Error and Absurdity in Shakespeare’s First Folio

17. Oktober 2023 19:00

Prof. Tiffany Stern FBA

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Prof. Tiffany Stern FBA
The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

“Error and Absurdity in Shakespeare`s First Folio”

Tuesday October 17th 2023 at 7 pm
Goethe Museum, Schloß Jägerhof, Jacobistrasse 2

Shakespeare’s First Folio is so important that it is often thought to be good. John Payne Collier called it „A credit to the age, even as a specimen of typography.“ But the First Folio has some notable blunders, from its poorly spaced preliminary matter onwards. My lecture will investigate what error reveals about the Folio’s transcribers (who copied Shakespeare’s plays in neat for the press); compositors (who rendered the plays they received into print); and „readers“ (who pronounced the plays out loud for proofing). Celebrating the people who put the Folio together, many of whose names are not known, it will show how crises and successes in the early modern printing house remain part of „Shakespeare“ today.

Tiffany Stern, FBA, is Professor, Fellow and Chair of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, having previously been Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Oxford. Author of 12 books and editions and over sixteen articles and chapters, she specializes in Shakespeare, theatre history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, book history and editing. She is general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (16th century), New Mermaids Plays and Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series; her work on early modern theatre practice is widely used by theatre companies interested in historically inflected performance. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

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