Introduction

The essays in this volume explore the institutional practices that shape contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s plays. At the start of the twenty-first century, film, video, and to a more limited extent, live performance have overtaken the printed book as the primary means of access to cultural experience for a significant fraction of the population. Many students have their defining encounter with Shakespeare by way of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet or Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, films that have been widely praised for their accessibility. The current preoccupation with the accessibility of performances has apparently been achieved at the expense of those traditional notions of authority that had such tremendous urgency for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. There’s a whole lot of Shakespeare going on and modern performances often take outlandish liberties with these valued works. But performance is not well understood as a derivative form that owes its social dignity to the originary force of a text. The stage has a constitutive power or authority in its own right (Weimann 2000: 1-17). The common aim in these essays is to take the notion of performance seriously in both a theoretical and a historical sense. But the contributors here understand that it doesn’t help to replace reified notions of textual authority with a vague, diffuse and poorly delineated notion of ‘performativity’.