As well as being called ‘play-makers’ and ‘poets’, playwrights of the early modern period were frequently known as ‘play-patchers’ because of the common perception that a play was pieced together out of a collection of odds and ends: it was not a single whole entity. The term was unflattering and designed to wound, as was ‘playwright’, with its implication that constructing plays was a craft equivalent to being a cartwright or a wheelwright rather than an art. But, just as ‘playwright’ over time lost its pejorative implications, so ‘play-patcher’ too came to be seen as an unpalatable truth. Well mayRandolphsneer at the poet who makes a ‘Comedy’ out of ‘patches of his ragged wit, as if he meant to make Poverty a Coat of it’, and Wither lament the men who can do little more than ‘patch up a bald witlesse Comedy’ out of ‘rotten-old-worme-eaten stuffe’; there was something ‘patchy’ in the very substance of early modern plays. [download]
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