The Wild Girl: A moving novel about the literary history of fairy tales

Kate Forsyth’s book, The Wild Girl, was published in Australia in 2013 but has recently been released in the United States in both hardback, Kindle, and audio versions. It tells the story of an unsung hero of the history of fairy-tales: Dortchen Wild, the sweetheart and eventual wife of Wilhelm Grimm and the origin of many of the Grimm’s tales.

Dortchen grows up with six sisters and an invalid mother under the authoritarian rule of her apothecary father, Herr Wild, near Hesse-Kassel (part of what is known today as Germany). Their next-door neighbors, the Grimms, fascinate Dortchen, who befriends the youngest Grimm, Lotte. At a very young age, Dortchen develops a crush on Lotte’s older brother, Wilhelm, who has returned from university. She assists Wilhelm and his brother, Jacob, as they work on their project to collect German folktales. Along the way, Dortchen and Wilhelm fall in love (this isn’t a spoiler, as you learn about their relationship in the first chapter). But war, poverty, and family trauma keeps them apart, even as the stories they share draw them closer together.

Forsyth incorporates a lot of historical research into The Wild Girl, describing daily German life as well as providing the larger context of the Napoleonic wars. What I found most fascinating was the ways the Grimms researched and wrote their story collections. Fairy-tale nerds like me will appreciate the behind-the-scenes look at how 19th century fairy-tale scholarship worked — and how it sometimes didn’t work, as we see when Jacob and Wilhelm’s collections do not initially sell. And I am grateful to Forsyth for another book that draws attention to the unknown female storytellers of these famous tales. Her book Bitter Greens performs this task for the women behind the “Rapunzel” tale; in The Wild Girl, we have Dortchen Wild’s legacy as a consummate storyteller unearthed and preserved. That alone is reason to celebrate this book.

But Forsyth’s own storytelling is beautiful and heartbreaking on its own. Reading The Wild Girl was, at times, hard to continue because of what a painful story Forsyth has pieced together — some details imagined, I’m sure — for Dortchen. I had to take a couple of breaks from the book because of how sad Dortchen’s life became. Some of her experiences, particularly those with her father, are visceral and traumatic. But Forsyth manages to weave them together with the fairy tales (probably worthy of trigger warnings themselves) that Dortchen tells Wilhelm, creating a frame narrative in which Dortchen expresses her own grief and horror through her storytelling. I was reminded again of Bitter Greens, and the ways in which the women claim their own voices in the face of oppression and abuse.

In the face of Dortchen’s suffering, I broke down and wept when Wilhelm presented her with a new copy of the Grimm collection. He has re-written the tale “All Kinds of Fur” to shape it into a joyful tale rather than a horrific one. He tells her that “the whole reason for telling the fairy tales is to awaken the heart. To help people believe that misfortune can be overcome and evil can be conquered.” In The Wild Girl, Forsyth has created a powerful novel espousing the idea that stories can bring hope and healing.

The audiobook was read by Kate Reading, whom I know best as the female narrator of THE WHEEL OF TIME series. Her voice, warm and cultured, conveyed Dortchen’s vulnerability perfectly, while also capturing the gravitas of other characters.

*This review first appeared on FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave the book 4 stars.

The Word Exchange: Literary Thriller with a side of Doomsaying

When I started listening to Alena Graedon's The Word Exchange on audiobook (read by Tavia Gilbert and Paul Michael Garcia), I was bowled over. The sheer beauty of Graedon's language, the book's inventive dictionary structure, its references to Alice in Wonderland, and the compellingly plausible mystery of the Word Flu hooked me from the beginning. But . . . ah, there's always a but, isn't there?

The Word Exchange is largely composed of the journal entries of two employees of the NADEL, the North American Dictionary of the English Language: Anana "Ana" Johnson and Horace "Bart" Tate. Ana's father, Doug Johnson, is the NADEL's general editor, and he has gone missing, leaving behind one clue: the word “Alice.” As Ana and Bart try to get to the bottom of Doug's disappearance, they uncover an even more sinister truth: something, or someone, is destroying language, starting by wiping out the NADEL's corpus and ending with a pandemic virus that attacks human language centers, rendering people incapable of speaking or processing language as they used to.

The world Graedon writes about in The Word Exchange is not too far removed from our world, perhaps only a few years in the future. In this world, Memes—devices something like our smart-phones, but with a lot more features, such as the ability to predict the user's needs—are ubiquitous. People hail cabs, pay bills, text, chat, and play games on them. They also use them to look up words on the titular The Word Exchange, a sort of online dictionary. So far, so familiar, right? 

Doug's disappearance coincides with the release of a new version of the Meme—the Nautilus. This device attaches directly to the user's skin, merges with their bio-matter, and does not require a screen. Instead, it projects images, smells, sounds, and other sensations directly into the brain. Oh, and it gives the user an overwhelming sense of calm and well-being. Not creepy at all . . . 

Doug, an inveterate lover of print and books, has always warned Ana against using her Meme. His worries are proven correct when Ana discovers that use of the Meme (and, to a greater extent, the Nautilus) is strongly correlated with the Word Flu, a disease that is spreading through English language speakers. Before it kills you, the Word Flu manifests as mild to severe aphasia, which Graedon has cunningly inserted into the first-person narrative of her characters. The effect is incredibly eerie. Ana and Bart both begin to use words that aren't words: "zhaman," "eezow," and "lavo." While the reader can still make out the meaning from the context, the casual, off-hand delivery of these words lends The Word Exchange a deep sense of foreboding. 

Ultimately, the Big Bad ends up being a corporation. The academics, banded together in a secret group called the Diachronic Society, help save the day and civilization by coming up with a cure for the Word Flu. Spoiler: it involves reading books. Hooray for the Humanities!

Graedon's writing is strong, lyrical, and descriptive; I was especially impressed with the verbs she chose, as in this sentence: "My neck petalled with heat." The writing was also emotionally resonant. I caught myself choking up several times as Ana described her frustration, panic, and sadness. At the same time, it was emotionally restrained. Take this example, Ana's description of two ex-lovers having coffee: "Doug said it was 'nice," Vera that it was 'pleasant," which I think means it was sad for both of them." That understatement completely captures the sense of resignation and loss I associate with meetings-with-exes.

But, after a while, the detail The Word Exchange lavishes on us became too much for me. There are so many consciously creative descriptions of people ("a laconic brunette with luminescent eyes who speaks as if she has marbles in her mouth") and of physical sensations* ("my stomach fluttered like a wind-torn plastic bag") that, at some point, it just felt like showing off. Worse, it got in the way of the story moving forward.

The main character, as quirky and lovable as she was at first, also began to grate on me. Several reviews have pointed out how TSTL Ana is and it's true; she puts herself in danger several times against the warning of her friends, her past experience, and her better judgment. But even dumber, I feel, is her attraction to either of the men in her life. Both Max, the rich cheating ex-boyfriend with a gold toilet, and Bart, the overlooked sweet-and-sensitive work-friend, are pretty arrogant and proprietary of Ana. Max's attitude towards her is more obvious, and more egregious, but I was also put off by Bart's assumption that he's the only guy in the world capable of really "getting" Ana. He seems to think that, because he loves her for her brain and her body, he automatically deserves her. (Also, Bart name-drops European philosophers and cool bands and calls his thoughts his "pensées," so, no.)

Listening to The Word Exchange on audio also had its strengths and weaknesses. I really enjoyed both readers. Gilbert especially read with an emotional range that contributed to my verklempt-ness. And hearing the book rather than seeing it compounded the eerie feeling I got when Graedon began dropping the verbal “slips” into her character’s speech. Instead of being able to scan back over a word visually and confirm that it was a “slip,” I was perpetually in the position of the characters themselves, wondering “Did I just hear what I think I heard?” At the same time, though, hearing it occluded some of Graedon’s creativity. Some of the “slip” words, for instance, were spelled with Cyrillic letters, a difference that didn’t come across strongly in audio. And one of the book’s best examples of word play, the Creatorium (rather than the cretorium), didn’t come across at all; I had no idea until I looked at a paper copy that the word was intentionally spelled differently.

In the end, however, the biggest problem I had with The Word Exchange was that, without exception, it privileges the written word over the digital text. While I will be the first to admit that the relentless digitization of our world has its problems, I am not a doomsayer. The history of language is full of sea-changes and each one has come with its attendant crisis. Language always changing slowly, imperceptibly; that process just speeds up when a new technology appears. From stone to manuscript, to hand-press print, to industrialized automated printing, to digital text—each of these textual revolutions came with major shifts in the methods of (and purposes for) disseminating human language. And each one inspired fear and concern. When the print revolution happened, people associated printed texts with low-class, with trash, with easily disseminated heresy, evil, and wickedness. They worried about the rise of literacy hurting our eyes and causing diseases like brain fever and hysteria. They worried about not being able to remember things any longer because they'd be written down. Language and access to language has always been policed (who gets to write? who is taught to read? what kind of texts can they access, and how?) and the current furor surrounding the digital revolution is not fundamentally different from the worries that happened when print was invented and began to be widely used, nor is it different from worries that attended the rise of radio, TV, the telephone, etc.

Despite this, people still resist language change. While it does not seem like Graedon is one of those people herself (she admits to using a smart-phone), her book memorializes written and printed text and puts it on a pedestal. Graedon's book speaks to our nostalgia for print, a nostalgia I certainly take part in, but it doesn’t really offer much else as a compelling alternative to the digital world we already live in.

*An interesting experiment would be to count how many different ways Graedon describes Ana's sensation of nervousness.

(This blog post originally appeared at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave it 3 out of 5 stars.)

Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880

In this volume, subtitled "Print, Text, and Performance in Europe," Julie Stone Peters performs an admirable and outrageous task--attempting to look at the ways in which the rise of print affects the stage . . . in Europe . . . over 400 years. Yup. As has been noted by basically every reviewer, this topic can be and has been broken down into much smaller segments and treated more thoroughly by other scholars.

However, it's a good intro to the topic if, like me, you have to know about it and don't have time to read every other book. And she sets the scene well: "In the late fifteenth century, half-improvised farce, costumed civic festivals, biblical stories enacted on platforms, the songs of court poets, and the dancing of mummers were confronted by print--by a drama conceived in the fixed and silent forms of the text." The basic struggle she goes on to outline is that between the art of theater--dynamic, personal, sensual, improvisatory, diffuse--and the medium of text--static, impersonal, visual, fixed, and authoritative. As print became ubiquitous, the book became an authority, something that actors, theatre architects, set and costume designers, and even playwrights themselves would refer back to. "Did I get that line wrong? Let's look back at the text." "Is this scene set wrong? Let's look at the diagram." "How is my gesture of grief? Do I look like this illustration?" "Is this a comedy or a tragedy? It has to fit into a genre."

The theater, in some ways, rebels against this controlling force by appealing to a popular, largely-illiterate viewing-and-hearing audience, by continually creating new genres and breaking old rules like the unities, by allowing for improvisation and embodiment, and by not being completely controllable.

But the relationship isn't as tug-and-pull as this brief summary indicates. As Peters notes, the professional theatre and print grew up together. Without a rebirth of interest in classical drama, made possible by the printing press, would vernacular drama have become so popular as a literary (and experiential) drama? Without drawings and illustrations of classical theatres, would early modern theatres have been conceived? Without playbills and posters, would those theatres have any customers?

This is another of those books that I might have to read in-full or at least in large part later on in the process.

Shakespeare In Print

This is one of those books, like those by Taylor, Greenblatt, Dollimore, et al., that I will have to read in full later on, after I've finished the plays. Andrew Murphy here provides as concise a history as possible of both editing and publishing history of $hakespeare. He does not focus solely on editing or publishing because, as he said, some editions did not sell very well but still had a huge impact on the way we think about editing/$hakespeare; and some texts were not very well edited or unique in their approach, but sold so well and so ubiquitously that they made a huge dent in the history of $hakespeare as a saleable (and readable) commodity.

From what I can tell, Murphy breaks these processes down chronologically into broad-brush phases.

Phase One: Make $hakespeare famous. These editors/collectors, like Heminge and Condell, the collectors of the First Folio, were invested in getting the words of the bard out there, in increasing his fame as a great (the greatest?) English poet/playwright.

Phase Two: Make $hakespeare beautiful. His words are so inspiring, so let's highlight the good ones and emend the bad ones, as Alexander Pope did. Let's also make him elite, a property of the higher classes, the best educated.

Phase Three: Make $hakespeare accessible and popular. These editions were put out in cheaper form without much emendation or critical intervention. The job here is to bring the plays to the people. Everyone should be able to afford and own their own copy of a play, or all the plays, of the most famous (at this point)  English writer.

Phase Four: Make $hakespeare understandable. As he gets more popular and less educated people read him, and as we travel in time away from his era, we need annotations, line numbering, act breaks, dramatis personae lists, to help the average reader make their way through the play.

Phase Five: Make $hakespeare scholarly. Here we need to add as many notes as possible to his works, drawing connections between his works and historical events, possible sources, other works of the time, critical viewpoints. Do we have an edition that includes all known versions yet? No? Let's make one.

Phase Six: Make $hakespeare original. Here the New Bibliographers are gaining/creating a sense of the historical process of writing/publishing, and terms like "foul papers" "promptbook" "quarto/Folio" are gaining credence. The idea here is to dig back through the layers of scribal/publisher/editorial intervention and get to the original text, the work in its purest, least adulterated form.

Phase Seven: Make $hakespeare dead. This is a joke, in the tradition of Barthes idea of the death of the author. In this schema, foul papers and bad quartos and prompter revisions are each a part of the process. There is no ideal or original work and $hakespeare himself is contigent upon the work of others and the process of production (theatrical and literary).

Phase Eight: Make $hakespeare digital. Not sure what this is about yet.

So, that's my broad-brush understanding of the book. As I read it in full, I will come back and emend this hastily drawn up blog, much as $hakespeare and other people in the process emended, revised, and changed the plays that have become a worldwide institution.

A Theory of the Early English Printing Firm

David R. Carlson discusses a new theory of William Caxton's printing work, beginning, not with his literary folios as many do, but with his jobbing. Explaining that jobbing was the way for a printer to start, and to maintain, some productivity, Carlson examines some of the extant pieces of Caxton's ephemera--a handbill advertising his own work, and an indulgence with blanks left for the purchaser's name. He considers briefly how the handbill reflects on and contributes to relations of production; it says "Don't pull this down" in Latin, using the innate authority of Latin to do the work of intimidating lower-classes from messing with it (reflecting on class struggle), while at the same time it is a piece of printing that is advertising for more printing (contributing to more production). In this moment, Caxton the printer was working for Caxton the publisher.

Ephemera were a good market for new printers; they were always being used and disposed of and people always needed more. But they were not using the productive capabilities of the new technology to the fullest, either. It has been assumed, Carlson says, that printing jobs was the potboiler for the real work, printing books, but he says it is probably the other way around: printing books on speculation was a way to make some money between jobs, which were paid up front.

Caxton also knew that the printing press was capable of more, so he tried to do more with it. However, he quickly learned that print could not compete with handmade books in the elite, literary, luxury book markets. So he learned to branch out and to create new markets of book-readers. He helped invent and exploit new markets for books, and to create new kinds of books. Caxton is partially responsible for Chaucer's title as the father of English literature; he began printing English literature which Continental printers were not doing much of.  He also worked in ecclesiastical and legal markets, which always needed new books; the English legal market especially had idiosyncrasies that were not being served by Continental printers. He also helped to create a sense of need for individual devotional books rather than books owned by an institution and shared among its members.

Caxton was never as financially successful in printing as his protege, Wynkyn de Worde and his partner Pynson. But these men built on and expanded models that Caxton was already working with. Carlson theorizes that Caxton worked this way because of the productive capacity of the new technology, not because of some innate and sentimental love of English literature. As he says, "all this the machines decided" (61).

The Word Made Print

In her article, "The Word Made Print: Luther's 1522 New Testament in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Jane Newman examines the paradox of scriptural authenticity in the early days of printing. While Luther (and others) were touting the need to rely on sola scriptura, the printing press made widespread dispersal and possession of a vernacular New Testament possible. In this way, everyone could rely on the words of the gospel for themselves and begin interpreting it themselves, which many church authorities did not like.


However, the same technology that made this possible also undermined it. Since it was so (relatively) easy to print a thousand copies of a vernacular New Testament, unauthorized translations were being created and disseminated, many with (no doubt) honest errors, and many with politically and religiously motivated differences from each other. This complicated the reassuring directive to rely on scripture alone; whose scripture should you rely on? How can you tell whose translation you're reading? If you can't, or aren't equipped to, compare different translations, how do you know if you're relying on words that were translated correctly? “For the public, however, it was difficult to distin- guish between authenticity and falsehood in printed Bibles, since all that they had in their hands was sola Scriptura, the text alone.”

Luther's New Testament is an interesting example of this. His name did not appear on any editions of his translation before the eighth. By then, his translation was such a big deal that it was being pirated by many printers and booksellers--and even other competing theologians went to great lengths to make their translations look like Luther's, so that people would buy theirs without knowing. Although he had a device created, "Luther's Rose," so that people would know it was an authorized copy of his translation they were buying, non-authorized translations were still printed and sold at a rate of 4 to 1.

Luther himself began to be frustrated with other's critiques of his work, as well. In one verse from Romans, he added the word "allein" (only) which was not in the original Greek and Latin versions from which he was translating. His excuse was that, like Paul speaking in koine Greek, he wanted to bring the Bible to people in common German, and given German grammar, this instance demanded the use of the word "allein"--otherwise (to paraphrase) it would sound funky to people and distance them from the text. He modeled himself after the apostle Paul, "a spiritual reproduction of the saint" that came about because of the literal printed reproductions of the New Testament.

The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text

This article, by Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia, begins with the fact that, from the eighteenth century until 1986, there was only one version of King Lear. Now we have three versions and a collation. The same is true of Hamlet, of Romeo and Juliet, of Macbeth. What does this fracturing of the works of $hakespeare do to our conception of his corpus, of his authorial position? For many years in $hakespeare studies, editors looked for an "authentic," an "original," what Stallybrass and deGrazia call "the thing itself." However, we have finally given this up and are beginning to see a multiplicity of texts. But is this better? Is this progress? Or is this just another editorial practice that is steeped in the particular history of the time, that later generations will look back on and criticize from their vantage point, as we criticize the 18th century collations and bastardizations that brought us $hakespeare? And, whether this is progress or not, if we choose to represent multiplicities of text, how do we represent that on the page?


The authors consider four categories that affect our understanding of $hakespeare: the work, the word, the character, and the author. For each of these, they provide examples of ways in which the material multiplicity of the texts undermine what we think of as a unified whole.


As regards works, King Lear has not only multiple texts but multiple names; how do we identify it? Is it a history, a true chronicle, or a tragedy? What makes $hakespeare's version a different work from its source, which might bear the same name? How many textual variants between two documents merit reproduction of "different" editions? And what gives First Folio rights of authenticity, when other collected versions of Shakespeare were attempted or completed? Even the current First Folio facsimile, the ur-text for many scholars, is a facsimile of thirty compiled copies of that book, when it is likely that due to collating errors, printing corrections, etc., no two copies were identical.


As regards words, what do we make of words like "weyward" which might signify "wayward" or, in another spelling, "weyard," might signify "weird"? The current OED entry for "weird" gives "weyward" as an alternate spelling of this word, but the only instance it cites is this play. Was $hakespeare quoting his source, which uses "weird," or was he re-characterizing the three sister witches?  If early modern readers/audience members might have heard "weyward" and registered both denotations, what does a modern editor do when the two words are no longer connotatively linked? "It is a semantic field and not a single word that needs to be retrieved," say Stallybrass and deGrazia--but how?


As regards character, character names were slippery, sometimes added to a script only after it was finished. Dramatis personae lists are irregular at best. Are we to regard $hakespeare's characterization, then, as Alexander Pope did (the first critic to read $hakespeare's plays with dramatis personae lists attached), remarking upon the unique individuation he gives the characters? I'm reminded of Tiffany Stern when she said that, sometimes, there is evidence that $hakespeare had a bit of poetry and just put it in the most convenient mouth, not really considering characterization that much. 

And the author himself: I have made a big deal of writing his name $hakespeare, to remind myself that what I am discussing is not the man, but the (marketable) institution. These authors make the same point, noting that sometimes his name is not attached at all (7 of his first 8 plays are anonymous) but other times it seems attached to a play to lend the play authority and value. Furthermore, we have 37 different spellings of his name, and the one we currently use might be a printerly intervention. The long S and the lowercase k characters tended to break when put next to each other, so printers often separated them with a neutral character, - or e, giving us "Shak-speare" or "Shakespeare" or sometimes "Shake-speare." Finally, our notion of $hakespeare, whether as a never-blotting genius or a thoughtful, revising poet, tends to leave out the agency of other authors, with whom he collaborated often.

They end by remarking that paper itself--a bunch of rags cobbled together, beaten to a pulp, expressed as paper, absorbing ink--is a good analogy for what we think of as the works of $hakespeare, with their (sometimes surprising) humble and multifarious beginnings and their necessarily collaborative production.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

I know I'm probably supposed to love this book. It's a seminal work, comprehensive in scope, and about something I find really interesting. But the truth is, I hated this book. Reading it was terrible. And unfortunately, now I own a copy of it. Damn it.

Elizabeth Eisenstein makes the case that the impact of printing on "Western Christendom" (really? Are we still calling it Christendom in the 70's?) was colossal, a sea-change, and that it has gone unremarked upon by scholars. Practically every paragraph begins with some statement like "So few studies have really dedicated attention to X issue" or "Y issue deserves stronger emphasis" or "On Z issue, the existing scholarship is too restrictive." WE GET IT, Eisenstein; you're about to tell us something mind-blowing that we've never heard before.

But the frustrating thing is that she doesn't. No, it's not just that she doesn't tell me something new because, honestly, from where I sit in 2011, book history is a big deal and a lot of people pay attention to it . . . that I can get over because she was writing in 1979 and this book was filling a gap. It's that she never really states her point. She says, "we should consider the multiple ramifications of A and B," but doesn't say what they were! What were they, Eisenstein? What were they?

She does eventually get around to making her points, but her writing is so circular and timid that it is difficult to read all the way till she says her piece. Her basic points are that: printing was an enormous, overwhelming change and contemporary people noticed it; printing changed the way people thought, by making scribal innovations like indices, title pages, alphabetical order, etc., normative; printing "fixed" texts so that later editions are thought to be more authoritative and settled; printing "corrected" texts by making errors more visible to more eyes; printing contributed to an explosion of knowledge by making cross-referencing and broad, rather than deep, reading more widely available to scholars; printing contributed to literal revolutions (French, American) by getting people on the same page (pun intended) at the same time.

Adrian Johns, who argues with Eisenstein, tomorrow.

Making $hakespeare, Chapters 1-4

Tiffany Stern's book Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page is awesome. I love it. I'm having a hard time stopping myself reading it to blog. But blog I must, so . . . here goes.

Her book, which discusses the process of and the influences on production of Shakespeare's plays, from the circumstantial (the size, shape, and location of playhouses, the actors in the company for which he wrote), to the authorial (the process of writing, revising, co-authoring, adapting, etc.), to the commercial (scribes and printing houses). She situates herself in a really interesting critical location in her prologue. The "stage-to-page" methodology she's using comes out of the new historicist school with its interest in textual indeterminacy (what is the text?, in both philosophical and practical senses) and de-centering the author (who is the author?, ditto); it also comes out of the established school of theater history and the more recent but just as militant school of book history. All of this stuff, by the way, I completely love and just go all nerdy-melty for, so I could tell that this book, from the very Prologue, is perfect for me.

A lot of stuff in here I already knew, but I'll just sketch out what the chapters are about. "Text, Playhouse, and London" begins by imagining the various approaches to the theater district in Bankside; across the Thames with the waterboatmen, or across the London Bridge, or, to the Blackfriars, through the Ludgate. These approaches and their sights, sounds, and smells would have been fresh in the eyes, ears, and noses of audience members; Stern traces references to and resonances with these locales in the plays. She also explores the ways in which the large, round, open-air theaters and the smaller, rectilinear, indoor theaters affected the plays; after the move to the Blackfriars, Shakespeare doesn't write plays that demand huge battles and booming cannons or drums, but more static plays that work with the "aesthetic of fixed things, painting, sculpture, stately dance, tableaux . . . "(32).

"Additions, Emendations, and Revisions" makes the point, first, that, contrary to Heminges and Condell, Shakespeare did revise his plays, marking out lines, etc. We can still see echoes of revision when there are repeated speeches, or speeches with nearly repeated lines; when there seem to be two endings, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream; when a character learns some information, but then later, seems not to know the same information anymore, as in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare seems to write in blocks, in chunks, that might later be moved around, given to different characters, used in different plays, or left out entirely, a hallmark of "a culture that works with commonplace books" (42). Differences between quartos, or a quarto and a folio version, may also indicate revision, which might have happened because a specific actor left, a specific audience member got pissed off at a reference that hit too close to home, a political change, or a change in censorship practice. It may indicate a difference in characterization, as in Othello when, in the folio version, Othello reacts more measuredly and with more self-control at Iago's allegations. And, as we know to be the case with our boy Middleton, revision may have occurred posthumously as another playwright adapts an earlier play.

"Rehearsal, Performance, and Plays" discusses all the ways in which a specific company of actors might influence a play's creation or revision. Preparing a production in this time had to happen very quickly, with little time for intense, method-acting reflection. There were no directors. Each actor was responsible for his part (literally, handed on a piece of paper, was his part with cue lines, not the whole play). Actors were often typecast: the senex (doddering old man), the king, the rebel, the romantic lady, the lover, the fool, much like actors today always play the hilarious and perpetually single best friend, or the miraculous aged black person. If an actor left, died, or fundamentally changed (as when boy's high voices lowered), parts that were written for him might be given to a different character entirely or future roles for a similar "type" might change, as the fool roles did when Will Kemp left and Robert Armin took over. Plays often gestured towards each other, as actors in new roles made references to past roles they played. Acting was also more formulaic than today; a set catalogue of gestures signified "the passions" (the major emotions, seven or more of which had been identified and codified). Certain tones of voice signified verse or prose.

On the whole, this is an extremely readable book full of a bunch of stuff I already knew, in theory. What makes it shine are the details, the anecdotes. Traitors par-boiled, pitch-blackened faces on pikes along London Bridge may have been in mind when audience members saw an actor, face blackened, play Othello. Shakespearean heroes compared themselves to baited bears beset by hungry dogs, calling to mind the imagery of the bear-gardens. While we care a great deal about characterization, Shakespeare may at times have been using a character as a mouthpiece for a particular piece of verse, and not really cared about which character said it, as in Romeo and the Friar. Italian names in non-Italian plays might indicate that Shakespeare originally set that play in Italy--or, as Stern says, that "Shakespeare thought that everywhere abroad was a version of Italy" (52). Middleton might have written the iconic "Double, double, toil and trouble" line of the witches in Macbeth. She writes some hilarious anecdotes about Richard Burbage, one where he gets propositioned by an audience member only to find that, when he shows up for the assignation, Shakespeare has got there ahead of him. Another where Burbage, as Hamlet, adds moans, groans, and other sounds after he's already said "The rest is silence" which, when I did it myself, created quite a funny effect.

So I didn't get through 2 books today, but I may still get to Surprised by Sin and if I don't, Stern was worth not being surprised by sin, I guess.

The Order of Persons, Part II and III

In the last half of Taylor's essay, "The Order of Persons," he discusses lists of fictional people, "identification tables." These are the lists of the persons in the play, the dramatis personae, at the beginning of the play when we read it today.

Plays were not always published with these, though, because plays were not always published to be read by an individual for pleasure. The first early modern plays were published with woodcuts as part of the paratext; these woodcuts, images of generic persona represented in the play such as in Everyman, performed some of the function of later lists.

However, after 1562, most plays were published sans woodcuts, with identification tables which may have evolved as a cheaper alternative to woodcuts. Taylor proposes that these plays were published more for amateur performance purposes than for a silent reader; households might have bought plays and performed them for entertainment after supper; touring troupes might have bought them to perform in various towns.

After the Vagabond Act outlawed unlicensed players and the theater became professionalized, such plays did not need identification tables. So when they began to spring up again, it was for a different reason--to add literary legitimacy to the play. Playwrights such as Ben Jonson added them, Taylor thinks, because classic Latin and Greek plays all had identification tables in the early-modern humanist editions.

From 1611 on, though, it seems that identification tables become steadily more common, quadrupling in the next century, indicating a shift in the consumers of plays. Plays are now commodities for readers, not just for actors, and an identification table is part of the paratext that helps a reader along. In fact, Taylor makes an interesting point that identification tables are the paratextual piece most likely to interpose itself in the act of reading.

Of the plays published during Middleton's lifetime, six have identification tables included in the paratext. We do not know that he wrote them or was involved in their printing, but this can be measured by other signs of involvement: signed epistles dedicatory, introductory letters, or prefatory poems. After examining the evidence, Taylor concludes that Middleton was almost certainly involved in the Masque of Heroes identification table.

Taylor lists a few things that we can learn from such lists, indicating a way in which lists show bias rather than objectivity. Lists represent hierarchies and expose values; in identification tables, men often come before women, higher class characters before lower class characters. In The Roaring Girl, characters are listed by households.

Grouping by gender caught on slowly but gained popularity by 1679. As Taylor says, “Absence of gender as organizing principle in those [earlier] lists results, primarily, from the almost complete absence of women." By 1660 women were no longer invisible or excluded but their presence was "characterized."


An interesting, but probably unanswerable, question Taylor asks is, if a play "represents" persons who exist outside the play, where do they exist?


Finally, Taylor concludes that today's editors cannot help but mediate the text as they present it for publication, paratexts included. We either stray away from choices that the original author/publisher made, by organizing identification tables alphabetically or in order of appearance, or we value the primacy of the original by keeping the "original" (sometimes dubiously so) table with all its hierarchical values intact.

The Order of Persons, Part 1

In the introductory essay to Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, Gary Taylor explores several different kinds of lists of persons related to or authored by Thomas Middleton, locating the reader in  the early modern textual "situation" as it were during Middleton's lifetime and early modern readership. The Preface lets us know that any definition of "early modern," of "English," of "textual culture," or even of text is always going to represent, at best, a fraction of the reality, the place where something exists "on a continuum between . . . nothing and everything," i.e. between no knowledge and all knowledge. As Taylor tells us, all knowledge about early modern textual culture is impossible, so instead of trying to encompass it all, we enclose and define and seek for "thin description" and "deep focus."

Taylor sees lists of people as indicative of relations between people and nations (citizenship, birthplace), institutions (companies, traditions (church rituals such as baptism and burial), social class (a gentleman or a "base fellow"?), financial obligations (lists of debtors), and other people (geneologies). The first part of his essay is about lists of actual people which include Thomas Middleton's name. Through an analysis of these lists, Taylor deduces that early modern identity was categorized by geography, credit, occupation, geneology, and value. He also says that, while these lists overlap and "mix," they are also partial/fractional and always in motion. They allow us to map the distances between persons but these distances are always relative and the lists themselves are often arbitrary in what they consider important.

Important points:

Texts created geography--a sense of national identity. The texts themselves were also changing as standards of English began to form, become normative, and struggle against each other.

An economy of credit is dependent on names--you must know the name of the person indebted to you to collect on the debt. However, the economy of the theater was not dependent on the names of the playwrights, which were often left off playbills in favor of the name of the theater or company or printer.

Being part of a company (of Drapers, of Stationers, etc.) could help one in London. There was no livery company for poets; however, they held themselves to a code of ethics similar to a livery company by collaborating with each other, by attempting to distinguish, as Jonson did, between poets and those playing-at-poetry (poetasters).

The genealogical mode (seeking for a lineage) and the philological mode (seeking for an origin) are opposed to each other. However, much scholarship (in the Renaissance and now) which seeks for origins is still indebted to genealogical methods of textual transmission.

The rejection of genealogy as a source of textual authority led to a rejection of genealogy as a source of political authority--and thus, to the Revolution.

On to Part II!

The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited

This article, by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, refutes a claim made by Peter W. M. Blayney in "The Publication of Playbooks" that playbooks, as a commodity, were not profitable for publishers nor enticing for readers. Blayney had been reacting against a long-held view that versions of popular plays sold well in early modern England and that the reason we don't see more records of sales and readership is that they were mostly "pirated." Blayney, says the authors, made an important claim when it comes to the piracy of the plays; however, his statement that the playbooks themselves didn't sell well and weren't largely produced is what is at stake in the Farmer and Lesser article. They claim that Blayney only looked at the numbers of playbooks sold from year to year, rather than comparing these numbers with numbers of other kinds of popular reading material, such as ballads and sermons. For their article, they look at the numbers of original plays and the numbers of reprints of older plays published per year, looking at expansions and contractions in the market from the year 1576-1660, the market share of professional plays among all speculative (non-monopolistic) books, and specifically how playbooks performed against sermons in first-time and repeat publication. In all ways, playbooks performed much better than Blayney has said; in fact, they seem to have been very popular.

An interesting paradox crops up, though--the Caroline paradox, in which reprinted versions of plays first published from 1629-1640 drop sharply, although first editions still perform well and reprints of plays from before 1629 perform well. Farmer and Lesser posit that a canon of "classic" plays was being established during this period, and these plays continued to reprint well. In addition, people still wanted versions of the new plays as they came out. However, the new plays did not become "classics" the way the earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean plays had. While the Caroline canon looks different from our own, it has helped shape our own, which favors Elizabethan and Jacobean drama over Caroline.

Literary Cultures and the Material Book

Okay, so after a two-month hiatus (during which I was studying Shakespearean original practices in Staunton, VA, moving to a new apartment, and planning for my class this semester), I'm back. Yay!

And we're starting off big this time, with Literary Cultures and the Material Book. This afternoon I read several essays in this book, edited by Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash, and Ian Willison. I was instructed to pay special attention to the final essay of the book, so I read the introductory materials, the essays that dealt with medieval and early modern book traditions, and the final essay, by David McKitterick.

In his essay "Some Material Factors in Literary Culture, 2500 BCE-1900 CE," Simon Eliot lays out very clearly three ways in which the materiality of the book affects and is affected by literary culture. The first is the physical form of the book which, in scrolls, in a codex, written on stone or wood or cloth, in a way chooses who gets to read it, what order they read it in, how they can manipulate the book (or not), and how long it sticks around. The second is the issue of copyright and ownership. Because I own a copy of a book, does that mean I own the content? What does that content ownership allow me to do? Cultures and periods differ on this, and the laws in-between countries can be especially confusing. The third is aspect of materiality hides in the wallet; how much does a book cost? How many people can afford to read it? For this, he takes the history of the Victorian novel as his exemplar. Three-volume novels, first edition, could cost as much as a weeks salary. Even depending on a circulating library, a lower-class citizen might not read a popular novel for years. However, when the novels began to come out serially, they were cheaper and more people could read them. Furthermore, second and third editions were even cheaper and more affordable for the lower class when they came out.

David Ganz, in his article "Carolingian Manuscript Culture," lays out several of the ways in which the Carolingian renaissance in medieval Francia (800-900) laid the foundation for later medieval book traditions. A new, simplified script was invented and adopted, the Caroline miniscule, which was easily read and easily learned. Collaboration and group production of texts occurred in the monasteries, a practice which allowed many more books (more than twice as many extant) to be made in this century as compared with the prior. Many monasteries began copying old Greek and Latin and patristic texts to keep them in circulation. Ganz says, "without the 280 ninth-century manuscripts of classical authors, we would not be able to read any Latin author except for Virgin, Terence, and Livy" (154). They began to copy books in vernacular languages, too. During this period, Walahfrid Strabo invented chapters, so that a reader could look for a specific place in a book. Some contemporary readers also added indices of notable words or topics to some of the classical manuscripts.

Brian Richardson contributed a very interesting article, "The Diffusion of Literature in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Pietro Bembo." He points out that the history of literature and the history of the book in Italy have long had nothing to do with each other. However, when looking at the history of the work of Pietro Bembo, an Italian poet, we see that Bembo had a hand in how his works were formatted, published, and distributed, working closely with the publisher.

So, good work, everybody!