Abstract
Is there (or are there) posthuman Shakespeare(s)? Or, to frame the question slightly differently, what would a notion of the ‘posthuman’ lend to our thinking about early modern dramatic writing in late (posthuman) (post)modernity? Much as digital writing has opened a material critique of the status of the printed work, so, too it provokes a reinspection of the stabilities often attributed to dramatic performance, especially those seen to arise from an artificial understanding of dramatic performance as predicated on the dramatic text. Rather than seeing contemporary ‘postdramatic’ theatre merely as a succession in technologies, we might more productively take the constitutive instability of performance – and perhaps especially of dramatic performance – as a location for the ongoing negotiation of the technologies of the posthuman.
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Notes
Citations of Shakespeare throughout the essay are from the The Riverside Shakespeare (1997).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ International Research Center, Freie Universität, Berlin, for support and collegial exchange during the writing of this piece.
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Worthen, W. Posthuman Shakespeare performance studies. Postmedieval 1, 215–222 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.26