Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 ed. by Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai (review)

The “Paratexts” transcribed and edited here are found principally in the preliminary materials and end matter of early modern English playbooks. The most famous of these are Ben Jonson’s poem to Shakespeare—“The Soul of the Age”—at the beginning of the First Folio, along with the letter to the reader by the editors, Heminges and Condell. But for the most part these poems and epistles, along with details of the publisher and the printer and the place where the book could be purchased—“at his shop without New-gate, at the signe of the Bible”—are easily ignored by modern readers. Indeed, many editions for years now have simply omitted all of these materials as tedious irrelevancies. A small but increasing number of scholars, most notably Tiffany Stern, David Bergeron, and Sonia Massai, have recently begun to mine the paratexts for information about the publication and performance history of English Renaissance drama and about the whole culture that supported this massive entertainment industry. This handsome two-volume scholarly edition now brings the great bulk of the paratexts in English printed drama together and makes them available for the more widespread research that they deserve.

The volumes range from Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece, written around 1497 and printed between 1512 and 1516, to John Denham’s The Sophy, published in the inauspicious year of 1642 when the outbreak of the English Civil War led to the closing of the theaters. The transcriptions are scrupulous, and such omissions as the neo-Latin drama of the period are justified. A “finding list” and several indexes (by people, places, plays, and topics) will help scholars begin to make their way through the mass of materials. In an ideal world, these indexes would have been bigger and better. The topics included are extremely limited: readers who would like to know what these paratexts say about the nature of tragedy or comedy will not find entries to guide them through the 953 pages of texts, nor are there entries for recurrent topics like Prometheus or Zoilus (the carping critic). A spot-check of even such entries as are included, such as that for Orpheus, suggests that the indexer failed to identify all of the occurrences.

But I do not want to be a Zoilus. All students of English Renaissance drama should be grateful for this valuable research tool. The volumes should be in any scholarly library with an interest in this period’s literature and culture.