The Fragmented Playtext in Shakespearean England, 1576-1642

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The project is to complete a book, The Fragmented Playtext, which is under contract to CUP. This groundbreaking book will combine empirical historicism and textual interpretation to produce a new vision of the theatre's working processes, showing how those processes have shaped the writing and revising of playtexts.As well as being called 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were frequently known as 'play-patchers' because of the common perception that a play was pieced together out of a collection of odds and ends: it was not a single whole entity. This aspect of the play is generally ignored by modern commentators who concentrate on the 'unity' of a text, believing that a playbook is as coherent a piece of literature as an epic poem. Various assumptions arise from the notion of a 'unified' playtext, for instance, the idea that revision happened over and indeed on a whole and entire play. But The Fragmented Playtext will argue that an absolutely complete text of a play often never entirely existed -- at least, not in one place. Prologues and epilogues were frequently written on separate pieces of paper from the plays they flanked, and were regularly updated or lost before publication; songs and letters were sometimes kept separately from their play and have not always survived to the printed text, leaving just a mark to show where they once were (usually the heading 'a song' 'the letter'). The body of a play was designed to be written and disseminated as separate cued parts for actors; for a playwright who did not intend to publish his text, those 'parts' will have been the form in which he expected his play to be read and studied: in bits. Plays were plundered for their useful fragments, and members of the audience took home snippets of playtext in their commonplace books to use entirely out of context in tavern-chatter and flirtations. Some printed texts / like Ben Jonson's Sejanus (1605) / even select their 'sententia' with quotation-marks, indicating which quotations the reader might choose to note down; such plays present themselves both as whole texts and as collections of fragments of varying worth to the reader.The Fragmented Playtext will provide chapters on each separate element that constituted a 'play' both on paper and in performance. It will consider, in particular, the loose bits of paper that made up a manuscript play, illustrating how often separable sheets became lost from their plays but survived in other books (jest-books, poetry-books) as other types of literature; it will show bills and title-pages hanging together on the posts of London as advertisements; it will show actors' parts taken home to separate houses around London to be studied, learned and, sometimes, altered. In short, it will show how the play was made up of patches of varying fixity and how, as a consequence, when texts were reworked and revised, they were altered in 'patches' rather than equally throughout. Arising from this are a number of questions of fundamental importance to the editor (what should be used as a copytext?), to the theatre historian (how does the play performed relate to the play printed?), and of essential importance also to the theoretician (in a play that is at its root fragmentary, how 'authored' is each section, and what is the text?)Using a huge body of fresh evidence about early modern theatre and early modern texts (garnered from over 1000 'new' printed and manuscript sources as well as several thousand 'known' sources), the book explores the piecemeal nature of the playtext in the theatre, redefining in fundamental ways what a play actually is.