Printing-Practice-as-Research: Using Letterpress for Research and Teaching Early Modern Literature
Résumés
Le présent article propose que le mot “pratique” dans les approches pratiques comme recherche pourrait et devrait non seulement décrire la pratique théâtrale ou dramatique, mais aussi les pratiques des technologies littéraires, particulièrement l’impression manuelle. Cet article défend cette approche en abordant la pratique comme recherche fondée sur la représentation théâtrale, le travail pratique sur des textes non-dramatiques de la première modernité, la discussion sur la façon dont cette approche basée sur la pratique est utile dans un environnement pédagogique, et la bourse d’études qui fournit un support conceptuel à mon approche. L’article se tourne ensuite vers une réflexion autour de cette approche fondée sur la pratique, en utilisant mes propres expériences dans la pratique de l’impression en tant que recherche comme mise à l’épreuve de la théorie.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
histoire du livre, imprimerie, matérialité du texte, pédagogie, pratique comme recherche, presse à bras, presse typographique, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare WilliamKeywords:
book history, handpress, materiality of the text, pedagogy, practice-as-research, printing, printing press, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare WilliamPlan
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Introduction
1Within Shakespeare studies, and early modern studies more broadly, practice-as-research has come to be virtually synonymous with the performance of dramatic texts. The word “practice” in this term gestures primarily to the actions of a wide range of theatre practitioners – actors, directors, dramaturgs, etc. – who work collaboratively with embedded, observing, or participating researchers to produce something that can be studied as a dramatic, rather than textual, object. Such practice-based approaches have yielded indisputably valuable insights to the study of early modern dramatic work. Adopters of this approach have enriched their discipline by effectively establishing a subfield of study in which scholars and students can analyse and interpret (e.g.) Shakespeare in an exciting and embodied dimension. But the use of practice within early modern research does not need to be restricted to the study of dramatic contexts. Our notion of practice-as-research can and should be expanded to include the practices of textual production. By including activities like letterpress printing, paper folding, book binding, and writing with quill and ink within our conception of “practices” worth exploring, it is possible to produce embodied, participatory experiences of textuality as our objects of study. The combination of learning to create these objects, undertaking the practice needed to create them, and analysing both the tangible outcome and the process provides the opportunity for participants in text-focused practice-as-research activities to learn more about the materiality and the context of early modern works as they existed in their various textual forms.
2This article acts as a first step toward establishing a practice-as-research approach based on the practices of early modern literary technologies. It does this by providing a rationale which includes a brief survey of some selected existing projects and scholarship which inform my conceptualisation of this approach. It is worth noting that this list is nascent; because this article is coming at an early stage in the development of this research and pedagogical perspective, it is not synoptic and it is designed to offer only a basis from which further investigation may develop. Concluding this article will be a test case based on my own experiences of practice-as-research – as a student, researcher, and teacher – which I hope will demonstrate the potential of this technique as both a research and pedagogical approach.
- 1 Robin Nelson “Introduction”, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, R (...)
3However, before getting into the rationale and test case, it is important to define the terms that I will be using to talk about “practice” and “research” in this article. There are many ways of describing research that puts practice at its centre. Robin Nelson deals with differences in nomenclature in the introduction of his book, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Nelson prefers “practice-as-research” over alternative terms such as “practice-led” research, which he says could imply that “knowledge follows after, is secondary to, the practice” and “practice-based” research which he reserves for “research which draws from, or is about, practice but which is articulated in traditional word-based forms.”1 In this essay, I use “practice-based” research when I refer to the critical analysis of this type of research (and its application) and “practice-as-research” when I am discussing the research activity itself.
Rationale
- 2 Stephen Purcell, “Practice-as-Research and Original Practices”, Shakespeare Bulletin 35.3, 2017, 42 (...)
- 3 Ibid.
4To begin with, it is useful to quickly take stock of current ideas about practice-as-research as it exists in the field of early modern studies and why it matters. For the most part, this means theatrical practice-as-research. Stephen Purcell’s article “Practice-as-Research and Original Practices” is very useful here, as its examination of the similarities and tensions between the approaches named in its title provides a helpful overview of some of the core tenets of practice-based approaches. Purcell distils what practice-as-research is, calling it “any scholarly work in which performance practice constitutes a major part of the research enquiry.”2 He also makes the point that this type of research “privilege[es] the subjective, the embodied, the collaborative and the provisional” and he quotes Estelle Barrett’s comment that practice as research is a “demonstration [of the fact that] ‘knowledge [can be] derived from doing and from the senses.’”3 Applying the concepts noted by Purcell to the question of the purpose of practice-as-research approaches can uncover – or recover – some aspect of Shakespeare’s works that is not accessible in the text on its own. In other words, there is something else that becomes accessible to a researcher once one’s practice engages with the text beyond the text.
- 4 Globe Theatre Editorial Team, “Explore Early Modern performance culture in our Research in Action s (...)
- 5 Anna Pakes, “Knowing through dance-making: choreography, practical knowledge and practice as resear (...)
- 6 Idem, see p. 17-19.
5The point of the usefulness of practice-based approaches to researching early modern drama does not need belabouring; the frequency with which practice-as-research is featured in doctoral, post-doctoral, and mid-career grant-based projects is a testament to its effectiveness and popularity. With its “Research in Action” series, headed by Will Tosh, the Globe Theatre has even bridged the gap between the academy and the general public by incorporating audience feedback, questions, and viewership into its researcher-actor practice-as-research dynamic.4 Practice-based projects are also popular outside of the fields of Shakespeare and early modern studies. It is obvious how critical investigation into drama of any kind can benefit from actually staging whatever piece is being explored. Similarly, the study of dance makes good use of practice-as-research techniques. Anna Pakes, a researcher in dance and choreography, succinctly phrased why practice-as-research is necessary in her field, writing that “knowledge of how to make a dance work is distinct from being able to analyse existing choreography or explain how and why it is effective.”5 For Pakes, “knowledge” of a dance is not just an understanding of the mechanics of a dance, but is instead connected to the Aristotelian concept of phronesis; participation in dance is a type of moral activity and therefore generates an understanding of that dance beyond its mechanics.6
- 7 Judith Hanks, “From research-as-practice to exploratory practice-as-research in language teaching a (...)
- 8 Matt Ratto, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life”, The I (...)
- 9 Anke Schwittay, Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative (...)
6Outside of the fields which deal explicitly with performance, practice-as-research has had a relatively recent but robust use in language teaching. Judith Hanks’s synoptic article, “From Research-as-Practice to Exploratory Practices-as-Research in Language Teaching and Beyond” details practice-based approaches to teaching (and subsequently, researching the teaching of) languages.7 There are also variations of practice-as-research that are concerned with adding a critical element to creative processes. Working in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Matt Ratto has coined the term “critical making” to describe a research approach that connects physically making technological objects to the exploration of the concepts that underpin them.8 Finally, Anke Schwittay has recently published a book, Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures, which outlines her “critical-creative” pedagogical approach.9 Privileging the coupling of co-investigation among students and teachers with embodied experiences as sources of innovation, the “critical-creative” approach described by Schwittay demonstrates how practice-based teaching and research is crucial to learning and research across academia. Practice-as-Research as an intellectual approach is clearly thriving.
Early Modern Practice-as-Research (and Teaching) outside of Performance
- 10 Jana Dambrogio, “Historic Letterlocking: the Art and Security of Letter Writing”, Book Arts / Arts (...)
7If we turn back to the field of early modern literature, we can take note of several projects that have brought practice to the forefront of research outside of drama. For several years, Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Smith have been leading the study of early modern Letterlocking, or the process by which a letter was “folded and secured shut to function as its own envelope.”10 Their study includes a practical element, taking the form of classes and workshops in which participants fold and seal their own letters. Dambrogio describes the purpose of including this practice in their work:
- 11 Idem, p. 23.
Making models of historic originals is a necessary part of the process of learning how these letters once functioned as three-dimensional objects. Unlike the originals, models can be manipulated; through folding them up to mimic how the original may have once functioned, observers may catch details that could otherwise be overlooked.11
8Practice in this case provides researchers with an ability to read beyond the material that they are confronted by – a letter, one which may no longer be folded, or which may be unfolded and bound in a book; or one that is folded, the opening of which might damage it – and develop embodied, experiential knowledge of that object and the cultural context in which and for which it was created.
9An instance where engagement with early modern printing practices has yielded material that could be used for what Nelson calls “practice-led” research is the 39 Step Press’s printing of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 126.” As it was originally written, “Sonnet 126” complicates what we think of as a sonnet, as it only consists of 12 written lines – the final two lines of the poem, what should, formally speaking, be a final couplet, are replaced with two sets of empty parentheses, indented and spaced to demonstrate the absence of the two concluding lines. 39 Step Press’s edition of this sonnet chooses to emphasise the absence by setting the poem in type but inking only the poem’s title, “126”, and the two concluding sets of parentheses. The resulting print is a (mostly) blind impression, the bite of the type making a legible counter-relief, followed by inked parenthesis:
- 12 39 Step Press, “Sonnet 126” (accessible online at: https://www.39steppress.co.uk/video, last access (...)
( )
( )12
- 13 Ibid.
1039 Steps Press notes on their website that the impressions made by the un-inked type “gradually smoothed themselves out […] leaving just a blank sheet of paper with the title and parentheses visible.”13 Though the practitioners involved did not explicitly name the project as an example of practice-based research, it is an excellent candidate for a practice-led research inquiry, as the undertaking itself generates conceptual questions linked to the sonnet’s production. 39 Steps Press’s version of “126”, made with the same basic handpress technology that was used to print the original printed version in 1609, introduces a critical and innovative instance of the poem that prompts comparative bibliographical inquiry.
11Moving from the realm of practice-based research into that of practice-based teaching brings us to the popularity of creating early modern “commonplace book” assignments. In the 16th and 17th centuries, commonplace books were mostly blank books, often with alphabetical headings (“A”, “B”, “C”, etc.) or thematic headings listed in alphabetical order (e.g., “Adventure”, “Faith”, “Tyranny”, etc.). The owner of a commonplace book would record comments, quotations, notes, etc. that they encountered in their lives, organising them under the appropriate headings. This form has been employed as a tool in many undergraduate classrooms to help students think thematically about the material they encounter on their early modern courses. Some institutions do this through their digital teaching software’s forum feature, asking students to make weekly posts linking quotations from their readings to the overarching themes of the course.
- 14 Joshua Eckhardt, “The commonplace book assignment revised and corrected” (accessible online at: htt (...)
12Other iterations of this assignment take the practice of commonplacing to a more tangible level. One such example is detailed in Joshua Eckhardt’s “The commonplace book / verse miscellany assignment”, uploaded on academia.edu.14 Eckhardt’s classes at Virginia Commonwealth University – I attended several while I was a student there – are asked to make their own physical books by folding and binding paper together. They then fill these books with entries by hand: copying quotations from their assigned reading with themed headings and citations. Eckhardt’s assignment gives students the benefit of not only collecting a swath of quotations that interest them (as the digital versions of the assignment do) but also the practical experience of making and filling up a manuscript book, an experience that would have been had by some university students in the early modern period. This pedagogical exercise is based on historical practices, rather than on a specific practice-as-research methodology. While the exercise is useful for a teacher hoping to make an impression on students, its greater value lies in the way that it places the student into the role of practitioner-learner. It is through their own emulation of early modern material practices that students are able to generate an embodied learning experience that is unique to this style of what Ratto would refer to as “critical making.”
- 15 I am not alone in using these practices for teaching. There are many excellent resources for teachi (...)
13To conclude this discussion of practice-based research and teaching projects, it is fitting to reflect on my own experiences of teaching via practical, textual methods. I am certain that my exposure to letterpress printing as a student (which I will discuss in more detail in the test case at the end of this article) drastically changed the way that I approach printed books. Now that I teach early modern literature, I have been conscious to make practical experience in literary technologies a core part of my pedagogy. In formal university classes and workshops with students at all levels, I have used paper folding of quarto facsimile sheets to teach about binding, writing with quills and iron oak gall ink to teach secretary hand, and of course letterpress printing to teach book history.15 I have found that students are much quicker to grasp bibliographical concepts like book format and citing by signature marks if they have a direct understanding of why those things were important to early modern printers. Similarly, learning how a quill’s nib resists or encourages certain pen strokes has also proven to be useful for students interested in early modern palaeography. Students’ awareness of the material limitations of early modern writing tools furnishes them with a deeper understanding of how letters were formed, making early modern hands easier to read.
14However, as might be expected, the real value in this type of practice-based teaching is the students’ direct experience. Student responses have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic – as much for a variation in class structure as discovering the otherwise obscured knowledge of how books were actually made. These responses have also often demonstrated students’ awe at how tedious, time consuming, and laborious letterpress printing is. Still, they invariably come away with a much more profound understanding of what making an early modern book entails. Discussion around Shakespeare’s first folio, for example, changes drastically when students have a clear idea of the type of work it takes to set one single line of text, or to print just one side of a folio sheet. I have also found that giving students the chance to engage with the practices associated with early modern book production is highly motivating for them. Students understand when they are being trusted with complex and interesting knowledge, and I have found that they are always ready to meet the challenge.
Scholarship and Conceptual Backing
- 16 For more on the New Bibliographer’s approach, see Andrew Murphy, “The New Bibliography”, Shakespear (...)
- 17 Fredson Bowers, “A Search for Authority: The Investigation of Shakespeare’s Printed Texts”, Print a (...)
- 18 W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text”, Studies in Bibliography 3, 1950-1951, 19-36.
15All of these projects and pedagogical approaches could be considered to be engaging with some variation of practice-as-research methods. However, unlike fields with an innate performative element built in (drama, dance, or speaking a new language), highlighting the application of practice-based approaches in disciplines that traditionally lack a performative element raises the question of the usefulness of those approaches. Why learn the skills needed to reprint a play or take notes with a quill by hand when the end goal of the educational experience is purely academic? This might have been a valid criticism were it not for academia’s clear interest in dealing with the materiality of early modern texts. The textuality of English literary works has been the focus of English studies for much of the life of the discipline. In particular, the work that the New Bibliographers did concerning editing Shakespearean texts necessitated significant investigations into those texts as physical objects.16 For the New Bibliographers to understand how their objects of study came to be, they needed to develop an awareness of the process of early modern printing. Fredson Bowers once described his editorial work as lifting the “veil of print” in order to have more direct access to the author’s intended manuscript.17 In this way, the goal of editors like Bowers and the New Bibliographers is akin to that of practice-based researchers of Shakespearean drama. The former’s deeply textual work was motivated by the prospect of accessing something that lies outside of the text with which they work. Even without the ultimate end of revealing traces of a prior manuscript version of a printed text, the discussions of two important figures in New Bibliography, R. B. McKerrow and W. W. Greg, regarding the “copy text” were rooted in an attempt to determine “ideal” copies of Shakespeare’s works.18 In effect, these scholars sought to construct versions of texts that do not, and never did, exist. Once again, this work shares a point in common with performance-based practice-as-research: to better understand Shakespeare by getting in touch with a play as it can, or could, exist, be that on a stage or in and ideal textual form.
- 19 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”, Shakespeare (...)
- 20 Idem, p. 257.
16Decades after the New Bibliographers sought ideal copies of Shakespeare’s works, a new trend in early modern textual studies emerged, helped along by the rise of post-structuralist criticism. Instead of attempting to find a perfect Shakespeare, scholars started to think about what it meant that Shakespeare’s works existed in several disparate forms. Perhaps the most clear articulation of this proposition was made in Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass’s “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.”19 In this article, de Grazia and Stallybrass identify four conceptual points through which one can examine the reality of Shakespearean plays: work, word, character, and author.20 Doing so prompts questions like which of the famously disparate versions of King Lear is the true Lear (work), what it means if the words making up a text shift between copies of the same version (word), what happens when plays lack dramatis personae (character), and at what point does the work of people other than Shakespeare – primarily the hands of people involved in printing – start to contribute to what we think of as “Shakespearean” texts (author). Questions like these, which attend to the flexibility and ambiguity of early modern texts, have served to inform bibliographical study in the thirty years since the publication of de Grazia and Stallybrass’s article.
- 21 On paper see Georgina Wilson, Paperscapes: Navigating Books in Early Modern England [PhD thesis], O (...)
- 22 See Adam Smyth, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Early Modern Book in England, Oxford, Oxf (...)
- 23 See Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence, “Printing and Book History: Insights from Practice”, T (...)
- 24 Ibid.
17One major consequence of such questions is the acceleration of interest in the material processes of book production over the past few decades. This interest has prompted studies on many intriguing materiality-focused topics including the nature and uses of paper, the significance of typography, and even blank spaces and book destruction in early modern England.21 All of these studies share a similar if unspoken motivation: if we cannot truly hope to access the authorial intent behind an early modern work, we ought to study what we can actually access, that is, the materiality of the object at hand. In attempting to discover the realities of a physical object, scholars can widen the frame of what they can say for certain about early modern books. It follows that engagement with the practices of early modern book production can be used not only to develop new knowledge about the very material process being investigated, but also to critically re-evaluate the accuracy of passively-received knowledge on the subject. Fittingly, discussions around the history of the book are increasingly likely to feature some incorporation of practice-based work. One such example is Adam Smyth’s Oxford Handbook of the History of the Early Modern Book in England, which, along with chapters entitled “Scribes, Compositors, Correctors” (Tamara Aktin), “What was a print shop, and what happened there?” (Paul Nash), and “Waste, offcuts, remains, reuse” (Anna Reynolds) includes a chapter called “Printing and Book History: Insights from Practice” (Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence).22 Franklin and Lawrence’s chapter starts with a concise summary of the use of practice-based methods in bibliographical scholarship over the 20th and 21st centuries.23 It then proceeds to an exceptionally useful section that details the materials needed to set up a press for bibliographical study, along with sample activities that illustrate various bibliographical concepts.24 The incorporation of this practice-as-research perspective and method in an Oxford Handbook is an indication of the contributions that practice-as-research can offer within an academic research environment.
18The close analysis of the material pieces of early modern texts prompts us to recall the question raised by de Grazia and Stallybrass’s intervention, which can essentially be reduced to: what is a Shakespearean text? Here, textual scholarship once again unites with the study of Shakespearean drama along conceptual lines. Both fields grapple with the fact that what they study is removed by several degrees from the ability to confidently identify any authorial intent, which, despite our attempts to move beyond it, somehow still feels important in a field called “Shakespeare Studies.” On the bibliographical side are investigations of all the materials that literally make up Shakespeare, including the labour of non-authorial hands whose work is the sole reason any printed Shakespearean texts exist. On the performance-focused side of things, there are enduring questions of dramatic collaboration (and the creative, even authorial labour of practitioners) and adaptation.
- 25 Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation”, Shakespeare and Perform (...)
- 26 Idem, p. 117.
19Margaret Jane Kidnie brings both sides of this question into simultaneous consideration in her chapter entitled, “Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation.” In this chapter, Kidnie uses the riddle “If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?” to ask ontological questions about Shakespeare’s works.25 As her title suggests, Kidnie explores whether a Shakespearean work is located in a text (but which one?), a performance (which performance?), or in an adaptation, which begs the question: how far can we stray from text or performance and still find Shakespeare there? The question is complicated by the fact that each of these answers can be correct in their own way. However, the variety of correct answers points to its own conclusion: Shakespeare is a conglomeration of all of these things. Indeed, Kidnie concludes her article by gesturing toward a definition of a Shakespeare play as a “temporal and cultural process.”26 That is precisely why embodied experience – be it on a stage or in a print shop – is important to scholarship. An actor has a different relationship to Shakespeare than an audience member or a researcher. Likewise, printers have a different relationship to Shakespeare than readers of his works do. Just as there is something extratextual that can be gleaned from experiencing a performance-based practice-as-research project, experience of printing brings a new relationship into the critical and interpretive field by adding an understanding of literary production to the researcher’s culturally constructed idea of Shakespeare.
20Having gone over the rationale of a practice-based approach to the study of early modern book history, bibliography, and textuality, it is pertinent to share a short test case to demonstrate how experience printing can change the way that one reads and critically interprets printed text. However, before I share this test case, it is worth mentioning that the “practice” in any practice-as-research project is the “research.” In much the same way that a recording of performance art results in a product that is removed from the thing itself, a typed-up reflection of the experiences of using early modern literary technologies must acknowledge that much of the value of the experience lies in the embodied act of practice. It is clear, then, how this can pose a problem within academia; at least in the United Kingdom, the pressure to be productive necessarily de-incentivises practice that results primarily in an experience for the researcher, regardless of how significantly that experience informs future research.
- 27 See Melissa Trimingham, “A Methodology for Practice as Research”, Studies in Theatre & Performance (...)
- 28 Idem, p. 57.
21In order to address the tension between doing and reporting on practice-as-research, Melissa Trimingham has articulated a method of ensuring that practice-based approaches remain firmly identifiable as research. Trimingham argues that for practice to be a part of research, it should adhere to a methodological pattern of hypothesising, questioning, applying practice, and evaluating, before using what has been discovered to develop a new hypothesis and begin the process again.27 Trimingham highlights the importance of stepping outside of practice to analyse the experience and come to shareable conclusions, but also acknowledges that practice “could continue indefinitely and may well be picked up again later.”28 In other words, the research does not permanently stop when a researcher pauses to evaluates it, rather, those periods of evaluation lead the researcher to better defined questions and hypotheses, which in turn prompt further practice.
22With Trimingham’s comments in mind, the following section serves not just as a report back from my own practice but also as an evaluation of that practice, which might be useful in developing further hypotheses. In what follows, I briefly reflect on my experience printing and discuss how it led me to a creative way of accounting for textual variants between versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Test Case
- 29 Westmoreland manuscript: New York Public Library [no shelf mark] (NY3); Cambridge Balam manuscript: (...)
23My own experience with letterpress printing has influenced the way in which I approach and “read” the materiality of early modern printed texts. While studying for my MA degree at Virginia Commonwealth University, I took several early modern classes with Joshua Eckhardt in which we used VCU’s Bowe House Press which was part of the university’s art school and was run by Jamie Mahoney. Over the course of these classes, we used an early 20th century “Reliance” iron handpress to print several early modern books. We started with a type-facsimile of William Symonds’s 1609 Virginia: A Sermon Preached at White-Chapel. Following the Symonds sermon, we undertook a critical editing project, in which we made manuscript facsimiles of three manuscript versions of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” (from the Westmoreland manuscript, the Cambridge Balam manuscript, and the O’Flahertie manuscript) and then used those manuscripts as the sources for printing a new edition of the “Holy Sonnets.”29 The “Holy Sonnets” project was then followed with an “independent study” undertaken by myself and a fellow student at the time, Dr Meghan Kern, in which we printed a portion of John Milton’s Paradise Lost from a facsimile of the printer’s copy held at the Morgan library. I make a point to mention here that these projects were done as part of a course of study because I think it is important to recognise that this occurred in a pedagogical environment, in which training in printing was mixed with bibliographical and book historical scholarship and literary criticism.
24Despite having not undertaken a letterpress project focusing on Romeo and Juliet, I have found that my experience of printing and reprinting other early modern books has enriched my engagement with the play’s early printed versions. One place in particular that my printing experience has informed my reading of the play is during the friar’s speech (in what modern editors call act 2 scene 2 or act 2 scene 3) in which the friar talks about the concoction that Juliet will use to simulate her death. He says:
- 30 William Shakespeare, An excellent conceited tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet, London, Iohn Danter [and (...)
Within the infant rinde of this small flower,
Poyson hath residence, and medecine power:
For this being smelt too, with that part cheares ech hart,
Being tasted, slaies all-sences with the hart.30
25It is that last phrase quoted here “slaies all-sences with the hart,” and specifically the word “slaies” (i.e., “slays”) that I want to talk about – precisely because the word “slaies” is not consistently used. The word appears as “staies” (i.e., stays) in Q2, while the other early editions (Q1, Q3, FF) all contain some variant spelling of the word “slays”. Even in Q2, where “staies” is drawn from, it is difficult to tell whether the word is “staies” or “slaies.” This difficulty in reading the type stems from the material – in the early modern period, type was made from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. This alloy was a soft metal with a low melting point. As type is used, it wears down, and not only does this worn-down type give a poorer imprint, but it also becomes less distinguishable from similar looking or feeling letters. The “st” ligature used in Q2’s “staies” for instance, has been severely worn down – the ligature’s thin connection at the top of the two letters is so worn that it can no longer leave an inked impression. When looking at this particular page of Q2, one can observe that the lines atop the other “long s” pieces and “st” ligatures in the vicinity of the passage we are concerned with are clearly inked, so the failure of the top part of the ligature in “staies” to leave a mark does not seem to be an issue of inking or press-pressure.
26The question is: why did this variant occur? One easy but unverifiable answer is that the printer of Q2 might have been working from copy that had the word “staies” in it; we have no existing printer’s copy for this play, so there is no way to prove this speculation. What we do have is the play itself – a material book made of printed and bound paper. By thinking about the materiality of the text in tandem with a direct, experience-based understanding of what it is like to print book by hand, we can find a hypothetical reason for this variation. In short, the “st” ligature likely ended up in the “sl” ligature compartment in the printer’s case (the many-compartmented open-face tray in which printers stored their type). This might have happened in one of two ways. If indeed the cross bar of the “t” was as worn as it appears to have been, there is a good chance that the distributor (the person, often an apprentice, whose job it is to return used type to the case) mistakenly placed the type in the wrong compartment of the case. Another possibility, suggested to me by the Cambridge-based printer Gordon Chesterman, is that the printer’s case may have been laid out in such a way that the “st” ligatures were housed just above the “sl” ligatures. When being used, cases of type are often set on slanted worktables (similar to drafting tables used by architects). Because of the slanted work surface, if one compartment were to be overfilled with type pieces, it would be very easy for a piece to fall into the compartment below it.
27Regardless of how it happened, once the “st” ligature seems to have made its way into the “sl” ligature’s compartment, the compositor (the person who sets the type in the composing stick) may have failed to notice this error when they set the type. My experience printing has taught me that after you learn the layout, or “lay” of the case (i.e., where all the pieces are housed) the quickest way to set type is to pick up a piece of type and feel it to determine if it is the piece that you want. Sometimes, even often, one will look at the type, too – but sometimes one skips this step, especially if they feel fairly confident that they have grabbed the correct piece – a printer’s version of touch typing. If the misplaced “st” ligature was worn enough to feel like an “sl” to the compositor, then perhaps this is what happened.
28The final step in the creation of this variant was its survival of the proofing process. Once an impression has been made of a sheet, it would be checked by a proof-reader. This person would be primarily concerned with catching typographic errors: letters placed upside-down, clear mix-ups of d’s, b’s, p’s, and q’s, and obvious spelling mistakes. They likely would not have noticed that “staies” had replaced “slaies,” especially considering the fact that the word makes sense in context. To “stay” someone’s heart – that is, to keep it from beating – is tantamount to “slaying” a person. One could even argue that “staies” makes for a more poetic and evocative reading.
29This may seem like a small and very speculative point, but my purpose in arguing it is to demonstrate that this interpretation was reached through the application of knowledge gleaned through direct, embodied experience with printing. That experience, of course, does not provide a perfect understanding of early modern printing practices. I have primarily used anachronistic tools (19th and 20th century iron handpresses for the most part) and my experience printing was done in a far-from-original-practice environment. I worked at a different pace and with different intentions from any early modern printer. However, much the same could be said about analogous performance-based practice-as-research work in Shakespeare studies, and yet that has yielded demonstrable value to both individual researchers and the discipline at large. The conclusion to be drawn from this investigation is that the textual variant “staies” found in Q2 of Romeo and Juliet was the result of a mistake made by non-authorial hands during Q2’s production process.
30While some might argue that the research and teaching potential of literary technology-based experiential knowledge could be replaced by deep bibliographical study and some creative thinking, I do not think that the impact on the individuals participating in textual practice-as-research activities can be overstated. When people, particularly students, get to experience the unfixity and slipperiness of textual production first hand, they acquire a new tool to aid their reading, analysis, and critical investigations. Taken together with practice’s ability to create exciting opportunities to engage with key ideas about early modern book history, materiality, labour, culture, and society, the development of a more nuanced interpretive framework also grants the participant with an expanded understanding of the cultural artifact that is, for instance, the Shakespearean text.
Notes
1 Robin Nelson “Introduction”, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances, ed. Robin Nelson, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013, 3-22, p. 10.
2 Stephen Purcell, “Practice-as-Research and Original Practices”, Shakespeare Bulletin 35.3, 2017, 425-443, p. 426
3 Ibid.
4 Globe Theatre Editorial Team, “Explore Early Modern performance culture in our Research in Action series”, 24 May 2022 (accessible online at: https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2022/05/24/explore-early-modern-performance-culture-in-our-research-in-action-series/, last accessed 26 July 2023).
5 Anna Pakes, “Knowing through dance-making: choreography, practical knowledge and practice as research”, Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader, ed. J. Butterworth, & L. Wildschut, Abingdon, Routledge, 2009, 10-22, p. 11.
6 Idem, see p. 17-19.
7 Judith Hanks, “From research-as-practice to exploratory practice-as-research in language teaching and beyond”, Language Teaching vol. 52.2, 2019, 143-187.
8 Matt Ratto, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life”, The Information Society vol. 27.4, 2011, 252-260.
9 Anke Schwittay, Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures, Bristol, Bristol University Press, 2021.
10 Jana Dambrogio, “Historic Letterlocking: the Art and Security of Letter Writing”, Book Arts / Arts du livre Canada, 5.2, 2014, 21-23, p. 21.
11 Idem, p. 23.
12 39 Step Press, “Sonnet 126” (accessible online at: https://www.39steppress.co.uk/video, last accessed 26 July 2023).
13 Ibid.
14 Joshua Eckhardt, “The commonplace book assignment revised and corrected” (accessible online at: https://www.academia.edu/28560388/The_commonplace_book_assignment_revised_and_corrected, last accessed 26 July 2023).
15 I am not alone in using these practices for teaching. There are many excellent resources for teaching book format by folding sheets, for example Illinois state University’s “Shakespeare in Sheets” project (accessible online at: https://about.illinoisstate.edu/shakespeareinsheets/, last accessed 26 July 2023) and Claire M. L. Bourne’s in-class version “Making Q1 Phylaster: Quartos in the Classroom (Redux)”, Of Pilcrows (accessible online at: https://www.ofpilcrows.com/blog/2016/10/16/making-q1-phylaster-quartos-in-the-classroom-redux, last accessed 26 July 2023). Virginia Commonwealth University’s palaeography club, the VCU Superscripts, recently hosted a quill writing event (Joshua Eckhardt, “Write for Real”, accessible online at: https://rampages.us/superscripts/2023/05/01/write-for-real/, last accessed 26 July 2023).
16 For more on the New Bibliographer’s approach, see Andrew Murphy, “The New Bibliography”, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 258-290.
17 Fredson Bowers, “A Search for Authority: The Investigation of Shakespeare’s Printed Texts”, Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, ed. Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim, Newark, University of Delaware Press; London, Associated University Press 1986) 17-44, p. 32. Leah S. Marcus highlights how this pursuit is problematic, as the manuscript itself shrouds the authorial intent in a “veil” of its own, Leah S. Marcus, “The Veil of Manuscript”, Renaissance Drama 30, 1999-2001, 115-131.
18 W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text”, Studies in Bibliography 3, 1950-1951, 19-36.
19 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”, Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3, 1993, 255-283.
20 Idem, p. 257.
21 On paper see Georgina Wilson, Paperscapes: Navigating Books in Early Modern England [PhD thesis], Oxford, University of Oxford, 2020; on typography see Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020; on blank space see Jonathan Sawday, Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature: An Archaeology of Absence, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023; on book destruction see Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
22 See Adam Smyth, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Early Modern Book in England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023.
23 See Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence, “Printing and Book History: Insights from Practice”, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Early Modern Book in England, ed. Adam Smyth, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023, 123-139.
24 Ibid.
25 Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation”, Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005, 101-120, p. 101.
26 Idem, p. 117.
27 See Melissa Trimingham, “A Methodology for Practice as Research”, Studies in Theatre & Performance 22.1, 2002-3, 54-60.
28 Idem, p. 57.
29 Westmoreland manuscript: New York Public Library [no shelf mark] (NY3); Cambridge Balam manuscript: Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 5778 (C2); O’Flahertie manuscript: Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS. Eng. 966.5 (H6).
30 William Shakespeare, An excellent conceited tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet, London, Iohn Danter [and Edward Allde], 1597, STC (2nd ed.) 22322, sig. D4r, last accessed (via EEBO) 26 July 2023.
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Julian T.S. Neuhauser, « Printing-Practice-as-Research: Using Letterpress for Research and Teaching Early Modern Literature », Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 42 | 2024, mis en ligne le 10 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/8977 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/137t1
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