Reviewing

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Notes

1 Jocelyn Clarke, ‘Uncritical Conditions’, in Theatre Stuff, ed. by Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), p. 96. Subsequent references included in the text.

2 I am mindful of Jill Dolan’s warning that objectivity is a ‘myth’ that ‘masks the biases that any critic […] brings to his or her work’. By ‘objectivity’, I am thinking of what Noel Carroll refers to as aesthetic and critical principles that are ‘inter-subjectively verifiable’: that is, ideas that are rooted in subjective experience but which are capable of being widely agreed upon. Put simply, I mean that the reviewer has an obligation to imagine how a work will be received by ‘readers in general’, and thus to guard against the kinds of bias Dolan highlights. See Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator in Action (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 5 and Noel Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 34.

3 Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 1968 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 35. Subsequent reference appears in the text. Jocelyn Clarke’s article, cited above, has some interesting observations about Brook’s statement.

4 Ibid., p. 37.

5 Kenneth Tynan, Right and Left (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. viii.

6 John Dryden, ‘The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry’, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. by Vinton A. Dearing, 20 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), XII, p. 87.

7 Ibid.

8 Discussed in more detail in Patricia Cohen, ‘Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review’, New York Times, 23 August 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?_r=0> [accessed 6 April 2014].