HEIDI CRAIG. Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars

This deeply researched study is important reading for anyone interested in early modern drama. Bringing together theatre history and book history, Heidi Craig provides fascinating new insights into the lasting literary impact of the closure of the playhouses. The central focus of the book is how the plays of the previous decades were recalled, preserved, and experienced in the period 1642–1660. Like other recent studies, it recognizes that some theatrical activity continued in these years, despite the prohibition on playing. The greater concern of the book, however, is with the role of print in ensuring that Renaissance plays, and the wider theatrical culture of which they formed part, were not lost in time. Craig emphasizes that stationers in these years not only published huge numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, but also produced the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. She also highlights how various authors sought to record memories of early modern theatrical culture, producing the earliest examples of what we might call theatre history. While she is less concerned with political readings of the plays than are many other studies of drama focused on the mid-seventeenth century, she recognizes that the widespread concern to preserve earlier plays was bound up with royalist nostalgia. There is a lot of detail here to support the book’s key argument that the theatrical prohibition led not just to the flourishing of drama in print but to the construction of English Renaissance drama as a genre and a field of critical study.