ABSTRACT
This essay is about anonymity in the drama of the early modern period. In sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England, it was common practice to publish play texts without dramatists’ names. The names of the acting company and the theater where the play had been staged were much more likely to appear on a title page, especially in the sixteenth century, than was an authorial label. In fact, if we survey early modern plays that were anonymous at first publication, their number (and their percentage of the extant published drama from the period) is surprisingly large.
