Editing Shakespeare for the Stage

A Comparative Analysis of Act I Scene iv of Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

After the text-based editorial approach of the 17th and 18th centuries, from the end of the 19th century, and even more from the middle of the nineteen-seventies, more and more scholars turned towards the study of stage directions. They started to discover their origins, their meanings, and their impact on the understanding of Shakespeare's plays. These researches led to the fact that Shakespeare criticism could no longer remain within the limited realms of literature, but it had to involve other disciplines such as cultural studies and theatre history in its researches too. The traditions of Elizabethan theatre and the relationship between theatre and literature came into the focus of research. This paper gives a comparative analysis of stage directions in one particular scene, the ballroom-scene (I.iv) of Romeo and Juliet, as they are presented in six prominent 20th-century editions. This study is to prove that nearly all the problems an editor has to face are theatrical in nature and therefore it is necessary to re-establish the relation between page and stage and to make performance-based editions that are useful to theatrical personnel as well as academics.