Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Carol Chillington Rutter The essays in this special issue continue conversations started six years ago at a conference at Notre Dame hosted by Peter Holland who invited participants—all of them scholars whose work, intersecting Shakespeare studies, theatre history and performance studies, is currently defining the subject area of Shakespeare performance studies—to consider “Shakespeare: Remembering Performance.” He tasked them with taking up all three elements of his title. He wanted them to think about Shakespeare and memory and performance, to ask what is remembered (in Shakespeare, of Shakespeare), who remembers it, how memory is performed to new audiences—and to what ends. What came out of that conference were papers of an astonishing diversity. Some reconstructed performance. Others pondered either acts of memory performed in the plays or memories of performance captured by editors for performance-alert glosses. Still others thought about how actors remember—and sometimes forget—Shakespeare, and about how costumes and properties remember actors’ performances. A book resulted, edited by Holland, Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006), but something else too: an urgent sense that we wanted the conversation to continue. Two years later, then, Barbara Hodgdon at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, hosted a second meeting of what was now calling itself the International Shakespeare in Performance Colloquium, titled “Watching Ourselves Watching Shakespeare.” The questions Hodgdon wanted addressing were these: “How do we process performance? To what are we attentive? How do we record what we hear and see? What matters? How do such documents take on use value? What is the place of performance memory as written discourse in the project of Shakespeare performance studies? And how might we go about putting the eye/I back into the analysis and theorization of performance?” Again, contributions were richly [End Page 1] various. Some explored the pleasures and pains—and downright frustrations, perplexities, fierce disappointments—of the watching experience. They interrogated the process of recording that watching by assessing the self-who-is writing, the “I” behind the “eye.” Others took up unexpected watching positions, sitting not out front in a theatre but inside a role with an actor; or watching an actor’s performance through the lens of earlier (irrelevant? constitutive?) performances; or indeed, discovering, through watching, a genuine challenge to normalised practices and responses that unsettled spectatorship, that made spectators “look different.” Essays from this conference will be familiar to readers of Shakespeare Bulletin, having been printed in two issues of Volume 25. But those essays also worked to prompt the subject of the third meeting of the colloquium, at the CAPITAL Centre, the University of Warwick, in 2009, which moved from thinking about watching and remembering to asking how we hang on to what we’ve seen, how we store what we remember, how we retrieve it: that is, how we archive the materials of performance memory and how we put those materials to work subsequently. Thus, “‘If you have writ your annals true’: Shakespeare in the archives” aimed to pick up a strand of conversation that had threaded through earlier discussions. It wanted to amplify echoes from Hodgdon’s 2004 essay, “Shopping in the archives,” to explore how we use the material traces of performance to remember, re-construct, and re-perform performance. Citing in the title Coriolanus’s suicidal challenge to Volsci memory and historiography just before he dies, a challenge framed by that significantly unsettling ‘if,’ this conference wanted to know what constitutes the “annals”—and indeed, what constitutes “true” writing. Participants were invited to consider how, in re-writing performance, we use writing about performance (theatre reviews, interviews, diaries, biographies, publicity, transcripts) and writing emerging from performance (theatre records such as promptbooks, stage managers’ reports, directors’ notes, rehearsal diaries, blogs). And not just writing: how we use the material archive, costumes, objects, production photographs, set and costume designs, posters, scores, film records. Wondering about the current state of theatre collections (about what is kept, discarded, re-made), the conference asked how performance archives are being constructed, preserved, accessed, and digitally disseminated. Finally, it wanted to know how the trace materials of performance were being used in teaching; how educators can enhance student learning and enrich...