Performing Prophecy: More Life on the Shakespearean Scene

’Tis ten to one this play can never please All that are here.¹

The Prophetic Wager

The stage has long played host to ghosts. Dramatic literature from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Suzan-Lori Parks enumerates a sizeable community of specters. In the past two or three decades, this community, always a powerful theatrical force, has seen its theoretical importance multiply as theater and performance theory has seized upon the ghost as the index of theatricality. ² This spectral metaphor lent affective force to historicism and expanded the political horizon of performance analysis through an injunction to remember the forgotten, the marginalized, and the subordinated.

As important as this injunction is, the spectral metaphor, in its very force and ubiquity, has emphasized certain domains as bearers of performance’s ontological truth while neglecting others.³ As William N. West notes, “These often tacit assumptions about performance have had an unfortunate effect of setting the approaches of performance studies and theater history against one another.”⁴ These assumptions have also determined certain conclusions about performance. If we wanted, for example, to think about theatrical futurity through the ghostly rubric, we would attend to qualities of repetition and return that would, as Marvin Carlson suggests, invoke Horatio’s question “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”⁵ But these are not the only ways to think about the theatrical future. An actor may make a joke in order to produce a response. A playwright may write a play that throws down a gauntlet to her fellow playwrights, daring them to match the technical achievement. A producer may stage a play that anticipates—even counts on—an oppressive response from the authorities. These acts cannot be understood solely as an obligation to repeat. They are better understood as interventions within the horizon of human plurality: as theatrical and political actions.

Thinking about performance as praxis shifts attention to performance’s potential for self-conscious, if ultimately fragile, interventions in webs of human, rather than spectral, relationships.⁶ This reorientation requires us to develop a model of the political community that prevails in the theater. How are we to think about the performer’s intervention into these webs of relationships? How can we model the audience member’s participation in multiple circuits of meaning and horizons of plurality? What strategy of interpreting performance and performance texts accompanies the recognition that the ghosts are not, as Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Epilogue has it, “all that are here”?⁷

I propose a wager on another theatrical denizen, the prophet. While ghosts and prophets enter extant drama simultaneously—the prophetic ghost of King Darius is summoned to Aeschylus’s earliest surviving play, Persians—the latter’s force as a trope for theater has not been so keenly felt. Indeed, it may strike us that prophetic futurity recapitulates the ghostly futurity of repetition and return. This intuition is due to a general misunderstanding of prophetic activity. As Edward L. Risden and his coauthors note, the “notion of prophecy as mere fortune-telling” is “common but incomplete”; prophetic activity is more properly understood in its “original meaning as ‘speaking out’ or ‘speaking before [an audience]’”—that is, in theatrical terms. Furthermore, a strong tradition emphasizes the speaker-audience relationship as the fundamental component of prophecy: writers from St. Paul to Spinoza have bracketed, more or less explicitly, the question of divine inspiration. This is not to say that we should entirely eliminate the dimension of futurity or prediction. We must emphasize the complex fragility of this dimension and its mediation through webs of human relationships. Emblematic, in this regard, is the story of the prophet Jonah: in prophesying doom to the sinful inhabitants of Nineveh, Jonah was so successful in persuading them to repent that God forewent the prophesied doom. Jonah, concerned that he would be taken for a false prophet, became angry with God and was chastised.⁸

To capture the fragility of prophetic address, we can think of performance as a prophetic wager. While performance’s speculative quality is obvious, for example, in the economic field, the prophetic wager...