ABSTRACT

This chapter offers some answers, underscoring the self-justification and self-advertising that printers indulge in this relatively new activity of printing dramatic texts. It highlights how these stationers used the prefatory site as a forum for their own distinctive voices, becoming in effect authors in their own right and keeping their eyes almost exclusively on the reader/purchaser of the text. The chapter addresses the purposes of publishers in their comments to readers and offers a retrospective of the addresses that precede this one. It provides an exemplary summary of the issues that printers and publishers write about: the connection to the theater and performance, the intended textual audience, and editorial judgment and function. The printers' active participation in the cultural production of these commodities, extending far beyond merely setting type reinforces the distance the culture had traveled since the earlier days of scribal production of texts.