The title pages of early printed plays make various claims to authority. They often refer to the corrections, revisions, and augmentations the text has undergone from manuscript to print. They can acknowledge theatrical collaborators including acting company, performance venue, and royal patrons, and non-authorial collaborators like the stationer involved in printing the playbook. And they sometimes identify an author.
This course examines the theories and practices of Shakespeare editing and interrogates how concepts of authorship, authenticity, and originality are shaped by editorial apparatuses that have been remade over the centuries. While our broad concern will be the questions of access, authority, and authorship that arise in relation to the texts of early editions of plays by Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights, students will also receive an introduction to palaeography, early modern pointing, the practice of commonplacing, and technical terms like ‘foul papers’, ‘promptbooks’, ‘editions’, ‘reprints’, and ‘substantive’ and ‘accidental’ variants. A core section of the course will be dedicated to the collaborative conditions of theatrical production and the issue of accessing and representing integral performance features (pre- and post-play announcements and entertainments, fencing, dancing, singing, clowning improvision) that are devalued by or do not show up at all on the printed page.
Assessment
The main course assignment will require you to make your own decisions about audience, access, authority, and authenticity by editing, with full scholarly annotations, one act of an early modern play.
