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Early modern authorship in 2007.

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MY GOODNESS. Reading Jeffrey Knapp's "What is a Co-Author?" one would think that scholars who have argued for a collaborative notion of authorship in late sixteenth-century England simply got all of their facts wrong. Attacking the claim that single authorship was "not the norm," Knapp marshals a heap of evidence to show that many early modern people recognized writers as writers, and that works by authors were published before the modern author supposedly emerged. (1) To my mind, it's all fine and good to offer a corrective to a story in which authorship was dreamed up suddenly in 1616 or 1623. And it's certainly useful to say that facts can be assembled so as to tell a story other than the one in which authorship does not have a starring role in the culture. But it also seems clear to me that the "facts" are not unambiguous. And if the facts can be arranged to tell different and somewhat contradictory stories--which I'll caricature as "authorship was historically different in the early modern period" vs. "actually authors were much the same as we imagine"--then it's reasonable to consider what diverse stories enable us to teach and to say about literature.

I was asked to participate in this forum because my 1993 book, The Imprint of Gender, argued that authorship was conceptualized in Renaissance printed poetic texts in gendered and sexualized ways. (2) This project started with my skepticism over the claim that because early modern plays were collective, social, and malleable, they lacked the "authorization" that poetic texts had. After reading Arthur Marotti's work on manuscript exchange and surveying prefaces to early printed works, I realized that printed poetic texts were also collectively and collaboratively produced works with unstable boundaries and shifting attributions. (3) Because manuscript was the medium of choice for contemporary elite writers, book producers had to take some pains to shape a legitimized notion of the published poetic text. In showing that problems of textual fixity and attribution didn't just crop up in drama, I engaged debates about authorship.

Now I'm asked to think about whether my view of authorship has changed in light of recent work. My first thought is that there are several ongoing debates about early modern authorship. The question posed to me whenever I give a public address on Shakespeare's works is whether someone named Shakespeare actually wrote these plays or not. Most scholars, having settled...

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