The “Print o’Life”: Transitions of Text and the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

Although printing first came to England nearly a century before Shakespeare’s birth, within his lifetime, the use of print quadrupled. This project considers the affective responses visible in Shakespeare’s plays and a pair of contemporary texts (Helkiah Crooke’s anatomy textbook Mikrokosmographia and Martin Billingsley’s handwriting manual The Pen’s Excellencie) as individuals react to the cultural transition from texts produced primarily by hand to texts produced by machine. When read in parallel, these texts reveal a striking ambivalence present in their society as individuals come to grips with how a new technology is changing their understanding of themselves, evoking anxiety over an imagined future and nostalgia for an imagined past. In the context of this transition, richly embodied metaphors consider books imagined as bodies and bodies read as though they were books. The metaphors present bodies and books as though similar enough to be interchangeable, but those using these metaphors (in plays and elsewhere) fail to sustain the comparison. As books replace a physical, “in-person experience” with the printed word, the texts themselves reveal a sense of loss. Be it an anatomist unfolding the interior of a human cadaver which is missing, or direct instruction from a calligraphy teacher demonstrating the proper technique of the hand and the pen, or the living, collaborative, embodied performance of a play, these texts reveal the nostalgia and anxiety about the change towards the printed form. This project pulls together themes and methods from a variety of scholarly fields including print and book history, technology and medical humanities, studies of embodiment (including questions of race and gender), epistemology or knowledge studies, as well as performance, strengthening the connections and intersections between them.