Abstract
One of the arguments of this collection as a whole is that a distinctive culture of drama developed in Caroline England. The publication of playbooks in the 1630s both provides important evidence for this development and was, in fact, one of the driving forces behind it. Caroline dramatic culture, in other words, took shape not only in theaters but also in bookstalls. In many ways, playbooks in this period differed significantly from those printed earlier, and there are many stories one could tell about the publication of drama in Caroline England, from the rise in author attributions on title pages, to the simultaneous rise in theater attributions, to the increased use of prefatory material such as dramatis personae, actor lists, dedications, and commendatory verses. Such changes in the material appearance of playbooks reveal a great deal about the theatrical culture of Caroline England: the creation of the professional dramatist as a literary author within, rather than against, the commercial theater; the growing rivalries among playing companies and theaters, such as that between the Phoenix and the Blackfriars; and the construction of social divisions among theatrical audiences.1
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Notes
For discussions of these trends, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77–165.
On the rivalry between playing companies at the Phoenix and Blackfriars theaters, see also Peter Beal, “Massinger at Bay: Unpublished Verses in a War of the Theatres,” Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 190–203.
see D. F. McKenzie, “Printing and Publishing 1557–1700: Constraints on the London Book Trades,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume IV, 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 ), 553–67
D. F. McKenzie, and D. F. McKenzie, “The London Book Trade in 1644,” in Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002 ), 126–43.
Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 )
Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995 )
Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994 )
Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 )
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), appendix I, 289–91.
C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols. (London: H.M.S.O., 1911), 1: 26–27.
Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: John D. 1997 ), 383–422, 389.
see David McKitterick, “ ‘Ovid with a Littleton’: The Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society11 (1997): 184–234, esp. 207–08.
See John Guillory, “Canon,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 ), 233–34.
Edward Blount, “To the Reader,” in John Lyly, Sixe Court Comedies (London, 1632), sig. A5r.
William Sheares, “The the Right Honovrable, The Lady Elizabeth Carie, Viscountesse Fawkland,” in John Marston, The Workes… Being Tragedies and Comedies, Collected into one Volume (London, 1633), sigs. A3v—A4r, emphasis added.
John Okes, “The Printer to the honest and High spirited Gentlemen of the never decaying Art, called the Gentle Craft,” in William Rowley, A Shoo-maker a Gentleman (London, 1638), sig. A3r.
John Spencer, “The Printer and Stationer to the Gentle Reader,” in Thomas Middleton, A Mad World My Masters (London, 1640), sig. A4r.
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© 2006 Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer
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Farmer, A.B., Lesser, Z. (2006). Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England. In: Zucker, A., Farmer, A.B. (eds) Localizing Caroline Drama. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601611_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601611_2
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