Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: an outline of approaches taken
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and editions
- Introduction: Brick, lime, sand, plaster over lath and ‘new oaken boards’: the early modern playhouse
- Case study A Richard III at the Globe
- Case study B An outdoor theatre repertoire: the Rose on Bankside
- Chapter 1 Tragedy
- Case study C Opening scenes
- Case study D Staging violence and the space of the stage
- Chapter 2 Revenge drama
- Case study E ‘Here, in the Friars’: the second Blackfriars indoor playhouse
- Case study F The social life of things: skulls on the stage
- Chapter 3 Histories
- Case study G Title pages and plays in print
- Chapter 4 Comedy, pastoral and romantic
- Case study H The boy actor: body, costume and disguise
- Chapter 5 City comedies
- Case study I The dramaturgy of scenes
- Case study J Collaborative writing or the literary workshop
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Case study K Topical theatre and 1605–6: ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’
- Case study L ‘Little eyases’: the children's companies and repertoire
- Chapter 7 Tragicomedy
- Case study M The visual rhetoric of dumb show
- Conclusion: The wind and the rain: the wider landscape of early modern performance
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to . . .
Case study G - Title pages and plays in print
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: an outline of approaches taken
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and editions
- Introduction: Brick, lime, sand, plaster over lath and ‘new oaken boards’: the early modern playhouse
- Case study A Richard III at the Globe
- Case study B An outdoor theatre repertoire: the Rose on Bankside
- Chapter 1 Tragedy
- Case study C Opening scenes
- Case study D Staging violence and the space of the stage
- Chapter 2 Revenge drama
- Case study E ‘Here, in the Friars’: the second Blackfriars indoor playhouse
- Case study F The social life of things: skulls on the stage
- Chapter 3 Histories
- Case study G Title pages and plays in print
- Chapter 4 Comedy, pastoral and romantic
- Case study H The boy actor: body, costume and disguise
- Chapter 5 City comedies
- Case study I The dramaturgy of scenes
- Case study J Collaborative writing or the literary workshop
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Case study K Topical theatre and 1605–6: ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’
- Case study L ‘Little eyases’: the children's companies and repertoire
- Chapter 7 Tragicomedy
- Case study M The visual rhetoric of dumb show
- Conclusion: The wind and the rain: the wider landscape of early modern performance
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to . . .
Summary
When playtexts were printed their contents were announced to readers by means of a title page. The content of these title pages did vary considerably and as artefacts in their own right they are increasingly becoming a significant source for theatre historians to use in compiling a sense of what spectators took away from or valued in the theatrical experience. Rather than separating print from performance as can sometimes be the tendency in scholarship, by looking at the visual and textual culture of title pages we may gain access to supposedly ‘lost’ or ephemeral moments of performance as much as to reading and printing-house cultures.
To concentrate initially, though, on the textual information carried by title pages to plays can in itself yield much interesting detail. As Alan Farmer has demonstrated, title pages for plays began increasingly to provide not just the title – sometimes in itself an indicator of genre, though again the fashion for this waxed and waned over time – but often a more explanatory subtitle and then more often than not, particularly as the seventeenth century progressed, information about supposed authorship and performance history. So, whereas the 1616 title page to Marlowe's The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (see Figure 4) tells us simply that it was by him, and the title and the address of the printers, the 1623 title page to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (see Figure 5) has become far busier with information: ‘The Spanish Tragedy: Or, Hieronimo is mad againe’ already provides us with an indicator of Hieronimo's significance as a protagonist – something the allusions of later plays have also evidenced (see Chapter 2 on revenge drama). But it also notes that the text contains ‘the lamentable end of Don Horatio and Belimperia; With the pittifull Death of Hieronimo’. It is as if the ‘hot spots’ of the plot are being picked out for readers who are wondering which playtext to buy, to tempt them – much as a modern literary endorsement on a book jacket would do – to enter the pages, to go beyond the cover.
- Type
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576–1642 , pp. 106 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014