The Fragmented Playtext in Shakespearean England, 1576-1642

这个项目是完成一本名为《碎片化的游戏文本》（The Fragmented Playtext）的书，这本书是与CUP签订的合同。这本开创性的书将结合经验历史主义和文本解释，以产生剧院工作过程的新视野，展示这些过程如何塑造剧本的写作和修改。除了被称为“戏剧制造者”和“诗人”之外，早期现代时期的剧作家通常被称为“戏剧修补者”，因为人们普遍认为戏剧是由零星碎片拼凑而成的：它不是一个完整的实体。戏剧的这一方面通常被现代评论家所忽视，他们把注意力集中在文本的“统一性”上，认为剧本和史诗一样连贯。从“统一”剧本的概念中产生了各种假设，例如，修改发生在整个剧本上。但《支离破碎的剧本》认为，一部戏剧的绝对完整的文本通常不会完全存在——至少不会在一个地方存在。序言和尾声通常与剧本分开写在不同的纸上，并在出版前定期更新或丢失；歌曲和信件有时与它们的剧本分开保存，并不总是能保存到印刷文本，只留下一个标记来显示它们曾经的位置（通常是标题“一首歌”“信件”）。戏剧的主体被设计为作为演员的独立线索部分编写和传播；对于一个不打算出版自己作品的剧作家来说，这些“部分”将是他希望自己的剧本被阅读和研究的形式：零零碎碎。戏剧中有用的片段被掠夺一空，观众们从他们的常用书中把剧本的片段带回家，在酒馆里闲聊和调情时完全断章取义。一些印刷文本/如本·琼森的《塞亚努斯》(1605)/甚至在选择“句子”时用引号，表明读者可能会选择记下哪些引语；这些戏剧既可以作为完整的文本呈现，也可以作为对读者价值不同的片段的集合。支离破碎的剧本文本将提供关于构成“剧本”的每个单独元素的章节，这些元素既包括纸上的，也包括表演中的。它将特别考虑组成手稿戏剧的松散纸张，说明可分离的纸张如何经常从戏剧中丢失，但在其他书籍（笑话书，诗歌书）中作为其他类型的文学作品幸存下来；它会把账单和扉页作为广告挂在伦敦的柱子上；它将展示演员的角色被带回家，送到伦敦不同的房子里进行研究、学习，有时还会进行修改。简而言之，它将展示戏剧是如何由不同固定的补丁组成的，以及当文本被重新编写和修改时，它们是如何被“补丁”改变的，而不是在整个过程中均匀地改变。由此产生了一系列问题，这些问题对编辑（应该用什么作为抄本？），对戏剧历史学家（演出的戏剧如何与印刷的戏剧联系起来？），以及对理论家（在一个从根本上说是碎片的戏剧中，每个部分是如何“创作”的，文本是什么？）来说都是至关重要的。使用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”印刷和手稿来源以及数千个“已知”来源中收集），本书探索了戏剧剧本的零碎性质，从根本上重新定义了什么是戏剧。

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.