Enactment and Exegesis: Recontextualizing Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London through Performance as Research

• Type of Material: Conference Paper
• Authors: Kevin Quarmby, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2015-06
• Publisher: Emory University Libraries
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: Property of the author and Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context post-conference website.
• Final Published Version (URL): http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/par/index.htm
• Conference or Event Name: Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context
• Research Categories: Literature, English; Theater

Abstract

McMaster University’s The Three Ladies of London conference engages with Wilson’s early modern dramatic text through Performance as Research (PAR). The archival recordings that make up this PAR moment reside in, and are accessed from, their digital home on the Queen’s Men Editions website (QME). Within the wider academic community, however, PAR has yet to achieve its full potential or acceptance. This essay considers the reason for this lessening of PAR’s scholarly status, associated, as it seems, with the hierarchical superiority of more traditional print-based exegesis, which is invariably prioritized and valorized as the sole means to validate PAR’s academic potential. Such valorization denies the collaborative model PAR offers as a laboratory for innovative scholarly inquiry. In addition, this essay questions the prevailing hegemony, and inherent presentism, of recent reconstructional 'original practice' scholarship, while offering an argument for recontextualizing, reviving, and re-enlivening the dramatic text through the embodied skill of the PAR actor.