Synopses & Reviews
Uncovering important links between acting and authorship in early modern England, Nora Johnson traces the careers of Robert Armin, Nathan Field, Anthony Munday and Thomas Heywood, actors strongly interested in marketing themselves as authors and celebrities. However, the authorship they imagined had little to do with modern ideas of control and ownership. Shakespeare's famous silence about his own work is one strategy among many available to writers for the stage. Johnson provides an alternative to the debate between traditional and materialist readers of dramatic authorship.
Review
"Johnson's style is lively, engaging and packed full of anecdotal detail, which brings a vividness and strong interest to her discussion."
- Early Modern Literary Studies
Review
"Refreshing and absorbing."
- Studies in English Literature
Review
"Johnson's argument about dramatic authorship is strong and consistent." Essays in Theatre,/i> William W.E. Slights, University of Saskatchewan
Review
"The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama will undoubtably stand as a significant contribution to the recent critical conversation about the construction of dramatic authorship both in its implicit challenge to Jonson and Shakespeare-focused approaches and in its loud questioning of Foucault's 'principle of thrift' as the dominant paradigm for understanding authorial self-fashioning in the Elisabethan and jacobean periods." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England Kirk Melnikoff
Synopsis
Uncovers important links between acting and authorship in early modern England.
About the Author
Nora Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Swarthmore College.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: playing author; 1. Publishing the fool: Robert Armin and the collective production of mirth; 2. The actor-playwright and the true poet: Nathan Field, Ben Jonson and the prerogatives of the author; 3. Anthony Munday and the spectacle of martyrdom; 4. 'Some zanie with his mimick action': Thomas Heywood and the staging of humanist authority; Coda: the Shakespearean silence; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.