Textual Intercourse
Collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama

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.

Reviews & endorsements

'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

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Product details

• Date Published: February 1997
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9780521589208
• length: 240 pages

• dimensions: 226 x 152 x 14 mm
• weight: 0.33kg
• contains: 11 b/w illus.
• availability: Available