From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (review)

From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England. By Douglas A. Brooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xviii + 293 pp.

Douglas A. Brooks sets out to explore the publishing history of dramatic texts in early modern London, especially "the manifold materializing processes that constituted the passage from playhouse to printing house, that transformed acting scripts into published dramatic texts" (xiii). At first glance, his project seems fairly modest: "I have tried to listen carefully to the stories that a half a dozen or so early modern books tell" (xiii) about those processes; in fact, this book undertakes the ambitious, for the most part successful project to define "the authorial status" of English Renaissance plays and the role that the printers played in shaping the authorship of drama. According to Brooks, the texts that he examines tell contradictory "dramas of authorship" (xiii).

The first of Brooks's five chapters focuses on the publication history of Ferrex and Porrex, also known as Gorboduc (1570); The White Devil (1612); and Shakespeare's First Folio (1623). For over a century textual scholars and editors have maintained that a fierce rivalry about the ownership and control of dramatic texts existed between playhouse and printing house in Shakespeare's time. Brooks considers this rivalry a myth: "The text of Jonson's folio, of Shakespeare's Folio, indeed, the texts of any number of quarto editions of plays tell very different stories in which printers and playwrights, and sometimes players, worked together to introduce plays to new and different markets" (16). Brooks's evidence is compelling. He examines the title page of the 1565 edition of The Tragedie of Gorboduc, on which the authors Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville are identified, and that of John Daye's 1570 edition of the play, published as Ferrex and Porrex, on which they are not. This edition identifies the printer and links the text to a specific performance for Queen Elizabeth some nine years earlier. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars saw this seeming usurpation of the playwrights' role as evidence of a rivalry; however, Brooks points out that in the preface Daye names Sackville and Norton as the authors, who never intended to publish their play. Daye describes the 1565 edition as a spurious one produced by an unscrupulous printer; apparently, therefore, he deliberately introduced the story of textual piracy to privilege "a theatrical manuscript over a corrupted printed text" (31). Brooks persuasively demonstrates that during this period Daye printed or reprinted eleven works attributed to Norton and thus "clearly had a lot at stake in deciding to produce a second edition of England's first tragedy" (29). Telling the tale of piracy and the privileging of a theatrical script was, Brooks concludes, a clever ploy on Daye's part to reprint and sell a text that had been printed and marketed by another publisher.

Brooks effectively debunks another rivalry myth as well, namely, that John Webster, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, and other playwrights condemned theater audiences as unable to appreciate their dramas. Brooks maintains that this criticism reveals not an antitheatrical prejudice on the part of the public but the playwrights' own strategy of cultivating a select readership for their printed texts. Webster, for example, delivered The White Devil, whose performance had been poorly received, to a printer who was "beginning to rely on a set of typographic conventions to create and foster a market of readers who may not only buy a play like The White Devil, but may also accord it the kind of respect and appreciation its writer thinks it deserves" (49). Along the same lines, Brooks asserts that even George Chapman, who earned a reputation not only for his dramatic works but also for his translation of Homer and completion of Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, attacked the deficient judgment of playgoers to create a market for...