Since the turn of the twentieth-century, the presumed invisibility of craft that defines dramatic theatre erases our capacity to usefully theorize the repeated use of a popular script in performance. Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre has further facilitated a segregation between performance and dramatic theatre and current critical frameworks that p…[Read more]

When Ben Jonson summons Shakespeare in his famous poem, “To The Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” and assures the late dramatist that he is “alive still while thy book doth live / And we have wits to read and praise to give,” Jonson affirms an authorial presence typical of the humanist approach to Shakespeare. More tantali…[Read more]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]