Shakespeare Performance Studies

Taking a 'performance studies' perspective on Shakespearean theatre, W. B. Worthen argues that the theatrical event represents less an inquiry into the presumed meanings of the text than an effort to frame performance as a vehicle of cultural critique. Using contemporary performances as test cases, Worthen explores the interfaces between the origins of Shakespeare's writing as literature and as theatre, the modes of engagement with Shakespeare's plays for readers and spectators, and the function of changing performance technologies on our knowledge of Shakespeare. This book not only provides the material for performance analysis, but places important contemporary Shakespeare productions in dialogue with three influential areas of critical discourse: texts and authorship, the function of character in cognitive theatre studies, and the representation of theatre and performing in the digital humanities. This book will be vital reading for scholars and advanced students of Shakespeare and of performance studies.

1. Shakespeare performance studies; 2. Intoxicating rhythms: Shakespeare, literature, and performance: Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Romeo and Juliet; 3. 'The written troubles of the brain': writing, character, and the cognition of performance: Punchdrunk Theatre, Sleep No More; 4. Retrotech: writing, theatre, and technologies of performance: Michael Almereyda, Hamlet.

W. B. Worthen is the author of many books on drama, performance theory, and Shakespeare, including The Idea of the Actor (1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (1992), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge, 1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge, 2003), Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2005) and Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (2010). He has edited and co-edited several volumes of drama and theatre scholarship, and has served as an editor of Theatre Journal and Modern Drama, guest editor of Renaissance Drama, and is the editor of The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama.