Unediting the Renaissance

Marcus, Leah S.

doi:10.4324/9780203424445

Cited by 130 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…In this case, two actors present the situation in its most economical form -one sentry relieving the other -with little apparent regard for verbatim reproduction. Shakespeare's theatre can be seen as a hybrid system, where the demand for textual fidelity is mapped onto a strong residue of orality (Marcus 1996;Weimann 2000). As we have seen, verbatim recall is a product of literate culture, and it exists only within the context of "the pursuit of interests which involve a strong concern for verbatim fidelity" (Rubin 1984: 433).…”

Section: "Authority" and The Dynamics Of Performancementioning

confidence: 96%

Languaging in Shakespeare’s theatre

Tribble

2009

P&C

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The enshrinement of William Shakespeare's plays in printed editions has led to the assumption that they were performed with an ideal of exact verbatim reproduction of the language. Evidence drawn from alternative versions of the plays circulating in Shakespeare's lifetime and from our knowledge of the material practices of playing in early modern England presents us with a very different picture. Performing practices in this period were marked by a tension between improvisational here-and-now languaging practices, including the use of gesture in playing, and a new set of expectations based upon an emergent conception of plays as written documents. Written language bias and the code view of languageNigel Love, among others, has pointed to the power of inscription technologies to shape the "code" view of language: "It is not because language is a code that we are enabled to reify our thoughts. Rather, it is because (with the crucial aid of writing) we reify our utterances -treat them as instances of more abstract entities -that we (think we) develop a code" (Love 2004: 542). As Per Linell (2005: viii) has argued, a persistent written language bias undergirds much of the discipline of linguistics and, by extension, literary studies. The implicit equation of language with written language models language as a "thing" rather than as an active, dynamic, distributed process produced by "co-acting bodies" (Cowley 2007: 577). 1 The powerful back-formation that is the written language bias has far-reaching effects. This paper examines one of these: the implicit or explicit assumption that Shakespeare's words are to be seen as codes for reproduction rather than a skeletal structure that constrains (but does not comprise or determine) performance. Written language bias would tell us that the plays consist of line and stage directions that can be reproduced in various ways, a view that the reification of the plays

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Section: "Authority" and The Dynamics Of Performancementioning

confidence: 96%

Languaging in Shakespeare’s theatre

Tribble

2009

P&C

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“…These are standard and well-14. Some recent examples of early modern textual scholarship that have helped build this body of knowledge include Marotti 1995;Marcus 1996;Brooks 2000;Holland and Orgel 2004. The list of earlier foundational works is too extensive to provide here.…”

Section: Early Modern Performance: What New Historicists Sawmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…On printing, see Eisenstein 1979;Chartier 1988;McLeod 1991;Tribble 1993;Brooks 2000. On theater companies, audiences, and performance conditions, see Marcus 1996;Stern and Palfrey 2007;Bayer 2011;Pollard and Craik 2013. 4.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Early Modern Audiences and the Pleasures of Cross-Dressed Characters

Low¹

2014

Poetics Today

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This essay constructs a genealogy for early modern audience studies, showing how this subcategory of scholarship on early modern drama responds to some of the questions raised by early New Historicist criticism. The foundation of audience studies is theater history; its methodology often derives from phenomenology-inflected theater studies, which examines perceptions of experience onstage and off. However, the assumption in New Historicist criticism that early modern drama actively participates in its culture, not merely reflecting the public sphere but actively shaping it, leads naturally to an investigation of the interactions among theater audiences and the various parts of the theater industry. To demonstrate the possibilities of audience studies, this essay includes an analysis of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's play Love's Cure; or, The Martial Maid (1647), a comic drama with a cross-dressed brother and sister. The analysis examines the construction of the play and its production history to understand the potential pleasures it offered to early modern spectators. This adds a new dimension to the gender studies that formerly dominated the scholarship on this play. The combination of several factors suggests that it was the element of femininity, both artificial and somewhat exaggerated, in performance, that made watching boy actors in the roles of young maidens so pleasurable for spectators. Among the factors involved are the playwright's decision to foreground the characters' study of appropriate gender performance; the creation of this play for the King's Men, a company whose repertoire frequently featured multiple female characters; and the peculiar acoustics of the Globe, which made alto voices particularly resonant.

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“…48 Miller, who also is sympathetic to the idea that A Shrew is a text with its own rationale, still uses the terms "compiler" and "plagiarist" and finds the play "derivative,"…”

Section: As the Topomorphical Analysis Of Doctormentioning

confidence: 99%