| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,600,000)
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| Research Abstract |
About 100 plays were examined in the chronological order based on Afred Harbage, Annals of English Drama. Helped by the search function of the digital texts of "Literature Onine", I carefully searched the stage directions referring to the upper stage in old quartos and modern editions in British Library in London; and also examined over 30 plays in the digital facsimile form of Early English Books Online in National Diet Library, Kansai, Japan.
(1) The present research chiefly focuses on the problems of time actors are allowed to take to move from the main stage to the upper stage, or from the upper to the main stage. The time can be measured with the number of lines spoken during the movement. I thoroughly checked out all the extant English plays up to 1610, and found more than 100 new stage directions instructing ascent to / descent from the upper stage; I rechecked the stage directions I picked out last year and amended some errors, too. Usually ascent takes the time for 10-25 lines, and descent 5-10 lines.
(2) As Mariko Ichikawa of Tohoku University earlier observed, many cases in Shakespeare's corpus require such short time that actors couldn't possibly move from one stage to the other. However, most of the problems seem to be resolved if we don't consider the positions of stage directions too strictly. In Pindarus's cases in JC 5.3, we may assume that he stands not on the upper stage, but upstage. The crux of ROM 3.5 could be also solved, if we make the best use of Q1 text.
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