Laurie Ellinghausen's Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567–1667 centers on the tactics used by “nonaristocratic” writers to negotiate their self-representation in relation to the print market and the emergence of a modern notion of professional authorship. Central to Ellinghausen's thesis is the period's privileging of manuscript culture over the “stigma of print,” which hinged upon the “putative (and false) distinction” (2) between those who wrote from a position of privilege versus those who wrote out of “economic necessity” (1). Ellinghausen argues that nonaristocratic writers consciously represented their writing as labor and use labor to “challenge … aristocratic literary culture” and negotiate their place in the literary and social hierarchy and thereby cultivate a “local” sense of identity to offset the alienation and charges of self-interest that followed from producing for the marketplace (1). Ellinghausen proposes these authors make a bid for professional authorship, using tactics that reflect and exploit the period's social mobility, and more boldly, that these writers were instrumental in the formation of a broadly defined “reading public” (141).

The first chapter focuses on Isabella Whitney's “A Sweet Nosegay,” in which Whitney presents herself “as a poor single woman who explicitly claims to write for money” (17), and thus, one who “turns her personal misfortune into the occasion for productive labor” (20). While feminist critics have focused more on the community Whitney forges with family and friends through writing, Ellinghausen emphasizes Whitney's “aloneness” as a crucial vehicle to her having an occupation and argues that Whitney contemplates the potential freedom of the marketplace even as she apprehends its risks. Necessarily, Ellinghausen is careful to acknowledge the role of Whitney's sex in a study about early modern authorship and selfhood, but stresses that Whitney is “rarely put into dialogue with male writers” and that the tactics she uses firmly place her within a “growing class of sixteenth century professional writers, female and male” (18). Yet here as well, Ellinghausen sets up subsequent chapters in which male writers are seen to identify with quasi-elite communities that exclude women.

In her second chapter, for instance, Ellinghausen turns to university-educated and therefore “nominally elite” men, and satirist Thomas Nashe in particular (37). She begins with the premise that better access to the early modern university prevented many graduates from attaining the status their education had seemed to promise, and then discusses several of Nashe's writings alongside the three anonymous Parnassus plays, which cast Nashe as “an important and recognizable figure in a narrative of scholars’ displacement within marketplace culture” (39). She argues that both Nashe and the Parnassus plays portray writing as scholarly labor and, hence, as the special province of educated men, and likewise, that satire becomes a specialized tool for scholarly authors both to mock the supposed rewards of higher education and to critique a market that often rewarded the “unlearned” for profit's sake (41).

A sense of intellectual and artistic elitism is also apparent in the central chapter, where Ellinghausen focuses on the self-representation employed by Ben Jonson, the erudite, socially aspiring son of a bricklayer who disparages manual labor while using it continually as a metaphor for writing. Ellinghausen explains this juxtaposition as well as Jonson's “anti-materialism” (64) as being consistent with the “body/soul” hierarchy, arguing that Jonson categorizes physical labor as merely “earthly” and intellectual labor as essentially divine (65). In his masques especially, Ellinghausen sees Jonson setting his own poetic labor above the more “mechanical” work and artifice of theater production, drawing upon his tumultuous partnership and rivalry with Inigo Jones, though as she observes, his success at this is questionable (65).

The fourth chapter focuses on “Water Poet” John Taylor and offers especially compelling evidence for Ellinghausen's claim that nonaristocratic writers make a bid for a professional identity that is both reputable and market driven. Taylor, she argues “makes his identity as a waterman a central feature of his self-presentation” (93), a move that allows him to create a unique literary “persona” that is “self-promoting, individualist, and entrepreneurial” (94). At the same time, Ellinghausen argues that Taylor's self-promotion “partakes of an emerging democratic discourse,” which stems from the supposed freedom of the marketplace; for instance, he stresses the availability of his work to “everybody” and attempts to cast writing with scullery as a service based in equal and honest exchange (105). Nevertheless, Ellinghausen notes that Taylor is also uncomfortable with the competition created by a “free” market and thus upholds some idea of hierarchical distinctions so as to argue, like Nashe and Jonson, that writing is reserved for a select group.

Ellinghausen concludes Labor and Writing with a somewhat brief discussion of the tactics employed by George Withers, who treats writing as a spiritual calling but was also among the first writers to claim “writerly labor as a kind of property over which he had certain rights” (124). Like Taylor, Withers wards off charges of self-interest and commercial greed by emphasizing his industry and commitment to the writing process, frequently by portraying “God as the authorizing force of his ambition” (129). As a whole, Labor and Writing provides a valuable point of intersection to the histories of labor and authorship, and offers a rich and nuanced discussion of how professional writing opened up the possibility of authorship as “vocation” and of the tensions this vocation posed for writers whose dependence on the market conflicted with the authorial identities they sought to forge.