Zachery Lasser writes in Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication that readers in the early modern were very different from playgoers, resulting in theaters creating a very different “product” when they staged a play, than publishers when they printed one. He writes that
While the [playing] company must target rather broad range of people to fill the theatre night after night, the publisher can cater to a smaller, “niche” audience. … When studying a play, the, we must at least consider that “the politics of publication” may have significantly affected the text that early modern audiences heard in the theatre, turning it into the one that they bought in the bookshop and that we study today. (20)
In what ways did publisher’s reshape early modern plays in order to cater to their own specific audiences? Their market was not the same as the audiences that attended live performances; it did not include the lower economic classes that, though they could afford to attend the live performances as groundlings, would not have been able to afford to purchase, or even read, printed books. Publishers catered to the literate, higher economic classes, and shaped Early Modern texts to suit the tastes of those book buyers.
Thus, the understanding of these plays today has been filtered through these seventeenth century “politics of publication,” re-shaping them into the plays with which we are familiar today. While we certainly owe much to these publishers for preserving an ephemeral art that would have otherwise died at the end of each performance, we also have lost much in this transition from stage to text.
Shakespeare’s drama, and that of his contemporaries, was one written for a much wider and diverse audience, than that which was eventually printed. His plays were meant to entertain a wide strata of Early Modern playgoers, from the groundlings to those in the boxes. Academic editions and literary critics of Shakespeare today sometimes forget that. Much has shaped Shakespeare’s plays over the past four hundred years into ideological cultural capital, in which Shakespeare has been made a symbol of the cultural elite.
I have railed in this blog recently against those who would claim Shakespeare as such a symbol. Shakespeare wrote for all of London, for the lower social classes as much as the higher. Shakespeare’s original audience was much broader than it is today.
