Shakespeare and the imprints of performance
By: J. Gavin Paul
Series: History of Text Technologies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9781137438430
Subjects: Dramatic production; Theater; Production and direction; Drama; Technique; Books and reading; Theater audiences; Psychology
Description: Within the study of drama, the question of how to relate text and performance - and what interpretive tools are best suited to analyzing them - is a longstanding and contentious one. Most scholars agree that reading a printed play is a means of dramatic realization absolutely unlike live performance, but everything else beyond this premise is contestable: how much authority to assign to playwrights, the extent to which texts and readings determine performance, and the capability of printed plays to communicate the possibilities of performance. Without denying that printed plays distort and fragment performance practice, this book negotiates an intractable debate by shifting attention to the ways in which these inevitable distortions can nevertheless enrich a reader's awareness of a play's performance potentialities. As author J. Gavin Paul shows, printed plays can be more meaningfully engaged with actual performance than is typically assumed, via specific editorial principles and strategies. Focusing on the long history of Shakespearean editing, he develops the concept of the "performancescape": a textual representation of performance potential that gives relative shape and stability to what is dynamic and multifarious. --Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-221) and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: Prospero's storm; title: Mediating page and stage; title: Text and performance on the early modern page; title: Performance and the editorial tradition; title: Performance commentary: writing in the sand; title: The critical edition as archive; title: Epilogue: Prospero's bands.