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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama, by Nora Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 206. Cloth $60.00.
In productive dialogue with recent work on theatrical collaboration, on early modern figurations of authorship, and on intersections between the page and stage, Nora Johnson's new study offers an original and provocative exploration of "actors as innovators in the construction of authorship ... [and of] the theatricality of authorship itself" (4). (1) Refreshingly, and perhaps surprisingly, the book is not focused upon Jonson or Shakespeare (though Johnson devotes a coda to the latter and much attention to the former); rather, its four chapters are dedicated to Robert Armin, Nathan Field, Anthony Munday, and Thomas Heywood, neglected and (if one accepts Johnson's arguments) misunderstood actor/writers all. As Johnson makes clear throughout, this unexpected focus is as much a challenge to New Historicism as it is to bardolatry.
Johnson's central contention is that a number of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century actor/writers self-consciously fashioned various forms of authorship that are not well conceptualized using the usual rubrics of "copyright, Jacobean absolutism, [or] Romantic subjectivity" (2). Rather, these figures manufactured forms of authorial charisma that are best understood as emerging from their free-flowing communal engagements as actors on the early modern professional stage. "[T]hey bring," says Johnson, "the social meaning of the actor into our definition of authorship, stressing audience response, protean changeability, a subjectivity constituted in self-division rather than self-possession" (14). These forms of authorship, constructed as they are out of "the exigencies of the social and the material" (4), function neither as the "principles of thrift" outlined by Foucault nor as vehicles of universal subjectivity (a la Harold Bloom). They instead act as so many signals of epistemological contingency, offering alternative modes of authorial self-presentation within an early modern discourse about dramatic authorship that many have mistakenly accepted as both instigated and dominated by Jonson and his bibliographic ego.
Johnson's first and most convincing chapter is "Publishing the Fool: Robert Armin and the Collective Production of Mirth." In it, she suggests that the normative Foucauldian association of authorship with notions of copyright and intellectual property has necessarily led to the marginalization of early modern authorial figures...
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