Today, I’m pleased to announce the publication from the other side of my life — the world of Shakespeare academia!
At the American Shakespeare Center, we’ve just finished up our 8th Blackfriars Conference, a biennial congregation of hundreds of scholars, practitioners, and students from across the world. From each conference, a panel selects a group of papers for publication. My 2013 paper, “‘Why do you thus exclaim?’: Emotionally-Inflected Punctuation in Editorial Practice and in Performance”, was selected for the collection from the 7th conference — and the hard copy is now in my hot little hands!
The title is a fancy of way of saying I care a lot about punctuation marks. More than a normal person should. Editors often change them from the original quartos and folios for the benefit of a reader, but that can become prescriptive in performance. When I pull text for workshops, I’m often heard at my desk, hollering at editors for putting in scurrilous exclamation points (by far the largest punctuative offender). The paper explores a few examples and suggests that digital texts may be better positioned to offer students and actors multiple options, rather than dictating one editorial choice over another.
Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage, edited by Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray and published by Farleigh Dickinson University Press, is available for purchase!
Cass Morris -- Author 