Documents of performance in early modern England
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Bibliographic Information
Documents of performance in early modern England
Cambridge University Press, 2009
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Note
Bibliography: p. 316-345
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: playwrights as play-patchers
- 1. Plot-scenarios
- 2. Playbills and title-pages
- 3. 'Arguments' in playhouse and book
- 4. Prologues, epilogues, interim entertainments
- 5. Songs and masques
- 6. Scrolls
- 7. Backstage plots
- 8 and 9. The approved 'book' and actors' parts
- Conclusion: repatching the play.
by "Nielsen BookData"