Performing Prophecy: More Life on the Shakespearean Scene

In the past two or three decades, this community, always a powerful theatrical force, has seen its theoretical importance multiply as theater and performance theory has seized upon the ghost as the index of theatricality. 2 This spectral metaphor lent affective force to historicism and expanded the political horizon of performance analysis through an injunction to remember the forgotten, the marginalized, and the subordinated. 9 Whatever the pragmatics of wagering on specific performance elements, theatrical performance acquires its speculative quality, in both the economic and prophetic senses, from its relationship to human plurality: the presence of multiple spectators with different predilections and modes of attention who enter into complex webs of relationship into which the performance intervenes.