Epilogue

Summary

The epilogue considers the afterlives of “matter” and “making” in the Elizabethan period. Through brief readings of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, the epilogue demonstrates that both ideas continue to guide literary practice during this period. At the same time, however, the economic and political position of the Elizabethan poet differs markedly from the place that earlier court writers had occupied in the sphere of cultural production, and this shift in position motivates a gradual turn, in Elizabethan literary theory, away from notions of “making,” which draw attention to the material process by which literature is constructed, and towards notions of “authorship,” which hold instead that literature is produced by an autonomous figure whose type of work is categorically distinct from other kinds of labor. “Authorship” thus emerges from an ideological shift predicated, not upon a fundamental difference in literary technique, but upon a change in the conditions under which early modern poets worked.