The other night I had one of those eureka! moments that bring me joy and make me crazy. But mostly bring me joy.
As some of you know I’ve been trying to sort out how to track Queen’s Men touring practices in the 1580s by teasing information out of the Records of Early English Drama dataset and looking at it on maps. I had some early success – 1583 record scraps offered what looks like a split tour during the summer months. I’ve been pinning the record scraps to an ArcGIS online map (and a pretty crappy job I did of it, too) and explaining away the vagueness of my plotting because I don’t always have very specific geo references (aside from an extant guildhall here and there, for which I’m grateful.) [Read more…] about Asking Better Questions
Checking back in
Have been flying below the radar lately. Have drafted several posts but life kept getting in the way of properly editing them. I have spent some time tweaking the site’s theme (still not happy with it, but I’ve become quite the theme hoarder).
Off to ROMARD we go
Just clicked ‘send’ on an article entitled “Title Page Engravings and Re-Ordering the Quartos of A Game at Chess“. It is scheduled to be published in the XLX 2011 issue of Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama. Quite the little monster – 9600 words plus endnotes, and features eight full page 17th century engravings. I expect there will be some more pre-press adjustments to be made, but I’m excited. Now on to the Henry VIII edition proposal, and the essay for Envisioning REED.
But first a bit of dinner, then back to reading Knight of the Burning Pestle for tomorrow’s class.
Skiles Breezeway or Blackfriars Theatre?
[reposted from TECHStyle]
This week I’m teaching Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle as part of my English 1102 course on London City Comedy. The play is usually identified as a breakthrough Early Modern parody (of other plays like The Shoemaker’s Holiday and The Four Prentises) and one of the first English plays to break the fourth wall. It is also a very challenging read, since at any time there are some three interweaving plot lines – not to mention the added noodle-twist of trying to imagine a boys acting company playing both cast and planted audience members. [Read more…] about Skiles Breezeway or Blackfriars Theatre?