This book, which focuses on the manner in which four Renaissance actor-playwrights justify their practice as dramatists, is both stimulating and exasperating, since it is based on a splendid idea insufficiently realized. The central premise of Nora Johnson's study is her contention that recent scholarship has tended to overemphasize Ben Jonson's model of “sovereign” authorship to the exclusion of those early modern English dramatists who acknowledged the communal and collaborative sources of their labor.