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In an essay called ‘Acting Scripts, Performing Texts’ I raised some large questions about the relation of text to performance in early modern drama, and some very specific ones about what kind of evidence printed texts provide, since these are for the most part all that survive of the plays of Shakespeare’s era. We have used the evidence of texts to attempt both to reconstruct the playwright’s original manuscript, and to trace the archeology of performance and reconceive what the Elizabethan spectator saw in the theater. These, however, are two very different things, and we must be clear about the differences if we are to understand, for example, what ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ can mean in relation to texts that can rarely be performed in less than three hours or more, or discern the implications of Jonson’s complaint that the actors misrepresented his plays. So the largest question is really the most basic one: what is the play? Is it what the actors do, or what the author writes? And if the play is not its text (I won’t say ‘simply’ or ‘merely’ its text, because there seems to me nothing simple or mere about the issue), what does the text of a play — the printed text, as it almost invariably is — represent?

Books and Readers in Early Modern England examines readers, reading, and publication practices from the Renaissance to the Restoration. The essays draw on an array of documentary evidence-from library catalogs, prefaces, title pages and dedications, marginalia, commonplace books, and letters to ink, paper, and bindings-to explore individual reading habits and experiences in a period of religious dissent, political instability, and cultural transformation. Chapters in the volume cover oral, scribal, and print cultures, examining the emergence of the "public spheres" of reading practices. Contributors, who include Christopher Grose, Ann Hughes, David Scott Kastan, Kathleen Lynch, William Sherman, and Peter Stallybrass, investigate interactions among publishers, texts, authors, and audience. They discuss the continuity of the written word and habits of mind in the world of print, the formation and differentiation of readerships, and the increasing influence of public opinion. The work demonstrates that early modern publications appeared in a wide variety of forms-from periodical literature to polemical pamphlets-and reflected the radical transformations occurring at the time in the dissemination of knowledge through the written word. These forms were far more ephemeral, and far more widely available, than modern stereotypes of writing from this period suggest.

In 1638 Inigo Jones and Sir William Davenant produced two masques for the English court. The first, Britannia Triumphans, danced by the king in January, celebrated, a little prematurely, the triumph of the royal scheme of Ship Money: the famous trial was about to reach its conclusion, with a narrow victory in the Star Chamber for the crown. Three weeks later, at Shrovetide, the queen danced in Luminalia, Jones's most elaborate scenic spectacle up to that time. The complexity of the engineering was the more impressive, Jones tells us, because it had to be devised very quickly