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<p>Acknowledgments ix</p> <p>Preface: Drama, Poetry, and Performance xi</p> <p><b>Introduction: Between Poetry and Performance 1</b></p> <p>i. Shakespeare 3.0 2</p> <p>ii. Images of Writing/Metaphors of Performance 8</p> <p>The score 8</p> <p>The blueprint 12</p> <p>Information/software 13</p> <p>Dramatic tools, performance technologies 20</p> <p>iii. Agencies of Drama: Burke, Poetry, and Performance 22</p> <p>Writing as agency: “Antony in Behalf of the Play” 29</p> <p><b>1 From Poetry to Performance 35</b></p> <p>i. Dramatic Performance and its Discontents: The New Criticism 39</p> <p>Drama, poetry, and “interpretation” 39</p> <p>“An arrangement of words” 45</p> <p>Acts of speech 50</p> <p>Heresy, responsibility, and performance 56</p> <p>ii. Dramatic Writing and its Discontents: Performance Studies, Drama Studies 64</p> <p>Antigone’s bones 64</p> <p>The “theater of acting” 69</p> <p>Rethinking writing 77</p> <p><b>2 Performing Writing: Hamlet 94</b></p> <p>i. Hamlet’s Book 97</p> <p>Playing the book 97</p> <p>The law of writ 101</p> <p>Speaking by the card 106</p> <p>ii. Corrupt Stuff; or, Doing Things with (Old) Words 112</p> <p>The crux of performance 113</p> <p>Enseamed beds 118</p> <p>iii. “OK, we can skip to the book”: The Wooster Group Hamlet 123</p> <p>Theatrofilm by Electronovision 127</p> <p>(Re)playing Burton, performing Hamlet 130</p> <p><b>3 Embodying Writing: Ibsen and Parks 139</b></p> <p>i. Can We Act What We Say?: Rosmersholm 142</p> <p>Inscribing character 147</p> <p>Acting the role 150</p> <p>Confession, disclosure, detour 152</p> <p>Doing (unspeakable) things with words 158</p> <p>ii. Footnoting Performance: The America Play and Venus 161</p> <p>A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout 172</p> <p>Diggidy-diggidy-diggidy-dawg 178</p> <p><b>4 Writing Space: Beckett and Brecht 192</b></p> <p>i. Quad: Euclidean Dramaturgies 196</p> <p>ii. By Accepting This License 205</p> <p>iii. What Where: Brechtian Technologies 211<br /><br /> Notes 216<br /><br /> Works Cited 239<br /><br /> Further Reading 258<br /><br /> Index 261</p>

<b>W. B. Worthen</b> is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of <i>The Idea of the Actor</i> (1984), <i>Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater</i> (1992), <i>Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance</i> (1997), <i>Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance</i> (2003), and <i>Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama</i> (2006). He is also the editor of several volumes, including <i>A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance</i> (with Barbara Hodgdon, Wiley-Blackwell 2005), and the <i>Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 5^th edition</i> (2006).

Using the work of Kenneth Burke to develop an original critical perspective on the dual identity of drama, this engaging new book offers a way to read plays ‘between poetry and performance’, exploring and contesting the threshold between text and performance. The author offers both a critical account of literary criticism and performance studies, and suggests a means for seizing dramatic writing as an instrument for performance. <p><i>Drama: Between Poetry and Performance</i> discusses major plays, drawing on examples from playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks, and asks how they offer a critical perspective on the drama's relation to books, to the process of embodiment, and to the mapping of space in the theatre. Exploring the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing, this is an ideal text which not only teaches students how to read drama, but also explores the key questions that have occupied the earliest playwrights through to today’s most distinguished literary and cultural critics.</p> <p>This book will appeal both to the professional and academic audience in drama and performance studies, as well as to a wider audience of theatregoers interested in the relationship between writing and performance.</p>

"So very, very few scholarly studies in the field have been useful in the classroom. In this context, Worthen's book is nothing short of god-sent."<br /> — <b>Martin Puchner</b>, Harvard University <p>"An impressive—indeed, brilliant—book, a powerful defence of dramatic textuality in its relationship to performance […] In addition to its deft negotiation of print practices and other early social technologies, it is refreshingly up-to-date in its awareness of the ways that digital technologies have transformed the delivery and reception of textual performance today."<br /> —<b>Stanton B. Garner Jr</b>, University of Tennessee</p> <p>"Essential reading not only for all drama and theatre studies students from undergraduate level upwards, but for anyone involved in teaching them, researching in the field, or interested in the state of theatre history, theory and criticism today."<br /> —<b>Robert Shaughnessy</b>, University of Kent</p>

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