The Book of the Play

Abstract

In an essay called ‘Acting Scripts, Performing Texts’ I raised some large questions about the relation of text to performance in early modern drama, and some very specific ones about what kind of evidence printed texts provide, since these are for the most part all that survive of the plays of Shakespeare’s era. We have used the evidence of texts to attempt both to reconstruct the playwright’s original manuscript, and to trace the archeology of performance and reconceive what the Elizabethan spectator saw in the theater. These, however, are two very different things, and we must be clear about the differences if we are to understand, for example, what ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ can mean in relation to texts that can rarely be performed in less than three hours or more, or discern the implications of Jonson’s complaint that the actors misrepresented his plays. So the largest question is really the most basic one: what is the play? Is it what the actors do, or what the author writes? And if the play is not its text (I won’t say ‘simply’ or ‘merely’ its text, because there seems to me nothing simple or mere about the issue), what does the text of a play — the printed text, as it almost invariably is — represent? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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