The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama

1147 Pages·2020·21.041 MB·English

by  Jeremy Lopez (editor)

The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama

The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama is the first new collection of the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in
over a century.
This volume comprises seventeen accessible, thoroughly glossed, modernized play-texts, intermingling a wide range of
unfamiliar works—including the anonymous Look About You, Massinger’s The Picture, Heminge’s The Fatal Contract, Heywood’s
The Four Prentices of London, and Greene’s James IV—with more familiar works such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Webster’s The
Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Each p lay i s e dited b y a different leading scholar in the field of early
modern studies, bringing specific expertise and context to the chosen play-text.
With an unprecedented variety of plays, and critical introductions that focus on the diversity and strangeness of different
early modern approaches to the artistic and commercial enterprise of play-making, The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern
Drama will offer vital new perspectives on early modern drama for scholars, students, and performers alike.
Jeremy Lopez is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and the
author of numerous books and essays on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The Routledge Anthology of Early
Modern Drama
Edited by Jeremy Lopez
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Jeremy Lopez; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Jeremy Lopez to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lopez, Jeremy, editor.

Title: The Routledge anthology of early modern drama / edited by Jeremy Lopez.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019038359 (print) | LCCN 2019038360 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English drama–17th century.

Classification: LCC PR1265.3 .R68 2020 (print) | LCC PR1265.3 (ebook) |

DDC 822/.508–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038359

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038360

ISBN: 978-1-138-95379-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-95380-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-66718-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Baskerville

by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Contents

Acknowledgments vii
General introduction 1
1 Cambises, by Thomas Preston 5
E D ITED B Y JAMES SI E MON
2 Poetaster, by Ben Jonson 49
E D I T ED B Y HE NR Y S . T UR NE R
3 The Fatal Contract, by William Heminge 136
E D ITED B Y AN DREA STE V EN S
4 The Four Prentices of London, by Thomas Heywood 195
E D ITED B Y WILLIAM N. WE ST
5 Look About You, by Anonymous 267
E D ITED B Y P A UL ME NZ ER
6 The Famous Victories of Henry V, by Anonymous 350
E D ITED B Y BR IAN W ALSH
7 The Picture, by Philip Massinger 382
EDIT E D BY LUC Y MUN RO
8 The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe 469
E D ITED B Y PET ER K IRWAN
9 The Scottish History of James the Fourth, by Robert Greene 508
E D ITED B Y KIRK MELNIKOFF
10 The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster 575
E D ITED B Y F AR AH K ARIM-COOPE R
11 Women Beware Women, by Thomas Middleton 659
E D ITED B Y ROBE RTA B ARKE R
12 The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, by Robert Armin 743
E D ITED B Y RICHARD P RE ISS
vi Contents
13 The Fair Maid of the Exchange, by Anonymous 816
E D ITED B Y G EN E VIEV E L OV E
14 Eastward Ho, by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston 882
E D ITED B Y KATHERINE SC HAA P WI LLIAM S
15 If This Be Not a Good Play, The Devil Is In It, by Thomas Dekker 944
E D ITED B Y DAVID M CINN IS
16 The Sea Voyage, by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger 1017
EDIT E D BY CLAIR E M. L. BO U R N E
17 The Bird in a Cage, by James Shirley 1079
EDITED B Y CLARE M CMA NUS
Acknowledgments

My greatest debt is of course to the seventeen contributing editors, whose careful, imaginative work and unfailing collegiality
made this project a pleasure to lead, even in those moments when it seemed like it would never be finished. At Routledge, I am
grateful to Polly Dodson and Ben Piggott for their interest in the anthology when I first proposed it, and to Ben for shepherding
it along; to Laura Soppelsa and Alaina Christensen for their support in bringing the manuscript to production; and to Tom
Bedford for meticulous copyediting. Four students at the University of Toronto—Divna Stojanovic, Jonathan Dick, Katherine
Chu, and Samantha Greco—provided invaluable assistance at various stages in the preparation of the texts. Nate Crocker, also
at Toronto, did an extraordinary amount of work at the proof-editing stage. On behalf of some of the contributing editors to
this volume I would also like to acknowledge, gratefully, the assistance of Melissa Schultheis and Nicole Sheriko (Rutgers Uni­
versity, Poetaster); Mary Rose Donahue and Alexa Culshaw (Colorado College, The Fair Maid of the Exchange); Amanda Rogus
(Mary Baldwin University Shakespeare & Performance, Look About You); and (for Eastward Ho) Alicia Parker (NYU), Arianna
Stucki (NYU Abu Dhabi), and Aiden Selmer and Alexandra Atiya (University of Toronto).
The American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia not only furnished the image on the cover of the volume, but
also produced a number of the plays it contains (in a few cases, theirs is the only modern professional production); I hope
that the publication of the anthology encourages them to undertake a few more. Four anonymous readers, finally, pro­
vided rigorous and encouraging reports on the initial proposal for the anthology. These reports were very important for
determining the anthology’s scope and structure; I hope that these readers will find the project’s promise realized in the
final product.

General introduction
Jeremy Lopez
This anthology comprises a representative sample of drama written and performed in England between the 1560s and the
1630s. A few of the plays will be familiar, and have appeared regularly in other anthologies—Doctor Faustus, The Duchess of Malfi,
Women Beware Women, and E astward Ho—but most of them will likely be unfamiliar, even to students of the period. More than
half of the plays have never been anthologized before, and many have never even been given a modern-spelling edition. Like
other volumes of its kind, this anthology represents the remarkable theatrical and verbal creativity, the astonishing range of
styles and forms, that characterized early modern English drama. By giving so much space to plays that are so seldom read or
written about, we hope that this anthology will also be an opportunity for students and scholars to make new discoveries about
the nature of dramatic form, and the interrelation between dramatic forms, in the age of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
As the word “we” in the previous sentence indicates, this anthology is a collaborative venture. Each of its seventeen texts
was selected and prepared by a different editor. While the selection process involved some negotiation, each editor chose his
or her text more or less independently of all the others. Each editor chose a text that he or she thought represented some­
thing particular and interesting about early modern dramatic form. In following this procedure for determining the table of
contents, we had two related goals: one was to present a genuinely eclectic, unexpected array of plays, assembled without
regard to pre-determined parameters of authorship or genre. The other was to demonstrate that a broadly historical view of
the period could be achieved by starting with the particular features of individual plays. It is in respect of this latter goal that
we have not attempted to sketch—either in this general introduction or in the critical introductions to the plays—a history of
the late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commercial theater in London. Nor have we attempted to articulate, in any sys­
tematic way, a contextual argument about the relation between the plays the anthology contains and the most urgent social,
political, and economic problems of the period. Accessible, more or less detailed historical overviews of early modern theater
history and of the political and social context for early modern drama are readily available in other anthologies, in editions
of Shakespeare’s plays, and in works of criticism likely to be provided in university courses where readers are most likely to
encounter this anthology. It did not seem necessary to provide any further such contextual overview here. Instead, the pri­
mary questions each editor was asked to consider in editing and presenting his or her text were: what kind of play is this?
Why is it worth reading? What does it tell us about the craft of play-making in the early modern period? The answers to
these questions often touch on, or delve into, matters of theater history, or social, political, and economic problems; but they
also tend most emphatically toward analysis of form and of the relation between one play and another. The critical introduc­
tions are intended primarily to help you get started reading the plays, and to help you read them in relation to other plays—
both those that are contained in the volume and those that are not. We hope that your encounters with the unfamiliar,
unusual plays represented in this volume will inspire and enable you to see more familiar plays, as well as the historical
materials and narratives most typically used to contextualize them, in a new light.
As eclectic as the table of contents is, it does, we think, achieve the goal of broad historical representation. It features plays by
most of the period’s major authors, and examples of a wide range of genres, including but not limited to comedy, tragedy,
English history, classical history, city comedy, estates satire, and romance. Moreover, the plays’ known or probable dates of
performance are more or less evenly distributed from the 1580s through the 1630s (Cambises, c. 1560–61, is an outlier here,
though it was reprinted in 1585 and 1595, and may have been revived in 1609). The table of contents also features two fascin­
ating “minor” playwrights of the period, Robert Armin and William Heminge, who are similar in their explicit responsiveness
to a wide range of plays (especially those of Shakespeare) that preceded them. Finally, it contains three works by one of the
early modern period’smostprolific, and still most under-represented playwrights: Anonymous.
But even more important than what the seventeen plays collected here represent about the dramatic authors, genres, and move­
ments of the early modern period is what they represent about the boldness, the inventiveness, and the largeness of conception of
early modern playwrights. The plays in this anthology are challenging, and not only because they are unfamiliar. They are dila­
tory, episodic, and digressive. They feature characters whopushactorstothe limitso ft heir craft(e.g. theEunuchin Fatal Contract,
Redcap in Look About You,andC ripplei nF air Maid); they revel in implausible incident (e.g. Four Prentices and Sea Voyage); they push
against the boundaries of time and space (e.g. the Cuckold’s Haven scene in Eastward Ho and Chorus vii in James IV); they