Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Textual note
- Introduction: Playwrights as play-patchers
- 1 Plot-scenarios
- 2 Playbills and title-pages
- 3 ‘Arguments’ in playhouse and book
- 4 Prologues, epilogues, interim entertainments
- 5 Songs and masques
- 6 Scrolls
- 7 Backstage-plots
- 8 The approved ‘book’ and actors' parts
- Conclusion: Repatching the play
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Playwrights as play-patchers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Textual note
- Introduction: Playwrights as play-patchers
- 1 Plot-scenarios
- 2 Playbills and title-pages
- 3 ‘Arguments’ in playhouse and book
- 4 Prologues, epilogues, interim entertainments
- 5 Songs and masques
- 6 Scrolls
- 7 Backstage-plots
- 8 The approved ‘book’ and actors' parts
- Conclusion: Repatching the play
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As well as being called ‘play-makers’ and ‘poets’, playwrights of the early modern period were frequently known as ‘play-patchers’ because of the common perception that a play was pieced together out of a collection of odds and ends: it was not a single whole entity. The term was unflattering and designed to wound, as was ‘playwright’, with its implication that constructing plays was a craft – equivalent to being a cartwright or a wheelwright – rather than an art. But, just as ‘playwright’ over time lost its pejorative implications, so ‘play-patcher’ too came to be seen as an unpalatable truth. Well may Randolph sneer at the poet who makes a ‘Comedy’ out of ‘patches of his ragged wit, as if he meant to make Poverty a Coat of it’, and Wither lament the men who can do little more than ‘patch up a bald witlesse Comedy’ out of ‘rotten-old-worme-eaten stuffe’; there was something ‘patchy’ in the very substance of early modern plays. Dekker articulates this when he describes a ‘play-patcher’ as ‘a Cobler of Poetrie’. Again, he is being uncomplimentary – to him plays are all too often ‘cobbled together’ – but ‘cobbler’ also simply implies that the writers of the texts are, like shoe-makers, constructing their artifacts of discrete and separate pieces; when the joins are ill-fitting or overly visible, that is a problem – but the patch remains a feature of the whole, that notwithstanding.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Documents of Performance in Early Modern England , pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009