Leah S. Marcus

Textual and theatrical Shakespeare : questions of evidence

Shakespeare commentary and performance today present us with a multiplicity of interpretations constructed and reconstructed from such diverse origins that the underlying evidence has become hidden by layers of reconceptualized meanings. What can or should count as evidence for the claims made by scholars and performers, and how should this evidence be organized? In Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare ten essayists answer these stimulating questions by exploring the possibilities for and the constraints upon useful communication among critics who come to Shakespeare from so many different directions. Bridging the stage-versus-page gap between actors, critics, and scholars, the contributors in this carefully crafted yet energizing book reflect upon the many kinds of evidence available to us from Shakespeares various incarnations as historical subject and as our contemporary as well as from his amphibious occupation of both stage and study. The constraints of such differences become arbitrary as each essayist clarifies the sources of this evidence; the seemingly rigid boundaries of scholarly and creative discipline are crossed and redrawn.

Herrick's Noble Numbers and the Politics of Playfulness

~ half a century ago, by the apparent childishness of the poet’s conception of Christianity.1 Despite its title, the collection seems to lay little claim to nobility. Herrick‘s “pious pieces” are notoriously shortwinded, over half of them a mere two to four lines long. Compared to the religious poems of a Donne or a Herbert, they appear thin, flat, and barren of intellectual or psychological complexity, Herrick places much greater emphasis on Christianity’s shimmering externals-the glow of candlesticks and the heady odor of incense-than on its substance. The most ambitious of his “noble numbers” are those singled out on the 1647 title page, in which he “sings the Birth of his Christ: and sighes for his Suuiours suffering on the Crosse.”2 But even these poems curiously reduce the emo-

Collaboration in the Parliamentary Speeches of Queen Elizabeth I

This chapter studies Queen Elizabeth I’s speeches before Parliament and parliamentary delegations as collaborative works. All of her speeches are “collaborative” in the form they have come down to us because our best records of them, in the absence of recording devices, are usually contemporary transcriptions by auditors. These are often lively and quite similar from one transcriber to another, which suggests that the transcriptions are fairly faithful to the speech as actually presented. Less reliable are the versions prepared at court for publication: paradoxically, these versions, likely revised by members of her government but possibly also by Elizabeth I herself, are typically much more abstruse and complex in terms of syntax, lacking much of the glowing language and elegant simplicity of the speeches as recorded by auditors. Thus, collaboration has both enabled our experience of a set of orations that were very highly valued by Elizabeth’s contemporaries, but also allows us to see that in the speeches destined for publication, for which we have the fullest documentation, the published version was often considerably less “Golden” than the speech as the queen is likely to have delivered it.

Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton

This is a book review. This is the definitive version as supplied by the publisher (© Modern Humanites Research Association).