The Crew / of Common Playwrights: Collaboration and Authorial Community in the Early Modern Theater
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2012 The Crew / of Common Playwrights: Collaboration and Authorial Community in the Early Modern Theater Lacey Ann Conley Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Conley, Lacey Ann, "The Crew / of Common Playwrights: Collaboration and Authorial Community in the Early Modern Theater" (2012). Dissertations. 299. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/299 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2012 Lacey Ann Conley LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO “THE CREW / OF COMMON PLAYWRIGHTS” COLLABORATION AND AUTHORIAL COMMUNITY IN THE EARLY MODERN THEATER A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY LACEY ANN CONLEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2012 Copyright by Lacey Ann Conley, 2012 All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the process of completing this dissertation, I have come to understand the many ways collaboration can occur in the creation of a written work, both in the early modern theater and, more importantly, in my own community. It is to those who made this seem a less solitary endeavor that I would like to express my thanks. I am grateful to the manuscript staff at the British Library for allowing me to have the most exciting scholarly experience of my life thus far, and to the English department at Loyola for creating a space wherein it is pleasant to be a graduate student. I would also like to thank my parents, and those who have become family along the way: Natalie, Kelly, Julia, Elise, Erin, and Allison, any statement of my gratitude for your friendship would have no means to become hyperbolic. I could not have been more fortunate in my dissertation committee. Chris Kendrick and Jim Knapp, I appreciate your time, your input, and your encouragement throughout this process. It has been a true pleasure working with both of you. Finally, my thanks to Suzanne Gossett, who has been both a mentor and a friend, and has held me to a standard that has made me a better writer and a better scholar. She has, by her own example, given me a model for the kind of professional I want to be. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii iii LIST OF TABLES v v INTRODUCTION 1 1 CHAPTER ONE: “NEED MAKE MANY POETS”: SETTINGS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROFESSION OF PLAYWRIGHT 18 Case Study: Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit 44 CHAPTER TWO: FORMS OF AFFILIATION 64 65 Attached Dramatists 82 Commercial Professionals 86 Literary Dramatists 92 Gentleman Authors 97 CHAPTER THREE: AUTHORIAL INTERACTIONS IN THE BOOK OF SIR THOMAS MORE 122 Munday and the Date of the Original Text 126 Munday and Catholicism 138 Dangerous Topicality in the Original Text 143 Chettle and the Date of the Original Text 147 Tilney’s Encounter with the Manuscript 155 Collaborative Revision, 1603/4 164 CHAPTER FOUR: “DO NOT ASSUME MY LIKENESS”: MIDDLETON, COLLABORATION, AND THE DIFFERENCE DIFFERENCE MAKES 176 CHAPTER FIVE: “WITHOUT THE PROTESTATION OF A SERVICE”: THE PLACE OF THE GENTLEMAN AUTHORS IN THE COMMUNITY OF PLAYWRIGHTS 246 WORKS CITED 297 VITA 308 iv LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Forms of Affiliation, 1580-1625 77 v INTRODUCTION The theatre is your poets' Royal Exchange, upon which their muses, that are now turned to merchants, meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware than words—plaudities, and the breath of the great beast; which, like the threatenings of two cowards, vanish all into air. Players are their factors, who put away the stuff, and make the best of it they possibly can, as indeed 'tis their parts so to do. Your gallant, your courtier, and your captain had wont to be the soundest paymasters, and, I think, are still the surest chapmen: and these, by means that their heads are well stocked, deal upon this comical freight by the gross; when your groundling and gallery-commoner buys his sport by the penny, and, like a haggler, is glad to utter it again by retailing. (59) The above passage is taken from Thomas Dekker's 1609 pamphlet, The Gull's Hornbook, and provides telling insight into the nature of the playwriting profession in the early seventeenth century. What is described is a world of commerce wherein the poets of the theater produce words that are sold by their muses for the cheap applause of the multitude. Two things are made apparent in Dekker's first sentence: one is that the poets seem to have very little control over the marketing of the “wares” they produce (it is not they, but their muses who act as the merchants, so the poets are not even in control of the sale of the words). The other is that the theater provides a “Royal Exchange” wherein playmaking is an inherently collaborative endeavor. The muses are “meeting” in the marketplace in order to “barter away the light commodity of words.” However, it is not each other with whom they are bartering, but with the source of the even lighter “plaudities, and the breath of the great beast,” or popular opinion. In other words, the poets' muses collaborate with one another to increase sales, while at the same time 1 2 working individually to sell their particular commodity. This collaboration is joined by the actors who are the “factors.” A “factor” is defined by the OED as either “One who makes or does (anything); a doer, maker, performer, perpetrator; an author of a literary work” (n. 1.1) or “One who buys or sells for another person; a mercantile agent” (n. 4a). Players “put away the stuff, and make the best of it they possibly can,” so they acting as agents for the selling of the wares, but also contribute to their marketability by “making the best of [them],” since they are in charge of the commodity's final presentation (at least in performance). While this description takes control of the selling of the wares away from the playwrights, the final lines of the passage reveal that some of these products have what we might call immense resale value. In the end, the poets' words, when they leave an impression on their auditor, are stored in memory and repeated to other, more private, audiences. Therefore, a poet whose lines are often remembered and favored by audience members is far more likely to thrive in the “poets' Royal Exchange.” Dekker's “poets' Royal Exchange” is the product of the emergence and stabilization of playwrighting as a commercial profession in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. To understand how this process of professionalization occurred, we must begin by looking at how the profession became necessary—because professions only form when there is a demand for them. It will be useful to take a moment here at the outset to define the terms “profession” and “professional,” since they are key concepts and bear specific and significant meaning in this project. Informed by the work of sociologists Andrew Abbott and Magali Larson,1 Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes 1 Andrew Abbot. System of Professions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988, and Megali Larson. Rise of Professionalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. As Melnikoff and Gieskes explain, “though these two sociologists differ in their understandings of the professions, their work is complementary in this 3 provide a useful definition of these terms: A profession is an occupation which depends on the deployment of a particular kind of knowledge—of cultural capital—and can, therefore be defined by its always unstable control over a specific area of intellectual labor. This control depends on the existence of a market for the professional's products [. .] and that professional's awareness of the norms of that market. The boundaries of a profession develop out of conflict—conflict between producers and consumers and […] between groups of producers. Professions and their practitioners are thus social products, and to label a figure a 'professional' is to assert that that figure occupies a particular position—a position characterized by a degree of self-awareness and control—in a more or less well-developed area of work. (13) In these terms, a profession forms out of the necessity created by “the existence of a market.” For the profession of playwright, the market emerged out of the newly settled repertory system characteristic of London theater companies by the early 1590s. The “cultural capital” under disputed control was, of course, the plays themselves, the poets' “wares.” In order to gain control over this “intellectual labor” in its relatively new, commercialized form, playwrights provided a variety of options for their audiences—the “consumers”—hoping that their particular brand of dramatic composition would gain support and increase its own demand in the marketplace. The willingness to attempt innovation in dramatic form and style was thus an important aspect of the professionalization of a writer for the commercial stage. To be considered a professional, a playwright needed “to occupy a particular position” of power or influence that was recognized by others. Stylistic innovation provided a means for this individuation, and many authors sought to be “known for” certain abilities and tendencies. Christopher Marlowe is one example of an early and respect” (13 n.51), the “this” being the basic definition of a profession and its practitioners provided here.