Page and Stage

Press, 2003), a study that analyzes the power of visual images to affect the reading experience and the reader. They argue, "The luminous nature of the reading experience in a manuscript culture situates the reader as a spectator constructed by the luminous quality of the page… This aspect of the reading experience in late medieval manuscript culture is analogous to the modern cinematic experience" (2). The connection between graphic novel narrative techniques and the cinema has been widely noted, but there is little to no Hoche

This essay interprets Hamlet’s reversion from the King’s “chiefest courtier” to an antic opposite, a “clown”—both “naturals” by means of artful impersonations worth studying. Drawing on Castiglione’s discussion of the courtier’s performance of apparent artlessness and on studies of the stage clown’s performance of apparently spontaneous improvisation, I explore several moments in Hamlet’s interpersonal theater as they develop the coincidence of these extremes.

This paper explores a block of controversial text—a chunk that appears in Q1 of Hamlet but not in Q2 or F. This is a conclusion of Hamlet’s instruction to the players in which he parodies the extemporizing clown at length (ll. 1210-1220). This parody in a way displaces Hamlet’s more philosophical reflections on “the purpose of playing” in Q2.  I review selected discussions of the authority of this passage. I suggest how its precarious textual status in weird ways matches what it’s saying and doing. In context, the design of this digression—its beauty, significance, and impact—makes it hard to exclude from the critical or the classroom evaluation of Hamlet.

This essay focuses on the alleged attack by Robert Greene on Shakespeare as an “upstart crow,” a work reprinted in almost every collection of Shakespeare’s works, and a document that has produced its own body of scholarly assessment. Employing recent textual criticism of the print industry in early modern England —including works by Zachary Lesser, John Jowett, Jeffery Masten, and D. Allen Carroll— we re-read “Green’s Groatsworth of Wit” as a kind of literary criticism that helps to illuminate both its own textual status as well as the material conditions of the late sixteenth-century theatrical world which produced it. Following a review of the basic lines of interpretation of the piece, I examine the nexus of the Henry Chettle, Robert Danter and Greene connection, in an attempt to show that by considering the “collaboration” between these three, we should come to a better understanding of the document itself. Equally important, by re-examining the text, reviewing the printing proc...

This essay questions the recent critical orthodoxy that treats authorship as a menacing latecomer to the popular and collaborative Elizabethan stage.  Demonstrating that a literary paradigm of single authorship dominated Elizabethan thinking about playwriting, the essay presents Hamlet as Shakespeare's attempt to develop a more theatrically inflected model of authorship through the dramatization of his own hybrid identity as actor and playwright.

This essay examines ways in which, as the title suggests, practice-based research and theatregoing may fruitfully aid advanced research in the study of early seventeenth-century plays. Scenes from four plays by Shakespeare (Macbeth), Jonson (The New Inn and Volpone) and Middleton (Women Beware Women) are analysed to illustrate a variety of ways in which insights into early seventeenth-century stage practice may be developed through attention to details such as spatial relations of actors within the playing space; costuming; the absence of certain aspects of the playtext within a particular production which engages with a director's personal concept; pacing and ensemble work within a company of actors. The limitations of such modes of research are also explored, though the chief emphasis is on the advantages of deploying what till recently may have been viewed as unorthodox research tools.

are everywhere in this piece through their generous sharing of materials and suggestions. No acknowledgment could repay our debt to them. 1 Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Hamlet throughout this essay follow The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), a facsimile edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), as do quotations from all other plays by Shakespeare. Citations include both Hinman' s through-line numbers and act-scene-line numbers keyed to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Translations of foreign-language quotations are our own.

Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson is lauded as a comedy writer extraordinaire. One of his most satirical farces, Poetaster, includes a scene involving a character's vomiting. Beyond the obvious humor, Jonson uses this scene regarding Crispinus to assert sophisticated notions of language use, intellect, and oratory-observations for which the playwright is given too little credit in critical scholarship of the era. This essay fills this gap by examining the scene from a theoretical framework derived loosely from structural linguistics and classical rhetoric. Deans' Distinguished Essay Award graduate recipient

This special issue on John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan illustrates the various tensions in London at the start of James I's reign. This city comedy deploys satire to urge its audience to see the anxiety and fears caused by misogyny, xenophobia, religious dissent, and contact with European foreigners, all of which create an alien environment infecting those who live in it. Each of the ten essays that make up the issue touches on these anxieties, or at least elements of strangeness that need arguing away or accepting as unresolvable in Marston's view of human nature.    

This paper situates the play in the context of the ongoing Complete Works of John Marston, under preparation for Oxford University Press, the first such collected critical edition ever to have been created. It discusses the edition’s aims and working practices as well as the new picture of Marston we expect to emerge from it. Scholars now often encounter The Dutch Courtesan in isolation, as Marston’s single best-known and most-read play. This paper approaches the play in the context of Marston’s career and publication history as a whole, in addition to the textual and theatrical relationships which work on the edition is gradually coming to disclose.  

are everywhere in this piece through their generous sharing of materials and suggestions. No acknowledgment could repay our debt to them. 1 Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Hamlet throughout this essay follow The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), a facsimile edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), as do quotations from all other plays by Shakespeare. Citations include both Hinman' s through-line numbers and act-scene-line numbers keyed to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Translations of foreign-language quotations are our own. 2 The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke by William Shake-speare. .. (London, 1603), sig. D4 v ; and Margreta de Grazia, "Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness,"

This chapter tells the history of what have come to be called ‘stage directions’: short, practical performance or reader-oriented instructions, often in pigeon Latin, of unclear authorship, that typically start, end and intersperse a printed play. It is in three parts, beginning in the eighteenth century when the phrase ‘stage direction’ was co-invented by Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald as a term for non-authorial directives in Shakespeare. It then turns to medieval and early modern plays, asking what a ‘stage direction’ was before it had a title, where it was situated on the page, what language it employed, who may have written it and for whom, and whether indeed it was ‘it’ before two words defined it as one entity. Finally, the essay considers the ‘stage direction’ after the term became established, asking how the rise of the theatre’s ‘stage director’ affected what ‘stage directions’ were on page and stage. Throughout, then, the chapter tells two different and only partially-connected stories: one is the story of the term ‘stage direction’, and the other the story of the thing(s) ‘stage direction’.

The whole issue is on line (open access)  at the address:
http://www.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/issue/current

This collection of essays is entitled Beyond Books and Plays precisely because its aim is to reflect on the relationship between performance cultures and practices of writing within and beyond the actual texts of the plays, or the material evidence of existing books. The attention to materiality that has emerged out of Textual Studies and the Sociology of Texts since the 1980s allows us-indeed requires us-to contextualize the production and transmission of texts within the specific context of early modern theatre.

Review of:

Terri Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Margrethe Jolly, The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.

Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2015.

What was a book in early modern England? By combining book history, bibliography and literary criticism, Material Texts in Early Modern England explores how sixteenth-and seventeenth-century books were stranger, richer things than scholars have imagined. Adam Smyth examines important aspects of bibliographical culture which have been under-examined by critics: the cutting up of books as a form of careful reading; book destruction and its relation to canon formation; the prevalence of printed errors and the literary richness of mistakes; and the recycling of older texts in the bodies of new books, as printed waste. How did authors, including Herbert, Jonson, Milton, Nashe and Cavendish, respond to this sense of the book as patched, transient, flawed and palimpsestic? Material Texts in Early Modern England recovers these traits and practices, and so crucially revises our sense of what a book was, and what a book might be.

This article explores how certain dramatists in early modern England and in Spain, specifically Ben Jonson and Miguel de Cervantes (with much more emphasis on the former), pursued authority over texts by claiming as their own a new realm which had not been available—or, more accurately, as prominently available—to playwrights before: the stage directions in printed plays. The way both these playwrights and/or their publishers dealt with the transcription of stage directions provides perhaps the clearest example of a theatrical convention translated into the realm of readership.

The performance of 'Bartholomew Fair' at the Hope Theatre in 1614 was the play’s first and only recorded public performance in Jonson’s lifetime, and the playtext still bears the stamp of this theatrical debut. Using the spatial theories of de Certeau and Lefebvre, I suggest that Jonson takes advantage of the liminal spaces of his performance venue, the ideologically ambiguous space of the Liberty that contained it, as well as his play’s fictive setting (the Fair itself), to pass comment on the more ideologically solid and austere environment of the City of London. I also argue that in some ways this first performance can be read as ‘proto-site-specific,’ inasmuch as the play relies on the particularities of its environment to achieve Jonson’s aim—to exhort his audience into a more sophisticated ‘reading’ of the play’s action—a reading that he hoped would, in turn, affect their reading of the real urban space outside the playhouse.
The Jonsonian ‘third way’ between represented and representational spaces (Lefebvre, Mardock) takes advantage of the heterogeneous environment of the playhouse and elides together the heterotopian environments of Fair and Liberty to invite a correspondingly unstable interpretive response from its audience. This experiential division is enforced in the space of the stage and auditorium, with the playwright’s use of inductive techniques, staging and direct address—which frequently privileges some groups of spectators, to the detriment of others—helping to enforce divisions within the audience. The interpretive openness of Jonson’s spatial practice becomes in effect a microcosm for the vast number of spatial practices performed by the inhabitants of the real city beyond the Hope’s walls. However, in his emphasis on ‘understanders’ rather than passive spectators the playwright provides his audience with the cognitive tools to be the actors rather than the acted-upon in the dog-eat-dog environment of London’s urban space, and it is within the triangulation between text, playhouse and suburban environment of the play’s first performance that this effect is most pronounced.

The arguments in this essay find their root in Amy Powell's premise that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paintings are images “split from within...suspended or oscillating between the assertion and denial of [their] own rhetorical mode[s].'' While Powell only discusses Deposition images in her book, I will argue that the fundamental conflict between literal and metaphorical, physical and nuomenal, corporeal and cerebral is also characteristic of northern European Annunciation images from the fifteenth century. Through an analysis of Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden's Annunciation from ca. 1465-1475, this paper will provide evidence that the dialectic between materiality and immateriality is ingrained in northern European fifteenth-century Annunciation paintings at large. I will argue that manifest in this painting’s representation of hand gestures, facial countenance, and posture, is the visualization of an anxious welcoming and rejection of the physical representation of the incorporeal divine.

This article focuses on a somewhat neglected genre in studies of literary visuality: drama. It is generally assumed that theatrical performance takes over the work of visualising a drama text, and that drama is not a genre that chiefly evokes readerly visualisation. For early modern drama texts and in particular for printed playtexts (playbooks), these assumptions of drama theory must be questioned (→ 1.): playbooks from circa 1590 to 1642 are multifunctional texts written for readers as well as for stage performance. In this light, it needs to be asked if drama theory is able to correctly define the status of early modern dramatic texts in relation to early modern orders of the visible and the visual (→ 2.): stage design, relations between word and image, text and picture, performance space and spoken word. Following a survey of classical and early modern rhetoric and post-Reformation discourses on images and the theatre (→ 3.), exemplary analyses of plays by Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker elaborate different ways of approaching dramatic visuality and demonstrate different ways of relating the levels of analysis comprised by 'literary visuality' (→ 4.). Middleton's The Puritan Widow and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are discussed chiefly as discourses on visuality and visibility, and as commentaries on contemporary, religious and rhetorical word-image practices. Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl is analysed as an example for a playbook that attempts to conventionalise the reading of printed play texts as a practice of imagining theatrical experience. Readerly visualisation of playbooks, I argue, is not identical with modern visualisation practices shaped by prose: it has to be understood as the imagination of mediated, theatrical, and performative visibility (→ 5.).

Abstract. The paper presents the results of a series of Principal Components Analyses of the frequencies of very common words in the dialogue of characters in plays by Ben Jonson. The first Principal Component in the data, the most important axis of differentiation, proves in ...

This essay argues that The Alchemist played an important but largely unrecognized part in the formation of early modern science. It shows how Jonson's innovative combination of alchemical content and neoclassical form produced a model of space, time, and dexterity useful for the development of laboratory experience. At the same time, the play demonstrates how new ideas about what a stage was and what it could do created a legacy of ambivalence in the development of the (semi-)public laboratory. Reading Jonson's play as exemplary, this essay will also indicate why we ought to consider early modern drama more generally as an important conceptual source of the protocols of experimental natural philosophy.

The paper presents the results of a series of Principal Components Analyses of the frequencies of very common words in the dialogue of characters in plays by Ben Jonson. The first Principal Component in the data, the most important axis of differentiation, proves in each case to be a spectrum from elaborate, authoritative pronouncements to a dialogue style of reaction and interchange. Reference to other quantitative studies, literary and otherwise, suggests that a version of this axis may often be among the most important in stylistic difference generally. In Jonson it has a chronological aspect -- there is a shift over his career from one end to the other -- and there is often significant change within the idiolects of his characters as well. Successive segments of Volpone and Mosca's parts (they are protagonist and antagonist of Volpone, perhaps Jonson's best-known comedy) change markedly along this axis, beginning far apart but coming by the end of the play to resemble each other very closely on this measure.

This essay argues that The Chronicle History of Henry the Fifth (published in quarto in 1600, 1602, and 1619) was an abbreviated version of Shakespeare’s play prepared for a readership interested in chronicle abridgments and other genres of history books. Critical consensus now identifies the Quarto, less than half the length of the Folio version we read and see performed today, as a reduced text prepared for the theater. I consider a range of materials that contest this performance hypothesis: abridged chronicles, popular histories, news reports, as well as title pages and paratextual matter from other books based on British history. By situating the early quartos of Henry V with these lesser known products of the London book market, I show that early modern publishers and authors shaped a variety of play texts as “chronicle histories” in order to introduce them to a broader market of readers. What emerges from analysis of this evidence, I argue, is a different view of Q Henry V: a playbook that owes its existence not to theatrical abridgment, but to reader demand for history books, a genre that Q Henry V helped to redefine.

The London book-trade in 1600 was, at once, more sophisticated in the diversity of its products and much smaller than we might assume. It was neither entirely a trade in printed books, nor were the printed books always English in origin. This broader perspective is important, for narratives of the book-trade commonly privilege the trade in printed books over manuscripts and construct their histories within national boundaries. Yet, as Sir William Cornwallis was to observe in his Essayes:`The Worlde is a booke: the words and actions of men Commentaries vpon that volume: The former lyke manuscriptes priuate: the latter common, lyke things printed.' The ambivalence that Cornwallis registers between words and actions, manuscript and print, the private and the public, is suggestive also of the way in which the book-trade in 1600 was poised between these competing interests. The books produced by London printing-houses catered to a large but specific segment of the overall market. Much material continued to circulate in manuscript, however, not only for religious and political reasons (and the two were often contiguous), but because the trade in printed books had yet to displace manuscripts as a primary source for the transmission of knowledge. Equally, the Latin trade (as it was called) in continental books catered for a learned clientele. This material, some of it extremely erudite and obscure, could be imported in limited quantities but provided far greater diversity in a bookseller's stock than it is now possible entirely to recover. For such publications the London book-trade rarely had either the resources or the necessary economies of scale to compete against the leading producers in Paris, Lyons, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Basle, Geneva, Venice and the other major centres of European book production. Approximately 80 per cent of the books that survive from the libraries of Ben Jonson and John Donne, for instance, were printed on the Continent. This is not untypical of the libraries of English intellectuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Ho, Lynceus! Seest thou yon gallant in the sumptuous clothes, How brisk, how spruce, how gorgeously he shows? Note his French herring-bones; but note no more, Unless thou spy his fair appendant whore, That lackies him. Mark nothing but his clothes, His new-stamp'd compliment, his cannon oaths; Mark those; for naught but such lewd viciousness E'er graced him, save Sodom beastliness. Is this a man? Nay, an incarnate devil, That struts in vice and glorieth in evil.