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From Performance to Print in Shakespeare's England
Edited by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel
Palgrave Macmillan
£50
Dateline: 23rd October, 2006
The next time you open a copy of Shakespeare's Complete Works
spare a thought for Edward Blount, whose publication of the 1623 First
Folio saved many of the Bard's plays from oblivion. Blount must have
assumed that if the magic name of Shakespeare could pack them in at
the playhouse, it would also ensure that a collection of his works would
sell like hot cakes. Unfortunately, at approximately £1 per copy
the book was much more expensive than a hot cake. Not only did the First
Folio fail to become a bestseller, the high cost of its production almost
certainly contributed to the failure of Blount's business.
This curious and somehow rather embarrassing fact is the first of many
surprises awaiting the reader of From Performance to Print in Shakespeare's
England. Twelve essays by some of today's leading Shakespeare scholars
are divided into four sections, each dealing with an aspect of the complex
transition of Shakespeare's works from the theatre to the reading public.
In the first section, Performing the Book, Stephen Orgel examines
the ways in which publishers tried to catch the reader's eye by drawing
attention to the book's genre rather than its author. As evidence that
printing did not finalize the text of a play, Orgel produces a copy
of F1 marked up for performance no later than the 1630's. Three of the
plays have been brutally cut and most of what we now think of as pivotal
scenes have disappeared completely! Gary Taylor relates how the bookshops
of Shakespeare's day served much the same function as eighteenth century
coffee houses - they were places for men to meet, chat and discuss the
books on display. John Jowett's essay sheds new light on the puzzling
Timon of Athens masque in which a group of female dancers are
simultaneously Amazons and personifications of the five senses, and
Gabriel Egan suggests that touring, far from being a company's last
resort when the London theatres were closed, was in fact a well organised
and profitable venture.
The second section, Editing and Performance, opens with Jeffrey
Masten's examination of boy-centred eroticism in the playhouse and in
print. Shakespeare's gender-bending in Twelfth Night was nothing
compared to that of Beaumont's Philaster, where the fact that
the boy Bellario is actually a girl called Euphrasia is revealed only
at the end of the play (creating a tricky problem for the publishers
of dramatis personae and cast lists). A.R. Braunmuller looks
at the way modern editors have sought to influence the performance of
Shakespeare's plays by tinkering with punctuation, his pet hates being
the use of exclamation marks - very rare in F1 and the quartos - and
unnecessary italics and quotation marks. Wendy Wall's essay on Romeo
and Juliet's contorted line of descent from Shakespeare's foul papers
to F1 and five quartos draws parallels between the degeneration of the
text, the titular disobedient children and the quasi-incestuous casting
that has dogged the play over the years.
Living Theatre opens with Lynn Enterline's essay on the influence
of grammar school education on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The
aim of early exposure to the highly theatrical arts of imitation, translation,
rhetoric and gesture may have been to produce articulate and self-confident
gentlemen, but it was also invaluable training for fledgling actors
and dramatists. Next, Anston Bosman analyses two artefacts from Germany
- a painted curtain from an 18th century theatre in Leipzig and the
title page of a 1620 volume of English plays translated into German
"together with Pickle-Herring", a prankster originally from
Münster but taken over and presumably Anglicised by English actors
touring in Germany. Lastly Richard Preiss takes issue with the customary
division of Shakespeare's comic characters into unruly adlibbing clowns
and, after Robert Armin joined his company, sophisticated witty fools.
In the final section, Shakespeare Reconstructed, Margreta de
Grazia examines the very different ways in which critics and audiences
from the 18th to the 20th centuries have reacted to Hamlet's desire
not only to murder Claudius, but to ensure that his uncle's soul will
be damned. Changing perceptions of Shakespeare are also the subject
of the book's last essay, Gordon McMullen's fascinating look at "lateness"
- the special quality critics have discerned in Beethoven's late quartets
and Titian's late paintings - in The Winter's Tale, The Tempest,
Cymbeline and Pericles. McMullen explains that this phenomenon,
invisible to Shakespeare's early editor Edmund Malone, had become a
commonplace by the end of the 19th century. It took Granville Barker's
revolutionary staging of The Winter's Tale in 1912 to reveal
that this play and the other "romances" are in fact challenging
avant-garde works, not picturesque fairy tales.
As is inevitable in a book aimed at an academic audience, some of the
essays in From Performance to Print are more accessible than
others to the general reader; however, a little extra concentration
is a small price to pay for such a wealth of information. The book is
also unusually rich in illustrations - fifty of them, in fact, most
of which I for one have not seen reproduced anywhere else. Some of the
plays by Shakespeare's lesser-known contemporaries sound so intriguing
it seems odd that they are all but forgotten today, and one in particular
- Beaumont's Philaster - simply cries out to be performed at
the RSC's Swan Theatre. From Performance to Print is a welcome
addition to Palgrave's Redefining British Theatre History series.
J D Atkinson
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