Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4rdrl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T18:59:03.390Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Telling the Story of Shakespeare’s Playhouse World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2007

Get access

Summary

In Albert Camus's The Plague Joseph Grand, a pedantic middle-aged clerk, uses coloured chalk to review the conjugations and declensions of Latin words: blue for variable endings and red for the part that never changes ('celle qui ne change ait jamais'). His reclusive neighbour Cottard, attracted by this logic, uses a piece of the red chalk to write a suicide note when he hangs himself ('Entrez, je suis pendu'). Though not as desperate or obsessive as Cottard and Grand, we historians of the theatre in Shakespeare's time have seen ourselves traditionally as the keepers of the red chalk. Unlike colleagues in criticism, whose protean theories force them to work in blue, we claim to have maintained the factual part of the discipline, the part that never varies.

We inherit this attitude from nineteenth century theatre historians who, with historians generally, took up the epistemology and methodology of the scientist. Looking through stationers' records, accounts of Court and civic offices, state papers, parish registers, and the correspondence of courtiers, the historians of Elizabethan drama came to see themselves as dispassionate observers of the natural laws that governed the evolution of the theatre in Shakespeare's time, and they conveyed the data of their investigations in the format of annals and chronicles. Charles W. Wallace epitomized the philosophy and discourse of choice in the field by the language in the title of his essay in 1910, 'Shakespeare and His London Associates as Revealed in Recently Discovered Documents'. The word 'Revealed' itself reveals the belief that the Truth about the past resides in documents from the past. All the historian has to do to find the Truth is to find and transcribe the documents, down to the last pson and occacōn.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare Survey , pp. 145 - 156
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×