With the support of a 2014-15 Andrew W. Mellon Long-Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I'm spending this year working on a new book, tentatively titled Seasonal Festivity and Commercial Performance in Early Modern England. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, holidays were often celebrated with dancing, music, athletic combat, informal roleplaying, and scripted drama. In the professional theatres, however, these same activities functioned not as communal rituals but as commodified entertainments. If audiences at playhouses were themselves regular participants in amateur theatrical games, how did their experiences with seasonal practices shape their understanding of professional drama? And how did calendar customs enacted on the commercial stage in turn influence festivity outside the theatres? My book will reconstruct the performance dynamics of May games, Robin Hood gatherings, morris dances, and other early modern holiday practices and analyze their relationship to the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, this project will trace how the commercialization of festive practices transformed performance from a ubiquitous mode of sociality that permeated communal life into the institutionalized representational mode that we think of today as "theatre."
The Folger is a great place to work on this project. Not only does it have a large collection of rare books and manuscripts, but it also offers a wonderful sense of intellectual community. There are a series of lunchtime talks where other fellows and visiting guests share their work in progress. In addition, there's a long-standing tradition of taking tea in the afternoons--an opportunity to talk with other scholars about their work and to get help on the challenging research questions one encounters during the day. A lot happens during that half hour! There are also a series of workshops and seminars that are offered by the Folger Institute. As part of my fellowship year, I participated in a week-long Advanced Paleography workshop in December 2014. Most handwritten early modern documents require special training to read, since they are written in a form of cursive known as secretary hand. I had a good deal of experience reading these documents before, but the workshop really solidified my knowledge and gave me the confidence to transcribe even torn and faded manuscripts. One of these nearly illegible manuscripts is a compilation of jests and poems that was owned by a sixteenth-century woman. It was very hard to read but fun to decipher since it included a number of clever anecdotes and even a few dirty jokes! More recently, as part of another workshop, I was able to try out writing with a goose quill pen and iron gall ink made by the Folger conservators. Actually handling these instruments was fascinating. It really taught me a lot about how early modern scribes made certain letter forms and offered insight that will help me decipher difficult manuscripts in the future. And as an added bonus, I won the Golden Quill Award for best secretary hand! How awesome is that?
March 19, 2015