From Performance to Print in Shakespeare's England (review)

From Performance to Print in Shakespeare's England is the third collection of essays in a series that, if the hopes of its general editor, Peter Holland, are fulfilled, will in its five completed volumes offer 'a significant review of where we are and what we think we are doing' when we engage in theatre history (p. xiv). Each volume of the series — Redefining British Theatre History — is planned to come together on the back of a conference hosted by the Huntington Library, an association that extends to the spines and title-pages of the finished volumes, Theorizing Practice (2003) and From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (2004). The trajectories implied by the two non-theoretical titles nicely signal the extent to which theatre history in the sophisticated forms offered here is now by self-conception as much a bibliographical discipline as it is purely dramaturgical, something of as much interest to readers of The Library as of Theatre Notebook (to take Peter Holland's example, p. xiv). The necessary questions to link these two areas of enquiry are asked by John Jowett, in his chapter on the masque in the collaborative Timon of Athens: 'How do we generate something that we may, perhaps over-optimistically, refer to as "knowledge" of early modern performance? To what extent can this knowledge be grounded in the printed texts of plays?' (p. 73). The strength of the collection is in its willingness to open out these questions to enquiry, to exist within what Gabriel Egan calls the 'backwards and forward tension' (p. 93) between performance and print, rather than to reduce them to simple solutions.

The twelve chapters that make up From Performance to Print are organized across four parts: 'Performing the Book', 'Editing and Performance', 'Living Theatre', and 'Shakespeare Reconstructed'. The first part, which offers essays by Stephen Orgel, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and Gabriel Egan, has complementary merits: Orgel broods elegantly over thirty-one figures of images in and marking on books, while Taylor more abruptly performs a thought experiment — 'Imagine that you are the sort of person who buys books' (p. 55) — in order to ask questions about the indivisible contiguity of 'Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623'. Jowett carefully revisits his own editorial treatment of fifty or so lines of Timon's masque to offer a McKenzian conception of an early modern 'theatre of the mind' (p. 73), while Egan's brisk, headlong rampage into the relationship of 'Title-Pages and the Theatre Industry to 1610' covers a huge amount of ground in nineteen pages and 109 footnotes.

Jeffrey Masten's chapter on 'Editing Boys' in the book's second part takes up the 'categorical unfixity of "the boy"' (p. 117) in early modern play-texts much where Orgel earlier left it in his Impersonations, unpacking the contradictory multiplicity of actor and role, script and audience. A. R. Braunmuller takes the evidence of editorial punctuation together with editorial stage directions to think about the (most probably irreconcilable) differences between editors and actors; while Wendy Wall takes Romeo and Juliet as an opportunity to interrogate the metaphor of family relations within which many editorial terms and theories, descent and degeneration among them, are held.

In 'Living Theatre', Lynn Enterline engagingly thinks through the 'theatricality of everyday life' in the Elizabethan grammar schools, the theatricality in question here being as much erotic as educational; Anston Bosman writes about the presence of early modern English plays on stage in German in Germany, among them Der bestrafte Brudermord and its vexed relationship to the Hamlet story; and a painfully overwritten chapter by Richard Preiss, 'Robert Armin Do the Police in Different Voices', allusively loops and swirls around Armin's case — as performer, printer, and himself a print phenomenon — and the (unfortunately self-reflexive) 'power of utterance to outpace its speaker' (p. 214). 'Hamlet's Smile', Margreta de Grazia's contribution to 'Shakespeare Reconstructed', is...