Funding Entity: Foundation for Science and Technology (POCTI/ELT/33464/2000)
Principal Researcher: José Camões
Research Unit: CET – Centro de Estudos de Teatro
Duration: 01-10-2001 a 31-12-2005 (62 meses)
Funding: 182.560,03 euros
Abstract: This Project is geared to establish and bring to light a collection of unpublished or unavailable works by 16th century Portuguese writers who were fundamental in the making of a theatrical diction, the construction of new models or a new reading of the old ones. A brief examination of the Theatre section in the Restricted Early and Rare Printed Collection at the National Library has shown that more than thirty documents are now catalogued as theatre texts, though many others could be found among the thousands of documents from that age that are kept in the library, once they are identified, analysed, and organised as a specific Collection.
In the 16th century Portuguese theatre began in fact to assert itself as an art form; many writers who have been kept remote and obscure by a conservative historical tradition, did make their contribution ó Chiado, Baltesar Dias, Sebastião Peres, Afonso Álvares, AntÛnio Prestes ó while Sá de Miranda offered comedies after the Italian manner, Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos published long humanistic comedies, and AntÛnio Ferreira experimented on tragedy.
When considering the current diminutive research on this field, we believe that many texts and authors are still waiting to be found in the repository of archives and libraries. It is essential to this Project that research may identify the largest number of texts possible, and expand the corpus under study.
In this particular research some criteria will be established for the selection of texts (date of publication or of the manuscript, idiom, author’s nationality). The edition will follow a method already tested in our CD-ROM edition of Gil Vicente. Todas as Obras: the choice among two versions, when the variants are not pertinent, and the option to publish both, particularly when one of them is the manuscript or when the published versions differ considerably; definition of criteria for the transcription; transcription of 16th century texts correcting obvious misprints; textual analysis as groundwork for the critical edition of the text; a study of the software tools and possibilities in order to make the best use of the information collected in the textual analysis.
Preparing a CD-ROM edition must take into account the software’s possibilities of giving information through subject-grouped data, glossaries and annotations that will meet the user’s search requirements. The edition must make use of the possibility to manipulate the whole collection of texts and the fields of knowledge that can help their reading. Software designing for Literature and Humanities is therefore urged to find adequate responses to the multiple interfaces suggested by the study of the texts; on the other hand, publishing techniques must make the best use of the software’s large capacity and manifold possibilities, maintaining high level requirements of text edition but also making terms with the user’s new ways of handling this specific kind of publication, a multidisciplinary approach that has been hitherto impossible to develop for lack of a simple and reliable process of converging the text and its paratext.