Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Romances since 1958: A Retrospect
- Puzzle and Artifice: The Riddle as Metapoetry in ‘Pericles’
- ‘Pericles’ in a Book-List of 1619 from the English Jesuit Mission and Some of the Play's Special Problems
- George Wilkins and the Young Heir
- Theatrical Virtuosity and Poetic Complexity in ‘Cymbeline’
- Noble Virtue in ‘Cymbeline’
- Directing the Romances
- Shakespeare and the Ideas of his Time
- The Letter of the Law in ‘The Merchant of Venice’
- Shakespeare’s Use of the ‘Timon’ Comedy
- Re-enter the Stage Direction: Shakespeare and Some Contemporaries
- The Staircases of the Frame: New Light on the Structure of the Globe
- Shakespeare in Max Beerbohm’s Theatre Criticism
- A Danish Actress and Her Conception of the Part of Lady Macbeth
- Towards a Poor Shakespeare: The Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1975
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Re-enter the Stage Direction: Shakespeare and Some Contemporaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Romances since 1958: A Retrospect
- Puzzle and Artifice: The Riddle as Metapoetry in ‘Pericles’
- ‘Pericles’ in a Book-List of 1619 from the English Jesuit Mission and Some of the Play's Special Problems
- George Wilkins and the Young Heir
- Theatrical Virtuosity and Poetic Complexity in ‘Cymbeline’
- Noble Virtue in ‘Cymbeline’
- Directing the Romances
- Shakespeare and the Ideas of his Time
- The Letter of the Law in ‘The Merchant of Venice’
- Shakespeare’s Use of the ‘Timon’ Comedy
- Re-enter the Stage Direction: Shakespeare and Some Contemporaries
- The Staircases of the Frame: New Light on the Structure of the Globe
- Shakespeare in Max Beerbohm’s Theatre Criticism
- A Danish Actress and Her Conception of the Part of Lady Macbeth
- Towards a Poor Shakespeare: The Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1975
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Summary
The twentieth century has seen important advances in the editing of Elizabethan dramatic texts. Sir Walter Greg, the acknowledged leader of the ‘new bibliography’, took a very special interest in the plays’ stage directions which, as he demonstrated, can tell us much about their textual origins. Yet while the diversity and significance of Elizabethan stage directions is now recognised, modern editors of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have devised no new ways of dealing with them: they reprint them in their original form or adopt eighteenth-century interpolations, or, more often than not, they conflate the two, with unhappy consequences. Here I offer some preliminary remarks on modern critical editions and their stage directions (which for the purposes of this paper I take to include speech prefixes); a more systematic study would reveal other inconsistencies and errors, and could greatly help future producers of the plays.
Misplaced stage directions, (a) Every editor of Shakespeare knows that scores of stage directions have been moved in the textus receptus from their position in q and f texts, where they were inserted a line or more too early or too late. Such rearrangement elicits little comment, the usual assumption being that juggling with the text is established practice and needs no defence.
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- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 117 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1976
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