ABSTRACT
The analysis of performance in the eighteenth century entails an awareness not only of how pre-existing cultural codes are enacted, but also how the performative repertoire instantiates future dispositions. Attention to performative time, to performative space, and to performing bodies in recent scholarship necessarily opens onto larger historical and social dynamics. Linking social and cultural history, the evidentiary procedures of performance studies provide a way of thinking about archives that are altering the nature of historiography in the period. This chapter examines multiple critical possibilities by focusing on a range of performances from a single calendar day at mid-century.
