The Book of The Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England

Introduction: Plays, Books, and the Public Sphere

introduction Plays, Books, and the Public Sphere marta straznicky In early modern usage, the “book” of a play was the printed or manuscript text as distinct from the play in performance. The term is used across a range of institutional and rhetorical settings, from the Stationers ’ Company, where licenses to print dramatic texts identify the licensed material as the “book” of a particular play, to records from the Revels Office, where the “book” is censored and approved for performance , to the playhouse, where the “book” is used to guide performance, to printers’ and authors’ prefaces to published plays, where the matter presented for reading is specifically understood as the “book” of a previously performed stage play. In these and other examples, the consistent usage of the term “book” to distinguish between a play in performance and a playtext indicates that the reading of drama (whether in the context of play production, censorship, pedagogy, or private leisure) was a recognized cultural practice in early modern England that only partially intersected with the culture of playgoing. At some level, scholars have always acknowledged this alternative mode of reception, but play-reading itself as a historical practice has been marginalized by critical inquiries and procedures that, even when they are directly engaged with the history of early modern playtexts, have focused either on the process by which plays move from page to stage, or on the book trade in terms of production, regulation, and distribution alone. For the first half of the twentieth century, the New Bibliographers examined the production of printed plays in ways that simultaneously created an archive about play-reading practices, cataloguing as they did the material forms of playtexts and matters of publication history that also carry information about marketing, readership, 1 and interpretation: it is no accident that one of their monumental achievements, W. W. Greg’s Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, is indispensable to many of the essays in this volume. But crucial as their work has been to the revisionary history of drama as a species of print culture, the New Bibliographers themselves took no interest in plays as reading material. In fact, Greg’s conception of the “book” of the play had exclusively to do with the nature and use of dramatic manuscripts in the playhouse. As Paul Werstine has shown, Greg fundamentally misrepresented the early modern usage of the term “book” when he took it to refer only to manuscripts of playhouse provenance.1 This in turn enabled him to produce the category of “promptbook,” which became decisive in setting the course of textual studies of early modern plays for much of the twentieth century, but it also had the effect of focusing scholarship on the transmission of drama from manuscript to print rather than on its reception in either medium. Reception was, perhaps unsurprisingly, at the center of the interpretive tradition against which early-twentieth-century bibliographers defined themselves. Beginning early in the nineteenth century with the work of such towering figures as Coleridge and Charles Lamb, criticism of early modern drama engaged itself directly with the issue of whether plays— particularly the plays of Shakespeare—are best realized in actual physical performance or in the theater of the mind.2 The question was decided, of course, unequivocally in favor of reading: “For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within—from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within.”3 As James Redmond points out, Coleridge’s seemingly extreme view on this matter was in fact orthodox in the nineteenth century, finding expression among the most important and influential writers of the time, including Hazlitt, Byron, Scott, and Browning.4 So entrenched was the idea that Shakespearean drama found its “proper” and “legitimate ” form only in the mind of the reader that when English literature became institutionalized as a subject of university study later in the century , Shakespeare was easily appropriated by English departments and taught as a species of poetry. Throughout much of the twentieth century, in fact, the study of early modern drama was fundamentally estranged from performance, its controversies focused entirely around the issue of 2 marta straznicky [18.119.253.93] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 22:26...