At first glance, the phrase “postmodernism and performance” seems straightforward: a critical rubric that designates the postmodernist practices within a specific cluster of cultural categories. Yet even when touched upon lightly, this rubric shatters into a multitude of related yet distinct shards, each a different facet of the relationship it describes. I shall attempt in this chapter to outline some of those facets. I shall not survey the field; rather, I shall discuss selected works and figures that exemplify particular issues and practices. I shall also focus on the performance scene in the United States, simply because it is the one I know best. Although I shall discuss several types of performance, I shall focus largely on questions concerning postmodernism and theatre because the particularly problematic relationship between those terms raises provocative questions. The complexities and difficulties of thinking through the conjuncture of theatre and postmodernism are worth discussing for the ways they point to issues involved in locating postmodernism within the history and practices of particular art forms.

Shortly after the US publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin on March 20, 1852, and following the publication of the novel in serial form, an employee at the New York publishing house of Putnam's mailed a two-volume set of Uncle Tom's Cabin to a contact in England. With no transatlantic copyright law to hinder them, British publishers began to bring out their own editions of the novel as early as July 8, 1852. And after “lying dormant on the bookshelves for several weeks,” the novel “exploded into favour.” Various British periodicals record the momentous nature of the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin: the Morning Chronicle writes “of illustrated editions, and newspaper printed editions, and editions in parts and numbers, ” concluding that Uncle Tom's Cabin is “the book of the day” and its “circulation . . . a thing unparalleled in bookselling annals.” The Eclectic Review records the novel's “marvellous popularity”: “its sale has vastly exceeded that of any other work in any other age or country”; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine describes the sale of Uncle Tom's Cabin as “the most marvellous literary phenomenon that the world has witnessed.”

This is the end

Postmodernist thinking has typically reacted with suspicion to the notion of origins. As first cause or foundation, an origin - a transcendental ground to which all subsequent phenomena must pay obeisance - resurrects the deity that the “death of God” supposedly vanquished. This resistance to origins is matched by a much messier obsession with “ends.” Postmodernist endings are not so neat as the term suggests, however. They are thorny and recalcitrant, at the very least placing certain practices or instruments of thought off-limits; at most, the latter are rendered fallacious, untenable, “no longer possible.”

An abiding example of this temper is the seemingly suicidal declamation of the end of philosophy. Where philosophy has engaged directly with postmodernism – let us call the result, for the moment, post-Nietzschean continental philosophy – it has produced a kind of thinking that cleaves to the shadow of its own mortality, compulsively rehearsing its own demise. But unlike other postmodernist annulments – the “ends” of authorial presence and ideology, for example – philosophy’s reprieve was granted in the same breath as its death sentence was pronounced. Which is to say, accompanying the termination was the possibility of renewal, ways of finding new uses for philosophical thinking. In fixating upon the conditions of its own abolition, then, philosophy turned those conditions into a kind of negative capability.

None of Marlowe's plays or poems exist in manuscript (for one partial exception, see the discussion of The Massacre at Paris, below). Our earliest witnesses are printed. Printed texts reveal a great deal about the circumstances of printing; but they can also be encouraged to speak about the circumstances of composition and consumption. A chapter about Marlovian texts and authorship is thus also a chapter about critics and readers, about tastes and preferences: not just about what Marlowe wrote but about how it was received.

The first of Marlowe's texts to reach print was Tamburlaine, possibly his first play. On 14 August 1590 the publisher Richard Jones made an entry in the Stationers' Register (the register in which publishers entered their right to a work) for the two parts of Tamburlaine. In the same year he published both parts as a single volume, in a small octavo format.

The title page is an endearing example of early modern advertising. It provides a racy plot summary, boasts of recent stage success, and promotes the quarto as hot off the press:

“Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin again.”

These simple words are from Mary Boykin Chesnut's magisterial Diary of her life in South Carolina during the Civil War years, and they indicate that she has read Uncle Tom's Cabin at least once before. Chesnut frequently invokes Stowe's novel as a discursive foil for her typically positive observations about the institution of slavery, the slaves within it, and the south more generally. She writes, “Topsys I have known - but none that were beauties - or ill-used. Evas are mostly in the heaven of Mrs. Stowe's imagination. People can't love things dirty, ugly, repulsive, simply because they ought, but they can be good to them - at a distance.” Despite their great political differences, however, Stowe's imagination seems never far from Chesnut's, who concedes, in one of her most famous lines, that “Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor” (168).

Chesnut’s Diary provides an entry point into an analysis of southern responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That they were deeply hostile comes as no surprise, although the negativity assumed particular discursive forms and strategies which will be the subject of this essay. That Stowe was a woman made the southern counter-assault more complicated in that several reviewers, especially men, felt the need to explain the vehemence of their critique of a novel written by a woman. In an especially rabid review, George Frederick Holmes begins by defending himself against the hypothetical accusation that he lacks chivalry: “the rule that everyone bearing the name and appearance of a lady, should receive the delicate gallantry and considerate tenderness which are due to a lady, is not absolutely without exception.”

Since Marlowe's four major plays are so different from each other, it is not surprising that their performance histories have been equally different. Initially, three of them at least were famous as vehicles for Edward Alleyn, the actor who created, and perhaps literally owned, the roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas (Edward II was probably written for a different company). The Jew of Malta, one of the most successful plays of the 1590s, was so completely associated with him that no one else dared play Barabas until after Alleyn's death in 1626. The play was revived in 1633, and there may also have been a production of Tamburlaine the Great as late as 1641, just before the outbreak of the Civil War and the closing of the London theatres. References to Faustus, Tamburlaine, and The Jew of Malta in Civil War pamphlets suggest that performances were still part of collective memory, though the plays were no longer associated with Marlowe's name.

Completely forgotten after the Civil War, Edward II and The Jew of Malta were the first Marlowe plays to receive serious attention from an eighteenth-century editor, probably because they seemed the most stage-worthy. They appeared in Robert Dodsley’s Old English Plays in 1744 and 1780, respectively, and The Jew of Malta was revived in 1818 in an adaptation by Solomon Penley which incorporated lines from Edward II. But the Marlowe who was recreated in the nineteenth century was more like a mad Romantic genius, thanks in particular to the inaccurate belief that he had been killed by a rival ‘in his lewd love’. Well into the next century, he was admired chiefly for Faustus and Tamburlaine, plays about men with ‘aspiring minds’, which looked all the more impressive because they seemed unstageable. From the 1920s and 1930s onwards, however, the accumulation of new evidence about the circumstances of the poet’s death and its possible connections with the Elizabethan secret service gradually began to reveal a more cynical Marlowe, perhaps more interesting to the late twentieth century. As a result, The Jew of Malta once again attracted directors, while Edward II came almost to dominate the Marlowe canon.

The society in which Marlowe lived and wrote, and the fictional worlds he created in his writings, were highly gender-segregated. Different physical, emotional, and intellectual qualities were ascribed to men and women, and to a significant extent they inhabited distinct social spaces. These gender divisions shaped the ways in which men and women came to know themselves as such, profoundly affecting the possibilities for sexual desire and expression. The theatre Marlowe wrote for did not merely represent this divided world, it also embodied it: as far as the making and performing of plays were concerned, it, too, was an all-male preserve. Yet the playwrights and actors had to speak to and entertain an audience that, although male-dominated, did include women; and poems like Hero and Leander appealed to female as well as male readers. The popularity of works like Marlowe's, depicting a wide range of sexual and social encounters between men and women, may constitute evidence of a shared awareness by his contemporaries of the possibility of testing - and perhaps even transgressing - the boundaries their world had established for itself. Marlowe's plays and poems provide diverse testimonials to the ideals to which the culture of Elizabethan England aspired, and against which it chafed; to its imaginings of alternative ways of organizing gender and expressing sexuality; and to the complex, multifaceted realities of lived experience.

Gender and sexuality can be both orderly and disorderly in the fictional worlds of Marlowe’s poetry and drama, working with and against the grain of the social structures they are shaped by and shape. Tracing the interrelations of gender and sexuality in Marlowe’s plays and poems, this chapter argues that the significance of Marlowe’s treatment of the relations between men and women, and men’s relations with one another, lies in his acute perception of the entanglement of their encounters with the political structures and everyday practices of his social world. These issues are explored under two headings.

Discussing the 1924 film version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Linda Williams comments that it is memorable for its staging of an unprecedented moment of black-on-white violence. In the film Cassy steals Legree's gun, to protect Emmeline against rape. But although she holds the gun to Legree's head she is unable to shoot. Later a black male slave picks up the gun and stalks Legree.

Most stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin did avenge Tom with Legree’s death, but usually at the hands of George Shelby, a white male. Even George Harris raises a gun against slave-catchers only in defence of his family. The violence in the film scene is not just directed at foiling masters by escape, but at avenging the violence committed against the slave. As Williams notes, the spectacle of righteous black revenge was considered so deeply incendiary that some prints of the film omit the scene.

Foreign settings in early modern English drama are often assumed to be as vague and imprecise as Shakespeare's famously non-existent Bohemian shore in The Winter's Tale. Designed to generate a nebulous sense of Otherness, foreign landscapes are sometimes little more than evocatively alien. Standing as an obvious exception to this view are the plays of Christopher Marlowe, in which dramatic location is carefully chosen: Tamburlaine's imperial conquests carry him from East to West, ever closer to an English audience both fascinated and terrified by his legacy; Barabas lives at the centre of Mediterranean trade and a flashpoint of Euro-Ottoman relations; and Faustus exists on the fault line of Protestant and Catholic conflict.

The care with which Marlowe chooses his settings speaks to his sustained interest in the profound cartographic and geographic innovations of the late sixteenth century. This interest has intrigued critics since at least the 1920s, when Ethel Seaton first pointed out that the itineraries of Tamburlaine’s many (achieved and projected) conquests are based upon Abraham Ortelius’s influential atlas, Teatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570). Relatedly, it is a commonplace of Marlovian criticism to read his protagonists in geographic terms, as transgressors of both moral and physical boundaries. And yet, what scholars have not attended to is the extent to which the precise relationship between geography and identity differs across Marlowe’s plays. To see this, we must first take up what are commonly termed the ‘new’ and ‘old’ geographies, then consider their importance for three of Marlowe’s works, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus. Along the way, we will focus not only on world geographies but also on local, affective ones, as represented by Faustus’s household or Barabas’s counting house. By considering geographies both old and new, and both global and affective, we will isolate the importance of the relationship between geography and identity to the representation of Marlowe’s central characters.

How does time signify in postcolonial analysis? This question has occasionally been taken up as a matter of deciding the status of the prefix “post.” Theorists who approach the question in this way have answered it by periodizing the postcolonial - that is, by situating it in epochal terms, relative to such other putative eras as the colonial, the modern, the postmodern, and so on (Appiah 1991; Hutcheon 1994). Since the attempt here has been to separate the postcolonial from these other epochs or eras (to specify when it emerges and its distinctive constituent features as an epoch), this approach has usually emphasized nominal and categorical rather than conceptual or epistemological issues.

The periodizing approach to the question of time in postcolonial analysis has generated some thought-provoking insights. Its weakness, however, is that it has tended to eschew larger philosophical meditations on what makes epochal pronouncements intelligible in the first place (e.g., explorations of how time has figured in the analysis of the postcolonial). Temporality has been explored rather more fruitfully in postcolonial studies by approaches that regard the postcolonial not as an epoch or age but as a particular mode of historical emergence. Here, the issues have entailed characterizing the “alterity” associated with postcolonial forms of being; in other words, the focus has been on the ways in which, and the degree to which, the postcolonial has been taken to represent an “other” time whose logic and historical expression are incommensurable with the normative temporality of clock and calendar associated with Western modernity. What follows is a discussion of such lines of enquiry into time.

When discussing Uncle Tom's Cabin in relation to the American Renaissance, it is customary - or perhaps obligatory - to marshal the differences between Stowe's great work and the masterpieces, say, of Hawthorne and Melville, a move that invariably begins with the same enumeration but proceeds to radically polarized conclusions. The male-authored classics of the 1850s, goes the argument, are marked by philosophical probing, stylistic density, subtle characterization, and self-reflexive irony. Stowe's novel, on the other hand, is stocked with two-dimensional characters, written in a straightforward, undistinguished prose, and rife with sentimental situations intended to reduce readers to tears rather than taxing their intellects. Having established this contrast, the critic, depending on his or her perspective, then construes the undeniable differences as either a tribute to Stowe's political agenda or a reproof of her aesthetic shortcomings. The second judgment, more common a generation ago, would pronounce the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin an effective agitator but an infinitely less accomplished writer than her contemporaries. The first judgment, now pretty much the standard one, acclaims her as a novelist of “sentimental power” who sought not textual complexity but societal change, and whose narrative was supremely calculated to achieve that objective.

Though rarely acknowledged as such in European history texts, or even in the critical conceptions of much of the recent work undertaken in the humanities subjects in the West, decolonization must surely signify as one of the key global processes of the second half of the twentieth century. In the two decades after the Second World War, around a hundred new states emerged (some fifty in Africa alone), having won independence from colonial rule. The largest number of these decolonizations occurred in what had been the British Empire, which, at its zenith in 1914, extended to some 12,700,000 square miles of the earth's surface, ranging from the Caribbean, to the Indian sub-continent, Australia, and large sections of Africa and Southeast Asia. The decolonizations, most of which occurred within a matter of years after the SecondWorldWar, involved an enormous loss for Britain, not just economically and politically, but culturally too, for as Edward W. Said, among others, has demonstrated so powerfully in his work, “most cultural formations presumed the permanent primacy of the imperial power” (1993: 199).

Notions of genre have a stubborn persistence. As recently as 1950, Bernhard Paumgartner wrote of the symphony's continuing significance, in the ‘postwar cultural confusion’ of his own time, as ‘a monumental art performed by a multitude of players before a still greater multitude of listeners’. The concept of symphonic monumentality – sometimes interpreted as having to do with the sheer magnitude of a work but more complex than that, as we shall see – has special relevance to Bruckner, as do other assumptions about genre that come up in Paumgartner's remarks. After having separated musical genres into the communal and the purely private (the latter exemplified by the lullaby), he divided communal music into three basic categories and then asserted that the various movements within the symphony showed the imprint of all three. That is to say, Paumgartner discerned traces of primordial communal functions in each type of symphonic movement: of martial or of ceremonial state music in the first, of dance music in the minuet or scherzo and also in the finale. And in the ‘emotional significance’ of the slow movement he heard a residue of the sounds and spirit of music used in religious rites.

Nowhere has the connection between the genre of the symphonic slow movement, in particular the symphonic Adagio, and religious experience been noted more often, it seems, than in treatments of Bruckner's lifework. August Halm, for example, called the Adagio not just the ‘central movement’ but the ‘shrine’ in his symphonies, adding that this had nothing to do with whether the character of the melodies sounds ‘ritualistically religious’. He wrote that Bruckner was in fact as likely to place a melody reminiscent ‘of the chorale or even of chant or the hymn’ in an opening movement or finale as in an Adagio. What Halm saw as of primary importance was that ‘for the construction of the Adagio he established a more regular rule – thus, more or less a ritual’.

“All that is solid melts into air”

The society and culture we inhabit today, at the start of the third millennium, appear at first glance to be the most secular that the world has yet known. As traditional conceptions of knowledge and religion appear increasingly redundant in the context of a postmodern pluralism, so an increasingly frenetic pursuit of this-worldly pleasures, along with an ever higher standard of living - with the attendant pressures not just to work harder and to play harder but, above all, to consume - seems definitively to have replaced that emphasis upon otherworldly and religious forms of comfort, or “salvation,” that was accorded social and cultural legitimation in precapitalist society. When Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in the middle of the nineteenth century they declared that the relentless logic of capitalist economics would ultimately dislodge “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,” with the result that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”It was a statement that proved to be eloquently prophetic, not simply of modernity, but also of the paradoxical (and notoriously difficult to define) cultural and economic phase that has succeeded it, which can very generally be described as postmodern and late-capitalist. For what Marx and Engels so astutely anticipated was the advent of a hyperactive society of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation,”driven ceaselessly onwards by technological advance, in which the desire for the new is so intense that new fashions and new ideas “become antiquated before they can ossify into custom.”

In its frequent and overt legal engagements, Harriet Beecher Stowe's work would seem to offer a perfect subject for scholars examining the connections between law and literature. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), and Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) advance an anti-slavery conception of American law. In Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), Stowe argues for women's rights, gender equality in marriage, and a more fully contractual conception of marriage in which the duties of both spouses are reciprocal and interdependent. However, with a few notable exceptions, such as Brook Thomas's Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature, scholars have not focused on Stowe's legal preoccupations - how the law influenced Stowe or how Stowe may have influenced American jurisprudence. Stowe scholarship has tended to focus on gender, religion, and sentiment to the exclusion or neglect of the jurisprudential aspects of her writing. Many critics seem to share James M. Cox's view of Stowe as writing “against the law” out of what he calls her “essentially sentimental determination to choose the religion of love over the religion of judgment.” Such accounts take at face value Stowe's characterizations of sentiment as a feminine and sympathetic alternative to law, which is masculine and more concerned with commercial and material self-interest than salvation.

In Robert Alexander's 1992 play, I Ain't Yo' Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's African-American characters accuse her of creating stereotypes and place her on trial.

George Harris delivers the main charge along with his verdict: “I find the accused - GUILTY!! . . . of writing stuff she couldn't possibly know about. A slave's experience. The black experience . . . my life here in America.” To make their case, the characters restage Stowe's story. They alter much of the dialogue, insert scenes, and rewrite their endings.

Restless in Canada, the escaped slave George returns to the United States at the head of the Black Thunder gang, whose mission is to free slaves and kill their masters.

Cassy, whose children have been sold and who has been the prisoner of Simon Legree for five long years (and in Alexander’s version, Legree does rape his newest acquisition, the young Emmeline), sees Legree beating Tom, aims a gun at him, and blows him away. This script change is too much for the manful George Harris, who yells “Cut,” demands to know “Who said the women get to shoot him?,” and summons Harriet, who insists that this is not the ending that she wrote. Cassy responds, powerfully: “You wrote every word of the rage that’s in me! You just didn’t give me a gun” (88).

Tom, listed in the dramatis personae as “a man with an image problem,” is transformed from an aggressively non-violent martyr into a figure resembling the protagonist’s grandfather in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. Tom advises Topsy to follow a policy of strategic acquiescence with Miss Ophelia: “Let her think she’s teaching you sumpthin! You’ll have her eatin’ outcho’ hand like a heafer at feeding time” (51). With this scene, in which the irrepressible Tom counsels the young Topsy, Alexander brings the two characters together, which Stowe never does, thus rendering vivid this lacuna in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Introduction

In her influential and controversial essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recounts the tale of a mysterious suicide: “A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself in her father's modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhubaneswari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy” (1988b: 307). Because Bhubaneswari “had known that her death would be diagnosed as the outcome of illegitimate passion,” we are told, “[s]he had . . . waited for the onset of menstruation” (307). Some years later, when Bhubaneswari's nieces are asked about the suicide, they say that “it was a case of illicit love ” (308).

Spivak confesses in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason that contemplation of “this failure of communication” had “so unnerved” her that, in her initial discussions of Bhaduri's suicide she had been led to write, “in the accents of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak!” (1999: 308; see also 1988b, 1985b). The lament arose from her realization that the subaltern in general, and the “historically muted subject of the subaltern woman” in particular, was inevitably consigned to being either misunderstood or misrepresented through the self-interest of those with the power to represent (1988b: 295).