Abstract
Chapter 2 examines in detail the arguments advanced by theatre historians to explain why early seventeenth-century indoor playhouses were described as ‘private’. It exposes unsupportable claims that the term was used to circumvent censorship: in fact, the plays bearing ‘private’ on their title pages were censored by the Master of the Revels. The chapter demonstrates that the term had a much wider range of meanings than theatre historians have acknowledged. It resists generalised claims and instead charts the various ways in which both ‘public’ and ‘private’ were used throughout the Jacobean period, thereby attesting to their significance and complexity. In doing this, it considers title page advertisements and offers new ways of thinking about how playbooks and theatre spaces were marketed.
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Notes
Peter W.M. Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422.
Robert S. Miola, ‘Creating the Author: Jonson’s Latin Epigraphs’, Ben Jonson Journal, 6 (1999), 35–48. Miola makes clear that the Latin mottos on Jonson title pages ‘certainly seem’ to be authorial, even if the other title page features are not (36).
Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 103–126.
For objections to the argument, see R.A. Foakes, ‘Book Review: Roslyn Lander Knutson. Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001’, Early Theatre, 6 (2003), 119–121 (120).
On the text, and Burre’s specialism as a printer of theatrically unsuccessful plays, see Zachary Lesser, ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, ELR, 29 (1999), 21–43.
Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, p. 271; Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 96.
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© 2015 Eoin Price
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Price, E. (2015). The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625. In: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494924_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494924_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-49491-7
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