I’m in the midst of my working vacation, and have been slogging through–I mean, thoroughly enjoying–lots of As You Like It promptbooks. It’s not not fun, it’s just that there are so many productions, and at the moment I’m only looking at the Royal Shakespeare Company ones! Starting with Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind in 1961 through Katy Stephens in the production I saw the other night, there are thirteen different RSC productions. It’s being staged every 4 years! And that doesn’t even count the transfers to London or Newcastle. Aside from being struck by the huge popularity of this play (at least, a popularity with the audience; the reviewers tend to range from blase to a despairing animosity toward the play), I’ve been struck by the staggering number of books that these productions generate. And I don’t mean books like the sort I’m writing, books that are about the productions…
Month: June 2009
being a reader in rare book libraries
I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to be a reader in a rare books library, a place like the Folger, or the British Library, or the Beinecke, for instance. That is, the sort of place where the lucky among us get to do research and routinely handle rare materials. I think about this topic often while I am teaching my undergraduate course on book history. Undergraduates are not typically allowed into rare book libraries–I’ve heard stories that even some university special collections don’t like to let students handle their materials, an attitude which is sorely misguided and shameful and not, I hope, actually common. But because undergrads are only a recent, and quite small, presence in the Folger reading rooms, I worry that they might be looked at askance by other readers. And because it is a wonderful thing that the Folger lets my students have full access…
plays aren’t books
This is getting a bit far afield from early modern books, but since I posted on the subject recently and since it is near and dear to my non-book research interests, here goes… Today’s featured New York Times contribution to idiocy comes not from the Style section (although see the blather on Plan B careers for matter for someone else’s blog) but from the front page. There, just beneath the fold, you can read a piece by Dwight Garner on “Submitting to a Play’s Spell, Without the Stage.” The premise is that, on the eve of the Tonys, Garner is going to read the playbooks for the four nominees for best play. And so he does. Why would he do this? Because he hadn’t seen any of the productions and he hadn’t read a play in a while. And what does he discover? Lo and behold, they’re not bad plays!…
what do Daily Show correspondents read?
This is not my usual style of post, but since my last topic was that of reading, I cannot resist this timely contribution on the subject from The Daily Show’s correspondents: