Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies

This article argues that a return to actor-led theatre without a director is the most important, and radical, form of Original Practice (OP) possible today. This involves a critique of the now-established OP theories of minimal rehearsal time and cue-script techniques of acting practice, which have concomitantly needed to posit or invent a director of sorts, in the form of the book-keeper, theatrical manager, or the playwright himself, to preserve theoretical coherence. The theory of no group rehearsal, cue scripts isolated to single actors who know nothing of the play, and a putative director, to ensure a theatrical coherence, go hand-in-hand.

A Shakespearean slant to Marcel Proust's evocations of sublimity is the starting point for an exploration of similarities between both authors’ conceptions of time and sublimity. Shakespeare and Proust make sublimity available phenomenally through a combination of the morphologies of their works, the synchronisation of fictional and real contexts, and the playgoer's/reader's own imaginative participation in the co-production of the sublime. In that participation, fictional contexts and real, historical contexts intersect at the sublime événement/event, which, belonging properly to neither context, is in transcendence of both and produces an extra-chronological interval that undermines the conventional distinction between art and reality.

This article explores the career of printer Joan Orwin and in particular on a playbook she was hired to print: Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queene of Carthage (1594). Drawing on archival records of female stationers in the period, the article demonstrates that Joan Orwin was unique in her employment of her brand ‘the Widow Orwin’. The play is a rich case study, not only because the multifarious significations of widowhood and loss in early modern culture seem to consolidate in and on the playbook Orwin printed, but because Dido engages in gender dynamics created by powerful widows who populate the play.

John Ford is known for regularly mining the work of fellow dramatists. Behind his best-known work, ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, the influence of a number of plays may be detected, notably in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Othello. In this note, I propose a further source-text for ’Tis Pity She's a Whore as well as for two other Ford plays that share a common feature. I set out correspondences between a lesser-known play, The Turk, by John Mason (written for The Children of the King's Revels) and ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, focusing particularly on the use of the upper stage, a device also found in Perkin Warbeck and The Lady's Trial.

In 2023, Silviu Purcărete engaged with William Shakespeare's Hamlet at the National Theatre in Bucharest through the mediation of a Romanian adaptation, Radu F. Alexandru's Gertrude (2012). In Purcărete's vision, Elsinore appeared as a burlesque, corrupt yet playful universe where a family drama unfolded under the eyes of a voyeuristic spectator. This article argues that by multiplying its self-conscious theatrical devices the production also reflected on the status of the adaptation, as a mediated, fragmented access to the work, mirroring the director's puzzlement with Shakespeare's tragedy.