The Introduction explains the collection’s argument, structure, and its interventions in the field. We challenge the fetishization of firsts in early modern drama studies, first performances, and first editions and highlight problems with privileging “maiden” performances and print “inceptions” of Renaissance plays over their ghost-like “afterlives” on the stage and page. Engaging with recent work in theatre and book history and editorial studies, the Introduction explores the idea that plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. We argue, in short, that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of renewal.

Although book historians have tended to date the beginnings of an established market for printed plays to the mid 1590s, the first year of play publication, 1584, saw four plays printed, two of them in multiple editions. More plays were printed in this year than the rest of the decade combined; it would be another sixteen years before a play went into multiple editions in a single year. This chapter asks what this strange year tells us about plays as printed, reprinted, and revived commodities. The four plays discussed are John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, and George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris. All four plays have things to say about reviving stories and performance, and three went on to be reprinted. Attending to them as a kind of corpus, this chapter investigates their place in the histories of revival, reprinting, and dramaturgy.

This chapter addresses the crucial interpretative issue of the relationship between performance and text in Pindar’s odes. What elements do we have to reconstruct the circumstances of their first performances? How important are these elements for the interpretation of the poems? In what manner was the wording of the texts themselves meant to reflect and interact with the extra-textual elements pertaining to the performance?The first parts of the chapter focus on the less studied fragments of Pindar’s cultic poetry, offering both a survey of the evidence and some novel interpretative contributions. The following sections move to the examination of the epinicians and the enkomia, as well as the question of the reperformances of his poems. The analysis of the whole corpus highlights the productive tension between the emphasis on performance and the emphasis on the text’s capability to transcend it, arguing that this is one of the key defining traits of Pindaric poetry.

This chapter examines a series of court cases in Hong Kong in which a number of newly elected legislators were disqualified from taking office in part because the ways in which they took their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony were deemed too flamboyant, too extravagant and too theatrical to be taken seriously. Implicit in the legal and political objections to their oath taking is the view that theatre has no place in the hallowed chambers of the law courts or the legislature, a view that is all the more surprising given the intertwined histories and representational strategies between law and theatre. Taking these cases as a starting point, I explore what may be at stake in this legal anti-theatricality, and argue that law’s determination to expurgate the theatrical could be read as part of an attempt to render invisible its own performative nature.

Appearing at the tail end of this volume, I begin with a brief meditation on the coda. A (musical) ending, the vulgar form of cauda (tail or privy member), figure of our fallen state, the coda may also be a whip or goad to inspiration or even exaltation. Attempting to turn my posterior position to good ends, I have, in the place of an ending, used the chapters here as provocations and inspirations. Recognizing in them a more expansive account of legal performance than my own, I point to how they unbind law and performance from the rigid definitional strictures on which I have relied, how they challenge the boundaries between text and performance, performance and law, law and world, world and fiction (the veritas falsa of theatre and the falsitas verus of law), how they show the methodological Über-Ich (with its rules and dogmas) to be unseated by an ontological Id that scoffs at its laws. That force – like the comedic cauda in the courtroom – answers legal solemnities with impudent laughter and other “minor jurisprudences of refusal,” creating heterotopias, wild zones, rehearsals for alternative futures.

Ignatius Sancho is largely known for a collection of his letters that were published by his friend after his death. Less well known is the fact that he holds the distinction of being the first published Black composer in Britain known to historians. In contrast to most of his letters, Sancho chose to write and publish at least one book of vocal music and four books of instrumental music over a period of thirteen years. In exploring the meanings of music in Sancho’s life through both production and consumption, this chapter argues that no one aspect of Sancho’s identity can be understood apart from his work in music. Music for Sancho was many things, including a personal avocation, a means of profit, and a vehicle for communicating his political opinions and honoring his friends and family. First and foremost, however, it was a sociable practice and a communal experience.

Ignatius Sancho had a rich artistic life, from music to literary criticism to engagement with the theater. Unfortunately, little is known about the latter – Joseph Jekyll’s 1782 short biography of Sancho offers only a few sentences about what appears to have been a failed attempt at playing the titular leads of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. However, Jekyll’s biography offers an important window into eighteenth-century thinking about race and performance, in spite of (and, in part, because of) its limited and compromised nature. Crucial to Jekyll’s explanation for Sancho’s theatrical failure is a supposedly “defective and incorrigible articulation,” most often read along the lines of disability. This chapter examines how vocal and linguistic performance in the eighteenth-century created and disrupted popular narratives about race.

Law, with its seemingly endless paperwork, is almost overwhelmingly textual. From contracts to briefs to opinions to treatises, law lives in its texts. Simultaneously, law requires performances to produce authenticity and authority. Witness testimonies, pleadings, and trials all enact the law through participants’ bodies. There is no law without text. There is no law without performance. Legal texts and performances produce and reproduce each other: Legal texts record or script legal performances; legal performances generate or stage legal texts. Because law entwines text and performance, this chapter considers the law’s material textuality and its theatricality in tandem by probing how law brings performance to book. Drawing on theater studies and the history of dramatic texts, I offer methods for reading legal texts as scripts that precede or follow legal performances. Examples from Anglo-American law reveal that legal documents’ typographical conventions uncover law’s reliance on performance and its anxiety about deviating from textuality. More sophisticated legal attention to the relationship between text and performance would better serve law and, more importantly, justice.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.

As climate awareness intensifies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance studies continues to reflect on and revise the depth of its engagement with ecology, understood broadly as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments. ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’ covers the rise of ecology first as a science then its gradual shift to the humanities and onto theatre and performance studies. The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. Hence, if ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, then ecology in theatre studies focuses on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of sentence at climate change. The chapter concludes by arguing that ecocriticism in Australia expands to encompass the impact of settler colonialism and the continuing dependence on fossil fuel consumption and exports.

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.

This chapter examines the impact of education policy on students, parents, caregivers, and teachers. This chapter argues that ‘big policy’ in education tends to operate under a market-based logic that has been described as ‘neoliberal’. Adopting a more nuanced and ‘problematising’ approach to policy, this chapter explores the nature and effects of policy in education in relation to its valorisation of market principles such as ‘choice’ and ‘competition’. It also explores the nature and effects of such policy as it seeks to regulate the performance of teachers and schools. Underpinning the discussion is the philosophical notion that policy not only addresses and solves ‘problems’ in education and schooling as it does ‘produce’ those problems in the first place. In this respect, policy can be understood as implicitly linked to programs of governance.

Co-written with Hala Jaber, John Nutekpor, and Ewa Żak-Dyndał, this chapter explores the concept of folk music within the framework of migration and discourses of belonging. It takes as its point of departure the experiences of the author, a child of Irish migrants to America, now working in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, and three of her doctoral students from Palestine, Ghana, and Poland. The paradoxes often inherent in the concept of folk music are further complicated by the experience of migration in the twenty-first century. An exploration of recent scholarship on music and diaspora, migration, and social inclusion demonstrates the power of ‘folk music’ as a fluid, imagined concept within which identity and belonging can be negotiated. The chapter includes three case studies related to performance research with new migrant communities in Ireland. It concludes that migration fosters the need to create new imaginaries of belonging and that music is a primary strategic resource in this endeavour.

The last decades witnessed important developments in our understanding of Ptolemaic Egypt. Traditionally seen as a highly centralised state exercising close control over the economy, it is now clear that the king was part of a broader coalition with the primary aim of raising stable revenues. Recent work on land tenure and taxation furthermore challenges the idea of a ‘royal economy’. This book tackles the other major pillar of this model: the so-called state monopolies in industry and trade. Ill-defined and anachronistic, it has been a problematic concept from its inception in the early twentieth century, yet it remains in wide use. Inspired by the famous ‘Revenue Laws’ papyrus, it evokes a centrally planned state economy. The book offers a deconstruction of these ideas and provides the first full assessment of the actual organisation of the sectors involved. The institutions are analysed within the framework of New Institutional Economics, including an analysis of their effect on economic performance. The study takes full account of both the Greek and the Demotic Egyptian sources. The Ptolemaic institutions are, moreover, contextualised within Greek and Egyptian fiscal history.

In this chapter, Jon Boden of the band Bellowhead confronts a pervasive element of folk performance that affects reception and yet often escapes notice: spoken introductions. He points out that as a conversational and informal art, folk music shares much with humour. Introductions, he argues, can serve several important purposes, including framing narratives, providing historical context, distancing, and offering a partisan viewpoint. Folk performers often have to balance an audience’s desire for a sense of personal accessibility and communality with the equally necessary demands of entertainment professionalism.

In this chapter, legendary artist Peggy Seeger draws together, in characteristically virtuosic fashion, the themes of this book as a whole through the trio of song, singer, and community. Communities, she argues, are the social soil upon which human cultures germinate. They breed and support singers who make, sing, and pass on songs, which in turn act as a group glue, thus creating new communities. She portrays herself as a ‘song-carrier’ and a storyteller, pointing out that folk songs provide us with great templates – opportunities for everyone to narrate their own story in their own way.