Read more
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 ParksExplores 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 writingEngages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance
List of contents
Acknowledgments. Preface: Drama, Poetry, and Performance. Introduction: Between Poetry and Performance. i. Shakespeare 3.0. ii. Images of Writing/Metaphors of Performance. The score. The blueprint. Information/software. Dramatic tools, performance technologies. iii. Agencies of Drama: Burke, Poetry, and Performance. Writing as agency: "Antony in Behalf of the Play". 1. From Poetry to Performance. i. Dramatic Performance and its Discontents: The New Criticism. Drama, poetry, and "interpretation". "An arrangement of words". Acts of speech. Heresy, responsibility, and performance. ii. Dramatic Writing and its Discontents: Performance Studies, Drama Studies. Antigone's bones. The "theater of acting". Rethinking writing. 2. Performing Writing: Hamlet. i. Hamlet's Book. Playing the book. The law of writ. Speaking by the card. ii. Corrupt Stuff; or, Doing Things with (Old) Words. The crux of performance. Enseamed beds. iii. "OK, we can skip to the book": The Wooster Group Hamlet. Theatrofilm by Electronovision. (Re)playing Burton, performing Hamlet. 3. Embodying Writing: Ibsen and Parks. i. Can We Act What We Say?: Rosmersholm. Inscribing character. Acting the role. Confession, disclosure, detour. Doing (unspeakable) things with words. ii. Footnoting Performance: The America Play and Venus. A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout. Diggidy-diggidy-diggidy-dawg. 4. Writing Space: Beckett and Brecht. i. Quad: Euclidean Dramaturgies. ii. By Accepting This License. iii. What Where: Brechtian Technologies. Notes. Works Cited. Further Reading. Index.
About the author
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).
Summary
Drama: Between Poetry and Performance discusses major plays, drawing on examples from playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks, and asks how they offer a critical perspective on the drama's relation to books, to the process of embodiment, and to the mapping of space in the theatre.
