The Influence and Association of Paratext in Caroline Drama By Audrey Birkett Royal Holloway, University of London Ph.D. Thesis 2011 Thesis Abstract This thesis is an in-depth analysis of the alliances, reputations, and meanings that were created within the Caroline dramatic community as a result of the playwrights’ meticulous use of paratext. By scrutinizing the paratexts (including prologues and epilogues, commendatory verses, and dedications to patrons and readers) of three different Caroline authors (William Davenant, Richard Brome, and John Ford), I have provided a picture of the divided and conflicting political and social landscapes of the professional theatre during the reign of Charles I. Through the use of such framing material, playwrights situated themselves in coteries that promoted very distinct outlooks on the purpose and place of drama. Within the commercial theatre, the desire to please, as well as shape diverse and complicated audience tastes, was forwarded in both printed and performed ancillary material. Playwrights used paratext to attract a specific audience to their published plays and explain the motives and meanings embedded in these texts. This material, while promoting one set of values, also worked to condemn competing ideals, as authors criticized peers in order to advance their own reputations and their own plays. Paratext was included as a matter of course in the era, to explain the author’s intentions in writing the play and to advertise the author in a specific and bespoke light. The paratexts that accompanied the plays of Davenant, Brome, and Ford helped shape and expand the reputation each man tried to form for himself. It also conditioned the reading of his plays, both in terms of meaning and message, as well as in how the play reflected the attitudes each held in relation to the theatre, his contemporaries, and his own public image. Davenant, Brome, and Ford had very different ideas on the role of the theatre and drama in society. These ideas were made known in the ancillary material and paratexts that accompanied their performed and printed plays. This thesis looks at how paratext and ancillary material were used in different ways by these men to shape their authorial reputations and temper audience reactions to their plays. It analyses how important and necessary paratext became to these playwrights writing from 1625 to the close of the theatres in 1642. Through these three playwrights, a wider investigation of how paratext was used to situate playwrights in the theatrical and literary communities of the Caroline era emerges. - 2 - Contents Page Thesis Abstract p. 2 Contents Page p. 3 Acknowledgements p. 4 Note on the Texts p. 5 List of Abbreviations p. 6 Introduction p. 7 Chapter 1 p. 35 Chapter 2 p. 94 Chapter 3 p. 144 Chapter 4 p. 198 Conclusion p. 251 Appendix A p. 256 Appendix B p. 257 Appendix C p. 260 Appendix D p. 262 Bibliography p. 263 - 3 - Acknowledgements I wish to thank Professor Ewan Fernie and Dr Roy Booth for their support and guidance in supervising this Ph.D. thesis – Ewan for his optimism and geniality and Roy for pushing me to write and re-write, to exam and re-exam, and to analyse and re-analyse. Dr Michael Wheare offered invaluable help and advice at the last minute and pulled me through when I most needed it. Thanks must also be given to Dr David Colclough (Queen Mary) and Professor Julie Sanders (Nottingham) for counsel and encouragement, to Professor Kiernan Ryan (Royal Holloway) for insisting that we’d get to this point, to Dr Chris Harrison (Keele) for his unique, critical spin, and to Dr Henry Turner for inspiring this course of study in the first place. In the often difficult path of doctoral studies, friendships are valuable in keeping sanity, focus, and perseverance alive. I would like to thank all of those who reminded me that there is a life outside of the Ph.D. – Oliver Morris and Phil Wright who provided me with a stable home life, and Sarah Cooney, Gemma Burgess, Peter Balderstone, David Dodds, Gwion Harding, and Fearghal McGoveran, who provided distraction. And Douglas Pollock. I would also like to thank Ann McGruer for her friendship and for giving me my first chance at publication, and Karen Britland for helping me navigate conferences. My thesis would not have been completed without the unquestioning encouragement and affection of my parents. In fact, this thesis would not have been undertaken without their support. I would like to thank the British Library’s Rare Books room for their flexibility in seat and book numbers, the Warburg Institute for an inspiring setting to write, and all the part-time jobs I’ve held over the past seven years for their printing facilities. Above all, I would like to thank Dr Jacqueline Johnson. Without her, I would have given up long ago, and at least a dozen times over the course of this process. The support, both as a colleague and as a friend, has inspired me to be a better writer, a better student, and a better person. - 4 - A Note on the Texts Unless indicated, I have modernized the original spellings of v/u, i/j, vv/w in all primary texts for the reader’s ease. Italicization within quotations is an exact transcription of the authors’ writings – acknowledgement being given when I add my own emphasis. Where letters were missing or unintelligible from the original texts, I have filled in the missing letter where obvious or included a […] where the original word is indistinguishable. Any original text written in all capitals has been standardized with only the first letter capitalized, unless stated for a specific purpose. Play titles have been modernized and capitalized. When a page number or a Signature is not available for reference, or when the numbers are out of sync, I have situated the page next to other pages in the text, for example ‘unpaginated page after the prologue’. - 5 - List of Abbreviations EMLS Early Modern Literary Studies MLN Modern Language Notes MP Modern Philology N&Q Notes and Queries ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America RBO Richard Brome Online RES Review of English Studies SEL Studies in English Literature STC Short Title Catalogue Wing Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700 YES Yearbook of English Studies - 6 - Introduction Much of the drama performed and printed during the reign of Charles I, specifically from 1625 to the closure of the professional theatres in 1642, was by dramatists who were highly aware of the manipulative power of the words that accompanied their plays on stage and in print. The paratexts and ancillary material that were included alongside plays influenced audience reception of both the author and his works. The simplest and most effective way for an author to declare his preferences and intentions was through carefully written and selected paratexts that advertised his views to literary and theatrical audiences. This thesis presents an in-depth analysis of the paratexts of three of the Caroline era’s most prolific and well-known dramatists: William Davenant, Richard Brome, and John Ford. Each of these playwrights used prologues, epilogues, dedications, and commendatory verses to promote themselves and their plays. This thesis examines the purpose and the usefulness of such material in the era and how it functioned in shaping identity and, in the words of Phillippe Lejeune, controlled ‘one’s whole reading of the text’.1 The different attitudes Caroline authors had toward the theatre and the publisher are signposted in the ancillary material and paratext that accompanied their plays on stage and in print. Likewise, the way playwrights wanted others to view them was directed in the dedications, commendatory verses, and prologues and epilogues that framed their plays in print. Brome, a staunch defender of the commercial stage, did not publish often, but when he did, paratext was included as a matter of course. It reflected a traditional view of the theatrical institution and the role of the playwright, as influenced by his mentor Ben Jonson. Brome used this material to portray himself as a humble man of the theatre, dedicated to pleasing audiences and earning a living. I believe his paratexts also display a viciousness aimed at his courtly, literary rivals that has here-to-fore gone largely unnoticed in contemporary scholarship. In comparison, Davenant’s paratexts showed the author’s animosity toward the commercial theatre; they attacked those audiences who he believed were unable to understand his dramatic vision or appreciate 1Phillippe Lejeune, Le Pacte authobriographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 45, quoted in Gerard Genette, Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 7. - 7 - his literary ability. This same material established him as a gentleman author of ‘literature’, more closely associated with the amateur, courtly poets than with the professional playwrights. However, Davenant’s aim was to please the court and the commercial theatre audiences, which he tried to do time and time again, but with little success. His paratexts did not always lead to the desired outcome, but they did ultimately shape his reputation as a courtly author worthy to be Poet Laureate. Ford’s paratexts revolved around a close-knit community of members of the Inns of Court, like-minded literary peers, and inter-connected members of the gentry whom he called ‘friends’ because of their association with him and understanding of his work. His ‘friends’ helped to establish him as an artist who was dedicated to fulfilling his own personal standards and to teaching those standards to others.