| A Larum for London is a play of anonymous authorship printed in 1602 and first performed in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the first season of the Globe Theatre. There are five known copies of the quarto, and editions were published in 1872 by Richard Simpson as part of his School of Shakespeare series and in 1913 by W. W. Greg as part of the Malone Society series. A facsimile edition was published in 1912 by John S. Farmer with the Tudor Facsimile series. The play dramatizes the 1576 "Spanish Fury," in which unpaid Spanish soldiers stationed in the Netherlands looted the city of Antwerp during a three-day rampage in which thousands of citizens were killed.;In contrast to the critical edition of early modem dramatic works that focuses on the earliest printed editions as representative of the intended work. It draws on recent views in performance studies that such texts are in fact first published to a theatre audience rather than to a reader, this critical edition will aim toward textualizing the initial Globe production. The general approach is an attempt to join the praxis of traditional bibliography with the later critique that considers the text as social document, and the dramatic text as product of the cybernetic relationship between writing and performance. In using a constructionist format that instantiates a participatory reading, this critical edition seeks to pull the surviving text out of the static archive and place it back into the dynamic repertoire for which it was created.;This critical edition consists of twelve chapters and ten appendices. A preface gives a general background on critical editions. The introduction includes discussion of description, date, authorship, source, performance, publication, editions, and criticisms. The third chapter explains the editorial methodology. The fourth chapter contains an old- spelling, old-punctuation documentary version of the text. The fifth chapter gives the approach for modernization. The sixth chapter contains a modem spelling edition. The seventh chapter contains a guide to the apparatus. 'Hie remaining chapter contain notes in five sections: explanatory notes (definitions), exploratory notes (social and cultural references), performatory notes (theatricality, spectacle, elocution, and performance), and literatory notes (quotes from related texts), and emendatory (corrections of textual errors). The appendices include source information and tables. |
