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  • Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 ed. by Thomas L. Berger, Sonia Massai, Tania Demetriou
  • Zachary Lesser (bio)
Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642. Edited by Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, with Tania Demetriou. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Illus. Pp. xx + 1040. $265.00 cloth.

This immensely useful book collects all paratextual material included in English playbooks printed through 1642. These paratexts are invaluable sources for studying the printing, publishing, and reading of early modern English drama, and they have been increasingly mined for the information they contain and read as rhetorical set pieces in their own right. The field owes Berger and Massai a debt for having undertaken such a time-consuming task and for having completed it so carefully, precisely, and thoughtfully. More than simply a compendium of paratexts, these two volumes represent a scholarly edition to which Berger and Massai have brought the kind of close attention usually reserved for the texts of the plays themselves.

In a brief introduction, the editors define their principles of inclusion and exclusion. As they note, “Deciding what constitutes the paratext as opposed to the dramatic dialogue in early modern playbooks was not always easy” (1:xiv). Some principles [End Page 467] are more obvious than others: no one will argue with their inclusion of title pages, dedications, addresses to the reader, dramatis personae, stationers’ advertisements, and so forth. Others are trickier: are prologues and epilogues paratexts, or are they part of the playtext? Berger and Massai include them here since they were often added to or subtracted from the play in performance. On the other hand, they “have omitted songs, choruses, dumb-shows, arguments and descriptive prose passages in masques, pageants and entertainments, when these types of texts include no extra-dramatic references beyond the fictive world of the play” (1:xiv). Of course one can always argue with taxonomic decisions: Weren’t songs also available for inclusion or exclusion from the play, much like prologues and epilogues? Is the long opening scene between the Prologue, the Citizen, and his Wife in The Knight of the Burning Pestle really a paratext? But such arguments are unavoidable in a project like this one. Berger and Massai lay out their criteria clearly and reasonably, and since they tend to err on the side of inclusion, it is hard to find fault with their choices.

Likewise, their selection of plays to draw from makes good sense. They exclude manuscript plays, since these raise a host of questions distinct from questions about printed playbooks. They exclude Latin drama, largely because W. W. Greg’s Bibliography of the English Printed Drama is not particularly helpful in defining a canon of Latin drama printed in England. And they end at 1642 rather than, say, 1660 (as Greg did), because the Interregnum represents “a distinctive stage in the history of the transmission of early English drama into print” and also, pragmatically, because it raises a number of difficult issues about how to categorize drama both formally and bibliographically (1:xvi). Here too, no doubt, some readers will wish the project had been more capacious—including manuscript drama or extending through 1700—but such desires, frequently expressed in response to bibliographic projects, seriously underestimate the labor involved. Berger and Massai have already accomplished something on a scale one does not often see in today’s academy, with institutional pressures that push us toward the “field-changing” argumentative monograph as the gold standard of research. Paratexts in English Printed Drama represents a welcome throwback to the kind of bibliographic work undertaken in the early- and mid-twentieth century by Greg, R. B. McKenzie, A. W. Pollard, Katherine Pantzer, and others. It is perhaps the highest praise one can give Berger and Massai that their two volumes deserve to sit on the reference shelf next to the bibliographies of those giants.

The texts are given in a semidiplomatic transcription that attends to typeface, mise-en-page, and other aspects of book design. Berger and Massai use boldface print as a modern surrogate for black letter (a convention that should have been mentioned in the introduction). They...

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