VoE - Sarah Neville === Sarah Neville: [00:00:00] So, the objectness of the book is itself important. We talk often about books as containers for texts, but as a book historian, I'm a materialist and I remember that a book is a container and the container itself has meaning. Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: Joining me today in the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio is Sarah Neville, associate Professor of English and Theater, Film, and Media Arts, the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She's the founder and [00:01:00] creative director of Ohio State's Lord Denny's Players, an academic theater company that we're gonna learn more about this afternoon. Dr. Neville, welcome to Voices. Sarah Neville: Thank you for having me. David Staley: Well, before we get to that, I wanna start first of all with your research, and you define yourself as a book historian. I want to take just a moment to tell us what a book historian is. Sarah Neville: That is a big question. A book historian... David Staley: We ask the big questions on this podcast. Sarah Neville: A book historian is interested in the materiality of the documents that we inherit as historians, the materiality, the thingness of books. So, book historians don't just study books: we also study single pieces of paper, we might study literature, but we also, as in my case, study things that are not literature, the textbooks or the informational materials that come down to us through these, these documentary traditions of the past. So, as a book historian, I study how these book [00:02:00] objects were made, but I'm really interested in the people who made them, and they made them as part of a craft economy in the 16th century, these, these printers and the people who funded the printers, the publishers, these were often two jobs, two separate kind of roles in the period and what they thought they were doing when they invested in making a particular book object. So, that's what I do as a book historian. David Staley: Books are technologies, aren't they? Sarah Neville: They are, and we tend not to think about them as technologies because, and I'm sure you talk about this too, once we've naturalized or normalized what a technology is, we stop thinking about it as a technology. David Staley: Yeah. Sarah Neville: We tend to think that technology is just something that is new and novel, but actually we keep inheriting new technologies and then we treat them as if they are a normal part of life. But a book was a piece of technology. In the first century AD, that book form with pages was a [00:03:00] radically new piece of technology, and before that, we were using scrolls and people had to learn what pages were and why they were advantageous over this sort of continuous, yet you need two hands to use a scroll, but a book, a book you can use one handed, that's pretty useful, that saves your other finger for putting in the back so that you can flip back and forth between the pages. David Staley: The best technology, I would say. Sarah Neville: Yeah. David Staley: You had mentioned your research, your book there a moment ago, _Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade_. Tell us, tell us about this book. Tell us what you discovered. Sarah Neville: So, this project actually came out of my undergraduate research, or rather it came out of a class that I took with the late great professor at the University of Toronto, Ian Lancashire, who was a linguist, and he taught a course in early modern English linguistics because English became what it is now during the early modern period. It was in the 16th century that English started to [00:04:00] steal from all of the other European languages and then even from languages outside of, of Europe, and, and one of the mechanisms that we did this was by writing down all the words that other languages had and creating these extravagant glossaries or linguistic equivalency dictionaries, and these preceded what we now understand as modern dictionary. So it was a course on that, and it was in this course that I had been given this large herbal, which was this big 1500 page textbook that was listing all of these plants, because on the back of the book there was an index that would name the plant in a bunch of different languages. And it was my job to do a little report on this book. And I got completely distracted by how big and weird this book was, and started to do more research on the book, and the research that I did sort of suggested that the person who wrote this book was kind of a scoundrel and a rogue, and he'd actually stolen the text of the book and he wasn't very bright, [00:05:00] and I thought, that seems a little weird, but I don't really quite know what to do with it, and I... it doesn't make me like the book any less. And then when I did my master's degree, I was exposed to the economic history of the book trade and the breadth of the work that was produced in the 16th century that wasn't "capital L Literature." So, if you're a Shakespeare scholar or an English student, you think about literature as being, here's a bunch of poems, here's John Milton and here's Edmund Spencer, here's William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, and all of these really impressive works of literature. It's the golden age of literature. I a hundred percent agree with that, but what I learned during my master's degree is that's like the 1%, and then there's a book trade of all this 99% of other books that are being printed in the period, and it's those books being bought and sold that are making the money that enable the publishers to say, oh, here's this [00:06:00] play called _Hamlet_, I guess I'm gonna see if it's gonna sell. And that broke the world open for me, and I was able to start to put my herbal into a different context, and that's when I realized it couldn't have been a book that was authored by that author who said, I write a book in the 1590s and I'm gonna bring it to a publisher to publish it. In fact, I came to the conclusion, there's no way that the author of this book was the originator or the prime mover of this book at all. This book was way too expensive for that. David Staley: Hmm. Sarah Neville: It had to have been something else, and I started to do more research and eventually changed the narrative around how we think about that book in particular, but other large illustrated books of natural history, that they're not simply the product of an author who writes one and then goes to find a publisher. In fact, in many cases, [00:07:00] in this case for sure, it's the publisher who says, I see a place in the market for a book of this sort, I'm going to find someone who can write a text for me, and I'm gonna make this happen. David Staley: Hmm. Sarah Neville: And that changes the script on the way that historians tend to think about these books. Speaker: Was that pretty common? Was that a pretty common practice? Sarah Neville: It was a common practice for large format books. Often they needed to be produced with an eye to publication, which meant that a publisher had to be on side first, otherwise they simply are not going to get printed in the period. David Staley: Hmm. You'd mentioned that the great "Literature" makes up 1% of the books that were produced, and there's this whole ocean of books including your herbals book. What sorts of books are we talking about here? Sarah Neville: Well, we're talking about a lot of religious books for one thing. David Staley: Okay. Sarah Neville: In England, this is, this is the age of the [00:08:00] Reformation. There's a lot of doctrine that is getting produced, but it's getting produced not just in through official channels, but also like lay people who are trying to write religious treaties that can explain, say, all the plants in the Bible. That's one of the herbals, it's called "A Herbal for the Bible", let me tell you about all the plants of the Bible and let me explain to you their significance and where you might find them in, in your landscape. So those, that's a huge chunk of, of material, but there's also works that are speculative for the purpose of helping people kind of populate their own home or domestic readership, their domestic libraries. It's not always clear in the first couple decades of printing being established in England at the end of the 15th century and then the, the beginning of the 16th century; no one is really sure what kind of books people are gonna wanna buy and sell, and [00:09:00] so the printers who are printing at this time, they're throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to see if it sticks. They are publishing a ton of things like ballads of course, very small pieces of they're just single pages of text, those were popular, very, very popular, but those don't really survive very well to make it easy for us to study them. The more pages that a book has, the more likely it is to survive. The fewer pages, the smaller the book is, the easier it is for that book to kind of get worn to pieces. And so, one of the things that I talk about in my book is that the most popular herbal of the period is a very small 16th century herbal that doesn't appear to have a lot of meaningful information in it. It doesn't have pretty pictures, it's small, it's about the size of a hand, an open hand in a format known as an [00:10:00] octavo, and it was humongously popular. It went through like 20 editions in something like 45 years, which makes it one of the most popular books ever in the 16th century. David Staley: Why? What, what explains this? Sarah Neville: Part of it is I think that people were eager to have a place to jot down their own notations about plants. So, the objectness of the book is itself important. So when we think about books, we tend to think of them as being important for the information they contain. We talk often about books as containers for texts, but as a book historian, I'm a materialist and I remember that a book is a container and the container itself has meaning. It's the thingness that of the book that enables a publisher to sell it, and when a publisher can sell it, they make money, and if they make money selling it, they're gonna print it again and again and again. And so, it's also the thingness [00:11:00] that attracts a reader to a book. They want to have a book and once they have it, it is now an object where they can record their own observations about plants. We don't have a lot of these left 'cause they often in got worn to pieces, used to pieces. They were small so they weren't likely to to survive. But the ones that we do have that I can look at in archives and libraries, they have lots of notes in them, including like recipes, random recipes, just notes about family life, things like that. David Staley: Is this like a commonplace book? Sarah Neville: They're not commonplace books, but they're places where commonplace could find a home, before or if they could, they could escape the commonplace book. A commonplace book was often just a, an empty notebook. But you can kind of see spillover of commonplace traditions within these little volumes, and that's what makes them fun. David Staley: So you also describe yourself as an editorial theorist, and I [00:12:00] understand the words, i'm not certain I know what an editorial theorist is though. Sarah Neville: So, an editorial theorist comes out of my work as, I am a Shakespeare editor also. So a, a textual editor or a, a editor of Shakespeare helps to decide what words constitutes Shakespeare's writing. So... David Staley: You get to determine that. Sarah Neville: I get to determine that, yes. Because we don't have Shakespeare's manuscripts, we don't have his holographs, they did not survive. What we have instead are his printed text or texts that are ascribed to him that were printed. Now, as I was just saying, if a text was printed, it was in a printing shop and it was set into type by a bunch of middle class craftsmen, people who are literally positioning individual pieces of type one by one in order to copy out a manuscript that happens to be in front of them. So there is a [00:13:00] mediation between Shakespeare's manuscript if that is in fact what the text of Shakespeare's play was being set from, and Shakespeare, and as everybody knows who's played a game of broken telephone, the process of transmission leads to error and errors creep in as texts were set into type. And even simply as you copy a document from one hand to another, we, we know this right? As you, you can do an experiment with students where you just copy two sentences and then have them pass along to another person, and once you do this three times, you're gonna start to notice how very quickly errors in spelling creep in and punctuation creep in lineation starts to shift around. And so, a Shakespeare scholar, a Shakespeare textual scholar attempts to correct for those errors that have crept in over [00:14:00] time, but we use our knowledge of the book trade, our knowledge of habits in the, in the printing shop, what kinds of errors were compositors likely to make when they set the type, sometimes we can identify those compositors and we know that they have habitual changes that as individuals they're just inclined to make, or we know that a particular printing house has a house style that they like to use, and so we use that forensic evidence to help us identify what might be error. And then that's, we, we can filter that back in to say, okay, well, I know that the word in the printed text is none. But... David Staley: Like the religious figure, nun. Sarah Neville: No, no. Like none, like not any. David Staley: Oh, not any NONE. Sarah Neville: Like NONE. But actually we are pretty sure that that is just the compositor getting what's called I skip and sort of carrying over an error from seeing the word none, two lines above, [00:15:00] and having that affect what they are setting into type, and that actually this should just be one, so we are going to amend. So, so the text may say none, but actually it really should be one. And this is a standard practice, all the additions of Shakespeare have been edited in this way and have been for centuries. So a, a textual scholar does that labor of deciding what the words of Shakespeare happen to be, and then we explain our notes and we make our, our arguments in the footnotes at the bottom of the edition of, of the page, of the edition. That's sort of where we spend a lot of our time and an editorial theorist does that work, but comes up with sort of broader explanations and justifications for how one should make these determinations, what is an acceptable amount of speculation versus what is an unacceptable amount of speculation. So I, I do that work as well. David Staley: So, I know that you're writing a new introduction to a new edition of _Hamlet_, and I assume that your introduction is going to be dealing with these sorts of [00:16:00] issues? As I was looking at that, I was thinking what could be said about _Hamlet_ that hasn't been already been said? Sarah Neville: That's part of the challenge of writing introduction to _Hamlet_ and that's actually one of the approaches that I am taking and writing the introduction. So, I did not edit the text. I did not determine the words of the text of this edition of _Hamlet_. That was done by my colleague on the New Oxford Shakespeare John Jowett. But I was, I did work on the project that produced this new edition, I just did different plays But one of the challenges for writing an introduction is that you have to try to invite people into the reading of a text so that they can have the information that they need in order to understand it, that's what an introduction does. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Neville: For _Hamlet_, the problem is that it is a text with so much cultural baggage that I don't think it's possible to [00:17:00] not have familiarity with _Hamlet_, but even if you've never read it, people know the words to be or not to be, they, you know, hold up a skull. They understand that this is somehow part of the text. There's this cultural weight to Hamlet, and so you kind of have to experience _Hamlet_ as a text that comes to you pre-read, pre-digested in some way. It's got a lot of cultural baggage and so I think the only way to deal with this is to, to approach that, that problem of it head on to recognize that we have afforded this text, this immense amount of cultural value that allows it to be deployed as a form of cultural status, and that that inheritance is something that makes it difficult for us to really see the text in a new and fresh way, that it's almost like there's this ossified, [00:18:00] calcified attitude towards it that makes it challenging to teach or learn about because you have to strip all of that away so that you can teach people to see things that are really there in the text, because it's history, it's weight is so, is so heavy. A David Staley: moment ago you said that in editorial theory, one of the things you have to watch for is speculation. Obviously you have to speculate a little bit. Sarah Neville: Mm-hmm. David Staley: How much speculation is permitted in this, in this field, and how do you know when someone has speculated too much? Sarah Neville: Great. That's a really good question and the way of answering it is I'm going to harken back to a precursor in the field, Fredson Bowers, who was a professor at the University of Virginia, who wrote about the difference between the, the possible, the probable, and the demonstrable, and demonstrable errors creep into a text in ways that are relatively easy and un debatable. Most people who [00:19:00] work in the addition in in creating additions are gonna agree that that's just a turned letter. That n is upside down and so, or it looks like a U but it really should be an n that, that sort of thing. Those errors are, are demonstrable. Another version of a demonstrable error is when an iamc pentameter line is split between two lines of type because a compositor runs out of measure. So that's, those are fairly straightforward. But what distinguishes one editor for another is the distinction between the possible and the probable. And the possible is exactly what it sounds like. It is possible that a solution to this difficult reading that might seem somewhat garbled could be this, and an editor will propose an emanation, and they will, they often will propose the history of editorial theory is filled with ingenious emanations for what could possibly have been [00:20:00] met meant in a given circumstance. The response that other critics may have to that is yes, but can you show that there is a probability that this kind of error occurred? Can you show that in other circumstances, Shakespeare spelled the word that way so, for example we know that Shakespeare, for one reason or another was fond of spe spelling the word silence with a CS, like, like science, SCI because it creeps up in a, a variety of printed texts in ways that could not possibly be the result of like compositors having weird habits of spelling or something. It has to be inherited from the manuscripts. And so, given that there is a demonstrable history of this spelling showing up in printed texts that lead to it probably being [00:21:00] Shakespeare spelling, that leads some people to conclude that a particular emanation that relies on a spelling of SCI to define is probable, right? There is a greater probability of that, so that might lead to a particular kind of emanation. So different editors, as I say, have different thresholds for those changes, and that's where they, tend to make their distinctions and often some of their most aggressive arguments in the pages of editorial theory journals. David Staley: Well, I introduced you as the creative director of Lord Denny's Players, and you'll have to tell us what is, what is this theater group? Speaker 2: So Lord Denny's Players was founded in 2014, which is the year that I arrived at OSU. I was very fortunate that when I arrived I inherited a little pot of money that had been given to the English department by an English department donor who wanted to see the English department [00:22:00] put on a play. And I knew a little bit about this and so this was my, my task was to put on a play to create some community within the English department, and we put on Richard II, the Tragedy of Richard II. This is a, a Shakespeare play from 1597. This is the play of the usurped King Richard II whose crown is aggressively removed from him by his cousin Henry Bowlingbrook. And this, this is the event that that leads to a century of Civil War essentially. And so, this experience was so successful that I was encouraged to keep going and the, the, the donor was very happy and has continued to fund this project. And what it has meant is that every year since Lord Denny's Players has been able to produce a play of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This is a company that is [00:23:00] designed to help students see some of the intersections between texts of Shakespeare, which as I've been indicating, have some debates associated with them, and performance, so, that we bring these interesting textual questions or textual curiosities to the public stage so that Central Ohio audiences can see them. So, we are fortunate in that unlike a regular theater company, we don't actually have to worry too much about trying to make money with our productions. Our donor is very happy to have students simply participate in this sort of high impact learning experience where they are getting an opportunity to build a show from the ground up, but also see the way that production can function as a form of research itself and have an impact on some of these larger critical questions that are coming up in Shakespeare [00:24:00] scholarships. So, in that very first production of Richard II, we took on a pressing critical question about that play, which is that it exists in two forms. This is a play about the usurpation of Richard II and the kind of central, beautiful showpiece of this play, which is in this perfect iambic pentameter verse, it's one of Shakespeare's like, sort of loveliest plays. There's a scene where King Richard pointedly un kings himself and gives his crown to, Bolingbrook. So Bolingbrook has had, has captured him, but Richard is holding out under this, this position that the only, I have been ordained by God effectively. I was born into my position. I have a kind of divinity of kingship, and the only person who can un king a king is a king. And so, I am gonna hold out for this deeply theatrical performance so that everyone at court can see that the only person who [00:25:00] caning me is me. And this is a really important scene in the play. It's the scene that most critics Shakespearean talk about this play this scene all the time. If you are David Tennant and you're performing this scene at the Royal Shakespeare Company, this is the scene that you wanna play, and it's amazing. Only that scene only made it into print in 1608 in the first editions, the first three editions printed in 1597. And then after that, that scene wasn't there. The scene didn't exist. And so, the question that scholars have been preoccupied with is, is this a scene that was censored because it's so profoundly affecting and, and potentially dangerous at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, nobody knows who's gonna take over for her. Are we gonna get plunged back into war? We don't wanna see an image, right? Was there censorship on the stage? Was there censorship for the press that [00:26:00] that's prevented this from being performed at all? That's one argument, but the other argument is no, Shakespeare just wrote that scene later and it got inserted after the fact. But because the performance history of the play sort of demands that this wonderfully effective, beautiful scene is necessarily a part of the play, no one had ever seen the play be performed without it. So, we performed the play two ways. David Staley: Oh, interesting. Sarah Neville: The first weekend without the scene, and then the second weekend we added it in. And what we were able to show and what scholars who came to see the play, 'cause a number of people were really interested in it, what they were able to see is that the play changes, so that it's not just this play about the performance of kingship, it's also a play that concludes where with some questions about paternity because with the absence of [00:27:00] this scene, you start to see a scene with a a relatively under acknowledged character and his son now takes much greater prominence at the ending of the play, because it's the big showpiece scene, which it isn't when there's a much more impressive single scene in front of it. And so, that became kind of the cornerstone of what Lord Denny's Players started to do. We started to use our company as a means to explore textual questions in performance. What sorts of critical questions did editorial theory did Shakespeare scholarship raise about Shakespeare's plays that exist in in multiple versions, and how could we use our really fortunate position to showcase some of those? David Staley: The student performers, are they theater majors, are they English majors? Sarah Neville: They're from all over the [00:28:00] campus. We have had students from over 50 majors. David Staley: Wow. Sarah Neville: Participate in our productions since we started, and I'm really, really proud of that. And every year we get folks from more places show up. David Staley: Where, where are these performances held? Sarah Neville: We perform in the public theaters of Columbus. We perform often in the Columbus Performing Arts Center. We will be performing at Mad Lab Theater also. Speaker: So, you already talked a bit about this, you talked about the course that that you took at the University of Toronto, that was the moment that you knew you wanted to be a book scholar, or a book historian. So, why are you a, I guess why that course? Why are you a book historian and say, I don't know, a physicist or a sociologist or something? How did you know that this was, this was the subject? Sarah Neville: I think it came about because I saw a system that underlay the [00:29:00] stuff that I loved, and so I loved the literature and that hasn't changed at all. I just, I became fascinated as an undergraduate with the literature of the 16th century with lyrical poetry and particularly with romance and the, the fairy queen and the stories of, of, of legends within that. And drama captivated me right from the start. I loved all of that, but what really took over for me when I started to learn about the, the, the book trade, was that I started to see how these pieces fit together within an economy that helped to explain to me why they were able to survive. And it was almost like it was like getting a look through a telescope at the broader cosmos, right, you can, must have felt for, for those initial [00:30:00] astronomers. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Neville: That's sort of what I, what I felt like. There was a moment where I, I learned about the short title catalog of books published in England and in English in the 16th century. And this is just a, it's a three volume list of books, it's just an Enumerative book list. It's a gigantic bibliography, but it's a list of everything that was printed since the beginning of printing in England until the start of the Civil War in 1640, so from 1473 to 1640. And I just, I couldn't get enough of pouring through this, this book, and I, I sort of realized that everything I might want to figure out about how people read in the past in the century that I'm interested in can be answered by looking at this. This is the list, this is my data set, this is the [00:31:00] world, and there was nothing quite like it after that. All of the things that I wanna do are an example of a specific text, a specific book, but I never lose sight of this larger textual ecology of which these books are apart. David Staley: So, tell us what's next. What are you, what are you working on now? Sarah Neville: Well, I'm working on this introduction to Hamlet and trying very hard not to psych myself out about it. Um, and, uh, it, it's coming, it's coming along. I'm also at work on a new edition of the second part of Henry the Sixth, which is the first play that Shakespeare wrote or quite possibly the first play that Shakespeare wrote when he arrived in London in the early 1590s. He was one of a group of people who were working on a play about the unsuccessful King Henry the sixth,[00:32:00] and it's a weird play because even though it's the second part, we now call it the second part, it was actually the first part of what had been conceived of as a two part play, and those two plays were so successful that they very quickly wrote a prequel that became part one. So, sorting out the narrative history of the events of these plays can be challenging, but also the chronology in which they were written can be challenging. So, that's gonna take me the next couple of years. David Staley: Sarah Neville, thank you. Sarah Neville: Thank you. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer. [00:33:00]