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About this Elements Series:

Elements in Shakespeare Performance is a dynamic collection of scholarship in a field that is at once always emerging and always evanescent. Responding incisively to the global range of Shakespeare performance today, the collection is a carefully curated hub launching provocative, urgent criticism for researchers, graduate students and practitioners.

The series emphasizes scholarship with a direct bearing on contemporary contexts of  Shakespeare performance: specific performances; material and social practices; ideological and cultural contexts; emerging or significant artists; the histories of performance. It seeks a wide range of analytic commentary, and indeed commentary not only on a diversity of current productions, and analysis of earlier productions that bear directly on the critical, ideological, and practical landscape of performance today, but also on how performance itself can provide a mode of inquiry. 


Elements in this series

Contact the Editor

If you are interested in publishing in this series, please contact W. B. Worthen at [email protected].

About the Editor

W. B. Worthen is Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Chair of the Theatre Department at Barnard College. He is also co-chair of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at Columbia University, where he is appointed as Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He is the author of many books, including: The Idea of the Actor (Princeton, 1984); Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (California, 1992); Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge, 1997); Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge, 2003); Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2006); Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge, 2014) and Shakespeare, Theatre, Technicity (forthcoming, Cambridge, 2019).

Advisory Board

Pascale Aebischer (University of Exeter), Todd Barnes (Ramapo College of New Jersey), Susan Bennett (University of Calgary), Gina Bloom (University of California, Davis) Rustom Bharucha (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Bridget Escolme (Queen Mary University of London), Alan Galey (University of Toronto), Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire), Sonia Massai (King’s College London), Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine), Peter W. Marx (University of Köln), Alfredo Michel Modenessi (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Robert Shaughnessy (Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey), Ayanna Thompson (George Washington University), Yong Li-Lan (National University of Singapore).

An interview with W. B. Worthen on Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare Performance

Areas of Interest:

Rather than defining a narrow range of topics, as a traditional publishing series might do, Elements in Shakespeare Performance instead encourages essays across the wide range of historical and contemporary Shakespeare performance. That said, it is important to underline that we encourage essays to consider Shakespeare performance broadly, in any medium, including written media, and understand performance as both an object of analysis, and also as an instrument of analysis, a participant in a dialogic critical process. Potential Elements in Shakespeare Performance authors might, then, engage one or several of these perspectives:

  • Performance in/as/cultural theory: how performance engages with, or can be placed in dialogue with, political theory, cultural theory, literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy
  • Performance media and technologies, including web-based performance
  • Global performance: global/local practices, translation, performance as a globalized commodity, performance and exchange, performance geographies
  • Performance spaces: architecture, design, the interplay of virtual (and non-virtual) venues
  • Performance identities: performance practices in/as practices of identity formation and resistance, including racialized, sexualized, classed, and nationalized identities
  • Performance history: performances, and performance and cultural practices, illuminated in contemporary critical perspectives, performance as interpretation
  • Performance genres (dance, hip hop, animation, comics, living history, opera)
  • Performance in/as pedagogy: challenges of teaching contemporary performance; of teaching performance history; of using performances in teaching; of thinking with performance(s) rather than thinking them only as objects of analysis