Drama: Between Poetry and Performance

Preface: Drama, Poetry, and Performance.

Introduction: Between Poetry and Performance.

i. Shakespeare 3.0.

ii. Images of Writing/Metaphors of Performance.

The score.

The blueprint.

Information/software.

Dramatic tools, performance technologies.

iii. Agencies of Drama: Burke, Poetry, and Performance.

Writing as agency: "Antony in Behalf of the Play".

1. From Poetry to Performance.

i. Dramatic Performance and its Discontents: The New Criticism.

Drama, poetry, and "interpretation".

"An arrangement of words".

Acts of speech.

Heresy, responsibility, and performance.

ii. Dramatic Writing and its Discontents: Performance Studies, Drama Studies.

Antigone’s bones.

The "theater of acting".

Rethinking writing.

2. Performing Writing: Hamlet.

i. Hamlet’s Book.

Playing the book.

The law of writ.

Speaking by the card.

ii. Corrupt Stuff; or, Doing Things with (Old) Words.

The crux of performance.

Enseamed beds.

iii. "OK, we can skip to the book": The Wooster Group Hamlet.

Theatrofilm by Electronovision.

(Re)playing Burton, performing Hamlet.

3. Embodying Writing: Ibsen and Parks.

i. Can We Act What We Say?: Rosmersholm.

Inscribing character.

Acting the role.

Confession, disclosure, detour.

Doing (unspeakable) things with words.

ii. Footnoting Performance: The America Play and Venus.

A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout.

Diggidy-diggidy-diggidy-dawg.

4. Writing Space: Beckett and Brecht.

i. Quad: Euclidean Dramaturgies.

ii. By Accepting This License.

iii. What Where: Brechtian Technologies.

Notes.

Works Cited.

Further Reading.  

Index.