Panizzi Lectures, 1998: Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe (review)

The Panizzi Lectures, 1998: Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe. By Roger Chartier. London: British Library, 1999. x, 73 pp. £16. ISBN 0-7123-4635-X.

Roger Chartier's The Panizzi Lectures, 1998: Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe is a set of three essays that were originally delivered as part of a lecture series established in 1985 to honor the Victorian librarian Sir Anthony Panizzi. Chartier's volume is small, and his essays exhibit a rhetorical looseness that signals their origin as oral performances. In them, however, Chartier celebrates the importance of print culture in the broadest terms, illustrating the processes by which early modern (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) playwrights turned stage productions into printed works, yet insisting on the performative character of printed works themselves.

In his opening essay, "Text as Performance," Chartier describes print culture as distinguished by what he calls a "lasting nostalgia for a lost orality, for the text as performance" (10). Drawing on the work of classicist Florence Dupont, Chartier characterizes the "transformation of the ritual poetic word into a literary monument" (8) as fraught with interpretive dangers. The greatest of these involves seeing texts--anachronistically, in the case of the early modern period--as always meant for silent and solitary readers. Against this view, Chartier suggests that the work of textual studies is, in large measure, the work of tracing orality in print; plays, as creations originally meant for performance in the most obvious sense, provide the best opportunities for doing this.

The next two essays illustrate some of the ways in which Chartier reads early modern plays as oral performances. Where the first essay is for the most part speculative (if evocative), the next two are concrete, sometimes stunningly so. The careful readings of individual editions (at least one of them textually odd) that Chartier offers in the second essay, "Copied Onely by the Eare," are the best parts of his volume. Here, for example, Chartier examines a pirated Lyons edition of Molière's Georges Dandin and concludes, from the presence of some slightly vulgar dialogue that does not appear in editions authorized by Molière, that the text was memorially reconstructed from performance--a technique of textual transmission that "has been largely ignored by French literary history" (45). Chartier notes that this dialogue may have been improvised in the provincial performance(s) attended by the scribe, or it may have been present in versions of the play performed in more courtly venues but suppressed by Molière when he created his authorized editions. In any case, the added dialogue points up the differences of aesthetic register that exist between a courtly and a provincial performance and between an authorized and a pirated text.

Chartier begins his third essay, "The Stage and the Page," with the assertion that in early modern Europe "there was a widespread [authorial] reluctance to print theatrical plays" (51). He then complicates this generalization by showing that publication sometimes offered playwrights real advantages: printed plays could, for example, include material excised from overlong stage productions, as did the first edition of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; they could also allow for the "pointing" of sententiae for educative purposes, as did editions of plays by Garnier in France and Jonson and Marston in England. Chartier's last essay is the weakest in the volume, however, and not merely because the discussion with which it closes--an independently fascinating excursis on the first known printed prompt book of Hamlet--bears only an obscure rhetorical relation to the remarks that precede it. The lack of a clearly articulated methodological framework that haunts the rest of the volume is a serious handicap in the third essay, which points up the disadvantages of the sweeping cross-cultural perspective that is generally one of Chartier's strengths. One wonders, throughout this essay, if the implicit parallels Chartier draws between writers like Molière in France and Webster in England shouldn...