Patronage as Censorship, draft 1

I don't think it's possible to upload a document as such directly to this blog, and I didn't really want to have to reformat my paper so that it would work here, so here is a link to my first draft, in Google Doc form.

See it here. 

If you have a chance, look over it. Let me know what you think.

Keeping it Short

I'm about done with the first draft of my paper, which I'm writing about Elizabethan patronage of Shakespeare's plays as an indirect vehicle for censorship, and I've been a little bit surprised by the hardest aspect of this paper for me: keeping it short.

Papers that are 15-20 pages in length are pretty standard for my majors and my place in them. Final papers are often a bit longer, and econometric analyses or behavioral experiments can have lots of appendices that really add to the stack. Last week, I turned in an econometrics paper that was a new record for me: 76 pages. (That's a lot of money for printing.) So keeping this paper to a measly three or four pages has been a bit different.

I've noticed that I have needed to scale back my writing style and leave out some pieces of the logical progression between thoughts, or at least to simplify the overall argument. I've also found myself citing fewer sources and providing less evidence for my argument. It's a weird feeling.

Not that I'm complaining.

Annotated Bibliography: Censorship in Elizabethan England

            For my annotated bibliography assignment, I decided to learn a little bit about censorship in Elizabethan England. Censorship is a topic that I’m very interested in, but it’s such a huge topic that I wouldn’t have known where to start if I was just researching anything to do with it, so I wanted to narrow it down somehow. The Tudors made for some of my favorite English royal drama, Elizabeth I is one of my favorite people, and Shakespeare was producing his work during the Elizabethan and Jacobean (Stuart) Eras, so I decided to learn everything I could about censorship in the Elizabethan Era. There weren’t very many books on that specific topic, but I was able to find several books in the library in which the issue was at least addressed on some level, and I used interlibrary loan to have a few other books sent over.

To Fold or Not to Fold? That is the Publisher's Question

If you have studied Shakespeare even a little bit, you should have been exposed to the idea of folios and quartos, not to mention octavos or thirty-twomo's.  If not you are about to be educated.

A thirty-twomo (its a book size :-)