Consolidating recent work in textual bibliographic and cultural studies of printed drama, this collection reminds us that plays have a multitude of lives, and one of them is book history. Contributors of these nine essays work through both real and imagined communities of play-readers with such subjects as a survey of Renaissance book readers, reading Charpham's The Fleer as an example of printed comedy, women reading plays through the body and "forbidden" plays such as those written against the government. Those on the relationship between play-reading and the book trade include a comparison of play-reading and news-reading (through Jonson), the authority of print, the masque, and the impact of technologies. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)