Jakub Boguszak, University of Southampton
We like owning things. This paper will discuss the process of turning live theatre performances into items that can be collected, owned, and shared. Producers of live theatre broadcasts have quickly identified a market for digital records produced over the course of transmission, recognising that scholars, fans, performers, and critics enjoy curating their own archives of performances. The availability of these new records of performance has given a huge boost to performance studies, but, on a more fundamental level, it has encouraged new patterns of behaviour: we got used to exercising control over theatrical performance. We get to place it, rather than be placed by it. To be sure, the boundary between an event one can experience and a video one can control is not always clear-cut when it comes to broadcasts, but the paper will argue that theatre always produces things we want to own, partly to capitalise on our sensitivity to its impermanence, partly to look at itself in a mirror. The focus of the paper will be the catalogues of Shakespeare productions recorded live at the Globe, the NT, and the RSC. Studies of Shakespeare in performance often find us practicing acquisitive scholarship; our research turns us into collectors, curators, possessors. The paper will not argue that this is wrong, but it will propose that our treatment of videos as collectable, sharable items (in folders, on shelves, on syllabi) does more to estrange the record from the live event than the technology used in its making.
Biography: Dr Jakub Boguszak is a Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Theatre at the University of Southampton. His first monograph, The Self-Centred Art: Ben Jonsonâs Parts in Performance (Routledge, 2021) adopts the perspective of early modern actors to bring a fresh understanding of the dramaturgy of Jonsonâs seventeen extant plays, and his work on various aspects of early modern theatrical practice and the dramas of Shakespeare and Jonson has appeared in journals such as Shakespeare Bulletin, RES, and Shakespeare as well as in edited collections Early British Drama in Manuscript (Brepols, 2019) and Shakespeare and the Shape of Words (CUP, upcoming). His current work focuses on the development of casting practices in the UK.