Overview

An engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance teaches students how to read drama by exploring the threshold between text and performance. Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance

Full Product Details

Author:   W. B. Worthen (Barnard College, Columbia University, USA)
Publisher:   John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Imprint:   Wiley-Blackwell
Dimensions:   Width: 15.40cm , Height: 1.90cm , Length: 23.00cm
Weight:   0.431kg
ISBN:  

9781405153423

ISBN 10:   1405153423
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   18 December 2009
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Preface: Drama, Poetry, and Performance xi Introduction: Between Poetry and Performance 1 i. Shakespeare 3.0 2 ii. Images of Writing/Metaphors of Performance 8 The score 8 The blueprint 12 Information/software 13 Dramatic tools, performance technologies 20 iii. Agencies of Drama: Burke, Poetry, and Performance 22 Writing as agency: “Antony in Behalf of the Play” 29 1 From Poetry to Performance 35 i. Dramatic Performance and its Discontents: The New Criticism 39 Drama, poetry, and “interpretation” 39 “An arrangement of words” 45 Acts of speech 50 Heresy, responsibility, and performance 56 ii. Dramatic Writing and its Discontents: Performance Studies, Drama Studies 64 Antigone’s bones 64 The “theater of acting” 69 Rethinking writing 77 2 Performing Writing: Hamlet 94 i. Hamlet’s Book 97 Playing the book 97 The law of writ 101 Speaking by the card 106 ii. Corrupt Stuff; or, Doing Things with (Old) Words 112 The crux of performance 113 Enseamed beds 118 iii. “OK, we can skip to the book”: The Wooster Group Hamlet 123 Theatrofilm by Electronovision 127 (Re)playing Burton, performing Hamlet 130 3 Embodying Writing: Ibsen and Parks 139 i. Can We Act What We Say?: Rosmersholm 142 Inscribing character 147 Acting the role 150 Confession, disclosure, detour 152 Doing (unspeakable) things with words 158 ii. Footnoting Performance: The America Play and Venus 161 A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout 172 Diggidy-diggidy-diggidy-dawg 178 4 Writing Space: Beckett and Brecht 192 i. Quad: Euclidean Dramaturgies 196 ii. By Accepting This License 205 iii. What Where: Brechtian Technologies 211 Notes 216 Works Cited 239 Further Reading 258 Index 261

Reviews

So very, very few scholarly studies in the field have been useful in the classroom. In this context, Worthen's book is nothing short of god-sent. ? Martin Puchner, Harvard University An impressive?indeed, brilliant?book, a powerful defence of dramatic textuality in its relationship to performance [?] In addition to its deft negotiation of print practices and other early social technologies, it is refreshingly up-to-date in its awareness of the ways that digital technologies have transformed the delivery and reception of textual performance today. ?Stanton B. Garner Jr, University of Tennessee Essential reading not only for all drama and theatre studies students from undergraduate level upwards, but for anyone involved in teaching them, researching in the field, or interested in the state of theatre history, theory and criticism today. ?Robert Shaughnessy, University of Kent

Author Information

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

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