- Volume 2023 (2023)
- Vol. 2023 (2023)
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- Issue 43
- No. 43
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- Pages 131 - 149
- pp. 131 - 149
Postdramatic Theatre and Pre-Theatrical Drama, What’s in a Name?: An Afterlife for Early British Drama
Pages 131 - 149
DOI https://doi.org/10.33675/SPELL/2023/43/12
open-access
This publication is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0.
This essay reconsiders what made late-medieval British drama distinct from that of other periods and what it shared with those dramas. It argues for a form of afterlife for the medieval and early Tudor stage in the dramaturgy of postmodern performance. Responding to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s claims for a post-dramatic theatre, it suggests that we should also think about a pre-dramatic theatre, or rather a pre-theatrical drama, existing, not in the tragic theatre of ancient Greece, but in late medieval England and Scotland, and that the postdramatic and the pre-theatrical have much in common in their radical approaches to stagecraft.
Keywords: Postdramatic theatre, playhouses, pre-theatrical drama, interludes, morality drama