Performing Prophecy: More Life on the Shakespearean Scene

T stage has long played host to ghosts. Dramatic literature from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Suzan-Lori Parks enumerates a sizeable community of specters. In the past two or three decades, this community, always a powerful theatrical force, has seen its theoretical importance multiply as theater and performance theory has seized upon the ghost as the index of theatricality.2 This spectral metaphor lent affective force to historicism and expanded the political horizon of performance analysis through an injunction to remember the forgotten, the marginalized, and the subordinated. As important as this injunction is, the spectral metaphor, in its very force and ubiquity, has emphasized certain domains as bearers of performance’s ontological truth while neglecting others.3 As William N. West notes, “These often tacit