From Performance to Print in Shakespeare's England: (Redefining British Theatre History)

Published in association with the Huntington Library, Redefining British Theatre History is a five-volume series under the general editorship of Peter Holland. The series brings together major practitioners in theatre history in order to establish ways in which previous assumptions need fundamental questioning and to initiate new directions for the field. The series aims to establish a new future for theatre history, not least by making theatre historians aware of their own history, current practice and future. What can the printed texts of plays from Shakespeare's time tell us about performance? How were plays marketed? How have printed plays been read and interpreted for performance? The essays in this collection, now available in paperback for the first time, freshly consider the evidence of early modern printed plays and their histories of production and reception. Bringing together a group of major scholars in the field who are concerned to rethink the nature of the evidence and the modes of interpretation for print materials in relation to theatre history, the essays examine a wide variety of cases, from the texts of Romeo and Juliet to the masque in Timon of Athens, from the ways title-pages refer to early modern performance to the psychology of Hamlet, from grammar-school beatings to the London bookshops of the Renaissance.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Series Introduction: Redefining British Theatre History; P.Holland Introduction: Printing Performance; P.Holland PART I: PERFORMING THE BOOK The Book of the Play; S.Orgel Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623; G.Taylor From Print to Performance: Seeing the Masque in Timon of Athens; J.Jowett 'As It Was, Is, or Will be Played: Title-pages and the Theatre Industry to 1610'; G.Egan PART II: EDITING AND PERFORMING Editing Boys: The Performance of Genders in Print; J.Masten On Not Looking Back - Sight and Sound and Text; A.R.Braunmuller De-Generation: Editions, Offspring, and Romeo and Juliet; W.Wall PART III: LIVING THEATRE Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools; L.Enterline History Between Theatres; A.Bosman Robert Armin Do the Police in Different Voices; R.Preiss PART IV: SHAKESPEARE RECONSTRUCTED Hamlet's Smile; M.de Grazia 'The Technique of it is Mature': Inventing the Late Plays in Print and in Performance; G.McMullan Index

About the Author :
PETER HOLLAND is McMeel Family Professor of Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He was Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon from 1997 to 2002. Among his publications, he is General Editor for the series Redefining British Theatre History (Palgrave Macmillan) and Oxford Shakespeare Topics and Editor for Shakespeare Survey. STEPHEN ORGEL is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, USA. His most recent books are Imagining Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), The Authentic Shakespeare (2002) and Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (1996). He has edited The Tempest and The Winter's Tale in The Oxford Shakespeare, and is the General Editor, with A.R. Braunmuller, of the new Pelican Shakespeare.

Review :
'In this timely volume, a dozen essays illuminate a dozen perspectives on how print culture impinges on the actor's interpretation as much as the critic's. The contributors eclipse the polemic of drama versus theatre - and its two-way bias of literary text versus enlivened social act - to explore the use of texts as scripts, objects, national icons, and records of erasure, all manifestations of issues debated by editors, artists, and readers from the Renaissance to our own time. Challenging the status of a playtext within the history of the book, these essays delve into the idea of texts' corruptibility or completeness in print and performance by identifying how to attend to their materiality, commercial viability, trans-cultural mutability, and epochal interpretive history in the playhouse, bookshop, library, and classroom.' - Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Northwestern University, USA 'From Performance to Print is a remarkably important book, not only in its reassessment of the historiography of British theatre history, but also as a glimpse into the future of performance-based Shakespearean studies...consists of a dozen engaging, informative, and refreshing essays written by established practitioners of Shakespeare's work. Such is the quality of the contributions that they are all worth praising...' - Natalie Aldred, SHARP News