All in the Playwrights' Hands

Abstract

IN THE ADVANCE publicity for Grace Ioppolo's latest book the Roudedge catalogue announced a volume entided Dramatic Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson , Middleton and Heywood. The change of tide is significant. The new one provides a more accurate reflection of the work's contents, for in it Ioppolo systematically attempts to place the playwright back at the very centre of studies of early modern dramatic texts. For Ioppolo, the dramatist was not only the figure who initiated the journey that a late sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century playscript would undertake after leaving its author's pen, but also the key figure and in some cases the only figure who controlled its subsequent evolution into a text for either reading or performance. In her previous book {Revising Shakespeare , Harvard University Press, 1991) Ioppolo showed that Shakespeare and his contemporaries, prompted by practical, literary, or political considerations, routinely returned to their dramatic works to make alterations; in this new monograph she goes a stage further, arguing that governing all the processes that a playscript would undergo rehearsal, the copying of the text (both in its complete form and in its constituent actors' parts), scrutiny by the censor, realisation in print the dramatist remained the main, if not the only, locus of authority. In so arguing, Ioppolo is contradicting a body of recent scholarship that has almost attained the status of a new critical orthodoxy. Her methodology in this book in itself represents a challenge to some of the principal proponents of the 'death of the author' trend in early modern theatre studies. Throughout Dramatists and their Manuscripts she insists that her own insights derive from first-hand examination of the extant manuscripts themselves, rather than from printed transcripts, and she denounces many of the luminaries of contemporary bibliography for failing (or being intellectually incompetent) to do the same. Several prominent figures come under the lash in this regard: Douglas Brooks ( From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modem England , Cambridge University Press, 2002), Paul Werstine, Leah Marcus, and, especially, Jeffrey Masten {Textual Intercourse , Cambridge