Scene Changes

Chapter 5 studies the impact of moveable scenes on playbook typography. Play quartos published after 1660 began to use pared-down “place-markers” that simply named the place for readers to “mark” (that is, acknowledge) where the action was situated. Focusing on a series of debates between Dryden and fellow playwrights, this chapter shows how Dryden’s preference for place-markers, which effectively untethered the act of reading from the material contingencies of theatrical performance, eventually won out over more elaborate accounts of scenery. The combination of a single generic place-marker at the beginning of the book and specific place-markers throughout became so prevalent in printed plays that Rowe used them in Shakespeare’s Works (1709) to harness the frequent geographical shifts in plays like Antony and Cleopatra. The strategy solved part of the problem of Shakespeare’s so-called flagrant disregard for dramatic decorum and helped to reframe his reputation as the English heir to a classical tradition.

Coda

The coda returns to the idea that early modern playbook typography evinces the creativity of those involved in designing and making these books. Each chapter of the book shows how printers, publishers, and playwrights repurposed typographic arrangements from more familiar print genres to ease readers into the act of play-reading. The coda reads Edward Capell’s highly innovative mid-eighteenth-century edition of Shakespeare as a logical extreme. Capell found all sorts of neat typographic solutions to the problem of mediating the theatricality of Shakespeare’s plays. However, the solutions were so unfamiliar to readers that the edition ultimately failed to make much of an impact. Although Capell’s typographic experiments marked the first comprehensive attempt to codify the theatricality of Shakespeare’s plays in print, English play-readers had already been heeding well-considered, if inconsistent, typographic arrangements engineered to help them intuit aspects of ostensibly unprintable theatricality for almost two centuries.

Dramatic Pilcrows

Chapter 1 explains how the printers of the earliest playbooks published in England made the most basic element of dramatic form—dialogue—legible to readers. Fulgens and Lucres (1512–16?), Hycke Scorner (1515?), and Everyman (1518?) were all printed with pilcrows (¶) at the start of every new speech. Derived from scribal capitula (), which were used in liturgical and scholastic manuscripts to divide the text into manageable and logical units of reading, pilcrows helped nascent play-readers already familiar with the glyph’s function in other books access to the plays’ back-and-forth of spirited verbal exchange more easily. This arrangement became conventional in the books of interludes and morality plays, but eventually fell away as readers grew more accustomed to reading plays. Readerly competency coupled with problems of type supply led to the indent displacing the pilcrow as the typographic means of articulating the play’s dialogic form.

Plot Illustrated

Chapter 4 argues that techniques of illustrating early modern plays were designed to correspond to the effects those same plays were said to have had in performance. It studies the careful composition of custom-made woodcuts in a trio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher quartos: The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), A King and No King (1619), and Philaster (1620). These plays cemented Beaumont and Fletcher’s widely acknowledged reputation for creating a pleasurable sense of not-knowing for playgoers through clever plotting. The title-page images present seemingly contradictory but equally viable forecasts of the plays’ endings and enhance readerly uncertainty through visual paradox. By contrast, the engravings made for the 1711 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Works depicted single, isolated moments. In step with the resurgence of neoclassical principles of dramatic decorum in the late seventeenth century, these engravings attempted to unify readers’ attention where the earlier woodcuts had sought to confuse it to pleasing effect.

Making a Scene

Chapter 3 shows how typography responded to the increasing formal complexity of vernacular plays. The central case study is the printer-publisher Richard Jones’s octavo of Tamburlaine the Great (1590). Jones used numbered scene headings to carve the plays into discrete units of action and tease out their episodic dramaturgy for readers. In particular, he removed divisions where characters are described as clearing the stage to “enter to the battle.” The absence of divisions at these moments in a playbook with an unusually full complement of divisions anticipated the treatment of numbered scene divisions in other plays that, like Tamburlaine, were styled as “histories.” The kinesis and noise of battle sequences invited the continuity of audience focus, not rupture. This typographic mediation of the iterative, “rotating door” strategy of staging battle scenes with limited resources exposes “the scene” as a shape-shifting entity of dramatic form.

Jonson’s Breaches and the Typography of Action

Chapter 2 focuses on typography that accounted for the theatrical impact of the actor’s body, locating the earliest of such experiments in the quartos of Ben Jonson’s comical satires. Instead of printing descriptions of this extra-lexical business in detail, the stationers who published Every Man Out (1600), Cynthia’s Revels (1601), and Poëtaster (1602) used parenthetical notes and, later, dashes to account for smoking, hiccupping, vomiting, and other behaviors that threatened eloquence. Jonson’s experiments with these “breaches,” as he termed them, show that the idea of the body in its varying states of insobriety was indispensable to his satire. The dash quickly became typographic shorthand for a whole range of physical activity. By the time Nicholas Rowe used dashes following deictics in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear (1709), it had come to mediate the technique of “pointing”: the use of non-verbal means to consolidate audience perceptions of action and circumstance.

Introduction

The introduction describes the original survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playbook typography on which the book’s arguments are based. It makes a case for typography as worthy of study by showing that printed plays were considered viable and profitable reading matter in their own time. It engages with recent field-shaping scholarship in book history and theatre studies to explain why playbook typography has not yet been taken up on its own terms. The introduction contends that early modern playbook typography yields a new way of understanding the surviving corpus of early modern playbooks: as reading texts that permitted readerly access to contemporary forms of theatricality rather than foreclosing the chance to experience their effects. In other words, the idiosyncrasies of early modern playbook mise-en-page offer a wealth of untapped evidence about the active—and necessary—creativity involved in the tricky business of making plays into books and books into plays.