Authorship and Appropriation Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710

Authorship and Appropriation is the first full-length study of the cultural and economic status of playwriting in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and argues that the period was a decisive one in the transition from Renaissance conceptions of authorship towards modern ones. Kewes offers a fresh account of the dramatic canon, revealing how the moderns--Dryden, Otway, Lee, Behn, and then their successors Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar--acquired an esteem equal, even superior, to their illustrious predecessors Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher.