Collaboration in the marketplace: Writers, publishers, and printers in early modern London

"Collaboration in the Marketplace: Writers, Publishers, and Printers in Early Modern London" examines the creative interaction between writers and book producers and their joint construction of texts and their own public images. I focus on four writers---Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, and John Milton---and the printers and publishers they worked with at key moments in the history of the book trade and in each of their careers. Throughout my study, I emphasize the essentially collaborative nature of the early modern literary marketplace. As the title pages, prefatory letters, and dedicatory poems that frame early modern printed texts indicate, both writers and producers benefited from their professional associations; writers relied on book producers to prepare their works efficiently for various audiences, and producers correspondingly relied on writers to raise their own status in the book trade. As they took advantage of the particular skills, connections, and reputations of their collaborators during the production of texts, each marketplace participant was able to maintain an important individuality and agency. My readings of these paratextual materials reveal how the ambitions and professional goals of writers and book producers simultaneously could overlap and conflict during the process of print publication.; A reading of the early modern book trade through a lens of collaboration draws attention to the many mediators who had a hand in creating texts for readers. Thus, I work to complicate existing notions of the minor, exclusively profit-focused producer and the individual "author" figure. My project also encourages a rereading of the printed texts that resulted from these marketplace collaborations---specifically, some of the most studied literary works of the early modern period. Within these plays, poems, and prose tracts, as in the paratexts, there is a noticeable engagement by writers with notions of collaboration and reciprocity and an ongoing negotiation of multiple, overlapping interests. The materiality of a text, I suggest, both influences and is inextricable from its larger meanings.