This chapter asks whether we can detect signs of aesthetic or ideological design in the reviving of plays for courtly audiences. It takes as its case study the 1621–2 Christmas season at court, which is unusual in that a complete list of the plays performed has survived, with dates. The Master of the Revels, whose job it was to select plays from the commercial theatre for court performance, might have been especially cautious during this season, because it occurred at a time when King James was asserting his power over a rebellious House of Commons and restricting outspoken preachers and pamphleteers from criticizing his policies. This case study suggests that we may be justified in seeing careful design in the choice of revivals in the early modern English court.

When the King’s Men took over the residency of the Blackfriars indoor theatre in 1609, they embarked upon a period of conscious reinvention of company identity, combining their existing resources and reputation with a new playing space, audience, financial approach, and performative sensibility. The company made music a key part of this reinvention, drawing on its new assets to increase the presence and variety of original music in its plays. By 1642 they still held a reputation for musical innovation, performing newly written music for both new and older plays in the repertory; their musical settings were still newly circulated in manuscript and print into the 1650s. This chapter explores these musical reinventions, examining dramatic impacts of altered lyrics, melody, harmony, accompaniment, and performance style.

The book of accounts kept by Philip Henslowe at the Rose playhouse provides considerable evidence on the offerings of seven adult playing companies, 1592–1603. Theatre historians generally agree that the plays marked “ne” were considered by Henslowe to be in some sense new; those not so marked were considered in some sense old. In terms of categories, one kind of play could be called old because it was still in production following its debut performance, another kind could be old because it had been retired from the stage but was now being revived. This chapter examines the evidence in Henslowe’s “Diary” that revival was a routine feature of repertorial commerce practiced industry-wide by the adult companies. It argues that Henslowe’s accounts document the commercial viability not only of those plays scholars consider successes due to the literary and theatrical reputation of their authors but also of those anonymous to us now and/or lost.

This chapter considers reprints as new editions and insists that they offer the clearest indication of an author or play’s popularity. I explore the accessibility of Shakespeare’s plays between 1660 and the turn of the century, place quarto playbook publication in the context of late seventeenth-century politics, and highlight how traditional periodization, folio-centric scholarship and attitudes toward abbreviated and altered playtexts have distorted our view of the print history of Renaissance drama. I argue that Shakespeare’s unaltered plays were not recognised as marketable print commodities until c. 1681, a development reflected in publishers’ willingness in the 1680s and 1690s to not just publish his plays but also risk facing the consequences associated with pirate printing ventures. The chapter intervenes in long-standing debates about the causes and measurability of Shakespeare’s popularity and his relationship to authorship, genre, and the canon in the late seventeenth-century book trade.

The completion of the Cockpit-in-Court at Whitehall Palace in 1630 seems to have ushered in a period of dramatic revivals at court. A simple cross-reference of extant titles shows curious similarities between plays performed between 1610 and the early 1620s, and the 1630s, in particular the autumn of 1636 through January of 1639. During these active years of spectatorship, Charles I saw dozens of revivals of “old” plays that he also watched as a prince in his father’s court. Rather than imposing a reductive biographical reading on the monarch and what appears to resemble a kind of nostalgia for his early formative years, I argue that the revivals of these plays in the 1630s represent a pattern of monarchical performativity related to Charles I’s period of Personal Rule, as well as an aesthetic preference for monumentalizing the past shared by Charles and Henrietta Maria during this decade of their rule.

This chapter theorizes place as both an object and an agent of renewal, taking, as its case study, Ben Jonson’s revision of Every Man in His Humour. Although the play was set in Florence when first performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598, Jonson shifts that setting to London when preparing Every Man in His Humour for his 1616 folio. Beneath this remarkable change lie several striking continuities, including Jonson’s repeated allusions to the New World. Such allusions are effectively reprinted in the 1616 folio, and yet they are simultaneously rewritten through Jonson’s change of setting. To trace the effects of such rewriting, the chapter documents the deepening imbrication of England and the New World in the first decades of the seventeenth century, showing, in turn, how Jonson’s revisions of Every Man in His Humour both acknowledge and manage the consequences of this imbrication for his comedy of humors.

In 1646, when the London theatres were closed, James Shirley published a collection titled Poems &c. Shirley’s et cetera included “Prologues and Epilogues Written to severall Playes Presented in this Kingdom, and else-where.” While the paratexts in this volume are for plays that had already been performed, Shirley’s Poems offers the first or only known publication for some prologues, for instance, for Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir (first published in 1652; also included in Six New Plays, 1653). This chapter explores how the dramatic epitexts in Shirley’s Poems make meaning without the full text of their play. Shirley reveals himself to be Ben Jonson’s heir and a poet-playwright in the classical tradition. These paratexts no longer frame plays; rather, they act as a threshold that opens into Shirley’s dramatic oeuvre and makes it the centerpiece of, to use Richard Helgerson’s term, Shirley’s “self-crowned laureateship.”

Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama: While no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, there are consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tatary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This chapter takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plots of the period to consider the stage life of Chinggis Khan inaugurated by the lost “Tamar Cham” plays. The two plays proved highly successful in the Elizabethan era and continued to haunt the paratextual record of early English performance into the late eighteenth century. The chapter explicates the financial data of the “Tamar Cham” plays in a repertorial context invested in Mediterranean tyrants to situate two newly discovered medieval source documents that together suggest a particular nostalgia in a fantasy if global unity.

The Introduction explains the collection’s argument, structure, and its interventions in the field. We challenge the fetishization of firsts in early modern drama studies, first performances, and first editions and highlight problems with privileging “maiden” performances and print “inceptions” of Renaissance plays over their ghost-like “afterlives” on the stage and page. Engaging with recent work in theatre and book history and editorial studies, the Introduction explores the idea that plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. We argue, in short, that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of renewal.