Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare

Abstract

Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare argues for editing Shakespeare's plays in a new way, without pretending to distinguish authorial from theatrical versions. Drawing on the work of the influential scholars A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg, Werstine tackles the difficult issues surrounding 'foul papers' and 'promptbooks' to redefine these fundamental categories of current Shakespeare editing. In an extensive and detailed analysis, this book offers insight into the methods of theatrical personnel and a reconstruction of backstage practices in playhouses of Shakespeare's time. The book also includes a detailed analysis of nineteen manuscripts and three quartos marked up for performance - documents that together provide precious insight into how plays were put into production. Using these surviving manuscripts as a framework, Werstine goes on to explore editorial choices about what to give today's readers as 'Shakespeare'.

From directions to descriptions: Reading the theatrical Nebentext in Ben Jonson’s Workes as an authorial outlet

“…The studies on stage directions in early modern English drama carried out by Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson (who co-wrote their seminal A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580-1642) claim that the nebentextual stage directions are transcriptions of a specific dialect common to all theater practitioners-the "theatrical vocabulary," Dessen terms it-and that "in reading one of the early printed texts of a Shakespeare play, we enter in the middle of a conversation-a discourse in a language we only partly understand-between a dramatist and his actorcolleagues" (1995, 5;Ichikawa 2013, 17-25). This idea of lay readers "eavesdropping" on a jargon-ridden dialogue among playhouse professionals fits in well with Grace Ioppolo's (2006) theory that theatrical manuscripts were written and rewritten by playwrights working in close quarters with acting companies, which recently received substantial support from Paul Werstine's (2012) reappraisal of New Bibliography's ideas that underlined most of twentiethcentury early modern manuscript studies; and Tiffany Stern's (2009) work on the paper trail of the early modern English playhouse also allows for such a scenario.…”

Shakespeare and the Impact of Editing

“…This consensus was fundamental to the New Bibliography, and in the 1980s and 1990s it was subject to a series of criticisms arising from its overly specific c;haracterisation of the differences between authorial papers and those used to run a play in performance. 8 More generally, the editorial confidence that led New Bibliographers to interfere extensively in the texts they were editing, especially in correcting what they perceived as errors, has come to be seen as editorial hubris.…”

Beyond Materiality in Shakespeare Studies

“… Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ).…”