Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England [First Edition] 103205901X, 9781032059013

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Table of Contents
Figures
Notes on referencing and transcription
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Reading plays in early modern England
Notes
Chapter 1: Who read plays?
The materiality of playbooks revisited
London readers and the continuum of literacies
Welcoming a ‘universalitie of Readers’: Thomas Heywood and others
Liking with judgement: paratexts and the management of reader response
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 2: Why read plays?
Printing plays ‘as’ performed: expectations of theatrical similitude
What’s in a name? The meanings of authorial attribution
Latin mottoes and genre designations: dramatic poetry and (deceived) expectations
Tragedy
Comedy
Aut prodesse : profit as an incentive for playreading
Aut delectare : pleasure as an incentive for playreading
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 3: How were plays read?: Part one: Extractive reading
Edward Pudsey
William Drummond of Hawthornden
Abraham Wright
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4: How were plays read?: Part two: Using, marking, annotating
Responses to the play as book
Responses to the play as text
Responses to the play as play
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 5: Conclusion
Notes
Appendix
Professional play quartos with Horatian title page mottoes, 1598–1659
Bibliography
Primary sources: plays
Non-dramatic primary sources
Modern editions
Secondary sources
Databases and reference works
Blogs and blog posts
Manuscripts
Playbooks with manuscript marks or marginalia
Abbreviations
Index

Citation preview

“August’s book looks afresh at evidence of playbook reception from prefaces to prices to marginalia, finding compelling new things to say about book history, theatre, gender, and reading. Brilliantly written and expertly researched, this is authoritative and transformative.” Emma Smith, Hertford College, University of Oxford “Based on an immense and impressive body of archival evidence, and juxtaposing printed dramatic paratexts and manuscript sources, Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England offers a complex, nuanced, and illuminating picture of early modern dramatic reading practices. It is essential reading for scholars of early modern drama, readership studies, and book history.” Heidi Craig, Texas A&M University “This is a careful and sophisticated investigation of an important topic […]. [August] has command of a vast array of material and shows that playbooks had a wider potential appeal and were marketed to wider audiences than we might have thought.” Laurie Maguire, Magdalen College, University of Oxford

Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama’s most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence. Hannah August is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University in New Zealand.

Material Readings in Early Modern Culture Series editors: James Daybell Plymouth University, UK

Adam Smyth, Balliol College University of Oxford, UK

The series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms of texts as part of an investigation into the culture of early modern England. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary nature, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research with an attention to theoretical models that might illuminate the reading, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take innovative approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms of the kinds of primary materials under investigation, and in terms of methodologies. What are the questions that have yet to be asked about writing in its various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of materiality that are critically neglected? How does form mediate and negotiate content? In what ways do the physical features of texts inform how they are read, interpreted, and situated? Recent in this series Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe Studies in the Production, Collection, and Use of Mathematical Books Edited by Philip Beeley, Yelda Nasifoglu and Benjamin Wardhaugh Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture Elizabeth R. Williamson The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England Arthur F. Marotti Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England Hannah August For more information on this series, please visit: https://www.­ routledge.com/Material-Readings-in-Early-Modern-Culture/book-series/ ASHSER2222

Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England

Hannah August

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Hannah August The right of Hannah August to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-05901-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-23254-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19974-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For my mother and father

Contents

Figures x Notes on referencing and transcription xii Acknowledgements xiv Introduction 1 1 Who read plays?

28

2 Why read plays?

75

3 How were plays read? Part one: Extractive reading

126

4 How were plays read? Part two: Using, marking, annotating 177 5 Conclusion

230

Appendix Bibliography Index

237 239 262

Figures

0.1 Title page of Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1584, STC 25784, sig. A1r). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 1.1 An unbound, stab-stitched quarto playbook: final page of The London Prodigall (1605, STC 22333, Folger copy 2, sig. G4v). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 1.2 Title page of Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turke (1612, STC 6184, sig. A2r). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, PR 2240 D15 C5 1612. 2.1 Title page of Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lvcrece (1608, STC 13360, sig. A1r). Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Harry Ransom Center, Pforz 483 PFZ. 2.2 An early typographic privileging of the adjective ‘pleasant’ on the title page of a comedy: William Shakespeare’s Loues Labors Lost (1598, STC 22294, sig. A1r). Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Geneva). 3.1 Sheet from Edward Pudsey’s commonplace book featuring extracts from Much Ado About Nothing, and showing his use of marginal commonplace markers and glosses (SBT ER82/1/21, fol. 1v). © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 3.2 First page of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s transcription of Fuller’s speech from How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, showing his division of it into numbered sixains (NLS MS 2059, fol. 212r). By permission of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. 3.3 Second page of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s extracts from A Mad World, My Masters, showing the marginal glosses ‘madenhead’, ‘adulterie’, and ‘woemen’ (NLS MS 2059, fol. 221v). By permission of

8

31 49 81

113

137

144

Figures  xi

3.4

3.5 3.6

4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. 147 The concluding page of James Shirley’s ‘Epistle’ to George Berkeley in The Young Admirall (1637, STC 22463, sig. A2v). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, Ah Sh66 637 Copy 1. 158 Abraham Wright’s rendering of Shirley’s epistle to Berkeley in his commonplace book (Add. MS 22608, fol. 89r). © The British Library Board. 159 The concluding page of Abraham Wright’s epistle prefacing his Five sermons, in five several styles (1656, Wing W3685, sig. A8v). The National Library of Scotland, OO.8.4. 163 Marginalia on final page of John Lyly’s Sapho and Phao (1591, STC 17087; BL 161.a.73). © The British Library Board. 181 Marginalia on final page of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The tragedy of Rollo Duke of Normandy (1640, STC 11065; BL 644.e.2). © The British Library Board. 187 Marginalia on sig. L2v of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie (1618, STC 15092). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Mal. 212(6). 191 Hand-drawn manicule on sig. I3v of Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1602, STC 14781; BL 644.b.52). © The British Library Board. 203 Marginalia on sig. A4r of Thomas Middleton’s A Tricke to Catch the Old One (1616, STC 17897; BL 644.b.78). © The British Library Board. 210 The third gentleman’s exit line on sig. B1r of Thomas Middleton’s A Tricke to Catch the Old One (1616, STC 17897; BL 644.b.78). © The British Library Board. 211

Notes on referencing and transcription

a) Throughout the text of Playbooks and their Readers, plays are referred to using the modernised title by which they appear in Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser’s open-access Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP). These modernised titles are also used in the list of plays cited in the bibliography, where they are accompanied by their STC or Wing number. Readers seeking fuller bibliographical information for cited titles, including their early modern spelling and publication details, will be able to easily obtain it by making use of the bibliography in conjunction with DEEP and/or the British Library’s English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). b) When early modern playbooks or their paratexts are cited, signature numbers for the pages cited are given in parentheses in the text, provided it is unambiguous which issue or edition is being quoted. In other instances, and when doing so would make reading more commodious, identifying bibliographical information is given in endnotes. In all cases, this information is sufficient, when combined with that in the bibliography, for fuller details to be sourced on the openaccess databases detailed above. c) Author attributions are from Martin Wiggins’s British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, 10 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–). Modern attributions are signalled by the enclosure of the author’s name in square brackets in the bibliography and/or notes; when Wiggins remains uncertain about an attribution this is mentioned in the text or a note, and the play is listed in the bibliography under its title only. d) Works of classical and early modern literary criticism are cited from modern editions. All other early non-dramatic primary sources are cited from the relevant sixteenth- or seventeenth-century edition. e) Throughout, references to the OED and the ODNB signal the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, respectively. f) Quotations preserve original typeface differentiations and original spelling; ‘u’, ‘v’, ‘i’ and ‘j’ have been silently emended except in titles

Notes on referencing and transcription  xiii from the ESTC or when the passage quoted is from a modern edition or secondary source that makes no such emendation. g) Manuscript sources are transcribed ‘semi-diplomatically’. Superscribed letters are lowered, thorns are replaced with ‘th’, otiose tildes are removed and contractions are expanded. Conventions used are as follows: italics = letters supplied after contraction expanded [] = omitted letter or word provided editorially = enclosed letter or word struck through in manuscript {}= cropped or blotted text; supplied where possible, otherwise rendered {…} /// /// = enclosed text rendered in italics or hand otherwise distinguished from that normally deployed

Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation period, and I have benefited from the generosity of many people and institutions as it made its way towards the light. It began life as a doctoral project at King’s College London; there, Sonia Massai was the type of knowledgeable, patient, wise, and kind supervisor that I now aspire to be. Gordon McMullan helped me secure the funding that first got me to the UK as a Masters student; once there, he, Sonia, and the other staff in the King’s English Department made it the kind of place I wanted to stick around. I was lucky to have the intellectual and social companionship of a wonderful PhD cohort, and particularly lucky that Megan Murray-Pepper, Camilla Mount, and Will Tattersdill were part of it. Emma Smith and Sue Wiseman examined my thesis and first encouraged me to turn it into a book; I am particularly grateful to Emma for continuing to badger me gently when this didn’t happen quickly, and for reading a draft of the manuscript in full when it finally did. I am also grateful to the manuscript’s other readers: Laurie Maguire, Heidi Craig, and an anonymous fourth reviewer. Their enthusiasm and criticisms were both much needed, and the book is, I hope, stronger for their feedback (any errors that remain are, of course, entirely my responsibility). Heartfelt thanks to Adam Smyth and James Daybell, for giving the book a home in the Material Readings in Early Modern Culture series at Routledge. My profound thanks, too, to Simon Smith, Will West, Claire Bourne, and Jane Rickard, who all offered valuable feedback on parts of the manuscript in earlier iterations. Further thanks to the many others who have asked pertinent questions or offered helpful comments at conferences and seminars where I have presented work in progress, and to Molly G. Yarn, for her rigour and patience in preparing the book’s index. Simon is at the top of the list of far-flung good Samaritans who have helped me overcome the tyranny of distance since my return to New Zealand, and in particular since the onset of the global pandemic in early 2020. Simply put, I could not have completed this project without the help of kindly colleagues at various institutions in the US and the UK who checked and photographed copies of early modern books for me in

Acknowledgements  xv between lockdowns, compounding my gratitude for their earlier assistance during periods of in-person data collection. My sincere thanks go to staff at these libraries: the British Library; the Bodleian Library; the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; the Pepys Library at Magdalene College; the University of Sheffield Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the Fondation Martin Bodmer. Special thanks to Aaron Pratt at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas), and to Michael Powell-Davies for sharing his expertise on early modern handwriting. In-person research at some of these libraries was made possible by financial support from King’s College London and the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women, and its eventual transformation into this book was made possible by the support I have received since 2017 in my role in the English programme at Massey University. I am grateful to Massey for giving me a second chance, and, for their particular support of this book project, to Jenny Lawn, Pansy Duncan, Philip Steer, and Kerry Taylor. I am also thankful for the support of locally based early modern colleagues who have taken an interest in my work: Tom Bishop, Mark Houlahan, Sarah Ross, Sophie Tomlinson, honorary Kiwi Lyn Tribble, and the other members of the ANZSA Executive Committee. Writing books is typically troped as an antisocial activity, yet it is my social network that has sustained me through the writing of this one. In its early stages, I could not have done without the support of Sarah Hesketh, Kitty Higbee, and Lauren Monaghan-Pisano; in its later stages, Alan Ibell has given me everything I needed and more. Throughout, my family has been more tolerant, loving, and generous than I no doubt deserve: thank you to Nick, Kitty, Jane, Sandy, Lief, Theo, Freya, Astrid (who arrived right at the end), and to my parents Marilyn and Steve, who first took me to the library, and then bit their tongues as I followed the path those books unfurled. This particular book is dedicated to them, with love.

Parts of this book have been published in earlier iterations, as follows: Part of Chapter 2 was published in Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance, ed. by Claire M. L. Bourne (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2021). It is reproduced with the permission of The Arden Shakespeare. Small portions of Chapters 2 and 3 appear in an essay, ‘“Tickling the Senses with Sinful Delight”: the Pleasure of Reading Comedies in Early Modern England’, in The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, ed. by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (Manchester:

xvi Acknowledgements Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 201–16. They are reproduced with the permission of MUP. Parts of Chapter 4 were previously published in the article ‘Reading Plays as Books: Interpreting Readers’ Marks and Marginalia in Early Modern Play Quartos’, Renaissance Drama, 48 (2020), 1–30. They are reproduced with the permission of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Press.

Introduction

Ask a seventeenth-century God-botherer what he thought of reading plays, and you could expect a strong answer. For William Prynne in 1633, ‘the obscenity, ribaldry, amorousnesse, heathenishnesse, and prophanenesse of most Play-bookes, Arcadiaes, and fained Histories’ was such that their reading by ‘any (especially […] Children, Youthes, or those of the female sex, who take most pleasure in them)’ should be forbidden. This was because of the risk, Prynne held, that playbooks ‘should inflame their lusts, and draw them on to actuall lewdnesse, and prophanesse’.1 Around a decade later, the preacher Francis Cheynell offered some parenting advice along similar lines: Command [your sons] to lay aside their Amorous Pamphlets, and corrupting Play-Books; but more especially convince the son of your hopes, and the son of your desires, That those black Books which kindle the fire of lust, kindle the black fire of Hell within him.2 And by the time of the Restoration, the Puritan pamphleteer Richard Younge was singing a familiar tune when he dismissed the ‘raw fruits’ of ‘Poetry, Pamphlets, and Playbooks, (which take so with our youth and Gentry) that weaken the stomack of the soul, and fill it full of crudities, which will not be digested into any good blood, either of knowledge or virtue’.3 In the eyes of these men, reading plays is at worst sinful and at best a waste of time better spent on other (more devotional) reading mat­ erial: in 1657 the preacher Thomas Baker bemoaned the fact that ‘works, that are not grounded upon Faith in Christ’, are ‘soon[er] […] opened, whether History, or Philosophy, or Philology, much more of Romances, of Pasquils, of Play-books, or whatever other Pamphlets’. Baker acknowledged that these were ‘a pretty kinde of Course, for the passing away of time; but still besides the way’.4 And even if reading plays didn’t jeopardise your soul it could still compromise your sanity: according to Robert Burton, poor choice of reading material is one of the symptoms of lovesick ‘Inamoratoes’, who ‘read nothing but play-bookes, Idle Poems, DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748-1

2 Introduction Jests, Amadis de Gaul, the Knight of the Sun, the seaven Champians, Palmerin de Oliva, Huon of Burdeaux, &c’ and, as a consequence, ‘many times prove in the ende as mad as Don Quixot’.5 It is clear from the existence of such statements that – despite arguments for the relative unpopularity of drama as a reading genre – there were people in early modern England who were reading plays.6 Discursive constructions of playbooks and their readers such as the ones above, however, undoubtedly reveal more about their authors’ anxieties than they do about those actual men and women who read plays in early modern England and their reasons for doing so. Nevertheless, these dismissive comments provide an apt launching pad for this book’s interrogation of who those readers were, how and why they chose to read plays, and what their responses to them were. In their hyperbolic language, the writers’ criticisms hint at what the answers to these questions might look like. In Prynne and Younge’s descriptions of playbooks’ popularity with children, youths, women, and the gentry, we get a sense of the holistic appeal of playbooks and the diversity of the playreading demographic, two things that are fully interrogated in Chapter 1. In Cheynell, Baker, and Burton’s depictions of playbooks as diversionary pleasures which feed readers’ desires for erotic literary content, we see one prevailing assumption about the reasons readers might open a playbook and what they would expect to find within its pages: a fuller range of possible playreading rationales and expectations is explored in Chapter 2. And in the repeated rhetorical location of playbooks alongside other print genres, we see their position within what Douglas Bruster has called ‘the representation market of early modern England’, a fact that flattened the generic distinctiveness of printed drama.7 The ramifications of this in terms of early modern playreaders’ habits of reading and modes of response are presented in Chapters 3 and 4. In short, this book seeks to situate evidence such as the viewpoints cited above alongside what playbooks themselves imply about their readers – textually, paratextually, and materially – in order to expand and nuance our knowledge of the earliest readers of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the quality of these readers’ interactions with printed drama. In doing so, it focuses on the material format that most early modern readers would have understood by the term ‘playbook’: the single-play quarto editions of plays which had been professionally performed in the playhouses of early modern London. These are the plays that, from 1584 onwards, form the backbone of the market for printed drama. Between 1584 and 1660, more than twice as many single-play quarto editions of professionally performed plays were printed than single-play editions of plays in all other formats and of all other types – folio, octavo, closet drama, university drama, Latin drama, masque, or other.8 When it comes to collected plays, despite the cultural significance we accord today to the folio collections of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, editions of collected drama printed during this period are outnumbered by professional single-play quartos by five to one.9

Introduction  3 To read a play in early modern England was, almost by default, to read a quarto edition of a professionally performed play. This is the format that is denoted by the ‘playbooks’ of this book’s title. As for the ‘readers’ of these playbooks, despite recent excellent scholarship that casts the publishers, printers, and booksellers of early modern London as astute ‘readers’ of the plays they brought to market, this is a book that is interested not in readers who produce, but those who consume.10 It seeks to shed light on the identities and responses of those who were the end users of the objects that had been read and approved as texts by the stationers who produced them, but which were consequently encountered in a particular printed format by those who bought, borrowed, or otherwise engaged with their contents. While specifying such meanings for the terms ‘playbooks’ and ‘readers’ is relatively straightforward, defining the referent of ‘early modern England’ is less so. The term’s capaciousness has allowed scholars interested in the histories of reading and writing to produce works that reach backwards for their evidence into the early Tudor period and forwards into the eighteenth century.11 Playbooks and their Readers has a more delimited focus. Given its examination of readers’ relationships with professional playbooks, its start date of 1584 should appear logical: this was the year that saw the publication of the first professionally performed plays.12 Its choice of 1660 as an end date may appear less self-evident. Joad Raymond, who likewise selects the date as the terminus ad quem for the first volume of The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture – Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 – notes that the year ‘falls in the middle of longer-term developments’ and could be considered an ‘arbitrary’ end date for his volume.13 Despite this, it retains a conceptual logic for studies of early modern drama, given that, as the date when Charles II’s restoration to the throne put an end to the eighteen-year-long prohibition against public performance, it ushered in a new era of theatrical production and consumption. That this shift in the status of drama applies equally to plays in print is hinted at by W. W. Greg’s choice of 1660 as the end date for his monumental Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration. Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai choose as the terminus ad quem for their Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 that other significant date in early modern theatre history, the closure of the playhouses. But commercial drama from before the Civil War and Protectorate periods continued to be printed as well as read during this time, as is indicated by the dates of several of the contemporary references to playreading cited above.14 The picture of how early readers responded to the print incarnation of previously performed plays is nuanced by these quartos printed between 1642 and 1660. It is for these reasons that the discussion in Playbooks and their Readers is informed by a survey of professional play quartos printed between 1584, the year that saw printed commercial drama inaugurated as a reading genre, and 1660, the year when English audiences could once more attend public performances in the nation’s metropolis.

4 Introduction This is a book about the history of reading a particular literary genre, printed in a particular format, in a particular time and place. In these respects, it follows in the footsteps of other books that have sought to map the reading culture of early modern England by focusing a lens on a particular set of texts rather than on a certain reader or group of readers.15 These works have deepened our understanding of the degree to which reception and readerships were or were thought to be governed by genre. They have revealed the sometimes surprising disconnect between the ways we ourselves value particular texts and the ways they were valued by their earliest readers, and have led in some cases to the re-evaluation of critical orthodoxies. The works that offer the richest interrogation of particular textual genres are those that consider diverse bodies of evidence in order to expose instances where otherwise persuasive inferences are contradicted, and to highlight those instances where implications can be confirmed. In particular, books such as Sasha Roberts’s Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (2002) or, more recently, Tamara Atkin’s Reading Drama in Tudor England (2018) expose the gaps and overlaps between print constructions of implied readers and suggested reading strategies, and the traces of actual readers to be found in archives and historical records. Like Atkin’s Reading Drama, which focuses on printed plays from the earlier ‘pre-playhouse era’, Playbooks and their Readers is interested in the nuanced history of reading that can be written by examining playbooks as material objects which were both mediated to imagined readers and consumed by historical readers. This approach requires an alertness to the implications of playbooks’ material, paratextual, and, for certain annotated or excerpted copies, manuscript attributes. The material attributes of the printed book have long been understood as repositories of meaning, encoding information not just about contexts of production but also probable reception. The format of quarto playbooks, in particular, has been read variously as a signifier of their cultural status, their affordability, their ephemerality, and their popularity. Recently, however, scholars have questioned some of the dominant narratives that have grown up around quarto playbooks’ format. Joseph Dane and Alexandra Gillespie have debunked ‘the myth of the cheap quarto’; Aaron T. Pratt has argued that the habit of ‘stab-stitching’ playbooks was nothing more than the standard mode of binding any quarto publication of a similar length, rather than an index of playbooks’ low value and disposability; Alan Farmer has demonstrated that quarto playbooks were in fact less ‘ephemeral’ than other similarly sized books.16 The usefulness of the concept of ‘popularity’ has been thrown out the window by numerous scholars.17 It is partly because we are at a moment of sea-change in terms of how the formal elements of a book are understood to make meaning that the first chapter of this book begins by reinterrogating the formal features of quarto playbooks in relation to the contention, here posed by Mark Bland, that ‘distinctions in format, type-face and type-size indicated something about the nature of the [reading] material, the audience for which it was intended, its portability and use’.18

Introduction  5 In undertaking such an interrogation, I seek to confirm and complicate some of the implications created by playbooks’ paratextual preliminaries, which are the second body of evidence examined. Too long overlooked, early modern playbooks’ original title pages, dedications, epistles to the reader, prefatory verses, and other framing material have merited the attention they have received in recent years.19 As multiple scholars have argued, they provide valuable clues as to how early modern authors and publishers conceived of the potential market for the books they produced.20 Yet in the dominant focus on dramatic paratexts as marketing material, arguably what has been lost is Gérard Genette’s original conception of the term. When taxonomising the form and function of paratexts, Genette speaks of paratextual ‘mess­ ages’, the metaphor denoting the possession of meaning.21 Paratexts are the ‘thresholds of interpretation’ [my italics], as his book’s English subtitle has it: they are not simply the boundary markers that keep one set of readers out and usher another in. Nor are they merely the stakes in the ground left by playwrights who seek to establish their authorial personae.22 In its opening chapters, Playbooks and their Readers reclaims the paratext as an element of the book that influences the reading experience, mapping not just the identities of the implied readers reached out to by dramatic paratexts, but also the interpretive modes made available by those paratexts. In its third and fourth chapters, the book turns to a third body of evidence: the traces of reading that can be found in the fragments of plays transcribed into manuscript commonplace books, and in the marked and annotated pages of extant playbooks. Such evidence typically invites scholarly caveats: it is oblique, hard to decipher, often impossible to date or attribute.23 We cannot, ultimately, know what prompted a particular reader to respond to a particular passage by marking, excising, or extracting it: as Steven N. Zwicker reminds us, ‘acts of interpretation [...] occur in the private space between the reader and the page’.24 Yet the proliferation of scholarly examinations of what William Sherman has termed ‘book use’ has both legitimated it as a sphere of investigation and helped to make the manuscript traces more decipherable, as common modes of ‘use’ become apparent across multiple books.25 As Sasha Roberts argues, ‘even if we may not always be able to recover reading events or reading acts, we can go some way to reconstructing possible reading strategies in the period’ and these in turn shed light on ‘the ways in which a reader might have responded to the text’.26 With knowledge of the types of reading strategies dominant in the period, we can more authoritatively ‘read the readings’ of annotating, marking, and commonplacing playreaders, and arrive at plausible interpretations of the nature of their own interpretive acts, particularly if we also maintain an alertness to the types of reading approaches facilitated and encouraged by the paratexts of individual playbooks. The juxtaposition of these sources is crucial, as Roberts underlines when she notes that ‘readerships defined by prefatory material represent only a general guide on the part of the author or stationer; in practice, we

6 Introduction need to remember that books might circulate widely across different social groupings and generations, and so find surprising readers.’27 The readings to which readers subjected playbooks can be equally surprising: ‘[i]mplied readers behave differently to real readers’, or at least have the capacity to, as Atkin points out when introducing her examination of readers’ marks and marginalia in extant Tudor playbooks.28 In combining close readings of the elements of the playbook that encode imagined reception with analysis of the material traces of historical reception, Playbooks and their Readers draws out the ways in which these bodies of evidence both confirm and contradict one another. No one form of evidence can, by itself, be relied on for accurate information about playreading in the period. Formal elements of the playbook have been made to over-signify; paratexts are rhetorically constructed; manuscript evidence, as discussed above, is often fraught with interpretive difficulties. However, by juxtaposing these three types of evidence, instances present themselves in which the implications of all three cohere, strengthening the impression that the paratexts in places do present what is historical rather than what is merely rhetorical, or signalling the apparent veracity of certain narratives about playbooks’ format. Similarly, when the sources appear to contradict one another, it is possible to expose the degree to which certain responses are, as Zachary Lesser puts it, either ‘imaginary’ (in the case of print) or ‘idiosyncratic’ (in the case of manuscript).29 By examining multiple bodies of evidence, over the course of its four chapters, Playbooks and their Readers deepens and nuances our understanding of the ambivalent position held by quarto playbooks within the reading culture of early modern England.

Reading plays in early modern England From the moment the first English professional plays were printed, playbooks occupied a Janus-like position. Their paratexts advertised their o ­ rigin in performance at the same time as their material form signalled their textual­ ity. They presented themselves as recreational reading material to readers who then sat down, pen in hand, to mine reusable phrases, intertwining the pursuit of pleasure with that of profit. The duality of playbooks’ nature is unintentionally exposed in 1586 by William Webbe, whose Discourse of English Poetry mediates to English readers the first-century BCE precepts of Horace regarding the nature of poetry. Webbe translates the sixteenthcentury German humanist Georg Fabricius’s take on Horace, offering up the Roman writer’s ‘canons or general cautions of poetry’ as ‘very necessary observations to be marked of all poets’.30 One of these ‘canons’ is as follows: Poets are either such as desire to be liked of on stages, as comedy and tragedy writers, or such as would be registered in libraries. Those on stages have special respect to the motions of the mind, that they may stir both the eyes and ears of their beholders. But the other, which

Introduction  7 seek to please privately within the walls, take good advisement in their works, that they may satisfy the exact judgements of learned men in their studies.31 In England in 1586, however, this taxonomy was out of date. Two years prior to the publication of Webbe’s Discourse, in 1584, a slim book had been printed in London, exploding the binary opposition between performed dramatic poetry and library-bound non-dramatic poetry. The title page of the first quarto of Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London announced it as ‘A right excellent and famous Comœdy’; accompanying this claim was the advertisement that the playtext was ‘as it hath beene publiquely played’ (Figure 0.1). This was a play that had ‘stir[red] […] the eyes and ears of [its] beholders’ when performed by Leicester’s Men at the start of the decade. But it was now a printed ‘worke’ (or so its title page declared), its format aligning it with the type of poetry that was, according to the Discourse, to be read privately by ‘learned men’. Furthermore, it was a work ‘right worthie to be marked’, the verb – whether deliberately or not – offering the play up for the type of ‘active reading’ performed by those with a humanistic education, who had been taught to read with pen or pencil in hand in order to ‘mark’ passages of note in edifying texts.32 When Roger Warde printed Wilson’s play with these particular title page paratexts, he created a new category of English ‘poetry’. This category married the two halves of Webbe’s classically derived taxonomy and made it possible for tragedies, comedies, and other dramatic genres both to ‘please privately’ when read and to have been ‘liked of on stages’ – in particular, the stages of the playhouses of early modern London. Prior to the publication of The Three Ladies, when English printed drama advertised its origins in past performance, the performances invoked were private: command performances before the monarch, or in Oxbridge colleges. Readers of these playbooks were, as Atkin points out, being drawn in by the promise of ‘textual access [to] […] the hallowed halls of England’s great houses and institutions’, places where, ‘for most potential purchasers, it would have been physically impossible to go’.33 By contrast, when playbook title pages advertise plays’ origins in public performance – as they do increasingly from 1584 onwards – they signal themselves as printed versions of theatrical events which were frequented by audience members from every sector of London society. They retain the aura of the theatre, even while physically resembling the other genres of non-performed reading material that proliferated throughout the period. It is for this reason that such playbooks have been viewed as ‘surrogates’ for performance (to use Jeffrey Masten’s term), which function as ‘record[s] of […] particular theatrical performance[s] a reader/consumer may have heard of or attended’.34 In Masten’s formulation, playbooks transition at some point during the first half of the seventeenth century into ‘readerly text[s]’ that are ‘deliberate substitute[s] for theatrical

8 Introduction

Figure 0.1  Title page of Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1584, STC 25784, sig. A1r). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Introduction  9 experience’ – in other words, they become ‘dramatic literature’.35 This supposed shift from theatrical aide-mémoire to consciously literary text has been prominent in studies of the production and reception of early modern playbooks, although more recently scholars have sought to complicate the dichotomy of ‘theatrical’ vs. ‘literary’ playbooks. Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, for instance, hold that, based on the paratextual apparatus of playbooks published in the first thirteen years of the seventeenth century, publishers ‘seem not to have seen any contradiction between the literary status of plays and their theatricality’.36 Atkin’s examination of the paratextual features of printed plays from the ‘pre-playhouse’ period leads her to argue that even ostensibly ‘theatrical’ paratexts helped to package plays as ‘readerly’ texts, long before the subsequent explosion of title page features, dedications, epistles, and commendatory verses that Lukas Erne sees as central to the ‘gentrification’ of printed plays and their transformation into ‘literary drama’.37 Claire Bourne, meanwhile, similarly argues that printers and publishers throughout the period were creating ‘readerly’ texts, but that they did so by exploiting the possibilities of early modern typography in order to render legible plays’ inherent theatricality.38 Shifting the focus from publishers to readers, however, means asking whether playreaders themselves had a sense of printed drama as an inherently theatrical genre, or whether, despite persistent title page advertisements of theatrical auspices that drew in playgoing readers, most such readers may in fact have been unable, subsequently, to get past the printed play’s ‘book-ness’: the clear material reminder that the text was not a performance. In her examination of readers of Tudor drama, Atkin finds that ‘[p]laybook users […] were far less concerned with the distinction between the literary and the non-literary than scholars of today’, and that they ‘subjected their playbooks […] to the same kind of engaged reading as they undertook with other non-dramatic works’.39 This chimes with my own findings for the later period. Contradicting Bourne’s recent claim that ‘much recorded readerly engagement with plays occurred at the intersection of drama’s two media – print and performance’, my own survey of playreaders’ manuscript responses to playbooks in multiple British and North American research libraries indicates that the vast majority of recorded early modern readerly engagement with professional plays mirrored readerly engagement with the multiplicity of non-dramatic texts that were published in the period.40 Playbooks might have been presented as records of theatrical events via variations on the familiar title page announcement that the printed play is ‘As it was acted’, or they may have attempted to signal the theatricality of drama via the typographic techniques Bourne describes. But they seem to have been received – if not always as the ‘works’ of poetry that later paratexts constructed them as – at the very least as textual objects. This is, in fact, unsurprising, given that plays were simply one genre in an increasingly crowded marketplace

10 Introduction of print, in an England in which books were progressively cheaper and literacy levels progressively higher, and in which readers did not necessarily change their mode of engagement when they put down a poetry book or a prose romance and picked up a playbook. When Farmer and Lesser set out to rebut Peter Blayney’s argument that playbooks were never that popular, they did so in part by demonstrating that playbooks in fact constituted a not insignificant portion of the market for ‘non-monopolistic speculative’ books printed in London, in English, between the years 1590 and 1640. Yet playbooks never amounted to more than 10% of this market, which was composed of a multiplicity of genres gestured at by the contemporary quotations with which this chapter began.41 In the view of their detractors, playbooks jostle with pamphlets, poetry books, jest-books, romances, and works of history, philosophy, and philology, as well as the printed sermons and books of divinity the writers would rather playreaders were reading. That playreaders were consuming multiple print genres is borne out by contemporary library lists and by the evidence of early modern commonplace books. To take only two examples, the library of the seventeenth-century gentlewoman Frances Wolfreston contained not just plays but also poetry, jest-books, and romances, as well as ‘works of history, politics, theology, medicine, languages’.42 Similarly, the manuscript commonplace book compiled by the early seventeenth-century playreader Edward Pudsey contains extracts not just from Shakespeare and other dramatists, but also from ‘English translations of the classics and of contemporary works in foreign languages, such as Plutarch’s Moralia, More’s Utopia, and Castiglione’s The Courtier; the essays of Bacon, Cornwallis, and Johnson; and pamphlets from the controversy between Harvey and Nashe’.43 Playbooks were one print genre among many, vying for readers’ attention against an increasing number of competitors: Heidi Brayman Hackel notes that while ‘[i]n 1591 one book was printed in Britain or in English abroad for every thirteen people in England; by 1642 four books were produced for every five people’. Over the course of the period, ‘the gross ratio of books to person jumped nearly tenfold’.44 Of course, this did not mean that those books were distributed equally amongst England’s populace, which was notoriously varied in terms of class and economic standing. But as the output of the presses increased, so too did the accessibility of that output. Tessa Watt points out that books become more affordable as time goes by, noting that ‘[b]ook prices remained steady from 1560 to 1635, when other commodities more than doubled in price and wages rose by half to two-thirds’.45 The price and relative affordability of playbooks are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1, but for the moment it is worth noting David J. Baker’s argument that at the same time as books were becoming cheaper in real terms, early modern English households were busy reallocating their resources and changing their priorities in terms of what they produced and consumed so as to be better

Introduction  11 able to participate in a burgeoning consumer society. In part because of the desire to emulate the social elite, ‘[h]ouseholds, both rural or urban, wanted the new commodities that were becoming available’, and because of their readjustment of what they chose to spend their money on a situation was created in which, as Carole Shammas puts it, ‘[b]eing poor and being a consumer [...] were not mutually exclusive conditions’.46 In this analysis of early modern production and consumption, a poorer member of the literate populace who was minded to purchase a playbook – certainly an item belonging to the category of ‘new commodities’ – was theoretically capable of reprioritising their spending in order to reflect ‘social or family needs or expectations, or personal preferences’.47 If the size of the potential consumer base was growing, so too was the size of the literate populace. By the 1640s, two-thirds of Londoners could sign their name, and the number who could read was likely to have been much higher: it has long been argued that estimates of literacy levels based on evidence of the ability to sign one’s name misrepresent the true reach of literacy.48 This is because reading and writing were taught as distinct skills in early modern England, the former before the latter. As a consequence, those whose schooling had been limited might very well have some reading ability, even if they could not sign their name. For this reason, Brayman Hackel prefers to speak not of literacy levels but of an early modern ‘continuum of illiteracies and literacies’.49 This continuum is familiar because it is invoked in the epistle to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which famously addresses itself to ‘the great variety of Readers[:] From the most able, to him that can but spell’.50 In an elite and pricey publication such as the First Folio the continuum of readers is almost certainly rhetorical, but Brayman Hackel argues that other texts which invoke multiple literacies in their paratexts are ­testament to actual readerships that are ‘heterogeneous and multiple’.51 As Chapter 1 demonstrates, quarto playbooks were certainly among such texts; they were also very likely among those texts consumed via ‘­surrogate or delegate literacy’, whereby unconfident readers experienced books by hearing them read aloud.52 Anna Bayman suggests that the texts which would most plausibly have received this treatment are those genres that have a performative quality, such as ballads or jest-books.53 Given playbooks’ origin in performance, it would be odd not to find them being experienced aurally, and indeed, diverse sources suggest that they were. For instance, when Thomas Heywood dedicates the second part of The Iron Age (1632) to Thomas Mannering, he expresses his hope that Mannering will ‘spare some sorted houres to heare it read’ (sig. A3v). And in The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1673), which contains the faux-­ autobiography of the seventeenth-century professional writer and erstwhile lady’s maid Hannah Wolley, the narrator notes that ‘that which most of all increast my knowledg, was my daily reading to my Lady, Poems of all sorts, and Plays’.54

12 Introduction Such sources construct playbooks as recreational literature, to be consumed during the leisure time that Peter Burke has argued was becoming more in evidence throughout the period.55 Lori Humphrey Newcomb notes that by the time of the Jacobean era, leisure reading was no longer the preserve of the elite, while Louise Wilson has found that a movement to promote recreational reading begins much earlier, in the paratexts of prose fiction from the 1580s.56 Later playbook paratexts certainly participate in this discourse: Philip Massinger’s dedication of The Bondman (1624) to Philip Herbert envisages Herbert’s ‘perusall’ of the play taking place in a ‘vacant houre, when your Honours more serious occasions shall give you leave to reade it’ (sig. A3v), while James Shirley’s dedication of Hyde Park (1637) to Henry Rich hopes that Rich will read the play at a time when he is ‘retir’d from businesse into a calme, and at truce with those high affaires, wherein [his] Counsell and spirit is fortunately active’ (sig. A2r). When Shirley dedicates his Maid’s Revenge (1640) to Henry Osborne he simply states, ‘Read when you have leasure’ (sig. A2r); in the same year, Richard Brome offers his The Antipodes to William Seymour for ‘your Recreation at your retirement from your weighty Employments’ (sig. A2r-v). Playbooks are here legitimated as restorative respites from the daily grind, the word ‘recreation’ meaning at the time literally ‘refreshing, reviving or restoring’.57 Women too had need of such recreation: Naomi Tadmor points out that the popular trope of women readers as idle fantasists rests on ‘an underestimation of the household work that was performed by women – even gentlewomen – in both practical and managerial capacities’.58 Hannah Wolley’s mistress in The Gentlewoman’s Companion, then, is also consuming plays as recreational reading, even if for Hannah herself (or whoever penned her memoir) playreading is more like work: the writer describes the mistress guiding the maid towards an expert reading, ‘teaching me as I read, where to place my accents, how to arise and fall my voice, where lay the emphasis of the expression’.59 The Januslike aspect of playbooks can be seen once more: for one participant in this scene of playreading, the play is a hoped-for source of diversion and recreation; for the other, it is a site of self-improvement. Furthermore, while the attention to oral delivery implies a theatricality to the reading that is dictated by the playbooks’ genre, the reader is to apply the same approach to her reading of poems. Just as the examples cited at the start of this chapter elide drama’s generic uniqueness by envisaging playbooks being read alongside other genres of reading material, in the scene conjured up by this ostensible reminiscence there is no distinction between the reading approach that is to be taken to these two supposedly distinct literary genres, drama and poetry. In a different context, the homogenising effect of a dominant reading approach can be seen in the manuscript traces of ‘active reading’ to be found in extant playbooks and readercompiled commonplace books.

Introduction  13 In counterpoint to the paratextual presentation of plays as leisure reading material is the large body of manuscript evidence that implies that, as Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier have observed, plays in early modern England ‘were read above all for reuse in the form of fragments’.60 The traces of this type of ‘goal-oriented’ reading can be seen in the numerous marginal and sub- or superlinear markings, in ink or pencil, that isolate particular lines or passages in extant early modern books, as well as in those surviving manuscript commonplace books into which such ­fragments were transcribed.61 Conceiving of texts as sites of reusable fragments was one of the hallmarks of the humanist approaches to pedagogy that dominated throughout the period, implying that such markings or transcriptions were made by men who had had the benefit of at least a grammar school education.62 Zwicker argues, however, that ‘the powerful and regulated impulses of humanist education’ had, by the middle of the seventeenth century, spread the habit of marking and annotating books to ‘a wider, more socially diverse [...] field of readers’.63 What had also spread was the range of textual genres that readers were marking or extracting from. A practice that had originated in the classroom to help schoolboys better absorb the contents of their Latin textbooks was now being applied to all sorts of texts, from Bibles to prose romances to medical manuals.64 Playbooks were simply one more textual genre ‘right worthie to be marked’ within what Adam Smyth has called early modern England’s ‘commonplace book culture’, a culture in which reading was often undertaken pen in hand, regardless of a genre’s origins in orality.65 Smyth notes that within this culture there was ‘a connection between commonplacing and improvement (whether linguistic, moral, social, financial, spiritual)’.66 The idea that marked or extracted lines and passages would be either linguistically exemplary or morally edifying stemmed from the treatises of early modern pedagogical theorists who advocated some form of commonplacing.67 Analysing extracts from Shakespeare’s plays in printed commonplace books from the period, Sasha Roberts observes that the extracts give the impression that plays were read for ‘moral instruction, even certitude’.68 However, the public nature of the print medium should perhaps serve to qualify Roberts’s statement that the printed commonplace books ‘emulat[ed] the habits of readers in manuscript’.69 My own analysis of the lines in playbooks picked out by early readers with manuscript commonplace markers, as well as the dramatic extracts in three seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace books, implies that the type of profit acquired from playreading was more often pragmatic than ethical. It is the type of profit depicted by John Marston, who in 1598 satirises the playreader who: [H]ath made a common-place booke out of plaies, And speakes in print, at least what ere he sayes

14 Introduction Is warranted by Curtaine plaudeties, If ere you heard him courting Lesbias eyes; Say (Curteous sir) speakes he not movingly From out some new pathetique Tragedie? He writes, he railes, he jests, he courts, what not, And all from out his huge long scraped stock Of well-penn’d playes.70 In Marston’s satire, the impression given of the commonplacing playreader is not that he reads plays for moral edification but rather that it is primarily a linguistic profit that he seeks in his ‘stock | Of well-penn’d playes’. Not only does he appropriate dramatic language to improve his written expression, he also uses it to augment the quality of his speech, in a variety of social interactions that all, crucially, require a heightenedly performative mode of delivery: persuasion, the expression of anger, the recounting of jests, and courtship. In the manuscript evidence I discuss in Chapters 3 and 4, I find few clear implications that playreaders read for moral profit, and instead argue that commonplacing or annotating readers most often searched for linguistic profit. As András Kiséry has recently argued, printed plays were a genre that, given their origin in oral performance, may have been viewed as a particularly fruitful location of lines or passages that could be appropriated by a reader and transposed into a new extra-theatrical context of social interaction.71 At the same time, playbooks clearly served as useful sources of inspiration for readers planning their own written compositions: dramatic, published, or otherwise. However, one of the strong implications of the manuscript evidence I examine is that a reading strategy aimed at the acquisition of profit could nevertheless encode a pleasurable reading. Eugene R. Kintgen, discussing reading in the Tudor period, argues that readers ‘generally lacked what we might think of as a purely aesthetic approach to literature; for them the dulce was inextricably linked to the utile’.72 It is thus within the utilitarian response framework of commonplacing that responses more attuned to the ‘dulce’ are disguised. However programmatic reading may be, it is also always personal, and plenty of evidence seems to indicate readers responding to the personal pleasurable appeal of a text by marking as commonplaces lines that are neither rhetorically striking nor deal with the types of universal topics traditionally thought worthy of being gathered for reuse. There were, I argue, enough readers fixating on the bawdier passages of plays (particularly comedies) in what appears to be the pursuit of a titillating erotic pleasure for dramatic paratexts to subtly market playbooks as repositories of such pleasure. Indeed, this type of playreading agenda may in fact respond to the authoritative prompts of paratextual print conventions that were being newly deployed in printed commercial drama, one of them the printed commonplace markers that presented passages to readers pre-authorised for extraction or particular noteworthiness. In Lesser

Introduction  15 and Stallybrass’s survey of the subject matter of the lines picked out by printed commonplace markers in the first editions of playbooks published between 1600 and 1613, they find that (once Ben Jonson’s Sejanus is excluded from the tally) ‘maxims associated with the querelle des femmes and with women’s beauty, chastity, or sexual vice are at least as important as the serious political matter that has often been considered the proper subject of sententiae’.73 What the evidence discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 indicates is that the ‘subjects [that] interested the writers, scribes, readers and stationers involved in the production of these playbooks’ also seem to have interested those consuming readers who made their own idiosyncratic commonplace marks against similar lines in other playbooks or transcribed such lines into their commonplace books.74 As more isolated investigations of these types of sources have begun to reveal, playbooks (and the commonplace books whose construction they fed) were quite clearly sites in which readers could think about sex, and in which they could record their stance on the seventeenth-century ‘woman question’.75 That seemingly autonomous manuscript responses may in fact betray the influence upon readers of new paratextual conventions is something I consider further in these two chapters. To respond with pleasure to a line or passage of text implies that it has been ‘read’ in the sense that we ourselves understand, that the reader has performed the act defined by the OED as involving the inspection of writing and, crucially, its subsequent interpretation.76 Yet as Sherman stresses, many of the marks and marginalia that bear witness to the responses of the early modern men and women who put pen or pencil to paper within the pages of playbooks are often not the result of reading so defined. They are instead, according to Sherman, evidence of a broader ‘use’, and as such respond to the material features of the early modern book, not the playtext.77 They are the doodles, the inscriptions of names, the sums, the handwriting practice, the records of life events, the half-finished literary compositions that seem to bear no relation to the text of the play at all. Such marks and marginalia shed light on the identities of the early readers of playbooks, the way these readers valued their books, and the conceptual space playbooks occupied within the early modern cultural imagination. As Chapter 4 makes clear, they also show that among the things early readers might have thought they would ‘get’ from a playbook, alongside pleasure, profit, poetry, or – seemingly rarely – the traces of performance, was the added bonus of blank page space in a time when paper was dear. In a different sense, the valuing of blank pages is in part what has contributed to the scope of this book and the evidence it surveys. Numerous scholars of the history of reading have remarked upon, and mourned, the interventionist collecting practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that saw early modern books washed and cropped in order to remove the traces left by their early annotating readers. The more highly prized the title, the more likely it was to undergo such treatment. This is

16 Introduction one reason why much of the evidence presented in the second half of this book is drawn from an examination of all the copies in the British Library of professional plays printed in quarto for the first time after 1583 and reprinted at least once before the Restoration – with the exception of those by William Shakespeare. Multiple scholars have discussed what remains in terms of readers’ marks and annotations in extant copies of Shakespeare, ranging from Sonia Massai’s analysis of the British Library’s quartos to Emma Smith’s examination of First Folios, and, most recently, Jean-Christophe Mayer’s wide-ranging monograph, which surveys both quartos and folios.78 So dominant has Shakespeare been in scholarship on playbook marginalia that the history of playreading risks being constructed by default in a Shakespeare-shaped form. This is problematic for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, it misses the richness of manuscript evidence in the extant works of other non-canonical dramatists. Secondly, by not taking into account the recurrence of certain types of response across a range of dramatic titles, it risks imputing our own sense of Shakespeare’s pre-eminence to early readers and implying that these types of response encode such a sense, when in fact they form part of the general response spectrum of annotating readers to printed drama (and indeed, to printed books) more generally. This pitfall is apparent in a statement such as Mayer’s when, noting that it is common to find readers of the First Folio copying out parts of the volume’s paratextual preliminaries, he argues that: What can be regarded as penmanship exercises or pen trials may be seen either as attempts at self-expression sparked by Shakespeare’s work, or as confident assertions by extremely literate individuals of their mastery of the written medium in a rare book.79 Given that similar paratextually inspired pen-trials or handwriting practice can also be found in the quartos of plays by non-Shakespearean dramatists, the idea that they are prompted by early readers’ sense of Shakespeare’s significance (or that of the folio format) loses weight. Instead, such marginalia appears to be part of the early modern response spectrum to printed drama in general, and to hint at the fact that, despite Shakespeare’s demonstrable popularity in print during the early modern period, early modern playreaders had a sense of themselves as readers of plays, not as readers of Shakespeare.80 A keen seventeenth-century playreader like Sir Edward Dering scrupulously noted it down in his book of expenses whenever he bought some new playbooks. But these titles, which would have included a range of different authors and genres, are almost always listed collectively, under the simple heading ‘playbookes’, creating the impression that it is the dramatic genre that is of consequence to him, not its individual examples.81 Sir John Harington bound his collection of 135 quarto playbooks together into 11 volumes, each volume

Introduction  17 containing between 9 and 13 plays. The organising principle for each volume was idiosyncratic, and his numerous Shakespeare titles were bound in together with other less canonical texts.82 In reader-compiled manuscript commonplace books, dramatic extracts from different plays sit cheek by jowl, with pages often featuring sections of extracts from multiple plays by different playwrights.83 The homogenising effect created by such practices is a strong indicator that a history of early modern playreading that separates out Shakespeare from other playwrights reflects our own scholarly biases rather than the behaviour of early readers.84 One of the aims of this book, then, is to go some way towards redressing the imbalance created by the scholarly fixation on Shakespeare that is fed by the preferences of publishing houses and funding bodies. Nearly six hundred quarto editions of professional plays survive from the period, but only sixty-eight of these are of plays by Shakespeare.85 The others were published because stationers believed there was a market for them, and the evidence of voracious playreaders such as Dering and Harington demonstrates that there was. Focusing on what these playbooks can tell us about the human shape and preferences of this market provides a necessary counterpoint to work that has already been done on the (now) most elite of playwrights and on elite readers of his work. Playbooks and their Readers is also not focused on mapping the presence of plays in the libraries of those who could afford to amass large collections; such information has been compiled by Mayer, Erne, and others.86 The manuscript evidence discussed in the second half of the book provides traces of the responses of such elite readers, as it is their books that are most likely to have made their way into well-resourced contemporary archives. But the percentage of playbooks, marked or otherwise, that do not survive in research libraries should give us pause when we attempt to draw conclusions based on those that do. What of the books read by the unnamed, the unlettered, the autodidacts such as the surveyor Richard Norwood, a playreader ‘without status, significant means, or university education’?87 Or the seventeenthcentury bookseller Francis Kirkman, apprenticed in his teens to a scrivener but destined for a profession that reflected his ‘fancy and delight (ere since [he] knew any thing) to converse with Books’ – among them plays, from which he derived a ‘pleasure’ that he describes as ‘extraordinary’?88 Kirkman’s kin can be found in the notary public Humphrey Dyson, whose playbooks do survive in various research libraries and who was the son of a wax chandler, as well as in the man who bought many of these playbooks following Dyson’s death, Richard Smith, who held various roles at the Poultry Compter (a Cheapside prison). In having left behind archival traces of their playreading, Dyson and Smith are rare exceptions amongst readers of the ‘middling’ and ‘lower’ sorts.89 It is the unrecorded identities and unwritten responses of Norwood, Kirkman, Dyson, and Smith’s playreading fellows that the first half of this book,

18 Introduction through its focus on the material and paratextual implications of playbooks themselves, attempts to rehabilitate into a history that has been hitherto tilted towards the elite. Analysis of archival evidence draws conclusions based on what is in the archives: that may be all there now is, but it is not all there once was. The syncretic approach towards print and manuscript evidence taken in this book paints a picture of playreading as an activity whose appeal was as holistic as Prynne and other detractors made it out to be, and playbooks as a genre that both invited and elicited an equally wide range of responses. The holistic nature of the playreading demographic is examined in Chapter 1, which focuses on what playbooks’ formal and paratextual aspects imply about early modern playreaders’ identities. Quarto playbooks had a broad appeal, I argue, that was both created and reflected by their material format, which placed them in the same category as other affordable quarto pamphlet publications. Closely analysing readerly paratexts such as commendatory verses and epistles to the reader, I confirm that playbooks were expected to attract a readership that encompassed the broad spectrum of social backgrounds and reading abilities to be found among early modern playhouse audiences; I also confirm that playreaders were assumed to be both male and female. I argue that this broad readership at times caused anxiety among playwrights (as in the case of Ben Jonson), and at others was welcomed (as in the case of Thomas Heywood). It was, however, always an accepted possibility, and for this reason, as I discuss in the final section of the chapter, the writers of dramatic paratexts regularly made use of a particular strategy in an attempt to ensure favourable responses from less educated readers. By repeatedly exhorting readers to ‘judge’ the play (the judgement in question always implicitly favourable), paratexts encourage less privileged readers to align their responses with those of their social betters, building on an internalised drive towards cultural betterment that intersected with the upward social mobility which was a characteristic of early modern England, and London in particular. In Chapter 2, I consider the expectations that dramatic paratexts encouraged early modern readers to bring to their reading of playbooks, in order to try and better understand why early modern Englishmen and women might wish to read a play. Focusing in the first instance on individual elements of the title page paratext, I interrogate the implications created by the frequent title page claim that a play is printed ‘As’ it was performed. Hypothesising that title page paratextual elements traditionally viewed as legitimising a play’s literary status may in fact have signified something different for early modern readers, I consider what readers may have expected from an author’s name – specifically, that of ‘William Shakespeare’ – on quarto playbooks’ title pages, and how their expectations may have been modified by the presence or absence of an accompanying genre indication. Genre indications themselves, I go on to argue, had the potential to create unrealistic expectations regarding dramatic

Introduction  19 form and content in readers who were familiar with the most widely available works of early modern poetic theory. As commercial drama increasingly styled itself as poetry – partly through the use of another element of title page paratext, the Latin tag – readers expected plays advertised as ‘comedies’ or ‘tragedies’ to exhibit the features of these genres that were outlined in classical or classically influenced works on poetry. It is for this reason, as I demonstrate through close analysis of commendatory verses, epistles, and dramatic arguments, that the paratexts of professional playbooks promoted their own theoretical framework to assist readers in passing favourable aesthetic judgement upon a play – a framework that took account of such plays’ origins on the stages of early modern London, rather than those of Greece and Rome. Finally in this chapter, I consider the ways in which dramatic paratexts created an expectation in readers that playreading would furbish them with either profit or pleasure (or both) and the particular forms that this profit and pleasure might take. In Chapter 3, I move to a consideration of the manuscript evidence of actual early modern readers’ responses to playbooks, and in particular, the responses that are implied by transcriptions of dramatic text removed from its original locus in the playbook. I focus on the dramatic extracts in three seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace books compiled by ‘gentlemen readers’: Edward Pudsey (1573–1612/13), William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), and Abraham Wright (1611– 1690).90 The well-travelled ground of these manuscripts’ dramatic contents is surveyed through a fresh lens as I seek to analyse them in relation to the implications of the paratexts examined in the previous chapters. In doing so, I consider what the three men’s dramatic commonplacing may imply about the extent to which their approaches to playreading are shared, given that their educational backgrounds mark them out as members of a particular interpretive community. Treating the manuscripts in turn, I argue that, in keeping with the framing of the paratextual preliminaries discussed in Chapter 2, each man’s playreading was governed by the pursuit of both profit and pleasure – but while the profit they sought can in each instance be broadly characterised as ‘linguistic’, the types of pleasure they appear to have gained from their reading were varied and idiosyncratic. In the book’s final chapter, I consider a different type of manuscript evidence of playreading, the marks and marginalia left by anonymous early readers in extant playbooks. Once more, I aim to compare and contrast the implications of this type of evidence with those of the material and paratextual aspects of playbooks discussed in the first two chapters. Basing my conclusions on a survey of over five hundred playbooks, I begin by considering what inscriptions of names can tell us about early readers and the way they valued playbooks, before moving on to a discussion of what other types of marginalia that seemingly bear no relation to the playtext signal about the identities of early playreaders and the

20 Introduction place of playbooks in the early modern cultural imagination.91 I then examine marks and marginalia that more directly respond to the text of the play. These can demonstrate, I argue, not only the intertextual connections that playreaders were in the habit of drawing, but also the influence of paratextual material and the widespread understanding of playreading as an activity whereby readers could confirm their stance in the early modern querelle des femmes. I then examine the presence of hand-drawn ‘manicules’ in playbooks and the types of readings these imply. In the chapter’s final section, I consider the scarce manuscript evidence of reading that appears to respond to professional playbooks’ latent theatrical origins. I argue that when readers inscribe records of performance on the flyleaves of playbooks, or annotate the playtext in ways that ostensibly facilitate visualisation of it in performance, or when they discern i­ ntertextual connections with other plays, it is rarely possible to state definitively that they do so because they have a strong sense of the playtext’s theatricality. I conclude that such marginalia more often demonstrate a sense of commercial drama as a textual genre, rather than an acknowledgement of printed plays’ inherent performability. I return to the issue of the apparently non-theatrical nature of reading-asmarking in my Conclusion, in order to consider briefly whether it coexisted alongside an unarchived mode of oral reading that reinfused the printed texts of professional plays with some of the liveliness of performance. I want to end this introductory chapter with a final remark about language. One of the points I demonstrate emphatically in this book is that playreaders were both male and female. As Brayman Hackel points out, there is a variety of reasons for the dearth of manuscript evidence of women’s reading compared with men’s, and careful scholarship is overcoming this in order to rehabilitate early modern women into histories of reading.92 Despite this recent ‘turn’, the fact remains that, thanks to the intersection of pedagogical with patriarchal agendas, most readers in the period – and certainly most annotating readers – were men. Thus, while in other contexts I support pronominal positive discrimination, throughout this book I generally refer to otherwise unidentified readers as ‘he’, rejecting ‘they’ because of its contemporary significance for transgender politics. I find the politically correct ‘he or she’ too awkward to bear constant repetition, but for reasons I hope this book will demonstrate, shun it in most places only because it is statistically improbable, not because it is categorically impossible.

Notes 1 William Prynne, Histrio-mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragædie (1633, STC 20464), sigs 6A2r-v. 2 Francis Cheynell, The man of honour, described in a sermon, preached before the Lords of Parliament, in the Abbey Church at Westminster, March 26. 1645 (1645, Wing C3812), sig. K2r.

Introduction  21 3 Richard Younge, An infallible vvay to farewell: in our bodies, names, estates, precious souls, posterities (1661, Wing Y165), sig. A1v. 4 Thomas Baker, The unspotted high-court of justice erected and discovered in three sermons (1657, Wing B523), sig. E4r. 5 Robert Burton, The anatomy of melancholy (1621, STC 4159), sig. Z2r. 6 The argument that plays were an unpopular reading genre has been advanced most prominently by Peter Blayney in ‘The Publication of Playbooks’ in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422. For discussion of the influence of Blayney’s argument, and a rebuttal of it, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1 (2005), 1–32. The debate between the scholars continues in Blayney, ‘The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56.1 (2005), 33–50, and Farmer and Lesser, ‘Structures of Popularity in the Early Modern Book Trade’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56.2 (2005), 206–13. 7 Douglas Bruster, ‘The Representation Market of Early Modern England’, Renaissance Drama, 41 (2013), 1–23. 8 Calculations are enabled by Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser’s Database of Early English Playbooks or DEEP (2007) [accessed 5 November 2019]. DEEP, of course, lists only extant titles, but as Farmer and Lesser point out, loss rates of entire editions of printed playbooks are likely to be minimal. See ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, pp. 29–30. 9 Calculations are enabled by DEEP. 10 See most prominently Zachary Lesser’s Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 11 As an example, see the time period covered by Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker’s edited collection, Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), which includes a chapter by Richard Wendorf entitled ‘Abandoning the capital in eighteenthcentury London’; and that heralded as the sphere of inquiry by James Daybell in the subtitle of his monograph The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 12 These plays were Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (STC 25784); George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris (STC 19530); and the two John Lyly plays Sappho and Phao (STC 17086) and Campaspe (STC 17047.5). 13 ‘Introduction: The Origins of Popular Print Culture’ in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. by Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 1–15 (p. 2). 14 Commercial drama also continued to be performed after 1642, albeit more sporadically: see Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 37–50. 15 Such works have proliferated since the start of the century. A sample includes: D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Lauren Shohet, Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

22 Introduction 16 Joseph A. Dane and Alexandra Gillespie, ‘The myth of the cheap quarto’, in Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. by John N. King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 25–45; Aaron T. Pratt, ‘Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 16 (2015), 304–28; Alan B. Farmer, ‘Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality’, in The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text: Essays in Honor of David Scott Kastan, ed. by Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2016), pp. 87–125. 17 Its use is limited in part because of the polysemous nature of the term as well as the ways in which the concept of early modern ‘popular culture’ has been problematised in recent years: see Tamara Atkin, Reading Drama in Tudor England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 5–6, and the approaches taken by the contributors to Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield’s edited collection Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 18 ‘The London Book-Trade in 1600’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by David Scott Kastan (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 450–63 (p. 456). For similar points made by other scholars, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 115–16. 19 The most significant instance of this attention is Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai’s two-volume Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), which assembles transcriptions not just of these paratexts but also character lists, arguments, errata notes, printed marginalia, booksellers’ catalogues, running titles, head titles, and act and scene divisions. Berger and Massai also transcribe what Massai elsewhere terms ‘theatrical paratexts’: prologues, epilogues, inductions, and choruses. Because in this book I am interested specifically in paratextual constructions of readers and the reading experience that were deliberately added when the play was repackaged as a printed product, I do not focus on these paratexts that (in general) had their origin in performance. Massai’s definition of ‘theatrical paratexts’ can be found in ‘Shakespeare, Text and Paratext’, in Close Encounters with Shakespeare’s Text, ed. by Peter Holland (= Shakespeare Survey, 62 (2009)), pp. 1–11 (p. 3). 20 See for instance the framing arguments of Michael Baird Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Erne, Book Trade, esp. Chapters 2 and 3, and Peter Berek, ‘The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public’, Philological Quarterly, 91 (2012), 151–84. 21 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 4. 22 This argument has been advanced by scholars such as David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Wayne Chandler, Commendatory Verse and Authorship in the English Renaissance (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). 23 For a recent consideration of some of the methodological snarls of margin­ alia studies, see Adam Smyth, ‘Book Marks: Object Traces in Early Modern Books’, in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. by Katherine Acheson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 51–69 (pp. 63–66). 24 ‘Reading the Margins: Politics and Habits of Appropriation’ in Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 101–15 (p. 106).

Introduction  23 25 Sherman rationalises his preference for ‘the language of “use”’ in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. xiii. In addition to Sherman’s work, recent important studies of early modern manuscript marginalia and manuscript commonplace books include Katherine Acheson’s edited collection, Early Modern English Marginalia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Laura Estill’s Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2015); and the essays by Jason Scott-Warren and Fred Schurink in the special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly entitled The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England, ed. by Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink (73.3, 2010). Adam Smyth’s Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) considers more extreme forms of book ‘use’ such as burning and cutting. 26 Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 5. 27 ‘Reading in Early Modern England: Contexts and Problems’, Critical Survey, 12.2 (2000), 1–16 (p. 8). 28 Atkin, p. 147. 29 Lesser, Renaissance Drama, p. 18. 30 William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry in A Critical Edition of William Webbe’s ‘A Discourse of English Poetry’ (1586), ed. by Sonia HernándezSantano (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2016), pp. 65–140 (p. 132). 31 Ibid., p. 139. 32 Wendy Wall notes that ‘[w]hile marking, in early modern parlance, meant noticing or observing, it also signaled the material act of inscribing a mark onto a surface’, further remarking that ‘according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the graphic meaning of marking likely preceded the cognitive one’. See Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 30. For more on how this practice tied into humanist pedagogy, see Chapter 3, pp. 145–46. 33 Atkin, p. 7. 34 Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 115. 35 Ibid., pp. 115, 117. 36 Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 371–420 (p. 409). 37 Atkin, esp. Chapters 1 and 2; Erne, Book Trade, p. 93. 38 Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 39 Atkin, p. 8. 40 Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Marking Shakespeare’, Shakespeare, 13 (2017), 367–86 (p. 368). For a fuller engagement with this article, see Hannah August, ‘Reading plays as books: interpreting readers’ marks and marginalia in early modern play quartos’, Renaissance Drama, 48 (2020), 1–30. 41 See Farmer and Lesser, ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, p. 15. ‘Speculative’ publications are those that involve a degree of risk for the publisher, who ‘decide[s] to invest in them based on their assessment of potential consumer demand’; they thus exclude command publications such as state proclamations, visitation articles, or university act verses (p. 14). ‘Nonmonopolistic’ publications are those that are not included within the ‘select

24 Introduction group of titles protected by royal patents or by the English Stock monopoly [such as] almanacs, Bibles, catechisms, and school books’ (p. 16). Farmer and Lesser’s count is of professional playbooks only. 42 Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, p. 52. 43 Fred Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England, in The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England, ed. by Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink (= Huntington Library Quarterly, 73.3 (2010)), 453–69 (p. 465). 44 Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘Popular Literacy and Society’ in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 1, ed. by Raymond, pp. 89–100 (p. 95). 45 Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 261. 46 David J. Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 16; Carole Shammas, The Preindustrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 1. 47 David McKitterick, ‘“Ovid with a Littleton”: The Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 11 (1997), 184–234 (p. 188). Lesser (Renaissance Drama, p. 26) argues that books should be thought of as commodities; so too does Gary Taylor: see ‘Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623’ in From Performance to Print in Early Modern England, ed. by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 55–72 (p. 58). 48 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 18. There were significant regional differences in literacy levels during this period, such that a national aggregate of literacy levels would be misleading: for more on regional differences and the use to which signature surveys have been put, see Brayman Hackel, ‘Popular Literacy’, pp. 92–7. 49 ‘Rhetorics and Practices of Illiteracy or The Marketing of Illiteracy’ in Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Ian Frederick Moulton, Arizona studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 169–83 (p. 172). 50 William Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623), sig. A3r. 51 ‘Popular literacy’, p. 99. 52 Ibid., p. 99. 53 Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 32. 54 The gentlewomans companion; or, A guide to the female sex (1673, Wing W3276A), p. 13. While this is attributed to ‘Hannah Woolley’ on its title page, the ODNB calls it ‘[a]n unauthorized work based on [Wolley’s] [earlier] books’, noting that it contains ‘unreliable biographical information’. However, it is undisputed that Wolley was ‘under the patronage of a noblewoman, almost certainly Anne, Lady Maynard (d. 1647)’, into whose service she went at the age of seventeen. See John Considine, ‘Wolley [other married name Challiner], Hannah (b. 1622?, d. in or after 1674), author of works on cookery, medicine, and household affairs’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004– ), https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/29957. 55 See ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, 146 (1995), 136–50. 56 Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, p. 99; Louise Wilson, ‘“Certaine houres amongst my bookes”: Recreation, Time, and Text in 1580s London’, Shakespeare Studies, 45 (2017), 60–7. 57 Definition from Edward Philips’s The New World of English Words (1658), sourced via LEME: Lexicons of Early Modern English, ed. by Ian Lancashire, created 2006 [accessed 1 June 2021].

Introduction  25 58 ‘“In the even my wife read to me”: women, reading and household life in the eighteenth century’ in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. by James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 162–74 (p. 164). While Tadmor’s chapter is focused on the eighteenth century and women’s reading after the rise of the novel, tropes around female readers begin to be established much earlier. For further discussion of these tropes see Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, pp. 20–61; Marta Straznicky, ‘Reading through the Body: Women and Printed Drama’, in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. by Marta Straznicky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), pp. 59–79; and Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Women reading, reading women’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 80–99. 59 The gentlewomans companion, p. 13. 60 Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, ‘Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590-1619’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. by Andrew Murphy (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 35–56 (p. 52). 61 The term ‘goal-oriented’ reading was first coined by Lisa Jardine and Antony Grafton in their seminal article ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990), 30–78; more recent scholarship has tended to refer to ‘active reading’ (in which the activity could be less energetic than Harvey’s assiduous annotating). For recent Shakespearecentred analyses of early readers’ marks and marginalia see Bourne, ‘Marking Shakespeare’; of most note among the publications Bourne surveys are chapters by Sonia Massai (‘Early Readers’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 143–64) and Emma Smith (Chapter 2 of her Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)). Jean-Christophe Mayer’s significant monograph, Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), appeared shortly after Bourne’s article was published. Akihiro Yamada’s Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2017) focuses on Shakespeare but also examines readers’ marks in playbooks by George Chapman, John Ford, and John Marston; non-monograph-length work that shuns a specifically Shakespearean focus includes John Jowett’s ‘For many of your companies: Middleton’s Early Readers’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 286–327; Simon Smith’s ‘Reading Performance, Reading Gender: Early Encounters with Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady in Print’, Early Theatre, 20 (2017), 179–200 and Dermot Cavanagh’s ‘William Drummond of Hawthornden as Reader of Renaissance Drama’, The Review of English Studies, 66 (2015), 676–97. On play fragments in manuscript commonplace books, see most comprehensively Estill, Dramatic Extracts, and most recently Beatrice Montedoro, ‘Comedies and Tragedies “read of me” and “not yet learned”: Dramatic Extracting in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 952’, in Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 279–96. 62 On humanist pedagogy see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Chapter 1 of Jeff Dolven’s Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

26 Introduction 63 ‘Habits of reading and early modern literary culture’ in The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. by David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 170–98 (pp. 177–78). 64 On the marking of these three genres, see Molekamp, Women and the Bible, Chapter 2; Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Chapter 4; and Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), Chapter 6. 65 Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 123–30. 66 Ibid., p. 129. 67 The most influential proponent of commonplacing is Desiderius Erasmus in his 1513 De Copia Verborum; the practice still holds sway a century later when the English educational theorist John Brinsley maintains its usefulness in his 1612 Ludus literarius: or, the grammar schoole. See further, Chapter 3, pp. 128–29. 68 ‘Reading Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra in Early Modern England’ in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works Volume 1: The Tragedies, ed. by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 108–33 (p. 109). 69 Ibid., p. 125. 70 John Marston, The scourge of villanie (1598, STC 17485), sig. H4r. 71 ‘“Flowers for English Speaking”: Play Extracts and Conversation’, in Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020), pp. 155–74. Beatrice Montedoro likewise argues that dramatic extracts were copied into commonplace books in part because of their capacity for reuse in social situations: see ‘Comedies and Tragedies’, p. 294 and passim. 72 Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), p. 188. 73 Lesser and Stallybrass, p. 413. Lesser and Stallybrass’s work builds on that of G. K. Hunter, in ‘The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances’, The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951–52), 171–88. 74 Lesser and Stallybrass, p. 413. 75 See for instance Montedoro, esp. pp. 291–93, and Smith,‘Reading Performance’. 76 ‘read, v., II.5.a.’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000– ) [accessed 1 November 2020]. 77 Sherman, p. xiii. 78 Massai, ‘Early Readers’; Smith, Chapter 2 of Shakespeare’s First Folio; Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers. 79 Jean-Christophe Mayer, ‘Early Buyers and Readers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. by Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 103–19 (pp. 111–12). 80 For the popularity of Shakespeare in print see Alan B. Farmer, ‘Shakespeare as Leading Playwright in Print, 1598–1608/09’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 87–104, and Chapter 1 of Erne’s Shakespeare and the Book Trade. 81 For details of Dering’s playbook purchases, see Sir Edward Dering, 1st bart., of Surrenden Dering and his ‘Booke of Expences’ 1617–1628, ed. by Laetitia Yeandle (Kent Archaeological Society, [n.d.]) [accessed 6 November 2019].

Introduction  27 2 Stallybrass and Chartier, pp. 41–42. 8 83 See for example fol. 86v of Edward Pudsey’s commonplace book (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. d. 3), discussed in Chapter 3, which features extracts from John Lyly’s Campaspe and Love’s Metamorphosis alongside extracts from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. 84 Laura Estill notes, similarly: ‘A reception history focused on Shakespeare elides the bulk of the archive, and, as such, the majority of evidence about responses to early English drama’. See ‘Shakespearean Extracts, Manuscript Cataloguing, and the Misrepresentation of the Archive’ in Rethinking Theatrical Documents, ed. by Stern, pp. 175–92 (p. 176). 85 Counts are enabled by DEEP; the count of Shakespeare quartos increases to 71 if he is assumed to be the author of The Taming of a Shrew. 86 See Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, Chapter 1; Erne, Book Trade, Chapter 5; Alan H. Nelson, ‘Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles: from the earliest years to 1616’ in Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading, ed. by Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library, 2005), pp. 49–73; T. A. Birrell, ‘Reading as Pastime: The Place of Light Literature in Some Gentlemen’s Libraries of the 17th Century’, in The Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library, 1620–1920, ed. by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1991), pp. 113–31; and on playbooks in libraries more generally, Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘“Rowme” of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries’ in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. by Cox and Kastan, pp. 113–30. 87 Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 169 (and ff. for a full discussion of Norwood’s playgoing and playreading). 88 Kirkman’s declaration is in his epistle to A Cure for a Cuckold, co-authored by John Webster, William Rowley, and (attributed) Thomas Heywood (1661, Wing W1220), sig. A2r; for biographical information on Kirkman see the ODNB. 89 On Humphrey Dyson’s playbooks, which can be identified by his autograph ownership inscription, see Nelson, pp. 64–69; on Richard Smith’s annotations, see Chapter 4, p. 199. For biographical information on both men, see the ODNB. 90 See Chapter 3, n. 5, for the rationale behind including the Scots poet Drummond in a survey of playreading ‘in early modern England’. 91 See Chapter 4, n. 4, for the scope of the survey of playbooks undertaken. 92 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, pp. 144 & 203–07. In addition to important earlier work by Brayman Hackel (esp. Chapter 5 of Reading Material) and Roberts (esp. Chapter 1 of Reading Shakespeare’s Poems), see as examples of such work two recent edited collections: Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer’s Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018); and Valerie Wayne’s Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020), in particular the chapters by Georgianna Ziegler, Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, and Lori Humphrey Newcomb.

1 Who read plays?

In 1590, the printer Richard Jones produced a small two-play collection. Printed in octavo, it contained the first and second parts of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, and was prefaced with what was, at the time, a novel addition to a playbook. This was an epistle to the readers, authored and signed by Jones himself, and addressed ‘To the Gentlemen Readers: and others that take pleasure in reading Histories’.1 This inclusive framing of the play’s readership was repeated in the epistle’s first sentence, which begged the attention not just of ‘Gentlemen’, but of ‘curteous readers whosoever’. It is these supposedly courteous ‘others’ that this chapter seeks to rehabilitate into the history of playreading: those anonymous readers who were not men belonging to the ranks of the gentry (or above), and therefore were far less likely to leave behind traces of their reading in the form of manuscript records (commonplace books, probate inventories, accounting records, library catalogues etc.) or collections of playbooks. These readers can be found, implicitly and explicitly, in the paratexts of early modern playbooks, and are a part of the market created by these books’ material form. While the absence of other evidence testifying to their ­existence means that they inevitably remain ‘imagined’, their historical ­existence is consistent with an early modern publishing industry in which, as James Raven puts it, there was ‘a general perception […] that market expansion was dependent on the increase of market area rather than of market depth in the sense of increased per capita income’.2 In other words, targeting as many readers as possible, regardless of the surety of their financial standing, seems to have been considered a more effective marketing ­strategy than targeting only those readers whose affluence might enable the ­purchase of multiple titles. This creates a tension between the wide spectrum of ­imagined readers sought by stationers and the narrowly conceived ‘ideal reader’ desired by playwrights and their associates. This tension, as shall be seen, plays out in playbooks’ multiple paratextual elements. Far from coalescing into one ‘ideal reader’, playreaders are always a plurality, and, in a proto-capitalist early modern England in which the acquisition of a novel commodity could matter more than its subsequent appreciation, frequently it is only in their purchasing power that they are ideal. Dramatic paratexts DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748-2

Who read plays?  29 invoke a multiplicity of potential readers at the same time as the material form of playbooks beckons these readers closer, signifying affordability and portability. Together, playbooks’ formal and paratextual elements offer evidence that stationers and playwrights anticipated a readership composed not simply of gentlemen readers, but also those archivally less visible ‘others’. In incorporating these ‘others’ into the history of early modern playreading, the demographic diversity of early modern playreaders becomes clear. This demographic diversity has been murkier prior to now in part because of the excellent use scholars have made of archival evidence such as that described in the opening paragraph in order to create a directory of elite playreaders like Sir Edward Dering, Sir John Harington, and others introduced in the previous chapter. A roll call of early modern men and women known to have read or owned quarto playbooks would include aristocratic readers such as Edward Conway, second Viscount Conway (1594–1665); John Holles, second Earl of Clare (1595–1666); Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland (1602–1668); Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent (1556–1632); Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1583–1636); and King Charles I (1600–1649).3 Known readers amongst the gentry include Dering; Harington; Sir Thomas Barrington of Hatfield Broad Oak (d. 1644); Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun (1580–1656); Sir Richard Wingfield, second Baronet of Letheringham and Easton, Suffolk (d. 1656); Elizabeth, Lady Puckering, (1621/22–1689), wife of Sir Henry Puckering, third baronet; Scots poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649); George Buc, Master of the Revels in James I’s reign (1560–1622); barrister and Justice of the Peace Richard Simonds (c. 1550–1611); and four country gentlemen: Edward Pudsey (1573–1613), William Freke (1605–1656), John Buxton (1608–1660), and Henry Oxinden (1609–1670).4 Of similar standing but a different gender to these last was Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677), who married a Staffordshire gentleman somewhat less intellectually driven than herself.5 While there are also a handful of highly literate members of the professional classes who are known to have owned and read playbooks, in general, attention has been focused on these ‘elite males’ (with an honourable mention for four well-to-do women named Frances or Elizabeth) who, according to Cyndia Susan Clegg, comprised the expected readership for plays.6 This focus has had a similar effect to the attention devoted to the history of reading plays by Shakespeare: it has elided the historical existence of non-elite and non-male playreaders. In 1991 T. A. Birrell, examining the place of ‘light literature’ (amongst which he included plays) in seventeenth-century gentlemen’s libraries, found it remarkable that such books would be read by the gentry. This was, he contended, ‘[t]he really interesting social and cultural point’, rather than ‘that the peasants read such stuff – they would, wouldn’t they?’7 In the intervening decades, this statement has undergone an almost complete reversal, and while it is now widely understood that playbooks were read by the gentry, scholars express scepticism about the extent to which they would have been read by those who were not ‘Gentlemen Readers’.8 As the

30  Who read plays? terms Birrell favours, the ‘peasants’ and ‘the bourgeois’, have been replaced by the language of ‘sorts’, it is the playreaders amongst the ‘lower’ and ‘middling’ sorts that have faded from view, such as the yeomen, artisans, shopkeepers, husbandmen, and servants who were increasingly literate over the course of the period, and for whom printed matter was increasingly affordable. The lack of focus on such non-elite playreaders is due in part to the upsurge of interest in the archival evidence associated with the figures named above, but also to a re-evaluation of the signifying features of the object that was the early modern playbook. The material attributes of the printed book have long been understood as repositories of meaning, capable of conveying information not just about contexts of production but also probable reception. While it remains generally accepted that these material attributes ‘indicated something’ about genre, readership, circulation, and mode of engagement, when it comes to quarto playbooks, certain long-standing assumptions about what that ‘something’ was have recently been unpicked.9 Scholars have asked whether particular aspects of the early modern playbook have been overfreighted with significance, in particular as regards the story told about the genre’s readership and cultural status. By way of introduction then, to the textual objects that sit at the heart of this study, the following section considers what – if anything – can be inferred about playreaders from four key nonlexical elements of their reading material: the quarto playbook’s size, paper, (lack of) binding, and typeface. In doing so, it reasserts playbooks as a print genre that had the capacity to reach the same wide range of readers who would have been consuming other genres of early modern ‘cheap print’. The subsequent two sections present supporting evidence from playbooks’ paratexts that implicitly or explicitly acknowledges this heterogeneous readership, while the chapter’s final section examines the strategies the paratexts’ writers used in their attempts to control the responses of this ‘great variety’ of readers.

The materiality of playbooks revisited What does a quarto playbook look like? Most of the playbooks that scholars and students encounter today look different from the original objects that would have been presented to book buyers in early modern England. Those of us not privileged enough to work near research libraries with rare books holdings consult two-dimensional facsimiles on websites such as Early English Books Online or the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto site. Even the physical playbooks held by institutions such as the British Library have often morphed into something far from their sixteenth- or seventeenth-century form. Early modern readers would have encountered printed play quartos as unbound pamphlets, or as composite volumes known as Sammelbände, in which multiple plays were bound together, but extant playbooks are generally bound individually in later bindings. In addition, they may have lost their original size and shape thanks to over-zealous collectors who cropped their page margins in order to remove manuscript

Who read plays?  31

Figure 1.1   An unbound, stab-stitched quarto playbook: final page of The London Prodigall (1605, STC 22333, Folger copy 2, sig. G4v). Used by permiss­ion of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

traces of prior reading. For the early modern playreader, however, a quarto was a slim ‘square-shaped book […] created by folding sheets of printing paper in half twice, thereby creating four leaves and eight pages per sheet’, with these pages measuring approximately 7 × 9 inches.10 It was most likely printed on paper known as ‘pot’ paper, ‘the ordinary stock of the [English]

32  Who read plays? publishing trade’.11 A single quarto playbook was sold unbound, roughly ‘stab-stitched’ along its central fold in order to hold the sheets together.12 It was generally set in a roman type called pica, replacing the black letter that predominated in printed drama of the earlier Tudor period.13 In early modern cultural discourse, the image of the quarto is often used metaphorically to denote something of lesser magnitude, in many cases by opposing it to the largest publication format, the folio. For instance, in Henry Glapthorne’s 1639 comedy, Wit in a Constable, the character of Thorowgood bemoans his gulling at the hands of Clara and Grace, the women he and his friend Valentine are courting. The women’s gleeful mockery of their other suitors pales in comparison to what he has experienced, declares Thorowgood: ‘the rest were made | But fooles in Quarto, but I finde my selfe | An asse in Folio’ (sig. D3v). In a similar vein, Thomas Randolph’s 1630 university play Aristippus features a scene in which the title character is praised for his depth of knowledge when compared with that of two unnamed ‘scholars’. The scholars are dismissed and Aristippus lauded with the claim that ‘one Epitome of his in quarto is worth a volume of these Dunces’ (sig. A4r). The pithy quarto is opposed to the larger ‘volume’, presumably a folio: Richard Brome will later (and pejoratively) use the adjective ‘voluminous’ to describe a folio playbook, John Suckling’s 1638 Aglaura.14 Even in non-dramatic works without a thematic focus on books or learning, the metaphor surfaces: in one of the ‘sundry poems’ appended to Robert Fletcher’s 1656 translation of Martial’s Epigrams, the poetic speaker queries the value of a life of restraint, asking whether he should instead act with such excessive immorality, ‘That when I dye, where others goe before | In whining venial streams, and quarto pages, | My flouds may rise in folio, sinck all ages?’15 Given quartos’ comparative smallness, their size may, as Mark Bland suggests, have had something to do with their portability and thus the audience they reached, but only if they were small in multiple respects – in short, only if they were thin instead of fat. A quarto’s pages might be half the width and height of a folio’s, but both books could be equally bulky: William Prynne’s antitheatrical manifesto Histriomastix, for example, while printed in quarto, is over a thousand pages long (a fact he is somewhat defensive about in his epistle to the reader).16 Such a thick book would have had a limited readership, not only because Prynne’s diatribe presumably appealed to a select audience, but because the significant cost of the paper involved in preparing such a hefty publication would have been factored into the book’s price. As Joad Raymond points out, ‘the single most costly element in the printing of a book was the paper’, and as a consequence ‘paper was a major determinant of the price of books’.17 It is this fact that has led to a degree of confusion amongst scholars about whether, based on the amount of paper they contained, quarto playbooks belonged among the genres of ‘cheap print’. These were the publications that, while also being read by the educated elite, were theoretically affordable for the ‘middling’ and ‘lower’

Who read plays?  33 sorts whose burgeoning literacy levels throughout the period allowed them to participate in the marketplace of print. At the start of this century, the narrative told about the affordability of playbooks was a straightforward one. According to one pair of scholars, ‘the playbook always appeared as a cheap quarto’; for another, the quarto format ‘suggest[ed] a pamphlet-like publication – relatively inexpensive and disposable’.18 One account by a very influential scholar noted that these ‘six-penny pamphlets’ provided ‘a relatively cheap way of happily recalling a performance or catching up with one that had unhappily been missed’.19 A decade later, ‘quarto-sized playbooks’ were included among the genres of ‘cheap print’ listed in a handbook of early modern literature, and a chapter on ‘Playbooks’ was a natural addition to the aforementioned first volume of The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (subtitled Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660).20 Yet it was in the course of that chapter that Zachary Lesser asserted that ‘[t]he cost of playbooks […] probably prevented the lower sorts from purchasing them’.21 His paradoxical statement, given the volume’s subtitle, is echoed by Jean-Christophe Mayer when he states that ‘the price of playbooks may have been high for people of modest means’.22 The narrative about the cheapness of playbooks – like that of quartos more generally – has developed some holes.23 Were playbooks cheap or weren’t they? Given that numerous types of evidence point towards the conclusion that play quartos were conceived of as potential reading mat­ erial for readers from across the social spectrum, it seems crucial to interrogate further the supposed barrier to access created by their cost. Paper is an important element in this interrogation because it is a key part of defining the category of ‘cheap print’. In one of the most important studies of the subject, Tessa Watt places within this category printed texts of up to four sheets of paper, retailing for fourpence or less.24 As the median length of playbooks is nine-and-a-half sheets, they cannot be considered ‘cheap’ according to the first of these criteria. They also cannot be considered ‘cheap’ according to the second: as numerous dramatic paratexts confirm, the standard price for a quarto playbook was sixpence.25 Yet as Tara Lyons points out, ‘not all quartos were created equal’. She hypothesises that booksellers might have ‘charge[d] more for plays that were longer and used more paper’; equally, they might have charged less for plays that were shorter and used less.26 This would push some plays into the realm of cheap print: Peter Blayney, who believes that plays would have been priced according to their paper content, suggests that a shorter playbook such as the anonymous A Yorkshire Tragedy, containing only four sheets of paper, would plausibly have retailed at 3.42d (presumably rounded up to the nearest pence or halfpenny).27 Were playbooks sold at prices that reflected their paper content? The historical evidence is unclear. Firstly, certain sources indicate that the understanding of playbooks, collectively, as ‘six-penny pamphlets’ overrode any variation in the amount of paper an individual playbook might require. This is demonstrated

34  Who read plays? by the entries for single plays in the Norfolk gentleman John Buxton’s records of books purchased between 1627 and 1631. Although sixpence was the price Buxton outlaid in 1630 for a playbook of the median length of nine-and-a-half sheets, Thomas Middleton’s newly published A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, it was also the price he paid for another play published that year, Philip Massinger’s The Renegado.28 At eleven-and-a-half sheets, Massinger’s play should have been selling for more than sixpence if priced according to paper content: possibly closer to eightpence, the rounded price for a twelve-sheet playbook according to the formula used by Blayney.29 A decade later, in 1640–41, Humphrey Moseley was selling copies of a playbook of exactly twelve sheets, John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas, and pricing them at the standard sixpence.30 Conversely, in a bookseller’s account prepared for Sir Richard Wingfield in 1654, three relatively recently published shorter plays ranging from five to six-anda-half sheets long also sold for sixpence each (the same price paid by Wingfield for other, more paper-rich playbooks as part of this purchase).31 Evidence such as this seems to indicate that booksellers – and book-­ buyers – were willing to accept a standard price for playbooks (indeed, one that stayed constant for at least four and a half decades), presumably on the understanding that any over-charging or under-­charging based on paper cost would come out in the wash. Other evidence complicates this conclusion. As discussed in the previous chapter, frequent play-buyer Sir Edward Dering assiduously recorded in his accounts book the numerous playbook purchases he made between the years 1619 and 1624. It is apparent from Dering’s accounts that although very occasionally he bought a single playbook, most often he made bulk purchases (sometimes of multiple copies of the same play). And the prices paid for these bulk lots of ‘playbookes’ do not divide neatly into multiples of six. Of the twenty entries in his accounts book that record the purchase of multiple untitled ‘playbookes’ or ‘playes’, averaging the individual cost of each playbook in a bulk lot produces five instances of plays retailing at sixpence exactly; five instances of them retailing at less than this; and ten of them retailing at more than this.32 The crucial point, however, is that the total amount often does not divide without a remainder. Playbooks could cost different amounts. Sixpence was not the inevitable price of a playbook, and plays could be both more expensive than this, and also closer in price to the publications that Ian Green places at the ‘bottom end’ of a scale denoting price and quality: ‘almanacs, broadsheets and chapbooks, priced at a penny or two up to threepence or fourpence’.33 For example, on 10 February 1623, Dering bought six playbooks for a total of 2 shillings – averaging out at fourpence each.34 These variations in price could reflect Dering’s patronage of booksellers who did care about pricing books according to their paper content, or it could reflect something specific about the titles he was purchasing. Playbooks that were out of print and therefore hard to come by might have been among those that cost more than sixpence: John Buxton paid 1s. 6d. in 1628 for a copy

Who read plays?  35 of George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, which had last been printed in 1608.35 But what about those that cost less than sixpence? The records kept by another elite playreader hint at a possible explanation. In the autograph library catalogue of the Scots poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, compiled in 1611, next to the entry for Romeo and Juliet is the price 4d.36 When the nineteenth-century scholar David Laing made an early examination of this manuscript, he posited that the prices recorded next to the titles in the catalogue are what Drummond paid for them, rather than a later valuation.37 If we follow his lead and assume similarly, a conundrum presents itself. As he records elsewhere, Drummond read (and likely bought) this play in 1606, seven years after its most recent quarto publication; we know that it was the 1599 second quarto of Romeo and Juliet that he read because it is this edition, with Drummond’s characteristic manuscript markings, that is now in the University of Edinburgh library.38 The second quarto of Romeo and Juliet is not a short playbook, clocking in at 92 pages (eleven-and-a-half sheets). If price were set by paper content, Drummond should by rights have paid more than 6d. for this play, not significantly less; the fact that it was seven years since the popular play had last been printed might also have justified a higher price tag, one that signalled that available copies were dwindling (leading to John Smethwick’s issue of a third quarto in 1609). The conundrum may be resolved by Robert H. Macdonald’s observation that Drummond had no aversion to buying second-hand books.39 The second-hand book market and the influence it may have had upon playbook pricing deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Maureen Bell notes that this market ‘is hard to pin down’ but concludes that ‘[t]he circulation of second-hand plays was probably widespread, but largely unidentifiable’.40 Recently, Maria Kirk has identified a significant instance of second-hand plays being purchased in the late 1630s, when Algernon Percy, the 10th Earl of Northumberland, bought around 148 quarto playbooks.41 As was customary amongst readers who could afford to buy playbooks in bulk, these were bound together into Sammelbände, resulting in 16 bound volumes containing between six and eleven plays each, now known as the ‘Petworth House Plays’.42 Via an analysis of the manuscript marks and marginalia within these playbooks, Kirk is able to demonstrate that many of them had previous owners, and that the bound volumes represent a bulk purchase in which new and second-hand texts were acquired indiscriminately. This is logical, given that second-hand books were sold alongside new books – indeed, this is one of the reasons the second-hand book trade is hard to map, as booksellers’ inventories of second-hand stock, if they ever existed, do not survive.43 The presence of ‘graffitied’ second-hand playbooks in the Petworth collection implies that even elite early modern playreaders lacked an aversion to ‘used books’; it may also provide evidence that it was second-hand plays which retailed at the sorts of prices more usually associated with ‘cheap print’.44

36  Who read plays? When discussing the provenance of the Petworth plays, Kirk notes that many of them were likely purchased in unbound ‘bundles’ from booksellers, and it was these bundles that dictated the contents of the bound volumes, rather than (in most cases) less arbitrary defining attributes such as theme or author.45 This leads her to interpret an annotation on the title page of the Petworth copy of John Marston’s Parasitaster as the likely price paid for the bundle of ten second-hand plays that became the contents of the twelfth Petworth volume. That price is 2 shillings and sixpence, meaning that the price per playbook would have been threepence. Given that more than half of the playbooks in this volume are damaged or heavily annotated, Kirk finds this ‘not an entirely unreasonable amount’.46 Cheaper pricing for some second-hand playbooks is supported by the few probate inventories from the period that include appraisals of individual playbooks. In 1610, a copy of the thirteen-and-a-half-sheet Sejanus quarto, then five years old, was appraised at only 4d.; in 1613, a play of a more modest length, Thomas Middleton’s eight-sheet A Trick to Catch the Old One, also five years old, was appraised at a mere 2d.47 If playbooks such as these made it onto the second-hand market at these prices, an alternative explanation presents itself for the sub-sixpence cost of the playbooks purchased by Drummond and Dering. Playbooks might become ‘cheap print’, even if they had not started out that way. And this, again, would have had ramifications for the breadth of their readership. As Richard Preiss points out, ‘[t]he used book trade […] would have gradually filtered playbooks down to lower-income patrons’: those who bought chapbooks, ballads, almanacs, and the like.48 Another way in which playbooks might have become cheaper and more widely accessible was through distance from their initial publication. Although evidence such as John Buxton’s hefty outlay for the twentyyear-old Bussy D’Ambois indicates that, for the right buyer, older plays could boast a high price tag, other sources suggest that Watt is right to hold that titles containing more paper ‘became more affordable the older they grew. As they fell out of favour with fashionable Londoners they came into favour with social groups who could begin to afford them’.49 Watt’s argument is that subsequent editions – reprints – could be cheaper to buy than first editions, something Blayney implicitly counters in his calculation of the returns to a publisher on a reprinted second edition.50 Regardless of which scholar is correct, it can be noted that playbooks are not quite like other books, in that they have already been ‘published’ even before they make it into print – via performance in a public playhouse. Watt’s observation uncannily echoes the statement made by the writer of the epistle to Lording Barry’s The Family of Love (1608), who voices his disappointment that the play was not published when the general voice of the people had seald it for good, and the newnesse of it made it much more desired, then at this

Who read plays?  37 time: For Plaies in this Citie are like wenches new falne to the trade, onelie desired of your neatest gallants, whiles the’are fresh: when they grow stale they must be vented by Termers and Cuntrie chapmen.51 For the epistle’s writer, the ‘first’ publication of the play is its performance, and it is the length of the gap between the play’s initial staging and its first appearance in print that can widen a playbook’s potential market. This is because older plays supposedly join the genres of cheap print that are distributed provincially by ‘termers’ and ‘country chapmen’. According to William St. Clair, the reference to the ‘venting’ of plays by ‘termers’ demonstrates that: [L]aw students who bought the light and portable quarto playbooks on their visits to London, sold them soon afterwards in order to buy more recent plays, evidence that such texts were read extensively, and that the velocity of circulation from reader to reader was rapid.52 This is a somewhat creative, if plausible, extrapolation – certainly the reference seems to reinforce the existence of a second-hand market for printed drama, as the termers (i.e law students) must themselves have initially purchased the playbooks. However, it does not necessarily follow that the students’ sale of the plays ‘presumably [took place] when they returned to the country [i.e. Oxford or Cambridge]’: the aspiring lawyers may equally have circulated their playbooks amongst their fellows also sojourning in London.53 ‘Country chapmen’, however, would certainly have plied their wares in the provinces. The question is, given that the epistle to The Family of Love and Sir Thomas Bodley’s famous reference to plays as ‘baggage books’ are the only evidence we have of playbooks seemingly being distributed via the chapman network, did they in fact reach a provincial, non-elite readership in this way?54 In order to arrive at an answer, I want to move to consideration of another aspect of playbooks’ material form – the fact that they were sold as stab-stitched pamphlets.55 In the past, this fact alone would have been enough to relegate playbooks to the category of ‘cheap print’, indicating their supposed similarity to other ephemeral, ‘popular’ publications. Yet as Alan Farmer and Aaron Pratt have more recently shown, this narrative does not stand up to closer scrutiny. In comparison with other publications, playbooks were not particularly ephemeral, and the ‘stab-stitching’ of their pages along the central fold was not an indication of printed plays’ low status as a genre, but simply the normal way of securing together the leaves of any publication under a certain length.56 What is worth considering, however, is the democratising effect that playbooks’ pamphlet format may have had on their readership – not because it had a particular signifying effect, but because it enhanced their portability and, therefore, their reach. Raymond holds that ‘[a]s pamphlets were more mobile than weighty, bound volumes,

38  Who read plays? and accessible to a wider, less wealthy readership, itinerant vendors played an important part in their distribution’.57 Watt, however, casts doubt on the extent to which quarto pamphlets, as opposed to the even smaller octavo or duodecimo publications, would have regularly found their way into chapmen’s packs.58 As the quotations from early modern sources above demonstrate, quartos were small: were they sufficiently small to be included among the ‘small books’ found in the bags of the ‘country chapmen’ referred to in the epistle to The Family of Love?59 When Richard Brome mocks the pretentiousness of the publication in folio of John Suckling’s Aglaura, he scoffs at the ‘great voluminous Pamphlet’ whose ‘Giant-bulk’ destines it ‘in Libraries to hang in chaines’, and states his preference instead for ‘sociable Pocket-books’. Their opposition within Brome’s verse to the ‘empty Folios’ which ‘only please the Cooks’ indicates that these are smaller format publications, able to be carried around in readers’ pockets and thereby lent to others, earning them the epithet ‘sociable’ – unlike the library-bound folios, whose readership is restricted to those permitted to access such elite spaces.60 It would be logical to assume that these ‘Pocket-books’ are quarto playbooks, the format in which, as we have seen, the majority of single plays are printed throughout the period (including most of Brome’s own dramatic works), although this assumption is counterbalanced by the fact that most other contemporary references to ‘pocketbooks’ seem to have denoted the octavo or duodecimo volumes that were made deliberately small in order to enhance their portability.61 However, enough references to the portable nature of quartos indicate that, conceptually at least, ‘small books’ included anything that wasn’t a folio. A 1617 sermon by John Hales, published in quarto, refers to ‘pocket volumes in this kinde’.62 John Norden, the author of The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1607), makes the creative decision to present the rudiments of the craft of surveying via a Socratic dialogue, and has his Surveyor announce that he has compiled a set of mathematical tables to facilitate the surveying process, and ‘set them downe in a little booke’ as ‘they may the better fall into leaves of a portable booke, being before in long and troublesome rolles’.63 The tables follow: the book, of course, is The Surveyor’s Dialogue itself, published in quarto. And when Thomas Heywood compiles his Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World (1640), he limits himself to nine, ‘though I could produce infinites to make this pocket booke rather voluminus then portable’.64 The ‘portable pocket booke’ is a quarto. While quartos may be larger than octavos or duodecimos, they are quite evidently still conceived of as portable. The historically portable nature of quarto pamphlets, and their inclusion among the ‘baggage books’ that were sold by itinerant chapmen, has also been established by Watt, despite her primary focus on octavo and duodecimo publications. Examining the stock of the so-called ‘ballad partners’, a group of stationers who began to specialise during the Jacobean era in the production and sale of broadside ballads, she notes that these

Who read plays?  39 men appear to have been particularly savvy when it came to regional distribution, with their shops located for proximity to routes out of the city.65 Proof that their stock was carried by chapmen along these routes is provided by John Taylor the Water Poet, who in his Carriers cosmographie (1637) refers to readers acquiring this quarto pamphlet via just such a distribution network.66 While Shakespeare’s Autolycus has cemented for us the image of the travelling ballad-seller, jostling alongside the printed ballads in some chapmen’s packs were quarto pamphlets which, in size and format, were identical to playbooks. The likelihood that some of these pamphlets were in fact plays is supported by the publishing portfolio of the distribution-savvy ‘ballad partners’, which included not just broadside ballads and the works of John Taylor, but numerous quarto playbooks. Many of these playbooks were either reprints of older titles or shorter than average in terms of their paper content, two factors which – as discussed above – may potentially have earned them a price that would have aligned them with the other genres of ‘cheap print’ for sale by travelling chapmen. For instance, two of the ‘ballad partners’, John Wright and Thomas Pavier, between them published over a third of the pro­fessional plays produced throughout the period whose length meant they could be printed on six sheets of paper or fewer.67 John Wright, furthermore, specialised – as Zachary Lesser has shown – in publishing reprints of older plays, producing multiple later editions of three of the period’s bestsellers: the anonymous Mucedorus, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.68 Whether or not such ‘tried and true’ titles were expected to retail for less than more recently premiered plays, they were certainly reaching out to a readership that was not restricted to the ‘neatest gallants’: Faustus and The Shoemaker’s Holiday were printed in black letter, the typeface used for all broadside ballads, thus foregrounding their similarity to that genre of definitively cheap print at a time when other play publishers had eschewed the typeface in favour of roman. Discussing The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Lesser also notes that ‘the prefatory material [i.e the songs that are printed prior to the main play text] strongly resembles the publishing mainstay of John Wright and his partners: the ballad’.69 Wright’s Faustus editions, moreover, featured a woodcut illustration on their title pages, as did his 1615 edition of Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London. So too did Augustine Matthewes’ 1623 reprint of The Spanish Tragedy, which was to be sold at the shop of John Grismond, another ‘ballad partner’, and John Trundle’s edition of the 1617 Thomas Middleton and William Rowley play A Fair Quarrel, which was included amongst Wright’s own stock.70 As title page woodcuts were often repurposed from or for broadside ballads, these illustrations served once again to align the playbooks with cheap print.71 If any plays were likely to be sold by ‘country chapmen’, they were the plays published or stocked by John Wright and his partners. Traces

40  Who read plays? of the playbooks’ eventual arrival at a rural destination can possibly be discerned in the presence of passages from the anonymous comedy Wily Beguiled in a folk play from Broughton in Lincolnshire: a 1635 reprint of Wily Beguiled was to be sold at the shop of Francis Coles, the ballad partner who succeeded Thomas Pavier in 1626.72 It is common to observe that provincially located elite playreaders such as the seventeenth-century gentlewoman Frances Wolfreston may well have purchased playbooks from travelling chapmen as well as provincial bookshops, but the point made in the above paragraphs is that the playbooks that made their way into the packs of chapmen were unlikely to have been those that were affordable only for the likes of Wolfreston.73 Rather, they were likely to resemble in price, size, and other material features the genres of cheap print being consumed by Raymond’s ‘wider, less wealthy readership’ and even some among Lesser’s ‘lower sorts’. Certain playbooks were clearly more expensive than others, but it is also clear that in a variety of circumstances playbooks – short or long – could also be cheap or perhaps more accurately affordable for all those who were sufficiently solvent to be participating as consumers in the early modern print marketplace, particularly given fluctuations in disposable incomes over the course of the period.74 This, at least, is what is suggested by the material aspects of playbooks discussed so far. By way of concluding this discussion of playbooks’ material form, I want to briefly consider a further playbook feature that has in the past been taken to indicate a restricted readership but has more recently been re-evaluated: typeface. Most early modern professional plays printed in quarto after 1584 are printed in roman type. Like other material features of the quarto playbook, this has been taken to signify something about their readership, namely, that plays were less likely to be read by women and the less educated members of the middling and lower sorts. This is because roman type was supposedly less legible than black letter to those who had not progressed in their education. According to Keith Thomas, writing in the 1980s, ‘black letter literacy […] was a more basic skill than roman-type literacy; and it did not follow that the reader fluent in one was equally at home in the other’.75 This view led to the assumption that books printed in roman type, such as most playbooks, excluded from their readership those who had not advanced past the initial stages of literacy acquisition. More recently, scholars have upended this assumption. Adrian Weiss, for example, points out that both primers and other texts often categorised as ‘popular’, such as ballads, regularly made use of a variety of different typefaces. He concludes: ‘In short, Elizabethan children were exposed to roman and italic as well as black letter typefaces from the beginning of their reading education’, resulting in a ‘widespread familiarity with all three typefaces, especially among commoners’.76 Readers later in the period would have been similarly typographically ambidextrous, or, increasingly, used to reading texts printed predominantly in roman.77

Who read plays?  41 Playbooks were not marked out ‘for’ a certain class of readers because of their roman type. Instead, as I’ve argued throughout this section, they were a print genre that – both due to and in spite of its material features – had the capacity to be bought and read by a demographic of readers nearly as wide-ranging as those who frequented the London theatres in which the plays were originally performed. Further confirmation of this can be seen in the playbook paratexts that explicitly invoke those playgoing ­playreaders and the wide range of literacies to be found amongst them. It is to the evidence of these paratexts that I turn in the following section.

London readers and the continuum of literacies As the previous section argued, it seems probable that quarto playbooks would have reached the hands or ears of socially diverse readers outside of London. Evidence to support this claim is at times conjectural; more concrete indications of a socially variegated playreading market can be found by focusing in on the location where those printed plays were first performed. London’s heterogeneous market is repeatedly invoked by playwrights and stationers who assume that those audience members who have already seen the play performed in one of the metropolis’s playhouses will also be the playreaders with the most interest in purchasing the printed playbook. The wide range of educational, class, and gender backgrounds to be found amongst the audiences of professional plays is reflected in the paratexts penned by stationers, playwrights, and their allies who both anticipate and are wary of such a broad readership for plays. Tiffany Stern, discerning a connection between early modern playbooks’ title pages and the play-bills for performances at London playhouses, remarks: ‘Marketed using the same lurid language, books and plays were almost certainly intended for the same people’.78 The overlap in the playgoing and playreading markets is hinted at in a number of different ways. One is through playbooks’ capacity, as pamphlets, to have been sold not just by chapmen travelling outside of London, but also by the hawkers, pedlars, and mercury women who sold books and other items outside the entrances to the locations where the plays now available in print had originally been performed.79 Stern has established the presence of reading material both inside the playhouses and at their doors, where various genres of print were sold by both ‘mixed-goods salesmen whose trays included books, and pamphlet-sellers who sold books exclusively’.80 Despite the lack of definitive evidence that these books included plays, it seems entirely plausible that they did so, particularly as the vendors of ‘small books’ at the playhouse doors apparently had other non-dramatic quarto pamphlets amongst their stock.81 Just as contemporary London theatres sell souvenir programmes that include the text of the play, so too would it have made sense to sell the texts of early modern plays to those who had freshly enjoyed them in performance.

42  Who read plays? That this was understood by stationers is implied by the fact that right throughout the period, it is the audience members at professionally performed plays who are assumed in dramatic paratexts to be the most likely readers of subsequently printed playbooks. In Jones’s revised epistle for the 1605 Tamburlaine quarto, he announces his hope that ‘this tragicall Discourse […] will bee now no lesse acceptable unto you to reade […], then it has bene (lately) delightfull for manye of you to see, when the same was shewed in London upon stages’ (sig. A2r). According to Jones, the printed playbook is most likely to appeal to those who have already seen (and enjoyed) the play performed, the silent ‘few’ who have not seen it set against the ‘manye’ who have. Over two decades later, in 1628, the stationer who writes the epistle for the third edition of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Philaster still assumes that the market for the playbook will be primarily composed of playgoers, announcing to ‘The Understanding Gentrie’ that the play has been ‘affectionately taken, and approoved by the Seeing Auditors, or Hearing Spectators, (of which sort, I take, or conceive you to bee the greatest part)’ (sig. A2r). Still later, in 1654, the epistle that prefaces the anonymous Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany (attributed to George Chapman on its title page), addresses itself simply ‘To the Reader’, rejecting the common adjectival epithet ‘courteous’ on the assumption that its readers who have seen the play in performance will already be favourably predisposed towards its printed incarnation: ‘I Shall not need to bespeak thee Courteous’, declares the unnamed writer of the epistle, ‘if thou hast seen this Piece presented with all the Elegance of Life and Action on the Black-Friers Stage’ (sig. A2r).82 Such epistles underscore the implication created on numerous playbook title pages by an advertisement of the play’s performance origin – that prior performance, in most cases, is a selling point, and that, among other things, a playbook is often a ‘way of happily recalling a performance or catching up with one that had unhappily been missed’.83 Of the 678 paratextually distinct quartos of professional plays printed in London between 1584 and 1660, nearly two-thirds feature an unambiguous title page indication of public performance origin.84 The preponderance of claims that the play contained within the printed book is ‘As it was Acted’ or ‘Presented’ (at either an outdoor or indoor playhouse) and the variations thereon confirm that, anomalous figures such as Walter Burre aside, publishers throughout the period thought it expedient to reach out to those potential purchasers who had been in the audience at a performance of the play and wished to acquire it in its textual form.85 In doing so, they targeted what Cyndia Susan Clegg has argued should be understood quite literally as a ‘great variety of readers’, their social backgrounds as various as their reading abilities.86 Clegg draws on the work of Andrew Gurr in arguing for the social diversity of playhouse audiences, quoting his observation in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London that the composition of these audiences would

Who read plays?  43 have encompassed ‘the complete social range’, stretching from ‘earls and even a queen to penniless rogues […], families of beggars, and the unemployed’.87 Both Gurr and Clegg, however, stress the importance of the large ‘middle stratum’ in furbishing London playgoers.88 Representative professions within this bloc were artisans, merchants, schoolmasters, and scriveners, amongst whom there would be varying levels of literacy and wealth. Some might be on the make, sufficiently wealthy to pay the 6d. entrance fee for the private playhouses, and perhaps even to buy their way into the ranks of the gentry. Others might be journeymen employees, skiving off from work for the afternoon to see a play. There would have been a number of women among them, particularly the wives of citizens (tradesmen who were employers rather than employees). Indeed, it was citizens and artisans who were, according to Gurr, the ‘silent majority’ amongst the diverse playgoing body, even if – as usual – more documentary evidence remains for the presence of gentlemen and other elites.89 The wide social spectrum of playgoers would have benefited from an equally wide range of educational opportunities that manifested themselves in what Keith Thomas calls an ‘elaborate hierarchy of literary skills’.90 This ranged from what Heidi Brayman Hackel dubs ‘abecedarian literacy’ – a ‘rudimentary level of reading unaccompanied by writing skills’, possessed by figures including ‘women, laborers, and servants’ – to what Wyn Ford calls ‘cultural literacy’, which he associates with ‘the literary and artistic concerns of polite society [in other words, members of the gentry] which involved knowledge of the classics’.91 Adam Fox further points out the number of ‘merchants and specialist craftsmen’ among those two-thirds of Londoners who by the 1640s could sign their name (and therefore read fairly fluently), constituting the midpoint on Brayman Hackel’s ‘continuum of illiteracies and literacies’.92 And as she observes, even those from the lower social orders who possessed the most basic level of literacy – those who leave no record in the archives because they lack the ability to write – were perceived ‘by their contemporaries as newly engaged in the marketplace of print during the period’.93 Crucially, the paratexts of professional playbooks are acutely conscious of the hierarchy of reading abilities likely to be exhibited by their potential readers, once more implying that plays were expected to be bought and read by readers from a broad range of educational and therefore social backgrounds, such as those to be found within early modern playhouse audiences. Ben Jonson’s first epigram in his 1616 Works, ‘To the Reader’, runs thus: ‘Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my booke in hand, | To reade it well: that is, to understand’.94 In playbook paratexts ‘understanding’ is routinely portrayed as the most desirable category of reader response, implying a higher level of comprehension than the ability simply to read (rather than to ‘reade […] well’). ‘Understanding’ requires the type of literacy that Ford identifies as ‘cultural’. Jonson had already rehearsed this trope in 1611, preparing the two epistles of the first Catiline quarto. Famously, one is addressed to

44  Who read plays? ‘The Reader extraordinary’, who is Jonson’s ideal reader: the ‘better Man’, to whom Jonson ‘submit[s] [his] selfe, and worke’. However, the other constitutes Jonson’s acknowledgement that his play may also be read by ‘The Reader in Ordinarie’, whose assessment of the play Jonson cannot guarantee will cohere with his own, and whose lack of discernment will lead him to ‘commend the two first Actes, with the people, because they are the worst; and dislike the Oration of Cicero, in regard you read some pieces of it, at Schoole, and understand them not yet’ [my italics].95 He will similarly imply that ‘understanding’ is superior to ‘reading’ in the epistle to The Alchemist, published a year later. The epistle headed ‘To the Reader’ begins, ‘If thou beest more, thou art an Understander, and then I trust thee’, Jonson declaring that whoever can do ‘more’ than simply ‘read’ will gain the playwright’s trust.96 This difference of ability between ‘reading’ and ‘understanding’ is reiterated once more by ‘W. B.’ in the commendatory verse he contributes to the 1624 quarto of Philip Massinger’s The Bondman. ‘W. B.’ points out the differing rewards that the playbook will offer to those with differing levels of reading ability. The reader is assumed to have seen the play in performance – ‘’Tis granted for your twelve-pence you did sit, | And See, and Heare’ – but not to have appreciated the play on the level that reading it will enable (the playgoing reader is assumed ‘not yet’ to have ‘Underst[oo]d’ it). Therefore: The Author (in a Christian pitty) takes Care of your good, and Prints it for your sakes. That such as will but venter Six-pence more, May Know, what they but Saw, and Heard before: ’Twill not be money lost, if you can reed, (Ther’s all the doubt now,) but your gaines exceed If you can Understand, and you are made Free of the freest, and the noblest Trade.97 As Benjamin Townley Spencer points out in his modern edition, ‘twelvepence’ would have bought one of the better seats at the Cockpit, where the play was performed, and the playgoing reader who is addressed is thus an affluent one, capable of shelling out half as much again to re-experience the play in print.98 He is, however, one whose ability to read is suspect – ‘(Ther’s all the doubt now,)’ – perhaps because his affluence has a professional rather than a social foundation. Spencer notes that the phrase ‘[f]ree of’ in the final line ‘is used in its technical sense’, i.e. ‘being a member of a city guild who [is] an employer as distinct from an employee or artisan’.99 The reader is thus constructed as a wealthy citizen, whose financial success has not until now been dependent on the ability to read, but whose social standing may improve through his purchase and ‘understanding’ of the play. The scepticism of ‘W. B.’ that a purchaser of the play will be able to read it, let alone understand it, belies the fact that there is a third category of

Who read plays?  45 potential playreaders, who occupy the opposite end of the spectrum of literacy that places those who ‘understand’ at its top end and those who merely ‘read’ in the middle. These are those readers who, as the epistle ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ prefacing the 1623 Shakespeare folio has it, ‘can but spell’, thereby exhibiting Brayman Hackel’s ‘abecedarian literacy’. As argued in the Introduction, the folio’s price prevents these unskilful readers from being, for this volume, anything but rhetorical, but they appear with sufficient frequency in the paratexts of far more affordable quarto playbooks that Heminge and Condell’s address appears as a consequence to respond to a real situation in the market for smaller format quarto publications (in which form the previously printed Shakespeare plays have all appeared). For instance, in his contribution to the commendatory verses that preface the first quarto of John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, Francis Beaumont declares that he has had to be ‘perswaded to have hurld’: These few, ill spoken lines, into the world, Both to be read, and censurd of, by those, Whose very reading makes verse senceles prose, Such as must spend above an houre, to spell A challenge on a post, to know it well.100 Beaumont’s verse, of course, forms part of the material item that is the playbook of The Faithful Shepherdess: the potential unskilled reader of Beaumont’s poem is also the potential unskilled reader of Fletcher’s play. The unskilful reading indicated by the verb ‘spell’ is once more recalled in Richard Woolsall’s commendatory verse in Lewis Sharpe’s 1640 The Noble Stranger. Woolsall notes that the ‘smooth numbers’ of Sharpe’s verse will ‘preferre | Thy Stranger to the Globe-like Theatre’. ‘But yet’, he continues, ‘perhaps some squint-ey’d sot will look | Worse then Magicians when they spell the book | Of exorcisme’ (sig. A4r). The verb ‘spell’ to describe the magicians’ reading is rhetorically transferred – more mundanely – to the ‘sot’, who, squinting over the page as he reads with difficulty, is the paratextual fellow of Beaumont’s reader who struggles to spell the challenge on the post. A further example that opposes rudimentary ‘spelling’ to a more desirable ‘reading’ can be found in Jonson’s epistle to the 1631 The New Inn, when he experiments with publication in octavo format. Materially distinguishing his play from the majority of other playbooks does not assuage Jonson’s anxiety about his potential readers. Heading his epistle ‘The Dedication, to the Reader’, Jonson begins: ‘If thou bee such, I make thee my Patron, and dedicate the Piece to thee: If not so much, would I had bene at the charge of thy better litterature’ (sig. (*)2r). Jonson gives ‘literature’ the OED’s first meaning: ‘[f]amiliarity with letters or books; knowledge acquired from reading or studying books, esp. the principal classical texts associated with humane learning […]; learning,

46  Who read plays? scholarship’, and the appositive clause after the colon indicates that he is prepared for the possibility that his readers may not possess this level of education.101 He continues by echoing Heminge and Condell and declaring that these readers may be those who ‘[can] but spell’.102 When writers of playbook paratexts imagine a potential readership that encompasses such a wide range of literacies and the spectrum of readers’ social backgrounds that this in turn implies, they appear to respond to an actual situation in the market for professional playbooks. This is demonstrated by Mathew Rhodes’s ‘Printers Epigrammaticall Epistle’ which prefaces Gervase Markham and William Sampson’s 1622 Herod and Antipater. Rhodes’s epistle is once more addressed to ‘the understanding Readers’ at the top end of the literacy spectrum, but his choice of epithet is seemingly influenced by the fact that the play is a tragedy. He addresses himself to those ‘Readers: whose hearts have sparkled with Desire | To be inflamed with Promethian Fire, | Fetcht from Pernassus Shrine’, who ‘contemne’: The drossy Substance, highly priz’d by Men Of Earthy breeding; who can never gleane The least Content from a true Tragicke Scœne Of high and noble Nature; nor care they To heare, or understand; but see a Play: For Tragœdy or History, you shall Never finde these at any Stationers Stall Bestow one Six-pence: but, for bald Discourses Of Commicke Ribaldry, they’l draw their Purses.103 Rhodes’s epistle confirms the existence of a non-elite readership for plays, composed of ‘Men | Of Earthy breeding’, but it is clear that the dramatic genre that most attracts these readers is comedy. Philip Massinger, in the dedication of his 1629 tragedy The Roman Actor, similarly discerns a polarisation of the readers of tragedy and comedy, assuming that ‘the gravity and height of the subject [will] distaste such as are onely affected with Jigges, and ribaldrie’. Like Rhodes’s ‘Men | Of Earthy breeding’ who do not ‘understand’ plays, the readers whom Massinger believes will ‘distaste’ his tragedy are, he goes on to say, ‘ignorant detractors’ (sig. A2v). Yet these ignorant, lower-class readers who prefer comedies seem to be such a substantial portion of the playreading market that they dictate the quality of publishers’ investment in it, as Rhodes goes on to demonstrate. The Herod and Antipater epistle continues: Hence is the cause, that Stories (like to This) Shall lie in darke Obscurity, and misse The Printers Presse, t’adorne and set them forth In the true Glories of their Native Worth[.]104

Who read plays?  47 There may be some truth to this statement: of the professional plays published in quarto throughout the period, twice as many are comedies than tragedies.105 The anxiety about less able readers that pervades paratexts by Jonson and others, however, seems to stem from the fact that the playreading of the ‘ignorant’ who prefer comedies is not always restricted to that genre. This may be because of quarto playbooks’ material ­format, which – as argued in the previous section – could act as an index of their affordability and popularity. When George Chapman dedicates the 1612 quarto of his Widow’s Tears to John Reed, he is apologetic that ‘[t] his poor Comedie’ is not ‘some worke more worthie’. After justifying his temerity at dedicating the play to Reed by citing Italian ­precedent, he states that he is confident Reed will not, therefore, take offence, ‘[w]ell knowing that your free judgement weighs nothing by the Name, or Forme; or any vaine estimation of the vulgar; but will accept acceptable matter, as well in Plaies; as in many lesse materialls, masking in more serious Titles’ (sig. A2r). While Chapman is relatively confident that his play contains ‘acceptable matter’, he assumes that others of Reed’s rank (Reed is ‘Mr.  Jo. Reed […] Esq.’) who lack his ‘free judgement’ might ­dismiss the play because of its ‘Name’ (i.e. its dramatic genre) or, crucially, its ‘Forme’ – the fact that, materially, it belongs to the category of affordable pamphlets purchased by those below the rank of gentleman. The importance of plays’ material ‘Forme’ in attracting readers who might habitually read other similarly sized publications seems to be implied by John Fletcher in his contribution to the commendatory verses that open the 1611 Catiline quarto. Fletcher disparages those readers who, as he puts it: [S]ee your [i.e. Jonson’s] Booke, and reade; and then, Out of their learned ignorance, crie ill, And lay you by, calling for mad Pasquill, Or Greene’s deare Groatsworth, or Tom Coryate, The new Lexicon, with the errant Pate.106 Lesser notes that these texts are ‘well-known examples of what had come to be seen as low humor’; Ronald A. Tumelson II identifies them as the pamphlets Pasquils Mad-Cap (by Nicholas Breton, the earliest extant edition of which is dated 1600), Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (first published in 1592), and ‘[e]ither Coryats Crambe or Coryats Crudities, or indeed both’, published in 1611.107 Given the association of pamphlet publications with unlearned readers, it seems probable that the reference to ‘Tom Coryate’ is less likely to refer to the lengthy tome that constitutes the Crudities and is more likely the far shorter Coryats Crambe. If, as Tumelson surmises, the reference to the ‘new Lexicon’ modifies ‘Tom Coryate’ rather than referring to an unspecified dictionary, all the publications listed are around the same length as contemporaneously

48  Who read plays? published playbooks, which supports the image Fletcher constructs of the reader who begins to read Catiline because the playbook looks like it will offer the jocular content that the other types of popular pamphlets he is used to reading do, only to be disappointed. In Fletcher’s sarcastic disparagement of these readers who in their ‘learned ignorance’ prefer materially similar quarto pamphlets such as Greene’s Groatsworth or Pasquill to Catiline is concealed the fact that the play’s erudite and tragic subject matter does not – at least initially – actually stop them reading it. Lucy Munro has argued that commercial playbooks could be read equally as ‘post-theatrical events’ and as what David Scott Kastan terms ‘non-theatrical texts’. As a ‘non-theatrical text’, a playbook could resemble in both content and material form any similar small-format publication: in a discussion centred on Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer (1607), Munro uses the example of the jest-book.108 This fact, I contend, is what lies behind Fletcher’s imagined readers’ dissatisfied encounter with the Catiline quarto. In their material form (and perhaps in their price, as discussed in the previous section), playbooks align with other quarto pamphlets consumed by ‘the vulgar’ who have esteemed Chapman’s Widow’s Tears. But in their paratextual preliminaries, their textual content is often constructed to appeal to the educated elite, such as when Chapman cites a string of Italian plays as precedents for his dedication to Reed.109 This can create a situation where stationer and playwright are at odds over who they hope will buy the playbook. While playwrights want a reception for their play that coheres with their own high opinion of it, publishers want, as Raven succinctly puts it, ‘to sell the full edition [of a title] as quickly as possible’.110 And that may mean targeting a socially diverse market area rather than the market depth represented by a readership restricted to the elite. Robert Daborne outlines this situation in his epistle ‘To the Knowing Reader’ in the 1612 A Christian Turned Turk. Daborne’s ideal ‘knowing reader’ is akin to Jonson’s ‘reader extraordinary’, who will appreciate the play as its author intends. However, Daborne demonstrates his awareness that his play may be read by other, less knowledgeable readers when he ends his epistle thus: I wish no other perusers, then those to whom I dedicate my selfe [i.e. the ‘knowing’ readers]; though herein I speak against the Printers profit, if these accept my impolished labours, I promise the next shall bee coockt for the stomacks of the Criticall messe it selfe. The readers that Daborne wishes for are drawn from the educated elite who will be capable of understanding the Latin tag with which he closes: ‘Sanabimur si separemur a cœtu’ (‘We will be cured if separated from the throng’).111 The ‘wish’, however, would not be necessary were the reality already satisfactory, and in acknowledging that to disregard the ‘throng’ in favour of the ‘Criticall messe’ is to ‘speak against the Printers profit’,

Who read plays?  49

Figure 1.2  Title page of Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turke (1612, STC 6184), sig. A2r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, PR 2240 D15 C5 1612.

50  Who read plays? Daborne hints at a tension between stationers’ ideas about the best way to sell a book, and writers’. It is a tension that is played out in the competition for attention between external and internal paratexts, a competition that the title page is always going to win – particularly if the playbook is sold uncut or the title page is viewed in isolation.112 A potential play-buyer, confronted with an uncut copy of Daborne’s play, would see advertised a play ‘Written by Robert Daborn, Gentleman’, ostensibly printed ‘As it hath beene publickly Acted’. They would also be confronted with a Latin motto, ‘Nemo Sapiens, Miser est’ (Figure 1.2).113 Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser note that a paratextual marker of social rank accompanying an author attribution could ‘rais[e] the status of the book’.114 They also note that ‘including Latin on a title page [is] a classicizing gesture’, meaning that a play is legitimated as ‘literature’, or more specifically ‘poetry’.115 These two paratextual additions to the title page therefore look towards a certain class of reader, perhaps Daborne’s ‘Criticall messe’. But the indication of public performance origin, along with the printed play’s quarto format, look towards another: those m ­ embers of the socially diverse ‘throng’ that have seen it performed in the theatre, among whom are those who may have purchasing power but limited critical acumen. Published in 1612, A Christian Turned Turk appears in the final two years of the time period that Lesser and Peter Stallybrass survey in order to be able to claim that when ‘playbooks are marked as literary’, they are ‘not [at the same time] distanced from their origins in the professional theatres’.116 Yet even in the 1630s, for instance, publishers are combining ‘literary’ title page paratexts such as author attributions and Latin tags with indications of performance origin.117 Over half of the playbook title pages from this decade feature both an author attribution and an indication of public performance origin, and over a quarter of these also possess a Latin tag. In the 1640s, the frequency with which these title page paratexts occur in conjunction with one another is even greater: around three quarters of title pages have both an author attribution and an indication of public performance origin, and the number of these that also feature Latin is closer to a third.118 Clearly, Lesser and Stallybrass’s point continues to hold true even for plays printed after the closure of the theatres. Authorship attributions and Latin mottoes may attempt to market the playbook by reaching out to a potential readership that values these features as indicators of literary status, but they operate in tandem with the feature that has the potential to attract anyone who possessed basic reading skills and enough disposable income to have seen the play performed and want to buy it afterwards. Playwrights such as Daborne, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher might wish in their internal paratextual preliminaries for ‘understanding’ readers drawn from the ‘Criticall messe’. But playbook title pages show many stationers aiming at market area rather than market depth, heaping external paratextual elements one on top of another, hoping that one or other of them will catch the eye of a potential play-buyer, regardless of his social standing and level of education.

Who read plays?  51

Welcoming a ‘universalitie of Readers’: Thomas Heywood and others The tension between playwright’s wishes and printer’s profit is not always in evidence, however; playwrights are not routinely against the idea of a broad readership for their plays. Indeed, some appear to have welcomed it, and to have adopted a stance of inclusiveness towards their potential readership that allied them with publishers and may echo more realistically the conditions under which playbooks were disseminated in the early modern print marketplace. In this section, I consider examples of paratexts composed by playwrights who explicitly aim at a readership that is not socially exclusive and those who accept women among its number, in order to demonstrate further that playbooks were conceived of as capable of attracting a readership that was not confined to ‘elite males’. An early model for welcoming a socially inclusive readership is provided by Robert Armin in his epistle to the 1609 Two Maids of MoreClacke, in which the social diversity of the groups listed in his address ‘To the friendly peruser’ mirrors that of the audiences in front of whom Armin was accustomed to performing. ‘Gentlemen, Cittizens, Rustickes, or quis non’, begins Armin: a multiplicity of addressees that his subsequent claim about the attractions of the play’s style implies is more than rhetorical. ‘[Y]ou shall find [in it] verse, as well as blancke, as crancke’, he declares, promising that the play caters for both sophisticated and unsophisticated tastes, the blank verse for the ‘Gentlemen’ and the ‘crank’ – defined by the OED as ‘lusty, sprightly, merry’ – for the citizens and ‘rustics’ who belong to the social orders identified by Rhodes as preferring ‘[d]iscourses | Of Commick Ribaldry’.119 It is this broad social spectrum of playreaders that is repeatedly and most prominently targeted by another actor-playwright, Thomas Heywood.120 Of the twelve epistles to the reader that Heywood composes for his solo-authored plays, only that to The Rape of Lucrece (first published in 1608) addresses its ‘curteous Readers’ with the ostensibly restrictive title ‘Gentlemen’.121 His second epistle, written three years later for the 1611 Golden Age, demonstrates the more democratic attitude towards his readership that will dominate Heywood’s dramatic paratextual persona for the next twenty-five years.122 Heywood declares that the epistle serves to ‘commit [the play] freely to the generall censure of Readers’ [my italics], a formula that he recycles twenty-three years later in the epistle to A Maidenhead Well Lost (1634), noting that the comedy ‘may be freely read without distaste; and of all in generall’ [my italics]. The metaphor of taste also appears in the epistle to the first part of the 1632 Iron Age, in which he hopes that ‘the reading there of [i.e. the reading of the play and its sequel] shall not proove distastfull unto any’ [my italics].123 That these inclusive substantives are intended to indicate both the educated elite and readers whose knowledge is less specialised is borne out by other aspects of Heywood’s paratextual commentary. In the epistle

52  Who read plays? prefacing the 1636 Love’s Mistress, Heywood discusses the play’s source material: The argument is taken from Apuleius, an excellent Morall, if truely understood, […] which though it bee not altogether conspicuous to the vulgar, yet to those of Learning and judgement, no lesse apprehended in the Paraphrase, then approved in the Originall: of which, if the perusers hereof were all Apuleians, and never a Midas amongst them, I should make no question.124 The foolish Midas is opposed to the perspicacious ‘Apuleians’ who have achieved the necessary level of education to be able to read the Latin source text in its original: if these last were the only readers he expected for his play, says Heywood, he would not have bothered to ‘paraphrase’ Apuleius’s work in English. It is precisely because he is aware that the readership of his plays will inevitably contain a Midas or three that he declares his intention, in the epistle to the second part of The Iron Age (1632), to collect the Age plays in one volume with an appended ‘explanation of all [t]he difficulties, and an Historicall Comment of every hard name, which may appear obscure or intricate to such as are not frequent in Poetry’ (sig. A4v).125 Those readers who ‘are not frequent in Poetry’ are those who have not had the benefit of the type of upbringing that would have rendered unnecessary such a glossary as he describes. As Benedict Scott Robinson sees it, Heywood ‘imagines a book that will bring the iconographic richness of humanism to those who have not had the leisure for an education in the classics’: the type of education that was typically the purview of gentlemen.126 Heywood’s envisaged readership is explicitly not restricted to gentlemen: as he explains in the epistle to one of his non-dramatic works, the 1624 Gunaikeion, he ‘write[s] to all’. Anticipating an objection to the Gunaikeion’s intermingling of ‘sad and grave Histories’ with ‘fabulous Jeasts and Tales, savouring of Lightnesse’, Heywood counters thus: I have therein imitated our Historicall and Comicall Poets, that write to the Stage; who least the Auditorie should be dulled with serious courses (which are meerely weightie and materiall) in everie Act present some Zanie with his Mimick action, to breed in the lesse capable, mirth and laughter: For they that write to all, must strive to please all. And as such fashion themselves to a multitude, consisting of spectators severally addicted; so I, to an universalitie of Readers, diversly disposed.127 Heywood herein disingenuously articulates his philosophy of dramatic composition, claiming in the Gunaikeion to ‘imitate’ playwrights when he has at this point been one himself for thirty odd years. Recalling Armin’s assurance that The Two Maids of More-Clacke will appeal to a

Who read plays?  53 socially diverse group of readers because it contains verse both ‘blanke’ and ‘crancke’, Heywood argues that a combination of high and low subject matter is necessary in order that ‘the lesse capable’ in the audience should not ‘be dulled’.128 What is striking about this passage is his rhetorical equation of the theatrical ‘multitude, consisting of spectators severally addicted’ with an envisaged ‘universalitie of Readers, diversly disposed’. Heywood conceives the potential readership of this non-dramatic work to be as demographically varied as a playhouse audience: the paratexts prefacing his plays, which have been performed before just such an audience, logically encode the same assumption. Heywood’s equation of audience diversity with readership diversity supports the argument made earlier in this chapter regarding the crossover of playgoers and playreaders. My contention that playbooks also appealed to non-elite readers because of their format as quarto pamphlets, and that Heywood both recognised and embraced this fact, is further supported by his explanation of the non-appearance of a collected edition of his plays. Scholars generally assume that Heywood’s declaration in the epistle to The English Traveller (1633) that it ‘never was any great ambition in mee, to be in this kind Volumniously read’ – that is, to have his plays ‘exposed unto the world in Volumes, to beare the title of Workes’ (sig. A3r) – is insincere. David M. Bergeron calls it ‘disingenuous’, and Grace Ioppolo assumes that Heywood is here ‘crying out […] for a folio edition of his collected works to match those of his former colleagues Jonson and Shakespeare’.129 Heywood’s paratextual construction of himself elsewhere as a writer for the people, however, makes it far more likely that this is a statement that should be taken at face value. How may Heywood succeed in ‘writ[ing] to all’ if the less solvent members of his potential readership are excluded by the inflated size and price of a folio collection? Elsewhere he lauds the format of the quarto pamphlet, praising its lack of ostentation: in the epistle to the first part of the 1631 Fair Maid of the West, Heywood declares that his plays ‘have not beene exposed to the publike view of the world in numerous sheets, and a large volume; but singly […] with great modesty, and small noise’ (sig. A4r). The use of the typically idealised feminine qualities of modesty and silence to describe the plays’ quarto format is significant given Heywood’s particular solicitude when it comes to female readers.130 Like Humphrey Moseley in his preface to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio (famously asserting that he has excluded previously published plays because ‘it would have rendred the Booke so Voluminous, that Ladies and Gentlewomen would have found it scarce manageable, who in Workes of this nature must first be remembred’), Heywood explicitly relates material size to the gender of his readers.131 As previously mentioned, in his follow-up to the Gunaikeion, the 1640 Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World, Heywood states that he has chosen to limit his stories of women to nine, ‘though I could produce infinites

54  Who read plays? to make this pocket booke rather voluminus then portable’ (sig. **2r). The manageability of books’ size and weight is evidently something to be taken into account when contemplating a female readership: both titles are among those that Suzanne Hull describes as ‘Books for Women’.132 The folio format of the earlier publication and the quarto format of the later one perhaps indicates that Heywood’s solicitude towards female readers increased with time, as it is not until a decade after the publication of the Gunaikeion, in the epistle to the 1634 A Maidenhead Well Lost, that he openly acknowledges and welcomes women playreaders. This epistle demonstrates incontrovertibly that Heywood seeks a dramatic readership that includes women. Addressed to the ‘Courteous Reader, (of what sexe soever)’, the epistle goes on to point out that despite the play’s somewhat salacious sounding title, it is entirely appropriate reading material for women. Heywood enjoins the reader to: [L]et not the Title of this Play any way deterre thee from the perusall thereof: For there is nothing herein contained, which doth deviate either from Modesty, or good Manners. For though the Argument be drawne from a Mayden-head lost, yet to be well lost, cleares it from all aspersion.133 The invocation of the ‘modesty’ of the play’s subject matter as a quality that makes A Maidenhead Well Lost appropriate reading material for women links it with the ‘modesty’ of its quarto format, as advertised by the epistle to the first part of The Fair Maid of the West. Both epistles thus speak to broader anxieties in the period about women reading plays, anxi­eties which mean that, contrary to Moseley’s assumption, women are in general not those who are ‘first […] remembered’ in the paratexts of commercial drama, and which show Heywood to be somewhat exceptional in his outright solicitude and accommodation of female playreaders. It is not until 1657, in Henry Brome’s epistle to Richard Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange, that someone involved in preparing paratextual matter for a quarto playbook will politely address his readers as ‘Gentlemen and Ladies’ (sig. A2r). But as early as 1608, it is clear that certain dramatists assume that their potential readership will include both men and women. John Day playfully addresses the tongue-in-cheek epistle to his 1608 Humour out of Breath ‘To Signior No-body’, disingenuously declaring that he ‘had rather bestow [his] paynes on your good worship for a brace of Angells certaine, then stand to the bountie of a Better-mans Purse-bearer, or a very good womans Gentleman-usher’ (sig. A2r). The joke – that ‘No-body’ will pay ‘a brace of Angells’ (one pound) for a quarto playbook – is propped up with a description of those figures who may more realistically be expected to purchase the play, presumably for the more modest sum of around sixpence. Day’s epistle demonstrates that women – aristocratic women at least – were conceived of as an established

Who read plays?  55 sector of the playreading market, to be considered in the same breath as men, although the fact that it is the ‘very good womans Gentleman-usher’ who buys the play for her supports Marta Straznicky’s argument that women were constructed as ‘book handlers rather than book buyers’.134 The anxieties produced by the idea of women handling playbooks underpin subsequent paratextual acknowledgements of female playreaders. Four years after the publication of Humour out of Breath, the anonymous potential female reader is the ostensible addressee of Nathan Field’s dedication prefacing his 1612 A Woman is a Weathercock. Ostensible only, because Field’s dedication mocks convention in much the same way as Day’s epistle, while nevertheless hinting at wider concerns about actual women’s playreading in the period. Addressing the dedication ‘To any Woman that hath beene no Weather-Cocke’, Field declares that he ‘[d]id determine, not to have Dedicated my Play to any Body’, because doing otherwise seemed futile when a speculative dedication of a quarto playbook offered little hope of significant financial reward (sig. A3r). The misogynistic sting that follows – ‘[a]nd now I looke up, and finde to whom my Dedication is, I feare I am as good as my determination’ – casts doubt upon the sincerity of Field’s consideration for women readers, but his subsequent declaration seems to be more than a useful rhetorical conceit with which to advertise his next publication.135 Field challenges his imagined female playreaders to be faithful, leaving: [A] libertie to any Lady or woman, that dares say she hath beene no weather-Cocke, to assume the Title of Patronesse to this my Booke. If she have beene constant, and be so, all I will expect from her for my paynes, is, that she will continue so, but till my next Play be printed, wherein she shall see what amendes I have made to her, and all the sex, and so I end my Epistle, without a Latine sentence.136 The power of a play’s title to circumscribe readership is made explicit by paratexts such as Heywood’s epistle to A Maidenhead Well Lost, and it is hard to know how many less-educated female playreaders (those for whom Field courteously omits a Latin ‘sentence’) would actually have wanted to read a play whose title overtly disparaged their sex’s constancy.137 While the group of female readers Field seemingly addresses may in the case of this particular play in fact be relatively small, the dedication’s challenge to constancy encodes a wider anxiety about the existence and chastity of female playreaders in general – an anxiety which may explain the rare appearance of women readers in dramatic paratexts, and to which certain of these paratexts attempt to respond. Louis B. Wright identifies a number of non-dramatic texts from the period that – as later commentators point out – trope women’s playreading as a catalyst for or adjunct to immodest behaviour.138 In Thomas Cranley’s 1635 Amanda, or The Reformed Whore, the unreformed Amanda’s reading material consists of ‘amorous Pamphlets[,] Songs of love, […] Sonets

56  Who read plays? exquisit’, and ‘many merry Comedies’.139 In John Johnson’s 1641 Academy of Love, the female pupils learn their lessons in love from Shakespeare, Massinger, and Shirley.140 The 1656 Yellow Book, attributed to William Blake, describes the chamber of Mrs Wanton, ‘where there is nothing but four or five naked Pictures, a Song book, a Play book, a Lute, a History, two or three great Looking-glasses’, a mysterious ‘Jackalattostick’, and a pot of face cream.141 Printed playbooks – particularly printed comedies – become a metonym for wayward female desire, characters’ amorous incontinence transferred onto the readers whose feminine frailty makes them particularly susceptible to fictional stimuli.142 As Straznicky puts it, quoting from William Prynne’s 1633 Histriomastix: [T]he ‘frequent constant reading of Play-bookes, of other prophane lascivious amorous Poems, Histories, and discourses,’ is dangerous precisely because there are ‘no women […] so exactly chaste, which may not easily be corrupted by them, and even inflamed into fury with strange and monstrous lusts’.143 Thus when playbook paratexts do acknowledge their female readership, they do so by stressing the propriety of their subject matter, in order to combat the non-dramatic discourses that view women’s playreading as an incitement to immodest thoughts or behaviour. Helen Smith argues that early modern women’s engagement with their reading material was understood as corporeal – that reading was frequently troped as having a physiologically transformative effect.144 The internal transformation effected by the reading experience is externally manifested in an alteration of composure, signified by the blush. Early modern writers were wary of the female blush as a signifier of inappropriately stirring reading material: Sir John Harington, for instance, in his 1591 Brief Apology of Poetry, quotes the epigram by Martial that begins ‘erebuit pousitque meum Lucretia librum’ (‘Lucretia blushed and put my book aside’). Harington then observes that Martial’s point is that ‘Lucretia (by which he signifies any chaste matron) will blush and be ashamed to read a lascivious book’. Martial’s epigram continues: ‘sed coram Bruto; Brute, recede: leget’, which Harington glosses by commenting that the woman reader will not blush ‘except Brutus be by, that is, if any grave man should see her read it. But if Brutus turn his back, she will to it again and read it all’.145 If the visible physical response that demonstrates that a woman is moved by her reading matter is negated only because nobody is around to observe it, then those who attempt to legitimate plays as reading material for women must paratextually deny the possibility of the blush’s existence in any circumstance. This strategy can be seen in Thomas Carew’s commendatory verse at the beginning of Thomas May’s 1622 The Heir, in which Carew commends May’s tight plotting, adding that ‘where his sportive Muse doth

Who read plays?  57 draw a thred | Of mirth, chast Matrons may not blush to reade’ (sig. A3r). The chastity of female playreaders enjoined by Field in his fauxdedication to A Woman is a Weathercock is here made an explicit attribute of the women who may read The Heir. At the same time as the verse sanctions the play’s humour as appropriate for ‘Matrons’, who will find nothing therein so improperly stirring as to make them blush, it also performatively ‘chastens’ these readers. ‘[M]ay not’ reads as both subjunctive and imperative: the women readers should not blush because the play contains no matter that merits blushing as a response, but in a piece of disguised circular logic, this legitimation of the play as appropriate reading material for women is only possible if the women’s response is not to blush. It is worth remarking that the category of women readers here imagined is, somewhat cautiously, the older, married ‘Matrons’ who may reasonably be expected to have a greater familiarity with the subject matter of any unsavoury bawdy jokes than the ‘sparkish girles’ whom John Johnson pruriently imagines reading Shakespeare in their closets around bedtime.146 The play may be unshocking, but then the ‘Matrons’ are least likely to be shocked. Eight years later, when Philip Massinger composes his contribution to the commendatory verses that preface James Shirley’s The Grateful Servant (1630), the female readers he envisages are more impressionable ‘maids’. Praising the superiority of Shirley’s play compared to the work of lesser dramatists, Massinger lists as one of its selling points the fact that it contains ‘No obscene sillable, that may compell | A blush from a chast maide’ (sig. A4r). Again, the female playreaders that Massinger constructs are ‘chaste’, combating the non-dramatic discourse that envisages them as whores like Amanda or sexually curious girls like the students in The Academy of Love, who allow their male tutors to point out words and phrases in their reading material with a phallic ‘Fescue’.147 Equally, the fact that they are ‘maids’ legitimises the playbook as still more erotically inoffensive than Carew’s invocation of the ‘chast Matrons’ did: typically troped as being susceptible to erotic reading matter because of their youth, the maids’ presence in the verse demonstrates Massinger’s confidence in the play’s probity more determinedly than did Carew’s ‘Matrons’.148 A lack of ‘obscenity’ in its jokes also licenses Robert Chamberlain’s 1640 The Swaggering Damsel as ‘safe’ reading material for unmarried women, according to the commendatory verse contributed by Edward Benlowes: No debaucht Scenes, nor such base mirth as we Place in the Scenes, of obscene Ribaldry, Pollutes thy Pen, thy happy influence, Virgins may read with a safe innocence[.]149 The play’s inability to corrupt its women readers is here advertised not merely with chastity, but with virginity: young female readers need not fear

58  Who read plays? the assault of Chamberlain’s ‘unpolluted’ phallic ‘Pen’. Unlike Massinger and Carew, Benlowes makes no mention of his virgins’ capacity to blush – to respond bodily to what they read. In this way, his invocation of them as figures lacking corporeal essence forces them to serve the same purpose as Marta Straznicky argues do the names of the illustrious women heading the rare dedications of professional plays to women.150 Straznicky contends that the dedication of a commercial play ‘to a woman of irreproachable “honor” and “virtue,” whose purity virtually nullifies her physical existence, bolsters the fiction that the play in question, its commercial auspices notwithstanding, belongs to a ‘private’ culture of intellectual refinement’. The negation of the named woman’s physicality through superpraising of her moral and intellectual qualities serves, like the negation of the virgins’ blush, to legitimate the playtext as something with which both the dedicatee and the other potential unnamed women readers will ‘have a strictly cerebral engagement’.151 This type of cerebral response, which suppresses other types of anxiety-inducing emotional or physiological response, is encoded in the paratextual invocation of female dedicatees’ judgement. Straznicky discusses Jonson’s announcement in his dedication of The Alchemist to Lady Mary Wroth that the play will be ‘safe in [her] judgment’: however, as she points out, the autonomy of female judgement is called into question by Jonson’s parenthetical declaration that this judgement ‘is a SIDNEYS’, and thus authorised by patrilineage.152 Women’s judgement is frequently invoked by equating it with men’s, as in John Ford’s dedication of the 1639 Lady’s Trial to ‘my Deservingly-honoured, John Wyrley Esquire, and to the vertuous and right worthy Gentlewoman, Mrs Mary Wyrley his wife’ (sig. A3r). Potential gendered differences of response are elided as Mary-as-reader is explicitly placed on the same footing as her husband: they are a ‘most equall Paire’, to ‘the mercy of [whose] Judgements’ Ford exposes his play (sig. A3v). Their mutual possession of the intellectual quality of judgement creates the sexual equality of the dedication. ‘Equal’ at this time carries both its modern meaning and that of ‘fair’ or ‘equitable’, and it is frequently deployed in prefaces in conjunction with the idea of judgement.153 Because Ford has faith in Mary Wyrley’s unprejudiced judgement, he can dedicate The Lady’s Trial to one of a group of readers who are less overtly paratextually visible than the ‘gentlemen readers’ that include her husband – but whose infrequent appearance in dramatic paratexts has more to do with pervasive suspicions about women’s reading in the period than an expectation that women would not be among those who read playbooks. Indeed, it is the very presence of paratextual management strategies that speak to those anxieties which betrays the centrality of women in the playreading culture of early modern England. Such is the argument put forward by Lena Cowen Orlin and Richard Levin, who make much of Moseley’s epistle to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, with its solicitude for female readers.154 Levin holds that ‘during

Who read plays?  59 the course of this period women became an increasingly significant component of the market for playbooks’, and justifies this claim with the observation that the ‘early formula’ of playbook epistles headed ‘To  the  Gentleman Readers’ ‘soon disappears’, giving way to ‘the ­neutral “To the Readers” or […] other ungendered headings such as “To the Courteous Reader,” “To the Judicious Reader,” “To the Reader Extraordinary,” “To the Comic Play-readers,” “To the General Reader,” “To the great Variety of Readers” etc.’155 The point made here, however, is not that playbooks were marketed to women: it is clear from the examples Levin gives that they weren’t. It is that they weren’t not marketed to women. As the preceding discussion demonstrates, playbooks were expected to have a readership that was inclusive in terms of both gender and social background. This fact is, paradoxically, underscored by the paratextual epithets used to describe playreaders that, while ‘ungendered’, nevertheless convey an exclusivity related to class and to a type of education that was typically the preserve of males. The r­ easons for this paradox are unpacked in the following section.

Liking with judgement: paratexts and the management of reader response In a chapter on paratextual preliminaries and printed marginalia in early modern books, Heidi Brayman Hackel observes what the paratextual anxieties expressed by Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Daborne have already made clear: that ‘once the printing press begins divulgating books in the marketplace’, there is no way for ‘access to books [to] be limited to the social and intellectual elites’.156 As a consequence, and just as anxieties about plays being read by women are managed paratextually, writers and stationers develop several strategies to attempt to ensure the favourable reception of books by readers who may not have the type of social or educational background that would ensure proper appreciation of their reading material. The most common of these strategies, holds Brayman Hackel, is the paratextual construction of the unknown reader as ‘gentle’, an epithet which, she argues, despite ‘carry[ing] clear class associations’, is ‘prescriptive not descriptive’. Potentially ungentle readers were led to identify with the ‘Gentle Reader’ addressed in a book’s epistle, and in the process, it was hoped, moulded into ‘receptive, pleasant reader[s]’ who would respond to what they read with the presumed civility of their social superiors.157 This strategy can certainly be seen in playbook paratexts, where ­writers are at times wearily upfront about the performative nature of the epithets they deploy. Brayman Hackel notes that just as commonly as they are framed as ‘gentle’, readers are described as ‘courteous’.158 Both adjectives are familiar from Richard Jones’s early Tamburlaine epistle, but as the period progresses, their usage becomes increasingly clichéd. As already mentioned, in the epistle to Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany

60  Who read plays? the writer declares that if the reader has seen the play in performance he (the writer) ‘[s]hall not need to bespeak [him] Courteous’ [my italics], the verb suggesting the performativity of other uses of the adjective. Similarly, when Will Atkins composes a commendatory verse to preface James Shirley’s 1635 The Traitor, he claims that his intention in doing so is not to ‘Court […] | The humorous Reader into Gentlenesse’ [my initial italics], implying that this is precisely what other playbook paratexts aim to do.159 Calling out such flattery doesn’t put an end to it, however, and four years later the publisher of Robert Davenport’s 1639 A New Trick to Cheat the Devil will double down on the strategy and address his epistle ‘To the Courteous Reader, and gentle peruser’ [my italics].160 Despite such examples, Brayman Hackel’s identification of ‘gentle’ and ‘courteous’ (alongside ‘friendly’ and ‘docile’) as the most common epithets applied to readers in the epistles of early modern books needs qualification in the case of playbooks.161 More noticeable amongst dramatic paratexts is the description of playreaders as ‘judicious’. Cyndia Susan Clegg notes that ‘[c]asting readers as judges is the most pervasive trope by far in epistles to printed plays in the English Renaissance’.162 What is striking about the trope’s use is that it can often be found in dramatic paratexts that explicitly address an inclusive readership. John Day’s 1608 Law Tricks is submitted to ‘any judicious censurer’; Thomas Walkley writes in his epistle to the first quarto of Othello (1622) that ‘leaving every one to the liberty of judgement: [he has] ventered to print this Play, and leave[s] it to the generall censure’ [my italics].163 Most explicit is the printer’s address that prefaces Beaumont and Fletcher’s 1615 Cupid’s Revenge, which declares that the play is dedicated ‘to the Juditious in generall, of what degree soever’, while neglecting those who ‘be they never so great, […] want judgement, for to them it belongs not, though they pay for it’ (sig. A2r). There is, therefore, something about the quality of judgement that can forestall a poor reception from those who come from a lowly background. Clegg believes that the importance of the quality of judgement lies in its association with ‘the kind of humanist education that most men of the propertied and aristocratic classes received’.164 Contemporary writers such as Roger Ascham and William Harrison confirm that judgement is a skill acquired through education, one that, according to Ascham, is not perfected until the student is at a relatively advanced stage of his studies: in discouraging grammar school teachers from introducing their students to the overly difficult practice of Latin paraphrase, Ascham cautions that ‘Paraphrasis […], by myne opinion, is not meete for Grammer scholes: nor yet verie fitte for yong men in the universitie, untill studie and tyme, have bred in them, perfite learning, and stedfast judgement’.165 That young men cannot be considered to possess judgement until after they have spent time in university studies is confirmed by Harrison, who notes that it is only in exceptional cases that students can bypass the prerequisite broad first degree (‘that of the generall sophisters’) and embark directly

Who read plays?  61 upon ‘higher studies’ in law or medicine. Those exceptional cases occur when the freshman student has sufficient ‘knowledge in the toongs and ripenesse of judgement’, implying that ‘ripenesse of judgement’ is typically acquired throughout the course of a first degree.166 This understanding of judgement as a quality acquired through education leads Clegg to conclude that, given the frequency with which it is invoked in dramatic paratexts, ‘many playwrights and printers envisioned […] an educated audience’.167 As established above, however, playwrights and printers may not always have envisioned the same type of readership, and the readers they did envision may have been rather less educated than they hoped for. The coupling of the epithet ‘Juditious’ with the phrase ‘of what degree soever’ in the Cupid’s Revenge epistle also hints that the attribution of judgement may, like the attributions of gentility and courteousness, be functioning more prescriptively than descriptively. Unknown and potentially uneducated readers are being exhorted to display judgement, which in the context of currying favourable reception, looks somewhat different to the ‘free’ judgement Clegg believes predominates in playbook paratexts.168 What this other type of judgement looks like can be inferred from Thomas Carew’s commendatory verse prefacing William Davenant’s 1636 The Wits. Rehearsing the popular trope that plays ‘are Feasts’, Carew goes on to elaborate: ‘Poets [are] Cookes, and the Spectators Guests, | The Actors Waiters’. He then observes that ‘From this Similie, | Some have deriv’d an unsafe libertie | To use their Judgements as their Tastes’. Carew stresses that the two should not be confused: judgement should result in a verdict that is constant, while taste is variable since individual. ‘If you trans-fer your reason to your sense’, he holds, your judgement will be faulty (sense here is a metonym for emotional response). Extending the metaphor of the play-as-feast, Carew notes: Things are distinct, and must the same appeare To every piercing Eye, or well-tun’d Eare. Though sweets with yours, sharps best with my taste meet, Both must agree this meat’s or sharpe or sweet[.] Individual reader preference is both allowed and expected, but should not be permitted to seep into an assessment of the quality of a play; ‘the kind’ (i.e. the genre) may ‘distaste or please’ so long as ‘the Good | And Bad, be by […] Judgement understood’. If, however, the reader of The Wits ‘professe[s] that [he] can nothing [therein] meet | That hits [his] taste, either with sharpe or sweet, | But cr[ies] out, ’tis insipid’, then, warns Carew, ‘[his] bold Tongue | May doe it’s Master, not the Author wrong’. The Wits has already been judged a play of quality by Carew and other ‘Men of better Pallat’, and to express a contrasting opinion belies both the privileging of taste over judgement and also the reader’s ignorance.169

62  Who read plays? Carew’s verse helps to elucidate the way in which the numerous invocations of readerly judgement found in dramatic paratexts were intended to function. Most important is its implication that, within the context of the hoped-for aesthetic response to a play, ‘judgement’ is not a considered pronouncement on its quality that deems it either good or bad (despite Carew’s initial definition). It is instead a marker of readerly discernment that always and inevitably deems the play to be good, because the judging reader’s opinion will align with the artistic judgement of the author, with that of the publisher who has judged the play worth printing, and with that of the writers of the supporting paratexts, who – whether sincerely or not – declare that they judge the play worth the reading.170 Judgement does, in fact, equate with liking, as one of the commendatory verses by ‘T. R.’ that prefaces the Volpone quarto confirms. The reader is told: ‘If thou dost like it, well; it will imply | Thou lik’st with judgement’.171 If the reader likes the play, it implies he possesses judgement – not first and foremost the ability to arbitrate, because this leaves room for the passing of an undesirable negative judgement, but the ‘discernment, discretion, wisdom, understanding, good sense’ that the OED gave until recently as one of the word’s subsidiary definitions.172 This is why Fletcher’s dedication of The Faithful Shepherdess to Sir Walter Aston can state ‘[t]his play was never liked, unlesse by few | That brought their judgements with um’ (sig. ¶1r): the quality of the play that makes it worth printing despite its lack of stage success was discerned by those few approving audience members who ‘liked’ it because they deployed their judgement. Paratextual invocations of judgement thus work in a similar way to those of gentility or courteousness. When playreaders are performatively designated ‘gentle’ or ‘courteous’, epithets which ‘reveal the cultural association of polite, skilled reading with membership in the ruling class’, those who are not members of the gentry or aristocracy are encouraged to align themselves with those who are, and to assume the mantle of upperclass civility as they read.173 When playreaders are encouraged to use their judgement, those whose gender or social background means they have not benefited from the type of education that develops such judgement (an education that itself gave access to the ranks of the gentry) are implicitly exhorted to align their judgement with that of their social superiors.174 As demonstrated above, that judgement is always favourable, and thus if a reader has the temerity not to like what he reads, he is exposing both his class and his ignorance: the verse by ‘T. R.’ from Volpone, quoted above, declares that the reader’s favourable response to the play implies he likes it ‘with judgement, or best company’ (sig. A1v). The two go hand in hand. Invocations of readers’ judgement thus target readers’ desires to imaginatively self-identify as intellectually and/or socially superior. That the passing of judgement was considered a desirable indicator of social standing – presumably because of its connotations of advanced educational training – is demonstrated by Jo. Hall’s commendatory verse on

Who read plays?  63 The Grateful Servant (1630). Hall bemoans the fact that ‘only swelling words do please the age | And malice is thought wit’, and ascribes this to the faulty judgement of the audience: ‘to make’t appeare | They judge they mis-interpret what they heare’. It is in the interests of appearing knowledgeable that this ignorant audience’s preference is for plays that ‘are admired but never understood’ (sig. XA1r). The exercise of aesthetic judgement is the preserve of the grand, and of those with pretensions to grandeur. These last, according to Hall, publicly enact it in the theatre: Beaumont confirms this with his commendatory verse on The Faithful Shepherdess, lamenting the presence of the ‘thousand men [who] in judgement sit, | To call in question [Fletcher’s] undoubted wit | Scarce two of which can understand the lawes | Which they should judge by’, and among whom ‘there is not one that hath | In his owne censure an explicite faith’ (sig. A3v). In the realm of private reading, however, judgement can be guided paratextually in order to ensure it recognises the ‘undoubted wit’ of writers such as Fletcher. Two strategies seek to effect this. The first is to use the playbook’s paratextual preliminaries to advertise the (innately favourable) judgement of an illustrious figure whose name and clear social and intellectual superiority will overrule any dissenting voices. This strategy is apparent in William Davenant’s dedication of his 1630 The Just Italian to Edward Sackville, the fourth Earl of Dorset. Davenant notes that: The uncivill ignorance of the People, had depriv’d this humble worke of life; but that your Lordships approbation, stept in, to succour it. Those many that came with resolution to dispraise (knowing your Lordships judgement, to be powerfull, above their malice) were eyther corrected to an understanding, or modesty[.]175 The Just Italian would have displeased the prejudiced ‘ignorant People’ had they not been ‘corrected to an understanding’ by Sackville’s ‘approbation’. The play’s detractors change their minds not because Sackville’s judgement is just, but because it is ‘powerfull’: just as he wields power over his social inferiors in real life, so too does he dominate in the realm of aesthetic response. Davenant’s paratextual foregrounding of Sackville’s favourable judgement of course hopes that it will have the same effect upon readers as it has done upon spectators; Shackerley Marmion’s dedication of his 1633 A Fine Companion to Sir Ralph Dutton has similar aspirations. Dutton is described as one of the ‘worthie Patrons of Learning that can best vindicate [the] worth [of poetry]’, among those ‘whose abilitie of judgement can both wipe off all aspersions, and dignifie desert’ in the face of ‘the petulancy of Writers [who] declaime against her’. Dutton’s judgement is linked to his status as a ‘Patron of Learning’, and as such it overrules the ‘malice & ignorance’ of those who condemn poetry (to which genre, Marmion implies, A Fine Companion belongs).176

64  Who read plays? This strategy involves the negation of unfavourable censure by stressing the social superiority of those who exhibit good judgement and hence the dominant value of their aesthetic appreciation. A second parallel strategy consists of an attempt to ensure favourable judgement by encouraging readers to, as Brayman Hackel puts it in her discussion of paratextual descriptions of ignorant readers, ‘choose camps’: to align themselves with the educated and elite – Carew’s ‘Men of better Pallat’ who respond with judgement rather than taste – or to be among the untrained and unsophisticated ‘purblind critticks’ on whom Jo. Hall lets fall ‘this curse | To see good playes and ever like the worse’.177 This strategy can be seen at work in Nicholas Vavasour’s epistle to the reader that prefaces his 1634 edition of Thomas Dekker’s The Noble Spanish Soldier. Vavasour addresses himself to the ‘Understanding Reader’, the epithet, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter, already denoting a sophisticated level of comprehension – the possession of the ‘cultural literacy’ instilled by a humanist education. He declares: [The printed play] is now communicated to you whose leisure and knowledge admits of reading and reason: Your Judgement now this Posthumus assures himselfe will well attest his predecessors endevours to give content to men of the ablest quality, such as intelligent readers are here conceived to be.178 If the reader wishes to be thought (or to think himself) ‘intelligent’, and a ‘[man] of the ablest quality’, he must derive ‘content’ from the play through the exercise of a ‘Judgement’ that comes from ‘knowledge’. Not passing this inherently favourable judgement means that he risks appearing ignorant: as Jonson points out in the epistle to the ‘Reader in Ordinarie’ in the 1611 Catiline, ‘men judge only out of knowledge’ (A3r). Judgement that does not esteem the play’s worth casts aspersions not only on the reader’s level of education (and hence social status), but his very masculinity. This final point returns us to the ‘Gentlemen readers’ whose presence in the paratexts of early modern playbooks seems at first glance so pervasive. As the evidence presented in this chapter demonstrates, playreaders were not a small coterie comprised of the ‘learned, and judicious Gentlemen’ who are ostensibly Massinger’s preferred readers in the dedication to The Roman Actor. Instead, they were a socially variegated group that included women and those below the ranks of the gentry, who had to be paratextually cajoled to read like ‘learned, and judicious Gentlemen’. When given the option of matching one’s judgement (synonymous, as argued above, not with arbitration but with approbation) either with that of educated gentlemen or of the ‘malicious, and ignorant detractors’ who Massinger announces will be ‘distaste[d]’ by the play (sig. A2v), the choice for any self-respecting reader is clear. If the reader wishes not to be thought malicious or ignorant, and to align himself rather with the educated gentry, he must do so through the deployment of

Who read plays?  65 judgement – in other words, by approving of the play. Gentlemen exercise judgement and exercising judgement involves acting like a gentleman, even if one is not. The firm association of the qualities of judgement and masculine gentility (the equivalence of Mary Wyrley’s judgement with that of her husband is recalled) means, ultimately, that invocations of gentility become invocations of approving judgement, and vice versa. As a result, dramatic paratexts addressing an ostensibly restrictive readership, whether the restriction is of class or gender, often serve not as an index of who playbook readers were, but of the broad spectrum of who they could be. William Rowley’s 1638 A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, for instance, has an epistle addressed to ‘[n]one but’ the ‘honest and Highspirited Gentlemen of the never decaying Art, called the Gentle Craft’ (sig. A3r). These are the artisan shoemakers who can see themselves reflected among the play’s characters, but the idea that only shoemakers will read the play is patently ridiculous. On the contrary, the play’s thematic interest in social mobility means the epistle’s heading feeds directly into the context of aspirational gentility invoked by other playbook epistles that performatively address a certain desirable type of reader.

Conclusion Nora Johnson argues that ‘[p]eople buy plays in part because they like to imagine themselves included among the elite who understand The Faithful Shepherdess or Catiline’.179 The paratextual strategies explored above capitalise on the same desire that motivates such purchases in an attempt to secure a favourable aesthetic response when the play is read. In final sum, however, I am not suggesting that lengthy, erudite, generically innovative plays such as The Faithful Shepherdess or Catiline were bought or read in great numbers by the hoi polloi of early modern England. What I am suggesting is that playbooks in general had a much wider potential appeal than they have, as a genre, often been credited with. Their material form widened their potential reach, both in terms of their portability and their cost. Writers and stationers acknowledged this in the content of playbooks’ title pages, epistles, dedications, and commendatory verses, at times openly welcoming a wide range of readers, at others grumpily acknowledging it as an inevitability and deploying a variety of different strategies to attempt to manage the responses of playreaders who were less educated (or less male). That these paratextual management strategies may have been in vain is borne out by the manuscript evidence discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, which demonstrates that even elite readers were capable of passing unfavourable judgement upon the plays they read. Before returning to responses, however, the following chapter considers what precedes response: namely, expectation. What did the ‘Gentlemen […] and others’ who read playbooks think they would get from doing so – and how were those expectations paratextually fostered?

66  Who read plays?

Notes 1 Christopher Marlowe, 1 & 2 Tamburlaine the Great (1590), sig. A2r. This epistle was reproduced when the Tamburlaine plays were reprinted in 1593 and 1597, and also appeared at the start of 1 Tamburlaine when the play was published in a separate quarto edition in 1605. 2 ‘The economic context’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4: 1557–1695, ed. by John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 568–82 (p. 576). 3 Biographical information and secondary sources treating these figures’ reading is available on Book Owners Online (BOO), ed. by David Pearson and others, last modified 11 May 2021 [accessed 3 June 2021]. 4 For biographical information and secondary sources see BOO. At the time of writing, BOO did not include entries for Gordon, Freke, Drummond, or Pudsey: for Gordon, see Pamela and David Selwyn, ‘“The Profession of a Gentleman”: Books for the Gentry and the Nobility (c. 1560 to 1640)’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Volume 1: To 1640, ed. by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 489–519 (pp. 509–17); for Freke, see Erne, Book Trade, pp. 217–18; for Drummond and Pudsey, see Chapter 3 of this book. Lena Cowen Orlin speculates on the extent to which men’s playbook collections, in particular that of Henry Oxinden, may originally have been compiled by or for women: see ‘The Private Life of Public Plays’, in Shakespeare’s World/ World Shakespeares, ed. by Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn, and R. S. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 140–50 (p. 143). 5 On Frances Wolfreston, see Paul Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector’, The Library, 11 (1989), 197–219, and more recently Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s ‘Frances Wolfreston’s annotations as labours of love’, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book, ed. by Wayne, pp. 243–66. Sarah Lindebaum’s blog, Frances Wolfreston Hor Bouks (established in 2020) is an ongoing project to identify and provide digital images of books bearing Wolfreston’s signature: see https://franceswolfrestonhorbouks.com [accessed 10 May 2021]. 6 Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘Renaissance Play-Readers, Ordinary and Extraordinary’, in The Book of the Play, ed. by Straznicky, pp. 23–38 (p. 29). BOO includes four further men known to have owned or read playbooks, categorised by their profession rather than their social status: Deputy Chamberlain of the Exchequer Scipio Le Squyer (1579–1659); Middle Temple member Edward Gwynn (d. c.1645–1649); the clergyman Walter Brown (1575/76–1613); and academic Robert Burton (1577–1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. The Caroline clergyman Abraham Wright (1611–1690) is not included in BOO: on Wright, see Chapter 3 of this book. According to Barnaby Rich’s classification in his 1609 Roome for a Gentleman, the fact of these men’s university educations gave them the right to call themselves gentlemen, regardless of their background: see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60. Gwynn’s educational background is unknown, but he self-identifies as a gentleman in his will: see William A. Jackson, ‘Edward Gwynn’, The Library, 4th ser., 15 (1934), 90–96 (p. 95). 7 Birrell, p. 113. 8 See the discussion on p. 33, below. 9 As quoted in the Introduction, Mark Bland observes that ‘distinctions in format, type-face and type-size indicated something about the nature of the

Who read plays?  67 [reading] material, the audience for which it was intended, its portability and use’ (‘The London Book-Trade’, p. 456). 10 Tara L. Lyons, ‘Shakespeare in Print Before 1623’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. by Smith, pp. 1–17 (p. 2). 11 Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (Malden: Blackwell, 2010), p. 27. 12 For a description of a stab-stitched quarto, see Pratt, p. 304. 13 Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, p. 405. 14 Richard Brome, ‘Upon Aglaura printed in Folio’, printed before The Weeding of the Covent Garden in Five New Plays (1659), sigs A2r-v (sig. A2r). 15 ‘Content’, in Ex otio negotium. Or, Martiall his epigrams translated. With sundry poems and fancies (1656, Wing M831), sigs O4v-O6v (sig. O5r). 16 See the opening pages of the address ‘To the Christian Reader’ in Histriomastix, unsigned. 17 Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 72. 18 Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader’, in Reading, Society and Politics, ed. by Sharpe and Zwicker, pp. 1–37 (p. 5); Paul J. Voss, ‘Printing Conventions and the Early Modern Play’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 15 (2003), 98–115 (p. 100). 19 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 31. 20 See Joshua B. Fisher, ‘Changes in the Canon’, in The Renaissance Literature Handbook, ed. by Susan Bruce and Rebecca Steinberger (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 156–74 (p. 170); Zachary Lesser, ‘Playbooks’, in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 1, ed. by Raymond, pp. 520–34. 21 Lesser, ‘Playbooks’, p. 531. 22 Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, p. 18. 23 Joseph A. Dane and Alexandra Gillespie debunk ‘the myth of the cheap quarto’ in their chapter of the same name in Tudor Books and Readers, ed. by King, pp. 25–45. 24 Watt, pp. 273; 279. 25 For paratexts that refer to the price of the quarto playbook as sixpence, see the epistles to the reader in John Day’s Law Tricks (1608), sig. A2r; the second issue of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1609, STC 22332), sigs ¶2r-v; Philip Massinger’s The Bondman (1624), sig. A4r; and Gervase Markham and William Sampson’s Herod and Antipater (1622, STC 17401), sig. A2r. 26 Lyons, ‘Shakespeare in Print before 1623’, p. 3. 27 Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, p. 411 n. 61. 28 McKitterick, pp. 226, 229. 29 Blayney thinks the twelve-sheet Richard III would have been priced at 7.57d.: see ‘Publication of Playbooks’, p. 411 n. 61. 30 Martin Wiggins in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, 10 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011– ), VI (2015), entry 1788. 31 R. J. Fehrenbach, ‘Sir Richard Wingfield. Estate Landowner: Bookseller’s Account. 1654’, in Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists, ed. by R. J. Fehrenbach and Joseph L. Black, 10 vols (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 1992–2020), IX: PLRE 261–79 (2017), pp. 371–76. 32 The 14 shillings paid by Dering on 22 October 1622 for ‘Argenis and playbooks’ cannot be averaged out because Barclay’s Argenis is not a play; see Sir Edward Dering, 1st bart., p. 137. The possibility that the prices Dering records for bulk purchases of playbooks includes their binding into Sammelbände is discounted by Dering’s separate entries for the binding of playbooks.

68  Who read plays? 33 Ian Green, ‘Print’, in Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources, ed. by Laura Sangha and Jonathan Willis (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 78–94 (p. 83). 34 Sir Edward Dering, 1st bart., p. 145. 35 McKitterick, p. 208. 36 ‘Table of my English bookes | anno 1611’, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 2059, fol. 382r. 37 David Laing, ‘A Brief Account of the Hawthornden Manuscripts in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland; with Extracts, containing several unpublished Letters and Poems of William Drummond of Hawthornden’, Archaeologia Scotica: or Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 4 (1831), 57–116 (p. 76). 38 University of Edinburgh Library, shelfmark De.3.73. Drummond includes Romeo and Juliet in his list of ‘Bookes red be me | anno 1606’, MS 2059, fol. 362r; 1606 is the year in which he spends time in London en route for France, likely visiting the bookshops of St. Paul’s Churchyard: see The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. by Robert H. Macdonald (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), p. 9. 39 The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, p. 1. 40 ‘Booksellers without an author, 1627–1685’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, ed. by Taylor and Lavagnino, pp. 260–85 (p. 281). 41 See ‘Books and their Lives: The Petworth House Plays’, in Writing the Lives of People and Things, AD 500–1700: A Multi-disciplinary Future for Biography, ed. by Robert F. W. Smith and Gemma L. Watson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 203–24 as well as her doctoral thesis, ‘Performing Consumption and Consuming Performance: A 17th Century Play Collection’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2016). 42 Kirk, ‘Books and their Lives’, p. 205. 43 Molekamp, p. 36 n. 38. 44 The term ‘graffiti’ is used by Jason Scott-Warren to describe a range of marks and marginalia in early modern books, many of which are apparent in the Petworth House playbooks. See ‘Reading graffiti in the early modern book’, in The Textuality and Materiality of Reading, ed. by Richards and Schurink, pp. 363–81 and for representative images, Kirk’s ‘Books and their Lives’. 45 See Chapter 1 of ‘Performing Consumption’. 46 Kirk, ‘Performing Consumption’, p. 92. 47 Joseph L. Black and Juliette M. Cunico, ‘Abel Trefry. Scholar (M.A.): Probate Inventory. 1610’ and Joseph L. Black, ‘Walter Brown. Cleric, Scholar (B. Th.): Probate Inventory. 1613’, both in Private Libraries in Renaissance England, ed. by Fehrenbach and Black, 10 vols, VII: PLRE 151–66 (2009), pp. 103–12 (p. 112) & pp. 113–209 (p. 155). 48 Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 53. 49 Watt, p. 262. 50 See Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, pp. 412–13; Watt, p. 262. Watt’s argument relies on Francis R. Johnson’s conclusions about the pricing of reprints in his ‘Notes on English Retail Book-Prices, 1550–1640’ (The Library, 5th ser., 5 (1950), 83–112), in which he presents insufficient data regarding reprints of quarto playbooks for his conclusions to be applied with confidence to printed drama. 51 [Lording Barry], The Family of Love (1608, STC 17879a), sig. A1v. 52 William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 143.

Who read plays?  69 53 Ibid., p. 692. 54 On ‘baggage books’ as the wares of chapmen, see Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. Bodley’s much-quoted letter to his librarian is reproduced in Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 52–53. 55 The term ‘pamphlet’ has received renewed interest recently, as scholars have begun to argue that, due to their short length and typically unbound state when sold, quarto plays are more accurately described as play-pamphlets rather than play-books. This involves taking the term in its ‘neutral bibliographical sense’ (Watt, p. 264); as Pratt points out, the term has also acquired an imprecise cultural sense, whereby it designates a publication that is ephemeral and, by extension, ‘subliterary’. See Pratt, ‘Stab-Stitching’, esp. pp. 306–11. For a prominent insistence on the distinction between books and pamphlets in which plays are included amongst the latter, see Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, ‘What Is a Book?’ in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, ed. by Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 188–204 (pp. 195–96). 56 See Farmer, ‘Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality’, and Pratt, ‘Stab-stitching’. 57 Raymond, Pamphlets, p. 84. 58 Watt, p. 265. 59 The printed contents of these chapmen’s packs are discussed in Margaret Spufford’s Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-century England (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1981). 60 Brome, ‘Upon Aglaura printed in Folio’, sigs A2r-v. A record from later in the period that demonstrates a conception of playbooks as loanable items is Frances Wolfreston’s list, jotted in a 1670 almanac, of nine ‘plaie boucks I lent to cosen robart comarford’: see Newcomb, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s annotations’, pp. 253–54. 61 See Rebecca Unsworth, ‘Hands Deep in History: Pockets in Men and Women’s Dress in Western Europe, c. 1480–1630’, Costume, 51 (2017), 148–170 (p. 163). 62 John Hales, A sermon preached at St Maries in Oxford upon Tuesday in Easter weeke (Oxford, 1617, STC 12628), sig. C3r. 63 John Norden, The surveyors dialogue (1607, STC 18639), sigs L4r-v. 64 Thomas Heywood, The exemplary lives and memorable acts of nine the most worthy women of the world (1640, STC 13316), sig. **2. 65 Watt, p. 76. 66 Ibid., pp. 76–77. 67 This count, enabled by DEEP, is of play titles rather than editions (and includes only professional plays printed in quarto). 68 Zachary Lesser, ‘Typographic Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity, and the Meanings of Black Letter’, in The Book of the Play, ed. by Straznicky, pp. 99–126 (pp. 108–09). 69 Ibid., p. 116. 70 See Gerald D. Johnson, ‘John Trundle and the Book-Trade 1603-1626’, Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 177–99 (p. 188). Watt (pp. 75–6) sees the presence of other stationers’ titles – like A Fair Quarrel – amongst Wright’s stock as ‘an indication of his access to [regional] markets which [the other stationers] could not reach from their own shops’. 71 John Astington, ‘Visual Texts: Thomas Middleton and Print’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, ed. by Taylor and Lavagnino, pp. 226–46 (p. 230).

70  Who read plays? 72 For Coles’s succession, see Watt, p. 75; for the presence of Wily Beguiled in the Broughton Play, see Spufford, pp. 11–12. 73 See for example Watt, p. 316; Jowett, p. 291; Alex Davis, ‘Chapbooks’ in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 431–34 (p. 433). 74 Some of these fluctuations for those living in the centre of playbook production are mapped by Jeremy Boulton in ‘Food prices and the standard of living in London in the “century of revolution”, 1580–1700’, Economic History Review, 53 (2000), 455–92 (esp. pp. 468–69). It is important to remember that ­discussions about what print was affordable for whom inevitably exclude many of the ‘lower sorts’ who would not have been purchasing any kind of print, cheap or otherwise: Nigel Wheale points out that given the limited disposable income of many wage workers (such as cottagers and labourers), ‘there would be little enough money even for purchase of two-or three-penny pamphlets or a bible at three shillings and four pence’. See Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590–1660 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 40. 75 ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’ in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Wolfson College Lectures 1985, ed. by Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 97–131 (p. 99). 76 Adrian Weiss, ‘Casting Compositors, Foul Cases, and Skeletons: Printing in Middleton’s Age’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 195–225 (p. 204). 77 Weiss notes (p. 205) that ‘[b]y the 1620s black letter had been displaced by romans and italics’, remaining in use as a ‘bibliographical signifier’, invoking antiquity or foreignness. See Lesser, ‘Typographic Nostalgia’, for an application of this argument to playbooks. 78 Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 60–61. 79 Hawkers, suggests Stern, were street-sellers who predominantly sold books; mercury women were their ‘female counterparts’. Pedlars offered a wider selection of goods, with books merely one type of ware amongst many. See ‘Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in Shakespeare’s Playhouse’, in How To Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, ed. by Laurie Maguire (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 136–59 (pp. 139–40). 80 Stern, ‘Watching as reading’, p. 140. 81 A character in William Cartwright’s 1651 play The Ordinary describes the ‘playhouse trader’ selling ‘“small books”’ at the door of the playhouse, which include the popular quarto pamphlet A Crystal Glass for Christian Women, or ‘The life | And death of Katherin Stubs’, reprinted numerous times between 1591 and 1660 (including by the ballad partners John Wright and Thomas Pavier). See Stern, ‘Watching as reading’, p. 140. 82 The epistle’s writer also acknowledges potential readers to whom the play may be a ‘Stranger’, which can perhaps be attributed to its publication date twelve years after the closure of the theatres. 83 Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, p. 31. The ‘other things’ a playbook might be are explored further in the following chapter. 84 By ‘public’ I mean performance in locations where the audience included members of the public (including indoor playhouses) rather than performance at court. This count is of quarto playbooks that exhibit substantive differences in their paratextual elements: using data from DEEP, successive editions, separate issues, and variant states are all counted individually. The count excludes plays listed in DEEP as professional but ‘unacted’, as well as the ‘opera’ of the late 1650s.

Who read plays?  71 85 On Walter Burre’s strategy of dissociating the plays he published from their playhouse origins, see Chapter 2 of Lesser’s Renaissance Drama. 86 Cyndia Susan Clegg, Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences: Early Modern Books and Audience Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 11. 87 Clegg, Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences, p. 6; Gurr, p. 58. 88 Clegg, Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences, p. 6; Gurr, p. 58. 89 Gurr, pp. 70–71; p. 77. 90 Thomas, p. 101. 91 Brayman Hackel, ‘Rhetorics and Practices of Illiteracy’, p. 171; Wyn Ford, ‘The Problem of Literacy in Early Modern England’, History, 78 (1993), 22–37 (p. 26). 92 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, p. 18; Brayman Hackel, ‘Rhetorics and Practices of Illiteracy’, p. 172. 93 Brayman Hackel, ‘Rhetorics and Practices of Illiteracy’, p. 170. 94 Ben Jonson, The Works (1616, STC 14752), sig. 3T1r. 95 Ben Jonson, Catiline (1611), sig. A3r. 96 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (1612), sig. A3r. 97 Philip Massinger, The Bondman (1624), sig. A4r. 98 Philip Massinger, The Bondman: An Antient Storie, ed. by Benjamin Townley Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932), p. 167. 99 Ibid., p. 168. The definition is Gurr’s, p. 62. 100 John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess ([1610?]), sig. A3v. 101 ‘literature, n. 1’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed 1 November 2020]. 102 Jonson, New Inn, sig. (*) 2r. It is a mark of the vehemence of Jonson’s antitheatrical print persona that he then declares that, provided they can also form words from letters and ‘joyne [his] sense’, these readers will nevertheless be preferable to the ‘fastidious impertinents’ who took against his play in the theatre. 103 Gervase Markham and William Sampson, Herod and Antipater (1622, STC 17401), sig. A2r. 104 Ibid., sig. A2r. 105 This count is of total editions and is enabled by DEEP, using the genre classifications of the Annals of English Drama. 106 Jonson, Catiline, sig. A3v. 107 Lesser, Renaissance Drama, p. 62; Ronald A. Tumelson II, ‘Robert Greene, “Author of Playes”’, in Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer, ed. by Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 95–114 (pp. 95–96). 108 Lucy Munro, ‘Reading Printed Comedy: Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer’, in The Book of the Play, ed. by Straznicky, pp. 39–58 (p. 45); Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, p. 8. 109 ‘Other Countrie men have thought the like worthie of Dukes and Princes acceptations; Injusti sdegnii; Il Pentamento Amorose; Calisthe, Pastor fido, &c. (all being but plaies) were all dedicate to Princes of Italie’ (George Chapman, The Widow’s Tears, sig. A2r). 110 Raven, p. 578. 111 Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turk (1612), sig. A3r. Latin translation from Daniel Vitkus’s edition in Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 152. 112 In arguing that detached title pages were used to advertise plays, Stern (Documents of Performance, p. 55) discusses Jonson’s epigram ‘To My Bookseller’, in which he wishes not to ‘have my title-leaf on posts or walls, |

72  Who read plays? […] For termers, or some clerk-like serving man, | Who scarce can spell th’hard names’. Jonson, as Stern points out, ‘illustrates that post-advertising was thought of as “low,” whilst also implying that his […] plays […] are likely to be so advertised’ – once more implying breadth of readership. 113 ‘[N]o one who is wise is miserable’ (Vitkus’s translation, Three Turk Plays, p. 149). 114 ‘Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 39 (2000), 77–165 (p. 94). 115 Ibid., p. 101. 116 Lesser and Stallybrass, p. 409. 117 The argument that paratextual elements such as title page author attributions and Latin mottoes cast a playbook as ‘literary’ is advanced most prominently by Lukas Erne: see Chapter 2 of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Chapter 3 of Shakespeare and the Book Trade. 118 See n. 84, above, for details of the data set which enables these calculations. 119 Robert Armin, The Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609), sig. ¶2r; ‘crank, adj.1 and adv.’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed 1 November 2020]. 120 Nora Johnson, in The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), also notes that Heywood ‘establishes himself as an author without [Jonson’s] strong ethic of exclusion’ (p. 127) and sees him as a ‘compiler of erudition for “the ruder” sort of readers and playgoers’ (p. 141). But she is ultimately more interested in how this contributes to her discussion of Heywood’s construction of a ‘theatrical model of authorship’ (p. 134) than in its ramifications for a history of readerships. 121 Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece (1608), sig. A2r. The other plays by Heywood that feature epistles to the reader are The Golden Age (1611), The Brazen Age (1613), The Silver Age (1613), The Four Prentices of London (first published 1615), the two parts of The Fair Maid of the West (1631), the two parts of The Iron Age (1632), The English Traveller (1633), A Maidenhead Well Lost (1634), and Love’s Mistress (first published 1636). 122 The only other epistle which Heywood will address to an exclusive readership is that to The Four Prentices of London, printed in 1615 and 1632, and the named readership will be a specifically non-elite one: the ‘honest and hie-spirited Prentises’ whom, Heywood states, ‘this Play most especially concernes’ (STC 13321, sig. A2r). 123 The Golden Age, sig. A2r; A Maidenhead Well Lost, sig. A3r; 1 The Iron Age, sig. A4r. 124 Thomas Heywood, Love’s Mistress (1636), sig. A2r. 125 Benedict Scott Robinson holds that, as a five-play volume, this is likely to be ‘a largish quarto or octavo rather than a folio’ (‘Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections’, Studies in English Literature, 42 (2002), 361–80 (p. 361)). 126 Robinson, p. 374. 127 Thomas Heywood, Gynaikeion: or, Nine bookes of various history. Concerninge women (1624, STC 13326), sig. A4v. 128 Nora Johnson, also quoting this passage from the Gunaikeion, notes that ‘Heywood associates the desire for mirth with “the lesse capable”’ (p. 123), an observation that recalls Rhodes’s and Massinger’s depiction of comedies as the dramatic genre preferred by those of ‘Earthy breeding’ and the ‘ignorant’. 129 Bergeron, p. 176; Grace Ioppolo, ‘Thomas Heywood, Script-Doctor’ in Shakespeare without Boundaries, ed. by Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen

Who read plays?  73 Orlin, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 47–59 (p. 53). Robinson (p. 363) calls it a ‘transparent disavowal’. 130 For a discussion of the early modern expectation that women should be ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’, see Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers’ in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. by Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 93– 116, esp. pp. 96–99. 131 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies, sig. A4r. 132 Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982). 133 Thomas Heywood, A Maidenhead Well Lost, sig. A3r. 134 See Straznicky, p. 59. 135 Field, A Woman is a Weathercock, sig. A3r. It would be another six years until the publication of Field’s titularly appropriate Amends for Ladies, which had first been performed in 1610 (Wiggins’s dating), but the dedicatory epistle to A Woman is a Weathercock indicates that he is already planning his next foray into print. 136 Field, A Woman is a Weathercock, sig. A3r. 137 An enthusiastic female consumer of plays who objects to the use of Latin because she cannot understand it can be found in the induction to William Hawkins’s grammar school play Apollo Shroving (1627), sig. B2r. 138 ‘The Reading of Renaissance English Women’, Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), 671–88 (pp. 682–84). 139 Amanda: or, The reformed whore (1635, STC 5988), sig. E4v. For further analysis of the connotations of Amanda’s reading, see Katharine Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 132, and Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, p. 37. 140 The academy of love (1641, Wing J782), sig. O1r. See Straznicky, pp. 68–69, for further discussion of the learning environment of Johnson’s academy. 141 ‘W. B.’, The yellow book (1656, Wing B3153D), sig. A4r-v. See Pearson, p. 88, for discussion of the playbook and the history as ‘the moral equivalents of [Mrs. Wanton’s] collection of “naked Pictures”’. 142 Roberts encapsulates the male anxiety regarding female engagement with print when she writes, ‘[i]n the body of a woman reader, textual and sexual experience become fatally linked’ (Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, p. 21). For texts discussing the early modern conception of women as particularly susceptible to corruption, see Straznicky, p. 64 n. 15. 143 Straznicky, p. 68. 144 ‘“More swete vnto the eare | than holsome for ye mynde”: Embodying Early Modern Women’s Reading’, in The Textuality and Materiality of Reading, ed. by Richards and Schurink, pp. 413–32. 145 Sir John Harington, A Brief Apology of Poetry, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), pp. 260–73 (p. 272). 146 Johnson, The academy of love, sig. O1r. 147 Ibid., sig. O1r. 148 On the early modern conception of erotic reading matter as damaging to youth, see Craik, pp. 118–25. 149 Robert Chamberlain, The Swaggering Damsel (1640, STC 4946, Greg 589AI), sig. A3v. 150 For the pre-1642 editions of commercial drama that are dedicated to women, see Straznicky, p. 65, n. 17.

74  Who read plays? 51 Straznicky, p. 65. 1 152 Ibid., pp. 66–67. 153 See Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 10. 154 Orlin, p. 145; Richard Levin, ‘Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.2 (1989), 165–74 (p. 173). 155 Levin, p. 173. 156 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, pp. 116–17. 157 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 158 Ibid., p. 116. 159 James Shirley, The Traitor (1635), sig. A3r. 160 Robert Davenport, A New Trick to Cheat the Devil (1639, STC 6315), sig. A2r. 161 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, p. 116. 162 Clegg, ‘Renaissance Play-Readers’, p. 27. 163 John Day, Law Tricks, sig. A2r; Shakespeare, Othello (1622), sig. A2r. 164 Clegg, ‘Renaissance Play-Readers’, p. 28. 165 Roger Ascham, The scholemaster (1589, STC 836), sig. L4r. 166 Raphael Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles (1587, STC 13569), sig. O2v. 167 Clegg, ‘Renaissance Play-Readers’, p. 28. 168 Ibid., pp. 27–28. 169 William Davenant, The Wits (1636), sig. A3v. 170 Several dramatic paratexts testify to the fact that commendatory verses were occasionally commissioned in an attempt to increase a substandard play’s worth in the eyes of the reader; see for instance the evidence provided in the verses by John Hall, ‘J. B.’, and James Shirley among the preliminaries to Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew (1652). 171 Jonson, Volpone (1607), sig. A1v. 172 ‘judgement, judgment 8.b’, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn [accessed 1 November 2020]. 173 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, p. 116. 174 Rosemary O’Day demonstrates that about half of all students who commenced studies at the universities were not members of the gentry (Education and Society, 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longman, 1982), p. 90). Completing a degree earned one the right to call oneself a gentleman. 175 William Davenant, The Just Italian (1630), sig. A2r. 176 Shackerley Marmion, A Fine Companion (1633), sig. A2r. For the implications of the paratextual elevation of plays to the status of poetry, see the following chapter. 177 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, p. 122; Shirley, The Grateful Servant (1630), sig. XA1r. 178 Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier (1634), sig. A3r. 179 Johnson, The Actor as Playwright, p. 68.

2 Why read plays?

I will not raise thy Expectation further, nor delay thy Entertainment by a tedious Preface. The Design is high, the Contrivement subtle, and will deserve thy grave Attention in the perusall. Farewell.1 Such is the way the writer of the address to the reader in the 1654 quarto of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany concludes his epistle, foregrounding the fact that, just as the role of paratextual preliminaries is to ‘bespeak [the reader] Courteous’, it is equally to ‘raise [the reader’s] Expectation’ regarding the text that follows. It is the quality of this expectation that I set out to identify in this chapter. Turning once more to close analysis of dramatic paratexts, I consider what early modern playreaders might have thought they would ‘get’ from reading a play, based on the presence and content of those paratexts. I examine how playbooks’ paratextual packaging responded to readers’ established expectations and attempted to ‘raise’ new ones, both catering to pre-existing markets and aspirationally targeting others. In the process, I show that the range of motivations and assumptions readers might have brought to their reading of a playbook was nearly as varied as the playreading demographic established in the previous chapter. Although the present chapter is concerned in part with the marketing capacity of preliminary paratexts, particularly certain elements of title page copy, I am largely interested not in how these paratexts secured a purchase but in how they might have affected a reading. In shifting the focus from playbooks as products to playbooks as loci of reading experiences, it is necessary first to confront an elephant in the room. This is the debate over the ‘status’ of playbooks, and in particular whether they were ‘theatrical’ or ‘literary’.2 These terms, or variations thereon, have surfaced in discussions of playbook paratexts for over two decades, often corralled into a narrative of change over time, whereby printed plays from the professional theatres start out as little more than souvenirs of past performances, and become over time textual substitutes for these performances, paratextually aligned with other genres of ‘literature’.3 It is clearly observable that, over the course of the first half of the seventeenth DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748-3

76  Why read plays? century, playbooks become increasingly inflected with the types of paratextual ‘added extras’ that scholars have argued are ‘literary’, rather than ‘theatrical’: authors’ names, Latin title page mottoes, dedications, prefatory epistles, commendatory verses, lists of dramatis personae, arguments, printed commonplace markers, and act and scene divisions.4 What is less clear is that there came a point at the end of the sixteenth century or sometime during the first few decades of the seventeenth when, thanks to the proliferation of such paratexts, playbooks – as Lukas Erne puts it – ‘started being read as literature’.5 Other scholars have pointed out the inappropriateness and anachronism of the terms ‘literature’ and ‘literary’ to describe fictional writing from this period, providing one ground on which to take issue with Erne’s framing.6 A different issue arises when we take seriously the proposition that if plays came to be read in the same way as certain other printed texts in the period, then they had somehow been read differently prior to this transition moment. No scholar satisfactorily addresses what this reading of playbooks not ‘as literature’ but – in another popular framing – as ‘record[s] of theatrical event[s]’ might historically have looked like.7 It might logically have involved envisaging the playtexts in performance, as opposed to accepting their construction of a fictive world that has no recourse to the stage, but this is not in fact the distinction Erne draws in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Instead, he believes that the longer ‘literary’ quarto and folio texts of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Hamlet enable what Harry Berger terms ‘imaginary audition’, in that ‘they allow a reader to imagine a point of stage business that could otherwise only be conveyed in performance’.8 The theatre remains at the heart of the ‘literary’ mode of interpretation, a paradox Erne confronts in the preface to the second edition of Literary Dramatist, acknowledging that ‘the terms [literary and theatrical] can be problematic, since they may suggest a dichotomy where none exists’.9 Erne is right to place pressure on the false dichotomy. As the evidence presented in the following chapters makes clear, it remains uncertain to what extent early modern men and women ever read plays while remembering a past performance or imagining a potential one. This may be to do with the fact that, as a genre, plays had a much longer history as ‘literary’ texts than they have been given credit for: Atkin convincingly argues that it was in the 1560s and 1570s when ‘playbooks were marketed as literary artefacts for the first time’.10 Yet when plays that had originally been performed by the professional playing companies of early modern London began to be printed, the paratexts of their printed versions tied them (truthfully or not) to prior performances that playreaders might have attended. Right throughout the pre-Restoration period, playbooks were almost always both literary and theatrical in their paratextual make-up, as Alan Farmer, Zachary Lesser, and Peter Stallybrass have shown.11 The two states were linked but separate, as John Marston acknowledges in

Why read plays?  77 the epistle to the playgoing playreader of The Malcontent (1604), hoping that the ‘unhandsome shape which [the play] in reading presents, may bee pardoned, for the pleasure it once afforded you, when it was presented with the soule of lively action’.12 The play read is different from the performance remembered, even though it might be the latter that prompts an interest in the former. In 1634, Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, writes to Thomas Carew thanking him effusively for the loan of a play which he has previously seen performed: ‘[I]f I valued it so high at the single hearing, when myne eares could not catch half the wordes’, writes Cary, ‘what must I do now, in the reading when I may pause upon it[?]’.13 Cary has fond memories of the performance, which is why he wants to revisit it on the page, but he knows that the reading of a playtext is experientially different – more akin, for him, to the considered study of other nontheatrical texts. For these reasons, it seems less productive to try to pronounce ­judgement on which playbooks were ‘literary’ and which ‘theatrical’ than to place pressure on the elements of paratext that have been taken to denote literariness or theatricality and to think about how each one offers up a particular type of reading experience. It is this proposition that I explore further in what follows. This chapter does not seek to map how ­certain paratextual elements transposed playbooks as cultural objects from one place to another on a somewhat arbitrarily conceived spectrum. Instead, I examine how such elements might have affected early modern men and women’s expectations of what they would get from reading books that both invoked their origins as performances and asserted their place within the wider textual culture with which readers were ­engaging. Beginning with two elements of title page paratext that are typically viewed as serving a marketing function, I consider what types of expectations are established by variations on the claim that a play is printed ‘As it was performed’ and by the presence of an author’s name, exploring how these expectations might be fulfilled or dashed in the act of reading that succeeds a purchase. I then consider the types of expectations that readers might have brought to playbooks which increasingly featured p ­ aratextual elements asserting commercial drama’s status as poetry, when those readers lived in a culture in which understanding of dramatic poetics was conveyed primarily via two classical texts: Horace’s first-century BCE Ars Poetica and Aristotle’s fourth-century BCE Poetics (the latter ­mediated by the Italian neoclassicists). Focusing on the c­ onnotations of title page genre indications, I argue that readers’ understanding of the dramatic form and content conveyed by the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ would have become more capacious as time went by, in part thanks to the ­presence of other preliminary paratexts which sought to instill new expectations amongst educated readers of professional plays. Finally, I argue that as these plays were increasingly constructed as poetry, a genre intended to (in Horace’s formulation) ‘profit and delight’, dramatic paratexts

78  Why read plays? pronounced the value of reading plays via an idiosyncratic interpretation of these terms that reflected the wider habits, priorities, and predilections of participants in early modern reading culture.

Printing plays ‘as’ performed: expectations of theatrical similitude Given that perhaps the most famous epistle in an early modern dramatic publication is explicitly and repeatedly insistent that ‘what ever’ its readers do with Shakespeare’s First Folio, they should ‘buy it first’, it’s not surprising that a particular view of the function and purpose of preliminary paratexts has risen to prominence.14 This view is encapsulated by Michael Baird Saenger’s description of early modern front matter as ‘an early, coherent, and very versatile system of advertising […] geared around a very specific and rather crucial act of reader response: the purchase’.15 Scholars who discuss the front matter of playbooks often echo this claim: Erne, for instance, sees it as ‘the locus in which [publishers] can […] make of the potential reader a customer’, while Peter Berek describes title pages in particular as ‘the crucial form of “point-of-sale” advertising for books’.16 Historical evidence shows title pages playing a marketing role away from the ‘point-of-sale’ of the bookshop: as separate sheets of paper, they were ‘posted’ around London in order to publicise books and the locations at which they could be purchased.17 What seems worth recalling, however, is that paratextual front matter has an effect upon a reader just as much as a potential purchaser. Plenty of early modern men – and particularly women – read playbooks that they would not have purchased personally or that they would have bought sight unseen, meaning that for these readers, dramatic paratexts’ influence must be different.18 Even those who bought plays as a result of browsing in bookshops or viewing a posted title page would have done so in many cases because they thought past the act of acquisition and imagined instead a still more ‘crucial act of reader-response’, but one that has been curiously side-lined: the reading itself. We too need to think past the figure of the reader-asconsumer and consider what preliminary paratexts – particularly those on playbooks’ title pages – may have offered up to readers-as-readers. I want to begin by placing pressure on that word ‘as’ – the ‘as’ that finds its way into Erne’s assertion that plays were read ‘as’ literature, but which in the early modern period surfaces time after time in title page claims of playbooks’ supposed theatricality. Throughout the period, dramatic title pages announce that inside the playbook, readers will find the named play ‘as it hath beene publiquely played’ (1584), ‘As it was (sundry times) publikely acted’ (1591), ‘as it hath of late been divers times acted’ (1602), ‘As it hath beene often presented’ (1613), ‘As it was approovedly well Acted’ (1623), ‘As it was lately plaied’ (1630), ‘now Printed as it was lately Acted’ (1640), ‘As it was Acted, with great Applause’ (1654) – and so on, with variations on such claims of prior performance appearing

Why read plays?  79 on over half the title pages of pre-Restoration playbooks.19 It is these claims, generally accompanied by the name of either a playing company or playhouse, that when viewed as marketing copy seem to be reaching out to those potential playreaders who are also playgoers. As Stephen Orgel observes, in doing so they purport to offer ‘the reader direct access to [the] theatrical event in the past’.20 Such an offer can only ever be disingenuous, however, and multiple scholars have noted, along with David Scott Kastan, that ‘the printed text can never be the play “as it was played”’, can never be the play ‘[a]s […] it existed in the theatre, in the ephemeral sounds and gestures of dramatic action’.21 Although others such as Claire Bourne, J. Gavin Paul, and Holger Syme have argued that playbooks can typographically and paratextually simulate the effects of performance, what they can self-evidently never do is reconstruct the particular past theatrical events that playgoing playreaders are encouraged to recall.22 In addition to the absence of the theatre’s various sensory stimuli, even the words on the page may not accurately reflect what the reader had heard spoken: as is frequently observed, a number of early modern playtexts require longer to act than the time allotted for public performance permitted, meaning either that they were abridged for such performances or that they were performed in the more temporally lenient (and socially exclusive) context of late-night court revels.23 That ‘as’ which implicitly constructs a fidelity between the performed play invoked on the title page and the printed playtext that followed could thus be seen as misleading advertising, although playwrights and their supporters are occasionally upfront about the experiential deficit of playreading.24 Around 1634, Sir Richard Baker pens a rebuttal of William Prynne’s Histriomastix, noting in passing that ‘a Play read, hath not half the pleasure of a Play Acted: for though it have the pleasure of ingenious Speeches, yet it wants the pleasure of Gracefull action’.25 His sentiments are echoed by John Marston, who in the epistles he pens for the second edition of Parasitaster (1606) expects that the reader will be disappointed to read a printed comedy, ‘whose life rests much in the Actors voice’, and abjures him to ‘[r]emember the life of these things consists in action’.26 A further foregrounding of printed plays’ inferiority to performed plays comes from James Shirley, in his ironic dedication of the 1633 Bird in a Cage to William Prynne. Shirley declares that the printed play ‘wanteth I must confesse, much of that Ornament, which the Stage and Action lent it’. This is in part because ‘[t]he Musicke, the Songs, the Dancing, and other varieties, which I know would have pleas’d you infinitely in the Presentment’ must regretfully, says Shirley, be ‘referre[d] to [Prynne’s] imagination’ (sig. A2r). The statement is playfully sarcastic: Prynne had recently been imprisoned because he had complained in Histriomastix about the inappropriateness of women performing on stage, at just the same time as Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies were in rehearsals for a court performance of Sir Walter Montagu’s pastoral The Shepherd’s

80  Why read plays? Paradise.27 It is the female characters of The Bird in a Cage who sing, dance, and play music, and observing them do so ‘in the Presentment’ would have been anything but ‘infinitely pleasing’ to Prynne. But Shirley’s faux-dedication does more than indulge his Schadenfreude. It also identifies the three aspects of performance that the readerly imagination is least equipped to substitute: dance, music, and song. At the same time as taking aim at Prynne, then, Shirley manages the expectations of readers who have noted the claim on the title page of The Bird in a Cage that the play on offer is ‘As it hath beene Presented at the Phoenix in Drury-Lane’, but who are confronted instead with oblique textual traces of moments that offered fuller sensory stimulation in performance. All that remains of the ‘Musicke, […] Songs, [and] Dancing’ are, on sig. F3r, the stage directions ‘Song’, ‘They dance’, and an in-text indication of the fact that the ladies sing while accompanying themselves upon lutes (‘Shall we try our Lutes Madam?’; ‘And voyces if you please’). The experiential lacuna mediated by the stage directions in The Bird in a Cage is made still more noticeable by the absence of any lyrics for Donella’s ‘Song’, although early modern readers of Shirley’s plays may have been used to this.28 Tiffany Stern argues that the frequent absence of lyrics accompanying directions to sing reflects the fact that songs were often transcribed separately, and thus failed to make it to the printing house with the manuscript of the play in which they had appeared. Consequently, she holds that songs ‘were, from the moment of their composition, separate from the play, even if written for it’.29 While materially accurate, this does not always seem to have been the opinion held by early modern playreaders, who, while they may have been willing to let slide the lack of music and dancing, seem in certain instances to have considered songs to be integral both to the play ‘as acted’ and ‘as printed’. An examination of the paratextual apparatus attached to the five editions of Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece may confirm this. The Rape of Lucrece was first performed at the Red Bull in 1607 and appeared in quarto the following year (Q1), published jointly by John Busby and Nathaniel Butter, with Butter selling copies out of his shop at the Sign of the Pied Bull. Subsequent quarto editions were published in 1609 (Q2), 1614 (Q3), 1630 (Q4), and 1638 (Q5); by the end of the 1630s it had become a Cockpit play, and the printed editions were now being published by Butter alone.30 It is a play with an unusually large number of songs, to be sung by the actor who plays Valerius. In Q1 there are eleven, as well as a catch that is sung by Valerius, Horatius, and the Clown. The lyrics of each song are provided, and their presence is considered a selling point: the playbook’s title page declares that its contents are ‘The Rape of Lucrece. A True Roman Tragedie. With the severall Songes in their apt places, by Valerius, the merrie Lord amongst the Roman Peeres’ (see Figure 2.1). Not only are the full lyrics printed, implying that an unexpanded ‘Song’ may have been a frustrating stage

Why read plays?  81

Figure 2.1  Title page of Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lvcrece (1608, STC 13360, sig. A1r). Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Harry Ransom Center, Pforz 483 PFZ.

82  Why read plays? direction for readers, but according to the title page they are printed ‘in their apt places’, i.e. in the location they occupied within readers’ performed dramatic action.31 The songs in The Rape of Lucrece are quite evidently thought to be an integral part of the play, both performed and printed.32 Their inclusion in the printed playbook demonstrates Busby responding to a consumer assumption that, as Orgel puts it, ‘the most desirable text is […] the one closest to the original performance’.33 Although ink and paper cannot provide what William Prynne calls the ‘viva vox’, lyrics are far better than nothing, particularly if, as in the case of the songs in The Rape of Lucrece, certain songs were available elsewhere in contemporary settings or were clearly reworkings of others whose tunes were widely known.34 Orgel’s contention that playtexts were expected to encode ‘original performance’ [my italics] deserves modification in light of other elements of the paratextual apparatus of the first and subsequent editions of The Rape of Lucrece. On sig. K2r of Q1 is a second, unsigned, address to the reader: Because we would not that any mans expectation should be deceived in the ample printing of this booke. Lo (Gentle Reader) we have inserted these few songs, which were added by the stranger that lately acted Valerius his part in forme following. The two songs that follow are self-evidently not ‘in their apt places’: as Stern points out, they clearly postdate the play’s first performance and as such are more likely to have arrived in the printing house as documents separate from the manuscript of the playtext.35 However, the inclusion of them even at the back of the playbook is an acknowledgement of the power of title page paratexts. Announcing on the title page that the printed play will feature the songs that have evidently been a memorable feature of its performances creates the expectation among readers that the book will make good on its promise, and it is in an attempt not to ‘deceive’ these expectations that the extra songs are added on sigs K2 and K3. Furthermore, their inclusion indicates that the expectations of readers rested on the assumption that the playbook would reconstitute not the ‘original’ but the most recent version of the play in performance: these two songs have been ‘added’ by the actor who ‘lately’ played the part of Valerius, and accordingly must be added to the printed playbook.36 The later editions of The Rape of Lucrece strengthen the implication that, as the performance tradition of a particular play developed, play­going readers quite naturally assumed that the most recent printed p ­ laybook would approximate the most recent performance of the play. Thus, when the play becomes still more musically inflected after its transfer to the Cockpit, its later editions reflect this. Four new songs are added to Q4; in Q5, an additional five ‘sundry Songs before omitted’ are ‘now inserted in

Why read plays?  83 their right places’, according to the title page. Once more, the fact of their appearance in the ‘right places’ within the dramatic narrative appears to be considered a selling point, and to announce that this edition includes those songs that were ‘before omitted’ hints at it being a response to the ‘deceived expectations’ of those readers who anticipated their inclusion in the previous edition. The paratextual advertisement of the songs in The Rape of Lucrece can be interpreted as a response to reader expectations that the printed play will provide as close an approximation of the content and structure of its performed incarnation as is possible. Given the solicitude apparent in the inclusion of the songs, then, it is perhaps surprising to find the play is announced on its successive title pages simply as ‘Acted by her Majesties servants at the Red Bull’, rather than ‘As Acted’. In light of the later Cockpit transfer, however, the omission only serves to highlight the potential power of the adverb, and Butter’s apparent commitment to paratextual veracity. The play has indeed been acted at the Red Bull, a historical detail which remains on the title pages of the later editions; but these, while proclaiming the increasingly songful content that may be a result of the transfer to the Cockpit, do not claim to present the play ‘as’ it was acted in the theatre of its original performance.37 Although the formulaic playbook title page claims that texts were printed ‘as’ performed quite evidently served a marketing function – reaching out, as the previous chapter has discussed, to playgoing playreaders – they also, by invoking a link between playtext and performance, set up expectations in those readers. That these expectations involved the play’s content approximating as closely as possible what readers had seen on stage is borne out not just by the paratextual presentation of the songs in The Rape of Lucrece, but by numerous other title page advertisements of novel additions. As new elements were added in performance, play­ going playreaders expected these to be included in the newest printed editions of the plays. Thus the fourth edition of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1602) is ‘enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others’ and presented for the first time with the claim that it is ‘as it hath of late been divers times acted’ (sig. A1r).38 The third edition of Marston’s The Malcontent is printed ‘With the Additions played by the Kings Majesties servants’ and includes Webster’s metatheatrical induction composed for performance at the Globe.39 The fourth quarto of Richard II (1608) appears ‘With new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard […] As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Majesties servantes, at the Globe’, the deposition scene apparently deemed performable (and printable) in James’s reign as it had not been in Elizabeth’s.40 Such claims can of course also become formulaic and, eventually, disingenuous: every subsequent edition of The Spanish Tragedy published over the following three decades will also (according to its title page) supposedly be ‘Newly Corrected, Amended, and Enlarged with new Additions’.41 Yet looking past the marketing function that these claims

84  Why read plays? develop allows us to unearth the expectations they might originally have been designed to meet, and to consider to what extent readers’ expectations of a playbook such as the 1633 Spanish Tragedy – lying about its ‘new Additions’ while claiming to be printed, like its 1602 predecessor, ‘as it hath of late been divers times Acted’ – might have been deceived.

What’s in a name? The meanings of authorial attribution If title page advertisements of playbooks’ origins in performance might have created certain expectations about their content amongst readers, so too might another element of title page paratext that has also been predominantly understood as a ‘selling point’.42 This is the author’s name.43 As the period progresses, author attributions increasingly accompany indications of performance origin on playbooks’ title pages, providing potential purchasers with further assurance of the play’s quality. At least, this is how scholars have most often interpreted the presence on a title page of an author’s name, providing as evidence the two dramatic paratexts that support this stance: Richard Brome’s claims in his commendatory verse prefacing John Fletcher’s 1639 Monsieur Thomas that the play is ‘authoriz’d by the Authors name’ and that ‘each man can say | If Fletcher made it ’tis an exc’lent play’ (sig. A2r), and Thomas Walkley’s assertion in his epistle in the 1622 Othello quarto that ‘the Authors [i.e. Shakespeare’s] name is sufficient to vent his worke’ (sig. A2r).44 Together, these two statements imply that names were useful marketing devices because they signified quality: ‘Buy this book: it’s by so-and-so, it’s bound to be good!’ Viewed in this way, names create a certain type of expectation amongst readers, but a fairly non-specific one. More specificity inheres in Mark Rose’s observation, quoted by Erne, that the author’s name can serve as ‘a kind of brand name, a recognizable sign that the cultural commodity will be of a certain kind and quality’, but Erne himself is almost exclusively focused on the dramatist’s name as an index of quality.45 Considering instead the ways in which names can signify something about the kind of text being encountered means that we can access more fully the range of expectations that certain names may have created for early modern playreaders. Doing so involves returning – perhaps unfashionably – to Michel Foucault’s idea of the author-function. This sits behind statements about authors as ‘brand names’, but has more nuance. When Foucault describes the author as ‘the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’, he asserts that the author’s name means something. This meaning is more than merely ‘excellence’: the name’s use as a ‘classificatory function’ rests on the fact that it signifies something about the thematic and stylistic attributes seen as particular to that author’s body of work.46 That its referent is not the actual author – the creative producer of the text – means that the authorfunction is naturally increasingly evident in a period that sees the rise of what Douglas Bruster refers to as ‘embodied writing’, in which ‘an author’s

Why read plays?  85 style [is made] into a thing’ and ‘books [are] conflated with their authors’.47 William Singleton’s commendatory verse which prefaces John Ford’s 1629 Lover’s Melancholy demonstrates the use of this trope in a dramatic paratext: ‘When Thou art read’, writes Singleton to Ford, ‘The Theater may hope Arts are not dead’ (sig. A3v). The author, whose name is prominently displayed in the verse’s title (‘To his worthy Friend, the Author, Master John Ford’), becomes the playbook, his actual identity replaced with what is signified by the author-function, ‘John Ford’.48 Yet readers have as yet little idea what to expect from a play by Ford, because The Lover’s Melancholy is the first to be printed. As Bruster observes, the ability to identify a writer’s name with a particular style or thematic content increases with the number of works in his œuvre.49 ‘John Ford’ as a published dramatist is an unknown quantity and therefore does not yet mean anything to readers, and it is perhaps for this reason that his name does not appear on the title page of The Lover’s Melancholy. What then of a dramatist whose textual identity rapidly became sufficiently familiar that readers were able to associate his name with a particular quality in his writing? As Alan Farmer notes, William Shakespeare’s status as ‘England’s best-selling playwright’ in print dates from the moment in 1598 when he was first named as author on a playbook title page.50 In the years before his death in 1616, twenty-eight quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays are published with his name on the title page, more than for any other contemporaneous playwright (either with or without title page attribution).51 Later in the period, only James Shirley could match this type of success: in the heyday of his career as a published dramatist during the Caroline period, a similar number of authorially attributed playbooks would appear, but few would be the reprinted editions that are an important indicator of a play’s popularity.52 Shakespeare’s success in this respect is clear: in the decades after his death, all but four of the plays published in quarto during his lifetime were reprinted in the same format, some multiple times, and all but one of these pre-Restoration posthumous reprints featured the author’s name on the title page.53 If the name ‘William Shakespeare’ was indeed a ‘selling point’, as is implied not just by its appearance on the title pages of play quartos both Shakespearean and apocryphal, but also by its pride of place on the title pages of the 1623 and 1632 folios, then what exactly was it helping to sell?54 When Erne discusses the misattribution of playbooks to William Shakespeare (or, less ostentatiously, ‘W. S.’ or ‘W. Sh.’), he briefly considers whether the popularity of Shakespeare’s history plays in print might have influenced the paratextual elements on the title page of Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602), with its description of the play as a ‘True Chronicle Historie’ and its attribution to ‘W. S.’.55 Joseph Loewenstein also sees the misattribution of The Troublesome Reign of King John (1611) to ‘W.Sh.’ as implying an understanding of ‘William Shakespeare’ as ‘[a] name-brand for historical drama, linked and sequenced history plays, the matter of

86  Why read plays? Henry, the stuff of Falstaff’.56 In these two instances, then, the ‘kind’ of text signified by the abbreviated ‘William Shakespeare’ is a history play. This hints at the fact that early printers who sneaked Shakespeare’s name onto the title pages of non-Shakespearean publications may have viewed it not just as an indicator of quality and value, but also, in Loewenstein’s words, as ‘very nearly generic, a marker of “family resemblance” […] and a source thereby of borrowed meanings’.57 Yet pinning down those meanings and the name’s generic signification for early modern readers is complicated by the celebrated generic diversity of Shakespeare’s output. Not only was he the author of two highly successful narrative poems and a collection of sonnets, but he was also a dramatist who, in addition to being famed for his history plays, was pre-eminent as a writer of both comedies and tragedies: ‘the most excellent in both kinds for the stage’, according to one early critic.58 This diverse ‘portfolio’ of works means that at first glance, ‘William Shakespeare’ looks like a decidedly unthrifty author-function. Closer examination, however, reveals that the name may well have had a dominant meaning that was ‘very nearly generic’ in the eyes of early modern readers – one which would have shaped their encounters with playbooks’ content. Unpacking that meaning involves taking to heart a comment made by Gérard Genette – an action that has, again, become unfashionable as scholars have argued for the inapplicability of Genette’s theories of paratext to the early modern period.59 Discounting them for their ahistoricism, however, means not pausing on relevant statements such as his assertion that ‘the name of the author […] has an effect that blends with the effects of other elements, such as the presence or absence of a genre indication’.60 In other words, no author attribution is an island; it is a piece of the paratextual continent of the title page, working in conjunction with other elements on the page.61 Consequently, the presence of a genre indication makes it difficult for the author’s name to be ‘very nearly generic’, because the clear advertisement of the play’s genre serves that purpose itself. When Shakespeare’s name appears on the title pages of early modern playbooks, it is almost always accompanied by a genre indication, at least in the case of histories and tragedies. All but two of the histories and tragedies published as pre-Restoration quartos have title pages that announce the play’s genre, even if that genre is sometimes not what we have become used to from the First Folio’s categorisations.62 Richard II and Richard III, for instance, are repeatedly published as ‘The Tragedie of King Richard the second’ and ‘The Tragedie of King Richard the Third’, the chosen genre indication conveying the dramatic trajectory of the plays’ eponymous protagonists. (This trajectory is captured equally well by John Norton’s substitution on the title page of the 1634 Richard II quarto: ‘The Life and Death of King Richard the Second’.) The Lear quartos and the first and second quartos of Hamlet announce the plays as ‘histories’, but the noun, which at this point has not yet calcified into a dramatic

Why read plays?  87 marker, is accompanied by an adjective that conveys the content of the ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ it describes: Hamlet is a ‘Tragicall Historie’; Lear is a ‘True Chronicle Historie’, its dramatic action drawn from Holinshed’s Chronicles.63 Only Troilus and Cressida is obliquely labelled merely a ‘Historie’, or in its paratextually fuller issue a ‘Famous Historie’ – a point to which I will return. Potential readers of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies in quarto, then, generally knew what they were getting: if they could see from the title page that the play was by Shakespeare, they could also see from the genre indication whether it was tragic or based on historical events. The case is different when it comes to comedies. Five editions of comedies that made their way into the 1623 folio were printed with Shakespeare’s name and the genre indication ‘comedie’ on their title pages: both extant Love’s Labour’s Lost quartos (1598 and 1631), the first two quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602 and 1619), and John Smethwick’s 1631 edition of The Taming of the Shrew. However, when it comes to the other pre-Restoration quarto editions of plays we now classify as comedies or tragicomedies, meaningful genre indications accompanying Shakespeare’s name are absent. Thomas Fisher’s edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) lacks a genre indication; so too does Andrew Wise and William Aspley’s Much Ado About Nothing, published the same year. A Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t acquire any different title page paratextual features when Thomas Pavier reprints it in 1619. The Merchant of Venice quartos (1600, 1619, and 1637) sport the empty label ‘excellent historie’, the elaborate plot details that qualify it defusing any expectations that the play will contain actual historical content as opposed to being an ‘excellent story’. Richard Meighen’s 1630 edition of Merry Wives omits the genre indication that had featured on the title pages of the earlier quartos; the anonymous comedy The London Prodigal (1605), misattributed on its title page to William Shakespeare, has no accompanying genre indication, and neither does a less ostentatiously misattributed comedy, Thomas Middleton’s The Puritan (1607), supposedly authored by ‘W. S.’.64 Nor do plays that we now designate tragicomedies: the five standalone Pericles quartos (1609 (two editions), 1611, 1630, 1635) deploy an indication of the play’s dramatic status in the location where a genre indication might otherwise be found, their title pages offering readers typographic variations on ‘The Late, And much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre’; The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) declares itself to be ‘Written by the memorable Worthies of their time; {Mr. John Fletcher, and | Mr. William Shakspeare.} Gent’.65 No genre indication accompanies this announcement. Of course, multiple different agents of the book trade were involved in the preparation of these playbooks, and their publication dates span nearly four decades. Yet the pattern is stark. The absence of a genre indication to accompany Shakespeare’s name on the title pages of comedies

88  Why read plays? in quarto strongly suggests his name was, in fact, ‘very nearly generic’. What it signified to these playbooks’ readers was the genre of comedy, or, more broadly, comic content. This contention is supported by allusions to Shakespeare in various contemporary ‘epitexts’, a coinage of Genette’s less frequently used in discussion of early modern paratexts, but which he defines as those paratexts outside the volume at hand which have a bearing on its reception.66 Despite Francis Meres’s early identification of Shakespeare as pre-eminent when it comes to both comedy and tragedy, a perusal of epitexts collected in The Shakspere Allusion-Book demonstrates that this is not, in fact, the conceit that predominates over the coming decades. Outside of the folios (which, given their advertised inclusion of multiple dramatic genres, must understandably laud the broad sweep of the playwright’s abilities), and notwithstanding the famous description of Shakespeare as ‘rare Tragedian’, the genre with which Shakespeare’s name appears to be most often associated in verses composed throughout the period is comedy.67 In 1631, commenting upon the style of various poets of the age, Michael Drayton lauds Shakespeare’s ‘Comicke vaine’, which ‘[fits] the socke’ (rather than the tragic buskin).68 In 1638, James Mervyn opposes Shakespeare’s ‘mirth’ to Beaumont’s ‘weight’; in the same year, Richard West contrasts the diversionary nature of Shakespeare’s work with the more scholarly rewards of Jonson, observing that ‘Shakespeare may make griefe merry’.69 When William Cartwright wants to make a claim for the refinement of Fletcher’s ability as a comic playwright in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio, the point of comparison he chooses is Shakespeare’s ‘Old fashion’d wit […] which made Bawdry pass for Comicall’; in George Daniel of Beswick’s 1647 manuscript encomium to Samuel Daniel Shakespeare is once more given the epithet ‘Comicke’.70 And in 1653, when Aston Cokaine imagines the reopening of the t­ heatres, he conceives of a moment when: Learn’d Johnson [shall] reassume his Seat, […] Judicious Beaumont, and th’ Ingenious Soule Of Fletcher too may move without controule. Shakespeare (most rich in Humours) entertaine The crowded Theaters with his happy veine.71 It is Shakespeare’s ‘happy veine’ that evidently makes the greatest impression on Thomas Philipot, who in his 1659 history of Kent writes of Henry IV and ‘Prince Henry his Son, and Sir John Falstaffe his make-sport, so merrily represented in Shakespear’s Comedies’.72 Philipot’s assessment of the Henry IV plays as comic chimes with Wise and Aspley’s earlier eschewal of a genre indication on the title page of their 2 Henry IV quarto (1600), which emphasises instead that it will contain ‘the humours of sir

Why read plays?  89 John Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistoll’ (sig. A1r). Falstaff’s ‘humours’ and Pistol’s ‘swaggering’ will reappear on the title pages of the Merry Wives quartos, indicating that Wise and Aspley, like Philipot, see the Henry IV plays in terms of their comic content, perhaps explaining their decision not to indicate with a title page genre indication that 2 Henry IV is a history.73 That those preparing paratexts for Shakespeare’s plays earlier in the period might equally have understood his name to be associated predominantly with comedy is hinted at by the ordering of the genres in the title of the 1623 folio. Potential readers and purchasers are presented with a volume entitled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, with the comedies taking precedence in the book’s title just as they do in the ordering of the plays within. Similarly, the much-discussed preface to the second issue of Troilus and Cressida repeatedly stresses Shakespeare’s pre-eminence as a writer of comedies, augmenting the title page’s claim that the play presents ‘The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid’ with assertions that it is ‘passing full of the palme comicall’; that ‘[a]mongst all [Shakespeare’s comedies] there is none more witty than this’; that it is on a par with ‘the best Commedy in Terence or Plautus’.74 These claims may seem disingenuous, given the play’s actual genre, but they tap into and reinforce an understanding of Shakespeare as a playwright whose particular strength was comedy, and whose name thus connotes comic content. What this means is that when genre indications announce plays as histories or tragedies on the title pages of Shakespeare’s quarto playbooks, their effect is to manage the default expectations otherwise created by his name. When that name appears by itself, it acts as a shorthand indication of genre, implicitly conveying to the reader that what he or she is about to read is a comedy.75 While viewing the name ‘William Shakespeare’ as an indicator of quality acts as a guarantee for a potential book-buyer that his or her money will not be spent in vain, viewing it as a guide to generic content or ‘kind’ creates a different set of readerly expectations. These range from assumptions about dramatic form to the anticipation of the sensory rewards offered by reading printed comedies.76 The experience of reading the text thus becomes inflected by the paratext, as expectations are met – or challenged. Readers who had accepted the claims for Troilus and Cressida’s comic content would have been more likely to respond with confusion or frustration as they read on than they might have done had the play been labelled a tragedy. Those for whom Shakespeare’s name suggested comedy, a genre supposedly distinguished by its depiction of love but also ‘bawdrie, […] whordome and adulterie’, may have been primed to expect sexual content from a playbook that lacked a qualifying genre indication – an expectation reinforced by the double entendre in a title such as Much Ado About Nothing, but one that may have been left unsatisfied for readers of this play in which women’s sexual activity is a chimera.77 Paratexts work in conjunction not just

90  Why read plays? with one another, but – like texts – in conjunction with the wider framework of knowledge, assumptions, and behaviours that contribute to the horizon of expectations any reader brings to his or her reading.

Latin mottoes and genre designations: dramatic poetry and (deceived) expectations The works of few playwrights were published in sufficient numbers throughout the period for their names to begin to connote generic content in the way that Shakespeare’s did; in terms of professional plays published in quarto, even the prolific Beaumont and Fletcher or, later, James Shirley, only manage around half the editions that Shakespeare does. Genre indications on the title pages of non-Shakespearean publications thus play an important part in creating reader expectations of dramatic content and style. While other scholars have mapped the wider meanings of words such as ‘tragedy’ in the early modern period, and considered what they might have connoted for readers, when it comes to quarto playbooks their analysis once again does not take into account how one paratextual element borrows meaning from others with which it is in proximity.78 In what follows, I want to consider how the paratextual indication of plays as ‘tragedies’ or ‘comedies’ might have been interpreted in relation to other printed paratexts that constructed plays as ‘poetry’, in particular the title page Latin motto, and how the writers of internal paratexts attempted to manage the unreasonable expectations these intersecting elements may have created. Taking my lead from Daniel Javitch’s study of a similar phenomenon in Cinquecento Italy, I argue that paratexts were a space in which a ‘selfjustifying’ poetics could be articulated.79 Within this paratextual poetics, the form and quality of English commercial drama in print could be legitimated based on its origins in performance and on contemporary continental dramatic theory, rather than assessed – and found wanting – against theories of poetics with which readers may have been more familiar. In the now somewhat hackneyed ‘literary vs. theatrical’ argument, one of the main pieces of evidence rolled out to support the claim that playbooks gradually acquire the status of literature is their increasing inclusion of certain types of paratexts (and other bibliographical features). Lukas Erne enumerates these ways in which ‘literary respectability’ could be signalled: ‘Latin title page mottoes, dedications, prefatory epistles, commendatory poems, dramatis personae, arguments, sententiae markers, continuous printing, and act and scene division’.80 However, what many of these paratextual and typographic elements achieve is not the advertisement of a playbook’s ‘literary respectability’, but – less ana­ chronistically – its alignment with the genre of poetry or ‘poesy’.81 From 1605 onwards, this nomenclature is used to describe plays in epistles, dedications and commendatory verses preceding diverse playtexts. The trendsetter is of course Ben Jonson, who in the address to the readers

Why read plays?  91 of the quarto of Sejanus His Fall (1605) implicitly aligns his play with earlier classical ‘Drammatick Poëmes’ (sig. ¶2r). Within the following decade, a host of other playwrights have followed suit, beginning with John Marston, who in the epistles to Parasitaster and Sophonisba (both published in 1606) refers to his plays as ‘Poems’.82 Thomas Dekker in the epistle to the 1607 Whore of Babylon calls the play a ‘Drammaticall Poem’ (sig. A2r), and in the dedication of If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is in It (1612) refers to plays as ‘Brave Triumphes of Poesie’ (sig. A3v). In the same year, Robert Daborne in the epistle to A Christian Turned Turk implies that printed professional plays belong to the category of ‘Poesy’ (sig. A3r); around the same time, John Fletcher’s epistle to The Faithful Shepherdess (most likely published in 1610) had explicitly placed his play in that category, designating it a ‘Poeme’ (sig. ¶2v). The construction of commercial drama as poetry also happened less overtly via a different paratextual element, the title page Latin motto. Pithy Latin quotations can be found on the title pages of commercial playbooks throughout the period: sometimes attributed, sometimes not, always untranslated. They are one of the elements of title page paratext that reach out to more elite readers, signalling the worth of the playbook by stamping it with the language of the great classical dramatists such as Seneca, Plautus, and Terence. On a visually symbolic level, Latin quotations may have signified literary pedigree, but to those educated readers who possessed a familiarity with the works from which they were taken, they cemented the construction of commercial drama specifically as poetry. This is because of the predominant source of the quotations. Of the 91 pre-Restoration playbook title pages that feature attributable Latin quotations, 49 quote from works by the Roman poet Horace.83 Twenty-six of these are from his famous first-century BCE treatise Ars Poetica; a further nine are from texts that belong to his wider œuvre of writing on poetics.84 These Horatian mottoes confirm commercial drama as poetry in two ways. On the one hand, they rely on the reader’s ability to supply a missing subject that invokes poets or poetry, as in the case of Thomas Heywood’s chosen motto, ‘Aut prodesse solent aut delectare’. This appears on the title pages of nine of his plays, presumably with the knowledge that the tag and its source, the Ars Poetica, are so well known that readers who understand it will be able to supply the implied subject, ‘poetae’. The motto, which translates as ‘poets either profit or delight’, thus implicitly constructs Heywood as a poet and his plays as poetry.85 However, such was Horace’s reputation in early modern England as a poetic theorist that even a quotation from another work (and especially from those works that contained poetic commentary, such as Satires 1.4 and 1.10, or Epistle 2.1) could have a synecdochic effect on a reader who recognised it as originating from the corpus of the writer of the Ars Poetica. Horace’s works were widely read, and the Ars Poetica underwent multiple printings and

92  Why read plays? appeared in various ‘Englished’ versions throughout the period.86 Young boys encountered it in Latin at grammar school, and poetic theorists writing in English leaned on Horace’s thinking.87 An educated playreader confronted with an attributed or otherwise recognisable Horatian motto, regardless of its origin, would have recalled Horace’s authority as a writer of poetic theory and would have been encouraged to think of the playbook he (or occasionally, she) was about to read as belonging to the genre of poetry.88 Specifically, dramatic poetry: Horace, like Aristotle before him, includes plays under the wider umbrella of poetry. And herein lay the potential pitfall of the title page Latin motto and other paratextual strategies of poetic legitimation. As commercial plays began to be presented as poetry, with paratexts that reached out to those readers who were sufficiently educated to appreciate the genre’s pedigree, they ran the risk that those same readers would be familiar with the precepts regarding the ideal form and content of that genre. In early modern England, those precepts were set out not just in Horace’s Ars Poetica, but in a range of vernacular works whose titles announced their theoretical treatment of poetry. Foremost amongst these was Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, first published in 1595 and reprinted numerous times throughout the following century as part of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; complementing (and at times contradicting) Sidney’s Defence were Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetry (1586), George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589), and Sir John Harington’s Brief Apology of Poetry, which prefaced his Orlando Furioso (1591; reprinted 1607 and 1634). And very little of what these vernacular works had to say about dramatic poetry – particularly given their writers’ reliance on Horace and Aristotle – was applicable to comedies and tragedies that had had their origin not on the stages of Greece and Rome but on those of early modern London.89 Playreaders who had assimilated ideas mediated from classical sources about what Sidney calls ‘the rules […] of skilful poetry’ were liable, when confronted with a professional play repackaged as a ‘poem’, to judge the play unfavourably because of its flagrant disregard for these rules.90 This can be inferred from Jonson’s epistle to the reader in the Sejanus quarto. ‘[I]f it be objected’, writes Jonson, ‘that what I publish is no true Poëme; in the strict Lawes of Time […] I confesse it: as also in the want of a proper Chorus’ (sig. ¶2r). At the time of Sejanus’s publication, the two treatises on poetry with which its readers were most likely to have been familiar were the Ars Poetica and The Defence of Poesy.91 It is Sidney who mediates to English readers Aristotle’s precept (set down in the Poetics) regarding the unity of time, and it is Horace who declares that ‘the Chorus [should] sustain the part and strenuous duty of an actor’ (ll. 193–94).92 The potential objection based on Sejanus’s shortcomings as a ‘true Poëme’ that is anticipated by Jonson thus comes from those educated playreaders who are well versed in classical theories of

Why read plays?  93 poetics. Jonson’s riposte to those objections is the epistle itself, in which he deploys a strategy that will become increasingly prevalent throughout the period. He justifies the play’s potentially disappointing form by pointing out its origin on the public stage in early modern London: ‘Nor is it needful, or almost possible, in these our times, and to such auditors as commonly things are presented, to observe the old state and splendour of dramatic poems, with preservation of any popular delight’ (sig. ¶2r). For all his pretensions to literary grandeur, Jonson is still a commercial playwright: knowing the composition of his audience, he also knows that what will satisfy this early modern English audience is not that which had satisfied the audiences of ancient Greece and Rome. A play whose raison d’être is performance must please when performed (even if, by all accounts, Sejanus itself failed on that front).93 Readers, suggests Jonson, must bear this original context in mind when judging the form and content of the printed play. When Jonson implies that his play should be thought of as a ‘Drammatick Poëme’ even though its form reflects its origins in public performance in a Jacobean theatre, he initiates an English version of Javitch’s ‘self-justifying’ poetics. At the same time as paratexts attempt to elevate the status of commercial drama by constructing it as poetry, they also attempt to modify that term’s referent, and to widen reader expectations regarding the formal and stylistic elements of dramatic ‘poems’ that were composed initially in the hopes of securing ‘popular delight’ in performance. In particular, such paratexts set out to rebut Sidney’s contention that ‘[English] tragedies and comedies observ[e] rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry’ (p. 44), and to demonstrate that those plays whose title pages announced them as ‘tragedies’ or ‘comedies’ – the two most theorised dramatic genres – could, despite Sidney’s contention, be considered both ‘skilful’ and ‘poetry’.94 Such a project was necessary because of what Peter Berek describes as the ‘notorious lack of fit between early modern writings about genre […] and the actualities of plays distinguished by generic terms’.95 These ‘actualities’ were dictated by the conditions of the plays’ production and reception in performance, and although audiences would have had expectations of what a play whose bill advertised it as a ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ might offer, these expectations, unlike those of readers, were raised in isolation from competing paratextual claims that the play was a ‘poem’. Once printed, the plays which in performance had presented genre as ‘mutable and unstable’ became subject to the sets of expectations readers carried from their exposure to other printed texts in which generic conventions were presented as ‘static and unchanging’.96 It is this situation that creates the need for the self-justifying poetics evident in printed commercial plays’ preliminary paratexts. In justifying the shape and style of early modern tragedies and comedies printed in quarto, and thus forestalling and assuaging potential ‘objections’ even as they insist that these plays, too, are ‘poetry’, paratexts’

94  Why read plays? writers often appear to lean on precisely the contemporary Italian poetic treatises discussed by Javitch. This move was necessary due to the limited and anachronistic scope of the dramatic genre theory accessible in England at the time. On the continent there had been, over the course of the sixteenth century, a spate of vernacular publications focused on translating and, importantly, moderating classical genre theory for early modern readers and dramatists. But there was no English equivalent of Giovan Battista Giraldi’s On the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies (1554), or Ludovico Castelvetro’s ‘explicated’ Poetics of Aristotle (1570), or Giambattista Guarini’s Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601). Polyglot playreaders might have been able to read the Italian texts in the original: Jonson in Volpone comments on the degree to which Guarini is considered a source of inspiration for ‘English writers, | […] such, as are happy in th’ Italian’.97 But for those playreaders with a layman’s interest in literary criticism who were not ‘happy in the Italian’ or were unable to access books printed on the continent, their expectations of what constituted formal and stylistic quality in a tragedy or comedy would have been constructed by exposure to classical theorists such as Horace, or by discrete passages in a small handful of texts published before the end of the Jacobean period, comprising vernacular works of poetics or treatises defending the theatre against the venom of the antitheatricalists.98 Thus, seemingly drawing inspiration from continental theorists who understood that – as Robert Henke puts it – ‘matters of dramatic composition […] are based on the needs and natures of audiences rather than on purely structural considerations’, the writers of commercial playbooks’ paratextual preliminaries set out to combat the expectations created by the English and classical texts’ taxonomies of genre-defining features.99 Because those features had little to do with the elements that guaranteed stage success for an early modern play whose title page would subsequently announce it as a ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’, the writers of epistles, dedications, arguments, and commendatory verses created, over the course of the period, a vernacular theory of dramatic genre and poetics that was appropriate to the playhouse origin of the English plays they introduced.100 By the time of the Restoration, regular playreaders who took time to read preliminary paratexts and who had assimilated the idea of plays as poetry would have understood something different by the title page designations ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ than their predecessors in the 1590s who were reading plays published around the same time as The Defence of Poesy. This proposition is explored further in the two sections below. Tragedy Seven years after the publication of the Sejanus quarto, John Webster expresses his own anxiety about playreaders’ potentially ill-fitting

Why read plays?  95 expectations of a play’s form and content. Paraphrasing Jonson, Webster addresses the reader of the epistle to the 1612 The White Devil thus: ‘If it be objected this is no true Drammaticke Poem, I shall easily confesse it’, he states, before asserting that ‘willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted’. Before explaining the motivation behind this deliberate fault, Webster enumerates the features that would have rendered the play a ‘true Drammaticke Poem’ – specifically, the hypothetical ‘most sententious Tragedy that ever was written’. Such a tragedy would ‘observ[e] all the critticall laws’ such as ‘heighth of stile; and gravety of person’, and the playwright would ‘inrich it with the sententious Chorus, and as it were life’n Death, in the passionate and waighty Nuntius’.101 These ‘criticall laws’ would have been familiar to readers of Horace, Sidney and other English critics. Horace insists on the differences between tragic and comic characters’ bearing and modes of speech in lines 220–50 of the Ars Poetica, and English translators and critics reinforce his message, with Webbe stating that ‘Every person must be fitted accordingly […] and the speech well ordered: wherein are to be considered the dignity, age, sex, fortune, condition, place, country, etc. of each person’, and Puttenham reminding his readers that, historically, ‘Tragedies […] were written in the high stile’ and featured ‘Princes [and men of] great estates’.102 Horace also (as mentioned above) stresses the importance of the Chorus (ll. 194–201), and it is Sidney who states that the best way to observe the dramatic unities is to have ‘some Nuntius to recount things done in former time or other place’ (p. 46). Webster thus – like Jonson – recites the received wisdom about ‘true’ tragedy that is circulating in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, he then goes on to declare that this play – despite its title page Latin motto accompanying the affirmation that it prints ‘The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano Ursini’ – will not observe the ‘critticall lawes’ of tragedy outlined in those poetic treatises. Like Jonson, Webster justifies his flaunting of the laws by pointing out that a tragedy that slavishly observes them is less likely to please ‘the uncapable multitude’. Despite his disparagement of the audience whose ‘breath […] is able to poison’ the ‘divine rapture’ of the ideal tragedy he describes, Webster has nevertheless structured his own with a view to satisfying that bad-breathed multitude.103 This attentiveness to the responses of the audience echoes the viewpoint of the Italian theorist Castelvetro, expressed more positively in his commented translation of Aristotle’s Poetics: [P]oetry was invented for the sole purpose of providing pleasure and recreation […] to the souls of the common people and the rude multitude, who are incapable of understanding the rational proofs, the distinctions, and the arguments […] which […] students of the arts [make use of] in constituting the arts; and, not understanding them, it is only natural that they should hear them with annoyance and displeasure.104

96  Why read plays? Commercial English drama, particularly that performed – like The White Devil – at amphitheatre playhouses, had of necessity to provide ‘pleasure and recreation’ to the ‘common people’ or it failed to fulfil its raison d’être. Like Castelvetro, then, for whom ‘poetry’ should appeal to the lowest common denominator in a contemporary audience, Webster legitimates the structure of his tragedy by invoking rather than eliding its origin in performance. He rejects precepts set down for tragic composition by the critics who were more likely to be accessible and familiar to his educated readers, and instead creates a justification for its form by mediating a foreign text on poetic theory to English playreaders.105 He thereby creates a new category for assessment of the play’s tragic quality that attempts to modify the rigid referential expectations created by the word ‘tragedy’ on the Latin-emblazoned title page of this ‘Drammaticke Poem’, and to align them more closely with what is realistic given The White Devil’s origin in public performance. A similar strategy is employed by the writer of the argument added to the 1632 edition of John Mason’s The Turk (whose title page declares it ‘An excellent tragedy’ and also bears a quotation from Horace).106 The argument ends by noting that ‘[t]here are other passages of Triviall Inferior persons; Interwoven into this peice, which serve as a foyle to the Bravery and hight of the Tragedy, yet are Instruments aptly set going to wheele up the worke’ (sig. A2v). The justification of the subplot involving the priapic Bordello as a foil for the tragedy’s main action is an attempt to create a post hoc ergo propter hoc rationale for an aspect of the printed play that was clearly intended as bawdy crowd-pleasing filler in performance. The paratext recalls by way of contrast Richard Jones’s decision to excise from his editions of Tamburlaine those ‘fond and frivolous jestures’ that had pleased the ‘vaine conceited fondlings’ among the audience at the play’s performance.107 Jones writes his epistle a year after the publication of The Art of English Poesy, in which Puttenham echoes Horace’s decree that ‘[a] theme for Comedy refuses to be set forth in verses of Tragedy’ (Ars Poetica, l. 89) by declaring that ‘sentences that hold too much of the mery and light, or infamous and unshamefast’ should not be ‘intermingle[d]’ with those that treat ‘grave and weightie matters’ – i.e. the matter of tragedies.108 But forty-two years on, when Puttenham’s authority has perhaps diminished with time, the writer of The Turk’s argument chooses instead to boldly confront the fact that a commercial tragedy, by virtue of its composition for the public stage and its varied audience demographic, ‘mingl[es] kings and clowns’, as Sidney puts it, ‘thrust[ing] in [clowns] by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion’ (p. 46). Refusing to accept with Sidney that such scenes render the play no ‘right traged[y]’ (ibid.), the argument’s writer instead sets out to modify the expectations of those readers who still accept the authority of Puttenham and Sidney by performatively constructing the scenes as integral to the whole, ‘aptly set going

Why read plays?  97 to wheele up the worke’. The tragedy is to be assessed according to the standards set out in its own prefatory paratext, rather than according to readers’ preconceptions about what a play in the tragic genre should or should not contain. This strategy of generic self-justification is employed once more by one of the contributors to the commendatory verses that preface Thomas Rawlins’s 1640 tragedy, The Rebellion. Rawlins has little time for the prescriptions of classical theorists: in addition to the play’s lack of ­dramatic unity occasioned by its interwoven plot strands (one romantic, one political), it ends in an onstage bloodbath to rival that of the fifth act of Hamlet. This final succession of violent deaths contravenes Horace’s edict that poets must not ‘bring upon the stage what should be p ­ erformed behind the scenes’, and that events such as Medea’s murder of her ­children should be narrated (often by Sidney’s desired ‘Nuntius’) rather than represented (Ars Poetica, ll. 182–86). Yet in Nathanael Richards’s verse prefacing Rawlins’s Rebellion, it is the bloody nature of the drama that he casts as contributing to its quality. Addressing ‘his loving friend the Author, upon his Tragedy The Rebellion’, Richards describes a narrative in which ‘[p]lots meet with Counter-plots, revenge, and blood’, and tells Rawlins that it is these aspects that ‘[make] thy Tragedy good’.109 Richards’s verse asserts that onstage bloodshed, so popular in the tragedies performed in the playhouses of early modern London, can be part of what renders a tragedy ‘good’. This seemingly contradicts Horace, although again, continental dramatic theory had already attempted to alter classically received wisdom about the appropriateness of deaths on stage. Giovan Battista Giraldi, popularly known as Cinthio, had in 1554 stated that ‘Horace did not (as many believe) intend to forbid the use of a suitable death on the stage when the matter at hand demanded it’, only ‘that those accompanied with cruelty should be avoided’. Furthermore, he says, the ­performance of death onstage can be particularly effective in the creation of the ‘tragic pity’ necessary to the Aristotelian catharsis that should be one of the main ends of tragedy.110 Whether Cinthio would class the string of deaths that occupies the final pages of Rawlins’s tragedy as ‘suitable’ is debatable. What Richards’s verse accomplishes, h ­ owever, is to performatively create a measure for assessing a play’s tragic quality that encodes both the authority of an otherwise untranslated foreign treatise on poetics, and lauds a supposedly non-Horatian element of the tragedy – one that owes its existence to a desire to satisfy the tastes and expectations of the early modern playhouse audience.111 Comedy The examples above demonstrate the writers of paratexts creating a selfjustifying poetics for the genre of dramatic poetry most fully theorised by the ancients. Those that follow indicate the writers’ mediation of more

98  Why read plays? contemporary continental sources that theorised the poetics of the genre famously neglected by Aristotle: comedy.112 In addition, the paratexts discussed exemplify the attempt to widen the referent of the term ‘comedy’ to accommodate changing tastes throughout the period. For early modern antitheatricalists, one of the main dangers of comedy as a genre was its depiction of (in Philip Stubbes’s dismissive terms) ‘bawdrie, […] whordome and adulterie’.113 Sidney echoes Stubbes when he argues that the English stage has produced ‘no right comed[ies]’, but instead offers up ‘nothing but scurrility unworthy of any chaste ears, or some extreme show of doltishness’ (p. 47). Continental literary critics, however, saw the subject matter of comedies in a different light. For instance, when Castelvetro expands his translation of Aristotle’s Poetics by offering his own commentary on comedy, he taxonomises the elements of the genre – the ‘pleasurable things apprehended by the senses or the imagination’ – that move the audience to laughter.114 The final element on his list is ‘all the things having to do with carnal pleasure, like the privy parts, sexual intercourse, and the memories and representations of both’.115 Where Sidney laments that such things produce only ‘loud laughter’ as opposed to the more desirable ‘delight’ (p. 47), Castelvetro legitimates this laughter, as well as the type of subject matter prevalent in so many of the jokes peppering the corpus of commercial English comedies. Although he notes that, ideally, such subject matter will be ‘hidden under a veil that will make it possible for [audience members] to pretend that [they] laugh at something other than […] lewdness’, he sees bawdy content as an important component of comedy as a poetic genre. Indeed, this content is most likely to fulfil the end goal of comedy and produce laughter if it is experienced ‘in a place where we are unobserved by others’ and therefore unashamed to be caught out laughing at dirty jokes.116 That private playreading provides just such a space means that, predictably, several writers of dramatic paratexts advertise bawdiness as a distinguishing feature of the comic genre. Thomas Middleton, for instance, announces proudly to the ‘Comicke […] Play-readers’ of his epistle to the 1611 Roaring Girl that the play will offer them ‘Venery […] and Laughter’, as well as ‘letcherous jests’.117 These ‘letcherous jests’ may in fact be roughly synonymous with the ‘witty jests’ identified by Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors as one of the components of comedy.118 Although ‘wit’ is primarily a linguistic quality, it acquires over the course of the period a spectrum of broader meanings, one of which Ian Munro identifies as ‘“genitalia”, both male and female’.119 The numerous dramatic paratexts that advertise ‘wit’ as an identifying feature of the comedy they preface may thus, while less willing than Middleton to frankly proffer ‘venery’, nevertheless be aware that the sexual double entendre at play in ‘wit’ makes it an appropriate attribute with which to advertise a bawdy comedy.120 Just as the sexual puns that are a staple of early modern comedy can be read

Why read plays?  99 two ways, so too can the term that simultaneously advertises the genre’s verbal humour and its commonly sexual (or ‘venereal’) subject matter. And it is presumably humour based around lewdness and bawdiness to which Massinger refers in the dedication of the 1629 Roman Actor, when he contrasts the ‘gravity and height’ of his tragedy’s subject matter with the ‘ribaldrie’ of comedies (sig. A2v). While Sidney, Stubbes, and his clan turn up their noses at English comedies because of their bawdy subject matter, the paratexts of English commercial drama, like Castelvetro in his Poetics, create a space in which such subject matter is an acknowledged and key attribute of the poetic genre. A further category of assessment for a comedy’s quality that is paratext­ ually constructed over the course of the period is originality. Although Horace had advised would-be poets that they should ‘[e]ither follow tradition or invent what is self-consistent’ (Ars Poetica, l. 119), it is once more Castelvetro who develops this precept into an element of generic theory which is subsequently mediated to English readers via dramatic paratexts. Castelvetro states that ‘all plots fashioned by tragic […] poets are and ought to be based upon events that can be called historical’. ‘The comic poet’, however, ‘invents both the universal form of his plot and its particulars’. He stresses his point: ‘[N]othing that has actually happened is any part of [a comic plot], […] [a]nd if [a poet] wishes to be known as a true poet – as an inventor – he is bound to invent every constituent of his comedy’.121 The assimilation of this idea, that a laudable comedy should exhibit originality, can be seen in numerous dramatic paratexts throughout the period. In William Habington’s commendatory verse prefacing James Shirley’s 1629 comedy The Wedding, for instance, Habington addresses Shirley with these lines: [T]hy Muse is chast, on which no Rape Was ere by thee committed, Learnings Ape Is franticke imitation; and the Bough That Crownes such Writers, withers on their brow[.]122 Unlike those writers whose works are the product of ‘franticke imitation’, Shirley’s ‘Muse is chast’. In other words, his inspiration for his comedy is his alone and not a borrowed subject matter previously treated by other poets, of which Shirley’s adaptation would constitute a ‘Rape’. Laurels acquired for comedies that are not the product of imaginative invention are unjustly deserved, concludes Habington, firmly establishing originality as a desirable quality in comic composition. Thomas Jay expresses a similar sentiment in the commendatory verse he contributes to the 1633 quarto of Massinger’s comedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Praising ‘The craftie Mazes of the cunning plot; | The polish’d phrase; the sweet expressions’, Jay adds as a further praiseworthy element the fact that they

100  Why read plays? are ‘got | Neither by theft, nor violence’, and that ‘the [play’s] conceipt [is] | Fresh, and unsullied’ (sig. A3v). The commendation of the fact that the comedy’s formal elements owe nothing to either ‘theft’ or ‘violence’ recalls Habington’s negation of Shirley’s ‘Rape’ of another poet’s muse. And the reiteration of the idea that a comedy’s quality is owed to the writer’s rejection of material ‘stolen’ from other sources can be seen once more in the prologue to John Ford’s 1638 The Fancies, printed on the verso of an inserted leaf also containing Edward Greenfield’s commendatory verse, meaning that it has the appearance of a readerly rather than a theatrical paratext. It begins: ‘The Fancies! that’s our Play; in it is showne, | Nothing, but what our Author knowes his owne | Without a learned theft’, and goes on to further praise Ford’s ‘free invention’ (sig. a2v). The paratexts of English commercial comedy firmly present it as a poetic genre from which its readers can expect originality and inventiveness. Where the paratexts that justify the shape of early modern tragedies tend to do so by highlighting their dissension from classical ideas of tragic form, those paratexts that introduce readers to new ways of assessing the quality of comedies tend to do so by pointing out that poetic style evolves. This evolution in form can be perceived even over the course of a few decades, as Middleton discusses in the epistle to The Roaring Girl, using the analogy of changing fashions in dress. ‘The fashion of playmaking’, writes Middleton: [C]an properly compare to nothing, so naturally, as the alteration in apparell: For in the time of the Great-crop-doublet, your huge babasted plaies, quilted with mighty words to leane purpose was onely then in fashion. And as the doublet fell, neater inventions beganne to set up. Now in the time of sprucenes, our plaies follow the nicenes of our Garments, single plots, quaint conceits, letcherous jests, drest up in hanging sleeves, and those that are fit for the Times, and the Tearmers[.]123 The ‘mighty words’ previously in vogue have, like ‘the Great-cropdoublet’, given way to ‘neater inventions’, comprised of ‘single plots, quaint conceits’, and the aforementioned ‘letcherous jests’. Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser note that during the Caroline period, old plays that are printed for the first time paratextually foreground the evolution of taste that accounts for their formal and stylistic differences from those more recently performed.124 What they do not remark upon is that it is comedies in particular whose antiquated style is most explicitly defended in the face of potential reader objections, with this defence in the process rehearsing and expanding the list of comedy’s laudable features. One frequently invoked praiseworthy feature is well-chosen dramatic language. As Middleton points out, even in 1611 the fashion is no longer for ‘mighty words’, and in 1630 when John Fox composes

Why read plays?  101 a commendatory verse to preface James Shirley’s comedy The Grateful Servant, he declares that Shirley’s ‘fame’ is unsullied precisely because his dramatic dialogue ‘[does] not swell with mighty rimes’ or ‘[a]udacious metaphors’ (sig. XA1r). Rhyme’s fall from grace is further underscored by the address to the reader prefacing the second edition of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (1640). Its author, John Spencer, calls to mind Webster and Jonson’s imagined ‘objections’ when he anticipates ‘a censure that may arise in the reading of this Comedy’ that ‘here & there you shall find some lines that doe answer in meetre’ (i.e. rhyme). By way of excuse, Spencer points out that ‘it is full twenty yeares since [the play] was written, at which time meetre was most in use, and shewed well upon the conclusion of every Act & Scene’.125 Readers are implicitly exhorted to judge the play based on the lineaments of comic style in vogue at the time of its composition, adjusting their horizons of expectation backwards: if they do so, they will appreciate the play on its own merits. A similar strategy can be seen in John Okes’s prefatory epistle to William Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman, published in 1638 but first performed around 1618, and described on its title page as ‘A Merrie and Pleasant Comedy’.126 The printer admits that he ‘know[s] [the play] may come short of that accuratenes both in plot and style that this witty age doth with greater curiosity acquire’, but justifies this deficiency by stating that ‘as Plaies were then, some twenty yeares agone, it was in the fashion’ (sigs A3v-A4r). Like Spencer, Okes is also apologetic about the dramatic language, but states that although the comedy was ‘written many yeares since’, it ‘ought not therefore to be slighted: I confesse we have better for Language in these our exquisite and refined Times, yet for the matter and Subject, none of a more delightfull and pleasant Style’ (sig. A3r). The dramatic language that a reader might expect to find in a comedy written at the end of the 1630s differs from that of one written two decades earlier: it is the difference, for instance, between the naturalistic blank verse of Thomas Nabbes’s The Bride (1640; first performed 1638) and the intrusive end rhymes that surface throughout the Queen’s Men’s comedy The Honest Lawyer (1616; first performed 1614).127 The point that underpins the epistle of A Shoemaker a Gentleman, however, is that by the time of the play’s publication, the promise of both these styles is contained within the title page’s genre designation of ‘comedy’. The play is a comedy in the sense readers would have understood the word ‘twenty yeares agone’, but a ‘comedy’ is also a play that exhibits those lineaments of ‘plot and style that this witty age [i.e. the 1630s] doth with greater curiosity acquire’. Thus, the designation ‘comedy’ comes to contain within it a multiplicity of referents in terms of its formal and stylistic qualities  – ­referents that alter depending on the evolving tastes of successive audiences. What this generic category signifies is expanded over the course of the period just as the genre of poetry itself expands to include the quarto pamphlets that contained the texts of publicly performed plays.

102  Why read plays? In summary, when plays performed on the public stages of early modern London were printed and paratextually repackaged as ‘poetry’, those potential playreaders who had a pre-conceived idea of what the genres of dramatic poetry should look like had to adjust their expectations in order to avoid being disappointed by the form and content of these ‘Drammatick Poëmes’. Using strategies ranging from the explicit rejection of ‘critticall laws’ to the implicit construction of new grounds for assessing quality, the writers of these paratexts (at times seemingly drawing inspiration from Italian critics) created increasingly multivalent referents for the two genre indications that most commonly appeared on the title pages of commercial playbooks. In their creation of this paratextual self-justifying poetics, they expanded the limited determiners of quality set out by the classical and vernacular theorists most accessible to English readers, and established a new set of formal expectations for printed English commercial drama. These new expectations were appropriate to its origin on the public stage, and also to what Michele Marrapodi, citing Polonius, calls the ‘generic promiscuity of drama’, which saw playwrights continue to write plays that might well be described with accuracy as ‘tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’, even as their printed title pages narrowly proclaimed them to be a comedy or a tragedy.128

Aut prodesse: profit as an incentive for playreading If those who composed dramatic paratexts hoped to satisfy playreaders’ expectations regarding the formal generic features of commercial drama by expanding the scope of these expectations, what type of satisfaction did they claim to offer when it came to the function of this drama? The answer has its roots once more in classical poetic theory and the Horatian dictate adopted by Heywood: that poems should both profit and delight the reader. The title page of Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607) invokes Horace by declaring that the printed play has been revised ‘for the more pleasure and profit of the Reader’ (sig. A1r), but the vernacularisation of the ‘aut prodesse […] aut delectare’ line hints that, just like the paratextual genre theory discussed above, the particular flavour of pleasure and profit offered to early modern English playreaders suits the context in which playbooks are produced and received. As printed pro­ fessional plays become legitimated as poetry, Horace quite naturally lurks beneath the surface of internal paratexts that convey to readers the idea that playbooks are worth reading because of the profit and pleasure they offer. However, in many cases the types of profit and pleasure outlined reflect not Horace’s thinking, but diverse theories and practices of early modern reading, ranging from those that were promoted by contemporary pedagogical writers to those that were denounced by antitheatricalists. The multiplicity of types of profit and pleasure that paratexts present perhaps stems from the fact that despite the currency given in the early

Why read plays?  103 modern period to lines 333–34 of the Ars Poetica, Horace himself does not expand upon the nature of the profit and pleasure he intends poets’ works to offer.129 When later theorists considered what it was exactly that poetry provided that was ‘helpful to life’ (l. 334), they tended to rearticulate the viewpoint of another classical writer, Plutarch. Philemon Holland in his 1603 translation of the Moralia (c.100 BCE) summarises the affective profit Plutarch sees as inhering in poetry as ‘the gentle framing of the minde unto the love of vertue’.130 The idea that reading poetry could be a mode of virtuous self-fashioning was naturally adopted by the writers of dramatic paratexts who most conscientiously promoted drama as poetry. Plutarch is a direct source text for George Chapman in the lengthy commendatory verse he contributes to the Sejanus quarto, in which Jonson’s ‘Poëme’ is constructed as having the ability to provide ‘[w]orthy instruction’ and ‘correct | Rude manners’.131 Jonson himself, in the epistle to Volpone (1607), states that good plays offer ‘instruction, and amendment’, and fulfil ‘the principall end of poesy to informe men, in the best reason of living’ (sig. ¶3v). The ‘good Poët’, according to Jonson, is ‘able to informe yong-men to all good disciplines, inflame growne-men to all great vertues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or as they decline to child-hood, recover them to their first strength’.132 This ability to ‘instruct to life’ is, given the genre of Volpone, couched as ‘the office of a Commick-Poet’ (sig. ¶3v), but the specific capacity of tragedies to foster virtuous behaviour is also stressed, again by Chapman, in his dedication of the 1613 Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois to Thomas Howard. Chapman states that ‘the soule, lims, and limits of an autenticall Tragedie’ are ‘materiall instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to Vertue, and deflection from her contrary’ (sig. A3v). Exactly how plays provide moral benefit to their readers is confronted by other writers of paratexts, who, like contemporary poetic theorists such as Sidney and Webbe, believe that a morally curative profit is most effectively offered to readers via the presentation of immoral characters or actions.133 The idea that it is through negative example that those who consume plays are compelled towards moral self-improvement can be seen in the paratexts whose writers expound most fully the belief in playreading’s moral profit. In the epistle to the reader prefacing his 1632 comedy Holland’s Leaguer, Shackerley Marmion pre-empts any criticism of his play by declaring that ‘[his] Muse has descended to [its] subject’ (rehearsing the common conception of comic subject matter as ‘low’), but that ‘men [should] esteeme of her, onely as a reprover, not an interpreter of wickednesse’. He supports the a­ bility of his play to ‘reprove’ by citing as precedents Aristippus and Plato, stating: ‘your former Writers, in their accurate discovery of vice, have ­mingled the precepts of wisdome’ (sig. A3r-v). The ‘discovery of vice’ provides a more effective incentive towards upright moral behaviour than does the depiction of this desired behaviour, as is made clear by the commendatory verse contributed by ‘R. C.’ to the 1653 The Queen, or The Excellency of

104  Why read plays? Her Sex, attributed to John Ford. ‘[T]here is more gain’, writes ‘R. C.’, ‘[i]n seeing men act vice then vertue fain’ (sig. A3r). A similar conviction presumably lies behind Jonson’s decision regarding the ending of Volpone, of which he declares that it has been his ‘special aime […] to put the snafle in their mouths that crie out, we never punish vice in our Enterludes’. Punishing vice and thereby ‘imitat[ing] justice’ within the framework of the play provides a deterrent for those spectators, and subsequently readers, who might be contemplating amoral action (sig. ¶3v). If the profit advertised by such paratexts leans on the programmatic ideologies of contemporary poetic theory, elsewhere the type of profit advertised has more to do with the pragmatic uses to which playbooks were put by their early readers. That playbooks were treated by many readers as sources of inspiration for their own speech and writing is demonstrated by Marston’s satire (quoted in this book’s introduction) about the commonplacing playreader who ‘writes, […] railes, […] jests, […] courts, what not, | And all from out his huge long scraped stock | Of well-penn’d playes’; it is further confirmed by the manuscript evidence presented in the two chapters that follow this one.134 It is thus natural that paratexts also construct plays as sources of potential linguistic profit, either responding to or helping to create readers’ expectations of what they might get out of reading a play. Acknowledging playreaders’ expectations regarding the attainment of linguistic profit may provide a further lens through which to view the enigmatic epistle to the second issue of Troilus and Cressida and its insistence on the abundance of ‘wit’ in the play it prefaces. This lens is enabled by the way the epistle blurs the line between the incarnations of Shakespeare’s plays in print and performance and the modes of reception these different media elicit. When William Sly, posing as an anonymous playgoer in Webster’s induction to Marston’s The Malcontent, announces that he is ‘one that hath seene this play often, & can give [the players] intellegence for their action’, he goes on to declare: ‘I have most of the jeasts heere in my tablebooke’.135 The ‘table-book’ was a notebook portable enough to be taken to the playhouse, in which the playgoing owner could jot down the ‘witty jests’ deemed by Heywood to be a crucial ingredient of comedies. He could then revisit these at a later date outside of the playhouse, studying them for reuse in his own conversation. Despite the fact that the practice takes place during performance, it is thus conceptually similar to that of commonplacing from printed playbooks, as satirised by Marston himself. It is this conceptual similarity that the Troilus epistle plays on when it describes those ‘dull and heavy-witted worldlings [such] as were never capable of the witte of a Commedie’ who, ‘comming by report of them to [Shakespeare’s] representations, have found that witte there, that they never found in them-selves, and have parted better wittied then they came’.136 As discussed in the previous section, ‘wit’ is a polysemous term in the period; however, its usage in the context of the epistle seems

Why read plays?  105 intended to recall its connotations of facility with language. The epistle’s writer (or writers) praises Shakespeare’s ‘dexteritie’ in the same breath as his ‘power of witte’ (sig. ¶2r): ‘dexterity’ (this time ‘of thought’) is the same quality that William Davenant sees as inhering in ‘wit’ in the quotation given by the OED to support its definition of the word as ‘[q]uickness of intellect or liveliness of fancy, with capacity of apt expression’.137 The epistle thus seems to indicate that attending performances (‘representations’) of Shakespeare’s witty comedies increases the audience’s own capacity for verbal wit (although whether this happens through osmosis or the transcription of jests into a table-book is left unclear). But it also offers this linguistic profit to readers. Truthfully or not, the epistle’s writer has billed Troilus and Cressida as ‘a new play, never stal’d with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger’. Yet this does not stop him yoking it to the performed ‘representations’ of Shakespeare’s comedies that increase their spectators’ wittiness, by concluding the pass­ age quoted above with the line ‘[a]mongst all there is none more witty then this’ (sig. ¶2r). The epistle thus presents the opportunity to become ‘­better wittied’ to those readers who encounter the supposedly unperformed Troilus and Cressida in print, just as it is available to those who attend performances of Shakespeare’s other comedies. The profit inhering in the increase of one’s capacity for verbal wit is paratextually proffered to readers just as it is to spectators. Several other paratexts also construct playbooks as potential sources of linguistic profit. Like the epistle to Troilus and Cressida, the commendatory verse contributed by ‘W. B.’ to Massinger’s 1623 Duke of Milan casts the playbook as a repository of wit from which those lacking the quality may obtain it: ‘Here, may the Puny-wits themselves direct’, avers ‘W. B.’. He continues: ‘Here, may the Wisest find what to affect; | And Kings may learne their proper Dialect’, implying that the playbook contains exemplars of both morally elevated action and socially elevated language (sig. X1v). That these are being made available as exemplars upon which readers may wish to model their action or speech, and thus profit themselves through self-improvement, is hinted at by other paratexts that invoke readerly imitation. For instance, in the epistle that prefaces A Shoemaker a Gentleman, Okes tells the reader that he ‘leave[s] [the play] to your perusall and imitation’ (sig. A4r). At a time when imitation is a decidedly polysemous term, it is unclear whether Okes intends this imitation to be moral emulation or linguistic imitatio; when Daniel Lakyn uses the word in the commendatory verse he contributes to Massinger’s 1630 The Renegado, it is more clearly the formal elements of the play that he considers worthy of imitation by those who wish to write well.138 Addressing Massinger, Lakyn writes: Many may strive to equall you, but misse Of your fayre scope, this worke of yours men may

106  Why read plays? Throw in the face of envy, and then say To those that are in Great-mens thoughts more blest, Imitate this, And call that worke your best[.]139 Although other writers may have greater success when it comes to attracting patrons, implies Lakyn, their work is not as worthy of imitation as Massinger’s.140 It is worth remembering that imitation within the early modern culture of written composition rarely involved copying or adapting more than a part of a work (and usually involved combining this with parts of other works that had similarly provided inspiration), and Massinger’s own conception of the printed Renegado as an object that may be used in such a fashion seems to be implied by his statement to George Berkeley in his dedication, that the play contains ‘some peeces worthy the perusall’ [my italics].141 In other words, it is in its parts, not its whole, that the play’s usefulness resides – a rare explicit acknowledgement of the view that seems to have been held by many of the pen-wielding playreaders whose responses are discussed in the following two chapters. The examples given above indicate that, despite feeling the need to advertise commercial drama as capable of providing the type of moral profit that – according to Sidney and others – supposedly inhered in ‘poetry’, the writers of dramatic paratexts knew enough about the way plays would predominantly be read to also offer them up as sources of a more utilitarian linguistic profit. In addition, they promoted plays’ ability to provide readers with a different type of profit, deploying a rhetorical strategy designed to counteract one that was popular with playbooks’ detractors. These last frequently deployed physiological metaphors to describe the harm supposedly caused by playreading. For instance, the Puritan pamphleteer Richard Younge, as mentioned in this book’s introduction, argued that playbooks ‘weaken[ed] the stomack of the soul, and fill[ed] it full of crudities, which will not be digested into any good blood’, while William Prynne held that ‘idle Play-bookes’ were ‘but empty huskes, which yeeld no nourishment but to Swine’.142 Richard West, in his commendatory verse prefacing Jacques Ferrand’s 1640 Erotomania, declared that ‘Playes are the Sores of Love, this Book the Cure’, the context making it clear that the plays he means are printed playbooks.143 Counteracting this discourse which constructed playreading as detrimental to one’s health were assertions within dramatic paratexts of the physiological benefit that might accrue to the recreational playreader. Thomas Heywood’s dedication of the first part of The Fair Maid of the West (1631) to John Othow casts the play as light reading. ‘I must ingenuously acknowledge’, writes Heywood, ‘a weightier argument would have better suited with your grave imployment’. However, his justification for presenting Othow with the play is that ‘there are retirements necessarily belonging to all the labours of the body and brain’ (sig. A3r). In contrast to West, who rhetorically constructs playreading as a disease in need of a cure, Heywood here invokes it as part of a holistic programme for

Why read plays?  107 maintaining physical and mental well-being. Its physiologically restorative powers are implied still more strongly in the extended metaphor deployed by ‘C. G.’ in the commendatory verse he contributes to the paratextual matter prefacing Brome’s 1640 The Sparagus Garden. ‘C. G.’ begins his verse (addressed ‘To His Deserving Friend Mr. Richard Brome’) thus: ‘What ever walke I in your Garden use, | Breeds my delight, and makes me love thy Muse | For the designment’. He builds the conceit of the play as an actual garden (praiseworthy for its ‘rare fruits’ and ‘plot of ground [in which] no weed doth spring’) to a concluding couplet in which he declares: ‘Thy Hearbs are physicall, and do more good | In purging Humors, then some’s letting blood’ (sig. A3r). Reading Brome’s play can provide greater benefit to the reader’s constitution than a widespread medical practice, asserts the verse’s extended metaphor.144 The medicinal qualities of Richard Brome’s writing are also invoked by Alexander Brome in the verse he contributes to the quarto of A Jovial Crew, published in 1652. Alexander Brome sutures his praise of Richard Brome to social commentary criticising the Protectorate regime. Referencing the play’s subtitle (The Merry Beggars), he addresses the playwright thus: Thou tell’st the World, the life that Beggars lead, ’Tis seasonable, ’twill become our Trade. ’T must be our study too; for in this time Who’ll not be innocent, since Wealth’s a Crime? His conclusion to this stanza is, ‘Thou’rt th’ Ages Doctor now; for since all go | To make us poor, thou mak’st us merry too’.145 The provision of mirth or merriment as a necessary distraction in such times is cast as the responsibility of a doctor, who is simultaneously identified as the playwright – once more according a physiological affect to playreading that is beneficial rather than harmful.146

Aut delectare: pleasure as an incentive for playreading When ‘C. G.’ praises the purgative benefit of reading The Sparagus Garden, he also stresses the pleasure that reading the play brings him, declaring: ‘I’me in a maze, and know not how to find | A freedome, that will more delight my mind’ (sig. A3r). In announcing that his mind is delighted, ‘C. G.’ offers a potential insight into the quality of the delight that should, in the best poetry (according to the Horatian formulation), accompany the profit gleaned by the reader. Sidney and Puttenham had both expounded theories on how the Horatian ‘delight’ could be produced by English poetry, but neither theory was appropriated by the ­writers of later dramatic paratexts. Puttenham had, for instance, elaborated on his assertion that reading poetry is recreational by stating that its purpose is ‘to refresh the mynde by the eares delight’.147 Yet the sensory

108  Why read plays? delights of dramatic language are rarely invoked by paratexts that cast the pleasure of playreading as inhering in the mind, and a further commendatory verse prefacing The Sparagus Garden, by one ‘R. W.’, states simply (addressing Brome once more), ‘on thy Sparagus are throughly pleased | Our intellects’ (sig. A3v). A commendatory verse by William Habington, contributed to Shirley’s Grateful Servant, hints that this delight might inhere in an intellectual appreciation of a playwright’s skill when it comes to the formal and mimetic requirements of dramatic composition. Constructing an image of Shirley as the reincarnated Ben Jonson, Habington states that Shirley has: [G]iven a name To the English Phenix, which by thy great flame Will live, in spight of mallice to delight Our Nation, doing art and nature right.148 It is Shirley’s ability to do ‘art and nature right’ that will ‘delight’ English playreaders, Habington’s praise of Shirley’s representation of ‘nature’ recalling the Aristotelian assertion that mimesis is inherently delightful.149 Another instance in which it is assumed that pleasure will result from a play’s form can be found in the only attempt made by a preliminary paratext of a professional play to legitimate history as a dramatic genre. When John Kirke dedicates The Seven Champions of Christendom (1638) to John Waite, he identifies the play as a ‘history’ (the Annals of English Drama deem it a ‘Heroical Romance’), and states that ‘being History; it consists of many parts, not walking in one direct path, of Comedy, or Tragedy, but having a larger field to trace’ (sigs A2v-A3r). It is presumably because of the narrative scope that this dictates, and, concomitantly, the greater degree of intellectual engagement it necessitates, that Kirke thinks the play ‘should yeeld more pleasure to the Reader’ (sig. A3r). Elsewhere, the type of delight invoked taps once more into ideas that circulated in the early modern period about the transformative power of reading and the blurred line between physiological and emotional affect. And once more, the dramatic paratexts reflect an awareness of the early modern English market for playbooks more than they do any classical ideals. It is precisely this fact that Sidney bemoans when he condemns English playwrights for assuming that in making their audiences laugh they have fulfilled the Horatian requirement for the provision of delight. On the contrary, avers Sidney, ‘though laughter may come with delight yet cometh it not of delight’ (p. 47). He enumerates various situations in which we may laugh without experiencing delight, or vice versa, and argues that laughter produced in isolation from delight is a base emotion: ‘Delight hath a joy in it, either permanent or present. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling’ (p. 47). Playwrights should not ‘make folks gape at a wretched beggar or beggarly clown […] [o]r, against law of

Why read plays?  109 hospitality […] jest at strangers because they speak not English so well as we do’ (p. 48). The preponderance in pre-Restoration commercial comedies of ‘beggarly clowns’ and characters whose humorous nature inheres in their poorly accented English demonstrates the continued disregard shown to this particular Sidneian precept; when such plays find a new life on the page, their dramatic paratexts likewise show no hesitation in advertising laughter as a legitimate and pleasurable by-product of playreading. Most often this is done by personifying the playbook. William Rowley’s dedication of the 1617 A Fair Quarrel to Robert Grey, for instance, constructs it as ‘a handsome pretty spoken infant’, with Rowley exhorting Grey: ‘at your leasure looke on it, at your pleasure laugh at it’.150 Grey’s pleasure at reading the play will manifest itself in laughter, an external expression of the transformative power of reading.151 Other paratexts cast laughter or an inclination to laugh as a quality belonging to the playbook itself, transferring it to the reader only rhetorically. Dekker’s commendatory verse prefacing Brome’s 1632 The Northern Lass states that the play, Brome’s ‘Daughter’, is ‘full of laughter’ (sig. A4r). And the Latin motto chosen by Brome to adorn the title pages of this and most of his other comedies is taken from Martial and translates as ‘I want this whole book to laugh’.152 These paratexts also hint at the elements of printed comedies that create this laughter, and at the potential reason Sidney is disdainful of it. Dekker’s assertion, in context, reads: ‘But what I bring shall crowne thy Daughter | (My Grand child) who (though full of laughter) | Is chast and witty to the Time’. Dekker feels the need to state that the playbook/girl is chaste ‘though full of laughter’ [my italics], as if its/her chastity counteracts the quality of the laughter. This quality is clarified by the source of Brome’s Latin motto, which strengthens the implication that the laughter stems from a dramatic subject matter that includes ‘the things having to do with carnal pleasure, like the privy parts, sexual intercourse, and the memories and representations of both’ which Castelvetro identifies as one of the ingredients of comedy. The works of Martial are, with those of Juvenal, the second most popular literary source from which Latin mottoes on dramatic title pages are drawn.153 Thus, as in the case of the title page quotations from the Ars Poetica (although to a lesser degree), quotations from Martial were liable to be associated with the fuller context from which they were taken.154 And the context of the title page motto of Brome’s comedies, Epigram 11.15, is this: I have books which Cato’s wife and the awesome Sabine ladies could read; but I want this whole book to laugh and be naughtier than all my books. Let it […] play with the boys and love the girls, and let it not talk in euphemisms about that thing from which we are created, the parent of all, the thing which revered Numa used to call his prick. […] [T]hese verses are Saturnalian[.]155

110  Why read plays? The laughter offered by Martial, and hence by Brome, goes hand in hand with a frankness about sexual activity that supposedly makes their books inappropriate reading matter for chaste women. It is this association of comic laughter with sex that the printer of Edward Sharpham’s 1607 comedy The Fleer develops when, in his epistle to the reader, he casts the play as a book ‘to make you laugh and lie downe too, if you please’ (sig. A2r). ‘Laugh and lie down’ is proverbial and often has sexual connotations; it is used, for instance, in the bawdy exchange between the female ‘Merry Beggars’ and their suitors in Brome’s A Jovial Crew. The men declare that they are ‘[m]erry and lusty’, ‘can hold out no longer’, and that ‘[t]his night’ they will ‘lye togither’ with their lovers, announcing that the objects of their affection will ‘laugh and lye down | When [their] bellies are full’.156 The use of the phrase in the epistle to The Fleer thus creates an image of a reading experience that not only produces laughter, but also sexual arousal: if the reader is pleased by the comedy’s titillating subject matter, he will want to ‘lie down’. The epistle enables the possibility that the sensation it may ‘please’ the reader to experience is a specifically sexual pleasure. The idea that playbooks offered something particularly appealing to readers who were fixated on love or sex was widespread in the early modern period. In addition to West’s description of them as the ‘Sores of Love’, Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy observes that they are one of the preferred genres of love-sick ‘Inamoratoes’, and Richard Braithwaite in his 1638 A Nursery for Gentry describes ‘voluptuous’ young gentlemen who read ‘Idle Pamphlets’ (which almost certainly include plays), preferring: Stories of Love; where every line works such moving impressions in their unsteady fancies: as they reduce every period of Loves discourse, to a Sceane of Action; wherein they wish themselves Prime-actors, to close in a personal re-greet, with so light and sensuall a Relation.157 Some dramatic paratexts put a positive spin on the immersive reading experience that playbooks can offer to an amorous reader, advertising an almost homeopathic effect. For example, when Robert Stapylton lauds Shirley’s Grateful Servant (which forces two sets of lovers to overcome various hurdles before being united in marriage), he claims that its ‘fancies, are to pleasing Cupid feares | To loose his tribute paid in sighes and teares | Whilst lovers make their peace with thy conceit’ (sig. XA3v). Stapylton implies that the play’s narrative of love provides a fictional cipher that is so absorbing that those in love find within it a satisfactory real-world resolution of their emotion.158 Other paratexts, however, are less concerned with justifying the presence of erotic content in plays than with simply invoking it, placing varying degrees of emphasis on the sexual nature of the content, and in the process constructing the ‘pleasure’ they offer to readers as one that – as in The Fleer example – can involve sexual titillation. As

Why read plays?  111 such, they appear to both respond to and help to construct the market for playbooks identified by West, Burton, and Braithwaite, a market that, as Braithwaite’s description of ‘voluptuous’ readers implies, includes those ‘addicted to sensual pleasure or the gratification of the senses’.159 In addressing this market, many writers of paratexts assume – like Braithwaite – that the readers of playbooks are predominantly male. Within the heteronormative context of early modern English society, this means that the writers can thus contribute to the discourse identified by Wendy Wall in her feminist analysis of the early modern publishing industry, whereby early modern texts are frequently gendered as female, leading to a sexualisation of ideas of book-buying and reading.160 As already noted, the writer of the epistle to Lording Barry’s 1608 The Family of Love laments the time that has elapsed between the play’s first performance and its subsequent publication in these terms: ‘Plaies in this Citie are like wenches new falne to the trade, onelie desired of your neatest gallants, whiles the’are fresh: when they grow stale they must be vented by Termers and Cuntrie chapmen’ (sig. A1v). In the previous chapter, this quotation was discussed for what it might have to say about the distribution of playbooks; looked at through a different lens, it can be seen that the simile explicitly invokes a sexual desire for the printed play. The orthographical pun in ‘Cuntrie’ reinforces the link between playbook and prostitute, meaning that when the writer declares in the sentence that follows, ‘I know not how this labor will please’ [my italics], the type of pleasure invoked – as in the epistle to The Fleer – is rhetorically linked with the sexual desire of the preceding simile. The comparison of playbook with woman becomes a metaphor that is repeatedly employed in later paratexts, particularly when the play shares its name with that of its heroine. It is found, for instance, not just in Dekker’s verse (discussed above), but throughout the other prefatory material of The Northern Lass. In his dedication to Richard Holford, Brome personifies the play as: ‘a Countrey Lasse […] that […] came out of the cold North, thinly clad’. He continues: But Wit had pitty on her; Action apparrell’d her, and Plaudits clap’d her cheekes warme. […] Shee is honest, and modest, though she speake broad […] And though Art never strung her tongue; yet once it yeelded a delightfull sound: which gain’d her many Lovers and Friends, by whose good liking she prosperously lived, untill her late long Silence, and Discontinuance (to which shee was compell’d) gave her justly to feare their losse, and her owne decay.161 The claim that ‘Action apparrell’d her’ cannot help but negatively construct a potentially titillating image of the female playbook – from which the ‘Action’ of performance is absent – as naked, an image that Brome seems to want to downplay with his assertion that ‘she is honest, and

112  Why read plays? modest’.162 But the final sentence, with its invocation not just of the play’s multiple ‘Friends’ but its/her ‘Lovers’, manages to undercut this assertion, at the same time as recalling the epistle to The Family of Love, in which the ‘good liking’ of plays and prostitutes wanes with the passing of time. The image of playbook as prostitute is further developed by ‘F. T.’ in his commendatory verse (‘To his approved Friend M. Richard Brome on his Northern Lasse’). The verse by ‘F. T.’ begins thus: ‘What! wilt thou prostitute thy Mistresse, (Friend) | And make so rich a Beauty common!’, and continues, ‘What end | Do’st thou propose? Shee was thine owne, but now | All will enjoy her free’, before concluding that Brome must have ‘tri’d her, found her chast, | And fear’st not that Shee’ll lewdly be embrac’t’ (sig. A3r). The conclusion does not quite contain the common anxiety about the ungovernable circulation of a multiplicity of print copies in the public sphere, which is akin to the period’s pervasive anxiety about women’s chastity, and despite the assertion that The Northern Lass will not be subjected to ‘lewd embraces’, the very next commendatory verse, by ‘St. Br.’, casts the play not just as an object of desire but of incestuous desire, ‘St. Br.’ addressing Brome thus: ‘Although I call you by a Brothers name, | I must confesse (nor doe I feare the shame) | I am in love with your faire Daughter, this’ (sig. A3v).163 Other paratexts of eponymously female plays employ still more explicit double entendres to convey the type of erotically pleasurable experience that reading them can provide. In Robert Chamberlain’s dedication of his 1640 Swaggering Damsel to Thomas Kendall, he expresses his hope to Kendall ‘that you would please to let this Comedy finde your wonted embracements, which may now and then force a smile upon your sweet retirements’ (sig. A2r). The ‘lewd embraces’ that formed part of the response spectrum to The Northern Lass are here condoned as ‘wonted embracements’ to be experienced during Kendall’s ‘sweet retirements’ (the noun connotes both leisure time and bedtime). Furthermore, the use of the verb ‘force’ indicates the involuntary nature of the pleasurable response to the female playbook: in another eponymously female play, The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher takes pains in his dedication to stress that his rationale for publishing the play is not to ‘ravish kinde Atturnies, | in their journies’ (sig. ¶1v), which assumes that other printed playbooks – perhaps particularly those with female titles – intend to do exactly that. It implies that the rhetorical construction of playbooks as erotically desirable intersects with an understanding of them as objects that offer to their male readers a pleasurable ‘ravishment’ – ‘the transport[ation]’ of the mind ‘with the strength of some emotion’; the ‘fill[ing] with ecstasy, intense delight, or sensuous pleasure; […] entrance[ment], captiv[ation], or enraptur[ing]’.164 It is notable from the examples discussed above that it is almost exclusively printed comedies that are paratextually constructed as repositories of erotic pleasure. This should lead us to reconsider the connotations of the seemingly innocuous phrase ‘pleasant comedy’, which can be found on numerous playbook title pages printed throughout the period. Fred

Why read plays?  113

Figure 2.2  An early typographic privileging of the adjective ‘pleasant’ on the title page of a comedy: William Shakespeare’s Loues Labors Lost (1598, STC 22294, sig. A1r). Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Geneva).

114  Why read plays? Schurink, discussing the use of the root ‘pleas-’ and its cognates on the title page of John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578; reprinted multiple times into the 1630s), notes that it suggests an ‘intimate relationship between the pleasure of love and the pleasure of reading’ and that ‘[t]he implication is that reading is almost a substitute for love’.165 The same can be said, I argue, for the way the adjective ‘pleasant’ is used on the title pages of plays that advertise a ‘pleasant comedy’ – the genre of which ‘the matter and ground is love’. But given that the word works in conjunction with paratexts such as those discussed above, which construct the printed comedy as both feminised and sexualised, it is not just the imagined pleasures of love that are offered the (male) reader, but those of ‘bawdrie, […] whordome [and] adulterie’. The adjective ‘pleasant’ may not advertise a pleasurably titillating reading experience as openly as, for instance, Middleton’s offer of ‘venery’ to ‘the Comicke Play-readers’ of The Roaring Girl, but it is more than a hollow epithet. Rather, its appearance on a comedy’s title page promises to those ‘Men | Of Earthy breeding’ who, in Rhodes’s conceit, shun tragedies and histories in favour of ‘bald Discourses | Of Commicke Ribaldry’, that the type of pleasure they can expect to experience in reading this particular genre is a titillating sexual pleasure that responds to the predominant subject matter of English commercial comedies and the sexualising rhetoric of their internal paratexts. When antitheatricalists such as William Prynne worried that playbooks would ‘inflame their [readers’] lusts’, they merely used stronger language to describe a mode of engagement that playbook paratexts were already advertising.166

Conclusion The construction of commercial playbooks as a genre from which a reader could expect to glean an erotically charged pleasure is, as my discussion above makes clear, reliant on rhetorical strategies that assume this reader will be male.167 Yet this does not mean that women were not part of the playreading market envisaged by those who prepared paratextual front matter: indeed, the discussion in Chapter 1 demonstrates that they were. Rather, it indicates the way in which the various paratextual strategies for ‘raising expectation’ that I have discussed in this chapter anticipate a market of playreaders that is just that: various. Women need not be targeted by a paratextual presentation of playbooks as pleasurably titillating, because they may be reading them as aide-mémoires for performances they have attended and thus be attracted by the claim that a printed play is ‘As it was acted’. Other readers may similarly have been susceptible to the expectations of generic content created by a particular author’s name. Educated readers may well have brought expectations based on their knowledge of classical and contemporary poetics to playbooks whose paratextual features, such as title page Latin mottoes, raised the publications’ status to that of ‘poetry’;

Why read plays?  115 internal paratexts attempt to modify the nature of the expectations that title page genre indications created in such readers. Still other readers might have read plays in the expectation that they would thereby attain some sort of profit, whether moral or linguistic or physiological; others may have expected simply to delight in the playwright’s mimetic skill or his mastery of the provision of mirth. The types of expectation raised are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but this is precisely the point: in a print marketplace in which publishers focused on market area rather than market depth, it was commercially savvy to incentivise playreading by as many different means as possible, and to build expectation on multiple paratextual fronts in order to convince readers that a playbook was worth their time and money.168 Whether the publishers’ assessments of why readers might want to read plays were accurate – in other words, whether paratexts had the anticipated effect – is a question that surfaces at numerous points throughout the following two chapters, which focus on the ways in which actual early modern playreaders translated expectation into response.

Notes 1 Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, sig. A2r. 2 See Pratt, ‘Stab-Stitching’, esp. pp. 306–09, for a recent discussion of debates around the ‘status’ of playbooks. 3 For iterations of this argument, see Masten, pp. 113–19; Berek, ‘The Market for Playbooks’, pp. 160–63; and Erne, Book Trade, pp. 92–93. 4 The list is Erne’s: see Book Trade, p. 92. 5 Erne, Book Trade, p. 93. Atkin discusses the various dates (usually aligned with ‘watershed’ publications) that have been proposed as the advents of plays-as-literature in Reading Drama, p. 6. 6 See for example James P. Bednarz, ‘New Directions: Jonson’s Literary Theatre: Volpone in Performance and Print (1606–1607)’, in Volpone: A Critical Guide, ed. by Matthew Steggle (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 83–104 (p. 91) and Adam Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 28–29. 7 This phrase is Massai’s, in ‘Early Readers’, p. 146. 8 Erne, Literary Dramatist, p. 246. 9 Ibid., pp. 3–4. For further engagement with Erne and another rejection of the literary/theatrical binary, see J. Gavin Paul, Shakespeare and the Imprints of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 66–71. 10 Atkin, p. 8. 11 For the persistent co-existence of ‘literary’ and ‘theatrical’ elements of title page paratext, see Farmer and Lesser, ‘Vile Arts’, and for ‘literary’ additions such as printed commonplace markers to supposedly ‘theatrical’ plays see Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet’. 12 John Marston, The Malcontent (1604, STC 17479), sig. A4r. 13 Quoted in Gurr, pp. 226–27. 14 Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, sig. A3r. 15 Saenger, p. 5. 16 Erne, Book Trade, p. 91; Berek, ‘Market for Playbooks’, p. 158. 17 See Stern, Documents of Performance, pp. 55–56.

116  Why read plays? 18 As discussed in the previous chapter, playbooks read by women may often have been acquired for them by male servants or acquaintances, and playreaders outside of London may have bought plays not based on the promises of a title page but on the recommendation of a bookseller correspondent, as McKitterick (p. 211) describes John Buxton doing in the late 1630s. 19 In ascending chronological order, these claims are from the title pages of: Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London; 2 The Troublesome Reign of King John; Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy; George Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois; John Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case; Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bongay; Henry Glapthorne’s Wit in a Constable; and The Cunning Lovers, attributed to Thomas Heywood (possibly with Richard Brome). The number of playbook title pages which claim that the play printed is ‘as’ it was publicly performed is 340, a number that increases when more ambiguous phrasings are included in the tally, such as claims of performance by professional playing companies that do not also advertise a public playing venue. See Chapter 1, n. 84, for fuller details of the playbooks which enable this tally. 20 Stephen Orgel, ‘The Book of the Play’, in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 13–54 (p. 21). 21 Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, p. 8. See also Preiss, pp. 51–52, and Paul, pp. 44–45. 22 Bourne, Typographies of Performance; Paul, esp. Chapter 2 of Imprints of Performance; and Syme, ‘Unediting the Margin: Jonson, Marston, and the Theatrical Page’, English Literary Renaissance, 38.1 (2008), 142–71. 23 See Richard Dutton, Shakespeare, Court Dramatist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 67–96. 24 For a slightly different interpretation of the title page ‘as’, in which the word both ‘affirms that the book is not a stage’ and simultaneously presents the playbook as ‘a viable version of what audiences might have seen and heard on a London stage’, see Bourne, Typographies of Performance, p. 10. 25 Quoted in Gurr, p. 290. Baker’s Theatrum redivivum, or, The theatre vindicated was finally published in 1662. 26 John Marston, Parasitaster (1606, STC 17484), sigs A2r-v. 27 See The Bird in a Cage, ed. by Julie Sanders, in Three Seventeenth-century Plays on Women and Performance, ed. by Hero Chalmers, Julie Sanders, and Sophie Tomlinson, Revels Plays Companion Library (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 178. 28 Stern highlights Shirley’s plays among those from the period that are printed lacking song lyrics: ‘[s]eventeen of the songs called for in Shirley’s dramatic works […] are not supplied’ (Documents of Performance, p. 121). 29 Tiffany Stern, ‘“I Have Both the Note, and Dittie About Me”: Songs on the Early Modern Page and Stage’, Common Knowledge, 17.2 (2011), 306–20 (p. 319). See also her discussion of songs in Documents of Performance, pp. 120–73. 30 For the play’s early performance history, see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 4. 31 Stern’s observation that the first three quartos include a moment that in performance clearly required the singing of a song for which lyrics are not given (they appear in the 1630 quarto) does not strictly contradict the title page’s claim: the missing song is to be sung by Horatius, not Valerius. See Documents of Performance, p. 124.

Why read plays?  117 32 Nora Johnson, in her discussion of the songs in The Rape of Lucrece, also remarks that the phrasing of the title page ‘seeks to reassure potential buyers that they will find the songs just where they ought to be, that the text has been printed with an eye toward the authentic reproduction of the Red Bull performances’ (p. 144; subsequent discussion on pp. 144–49). However, she then goes on to argue that what the title page claims to offer readers is ‘access to […] delightful music’ (p. 144). As Shirley reminds Prynne, music is something a playbook does not and cannot offer the reader: what the printed versions of The Rape of Lucrece provide are song lyrics. 33 Orgel, p. 21. 34 Prynne finds playreading more acceptable than playgoing partly because ‘when a man reads a Play he ever wants that viva vox, that flexanimous rhetoricall Stage-elocution, that lively action and representation of the Players themselves which put life and vigor into these their Enterludes’ (sigs 6C2v6C3r). For the origin of the songs in The Rape of Lucrece, see Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, p. 9. 35 Stern, Documents of Performance, p. 148. 36 Wiggins erroneously claims that the extra epistle and songs on K2 and K3 were first added to Q4, the edition printed in 1630 British Drama 1533– 1642: A Catalogue, V (2015), entry 1558. For a more accurate description of the various editions’ paratexts, see DEEP. 37 Attributing the increasing musicality of the play to its transfer to a hall playhouse seems plausible given the extra focus on musical interludes in such playing spaces: proof positive of its indoor staging can be found in the Duke of Buckingham’s documented attendance at a Cockpit performance in 1628 (see Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, p. 4). 38 Whether the additions were written by Ben Jonson for the Admiral’s Men or by Shakespeare for the Chamberlain’s Men is a subject of scholarly debate: see Brian Vickers, ‘Identifying Shakespeare’s Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602): A New(er) Approach’, Shakespeare, 8 (2012), 13–43 (pp. 13–18). 39 John Marston and John Webster, The Malcontent (1604, STC 17481), sig. A1r. 40 Shakespeare, Richard the Second (1608, STC 22311), sig. A1r. On the probability that the earlier editions of the play contain a text that reflects censored Elizabethan performance, see Janet Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 83. 41 Claims of enlargement or ‘additions’ that reflect an evolution in performance history of course contrast with those of playwrights such as Jonson, who famously asserts on the title pages of the Every Man Out of His Humour quartos (1600) that the printed play ‘contain[s] more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted’ (STC 14767, sig. A2r). They also differ from the ‘editorial pledges’ of correction or emendation which offer up a text that is ostens­ ibly superior to the printed edition that has preceded it. On these, see Sonia Massai, ‘Editorial pledges in early modern dramatic paratexts’ in Renaissance Paratexts, ed. by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 91–106 and Farmer, ‘Shakespeare as leading playwright’. Dutton argues that editorial pledges that advertise expanded texts may be implicitly advertising a court performance: see Shakespeare, Court Dramatist, passim and esp. pp. 124–37. 42 Erne, Book Trade, 105. 43 Scholars who have construed the author’s name as having a marketing function include, alongside Erne, Adam Hooks (‘Introduction: Shakespeare for sale,’ Philological Quarterly 91.2 (2012), 139–50 (p. 140)); Kastan (‘The Body of

118  Why read plays? the Text,’ English Literary History 81.2 (2014), 443–44 (p. 445)); and Gary Taylor, (‘The Order of Persons,’ in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 31–79 (p. 40)). 44 Scholars who reference these two paratexts include Erne (Book Trade, p. 59); Hooks (Selling Shakespeare, pp. 23–27); and David Scott Kastan (‘Plays into Print: Shakespeare to His Earliest Readers’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 23–41 (p. 34)). 45 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: the Invention of Copyright. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 1; quoted in Erne, Book Trade, p. 59. 46 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, trans. by Joseph V. Harari, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. by David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 197–210 (pp. 201, 209). 47 Shakespeare and the Question of Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 79. See Bruster’s third chapter for his discussion of the phenomenon of embodied writing. 48 John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy, A3r. 49 Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, p. 77. 50 Farmer, ‘Shakespeare as leading playwright’, p. 89. 51 The playbook tallies in this paragraph are enabled by DEEP. 52 On the profitability of reprints, and possible reasons for poor reprint rates for Caroline drama, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England’, in Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625– 1642, ed. by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 17–41. 53 The four plays not reprinted in quarto were 2 Henry IV (1600), Much Ado About Nothing (1600), Troilus and Cressida (1609), and Titus Andronicus, which reached its third (unattributed) edition in 1611 and did not re­appear until it was included in the 1623 folio; the falsely attributed London Prodigal (1605) also saw only one edition. Shakespeare’s name was absent from the title page of Thomas Pavier’s 1619 Henry V quarto; the title page of John Smethwick’s 1623 Romeo and Juliet appeared in two states, one of which (STC 22325a) omits the author’s name. 54 For a list of plays falsely attributed to ‘William Shakespeare’ (as well as to ‘W. S.’ and ‘W. Sh.’) see Erne, Book Trade, p. 57. The most famous misattribution is of course of a poetic rather than dramatic publication: William Jaggard’s 1599 The Passionate Pilgrim. 55 Erne, Book Trade, p. 71. 56 Loewenstein, p. 64. 57 Ibid., p. 64. Loewenstein also acknowledges that the name ‘William Shakespeare’ brings with it ‘borrowed value’; his discussion has moved to William Jaggard’s misattribution of The Passionate Pilgrim. For further discussion of the meanings carried by Shakespeare’s name as a paratext in early poetry publications, see n. 75, below. 58 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598, STC 17834), sig. 2O2r. 59 For a nuanced assessment of the ways in which Genette’s theories of paratext inadequately capture the early modern situation, see Helen Smith and Louise Wilson’s introduction to their edited collection, Renaissance Paratexts, pp. 1–14. 60 Genette, p. 41. 61 Such is Farmer’s implicit argument in ‘Shakespeare as leading playwright’, in which he considers whether Shakespeare’s exceptional popularity may be

Why read plays?  119 connected with title page ‘editorial pledges’ that construct him as ‘a revising author attentive to the accuracy of the printed texts of his plays’ (p. 90). 62 This count does not include The Whole Contention, a quarto collection which ‘was apparently intended to contain ten plays [and which] lacks a general title page’: see DEEP. The two playbooks that omitted a title page genre indication were Andrew Wise and William Aspley’s 2 Henry IV (1600) and John Norton’s 1634 Richard II. 63 ‘history, n., I1b,’ The Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed 2 February 2020]. 64 Other misattributed plays such as A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608, 1619) or Robert Wilson, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, and Richard Hathaway’s 1 Sir John Oldcastle (1600, 1619) – advertised on its title page as ‘The first part Of the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Old-castle’ (STC 18795) – contain an indication of their non-comedic genre within their title. 65 Pericles (1609, STC 22334), sig. A1r; The Two Noble Kinsmen, sig. A1r. The Annals of English Drama classify Pericles as a tragicomedy; Martin Wiggins designates it a ‘romance’ (British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, V, entry 1555). 66 See Paratexts, pp. 4–5. 67 Brandon S. Centerwall argues that the phrase ‘rare Tragedian’ originates with John Donne. See ‘Who Wrote William Basse’s ‘Elegy on Shakespeare’?: Rediscovering a Poem Lost from the Donne Canon’, Shakespeare Survey, 59 (2006), 267–84. 68 Michael Drayton, ‘To my most dearely-loved friend Henry Reynolds Esquire of Poets and Poesie,’ in The battaile of Agincourt (1631, STC 7191), sig. V1r. 69 Mervyn, ‘On M. James Shirley his Royall Master,’ in The Royal Master (1638), sig. B2r; West, ‘On Mr. Ben. Johnson,’ in Jonsonus Virbius, ed. by Brian Duppa (1638, STC 14784), sig. H4v. 70 Cartwright, ‘Another,’ in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies, sig. d2v; George Daniel’s verse printed in The Shakspere Allusion-Book, ed. by C. M. Ingleby and others, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), I, p. 506. 71 Aston Cokaine, ‘A Præludium to Mr. Richard Bromes Playes,’ in Five New Plays by Richard Brome (1653), sig. A3r. 72 Thomas Philipot, Villare cantianum (1659, Wing P1989), sig. S4v. 73 The title pages of all three pre-Restoration Merry Wives quartos advertise the ‘swaggering vaine of Ancient Pistoll, and Corporall Nym’; the title page of Richard Meighen’s 1630 edition also promotes (in lieu of a genre indication) ‘the humours of Sir John Falstaffe’ (sig. A1r). 74 Troilus and Cressida (STC 22332), sigs ¶2r-v. 75 I have thus far refrained from engaging with the likelihood that early readers of Shakespeare’s plays in quarto may well also have been readers of his poems in quarto, and that their conception of ‘Shakespeare’ may therefore have been influenced by the meanings the name accrued from these nondramatic publications. Hooks argues that the reputation the poems built for him meant that Shakespeare’s name began to connote a certain stylistic ‘sweetness’ and an Ovidian subject matter, and that that ‘stylistic (and amorous) reputation could […] extend to his plays’ (Selling Shakespeare, p. 76). He discusses the way that Richard II, in particular, builds on the reputation Shakespeare had already developed in print (pp. 80–81), but the more obvious overlap between Shakespeare’s poems and his plays is in the genre of comedy: both are to do with love; a play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a poem like Venus and Adonis draw equally on Ovidian source material.

120  Why read plays? Even if playreaders brought to Shakespeare’s printed comedies expectations about their content derived from their reading of his poems, these expectations wouldn’t be too far from the mark. 76 On the formal connotations of genre indications on title pages, see the following section; on the sensory affect of playreading, see Hannah August, ‘“Tickling the senses with sinful delight”: the pleasures of reading comedies in early modern England’ in The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558– 1660, ed. by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 201–16. 77 This assessment of the subject matter of comedy is Philip Stubbes’s, from The Anatomie of Abuses (1583, STC 23377), sig. N4r. On the accuracy of Stubbes’s assessment, see August, ‘“Tickling the senses”’, p. 202. 78 See for instance Lucy Munro, ‘Tragic Forms’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. by Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 86–101 and Peter Berek, ‘Genres, Early Modern Theatrical Title Pages, and the Authority of Print,’ in The Book of the Play, ed. by Straznicky, pp. 159–75. Although Berek argues that other title page elements of Jonson’s 1616 Works infuse the volume’s generic terms with both classical and performative resonances, when it comes to single-play editions of professional plays, he claims that ‘generic designation does not seem linked to other qualities of plays that one might think conferred status or prestige’ (‘Genres’, pp. 166–67), a statement with which this section takes issue. 79 See Daniel Javitch, ‘Self-Justifying Norms in the Genre Theories of Italian Renaissance Poets’, Philological Quarterly, 67 (1988), 195–217. 80 Book Trade, p. 99. 81 See Bednarz, pp. 91–93, for discussion of the early modern identification of plays as poems and playwrights as poets; also Chandler, pp. 112–15, whose discussion of the paratextual transformation of plays into poetry does not acknowledge that it is specifically vernacular commercial drama that is seen as being in need of this legitimation. 82 Parasitaster (STC 17483), sig. A2v; Sophonisba (STC 17488), sig. A2r. 83 For these plays, see the Appendix, ‘Professional play quartos with Horatian title page mottoes, 1598–1659’. 84 For discussion of this wider œuvre, see Part Three of C. O. Brink’s Horace on Poetry: Prolegomena to the Literary Epistles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 85 Heywood modifies the verb, which in the original (Ars Poetica l. 333) is ‘volunt’ (‘wish to’), not ‘solent’: his modification has the meaning ‘are wont to’ or ‘are accustomed to’. For plays by Heywood on whose title pages this motto appears, see the Appendix. For the Latin text of the Ars Poetica see Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 194 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), pp. 442–89. 86 For the publication frequency and dates of editions of the Ars Poetica printed in early modern England, see Heinrich F. Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics: A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 212–14. Thomas Drant’s Horace his arte of poetrie, pistles, and satyrs Englished (STC 13797) was printed in London in 1567; William Webbe’s ‘canons or general cautions of poetry, prescribed by Horace’ was appended to his Discourse of English Poetrie (STC 25172) in 1586; and Ben Jonson’s Q. Horatius Flaccus: his Art of poetry (STC 13798) was printed in 1640. 87 T. W. Baldwin in William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944) notes that the 1611 syllabus at the Merchant Taylors’ school included the Ars Poetica (I, p. 400).

Why read plays?  121 88 An example of an educated (and highly privileged) early modern woman who was familiar with Horace can be found in Elizabeth Tudor, who translated the first 178 lines of the Ars Poetica (see Part Four of Elizabeth 1: Translations, 1592–1598, ed. by Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009)). 89 Micha Lazarus has recently argued that familiarity with Aristotle’s fourth century-BCE Poetics is demonstrated not just by Sidney in his Defence, but also by Webbe in his Discourse and Harington in his Apology. Regardless of the extent to which early modern English writers and readers were familiar with Aristotle, they were undoubtedly more familiar with Horace. See Micha Lazarus, ‘Aristotelian Criticism in Sixteenth-Century England,’ Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1–26 . 90 The Defence of Poesy in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 1–54 (p. 44). Page numbers for subsequent quotations from the Defence are given in the body of the text. 91 A new edition of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, including The Defence of Poesy, was published in the same year that the Sejanus quarto appeared. 92 Fairclough’s translation in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica. All subsequent quotations from the Ars Poetica are from Fairclough’s translation and line numbers are given in the body of the text. Sidney states: ‘the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day’ (p.  45); Horace’s elaboration on the role of the Chorus can be found at ll. 194–201. It is commonly acknowledged that Sidney’s understanding of the unities comes not directly from Aristotle (who never advocated a unity of place), but from Aristotle as mediated by the Italian critic Ludovico Castelvetro, in his 1570 ‘explicated’ Poetics of Aristotle, which Sidney ­selectively draws upon for his Defence. See Lazarus, p. 9. 93 On the poor reception of Sejanus in performance, see Bednarz, p. 89. 94 Title page indications that a play is a ‘tragedy’ or a ‘comedy’ vastly outnumber indications that a play is a ‘tragicomedy’ or a ‘history’, and this last is in any case untheorised by classical writers of dramatic theory, meaning that the form and content of early modern history plays need no justification to bring them in line with educated readers’ expectations. On tragicomedy, see n. 128 below. 95 Berek, ‘Genres’, pp. 159–60. 96 Munro, ‘Tragic Forms’, p. 86. 97 Jonson, Volpone (1607), sig. G2r. 98 Examples of such treatises include Thomas Lodge’s Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579) and Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612). In addition to Horace, schoolboys were also likely to have encountered the views of the fourth-century grammarian Donatus on the composition of comedy: the fragment from Donatus’s On Comedy and Tragedy was appended to early modern editions of the plays of Terence, which were widely taught in grammar schools. Donatus’s commentary is firmly couched as a description of historical conventions: some of what he has to say resurfaces in the vernacular in the work of later critics such as Puttenham and Heywood. 99 Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian  Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), p.  69. Determining direct  lines of influence is difficult, but as Michele Marrapodi comments, ‘theorists and writers of the Italian Renaissance [were] regarded as model-makers for the formation of mainstream rules in

122  Why read plays? Cinquecento literary production and their works were frequently ransacked to suit the English dramatists’ individual agenda’ (‘Introduction: Shakespeare against Genres’ in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories: AngloItalian Transactions, ed. by Marrapodi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 1–22 (p. 12)). This agenda could involve the paratextual promotion and explication of printed plays: thus much is clear from Fletcher’s borrowing from Giambattista Guarini’s Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601) to ‘justifie’ the form and content of The Faithful Shepherdess ([1610?], sig. ¶2v). 100 In ‘The mixed fortunes of Shakespeare in print’ (Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. by Kidnie and Massai, pp. 57–68), Sonia Massai argues that during Shakespeare’s lifetime it is predominantly the paratexts of plays performed by the boys’ companies that contain ‘critical thinking about dramatic literature’ (p. 63) and that this paratextual apparatus targeted an elite readership. The discussion below provides examples of self-justifying poetics in paratexts from plays performed by both boys and adult companies, indicating that the readership of the former may have been less discerning than Massai imagines. Without borrowing Javitch’s term, Chandler too notes that it is one of the functions of commendatory verses (in particular) to ‘[suggest] to the reader the proper qualities, functions, or content of literary art that he or she should value, then assert […] that the work at hand contains these qualities’ (p. 103); he pays attention to the commendatory verses that preface printed drama on pages 108–16 of Commendatory Verse and Authorship, but without considering their articulation of genre theory. 101 Webster, The White Devil (1612), sig. A2r-v. 102 Webbe, p. 133; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 153. 103 Webster, The White Devil (1612), sigs A2r-v. Like Sejanus, The White Devil suffered an initial lack of theatrical success, but it is unclear whether this was due to Webster serving up fare that playgoers disliked or whether poor weather at the time of the play’s first performance kept them away. 104 Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry: An Abridged Translation of Lodovico Castelvetro’s ‘Poetica d’Aristotele Vulgarizzata et Sposta’, trans. by Andrew Bongiorno (Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1984), p. 19. 105 Whether Castelvetro’s Poetics is Webster’s direct source text for his epistle is, of course, unknowable, but as Henke points out in Pastoral Transformations (pp. 45–56), the ideas of the Italian theorists arrived in England by a variety of routes, not simply through consumption of the texts in which they originated. 106 The quotation is from Odes 3.30.14–15. 107 Marlowe, 1 & 2 Tamburlaine (1590), sig. A2r. 108 Puttenham, p. 153. 109 Thomas Rawlins, The Rebellion (1640), sig. A2v. 110 Giovan Battista Giraldi, ‘Discourse or Letter on the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies’, trans. by Daniel Javitch, Renaissance Drama, 39 (2011), 207–55 (pp. 219–20). 111 Cinthio’s influence upon English poetic theory is argued for by Marrapodi, who claims (p. 6) that he is Sidney’s ‘deep source’ for the Defence. Sidney does not theorise the propriety of onstage deaths. 112 Jonathan Goossen has recently rehabilitated Aristotle’s thinking on comedy, although it remained opaque to early modern thinkers. See Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy (New York: Routledge, 2018). 113 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, sig. N4r. 114 Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, p. 214.

Why read plays?  123 15 Ibid., p. 218. 1 116 Ibid., p. 219. 117 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (1611), sig. A3r. 118 Heywood states that comedies are ‘pleasantly contrived with merry accidents, and intermixed with apt and witty jests’; see An Apology for Actors in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. by Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 213–54 (p. 242). 119 ‘Shakespeare’s Jestbook: Wit, Print, Performance,’ English Literary History, 71 (2004), 89–113 (p. 101). 120 For three examples (among many) of dramatic paratexts that laud the wit of the comedy they accompany, see the dedication of Richard Brome’s 1632 The Northern Lass (sig. A2r); the dedication of John Fletcher and James Shirley’s 1640 The Night Walker (sig. A2r), and the prologue to Brome’s The Antipodes (sig. A3v). Although this last is technically a ‘theatrical paratext’, the fact that it is printed between two commendatory verses gives it the appearance of a readerly paratext. For further exploration of the early modern connotations of ‘venery’, and the appropriateness of Middleton’s usage of it in the epistle to The Roaring Girl, see Bourne, Typographies of Performance, pp. 77–78. 121 Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, pp. 95–96. 122 James Shirley, The Wedding (1629), sig. A4r. 123 Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, sig. A3r. 124 Farmer and Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics’, pp. 32–35. 125 Thomas Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters (1640), sig. A4r. Wiggins’s ‘best guess’ at this play’s original performance date is 1605, which means that it is in fact ‘full thirty-five’ years since it was written. See British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, V, entry 1479. 126 The dating of the first performance follows Wiggins: see British Drama 1533– 1642: A Catalogue, VII (2016), entry 1868. Wiggins gives the play’s genre as ‘romance’. 127 The dating of the first performance of The Honest Lawyer follows Wiggins’s ‘best guess’: see British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, VI, entry 1754. 128 Marrapodi, p. 1. Over the course of the period, there is an increase in the number of title page indications of ‘tragicomedy’, a genre about which Sidney is notoriously sniffy (see his comments about ‘mongrel tragicomedy’ on p. 46 of the Defence). It may be the wider assimilation of Sidney’s view that leads to generic self-justification in later paratexts that precede tragicomedies, for example Fletcher’s use of Guarini to explain the genre’s lineaments in the epistle to The Faithful Shepherdess, and, later still, a verse included in the 1641 The Prisoners and Claracilla: Two Tragæ-Comedies by Thomas Killigrew, in which H. Benet praises Killigrew for his deliberate flouting of restrictive ‘Dramatique Lawes’ (sigs πA2v). 129 Fairclough translates lines 333–34 – ‘Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae | aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae’ – as ‘Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life’. 130 Plutarch, The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, trans. by Philemon Holland (1603, STC 20063), sig. B3v. On Plutarch’s influence upon early modern literary theorists, see Craik, p. 2. 131 Jonson, Sejanus, sig. ¶4r. That Plutarch’s Moralia is a source for Chapman’s verse is pointed out by Philip J. Ayres in his 1990 Revels edition of Sejanus (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 56. 132 Jonson, Volpone, sigs ¶1v-¶2r. R. B. Parker in his 1983 Revels edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press) identifies the Italian Minturno’s 1559 De Poeta as the immediate source for the passage about the benefit

124  Why read plays? of poetry to the three distinct ages of men (p. 70). For the old men, reading poetry has a physiological benefit, a different type of profit which is also promoted by certain dramatic paratexts: see the discussion on pp. 106-07, below. 133 See Sidney, pp. 27–28 and Webbe, p. 90. 134 Marston, The scourge of villanie, sig. H4r. 135 Marston and Webster, The Malcontent (STC 17481), sig. A3r. 136 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (STC 22332), sig. ¶2r. 137 The OED quotes from William Davenant’s 1650 Preface to Gondibert: ‘Witte is not only the luck and labour, but also the dexterity of thought’; see ‘wit, n. 7’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed 19 May 2020]. 138 ‘Imitation’, as Gavin Alexander points out, is a loaded term in the period: it can mean ‘imitation as representation’ (mimesis); ‘imitation of literary and stylistic models’ (imitatio); and ‘readerly behavioural imitation’ (emulation). See ‘Introduction’, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’, ed. by Alexander, pp. xvii–lxxix (p. xxxiv). 139 Philip Massinger, The Renegado (1630), sig. A4v. 140 The following chapter demonstrates that the Caroline clergyman Abraham Wright regarded certain of the plays he read as worthy of precisely the type of dramatic imitation Lakyn here envisages. 141 Massinger, The Renegado, sig. A3v. 142 Younge, sig. A1v; Prynne, sig. 6C1r. 143 Erotomania, or A treatise discoursing of the essence, causes, symptomes, prognosticks, and cure of love, or erotique melancholy (Oxford, 1640, STC 10829), sig. b3v. 144 The extent to which such descriptions of the power of reading may have been understood as literal rather than figurative has been established by work on early modern reading and physiological affect: see for instance Craik, Reading Sensations, and Helen Smith, ‘More swete vnto the eare’. 145 Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew (1652), sig. a1v. 146 It is specifically the ‘mirth’ offered by Brome’s writing that Alexander Brome praises, professing: ‘I love thee for thy […] Mirth that does so cleane and closely hit’ (A Jovial Crew, sig. a1r). The therapeutic qualities of mirth were widely acknowledged in the early modern period: see Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 52–54. 147 Puttenham, p. 23. Sidney (p. 52) finds rhyme inherently delightful; his most extended discussion of what causes delight (as opposed to laughter) is on pp. 47–48 of the Defence. 148 James Shirley, The Grateful Servant (1630), sig. X1r. 149 This idea circulated in English discussions of dramatic poetics from early on: Thomas Lodge, for instance, in his 1579 Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse writes, ‘[b]ut (of truth) I must confess with Aristotle that men are greatly delighted with imitation’ (in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (ed. by Pollard), pp. 37–61 (p. 54)). 150 Middleton and Rowley, A Fair Quarrel (STC 17911a), sig. A2v. 151 On the early modern understanding of laughter as an external sign of internal emotional alteration, see Ghose, p. 69. Lucy Munro considers the conditions under which laughter might be produced from reading comedies, focusing in particular on whether the production of laughter necessitates an oral reading, in ‘Reading Printed Comedy’, pp. 42–43. 152 Epigram 11.15, translation by N. M. Kay, in Martial Book XI: A Commentary (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 98. The line from Martial, ‘Hic totus volo rideat

Why read plays?  125 Libellus’ appears first on the title page of The Northern Lass, and subsequently on the title pages of The Antipodes, The Sparagus Garden, and A Jovial Crew. 153 As discussed above, those of Horace are the most popular. 154 Kay notes (p. 17) that Martial was being taught in English schools by 1550. 155 Kay’s translation, p. 98. 156 Brome, A Jovial Crew, sig. G3v. Although the line about filling their bellies is literal given the characters’ subsequent conversation about food, it also recalls Celia’s innuendo-laden accusation in As You Like It that Rosalind wishes to know who is writing her love poetry ‘so [she] may put a man in [her] belly’ (Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, sig. R2v). 157 Burton, sig. Z2r; Richard Braithwaite, A suruey of history: or, a nursery for gentry (1638, STC 3583a), sigs 2Y1v, T2r-v. 158 For a fuller discussion of the engagement of amorously given playreaders with printed comedies, see August, ‘“Tickling the senses with sinful delight”’. 159 ‘voluptuous, adj. 2’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed 2 November 2020]. 160 See The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); the following analysis owes much to Wall’s identification of the ‘gendered and erotic ramifications of the practice of giving books female titles’ (pp. 203–05). Wall is largely uninterested in discussing printed drama. 161 Brome, The Northern Lass, sig. A2r-v. 162 Wall points out (Imprint, pp. 180–81) that Thomas Heywood creates an explicit image of the naked playbook in his epistle to the reader in The Golden Age, in which he describes the printed play as having been ‘thrust naked into the world’ (sig. A2r). 163 Julie Sanders notes when introducing her online edition of the play that ‘St. Br.’ is unlikely to be a blood relative (an otherwise unlocatable ‘Stephen Brome’) and may instead be the physician Stephen Bradwell, a friend of Thomas Heywood. The incestuous desire for the playbook invoked by the verse is thus a deliberate rhetorical construction. See ‘Textual Introduction’, Richard Brome Online, [accessed 31 May 2021]. 164 ‘ravish, v. 4.b’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed 2 November 2020]. 165 Fred Schurink, ‘The Intimacy of Manuscript and the Pleasure of Print: Literary Culture from The Schoolmaster to Euphues’ in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, ed. by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 671–86 (p. 681). 166 Prynne, sigs 6A2r-v. 167 Or, less plausibly, that there is a substantial market of homoerotically driven female playreaders. 168 A further title page paratext not discussed in this chapter is the title page woodcut illustration; see Bourne (Typographies of Performance, pp. 203– 19) for discussion of how it might have deliberately ‘generate[d] readerly expectations that the act of actually reading the plays would test’ (p. 210).

3 How were plays read? Part one: Extractive reading

The previous two chapters of this book were concerned with what the material and paratextual aspects of printed playbooks imply about readers and their expectations and responses. In this chapter and the next, I set some of those chapters’ conclusions against examples of actual evidence of early modern playreaders’ responses to quarto playbooks. Juxtaposing these two types of evidence allows the implications of the former to be tested, in particular as regards the varied nature of the playreading demographic, the importance of key paratexts such as the author’s name and indications of genre and performance origin, the construction of plays as poetry, and the ways in which playreading could be both profitable and pleasurable. In short, these chapters ask: was what playreaders were offered in their playbooks the same as what they took from them? Or, more precisely, how are the conclusions enabled by print confirmed or complicated by manuscript, and what can manuscript evidence reveal that print does not? Although multiple forms of evidence have been adduced in discussions of historical reader response, these chapters focus on manuscript evidence because it is this that has been treated most often in work on early modern playreading, and because there is a need to add to or qualify some of the narratives that it has previously enabled.1 I discuss two key types of manuscript evidence: in this chapter, dramatic extracts in manuscript commonplace books; and in the next, readers’ marks and marginalia in extant printed playbooks. Together, they show that many early modern readers saw playbooks as repositories of reusable text – or indeed, reusable paper. They show that few readers saw playtexts as inherently performable, or as records of ‘theatrical events’; instead, they demonstrate the overpowering influence of what Adam Smyth has dubbed the ‘commonplace book culture’ of early modern England.2 Readers brought to plays the same reading strategies and agendas that they had learned to bring to other, non-dramatic texts, and their manuscript responses often erase the generic distinctiveness of drama. Playreaders’ interests are betrayed not just by the lines and passages they fixate on, but by the DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748-4

How were plays read? Extractive reading  127 idiosyncratic methods they use for recording these in their commonplace books, and the individualised ways they capitalise on available blank space on the pages of printed playbooks. As much as the evidence reveals trends, it also underscores the extent to which playreading was deeply personal and, at times, driven by motives that evade even informed scholarly conjecture. The ‘personalized and contingent’ nature of playreading is stressed by Laura Estill, who has written most extensively on the type of evidence dealt with in this present chapter. In discussing multiple seventeenth-­ century manuscripts that demonstrate the practice of what she chooses to call ‘dramatic extracting’, she argues that readers who transcribed lines or short passages from playbooks into notebooks or other personal compositions ‘viewed early modern plays, like other texts, as works to be broken into fragments for personal use’.3 Estill sees the practice of extracting as stemming from humanist pedagogical practices, in particular those that taught students to mine texts for reusable ‘commonplaces’ in a quest for self-improvement. She also links the rise in the number of dramatic extracts in manuscript commonplace books to the appearance, around the turn of the seventeenth century, of several printed commonplace books containing memorable phrases drawn from commercial drama.4 In the discussion that follows, I seek to complement and nuance the conclusions of Estill’s survey by closely examining three manuscript commonplace books that could be considered well-trodden ground: those belonging to Edward Pudsey (1573–1612/13), William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), and Abraham Wright (1611–1690).5 Taking a fresh look at them, however, enables new observations in relation to the crosspollination of print and manuscript argued for by Estill. It sheds light on the paratextual and typographic elements of playbooks that influenced commonplacing readers’ choices and modes of extraction, as well as those elements that lacked the influence we might expect. Furthermore, thinking about these commonplace books in relation to the reading rationales constructed by dramatic paratexts also allows for consideration not just of the types of profit that are a widely acknowledged by-product of readingas-extraction, but also the types of pleasure that might go hand in hand with it. And finally, viewing the dramatic content in these manuscripts with an awareness of what else their compilers were reading – and also writing – helps to provide the context that can be lacking not just in the Shakespeare-centric studies with which Estill takes issue, but those that anachronistically insist on the generic distinctiveness of drama itself.6 In the discussion that follows, I refer to the manuscripts compiled by Pudsey, Drummond, and Wright as ‘commonplace books’, although this is a term that has begun to be considered too specific given the varied layout of their contents. As Jean-Christophe Mayer points out, there is frequently a disconnect between the formal specifications given by pedagogical theorists who advocated keeping commonplace books and the idiosyncratic

128  How were plays read? Extractive reading form of those surviving manuscripts in which conscientious early modern readers gathered the fruits of their reading.7 This disconnect can certainly be seen in the three manuscripts discussed in this chapter, and scholars have responded accordingly: in a recent discussion of Pudsey’s manuscript, András Kiséry calls it a ‘notebook’ (seemingly the word that Pudsey himself would have used to describe it), and Estill, in her analysis of the manuscript compiled by Wright, calls it a ‘dramatic miscellany’.8 I prefer to retain the term ‘commonplace book’ because all three manuscripts exhibit the qualities that Smyth sees as characteristic of the early modern ‘commonplace book culture’. This more capacious term acknowledges what Ann Moss points out elsewhere: that the members of this culture ‘brought into adult life certain mental attitudes, and certain habits of reading and writing’, even as they asserted their adult independence and rejected the prescriptive layout of the commonplace books they had been taught to keep at school.9 The manuscripts compiled by Pudsey, Drummond, and Wright are thus most helpfully referred to as commonplace books because they exhibit a majority of the sixteen characteristics of the early modern ‘commonplace book culture’. Smyth outlines these characteristics in a helpful taxonomy, a brief summary of which follows. The manuscripts convey the sense of reading as an ‘active, interventionist practice’, and of texts as ‘collections of fragments’. They encode ‘an intimate connection between reading and writing’, and ‘the sense that excerpts are blocks out of which a new text or discourse might be built’; with this comes a ‘tendency [on the part of the compiler] to cut, add, or alter text’ when transcribing it into the manuscript. This last creates ‘a […] double-edged sense of ownership of the transcribed materials by the compiler[,] which strikes a balance between the appropriation of materials as the compiler’s own, and a recognition that excised aphorisms can […] be taken up […] by later readers’ who are sometimes signalled by ‘the presence, in texts, of several hands’. Although perhaps subconsciously, the manuscripts exemplify ‘the pursuit of excerpts that provide various expressions of the same theme’. They ‘locate themselves within a broader network of texts’, in part because of the ‘presence [within them] of many different genres of writing’. And most importantly, they betray ‘a connection between commonplacing and improvement (whether linguistic, moral, social, financial, spiritual)’.10 The link between self-improvement and the collection of commonplaces was a persistent idea in humanist pedagogy. A hundred years after Desiderius Erasmus laid out an approach and rationale for commonplacing in his rhetorical manual De Copia Verborum (1513), the English educational theorist John Brinsley still maintained that keeping a c­ommonplace book was ‘a great help’ for students. Those working on written compositions could store therein ‘all the choyse sentences and matter in the best Authours’ (including ‘the most excellent places in Poets’) and reincorporate these into their own writing on similar themes.11 As Brinsley’s use of the word ‘sentences’ – the anglicised

How were plays read? Extractive reading  129 sententiae – implies, by the early seventeenth-century commonplaces are predominantly c­onceived of as ‘rhetorically well-phrased sayings that express an accepted insight’.12 The decidedly heterogeneous nature of the dramatic extracts in the manuscript commonplace books this chapter discusses thus appears to show their compilers asserting their autonomy as readers: plenty of extracts have nothing rhetorically notable about them and are clearly selected for their individual rather than their global appeal. Yet it is worth bearing in mind that Erasmus’s original list of the types of things students might note down in their commonplace books is relatively expansive, encompassing anecdotes, fables, illustrative examples, strange incidents, maxims, witty remarks, proverbs, metaphors, and similes. And where Brinsley believes the content of commonplace books for aspiring verse writers should be drawn from ‘the most exquisite and pure Poets’, Erasmus encourages the commonplace book compiler to divide the book into headed sections so that ‘whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is rather striking, you will be able to note down immediately in the proper place’ [my italics].13 The eclecticism of the dramatic extracts in these readers’ commonplace books, as well as their origin in texts whose authors Brinsley certainly would not number amongst ‘the most exquisite and pure Poets’, could perhaps be put down to the long shadow cast by the godfather of humanist pedagogy. In their extractive approach to playreading, Pudsey, Drummond, and Wright thus show themselves to be products of the educational training they would all – as ‘gentlemen readers’ – have received. The high value that pedagogical theorists placed on imitation would have taught these playreaders to see fragments of the texts they read as freely available for appropriative alteration and reuse in their own speech and writing.14 Yet as adults whose lives of privilege afforded them the leisure and income to compile commonplace books out of texts they themselves selected, these men also asserted their right to reject the theorists’ precepts. None of the three orders his commonplace book in the way advocated by theorists, with extracts organised underneath alphabeticised, thematic headings: each takes the easier option and records extracts seriatim, in the order in which they are encountered in the text. And although Erasmus acknowledges that even texts of an insalubrious nature can contain noteworthy commonplaces, it is frequently the most insalubrious passages that make their way into the commonplace books of readers like Pudsey and Drummond. Moss discusses Erasmus’s use of Virgil’s homoerotic second eclogue in his De Ratione Studii, noting that he ‘does not suppress any lines in the poem’: What he does do is to show how the teacher can deflect his young readers’ attention from the homosexual desire which pervades it, by suggesting to them certain general themes (commonplaces) of an irreproachable and edifying character for them to employ as a key to annotating the text.15

130  How were plays read? Extractive reading Outside of the classroom, though, lines from early modern English comedies that are far from irreproachable and edifying find themselves transposed into readers’ commonplace books, turning these books into storehouses of prurience and misogyny as much as wit and wisdom. Edward Pudsey, William Drummond, and Abraham Wright belonged to a particular interpretive community, one that excluded Ben Jonson’s ‘readers in ordinarie’ (apparent evidence of whom is discussed in the following chapter). But, contrary to the hopes of Jonson and others, that does not mean these men all judged or understood plays in the same way. The divergences – and similarities – in their playreading approaches are discussed in the following three sections.

Edward Pudsey The commonplace book of Edward Pudsey is, as Estill points out, ‘perhaps the best known’ manuscript from the early seventeenth century that contains extracts from printed plays.16 Its claim to fame stems largely from the fact that just over a quarter of the dramatic extracts it contains are by Shakespeare, the playwright who has often been the focus of scholars’ interest in manuscripts featuring dramatic extracts, despite the skewed perspective this can create.17 The most insightful discussions of Pudsey’s commonplace book are less interested in whether, for instance, his anomalous transcriptions of lines from Othello were made in the playhouse, but – given that the other dramatic extracts are clearly copied from printed playbooks – in what the extracts collectively can tell us about playreading habits and agendas.18 Such is the approach taken most recently by András Kiséry, who argues that Pudsey’s playreading was motivated by a search for reusable ‘bons mots’, ‘language he could repurpose […] in conversation and composition, lines to be used to embellish or prop up an argument’.19 In mining plays for linguistic profit, Pudsey appears like Marston’s commonplacing playreader who draws on his ‘huge long scraped stock | Of well penn’d plays’ in order to write, rail, jest, and court. But his commonplace book tells us more than that he is reading plays in order to appropriate and repurpose the ‘wit’ contained therein. It demonstrates the way that readers were influenced by new paratextual print conventions that claimed authority for vernacular literature, and that playreading could offer moments of pleasure as well as opportunities for improving one’s speech or writing. Above all, it shows that the reading strategy inculcated by the commonplace book culture could be more important to a reader than what was actually read. Edward Pudsey was baptised in Longford, Derbyshire, in 1573, and died in 1612/13.20 In 1600 he began keeping a commonplace book, which contains – among other things – eleven leaves bearing extracts from twentynine plays.21 No record of Pudsey’s education has been found, although his cousin Richard Pudsey (b. 1562) was awarded his BA from St. John’s,

How were plays read? Extractive reading  131 Oxford in 1580 and his MA in 1583, and was later admitted to the Middle Temple – a milieu with which, according to Thomas Lockwood, the playreading Edward was also familiar.22 A similar educational background is certainly suggested by the range and erudition of many of the texts included in Pudsey’s commonplace book: in addition to plays from the professional stage, it includes extracts from poetry, pamphlets, and moral, political, philosophical, and historical works by both classical authors and those who were contemporary at the time of the commonplace book’s composition (always, if foreign, in current English translations). Pudsey’s will reveals him to be a man with a high regard for books and learning. He declares his wish for his wife to ‘bee exceedinge Carefull to see our Children […] brought up in the true feare of God and learninge’ and stipulates his desire for his son Edward to have a university education. He also wills ‘that all my books be safe kept for [his son Edward] (especiallye my note books)’.23 This stipulation indicates firstly that he was in the habit of compiling ‘note books’ like the one discussed in this chapter, and that his extant commonplace book was not the only volume that synthesised his thoughts and reading. Secondly, it demonstrates that he envisaged these books not as private records of his reading, but as reference tools to be read and profited from by members of his family.24 And thirdly, it implies that he valued these manuscript commonplace books more highly than the other books in his possession: containing the personal highlights of Pudsey’s reading, these compendia acquire greater worth than the printed texts they draw from, and are ‘especiallye’ to be preserved. Like the contemporaneous printed commonplace book Englands Parnassus, Pudsey selects his ‘choysest Flowers’ from amongst ‘Moderne Poets’ – including commercial dramatists.25 And like its compiler Robert Allott, who takes care to attribute the extracts in Englands Parnassus to the playwrights who wrote them, Pudsey has a strong sense that plays are written by ‘poets’ with recognisable names. In fact, perhaps surprisingly for so early in the period, what seems to matter most to Pudsey in his choice of dramatic reading material is not genre or performance origin but author.26 This can be inferred not only from the frequency with which he reads multiple titles by the same author (in addition to its eight plays by Shakespeare, his commonplace book includes extracts from five by Ben Jonson, four by John Marston, and two each by John Lyly and Thomas Dekker),27 but in the use of playwrights’ names, in addition to play titles, to demarcate the dramatic sections of the manuscript. In his transcriptions, Pudsey rejects the traditional ordering principle of the commonplace book, the abstract nouns known as ‘commonplaceheads’ under which readers are supposed to group thematically similar extracts. Instead, for the most part, Pudsey’s dramatic extracts are recorded in the order they are likely to have been encountered in the playbook. His reading commenced at the beginning of a play and, in most cases, continued to the end, and he marked passages that he deemed noteworthy as he

132  How were plays read? Extractive reading happened upon them, copying them into his notebook either immediately or at a later date. Despite the lack of commonplace-heads, however, the extracts do not appear unorganised: in all but six cases, the groups of extracts have a clear heading that includes an abbreviated play title and, for half of these, the name of the play’s author.28 Importantly, in the majority of instances, the attributed author’s name appears on the title page of the quarto edition in which Pudsey can be expected to have read the play. In the preceding chapters, I argued that many stationers seem to have added multiple paratextual elements to playbooks’ title pages in the hopes of ensuring a play would appeal to as many readers as possible: it appears that, for Pudsey, the title page paratext that held the greatest sway was the author attribution. It was this that he chose to recycle in the system of headings with which he replaced the traditional commonplace-heads in his notebook, as well as deploying it in headings inscribed into the notebook’s top horizontal margins, signalling the contents of a page containing transcriptions from multiple plays as, for example, ‘Pl: Marston. Johnson’; ‘Pl. shakesp. Joh.’; or ‘PL. Johns:’.29 As well as providing him with a finding aid, the transposition of the title page element of the author’s name into the new domain of the commonplace book achieved something else. Now appearing in isolation from other ‘authorising’ paratextual elements such as a genre indication or statement of performance origin, it transformed plays that had their origin in collaborative production into texts originating with a named, individual author. This transformation of performed or performable drama into non-dramatic text is consistent with Pudsey’s attitude in the excisions and alterations he makes in his transcriptions, discussed further below. In addition to this, however, it is worth pointing out the way in which Pudsey’s commonplace book provides evidence of an early modern reader privileging the ‘author’ as the governing principle of collaboratively produced playtexts well before the supposed watersheds of ­dramatic author ‘birth’, the 1616 Jonson Works and the 1623 Shakespeare folio.30 Jeffrey Masten comments that twentieth-century bibliographers ‘[f]ocused intently on one piece of information – a playwright’s name, only occasionally present’ and as a consequence ‘largely ignored the constellation of other figures present on quarto title pages and […] read them as peripheral bits of information useful only insofar as they substantiate, call into question, or lead back to an authorial identity’.31 The work of scholars such as Tiffany Stern has shown how crucial these ‘other figures’ (publishers, printers, playing companies, and others) were in the ‘coauthoring’ of printed playtexts, yet Pudsey’s commonplace book shows him approaching drama not attuned to the subtleties of production that twenty-first-century scholarship has rediscovered, but seemingly rather more like those twentieth-century bibliographers dismissed by Masten.32 The manuscript thus offers a caution that theories of original production do not necessarily cohere in practice with original reception.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  133 It is also worth considering Pudsey’s author attributions in light of Joseph Loewenstein’s contention, discussed in the previous chapter, that the name of a playwright such as Shakespeare could be ‘very nearly generic, a marker of “family resemblance”’ – that as well as authorising a text, a playwright’s name could have what Foucault terms ‘a classificatory function’, offering readers a certain style or subject matter.33 Douglas Bruster, as noted in that chapter, observes that for an author’s name to act as an index to his style, he must have produced multiple works, and it is perhaps significant that it is only when Pudsey reads more than one play by an author that he appends their name to the page or section of extracts he transcribes.34 In Pudsey’s commonplace book, dramatists’ names provide a satisfactory substitute for the organising commonplaceheads because Pudsey has read their plays in sufficient number to gain a sense of the authors’ predominant style or content. The names can thus become rudimentary generic or stylistic indicators of the form and matter of the extracts they head. They transform the manuscript into a reference tool; one that, while not organised under the orthodox alphabetical commonplace-heads, deploys Pudsey’s knowledge of his favourite playwrights’ individual styles to turn his notebook into a rudimentary library catalogue, writ small. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the types of lines Pudsey extracts hint at his sense of the distinguishing features of a given writer’s style. For Pudsey, Jonson offers a plenitude of witty turns of phrase, of the type would-be gentlemen were expected to deliver extempore, but which – as Marston’s satire implies – were equally likely to have been pre-prepared. Thus when Pudsey went to his commonplace book in search of a quip that he intended to pass off as his own, he may have remembered these to be Jonson’s speciality, and turned to one of the pages headed, in its top horizontal margin, ‘PL. Johns:’, ‘Pla: Joh:’, or ‘Play: Johns:’.35 There he would have located his transcription of Cordatus’s description of Orange in Every Man Out of His Humour as ‘one that can laugh at a jest […] and some houre after in private aske you what it was’, or Mercury’s description in Cynthia’s Revels of the man who ‘speakes all creame, skimd, & more affected then a dozen of waiting women’, or Julia’s description in Poetaster of ‘the common disease of […] Musitians, that they knowe no meane, to be intreated, either to begin, or ende’.36 Given the association of Shakespeare’s name with comedy implied by the paratexts discussed in the previous chapter, we might expect to find similar morsels of wit dominating the sections headed ‘Sha.’, ‘Shak.’, ‘Shaksp.’, or ‘shakesp’ – but Pudsey seems instead to have valued Shakespeare for figurative language more generally.37 It may thus have been in search of inspiration for a written composition that he could have scanned the sections of extracts headed with Shakespeare’s name and found his transcription of these lines from Much Ado About Nothing, on plain-speaking: ‘he hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his tongue is the clapper, for what his

134  How were plays read? Extractive reading heart thinkes, his tongue speakes’, or Laertes’s description of Hamlet as ‘the brooch indeed | And Jem of all the Nation’.38 Indeed, it is perhaps because Pudsey has such a strong sense of Shakespeare’s linguistic style that his unattributed Romeo and Juliet extracts conclude on a page that is clearly intended as a repository of Shakespearean text: it also contains his extracts from Richard II, Richard III, and the unheaded Othello extracts.39 Pudsey follows the prompt of the early Romeo and Juliet quartos’ title pages in omitting Shakespeare’s name, but an indication that the paratextual presence or absence of playwrights’ names wasn’t something to be slavishly emulated can be found in his omission of George Chapman’s name to introduce the extracts from The Blind Beggar of Alexandria. Where Shakespeare’s name and style are familiar because Pudsey has read multiple plays by Shakespeare, the style of someone like Chapman is sufficiently unfamiliar for Pudsey not to bother heading the extracts from The Blind Beggar of Alexandria with the playwright’s name (which appears, in full, on the title page of the edition he must have read).40 In the sixteenth-century Elementa Rhetorices of Melanchthon – an early advocate, with Erasmus, of the keeping of commonplace books – the writer laments the ineffectuality of what may appear at first glance to be Pudsey’s method: Some people think they have collected commonplaces when they have heaped up phrases on a variety of things, excerpted here and there from poets and orators. And because they judge this heap of notable sayings to be the be-all and end-all of learning, they read the authors to no other purpose but to pluck sayings from them, like flowers. Meanwhile, they learn no discipline properly, they understand no piece of writing in its entirety, at no point do they consider the overall character of any piece of discourse.41 Even though the ordering principle of Pudsey’s transcriptions differs from that of the traditionally conceived commonplace book, and his rejection of thematic commonplace-heads means that he appears at first glance to have accumulated an unwieldy ‘heap’ of ‘notable sayings’, it is precisely because he considers ‘the overall character’ of the plays from which he extracts that his method of organisation enables the use of his notebook as a reference tool – a source of linguistic profit structured through his privileging of the early modern author and its classificatory function. Pudsey’s commonplace book thus provides evidence of the influence of one title page paratext – the author’s name – upon this particular playreader. It also, however, casts doubt on the influence wielded by other dramatic paratexts, such as epistles to the reader. As stated above, Pudsey generally reads playbooks from beginning to end, but it is worth noting that the beginning, for him, constituted the beginning of the play itself (or

How were plays read? Extractive reading  135 the prologue or induction), rather than any preliminary paratext addressed specifically to the reader. While he evidently reads the lengthy paratextual descriptions of the characters provided at the beginning of Every Man Out, the only epistle to the reader from which he transcribes is that to Webster’s 1612 The White Devil. Pudsey copies from this two rhetorically striking passages: one is the figurative description of the play being ‘not writt with a goose quilL wing’d with two feathers’ to explain its delayed appearance; the second is an anecdote which also serves as what Erasmus would call an ‘illustrative example’ of the rhetorical figure of amplification: ALcestides obiecting to Euripides, that hee had onely in three days composed three verses wheras him self had written three hundred; thou tel’st truth quoth hee but heer is the difference, thyne shall onely bee redd for three days wheras mine shall continue three ages.42 In Pudsey’s commonplace book, these two passages appear not at the beginning of the set of extracts from The White Devil, but at the end. While more and more scholarship – including that which fills the first two chapters of this book – argues for the importance of paratextual preliminaries in influencing the reader’s approach to the subsequent playtext, manuscript evidence of this sort provides an important caution. Readers did not always read books in the order they might have been expected to, and paratexts may therefore not have been as effective at influencing readers’ judgement as their writers hoped. It is seemingly only after Pudsey has read and mined the play for its (frequently misogynistic) sententiae that he goes back to read the legitimating paratext that asks for this play to be read ‘by [the] light’ of Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare, Dekker, and Heywood (sig. A2v). Although Pudsey’s sense of the style of – in particular – Jonson, Shakespeare, and Dekker would have made him susceptible to Webster’s attempt to authorise his own play by invoking the names of other well-known dramatists, unfortunately this reader’s judgement cannot be affected by such a strategy because he seemingly declines to read the playbook’s preliminary paratext before jumping into its text. Other print elements designed to signal the quality of the playtext hold more sway over him, however. This can be inferred from Pudsey’s manuscript rendering of the printed commonplace markers that began to appear in quarto playbooks at the end of the sixteenth century to signal noteworthy sententiae. Even though the idiosyncrasies of form and content exhibited by his notebook depart from the prescriptive guidelines for commonplacing set out by Erasmus and others, Pudsey leaves us in no doubt that he himself conceives of what he is doing as commonplacing because, in the margin next to the majority of dramatic extracts, he adds the double inverted commas that signal commonplaces in printed

136  How were plays read? Extractive reading drama (see Figure 3.1).43 G. K. Hunter observed over half a century ago that ‘the indication of rhetorical figures, especially the sententiae, so that they are easily noticed on the page is natural in an age which attaches importance to maxims as a basis of exhortation and of literary construction’.44 More recently, however, Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, in discussing the genesis of printed commonplace markers, have noted that they are ‘a feature central to early seventeenth-century attempts to forge a culture of literary drama and poesy in the vernacular’.45 Appearing first in sixteenth-century editions of Greek and Roman drama, their subsequent introduction to mark out commonplaces in commercial drama is part of the general paratextual drive to legitimate playbooks – for those readers to whom such legitimation mattered – as poetry. Pudsey’s use of them to accompany his transcriptions can thus be seen as participation in this drive, an attempt to justify his preference for drama either to himself or to future readers of his commonplace book. What is interesting about the way he uses these commonplace markers is that often, they accompany nearly every line on a page. This might seem logical given that, by virtue of being included in his commonplace book, each line has been adjudged a commonplace, but why then add the markers at all? They seem to act as verification that the extracted passages have the seal of approval from their transcriber, to explicitly authorise them for reuse. Pudsey demonstrates his own susceptibility to the authorising power of the commonplace marker when he copies out, verbatim, passages that are accompanied by inverted commas in the quarto text, such as Macilente’s ‘Offer no love-rites, but let wives still seeke them, | For when they come unsought, they seldome like them’ from Every Man Out. Pudsey in his transcription accompanies this with two sets of inverted commas – “” – to indicate that it has been authorised by both Jonson and himself.46 Where elsewhere Pudsey’s transcriptions constitute only rough approximations of their source, lines or passages of the printed playbook that are marked with a typographic signifier of authority are carefully transcribed without alteration, his judgement of their significance clearly influenced by the value the new print conventions performatively create for them. The same is true of lines or passages distinguished by a change in typeface. Heidi Brayman Hackel observes that, similarly to marginal commonplace markers, ‘the typography of vernacular works often called readers’ attention to weighty or witty passages’.47 The power of an alteration in typeface to convey worth on a passage, influencing a reader’s judgement of its value, is indicated by Pudsey’s use of italic rather than secretary hand in his transcription of commonplaces printed in italic. Assimilating the value judgement made by the playbook’s producers, he re-encodes this in his manuscript rendering. When he copies out these lines from Carlo Buffone’s speech in Every Man Out, ‘’Tis an Axiome in Naturall Philosphie, What comes nearest the Nature of that it feeds, converts

How were plays read? Extractive reading  137

Figure 3.1  Sheet from Edward Pudsey’s commonplace book featuring extracts from Much Ado About Nothing, and showing his use of marginal commonplace markers and glosses (SBT ER82/1/21, fol. 1v). © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

quicker to nourishment, and doth sooner essentiate’, Pudsey carefully replicates the changes in type through his own differentiation of secretary and italic hands.48 The passage thus stands out in its new context of the commonplace book, reaffirming the noteworthiness it proclaimed

138  How were plays read? Extractive reading from the page of the printed text and retaining its original authorial (or editorial) authority.49 In such instances, Pudsey departs from the dominant practice within the commonplace book culture of ‘appropriat[ing] materials as the compiler’s own’ via cuts or alterations to the text, and shows instead his subservience to the authority of print.50 The presence in Pudsey’s commonplace book of pre-packaged sententiae helps to cement the sense that he transcribes dramatic extracts in order to create a profitable storehouse of received wisdom, just like those advocated by the pedagogical theorists. This impression is enhanced by the fact that Pudsey does not entirely reject the humanistic ­commonplacing methodology taught in schools, implying that his heading of sequentially ordered extracts with author and title is – while functional – also to do with expediency of transcription. Erasmus’s influence can be observed in the fact that, while Pudsey’s transcriptions are not ordered under ­commonplace-heads, they are nevertheless often accompanied by marginal glosses or keywords that identify their subject matter in the same way a commonplace-head would.51 Given that the phrases and passages Pudsey excerpts are recorded for the most part in a neat secretary hand and contained within pre-ruled margins, the italicised marginal glosses next to certain extracts stand out easily when a page of transcriptions is scanned for a more precise indication of its contents than that provided by its overall heading (see Figure 3.1). The glosses are frequently the type of abstract nouns that Erasmus would recommend as commonplaceheads: ‘Enuy’, ‘hate’, ‘Ignorance’, ‘Riches & pouerty’, ‘Witt’.52 Sometimes these are simply the keywords from an extract, such as ‘Truth’ next to a paraphrased line from Poetaster: ‘The ffemale truth ys the simple truth’.53 At other times the gloss involves an act of interpretation on the part of the glosser: Thorello’s paraphrased caution, from Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, to ‘Beware when mutuall pleasure sways the appetite & in the pride of blood’, is glossed with the emotion it describes, ‘Lust’.54 Pudsey makes a decision about the line’s referent based on context, and records an appropriate keyword that will indicate, with a quick scan of the margins, the location of reusable matter pertaining to the topic that has been glossed. These marginal keywords marshal Pudsey’s organically composed notebook into as close an approximation of the pedagogical commonplace book as its sequentially recorded extracts will allow, implying that, despite its idiosyncrasies, Pudsey believes in his manuscript’s capacity to act as a reference tool. Yet the manuscript’s idiosyncrasies belie the fact that Pudsey’s reading is not always practically driven, although such humanist trappings as the glosses make it appear on the surface to be so. Smyth identifies one of the defining characteristics of commonplace book culture as ‘a recognition that excised aphorisms can always be passed on, can always be taken up, by later readers’, and it is worth speculating about the effects of Pudsey’s intention, outlined in his will, that his ‘note books’ be preserved and passed

How were plays read? Extractive reading  139 onto his son.55 Did this drive what is evidently often the later addition of identifying glosses to his records of reading that initially involved, in certain instances, a more personal pleasure in dramatic language? This personal pleasure can be inferred from other glosses that, unlike the abstract nouns discussed above, refer to subjects that are so specific – so far from being commonplace – that a situation for reuse is hard to envisage. Glosses such as ‘Asses’, ‘slow speech’, ‘A Spung’ (i.e. ‘a sponge’), ‘gay cloths’, or ‘a gloue’ pretend to offer up the phrase or passage they accompany for reuse in the same way as others such as ‘greef’, ‘contempt’, ‘curtesy’, or ‘mariage’ do, but in actuality they disguise extracts chosen for their personal rather than their universal appeal.56 The presence in the commonplace book of the extracts these glosses accompany hints at an approach to reading that takes pleasure in uniquely striking passages of dramatic language, at the same time as it assesses the potential of other passages on more universal themes to be profitably recycled. That Pudsey does not transcribe extracts with the sole intention of reuse is implied by the fact that in the sections of extracts from plays printed after 1603, the marginal glosses disappear, leaving merely dense blocks of text in which the end of one extract is hardly distinguishable from the beginning of the next. Retrieving recyclable phrases becomes much more difficult, and the frequency of bawdy extracts notably increases in these non-glossed sections: the quotation at the top of the second page of Hamlet extracts, for instance, comes from Ophelia and Hamlet’s exchange prior to the performance of The Mousetrap: ‘Oph. You are keene my lord, you are keene. | Ham. It would cost you a groning to take off mine edge’.57 As I argued in Chapter 2 one of the impetuses for playreading imagined by the writers of paratexts seems to have been the pursuit of a titillating erotic pleasure. The salacious quips that in the later pages of Pudsey’s manuscript overtake the more traditionally appropriate matter for commonplace book extraction, as well as those extracts glossed by less universal keywords, construct Pudsey as a playreader who balances the pursuit of linguistic profit with that of sensory and aesthetic pleasure. His playreading agenda thus appears to conform with some of the incentives for reading commercial drama set out in its preliminary paratexts – though largely not, it may be noted, its capacity for moral instruction. As Fred Schurink observes, Pudsey’s playreading tends to focus on ‘objects and actions rather than [on] abstract moral concepts and reflect[s] an emphasis on women and love, and on vices rather than virtues’.58 Kiséry argues that Pudsey’s commonplace book shows him reading plays, like Jonson’s Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone, ‘for discourse’s sake merely’.59 In Pudsey’s transcriptions from playbooks, he alters the excerpted text in order to erase its original dramatic context and either universalise or personalise it, seemingly with an eye to reuse in conversation. He routinely removes speech prefixes, alters pronouns and tenses, and elides shared lines of dialogue in the interests of rendering

140  How were plays read? Extractive reading the passages more aphoristic, so that they are more obviously available for reuse in multiple contexts.60 A representative example of a passage appropriated and amended to reflect a more immediate personal applicability can be seen in this extract from The White Devil. The dialogue in the 1612 quarto runs thus: [FLAMINEO]. Would

I were a Jew.

[MARCELLO]. O, there are too many. FLA. You are deceiv’d. There are not

Jewes enough; Priests enough, nor gentlemen enough. MAR. How? FLA. Ile prove it. For if there were Jewes enough, so many Christians would not turne usurers; if Preists enough, one should not have sixe Benefices; and if gentlemen enough, so many earlie mushromes, whose best growth sprang from a dunghill, should not aspire to gentilitie.61 Pudsey renders the exchange thus: ‘one said theer wer not Iews Preests nor gentlemen | inough in England, els so many christians wold not turn | vsuring Iews, one Preest shold not haue so many benefices | nor so many dunghill vpstarts become gentLemen’.62 The ‘one said’ implies that he plans to recount this as a jest overheard, to an audience whose frame of reference will not be the Italy of Webster’s play; thus, at the same time as universalising and de-dramatising the dialogue through concision, paraphrase, and the removal of speech prefixes, he localises the passage by geographically situating it ‘in England’ – his home country. The appropriative alteration that is central to the commonplace book culture is here personalised, betraying a reading that not only assesses passages for their universality and potential reuse, but also reformulates resonant extracts so that they apply to the reader’s own context. Most importantly, however, what this and other similar examples signify is Pudsey’s view of playbooks as ready storehouses of textual fragments that could be reused exactly like other texts. When Kiséry turns his attention to the extracts from the non-dramatic texts in Pudsey’s commonplace book, he finds that ‘[Pudsey’s] reading of history and political writing is informed by the same, dominantly formal, aesthetic concerns as his play-reading’.63 Rather than seeming alert to the political resonances of a topical text such as Francis Bacon’s A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons … of the Late Earle of Essex (1601), Pudsey’s wider reading, contends Kiséry, is governed by a persistent interest in snippets of text that are formally striking or clearly aphoristic, thereby lending themselves to reuse in the same conversational or compositional contexts as the dramatic extracts. His transcriptions show that he is just as susceptible to italics in the printed texts of non-dramatic works, and, like the dramatic extracts, the excerpts from works such as Bacon’s are – as Kiséry puts it – ‘shorn of almost all sense of specificity’.64

How were plays read? Extractive reading  141 Edward Pudsey thus appears as a reader who perceives drama not as a distinct genre defined by its performability, but as a source of potentially reusable textual gobbets, to be stripped of the identifiers of their original context and adapted for his own purposes in the same way that non-­dramatic text was. His reformulating of dramatic dialogue and the ­appearance of his commonplace book as a whole create the sense that Pudsey’s playreading is governed by the strategies instilled by the commonplace book culture, which privileged text and the imagining of personal contexts for its reuse rather than the imagining of plays in performance. For Pudsey, what is important is the playbook as a locus of extractable text, not performed or performable text. Creating his commonplace book in a period before playbooks had supposedly become ‘literary’ rather than ‘theatrical’, Pudsey demonstrates the false premise of the binary. Plays for him are neither literary nor theatrical: they are textual, conversational, repositories of reusable wit and wisdom that the reader imagines issuing from his own mouth, not that of a particular character.

William Drummond of Hawthornden According to Estill, it was the pursuit of ‘wit and wisdom worth noting and remembering’ that motivated another early seventeenth-century playreader who compiled a commonplace book around the same time as Edward Pudsey.65 William Drummond of Hawthornden, ‘the foremost Scots seventeenth-century poet’, was a playreader whose reading, like Pudsey’s, was shaped by his membership of the early modern commonplace book culture.66 But my own examination of the commonplace book upon which Estill bases her assessment indicates that, if Drummond was interested in reading plays for the ‘wit’ offered up by their preliminary paratexts, it was very often because he had the word’s bawdier conno­ tations in mind. Drummond read plays with the eye of a fledgling poet who was aware of the power of print conventions to elevate commercial drama to the status of poetry, and his commonplace books show him collecting extracts that he may have intended to reuse – alongside lines or passages drawn from non-dramatic texts – in his own written compositions. But in addition to his pursuit of profit, the young Drummond sought from plays a type of pleasure that was an acknowledged by-­ product of his preferred dramatic genre, comedy: a pleasure that resided in a prurient fixation upon erotic subject matter. William Drummond was born in 1585 and died in 1649. He attended the high school of Edinburgh, and spent four years at the University of Edinburgh (then known as the College of Edinburgh and later the College of King James), graduating MA in 1605.67 In his early twenties, he spent time in London, Paris, and Bourges, before returning to Scotland in 1610 to take over the family estate from his father. From this point on, according to Robert H. MacDonald, Drummond led ‘the life of a laird of modest

142  How were plays read? Extractive reading income’, who was more interested in scholarship than affairs of state, and who remained unmarried until the age of forty-six.68 Traces of Drummond’s playreading can be found in two manuscript commonplace books: MS 2059 and MS 2060 in the National Library of Scotland. The bulk of the dramatic extracts is in MS 2059, a vast tome comprising 403 leaves of varying sizes which have been bound together, and which contains sections of extracts from twelve plays, the vast majority of them comedies, at least half of which were seemingly transcribed around 1609–10 when Drummond was in his mid-twenties.69 These plays are not the limit of his dramatic reading, however: MS 2060 contains extracts from another five plays, and Drummond’s lists of ‘Bookes red be me’ that form part of MS 2059 include the titles of further playbooks, now in the Edinburgh University Library, which he seemingly marked up for transcription but whose marked lines did not make it into his extant commonplace books.70 Furthermore, on fols 122–23 of MS 2060 is a list of fifty-seven English plays, ‘presumably’, believes MacDonald, ‘plays Drummond had read or plays that he had bought’.71 As extracts from several of the plays listed appear in MS 2059, it seems more than likely that this catalogue does, in fact, represent a record of plays read, and as the publication dates of the plays in the list mean it must have been compiled at some point after 1621, it demonstrates that Drummond read plays well into adulthood. That the extracts in MS 2059 seem in general to represent traces of the playreading of his earlier years, and the significance of this, is ­discussed further below; for the moment it is worth noting that aspects of his ­transcriptions certainly do seem to show him following the dictate of humanist pedagogy to improve his own writing through the ­practice of commonplacing. While Pudsey’s possible reuse of his c­ ommonplaced extracts in written composition can only be guessed at (his will and commonplace book being the only extant documents in his hand), Drummond’s rationale for keeping a commonplace book as a s­ torehouse of literary inspiration is clearer. His own writing, as MacDonald observes, is ‘excessively imitative’, and it has long been acknowledged that he drew on sources ranging from Hamlet to Astrophil and Stella for the essay A  Midnight’s Trance, published in 1619.72 But the genre in which Drummond makes his mark is poetry, and it is this that appears to be at the forefront of his mind when he copies out extracts from plays in the leadup to the publication of his first poem, Tears on the death of Meliades, in 1613.73 The layout of many of his dramatic extracts in MS 2059 indicates not only the influence upon him of certain paratextual and typographic conventions, but also the way that this poet-playreader saw dramatic text not as dialogue to be uttered by embodied characters, but as poetry. Aspects of Drummond’s transcriptions seem to be prompted by a similar sense of the authority of print to that displayed by Pudsey, but also by his sensitivity to the formal characteristics of poetry. Like Pudsey, Drummond records dramatic extracts seriatim, heading each group of

How were plays read? Extractive reading  143 extracts in MS 2059 with the title of the play from which they are taken, along with its author (if given on the play’s title page), and, for half of the plays quoted, an indication of their genre: ‘comedie’.74 Perhaps reflecting his comparative financial security, however, Drummond shows little respect for the cost of paper, and is instead profligate with space, meaning that his pages of dramatic extracts look very different to those covered in cramped lines that fill Pudsey’s commonplace book. Of particular significance is the fact that when Drummond quotes longer passages of dramatic verse, he normally emulates the printed layout of the lines. In doing so, he appears to be showing an aspiring poet’s respect for versification. This is apparent from various idiosyncrasies of transcription, such as his division of a twenty-eight-line speech in How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (tentatively attributed to Thomas Heywood) into four ‘stanzas’. Delivered by the character of Fuller, the speech begins with a couplet which is a response to the preceding line, and then launches into an anecdote (about courting women by playing hard to get) which begins: ‘It was my chance once in my wanton daies | To Court a wench, harke and Ile tell thee how’.75 Appearing as an unbroken passage of verse in the early editions of the play, Drummond’s full transcription on fol. 212r-v of MS 2059 divides the speech into four sections, the first unlabelled, the following three headed ‘2’, ‘3’, and ‘4’ (see Figure 3.2). This is because he observes that the account that follows the colon is in fact composed of four sixains, with an ababcc rhyme scheme. Demonstrating respect for the genre he himself aspired to write in, Drummond pulls the poetry from its dramatic setting and renders it appropriately in his commonplace book. Although the plays included in MS 2059 are generally lacking in internal paratexts that make claims for commercial drama to be thought of as poetry (only the epistle to Marston’s Parasitaster hopes explicitly for the comedy to be classed among those ‘Poems […] thought worthy to be kept in Cedar chests’), the layout of such passages as the one transcribed from How a Man May Choose clearly demonstrates Drummond’s acknowledgement of commercial comedies’ capacity to be considered poems.76 A similar fixation on the appearance of metrical verse, and a possible insight into Drummond’s awareness of intertextual connections, can be discerned in his rendering of the passage that appears thus in the 1608 quarto of John Day’s Law Tricks: [HORATIO].  O tombe. [PAGE]. No tombe but Cesterne fild with teares. HO. O heart! PA. No heart, but sinke of greefe and feares.77

Drummond’s transcription of this exchange appears in MS 2059 as ‘o Tombe no Tombe but cisterns filled with tears | o hart no hart but sinke of griefe & fears’ (fol. 211v). His excision of the speech prefixes seems to

144  How were plays read? Extractive reading

Figure 3.2  First page of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s transcription of Fuller’s speech from How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, showing his division of it into numbered sixains (NLS MS 2059, fol. 212r). By permission of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  145 stem from more than just a desire to remove dramatic context as Pudsey does: in conflating the antilabē he betrays a poet’s habitual deployment of full lines of metrical verse, and also provides a manuscript version of the ‘continuous printing’ that Zachary Lesser identifies as a strategy for typographically elevating the status of commercial drama to that of poetry.78 In addition, the layout of Drummond’s transcription gives the impression that he is familiar with the lines Day is parodying – Hieronimo’s famous ‘O eyes, no eyes’ speech from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy – creating as it does a more striking visual echo of Kyd’s ‘Oh eies, no eies but fountains fraught with teares, | Oh life, no life, but lively fourme of death’.79 The lines’ spatial rendering may thus provide an example of the way in which this poet-playreader’s reading was informed by an awareness of intertextuality, as well as by a concern for the visual appearance of metrical verse that stemmed from a familiarity with classical dramatic ‘poetry’ in print.80 A further sense that Drummond views dramatic text as either poetry or as having poetic potential can be inferred from moments in which his extractions exhibit the appropriative alteration that is at the heart of the commonplace book culture. Unlike Pudsey’s generally subtle universalising adaptations, Drummond often uses the occasion of copying out extracts as a chance to flex his poetic muscles. Thus, among the extracts in MS 2059 from Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s Westward Ho (1607) can be found the line, ‘Preachers are like an almanacke if the | one saith be faire weather, the other is foule’ (fol. 217v). This is a drastic reformulation of a line delivered by the character of Judith: ‘Ile be like an Almanacke that threatens nothing but foulewether’ (sig. I1v). Drummond takes the simile and adds a more poetic antithetical parallelism, at the same time giving the line a new subject of his own devising. This action betrays the type of hoped-for profit that underpinned his extractive playreading as well as the influence upon that reading of contemporary pedagogy’s approaches towards imitation. The pedagogical theorist William Kempe, for instance, in his 1588 Education of Children in Learning, licences ‘the scholler […] in imitation’ to ‘adde more than his author hath’ and allows that ‘he may in some part alter the method, forme of syllogismes, axiomes, arguments, figures, tropes, phrases and words’ of the original.81 Appropriative imitation is the training wheels of composition: the ultimate aim is for the scholar ‘to make somewhat alone without an example’.82 In Drummond’s case, his aim was evidently to develop an individual poetic style that never quite managed to break free from its origins in imitation. Drummond’s treatment of the dramatic extracts in MS 2059 shows him applying an approach he almost certainly acquired during his humanistic, classically focused education to a type of reading material that had only recently begun to be packaged as a source of poetic inspiration.83 Two further echoes of humanist pedagogy that indicate Drummond’s conception of the extracts from plays in his commonplace book as potential sources of linguistic profit are firstly, the non-textual markings that serve to highlight particular lines and passages, and secondly, sporadic

146  How were plays read? Extractive reading marginal glosses. Educational theorists such as Brinsley recommended ‘that whatsoever difficult words, or matters of speciall observation, [students] doe reade in any Author, be marked out’: I meane all such words or things, as eyther are hard to them in the learning of them, or which are of some speciall excellency, or use, worthy the noting […]. For the marking of them, to doe it with little lines under them, or above them, or against such partes of the word wherein the difficulty lieth, or by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or marke may best helpe to cal the knowledge of the thing to remembrance[.]84 The influence of such a practice on adult reading habits can be clearly seen in the dramatic sections of MS 2059, where a technique intended for use with printed books is applied to the new textual artefact of the commonplace book. While Drummond may not have set out to memorise everything he marked, the many underlinings, overlinings, marginal daggers, crosses, and asterisks that pepper the pages of dramatic extracts clearly indicate the phrases he considered of ‘speciall excellency’ or ‘worthy the noting’ for future ‘use’ within those passages he had already approved of highly enough to transcribe. They also demonstrate that Drummond returned to and reread the extracts he copied into his commonplace book. Locating the extracts he wanted to revisit would have been enabled by the marginal glosses he records next to many (though not all) of the pass­ ages he transcribes, gesturing – like Pudsey – towards the more precise commonplacing methodology that required the collection of phrases under commonplace-heads. These glosses are occasionally abstract nouns of the type approved by Erasmus (‘Beautie’ (fol. 209r), ‘audacity’ (fol. 219r), ‘flatery’ (fol. 218v)), but they rarely record Drummond’s interpretive judgement of a passage’s subject matter, more often simply replicating its grammatical subject. ‘Beautie’, for instance, accompanies Drummond’s transcription of the line from George Chapman’s 1605 All Fools, ‘what is Beauty? a meere Quintessence’ (sig. A4v). As in Pudsey’s commonplace book, this means that his glosses often do not clearly advertise their accompanying passage as available for reuse in a variety of contexts. For example, the locations of passages dealing with less universal themes are advertised by the marginal additions of ‘scepters’ (fol. 218v), ‘a rare bed’ (fol. 219v), ‘a whale’ (fol. 220r), or ‘an il favoured and old woman’ (fol. 347v). This last is in fact a variation on what the glosses give away as Drummond’s favourite theme amongst the extracts in MS 2059: of those that are legible (some recede into the binding so as to be unreadable), the only one that is repeated is ‘women’, which appears at least eight times.85 Considered in conjunction with the frequency of glosses such as ‘madenhead’ (fol. 221v), ‘adulterie’ (ibid.), ‘courses of Loue’ (fol. 345v), and ‘cupids laws’ (fol. 348v), Drummond’s playreading priorities become clear (see Figure 3.3).

How were plays read? Extractive reading  147

Figure 3.3  Second page of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s extracts from A Mad World, My Masters, showing the marginal glosses ‘madenhead’, ‘adulterie’, and ‘woemen’ (NLS MS 2059, fol. 221v). By permission of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.

148  How were plays read? Extractive reading Showcasing the capacity – noted by Smyth – for members of the commonplace book culture to ‘[pursue] excerpts that provide various express­ ions of the same theme’, the dramatic extracts in MS 2059 demonstrate how interested Drummond was in women.86 MacDonald charitably notes that the commonplace book, made when Drummond was ‘young in years and immature in understanding’, shows his ‘first enthusiasms […] for the romances and the love sonnet’.87 Focusing on the dramatic extracts, however, shows Drummond complementing these interests with an equal enthusiasm for misogyny and prurience, and turning to plays in particular for passages that encoded such attitudes towards the opposite sex. Through the use of marginal markings or underlining, Drummond frequently draws special attention to extracts coloured by a bawdy m ­ isogyny. One of the marginal ‘woemen’ [sic] accompanies his transcription of Mistress Tenterhook’s account in Westward Ho of the gentleman who declared ‘that women were like horsse [sic]. […] Theyde break over any hedge to change their pasture’ (sig. G2v). The dramatic context, which conveys the female character’s outrage and disparagement of such a view, is effaced in Drummond’s appropriative paraphrase, which asserts that women ‘will’ break over any metaphorical hedges in pursuit of infidelity (fol. 214r). Other extracts chosen for transcription are more overtly misogynistic: a second marginal ‘woemen’ accompanies an underscored line from Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters in which Master Penitent Brothel questions the purpose of man’s life being, in Drummond’s rendering, ‘To doat on weaknesse slime corruption women’ (fol. 221v); a third draws attention to a complete (if occasionally paraphrased) transcription on fol. 347v of Zuccone’s apostrophic plea for male parthenogenesis in Marston’s Parasitaster.88 The strengthening of the sentiment of such extracts through their removal from their dramatic context implies that Drummond uses his playreading to confirm views he already holds.89 The misogyny that appears to underpin many of his transcriptions is complicated by the fact that elsewhere, Drummond appears to show a prurient interest in lines to do with women’s role in matters of a more overtly erotic nature. He repeatedly pauses over passages that mention maidenheads: in the Law Tricks section, the lines ‘upon her finger wore her Madenhead’ and ‘Arbors with sweet violet Beds | that hath beene prest to death with madenheads’ are overlined for emphasis (fol. 210v); in the Mad World section, the gloss ‘madenhead’ accompanies the line on fol. 221v ‘fouls then ar maides to locke from men that treasure | wich death wil plucke & neuer yeeld them pleasure’ (although interestingly, these two lines are scored through with a diagonal line, as though Drummond at a later date no longer approved of their sentiment).90 On fols 223v–224r he transcribes almost the entirety of the interaction between the characters of Violetta and Hippolita in John Day’s The Isle of Gulls (1606) in which they speculate about what the experience of losing their virginity will be like.91 In this innuendo-heavy scene, Violetta recounts a dream she has

How were plays read? Extractive reading  149 had of the stages of her wedding, from courtship to occupation of the marital bed, and her annoyance at awakening from the dream just prior to the marriage’s consummation: ‘Lord how it chaft me that I wakt so soone, | One minuts dreaming longer, I had tride, | The difference twixt a virgin and a bride’ (sig. D3v). The scene deliberately builds to a titillating climax which it then fails to deliver, and it is tempting to detect a note of sexual frustration in the firmly scored vertical line in the margin next to the passage quoted above – which Drummond conflates with Hippolita’s response, ‘O’twould ha vext a Saint, my blood would burne | To be so neere, and misse so good a turne’.92 A further prurient lack of faith in women’s loyalty is exhibited by Drummond’s transcription on fol. 221r of the Courtesan’s speech in Middleton’s 1608 A Mad World, in which she educates Harebrain’s wife in the art of dissimulation. This speech, which begins, ‘When husbands in their ranck’st suspitions dwell, | Then tis our best Art to dissemble well’ (sig. B1v), Drummond quotes almost in its entirety, up to ‘keepe you your chamber, be not seene; | If he chance steale upon you, let him find, | Some booke lie open gainst an unchast mind’ (sig. B2r). However, he stops short of the following three lines of the speech, which conclude the lesson in sexual duplicity: ‘And coted Scriptures, tho for your owne pleasure, | You reade some stirring pamphlet, and convay it | Under your Skirt, the fitest place to lay it’ (sig. B2r). The image of the woman who keeps to her chamber pretending to read Scripture while sequestering a titillating poem – or play – underneath her skirts forms part of the (male) rhetorical construction of women’s reading in the period discussed in Chapter 1. It is a view that is, as Sasha Roberts observes, ‘fissured by mistrust, misogyny, voyeurism and titillation’.93 Roberts rightly points out that this rhetoric does not constitute evidence of real readerships – not, it may be noted, when it comes to women readers. But the contents of Drummond’s sections of dramatic extracts in MS 2059 show him time and again pausing on pass­ages – in exactly the type of literature Harebrain’s wife is described as reading – that could reasonably be described as sexually ‘stirring’. The conspicuous absence of the concluding lines of the Courtesan’s speech may indicate a disturbing moment of self-realisation, when the misogyn­ istic Drummond, in the midst of transcribing a passage that provided the titillation he habitually sought in vernacular drama, suddenly paid closer attention to what he was writing – and caught himself reading like a woman. If Drummond read plays in part because they provided readily extractable bawdy content, this may explain his preference for comedies, the genre that – as observed in Chapter 2 – often relies for its subject matter on Philip Stubbes’s despised ‘love, bawdrie, […] whordome [and] adulterie’.94 Was he then susceptible to the paratextual strategies used to advertise printed comedies to readers in search of such subject matter? The success of paratextual advertisements of the genre’s capacity to offer

150  How were plays read? Extractive reading ‘venery’ to ‘comicke playreaders’ may perhaps be seen in the fact that all but two of the plays extracted in MS 2059 are comedies: if Drummond was looking for venereal subject matter, he knew where to go. And that he understood the frequent title page advertisement of comedies as ‘­pleasant’ to be an announcement of their erotically ‘pleasing’ nature may also be hinted at in the title he chooses for the section of MS 2059 containing the dramatic extracts. Drummond’s handwritten title page on fol. 183r reads: ‘This booke is full of pleasant discourses | and merrie uerses; of Latine, Spanishe, French | Italians, and Englishe’. Given the nature of the contents of the twenty-three folios of the ‘booke’ that contain dramatic extracts, ‘pleasant’ here cannot help but take on some of the meaning it possesses on the title pages of printed comedies, where it implies that the reader will be ‘pleased’ through the playbooks’ provision of titillating sexual content. In another respect, though, Drummond’s commonplacing habits contradict the implications of dramatic paratexts: it is quite evident, when looking at the example of the landed Drummond, that it is not simply Mathew Rhodes’s ‘Men | Of Earthy breeding’ who prefer comedies as a dramatic genre. That Drummond had a firm sense of his preferred dramatic genre is reinforced by the fact that it forms part of the way he organises the groups of dramatic extracts in MS 2059. Unlike Pudsey, whose headings for his sections of dramatic extracts note their textual genre (‘plays’) alongside the title and author of the works from which they are drawn, Drummond – as previously mentioned – accompanies the plays’ titles and authors with an indication (for half the plays he quotes from) of their dramatic genre: ‘comedie’. His overwhelming preference for comedies becomes remarkable when the extracts in MS 2059 are compared with those included in MS 2060. This second commonplace book, which has received limited interest from scholars, contains extracts from a further five plays – none of which are comedies.95 Two of them – George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1607, 1608) and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1619) – proclaim themselves as tragedies on their title pages; the three others (Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London (1615), Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1615, 1619), and Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel (1617)) lack a title page genre indication and are variously designated by Martin Wiggins as a romance, another tragedy, and a tragicomedy.96 Rather than being unified by genre, what is instead striking about this group of plays is that, for three out of five of them, there is a rare woodcut illustration on the title page of the quarto edition Drummond would most likely have read, hinting that this paratextual element may have been a drawcard for readers. Most notably, however, the latest play in MS 2060, The Maid’s Tragedy, was first published in 1619, a decade after Drummond read the comedies A Mad World, My Masters, The Isle of Gulls, Parasitaster, Sir Giles Goosecap (1606, attributed to George Chapman), and the anonymous Contention

How were plays read? Extractive reading  151 between Liberality and Prodigality (1602) and Nobody and Somebody ([1606]).97 Neither of these last two plays is designated a comedy by Wiggins, but Drummond viewed them as such, accompanying both their titles with the descriptor ‘comedie’ when he transcribed extracts from them. It is the later date of the reading ­represented in MS 2060 that may help to explain Drummond’s apparent preference for comedies in MS 2059. When Richard Braithwaite discusses the susceptibility of ‘voluptuous’ gentlemen to literature with an amorous subject matter, the key point he makes is that ‘Stories of Love’ are most appealing to those who are young. Those less advanced in years are also less practised at governing their emotions, which they indulge through imaginative engagement with scenes of a romantic nature.98 If, as MacDonald surmises and as the publication dates of the plays in MS 2060 imply, that commonplace book re­presents a period of later reading, then the erotic extracts from comedies that are a feature of MS 2059 seem to confirm the popular conception of younger readers’ preferences.99 The image of Drummond as a typical young gentleman with a preference for erotic content is reinforced by his own lists of ‘books red be me’ for the years between 1606–09, when he is in his early twenties: the fourteen plays that feature on these lists include only two tragedies (Romeo and Juliet and Locrine), contrasting with the longer, post-1621 list of ‘plays […] read or […] bought’ which has a roughly equal number of comedies and tragedies. The plays read by the young Drummond form part of his wider interest in literature with erotic or romantic content: in 1606, when he is twenty-one, by his own declaration Drummond reads not only Romeo and Juliet (marking multiple pass­ ages of bawdy banter), Love’s Labour’s Lost, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim (perhaps demonstrating the effectiveness of William Jaggard’s use of ‘Shakespeare’ as a ‘brand name for venereal poetry’), Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Robert Chester’s 1601 Love’s Martyr, the 1596 translation of Euryalus and Lucresia, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses ‘in english’ – among other works of a similar ilk.100 Eight years later, in the opening sonnet of his first published collection of poems, Drummond will seem to acknowledge both what drove his youthful obsession with this type of literature, and the extent to which it has influenced his writing: In my first Prime, when childish Humors fed My wanton Wit, ere I did know the Blisse, Lies in a loving Eye, or amorous Kisse, Or with what Sighes a Lover warmes his Bed: By the sweete Thespian Sisters Error led I first begouth [i.e. began] to read, then love to write, And so to praise a perfect Red and White[.]101

152  How were plays read? Extractive reading Unloved, unkissed, unbedded, the young Drummond as poetic speaker turned to the Muses and sought to feed his curiosity and his ‘wanton Wit’ through reading about the sensations of love. Two years later, when he radically revises this sonnet for republication, he perhaps thinks better of such a confession and removes the frank expression of youthful sexual curiosity: the speaker now instead reminisces more poetically about how, ‘Ere Beauties Force I knew or false Delight, | Or to what Oare shee did her Captives chaine’, he ‘entertaine[d]’ his ‘Wits’ with ‘sweet Conceits’.102 Yet the 1614 version of the sonnet stands, recording Drummond’s sympathy with the attitudes expressed by the sexually curious yet virginal Violetta in The Isle of Gulls and the unstimulated wife who ‘for [her] pleasure’ must resort to reading ‘stirring Pamphlets’ in A Mad World. Both versions of the sonnet depict the act of reading as a prompt for writing, implicitly casting Drummond’s youthful commonplace book as a storehouse of literary inspiration.103 But the earlier version implies that the bawdy, prurient love that is a focus of Drummond’s reading of comedies could be an end in itself. The trappings of the pursuit of literary profit that overlay the dramatic extracts in MS 2059 – marginal glosses, underscoring, universalising adaptation – disguise a playreading that is driven just as much, if not more, by the pursuit of private erotic pleasure. A final point to be made about Drummond’s dramatic extracting is that, once more, it does not imply a habit of playreading that is concerned with the generic distinctiveness of drama. As Cavanagh points out, Drummond ‘does not appear to make any hierarchical distinction between contemporary plays and other kinds of literature’, drawing upon them equally to feed the composition of A Midnight’s Trance (expanded four years later into Cypress Grove).104 He viewed playbooks as repositories of text that was or could be rendered as poetry, and – like Pudsey – his transcriptions erased elements tied to performance, such as speech prefixes. He understood printed comedies as the source of titillating scenes that could be focused upon more easily in the privacy of the reader’s own imagination than in the public environment of the playhouse.105 His early commonplace book implies that he read plays not with a sense of their performability, but in search of prurient pleasure, and also to confirm views purveyed by a dominant discourse of misogyny. In addition, it demonstrates his thorough absorption of humanist pedagogical practices that encouraged the mining of texts, of whatever genre, for literary profit.

Abraham Wright For an example of a slightly later playreader who also viewed plays as a source of literary inspiration, but who retained a sense of their potential incarnation in performance, I turn now to the Caroline clergyman Abraham Wright. Wright was born in London in 1611 and lived through the bulk of the tumultuous seventeenth century, dying in 1690. His early education was conducted at the Mercers’ Chapel and Merchant

How were plays read? Extractive reading  153 Taylors’ schools; he subsequently became a fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, matriculating in 1629 and receiving his MA in 1637. In addition to the sermons he composed in his later employment as a minister, Wright wrote drama and poetry, and although his university play, The Reformation, has not survived, we still have his 1656 poetic miscellany, Parnassus Biceps, as well as his Five Sermons (1656) and two Restoration religious commentaries.106 Wright was a loyal Royalist, a fact that has led Estill, in the most recent discussion of his commonplace book, to view the dramatic extracts therein as having been collected ‘with a sense of royalist nostalgia’.107 While Estill’s argument is plausible, other ways of understanding the impetus behind Wright’s playreading are possible, and it is these that the following discussion explores. In particular, it focuses on the way in which Wright’s playreading aims to extract profit not just from playtexts themselves but from dramatic paratexts, as well as exploring the implication that the pleasure he gleans from his reading is that of a writer a­ ppreciating the skill of other writers. Furthermore, it considers how Wright – in contrast to Pudsey and Drummond – retains a sense of plays as performable wholes, even as he reshapes them into groups of ­textual fragments. At the same time, it considers how Wright’s profitdriven playreading collapses the distinction between plays and another early modern genre that existed in both oral and textual form: the sermon. Wright’s commonplace book, British Library Add. MS 22608, is bound in quarto and has 119 leaves. Its first section contains extracts from works on the history of the monarchs of England, but the commonplace book has been of interest to scholars largely because of a subsequent section in which Wright not only excerpts from plays (including those of Shakespeare), but pens short summative assessments of their quality that provide rare insight into the judgements of an early modern playreader.108 It is this section which Estill believes should more rightly be called a ‘dramatic miscellany’, as it was ‘only later included in [the] composite volume’, implying that the ‘dramatic extracts […] were conceptualized as a single unit’.109 This last claim deserves a caveat: in the midst of the dramatic extracts is a section of excerpts from Thomas Fuller’s Historie of the Holy Warre (first published 1639), and at the extracts’ end a ­collection of excerpts from Ben Jonson’s 1616 Works includes, amongst extracts from the plays, fragments from the poems featured in ‘The Forest’.110 The excerpts from the Works lack headings, but they belong to the same group of extracts that include those from Jasper Mayne’s The Amorous War and Love in its Ecstasy (attributed to William Peaps), first published in 1648 and 1649, respectively. It is Estill’s identification of these two ‘as-yet-unnoticed’ plays that allows her to re-date the compilation of Wright’s manuscript from c.1640 to c.1640–50, leading her to conclude that it exhibits ‘clear royalist nostalgia’ for the theatre of the pre-Civil War period. She notes that Wright’s royalist sympathies are belied by his choice to read comparatively recent plays by playwrights such as James Shirley and William Davenant alongside those of Jonson,

154  How were plays read? Extractive reading Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher – all poetae non gratae for parliamentarians.111 The association of drama with the royalist cause during the Caroline and Civil War periods is well-travelled territory; refocusing the lens away from Wright’s political leanings, however, typifies him as a Caroline reader in a different way. When Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser extend their examination of the popularity of playbooks into the Caroline and Civil War periods, they discern what they refer to as the ‘Caroline paradox’. They posit that in the 1630s there develops ‘a division in the playbook market between new plays and “classic” plays’, with some publishers furbishing playreaders with ‘new bookes’ and others ‘good bookes’, as Webster puts it in the epistle to the 1612 The White Devil (sig. A2r).112 The older ‘good bookes’ are those that are ‘second-plus editions’ first printed in the Jacobean or Elizabethan periods, or ‘undiscovered classics’ – plays first performed decades earlier but receiving their first outing in print in the 1630s.113 Farmer and Lesser’s supply-side analysis assumes that this bifurcated market responds to buyer demand, and their hypothesis is proven by the historical example of Abraham Wright. Wright’s commonplace book confirms that certain Caroline playreaders had no wish to be numbered amongst Webster’s novelty-loving ‘ignorant asses’, but were instead seeking out plays from the new ‘canon’ of older English drama.114 To be fair, this is not immediately apparent when considering the titles of the plays from which Wright extracts, in part because of the preponderance of plays by the Caroline playwright James Shirley: eleven of the thirty-six plays in his commonplace book are by Shirley. The ratio of Shirley to non-Shirley justifies the conclusion that Shirley is Wright’s favourite ­playwright  – but Wright values his works because they are by Shirley, not because they are relatively recent compositions. The value he accords Shirley’s works is implied by his jotting down, in a margin, the location of the bookshop where they can be bought, as well as by his strong sense of the playwright’s style, conveyed by his approving description of The Wedding as ‘A very good play: both for the plot and lines truely Shirley’s’.115 If Wright reads multiple plays by Shirley because he particularly admired the playwright, we can set these plays aside when assessing his preference for ‘good’ plays over ‘new’ plays on the assumption that he would have bought and read them regardless of their initial publication date. Once this is done, of the playbooks excerpted in his commonplace book, the majority are plays first printed or performed either before his birth or before he was old enough to reasonably be expected to have taken an interest in reading them. They include multiple plays from Farmer and Lesser’s ‘Caroline Canon of Classic Plays’, including Hamlet (reprinted in 1637), Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (reprinted in 1629), and four Beaumont and Fletcher plays that were printed in fresh quarto editions in the 1630s: Philaster, The Scornful Lady, The Maid’s Tragedy, and A King and No King.116 In addition, Wright reads one of Farmer and Lesser’s ‘undiscovered classics’, Henry Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier

How were plays read? Extractive reading  155 (1638), as well as other plays from what they term the ‘“Golden Age” of early modern drama’: plays written between c.1590 and c.1610, which for Wright include Othello and the Jonson titles in the 1616 folio.117 He also reads slightly later Jacobean titles such as Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case, The Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil – the last with its epistle’s dismissive reference to the ‘ignorant asses’ who prefer ‘new bookes’ to ‘good bookes’. In fact, once Shirley is set aside, the only plays Wright reads that could reasonably be termed ‘new’ are William Davenant’s The Wits (1636) and The Platonic Lovers (1636). The ‘nostalgia’ that Estill sees infusing Abraham Wright’s playreading choices thus helps to confirm Farmer and Lesser’s conclusions regarding the ‘[t]wo distinct but dialectically defined markets for plays’ during this period: analysis of consumption affirms analysis of production.118 It also complicates them, however; where Farmer and Lesser argue that it is in the Restoration that ‘we see a shift away from favorite titles […] and towards favorite authors’, we can see the earlier beginning of this shift in Wright’s clear preference for Shirley.119 Furthermore, where they point out that publishers’ paratexts ‘tried to persuade customers’ to share their view of the particular worth of these older plays, Wright’s summative judgements often show him rejecting such paratext­ ual exhortations.120 What is notable about Wright’s playreading is how ineffectual some of the self-justifying paratextual strategies discussed in the previous chapter seem to have been at aligning his expectations regarding quality dramatic poetry with the form and content of plays that had their origin in public performance – particularly public performance in the Jacobean era. Wright does not, in principle, dislike the plays of John Webster: if he did, he would not have read three of them. But each play disappoints him in a way that the writers of dramatic paratexts made repeated and concerted efforts to prevent. The White Devil, for instance, has – according to Wright – ‘lines [that] are to | much riming’ (fol. 89r). This demonstrates the futility of the paratextual pleas (discussed in Chapter 2) that Caroline playreaders should not disapprove of newly published editions of old plays based on their outmoded deployment of rhyme – and instead perhaps indicates Wright’s alignment of his critical opinion with that of John Fox, who praises Wright’s beloved Shirley because the dramatic dialogue in The Grateful Servant ‘[does] not swell with mighty rimes’.121 Furthermore, Webster’s careful explanation in the epistle to The White Devil of why his plays do not deserve dismissal despite their failure to observe the ‘criticall lawes’ is simply ignored by Wright, who has absorbed the authority of Aristotle (either via Sidney or elsewhere), and finds fault with ‘the business’ of The Duchess of Malfi, which ‘was | 2 yeares a doeing as may bee perceaued by the beeginning of the 3d act; where Antonio has 3 | children by the Dutchess, when in the first act hee had but one’. As Wright states frankly, this is ‘against the lawes of the scene’ (fol. 88v). Similarly, despite paratextual efforts to justify the legitimacy of subplots and generic variety,

156  How were plays read? Extractive reading Webster’s epistolary description of The Devil’s Law Case as a ‘Poeme’ (sig. A2v) does him no favours with Wright: fixated on poetry’s need to exhibit Horatian decorum, he declares that the tragicomedy is ‘faulty, by reason many passages doe either not hang together, or if they doe it is so sillily as noe man can perceiue them likely to bee euer done’ (fol. 75v). Wright does seem to have assimilated the paratextually conveyed conception of comedy as a genre from which readers can expect originality, but only in part. It is the plays that he designates not as comedies but as tragicomedies which most often draw his praise for their ­novelty and unpredictable plot points.122 Thus he appreciates Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King ‘especially for the plot which is extra­ ordinary, and soe strange that noe | man can thinke what it would come to till the latter end of the last acte’ (fol. 95v), and Shirley’s skill in The Young Admiral whereby having ‘brought you to the upshot as it were of a passage, hee then takes you of[f] with a contrary which you would nere expect’ (fol. 90v). Elsewhere, however, it is clear that paratexts e­ xplicitly promoting originality of composition hold no sway over him. For instance, when Wright reads Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts his judgement goes directly against that of Thomas Jay in his commendatory verse which praises Massinger’s inventiveness in the play.123 For Wright, A New Way is ‘A silly play’, and once he reaches the third act he gives up on transcribing extracts from it, declaring ‘The rest [is] not worth the reading’ (fol. 93v). This is because there is, in his opinion, nothing original about either the plot, ‘the cheating of an vsurer ­beeing the plot of a good | many plaies, [or] at least a maine passage in them’, or the ‘lines’, which ‘are very | poore’ and lacking ‘any new | dress either of language or fancy’ (fol. 93v). As his classically inflected objections to Webster’s plotting make clear, Wright evidently accepts commercial drama as poetry. But he does not, despite the best efforts of internal paratexts like those discussed in the previous chapter, accept wholeheartedly the terms for judging its quality that professional dramatists and their allies attempted to introduce into a culture in which educated playreaders’ expectations were governed by Horace, Aristotle, and the English texts that mediated classical theories of poetics. Once more, manuscript evidence of reception qualifies the conclusions pointed at by analysis of the printed evidence of production. It would be wrong to say that paratexts have no influence over Wright, however. As Estill points out, it is clear that he has a keen interest in one particular type of dramatic paratext, which he frequently copies into his commonplace book: the epistle, which for Wright is a term that encompasses both dedications and addresses to unnamed readers.124 Wright’s transcriptions of such epistles shed light on the profitable use to which he intended to put his playreading, leading Estill to note that they ‘offer a model for correspondence’.125 But when viewed in conjunction with other notes in the commonplace book they present the possibility that Wright viewed them as a model for a different, more public type of writing.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  157 This can be inferred from the physical layout in Wright’s manuscript of his paraphrased transcriptions of the dedicatory epistles in Shirley’s The Young Admiral and The Lady of Pleasure. Elsewhere in the commonplace book, the lines Wright transcribes crowd the pages, distinct ­passages s­ eparated only by ‘x’ or ‘xx’ so that all available space is filled. His renderings of these two dedications, however, are conspicuous for the blank paper that surrounds them. This implies that Wright pays particular attention not only to their content but to their appearance in print. As an example, Shirley’s dedication to George Berkeley which prefaces The Young Admiral appears thus in the 1637 quarto (see also Figure 3.4): My Lord, The many testimonies of your excellent nature […] have […] long since prepard my particular ambition to be knowne to you, that I, among other, whose more happy wits have gained by being onely read under so noble a Patron, might by some timely application derive upon me your Lordships influence. Be pleas’d my most honourable Lord to accept this Poeme, till something of more high endeavour may present my service […] Now if your Lordship smile upon it in this addresse, and bid it welcome, it shall dwell with honour and security under your name, and the author glory to professe himselfe My Lord Your most humble Honourer, James Shirly.126 Wright’s rendering of the dedication on fol. 89r treads a very fine line between transcription and appropriative adaptation (see Figure 3.5). Retaining both line breaks and indents, his paraphrased version reads: My Lord,  It hath binne my particular ambition to bee knowne b[y] you; that I among other, whose most happy | witts haue gaind by beeing onely read under soe happy a patron, might by some happy | application deriue upon mee your Lordships influence. x Bee pleasd to accept of this till | something of more high endeauour may present my seruice, soe may the author glory | to professe himselfe My Lord  your most humble honourer James Shirly. Guarding Shirley’s name is a nod towards acknowledgement, but Wright’s appropriation of the paratext as freely available for adaptation is apparent in his omission of ‘Poeme’, suggesting he is already thinking about

158  How were plays read? Extractive reading

Figure 3.4  The concluding page of James Shirley’s ‘Epistle’ to George Berkeley in The Young Admirall (1637, STC 22463, sig. A2v). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, Ah Sh66 637 Copy 1.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  159

Figure 3.5  Abraham Wright’s rendering of Shirley’s epistle to Berkeley in his commonplace book (Add. MS 22608, fol. 89r). © The British Library Board.

how he can repurpose the dedication’s structure and sentiments in his own writing. As his careful replication of the typographic layout suggests, however, he is not necessarily thinking of these epistles as models for private correspondence. Instead, it is equally likely that he views them as models for precisely the type of epistle he has transcribed: a preliminary paratext in a printed book.

160  How were plays read? Extractive reading This possibility is laid open by a set of notes that haphazardly fill the blank space surrounding Wright’s extracts from Jonson’s Staple of News on fol. 69r and are written in a different ink and later hand (which can nevertheless be assumed to be Wright’s because of its resemblance to that on fols 111–16). Parts of the notes are indecipherable, but they provide tantalising evidence of the use Wright envisaged for his reading and commonplacing. In 1967, James G. McManaway transcribed these notes as follows: [See] p. 168 of yr [or ye] papers. Marke Montague Sydnam … ye voyage to ye Levant. Herberts poems. Maine’s and Shirley’s play.127 My pap ffelthams resolves see pa: 168 of yr papers. And for words yt are newe yr Inglish dictionary will alone suffice, and make more use of this then you have done, for this is sydnams way and every o Marke Sydnam for penning Epistles and imitate him xxx take out of these some sett expressions (as yt, put them to a gaze, and a sta … and make common vse of them vpon their several occas 128 those places markd h [elongated plus sign] either or in my books are not phrases but ex-/

ressions and lines.129 Scholars who have examined Wright’s commonplace book, Estill included, have followed McManaway’s lead in interpreting these notes as being ‘for purposes of instruction’, and more specifically, ‘to guide a young reader’: James Wright, the son to whom Abraham Wright bequeathed the commonplace book he had painstakingly compiled.130 Using the dating of The Amorous War (as the first published play by Jasper Mayne to which Wright might be referring), McManaway identifies the earliest possible date for the penning of the instructions as 1648, when James Wright would have been five – and thus far too young to be making use of a commonplace book. He thus requires the notes to have been written ‘at least seven or ten years later’, a conjecture with which I happen to agree, but for a reason that has nothing to do with the education of James Wright.131 This reason rests on the possibility that the notes, which economically fill an otherwise unused area of the page, are not intended as directives for another person. Instead, it should be considered that they are simply the jottings of a man who wrote as well as read widely, reminding himself of the works and authors he had found most useful and inspirational, chastising himself for sloppiness in his scholarship or composition, and making a note of an idiosyncratic methodology which might otherwise be forgotten at some later date.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  161 The first argument for such an interpretation lies in the very messiness and occasional illegibility of the notes: even allowing for the comparative ease with which a seventeenth-century reader might approach them (as opposed to a twenty-first-century scholar), they are in no way as neat as the headings throughout the manuscript or the ‘table of contents’ on fol. 111r, both elements of the commonplace book that could be interpreted as ‘guides’ for a later reader. Furthermore, as Estill points out, Wright pens some of his instructions in a private code, rendering ‘newe […] as nffxxff; Epistles as Epkstlffs; these as thffsff; and expressions as ffxprffssklns’.132 The difficulty this produces in deciphering the ‘instructions’ makes it less likely that they were intended as directives for a schoolboy. The second indication that Wright was simply writing notes to himself is his inconsistent use of the second-person pronoun. ‘My pap ’ is presumably ‘My papers’, seemingly contrasting with ‘yr papers’, of which the reader is to consult page 168. Yet the likelihood that this second bulky collection of papers belongs to the teenaged James Wright is slim. More convincing is that the notes are performative, and that the figure invoked by the second-person pronoun is Abraham Wright the writer addressed by Abraham Wright the reader. This is consistent with the way Wright uses ‘you’ in his appraisals of plays, noting particular plot elements for the inspiration they offer to a neophyte playwright such as himself. The discovery of Bellario in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, for instance, is ‘worthy the imitating when you haue occasion to discouer | any in a play’ (fol. 94v). Unless he has already planned for his son to become a playwright (which James Wright did not), this is far more ­plausibly a ‘note to self’ written by someone who had written at least one play (The Reformation) and may have aspired to write more. The use of ‘you’ and ‘your’ and accompanying imperatives in the notes on fol. 69r should thus be viewed in the same light, particularly as the command to look in the dictionary for ‘for words yt are newe’ can also be read in relation to the extracts and appraisals. I suggest that ‘newe’ in this context means simply that: words that are newly come into the English language (and therefore to be found in the latest edition of the dictionary). That Wright has an interest in expanding his vocabulary can be seen in the fact that, throughout the dramatic extracts, he notes down unfamiliar words and accompanies them with a definition: on fol. 87r, for instance, amongst the extracts from Shirley’s Hyde Park (1637), he has recorded, ‘Vagaries, ie, whimzies’. The OED’s earliest example of ‘vagary’ in its sense of ‘a capricious, fantastic, or eccentric action or piece of conduct’ is dated 1629, or roughly contemporaneous with the commonplace book’s composition, demonstrating that it is what Wright would consider a ‘newe’ word. This brings us back to the year in which Wright jotted down these notes. McManaway conjectures that the earliest year in which they may have been written is 1655. In 1655, the tenth edition of Henry Cockeram’s

162  How were plays read? Extractive reading English dictionarie appeared, offering itself as An interpreter of hard English words[, e]nabling […] the more speedy attaining of an elegant perfection of the English tongue, both in reading, speaking, and writing. Yet it is not just the possibility that this is the ‘Inglish dictionary’ that Wright tells himself to ‘make more use of’ which makes McManaway’s suggestion plausible. It is the line ‘Marke Sydnam for penning Epistles and imitate him’. In 1656, two books by Abraham Wright appeared in print: his poetic miscellany Parnassus Biceps and his Five Sermons. Both contained lengthy addresses to the reader – or ‘epistles’. At a time when he was thinking about the composition of his own printed epistles, Wright drew inspiration from those of another sermon writer he clearly admired, the royalist preacher Humphrey Sydenham, whose own Five Sermons was reprinted multiple times throughout the 1620s and 1630s, each sermon prefaced by a carefully crafted dedicatory epistle.133 Wright also returned to the commonplace book in which he had earlier culled matter from epistles that he considered effective, most notably those of his favourite playwright, James Shirley, and his manuscript layout of The Young Admiral’s epistle found a new print analogue on the final page of the Five Sermons’s ‘Epistle rendring an Account of the Author’s Designe in Printing these his Sermons, as also of the Sermons themselves’ (see Figure 3.6).134 Viewing Wright’s commonplace book alongside his own written works throws into relief the esteem he holds for the medium of print, and the extent to which he understood playbooks as repositories not just of imitable texts, but imitable paratexts. The impression conveyed by both the notes on fol. 69r and the extracts and appraisals is that Wright’s main agenda in reading plays is the pursuit of literary self-improvement and linguistic profit. Wright reads plays as a writer, in search of a writer’s profit, and the pleasure he derives from his reading is a by-product of this search. It results from an appreciation of his fellow writers’ skill, with his ‘delight’ in Shirley’s plays deriving – as William Habington puts it – from an appreciation of the dramatist’s ability to ‘[do] art and nature right’.135 The discourse of writing pervades Wright’s approbation: those plays he finds ‘very good’ fulfil his requirement of having both well-crafted ‘lines’ and ‘plot’, and scenes or parts of which he approves are deemed ‘well pennd’.136 If Wright has absorbed Sidney’s precepts thoroughly enough to object to Webster’s violation of the ‘lawes of the scene’, he has also read that ‘they that delight in poesy […] should seek to know what [poets] do and how they do’ (p. 43). Wright’s commonplace book shows him reading drama in order to do just that, and, as part of this project, retroactively transforming his manuscript into a more easily navigable reference tool for his own compositions – not necessarily those of his son. Perhaps because one of the genres in which Wright composes is drama, he shows a respect for the origins of dramatic text that is not evident in Pudsey and Drummond’s transcriptions. Like them, Wright transcribes extracts sequentially, heading each section (except for the

How were plays read? Extractive reading  163

Figure 3.6  The concluding page of Abraham Wright’s epistle prefacing his Five sermons, in five several styles (1656, Wing W3685, sig. A8v). The National Library of Scotland, OO.8.4.

164  How were plays read? Extractive reading extracts from the Jonson folio and the Mayne and Peaps plays) with ‘Out of’ followed by the title, author, and in most cases, genre. Yet the sequential ordering of his transcriptions seems to be driven less by convenience than by a conception of the playtext as a linear narrative and of the extracts as a quasi-abridgement rather than a collection of fragments. This can be seen on fol. 90r, when at the end of the transcriptions from Shirley’s The Young Admiral Wright records a line out of sequence, while solicitously drawing attention to this fact, noting: ‘(This out of the 3d act)’. Marking acts is a clear way of signalling text as dramatic, and it is telling that rather than deploying the marginal glosses used by Pudsey and Drummond to disguise their extracts from commercial drama as the type of textual material more traditionally found in humanist commonplace books, Wright’s chosen marginal identifiers are act numbers. Adjacent to the sections of text they should correctly accompany, and preceded in each instance by the word ‘Act’, they serve as constant reminders of the extracts’ dramatic provenance. Furthermore, in contrast to the universalising alterations of Drummond and Pudsey, Wright generally retains the original first-person pronouns in the quotations he transcribes, and at times a character’s name lingers conspicuously. Thus Laertes’s line from Hamlet is recorded verbatim: ‘Too much of water hast thou poore Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my teares’ (fol. 85v).137 While a parenthetical note ‘(speaking of one drownd)’ shows Wright thinking about a more universal application for the line, the retention of ‘Ophelia’ and the first-­person pronoun declare that unadulterated dramatic quotations are perfectly suitable matter for a commonplace book intended for future consultation. This more faithful habit of transcription may be due not just to Wright’s own regard for drama as a genre but to the later composition date of his commonplace book. Even allowing for uncertainties of dating, by the time Wright begins compiling his manuscript, commercial drama in quarto has undergone at least two decades more of paratextual legitimation than it had when Drummond and Pudsey were in the process of compiling theirs. This paratextual legitimation eventually leads to a situation in the 1650s, as Adam Hooks argues, whereby booksellers’ catalogues begin to acknowledge printed plays as a distinct and desirable category of text.138 Wright’s retention of textual and paratextual elements that signify dramatic provenance may thus be seen as feeding into this shift in status. These transcription conventions do not necessarily belie a sense of drama as performed or performable, however. Acknowledging drama as a distinct textual form is not the same as acknowledging it as a distinctly theatrical form: act divisions, for instance, are by the Caroline period associated just as much – if not more so – with plays on the page as plays on the stage.139 For an indication that Wright read plays while imagining them in performance we must look again to his appraisals, which provide rare evidence of an approach to playreading that could hold both stage and page in mind simultaneously.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  165 As Tiffany Stern points out, performance is often at the back of Wright’s mind, even when he reads plays he has not seen on stage.140 For instance, in his appraisal of The White Devil, he notes: ‘But an indifferent play to read, but for the presentments I beeleeue good’ (fol. 89r). Webster’s epistle to the reader specifically says that the play’s ‘presentments’ have not been ‘believed good’, meaning that Wright’s assessment is based on his own imagined conception of what the play might look like in performance: a White Devil for which the ‘indifferent’ printed play is not a substitute but simply an alternative (and inferior) incarnation. Plays on stage and plays on the page are to be assessed according to different criteria, but they are still ineluctably linked: when he writes down his assessment of Henry Shirley’s Martyred Soldier, a play which he evidently has seen performed, he notes that it is ‘An indifferent good play […]; the lines indifferent but very | good for the presentments and songs by angel; by which the people were much | taken’ (fol. 113v). Again, the textual quality of the playbook (‘the lines’) and the visual and aural experience of performance are intertwined in Wright’s overall assessment of the play, presenting him as a rare example of a reader who is sensitive to both the literary and theatrical qualities of the plays he reads. Wright’s explicit acknowledgement of the theatrical underpinnings of dramatic text means that the homogenisation of this text that can be seen in Pudsey and Drummond’s commonplace books is not present to such a degree in Wright’s – with one noteworthy exception. This is the way that Wright’s notes on fol. 69r regarding the texts from which the most profit is to be gleaned align plays not just (as might be expected) with other genres of poetry, but with essays, travel writing, and sermons. When Wright abjures himself to ‘Marke Montague Sydnam … ye voyage to ye Levant. Herberts poems. Maine’s and Shirley’s play’, he is proposing to draw inspiration from the plays of Mayne and Shirley (presumably his favourite James, not Henry); the poems of George Herbert, whose Temple had been published in 1633; Henry Blount’s 1636 travelogue A Voyage into the Levant; the sermons of Humphrey Sydenham; and, depending on the identity of ‘Montague’, the theological tracts of Bishop Richard Montague or the musings upon death in Sir Henry Montagu’s 1631 Contemplatio Mortis, et Immortalitatis.141 It is the triple invocation of the preacher known as ‘Silver-tongue Sydenham’, explicitly valued in adjacent notes for his epistles and his habit of using ‘newe’ words, that is worth dwelling on.142 In his Histriomastix, William Prynne bemoans the fact that (in the early 1630s) playbooks are ‘more vendible than the choycest Sermons’, complaining that people ‘[read] over three Play-bookes at the least, for every Sermon’. In doing so, he sets up a rhetorical opposition between ‘bad’ plays and ‘good’ sermons, separating the two genres: according to Prynne, people ‘would rather heare the most lascivious Comedy, then the best soule-searching Sermon’.143 Yet as other sources imply, the distinction between plays and sermons was not so fixed. Another critic of

166  How were plays read? Extractive reading playreading, the Puritan clergyman William Gouge, makes a complaint similar to Prynne’s, arguing that ‘[s]ome care not to reade the Scriptures, but of all books make lest account of it: Chronicles, Histories, Playbookes are often read; the Scriptures seldome’. He acknowledges that ‘[s]ome will reade [the Bible] at Church, and turne to places as they are quoted, but never at home’; these, however, ‘yet are better than many, that will bring other bookes to Church, and while the Minister is preaching, reade those’.144 Those ‘other bookes’ smuggled into the church seem to include the aforementioned playbooks, meaning that the divide between playbooks and sermons is collapsed as the former are made to occupy the same physical space as the latter. An equivalent effect is created when sermons and plays share the physical space of a book: at the back of Richard Steward’s Three sermons preached by the Reverend and learned Dr Richard Stuart (1658) is a bookseller’s catalogue of the type discussed by Hooks, which includes amongst the ‘Books Printed for, and sold by, Gabriel Bedel, and Thomas Collins, 1658’ a list of ‘Playes in Folio, Quarto & Octavo’.145 Bedel and Collins obviously saw the potential market for sermons and playbooks as one and the same. Wright’s commonplace book shows him to be part of that market, drawing equal inspiration for his own writing from printed sermons and printed plays.146 Both a preacher and a playwright, Wright’s membership of the commonplace book culture enables him to see value in both genres. In doing so, he goes against the will of Prynne, who tries to negate decades of humanist pedagogical training by insisting that – rather than following Erasmus’s directive to take note of and make use of ‘whatever you come across in any author’ – ministers ‘must speake nothing in the Pulpit but those words which God shall put into their mouthes’. In particular, ‘they must deliver Gods message in his owne dialect; not in the language of Poets, and other humane Authors, in which Gods spirit never breathes’.147 As Guillaume Coatalen points out, Prynne is concerned because he has noticed that sermons often contain ‘quotations’ that have been ‘borrowed’ from the stage.148 Coatalen demonstrates the veracity of the antitheatricalist’s claim, discerning dramatic allusions in a number of seventeenth-century sermons, as well as providing testimony from the anonymous compiler of another early seventeenth-century commonplace book, who transcribes an excerpt from Romeo and Juliet and notes that it formed part of a sermon he heard in 1620.149 Coatalen rightly observes that the incorporation of a commonplaced extract from a play into a sermon urges us to reconsider ‘the complex interplay between two competing genres’, but it is precisely the notion of competition that should be reconsidered.150 Scholars have long observed the similarities between sermons and plays inhering in their shared origin in oral delivery, but what a commonplace book such as Wright’s reminds us is that, once printed, it was the reading approaches of readers with particular value frameworks and motivations that could place the genres on an equal footing.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  167

Conclusion The commonplace books of Edward Pudsey, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and Abraham Wright tell us some things about how three privileged male readers in the first half of the seventeenth century read some plays. They do not tell us about how all readers read all plays, and they exhibit enough idiosyncrasies to remind us that, even among those with a shared background, reading and response remained highly personalised activities. Yet these men’s membership of an interpretive community of readers who received a similar educational training also reveals commonalities between their approaches, and these commonalities point to wider trends which are explored further in the following chapter. All three commonplace books display the lineaments of humanist pedagogy that marshal the extracted text for reuse: the marginal marks and glosses in Pudsey and Drummond’s books, the appropriative adaptation in all three. These aspects of the commonplace books provide evidence that the three playreaders had no trouble conceiving of vernacular drama as a source of potential (linguistic) profit; the pleasure they clearly also derived from their playreading ranged from the prurient (particularly in Drummond but also evident in Pudsey), to the literary (in Wright and Drummond, but also demonstrated by Pudsey’s evident appreciation of a linguistically striking turn of phrase), to the escapist. This last is hinted at by the sequentiality of extracts in all three manuscripts, which implies that commonplacing readers didn’t just think of early modern plays as ‘works to be broken into fragments for personal use’. Although commonplace books present fragments of plays, their compilers did not necessarily abdicate a sense of the play as a whole in their initial reading of it, as demonstrated by Wright’s assiduous recording of the acts from which his ­dramatic extracts are taken. Schurink also argues that the sequential nature of the dramatic extracts in Pudsey’s commonplace book and the fact that they are ‘fairly equally divided over the work as a whole, reflect[s] a greater fidelity to and interest in the text for its own sake than in its application’.151 Cavanagh draws a similar conclusion about Drummond, arguing that the traces of his playreading show him to be ‘not only interested in utilisable fragments but in plot and dramatic process as well’.152 The three commonplace books also demonstrate the growing authority of print in the period. They indicate the extent to which new paratextual and typographical conventions could hold sway over readers, not just in the replication of certain elements of the printed text in the readers’ manuscript transcriptions, but also in their generally careful attribution of the plays they read. Title page author attributions (whether accurate or not) increase throughout the period and their authority increases accordingly: Pudsey, Wright, and Drummond’s manuscript reinscription of this authority demonstrates that where recent scholarship has tended to privilege a collaborative paradigm of dramatic authorship, the attitude of

168  How were plays read? Extractive reading commercial drama’s first readers may in fact have more closely resembled the bibliographic fixation on the author that has to a degree become unfashionable. Finally, these commonplace books demonstrate the way in which so-called ‘goal-oriented reading’ could strip playtexts of their generic distinctiveness, showing the three men either erasing traces of extracts’ dramatic provenance or drawing indiscriminately upon plays and other textual genres for written inspiration. The following chapter presents further evidence that the majority of playreaders read playbooks not with a sense of their contents as performed or performable text, but as texts to be read like other texts, or even simply as repositories of blank paper and imitable type.

Notes 1 Thought-provoking examples of scholarship in the area of the history of reading that examines non-manuscript engagements with books include Brayman Hackel’s study of library catalogues in Reading Material; Jeffrey Todd Knight’s study of binding practices in Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Adam Smyth’s study of interventions such as burning and cutting in Material Texts. For significant work on manuscript engagements, see the Introduction, n. 61. 2 For Smyth’s discussion of commonplace book culture see Autobiography, pp. 127–29. 3 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. xx. 4 Ibid., pp. 2–6. Lesser and Stallybrass discuss the genesis of the first two printed vernacular commonplace books to contain extracts from commercial drama, Bel-vedére or The garden of the Muses (1600) and Englands Parnassus (later the same year) in ‘The First Literary Hamlet’. 5 The Scottish Drummond should by rights be excluded from a study of playreaders ‘in early modern England’; he is included because even if his playreading may not have taken place in England, it was facilitated by his presence in London at the start of the seventeenth century, a trip (or possibly two) that enabled his purchase of the playbooks he then read. See Cavanagh, p. 680. 6 Estill points out (Dramatic Extracts, p. xxi) that the attention paid to Shakespeare in studies of dramatic commonplacing ‘points more to our modern preoccupation with Shakespeare than to early modern reading practices: the archival evidence suggests that there are more manuscripts with extracts from plays by Jonson, Francis Beaumont & John Fletcher, James Shirley, or even Sir John Suckling than Shakespeare’. 7 Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, pp. 143–46. See also Smyth, Autobiography, pp. 123–27. 8 András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 267; Estill, Dramatic Extracts, p. 81. Pudsey’s will states his desire that his ‘note books’ be preserved for his son, Edward: the ‘note books’ presumably include his commonplace book and other similar volumes. Pudsey’s will is transcribed by Juliet M. Gowan in her unpublished MPhil thesis, ‘An edition of Edward Pudsey’s commonplace book (c.1600–1615) from the manuscript in the Bodleian Library’ (University of London, 1967), pp. 713–16. 9 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. v.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  169 10 Smyth, Autobiography, pp. 128–29. 11 Brinsley, sigs 2B2v, 2C2v. 12 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, p. 2. 13 Brinsley, sig. 2C2v; Desiderius Erasmus, The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. by Craig R. Thompson, 89 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974– ), XXIV: Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia/De Ratione Studii, trans. by Betty I. Knott and Brian McGregor (1978), pp. 636–38. For fuller discussion of Erasmus’s prescriptions regarding commonplacing, including the organisational principle of the ‘commonplace-heads’, see Smyth, Autobiography, pp. 125–26. 14 For a contemporary description of the educational importance of imitation, see William Kempe, The education of children in learning (1588, STC 14926), sig. C4v. 15 Moss, p. 106. 16 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, p. 16. The manuscript is now in two parts; the largest part is housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford as MS Eng. poet. d. 3, while four leaves that became detached from it at the end of the nineteenth century are in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office in Stratford-upon-Avon as MS ER 82/1/21. Sustained discussions of the commonplace book can be found in Juliet Gowan’s ‘“One man in his time”: the notebook of Edward Pudsey’, Bodleian Library Record, 22.1 (2009), 94–101; Fred Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books’, pp. 465–69; Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, pp. 267–80; and with a specific focus on the dramatic extracts, Roslyn Lander Knutson’s Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 143–46 and Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, 1592–1623 (London: Black, 2011), pp. 72–83. 17 An exclusionary focus on the extracts from Shakespeare plays in Pudsey’s commonplace book began at the end of the nineteenth century when Richard Savage published a selective transcription of the manuscript’s dramatic extracts entitled Shakespearean Extracts from ‘Edward Pudsey’s Booke’ (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1887). 18 For discussion of the possible provenance of the Othello extracts, which appear in Pudsey’s commonplace book even though his death in 1613 means he could not have read the play in print, see Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. 16–17. As Kiséry (Hamlet’s Moment, p. 274) points out, the key pitfall created by these extracts is that they lead scholars to assume that other extracts also weren’t copied from print sources, when closer examination makes it very clear that they were. 19 Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, p. 270. See also Kiséry’s ‘“Flowers for English Speaking”’, pp. 160–62. 20 Biographical information is from the ODNB. 21 For a list of the non-dramatic contents of MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, see Gowan, ‘An Edition’, pp. 34–37. When Gowan was preparing her thesis, she had not yet discovered the four leaves in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office; for a list of the plays in both MS. Eng. poet. d. 3 and MS ER 82/1/21, see Estill, Dramatic Extracts, p. 16 n. 71. The original ordering of the leaves featuring dramatic extracts, including those in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, is discussed by Knutson, p. 144, n. 57. Previous scholarship has assumed there are twenty-seven plays in the manuscripts (including the Othello extracts); more recently, the compilers of the Dramatic Extracts database have noticed the few lines from Heywood’s The Golden Age that feature, unheaded, at the bottom of MS ER 82/1/21 fol. 4r; the beta version of the database does not include the otherwise unidentified extracts from Daborne’s

170  How were plays read? Extractive reading A Christian Turned Turk that appear on fol. 81r of the Bodleian manuscript. See DEx: Dramatic Extracts, beta version, ed. by Laura Estill and Beatrice Montedoro [accessed 1 June 2021]. 22 Biographical information is from the ODNB. For Edward Pudsey’s potential connection, via his cousin, to the Inns of Court and the playwright John Marston, see Thomas Lockwood, ‘“At Mr Marston’s Request”: Edward Pudsey and the Inns of Court’, Notes and Queries, 63.3 (2016), DOI: 10.1093/notesj/gjw153. 23 Gowan, ‘An Edition’, pp. 713–16. 24 That Pudsey was not the sole reader of – or indeed contributor to – his commonplace book is evident from the presence in MS Eng. poet. d. 3 of a number of different hands. These are discussed by Gowan on pp. 49–63 of her edition of the manuscript; she argues persuasively that the sections of dramatic extracts are all in Pudsey’s own hand. 25 Robert Allott, Englands Parnassus (1600, STC 378), sig. A3r. 26 Pudsey’s preference for comedies is balanced by an interest in reading tragedies and other genres such as history, romance, and satire; he does not discriminate between plays performed at indoor or outdoor playhouses in his choice of dramatic reading. 27 1 The Honest Whore is commonly agreed to have been co-authored by Dekker and Middleton, but the title page of the 1604 edition (seemingly that which Pudsey read, due to his transcription of its title The Converted Courtesan) bore only Dekker’s name. 28 Occasionally, the title Pudsey gives a play is not that given on its title page: see for instance his entitling of Chapman’s Blind Beggar of Alexandria ‘Irus’. The verso of fol. 80 and both sides of fol. 81 in MS. Eng. poet. d. 3 are headed simply ‘Plays’: extracts on these pages are in an italic hand, leading Kiséry to argue that they were made at a later date, by someone other than Pudsey (see Hamlet’s Moment, p. 268 n. 48). This isn’t entirely consistent with his view that Pudsey was particularly interested in the plays of the poetomachia, as one of the plays on fol. 81r is John Marston’s 1607 What You Will, a play Kiséry lists among those ‘read’ by Pudsey (pp. 268–69). Given that Pudsey switches between italic and secretary hand even in the earlier sections of dramatic extracts, I am persuaded by Gowan’s view that all of these, including those on MS. Eng. poet. d. 3 fols 80v and 81, are in Pudsey’s own writing, while accepting that evolutions of both hand and methodology may indicate the transcriptions on these pages were made towards the end of Pudsey’s life: see ‘An Edition’, p. 63. For a fuller description of the layout of Pudsey’s headings and the organisational principles of the manuscript as a whole, see Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books’, p. 465. 29 MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fols 40v, 41r, and 39v. 30 See Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 105–06, for the importance that critics have accorded these two works in the construction of early modern paradigms of singular dramatic authorship. 31 Masten, p. 115. 32 See Stern’s Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004) for an account of the multiple agents involved in the production of printed commercial drama. 33 Loewenstein, p. 64; Foucault, p. 209. 34 Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, p. 77. 35 See fols 39v, 40r, and 42r of MS. Eng. poet. d. 3; also fol. 40v (‘Pla: Joh: Marst’), fol. 41r (‘PL. shakesp. Joh.’), and fol. 41v (‘Pl: Marston. Johnson’). All such headings, and the marginal keywords I discuss below, are made in Pudsey’s ‘glossing hand’, which is the same hand he uses to render printed italics in his transcriptions.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  171 36 Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour (1600, STC 14767), sig. H3r (MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 39v); Cynthia’s Revels (1601), sig. D4v (MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 40r); Poetaster (1602), sig. D2r (MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 42r). 37 As well as the heading on fol. 41r of MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, all the pages of Shakespearean extracts in MS ER 82/1/21 are headed with the playwright’s name. 38 Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1600), sig. E1v (MS ER 82/1/21, fol. 1v); Hamlet (1604), sig. L4r (MS ER 82/1/21, fol. 2v). 39 This page is MS ER 82/1/21, fol. 1r. 40 As Lockwood argues (in ‘“At Mr Marston’s Request”’), when Pudsey adds a name that is absent from the playbook’s title page, as in the case of John Marston in his heading for the extracts from Jack Drum’s Entertainment (MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 40v), it may be because of his family and social connections with the playwright. 41 Quoted in Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, p. 128. 42 MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 81v; original passages on sig. A2v of the 1612 The White Devil. 43 These inverted commas are absent from the transcriptions of extracts from playbooks printed after 1603, just as the marginal glosses (discussed below) are. 44 Hunter, p. 171. 45 Lesser and Stallybrass, p. 376. See also Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. 18–19. 46 Jonson, Every Man Out (STC 14767), sig. G1v. Pudsey’s transcription is on fol. 39v of MS. Eng. poet. d. 3. For further discussion of this couplet’s circulation, see Kiséry, ‘“Flowers for English Speaking”’, pp. 157–58. 47 ‘The “Great Variety” of Readers and Early Modern Reading Practices’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 139–57 (p. 151). 48 Jonson, Every Man Out (STC 14767), sig. P4v; Pudsey’s rendering on fol. 39v of MS. Eng. poet. d. 3 is ‘An ///Axiome/// in naturall philosophie. ///what comes nearest the nature of | that it feeds conuerts quicker to norishment & doth sooner essentiate///’. Estill draws attention to a mid-seventeenth-century reader of Fulke Greville’s Mustapha who copies out only the passages from this play that are printed in italics in Greville’s Certain Learned and Elegant Works (1633): see Dramatic Extracts, p. 21. 49 Lesser and Stallybrass consider the likelihood that such italicised sententiae derive from editorial rather than authorial intervention in ‘The First Literary Hamlet’, p. 403. 50 Smyth, Autobiography, p. 128. 51 These are absent from the sections of extracts from plays first printed after 1603. For further discussion of these glosses, including their use in the non-dramatic sections of the manuscript, see Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books’, pp. 466–68. 52 MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fols 39v, 41v, and 42r-v. All these are also commonplaceheads in Englands Parnassus. 53 MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 41v; paraphrase of Poetaster, sig. G1v. 54 MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fol. 41r; paraphrase of Every Man in His Humour (1601), sig. D3r. 55 Smyth, Autobiography, p. 128. 56 MS. Eng. poet. d. 3, fols. 21v, 40v, and 42r-v and MS ER 82/1/21, fol. 1v. 57 Shakespeare, Hamlet (1604), sig. H3r. Pudsey renders this in MS ER 82/1/21 (fol. 2v): ‘Yow are keen my L. response; yt wil cost yow a groaning to take of my edge’. Replacing the speech prefix with ‘response’ is typical of his habit of excising dramatic context. 58 Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books’, p. 468. Kiséry (Hamlet’s Moment, p. 271) also remarks on Pudsey’s ‘eagerness for misogynous double entendre

172  How were plays read? Extractive reading and sexual innuendo’; Katherine Duncan-Jones, too, notes the prurient nature of several of Pudsey’s extracts (Shakespeare: Upstart Crow, pp. 74–75). 59 Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, p. 279. 60 A further indication of the cross-pollination of manuscript and print is that, in altering his transcriptions in this way, Pudsey makes them more closely resemble the types of dramatic extracts found in contemporaneous printed commonplace books like Englands Parnassus. On Robert Allott’s alterations of the Shakespearean extracts in Englands Parnassus, especially the removal of speech prefixes, see Stallybrass and Chartier, pp. 49–50. 61 Webster, The White Devil (1612), sig. F3v. 62 MS. Eng. poet. d. 3., fol. 81v. 63 Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, p. 275. 64 Ibid., p. 275. 65 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, p. 20. 66 The accolade is from the ODNB: see Michael R. G. Spiller, ‘Drummond, William, of Hawthornden (1585–1649), poet and pamphleteer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/8085. Drummond’s commonplace book is MS 2059 in the National Library of Scotland. Barring Estill’s brief discussion of it (Dramatic Extracts, pp. 19–21), the only concentrated discussion of Drummond’s playreading habits published to date is Dermot Cavanagh’s article, ‘William Drummond of Hawthornden as Reader of Renaissance Drama’. Cavanagh also explores the ways in which Drummond’s commonplace books and marked-up playbooks encode and depart from the approaches central to the commonplace book culture; he is less struck by the misogynistic and prurient tone of many of the passages Drummond transcribes and marks that is a focus of the present discussion. 67 Biographical information is from the ODNB. 68 MacDonald, ed., The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, pp. 9–10. 69 This can be inferred from the presence of six of the commonplaced plays in Drummond’s list of ‘bookes red anno 1609 be me’, which is also a part of MS 2059 (see MacDonald, ed., The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, p. 229 for a transcription). MacDonald describes the provenance of MS 2059 and MS 2060 in ‘The Manuscripts of Drummond of Hawthornden’, unpublished PhD thesis, 2 vols, University of Edinburgh (1969), I, pp. 1–5, and lists their contents in the second volume of his thesis, on pages 1–43 (MS 2059) and 52–108 (MS 2060). Although MacDonald refers to both manuscripts as commonplace books, the nineteenth-century binding together of multiple collections of jottings has given them a definitively miscellaneous character. Thus the ‘commonplace book’ under discussion is the section of MS 2059 that begins on fol. 183r. 70 MacDonald’s transcriptions of the ‘Bookes red be me’ lists, which cover the years 1606–14, are on pp. 228–31 of The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden; the original lists are on fols 359–67 of MS 2059. Cavanagh discusses several of Drummond’s marked-up playbooks in ‘William Drummond of Hawthornden as Reader’. 71 MacDonald, ed., The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, p. 231. MacDonald’s transcription of the list is on pp. 231–32. Cavanagh (p. 680) points out that this list still cannot be considered comprehensive as it is missing titles by both Shakespeare and Jonson. 72 MacDonald, ed., The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, p. 9; see also Cavanagh, pp. 681–83. 73 For discussion of how Drummond used the non-dramatic contents of his commonplace books to hone his skills at poetic composition, see MacDonald, ‘The Manuscripts’, I, pp. 266–303.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  173 74 The only play with a title page author attribution that Drummond fails to attribute in his commonplace book is John Day’s The Isle of Gulls (1606). 75 [Thomas Heywood], How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602), sigs B3v-B4r. 76 Marston, Parasitaster (STC 17483), sig. A2v. 77 Day, Law Tricks, sig. G4v. 78 Continuous printing constitutes ‘a compositional technique […] in which verse lines broken between two speakers are set on one line to create a full metrical unit’: see Lesser, Renaissance Drama, pp. 66–67. 79 Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy ([1592]), sigs E1v-E2r. Emma Smith’s appendix to her edition of the play demonstrates the frequency with which the opening lines of this speech were parodied in the period, increasing the likelihood of Drummond’s recognition of Day’s borrowing. See The Spanish Tragedie with The First Part of Jeronimo (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 150–51. 80 Lesser notes (Renaissance Drama, pp. 67–68) that ‘the practice of continuous printing began in the universities and with translations from classical drama’; printers of professional plays begin to employ the technique around the start of the seventeenth century, at roughly the same time as Drummond was making his transcriptions from Law Tricks. 81 Kempe, sig. C4v. 82 Ibid., sig. F2r. 83 See MacDonald, ed., The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (pp. 14–21), for discussion of the humanistic focus of Drummond’s education. 84 Brinsley, sig. G3v. 85 On fols 209r, 214r, 219r, 220v, 221v, 223v, 346v, and 347v. 86 Smyth, Autobiography, p. 128. 87 MacDonald, ‘The Manuscripts’, I, pp. 10, 15. 88 See A Mad World, My Masters (1608), sig. F1v for the original line and punctuation; Zuccone’s speech on sig. G3r of Parasitaster (STC 17483) begins ‘O heaven! that God made for a man no other meanes of procreation and maintaining the world peopled but by weomen [sic]’. 89 The extant marked-up copies of Drummond’s playbooks in the University of Edinburgh Library indicate that he did not copy into his commonplace book all the lines he marked in the playbooks themselves. Thus, while Cavanagh (pp. 687–89) observes that the large number of lines and passages marked by Drummond in his copy of Dekker and Middleton’s 1 The Honest Whore (University of Edinburgh shelfmark De.3.60) encode diverse attitudes towards women, the fact that not all of these lines (or attitudes) make their way into his commonplace book signals that those that do are the ones to which he has given the final seal of approval. 90 For the original passages in the plays’ first editions see Day, Law Tricks, sigs C3r and C4v; Middleton, A Mad World (1608), sig. D2v. 91 This scene is on sigs D2v-D3v of The Isle of Gulls (1606). 92 Day, The Isle of Gulls, sig. D3v. Drummond’s rendering of the exchange on fol. 224r of MS 2059 is ‘on minuts dreame longer I had tride | the difference twixt a virgin & a bride. | 2 o twald haue vex a saint, my bloud wule burne | to be so near & misse so good a turne’. The bold represents overlining. 93 Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, p. 30. For discussion of plays as pamphlets, see Chapter 1, pp. 37–39. 94 Stubbes, sig. N4r. 95 Cavanagh quotes from it briefly (p. 685); Estill does not acknowledge its existence in her discussion of Drummond’s dramatic extracting (Dramatic Extracts, pp. 19–21). MacDonald transcribes Drummond’s rendering of the

174  How were plays read? Extractive reading titles of the five plays in ‘The Manuscripts’, II, pp. 103–04. The dramatic extracts in MS 2060 can be found on fols 296v–298r. 96 Dates given are those provided by MacDonald to accompany his transcription, indicating the edition Drummond would have read (or, when ambiguous, the editions). 97 These plays are all listed in Drummond’s ‘Bookes red be me’ list for 1609. 98 See Braithwaite, sig. T2r, and the earlier discussion in Chapter 2, pp. 110–11. 99 MacDonald argues that MS 2059 represents the earliest record of Drummond’s reading, and that he began compiling it in 1606, at the age of twenty-one. See ‘The Manuscripts’, I, p. 14. 100 All these titles appear in Drummond’s list of ‘Bookes red be me | anno 1606’. Cavanagh discusses the passages that Drummond marks up in his copy of Romeo and Juliet on p. 692 of ‘William Drummond of Hawthornden as Reader’; the argument about Jaggard’s use of Shakespeare’s name is Loewenstein’s in Ben Jonson, p. 64. 101 William Drummond, Poems (Edinburgh, 1614, STC 7254), unsigned. 102 William Drummond, Poems (Edinburgh, 1616, STC 7255), A3r. 103 The 1614 version even seems to make explicit reference to this commonplace book, with Drummond-as-speaker declaring that now he has met the woman who is personified as the ‘blushing Booke’ (in 1616 she will become a ‘living Booke’), he has ‘all Ephemerides laid aside’. ‘Ep^h^emeris’ is the title written in Drummond’s hand on fol. 1 of MS 2059. 104 Cavanagh, p. 681. 105 For further discussion of the comparative advantages of playreading over playgoing, see August, ‘“Tickling the senses”’. 106 Biographical information is from the ODNB. For further (limited) information about The Reformation see Misha Teramura, ‘Reformation, The’, Lost Plays Database, ed. by David McInnis, Matthew Steggle, and Misha Teramura, updated 3 December 2015 [accessed 1 June 2021]. 107 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, p. 81. Estill’s full discussion of Wright’s commonplace book can be found on pp. 81–88 of Dramatic Extracts; significant earlier discussions of the manuscript can be found in James G. McManaway, ‘“Excerpta Quedam per A. W. Adolescentem”’, in Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, ed. by Thomas P. Harrison and others (Austin: University of Texas, 1967), pp. 117–29 and Arthur C. Kirsch, ‘A Caroline Commentary on the Drama’, Modern Philology, 66 (1969), 256–61. 108 For a transcription of these assessments, see Kirsch, pp. 256–59. Estill, following the British Library catalogue, states that the bound volume contains three parts: firstly, the prose histories on fols 3–68, secondly, the dramatic extracts and extracts from Thomas Fuller’s Holy War on fols 69–116, and thirdly, a short section of extracts from Anthony Stafford’s Niobe on fols 117–19v (see Dramatic Extracts, p. 81). It in fact contains four parts, as Wright’s own numbering of its pages shows: the historical texts comprise two parts, the first containing pages numbered 1–54 and the second (more or less accurately) 1–73. The third and fourth parts of the manuscript – the dramatic extracts including Fuller’s Holy War and the three pages of extracts from Niobe – similarly each begin their page numbering anew. For further detail of the volume’s non-dramatic contents, see McManaway, p. 118. 109 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, p. 81. 110 These unheaded extracts from the Works, on fols 115r–116r, have hitherto gone unnoticed by scholars. 111 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. 84–85. For a list of the plays (excluding the Mayne, Peaps, and Jonson folio titles) included in the manuscript and the number of pages their extracts occupy, see McManaway, pp. 121–22.

How were plays read? Extractive reading  175 112 Farmer and Lesser, ‘Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, p. 6. The scholars elaborate their argument in ‘Canons and Classics’. 113 For further discussion of these two categories, see Farmer and Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics’. 114 Webster, The White Devil (1612), sig. A2r. 115 In the left-hand margin of fol. 111r (a page which features a handwritten ‘table of contents’ for the dramatic extracts in the commonplace book) is the note ‘see for Shirleys plaies at the marigold in the yard’ – in other words, the bookseller at the sign of the Marigold in St. Paul’s Churchyard. For the appraisal of The Wedding, see fol. 82r. 116 Farmer and Lesser’s full list of the ‘Caroline Canon of Classic Plays’ is on pp. 31–32 of ‘Canons and Classics’. 117 See ‘Canons and Classics’, p. 33, for the list of ‘Undiscovered Classics’; what Farmer and Lesser term the ‘Golden Age’ is ‘the period of, roughly, 1590– 1610’ (‘Canons and Classics’, p. 30). 118 Farmer and Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics’, p. 30. This analysis of Wright’s commonplace book complicates Beatrice Montedoro’s conclusion – drawn in relation to another 1630s manuscript commonplace book housed in the Bodleian Library – that ‘the consolidation of a canon of ‘classic’ plays observed in the playbook market is not corroborated by the [manuscript] collections containing dramatic extracts’ (‘Comedies and Tragedies’, p. 288). 119 Farmer and Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics’, p. 36. 120 Ibid., p. 35. 121 Commendatory verse included in James Shirley’s The Grateful Servant (1630), sig. XA1r. 122 Like Drummond, Wright is in the habit of listing the genres of the plays from which he extracts. He designates as ‘tragicomedies’ James Shirley’s The Young Admiral, Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King and Philaster, Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case, Davenant’s The Platonic Lovers, and Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess; in several instances, he correctly assesses the play’s genre without paratextual guidance from the title page or internal paratexts. His genre designations can be found both in the ‘table of contents’ on fol. 111r and as part of the headings that introduce each group of dramatic extracts. 123 See Chapter 2, pp. 99-100. 124 Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. 87–88. Estill focuses on Wright’s transcription of Shirley’s dedicatory epistles; he also copies extracts from the addresses to the reader in The Devil’s Law Case and The Duchess of Malfi, as well as from the commendatory verses prefacing The Faithful Shepherdess. 125 Ibid., p. 87–88. Estill also sees Wright’s ‘inherently royalist attitude’ (p. 88) encoded in the transcriptions of Shirley’s dedications, given that those which he chooses to copy are all to noble patrons (with the exception of the satirical dedication of A Bird in a Cage to William Prynne). 126 James Shirley, The Young Admiral (1637), sigs A2r-v. 127 See p. 165, below, for the identification of these writers. 128 As McManaway notes, this passage is ‘[i]n the right margin, in a different ink’. 129 Kirsch (p. 260) notes that the lines designated by a plus sign in the manuscript are ‘direct quotations of lines or speeches’, whereas those ‘phrases’ not accompanied by such a marker are ‘paraphrases or quotations of turns of phrase’. Such consistency cannot be categorically asserted. McManaway’s transcription can be found on pp. 120–21 of ‘“Excerpta Quedam”’. As he himself acknowledges, it is by no means perfect, and it is possible to fill in several lacunae. For example, ‘Take out of these’ is in the manuscript followed by ‘fff’, which may be assumed to refer to the pages that follow, and after ‘several occas < >’ is written ‘Vid: for ye names of each | play pag. 43’.

176  How were plays read? Extractive reading (This is the ‘table of contents’ page on fol. 111r). The final line should read ‘either here or in my books’ (my emphasis). 130 McManaway, pp. 120–21; Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. 86–87. Kirsch (p. 260) also accepts this premise. 131 McManaway, pp. 120–21. 132 McManaway’s transcription, p. 121, n. 8. Estill explains the code in a note (Dramatic Extracts, p. 87 n. 52) and conjectures that ‘Wright evidently intended his son to be able to read the cipher’ (p. 87 n. 53). 133 Sydenham’s Five Sermons was printed six times between 1627 and 1637 (three times in 1627, once in 1636, and twice in 1637). 134 Wright, Five sermons, in five several styles (1656, Wing W3685), sig. A8v. 135 Shirley, The Grateful Servant (1630), sig. X1r. See Chapter 2, p. 108, for discussion of Habington’s verse. 136 According to Wright, the scene of attempted rape in Shirley’s The Traitor is ‘well pennd’ (fol. 74r) and ‘Iago for a rogue and Othello for a iealous husband [are] 2 parts well pend’ (fol. 84v). For further discussion of Wright’s fixation on ‘lines’ and ‘plot’, see Stern, Documents of Performance, p. 8. 137 For the original see Shakespeare, Hamlet (1637), sig. L3r. The crossing-out of ‘feare’ and its replacement with the correct ‘teares’ in later ink offers proof that the dramatic extracts were carefully read when revisited. 138 Adam Hooks, ‘Booksellers’ Catalogues and the Classification of Printed Drama in Seventeenth-century England’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102.4 (2008), 445–64. 139 For more on readers’ conception of act divisions as markers of dramatic literature, see Chapter 4, pp. 214-16. 140 Stern, Documents of Performance, p. 8. 141 Estill identifies these writers in Dramatic Extracts, p. 87 n. 52, pointing out that the most elusive writer in Wright’s list is ‘Montague’: as a third option, she proposes Montague Bertie, the second Earl of Lindsey. 142 The epithet originates with the seventeenth-century biographer Anthony Wood. 143 Prynne, sigs *3r-v, 3A*3r. 144 William Gouge, Exposition on the whole fifth chapter of S. Johns Gospell (1630, STC 12114), sigs M1v-M2r. 145 Richard Steward, Three sermons preached by the Reverend and learned Dr Richard Stuart (1658, Wing S5527), sigs I2r-v. 146 Kirsch notes, without justification: ‘Clearly, Wright […] was using plays as he had used Sydenham, as rhetorical primers for his own sermons’ (p. 260). 147 Prynne, sigs 6D1r-v. 148 Ibid., sig. 6D1r; Guillaume Coatalen, ‘Shakespeare and other ‘Tragicall Discourses’ in an Early-Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book from Oriel College, Oxford’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, 13 (2007), 120–64 (pp. 157–58). 149 Coatalen, p. 157. 150 Ibid., p. 158. 151 Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books’, pp. 466–68. 152 Cavanagh, p. 678.

4 How were plays read? Part two: Using, marking, annotating

The previous chapter examined the playreading habits and agendas of three elite men whose known biographical details help to confirm the conclusions pointed at by their commonplace books. By contrast, this chapter examines the playreading of early modern men and women who most often leave as the only clues to their engagement with printed drama the ink and pencil traces of reading that are found in playbooks themselves. Such traces have been influentially construed by William Sherman as evidence of book ‘use’ rather than ‘reading’, the terminological distinction arising from the recognition that while manuscript marks and marginalia in printed books may demonstrate moments of engagement with either the text or the book-as-object, many of them do not appear to be the result of the act that the OED defines as involving the inspection of writing and, crucially, its subsequent interpretation.1 While the commonplace books of Pudsey, Drummond, and Wright might seem to indicate these men’s ‘use’ of playbooks as sources of linguistic profit, in the process of extracting that profit they necessarily also interpret what they read: in this chapter, and particularly in its first section, I consider a broader spectrum of ‘use’-ful reading. This includes evidence of responses not just to playbooks’ text or paratext, but also, more basically, to the elements to which they owe their very ‘book-ness’: their paper and ink. Although such responses may not always cast light on the interpretive acts of playreading, they do hint at the position occupied by playbooks in the early modern cultural imagination, and at the gender, social networks, and literacy levels of playreaders – once more confirming and qualifying the implications of rhetorically constructed print evidence with manuscript evidence of actual historical reception. Even as studies of marginalia and book use have proliferated, scholars have critiqued their methodology and questioned the extent of what manuscript annotations can tell us about reading in the past.2 Adam Smyth, for instance, has recently highlighted the dominance of case studies of known individuals’ annotating habits, as well as pointing out the need to map the genre of marginal annotations.3 This chapter’s focus on anonymous readers bypasses the first concern, and the large number DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748-5

178  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating of playbooks surveyed is precisely what allows for trends (and departures from them) to emerge and a greater understanding of the common conventions for marking books to be developed.4 In an earlier critique, Zachary Lesser laments that manuscript evidence rarely casts light on early modern readers’ readings of plays, providing more often discrete instances of ‘acts of reading’ and evidence of the type of reading practices habitually utilised in early modern England.5 Rather than focusing on the extent to which such evidence provides proof of readings such as we ourselves might make of a play, I argue that its usefulness and importance instead lie in the way in which the marks and marginalia that point to moments of ‘use’, to ‘acts of reading’, to shared and individual reading practices, and (occasionally, if not often) to ‘readings’, coalesce to provide a more meaningful and nuanced picture of the way those early modern men and women who had access to pen and ink or lead pencil responded to and valued printed playbooks.6 In his introduction to Used Books, Sherman cites Carl James Grindley’s taxonomy of the three broad categories of manuscript marginalia found in early modern printed books.7 They are, according to Sherman, marks or annotations that ‘“are without any identifiable context”’, ‘“exist within a context associated with that of the [book]”’, or are ‘“directly associated with the various texts that the [volume] contains”’.8 I suggest that the marginalia found in playbooks can similarly be divided into three broad categories – around which this chapter will be organised – but my categories differ from Grindley’s because, when following Sherman’s lead and extending his taxonomy to include printed books, it seems necessary to reject the contention that marks or annotations can exist ‘without any identifiable context’. I maintain instead that the context of such seemingly oblique marginalia is always the book, and that marks and annotations that seem to bear no relation to the text in fact respond to the material features that transform the text into a book: the paper of its pages or the typeface(s) in which its words are printed. My first category of readers’ marks and marginalia thus includes those that respond to the playbook as object, that show a conception of it as a possession, as an available source of paper and imitable printed type – that indicate in some way an acknowledgement of its ‘book-ness’ as opposed to its textual or dramatic nature. I devote the first section of the chapter to discussion of such marginalia, beginning with an examination of inferences that can be drawn from the inscription of a name in a playbook. I then address certain marginalia that indicate readers using the playbook – as opposed to the playtext – as a tool to improve their literacy, and consider how this might confirm the implications of the paratextual material discussed in Chapter 1 regarding the range of playreaders’ educational backgrounds; next, I discuss marginal annotations that appear to cast light on the category of reading material to which readers conceived of playbooks as belonging. Finally, I look at an

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  179 example of a reader using a playbook as a location of personal recordkeeping, and argue that such annotations are not necessarily always the unrelated addenda to the playtext that they may at first glance appear. This final point leads into a discussion of my second category of playreaders’ marks, which, like Grindley’s third, consists of marks and annotations that demonstrate readerly engagement with the text or paratext printed in the book. These are indications of a response to the playtext as text – ‘readings’ or ‘acts of reading’ or evidence of prevailing reading practices. They demonstrate the ways in which readers connected plays with other historical and cultural discourses, and they reveal once again that playreading was an activity that enabled readers to condone – or resist – a dominant early modern discourse of misogyny. These marks and annotations also often indicate their makers’ membership of the commonplace book culture to which Pudsey, Drummond, and Wright belonged, and provide further examples of the types of approaches to playreading discussed in the previous chapter, this time localised within the immediate context of the playbook itself. As with the three commonplace books, however, the responses these approaches encode can be both idiosyncratic and personal. In the third section of the chapter, I deal with my final category of playbook marks and marginalia, those which ostensibly acknowledge the uniqueness of commercial drama as a genre that was originally not just text but performance, and which appear (unlike those discussed in the second section) to constitute indications of a reader’s engagement with the printed text as a generically distinct form, a play. They are annotations that add elements of what Roman Ingarden refers to as the Nebentext: character speech prefixes, stage directions, and act divisions. Ostensibly, these demonstrate theatrically minded readers visualising the play in performance, but as often as not, I argue, they in fact simply aid conceptualisation of its action (rather than its dramatic action), or seek to provide missing elements seen as belonging to the printed play. Readers’ manuscript additions that more firmly link the play in print to its performed incarnation are those that record details of past performance in the form of a particular theatrical event, but even these do not indicate that the readers that made them necessarily thought about these performances when (or if) they then read the play. Similarly, the marking of passages that demonstrate an awareness of dramatic intertextuality does not clearly indicate whether readers are drawing connections with performed plays or with other printed plays. Such evidence underscores the rare nature of Abraham Wright’s playreading, which holds plays’ textual and theatrical qualities in mind simultaneously. When set against the type of evidence discussed in this final section, Wright appears as the exception that proves the rule: that regardless of the paratextual implications that readers may have valued plays for their theatrical provenance, once a play was transformed into a book it was most often read as such, the remembered or imagined stage giving way to the immediate tangibility of the page.

180  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating

Responses to the play as book One of the first and most common types of manuscript annotation to confront one when opening an early modern playbook is a name or signature, most frequently found on the title page, but also often enough on subsequent pages of the text. Jason Scott-Warren has argued, following Sherman, that these marks should be thought of as ‘graffiti’, providing at a fundamental level ‘the documentation of a relationship between [a person and a place]’.9 In the case of signatures or name inscriptions in plays, the ‘place’ is the playbook, and in the following discussion I want to consider what the quality and positioning of certain instances of this type of marginalia might tell us about the relationship between the people who made them and the books they made them in. ScottWarren discerns three main impetuses for the inscription of a name in a printed book: pen-trials, literacy development (specifically writing), and the provision of what Heidi Brayman Hackel calls ‘sassy records of ownership’.10 Playbooks were certainly sites for the first and second of these, as my subsequent discussion of non-onomastic marginalia demonstrates. I want to begin, however, by focusing on names as records of ownership, and consider what these might tell us about the writers’ valuation of the playbooks in which they left their mark. As other scholars have established, many of the early modern playbooks preserved in the research libraries of the British Isles and the United States contain signatures or names that were clearly made by early readers.11 Sometimes, however, a name is accompanied by the assertion that the play in hand is something that the writer ‘owns’, or is ‘his’ or ‘her book’, which clearly throws the annotation into the realm of ownership inscription, rather than any of the other categories identified by Scott-Warren. An example can be found in one of the Folger Shakespeare Library copies of George Chapman’s 1599 comedy An Humorous Day’s Mirth, in which an inscription in an early hand on the verso of the final page proclaims: ‘Thomas Bentley ownes | this booke’.12 In a copy of John Marston’s The Malcontent (1604), again in the Folger, the title page’s verso possesses the declaration ‘Thomas Haukes | his boke’; Frances Wolfreston famously inscribed her playbooks with the words ‘Frances Wolfreston hor bouk’.13 Examples such as these imply that a playbook is a valued object meriting a possessive ownership inscription. However, they can also, when juxtaposed against further marginalia, hint at a playreading context involving sociability and the circulation of the playbook among multiple readers. On the verso of the final page of one of the British Library’s copies of the 1591 edition of John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao, a careful hand has written ‘John Fletcher | his booke and | hee that steleth | shall bee hanged | a pon a h’ (Figure 4.1).14 The threat of punishment, despite its hyperbole, indicates Fletcher’s conception of the playbook as something of value: a possession that is his alone. The two names

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  181

Figure 4.1  Marginalia on final page of John Lyly’s Sapho and Phao (1591, STC 17087, BL 161.a.73). © The British Library Board.

182  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating in different hands that are superscribed above Fletcher’s warning – ‘James Loucst’ and ‘Thomas Huckel’ – thus mock the threatening antagonism of Fletcher’s inscription, indicating as they do that the book has at some stage passed out of Fletcher’s possession, enabling other readers (who have escaped the gallows) to make their marks upon it. In an alternative interpretation, Fletcher’s inscription may date from a point subsequent to those of the other two men, indicating that the fact of a playbook’s previous circulation through the hands of others did not prevent it being seen as an object of worth, deserving of the manuscript ‘anathema’ added to its final page.15 As discussed in Chapter 1, second-hand plays may have had a broad appeal thanks to their cheaper price tag: the manuscript inscriptions in Sappho and Phao perhaps offer proof that a playbook’s value for money did not diminish its value as a possession. If the poetic testimony of Richard Brome can be taken at face value, it is the small format of this quarto playbook that makes it particularly likely to encounter multiple readers. When Brome describes quarto playbooks as ‘sociable Pocket-books’, he creates an image of easily portable publications (Bodley’s ‘baggage books’) that can be passed from reader to reader, definitively opposed to the immoveable folios that aspire ‘in Libraries to hang in chaines’.16 The ‘sociable’ nature of the reading and exchange of quarto playbooks encoded in the transferred epithet used by Brome is supported by the numerous instances of multiple readers recording their names in playbooks. A Thomas Knight writes his name twice on the title page of one of the British Library copies of the 1608 The Revenger’s Tragedy (attributed to Thomas Middleton); this copy also bears the name ‘Ed: Barkeley’ carefully inscribed next to the word ‘Tragædie’ on the title page; and that of ‘ffrances Slator’ appears several times on sig. C4r, interspersed amongst several lines of marginalia that have been either cropped or struck through so as to render them largely illegible.17 In the outer margin of sig. B4v of a British Library copy of the 1630 edition of How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad is the name ‘William’; a few pages on (sig. C4v) is the name ‘John’, in a different hand, while the verso of the title page features the name ‘Mary’ in yet another hand, struck through.18 While the seemingly incidental location of these inscriptions may push them away from classification as ownership inscriptions and towards the realms of pen-trials or literacy practice posited by Scott-Warren as an additional rationale for the presence of names in books, they nevertheless testify to the multiple hands through which these ‘sociable Pocket-books’ have passed. Whether the names are those of contemporaries among whom the playbook was passed around, or of members of a subsequent generation to whom it was passed down; whether the transaction between the readers that enabled the inscription of a new name was financial or not: what name inscriptions illuminate is the playbook’s valued status within a sociable network of object exchange.

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  183 They also confirm the extent to which early modern women were participating in this network, and the range of these women’s playreading. Despite frequent references to plays as the genre of reading material preferred by women (Brome, for instance, remarks: ‘Ladies […] ne’re look | On any but a Poeme or Play-book’), the number of playbooks currently included among the titles on the Early Modern Female Book Ownership blog remains limited.19 The collections of the major research libraries, however, offer up plenty of playbooks featuring the names and signatures of early modern women, testifying to wide-ranging tastes in drama that extended well beyond the confines of the comic genre assumed to appeal most to female readers.20 While a Folger copy of the first edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s comedy The Scornful Lady bears the inscription ‘Mary Barbour’s booke’ adjacent to its header title, the title page of a copy in the National Library of Scotland of the 1598 edition of Marlowe’s more tragic Edward II bears the name ‘Grace Strangwayes’ on its title page.21 A ‘Gartrude Short’ inscribed her signature below the ornament on the final page of a copy in the Bodleian Library of How a Man May Choose (a comedy), but a Temperance Cremer wrote her name and the date, 1651, on the title page of a British Library copy of the first part of Thomas Heywood’s ‘classical legend’ The Iron Age – perhaps confirming the success of Heywood’s paratextual solicitude towards female and less-educated playreaders.22 Three extant copies of the Beaumont and Fletcher tragicomedy A King and No King in the Bodleian and the National Library of Scotland were inscribed by women: an Anne Lovelace, a Mary Wood, and a Mary Holman.23 Other inscriptions of women’s names allow for a less confident pre-eighteenthcentury dating, but those cited give an indication of the spectrum of taste among early modern women playreaders – which was certainly generically wider than early printed evidence might have us believe. All the examples discussed above complement – and complicate – some of the conclusions that have been drawn about readers’ inscriptions in copies of plays by William Shakespeare. Jean-Christophe Mayer, for instance, interprets multiple inscriptions of different readers’ names in a copy of the Second Folio as instances in which ‘readers seem to compete in their claims of ownership of the book and for their right to inscribe their names against Shakespeare’s’.24 This imagines that early readers shared our own sense of Shakespeare’s cultural value – but what then should we make of the existence of similar inscriptions in non-canonical playbooks, printed in a less prestigious format? John Fletcher clearly valued his copy of Sappho and Phao, despite the fact that, lacking a title page author attribution, it was ostensibly by an anonymous playwright – and in any case, not by Shakespeare. This perhaps signifies that early readers might have had a regard for other works and playwrights that equalled the esteem Mayer supposes them to have had for Shakespeare. When we move to consider instances of the other types of ‘graffiti’ identified by

184  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating Scott-Warren, Mayer’s Shakespeare-centred conclusions are once again problematised. ‘What can be regarded as penmanship exercises or pen trials’, holds Mayer, ‘may be seen either as attempts at self-expression sparked by Shakespeare’s work or as confident assertions by extremely literate individuals of their mastery of the written medium’.25 However, looking at identical examples of such marginalia in non-­Shakespearean quarto playbooks offers a caution. Either the works of other less esteemed playwrights were equally encouraging of ‘self-expression’, or – more plausibly – all playbooks, including those by today’s favourite early ­modern dramatist, made their inked type and blank paper available to early readers as sites of pragmatic self-improvement. As well as the scribbles that are the most basic form of pen-trial, numerous non-Shakespearean quarto playbooks demonstrate readers responding to the availability of an adjacent blank space on the page next to a line that provides a ready exemplar for copying and thereby improving their hand – or hands. In a British Library copy of Philip Massinger’s The Bondman (1624), a reader uses the prompt of the running title and the space of the outer margins of sigs B4r, D2r, and I4v to write the play’s title in three different hands: a formal engrossing italic, a plain italic, and a secretary hand.26 The striking image ‘Carry your body swimming’, to describe dancing, is also copied out in the margin of sig. H4v (the page on which it appears), an indication of a moment in which a humanistic attention to unusual or effective phrasing cohered with a drive towards a more skill-based self-improvement. A similar instance of a particular phrase prompting marginal transcription by a reader practising his handwriting can be found in a British Library copy of Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies (1618), in which the Latin aphorism ‘Si non caste, tamen caute’ has been transcribed vertically in the outer margin of sig. E2r (on which it appears).27 The reader’s use of an italic hand mimics the typeface in which the phrase is printed in the text, perhaps confirmation of Brayman Hackel’s observation about the noteworthy nature of a change in type – the rendering, which has been subsequently struck through, is the only manuscript marginalia in the copy. Lines copied in the interests of handwriting practice are not always those that are inherently noteworthy, however, and can sometimes emulate paratext rather than text: on the final page of a British Library copy of the 1602 Spanish Tragedy, a reader has made use of the outer margin to vertically copy the four lines of Revenge’s closing speech, the first couplet rendered in a neat secretary hand and the second in italic. Accompanying them is a truncated rendering of the colophon, given by the reader as ‘Imprinted | W W |1602’.28 The manuscript marginalia in playbooks that is clearly mere handwriting practice is unlikely to have been made by the ‘extremely literate individuals’ imagined by Mayer. Instead, it seems to point towards the existence of playreaders who had benefited from sufficient education to have acquired the rudiments of written literacy, but had not advanced them through extensive practice in the types of written composition that

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  185 would have been required in the later years of grammar school and at the universities: precisely those less elite potential play-buyers who Jonson and others worried would be able to read plays but not understand them. By dint of their ability to wield a pen, these readers are more literate than those who ‘can but spell’, but some of the types of annotations they make cannot help but recall the early stages of literacy acquisition, focusing as they do on individual letters or short two- or three-letter words. In a British Library copy of Dekker and Middleton’s 1 The Honest Whore (1616), a reader uses the lower half of the outer margin of sig. K4r to practice forming the letter ‘f’ (four times).29 A reader inscribes the word ‘my’ in the outer margin of sig. E3v of a British Library copy of Marston’s 1616 Jack Drum’s Entertainment – again, four times.30 On the verso of the final page of another British Library copy of Sappho and Phao, a reader writes out the first ten letters of the alphabet, beginning with the majuscule and minuscule versions of the letter ‘A’, in an unpractised and untidy secretary hand.31 That this is simply a pen-trial is rendered unlikely by a handdrawn table on sig. A1v which is headed ‘Amendment of writing come | h’. It is impossible to know why the reader then left the table blank and chose the playbook’s final page as a more appropriate location for handwriting practice, but it is clear that he viewed the blank pages of the playbook as an appropriate site for the improvement of practical rather than cultural literacy. Such marginalia seem to confirm the existence not of gentlemen playreaders, but ‘the non-elite humdrum reader’ that John Jowett believes ‘is certainly to be found in the marginalia of […] printed texts’, strengthening the argument for playbooks’ wide appeal that I made in Chapter 1.32 An early modern playreader did not need to be able to write in order to use pen and ink to respond to printed elements of the playbook or the inviting blank spaces of its pages – not if he were able to draw. At times the types of artistic marginalia to be found in playbooks appear to respond to the book’s printed features: the woodcut illustrations on the title pages of the 1632 edition of the first part of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody and the 1614 edition of John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque seem to have prompted readers to add, in a Bodleian copy of the first, a number of bisecting horizontal and vertical lines which visually echo the bisecting lines that create the effect of the tiled floor on which Queen Elizabeth stands, and in the British Library copy of the second, five small behatted heads in the outer margin of sig. L4r, which perhaps respond to the title page rendering of the hat-wearing Greene.33 Other instances seem in no way to respond to the playbook’s printed contents: in a British Library copy of a playbook that lacks a title page woodcut, Fletcher and Massinger’s Rollo, Duke of Normandy (1640), an early reader’s doodle creates a baffling Rorschach test for the contemporary scholar. At the top of the verso of the book’s final page, an eighteenth-century hand has recorded a list of debts.34 Yet below this, in a different and possibly earlier ink, is what is perhaps a schematically drawn insect such as

186  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating a fly, or perhaps a crudely drawn phallus and testes enclosed by oversized female labia (see Figure 4.2). If it is this last, it gestures once more at a readerly conception of playbooks as natural locations of erotic subject matter, whether textual or visual: a printed precedent for visual bawdiness can be found in the woodcut initial capital ‘Y’ of the dramatic text of Massinger’s The Renegado (sig. B1r), in which the stem of the ‘Y’ obscures the genitalia of a naked woman who squats, legs splayed, on a bedstead. Moving back to textual marginalia, a perhaps less ambiguous example of a playreader’s annotation that situates playbooks within a certain category of literature can be found in one of the British Library’s copies of Cyril Tourneur’s 1611 The Atheist’s Tragedy.35 On seven consecutive leaves of this copy, a reader has taken advantage of the outer margin of the recto pages to record what appear to be the lines of an original poem. The four vertical lines in secretary hand that appear on leaves G1 and G2 are largely illegible due to smudging and the later cropping of the pages. However, despite this cropping, several of the lines on the subsequent pages are decipherable, written in the same ink as those on G1 and G2, but now in a scrawled italic rather than secretary hand. They are as follows: G3 [cropped line] Shewes Venus Ennimie to Capicorne. G4 {…} {…….}, Venus oppo{…} to Mars Was in Conuinction [sic] with her {…} broughtas [sic]. H1 , & H2 Appollo rages. {….} Mercury {bl}un{d}ers. Luna lookes redde & Grimfacd Mars he thunders H3 So blushe{s} Saturnus rayle{s} Jupiter threatens, Venus sets up sayles She only she, this acte of Copulation Hath hidden out of Ponds prognostication[.] The story of Mars and Venus being discovered in flagrante delicto by Apollo, who reports their assignation to Vulcan (here possibly confused with Saturn), is found in Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid circulated widely in a variety of vernacular formats in early modern England and this particular story had been available in Arthur Golding’s English translation of the Metamorphoses since 1565; Chaucer’s take on it, The Complaint of Mars, had been published in 1500, and a contemporary

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  187

Figure 4.2  Marginalia on final page of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The tragedy of Rollo Duke of Normandy (1640, STC 11065; BL 644.e.2). © The British Library Board.

188  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating iteration could be found in a song featured in Edward Sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligig, of which the second edition was also published in 1611.36 Early modern dramatists drew on Ovid as a matter of course in order to furbish themselves with material, and to find a reader annotating a playbook with his own take on an Ovidian story confirms the conceptual link between Ovid and the genre of commercial drama.37 However, the reference to ‘Ponds prognostication’ almost certainly invokes a different well-known text: one of the almanacs compiled by Edward Pond, and published annually between 1601 and 1612.38 Among the contents of the annual President for prognosticators for the three years preceding the publication of The Atheist’s Tragedy was ‘A Generall Judgement Astrologicall, of the Inclination and Change of the Ayre, by the Conjunctions & Aspects of the Planets, amongst themselves’.39 Just as Chaucer had done in The Complaint of Mars, the poet-playreader appears to weave myth with astrology, playing on the double meanings of ‘conjunction’ and ‘copulation’.40 In doing so his doggerel verse in fact resembles that strewn throughout the very almanacs with which he is evidently familiar, and which offers either moral wisdom or a handy ­mnemonic.41 What the poet-playreader’s intertextual nod to Pond demonstrates is that he finds it entirely appropriate to reference a traditionally ‘popular’ print genre within the pages of a playbook, and the annotation consequently serves to connect the genres of almanac and playbook in the same way that Sir Thomas Bodley’s contemporaneous dismissal of both genres as ‘baggage books’ does.42 This annotation of The Atheist’s Tragedy suggests that the conceptual link drawn by Bodley in terms of production was also held by certain readers, and implies that plays may have been viewed as belonging to the category of ‘popular’ literature by those who read them as well as those who dismissed them. Elsewhere, annotations that seem to lack context are, I argue, prompted by a conception of the playbook as an object that could constitute a source of commonplaceable phrases, indicating once more that readers viewed plays as profitable reading matter. Printed commonplace markers had, from 1600 onwards, begun to reinforce such a conception, and the existence of manuscript commonplace books such as those discussed in the previous chapter confirms its influence.43 I argue that it is this conception, allied with the origin of the commonplace book as a pedagogical tool for aiding one’s Latin composition, that lies behind two instances of marginal Latin sententiae inscribed in playbooks and seemingly entirely unrelated to the adjacent printed text. On sig. A1v of a 1638 copy of Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece in the British Library, the phrase ‘Invidus alterius Rebus macrescit opimus’ appears twice, in two different hands, and has in both instances subsequently been struck through.44 In a second Folger copy of An Humorous Day’s Mirth, a reader who was perhaps named Nicholas Reynolds has made use of the outer margin of sig. B4r to vertically inscribe the line ‘Deus et animus nobis aut Carmina dicunt’.45

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  189 ‘[I]nvidus alterius macrescit rebus opimus’, or ‘The envious man grows lean when his neighbour waxes fat’, is line 57 of Horace’s second epistle. It was a well-known tag in the period, circulating in printed books isolated from its context from as early as 1572, when it was included in An extract of examples, apothegms, and histories collected out of Lycosthenes, Brusonius and others; translated into English, and reduced into an alphabetical order of commonplaces, translated as ‘The envious man pineth awaye when he seeth his adversarie prosper’; its inclusion seventy-six years later in Charles Hoole’s 1658 translation of Leonhard Culmann’s Sentences for children, English and Latin; collected out of sundry authors long since is testament to its abiding popularity.46 ‘Deus et animus nobis aut Carmina dicunt’ is an imperfect rendering of the first line of one of Cato’s distichs, the first of Book 1: ‘Si deus est animus, nobis ut carmina dicunt, | Hic tibi praecipue sit pura mente colendus’ (‘If God be spirit, as bards represent | He must be worshipped with clean intent’).47 The exceptional popularity in the early modern period of Cato’s distichs as classroom texts is demonstrated by the thirty-plus editions published in England and Scotland prior to the Restoration, ‘in usum Scholarum’, as the title page of Andro Hart’s 1620 edition had it; when educational theorist John Brinsley chose the first distich as his example in Ludus Literarius to demonstrate Latin mottoes’ use in illustrating philosophical or moral standpoints, he was so confident of its familiarity to readers that he rendered it simply ‘Si Deus est animus, &c.’.48 Such tags are widely recognisable throughout the period even for those whose education has been limited: they are precisely the type of sententiae students were encouraged to compile in their commonplace books. Their otherwise seemingly inexplicable presence in the playbooks can be explained by a conceptual link that was established between playbook and commonplace book. As the idea of the vernacular play as a repository of reusable sententious commonplaces took hold in seventeenth-century readers’ imaginations, so too did the playbook-as-object become a fitting location in which to record externally sourced commonplaces. As the above examples demonstrate, annotating readers were in the habit of thinking of other types of books as they read plays. A final example indicates the extent to which intertextuality could permeate even the type of notes that, according to Sherman, ‘had no obvious connection with the text they accompanied – but nonetheless testified to the place of that book in the reader’s social life, family history, professional practices, political commitments, and devotional rituals’.49 The example can be found in a Bodleian copy of the 1618 edition of The Spanish Tragedy, in which a reader records a detail of his or her family history, but in such a way that to view the annotation as unconnected with the playtext is impossible. In the outer margin of sig. G2v, the reader observes in a neat vertical inscription, ‘My cosen Betty dyed | 14. Decembr. | 1638’.50 Further detail as to the identity of the cousin is given on sig. L2v: ‘Betty

190  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating Rotton died | 14. Decem. 1638’. A bracket to the right of these two lines points towards four lines of verse, also inscribed vertically in the margin (see Figure 4.3). They read: How happie were mankinde if Deaths strict Lawes consum’d our Lamentations like the cause: Or that our greife turninge to dust, might end with the disolued body of a freind? This is an extract from an elegy entitled The Anniverse, written by the poet (and bishop) Henry King on the anniversary of his wife’s death. Although it was not published until 1657, in King’s Poems, elegies, paradoxes and sonnets, the verse’s opening line (‘So soon grown old! hast thou been six years dead?’) indicates its composition date: King’s wife Anne had died at the age of twenty-four in 1624.51 The poems of the long-lived King (1592–1669) circulated in manuscript prior to their publication, and it seems more likely that the reader of The Spanish Tragedy who borrowed King’s words to express his sentiments on the death of his cousin did so at some point closer to the date he records in the playbook, rather than nineteen years after the fact, when he would have been able to read The Anniverse in print.52 This reader’s use of the blank margins of Kyd’s play to record an event in his family history and a personal reaction to this event certainly seems at first glance to fall among those annotations that Sherman describes as having ‘no obvious connection with the text’. But when the annotations are read in conjunction with the text whose pages they share, it is very hard not to discern a connection between the two. The Spanish Tragedy could broadly be described as a play about grief (and its consequences in a vengeance-driven society). Several of Hieronimo’s long speeches are disquisitions on the topic, and two of them continue or conclude on sigs G2v and L2v. On sig. G2v, Hieronimo movingly interrogates the strength of his grief at the murder of his son Horatio, before beginning to contemplate how his untimely death may be avenged. On sig. L2v, he concludes his explanation of the course of action to which his grief has driven him with a resolution towards suicide (‘Urge no more wordes, I have no more to say. | He runneth to hang himselfe’). The first mention of Betty Rotton’s death thus stands aptly juxtaposed to a passage about the death of a blood relative, and the second, accompanied by the extract from the poem by King, becomes an apparently empathetic response to the grief-stricken Hieronimo’s desperation. The intertextual connection created between the manuscript elegy and the printed dramatic text is both literary and personal. A final annotation in this playbook once more creates a blurring of literary and personal response. On the verso of the title page, the reader has transcribed the opening of the final speech by the chorus in Seneca’s Oedipus:

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  191

Figure 4.3  Marginalia on sig. L2v of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie (1618, STC 15092). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Mal. 212(6).

Fatis agimur: cedite fatis: Non sollicitæ possunt curæ Mutare rati stamina fusi. Quicquid facimus mortale genus, Quicquid patimur, venit ex alto:

192  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating Omnia certo tramite vadunt, Primusque dies dedit extremum.53 E. F. Watling renders this as follows: Fate guides us; let Fate have her way. No anxious thought of ours can change The pattern of the web of destiny All that we do, all that is done to us, Mortals on earth, comes from a power above. […] All creatures move on their appointed paths; In their beginning is their end.54 When read as a response to the plot and themes of The Spanish Tragedy, this appears an entirely appropriate intertext. However, when read in conjunction with the marginal recording of Betty Rotton’s death, it becomes a fatalistic commentary on mortality and the acceptance of its fact, housed within a thematically appropriate textual artefact. The reader’s annotations are also generically and materially appropriate: Oedipus is, of course, another play; Bishop King is himself a known playreader, drawing on plays by Shakespeare and Jonson for his sermons; and if the Betty Rotton named is the Elisabeth Rotton who wrote her name in a copy of the 1599 Romeo and Juliet now housed in the Yale University Library, meaning that she and her cousin shared a mutual appreciation of printed drama, then a playbook is a fitting place to eulogise her.55 Playbook annotations that record personal history can also record the way that playbooks – those ‘sociable pocket-books’ – were embedded in the weft of that history.

Responses to the play as text The final example in the previous section can be interpreted as an instance of marginalia that engages with the playbook as both object and text. In what follows, I focus on the second half of this dichotomy, and discuss evidence that demonstrates readers engaging with the text or paratext of playbooks and recording responses that are semantically rather than semiotically driven. The examples of manuscript annotation examined in this section are, once more, in many cases the idiosyncratic responses of individual men and women to the playbooks they read. But looked at in conjunction with one another, they enable the extrapolation of wider conclusions about the ways in which readers perceived printed commercial drama as intersecting with its historical and cultural context and with other textual genres; how readers responded to plays with readings that both confirmed and resisted dominant ideological positions; and how, once more, they were influenced

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  193 by both the humanist reading methodology that sought profit in fragments of text, and by newly authoritative print conventions. *** As I surveyed the hundreds of playbooks that provide the evidence discussed in this chapter, the rarity of a particular type of reading became clear. Despite playwrights’ anxieties, the analogical playreading that involved the ‘application’ of dramatic events or characters to a real-world political context seems – at least from extant marginalia – to have been uncommon.56 Heavily annotated playbooks that display this type of reading, such as a 1625 copy of George Chapman’s two-part Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, appear exceptional.57 Nevertheless, isolated instances can be found in which readers’ brief additions of marginal commentary connect textual moments within a play to contemporary or historical context. One such instance, which seems to indicate a reader of historical drama connecting the fictive world of the play with the real world via extra-dramatic intertexts, can be found in a British Library copy of the 1623 edition of the second part of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody.58 On sig. K1r, the character of Queen Elizabeth gives a rousing speech to her army, evidently Heywood’s take on the address to the troops at Tilbury in 1588. (The play’s title page description offers ‘The famous Victory of Queen Elizabeth: anno 1588’, reusing the Queen’s own words at Tilbury when she promises that the English army ‘shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God and of my kingdom’).59 In Heywood’s play, the speech concludes: [W]ith the meanest here Ile spend my blood, And so to lose it count my onely good. A march, lead on: wee’ll meet the worst can fall, A maiden-Queen will be your Generall. Heywood’s version of the speech, and in particular the final line, echoes the real queen’s declaration at Tilbury that ‘I myself will venter my royal blood; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of your virtue in the field’.60 Elizabeth’s role in the victory over the Armada had been praised on the commemorative medals issued to celebrate the Spanish defeat with the phrase ‘Dux Foemina Facti’, a line from Virgil’s Aeneid that in its original context constitutes a comment on Dido’s supposedly unwomanly leadership skills in organising her supporters to flee Tyre and the tyrannous reign of her brother Pygmalion in order to found Carthage.61 Thus, when an early reader of the British Library copy of the 1623 2 If You Know Not Me inscribes ‘dux foemina facti’ in a careful hand next to the final line of the speech quoted above, the inscription connects the fictionalised history of

194  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating the play with the actual historical intertext of the medal, in an act of reader response that legitimises the historical authenticity of Heywood’s play. However, by the time this edition of 2 If You Know Not Me was published, the phrase ‘dux fæmina facti’ had been appropriated in another realm of early modern print production. The third and final response to Joseph Swetnam’s misogynistic tract The Arraignment of Women (1615) was entitled The worming of a mad dogge: or, A soppe for Cerberus and was written by one Constantia Munda in 1617. The title page proudly proclaims its author’s gender by printing her name and, beneath it, ‘—— dux fæmina facti’.62 Although the ODNB raises doubts about the gender of the most likely pseudonymous author, the actual sex of ‘Constantia Munda’ is irrelevant, because the effect of the Latin’s coupling with the female name remains.63 Instead of a male author (Virgil) finding it necessary to remark on the fact that a woman has the same capabilities as a man, here a woman (at least ostensibly) claims the phrase for her own, announcing – through confident use of the traditionally male medium of print – that women are naturally at the vanguard of the movement towards sexual equality. The phrase’s appearance as a response to Elizabeth’s speech in the 1623 edition of 2 If You Know Not Me thus comments on the plot’s historical veracity, but also links the play with contemporary proto-feminist writings. The appropriateness of plays as a genre in which to debate the querelle des femmes had been confirmed in 1620 with the publication of the ­anonymous comedy, Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women, which once again weighed in on the side of women.64 Yet readers’ responses to dramatic descriptions of the treatment of women could be at times ideologically conformist and at times resistant, and did not necessarily cohere with the viewpoint presented by the dramatic narrative as a whole. A marginal inscription in a British Library copy of Shackerley Marmion’s 1632 Holland’s Leaguer, for instance, provides evidence of a reader using Swetnam as an intertext in order to denigrate women in response to a passage that intends no such denigration.65 On sig. B3r, the character of Ardelio, described in the character list as ‘a parasite’, describes his love of ‘Venery’. He announces, ‘I doe love a pretty Wench well’, and declares ‘I will not leave my recreation that way | For a whole Empire, ’tis my ­summum bonum, | My sole felicity, tickles my conceit’. He subsequently rationalises whoring to himself thus: ‘I feele this heat | Renewes my bloud, and makes me younger for it’, and admits, ‘a heavy burthen | Of fleshly desires, daily growes upon me’. Later in the play, Ardelio’s sexual incontinence will result in him being made destitute, a morally just comeuppance for allowing himself to be ruled by his desires.66 But in the immediate context of sig. B3r, his behaviour is exonerated by an early reader who responds to the text by annotating it with a quotation that makes women culpable for creating immoral desire in men. Two cropped lines, inscribed vertically in the outer margin of the page, read: ‘aple and lost with the paring yong wites are

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  195 soo{ne} | Corrupted wemens brightnes breedes curious thou{ghts}’. This is a paraphrase of a line from Swetnam’s Arraignment of Women that reads in full as ‘yet Women are easily wooed, and soone won, got with an apple, and lost with the paring: young wittes are soone corrupted, womens bright beauties breed curious thoughts’.67 The supposed ease with which women will relinquish their chastity becomes the excuse for Ardelio’s womanising. The ‘curious thoughts’ that he describes in the passages quoted above are the natural product of women’s ‘Lightness’ – the noun with which a ­different hand has later replaced ‘brightnes’, thereby further intensifying the sentence’s misogynistic overtones. Elsewhere, it is through excising text, not annotating it, that a reader rehearses his adherence to a misogynistic agenda, this time one that seeks to subdue women by denying their sexual autonomy. Manuscript excisions of oaths are frequently found in printed playbooks, and examples such as the instances of ‘God’, ‘Lord’, ‘Domine’, and ‘Jehova’ struck through in a Bodleian copy of the 1602 How A Man May Choose may be evidence of a sense that the 1606 ‘Act to Restrain Abuses of Players’ should apply equally to printed drama.68 A Folger copy of Nathan Field and Philip Massinger’s 1632 The Fatal Dowry, however, presents a reader who took exception to a word with no religious connotations which seems superficially ­unobjectionable.69 On sig. I1r of The Fatal Dowry, these lines are thoroughly struck through: ‘When I first pleas’d her, in this merry language, | She gave me thanks’, and on sig. I1v, the lines ‘That women, when they are well pleas’d, cannot hold | But must laugh out’. The first line is delivered by the character of Charalois, who overhears his wife, Beaumelle, laughing within with the man who is cuckolding him, Novall Junior. Her laughter, linked with sex just as it is in the proverbial ‘laugh and lie down’ (discussed in Chapter 2), is a sign of her infidelity: the second line is delivered by Charalois’ panderous host, Aymiere, just before Charalois re-enters, having exited briefly to discover Beaumelle and Novall Junior in flagrante delicto. Beaumelle’s laughter is thus an indication of her sexual (possibly orgasmic) responsiveness, and the verb ‘please’ in this context explicitly means to please sexually, a connotation, as I argued in the previous two chapters, that it holds in paratextual advertisements of textual pleasure to readers of early modern comedies. Precisely because of the frequent title page advertisements of plays as ‘pleasant’ reading matter, it seems unlikely that the reader would have been unprepared for such sexual explicitness: rather, it is the fact that the lines directly invoke female sexual pleasure that seems to have rendered them sufficiently objectionable to manually erase them from the playtext, the act of doing so apparently betraying not prudishness, but a misogynistic dismissal of female sexual fulfilment. In the course of this reader’s editorialising reading (elsewhere he carefully marks typographical errors and uses the space of the margin to correct them), he also takes the opportunity to confirm his adherence to an ideological standpoint that denies women’s sexual emancipation.

196  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating If the excisions intersect with the paratextual discourse of erotic reading pleasure discussed in Chapter 2, the following example recalls the effect created by another dramatic paratextual feature, the title page Latin motto. In the same copy of the 1591 Sappho and Phao that served as the location for the handwriting practice discussed above, a different reader used the space of the margin on several pages to provide a neat Latin gloss upon Lyly’s text. In two instances, this was a single word, of precisely the type Erasmus suggests should be employed as commonplaceheads: on sig. A3r the line ‘Envie never casteth her eie lowe’ is glossed with ‘Inuidia’ (or ‘Envy’), while on sig. B2v the word ‘{..}aritia’ (assumed to be ‘auaritia’, i.e. ‘greed’) appropriately accompanies Mileta’s description of her attitude towards men: ‘Give me their giftes, not their vertues, a graine of their Golde weigheth downe a pound of their witte, a dram of give me, is heavier than an ounce of heare mee. Beleeve mee Ladies, give is a prettie thing.’ The nouns’ presence recalls Pudsey and Drummond’s use of marginal glosses in their commonplace books, only here the pass­ages they identify remain in their original location, rather than being transferred to the remove of the commonplace book. Elsewhere, however, the marginal glosses given by this reader seem to provide evidence of a deeper intellectual engagement with the text. Phao begins his speech on sig. A3r thus: ‘Thou art a Ferriman, Phao, yet a free man, possessing for riches content, and for honours quiet. Thy thoughts are no higher than thy fortunes, nor thy desires greater than thy calling’. A marginal annotation adjacent to this passage reads, ‘Quisqe [sic] sua sor{..} | contentus’. Despite cropping, the phrase is a recognisable modification of the proverb ‘Nemo sua sorte contentus’ (‘No-one is happy with his lot’), here altered to ‘Someone who is happy with his lot’ – an apt paraphrase of the characterisation of himself that Phao gives in the text. Further down this page, the gloss ‘Inuidia’ is accompanied by the phrase ‘Sum{ma} petit liuor’, a well-known Ovidian tag, the sentiment of which (‘Envy aims at the highest things’) is precisely that conveyed by the line of dialogue to which it is adjacent (‘Envie never casteth her eie lowe’). On sig. B4v, the character of Sybilla lectures Phao on the transience of beauty, a long speech which the reader has marked out with dashes in the ­margin but also glossed appropriately with the beginning of the Latin motto ‘forma flos, fama flatus’ (‘beauty is a flower, fame is a breath’). In each of these three instances, the marginal annotation by what is evidently an educated reader identifies either the Latin source text for Lyly’s expanded vernacularisation or at the very least an appropriate class­ ical intertext. The annotations thus hint at a playreader who recognises English commercial drama not just as a source of commonplaces but as a site of sententious authority equal to that of its Roman antecedents. The juxtaposition of the marginalia in the language of humanist thought with the English dramatic dialogue serves to signal the ‘literary’ or ‘poetic’ credentials of the play in a similar fashion to Latin title page quotations,

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  197 except that in the example of the Sappho and Phao marginalia it is a reader whose deployment of Latin accords the play the status of commonplaceable literature, not a playwright or publisher invested in its sale. Further instances of readers’ assessments of plays mirroring the types of paratextual legitimising strategies deployed by playwrights and publishers are to be found in the manuscript genre indications that certain readers appended to plays’ title pages. These tend to exhibit the same fluid ­conception of genre conventions that was promoted by preliminary ­paratexts, perhaps demonstrating the efficacy of this strategy in allaying the unreasonable expectations of those readers brought up on Horace, Sidney, and Puttenham (see Chapter 2). For instance, the reader who ­carefully m ­ imicked the typeface of the title in a British Library copy of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) in order to designate it ‘A Tragedie’ ­demonstrates an understanding of the genre that responds to its origin on the English public stage, rather than the classically inflected genre criticism that dominated poetic theory in early modern England: Giovanni’s sensational onstage murder of the pregnant and repentant Annabella would hardly have been considered dramatically appropriate by Horace and his followers.70 Similarly, when an early reader of the 1648 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater identifies the play as ‘A Comedy’ on its title page, the genre designation acknowledges the effect of such elements of the plot as Lazarello’s absurd quest for a delicious fish-head, rather than its form and content.71 Whereas Puttenham had stipulated that ‘[c]omedies]’ treat of ‘meane men, their life, and busines, as lawyers, gentlemen, and marchants, good housholders and honest Citizens’, and ‘sound neither to matters of state nor of warre, nor leagues, nor great alliances’, this reader is unbothered by the apparent indecorum of the cast list of The Woman Hater, which includes a Duke, a Count, and two ‘Intelligencers’. The function of the last is explicitly specified in the text as to be concerned with ‘affaires of state’.72 The reader’s manuscript genre designation is thus based on an understanding of the comic genre that is created by over half a century of English commercial drama making its own rules – and of those rules being articulated in its paratextual preliminaries. The annotation may also have been in part prompted by the presence on the title page of the 1648 edition of The Woman Hater of an author’s name: if so, it constitutes another example of the influence of dramatic paratexts upon a reader. Where the 1607 edition had been unattributed, the title page of the 1648 edition reads ‘Written by JOHN FLETCHER Gent’.73 Although the ability of the name ‘John Fletcher’ to act as a signifier of comic subject matter may not have been as firmly established as that of Shakespeare (see Chapter 2), Fletcher nevertheless seems to have been paratextually acknowledged as another author whose proficiency lay in the composition of comedies. The title pages of other quartos that erroneously attribute a play solely to Fletcher couple his name with a capitalised genre indication, ‘COMEDY’, and the couplet headed

198  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating ‘Lectori’ that forms part of the paratextual preliminaries of the 1637 Elder Brother doubles down on this connection, announcing: ‘Would’st thou all wit, all Comicke art survey? | Reade here and wonder; FLETCHER writ the Play’ (sig. A2r).74 It is thus perhaps the sense of Fletcher as a comic playwright that may have led another early reader of The Woman Hater to deploy a neat italic hand and append the legend ‘By John Fletcher’ to the title page of a British Library copy of the unattributed 1607 edition – a legend that a subsequent reader will strike through and replace with ‘ffrancis Beamont’, rejecting the (correct) possibility of the play’s co-authorship in favour of singular authorial authority.75 Readers’ manuscript additions of playwrights’ names to unattributed plays’ title pages demonstrate a conviction that plays are authored and should be acknowledged as such, an attitude that chimes with Edward Pudsey’s privileging of dramatists’ names when turning his commonplace book into a more readily navigable reference tool. Pudsey’s sensitivity towards the potential classificatory function of authors’ names  – particularly that of Shakespeare – may be mirrored, I argue, in readers’ annotations that misattribute plays. When a reader expands the initials on the title page of a Folger copy of the Middleton play The Puritan (1607) so that it is no longer advertised disingenuously as ‘Written by W. S.’ but by ‘W. Shakespeare’, the annotation begs the question whether William Shakespeare was the only playwright the reader knew of whose name matched the printed initials, or whether the reader identified something particularly ‘Shakespearean’ in the play: as Holger Syme points out, the ‘initials […] make a less than strident claim for authorship’, and are not as effective a false marketing tool as the ‘William Shakespeare’ on the title page of the 1605 The London Prodigal.76 The Puritan is, of course, a comedy, although not advertised as such on its title page – if the name ‘William Shakespeare’ functioned as a signifier of a comic subject matter when printed on the title page of a play that lacked a genre designation (a possibility raised in Chapter 2), then what the reader perceived as inherently ‘Shakespearean’ about the play may have been its genre. A similar connection of Shakespeare’s name with the comic genre may have prompted an early reader’s title page attribution of a British Library copy of Patient Grissel (1603) to ‘Wwilliam Shakespeare’: the name of the play’s heroine and all other title page elements are, after all, typographically dominated by the large majuscules of the words ‘THE PLEASANT COMŒDIE OF’ (sig. A1r).77 Readers’ manuscript additions of authorship attributions may indicate an engagement with and the influence of dramatic paratext as much as playtext.78 If this final example demonstrates a reader engaging not with the play’s comic subject matter, but with the paratextual advertisement of the play as a comedy, it is consistent with the scarcity of early annotations that appear to pass judgement on a playtext as a whole – that provide evidence of Lesser’s elusive ‘readings’ – rather than approving or disapproving of

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  199 individual textual moments. Such judgements exist amongst the playbooks owned by Frances Wolfreston, in which Wolfreston jots down brief plot summaries and deems plays to be ‘sad’ or ‘prity’ (often accompanied by a modifier such as ‘very’, ‘exceding’, or ‘resnably’).79 They can also be found on playbooks belonging to the book collector Richard Smith (1590–1675), who recorded grumpy verdicts on the first and final pages of the numerous playbooks he acquired from Humphrey Dyson in 1633, deeming the plays to be ‘ffoolishe’, ‘lamentable’, ‘woefull’, and other uncomplimentary adjectives.80 However, readers’ overall responses to a play can sometimes be gleaned from less openly evaluative annotations – for example, separate instances of ‘retitling’ on the title pages of two popular early seventeenth-century comedies, which once more demonstrate playreading as an activity in which early modern men and women could confirm their stances in the querelle des femmes. In the Bodleian copy of the 1602 How A Man May Choose discussed above, a manuscript subtitle provided by a reader (who seemingly differs from the bowdlerising reader already mentioned) transforms the ‘good wife’ of the title from a passive, pre-formed commodity to a potentially changeable active agent.81 Underneath the printed title – ‘A Pleasant Conceited Comedie, Wherein is shewed how a man may chuse a good Wife from a bad’ (sig. A1r) – a reader has subscribed an alternative title: ‘or rather | When you haue a good wife make much on h{er}’. The annotation hints at a playreader who has been frustrated by the chaste and loyal Mistress Arthur’s patient acceptance of her husband’s disdain for her (which extends to an attempt to poison her so he can marry another woman), and who believes that male playreaders tempted to accept the title’s packaging of the play as a quasi-conduct book could do with a more realistic piece of advice: the constant goodness of one’s wife is not a given, and will wane without spousal care and affection. The reader thus responds to a play that strongly articulates dominant patriarchal ideologies regarding laudable female behaviour with the mildly subversive suggestion that women must be incentivised to conform to patriarchal norms.82 Another instance of retitling implies a reading that, in contrast to the example above, is underpinned by approval of such norms. On the title page of a British Library copy of the 1615 edition of Dekker and Middleton’s 1 The Honest Whore, an early reader has copied out the title’s subsidiary phrase, ‘With the Humours of the Patient Man, and the Longing Wife’, but replaced the word ‘Longing’ with ‘Louing’.83 The plot strand that the phrase advertises deals with the unflappable Candido and the increasingly outrageous actions of his wife Viola, who longs to move her relentlessly placid husband to anger. In the early reading implied by the manuscript annotation, however, Viola’s antagonism is not construed as typically shrewish behaviour, but as a strategy born out of love for her husband, whose surplus of the typically feminine quality of patience effectively emasculates him. As Paul Mulholland points out, ‘[Viola’s] longing

200  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating for an expression of anger from her husband registers her adherence to the conventional codes that define manhood and patriarchal authority within and beyond manhood’.84 Early in the play, Viola declares that she ‘love[s]’ Candido ‘most affectionately’, but that she is ‘ready to bite off [her] tongue because it wants that virtue which all women’s tongues have – to anger their husbands’.85 Her actions thus stem from a desire to transform Candido into a ‘proper’ husband, and by extension man, and the early reader’s annotation appears to indicate approval of such a patriarchally laudable move. If the two examples above constitute ‘readings’ of plays, the following instances are more accurately described as ‘acts of reading’. It is undeniable that the manuscript traces far more commonly found in playbooks are marks that betray readers’ engagement with parts of a playtext rather than its whole. The manuscript dots, dashes, crosses, asterisks, flowers, short parallel lines, underlinings, overlinings, and stylised pointing fingers that pick out certain lines or passages in printed playbooks demonstrate the degree to which playreaders are operating within the commonplace book culture which, as Smyth puts it, involves an ‘approach to language that privileges the sentence, aphorism, or little block of text’.86 Given that such an approach was acquired as part of a humanist pedagogical training, the marks imply their makers’ possession of a certain level of education. It is notable, however, that – as in the case of the three gentlemen playreaders discussed in the previous chapter – marking readers’ choices of lines or passages do not necessarily recognise the same type of ‘speciall excellency’ stipulated by educational theorists such as John Brinsley who advocate this practice.87 This can be seen in a group of playbooks that exhibit manuscript versions of the marginal mark which Sherman dubs the ‘manicule’ – the small fist with index finger extended towards the noteworthy line or passage of text.88 The lines and passages marked therein demonstrate once more the ways in which individual readers’ tastes could be at times idiosyncratic, and at others encode – and sometimes reject – more widespread priorities and ideological assumptions. Sherman observes that within the broad spectrum of early modern readers’ marks, ‘[a]side from writing out the word “nota” in full or abbreviated form, the manicule served alongside the asterisk and the flower as the most visible technique for marking noteworthy texts’.89 Numerous early modern books exhibit both print and manuscript versions of the mark, the first indicating the passages deemed noteworthy by the author and/or publisher of the work, and the second those so adjudged by its reader(s). This fact notwithstanding, even after playbooks begin to feature printed commonplace markers such as the marginal double inverted comma, they do not feature printed manicules, perhaps an indication that – despite the rise in use of other paratextual techniques to elevate the status of playbooks – the textual matter of commercial drama is not considered worthy by its producers of being marked with this ‘most visible’ of symbols.90 The readers of these plays, however, evidently thought that it was, and regularly

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  201 took the time to draw stylised manicules in the margins of their playbooks. Regularly, but not frequently – what makes playbook manicules (and the lines they accompany) of most interest is that normally only one or two examples are to be found in a playbook in which passages are also liberally highlighted with other less obtrusive techniques such as the marginal cross or the underline. This has the effect of making the manicules and the pass­ ages they point to appear of greater significance to the reader, who, rather than simply marking his approval of a line in passing with a quick cross or underline, took the time to draw a symbol that would be more visually arresting when flicking through the book again at a later date. It must be acknowledged that at times it is hard to tell what motivates a reader to deem certain passages worthy of being picked out with a manicule. For instance, a copy in the British Library of the sixth edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy possesses, somewhat unusually, multiple lines that have been picked out by stylised handdrawn manicules.91 On sig. A4r the line ‘And if he will not be wise, you are forsworn’ is both underlined and accompanied by a manicule. So too is the phrase on sig. B2r, ‘ease and wine | Have bred these bold tales’, as well as Amintor’s lines on sig. I1r, ‘Leave me, for there is something in thy looks | That calls my sins in a most hideous form | Into my mind’. Nothing in terms of the form or content of these lines unifies them, neither are they particularly rhetorically striking, nor traditionally aphoristic or sententious. It is impossible to guess with any confidence at what might have constituted their ‘speciall excellency’ for the reader who picked them out. More striking is the sole manicule among numerous other pencil marginal marks in a Folger copy of the 1622 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster.92 Situated at the top of sig. L3r, it points to the speech delivered by the character of Eufrasia, in which she movingly confesses the genesis of her unrequited love for Philaster. Recounting the moment when ‘sitting in [her] Window | Printing [her] thoughts in Lawne’, she saw Philaster enter at her father’s gates, Eufrasia continues: My bloud flue out, and backe againe as fast As I had pust [sic] it forth, and suckt it in Like breath, then was I cald away in hast To entertaine you. Never was a man Heav’d from a sheepe-coate, to a Scepter rais’d, So high in thoughts as I, you left a kisse Upon these Lippes then, which I meane to keepe From you for ever, I did heare you talke Farre above singing; after you were gone, I grew acquainted with my heart, and search’t What stir’d it so, alas I found it Love, Yet farre from Lust, for I could but have lived In presence of you, I had had my end.93

202  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating The reader’s isolation of this passage which vividly evokes the pangs of love speaks again to the contemporary non-dramatic sources that see playreading as a preferred activity of the amorously given, who find their own emotions reflected in those of the characters. The image constructed by Robert Stapylton in his verse praising James Shirley’s The Grateful Servant of the reading ‘lovers’ who instead ‘make their peace with [Shirley’s] conceit’, causing ‘pleasing Cupid […] | To loose his tribute paid in sighes and teares’ gains greater verisimilitude when set against the manuscript evidence of readers marking passages such as that in the Folger Philaster.94 The previous chapter presented William Drummond’s playreading as an example of manuscript response intersecting with printed rhetorical constructions of ‘pleasant’ comedies: the manicule in the Folger Philaster is a similar example, I suggest, albeit one that demonstrates a playreader focused (as Eufrasia’s speech has it) on ‘Love’, rather than the lineaments of ‘Lust’ seemingly preferred by Drummond. The stylised ink manicule that constitutes the sole reader’s mark in a British Library copy of Jonson’s Poetaster likewise accompanies a passage about love, this time the character of Ovid’s argument for the superiority of physical love over spiritual love.95 However, the playreader who made it may have been influenced less by an interest in the physical aspects of love that appealed to Drummond, and instead susceptible to the new print conventions that evidently held sway over Edward Pudsey: in particular, the printed commonplace marker. The manicule points to the line, ‘And in the soule, are no Affections’ (see Figure 4.4). The following eight lines develop this idea thus: We poure out our Affections with our Bloode; And with our Bloods affections; fade our Loves. No life hath Love in such sweete state, as this; No Essence is so deare to moodie Sense, As Flesh, and Bloode; whose Quintessence is Sense. Beautie, composd of Blood, and Flesh, moves more, And is more plausible to Blood, and Flesh Then Spirituall Beautie can be to the Spirit.96 Several decades later, Andrew Marvell would provide his take on this commonplace, and write ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, | But none, I think, do there embrace’.97 The unlikely possibility that this passage of Jonson’s play influenced the composition of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is neither here nor there: what is important is that the sentiment is a commonplace, and, in the quarto of Poetaster, is marked as such, with double inverted commas that are printed in the outer margin adjacent to the six lines from ‘No life hath Love’ to ‘Then Spirituall Beautie’. Although various lines throughout the play are marked in this fashion, this particular speech is one of only two instances in which a speech of six lines or more

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  203

Figure 4.4  Hand-drawn manicule on sig. I3v of Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1602, STC 14781; BL 644.b.52). © The British Library Board.

204  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating is foregrounded in this way. The proximity of the sole manicule thus raises the possibility that the reader’s decision to mark out this particular passage is dictated less by his own judgement of its noteworthiness, than by the fact that it has already been signalled as such by the printed commonplace markers. These were a relatively new sight in professional plays at the time of Poetaster’s publication in 1602, and may therefore have possessed the authority of novelty. The previous chapter explored the possibility that Pudsey’s commonplacing may have been materially inflected, influenced by printed indications that certain lines and passages had been preauthorised as noteworthy: the manicule in this copy of Poetaster may ­provide an example of an anonymous reader with the same susceptibilities. If such an instance seems to indicate an act of reading in which a reader’s judgement of a passage is not necessarily the result of his personal assessment of its worth, the following three examples seem to demonstrate acts of reading in which passages did appeal to readers’ personal sensibilities, and were – once more – used to confirm a dominant early modern stance of misogyny. In a heavily marked British Library copy of the 1630 edition of How a Man May Choose, the sole manicule appears in the margin of sig. B2v, adjacent to these lines, which occur in the long speech in which the virtuous Mistress Arthur outlines for her husband the quality of her submissiveness to him and the degree to which she is willing to abase herself in order to retain his good favour: If you delight to change, change when you please, So that you will not change your love to me: If you delight to see me drudge and toyle, Ile be your drudge because tis your delight[.]98 A passage that similarly condones the submission of early modern wives to the will of their husbands is accompanied by a manicule in the British Library copy of Patient Grissel discussed above. On sig. L1v, a sophisticated manicule points to these lines: [M]arried men That long to tame their wives must curbe them in, Before they need a bridle, then they’ll proove All Grissils full of patience, full of love[.] Its positioning makes it quite evident that it is these particular lines that the reader wishes to emphasise, excluding the mitigating couplet with which the speech ends (‘Yet that olde tryall must be tempered so, | Least seeking to tame them they master you’). A further example of marginal approbation of misogynistic sentiment can be found in a British Library copy of Middleton and Rowley’s 1617 A Fair Quarrel, in which the reader has used, instead of a manicule, two short parallel lines to mark out the lines on sig. H2v, ‘O who’de erect th’assurance of his joyes | Upon a womans goodnes?’ – the sole manuscript mark within this copy.99 Like the excision of the lines about women’s sexual pleasure in the Folger copy

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  205 of The Fatal Dowry, and the retitling of the British Library copy of 1 The Honest Whore, these three examples cohere to create a picture of a subset of playreaders who used their reading of textual moments that condoned the subjugation of women as a way of reinforcing their own adherence to the dominant early modern ideologies of patriarchy and misogyny. Elsewhere, however, manicules pick out lines that, when isolated from their context by the reader’s mark, appear to condone subversion of other dominant ideologies. An example can be found in a British Library copy of the 1607 issue of Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, in which an inked manicule and a hand-drawn asterisk on sig. E1v mark out the lines that contain the parenthetical phrase, ‘by the peoples voice, | Which is the voice of God’.100 The phrase, within the context of the long speech in which it appears, refers to the source of the ‘greatnesse’ of the corrupt ‘great man’, who ‘Bumbasts his private roofes, with publique riches’; contextually, then, Bussy is disparaging the god-like power of the ignorant ‘people’ to raise up individuals who have not merited it. When the two lines are read in isolation from the surrounding text, however – as the positioning of the manicule encourages – they convey a rather more subversive sentiment. That is, they argue, without the context of sarcasm, that ‘the peoples voice’ is equivalent to ‘the voice of God’. In the hierarchical structure of Protestant early modern England, in which the monarch – as head of both State and Church – is constructed as the mouthpiece of the deity, asserting instead the religious and, by extension, moral authority of the monarch’s subjects is subversive if not treasonous. A still more blatant instance of a reader fixating on irreligious sentiment in a playbook can be found in a Folger copy of the 1594 1 Selimus.101 On sigs B2r–B4r, Selimus makes an extraordinary speech in which he describes religion as the opiate of the masses, expounding on its origin in makebelieve and power play, and declaring that he intends to prosper by rejecting its moral framework entirely. Daniel Vitkus, discussing this speech, remarks that ‘[f]or Elizabethan theatergoers, [it] would have been disturbingly transgressive, providing electrifying moments for the audience, who gasped to hear such fearless defiance of divine law’.102 Vitkus’s imagined scenario of ideologically driven collective response is problematised by the fact that an early reader of the Folger copy of the play has – far from expressing disturbed disapproval – underlined or placed unobtrusive commonplace markers next to numerous lines of this speech. Furthermore, he has deployed a pencil manicule to pick out the line that is Selimus’s most blunt avowal of his fidelity to irreligious behaviour: ‘I count it sacriledge, for to be holy’.103 As demonstrated above, playreaders were quite capable of using their pens or pencils to excise lines or words within the dramatic dialogue that they found objectionable. The fact that the annotating readers of Bussy and Selimus chose instead to draw attention to the subversive sentiment of these lines with their hand-drawn manicules hints at a decontextualising approach to playreading that ignored the containment typically provided by the dramatic narrative in order to emphasise lines

206  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating articulating unorthodox and otherwise inexpress­ible viewpoints that may have mirrored the reader’s own.104 As readers deployed shared strategies for noting their responses to playtexts, these ‘acts of reading’ nevertheless recorded their individual judgements.

Responses to the play as play If the personal, individualised nature of reader response to commercial drama is perhaps to be expected from a genre that, despite its fate four hundred years later, does not contain texts that are encountered within the guiding framework of the education system, it should not be forgotten that these plays had nevertheless originally been launched into an arena of collective response: the playhouse. Certain early annotating playreaders seemingly did not forget this fact – they were, after all, reminded of it by printed plays’ title page announcements of their performance origin – and the playbook markings and marginalia that I discuss in this final section are those that in some way respond to the text as drama, rather than as genre-non-specific text. As the work of other scholars has shown, it is clear that printed playbooks could be conceived of as malleable sources of future performances. Archival encounters have unearthed over the years a handful of nonShakespearean quartos that bear the extensive and systematic cuts and marginal annotations that indicate their early use as prompt-books.105 These are in addition to the Shakespearean volumes that have been more thoroughly picked over.106 Interventions such as marking cuts to roles and scenes and noting later actors’ names against certain characters are corrections to the playbook’s claim that the text it contains is ‘as it was played’ – prompt-books instead encode the text as it will be played, signalling a clear conception of a specific anticipated performance. These marks are made by a different type of ‘producing readers’, those whose intimate awareness of the conventions of theatrical production can lead them to order actors/characters to be ‘ready’ for their entrances well in advance.107 The following discussion is interested instead in what marks and ­marginalia can tell us about the theatrical sensitivities of ‘consuming readers’ who annotated their playbooks more sporadically, and whose brief, localised cuts were prompted by concerns other than abridgement for performance. In examining this third category of marginalia, I am guided by a central question: do these readers’ marks and annotations appear to be prompted by an awareness of drama as a distinct genre that has performance as its raison-d’être, or as a now legitimate subsection of ‘poetry’ distinguished by increasingly standardised print and paratextual conventions? In arguing that – in most cases – annotations cannot, in fact, be definitively interpreted as instances of readers conceptualising performance, the conclusions I arrived at in earlier chapters are qualified once more: notwithstanding the numerous dramatic paratexts that appear to anticipate

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  207 playgoing playreaders, if playbooks were bought by playgoers, many of those who annotated their purchases do not appear to have done so with a strong sense of a play’s origin in performance. My survey of readers’ marks and marginalia in playbooks suggests the extent to which a reader such as Abraham Wright was anomalous with his attentiveness to both the literary and theatrical states of plays. Whether we accept Erne’s argument that playbooks’ proliferating paratexts led to them being read not as ‘records of performance’ but ‘as literature’, or whether Atkin is right that printed playbooks became a ‘recognisable textual category’ long before the first professional plays were printed, we must be wary of asserting that ‘so much recorded readerly engagement with plays occurred at the intersection of drama’s two media – print and performance’.108 Despite Claire Bourne’s implication in this statement that readers were able to hold both states of play(s) in mind simultaneously, my extensive survey of extant early modern play quartos indicates that for most readers, printed playbooks were just that – printed books, not repositories of performance. *** When defining ‘the difference between the “dramatic” and the “nondrama­ tic” form of literary works’, Roman Ingarden describes the identifying feature of drama as its Nebentext or ‘side text’: those ‘stage directions’ that provide ‘information with regard to where, at what time, etc., the given represented story takes place, who exactly is speaking, and perhaps also what he is doing at a given moment, etc.’.109 In addition to those typically italicised extradialogic indicators of action that the word ‘stage directions’ implies, M. J. Kidnie argues that the Nebentext includes speech prefixes and act breaks.110 Various early modern playreaders’ annotations demonstrate their assessment of the importance of each one of these elements of Nebentext, and their correction of erroneously printed elements or addition of missing ones marks them as the type of early editorialising readers identified by Sonia Massai in Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor.111 Yet whether their corrections reflect a desire to clarify a performance text or a literary text is often unclear. Massai remarks that it is readers’ ‘familiarity with the fictive world of the play [that] allow[s] them to spot mis-assigned or missing speech prefixes’, but the phrase ‘fictive world’ is an ambivalent one: while plays can certainly construct a fictive world in performance, they can do so equally when read (just as, for example, a prose romance does).112 If we seek to demonstrate that early playreaders read with a sense of the performance in the text, we need to focus on annotations that unambiguously demonstrate their understanding of the playtext’s theatrical aspects as crucial in the construction of the fictive world made available via the printed page. And it is these that are few and far between. In searching for them, manuscript corrections of speech prefixes might seem the most obvious site to examine, as they appear to encode the orality

208  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating that is a key feature of theatrical performance. Linda McJannet believes that the standardised layout in early printed playbooks of dramatic speech with its left-aligned speech prefixes represents an evolution from earlier conventions that serves to ‘[suggest] aspects of an audience’s aural and visual experience in the theatre in ways that a non-dramatic text does not’.113 If so, the readers who correct or add misprinted or missing speech prefixes might be supposed to be doing so because they are alert to the fact that such errors impede performance. Bourne therefore argues that when readers correct such errors ‘they are not just fixing scribal or compositorial oversights’.114 However, in a variety of cases it appears reasonable to assume that the obviousness of a printing error is what drives the reader’s annotation, rather than a strong sense that certain lines should be delivered by certain characters in performance. For instance, the beginning of sig. I4r of the 1605 quarto of How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad is printed thus: But more than faire, was she not vertuous, Indued with the beautie of the mind? YONG AR: Faith so they said. MA. Harke in thine eare, Ile trust thee with my life, Then which what greater instance of my love: Thou knewst full well how sodainely shee dide, To injoy thy love, even then I poisoned her. MA: How poisoned her? accursed murtherer[.] YONG AR:

In an exchange between only two characters (the character of Brabo has been directed to stand aside), the correction called for is quite clear, and an early reader of a British Library copy of this edition obliges, striking through the erroneously printed speech prefixes and using the gutter margin to inscribe ‘Mary’ and ‘Ar.’ adjacent to the middle lines that they correctly accompany.115 In a similar example, the final line of sig. B3v in the 1607 edition of The Woman Hater lacks a speech prefix, and thus appears to belong to the character of Lazarello, who has the line above it – even though the first speech prefix given on sig. B4r is also ‘Lazar’. An early reader of the previously discussed British Library copy of the quarto assumes, rightly, that the double attribution is erroneous, and adds the missing speech prefix to the margin on sig. B3v so that its final line now correctly belongs to Lazarello’s interlocutor, the Count.116 In these two examples, neither a firm engagement with the textually created ‘fictive world of the play’ nor a sense of these lines’ delivery in performance is needed, as the immediate context provides sufficient advertisement of the typographical error and its necessary correction. Other examples of corrected speech prefixes, however, imply readers possessing what Bourne calls ‘an additional layer of understanding’ derived from their absorption in the play’s dramatic action.117 Act II Scene 2 of the 1638 edition of Massinger’s The Bondman features four characters: Asotus, Gracculo, Corisca, and Zanthia (a fifth, Cleon, enters

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  209 just before the scene’s end). Unlike in the How a Man May Choose example above, the number of speakers here renders it less immediately apparent when a speech prefix has been misprinted, as it has on sig. D2v, when the line ‘My mother in law is sure | At her devotion’ is given to the character of Gracculo. An attentive reader of a British Library copy of the play was evidently sufficiently familiar with the relationships between the characters to know that the ‘mother in law’ referred to is Corisca, who is married to Asotus’s father Cleon – and was therefore able to strike out ‘Grac.’ and inscribe the correct speech prefix, ‘Asot.’ in the adjacent margin in a hand that tentatively mimics the italic font.118 The question remains whether this and other similar examples of early readers’ corrections of speech prefixes are indications of an engagement with the play as a performed or performable text, or whether they are, as Emma Smith puts it, simply ‘maintain[ing] the fictional coherence of the playworld’.119 Holger Syme would argue that they do both, ‘straddl[ing] the supposed divide between page and stage, applying to and functioning equally as a performance direction and as a narrative intervention’.120 In other words, such annotations cannot be said to respond definitively to either a sense of the play’s theatricality or its textuality. The key point here is that, as a consequence, they appear to us as simultaneously literary and theatrical, because we cannot definitively interpret them as one thing or the other. Early readers, however, may well have been reading on one side of the divide: just because we cannot access their position via their annotations does not mean that their reading conflated two modes of perception. The same ambiguity surrounds readers’ motivations for adding or correcting stage directions, because it is at times difficult to discern to what extent early playreaders who do so are acting out of an awareness that stage directions are appropriate additions to a text that has its origin in performance, or simply because they are necessary to facilitate visualisation of the ‘fictional universe structured by the text’.121 Genevieve Love rightly interrogates Kidnie’s contention that stage directions help ‘to create […] a sort of virtual performance, a theater of the mind’, asking: ‘If early modern readers “visualized” the plays they read […] one wonders what conventions of theatrical performance persisted in this “theater of the mind”’. Love is specifically interested in the phenomenological extent of this visualisation of performance, musing: ‘Did early modern readers “see” boy actors in female roles of adult-company plays; did they “see” boy actors in all the roles in boy-company plays?’122 On a more basic level, however, it can be noted that some stage directions relate to effects that are specifically theatrical, whereas some – such as indications of exits or entrances – describe actions that also commonly occur in non-performance contexts.123 It is notable that readers’ interpolated manuscript stage directions are most often of the latter kind, meaning that it is impossible to tell whether they have been made in the course of

210  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating

Figure 4.5  Marginalia on sig. A4r of Thomas Middleton’s A Tricke to Catch the Old One (1616, STC 17897; BL 644.b.78). © The British Library Board.

imagining performance – whether real, potential, or virtual – or simply the fictional narrative that is offered up within the playbook as dramatic literature. Emma Smith’s examination of readers’ corrections of missing exits and entrances in copies of the First Folio leads her to argue that these suggest readers’ attentiveness to ‘the spatial protocols of imagined action’ and demonstrate them ‘imagining a stage space as they read’.124 An example of a reader adding missing exits and entrances in a less prestigious publication hints at how we might interpret such annotations differently. Sig. A4v of the 1616 edition of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One lacks directions indicating both the exits of Witgood and the Courtesan, and the entrance of the three gentlemen, Onesiphorus, Limber, and Kix. An early reader of a British Library copy of the quarto has identified seemingly appropriate locations to add these: the first after the end of Witgood’s speech at the top of the page; the second prior to the first gentleman’s opening line, ‘Whose that?’ (Figure 4.5).125 However, he has provided manuscript additions that are only partially correct, implying that they are made at the point of a first encounter with the text, rather than after considering the shape of the scene. The first of the reader’s stage directions reads ‘exiunt’. Scanning this page and the one facing it, getting both the Courtesan and Witgood off the stage at this point seems appropriate: the scene on sig. A4v is an interaction between the gentlemen, and Witgood’s re-entrance is indicated on sig. B1r with the printed stage direction ‘Enter at one doore, Wit-good, at the other Host’ (Figure 4.6). Yet Witgood has one more line on the left-hand page:

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  211

Figure 4.6  The third gentleman’s exit line on sig. B1r of Thomas Middleton’s A  Tricke to Catch the Old One (1616, STC 17897; BL 644.b.78). © The British Library Board.

modern editions indicate his exit after the line ‘You will not see me now, the comfort is ere it be long you will scarce see your selves’.126 Furthermore, the text implies that the Courtesan exits not with but before Witgood, following his prompts at the bottom of sig. A4r to ‘bee gone […] away’. The misspelled plural ‘exiunt’ is thus employed by a reader who perceives that the two interlocutors are not part of the scene on sig. A4v, but is not alert to the presence of embedded stage directions and cannot envision a split stage space in which one character can deliver an aside while others are posing questions about him as though he cannot hear them. The second manuscript stage direction on sig. A4v encodes a similarly false assumption about the presence of characters in a scene. In the outer margin adjacent to the lines of the first two gentlemen (who are referred to simply as ‘1’ and ‘2’), the reader has provided the direction ‘Enter 2 | gentlemen’. This seems to be an apt addition to the text, until the end of the scene is reached on sig. B1r and it becomes clear that there have in fact been three gentlemen on stage the entire time, although the third has no lines until just before they all exit (‘A match, if it be a match?’ is the line given to ‘3’, adjacent to the ‘Exeunt’ before the re-entrance of Witgood, accompanied by the Host). The overly confident annotating reader thus seems to be more concerned with the – at times misleading – narrative prompts of dialogue, rather than with an imagined performance in which characters can have a physical but not a verbal presence in a scene. The reading implied is therefore one that seems to be more textually than theatrically driven, despite the traditional role of entrance and exit directions in denoting stage action. The annotations hint at a reader who is absorbed in the playworld

212  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating constructed by the text, rather than visualising the creation of this world via performance – someone who has performed a linear reading of a series of narrative events, rather than a full imagining of the dramatic action. Certain reader-added stage directions, of course, indicate actions that take place only in a performance context, and these constitute rare examples of times when a reader may in fact – like Abraham Wright – have been conceptualising the play in performance as he read. One is the ­direction for an action to take place ‘within’, signalling a playhouse location (within the tiring-house or closed-off discovery space) that is, ­paradoxically, often meant to stand in for an exterior locale.127 The annotator of an earlier edition of A Trick to Catch the Old One clearly envisaged a playing space rather than the interior of an actual Cole Harbour tenement when he added ‘[Kno]cks within’ as a marginal direction on sig. E4v shortly after Hoord’s query ‘Who knocks?’: in the fictive world of the play the knocker, Lucre, is outside.128 Similarly theatrical is the direction to speak aside, an action that, as Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson describe it, ‘maintain[s] the fiction that the speaker’s words can be heard only by the playgoer or by some but not all of the figures onstage’.129 Thus when an early reader of a British Library copy of Dekker’s 2 The Honest Whore (1630) marks as asides those lines on sigs C3r, C3v, D1v, and D2r delivered by the disguised Orlando that reveal his inner thoughts, and on sigs D3r and D3v the sotto voce exchanges between Candido and Lodovico that Candido’s wife is not supposed to hear, he clearly imagines the speakers as actors, rather than characters.130 This means that other stage directions added by this reader which might otherwise more ambiguously seem to aid creation of a fictive world – the apt addition of the interpretive direction ‘Shewing him his | Ring’ in the margin of sig. E3r, and an erroneously marked exit on sig. D3r – appear instead to confirm a reading that is aware of the play as a text for performance. A different type of reader-added stage direction that appears to indicate a conception of printed plays as performance texts can be found in British Library copies of the first edition of Soliman and Perseda (attributed to Thomas Kyd) and James Shirley’s The Grateful Servant (1637), and in a Folger copy of the anonymous 1606 Nobody and Somebody discussed by Syme. These are early reader annotations that acknowledge the intended presence of those aspects of performance of which Shirley regrets depriving William Prynne in the epistle to The Bird in a Cage: the ‘Musicke, […] Songs, [and] Dancing’ which, teases Shirley, ‘would have pleas’d [Prynne] infinitely in the Presentment’ (sig. A2r). It is impossible to know whether the annotator of Soliman and Perseda supplements his reading with a recollection of actual performance or a sensitivity towards the possibilities of potential performance. In the outer margin of sig. E4v, adjacent to Soliman’s lines ‘And now Erastus come and follow me. | Where thou shalt see what pleasures and what sports, | My minions and my Euenukes can devise, | To drive away this melancholly moode’, is the manuscript legend

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  213 ‘the daun[c]e | before piston | enters’.131 The annotation reflects a very interpretive dramaturgy: Soliman’s speech and Erastus’s exit line after his short exchange with Piston (‘For now I must attend the Emperour’) imply that the two characters watch the eunuchs’ entertainment together offstage; furthermore, a printed direction in the gutter margin next to the final lines of Soliman’s speech requires the Emperor to exit, alone, before Piston’s entrance. The dialogue and the pre-existing printed stage directions on this page do not render the reader’s annotation obvious. It is a similar case with the only other annotation in this copy of the play, which is a direction in the outer margin of sig. G2r, next to Soliman’s exit, reading: ‘the songe to | be sunge befor{e} | Basilisco | enters’. Again, the dialogue indicates that this is a moment for a musical interlude, but it implies that, if a song is sung, it is sung offstage. Soliman, left alone onstage after the exit of Brusor and Lucina, announces: And now to ease my troubled thoughts at last, I will go sit among my learned Euenukes, And here them play and see my minions dance, For till that Brusor bring me my desire, I may asswage, but never quench loves fire. His exit after this speech is the fulfilment of his intention to ‘go’ and hear his eunuchs play: the reader’s manuscript direction of a moment of onstage song thus modifies the dramaturgy offered by the printed text, either deploying the resources of his own imagination, or that of the actors in a previously viewed performance of the play. If the indicated song was once an integral part of the performance of Soliman and Perseda, then it constitutes what Tiffany Stern refers to as a ‘lost song’. Stern posits several explanations for the ‘loss’ of songs from printed playbooks, but also notes that comparatively little scholarly attention is given to song lyrics that are not lost: ‘Editors often simply render their italics into roman type and change their “statement” headings to stage directions’.132 Further proto-editorialising is thus seemingly undertaken by an early reader of Shirley’s 1637 Grateful Servant, who annotates the rhyming incantation delivered by ‘one like Silvanus’ on sig. I1v with the marginal direction, ‘sing’.133 Silvanus’s lines, however, are not printed in italics, nor are they accompanied by a ‘“statement” heading’ such as ‘song’. Nevertheless, their rhyming couplets, and their presence within what the character of Lodwicke identifies as ‘[s]ome maske, a device to entertaine’ (sig. I2r), makes it dramaturgically probable that they are sung, not spoken – a probability identified by the reader who annotates the text with an eye to performance. In the same vein as the previous examples is a Folger copy of Nobody and Somebody to which Syme draws attention because of the ‘substantial number’ of reader-added stage directions it contains, ‘virtually all of

214  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating [which] concern only music’. He provides the example of a reader’s annotation on sig. A3r that offers the musical direction, ‘fflorishe’, and notes that ‘elsewhere a “senate” (i.e. sennet) is added’. Syme rejects as unlikely the possibility that the copy could have been a playhouse musician’s cue script because of its otherwise clean state, and calls the copy a ‘curio’, but it is in fact one of a group of playbooks that provide evidence of readers ‘referr[ing] to [their] imagination[s], The Musicke, the Songs, the Dancing, and other varieties’ that are normally the preserve of ‘the Presentment’.134 Such annotations seem to stem from the same set of expectations that governed the paratextual revisions of the successive editions of The Rape of Lucrece, discussed in Chapter 2. These expectations, as I argued, held that printed plays lacking performance’s ‘Gracefull action’ should nevertheless provide as much as possible in the way of textual aids for the imagining of this action, whether in the form of the full text of songs or – as in the case of readers’ manuscript additions to the already crowded printed page – in elliptical stage directions that signal when moments of visual or aural action unable to be rendered textually could or did take place. When we turn to readers’ manuscript provision of the third element of Nebentext discussed by Kidnie – printed indications of act divisions – we move back into the realm of ambiguity. It is once more unclear when early readers add these themselves whether they are doing so because they are remembering or conceptualising the play in performance, or because they have a sense that act divisions belong to the paratextual apparatus of the playbook, and should be added in order to complete or ‘perfect’ the play as book (and, simultaneously, confirm the status of commercial drama as ‘poetry’).135 An example of an early reader who adds act divisions to a playbook that possesses none can be found in the National Library of Scotland’s copy of the 1594 issue of 1 Selimus.136 In a hand that attempts to carefully mimic the roman type of the running title but whose ‘t’ betrays its writer’s more habitual use of a secretary script, a reader has added, above the entrance directions that indicate the commencement of new scenes on sigs C1r, E2r, G1r, and I2v, the legends ‘Act 2’, ‘Act 3’, ‘Act 4’, and ‘Act 5’.137 1 Selimus is not a play that is written to a classical five-act structure: Daniel Vitkus’s modern edition presents it in twenty-nine scenes.138 The reader’s annotations must thus be interpreted as other than the addition of ‘missing’ aspects of the Nebentext that the playwright or printer failed to provide. As such, there are, I argue, two possible motivating factors behind the manuscript act divisions. One is that they represent the reader’s imagined reconstruction of the play in a performance he attended at a date around or after 1610. This is the date generally posited as the earliest point at which outdoor playhouses may have begun to adopt the convention of act breaks that had always been a necessity at candlelit indoor playhouses, where pauses in the dramatic action were required in order to trim the candle wicks.139 Whether Selimus – originally a Queen’s Men play and probably written

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  215 sometime around 1591 – would still have been being performed two or more decades after its initial appearance on the London stage is uncertain, particularly given its antiquated, Marlovian style.140 It certainly appears unlikely, in light of the scope and nature of its dramatic action (which is similar to that of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine), that it ever transferred to an indoor theatre, and the artificial introduction of act breaks into an amphitheatre play that was not also performed in a context that actually required them is equally uncertain. If not therefore representing a reading experience that recalls an actual performance of the play, the reader’s annotations may still hint at a later Jacobean or Caroline assumption that performed plays have act breaks and an acknowledgement that Selimus is or was a performed play.141 Perhaps more persuasive, however, is that the additions of the act divisions respond to several paratextual conventions increasingly in evidence in quarto playbooks. The first of these is, simply, the indications of act breaks that became the norm in plays printed for the first time after 1609.142 Just as a reader felt prompted to add missing exits and entrances in locations where he expected to find print indications of them, so too might he feel the need to add the act divisions that he had come to expect from his reading of later plays to an earlier play that lacked them, even if their location was unclear and involved an act of interpretive judgement on his part. However, another paratextual convention that became increasingly standardised among the corpus of commercial playbooks may also have had an influence upon the annotating reader of Selimus. This is the number of preliminary verses and epistles that performatively referred to such drama as ‘poetry’, and the title page Latin mottoes – particularly from Horace – that obliquely reinforced this. It is within this class of paratexts – those that Lukas Erne argues increase a playbook’s ‘literary cachet’ – that James Hirsh situates printed act divisions in plays that lack an organic five-act structure.143 Such paratexts, as argued in Chapter 2, created certain expectations among playreaders raised on Horace’s Ars Poetica that other paratexts attempted to manage or alter: in the annotating reader of this copy of Selimus, I argue, can be seen a playreader altering not his expectations but the text itself in order to comply with Horace’s dictates regarding dramatic poetry. It is Horace’s command to ‘[l]et no play be either shorter or longer than five acts’ (ll. 189–90) that the neoclassicist dramatists follow, and when the reader of Selimus imposes a five-act structure upon a play that lacks one, he implicitly gives the status of poetry to this play that had its origin on the public stage, and makes it resemble contemporary editions of works with act divisions written by classical dramatists such as Terence.144 Given that such Roman plays were encountered in the first instance on the page, often as schoolroom reading texts, the reader’s added act divisions appear, ultimately, to stem less from an awareness of early modern performance conventions and more from an engagement with the idea of the play as a literary text and/or book.

216  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating The example of another reader’s annotations similarly indicates that act divisions may have been conceived of as more closely tied to the experience of the play on the page than on the stage, albeit in a more pragmatic fashion. A manuscript annotation in a mixed hand on the final page of a British Library copy of the 1646 Bussy D’Ambois reads as follows: first act ends fo the 14 the second------------27 the third--------------44 the fourth------------57145 The numbers given correspond to those on the printed pages that bear the listed act divisions, meaning the reader’s annotation resembles a rudimentary table of contents. This in turn implies a conception of the play as a text to be read in stages, rather than at a sitting. If the end of an act is a natural location to pause one’s reading, the manuscript table is a finding aid that allows for its easy resumption, without flicking through the pages of the playbook. When plays are cast by paratexts as leisure reading, what is often elided is the fact that the ‘sorted houres’ a playwright like Heywood hopes the dedicatee of 2 The Iron Age will ‘spare […] to heare it read’ (sig. A3v) may not – from choice or necessity – be consecutive. The manuscript table implies a readerly investment in the linear experience of the dramatic narrative, but not one that is at the level of the playgoer’s durational experience of performance. Act divisions – among those elements of Nebentext that seem most obviously and immediately to mark out a text as theatrical – may have been viewed by certain early modern readers as nothing more than indicators of the most commodious locations to pause in their reading.146 A further ambiguous category of manuscript marks is those that seem to recognise allusions to other professional plays, thereby creating a connection between the play being read and the play being invoked, and demarcating commercial drama as possessing a distinct corpus. Yet again, however, it remains unclear whether these marks that recognise dramatic intertextuality are prompted by readers’ remembrance of performances, and thus a sense of printed plays’ latent theatricality – or simply by their familiarity with the ever-increasing corpus of printed playbooks which resembled the one they held in their hands. One example of dramatic intertextuality noticed by readers is other playwrights’ parodies of Marlowe’s famous line from 2 Tamburlaine: ‘Holla, ye pampered Jades of Asia: | What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day’.147 Charles Whitney, in a discussion of early modern printed allusions to Tamburlaine, argues that Pistol’s mangling in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV of the line as ‘hollow pamperd jades of Asia which cannot goe but thirtie mile a day’ is ‘a parody not so much of the conqueror himself but of playgoers who admire Tamburlaine incontinently’.148 While this

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  217 is a legitimate reading, it fails to take into account the degree to which this particular line from Marlowe’s play became a recognisable dramatic commonplace, spotted by playreaders who apparently unironic­ ally picked out reworkings of the line in other dramatic works. One such instance of reworking can be found in the 1607 edition of Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer, where the final lines of the song on sig. D1r are ‘Holla, holla ye pampred Jades of Asia, | And can you draw but twentie miles a day?’ The lines’ currency is made apparent by the fact that they are accompanied by printed commonplace markers, something that has not prevented an early reader of a British Library copy of the play encircling them for good measure.149 Although – as Lucy Munro points out – other marks and annotations in this copy seem to be ‘reshap[ing] it for potential performance’, the reader’s selection of the lines may simply stem from his or her recognition of their original dramatic context.150 This inference is supported by the fact that, in the 1616 edition of another Sharpham play, Cupid’s Whirligig, among numerous lines picked out with unobtrusive marginal pencil dots in a British Library copy is that of Sir Troublesome to his servant Wages on sig. D1v: ‘O thou pampred Jade! what wouldest thou have? what, wouldst thou feede on Quailes?’151 The line is rhetorically unremarkable and does not resemble those habitually marked by this reader (who is otherwise most i­ nterested in lines to do with the relations between the sexes) leading to the impression that it is recognition of the dramatic source of the initial quotation that prompts the manuscript mark. By the time the third edition of Cupid’s Whirligig was published in 1616, there had been no recorded performances of the Tamburlaine plays for over twenty years, and even if Edward Alleyn continued to play the title role after the last recorded performance in 1595, he had retired in 1605.152 This was shortly before the play’s second part appeared in print for the fourth time, rendering it perhaps more likely that these marking playreaders are signalling their familiarity with a printed playtext rather than a performed play. If so, their marginal marks could be understood as acknowledging instances of what might be called ‘textual metatheatre’, whereby references to another dramatic text jolt readers from their absorption in the play’s ‘fictive world’ and remind them that they are reading a play. Recognition of textual metatheatricality of a slightly different sort seems to be behind the marks made by a reader in a British Library copy of Thomas Nabbes’s Tottenham Court (1639).153 This reader seems particularly struck by passages that make reference to plays.154 On sig. B2v, a pencil vertical rule in the margin accompanies a line in which a character explains the origin of the phrase he has used in his previous line, ‘I am as sleepy as if I had eaten a Puppie’. When his interlocutor exclaims at the oddness of the simile, he responds that he ‘heard [his] Landlords carter speake it last Whitsontide in a Play’. The exchange provides an example of the poaching of dramatic dialogue for reuse in conversation that is

218  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating satirised by Webster in the Induction to The Malcontent (discussed in Chapter 2). That playgoing – or perhaps playreading – can be practically profitable is also the sentiment found in law student James’s speech on sig. E2r. In response to another character’s suggestion that they go ‘home to [their] studies and put cases’, he replies: Hang cases and bookes that are spoyl’d with them. Give me Johnson and Shakespeare; there’s learning for a gentleman. I tell thee Sam, were it not for the dancing-schoole and Play-houses, I would not stay at the Innes of Court for the hopes of a chiefe Justice-ship. Although James evidently frequents the theatre, he also seems to read plays by Jonson and Shakespeare – their names stand in opposition to the law books that are ‘spoyl’d’ with cases, implying that it is the playwrights’ printed œuvres for which their names are metonymies. The vertical pencil line that accompanies this passage in the outer margin of the page thus seemingly indicates a playreader approving of a moment in a play in which a playreader approves of reading plays. Except for the marginal mark on sig. B2v of Tottenham Court, none of the marks discussed above that pay attention to ‘textual metatheatre’ or dramatic intertextuality appear to definitively demonstrate early modern men or women connecting their playreading with performance rather than with other instances of textually encountered drama. If this category of marks implies that readers did, pace Adam Hooks, eventually acquire a sense of printed plays as a generically distinct corpus, they also imply, pace Jeffrey Masten, that this generic distinction may not have relied to any great degree upon a conception of printed plays as ‘surrogates’ to performance.155 For such a conception, we might turn finally to annotations that acknowledge more broadly that the printed play is a material object linked to past performance, by commenting – usually within its opening or closing pages – on the theatrical event with which the printed play shares its title. Such comments might be as simple as that left by an early reader of a Folger copy of Massinger’s 1636 Great Duke of Florence, who observes in a brief note along the top of the title page, ‘This play had good success’.156 The rare instances of more elaborate comments have already been noticed by other scholars: Lesser discusses the ‘waggish epigram’ inscribed on sig. A1v of Humphrey Dyson’s copy of Beaumont’s 1613 Knight of the Burning Pestle, ‘O how the Headed Cittizens did nestle | To be abused w[i]th K[nigh]t of burning pestle’, which Lesser suggests hints that the play’s lack of theatrical success was due not to the citizen audience’s inability to understand the play’s irony, but their uneasiness at being the target of it.157 And T. H. Howard-Hill in his edition of Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1625) transcribes this early reader’s observation about the play’s notorious original performances, made on

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  219 sig. A1r of a copy of the second quarto in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum: After nyne dayse wherein I have heard some of the acters say they tooke fiveteen hundred Pounde the spanish faction being prevalent gott it supprest the chiefe actors and the Poett Mr. Thomas Middleton that writt it committed to prisson where hee lay some Tyme and at last gott oute upon this petition presented to King James[.] A version of the petition – Middleton’s verse ‘To the King’ – is inscribed beneath this observation.158 The reader’s comment thus links an account of the events surrounding the play’s performances to the playtext that purportedly records the words spoken in those performances. These three examples indicate a clear conception of the printed play’s origin in performance. Yet it should be noted that in none of them does the reader clearly indicate that he himself was present at a performance of the play: the annotations do not imply that when (if) he went on to read the play he recalled a particular performance of it, or that his imaginative engagement with the printed play was with anything other than a literary text. The annotations mark the playbook as theatrical, but not the reading of it.

Conclusion Recent scholarship has sought to expose early modern playreaders’ ‘performative [i.e. performance-conscious] acts of interpretation and annotation’.159 But based on the evidence in the large number of playbooks surveyed for this chapter, it is by no means certain that performance was at the forefront of readers’ minds when they annotated these books. When early modern playreaders wrote in play quartos, their sense seems largely to have been of these material objects as books that resembled other books, containing texts that invoked other texts – rather than the performances of those playtexts that were historic, contemporaneous, or virtual. This is one conclusion enabled by the evidence surveyed; others can be inferred from the multiple uses to which early modern playreaders put their playbooks, which shed light on the ways in which they conceived of the genre of commercial drama in quarto. Ownership inscriptions imply that playbooks were valued by their early readers, while handwriting practice implies that these readers possessed the range of literacies argued for in Chapter 1. Various marginalia also demonstrate playbooks’ membership of the problematic category of texts identified by Tom Healy, those which ‘manifest a seemingly high and low form separately but simultaneously’.160 This is made clear by the range of ­marginalia that links playbooks with other genres more clearly situated on either side of the high/low binary: Latin works by Seneca, Virgil, and

220  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating Ovid, but also ‘baggage books’ and (possibly) pornography. Readers clearly understood playbooks to be repositories of commonplaceable extracts, and also as locations in which they might affirm their stance in the querelle des femmes or record other personal ideological standpoints using the marks of ‘active reading’ – such as the manicule – that were associated with the early modern commonplace book culture. But when this active reading involved ‘perfection’ of the playtext via the ­addition of elements of paratext and Nebentext, these annotations seem to have stemmed not from readers’ conceptualisation of the play on stage, but from their susceptibility to the authority of certain print conventions associated with plays on the page.

Notes 1 ‘read, v., II.5.a.’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed 1 November 2020]. 2 For recent publications on marginalia and book use, see notes 25 and 61 in the Introduction. 3 Smyth, ‘Book Marks’, pp. 63–64. 4 The bulk of the playbooks surveyed for this research are held by the British Library (BL), where I examined 460 playbooks for traces of early readers’ marks and marginalia. This included all non-Shakespearean pro­ fessional plays printed in quarto and reprinted at least once between 1584 and 1660 that form part of the BL’s holdings, as well as 146 single editions of ­professional plays in quarto printed during this period and consulted in the course of wider research. Of these, I recorded a total of 260 playbooks that contained some type of marks or marginalia. In addition, I examined a smaller number of playbooks held in the Bodleian Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum where I thought they might provide c­ounterexamples to copies of the same titles already consulted in the BL. It is worth pointing out that because so many of the playbooks surveyed exhibit marks and marginalia that are sparse or isolated, the effect of another issue identified by Smyth is mitigated. This is the temptation to view more ­regularly occurring marks or annotations as ‘all-composed-at-once: as existing in a synchronic instant’ when in reality they may have been made on multiple occasions and reflect multiple readerly motivations. The number of possible contrasting motivations is fewer when the number of marks or a­ nnotations throughout the book is fewer. See Smyth, ‘Book Marks’, p. 66. 5 Lesser, Renaissance Drama, pp. 6–7. 6 Scholars have argued that the use of graphite pencils was uncommon prior to 1662, when such pencils began to be commercially manufactured in Germany: see Peter Stallybrass and others, ‘Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (2004), 379–419 (p.  409). However, as Sherman points out, ‘pensil[s] of black lead’ were clearly envisaged as a regular note-taking tool for students as early as 1612, when John Brinsley in Ludus Literarius recommends the use of ‘blacke leade thrust into a quill’ for notes you might later wish to erase. See Sherman, p.  162 and Brinsley, sig. G4r. For discussion of the non-pen-wielding readers

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  221 that Smyth (‘Book Marks’, pp. 65–66) sees as neglected by early modern marginalia studies, see this book’s Conclusion. 7 Grindley calls for a broad definition of ‘marginalia’, which I too adopt throughout this chapter, arguing: ‘There are many types of margins, some of which are not necessarily found beyond the bounding lines of b ­ ifolio. Flyleaves, for example, are the ur-margins of books’ (‘Reading Piers Plowman C-Text Annotations: Notes toward the Classification of Printed and Written Marginalia in Texts from the British Isles 1300–1641’, in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work, ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, ELS Monograph Series, 85 (Victoria, BC: ELS, 2001), pp. 73–141 (p. 77)). 8 Sherman, p. 15. Parenthetical substitutions are Sherman’s. 9 Scott-Warren, p. 366. 10 Ibid., pp. 366–68; Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, p. 158. 11 For individual examples see Erne, Book Trade, pp. 215–17; Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, pp. 48–50; and Massai, ‘Early Readers’, pp. 153–54. 12 Folger STC 4987, copy 1; for a discussion of the other marginalia in this copy see Holger Syme, ‘Well-Read Plays V’, in Dispositio: Mostly Theatre, Then and Now, There and Here, posted 6 February 2012 http://www.dispositio.net/archives/751 [accessed 12 May 2021]. Throughout this chapter, I focus on marginalia that is plausibly pre-eighteenth century; all instances discussed are in ink unless otherwise specified. Except for when the hand in which an inscription is made has significance for its interpretation, I do not define it as other than ‘early’; it is often difficult to categorically describe a hand as ‘secretary’ or ‘italic’ based on a sample of only a few words, and many of the instances of playbook marginalia I discuss appear to have been made in the idiosyncratic hybrid secretary/italic hands that emerged over the course of the seventeenth century. 13 Folger STC 17481, copy 2; on Frances Wolfreston’s inscriptions ‘evincing pleasure in literacy and ownership’, see Newcomb, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s annotations’, p. 243. 14 BL 161.a.73. Whether this is John Fletcher the playwright is uncertain. 15 On the history of book curses or ‘anathema’, see Marc Drogin, Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (Totowa, NJ: Allanheld & Osmun, 1983). 16 Brome, ‘Upon Aglaura printed in Folio’, sigs A2r-v. 17 BL c.12.f.8/1. 18 BL 161.d.33. 19 Brome, ‘Upon Aglaura printed in Folio’, sig A2r. See Early Modern Female Book Ownership: #HerBook, ed. by Mark Empey and others [accessed 5 May 2021]. Emma Smith discusses traces left by female readers of First Folios in Shakespeare’s First Folio, pp. 177–81. 20 For discussion of contemporary sources that assume that women are drawn to the amorous subject matter of comedies, see Chapter 1, pp. 55-56. 21 Folger STC 1686; NLS H.28.e.37(2). A Mary Barbour was married to a John Tefft, who emigrated from England to America in the mid-seventeenth century; she died in 1679 (see William Richard Cutter, Encyclopedia of Massachusetts, Biographical-genealogical, 13 vols (New York: American Historical Society, 1916), VII, p. 205). Grace Strangwayes may be the wife of the politician Sir John Strangways (1584–1666), who married him some time prior to 1607 and died in 1652 at the age of sixty-nine: see David L. Smith, ‘Strangways, Sir John (1584–1666), politician’, Oxford Dictionary of

222  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39725. Connecting such biographical information with inscriptions in playbooks is, in the case of commoner names, rarely more than speculation. 22 Bodleian Mal. 233(5); BL c.12.f.13/2a; genres from Wiggins. A Gartrude Short, spinster, married John Newby, yeoman, on the 12th of February 1672, according to the parish register of Monk Hesledon in County Durham (Durham Marriage Bonds 1664–1674 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: M. S. Dodds, 1912), p. 135); a Temperance Cremer and her husband Robert lived with their large family in Little Massingham in Norfolk from 1631 until at least 1649 (see Rev. Ronald F. McLeod, Massingham Parva: Past and Present (London: Waterlow & Sons Ltd., 1882), p. 74). Heywood’s Iron Age plays were also read with approval by Frances Wolfreston: see Straznicky, ‘Reading through the Body’, p. 72. 23 Bodleian Mal. 244(3); Bodleian Wood 330(8); NLS Bute 19. Anne Lovelace may be related to the poet Richard Lovelace (1617–1657), possibly even the Anne Lovelace to whom his 1649 Lucasta is dedicated: the connection is perhaps made more persuasive by the fact that Lovelace contributed a poem to the 1647 collected works of Beaumont and Fletcher (Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Lovelace, Richard (1617–1657), poet and army officer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17056). Mary Wood (1602–1667) was the mother of Anthony Wood the antiquary: see Tara L. Lyons, ‘Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, A King and No King (1631) and George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundry Flowres [1573]’, Early Modern Female Book Ownership: #HerBook, 5 August 2019 [accessed 6 May 2020]. No seventeenth-century candidate for the identity of Mary Holman has presented herself. 24 Shakespeare’s Early Readers, p. 49. He is discussing Folger Fo. 2. no 32. 25 Ibid., p. 48. 26 BL 162.d.9. 27 BL c.136.bb.3. 28 BL c.57.d.5, sig. L2v. 29 BL 644.b.20. 30 BL 161.a.25. 31 BL c.34.d.18. 32 Jowett, p. 312. The fact that such annotations are found in playbooks that have made their way into elite libraries may perhaps be explained by the willingness of aristocratic playreaders such as the 10th Earl of Northumberland to purchase marked second-hand copies: see Chapter 1, pp. 35-36. 33 Bodleian Mal. 212(7); BL c.34.c.19. 34 BL 644.e.2. Lists of accounts are a type of marginalia observed by Mayer in multiple copies of plays by Shakespeare: see Shakespeare’s Early Readers, pp. 59–60. 35 BL c.34.e.10. 36 This song, ‘Venus lay where Mars had found her’, can be found on sig. D4v of the 1611 Cupid’s Whirligig. 37 It is a link that is emphasised with particular relation to playreading in John Johnson’s Academy of Love, in which the female students of the Academy read works by Shakespeare, Massinger, and Shirley to complement their studies at ‘Loves Schoole of Poetry’ – which is, as Roberts observes, ‘populated with figures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ (Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, p. 38).

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  223 38 After an apparent hiatus, Pond resumed publishing almanacs in 1625; it is possible that editions from the period between 1612 and 1625 have been lost. Despite his death in 1629, ‘Pond’ almanacs continued to be published into the early eighteenth century: see Joad Raymond, ‘Pond, Edward (d.  1629), almanac maker’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22489. 39 Edward Pond, A president for prognosticators: An almanacke for the yeare of Christ 1611 current (1611, STC 501.11), sig. C5v. 40 As A. C. Grayling points out in The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind (London: Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 173), contemporary astronomers used the two terms interchangeably, although the OED does not record an astrological meaning for the second. For the astrological underpinning of Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars, see Johnstone Parr and Nancy Ann Holtz, ‘The Astronomy-Astrology in Chaucer’s “The Complaint of Mars”’, The Chaucer Review, 15.3 (1981), 255–66. 41 See as examples the verses on sigs B6-8 (rectos) and C8v of Pond’s 1611 President for prognosticators. 42 What might be meant by the term ‘popular literature’ has been widely debated in recent years; here it acknowledges the fact that ‘almanacs were stereotypically perceived to appeal to the less educated’. See Alison A. Chapman, ‘Almanacs’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. by Kastan, pp. 26–30 (p. 27). 43 As Lesser and Stallybrass point out, Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) is the first professional play to feature printed commonplace markers (‘The First Literary Hamlet’, p. 395). 44 BL c.12.f.12/6. 45 Folger STC 4987, Copy 2. The name Nicholas Reynolds appears beneath the Latin, in the same hand. 46 [John Parinchef], An extracte of examples, apothegmes, and histories (1572, STC 19196), sig. I1v; Hoole renders it as ‘An envious man waxeth lean at the prosperity of another’ (Culmann, Sentences for children, English and Latin (1658, Wing C7476), sig. C3v). 47 Text and translation from Dicta Catonis in Minor Latin Poets, Volume II, trans. by J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, Loeb Classical Library 434 (London: Heinemann, 1934), pp. 585–639 (p. 597). 48 Dionysii Catonis Disticha de Moribus ad Filium (Edinburgh, 1620, STC 4849, sig. A1r); Brinsley, sig. T4v. 49 Sherman, p. xiii. 50 Bodleian Mal. 212(6). 51 Henry King, Poems, elegies, paradoxes, and sonnets (1657, Wing K501), sig. E5v. 52 For biographical information on King see the ODNB; for the manuscript circulation of his poems, see The Poems of Bishop Henry King, ed. by Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 48–53 and 55–59. 53 Except for one omitted line, the substitution of ‘[q]uicquid’ for ‘quidquid’, and the swapped positioning of ‘facimus’ and ‘patimur’, the transcription matches the text on sigs H1r-v of the edition of Seneca’s tragedies published in London in 1634 (L. & M. Annæi Senecæ tragoediæ, STC 22220). 54 Seneca, Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. by E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 248–49. 55 For King’s use of plays in his sermons, see Coatalen, p. 157. Scott-Warren (p. 370) draws attention to the annotation by Elisabeth Rotton, commenting on her subscribed anagrammatisation of her name as ‘Her Lot is to b neat’; the page of the playbook and its annotation is reproduced in Stephen Parks’s

224  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Its Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 225. 56 The absence of such marginalia may reflect the success of playwrights’ paratextual admonishments against over-interpretation. Marston in the epistle to The Malcontent (STC 17479) tells his readers that ‘some have bin most unadvisedly over-cunning in mis-interpreting me’ (sig. A3v); meanwhile, Jonson remarks in the epistle to the Volpone quarto that ‘[a]pplication […] is now […] growne a Trade with many; and there are, that professe to have a Key for the deciphering of every thing, but let wise and noble Persons take heed how they bee too credulous’ (sig. ¶2v). In a similar vein, ‘The Booke to the Reader’ in John Day’s Law Tricks cautions readers to ‘[P]icke no more out of me, then he that writ put into me: nor knowe me not better then he that made me’ (sig. A2r). 57 This copy (now in the British Library) is discussed by A. H. Tricomi in ‘Philip, Earl of Pembroke, and the analogical way of reading political tragedy’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 85.3 (1986), 332–45. 58 BL c.34.c.48/2. 59 Thomas Heywood, 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1623), sig. A1r; Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 326. 60 Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 326. 61 Leah Marcus describes the Armada medal in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 87. The line ‘dux femina facti’ is line 364 of The Aeneid, Book 1 (see Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916)). 62 ‘Constantia Munda’, The worming of a mad dogge: or, A soppe for Cerberus (1617, STC 18257), sig. A1r. 63 Susan Gushee O’Malley, ‘Munda, Constantia (fl. 1617), author’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/46913. 64 Lesser argues that the seventeenth-century publisher Thomas Archer deliberately curated his list of playbooks to appeal to readers’ interest in the contemporary querelle: see Chapter 4 of Renaissance Drama. 65 BL 82.c.25/1. 66 On sig. K2r, the character of Philautus gives orders regarding Ardelio: ‘Discharge him the house. | Take his accounts and office, and dispose them’. 67 Joseph Swetnam, The araignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women (1615, STC 23534), sigs E1v-E2r. 68 Bodleian Mal. 849. These excisions appear throughout the playbook, sometimes in ink, sometimes in pencil; the sole instance of ‘Jehova’ on sig. E1v has been carefully burnt out of the page, seemingly indicating its particular objectionableness. Excisions are, of course, impossible to date: that these in particular were made at least four years after the play was published is plausible if we accept Holger Syme’s proposition that the rise of such a playreading practice is connected to the 1606 Act which prohibited actors from ‘iestingly, and prophanely speak[ing] [or] vs[ing] the holy Name of God, or of Christ Iesus, or of the holy Ghost, or of the Trinitie’ (quoted in Hugh Gazzard, ‘An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606)’, Review of English Studies 61.251 (2010), 495–528 (p. 495)). Syme makes his point in relation to similar excisions (which he aptly describes as ‘private censorship’) in a Folger copy of Chapman’s 1606 Monsieur D’Olive (‘Well-Read Plays IV’, in Dispositio, posted 13 January 2012 [accessed 5 May 2021]); for an alternative interpretation

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  225 of further similar excisions in a New York Public Library copy of the 1619 A Yorkshire Tragedy, see Jowett, p. 310. 69 Folger STC 17646, Copy 3. 70 BL c.12.g.3/4. 71 This annotation is found on the title page of the Library of Congress copy digitised by Early English Books Online. 72 Puttenham, p. 152; Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Woman Hater (1648, Wing B1618), sig. E1v. 73 The edition under discussion is Wing B1618; a second issue (Wing B1619) has a different title page that bears a genre indication, an attribution to both Beaumont and Fletcher, and the date 1649. 74 In addition to the 1637 Elder Brother, which is now acknowledged to have been co-authored by Massinger, Fletcher’s name appears as the sole author on the title pages of the 1640 The Coronation (in fact written by James Shirley), and The Night Walker, also published in 1640 following a significant revision of Fletcher’s text by Shirley in 1633. Title page advertisements of the plays’ public performance origins may indicate that Fletcher’s comic reputation is created in the playhouse as much as in the printing house. 75 BL c.34.c.34. Masten (pp. 132–38) finds an analogue in print, noting that the writers of the commendatory verses prefacing the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio ‘attempt […] to refigure’ what he calls the ‘strangeness’ of the men’s playwrighting collaboration ‘within a patriarchal-absolutist model of singular authorship’. 76 Folger STC 21531, Copy 2; discussed by Syme in ‘Well-Read Plays V’. 77 BL c.3.a.19; the play is now attributed to Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton. 78 For more on early readers’ manuscript author attributions, see Erne, Book Trade, p. 82 and pp. 199–200, and Jowett, p. 310. 79 On Frances Wolfreston’s verdicts, see Newcomb, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s annotations’, pp. 251–57. 80 On Smith, see Atkin, pp. 1 & 167–68 and George M. Kahrl & Dorothy Anderson, ‘Introduction’, in The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays: A Catalogue with An Historical Introduction (London: The British Library, 1982), pp. 1–80 (p. 11–13); the plays that received the quoted verdicts are a 1617 edition of The Merry Devil of Edmonton in the National Library of Scotland (NLS Bute 528), and British Library copies of the 1625 edition of The Fair Maid of the Exchange (BL 644.e.34) and the 1594 edition of John Lyly’s Mother Bombie (BL c.34.d.15). Mayer (Shakespeare’s Early Readers, pp. 28–29) follows Marion Linton in misattributing Smith’s inscriptions to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: see Linton, ‘The Bute Collection of English Plays’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 December 1956, p. 772. 81 The readers are not the same, I contend, because the retitling seems to be the work of someone who has actually read the play in its entirety, whereas certain instances in which a word that is elsewhere objected to is left ­ untouched give the impression that the excisions are the result of an imperfect sanitising skim reading. 82 A common instance of retitling that also seemingly accords greater agency to a female character is the transposition of Romeo and Juliet to ‘Juliet and Romeo’, on the title page of a copy of the 1623 quarto held in the Folger, but also elsewhere: see Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-reading in the First Folio’, in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. by Acheson, pp. 195–233 (pp. 218–19). 83 BL 644.b.19.

226  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating 84 ‘Introduction to The Patient Man and the Honest Whore’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 280–85 (p. 281). 85 Dekker and Middleton, 1 The Honest Whore (1615), sig. B1r. 86 Smyth, Autobiography, p. 128. 87 See Chapter 3, pp. 145-46. 88 On the background and usage of the manicule in early modern textual culture, see Chapter 2 of Sherman’s Used Books. 89 Sherman, pp. 43–44. 90 Quarto playbooks also do not contain such eye-catching printed marginal markers as the asterisk or the flower. 91 BL 644.d.9. 92 Folger STC 1682. 93 Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster (1622), sig. L3r. 94 See Chapter 2, p. 110 for discussion of Stapylton’s verse. 95 BL 644.b.52. 96 Jonson, Poetaster, sig. I3v. 97 Andrew Marvell, ‘To his Coy Mistress’ in Miscellaneous Poems (1681, Wing M872), sigs E2r-v. 98 BL 161.d.33. 99 BL 644.b.79. Jowett (p. 310) acknowledges the difficulty of dating marginal marks such as this, but notes that ‘most such interventions belong to the seventeenth century [because] [s]election of memorable phrases and passages is consonant with the compilation of commonplace books’. 100 BL 644.d.41. 101 Folger STC 12310a. 1 Selimus has been attributed to Robert Greene. 102 ‘Introduction’, in Three Turk Plays, ed. by Vitkus, pp. 1–53 (p. 22). 103 [Robert Greene], 1 Selimus (1594), sig. B2v. 104 Selimus is, of course, a play in which there is (notoriously) no containment, leading Vitkus to imagine his Elizabethan theatregoers ‘[becoming] increasingly uneasy later in the play as Selimus’ sins went unpunished’ (‘Introduction’, p. 22). 105 For discussion of printed quartos marked up as pre-Restoration promptbooks, see Munro, ‘Reading Printed Comedy’, pp. 50–52; Charles Read Baskervill, ‘A Prompt Copy of A Looking Glass for London and England’, Modern Philology 30.1 (1932), 29–51; Richard Rowland, ‘Two Plays in One: Annotations in the Third Quarto of Edward IV’, Textual Cultures 1.1 (2006), 46–63; and Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 314–17 and 335–40. Other theatrically annotated quartos whose markings can less confidently be dated as pre-Restoration are discussed by Simon Smith, ‘Reading Performance’, pp. 183–88; Leslie Thomson, ‘A Quarto “Marked for Performance”: Evidence of What?’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 8 (1996), 176–210; and Edward A. Langhans, Restoration Promptbooks (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), pp. 515–17. 106 See G. Blakemore Evans, ed., Shakespearean Prompt-books of the Seventeenth Century, 8 vols (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of Virginia, 1960– 96), and more recent discussions in Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, pp. 110–28 and Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, pp. 238–45. 107 On these ‘warning directions’, see Werstine, pp. 209–18, and pp. 243–44 for a full list of the types of annotations found in prompt-books. 108 Erne, Book Trade, p. 93; Atkin, p. 3; Bourne, ‘Marking Shakespeare’, p. 368.

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  227 109 Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature, trans. by George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 208. 110 Margaret Jane Kidnie,‘Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare’s Drama’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 456–73 (p. 462 n. 17). 111 Such corrections are of course not limited to elements of paratext or Nebentext; as Massai points out, ‘[t]he most common types of manuscript annotations in early modern printed playbooks are sporadic corrections in the main body of the dramatic text’. For examples see Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.  14–30, and Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, pp. 73–82. Dramatic paratexts occasionally invited such correction: see ‘Ad Lectorem’, in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix (1602), sig. A4v; ‘The Printer to the Reader’, in Shirley’s A Bird in a Cage, sig. K4r; and the untitled errata note in Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio (1637), sig. A4r. 112 Massai, Rise of the Editor, p. 14. The distinction between typographic elements that encouraged ‘reading for a fictive stage’ and those that encouraged ‘reading for the fictional world of the play’ is explored by Bourne in the final chapter of Typographies of Performance (see esp. p. 234), in which she argues that the second mode only emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While allowing for the inevitable imprecision of dating early marginalia, the evidence discussed in this section implies that it may have emerged earlier, in an implicit rejection of stationers’ efforts – mapped by Bourne throughout her monograph – to encode theatrical elements in print. 113 Linda McJannet, ‘Elizabethan Speech Prefixes: Page Design, Typography, and Mimesis,’ in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. by David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 59–60. 114 Bourne, ‘Marking Shakespeare’, pp. 377–78. 115 BL 643.c.56. 116 BL c.34.c.34. 117 Bourne, ‘Marking Shakespeare’, p. 378. 118 BL 644.e.81. 119 Shakespeare’s First Folio, p. 160. 120 Syme, ‘Well-Read Plays IV’. 121 This phrase is Patrice Pavis’s, cited by Kidnie, p. 460. 122 Kidnie, p. 465; Genevieve Love, ‘“As from the Waste of Sophonisba”; or, What’s Sexy About Stage Directions’, Renaissance Drama, 32 (2003), 3–31 (p. 17 n. 53). 123 In A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson draw on the work of Richard Hosley to distinguish between ‘theatrical directions’ and ‘fictional directions’, and note certain instances in which it is ambiguous to which category a particular direction belongs: see the entry for ‘fictional stage directions’, pp. 90–91. 124 Shakespeare’s First Folio, pp. 159–60. 125 BL 644.b.78. 126 See for instance Paul Mulholland’s Revels edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), in which Witgood’s exit is indicated after I.1.111. 127 Dessen and Thomson (p. 90) identify ‘within’ as a ‘theatrical direction’, although Henry S. Turner, following W. W. Greg, proposes a greater ambiguity for the term: see The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 172–75.

228  How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating 128 Folger STC 17986a. That this reader was generally more sensitive to the theatrical potentialities of the play is implied by his greater success at adding accurate stage directions when compared with the annotator of the British Library copy discussed above. 129 Dessen and Thomson, p. 15. 130 BL 644.b.21/2. 131 [Thomas Kyd], Soliman and Perseda ([1592?]); BL c.34.b.44. 132 Stern, ‘“I Have Both the Note”’, p. 309. 133 BL c.12.f.15/2. 134 Holger Syme, ‘Well-Read Plays II’, in Dispositio, posted 23 December 2011 [accessed 12 May 2021]. The copy discussed is Folger STC 18597. 135 ‘Perfecting’ is Massai’s term: for her discussion of its early usage to mean both ‘to correct’ and ‘to complete’, see Rise of the Editor, pp. 5–10. 136 NLS Bute 463. 137 I am grateful to Mark Houlahan for drawing my attention to the annotations in this copy. 138 For discussion of the play’s structure, see Vitkus, ‘Introduction’, pp. 19–20. 139 See Gary Taylor, ‘The Structure of Performance: Act-Intervals in the London Theatres, 1576–1642’, in Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606–1623, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 3–50. 140 For the play’s composition and early performance history, see Vitkus, ‘Introduction’, pp. 17–19. 141 Taylor argues that, by roughly 1616, all adult playing companies had adopted the convention of act breaks: see ‘Structure of Performance’, pp. 30–37. 142 Taylor notes that ‘well over half the plays published between 1609 and 1616 contain act-divisions’ (‘Structure of Performance,’ pp. 16–17). Plays published without act divisions prior to 1609 and reprinted after this date generally only acquire them if they transition into folio: see ‘Structure of Performance’, pp. 42–50. 143 Erne, Book Trade, p. 99. Hirsh contends that such divisions were added in the printing house in order to make plays by dramatists such as Shakespeare ‘look more respectable and hence more marketable’: see ‘Act Divisions in the Shakespeare First Folio’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 96.2 (2002), 219–56 (p. 244). 144 As Turner points out, the division of Terence’s plays into five acts was itself undertaken by a later reader who had absorbed Horace’s stipulation in the Ars Poetica regarding acts: the fourth-century grammarian Donatus. See Turner, p. 179 n. 35, and pp. 178–80 for further discussion of act divisions on page and stage. 145 BL 644.d.43. 146 Mayer (Shakespeare’s Early Readers, p. 80) finds the reader-added act divisions in a 1639 quarto of 1 Henry IV in the Folger to be ‘an effort on the part of th[e] […] reader to impose some kind of personal structure’ upon the text; the preceding discussion indicates that such efforts were not reserved for Shakespeare’s plays. 147 Marlowe, 1 & 2 Tamburlaine the Great (1590), sig. I7v. 148 Whitney, p. 63. Pistol’s line is on sig. D4v of the 2 Henry IV quarto (STC 22288). 149 BL 11773.c.8. 150 Munro, ‘Reading Printed Comedy’, p. 50. 151 BL 643.c.11.

How were plays read? Using, marking, annotating  229 152 Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Introduction’, in Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two by Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Dawson, New Mermaids edition (Bloomsbury: London, 2008), pp. vii-xliv (p. xxix). 153 BL c.131.d.17/5. 154 As such, he resembles the reader who drew manicules in the HalliwellPhillip’s copy of Q1 Hamlet in the British Library (BL c.34.k.1); as Massai observes, the lines they point to ‘[reveal] an early reader interested in passing references to classical drama, to the acting profession in late Republican Rome, and to Hamlet’s lesson to the actors’ (‘Early Readers’, p. 152). 155 See Hooks, ‘Booksellers’ Catalogues’; Masten, p. 115. 156 Folger STC 17637. 157 Lesser, Renaissance Drama, p. 228. In Lesser’s interpretation of the manuscript comment, ‘[t]he “headed” (cuckolded) citizens in the audience at the Blackfriars […] did not fail to understand the satire; rather, they “nestled” (fidgeted uneasily) at its abuse and simply rejected the play’. The copy on which the inscription can be found is BL c.34.f.30. 158 Dyce 25.D.42, transcribed in A Game at Chess, ed. by T. H. Howard-Hill, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 211. 159 Harry Newman, ‘Reading Metatheatre’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 36.1 (2018), 89–110 (pp. 90–91). 160 Tom Healy, ‘Elizabeth I at Tilbury and Popular Culture’, in Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. by Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, pp. 165–77 (p. 165).

5 Conclusion

My concluding remarks in the final section of the previous chapter confirm Sonia Massai’s findings in relation to the British Library’s collection of Shakespeare quartos, namely that, based on manuscript evidence, when early modern men and women read playbooks they rarely did so with a strong sense of the playtexts’ theatricality.1 This conclusion is perhaps to be expected, because it is in part dictated by the evidence surveyed, and the way in which it is encountered. Writing or other nonverbal marks made with a pen or a pencil speak to a culture of silent textual engagement that scholars who study extant early modern books themselves participate in, quietly poring over pages held open by snake weights and assiduously note-taking in the studious surrounds of libra­ ries’ rare books rooms. Within such contexts, playbooks and even bound manuscripts such as commonplace books are definitively books, to be read silently because to do otherwise would result in an angry shushing from librarians or fellow readers. This means that another crucial mode of engagement is obscured, one that Jennifer Richards has recently argued forcefully should be rehabilitated into the history of early modern reading. Discussing the type of evidence examined in this book, Richards notes the visual bias of such examinations, asking ‘have we been misled by the evidence we have because we can see it?’, and pointing out, ‘[w]hat we cannot see very easily are real readers reading aloud or listening’.2 I do not believe that print or manuscript traces of early modern reading approaches mislead us into drawing historically inaccurate conclusions about these approaches, but the conclusions they do enable are only part of the picture. This picture, as Richards suggests, needs to be complemented by an acknowledgement of the widespread practice of a more performative oral – or ‘vocal’ – reading.3 Just as important a component of the humanist pedagogical training that led readers to mark their books or copy out certain passages, notes Richards, was an emphasis on acquiring rhetorical techniques for the oral delivery of written texts.4 Books were not just read aloud as ‘an exercise in sociability’, as Roger Chartier DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748-6

Conclusion  231 has argued; in Richards’s revisionist history of reading the voice is an integral part of how the reader makes meaning, and performative cues for vocalisation are embedded within aspects of the text such as punctuation.5 Within this framing, the supposed generic distinctiveness of plays is once more homogenised, as all early modern books are seen to offer themselves up for a quasi-theatrical oral reading. Richards notes that there ‘has been a surprising reluctance to explore the oral reading of drama in print’. ‘But’, she goes onto observe, ‘one can easily imagine reading aloud a printed play, or parts of it, paying attention to the vocality of the text; it is just a different experience to a fully embodied production’.6 The account in Hannah Wolley’s unauthorised memoir, discussed in the Introduction, provides just such a scene as Richards conjures of women in an elite household reading aloud – and listening to – a play. Richards muses on the experience for women readers of vocalising the lines of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam and ‘speaking unsayable things’, but given the evidence of women’s playreading surveyed in the preceding chapters, there is no need to imagine that women such as Hannah and her mistress confined themselves to reading closet drama by other women.7 Accepting the scene’s verisimilitude if not the authorship of The Gentlewoman’s Companion, we can consider that as Hannah received her employer’s guidance (similar to that extended to male students in the grammar schools and universities) on ‘where to place [her] accents, how to arise and fall [her] voice, where lay the emphasis of the expression’ while reading plays, she may well have ventriloquised subject positions deeply at odds with those her role as a lady’s maid otherwise required of her.8 Indeed, we should contemplate what exactly constituted the ‘knowledg’ that the writer saw herself (or the Hannah Wolley whose persona he or she assumed) as having acquired from her ‘daily reading to my Lady, Poems of all sorts, and Plays’ – was it polished elocution, or was it a wider awareness of the workings of early modern patriarchal society, as explored in the commercial drama of the period?9 Would the emphases Hannah was directed to use by her mistress have been the same as those a male reader might have chosen – and how might this have affected the play’s meaning for the two women? In all the readerly paratexts in quarto editions of professional plays printed between 1584 and 1660, there is only one explicit reference to the practice of reading plays aloud. This is Thomas Heywood’s dedication of the second part of The Iron Age to Thomas Mannering. ‘I much deceive myselfe’, writes Heywood, ‘if I heard you not once commend it, when you saw it Acted; if you persist in the same opinion, when you shall spare some sorted houres to heare it read, in your paynes I shal hold myselfe much pleased’ (sig. A3v). It is worth pausing to consider who might have read the play aloud to Mannering in those ‘sorted houres’ – the possibility that, given Heywood’s solicitude towards female readers, it was a wife or other female relative encourages us to consider once more what the

232 Conclusion emotional experience of female playreaders vocalising alternative subject positions might have been. But perhaps more important is what this unique reference to oral playreading may imply about how widespread the practice was. There is a good chance that the reference is unique not because the practice was unusual, but because it was so usual that it did not need mentioning. In analysing references to reading in a well-studied document from slightly later in the period, Elspeth Jajdelska finds that throughout Samuel Pepys’s diary, Pepys uses the verb ‘to read’ to mean both ‘to read aloud’ (oral reading) and ‘to listen to someone else reading’ (aural reading). ‘Read’ is used for ‘reading aloud’ so often that it is clear that the ‘aloud’ was not usually considered necessary. The diary’s implication, she concludes, is that ‘“read” may be as likely to mean “read orally” or “read aurally” as “read silently” in seventeenth-­ century contexts’.10 In addition to the silent reading that resulted in marking, commonplacing, altering, and erasing the text of playbooks, what if the type of playreading expected of those ‘Gentlemen readers, and others’ was a vocal one, one that – contradicting the assumptions of non-playreader William Prynne – did not lack the sensorially stimulating ‘viva vox’?11 And what if those gentlemen ‘and others’ in fact at times read playbooks together, speaking and listening in Chartier’s ‘exercise in sociability’, an activity implicitly encouraged by these ‘sociable pocket-books’ with their origins in orality and their plurality of characters? Heidi Brayman Hackel sees behind Sir Edward Dering’s seventeenth-century purchases of multiple copies of the same playbooks ‘an elaborate version of communal reading that verged on theater’ (a claim backed up by the fact that he also records a payment for several wigs and beards).12 Dering’s accounts note his purchase of ‘6 playbookes of Band Ruff and Cuff’ and ‘3 playebookes of ye woman hater’.13 Given that he is known to have engaged in amateur dramatics, buying multiple copies of the same play looks suspiciously as though Dering is planning some sort of performance, but if so, why only three copies of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater, when it has seventeen speaking parts? Obviously price is prohibitive, but in that case, why three and not one from which a scribe could copy out parts as he had been paid to copy out the Henry IV plays which Dering had subsequently corrected?14 Three seems an illogical number for a fully staged performance, but a much more plausible amount for a communal reading in which three friends took all the parts between them, or a larger cast clustered around the three texts in order to read through the play aloud. Thus the ‘theatrical’ reading of plays that is generally not apparent in the manuscript evidence examined in the previous two chapters may have existed in the unarchived oral reading that, as Richards and Jajdelska suggest, was an integral part of how early modern men and women

Conclusion  233 experienced books. Conceiving of oral reading as the invisible substratum in the history of reading may provide a partial answer to Adam Smyth’s question in his list of potential issues with the popularity of marginalia studies: ‘How can the history of book use respond to the overwhelming majority of early modern pages that are unmarked by readers, and the moments of reading that such texts imply?’15 One resolution would be to try and keep in mind the voice as an unarchived, ephemeral marker of book use – although this would involve rejecting Smyth’s characterisation of the readers of non-marked books as passive or ‘inactive’, and instead seeing them as a different type of ‘active’ readers. As Smyth points out, one aspect of the received wisdom about ‘active’ readers who marked or wrote in their books is that they ‘were quick to depart from prescribed interpretations’.16 Non-marking vocal readers, however, also actively rejected the dictates of another preliminary paratext, the character list, when they lent their voices to characters whose identities were at odds with their own gender, class, or nationality, and in doing so phenomenologically upended the prescribed social structure of the dramatic – and the real – world.17 Even taking Smyth’s question at face value, though, can yield more interesting (if speculative) answers than we might suppose. One of the striking features of playbooks in the archives is the number of times that a play exhibits the manuscript marks of active reading in its early pages, only to have these abruptly cease partway through, giving way to more inscrutable unmarked pages.18 What are we to make of these? Are they moments where a reader simply gave up on a play, deciding like Abraham Wright with A New Way to Pay Old Debts that ‘The rest [was] not worth the reading’?19 Or are they moments in which he became so absorbed in the dramatic narrative that the pen was laid down and the reading became a silent imaginative engagement with a fictive world, with the reading strategy that encoded the pursuit of profit subordinated to one that indulged in the pure pleasure of reading?20 In such a scenario, print asserts its power over manuscript – not in the realm of paratext, but via the text itself. This book’s aim has been to expose the push-and-pull between paratextual ‘message’ and manuscript response in the realm of printed commercial drama. In doing so, it nuances our understanding of the gaps and correspondences between implied readers and historical readers, as well as those between imagined and actual reading experiences. It thus paints a fuller picture than we have previously had on view of how quarto playbooks, as material and textual objects, were valued and consumed by early modern readers. The identities of those readers, as I have argued, were likely far more diverse than archival evidence has previously shown them to be. Equally diverse was the range of rationales for reading presented, implicitly and explicitly, by playbook paratexts. Close analysis reveals that individual playbooks’ constellations of preliminary paratext­ ual elements targeted different playreaders’ differing reading agendas, thereby confirming playbooks as a genre that sought to access market

234 Conclusion area, rather than market depth. The range of expectations raised was met by an equivalent range of responses, some of which cohered with paratextual implications regarding reader reception, and some of which were determinedly idiosyncratic. Incentives for playreading appear to have ­centred around the pursuit of both profit and pleasure: amongst other things, playbooks were packaged, and read, as sources of a linguistic profit that had its roots in humanist pedagogy’s promotion of commonplacing; they also provided a pleasure that could derive from striking images or original plots but could equally involve appreciation of certain passages’ t­ itillating eroticism. The often misogynistic canon of non-Shakespearean commercial drama emerges as a genre that provoked early modern ­ readers into asserting their stance on the seventeenthcentury ‘woman question’. Manuscript evidence also indicates the influence (and lack thereof) that a range of new print conventions had on annotating and commonplacing readers, as well as the extent to which playreading enabled the drawing of intertextual connections. This ­evidence further demonstrates that, while playbooks continued to advertise their origins in performance at the same time as they were styled as poetry, playreading was in general more influenced by the materiality of the playbook than by a clear ­conception of the playtext’s theatricality. The brief discussion above suggests how this final conclusion may be qualified by further consideration of an unarchived culture of oral playreading. Other avenues for further research might open up by applying this book’s approach to smaller subsets of plays. In painting a picture of playreading in the period I have used broad brush strokes, presenting choice and representative examples from the vast amount of evidence – both paratextual and manuscript – that I surveyed during my research. This overview of the types of readers and responses quarto playbooks could expect would be nuanced still further by focusing in on playbooks with further shared characteristics, as Massai does when she speculates about the different characteristics of the readers of plays originally performed in amphitheatre playhouses compared with those who read plays performed by children’s companies.21 More pressure could also be placed on Mathew Rhodes’s implication (discussed in Chapter 1) that the readerships of tragedies and histories differed from those of comedies, by focusing a study on the readers of each individual genre. Traditionally period-focused studies that examine Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline, or Interregnum playreaders would perhaps find the methodology I have employed – the juxtaposition of print and manuscript evidence – less useful, given the difficulty of dating playbook marks and marginalia. Yet even these types of projects may become possible: as more and more scholars thumb through early modern books looking for manuscript traces of reading, so too do archives’ attitudes towards digitisation and open access continue to evolve, enabling the crowd-sourcing of interpretation and increasing the ability to crossreference annotations and images of tricky handwriting.

Conclusion  235 While such projects might offer granulated perspectives on some of the findings presented in this book, it is worth bearing in mind the point I made at its start. Readers of plays in early modern England were i­ ndiscriminate. They applied the same approaches to reading quarto playbooks by nonShakespearean dramatists as they did to reading quarto playbooks  by Shakespeare, and to folios, and to poetry, and to prose fiction.22 Further research focused on plays by particular authors, or produced by particular publishers, or of a certain sub-genre may reveal the success (or otherwise) of these plays’ paratextual strategies regarding readings and readerships. But these revelations should be contextualised within the knowledge that early modern readers read printed plays in much the same way as they did other books, whether that reading was silent, oral, or aural. Unlike contemporary scholars who since the end of the last century have read plays under the aegis of performance criticism and imagined how they would have looked (or could potentially look) on stage, early modern play­readers read more like our scholarly forebears: the New Critics for whom plays were not theatrical documents, but poetry.

Notes 1 Massai, ‘Early Readers’, p. 150. 2 Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 39. 3 See Richards, p. 16ff. for an explanation of her preference for the term ‘vocal’ rather than ‘oral’ reading. 4 See Chapter 2 of Voices and Books. 5 Roger Chartier, ‘Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe’, trans. by Carol Mossman, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. by Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 103–20 (p. 104); Chapter 1 of Voices and Books. 6 Richards, p. 119. 7 Ibid., p. 119. 8 The gentlewomans companion, p. 13. 9 Ibid., p. 13. 10 Elspeth Jajdelska, ‘Pepys in the history of reading’, The Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 549–69 (pp. 553–54). 11 As noted in Chapter 2, Prynne believes that ‘when a man reads a Play he ever wants that viva vox, that flexanimous rhetoricall Stage-elocution, that lively action and representation of the Players themselves which put life and vigor into […] their Enterludes’ (Histrio-mastix, sigs 6C2v-6C3r). 12 Brayman Hackel, ‘The “Great Variety” of Readers’, p. 148. 13 Sir Edward Dering, 1st bart., pp. 180, 193. 14 See George W. Williams and Gwynne B. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in The History of King Henry the Fourth: As Revised by Sir Edward Dering, Bart., Folger Facsimiles (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974). 15 Smyth, ‘Book Marks’, p. 65. 16 Ibid., p. 65. 17 On seventeenth-century printed character lists and the way their layout ‘reflect[s] hierarchies which exist outside the theatre’, see Taylor, ‘The Order of Persons’, p. 67.

236 Conclusion 18 Three examples among many in which marginal markings disappear partway through the playbook are BL 643.c.9 and BL 643.c.11 (copies of the 1607 and 1616 Cupid’s Whirligig quartos, respectively) and BL 643.c.57 (a copy of the 1630 How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad). 19 See Chapter 3, p. 156. 20 Such a reading is perhaps implied by William Drummond’s copy of Romeo and Juliet (University of Edinburgh Library, De.3.73), in which his characteristic marginal markings are present until sig. C2v (the end of Act One, Scene Four, just prior to the scene in which Romeo and Juliet meet at the Capulet party), then absent throughout the bulk of the dramatic action that cements the lovers’ fate until sig. L3r (Romeo’s suicidal monologue in the Capulet tomb). 21 Massai, ‘The mixed fortunes of Shakespeare in print’. 22 Such a conclusion is enabled by the work on readers’ manuscript responses undertaken by Mayer (Shakespeare’s Early Readers), Emma Smith (Shakespeare’s First Folio), Roberts (Reading Shakespeare’s Poems), and Brayman Hackel (Reading Material).

Appendix

Professional play quartos with Horatian title page mottoes, 1598–1659 (AP = Ars Poetica) Greg No.

Publ. Date(s)

Title

Author

Source

149A

1598

The Scottish History of James the Fourth

Robert Greene

AP

163a, 163b, 1600, 1600, 163c 1600

Every Man Out Ben Jonson of His Humour

188A

1602

Blurt, Master Constable

Anonymous

Epistle 2.1

195A*, 195A†

1602

Satiromastix

Thomas Dekker

Satire 1.4

259aI, 259aII

1607

Volpone

Ben Jonson

AP

286a, 286b 1610, 1632

The Turk

John Mason

Ode 3.30

296a, 296c, 1611, 1635, 296d 1635

Catiline His Conspiracy

Ben Jonson

Epistle 2.1

303a

1612

Epistle 1.19;

AP

The Alchemist

Ben Jonson

Satire 1.10

316a, 316b 1613, 1635

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Francis Beaumont

Epistle 2.1

317A

1613

The Silver Age

Thomas Heywood

AP

337A

1616

The Honest Lawyer

S. S.

AP

304cI, 304cII

1620

Epicene

Ben Jonson

Satire 1.4

389a, 389b*, 389b†

1623, 1640

The Duchess of Malfi

John Webster

Epistle 1.6

(Continued)

238 Appendix (Continued) Greg No.

Publ. Date(s)

Title

Author

Source

425a, 425b, 1629, 1633, 425c 1660

The Wedding

James Shirley

Ode 3.30

429a, 429b 1630, 1637

The Grateful Servant

James Shirley

Ode 3.30

440A

Match Me in London

Thomas Dekker

Epistle 1.6

441a, 441b 1631, 1637

The School of Compliment

James Shirley

AP

461A

1631

Holland’s Leaguer

Shackerley Marmion

AP

467AI, 467AII

1632

1 The Iron Age

Thomas Heywood

AP

468A

1632

2 The Iron Age

Thomas Heywood

AP

477A

1633

The Witty Fair One

James Shirley

Satire 1.10

481A

1633

A Fine Companion

Shackerley Marmion

Epistle 2.1

484A

1633

The English Traveller

Thomas Heywood

AP

493A

1634

A Maidenhead Well Lost

Thomas Heywood

AP

494A

1634

The Late Lancashire Witches

Thomas Heywood & Richard Brome

AP

504a, 504b, 1636, 1640, 504c 1640 [i.e. 1661?]

Love’s Mistress

Thomas Heywood

AP

509A

1636

A Challenge for Beauty

Thomas Heywood

AP

514A

1637

Microcosmus

Thomas Nabbes

AP

516A

1637

The Royal King and the Loyal Subject

Thomas Heywood

AP

535A

1638

The Wise Woman of Hogsdon

Thomas Heywood

AP

597A

1640

The Noble Stranger

Lewis Sharpe

AP

1631

Bibliography

Primary sources: plays Place of publication for all plays is London. Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany (1654, Wing C1952) Armin, Robert, The Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609, STC 773) Barnes, Barnabe, The Devil’s Charter (1607, STC 1466) [Barry, Lording], The Family of Love (1608, STC 17879a) Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647, Wing B1581) ———, Cupid’s Revenge (1615, STC 1667) ———, The Maid’s Tragedy (1650 [1660?], Wing B1595) ———, Philaster (1622, STC 1682; 1628, STC 1683) ———, The Woman Hater (1607, STC 1692; 1648, Wing B1618) Brome, Richard, The Antipodes (1640, STC 3818) ———, Five New Plays (1653, Wing B4870; 1659, Wing B4872) ———, A Jovial Crew (1652, Wing B4873) ———, The Northern Lass (1632, STC 3819) ———, The Sparagus Garden (1640, STC 3820) ———, The Queen’s Exchange (1657, Wing B4882) Chamberlain, Robert, The Swaggering Damsel (1640, STC 4946, Greg 589AI) Chapman, George, All Fools (1605, STC 4963) ———, Bussy D’Ambois (1607, STC 4966, Greg 246A*) ———, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613, STC 4989) ———, The Widow’s Tears (1612, STC 4994) Daborne, Robert, A Christian Turned Turk (1612, STC 6184) Davenant, William, The Just Italian (1630, STC 6303) ———, The Wits (1636, STC 6309) Davenport, Robert, A New Trick to Cheat the Devil (1639, STC 6315) Day, John, Humour Out of Breath (1608, STC 6411) ———, The Isle of Gulls (1606, STC 6412) ———, Law Tricks (1608, STC 6416) Dekker, Thomas, If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It (1612, STC 6507) ———, The Noble Spanish Soldier (1634, STC 21416) ———, Satiromastix (1602, STC 6520.7) ———, The Whore of Babylon (1607, STC 6532)

240 Bibliography Dekker, Thomas, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, Patient Grissel (1603, STC 6518) Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton, 1 The Honest Whore (1615, STC 6503) Dekker, Thomas, and John Webster, Westward Ho (1607, STC 6540) Field, Nathan, Amends for Ladies (1618, STC 10851) ———, A Woman is a Weathercock (1612, STC 10854) Field, Nathan, and Philip Massinger, The Fatal Dowry (1632, STC 17646) Fletcher, John, The Faithful Shepherdess ([1610?], STC 11068) ———, Monsieur Thomas (1639, STC 11071) Fletcher, John, and Philip Massinger, The Elder Brother (1637, STC 11066) Fletcher, John, and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634, STC 11075) Fletcher, John, and James Shirley, The Night Walker (1640, STC 11072) Ford, John, The Fancies (1638, STC 11159) ———, The Lady’s Trial (1639, STC 11161) ———, The Lover’s Melancholy (1629, STC 11163) ———, The Queen, or The Excellency of Her Sex (1653, Wing Q155) Glapthorne, Henry, Wit in a Constable (1639, STC 11914) Greene, Robert, Friar Bacon and Friar Bongay (1630, STC 12268) [Greene, Robert], 1 Selimus (1594, STC 12310a) Hawkins, William, Apollo Shroving ([1627], STC 12963) Heywood, Thomas, 1 The Fair Maid of the West (1631, STC 13320) ———, The Four Prentices of London (1615, STC 13321) ———, The Golden Age (1611, STC 13325) ———, 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1623, STC 13338) ———, 1 The Iron Age (1632, STC 13340) ———, 2 The Iron Age (1632, STC 13340) ———, Love’s Mistress (1636, STC 13352) ———, A Maidenhead Well Lost (1634, STC 13357) ———, The Rape of Lucrece (1608, STC 13360; 1609, STC 13361; 1614, STC 13361a; 1630, STC 13362; 1638, STC 13363) [Heywood, Thomas], The Cunning Lovers (1654, Wing B4850) ———, How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602, STC 5594; 1605, STC 5595; 1630, STC 5599) Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist (1612, STC 14755) ———, Catiline His Conspiracy (1611, STC 14759) ———, Every Man in His Humour (1601, STC 14766) ———, Every Man Out of His Humour (1600, STC 14767) ———, Cynthia’s Revels (1601, STC 14773) ———, The New Inn (1631, STC 14780) ———, Poetaster (1602, STC 14781) ———, Sejanus His Fall (1605, STC 14782) ———, Volpone (1607, STC 14783) ———, The Works (1616, STC 14752) Killigrew, Thomas, The Prisoners and Claracilla (1641, Wing K452) Kirke, John, The Seven Champions of Christendom (1638, STC 15014) Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy ([1592], STC 15086; 1602, STC 15089; 1618, STC 15092; 1633, STC 15094) [Kyd, Thomas], Soliman and Perseda ([1592?], STC 22894) The London Prodigal (1605, STC 22333) Lyly, John, Sappho and Phao (1591, STC 17087)

Bibliography  241 Markham, Gervase, and William Sampson, Herod and Antipater (1622, STC 17401) Marlowe, Christopher, 1 & 2 Tamburlaine the Great (1590, STC 17425) ———, 1 Tamburlaine the Great (1605, STC 17428) Marmion, Shackerley, A Fine Companion (1633, STC 17442) ———, Holland’s Leaguer (1632, STC 17443) Marston, John, The Malcontent (1604, STC 17479) ———, Parasitaster (1606, STC 17484; 1606, STC 17483) ———, The Wonder of Women, or Sophonisba (1606, STC 17488) Marston, John, and John Webster, The Malcontent (1604, STC 17481) Mason, John, The Turk (1632, STC 17618) Massinger, Philip, The Bondman (1624, STC 17632; 1638, STC 17633) ———, The Duke of Milan (1623, STC 17634) ———, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1633, STC 17639) ———, The Renegado (1630, STC 17641) ———, The Roman Actor (1629, STC 17642) May, Thomas, The Heir (1622, STC 17713) Middleton, Thomas, A Mad World, My Masters (1608, STC 17888; 1640, STC 17889) ———, A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608, STC 17896; 1616, STC 17897) [Middleton, Thomas], The Puritan (1607, STC 21531) Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (1611, STC 17908) Mucedorus (1598, STC 18230) Nabbes, Thomas, Hannibal and Scipio (1637, STC 18341) ———, Tottenham Court (1639, STC 18345) Randolph, Thomas, Aristippus (1630, STC 20686.5) Rawlins, Thomas, The Rebellion (1640, STC 20770) Rowley, William, A Shoemaker a Gentleman (1638, STC 21422) Rowley, William, and Thomas Middleton, A Fair Quarrel (1617, STC 17911a) Shakespeare, William, Hamlet (1603, STC 22275; 1604, STC 22276; 1637, STC 22279) ———, 2 Henry IV (1600, STC 22288) ———, King Lear (1608, STC 22292; 1608 [i.e. 1619], STC 22293; 1655, Wing S2957) ———, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598, STC 22294; 1631, STC 22295) ———, The Merchant of Venice (1600, STC 22296; 1600 [i.e. 1619], STC 22297; 1637, STC 22298) ———, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602, STC 22299; 1619, STC 22300; 1630, STC 22301) ———, Much Ado About Nothing (1600, STC 22304) ———, Othello (1622, STC 22305) ———, Pericles (1609, STC 22334) ———, Richard the Second (1597, STC 22307; 1598, STC 22308; 1598, STC 22309; 1608, STC 22310; 1608, STC 22311; 1615, STC 22312; 1634, STC 22313) ———, Richard the Third (1597, STC 22314; 1598, STC 22315; 1602, STC 22316; 1605, STC 22317; 1612, STC 22318; 1622, STC 22319; 1629, STC 22320; 1634, 22321) ———, The Taming of the Shrew (1631, STC 22327) ———, Troilus and Cressida (1609, STC 22331; 1609, STC 22332) ———, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623, STC 22273)

242 Bibliography Sharpe, Lewis, The Noble Stranger (1640, STC 22377) Sharpham, Edward, Cupid’s Whirligig (1611, STC 22381; 1616, STC 22382) ———, The Fleer (1607, STC 22384) Shirley, James, The Bird in a Cage (1633, STC 22436) ———, The Coronation (1640, STC 22440) ———, The Grateful Servant (1630, STC 22444; 1637, STC 22445) ———, Hyde Park (1637, STC 22446) ———, The Maid’s Revenge (1639, STC 22450a) ———, The Royal Master (1638, STC 22454) ———, The Traitor (1635, STC 22458) ———, The Wedding (1629, STC 22460) ———, The Young Admiral (1637, STC 22463) Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602, STC 21532) 2 The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591, STC 14644 [pt. 2]) 1 & 2 The Troublesome Reign of King John (1611, STC 14646) Webster, John, The Devil’s Law Case (1623, STC 25173) ———, The White Devil (1612, STC 25178; 1631, STC 25179) Webster, John, William Rowley, [and Thomas Heywood], A Cure for a Cuckold (1661, Wing W1220) Wilson, Robert, Three Ladies of London (1584, STC 25784) Wilson, Robert, and others, Sir John Oldcastle (1600 [i.e. 1619], STC 18795)

Non-dramatic primary sources Place of publication is London, unless otherwise specified. Allott, Robert, Englands Parnassus (1600, STC 378) Ascham, Roger, The schoolemaster (1589, STC 836) ‘B., W.’, The yellow book (1656, Wing B3153D) Baker, Thomas, The unspotted high-court of justice erected and discovered in three sermons (1657, Wing B523) Braithwaite, Richard, A suruey of history: or, a nursery for gentry (1638, STC 3583a) Brinsley, John, Ludus literarius: or, the grammar schoole (1612, STC 3768) Burton, Robert, The anatomy of melancholy (Oxford, 1621, STC 4159) Cheynell, Francis, The man of honour, described in a sermon, preached before the Lords of Parliament, in the Abbey Church at Westminster, March 26. 1645 (1645, Wing C3812) Cranley, Thomas, Amanda: or, The reformed whore (1635, STC 5988) Culmann, Leonhard, Sentences for children, English and Latin, trans. by Charles Hoole (1658, Wing C7476) Dionysii Catonis Disticha de Moribus ad Filium (Edinburgh, 1620, STC 4849) Drayton, Michael, The battaile of Agincourt (1631, STC 7191) Drummond, William, Poems (Edinburgh, 1614, STC 7254) ———, Poems (Edinburgh, 1616, STC 7255) Duppa, Brian, ed., Ionsonus Virbius (1638, STC 14784) Ferrand, Jacques, Erotomania, or A treatise discoursing of the essence, causes, symptomes, prognosticks, and cure of love, or erotique melancholy (Oxford, 1640, STC 10829)

Bibliography  243 Fletcher, Robert, Ex otio negotium. Or, Martiall his epigrams translated. With sundry poems and fancies (1656, Wing M831) The gentlewomans companion; or, A guide to the female sex (1673, Wing W3276A) Gouge, William, Exposition on the whole fifth chapter of S. Johns Gospell (1630, STC 12114) Hales, John, A sermon preached at St Maries in Oxford upon Tuesday in Easter weeke (Oxford, 1617, STC 12628) Heywood, Thomas, Gynaikeion: or, Nine bookes of various history. Concerninge women (1624, STC 13326) ———, The exemplary lives and memorable acts of nine the most worthy women of the world (1640, STC 13316) Holinshed, Raphael, The first and second volumes of Chronicles (1587, STC 13569) Johnson, John, The academy of love (1641, Wing J782) Jonson, Ben, The workes (1616, STC 14752) Kempe, William, The education of children in learning (1588, STC 14926) King, Henry, Poems, elegies, paradoxes, and sonnets (1657, Wing K501) Marston, John, The scourge of villanie (1598, STC 17485) Marvell, Andrew, Miscellaneous Poems (1681, Wing M872) Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia (1598, STC 17834) ‘Munda’, ‘Constantia’, The worming of a mad dogge: or, A soppe for Cerberus (1617, STC 18257) Norden, John, The surveyors dialogue (1607, STC 18639) [Parinchef, John], An extracte of examples, apothegmes, and histories (1572, STC 19196) Philipot, Thomas, Villare cantianum (1659, Wing P1989) Pond, Edward, A president for prognosticators: an almanacke for the yeare of Christ 1611 current (1611, STC 501.11) Plutarch, The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, trans. by Philemon Holland (1603, STC 20063) Prynne, William, Histrio-mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragaedie (1633, STC 20464) Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, L. & M. Annæi Senecæ tragoediæ (1634, STC 22220) Steward, Richard, Three sermons preached by the Reverend and learned Dr Richard Stuart (1658, Wing S5527) Stubbes, Philip, The anatomie of abuses (1583, STC 23377) Swetnam, Joseph, The araignment of lewd, idle, froward, and vnconstant women (1615, STC 23534) Wright, Abraham, Five sermons, in five several styles (1656, Wing W3685) Younge, Richard, An infallible way to farewell: in our bodies, names, estates, precious souls, posterities (1661, Wing Y165)

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244 Bibliography Daborne, Robert, A Christian Turned Turk, in Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, ed. by Daniel Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 149–239 Dicta Catonis, in Minor Latin Poets, Volume II, trans. by J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, Loeb Classical Library 434 (London: Heinemann, 1934), pp. 585–639 Durham Marriage Bonds 1664–1674 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: M.S. Dodds, 1912) Erasmus, Desiderius, The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. by Craig R. Thompson, 89 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974– ), XXIV: Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia/De Ratione Studii, trans. by Betty I. Knott and Brian McGregor (1978) Giraldi, Giovan Battista (‘Cinthio’), ‘Discourse or Letter on the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies’, trans. by Daniel Javitch, Renaissance Drama, 39 (2011), 207–55 (pp. 219–20) Greene, Robert, Selimus, Emperor of the Turks, in Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, ed. by Daniel Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 55–147 Harington, Sir John, A Brief Apology of Poetry, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), pp. 260–73 Heywood, Thomas, An Apology for Actors, in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. by Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 213–54 Horace, ‘Ars Poetica’, in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 194 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), pp. 442–89 Ingleby, C. M. and others, eds, The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1932) Jonson, Ben, Sejanus His Fall, ed. by Philip J. Ayres, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) ———, Volpone, or, The Fox, ed. by R. B. Parker, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983) King, Henry, The Poems of Bishop Henry King, ed. by Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedie with The First Part of Jeronimo (anonymous), ed. by Emma Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1998) Lodge, Thomas, ‘A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse’, in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. by Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 37–61 Massinger, Philip, The Bondman: An Antient Storie, ed. by Benjamin Townley Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932) Middleton, Thomas, A Trick to Catch the Old One, ed. by Paul Mulholland, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) ———, A Game at Chess, ed. by T. H. Howard-Hill, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936) Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. by E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966)

Bibliography  245 Shirley, James, The Bird in a Cage, ed. by Julie Sanders, in Three Seventeenthcentury Plays on Women and Performance, ed. by Hero Chalmers, Julie Sanders, and Sophie Tomlinson, Revels Plays Companion Library (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 177–266 Sidney, Philip, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 1–54 Sir Edward Dering, 1st bart., of Surrenden Dering and his ‘Booke of Expences’ 1617–1628, ed. by Laetitia Yeandle (Kent Archaeological Society, [n.d.]) [accessed 6 November 2019] Tudor, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) ———, Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592–1598, ed. by Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009) Virgil, Aeneid, Book 1’, in Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6, trans. by H.  Rushton Fairclough, rev. by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916 Webbe, William, A Discourse of English Poetry in A Critical Edition of William Webbe’s ‘A Discourse of English Poetry’ (1586), ed. by Sonia HernándezSantano (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2016), pp. 65–140

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258 Bibliography Wendorf, Richard, ‘Abandoning the Capital in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 72–98 Werstine, Paul, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Wheale, Nigel, Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590– 1660 (London: Routledge, 1999) Whitney, Charles, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Williams, George W., and Gwynne B. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in The History of King Henry the Fourth: As Revised by Sir Edward Dering, Bart., Folger Facsimiles (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974) Wilson, Louise, ‘“Certaine Houres Amongst My Bookes”: Recreation, Time, and Text in 1580s London’, Shakespeare Studies, 45 (2017), 60–67 Woolf, D. R., Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Wright, Louis B., ‘The Reading of Renaissance English Women’, Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), 671–88 Yamada, Akihiro, Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2017) Ziegler, Georgianna, ‘Patterns in Women’s Book Ownership, 1500–1700’, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. by Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020), pp. 207–23 Zwicker, Steven N., ‘Habits of Reading and Early Modern Literary Culture’, in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. by David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 170–98 ———, ‘Reading the Margins: Politics and Habits of Appropriation’, in Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 101–15

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Bibliography  259 McInnis, David, Matthew Steggle, and Misha Teramura, eds, Lost Plays Database, revised and migrated 2018 [accessed 1 June 2021] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004– ) [accessed 1 June 2021] Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000– ) [accessed 1 June 2021] Pearson, David, and others, eds, Book Owners Online, last modified 9 January 2022 [accessed 14 January 2022] Plett, Heinrich F., English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics: A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1995) Shakespeare in Quarto (London: British Library) [accessed 2 September 2021] Wiggins, Martin, in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533– 1642: A Catalogue, 10 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011– )

Blogs and blog posts Empey, Mark, and others, eds, Early Modern Female Book Ownership: #HerBook [accessed 5 May 2021] Lindenbaum, Sarah, Frances Wolfreston Hor Bouks, established 28 April 2020 [accessed 10 May 2021] Lyons, Tara L., ‘Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, A King and No King (1631) and George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundry Flowres [1573]’, Early Modern Female Book Ownership: #HerBook, ed. by Mark Empey and others, posted 5 August 2019 [accessed 6 May 2020] ‘Resources’, Early Modern Female Book Ownership: #HerBook, ed. by Mark Empey and others [accessed 24 March 2021] Syme, Holger, ‘Well-Read Plays II’, in Dispositio: Mostly Theatre, Then and Now, There and Here, posted 23 December 2011 [accessed 12 July 2013] ———, ‘Well-Read Plays IV’, in Dispositio: Mostly Theatre, Then and Now, There and Here, posted 13 January 2012 [accessed 12 July 2013] ———, ‘Well-Read Plays V’, in Dispositio: Mostly Theatre, Then and Now, There and Here, posted 6 February 2012 [accessed 12 July 2013]

Manuscripts Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 2059 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 2060 London, British Library, Add. MS 22608 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. d. 3 Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, MS ER 82/1/21

260 Bibliography Playbooks with manuscript marks or marginalia Abbreviations BL = British Library Folger = Folger Shakespeare Library Bodleian = Bodleian Library NLS = National Library of Scotland Beaumont, Francis, The knight of the burning pestle (1613, STC 1674), BL c.34.f.30 Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher, A king and no king (1625, STC 1671), Bodleian Mal. 244(3) ———, A king and no king (1631, STC 1672), Bodleian Wood 330(8) and NLS Bute 19 ———, The maids tragedy (1650 [1660?], Wing B1595), BL 644.d.9 ———, Philaster (1622), Folger STC 1682 ———, The scornful ladie (1616), Folger STC 1686 ———, The woman hater (1607, STC 1692), BL c.34.c.34 ———, The woman hater (1648, Wing B1618), Library of Congress copy digitised by Early English Books Online Chapman, George, Bussy d’Ambois: a tragedie (1607, STC 4966), BL 644.d.41 ———, Bussy D’Ambois: a tragedie (1646, Wing C1943), BL 644.d.43 ———, A pleasant comedy entituled: An humerous dayes myrth (1599), Folger STC 4987, Copy 1 and Copy 2 [Cooke, John], Greenes Tu quoque (1614, STC 5673), BL c.34.c.19 Dekker, Thomas, The second part of The honest whore (1630, STC 6506), BL 644.b.21/2 Dekker, Thomas, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, The pleasant comodie of patient Grissill (1603, STC 6518), BL c.3.a.19 Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton, The honest whore. With the humours of the patient man, and the longing wife (1615, STC 6503), BL 644.b.19 ———, The honest whore. With the humours of the patient man, and the longing wife. (1616, STC 6504), BL 644.b.20 and University of Edinburgh Library De.3.60 The fayre maide of the Exchange (1625, STC 13318), BL 644.e.34 Field, Nathan, Amends for ladies. A comedie (1618, STC 10851), BL c.136. bb.3 Field, Nathan, and Philip Massinger, The fatall dowry (1632), Folger STC 17646, Copy 3 Fletcher, John, and Philip Massinger, The tragoedy of Rollo Duke of Normandy (1640), BL 644.e.133 Ford, John, ’Tis pitty shee’s a whore (1633, STC 11165), BL c.12.g.3/4 [Greene, Robert], The first part of the tragicall raigne of Selimus (1594, 12310a), Folger STC 12310a and NLS Bute 463 Heywood, Thomas, If you know not me, you know no body. Or, The troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1632, STC 13334), Bodleian Mal. 212(7) ———, If you know not me, you know no body. The second part (1623, STC 13338), BL c.34.c.48/2

Bibliography  261 ———, The iron age (1632, STC 13340.5), BL c.12.f.13/2a ———, The rape of Lucrece (1638, STC 13363), BL c.12.f.12/6 [Heywood, Thomas], A pleasant conceited comedie, wherein is shewed, how a man may chuse a good wife from a bad (1602, STC 5594), Bodleian Mal. 849 ———, A pleasant conceited comedie, wherein is shewed, how a man may choose a good wife from a bad (1605, STC 5595), Bodleian Mal. 233(5) and BL 643.c.56 ———, A pleasant conceited comedy, wherein is shewed, how a man may choose a good wife from a bad. (1630, STC 5599), BL 161.d.33 and BL 643.c.57 Jonson, Ben, Poetaster (1602, STC 14781), BL 644.b.52 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish tragedie (1602, STC 15089), BL c.57.d.5 ———, The Spanish tragedie (1618, STC 15092), Bodleian Mal. 212(6) [Kyd, Thomas], The tragedye of Solyman and Perseda ([1592?], STC 22894), BL c.34.b.44 Lyly, John, Mother Bombie (1594, STC 17084), BL c.34.d.15 ———, Sapho and Phao (1591, STC 17087), BL 161.a.73 and BL c.34.d.18 Marlowe, Christopher, The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, King of England (1598, STC 17438), NLS H.28.e.37(2) Marmion, Shackerley, Hollands leaguer (1632, STC 17443.5), BL 82.c.25/1 Marston, John, Iacke Drums entertainement (1616, STC 7244), BL 161.a.25 Marston, John, and John Webster, The malcontent. Augmented by Marston (1604), Folger STC 17481, Copy 2 Massinger, Philip, The bond-man (1624, STC 17632), BL 162.d.9 ———, The bond-man (1638, STC 17633), BL 644.e.81 ———, The great Duke of Florence (1636), Folger STC 17637 The merry diuel of Edmonton (1617, STC 7495), NLS Bute 528 Middleton, Thomas, A game at chæss ([1625?], STC 17883), National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dyce 25.D.42 ———, A Trick to catch the Old-one (1608), Folger STC 17986a ———, A tricke to catch the old one (1616, STC 17897), BL 644.b.78 [Middleton, Thomas], The puritaine (1607), Folger STC 21531, Copy 2 ———, The reuengers tragædie (1607), BL c.12.f.8/1 Nabbes, Thomas, Totenham-Court (1639, STC 18345), BL c.131.d.17/5 No-body, and some-body ([1606]), Folger STC 18597 Rowley, William, and Thomas Middleton, A faire quarrell (1617, STC 17911), BL 644.b.79 Shakespeare, William, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (1603, STC 22275), BL c.34.k.1 ———, The most excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet (1599, STC 22323), University of Edinburgh Library De.3.73 Sharpham, Edward, The fleire (1607, STC 22384), BL 11773.c.8 ———, Cupids Whirligig (1607, STC 22380), BL 643.c.9 ———, Cupids Whirligig (1616, STC 22382), BL 643.c.11 Shirley, James, The gratefull servant (1637, STC 22445), BL c.12.f.15/2 Tourneur, Cyril, The atheist’s tragedie (1611, STC 24146), BL c.34.e.10

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate figures and page numbers followed by n indicate notes. addresses to the reader, see epistles to the reader Alchemist, The (Jonson) 44, 58 almanacs 188 annotations, see marks and marginalia antitheatricalists 1–2, 94, 98, 102, 106, 114, 165–166 anxiety: about effects of reading 1–2, 55–58, 98, 106, 114; of men, about women 14–15, 53–58, 146–152, 193–197, 199–205; of playwrights, about readers 18–19, 28–29, 43–50, 59–65, 91–102, 103–104, 185, 193 appropriative imitation and adaptation 13–14, 99–100, 105–106, 128–130, 138, 139–142, 145–146, 152, 157–162, 158, 159, 167; see also originality arguments, dramatic 18–19, 94; The Turk (1632) 96–97 Aristotle 77, 92–93, 94, 95, 97–98, 108, 155–156 Atkin, Tamara 4, 6–7, 9, 76, 207 attribution, see authors audiences and playgoers 7, 18, 42–43, 51, 53, 62–63, 92–97, 101, 105, 108–109, 208, 218–219; playgoers as playreaders 7, 9, 41–44, 52–53, 78–84, 104–105, 165, 179, 206–207, 214–215, 216, 218–219 authors, authorship, and attribution 18–19, 50, 77, 84–90, 131–134, 143, 155, 171n40, 194, 197–198, 218; see also under genre; title pages, elements of

ballads 11, 38–40; see also chapmen; songs and lyrics Beaumont, Francis 90, 232; in commonplace books 150, 154, 156, 161; marginalia in plays by 183, 197–198, 201–202, 208, 218; paratexts by and about 42, 45, 50, 53–54, 59, 60, 63, 88, 225n75 Blayney, Peter 10, 33–34, 36 Bodley, Sir Thomas 37, 182, 188 Bondman, The (Massinger) 12, 44–45, 184, 208–209 book collectors and collecting 16–18, 29–30, 34–37, 232 book trade, economics of the 9–11, 17–18, 28–42, 54–55, 154–155, 166, 188; provincial distribution networks and sellers 36–40, 111, 116n18; reprints 35–37, 39–40, 85, 154–155, 217; second-hand market 35–37, 182, 222n32; see also chapmen; stationers Bourne, Claire M. L. 9, 79, 207, 208, 227n112 Braithwaite, Richard 110, 151 Brayman Hackel, Heidi 10–11, 20, 43, 45, 59–60, 64, 136, 180, 184, 232 Brinsley, John 26n67, 128–129, 146, 189, 200, 220n6 Brome, Richard 32, 38, 182, 183; paratexts by and about 12, 54, 74n170, 84, 88, 107–108, 109–110, 111–112 Bruster, Douglas 84–85, 133 Burton, Robert 1–2, 110

Index  263 Bussy D’Ambois (Chapman) 34–35, 150, 205–206, 216 Buxton, John 33–34, 36 Carew, Thomas 56–58, 61–62, 64, 77 Castelvetro, Ludovico 94, 95–96, 98–99, 109 Catiline (Jonson) 43–44, 47–48, 64, 65 Chapman, George: in commonplace books 134, 146, 150; marginalia in plays by 180, 188–189, 193, 205–206, 216; paratexts by and about 47–48, 103 chapmen 37–41, 111; see also book trade, economics of the Chartier, Roger 13, 230–231, 232 A Christian Turned Turk (Daborne) 48–50, 49, 91, 169n21 Clegg, Cyndia Susan 29, 42–43, 60–61 Comedies and Tragedies (Beaumont and Fletcher, 1647) 53–54, 88, 225n75 commendatory verses 18–19, 215; The battaile of Agincourt (1631) 88; The Bondman (1624) 44–45; Catiline (1611) 47–48; Comedies and Tragedies (Beaumont and Fletcher, 1647) 88, 225n75; The Duke of Milan (1623) 105; Erotomania (1640) 106; The Faithful Shepherdess ([1610?]) 45, 62, 63, 65, 175n124; The Fancies (1638) 100; Five New Plays (Brome, 1653) 88; The Grateful Servant (1630) 57, 62–63, 64, 100–101, 108, 110, 155, 162, 202; The Heir (1622) 56–57; Jonsonius Virbius (1638) 88; A Jovial Crew (1652) 74n170, 107; The Lover’s Melancholy (1629) 85; Monsieur Thomas (1639) 84; A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1633) 99–100, 156; The Noble Stranger (1640) 45; The Northern Lass (1632) 109–110, 111–112; The Prisoners and Claracilla (1641) 123n128; The Queen (1653) 103–104; The Rebellion (1640) 97; The Renegado (1630) 105–106; The Royal Master (1638) 88; Sejanus (1605) 103; The Sparagus Garden (1640) 107–108; The Swaggering Damsel (1640)

57–58; The Traitor (1635) 60; Volpone (1607) 62; The Wedding (1629) 99; The Wits (1636) 61–62, 63 commonplace books and commonplacing 5, 10, 12–19, 104–106, 126–168, 137, 144, 147, 159, 172n60, 176n151, 188–189, 200; organization and layout 129, 131–139, 142–147, 150–151, 157–164; see also Drummond, William; Pudsey, Edward; Wright, Abraham commonplace markers 135–136, 137, 188, 200, 202–204, 203, 217 Cupid’s Whirligig (Sharpham) 186, 188, 217, 236n18 Daborne, Robert 48–50, 49, 91, 169n21 dance 79–80, 212–213; see also performance; songs and lyrics Davenant, William 153; in commonplace books 155; paratexts by and about 61–62, 63, 105 Day, John: in commonplace books 143, 145, 148–149, 152, 173n74; paratexts by and about 54–55, 60, 67n25, 224n56 dedications 57–58, 156–159; The Alchemist (1612) 58; The Antipodes (1640) 12; The Bird in a Cage (1633) 79–80, 117n32, 175n125, 212; The Bondman (1624) 12; 1 The Fair Maid of the West (1631) 106–107; A Fair Quarrel (1617) 109; The Faithful Shepherdess ([1610?]) 62, 112; A Fine Companion (1633) 63; Five Sermons (Wright, 1656) 162, 163; Hyde Park (1637) 12; If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is in It (1612) 91; 2 The Iron Age (1632) 11, 216, 231–232; The Just Italian (1630) 63; The Lady of Pleasure (1637) 157; The Lady’s Trial (1639) 58, 65; The Maid’s Revenge (1640) 12; The Northern Lass (1632) 111–112; The Renegado (1630) 106; Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613) 103; The Roman Actor (1629) 46, 64–65, 99; The Seven Champions of Christendom (1638) 108; The Swaggering Damsel (1640) 112;

264 Index The Widow’s Tears (1612) 47–48; A Woman is a Weathercock (1612) 55, 57, 73n135; The Young Admiral (1637) 157–159, 158, 159, 162, 164 Dekker, Thomas: in commonplace books 131, 145, 148; marginalia in plays by 173n89, 185, 198, 199–200, 204–205, 212; paratexts by and about 64, 91, 109, 111, 198, 227n111 demographics: of audiences 41–44, 92–93; of playreaders 2, 5–6, 10–13, 17–18, 20, 28–65, 177–179; see also economic status; education and pedagogy; gender; literacy and reading ability; readers, types of; social class Dering, Sir Edward 16, 34, 36, 232 Devil’s Law Case, The (Webster) 155, 156, 175n124 Drummond, William (of Hawthornden) 19, 35, 36, 127–130, 141–152, 144, 147, 168n5, 173n89, 174n103, 174n108, 177, 202, 236n20 Drummond, William, texts in commonplace books of: All Fools 146; Bussy D’Ambois 150; Contention between Liberality and Prodigality 151; Cupid’s Revenge 150; A Fair Quarrel 150; The Four Prentices of London 150; How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad 143, 144; The Isle of Gulls 148–149, 150, 152, 173n74; Law Tricks 143, 145, 148; A Mad World, My Masters 147, 148, 150, 152; The Maid’s Tragedy 150; Nobody and Somebody 151; Parasitaster 143, 148, 150; Sir Giles Goosecap 150; Westward Ho 145, 148 Dyson, Humphrey 17–18, 199, 218 economic status 10–11, 17–19, 28–30, 32–53, 129, 232; see also demographics; playbooks, value of; readers, types of; social class education and pedagogy 11, 40, 43–53, 59–62, 184–185; influence of classical and humanist texts 91–99, 102–103, 107–110, 114–115, 121n98, 189, 193,

196–197, 215, 228n144; in relation to reading 7, 13–14, 127–131, 138, 142, 145–146, 152, 160–161, 166, 188–189, 200, 220n6, 230–231; see also commonplace books and commonplacing; economic status; judgement and taste; literacy and reading ability; reading strategies and practices; social class epistles to the reader 18–19, 41–60, 134–135, 156–159, 162, 215; The Alchemist (1612) 44; Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany (1654) 42, 59–60, 75; The Bondman (1624) 67n25; Catiline (1611) 43–44, 64, 65; A Christian Turned Turk (1612) 48, 50, 91; Comedies and Tragedies (Beaumont and Fletcher, 1647) 53–54, 58; Cupid’s Revenge (1615) 60–61; A Cure for a Cuckold (1661) 17, 27n88; The Devil’s Law Case (1623) 156, 175n124; The Duchess of Malfi (1623) 175n124; The English Traveller (1633) 53; Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts… (1640) 38, 53; 1 The Fair Maid of the West (1631) 53, 54; The Faithful Shepherdess (1610) 91, 121n99, 123n128; The Family of Love (1608) 36–38, 111; First Folio (Shakespeare, 1623) 11, 45, 78; Five Sermons (Wright, 1656) 162, 163; The Fleer (1607) 110–111; The Four Prentices of London (1615, 1632) 72n122; The Golden Age (1611) 51, 125n162; Gunaikeion (1624) 52–53; Herod and Antipater (1622) 46–47, 67n25; Holland’s Leaguer (1632) 103; Humour out of Breath (1608) 54–55; 2 The Iron Age (1632) 52; Law Tricks (1608) 60, 67n25, 224n56; Love’s Mistress (1636) 51–52; A Mad World, My Masters (1640) 101; A Maidenhead Well Lost (1634) 51, 54–55; The Malcontent (1604) 76–77, 224n56; The New Inn (1631) 45–46; A New Trick to Cheat the Devil (1639) 60; The Noble Spanish Soldier (1634) 64; Othello (1622) 60, 84; Parasitaster (1606) 79, 91, 143; Parnassus Biceps (1656) 162; Philaster (1628) 42; The Queen’s

Index  265 Exchange (1657) 54; The Rape of Lucrece (1608) 51; The Roaring Girl (1611) 98–99, 100; Sejanus His Fall (1605) 90–91, 92–93; A Shoemaker, A Gentleman (1638) 65, 101, 105; Sophonisba (1606) 91; 1 and 2 Tamburlaine the Great (1590) 28, 59, 96; 1 Tamburlaine the Great (1605) 42; Troilus and Cressida (1609) 67n25, 87, 89, 104–105; The Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609) 51, 52–53; Volpone (1607) 103–104, 224n56; The White Devil (1612) 94–96, 135, 154, 155, 165; The Whore of Babylon (1607) 91; The Works (Jonson, 1616) 43 Erasmus, Desiderius 26n67, 128–129, 135, 138, 146, 166, 196 Erne, Lukas 9, 76, 78, 84, 85, 90, 207, 215 errata notes: A Bird in a Cage (1633) 227n111; Hannibal and Scipio (1637) 227n111; Satiromastix (1602) 227n111 Estill, Laura 127–128, 130, 141, 153, 155, 156, 160–161 extracts and extracting, see commonplace books and commonplacing 1 The Fair Maid of the West (Heywood) 53, 54, 106–107 A Fair Quarrel (Rowley and Middleton) 109, 150, 204–205 Faithful Shepherdess, The (Fletcher) 45, 62, 63, 65, 91, 112, 123n128, 154, 175n124 Farmer, Alan B. 4, 9–10, 37, 49, 76, 85, 100, 154–155 Field, Nathan: marginalia in plays by 184, 195, 204–205; paratexts by and about 55, 57, 73n135 First Folio (Shakespeare) 11, 45, 78, 85 Fleer, The (Sharpham) 48, 110–111, 217 Fletcher, John 90, 221n14, 232; in commonplace books 150, 154, 156, 161; marginalia in plays by 183, 185–186, 197–198, 201–202; paratexts by and about 42, 45, 47–48, 50, 53–54, 60, 62, 63, 65, 84, 87, 88, 91, 112, 121n99,

123n128, 175n124, 197–198, 225n74, 225n75 Ford, John: marginalia in plays by 197; paratexts by and about 58, 65, 85, 100, 103–104 Foucault, Michel 84–85, 133 gender 12, 14–15, 20, 29, 43, 51–59, 64–65, 78, 79–80, 109–114, 148–149, 183, 193–195, 199–205, 217, 220, 231; see also anxiety; misogyny; playbooks, sexual and romantic content; reception and reader response; women and women readers Genette, Gérard 5, 86–88 genre 4, 9–10, 12–13, 18–19, 30, 32–33, 37, 46–48, 75–115, 155–156, 165–166, 183, 197–199; of commercial drama 2–3, 16, 20, 140–141, 152, 162, 164–166, 188, 192, 196–197, 206–220, 234; as organizing principle in commonplace books 143, 150–151, 175n122; in relation to authorial attribution 18–19, 84–90, 132–134, 197–198; on title pages 7, 8, 18–19, 77, 84–102, 112–114, 113, 121n94, 123n128, 149–151, 193, 195, 197–198, 202; see also poetics and dramatic theory; title pages, elements of Giraldi, Giovan Battista (Cinthio) 94, 97 Grateful Servant, The (J. Shirley): marginalia 212–213; paratexts 57, 62–63, 64, 100–101, 108, 110, 155, 162, 202 Guarini, Giambattista 94, 121n99 handwriting, styles of 136–138, 161, 170n28, 170n35, 184–185, 214, 221n12 Harington, Sir John 16–17, 56, 92 Heywood, Thomas: in commonplace books 143, 144, 150, 169n21; marginalia in plays by 182, 183, 185, 188–189, 193–194, 195, 199, 204, 208, 236n18; non-dramatic works 38, 53–54, 98, 104, 121n98, 123n118; paratexts by and about 11, 18, 38, 39, 51–55, 72n122, 80–83, 81, 91, 102, 106–107, 125n162, 214, 216, 231–232

266 Index Holland’s Leaguer (Marmion) 103, 194–195 1 and 2 The Honest Whore (Dekker and Middleton) 173n89, 185, 199–200, 204–205, 212 Hooks, Adam 119n75, 164, 166, 218 Horace 6–7, 77–78, 91–97, 99, 102, 107–108, 109, 156, 189, 197, 215, 228n144, 237–238 How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad ([Heywood]) 143, 144, 182, 183, 195, 199, 204, 208, 236n18 humanism, see education and pedagogy An Humorous Day’s Mirth (Chapman) 180, 188 Hyde Park (J. Shirley) 12, 161 imitation, see appropriative imitation and adaptation Ingarden, Roman 179, 207 intertextuality 145, 173n79, 186, 188–192, 216–219 1 and 2 The Iron Age (Heywood) 11, 51–52, 183, 216, 231–232 Javitch, Daniel 90, 93 Jones, Richard 28, 42, 59, 96 Jonson, Ben 18, 88, 108, 139, 185, 218; in commonplace books 131–132, 133, 138, 153, 155; marginalia in plays by 202–204, 203; paratexts by and about 43–48, 58, 62, 64, 65, 71n112, 90–91, 92–93, 95, 103, 104, 117n41, 223n43, 224n56 judgement and taste 59–64, 100–101, 135–138, 153–156, 164–165, 197–206; see also education and pedagogy; literacy and reading ability; social class Kidnie, M. J. 207, 209, 214 King, Henry 190–192 A King and No King (Beaumont and Fletcher) 154, 156, 183 Kirkman, Francis 17 Kiséry, András 14, 128, 130, 139, 140 Kyd, Thomas 145; marginalia in plays by 184, 189–192, 191, 212–213; paratexts by and about 83–84 Latin: in marginalia 184, 188–189, 193–194, 196–197, 215, 219–220;

in printed playbooks 48–50, 49, 90–92, 95–96, 102–103, 109–110, 114–115, 193–194, 215; signalling educational attainment 13, 48, 52, 55, 60–61, 73n137, 91–92, 188–189, 196–197, 215; see also education and pedagogy; title pages, elements of Lesser, Zachary 6, 9–10, 14–15, 33, 39, 40, 47, 50, 76, 100, 135, 145, 154–155, 178, 198–199, 218 literacy and reading ability 10–11, 18–19, 40–53, 177–178, 180, 182–185; see also education and pedagogy; judgement and taste; social class Loewenstein, Joseph 85–86, 133 London Prodigal, The 31, 87, 198 Lyly, John: in commonplace books 131; marginalia in plays by 180–182, 181, 183, 185, 196–197; paratexts by and about 114 A Mad World, My Masters (Middleton) 101, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152 Maid’s Tragedy, The (Beaumont and Fletcher) 150, 154, 201 Malcontent, The (Marston) 76–77, 83, 104, 180, 217–218, 224n56 manuscript evidence, see commonplace books marks and marginalia marketing and advertising 5, 7, 9, 19, 28–29, 42, 50, 75–115, 149–150, 195, 198, 225n74; see also paratexts and paratextual strategies marks and marginalia (handwritten) 5–6, 9, 13–16, 19–20, 35–36, 177–220, 220n4, 233; commonplace markers 135–136, 137; corrections and excisions 195, 204–205, 208–212, 210, 224n68, 225n81, 225n82, 227n111; emulating print 135–138, 137, 184, 188, 197, 204, 209, 214–215; inscriptions of names 19, 178, 180–183, 181, 223n55; intertextual references 188–197, 191; literacy practice and development 180, 182, 184–185, 186, 188; manicules 20, 200–206, 203, 229n154; marginal glosses 137, 138, 145–148, 147, 164, 171n51, 196; non-textual

Index  267 marks 145–146, 148, 185–186, 200–206, 226n99; pen trials and doodles 15–16, 178, 180, 182–185, 187; performance-related 164, 207–220, 210 Marlowe, Christopher 215, 216–217; marginalia in plays by 183; paratexts by and about 28, 39, 42, 59, 96 Marmion, Shackerley 63, 103, 194–195 Marston, John: in commonplace books 131, 132, 143, 148, 150, 170n28; marginalia in plays by 36, 180, 185; paratexts by and about 13–14, 76–77, 79, 83, 91, 104, 130, 143, 180, 217–218, 224n56 Martial 32, 56, 109–110 Massai, Sonia 3, 16, 122n100, 207, 230, 234 Massinger, Philip 56; in commonplace books 156, 233; marginalia in plays by 184, 185–186, 195, 208–209, 218; paratexts by and about 12, 44–45, 46, 57–58, 64–65, 67n25, 99–100, 105–106, 156, 186 Masten, Jeffrey 7, 9, 132, 218 Mayer, Jean-Christophe 16, 33, 127–128, 183–184 Mayne, Jasper 153, 160 Middleton, Thomas: in commonplace books 147, 148–149, 150, 152; marginalia in plays by 173n89, 182, 185, 198, 199–200, 204–205, 210, 210–212, 211, 218–219, 221n18; paratexts by and about 39, 87, 98–99, 100–101, 109, 114, 198 misogyny 55–59, 146–152, 179, 193–195, 199–205, 234; see also anxiety; gender; women and women readers Moseley, Humphrey 34, 53, 54, 58 Munro, Lucy 48, 217 Nobody and Somebody 151, 212–214 Northern Lass, The (Brome) 109–110, 111–112 Norwood, Richard 17 originality 82–83, 99–100, 102–107, 145–146, 156; see also appropriative imitation and adaptation Ovid 119n75, 151, 186, 188, 202 pamphlets 1, 10, 30, 33, 37–40, 41, 47–48, 53, 101–102

paper: blank space and marginalia 15–16, 126–127, 143, 160–163, 178, 184–191; types and prices 30–36 Parasitaster (Marston) 36, 79, 91, 143, 148, 150 paratexts and paratextual strategies 5–10, 17–19, 39, 41–65, 75–115, 135, 155–156, 162, 196–200, 215, 233–234; see also arguments, dramatic; commendatory verses; dedications; epistles to the reader; errata notes; performance-related paratexts; title pages pedagogy, see education and pedagogy performance: as documented in commonplace books and marginalia 139–141, 143–145, 152, 162, 164–167, 179, 206–220; as source of printed playtexts 2–3, 7, 8, 9, 18–19, 36–37, 41–44, 48–50, 53, 79–84, 94–98, 102, 105, 132, 206–220; see also audiences and playgoers; playbooks; reading strategies and practices; title pages, elements of performance-related paratexts 179, 206–220; act and scene markers 164, 207, 214–216; speech prefixes 143, 145, 179, 207–209; stage directions 80, 179, 207, 209–214, 227n123, 228n128; see also dance; playbooks; reading strategies and practices; songs and lyrics; title pages, elements of Philaster (Beaumont and Fletcher) 42, 154, 161, 201–202 playbooks: as literary texts 6–10, 18–19, 75–78, 90–102, 126–168, 196–197, 200–201, 206–207, 215 (see also commonplace books and commonplacing; education and pedagogy; poetics and dramatic theory); as theatrical texts 6–10, 18–20, 36–37, 41–44, 48–50, 75–84, 132, 139–141, 148, 152–153, 162, 164–166, 179, 206–220 (see also performance; performance-related paratexts); literary vs. theatrical binary 7, 9, 75–115, 141, 206–207; circulation of 35–40, 180–183, 192 (see also book trade); sexual and romantic content in 1–2, 14–15, 54–58, 89, 98–99, 109–114, 113, 139,

268 Index 141–152, 147, 185–186, 187, 194–196, 201–205, 203, 234 (see also reception and reader response) playbooks, material format and print conventions of 2–3, 30–41, 53–54; see also paper; paratexts and paratextual strategies; performancerelated paratexts; typography and typefaces playbooks, value of: cost and price 9–11, 31–41, 53–55; ownership and personal value 15–16, 19–20, 29, 180–184, 181 Poetaster (Jonson) 133, 138, 202–204, 203 poetics and dramatic theory 77–78, 90–104, 122n100, 141–145, 155–156, 196–197; see also education and pedagogy; genre; playbooks, as literary texts prologues and inductions 134–135; The Fancies (1638) 100; The Malcontent (1604) 83, 104, 217–218 Prynne, William 1–2, 18, 32, 56, 79–80, 82, 106, 114, 117n32, 117n34, 165–166, 212, 232 Pudsey, Edward 10, 19, 127–141, 137, 169n16, 170n24, 170n28, 177, 202, 204 Pudsey, Edward, texts in commonplace book of: The Blind Beggar of Alexandria 134; A Christian Turned Turk 169n21; Cynthia’s Revels 133; Every Man in His Humour 138; Every Man Out of His Humour 133, 135, 136–137; The Golden Age 169n21; Hamlet 134, 171n57; Jack Drum’s Entertainment 171n40; Much Ado About Nothing 133, 137; Othello 130, 134; Poetaster 133, 138; Richard II 134; Richard III 134; Romeo and Juliet 134; What You Will 170n28; The White Devil 135, 140 Puritan, The (Middleton) 87, 198 Puttenham, George 92, 95, 96, 107, 197 Rape of Lucrece, The (Heywood) 51, 80–83, 81, 188, 214 Raymond, Joad 3, 32, 37–38, 40

readers, types of: implied vs. actual 4–5, 126–127, 135, 233–234; elite 10, 16–17, 19, 29, 32–36, 38, 40, 48, 56, 58–65, 91–92, 126–168, 177, 179–180, 199, 202, 204, 207, 212, 222n32, 231–233; non-elite 29–30, 32–41, 51–53, 59–65, 122n100, 183–185, 230, 233; see also economic status; education and pedagogy; social class; women and women readers reading, reasons for 1–2, 75–114, 126–168, 177–220, 233–234; pleasure and recreation 11–12, 14–15, 107–114, 139, 141; profit and self-improvement 13–15, 59–64, 102–107, 123n132, 127–130, 152–168 reading skill, see literacy and reading ability reading strategies and practices 5, 126–168, 177–220; active 5–7, 9, 13–17, 19–20, 126–168, 233; envisaging performance 76–84, 139–141, 152, 164–168, 179, 206–220; oral and aural 11–12, 20, 166, 230–235; see also commonplace books and commonplacing; education and pedagogy; marks and marginalia (handwritten) reception and reader response 4, 6, 30, 41–65, 75–115, 126–168, 177–220, 232; erotic pleasure 1, 14–15, 56–57, 109–114, 113, 139, 141–152, 167, 195–196, 234; physiological effects 56–57, 106–114, 123n132, 139; political interpretations 153–154, 193–194, 205 Renegado, The (Massinger) 105–106,186 Rhodes, Mathew 46–47, 51, 114, 150, 234 Richards, Jennifer 230–231, 232–233 Roaring Girl, The (Dekker and Middleton) 98–99, 100, 114 Roberts, Sasha 4–6, 13, 149 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 35, 134, 151, 166, 192, 225n82, 236n20 Rowley, William: in commonplace books 150; marginalia in plays by

Index  269 204–205; paratexts by and about 39, 65, 101, 105, 109 Sappho and Phao (Lyly) 180–182, 181, 183, 185, 196–197 Sejanus His Fall (Jonson) 36, 90–91, 92–93, 103 1 Selimus ([Greene]) 205–206, 214–215 Seneca 91, 190–192 sententiae 13–15, 128–129, 135–136, 188–189, 196–197; see also commonplace books and commonplacing; commonplace markers; Latin sermons 153, 165–166 sexual content and pleasure, see playbooks, sexual and romantic content in reception and reader response Shakespeare, William 39, 56, 57, 125n156, 131–134, 183–184, 218, 232; in commonplace books 13, 16–17, 127, 130, 133, 134, 137, 151, 154, 155, 164, 171n57, 176n136; marginalia in plays by 16, 192, 198, 222n34, 225n82, 236n20; paratexts by and about 11, 18, 31, 45, 60, 67n25, 78, 83–90, 104–105, 113, 118n53, 118n54, 119n62, 119n64, 119n75, 134, 198 Sharpham, Edward 48, 186, 188; marginalia in plays by 217, 236n18; paratexts by and about 110–111 Sherman, William 5, 15, 177–178, 180, 189, 190, 200 Shirley, Henry 154, 165 Shirley, James 56, 85, 90; in commonplace books 136, 153–165, 158, 159, 176n136; marginalia in plays by 212–213; paratexts by and about 12, 57, 60, 62–63, 64, 79–80, 99–101, 108, 110, 116n28, 117n32, 155, 156, 157–159, 158, 159, 162, 164, 175n125, 202, 212, 227n111 Sidney, Sir Philip 92–99, 103, 106, 107, 108–109, 122n112, 123n128, 151, 197 Smith, Emma 16, 209, 210 Smith, Richard 17, 199 Smyth, Adam 13, 126, 128, 138, 148, 177, 200, 233 social class 7, 10–12, 13, 17–19, 28–30, 32–53, 59–65, 91–97, 129,

177, 184–185, 200, 231–233; see also demographics; economic status; education and pedagogy; literacy and reading ability; readers, types of songs and lyrics 79–84, 116n28, 212–214; in The Rape of Lucrece (Heywood) 80–83, 81, 214; see also dance; performance; performancerelated paratexts Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd) 83–84, 145, 184, 189–192, 191 Stallybrass, Peter 9, 13–14, 50, 76, 136 stationers 5, 9, 17, 28–29, 32–42, 47–48, 50, 59–60, 65, 78, 115, 132, 154–155 Stern, Tiffany 41, 80, 132, 165, 213 Straznicky, Marta 55–56, 58 Stubbes, Philip 98, 149–150 Suckling, John 32, 38 Swaggering Damsel, The (Chamberlain) 57–58, 112 Sydenham, Humphrey 160, 162 Syme, Holger 198, 209, 212, 213–214 1 and 2 Tamburlaine (Marlowe) 28, 42, 59, 96, 215, 216–217 taste, see judgement and taste title pages 7–9, 18–19, 39, 41–42, 48–50, 75–102, 109, 112, 114–115, 132, 134, 150–151, 167, 180, 185, 194–200 title pages, elements of: authorial attribution 18–19, 50, 77, 84–90, 118n53, 132–134, 143, 170n27, 194, 197–198, 225n74; genre indications 7, 8, 18–19, 77, 84–102, 112–114, 123n128, 149–151, 193, 195, 197–198, 202; Latin mottoes and tags 18–19, 48–50, 76, 90–97, 109–110, 124n152, 194, 196, 215, 237–238; performance origins or attributions 6–9, 8, 41–42, 50, 77–84, 206, 225n74; woodcuts 39, 125n168, 150, 185–186 title pages, examples from: A Christian Turned Turk (1612) 48–50, 49; The Devil’s Charter (1607) 102; The Elder Brother (1637) 197–198; Euphues (1578) 114; Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) 117n41; First Folio (Shakespeare, 1623) 85, 89; Hamlet (various) 86–87; 2 Henry

270 Index IV (1600) 88–89; King Lear (various) 86–87; The London Prodigal (1605) 31, 87, 198; Love’s Labour’s Lost (various) 87, 113; The Malcontent (1604) 83; The Merchant of Venice (various) 87; The Merry Wives of Windsor (various) 87, 89; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (various) 87; Much Ado About Nothing (1600) 89–90; The Northern Lass (1632) 109–110; Patient Grissel (1603) 198; Pericles (various) 87; The Puritan (1607) 87, 198; The Rape of Lucrece (various) 80–83, 81; Richard III (various) 86; Richard II (various) 83, 86; The Roaring Girl (1611) 114; Romeo and Juliet (various) 134, 225n82; Second Folio (Shakespeare, 1632) 85; The Spanish Tragedy (1602) 83–84; Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602) 85; The Three Ladies of London (1584) 7, 8; Troilus and Cressida (1609) 87, 89; The Troublesome Reign of King John (1611) 85; The Turk (1632) 96; The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) 87; The Woman Hater (various) 197–198; The worming of a mad dogge (1617) 194 A Trick to Catch the Old One (Middleton) 36, 210, 210–212, 211 typography and typefaces 9, 32, 40–41, 136, 140, 145, 178, 184, 213, 214, 226n90, 227n112; see also handwriting; marginalia, emulating print Volpone (Jonson) 62, 103–104 Watt, Tessa 10, 33, 36–39 Webbe, William 6–7, 92, 95, 103 Webster, John: in commonplace books 135, 140, 145, 148, 154–156, 162, 165, 175n124; paratexts by and about 17, 27n88, 83, 94–96, 101, 104, 135, 154, 155, 156, 175n124, 217–218, 224n56 White Devil, The (Webster) 94–96, 135, 140, 154, 155, 165

Wingfield, Sir Richard 34 Wits, The (Davenant) 61–62, 64, 155 Wolfreston, Frances 10, 40, 69n60, 180, 199, 222n22 Wolley, Hannah 11, 12, 231 Woman Hater, The (Beaumont and Fletcher) 197, 198, 208, 232 women and women readers: actual and historical 10, 11–12, 20, 29–30, 43, 58–59, 116n18, 121n88, 125n167, 183, 231–233; tropes and stereotypes 51–59, 73n137, 109–114, 125n156, 146–152, 193–197, 199–205, 222n37; see also anxiety; gender; misogyny Works, The (Jonson, 1616) 43, 153, 155 Wright, Abraham 19, 124n140, 127–130, 152–168, 159, 163, 177, 179, 207, 212, 233 Wright, Abraham, texts in commonplace book of: The Amorous War 153, 160; Bartholomew Fair 155; The Devil’s Law Case 155, 156, 175n124; The Duchess of Malfi 155–156, 175n124; The Faithful Shepherdess 154, 175n124; Hamlet 154, 164; Historie of the Holy Warre 153; Hyde Park 161; A King and No King 154, 156; The Lady of Pleasure 156; Love in its Ecstasy 153; The Maid’s Tragedy 154; The Martyred Soldier 154–155, 165; A New Way to Pay Old Debts 233; Othello 155, 176n136; Philaster 154, 161; The Platonic Lovers 155; The Scornful Lady 154; The Staple of News 160; The Traitor 136, 176n136; The Wedding 154; The White Devil 155, 165; The Wits 155; The Works (Jonson, 1616) 153, 155; The Young Admiral 156, 157–159, 159, 162, 164 Young Admiral, The (J. Shirley) 156, 157–159, 158, 159, 162, 164 Younge, Richard 1–2, 106 Zwicker, Steven N. 5, 13