\u27A play and no play\u27: Printing the performance in early modern England

Using the typographical arrangements of the dramatic page as a rich site of inquiry, this dissertation challenges the long-standing division between the theatrical and the literary in studies of early modern drama. Taking as its foundational premise the New Textualist insistence that printed plays should be taken seriously as reading matter, it shows that plays initially written with the theater in mind developed into intelligible reading matter not only through their acquisition of bookish features, such as authorial attributions and dedicatory epistles, but also through print\u27s deliberate negotiations with stage dramaturgy and the effects of early modern plays in performance. At the same time as it contributes to our growing understanding of early modern play-reading, it does so with a keen eye for the performative qualities of early modern plays that made them successful in the theater, both ideologically and as entertainment. ^ In particular, this dissertation argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century experiments in playbook typography and page design show early modern English playwrights and stationers attempting to make plays in print legible to readers as drama. These experiments—with scene division, punctuation, illustration, and place markers—were designed to encourage reading experiences around genre-specific theatrical innovations that answered for the experiences that these innovations produced in performance: the frightful and relentlessly violent stage tableaux of Christopher Marlowe\u27s Tamburlaine; the excessive physicality central to Ben Jonson\u27s comical satire; the suspenseful plotting of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher\u27s tragicomedy; and the use of moveable scenes to register place in heroic tragedy. The conventions of dramatic typography that seem mundane to us today were by no means settled in these first two centuries of printing plays in England. By studying how these typographic conventions came into being, this dissertation claims book design as fertile ground for understanding the evolution of theatrical conventions and play-reading between the early printings of native morality plays at the start of the sixteenth century and the publication of Shakespeare\u27s Works by Jacob Tonson at the start of the eighteenth.