Project MUSE®: Theatre History Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Theatre History Studies.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 27 (2007) through current issueLatest Articles: Theatre History StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Theatre History Studies2166-99530733-2033Latest articles in Theatre History Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955979
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As this issue goes to press, the world is continuing to grapple with COVID-19's ubiquity, Israel and Hamas are at war, and the United States' 2024 presidential election cycle is rumbling. There are many unknowns and uncertainties. And yet theatre and history and theatre histories continue to yield insight into ways to make meaning and move forward with compassion and understanding for one another even, and especially, in difficult times.The three articles in the general section reflect multifaceted, multicultural performance histories and reevaluations of historiographical approaches to understanding the historical events and cultural traditions detailed in each essay. The special section, "Manifestos for Black
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallIntroduction2025-04-02text/htmlen-USIntroduction2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®94732026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Training Aztlán to Act: Chicanx Theatre, TENAZ, and Theatre as Social Change
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955980
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As mainstream theatre history would have it, the Chicanx theatre movement began in 1965 with the first actos staged as part of Cesar Chavez's farmworkers' movement and ended in 1981 with Luis Valdez's film adaptation of his play Zoot Suit.1 This imagined trajectory makes for a tidy story arc that follows a marginalized population from the grape fields of California to the bright lights of Broadway and Hollywood. These bookends also serve as exemplars of the Chicanx theatre movement's emphasis on social justice; the former used theatre as a tool for organizing labor unions while the latter drew attention to racist policing practices and a discriminatory legal system. For many historians, Valdez and the collective of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallTraining Aztlán to Act: Chicanx Theatre, TENAZ, and Theatre as Social Change2025-04-02text/htmlen-USTraining Aztlán to Act: Chicanx Theatre, TENAZ, and Theatre as Social Change2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®743562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Revisiting Mei Lanfang's 1930 USA Tour: Triumphs of Curation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955981
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On January 31, 1930, after nearly a fortnight's journey from Shanghai on the Empress of Canada, Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳 (1894–1967), accompanied by twenty-one performers, musicians, interpreters, and supporters disembarked in Victoria, British Columbia, where members of Seattle's Chinese community received them. After ferry travel to Seattle, they were welcomed by P. W. Kuo (Ping-wen Kuo; Guo Bingwen 郭秉文, 1880–1969), head of the China Institute who had traveled expressly from New York.1 Immigration delayed the group for several days before they arrived in New York on February 8, nine days before debuting at the Forty-Ninth Street Theatre on Broadway.2Chinese- and English-language scholarship on this trip has been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallRevisiting Mei Lanfang's 1930 USA Tour: Triumphs of Curation2025-04-02text/htmlen-USRevisiting Mei Lanfang's 1930 USA Tour: Triumphs of Curation2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®1507462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Robey Theatre Company's Bronzeville: Critical Historical Performance of Afro-Asian Political Economy in Los Angeles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955982
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In 2007, the Robey Theater Company, located in downtown Los Angeles, commissioned playwrights Aaron Woolfolk (Black American) and Tim Toyama (Japanese American) to develop a theatrical project about Japanese American mass incarceration during the 1940s.1 The result of the Woolfolk/Toyama collaboration was a two-act play titled Bronzeville (2009), which had an initial five-week run in July 2009 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) and a subsequent three-day run in May 2011 at the site of the Manzanar concentration
Figure 1
The cast of the 2009 production of Bronzeville, including CeCe Antoinette, Dana Lee, Iman Milner, Larry Powell, Adenrele Ojo, and Dwain Perry. Photo Source: Ed Kreiger
[AI Generated Alt
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallRobey Theatre Company's Bronzeville: Critical Historical Performance of Afro-Asian Political Economy in Los Angeles2025-04-02text/htmlen-USRobey Theatre Company's Bronzeville: Critical Historical Performance of Afro-Asian Political Economy in Los Angeles2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®1236532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Introduction to the Special Section: Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955983
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We begin this special section of Theatre History Studies with a public declaration of our own: Black theatre artists have long evidenced a commitment to upending the dramaturgical status quo by documenting and disseminating their beliefs about the meanings and uses of theatre and performance in Black life. While such an assertion might register as obvious to some, we contend that it bears emphasizing here given how often the rich aesthetic, critical, and theoretical interventions of Black theatre artists go unacknowledged or underexplored in considerations of the history and evolutions of the manifesto genre. Much of this inattention might be attributed to the fact that manifestos for Black theatre often take on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallIntroduction to the Special Section: Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now2025-04-02text/htmlen-USIntroduction to the Special Section: Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®235162026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02"Cake Walks and Culture": The Black Struggle for Sovereignty at the Dawn of Jim Crow
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955984
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We want our folks, the Negroes to like us. Over and above the money and the prestige is a love for the race. We feel that in a degree we represent the race, and every hair's breath [sic] of achievement we make is to its credit. For first last and all the time we are Negroes. We know it, the race knows it, the public knows it and we want them to keep knowing it.George Walker (1872–1911) proclaimed his final manifesto of Afro-American cultural sovereignty shortly before he retired from the stage and subsequently passed from the scene. For nearly two decades, he and his contemporaries bravely took every conceivable opportunity to blaze a new pathway for Black artists to express themselves and assert their liberty
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmall"Cake Walks and Culture": The Black Struggle for Sovereignty at the Dawn of Jim Crow2025-04-02text/htmlen-US"Cake Walks and Culture": The Black Struggle for Sovereignty at the Dawn of Jim Crow2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®965822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02"I Thought I Loved Him, … the Pale Coward": The Politics of Interracial Love in W. E. B. Du Bois's "Seven-Up"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955985
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Discussions of early Black theatre manifestos frequently invoke the following assertion from W. E. B. Du Bois's 1926 Crisis article, "Criteria of Negro Art": "Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy."1 Less referenced—and, indeed, less remembered—is the opening line of the next paragraph in the piece: "In New York we have two plays: White Cargo and Congo."2 After offering a New Negro Renaissance–era call for propagandistic art and a Black theatre that works toward the end of "gaining the right of black folks to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmall"I Thought I Loved Him, … the Pale Coward": The Politics of Interracial Love in W. E. B. Du Bois's "Seven-Up"2025-04-02text/htmlen-US"I Thought I Loved Him, … the Pale Coward": The Politics of Interracial Love in W. E. B. Du Bois's "Seven-Up"2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®829472026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02When, Where, and How We Enter: Early Black Feminist Ruminations on Black Dramaturgies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955986
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In 2011, LMDA Review, the annual journal published by the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, featured a special issue titled "Shifting Boundaries: Perspectives from African American Dramaturgs." Edited by practicing dramaturg Sydné Mahone, the issue expanded on a conversation that took place during a panel of the same name organized by Mahone at LMDA's 2009 conference. The panel aimed both to situate the event as a mechanism for adding dimension to the exploration of dramaturgy and cultural practice and to prompt new discussions that might bring depth and light to the national conversation on race.1 The event marked the first time in LMDA's history that its annual conference included a panel of Black
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallWhen, Where, and How We Enter: Early Black Feminist Ruminations on Black Dramaturgies2025-04-02text/htmlen-USWhen, Where, and How We Enter: Early Black Feminist Ruminations on Black Dramaturgies2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®589142026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Histories of the Counter-Future: Theodore Ward, Alice Childress, and the Manifestos of the People's Theatre
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955987
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On the heels of the Federal Theatre Project's dissolution in 1939, Black theatre artists debated about and dreamed of new institutions and movements that would insist on, and even perhaps bring about, Black freedom. Proponents of Negro people's theatre planned a movement based in artistic self-determination, by Black theatre artists and for Black people, while embracing the interracial spirit of the Popular Front. The Negro people's theatre would expand to fit many forms and manifestations across the 1930s–1940s: it could be explicitly left-wing and stage-stirring protest dramas; it could be experimental and expressionist, drawing from trends in European and Soviet theatre; it could be commercially minded, as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallHistories of the Counter-Future: Theodore Ward, Alice Childress, and the Manifestos of the People's Theatre2025-04-02text/htmlen-USHistories of the Counter-Future: Theodore Ward, Alice Childress, and the Manifestos of the People's Theatre2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®925952026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Seen/Scene: Suzan-Lori Parks's Manifesto for Black People Onstage Revisited
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955988
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Originally conceived by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Watch Me Work debuted at the Public Theater in 2011. Parks describes the project simultaneously as an interactive "meditation on the artistic process" and as a working session for herself and the spectators.1 The actual performance of Watch Me Work is rather unremarkable. Parks introduces the piece by explaining what it is and how it will unfold: it will include both action and dialogue, beginning with a writing session (the action), and then followed by the dialogue, a question and answer session in which the audience can ask Parks directly about her writing process and about their own writing.2 While Parks invites the audience to work alongside her, it is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallSeen/Scene: Suzan-Lori Parks's Manifesto for Black People Onstage Revisited2025-04-02text/htmlen-USSeen/Scene: Suzan-Lori Parks's Manifesto for Black People Onstage Revisited2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®631422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02A Manifesto in Motion: Reimagining Collective Dance Histories Through Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's Continuous Replay
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955989
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Milan, 1986: A single dancer dressed in black moves across the stage.The stage is a small proscenium. The dancer's pathway is a narrow runway lit from above, spanning the width of the stage from right to left, a rectangle of light in an otherwise dark theatre. The dancer moves haltingly along the pathway from stage right in a series of accumulated gestures: 1, 1+2, 1+2+3, and so on. The gestures are focused in the upper body and integrate several techniques from modern and postmodern dance, martial arts, and other physical disciplines. The dancer wears a black tank top, and the gestural sequence emphasizes the musculature of his upper body. The gestures are dynamic, angular, often percussive, and performed with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallA Manifesto in Motion: Reimagining Collective Dance Histories Through Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's Continuous Replay2025-04-02text/htmlen-USA Manifesto in Motion: Reimagining Collective Dance Histories Through Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's Continuous Replay2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®1072692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History by Katrina M. Phillips (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955990
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Katrina Phillips's Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History tackles the historical and continued borrowing and retelling of Native American narratives and Native history as the basis for tourist-centered local outdoor dramas. Phillips analyzes three productions, still performed annually to date, that represent a tenuous convergence of tourism and Native narrative history and exemplify, as she describes, "the continued use of Indians and Indianness as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development" in the United States (7). The Happy Canyon Indian Pageant and Wild West Show (Oregon), Unto These Hills (North Carolina), and Tecumseh! (Ohio), may seem disparate at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallStaging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History by Katrina M. Phillips (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USStaging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History by Katrina M. Phillips (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®90602026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Standby: An Approach to Theatrical Design by Joshua Langman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955991
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Robert Edmond Jones, the early-twentieth-century US American designer, wrote that "the designing of stage scenery is not the problem of an architect or a painter or a sculptor or even a musician, but a poet."1 Jones was exceptional in his ability to reach these heights, both in his stage designs and in his writing and lectures (poetry, really) for the stage designer. Since Jones's much-loved The Dramatic Imagination (1941), however, few designers or critics have been able to combine useful principles of theory of stage design with practical advice drawn from a working career. Joshua Langman, a practicing lighting, sound, and projection designer, has made a laudable contribution in this tradition. Standby is an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallStandby: An Approach to Theatrical Design by Joshua Langman (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USStandby: An Approach to Theatrical Design by Joshua Langman (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®93752026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation by Ryan Claycomb (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955992
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Advocates of verbatim theatre have long held that listening to diverse, firsthand accounts of a crisis can heal social rifts. For nearly twenty years, feminist theatre scholar Ryan Claycomb has tended to agree. In his latest book, however, Claycomb offers a compelling reassessment. In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation interrogates the visions of empathetic and transformative dialogue that have popularized verbatim theatre in the United States and beyond.The book's contribution to documentary studies begins with its premise: that prominent verbatim plays are distinguished not only in their epistemological claims to know and tell what is real but also in their political and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallIn the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation by Ryan Claycomb (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USIn the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation by Ryan Claycomb (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®95772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02The Song Is You: Musical Theatre and the Politics of Bursting into Song and Dance by Bradley Rogers (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955993
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Alan Jay Lerner rationalized musicalizing George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion into My Fair Lady by observing that "there was so much oblique and unsated emotion" in the drama that he felt a need to utilize music to unleash these elements. He suggested that in such emotional disjunctures lay the opportunity to connect song directly to character stakes, given circumstances, and a production's overall meaning. Lerner's articulation of the presence of narrative-driven moments of song signaled an evolving twentieth-century desire for musical creators, directors, and performers to control such bursts to mirror the movement of plays toward "truth"-driven emotional arcs. This drive toward narrative "control" over song helped
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallThe Song Is You: Musical Theatre and the Politics of Bursting into Song and Dance by Bradley Rogers (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USThe Song Is You: Musical Theatre and the Politics of Bursting into Song and Dance by Bradley Rogers (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®115962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era by Esther Kim Lee (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955994
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Esther Kim Lee's Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era opens with a statement that "This book is dedicated to Asian American actors. May the gates open for you" (v). The hope that Asian American actors will have a future that diverges from historical practices of exclusion onstage and on-screen resounds like a heartbeat through Lee's historiography of yellowface. Yellowface, which Lee defines as "the theatrical convention of using makeup, costumes, and visual technology to transform someone to look East Asian" (1), enjoyed popularity in the exclusion era (1862–1940) while persisting through the twenty-first century in the United States. Yellowface's extraordinary endurance and normalization has meant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallMade-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era by Esther Kim Lee (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USMade-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era by Esther Kim Lee (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®108052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Anti-Racist Shakespeare by Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955995
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As part of the Cambridge Elements: Shakespeare and Pedagogy series, this book is a slim slip of a thing, a fast read, freely and openly available, and an absolutely vital tool for any educator. Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh offer a powerhouse of pedagogical tactics and resources for anyone who is looking to make themselves more conversant in contemporary best practices regarding race and pedagogy. The book is not just for early modernists but any scholar who wishes to connect their teaching with the urgent and necessary labor of deconstructing whiteness, talking about race with students, and braiding anti-racist methods into the university classroom. This book is here not to be an exhaustive encyclopedic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallAnti-Racist Shakespeare by Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USAnti-Racist Shakespeare by Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®93632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Conversations with Sam Shepard ed. by Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, and Mary C. Hartig (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955996
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Playwright, film star, author, stage and screen director, rock drummer, cowboy—in a complex artistic career and intriguing life, Sam Shepard was all of these things. Conversations with Sam Shepard from the University Press of Mississippi, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, and Mary C. Hartig, presents a series of interviews conducted by different publications between 1969 and 2016 with the semi-reclusive Shepard. The interviews cover a wide series of topics, ranging from Shepard's past to whichever project he was most engaged with at the time of the individual interview and the future trajectory of his work. With the final interview dated only a year before Shepard passed away from amyotrophic lateral
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallConversations with Sam Shepard ed. by Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, and Mary C. Hartig (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USConversations with Sam Shepard ed. by Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, and Mary C. Hartig (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®81022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players by Jeffery Kennedy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955997
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It is no small task to write a history of the Provincetown Players. Though their existence spanned less than ten years, they were active in several locations, innovating in numerous styles, genres, and disciplines. More problematically for historians, a haze of legend has settled over the group in the century since its demise. High praise must go to Jeffery Kennedy for both cutting his way through the haze and filling in many of the gaps in the historic record that partially account for it. This book has been needed for some time and it should become required reading for anyone studying the US theatre of the early twentieth century.Kennedy's stated goals are threefold: to supply a fuller biography of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallStaging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players by Jeffery Kennedy (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USStaging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players by Jeffery Kennedy (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®81292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism by David Bisaha (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955998
<p></p>
There is no shortage of research dedicated to the history of early twentieth century US American scenic design. My own shelves are filled with books on Jo Mielziner, Joseph Urban, Norman Bel Geddes, Donald Oenslager, Robert Edmond Jones, and other notable scenic designers of that period. Relying heavily on the curation of design artifacts (production photographs, scale models, renderings), these books chart innovations in style in scenic design and how they contributed to the development of US American theatre; they construct history based on design. David Bisaha's American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism offers a fresh approach. Bisaha's book is not interested in the history of design aesthetics; it is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallAmerican Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism by David Bisaha (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USAmerican Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism by David Bisaha (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®86592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Theatre of the Macabre ed. by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955999
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Theatre and the Macabre, a new collection of critical essays edited by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., explores the dreadful, fantastic, and ghastly devices that terrify and fascinate theatregoers. The book is split into four chapters: "Histories of the Macabre" obsesses over the body both during and after life. "Dramaturgies of the Macabre" examines the mechanisms and aesthetics theatremakers use to frighten their audiences. "Staging the Macabre" studies the dramaturgical effects of a body damaged almost beyond recognition. Finally, "The Immersive Macabre" documents theatrical experiences that further blur the boundary between audience and artist.The essays themselves range over a variety of topics: from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallTheatre of the Macabre ed. by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USTheatre of the Macabre ed. by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®115252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/956000
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Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe, in its just under two-thousand-year sweep from antiquity to the early modern period, dismantles the mythography of law's pure literality and disrupts its Austinian verbal integrity. Julie Stone Peters has provided us with a book that, rather than positioning the aesthetics of legal performance as a stable apparatus, instead finds its taut threads running through a messy, embodied entanglement of institutional indices and individuated actions. As Peters states, the book is "not only a history of law as a performance practice; it is also a history of legal performance as a constitutive idea in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallLaw as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters (review)2025-04-02text/htmlen-USLaw as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters (review)2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®110252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02Books Received
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/956001
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/577/image/coversmallBooks Received2025-04-02text/htmlen-USBooks Received2025-04-022025TWOProject MUSE®236292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-04-02