Date/Time
Date(s) - 6 Apr 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Penn Workshop in the History of Material Texts:
Please join us this coming Monday, 6 April, for the next meeting of the
Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We will convene at our usual
time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center
on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Claire M.L. Bourne
Virginia Commonwealth
University
*TITLE*
‘thou hast it *punctually* as it was acted’: The Typography of Action in
Early Modern Playbooks
*ABSTRACT*
This talk is my first sustained attempt to synthesize a new set of
observations about the page designs of early modern English playbooks and,
more specifically, about experimental ways of accounting for particular
kinds of stage action in print. The overarching argument of this talk—and
of the book I’m working on—is that typographic experimentation in early
modern playbooks correlated to theatrical innovations born from nascent
dramatic genres. Instead of treating printed plays as inferior surrogates
of performance or evidence of a drama-made-literary through its distance
from the stage, I argue that attending to playbook typography in a feedback
loop with the performed lives of early modern plays exposes how
playwrights, printers, publishers, and others involved in the London book
trade mobilized the capacity of print to render the extra-lexical dynamics
of performance intelligible on the page. In my talk, I will touch on the
range of typographic strategies used to instantiate action in print during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but my focus will be on the use of
the dash in printed plays from around 1600, when they first appeared in the
quartos of Ben Jonson’s comical satires, to 1709, when Nicholas Rowe
deployed them to different ends in *The Works of Mr William Shakespear*.
I’ll propose that that the dash emerged as a neat typographic mechanism for
instantiating the excessive corporeality of Jonson’s humorous characters in
print but that, by the end of the seventeenth-century, it was being used to
register deixis. It went from accounting for bodily disruptions in speech
to working in concert with speech to concentrate readerly attention around
moments that would have played as “points” on stage.
Some of the material I’ll be presenting to the seminar was foundational to
the conception of the book project. The rest, I’ve gathered over the course
of my year at the Folger, where I have been surveying all the playbooks in
the collection printed before 1709 for typographic convention and
experiment. That said, I welcome any and all insight, questions, and
feedback on this work-in-progress.
*BIO*
*Claire M. L. Bourne (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2013) is Assistant
Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches
courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama, the history of the book, and
theater history. During the 2014-15 academic year, she is the Charlton B.
Hinman Long-Term Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington,
DC. Her current research is situated at the intersection of print and
theatrical performance in early modern England, and she is working on a
book project that connects typographic experiments in printed plays to
theatrical innovations associated with emergent dramatic genres. Her work
has appeared or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America, and edited collections about
Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare in print post-1640. She also tweets
about her research and bookish things more generally as @roaringgirle. *
All are welcome! Please forward this email widely to any who might be
interested. Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards
should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the
library building.