Dedications, Epistles to the Reader, and Prefatory Custom in Printed English Playbooks, 1559–1642

Abstract

Abstract This essay argues for the value of approaching printed dedications and addresses to readers through a comparative lens. For printed drama in particular, the presence of readerly paratexts has been a means of charting the genre’s literary ascent. The essay presents a bibliometric survey of the two paratexts in plays printed between 1559 and 1642, and compares their rates of occurrence in plays from the professional theatres with those from nonprofessional contexts. Contrary to the critical commonplace that the establishment of early modern literary culture saw the decline of patronage and the rise of the figure of the reader, the rates of publication of dedications and addresses to readers suggest the opposite. The essay documents a striking absence of attention to readers in the preliminaries of playbooks and finds that the dedication was the more popular form of prefatory address for both professional and nonprofessional plays, although professional plays initially favoured addresses to readers. After suggesting ways of accounting for these trends and considering their implications, the essay concludes with a discussion of dramatic prefaces which self-reflexively invoke the ‘custom’ of having a printed preface. The essay argues that this rhetorical convention shows authors and stationers weighing the merits of prefatory matter and negotiating the attendant question of literary worth as they sought to position their plays favourably in the print marketplace.