Commendatory Verses and Authorial Communities in Early English Playbooks

This essay argues that Humphrey Moseley’s exceptional use of commendatory verses in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 finds its origins in the printed play quartos of Ben Jonson. Not only were Jonson’s early quartos the first books featuring poems by both Beaumont and Fletcher, but their paratexts suggest that, shortly after stationers began to see playbooks as a profitable print genre in the 1590s, Jonson realized that playwrights’ literary authority could be reinforced through commendatory verses in the 1600s. When read the way that early modern readers would have encountered them, as printed drama featuring occasional poetry, the quartos of Sejanus (1605), Volpone (1607), Catiline (1611), and The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1610) demonstrate Jonson’s awareness that the medium of print could be used to raise the social status of drama itself. As dramatic literary authorship became more established over the late Jacobean and early Caroline period, other playwrights gradually agreed that commendatory verses could signal community within the commodity of the printed playbook, eventually cumulating in the unprecedented explosion of commendatory verses in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher first folio. [S.N.]