ABSTRACT
Early modern dramatists negotiated their working conditions and contracts, including obligations, duties and fees, and their ‘art and industry’—that is, their artistic concerns, needs, requirements and desires—in order to write a ‘good’ play. Together with Henslowe’s and Alleyn’s papers, contemporary playhouse and performance documents, bills, memoirs and texts of plays in manuscript or print give authors a voice, sometimes at their own insistence and sometimes by accident. Either way, dramatists speak loudly. If dramatists did not demand or receive full authority over their conditions and texts, they seem to have expected or to have claimed whatever authority they could, subject to negotiation.
