Early modern literary and theatrical culture relied upon repetition. Stephen Reference GreenblattGreenblatt puts it evocatively when he writes of early modern drama and literature “as part of a vast, interlocking system of repetitions, embracing homilies and hangings, royal progresses and rote learning” (221). But there is a paradox at the heart of early modern theatre studies. While professional theatre was designed with repetition in mind – plays written for the playhouses were intended to be performed multiple times – scholarship on early modern drama has paid insufficient attention to the varying forms of repetition and renewal which gave rise to the vibrant drama of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, preferring instead to prioritize – perhaps even, to fetishize – first performances and first editions. In early modern England “imitation was unarguably central to literary practice” (Reference BurrowBurrow 1); the modern critical investment in originality and novelty, liable as it is to distort our understanding of the period’s drama, is thus peculiarly ironic.

But what if we treated a play’s later performances or publications as being as important as its first? What if we acknowledged that processes of repetition and renewal were as central to playmaking and playgoing as composition and creation? Important work on the drama of the period has sought to emphasize that early modern plays in print and/or performance are “unstable” (Reference DuttonDutton, Mastering 4), “palimpsested” (Reference HarrisHarris, Untimely 73), “patched” (Reference SternStern, Documents 2), “inherently multiple” (Reference PreissPreiss 20), “recycled” (Reference KerriganKerrigan 239), and “repertorial” (Reference Knutson, Melnikoff and KnutsonKnutson, “Marlowe in Repertory”26), but the field more broadly – in its methods of reading, pedagogy, editing, and anthologizing – remains restricted by a preoccupation with origins, novelty, and creation stories, or what the book historian Tom Reference MoleMole has aptly described as “punctual historicism” (21). Readers and audiences remain drawn to the idea of a play’s moment of composition, even when there is little evidence as to when that moment may have been, or whether that composition happened at one time. It is now widely acknowledged that plays were performed in repertory, and that theatre and playbook publication were sustained and enriched as enterprises through individual and corporate acts of dramatic revival, adaptation, and repackaging. Yet this knowledge – that early modern drama is, in essence, a form of repetition – has not yet displaced the orientation of the field around moments of origin.

This book challenges the fetishization of first editions and first performances in early modern drama studies. The essays collectively argue that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of repetition and renewal. The contributors demonstrate the varied ways in which plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. The collection is necessarily wide and provocative in scope. The essays cover a wide time span, from the beginning of commercial theatre in the Elizabethan period (Andy Kesson [Chapter 1], Roslyn L. Knutson [Chapter 4], Elizabeth E. Tavares [Chapter 9]), to Jacobean (David Nicol [Chapter 5], Jennifer Moss Waghorn [Chapter 11]) and Caroline-era revival (Eoin Price [Chapter 3], Catherine Clifford [Chapter 7]). The collection also extends the study of Renaissance drama beyond the expected cutoff point marked by the closure of the theatres in 1642. Essays by Justin Kuhn (Chapter 6) and Laura Estill (Chapter 12) deal with reprints and revivals during the theatre ban, while Heidi Craig (Chapter 8) and Emma Depledge (Chapter 2) extend the discussion further to consider Restoration and eighteenth-century reprints, thereby challenging critical orthodoxies which discourage scholars from crossing between the Renaissance and Restoration periods. This approach enables us to challenge established periodic boundaries and reveal the long historical processes of social, cultural, and theatrical change.

Shakespeare, his acting company, and his publishers are central to several chapters in the collection, from Moss Waghorn’s piece on the King’s Men’s musical reinventions of plays in the first half of the seventeenth century, to investigations by Kuhn and Depledge into new print editions of Shakespeare plays in the 1650s and beyond. However, the collection addresses a wide number of agents and institutions of playmaking beyond those associated with Shakespeare’s dramatic output. These include playwrights (John Lyly, Ben Jonson, John Marston, James Shirley, to name but a few), but also actors and acting companies, theatrical entrepreneurs, political figures such as the Master of the Revels, publishers, printers and booksellers, and playhouses and performance spaces at court, not to mention the diverse and shifting audiences and readers who demanded and – in many ways – participated in forms of dramatic repetition and renewal. The large scope and periodic range of the collection allow us to offer a sense of a bigger picture which can often be obscured by the necessarily rigorous attention to detail that book history and theatre history demand. Collectively, the chapters analyze and connect particular forms of dramatic repetition and renewal in order to rethink ideas about temporality, commerce, aesthetics, agency, and canon formation. In what remains of this Introduction, we aim to set out some of the core principles that underpin our collective endeavors.

Fetishizing Firsts

It is not a coincidence that the best-known and most widely studied of books, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, is now most commonly referred to as Shakespeare’s First Folio or often simply the First Folio, even though, of course, it is neither the first published folio, nor the first published folio of dramatic works (Samuel Daniel, in 1601, and Ben Jonson, in 1616, got there earlier). The appeal of the book resides not only in the canonical standing of its author but also in the status attached to the idea of firstness. Famously, the volume contains eighteen plays never before printed; without the folio, it is possible that they may not have been passed down to us. What is less frequently remarked upon is that the collection also contains eighteen plays that had appeared previously in print. This most famous of firsts was also a source of repetition and renewal. In some of the most striking recent work on the 1623 folio, Reference SmithEmma Smith has sought to reorient attention away from its origin by charting its “biography” (18), but in the view of Brian Reference CummingsCummings, the more the book is studied, the more it becomes a fetishized object about which we now “know too much” (259). The fame of the first Shakespeare folio outstrips other books in such a way that distorts our understanding of early modern drama; the powerful sense of the book’s firstness, even though contestable, continues to drive interest in the volume, often at the expense of other potential avenues.

It was not ever thus. As Adam G. Reference Hooks and SmithHooks observes, Nicholas Rowe used a copy of the 1685 Fourth Folio in his 1709 collected works of Shakespeare, rather than the 1623 edition. It was not until 1765 that George Steevens became “the first editor to explicitly state the primary textual authority of the First Folio” (“Afterword” 190). The fame of the First Folio is not without justification, but its primacy is not quite the inevitable consequence it may now seem. In turn, many of our current standard scholarly practices, which privilege origin and creation stories at the expense of reprints, revivals, and other forms of renewal, can be traced back to eighteenth-century criticism. As Tiffany Stern has recently shown, for example, the chronological shape of the early modern dramatic canon, and our methods for ordering plays, are – for better and for worse – the legacy of the eighteenth-century editor Edmond Malone. Malone was the first scholar to establish a chronology for Shakespeare’s plays in his Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakespeare were Written (1778; revised and republished in 1790 and 1821), setting a precedent for how to understand Shakespeare and Shakespearean drama in terms of a playwrighting career. Many of Malone’s dates and sequences have been discredited or challenged by modern scholarship, and some scholars such as Martin Wiggins in British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, have recently begun to present plays in terms of date “ranges” that identify possible dates for “additions,” “revisions,” or “adaptations.” But Shakespeare and early modern drama studies is still – in Stern’s phrase – “Malonian at heart”: Chronology of original composition is still king and wields significant influence over biography, theatre history, bibliography, and stylometric analysis, and indeed any form of scholarship that – consciously or not – conceives of Shakespeare as having an “early Shakespeare” and “late Shakespeare,” or an “Elizabethan Shakespeare” and “Jacobean Shakespeare” period (Reference SternStern Chronology 89).

The field of early modern drama studies remains driven by a desire to trace or imagine an originary scene of writing, a play’s graphic birth. There is still a presiding impulse, in theatre history and historically minded criticism, to understand an early modern play in the context of what James Shapiro has elegantly described as a rich and singular “cultural moment” (Reference ShapiroShapiro, 1599 152; Reference Shapiro1606 13) of creation. But while often illuminating, the fixation on a cultural “moment” time-bounds texts, making it harder to appraise them outside or beyond the period in which they were first written or performed. In a similar vein, the “evolutionary view” of early modern theatre critiqued by Jeremy Reference Lopez and LopezLopez (“General Introduction” 2), in which each play can be understood in part by its relationship with its forebears, also arguably simplifies the much more temporally complex modes of composition and reception, closing off a wider range of possibilities. The critical fascination with linear, chronological narratives of early modern drama, despite its limitations, remains ingrained in scholarly practice. It is evident in part from the ways in which plays are dated, categorized, and ordered for a wide variety of audiences and readers, in theatre and book history, but also in literary criticism, chronologies and catalogues of drama, anthologies and collected works, literary biographies, and performance adverts and programmes. Students of early modern English drama typically encounter plays, Shakespearean and otherwise, in anthologies and collected works that are structured and packaged chronologically: Plays typically appear in the order in which they are determined to have been written or first performed, and these dates are often provided on contents pages as well as in introductions to plays. Resisting the urge to chronologize has proven difficult even for iconoclastic editions such as Lopez’s anthology of early modern drama. Instead of arranging the plays in the chronological order of their first performance or publication, Reference LopezLopez playfully – but nonetheless, chronologically – orders them in terms of the time period in which they appear to have been set (“Reference Lopez and LopezGeneral Introduction” 2–3). Scholarship has found it hard to imagine a way of doing theatre history or criticism that does not, in some sense or other, reify the very idea of firstness.

The privileging of first performances and first publications, and of originary moments of composition, is often couched in forms of language and imagery that encode ideologies of newness and oldness. Historians, critics, teachers, and students of Renaissance drama often refer to plays as being “conceived” and “born,” or as having “maiden runs” and “afterlives.” These are terms which, despite or perhaps because of their familiarity, disguise social commentary as neutral statements of fact. Language that focalizes and celebrates plays’ newness is in a sense rather old, and indeed – despite the impact of Malone and other post-Enlightenment scholarship – many of our models for reading early modern drama and situating plays temporally are rooted in the period itself. In early modern England, plays were widely presented and peddled as new or old in gendered, social, and political terms. Discourses of newness and oldness swirled around and through plays in both performance and print. The preface to the second issue of Reference ShakespeareShakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, for example, figures printed plays as fresh “Commodities” “never stal’d with the Stage, never clapper clawd with the palmes of the vulger” (sig. ¶2r). John Hall’s encomium to James Shirley’s The Cardinal imagines plays as “reliques” preserving and honouring the “dying Scene” of a bygone theatrical age (sig. A4v), while Walter Burre’s dedicatory epistle appended to his edition of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle presents the play as an unwanted child “fostred” and newly “clad in good lasting cloaths” (sig. A2r–v) by caring publishers. More disturbingly, John Day’s address to the reader in Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (newly titled Reference Norton and SackvilleThe Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex) describes the tragedy as “a faire maide” who has been sexually “corrupted,” “disfigured,” and “thrust … out of dores dishonested” by a rival stationer and needs to be newly “apparelled, trimmed, and attired” in the form of a corrective reprint (sig. A2r). Donald Reference LuptonLupton’s satirical character sketch of a playhouse in London and the Countrey Carbanadoed (1632; 79–83) mocks theatre’s desperate reliance on strategies of dressing up the old as new. Actors, Lupton writes, “are as crafty with an old play, as Bauds with olde faces; the one puts on a new fresh colour, the other a new face and Name” (79–80). Acting companies on provincial tours, he goes on, recycle material and thus “do as some wandring Sermonists, make one sermon travaile and serve twenty Churches” (82).

The power of the language of oldness and newness to shape perception is most apparent in dramatic paratexts: Prologues, epilogues, inductions, title pages, prefaces, dedications, and so on. Dramatic paratexts framed plays using densely metaphorical language designed to direct audiences’ and readers’ commercial and aesthetic responses to notions of newness and oldness. The prologue to the 1634 quarto of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, over twenty years old when it was first printed, explores an analogy between new plays and virginities or “maidenheads”:

It would be easy to say this prologue fetishizes the play as new by appealing to masculinist fantasies of defloration. The opening lines seem, at first, to position audience members as customers in a brothel or marriage market which prizes “maidenheads” as premium objects of sale. The promise of an erotic encounter with the new may set teeth on edge or make stomachs queasy. Yet the analogy between new plays and maidenheads is complicated and ironized. Its two halves struggle to fit straightforwardly: They are only “near akin,” and the kinship between the male play (blushing on “his” marriage day or premiere) and his female counterpart (“her,” the bride preparing for the wedding night) suggests an incestuous coupling. The analogy is also confused, as Jeffrey Reference MastenMasten has shown, by a sustained ambiguity as to who the (feminized but male) play’s husband is in this “masculinist economy” of buying and selling plays: It may be Shakespeare and Fletcher as authors, the King’s Men, or the paying audience (56–57). The prologue implies that perceptions of newness and goodness are conditioned by forms of repetition and renewal – that is, what happens after the consummation of the marriage day. A good play, the prologue claims, is like a woman who retains her “Modesty” – a term Lois Potter glosses as “freshness” (Reference Shakespeare and PotterPotter 177 n) – after “first night’s stir.” This comparison is particularly significant if we consider that, as G. R. Reference Proudfoot, Fletcher, Shakespeare and ProudfootProudfoot has argued, the prologue may have been written not for the play’s premiere in 1613 – its so called “maiden run” – but for one of its revivals by the King’s Men, in 1619–20 or 1625–6 (xii).

Newness, like goodness, is suggested to be a matter of perception, and thus the prologue is not simply being – in Donald Lupton’s words – “crafty with an old play.” It is provoking reflection on how the cultural value of drama is generated and tested in the theatre. The prologue sells the play as both new and old at the same time to demonstrate its worth to an audience who has already paid to see it. “The play’s value is said to exist prior to its sale as a cultural object,” Jonathan P. Reference LambLamb writes of the prologue, “but its value is contingent on that sale. In this case, a good play retains its inherent value when its novelty holds up under iteration, but the only way we know it has that value is if it holds up under iteration” (211). Iteration is both the aim and the method, essential to the craft of all playmaking in early modern commercial theatre. Despite its initial fetishization of new plays as marketable maidenheads, this prologue redirects our attention to the desirable value inherent in processes of repetition and renewal. Subsequent scholarship has tended, whether explicitly or implicitly, to prioritize firsts, often in spite of what the period’s playwrights and playgoers have tended to say about the drama they wrote and consumed. Taking our cue from the early moderns, this collection aims to look beyond firsts and toward the multiple forms of repetition and renewal that proliferated in the playhouses and print shops of early modern London.

Repetition and Renewal

Challenging the perceived inferiority of adaptation, the literary theorist Linda Reference Hutcheon and FlynnHutcheon remarked that Reference Sandersadaptation “is second without being secondary” (9). The same is true of reprints and revivals. In privileging first editions and performances, scholarship has tended to view reprints and revivals as of secondary importance, but the renewal of plays was a core component of the early modern theatre business and book trade. Indeed, what we know of early modern theatrical practice indicates that revivals were not just a desired outcome that a select few popular plays might attain but rather a necessary function of the repertory system, without which the London theatre business could not have sustained itself. The records of the owner of the Rose playhouse, Philip Henslowe – colloquially known as Henslowe’s diary – demonstrate that, while potentially lucrative, acquiring new plays was expensive. Playing companies needed new plays to generate interest and excitement, but they needed old ones too. Revival was cheaper than producing new plays (Reference Knutson, Melnikoff and KnutsonKnutson, Repertory 36), so theatre companies necessarily revived drama frequently. For the early modern theatre business, there was no survival without revival.

But revivals were also more than simply an economic necessity, not just a way for theatre companies to pad out their repertory. Revivals could be lucrative for playing companies and attractive to audiences. Henslowe’s accounts show that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine returned very high box office receipts when revived, the kind of figures ordinarily only associated with a theatrical premiere.¹ In his antitheatrical attack on actors, “A Common Player,” John Stephens aligned revivals and new performances in such a way as to suggest that both were highly sought-after theatrical events. The actor’s main concern, according to Stephens, is “A new play, or A play newly revived” (sig. W3v). Revivals offered opportunities for playgoers to revisit plays they had seen years or decades earlier, but they could also attract new audiences, who may have heard of, but not seen, the plays of earlier generations. Theatre companies needed to revive plays, but crucially audiences also enjoyed revival. A revival of the Strange’s Men play Henslowe called “Jeronymo” – generally agreed to be Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy – also achieved some of the highest takings in Henslowe’s accounts, outperforming almost all new plays (HD 17).

Over time, revived plays became ever more central to the practice of the professional stage. By the time the theatres were shut down in 1642, a company such as the King’s Men, which had been in operation for several decades, had a sizeable back catalogue of plays, many of which were still in use long after their theatrical premieres. On August 7, 1641, the Lord Chamberlain warned the Stationers’ Company not to print King’s Men plays without the theatrical company’s consent. His letter contained a list of sixty-one plays in the company’s repertory, most of which were years, or in many cases, decades old (Reference BentleyBentley 65–66). Not only were these plays still in use, but they were valuable enough to be worth protecting. Companies which were not as long-standing as the King’s Men also sought to acquire older material to cater to the tastes of their clientele. The theatre impresario Christopher Beeston was particularly astute at choosing older plays for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men to revive in the 1630s and had a penchant for successfully performing plays that had failed on their first performance (Reference PricePrice, “Why Was The Knight ” 62–63). Old plays were in high demand, and various playing companies traded on their appeal (Reference ButlerButler, Crisis 185). Revival was not a niche interest for playgoers but a major attraction of the early modern stage. As Eleanor Reference CollinsCollins argues, “the staging of revivals was itself a deliberate repertory strategy” for various theatre companies in the Caroline era (121).

Given their abundance, revivals were attended by large numbers of playgoers over long periods of time. Relatively few playgoers will have got to see a play on its premiere or in its initial theatrical run, but, taken cumulatively, many more playgoers will have seen plays in revival. A playgoer born in the late 1590s may have been too young to see – or may not remember seeing – the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s Othello but will have had multiple later opportunities to see the play in revival. The play’s first print edition of 1622 alludes to “diuerse” performances “at the Globe, and at the Black-Friers,” and surviving evidence attests to revivals of Othello at the Globe in April 1610, at Oxford in the same year, at court between Christmas 1612 and April 1613, at the Blackfriars in November 1629 (as a benefit for the Master of the Revels, Henry Herbert) and in May 1635 at the same playhouse, and at Hampton Court on December 6, 1636 (Wiggins #1437). Indeed, of the small number of firsthand accounts of early modern performance, several relate to revivals. There is no direct record, for example, of the early performances of Othello, but there exist two separate accounts of revivals of the play at two different venues in the same year: a Globe performance recorded by the secretary of Prince Louis Frederick of Würtemberg and an Oxford performance detailed by Henry Jackson (Reference Steggle and EvansSteggle, “A Prince”). Similarly, while there is no account of the early performances of Macbeth, Simon Forman famously detailed a April 20, 1611, revival, some five years after the play’s debut (Reference LeggattLeggatt, Macbeth, 94–95).

Henslowe’s accounts suggest that, due to the associated costs, plays were often revived without revisions (Reference KnutsonKnutson, Repertory 36). On occasions though, revived and reprinted plays differed from earlier productions and editions in notable ways. Reprints often declared changes made to earlier editions. The second edition of Romeo and Juliet (1599), the third edition of Richard III (1602), and the third edition of The Malcontent (1604) are all examples of playbooks that boasted of an “augmented” text on their title pages. Scholars have offered thoughtful reflections on some of the best-known revised texts, such as the additions to King Lear (Reference IoppoloIoppolo), Measure for Measure (Reference Taylor and JowettTaylor and Jowett), and The Spanish Tragedy (Reference SymeSyme, Theatre History). These texts, revised for revival, unsettle the idea that a play had a stable, easily discernible identity. Focusing primarily on the very earliest performances, scholars risk occluding a play’s subsequent stage life, making plays appear fixed and static when they were, as Tiffany Reference SternStern has shown (Reference SternDocuments 82), considerably more fluid. Studying reprints and revivals more concertedly – and extending the discussion beyond the most famous and canonically central examples – allows for a fuller and richer examination of early modern dramatic practice.

But even when revived and reprinted plays were not revised extensively, or at all, they were different from earlier performances and editions in a simple but utterly transformative way: They existed at a different moment in time. Historicist scholars have found many ways to situate texts in a variety of literary, theatrical, cultural, political, and religious contexts, but in doing so they have overwhelmingly privileged moments of composition and first production. A play first performed in the early seventeenth century might have a very different frame of reference for playgoers several decades later. Likewise, a reprinted play, even if marketed in a similar way to an earlier edition, might read differently given the new cultural circumstances in which it appeared. Theatre companies and book publishers sometimes capitalized on the newfound cultural resonances of older plays. The Admiral’s Men for example, staged George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, first performed around 1588, in 1601, the year in which news circulated about King Sebastian of Portugal, a character represented in Peele’s tragedy. King Sebastian, previously presumed dead, was rumored to be alive. On other occasions, theatre companies appear to have revived plays to intervene in political discussions, as Karen Reference BritlandBritland suggests was the case when the King’s Men revived Shakespeare’s Richard III at court in November 1633 (134), or more famously and contentiously, when the supporters of the Earl of Essex procured a Globe performance of Richard II, probably including the deposition scene, on the eve of the Essex “rising” in 1601 (Reference HammerHammer). The same was true of reprints: Publishers reprinted plays in later periods to reach new readers and to take advantage of political resonances that were unavailable, or less readily available, in earlier editions (Reference Farmer and StraznickyFarmer, “John Norton”; Reference LidsterLidster, “Caroline Reprints”). Changing cultural circumstances breathed new life into old plays (Reference Harrison and ShohetHarrison 141).

Reprints and revivals offer a challenge to standard, teleological conceptions of periodization by taking plays, playwrights, and players out of the historical circumstances within which they are usually time-bound. The plays of John Lyly, conventionally viewed as distinctively Elizabethan works, were reprinted and repackaged in the 1630s.² Plays such as Macbeth and Volpone, which have been read illuminatingly as responses to a specific, major political event, were still being performed decades after their premieres and accrued new associations over time (Reference HarrisHarris, “Smell of Macbeth”; Reference DuttonDutton, Volpone). Scholars have attended to the difficulties, ambiguities, and challenges of periodization (Reference Poole and WilliamsPoole and Williams; Reference Chakravarty and ThompsonChakravarty and Thompson). Terms such as “Renaissance” and “early modern,” both used in this volume, are contested and in many ways inadequate; and attempts to associate writers or performers narrowly with regnal time periods – the Elizabethan, the Jacobean, even Tudor and Stuart – are often in some sense unsatisfactory or limiting. Revival by nature crosses established boundaries. But despite their temporal complexity, reprints and revivals have not had a prominent part even in radical, field-changing studies of early modern dramatic temporality by Jonathan Gil Reference HarrisHarris (Untimely Matter) and Andrew Reference SoferSofer, which have done so much to challenge linear and teleological approaches to early theatre. Reprints and revivals offer new ways of thinking about temporality which challenge still-ingrained attitudes and assumptions.

Forms of Renewal

The contributors to this collection examine numerous forms of renewal in print and performance. We have chosen to consider the topic of reprints and revivals broadly and permissively, since the terms are complex, interrelated, and difficult to define satisfactorily. On face value, for example, a reprint might refer, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, to “An act of printing further copies of a work” or, more narrowly, “a new impression of a work previously printed, without alteration of the material” (n.1). In this view, reprints are “new” and yet unaltered; they are a continuation, rather than a departure. A reprint may renew an older text by duplicating it exactly or near exactly. But many later editions of early modern plays alter material, sometimes radically, and it was not unusual for such changes to be advertised on title pages. Hence, the second and third quartos of Hamlet declare themselves to be “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppy.” The fourth and fifth quartos contain the same title page phrasing but add “lastly printed.” If we follow the OED definition rigidly, then there is a question as to whether the second quarto of Hamlet (Q2) is a reprint of the first (Q1), since it departs so drastically from the earlier text. We have taken the view, however, that any edition beyond the first constitutes a reprint since it repeats and renews, even if it also reforms, material from an existing edition.

Our understanding of revival is also permissive. The OED offers the following definition, which hints at the word’s multiple possible meanings:

Revival, then, may be theatrical and/or textual; it can refer to a later set of performances which have taken place after a play’s initial run, but it could also refer to a publication of a play which makes newly available an old play. First editions too, can be seen as kinds of revival which generate new interest in a previously performed play. The first edition of Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter, for example, boasts on its title page that the play has been “more exactly revewed, corrected, and augmented since by the Author, for the more pleasure and profit of the Reader.” While the term “augmented” on playbook title pages seems usually to refer to changes that have been made to a previously printed text, the Barnes edition reminds us that the printing of any early modern play was already a kind of augmentation, a means of renewing older material in a different form. That print could be a form of revival was made even more explicit by Richard Lovelace, in his poem “Fletcher Reviv’d,” one of the prefatory poems appended to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio (a collection of plays never before printed). Lovelace imagines the edition (and his poem) as enabling the dead Fletcher to reach a new audience in print at a time when playhouse performance (and attendance) was prohibited. Indeed, as Marissa Reference NicosiaNicosia has argued, for “former actors” in the years of theatre closure, “printed playbooks were akin to revival” (471).

First editions can also contain reprints within them. While the Beaumont and Fletcher collection largely contained newly printed material, folio collections were often comprised of plays that had been printed in some form beforehand. Samuel Daniel’s The Works (1601) included an edition of his Cleopatra which represented the fifth time the play had appeared in print. The Ben Jonson folio of 1616 – a focus of Andrew Bozio’s chapter in our collection (Chapter 10) – contains nine plays of which only one, Epicene, had not been printed previously. The folio represented the fourth time that Every Man Out of His Humour had appeared in print. By the time the publishers of the 1623 Shakespeare folio came to produce their collection, the precedent that a major new volume might include older material alongside never-before-printed texts had been set. Several of Shakespeare’s plays had been printed numerous times previously. The “first” folio included the eighth edition of 1 Henry IV, the seventh edition of Richard III, and the sixth edition of Richard II. Romeo and Juliet appeared in print for the fifth time while Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Henry V, and 2 Henry VI received their fourth editions. These plays were already apparently popular in print, and their appearance in the collection was arguably as much as a selling point for the edition as the publication of the eighteen plays that had not appeared in print before.

Renewal, as the word implies, involves taking something that already exists in some form or other and rendering it new in some way. As our contributors discuss, that might mean, as in Estill’s essay, repackaging epilogues and prologues in a new anthology, or as in Moss Waghorn’s contribution, adding in new material to a performance, such as songs. The printing or performance of a text in a new temporal moment, or in a new performance context, may also constitute a kind of renewal, as Nicol details in his analysis of court revival, or as Craig outlines in her chapter on the Restoration republication of Tudor interludes. But our contributors are also alert to the fact that renewal involves continuity as well as change. The pleasure of encountering a revived or reprinted play may, as Clifford suggests in her chapter on Caroline court revival, have been to do with what stayed the same, as well as what varied. Chapters by Knutson and Tavares are similarly focused on the appeals of recycling and repeating familiar plays, tropes, and stage devices. Multiple performances or publications of a single play speak to an enduring interest. Print editions continually boast of new additions long after they were made new, as is the case with the 1637 Hamlet and the 1633 edition of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the title page of which erroneously presented the playtext as “Newly Corrected, Amended, and Enlarged with new Additions.” On the one hand, this title-page locution attests to the appeal of novelty; on the other, it reminds us, in its replication of earlier title pages, of the power of repetition.

The aim of this volume is not to police the borders of the new, nor to attempt to determine, in detailed terms, what it is that might make something new, nor at what point a refashioned text becomes something entirely new rather than merely renewed. Such conversations, if they are able to be had, are best attempted on a case-by-case basis, rather than in generalized terms. Instead, our objective is to emphasize that the renewal of early modern drama was multifaceted and multivalent, that renewal, in its varied forms, was fundamental to dramatic production and reception. In her study of adaptation, Julie Reference SandersSanders remarks that “Shakespeare is constantly being made new” (Reference SandersAdaptation 60) in the twenty-first century. While the continual renewal of Shakespeare’s works in myriad forms is now a major strand of critical inquiry, its prehistory remains understudied. The renewal of early modern drama – which included but was by no means limited to the revival and reprinting of Shakespeare – helped create the conditions by which Shakespeare would become the most renewed and revived of all English authors. If we are to understand how and why Shakespeare is revived today (a question that remains pressing and important), then it is necessary to study the many different forms of print and performance renewal that took place in London centuries earlier.

Methodologies

Reprints and revivals have garnered most attention for what they tell us about the economics of the theatre business and book trade and for what they suggest about the popularity of plays. Roslyn L. Knutson – one of the contributors to this volume – has done more than anyone to analyze the economic impulse behind theatrical revival. Knutson’s work has stressed the financial considerations theatre companies faced when choosing which plays to revive and when. Such considerations were often related to questions of theatrical taste. Theatre companies had to capture the attention of their audiences if they were to stay in business. So, for example, Reference KnutsonKnutson has argued that the Admiral’s Men revived and revised Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to try and ensure that an old, popular play which had lost its edge could appeal to audiences whose generic tastes were beginning to change (“Reference KnutsonInfluence” 274), while the King’s Men revived Hamlet around 1606 to 1608 to cash in on a wave of interest in revenge tragedy (Reference 256KnutsonPlaying Companies 124). Knutson’s contribution to this volume extends her interest in the economics of revival, and other contributors such as Kesson and Tavares are also invested in the ways that revivals appealed to playgoers and what those attractions might suggest about audience taste.

Reprints have similarly received attention as an important part of book-history analysis of playbook popularity, in which the work of Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser is highly influential (“Reference Farmer and LesserStructures,” “Reference Farmer and LesserRevisited,” “Reference Farmer, Lesser, Zucker and FarmerCanons and Classics”). In their estimation, reprint rates are the “criterion that brings us closest to consumer demand” (“Revisited” 5), revealing which plays were most avidly sought out by readers. Rather than making up a small part of the overall market, “reprints were a major component” of the total share, accounting for 37 percent of all printed plays, and 40 percent of all printed professional plays (“Revisited” 7 fn25). As a major component of the early modern printed playbook trade, reprints deserve greater consideration, and careful study of them can reveal new insights. Claire M. L. Reference BourneBourne has argued that it is only by attending to large corpora, including later editions, that scholars can begin to make sense of manuscript interventions in printed playbooks (“Reference BourneMarking” 368). Reprints deserve the kind of careful attention usually extended to first editions; they often include typographical features, or manuscript annotations, that mark them out as different from earlier editions. The third quarto of Arden of Faversham (1633), which was printed forty-one years after the play’s first publication, is a case in point. The third quarto contains a woodcut not present in earlier editions, and which apparently derived from a recently published ballad (Reference DuttonRichardson 99–100). The third quarto of John Marston’s The Insatiate Countess (1631) offers another rich example. Albert H. Reference TricomiTricomi documents a copy of the edition housed at the National Library of Scotland annotated by two seventeenth-century readers, which sheds light on their “analogical habits of reading” (107). In analyzing large corpora, which includes masses of reprinted plays as well as their usually more famous first editions, scholars such as Bourne demonstrate the advantages of making reprints fundamental, rather than adjunct, to the study of printed playbooks. Our volume includes chapters by Depledge, Craig, Kuhn, Estill, and Bozio which similarly show the value of studying reprints.

Bourne’s insistence on the importance of large corpora offers an important reminder of the value in looking beyond the canonically central plays and playwrights which have most frequently attracted scholarly attention. While important book history projects such as the Shakespeare Census and the Marlowe Census attempt the valuable work of locating and describing extant copies of plays by canonical playwrights, there has been much less sustained interest in reprints of plays by less well-known authors. The reprints and revivals of the most famous authors are most likely to garner attention, and this in turn calcifies the impression that those writers were peculiarly or uniquely popular. Attending to a wider range of reprinted and revived plays enables new perspectives on the early modern canon, challenging ingrained ideas about which plays were successful. As Peter Reference Kirwan, Kesson and SmithKirwan has discussed, Mucedorus, a play that is now relatively obscure, went through sixteen quarto editions between 1598 and 1656, making it far and away the most frequently printed play of the period. Information about revivals is patchier, but some of the top-grossing plays in the daily accounts of Henslowe, such as “The Wise Man of West Chester,” are now lost (Reference SymeSyme, “Meaning” 507). It seems likely that plays that are now at the fringes of the canon were among the most often revived within the period. Craig demonstrates in her contribution to this volume, for example, that rarely studied Tudor plays such as Tom Tyler and Gammer Gurton’s Needle were reprinted a century or more after their first publication, while in her essay on 1630s court revival, Clifford details the continued popularity of decades-old plays such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge. It may be stretching things to say that such plays were “for all time,” as Ben Jonson famously said of Shakespeare, but it is also true that they were not straightforwardly “of an age.”

Our collection pays due attention to reprints of plays by canonical writers such as Shakespeare (Depledge; Kuhn) and Jonson (Bozio), but we have cast our net widely. Accordingly, essays in this volume focus on reprints or revivals of plays by Lyly, George Peele, and Robert Wilson (Kesson), Marston (Price), Shirley (Estill), and a plethora of lost plays (Knutson; Tavares). The collection considers plays by a range of theatre companies performing at several different playhouses, including the Children of the Chapel Royal at the Blackfriars (Kesson), the Admiral’s Men at the Rose (Knutson), and the King’s Men at both the Globe and Blackfriars (Price; Moss Waghorn), as well as different playing companies performing at various court performance venues. Nicol, for example, considers the interaction between performances by the King’s Men and Prince Charles’ Men at the court of James I, while Clifford is interested in the various companies employed to perform before Charles I and Henrietta Maria a decade later. By adopting a broader scope, the collection aims to avoid homogenizing revival and allows the contributors to produce detailed and nuanced accounts of the various agents responsible for theatrical production in early modern England. There was no single reason that caused a play to receive a reprint or a revival – although financial considerations were often high on the agenda – so our contributors explore the numerous factors that might have influenced the varied agents (publishers, theatre companies, the Master of the Revels) to produce, or license, the renewal of plays.

The collection is structured in four parts, which each address a different aspect of print and performance renewal. The first two parts examine the rationale for reprinting and revival; the last two parts reexamine the complex concepts of oldness and newness which are integral to the study of dramatic renewal. The first set of three chapters in Part I focus on the logic of renewal. Andy Kesson’s chapter “1584: The First Evidence for Playhouse Reprints and Revivals?” (Chapter 1) opens the collection. Taking four plays printed in 1584 as a kind of corpus – George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, and John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao – Kesson attends to the “deeply nonteleological rhythms of performance, revival, publication, and reprinting.” While these 1584 plays helped establish a marketplace for print and performance, paving the way for the more critically well-studied commercial successes of the following decade and beyond, they also experimented with dramaturgical and narrative form in ways that are at odds with canonical 1590s drama and the rise of Shakespeare. What emerges from Kesson’s essay is that a central appeal of print and performance renewal was its pleasurable and profitable intermixing of the old and the new.

Continuing Kesson’s discussion of print popularity, but in a much later period, Emma Depledge’s chapter, “Alterations, Piracies and Nonce Volumes: Shakespeare’s Print Popularity, 1660–1700” (Chapter 2), argues that playbook publication offers the clearest indication of an author’s or play’s popularity. Intervening in long-standing debates about Shakespeare’s popularity, the chapter takes as its focus understudied texts such as multiauthor “nonce” anthologies, expanding our sense of what might be considered a reprint beyond the kind of editions ordinarily privileged in bibliographical analysis. In doing so, she complicates and enriches our understanding of what might constitute the logic of renewal. Clearly, a primary aim for purveyors of playbook republication was to make money, and reprints of varying kinds proved profitable.

Whereas the first two chapters in this collection offer readings of different kinds of print and stage popularity, the third chapter in Part I, “The Malcontent and the Records of Revival” by Eoin Price, offers a slightly more skeptical account of scholarly attempts to impose meaning on practices of theatrical renewal. In Chapter 3, Price considers the diary records of a Caroline playgoer who attended a revival of John Marston’s The Malcontent in 1635 and asks what insights theatre historians might be able to draw from such fragmentary records. Kesson and Depledge demonstrate that reprints and revivals were underpinned by commercial logic; Price accepts such claims but seeks to emphasize the “messier, chaotic, more random reality of playmaking and playgoing.”

The next three chapters, which form Part II, focus in greater detail on specific agents of renewal: theatrical entrepreneurs, censors, and playbook publishers. In Chapter 4, “Henslowe on Revivals,” Roslyn L. Knutson examines the best-known records relating to theatrical revival in the period, compiled by the most famous of early modern theatre entrepreneurs, the owner of the Rose playhouse, Philip Henslowe. Henslowe’s book of accounts shows that revival was a routine feature of repertorial commerce. Challenging still-ingrained attitudes which treat lost plays as mere filler, Knutson argues that many plays which are now lost had serious commercial appeal. Many lost plays were revived, apparently successfully; their revival was, in turn, essential to the wider commercial enterprise of the early modern repertory.

In Chapter 5, “Reviving by Design: The Christmas Season at Court, 1621–1622,” David Nicol turns our attention toward the Master of the Revels as an agent of revival and focuses on the court, rather than the playhouse or the print shop, as a key site of dramatic renewal. Whereas Price cautions against seeing playhouse revival as a careful, finely calibrated process, Nicol shows that selecting plays for performance at court was a necessarily sensitive task which the Master of the Revels had to negotiate adroitly. Using the unusually well-documented 1621–2 court season as a case study, Nicol proposes that Sir George Buc aimed to please King James by creating a program of theatrical activities which entailed the strategic revival of old plays that resonated with contemporary court politics.

The final essay in Part II focuses on the print marketplace as a site of transformational renewal. In Chapter 6, “Reprinting Othello in Republican England,” Justin Kuhn examines the bookseller William Leake’s 1655 edition of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Leake, Kuhn argues, aimed to capitalize on the new cultural and political circumstances in producing his edition. Othello, a play set in the republic of Venice, gained a new set of resonances, unanticipated by its author, when read in 1650s England, years after the execution of Charles I and during a period of republican rule. Most significantly, the reprint invited readings of Iago as a contagion in a republican state vulnerable to insidious ideologies of “private interest.” The villain’s infectious ethos of self-interest would have been especially politically charged in republican England, where there was an anxious emphasis on the virtues of civic duty and working for the “common good.” Stationers such as Leake reshaped the meanings of plays by reprinting them at opportune moments, variously motivated by their own private financial interest, a desire to shape public and political discourse, or a combination of the two.

In Part III, the third set of essays explore, in different periods and in different settings, the varied appeals of oldness. Catherine Clifford’s chapter, “Performing Nostalgia: Reviving Jacobean Plays at the Court of Charles I” (Chapter 7), argues that, while reviving plays often involved varying kinds of change – in circumstances, in venue, perhaps also of the performance text itself – the frequent revival of certain well-loved plays at the court of Charles I and Henrietta Maria demonstrates that oldness itself had value. Charles invested a good deal of time in watching plays with which he was very familiar, some of which he had known from childhood. Analyzing patterns of dramatic revival at court in the 1630s, Clifford investigates Charles’s spectatorship as both a political and a personal activity, consistently driven by the king’s “impulse to reenact and idealize the past” as he sought to stabilize his present and future rule.

Chapter 8, “A Century of English Drama: Restoration Reprints of Tudor Plays” by Heidi Craig, is similarly concerned with theatrical nostalgia, though Craig is primarily focused on degrees of oldness that shade into the “historical,” stretching beyond all living memory. Focusing on 1661 reprints of two anonymous Tudor plays which were over a hundred years old, Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Tom Tyler and His Wife, Craig calls attention to the pleasure that consumers of print plays might find in the reprinting of plays that were explicitly marketed as old, and even old-fashioned. Craig argues that the reprinting of Tudor interludes in the 1660s was an important part of a wider project to construct a history of English drama.

Elizabeth E. Tavares rounds off Part III with her chapter, “Cham’s Beard and Tartar’s Bow: Staging Mongolia in and after the Elizabethan Repertory” (Chapter 9). Tavares revisits some of the terrain of Knutson’s essay, focusing in particular on a lost “Tamar Cham” play and its sequel. Yet in examining the plays and their allusive afterlives, the chapter aims to move beyond the economic focus common to many studies of theatrical revival. Tavares shows that the repetitious nature of the early modern repertory gave rise to the potent figure of the stage Tartar but also enabled the promulgation of racialized stereotypes which, while evidently appealing to early audiences, have proven to have damaging legacies.

The final part of the volume, Part IV, considers the potential novelty of reprints and revivals. Andrew Bozio’s chapter, “New Worlds, Old Plots: Atlantic Conquest and the Revised Every Man in His Humour” (Chapter 10), attends to Ben Jonson’s dramatic revision. In changing the setting of his play from Florence to London, and in making a range of other revisions, Jonson grappled with the changing nature of the city, as London grew into a global metropolis reshaped by English colonial ventures and the influx of commodities such as tobacco from the New World. Jonson’s revision of his own play, Bozio argues, “both acknowledges and attempts to manage the consequences of this transformation for his comedy of humours.”

The next chapter, “Musical Reinventions for the King’s Men” by Jennifer Moss Waghorn (Chapter 11), is similarly invested in the transformative potential of theatrical revision. However, by focusing on music, it moves beyond the playwright as the agent of revival to consider composers and musicians as collaborators in the production of theatrical meaning. Analyzing a diverse range of King’s Men plays, including Measure for Measure, Fletcher’s The Mad Lover, Sir John Suckling’s The Sad One, and William Cavendish’s The Variety, Moss Waghorn investigates the myriad ways in which music – a key constituent of playhouse performance – could revitalize and revivify the repertory of a major company across several decades.

Finally, Chapter 12 by Laura Estill, “Frames without Pictures: Shirley’s Prologues and Epilogues in Poems &c (1646),” considers the ways that prologues and epilogues circulated beyond or outside of the plays to which they were theoretically attached. Shirley’s Poems emerges as a temporally complex and peculiar collection. It features reprints of prologues and epilogues (but without the plays they refer to) alongside other paratexts printed for the first time and in some cases referring to plays that no longer survive. Estill argues that publication of the collection is an act of self-canonization: In presenting his prologues and epilogues as a threshold to his dramatic oeuvre, Shirley frames himself as Ben Jonson’s heir, a great poet-playwright who deserved to be poet laureate.

As the first extended study to focus primarily on reprints and revivals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the present volume aims to make forms of renewal the central subject of study, rather than a subsidiary topic or an afterthought. The collection seeks both to reflect on current critical approaches to revival and to push the conversation in new directions. But our insistence that reprints and revivals are important is by no means entirely novel. Rather than beginning the study of revival from scratch, our task is to renew the study of renewal.