Does Performance Studies Speak to Restoration Theatre?

The rise of Performance Studies (PS) has been nothing short of phenomenal, but the field of Restoration drama and theatre has resisted this popular methodology, preferring critical approaches grounded in theatre history, literary exegesis, and, more recently, gender studies and queer theory. In part, the resistance is understandable: the dominant themes of PS – ethical research, social action, non‐scripted events, hybridity, and marginality – hardly apply to a theatre as resolutely textual and elite as the Restoration. Then too, Restoration drama's institutional history, which has traditionally privileged the ‘literary’ over the ‘theatrical’, additionally explains its disregard of PS. The field, however, has paid a price for not jumping on the PS bandwagon as evidenced by the decline in scholarly interest over the past decade. Arguably, criticism informed by ‘materialist semiotics’ and ‘site‐specific performance analysis’ might not only revive interest in Restoration theatre and drama but also avoid the theoretical shortcomings of PS.