Harriman-Smith J. The Anti-Performance Prejudice of Shakespeare’s Eighteenth-Century Editors. Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 2014, 29(2), 47-61.

On bookshelves, in ephemera, drama exists on the page. On bodies, in spaces filled with actors and spectators, drama exists on the stage. These two spheres, page and stage, are too easily distinguished and kept separate when we write about the literature of the theatre (Berger 139-40). The English roots of this division, which continues to structure some academic work today, go back to the eighteenth century at least, when several of Shakespeare’s earliest editors attempted to produce what they took to be the best possible versions of his work. In so doing, they had to confront the problem of stage and page, which is to say the inability of each medium to mirror the experience of the other. The result of this confrontation was a new, hostile understanding of performance as a process which tainted the work of art, as opposed to the careful preservation undertaken by the printing of an edition. Such a conclusion was deeply anti-theatrical in that it was anti-performance, severing stage and page not so much on moral grounds as on aesthetic ones. In what follows, I build upon the work of Vanessa Cunningham and others to describe how such a situation came about by analyzing the tensions between the methods of Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century editors and their a priori assumptions about their chosen subject.11 then conclude with a brief sketch of how such anti-theatrical forces remained at the heart of Romantic responses to England’s most celebrated dramatist, and so continue to influence us today.