Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-767nl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-15T19:57:23.450Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. By Marvin Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002; pp. 216. $47.50 cloth.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2004

Thomas Postlewait
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University

Extract

The tradition of Western drama has its ghosts, from the spectral characters of Darius in The Persians and Clytemnestra in The Eumenides to the attending ghost in The Spanish Tragedy and the ghostly voice in the “all grey” room of Beckett’s Ghost Trio. In turn, some non-Western traditions of theatre, such as Japanese noh, insist upon the primacy of ghosts, whose stories are recounted on stage. Perhaps, from the perspective of our modern world, such characters are anomalous devices of the theatre. Yet Marvin Carlson insists in The Haunted Stage that we understand them as emblematic signs of how all drama and theatre are organized and experienced.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2003 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)