Since the beginnings of modern scholarship in the eighteenth century critics have placed a high value on authorship. This is hardly surprising, for the scholar's primary task is to secure the provenance of texts. The concept has provided both a point of origin and a source of authority, retrieval of an author's intentions regarded as key to establishing the text itself, if not to determine meaning. If one definition of ‘the modern’ is the rise and privileging of the individual consciousness, it is perhaps not surprising that the consecration of the author occurs at this historical moment. The shift from ‘writer’ to ‘author’ draws in its wake an entire legal and philosophical belief system, and it is hardly an exaggeration to suggest it is on this foundation that modern literary scholarship rests.

However, when ‘the author’ is historicized, the matter becomes complicated. If this figure is a modern construct, not a given or natural entity, then the question that must be asked is how useful it is to apply it to other historical epochs. For much of the twentieth century this issue did not arise, but recently this has been challenged, as a result of two developments, one directly concerned with early modern theatre scholarship, and the other with its origins in postmodern literary theory. Indeed, some aspects of postmodern theory find in the early modern period interesting analogues with the present. One such is the issue of the relationship between writer and text, the other, to be discussed more fully in the next section, the nature of early modern playmaking.

The seminal essay in the shift in literary studies to text- centred interpretation - the recognition that textual meaning changes through time, as a result of the text's activation by successive and different readerships - is Roland Barthes's ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968). Barthes's essay empowers the reader/critic at the expense of the author, who is to be displaced from the interpretative equation. In emphasizing this shift from a personal, authorial work to a text open to repeated reinterpretation, Barthes's essay signalled a paradigm shift in literary studies. Michel Foucault's essay ‘What is an Author?’ (1969) proceeded to ask how an author's name signifies, and concluded that a name imposes a unity and form on texts, restricting textual meaning by its very activation: ‘The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’.