Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade

Shifting our focus from author to publisher and from first performance to first edition, Zachary Lesser offers a vantage point on the drama of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and their contemporaries. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication reimagines the reception and meaning of plays by reading them through the eyes of their earliest publishers. Since success in the book trade required specialization, locating a play within its publisher’s output allows us to see how the publisher read it and speculated that customers would read it. Their readings often differ radically from our own and so revise our views of the drama’s engagement with early modern culture. By reading the 1633 Jew of Malta as a part of Nicholas Vavasour’s Laudian specialty, for example, or the 1622 Othello in the context of Thomas Walkley’s trade in parliamentary news, Lesser’s study reveals the politics of these publications - for early modern readers and for us.

• Offers a perspective on Renaissance drama by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster and contemporaries through the eyes of its earliest publishers • An altenative approach to the history of reception, investigating publishers as the first readers of plays • This study will be of great interest to scholars of Renaissance literature and drama, of history of the book and of publishing, and of the history of reading

List of illustrations; Preface; List of abbreviations; Introduction: from text to book; 1. Speculation in the book trade; 2. The cultural uses of typography in early modern England: Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle; 3. Marlowe’s Jew goes to church: Nicholas Vavasour and the creation of Laudian drama; 4. Insatiate, roaring devils and outlandish cups: Thomas Archer’s dialogic publishing in the querelle des femmes; 5. ‘Courtier’s merchandise’: Thomas Walkley and the paradoxes of domestic policy; Epilogue: readings then and now; Index.

Winner of the Elizabeth Dietz Award for the best book in Early Modern Studies, given by SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 2006 - Winner

\'Lesser\'s book maps out important directions for Renaissance scholarship.\' Forum for Modern English Studies

\'Lesser\'s findings are of considerable importance to publishing history … scholarly and thought-provoking … Through his four absorbing case histories Zachary Lesser offers a study of the highest importance not only to bibliography and the history of the English book trade but also to many other areas of historical, literary, and cultural studies.\' Review of English Studies

\'This is a book that offers direction for the study of early modern playbooks, a way of reading that will be responsive not only to bibliographical evidence but also to the earlier readings that it creates …\' The Library

\'Lesser’s radical approach permits a radical clarity … he casts a dazzling and original light onto the public moment of these plays’ birth.\' Renaissance Quarterly

\'… most interesting and useful … especially interesting and original [of all those published during the year]. … This is a genuinely original approach and yields important new insights into the reception of the plays he considers … Lesser makes a convincing case that attention to publishers can yield important information about how plays were read.\' Studies in English Literature

\'Lesser has written an excellent book … a genuinely new contribution to the field … It will be hard for anyone who has read his book to go on to read an early modern play without paying attention, in a way they are unlikely to have done before, to the identity of its publisher …\' Renaissance and Reformation

\'Lesser\'s claim is compelling, and he usefully isolates and understudied but undoubtedly important aspect of the drama …\' Literature and History