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The Book of the Play is a collection of essays that examines early modern drama in the context of book history. Focusing on the publication, marketing, and readership of plays opens fresh perspectives on the relationship between the cultures of print and performance and more broadly between drama and the public sphere. Marta Straznicky's introduction offers a survey of approaches to the history of play reading in this period, and the collection as a whole consolidates recent work in textual, bibliographic, and cultural studies of printed drama.

Individually, the essays advance our understanding of play reading as a practice with distinct material forms, discourses, social settings, and institutional affiliation. Part One, “Real and Imagined Communities,” includes four essays on play-reading communities and the terms in which they are distinguished from the reading public at large. Cyndia Clegg surveys the construction of readers in prefaces to published plays; Lucy Munro traces three separate readings of a single play, Edward Sharpham's The Fleer; Marta Straznicky studies women as readers of printed drama; and Elizabeth Sauer describes how play reading was mobilized for political purposes in the period of the Civil War. 

In Part Two, “Play Reading and the Book Trade,” five essays consider the impact of play reading on the public sphere through the lens of publishing practices. Zachary Lesser offers a revisionist account of black-letter typeface and the extent to which it may be understood as an index of popular culture; Alan Farmer examines how the emerging news trade of the 1620s and 1630s affected the marketing of printed drama; Peter Berek traces the use of generic terms on title pages of plays to reveal their intersection with the broader culture of reading; Lauren Shohet demonstrates that the Stuart masque had a parallel existence in the culture of print; and Douglas Brooks traces the impact print had on eclipsing performance as the medium in which the dramatist could legitimately lay claim to having authored his text.

The individual essays focus on selected communities of readers, publication histories, and ideologies and practices of reading; the collection as a whole demonstrates the importance of textual production and reception to understanding the place of drama in the early modern public sphere.

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

In this richly textured multidisciplinary work, Steven Mullaney examines the cultural situation of popular drama in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Relying upon a dynamic model of cultural production, Mullaney defines an original and historically grounded perspective on the emergence of popular theater and illustrates the critical, revisionary role it played in the symbolic economy of Renaissance England. Combining literary, historical, and broadly conceived cultural analysis, he investigates, among other topics, the period's exhaustive "rehearsal" of other cultures and its discomfiting apprehensions of the self; the politics of vanished forums for ideological production such as the wonder-cabinet and the leprosarium; the cultural poetics of royal entries; and the incontinent, uncanny language of treason. As Mullaney demonstrates, Shakespearean drama relied upon and embodied the marginal license of the popular stage and, as a result, provides us with powerful readings of the shifting bases of power, license, and theatricality in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. "A major study, not merely of selected Shakespearean plays but of the very conditions of the possibility of Renaissance drama." --Louis Montrose, University of California, San Diego "Mullaney's rich and engaged reading of the place of Shakespeare's stage represents the texture of early modern life and its cultural productions in the vivid tradition of annales history and brilliantly exemplifies his theoretical call for a poetics of culture." -- Shakespeare Quarterly "Mullaney marshals an impressive range of cultural representations which, taken together, will undoubtedly force a reconsideration of the semiotics of the Elizabethan stage." --Times Higher Education Supplement ". . . something of a dramatic feat in cultural studies: literary critic Mullaney calls in a cast ranging from Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu to Raymond Williams, Mary Douglas, and Michel Foucault." --Contemporary Sociology.

The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship—a field in a period long defined by its focus on poetry—by reenvisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social production. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extra-theatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.

Explores the profound influence of multilingual dictionaries, dialogues, and grammars on English Renaissance playwrights

In Theaters of Translation, Andrew S. Keener offers a fascinating account of the ways that plays by Thomas Kyd, Mary Sidney Herbert, Ben Jonson, and their fellow English contemporaries were shaped by and part of a multilingual Europe where dictionaries, grammars, and language-learning materials circulated widely. He proposes a fresh, multilingual approach to English Renaissance drama that challenges the histories of early modern European languages as sites of national and linguistic cohesion.

Covering the period between 1570 and 1640, when England’s drama and the English language itself were evolving, Keener uses the term “cosmopolitan vernaculars” to examine how nonclassical European languages modeled transnational forms of belonging for playgoers, readers, and authors in Renaissance England. Combining recent contributions to cosmopolitan theory and transnational studies of early modern literature and culture, Keener highlights both the ways in which cosmopolitanism manifests through Europe’s vernacular languages—in print and performance—and the ways languages themselves can exhibit cosmopolitanism for those who encounter them on the page or on the stage.

Theaters of Translation opens up new transnational interpretations of English Renaissance plays and casts fresh light on historical anecdotes, such as Jonson inscribing a copy of Pietro Aretino’s scandalous Italian dialogues or Shakespeare’s First Folio being advertised for sale in Germany before its London publication. It offers much of interest to readers and scholars of Renaissance Europe, early modern drama, and the development of national European languages.