Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature

Abstract

This article reevaluates the significance of buying and reading English play quartos in stab-stitched copies. A survey of more than 2,500 surviving books from the period before 1641 demonstrates that stab-stitching was the dominant choice for short quartos of all forms and genres—not only playbooks and ‘ephemeral’ publications—forcing us to abandon orthodox narratives that use the physical appearance of playbooks as a way to gauge their literary credentials. Poetry by Sidney and Spenser was also sold stab-stitched, and so too were books ranging from humanist classics like More’s Utopia to philosophical treatises written in Latin. Early-modern stab-stitching reminds us that the meaning of bibliographical features is almost always relative, contingent upon book-trade norms and consumer expectations. Playbooks may have been ‘cheap quartos’, but this identity was one that served to connect rather than distance them from other literature.