Theatre Survey

• Published in: Theatre survey 2008-05, Vol.49 (1), p.137
• Main Authors: Holland, Peter, Straznicky, Marta, Munro, Lucy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Children & youth; Jonson, Ben (1573-1637); Libraries; Males; Musical performances; Nonfiction; Politics; Prefixes; Prose; Studies; Theater; Translation
• ISSN: 0040-5574; 1475-4533
• DOI: 10.1017/S0040557408001038

[...] it is, in effect, in that new hybrid company's performance of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair--one of the most extraordinary and ambitious pieces of theatre of the entire period--where the interaction between the boys' company and adult performers is most completely demonstrated; in its vast array of characters and remarkably large cast of actors, boys and adults (and puppets) performed alongside each other, with boy actors playing some of the major adult roles, like the irascible tutor Wasp.\n As closet drama becomes a term shifting between the unperformed and the unperformable, the silently read and the communally read aloud, the creation of a gendered space of writing and the redefinition of this space in the light of a professional practice of women playwrights in the career of Aphra Behn, so the precise modes of the presentation of closet drama increasingly come to matter, from Straznicky's perspective. Realizing the significance of Lumley's choice of prose--a choice that makes the performative differently manifest in the pages of the manuscript, with, for instance, speech prefixes standing out in a way that verse translation tended to underplay--Straznicky draws out the complex cultural meanings of each aspect of Lumley's decisions, less concerned with, say, the political implications of its possible local allusions to the fate of Lady Jane Grey than with the civic function that all such translation was supposed to fulfill, and with which Lumley's work engages.