Chapter 2. Thomas Creede, William Barley, and the Venture of Printing Plays

‘To reforme a frame’: The 1602 translation of Il pastor fido and Elizabethan theatrical publishing

“…27 However, a fashion for printing plays had begun around 1594, and Creede was at its centre: as Holger Schott Syme has written, 'no one printed more plays than he did between 1590 and 1604 (26, well ahead of Edward Allde's 22)'. 28 His dramatic catalogue included several Shakespearean titles -such as Romeo and Juliet and Richard III -the outward appearances of which in printed form were strikingly similar to that of the Dymock translation. The main disparities resided in the higher degree of editorial information present in William Shakespeare's plays: the title-page of the 1599 edition of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, gives indications as to who had staged the play as well as where and when, and includes the name of the stationer himself; whereas no stage details are given in the 1602 Il pastor fido, where Creede is only evoked by the presence of his emblem cum motto.…”

Reading Performance, Reading Gender: Early Encounters with Beaumont and Fletcher’s <i>The Scornful Lady</i> in Print

“…Holger Syme and Hannah August have found readers adding stage directions, whilst Emma Smith shows how commonly speech prefixes were corrected in the 1623 Shakespeare folio, for instance. 20 B's mark therefore seems to fit an emergent pattern of early modern play-reading in which imaginative attention to performance -Meric Casaubon's 'paper pictures', explored by August -can often be central. 21 Indeed, B's intervention is particularly telling in that the underlining indicates not the required correction of an error, without which a passage does not make sense, but rather a reader's choice.…”