Shakespeare without Print

Book excerpt: Everything we know about Shakespeare – his world, his words, his work – is preconceived by print. This knowledge extends to cultural expressions that seek to evade ink, paper, and moveable type, such as performance, such as acting. Print privileges qualities quite alien to performance, however: standardization, reproducibility, and, above all, uniformity. Thus the master tropes of print occlude rather than clarify our thinking about acting. How might we think about Shakespeare and performance without print? Examining texts both early and modern, Shakespeare without Print contends that Shakespeare and performance has long been dominated by a medium alien to its expression, print, a foreign government that forecloses alternative conceptualizations and practices. Through a series of discrete but linked excursions into the relationship between Shakespearean print and Shakespearean performance, this Element auditions alternative prepositions to enfranchise scholars and practitioners from print, which currently binds and determines our various approaches to Shakespearean performance.