When playtexts were printed their contents were announced to readers by means of a title page. The content of these title pages did vary considerably and as artefacts in their own right they are increasingly becoming a significant source for theatre historians to use in compiling a sense of what spectators took away from or valued in the theatrical experience. Rather than separating print from performance as can sometimes be the tendency in scholarship, by looking at the visual and textual culture of title pages we may gain access to supposedly ‘lost’ or ephemeral moments of performance as much as to reading and printing-house cultures.

To concentrate initially, though, on the textual information carried by title pages to plays can in itself yield much interesting detail. As Alan Farmer has demonstrated, title pages for plays began increasingly to provide not just the title – sometimes in itself an indicator of genre, though again the fashion for this waxed and waned over time – but often a more explanatory subtitle and then more often than not, particularly as the seventeenth century progressed, information about supposed authorship and performance history. So, whereas the 1616 title page to Marlowe's The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (see Figure 4) tells us simply that it was by him, and the title and the address of the printers, the 1623 title page to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (see Figure 5) has become far busier with information: ‘The Spanish Tragedy: Or, Hieronimo is mad againe’ already provides us with an indicator of Hieronimo's significance as a protagonist – something the allusions of later plays have also evidenced (see Chapter 2 on revenge drama). But it also notes that the text contains ‘the lamentable end of Don Horatio and Belimperia; With the pittifull Death of Hieronimo’. It is as if the ‘hot spots’ of the plot are being picked out for readers who are wondering which playtext to buy, to tempt them – much as a modern literary endorsement on a book jacket would do – to enter the pages, to go beyond the cover.