The nine essays gathered together in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England explore the experiences, practices, and rhetoric of reading printed drama from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. The volume's editor, Marta Straznicky, identifies the collection's main interest by situating its focus against work on the production of printed and performed drama by new bibliographers and new historicists, respectively, in which, she claims “the reception of early modern printed drama … has been almost completely overlooked” (4). In moving on from the emphases of these approaches, the volume connects with recent studies that have resituated the production and reception of plays in print among the cultural, political, and economic worlds of early modern England. Indeed, several essays see scholars who have already contributed to current rethinking of drama in print reiterating, or expanding on, earlier work. Zachary Lesser's essay continues his work on typography and the “stationer-function” as a principle for textual interpretation by reading John Wright's publication of The Shoemaker's Holiday in black-letter type alongside his ballad publications as a nostalgic attempt to convey a sense of English popular culture (Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Print Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade [Cambridge, 2004]). Douglas Brooks's exploration of the fascinating tension between the theatrical and the readerly in the 1640 quarto printing of Richard Brome's The Antipodes is governed by the now-familiar narrative of the rise in print of the individual author during the early years of the seventeenth century, connecting with Brooks's earlier publications (From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England [Cambridge, 2000]) and work by critics such as Jeffrey Masten (Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama [Cambridge, 1997]).

If the essays in this collection primarily offer a consolidation or continuation of recent work, moments gesture toward some less-traveled avenues concerning the reception and consumption of early modern drama. The volume's emphasis on the printed play as a reading text opens up important considerations about the complex relationships between plays in print and their existence(s) in performance, whether the performance first took place at court, in private, or at the public playhouse. Essays by Lauren Shohet, Lucy Munro, and Straznicky all address the manners in which printed drama differed from, stood in for, commemorated, or supplemented theatrical representation. Shohet's “The Masque in/as Print” explores the profound difference between the closed, elite performance of masques and their circulation in often cheap print editions, which catered to an entirely new group of consumers with different cultural and interpretative interests from the masques’ theatrical audience. Munro offers an exploration of three different readers’ reactions to Edward Sharpham's The Fleer that embody divergent readerly relationships between book and performance. Munro discerns a theatrical context in the binding of one copy of the play in proximity with other plays by the same company, while Robert Chamberlain's use of the text in making a jest book removes material from its theatrical context entirely; the book of The Fleer returns to a theatrical context in the instance of a copy being marked up for use in performance. Tracing the relationships between performance and the printed book across a range of contexts, including printed prefaces and antitheatrical texts, Straznicky's contribution on female play reading explores how the specifically domestic and private sphere, in which women were assumed to read, is contrasted in the culture with the potentially dangerous public places of performance.

In addition to Lesser's reading of Wright's dramatic output alongside his printed ballads, other essays also make useful contributions to resituating plays in relation to the other printed reading materials with which they shared space in early modern libraries and bookstalls. Alan Farmer's discussion of Ben Jonson's The Staple of News suggests how readers’ responses to this particular drama might be shaped by their experiences of reading news pamphlets, as well as how page design and typography in one genre might pass across into another. Offering a supplement to recent analyses of authorial ascriptions on printed plays’ title pages by considering advertised details of genre, Peter Berek opens up new relationships between drama and other printed texts by tracing how a common language of dramatic genre came to operate in the publication of nondramatic texts as well as plays.

It is with the essays’ attention on the reader that the collection is at its most suggestive, as the early modern reader proves to be a most elusive object of inquiry. The volume opens with Cyndia Susan Clegg's survey of the paratextual addresses to readers, which, she argues, consistently present the early modern reader of drama as “intelligent and discerning, possessed of indifferent judgment” (35). While the survey provides a useful introduction to the rhetoric of book reading as it is generated by those seeking an audience of readers, the reader remains elusive. Do the prefaces and epistles capture, or flatter, their readerships? Do the readers recognize themselves in this description, or do they present images of discerning individuals with whom (some) readers might aspire to associate themselves through their choice of reading matter? The answer to both questions, as several of the essays suggest, is probably yes and no, as the particularity of reading practices and experiences destabilizes any notion of the reader. This disjunction between the rhetorical construction of the reader and the individual practices of readers themselves perhaps becomes most clear in Straznicky's exploration of female readership. As Straznicky considers the libraries of Frances Egerton, Elizabeth Puckering, Margaret Cavendish, and Frances Wolfreston, the actual practices of reading become detached from the discursive presentations of female readership in antitheatrical texts and play prefaces alike. But most important, each reader appears to resist categorization in a unique way, and even the individual reader evidently treated some of her printed plays differently from others.

The matter of particularity encapsulates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the volume. In offering essays by a range of strong scholars addressing different moments of textual reception, varied readers and publishers, and a range of dramatic forms, the volume constitutes an interesting collection of the micronarratives of dramatic book production and reception that a rethinking of early modern textual studies seemingly requires. But the breadth of the essays—which cover a period in which drama was shaped and reshaped by the establishment of the professional theater, saw the growth in printed drama in the late sixteenth century and the later publication of the folios of Jonson and William Shakespeare, and experienced the closing of the theaters and their reopening in the restoration—means that the studies of textual reception feel too scattered to offer more than a series of suggestive points of departure for more sustained studies.