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

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

James Compton and Cosmo Manuche and Dramatic Manuscripts in the Interregnum — WILLIAM PROCTOR WILLIAMS

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

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

“ As the eagerly anticipated flagship volume of ‘British Manuscripts’, a new ser­ies published by Brepols under the editorship of A.S.G. Edwards, Early British Drama in Manuscript exceeds expectations and sets a high standard for future volumes (…) Brepols has produced a book of impressive quality, befitting the scholarship it contains. Early British Drama in Manuscript is a weighty volume, literally and intellectually.” (Brett Greatley-Hirsch, in Early Theatre, 23.1, 2020, p. 225-29)