The political function of Elizabethan literary celebrity

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In his edition of The Martin Marprelate Tracts, Joseph L. Black discusses the difficulty of identifying the number and names of Marprelate authors, although it seems certain that the Welsh cleric John Penry and the gentleman Job Throckmorton were involved in the project (Black 2008, pp. xxxiv–xlvi).

2. The tract’s title is a reference to the calls of street-sellers.

3. On the Marprelate print run, see Joseph Black’s website, where he transcribes and narrates the documents relating to the controversy: http://people.umass.edu/marprelate/achronologicalnarrative.html.

4. Marprelate had considerable stylistic influence over Thomas Nashe, whose later writing is characterised by the breaking of literary decorum and the shifting between comic and religious registers (see Summersgill 1951).

5. The question of fame resulting from the fictionalisation of the authorial persona is also discussed by Lilti (2008) and Braun (2010).

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Kate De Rycker

Kate De Rycker is a research associate on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded ‘Thomas Nashe Project’ in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests are in the theatre and print culture of the early modern period, focusing especially on how the profession of writing was developing during this period.