The Fragmented Playtext in Shakespearean England, 1576-1642

该项目是完成一本书，零碎的播放文本，这是与世界杯的合同。这本开创性的书将结合经验历史主义和文本解读，对剧院的工作过程产生新的看法，展示这些过程是如何塑造剧本的写作和修改的。早期现代时期的剧作家除了被称为“戏剧制作人”和“诗人”外，还经常被称为“戏剧补丁”，因为人们普遍认为，一部戏剧是从一系列零碎的东西中拼凑而成的：它不是一个完整的实体。该剧的这一方面通常被现代评论家忽视，他们专注于文本的统一，认为剧本就像史诗一样连贯，就像一部文学作品一样。不同的假设源于“统一的”剧本的概念，例如，修改是在整个剧本上进行的，实际上是在整个剧本上进行的。但零散的剧本文本会争辩说，一部戏剧的绝对完整文本往往从来就不完全存在--至少在一个地方不存在。序言和尾声经常写在与它们两侧的戏剧分开的纸上，并在出版前定期更新或丢失；歌曲和信件有时与戏剧分开保存，并不总是留在印刷文本中，只留下一个标记来表明它们曾经在哪里(通常是标题“一首歌”“信”)。戏剧的主体被设计为作为演员单独的线索部分来编写和传播；对于一个不打算发表文本的剧作家来说，这些“部分”将是他期望自己的戏剧被阅读和研究的形式：以片段的形式。戏剧被掠夺以寻找有用的片段，观众们把他们普通书籍中的戏剧文本片段带回家，在酒馆闲聊和调情中完全断章取义地使用。一些印刷文本，如本·琼森的《塞扬努斯》(1605)，甚至用引号标明读者可能会选择记下哪些引语；这样的戏剧既表现为完整的文本，也表现为对读者有不同价值的片段的集合。零碎的戏剧文本将为构成纸面上和表演中的戏剧的每个单独的元素提供章节。它将特别考虑构成手稿戏剧的松散的纸片，说明可分开的纸片如何经常从他们的戏剧中丢失，但作为其他类型的文学在其他书籍(笑话书、诗集)中幸存下来；它将展示作为广告挂在伦敦柱子上的账单和标题页；它将展示演员们被带回家，在伦敦周围的不同房子里学习，供研究、学习，有时还会被修改。简而言之，它将展示该剧是如何由不同固定程度的片断组成的，以及结果是，当文本被重写和修改时，它们是如何在片断中被修改的，而不是在整个过程中被同等地修改。由此产生了一些对编辑(什么应该被用作文案？)、对戏剧历史学家(演出的戏剧与印刷的戏剧有什么关系？)以及对理论家(在一个从根本上是零碎的戏剧中，每个部分是如何“创作”的，以及文本是什么？)至关重要的一些问题，这本书使用了大量关于早期现代戏剧和早期现代文本的新证据(从1000多个“新的”印刷和手稿来源以及数千个“已知”来源)，探索了戏剧中戏剧文本的零碎性质，从根本上重新定义戏剧到底是什么。

The project is to complete a book, The Fragmented Playtext, which is under contract to CUP. This groundbreaking book will combine empirical historicism and textual interpretation to produce a new vision of the theatre's working processes, showing how those processes have shaped the writing and revising of playtexts.As well as being called 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were frequently known as 'play-patchers' because of the common perception that a play was pieced together out of a collection of odds and ends: it was not a single whole entity. This aspect of the play is generally ignored by modern commentators who concentrate on the 'unity' of a text, believing that a playbook is as coherent a piece of literature as an epic poem. Various assumptions arise from the notion of a 'unified' playtext, for instance, the idea that revision happened over and indeed on a whole and entire play. But The Fragmented Playtext will argue that an absolutely complete text of a play often never entirely existed -- at least, not in one place. Prologues and epilogues were frequently written on separate pieces of paper from the plays they flanked, and were regularly updated or lost before publication; songs and letters were sometimes kept separately from their play and have not always survived to the printed text, leaving just a mark to show where they once were (usually the heading 'a song' 'the letter'). The body of a play was designed to be written and disseminated as separate cued parts for actors; for a playwright who did not intend to publish his text, those 'parts' will have been the form in which he expected his play to be read and studied: in bits. Plays were plundered for their useful fragments, and members of the audience took home snippets of playtext in their commonplace books to use entirely out of context in tavern-chatter and flirtations. Some printed texts / like Ben Jonson's Sejanus (1605) / even select their 'sententia' with quotation-marks, indicating which quotations the reader might choose to note down; such plays present themselves both as whole texts and as collections of fragments of varying worth to the reader.The Fragmented Playtext will provide chapters on each separate element that constituted a 'play' both on paper and in performance. It will consider, in particular, the loose bits of paper that made up a manuscript play, illustrating how often separable sheets became lost from their plays but survived in other books (jest-books, poetry-books) as other types of literature; it will show bills and title-pages hanging together on the posts of London as advertisements; it will show actors' parts taken home to separate houses around London to be studied, learned and, sometimes, altered. In short, it will show how the play was made up of patches of varying fixity and how, as a consequence, when texts were reworked and revised, they were altered in 'patches' rather than equally throughout. Arising from this are a number of questions of fundamental importance to the editor (what should be used as a copytext?), to the theatre historian (how does the play performed relate to the play printed?), and of essential importance also to the theoretician (in a play that is at its root fragmentary, how 'authored' is each section, and what is the text?)Using a huge body of fresh evidence about early modern theatre and early modern texts (garnered from over 1000 'new' printed and manuscript sources as well as several thousand 'known' sources), the book explores the piecemeal nature of the playtext in the theatre, redefining in fundamental ways what a play actually is.