Shakespeare and the Imprints of Performance

Within the study of drama, the question of how to relate text and performance - and what interpretive tools are best suited to analyzing them - is a longstanding and contentious one. Most scholars agree that reading a printed play is a means of dramatic realization absolutely unlike live performance, but everything else beyond this premise is contestable: how much authority to assign to playwrights, the extent to which texts and readings determine performance, and the capability of printed plays to communicate the possibilities of performance. Without denying that printed plays distort and fragment performance practice, this book negotiates an intractable debate by shifting attention to the ways in which these inevitable distortions can nevertheless enrich a reader's awareness of a play's performance potentialities. As author J. Gavin Paul shows, printed plays can be more meaningfully engaged with actual performance than is typically assumed, via specific editorial principles and strategies. Focusing on the long history of Shakespearean editing, he develops the concept of the "performancescape": a textual representation of performance potential that gives relative shape and stability to what is dynamic and multifarious.

Most scholars agree that reading a play is absolutely unlike live performance, but everything else about their relationship beyond this premise has proven contestable. Focusing on the editorial and textual history of Shakespeare, this book navigates these debates by exploring how textual distortions enrich a play's performance potentialities.

J. Gavin Paul is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His work has appeared in Shakespeare: The Journal of the British Shakespeare Association, The Review of English Studies, and other publications, and his doctoral dissertation won the prestigious J. Leeds Barroll Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America in 2009.

Prologue: Prospero's Storm1. Mediating Page and Stage2. Text and Performance on the Early Modern Page3. Performance and the Editorial Tradition4. Performance Commentary: Writing in the Sand5. The Critical Edition as ArchiveEpilogue: Prospero's Bands