British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Reading repertories
Saturday 3rd September 2005, 9.30-11.00am,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 1
Participants
Lucy Munro, Keele
'The "Jacobethan" Repertory in Revival: Reading
"The Malcontent"'
Dr Farah Karim Cooper, Shakespeare's Globe/King's College
London
'Reading Cosmeticised Bodies in the Repertory of the
King's Men 1606-1621'
Tom Rutter, London South Bank
'"Wonders not of nine daies, but 1599": "Patient
Grissil" and the Admiral's Men'
Description
Both within and outside the academy, Shakespeare is still often used to embody a conception of the author as an independent creative genius whose works convey a meaning that transcends the social and economic conditions of their production. Nevertheless, trends in criticism over recent decades have insistently interrogated this privileged position, through a general questioning of the idea of authorship, a theoretically-informed location of the text in history, and a willingness to contextualise Shakespeare within the early modern theatre industry and its attendant practices such as collaboration and revision. This panel will propose that an interest in the repertory as an object of study can work both to bring together such critical methodologies, and to generate new ones.
Repertory studies are a familiar approach within the discipline of theatre history, and interest in this area seems to be growning among early modernists: see, for example, Roslyn Knutson's The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company, 1594-1613, Andrew Gurr's The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642, and Lucy Munro's forthcoming Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory. The field has a number of attractions. It encourages a decentring and recentring of the canon, whereby Shakespeare, for example, can be studied alongside his fellow King's Men dramatist Barnaby Barnes. The author can be treated as just one of several generators of theatrical meaning, such as actors within a company, that company's audience, and other plays within a repertory with which individual works enjoy an intertextual relationship. By insisting on the company auspices of dramatic production, repertory studies locate plays firmly within the material practices of the early modern entertainment industry, such as the need to attract audiences, relationships between playwrights, playing companies and theatre owners, and the tacit or explicit influence of company patrons.
Tom Rutter will relate Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton’s Patient Grissil
to the position of the Admiral’s Men in 1599; Farah Karim-Cooper will
examine face-painting, murder, and revenge in plays from the King’s Men’s
repertory; Lucy Munro will focus upon the RSC's recent ‘Jacobethan’
season, and its deliberate treatment of the plays as a repertory within which
intertextual connections and allusions could be made.
