"Nor Stage, Nor Stationers Stall Can Showe": The Circulation of Plays in Manuscript in the Early Seventeenth Century

Harold Love, Arthur F. Marotti, and Henry Woudhuysen have focused attention on scribal publication after Gutenburg, and have confirmed the persistence of the transmission of texts in manuscript throughout the first two centuries of print. ¹ Yet there is no recent reconsideration of the circulation of dramatic manuscripts, despite attention given to the manuscript origins of printed plays and the taxonomy of surviving dramatic manuscripts. Further, despite the clear evidence of the vendibility of transcripts of poems and of such prose works as Thomas Scott’s Vox Populi (1620), the question of the sale of scribal copies of early English plays has not been addressed.

The possibility of the entrepreneurial publication of plays, to adopt Harold Love’s terminology, is highly relevant to the concerns of modern theatrical scholarship. ² Under the aegis of poststructuralist theories of criticism, a modern group of revisionists has rigorously challenged the widely accepted findings of the “new bibliographers” (Pollard, McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, and their students), particularly their classification of dramatic documents in connection with the editing of plays. ³ The existence or absence of a commercial category of dramatic manuscripts, especially one of potentially diminished accuracy and authority from which editions may have been printed, is significant for editors. More important perhaps, if entrepreneurial scribal publication of plays existed alongside publication in print, cultural historians would receive valuable evidence about the process by which drama was rehabilitated as a form of literature, a process apparently print-dominated and accomplished in England by the end of the seventeenth century. It would be especially interesting, for instance, to observe whether the closing of the public theaters in 1642 resulted in a strengthened market for plays in print and a consequentially enlarged readership, of which scribal publication could provide an index.

The economics of scribal publication was different for a scribe who was self-employed and for the stationer or bookseller who was the head of a commercial enterprise that employed other people. In the usual course, the stationer who sold scribal copies of manuscripts would engage scribes to make transcripts, and would have purchased the copy in the first place. A stationer will have made a commercial investment in the literary property before multiplication of copies began, but because the single manuscript was not his only potentially profitable enterprise, his risk of loss is supportable, in theory. However, an individual scribe may not have had to purchase his copy, but his investment of time and effort was necessarily serial and he almost literally lived from hand to mouth. It may be difficult to establish on this basis which of the two was more likely to survive entrepreneurially, but it is clear that the economic contexts in which the individual scribe and stationer worked were significantly different. This essay, therefore, is concerned not so much to consider the extent to which different forms of drama (academic, closet, public) circulated in manuscript or print during the English Renaissance as to consider whether the market for plays was so great (or of such a kind) as to encourage the commodification of drama in the form of scribal copies of plays offered for sale by booksellers.

Drama, the Stage, and Commodification

In a sense, the commodification of drama in sixteenth-century England had a shorter course than other literary forms because it was already commodified in the theater. The primary site of the publication of plays is the stage, before an audience, rather than books printed for readers. Increasingly, the performance of secular plays was rewarded, by sustenance, protection, and tips from noble patrons, performance fees for command performances in the court, and by the admission fees of spectators in public theaters. The establishment in London in the 1560s and 1570s of the first houses devoted solely to the production of plays coincided with a growing supply of dramatists educated from the works of the classical dramatists. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, English playwrights had begun to perceive the additional monetary benefits of print publication. The wider commodification of...