Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.

Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.

This chapter is focused on a battle in the Athenian law-court between two great orators. Aeschines was trained as a tragic actor who worked in a mask, and brought the skills of the stage to the democratic arena. He argued for making peace with the new rising imperial power, Macedon, and tried to persuade the jury to position themselves as authentic democrats. Demosthenes was a skilled writer who wrote speeches for others, and later learnt how to present himself as a public speaker. He won the debate for two reasons. He persuaded the jury to position themselves in nationalistic terms as Athenians, and he also persuaded them that he was sincere while his opponent was merely acting. The reputation of Demosthenes has undergone many changes, and it was only in the nineteenth century that he emerged as an archetypal democrat. In Demosthenes’ day the drive for sincerity was tied to a shift from communitarian thinking to a higher degree of individualism, in a political context where the city was losing its power of self-determination. I end by drawing on Peter Brook’s minimalist definition of theatre to create a definition of democracy.

This chapter investigates how the idea of ‘service’ narrates the shifting (and sometimes consistent) ways in which actors have been understood on and off the British stage since the Second World War. ‘Service’ is a word often used casually by critics and theatre workers alike, but it contains a multitude of sometimes contradictory meanings, revealing of the peculiar social status of actors in Britain. The chapter argues that the combination of an idealist sense of service, inherited from the nineteenth century stage with the rhetoric of national duty during the war, promoted the increasing professionalisation among actors in Britain since 1945. The idea of the actor as public servant or member of the professional classes was complicated, however, by the longstanding association of actors with bohemianism, producing an ambiguous class identity for the acting profession. It is this class anxiety and ambivalence, complicated by post-war ideas of national service, that is the concern of this chapter. Finally, the chapter proposes that the rhetoric of service and the cultures of bohemianism have functioned as forms of mystification that disavow the actor’s status as a waged worker.

This chapter explores Puccini’s relationship with the Italian spoken theatre of his time. Stage plays were often adapted as operas during this period and there are plentiful examples in Puccini’s oeuvre. Puccini preferred to adapt foreign plays, rather than Italian ones (even sometimes, as in the case of Madama Butterfly, selecting a subject whose original text was in a language he did not understand), and he ranged across a wide variety of different theatrical genres. The chapter considers developments in Italian theatre during the nineteenth century, and the emergence of key native playwrights, as well as the national penchant for foreign works in translation, such as the plays of Shakespeare. The author examines changes in acting technique that took place in Italy and more broadly during this period and considers the careers of leading actors of the time such as Eleonora Duse. Puccini’s choice of dramatic subjects – the sorts of themes that attracted him and stimulated his musical imagination – is discussed in detail, as is the range of dramatic devices that he borrowed from a variety of different theatrical traditions.

It should not surprise us if voters are as much persuaded by the charisma of a politician’s personal performance as by their policies. Neither should it surprise us that actors have sometimes successfully made the move from showbiz to the business of government. President Reagan and Governor Schwarzenegger are well-known examples. Sometimes the substance exceeds the show, as it does in the case of the actor Volodymyr Zelensky who went on to become the celebrated wartime president of Ukraine. With other performers, a spectacular show might make up for lesser substance. Donald Trump has been a major beneficiary of voters’ susceptibility to persuasive political performance. What Donald Trump lacks in political education he has made up for through practical experience in the entertainment industry, and especially through his role as host of the popular programme The Apprentice. This chapter examines the arts of political performance including, but not exclusively, in relation to the ways in which the speech, gesture, and costume of Donald Trump, exploit the Making Sense.

The veteran classical actor Louis Butelli played Duncan in the 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre, a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. In this interview with Richard Schoch, Butelli explores the challenges that Restoration Shakespeare presents to a contemporary actor, including unfamiliarity, bias toward Shakespeare’s original versions, heightened language and the interpolation of music. Drawing on his own research into Restoration theatre, Butelli also reflects on his experience of collaborating with a team of scholar in the production of Davenant’s Macbeth. In contrast to the chapter by actor Kate Eastwood Norris, this chapter investigates how actors can learn from documentary sources about Restoration theatre (e.g., Colley Cibber’s Apology) to enhance their own work today.

Apart from its singing and dancing witches, Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth is most famous for expanding the role of Lady Macduff. Augmenting the mere nineteen lines afforded the character in Shakespeare’s text, Davenant significantly enlarges and complicates the role, giving Lady Macduff an additional four scenes, in which she demonstrates agency in both familial and political matters. This chapter puts Shakespeare’s and Davenant’s Lady Macduffs into conversation, exploring the opportunities and challenges presented by both versions of the role in performance.  Combining theatre history, textual analysis, and practice-as-research methodologies, I begin by surveying the depiction of Lady Macduff in twenty-first century stagings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  I argue that concepts of the feminine, the victim, and the mother define the interpretation of Lady Macduff in performance. I then contrast Shakespeare’s depiction of the character with that of Davenant, drawing on Anne Greenfield’s argument to consider how Davenant’s Lady Macduff might be considered a ‘subversive tragic heroine’. Developing this idea through practical exploration of Davenant’s Lady Macduff in performance, this chapter concludes by considering what practitioners today can learn from Davenant’s adaptation.

Kate Eastwood Norris played Lady Macbeth in the Folger’s 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth, in collaboration with the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. Writing from her perspective as a professional actress, Eastwood Norris explains the parameters of the Folger’s production, both logistical and creative. She then recounts and reflects on the experience, both formal and informal, of working with the team of scholars attached to the production. In contrast to the chapter by actor Louis Butelli, this chapter move beyond its immediate production-based narrative to consider in a more general way the need for scholars to explain their insights in a way that is appropriate, useful, and valuable to professional theatre artists. This chapter argues that when scholarship is treated as an idea—a possibility—rather than as a fact—a fixed certainty—the creative aspects of both scholarship and performance can form the solid basis of scholar-artist collaboration.

Just before his death, Hamlet bids Horatio “to tell my story.” However, immediately after Fortinbras's arrival, when Horatio wants to perform this task and “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about”, Fortinbras interrupts him, claiming “some rights of memory in this kingdom” for himself, and commands his men to “Take up the bodies” and “Go bid the soldiers shoot.” These final moments of Shakespeare’s play initiate the dramaturgical process for future generations to recount the events which led to Hamlet’s death, reconsidering, re-enacting as well as resisting his and the play’s legacy in constantly shifting forms and constellations. This chapter reflects on how this dramaturgical process is established in the play itself bringing together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text analysis and performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. Highlighting the performative link between virtue and virtuosity, dramaturgy connects research and practice and is designed to develop and enhance creative work in the theatre. The aim of dramaturgical analysis is to open up new dimensions for productions of classical texts, by illuminating these texts from innovative perspectives and laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed for stage interpretations of the text.

In 2017, as part of the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, the editors led a research team of scholars and artists in discussing, workshopping, rehearsing, and performing scenes and songs from Thomas Shadwell’s 1674 operatic revision of Davenant and Dryden’s The Tempest at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This chapter offers reflections on how scholar-artist collaboration in performing Restoration Shakespeare has functioned as sustained moments of what Rebecca Schneider (following Gertrude Stein) has called ‘syncopated time’ – in this instance, a collision of archival past and embodied present, in which each dimension punctured the other. Reflecting on their practice-based research, the authors propose that what can emerge through such syncopations are performance-generated insights that neither the recorded past nor the embodied present could fully apprehend on its own.

Molière’s life and works offer numerous parallels with the commedia dell’artie, which goes some way towards explaining the profound singularity of his plays and scenic practices in the context of seventeenth-century French theatre. For roughly fifteen years, Molière rubbed shoulders with the Italians and undertook various adaptations of original works derived from the commedia dell’arte, as is demonstrated by several of his plays that are based on famous soggetti. Molière also borrowed a number of his characters from the commédia dell’arte, reproducing both their names and their behaviour. The similarities are not only textual but also in his acting style: physical and verbal virtuosity, and above all the use of facial expressions to demonstrate his characters’ emotions. Molière’s plays were constructed around such lazzi, which gave him a certain flexibility in the elaboration of his shows. Finally, it is in his qualities as an author, actor and company leader, and also in his way of practising theatrical activity as a true entrepreneur that Molière can be seen to have been influenced by the commedia dell’arte more generally.

This chapter looks at the evolution of acting styles in Molière’s time, paying particular attention to the creation of a ‘regular acting’ that matched the emergence of the classical rules, and also to the competition between the two main playhouses of the time. Molière prioritised variety. Stage business became a crucible of several traditions and a means of experimenting with new comic effects: from vulgar gestures, beatings and mimicry to lazzi and rodomontades; from provincial accents to stuttering and an uncontrolled emotional hiccup; from cross-dressing to disguise. In the 1660s, Molière sought to differentiate his company from the Hôtel de Bourgogne, whose forte was tragic, oratorical acting, and whose actors may not all have been as physically agile on stage as Molière was himself. He sparked controversy, promoting his hybrid acting ‘brand’, which probably consisted of a combination of an attenuated declamatory style and a faster flow in the tragic and, conversely, an exaggerated and excessive body language style accompanied by extreme contortions in the comic. Molière triumphed on the comic stage, becoming a model and marking the next generations of actors.

Chapter 10 explains many ways in which Italian music in particular was cultivated at the new Comédie-Italienne from 1716, directed by Luigi Riccoboni. Arias in Italian by Mouret contributed to divertissements of plays. Research into the company’s principal singers introduces an account of Le Joueur, written in-house as a response to Giuseppe Orlandini’s Serpilla e Baiocco at the Opéra in 1729. An edition of Le Joueur specially made for this book is referred to, accessible from its online space. Evidence then shows that different French singers were influenced by performing Italian, or Italianate, music: Pierre Théveneau, Charles Rochard, Joseph Caillot. ‘Il soldato valoroso’ focuses on a descriptive aria by Mouret (1729) presaging comic narratives in the French repertory. ‘Towards La Servante maîtresse’ explains the special nature of the 1746 performances of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, then discusses French acting skills in relation to the requirements of Italian musical comedy. The repertory of Eustachio Bambini’s visiting troupe at the Opéra (1752–54) is discussed in relation to French cultural experience. The early career of Marie-Justine Favart is described, and her singing. French experience of intermezzi is assessed using a 1954 recording of Il maestro de musica, sung and spoken in German.

Chapter 2 continues the introductory process (1) by surveying the large part played by music in seventeenth-century plays; (2) by scrutinising the functions of music in plays; (3) by discussing perceptions of speech and music in dramatic alternation. ‘Recent Research’ introduces John S. Powell’s study of 153 plays with music and isolates key elements for popular opera: the presence of borrowed songs and vaudevilles; their dramatic functions; performative demands, especially when main actors have to sing as well as speak; and manuscripts proving that music occupied far more stage time, relative to spoken material, than appears likely from other written sources. The historical origins of ‘opera’ are problematised by juxtaposing the growth of forms that contained speech. A personal account of hearing songs in contemporary drama provides ideas that are used later in the book. ‘Molière and Music’ describes evolution in this playwright’s musical practice through Le Sicilien and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, culminating in Le Malade imaginaire. Their types of dramatic integration are discussed. ‘After Molière’ is a case-study illustrating important increases in musical diversity: Poisson’s Les Foux divertissans, whose extensive musical score was composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Various parodies of Lully foreshadow opéra-comique, as does the commonplace working milieu.

The originality and impact of Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet and its influence on the Chicago theater scene is the focus of this chap-ter, showing how the language and subject matter of the play almost single-handily overturned Chicago theater in the 1970s. Previously a try-out town for productions headed to Broadway, or a stop for touring plays, Mamet and a cohort of young directors and actors initiated a series of experimental theaters off-Loop (out of downtown), providing a breeding ground for new plays that inverted traditional formats. Emerging out of a tradition of minor but experimental theater groups like the early Little Theatre, this new form of theater soon took shape with the Compass Players, the Organic Theater, Second City, Body Politic, and Steppenwolf. Theater took on new methods of presentation and subject matter with Mamet leading the way. With its frank talk about sex and relationships, Sexual Perversity in Chicago set the tone for new dramatic experiences, offending some but, more importantly, finding newer and younger audiences eager for unique theatrical experiences representing contemporary urban life.

From the revival of the English theatres under the Restoration to the rise of a transnational Romantic theatre in the early nineteenth century, developments in dramatic literature and acting mirrored shifting medical constructions of the body, disease, and health. At the same time, they reflected a deep cultural anxiety about the feigning of illness. This chapter will consider how notions of both true and false ill-health were explored in English drama of the long eighteenth century through the medium of the performed symptom. Symptoms could disclose dramatic internal truths, or could be faked by both patients and actors – and misread by doctors and spectators – to comic effect. For most of the eighteenth century, the latter model prevailed as playwrights and actors drew upon theatre’s association with fakery to mock affected invalidism, incompetent physicians, and the frauds of fashionable society. As nerve-based conceptions of sensibility and vitalist paradigms rose to prominence, however, a new generation of playwrights and performers called upon disease’s symptoms not to spoof quackery but to represent emotional interiority. The resulting performance languages would help to give birth to the Romantic stage.

Acting in Stoppard requires verbal dexterity, great emotional intelligence, and clarity of thought. The original production of Arcadia, in which the essay’s author played Valentine, marked a particularly productive combination of text, actors, and cultural and intellectual history that highlighted the genius of Stoppard’s writing for the theatre.

This chapter reveals the elaboration of a set of critical priorities, transition prime among them, crystallised by Aaron Hill in the 1730s. Offering what he claimed to be a purified version of pantomime’s techniques for arresting attention, Hill wrote of how actors could become a ‘true FAUSTUS’ for the theatres through transition, creating iconic and dynamic moments of suspension during which they could shift mind and body from one passion to another. Hill’s emphases continue into the time of David Garrick, whose transitions into ‘pensively preparatory attitudes’ were praised as intellectual achievements and blamed as pantomimical tricks. Ultimately, pauses and the transitions that occurred upon them became moments when an actor could be described as asserting their artistic autonomy and the focal point of critical attention. The realisation of Hill’s dreams — a theatre where sophisticated emotion replaced slapstick motion as the key source of spectacle — soon, however, risked becoming a Faustian pact, for an insight into the transitions of a play seemed to demand as much private attention to the page as public engagement with the stage.