Some of the most familiar figures of the late Elizabethan literary scene were neither authors nor characters but personations, semifictive identities closely associated with certain writers but also independent of them, seemingly autonomous agents in the early modern literary arena. In Paper Monsters, with chapters on personae associated with Robert Greene, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and Thomas Nashe, Samuel Fallon introduces us to the best known of these figures: the ghost of Robert Greene, Colin Clout (Edmund Spenser), Astrophil and Philisides (Philip Sidney), and Pierce Penilesse (Thomas Nashe). Fallon acknowledges an extended genealogy of literary personation, from the traditions of laureate poets and medieval complaint up through the “detachable” characters of eighteenth-century fiction. But he makes a persuasive case that these late sixteenth-century figures represent a period-specific phenomenon. Drawing on critical conversations on authorship, persona, print, and the cultural field, and more recent work on circulation and publics, Fallon argues that literary personations (his preferred term for the phenomenon he discusses) embodied negotiations particular to the late sixteenth century between manuscript and print, authors and audience. Personations helped fashion a form of authorial identity suitable for the medium of print, creating a new, textually based form of public selfhood.

The book opens with the pioneering Elizabethan literary celebrity Robert Greene. Greene has become increasingly prominent as a subject of scholarly attention: Elisabeth Chaghafi's English Literary Afterlives: Greene, Sidney, Donne and the Evolution of Posthumous Fame (2020), published too recently to be cited here, likewise begins with Greene as a foundational figure. The usefulness of Greene to current scholarship lies not so much in his many writings as in the strategies he developed as a professional author navigating an emerging marketplace of print. Fallon focuses on the “ghost” pamphlets published by writers seeking to capitalize on the name Greene had so effectively commoditized. In these posthumous appropriations, Fallon suggests, Greene's ghost becomes a “mobile allegory for the experience of circulation” (30), the pamphlets serving collectively as an “unusually sustained meditation on the conditions of literary publicity” (48).

Colin Clout, “retiring avatar of pastoral melancholy” (54), seems at first an unlikely companion for the ghost of Robert Greene, the volubly sociable voice of prose satire and romance. But as Fallon argues in chapter 2, both came to exist “as a person at large in the literary public” (54) through response and appropriation. Fallon deftly situates Colin within long-standing critical debates about Spenser, the “new poetry,” and the lyric domain. But the focus here is the citational afterlife of Colin following his appearance in The Shepheardes Calender (1579). In the hands of later Elizabethan poets, Colin “served as a versatile sign of affiliation” (66) with Spenser, a gesture that “demarcated a network of professional affiliation in the real world” (68). By the time Spenser himself reclaimed Colin, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) and the sixth book of The Faerie Queene (1596), the independent public career Colin had enjoyed over the previous two decades had “rendered him a person with a life of his own” (77). Spenser's late engagements with Colin, Fallon concludes, speak to the “ambivalence of relative autonomy in the literary field,” a space that exists “both within and apart from the world at large” (85).

The ambivalent Colin, yearning for an “imagined coterie past” (85) that set a poetic elite against the broader literary field, leads to the exploration in chapter 3 of Philip Sidney's personae Astrophil and Philisides. Like Colin, these figures offered the promise of proximity, a way to “recover the exclusivity” that Sidney's own texts seemed to lose as they made their way posthumously into print (89). Building on the authoritative scholarship devoted to Sidney's reputational, textual, and appropriative afterlives, Fallon argues that “fictions that reimagined Astrophil and Philisides played a key role” (90) in the articulation of emerging distinctions between public and coterie writing, print and manuscript. The concluding discussion of the “Astrophel” elegies published in Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Again anchors the chapter's broader argument that uses of Sidney's “strange and elusive personae” represent a performance of access to an imagined community associated with the Sidney circle, “a way to reimagine exclusion and affiliation in print” (118).

The uses of personae to demarcate distinctions within the literary field leads to Nashe, the focus of chapter 4. Nashe's Pierce Penilesse played a key role in debates through the 1590s about the logic of literary distinction, a logic “the form of the persona both enabled and, in revealing ways, confounded” (119). Fallon offers welcome attention to the complexity of Nashe's use of persona and to his pamphlet quarrel with Gabriel Harvey. As Fallon notes, the two had much in common and often seem to have made the same arguments: the dispute was less about competing positions on controverted issues than competing claims to speak with authority on literary worth. Recent work on Nashe has argued for a stronger influence on the literary culture of the period than has usually been recognized, and a concluding discussion of early seventeenth-century pamphlets that resurrected Pierce as the recipient of the devil's reply to Pierce's “Supplication” contributes to current arguments for the influence of Nashe's voice, one characterized by irony, ambiguity, and self-reflexive play.

A coda looks ahead to Robert Burton and his use of “Democritus Junior” in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Burton marks the end of the story Fallon tells: while sixteenth-century personae “took part in the conceptual formation of the author, allowing authors to be imagined as a form of virtual identity in a virtual public” (154), Burton reclaims the persona-form “as a tool to deflect attention” from the writer (165). The book throughout is elegantly written, persuasively argued, and well anchored in current theoretical and critical debates: it will be the starting point for any future consideration of literary personae and the role they played in the early modern literary field independently of the authors who created or inspired them.