ABSTRACT
In Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre, Robert Weimann traces the fruitful tensions between two modes of presentation exploited on the Elizabethan stage, the textual authority of the playwright and the self-authorizing performative powers of the actor. Weimann's study reminds us that for playing, at least, authority was not given but redirected from a variety of sources and capacities. This chapter focuses on some particular passages that scholars have frequently returned to in trying to understand the particular authority of Shakespeare, and more generally of Elizabethan playwrights, during the period in which they were first making their plays. Like Meres, Nashe in Pierce Penilesse is trying to place Shakespeare and other writers within a larger system – albeit a very different one than that which Meres sees – in this case, the conditions under which plays are produced rather than their classicizing reception.
