Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and
playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and
masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries,
and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English
Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to
examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early
modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from
plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers
and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be
altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records
provide information that is not available in other forms about the
popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays
appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most
interested audiences. Tracing the course of dramatic extracting
from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific
manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and
reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to
create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic
extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic
Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching,
Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John
Milton's signature to unpublished university plays) while also
analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as
Shakespeare's The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the
study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts,
particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F.
McKenzie puts it, "different readers [bring] the text to life in
different ways." By providing careful analyses of these rich source
texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading
(that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays
themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts
and positioning the plays in new contexts.
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