Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama

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Cambridge University Press, Feb 20, 1997 - Drama - 223 pages
Textual Intercourse proposes that the language and practice of writing plays in early modern England was inextricably linked to languages and practices of eroticism, sexuality and reproduction. Jeffrey Masten reads a range of early modern materials - burial records, contemporary biographical anecdotes and theatrical records, essays, conduct books and poems; the printed apparatus of published plays, and the plays themselves - to illustrate the ways in which writing for the theatre shifted from a model of homoerotic collaboration toward one of singular authorship on a patriarchal-absolutist model. Plays and collections of plays by Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Fletcher, Beaumont and Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, and others, are considered. Textual Intercourse illustrate the ways in which methods attuned to sexuality and gender can illuminate more traditional questions of authorship, attribution, textual editing and intellectual property.

From inside the book

Contents

Seeing double collaboration and the interpretation of Renaissance drama
12
Between gentlemen homoeroticism collaboration and the discourse of friendship
28
Representing authority patriarchalism absolutism and the author on stage
63
Reproducing works dramatic quartos and folios in the seventeenth century
113
Mistris corrivall Margaret Cavendishs dramatic production
156
Notes
165
Bibliography
203
Index
217
Copyright

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Page 1 - In the same Grave Fletcher was buried, here Lies the Stage-Poet, Philip Massinger. Playes they did write together; were great friends, And now one grave includes them in their ends. So whom on earth nothing did part, beneath Here (in their Fames) they lie, in spight of death.

About the author (1997)

Jeffrey Masten is Professor of English and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University.