Prompting In Ex Tensions Of The Manuscript Literary And Editorial Approaches To Selected Early Play Scripts Of The Abbey Theatre

Prompting in/ex/Tensions of the Manuscript. Literary and Editorial Approaches to Selected Early Play Scripts of the Abbey Theatre

This book, whose slashed part of the title refers to Allen Tate’s idea of poetic tension, “derived from lopping the prefixes off the logical terms extension and intension” (Tate 1938: 283; italics in the original; see also Markowski 2006: 140–141), addresses various dimensions of prompting and its techniques preserved in the old play scripts of the Abbey Theatre. They were both encoded inside the plots of the dramatic works and inscribed on the pages of the unique typographical, textual and graphic composite constructs. The research presented stems from an exploration of the duality of intention and tension within literary and editorial studies. The two concepts relate to the thematic dimensions (the motif of tension in literature) as well as theoretical literary and textual problems (the question of intent and intention in literary interpretation and editorial research). “Tension” and “intention” in literature have been considered in various manners depending on a given theoretical approach. Their treatment should require a specific approach and methodology if literary works – plays, to be more specific – subject to a critical and interpretative examination are encapsulated within the unique forms of manuscripts whose original function was to guide the stage managers, prompters, or actors through the complex process of rehearsing and producing dramas at the theatre.

New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art

Portia Coughlan

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 1997. 'Carr's harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.' Independent on Sunday There's a wolf tooth growin in me heart and it's turnin me from everywan and everthin I am. Portia Coughlan lives life in monstrous limbo, haunted by a yearning for her spectral twin brother lying at the bottom of the Belmont river, unable to find any love for her wealthy husband and children, seeking solace in soulless affairs, deeply afraid of what she might do. Portia Coughlan premiered on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock Stage, Dublin, in April 1996 and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May that year. It was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2023. 'Taut and haunting, funny and sad . . . Carr plays with time and place to resonant, ultimately devastating effect.' The Stage 'One of the most important Irish plays of the twentieth century.' Arts Review 'Marina Carr goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence. The female quality of her writing comes through not only in the way she writes about women, it's in the physicality in her writing. She is right in there with the cycles of life, with the blood and the dirt.' Joyce McMillan, New York Times