The Trick of Singularity
“Attuned to a wide range of current theories and methodologies, Osborne's study of performance editions is a major contribution to the project of historicizing the interplay between textuality and performance. By recasting that history, her book allows readers to see Twelfth Night anew, refigured by the productive power of her paradigm.”—Barbara Hodgdon, Drake University
“Osborne has written a rich and suggestive book on Twelfth Night which should prove of great value to Shakespeare studies. Her defense of performance editions (long ignored by scholars) as legitimate texts in their own right opens fascinating questions about authorship and transmission…Osborne's book is equally valuable for suggesting how performance editions inscribe cultural biases.”—James C. Bulman, Allegheny College
“Osborne can legitimately claim that the kind of cultural studies research she has done in The Trick of Singularity is destined to supersede traditional theater history, with its focus on production and details and other anecdotal information. This is not just a study of the reception of Twelfth Night, and still less a series of discussions of the 'texts' of a single play. It touches on a much wider range of cultural issues related to reading, stage production, cultural policy, and the representation of gender and sexuality. In her treatment of Shakespeare in the contemporary electronic media, especially videotext, Osborne quite simply leads the field. I know of no one currently writing on Shakespeare who possesses her level of expertise on these new formats.”—Michael D. Bristol, McGill University
“…Osborne presents a wide-ranging and innovative study of the intertextual relation between Shakespearean performance and publication, and this book should be required reading for those who insist on separate spheres for the study of theatre history and the story of 'Shakespeare.' By uncovering many fascinating details in the area that challenges any 'fixed' notion of a literary text, Osborne ultimately cautions us, as readers, critics, and auditors, not to repeat Malvolio's mistaken notion of performing the 'trick of singularity.'”—Shakespeare Newsletter
In this innovative union of textual studies and performance criticism, Laurie Osborne explores the important ways in which an apparently single, unproblematic text is in fact multiple and various. Through a close analysis of the performance editions of Twelfth Night, she argues that the complex interaction between text and performance establishes a comedy as a work realized within changing social and erotic constructions.
Because it appears in a relatively clean and dated version in the Folio, Twelfth Night seems to be exempt from arguments for variant texts—but there are significant and persistent variations represented in the performance editions. Osborne's careful reading of these provides a crucial bridge linking theatre history and textual criticism. She employs a wide variety of approaches and disciplines—Shakespearean and Renaissance studies, theatre history, gender studies, contemporary literary criticism, and cultural history—to provide a fresh and engaging yet rigorous view.
Although she focuses on Twelfth Night, Osborne's argument applies more broadly to the history of performance and criticism, including a chapter on video versions of the play. Widely read in Shakespearean and Renaissance scholarship, she employs her archival research in promptbooks, the publishing history of the plays, and the history of Shakespearean production to accomplish a major job of scholarly integration and analysis of Shakespearean drama in performance.
1 - Double Dating
2 - Performance Editions and the Quest for the Original Twelfth Night
3 - Rearranging the Texts from Bell to Lacy and Beyond
4 - Textual Perversity in Illyria
5 - The Video Editions
6 - Displacing and Renaming Love: A Lacanian Reading
7 - “What's in a Name?”; Or What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Twelfth Night?