Robert Epstein
Lydgate’s Mummings and the Aristocratic Resistance to Drama
Volume 36.3/4, Fall/Winter 2002–03

In an article in PMLA in October 1998, W. B. Worthen declared “a conceptual crisis in drama studies.”¹ Over the last two decades, the field of performance studies has coalesced around assertions of the primacy of temporal performance over the presumed authority of the written text; thus drama studies, from which performance studies emerged, has been left in a critical quandary. The essential problem, Worthen says, is that “the burgeoning of performance studies has not really clarified the relation between dramatic texts and performance.”²

Notes

¹W. B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA 113 (1998): 1093–1107.

²Ibid., 1094.

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