Reading Drama in Tudor England by Tamara Atkin (review)

Reading drama in tudor england is, in Tamara Atkin's words, 'about the articulation of dramatic form in print', and, specifically, 'about the print invention of drama as a category of text designed for readerly consumption' (p. 195). Compellingly she makes the case that early printed drama (that is, playbooks published before 1576, a date marking the earliest purpose-built commercial theatre) was intended mainly for readers rather than, as has sometimes been argued, primarily as scripts for potential performers. Although a number of printed texts call attention to theatrical possibilities—such as the title-page of Enough is as Good as a Feast claiming that 'Seuen may easely play this Enterlude'—it is hard to imagine that whatever the usual size of an edition of a particular play might be (perhaps 500, as Greg Walker has speculated) there would ever have been enough professional and semi-professional troupes or eager amateur performers to justify the size of the print run.

Atkin attends to various textual aspects of these printed plays that worked to establish drama as a recognizable category within the emerging print market-place, and she helpfully provides a census of known single-play playbooks that were published before 1576: seventy-six plays in 121 separate editions or issues, organized by date of publication, with a short form of the title, its author if known, the printer and/or publisher, DEEP number, STC number, and format (pp. xxi–xxvi). In the study itself, she examines title-pages, character lists, page layout, type fonts, and even 'the routine absence of certain preliminary paratexts', all of which help 'identify the text as play' (p. 70) for its potential readers and enable the category of printed drama to become visible and vendible within a broader field of 'literary' publications.

It is an important revisionary argument, challenging and correcting a number of often-repeated assumptions about early printed drama, although perhaps her alert and patient analysis of various print and design features of the playbooks underestimates just how much work has been effectively done to make 'the form of the play immediately legible to potential purchasers' (p. 69) merely by the word 'Playe' or 'Interlude' that appears as part of the title in almost fifty per cent of the playbooks in her census.

This is not to dismiss the argument that is made about other textual features, but only to express some surprise that these telling generic markers are so thoroughly subordinated to the other aspects she considers. Or maybe it is to say that the overall argument of the book is less compelling than the evidence offered for it. The trees here are generally more interesting than the forest.

Atkin has remarkable command of the textual particularities of these playbooks, reminding us of their consequence and of their weirdness (and we do need to be reminded, as the corpus of this early drama has largely disappeared from course syllabi and even from PhD reading lists). Her account of character lists, for example, is fascinating, not least because of the one appearing on the title-page of Q2 Jacob and Esau (p. 80), 'partes and names of the Players', which is a particularly odd way to introduce a list of roles. And her wonderful conclusion happily is not one, but provides yet another fascinating tree for contemplation, here the strange fate of three early plays that turn up, at least in part, in other books (one as binder's waste found in Isaac Newton's copy of a late sixteenth-century Genevan edition of Petrarch's De remediis vtrusque fortunae), though early drama, as Atkin notes, was always a form constructed in 'parts', however variously that term might be understood.

Still, it would be useful if Atkin had wrestled a bit harder with the 'bifold authority' (Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.151) of the printed playbook, split...