This collection of essays examines medieval and early modern drama in the context of a rich and varied manuscript culture. Focusing on the production, performance, and reception of dramatic documents made in Britain between 1400 and 1700, the essays in this book shed new light on the role of dramatic manuscripts in a range of different social and literary spheres. From extant manuscripts of England’s mystery cycles to miscellanies kept by seventeenth-century readers, the documents discussed in this volume reflect a culture of producing and using drama in ways that have been overlooked by the recent critical focus on drama and print by theatre historians and literary critics. By showing the various continuities, exchanges, lendings, and borrowings between medieval and early modern scribal practices, as well as between manuscript and print practices, this volume interrogates accepted critical narratives about the way that drama has been historicized.
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
Introduction — TAMARA ATKIN AND LAURA ESTILL
Production
The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation — JOE STADOLNIK
The Coventry Playbooks — PAMELA M. KING
The Towneley Plays: Huntington Library MS HM 1 — ALEXANDRA F. JOHNSTON
Un-dating the Chester Plays: A Reassessment of Lawrence Clopper’s ‘History and Development’ and MS Peniarth 399 — MATTHEW SERGI
Noting Baiazet, the Raging Turk — MARY POLITO AND KIRSTEN INGLIS
John of Bordeaux: Performance and the Revision of Early Modern Dramatic Manuscripts — JAMES PURKIS
James Compton and Cosmo Manuche and Dramatic Manuscripts in the Interregnum — WILLIAM PROCTOR WILLIAMS
Performance
The Play of Wit and Science: Evidence for the Performance of a Choir School Manuscript — LOUISE RAYMENT
Sixteenth-Century Courtly Mumming and Masking: Alexander Montgomerie’s The Navigatioun — SARAH CARPENTER
Speech and Silence in an Actor’s Part — JAKUB BOGUSZAK
‘In witnes here of I set to my hand’: Early Modern Actors’ Offstage Textual Rituals — KARA J. NORTHWAY
Comedy, Clowning, and the Caroline King’s Men: Manuscript Plays and Performance — LUCY MUNRO
Unfolding Action: Locked Letters as Props in the Early Modern Theatre — DANIEL STARZA SMITH AND JANA DAMBROGIO
Reception
Remediating Sixteenth-Century Drama: Gismond of Salerne in Script and Print — TAMARA ATKIN
The Early Manuscript Reception of Shakespeare: The Formation of Shakespearean Literary Taste — JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MAYER
Comedies and Tragedies ‘read of me’ and ‘not yet learned’: Dramatic Extracting in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 952 — BEATRICE MONTEDORO
Seeing is Believing: External vs. Internal Evidence in the Controversy over the Ireland Forgeries — ANTONIA FORSTER
The Macro Plays in Georgian England — GAIL MCMURRAY GIBSON
Unseen things seen’: Digital Editing and Early Modern Manuscript Plays — MATTEO PANGALLO
Mongrel Forms: Print-Manuscript Hybridity and Digital Methods in Annotated Plays — REBECCA MUNSON
Index