The photographs of David Greenspan in performance that accompany our first essay—Nick Salvato's analysis of Greenspan's The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion and A Horse's Ass—collectively suggest a simultaneity of time. “Then” and “now” slide unstably and circularly into one another, not so much merging temporalities as superimposing them, creating what Salvato identifies as a queering of time. Queer time potentially liberates us from the coils of straight time, argues Salvato. By experiencing queer time, especially in the theatre, we see differently in part because of the distinctive features of theatre itself: its metatheatricality, antitheatricality, superimposition, and layering of identities between actor and character, and the enchanted temporality of “now” in live performance. As I survey this particular issue of Theatre Survey, I am struck that the articles here suggest a number of temporal collisions. Not all of these are queer per se, yet many of these convergences interrogate norms, conventions, and coherences in ways that are both productive and provocative.

Salvato provides a rich evocation and analysis of Greenspan's vast repertoire of temporally disruptive mechanics, playfully and wittily deployed. The artist's solo performance A Horse's Ass, which adapts the sixteenth-century Italian comedy Il marescalco by Pietro Aretino, commences, as did its antecedent, with a prologue. The speaker addresses the audience: “Okay, so a few years ago—say, 1526—the Duke of Mantua, who is an example of kindness and goodness in this, this most hideous century of ours, had in his service a certain Marescalco (a master of horses) who was as enthusiastic about women as a hemophiliac is about needles.”Footnote ¹ Listening to this prologue, we do not know whether to be more surprised by the speaker's estimation of the temporal proximity of the action (five centuries in the past characterized here as “a few years ago”), or by the original play's apparently explicit and forthright treatment of a same-sex relationship. Greenspan's Prologuer is extremely opinionated: he criticizes Aretino's abilities as a playwright; he rejects the idea of having prologues at all—that is, texts that send an actor onstage to give away the end of the play; he jokingly questions the textual authenticity and originality of Aretino's Il marescalco (“I mean this play was commissioned, he was supposed to write something original, not just copy some antique play”); and he objects to poor editing, calling Aretino's play too long and riddled with inside jokes. The dizzying layers of temporality, self-referentiality, and identity at the play's outset only compound with each passing moment, leaving the audience by play's end situated in a very queer time indeed—which is to say, superimposed time. The years 1533, 1963, 1989, and 2009 collide without ever merging. The temporality of Greenspan's play is both “all time” and “no time,” Salvato argues, and in that space we are liberated to apprehend marriage and nonnormative relationships without being so myopic, so restricted in our vision.

The next essay, “The Medieval Archive and the History of Theatre: Assessing the Written and Unwritten Evidence for Premodern Performance” by Carol Symes, takes us even further into the past: 963, when the Æthelwold of Winchester was attempting to control through liturgical notes the unruliness of live performance by establishing a set of rules for worship in England's monasteries. Symes argues that this attempt to create norms did not inaugurate medieval theatricality, as has been heretofore thought by scholars, but rather attempted to constrain it. She believes that contemporary historians have been “duped” by the powerful rhetoric and self-proclaimed authority as well as privileged access to texts enjoyed by the likes of Æthelwold of Winchester and monastic scribes. Scholars have read these medieval sources as representing a norm, when really we must read against the grain so as to perceive the unwritten evidence of performance practices that such texts were designed to curtail. Symes asks: What is the relationship between what was written down and what was really going on? She argues that “we need to read the evidence in a different way, one that pays full attention to the processes by which any artifact came into being.” In other words, one might say (though Symes does not) that we need to read these medieval sources queerly. She draws our attention to a history of careless scribes, the struggles for authority between actors and copyists, the significance of annotations and underlinings made by subsequent generations, the variations among copies, and the interpretations that might be gleaned from the relative scarcity or ubiquity of certain texts preserved in today's archives. Symes also articulates the perplexing questions raised by highly ambitious stage directions. When one play describes the punishment of the king's counselors as being thrown into a pit where they “will immediately be eaten by the lions,” one can't help wonder how this was to be done onstage.Footnote ² One also can't resist imagining how such texts as Symes quotes throughout her brilliant essay might appear in a solo performance by David Greenspan.

The struggle over authority and authorship between actor and playwright and the tension between theatre's sometimes warring proclivities of telling versus showing—as were signaled by Greenspan's Prologuer in A Horse's Ass—reappear in the next essay, “‘For without Vanity, I'm better known’: Restoration Actors and Metatheatre on the London Stage” by Jane Milling. Prologues and epilogues are for Milling not just beginnings and endings: they are the very substance of her study. With a particular focus on Restoration London theatres, she analyzes what prologues and epilogues tell us about the individuation of actors, as well as the implications this has for our interpretation of acting and acting style. Milling argues that the audience's reception of these pieces involved a referentiality that was as much about the actor's personage and history of theatrical roles as it was about the play at hand, suggesting a temporal simultaneity that we also can see at work in Greenspan's prologue several centuries later. The tone of Restoration prologues and epilogues could range from frivolous comic turns to an utterly serious recanting of a religious conversion. The very issues that Symes had also flagged about the struggle between authors’ and scribes’ textual authority and actors’ performative practice are, in Millings essay, apparent too in the Restoration. She demonstrates how prologues and epilogues “chart the tactical interventions of performers in spaces outside text, character, and the conventions of dramatic genre. They draw as much upon the performance of popular, fairground culture as the practices of licensed drama, and they mark the arrival of the celebrity performer.” Read together, the essays by Salvato, Symes, and Milling create a superimposition of temporalities, a queering of time as the year 2009 merges with 1533, and 963 with 1668. Through each author's interrogation and careful analysis of issues that are at once particular to their respective time periods yet also persistently central to the domain of theatre transhistorically, we see a number of key issues differently.

With the next essay, “William Gladstone and the Theatre” by Anselm Heinrich, this Theatre Survey shifts gears: Heinrich's essay inaugurates a set of themes that animate many of the subsequent contributions in this issue. By examining the role of William Gladstone in formulating the idea that theatre should be a public enterprise—a publicly funded endeavor central to a nation's heritage—Heinrich draws our attention to the inception of a liberal dispensation that elevated theatre beyond its prior sullied reputation as a “promoter of frivolity, vanity, and female forwardness.” During Goldstone's lifetime and through his leadership, British theatre came to be seen and sponsored as a public good, a public necessity—an endeavor deemed to have value beyond being simply commercial. As Heinrich argues, “Gladstone . . . would not accept the state of affairs that left theatres to their own devices, nor was he content with some limited state aid to municipal playhouses. Instead, he called for a national theatre entirely funded by the taxpayers. Gladstone was thinking about this issue long before others did—and his thoughts were more radical than most.”

Heinrich's analysis of the emergence of a public valuation of theatre is especially prescient considering our historical moment, 2011, when the notion of a public good both for the arts and education throughout North America and Europe is severely under attack. Several of the contributions that follow Heinrich's essay attest to a profound contemporary transformation to a new neoliberal dispensation. The “Critical Stages” article by M. G. Renu Cappelli and Jill Dolan considers the notion of “the greater good” from their respective locations at Stanford and Princeton, two private American universities, in the year 2010. Each narrates educational experiences at the very core of the academic mission: the pedagogical contact between professors and students, specifically in our discipline of theatre. Both Dolan and Cappelli talk of leaving the classroom, together with their students, to sojourn into a world of performed events, including site-specific enactments and mobile performances, as well as productions located in traditional theatrical spaces. In their meditations on the idea of “the greater good,” Cappelli and Dolan reflect on what we mean by “good theatre,” “great books,” and experiences in the theatre that we promote to our students as being “good for you.” Haunting the edges of this essay are larger questions that loom on the horizon for many of us: How do we translate the “goods” of the educational encounter and theatre's place within it into a rationale, as Dolan says, that is legible and persuasive to administrators as we try to maintain our educational theatre programs “in the face of economic retrenchment that threatens anything extraneous to its ‘core’ mission, which is too often articulated as a rigid, catholic notion of ‘the greater good’?” In the future, will theatre and performance studies be considered “good” enough to remain in the academy at all, or we will find that our discipline relocated outside even the greater metropolitan area of the “good” in the academy. This signals another meaning of “good”: a product that is perceived to have value and utility.

The next several essays in this edition appear under the adapted banner of a recent Theatre Survey column called “What Are You Watching?” Originally conceived as a forum for colleagues to write about live performance in a format that is more capacious and free-ranging than a traditional “review,” the column appears here in a form that addresses the question, “What Are You Witnessing?” We solicited testimony from scholars located in New York, California, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom about how the massive attacks on higher education throughout the country and the world in the past twelve to eighteen months have impacted theatre and higher education in their respective locations. Marvin Carlson begins by speaking about the sudden closure of the SUNY Albany theatre department in fall 2010, an event he considers also in relation to the status of theatre at the neighboring private university of Cornell. Larry Bogad chronicles some of the performative interventions mounted by activists during the University of California's historic battles of the past year—travails closely watched throughout the nation, since California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education became the template for public higher education throughout the United States for decades thereafter. Next is Lowell Fiet's inspiring and disturbing chronicle of the massive cutbacks and impressive acts of resistance staged at his campus, the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras. Given the long history of protests at this campus as well as the severity of recent retrenchments, Puerto Rico may well be a more telling harbinger of our future than California. An emergency bill passed in Puerto Rico in 2009 “suspend[ed] existing public-employee union agreements and contracts, permit[ted] the radical revision of institutional budgets and funding formulas and the firing of personnel,” as well as the creation of new taxes and penalties for resistance. As Fiet reports, “Before the end of 2009, between twenty and twenty-five thousand tenured and untenured public employees had been summarily dismissed.” Theatre Survey's parent organization, the American Society for Theatre Research, convened in Puerto Rico for its annual meeting in 2009, and I thus expect that our readers will be especially interested to read about what is happening at this university in that “other” part of America, the colonized America located outside of the contiguous states.

As this issue of Theatre Survey went to press, Lowell Fiet was trying to respond to our editorial queries while scores of students were being arrested just outside his office simply because they were passing out pamphlets. In similarly urgent conditions, Janelle Reinelt penned her contribution, which offers her perspective as an expatriate U.S. scholar presently located in the United Kingdom, where November and December of 2010 saw educational protests of historic proportions. Reinelt describes several sites of protest, vividly narrating the simultaneity of events during which scholars were holding a conference—trying to get on with our core academic enterprise of research and teaching—while elsewhere in the country protests had turned so violent that such quotidian university activities became impossible. Reinelt submitted her essay to us in January 2011 on the eve of two major scheduled protests. “This is the state of the profession, as I see it now,” is her concluding line, conveying a very uncertain and volatile state indeed. Perhaps our present state of vulnerability desperately needs to be queered, for if we see ourselves only within the myopia of straight time—a teleological time of cause and effect—the state of the profession looks decidedly bleak at this moment. It is productive and suggestive to superimpose on the present a temporally distant state, the world of William Gladstone when theatre was first ascending in Britain as a valued public good.

In our Re: Sources column, Lauren Shutt and Sean Tennant provide an illuminating view of the posters of the German Democratic Republic at George Mason University Libraries. In “What Are You Reading?” Ted Ziter also provides an enticing tour of the recently read books in his library and classroom, as well as a reminder about how our fantasies of the professor's life often turn out to be so very far from the realities.

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I conclude this, my last issue as Editor of Theatre Survey, with a few announcements. On behalf of our entire editorial team, I first want to extend resounding congratulations to Magda Romanska, who was awarded ASTR's prestigious Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize in 2010 for her essay “Between History and Memory: Auschwitz in Akropolis, Akropolis in Auschwitz,” which was published in the November 2009 issue of Theatre Survey. As I step down as Editor, Leo Cabranes-Grant will assume the helm. Given what a fantastic job he has done as Associate Editor, I know I leave the journal in very capable hands. Leo Cabranes-Grant will be joined by the journal's new Associate Editor, Esther Kim Lee, to whom we extend a warm welcome. This issue is also Katherine Scheil's last as editor of the Book Review section. She has served the journal so capably over the past two years, for which we are especially grateful. We are delighted that Kim Solga will succeed as Book Review Editor. The work of our new Re: Sources editor Beth Kattelman appears for the first time in this issue, and readers will no doubt be interested to read her editorial note outlining her objectives and ambitions for this long-standing section of the journal. With this issue, Theatre Survey welcomes four new members to our editorial board: Judith Milhous, Emily Roxworthy, W. B. Worthen, and Harvey Young. We also want to extend our appreciation to board members J. Ellen Gainor and Matthew Wilson Smith, who have completed their terms on the board. I'd like to acknowledge the five-star service that Theatre Survey receives from our editorial team, which includes Kate Babbitt as Assistant Editor, Michael Gnat as Copyeditor, Jonathan Geffner as Production Manager, and Sally Hoffmann as Sponsoring Editor, as well as the many other staff at Cambridge University Press who do such a capable job hosting and producing the journal. We are especially grateful for the augmentation in our space allocation that has allowed the issue you hold in your hands to be more substantial in volume. Finally, I wish to thank the members of ASTR for allowing me the privilege of editing Theatre Survey over the past few years. I share my predecessor Martin Puchner's sentiments expressed in his last issue as Editor of the journal: “I am looking forward to a new—and old—role at Theatre Survey: that of a reader” (50.1: 1).