From Performance to Print in Shakespeare's England [Paperback]

What can the printed texts of plays from Shakespeare's time say about performance? How have printed plays been read and interpreted? This collection of essays considers the evidence of early modern printed plays and their histories of production and reception, examining a wide variety of cases, from early performance to the psychology of Hamlet.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

'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' corruptilS×