Tiffany Stern

Renaissance Drama: Future Directions

The (re)discovery most important of history. development This is in not our the field result latterly of a single has been piece our of (re)discovery of history. This not th result of a single piece of work, a single author, or even a single thought: it has been a product of the Internet. The kind of research once possible for only a privileged academic with access to a rare book library can now be undertaken by anyone whose university subscribes to EEBO (Early English Books Online), ECCO (EighteenthCentury Collections Online), or LION (Literature Online); it can be dabbled in by professional academic, graduate, and undergraduate alike. New and further historical material is being mounted online all the time. Recently the Burney Collection Database has been placed on the Net, making most eighteenthand nineteenth-century newspapers available for reading and scanning; seventeenth-century English Civil War corantos and pamphlets can be accessed through the online Thomason Collection. In addition, large quantities of early performance ephemera from the Bodleian Librarys John Johnson Collection has now been digitized and made available; while all the theatrical manuscripts belonging to the entrepreneur and theater owner Philip Henslowe and his actor son-in-law Edward Alleyn are accessible through the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project. That means that almost all printed, and some manuscript, literature from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century is, in facsimile form, now widely available to anyone whose university has paid a subscription

Shakespeare's Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context (review)

Most modern Shakespeare dictionaries try to produce range—in both subject and definition. Early modern dictionaries and word glosses, on the other hand, were written by one person and unabashedly represented the character, opinions, and concerns of their author. So John Rider defining the word “Pope” in his Riders Dictionarie (1606) frankly expressed his belief that the man was “Sathans chiefe vicar on earth” (sig. T6v).1 Reading Hugh Richmond’s Shakespeare’s Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context is like reading Rider’s Dictionarie: it is similarly idiosyncratic, opinionated, touchingly personal, and relentlessly single focused. For Richmond’s book is an account, in dictionary form, of its author’s lifetime of thinking about Shakespeare: it covers the books he read and by which he was influenced, the productions he saw in Berkeley or at the “restored” Globe, and the themes around which he constructed his own articles. All this information is presented in alphabetical order, with word choice as quirky as everything else, so that “sharers” is followed by “shirt,” “short lines,” and “Mrs Sarah Siddons.” When the dictionary functions as a Shakespeare glossary, it is clear and useful; explanations for such words as “hobby-horse” and “rack” are well-written and precise. Moreover, the book provides the reader with plenty of opportunities for the serendipitous discovery of forgotten (or never-known) words or definitions: that the Cockney “wotcher” is a corruption of “what cheer?” (98), or that “thrum” in “Cut thread and thrum” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.286),2 has a precise meaning (“the tuft ending a warp where it is attached to the frame of a weaving machine”) (460). When the dictionary offers to be a guide to the actors, theaters, or critics of Shakespeare, however, the extent (and limitation) of its range of references becomes an issue. The names Richmond chooses are at once one of the book’s pleasures and one of its chief irritations. So a relatively obscure eighteenth-century scholar such as Maurice Morgann, the Baconian, is given a section (302–3), as is the nineteenth-century Baconian James Spedding (432–33), while there are no entries for important and influential Shakespearean critics of the same period—Edmund Malone, Samuel Johnson, or even John Payne Collier. The same strangeness governs the choice of his-