Shakespeare, Anecdotally

Performance history is largely a province of fact, a positivist place of verifiable data, to which anecdotes form an embarrassing suburb. Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year performance history is, however, full of anecdotes—gossipy, trivial, and but loosely allegiant to fact. “Shakespeare, Anecdotally” argues that such anecdotes are, nevertheless, a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare’s plays generate meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore, particular plays have accreted peculiar anecdotes—stories of a real skull in Hamlet, superstitions about the name “Macbeth”—and therefore express something immanent in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play’s performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel intimately involved in their production. This history and these readings are every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play’s meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism. The ambition of “Shakespeare, Anecdotally” is then to develop a historiography of the anecdote, expanding on anecdotal theories developed by Jane Gallop, Joel Fineman, and others. Secondly, the project limns particularly durable anecdotes and argues for them as demotic readings of Shakespeare’s plays. The project ultimately aspires to provide, both by example and through examples, a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based entirely in fact but nonetheless full of truth.

Professor Paul Menzer is Director of the Mary Baldwin College graduate program in Shakespeare and Performance. He is the editor of Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (2006), author of The Hamlets: Cues, Q’s, and remembered texts (2008), and of dozens of articles, essays, reviews, and chapters on theatre history, textual criticism, and performance studies. He is President of the Marlowe Society of America and co-editor of The Hare, an online journal of brief essays and untimely reviews. He is also a practicing playwright and his plays Anonymous, The Brats of Clarence, and Shakespeare on Ice have appeared on the Blackfriars stage and elsewhere. His most recent play, Invisible Inc., will premiere at the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Texas in early 2013.

Featured publications

• The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and the remembered text, University of Delaware Press: 2008. Times Literary Supplement, “Book of the Year,” 2010
• Editor, Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, Susquehanna University Press: 2006.
• “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” in Moving Shakespeare Indoors, eds. Farah Karim-Cooper and Andrew Gurr (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
• “Lines,” in 21st Century Approaches: Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• “Marlowe’s End” in Marlowe in Context,eds. Emma Smith and Emily Bartels (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
• “Character Acting,” in Special Effects on the Early Modern Stage, eds. Tiffany Stern and Farah Karim-Cooper (Arden, 2013)
• “cf. Marlowe,” in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (Routledge, 2012)
• “Ophelia’s Wake” in The Afterlife of Ophelia, eds. Deanne Williams and Kaara Petersen (Palgrave, 2012)