Humanism, Drama, and Performance

This book examines the appropriation of theatre and theatrical performance by ideologies of humanism, in terms that continue to echo across the related disciplines of literary, drama, theatre, and performance history and studies today. From Aristotle onward, theatre has been regulated by three strains of critical the segregating theatre and the practices of the spectacular from the humanizing work attributed to the book and to the internality of reading; the approving the address of theatrical performance only to the extent that it instrumentalizes literary value; and the assimilating performance to the conjunction of literary and liberal values. These values have been used to figure not only the work of theatre, but also the propriety of the audience as a figure for its socializing work, along a privileged dualism from the aestheticized --harmonizing actor, character, and spectator to the essentialized drama--to the politicized theatre understood as an agonistic gathering.