Chapter 6 Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in Shakespeare’s Playhouse Tiffany Stern Rationale Lukas Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist maintains that Shakespeare’s plays as published are not in fact transcriptions of productions mounted at the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses: what have come down to us are texts that Shakespeare reshaped and rewrote for readers. That Shakespeare had an interest in publication is consonant with everything we know about the playwright. But some critics have pushed Erne’s argument further, arguing that Shakespeare was really a “poet,” and that his con- cerns were literary rather than theatrical. It seemed to me that we were in danger of returning to the Victorian idea that Shakespeare was a noble poet writing in a garret well away from the day-to-day business of staging and performance. So I decided to examine whether the language of books was ever used to describe staging, and, conversely, whether the language of staging was ever used to describe reading. In this way I could challenge the terms in which assumptions were being made about what is “literary” and what is “theatrical”: what do such words mean when looking at the work of an early modern playwright? Copyright © 2008. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/14/2015 11:44 AM via BODLEIAN LIBRARIES - UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD AN: 209563 ; Maguire, Laurie E..; How to Do Things with Shakespeare : New Approaches, New Essays Account: s8580219