In Theatre and Citizenship. A History of Practice, David Wiles argues for the interrelatedness of spectatorship in the theatre and conceptions of citizenship throughout history. Viewing citizenship as the nexus between the individual and the collective, and the state and its people, Wiles goes on a diachronic journey in political theory and sociology, and theatre and performance studies, exploring the highly variable conceptions of citizenship, theatre, and spectatorship.
He builds on scholarship like Theatre Audiences by Susan Bennett, but his decidedly diachronic historical, and multi-national approach, as well as the notion of citizenship as opposed to identity focalize the nexus of politics, performance, and power in relation to an individual as well as a collective and allow him to construct a far-reaching theory.
Wiles claims that citizenship is not necessarily bound to an affiliation to a state but any kind of political order, and he investigates how the concept is mobilized in theatrical performance and spectatorship across history. The stakes of this investigation are heightened by asking if there is anything to be learned for our present-day dilemmas about rights, duties, and belonging.
Each chapter circles around questions about theatre’s location in relation to a public sphere or as constitutive of a public sphere; about the relationship between mimesis, representation, and performance to citizenship; and the relationship between the individual and the collective. He engages with the theme of citizenship and spectatorship by focusing on one or two playwrights and political theorists as representatives of controversies and conceptions of the respective period, often using classical conceptions of citizenship (such as the warrior as citizen, or a participant in political or social life) and of the classical modi and functions of theatre (mimesis, education, and catharsis) as a foil for comparison.
In his chapters, he centers play analyses while positing that plays are not mere “textual containers” with inherent meaning, but socio-political events, and hence a site of struggle and negotiation (23). These accounts are situated within an investigation of the performance practices in terms of institutionalization and concomitant questions of accessibility for various fractions of a society, practices in spectatorship, and historical events that lead to shifts in the political organization of a country. Honoring the subtitle of this book, he commits to a conception of theater as an embodied and material practice. Herein, he sees as a strong parallel to spectatorship (“the phenomenology of the embodied community” (8)), since citizenship is equally material and embodied, always in process and constantly engaging in renewal (23).
This approach leads Wiles to conduct analyses on multiple levels: the political, the social, the moral, the aesthetic, (12) the affective, the theatrical, not as separate but as a dialectic necessitating the analytical linkage of dramatic and political texts and practices. The specificity of time and locale are crucial to his intervention since they give insight into political, social and economic conditions, and clarify how citizenship is also an exclusionary category for some populations. Consequently, he mainly explains change through shifts in organizations of government that require specific understandings of citizenship.
On the scale of individual chapters, Wiles accomplishes further historiographic contributions:
In his chapter on classical Athens he posits that competitive structure of drama fosters the potential of experiencing unity through division (41). Focusing not only on the City Dionysia but also on local and small-scale performance practices (especially choral dance) as a means of performing citizenship, Wiles claims that “the goal of performance was to engender an interactive experience…The chorus belonged to the world of the active citizen” (41) and thereby also questioning a clear cut distinction between ritual and art (24). The participatory conception of citizenship in classical Athens is paralleled with active participation in the theater.
In Medieval Florence Wiles juxtaposes Machiavelli’s (previously only individually analyzed) dramatic writing with his political theory. The play analyses of Andria and La Clizia focus on the adaptation from a previous into a contemporaneous socio-political context, furthering an understanding of theatre as practice and enabling the argument that Machiavelli used comedy to create an alternative political order (i.e. republic) for his audience and that plays provide “the scenario for a socio-political event” (73) rather than inherent ethical meaning, concluding that Machiavelli was not convinced of the educational power of theatre.
In his chapter on Medieval to Early Modern Coventry and London we see the convergence of Catholic, puritan and classical republican sentiments in a moment of a radical transformation of the political order from medieval fraternal organization of guilds to the Elizabethan monarchy. Wiles analyzes the Coventry Weaver’s Corpus Christi as an enactment of citizenship in bringing communities together and develops his argument about transformation of theatrical spectatorship along the shifting social and political order from medieval to early modern Elizabethan England in cosmopolitan London where individuality gains importance.
This also foreshadows one of the problems discussed in his chapter Enlightenment Geneva where the usual Rousseau vs. Voltaire debate is expanded to contrasting views on theatre in the light of citizenship, individuality and the collective. Wiles frames Rousseau as being concerned with institutional framing of theatre (in contrast to the festival) and active participation, and Voltaire as being concerned with content and individual spectatorship. Like in many chapters, he directs the readers view back to antiquity and the two philosophers’ interpretation thereof, as well as directing us forward into the context of the French Revolution, all contextualized in the discursive environment of religion, in order to understand conviction about the theatre in the context of political stances.
In his chapter on Paris and the French Revolution Wiles parallels the reading of active spectatorship of revolutionaries and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen showing their inextricable interrelatedness in the performance of a body public. The juxtaposition of David’s painting Brutus with theatrical realizations of the same subject (Corneille, Voltaire) epitomizes the contentiousness of the debate of individualism vs. contractual civic duty in the context of a liberty-oriented revolutionary France. Additionally, the importance of aesthetics “based on residues of cultural memory” (7) once again becomes crucial to the analysis. Wiles’ analysis of Chénier’s “authentic” mis en scène and acting (in prose to show that the king was an ordinary man) in Charles IX concludes that “within the shell of classical form, with its traditional hierarchical divide between high and low, noble and plebeian, heroic world and everyday world, Chénier inserted not myth but historical actuality” (163) that was believed to have the power to “kill royalty” just like Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro had “killed off nobility” (161).
In the last chapter on the modern public sphere Wiles gives an overview over collectivist impulses in pre-war Germany under the political order of the Weimar Republic and subsequently the Nazis and then expands his geographical and cultural scope to non-Western performance practice. This turning point in his scope, is also indicative of his argument that globalization complicates the construction of cultural identities (coming full circle with the introduction) and belonging to local communities which emphasizes the contingency of individual rights in relation to citizenship and, on a global scale, cohabitation on this planet (2).
Wiles deploys diachronicity in multiple ways. Firstly, Wiles explores the subject of theatre and citizenship in selected examples in the time period between classical Greece and today, but secondly, he engages in a diachronic reception analysis of each period in order to underline his claims about the linkage between conceptions of theatre and political organization.
He rarely restricts himself to strictly synchronic history in individual chapters and constantly invokes genealogies of plays, tropes, and theorization and frequently contrasts the period-specific stance with thinkers like Plato, Rousseau, and Arendt. He further engages with historiographic traditions on the respective period in more recent history which are subsequently picked up in later chapters as part of a historicization of those later periods. Exemplarily, in his chapter on classical Athens, Wiles invokes the idea of plays for political engagement of Berthold Brecht and Arthur Miller (29), the idea of parallels in the formal organization of space on stage and the individual and community in the audience of Vernant (29), or anthropological and psychoanalytic interpretations of the French scholarship from which he borrows the acuteness for the affective power of Greek tragedy (29). In the above mentioned subsequent historicization of each historiographic focus, he links them back to the respective political organization, such as Vernant’s and Goldhill’s democratic liberalism, leading them to a conception of a “morally autonomous spectator who engages more or less successfully with a problem play” (31), or Rousseau’s civic republicanism and concomitant conviction that the embodied practice in the public sphere is of greater significance than the “individual’s private reflection upon an art-object” (31).
The diachronic approach allows Wiles to demonstrate the historical “swing of the pendulum” (21, 223) between individualism and collectivism in light of historical events and shifts in political organization. This historical and geographical specificity is connected through and facilitates an overarching theory that links dramatic theory and spectatorship as part of a dialectic to conceptions of citizenship. Theatre is thus not established as a medium to transmit a predetermined message conceived by the playwright, but as a powerful practice and site for community building, contestation, negotiation, and critique of power, and the relationship between the individual and the community, as a participatory creative process and collective experience.
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