Ellen MacKay

I work and write in two overlapping fields: early modern English drama and public culture (including sermons, royal entries, ballads, mayoral pageants, beast baitings, polemics, satires and feuds) and Western theatre and performance, from the Greeks to the present. My approach to the Shakespearean stage is driven by the epistemological problems that the theatre poses to a culture eager to draw a clear line between what is and isn't real. I tend to focus on phenomena that don't sit easily within the counterfeit world of a play, such as onstage animals, gunfire, nudity, stuttering, and pyrotechnics. In my first book, Persecution, Plague and Fire, I argue that the disasters let loose from the realm of theatrical action (most famously the fire that consumed the Globe in 1613) are illustrations of an early modern philosophy of the stage that anticipates a key tenet of performance studies: that performance "becomes itself through disappearance" (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked). Rather more daunting is the correlative proposition, well evidenced in the perplexed discourse of 16th century theatre history, that performance disappears the epochs in which it triumphs.My teaching intervenes in these questions, as well as in the following disciplinary discourses: historiography, performance studies, political philosophy, phenomenology, affect studies, gender studies, social and theological history, Commonwealth studies (I am a Canadian American), and aesthetics.