The Commonplacing of Professional Plays Revisited: Print, Theater, and Early Modern Institutional Exchange

Abstract

In early 1600, William Holme would have seemed unlikely to be the stationer who would soon transform the publication of early modern drama. Over the course of a ten-year career, through 1599, he had sold just thirteen titles, none of which he reprinted and none of which was a play. But that would soon change. On April 8, 1600, Holme entered Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour in the Stationers’ Register, and published the first edition shortly thereafter.1 This playbook changed the way in which the book trade printed and sold early modern drama, and not only because the claim on its title page that it contained “more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted” was unprecedented among the era’s professional vernacular playbooks.2Every Man Out also inaugurated the practice of publishing professional vernacular drama with printed commonplace markers, the full-line font change or marginal commas (sometimes inverted) used to signal aphoristic, extractable wisdom. Prior to 1600, commonplace markers had appeared in translations of classical and French drama and in vernacular nonprofessional plays and nondramatic literature. But no professional vernacular playbook featured printed commonplace markers until Every Man Out’s first quarto. It was thus Holme who published what was, in the spring of 1600, one of early modern London’s most innovative playbooks.