The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (review)

This timely volume complements a number of recent studies that have identified the early modern English stage as a theater of the book. It is particularly concerned with "how and to what effect reading the 'book' of the play intersected with theatrical culture and the public sphere" (8). That the reading of playtexts had become pervasive by the second decade of the seventeenth century (and to Beaumont's mind a bit confused) is implicit in an opening episode of The Knight of the Burning Pestle's fourth act. To the Boy's contention that "it will show ill-favouredly to have a grocer's prentice to court a king's daughter," the Citizen counters, "Will it so, sir? You are well read in histories! I pray you, what was Sir Dagonet? Was not he prentice to a grocer in London? Read the play of The Four Prentices of London, where they toss their pikes so" (Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle [Manchester, 1984] 4.1.46–51). The Book of the Play is collectively interested in such "histories," in early modern drama in print and in manuscript, specifically with their alternate modes of production and reception as distinct from those we associate with playgoing. Published as part of the Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture series and edited by Marta Straznicky, this collection considers how drama's social impact was directed not just by the playhouse but by agencies like the printing house as well. It attends to playreading as a culturally-inflected practice and to playtexts "as material objects that record the specific cultural, intellectual, and political conditions that prevailed at the time of printing" (7). Divided into two reasonably coherent sections, the volume offers four essays that are primarily concerned with "real and imagined" communities of playreaders and five essays on the impact of playreading upon a developing public sphere.

Drawing evidence primarily from playbook prefatory material, Cyndia Susan Clegg's "Renaissance Play-Readers, Ordinary and Extraordinary" opens the first section by describing how early modern playwrights and publishers generally constructed their readership "as intelligent and discerning, possessed of indifferent judgment and free" (35). To this conclusion, Lucy Munro, in her consideration of three contemporary readings of Edward Sharpham's The Fleer, adds that "different readers could approach printed comedy in a number of ways, depending on the contexts in which they found the play and the uses they intended to put it" (52). Straznicky returns to playtexts' construction of readers in her provocative essay "Reading through the Body: Women and Printed Drama." In it, she argues that prefatory rhetoric in texts like The Alchemist subtly license their female readers' pleasurable engagement with drama. As such, playtexts helped to generate a discourse of female performance that "could not have materialized in any other field of early modern culture" (74). The first section concludes with Elizabeth Sauer's analysis of a 1643 translation of Buchanan's closet drama Baptistes sive Calumnia (1577). "Closet Drama and the Case of Tyrannical Government Anatomized" traces the Parliament-sponsored print cooptation of an Elizabethan anti-establishment closet drama for republican political ends.

The collection's second section is well headed by Zachary Lesser's "Typographic Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity and The Meanings of Black Letter." Questioning previous associations of black-letter print with popular literature, Lesser convincingly connects this ubiquitous typeface with instances of what he calls a "typographic nostalgia," and he ultimately calls for a semiotic approach to black-letter, one that assumes that the font's meaning was dependant upon the particular context of its use and reception. Ben Jonson's concern over the commodification of printed and performed plays as news in the 1620s and 1630s constitutes the focus of Alan B. Farmer's contribution, while Peter Berek's "Genres, Early Modern Theatrical Title Pages...