Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill's Early British Drama in Manuscript is a versatile collection of essays that demonstrate the material, textual, and performative interplays of manuscripts in the study of British drama. Spanning manuscripts produced (or supposedly produced, in one case) between 1400 and 1700, the twenty essays highlight an impressive range of methodologies for approaching manuscript study for scholars of dramatic histories. Atkin and Estill have organized the collection into three thematic, roughly chronological sections, “Production,” “Performance,” and “Reception,” emphasizing the life cycle of a manuscript. The volume's thoughtful organization demonstrates unexpected continuities and overlaps between the presented topics and methodologies.

The essays in the first section, “Production,” are united in their attention to the manuscripts’ material histories and these histories’ intersections with the manuscripts’ creations and textual performances. Joe Stadolnik opens with an examination of the Abraham and Isaac play found in the Book of Brome. Arguing that the play's inclusion in the book is “part of a process of impersonal compilation” rather than one of “amateur, personal compilation” by one of the book's early owners (21), Stadolnik suggests that its negligible utility as a playbook points toward a fashion for reading plays. In “The Coventry Playbooks,” Pamela M. King likewise interrogates the utilities of surviving playbooks, analyzing the peculiarities of the Coventry Weavers’ playbooks as texts functional for performance and also materially valuable to their owners. These essays, along with the two that follow, Alexandra F. Johnson's on the Towneley Plays and Matthew Sergi's on the Chester Plays, deconstruct commonly held narratives about their respective manuscripts. In a convincing reexamination of the Towneley plays, Johnson argues that the plays were prepared as ecclesiastical documents used to help suppress Catholic drama in the north early in Elizabeth I's reign. The conditions of the expensive-looking manuscript have, she concludes, prevented scholars from letting “the pages speak for themselves” (68). Like Johnson, Sergi reconsiders previously accepted dating of religious dramatic manuscripts, in his case the Chester cycle plays. Rather than setting limits on their dates, Sergi instead commends their “remarkable resistance to dates,” which has allowed them to be “both preserved and revised” for so long (100).

The final three essays of the first section turn to manuscript plays that survive in more than one source, including printed texts. In their chapter, Kristen Inglis and Mary Polito argue, taking a cue from Tiffany Stern's thesis about Hamlet Q1, that the surviving manuscript of Thomas Goffe's play Baiazet resulted from a team of amateur “note-takers.” They identify ten distinct hands, with one apparent overseer, who took turns transcribing the play during an Oxford University production in 1619 (104). Next, James Purkis turns to the Alnwick Castle manuscript of the anonymous play John of Bordeaux to question the relationship between dramatic manuscripts, performance, and memory. Reconsidering W. W. Greg's memorial reconstruction theory, Purkis offers a more flexible view of the text's lacunae. William Proctor Williams ends the first section with an entertaining reconsideration of the assumption that James Compton and Cosmo Manuche's Interregnum plays were intended to be closet drama, contending that they were instead intended for performance. Williams's essay, like many in the volume, presents new, rich histories of dramatic practices by uniting material and textual evidence from the period in question.

The second section, “Performance,” opens with Louise Rayment's piece about a manuscript miscellany bearing witness to The Play of Wit and Science. The manuscript, she argues, was intended to be used simultaneously as a pedagogical aid and a performance text for the choirboys at St Mary-at-Hill. Rayment's analysis shows that the manuscript's practical, pedagogical usage was versatile. In “Sixteenth-Century Courtly Mumming and Masking: Alexander Montgomerie's The Navigation,” Sarah Carpenter uses a case study of Montgomerie's masking entertainment for the Scottish court to examine how these “ephemeral” types of entertainments, which emphasized visuals like costumes and dancing, survive in fragments in several manuscripts of different genres (165). Carpenter's approach demonstrates the rich mine of sources available for reconstructing one-off performances for which scripts or more “complete” play texts are not extant. Next, Jakub Boguszak offers a close reading of silences in actors’ parts to demonstrate their range of possibilities namely, “how the combination of certainty and ignorance, deliberation and chance, conditioned the actors’ performances” (194). Continuing the thread of early modern performance practices, Kara J. Northway looks to the meaning of actors’ witness signatures on loans to explore how such rituals informed theatrical professionals’ sense of their “professional community” (209). Lucy Munro's essay about clowning and casting similarly examines the business practices of the early modern theater. She finds manuscript plays an especially useful source of information for locating patterns of casting by the King's Men between 1629 and 1632. Finally, Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio examine manuscripts as props onstage, particularly locked letters. Their work acknowledges the embedded social codes of these epistolary props and offers a thought-provoking account of their experiences recreating locked letters for the contemporary stage.

The book's third and final section centers on reception in a diverse selection of dramatic and paradramatic texts. In her opening essay to this section, Tamara Atkin, one of the volume's editors, examines the ways different “hands,” figuratively and literally, shaped the “textual and material reception” of the Inns of Court play Gismond of Salerne (249). Her argument positions the manuscript and printed versions of the play within a context of textual remediation, allowing for a sharp analysis of the process of making play “legible” to readers and users (262). Jean-Christophe Mayer pieces together readers’ responses to Shakespeare's plays in seventeenth-century manuscripts. In examining this “first generation” of critical readers, he rewrites a commonly held narrative about the tastes of readers of Shakespeare's work, one that usually centers the neoclassical age as a starting point for Shakespearean criticism (268). Mayer's chapter, followed by Beatrice Montedoro's, are interested in “reading readers” of manuscripts (267). Montedoro focuses on the dramatic extracting in a particular early modern commonplace book to forward the thesis that “through commonplacing, vernacular drama gained its own new cultural value” different from the “moral and universal wisdom for which the classics were traditionally read” (281). She finds that drama proved a malleable commodity for extractors.

The next two chapters focus on manuscript ownership and verification. In her essay, Antonia Forster analyzes the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries, asking why so many otherwise reputable contemporary examiners eagerly took the manuscripts as authentic. She thus provocatively exposes a similar “seeing is believing” attitude in contemporary Shakespearean criticism. Georgian Age antiquarianism also features in Gail McMurray Gibson's telling of the “discovery” of medieval drama in manuscript via the Macro Plays. Gibson details the ways the manuscript and, indeed, the impulse to collect dramatic manuscripts, has played into the creation of the morality play as a genre. The collection concludes with a pair of sharp chapters about ways digital projects can utilize the hybridity of manuscripts, propelling the foregoing discussions in the volume towards the possibilities of future editorial practices and digital collaboration, respectively. Matteo Pangallo's essay focuses on decentering the textual editor's authority in sanctioning a centralized text where a playbook manuscript exists. He argues that digital editions allow for the possibilities of recreating the “conditions of variant use and change” that created such dramatic manuscripts (330). Rebecca Munson continues, positioning annotated manuscripts as “compilations” and finding in digital humanities projects a “methodological synergy” for engaging with them and the “premodern reading practices” they point to (358).

On the whole, Early British Drama in Manuscript's strengths lie in the collection's variety and breadth, even as many of the essays center a single manuscript for close study. As Atkin and Estill's introduction promises, it brings medieval and early modern drama “into conversation” (2), revealing continuities that are best brought into focus through attention to manuscripts and their histories. The essays collected here are thoughtfully arranged to effectively demonstrate this aim. Indeed, the volume is a valuable addition to the study of early British drama.