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environments and characters that reflected their own lives and ideological interests. Here it is important to note that there were also pro-suffrage songs, operas, music-hall sketches, dances and films that deserve more detailed consideration by scholars working on suffrage and performance histories. These are unfortunately beyond the scope of much of this book. The idea that ‘preservation is linked to publication’ is an important one.10 The print culture in which suffrage plays were first made publicly available was immeasurably different from today. Many of the plays
their own performance histories. She argues: An intertheatrical reading … seeks to articulate the mesh of connections between all kinds of theatre texts, and between texts and their uses. It posits that all entertainments, including the dramas, that are performed within a single theatrical tradition are more or less interdependent. They are uttered in a language, shared by successive generations, which includes not only speech and the systems of the stage – scenery, costume, lighting and so forth – but also genres, conventions and, very importantly, memory. Int ro d
’, 21 Ariel's textual origins have been variously attributed to esoteric magic, Jacobean witchcraft beliefs, Jewish and Christian demonology, and elemental symbology. 22 His slippery textual status is clearly reflected in the play's performance history, with his casting and characterisation fluctuating widely given a period's aesthetic and ideological preoccupations. In several instances, directors have even cast multiple actors in the role, from a bifurcated ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ Ariel in the
, throughout its performance history, been implicated in questions of sexual and gender identity, these productions particularly foreground issues of transvestite masquerade and same-sex desire that the tradition of female Rosalinds has largely occluded. This is followed, in Chapter VI , by a consideration of the play’s fortunes in the medium in which it has fared least successfully. The first, silent film
2 ‘I, Catherine’: biography, documentary culture, and public presence Introduction In the previous chapter, performance history provided an alternative understanding of the 1468 Saint Catherine jeu that incorporated social and cultural context; it demonstrated that the jeu took part in a movement that positioned women at the centre of devotions to the saint. To further develop this relationship between women’s lives and performances, I turn to Catherine Baudoche, who funded the jeu, and the interaction between her performance practice and financial activity more
exclusion from legal ceremony, but also in the documentation of other kinds of performance such as the Saint Catherine jeu. Given this bias in the archive, it cannot be assumed that women in Metz prioritised the material elements of their practice over other aspects. Narrow representations of the performances of the Catherines and Claude carry serious consequences for performance history, on the whole. When text is unreliable and performing women employ physical channels of expression, then the destruction of the material heritage of the later Middle Ages means the loss
or six years. This means that every new production, no matter how determined to make a fresh start, is already caught up in a cycle of iteration and haunted by the ghosts of its performance history. In his account of As You Like It at Stratford, Robert Smallwood writes of how taking a long view of its performance reveals how much productions are in dialogue with previous ones, and how much they are
sense represented a tool for making sense of the world. Legends and myths were retold and remembered through performance; histories were recreated in virtual reality, in the very presence of the spectator; and actors told fictional stories ‘to th’yet unknowing world’, playing out ‘how these things came about’. Perennially hungry for sensation, audiences could hear, and see
performance history of the play – amateur, professional and radio – see my website The Jacobethans . 11 Part V of this book is indicative of the renewed interest in Thomas Kyd and his work after 2000. The increased number of single-author volumes and extended critical articles on Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy signals the clear shift from
, whose story should be considered dominant. In short, a productive way of considering the play’s performance history is by asking whose play it has been perceived to be. In the twentieth century the title character has occasionally loomed over productions like the colossal statues often relied upon to keep his memory alive in the latter half of the show, and there is some reason – albeit speculative – to