Paper stages: The intersection of printing and drama as cultural institutions in Tudor and Stuart England

My dissertation argues that printing and drama were linked fundamentally as cultural institutions in Tudor and Stuart England---registered primarily in the new forms and functions of drama that emerged from a series of intersections between the theater and a variety of printing practices. I show how that printing and drama became complimentary modes of production between the accession of Henry VII in 1485 and the closing of the public theaters in 1642. In their shared commercial orientation, reliance on collaborative labor, and development of new forms of "publicity," drama and printing were uniquely situated as cultural institutions to engage in acts of mutual recognition and definition. The power of print to produce thousands of copies of books in a relatively short time created a new kind of product oriented around the "event" of publication rather than the church calendar or the temporality of folk holidays. The new mode of publicity made possible by the press also fostered a new kind of autonomy that influenced drama in its move away from ritual contexts and toward a model of professional drama organized around commercial processes of production and consumption.; My dissertation also shows how drama shaped printing, given that several print-oriented genres depended on theatrical modes of representation as a means of appealing to a readership more familiar with oral forms of culture and inherently distrustful of printing as a means of reproduction. Taken as a whole, my project demonstrates how printing could be an agent of cultural change not as a result of technological innovation in and of itself, but rather as a consequence of the intersections between material practices and cultural forms.