Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 2003 - 494 pages
It shows that, far from being marginal to Renaissance dramatists, the printing press had an essential role to play in the birth of the modern theatre, crucially shaping the normative conception of theatre as a distinct aesthetic medium and of drama as a distinct narrative form, helping to forge a theatricalist aesthetics in opposition to 'the book'. Treating playtexts, engravings, actor portraits, notation systems, and theatrical ephemera at once as material objects and expressions of complex cultural formations, Theatre of the Book examines the European theatre's resistance to and continual refashioning of itself in the world of print."--Jacket.
 

Contents

Experimenting on the Page 14801630
15
Drama us Institution 16301760
41
Illustrations Promptbooks Stage Texts 17601880
66
THEATRE IMPRIMATUR
91
Reinventing Theatre via the Printing Press
93
Critical Law Theatrical License
113
Accurate Texts Authoritative Editions
129
THE SENSES OF MEDIA
145
Dramatists Poets and Other Scribblers
203
Who Owns the Play? Pirate Plagiarist Imitator Thief
219
Making it Public
237
THEATRICAL IMPRESSIONS
255
Scenic Pictures
257
ActorAuthor
276
A Theatre Too Much With Us
294
Epilogue
308

The Sense of the Senses Sound Gesture and the Body on Stage
147
Narrative Form and Theatrical Illusions
166
Framing Space Time Perspective and Motion in the Image
181
THE COMMERCE OF LETTERS
201
Notes
313
Works Cited
444
Index
487
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Julie Stone Peters is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University NY. Her publications include Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word (Standford UP 1990) and, with Andrea Wolper, Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (Routledge 1995).

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