Labor in Contemporary Shakespeare Performance

Labor in Contemporary Shakespeare Performance Amy Borsuk, Alessandro Simari, and Martin Young We dedicate this special issue in loving memory and honor ofCatherine Silverstone, an incredible scholar, teacher and friend. There is no theater without work. Accounting for the relationship between theater and work is therefore a fundamental question: over the last decade, there has been a substantial and increasingly influential preoccupation with the politics of labor within Theater and Performance Studies. This interest in theatrical labor has also frequently been part of a broader interest in economics, finance, and industry in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, and we anticipate that this concern will be renewed in the wake of a new crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We therefore raise these questions now with some sense of political urgency. In drawing together contributions on this subject, this special issue joins the ranks of Performance Research 17.6 "On Labour & Performance" (2012) and Platform 14.1 "Theatres of Labour" (2020), but at the same time takes up the intervention made by Susan Bennett and Gina Bloom in Shakespeare Bulletin 35.3 of seeking a more mutually productive dialogue between the disciplines of Theater and Performance Studies and Shakespeare Studies. Specifically, we have observed that the attention to labor that is by now well established in Theater Studies has only occasionally been brought to bear on contemporary performance of Shakespeare. We offer this special issue as an example for how to bridge the disciplines of Theater Studies and Shakespeare Studies, bringing the critical insights from the former into dialogue with the concerns of the latter. [End Page 1] The articles address some of the central debates currently taking place both within academic study and within the theater industry itself regarding theatrical labor: the role of volunteers, the emerging role of digital technology in theatrical production, working conditions for theater staff, and the relationship between theatrical and academic labor. The contributors and their case studies are drawn from the UK, US, and Canada and pertain to some of the most significant mainstream institutions of English-language Shakespeare production: the Royal Shakespeare Company, Broadway, the Stratford Festival of Canada, the UK's National Theatre, and Shakespeare's Globe. This introduction serves to contextualize the articles within this issue, particularly by outlining how labor has been framed within Theater Studies and Shakespeare Studies respectively. The scholarship from which we draw our research and methodologies also serve as potential core texts for further study and teaching within the field of Shakespeare Theater Studies. We aim for this issue to be a starting point, rather than an end, for incorporating labor issues into the discussion of contemporary Shakespeare performance, and for greater disciplinary dialogue between Shakespeare Studies and Theater and Performance Studies. For the purposes of this special issue, we are adopting a fairly capacious conception of labor, one which allows different kinds of activity related to the production of theater to enter into consideration. In practice, our starting point is waged work in the theater industry, but as the discussions of voluntarism, emotional labor, and creative work make clear, this rubric is inadequate and cannot account for all the activity which in reality contributes to the production of a performance or maintains the lives of those involved. On the other hand, we stop short of the tendency within Performance Studies to define "labor" as broadly as possible; as, in the words of Miranda Joseph for example, "all human doing" (32). We would turn instead to the historian Keith Thomas who, surveying the historical, social, and cultural contingency of the concept, offers "the ingredients that have to be included in any acceptable definition": work "has an end beyond itself, … involves a degree of obligation or necessity, … [and] is arduous, involving effort and persistence" (xiii-xiv). However ambivalent the category, and however much theater mobilizes discourses of enthusiasm and passion which obscure the facts of obligation and arduousness, these key concerns recur throughout the articles in this special issue. Focusing on the relationship between labor and performance facilitates consideration of how choices made in the service of the text interact with the practical constraints of professional work, and in particular how this [End...

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