Re-assessing the seventeenth-century quarto of Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1602-04)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sir David Lindsay’s morality play Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (c.1552) is the only surviving drama of pre-Reformation Scotland. A quarto printed by Robert Charteris in Edinburgh in 1602, and redistributed in London in 1604, is accepted to be the best full representation of the play as it was originally performed. This essay explores the major historical challenges posed by the play’s transmission into print in the early seventeenth century. Drawing on bibliographical and contextual evidence, it argues that the Satyre quarto is best understood as a work of ‘succession literature’ intervening on the accession of King James VI/I to the English throne.