Blackwell Reference Online

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I refer to surviving English manuscript playbooks as “Precious Few” in two senses: there are “precious few” of them, because only eighteen survive out of probably 3,000, and these few are precious because they comprise our chief repository for knowing what kinds of manuscripts playwrights delivered to the playing companies and for finding out how the players altered these manuscripts in putting plays into production. These manuscripts thus are not merely antiquarian curiosities; they comprise the major source for theater researchers into staging and production and for revealing to editors what was likely to happen to a manuscript in the playhouse. Given their seminal and vital importance, it might well be assumed that much research had been done on them, that their features had been well examined, and their significance and implications become the commonplaces of scholarly papers on theater practice and in textual introductions to the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. If such were the case, there would be no need to write this essay. Alas, these “precious few” generally have been ignored: theater researchers regularly make suppositions about staging and “directing” without referring to surviving manuscripts; in seeking to establish the nature of the manuscripts which lay behind printed editions, editors expend great quantities of ink discussing “promptbooks” and ... log in or subscribe to read full text