Editorial Comment: Women/Performance/History

This issue of Theatre Journal was not planned around a special theme, yet the five essays published here all revolve around fictional and/or real female figures: Ophelia; Sarah Siddons and two of her key roles, Lady Macbeth and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Elvira from Pizarro; Queen Henrietta Maria and her onstage counterpart, William Habington's eponymous character the Queen of Aragon; the late postmodern choreographer Pina Bausch; and Jeanne Panne, burned as a witch in Belgium in 1650 and again at a "witch festival" in 2012. But although the essays touch in various ways on gender or feminism through their engagement with these central female figures, their primary focus is on performance and history. The issue is framed by essays by Gina Bloom, Anston Bosman, and William West and by Jody Enders that re-theorize performance and performativity through respective considerations of performance as theatre history, and of a theatrical restaging of history. Between these bookends are essays by Selena Couture, Rebecca Bailey, and Kate Elswit that engage in acts of revisionist historiography and open up alternative critical perspectives on particular historical performances.

In the opening essay, "Ophelia's Intertheatricality, or, How Performance Is History," Bloom, Bosman, and West take issue with the prevailing view of performance's "evanescence" and the idea that it disappears in the process of enactment. Instead, taking up the notion of intertheatricality articulated by Jacky Bratton in New Readings in Theatre History (2003), they argue that "performance does not take place in an instant, as an event, but at many times at once"; it "is not always already disappearing, but emerges through, is indeed constituted by, dissemination and reverberation." Less privileged and authoritative than the Ghost of Old Hamlet, who has more often been used to represent performance's fundamental nature ("What, has this thing appeared again tonight?"), the performed figure of Ophelia has "resist[ed] singularity and iconicity" and therefore best exemplifies this alternative view of the temporality and historicity of performance, particularly in the act 4 mad scene of Hamlet, where she is a kind of "switch point or lighting rod of theatrical possibility," recycling past cultural performances while also staging possibilities for future performances. Thus, the authors argue, performances of Ophelia demonstrate "how theatre makes itself" and how performance is "itself a kind of history of theatre."

Whereas Ophelia's intertheatricality prompts Bloom, Bosman, and West's re-theorization of performance's historicity and of theatre's performativity, Couture considers how intertheatricality factored into the impact of Siddons's performance as Elvira in Pizarro (1799). Sheridan's dramaturgical redeployment of his famous parliamentary speeches about the abuses of colonial rule in India has been a central concern in the critical literature on Pizarro, but in "Siddons's Ghost: Celebrity and Gender in Sheridan's Pizarro," Couture redirects attention away from the character Rolla, who in the play speaks the recycled version of Sheridan's speech, and toward Elvira as portrayed by Siddons in a performance that was particularly resonant for the play's original spectators. Noting how Sheridan's adaptation of the Kotzebue play on which Pizarro was based places greater focus on Elvira than does the source text, Couture further argues that the playwright/politician's awareness that he was writing the part for Siddons enabled him to exploit the famous actress's particular celebrity—her public persona as a grieving maternal figure, her status as a national icon of idealized British womanhood, and her famed portrayal of the ultimately remorseful Lady Macbeth—in order to sharpen his critique of the brutalities of British colonial rule. When Elvira condemns her lover, the Spanish conquistador Pizarro, for his treatment of the Incas, the intertheatrical ghosts that haunted the scene through Siddons's performance and that lent critical force and topical resonance to Sheridan's text were thus "the grieving mother, idealized British womanhood, Britain itself, and Lady Macbeth, who is mad with guilt." As Couture concludes: "That such a popular play revealed doubt at the centre of the Empire and called for a self-reflexive criticism on the part of colonial governments weakened the monolithic nature of the British colonial project." Strikingly, Couture's...