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Defoliating Playbooks and the Reading Public
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 56, Number 2, Spring 2016
- pp. 395-416
- 10.1353/sel.2016.0016
- Article
- Additional Information
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Octavo collections of plays published during the Interregnum make visible a change in the market for printed plays which advances the creation of a reading public. The movement away from the folio format for presenting collections is linked with a new rhetoric for shaping the responses of readers. The paratexts of Humphrey Moseley’s 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio imply that the book addresses a known community of like-minded Royalist theatergoers. By the 1650s, printed volumes that once functioned as a record of performances and political debate now themselves create the debate. The “defoliated” octavo collections of plays by James Shirley, Lodowick Carlell, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome create a debate about writers and books, not politics. These printed collections show the change in audiences from a theatrical community to a reading public.