Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (review)

Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. By Jeffrey Masten. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 223. $47.50 cloth, $15.95 paper.

Jeffrey Masten's Textual Intercourse argues that present critical formulations, along with well-established editorial and bibliographic traditions, situate early modern dramatic texts within a regime of the single author that is, properly speaking, more appropriate to the post-Enlightenment world than to sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Europe. Masten makes a strong case for what in some ways is a self-evident truth: one dominant strategy of dramatic authorship in Shakespeare's England was collaboration, and hence the obsession with establishing authorship among plays that were collaboratively produced risks imposing an ahistorical modern understanding of the singularity of the author onto plays that were not produced within this regime of knowledge.

In pursuit of his thesis Masten writes suggestively about how the collaborative nature of theatrical production finds its way into the printed record of quarto editions of early plays, which are presented not so much as texts to be read but as "record[s] of . . . particular theatrical performance[s] . . ." (115). Although he follows critics such as Leah Marcus and Margreta de Grazia in showing that the collection of dramatic works into Folio volumes in the period certainly presages the emergence of the author in a modern sense, he nevertheless argues that any study of these Folios and the works contained within them must proceed from an assumption that the author had not yet emerged as the discursive marker of a central and defining producer of the dramatic or literary product. Study must proceed with an understanding of the relevance and importance of collaborative writing in the period. To show that problems and issues of collaborative authorship were not simply matters of production but were thematized in the plays as well, Masten provides nuanced readings of plays as varied as Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Tempest, Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen, Francis Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Fletcher's A King and No King.

Even more interesting, Textual Intercourse takes this argument a step further by bringing to bear on it recent interpretations of the history of sexuality in early modern England. In a provocative analysis, Masten looks at Richard Braithwait's The English Gentleman (1630) and Montaigne's essay "On Friendship" (1580) to show that friendship was discursively produced as an ideal of mutual penetration between two men. Inscribed as a conjoining of two male bodies into one, friendship takes on (as many critics have suggested) an erotic charge that both includes and comprehends more than modern understandings of same-sex attraction. Collaborative writing becomes, in these terms, an act of creative reproduction between friends, and Masten argues that throughout the period there is an overlap between discourses of friendship, masculine collaboration, and reproduction which situates dramatic collaboration within a homoerotic or, at the very least, homosocial sphere of cultural production.

Bringing this material into even closer proximity with his argument about authorship, Masten explores the ways the introductory and prefatory material to the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 can be read to show that the emergence of the modern concept of the author coincides with the emergence of an awareness of same-sex erotic behavior as somehow strange or queer. We can begin to find material in the Folio, Masten believes, that marks a new understanding of Beaumont and Fletcher's peculiar personal and professional relationship as "queer" in the modern senses of that term. It is an ingenious argument, suggesting the ways in which homosexual behavior can come to be singled out for remark only once it is unmoored from other discourses (such as collaborative authorship and friendship) that render it fully Other in the early modern period. To clinch his point, Masten examines the Folio volume of Margaret Cavendish's plays to show that this new...