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Chapter Two. Reading Printed Comedy: Edward Sharpham‘s The Fleer
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t wo Reading Printed Comedy: Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer lucy munro Onely one thing afflicts mee, to thinke that Scenes invented, meerely to be spoken, should be inforcively published to be read. John Marston, The Malcontent (1604) My focus in this essay is on early-seventeenth-century readers of Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer, a comedy first performed by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars theater around 1606, and printed in 1607, 1610, 1615 and 1631.1 I look closely here at three documents that present readers or reading contexts for this play. The first is a manuscript inventory of playbooks owned by Sir John Harington, compiled around 1609 (BL Add. MS 27632), in which plays are listed by the volumes within which they were bound.2 The second is a jest-book, Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies (1639), compiled by the poet and dramatist Robert Chamberlain, in which ten of the play’s jokes are reworked. The third is a copy of the first edition of The Fleer (British Library 11773 c. 8), in which a seventeenth-century hand has made extensive cuts and revisions, excising around one-third of the play and several characters. The revision was carried out after Sharpham’s premature death in 1608, but before the outbreak of war in 1642; it is usually dated to the 1620s or 1630s.3 It has generally been studied as an example of theatrical revision: John Kerrigan treats it as a “non-authorial” revision , comparing it with the extant texts of Shakespeare’s King Lear; Clifford Leech views it as the adaptation of a play for a specific performance. In what follows, however, I view the revision as one reader’s response to the play and compare the reviser’s attitude toward the text with that of the hypothetical reader of Harington’s bound volume of plays or the compiler of Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies. 39 The presentation of plays as reading material posed problems for those who marketed and disseminated printed books. David Scott Kastan is probably right to argue, summing up the problems associated with an assumed relationship between text and performance, that “neither one is the effect of the other; neither reproduces, or draws upon (except rhetorically) the other’s claim to authenticity.The printed play is neither a pre-theatrical text nor a post-theatrical one; it is a non-theatrical text.”4 The printed play is generally, however, a post-theatrical event, and a “rhetorical” claim to theatrical authority, presented on a title page or in a preface, may have a greater impact than Kastan implies. In printed editions of The Fleer, the publisher provides the reader with paratextual material aimed at presenting Sharpham’s work as both a post-theatrical and a non-theatrical text. This material provides a reader of the play with a range of interpretive models, and surviving evidence suggests that readers absorbed these variant modes of reading, approaching the play in markedly different ways. The fact that contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous readers might arrive at different conclusions concerning a text’s interpretation is crucial: as Roger Chartier reminds us, “all who can read texts do not read them in the same fashion.”5 Before we look at individual readers of The Fleer, however, it is necessary to examine the ways in which comedy could be presented to a print audience, and to investigate in greater detail the interpretive perimeters offered to readers of the printed play. Reading Printed Comedy In his poem “Against Fruition [2]” John Suckling writes: Women enjoy’d (where e’re before t’have been) Are like Romances read, or sights once seen: Fruition’s dull, and spoils the Play much more Than if one read or knew the plot before.6 The anonymous author of the preface to The Family of Love (1608) writes, “Plaies in this Citie are like wenches new falne to the trade, onelie desired of your neatest gallants, whiles the’are fresh: when they grow stale they must be vented byTermers and Cuntrie chapmen.” In other words, “stale” plays are—like experienced prostitutes—appropriate to spectators of a lower social status; Suckling uses the same erotic trope to suggest that sexual and dramatic “play” are both marred by overfamiliarity. Similar con40 lucy munro [3.238.57.9] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:50 GMT) nections between dramatic and erotic performance are drawn in Edmund Waller’s “In Answer of Sir John Suckling’s...