| The influence of popular authors, mass audiences, and the commercial press on literature in the English Renaissance has, outside dramatic writing, been largely overlooked. The dissertation uses close readings of Greene, Nashe, and Jonson to explore the relationship between commercial and patronage authors, their work, and the audiences for whom they wrote.;In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, a variety of factors, including the growth of the printing industry, increasing literacy, and declining noble patronage, combined to make traditional views of author and text increasingly unstable. Writers such as Greene and Nashe, excluded from traditional authorial niches (patron's household, government position, or clerical appointment), created new visions of text and self that combined commercial and patronage attitudes towards text and audience. Chapters One and Two trace Greene and Nashe's attempts to develop strategies of writing and self-fashioning aimed at appealing to a broad-based commercial market rather than to a single patron. Their attempts mark the birth of the concepts of the "professional author" and the mass-market text.;The ready availability in the late English Renaissance of printed material promoted a view of the text as a Protean force with the ability to alter both reader and writer. Focusing on magic as a metaphor for textual power, Chapter Three explores the fetishization of the text in dramatic works by Greene, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and suggests the uneasy view these authors had of the instability of self and society that the text seemed to promote.;Ben Jonson's 1616 Workes represents a fusion of commercial and patronage economies that allowed Jonson to avoid many of the difficulties of his predecessors. Combining the commercial strategies of Greene and Nashe with a classically-derived understanding of the role of the author, Jonson was able to fashion a persona that allowed him to exist in both commercial and patronage worlds, while appearing to be controlled by neither one. This vision of authorial self-sufficiency permanently altered the understanding of the author in English society. |
