Reading Metatheatre

Is it possible to read metatheatre? If so, to what extent was metatheatre part of the playreading experience in early modern England? Focusing on "paratexts" to a range of plays printed in England in the early seventeenth century, from printed character lists to manuscript marginalia, this article investigates implied and actual readers' responses to the self-reflexive qualities of playbooks, whether or not those qualities are intentional. In doing so, it argues that early modern printed playbooks prompted "performative" reading practices through which readers actively reflected on the relationship between the real- and play-worlds, and enacted their own roles in the production of metatheatre. While Stephen Purcell proposes in this special issue that metatheatre is a "game … that can be played only in [theatrical] performance" (19), I contend that certain forms of metatheatre are accessible through—and sometimes even dependent on—the interplay between different agents of meaning-making (dramatists, stationers and readers) on the "paper stage" of the printed book. Such an approach offers a new methodological framework and uncovers a neglected body of evidence for the analysis of metatheatre in early modern drama, including character and errata lists, printing errors in Shakespeare's First Folio, and readers' marks. Metatheatre, I suggest, needs to be re-assessed from the perspective of book history as well as theater history, and especially intersections between the two. Early modern metatheatre was largely experienced through the conspicuous mixing of media, manifestations of the theatricality of the book and the bookishness of theater.

Playreading as performance: Metatheatre, paratexts and paper stages

For some scholars, self-reflexive playreading might fall into the domain of "metadrama" rather than "metatheatre." Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait define metadrama as "a play which comments on the conventions of its genre," and metatheatre as "a performance calling attention to the presentational aspects of theatre and its conventions in the moment of its transpiring" (14–15).¹ I have chosen to use the word "metatheatre," however, because I want to challenge the tendency to characterize playreading in opposition to performance and theatricality.² Although playgoing and playreading were different activities in many respects, recent scholarship has started to explore intersections between reading and performance, considering "how and to what effect reading the 'book' of the play intersected with theatrical culture" (Straznicky 8). While Tiffany Stern has shown that "a play at a playhouse was continually thought of as having bookish qualities" ("Watching as Reading," 154), other scholars have explored ways in which printed playbooks were designed to simulate or facilitate theatrical experiences for readers. Holger Syme, for example, suggests that print could "construct an alternative mode of theatricality" (144). He argues that Ben Jonson and John Marston, collaborating with printers and publishers, "used the page's specific signifying systems to recreate a set of effects characteristic of the stage; or, to put it more simply, … they found a way of making the book a theater" (144).³ Printed forms of drama, it is increasingly being recognized, should not be seen as non-theatrical and non-performative, but rather as offering readers new ways of engaging with performance and theatrical culture.

Early modern paratextual reflections on, and instructions for, playreading often encouraged this way of thinking about printed drama. The prefatory materials to a range of printed books, including playbooks, suggested that reading was akin to watching—or even participating in—a theatrical performance. The printed page was often framed as an alternative performance space, what Thomas Nashe called a "paper stage" in his preface to Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591; A3r). In a prefatory poem to Shakespeare's posthumous First Folio, James Mabbe dramatizes the author's grand entrance into the book trade, exploiting the fact that a number of readers would have been former spectators, and even seen Shakespeare perform in his own plays: "Wee thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth, / Tels thy Spectators, that thou went'st but forth / To enter with applause" ([^πB]1r). "Hee may become an Actor that but Reades," writes John Ford in his contribution to the commendatory verses that preface the quarto of Philip Massinger's...