Being Good: Actors’ Testimonies as Archive and the Cultural Construction of Success in Performance

This article makes use of a unique archive held at Shakespeare's Globe in London where, at the end of every season, actors in the repertory are interviewed by the company's head of research, creating what are known as 'Research Bulletins'. Comprising actors' notes and records of experimentation with movement, voice, audience response, and character creation in rehearsal and performance, these testimonies reveal the centrality of an actors' desire to be 'good - even when Shakespeare requires that they be 'bad'. The article uses these testimonies and the preoccupations they reveal in order to consider actors as objects and subjects of academic study - rather than as transparent vessels for Shakespeare's meaning. Responding to previous academic work on actor testimonies - namely Carol Chillington Rutter's Clamorous Voices, Sarah Werner's Shakespeare and Feminist Performance, and Jonathan Holmes's Merely Players - it examines the anxieties and uncertainties that still sometimes underpin the relationship between the theatre and the academy. In doing so, it seeks to offer suggestions for how academics can use archives of actors' testimonies to create an ethical and compassionate academic critique of both 'good' and 'bad' performance, while still permitting rigorous critique of objects of study which are also human subjects.