ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the historical evidence of early modern playreading that is constituted by manuscript marks and marginalia left by anonymous early readers in extant playbooks. As in the previous chapter, the implications of this type of evidence are compared and contrasted with those of the material and paratextual aspects of playbooks discussed in the book’s first two chapters. The present chapter draws conclusions from a survey of over five hundred playbooks, examining in turn three different categories of marks and marginalia: those that respond to the object of the playbook and its material features; those that respond to its text or paratext without demonstrating an awareness of the play’s origin in performance; and those that can be construed – although rarely conclusively – as acknowledging printed commercial drama’s latent theatricality. The dearth of examples of marks and marginalia in this last category contributes to the chapter’s ultimate conclusion: that early modern playreaders most often consumed printed professional plays in the same way they did other non-dramatic texts, rather than responding to them as a distinctive genre characterised by its past, present, or potential performability.
