ABSTRACT
Ever since Foucault famously asked “What is an Auhor?” (113-38), critics have sought to recover a history of the idea of authorship, engaging in a complicated process of locating “the author” in particular time periods, cultures, and perhaps most crucially, texts. But in the process of searching for this history, we are always in danger of digging like a clumsy archaeologist, and finding coins that have dropped out of our own pockets. Whenever the history of anything is written, post-Enlightenment historians of culture have tended to paint the past as a forerunner of the future, a gradual or fitful period of awakening into the concepts of a naturalized present, a bias accentuated by Marxist progressivism. The basic facts of Renaissance authorship are often repeated: that Sidney never attempted to publish his texts in print, that Shakespeare did so only sporadically, that there was no concept of intellectual property or copyright, that creative autonomy is a concept which has more to do with Wordsworth than Shakespeare. But however often these factoids are repeated, modern criticism has been stubbornly resistant to their implications, and histories of authorship tend to privilege the (perceived) moment when England awoke from this strange netherworld into a modern conceptual universe, where print means everything and authorship is gloriously self-sufficient. Henry S. Turner has recently engaged in an effort to supplement the “declared interest in material culture-objects, things, bodies, places,” which has become central to recent criticism by applying new attention to Nashe’s discourse on the material culture of his own time (529). Perhaps something similar can be done with authorship; this final chapter will seek to historicize the concept of authorship by examining three instances where the makers of early modern texts perform a contemporary act of excavating, framing and identifying a textual voice. Each of these texts begins, as it were, with a desire to speak with the dead. Amidst a complex and changing commerce of textual interchange, the early modern writer was thoroughly entangled in a collaborative environment, and to attempt any disentanglement would miss the point. I would suggest that in early modern culture the border between the intended text of the author and the vicissitudes of textual materiality was quite obviously permeable, if indeed it existed at all. Publishers often framed, reframed and misprinted books, booksellers used unsold books as wrapping paper, theatre practice inevitably altered written plays, plays were transformed into print and works like The Spanish Tragedy and
The Mirror for Magistrates214 were subject to seemingly endless accretions and emendations. Perhaps the best way to conclude this study is with an examination of three books which devote considerable emphasis to an author-figure who, so far from being a modern original genius, is a visibly precarious, unnatural, flawed, or pointedly textual entity. Foucault crucially observed that when medieval Christian tradition sought to authenticate texts, it established a conceptual economy of exegesis which not only explains a text but also operates in tandem with it to establish an author-function, and that the author-function serves to unify a group of texts in a variety of waystransforming them into works-and helps to render them sacred.215 A variety of texts and images on the title page can represent a solid, real, or nontextual origin of the book; here I apply Foucault’s category of exegesis to all marks on a printed title page (including the imprint, the date and any text which explains the title) which bracket the such “real origins” and help to define them as such.216 Marks on the page which operate as symbolic origins conform to Foucault’s understanding of the way in which writing is preserved and then ascribed “the religious principle of hidden meanings (which require interpretation) and the critical assumption of implicit significations, silent purposes and obscure contents” (120). Amidst this framework, the presented author-as distinguished from the actual one-is a discursive formation fraught with highly contradictory collaborative entanglements and effacements.217
