The Antitheatrical Prejudice: New Edition - by Jonas Barish (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Antitheatrical Prejudice is essential reading today when theatricality, antitheatricality, and performativity are once again provocative issues playing out across contemporary culture and the arts. The original edition was published in 1981. The new edition includes a Foreword by Joseph Roach, the distinguished theatre historian and stage director, and professor emeritus, Dept. of English, Yale University. He is the author of The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting and Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance.

Review Quotes

How to nominate a work of criticism as a classic? Testimony in support of The Antitheatrical Prejudice proliferates in the work of scholars in the field of drama, theater, and performance studies who have come back repeatedly to Barish to test their own ideas and predicate new arguments.
-from the foreword by Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and Professor of English Emeritus at Yale University, author of The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting

Now that the accusation 'you are so performative!' has become a tremendous insult, Barish's terrific analysis of the historical distrust of theater is especially valuable.
--Peggy Phelan, Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts at Stanford University, author of Mourning Sex

At a time when theatricality has been supercharged by social media, Jonas Barish's classic is a good reminder that the opposite, the anti-theatrical prejudice, must be given equal attention.
--Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama

Reviews from the first edition:

In undertaking to chronicle and discuss the range of anti-theatrical prejudice sincefirst there was a theatre to provoke such feeling Jonas Barish has shouldered a burden that might have broken many a good man; he has performed it not only with scholarly fullness but with a concision and wit that make delightful reading.
--University of Toronto Quarterly

Fixes on a fascinating intellectual puzzle: the ambivalence which mankind has felt toward the theater...The greatest virtue of Jonas Barish's book is that he displays through case studies the historical sweep and depth of the ambivalence...The intensity of the various attacks is astonishing. Barish's case studies the historical sweep and depth of the ambivalence...The intensity of the various attacks is astonishing. Barish's case studies are gripping...Its historical richness furthers discussion in a fascinating but neglected area--the philosophy of theater.
--Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Explains, among other valuable functions, why theater has traditionally been a threatening source of disquiet to those concerned with social and political behavior. With impeccable scholarship and learning, Professor Barish traces the ancient distrust of plays and players from its earliest appearance in Plato...until it enters the theater itself, in the purifying fires of Artuad, Grotowski, and Handke...A most valuable book providing important insights into the way we think about the stage.
--New Republic

The usefulness of the professor's book lies in his classification of objections to the theater. By way of these objections, he shows clearly the ways in which morality caries according to the culture from which it comes and makes this truism seem new by staging it, so to speak, instead of confining it to the prose.
--New York Review of Books

About the Author

Jonas Barish (1922-1998) was a distinguished theatre historian and authority on Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. He taught at the University of California. A leading scholar of his generation, Barish was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.