ABSTRACT
Most recent studies of the development of early modern dramatic authorship have focused on textual, not theatrical matters: on authorial negotiations with readership, apparatuses of state and religious censorship, systems of patronage, and the market for books. Douglas A. Brooks, for example, building on the work of bibliographers including Richard C. Newton and
Alexandra Halasz, focuses on the practices of the printing house, on the interventions of individual authors like Jonson in the stationers’ craft, and on their participation in the marketing of their work;3 Brooks argues that it is “the circulation and publication of dramatic texts” that “contributed to . . . the construction of proto-modern notions of authorship.”4 Joseph Loewenstein carries this focus forward in his recent dual studies of the history of intellectual property and plagiarism, arguing that the modern author, in the sense of a writer who maintains ownership over his work, arises from the competition between the stationers and the players over the rights to playtexts.5 Other work, like Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates, is less materialist in its methodology, but still focuses on texts rather than dramatic practices. Helgerson’s treatment of Jonson, like that of Spenser and Milton, discusses the poet’s authorial claims as inscribed on a readership, molding an authorial identity out of the differing assumptions of coterie manuscript culture and print transmission.6
