Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

PROLOGUE Enter AUTHOR (sweeping stage): Let's get it over with, the SEL review opening gambit: humility (with feeling) before the range and quality of this year's scholarship, art which well exceeds my scope; surprise (muted at the overwhelming preponderance of work on Shakespeare to the near exclusion of his contemporaries; surprise (more muted) at the absence of important new fault lines or factions emerging; and (sincerely) a slight readerly fatigue. [...]the Ghost poses a number of contradictions typical of purgatorial spirits, which emerge with fresh energy against the rich texture of Purgatory that Greenblatt has exfoliated here: the Ghost calls not for prayer but vengeance; he seems to arouse the suspicion of trickery (suspicion that can be resolved only with another transparently ambiguous device, the play-within-the-play); and he paradoxically seems to drive Hamlet even farther into a kind of Protestant contemplation of corruption and mortality. Greenblatt launches into a brief but superb reading of the toxicity of incorporation in Hamlet, the king making his progress through the guts of a beggar, the recycling of the funeral baked meats, and the many tropes by which alimentation signifies the inevitable and alarming end of mortality-to this favor we must come. Greenblatt returns to an old question with elegant historical and critical sophistication: this vivid encounter with the poetics of Purgatory and with the emotional and psychological crises it mediates sustains a genuine, and genuinely provocative reading of Hamlet and its culture, and an account of the ambivalent solace of fiction as well. In the course of the book, Peters treats a compelling range of issues: the development of the mise-en-page of the play, and the consequences of various experiments in design and layout; the different uses of printed drama by theater companies; the durability of manuscript publication of drama well into the print era; the rise of printed drama and its well-known tension with modes of literary publication; the tribulations of dramatic authorship; the utility of printed materials in recording and determining architectural spaces and performing conventions; the changing relationship between playhouses and the publishing industry; theatrical orality and its preservation in print; print's role in inspiring and recording scenic illusion.