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OVERVIEW
For my three orals fields, I
have chosen "Tudor-Stuart Drama" as my
major field and "The London Book Trade, 1500-1650"
and "British History, 1603-1642" as my
two minor ones. As these fields suggest, I am interested
in the relationship between history and early modern
plays, in the ways plays may be thought of as historical
evidence, and in the ways plays participated in
the political and social concerns of early modern
London. I thus have sought to organize my fields
so that I can read the major plays of the Tudor-Stuart
period within the contexts of the production and
circulation of texts within the early modern book
trade and of the political history of early seventeenth-century
England, Scotland, and Ireland.
In my British history field, I mainly focus on questions
of politics and political theory, and, as such,
this field is heavily influenced by "revisionist"
studies of early seventeenth century politics. I
have done so not only because of the individual
merits of revisionist arguments, but also to avoid
the oft-leveled claim that historicist literary
critics do not "do history" very well,
that they often fail to engage with recent historical
research. As Glenn Burgess and others have pointed
out, literary critics tend to take on uncritically
the theories of historians like Lawrence Stone and
Christopher Hill, without situating these historians
within the larger field of British historiography.
While the methodological pitfalls of studying literature
in and as history surface regardless of which historians
a literary critic "uses," I have tried
to construct a history field that takes account
of recent research on early seventeenth-century
Britain, and which I hope will provide a solid foundation
for investigating early modern politics and drama.
One area in which we can see the concerns of these
two areas come together is in "the history
of the book" and the London book trade. As
textual critics such as G. Thomas Tanselle, D. F.
McKenzie, and Roger Chartier have convincingly argued,
a thorough investigation into the production and
circulation of textual documents-or the forms of
texts-should affect how we interpret their reception
and, hence, their meaning. The plays literary critics
read and the documents historians frequently use
were both produced within the printing and scribal
networks
of the early modern book trade, and as such we need
to recover how and under what conditions these texts
were produced if we hope to recover certain historically-contingent
meanings they may have once had. My field on the
London book trade explores some of the central features
of these print and scribal networks-censorship,
printing history, scribal history, publication networks,
etc.-and, as a result, it should help us to understand
better the documents both historians and literary
critics use, as well as the ideas these documents
contain.
I therefore see my three orals fields not just as
distinct areas for isolated research, but as three
interrelated fields, each of which can yield insights
into the other two. Below I outline more specific
concerns that I will deal with in the individual
fields.
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