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while the second half of the collection contains essays which consider the circumstances under which theatre tips away from the postmodern. Moreover, these initial essays do much to provide substance to Jean Francois Lyotard’s claim that “[a] work can become modern only if it is first postmodern” (79). Indeed, without such a statement from one of postmodernism’s foremost theorists, Jenn Stephenson’s essay on King Lear (herein), which finds convincing postmodern dramatic features in Shakespeare, might strain this collection’s credibility. Instead, the essay’s thesis (the reasonableness of which is substantiated by Lyotard) only reinforces the central conceit of the work—which is that the unique morphological features of drama lead to the early and inevitable appropriation of various postmodern concepts, or, as Stephenson puts it in arguing the case for King Lear,
While this might not quite be the self-conscious making “visible to the audience and (if they are permitted to recognize it) the characters” of “the footlights, the edge of the stage” that McHale speaks of, it is—at the very least—a self-conscious exploitation of features all the same.
Bill Angus also explores how the Renaissance theatre presented a particularly apt environment for the postmodern play not only because of the theatre’s specific morphology, but because of the way in which this morphology allowed its practitioners “a place where tacit questions can be asked of oppressive structures simply by recreating them onstage, without necessarily making explicit their oppressive nature” (48 in this volume) Angus uses this observation as a means to push his