Theatrical Preservation and the Digital Book

As you may have figured out by this point in the semester, my major interest is in the relationships between books and theatre (and to a lesser extent, film). It is from this perspective that I’d like to think about digital books and their capacity for preserving objects in all of their formal complexity. In this light, digital books (which can incorporate sound and video) can actually do some of the preservation work that paper books (and other non-digital manuscripts) have been unable to do for centuries. While non-digital copies of plays have helped us to pass on the text of a performed play through the centuries, a lot of the context that is vital to interpreting their performances has been lost. Who played these roles? What associations would their contemporary audiences have seen between characters because one actor may have played a certain other character or because of details of their personal lives the audience might have been familiar with? These meta-performative jokes are all too common in contemporary film and theatre, and I believe that they would have been just as common in earlier theatrical performances.

Take, for example, the enormous amount of scholarship that has been done of Robert Armin, a Shakespearean clown who played some of the most iconic fool roles in Shakespeare. Without knowing at least some of his biography (and without having the peripheral information available to us to identify which roles he might have played) there are many interpretations that simply wouldn’t be available for contemporary scholars. One of the projects I’m currently working on involves trying to reconstruct an idea of what the original performance of the role of Viola in Shakespeare’s  Twelfth Night might have looked like (and what interpretive associations it might open up) by identifying the boy actor who likely played the role. It is only possible for me to make these sorts of assertions based on some paratextual information that was discovered a little over ten years ago in an archive in Britain. With the help of this information we are able to re-construct a theory about what was lost, but with digital books we are given the ability to record and store this information.

The Folger Shakespeare App series, which I have blogged about here before, has already attempted to include with a reading copy of the play an approximated idea of what the plays might have sounded like (by having Shakespearean actors read the play in a Shakespearean dialect and making it possible to read the play along with them), but digital book technology could be leveraged even further when it comes to creating editions of contemporary plays. If a digital book publisher could capture the play in its initial run (with the details from the original collaborators – including, but not limited to actors, costume designers, set designers, music arrangers, composers, conductors, and orchestra members – represented as in the ways which informed the collaborative writing process), then we can preserve these sorts of relevant interpretive details which have otherwise been washed away over time when their records were recorded in non-digital books. Including these sorts of things will also to help remind readers that staging is a collaborative process, and that “authorial intention” (if this is something we are even interested in tracing) belongs to many collaborators when it comes to theatrical pieces. In a sense, this sort of digital book can capture performative “footnotes” and “marginalia” that exist outside of the traditional scope of the book as text, but are none-the-less important to the meaning of the text.