Estimación y medida del Esfuerzo Cortante

This is primarily a study of playwrights and playwriting. To that end, I have taken an author- centred approach to research and prioritized close textual and formal analysis of my

selected case studies. There are various theoretical concerns that may be raised against the text-based approach I have taken, which can be accused of granting the text an over-

privileged status as a self-contained literary artefact it does not warrant – particularly in the world of Theatre Studies, where the authority of the text has increasingly been displaced in favour of the ‘liveness’ of the performance event.82 My primary research method

nevertheless has a firm foundation in some of the basic presumptions of appropriation studies which, as Fischlin and Fortier contend, invariably involves an analysis of the way a writer intervenes to appropriate, and make intertextual changes to, a prior text.83 Close-text analysis has also been vital in recovering a wide range of appropriations of King Lear, often beyond plays that ‘announce’ a specific intertextual relation to King Lear via a title (as in

Seven Lears). This has allowed for a more thorough appreciation of various forms of

appropriation.

My approach to close-text analysis has been author-centred. By resurrecting a figure pronounced dead in some poststructuralist theory, I have attempted to situate

82

See in particular Hans-Thies Lehman, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (Oxford: Routledge, 2006). See also the Special Issue of Performance Research entitled ‘Performing Literatures’, Performance

Research, 14:1 (2009) for an excellent collection of essays on the question of text/performance.

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appropriations of King Lear within the wider oeuvre of the playwrights under study. To determine, analyse and even critique aspects of authorial intention, I have also drawn on other, ‘non-literary’ and ‘non-dramatic’ texts. These have come in the form of essays, critical articles, interviews, public addresses and so on. My prioritization of the author and

authorship is also reflected in the original, in-depth interviews I have conducted with Rudkin and Barker, transcriptions of which are included in the Appendix. While the interviews are concerned with authorial intention, it should also be observed that these conversations are not always supportive of the readings I have taken and that interpretation can never be reduced to the (in any case, variously conceived and contingent) intentions of the author. These interviews were also undertaken with the aim of ascertaining more about the original performances of the plays and some of the conditions around staging. I have also engaged in archival textual research, most of all on David Rudkin, who donated an archive of materials to the British Library in 2010. My research in the Rudkin Archive led to the discovery of an unfinished ‘Shakespeare’ play, which I touch on again in Chapter Five. I remain one of the few researchers working on the Rudkin Archive, which I visited over 2015- 2016.

My emphasis on close-text analysis has, in part, been motivated by practical concerns. Due to the relatively marginal status of the playwrights I study, revivals of the plays have been few and far between. Playwriting does, however, invariably (though not inevitably) take place with a performance in mind and, in studying appropriations of a drama text by playwrights, I have also undertaken performance analysis. Over 2016 I

accessed the Exeter Digital Performance Archive in order to study its recordings of Wrestling School productions, which includes some of the original staging of Seven Lears. I have also engaged in other forms of archival work to analyse past stagings and the way Catastrophist

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subjectivity is performatively embodied. This has meant work on various performance ephemera and press reviews, which have played a role in the way I read subjectivity in performance.

My analysis of performance both draws on – and contributes to – Frankfurt School theory. In his analysis of artistic performance – most obviously in music – Adorno critiques the ‘compulsive repetition’ of ‘standardized performances’, whereby performers repetitively embody the same predictable movements and actions.84 This is something he relates to social and political systems that aspire to total domination, which must inhibit all individual spontaneity – a phenomena Arendt also analyses.85 It is a process of domination that, as both Adorno and Arendt contend, found its nadir in the concentration camps.86 My analysis of past stagings draws on the etymology of catastrophe as an unexpectedly sudden ‘turn’.87 I show that the Catastrophist subject often performs a sudden turn away from the

predictable action or word, in favour of something more open-ended. This may be a turn in physical and psychic orientation and/or in speech. These enable the autonomy of the

subject, who turns away from prescribed actions and even from closure itself – the expected (or, as King Lear would have it, ‘promised’) end.88 It is also worth recalling that the oldest of the Three Fates in Greek mythology is Atropos, whose name signifies ‘without turn’.89 Atropos implies the impossibility of turning away from fate, the end which is allotted to the tragic hero in Greek tragedy. The Catastrophist subject who has the capacity to turn reveals

84

James Martin Harding, Adorno and “A Writing of the Ruins” (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997).

85

See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 597 and 573.

86

Ibid, pp. 573-603.

87

‘catastrophe, n.’. OED Online. Accessed February 26, 2018

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/28794?redirectedFrom=catastrophe.

88

This is again captured in the etymology of catastrophe as a ‘subversion of order’ (OED Online).

89 _{Quoted in Knut Ove Eliassen, ‘Catastrophic Turns – From the Literary History of Catastrophic’, The Cultural}

Life of Catastrophes and Crises, ed. Carsten Meiner and Kristin Veel (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), p.

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a form of tragedy where the subject can resist the ‘inevitable’ end and preserve his or her bid for freedom.