Surface Impressions: Drama and Book Buying in Early Modern England

This dissertation contends that readers in Shakespeare’s time literally judged books by their covers, and that minimal reading strategies had a surprising impact on the production and reception of early modern drama. Despite their recent invention in the late-fifteenth century, title-pages quickly became a subject of widespread fascination among both general and scholarly readers, evolving from sixteenth-century criticism of superficial title-page perusers to seventeenth-century praise of experts in “Title Page Learning.” I posit that this surface-level reading practice extended to the bookshop’s frontage—stall, window, shop sign—where title-pages were advertised to passersby, cultivating a perception of the shopfront as interpretable textual architecture, and of book shopping as sense-making. In analyses of works by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Kyd, and others, I recover the ways in which early moderns formed impressions of print drama through the purchasing experience: encountering castoff quartos collaged on the backsides of shop doors, browsing stalls checkered with play and sermon title-pages that served as makeshift chessboards, bidding for Ben Jonson portraits at art auctions near the former site of the Ben Jonson’s Head bookshop. Ultimately, I argue that the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries assume new interpretive valences when we attend to their material surfaces in their original retail contexts, as did early modern book buyers.