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, Tobin Nellhaus,
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and
Tamara Underiner
Third edition published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 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,
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storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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)

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 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 I 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
Figures

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
The Bhagavan or Hermit’s wayward student, Shandilya in a kutiyattam production of The Hermit/Harlot in
2.6
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, 1977
2.7 Floor plan of a playhouse for Sanskrit theatre in India
Temple theatre, known as a kuttampalam, built for kutiyattam in the Lord Vadakkunnathan (Siva) temple in Trissur,
2.8
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
Scene from the medieval play The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, from the Livre d’Heures pour maître Etienne Chevalier
3.7
(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
Drawing made in 1942 of a Native American as a Spanish Christian saint on a horse in a moros y cristianos production
3.13
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
A performance of the popular kabuki play, Shibaraku (Wait a Moment!), in Tokyo’s Nakamura Theatre in the mid-
4.10
nineteenth century
4.11 Danjūrō XII as Sukeroku in the kabuki play Sukeroku: Flower of Edo
4.12 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
Faustus (played by Edward Alleyn) conjures a devil on the title page for a seventeenth-century edition of The Tragical
5.1
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)
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
6.4
of San Jerónimo
Cut-away drawing by Gustaf Kull of the chariot-and-pole machinery for changing flats at the Drottningholm Court
6.5
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
Detail from the painting Village Festival in Honor of St. Hubert and St. Anthony by Pieter Brueghel the Younger
6.9
(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
James Robinson Planché’s antiquarian design for the king’s costume in Charles Kemble’s 1824 production of
8.5
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
V.S. Simov’s 1898 naturalistic design for Act I of the Moscow Art Theatre’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The
9.13
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
Alfred Jarry’s lithographed program for the 1896 Paris premiere of his play Ubu Roi (King Ubu), at the Theatre de
11.3
l’Oeuvre, staged by Aurélien Lugné-Poe
Lyubov Popova’s Constructivist set for Meyerhold’s 1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand
11.4
Crommelynck
The “meat mincer” setting, designed by Varvara Stepanova, for Meyerhold’s 1922 production of The Death of Tarelkin,
11.5
by Alexander Kobylin
Image from Triple-A Plowed Under, a 1936 “living newspaper” production by the U.S. Federal Theatre Project about
11.6
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
Peter Hall’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, London,
12.3
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
“Spaceship” section of Einstein on the Beach (by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s
13.9
Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, New York, December 8, 1984
Final scene of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches from the 1992 production of the
13.10
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
Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata: the archery tournament for the young cousins, in Part I: The Game of Dice, from the
14.5
1986 production at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris
Dancing chorus members in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulus, in the Les Atrides cycle as staged by the Théâtre du Soleil,
14.6 directed by Ariane Mnouchkine at the Cartoucherie, Paris, 1990

Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in the Les Atrides cycle of the Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine,
14.7
Cartoucherie, Paris, 1990
The grandmother in Eréndira, an adaptation from Gabriel García Márquez’s short novel, directed by Amal Allana,
14.8
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

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 misogynistic, 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.
PART I

Performance in oral and manuscript cultures

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 I TIMELINE
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.

*
CHAPTER 1

From oral to literate performance

Tobin Nellhaus
Contributors: Phillip B. Zarrilli, Tamara Underiner, and
Bruce McConachie

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 1.1
Mali: 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 1.2
Map: 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 1.3
The 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)

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 1.4
The 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.

Figure 1.5
Fragment 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] Wennnefru
[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.

(Gaster 1950: 41–2)

Figure 1.6
Map of Egypt c.1850 BCE.

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 1.7
Map 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 creation).
(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). 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.

Figure 1.8
Rabinal 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.

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 1.9
Map 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 1.10
This 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 1.11
Aerial photo of the Acropolis showing the Theatre of Dionysus (lower left) and the Parthenon (top).
Source: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Figure 1.12
Model 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 1.13
Model 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 1.14
The 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 1.15
Theatre 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 1985: 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.

*
CHAPTER 2

Pleasure, power, and aesthetics: Theatre in early literate

societies, 500 BCE–1450 CE

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Contributor: Phillip B. Zarrilli

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 2.1
An 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 2.2 This 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:
DAEMONES: All 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]
GRIP US: Will it be all right [Daemones jumps] if I have a word with you, sir?
(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:
PLESIDIPP US: Do you think we shall be betrothed today?
TRACHALIO: I do.
PLESIDIPP US: Do you think I should congratulate the old man on finding her?
TRACHALIO: I do.
PLESIDIPP US: And the mother?
TRACHALIO: I do.
PLESIDIPP US: And what do you think?
TRACHALIO: I do.
PLESIDIPP US: You do what?
TRACHALIO: I think.
PLESIDIPP US: You do think what?
TRACHALIO: I do think what you think.
PLESIDIPP US: Don’t you think you could think for yourself?
TRACHALIO: I do.
(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 2.3
Statue 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 2.4
Ground 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.
Figures 2.5 and 2.6
The 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 2.7
Floor 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 2.8
A 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.

Figure 2.9
Cross-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.

… 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)

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 2.10
The 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 2.11
A 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 2.12
Nō 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 2.13
Each 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 2.14
This 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 Dōjōji

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 2.15
In a performance of the nō play Dōjōji at the Kanze Theatre, Tokyo, 1962, the ghost of the maiden, dressed as a beautiful
shirabyōshi dancer, approaches the bell at Dōjō 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 2.16
The 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 yūgen 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.

*
CHAPTER 3

Commemorative drama and carnival

Tamara Underiner
Contributors: Phillip B. Zarrilli and Tobin Nellhaus

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 3.1
This 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 3.2
Latter-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 3.3
Because 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 3.4
The 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 3.5
In 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 3.6
Detail 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 3.7
A 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 3.8
The 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 3.9
Plan 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 3.10
A 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 3.11
Map 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 3.12
Stonework 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 3.13
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. 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 3.14
Qur’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 3.15
A 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 3.16
In 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 3.17
Ravana, 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 3.18
A 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_mask_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.”

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Wiles, D. (2000) Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, 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 University Press.
Wise, J. (1998) Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
PART II

Theatre and performance in early print cultures

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
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.

*
CHAPTER 4

Secular and early professional theatre, 1250–1650

Tamara Underiner
Contributors: Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Tobin Nellhaus

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 4.1
Thirteenth-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 4.3
Scene 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 4.4
Late 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 4.5
Artist’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 4.6
A 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 4.7 A
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 playwrights
(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 4.8
Detail 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 4.9
Japanese 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 4.10
A 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 4.11
Danjū 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 4.12
The 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 4.13a and b
The 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.

*
CHAPTER 5

Theatre and the print revolution, 1550–1650

Tobin Nellhaus
Contributors: Bruce McConachie and Tamara Underiner

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 5.1
Faustus (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 5.2
Interior 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 5.3
Sketch 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 5.4
The “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
communication 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.

*
CHAPTER 6

Theatres of absolutism, 1600–1770

Bruce McConachie
Contributor: Tobin Nellhaus

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 6.1
Political 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 6.2
The 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 shipwrecks, 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 6.3
Costume 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 6.4
Sor 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 H TTP:<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 6.5
Cut-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 6.6
Giacomo 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
verisimilitude, 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 6.7
Plan 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 6.8
Scena 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 6.9
In 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 6.10
Orgon 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 6.11
The 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 6.12
Aphra 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 6.13
Portrait 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 6.14
The 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 6.15
Touring 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, 118–41.
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/HcHLEQLsVE6yBvqVb726.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.
PART III

Theatre and performance in periodical print cultures

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
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

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.

*
CHAPTER 7

Theatre and sentiment: newspapers, private lives, and the

bourgeois public sphere, 1700–1785

Tobin Nellhaus
Contributor: Bruce McConachie

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 7.1
A 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 7.2
A 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 7.3
Scene 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.

Figure 7.4
A scene from Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s The Twins, a Storm and Stress play, in a contemporary engraving by Albrecht.
© Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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.

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 7.5
The 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 7.6
Mr. 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 7.7
Mr. 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 7.8
Mr. 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 7.9
Garrick 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.

*
CHAPTER 8

Nationalism in the theatre, 1760–1880

Bruce McConachie

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 8.1
The 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 8.2
This 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 8.3
Henry 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 8.4
Political 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 8.5
James Robinson Planché’s antiquarian design for the king’s costume in Charles Kemble’s 1824 production of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV, Part 1.
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 8.6
Contemporary 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 8.7
Tommaso 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 8.8
Political map of Europe in 1880.
Figure 8.9
Floor 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 8.10
Political 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 8.11
Henry 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.

*
CHAPTER 9

Performing “progress”: From imperial display to the

triumph of realism and naturalism, 1790–1914

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Contributors: Bruce McConachie and Gary Jay Williams

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 9.1
A 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, Figure 2.

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 9.2
George 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 9.3
Jingju 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 9.4
Ruth 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 9.5a and 9.5b

Two 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 9.6
English 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 9.7
An 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 9.8
Kei 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 9.9
Emile 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 9.10
The 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 9.11
André 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.
Figure 9.12
A 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.

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 9.13
V.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 9.14
A 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 9.15
Sonja (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 9.16
Nora (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 9.17
In 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 9.18
In 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.

*
CHAPTER 10

New media divide the theatres of print culture, 1870–1930

Bruce McConachie

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 10.1
U.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 10.2
Dolores (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 10.3
An 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 10.4
Poster 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 10.5
Adolphe 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 10.6
Contemporary 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 10.7
Old 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 10.8
Karl 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): 186–92.
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): 284–99.
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.
PART IV

Theatre and performance in electric and electronic

communication culture

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
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.

*
CHAPTER 11

New theatres for revolutionary times, 1910–1950

Bruce McConachie

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 11.1
Political 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 11.2
Photograph 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 11.3
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. 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 11.4
Lyubov 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 11.5
The “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 11.6
Image 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

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.
(Brecht 1964: 73)

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 11.7
Helene 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 11.8
Katrin, 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 11.9
The 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 11.10
Stage 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.

*
CHAPTER 12

The aftermath of the Second World War: Realism and its

discontents in an increasingly shrinking world, 1940–1970

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Contributor: Bruce McConachie

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 12.1
Samuel 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 12.2
Clov (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 12.3
Peter 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 permanent ally 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 12.4
A 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 12.5
Scene 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
snippets 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 12.6
Okhlopkov’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 12.7
In 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 12.8
In 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 12.9
Photograph 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?

*
CHAPTER 13

Art, politics, or business? Theatre in search of identity,

1968–2000

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Contributors: Gary Jay Williams, Tamara Underiner, and
Bruce McConachie

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 13.1
Poster 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 13.2
Percy 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 13.3
The 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
mainland 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 13.4
Ryszard 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 13.5
The 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 13.6
Oberon (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 13.7
Dionysus (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 13.8
The 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 sadomasochistic 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
subsidies 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 13.9
Performers 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 13.10
The 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 13.11
Peter 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.

*
CHAPTER 14

Theatres of local roots and global reach, 1970–present

Tamara Underiner
Contributors: Bruce McConachie, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei,
and Gary Jay Williams

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 14.1
A 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, through out-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 14.2
The 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
homogenization. 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 14.3
A 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 14.4
A 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 14.5
In 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 14.6
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.
Source: Photo © Martine Franck/Magnum Photos.

Figure 14.7
Orestes (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 14.8
The 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 14.9
Cover 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 14.10
Butoh 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 14.11
Backstage 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
 spectactors, 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 14.12
A 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.

*
CHAPTER 15

Theatre in networked culture, 1990–present

Tamara Underiner

“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 15.1
Australian 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 15.2
Robots 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 15.3
The 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:
A: Augh!
B: Whatever is it, man?
A: It’s my leg, Doctor.
B: This looks nasty. I shall have to amputate.
A: It’s the one you amputated last time, Doctor. […]
B: You mean you’ve got a pain in your wooden leg?
A: Yes, Doctor.
B: You know what this means?
A: Not wormwood, Doctor!
B: Yes. We’ll have to remove it before it spreads to the rest of you. (A’s chair collapses.)
B: My God! It’s spreading to the furniture!
(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 15.4
An 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 15.5
Oedipus 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:
Figure 15.6
A scene from Robert Lepage’s Zulu Time (2001).
Source: Photo: Emmanuel Valette

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).

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 15.7
Masked 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 15.8
British 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 15.9
Roommates 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 15.10
B-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 15.11
Aya 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/.

Books, articles, and websites

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Beckett, S. (1984) The Collected Shorter Plays, New York: Grove Press.
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Palgrave Macmillan.
Pattie, D. (2000) The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, London: Routledge.
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Pronunciation guide

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
Angura ahn-goo-rah
Aragoto ah-rah-goh-toh
Auteur OH-tu(r)
Auto sacramental 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
Egúngún EH-goon-goon
Einfühlung AHYN-few-lungk
Geisha gheh-sha
Geju guh ju
Gesamtkunstwerk ghe-ZAHMT-koonst-vehrk
Gestus GHE-stoos
Hanamichi hah-nah-mee-chee
Hashigakari hah-shee-gah-kah-ree
Innamorato, -ta, -ti in-nah-moh-RAH-toh, -tah, -tee
Jingju jing ju
Kabuki kah-boo-kee
Kathakali kah-TAHK-ah-lee
Kōken koh-kehn
Kunqu kwin chu
Kutiyattam KOO-tee-ah-TAHM
Kyōgen 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
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
Yūgen 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.
Kyōgen. 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, 172; see 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; radio; 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, 278; see also antiquarianism; 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; 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; 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, 299; see
also private sphere; 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 see Wei Changsheng
Chapelain, Jean 204
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 493; see also
Ming 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 70–6; see also New Comedy;
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 403–4; see also audiophonic media; electric and
electronic cultures; internet; literate cultures; manuscript cultures; oral cultures; print cultures; 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; 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 see 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 1910–1950 411–13, 416–19, 423–8, 437–44; social media 406, 549, 563–4; Stelarc 552, 553, 553, 562;
technology 552–5, 553, 561–5; see 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 264–6; see
also the Globe Theatre; Shakespeare, William; 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 329; see 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 170–1; see also cross-dressing; feminism; homoeroticism; 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.; The Mikado; operetta; 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, 152; see 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 113; see also Corpus Christi
Jews: expulsion from Spain 119; marranos 124; see also Judaism; 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, 607; see 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 see 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 see Osanai Kaoru
Kaprow, Allan 472, 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 see Ōno 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 68–81; see 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; see also 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, 470–1
memory aids, oral cultures 28–30
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 see blackface minstrelsy
Miranda, Lin-Manuel 580
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 60, see also Hip Hop theatre; musicals; opera;
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; 1760–1800 292–9; American 313–22; definition 603; European 1815–48 303–307; French
Revolution 299–302; German 309–12; Italian 308–9; Russian 307–8; see also cultural nationalism; liberal nationalism;
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 560–1; see also objectivity, rule; 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; private sphere; 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; 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, 611; see also Black Theatre Movement (BTM); Boal, Augusto; Brecht, Bertolt; feminist theatre; Fo, Dario; La
Fomma; Fugard, Athol; Gao Xingjian; Gómez-Peña, Guillermo; Hip Hop culture; La Fomma; Lo’il Maxil; Nuevo Teatro
Popular; Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA); San Francisco Mime Troupe; Serpent Players; El Teatro
Campesino; Teatro Escambray
Polly (Gay) 267, 268
Polos 63
polysemy 46
Pompey the Great 78
poor theatre see Grotowski, Jerzy
Popova, Lyubov 418, 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; 1870–1930 363–4, 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 191; see also periodical
print cultures; print revolution; printing; secular theatre; 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 606; see also bourgeoisie; 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, 473; see also apartheid; racial
nationalism; yellowface
Radhakrishnan, Dr. 469
radical theatre see political theatre
radio 363, 404, 405, 411; Beckett 450; niche market 508; 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 22–3; see also Buddhism; Christianity;
Hinduism; Islam; 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 377; see also Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution 409, 411, 416, 417–19, 435

Sackville, Thomas 189

sacrifice 45–6, 47, 48, 85, 113
Sadayakko see Kawakami Sadayakko
Said, Edward 327–8
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 302; see
also chariot-and-pole system; scena per angolo; simultaneous staging; 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, 1250–1650 151–84
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, 261–2 definition 608; 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 171; see 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 see Tsubouchi Shōyō
Shōyō Tsubouchi see Tsubouchi Shōyō
Shūji Terayama see Terayama Shūji
Sierra Leone 482
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, 80; see also bourgeoisie; samurai; 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, 78; see 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, 79, see also environmental theatre; the Globe Theatre; 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 465; see 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, 562; see 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 333; see 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, 25; see
also alphabets; logograms; 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 see Askikaga Yoshimitsu
Yoshimoto Nijō see Nijō Yoshimoto
Yoshizawa Ayame I 181–2
You Made Me a Communist (Bhaasi) 468–9
YouTube 13
Yuan dynasty 148, 153–4
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