The Longue Durée: Identity, Place, Time and Performative Representations of the Earls of Derby

The idea that early modern elite identities were performative has become a commonplace. Ernst Kantorowicz's influential work of political philosophy from 1957, The King's Two Bodies, argued that the inheritance of medieval theories of divine right produced the "twin-born" identities of kings (H5 4.1, 231), combining the individual identity of the natural man with a performed and ritualized identity as a monarch. Famously, he described the deposition scene in Shakespeare's Richard II as enacting the ceremonial splitting of the personal identity of Richard from his performative identity as a monarch, as he moves thorough the extended process of being "unking'd by Bolingbroke," becoming "nothing" (R2 5.5.37). New historicist attention to the iconography of Renaissance monarchs and the broader aesthetics of "self-fashioning," produced from a predominantly literary perspective, might then be seen to have combined such thought with a focus on the representational operations of written and visual texts in producing self-consciously created selves (Greenblatt, Renaissance; Representing; and "Fifty Years"; Montrose; Tennenhouse). Through its direct and indirect influence, new historicism, along with other theoretical approaches to identity-formation (especially associated with John L. Austin's concept of performative language as comprising an act that changes a social reality), has, in turn, produced a wealth of scholarship in recent decades. This has tended to focus on the forms and content of historical, literary, dramatic, and visual texts as constitutive of a broad range of both textual and historical performative subjectivities.

But if in this work there is often an elision of what is performed and what is represented, other traditions of scholarship have sought to distinguish the representational from the performative. Drama-practice theory, in particular, has explored the difference between the verbal content of dramatic texts (representing, say, the lives and actions of characters) and the dynamics of acting, of performance itself. In the 1960s, Jerzy Grotowski, for instance, queried the primacy of the written playscript, a representational form, by separating the authenticity of performance from any authority of the written, pre-existing text. "The core of the theatre is an encounter," he writes. "For me, a creator of theatre, the important thing is not the words but what we do with these words, what gives life to the inanimate words of the text" (56–58). More recently, considering first avant-garde, but then more mainstream, theatre, Małgorzata Sugiera has written:

When the language of drama breaks free from its formerly primary function of representing the speech of the stage characters, then it becomes the proper substance of a text for theatre. It no longer represents logically organized stories, but rather attempts to stimulate particular perceptual and cognitive processes (26).

Such accounts emphasize the prime importance of relationships surrounding, and produced by, performance as an act, as acting. These are cognitive, affective and reflexive. They occur experientially between performers, text and—definitively—audiences. Importantly, they create an ever-changing present that differs from the temporalities that exist at the level of textual content or what is represented. (Gilles Deleuze's insistence on the constant presentness of time, likened to a scar, perhaps underlies the temporal play invoked by such theories: "A scar is the sign not of a past wound but of 'the present fact of having been wounded': we can say that it is the contemplation of the wound, that it contracts all the instants which separate us from it into a living present" [77]).¹ Performance, for such theatre practitioners, is not fully the same as performativity: it is distinguishable from representational elements of script and verbal content; it exists only in the present moment; it is relational; it depends on an audience; it produces a phenomenological roundness of experience.

In this article, I want to take such thought about differences and likenesses between representation, performance, and performativity as a background prompt. My aim is to revisit the role of pre-dramatic and dramatic performance per se as a constituent of the early modern royal and aristocratic courtly habitus. Specifically, I will explore the relationships that inhere in...