Shakespeare Quarterly’s open review for our special issue on performance is up and running strong–so strong that we’ve extended the commenting period to enable the conversations to continue. You now have until April 7th to evaluate and comment on the six submissions that have been put online: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/shakespearequarterlyperformance.
One of the reasons we were interested in doing another open review was to build on the success we saw with last year’s New Media special issue. In that open review, there were debates in the comments that helped define why the submissions were important pieces of scholarship. We also saw that authors were able to engage with each other, strengthening the work of everyone involved. In the Performance open review, we are again seeing some great responses to the submissions from commentators sharing their expertise. The breadth of the reviewers is especially helpful since the submissions cover a wide range of subjects: Merchant of Venice in post-war West Germany; political theatre as staged by the RSC’s most recent stagings of the Histories; Othello in 1903 Japan; a film about a Northern Ireland prison adaptation of Macbeth ; prophecy as a trope for performance; and a review of Ninagawa Yukio’s recent Doctor Faustus.
This time around, we also wanted to encourage an active conversation around a topic that is relevant to many of us who study and who read about performance. To that end Michael Dobson allowed us to post his review of a recent As You Like It, a review that has prompted an ongoing debate about who the audience of academic theatre reviews is and what the conventions of reviewing might be.
I hope that we’ll see more of you join in the conversation around the submissions in the coming days. I know this is a strange medium for many of us who are used to reading on paper and to writing anonymous responses to an editor, who then chooses how to pass those comments on to the author. This open review, with the need to read on screen and to respond publicly on screen, for the author and all other reviewers and readers to see, might nudge us out of our comfort zone. But the aim of the open review is not any different than what our aim is in any intellectual endeavor: to push forward the boundaries of learning and to help our field produce exciting scholarship. So take a look around the site, read some of the submissions and comments, and let us know what you think. The authors and the editors will be grateful for your participation!
Sarah Werner
Associate Editor
Shakespeare Quarterly Forum 