ABSTRACT
This chapter argues the inextricable link between authorship and textual patronage, made manifest in the playwrights' paratexts. It suggests that in early addresses to readers and epistles dedicatory John Marston and his Jacobean colleagues worked out an accommodation with publication of their dramatic texts. This arrangement makes textual patronage possible, as textual patronage makes publication possible; and prefatory documents reveal the struggle, providing in fact the only reliable measure. The chapter shows the playwrights as embodying the tension that Robert Weimann has tellingly analyzed as that between the "author's pen" and "actor's voice." Offering a different perspective on the relationship of performance and the printed text, Thomas Middleton writes an address to readers, "To the Comicke Play-readers, Venery, and Laughter," at the beginning of the play The Roaring Girl on which he had collaborated with Thomas Dekker. This entertaining and controversial play intersects the real life experience of Mary Firth, the crossdressed Moll of the play.
