Textual Intercourse
Collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama

Shows how the writing of Renaissance drama was conceptualised in the language of eroticism.

Jeffrey Masten (Author)

9780521589208, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 February 1997

240 pages, 11 b/w illus.
22.6 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.33 kg

'This is an absorbing book, which bristles with provocative insights … Of necessity, therefore, and often brilliantly, masten ranges widely in his study over the terrains of queer studies, the history of sexuality and ditorial controversy … Textual Intercourse thus constitutes a landmark volume … This important work will have a notable impact on Renaissance scholarship and editorial practice alike.' Mark Thornton Burnett, Theatre Research International

Textual Intercourse proposes that the language and practice of writing plays in early modern England was inextricably linked to languages and practices of eroticism, sexuality and reproduction. Jeffrey Masten reads a range of early modern materials - burial records, contemporary biographical anecdotes and theatrical records, essays, conduct books and poems; the printed apparatus of published plays, and the plays themselves - to illustrate the ways in which writing for the theatre shifted from a model of homoerotic collaboration toward one of singular authorship on a patriarchal-absolutist model. Plays and collections of plays by Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Fletcher, Beaumont and Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, and others, are considered. Textual Intercourse illustrate the ways in which methods attuned to sexuality and gender can illuminate more traditional questions of authorship, attribution, textual editing and intellectual property.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG]