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Introduction: Playwrights as play-patchers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2009

Tiffany Stern
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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