As soon as I started researching the presence and function of symbolic type in early print, I started noticing the very same symbols in the world around me. Non-alphabetic and non-numeric characters are everywhere...
Read more'Shakespeare's Theatrical Documents': Text ↔ Performance, &c.
I had the privilege of participating in this weekend’s Folger Institute symposium, “Shakespeare’s Theatrical Documents.” What follows is an attempt to synthesize some of the main threads of thought that emerged out of the weekend. These comments represent my own take-aways from the event. If my account seems abstract, it's only because I don't want to speak for the other participants, whose exceptional work for the symposium will surely find its way into a more public place over the next few years.
Organized by Tiffany Stern (Oxford University) and Owen Williams (Folger Institute), the symposium was designed to...
Read moreWhy I *Loved* the Star
A set of asterisks in The Adventure of Five Hours (London: Henry Herringman, 1663), T3229, Folger Shakespeare Library
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about stars.
In early November, Twitter replaced its ★ button with a ♥ button. Many Twitter users reacted negatively to the change, lamenting the loss of the ★'s neutrality, on the one hand, and its multi-valence, on the other. Clicking ★ underneath a tweet never automatically signaled agreement, but it is hard not to feel you're agreeing with a tweet when you click ♥ (especially when Twitter itself explicitly equates ♥-ing something with liking it).
The other day, I was writing about the use of asterisks in seventeenth-century English playbooks...
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Last year, I started reserving a day in each of my Shakespeare courses for students to "make" quartos. I wrote at some length (almost exactly a year ago) about the experience of making Q1 Hamlet with my students at VCU and posted instructions, information about supplies for the activity, and a link to the sheets (which I made from EEBO printouts).
This semester, I'm teaching a senior seminar called "Early Modern Drama: Manuscript, Print, Performance" that focuses on the material-textual processes that facilitated the making of theatrical performance and printed texts of the plays. So far, my students have reverse-engineered scribal backstage plots of Doctor Faustus, performed a scene from the same play using cue scripts, and "made" quartos.