In the following pages, I outline some ideas that have emerged for me as I have read recent essays on electronic editing with women's theater writing and authorship in mind. I must offer two very important disclaimers.

Second, I have only begun to collect information from other theater history scholars interested in electronic textuality and archives. It may be that some of the issues I worry over in my discussion are already being discussed in other working groups of whose work I am not yet aware. As this site develops and our work continues, I hope that we will begin conversation with those engaged in other projects as a way of enriching our own specific inquiry into the set of issues that, to some extent, are quite specific to our particular set of contexts, though not unrelated to issues that emerge in other periods, other nations, and other sets of theatrical institutions. If any of you reading my discussion here know of theater history work being done along similar lines, I would encourage you to let scholars know about the work of this site so that, again, those of use working here might be able to benefit from the approaches others have taken to related issues.

I. Purposes

Access
What is its value?

One of the main issues any attempt to build an electronic archive of theater materials must consider is how such an archive might affect access to theater materials. We have to look at the role access—limitations on it, structures surrounding it—play in our historical work—in its inquiry, its explanation, its publication. Why might we want to—or not want to—increase access to historical materials and what would be the effects of changing the accessibility of theater materials?

Gender has something to do with where archival materials are and in what state or form. It also influences the likelihood of their accessibility being maintained (though not in a simple way). Gender also influences, of course, what interests users about texts and how these texts will be used. Because gender influences the social practices that constitute accessibility of materials, gender will influence changes in use of those materials. Therefore, gender must influence how we encode texts since encoding cannot help but ask questions about probable use.

In this context, why shouldn't we consider simply taking transcriptions from archives and preparing them so they are as readable as possible or as rehearsable as possible? Are texts to which access has been limited really best served by scholarly ideologies of representational rigor? Is a turn from adequacy of representational editing toward increased use really a slippery slope by which we begin the long decline into inaccurate and finally new texts that bear little or no relationship to their originals? Is there no middle ground? But even if there will be slippage is not one of the realities of performance that there was likely to have been "slippage" from any text to the performance? Does not the text slip away from performance in various different directions—toward the needs of the licenser, of the actors, of the printer. What are we trying to hold in place with representational editorial adequacy and accuracy? Is it something we could broadly call "performance"?

The very idea of an authoritative text seems to go against the grain of a performance text. It is not that scholarship on theater history might not be interested in accuracy, but rather that what one is accurate to seems a much more tangled business in writing that presumes multiple versioning. The whole point of the theater text is its potential multiplicity, its variations within familiar structures. As Philip Brockbank has commented: "The theatre text has always been mobile and must not be hypostatized (either as one text or two)" (Brockbank quoted in Walsh, 34). For this reason, maybe encoding of theater texts needs to be at a different level of textual structure than line by line, word by word.

How we decode what matters about the materials we make accessible depends to a large extent on who we envision using them. When I ask for whom electronic editing and availability of women's theater texts might be done, the response might be, "Well, who cares about these texts other than scholars?" And yet, in this answer lies evidence of one of the more vexing problems in editing plays that are somewhat difficult for even scholars to reach—the conditions of our systems of delivery depend upon our mediation of access and knowledge. Though we do not absolutely control access to the plays of women playwrights, we have more influence than anyone. As a result, we in effect participate in maintaining the conditions by which decisions about the purposes of electronic editing are coerced. We might have no choice but to edit these texts with our colleagues in mind as users because we colleagues have tremendous influence on who will use these texts.

Clive Bradley offers interesting and scary comments on why the potential new economies of publishing and making available electronic texts might be more complex than we would think:

One solution . . . is that education authorities should provide the whole cost of such services themselves. After all, they urge, it is cheap and the service is important. . . . The authorities in control of information. Salaried authors, paid by the state, their earnings unrelated to the quality and success of their output. Budget restraints. Cannot afford to innovate, old boy, sorry. (74)

Of course, in the context of what we know about print publishing's inadequacy in maintaining a documentary record of theater history, there may be risks we cannot afford not to take.

Together computers and women authors represent a conjunction of inauthenticities, in their relation to books, knowledge as high culture, and textuality, which itself proposes an intriguing, because profoundly unstable and temporary, political alliance. Here women have something to teach: centuries of practice in recognizing our textual illegitimacy provide women, I earnestly hope, with a certain resistance to intimidation by variants (as well as to wholesale electronic seduction). Where so many writings have scarcely been allowed transmission, the niceties of emendation, corruption, or 'purity', like the vexed relationship of editorial choice to authorial intention, can be said to be less exclusive in their relevance. (Sutherland, "Challenging Assumptions," 64.)

Julia Flanders, taking a rigorously critical approach to the "correction" of textual variants, notes the way that "data" about the actuality of some particular text is obscured (or at least structured) by editorial intervention. All in the name, perhaps, of getting closer to authorial intention. It all seems wrongheaded, I agree. There is a blockade put up to certain kinds of use of data based on establishing a set of priorities that reflect the editor's goals, goals often serving "authorial intention." However, in some ways, Flanders' challenge to these strategies of correction seems to grant too easily that the purposes of editing involve some form of representation. In effect, she argues that accuracy to something more than authorial intent or even authorial production is needed. But isn't this the way only a scholar with a certain invested interest in certain uses of the materials in archives might think? And doesn't this model propose (implicitly) that consideration of different perspectives on use value and access are finally not as important as representation (though to some degree they remain its unexamined pre-condition and economic motive)?

Consider the following contrast in priorities. C.M. Sperberg-McQueen (41) offers three requirements for electronic scholarly editions:

• Accessibility without needless technical barriers to use
• Longevity
• Intellectual integrity

Compare this vision of electronic editions to Peter Shillingsburg's provocative set of archive specifications (33-4)

• The electronic archive should be multimedia. . . .
• The software design should incorporate the ideal that interaction with the material is desirable...
• User commentary should be attachable to the archive, making a growing bulletin board that is indexed to the archive...
• The system must give users the capability of marking texts and quoting from any part of the archive for their own use...
• A web or network of cross-referencing should be created...
• Intertextuality—linking parallel texts and countertexts. Parallel texts, annotations, visual contexts, and adaptations should all be linked and available in windows...
• Contextuality and interpretations: archival material should be linked to related materials in other media...

While these two sets of specifications are not addressed to the same facets of electronic processing of materials, the chasm between their respective visions is startling. Sperberg-McQueen seems to have in mind something like a more extensive and flexible set of scholarly editions. Shillingsburg seems to see how possibilities beyond cleverly delivered scholarly editions could radically change not just our access to texts but our very ways of working, collaborating, and performing. Unfortunately, I find myself most in sympathy with Shillingsburg's rather daunting ideas, while at the same time wanting to assure that Sperberg-McQueen's standard is met.

II. Contexts

Performances as absent texts

While providing some encoding structures to address cases in which printed materials mention performance history, the TEI guidelines for drama make this published gesture seem far more simple than in fact it is.

Performance texts are not only printed in books to be read, they are also performed. It is common practice therefore to include within the front matter of a printed dramatic text some brief account of particular performances. . . .
 No particular elements for such features as theatres, directors, etc., are proposed at this time. (Text Encoding Initiative, "Base Tag Set for Drama")

However, print text gestures toward performance should not be taken as simply representational. They are instead, depending on the period in which they are made, part of a complex interrelationship between the printed text and the performance. They may be promotional. They may be an attempt at conveying that the text before us has a kind of documentary authenticity. But they cannot be taken at face value nor can they be taken simply as evidence of performance history. They must be understood to be part of the print product's apparatus. But the way the TEI guidelines reference them suggests that issues raised by performance writing have not yet been adequately considered. It is not surprising that they have not been, because, when it comes to theater writing, the guidelines seem to take printed drama as, in effect, the normative form of dramatic writing. In doing so, there are potentials for ahistoricism (what period's normative standards of dramatic publishing are chosen?) and for limiting the potential usefulness of theater materials as part of an encoded archive. There is much thinking and petitioning to be done to help develop text encoding guidelines that will enable theater historiographic work that reflects the complex role that manuscripts and printed texts might play in scholarship if encoded adequately.

In her discussion of "authorship" and women theater artists, Jane Moody proposes several challenging ideas for us to consider when thinking about how authorship will function in our consideration of electronic editing of theater materials relating to British women from around 1800. Commenting on two of the British nineteenth-century stage's significant auteurs, she writes,

Neither Céleste nor Vestris claimed the identity of a dramatic author. Indeed, apart from their possible roles in the composition of playbills and other theatrical advertising, neither woman wrote a word for public consumption. Interpreting their playwrighting is a task rendered more difficult, too, by the extant traces of their professional lives as perceived through the eyes of male playwrights such as Planché and Boucicault; reviewers friendly, hostile or rhapsodic and, in the case of Vestris, through the voyeuristic shadows cast by scandalous memoirs of her 'public and private adventures'. Can we interpret Vestris and Céleste as collaborators in a form of institutional playwrighting? To what extent did Vestris and Céleste 'ventriloquize' a form of dramatic authorship through men such as Planché, Bernard and Buckstone? (Moody, 5)

These are important questions certainly for understanding the theater work of these specific women. They are even more profound questions for understanding the range of women's theater work and how it might be represented through electronic archiving and databases.

There are important theoretical implications to the tensions between print structures and gender. Discussing Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare, Flanders points to a crucial point in the tradition of textual criticism where the gendering of the relationship between author and text, intention and unruly medium, has significance for our work with women theater artists.

The identification and recovery of the author's true text relies on a belief in the centrality of intention—the ability to will and to perform one's will—to the production of textual meaning. Intention here is defined in opposition to the realm of the involuntary, the physical body which compromises the spiritual man. (Flanders 131)

There are many layers—particularly around 1800 in Britain—to the gendering of performing bodies and their relationship to the legitimate dramatic textual tradition. It is precisely the phantom "true dramatic text" that haunts any historiography of theater writing in this period, clouding even the somewhat bookish dramaturgy of Joanna Baillie with the seemingly ambivalent alterations that were made for this or that production. Baillie herself, fortunately or unfortunately, authorized texts of her plays before she died through her editing of the 1851 collection of her works. And yet much of what Baillie wrote in her lifetime—about the importance of performance and about her plays' potential need for adaptation—complicates her own authoritative literary editing of her works. If as Flanders remarks, "[A]uthorially intended meaning is achieved within an eroticized theatre of sexual domination, in which the subordination of the material to the authorial will is cast as a feminized sexual submission" (131), how much more complex is this editorial gender politics when enacted among the versions of a dramatic text.

However, Flanders also points to Jerome McGann's alternative approach to the medium/intention problem:

[William Morris's] model of artistic production, based not on the subordination of the material but on the potential meaningfulness of its autonomy, helps diversify our sense of what counts as meaning and where we look for it: not just authorial meaning but social meaning; not just in the author's production of language, but in the cultural incarnations of that language. This paradigm allows for the inclusion of numerous other agents and influences—editors, printers, readers, libraries. . . . (Flanders, 132-33)

I would argue that, in the case of theater writing, all the conditions surrounding the text must to some extent be "included" in our "decoding" and "encoding" of the text. Flanders' discussion of McGann points us to the possible significance of the non-published fragmentariness of the kinds of texts we are likely to find when excavating the works of women playwrights. We are faced not just with resistant material forms, but also with material forms that exist within resistant social processes and whose materiality might potentially yield evidence of those resistances. For example, Jane Scott's manuscript for the licensers is just one example of intention in relation to complex resistance. It exhibits, though not perhaps in a way that is easily decipherable, counter-intentions. If we had alongside it a manuscript for use in rehearsal, we might note different features and decode different purposes. Still, studying the licenser's copy invites us to think about how two very different scripts might be related. Our models of textual encoding must anticipate this kind of complex decoding.

References

• Bradley, Clive. "The Politics of Access." The Politics of the Electronic Text. Ed. Warren Chernaik, Carolyn Davis, and Marilyn Deegan. Oxford: Office for Humanities Computing, 1993. 73-76.
• Brockbank, Philip. "Towards a Mobile Text." in The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing. Ed. Ian Small and Marcus Walsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 90-106.
• Burroughs, Catherine. Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
• Chernaik, Warren, and Marilyn Deegan. "Introduction." The Politics of the Electronic Text. Ed. Warren Chernaik, Carolyn Davis, and Marilyn Deegan. Oxford: Office for Humanities Computing, 1993. 3-8
• Davis, Tracy C. "The Sociable Playwright and Representative Citizen," in Playwriting and Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. MS. pp. 1-21.
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• Text Encoding Initiative. "Base Tag Set for Drama." Guidelines for Encoding and Interchange of Machine-Readable Texts. Online. University of Illinois-Carbondale. Internet. December 7, 1998. Available http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/p3/doc/p3dr.txt
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