Actors’ Annotations and Paradoxical Editions of Shakespeare’s Texts

Abstract

Theatre makes its backstage texts – including the playwright’s script – disappear, subsumed into a seemingly real history or tragedy or comedy, or at least into an evening of shared imaginative play between actor and audience. And yet not so, for with a text ‘twas made. My goal is to undo this vanishing act, to make visible and to study the theatrical texts that are obscured by performance. They constitute our only archive of the process of interpreting Shakespeare. Backstage theatrical documents, from early modern to present-day, represent not the polished production, but living, working theatre, captured mid-creation. Considering how thoroughly backstage documents are hidden from the staged performance and from the textual and even the theatrical history of Shakespeare’s plays, it might be surprising how extensive they are – and, unfortunately, how few of them survive in archives. Actors’ marginalia, in particular, capture uniquely creative minds meeting uniquely challenging roles, at a unique moment in time, and textualizing that meeting. I argue here for their value, for their preservation, and for a new idea of their use for scholars: as the basis for an approach to editing more reflective of modern theatrical practice and more engaging for readers.