Shakespeare and Paradigms of Early Modern Authorship

This essay examines current thinking on early modern authorship within the competitive economies of the theatre and publishing industries. In the wake of Foucault’s seminal essay, ‘What is an Author?’, there has been much investigation of the status, the branding, the proprietary and moral rights of the author in the early modern period and claims made for the emergence and birth of the author. The essay argues that, while authors were increasingly alert to authorship being wrongly claimed, the late sixteenth to early seventeeth century was in England a moment of transition and uncertainty. Unlike Ben Jonson not all authors vigorously identified with and laid claim to their work. The author’s emergence was a slow and fluctuating process.