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Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade.

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Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade By Zachary Lesser Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Zachary Lesser's Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication is a provocative and illuminating study of the Stuart book industry and the way it marketed printed play texts for its reading audience, sometimes several years after the plays were composed and performed. The study integrates in a fresh way the findings of book history, reception studies, and historicist and materialist approaches, but its most significant break with tradition is in its choice of an agent through which to read the plays. Instead of invoking the author as a source of meaning, Lesser turns to those booksellers and Stationers' Company members who published books, arguing that they are readers with an astute understanding of how printed playbooks fit into particular literary and political contexts. Using these publishers and their marketing niches as an interpretive lens, Lesser rereads with historical precision Stuart editions of several plays, among them, Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613), Marlowe's Jew of Malta (1633), Webster's White Divel (1612), Shakespeare's Othello (1622), and Beaumont and Fletcher's King and No King (1619).

Lesser's premise is deceptively simple; he asks "why that play was published then" (16, his emphasis). This question conspicuously echoes the inquiries of New Historicists who envisioned literary texts as players in the political field, but Lesser answers his question by circumscribing the field very precisely. The "politics of publication," as he terms it, refers to the political, literary, and economic context created by a stationer's career specialization as it resonates for readers at particular historical moments (22-23). When stationers published a play, they necessarily and intentionally placed the play in the context of their book list, anticipating that readers would recognize their generic categorization of the text and perhaps even share their reading of it. Evidence of early...

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