From the Editor

This special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly presents a wide range of writing on Shakespeare and performance. The essays look back to early modern understandings of Henry VIII and forward to the growing genre of performances of Shakespeare in prison. They range geographically in interest from South America to Northern Ireland, Germany, and Japan and examine performances mediated by print, stage practice, filmic techniques, and modern closed-circuit video surveillance. They consider the ongoing debate about the relationship between literariness and performativity, propose a shift away from hauntings to prophecies, and argue that the act of performance and the recording of performance in our written work shape both our understanding of early modern drama and the relationships we forge with other scholars and communities.

In calling for papers for this special issue, we hoped to gauge the present state of the field and announce our intent to make SQ a home for work on Shakespeare and performance. The breadth of responses to that call confirms the continued growth and transformation of the study of performance and its centrality to the larger world of Shakespeare scholarship. This vitality is further reflected in the depth and intensity of conversation in the comments on our open peer review of submissions.

We are eager to expand beyond the boundaries of what we formerly referred to as “Shakespeare Performed.” This issue’s “Rethinking Academic Reviewing” signals our desire to rethink the subject and practice of reviewing, while the issue as a whole represents other forms of engagement with Shakespeare and performance that might be the patterns for future contributions.

A note about our working process: as is now SQ practice, we circulated an open call for papers for this special issue. In response to the call for papers, we received about twenty-five submissions. From those, we selected the strongest six pieces to be part of an open peer review, held online at MediaCommons. A group of self-selected peer reviewers commented on each paper over a period of six weeks. At the end of the review period, the authors revised their essays and resubmitted them to SQ. We are publishing four of those pieces here, along with two other essays that were submitted independently of the call for papers and that went through SQ’s usual double-blind review process.

We are extremely grateful to Kathleen Fitzpatrick and MediaCommons for being our partners in this endeavor. We also thank the authors who participated in the open review, which might have felt at times like an overly exposed one. Finally, we want to acknowledge the readers who took the time to participate and comment in this evaluation. The work of reviewers is often invisible, but in this case, the open nature of the review means that we can thank them by name: Andrew Bonnell, Alex Huang, Anita Hagerman, Carolyn Sale, Thomas Cartelli, Chris Fahrenthold, Christian Billing, Daniel Keegan, Jami Rogers, J. B. Cook, James C. Bulman, Jeremy Lopez, John Gillies, Karl Steel, Katherine Rowe, Linda Charnes, Matt Kozusko, Michael Dobson, Pascale Aebischer, Paul Menzer, Peter Kirwan, Peter Holland, Lois Potter, Ramona Wray, Robert Tierney, Todd Borlik, Tom Magill, W. B. Worthen, and Zeno Ackermann.¹