Article
Reference
Dedications, epistles to the reader, and prefatory custom in printed english playbooks, 1559–1642
SINGH, Devani Mandira
Abstract
This essay presents a bibliometric survey of dedications and addresses to the reader in plays printed between 1559 and 1642, and compares their rates of occurrence in plays from the professional theatres with those from nonprofessional contexts. Contrary to the critical commonplace that the establishment of early modern literary culture saw the decline of patronage and the rise of the figure of the reader, the rates of publication of dedications and addresses to readers suggest the opposite. The essay documents a striking absence of attention to readers in the preliminaries of playbooks and finds that the dedication was the more popular form of prefatory address for both professional and nonprofessional plays.
SINGH, Devani Mandira. Dedications, epistles to the reader, and prefatory custom in printed english playbooks, 1559–1642. The Review of English Studies, 2021, p. 31
DOI : 10.1093/res/hgaa069
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:146022
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Dedications, Epistles to the Reader, and Prefatory Custom in Printed English Playbooks, 1559-1642
Abstract: This essay argues for the value of approaching printed dedications and addresses to readers through a comparative lens. For printed drama in particular, the presence of readerly paratexts has been a means of charting the genre’s literary ascent. The essay presents a bibliometric survey of the two paratexts in plays printed between 1559 and 1642, and compares their rates of occurrence in plays from the professional theatres with those from nonprofessional contexts. Contrary to the critical commonplace that the establishment of early modern literary culture saw the decline of patronage and the rise of the figure of the reader, the rates of publication of dedications and addresses to readers suggest the opposite.
The essay documents a striking absence of attention to readers in the preliminaries of playbooks and finds that the dedication was the more popular form of prefatory address for both professional and nonprofessional plays, although professional plays initially favoured addresses to readers.
After suggesting ways of accounting for these trends and considering their implications, the essay concludes with a discussion of dramatic prefaces which self-reflexively invoke the
‘custom’ of having a printed preface. The essay argues that this rhetorical convention shows authors and stationers weighing the merits of prefatory matter and negotiating the attendant question of literary worth as they sought to position their plays favourably in the print marketplace.
In 1615, Thomas Creed printed the first quarto of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s tragedy Cupid’s Revenge with an epistle that explicitly invoked the Jacobean book marketplace and the evolving role of printed drama within it. ‘It is a custome,’ it begins,
‘vsed by some Writers in this Age to Dedicate their Playes to worthy persons, as well as their other works; and there is reason for it, because they are the best Mineruaes of their braine, and expresse more puritie of conceit in the ingenious circle of an Act or Scæne, then is to be found in the vast circumference of larger Volumnes’.1 The statement sets up a likeness between printed ‘Playes’ on the one hand and ‘works’ on the other, between slender playbooks and capacious ‘Volumnes’ that signal their elevated subject matter in material terms. Cupid’s Revenge had been performed at an exclusive indoor theatre by a company with a royal patent, knowledge which may have bolstered the preface writer’s suggestion that the play could claim the same intellectual status as ‘other works’ which are usually dedicated.2
The first English book to print plays from the public theatres under the title of ‘works’
would appear the following year, with the publication of Ben Jonson’s folio containing his poetic and dramatic writing. But in 1615 the first quarto of Cupid’s Revenge, which argues for the literary merit of theatre plays alongside ‘other works’, signals an ongoing shift in the reception of printed English drama and anticipates a future in which a groundbreaking publication like Jonson’s is possible.3 In printed playbooks, the dedication was a visible marker of drama’s emergent status as a respectable form of literary production which had earned its place beside other, ‘larger Volumes’ . If ‘worthy persons’ confer their honour onto such books, then playbooks might be elevated by virtue of naming a dedicatee. They, too, become ‘worthy an answerable Mecœnas, to honour and bee honoured by them’. The
sentiment ingeniously turns the conceit of worth upon itself: by the fact of having a dedicatee, the book both receives and bestows favour.
By this account, it was clearly advantageous to dedicate a play in the period, and we might reasonably expect that many authors or publishers would seize upon the opportunity.
Some, like Jonson, did just that. In a characteristically headstrong statement about the literary value of his plays, the collected Workes of 1616 includes a total of ten dedications to eminent persons and institutions.4 The value of the dedication is affirmed by Peter Blayney’s survey of the market for professional plays, which charts a steadily increasing incidence of dedications in printed playbooks between 1583 and 1642.5 There are good literary and commercial reasons, in other words, for Cupid’s Revenge to have included a dedication in 1615—and yet it does not. The epistle that follows the title page, which begins with a discussion of the customary dedication, is instead entitled ‘The Printer to the Reader’, an address that is more generically mixed than either its title or its first lines imply.
After its opening affirmation about the desert of some plays to be dedicated, the writer of the address continues that he has ‘made bolde my selfe, without his [the author’s] consent to dedicate this Play to the Iuditious in generall, of what degree soeuer’. In its movement between the generic expectations of the dedicatory epistle and the address to the reader, the Cupid’s Revenge preface exposes the slippery nature of the two texts and the fluid roles of book trade agents themselves. The agent responsible for writing this address ‘The Printer to the Reader’ is most likely to be the book’s publisher, Josias Harrison.6 If Harrison serves as a surrogate for the absent author, then the generic reader stands in for the traditional dedicatee, in a substitution which inverts the customary hierarchy of these imagined readers.7 The letter itself accounts for the lack of a formal dedication by its author’s removal from the publication venture (‘I am not acquainted with him’). It has been suggested that the chief agents of
playbook dedications in the period were authors themselves, and the author’s absence provides one explanation for the choice of a playfully hybrid dedication-turned-readerly epistle in Cupid’s Revenge.8
Yet at least one play published in 1615 features a hybrid epistle written by the author, and one that fuses the act of dedication with the custom of addressing the reader. Thomas
Heywood’s Four Prentises of London (1615, STC 13321) contains a preface signed by the playwright and addressed ‘To the honest and hie-spirited Prentises The Readers’, which forgoes the patron altogether: ‘To you [The Readers] I thought good to dedicate this Labour’
(sig. A2r). Heywood’s presentation of the play to an imaginary community of apprentice readers deliberately subverts convention, for such readers occupied a lower social rung than any would-be patron, and one beneath that of Heywood himself. Like the hybrid preface in Cupid’s Revenge, the Four Prentises epistle confounds social as well as bibliographical order.
The ‘custome’, if we recall Harrison’s words, is for authors (not stationers) ‘to Dedicate their Playes to worthy persons’ (not to apprentices, nor to readers ‘in generall’). To do otherwise is to upset the customary hierarchies—between types of reader and types of epistle—that obtained in the Elizabethan and Jacobean book trades.
For all their playfulness, hybrid prefaces deserve serious scrutiny. In their setting up of prefatory conventions only to topple them, they communicate a sophisticated understanding of contemporary book trade norms, of the respective roles of authors and stationers, and of the affordances and limitations of early modern paratexts. Although numerous prefaces speak revealingly about customary book trade practices, the claims of prefatory addresses are notorious for being formulaic, self-interested, and potentially misleading marketing ploys. Yet to dismiss them outright would not do; instead, the claims and assumptions made in
individual prefaces may be usefully weighed alongside external evidence that enables a more comprehensive assessment of the book marketplace and its prefatory norms.
Employing a bibliometric approach, this essay investigates the validity of claims about prefatory ‘custome’ that underpin texts like Harrison’s epistle to the readers, and considers the implications of its findings for the status of printed playbooks in the early modern book
trade. It uses data derived from the Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) to
interrogate the extent of the supposed custom of dedicating early modern plays, and compares the overall incidence of dedications to the related but distinct practice of addressing the general reader.9 It also compares the dedicatory and readerly addresses in printed plays from the professional theatres alongside their nonprofessional counterparts—a category that includes translations, closet drama, interludes, occasional plays, and university and Inns of Court drama—in order to determine whether either dramatic genre used these printed paratexts more frequently.10
The essay finds that dedications and addresses to readers emerged at different rates in the two dramatic genres and that the presence of the two paratexts follow strikingly different patterns in early English playbooks. Seemingly at odds with the rise of the reader as a figure in the seventeenth-century book trade is the revelation that in first-edition printed playbooks, dedications appear to be a much more important feature than prefaces to readers, both in terms of their overall presence and their accelerated rate of growth over time. This
comparative approach has the benefit of further sharpening our understanding of the often convoluted relationship between dedicatory and readerly epistles, and contextualizes their strategic use in the early modern book trade.
The relationships between printed drama and its dedicatees, stationers, authors, and readers are fundamental to recent debates about the trade in printed English plays from the professional theatres and their status as literature in their own time. Increasingly, the
trappings of the early modern printed book, known as its paratexts,11 have been implicated in the gradual rise of English literature and coronation of the print-published author. For the study of printed drama in particular, paratexts have become a means of charting the genre’s ascent as a socially respectable form of literature. As Paul J. Voss has put it, ‘printing conventions actually helped create, define, and transform the literary status of the early
modern printed play’.12 Beyond epistles, title pages, character lists, prologues and epilogues, commendatory verses, printed commonplace markers, and printed marginalia have all been studied as material evidence of the socio-cultural, historical, and bibliographical conditions in which English Renaissance drama was written, printed, and consumed.13
Dedications and addresses to the reader attract thorough scrutiny and discussion in countless pieces of scholarship on individual plays and authors, but rarely have they been subjected to a sustained comparative approach. Rather, the tendency has been either to study each in isolation or to conflate them under the headings of preliminaries, prefaces, or more generally still, paratexts. Proponents of the first approach would argue that each has its own rhetorical conventions particular to the addressee (patron or reader) and which warrant separate consideration,14 while those who study them in tandem might point out that the two types of preface often perform the same key functions of describing the work’s origins, advertising its content, and wishing for its favorable reception. It does not help matters that epistles to patrons and to readers are usually bibliographically proximate but remain separate, appearing on consecutive leaves in the early modern book but under different headings and distinguished by contrasting typefaces.15 Dedications and letters to readers are bibliographical neighbours, similar enough in function to be merged under the same heading, yet undeniably separate in their tone, register, and appearance on the printed page.
Dedicatory and readerly addresses have aptly been characterised as having ‘an interesting friction’, ‘tension’, and a relationship that is ‘at odds’.16 It is this teetering between the sameness and difference of the two forms that is pushed to its limit in the hybrid examples of Cupid’s Revenge and Four Prentises, each of which deliberately blurs the line between the address to the dedicatee and to the reader. As Hackel notes, the pair of prefatory conventions evolved alongside one another in the early modern book, and ‘ultimately, the letters defined two quite distinct relations to the book’.17 This differentiation developed gradually, but the
separateness of the two modes was well enough entrenched that Nathan Field’s comedy A Woman is a Weather-Cock (1612), could mock each of them separately and in turn.18 Demonstrating some of the satiric bite of the play itself, Field dedicates the book ‘To any Woman that hath beene no Weather-Cocke’ (A3r) before addressing the reader on the dedication’s verso, ‘Reader, the Sale-man sweares, youle take it very ill, if I say not
somewhat to you too’ (A3v). Field’s pair of letters and the hybrid prefaces highlight ways in which the two paratexts could exist in tension as well as in concert, and make a case for disentangling them so as to better understand the presence, properties, and importance of each as they appear in early printed plays.
The data and discussion that follow consider the prevalence of addresses to dedicatees and to readers in English playbooks printed until 1642. The essay’s aims are to compare the emergence of dedicatory and readerly prefaces in printed drama, to identify the contours of their mutually dependent relationship, and to situate each type of preface in relation to the changing landscape of printed English drama in the period.19 Some prefaces, like those in Field’s Weather-Cock and Heywood’s Four Prentises, take inspiration from the tone and dramatis personae of the plays they introduce, while others, such as Cupid’s Revenge, seem to gesture towards their elite theatrical origins. An author or stationer might also use the prefatory space to react to a play’s reception in performance—perhaps to launch a defense against an ‘angry’ or hostile audience, or to promote a work which has become ‘eagerly sought for’ after creating a sensation on stage.20 It is rarely possible, however, to identify a clear impetus behind the decision to include or exclude prefaces, and nigh impossible to judge the veracity of most prefatory claims. The bibliometric data gathered here places these enigmatic texts in context, with a thorough empirical study of the distribution of the more than three hundred prefaces surviving in English playbooks of the period.
Using data from DEEP, the essay considers all playbook titles printed during this period,
and studies professional plays separately from nonprofessional ones.21 To aid its quantitative and comparative methodology, the corpus includes only single-play playbooks, and excludes play collections.22 In order to avoid biasing the results towards more popular plays which received multiple editions, the corpus studied here includes first editions only, making it compatible for comparison with the methods and results of prior surveys by Tamara Atkin and Blayney.23 Prefaces were sometimes added or cancelled from one state to another;
therefore, where a play exists in multiple states in its first edition, each of these has been counted separately.
The essay also returns to the issue of literary ‘worth’ raised by the preface to Cupid’s Revenge, and asks whether those responsible for professional and nonprofessional plays favoured one type of address over another. Although the broad categories of ‘professional’
and ‘nonprofessional’ plays iron out a fair degree of difference between the various types of texts and performances that comprise each category, the primary distinction I wish to make in this essay is between a form of drama that was written for the commercial stage and
performed by professional actors, and another form that was either never performed at all, or performed in academic, ceremonial, or civic contexts.24 Unlike this second, more respectable form of drama, professional plays were seen as comparatively tainted by their commercial origins. The juxtaposition in this essay of the two different forms of early modern drama offers a valuable means of classifying a large body of plays in order to assess the claims to literary status that each genre made in its printed incarnations.
Examining the emergence of prefaces in the two genres side by side, it appears that plays conceived for the professional theatres followed nonprofessional plays in their practice of adding prefatory matter, but that professional plays would eventually surpass nonprofessional plays in their use of dedicatory and readerly addresses. With its ability to interrogate the idea of ‘worth’ promoted through the use of the two types of preface, the essay’s comparative
methodology advances and refines our understanding of the changing literary and cultural status of playbooks printed in England before the closing of the theatres.
The Rise of the Reader Revisited
We may begin by testing the Cupid’s Revenge statement, printed in 1615, about the custom of some writers ‘to Dedicate their Playes’ by looking at all first-edition plays published between 1610-1615. According to my figures, there were fifty-two first-edition playbooks published during this period. Of these, twenty-two contained a dedication (forty- two per cent, or more than four in every ten). In other words, the preface’s claim holds up to initial scrutiny: ‘some’ plays in the period do indeed contain dedications, though not a majority. To probe the question further, it is necessary to consider professional plays separately from their nonprofessional counterparts.
Critical consensus has it that professional plays were gradually seen as bona fide literary works after the publication of the Jonson and Shakespeare folios, and that they were more frequently adorned with authorizing paratexts as a result of this legitimisation. This orthodoxy is handily summarized in an influential essay by Blayney:
Only five of the playbooks first printed in 1583-1602 contained dedications (5 percent). In 1603-1622 the number rose to twenty-two (19 percent), and in 1623- 1642, after the Jonson and Shakespeare collections had helped to increase the respectability of printed plays, it soared to seventy-eight (58 percent).25 For Blayney, not only can dedications be taken as a proxy for literary respectability, but where professional plays are concerned, their acceptability as serious literature accelerated swiftly after 1623. The figures that emerge from my own investigation closely follow Blayney’s (Table 1), and contextualize them with reference to the nonprofessional drama.
Looking at first editions only, I find that dedications appear in an average of thirty-two per
cent of professional playbooks published during the period—gradually climbing from 1583- 1602 (three per cent), through 1603-1622 (eighteen per cent), and more than tripling that by 1623-1642 (sixty-three per cent). By the closing of the theatres in 1642, dedications would come to have a presence in nearly two-thirds of all first-edition professional playbooks, a rise which might well suggest the genre’s increased respectability.
How does the presence of dedications in professional plays compare to that of
nonprofessional drama, a genre which had long held literary credentials? For the period 1559- 1582, twenty-nine per cent of nonprofessional single-play playbooks contained dedications, a figure which mostly levels off during later periods.
Table 1:26
Dedications in first editions of single-play English playbooks
Professional Nonprofessional
Dedications Total Plays Dedications Total plays
1559-1582 0 (0%) 1 14 (29%) 48
1583-1602 3 (3%) 91 10 (53%) 19
1603-1622 25 (18%) 138 30 (50%) 60
1623-1642 91 (63%) 145 48 (55%) 88
Average 32% 47%
Compared to the thirty-two per cent overall presence of dedications in professional plays, they are included in nonprofessional playbooks forty-seven per cent of the time. Table 1 shows that the dedication emerged at different rates in the two dramatic genres. Since the publication of Jasper Heywood’s translations of Senecan tragedy (1559),
one in three nonprofessional plays in the period tended to contain a dedication.27 The adoption of the dedication was more gradual in professional plays, which had a market that was much less mature. By the end of the period under investigation, however, professional plays were more likely than nonprofessional plays to be dedicated.
This pattern, whereby professional plays suddenly emerge to outperform the
nonprofessional in terms of dedications, coincides with their greater prominence in the book trade from the late Elizabethan period onwards. Professional plays were generally more successful than nonprofessional plays (having more than double the reprint rate of
nonprofessional plays during the period 1576-1625),28 and also appear to have been a more popular investment (having a growing market share during the Elizabethan period).29 If we take the dedication as a proxy for literary worth, then these trends confirm Atkin’s claim that a printed drama that can be considered ‘literary’ predated the opening of the professional playhouses.30 But the stalled rate of dedicating nonprofessional plays cautions against the straightforward equivalence of preliminaries with literary status where these two broad categories are concerned. Importantly, the figures do suggest that nonprofessional plays provided the playhouse drama with a convenient bibliographical template for their entry into print.31
Comparatively little work has been done on the emergence of addresses to readers within the book trade. Being primarily concerned with the process by which stationers acquired and printed plays, Blayney’s brief discussion of dedications in relation to literary respectability does not consider epistles to readers. Another essay, by Cyndia Susan Clegg, takes up the task by surveying 248 plays located at the Huntington Library. Clegg’s study finds that very few plays from the sixteenth century—‘[o]nly 22 percent’—contain any front matter, and that letters to the reader became more frequent between 1600 and 1625, but were less popular in the 1630s, when plays were more likely to have ‘some form of dedication’ (epistle or commendatory verses) instead.32
My figures reveal a twenty per cent overall presence of letters to readers in professional playbooks, compared to twenty-two per cent in nonprofessional playbooks. Compared to those in Table 1, the two figures appear very similar—but as with the dedications, they
obscure a more complex, divergent pattern (Table 2).
Table 2:
Addresses to readers in first editions of single-play English playbooks
Professional Nonprofessional
Addresses to Readers
Total Plays Addresses to Readers
Total Plays
1559-1582 0 (0%) 1 13 (27%) 48
1583-1602 8 (9%) 91 7 (37%) 19
1603-1622 38 (28%) 138 10 (17%) 60
1623-1642 30 (21%) 145 17 (19%) 88
Average 20% 22%
Unlike dedications, letters to readers do not uniformly multiply with time in both genres. Far from being ‘a habit of most playwrights’,33 the address to the reader was a rarity in plays printed before 1642, appearing in only two out of every ten surviving plays.
In professional playbooks, they peaked in the period 1603-1622 (twenty-eight per cent) before declining again in 1623-1642 (twenty-one per cent); their trajectory in nonprofessional playbooks maps an even sharper downturn. The divergence between professional and
nonprofessional plays observed for dedications in Table 1 repeats itself in Table 2: by the end of the period, the percentage of professional plays to include addresses to readers is higher than that found in nonprofessional plays, which had been the earlier adopter of the form.
Together, Tables 1 and 2 reveal that for nonprofessional plays printed in any given period, the presence of dedications is always higher than that of addresses to readers, and often
overwhelmingly so. By contrast, the first plays from the professional theatres initially favoured addresses to readers over dedications, before enthusiastically reverting to
dedications (in sixty-three per cent of cases) after 1623. Dedications, associated with greater literary respectability, only emerged at significant levels in professional plays after 1602, when the market for that genre had matured. Such figures reveal that any likeness between the two forms of preface had its limits, for dedications and epistles to the reader were
governed by distinct patterns of use in printed plays.
The trends in Tables 1 and 2 raise several additional questions. First, why might
dedications in professional playbooks have increased so rapidly by 1642, while the level in less successful nonprofessional plays plateaued around fifty percent? There are several possibilities, one being a ‘First-Folio effect’ in which publishers assigned greater literary value to theatre plays following the appearance of that collection in 1623. Another possible explanation is that this rise in the percentage of dedicated playbooks is simply a reflection of the established norm within the wider trade, and is not particular to professional playbooks.
Williams, for instance, describes such a phenomenon: ‘from Caxton to 1640 there is a steady increase in book dedications—not merely in absolute numbers but, more importantly,
proportionately in relation to the increasing volume of publication’.34 Hackel, following an observation by Williams, suggests a further possibility: the increase in dedicated professional playbooks might be attributable to the rise in the number of titles published specifically by their authors, ‘which generally bore dedications by the end of James’s reign’.35 While the specific agents responsible for the publication of an early modern book and its parts are often difficult to ascertain, Williams’ hypothesis that authors had more agency in publishing
playbooks, including their dedications, fits neatly with the increasing visibility of authors in printed playbooks witnessed by the second decade of the seventeenth century.36
Second, why did the overall percentage of addresses to readers in printed playbooks of professional plays triple its previous rate between 1603-1622 (to twenty-eight per cent) and then fall by 1642 (to twenty-one per cent)? One possibility is that the newly respectable genre of printed theatre plays had a diminished need for authors and stationers to present a formal apologia in the form of prefatory addresses to readers at all.37 There is a marked shift in tone, for instance, in the only two epistles to readers which preface pre-Folio Shakespeare plays, the 1609 Troylus and Cressida and the 1622 Othello. In the interval between their respective
years of publication, as Brooks has noted, ‘the theatre has all but disappeared as the defining oppositional context for promoting the publication process’.38 While this transformation is certainly not applicable to all plays—for many continued to relate with pride the applause they received in performance39—it is nonetheless conceivable that the defensive stance which characterizes numerous letters to readers was less necessary after 1623, by which time
authors and stationers printing plays for a mature market were less compelled to introduce or justify their venture.40
There is a second viable explanation for the uptick in the period 1603-1622. Studying all the letters to readers written in this period as well as their writers, it becomes apparent that a vocal minority of individual authors who were prolific in printing addresses to the reader contributed disproportionately to this sudden rise. Between them, Thomas Heywood, John Marston, and Ben Jonson account for more than one-third of the addresses to readers published in professional playbooks during this chronological window.41 The decline after 1622 might thus be partly on account of the fact that two of these men, who had together written seven of the thirty-eight published prefaces in the earlier period, were virtually inactive as preface writers in the latter period.
For Jonson, the publication of the Workes in 1616 was a ‘fault-line’ in his habit of writing prefatory addresses to readers.42 Before 1616, seven of Jonson’s first-edition single-play playbooks (out of fifteen, or forty-seven per cent) contain addresses to the reader; after that, only 1631’s failed play The New Inn does (out of twelve playbooks, or eight per cent). Jonson was the first to append the heading ‘Ad Lectorem’ to a professionally acted play, his
neoclassical comic satire Cynthia’s Revels (1601, STC 14773), ahead of a Latin epigram from Martial which describes the desire for ‘a reader with a good nose’, or a discerning
readership.43 Although most addresses to readers prefacing Jonson’s plays are written in English prose, they share this epigram’s commitment to distinguishing good readers from
bad, and to lambasting poor literary judgement. Between 1616 and his death in 1637, Jonson published mostly court masques—a genre itself unlikely to address its readers formally—and he would never adorn a single one with an address to the reader. Though Jonson was still alive and publishing plays after 1622, then, his contribution to the overall number of plays (professional or otherwise) containing readerly addresses was greatly diminished. Like Jonson, Marston was innovative in strategically deploying printed prefaces to his plays, but where Jonson imagined his readership as the enlightened antithesis of a theatrical audience, Marston used his prefatory writing to cultivate a misanthropic persona who was begrudging of publication and, at best, casually indifferent to readers themselves.44 Having retired from playwriting around 1607, Marston is responsible for several important epistles from authors to readers first published during the 1603-1622 window, but for no new ones thereafter.
Not only was the longsuffering Heywood, by contrast, ‘perhaps the most prolific writer of his generation’,45 but he also composed more addresses to readers than any other playwright in the period. His penchant for the form is exemplified both in published prefaces to his own plays (which number at least a dozen distinct cases) and in his contribution of an epistle ‘To the Reader’ in praise of its author to Greene’s Tu Quoque (1614).46 Heywood’s prefatory output only grew with time, for he began attaching dedicatory epistles to his printed plays after 1630, having never previously done so, and ever in pursuit of legitimacy for his printed dramatic works.47 The addresses to readers written by Jonson, Marston, and Heywood vary in tone and substance, but they collectively show these authors as deeply engaged with the idea of themselves as authors in print.
In the period 1623-1642 (while Heywood is still writing prefaces), we nonetheless see an overall decrease in the proportion of professional plays to contain letters to readers (to twenty-one per cent). Notably, even in this period of decline, letters to readers appear at a slightly higher rate in professional plays compared to nonprofessional ones. This comparison
of their histories reveals that plays initially written for the professional stage were, by 1642, more prone to include dedications and letters to readers than those that had emerged from noncommercial contexts. The careers of Jonson, Marston, and Heywood tell part of the story of the rise and fall in the popularity of letters to readers between 1603-1642, but it is
impossible to determine for certain which larger forces drove either the increase in dedications and the weakening interest in letters to readers in printed plays. Whatever the reasons for the lag between the two types of preface, the data gathered here suggests that dedications were generally seen as a more effective way of promoting professional and nonprofessional plays alike. It is likely that the cultural and bibliographical superiority of the dedication ultimately made it a more attractive paratext to accompany drama published for the print marketplace, and this seems especially true for the professional plays published later in the period.
A recent study of nonprofessional plays by Atkin found that thirty per cent of first-edition plays printed between 1559-1576 ‘contain one or more so-called “literary preliminaries”’.48 To further develop this picture, it is worthwhile to compare professional and nonprofessional plays for whether they contained either type of prefatory address, or both.
Table 3:
Prefaces (dedications and/or addresses to readers) in first editions of single-play English playbooks
Professional Nonprofessional
Prefatory epistles Total Plays Prefatory epistles Total plays
1559-1582 0 (0%) 1 17 (35%) 48
1583-1602 10 (11%) 91 11 (58%) 19
1603-1622 56 (41%) 138 33 (55%) 60
1623-1642 103 (71%) 145 55 (63%) 88
Average 45% 54%
Overall, plays that contained some form of preface increased over time. As Tables 1 and 2 confirm, however, this trend is driven mostly by the rise of dedications. Again, the data
reveals that, by the end of the period, publishers were prefacing professional plays more frequently than nonprofessional plays. The generally plateauing levels of prefatory addresses in nonprofessional plays provide a striking contrast to their rapid multiplication in
professional plays from 1583.
Figures 1 and 2 present a different way of rendering the relationship between dedications and addresses to readers. If we classify plays according to whether they contain neither, either, or both, the growing importance of prefaces and the relative dominance of dedications in professional plays is readily apparent.
[Figure 1]
[Figure 2]
These figures also reveal that it was rare for both forms of preface to be printed in the same book: overall, this occurs only for fifteen per cent of nonprofessional plays and for seven per cent of professional plays (although in this case it was a trend on the rise).49 It is not possible, however, to establish a causal link between the rise of dedications and the concurrent decline of addresses to readers in professional playbooks during the later period; we cannot say from this data that publishers dedicated playbooks at the expense of addressing their readers.
Nonetheless, the data does show that dedications were more likely than letters to readers to stand alone, while letters to readers were printed without dedications less frequently,
particularly in nonprofessional playbooks. Of all professional playbooks that were dedicated, twenty-two per cent also had an address to the reader; conversely, playbooks that had a letter to the reader were dedicated at a higher rate (thirty-four per cent).50 This gulf is wider for nonprofessional plays, which saw only thirty-two per cent of all dedicated plays also
accompanied by letters to readers, while a massive seventy per cent of those that had a letter to the reader were also dedicated.51 That letters to readers were more frequently paired with dedications and less likely to be published on their own confirms that the hierarchy between
the two forms was perpetuated by book trade practices which favored dedications.
The data’s suggestion that dedications were more important in early modern printed plays than were letters to readers challenges prevailing theories about the decline of literary
patronage during the seventeenth century. Arthur Marotti, for instance, speaking of the patronage of poetry writes that, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ‘another set of social relations was emerging in which the patron was ultimately eclipsed by the
increasing sociocultural authority of authors as well as by the economic and interpretive importance of the reader’.52 A frequently cited article by Voss also describes a shift in the book trade, whereby the mass of anonymous readers replaced patrons and in which, ‘Instead of pleasing an Essex, an Elizabeth, or a Burghley, printed books needed to satisfy a growing number of readers in an already competitive market’.53 Writing of drama in particular, Bergeron interprets Ben Jonson’s preface to The New Inn (1631), which was titled ‘The Dedication, To the Reader’ in a similar vein: ‘No longer seeking the patronage of Pembroke, the universities, Esmé Stuart, or Mary Wroth, Jonson turns self consciously to the reader, who in the emerging market economy of publishing has become by now well established as a patron’.54
The figures presented here, however, contradict the critical commonplace about the decline of patronage as a powerful socio-cultural force in the book trade by the middle of the seventeenth century in England. At the same time, the presence of a dedication in an early printed book conveys less than it purports to about the contemporary circumstances of its publication and patronage. Many dedications express the mere wish for social or monetary preferment, rather than confirm the existence of an already existing patronage relationship.
The dedication that prefaces John Stephens’ Cynthia’s Revenge (1613) is addressed ‘To the worshipfull and his Constant friend, Mr Io. Dickinson’ and is signed ‘Your industrious friend, I.S.’. Despite being framed in these familiar terms, the dedication itself consists of a defence
of Stephens’ presumption: ‘if an Author will, without præ-acquaintance (as I haue done) respecting his duety and zeale, thrust forth a doubtfull worke into a wise and well-deseruing patronage’.55 Imperfect though they might be as a measure of early modern literary
patronage, the finding that dedications occupied an increasingly dominant role in printed plays compared to epistles to the readers troubles the precept that it was the figure of the reader who was of central importance to the shifting economy of the seventeenth-century book trade. At a minimum, these figures show that the convention of placing a dedication into a printed playbook only became stronger with time, and that dedications were a valuable supplement to such books, for they would grow to be included in over half of all the plays printed between Shakespeare’s First Folio and the closing of the theatres.
Dedications, once committed to the printing press, were available for perusal not only by their addressees, but by anyone browsing the wares of an early modern bookshop. While printed dedications to a patron might signal little more than the pursuit of patronage, they could also serve as emblems of the book’s status for any prospective reader, enabling their authors, in McCabe’s words, ‘to address the many through the one’.56 Like the epistle to the masses of anonymous readers, the dedication to the named patron ultimately conveys precious little about the reception of any individual book, either as social currency or as reading material. In the absence of information about a book’s life beyond the bookshop, the proportions of dedications and letters to readers in early printed books can only suggest, rather than definitively supply, answers about the relative importance of either patron or reader to the book trade and literary culture of early modern England. They can, however, provide a powerful insight into the strategies with which publishers and authors attempted to craft the reception of their books.
The Convention of Prefatory Custom
The bibliometric trends identified in this essay offer meaningful context for the numerous
claims about prefatory conventions found in early modern dramatic prefaces themselves.
Although the application of statistical methods to the study of the book trade is a tool of modern scholarship, the questions raised here—about the relative value of epistles to dedicatees and to readers, or the extent to which playbooks could materially imitate other books—were also those that occupied the agents who wrote early modern prefaces. The discussion that follows highlights particular prefaces in which authors and publishers weigh the merits of dedications against prefaces to readers, or of epistled books against those lacking such ornament. The prefaces may be tools of marketing, but on occasion they reveal the processes of thought and of reckoning that took place inside the premises of early modern stationers whose job it was to make and sell books. In these prefaces, we witness the writers of prefaces thinking in comparative terms about the playbook at hand and its place in the wider market. The reminder of this essay argues that the makers of early modern playbooks enlisted the self-reflexive space of the preface to carve out a place for their wares within the crowded print marketplace, and that they did so using the language of ‘custom’.
We have already established the validity of the claim in Cupid’s Revenge (1615) that
‘some’ plays in the period contain dedications. For its likely author, Harrison, this selectivity is key, for not all plays contain dedications, but only those deemed by their authors to be ‘the best Mineruaes of their braine’ [emphasis added]. Given that only eighteen per cent of first- edition professional plays between 1603-1622 contained dedications (and only forty-two per cent of all single-play playbooks during 1610-1615) Harrison’s emphasis on exclusivity is apposite. As a publisher, he knows that not all plays like his contain dedications—only ‘some’
and ‘the best’ do—and he deftly positions Cupid’s Revenge within that set.
Likewise, the earlier Claudius Tiberius Nero (1607, STC 24063) is acutely aware of its position in the minority of dedicated plays, for its dedication to Sir Arthur Mannering invokes the ‘Custome’ of not dedicating plays:
then might I iustlye feare reprehension for this my Dedication, hauing (to my knowledge) but a singular President heerein; and the reason wherefore so many Plaies haue formerly beene published without Inscriptions vnto particular Patrons (contrary to Custome in diuulging other Bookes) although perhaps I could nerely guesse yet because I would willingly offend none, I will now conceale’ (sig A3r).
The dedication, signed in one variant by publisher Francis Burton, first announces itself as a breach of custom.57 Where Harrison has his play join the ranks of other deservingly dedicated works, Burton more pointedly invokes the custom of printing plays without a dedication. But as with the preface in Cupid’s Revenge, Burton goes on to describe the play’s exceptional merit. Unlike the majority of earlier plays ‘published without Inscriptions’, presumably due to their inferior quality (so goes his argument), Claudius Tiberius Nero deserves one. This tactic is entirely consistent with other attempts by the publisher ‘to talk up the play as a piece of high art’, including the suggestion of Tacitean source matter, the Latin title-page motto, and Burton’s apparently baseless claim that the author ‘was an Academian’.58 Moreover, notes Burton, like the tragedy’s eponymous protagonist, this anonymously printed play is
‘fatherles’ and so in need of a protective ‘Guardian’ (sig A3r).59 Both Harrison and Burton use the dedicatory space to argue that their plays are as worthy of this distinguishing formal feature as are ‘other Bookes’. Burton’s supposition that there was only ‘a singular President [precedent]’ may have been a deliberate exaggeration or a best guess, but his strategy of singling out his playbook as (almost) uniquely suitable for a printed dedication is a rhetorically effective one.60
In the same year, Edward Sharpham published his comedy Cupid’s Whirligig (1607, STC 22380) with a dedication addressed to his ‘iudiciall friend, Maister Robert Hayman’. In imagery reminiscent of the title character’s shooting of ‘Darts’ of love (sig. B1r), the preface takes a self-conscious stance:
SIR, I must needs discharge two Epistles vpon you the one the Readers, that should be like haile shot that scatters and strikes a multitude, the other dedicatory, like a bullet, that aimes onely at your selfe: if either doe strike you, it shal bee at your choice, whether I shall hit you in the head, to let you vnderstand my meaning, or in the heart, to make you conceiue my loue: yet I must confesse, I had rather expresse my loue out of the flint, then my meaning in any part of the shot. I aime at you rather then the Reader […] (sig. A2r).
In its invocation of the epistle to the reader only to denounce it in favour of a dedication, Sharpham’s dedication is unusual; other subversions of the two paratexts (as in Cupid’s Revenge, or Four Prentises) tend to reject the letter to a named dedicatee in favour of a more democratising dedication addressed to readers en masse. But Sharpham takes the bold and explicit step to refuse penning a letter to the readers which, as he points out, would have also been directed ‘vpon you [Hayman]’. The pivot documented in his two opening sentences—
from the ‘need’ for writing a dedication and an epistle to the reader, to writing both for Hayman’s benefit, to the outright dismissal of ‘the Reader’ and the epistle so directed—is striking in its audacity. The implicit subordination of the reader to the patron is a hierarchy embedded in the order of dedicatory and readerly epistles in printed books, but rarely is it so brashly wielded by the writers of early modern prefaces.
As in the prefaces of Harrison and Burton, Sharpham’s flattery of Hayman relies upon the idea of subverting what is customary: he ‘needs’ to write two Epistles but would actually prefer to write only one, and dispense with the reader altogether. This rebuff of the reader is a risky strategy to be sure, but a calculated one. The dedication’s mention of the time ‘since our trauailes’ hints at a prior relationship between the two Devonshire men, and the boldness of Sharpham’s approach might suggest his confidence that the book would be received
favourably.61 At the heart of this prefatory strategy, once more, is the use of the space of the
preface to name a custom only to deviate from it, and in doing so, to signal the exceptionality of the work, the author, or the patron.
Weighed against the knowledge that in 1601-1606, only twenty per cent (or one in five) of all first-edition single-play playbooks of professional plays contained a letter to the
reader,62 the professed ‘need’ for two epistles in Sharpham’s 1607 play is an overstatement of custom which allows the author, by rejecting it, to trumpet his absolute devotion to Hayman.
In light of what we know about dedications and letters to readers in printed drama, his claim rings hollow. In fact, relative to other plays of its time, Sharpham’s is distinctive not for its disavowal of the letter to the reader, but for its inclusion of a dedication at all.
It remains possible, though, that Sharpham is taking his cue about a book’s need for dedicatory and readerly paratexts not from the relatively narrow market for printed drama, but from the book trade in general. Unlike Harrison and Burton, he does not specify that the custom he alludes to is particular to plays. Other printed playbooks are similarly vague on this point. In 1639, Henry Glapthorne’s tragedy Albertus Wallenstein included a dedication which asserts its supplication as ‘authorisd by custome’, since ‘Works of this nature have alwaies assumed this priuiledge, to aspire the noblest for their Protectors’.63 And yet, it is clear from the data that printed plays, especially professional ones, had not ‘alwaies assumed’
the status of being dedicated. What is less apparent is what Glapthorne means when he refers to ‘[w]orks of this nature’. Is he speaking specifically about plays from the professional theatres, or about dramatic publications as a whole? Or about the genre of tragedy itself? Or more broadly still, about imaginative works that we might today consider literature? The tactful imprecision of his statement about this ‘custome’ leaves open the possibility that Glapthorne is comparing his book not to other plays only, but to literary ‘works’ in general.
In 1622, the preface to the first quarto of Shakespeare’s Othello famously quipped that
‘To set forth a booke without an Epistle, were like to the old English prouerbe, a blew coat
without a badge’—that is, like a servant’s livery lacking his master’s heraldic device.64 This preface, titled ‘The Stationer to the Reader’ and signed by publisher Thomas Walkley,65 goes on to add that because the Author is dead, the work of writing the epistle has fallen to
Walkley himself. Recent scholarship has pointed out, however, that Walkley’s statement misrepresents the reality of printed playbooks in the early modern period. Lukas Erne
concludes that ‘Walkley’s address is an attempt to make his publication more attractive rather than an accurate description of contemporary publication conventions’.66 In the five years up to and including 1622, only twenty-four per cent of first-edition printed plays contained a verse or prose address to the reader—hardly an overwhelming case for Walkley to feel compelled to include one.67 But the publisher’s statement is more ambiguous than has perhaps been previously realized. When Walkley speaks of ‘an Epistle’ it is not clear that he means an epistle to the reader specifically, for he could be referring to either type of epistle, which might be furnished by the author or someone else involved in the book’s production.68 The preface’s reference to livery, usually donned by servants or players of the patron under whose protection they work, is particularly appropriate for dedicatory rhetoric in particular;
thus Drayton in the verse dedication to Ideas Mirrour (1594, STC 7203) describes his patron’s name as the ‘gracious livery’ of his poems (sig. [A]2r).69
The first surviving play that he published, Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King (1619, STC 1670) contains a dedication not from either author but from Walkley himself, expressing gratitude to the ‘Worthie Knight, Sir Henrie Nevill’ for having supplied the manuscript of the play for publication (sig. A2v). In 1622, Walkley also wrote an epistle ‘To the Reader’ for another play, Q2 Philaster (STC 1682), which advertised the new edition’s improvements on the first. In fact, of the ten surviving books (including but not limited to plays) that Walkley had published before Othello, only two lacked an epistle of some sort.70 Although certain authors could insist on the inclusion of prefatory matter in their books (as
was the case with Jonson, Marston, and Heywood), it was publishers who ultimately controlled their presence.71 In other words, Walkley’s claim in 1622 that a book needs an epistle might come nearer to indicating his own practice for promoting his printed books than has been previously acknowledged. It is equally likely, then, that when Walkley refers to ‘a book’, he means just that: a printed book, in general, which was more likely than a printed playbook to have some prefatory epistle to the patron or to the reader.72 Interpreted thus, Walkley’s stated reluctance to forgo custom by publishing Othello without an epistle appears informed by his own marketing strategies as a publisher and by his desire to associate the play with other books that boasted either form of epistle.
By implying that their printed plays belong under the broader umbrellas of the ‘book’ or
‘works’ in general—bibliographical entities which would normally contain front matter—the prefaces written by Glapthorne and Walkley could adroitly align themselves with these established and respectable literary categories. On the other hand, the earlier dedications of Harrison and Burton speak of themselves as belonging to ‘plays’ and emphasize their
defiance of the dominant prefatory conventions associated with the genre. Where these earlier playbooks justify their dedications on the basis that they belong to an exclusive minority of deserving plays, those that come later pass over their status as plays altogether, and defend their inclusion of dedications or epistles on the grounds that they are like other books or works in general. In this rhetorical shift from exclusivity to inclusivity—from plays with literary trappings being perceived as the exception, and later, as the norm—emerges further evidence for the transformation of the book trade between the start of the Elizabethan period and the closing of the theatres, and the role of printed drama within it. With the rise in the respectability of printed professional plays in the period, these playbooks came to take on all the hallmarks of literariness: not only the increasing volume of prefatory matter (charted in Figures 1 and 2), but also an increase in the number of plays published with authorial
attributions, the number promoted into collections, and the number adorned with printed sententiae that mark their erudition.73 As these printed plays gained the credibility to sit alongside poetry and prose texts as serious reading material, it is unsurprising that there should be an attendant change in the rhetorical strategies of the very paratexts that slowly betokened that shift. With the rise in the fortunes of professional plays in print, the writers of prefatory matter could justify their inclusion not by citing a deserving play as an exception, but by confidently invoking the rule. This evolution in the ways different plays might cite prefatory custom attests that the rhetoric of prefaces, however conventional, could be deployed in suggestively nuanced ways. It has been said of dedicatory rhetoric that ‘the apparently unconventional needs to be read in the context of convention’,74 but the nature of conventions themselves may only be identified and illuminated through comparative study.
To justify a dedication by citing convention or exception; to include or omit a preface to the reader; to name a play as a play or to group it with ‘other works’: these are choices exercised during the making and marketing of printed plays and sometimes preserved in their prefaces. The self-referential nature of such prefaces, however playful they might be,
suggests the extent to which their writers took them seriously as a tool for enticing customers and winning over skeptical readers. Their invocation of custom is one rhetorical formula amongst many, but its status as a convention does not automatically nullify its significance.
Rather, as this essay suggests, there are multiple meanings at play in the trope of prefatory custom, as well as nuances which may be fruitfully revisited in relation to emergent knowledge about the wider trade made possible by comparative study and resources like DEEP.75
The landmark publication of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, with its audacious sales pitch ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, may have done much for the cause of literary drama, but would appear to have contributed little to the popularity of printed letters
to readers more broadly. The data gathered here indicates that dedications rose significantly and epistles to readers became increasingly rare in printed English drama after 1623. While the growth in dedicated plays does not signal a concomitant flowering of patronage
relationships, it does reveal the remarkable staying power of the dedication as a feature within the architecture of the printed playbook, above and beyond its utility as an instrument of patronage.76 As for epistles to readers, their general scarcity in printed plays should not undermine their value to the study of the drama. On the contrary, epistles to readers in printed English plays are made all the more meaningful by their rarity, for there was nothing
inevitable about their continued publication. Whatever their own writers might claim, the prefaces that adorn these playbooks are not the mere products of deference to an all- prevailing custom, but the result of deliberate design.
1 STC 1667, sig. L2r. Notably, the preface appears in Q1 (1615) but not in Q2 (1630) or Q3 (1635).
2 Cupid’s Revenge was played by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Blackfriars around 1607-1608 and revived at the Whitefriars in 1611-1612 and 1612-1613. See Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge, 2005), 120-4.
3 Nonprofessional plays (by George Gascoigne and Samuel Daniel) were already published in collections entitled ‘Works’ during the late Elizabethan period. See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, 2003), 45.
4 The Jonson folio contains a dedication for each of the nine plays and one for the epigrams.
The list of plays and their respective dedicatees populates the leaf that follows the title page, sig. ¶3r.
5 Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997), 383-422 (395).
6 On the tendency of publishers to call themselves ‘printers’ in the sense that they caused the work to be printed, see Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, 391.
7 On the hierarchies inherent to early modern dedications and epistles to the reader, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), 114.
8 In the Introduction to his Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses (London, 1962), x, Franklin B. Williams observed that by 1625, ‘the custom [of dedicating a play] was general if a play was actually published by its author’.
9 Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser (eds), DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks (pubd online 2007) <http://deep.sas.upenn.edu> accessed 11 Feb 2019.
10 One avenue for further research would be to compare the presence of prefaces in printed plays from the private and public stages.
11 See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge, 1997), 1–2.
12 Paul J. Voss, ‘Printing Conventions and the Early Modern Play’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 15 (2002), 98-115 (98).
13 Sonia Massai, ‘Editorial Pledges in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts’, in Helen
Smith and Louise Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge, 2011), 91-106; Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge, 2002), 133-202; Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of
Professional Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 371-420; Tamara Atkin and Emma Smith, ‘The Form and Function of Character Lists in Plays Printed before the Closing of the Theatres’, RES, 65 (2014), 647-72; Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), 63-80.
14 One writer, for example, separates epistles to dedicatees and to readers according to their discursive registers: ‘The former is formal, figuring the work as an inadequate private gift, whereas the latter is colloquial, figuring the work as a good bargain on sale to the public’. See Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot, 2006), 63.
15 Hackel, Reading Material, 101.
16 Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, 1995), 293; Helen Smith, ‘Acknowledgements and Dedications’, in Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (eds), Book Parts (Oxford, 2019), 96-107 (98); Hackel, Reading Material, 104.
17 Hackel, Reading Material, 103.
18 STC 10854.
19 The corpus studied here includes all dedications (dedicatory inscriptions as well as prose and verse epistles) and all addresses to readers (prose and verses epistles). For both types of preface, prose epistles comprise the majority. In professional plays, prefaces take the form of verse in only five per cent of dedications and eleven per cent of addresses to readers. In nonprofessional plays, prefaces appear as verse more frequently: in twenty-seven per cent of dedications and twenty-three per cent of letters to readers. Latin prefaces, also included in the corpus, are very scarce in relation to their English counterparts, appearing in a total of
thirteen dedications (six per cent) and twelve addresses to readers (ten per cent).
20 John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess (1610; STC 11068), sig. ¶2v; Francis Beaumont, Philaster (1628; STC 1683), sig. A2v.
21 Where DEEP registers uncertainty about the performance status or context of a play (with a question mark [?]), it was excluded from the count.
22 By this token, borderline cases such as Christopher Marlowe’s 1 and 2 Tamburlaine (1590;
STC 17425), the first professional play to contain an address to the reader in print, are also excluded since DEEP records such cases as collections. Such serial play collections were a minority; see Tara L. Lyons, ‘Richard Jones, Tamburlaine the Great, and the Making (and Re-making) of a Serial Play Collection in the 1590s’, in Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn Knutson (eds), Christopher Marlowe: Theatrical Commerce and the Book Trade (Cambridge, 2018), 149-164 (150).
23 Tamara Atkin, Reading Drama in Tudor England (London, 2018), 72; Blayney,
‘Publication of Playbooks’, 395.
24 Publishers of professional and nonprofessional plays often overlapped; ‘almost two-thirds’
of those who published nonprofessional works between 1580 and 1640 also invested in professional plays. See Tara L. Lyons, ‘Publishers of English Drama, 1580-1640’, in Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Warren Hopper (eds), A New Companion to Renaissance Drama, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2017), 560-75 (563).
25 Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, 395.
26 Percentages in the tables and figures are rounded to the nearest whole number.
27 Jasper Heywood’s Troas (1559, STC 22227) contained a dedication to Elizabeth I as well as an epistle to the reader.
28 Zachary Lesser, ‘Playbooks’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford, 2011), 521-35 (532 and n.). As Lesser notes, however, the Caroline period saw nonprofessional plays being reprinted more than professional ones.
29 By contrast, nonprofessional plays saw their market share shrink during the same period, an indication that publishers’ interest in the latter genre may have been on the wane. See Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘What Is Print Popularity? A Map of the Elizabethan Book Trade’, in Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (eds), The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Burlington, 2013), 19-54 (37-9).
For the evolution of the market for printed professional drama, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005), 1-32 (7-8).
30 For objections to the use of preliminaries as a straightforward indication of literariness, however, see Atkin, Reading Drama, 69-71.
31 For a compelling argument about the influence of George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578), a nonprofessional play, on the publisher’s presentation of Christopher Marlowe’s 1 & 2 Tamburlaine (1590), see Lyons, ‘Richard Jones’, 149-164.
32 Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘Renaissance Play-Readers, Ordinary and Extraordinary’, in Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst, 2006), 23-38 (32-4). It is important to note that Clegg’s study selected for ‘the most important’ sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playwrights and their collaborators.
33 David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570-1640 (Aldershot, 2006), 177.
34 Williams, Index, p. x.
35 Hackel, Reading Material, 101, n. This theory remains hard to prove since the role of an author in a play’s publication is often unknown, and since an author’s name appended to a preface is no guarantee of him or her having written it.
36 Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist notes that anonymously published plays declined steadily between 1594 and the second decade of the seventeenth century, when ‘playbooks published without any indication of authorship had become exceedingly rare, totaling less than 10 percent’ (71).
37 Plays which present the preface as a rhetorical apologia include The Fleer (1607, STC 22384); The Dumb Knight (1608, STC 17398); Holland’s Leaguer (1632, STC 17443); and Love’s Mistress (1636, STC 13352).
38 Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 61.
39 For example, on the title pages of James Shirley, The Grateful Servant (1630, STC 22444);
Beaumont and Fletcher, The Scornful Lady (1630, STC 1688); Richard Brome, The Northern Lass (1632, B4878); William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust (1633, STC 21425); Thomas Heywood, A Maidenhead Well Lost (1634, STC 13357).
40 See Farmer and Lesser, ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, 8.
41 This figure represents fourteen out of thirty-eight playbooks (and including Heywood’s preface to Greene’s Tu Quoque), or thirty-seven per cent. On the prefatory strategies of these authors, see Benedict Scott Robinson, ‘Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections’, SEL 42 (2002), 361-89; Bergeron, Textual Patronage, 93-7.
