Theatricality (review)

Before performativity, there was theatricality. As Janelle Reinelt (2003 [2002]:153-55) has shown, the rise of terminology derived from performance rather than theatre resulted from three develop-ments: the desire for a critical term to distinguish certain forms of aesthetic performance (e.g., performance art) from theatre; the development of the category of cultural (as opposed to aesthetic) performance in anthropology and its connection to the definition of performance studies as a field; and the interest of a number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler) in J.L. Austin's linguistic concept of performativity. Although there has long been resistance to the expansion of the category of performance and its seeming usurpation of theatre as an object of intellectual inquiry, only recently has the concept of theatricality come back into focus.¹

Theatricality shows that there is life in the old concept yet, if its ability to generate interesting discussion is a measure. In a very useful introduction that outlines the twists and turns the concepts of theatre and theatricality have undergone since the Renaissance (to put it crudely, theatricality is one of those terms that has also been used to mean the opposite of any of its attributed meanings), editors Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait define their intent to "identify, with historical and theoretical rigor, what some of the interpretive possibilities and critical problems are that pertain to the idea of theatricality" without pinning the concept down or limiting it (3). The six case studies that follow the introduction take up these challenges with clarity and élan.

Two of the essays focus on the ways in which understandings of theatricality are negotiated across cultures. Using Brecht's comments on the Beijing Opera as a point of departure, Haiping Yan demonstrates that Confucian aesthetics do not assume that audiences identify or empathize with dramatic characters unless prevented from doing so, but entail a notion of theatricality that always already includes the idea of a responsive, ethically engaged audience. Jody Enders also emphasizes the importance of cultural context to understanding theatrical representation in her study of the mystery play at Valenciennes, France, in 1547, which involved either the production or a reproduction of a miracle. In a playful and subtle theoretical speculation on the equivocal historical record, Enders brings out the ways that historical discourse depends on what we think other people very different from ourselves must have thought.

Postlewait also engages with the question of how we characterize the thought of distant others in his consideration of modern and postmodern scholars' descriptions of Elizabethan society alternately as antitheatrical or thoroughly theatricalized. He argues that the documentary evidence of an antitheatrical bias has been greatly overvalued. He is equally skeptical of contrasting claims that Elizabethan England was a theatricalized society on the grounds that this broad use of the term seems to void it of any specific meaning. While Postlewait's critiques are well supported and persuasive, they lead primarily to a generalized call for a more rigorous historical method.

Shannon Jackson also takes scholarly discourse as her subject in a consideration of how the performativity/theatricality debate and the feminism/queer theory debate mirror, shape, and overlap one another. In addition to tracing the history of this intellectual conjuncture and the positions taken by various participants, Jackson shows how disciplinary and theoretical commitments can lead to mischaracterizations of different positions and how advocates of one discourse may shore it up at the expense of other discourses.

Davis and Jon Erickson bring the concept of theatricality into the political realm. Davis explores the etymology of the word theatricality, whose coinage the OED attributes to Thomas Carlyle. Carefully rereading Carlyle and some of his 18th-century precedents, Davis argues that the OED's equation of theatricality with inauthenticity is incorrect, and that Carlyle viewed theatricality as the opposite of sympathy. For Davis, theatricality is essential to the functioning of civil society, as it is the affective state that allows us to dissociate ourselves from...