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This introduction outlines the essays in the Early Theatre Issues in Review forum ‘Playing in Repertory’, placing them in the context of new movements in the study of early modern English repertories for contemporaneous and contemporary performance.

The first edition of Hamlet – often called ‘Q1’, shorthand for ‘first quarto’ – was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it is worth arguing about. The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1’s Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare’s relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.

Study of the Q1 Hamlet (1603) has been characterised by analysis of its degree of similarity to the Q2 and Folio versions. Detailed consideration of the unique lines in Q1 – that is, lines for which there is no analogue in Q2 or F – has been ignored, with discussion of Q1 focusing instead on whether it ‘cuts’ or ‘remembers’ any lines from Q2 or F. This article demonstrates the consistent presence of a key image – the heart – in association with the character of Corambis in unique Q1 lines. This consistency means that whichever model of transmission one accepts, some account is needed of the prospect that unique lines were either cut or added systematically in conjunction with the change of name of the King’s counsellor.

Background Infection with the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has been associated with a hypercoagulable state. Emerging data from China and Europe have consistently shown an increased incidence of venous thromboembolism (VTE). We aimed to identify the VTE incidence and early predictors of VTE at our high-volume tertiary care center. Methods We performed a retrospective cohort study of 147 patients who had been admitted to Temple University Hospital with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from April 1, 2020 to April 27, 2020. We first identified the VTE (pulmonary embolism [PE] and deep vein thrombosis [DVT]) incidence in our cohort. The VTE and no-VTE groups were compared by univariable analysis for demographics, comorbidities, laboratory data, and treatment outcomes. Subsequently, multivariable logistic regression analysis was performed to identify the early predictors of VTE. Results The 147 patients (20.9% of all admissions) admitted to a designated COVID-19 unit at Temple University Hospital with a high clinical suspicion of acute VTE had undergone testing for VTE using computed tomography pulmonary angiography and/or extremity venous duplex ultrasonography. The overall incidence of VTE was 17% (25 of 147). Of the 25 patients, 16 had had acute PE, 14 had had acute DVT, and 5 had had both PE and DVT. The need for invasive mechanical ventilation (adjusted odds ratio, 3.19; 95% confidence interval, 1.07-9.55) and the admission D-dimer level ≥1500 ng/mL (adjusted odds ratio, 3.55; 95% confidence interval, 1.29-9.78) were independent markers associated with VTE. The all-cause mortality in the VTE group was greater than that in the non-VTE group (48% vs 22%; P = .007). Conclusions Our study represents one of the earliest reported from the United States on the incidence rate of VTE in patients with COVID-19. Patients with a high clinical suspicion and the identified risk factors (invasive mechanical ventilation, admission D-dimer level ≥1500 ng/mL) should be considered for early VTE testing. We did not screen all patients admitted for VTE; therefore, the true incidence of VTE could have been underestimated. Our findings require confirmation in future prospective studies.

This chapter examines how the supernatural elements in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are constructed from mythical and folkloric sources but are reconfigured as contemporary topical allusions. The play thus seems to be a locus for potentially competing influences: borrowing from the past while also writing to the present moment, most likely to excite the interest of his audiences and their yen for gossip or scandal. Shakespeare’s invention of the name ‘Puck’ for the powki figure of folklore creates opportunities for every member of an audience to see the figure as consonant with their own local knowledge of such a sprite, but also enables the playwright to develop an allusion to George Buck and his competition with John Lyly for the reversion of the Master of Revels. The play thus also positions the censor as its first audience, with the allusion and Puck’s epilogue addressed directly to the Master of Revels at the time, Edmund Tylney, making amends for recent offences by Shakespeare’s company. The forest outside Athens becomes the site for a clash between modes of signification—sources and topicality—anchoring supernatural elements to far more worldly contemporary issues.

This article identifies two items in Edward Alleyn's list of playing apparel (c.1601-1602) as references to the East Anglian seafarer Thomas Cavendish. The authors propose that the lost play The New World's Tragedy is a viable source for the character of Cavendish on the early modern stage.

For an ethical relation to exist between two interlocutors, according to Emmanuel Levinas, the potential for dialogue (an unimaginable future) must first exist. Levinas calls this Saying, opposed to the prescription of fixed meaning: the Said. Against the notion that a Shakespearean play text should be closed off by seeking to understand ‘what it means’ or that a performance can be measured by its fidelity to the text, each of which amounts to the Said, this essay proposes that the technologies of early modern performance open a text to the possibility of Saying. Attempts to characterise Shakespeare’s plays as either literature or theatre invariably situate key elements of early modern stagecraft (cue scripts, conventions for entrances and exits, actor extemporisation, or jigs) outside the play-as-text. The possibility of Saying is revealed through these technologies as the way the play text unfolds itself on the stage before an audience. More than merely directing or framing the action, after the manner of the Said, the early modern stage direction and the technologies of performance to which it refers are writ through the text as part of how the audience make sense of the play and engage with it.

While much has been done in the past hundred years to add to our stock of knowledge on the existence of the theatre at Newington Butts, questions relating to names persist: there is no agreement over the origin of the name of the location itself—whence the 'Butts' in Newington Butts—and studies of the theater invariably concede that we have no way of knowing the name of the playhouse itself. Answers to both questions are to be found in the public record: in the case of the origin of 'Butts', I consider a Privy Council document that is readily available in the Acts but that seems to have passed unnoticed to date; regarding the name of the playhouse, I point to where the answer has been hiding in plain sight in lease documents that scholars have been discussing for half a century.

This chapter re-orients consideration of realist elements in Bowen’s short stories by framing readings according to a series of ‘recesses.’ The first is as a building feature designed to conceal and display, which frames a discussion of the status of ‘things’ in Bowen’s writing, that is, the objects that deck out her narratives and become a focus for critical interest in her realism. The second is as a cue for the notion of receding, which I use against claims about consistency in narrative voice in Bowen’s work to argue instead that Bowen’s ‘voice’ can be shown increasingly to recede, leaving the subject-position in such doubt as to compel the willing reader to complete the point of view. Finally, ‘recess’ is used in the sense of suspension or adjournment, against claims that the ‘psychological realism’ created by Bowen presents a ‘transtemporal subjectivity,’ to argue that agency in Bowen’s narratives becomes, by virtue of the points raised above, suspended, such that ‘subjectivity’ is itself untenable. The term I will use to describe the coming together of people and things in Bowen’s fictional universe—and indeed in her writings about the world of the Blitz—will be ‘inter-objectivity.’

The 1976 Tangshan earthquake and the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake rank among the deadliest natural disasters in the world. We argue that China's weak planning capacity and its inexperience with disaster recovery in the 1970s were important contributing factors to the slow recovery after the Tangshan earthquake. The recovery planning struggled to present a blueprint that balanced the time sensitive nature of disaster recovery against the government's ideologically-driven desire to reinvent Tangshan into a model socialist city. The recovery planning after the Wenchuan earthquake was heavily influenced by the lessons that the Chinese government drew from its own handling of the Tangshan earthquake recovery. The national government put great emphasis on the speed of recovery planning and progress – with great attention directed towards the housing sector. China's strong planning institutions and the existence of prior development visions for the disaster region enabled the government to achieve its goals of speedy planning and fast physical reconstruction. However, future research is needed to investigate how this form of rapid physical planning and reconstruction relates to the overall socio-economic recovery in the earthquake-impacted area.

While recent studies offer new information about companies that used the Playhouse at Newington Butts from 1575 to 1594, mystery remains about the identity of the company that performed there in contravention of a restraint in May 1586. Using evidence related to the movements of companies active in 1586, particularly from the Records of Early English Drama (reed), this article offers an answer based on a process of elimination. After ruling out other options, the article explains why a fragment of Leicester’s Men likely performed at Newington for a short time before joining the earl on his diplomatic campaign in Europe.

In their introduction to this volume, Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter describe the trends in Shakespeare criticism that have seen source study gradually marginalized in favor of more theoretically focused methodologies. Although they suggest that the post-structuralist turn implicitly began this decline, inasmuch as the death of the author signaled (quite rightly) a loss of faith in the merits of reconstructing authorial intentions, for theater historians the decentering of authorship has been productive in ways that foster an alternative appreciation of source study. The repertory studies of such esteemed scholars as Bernard Beckerman, Roslyn L. Knutson, Scott McMillin, Sally-Beth MacLean, Lawrence Manley, Lucy Munro, and others have reoriented our perspective of London commercial theater such that the playwright’s role is seen as only one aspect of a much larger, more complex matrix. 1 Playing companies become the organizing principle, with what McMillin calls “company style” being the focus 2 : plays, in this view, are the essential commodity of a company, and how that company acquires, performs, and revives the plays in its repertory in response to playgoer demand and the offerings of other companies is paramount. Players, playgoers, and even playhouses have important roles in our understanding of the highly competitive theatrical marketplace of Shakespeare’s London. W. David Kay urges scholars to treat Shakespeare as a “creative actor-playwright” rather than author, in the hope of producing a more “theatrically-oriented source study,” 3 and a repertory studies approach would take this insight even further, focusing less on the actor-playwright and more on the theatrical context of the company for whom he wrote. In other words, I’m suggesting that we should reconceptualize source study as a means of further understanding how and why a company offered the plays it did for performance. What did companies (rather than playwrights) respond to, either by emulating or overwriting their own and their competitors’ repertories?

When Shakespeare’s plays are creatively reinterpreted or rewritten, ‘Shakespeare’ invariably remains locked in as the fixed point of reference: rewritings of Shakespeare; reinterpretations of Shakespeare, and so on. Since 1753, Shakespeare source studies have been mapping the source materials on which his plays were based, which should have enabled us to loosen this fixed point of reference and to begin to picture the much longer history of reinterpretations in which the plays participate. Yet traditional approaches to Shakespeare source studies merely lock in a new point of reference, encompassing both source text and play. This paper aims to show that the new source studies unravels the notion of an ‘original’ by enabling us to unlock broader fields of exchange within which Shakespeare’s texts and our interpretations circulate together. Using the example of Macbeth and the language of borrowing and robbery within it, this essay illustrates the capacity for creative or writerly engagements with a Shakespearean text to tap, perhaps even unconsciously at times, into a history of words and images that goes far beyond the 400 years that we are marking in this year of Shakespeare.

Johnson argues that early modern conceptions of self-consciousness were expressions of identity manifesting through the recombination of always fragmentary, distributed materials. Focusing on Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” speech, Johnson dissects the differences between the Q2 and F1 versions and what they mean to Hamlet’s assessment of human capacity. Johnson disagrees with Harold Bloom’s often-quoted assertion about Shakespeare’s invention of self-consciousness in the character of Hamlet. Further, Shakespeare’s conception of consciousness was necessarily patchy and dispersed like the cognitive processes that circulated in early modern theatrical practice. Johnson, citing the relationship between theatrum mundi as a metaphor and as an internalized state, observes the importance of metatheatrical language to constructions of consciousness in Hamlet and other Shakespeare characters.

The prospects for a phenomenology of technology have been guided in the past decade by a split between supporters of Martin Heidegger and those who subscribe to Bernard Stiegler's critique of Heidegger. This essay proposes that both are needed for a phenomenology of what Edward Castronova calls 'synthetic worlds' (large on-line environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft). Here is a phenomenology that must take into account histories of design and technical evolution to account for the particular 'fantasy of disembodiment' that shapes a user's experience of a synthetic world, forgetting the bodily engagement with hardware.

Does a Postal Principle, a principle of destinerrance, hold true for computer mediated communication (CMC)? Perhaps. However, the question is not one concerning technology. Is it rather the case that we must ask, after Derrida, after all, whether destinerrance ever held true, as a principle? This paper considers the prospect that the Postal Principle was, in principle, or as a principle, an expression of a truth value from something that can not in fact, be held at all: the ghost in the machine. Drawing on a phenomenology of computer practice, the paper argues that there is greater explanatory value to be found in Derrida's more recent comments on the relative exteriority of the technological apparatus (in Archive Fever and elsewhere), framing an understanding of the human body as partes extra partes. Yet it is demonstrated here that this same framing was already in place from the moment that the principle of destinerrance was first articulated, and that a subsequent technical turn in Derrida's work merely extends a framework already set in place in the earlier work (in The Post Card, for example). It is argued, then, that in articulating a Postal Principle for the purpose of guaranteeing its failure, Derrida had calculated the future trajectory – and had built the logic of the calculation and of the ‘jet’ words, as he calls them, into this trajectory – of what I call the ‘fantasy of the disembodied virtualm’ through which users of CMC project themselves into the archive of archives that the internet was bound to become.