TY - JOUR
AU - Andrews, Meghan C
AB - In early 1600, William Holme would have seemed unlikely to be the stationer who would soon transform the publication of early modern drama. Over the course of a ten-year career, through 1599, he had sold just thirteen titles, none of which he reprinted and none of which was a play. But that would soon change. On April 8, 1600, Holme entered Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour in the Stationers’ Register, and published the first edition shortly thereafter.1 This playbook changed the way in which the book trade printed and sold early modern drama, and not only because the claim on its title page that it contained “more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted” was unprecedented among the era’s professional vernacular playbooks.2Every Man Out also inaugurated the practice of publishing professional vernacular drama with printed commonplace markers, the full-line font change or marginal commas (sometimes inverted) used to signal aphoristic, extractable wisdom. Prior to 1600, commonplace markers had appeared in translations of classical and French drama and in vernacular nonprofessional plays and nondramatic literature. But no professional vernacular playbook featured printed commonplace markers until Every Man Out’s first quarto. It was thus Holme who published what was, in the spring of 1600, one of early modern London’s most innovative playbooks. Every Man Out’s transformative impact on London’s print marketplace was immediately apparent. It would go through two more editions before the year was out, and both the second and third editions, despite being set from new type, reprinted all of the first edition’s commonplace markers. Moreover, later in 1600 the anonymous The Wisdom of Doctor Doddypoll and Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament were also printed with commonplaces. And the numbers would only go up from there. From 1600 to 1610, forty-one first editions of professional vernacular drama were published with commonplace markers; the inclusion of second-plus (that is, second and/or subsequent) editions brings the count to over fifty.3 What happened to cause publishers of vernacular playbooks to adopt, with increasing frequency, the convention of printing these texts with commonplace markers? What happened, I argue, was the Poets’ War. Also known as the War of the Theaters or the Poetomachia (to use Thomas Dekker’s term), the Poets’ War was a turn-of-the-century theatrical “game of satirical one-upmanship” during which Shakespeare, Jonson, John Marston, and Dekker wrote a dialogic series of satirical, metacritical plays debating the nature and function of comedy as well as the cultural role of the poet-dramatist and the theater.4 There is general critical agreement that plays of the Poets’ War include Jonson’s Every Man Out (1599), Cynthia’s Revels (1600), and Poetaster (1601); Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), What You Will (1601), and likely Histriomastix (circa 1599); Dekker’s Satiromastix (1601); and Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599–1600), Hamlet (1600–1601), Twelfth Night (1601–1602), and Troilus and Cressida (1601–1602). In this essay I will also include Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour (1598) as a Poets’ War play because of how it became retroactively associated with the Poets’ War through Every Man Out and Satiromastix.5 This essay’s first section demonstrates that Poets’ War plays and authors dominated the first wave of commonplaced professional playbooks published from 1600 to 1604, thus playing a crucial role in establishing the convention. The second and third sections demonstrate that, beyond commonplace markers, Poets’ War playbooks also included an unprecedented number of other literary textual design features—many of which similarly became more common after the Poets’ War—and that the stationers involved in the publication of Poets’ War drama, many of whom showed scant interest in drama otherwise, were persuaded to publish these plays because of the plays’ involvement in the Poets’ War and the claims it made for the cultural authority of professional drama. The Poets’ War, I therefore contend, was a key but heretofore unrecognized turning point for early modern English drama in print. In the essay’s fourth and fifth sections, I argue that the influence of the Poets’ War on the book trade derived from its connection with the Inns of Court, important centers for vernacular literary activity. Commonplacing was a practice connected to the Inns at the turn of the century, and so commonplacing Poets’ War drama served to make the playbooks appealing commodities for Inns men, the primary customer base for many of the stationers involved. By focusing on how and why the practice of commonplacing professional drama took hold in 1600, this essay offers the most complete and nuanced account to date of the commonplacing of professional drama and of drama’s rise to a more culturally elevated, literary status. It builds on Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass’s “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” which argues that professional drama became a commonplaceable genre in 1600 when excerpts from commercial plays were included in two vernacular-only commonplace editions associated with John Bodenham’s literary circle.6 My analysis examines the pivotal first five years in which commonplaced playbooks were published in order to show how playbooks became thinkable as commonplaceable commodities and how drama could be not just read but also sold as elevated literature. These are distinct changes, and the need to study both is made more pressing by the fact that, with the exception of Nicholas Ling, none of the stationers who published the first wave of commonplaced playbooks was involved in the Bodenham circle’s project. To write a full history of dramatic commonplacing, we need to understand the broad range of cultural factors to which the publishers of the first wave of commonplaced playbooks were responding. One of those factors was the professional theater itself, which in 1600 was beginning its well-chronicled shift from an actor’s to an author’s theater, impelled by the reopening of the children’s companies and the rise to prominence of a new generation of ambitious writers penning more self-consciously literary drama.7 When stationers printed Poets’ War playbooks with literary design features, they were responding to and attempting to amplify claims made by the plays for their own literary merit. Commonplace markers and other literary design features, that is, were symptomatic of literary status as much as they were constitutive of it: for a text to be worthy of being printed with commonplaces and other literary markings, it had to have already been read as possessing literary authority. Not only does this suggest that stationers were highly attuned to London’s theatrical world and made decisions based in part on what occurred in the theaters, but it also indicates that any history of drama’s rise to literary status in print cannot limit its focus to the print marketplace itself. Recent scholarship on London’s book trade has been enormously generative in analyzing stationers’ canons and how stationers and authors made design and publication choices to facilitate certain kinds of reading and to satisfy certain readerships.8 But it is important to remember, as Douglas Bruster and Jonathan Lamb have argued, that the market in books was also a market in texts; overlaid onto the material book marketplace was a textual/literary marketplace, in which genres, forms, and modes of writing jostled for position as much as the books containing these texts jostled for position in London’s bookstalls.9 The trade in books was responsive to market forces in this textual marketplace, and in order to understand this responsiveness, it is necessary to be attuned to the larger cultural factors to which stationers themselves were attuned and to examine the ways in which the book trade’s interplay with other cultural institutions—including, but not limited to, the theater—influenced the publication of early modern drama. The advent of commonplacing in printed vernacular commercial drama thus offers a case study illustrating how individual agents’ individual decisions—motivated by individual economic interests—could work in the aggregate to change the norms of a profession. It provides, therefore, an opportunity to analyze the multifaceted and complex nature of institutional change. I. Print and Theater: First Wave Before 1600 no commercial playbook was printed with commonplace markers, but from 1600 to 1604 fourteen commercial plays were published (in nineteen total editions) with printed commonplace markers. These fourteen titles constitute what I will refer to throughout the essay as the “first wave” of commonplaced commercial drama.10 As can be seen below, while Poets’ War plays made up just 18 percent of all playbooks published in 1600 to 1604, they constituted a disproportionately high percentage of the first wave of commonplaced playbooks: three of the first six, five of the first eleven, and six of the first thirteen—and an additional play can be added to each total if one counts Every Man In. The first wave of commonplaced playbooks is as follows, with Poets’ War titles bolded and initial Stationers’ Register dates included in parentheses (with the year the same as that of publication unless otherwise noted):  1600: Every Man Out of His Humour (April 8), The Wisdom of Doctor Doddypoll (October 7), Summer’s Last Will and Testament (October 28)  1601: Every Man In His Humour (stayed August 4, 1600; entered August 14, 1600), Jack Drum’s Entertainment (September 8, 1600), Cynthia’s Revels (May 23)  1602: The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality (no entry), Antonio and Mellida (October 24, 1601), Antonio’s Revenge (October 24, 1601), Satiromastix (November 11, 1601), Poetaster (December 21, 1601), Blurt, Master Constable (June 7)    1603: Hamlet (July 26, 1602)    1604: The Malcontent (July 5) Further, Poets’ War authors were represented even more disproportionately in this initial wave. Of the fourteen professional first editions commonplaced from 1600 to 1604, eleven were by authors involved in the Poets’ War; when counted by individual editions, the number increases to sixteen of nineteen playbooks.11 Even to 1606, Poets’ War authors continued their dominance, providing sixteen of twenty-three first-edition commonplaced titles. Given that Jonson and Marston were probably the two early modern playwrights most involved with and invested in the printing of their plays, this is not entirely surprising. At the same time, the predominance of Poets’ War playbooks and authors in the first wave of commonplaced professional drama indicates that the Poets’ War played a significant role in making the practice of dramatic commonplacing widespread. A strong link between the Poets’ War and commonplacing is further suggested by two pieces of data not immediately visible on the list above. First and crucially, every single play of the Poets’ War that was printed individually was commonplaced in the first edition, including Marston’s What You Will (published 1607) and Histriomastix (published 1610) and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (published 1609), not among the first wave. This might not be surprising where Jonson and Marston are concerned, but it is highly unusual for Shakespeare and Dekker. In fact, the only two Shakespeare first-edition playbooks to be commonplaced before the First Folio were Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida—which were also the only Poets’ War plays by Shakespeare to be published in single editions. Similarly, if we assume that Blurt, Master Constable was Dekker’s, it and Satiromastix stand as the only plays by Dekker to be commonplaced in the first edition. Second, the only adult public theater plays to be commonplaced in the first wave belonged to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—the only adult company involved in the Poets’ War—and only the company’s Poets’ War plays were commonplaced. The implications of these data are twofold. First, the predominance of Poets’ War playbooks in the first wave of commonplaced commercial plays indicates that the Poets’ War was instrumental in helping to initiate and regularize the practice of printing commonplaced professional drama. Second, if the printing of professional drama with commonplace markers “assert[ed] the worth of the professional stage … [and] the professional theater’s capacity to produce literature,” the Poets’ War was in the vanguard of this cultural shift.12 Indeed, as an indication of pre-reading and pre-digested significance, the commonplace markers in these printed plays seem to represent their stationers’ view of the Poets’ War as a particularly literary phenomenon. II. Title Pages, Character Lists, and Other Paratexts If it is true that stationers saw the Poets’ War as a literary phenomenon, we should expect to find evidence of this in other textual design features of the playbooks, as well as evidence that they perceived the Poets’ War as a coherent intertheatrical dialogue that was doing important literary-cultural work. In this and the third section of the essay I support these suggestions by analyzing the design and paratextual features of Poets’ War plays as well as some of the other print productions of Poets’ War stationers. The first part of a playbook an early modern book buyer would have seen was its title page, and it is notable that the title pages of all Poets’ War playbooks contain design elements that scholars have come to see as markers of literary status. With the exception of Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment (whose publisher, Richard Olive, did not include an authorial ascription for any play he published), every Poets’ War playbook was printed with an authorial attribution on its title page.13 Theater attributions tell a similar story. Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser have argued that in the first decade of the seventeenth century, title page performance attributions to specific theaters rose in prominence to mark the socially elevated nature of children’s company drama; it is thus not surprising that every Poets’ War play acted by a children’s company contains a theater attribution, but that none of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Poets’ War plays does.14 At the same time, however, the Lord Chamberlain’s Poets’ War playbooks—Every Man Out and the first two quartos of Hamlet—possess unique and unprecedented title page material that makes implicitly literary claims for their texts (see figures 1–3). Q1 Hamlet, for example, is “the only printed professional play in the entire pre-Restoration period that claims on its title page to have been performed at any university—much less at both Cambridge and Oxford.”15 On the other hand, not only does Every Man Out’s title page claim that the playbook “Contain[s] more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted,” it also notes that the play appears “As It Was First Composed by the Author B. I.” and contains “the seuerall Character of euery Person,” all of which serve to mark it as a playbook made for reading. Somewhat similarly and unusually for a Shakespeare playbook, Q2 Hamlet does not mention the company that performed it or any particular performance location. Instead, the title page simply declares that the text has been “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie,” an unusual claim for the quality, length, and accuracy of the text.16 Along the same lines, Dekker’s Satiromastix is the first professional playbook, and one of just a handful in the period, to include a list of errata—a paratext that bespeaks a high level of concern for textual accuracy. Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Title page of Q1 Every Man Out of His Humour (London, 1600), STC (2nd ed.) 14767. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 31191. Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Title page of Q1 Hamlet (London, 1603), STC (2nd ed.) 22275. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 69304. Figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Title page of Q2 Hamlet (London, 1604), STC (2nd ed.) 22276. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image File Name: 3001. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The Poets’ War also seems to have popularized the use of Latin mottoes on the title pages of professional vernacular drama. A traditionally literary feature associated in particular with noncommercial drama, Latin mottoes signaled classical authority and, like commonplace markers, were used to “develop literary authority” for the commercial playbooks on which they appeared.17 In the 1590s, Latin mottoes had appeared on the title pages of only four commercial playbooks, all by University Wits. But aside from Jack Drum and Hamlet, all first-wave Poets’ War playbooks had Latin mottoes on their title pages, which may have helped lead to the printing between 1605 and 1610 of six more commercial playbooks with Latin mottoes. And even if we largely attribute the emergence of this phenomenon in 1600 to 1604 to Jonson, it is worth noting that Satiromastix was the first and one of the few Dekker plays to feature a Latin motto. Here the contrast with non-Poets’ War first-wave commonplaced playbooks is also striking, as the only such playbook to be printed with a Latin motto was Blurt, Master Constable—likely because of Dekker’s authorship and the recent publication of Satiromastix. Beyond title pages, other paratexts in first-wave Poets’ War playbooks both signaled literary status and were regularized by these playbooks. Perhaps the most notable is the character list—a feature, as Emma Smith notes, “designed explicitly for readers,” and one that can be seen “as a kind of imperfect synecdoche for the development of literary printed drama” in the period.18 While only four commercial plays printed between 1590 and 1599 contain a character list, such lists appear in every Poets’ War play published in the first wave of commonplaced drama except for Hamlet. Like commonplaces, they also seem to have been regularized by the Poets’ War, as between 1605 and 1610 seventeen first-edition plays (ten of which were also commonplaced) were published with character lists. Further, most Poets’ War character lists were printed in a manner that, as Smith and Tamara Atkin have argued, represented the playbooks as elite goods, either because they were printed on a single leaf (Every Man Out, Cynthia’s Revels, Every Man In, Jack Drum), were printed with decorative borders of some kind (Cynthia’s Revels, Every Man In), or both.19 Other paratextual features, such as dedications and addresses to readers, were likewise unusual before the Poets’ War and common thereafter. From 1590 to 1599, only three professional plays were published with addresses to readers, but this kind of paratext appears in about half of the first wave of Poets’ War playbooks (as opposed to only one commonplaced non-Poets’ War play), and then in thirteen commercial playbooks printed between 1605 and 1610. And while with one exception dedications—“a visible marker of drama’s emergent status as a respectable form of literary production,” in the words of Devani Singh—did not appear in any professional playbook before Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600), three occur in first-wave commonplaced playbooks (Cynthia’s Revels, Antonio and Mellida, and The Malcontent), and nine in plays published between 1605 and 1610.20 In the aggregate, then, we can see that Poets’ War drama was printed with unusually literary textual design features, suggesting that the stationers responsible for these playbooks saw them as particularly literary commodities. III. Publishing the Poets’ War Why did stationers who published Poets’ War plays decide to publish these playbooks at all, let alone with such literary textual design features? Most of them had demonstrated little prior interest in publishing drama, though they did have an interest in publishing vernacular literature. In this section I suggest that it was the latter interest that led them to publish Poets’ War drama, and that they saw drama on equal footing with their other vernacular literary titles. I also suggest that by mid-1601 the publishers of Poets’ War drama were aware of the Poets’ War as such, and were motivated to publish these playbooks because of it.21 I should note here that with one exception, this section focuses on the publishers rather than the printers of Poets’ War drama because they were far likelier to have made the decision to publish the drama with the design features chronicled in the previous section. As Sonia Massai has shown, “compositors and printing house correctors focused on spelling, pointing (or punctuation) and typographical inaccuracies, and not on inconsistencies in speech prefixes, stage directions and dialogue,” and so were unlikely to have introduced a feature such as commonplace markers, let alone a paratext such as a character list.22 I begin with a discussion of two stationers who published Poets’ War plays before the Poets’ War could have been understood as such: Holme, the publisher of Q1 and Q2 Every Man Out (1600), and Olive, the publisher of Jack Drum (1601) as well as the commonplaced Doctor Doddypoll (1600). When Holme registered Every Man Out in April 1600 and Olive Jack Drum in September of that year, it was not yet clear that the Poets’ War would become a multiplay conflict. Jack Drum (which was likely just on the boards when Holme registered Every Man Out) parodies Jonson, but it was Cynthia’s Revels that catalyzed the Poets’ War into a larger conflict, and as that play was among the first plays acted by the Children of the Chapel when they resumed playing at the Blackfriars in September 1600, it is unlikely that when Olive registered Jack Drum in that month he had a clear sense of an ongoing theatrical feud. Instead, Holme and Olive were likely led to publish their commonplaced playbooks by their joint collaboration with Thomas Creede on Parismenos in 1599 and their larger interest in vernacular literature, as both men’s small canons included a high percentage of vernacular literary works (four of the seven titles Olive sold immediately before he began publishing drama were works of vernacular literature, including the 1596 reprint of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, while nine of Holme’s thirteen titles predating Every Man Out were literary works). Creede’s “almost singular prominence as a printer, publisher, and enterer of plays in the 1590s can hardly be overstated,” and in 1598 and 1599 alone he published five playbooks and printed three more.23 Olive in particular would have been attuned to Creede’s activity in the late 1590s—Creede printed nine of the eleven titles Olive sold from 1596 to 1601—and in 1599 it could not have been lost on either Holme or Olive that Creede was doing well in the publishing of drama. That success may well have led both to publish playbooks for the first time, offering them as vernacular literary works like their other titles.24 In contrast, when Walter Burre entered Jonson’s Every Man In on August 14, 1600, he was likely spurred by the print success of Every Man Out, but by the time he registered Cynthia’s Revels in May 1601, the Poets’ War had sharpened into a defined conflict. Not only had Jonson’s play, which obviously attacked Marston and Dekker, been staged, but Marston himself was now firing back with What You Will, and Shakespeare was adding his own caustic commentary with Hamlet. It is likely that the now-apparent conflict led Burre not only to acquire the rights to Cynthia’s Revels but also to publish it and Every Man In as something of a duology, for their title pages are extremely similar, down to the shared Latin motto (see figures 4 and 5). Recent scholarship has identified Burre as a publisher interested in cultivating an oeuvre containing drama that appealed self-consciously to a higher-class readership—readers who saw themselves as wittier and more sophisticated than ordinary playgoers—which suggests that he saw Jonson’s plays as the kind of sophisticated reading matter he wanted to offer, a view that may be reflected in these plays’ title pages.25 While not as classical-looking as the later title pages to Volpone (printed 1607) or Catiline (printed 1611), there is nevertheless something of the “uncluttered simplicity that was increasingly associated with the authority of classical antiquity” about the title pages of Burre’s Poets’ War plays; rules separate parts of the title page, whose type continuously shrinks as it moves from play title to theatrical information to Jonson’s name (centered on both title pages), and whose Latin motto and imprint balance the theatrical information and title.26 Figure 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Title page of Every Man In His Humour (London, 1601), STC (2nd ed.) 14766. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image File Name: 1376. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Figure 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Title page of Cynthia’s Revels (London, 1601), STC (2nd ed.) 14773. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 60512. In the autumn and winter of 1601, the Poets’ War was at a fever pitch. In Poetaster, Marston’s personation was forced to vomit up his words, and in Satiromastix Jonson’s personation was untrussed, baited like a bear, and crowned with stinging nettles. Further, by the end of 1601, Shakespeare would produce his sharpest and most obvious rebuke of Jonson in Twelfth Night’s Malvolio, and in 1602 was probably parodying him at the Globe in the form of Troilus’s Ajax. Amid all this satirical activity, stationers rushed to enter not just Satiromastix (November 11, 1601) and Poetaster (December 21, 1601), but also Marston’s Antonio duology (October 24, 1601); all four plays were published in 1602. The principal publisher of commonplaced playbooks in that year was Matthew Lownes, who published Marston’s Antonio plays with Thomas Fisher and then Poetaster on his own, providing half of the year’s commonplaced playbooks. Fisher had an extremely brief career, for the only other titles he published were Nicholas Breton’s Pasquil’s Mistress and the first edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both in 1600; given his previous publication of Dream, it may have been the case that Fisher approached Lownes about the Antonio plays before Lownes alone decided to publish Poetaster. Not much can be gleaned from Fisher’s publishing history beyond an interest in drama, but the same cannot be said for Lownes. In a career that spanned thirty years, from 1595 to 1625, the Antonio plays and Poetaster were the only commercial playbooks that he published. However, seven of Lownes’s eleven pre-1602 publications were nondramatic works of literature, and he would go on to publish multiple editions of Sidney’s and Spenser’s works throughout the first decades of the seventeenth century.27 Lownes, like his former master Nicholas Ling, had a strong interest in the nascent English canon, and it seems logical to infer that he perceived the few plays he published as on par with his other works of important vernacular literature.28 The printer Edward Allde also showed a taste for elevated drama when he acted as a publisher, as the majority of the plays he published were court entertainments and civic pageants.29 This is key because while Allde printed Dekker’s Satiromastix and Blurt, Master Constable in 1602, he seems also to have acted in some ways as a publisher for these titles. Most straightforwardly, Allde entered Blurt in the Stationers’ Register on June 7, 1602 and proceeded to print it for Henry Rockytt, likely allowing Rockytt to publish the title in exchange for the guaranteed business of printing it; however, a further profit-sharing agreement may well have been in place given that Rockytt was sharing Allde’s shop near St. Mildred’s Church in the Poultry at this time.30 Notable too is that Rockytt had published no plays before Blurt, while Allde was already established as a prolific printer of drama, making it likely that he brought Blurt to Rockytt’s attention. Allde and Rockytt would also print and publish Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton’s Patient Grissil in 1603 despite its being entered to Rockytt’s ex-master Cuthbert Burby in 1600.31 Somewhat similarly, Allde printed Satiromastix for his frequent collaborator Edward White in 1602 despite the play’s being entered by John Barnes in November 1601. White had been a regular publisher of drama in the 1590s, but by 1602 he had largely stopped publishing new drama, preferring instead to reprint a handful of popular plays; this pattern may suggest that it was Allde who brought Satiromastix to White’s attention. Allde thus serves as the common denominator linking these three turn-of-the-century Dekker titles. The evidence is circumstantial, but given White’s shift away from new drama and given that Rockytt was sharing Allde’s shop and had otherwise been uninterested in drama to this point in his career, it seems likely that Allde provided at least some of the driving force behind the publication of these Dekker plays. Though he may not have acted as a traditional publisher for all three, he likely played a larger role in their publication than simply printing them—which suggests that he saw them as of a piece with the courtly entertainments and civic pageants that otherwise made up the list of plays he published. The final publisher of first-wave commonplaced drama of note was Nicholas Ling, who published the third quarto of Every Man Out in 1600, as well as the first and second quartos of Hamlet in 1603 and 1604. In recent years Ling has been recognized as a stationer who possessed “a commitment to the developing category of English ‘literature.’”32 However, for all that Ling was a highly prolific publisher of vernacular texts over the course of three decades, he, much like his apprentice Lownes, showed very little interest in publishing professional drama. After some limited, unprofitable attempts prior to 1600, Every Man Out was the first commercial play Ling published.33Hamlet was next, and Ling would publish only one more, The Taming of A Shrew (1607), before his death in early 1607.34 Ling likely published Q3 Every Man Out—which he rushed out in a “careless, … probably hurried” job farmed out among four printing houses, suggesting urgency to get it in print—because he saw how popular Holme’s editions of the play had been and because of its claims for the dignity of English letters.35 He likely was willing to publish Hamlet, however, not only because it pleased the wiser sort but also because, through its involvement in the Poets’ War, the play seemed to share in the same impulse behind the Bodenham circle’s commonplacing project: to place vernacular literature on equal footing with the classics and to confer on it the same level of cultural authority.36 IV. Theater and the Inns of Court That the Poets’ War was closely connected to London’s four Inns of Court—the Middle and Inner Temples and Gray’s and Lincoln’s Inns—is indicated not only by Jonson’s and Marston’s positions as leading playwrights for the children’s companies, which catered to Inns men, but also by the close ties between the three main authors involved in the War and the Inns. Marston was a member of the Middle Temple, and while Jonson did not belong to any Inn, their intellectual milieu was nevertheless formative for him. In his 1616 Folio, he dedicated Every Man Out—which borrows quite directly from the Middle Temple’s Christmas Revels and references the Mitre, a tavern at which Inns men often congregated—“To the Noblest Novrceries of Hvmanity, and Liberty, in the Kingdome: The Innes of Court.” He explains: “When I wrote this Poeme, I had friendship with diuers in your societies… . Now … I am carefull to put it a seruant to their pleasures, who are the inheriters of the first fauour borne it.”37Poetaster, on the other hand, received a dedication “To the vertvovs, and my worthy friend, Mr. Richard Martin,” a popular and prominent member of the Middle Temple who had earlier defended Poetaster: “[F]or whose innocence, as for the Authors, you were once a noble and timely vndertaker, to the greatest Iustice of this kingdome.”38 Shakespeare’s connection to the Inns at the turn of the century is less well-defined, but there is considerable evidence to support one. In 1601, Shakespeare contributed “The Phoenix and Turtle” to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr, which was dedicated to John Salusbury, a Middle Templar; recently, Mary Ellen Lamb has also suggested that in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare was contributing to poetic exchanges at the Inns, particularly at the Middle Temple.39 Beyond these poetic endeavors, Twelfth Night was performed at the Middle Temple in February 1602, and Troilus and Cressida, conventionally dated to 1601–1602, likely was written to appeal to an Inns audience.40 Furthermore, just over a month after the Middle Temple performance of Twelfth Night, John Manningham recorded in his diary a ribald story of Shakespeare’s sexual exploits in which “William the Conqueror” beats “Richard III” (Burbage) to an assignation with a smitten playgoer, suggesting that at this time Shakespeare may have been a social presence around the Inns, as well as an authorial one.41 Finally, Thomas Greene, a member of the Middle Temple who studied there from 1595 to 1602, was Shakespeare’s boarder, lawyer, at times business partner, and perhaps cousin. After being called to the bar in October 1602, Greene almost immediately moved to Stratford to become town clerk; Greene and his family were Shakespeare’s tenants at New Place several years later, and it is “a strong possibility” that they had lived with the Shakespeares since moving to Stratford, links that indicate an acquaintance between Shakespeare and Greene in London when Greene was resident at the Middle Temple.42 Beyond and because of these connections, the socioliterary culture of the Inns had a formative influence on the Poets’ War, and in fact was to some degree the subject of it. The Poets’ War was a debate over satire, a literary genre closely associated with the Inns in late Elizabethan England. Six of the seven non-translated satiric works singled out for censorship in the Bishops’ Ban of 1599 (including two Marston titles) were either by, or heatedly responded to, texts by Inns men, and the foremost writers of satire not named in the ban—Jonson and Lincoln’s man John Donne—were also Inns-affiliated. The moral authority of the satirist and the line between satire and abuse were key concerns in the satiric writing associated with the Inns, as Michelle O’Callaghan has shown; in their dramatization of these concerns, the plays of the Poets’ War emerged directly out of the Inns’ literary culture. Indeed, O’Callaghan argues that the Poets’ War might even be seen as a large-scale literary-theatrical example of flyting, the ritualized or formalized exchange of personal insults that was a popular practice at the Inns and their tavern societies.43 V. The Inns of Court and Print But how and why did the Poets’ War’s connection to the Inns lead stationers to commonplace Poets’ War drama? To answer this question, I take up the issue of readership. I argue that the stationers who published Poets’ War plays perceived men from the Inns of Court to be a (or perhaps the) primary target audience for these playbooks. Publishers commonplaced Poets’ War drama, I suggest, because the Inns themselves possessed a tradition of commonplacing vernacular texts. The stationers thus likely felt that commonplace markers would make these playbooks more desirable in the eyes of Inns men. The first clue that these stationers perceived men from the Inns to be their target customer base is simple geography, as many were neighbors to the Inns. At the time of the Poets’ War, Holme, Ling, and Ling’s ex-apprentice Lownes all worked at least part of the time out of bookshops located either at Serjeant’s Inn Gate (Holme) or the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s in the West (Ling and Lownes). St. Dunstan’s was literally right across Fleet Street from (from west to east) the Middle and Inner Temples and Serjeant’s Inn; was next to Clifford’s Inn, another Inn of Chancery; and was separated from Lincoln’s only by the length of Clifford’s. Furthermore, a number of Lownes’s pre-1602 publications were linked to the Inns in some fashion, and Kirk Melnikoff has recently suggested that in the last decade of his career Ling offered several texts that embraced a republican political philosophy, popular at the Inns at this time.44 Nor was targeting an Inns readership restricted to stationers who were located close to the Inns. Lesser has argued that Walter Burre “constructs his readers as ‘typical’ (at least in the social imagination of the period) students at the Inns of Court,” and that even if that was not (or not only) the audience who bought his playbooks, it was nevertheless “the audience imagined in his playbooks themselves.”45 Holme, Ling, Lownes, and Burre together accounted for eleven of the first sixteen playbooks to be published with printed commonplace markers. That the practice of commonplacing professional drama was geographically linked to the Inns at its inception is perhaps unsurprising given that the Inns were associated with the practice of commonplacing vernacular texts throughout the sixteenth century, especially in its closing decade. G. K. Hunter’s seminal article on commonplacing lists just ten pre-1592 printed books with commonplace markers, six of which were Inns products.46 George Gascoigne, author of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573), The Posies (1575), and The Steel Glass (1576), was a member of Gray’s (and all three titles were printed by Henry Bynneman, Ling’s master, during Ling’s apprenticeship).47 Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, who wrote Ferrex and Porrex (1570)—the second edition of Gorboduc and to our knowledge the first vernacular play to be commonplaced—belonged to the Inner Temple, the site of Gorboduc’s first performance. Also an Inner Templar was Robert Wilmot, whose Tancred and Gismond (1591) was a rewritten version of Gismond of Salerne, performed for the queen by the Inner Temple in the 1560s. And the 1587 edition of The Mirror for Magistrates was an expansion of a text whose origins were rooted firmly in the Inns. Moreover, following Hunter, Lesser and Stallybrass identify nine commonplaced vernacular literary titles published from 1594 to 1599, which they argue paved the way for the commonplacing of professional drama.48 Seven of these nine titles were connected to the Inns in some fashion. Four were by Inns members Marston, Everard Guilpin, and Sir John Davies; two were by Michael Drayton, who was so closely associated with the Inns that he modeled his coat of arms on those of the Inner Temple; and the seventh was Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, dedicated to Southampton, a member of Gray’s.49 When at the turn of the century Poets’ War playbooks were printed with commonplace markers, therefore, they were offered as commodities not dissimilar to the poems of Marston, Davies, and Guilpin published in 1598–1599: satiric vernacular writing whose literary merit and Inns connections were emblematized by their commonplace markers. In this context, it is also suggestive that the first commonplaced playbooks were disproportionately published by stationers located near the Inns and were predominately children’s company plays, for the children’s companies catered to the literary tastes of Inns men. There were thirty-three first-edition professional playbooks published from 1600 to 1603, thirteen of which were commonplaced. Fourteen (42.4 percent) were sold at St. Paul’s, six (18.2 percent) at St. Dunstan’s/Fleet Street, and thirteen (39.4 percent) at other locations. Yet of the thirteen commonplaced playbooks, five (38.5 percent) were sold at St. Dunstan’s/Fleet Street and four each at Paul’s and other locations (30.8 percent); further, an overwhelming 83.3 percent of first-edition playbooks sold at St. Dunstan’s in this span were commonplaced, as opposed to just 28.6 percent of St. Paul’s titles and 30.8 percent of titles at other locations. Nor do the numbers change much when second-plus editions are added; despite being the location of just eight of forty-five total playbook editions (17.8 percent), St. Dunstan’s/Fleet Street provided seven (46.7 percent) of the fifteen commonplaced playbooks published in this span, making 87.5 percent (seven of eight) of St. Dunstan’s/Fleet Street playbooks published with commonplace markers.50 Further, of the forty-one professional commonplaced plays published between 1600 and 1610, nine belonged to the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men (including five Poets’ War plays), two to Queen Anne’s Men, and an overwhelming thirty (73.1 percent) to children’s companies.51 Massai has shown that the book trade in general reflected a hunger for children’s company drama, noting that beginning around 1605, “demand for plays originally staged by the adult companies shrank in comparison to plays originally staged by the children”; the book trade in this period thus swung toward offering a body of commonplaceable plays, localized around the Inns and private theaters, that “presented stage plays to their first readers as different, more self-consciously literary texts” appropriate for the fashionable reading audience of Inns men.52 We cannot credit the Poets’ War alone with conferring literary status upon commercial vernacular drama, but it was clearly an important step in the process. A final look at Shakespeare’s contributions to the Poets’ War can be instructive in this regard. Massai notes that Richard Bonian and Henry Walley likely presented Troilus and Cressida in a fashion similar to children’s company playbooks—affixing a prefatory publisher’s note focused on its status as a readerly object halfway through the print run—because it was “the closest Shakespeare ever came to writing the type of play that had become the trademark of the children’s companies.”53 We might also note that Q2 Hamlet’s title page “imagines Q2 as a more literary text than Q1 by reference to a manuscript original” and emphasizes the enlarged length of the text.54 And even Q1 Hamlet, with its title page claim to having been played at Oxford and Cambridge, makes an “assertive appeal to the discerning reader of literary drama” as did no other playbook of the period.55 In other words, the only two commonplaced pre-Folio Shakespeare plays—also the only two Poets’ War plays by Shakespeare to be published individually—possessed additional (and, for Shakespeare, unusual) paratextual materials emphasizing their status as readerly objects for an au courant audience. That the Shakespearean Poets’ War playbooks were set off from Shakespeare’s other playbooks as distinctly literary texts again suggests that the Poets’ War was thought of as a particularly literary phenomenon, a case of what happened on London’s stages spilling over into its bookstalls thanks to their joint target audience: men from the Inns. * By the time the last three plays from the Poets’ War that were published individually—Marston’s What You Will (in 1607) and Histriomastix (in 1610), and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (in 1609)—saw print, the Poets’ War was more than half a decade in the past. It seems unlikely that these plays were published because of it. Rather, Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of Marston’s two plays, likely acquired their rights owing to his interest in sophisticated drama from the children’s companies and Ben Jonson. Bonian and Walley also attempted to cultivate a sophisticated dramatic slate—together they published Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (circa 1610) and Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609)—and were likely attracted to Troilus because of its stylistic similarity to children’s company plays (an association that might have been emphasized by the King’s Men’s recent acquisition of the Blackfriars). Commonplacing drama was also, relatively speaking, much more common now than it had been from 1600 to 1604. Nine plays published in 1605–1606 featured printed commonplace markers, and What You Will was one of ten playbooks published with commonplace markers in 1607 alone. Nor was the practice geographically centered on the vicinity of the Inns any longer, as in the intervening years far more booksellers at Paul’s and other locations had begun to offer commonplaced drama.56 Nevertheless, that these last three Poets’ War plays were all published with commonplace markers speaks not only to their status as particularly literary texts but also to how influential the Poets’ War had been on the print marketplace: by the end of the decade, the fact that printing had elevated drama with commonplace markers seemed a kind of “typographical inevitability.”57 This typographical inevitability would not last, however, as the rate of commonplacing professional drama slowed substantially after the peak period of 1600 through 1610. From 1611 to 1640, only thirty-two first editions were commonplaced (as opposed to the forty-one during the peak decade): eleven from 1611 to 1620, just six from 1621 to 1630, and fifteen from 1631 to 1640. This decline was matched by a precipitous drop in the publication of children’s company drama after the peak years of 1600 to 1610, when forty-nine first editions were published and, as Massai notes, children’s company drama dominated the market for new plays.58 From 1611 to 1620, there were just eleven first editions of children’s drama published; from 1621 to 1630, none; and from 1631 to 1640, thirteen. While in broad strokes both sets of numbers reflect larger contractions and expansions in the book market, it is nevertheless suggestive that the number of commonplaced titles dropped so sharply just as the publication of children’s company drama also drastically slowed.59 That the two were related may be further suggested by the fact that beginning in 1611, it was adult company drama that was commonplaced most frequently; from 1611 to 1640, the King’s Men led all companies with eleven commonplaced first editions, double the number of the next closest company and far outpacing the just three commonplaced children’s company first editions published in that span. On the whole, the history of dramatic commonplacing after the peak decade of 1600–1610 further suggests that that decade’s high number of commonplaced professional plays was driven by stationers’ desires to construct and market children’s company drama in particular as an elite form of reading material. As this essay has demonstrated, this possibility became newly available to London’s stationers thanks to the Poets’ War and the textual and paratextual claims it made for drama’s elevated status at the beginning of the decade. The Poets’ War’s strong association with the Inns of Court also allowed stationers to conceive of playbooks as literary reading material and likely helped them particularly embrace commonplacing children’s company drama. While the “construction of Shakespearean, and more broadly of dramatic, authorship was local and contingent, conditioned by the motives and values of the members of the early modern book trade, the customers they served, and the readers, writers, and critics they cultivated,” in the realm of commonplacing, at least, the book trade seems to have taken its cue from the stage and Inns, and from the constructions of authority and authorship that the Poets’ War had foregrounded.60 London’s stationers thus found these plays important and powerful forms of cultural representation—a capacity that a handful of stationers were interested in capitalizing upon but that would not have existed without the stage itself and without both the theater’s and the stationers’ links to the Inns of Court. If we fail to recognize the interdependence of these institutions, we risk missing key pieces of the shifting cultural landscape that affected the production of early modern literature and allowed, for example, Jonson’s Folio of 1616 to be a thinkable print commodity. In other words, we risk being Hamlet, befuddled by the children’s companies’ effect on the London theater and bemusedly asking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “[h]ow comes it?” and “[i]s’t possible?” (2.2.337, 357). The answer to the latter question is yes. The answer to the former is far more complicated, but infinitely worth pursuing. For their incisive comments on various versions of this essay, I am grateful to Adam Hooks, Jonathan Lamb, Tara Lyons, and Shakespeare Quarterly’s readers and editors, most especially Jeremy Lopez. I am also indebted to the feedback provided by audiences at the Modern Language Association and Society for Textual Scholarship conferences. Footnotes 1 This and all Stationers’ Register dates are taken from Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554–1640 A.D., 5 vols. (London, 1875–77 and Birmingham, 1895); for Every Man Out, see 3:159. 2 Ben Jonson, The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Ovt of His Humor (London, 1600), STC (2nd ed.) 14767, title page. 3 The first edition count is taken from Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.4 (2008): 371–420, 405–406; the count of second-plus editions is my own, includes editions in collections, and is taken from DEEP: The Database of Early English Playbooks, maintained by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/. 4 Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020), 93. The fullest exploration of the Poets’ War to date is provided in James Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia UP, 2001). 5 Hamlet has been linked to the Poets’ War through the “little eyases” passage (2.2.338), with its references to the “much to do on both sides,” “controversy,” “cuffs” between poet and player, and “throwing about of brains” that have recently afflicted London’s theatrical world (ll. 352–53, 354, 355, 358–59); quotations of Shakespeare’s works follow G. Blakemore Evans, gen. ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). There are perhaps deeper connections as well. Neil Rhodes has recently argued that “something of the critic-protagonists of [Jonson’s] early satirical drama has rubbed off on Shakespeare’s character” and that “when [Hamlet] tells the players to ‘show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ . . . , he sounds exactly like Jonson [in] acknowledg[ing] the social responsibility of the artist”; see Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018), 291. William Tanner has also recently argued that Hamlet engages with Marston’s satiric persona as part of the Poets’ War; see his “To Kill a King in the Malcontent Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 70.2 (2019): 129–58, esp. 137–38. I would add that when Hamlet uses The Mousetrap to try to catch Claudius’s conscience, Shakespeare deploys a version of the exposure plot—a staple of Jonson’s Every Man plays, in which one character manipulates another into a situation that exposes their foolishness to prompt moral reformation—that fails to help its victim achieve moral enlightenment. 6 For more on the Bodenham circle, see Lesser and Stallybrass, “Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” 383–99; Lukas Erne and Devani Singh, introduction to Bel-vedére, or The Garden of the Muses: An Early Modern Printed Commonplace Book (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020), xv–xxix; and Rhodes, Common, 296–300. 7 On the turn from the actor’s to the author’s theater, see for example Bart van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 195–231. 8 For studies that focus on stationers’ canons, see Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004); Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography, ed. Marta Straznicky (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013); Adam G. Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016); and Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2018). For studies that focus on the relationship between stationers and readers, see Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015); Bourne, Typographies; and Megan Heffernan, Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2021). 9 Douglas Bruster, “The Representation Market of Early Modern England,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 41.1–2 (2013): 1–23, and Jonathan P. Lamb, Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 1–32. 10 I have dated the “first wave” of commonplaced playbooks to 1600–1604 for three reasons. First, while twelve commonplaced first editions appeared from 1600 to 1602, 1603 and 1604 saw only one each before commonplacing activity picked up again in 1605 (five first editions). The year 1604 thus seems a natural cutoff. Second, the commonplacing of 1605 to 1610 was largely fueled by Thomas Thorpe and George Eld, as at least one of these two had a hand in over half the commonplaced plays published in that span. One sign that Thorpe especially was invested in commonplacing drama is that every play he published was commonplaced in the first edition; in addition, none of George Chapman’s non-Thorpe-published plays of the decade were printed with commonplace markers, but all of the Chapman plays produced by Thorpe were commonplaced. However, in this essay I am interested in establishing the conditions in which Thorpe and Eld worked. Third, half a decade seems an appropriately long enough time for the process of commonplacing to become common, as the boom in commonplaced playbooks beginning in 1605 would suggest. 11 These counts depend on attributing Blurt, Master Constable to Thomas Dekker, an attribution that is now widely accepted. See MacDonald P. Jackson, “Early Modern Authorship: Canons and Chronologies,” 80–97, esp. 83–89, and MacDonald P. Jackson and Gary Taylor, “Works Excluded from This Edition,” 444–48, esp. 444, both in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to “The Collected Works,” gen. ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). In turn they cite, for example, David J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays: Internal Evidence for the Major Problems of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), esp. 66–90, and MacDonald P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1979), esp. 109–13. 12 Lesser and Stallybrass, “Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” 410–11. 13 For authorial attribution as an emerging design feature in the late 1590s and early 1600s that connoted literary status, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 31–55. 14 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, esp. 87–95. I have accepted Farmer and Lesser’s hypothesis that a title page claim of being acted by the Children of Paul’s also served as a theater attribution (87–88). 15 Lesser and Stallybrass, “Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” 371. 16 William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke (London, 1604), STC (2nd ed.) 22276, title page. 17 Farmer and Lesser, “Vile Arts,” 101. 18 Emma Smith, “The Canonization of Shakespeare in Print, 1623,” in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Kidnie and Massai, 134–46, 135, 142. 19 Tamara Atkin and Emma Smith, “The Form and Function of Character Lists in Plays Printed Before the Closing of the Theatres,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 65.271 (2014): 647–72, esp. 652–53. 20 Devani Singh, “Dedications, Epistles to the Reader, and Prefatory Custom in Printed English Playbooks, 1559–1642,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 72.304 (2021): 280–300, 281. Worth noting is that dedications do not appear in all the extant copies of Cynthia’s Revels, nor are its dedications always to the same individual; a copy held at the Huntington Library includes a dedication to William Camden, while one held at UCLA possesses a dedication to the Countess of Bedford. With these multiple dedications, Cynthia’s Revels is akin to more elevated poetic collections, and can be seen to be making a claim for the cultural authority of drama. 21 For my discussions of individual stationers, I have used DEEP and the Stationers’ Register as a supplement to the information provided in A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, revised by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Bibliographic Society, 1976–91). 22 Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 11. Further, with the exception of Edward Allde (discussed in the body of the essay), the other printers of first-wave commonplaced drama produced few if any commonplaced playbooks over the course of their careers, suggesting that it was not the printers who introduced commonplace markers into the texts. 23 Holger Schott Syme, “Thomas Creede, William Barley, and the Venture of Printing Plays,” in Shakespeare’s Stationers, ed. Straznicky, 28–46, 28. 24 Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser observe that “the surge [in professional playbooks] from 1600 to 1602 . . . probably indicates rising demand among stationers for professional plays after it became clear in 1598 and 1599 that book buyers’ interest justified second and third editions”; “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1 (2005): 1–32, 10. This interest also may have helped entice Holme and Olive to dabble in drama. 25 Lesser, Politics of Publication, 52–80. 26 Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “Shakespeare between Pamphlet and Book, 1608–1619,” in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Kidnie and Massai, 105–33, 109. See also Lesser, Politics of Publication, 57. 27 Editions or issues with which Lownes was involved include Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again in 1611 and 1617; The Faerie Queene in 1609, 1611, 1612 or 1613, and 1617; The Shepheardes Calender in 1611; Prosopopoia in 1612 or 1613; and Four Hymns in 1611 and 1617, and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1597 and the Arcadia in 1605, 1613, 1622, and 1623. 28 His apprenticeship is recorded in Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, II.115. 29 The only exceptions in Allde’s canon as a publisher were Thomas Preston’s Cambises (first edition ca. 1570, Edward Allde’s two editions ca. 1585 and ca. 1595), the rights to which he seems to have inherited from his father, and potentially Q3 of A Game at Chess (ca. 1625). On Allde’s involvement in the latter, see Gary Taylor, “A Game at Chess: General Textual Introduction,” in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, ed. Taylor and Lavagnino, 712–873, 715–16. 30 R. B. McKerrow, “Edward Allde as a Typical Trade Printer,” in Ronald Brunlees McKerrow: A Selection of His Essays, ed. John Phillip Immroth (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974), 94–131, esp. 102. 31 Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, II.201, 731. 32 Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 117. On Ling, see also Gerald D. Johnson, “Nicholas Ling, Publisher 1580–1607,” Studies in Bibliography 38 (1985): 203–14; Lesser and Stallybrass, “Commonplacing of Professional Plays”; and Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing, 155–82. 33 Ling published Kyd’s translation of Cornelia in 1594 (printed by James Roberts with commonplace markers), but it was neither a vernacular nor a public theater play. Melnikoff notes that Cornelia did not sell well and that Ling’s 1594 registration of The Jew of Malta also seems not to have been successful, making his willingness to publish Every Man Out and Hamlet that much more unusual (Elizabethan Publishing, 171). 34 We should note, however, that Ling also acquired the rights to Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labor’s Lost in addition to The Taming of A Shrew, all on January 22, 1607, from Cuthbert Burby. He seems to have acquired the rights to Hamlet and Every Man Out as well, though no Register entries record these transactions; but the rights to Hamlet were transferred from Ling’s estate to John Smethwick on November 19, 1607, and Smethwick was also the next to hold the rights to Every Man Out. Given that Ling was apparently more open to publishing drama by the end of his career, it may be that his experiences with Every Man Out and Hamlet convinced him that drama could sell well for him; had he lived, The Taming of A Shrew might have been the first of several more published playbooks. Given that most of these titles are Shakespeare or Shakespeare-affiliated, it is also tantalizing to wonder whether Ling was planning to produce a Shakespearean nonce collection before his death. Either way, these transactions also underscore his particular interest in Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s drama. 35 Quotation from Helen Ostovich, introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001), 4. 36 Ling may have had a particular interest in Poets’ War plays from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Aside from Every Man Out and Hamlet, the other Poets’ War plays performed exclusively by Shakespeare’s company were As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and (retroactively or by association) Every Man In. James Roberts, Ling’s frequent partner and collaborator on Q2 Hamlet—Roberts initially held the rights to Hamlet before transferring them to Ling—also entered Troilus and Cressida into the Stationers’ Register in 1603, though to our knowledge no edition was produced at that time. He was also connected to the staying order that prevented the publication of As You Like It and Every Man In in 1600 (for a recent reevaluation of the order, see Michael J. Hirrel, “The Roberts Memoranda: A Solution,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 61.252 [2010]: 711–28). In other words, at the time of the Poets’ War, insofar as evidence exists in the documentary record, Roberts seems to have taken steps to secure the rights to all of the Poets’ War plays that belonged exclusively to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men for which we have a transactional record. 37 The workes of Beniamin Ionson (London, 1616), STC (2nd ed.) 14751, sig. G2r/81. Taken from the Early English Books Online (EEBO) facsimile of the British Library copy. See also Henk Gras, “Twelfth Night, Every Man Out of His Humour, and the Middle Temple Revels of 1597–98,” Modern Language Review 84.3 (1989): 545–64, and Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), esp. 35–59. For Marston and the Inns, see Philip Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969). 38 The workes of Beniamin Ionson, sig. Z5r/273. See also Tom Cain’s introduction to his Revels edition of Poetaster (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), 43–47. 39 Mary Ellen Lamb, “‘Love is not love’: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, Pembroke, and the Inns of Court,” Shakespeare Quarterly 70.2 (2019): 101–28. 40 See for example W. R. Elton, Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” and the Inns of Court Revels (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000); Gary Taylor, “Troilus and Cressida: Bibliography, Performance, and Interpretation,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 99–136; David Bevington, introduction to Troilus and Cressida (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998), 88–89; or Anthony B. Dawson, introduction to Troilus and Cressida (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 7–10. 41 See The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–1603, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1976), 75. 42 Robert Bearman, “Thomas Greene: Stratford-upon-Avon’s Town Clerk and Shakespeare’s Lodger,” Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 290–305, 295. For more on Greene, see also Meghan C. Andrews, “Michael Drayton, Shakespeare’s Shadow,” Shakespeare Quarterly 65.3 (2014): 273–306, esp. 295–97, and Douglas Bruster, “Shakespeare’s Lady 8,” Shakespeare Quarterly 66.1 (2015): 47–88, esp. 81–87. 43 O’Callaghan, The English Wits, 36–44. 44 Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing, 155–82, esp. 171–75. 45 Lesser, Politics of Publication, 74–75. 46 G. K. Hunter, “The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances,” The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951–52): 171–88. 47 On Ling’s apprenticeship, see Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, I.434, II.679. 48 Lesser and Stallybrass, “Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” 385–86. 49 The four titles by Inns men were Middle Templar Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and The Scourge of Villanie (both 1598), Gray’s member Everard Guilpin’s Skialetheia (also 1598), and Middle Templar Sir John Davies’s Nosce teipsum (1599). On Drayton’s closeness to the Inns, see Andrews, “Michael Drayton,” esp. 296–97. 50 There were only forty-five playbooks published from 1600 to 1603, but I have counted Every Man Out as both a St. Paul’s and St. Dunstan’s publication since Ling was likely working out of both locations in 1600. On the other hand, I have counted Q1 Hamlet as a St. Dunstan’s play since evidence suggests that Ling worked out of his St. Dunstan’s shop if not exclusively, then certainly primarily, beginning in 1602. See Johnson, “Nicholas Ling,” 212–14. 51 Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament was not a part of the contemporary theater scene and so has been excluded from this count. I consider Marston’s Malcontent a children’s play because the text originated with a children’s company and the first two quartos reflect the children’s text; in contrast, Dekker’s Satiromastix has been counted as both a King’s Men’s and children’s text, as its title page specifies that it was played by both. Chapman’s The Gentleman Usher has been counted as a children’s play because there is general agreement that it was a Blackfriars play; similarly, I have counted Jonson’s The Case is Altered as a children’s play because there is general agreement that the printed text represents a children’s company’s revival of an older adult company play. I have accepted Martin Wiggins’s argument that The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality was a new play belonging to the Children of the Chapel; see his British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vol. 4, 1598–1602 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), 275–78. 52 Sonia Massai, “The Mixed Fortunes of Shakespeare in Print,” in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Kidnie and Massai, 57–68, 60. 53 Massai, “Mixed Fortunes,” 66–67. 54 Lesser and Stallybrass, “Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” 373. 55 Lesser and Stallybrass, “Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” 372. 56 Of the eighteen first editions of commonplaced vernacular professional drama published from 1607 to 1610, only two were sold at St. Dunstan’s/Fleet Street shops. Eight were sold at St. Paul’s and the other eight at other or unknown locations. 57 Lesser, Politics of Publication, 70. 58 Massai, “Mixed Fortunes,” 58–60. 59 See Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England,” in Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642, ed. Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 17–41, esp. 20–22. 60 Hooks, Selling Shakespeare, 29. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - The Commonplacing of Professional Plays Revisited: Print, Theater, and Early Modern Institutional Exchange
JF - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quac059
DA - 2022-12-13
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-commonplacing-of-professional-plays-revisited-print-theater-and-jFe1kJzPSO
SP - 199
EP - 223
VL - 73
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
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