Brief remarks suggest different reading strategies to different readers, both specialist and nonspecialist. Those less familiar with modern Iranian history and politics are invited to begin with Chapter 1, the “Introduction.” More knowledgeable readers may prefer to skim over parts of Chapter 1 in order to begin with Chapter 2, “Tied Up in Tehran.” Thanks to the community of support who have contributed to this project.

Stand-up comedy is performed in front of an audience, a point both self-evident and critical. Comedians construct their material to best elicit the desired aesthetic responses, laughter being chief among them, from any given crowd that might be assembled before them, and the audience’s engagement is constitutive of the thing produced in that moment of performance. This chapter explores multiple senses of ‘audience’ – as the market for and tradition-bearers of stand-up, as the followers and fanbase of a specific comedian, and as those present at the moment of a performance – before demonstrating the nature of the creative collaboration in completing the prepared ‘text’, in allowing for more spontaneous displays of wit through crowdwork and handling hecklers, and in the breakdown of performance when expectations are breached and the audience withdraws its support.

In 2018, Hannah Gadsby created a sensation through her stand-up show Nanette. In it she shocked audiences by telling her hard-hitting trauma narrative, revealing the impact of sexual abuse, male violence, and homophobia on her mental health. Controversially, Gadsby also claimed that stand-up as a form and the mainstream stand-up industry itself were significant agents in deepening her psychological harm. This chapter examines Gadsby’s dramaturgical strategies and struggles in attempting to construct a means of speaking about the pain of her lived experience and seeking a therapeutic means of addressing her trauma through stand-up. Luckhurst analyses Gadsby’s interest in ethical story-telling and her notion of educating audiences about laughter and political complicity. Finally, Luckhurst argues that Gadsby draws on therapy models to transform her trauma narrative into a story of healing for herself and her audiences.

Offers a wide-ranging yet nuanced account of the articles and reviews of The Rite of Spring that emerged in the Parisian press – the daily newspapers and specialist music and theatre journals – around the time of the premiere in May 1913. In doing so, this chapter seeks to chip away at some of the myth-making and exaggerated rhetoric that has contributed to our (mis)understanding of the supposedly riotous first night at the newly built Théâtre de Champs-Élysées, Paris. Close examination of the press reveals what, or rather who, most angered or else stupefied spectators and how choreography, music, decors and costumes were regarded by a select audience. Broader social and political tensions come to the fore as reports in the press are read in the context of a wider cultural history of the period.

These sermons were aimed at inspiring believers to imitate the martyrs, who themselves imitated Christ, their archetype. Christ’s voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice defeated the devil and death, expiated our sins, and restored to believers the possibility of eternal happiness, with God’s grace. Augustine modifies the traditional definition of “martyr” as “witness” to make martyrdom contingent on suffering and self-sacrifice: the essence of martyrdom and mandatory for all who would be Christian. He provides examples of this ideal behavior, such as calmly accepting the loss of one’s property. Suffering proves the cause for which martyrs died is true; otherwise they would have failed their ordeals. Augustine draws on Cyprian, recognizing a literal martyrdom in times of persecution, and in times of peace, a spiritual martyrdom fought daily against temptation and sin. These sermons also document the obstacles Augustine faced when preaching: not only correcting the errors of the Donatists, Manichees, and Pelagians, but also accommodating his flock’s limitations. He thus presents an inclusive church, a concord of different levels of expertise ordered hierarchically.

How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

Most of the ancient historians give some indication to their audience why they embarked upon writing their history. These remarks sometimes concern themselves with the unique nature of the historian’s subject matter; in addition to the greatness of the deeds, historians will frequently explain other circumstances that led them to the composition of their histories. There is, in general, a tendency as time goes on for authors, while not abandoning the magnification of their theme, to present a more ’personal’ call to history, that is, to say something of themselves and the personal experiences that underlay their writing of history.

In this chapter, we outline examples of two common forms of business writing in a contemporary business context: informative writing and persuasive writing. While there are many forms of informative writing (such as media articles, descriptive essays, manuals and reports), the chapter focuses on one important business genre, reports. Similarly, while there are many forms of persuasive writing (such as advertising, proposals, letters of application and professional tenders), we’ve selected proposals (a specific report format) as an example of persuasive writing. Finally, in the Extend your understanding section, we briefly explore eight key writing strategies and techniques that will enable you to write with more confidence and effectiveness. Of course, many of these can be used outside the business context in your personal life to craft better messages to achieve your goals.

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.

The Tempest throws us into the midst of a world of tragic repetition, in which usurpation, oppression, and the drive for mastery repeat themselves again and again. The chapter argues that it also offers a precious, if tenuous, escape from tragic history, by calling for a politics of humble disappointment. This tentative path runs through abjuration or negation. The play consistently stages violent and intrusive spectacles that break the characters (and the audience) out of their initial subject positions and into a more outward-looking mode. Such interruptions connect to the tradition of negative theology, in which poorness or nothingness “is the ultimate state of receptivity” (Meister Eckhart). They offer a breath of air from outside the masterful self, a sliver of distance from the tragic past. In particular, the play institutes a theatrical form of collectivity through the isle’s inclusive dramatic “air”. It draws us, as well as the sovereign figure of Prospero, into a broader dramatic life-force or “intersubjective phenomenology” (Schalkwyk). Indeed, in the Epilogue, the sovereign power is subject to the many; subject to audience’s judgment, pleasure, and approval. It is this recognition of mutual need (Plato) that opens the vision of a renewed political community.

Chapter 4 continues the previous chapter’s translational approach to the performing body, exploring the potential and limitations of what Walter Mignolo terms the “decolonial gesture” through three award-winning Argentinian productions. Building upon contemporary theories of coloniality, the chapter examines the performers’ and their audience’s linked participation as site for considering how the translational might effectively engage onstage with the “other.” In Timbre 4’s Dínamo (Dynamo), the decolonial gesture is initiated in a performer’s own dramaturgy of nontranslation, which not only impedes linguistic communication but also triggers audience critical self-awareness. In Guillermo Cacace’s production of Mi hijo sólo camina un poco más lento (My Son Only Walks a Bit Slower), a Spanish-language production of a Croatian play, the decolonial gesture resides in the director’s translational reconfiguration of actor-spectator empathy and seemingly contradictory approaches to casting disability. In the chapter’s final case, Sudado (Sweaty/Stew), a collectively devised production, decolonial gesturality is complicated at multiple translational levels through the translocation of the Peruvian immigrant to the Buenos Aires stage. The chapter argues that theatre can offer opportunities for decolonization, but only if they emerge from within theatre’s assembled collective, which translationally determines the creation, construction, communication, and reception of the decolonial gesture.

Christophe Triau’s chapter accounts for the state of the art of mise en scène in contemporary theatre. Triau explains how contemporary mise en scène is characterized by its marked refusal to construct immediately legible meaning or recognizable reference points on stage. Instead, with reference to the works of four major directors – Claude Régy, François Tanguy and the Théâtre du Radeau, Joël Pommerat, and Gisèle Vienne – Triau argues that stage direction tends to place audience members’ sense of perception under pressure. The stage is transformed into a destabilizing space of uncertainty, dream, hallucination or fantasy, which questions and renews the audience’s experience of perception, opening it out to other possibilities distinct from ordinary perception. In their very different ways, these directors bring into play not only what is seen but how the audience sees: the frameworks and activity of perception both in the theatre and in life.

Clare’s declaration that he ‘found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down’ is, to some extent, pretence; however quickly he might compose, he corrects and revises from very early on, before he gets any guidance from others. The more he writes, the more he confronts the inevitable problem of repetition: his solutions can be seen in the concentrated echoes and references back and forth between poems. The manuscripts in all their teeming detail demonstrate his determination to get things right. Once publication arrives he has to contend with the conflicting demands of editors, publishers, and supporters; there are vexed questions of taste and politics. As he moves towards The Shepherd’s Calendar, however keen his desire for independence, increasingly the process becomes collaborative. When his life is turned upside down with the move to Northborough in 1832, his deeply personal poems of loss are worked on with extraordinary intensity.

This chapter examines how Pindar and Bacchylides make use of early epic (esp. Homer) in their victory odes, from an explicitly ’intertextualist’ perspective. It discusses (inter alia) the meaning of ’Homer’ in the fifth century BC to the earliest audiences of Pindar and Bacchylides and adverts to the complexity and multiplicity of the audiences of their victory odes. It argues furthermore for the critical importance and benefits of intertextual analysis of Pindar and Bacchylides, especially the ways in which interaction with texts such as those of archaic epic should prompt a wider openness to intertextual investigation of victory odes.

Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

This chapter turns from democracy as theatre to the question of theatre’s place within a democracy. Modern political theatre foregrounds playwrights, understood to be people capable of enlightening the audience through their truthful representation of the world. Euripides’ Trojan Women has typically been read as an exposé of political wrongdoing, and an invitation to empathise with the suffering of the protagonists. In Athens, these plays were ’political’ in that they helped spectators unpick rhetorical strategies (Aristotle’s term is dianoia), making them discriminating judges in the law-courts and Assembly. Tragedies were part of a competition where audiences learned to judge the performance skills of writers and actors. Aristophanes’ Frogs is a case study in how decisions were actually made. Plato thought it unacceptable that aesthetic judgements could be based on crowd responses. He coined the term theatrocracy to evoke the power of the crowd to make aesthetic judgements, which he thought should remain the preserve of an educated elite. He saw the rule of the people in the theatre as both a metaphor for democracy and an instance of democracy in action.

The difference in how Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison conceived of Black subjectivity has profound consequences for how we understand the audience of African American literature in the contemporary period. While Ellison assumed that the Black subject is invisible because whites fail to recognize African American humanity and complexity, Morrison understood herself to be both legible and embraced by her Black community. Ellison and Morrison represent twin poles for the consideration of such issues as the implicit desire for white validation to the bold expectation that Black life not be explained to outsiders. Evidence of Ellison and Morrison’s respective approach to Black literature is reflected in two recent texts by prominent African American writers. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019) both highlight how key aspects of Black life remain invisible to white observers while also using readerly intimacy as a potent force for social change. These texts demonstrate the continued tension of presenting Black writing within a national landscape dominated by white hegemonic power.

Ovid’s journey towards Tomis is represented as a reversal of Aeneas’ destiny, particularly because – unlike the Virgilian hero – the exiled poet has to leave Rome (the world capital, and not a ruined city) with no promises of a glorious future. Thus, his new subjective elegy which originates at this (wild) periphery of the empire cannot but be a sad elegy. However, Ovid’s ‘eccentric’ exile poetry increasingly displays – from the Tristia to the Epistulae ex Ponto – some remarkable traces of evolution. In particular, towards the end of the second collection, the poet sketches a peculiar image of himself: that of an interethnic uates who has been able to find a new, unprecedented audience in the Greco-Getic tribes. The public role he now plays in Tomitan society allows him to engage in a sort of civilising mission as an imperial officer. Such a complex strategy of self-accreditation emphasises the transnational character of his poetry rather than its merely national dimension. The exile still remains a harsh experience for Ovid: nonetheless, he conceives the possibility of an evolution and cultivates the dream of gaining universal poetic renown even from the extreme boundaries of the world.