Events

Zachary Lesser of the University of Pennsylvania) will speak on

Literary Drama: William Shakespeare vs. The Anonymous Thomas Tomkis

A presentation of the Rutgers History of the Book Seminar Series

Thursday, March 27, at 5:00pm at Alexander Library in the Pane Room

Abstract: Over the past two decades, the question of the "literary" status of drama has remained a central preoccupation of book-historical work in early modern studies. Were the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries considered merely subliterary "riff-raff" as Thomas Bodley termed them in a letter advising his librarian to exclude playbooks from the nascent Bodleian Library? Or did these "plays" become "works" over the course of the early modern period? If so, how was this transformation effected? What I want to suggest in this talk is that, in seeking to answer these questions, we have left largely unexamined a logically prior question: What exactly do we mean by "literary" drama, and how does what we mean by that term relate to what early modern meant by it? To begin to answer this question, this paper tells the story of two very different publishers, Simon Waterson and his son John, who ran a shop at the sign of the Crown in Paul's Churchyard for nearly seventy years; and of two very different plays, Thomas Tomkis's Lingua (1607) and Shakespeare and John Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), that issued from the Crown bookshop. Examining the careers of these two stationers, their playbooks, and especially the collapse of the Waterson shop following the death of the father and the accession of the son, will help to illuminate the fractured and often self-contradictory nature of "the literary" in seventeenth-century England.

For details, visit http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/book_history/RSHOB_2008_abstracts.html