Authorship and Performance in Early Modern Literature
Summary
Research into authorship and performance in the early modern period examines the complex interplay between texts and stages across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars have combined traditional philological methods with digital humanities to trace collaborative writing practices, establish attribution of anonymous or disputed plays, and reconstruct the dynamics of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. This field embraces manuscript studies that reveal how plays circulated in miscellanies or promptbooks, and how marginalia and corrections record evolving stage directions. Performance studies have likewise explored university and court masques, touring companies and boy players, drawing attention to audience address, rhetorical strategies such as soliloquy, and the material conditions of playhouses. Together, these approaches illuminate the social networks, publication economies and ideological frameworks that shaped early modern drama, while also informing modern productions and classroom pedagogy.
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Authorship and Performance in Early Modern Literature publication trend
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Technical terms
Attribution: Process of identifying the likely author of a text through analysis of linguistic, metrical and stylistic features.
Soliloquy: A dramatic monologue spoken by a single character alone on stage, intended to convey private thoughts or plans.
Manuscript miscellany: A bound collection of diverse texts compiled in a single volume, often reflecting the performance or reading interests of a particular community.
Stylometry: Computational approach to measuring textual features (such as word frequency and sentence length) in order to support authorship studies and genre classification.
References
- Memory Traces in The Reign of King Edward III. Humanities (2022).
- Paris’s Choice (1670) by Charles Davenant: A Seventeenth-Century Play Preserved in a University Manuscript Miscellany. Neophilologus (2022).
- Addressing the Audience and Making History: Soliloquies in Richard III. Humanities (2024).
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