The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks

Abstract

IN THE POPULARITY OF PLAYBOOKS REVISITED,; Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser take so many opportunities to praise my essay The of Playbooks (hereafter simply Publication) that I regret being unable to return compliment as often.1 Their arguments, however, have failed to convince me that I was mistaken about the relative unpopularity of playbooks (18). One of my aims in Publication was to make literary historians take a new and more critical look at some tired old assumptions-rarely challenged but often groundless-about place of plays in early modern book trade: how and why they came to be published; how keenly (or otherwise) they were sought by publishers; how quickly (or otherwise) retail customers snapped them up in bookshops. At end of their paper Farmer and Lesser (hereafter the authors) declare that reevaluation must continue (29). I therefore hope they will accept that this critique is a necessary step in that process. In their opening paragraph authors present three quotations from what I think of as bad old days. For contrast, in next paragraph they quote several recent studies influenced by Publication-two of which suggest that some scholars are rejecting old myths so forcefully that they risk overbalancing in opposite direction. Of plays first published in 1583-1642, I wrote that fewer than 21 percent were reprinted within nine years and fewer than 41 percent within twentyfive.2 Those numbers do not quite support claim thatvery few of them were so popular as to justify editions after first.3 And while wording is certainly based on my own, I would neither make nor endorse assertion that publishers hardly bothered with them4 But overstatements of that kind can be countered without going so far as to argue that printed plays were really much more popular than their mere numbers suggest. In attempting to argue just that, authors have gone astray in several ways: historically, logically, and mathematically.