Text and Performance on the Early Modern Page

Abstract

Having offered some preliminary suggestions as to the potential usefulness of performancescape, I must now confront its interpretive limitations, which become apparent when the term is applied to plays as they were printed in the early modern period. Given that performancescape is meant to help triangulate the dynamic relationship between editors, printed texts, and readers, early modern methods of textual production, printing practices, and modes of reception introduce a number of complicating factors that restrict the term’s scope and limit its utility. Editing—as we think of the task today—can only be applied anachronistically to the early modern publishing trade; this is not to say that texts printed during this time went unmediated, only that the types of mediation that took place were not discrete activities systematically aimed at emendation, organization, or elucidation. That mediation took place is undeniable; indeed, the understanding that mediation always takes place—that all texts are mediated texts, or as Alan Farmer writes, “those who participate in the production and transmission of a text inevitably affect its final form” (164)—is beyond dispute. In the case of drama, the forces brought to bear on the transformation of written manuscripts into printed books are well documented. Scribal and compositor studies initiated by the New Bibliographers have demonstrated the ways in which a range of individuals could modify— perhaps emend, perhaps corrupt—texts in various ways, though it is only in rare instances that these modifications can be considered to have been executed with the same rigor or motivated by the same concerns that we now associate with editorial activity.¹