ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the unexpected afterlives of three early printed plays, showing that efforts to shape receptive horizons were only partially successful, that patterns of use did not always follow those suggested by title-pages and other front matter. The first complicates the view that there was a secure market for playbooks by tracing the fate of a copy of Impatient Poverty as binding waste. The second and third show two other ways that playbooks could turn up inside other books, thereby suggesting that for some early readers the primary unit of meaning was not the play as a whole, but one or other of its constituent parts. A memo in the hand of the book collector Brian Lawn on the verso of the second free endleaf correctly identifies the text as Q1 Impatient Poverty, and rightly notes British Library, as the only other copy of this edition to have survived.
