Echoes: Shakespeare, the reviewer and the theatre historian, revisited

Abstract

Though scholarly critics of Shakespearean performance can and should draw our attention to productions that break through the boundaries of established theatrical practices and forge new aesthetic paradigms, and though performance historians have the analytical tools to draw our attention to the limitations and contradictions within more mainstream contemporary performance practices, it is equally our job to record and analyse these mainstream practices without condescension. We must, for example, recognize and analyse – indeed, we should celebrate – in our analyses of contemporary mainstream performance the persistence of “emotionalist” Stanislavsky-based approaches to character and acting, however much such views of character are inconsistent with the early modern definitions of subjectivity encoded within the scripts, and however much these approaches have been challenged by postmodern theory and theatrical practices.