All in the Playwrights' Hands

In the advance publicity for Grace Ioppolo's latest book the Routledge catalogue announced a volume entitled Dramatic Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood. The change of title is significant. The new one provides a more accurate reflection of the work's contents, for in it Ioppolo systematically attempts to place the playwright back at the very centre of studies of early modern dramatic texts. For Ioppolo, the dramatist was not only the figure who initiated the journey that a late sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century playscript would undertake after leaving its author's pen, but also the key figure – and in some cases the only figure – who controlled its subsequent evolution into a text for either reading or performance. In her previous book (Revising Shakespeare, Harvard University Press, 1991) Ioppolo showed that Shakespeare and his contemporaries, prompted by practical, literary, or political considerations, routinely returned to their dramatic works to make alterations; in this new monograph she goes a stage further, arguing that governing all the processes that a playscript would undergo – rehearsal, the copying of the text (both in its complete form and in its constituent actors' parts), scrutiny by the censor, realisation in print – the dramatist remained the main, if not the only, locus of authority.

In so arguing, Ioppolo is contradicting a body of recent scholarship that has almost attained the status of a new critical orthodoxy. Her methodology in this book in itself represents a challenge to some of the principal proponents of the 'death of the author' trend in early modern theatre studies. Throughout Dramatists and their Manuscripts she insists that her own insights derive from first-hand examination of the extant manuscripts themselves, rather than from printed transcripts, and she denounces many of the luminaries of contemporary bibliography for failing (or being intellectually incompetent) to do the same. Several prominent figures come under the lash in this regard: Douglas Brooks (From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2002), Paul Werstine, Leah Marcus, and, especially, Jeffrey Masten (Textual Intercourse, Cambridge University Press, 1997) are all castigated for their unwillingness or inability to get their hands dirty in the archives. Ioppolo pulls no punches here – she exposes the inaccuracies which underpin the spuriously authoritative pronouncements of her opponents with almost clinical precision – although the most sustained and venomous of her attacks are, diplomatically or timorously, concealed in massive Footnotes found at the end of the book (see particularly notes 7, 15, 16, and 18, pp. 186–9). Lukas Erne's influential Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 2004) gets off a little more lightly (it may have arrived too late to receive the critical mauling Ioppolo could surely have given it) but, like every single one of her other enemies, Erne is further annihilated by being excluded from the (very) 'Select Bibliography'.

Ioppolo's thorough exploration of the extant documents pays dividends throughout the book, and the benefits of this approach are yielded in areas beyond just the dramatic manuscripts themselves. The opening chapter, for instance, features a fascinating new analysis of the Henslowe operation, and Ioppolo's decision to look again at the papers themselves reveals details that a reliance on her friend Reg Foakes's (albeit excellent) transcript could not have done. And here, as elsewhere in the book, Ioppolo's formidable bibliographical prowess is amply and helpfully supplemented by judiciously chosen and finely reproduced photographs. This combination of close-up examination of the original manuscripts together with an admirable clarity of presentation is one of the book's great strengths, and it can produce really valuable results: for example, Ioppolo's fresh exploration of the manuscript containing Jonson's Entertainment at Britain's Burse (pp. 159–69) at once sheds important new light on the compositional process that generated the text, on the contributions of the scribes who produced it, and on...