Editing, Performance, Texts

The critical work of editing performance texts poses particular challenges for historians and scholars of the early periods of English literature, not least of which is the ephemerality of performance and the fragility of the archival evidence. The contributors to this volume engage with this challenge, asking how might editors of early period drama and performance literature account for the performance histories implied in the extant documents. The resulting chapters work in dialogue with each other to challenge many current givens in medieval and early modern drama research, especially around periodization and editorial practice, and around what constitutes the archive. Divided into three key parts headed 'Enabling Manuscripts to Speak', 'Performance Traces in the Archive' and 'Editing Through Performance', the chapters collected here showcase cutting-edge research practices and approaches in textual editing, and in manuscript and performance studies to produce new ways of reading and working for students and scholars alike. List of Contributors: Christie Carson, Richard Allen Cave, Mary C. Erler, Lynette Hunter, Kirsten Inglis, Jacqueline Jenkins, Boyda Johnstone, Peter Lichtenfels, Eleanor Lowe, Murray McGillivray, J. Gavin Paul, James Purkis, Julie Sanders, Claire Sponsler, Andrew Taylor, Brian Woolland.