BY GUEST AUTHOR PATRICK DURDEL, UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE
Let me play the New Historicist for a moment and start with an anecdote.
As I was hurrying (a bit delayed by life) to the first morning panel on "Biblical & Classical Marlowe", I saw some people preparing something on Goldsmith's College Green, right outside the building where our panels are held. In my mind, tired and rushed, I framed this as activity that must be vaguely related or in some way similar to the students setting up their art exhibition in the same building the day before: something will be happening here. So, imagine my surprise when, on my way to the coffee break, there was no film or photoshoot on the Green, no performance or dance rehearsal, but instead what seemed in the moment like a thousand primary school aged children: sack-racing, spear-throwing, tug-of-warring. Certainly, I thought, this must mean something.
In fact, I realized during the coffee break, I should have been prepared for this. In her paper and during the Q&A, Ruth Lunney had repeatedly mentioned the children performing (& potentially watching) Dido. And luckily, all three papers in the "Early Modern Acting" panel helped me make further sense of what was happening outside: the skill involved in falling, for example, the intricate language of fencing (with foam spears), and how all this was a way for the children (or child actors) to learn the necessary skills for a successful career on the stage. Nice.
Then I had some lunch, went to the "Marlowe and Materiality I" panel, and realized that I had gotten it completely wrong. I had misunderstood the evidence available to me. In fact, this question of what we know, the challenge of how little we often know, and how we can (methodologically, theoretically, practically) deal with this uncertainty figured in some way in almost every paper I heard yesterday. Laurie Johnson used the scarce evidence to paint a vibrant picture of Tamburlaine on tour, and Anouska Lester explicitly prompted us to explore and interrogate the constellations of the different kinds of evidence we use in our scholarship. This connected seamlessly, I felt, to the discussion of editorial practices in the afternoon's plenary panel on "Re-Editing Marlowe for the Modern Reader". And Subha Mukherji's keynote further added to the "Notes on Evidence" hastily typed into my phone, by underscoring, in one of the for me most memorable moments of the paper, the inherently theatrical quality of false legal evidence (false tears, in this case).
There is more to be said here and there are more questions to be asked. But I am sitting on the rush hour-filled tube on the way to Deptford and writing this in my notes app and I should eat something, and I have my own paper to worry about. (I also want to apologize to everyone I did not mention here by name, it is not because I did not appreciate your paper but because I had to commit to my little anecdote from the beginning.)
In the morning, Ruth Lunney told us: "There is no evidence, we are looking for little echoes of things". Violently taken out of context here, the statement might seem a bit too general at first, but so many of the panelists yesterday displayed a great talent for listening closely to faint echoes, making sense of what they heard, and telling us about it. And it was thrilling to listen.
