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![]() ![]() ![]() The Disappearing ActĪnalyzing a play is not like analyzing a poem. ![]() Plays are also peculiar in that their contextual differences also include live performances, providing us with not just bibliographic codes, but performance codes as well. The method of analyzing the bibliographic codes - what changes about the text and its context from publication to publication - shows us that it is important to read different versions of a supposedly single text in order to learn new things about the author and the context she was writing in. ![]() But in considering King Lear (or Johnson’s Plumes, in this study), there is no way to acknowledge any one publication as more important than the other. People universally acknowledge that Leonardo’s smirking lady resides in the Louvre, although we can access a picture or a copy online with the click of a button. He opens his discussion of bibliographic codes by posing a question about a play: “If the ‘Mona Lisa’ is in Paris at the Louvre, where is King Lear ? This question opens important issues of what constitutes the (or is it a?) text” (Bornstein 5). George Bornstein, the scholar whose method of bibliographic analysis is the basis of our project, focuses primarily on the changes a poem experiences in different contexts of publication (e.g. ![]()
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