Commemorating Shakespeare in performance: Betterton and Irving

Photographing Titus Andronicus: Textual Fidelity, Spectacle, and the Performance Tradition

“…Richard Schoch asks whether we should consider performance to be "a living archive, an embodiment and preservation of past performances, [or] a source of novelty and innovation that spurns its own past." 2 In the historiography of Shakespearean performance this tension is heightened, because the longevity and prestige of the literary tradition weigh heavily on contemporary revivals, and in turn because that weight makes practitioners particularly anxious that their work stand out as a creative rather than derivative instance in a long series of performances. Photographs are often tasked with negotiating the relation between tradition and innovation for audiences and later for historians; Hodgdon has suggested that they have "a double history" as marketing before the performance and archive material after it.…”