Stern's reading is staggeringly wide and her book - besides being both easily readable and entertaining - is full of pertinent illustrations of her various conclusions I was excited by all that I was learning This is an important study, stimulating and riveting to read, exhaustively well-researched and clearly organized.
I heartily recommend it. As well as being called 'poets', playwrights of Shakespeare's period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made up of separate documents. Using fresh print and manuscript evidence, Stern explores the piecemeal nature of the playscript in the theatre, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.
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If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime. As well as 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made from separate documents.
This book is the first to consider all the papers created by authors and theatres by the time of the opening performance, recovering types of script not previously known to have existed. With chapters on plot-scenarios, arguments, playbills, prologues and epilogues, songs, staged scrolls, backstage-plots and parts, it shows how textually distinct production was from any single unified book. And, as performance documents were easily lost, relegated or reused, the story of a play's patchy creation also becomes the story of its co-authorship, cuts, revisions and additions.
Using a large body of fresh evidence, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England brings a wholly new reading to printed and manuscript playbooks of the Shakespearean period, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.
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This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Dec 04, Mike Jensen rated it it was amazing. Edited from the introduction I'm doing for an interview with the author: David Scott Kastan said: It is remarkable and game-changing.
The book has so many new facts about the ways in which plays were staged and printed. Stern also uncovers hitherto unknown or little commented upon scraps of paper such as arguments summaries of the story given to some patrons , plot-scenarios which make it possible for so many of the plays to be co-authored, each writer followed the plot-scenario that had been written sometimes by someone else and sometimes by one of the co-authors , masques, scrolls and letters read on stage, the backstage plots used by the prompter a sort of stage manager and company to keep the performance in its correct order and get everyone on stage at the correct time.
Stern reveals that plays were composed and marketed by patching together a lot of pieces of paper, often including the dialog itself. No one has ever looked at the bits of paper in this way, this systematically, or with these primary sources.
Stern has reversed and inverted hundreds of years of scholarship in such a way that makes off-the-cuff phrases such as "from the page to the stage" turn into gibberish. This monograph blurs the lines between concepts and reality so thoroughly that I now have to reconsider whether the page even exists at all in a meaningful way. Mary-Ellen Lynn rated it it was amazing Sep 21, Emer rated it really liked it Jan 03, Geemac rated it did not like it Mar 01, As a result, Stern has to rely and does so judiciously on later playhouse procedures, continental materials, cognate forms court masques or university productions , and analogous documents—no play bills before survive, but bills advertising bear-baiting, rope-dancing, a challenge, and a puppet show do.
These analogues, along with what is said about playbills in a wide array of other sources, make for an intriguing argument about their content, graphic design, distribution, and residual traces on title pages. When documents are extant, Stern inspects them closely for the bibliographic evidence they offer concerning performance.
These features are not, Stern argues, a manifestation of the "'literising' of texts for the page," but signs [End Page ] of "a would-be stage-property and sometimes a preserved one" Generic headings like "the letter" or "a song" identified a passage to be copied in accordance with the font, layout, and other physical features including ink color the company desired. Such headings and directions around scrolls, rather than being aimed at the actors, were intended for the scribe s preparing scrolls and actors' parts.
Documents of Performance in Early Modern England
Probably copied from dictation from the playbook, these plots were "a pooled selection of warnings for things to come" in production; in tandem with the book, they helped the prompter to, as later theater professionals would say, "call the show. Whereas backstage plots were likely "the last creation before performance" , another kind of plot may have been the first. The "plot-scenario" presented a list of the characters and a scene-by-scene summary of the story from which the play was to be written.
Noting how frequently early modern writers distinguished plot from language, story from dialogue, Stern argues that the author of the scenario need not have been the author of the speeches; that the author of