Date/Time
Date(s) - 23 Jan 2012
5:15 PM - 6:15 PM
Location
Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us on Monday, January 23rd for the first session of the spring semester’s Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We have a splendid roster of presenters this term, starting with Penn’s own Zachary Lesser (see below). As usual, we will be meeting in the Margy and Martin Meyerson Conference Room on the second floor of the Van Pelt Library (diagonally across from the elevators); unless otherwise noted, all sessions start at 5:15 PM.
Zack Lesser writes:
“Enter the Ghost in His Nightgown: Hamlet after Q1”
In 1823, while doing some inventory of the manor house he had recently inherited in Great Barton, Suffolk, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered “a small quarto, barbarously cropped, and very ill-bound” in one of his closets. Bound together in the volume were twelve Shakespeare plays, most of them first editions, including copies of Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and several history plays. But what struck him, and the world of nineteenth-century British letters, most powerfully was an edition of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke dated 1603, a year earlier than any edition then known. This was the first quarto, the so-called “bad quarto,” of Hamlet, a version of the play strangely different from the one that had, by 1823, already become one of the most important pieces of literature in the English language. Bunbury’s discovery, in itself a historical accident, has had profound effects on our understanding of Hamlet, of Shakespeare, and of the Shakespearean text. In this paper, I examine a single stage direction that appears in the closet scene, but only in Q1: “Enter the Ghost in his nightgown.” These six new words transformed Victorian ideas about the play, both in criticism and in performance, in ways that, while largely invisible and unrecognized, continue to shape our own critical, stage, and editorial practice.
Zachary Lesser is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade and (with Alan B. Farmer) the forthcoming Print, Plays, and Popularity in Shakespeare’s England.