ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the evidence of historical reader response to plays that is constituted by three seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace books containing dramatic extracts: those of Edward Pudsey (1573–1612/13), William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), and Abraham Wright (1611–1690). The extracts from plays in these commonplace books are freshly analysed in relation to the implications of the dramatic paratexts examined in the previous two chapters. Treating the manuscripts in turn, the chapter argues that, in keeping with the framing of the paratextual preliminaries discussed in Chapter 2, each man’s playreading was governed by the pursuit of both profit and pleasure. However, while the profit these playreaders sought can in each instance be broadly characterised as ‘linguistic’, the types of pleasure they appear to have gained from their reading were varied and idiosyncratic.
