Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama

by Jeffrey Masten

Overview

Textual Intercourse brings together literary criticism, theater history, the study of printed books, and gender studies, to show how the writing of Renaissance drama was conceptualized in the languages of sex, gender, and eroticism. Jeffrey Masten argues that the plays of Shakespeare and others, and the way in which those plays were first printed, illustrates a shift from a model of collaboration to one of singular authorship. Using methods attuned to sexuality and gender, Masten illuminates questions of authorship and intellectual property.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521572606
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/20/1997
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture , #14
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.29(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey Masten is Professor of English and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Seeing double: collaboration and the interpretation of Renaissance drama; 2. Between gentlemen: homoeroticism, collaboration, and the discourse of friendship; 3. Representing authority: patriarchalism, absolutism, and the author on stage; 4. Reproducing works: dramatic quartos and folios in the seventeenth century; 5. Mistris Corrivall: Margaret Cavendish's dramatic production; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Masten's is a lucidly argued study of the relationship between such issues as dramatic collaboration and authorship, and the notions of subjectivity and erotic practices....His wonderful reading of Pericles is just one of the many splendid philological readings in which Masten recovers for us early modern erotic taxonomy, revealing the layers of the erotic, sexual, 'queer' meaning embedded in the depth of language....The Renaissance gender historiography, especially queer studies, has benefited greatly from the orginality of Masten's book." Goran V. Stanivukovic, Boston Book Review

"...His analysis also brings out more personal and erotic aspects of this partnership." Studies in English Literature

"Jeffrey Masten (Harvard) has produced a short book you will want to read more than once. It is brilliant." "...Textual Intercourse becomes one of the most significant books in its field this year. Very highly recommended." Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

"...Masten's work is exemplary; his text demonstrates thorough research and documentation...." Dana E. Aspinall, Sixteenth Century Journal

"...Masten's provocative thesis has significant implications for our understanding of authorship, sexuality, and ideological transformation in seventeenth-century England, and should be taken as a necessary point of depaarture for future scholarship in these areas." Mario DiGangi, Journal of English & Germanic Philology

From the Publisher