This chapter considers the complex task of editing Puccini’s works, informed by the production of the Ricordi critical edition (launched in 2008 and ongoing). An abundance of materials exist upon which the editor can draw, including autographs, sketches, printed editions, and correspondence, thanks to Puccini’s close and long relationship with the Ricordi firm. However, some gaps exist in the surviving sources, and some sources disagree with others. The author explains that the editor must choose a text on which to base the edition, drawing on further sources as necessary to make informed interventions, striving to get as close as possible to the composer’s intentions, but mindful of the fact that his intentions and preferences changed over time. In Puccini’s case, second editions usually reflect the works as performed at their premieres, the first edition already becoming obsolete in rehearsal. The chapter discusses the various decisions and interventions that an editor must make in order to make an edition both faithful and usable. Puccini’s working method and process of revising his operas are discussed in detail. The chapter ends by asking whether early recordings, as well as printed and written documents, should inform an edition.

This chapter identifies scenes of aural recognition in a number of nineteenth century texts from the 1810s and 1820s: recurrent scenes which involve a character, a narrator, or an autobiographical witness hearing something (a song, a melody, a sequence of words) which they believe they have heard at least once before. Although seemingly unimportant scenes, they are often ones which are pivotal to the plot, the development of character, or the instigation of a regime of feeling. Analysing examples of this scene in Scott’s Guy Mannering, a stage adaptation by Daniel Terry, short stories by John Galt, and a travel narrative by Reginald Heber, the chapter tracks the various ways in which hearing accrues significance as a mobile sense in the context of a newly mobile world of extreme travel and colonization.

The Introduction establishes the distinctive focus and range of contributions within Shakespeare at War. This transhistorical material history prioritizes how Shakespeare is used at times of war from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, and shows how this focus sheds light on some of the core political issues dominating a conflict, the wartime role played by the arts, and the shifting cultural capital of Shakespeare for different communities. The Introduction argues for the importance of a ‘material’ emphasis: all contributions use a significant archival object as their starting point in order to establish how these items can help us recover different wartime stories, voices, and perspectives. In place of a single, linear history, our aim – through the structure, content, and material focus of the collection – is to embrace a plurality of histories. The Introduction also contextualizes the diversity of its twenty-six contributions: nineteen are essays by Shakespeare scholars, war historians, or public figures who have served in the British Army, while the remaining seven are by theatre directors who have directed Shakespeare while the UK was at war or have set their productions at times of war to encourage audiences to think critically about the complexities of major conflicts.

Chapter 10 reviews Staël’s impact on French nineteenth-century theater, from her critical discussions in treatises like De l’Allemagne, to which Romantic drama theory owes profound debts, to her own performances in Geneva and across Europe, to her substantial dramatic output, from Voltairean verse tragedies to vaudevilles and avant-garde drames, source for at least two Romantic authors including E. T. A. Hoffmann. Staël’s complex relationship to German Romanticism, from Hoffmann to Tieck and the Schlegels, gains from this review.

The Boston Massacre was a pivotal event in the radicalization of American colonists that led to the Revolution. Barely three months after the ‘massacre’ took place, the American Company advertised a performance of Julius Caesar that evoked the republican discourse surrounding the event. Indeed, the play would appear to present a perfect opportunity to foster the rhetoric of republican revolutionary fervour, and in fact Julius Caesar and its adaptations were often cited by revolutionary leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Yet, after this initial performance, the play was not produced very often during the revolutionary period. This essay explores the ideological conflicts within the Patriot movement that led to the relative scarcity of these productions, despite the drama’s centrality to the rhetoric of the revolution.

Drawing on race-centered Hamlet scholarship by Patricia Parker and Peter Erickson, and alluding to work by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, “Engendering the Fall of White Masculinity in Hamlet” offers a racially focused analysis of this rich text that centers white people watching other white people. Hamlet surveys deviations from ideal white conduct and reveals how gender expectations are violated and how white people repeatedly disrespect, only to redefine, socially constructed racialized boundaries. I offer a critique of Hamlet that directly associates white unmanliness with Denmark’s “rotten” state, its socio-political ruin. Specifically, I read the intraracial discord against the play’s structure as a decomposition process. Hamlet depicts uncouth, less-than-ideal whiteness in relationship to gender expectations: unmanliness gets coded as black so the play can suggest certain Danish figures do not epitomize ideal white masculinity.

This chapter is based on the proposition that translation is about the extension of one language by another, not about the provision of a replacement text; translation is not about interpretation but about inhabitation. The chapter critically reviews different perspectives on interpretation, particularly those supplied by the diachronic and synchronic, by universality and totality, by the signifier and the signified. Our meanings are always just beyond us, in intentions to mean. The chapter goes on to consider the status of je/I in speech and the nature of linguistic performance. It ends with a short reflection on translation’s perturbational effects on language.

This chapter provides an introduction to Swiss contract law. It discusses the Code of Obligations as the main source of law, the fundamental principles of Swiss contract law, the notion of an obligation as the effect of the contract, the formation of contracts, including pre-contractual liability, as well as the notions of offer and acceptance. This chapter then turns to the principles applicable to the interpretation of contracts and the principles governing the validity of contracts. This chapter further discusses the notion of agency, general terms and conditions as well as the various categories of contracts found under Swiss law. This chapter moreover explores the significant issues of the performance of the contract and breach of contract. Finally, this chapter analyses the extinguishment of obligations as well as the concepts of the assignment of a claim and the assumption of debt.

This chapter deals with the issue of the role of philosophy in Mesoamerica and its sources. Offering an expansive account of philosophy, it argues that the sources of philosophy in ancient Mesoamerica include, but are not limited to, textual material. While there is a long textual tradition in Mesoamerica, particularly in Maya and Aztec cultures, we find philosophy in other sources as well, including architecture, art, oral tradition, and performance. The chapter describes the ways philosophy can be found in these numerous sources, and argue for the importance of philosophical interaction with anthropology, art history, and other relevant fields.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night refers to a religious ritual in its title that then is excised from the play. It appears to conform in that way to what Stephen Greenblatt has called “a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out.” Yet the play does not conform to such an antithesis of performance and belief. Rather, it is full of mimetic forms of emotion that embody a sense of ritual that revives and reforms social memory. This chapter examines both social ritual and festive forms (both real and fictional) via analogies with liturgy and masque, on the one hand, and theories of memory and emotion, on the other. In the process, it suggests a rewriting of the boundaries of metaphor and embodiment, as well as the sacred and secular.

This chapter explores the literary 1890s as a stage where new character types were established and exploratory formations of narrative emerged. Before the radical turn into modernism, work was already being done to deconstruct nineteenth-century forms of fictional realism, to inflect its shapes and patterns. The work of Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather sowed seeds that bore fruit over the next decades. Thus, Chopin was fascinated by the human margin, by varieties of behavior that suggested new configurations of sensuality and transgression. Stephen Crane proffered a purgation of nineteenth-century prose, developing a stripped-down realism that connected “the real” to a documentary discourse. In Cather’s early writing a fascination with female performance was allied to an interest in European movements such as Aestheticism and Symbolism. Linking both subjects, her focus on a sensory writing pointed forward to a modernist fascination with embodiment.

In Chapter 2, we move inside the Bournville factory. As Cadbury’s staff numbers grew over the first three decades of the twentieth century, several indoor performance spaces were created across the estate to accommodate the increasing number of entertainments created and staged in-house. These spaces varied enormously, from purpose-built parts of major factory expansions and developments, to found spaces that were temporarily re-appropriated for performance. Framed by a range of performance case studies, the chapter identifies the complexity of Cadbury’s indoor performance and explores the entwined recreational, promotional, and business functions theatrical activity served at the firm’s Bournville headquarters.

Caroline Bergvall’s Drift was produced as text, performance and gallery installation between 2012 and 2014. An Old English poem that survives in a single manuscript dated to around the year 1000, ‘The Seafarer’, is one of the beginnings of the project. Drift features translations and rewritings of ‘The Seafarer’ and uses it to chart global transfers – of language, texts, ideas and people – across space and time. This chapter explores how Drift meditates on the personal and political translations that structure our knowledge of the past and present, and how Bergvall marks out the temporal possibilities and ethical limits of movement across and between times and languages.

Translation in a global world is not only literary but also profoundly performative, embedded in how ideas and gestures, sounds and voices transform and move. We draw from dominant theorizations about translation as literary work and rise up to the challenge of thinking translation performatively, within a theatrical setting and beyond, as a medium, a mode and a method. Our inter-related arguments therefore sit at the intersection of three disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) formations – Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and Theatre and Performance Studies – even as they attempt to bridge another set of enduring divides, between theoretical and practical approaches to translation, between Theatre and Performance Studies. In sum, we argue that performance emerges as a generative and indispensable frame and method for thinking translation as an act that is not only transdisciplinary but also necessarily trans-medial.