They Are All Fossils: A Paleontology of Early Modern Drama

Abstract

As Stephen Jay Gould notes, Charles Darwin famously compares the fossil record, fragmentary and incomplete as it is, to a mutilated and largely lost work of literature. This chapter, on the other hand, reverses Darwin’s metaphor from natural history back into literature. It argues that the language and conventions of palaeontology can be helpful in thinking about the lost and extant texts of early modern drama. In particular, palaeontology provides a vocabulary to address the methodological problems implicit in interpreting a whole early modern “media ecosystem”—as one might say—from its scattered surviving fossils. Specifically, this essay (1) explores the metaphorical possibilities of the observation that “soft parts” of animals largely leave no direct trace in the fossil record; (2) argues that printed playtexts themselves have some of the qualities of fossils—detailed and well-preserved ones, but fossils nonetheless; and (3) looks for the lagerstätten of early modern drama.