2015 Theses Doctoral

"Fooles in Retayle": Personae and Print in the Long 1590s

Streeter, Ashley

This dissertation focuses on the proliferation of literary personae in print between 1588 and 1603, a phenomenon which generated the conditions for print stardom, heated debate, cross-volume narratives, and a culture of literary appropriation. Each chapter focuses on a different persona - Colin Clout, Martin Marprelate, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene - and contains close readings of generically diverse texts. In so doing, the project tells a new story about literary culture of the 1590s, a story in which personae stimulated the print market by becoming textual celebrities, fighting with one another, and capitalizing on already well-known textual personalities' fame.