Preliminaries and paratexts

This chapter proposes that discursive paratexts – dedications, addresses to readers, and commendatory verses – are crucial sites for developing ideas of dramatic authorship during the early modern period. These materials indicate that models of authorship were collaboratively and differently conceived: the dramatist is one among a number of authorizing agents and is part of a discourse that has a particular interest in the ‘authority’ of interpretation within the book trade. The second part of the chapter concentrates on Shakespeare’s playbooks – both single-text editions and the 1623 Folio – to show that their discursive paratexts, none of which reveal Shakespeare’s own voice, solidify a model of singular authorship, where the dramatist is sole author and authority. This model of authorship has proved exceptionally influential, but, as this chapter argues, it is not the only one for the period and is a construction authorized by agents invested in drama as a printed commodity.