Comparative Drama

Reading Drama in Tudor England argues that "well before the opening of London's commercial theatres, drama had become a recognisable textual category that had its own market appeal" (3). In this, Atkin challenges the prevailing view that printed plays only acquire literary status in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Atkins reviews the debate between Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser and Peter Blayney in which market success (or lack thereof) is the measure of the popularity of printed plays, the material form of which appeals to a non-elite audience. She also takes into account Lukas Erne's work that extends Farmer and Lesser's views on the success of playbooks to argue that in the 1590s playbooks emerged as a distinctive printed genre marked by readerly qualities that convey their literary value and separate them from performance. According to Atkin, this line of argument insists that "early printed playbooks cannot be literary because their primary function is to facilitate performance," which is "inimical to the achievement of literary status" (7). Playbooks printed before the opening of the first successful commercial theatre in 1576, thus, have been dismissed as a mere backdrop for real dramatic literature.

Atkin challenges this line of argument, and she begins with Blayney's foundational article, "The Publication of Playbooks," which insists that to investigate a playtext is to investigate the publisher. Such an approach she deems insufficient for understanding early printed drama. The publisher's duties, including writing prefatory material, designing title pages, and making decisions about printing conventions, need also to be considered because they make "drama legible as a distinct category of text" (3). Indeed, "much of what can be intuited about the interactions between authors, printers, and publishers can be found within the pages of early printed playbooks in the form of title-page attributions and imprints, signed prefaces and colophons" (4).

The subject, then, of Reading Drama in Tudor England is paratextual materials and how they shape reading strategies and reveal printing house practices. Atkin finds that "some types of playbooks were marked as literary by their paratextual apparatus" and "since these 'literary' paratexts became common only after 1559," she sees "the 1560s and 1570s as a unique period in English literary history when playbooks were marketed as literary artefacts for the first time" (8).

This study extends from the earliest existing English playbook (c. 1512) to 1576, when London's "first successful permanent playhouse" opened. It takes [End Page 113] into account ninety-two plays, eighty-seven of which rely on Farmer and Lesser's online Database of Early English Playbooks. Atkin adds an additional five because, unlike DEEP, she includes every single play extant. These plays reflect a range of dramatic genres, including translations, pageants, masques, interludes, and both academic and closet dramas. She compares these to the nineteen quasi-dramatic texts in twenty-nine editions listed before 1576 in Martin Wiggins's British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue in order to distinguish distinctive bibliographic characteristics for printed drama. The prefatory materials include two useful tables with relevant bibliographical information; the first lists the ninety-one early playbooks that are the focus of this study, and the second lists the twenty-nine titles from Wiggins. The main approach for each of the four main chapters is to present a statistical analysis of the playbooks containing the features of the material book the chapter is considering, and then to describe illustrative examples of the feature. Chapters tend to conclude with an extended discussion of one or two very strong examples that make a case for either the early development of play-text printing conventions or the presence of readerly markers characteristic of "literary" publication. The first two chapters following the introduction focus on paratextual materials: the first considers how the interaction of words and images on title pages frame play texts, and the second turns to front matter, including both character lists and such literary preliminaries as dedications, addresses...