Textual reproduction: Collaboration, gender, and authorship in Renaissance drama

Abstract

This dissertation emerges from a pair of related perceptions about the English Renaissance that criticism has largely ignored. First, collaboration was the dominant mode of textual production in the Renaissance theatre, before copyright, authorial ownership, and an idealized conception of individuated style. Second, textual production--the writing, performing, collecting, and publishing of plays--occurred within the context of conflicting sex/gender systems; moreover, the printed forms of play-texts participated in the construction of those systems. This dissertation proposes an historically rigorous reconsideration of both textual and sexual reproduction at the points of their intersection. Chapter One, Seeing Double, revises our conception of collaboration in light of recent historicist and post-structuralist treatments of authorship. Arguing that criticism has traditionally framed readings of the drama with an anachronistic notion of the author, the chapter offers an interpretation of The Knight of the Burning Pestle based in the collaborative practice of Renaissance theatrical and textual production. Chapter Two, Between Gentlemen, traces the relation of male friendship, homoeroticism, class, and collaboration in period conduct books, essays, The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Chapter Three, Representing Author/ity, analyzes an emerging author-function and patriarchalism in plays like Pericles that place authorial figures on stage, and relates these representations to contemporaneous folio volumes that reconceptualized the collection of texts around a single authorial figure. Chapter Four, Reproducing Works, begins by tracing the transition of play-texts from theatrical performance to printed quartos; focusing on title pages, it argues that quartos advertised themselves as ephemeral and collaborative re-presentations of theatrical events. Returning to the dramatic folios and their patriarchal pedigree, the chapter concentrates upon the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio. Got by Two Fathers, the textual offspring of two Masculines espous\u27d (in the words of one of its commendatory poems), this volume illuminates both absolutist/patriarchal and homoerotic textual reproduction, and inscribes the competition of authorship and collaboration at a decisive moment in English history. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of the folio collections of Margaret Cavendish\u27s plays, volumes that register the difficulties of a woman attempting to insert herself into a genre and textual economy normatively transacted by men