Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, June 2005 (review)

Print, Manuscript, and Performance: Prospects for Early American Studies

In the 2005 James Russell Wiggins Lecture delivered at the American Antiquarian Society conference "Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America," Sandra Gustafson suggested that a "stadial theory" of production has implicitly informed understandings of the development of print culture: just as theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment proposed that civilization developed in a series of well-defined, progressively improving states, so, too, have we tended to imagine an ascending technological line of development from oral communication, to hand-lettered manuscript, to the advent of the printing press and current technologies of mass communication and digitization. According to Gustafson, this is a developmental narrative that we might do well to question. For instance, oral communication does not disappear in the age of print; rather, it coexists with print, and indeed, assumes a new role in relation to print culture. Gustafson's argument is significant insofar as it reflects a line of thought that has emerged quite powerfully from the "history of the book" studies that have emanated from the American Antiquarian Society in the past 20 years: namely, that the privileged artifact of print culture—the book—is less meaningful as a finished object than as a process.

The close scrutiny of the material production of the book to which scholars of the history of the book have subjected early American texts has had the curious effect of deconstructing the book as a solid and identifiable object—rendering the book less a coherent, reproducible item than a series of moments or scenes, including scenes of writing, production, advertising, circulation, reading, and reprinting. Indeed, one might construe these scenes as a series of performances or a set of enacted relations (staged between writer and publisher, between author and readership, between bookseller and consumer, between critic and reading public) that define a book as something far different from a lapidary text that retains its meaning from first printing through twenty-first-century incarnation as a Norton critical edition assigned in the college classroom. The term "performance"—nestled within the title of the recent American Antiquarian Society conference—thus gestures toward the study of dramatic and theatrical performance in early America, but also locates, more broadly, a performative dimension within book production and reception that disrupts the solidity of the text. As such, the rubric of performance, in relation to the history of the book, points to the many scenes of meaning-making embedded within book history and raises questions, both historical and methodological, as to how scholars might collect and analyze evidence of these scenes.

The question of how to recuperate the elusive performative relations that inform culture-making at particular historical moments is one that has both energized and bedeviled scholars of early American drama for some time. The solid fact of the text has never offered much certainty to critics and historians working in the field of theater studies: clearly, scripts are important to dramatic performance but do not tell the whole story of how meaning is conveyed at a given theatrical event. Indeed, scholarship in this field has suffered from both the excess circulation of texts—from a redundancy of play books, prompt copies, and scripts that generate a lack of clarity as to the provenance, authorship, and stability of dramatic texts over time—and from a textual absence—that is, from the lack of an extant script corresponding to a reported performance or the lack of a definitive version of a given script.

Consider, for instance, the history of a play such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro. First performed in London in 1799, the play appeared within months on the U.S. stage and in multiple print editions: it was subsequently performed every season save one in New York City from 1800 to 1863 (see Matlaw). Sheridan's play was itself an adaptation of a translation of August Von Kotzebue's play Die Spanier in Peru, oder Rolla's Tod—a play that critiqued...