"She can take a hint!" cried the little man, with a hearty smack of his hand on the
prompt-book. "She's a born actress, if ever there was one yet!"
'Oh DON'T!' Miss Podsnap faintly ejaculated: when Mrs Lammle took the
prompt-book.
As he demonstrates repeatedly and compellingly, so many of our go-to critical and editorial terms--play-book,
prompt-book, foul papers, fair copy, author, reviser, censor, collaboration--invoke these manuscripts or, more often, a non-extant, "imagined or inferred" version of them that critics have set up as a working model.
Shakespeare versus Multiple Authorship:
Prompt-book and Performance
She distinguishes correctly between marks of "composition;' and subsequent progress of the hypothetical copy-text to "prompt-copy." She debates this issue in her Introduction (129ff.) where she rejects the "
prompt-book" solution, and follows F.
Even the manuscript, which may have been copied from the
prompt-book before Herbert's intervention, seems to have been purged somewhat: 'Heaven', for example, regularly replaces 'God', which in some cases appears in the later printed text.
Depending on the proximity of the
prompt-book that contains the play-text to the time of the premiere, a play-text can reflect the final version of a production to a lesser or greater extent.
Embedded in the back cover are two delightful lagniappes: a Billy Wilder cartoon bookmark and a perfect facsimile of Marilyn Monroe's
prompt-book complete with the diva's handwritten notes.
'
prompt-book' seem as likely as any other of the most common
This means that the text is thoroughly modernized and theatrical versions are preferred over authorial ones: "the Oxford editors prefer, when there is a choice, copy based on the
prompt-book to copy based on the author's own draft" (72) .