The following has been transcribed and edited for clarity by Sean O'Sullivan. SharonMarcus (SM): I'm Sharon Marcus-I'm a Professor of English at Columbia University: I'm a Victorianist, and I work on nineteenth-century French literature, so I'm well-acquainted with the history of seriality. I'm also the Dean of Humanities and Editor of publicbooks.org. I would like to thank Lauren Goodlad and Sean O'Sullivan and EileenGillooly and everyone at the Heyman Center for putting this on today. I am going to introduce our panelists, although they don't really need an introduction. They say of great actors that you would be happy to listen to them read the phone book. I think we can say of our panelists that we' d be happy to hear them write a review of the phone book, write a novel based on the phone book, or produce the phone book as a radio podcast.[laughter] But rituals are important, so here we go: Lev Grossman is the author of five novels, including the #1 New York Times-bestselling Magicians trilogy, which is now an

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A compelling element of the four plays in Arbury 414 is their framing speeches. By contrast the revised, neater version of The Humorous Magistrate found in the Osborne collection contains neither prologue nor epilogue. Of the four plays in the Arbury collection, The Emperor's Favourite includes only a prologue, while the other three plays feature both prologues and epilogues. Ghismonda and Guiscardo, a tragedy based on Boccaccio's Decameron 4.1, contains an eighteen line prologue and a twelve line epilogue; The Twice Chang' d Friar, a comedy based on Decameron 4.2, contains a twenty-two line prologue and a fourteen line epilogue; The Emperor's Favourite, a Roman tragedy that draws from Juvenal's and Suetonius's descriptions of Nero's favourite Crispinus, contains a sixteen line prologue; and The Humorous Magistrate, an original comedy, features a twenty-four line prologue and a thirteen line epilogue. 1 These speeches are reproduced in full in the appendix. Framing texts like those attached to the Arbury plays have garnered little critical attention. Recent scholarship has begun to reverse this neglect and has challenged traditional assumptions that framing speeches are merely uncomplicated introductions and conclusions to the only material of real interest. Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann maintain that these speeches often go beyond the 'conventional and supplicatory' 2 and serve, in fact, as 'interactive, liminal, boundary-breaking entities that negotiated charged thresholds between and among, variously, playwrights, actors, characters, audience members, playworlds, and the world outside the playhouse'. 3 Tiffany Stern, studying the speeches in printed dramas that would have been performed in London on the stages of the commercial theatres, suggests that prologues and epilogues were a 'temporary form' that convey 'just how local and detailed the critiques [of plays] could be'. 4 In the most recent and comprehensive study of prologues and epilogues, Brian Schneider argues for the 'extraordinary experimentation to which prologues and epilogues were

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