According to Script

To readers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a printed book was a prompt to a wide variety of actions. For example, it could be read aloud in company, or sent to the binder's to be handsomely finished, or carefully marked up to show which extracts should be copied into a commonplace book. Sometimes these actions involved marking the printed text, which could itself be a preparation for further action. A copy of the Shakespeare First Folio now at the University of Padua was extensively marked up for performances of Macbeth and Measure for Measure. Stephen Orgel observes that this enabled 'the book to become a play again . . . the text to become a script'. This is true in that the printed plays didn't, as it were, speak for themselves, but for practical purposes needed work doing to them before they could be performed. But in another sense any printed text at the time was already a script because, in combination with the ideas shared by readers of the period about what should be done with books, it provided a host of opportunities for action and a set of implicit instructions about what to do. Not all of these opportunities could be followed up, nor all of these instructions obeyed, by a single reader at one time. A book was therefore a platform supporting a wide range of activities which the reader could pick and choose from–rather as a playtext provides a director with a host of choices about how to stage a play. All printed books called upon their readers to act, and their readers did so by making choices about how to apply habitual practices which together formed a culture of using books.

Stephen Orgel's study explores this culture by analysing thematically grouped examples of books marked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He focuses on examples in which annotations engage directly with the text, although he does acknowledge the other varied uses to which blank spaces in books could be put, such as making laundry lists, kitchen recipes, pen trials, and letter drafts. Orgel's chapters form a series of linked essays rather than a tightly argued monograph. They cover schoolroom use of Latin texts, marking of dramatic texts, annotated copies of Spenser, a single annotated copy of a scandalous history of James I's reign, and annotations made in the late seventeenth century by Lady Anne Clifford (whose reading habits have already been well studied by Heidi Brayman Hackel and others).¹ Orgel's introduction suggests that his study will address questions about how historians of the book and of literature can take into account early modern annotations, and even promises 'a sociology of reading and writing in relation to ownership'. This signposting gives a misleading impression of the study's real strengths. The book which follows contains thoughtful analyses of individual marked books underpinned by an eclectic method which takes into account the variety of practices employed by early modern readers, but it does not include a rigorously developed theory about the nature of the evidence they provide to literary historians. Instead, a skilful 'archaeological' approach manifests itself in careful attention to each specific example, offering plausible reconstructions of the motivations behind acts of marking and the contexts which made them possible, but without pressing them into the service of a larger theory. Orgel's focus is on concrete examples of readers 'in action' as they, for example, learn Latin or keep track of characters in The Faerie Queene.

Following readers in action is revealing because it shows them making choices. One early reader of Hamlet (again in a copy of the First Folio, this one now at Meisei University in Tokyo) put marks beside passages which describe the day-to-day business of the Danish court. As Orgel's student Esther Yu observes, this reader saw Shakespeare 'as a source of information about appropriate courtly rhetoric and behaviour'.² The reader was a Scot, but nothing more is...