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Rubrics and didascalie in fifteenth-century dramatic texts: some observations on the evolution of the stage direction And so, let us play the game of rubrics. It is entertainingfor the researcher, though it may sometimes be harmful to his scholarly health. (A. M . N A G L E R ) In the course of research on fifteenth-century Florentine religious drama, I have had occasion to meditate on the way in which the conventions of the theatre text are established, and where those conventions might have come from. This paper presents some of m y findings, and a plea for a different approach in the future. By 'rubrics' I mean those parts of the manuscript text copied in red. In early printed texts, the formerly mbricated material is printed in black and the characters are undifferentiated. In modem editions, the rubricated material is treated as a stage direction (though the term is anachronistic), and differentiated, by the use of a different typeface, from that part of the text which is to be spoken. The Italian term for a stage direction is didascalia (from the Greek didaskalia, 'instruction, teaching'), and it is in the manuscripts of the Florentine sacre rappresentazioni that w e see the transition happening from rubric to stage direction. For the greater part of Italian religious drama, it is impossible to match surviving texts and known performances. W e have texts accompanied by more or less detailed stage directions; w e have archival material (expense books, council statutes and inventories) but no corresponding texts; or w e have descriptions (narrative accounts prepared as public or private accounts of a remarkable event) with no texts or archival material. Most links between texts, archival material and descriptions are highly suspect. A. M . Nagler argued that many critics before him had gone far beyond the limits of permissible conjecture in the reconstructions that they base on rubrics, and he advocated more caution.1 But now that critical exegesis of the dramatic 1 A. M. Nagler, The Medieval Religious Stage: Shapes and Phantoms, New Haven and London, 1976, chap. 1, 'Toying with Rubrics', pp. 1-15. The epigraph above is from p. 1 of this work. P A R E R G O N ns 13.2, January 1996—Text, Scribe, Artefact 94 N. Newbigin text has yielded its absolute priority to performance, context and social function as the legitimate concerns of scholarly research, it is more necessary than ever to exploit every possible means of giving flesh to the skeletal word of the dramatic text. I shall begin, then, by recounting how I became aware of the stage-direction problem. For over a century, the Florentine sacra rappresentazione was wholly described by Alessandro D'Ancona's three-volume anthology, Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI, of 1872, and his two-volume study, Origini del teatro italiano, first published in 1877 and extensively revised in 1891.2 Although the historical study drew extensively on manuscript sources for texts and descriptions of the medieval theatre, and D'Ancona's correspondents provided him with a huge quantity of new material for the second edition, the anthology of texts, quite extraordinarily, reproduced only printed texts, which have been reprinted almost without question in subsequent anthologies. By the time his Origini was published, if not before, D'Ancona must have known that the earliest date for his printed texts was 1485, and that most of the editions he used were published either in the 1490s or after the return of the Medici in 1512. He must also have known that most of his 'records of performance' dated to before 1478. Even so, he used late printed editions as the copy-texts for his 'edition' (without any pretension to philological correctness) of the plays, and did not at any later stage back away from thatfirstedition. I became aware that there was a 'problem' with the D'Ancona texts only by chance. While doing research on sixteenth-century Sienese comedy, I spent some time seeking out unpublished manuscripts of comedies. To this end, I combed the arcane catalogues that protect the manuscript collections of Italian libraries. I found sixteenth-century manuscripts of comedies in prose under tides...

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