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2 results

  • Chapter 5 - Playgoing, Apprenticeship, and Profit: Francis Quicksilver, Goldsmith, and Richard Meighen, Stationer

  • from Part II - Playgoers
  • Edited by Simon Smith, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Emma Whipday
  • Book:
    Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England
    Published online:
    10 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022, pp 104-121

  • Summary

    This essay revisits the question of playgoing by apprentices in early modern London via analysis of Chapman, Jonson and Marston's 1605 play Eastward Ho! and a newly uncovered set of depositions deriving from a lawsuit over the apprenticeship of the stationer Richard Meighen. Although their origins, purposes and modes differ, these materials represent playgoing through a similar set of conventions, assumptions and clichés. Functioning like a cultural script, such conventions enable playwrights and deponents alike to articulate shared assumptions about apprenticeship and its relationship with playgoing. Simultaneously, however, they also reveal some of the fault-lines within those tropes. In neither case, is it easy to position playgoing as a misdemeanour that must be cast off in order for the apprentice to repent and be re-assimilated into the structures of civic trade and profit. On the contrary, Eastward Ho’s erring apprentice Francis Quicksilver and Richard Meighen present examples of apprentices who are able to turn their interest in theatre to profitable ends.

Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare
  • Stationers Shaping a Genre
  • Amy Lidster
  • Published online:
    10 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022
  • During the early modern period, the publication process decisively shaped the history play and its reception. Bringing together the methodologies of genre criticism and book history, this study argues that stationers have – through acts of selection and presentation – constructed some remarkably influential expectations and ideas surrounding genre. Amy Lidster boldly challenges the uncritical use of Shakespeare's Folio as a touchstone for the history play, exposing the harmful ways in which this has solidified its parameters as a genre exclusively interested in the lives of English kings. Reframing the Folio as a single example of participation in genre-making, this book illuminates the exciting and diverse range of historical pasts that were available to readers and audiences in the early modern period. Lidster invites us to reappraise the connection between plays on stage and in print, and to reposition playbooks within the historical culture and geopolitics of the book trade.