Counting Insatiate Countesses: The Seventeenth-Century Annotations to Marston's "The Insatiate Countess"

Abstract

I n his recent book Shakespeare after Theory, David Scott Kastan reminds us that great age of theory is overand that the present task of scholarship is to assess the theoretical insights of the last generation by a thoroughgoing practice of historical scholarship.' Keeping this exhortation in mind, I am in this essay especially concerned with the need to validate the frequently stated assertion that dramatic texts possess power. On what concrete evidence can such a proposition be sustained? And what might be the measures of that power in a dramatic text in particular? From this perspective, the hitherto unpublished marginal notations on a copy of the 1631 quarto of John Marston's and William Barksted's The Insatiate Countess assume unusual significance,2 for they present a rare opportunity to assess this play's power of representation in relation to two seventeenth-century readers. Although the annotations are not extensive, they nevertheless disclose a good deal about the cultural principles governing their inscription as well as the cultural directives that shaped this early Stuart tragedy. I propose, first, to establish the dating limits of the marginalia, to distinguish the two hands involved, and to describe fully the four kinds of annotation. Then in the balance of the essay I will attempt to establish the analogical habits of reading that govern the topical applications offered by the readers and to treat the cultural significance of their practice. This copy of The Insatiate Countess, housed at the National Library of Scotland, has been annotated by two distinct hands. In both cases this obviously occurred after 1631, the publication date of the third quarto, and their annotations can be dated more precisely using other external as well as internal evidence. The

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