Joanna Baillie's Witchcraft : from Hypermedia Edition to Resonant Responses

This paper will report on the first year of a
3-year grant funded by the
Fonds québecois
de la recherche sur la société et la culture
led by playwright Patrick Leroux (overseeing
the creative component) and Michael Eberle-
Sinatra (overseeing the academic component).
The specific nature of this group project
is nestled in the promising dialogue to
be established between Romantic literature
scholars, a theatre practitioner, and a scholar
preoccupied with the pedagogy of Romantic
drama using hypermedia as a template and an
engaging interface.
When artists teach, they never quite relinquish
their initial creative impulse. Historical works,
while being taught for their intrinsic value
and larger pertinence within a literary context,
nevertheless solicit a resonant response.
Classroom exercises in both academic and
creative courses suggest that many students
engage in a similar empathic manner when
allowed to prod, question, and interact actively
with a studied text.
The “creative” component of this research-
creation project with strong pedagogical intent
is precisely linked to an artistic response to
the source text, Joanna Baillie’s
Witchcraft
.
In addition to the edited text, its scholarly
annotations and commentary, and the filmed
Finborough production of the play, we will
create workshop situations with actors and
students in which the play will be explored
in rehearsal prompting us to investigate other
manners of staging the work and illustrating,
through filmed documentation, the
process of
reading a text for performance
. Short video
presentations of key creative and interpretive
issues will be edited for inclusion in the
hypermedia presentation. The actual process,
whether filmed or not, will allow the actors and
creative faculty to fully immerse themselves in
Baillie’s world and work in order to fuel their
resonant responses to them.
This second creative component, the
resonant
response
, will take the form of short theatrical
pieces conceived for film. The nuance is essential
as the pieces will not be short cinematic
films but rather short-filmed theatrical pieces.
The emphasis on speech, dramatic action, and
relationship to a defined theatrical space will
differentiate these pieces from more intimate,
image-based cinematic pieces. The resonant
responses could be as short as two minutes
or as long as ten minutes, in order to fully
explore very precise formal issues (a character’s
speech, the subtext in a given dialogue, what
we couldn’t stage during the 19
th
Century but
feel we could now). These creative pieces will be
developed with Theatre, Creative Writing, and
English literature students and faculty.
Existing TEI guidelines for scholarly encoding
do not account for the unique relationship
between a play script and performance practice
and history. Scholarly encoding typically views
the structures of texts in relation to the protocols
that guide how readers interpret documents.
But dramatic scripts require different kinds of
reading and, thus, different kinds of encoding.
Performance-informed inquiry into play texts
depends on a reader’s ability to think about the
range of possibilities—both historically distant
and contemporary—for theatricalization of a
line of dialogue, a bit of physical action, or a
visual space.
Additional historical materials on the theatre
and culture of Baillie’s era will be provided by
team members. For our hypermedia resource
to organize multi-media materials in ways that
will help students in literature classes to use
the hypermedia edition of the play, we will
need to develop innovative customizations of
TEI encoding guidelines. Discovering how best
to support a student reader’s work with a
historically unfamiliar dramatic work provides
an important test case for existing guidelines for
XML encoding of drama.

2
This project will take an innovative approach
in several senses. It will use hypermedia to try
to solve a classroom problem created by plays
with little performance history or connection
to familiar theatrical styles. It will also test
the limitations of the TEI scholarly encoding
guidelines by exploring how, in the case of
play scripts, building hypermedia resources
requires creative, user-oriented strategies of
encoding. The research-creation program will
illustrate how contemporary artists can engage
with historical works, while shedding light onto
the theatrical creative process. Finally, our
Resonant Response to Joanna Baillie’s Drama
will combine scholarly research on Romantic
drama, practice-driven analysis, the creation of
new work, and hypermedia expertise.
This particular research-creation program is
singular and innovative in its combination of
academic close reading, dramaturgical analysis,
dramatic writing and theatrical performance,
filmed theatre, and a resolutely pedagogical
preoccupation with a full and thorough
exploration of the possibilities of hypermedia
edition.
In addition to creating a prototype hypermedia
edition, the project seeks to find out:
-
what value performance annotations can add
to a teacher’s work with students on a seldom-
performed play;
-
how the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI)
scholarly encoding guidelines can best be
customized to design hypermedia play
editions;
-
how the process of collaboration among
faculty and students in humanities and
communications disciplines can enrich
understanding of technology’s interaction
with interpretation.