Patrick Cheney is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (1997) and Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (1993) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Marlowe (2004).
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on texts
Proem: Shakespeare's 'Plaies and Poems'
Part I. The Imprint of Shakespearean Authorship: Prelude: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Petrarch
1. The sixteenth-century poet-playwright
2. Francis Meres, the Ovidian poet-playwright, and Shakespeare criticism
Part II. 1593-1594: The Print Author Presents Himself: Play Scene: 'Two Gentlemen' to 'Richard III'
3. Authorship and acting: plotting Venus and Adonis along the Virgilian path
4. Publishing the show: The Rape of Lucrece as Lucanian counter-epic of empire
Part III. 1599-1601: The Author Brought Into Print: Play Scene: 'Love's Labor's Lost' to 'Troilus and Cressida'
5. 'Tales ... coined': 'W. Shakespeare' in Jaggard's The Passionate Pilgrim
6. 'Threne' and 'scene': the author's relics of immortality in 'The Phoenix and Turtle'
Part IV. 1609: Imprinting the Question of Authorship: Play Scene: 'Measure for Measure' to 'Coriolanus'
7. 'O, let my books be ... dumb presagers': poetry and theatre in the sonnets
8. 'Deep-brain'd sonnets' and 'tragic shows': Shakespeare's late Ovidian art in A Lover's Complaint
Epilogue. Ariel and Autolycus: Shakespeare's counter-laureate authorship
Works cited
Index.
