Jeffrey Masten

Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama

Introduction 1. Seeing double: collaboration and the interpretation of Renaissance drama 2. Between gentlemen: homoeroticism, collaboration, and the discourse of friendship 3. Representing authority: patriarchalism, absolutism, and the author on stage 4. Reproducing works: dramatic quartos and folios in the seventeenth century 5. Mistris Corrivall: Margaret Cavendishs dramatic production Notes Bibliography Index.

Material Cavendish: Paper, Performance, "Sociable Virginity"

MY Lord was pleased to illustrate my Playes with some Scenes of his own Wit, to which I have set his name, that my Readers may know which are his, as not to couzen them, in thinking they are mine; also Songs, to which my Lords name is set, for being no Lyrick Poet, my Lord supplied that defect of my Brain with the superfluity of his own Brain; thus our Wits join as in Matrimony, my Lords the Masculine, mine the Feminine Wit, which is no small glory to me, that we are Married, Souls, Bodies, and Brains, which is a treble marriage, united in one Love, which I hope is not in the power of Death to dissolve; for Souls may love, and Wit may live, though Bodies dye.—Margaret Cavendish, prefatory letter to her Playes (1662)