Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on documentation
- List of abbreviations
- 1 “Let it be hid”: price tags, trade-offs, and economies
- 2 Rescripting Shakespeare's contemporaries
- 3 Adjustments and improvements
- 4 Inserting an intermission/interval
- 5 What's in an ending? Rescripting final scenes
- 6 Rescripting stage directions and actions
- 7 Compressing Henry VI
- 8 The tamings of the shrews: rescripting the First Folio
- 9 The editor as rescripter
- Conclusion: what's not here
- Appendix: productions cited
- Notes
- Index
6 - Rescripting stage directions and actions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on documentation
- List of abbreviations
- 1 “Let it be hid”: price tags, trade-offs, and economies
- 2 Rescripting Shakespeare's contemporaries
- 3 Adjustments and improvements
- 4 Inserting an intermission/interval
- 5 What's in an ending? Rescripting final scenes
- 6 Rescripting stage directions and actions
- 7 Compressing Henry VI
- 8 The tamings of the shrews: rescripting the First Folio
- 9 The editor as rescripter
- Conclusion: what's not here
- Appendix: productions cited
- Notes
- Index
Summary
“with a quaint device the banquet vanishes”
The Tempest, 3.3.52From the eighteenth century to the present the editors of Shakespeare's plays have treated the stage directions found in the Folio and the various Quartos with considerably less respect than the dialogue. In his landmark 1790 edition Edmund Malone decided “that the very few stage-directions which the old copies exhibit, were not taken from our author's manuscripts, but [were] furnished by the players” and therefore announced: “All the stage-directions therefore throughout this work I have considered as wholly in my power, and have regulated them in the best manner I could.” Although recent editors may not be as openly scornful, in today's editions the original signals are regularly moved, adjusted, or reconfigured. In an influential essay E. A. J. Honigmann has justified such a practice by arguing that, since “Shakespeare was careless about stage-directions,” the editor or reader “cannot avoid giving a higher authority to the ‘implied stage-directions’ of the dialogue than to directions printed as such,” for “our general understanding of a character … or of what can and cannot be done successfully in the theatre … must always override the printed stage-directions.” Honigmann concludes: “We have a great opportunity, and a great responsibility: to see the plays, not as editors direct, but as we would wish to direct them ourselves.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rescripting ShakespeareThe Text, the Director, and Modern Productions, pp. 136 - 165Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002