Title: Australian plays for the Colonial Stage 1834-1899
Abstract: Richard Fotheringham, ed., Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834-1899 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006) With 734 pages of edited and annotated playtexts, an authoritative 'General Introduction', plus illustrations, chronology, abbreviations and Angela Turner's lengthy Appendix of words and music used in the plays, this latest publication of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature is a truly significant monument in cultural scholarship. It also signals a moment of maturity in the textual editing of early Australian plays. This activity can be found mostly in the discontinued 'National Theatre' series of editions, commenced by Currency Press in the late 1970s, and here heroically taken up by the University of Queensland Press. Diverse scholars including Philip Parsons, Elizabeth Perkins, Eric Irvin, Fotheringham himself and the present writer brought their particular skills and scholarly backgrounds to the task of devising the full-dress annotated edition, from varying angles of attack and degrees of proficiency. This chequered activity taught Fotheringham the necessity of textual editing informed by rigorous and consistent method, thoroughness of research, and by close acquaintance with contemporary debates on editorial theory. While lacking nothing in scholarly precision, the aim of this volume is to be both representative and comprehensible, usable and adaptable; respecting the specific problems of each source, tampering as little as possible with historically bound orthography, manuscript format and stage directions, while producing texts which are usable for current dramatic, historical and cultural comprehension. The volume's hefty size, weight and price might impede wide circulation, but there is ample opportunity for the collection to be broken down, whether in print or digital form, into its discrete playtexts with their particular introductions, while the authoritative 66-page 'General Introduction', which interprets the significance of theatre in Australia over this period, could well travel alone. Readers unfamiliar with the conventions of nineteenth-century dramatic genres and performance practices, or unused to deciphering manuscript plays, will find the editor at hand to anticipate their every question with lucid and fully documented explanations. As with all good scholarly writing, the reader's expertise and comprehension are built up by logical steps such that they are able to follow arguments on the relative merits of technical or interpretational complexities. The array of scholarly apparatus comprises notes on the provenance of the sources, textual variants, authorial biography, detailed textual glosses, historical and theatrical contexts. Do we really need so much labour to re-present popular plays, the epiphenomena of evanescent commercial enterprise? I think we do. Colonial theatre texts, and colonial cultural production generally, require the historical estrangement produced by the assumption that nothing about them is going to be familiar. Colonial popular performance is not a primitive, 'lite', or unevolved precursor to more achieved and sophisticated contemporary practices and knowledges. It is itself a vital public expressive form historically situated in a productively intricate, nuanccd, complex and dynamic web of social relations and understandings, literary and cultural citations and adaptations, micro- and macro-political enunciations and desires. Thus the lazy contempt or cultural-evolutionist assumptions that dogged much twentiethcentury thinking about this vibrant period of popular theatre can be challenged by confrontation with the essential alterity of a cultural milieu that is basically alien under its mask of superficial national familiarity. Fothcringham's edition requires us to follow the arguments, encounter the unfamiliar, catch up with our cultural homework. Only thus can the excitement of readerly intellectual discovery take place: particularly the important discoveries of broad patterns and points of contact which connect theatre with other cultural and historical enunciations of early Australia, and with the ideas, jokes, knowledges and practices of contemporary Australian culture. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 17
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot