Reading between the Lines

how did early modern readers and audiences respond to plays? Their reactions can be found in marginalia, annotations, and observations marked in copies of plays; comments on specific performances or works, as recorded in journals, diaries, and letters; and allusions found in other plays and literary texts. Perhaps the most significant form of evidence are the sources that Laura Estill explores in this richly documented study: extracts from plays that appear in contemporary print and manuscript sources. The author’s wide-ranging account makes an important contribution to the history of early modern reading and illuminates significant resources for future research.

Estill has surveyed an impressive amount of material in commonplace books, miscellanies, journals, notebooks, composite volumes, and other manuscript and printed material. Her account begins by noting the growing esteem accorded to vernacular literature during the late sixteenth century, as expressed by the increasing availability of printed drama and the growing attention paid to popular theater. The interest readers took in drama was shaped by the period’s broader tradition of pedagogy and, especially, by the practice of commonplacing. Estill emphasizes that readers viewed dramatic texts as resources for further use. To develop their expressive powers, insight, and creativity, they harvested plays for sententiae, witty remarks, pithy phrases, truisms, aphorisms, proverbs, moral insights, and, notably, songs. By the late 1590s, extracts from plays began to appear in manuscript sources alongside the poetry and prose of such leading vernacular writers as Spenser, Sidney, and Samuel Daniel. William Scott’s manuscript treatise “The Modell of Poesye” (ca. 1599) cites Richard II as well as The Rape of Lucrece, and lengthy extracts from I Henry IV appear in an anonymous manuscript of approximately the same date (British Library, Add. MS 81083). Edward Pudsey is perhaps the best-known example of an early seventeenth-century reader and playgoer who recorded extracts from plays in a commonplace book alongside his reading in a variety of non-dramatic modes and genres. Pudsey’s enthusiasm for theater seems to have extended to taking a table-book—a notebook with waxed pages that could be written on and erased—to performances. His extracts from Othello predate the play’s publication, and could have been transcribed from memory. At the same time, the Scottish poet and humanist William Drummond of Hawthornden was recording copious quotations from plays in his notebooks. He may have attended the theater on his visits to London, but his notebooks document his extensive interest in collecting, reading, and studying vernacular plays, and he also left signs of use in his copies of these texts. As is well known, plays themselves began to be printed with common place markers, with key quotations highlighted for the reader with inverted commas or variations in typeface. Printed commonplace books such as Robert Allott’s Englands Parnassus (1600) also began to draw on drama as a resource. Other sources for extracts from plays include manuscripts, memories of performances, and oral transmission.

Taking an extract out of its original context can change its implications, sometimes in surprising ways. Estill’s account of quotations from Elizabethan and Stuart masques and entertainments shows how preexisting songs were incorporated into them and appeared, in turn, in multiple manuscript and print sources. Speeches, epigrams, and couplets were excerpted from these works for a wide variety of reasons, including, in the case of Milton, an act of self-assertion by an author. In an album amicorum, Milton signed his name and quoted—somewhat immodestly, although without attribution—the last couplet of Comus: “if Vertue feeble were / Heaven it selfe would stoope to her.”

The complete texts of masques could also serve the ambitions, as well as interests, of readers. William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, ensured that his secretary prepared a manuscript that recorded a wide collection of contemporary poems and three complete masques that he had commissioned from Ben Jonson. Estill interprets the Newcastle manuscript as evidence of not only Jonson’s reputation but also Cavendish’s aspirations to establish his...