“High and Aloof”: Verse, Violence, and the Audience in Djuna Barnes’sThe Antiphon

Abstract

Djuna Barnes’s last play, The Antiphon, has been subject to a variety of readings that emphasize its autobiographical resonances, its unperformability, or the incoherence that resulted from the editorial interference of T.S. Eliot. There has been no major staging of this play in English since its publication in 1958, and this, along with the archaic language and verse form that Barnes uses, pose the biggest challenge to understanding the dynamics of the play. The article argues that Barnes stages revenge, abuse, violence, and theatricality in her play in negotiation with traditions of Renaissance and modern theatre and with an acute sense of the tensions between literary and popular entertainment. In this way, the article demonstrates how Barnes’s play interrogates the role and culpability of the audience as witness and demonstrates the importance of recovering The Antiphon for the canon of twentieth-century drama.