Abstract
(Un)editing with non-fictional bodies turns to debates around ‘theatricality’ to unmake and remake the playtext and decentre the fixity of the script.1 The occasion for this attempt or chapter is the recent attention being paid to the two manuscript versions of The Humorous Magistrate which has led us to think through the implications of editing, unediting and (un)editing for a text that has never before been edited, and at the same time, to bring to scholarly editing the impact of a complex and sophisticated understanding of the theatre. The two versions of the play, The Humorous Magistrate, are found in Arbury Hall A414, Warwickshire, and Osborne MsC 132.27, University of Calgary Special Collections.2 Dating from the early seventeenth-century, the two versions represent distinct stages in the composition of the play: the Arbury manuscript presents a heavily worked over and revised early version of the play, and the Osborne presents a more polished presentation copy and incorporates many of the revisions witnessed in the Arbury (and some other revisions, as well). The play itself is a five-act romantic comedy set in rural England, featuring a corrupt Justice Thrifty, his daughter and her suitor, and several other comic characters who explore the themes of love, loyalty, and familial and marital duty.
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Notes
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jurs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006).
Both versions have been edited for the Malone Society and published in separate volumes in 2011. Margaret Jane Kidnie (ed.), The Humorous Magistrate (Arbury) (Manchester: Malone Society, 2011).
Jacqueline Jenkins and Mary Polito (eds), The Humorous Magistrate (Osborne) (Manchester: Malone Society, 2011).
Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Near Neighbours: Another Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript of The Humorous Magistrate’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 13 (2007): 187–211.
Alexander Pope, Works of Mr. William Shakespeare (London: Jacob Tonson, 1725) vol. I, 155.
This is a ‘performativity’ that does something different to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as identities constructed iteratively through complex citational practices (Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge, 1993), and is closer to, but still different from, Diana Taylor’s sense of the ‘performatic’ that mediates between hegemonic discourse and hegemonic agency (The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For a short critique of the latter, see L. Hunter ‘Performatics: making a noun out of an adjective’, Performance Research 13.2 (2008): 7. We use ‘performativity’ to signify the allegorical stance, work in process, not yet culturally bound.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
Jacques Derrida, ‘Interview with Julia Kristeva’, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), in which the discussion of ‘différance’ outlines the process of making difference in the present of the reader’s reading; see also his Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) for discussions of ‘sacred allegory’. Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’, Aspen 5–6 (1967) is possibly the most well-known claim for the textual implications of the reader’s reading.
See Maureen Bell et al. (ed.), Reconstructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 231.
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’ Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83. Reprinted in Kenneth Carpenter (ed.), Books and Society in History (New York and London: R.R. Bowker, 1983) 3–26.
See Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels, Negotiating Shakespeare’s Language in Romeo and Juliet: Approaches to Reading from Criticism, Editing and the Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) ch. 3; published with a scholarly edition of Romeo and Juliet, at http://www.romeoandjulietedition.com.
It is striking that there is so little work on the phenomenology of reading as an activity. Allegorical reading as a somatic activity is not discussed by Derrida or deMan. This absence is one problematic gap between the literary and the theatrical sense of materiality, and the rather more detailed attention paid to it by theatricality may eventually open up possibilities in literary criticism. Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).
For a classic definition and thorough analysis of ‘representation’, see Stuart Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’, in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997) 13–74.
W. B. Worthen, ‘Globe Performativity’, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 79–116.
Randall McLeod (as Random Cloud), ‘What’s the Bastard’s Name?’, in George Walton Williams (ed.), Shakespeare’s Speech-Heading: Speaking the Speech in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997) 135.
G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Kirsten Inglis and Boyda Johnstone, ‘“The Pen lookes to be canoniz’d”: John Newdigate III, Author and Scribe’, Early Theatre 14.2 (2011): 27–61.
Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Pamela Sambrook and Peter Brears, The Country House Kitchen, 1650–1900: Skills and Equipment for Food Provisioning (Stroud: Sutton, 1996).
Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997) 1–6.
Peter Brears, Cooking and Dining in Medieval England (Blackawton: Prospect Books, 2008).
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© 2014 Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels
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Hunter, L., Lichtenfels, P. (2014). (Un)Editing with (Non-)Fictional Bodies: Pope’s Daggers. In: Jenkins, J., Sanders, J. (eds) Editing, Performance, Texts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320117_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320117_10
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