Othello, feminist textual editing and early modern women's performance
- Submitting institution
-
Roehampton University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1636093
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This portfolio showcases distinct methodologies of sustained historicised and archival literary research. Editing Shakespeare’s Quarto and Folio texts of Othello, with textual introduction, notes and comments (55,994 words of text; 5898 of apparatus) required textual interventions (e.g. emending, lineating, modernising) and extensive research into printing and playhouse practice, book history, textual theorisations, and Shakespeare editions and scholarship from F2 (1632) to the 21st century. In the co-edited Shakespeare Bulletin special issue (128 pages, 49,688 words), my 8,500-word article uses archives and scholarship on Italian actresses to bring these paradigms of print, somatics and vocality to bear on the Shakespearean playtext.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- "This portfolio of critical works examines the early texts of Othello through in-depth textual editing and historicised, transnational performance analysis, excavating the effects of women’s performance on the practice of the English boy-actor.
The portfolio comprises:
1.) Edited texts of the Quarto (1622) and Folio (1623) texts of Shakespeare’s Othello, in The Norton Complete Shakespeare 3rd Edition (W.W. Norton Ltd, 2015), gen. eds Stephen Greenblatt et. al. (print; online: https://digital.wwnorton.com/3013/r/goto/cfi/750!/4), 2073-2159. McManus edited Q and F, and wrote the textual introduction, textual variant notes and textual comments.
2.) Co-edited journal special issue: McManus and Lucy Munro (eds), Renaissance Women’s Performance and the Dramatic Canon, Shakespeare Bulletin 33:1 (2015), 1-128. Includes:
a) peer-reviewed article: McManus ‘“Sing It Like Poor Barbary”: Othello and Early Modern Women’s Performance’, 99-120 (8,500 words);
b) co-authored introduction: McManus and Munro, ‘Renaissance Women’s Performance and the Dramatic Canon: Theater History, Evidence, and Narratives’, 1-7;
c) 6 articles and afterword.
The edition edits each textual witness of Othello independently, deploying a feminist editorial methodology. This feminist approach to editing Shakespearean tragedy offers a significant intervention into the dramatic canon, revealing the workings of gender in early modern playtexts and their editorial mediations. McManus’s article extends the editorial analysis of Othello’s most significant textual variant, Desdemona’s Willow Song, revealing an unrecognised response to Italian singer-actresses by the English boy-actor. The special issue’s co-authored introduction contextualises McManus’s article, interrogating theatre history’s evidence base and periodisation, and its marginalisation of the effects of women’s theatricality. The full special issue intervenes further to examine how continental and English women’s performance affect the drama of the English commercial playing companies. It brings together paradigm-shifting research by 8 scholars (Stokes’s article won the Barbara Palmer Award, 2016)."
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
