 Our guest this afternoon is Professor Tom Pettit, who will present on the Gutenberg parenthesis, discerning historical patterns in media technology, cultural production, and perception. Professor Pettit is an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark's Institute of Literature, Media, and Cultural Studies, where he lectures on literature and theater in the late medieval and early modern periods. His research is devoted to exploring performance culture located in the Triangle of Literature, Theater, and Folklore. He has published many studies on customs, folk drama, and pageantry, legends, and wonder tales. He has also worked extensively on medieval drama and Elizabethan theater, including folkloristic approaches to Shakespeare and Marlowe. His subject this afternoon is a so-called Gutenberg parenthesis, and the question of whether our emerging digital culture is partly a return to certain practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press, and as many collateral media of cultural production. Our distinguished respondent, commentator, is Professor Peter S. Donaldson. Pete is professor of literature at MIT and author of two books, Machiavelli in The Mystery of State, and Shakespearean films, Shakespearean directors. As well as numerous publications on Shakespeare and film and digital media, he directs the MIT Shakespeare Electronic Archive, which since 1992 has used computers to develop new ways of studying Shakespeare across the media of text, image, and film. Related digital projects include Hamlet on the Ramparts, XMAS, a cross-media annotation system, and Shakespeare performance in Asia, the first phase of a global Shakespeare video archive. Tom will present his argument for the first half hour. Pete will then respond, and we'll open the forum to discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Perides. And my thanks to you and to David Thorper for letting me come into this forum and to Peter Donaldson for joining the conversation, bread to bread for practical work. Thank you all for joining us on this unseasonably warm afternoon. It will be a conversation. I'm trying to get used to the microphone, and I've got wires in places I don't often have wires. It's very appropriate. I'm kind of in a cyborg condition, which we may be discussing later on. I've harassed the organizers into allowing me to give a perhaps more substantial opening to the session than may normally be the case with your forums. It's for two reasons. Two reasons, it's mainly they know I'm better at presenting ideas than at discussing ideas. If you present me with an awkward question, I will have the answer, but it'll be as my plane comes into Copenhagen Airport early on Sunday morning. It'll be too late for you. I can email you my answer question, but let's see how it goes. And also I'd like this opportunity to establish as a basis for the conversation exactly what I understand by the Gutenberg parenthesis. It is other and more than the phase of media history between oral tradition and digital technology, which is suggested by the title. And I hope you're all inside of the handout, and the handout reproduces some of the most essential of the small cluster of PowerPoint slides, very simple elementary PowerPoint slides that I've prepared for today's presentation. Now the Gutenberg parenthesis has proved an elegant, an effective, and therefore a quite provocative way of formulating a thesis about the long-term history of media history. It has provoked a good deal of positive response and a good deal of negative response since I've been presenting the idea here and here in Boston in Cambridge. It's about the deep history of media, far beyond today's new media, the internet and digital technology, beyond even the old media, which is what new media people call film and television. To my disappointment, we have a media studies, fairly new media studies department in the University of Southern Denmark, and I was delighted to see that they were doing old media because I could say something about ballads and folktales and legends from the Middle Ages and low and behold, old media was film and television. I'm very pleased that attitudes to the history of media are otherwise over here. So we're talking about effectively the prehistory, from that perspective, the prehistory of the media in the form of printing and writing and the human voice as the means of communication. This idea about the parenthesis, it suggests that knowledge of what happened in that relatively distant past can be more than usually helpful in understanding what's happening in the present and what may happen in the future, and vice versa. And for me, of course, it's the vice versa that's important. I do not present myself as an expert on the modern media. I'm not particularly interested in the modern media, but if studying the modern media will help me better understand my own field, maybe even relation studies, which is what this parenthetical notion suggests, I'm very happy to exchange information and insights with people who are experts in modern media, which is why I keep coming back to MIT. The parenthesis image also explains why, as a student of Shakespeare, I've always felt more comfortable when I'm not studying Shakespeare in working on folklore and in working on African-American culture, in working on the modern media, more so than when teaching regular canonical literature of the period in between, of the parenthetical period of Milton and Pope and Swifton, Wordsworth and Thackeray and Kipling and all those great masterpieces of the Western canon. Though those, and I'll say in passing, I will downplay Shakespeare in my initial presentation because I know Jolly well. We're gonna have a Jolly good conversation about Shakespeare in a moment. These are some of the places we may be going in the course of this forum, but I'd like to start with the help of my PowerPoints by exploring the potential value of the Gutenberg parenthesis idea in suggesting answers to some important questions about the new media and their impact, which are currently the matter of urgent discussion. And as my first PowerPoint shows, in a very influential article in The Atlantic magazine in 2008, Nicholas Carr strikingly formulated what many people have been asking themselves is Google making a stupid? And he has a book coming out on the same subject in a month or so. And a couple of months ago, the American Edge Foundation, which poses an annual question to its star-studied panel of academics and artists, unveiled its question for 2010 and which has subsequently been discussed and reported in most of the world's series, newspapers, how is the internet changing the way you think? Translate into my PowerPoint presentation in my own simplified terms, how is change in media technology affecting our, what I call our mind work, which is my plain man's term for cognition? I will say cognition in due course, but I say mind work to start, just to emphasize, I simply mean what happens in the mind, the work that the mind does. Of course, both these questions beg questions. The first one assumes that before Google, we weren't stupid. And as someone who was there at the time, you have my personal assurance, we were. What the question really means is, is Google making a stupid in a different way? Which is effectively a rephrasing of the second question, how is the internet changing the way you think? And the Gutenberg parenthesis, the answer to both is yes, it is changing the way we think, and quite specific. The internet will ultimately make us think the way medieval peasants thought, or it's making a stupid, or Google is making a stupid in a more medieval rustic sort of a way, which may be an improvement on present conditions. Except of course, both questions are problematic in assuming the influence only goes the one way. They are guilty of technological determinism. The cardinal sin of media studies. Influence can equally go the other way. Mind work can influence or determine the development of media technology. So we could ask with equal legitimacy, is our stupidity making Google, how is the way you think changing the internet? Or even was it a change in the way we think that created the internet? Refraising their questions. And then thirdly, finally each of these questions omits a vital third ingredient. Media technology may influence mind work, mind work may influence media technology, but either way, the influence is likely to pass through or show itself in the cultural production, which is produced by that mind work and mediated by that technology. I mean the plays, the opera, the musicals, the films, the legends, the tales, the fiction, the novels, poems, songs, jokes, sermons, serials and soaps, rumors and news reports, gossip, chat and twittering, everything that is mediated by the media. And for some of us, those who think that the, with Hamlet that the plays the thing, those of you who are studying media in the sense of what the media mediate, our topic, our topic is the cultural production. The plays themselves, the stories themselves, the books themselves, the novels themselves. And the mind work and the media and the technology are contexts for that production. I therefore rephrase them as contexts for cultural production in my, in that current, that current PowerPoint context we need to know more about in order to better to appreciate the content and the form and the meaning of that cultural production. So my formulation of the Edge question would be how is the internet changing the way you create? Changing the way you write? How is it changing the way you produce words? And the Gutenberg parenthesis answer would be it's making me create a bit more like Shakespeare. Which brings us back to the historical dimension. We are evidently in the middle of a revolution in communications which is manifestly impacting on cultural production and prompting these questions about its impact on cognition. Started in the 20th century with recording, with sounds and film, with sound and film recording multiplied by radio and television and now supplemented and enhanced by the internet and digital technology. And there's a common theme in commentary that these developments constitute not just something new but the end of something old that they are a challenge to the dominance of print and the book and reading. And I just, there are now publications with titles like The End of Books, The Gutenberg Eliges, The Fate of Reading and Electronic Age, The End of the Rain of the Book. There's a collection that is called Beyond the Book and one of the articles in it is called We Are Already Beyond the Book. The book is dead with an extra subtitle, Long Live the Book. A heretical voice in this chorus and famously Jeff Gomez's The Print is Dead books in our digital age. And of course, talking about The End of the Book, I'll wait until it goes away. If it's for me, say I'm busy. Thank you very much. Talking about The End of the Book invites us of course to juxtapose that with the beginning of the book with the emergence of printing and the printed book. And another one of the influential works on this field in this field is Peter Schillingberg's study from 2006 which is entitled From Gutenberg to Google where his thesis is, We Are in the Infancy. We are now in the infancy of a textual revolution comparable to the one initiated by the invention of printing from movable type in the 15th century. Two revolutions, Gutenberg revolution, Google revolution. Three phases, the two revolutions taking us from one level of technology to another in the mediating context, from a low technology of personal face to face oral mediation with some writing, a step upwards in technology with Gutenberg into an intermediate technology with textual mediation by the printed book and then the Google revolution to a higher technology with the electronic media, digital technology, the internet and CMC, computer mediated communication which suggests, of course, then juxtaposing in itself that suggests juxtaposing these two revolutions should be mutually enlightening. We can, studying the Gutenberg revolution can help us better understand the Google revolution. In a 1995 position paper for the RAND Corporation James DeWoe was entitled, by DeWoe was called the information age and the printing press looking backward to see ahead. The book historian Roger Chartier sees that can see that one revolution can help us to understand the other and conversely, from the present to the past, we can use, I can use the Google revolution to better understand the Gutenberg revolution and what it meant to Shakespeare and others and people who work in my field, Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol have edited a collection of studies on print, manuscript and performance, the changing relations of the media in early modern England, they say they will study. The complex interactions, back then in Shakespeare's time between a technologically advanced culture of the printed book and a still powerful traditional culture based on the spoken word, word spectacle and manuscript, looking back from our own era, looking back from now from the Google age to the Gutenberg revolution, looking back from our own transitional moment as we attempt to negotiate the shift from typographic to electronic and visual media and there are others. There are universities who have sought grants on the basis of juxtaposing this modern revolution with the 16th century revolution with the Renaissance revolution with an aim to the reciprocal enlightenment on both sides and of course Marshall McLuhan famously has referred to the Gutenberg galaxy as the name for the phrase in between and that those two revolutions can be compared in their impact on the nature of human thinking and many other things. There others have done the same. Walter Ong also famously has developed this notion of secondary orality that we are moving into something that resembles even more the past. We are going through a period of print, moving into a secondary orality which takes us in many ways back to the primary orality of the pre-print period and that's moving onto something else because this is the notion that we're not merely moving up in technology on into a third phase but that third phase of media history is taking us back in many ways to the period between. Another Renaissance scholar, Leo Marcus, in a striking study called cyberspace renaissance has noted that in modern electronic editions texts are becoming more fluid, less stable, more subject to intervention by people who copy them and therefore that situation is taking us back to how things were in the age of manuscripts, in the age of the Shakespeare period where texts were not as stable as they became in the meantime. Some of you may recall from the conference here last year the program borrowed a very effective cartoon from the Denver Post suggesting that we are moving back. The future is taking us back into the past. The suggestion that the suggestion that mailing and tweeting, that's the right term, are a reversion to the limited communicative capacities of stone tablets. So the future is taking us back to the past and the most important figure in this field perhaps is John Foley from the Center for Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri who has instigated this massive project, Pathways of the Mind with a splendid website which explores the similarities between pre-literate orality, the world of oral traditions and the post Gutenberg phenomenon of digital texts which are accessible on the internet. John Foley has talked about the fundamental similarities between humankind's oldest and most pervasive communications medium oral tradition, on the one hand, and humankind's newest medium, the internet, that the two are reasonably juxtaposed and then finally my colleague Lars Olesauerberg at the University of Southern Denmark came up with this delightful phrase, the Gutenberg parenthesis, suggesting that as in a sentence we have been through our sentence, the sentence which is the history of the media has been interrupted by the age of print, by a printing, a book phase, and that insofar as we are leaving that book phrase we are going back, we are going back to the situation before that. Without any implications that the period in between was a waste of time or going in the wrong direction or misguided, it's not parenthesis, any pejorative sense, it's like in a sentence, if you're speaking a sentence or writing a sentence, you interrupt for a while with a second thought to add to your first thought, you then resume the first thought at the end of the parenthesis and the sentence goes on but that sentence will irrevocably be changed by what has happened, well at least I think so, in the parenthesis in between, it has not been a digression or something not worthwhile. It's also very appropriate of course in the sense that the parenthesis is an idea and the parenthesis, the brackets as symbols were themselves, the products of the age of print and were introduced and appreciated in the 16th century. I have all kinds of qualifications to this picture in the sense that it doesn't all happen in 1600, it is very gradual, it comprises many different aspects, some things happen at one time and some things happen at another and when I say 1600 and 2000, I'm referring if you like to mainstream, to the mainstream culture of Western Europe and subsequently of North America. Other, there'll be other timetables for subcultures within cultures and there'll be different timetables for different cultures, which is why folklore, when I study folklore, I'm effectively studying the culture of people who have not yet entered the Gutenberg parenthesis, even though the mainstream, the majority culture around them has entered the Gutenberg parenthesis, this is also why we may come back to this African-American vernacular culture is so interesting or can be seen in a new light from this perspective that in America there have been different subcultures, they have entered this parenthesis at different times and there's been interesting discrepancies between them as a consequence. In the little time I've got left, I'd like to, that is the basic situation, I'd like to take a bit of a look at exactly what it is that characterizes the parenthesis. In the time that I have, I'll focus on what's happening in the parenthesis but the implication is that before the parenthesis and after the parenthesis, things were different and they were different in the same way and as far as I can, I'll try and be consistent and sort of move slowly up the diagram in those various levels. This is the overall situation, just focus on if you like on the central part, it's extraordinarily simple but I seem to find patterns, it seems that there have been changes around about 1600, around about 2000, there have been changes under all three headings, under the heading of the mediating context and culture production and the cognitive context and they seem to be the same changes and the second change seems to reverse the first change. So as I say, this is nothing pretentiously intellectual, it boils down to some very basic things. So with regard, for example, to the mediating context, the key word is containment. Words have been imprisoned in the Gutenberg parenthesis if one thinks of all the ways words have been regimented thanks to this technology. Words are regimented into lines of the same length and the same height, those lines are structured into a block of text, that block of text is surrounded by a margin within a page, those pages are folded and gathered, then they are stitched together, then several gatherings are put together in a book and glued together and that book is bound and then put in covers, it may then be put into a dust jacket and it may be put into a slip case or in some cases it may be provided with metal clasps to stop the words from getting out, it seems. An extraordinary level, an extraordinary level of containment and there's not time, but we do the same thing with letters, when you write a letter to someone, you write it on the paper, you fold the paper, you put the paper into an envelope but therefore becomes an enclosure and you seal the envelope and send it off. We are in pristing words, we're putting words into things and with regard to printing, how do they get there, the words get into those containers by something we call the press and there's a very good reason why it's called a press, it was Gutenberg, the Gutenbergs didn't make many changes to existing machinery, the press was previously, that same device was previously used for pressing juice out of olives and grapes and into barrels, into bottles, which is a question of slightly adapting the technology, so whereas previously that press was used for getting juice out of vegetables out of olives and grapes into barrels, so now we are using, or Gutenberg used the press to press the words onto the pages, into the book, into the container, into volumes which have contents, the whole vocabulary is that of containment and then just to finish that off, when we buy one of those books full of words, even we are, if you like, confined within the book because a lot of those books are designed for what's called immersive reading, we ourselves, we ourselves, we immerse ourselves in that text and we are lost in the book is the conventional phrase. So it's a question, the Gutenberg prince is the question of confining, containing words and there's not really time for this but one thing that makes this change all the more striking or may make the connection with Gutenberg less firm is that similar things seem to be happening in other forms of production, in other media, all happens round about the same time, words get confined in books round about the same time that plays get confined to stages, plays weren't performed on sort of stages necessarily that kind of stage and stages get confined into theaters and performances occur sort of in venues, music is performed in concert halls, opera houses, in orchestra pits, music is printed behind staves, in staves behind bars and you need the right key to get them out again. There is this extraordinary influence, this sense of containment that was the media themselves and it has its impact on what is produced for those media and communicated in those media and I will use this diagram to summarize that, just about right, if you like that was the media contained but then the product itself is contained, it is separate, it is cut off from others, this is an indication of what's going on in this diagram, the squares indicate that this period, this same transition sees the emergence of something we take for granted and that is the individual work, the notion that a verbal product has to be a work, a story with a beginning and a middle and an end, the notion that a piece of music has to last a certain amount of time, the notion that a picture is one picture, it is a picture of just one thing and doesn't crawl all over a wall and involve all kinds of sequences of action and that works are complete. The notion that a given work isn't a fragment, it has a beginning and end, it doesn't just kind of wander on, it doesn't just stop arbitrarily as things might have been before and as things may well be after, works become isolated, they are not based on sources, they don't plagiarize earlier works, they are not much imitated, they're much influenced by other works, they are original, they belong to the man who creates them and then when they are created, they are passed on, they are mediated with as little change as possible. Before and after the parenthesis, change was normal, interference was normal, works weren't defended from external interference by some kind of imaginary war. So there's, I'm summarizing brutally now, just to cover the whole ground for the first time round, the media are contained, the works are contained, I forgot to say, I don't think I knew that the idea of a framed picture was so late, we take that for granted too, pictures were framed at roughly the same time that words were enclosed in books and then finally the last big topic is I anticipate that there's some connection, say I won't say which way the connection is, there are changes at the same time in the way we look at the world, the way that people see the world, this is the cognition term that I was hesitant to use earlier on but the way people perceive the world, the way, well, it's gone to my main example, bodies, okay, this is not me. I forgot to say at the start, a lot of this isn't my own work, I'm in a pre-parenthetical or post-parenthetical mode where I redeploy ideas from other people and this too, I came across this, these are my own diagrams but this notion, I came across this extraordinary idea in a French book, a book by a Swiss scholar called Guillemette Bollens, La Logique du Cor Articulaire. Guillemette Bollens detects a very interesting shift in the way we see bodies and she also links it to the difference between orality and literacy. Bodies are how we see them, we construct, we don't see the word, the world as it is, we perceive the world and we represent and treat the world in terms of preconceived structures, structures and shapes in our minds. Those shapes change and the changes seem to be correlated to these changes in media technology and culture production and say with regard to the body, the body is how we see it and how we see it changes and this theory will say that I've chosen some sort of, these are illustrations rather than documentation but the basic point is that within the parenthesis, this is Bollens's theory, within the parenthesis is my term of course but in the age of literacy and print, the body is seen as an envelope. We represent the body, we perceive the body, we treat the body as an envelope and the well-being of the body is dependent on the integrity of that envelope so that there is no improper ingress or egress into the body or from the body and our culture, again this corresponds in our culture, to obsession. The period of the Gutenberg parenthesis strangely corresponds to the notions of etiquette, all these things we were told to do and not to do with our bodies. All that upbringing, don't spit, don't burp, breathe through your mouth, eat with your door, eat with your mouth open, don't gape, don't guffaw, cover your mouth when you cough, cover your nose when you sneeze, keep your stomach in, keep your legs and your knees together. All that, all that business came in, came in with the book. It seems extraordinary. Things change, I mean etiquette changes, attitudes change but the idea that our bodies are envelopes and that it is the control of that envelope which is essential to the body. Even the way we dress, dressing, I'm not gonna get into the sordid details but there is an awful containment of the body by changes in clothing, not least undergarments, rough at the same time. Get on, I'll move on. Got two small points or two remaining points, I can do that very quickly. The same thing applies to space. There's not a correlation. The way we see space seems to have changed over the same period and perhaps in the same way. The way we look at the world, the way we make maps, the way we orient ourselves in the physical environment, I've provided you, again, an illustration rather than proof. In the Gutenberg parenthesis, the world is seen in terms of enclosures. We look at nations, at communities, at gardens, at estates, at houses, things that people own. Keep other people out of our enclosure. Whereas before and after, the world was seen in terms of movement of avenues and junctures. And it just turned out rather neatly. My illustration is concerns navigation. In the parenthesis, navigation uses charts, printed in books, and navigation takes the form of orienting oneself in relation to space, an enclosed space. One chart, one position is on a map. Whereas prior to that, people navigated or navigation books, navigation aids were instructions on when to go to a port and when to go to starboard. What landmark to aim for? These are pilot books. These are routiers, rutters. Navigation took the form of following instructions on when to turn left, when to turn right, when to head for a given landmark and say it seems to be returning in the vision of the world around us that we have with GPS. And then my final point, I'll just mention it without going further into it. But it's probably perhaps too big for today. But the final containment, I'm accusing the book, I'm accusing the Gutenberg parenthesis of containing everything, of making us see everything in terms of containment. And the last and the biggest is categories. Categories. The notion that we see the world in terms of categories that there are, that people can be categorized in terms of race, in terms of gender, in terms of species. All those big divides, that wasn't always the case. Medieval medicine distinguished three genders, male, female, and hermaphrodite. No great fuss. We are approaching that perception with great difficulty and pain in our time. Human medieval thought didn't distinguish too sharply between man and animal, man and material, man and machine. And again, we are now approaching a kind of pre-Gutenberg medieval notion that borders are crossable, that things overlap. And, well, that is my conclusion for that part of the interview. My answer under that last heading is that the internet will make us less categorical in the way we perceive the world. It'll make us less panicky, less worried about distinctions between the human and the divine, the human and the machine, the human and the animal, the living and the dead, the black and the white, the male and the female, between writing and speech. It'll make us less aggressive about transgressions of categories. So, in a way, when I say we are going back, the internet will make us think like medieval peasants. I think that there may be some healthy aspects to it. I'll stop there, Joe. Thanks very much. Turn it over to Pete. Thank you. Well, it was a little unclear exactly whether this would be a three-way discussion or a response and how much it would have to deal with Shakespeare. So, sort of winging it a little bit. But I think that, first of all, I wanted to thank Tom for his wonderful presentation. I should say, even its exaggerations, I thought were healthy and helpful and helped us to get a sense of when and how the book and the regime of the book and other such totalizing regimes can weigh upon creativity. I know Tom's already in advance said there's another side to this and that books are not merely engines for the compression and restriction and policing of meaning. And indeed, there are. But I found this a very, very helpful talk. And I love the metaphors and the visualizations that he brought to this. I thought Tom was going to speak about Shakespeare and about the sort of, what would you say, the arch-fetishized book, which is the Shakespeare Folio. And maybe he will a little bit later. But maybe, are you going to talk about that later? Or are you just going to respond to it? Yeah, oh well, OK, but I'm going to start with it. So, and here's an example, because this was the start. In some ways, it was the symbol of what a lot of people, actually that's a facsimile. What do you think of the collected works of Shakespeare, which this is not? This is a facsimile edition. But the big book, with all the plays, by an authoritative editor and commentary by authoritative scholars, and it went along with the social practice of the Shakespeare lecturer. We don't actually have Shakespeare lecturers at MIT. We have discussion sections and other kinds of things like that. And even Shakespeare students writing multimedia hypertext essays on Shakespeare in these days. But when I began, the figure of the authoritative professor at the front of a room like me right now, with 100 people, more or less the official interpreter of a sacred book, which had a unique and unitary meaning. Or if it didn't, the aim was to come as close to that as possible, which had an originary and authorized printed form, which if the historical facts did not actually make it possible to specify that form, at least that's what one was after as an editor. And so, but in the mind of a generation of people who went through this regime, and it's still common in many parts of the world, like perhaps very close to here in a certain way. But other universities. But there was an urge in the profession that kind of peaked in the mid 1980s. And it had a number in the Shakespeare profession. It had a number of inputs. One was that the fact of variation of texts. Half of Shakespeare's plays appear in two different versions. They're not always very different. Sometimes they're only, what would you say, nominally different, no major differences. But half of the plays appear in Cordeaux, which is small, and in Folio, which is that size. After Shakespeare's 36 plays published after Shakespeare's death, six years after, seven years after, 1623, during Shakespeare's lifetime, about half the plays appear in Cordeaux. And sometimes there are surprising differences. For example, To Be Or Not To Be, that is the question, one of the most famous lines appears in the first Cordeaux, as To Be Or Not To Be, I, there's the point. And it's kind of hard to imagine. It's a good example of variation that's potentially meaningful because instead of it being the question, it's more or less the point and the answer. But there are profound differences. Hammett is a play for which there are three significantly different texts, first Cordeaux, second Cordeaux, and Folio. King Lear has two. Othello has fascinating differences between the 1622 Cordeaux and the Folio in hundreds of individual words. Unlike King Lear and Hammett, it's not a matter of whole scenes or long passages, but individual words seem to have been changed. And we don't always know which way, since the date of publication is not necessarily the date of the underlying document. So in fact, in textual studies, they use the word add omission because you don't know whether something was added or omitted if you don't know the dates of the text or the stem. You don't know how they descended from on and off. So that was one thing. The text varied a lot, and the knowledge of this variation was hidden in impossibly tiny print at the end of the book that nobody ever used, and you would need a little bit of a course to understand. That was one thing. The other was the question of performance. How do we acknowledge adequately the fact that Shakespeare came to Stratford as an actor, made his way up as a writer? Yes, he took on the heirs of a gentleman and wrote sonnets, and they were published probably with more supervision or more intention than some of the other texts of Shakespeare. But he was a man of the theater. And in the theater, the variation is inescapable because theatrical productions vary from one day to the next, from one performance to the next. They can't help but vary that way. And of course, they vary even perhaps more grossly in one production to the next, in one language to the next, in one culture taking up the text and understanding it a different way. So variations seem to be, in many, many ways, cultural, textual, performative, something that needed acknowledging. And some of the steps taken, and I think this would be a very good example of the idea that words were being constricted in a certain kind of way and that we could loosen the bonds of the parenthesis. We didn't use the word at the time. And create something with more flow, more inclusion, and more honesty to the fact of what the human labor of writing play is like and how subject it is to variation and to imperfection on all sorts of levels, whether it's the imperfection of the writer who can come up with a word like print cocks that no one has ever heard before or since. And somehow that gets into the text or the performers or the editors. And so it seemed difficult within the margins of the book to give adequate form to this. And so I wanted to also look at another kind of book for a minute, which is a very well-known scholar started trying to find alternate ways within the limit of the bound book to give readers access to the fact of variation. It didn't all work out. This is by my friend Michael Warren at Santa Cruz. And this is the parallel King Lear. Now, he thought the way to really represent the facts of King Lear was to take the first quarter and the folio version and to put them side by side. But since the books are of different sizes, he had to develop this method, very complicated technological method called cut line factoring. So first you take a picture of the page, then you cut it so the reader can cross right over for the comparable parts of the quarter on folio. But there are different sizes, so there's white spaces in between and very, very hard to read. Allegibility was a great deal of a problem. So what Michael did for the next stage was to publish this book along with unbound fascicles of the three texts so that you could shift them and compare them as we're reading. He thought it was rather awkward. So he actually, in a sense, renounced the practice of editing at all within the confines of the Codex or the facsimile. And he joined our early efforts to find a way out of the confines of the book. So he joined our team at MIT in the hopes of finding a way of representing this variation. And so I wanted to give you just a few examples of what the kind of thing we were doing then and why does it maybe preface it by saying parentheses, that's curious. We've been talking about the Gutenberg parentheses and I kept thinking for the first time, I hadn't thought about it till Tom was talking, that there's a kind of parentheses around the period that I'm about to exemplify, which is the period of hypertext, hypermedia, and standalone hypertext, hypermedia. Well, as the novelist Robert Kuvert declares the end of books in 1994 in The New York Times and in 2002, you still can get it online thanks to Nick keeping it, keeping it alive online. The article, I think it's the end of hypertext or it's about the fading of the golden age of hypertext which lasts some vanishingly small period from maybe in 1984 to 2002. So they're gonna have the hypertext parenthesis as well. And we may have the Google parenthesis because free as we think it is, we may find that it's very confining in the end, who knows, we don't know. But there'll always be this tension between something that confines in its own way and a larger reality. I was gonna quote Solomon's Prayer that the completion of the temple is something like, but can this house ever hold the immensity of the Lord? So you have something completed, but with the recognition that there's no way that the confinement is going to work and that's part of the point. Part of the point is that there's a great deal outside the effort to confine. So this is what we started. We started with three faces for our, this is originally standalone project on workstations. And we actually have the developer and designer, Ed Moriarty, who some of this work is. I think much of it, maybe all of it, but a great deal, we're grateful to him. And we did this was kind of a secret reason. It's because the three faces of Shakespeare actually represent three different states of the engraved portrait because Shakespeare was important enough, it was important enough to get this right. So the plate was removed and worked on and put back twice. So and most people can't tell, there's a hair strand loose in one, probably two, we don't have the resolution to tell which one it is. And in one, his head looks like John the Baptist on a platter and then the artist put in some shading so he wouldn't look quite so cut off from his body. Intellectually looking fellow, a prosperous gentleman type with a big brain and a rock star of the medium of print. No one had ever had a full page portrait of themselves on the frontispiece. They had full face portraits. Edmund Spencer's works had a portrait, but it took up a tiny part of the page. Shakespeare was a pop star in the sense that he dominated what the book was. And if you've seen, we could open that and show you. But you couldn't get beyond the fact of variation, even in this medium. So we based our work on the idea that it was the variation, the struggling against the attempt to confine words that needed addressing by displaying their variation, but also their variation into media dreamt of and undreamt of in Shakespeare's time. We wanted to have the text relate to its afterlife in art and illustration and in videos from our own time. Of course, we ran into lots of copyright problems. Some of them are not actually solved even now, as would be no surprise to you. So this is an example of what you might call the expanded book way of trying to break out of that parentheses. A mode in some ways, which is superseded even in our own work, but we tried to do it well. And so we had a choice among electronic texts on the left. So there's the principle of multiplicity. And on the right, you click and you could get either, it's a little hard to read on the screen, folio, which is their folio facsimile and you can blow it up and stuff. But you could also get the earlier quarter editions if they existed of a given play and just oppose them with a folio or click on an art field and it would give you a stream of thumbnails, you could click on those and you get all linked to either that exact line or as we sort of compromise every two or three lines, we decide where the resources went. But notice it was still text-centric. So we're kind of radiating out from the Shakespeare text. One way to look at it was that we're in fact creating a more monstrous kind of worship of the author by having, being able to move out from one line to various resources. But we thought of it as liberating. And I think it is in some ways, it gives you a lot of information about what different lines have meant. Now you notice, maybe you didn't know, I don't know if that's visible, but I wanted to show you, I chose and some of you have heard me talk about my favorite example. The first letter, the first phoneme, well it isn't really, it's a, yeah it is, it's the first word spoken in Shakespeare play in the folio because the tempest comes first is the word Boson and the compositor who was working that day, the compositor E, he's the worst of the five, managed to put the letter upside down, the big decorated, the big decorated letter that would be the first thing that you saw and you turn to an actual play. So then going back, what this edition allows you to do is look at any of the four, there are four separate states even within the folio, there are four separate states of the first page. And one of them contains this egregious error. Well it's not what they call a significant variation since you know which way the letter really ought to go but it also accesses the kind of materiality of the book because the paradox here is this miserable copy, this must be one of the worst pages of the folio in existence is all foxed and damaged and other places water damaged and it has this awful typo, was laboriously cut out and repasted into a full page and bound and the join between the bad copy that the collector had and the book was disguised with a red line all around it. So even early on as the 18th century you had the fetishization of the Shakespeare text so that even a bad one was something that people were struggling and paying immense amounts of money. So I just want to, this is an example of the first quarter of Hamlet. We photographed all seven of the individual copies, only seven exist and you can click on those. Then we have an art collection of 1500 images from 1700 to 1900. This is the copying photograph of Hamlet and the skull. We, illustrating the line of last poor York, I knew him, Horatio, but there are others and we found that maybe 30% of the illustration in that period was comical. So here's a guy holding a rather gigantic Neanderthal skull. This is 19th century and then in the corner there's a little chicken rooster meditating on death and he's got a skull, a more recently deceased comrade and he stands in much greater danger of immediate death than the actor Harrison Wolf with his giant head, kind of imitating Shakespeare's head. So many, many comic versions is one of the things you find when you study variation in the text and in their performance. We also wanted to have video. We had a little trouble getting copyright, i.e. we got permissions. But we did get permissions from Mrs. Burton for the, to display the Richard Burton Hamlet. It's a very fine one. And we wanted to at least exemplify the concept. The same skulls or was your ex skull? The King's Gesture. Or this? Me and that. Let me see here. Oh, you're it. I knew him originally. Okay, and then we, another one we got was the Swedish television version directed by Ragnar Lith and with Stel and Stelskard as Hamlet and just played us for a second. You are your ex skull, isn't it? So these have become the only words in Swedish that I know. So, okay. Now, having, having done that, you know, we came to a point in our work where we had the opportunity to expand and we decided not to expand that model. At least not now. I mean the original model. There were certain reasons about how expensive it is to hand link thousands and thousands of lines to one another which may be more possible and easier to automate today. But what we realized was we wanted something that was a little less, there's two things, right? A little less text driven and more performance driven and also something that would deal with Shakespeare as interpreted elsewhere in the world. And we had a very fortunate conjunction with the possibility of a grant to do this with the development of a collection already taking place in our collaborator Alex Wang's collection that he was developing at Penn State for which he'd already begun to get online permissions before he had a way of putting them up. So we're now partners in this enterprise and this is a video centric archive, right? So it does not actually contain a text of Shakespeare but it contains at present 25 to 30 full video records of productions from a number of countries, notably Japan, Taiwan, People's Republic and with Korea coming. So East Asia. And so that's what we decided was a good move to take two steps away from the domination of the text. And this also converged with the understanding, the changing understanding of Shakespeare in Asia. I mean, one way of looking at it is like in Japan in 1905 and 1910, they would send people to Russia to study how Stanislavski put on the cherry orchard or put on another kind of a play and imitate the exact gestures. By 1996, these Asian countries have become centers of innovation in Shakespeare and my own view is that unrivaled centers of innovation. Far more interesting things happening in Japan or in Taiwan or China than in Great Britain as far as opening up the text to new understandings. So that's what we wanted to do. This is one of our interfaces for that but another one is this, and it's a matrix, you know. And so in our second version, we're gonna start with some version of a video matrix and you click on one and you're brought into the video performance itself. A second stage, the randomized filling of the matrix we randomized will be different and randomized. Third stage, it won't be randomized but it will conform as these sophisticated online things now do to your own choices, to your own interests, to the pathways that you may be following. And the third thing which I can't exemplify because we're working on it now is that we wanted to find a place for sort of scholarly Shakespeare and serious archives within a media ecology that includes examples of interactive or community uses of video that far transcend what we could do in quantity and also frankly in design of a space in which ordinary people can put up their material, enjoy it, communicate it around it. And of course I'm thinking of the video sites and YouTube in particular. So one of the goals of the new project is to be open not only to try to be open to other cultures, to a variation, to in performance but also to the de-centered world of contribution and communication of the contemporary social aspects of the web. And at least the first start will be to have a YouTube connection within the archive where people can post their YouTube playlists and where we also engage a wider public in sifting material that would be useful for online essays or enlarging the material we have. So there's just a taste of ways in which we've tried to go beyond that parenthesis but at the same time I think with the realization that I don't know if we can say that we've now entered a freer world in every way. You know there's going to be more restrictions in more ways in which, what is it? One of the, I think the Folger Education Department's books is called Freeing Shakespeare's Words. And that's a title very much in consonance with Tom's. So I wanted to give an example of ways in which one could try to go beyond this. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you Pete. Excellent combination of presentations here because the one has the abstract theory and the other has the concrete examples and I think it's very exciting work. So what I'd like to do now is open a session to discussion, William. Actually we would like people to speak into the microphone so I could, okay, be excellent. So indeed, thank you both. Also for raising the methodological, fundamental methodological issue here of how high to fly. Take the 300 foot router, the 50,000 yields very different data. I mean, Pete, you did a great job of showing the incredible variability of a so-called stable era. And Tom, pattern recognition is a tricky thing and I think I want to address my question to you. The parenthesis, I can take a lot of the same symptoms you've offered and read them, I'm sure anyone can sort of come up with, but just to say, if we think about before the 15th century we could talk about an era of embodiment. Yeah, there's containment that is containment through the body. The body writes the word, the church, the body of the church is the storage facility for it. Cartography is very much about embodied sites. We could think about the period after the 15th century in terms of we could capture that in a word like the algorithmic, the ability to fix, to get precise mathematical meaning. Three point perspective is an invention of this as much as the book and you pointed to the frame. My difficulty with your analysis comes at the other side of the parenthesis where we are today because I would say, well, if we think about Google, Google's a great example, we might think about a shift from the algorithmic, the notion of a precise, calculable, fixable, stable mathematical order to something like the algorithmic, which is processual, which works in the world of the computer. It's an old term, Euclid uses it, but it never really gets deployed very effectively until the coming of the computer, the ability to process. The algorithmic is not about certainty or fixity, it's about a formula. It's about the process, the procedural in a certain way. And Google's a great example of that because they changed the algorithm, I don't know, twice a day or twice a week or something to keep everyone guessing about what's really gonna come up. You can't game it, you can't predict it. Photosynth would be a great counterpart to three point perspective. Photosynth with its melding and morphing of hundreds of photographs into one sort of seething space. There is no point of view. Hey, Heidegger's notion of the world picture is shattered, is destroyed there. There is no subject-object relationship that's discernible. That was the project of the 15th century onwards, but we don't have that anymore. And it's not in the same way that it was embodied before the 15th. We could talk about it with something like the project of the Encyclopedia, which works very well in the era of print. But Wikipedia is something where your contributions are there, but constantly being repositioned by an algorithm. So I would argue that by talking about a parenthesis, what's occluded there is the computational, the era that we're in that allows a very different order of, and in fact the algorithmic, which is something that starts to intervene between us, between the subject and the object. There's a principle, there's a process, there's a formula there that often we don't see, but that actually is doing the mediation between us and the phenomenon that we encounter at the end. Okay, well thanks very much. I'll take that on board. A lot of the terms you used seemed quite encouraging. Interactive, de-centric, processual, and things being mixed up together. I've used art a bit, thinking about art and pictures and so on. A point I've noticed is that there is a change in the way the body is represented in art, in connection with the opening of the parenthesis. For example, the body of Christ in the crucifixion. You were talking about embodiment in abstract terms, so I'm still thinking very much of it, the actual body in the picture, and which is where I feel more at home. The actual representation of bodies shifts in the late middle ages and going into the 16th century. For example, the body of Christ was originally very angular. The body was almost coordinate with the cross, with the limbs following exactly the shape of the cross, so that the body is articulate, the body is a conjunction of limbs and joints, and then as we move as well, there's a correspondence, as we move into the period where, as it happens, books are being printed and becoming more important, then the body of Christ takes on a more enveloping shape that we get a greater, the body sags away from the cross. A great emphasis on the rib cage as a hollowing out envelope, the belly sags, and there's a notion of the body being penetrable and of essences coming out of the body. There's a shift there. And that business of, those portraits of renaissance women with those distended bellies. There's kind of a fashion for presenting women with very sort of protuberant stomachs at this time, and it doesn't seem, it wasn't because they were pregnant, it wasn't because they were sort of standing in a particular way, I don't think, because that's just how the female body became to be seen for a while. I can respond to you in terms of actual bodies, rather than processes of embodiment, and I shall need to explore further the points that you were making about arithmetic and algorithms and the like, but thank you, thank you, I'll explore that. Hi, thanks very much for your talk, Ian Conjury in CMS. It's very interesting, I have to say that Gutenberg parenthesis is a concept that's been stuck with me for the last few weeks I've been thinking about it, and I like the idea that there's something about oral culture that can tell us something new about today. I mean, I was thinking, well, it's certainly true if we think about how gossip works, it doesn't that seem similar to some of the things that happen online, the kind of communication and the way that it's sort of information plus a social relationship, right? You choose to join this or that stream of things coming through. But, you know, there's also sort of an ephemerality, I think, to oral culture that we're sort of returning to with digital culture as we lose all of our photos all of a sudden, and a reminder of the way storage is tricky. But one of the things that I guess my question, though, is it's related to Williams in the sense that, you know, how do we see what comes after the parenthesis? Right? And that if orality, if the medieval present is an image beforehand and then print and then the internet is the process we're trying to talk about, it seems to me that with the medieval present, the peasant trying to say something, right? He's sort of limited to who can hear from the soapbox, right? In the middle of the town square. And that one of the things print enabled was getting that opinion, that voice across a much greater distance, right? There's a different kind of permanence and a different kind of mobility that comes with print. And it seems to me that one way to read then this next step is a quantum leap in exactly that same print kind of thing. That there's even greater mobility. And instead of being constrained by the package, it's easy to copy and multiply. So sort of mobility and multiplicity is sort of what comes with the internet. And so in that sense, it seems to me, I'm not sure, right? Or if it's a print, maybe it's in more open parentheses or a bracket at the other end, I'm not sure that the previous then goes with the forward. And so I guess my question is, you know, in what sense, if you could give us more of a sense of how this understanding of orality and the medieval peasant can give us a greater sense of what's happening in media today. Maybe there's some other examples. I mean, categories and boundaries going down, but where can we see that, I guess, what I'd like to hear? That's right. There's a phrase I should have introduced into my presentation, perhaps it wasn't there. The post-parenthetical period is a reversion to the pre-parenthetical at a higher level of technology. So we've got to take that into account. There are going to be aspects of this, which are print, which will take print to a higher level. They'll be taking some of the advantages of print to a higher level, but in so doing, they will undermine other aspects of print, like the permanence of print, like the stability of the message, which will take us back to the pre-print period. It isn't just a question of, as I said before, of a pre-print orality coming back in the form of a post-print orality. It is in the form of text, but texts are changing. Texts are getting out of control. Tech texts are becoming free. They are escaping from the confines of the book. It may well be that there will be more texts. Any one text will be multiplied more. Any one, and I mean text rather than speech, any one text will be multiplied as a text and be more mobile as a text than texts were previously, but in becoming mobile and in being multiplied, it will become less stable. It will be free for any, the person who mediates it can change it, add to it, subtract from it, make it their own. Texts are becoming mobile. Texts are becoming fluid as a part of that process. The other part of it, well, thinking of the medieval peasant, the medieval peasant was also mobile, of course. He could go from one village to another, the performer, the spreader of a rumor. Let's not say a peasant and let's say a carter could take his rumor from one village to another and spread it on to another group of people. It was mobile in that sense and the rumor probably changed each time he told it, just as things will change every time they get repeated on the internet from one site to another. I'm grateful for the reference to categories though because I've been thinking about the implications of all this for, well, for the spread of news and the spread of rumor and so on. And I think that is one way. The medieval peasant probably had different sources of information, different kinds of version, different rumors came to him in different ways, but I'm not certain he had a hierarchy of trust in those different sources. In the meantime, we have had a hierarchy. We've had a period, well, I don't know, I think where we've said, well, it must be true. I read it in a newspaper that print has conferred authority on certain kinds of news. But now we're going back to the medieval situation where we can't really tell. The newspapers are becoming more like rumor in the sense that they are being made available in the same kind of sources, the same kind of media as rumors. It is harder, I mean, it is now harder for us to tell what we read in a newspaper. Is it a rumor, and when we hear a rumor, is it with the same authority as newspapers? There's the category of unofficial medium, of informal medium, and the category of official medium is breaking down. And we are losing that hierarchy. Our categories of news are breaking down. And I see that as a very much a reversion to, we can't sort them out. We're going through a confusing period. Can I assume talk about Shakespeare? All right, okay, sorry. Hi, I'm Nick Siever. I'm a grad student in comparative media studies. And I have a question about, well, about one of the images that you showed actually, which was the enraged musician. Because I think it has interesting ramifications. Yeah, it'd be great. It's on the handout. Can we go back to my pictures? Is it on the handout? It is on the handout. Oh, sorry, no, forget it, okay. Well, so the question is sort of about history and about period making. Because so there's a lot of things that start happening at roughly the same time, as you mentioned. And of course, what's implied in here is that these things also happen in particular places and not in other places. The parenthesis is around the musician inside, not around the people outside. And so in a certain sense, I think it was implicit in some of what you said, that the future comes at different times to different people. And I have a question about how useful it is, maybe to think about this period of containment in such a contained way as if everyone at one time is doing the same thing. There's a sense of which, I know we're talking William brought up this big picture, little picture question, this is certainly related, but it seems like bracketing off this historical period does blurs over some other kinds of bracketing that might happen, for example, in this image of class, but of race and gender and all of these other sort of containment that we might do. I was just curious about your response. I'm very, thank you very much for asking that question and for drawing our attention to this picture because I went very lightly and very confusedly over it in my strangely wired condition. And there's more to be said about this and this also helps me to emphasize, you've reminded me to emphasize a point which could have been, again, could have been made more clearly, is the question of the incidence of the timing. Different cultures enter the parenthesis at different times and will exit presumably at different times within any one culture, different subcultures will enter the parenthesis at different times. So at any one moment, there'll be people inside and people outside. And Hogarth's enraged musician, I've always found that a very good way of thinking, making me think about what's going on because this is, I mean, it's a Hogarth's way of saying that some forms of art are becoming parenthetical. The musician in the window is the Italian leader of the Covent Garden Orchestra. And the point Hogarth, not in my terms, of course, but the point Hogarth is making is that there is a growing wall between the fine arts and the street. And this isn't healthy. And I see that as one of the, those parallel developments to the opening of the parenthesis. So that is quite great. That musician is well in the parenthesis. Could I just make the point in case you check? I've reversed the picture. Because Hogarth didn't realize that there was a parenthesis, so he put the, he put the street on the right. I had to turn, it took me hours. I had to turn it around to get it the right way. The point, but you see the point is that it's about music and words. So within the parenthesis, we have the opera musician who you can just see is playing his music from a printed score and who will be producing, performing in opera in a confined opera house to which only the elite have access and only the people who have the right taste and the right money have access. And even the blind ballad singer in the street outside, she is singing songs, but she's also selling songs which are printed. She's selling them as commodities. These are broadside ballads. So we have, if you like, we have an elite culture and a form of commercial popular culture. I do wish Hogarth had put the blind ballad singer sort of a bit to the left. So which is not quite as far into the parenthesis as the singer. But this is precisely the point. While some parts of culture are getting themselves confined and cut off and becoming culture with a capital C and becoming physically confined into dedicated venues like opera houses, between them there is a fence and a wall. Between them and the world of what Hogarth is saying, natural music, real music, folk music, the music with energy, the music of the street and he's saying that that will be to the detriment that we will get a refined sort of a too refined, too refined artistic music which is losing contact with its roots in the street. So in one and the same period in London there are parenthetical people and there are pre-parenthetical people and there's only the window between them. They are losing touch with each other. Marty. This is Marty Marks from the music section. Thank you both very much, all of you. I mean, I think this is really brilliant, this discussion. But I have to ask why parenthesis? Why not dashes or ellipses? And the reason I'm saying that is because at certain points every time you spoke about another, you went in another direction, I kept thinking how fertile that was. For example, the fragment versus the closed work. And as I've always thought about the history of European intellectuals and so forth, I've always thought that romanticism was already the rebellion against confinement that was ultimately defined by the enlightenment that in a sense the culmination of your move, your representation of confinement is the enlightenment encyclopedia as the sum of the collection of knowledge. But, and the romantics revel in fragments. The romantics in music, in poetry. I mean, my area is music, but I know that in other areas too. Look at the great Wojcich by Buchner, for example, of 1820s, which is nothing but fragments. And how that was in a sense part of the revolution against rationality. So the only reason I bring that up is I'm hoping Pete could talk, and then you just mentioned the broadside ballot, and I was thinking, well, why doesn't Pete talk about newspapers and ballot and broadsides because they were just as much a part of the culture of print in the Shakespeare's Day as were books or quartos, if not more. And then, of course, I'm thinking about Aristotle, who's the beginning, and isn't the Renaissance's impetus towards confinement and categorization based on their rediscovery of Aristotelian texts. But when we look at it that way, when we look at it in terms of the infinite malleability of the human intellect to go in different directions at the same time, towards confinement and escape, towards the divine and the real, the concrete, towards the natural and the supernatural, when we look at it that way, what does it really have to do with media, except perhaps on the grandest scale of Hong's idea of orality and print or orality and written culture? He doesn't really talk about print culture, he talks about orality and written culture, which is not quite the same thing. So if we, but if we extended in one direction towards Aristotle, this debate, this opening up of the parenthesis, and we extended in another direction by breaking down the parenthesis in the 19th century rather than the 20th, how do we relate that to the media scheme that we're talking about, new media, old media, pre-old media, old, old, old media and so forth? I don't see how it all fits together and I think the word parenthesis is itself such a confining concept that you are in fact recapitulating the argument that you're trying to undermine or something, this is all my thoughts at this point. I don't know how you're gonna deal with that as a question. He asked you to say something first. Oh, okay, I would say something. I don't know much about Valid's and Broadside's, but I can refer people with complete confidence to the work of Tiffany Stern at Oxford on ephemeral paper in Shakespeare's time and it's astounding. I mean, so the world of London that she describes is one in which every conceivable surface is, it has a bill, what do they say, post no bills. They posted bills, every place and these could be bills for advertising a performance of a play. They could be just dozens of things, advertisements, but they were everywhere and she's documented this. So we have, and as I contrasted in my mind, the wonderful Olivier film of Henry V, there's a single playbill that falls from the sky and then becomes the screen in the credits, opening credits, but it's notable that's just a single one and the picture that she's describing is that a kind of free paper, unbound paper, unlicensed paper, unregulated paper, fraudulent paper, paper that contained rumors was everywhere in London in 1600. That's one little data micro point, another would be a little bit later, they are, we were talking about rumor. The Gabriel Noday's book on the discovery of the egregious imposters of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood in 1625, even Noday was the librarian of Richelot an important figure in that history and one of the chapters of the book on the Rosicrucians is about how rumors, he said there were three dangerous, common trope, there were three dangerous inventions in our time by which he means back to 1450 or so, gunpowder and the printing press and I forgot the other one, but it must have been pretty dangerous, but something obvious, but anyway, by the printing press and the printing press because any crazy person with an idea about overthrowing the state could get a bunch of leaflets printed, rumors about miraculous events could thrive in a way that go beyond carting them individually from one place to another. So this sort of idea that the printing press unlicensed, irrational, illicit paper is a part of the Shakespearean picture. I mean, they're just amazing scenarios that she has of descriptions of the lady of a house that was rich enough to have servants would send out a servant in the morning to rip all the paper off that she might be interested in off of the walls and off of the posts and bring it home in a pile and the lady of the house would then peruse it. That was the newspaper, right? And of course then it had to be pasted back up by somebody else so they had to keep doing the rounds to keep the city properly pasted over. But we don't have that idea of London when we go or when we go to a tourist village like Stratford or Oxford or Cambridge, you know, when we have old buildings, we think of them as unencumbered and unbygryphety or by pasted up paper, but they were. So there's just a couple of things but broadsides would be a very important part of this. Just make one observation here. The idea of a parenthesis is very provocative, I find. Interesting for making us think before and after. But the idea that we are moving to a post-literate society is very hard for me to understand because the entire technological framework that makes this media, this immersion media culture possible is super literate. It depends on vast amounts of commentary, more publications than we in the humanities can even imagine. These regimes are used constantly and I would also note that the people who inhabit the realms of social media and all the different areas of popular culture are themselves super literate. They are constantly writing, they are constantly communicating with each other through texts. The level of understanding of the word is probably beyond anything it's ever been. The notion of the parenthesis that we are actually returning to a pre-literate society I think needs to be modified somewhat by saying, well, it's not either or, it's both and. What we are actually merging into is something that is both a new secondary orality that is massively supported by a super literacy. And so we have to deal with that because that's not easy to deal with because, but I think this idea of parenthesis may be giving us the wrong kind of emphasis that we're returning to something that was before. I don't think that past is ever going to be recovered but elements of it and experiences of it of course can but supported by something that is fundamentally, it's a little like sometimes I think of Wells and the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Morlocks are down there grinding out and creating this possible culture than the Eloi and the top. But that's not really what's happening. It's something that's more complicated. So I don't know if you want to comment on that. I'll just take a response to that and perhaps say a word or two in defense of the parenthesis as an image. But the answer was in what you said in the sense that the users of the new media are super literate and they are all writing. That's the difference. In the parenthesis there are writers and readers. There are a few writers and many readers. And the New Age is one in which you can't really tell the difference between a reader and a writer because they're all writing. They're all writing and communicating with the same freedom that before the parenthesis they were all speaking. We are reproducing with texts the kind of fluidity, the interaction, and the declining categories, the breakdowning categories between the creator and the receiver and the consumer that was there with speech. Ong was getting close to it. I think Ong in his notes for a new edition of his work that never came out was starting to think about a secondary literacy. A new kind of literacy which was so widespread and so easily acceptable that people were writing to each other with the same freedom and the same ease and in the same syntax as they spoke to each other previously before the parenthesis. And with regard to the parenthesis itself, it's certainly, I mean, it's provocative, it's good it's provocative, if that's one of its good points because it's better than dashes or series of dots because it insists on a return. Dashes, there can be several sort of dashes in a sequence. The parenthesis is such a provocative way of saying there was this pause. One idea was going forward. We stopped, we left that for a moment, went into another idea, and then we came back to the first idea. It's not going backwards, perhaps I'm wrong to say, we're gonna be like medieval peasants, but we are resuming where we left off. We were moving forward at a certain point, then we stopped and did something else and now we're reverting to where we were and moving on beyond that. And it's appropriate, as I just managed to say, I think in that the parenthesis itself is a renaissance invention, an invention within the world of print. And with regard to Aristotle and the rediscovery of classical notions, I made this point when I was here the first time talking about this and I still think it's right, although it gets rid of Gutenberg, cultures can move in and out of this kind of parenthesis through the years. A given culture can start to drift in towards the parenthesis, which I think is what happened in the classical period. In the Greco-Roman classical period, there was a kind of a, it was like ice ages. There was a mini-ice age, a mini-textual age in the classical period where writing was becoming more dominant but without the advantage of print and then we moved out of it again in the middle ages and the renaissance rediscovered it. Can I make one last point about fragments? Romance fragments, it is quite right that romance writing was a kind of bid for freedom in writing fragments and not being confined by the rules and by the conventions, but I bet they did it on purpose. I bet it was self-conscious. It wasn't their default mode. Fragments and incompleteness are the default mode before the parenthesis and maybe it again after the parenthesis. A deliberate revolt against convention and confinement in itself is an act, it's rather like the Bactinian uncontained body. You can't have your Bactinian carnivalesque rebellion against the contained body unless you're the norm is the contained body. So I would have thought the romantic fragments, romantic fragmentation is self-conscious fragmentation which in a way acknowledges that the norm is containment, is completeness, is closure. Oh, Pete, you have an analogy. Sorry, I think we should. Go ahead, nice. My name is Les Pearlman. I'm in writing and humanistic studies and several lifetimes ago I was a medievalist. And I just actually wanted, as I was standing up here, I was actually going to make the same kind of point that Jim made. And I'd like to sort of give some concrete examples that parenthesis doesn't seem to be the right thing because it seems to be same but different in very, very different ways. For example, hierarchy. The Middle Ages was very big on hierarchy. The internet, if anything, is very flat. I think the difference between production and consumption, that oral tradition, you needed to have production everywhere or else you would not have, if you wanted to play in your town, if you wanted to have a mystery play, you put it on. You know, the various guilds put it on. If I wanna see something now, I can just go to YouTube. The fact is that many more people can produce but you don't necessarily have to produce. You can just consume much more than you could always consume before with many more choices. And another, one last point I'd like to make is with the whole idea of containment and hypertext. In the Middle Ages, not so much in the oral tradition but in the book tradition was the whole idea of the hypertext, the incipient notion of the hypertext in the avid moralize and in the Talmud. And those things only become really viable now in the digital age. Yes, yes. I would see that as compatible with the parenthesis. If we acknowledge that the parenthesis is multiple comprising several sort of calibrated or a broad fuzzy parenthesis and that some forms of textual communication. I like the notion of the text which is commented, the text which carries its own comments. And that we are, I'm happy about that in the sense that the way in modern times we can freely comment on and adjust a text is taking us back not merely to the era of speech but to a manuscript era in the sense that with a manuscript it's, oh, when you're speaking it's hard to distinguish between the authoritative voice and the voice that interrupts. And with writing, as with sort of authoritative manuscripts you can have the scribal text and then you can have the annotations and the marginal comments and they can look as author, especially when the manuscript's copied, they can look as authoritative. They differ in degree rather than in kind from the main text. And then with the printed book you can jolly well see that you distinguish between the text itself which is printed and then the annotations are clearly in hand and they belong to a different category of communication. So it's certainly that part I think I can, I'm comfortable with, thanks very much. Mary Fuller from the literature section. So one of the things that I kept thinking really if almost from the beginning of your talk was that I didn't recognize in early modern books the kind of book that you're talking about, the sort of the autonomous, the enclosed, the bordered and so on and so forth. What I did recognize was an idea of the book that as Pete was saying dates back was certainly one finds it in the 80s and earlier decades but it strikes me that in some sense it's a very modern idea of the book and a very modern practice of the book and practice of reading the book. I don't recognize it in the early modern texts that I work with which are compilations of put together by the editor sort of effectively hyperlinked to all kinds of contexts outside the book including by the editor. Compilations made by the editor very popular kind of book annotated by the editor annotated by readers used in practice et cetera et cetera et cetera sort of agglomerations of things that only don't look like networks if we don't understand the kind of books they are but that's an effect of our readership of them of our loss of the local context. And then as I was sitting, I had a lot of time to think about this as I was sitting on the steps. This is making me really sort of distrust the larger narrative of the parenthesis as an interruption which at the same time you have moved away from sort of repeatedly and said well actually it's much more mobile and local and people come in and out of it and so on and so forth. It strikes me that my ability to work with these early modern books in the way that I have the last few years is effectively being networks sort of full of hyperlinks and so on and so forth is very much a function of the historical moment at which I'm doing that work because I think that perspective wouldn't have been available 30 years ago. And so it seems to me that the digital era has reactivated certain kinds of loss potential in the Gutenberg age that we're never not there but we're not seen by us for a period just as it seems to be reactivating certain kinds of loss potential in the manuscript and oral age. So I can't make that into a question but I'll just leave it to you to respond as you wish. You say early modern books, is it a transitional phenomenon or does it carry on into the 18th, 19th centuries? You were saying it's more, I think that's fair enough that the Gutenberg parenthesis is cumulative and sort of increases in depth or increases in intensity as time goes by so that it'll take some time to get to the time of the kind of book I'm imagining. And I like that it's rather corresponded rather to what Peter was saying that the digital age is helping us to find things that were there that we couldn't really see before or handle before in earlier periods. But is it, do you get these compilations in the 19th century that they just carry on? I don't work in the 19th century so I couldn't really say. I wouldn't want to say that they don't occur then. All right. But there's, I mean, it's going to be varied, it's going to be muddled, it's going to be transitional. But I mean that, well, thank you for, I've been waiting to thump this book into the table for quite some time now. What I mean by that, the kind of contained book, is this one. This is, it's a facsimile. This is what they did to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays which were designed for performance and Shakespeare's plays which weren't terribly original all the time, Shakespeare's plays which were, in some cases, rewrites of existing plays and which deployed traditional materials in traditional ways and Shakespeare's plays which were themselves subjected to enormous intervention by the actors and which were taken around from place to place and performed by the actors, not always very accurately. Those living plays, that living pre-parenthetical, uncontained culture of highways and junctions, textual highways and junctions and real highways and junctions, it was imprisoned. Well, thank heavens because otherwise we wouldn't have the plays. But we can just say thank you, thank you, goodbye to the printers. This is, I mean, say this is a facsimile but this will be something like it. All of, it's a book, it's considered to be the complete works, complete plays, of an author and all the plays are complete. All the plays are claimed to be in better, more authentic versions than had been available individually previously. And here it is, all these, the text, the text is within its margins with a very careful line around the text to make sure the words don't start sort of crawling out of the page. And then, say, print it in that press, the pages are folded into gatherings and stitched, the gatherings are stitched together and the volume is then glued and given covers and the covers are stitched together or glued together and the book is put into its case and Shakespeare and his living world is carefully encapsulated and then what do you get? Then thank you for this chance of fetishization. The fetishistic approach, once you've turned Shakespeare into a thing, you can start to relate to it in an other than textual manner and I've had great pleasure over the years and I've brought you a small sample from my collection of slightly unhealthy advertisements for Shakespeare's plays. If you go, the Oxford Complete Works, I have an advertisement for the leather-bound edition of the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works and exquisite edition, bound in dark green leather with gilt-edged pages and with a sort of a special Shakespeare stamp. I have another version of the Oxford Shakespeare with the Complete Works. Shakespeare's Complete Works in exquisite blue carf skin and then this is the Arden. The Arden Complete Works bound in genuine maroon leather with gold embossed title lettering marbled endpapers and a ribbon marker exquisitely presented volume that will appeal to book collectors and Shakespeare lovers throughout the world. They're not supposed to read it, they're just supposed to look at it, stroke it. Mary Hopper, years ago, been around CMS and whatnot. First I'll say I'm a little biased. I tend to be dubious about the use of the parentheses. It's been artificial since, I think there's more continuity in the forces that came before and during our continuous and always there and in parallel all the time in different percentages and proportions but they're continuous now and past and it will be in the future. Also I think media history tends to be that one form of media doesn't replace another as much as it tends to be continuous and additive so the books will continue in the forces of the books. People will make their e-book readers hold just a single book and contain it very carefully and storage will continue to improve to the point where it will be long-term and permanent so it's not that it's just gonna go away but you did mention that if you do use the parentheses and you get to the point where you say okay well what comes after is different. You have said you do know that what comes after will be forever impacted by what is inside the parentheses. So even if you use it I'm just curious how would you represent what comes after as being impacted by what came within? Have you thought about what you would do to make it quite clear that what is after has been forever changed by what is inside the parentheses? Do you mean what I say or in the imagery that I use? I'm a visual person so probably in the imagery but even if it's just the language, yes. But I think say the parentheses in itself suggests that in that it invites a syntactical analogy in that the sentences are changed. But simply in terms of words as I've said previously that it's a reversion to where we were or a carrying on from where we left off but at a higher level of technology. And I'm trying to, I haven't succeeded yet in perhaps I need a three dimensional diagram to try and indicate that the matter of time because it does, just having the one parenthesis on the page looks like we all do it at the same time and it's complete and total. That's the worst thing about the parentheses. One of my diagrams had two I noticed just as a symbolic indication that there are multiple parentheses so. See on one side and a colon on the other or something like that. One can get out, stuff can get out one side. I've been using three kinds of brackets since some of my material that I've used a round bracket and a square bracket and one of those squiggly ones. It needs, if you're visual, I need some way to multiply the lines, to multiply the lines representing change and I also need some means to indicate the time factor that not all things happen at the same time. With regard to the continuity, so I've been thinking about continuity. You're quite right. And I'm very much aware of that that every time something new is introduced, what's there, most of it carries on. Been thinking a lot about that. And well, for example, print itself comes on top of in addition to the written book and in many ways the printed book doesn't qualitatively, doesn't do a lot more. There's not much difference between a printed book and a written one, in that sense, in the quite sense. But it struck me that surely it is must be relevant that there are just so many more of them. So whatever it is a book does, print multiplies quantitatively so it'll have a greater impact. It was something that was there already. It becomes endemic, it becomes much bigger so it can contribute in that way. I think we are running short. I'm gonna leave the last comment to Pete and thank you all for a very stimulating conversation. You have to little to the idea that Shakespeare would have shared the devaluation of the book because the evidence is, the contrary, as wonderful a dramatist as Shakespeare was, there's a strong anti-theatrical element to his art and the stage doesn't always, isn't always portrayed as a place of truth and it's often portrayed negatively. And for instance, in a sonnet where he speaks of, my nature is subdued almost to what it works in, like the dyer's hand. So the profession of being a playwright is subduing his nature and then he goes on to say, public manners, public sins, beget or something like that, I forget exactly what it is. But the idea is that his profession of writing for the public stage is degrading. And so this is part of the portrait of Shakespeare. Not that it was all that he thought, obviously not. It's not to say that's the whole story but it's part of the story. And another is that there's a lot of evidence that Shakespeare was confined by the stage rather than by the book. And some of this is in Lucas Ehren's arguments in Shakespeare, the dramatic artist, dramatic literary artist, I forget the exact title, Lucas Ehren and Geneva. And this is just one example of it but I think a very telling one. So a play like Henry V, which has been read as a pacifist play, as a radical play, as a radical reproach to authority, to war, to the state and so on in the 20th century. And as often as an authoritarian play and a hero play. But the grounding of the reading of Henry V as radical in some measure comes entirely from almost entirely from parts of the play that are in the folio and not in the cordial because the public stage was more assiduously censored. So for example, I mean I think of one example but it's many ways in which the war against France is relativized and called into question is done by the work of the chorus who pops up between each act and who is entirely absent in the cordial that was published during Shakespeare's life and who is likely to be closer to performance than the folio version. Or the passage in the fourth chorus where he's comparing King Henry returning in triumph to London and to the arrival of the noble general Essex from Ireland bringing rebellion broach it on his sword, a line that hovers between having defeated or maybe he'll defeat the Irish rebels but also maybe as actually happened in real life and for which he was executed he brought rebellion home to London and challenged the Queen in an unsuccessful revolt against the state. So and that's the only topical reference to current events that's undoubted in the Shakespeare canon. All of that's in the folio, none of it is in the cordial. You do have some freedoms in print that are striking sometimes relative to being hauled in for what might be performed on the public stage. So it can really work both ways. Also performance can be confining. The way actors did their parts in Shakespeare's time could be very confining because they didn't have the full play, they didn't do a read-through, they didn't read the book. They had cues, their parts and the cue and part and cue and part. So the freedom of the performer was we would have thought severely limited and texturally directed. It wasn't free. And as Tom of course knows, there was criticism in Shakespeare's plays of the freedom of the stage of the clown saying more in Hamlet and so on of that period outside the parenthesis. Or later you'll get the notion that after the restoration that there's an authority in performance just as there's a confining authority in print. The confining authority in print comes from what's on the page. The confining authority from performance consists in the need to establish that a Bederton for example, the leading actor of the time had learned his part in Hamlet from so and so who'd learned it from Francis Taylor who'd learned it from the author. And there's a great deal of attention to creating these genealogies of performance authority that go back just as the fetishized book does to the notion of the controlling author. So I don't think there's a panacea in performance or you know that one of these forms is necessarily only confining in another liberating it's a complicated story in the Shakespeare's case. I think that the case is pretty good that he was both a literary artist as well as a theatrical professional. And unless we forget, every age invents its own forms of confinement. We now have copyright and the internet is a perfect realm for it. So we still work with these things but thank you very much for a very stimulating conversation.