Reading Plays as Books: Interpreting Readers’ Marks and Marginalia in Early Modern Play Quartos

f the play is a book, it’s not a play.” Stephen Orgel’s claim has reverberated through the past two decades of scholarship in thefield of earlymodern drama, wending its way ever further from its original context in a discussion of how modern editors might or should render printed plays. One of the places it has resurfaced is in discussions of the historical perceptions of printed dramaheld by the earliest readers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Despite numerous claims for the “literariness” of early modern playbooks, Orgel’s statement has often been invoked in order to then be rejected or modified as part of a claim for printed drama’s theatricality.Richard Preiss, for instance, asserts that it “does not bear on the mentality of those earlymodern playgoers whowere being invited to attend performances and then to buy texts of them as modules of a single cultural activity.” Lucy Munro complicates the play/book dichotomy, arguing that it was mutable, and inhered not in the object but in the mode of reading: for early readers of John Marston’s The Fleer, “the playbook was sometimes a play, sometimes a book.” More recently, early modern readers have been tasked with the ability to read with “parted eye,” asHermia puts it inAMidsummer Night’s Dream, whereby they read