Nevitt, M. (2025) John Dryden, Henry Herringman, and the dedication of restoration playbooks. Seventeenth Century. ISSN: 0268-117X
Abstract
This article re-evaluates John Dryden’s relationships with his stationers and demonstrates how Restoration book-trade practices could influence literary meaning. Modern scholarship celebrates Dryden’s work with his later bookseller Jacob Tonson the Elder (1655–1736), centring Tonson as the dominant figure behind the marketing of literary culture in the long eighteenth century and the burnishing of Dryden’s critical reputation in that period. One consequence of this emphasis, however, is that the significance of the poet laureate’s work with his first stationer, Henry Herringman (1628–1704), has been occluded, underestimated, or disparaged. Focusing on the printed dedications to Dryden’s new quarto playbooks, including the much-reviled dedication to /The State of Innocence/ (1677), I offer quantitative and qualitative analysis to show that Dryden and Herringman modelled an influential format and practice for new playbook publication which Tonson imitated rather than ignored
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | Print culture; John Dryden; Henry Herringman; Restoration; theatre |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 19 Sep 2025 10:08 |
Last Modified: | 19 Sep 2025 10:08 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Taylor and Francis Group |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/0268117X.2025.2552294 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:231905 |
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