The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama

Nora Johnson’s study of actors who wrote plays in early modern England uncovers important links between performance and authorship. The book traces the careers of Robert Armin, Nathan Field, Anthony Munday and Thomas Heywood, actors who were powerfully interested in marketing themselves as authors and celebrities; but Johnson contends that authorship as they constructed it had little to do with modern ideas of control and ownership. Finally, the book repositions Shakespeare in relation to actors, considering Shakespeare’s famous silence about his own work as one strategy among many available to writers for the stage. The Actor as Playwright provides an alternative to the debate between traditional and materialist readers of early modern dramatic authorship, arguing that both approaches are weakened by a reluctance to look outside the Shakespearean canon for evidence.

• Contributes to current debates on authorship in the Renaissance, and therefore belongs more to Renaissance studies than to theatre studies • Explains the powerful connections between actors and authorship in early modern drama • Resituates Shakespeare and Jonson in relation to their fellow actor-playwrights

Introduction: Playing author; 1. Publishing the fool: Robert Armin and the collective production of mirth; 2. The actor-playwright and the true poet: Nathan Field, Ben Jonson, and the prerogatives of the author; 3. Anthony Munday and the spectacle of martyrdom; 4. ‘Some zanie with his mimick action’: Thomas Heywood and the staging of humanist authority; Coda: the Shakespearean silence.

‘… interesting and original ideas … this book is a prodigious achievement. Meticulously edited and beautifully produced, with a multifaceted chronology as an appendix, its essays are for the most part marvels of compressed and incisive critical judgement.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘… useful and stimulating study … Johnson’s work makes a crucial intervention in the debate concerning the nature of authorship and performance in early modern theatre.’ Theatre Notebook