The Book of The Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England

Chapter Three. Reading Through the Body: Women and Printed Drama

three Reading through the Body: Women and Printed Drama marta straznicky Humphrey Moseley’s preface to his edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays famously identifies women as a major segment of the market for printed drama: Some Playes (you know) written by these Authors were heretofore Printed: I thought not convenient to mixe them with this Volume, which of it selfe is entirely New. And indeed it would have rendred the Booke so Voluminous , that Ladies and Gentlewomen would have found it scarce manageable , who in Workes of this nature must first be remembred.1 When Moseley made this claim in 1647 women were, indeed, avid playreaders , although the assertion that their interests have a formative influence on the design of the volume is undercut by the simple fact that the preface is addressed exclusively to “Gentlemen” readers and that they alone are projected as book buyers.The rationale for limiting the contents of the volume to previously unpublished plays seemingly has less to do with women’s ability to handle a “Booke so Voluminous” than it has with the need to convince “Gentlemen” customers that the book is good value: “Besides, I considered those former Pieces had been so long printed and re-printed, that many Gentlemen were already furnished; and I would have none say, they pay twice for the same Booke.” Although Moseley clearly imagines that women will read the plays, he excludes them here from the kind of commercial transaction that Jean Howard has identified as the catalyst for the empowerment of female playgoers.2 Women did, of course, buy printed plays, the evidence for which will be discussed here, but even an astute businessman like Moseley chooses to construct them as book handlers rather than book buyers. 59 In this Moseley is perfectly consistent with the tendency throughout the early modern period to associate women’s reading with the body: plays kiss ladies’ hands or sit on their laps; licentious women have playbooks in their bedchambers (Shakespeare reportedly “creepes into the womens closets about bed time”); other playwrights are said to “ease” and “refresh” their female patrons.3 Interestingly, this embodiment of women play-readers is found not only in anti-feminist or satirical writings but also in texts—such as the Beaumont and Fletcher folio—that are not overtly political or regulatory in design. The work of social correction that Howard links with antitheatrical depictions of the eroticized female spectator is not, therefore, so clearly identifiable where women play-readers are concerned. The reason, I will argue, is that early modern printed drama could be made rhetorically discontinuous with the commercial theater—in constructions of its impact on social relations , its cultural and material practices, and above all its ambiguous intersection with the “public” sphere—and could therefore generate alternative discourses around theatricality, privacy, and the female body. In certain respects, and most notably where they fail, those alternative discourses rehearse the gender politics that prevented women from writing for and acting on the commercial stage; but in many instances the corporeality of women play-readers legitimizes women’s pleasure in drama—as both spectators and performers—in ways that are conceptually unavailable in the context of the public playhouses. In the context of print culture, playbooks occupy an ambiguous position : usually they are aligned with other forms of recreational literature such as ballads and prose romances, but there is also a concerted effort on the part of playwrights and publishers to elevate drama to the ranks of poetry, history, or the literature of moral instruction. This variability in the cultural status of the printed play reveals, as recent scholarship has shown, the transformation of playwrights into authors as it occurred over the course of the seventeenth century.4 But considered simply in its variations, rather than being set in an evolutionary framework examining the (male) author, the status of the printed play reveals differences in reading protocols that are not merely gendered but gendered consistently throughout the early modern period. Robert Wilmot’s early Inns of Court play TheTragedie of Tancred and Gismund (1591) is dedicated to both men and women and thus reveals what is at stake in such distinctions among readers. The first of four dedications is addressed to the ladies Anne Gray and Mary Peter, whose “favourable countenance” 60 marta straznicky Wilmot hopes to secure.5 The women evidently did not attend the...