Authorship and Social Status in Early Modern England

Abstract

This chapter shows that the social status of writers in England between about 1580 and 1620 was radically entangled with the status of literary genres and with bibliographical markers of status. These evolved and migrated rapidly between different genres. It explores the rise of markers of authorship and social status in printed play texts and in volumes of collected works, and shows how authors and stationers sought to borrow markers of status from adjacent genres in order to elevate themselves and their work. The final section explores how the inclusion of sonnet sequences within collected editions of poems by the ‘household laureates’ Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton in the early seventeenth century both elevated the status of the sonneteer and encouraged writers associated with noble households to present themselves as mere clerks or accountants. This is then related to the representation of social status in Shakespeare’s sonnets. A conclusion shows that the languages of social and literary status were complex codes and partially autonomous from each other, but that over the course of the forty or so years covered by the chapter it became markedly easier to claim high quasi-social status by virtue of literary activity.