The Theatre Historian as Director

According to his argument, since the Elizabethans were "careless about the precise placing of stage-directions," editors should be "free to standardise" early or late entries, especially those linked to "see where he comes" signals where the placement of the stage direction may vary before or after the spoken line. Honigmann is surely correct that in many respects the Elizabethans were far more casual than today's editor, so that authorial, scribal, or compositorial error cannot be ruled out. [...]as he and others will note, an obvious pitfall in any alternative line of argument is that interpretative ingenuity may elevate authorial errors or printing shop exigencies into meaningful, significant signals, supposed gems that have too long been ignored or suppressed. [...]any theatre historian seeking to recover what an Elizabethan playgoer actually saw "must be a most patient reader, listening to the implications of the text without much explicit help, because the positive evidence that we would like to depend on for the sake of objectivity is largely missing." Finding analogical connections between disparate personae, properties, or situations has long been a popular indoor sport among readers of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. [...]with the rise of "Shakespeare in performance" criticism in the 1970s those links have regularly been keyed to imagined stagings which have been given a variety of labels: linking analogues (my 1977 choice);30 dramatic rhymes; visual echoes; visual design.