In examining examples of prologues, inductions, and choruses from early modern drama, Authors, Audiences, and Elizabethan Prologics tries to frame a more comprehensive picture of dramatists’ relationships with the plays they write and the audiences for whom they write them. It suggests that these various prologics are imbued with an intrinsic authority that provides something of a rubric, perceptible by both playwright and playgoer, through which one can measure the crucial negotiations with and within the shifting valences of dramatic representation in the early modern period. The project develops a way of thinking about the prologic as a hermeneutics unto itself, one which allows us to contextualize more adequately the manner in which playwrights conceptualize and construct their own relationship to nascent notions of authorship and authority. My first body chapter (Chapter II) considers the rhetorical construction of audiences’ silences in various Elizabethan interludes, suggesting that such ideal silences register one’s contemplative engagement with the performance and, thus, work to legitimize early drama. The prologues to John Lyly’s plays—my subject in Chapter III—exemplify the desire to legitimize, instead, the playwright. Reading Lyly’s plays alongside his letters of petition to Queen Elizabeth and Sir Robert Cecil, one can see the manner in which Lyly creates an authorial persona rooted in his rhetorical skills. In Chapter IV I examine Shakespeare’s sparse but measured use of prologues to manipulate his audiences’ preconceptions of theatrical conventions and to guide them toward a consideration of what it means to have interpretive agency, how far that agency extends, and where to locate the limits of narrative in the necessarily liminal domain of the theater. Finally, I argue in Chapter V that Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament expands the prologic space, mimicking in the playspace the critical, interactive stance that he assumes in the printed marginalia of his prose writing. This is to say that Summer’s Last Will echoes—or in many cases prefigures—the authorial anxieties that Nashe expresses elsewhere in his work, and chief among them is an anxiety over the interpretational agency of the reader and auditor.

Robert Greene began collaborating with Thomas Nashe as English prose was turning away from the style and subject matter of Lyly's Euphues (1578) and Sidney's Arcadia (1590). When Greene and Nashe came together in London, the two writers appear to have set the tone for the pamphleteers who would establish the realistic tradition that contributed to the development of the novel. Greene's Menaphon (1589) may be a satire representing his abandonment of courtly fiction. The influence of the Marprelate controversy is reflected in Greene's appeals to the pragmatic character of the emerging literate middle class. Greene's Vision (1592) appears to be Greene's affirmation of his critical philosophy at a point of stress in the authors' relationship.

The thesis traces the evolving attitudes towards rhetoric in the highly-rhetorised English-language prose of the late sixteenth century by focusing on a term that was itself subject to significant change: 'wit'. To wit's pre-existing denotations of intellectual acumen, capacity for reason and good judgement was added a novel meaning, related to the capacity for producing lively speech. As a term encompassing widely divergent meanings, many Elizabethan and early Stuart works explored 'wit' as a central theme or treated the term as significant to explorations of the human mind, its capacity for rhetoric, and the social and moral dimensions of this relationship. The research centres on how 'wit' is seen and how it corresponds to rhetorical wittiness as produced in practice, and questions the implications of this for understanding the social and moral dimensions of the authorial wit. By focusing on the early vernacular manuals of rhetoric by author such as Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham, on Lyly's and Greene's euphuist prose, and on Thomas Lodge's and Sir Philip Sidney's prose defences of poetry, the first half of the thesis explores the term's conceptual ambiguity. Potentially both reformative and deceptive, this ambiguity becomes a useful tool for the author looking to construct a profitable persona as a Wit, or a brilliant-yet-unruly master of rhetoric. The second half of the research notes how 'wit' tends to outlive its usefulness as a multivalent term in later writings when these seek to move away from the social commodification of an author's rhetoric. Examining Sidney's theological and political aims in The New Arcadia, Thomas Nashe's carnivalesque questioning of the idea of profit, and Francis Bacon's systematic interpretation of Nature, the research suggests that rhetoric and 'wit' maintain both their significance and their ambiguity into the seventeenth century. A meta-rhetorical signpost, 'wit' comes to reflect through its use and disuse both the issues at hand and the inherent self-reflexivity of any attempt to deal directly with rhetoric.

This thesis reconstructs the genre of urban satirical pamphleteering. It contends that the pamphlets of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Barnaby Rich are stylistically and generically akin. Writing in a relatively undefined form, these pamphleteers share an interest in describing contemporary London, and employ an experimental style characterised by its satirical energy. In addition, they negotiate a series of tensions between profitability and play. In the early modern period, ‘profit' was variously conceived as financial, moral, or rooted in public service. Pamphleteers attempted to reconcile these senses of profitability. At the same time, they produced playful works that are self-consciously mocking, that incorporate alternative perspectives, and that are generically hybrid. To varying degrees, urban satirical pamphlets can be defined in relation to the concepts of profitability and play. Chapter One introduces the concept of moral profitability through an examination of Elizabethan moralistic pamphlets. In particular, it analyses the anxious response to profitability contained in Philip Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses (1583). Chapter Two argues that Greene disrupted appeals to totalising profitability, and instead demonstrated the alternative potential of play. Chapter Three examines Nashe's notoriously evasive pamphlets, contending that he embraced play in response to the potential profitlessness of pamphleteering. Chapter Four argues that although Dekker and Middleton rejected absolutist notions of profitability, their pamphlets redirect stylistic play towards compassionate social commentary. Finally, Chapter Five explores Rich's relocation of moralistic conventions in pamphlets that are presented as both honest and mocking. Taken as a whole, this thesis re-evaluates the style and genre of urban satirical pamphleteering. It reveals that this frequently overlooked literary form was deeply invested in defining and critiquing the purpose of literature.