Dramatic experiments

'To see the Playes of Theatre newe wrought': Electronic Editions and Early Tudor Drama

“…Unlike plays prepared for the later commercial London theatres and their heterogeneous audiences, the impetus for the performance of early Tudor drama was typically 'some larger collective activity on the part of a household, parish, town, or other institution', and thus authors and audiences 'could count on a high degree of common knowledge and group cohesion'. 41 As Leah S. Marcus has noted, this 'shared knowledge has to be recovered … before we can fully appreciate the vitality and daring of the plays', and early Tudor drama 'invariably increases in interest the more we are able to immerse ourselves in its immediate political contexts'. 42 What a print edition can only describe in static words and images, an electronic edition can recreate with rich multimedia and dynamic content.…”

“…'By reading the plays in modern editions that identify the allegorical persons by name before they speak', Marcus suggests, 'we receive a false sense of certainty about the relationship of concept to person that was probably far less readily available to early audiences'. 45 An electronic edition of John Skelton's Magnificence, to use Marcus's example, may animate the speech prefixes for Courtly Abusion and Pleasure so they dynamically interchange at given intervals, reflecting Magnificence's initial mistaking of one for the other and transferring this uncertainty to the reader. 46 If, as T.W.…”

“…Symonds announced that the Tudor moralities 'can hardly be said to lie in the direct line of evolution between the Miracle and the legitimate Drama, but rather to be an abortive side-effort, which was destined to bear barren fruit'. 2 Routinely dismissed as 'thematically humanistic, theatrically dull, and aesthetically mediocre', 3 early Tudor drama has, as Leah S. Marcus observes, typically 'interested scholars only as a transition to something else', 4 namely, the drama of Shakespeare and his immediate contemporaries. Frederick S. Boas' Introduction to Tudor Drama, for example, begins with the acknowledgment that Shakespeare 'does not stand alone in isolated majesty ', that His work is the climax, the consummation of the efforts and achievements of forerunners for a century before he began to write.…”