Ric Knowles: Shakespearean
Performativity, English History, and the First Tetralogy in Performance
Most
"performance criticism" of Shakespeare to date has concerned itself
with theatrical productions as "readings," as interpretation of
Shakespeare's plays as scripts, using definitions of and approaches to
"performance" that are isolated from activity in and scholarship on
contemporary performance, theatrical and otherwise. These definitions
and
approaches tend to treat Shakespearean performance in isolation from
other
contemporary theatrical activity and to isolate the performance
criticism of
Shakespeare from other Shakespeare scholarship. Much performance
criticism of
Shakespeare, ironically, has not followed the lead of even those
Shakespeare
scholars who understand the text itself to be "performative" (usually
in the sense that they consider the texts' "illocutionary force"). As
a working definition, Joseph Roach has usefully defined "performance"
as "the kinaeshtetic and vocal embodiment of social memory and self
invention," while Josette Feral has argued that performance "attempts
not to tell (like theatre) but to provoke synaesthetic relationships
between
subjects." This paper draws upon contemporary theories of performance
and
performativity in order to consider the performative "force" of
post-1963 productions of Shakespeare's first tetralogy as constitutive
embodiments of English social memory and English subjectivities. In
doing so it
will attempt to model a new approach to the performance criticism of
Shakespeare.