Tom Crochunis's wonderfully provocative essay defines both an agenda and a methodology for the textual encoding of nineteenth-century women playwrights. It encourages us to see electronic textuality as an unprecedented opportunity not only to redress the marginal position of women theatre artists in contemporary scholarship, but also to reimagine relationships between performances and texts. Within his exploration of the editorial questions and dilemmas which face us in the construction of an electronic archive, Crochunis offers us a glimpse of an electronic theatrical democracy. Above all, Crochunis demands that theatre historians should not sit idly by whilst the space shuttle carrying electronic textuality takes off for its unknown destinations. For if we do, we shall only have ourselves to blame for the perpetuation and electronic dissemination of encoding practices derived uncritically from the history of the printed book.

Crochunis delineates two competing models for the encoding of theatrical authorship. The first of these (C.M. Sherberg-McQueen's discussion offers a starting point here) is derived from current editorial practice in academic publishing, and I shall label it here—for the sake of convenience—the electronic academy. How can we characterize the electronic academy? The figure of cultural authority in the electronic academy is the scholar-editor, an individual who acts as the professional mediator of a (single) text to an audience of individual readers. In that process of mediation, the scholar-editor invokes "contexts" only to subordinate them to a "text", a text defined by an individualistic (and arguably masculine) model of authorship. At the same time, the scholar-editor in the editorial academy performs the role of an arbiter of textual value whose choice and presentation of texts shapes what and how we read.

The second model which Crochunis explores characterizes the electronic institution as an archive rather than as another kind of editorial institution (I shall refer to this model as the electronic archive). But whereas the etymology of the archive reflects the history of record keeping for the state (in ancient Greek, archive refers to a magisterial residence or public office, and by extension to the governmental records stored there), the electronic archive can be defined by its seditious dissolution of the academic nation-state, a jocular disdain for boundaries between texts and contexts, the literary and the non-literary, and a quiet insouciance about distinctions between performance and writing.

What would be the criteria for creating an electronic archive? Taking Peter Shillingsburg's criteria as a starting point, Crochunis suggests that an electronic archive devoted to women's theatre materials would be a multimedia collection. We might imagine, therefore, that the electronic archive would include not only play texts in variant forms (printed editions including illustrations of performance, Larpent manuscripts, promptbooks), but also contemporary performances (experimental videos, for example), as well as playbill and reviews. Images available within a multimedia collection might include portraits of performers and toy theatre sheets, whilst the medium of sound might encompass recordings of theatre music and/or musical scores including those theatre songs published for performance in the home. In this archive of performance writing, links could be established between published playwrights and those women whose theatrical authorship never acquired a printed form. Moreover the electronic archive would enable its users to move beyond a particular play to related materials which would "reveal women's perspectives on social performance" (Crochunis): extracts from conduct books, contemporary diaries perhaps, or acting manuals. In the electronic archive, too, information could be continuously extended and reinterpreted as its various users appended their own material (whether in the form of discussion, correspondence or scholarly essays or additional historical documents).

How can we characterize the methods and assumptions of the electronic archive? First, the electronic archive rejects print culture as the definitive medium of theatrical knowledge and as the unquestioned model for the encoding of performance writing. Secondly, a democratic community of "users" emerges as the collective editors of the electronic archive, displacing the former authority of the individual scholar-editor. The electronic archive imagines the practice of encoding not in terms of a hierarchical relationship of knowledge between editor and reader, but rather as a communal, collective activity entered into for the benefit of a broader cultural public of readers and performers. In the electronic archive, therefore, distinctions between the amateur and the professional user, between public scholarship and private experience, would seem to disappear. By re-placing the "author" amidst a potentially inexhaustible web of other cultural citizens, the electronic archive also tends to dissolve the individual author as the primary object of editorial knowledge. In the world of electronic "intertextuality" (we shall need a new kind of critical language to speak of these relationships between multiple media), a limitless network of connections, sources and cross-references will recreate the historical sociability of writing and performance amidst different social classes and cultural practices, amongst a variety of literary forms and across national literatures.

Electronic textuality, Crochunis reminds us, entails a radical revision of our systems of knowledge. Indeed, Crochunis's enthusiasm for the archival model of electronic textuality arises from his persuasive conviction that the electronic archive might offer us a digital instrument both more powerful and more flexible than our conventional archives through which to "recover" the absent text of theatrical performance (that old editorial myth of the authoritative text reappears in a new, electronic form!). Crochunis demonstrates that the electronic archive can be expected radically to change not only the availability of nineteenth-century plays by women but also the nature of our access to women's playwrighting. For the electronic archive entails a dissolution of existing hierarchies between academics and theatre practitioners, and indeed between scholars and students. Put simply, the archival model replaces an intellectual autocracy of knowledge with a cultural democracy of information. Indeed, by placing texts "equally" in the hands of students and scholars, the electronic archive promises to transform its "users" (Crochunis's term) from readers into "authorial editors" (my term) who read, perform and write in a continuous and collaborative global dialogue with each other.

I accept wholeheartedly and with enthusiasm Crochunis's manifesto for a performative model of electronic textuality. We have cause to be grateful, too, for the sophisticated intelligence with which Crochunis causes us to revisit the implication of gender within the print history of theatrical culture, and the consequences of uncritically assimilating that print model into electronic textuality. Many questions remain (not to mention some existential angst), but I want to focus on two related issues in particular. The first of these concerns reading practices (though viewing practices might be a more accurate term here), and the second revolves around the problem of critical value.

First, in a network where information is inexhaustible (where information, indeed, has replaced knowledge), how will we read (if reading can even be used to describe such an activity) in the electronic archive? What kinds of consequences does electronic textuality have for reading practices? Imagine, for example, what a play text in the electronic archive might actually look like. If, as Crochunis suggests, all the conditions surrounding the text must to some extent be included in our encoding, then how "readable" will those texts really be? The electronic archive promises a new kind of completeness, a paradoxically non-authoritative authoritative text. But in what ways might that completeness (or endlessness) disable and disempower as well as enable its readers? Amidst the (paralyzing?) boundlessness of performative intertextuality, too, will the electronic archive (not to mention the economic exigencies of scholarly life) simply reinvent in other forms those lineages which have constrained our old-fashioned textual knowledge? Think, too, of the ways in which electronic textuality will inevitably convert the material objects of theatrical research—the slim octavo volume of plays, the silk playbill or the crude, hurried color of a toy theatre sheet—into objects of still greater rarity and strangeness. Electronic textuality offers us the exciting promise of "recovering" a lost performance, but that recovery may also entail the loss—or at least the further historical distancing—of an important part of theatre's sensuous, material life.