The Complete Author.

Published: English Literary Afterlives: Greene, Sidney, Donne and the Evolution of Posthumous Fame (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 26-48.

Description: Outlines the “origins of early modern traditions of ‘lives of the poets’ and biographical reading” of their works. Includes analysis of Thomas Speght’s “Life of Geoffrey Chaucer” in his 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Workes, commenting on revisions made in the 1602 edition and on remarks about Chaucer by Thomas Fuller and William Winstanley. Argues that Speght’s biography “could be regarded as an indirect consequence of debates in the 1590s about authors’ lives and works.”