Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 8 (2019), pp. 7-16
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-24878

ISSN 2279-7149 (online)
www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
2019 Firenze University Press

Editorial

This collection of essays is entitled Beyond Books and Plays precisely because 
its aim is to reflect on the relationship between performance cultures and 
practices of writing within and beyond the actual texts of the plays, or 
the material evidence of existing books. The attention to materiality that 
has emerged out of Textual Studies and the Sociology of Texts since the 
1980s allows us – indeed requires us – to contextualize the production and 
transmission of texts within the specific context of early modern theatre.

Theatres are places for performance, and consequently represent points 
of contact between material traditions and immaterial legacies, between 
traces of written memory and practices in oral traditions. In medieval 
Europe, in a context of expansion and secularization of writing practices, 
adopting a written text for performances created a link between literary 
competence and traditions of entertainment or celebration. Darwin Smith’s 
contribution, ‘About French Vernacular Tradition’ systematically examines 
French manuscripts of sacred and profane dramas performed between 
the thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. Smith’s survey provides a 
glossary of terms used to classify manuscripts in terms of their form, content, 
and function. As ‘theatre manuscripts’ gradually became objects in their own 
right, they seemed ‘to invade the complex process to performance through 
rehearsals and vice-versa: players’ parts, books of prologues, conductor’s 
books, sermons, panels for characters and locations on stage, reference 
books, lists of secrets (special effects), of players and characters – of which 
only a few still exist (30). Smith concludes by exploring the variations and 
‘performed layers’ found in the writing processes of Maistre Pierre Pathelin 
and the Mysteres des Trois Doms. In the layers produced by performance 
processes, the original, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, served 
as a ‘full text used as a reference book (le livre) in a definite place and time’ 
(36). The same denomination – original, book – emerges from documents 
of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cycles of English Mystery Plays (Mills 
2007). The ‘stage original’, when used for rehearsals and performances, 
was transcribed  in separate parts for the players. These parts had the 
characteristic size and shape of rôles, or rolls, like those used to perform the 
Passion in the Coliseum in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rome, or like 
the Elizabethan scrolls, and the papeles for the actors of the professional 



raimondo guarino8 

Spanish troupes (for this kind of manuscript see Lalou 1991; Palfrey and 
Stern 2007; for the rotuli used in the Coliseum Passion Plays, Wisch and 
Newbigin 2013; for papeles, Vaccari 2006). Texts that were dismembered 
to be given to the players to perform were often lost, as was the case in the 
plays used in Italian court festivals (Bortoletti 2008). Theatre manuscripts 
were tools, and as such they convey information about their use and users.  
They served as aide-memoirs, supporting the transmission of information 
both in the context of the performance and beyond. In many cases, as with 
the Umbrian confraternities, they help us situate performance activities 
within the cults and ceremonies of the communities that adopted them 
(Nerbano 2006). The fluctuation of writing practices between permanence 
and impermanence accompanied the transition and overlap between 
manuscript and print cultures (for the impact of printing on the textual 
tradition of French Mystères, Runnalls 1999).

The introduction of printing in the second half of the fifteenth 
century, allowed a text with an undefined readership to be defined. Paola 
Ventrone’s essay ‘Acting and Reading Drama’ focuses on Florentine sacre 
rappresentazioni in print, analyzing how the development of printed text 
illustrated with woodcuts expanded and enhanced performances as spiritual 
experiences. Booklets were a shared medium which could be read out loud, 
or individually in silence. The relationship between text and  woodcut added 
value to the written, memorized, and performed word. 

With the spread of printing, anyone could buy the illustrated books produced for 
a large public, including those who could not read or wanted to learn, since the il-
lustrations provided a useful aid for recalling the words heard at the group reading 
and reliving them in the dimension of private devotion. (p. 92 in this volume)

Darwin Smith’s work on French texts, and Paola Ventrone’s on Florentine 
booklets, help us trace the origins of the many different paths that theatre 
texts followed. The phenomenon of printed plays, which has become the 
focus of debate over the last few decades in research on the history of 
the book, placed the printed work in a peculiar relation to the context 
and writing practices that gave rise to them (McKenzie 1986; Chartier 
1999). Printing transplanted and transformed theatre texts, but at the 
same time preserved the processes of writing for performance. At the time 
Shakespeare was working, two important phenomena came together. 
The printing of playbooks tended to consolidate both the unity of the 
text and the author’s identity, while, by contrast, the texts of playbooks 
were modelled on the requirements of production, the sharing out of 
collaborative copying and writing, the division into parts so that actors 
could learn their lines, the vagaries of aural memory on the scribe, who 
wrote and put together the copies ready for the censors, stage management, 
and the company’s repertoires. The Elizabethan and Jacobean professional 



editorial 9 

theatre system, it has been suggested, should be attributed to a ‘collective 
mind’ (Tribble 2011). There is no doubt some truth in this, with cognitive 
implications that become concrete whenever evidence of the texts’ use can 
be found: textual transformations were, of course, the result of numerous 
transcriptions according to the frequency of performances. In addition, there 
was infinite potential for tension between a unified text and the variations 
that resulted from the practices and processes of memorization. There were 
many different factors to take into account: playwriting was prevalently a 
collaborative activity, copies transcribed and memorized were stratified, and 
a literary identity of the playwright became apparent only gradually after 
the introduction of printed plays. Surviving theatre manuscripts were not 
accounted for in a systematic way until relatively recently (Ioppolo 2006, 
Werstine 2012). Compared to preserved manuscripts, the old opposition 
‘foul papers vs prompt-books’, and the very idea of prompt-books as 
operative texts, and tools for controlling the outcome of performances, has 
been circumscribed. They are now mostly labelled ‘a manuscript of theatrical 
provenance’ or as ‘playhouse manuscripts’ (Werstine 2012). Almost eighty 
years have not passed in vain from W.W. Greg’s Dramatic Documents from 
the Elizabethan Playhouses (1931) to Tiffany Stern’s Documents of Performance 
in Early Modern England (2009). On the one hand, the range of text types 
(manuscript and print) has widened (plot-scenarios, bills, advertising, scrolls, 
arguments, para-texts, backstage-plots); on the other, these text types show 
the wide range of written culture that framed playwriting.

The outcomes and appearance of printed texts give rise to rather 
generalized views regarding transcription processes: ‘Many different kinds 
of copies, foul papers, authorial or scribal fair copies, and previously printed 
Quartos were used during Shakespeare’s lifetime to print Quarto editions 
of his plays’ (Ioppolo 2006, 157). The stratification of the Quartos and the 
genesis of the First Folio made it ‘immediately apparent that “Shakespeare” 
was a book whose text could not be definitively established’ (Kastan 2001, 98).

Shakespeare’s texts and, more generally, theatre texts from Shakespeare’s 
time that circulated in order to be performed, had a practical application. 
Freed from the conditioning and teleology of the ‘editorial problem’, these 
texts can be read as vehicles of memory and transformation. The title of 
Pettitt’s contribution to this collection sums the issue up perfectly: ‘Beyond 
the Bad Quarto’. Starting with twentieth-century Shakespearean philology, 
hypotheses regarding manuscripts and print books have given us concepts 
and categories that discriminate print versions that are considered ‘suspect’, 
or ‘incorrect’, simply because they conform less than other versions to the 
quality required of a literary text. Apart from the fact that these criteria 
for evaluating Quartos have generally been discredited, this discriminating 
view has changed: variations can equally be seen as being signs of generative 
processes; as tools for delving into the living tissue of the text, into the 
economy of transcriptions within theatre companies, and the interface 



raimondo guarino10 

between the written and spoken word on stage. It is essential to go back 
to thinking in terms of practical memory dictated by the demands of 
performing on the stage. Memorial reconstruction in professional theatres 
has been considered by the New Bibliography as a hypothetical process of 
generating ‘bad Quartos’.  Performing written plays requires a hybridization 
of written records and aural memory, which conditions the stratification of 
texts and the actual writing of the play. A strategy that adopts ‘suspect texts’ 
as crystallizations of deep processes concerning writing and performance 
draws inspiration from Pettitt’s reading of Marlowe’s ‘formulaic episodes’,  
discussed by Laurie Maguire (1996, 116) in her re-evaluation of memorial 
reconstruction. This research direction has been continued in Petersen’s 
Errant Texts, examining the signs and processes ‘of a much more wide-
ranging notion of dramatic transmission’ (2010, 139).

In ‘Beyond the Bad Quarto’, Thomas Pettitt discovers the paths 
that segments of written (manuscript or printed) texts followed from 
London theatres, through the fragmentation of the drolls – the fragments 
recomposed and performed by strolling players – on to the local festive 
traditions of the mummers’ itinerant country performances. Tracing a 
relationship between bad Quartos and folk ballads, and other traditions of 
oral expression, started as an analogy of method. It has led, however, to a 
field where the dynamics of transformation and adaptation within the logic 
of the theatre, and in other performative traditions, have created important, 
lasting, and recurrent intercultural cross-pollination. This approach has 
led to consequences in other research areas. Studies on authorship and co-
authorship, and on criteria for edition and interpretation, tend to have to deal 
with a more specific notion of ‘instability’, in the sense that a text functions 
within a living theatrical organism. An indication of authorship given on 
the basis of internal evidence cannot be completely separated from the idea 
of an environment where collaboration does not mean a sum of parts, and 
where actors’ memories interacted with the craft of writing. New contours 
of disseminated or disintegrated authorship lend depth and definition to 
the profiles of Kyd, Marlowe, Peele, and Middleton. These recognitions 
require a more precise reconstruction of both the individual production of 
playwrights and the configurations of collective writing (Taylor 2017). The 
development towards recognizing ‘secondary’ figures supports the argument 
for a re-consideration (and a wider canon of works) of Thomas Kyd called for, 
in this collection, by Darren Freebury-Jones in ‘The Diminution of Thomas 
Kyd’, where the examination of internal evidence, and methodologies of 
attribution, are immersed in an environmental, concrete, interpersonal 
framework of imitation and influence around 1590: 

My evidence suggests that Shakespeare was deeply influenced by the phraseology 
of The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, King Leir, and Arden of Faversham 
(Shakespeare’s verbal borrowings from The Spanish Tragedy and King Leir 



editorial 11 

exceed Arden of Faversham), having perhaps seen or performed in these plays. 
Acknowledgement of Shakespeare’s debt to Kyd can therefore offer an insight into 
the development of Shakespeare’s dramatic language, and his aural, or ‘actor’s’, 
memory of theatrical phrases. (p. 256 in this volume)

We are not in a no-man’s-land, but, rather, in a recurrent situation of 
collaboration, which is far more important than the ability to attribute 
segments of text with certainty to one or another author. The quest to 
configurate an author within frames of collaboration in the late Elizabethan 
age, and other periods of Shakespeare’s trajectory, generates illuminating 
close-ups on the process of textual sedimentation. 

***

It is well known that the prevalent system for acting on stage and producing 
texts adopted by professional acting companies in Italy was the opposite of 
that adopted by commercial companies in England. The re-consideration of 
textual studies on Shakespeare and his contemporaries has its counterpart in 
research into the Commedia dell’Arte. For Italian actors, creating a structure 
for a play relied on putting together the actions catalogued in the repertoires 
of the scenari or canovacci (Testaverde 2007). By contrast, the actual acting 
of the parts relied more on the invention (‘improvisation’) of lines based 
on fixed conventions and loci, which were expressed freely, rather than 
based on the memorization of set, written scripts (on parti libere and tipi 
fissi , that is, ‘free parts’ and ‘set roles’, see Taviani and Schino 1982). It was 
another way of dealing with, managing, and publishing the relationship 
between stage craftsmanship and literary skill. The outcome was seen as a 
testament to the prestige and fame of the leaders and protagonists of the 
most successful companies (Marotti and Romei 1991). Research into these 
aspects has used sources and theatrical text types to contribute to a more 
valid reconstruction of the acting skills and writing habits of companies 
in Italy, as well as exploring their links with contemporary literary élites. 
Roberto Ciancarelli’s crowded Roman landscape in ‘Visions of the City’ 
shows how the accumulation and contamination of stage inventions created 
a common ground for amateur and professional companies in seventeenth-
century Rome. The seven-volume manuscript of the Opere sceniche diverse in 
prosa held in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, from which Ciancarelli 
extracts the fragments published, is a depository of skills and identities, 
where texts are imbued with the practice of constant hybridization with 
carefully-wrought inlays. The dilemma between the permanence and 
impermanence of text would be purely speculative if it were not rooted in 
the way a text was put to use. It is vital to recognize what has gone into the 
breadth of the repertoires in order to appreciate how effective theatre culture 
was. Collections of manuscripts and printed repertoires provide different 



raimondo guarino12 

perspectives. The monumental bibliography compiled by Saverio Franchi 
between 1988 and 1997 in Drammaturgia romana is worth citing here, as 
it focuses on Rome. It is a portrait, in the form of a chronological catalogue 
of prints, of theatrical life in a European city between the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries; a portrait re-evoked and re-constituted literally 
comparing the events on stage to printed pieces and libretti for operas and 
oratorios, the booklets which aimed to synchronize theatre seasons with 
opportunities for reading. They are not documenting facts; they are facts in 
themselves, which can provide a great deal of information, owing to their 
breadth, dissemination, and intensity of their ties with festive and everyday 
life. It is not a question of linking text to performance. It is, rather, a matter 
of exploring networks of relationships, and constellations of behaviours, 
between the public sphere and material culture of entertainment, in what 
Ferdinando Taviani (2010) has labelled ‘the literary space of the theatre’.

***

In research on the editorial definition of Shakespeare’s texts around 1700, 
Kastan’s observations concerning Lewis Theobald are often cited. In 
Theobald’s single figure, ‘can be seen the era’s [i.e. early eighteenth century] 
schizophrenic relationship to Shakespeare, always admiring but, in one 
mode, presumptuously altering his plays for success on the stage, while, 
in another, determinedly seeking the authentic text in the succession of 
scholarly editions’ (2001, 93). This ‘schizophrenic relationship’ was, in fact, 
inevitable in the contradiction and counterpoint between the stage life of 
texts and their printed history. A few examples might be useful at this point. 
Both hand-copied manuscripts and printed texts could well be destined 
for reading, but editions of plays for reading – as we might expect today – 
often became the means for actors to learn their parts, or for copies to be 
reproduced in the form of scripts. Shakespeare’s Quartos and the 1623 Folio 
have been used as prompt-books, and they could well have been used as a 
basis for revisions and re-elaborations both of the text and  performance 
– see, for example, the 1676 quarto of Hamlet annotated by John Ward 
in 1740s (Chartier 2015, but the chapter was first published in 2011, 201-
212; and, in general, for the seventeenth century, Evans 1960-1996). The 
dialectic between printing of an author’s text and alterations for the stage 
has led to entire collections of texts with glosses by actors written in the 
margins (Knight 2015), while scripts, alterations and acting versions were 
stabilized by means of their printing into ‘performance publications’. The 
fate of texts that have given life to the theatre and then been transformed 
into books is not only a transformation in a work of literature; it is also a 
potential return to the stage of a play. In the junctures and discords between 
these two alternatives, the history of European theatre is mirrored in a 
history of theatre in print (for a collection of overviews, Forestier, Caldicott 



editorial 13 

and Bourqui 2007; for Italy, Riccò 2008; for Spain, Profeti 1999). As the 
relationship between theatre life and book culture became more consolidated 
(see, in general, Peters 2000), the literary space of the theatre became an 
n-dimensional system, a ground of forking paths, where books – not just 
playbooks, but every other material manifestation of text – take on and 
multiply their potential uses. And where, similarly, actor/readers cross-over 
with writer/spectators and remodel the text according to the transactions 
and metamorphoses that have taken place in performances.

Christopher Haile’s essay, ‘ “Pawn! Sufficiently holy but unmeasurably 
politic” ’, searching for the identity of the White Queen’s Pawn in A Game 
at Chess, surveys the parody of theatrical clichés that Middleton, playwright 
and Chronologer of the City of London, adopted as a tool for representing 
the history of the day. To the extent that the making of Shakespeare’s First 
Folio was involved in the staging of the sacrificed pawn. In Middleton’s 
view, theatre could either frame or disrupt the readability of the world, or 
of contemporary affairs, in as much as spectators and readers acknowledged 
that the text of the play linked the small world of the stage to the big world 
outside by means of interpretations and metaphors.

The way that theatre interprets texts from the past is to breathe fresh 
life into the repertory by renegotiating different points of view. Maria 
Grazia Dongu, in her essay ‘An Eighteenth-Century mise en scène and the 
Play of Refractions’, explores Garrick’s Macbeth (in various productions 
from 1744 to 1768) challenging an issue that is methodologically tricky: 
how far should one accept the dictates of treatises or the testimonies of 
critics when analyzing the work of the actor? The language of description, 
and the values of theoretical perception, are considered from the actor 
and playwright Garrick’s perspective. In this game of refractions, ‘actors, 
critics and theatre goers negotiated the text into a collective, distinctively 
provisional rewriting of Macbeth’ (p. 229 in this volume).

***

In the vortex of Shakespeare’s work, in the endeavours of Italian actors in 
the Commedia dell’Arte, and the afterlife of repertoire modifications and 
the resurgence of playbooks, we are dealing with the things and voices 
that surround and underlie the text. There are different layers and different 
states of the spoken word that lead to – and lend life to – writing. In this 
dimension, the transitions – somewhere between imitations and variations 
– that take place in the transformation from speech, to text, to book, which 
are intrinsic to the theatre, are not linear paths but inter-textual and inter-
cultural shifts. There is a lively, never-ending motion between listening, 
reading, and writing. This motion requires us to focus on a key-role, to 
which we now devote a brief conclusion. Who were the scribes, and what was 
their task in the production of texts for the theatre? The possible responses 



raimondo guarino14 

are as many as the functions and interpretations of the part. Even scribes 
known to have worked with the company of the King’s Men, such as Ralph 
Crane and Edward Knight, played different roles. Knight was the playhouse 
book-keeper (employed by the troupe in 1620s/1630s), while Crane was a 
professional scribe, much debated in his role as ‘First Editor’ of some of the 
texts published in the 1623 Folio (Werstine 2015).

The role of scribes makes us wonder about their long-lasting influence 
and extreme importance: scribes were effectively men of letters who were 
present and active in professional theatres. The renewal of interest for 
the surviving manuscripts, which has reshaped our hypotheses about the 
lost manuscripts behind Shakespeare’s Quartos, have put scribes right at 
the centre of the theatrical scriptorium, responsible for the reproduction 
of copies and the transition from playhouse to printers. Their liminal 
identities have further resonance. In Scarron’s Roman comique (1651), the 
troupe of travelling actors welcomed Léandre, the boy escaping from the 
Jesuit College at La Flèche. They went on to offer him employment as le 
valet qui écrit tous nos rôles (‘the servant who copies all our roles’; Scarron 
1967, 254). As the author of Roscius Anglicanus (1708), the prompter John 
Downes is famously considered responsible for providing the first history 
of the London theatres after the Restoration. Theatre scribes, who were 
seemingly confined by the specialization of their task, actually responded to 
the various requirements of writing for the theatre. Their ability to negotiate 
their way between preserving and changing, which can be traced back to 
their book-keeper function in medieval performances, fulfilled several 
different duties: stage management, preservation of the dramatic repertoire, 
negotiations with censorship. Early modern theatre was organized on the 
basis of many different processes of reading and writing that influenced 
practical memory. Its unwritten traditions re-surface, emerge, and conflict 
with the physical evidence of acts of writing.

The phenomena that Thomas Pettitt observes as degeneration of textual 
fragments along the ‘low road’ of the ‘little traditions’ (a category that 
goes back to the origins of the very notion of cultural performance) were 
a transplant of symbolic values, from London productions to wider and 
peripheral contexts. Cheap prints and manuscript fragments, drolls and 
dialogues, revisions and transpositions: in all these states and processes, 
textual polymorphism was the result of continuous transactions between 
written transmission and performance practices which involved adaptations 
and agencies that were both professional and non. The flow of texts which 
played an active part in theatre practice are a vitally revealing and identifying 
element of the dynamics of writing in modern Europe.

Raimondo Guarino



editorial 15 

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Part One

Introduction