Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England

Hannah August

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000563115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama's most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.

1 Who read plays?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199748-2

In 1590, the printer Richard Jones produced a small two-play collection. Printed in octavo, it contained the first and second parts of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, and was prefaced with what was, at the time, a novel addition to a playbook. This was an epistle to the readers, authored and signed by Jones himself, and addressed ‘To the Gentlemen Readers: and others that take pleasure in reading Histories’.¹ This inclusive framing of the play’s readership was repeated in the epistle’s first sentence, which begged the attention not just of ‘Gentlemen’, but of ‘curteous readers whosoever’. It is these supposedly courteous ‘others’ that this chapter seeks to rehabilitate into the history of playreading: those anonymous readers who were not men belonging to the ranks of the gentry (or above), and therefore were far less likely to leave behind traces of their reading in the form of manuscript records (commonplace books, probate inventories, accounting records, library catalogues etc.) or collections of playbooks.

These readers can be found, implicitly and explicitly, in the paratexts of early modern playbooks, and are a part of the market created by these books’ material form. While the absence of other evidence testifying to their existence means that they inevitably remain ‘imagined’, their historical existence is consistent with an early modern publishing industry in which, as James Raven puts it, there was ‘a general perception […] that market expansion was dependent on the increase of market area rather than of market depth in the sense of increased per capita income’.² In other words, targeting as many readers as possible, regardless of the surety of their financial standing, seems to have been considered a more effective marketing strategy than targeting only those readers whose affluence might enable the purchase of multiple titles. This creates a tension between the wide spectrum of imagined readers sought by stationers and the narrowly conceived ‘ideal reader’ desired by playwrights and their associates. This tension, as shall be seen, plays out in playbooks’ multiple paratextual elements. Far from coalescing into one ‘ideal reader’, playreaders are always a plurality, and, in a proto-capitalist early modern England in which the acquisition of a novel commodity could matter more than its subsequent appreciation, frequently it is only in their purchasing power that they are ideal. Dramatic paratexts invoke a multiplicity of potential readers at the same time as the material form of playbooks beckons these readers closer, signifying affordability and portability. Together, playbooks’ formal and paratextual elements offer evidence that stationers and playwrights anticipated a readership composed not simply of gentlemen readers, but also those archivally less visible ‘others’. In incorporating these ‘others’ into the history of early modern playreading, the demographic diversity of early modern playreaders becomes clear.

This demographic diversity has been murkier prior to now in part because of the excellent use scholars have made of archival evidence such as that described in the opening paragraph in order to create a directory of elite playreaders like Sir Edward Dering, Sir John Harington, and others introduced in the previous chapter. A roll call of early modern men and women known to have read or owned quarto playbooks would include aristocratic readers such as Edward Conway, second Viscount Conway (1594–1665); John Holles, second Earl of Clare (1595–1666); Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland (1602–1668); Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent (1556–1632); Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1583–1636); and King Charles I (1600–1649).³ Known readers amongst the gentry include Dering; Harington; Sir Thomas Barrington of Hatfield Broad Oak (d. 1644); Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun (1580–1656); Sir Richard Wingfield, second Baronet of Letheringham and Easton, Suffolk (d. 1656); Elizabeth, Lady Puckering, (1621/22–1689), wife of Sir Henry Puckering, third baronet; Scots poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649); George Buc, Master of the Revels in James I’s reign (1560–1622); barrister and Justice of the Peace Richard Simonds (c. 1550–1611); and four country gentlemen: Edward Pudsey (1573–1613), William Freke (1605–1656), John Buxton (1608–1660), and Henry Oxinden (1609–1670).⁴ Of similar standing but a different gender to these last was Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677), who married a Staffordshire gentleman somewhat less intellectually driven than herself.⁵

While there are also a handful of highly literate members of the professional classes who are known to have owned and read playbooks, in general, attention has been focused on these ‘elite males’ (with an honourable mention for four well-to-do women named Frances or Elizabeth) who, according to Cyndia Susan Clegg, comprised the expected readership for plays.⁶ This focus has had a similar effect to the attention devoted to the history of reading plays by Shakespeare: it has elided the historical existence of non-elite and non-male playreaders. In 1991 T. A. Birrell, examining the place of ‘light literature’ (amongst which he included plays) in seventeenth-century gentlemen’s libraries, found it remarkable that such books would be read by the gentry. This was, he contended, ‘[t]he really interesting social and cultural point’, rather than ‘that the peasants read such stuff – they would, wouldn’t they?’⁷ In the intervening decades, this statement has undergone an almost complete reversal, and while it is now widely understood that playbooks were read by the gentry, scholars express scepticism about the extent to which they would have been read by those who were not ‘Gentlemen Readers’.⁸ As the terms Birrell favours, the ‘peasants’ and ‘the bourgeois’, have been replaced by the language of ‘sorts’, it is the playreaders amongst the ‘lower’ and ‘middling’ sorts that have faded from view, such as the yeomen, artisans, shopkeepers, husbandmen, and servants who were increasingly literate over the course of the period, and for whom printed matter was increasingly affordable.

The lack of focus on such non-elite playreaders is due in part to the upsurge of interest in the archival evidence associated with the figures named above, but also to a re-evaluation of the signifying features of the object that was the early modern playbook. The material attributes of the printed book have long been understood as repositories of meaning, capable of conveying information not just about contexts of production but also probable reception. While it remains generally accepted that these material attributes ‘indicated something’ about genre, readership, circulation, and mode of engagement, when it comes to quarto playbooks, certain long-standing assumptions about what that ‘something’ was have recently been unpicked.⁹ Scholars have asked whether particular aspects of the early modern playbook have been over-freighted with significance, in particular as regards the story told about the genre’s readership and cultural status. By way of introduction then, to the textual objects that sit at the heart of this study, the following section considers what – if anything – can be inferred about playreaders from four key non-lexical elements of their reading material: the quarto playbook’s size, paper, (lack of) binding, and typeface. In doing so, it reasserts playbooks as a print genre that had the capacity to reach the same wide range of readers who would have been consuming other genres of early modern ‘cheap print’. The subsequent two sections present supporting evidence from playbooks’ paratexts that implicitly or explicitly acknowledges this heterogeneous readership, while the chapter’s final section examines the strategies the paratexts’ writers used in their attempts to control the responses of this ‘great variety’ of readers.

The materiality of playbooks revisited

What does a quarto playbook look like? Most of the playbooks that scholars and students encounter today look different from the original objects that would have been presented to book buyers in early modern England. Those of us not privileged enough to work near research libraries with rare books holdings consult two-dimensional facsimiles on websites such as Early English Books Online or the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto site. Even the physical playbooks held by institutions such as the British Library have often morphed into something far from their sixteenth- or seventeenth-century form. Early modern readers would have encountered printed play quartos as unbound pamphlets, or as composite volumes known as Sammelbände, in which multiple plays were bound together, but extant playbooks are generally bound individually in later bindings. In addition, they may have lost their original size and shape thanks to over-zealous collectors who cropped their page margins in order to remove manuscript traces of prior reading. For the early modern playreader, however, a quarto was a slim ‘square-shaped book […] created by folding sheets of printing paper in half twice, thereby creating four leaves and eight pages per sheet’, with these pages measuring approximately 7 × 9 inches.¹⁰ It was most likely printed on paper known as ‘pot’ paper, ‘the ordinary stock of the [English] publishing trade’.¹¹ A single quarto playbook was sold unbound, roughly ‘stab-stitched’ along its central fold in order to hold the sheets together.¹² It was generally set in a roman type called pica, replacing the black letter that predominated in printed drama of the earlier Tudor period.¹³

Figure 1.1 An unbound, stab-stitched quarto playbook: final page of The London Prodigall (1605, STC 22333, Folger copy 2, sig. G4^v). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In early modern cultural discourse, the image of the quarto is often used metaphorically to denote something of lesser magnitude, in many cases by opposing it to the largest publication format, the folio. For instance, in Henry Glapthorne’s 1639 comedy, Wit in a Constable, the character of Thorowgood bemoans his gulling at the hands of Clara and Grace, the women he and his friend Valentine are courting. The women’s gleeful mockery of their other suitors pales in comparison to what he has experienced, declares Thorowgood: ‘the rest were made | But fooles in Quarto, but I finde my selfe | An asse in Folio’ (sig. D3^v). In a similar vein, Thomas Randolph’s 1630 university play Aristippus features a scene in which the title character is praised for his depth of knowledge when compared with that of two unnamed ‘scholars’. The scholars are dismissed and Aristippus lauded with the claim that ‘one Epitome of his in quarto is worth a volume of these Dunces’ (sig. A4^r). The pithy quarto is opposed to the larger ‘volume’, presumably a folio: Richard Brome will later (and pejoratively) use the adjective ‘voluminous’ to describe a folio playbook, John Suckling’s 1638 Aglaura.¹⁴ Even in non-dramatic works without a thematic focus on books or learning, the metaphor surfaces: in one of the ‘sundry poems’ appended to Robert Fletcher’s 1656 translation of Martial’s Epigrams, the poetic speaker queries the value of a life of restraint, asking whether he should instead act with such excessive immorality, ‘That when I dye, where others goe before | In whining venial streams, and quarto pages, | My flouds may rise in folio, sinck all ages?’¹⁵

Given quartos’ comparative smallness, their size may, as Mark Bland suggests, have had something to do with their portability and thus the audience they reached, but only if they were small in multiple respects – in short, only if they ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on referencing and transcription
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Who read plays?
• 2 Why read plays?
• 3 How were plays read? Part one: Extractive reading
• 4 How were plays read? Part two: Using, marking, annotating
• 5 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index