Selected Papers by Thomas Dabbs
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2023
This article focuses on a production in July 2021 entitled Waiting for Will, written and directed... more This article focuses on a production in July 2021 entitled Waiting for Will, written and directed by Shoichiro Kawai. This play, in Japanese, is presented in the spirit of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and features two aging Shakespearean actors trying to recover their memory of Shakespearean lines and scenes they once acted, while they wait for ‘Will’, a pun on William Shakespeare as well as on one's last will and testament. Waiting for Will is part of a genealogy of alternative theatre in Japan. Though the production echoes Western forms, it is still distinctly Japanese in nature.
The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century, 2023
This chapter uses the concept of asobigokoro, or the idea of the playful heart or spirit in Japan... more This chapter uses the concept of asobigokoro, or the idea of the playful heart or spirit in Japanese culture, to examine recent Shakespearean adaptations in Japan. This chapter uses this concept in exploring many examples from current stage productions, novels, manga, and anime in Japan. This chapter holds that asobigokoro affords Japanese adaptors and audiences the space and the strategies to challenge and critique the supposed global authority of Shakespeare as an author and as a brand. This chapter shows that adapting Shakespeare or “Japanizing” Shakespeare occurs across a range of popular, mass, and subcultural regimes. A playful lack of concern about an iconic figure, a desire through playful pseudo-mimicry to challenge as well as to entertain, marks the current way of adapting Shakespeare in Japan.
'Paul's Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520-1640', 2013
In the 16th century popular religious print became integrated with the sensational echoes of popu... more In the 16th century popular religious print became integrated with the sensational echoes of popular religious disputes from the aural environment of Paul’s Cross. Along with the echoes of sermons from the pulpit and off the north transept and choir of St. Paul’s, another echoing cycle surfaced, one in which print echoed in the public ear and from the pulpit and back into print. This new, thriving marketplace for Godly print, along with printing contracts secured from the Church of England, persuaded entrepreneurial publishers to engage in a more risky commercial publication—pleasure reading—that was often issued under the guise of moral instruction but that soon held a separate sway as secular entertainment for the common reader.
Although religious writers, speakers, and translators often decried their questionable moral value, these works in fact flourished within the profitable, echoing marketplace of religious print. Stories from William Painter’s (1540?-1594) Palace of Pleasure and such other works that were issued for pleasurable entertainment became source texts for new plays when the public theatres were established in the 1570s. A third echoing cycle emerged, one that aped the Paul’s Cross print and pulpit cycle: the echo from print to secular public theatre back to print.
The Paul’s Cross sermon during this period became an integral part of what the print industry understood as an oral and aural marketing machine for a growing common readership, one that immediately fed into the vast, gossipy echo chamber of the nave of St. Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk. There, both religious and secular imprints were echoed vigorously and indiscriminately. These print marketing, echo chambers, which came to include the public theatres just beyond the city limits, were in a large part the unintentional outgrowth of popularized piety. Whatever complaints the pious had against pleasure reading and plays, these new echoing forms of entertainment were to some degree the material offspring of reformed religion.
Conference Proceeding: EEBO-TCP Conference, Oxford., 2013
This talk examined one highly referential speech by Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in... more This talk examined one highly referential speech by Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in order to bring forward certain heretofore hidden elements within the physical architecture and also the architecture of consciousness at St Paul’s during the 1590s. It focused on the bookselling district of Paul’s Cross Churchyard on the northeast side of the cathedral. To do this EEBO-TCP and other digital resources in various degrees of development were assessed along with static, hard copy research.
In Act II, scene IV, of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio sardonically references six romantic heroines, whom, he asserts, Romeo wishes to place his own love interest above (Laura, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Hero, and Thisbe). In each case, an EEBO-TCP search shows that the names of the mythological women Mercutio mentions had a comeuppance in then printed works during the 1590s. The title pages of these works and other records indicate that these texts were available from bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard in the years subsequent to Romeo and Juliet. Instead of just being bawdy banter, Mercutio’s speech points to the print marketplace in the churchyard and shows how a Shakespearean play echoed stories and fashions that were popular, not in Verona, but in the City of London.
Recently, the team at the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project has reconstructed much of St Paul’s cathedral during the early modern period. From this reconstruction and also the search capabilities of EEBO-TCP, we can now identify relationships between this area and the Shakespearean stage with far more precision than before. We still do not know precisely how books were retailed, how long they were held in stock, or how popular they actually were. Also certain significant full texts may not be available yet in a TCP search. These pitfalls noted, this talk abided by the thesis that digital resources can bring us much closer to an understanding of a lost, physical world and also to human consciousness during the early modern period.
Renaissance Papers, 2012, ed. Shifflett and Gieskes, 2013
The more we learn about the physical environments and associated print culture of Paul's Cross Ch... more The more we learn about the physical environments and associated print culture of Paul's Cross Churchyard and the St. Paul's precinct of the City of London, the more we can understand how Shakespeare's plays were popularly received. It may seem that Shakespeare avoids direct reference to contemporary London—at least in comparison to Jonson, Middleton, and Marston, who satirize actual persons in their city comedies—but his references are more stealthy and intricate than theirs, and they are quite important in what they can tell us about the connections between drama and urban contexts during the Elizabethan period. Here I will focus on some colloquial banter between Romeo and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Of course this banter, which first saw print in quarto versions of the plays in 1597 and 1599, belongs to the streets of London, not distant to Verona. More specifically, it points to the attitudes of the young gallants who contemporary records tell us were common in the St. Paul's precinct during the 1590s.
Two competing but also mutually beneficial cultural forces met within Paul's Cross Churchyard. The first involved dramatic preaching events and public proclamations, which promoted and were promoted by religious print sold by the booksellers. In many cases these booksellers surrounded the pulpit, and the fronts of their shops physically echoed the sounds of sermons coming from the pulpit. The second force was the new market for pleasure reading that flourished in surprisingly close proximity to religious expression.
'Renaissance Papers, 2010' ed. Shifflett and Gieskes, 2011
The article offers information on Paul's Cross area in London, England during the 16th-century. I... more The article offers information on Paul's Cross area in London, England during the 16th-century. It examines the development of print culture during the Elizabethan period and the role of physical structures in processing speech for public theater. It describes the area of Paul's Cross as a venue for echoing the printed word or religious texts of the period. The article offers a background on the establishment of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers in 1557.
In 'English as a Discipline, or, Is There a Plot in this Play?', 1996
(Abstract for the essay collection)
"English"-- not the language, but the activity that takes pl... more (Abstract for the essay collection)
"English"-- not the language, but the activity that takes place in English departments at American universities--has long ceased to be anything resembling a single discipline, if in fact it ever was. It is a collection of disparate activities with multiple objects of inquiry, vaguely articulated methodologies, and diverse notions of proof.
With new essays by Gerald Graff, Paul Lauter, Louie Crew, George Garrett, Thomas Dabbs, Walter L. Reed, Phyllis Frus, Stanley Corkin, Tilly Warnock, and Stanley Fish, this volume does not attempt to define the discipline. Instead, as Graff observes in the opening chapter, it enacts it, sometimes with a passion verging on violence, each essayist defending interests that are threatened by the others. It is English as theater. The essays can be read in any order; the arguments among them will out. The conflicts rage on even after the curtain falls. But the issues are clarified: What's at stake, not just for English but for society at large, is the tenuous boundary between conversation and chaos.
Studies in Language and Culture: Hiroshima University, 1996
A Companion to Jane Austen Studies, 2000
Studies in Language and Culture: Hiroshima University, 1994
Studies in Language and Culture: Hiroshima University, 1995
Recent Talks and Events by Thomas Dabbs
The Extended Language of Religious Reform: Marking Up a Register for
... more The Extended Language of Religious Reform: Marking Up a Register for
Early Modern Sermons
This talk will report on the formation of an online open source register for early modern English sermons, a collaborative effort that includes scholars and technical experts from North America, the United Kingdom, and Japan. The need for a digital register of early modern sermons is abundantly clear to scholars who specialize in the history of the church and religious practice.
Sermons were, for better or worse, central to efforts to broadcast and enforce disquieting religious reforms and to address the unsettling controversies in religious practice during the early modern period. It should be stressed, also, that a well-constructed and user-friendly platform of
this nature would reach the many among the general public who are interested in the history of religion in general and in Christian church history in particular. The term register is used here to denote a comprehensive and searchable list of English sermons, sermon events, and related sermon information from a variety of contemporaneous records and sources during the period 1500 to 1700. This project will not attempt to digitalize full texts of print or manuscript sermons.
Extant sermons were often printed long after they were delivered and many remain separately catalogued in manuscript. Non-extant sermons are known about from disparate sources: chronicles, diaries, private correspondence, and records of church and state. This lack of cohesion creates something of a vacuum amidst a plethora of sources that make reference to preaching in general and also to individual sermons. The goal of this project, therefore, is to bring to a list of sermons the cataloguing and search functionality (on a much smaller scale) that the British Library Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) online currently affords printed works.
There have been efforts recently to explore and document sermons during this period in digital formats but with differing objectives. A host of fine scholars have been drawn to the study of early modern sermons, but this field has lacked an annotated and comprehensive register of sermons and sermon events. The developers of this project will use a TEI-compliant XML structure. Much of the platform can be encoded with standardized markups for such elements as date, speaker, and location.
However, this project is faced with the task of identifying and defining elements for a register in a space between digital bibliography and online textual archives or corpora.
Metadata will have to be extended to include an abundant number of tags for such areas as theological debate (e.g. purgatory, Eucharist) and church practice (e.g. baptism, burial). An exhaustive list of meta-concepts peculiar to the religious attitudes and movements of the period will have to be constructed. Among the many examples, such meta-tags as “anti-theatre,” “Anabaptist,” and “recantation,” will have to be identified, agreed upon, and listed.
In sum, the greatest challenge for this project is in developing a comprehensive taxonomy for its metadata. In the view of the project team, the best way to approach this challenge is to start small and to learn by doing. Phase 1 of this project, therefore, is to digitalize and annotate Millar
Maclure’s register of the sermons of Paul’s Cross along with the supplement to this edition.
Paul’s Cross, the outdoor preaching pulpit located on the northeast side of the St Paul’s precinct in early modern London, will be treated as ground zero for the cataloguing of early modern sermons. Located in the commercial and cultural center of London, Paul’s Cross was the most influential public site for preaching to large, non-elite audiences in England during tumultuous periods of religious reform. This one locale had an immeasurable impact on Christian practice and public opinion from the Henrican period until the years leading up to the Civil War.
As the project expands toward its goal of being a comprehensive annotated register for all early modern sermons, the TEI XML encoding and extensions will allow scaling to a much larger platform. During Phase 1 the metadata arrangement for developers will be clarified. Should problems or omissions arise, which they invariably do, the fix can be made before the project expands. Finally, given that TEI has become the standard for what will become a partner project, this encoding will be highly adaptable should it eventually be contributed to a digital archive repository or OAIS.
The Buzz of the City: Paul’s Walk and Shakespearean Drama in Early Modern London
The noise in it... more The Buzz of the City: Paul’s Walk and Shakespearean Drama in Early Modern London
The noise in it is like that of Bees, a strange humming or buzz, mixed of walking, tongues, and feet.
John Earle on Paul’s Walk (1628)
In Hamlet, after Laertes secretly returns from France to revenge his father’s death, King Claudius comments that Laertes will not lack ‘buzzers to infect his ear’ with false gossip. Claudius’s reference to the buzz of what he calls ‘pestilent speeches’ erupting from general public opinion points to an immediate city scene rather than to the surroundings of remote Elsinore. In early modern London, any reference to pestilent gossip would immediately be associated with the bustle within the cavernous nave of St Paul’s cathedral, the unruly and central public sphere commonly referred to as Paul’s Walk or the Middle Isle.
St Paul’s cathedral was ransacked during the Edwardian period and by the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne the sanctuary was overrun with what one London observer described as ‘jangling, brawling, fighting, bargaining,’ particularly in Paul’s Walk. Writers throughout the early modern period describe Paul’s Walk as the choice location in the city for cony catchers or thieves and also as the London center for gossip and news mongering. David Crankshaw voices the consensus opinion of modern historians of the cathedral when he observes that ‘there was little room for the sacred’ in the cathedral nave during the Elizabethan period and beyond.
However unsavory the environs became, the cathedral precinct and nave remained a place where those from all walks of life passed through to encounter and perhaps spread gossip, to view new fashions, and to read and hear about novelties from the fresh print that sold and that was echoed throughout the cathedral precinct. In his seventeenth-century recollections, Francis Osborne acknowledges that the cathedral was a loud and rude meeting place, but insists that gentry, lords, and courtiers also walked the nave in order to remain au courant. According to Osborne, ‘there happened little that did not first or last arrive’ at Paul’s Walk.
Paul’s Walk had a tight kinship with the new theatres that arose in the Elizabethan period. During various times there was, adjacent to the nave, a popular theatre venue for a child acting company and also the Blackfriars theatres eventually arose close by at two different times. The large public stages that sprung up just outside the city proper during the Elizabethan period were only a short walk away. The nave itself was theatrical and inspired Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker and other playwrights to make direct references to Paul’s Walk in their plays. Shakespeare avoided direct references to contemporary city scenes in London, but, as with the ‘pestilent buzzers’ mentioned by King Claudius, there are indirect references in Shakespeare’s work to the public sphere of Paul’s Walk.
Paul’s Walkers are typically lampooned in the writing and drama of the period, but the cathedral locale serviced drama in ways well beyond providing stock characters and themes for social satire. The nave was at the center of a bookselling industry that provided abundant fodder from that locale for stage plays. Stories and themes from books that sold from shops within Paul’s Cross churchyard and at other shops immediate to the cathedral nave were first received by readers in the cathedral precinct and in Paul’s Walk. New print was in a sense processed first by the public before being adopted for the stage. Paul’s Walk was central to a precinct that served as an enormous dynamo of public reception, where impromptu culture exchanges echoed from the cathedral precinct and its nave to the stages of theatres nearby.
Using new digital reconstructions of the cathedral precinct and bookshops and other recent digital as well as hard-copy resources, it will be argued that the cultural environment of Paul’s Walk in conjunction with the larger cathedral precinct helped Shakespeare and other playwrights form a grand template for the selection of play material that would lead to the writing of successful plays.
By exploring the cross-platform interoperability of new or relatively new digital projects in dev... more By exploring the cross-platform interoperability of new or relatively new digital projects in development, this talk presented a street view of theatre routes that London playgoers walked before and during the Shakespearean period. It examined the physical environs experienced while ambling to the theatres inside and outside the city and also probed into another crucial walk, the stroll through the St Paul’s precinct.
The nave of St Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk, and the bookshops of Paul’s Cross churchyard instantiated, by a type of cultural accident, a general centre for hearing the news and, for readers, the gateway to remaining au courant. Walking and browsing in this area was something of a prerequisite for playgoers and, for playwrights, a locale where one could hear what was on the buzz and also a reservoir from which to cull material for successful plays.
There have been a number of recent and fines studies connecting London city life with the early modern theatre. This talk examined how digital initiatives may advance this field by offering more insights into theatre going and into how plays were fashioned for then current audiences by Shakespeare and other playwrights.
This talk examined how digital platforms in development may be used to undo a scholarly dogma tha... more This talk examined how digital platforms in development may be used to undo a scholarly dogma that has historically restricted our understanding of Shakespearean drama. Traditionally these dramas have been viewed as privileged primary literature that has been fused with lesser secondary sources by a singular creative genius. The use of the term source suggests to us that plot of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, was drawn from minor or obscure print editions that the Bard of Avon molded into a fine literary work.
This line of reasoning is flawed. To view Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its popular Elizabethan translation into English by Arthur Golding as secondary to Shakespeare’s frequent use of this edition, is comparable to saying that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is secondary to the film adaptations of the same story. Many of the so-call sources that Shakespeare and other playwrights used, for instance the popular collection of stories in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, were more prominent in the minds of the Elizabethan public than the plays adapted from them. By cross-referencing searchable databases and digital reconstructions of Elizabethan London, we can see that Shakespearean drama was in fact keenly adapted to the popular reception of printed works available in English, particularly in the St Paul’s precinct.
This talk will examine digital reconstructions of the St Paul’s cathedral precinct in the City of London, the center of the book selling industry during the Elizabethan period. The cathedral’s great and boisterous nave, Paul’s Walk, and the open churchyard full of bookshops at Paul’s Cross, were centers for broadcasting new print. Until recently, however, it has been difficult to visualize this enormous locale as it existed during the Elizabethan period. Digital reconstructions of the cathedral precinct show that Shakespearean plays and many other plays were not crafted from obscure or lesser books. Instead such plays echoed from local theatres the reception of popular printed works particularly in the public sphere at St Paul’s.
As a work sample, this talk examined the single example of William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. This popular work comprised Painter’s translations of many classical and continental stories, including, among other Shakespearean adaptations, the stories of Romeo and Juliet and Timon of Athens. This publication was used by pre-Shakespearean playwrights to craft a spate of plays after its popular reception in the City of London and specifically at St Paul’s. By the time Shakespearean plays reached the public stage, the use of Painter and other popular authors had become something of a template for staging successful productions.
Several digital initiatives were used to show the progress from the printing of Painter’s work to its open public reception with stories from it being adapted for the Elizabethan stage, including adaptations by Shakespeare. The talk began with the Agas Map of London online in order to show how St Paul’s was positioned in the City of London in relation to local theatres that came into being within and on the outskirts of the city. The reconstructions at the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, shows the physical environment of the cathedral proper and also a reconstruction of Peter Blayney’s (hard copy) map of the bookstores of Paul’s Cross churchyard. These reconstructions point to the fact that new printed works were often read and discussed in this locale. Such databases as EEBO-TCP and the ESTC online will also be used to confirm the popular reception of Painter’s work within the St Paul’s precinct.
Titles of extant plays were explored with titles in the Lost Plays Database to show how early modern plays were crafted, not from singular inspirations drawn from independently selected source material, but from playwrights, including Shakespeare, hearing the echoes of popular printed works specifically in the St Paul’s precinct. The relationship between popular stories and plays can be established by searching EEBO-TCP, the ESTC, and other online reference material and then cross-referencing stories with play titles. The presumed story in the lost play, ‘Cupid and Psyche’ will not show up in a reading of Painter’s table of contents, but ‘A Greek Maid’ will, if one recognizes that the story of ‘Timoclea of Thebes’ is indeed about a Greek maiden and is the probable source of ‘Greek Maid’. The methodology here is much easier to show in Powerpoint than to describe in abstract, but the base method is to fill a reconstructed public gathering site with bookshops and popular stories that echoed into successful stage plays during the early modern period. The talk concluded that such stories as those found in Painter are not source material, per se, but well-known stories that were read and discussed in a central bookselling area and that were later cherry picked because of their apparent popular appeal to be adapted for commercial theatre events.
Along with showing how DH platforms can be collaborated, three suggestions were made for the future of early modern digital development and scholarship. The first concerns the singular direction of DH projects and the current need to increase the interoperability between platforms. For instance the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project recreates the environment at Paul’s Cross churchyard to focus on a sermon by John Donne. It is not currently aimed to provide more information about the churchyard bookstores that the project accurately reconstructs or information about printed editions on sale in these bookstores. This problem could be solved with the inclusion of an interactive interface that would provide pop-up bubbles with information about churchyard bookshop holdings. These bookshop holdings could in turned be linked to full texts (when available) at EEBO and to publication information at the ESTC.
The second suggestion concerns the unfinished nature of these projects. EEBO-TCP is slow in development as are other projects. This subject was mentioned only is passing as it could be the focus of an entire DH conference, one that would focus on how to manage continuous and reliable data input for open access sites.
The third suggestion is rooted in the fact that some of our greatest resources are only preserved in hard copy, with no search-ability at all or just the ‘look inside’ option at Amazon or the frustratingly narrowed options offered by Google Books. The future for digital research in the early modern period is in seeing ways to continue the development and interoperability of existing databases with interactive interfaces. We should find ways to finish and better collectivize what has been started, and to digitalize information in hard copy texts in ways more elegant than simple reproductions of the text.
"‘Nothing That Is Not There and The Nothing That Is’: Tracking the Digital Echoes between Churchy... more "‘Nothing That Is Not There and The Nothing That Is’: Tracking the Digital Echoes between Churchyard and Theatre in Shakespeare’s London"
This talk considers one of the ways in which various digital tools can be used in an integrated fashion to map the public reception of new print and drama during the Elizabethan period. Using the final line from Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” as a prompt, the paper extolls the virtue of using digital technology to make new assumptions about human consciousness in historic times and places that were once ‘there’ even if they are currently or ostensibly ‘not there.’ This paper also acknowledges the limits of digital reconstruction and its use in interrogating the past. Indeed, finding nothing may mean that there is nothing to be found.
Uploads
Selected Papers by Thomas Dabbs
Although religious writers, speakers, and translators often decried their questionable moral value, these works in fact flourished within the profitable, echoing marketplace of religious print. Stories from William Painter’s (1540?-1594) Palace of Pleasure and such other works that were issued for pleasurable entertainment became source texts for new plays when the public theatres were established in the 1570s. A third echoing cycle emerged, one that aped the Paul’s Cross print and pulpit cycle: the echo from print to secular public theatre back to print.
The Paul’s Cross sermon during this period became an integral part of what the print industry understood as an oral and aural marketing machine for a growing common readership, one that immediately fed into the vast, gossipy echo chamber of the nave of St. Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk. There, both religious and secular imprints were echoed vigorously and indiscriminately. These print marketing, echo chambers, which came to include the public theatres just beyond the city limits, were in a large part the unintentional outgrowth of popularized piety. Whatever complaints the pious had against pleasure reading and plays, these new echoing forms of entertainment were to some degree the material offspring of reformed religion.
In Act II, scene IV, of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio sardonically references six romantic heroines, whom, he asserts, Romeo wishes to place his own love interest above (Laura, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Hero, and Thisbe). In each case, an EEBO-TCP search shows that the names of the mythological women Mercutio mentions had a comeuppance in then printed works during the 1590s. The title pages of these works and other records indicate that these texts were available from bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard in the years subsequent to Romeo and Juliet. Instead of just being bawdy banter, Mercutio’s speech points to the print marketplace in the churchyard and shows how a Shakespearean play echoed stories and fashions that were popular, not in Verona, but in the City of London.
Recently, the team at the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project has reconstructed much of St Paul’s cathedral during the early modern period. From this reconstruction and also the search capabilities of EEBO-TCP, we can now identify relationships between this area and the Shakespearean stage with far more precision than before. We still do not know precisely how books were retailed, how long they were held in stock, or how popular they actually were. Also certain significant full texts may not be available yet in a TCP search. These pitfalls noted, this talk abided by the thesis that digital resources can bring us much closer to an understanding of a lost, physical world and also to human consciousness during the early modern period.
Two competing but also mutually beneficial cultural forces met within Paul's Cross Churchyard. The first involved dramatic preaching events and public proclamations, which promoted and were promoted by religious print sold by the booksellers. In many cases these booksellers surrounded the pulpit, and the fronts of their shops physically echoed the sounds of sermons coming from the pulpit. The second force was the new market for pleasure reading that flourished in surprisingly close proximity to religious expression.
"English"-- not the language, but the activity that takes place in English departments at American universities--has long ceased to be anything resembling a single discipline, if in fact it ever was. It is a collection of disparate activities with multiple objects of inquiry, vaguely articulated methodologies, and diverse notions of proof.
With new essays by Gerald Graff, Paul Lauter, Louie Crew, George Garrett, Thomas Dabbs, Walter L. Reed, Phyllis Frus, Stanley Corkin, Tilly Warnock, and Stanley Fish, this volume does not attempt to define the discipline. Instead, as Graff observes in the opening chapter, it enacts it, sometimes with a passion verging on violence, each essayist defending interests that are threatened by the others. It is English as theater. The essays can be read in any order; the arguments among them will out. The conflicts rage on even after the curtain falls. But the issues are clarified: What's at stake, not just for English but for society at large, is the tenuous boundary between conversation and chaos.
Recent Talks and Events by Thomas Dabbs
Early Modern Sermons
This talk will report on the formation of an online open source register for early modern English sermons, a collaborative effort that includes scholars and technical experts from North America, the United Kingdom, and Japan. The need for a digital register of early modern sermons is abundantly clear to scholars who specialize in the history of the church and religious practice.
Sermons were, for better or worse, central to efforts to broadcast and enforce disquieting religious reforms and to address the unsettling controversies in religious practice during the early modern period. It should be stressed, also, that a well-constructed and user-friendly platform of
this nature would reach the many among the general public who are interested in the history of religion in general and in Christian church history in particular. The term register is used here to denote a comprehensive and searchable list of English sermons, sermon events, and related sermon information from a variety of contemporaneous records and sources during the period 1500 to 1700. This project will not attempt to digitalize full texts of print or manuscript sermons.
Extant sermons were often printed long after they were delivered and many remain separately catalogued in manuscript. Non-extant sermons are known about from disparate sources: chronicles, diaries, private correspondence, and records of church and state. This lack of cohesion creates something of a vacuum amidst a plethora of sources that make reference to preaching in general and also to individual sermons. The goal of this project, therefore, is to bring to a list of sermons the cataloguing and search functionality (on a much smaller scale) that the British Library Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) online currently affords printed works.
There have been efforts recently to explore and document sermons during this period in digital formats but with differing objectives. A host of fine scholars have been drawn to the study of early modern sermons, but this field has lacked an annotated and comprehensive register of sermons and sermon events. The developers of this project will use a TEI-compliant XML structure. Much of the platform can be encoded with standardized markups for such elements as date, speaker, and location.
However, this project is faced with the task of identifying and defining elements for a register in a space between digital bibliography and online textual archives or corpora.
Metadata will have to be extended to include an abundant number of tags for such areas as theological debate (e.g. purgatory, Eucharist) and church practice (e.g. baptism, burial). An exhaustive list of meta-concepts peculiar to the religious attitudes and movements of the period will have to be constructed. Among the many examples, such meta-tags as “anti-theatre,” “Anabaptist,” and “recantation,” will have to be identified, agreed upon, and listed.
In sum, the greatest challenge for this project is in developing a comprehensive taxonomy for its metadata. In the view of the project team, the best way to approach this challenge is to start small and to learn by doing. Phase 1 of this project, therefore, is to digitalize and annotate Millar
Maclure’s register of the sermons of Paul’s Cross along with the supplement to this edition.
Paul’s Cross, the outdoor preaching pulpit located on the northeast side of the St Paul’s precinct in early modern London, will be treated as ground zero for the cataloguing of early modern sermons. Located in the commercial and cultural center of London, Paul’s Cross was the most influential public site for preaching to large, non-elite audiences in England during tumultuous periods of religious reform. This one locale had an immeasurable impact on Christian practice and public opinion from the Henrican period until the years leading up to the Civil War.
As the project expands toward its goal of being a comprehensive annotated register for all early modern sermons, the TEI XML encoding and extensions will allow scaling to a much larger platform. During Phase 1 the metadata arrangement for developers will be clarified. Should problems or omissions arise, which they invariably do, the fix can be made before the project expands. Finally, given that TEI has become the standard for what will become a partner project, this encoding will be highly adaptable should it eventually be contributed to a digital archive repository or OAIS.
The noise in it is like that of Bees, a strange humming or buzz, mixed of walking, tongues, and feet.
John Earle on Paul’s Walk (1628)
In Hamlet, after Laertes secretly returns from France to revenge his father’s death, King Claudius comments that Laertes will not lack ‘buzzers to infect his ear’ with false gossip. Claudius’s reference to the buzz of what he calls ‘pestilent speeches’ erupting from general public opinion points to an immediate city scene rather than to the surroundings of remote Elsinore. In early modern London, any reference to pestilent gossip would immediately be associated with the bustle within the cavernous nave of St Paul’s cathedral, the unruly and central public sphere commonly referred to as Paul’s Walk or the Middle Isle.
St Paul’s cathedral was ransacked during the Edwardian period and by the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne the sanctuary was overrun with what one London observer described as ‘jangling, brawling, fighting, bargaining,’ particularly in Paul’s Walk. Writers throughout the early modern period describe Paul’s Walk as the choice location in the city for cony catchers or thieves and also as the London center for gossip and news mongering. David Crankshaw voices the consensus opinion of modern historians of the cathedral when he observes that ‘there was little room for the sacred’ in the cathedral nave during the Elizabethan period and beyond.
However unsavory the environs became, the cathedral precinct and nave remained a place where those from all walks of life passed through to encounter and perhaps spread gossip, to view new fashions, and to read and hear about novelties from the fresh print that sold and that was echoed throughout the cathedral precinct. In his seventeenth-century recollections, Francis Osborne acknowledges that the cathedral was a loud and rude meeting place, but insists that gentry, lords, and courtiers also walked the nave in order to remain au courant. According to Osborne, ‘there happened little that did not first or last arrive’ at Paul’s Walk.
Paul’s Walk had a tight kinship with the new theatres that arose in the Elizabethan period. During various times there was, adjacent to the nave, a popular theatre venue for a child acting company and also the Blackfriars theatres eventually arose close by at two different times. The large public stages that sprung up just outside the city proper during the Elizabethan period were only a short walk away. The nave itself was theatrical and inspired Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker and other playwrights to make direct references to Paul’s Walk in their plays. Shakespeare avoided direct references to contemporary city scenes in London, but, as with the ‘pestilent buzzers’ mentioned by King Claudius, there are indirect references in Shakespeare’s work to the public sphere of Paul’s Walk.
Paul’s Walkers are typically lampooned in the writing and drama of the period, but the cathedral locale serviced drama in ways well beyond providing stock characters and themes for social satire. The nave was at the center of a bookselling industry that provided abundant fodder from that locale for stage plays. Stories and themes from books that sold from shops within Paul’s Cross churchyard and at other shops immediate to the cathedral nave were first received by readers in the cathedral precinct and in Paul’s Walk. New print was in a sense processed first by the public before being adopted for the stage. Paul’s Walk was central to a precinct that served as an enormous dynamo of public reception, where impromptu culture exchanges echoed from the cathedral precinct and its nave to the stages of theatres nearby.
Using new digital reconstructions of the cathedral precinct and bookshops and other recent digital as well as hard-copy resources, it will be argued that the cultural environment of Paul’s Walk in conjunction with the larger cathedral precinct helped Shakespeare and other playwrights form a grand template for the selection of play material that would lead to the writing of successful plays.
The nave of St Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk, and the bookshops of Paul’s Cross churchyard instantiated, by a type of cultural accident, a general centre for hearing the news and, for readers, the gateway to remaining au courant. Walking and browsing in this area was something of a prerequisite for playgoers and, for playwrights, a locale where one could hear what was on the buzz and also a reservoir from which to cull material for successful plays.
There have been a number of recent and fines studies connecting London city life with the early modern theatre. This talk examined how digital initiatives may advance this field by offering more insights into theatre going and into how plays were fashioned for then current audiences by Shakespeare and other playwrights.
This line of reasoning is flawed. To view Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its popular Elizabethan translation into English by Arthur Golding as secondary to Shakespeare’s frequent use of this edition, is comparable to saying that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is secondary to the film adaptations of the same story. Many of the so-call sources that Shakespeare and other playwrights used, for instance the popular collection of stories in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, were more prominent in the minds of the Elizabethan public than the plays adapted from them. By cross-referencing searchable databases and digital reconstructions of Elizabethan London, we can see that Shakespearean drama was in fact keenly adapted to the popular reception of printed works available in English, particularly in the St Paul’s precinct.
This talk will examine digital reconstructions of the St Paul’s cathedral precinct in the City of London, the center of the book selling industry during the Elizabethan period. The cathedral’s great and boisterous nave, Paul’s Walk, and the open churchyard full of bookshops at Paul’s Cross, were centers for broadcasting new print. Until recently, however, it has been difficult to visualize this enormous locale as it existed during the Elizabethan period. Digital reconstructions of the cathedral precinct show that Shakespearean plays and many other plays were not crafted from obscure or lesser books. Instead such plays echoed from local theatres the reception of popular printed works particularly in the public sphere at St Paul’s.
As a work sample, this talk examined the single example of William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. This popular work comprised Painter’s translations of many classical and continental stories, including, among other Shakespearean adaptations, the stories of Romeo and Juliet and Timon of Athens. This publication was used by pre-Shakespearean playwrights to craft a spate of plays after its popular reception in the City of London and specifically at St Paul’s. By the time Shakespearean plays reached the public stage, the use of Painter and other popular authors had become something of a template for staging successful productions.
Several digital initiatives were used to show the progress from the printing of Painter’s work to its open public reception with stories from it being adapted for the Elizabethan stage, including adaptations by Shakespeare. The talk began with the Agas Map of London online in order to show how St Paul’s was positioned in the City of London in relation to local theatres that came into being within and on the outskirts of the city. The reconstructions at the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, shows the physical environment of the cathedral proper and also a reconstruction of Peter Blayney’s (hard copy) map of the bookstores of Paul’s Cross churchyard. These reconstructions point to the fact that new printed works were often read and discussed in this locale. Such databases as EEBO-TCP and the ESTC online will also be used to confirm the popular reception of Painter’s work within the St Paul’s precinct.
Titles of extant plays were explored with titles in the Lost Plays Database to show how early modern plays were crafted, not from singular inspirations drawn from independently selected source material, but from playwrights, including Shakespeare, hearing the echoes of popular printed works specifically in the St Paul’s precinct. The relationship between popular stories and plays can be established by searching EEBO-TCP, the ESTC, and other online reference material and then cross-referencing stories with play titles. The presumed story in the lost play, ‘Cupid and Psyche’ will not show up in a reading of Painter’s table of contents, but ‘A Greek Maid’ will, if one recognizes that the story of ‘Timoclea of Thebes’ is indeed about a Greek maiden and is the probable source of ‘Greek Maid’. The methodology here is much easier to show in Powerpoint than to describe in abstract, but the base method is to fill a reconstructed public gathering site with bookshops and popular stories that echoed into successful stage plays during the early modern period. The talk concluded that such stories as those found in Painter are not source material, per se, but well-known stories that were read and discussed in a central bookselling area and that were later cherry picked because of their apparent popular appeal to be adapted for commercial theatre events.
Along with showing how DH platforms can be collaborated, three suggestions were made for the future of early modern digital development and scholarship. The first concerns the singular direction of DH projects and the current need to increase the interoperability between platforms. For instance the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project recreates the environment at Paul’s Cross churchyard to focus on a sermon by John Donne. It is not currently aimed to provide more information about the churchyard bookstores that the project accurately reconstructs or information about printed editions on sale in these bookstores. This problem could be solved with the inclusion of an interactive interface that would provide pop-up bubbles with information about churchyard bookshop holdings. These bookshop holdings could in turned be linked to full texts (when available) at EEBO and to publication information at the ESTC.
The second suggestion concerns the unfinished nature of these projects. EEBO-TCP is slow in development as are other projects. This subject was mentioned only is passing as it could be the focus of an entire DH conference, one that would focus on how to manage continuous and reliable data input for open access sites.
The third suggestion is rooted in the fact that some of our greatest resources are only preserved in hard copy, with no search-ability at all or just the ‘look inside’ option at Amazon or the frustratingly narrowed options offered by Google Books. The future for digital research in the early modern period is in seeing ways to continue the development and interoperability of existing databases with interactive interfaces. We should find ways to finish and better collectivize what has been started, and to digitalize information in hard copy texts in ways more elegant than simple reproductions of the text.
This talk considers one of the ways in which various digital tools can be used in an integrated fashion to map the public reception of new print and drama during the Elizabethan period. Using the final line from Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” as a prompt, the paper extolls the virtue of using digital technology to make new assumptions about human consciousness in historic times and places that were once ‘there’ even if they are currently or ostensibly ‘not there.’ This paper also acknowledges the limits of digital reconstruction and its use in interrogating the past. Indeed, finding nothing may mean that there is nothing to be found.
Although religious writers, speakers, and translators often decried their questionable moral value, these works in fact flourished within the profitable, echoing marketplace of religious print. Stories from William Painter’s (1540?-1594) Palace of Pleasure and such other works that were issued for pleasurable entertainment became source texts for new plays when the public theatres were established in the 1570s. A third echoing cycle emerged, one that aped the Paul’s Cross print and pulpit cycle: the echo from print to secular public theatre back to print.
The Paul’s Cross sermon during this period became an integral part of what the print industry understood as an oral and aural marketing machine for a growing common readership, one that immediately fed into the vast, gossipy echo chamber of the nave of St. Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk. There, both religious and secular imprints were echoed vigorously and indiscriminately. These print marketing, echo chambers, which came to include the public theatres just beyond the city limits, were in a large part the unintentional outgrowth of popularized piety. Whatever complaints the pious had against pleasure reading and plays, these new echoing forms of entertainment were to some degree the material offspring of reformed religion.
In Act II, scene IV, of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio sardonically references six romantic heroines, whom, he asserts, Romeo wishes to place his own love interest above (Laura, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Hero, and Thisbe). In each case, an EEBO-TCP search shows that the names of the mythological women Mercutio mentions had a comeuppance in then printed works during the 1590s. The title pages of these works and other records indicate that these texts were available from bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard in the years subsequent to Romeo and Juliet. Instead of just being bawdy banter, Mercutio’s speech points to the print marketplace in the churchyard and shows how a Shakespearean play echoed stories and fashions that were popular, not in Verona, but in the City of London.
Recently, the team at the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project has reconstructed much of St Paul’s cathedral during the early modern period. From this reconstruction and also the search capabilities of EEBO-TCP, we can now identify relationships between this area and the Shakespearean stage with far more precision than before. We still do not know precisely how books were retailed, how long they were held in stock, or how popular they actually were. Also certain significant full texts may not be available yet in a TCP search. These pitfalls noted, this talk abided by the thesis that digital resources can bring us much closer to an understanding of a lost, physical world and also to human consciousness during the early modern period.
Two competing but also mutually beneficial cultural forces met within Paul's Cross Churchyard. The first involved dramatic preaching events and public proclamations, which promoted and were promoted by religious print sold by the booksellers. In many cases these booksellers surrounded the pulpit, and the fronts of their shops physically echoed the sounds of sermons coming from the pulpit. The second force was the new market for pleasure reading that flourished in surprisingly close proximity to religious expression.
"English"-- not the language, but the activity that takes place in English departments at American universities--has long ceased to be anything resembling a single discipline, if in fact it ever was. It is a collection of disparate activities with multiple objects of inquiry, vaguely articulated methodologies, and diverse notions of proof.
With new essays by Gerald Graff, Paul Lauter, Louie Crew, George Garrett, Thomas Dabbs, Walter L. Reed, Phyllis Frus, Stanley Corkin, Tilly Warnock, and Stanley Fish, this volume does not attempt to define the discipline. Instead, as Graff observes in the opening chapter, it enacts it, sometimes with a passion verging on violence, each essayist defending interests that are threatened by the others. It is English as theater. The essays can be read in any order; the arguments among them will out. The conflicts rage on even after the curtain falls. But the issues are clarified: What's at stake, not just for English but for society at large, is the tenuous boundary between conversation and chaos.
Early Modern Sermons
This talk will report on the formation of an online open source register for early modern English sermons, a collaborative effort that includes scholars and technical experts from North America, the United Kingdom, and Japan. The need for a digital register of early modern sermons is abundantly clear to scholars who specialize in the history of the church and religious practice.
Sermons were, for better or worse, central to efforts to broadcast and enforce disquieting religious reforms and to address the unsettling controversies in religious practice during the early modern period. It should be stressed, also, that a well-constructed and user-friendly platform of
this nature would reach the many among the general public who are interested in the history of religion in general and in Christian church history in particular. The term register is used here to denote a comprehensive and searchable list of English sermons, sermon events, and related sermon information from a variety of contemporaneous records and sources during the period 1500 to 1700. This project will not attempt to digitalize full texts of print or manuscript sermons.
Extant sermons were often printed long after they were delivered and many remain separately catalogued in manuscript. Non-extant sermons are known about from disparate sources: chronicles, diaries, private correspondence, and records of church and state. This lack of cohesion creates something of a vacuum amidst a plethora of sources that make reference to preaching in general and also to individual sermons. The goal of this project, therefore, is to bring to a list of sermons the cataloguing and search functionality (on a much smaller scale) that the British Library Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) online currently affords printed works.
There have been efforts recently to explore and document sermons during this period in digital formats but with differing objectives. A host of fine scholars have been drawn to the study of early modern sermons, but this field has lacked an annotated and comprehensive register of sermons and sermon events. The developers of this project will use a TEI-compliant XML structure. Much of the platform can be encoded with standardized markups for such elements as date, speaker, and location.
However, this project is faced with the task of identifying and defining elements for a register in a space between digital bibliography and online textual archives or corpora.
Metadata will have to be extended to include an abundant number of tags for such areas as theological debate (e.g. purgatory, Eucharist) and church practice (e.g. baptism, burial). An exhaustive list of meta-concepts peculiar to the religious attitudes and movements of the period will have to be constructed. Among the many examples, such meta-tags as “anti-theatre,” “Anabaptist,” and “recantation,” will have to be identified, agreed upon, and listed.
In sum, the greatest challenge for this project is in developing a comprehensive taxonomy for its metadata. In the view of the project team, the best way to approach this challenge is to start small and to learn by doing. Phase 1 of this project, therefore, is to digitalize and annotate Millar
Maclure’s register of the sermons of Paul’s Cross along with the supplement to this edition.
Paul’s Cross, the outdoor preaching pulpit located on the northeast side of the St Paul’s precinct in early modern London, will be treated as ground zero for the cataloguing of early modern sermons. Located in the commercial and cultural center of London, Paul’s Cross was the most influential public site for preaching to large, non-elite audiences in England during tumultuous periods of religious reform. This one locale had an immeasurable impact on Christian practice and public opinion from the Henrican period until the years leading up to the Civil War.
As the project expands toward its goal of being a comprehensive annotated register for all early modern sermons, the TEI XML encoding and extensions will allow scaling to a much larger platform. During Phase 1 the metadata arrangement for developers will be clarified. Should problems or omissions arise, which they invariably do, the fix can be made before the project expands. Finally, given that TEI has become the standard for what will become a partner project, this encoding will be highly adaptable should it eventually be contributed to a digital archive repository or OAIS.
The noise in it is like that of Bees, a strange humming or buzz, mixed of walking, tongues, and feet.
John Earle on Paul’s Walk (1628)
In Hamlet, after Laertes secretly returns from France to revenge his father’s death, King Claudius comments that Laertes will not lack ‘buzzers to infect his ear’ with false gossip. Claudius’s reference to the buzz of what he calls ‘pestilent speeches’ erupting from general public opinion points to an immediate city scene rather than to the surroundings of remote Elsinore. In early modern London, any reference to pestilent gossip would immediately be associated with the bustle within the cavernous nave of St Paul’s cathedral, the unruly and central public sphere commonly referred to as Paul’s Walk or the Middle Isle.
St Paul’s cathedral was ransacked during the Edwardian period and by the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne the sanctuary was overrun with what one London observer described as ‘jangling, brawling, fighting, bargaining,’ particularly in Paul’s Walk. Writers throughout the early modern period describe Paul’s Walk as the choice location in the city for cony catchers or thieves and also as the London center for gossip and news mongering. David Crankshaw voices the consensus opinion of modern historians of the cathedral when he observes that ‘there was little room for the sacred’ in the cathedral nave during the Elizabethan period and beyond.
However unsavory the environs became, the cathedral precinct and nave remained a place where those from all walks of life passed through to encounter and perhaps spread gossip, to view new fashions, and to read and hear about novelties from the fresh print that sold and that was echoed throughout the cathedral precinct. In his seventeenth-century recollections, Francis Osborne acknowledges that the cathedral was a loud and rude meeting place, but insists that gentry, lords, and courtiers also walked the nave in order to remain au courant. According to Osborne, ‘there happened little that did not first or last arrive’ at Paul’s Walk.
Paul’s Walk had a tight kinship with the new theatres that arose in the Elizabethan period. During various times there was, adjacent to the nave, a popular theatre venue for a child acting company and also the Blackfriars theatres eventually arose close by at two different times. The large public stages that sprung up just outside the city proper during the Elizabethan period were only a short walk away. The nave itself was theatrical and inspired Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker and other playwrights to make direct references to Paul’s Walk in their plays. Shakespeare avoided direct references to contemporary city scenes in London, but, as with the ‘pestilent buzzers’ mentioned by King Claudius, there are indirect references in Shakespeare’s work to the public sphere of Paul’s Walk.
Paul’s Walkers are typically lampooned in the writing and drama of the period, but the cathedral locale serviced drama in ways well beyond providing stock characters and themes for social satire. The nave was at the center of a bookselling industry that provided abundant fodder from that locale for stage plays. Stories and themes from books that sold from shops within Paul’s Cross churchyard and at other shops immediate to the cathedral nave were first received by readers in the cathedral precinct and in Paul’s Walk. New print was in a sense processed first by the public before being adopted for the stage. Paul’s Walk was central to a precinct that served as an enormous dynamo of public reception, where impromptu culture exchanges echoed from the cathedral precinct and its nave to the stages of theatres nearby.
Using new digital reconstructions of the cathedral precinct and bookshops and other recent digital as well as hard-copy resources, it will be argued that the cultural environment of Paul’s Walk in conjunction with the larger cathedral precinct helped Shakespeare and other playwrights form a grand template for the selection of play material that would lead to the writing of successful plays.
The nave of St Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk, and the bookshops of Paul’s Cross churchyard instantiated, by a type of cultural accident, a general centre for hearing the news and, for readers, the gateway to remaining au courant. Walking and browsing in this area was something of a prerequisite for playgoers and, for playwrights, a locale where one could hear what was on the buzz and also a reservoir from which to cull material for successful plays.
There have been a number of recent and fines studies connecting London city life with the early modern theatre. This talk examined how digital initiatives may advance this field by offering more insights into theatre going and into how plays were fashioned for then current audiences by Shakespeare and other playwrights.
This line of reasoning is flawed. To view Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its popular Elizabethan translation into English by Arthur Golding as secondary to Shakespeare’s frequent use of this edition, is comparable to saying that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is secondary to the film adaptations of the same story. Many of the so-call sources that Shakespeare and other playwrights used, for instance the popular collection of stories in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, were more prominent in the minds of the Elizabethan public than the plays adapted from them. By cross-referencing searchable databases and digital reconstructions of Elizabethan London, we can see that Shakespearean drama was in fact keenly adapted to the popular reception of printed works available in English, particularly in the St Paul’s precinct.
This talk will examine digital reconstructions of the St Paul’s cathedral precinct in the City of London, the center of the book selling industry during the Elizabethan period. The cathedral’s great and boisterous nave, Paul’s Walk, and the open churchyard full of bookshops at Paul’s Cross, were centers for broadcasting new print. Until recently, however, it has been difficult to visualize this enormous locale as it existed during the Elizabethan period. Digital reconstructions of the cathedral precinct show that Shakespearean plays and many other plays were not crafted from obscure or lesser books. Instead such plays echoed from local theatres the reception of popular printed works particularly in the public sphere at St Paul’s.
As a work sample, this talk examined the single example of William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. This popular work comprised Painter’s translations of many classical and continental stories, including, among other Shakespearean adaptations, the stories of Romeo and Juliet and Timon of Athens. This publication was used by pre-Shakespearean playwrights to craft a spate of plays after its popular reception in the City of London and specifically at St Paul’s. By the time Shakespearean plays reached the public stage, the use of Painter and other popular authors had become something of a template for staging successful productions.
Several digital initiatives were used to show the progress from the printing of Painter’s work to its open public reception with stories from it being adapted for the Elizabethan stage, including adaptations by Shakespeare. The talk began with the Agas Map of London online in order to show how St Paul’s was positioned in the City of London in relation to local theatres that came into being within and on the outskirts of the city. The reconstructions at the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, shows the physical environment of the cathedral proper and also a reconstruction of Peter Blayney’s (hard copy) map of the bookstores of Paul’s Cross churchyard. These reconstructions point to the fact that new printed works were often read and discussed in this locale. Such databases as EEBO-TCP and the ESTC online will also be used to confirm the popular reception of Painter’s work within the St Paul’s precinct.
Titles of extant plays were explored with titles in the Lost Plays Database to show how early modern plays were crafted, not from singular inspirations drawn from independently selected source material, but from playwrights, including Shakespeare, hearing the echoes of popular printed works specifically in the St Paul’s precinct. The relationship between popular stories and plays can be established by searching EEBO-TCP, the ESTC, and other online reference material and then cross-referencing stories with play titles. The presumed story in the lost play, ‘Cupid and Psyche’ will not show up in a reading of Painter’s table of contents, but ‘A Greek Maid’ will, if one recognizes that the story of ‘Timoclea of Thebes’ is indeed about a Greek maiden and is the probable source of ‘Greek Maid’. The methodology here is much easier to show in Powerpoint than to describe in abstract, but the base method is to fill a reconstructed public gathering site with bookshops and popular stories that echoed into successful stage plays during the early modern period. The talk concluded that such stories as those found in Painter are not source material, per se, but well-known stories that were read and discussed in a central bookselling area and that were later cherry picked because of their apparent popular appeal to be adapted for commercial theatre events.
Along with showing how DH platforms can be collaborated, three suggestions were made for the future of early modern digital development and scholarship. The first concerns the singular direction of DH projects and the current need to increase the interoperability between platforms. For instance the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project recreates the environment at Paul’s Cross churchyard to focus on a sermon by John Donne. It is not currently aimed to provide more information about the churchyard bookstores that the project accurately reconstructs or information about printed editions on sale in these bookstores. This problem could be solved with the inclusion of an interactive interface that would provide pop-up bubbles with information about churchyard bookshop holdings. These bookshop holdings could in turned be linked to full texts (when available) at EEBO and to publication information at the ESTC.
The second suggestion concerns the unfinished nature of these projects. EEBO-TCP is slow in development as are other projects. This subject was mentioned only is passing as it could be the focus of an entire DH conference, one that would focus on how to manage continuous and reliable data input for open access sites.
The third suggestion is rooted in the fact that some of our greatest resources are only preserved in hard copy, with no search-ability at all or just the ‘look inside’ option at Amazon or the frustratingly narrowed options offered by Google Books. The future for digital research in the early modern period is in seeing ways to continue the development and interoperability of existing databases with interactive interfaces. We should find ways to finish and better collectivize what has been started, and to digitalize information in hard copy texts in ways more elegant than simple reproductions of the text.
This talk considers one of the ways in which various digital tools can be used in an integrated fashion to map the public reception of new print and drama during the Elizabethan period. Using the final line from Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” as a prompt, the paper extolls the virtue of using digital technology to make new assumptions about human consciousness in historic times and places that were once ‘there’ even if they are currently or ostensibly ‘not there.’ This paper also acknowledges the limits of digital reconstruction and its use in interrogating the past. Indeed, finding nothing may mean that there is nothing to be found.
After the churchyard as theatre is diagramed, more echoes of churchyard culture from the nearby stages will be examined using select lines from Shakespeare’s work. It will be argued in sum that certain morbid reflections and ghoulish images presented by characters had a dramatic immediacy in the minds of those in Shakespeare’s audience and that this language was arguably related to the experience of walking the centralized and fashionable Paul’s Cross Churchyard nearby. It will also be shown how fashion and novelty in Shakespeare are often equated with physical images of death, which would again reflect the intermixture of fashion and death in Paul’s Cross Churchyard. This talk will end by questioning if the intensely referential (and fearful) language concerning the immediacy of death and interment in Shakespearean drama has been, so to speak, bowdlerized by our perspective from our own time and place because we as moderns (happily) live apart from the immediate physical realities of the churchyard experience in early modern London.
Teaching and learning the Bible in Japan has led the author to another view of the Bible, one that stands in stark contrast with the Bible in the Bible-heavy culture that was the author’s beginning at a small crossroads in central South Carolina.
The focus of this study begins in the eighteenth century in order to demonstrate that Marlowe was a virtually unknown literary figure during that time. The early nineteenth century, however, saw the advent of a new form of critical inquiry, and a growing market for old plays and dramatic poetry was considered in terms of an overarching artistic theory. By the end of the Regency, Marlowe's works had gained status both because adventurous critics had commented on his works and because his plays enjoyed some popularity in a growing market for old drama.