The weeks are really flying by and it's amazing to think we are already onto our third speaker, Rachel Stenner. This Friday, 18th November, Rachel will speak about:
‘Becoming the “Eternal
Reader”?: Moving Troilus and Cressida
From Stage to Page’
In this paper I shall consider the presentation of the performed and printed versions of Shakespeare’s play, Troilus and Cressida, especially through the paratexts of the earliest printed version. This volume emerged in 1609, during a crucial transition in the development of English dramatic authorship, when authors were becoming professionals who newly wrote for publication as well as performance. The 1609 Troilus and Cressida has been characterised as a text for readers that not only rejects its theatrical provenance, but stigmatises the supposedly lowbrow theatrical audience. In a revision of previous arguments about this paratext, this paper suggests that the position of the reader is violently troubled and indeed implicated in the multitudinous audience that it apparently strives to leave behind. As it imagines its future reader, the book of the play is embroiled in its own past.
Rachel Stenner is in the first year of her MLitt on the
subject of paratexts in early modern literature. Before starting this research she completed a
Masters in English here at the University of Bristol, and prior to that a
Masters in Postcolonial Studies and a BA in English at the University of
Kent. Rachel is a regular contributor to
the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies, edits articles for the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and writes for the Bristol Review of
Books.
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