SOURCE: Eggers, Jr., Walter F. “Shakespeare's Gower and the Role of the Authorial Presenter.” Philological Quarterly 54, no. 2 (spring 1975): 434-43.

In the following essay, Eggers focuses on the character of Gower as an “authorial presenter,” a dramatic role common during late 1500s and early 1600s. The critic suggests that this convention gives the play authority by linking it to the past and by providing the audience with a different perspective on the story.

In 1606, the prologue to a private-theater play declared, “Inductions are out of date, and a Prologue in Verse, is as stale as a black Velvet Cloak, and a Bay Garland.”¹ These lines testify to the popular fashion of presenters in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, a fashion that persisted in the public theater despite this private-theater caveat. Within the next two years, one of the most popular public-theater plays, Pericles, featured a presenter who spoke in archaic...