Introduction

1589. Richard Tarleton, the well-known professional actor and clown, created the character of “Martin Marprelate,” in accordance with the bishops’ wishes to mock and parody the reformers’ cause in England.

1797. Sarah Yates, recently widowed actress and mother, played a London benefit performance of Francklin’s Earl of Warwick, winning her audience’s sympathy for her “mama grizzly” portrayal of Margaret of Anjou.

1916. Michio Ito deployed his personal performance style in At the Hawk’s Well, subverting director William Butler Yeats’s attempt to create a noh theatre version.

1973. Billie Whitelaw developed a collaborative relationship with her famously controlling writer and director, Samuel Beckett, in the premiere of Not I.

2011. Deaf actor Howie Seago suggested to Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch that he play Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird, a choice that transformed the courtroom scenes and engineered new forms of agency for Mayella.

2016. The Modern Language Association formally changed the name of the Drama Division to the “Drama and Performance Forum.”

To many observers—especially those in the audience—the actor plays the most visible role in any particular performance. But critical perspectives on drama, especially in literature departments, have tended to focus on the text rather than on the performer, for obvious reasons. In theatre studies, by contrast, the actor—as subject of biography or aesthetic analysis, or as the target of practical training—has taken center stage. Our call, born out of a sense that literary, critical, and historical perspectives require a living touchstone to ground analysis and anchor conclusions in the real world, seeks to corral some interesting thinking at the junction of two fields. In its contours, this collection demonstrates performance studies done historically and literarily. More than just interdisciplinary, these essays reveal multidisciplinary approaches to thinking about not only texts either destined for, or resulting from, performance, but also the human bodies essential to completing the meaning of those texts. We could not be more gratified by the historical breadth and compelling consilience of the group.

By coincidence, this issue appears at almost the same time that the Modern Language Association formally retitled the Drama Division the Drama and Performance Forum. The inclusion of “performance” alongside the venerable and more limited term of genre signals a burgeoning understanding of performance as both a wider category of analysis and as a methodological tool. The MLA has called for a “historic shift,” but in many ways the MLA is simply recognizing the state of things: literary studies has already begun to embrace the multidisciplinary nature of studying theatre and performance.

Theatre studies first emerged as a discipline largely out of English departments, within a generation or so of the first training institutes and degree programs focused on educating the actor. Performance studies, on the other hand, developed much later out of anthropology—in particular ethnography—as well as out of a focus on the panoply of 1960s performance forms within the counter-cultural scene. In a sign that performance studies has perhaps reached a sort of disciplinary maturity, Duke University Press’s recent digital book What is Performance Studies? uses video interviews alongside written essays to show how the tools of performance studies appear in many kinds of scholarship, and how the very definition of performance studies—is it a discipline, or a methodology?—remains an unsettled question. The heated debates from the 1980s and early 1990s, in scholarly forums like the American Society for Theatre Research, where theatre history and performance studies seemed to threaten each other’s existence, have now cooled to an approach that eccentrically and eclectically combines features and characteristics of the two while generating new properties. It is this new approach that literary critics now meet when they reintroduce themselves to theatre studies.

In late 2015, we conceived of a special issue that would explore the space between literary and theatre studies with a focus on the body of the actor, entitled “The Actor in the Interval.” The submissions we received so emphasized the agency of the actor, his or her power to “comment on” the text (to quote...