Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value

To many of their contemporaries, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were little more than artisanal craftsmen, "stage—wrights" who wrote plays for money, to be performed in common playhouses and in a manner often antithetical to what Jonson himself viewed as the higher calling of poetry. In response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, Paul Yachnin contends, players and dramatists alike had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, creating a r...