“WHICH THINGE OUR AUTHOR MARKING WELL, (…)
AND AS HE MUSED IN HIS MINDE, IMMEDIATELY
AROSE, AN HISTORY OF LATE YEARES DON, WHICH
MIGHT AS HE SUPPOSE, STYRRE UP THEIR MYNDES TO
GODLYNES,”: RELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE RETURN
OF THE AUTHOR IN EARLY MODERN DRAMATIC
PARATEXTS.
HERMES CONFERENCE 2015
JEANNE MATHIEU, IRCL/MONTPELLIER
INTRODUCTION
THE AUTHOR
• Jean-Christophe Mayer: “The question of the author
has never ceased to haunt the critics.” (6)
• Roland Barthes: “writing is the destruction of every
voice, of every point of origin, writing is that neutral,
composite, oblique space where our subject slips
away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting
with the very identity of the body writing.” (313)
• Michel Foucault: “texts, books, discourses, really
began to have authors (…) to the extent that
authors became subject to punishment, that is, to
the extent that discourses could be transgressive.”
(134)
INTRODUCTION
THE PARATEXT
• Martha Gause McCaulley: “a non-organic
element.”
• Douglas Bruster: “something like 40 per cent of the
surviving playtexts feature a prologue.” (1)
• Richard Macksey: “those liminal devices and
conventions, both within the book (peritext) and
outside it (epitext), that mediate the book to the
reader: titles and subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords,
dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, notes,
epilogues, and afterwords (…)” (xviii)
INTRODUCTION
THE CORPUS
Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter (1607)
Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (1607)
Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1625)
Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience
(1581)
• Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (c.15891590)
•
•
•
•
I. THE THEOLOGICAL DISPUTE AND
THE RISE OF THE AUTHOR
• Dekker: “The generall scope of this drammaticall
poem is to set forth (in tropicall and shadowed
collours) the greatnes, magnanimity, constancy,
clemency and other the incomparable heroical
vertues of our late Queene and (on the contrary
part) the inueterate malice, treasons, machinations,
vnderminings, & continual blody stratagems, of that
purple whore of Roome,” (Lectori 2-9)
• Dekker: “I may, (by some more curious in censure,
then found in iudgement), be critically taxed”
(Lectori, 24-25)
I. THE THEOLOGICAL DISPUTE AND
THE RISE OF THE AUTHOR
• Angeliki Athanasiadou: ”The choice of an adjective
use in a certain position (and not only in the
premodifier but also in the postmodifier and the
predicative position) seems to be associated with
the viewpoint of a speaker.” (210)
• An Excellent New Comedie intituled: The Conflict of
Consicence Contayninge a Most Lamentable
Example of the Dolefull Desperation of a Miserable
Worldlinge, termed, by the name of Philologvs, who
forsook the trueth of Gods Gospel, for feare of the
losse of lyfe, & worldly goods.
I. THE THEOLOGICAL DISPUTE AND
THE RISE OF THE AUTHOR
I. THE THEOLOGICAL DISPUTE AND
THE RISE OF THE AUTHOR
• Dekker: “of such a scantling are my words set downe,
that neither the one party speakes too much, not the
other (in opposition) too little in their owne defence.”
(Lectori.20-23).
• Dekker: “(in Tropicall and shadowed collours)” (Lectori.12)
• ODNB: “Middleton went into hiding, pursued by a
warrant; his son, Edward, was arrested and brought
before the privy council; Middleton himself claimed, in a
poem to King James, that he was imprisoned ‘in the
Fleet’. None of his extant plays can be convincingly
dated after August 1624, and he was probably released
on condition that he stopped writing for the stage.”
(“Middleton, Thomas (bap. 1580, d. 1627”)
II. AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY
• Dekker: “(…) wee present / Matter aboue the vulgar
Argument: / Yet drawne so liuely, that the weakest eye, /
(…) / (…) may reach the mistery: / What in it is most
graue, will most delight.” (The Prologue. 3-8)
• Dekker: “I falsifie the account of time, and set not down
Occurrents, according to their true succession, (…) I
write as a Poet, not as an Historian, and (…) these two
doe not liue vnder one law.” (Lectori.21-24).
• Woodes: And though the Historie of it selfe, be too too, dolorus,
And would constraine a man with teares of blood, his cheekes to wett,
Yet to refresh the myndes of them that be the Auditors,
Our Author intermixed hath, in places fitt and meete,
Some honest mirth, yet alwaies ware, DECORVM, to exceede:
(The Prologue.63-67)
II. AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY
• Middleton: “What of the Game, cald Chesse-play
can be made / To make a Stage-Play, shall this day
be plaid.” (The Prologue.1-2)
• Marlowe: “And if ought here offend your eare or
sight, / We onely Act, and Speake, what others
write.” (The Epilogue.5-6).
• Helen Smith and Louise Wilson: “(…) paratextual
elements are in operation all the way through the
reader’s experience of the text, not merely at the
start, and they continuously inform the process of
reading, offering multiple points of entry,
interpretations, and contestations.” (6)
II. AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY
II. AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY
• Gerard Genette: “Indeed, this fringe, always the
conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more
or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone
between text and off-text, a zone not only of
transition but also of transaction: a privileged place
of pragmatics and a strategy of an influence on the
public, an influence that – whether well or poorly
understood and achieved – is at the service of a
better reception for the text and a more pertinent
reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes
of the author and his allies” (2)
III. THE BIRTH OF COLLABORATIVE
AUTHORSHIP
• Barnes: To the honorable and his very deare friends, Sir
William Herbert, and Sir William Pope Knights, associates
in the noble order of the Bathe. Barnabe Barnes
consecrateth his loue. Noble Gentlemen, your loue
towards mee (so long time, and in so great measure
continued by you, not merited by me) did tie so firme a
knotte vpon the band of my dutie towards both of you,
that I have lincked you both great friends in the
patronage of this little Booke. And I stay well assured,
that of your good affection you would in any reasonable
course willingly protect him, that writte it, whose Penne
and the direction thereof, with all his best faculties, hee
sincerely deuoteth to your seruice, still resting yours most
assured, faithfull and affectionate: Bar.Barnes.
III. THE BIRTH OF COLLABORATIVE
AUTHORSHIP
• Gerard Genette: “The dedication always is a matter of
demonstration, ostentation, exhibition: it proclaims a
relationship, whether intellectual or personal, actual or
symbolic, and this proclamation is always at the service
of the work, as a reason for elevating the work’s standing
or as a theme for commentary (…)” (2)
• ODNB: “ (it) was the first single play printed with
engraved title-pages.”(“Middleton, Thomas (bap. 1580,
d. 1627”).
• Gerard Genette: “once the possibilities of the cover were
discovered, they seem to have been exploited very
rapidly”. (23)
III. THE BIRTH OF COLLABORATIVE
AUTHORSHIP
CONCLUSION
• Roland Barthes: “ (…) it is language which speaks
not the author.” (313)
• Gerard Genette: “what enables a text to become a
book.” (1)
• Gerard Genette: “valid or not, the author’s point of
view is part of the paratextual performance,
sustains it, inspires it, anchors it.” (308)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PRIMARY SOURCES
Barnes, Barnabe. The Devil’s Charter. New York: AMS Press. 1970.
Dekker, Thomas. “The Whore of Babylon”. The Dramatic Works
2. Ed. Fredson Bowers. London: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Marlowe, Christopher. “The Jew of Malta “. Christopher
Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Ed. J. B. Steane. London: Penguin
Books, 1969. 343- 430.
Middleton, Thomas. A Game at Chess. Ed. Trevor H. Howard-Hill.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Woodes, Nathaniel. The Conflict of Conscience. Eds. Herbert
Davis and F.P. Wilson. Oxford: Malone Society, 1952.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Macksey, Richard. “Foreword”. Paratexts: thresholds of
interpretations. By Gerard Genette. Cambridge: Cambridge
Athanasiadou, Angeliki. “Adjectives and subjectivity”. University Press, 1997.
Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity. Eds. Angeliki
Athanasiadou, Costas Canakis and Bert Cornillie. Berlin: Sgroi, Rosemary and Alan Davidson. "POPE, Sir William (1596Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. 209-239.
1624), of Cogges, Oxon". History of Parliament Online, Web.
<http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author". Trans. Stephen 1629/member/pope-sir-william-1596-1624>.
Heath. Modern Criticism and Theory: A reader. 3rd edition. Eds.
Nigel Wood and David Lodge. Harlow: Pearson, 2014. 313-316.
Smith Helen and Louise Wislon. "Introduction". Renaissance
Paratexts. Eds. Helen Smith and Louise Wilson. Cambridge:
Bruster, Douglas and Richard Weimann. Prologues to Cambridge University Press, 2011. 1-14.
Shakespeare’s Theatre: Performance and liminality in early
modern drama. London: Routledge, 2004.
Stater, Victor. “Herbert, William, third earl of Pembroke (1580–
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H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
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resource book for students. Eds. Mark Robson and Peter <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13058>.
Stockwell. London: Routledge, 2005. 133-139.
•
SECONDARY SOURCES
Gary. “Middleton, Thomas (bap. 1580, d. 1627)”. Gary
Interpretation. Taylor,
Taylor Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G.
Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed.
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Mayer, Jean-Christophe. Shakespeare et la postmodernité : <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18682>.
essais sur l’auteur, le religieux, l’histoire et le lecteur. Bern: P.
Lang, 2012.
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
McCaulley, Martha. “Functions and Content of the Prologue,
Chorus and other Non-organic Elements in English Drama, from
the beginnings to 1642”. Studies in English Drama, First Series.
New York: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1917.