Shakespearian Utopias

Summary

For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today . . . But for decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making.

While nothing might have been further from his thoughts when tracing the genealogy of sex in the modern period than the history of twentieth-century Shakespearian performance, the model of repression and liberation that is outlined in Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality provides a striking analogy for what is said to have happened to the early modern drama on stage since the Victorian period. This story is well known: it begins around 1888 with the publication of the rediscovered DeWitt sketch of the Swan, at the time that William Poel started his long and lonely struggle against the forces of illusion and spectacle in his tireless, eccentric and even fanatical proselytizing for the platform stage.