Abstract
Perhaps I should explain my title, which has, conveniently, two halves. The first half alludes to a wise man, a sage of baseball rather than of British theater. The wonderful and perdurable pitcher Satchel Paige allegedly said, ‘Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.’ I hope to look forward in discussing editorial protocols and theatrical performance, although some glances back will be necessary, and I hope that a fair reading will not convict me of having always already been gained upon. My title’s second half describes the editor’s task when she or he is asked to record and/or to imagine how a playscript is made physical, is sounded and seen onstage.2 Sixth and lastly, let me say, defensively, that I am an eager, frequent theater-goer in both hemispheres, a friend of actors and of performance and of the criticism that arises from performance. I am also an editor of playscripts, a person who turns the printed possibilities for, or remnants of, performances into new, or renewed, proto-remnants of performances for scripts 400 years old.
Warburton: Who does not see that the integrity of the metaphor requires we should read….
Johnson: Who does not see that upon such principles there is no end of correction?1
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Notes
Warburton and Johnson are cited from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, in the Yale Edition of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 7: 186.
Michael Cordner, ‘Annotation and Performance in Shakespeare,’ Essays in Criticism 46 (1996), 289–301, from p. 289.
Michael Cordner, ‘Actors, editors, and the annotation of Shakespearian playscripts,’ Shakespeare Survey 55 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 181–98,
See also Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 3.
See, e.g., the relevant note in A. R. Braunmuller, ed., Macbeth, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997):
Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, lines 27–8 in Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Private correspondence, B. Vinklers, 16 February 2004, citing Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6.80
Quoted from Mark Eccles, ed., William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, a new variorum edition (N.Y.: Modern Language Association, 1980).
The literature is immense; see Victoria Hayne, ‘Performing social practice: the example of Measure for Measure,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), 1–29,
for instance, and, more generally, B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), 12.
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Braunmuller, A.R. (2006). On Not Looking Back: Sight and Sound and Text. In: Holland, P., Orgel, S. (eds) From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England. Redefining British Theatre History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584549_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584549_7
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