –4, 411, 412, 415 –17,
426, 437 –8, 472, 501
definition 594
film 412
institutionalization 389 –91
Avatar Repertory Theater 562, 563
Avignoff Festival 516 –17
Avignon Festival 516 –17, 535
Ayame see Yoshizawa Ayame I

Babanova, Maria 423

The Bacchae (Euripides) 61, 328, 491, 497 –8, 497
Bahurp 467
Baikō see Onoe Baikō
Bakhtin, Mikhail 104, 105, 230, 232, 233
ballad opera 267
ballet 218 –19, 594
Balme, Christopher B. 280
Bandō Tamasaburō V 179, 180
bangzi qiang see clapper opera
Banks, Daniel 550, 576, 577, 579, 581
Baraka, Amiri (formerly LeRoi Jones) 473 –4, 474
Barbican Centre 506
Barish, Jonas 23
Barker, H. Granville 441
Barnes, Howard 461
Barnum, P. T. 319, 331
Baroque 147, 216 –17, 219, 221
aesthetic 246, 594
opera 224, 226, 228, 238 –42
stage design 224 –5, 227 –8
barques 40 –1, 40
Barranquilla 524 –5, 525
Barrault, Jean-Louis 498 –9
Barry, Elizabeth 237
Barry, Spranger 285
Barthes, Roland 280, 490
Bartholomew Fair (Jonson) 192, 207, 211
Bátiz-Benét, Mercedes 530
Batson, C. Daniel 430
The Battle of Legano (Verdi) 308
Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre 376
Bayreuth Festival Theatre, 311 –12
Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron 293, 304
Beaumont, Francis 163, 171 see also Fletcher, John
Beck, Julian 472
Beckett, Samuel 333, 447 –50, 448 –9, 452 –3, 457, 504, 532
Becque, Henri 348, 349
Bedeau, Julien 158
The Beggar’s Opera (Gay) 267, 268, 482
Behn, Aphra 170, 237 –8, 237
Beijing Opera see jingju
Belasco, David 340
The Bells (Lewis) 302, 302
Bennett, Susan 89
Beowulf 31, 32
Bergman, Ingmar 386
Bergson, Henri 73 –5
Berlin Conference 326, 446
Berliner Ensemble 432, 434, 454, 455, 465, 503, 506 see also
Brecht, Bertolt
Berman, Sabina 539
Bernhardt, Sarah 371 –2, 372 –3, 374, 379
BeSeTo (Beijing-Seoul-Tokyo) Festival 508
Bethell, Nicholas 454
Betsuyaku Minoru 457, 499, 508
Betterton, Thomas 236
Between God and Man (Kinoshita) 457
Bhaasi, Tooppil 467 –71, 470 –1
bhakti rasa 130
Bharata 82, 84, 86 –8
Bharucha, Rustom 535 –6
Bhaskar, Roy 209
Bhattacharya, Bijon 437
Bhattathiripad, V. T. 436
bhava 67, 82, 87 –9, 594
Bibbiena, Dovizi da 171
Bibiena, Ferdinando 228
Bibiena, Francisco 228
Bibiena, Giuseppe Galli 229
Bible 22, 109, 111, 112, 113, 188 –9
Puritans 192
translations 188
biblical dramas 111 –16
biomechanics 419 –23, 594 see also Meyerhold, Vsevolod
The Birth of a Nation (dir. Griffith) 412
The Birthday Party (Pinter) 453
Bismarck, Otto von 310 –11
Bixler, Jacqueline Eyring 539
Black Arts Repertory Theatre 474
The Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven 352
The Black Tent Theatre 457
Black Theatre Movement (BTM) 473
Black-Ey’d Susan (Jerrold) 304
blackface minstrelsy 317, 318 –23, 322, 332, 338 –9, 500, 500, 595,
602
Blackfriars Boys see Children of the Queen’s Revels
Blackfriars Theatre 167, 169
blacklist 461
Blavatsky, H. P. 382, 385
Blok, Aleksandr 379
Blood Knot (Fugard) 485
Blue Blouse troupes 418, 424, 425
Blurring Shine (Alexander) 578
Boal, Augusto 465 –6, 488, 542 –3
Bogart, Ann 492
Bohurupee 467
Bond, Edward 465
Book of Esther 107
books 186, 188, 189, 203, 206, 211, 225, 256, 257, 258, 261, 262,
265, 405 see also print cultures; see also printing
Booth, Edwin 371
Bootleg Faust (Shen) 489
Boris Godunov (Pushkin) 307
Boseman, Chadwick 579
Boucicault, Dion 343, 344, 372
Boulevard du Temple 274
Bourdieu, Pierre 99
bourgeois civil society see bourgeoisie; see public sphere;
The Bourgeois Gentleman (Molière) 232, 256
bourgeoisie 186, 256 –9, 261, 273, 307 –8, 348, 356, 375, 389, 404,
409, 415 –16
definition 595
nationalism 291, 293, 299see also private sphere
see also public sphere
Bouzek, Don 547
Bowlby, Rachel 370
box set 343 –4, 595
boxes 164, 167 –8
definition 595
royal 240 –2
The Braggart Soldier (Plautus) 73 –4, 76
Brand (Ibsen) 354
Brando, Marlon 339, 458, 461, 462
Brandon, James R. 180 –1
Brazil 315 –16, 488
authentic tours 526
carnival 103, 105
community-based theatre 546
Grupo Galpão 517 –18, 518
postwar 465 –6
Bread and Puppet Theater 473, 480
Brecht, Bertolt 335, 424 –5, 428 –34, 454, 455, 457 –8, 482, 528
Asia 532
The Caucasian Chalk Circle 424, 485
The Good Person of Setzuan 424, 425, 431
Mother Courage and Her Children 424, 432 –4, 432 –3
postwar theatre 465 –6
Breton, André 425 –6
The Bride of Abydos (Byron) 331
Brieux, Eugene 348 –9
Broadway 346, 366, 368, 369, 373, 458, 460, 461, 464, 507, 508, 509,
519 –22, 573, 576
Brook, Peter 494 –5, 495, 496, 499, 535, 535
Broschi, Carlo (Farinelli) 240, 240
Brown, S. 98, 99, 195
Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 103
Brueghel the Younger, Pieter 231
Bryusov, Valery 377
Buchell, Arend von 168
Büchner, Georg 485
Buckley, Matthew S. 299, 300 –1
Buddhism 67, 91, 93, 94, 97, 385
transformation 181
Buenaventura, Enrique 465, 466
bugaku 91
Bullins, Ed 473, 474
bunraku 153, 172, 175 –8, 175, 190, 501, 559, 595
Buñuel, Luis 426
Burbage, Richard 167
Burbage family 163
Bürger, Peter 415
Burgh, James 278 –9
burlesque 332, 595
Bus Stop (Gao) 489, 532
Bush, George W. 7
bushido 271, 340
butoh 456, 540, 540, 595
see also antoku butoh
Byron, Lord 331

cabaret 274, 376, 417, 418

Cage, John 472
Cailleau, Hubert 117
La Calandria (Bibbiena) 171
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 119 –20, 171, 200, 201
The Great Theatre of the World 120, 208
The Greatest Enchantment is Love 219
Life is a Dream 171, 200, 201
Camus, Albert 450, 451
Canada: agit-prop 426
butoh 540
community plays 545, 547
multicultural theatre 530
Stratford Festival 514
Canth, Minna 349
Cao Yu 352
capa y espada (“cape and sword” plays) 199, 221
capitalism 5, 147, 187, 214, 256, 349, 366 –7, 413 –14, 424
definition 595
industrial 363
rejection 404
Carballido, Emilio 466 –7
The Caretaker (Pinter) 453
Carlson, M. 203
carnival 102 –5, 230 –4, 595
carnivalesque 72, 101 –2, 104, 213, 230
definition 595
German states 242 –3
Carradine, David 339
Carroll, Lewis 570
carros 119
Carta Atenagorica (Letter Worthy of Athena – Sor Juana) 223
Carter, Lincoln J. 561
Cash, W. J. 463
Castelvetro, Lodovico 149 –50, 202 –3, 204
The Castle of Perseverance (morality play) 118, 119
castrati 239 –40, 276, 595
Castro, Fidel 487
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 459, 460, 460
catharsis 64
Catherine II, Tsarina 243
Catholicism 119, 155 –7, 189, 192, 215
Baroque 216
Brazil 315
carnival 102 –3
Counter-Reformation 157, 188, 214
mass 135
Passion plays 116
racial nationalism 313
Spain 198 –200
Cats (Lloyd Webber) 454, 519
The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht) 424, 485
cazuela 168
Celebration Theatre 510
censorship 261
absolutism 215 –16, 235
England 261, 266 –9
France 306
internet 407
Japan 269 –72, 290
Naturalism 349
postwar Japan 456
Russia 307
Chaikin, Joseph 499
chambers of rhetoric 108, 156, 157
Chameleon (ancient Greek philosopher) 56
Chameleons Group 552
Chang, Jeff 574 –5
Changsheng Wei Wei Changsheng Chapelain, Jean204
Chaplin, Charlie 412
Chapman, John 461
chariot-and-pole system 225 –6, 226, 228 –9, 236, 302, 596
Charles I, King 192, 218 –19
Charles II, King 169, 236 –7
Chaudhuri, Una 531
Chaussée, Pierre Claude Nivelle de la 272
Chekhov, Anton 308, 326, 351, 352, 355 –7, 356, 362, 447, 456, 573
Chen Shizheng 155
The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov) 351, 356, 456
The Cherry Pickers (Gilbert) 510
The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (McGrath) 481
Chikamatsu Monzaemon 174, 176, 178, 182, 190, 272
Children of the Queen’s Revels 163, 191, 194
Childress, Alice 474
Chile 517
Thriller 565
China 148, 151 –2, 153 –5
 Cold War 446
Cultural Revolution 477, 489, 530, 531 –2
globalization 488 –90
huaju 489, 531, 599
imperialism 413, 435 –6
jingju 258, 334 –5, 436, 529, 531 –2
multicultural theatre 530 –3
performance art 493Ming Dynasty
Yuan Dynasty
Chinese opera see jingju
Chinoiserie 335
Chong, Ping 503
chorus 93
definition 596
Mesoamerica 50
A Chorus Line (Bennett) 520 –1
Christian Mass 109 –11, 135
Christianity 22, 192, 216
commemorative dramas 102 –5
Crusades 120 –2
ludi opposition 80 –1
medieval commemorative performance 108 –11
medieval Spanish performance 122 –6
modernism 440
Protestant Reformation 188
schism 147
Chūshingura see Kanadehon Chūshingura
Cibber, Colley 264, 284
Le Cid (Corneille) 168, 204, 205, 206, 227
Cieslak, Ryszard 491, 492
circus 79, 318 –19, 331
Circus Maximus 79
City (or Great) Dionysia 54 –63
city dramas 501, 502
civil rights theatre 473 –4, 509 –10
civil society see bourgeoisie
Cixi, Empress Dowager 334
Clairon, Mademoiselle 279, 289
clapper operas (bangzi qiang) 334
class see social classes
Claudel, Paul 438, 440
Clear Channel Communications 520
Cleisthenes 52 –3
The Clouds (Aristophanes) 61
codified gestures 30
Coelina, Or the Child of Mystery (Pixérécourt) 300, 301
cognitive science 429 –30, 596
Cohan, George M. 365
Cold War 446 –7, 475, 477, 481, 487
end 479
postwar theatre 457 –61, 465 –71
Coleman, Robert 461
collaborative theatre devisement 571 –3
Collier, Jeremy 264
Colombia 524 –5, 525
colonialism 37, 325
anti-colonial plays 436 –7
colonization 48, 85, 121, 185 –6, 201, 313, 315, 316 see also
imperialism
comedias 199, 200
definition 596
Sor Juana 221 –2
Comédie Française 235, 244, 273 –4, 279, 288, 293, 305, 371, 442,
502
Comédie Italienne 273
comédie larmoyante 272, 596
Comédiens du Roi (King’s Players) 158, 202
comedy: Athens 54
City Dionysia 55, 61 –2, 63
definition 596
Jacobean 199
Roman Republic 70 –6see also New Comedy
see also Old Comedy
Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) 76
comic inversion 72
comic opera 273, 276, 604
commedia dell’arte 152, 158 –64, 193, 201
bourgeoisie 256
character types 159 –60, 160
definition 596
German states 242
Molière 230, 231, 232
opera 239
pantomime origins 266
sentimentalism 273 –5
Vietnam War 473
women 169
commedia erudita 159, 161, 596
commemorative dramas 38 –43, 50, 596
Christian 102, 102 –5, 104, 106, 108 –22, 115, 116, 117, 118,
122 –6, 125
Hindu 102, 130 –4, 131, 132
Islamic 102, 126 –30, 129
Jewish 102, 107 –8, 108, 124, 125
Mayan 47 –50, 105 –6
commemorative religious ceremonies 38
communication 10 –13, 210 –11, 262
early performance 25
technology 403 –4see also audiophonic media
see also electric and electronic cultures; see also internet; see
also literate cultures; see also manuscript cultures; see also oral
cultures; see also print cultures; see also writing
communism 349, 411, 413, 417 –23, 435 –6
definition 596
Germany 424
HUAC 460 –1
India 468
community-based theatre 487, 545 –7, 596
Compagnie Liebig 359
computers 404, 406 see also internet; see also online role-playing
games
Comte, Auguste 342
concert saloons 332
Confucianism 91, 153, 154
Congreve, William 264
The Connection (Gelber) 472
Connerton, Paul 38, 105, 135 –6
Connon, Derek 274
The Conscious Lovers (Steele) 264 –5
Constantine, Emperor 81, 109
Constructivism 418, 596 –7
contracts 189
Cooke, T. P. 304
Copeau, Jacques 442, 443
copyright 164, 187, 371, 372 –3, 504
definition 597
internet 407
Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 507
Corneille, Pierre 208, 227, 243
Le Cid 168, 204, 227
Cornerstone Theater 546
Corpus Christi: cycles cycle plays (mystery plays); feast of;113,
114, 116, 119, 122
corral 164 –5, 165, 168, 597
costumbrismo 314
Counter-Reformation 157, 188, 214, 597
Couple in the Cage (Fusco and Heredia) 527 –8
court entertainment 216 –19
Covent Garden Theatre 267
Cowley, Hannah 276
Craig, Edward Gordon 259, 377, 378 –9, 412, 438, 448, 555
critical realism 209
Crommelynck, Fernand 423
cross-cultural conversations 528
cross-dressing 169 –70, 171, 192, 193 –4
Crothers, Rachel 348
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Lee) 489
The Crucible (Miller) 460, 499 –500, 500, 504
Cruz, Petrona de la Cruz 523
Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la 201
Crystal Palace Exhibition 329
Cuba 327, 487 –8
cuckolds 171, 232
cultural assertion and preservation 523 –4
cultural differentiation 512, 522 –9
cultural memories 462, 464
cultural nationalism 292, 303 –7, 309 –10, 312 –13, 315, 323
cultural relativity 3 –5
Cunningham, Merce 472
“cup and saucer plays” 343
customary behaviors in oral cultures 30
cyborg theatre 552
cycle plays (mystery plays) 109, 113 –16, 120, 124, 155, 188, 597
cycloramas 344
Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand) 379, 499
Czechoslovakia 306
Prague Spring 479

Dada 415, 417, 425, 597

Dalcroze, Émile Jacques see Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile
Dali, Salvador 426
dan actor 334, 335
Daniels, Matt 580
Danjūrō see Ichikawa Danjūrō IX
danmari 496
Dante Alighieri 186
danza de las tijeras (scissors dance) 121, 122
dark tourism 526
Darwin, Charles 326, 331, 362
data mining 566
Davenant, William 236
Davies, Thomas 281
Davis, Jack 510
de Rojas, Fernando 170
De Todos Para Todos (From All for All) (Lo’il Maxil) 523
Death and the Fool (Hofmannsthal) 379
Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka) 37, 482
Death of a Salesman (Miller) 353, 459 –60, 459, 480
Decker, Thomas 482
decolonization 446, 467
deconstruction 359, 482, 490, 499 see also Derrida, Jacques
decorum (or propriety) 203, 597 see also the rules
Deep Azure (Boseman) 579
Delsarte, François 380
democracy 406, 413, 435, 559, 565, 566
Athenian 51 –3, 54, 57, 61
Chilean return to 517
Chinese opposition to 489, 533
European 278, 282, 295, 446
Hip Hop 575
Indian 134, 468, 469, 470
Russian 417
Twitter 564
U.S. 257, 316, 318, 366, 456, 460
Dench, Judy 456
dengaku 92
department stores 367, 370
The Deputy (Hochhuth) 455
Derrida, Jacques 24, 490
Descartes, René 77, 206, 209, 235, 237, 259, 285, 289
Desire Under the Elms (O’Neill) 388, 389
deus ex machina 234
Deutsches Theater 506
devised theatre 566, 571 –3, 597
DeWitt, Johannes 168
dialogic drama 50 –1
Diaz, Kristoffer 579
Díaz, Porfirio 515
Diderot, Denis 244, 273, 275, 281, 289, 554 –5
digital platforms 561 –4
Dionysian festivals 54 –63
Dionysus in ’69 (Schechner) 491, 497
Dionysus cult 26
Dirks, N. 85
Disorderly Houses Act of 1751 268 –9
dithyrambs 55, 57, 597
The Divine Narcissus (Sor Juana) 221
loa 120, 221
Dixon, Steve 552
djeli 576
Dobson, R. B. 116
Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 190, 190
documentary plays 424, 432, 454 –5, 504, 543
Dōjōji 95, 96 –7, 96, 98, 99
A Doll House (Ibsen) 352, 353, 354, 357 –61, 358 –60, 363, 467
Don Juan (Molière) 232 –3
Dorset Garden Theatre 236, 236
Dorst, Tankred 455
Doyle, Arthur Conan 344
Dragún, Osvaldo 465
Dramatists’ Guild of America 504
drame 273, 597
dream books 43
A Dream Play (Strindberg) 380
Dreamscape (Hinds) 577 –8
Dred Scott decision 317
Drewal, M. J. 33 –6
Drewal, M. T. 33 –6
Drottningholm Court Theatre 226, 226
Drowning Crow (Taylor) 573, 580
drugs, “Sixties” 478
Drury Lane Theatre 266 –7, 281 –2, 288
Dryden, John 237, 246
Du Bois, W. E. B. 580
The Duchess of Malfi (Webster) 171, 191
Duckworth, G. E. 71
Duke’s Company 236
Dullin, Charles 442
Duncombe, Thomas (William?) 284
Dürrenmatt, Freidrich 455
Duse, Eleanora 371
Dutch East India Company 185 –6
Dutchman (Baraka) 473 –4

Eagleton, Terry 353, 468

East-West Players 509
Easter 102 –3
Échame la Mano (Lend Me a Hand) (La Fomma) 524
Edelson, L. 179
Edinburgh Festival 516 –17
Edo era see Tokugawa era
Edwardes, George 364 –5
Egúngún masquerade 32 –7, 36, 102
Egypt 21, 25
Abydos “Passion Play” 37 –43
hieroglyphic texts 21, 42 –3
Egyptian Book of the Dead 39
Eh, Joe (Beckett) 450
Einfühlung 429 –34
Einstein on the Beach (Wilson and Glass) 502, 503
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 109, 206
Eisenstein, Sergei 418
electric and electronic cultures 11 –12, 480
avant-garde 375, 377 –9, 390 –1
definition 597
effects on performance structure and processes 566 –73
electricity 411
film 411 –13
 globalization 511, 540, 541 –2
internet 549, 551 –2
radio 411
revolutionary times 1910- 1950411 –13, 416 –19, 423 –8, 437 –
44
social media 406, 549, 563 –4
Stelarc 552, 553, 553, 562
technology 552 –5, 553, 561 –5see also online role-playing
games
electricity: industrialization 403 –4
invention 411
The Elephant (Betsuyaku) 457, 499
Elevator Repair Service 566
Eliot, T. S. 438, 440
Elizabethan era 155 –6, 165 –7, 169, 189 –91, 192 –8, 296 –7, 598
see also the Globe Theatre
elocutionary movement 290
Els Joglars 480
Else, Gerald 5, 26, 73
embodiment in online role-playing 558 –9
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 77
Emilia Galotti (Lessing) 275
emotes 557 –8, 559
emoticons 37
empathy 428 –34, 598
Los empeños de una casa (Pawns of a House – Sor Juana) 222
empiricism 206, 598
The Empty Space (Brook) 494
Encina, Juan del 119, 187, 199
Encyclopédie 273
Endgame (Beckett) 447 –9, 449, 504
Engel, J. J. 279
England: censorship 261, 266 –9
David Garrick 279 –87
Elizabethan era 155 –6, 165 –7, 169, 189 –91, 192 –8, 296 –7,
598
 elocutionary movement 290
Jacobean era 191 –2, 600
music hall 332 –5
nationalism 291, 304
neoclassicism 203 –4, 236 –8
pantomime, satire and censorship 266 –9
periodicals 263
Restoration 214, 237
satire 290
sentimental drama 264 –6see also the Globe Theatre
see also Shakespeare, William; see also United Kingdom
English Civil War 192, 214, 219
Enlightenment 147, 244 –5, 257, 261, 276
definition 598
Encyclopédie 273
French Revolution 300
nationalism 292, 301 –3
environmental theatre 491, 600 see also immersive theatre
epic theatre 424 see also Brecht, Bertolt
Epidaurus theatre 60
episodes, narrative development in oral culture 29 –30
Eréndira (Márquez) 538 –9, 538
Erenstein, R. 161
Espinosa, Isabel Juárez 523
Esslin, Martin 451, 454
Etherege, George 237
ethnic cleansing 295
Euell, Kim 578 –9
Eurhythmics 378, 439
Euripides 61 –2, 63, 328, 491, 497 –8, 497
Everyman (morality play) 119
evidence–theory connections 5 –6, 7
evolution 326, 331, 362, 414, 598
Evreinov, Nikolai 379
existentialism 450 –2, 475
exorcism 96, 598
Expressionism 363, 391
definition 598
film 412
German 380 –2, 413
United States 387 –8
expressive culture movement 388
eXtras 539, 539
see also Stones in His Pockets
Ezzat, Sharif 578

Fabian Society 414

fabula palliata 70
Fagaala (Genocide) 540
fairground theatre 194, 213, 242 –3, 266, 268, 273 –4
falda y empeño (“petticoats and perseverance”) 221
The False Antipathy (Chaussée) 272
false feet 334
farce 72, 73, 157 –9
definition 598
France 202
Molière 229, 230, 231, 232
La Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin (medieval farce) 157, 157
Farquhar, George 264
Farrell, Sean 568
fascism 409, 424, 426, 598
fashion 366 –70
fashion shows 367 –8, 369 –70
Feast of Corpus Christi 113, 114, 116, 119, 122
feast days 113 –16
Feast of Fools 105
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 427, 427
Fei Chunfang 530 –1
feminist theatre 179, 223, 349, 359, 362, 369 –70, 481, 509 –10, 536
feriae 69
Festa del Paradiso 217
Festival Theatre 311 –12, 312
festivals: Avignoff 516 –17
Avignon 516 –17, 535
BeSeTo Festival 508
Dionysian 54 –63
Edinburgh 516 –17
fringe 516 –17, 598
Hip-Hop 577
international 516 –18, 535
Vienna 518, 528 –9
Fideli troupe 161
figuralism 111
Filewod, Alan 547
film 363, 404, 409 –13
Chinese 489
musicals 522
silent 411, 450
talkies arrival 411
Film (Beckett) 450
filmic fragmentation 412 –13, 444
Finkelstein, Meredith 554
Fiorillo, Tiberio 234 –5
Fischer-Lichte, Erika 297 –8
Fjelde, Rolf 360
Flaminio Scala 161
flashmobs 565
Flaubert, Gustave 502
Fletcher, Angus 237
Fletcher, Joann 40, 171
Fletcher, John 163 see also Beaumont, Francis
Fluxus 472
Fo, Dario 481, 481
Foley, Helene 62
Folies-Bergère 365
La Fomma 523 –4
Fontaine, Jean de la 502
Ford, Henry 420
The Forest of Bondy (Pixérécourt) 301
formulas, verbal 29
Fornés, María Irene 509
forum theatre 543
Foster, Stephen 320
Foucault, Michel 194, 490
Fouquet, Jean 116
“fourth wall” 210, 273, 344, 351, 385, 598
Fowler, Will 314 –15
Fragments of a Trilogy (Serban) 499
France 156 –7, 201 –2, 425
absolutism 214 –16, 243 –6
Avignon Festival 516 –17, 535
ballet 218
dramaturgy 149
farce 157 –8
modernism 442 –3
nationalism 291 –2, 293, 299 –302, 304 –6
neoclassicism 234 –5
opera 240 –2
Paris Exposition 329, 329
performance texts 498 –9
permanent theatres 164
protests 478 –9
seating 167
sentimentalism 272 –4, 276 –7
stage design 226
Symbolism 377
theatre companies 162
variety theatre 365
“well-made plays” 353
world fairs 329see also French Revolution
Louis, Kings of France
France, Anatole 371 –2
Franco, Francisco 480
freak shows 330
Frederick II, King (Frederick the Great) 277
Frederick of Prussia, King 306
Fredrickson, George M. 309, 313
free theatre 565
Freedom 332
Freie Bühne (Free Stage) 349
Freire, Paolo 487
French Academy 204, 227, 234, 243
French Revolution 213, 243, 256, 257, 276, 292, 295, 299 –302, 304,
306
Freud, Sigmund 73, 374, 376, 388, 425, 463, 466
fringe festivals 516 –17, 598
The Frogs (Aristophanes) 61
From Morn to Midnight (Kaiser) 380
From Tel Aviv to Ramallah (Havrelock) 578
Frye, Northrop 73, 74
Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega) 200
Fugard, Athol 482, 483 –6
Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden) 179
functionalism 9
Fusco, Coco 493, 527 –8, 527
Futurism 415, 416 –17, 598

Gable, Jeremy 564

Gabriel, Peter 566
Gaiety Girls chorus 364 –5
Galileo 206
galleries 164 –5, 167 –8, 598
Gallese, Vittorio 430
Galsworthy, John 348
Gao Xingjian 489, 512, 531 –3
Garcia, Vanessa 573
Garden of Allah 368
Garibaldi, Giuseppe 308
Garrick, David 262, 266 –7, 279 –88, 283, 285 –6, 287 –8, 289
Gas (Kaiser) 380 –1
Gaster, T. 41
Gay, John 267, 268, 482
geju 436
Gelber, Jack 472
Gelosi troupe 159, 161
Gémier, Firmin 390
gender 167 –71
A Doll House 357 –61
English absolutism 236 –7
equality 349
female gladiators 79
Greek theatre 62
historiography 5
Japan 99 –100, 345 –7, 351 –2
niche theatres 509 –10
onnagata 174, 177 –82, 179 –80
print revolution 200
Sor Juana 221 –4
women’s roles in Renaissance drama 170 –1see also cross-
dressing
see also feminism; see also homoeroticism; see also queer
theory
geopathology 531, 532
Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen 350, 351
George Coates Performance Works 552
German Expressionism 380 –2, 413
Germany 277, 424
absolutism 242 –3
communism 424
nationalism 291 –2, 293 –9, 306, 309 –12
non-commercial theatres 506 –7
postwar theatre 454 –5
sentimentalism 275 –6, 277 –8
Gesamtkunstwerk 311, 379, 598
gestures: eighteenth century 278 –9
mie 177, 178, 602
 oral culture 30
gestus 425, 599 see also Brecht, Bertolt
Ghosh, Girish Chandra 437
The Ghost Sonata (Strindberg) 380, 382, 385 –6
Gibson, Charles Dana 368
Gibson Girls 368
gigaku 91
Gilbert, Kevin 510
Gilbert, William S. 304, 337 –9, 341, 364
Gilbert and Sullivan see Gilbert, William S.; see The Mikado; see
operetta; see Sullivan, Arthur;
Gillette, William 344
Giraudoux, Jean 76, 443
Girls Just Wanna Have Fund$ 565
Glaspell, Susan 387 –8
Glass, Philip 502
Glenn, Susan A. 369 –70
global theatre culture 512, 516 –22
globalization 9 –10, 14, 405, 488 –90, 566
communications 403
cultural preservation 523 –4
definition 599
intercultural theatre 534 –9
international theatre festivals 516 –18
mega-musicals 519 –22, 520
national identity 295
political theatre 481
and Shakespeare 512 –16
tourism 506, 514, 518, 522, 524, 525 –6
the Globe Theatre 166, 166, 167, 192, 195 –8, 196, 504
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre 166, 513 –14, 518
glocal 512, 540 –2, 599
Gluck, Christoph Willibald 275 –6, 378
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 277, 294, 296, 298
Gogol, Nikolai 307, 418, 482
Golden Age drama, Spanish 152, 198 –201, 208, 221
 metatheatricality 199
Goldhill, S. 56
Goldoni, Carlo 158, 161, 275
Goldsmith, Oliver 276
Gombrowicz, Witold 454
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 493, 527, 527, 551
The Good Person of Setzuan (Brecht) 424, 425, 431
Google Street View 565
Gorboduc (Sackville and Norton) 189
Gordon, Lady Duff (“Lucile”) 369
Gorky, Maxim 349, 349
Gorostiza, Manuel Eduardo 314
Gottsched, Johann Christoph 242 –3, 275
government subsidized theatres see national theatres
Gozzi, Carlo 275
GPS technology 565
Grant, Ulysses S. 344
gravitas 68 –9, 72
Great Chain of Being 4, 8
The Great God Brown (O’Neill) 388
The Great Pretenders (Lope de Vega) 208
The Great Theatre of the World (Calderón) 120, 208
Great War see World War I
The Greatest Enchantment is Love (Calderón) 219
Greece 26, 100, 186
Christianity in 109 –10
culture 152
influence of civilization 68 –72, 77 –8, 81, 85, 102, 186 –7, 190,
199, 202, 222, 235, 296, 451, 482, 489, 528, 579
writing 37 –8
Greek theatre and drama 5 –6, 21, 23, 328, 355, 496, 499, 536 –7,
536 –7, 550, 576
Athens theatre 50 –66
beginnings 5 –6, 26 –7, 28 –9
carnival 102
revivals 164
Griboyedov, A. S. 307
Griffith, D. W. 412
griots/griottes 31 –2, 31, 576
Grips Theater 480
Grotowski, Jerzy 485, 491 –2, 492
Ground Zero 547
Group Theatre: India 467
U.S. 458, 460
Grüber, Klaus-Michael 497 –8, 497
Grupo Galpão 517 –18, 518
Guan Hanqing 154
Guérin, Robert 158
guerrilla theatre 479
Guevara, Juan de 222
Guevara, Lina de 530
guilds 112, 114 –16, 119, 120, 599
Guthrie Theatre 521
Guthrie, Tyrone 441 –2, 514
Guyer, Paul 296
Guzmán, Feliciana Enríquez de 200 –1
Gwyn, Nell 237

Habermas, Jürgen 256

Habibabadi, Nabiollah 129
Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (Rado & Ragni)
478
Hale, T. A. 32
Hall, Michael Simon 568
Hall, Peter 452 –3, 453, 454, 506, 507
Hall, Stuart 319
hamartia 64
Hamburg Dramaturgy (Lessing) 275 –9, 293
Hamilton (Miranda) 580
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 156, 189, 190, 191, 207, 207, 210, 211, 284 –
5, 285, 352, 371 –2, 466, 506
Hamletmachine 455
Hammerstein II, Oscar 460
Handke, Peter 455
Hansberry, Lorraine 460
Hansen, Mark 566
Hanswurst (character) 105, 242 –3
Happenings 472, 492, 501 –2, 599
Happy Days (Beckett) 448
Hardy, Alexandre 202, 203
Harivamsa 131
Harlequins 159, 242, 266 –7
Harris, Henry 236
Harris, Max 122, 125
Harrison, T. 62
Hart, Lorenz 76
Hasenclever, Walter 380
hashigakari 94
Hauptmann, Gerhart 348, 350, 413 –14
Havelock, Eric 23
Havrelock, Rachel 578
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) 354 –5, 377, 554
Heddatron (Meriwether) 554, 554 see also Ibsen, Henrik
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 354, 439
Heian period 91
Hein, Norvin 131, 133
Held, Anna 368 –9
Hellenization 65
hellmouth 116, 118
Henke, Robert 159, 161
Henry IV (Shakespeare) 76, 304, 440
Henry V (Shakespeare) 441
Henry VI (Shakespeare) 283
Henry VIII (Shakespeare) 163, 513 –14
Henslowe, Philip 162 –3
Herbert, Victor 365
Hercules in Love (Baroque opera) 226 –7, 228
Herder, Johann Gottfried von 303 –4, 310
Heredia, Paula 528
The Hermit/Harlot (Mahendravarman) 82, 83, 83, 85
Hernández, Luisa Josefina 465
Hernani (Hugo) 305, 305
Herodotus 42
Hess, Linda 131, 133 –5
Hewlett, Robin 565
Heywood, John 156
“hidden transcripts” 125
hieroglyphic writing 21, 42 –3
high comedy 73
high modernism 447 –50, 599
Highway, Tomson 510
Hijikata Tatsumi 456
Hildegard of Bingen 118
Hill, Aaron 289
Hinds, Rickerby 577 –8
Hinduism 81, 100
Ramlila 102
Hip Hop culture 574 –5, 575
theatre 550, 573 –81, 578
Hirata Oriza 553
Hiroshi Ishiguro 553
Hiroshima and Nagasaki 455 –6, 457, 496
historiography 2 –13, 599
Hitchens, Robert 368
Hitler, Adolf 312
H.M.S. Pinafore (Gilbert) 304
Hobbes, Thomas 214, 237
Hobsbawm, Eric 295
Hoch, Danny 575 –6, 580
Hochhuth, Rolf 454 –5
Hoffenberg, P. H. 330
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 379
Hogarth, William 268, 268, 280 –1, 282 –4, 283, 286, 286
The Homecoming (Pinter) 453, 453
Homer 28 –9, 51, 54
The Iliad 28, 29, 51
The Odyssey 28 –9, 32, 51
homoeroticism 193 –8
homogenization 519, 523
Honegger, Gitta 529
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 77 –8, 202, 203
horizontal concepts of society 4
Hôtel de Bourgogne 158, 162, 164, 202, 234
House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC) 460 –1
Hrotsvitha 108
huaju 489, 531 –2, 599
Huang Zuolin 489
Hughes, Ted 499
Hugo, Victor 305, 305, 306
Human Be-In 478
humanism 186, 189, 190 –1, 198 –9, 201, 205, 599
Hungary 306
Hussein 128, 130, 135
Hwang, David Henry 339, 509
hybridity, cultural 512, 540, 547, 599

I, Too, Speak of the Rose (Yo tambien hablo de la rosa –

Carballido) 466 –7
Ibsen, Henrik 326, 349, 351, 354 –5, 354, 356 –61, 362, 363
A Doll House 352, 353, 354, 357 –61, 358 –60, 363, 467
Brand 354
Hedda Gabler 354 –5, 377, 554
The Master Builder 355, 377
Peer Gynt 354, 354
Symbolism 377
When We Dead Awaken 363, 377
The Wild Duck 356 –7
see also Heddatron
Ichikawa Danjūrō IX 344
Ichikawa Kumehachi I 179
iconography 280
iconology 280 –2, 287, 599
idealism, Romantic 354 –5
ideology 46, 599
Iffland, A. W. 298
Ikushima Shingorō 270
The Iliad (Homer) 28, 29, 51
Ilinsky, Igor 422, 423
image theatre 543
The Imaginary Invalid (Molière) 232
imaginary transposition 430, 433 –4 see also empathy
imagined community 256, 291, 295, 325
imitation 26, 202
immersive theatre 568 –70, 599 see also environmental theatre
immersive tourism 526
imperialism 46, 257 –8, 313, 314, 316, 325 –47, 362
anti- 435 –7
China 413, 435 –6
decline 409
definition 600
internal 334 –5
photography 342
realism 345
types of 326 –7
Impossible Theatre Company 572 –3, 572
improvisation 190 –1, 485, 499, 541, 554, 556, 558, 563, 564, 566,
572, 574
commedia 160 –1
opposition to 174, 190, 275
and play 35
In Case You Forget (Snyder) 579
In the Wine Time (Bullins) 474
India 22, 67 –8, 81 –9
anti-imperialism 436 –7
authentic tours 526
 kutiyattam 85 –7, 90, 130, 601
Mahabharata 81, 82, 535 –6, 535
Ramayana 81, 130 –1
Ramlila 102, 130 –5, 131, 132 –4, 132, 607
social drama 467 –71
theatre of roots 530
Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) 437
Indian Vedas 28
indianismo 315
indigenous performance: Africa 31 –2, 31, 32 –7, 36, 481 –2, 543 –
5, 576
India 81 –90, 102, 130 –5, 131, 467 –71, 530, 535 –6, 535, 601,
607
Mesoamerica 43 –50, 121
Mexico 314, 514 –15, 523 –4
Peru 121, 314, 488, 547
individualism 8, 206, 258 –9
methodological 8, 149
Indonesia 541 –2
industrial capitalism 148, 363
industrial revolution 258, 600
The Inferno (Strindberg) 382 –3
Injustice Done to Dou E (Guan) 154
innamorato/a 159, 161
Inquisition 600 see also Spanish Inquisition
Intar Theatre 509
intelligentsia 168, 376, 415, 421, 533
intelligibility 6 –7
intercultural theatre 534 –9, 600
internal imperialism 334 –5
International Theatre Institute 517
International Theatre Olympics 518
internet 406 –7, 549 –50
definition 600
online role-playing games 555 –61
Intimate Theatre 386
The Investigation (Weiss) 455
invisible theatre 501, 543
Ionesco, Eugène 452, 454
Ireland 191 –2, 438, 526, 539
“The Troubles” 479
Irrational Others 325 –6, 331 –2, 347, 362
Irving, Henry 302, 302, 344, 371
Isaka, M. 179
Ishiguro Hiroshi see Hiroshi Ishiguro
Islam 22, 126
arts 125
commemorative dramas 102
Qur’an 22, 126 –7, 127
Ta’ziyeh 102, 126 –30, 129, 135, 609
Italy: commedia dell’arte 158 –64
Futurism 416 –17
nationalism 291 –2, 307 –9
neoclassicism 202 –3
opera 238 –40
perspective 205
print revolution 186 –7
sentimentalism 274 –5
stage design 225 –6
Itō Michio 439
Ivanov, Viacheslav 377

Jacobean era 191 –2, 600

James, Henry 309
James I, King 163, 191
Jameson, Fredric 295
Jant-Bi Company 540
Japan 67 –8, 147 –8, 151 –2, 172 –82, 184, 362, 405
censorship 269 –72, 290
early theatre 22
fairs 330
Hiroshima and Nagasaki 445, 455 –6, 457, 496
 imperialism 327
Japonisme 336 –41
kabuki 24, 153, 170, 172 –82, 177 –80, 261, 269 –72, 269, 281,
344, 456, 600
Little Theatre 441, 501, 508
Madama Butterfly 339 –41
The Mikado 337 –9
national theatres 507
nō plays 90 –100, 150, 172, 344, 439, 604
performance texts 501
post WWII 455 –7
producer-directors 350
protests 479
realism 344 –5
religion 91, 92 –3, 95 –100
Russo-Japanese War 327
shingeki 351 –2, 362, 428, 456 –7, 528, 608
truth 351
women 170, 345 –7
writing 90 –1, 152see also Tokugawa era
Japonisme 336 –41, 336
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 378
Jarry, Alfred 415 –16, 416, 568
Jeffers, Cindy 554
Jelinek, Elfriede 361
Jellicoe, Ann 545
Jenik, Adriene 563
Jerrold, Douglas 304
Jessner, Leopold 390
Jesus of Nazareth 109
as risen Christ 113see also Corpus Christi
Jews: expulsion from Spain 119
marranos 124see also Judaism
see also Purim shpil
Jim Crow 320 –1
jingju (Beijing Opera) 258, 334 –5, 335, 436, 529, 531 –2, 600
jingxi see jingju (Beijing Opera) Jodelet (Julian Bedeau) 231 –2
Jodelle, Étienne 201
Jodrikdrik ñan Jodrikdrik ilo Ejmour 546
Johnson, Henry 320
Johnson, James H. 240 –1
Johnson, Julie Greer 222
Johnstone, Keith 558
La Jolla Playhouse 521
Jonczak, Nick 572
Jones, Inigo 218, 219
Jones, LeRoi see Baraka, Amiri
Jones, Marie 539
Jonson, Ben 24, 155, 163, 171, 190
The Alchemist 170, 191
Bartholomew Fair 192, 207, 211
first collection 191
influence 191 –2
The Masque of Queens 219
Volpone 155, 171
joruri 176
see also bunraku
Joseph, Marc Bamuthi 576
jousting 122
Jouvet, Louis 442, 443
Judaism 22, 107
Purim shpil 102, 107 –8, 607see also Jews
Juicio Final (Final Judgment) (Olmos) 121
Julius Caesar (Roman dictator) 69, 78 –9
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 69, 351
Junji Kinoshita see Kinoshita Junji

kabuki 24, 153, 170, 172 –82, 177 –80, 261, 269 –72, 269, 281, 344
censorship 456
definition 600
Mishima 456
kagura 98
Kahn, Gustave 376
Kaiser, Georg 380 –1
Kaison, the Priest of Hitachi (Akimoto) 457
Kakuzō Okakura Okakura Kakuzō Kale, P.84
Kalidasa 82
kami 91
Kammerspiele 386
Kanadehon Chūshingura 499
Kane, Sarah 571
Kani, John 482
Kant, Immanuel 294, 295 –6, 302, 437, 439
Kantor, Tadeusz 499
Kanze Kojirō Nobumitsu 96
Kaoru Osanai Osanai Kaoru Kaprow, Allan472, 491
Kashefi, Hussein Vaiz 128
katha 81
kathakali 90, 90, 528, 600
in Les Atrides 537
Kawakami Otojirō 345, 371
Kawakami Sadayakko 340, 345, 351, 371
Kawuonda Woman’s Group 546
Kazan, Elia 460, 461, 462
Kazuo Ōno OŌno Kazuo
Kean, Edmund 331
Keene, D. 271
Kei Aran 346
Kemble, Charles 304
Kennedy, John F. 7
Kennedy, Robert F. 479
Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC) 467 –71
Khartoum 332
Kierkegaard, Søren 450
Killigrew, Thomas 236
King, Martin Luther 479
King, Pamela M. 156
King John (Shakespeare) 304
King Lear (Shakespeare) 90, 191, 238, 285, 494
King’s Company 236
Kinoshita Junji 456 –7
Kinsley, Ben 565
Kipling, Rudyard 331
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 107 –8
Kishida Kunio 441
Klein, S. B. 99, 100
Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian 277, 277
Knapp, Bettina 244
Knight, Alan E. 112, 158
Knížák, Milan 472
Knock (Terayama) 501
Knowles, Ric 514
Kōbō Abe see Abe Kōbō
kōken 94, 175, 601
Kopit, Arthur 561 –2, 562
Korea 90, 92, 98, 147 –8, 151, 152, 208, 327, 330, 342, 346, 508, 528
Kortner, Fritz 381
Kota Yamazaki see Yamazaki Kota
Kott, Jan 452, 454
Kotzebue, August Friedrich von 277 –8, 298, 302
Kramnick, I. 264
The Krane 573
Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett) 450
Krio theatre 482
Kronenberger, Louis 461 –2
Kruger, Loren 295, 484
Kubo Sakae 428
Kumehachi see Ichikawa Kumehachi I
Kunio Kishida see Kishida Kunio
Kunisada Utagawa see Utagawa Kunisada
kunqu 154 –5, 334, 601
kusemai 98, 601
Kushner, Tony 504, 505
kutiyattam 85 –7, 90, 130, 601
kuttampalam 86, 87
Kyd, Thomas 189
kyōgen 95, 102, 601

Laberius 78 –9
El Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena (Indigenous and
Farmworker Theater Lab) 515
Lai Shengchuan (Stan Lai) 531
The Land of Volcanic Ash (Kubo) 428
landjuweelen 157
Lane, Yuri 578
Lang, Fritz 413
language: indigenous 523
Latin 111 –13, 188
Latin language: Bible translation 188
biblical dramas 111 –13
laughing comedies 276
Lawson, John Howard 426 –7
lazzi 158, 159 –60, 274, 601
Le Brun, Charles 281, 284
Le Conte, Valleran 158
Leach, William 366 –7
League of Nations 445, 446
Leary, Timothy 478
LeCompte, Elizabeth 499, 500
Lecoq, Jacques 503
Lee, Ang 489
legislative theatre 543
Lehar, Franz 365
Lehmann, Hans-Thies 570 –1
Leiter, S. L. 180, 269
Lekain (Henri-Louis Cain) 279
Lemaître, Frederick 305 –6
La Lena (Ariosto) 170
Lenaia 54, 63
Lenin, Vladimir 413, 419 –23
Lent 102 –3
Lenz, Jakob M. R. 277
León, Aya de 578
Leonardo da Vinci 217
Lepage, Robert 566, 567
Lermontov, Mikhail 307
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 275, 277, 279, 293, 294, 301
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller) 294 –5
Lewis, Leopold Davis, The Bells 302, 302
Leybourne, George 333
liberal nationalism 292 –4, 313 –17, 323
liberalism 348, 601
licenses 162, 168
England 267
Licensing Act of 1737 267 –9
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 285
The Life and Death of King Bamba (Lope de Vega) 200
Life is a Dream (Calderón) 171, 200, 201
Life Separates Us (Farrell) 568
Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (Wilson) 502
lighting 412
innovation 375, 377 –8, 411
psychological realism 458 –9
realist staging 344
Lilith Theatre 510
Lillo, George 265
Lin Shen see Shen Lin
Lincoln, Abraham 317, 321
Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre 266
Lion King 519, 520, 520
literary criticism 498
literate cultures 11 –13, 21 –2, 25 –6, 37 –8, 257, 601
Athens 50 –65
Egypt 38 –43
India 81 –90
Japan 90 –100
 Mesoamerica 43 –50
Rome 68 –81see also writing
The Little Clay Cart (Sudraka) 82 –3
Littlewood, Joan 465, 572
live/virtual performance 551 –5 “living newspapers”418, 427, 427,
436
Living Theatre 472 –3, 480, 491, 516
Livius Andronicus 69 –70
Lloyd Webber, Andrew 454, 480, 519 –20
loa, Divine Narcissus 120, 221
Locke, John 263 –4
locus 115, 166, 205, 601
logograms 37, 52
Lo’il Maxil 523
The London Merchant (Lillo) 265
Lopez, Jeremy 190
Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later King’s Men) 163, 166 –7, 195, 198
Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) 545 –6
Lott, E. 320
Lough, John 203
Louis XIII, King 204
Louis XIV, King 204, 214 –16, 226 –7, 229 –36, 291, 347, 496
Louis XV, King 240 –2, 245
Louis XVI, King 299 –300
Love is the Greater Labyrinth (Sor Juana) 222
The Love for Three Oranges (Gozzi) 275
Love’s Last Shift (Cibber) 264
love-suicide plays 270
The Loves of Mars and Venus (Weaver) 266
low comedy 73, 190
“low other” 124 –5
Löwen, Johann Friedrich 293, 294, 304
The Lower Depths (Gorky) 349, 349
L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) (Wooster Group) 500, 500,
504
Lucas de Iranzo, Count Miguel 124
Lucian 78
ludi 69 –71, 78, 80 –1, 601
Ludi Romani (“Roman Games”) 69
ludi scaenici 69 –70
Ludlam, Charles 509
Ludwig II, King 310
Lugné-Poe, Aurélien 377
Lully, Jean-Baptiste 241
Luna, James 551
Lutgendorf, P. 81, 131 –2
Luther, Martin 188
Lyceum Theatre 302, 344
Lyotard, Jean-François 498
lyric abstraction 442 –3

M. Butterfly (Hwang) 509

McArdell, James 284 –5, 285
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 179, 180, 190, 415, 569
McCarthy, Senator Joseph 460, 500 House Committee on Un-
American Activities (HUAC)
McCay, Winsor 551
MacDermot, Galt 478
McGrath, John 481
Machado, Eduardo 509
Machiavelli, Niccolò 187
McKendrick, Melveena 118, 199
Mackintosh, Cameron 519, 520, 521
Macklin, Charles 279
McLuhan, Marshall 148, 511
Macready, William Charles 304
Madama Butterfly (Puccini) 337, 339 –41, 509
Madame de Sade (Mishima) 456
Maddy, Yulisa Amadu 482
Madison Square Theater 344
Maeterlinck, Maurice 259, 376 –7
Magalhães, Domingos José Gonçalves de 315
The Magnanimous Cuckold (Crommelynck) 418, 419, 423
Maguire, Gregory 521
Mahabharata 81, 82, 535 –6, 535
Mahelot, Laurent 205, 205
Mahendravarman, King 83
The Hermit/Harlot 82, 83, 83, 85
Major Barbara (Shaw) 414 –15, 414
Malekin, Theo 386
Malik, Rohina 568
Malina, Judith 472
Mallarmé, Stephane 376
La Mama Experimental Theatre Club 499
Mamma Mia! 521, 522
Man and Superman (Shaw) 414 –15
Mandela, Nelson 484
Manet, Édouard 336
mansions 112, 204 –5, 601
manuscript cultures 11 –12, 101, 602
Mao Zedong 436, 477, 531
Maphio, Ser 159
Marat/Sade (Weiss) 494, 494
Marcos, Ferdinand 487
Mardi Gras 103, 104
Margolin, Deb 510
Margrave’s theatre 241
Marinetti, Filippo 416 –17
Marivaux, Pierre 244, 272, 274
Market Theatre 483
marketing, Ziegfeld Follies 366 –71
Marlowe, Christopher 189 –90
Márquez, Gabriel García 538 –9, 538
Martin, Pigmeat 500
Martinelli, Tristano 159
Martínez Medrano, Maria Alicia 515
The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia 115, 116
Marwick, Arthur 477
Marx, Karl 258, 349, 413
Marxism 319, 428, 429
Mary Stuart (Schiller) 294, 296 –7, 301
masks: Greek theatre 59, 60
Japan 91, 95, 95
Purim shpil 108
Rabinal Achi 106, 107
Yoruba ritual 35 –7, 36
The Masque of Queens (Jonson) 219
masques 213, 218 –19, 602
The Master Builder (Ibsen) 355, 377
Master of the Revels 162, 169, 195, 267
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (Wagner) 310 –11
Matsui Sumako 352
Maugue, Annelise 359
May, Elaine Tyler 463
May Fourth Movement 352
May 1968 events in France 478 –9
Maya 21, 25 –6
La Fomma 523 –4
Lo’il Maxil 523 –4
performance 37 –8, 43 –60
Pre-Columbian performance 37 –8, 43 –60
Rabinal Achi 37 –8, 47 –60
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 417, 418
Mazarin, Cardinal 226 –7
meaningful space 559
mega-musicals 519 –22, 547
Mei Lanfang 335, 432, 528
Méliès, George 411 –12
melodrama 278, 299 –302, 305 –6, 331 –2
definition 602
and early film 412
and realism 343 –4, 345, 356
and well-made play 354
Memories in Hiding (Bhaasi) 470, 470memory aids, oral
cultures28 –30
The Menaechmi (Plautus) 74, 76
Menander 70, 70, 76
Meng Jinghui 489
The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 169, 171, 279, 331
Meriwether, Elizabeth 554
Mesoamerican performance 43 –50
Mesopotamia 25
metaphors 11, 13, 24, 34
print 279, 289
sound 374
Metastasio, Pietro 239, 246
metatheatricality 199, 207 –11, 222, 425, 431, 438, 439 –40, 447 –8,
501, 602 see also plays-within-plays
Method acting 458, 460, 602
methodological individualism 8, 149
Mexico 122, 488
Mayan cultural assertion 523 –4
national theatre 507
nationalism 314
niche theatres 509
Pastorela 106
postwar 465, 466 –7
Revolution 427 –8
revolutionaries 413
Shakespeare 514 –15
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 289, 377, 379, 389, 414, 417, 418 –23, 428,
431, 491
mezzotints 284 –5, 285
Michio Itō see Itō Michio
Middle East 331 –2, 480, 594 see also Orientalism; Said, Edward
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 191, 207, 211, 344,
494 –6, 495, 514
mie 177, 178, 602
Mielziner, Jo 458 –9, 459, 480
The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan) 337 –9
Miller, Arthur 353, 459 –60, 459, 480, 499 –500, 500, 504
mime: Romans 69, 78
mimesis 23 –4, 63 –4, 202, 448, 602
Ming dynasty 148, 335
Ming Huang, Emperor 153
minimalism 447, 448, 516
Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing) 275
Minoru Betsuyaku see Betsuyaku Minoru
minstrel shows blackface minstrelsy Miranda, Lin-Manuel580
mirror neurons 430
Misanthropy and Repentance (Kotzebue) 277 –8
mise en scène 494, 602
Les Misérables (musical) 454, 506, 519, 522
Mishima Yukio 456
Mishra, Vijay 535
Miss Julie (Strindberg) 349, 380, 382 –4
Miss Saigon (musical) 339, 519
Miss Sara Sampson (Lessing) 275
[missed connections] 572, 573
El Misterio de Elche 117 –18
Mistero Buffo (Fo) 481
mitate 271
Mitra, Dinabendhu 436
Mitra, Sombhu 467
Miura Tamaki 341
Mixed Blood Theatre 529 –30
Mizejewski, Linda 368, 369, 370
mnemonic records 49
hieroglyphic texts 42 –3
Mnouchkine, Ariane 498 –9, 536 –7, 536, 537
modernism 404, 409, 411, 437 –44
definition 602
high 447 –50, 599
transforming in Europe 452 –4
US postwar 458
Moeller, Phillip 390
Mohammad 126 –7
Mokae, Zakes 485
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 76, 229 –34, 235, 246, 351, 496
Amphitryon 232
The Bourgeois Gentleman 232, 256
Don Juan 232 –3
The Imaginary Invalid 232
Les Précieuses ridicules 230 –2
The School for Wives 232
Tartuffe 208, 229 –30, 232, 233 –4, 496
Molina, Tirso de 200
Monet, Claude 336, 336
monomane 98 –9, 602
Monroe, Marilyn 458
Montaigne, Michel de 77
Monteverdi, Claudio 216
Monzaemon Chikamatsu see Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Moors 122 –6
moral sense philosophy 263, 264
morality plays 109, 118 –19, 121, 124 –5, 156, 603
Morehouse, Ward 461
moros y cristianos 123 –4, 125 –6, 125, 603
Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) 351, 352, 355, 377
Mostow, Joshua 340
Mother Courage and Her Children (Brecht) 424, 432 –4, 432 –3
mountebanks 155, 156
mourning dramas, Islamic 126 –30
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 276
Mr. Garrick in “Richard III” (Hogarth) 280 –1, 282 –4, 283
Mrożek, Sławomir 452, 453 –4
Mtwa, Percy 483, 483
Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 190
Mucha, Alphonse 373
Mudlark Theater 564
Müller, Heiner 455
multicultural theatre 528, 529 –34, 603
Mummers plays 124, 603
Murasaki Shikibu 91
Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot) 440
Murnau, F. W. 503
Muromachi period 95
Murphy, Arthur 284
Murphy, Paul 552
Murray, Gilbert 5
Muse, John H. 563 –4
music: at court 216
cultural fusion 540
Eurhythmics 378, 439
Greek theatre 60Hip Hop theatre
see also musicals; see also opera; see also operetta
music hall 332 –5, 603
musicals 364 –5, 375, 480
and film 522
mega-musicals 519 –22, 547
Muslims 122, 127 –8
and 9/11 568
Moorish territories 123
Shi’ite 128
Sunni 128
Musset, Alfred de 371 –2, 373
The Mysteries of Paris 306
mystery play see cycle play
“The Myth of Sisyphus” 451

Nacht und Traume (Beckett) 450

Nagler, A. M. 78
Naharro, Bartolomé de Torres 199
Nakamura Shikan VII 179
nanodramas 564
Napoleon Bonaparte 257, 292, 299, 303 –4, 307, 313, 319
Nara 91
narration, bunraku 176
narrative 6 –7
episodic 29 –30
Nathan the Wise (Lessing) 275
national identity 295
national theatres 504 –7
nationalism 256 –7, 258, 291 –2
1760- 1800292 –9
American 313 –22
definition 603
European 1815–48 303 –307
French Revolution 299 –302
German 309 –12
Italian 308 –9
Russian 307 –8see also cultural nationalism
see also liberal nationalism; see also racial nationalism
nationhood 256
Native Americans (North and South) 124 –6, 316, 327, 330, 551
Naturalism 150, 325 –62, 363, 374, 384, 391, 404, 413 –14
definition 603
Natyasastra 82, 84 –5, 86 –8, 100, 603
naumachiae 69, 79, 603
Nazis and Nazism 312, 361, 424, 432, 445 –6, 451, 454 –5, 456,
463, 491, 529
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 351
neoclassicism 185, 201, 202 –4, 206, 210
and absolutism 213, 216, 227, 228 –9, 230, 235, 243 –6
definition 603
England 203 –4, 236 –8
France 234 –5
French Revolution 300
see also Ars Poetica
Horace
Poetics
the rules
neo-colonialism 314, 316
Nero, Emperor 79
Netherlands 156 –7
community-based theatre 545
nationalism 291
networked culture 406 –7, 549 –50, 603 see also electric and
electronic cultures
Neuber, Caroline 242 –3
New Comedy 63, 65, 70, 200, 603
New Lafayette Theatre Company 474
New Popular Theatre 466
New Stagecraft Movement 458
New York Neo-Futurists 564
New York Public Theatre (NYPT) 520 –1
newspaper theatre 543
newspapers 256, 261 –90
The Spectator 256, 263, 264 –5
Ngema, Mbongeni 483, 483
Niao Collective 493
niche theatres 508 –10
Nicholas I, Tsar 307
Nicholson, Eric A. 169, 170 –1
nickelodeons 411
Nietzsche, Friedrich 375 –6, 379
Nigeria 482
Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance (NPTA) 543
Nijō Yoshimoto 92, 93
Ninagawa Yukio 501
ningyō-buri 175
No Exit (Sartre) 451
nō plays 90 –100, 150, 172, 344
definition 604
Mishima 456
Yeats 439
Nobumitsu see Kanze Kojirō Nobumitsu
Nodier, Charles 300 –1
Noiresque: The Fallen Angel (Chong) 503
non-commercial theatres 504 –8, 520 –1
Northern Ireland, the Troubles 479
Northwest Asian American Theatre 509
Norton, Thomas 189
Nos do Morro 546
Nosferatu (Chong) 503
Not I (Beckett) 448 –9
not-for-profit theatre 504, 507, 509
Ntshinga, Norman 482
Ntshona, Winston 482
Nuevo Teatro Popular 488
Nunn, Trevor 454, 506

objectification 370
objectivity 10, 363 –4, 387 –8, 391 –2
film 412
rule 557 –8, 559
O’Casey, Sean 426
O’Connor, Flannery 461
The Octoroon (Boucicault) 343
The Odyssey (Homer) 28 –9, 32, 51
Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles) 61
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 63, 164, 562, 563
Off-Broadway 508
Off-Off-Broadway 508
Ogunde, Hubert 482
Ogunde Concert Party 482
Ogyū Sorai 271
Oh, What a Lovely War! (dir. Littlewood) 572
Ohio Impromptu (Beckett) 448
Okakura Kakuzō 337
Okhlopkov, Nikolai 466, 467
Okuni 173, 173
Old Comedy 63, 70, 604
Olivier, Laurence 441, 506
Olmos, Andrés de 121
O’Neill, Eugene 363, 387 –8, 389, 458
O’Neill, P. G. 92, 98
Ong Keng Sen 510
online role-playing games 555 –6
performance techniques 556 –8
as theatre 560 –1objectivity, rule
see also reciprocal player agency
onnagata 170, 174, 177 –82, 179 –80, 270, 345, 347, 351 –2
definition 604
Ōno Kazuo 456
Onoe Baikō 179, 179
Open Theatre 499
opera 213, 364, 528
ballad 267
Baroque 216 –17, 224, 226, 228, 238 –42
definition 604
nationalism 308
print cultures 216
opera buffa (neoclassical comic opera) 239
opéra-comique (comic opera) 273, 276, 604
opera seria (neoclassical serious opera) 239 –41, 243, 275
operetta 337 –41, 364, 365, 604
oral cultures 11 –12, 21 –4, 25 –66
definition 604
Rome 69
orange wenches 168
oratory 53
Roman see rhetoric
Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) (Hildegard) 118 –19
The Oresteia (Aeschylus) 61
Orientalism 325, 327 –41, 345 –6, 362, 604
origin theories 5 –6, 26 –7
commedia dell’arte 158 –61
Oriza Hirata see Hirata Oriza
Oro, Juan Bustillo 428
The Orphan of China (Voltaire) 245, 335
Orpheus and Eurydice (Gluck) 378
Osanai Kaoru 351 –2
Osiris 39–43
Ositola, Kolawole 34
Osofisan, Femi 482
Ostrovsky, Alexander 307 –8, 343
Othello (Shakespeare) 171, 307, 309, 331
O’Toole, Peter 506
Our Town (Wilder) 440, 499
Out At Sea (Mrożek) 453

pageant wagons 114, 115, 115, 604

Pai, Hsien-yung (Kenneth) 155
Palitzsch, Peter 455
Palladio, Andrea 217 –18
Pan Asian Repertory Theatre 509
Panathenaia festival 54
Panikkar, K. N. 530
Panofsky, Erwin 280
pantomime 333
definition 604
England 266 –9
Roman 69, 78 –9
Papp, Joseph 515
Paradise Now (Living Theatre) 472 –3, 491
Paris Opéra 240 –1, 273 –4, 276
Parker, Alexander A. 199 –200
Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer 552
Parks, Suzan-Lori 509
parody 72
Parsifal (Wagner) 312
parterre 167 –8
participatory theatre 563, 568 –70
passion plays 37 –43, 109, 116, 117, 188, 604
passions 279 see also gestures
Pastorela 106
patents 162, 605
royal 236, 238
pathos 64
patriarchy 193
patricians 68
patrimonialization 524 –5, 605
patronage 155, 162, 164, 605
patter songs 337
Pattie, David 451 –2
Paulose, K. G. 87
Paulson, Ronald 282
Pavis, Patrice 566 –7
Pavlov, Ivan 421
Pear Garden 153
Peer Gynt (Ibsen) 354, 354
Peking Opera see jingju
Pelléas and Mélisande (Maeterlinck) 377
Peloponnesian War 65
penny character print 301
The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) (Tang) 155
People’s Theatre 428
performance art 24, 492 –3, 526 –9, 527, 605
Performance Group 491, 499
performance rights 372 –3
performance texts 498 –501
periodical print cultures 257, 261, 262 –4, 290, 605 see also print
cultures; see also private sphere; see also public sphere
periodization 10, 11 –12, 152, 450, 605
peripety 64
permanent theatres 164 –7, 199
Perry, Commodore Matthew C. 338 –9
personhood 406 –7
perspective, angle see scena per angolo perspective scenery 4,
204 –6, 216, 217 –18, 225 –6, 605
see also scena per angolo
scenery
Peru 488, 547
scissors dancer 121, 122
PETA see Philippine Educational Theater Association
Peters, Julie Stone 151
The Phantom of the Opera (Lloyd Webber) 480, 519 –20
Phèdre (Racine) 235, 456, 500
Philip II of Macedon 65
Philip IV of Spain 201, 219
Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) 487, 487, 546
Philippines 487, 546
philosophes 244 –5
Phoenician script 52
phonocentrism 24
phonographs 363, 374, 411
photography 356 –7, 362, 391 –2
invention 325
marketing 371
musical theatre 364 –5
Naturalism 347
realism 342 –3, 345, 374
Phrynicus 62
Pickelhering (character) 105
Pieces of Paper (Hall) 568
pietas 68 –9
Pinter, Harold 333, 452, 453, 453
piracy 187
Pirandello, Luigi 438, 439 –40
Piscator, Erwin 424, 428
Pisistratus 52, 54
pit 167, 240, 241, 311, 605
Pixérécourt, Guilbert de 300, 301
The Plain Dealer (Wycherley) 171
Planché, James Robinson 304
Planchon, Roger 495 –6
Plass, Paul 80
platea 112, 115, 116, 166, 204 –5, 605 see also mansions; see also
locus
Plato 23 –4, 63, 150, 186, 259, 451
plausibility 6 –7
Plautus, Titus Maccius 70 –6, 77, 80, 187
Play (Beckett) 448
The Play of Adam (biblical drama) 112
The Play of Daniel (biblical drama) 111 –12
Play of Herod (biblical drama) 112, 156
The Play of the Weather (Heywood) 156
playing: and improvisation 35
plays-within-plays 189, 207 –8, 211, 438, 440 see also
metatheatricality
playwrights: payment 163, 187
print cultures 212, 371 –3
Please Love Austria (dir. Schlingensief) 529
plebeians 68
Pliny the Younger 80
Plutarch 69
podplays 563
Poe, Edgar Allan 376 –7
Poel, William 441
poetic justice 203, 204, 605 see also the rules
Poetics (Aristotle) 63 –4, 73, 149 –50, 186 –7, 202 see also
Aristotle
Poland 306
protests 479
The Police (Mrożek) 453
polis 62 –3
political non-realism 404
political theatre 404, 480 –1
agit-prop plays 426, 472, 479, 488, 593
angura plays 457, 501, 593
civil rights theatre 473 –4, 509 –10
community-based theatre 487, 545 –7, 596
in mainstream theatre 480
 Mixed Blood Theatre 529 –30
niche theatres 508 –10
theatre for development (TFD) 487 –8, 543 –5, 609
Theatre of the Oppressed 466, 488, 542 –4, 609
yangbanxi 489, 611see also Black Theatre Movement (BTM)
see also Boal, Augusto; see also Brecht, Bertolt; see also
feminist theatre; see also Fo, Dario; see also La Fomma; see
also Fugard, Athol; see also Gao Xingjian; see also Gómez-
Peña, Guillermo; see also Hip Hop culture; see also La Fomma;
see also Lo’il Maxil; see also Nuevo Teatro Popular; see also
Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA); see also
San Francisco Mime Troupe; see also Serpent Players; see also
El Teatro Campesino; see also Teatro Escambray
Polly (Gay) 267, 268
Polos 63
polysemy 46
Pompey the Great 78
poor theatre Grotowski, Jerzy Popova, Lyubov418, 419
Popul Vuh 465
popular culture 318 –19
Portugal 315
racial nationalism 313
positivism 331, 342 –3, 347, 362, 363, 375, 412, 605
post hoc argument 7
postdramatic theatre 550, 566, 570 –1, 605 –6
postmodernism 447, 498, 606
The Pot of Gold (Plautus) 74, 76
Pound, Ezra 439
The Power of Darkness (Tolstoy) 349
Power House (Bhaasi) 470
Power, Will 580
The Precious Damsels (Les Précieuses ridicules – Molière) 230
–2
presence 551
in online role-playing 558 –9
primacy of practice theory 11
print capitalism 186
print cultures 11 –12, 148, 206 –7, 208, 210 –11, 216, 289, 606
1870- 1930363 –4, 371 –3, 391 –2
absolutism 261, 263, 265 –6, 305, 308
absolutist theatre 213 –16, 220 –5
bourgeois civil society 256 –7
early China 153 –5
Europe 155 –68, 185 –212, 216 –22, 224 –45
Japan 172 –82
nationalism 291 –4, 299 –302
new media 363 –407
newspapers 256
plays 191see also periodical print cultures
see also print revolution; see also printing; see also secular
theatre; see also sentimentalism
print revolution: beginnings 186
books 188 –9
female writers, importance for Spanish 200 –1
metatheatricality and 207 –11
the Reformation 188, 208
Renaissance 206 –7, 208
printing: movable type 147 –8, 151, 152, 186
plays 191
psychological impact 189, 278
religion 188, 189
women 200 –1
woodblocks 148
printing press 152, 186, 187
prints 147, 173, 269, 269, 280 –1, 282 –3, 284 –7, 285, 286, 336
private sphere 257, 258 –9, 263 –6, 268, 290, 391, 406, 407, 582
definition 606
private theatres 166 –7
The Prodigal Son (Bhaasi) 470
producer-directors 258, 350 –2
professionalization of theatre 152, 161 –2, 164, 185, 189, 202, 288
The Progeny of Krishna 90
Pronomos Vase 56, 56, 59, 60
prophets play 111
proscenium arch 224 –5, 606
prostitutes 170, 173 –4
Protector 162
protest movements: 1968 478 –9
apartheid 482, 483 –4
Arab Spring 480
in China 533
and growth of U.S. alternative theatre 472 –4
Prague Spring 478
Protestant Reformation 155, 188, 208, 214, 606
Vietnam war 478 –9, 501
Provincetown Players 387
psychological realism 148, 203, 387, 404 –5, 457 –61, 462 –4, 475,
606
public sphere 256, 257, 259, 261 –90, 292 –3, 391, 406, 407, 582
definition 606see also bourgeoisie
see also periodical print cultures
Puccini, Giacomo 337, 339 –41
PUENTE 530
Punch and Judy shows 159
Punchdrunk 569, 570
puppets 473
Japan 174 –6
Übermarionettes 379, 555, 610
wayang golek 541
wayang kulit 541, 541
Purim shpil 102, 107 –8, 108, 606
Puritans 155, 167, 188, 192, 195, 218 –19, 237, 264, 316
Pushkin, Alexander 307
the pyrrhic 54

Qianlong, Emperor 334

Quad I+II (Beckett) 450
Queen (British rock band) 540
queer theory 194
queer theatres 509 –10
Quillard, Pierre 376, 377
Qur’an 22, 126 –7, 127

Rabelais, François 498 –9

Rabinal Achi 37 –8, 47 –60, 105, 106 –7, 106, 135, 524
racial nationalism 292, 309 –12, 313 –23
Racine, Jean 235, 246, 456, 500
racism 257, 309, 337, 338 –9
blackface minstrelsy 318 –22, 602
cf. Orientalism 328
U.S. 316 –17, 473see also apartheid
see also racial nationalism; see also yellowface
Radhakrishnan, Dr. 469
radical theatre political theatre radio;363, 404, 405, 411 see
Beckett;450 niche market;508 see segue;459
Rado, James 478
Ragni, Gerome 478
A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry) 460
Ralph Roister Doister (Udall) 189
Ramachandran, Kaniyapuram 469
Ramayana 81, 130 –1
Ramcharitmanas (The Lake of Deeds of Rama – Tulsidas) 130
Rame, Franca 481
Ramlila 102, 130 –5, 131, 132 –4, 132, 607
Ramnagar Ramlila 132 –4
rasa 67, 82, 607
rasa-bhava aesthetic theory 87 –8, 89, 150
rationalism 206 –7, 259, 261, 347, 607
Rawzat al-shuhada (The Garden of Martyrs – Kashefi) 128
Reagon, Bernice Johnson 502
realism 149, 182, 258 –60, 325 –62, 363, 389 –90, 404
aesthetic 258, 326
cf. Naturalism 347
critical 209
 definition 607
gender 351 –2
photography 342 –3, 345, 356 –7, 374
producer-directors 350 –2
psychological 148, 203, 387, 404 –5, 457 –61, 462 –4, 475, 606
socialist 418 –19, 609
staging 343 –5
verismo 339
World War II aftermath 445 –75
Really Useful Group 519 –20
Rebellato, Dan 519
reciprocal player agency in online role-play 558 –9
Reconstruction 317, 321 –2
Red Lion 164 –5
Reed, Wendy 552
reflexivity 210 –11
Rehm, Ruth 58 –9
Reinelt, Janelle 468
Reinhardt, Max 363, 386, 389 –90, 391
religion: Athens 53 –4
commemorative ceremonies 38
holy scriptures 22
Japan 91
Mesoamerican performance 44 –6
as origin of theatre 5 –6
print revolution 188 –9
ritual 5 –6, 26 –7, 32
theatre disapproval 22 –3see also Buddhism
see also Christianity; see also Hinduism; see also Islam; see
also Judaism
remix 550, 566, 580, 607
Renaissance 10, 147, 185, 186 –7, 190, 195, 206, 217
definition 607
metatheatricality 109, 207
Renoir, Pierre-August 336
Reorbit Project 564
Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Reply to Sor Filotea – Sor Juana) 223
Restoration 214, 237, 264, 607
Retrospectivism 379, 607
Reuler, Jack 529
revenge tragedies 189, 191
rhetoric, art of 53
Roman 69
Rice, Elmer 388
Rice, Thomas Dartmouth 318, 320 –1
Rich, John 266
Richard II (Shakespeare) 238
Richard III (Shakespeare) 281, 282 –5, 283, 441
Richelieu, Cardinal 204, 214, 227, 234
Ridiculous Theatre Company 509
The Ring of the Nibelungen (Wagner) 310, 312
rites of reversal/misrule 105
ritual 21, 25, 27
definition 607
Egúngún masquerade 32 –7, 36
Mesoamerican performance 45
oral cultures 30 –2, 66
as origin of theatre 5 –6, 26 –7
religious 5 –6, 26 –7, 32
Robert Macaire (Lemaître) 306
Robertson, Jennifer 179 –81
Robertson, Roland 512
Robertson, Thomas W. 343, 343
Robespierre, Maximilian 300
robots 553 –5
Rodgers, Richard 76, 460
Rodgers and Hammerstein 460
Rohd, Michael 547
Rojas, Fernando de 222
Roman Empire 21 –2, 67 –81, 100, 186
carnival 102
Christianity 109
Roman Republic 68 –78, 100
Romantic idealism 354 –5
Romanticism 304 –5, 310, 363, 375, 429
Brazil 315
definition 607
Orientalism 335
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 195, 514, 515, 564
Mexican adaptation 515
The Rope (Plautus) 74 –5
Rose Theatre 163
Roselli, David K. 6, 67
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard) 454
Rosetta stone 21
Rostand, Edmond 379, 499
Rotrou, Jean 208
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 276 –7
The Rover (Behn) 170, 237 –8
Rowe, Nicholas 265
Royal National Theatre (the National or NT) 207, 453, 453, 454,
494, 495, 504, 506, 513, 514
Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 504, 506, 513, 514, 564
Rubin, Ben 566
the rules 77, 149 –50, 608
see also Ars Poetica
decorum
neoclassicism
poetic justice
Poetics
unities of action, time, and place
verisimilitude
Rural Dionysia 54, 56
Russia 424
absolutism 242 –3
Cold War 446, 477
communism 419 –23
Futurism 417
 nationalism 307 –9
postwar 467
realism 405
Retrospectivism 379
Russo-Japanese War 327
Symbolism 377see also Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution 409, 411, 416, 417 –19, 435

Sackville, Thomas 189

sacrifice 45 –6, 47, 48, 85, 113
Sadayakko Kawakami Sadayakko Said, Edward327 –8
St. Denis, Ruth 335, 335
saint plays (miracle plays) 109, 115, 117 –18, 608
Sakae Kubo see Kubo Sakae
Sakuntala (Kalidasa) 82
Salazar y Torres, Agustín de 222
Salle des Machines 226, 228
Salmi, Hannu 310
Salomé (Wilde) 379
Salvini, Tommaso 308 –9, 309
samurai 67 –8, 91 –2, 95, 99, 100, 172 –4, 177, 182, 270 –2, 340,
456, 496
San Francisco Mime Troupe 473, 480, 487, 529
Sandow the Magnificent 368
Sankai Juku 456, 540
Sano Seki 428
Sanskrit drama 81 –9, 100, 150, 608
Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) 492
Sardou, Victorien 353
Sartre, Jean-Paul 450 –1
sarugaku 92 –3
The Satin Slipper (Claudel) 440
satire 72, 191, 256, 261, 272 –4
England 266 –9, 290
France 273 –4
satyr play 59, 61, 62, 63, 73
 competition 55
definition 608
Saxe-Meiningen, Duke of see Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen
Sayonara (Oriza) 553
Sayonara II 553
Scala, Flaminio 161
Scaliger, Julius Caesar 202 –3, 206
Scamozzi, Vincenzo 218
Scarron, Paul 232
scena per angolo 228, 229
scenery 149
perspective 204 –6, 216, 217 –18, 225 –6, 605
stage design 224 –9
Symbolism 377 –9
three-dimensional 302see also chariot-and-pole system
see also scena per angolo; see also simultaneous staging; see
also stage design; theatre architecture
scenic writing 496
Schechner, Richard 134, 491, 493, 499, 551
schemas 11
Schiller, Friedrich 277, 294 –9, 301, 323
Schiller Theater 506
Schlingensief, Christoph 528 –9
Schmidhuber, Guillermo 221 –2
Schneider, Alan 448
Schons, Dorothy 222 –3
The School for Scandal (Sheridan) 276
The School for Wives (Molière) 232
Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig 279
Schumann, Peter 473
science 342 –3, 347
and empathy 429 –31
scientific management 419 –20
scientific revolution 149, 206 –7, 208, 259
scissors dance 121, 122
Scott, James C. 125
Scribe, Eugène 353
Scullion, Scott 61
The Seagull (Chekhov) 351, 352, 355, 573
Second Life 556 –7, 556, 562, 563, 570
Second World War see World War II
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (Lai) 531
secular theatre, 1250- 1650151 –84
segue 459
Segura, Manuel Ascensio 314
Seki Sano see Sano Seki
Sellars, Peter 155
semiotics 280 –1
Senda Akihiko 501 –2
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 77, 191
Sensitisation and Education through Kunda Arts (SEKA) 544, 545
sentimentalism 213, 256, 261 –2definition608
in England 264 –6
in Europe 272 –6
French Revolution 276, 300
A Short View […] (Collier) 264
Senusret III 41, 43
Serban, Andrei 499
Serlio, Sebastiano 217, 218, 224, 225
Serpent Players 482, 485 –6
The Servant of Two Masters (Goldoni) 275
sexuality, Twelfth Night 193 –8
Sha Yexin 489
Shakespeare, William 76, 152, 190 –1
antiquarianism 304
Antony and Cleopatra 195, 237
As You Like It 169, 171, 190, 195
Brook’s productions 494 –5, 495
Comedy of Errors 76
Coriolanus 507
cross-dressing 171
Garrick’s performances 281 –2, 283 –6
 globalization 512 –16
and Globe theatre 166
Hamlet 156, 189, 190, 191, 207, 207, 210, 211, 284 –5, 285, 352,
371 –2, 466, 506
Henry IV 76, 304, 440
Henry V 441
Henry VI 283
Henry VIII 163, 513 –14
influence 191 –2
Julius Caesar 69, 351
King John 304
King Lear 90, 191, 238, 285, 494
Lord Chamberlain’s Men 163
Macbeth 179, 180, 190, 415, 569
The Merchant of Venice 169, 171, 279, 331
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 191, 207, 211, 344, 494 –6, 495,
514
modernism 441 –2
Much Ado About Nothing 190
Othello 171, 307, 309, 331
Play of Herod 156
Richard II 238
Richard III 281, 282 –5, 283, 441
Romeo and Juliet 195, 514, 515, 564
The Tempest 442, 514
Titus Andronicus 495
Twelfth Night 169, 171, 185, 192, 193 –8, 196, 443
Two Gentlemen of Verona 171
UK non-commercial theatres 504 –6
The Winter’s Tale 171see also Shakespeare’s Globe
Shakespeare Behind Bars program 515
Shakespeare’s Globe 166, 513 –14, 518
Shakuntala see Sakuntala
shamans 32, 608
The Shame Man and El Mexican’t Meet the CyberVato (Gómez-
Peña, Sifuentes and Luna) 551
shamisen 176
sharing system 163, 608
Sharpeville massacre 484, 485
Shaw, George Bernard 414 –15, 414
Shaw, Peggy 509 –10
She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith) 276
Shen Lin 489
Shepard, Sam 504
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 276
Sherlock Holmes (Doyle) 344
Shibaraku (Wait a Moment!) 177, 178
Shikan see Nakamura Shikan VII
shimpa 345, 352, 362, 608
shingeki 351 –2, 362, 428, 528
definition 608
postwar 456 –7
Shinto 91, 92, 97
shirabyōshi 98, 99
shite 94 –5, 96 –7, 98 –9
Shively, D. H. 270
Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) 508
Shklovsky, Victor 425
shogun 91 –4, 99, 172 –4, 181, 184, 261, 270
shopping 366 –7, 522
A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (Collier) 264
Shōyō Tsubouchi Shōyō Shōyō Tsubouchi see Tsubouchi Shōyō
Shūji Terayama see Terayama Shūji Sierra Leone482
Sifuentes, Roberto 493, 551
silent films 411, 450
Simon, Barney 483, 483
Simov, V. S. 352
simultaneous staging 116, 204 –6, 608
Singapore 510
SITI 492
The Situation Theatre 457
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello) 439 –40
Siyâvash 129
Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (Fugard, Kani and Ntshona) 482, 486
Slave Ship (Baraka) 474, 474
slavery 45, 71 –2, 73 –5, 76, 103, 263, 315 –17, 321 –2
Sleep No More (Punchdrunk) 569 –70, 569
Sly, R. Evan 286, 286
Smith, Adam 264
Smith, Anna Deavere 504
Smith, Bruce 194
snowball effect 75
Snowstorm No. 1 (Knížák)472
Snyder, Ben 579
social activism, Africa 481 –2
social classes 202, 204
aristocracy 52, 63, 68, 91 –2, 154, 214 –15, 226, 334, 356
middle class 186, 261, 263, 265 –6, 275, 278, 281 –2, 291, 302,
308, 332 –3, 335, 353, 525 –6
Romans 68, 80see also bourgeoisie
see also samurai; see also working classes
social constructionism 9
social context 3 –5
Social Darwinism 331, 347 –8, 362, 414, 608
social drama 436
India 467 –71
social media 549, 563 –4, 565 –6, 582
social relationships 8
socialism 258, 348 –9, 413 –15, 426 –7, 465
definition 608
utopian 380 –1
socialist realism 418 –19, 609
society, theories of 8 –10
socio-spatial performance experiments 565
Socrates 61 –2
Sojourn Theatre 547
The Soldiers (Lenz) 277
Solon 26, 52
The Son (Hasenclever) 380
Sophism 61, 63
Sophocles 61, 62, 63, 562
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 120, 216, 219 –24, 220
The Divine Narcissus 120, 221
Soufas, Teresa Scott 200
South Africa 482 –6
South Asian theatre companies, U.K. 510
Soviet Union 258, 409, 417 –18, 420, 421, 423, 446, 467, 478, 479,
487
Soyinka, Wole 37, 482
Spain 121 –2, 163
auto sacramental 119 –20
corral 164 –5, 165, 168
Franco opposition 480
Golden Age drama 152, 198 –201, 208, 221
Inquisition 162
medieval performance 122 –6
permanent theatres 164 –5
print cultures 219 –24
Protector 162
racial nationalism 313 –14
The Spaniards (Lermontov) 307
Spanish Inquisition 119, 124, 162, 199, 221, 222, 307, 600
The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 189
spectacular bodies 364 –5
The Spectator 256, 263, 264 –5
speech 23
oral cultures 28
storytelling 32
speech art 53
Spiderwoman 510
Split Britches 509 –10
Spring’s Awakening (Wedekind) 389 –90, 390
stage design 458
 absolutism 224 –9
digital platforms 561 –2
realism 343 –5
Roman, 71, 71, 78see also scenery
theatre architecture
stage games, Roman 69 –70
Stalin, Joseph 418 –19, 420
Stanislavsky, Konstantin 309, 349, 350 –1, 355, 356, 362, 363, 377,
389, 458, 489, 491
stars, print cultures 371 –3
Steele, Richard 263, 264 –5
Stelarc 552 –3, 553, 562
Sten, Maria 122
Stepanova, Varvara 422
Stephan, Joseph 242
stereotypes 29, 124, 148, 309, 314, 338, 340, 461 –4, 473, 500, 552,
576
comedy 73, 473
Japan 338, 340
memory aids 29
Stewart, Ellen 499
Stoicism 77
Stones in His Pockets (Jones) 539
see also eXtras
Stoppard, Tom 454
Storey, John 319
Storm and Stress movement 277, 294
storytelling 21, 25, 27
oral cultures 30 –2, 66
Sanskrit 81
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 302, 317, 321
Strasberg, Lee 458
Street Knowledge 579
“Street with a View” 565
A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) 179, 459, 460, 461 –4
Strehler, Giorgio 465
Strindberg, August 349, 363, 380
“inferno” 380
and O’Neill 388
“The Powers” 382 –7
Stubbs, Philip 195
Stut Theater 545
subjectivity 363 –4, 374, 387 –8, 391 –2
film 412
Such Tweet Sorrow 564
Sudraka 82
Sukeroku: Flower of Edo 178, 180, 271
Sullivan, Arthur 337 –9, 341, 364
Sumako Matsui see Matsui Sumako
Sumarokov, Alexander 243
“Summer of Love” 478
Sun Huizhu (William Sun) 530 –1
Sun Yat-sen 413, 435
Sunarya, Asep Sundandar 542
Surrealism 425 –6, 447, 452, 454, 466, 609
Surveillance Camera Players 568
Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) 508
Suzuki Method 492, 496
Suzuki Tadashi 492, 494, 496, 499, 501, 508
Swados, Elizabeth 499
Swamp Gravy 545
Swan Theatre 168
syllabaries 37, 51 –2
symbolic capital 99
symbolic imagery 29
Symbolism 363, 374, 375, 376 –9, 391
definition 609
film 412
synesthesia 377
Syracuse 62

Tabaño 480
Tadashi Suzuki see Suzuki Tadashi
Tagore, Rabindranath 437, 467
Takarazuka Revue 182, 346 –7, 346, 365
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy 489
Takiyeh Dowlat 129
Talbot, Henry Fox 342
The Tale of Genji (Murasaki) 91, 96
Tamaki Miura see Miura Tamaki
Tamasaburō see Bandō Tamasaburō V
Tamasha 510
Tan Dun 155
Tandy, Jessica 461, 462
Tang Xianzu 155
Tango (Mrożek) 454
Tanguay, Eva 365
Taoism 91
tape recorder 450
Tara Arts 510
Tartuffe (Molière) 208, 229 –30, 232, 233 –4, 496
Tate, Nahum 238, 285
The Tatler 263, 264
Tatsumi Hijikata see Hijikata Tatsumi
Taylor, Diana 44 –6, 50
Taylor, Regina 573
Taylorism 419 –23
Ta’ziyeh 102, 126 –30, 129, 135, 609
tearful comedy (comédie larmoyante) 272
Teatre de la Carriera 480
El Teatro Campesino 509
Teatro Escambray 487 –8
Teatro Jornalero Sin Fronteras 546
Teatro Novissimo 225
Teatro Olimpico 164, 217 –18
techno-cabaret 566
technological determinism 13
Tedlock, Dennis 44, 48 –50
telegraph 332, 342, 364, 371, 374, 380, 403
telegraphic dialogue 380
telephones 11, 258, 342, 363, 374, 403, 405, 411
television 404, 405, 475, 479 –80
moon landing 479
post WWII 446
The Tempest (Shakespeare) 442, 514
Temple of Confessions (Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes) 493
Tenjō Sajiki 457, 501
Terayama Shūji 501 –2
Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 70, 72, 108
Terry, Ellen 371
tertulias 168
Tertullian 80 –1
Theatertreffen 506 –7
The Theatre 165 –6
Theatre of the Absurd 447, 450 –2, 475, 609
Theatre architecture and stages 4
Bayreuth Festival Theatre, 311 –12
India (Sanskrit drama) 84, 85, 87
Japan 93 –4, 93, 94, 96
Roman 78 –9, 79see also environmental theatre
see also the Globe Theatre; see also proscenium arch
Théâtre de Complicité 503
Theatre of Cruelty 426, 473, 490 –1, 494, 609 see also Artaud,
Antonin
theatre of cultural differentiation 512, 522 –9
theatre for development (TFD) 487 –8, 543 –5, 609
Theatre of Dionysus 6, 57 –60, 57 –9
The Theatre and Its Double 426, 472, 490 see also Artaud,
Antonin
“theatre of fact” 455
Theatre of Images 502, 503
Théâtre Libre 349 –50, 350, 351, 354, 384 –5
Théâtre du Marais 162, 202, 234
Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) 496
Theatre of the Nations festivals 517
Théâtre Odéon 351
Théâtre de l’Oeuvre 377, 415, 438
Theatre of the Oppressed 466, 488, 542 –4, 609
Theatre of Pompey 79
theatre for social change 512, 542 –7, 609
Théâtre du Soleil 498 –9, 536 –7, 536 –7
Theatre Works 510
theatron 57, 58 –9
Then She Fell (Third Rail Theatre) 569, 570
Thespis 54, 59
Thieves in the Temple (Léon) 578
Third Rail Projects 569, 570
Thirty Years War 214
Thompson, Evan 430
Three Sisters (Chekhov) 351, 356
Thriller (Jackson’s song) 565
The Thunderstorm (Ostrovsky) 308, 343
Tichener, E. B. 429
Tied to a Pole (Bōshibari) 95
Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 495
To Damascus (Strindberg) 380
Toga Art Park 508
Tokugawa era 172 –3
kabuki and bunraku 173 –82
Toller, Ernst 381, 381
Tolstoy, Aleksei K. 308
Tolstoy, Leo 349
Tongue’s Memory of Home (Niao Collective) 493
Torah 22
Torelli, Giacomo 225 –6
touring companies 148
tourism 329 –30, 506, 512 –14, 522 –9
tragedy: Athens 54, 56, 59, 61 –5, 73
City Dionysia 55, 61
definition 609
 Jacobean 199
Roman 77 –8
Seneca 77, 189, 191
see also Poetics
revenge tragedies
Shakespeare, William
tragicomedies 191, 201, 222
The Tragi-comedy of Calisto and Melibea (La Celestina) (Rojas)
170
Transfiguration (Toller) 381, 381
transformational model of social activity 10
transistors 403, 405
transvestitism 192 see also cross-dressing
travesty 233
Treadwell, Sophie 388
Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 344, 441
The Trickster of Seville (Molina) 200
Trissino, Gian Giorgio 187
The Trojan Women 62
Serban 499
Suzuki 494, 496
tropes 110 –11, 609
troupes 158, 161, 172 see also professionalization of theatre
truth 10, 23, 150, 206, 209 –10, 259 –60, 351, 407
Tsubouchi Shōyō 351
tsure 94
Tuft, Sarah 568
Tulsidas 130
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 169, 171, 185, 192, 193 –8, 196, 443
Twilight Crane (Kinoshita) 456 –7
Twisted Pairs (George Coates Performance Works) 552
Twitter 563 –4, 582
Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare) 171

Übermarionettes 259, 379, 555, 610

Ubu Roi (King Ubu – Jarry) 415 –16, 416, 568
Udall, Nicholas 187
ukiyo-e see woodblock prints (Japan)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 302, 317, 321
China 352
Uncle Vanya (Chekhov) 351, 355 –6, 356
UNESCO 50, 105, 517, 524
unintended consequences, law of 13
United Kingdom_ Edinburgh Festival 516 –17
expositions 329 –31
niche theatres 510
non-commercial theatres 504 –6
postwar theatre 465see also England
United States: American Revolution 3, 256
civil war 316, 321
Cold War 446, 447, 477
community-based theatre 545 –6, 547
department stores 367
Expressionism 387 –8
fairs 330, 331
Federal Theatre Project 427, 427
Japanese performers 345
manifest destiny 327
minstrel shows 338 –9, 518 –22, 602
multicultural theatre 529 –30
nationalism 292
niche theatres 508 –10
nickelodeons 411
non-commercial theatres 507 –8
post war Japan 456 –7
post WWII 445 –6, 447, 459 –64
protest movement 472 –5
psychological realism 404 –5, 457 –61
racial nationalism 316 –23
Shakespeare Behind Bars program 515
vaudeville 332
unities of action, time, and place 202 –3, 610 see also the rules
Uno, Roberta 575, 580
Urban, Joseph 369
urbanization 148, 161 –2, 186
Utagawa Kunisada 269
utopia 301, 310, 380 –1, 424, 472 –3
Uzume 97 –8

vacuum tubes 403, 404, 405

vagabond 161, 162, 164, 551
Valdez, Luis 509
Valk, Kate 500
Valmiki 131
The Vampire (Boucicault) 344
van Akkeren, Ruud 49
van Eyck, Jan and/or Hubert 110
Van Gogh, Vincent 336, 336
variety theatre 332 –5, 364 –5, 411, 610
Varman, King Kulasekhara 85 –6
Varro, M. Terentius 76
Vatsyayan, K. 89
vaudeville 322, 332, 365, 551, 610
vecchi 159
Vedas 82
Vega, Lope de 119, 163, 171, 200, 203, 208, 549
verbal patterns in oral culture 29
Verdi, Giuseppe 308
Verfremdungseffekt 425, 610
verisimilitude 202, 203, 216, 353, 610 see also the rules
verismo 339
Versailles 215
Versényi, Adam 45
vertical concepts of society 4
Vestris, Madame Lucia Elizabeth 343
Vicente, Gil 119, 187
Vienna Festival 518, 528 –9
Vietnam War 404 –5, 446, 455, 472, 473, 478 –9, 501
 Miss Saigon 339
Vieux-Colombier 442, 443
Viewpoints 492
Vigarani, Gaspar 228
Vignolo, Paolo 524
Vilar, Jean 516 –17
Villegas, Juan 517
Vince, Ronald 109, 120
Vincent-Buffault, Anne 272
Virgil 186
virtual: definition 610
platforms 550
worlds 555 –6, 559 –61, 562see also online role-playing
games
The Visit (Dürrenmatt) 455
Vitruvius 187, 217 –18
Volksbühne 424, 506
Volksgeist 303, 310, 610
Volpone (Jonson) 155, 171
Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) 244 –5, 246, 273, 288, 335

Wagner, Richard 310 –12, 376, 377 –8, 379

wagoto 177 –8, 610
Waite, Gary 157
Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 447, 448, 449 –50, 452 –3
waki 94, 96
Walder, Dennis 484 –5
Walpole, Horace 287
Walpole, Robert 267 –8
Walt Disney Corporation 520, 521
Wanamaker, Sam 513
Wanamaker family 368
Ward, David 117 –18
Waseda Shōgekijō (Waseda Little Theatre) 508
Watt, David 547
Watts, Richard 461
The Way of the World (Congreve) 264
wayang golek 541, 610
wayang kulit 541, 541, 610
Wayburn, Ned 369
Weaver, John 266
Weaver, Lois 510
Webster, John 191
Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White
(Childress) 474
Wedekind, Frank 389 –90, 390
wedges (in Yuan drama) 153 –4
Wei Changsheng 334
Weigel, Helene 432, 434, 454, 455
“Weimar classicism” 294, 296
Weimar Court Theatre 296 –8, 297
Weiss, Peter 454 –5, 494, 494
Welcome to Arroyo’s (Diaz) 579
“well-made plays” 353, 610
Wertheim, A. 485 –6
West End 508, 520
What If I Were Real (Sha) 489
Wheatcroft, A. 121
When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen) 363, 377
The White-Haired Girl 436
Whitelaw, Billie 448 –9
Wicked (Maguire) 521 –2
The Wild Duck (Ibsen) 356 –7
Wild Man (Gao) 512, 532
Wilde, Oscar 337, 379
Wilder, Thornton 438, 440, 499
Wiles, David 54
Wilkinson, Kathleen Mary Rose “Dolores” 370
Williams, Raymond 295, 319, 353
Williams, Tennessee 458 –9, 460, 460, 461 –4
Wilson, August 509
Wilson, Benjamin 284, 285
Wilson, Michael 282
Wilson, Robert 502 –3, 503
wing-and-groove system 236, 611
Wings (Kopit) 561 –2, 562
Winkler, J. J. 62
The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 171
wisdom texts 43
Wise, Jennifer 53
Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy 454
Wolf, Stacy 521 –2
women, objectification of 364 –5, 365, 366 –70, 370, 489
Women’s Project Theater Lab 565
women’s rights and early feminism 349, 351 –2, 357 –61
woodblock prints (Japan) 147, 173, 269, 336
woodblocks 148
Wooster Group 499 –500, 500, 504
working classes 258, 305, 320, 349, 413, 424, 481, 496
agit-prop 472
melodrama 302
minstrelsy 318
music hall 333see also social classes
world fairs 329 –31, 611
World Financial Center 565
World War I 306 –7, 363, 380 –1, 392, 404, 445
electric and electronic culture 409 –13
political maps 410
World War II 404
origins and aftermath 445 –75
World Wide Web 406
Worthen, W. B. 449
Woza Albert! (Mtwa, Ngema and Simon) 483, 483
writing 101
antitheatricality 23 –4
automatic 425
Christian Europe 109
contracts 189
 early literate societies 67 –100
Greek 51 –3
hieroglyphic texts 21, 42 –3
Hip Hop 574
Japan 90 –1, 152
Mayan 43 –4, 48
oral cultures 37 –8, 66
origins 21, 25see also alphabets
see also logograms; see also syllabaries
Wycherley, William 171, 237
Wyspiański, Stanislav 491

Yamazaki Kota 540

yangbanxi 489, 611
yanggeju 436
Ybarra, Patricia 295
Yeats, William Butler 438 –9, 448, 528
yellowface 338 –9, 339, 611
Yellowface (Hwang) 339
Yo tambien hablo de la rosa (I, Too, Speak of the Rose –
Carballido) 466 –7
York Cycle 114, 115, 116, 565
Yoruba ritual 32 –7, 36
Yoshimitsu Askikaga Yoshimitsu
Yoshimoto Nijō see Nijō Yoshimoto
Yoshizawa Ayame I 181 –2
You Made Me a Communist (Bhaasi) 468 –469
YouTube 13
Yuan dynasty 148, 153 –154
yūgen 98 –9, 611
Yukio Mishima see Mishima Yukio
Yukio Ninagawa see Ninagawa Yukio
Yuyachkani 488, 547

Zaïre 244
zaju 153 –4, 154, 245, 334, 611
zanni 159, 611
Zarrilli, Phillip B. 25 –66, 67 –100, 101 –36
Zeami 92, 93, 95, 97 –8
Ziegfeld, Florenz 365 –6, 368 –70
Ziegfeld Follies 365 –71, 370
Zola, Émile 259, 347 –8, 348, 349
“zombie ideas” 6
zone of contact 512, 529 –30, 547
Zulu Time (Lepage) 566, 567