Prof. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University (PSU), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama, the history of the book, and theater history. She previously taught at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
Her first monograph, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020, and is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)—intelligible on the page.
Prof. Bourne writes, “My next book project, tentatively entitled Accidental Shakespeare, approaches the fact and concept of textual “accident” in a variety of pre-modern and modern contexts to show that the Shakespearean text has always been contingent on “accidents” in the printing process. The book investigates how the New Bibliographic orthodoxy of distinguishing “substantive” features of early printed plays (words) from “accidental” features (punctuation, spelling, and anything else affecting the “formal presentation” of the text) has obscured stories about failed editorial audacity (including the Pavier/Jaggard Quartos of 1619; Edward Capell’s eighteenth-century editorial experiments; A.H. Bullen’s vision for the Shakespeare Head Press at the turn of the twentieth century; and Alice Walker’s inheritance of the old-spelling Oxford Shakespeare that never materialized) that shaped “Shakespeare” in as-yet unacknowledged ways.”
PAPER: “‘as small a compass as possible’: Theatricality, Textual History, and Edward Capell’s Editorial Aesthetic” [This paper has been separated into two parts, due to file size]
OBJECT: Edward Capell, Prolusions, Or Select Pieces of Antient Poetry (1760). [From the John Hay Library’s Starred Books Collection, Call No. PR1204 .C3 1760]