“Probably no kind of scene in early modern English drama has raised more questions about staging than the discovery scene. In the absence of pictorial or descriptive evidence, there are no certain answers about how or where these scenes were staged. But discovery scenes were also used in ways that we probably no longer fully realize because their contexts are more medieval and religious than modern and secular. This talk will consider the use of curtains in Christian rites and art as a context for some discovery scenes in secular plays that seem to have analogous elements.”
Leslie Thomson is Professor of English in the UTM Department of English and Drama, and in the Department of Graduate English. She is co-author (with Alan Dessen) of A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 (CUP, 1999); editor of the Middleton/Webster collaboration Anything for a Quiet Life in Thomas Middleton, Collected Works (OUP, 2007); curator of Folger Library exhibition, “Fortune: All is but Fortune”; also compiled and edited the accompanying catalogue. Has published articles in major journals on early modern drama, especially the original staging and stage directions. Thomson’s current project is a monograph provisionally titled Discovery in the Plays of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.
The Friday Workshops are a series of workshops in an informal setting, designed to give students and faculty opportunities to present works in progress for interdisciplinary critical discussion.
