Darwin's Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature's Stage

Performance challenges discourse. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is lexical. The relationship between performance and its reception attains to the kind of phenomenological density for which criticism lacks a specialized vocabulary. If this be doubted, skeptics might consider how many and what diverse kinds of performances the best authorities have indiscriminately approved as "natural": an Elizabethan boy actor as Desdemona, the Kabuki of Sakatu Tojuro, operatic castrati, the Comedie Francaise, Marlon Brando.2 Eskimos, linguists observe, have twenty-seven words for snow. Would that theatrical performance were such an abundant part of daily living, would that it were distributed so vividly across the cultural horizon that critics could articulate precisely its multiform varieties and shades of signification. But in Chicago it just "snows," and the actors act "natural."