A Partial Theory of Original Practice

Summary

How do we account for the rise of the ‘original practices’ movement in the production of early modern drama over the past twenty years? How do we account for the increasingly energetic collaboration, and indeed collusion, of theatre historians and other kinds of scholars working in a sceptical and relativistic academic climate with a form of theatrical practice that is based on highly dubious, manifestly problematic notions of authenticity and the uses of history? The range of possible answers to these questions is as complex as the questions themselves are stark. In this article I provide one partial and very specific kind of answer. My purpose is to situate the original-practices movement firmly in the world of literary discourse and, consequently, to destabilize some of the powerful claims to authority it currently makes with reference to material process and embodied action. In the pages that follow, I discuss the development of the original-practices movement of the past twenty or so years – since the groundbreaking for the new Globe and the founding of the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, in 1987 and 1988 respectively – among and alongside one of the key developments in literary criticism during that same period, the reaction against new historicism. I argue that the original-practices movement seems in part to be both a critique of and an attempt to co-opt ‘new historicism’ broadly considered as both a critical and an ethical practice. In making this argument, I hope to identify with precision and with sympathy some of the impulses (beyond the quest for authority and authenticity) that drive the original-practices movement – to identify how it responds to a need, or a variety of needs, in the academic community, and to begin to suggest some ways in which these needs might be met without recourse to the dubious theoretical and methodological assumptions and practices upon which the movement currently relies.