(Re)constructed Spaces for Early Modern Drama: Research in Practice

This special issue concerns the joining and intertwining of practice and research in early drama. Undertaking such work brings us to a complicated intersection of disciplines and traditions, concerned variously with literary analysis, performance strategies, the materiality of space, and fleeting encounters with the past, which allow us to tell the story of the medieval and early modern stage. This special issue questions the nature of the relationship between practice and research, and asks how, between the gaps and the unknowns and the contradictions of surviving evidence, as well as the temporal distance between moderns and our forebears, the act of doing and making in the present enables us to develop informed understandings of the past. The essays presented here attempt to tease out such questions. As editors we did not wish to impose a single framework for engaging in this kind of work, but rather to bring together discussions of projects that investigate common problems across a wider range of periods and geography than is often the case. Thus we hope that what follows offers readers the chance to compare similarities and differences in methodology and interpretations, and explore the kinds of questions and claims practice-as-research (hereafter PaR) can ask and make about early drama.

The projects and performances explored in this special issue are drawn from a wide range of periods, companies and approaches. The essays take us from the medieval Mystery cycles of York and Beverley to the Scottish Court and late-sixteenth-century provincial guildhalls, from performances in spaces newly built to those staged in ruins and modern university halls. The scope is therefore unusual in breadth, covering a period that stretches from c.1199 to 1621, and situating what might be considered "mainstream" commercial performances, as might be found at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, alongside those developed from more esoteric projects. What soon becomes clear, however, is that there is a common and shared concern with the ways in which performance can be used not just as an end illustration of literary and historical criticism, but as an analytical tool and as a provocation. Furthermore, for the majority of our contributors, it is the dialogue between performance and performance space which becomes particularly resonant, anticipating more ambitious modes of research in practice. In this short introduction, therefore, we consider intersections between practice, research, and reconstructed and recovered early modern spaces, as well as the kinds of claim such practice might make.

(Re)construction

The desire to resituate early drama in the contexts of its original performance spaces has a long history. Since Edmond Malone wrote the first significant account of the Globe's architecture in 1790, scholars and practitioners have recognized the potential a reconstructed theater might have, in the words of William Poel, "to obtain a more faithful representation of Shakespeare's plays upon the stage" (qtd. in O' Connor 77). From Poel's early simulacra sets built for the Elizabethan Stage Society productions at the turn of the 20^th century, to the range of replica playhouses constructed in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Australia, commercial enterprise has driven the construction of theaters in the Elizabethan mode. However, with the building of the Globe and Sam Wanamaker theaters in London and the Blackfriars at the American Shakespeare Center, the past twenty years have offered a flourishing of debate amongst researchers and practitioners concerning what we might learn about early playtexts, performance practices, and culture when drama is played out in reconstructed playhouses.¹

It is worth reflecting how initial cynicism towards the Globe project reminds us of the dangers of reconstruction. For many academics, an "authentically" "reconstructed" Globe is an unattainable goal and the reconstruction of early modern theatrical practice an inherently flawed activity. Creating an accurate and authentic version of the first Globe is an impossibility because the evidence does not survive and the analysis of extant evidence is always a subjective and interpretative exercise. As John Drakakis argues, "to engage in the business of reconstruction is to engage in a process of inevitable distortion...