The rise of print book culture in sixteenth-century England had profound effects on understandings of identity that are reflected in the prose, poetry, and drama of the age. Drawing on assemblage and actor-network theory, this dissertation argues that models of identity constructed in relation to books in Renaissance England are neither static nor self-contained, arising instead out of a collaborative engagement with books as physical objects that tap into historically specific cultural discourses. Renaissance representations of book usage blur the boundary between human beings and their books, both as textual carriers and as physical artifacts.

The first chapter outlines the relationship between book history and assemblage theory to examine how books contribute to the assembly of the human subject in different ways for readers, owners, and authors and to lay a theoretical and historical foundation for reading cultural assemblages in later chapters. The second chapter studies how authors and sometimes printers attempt as makers of books to construct public identities through them. The chapter focuses on how Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Isabella Whitney’s poetry anthologies play with texts and paratexts in order to create the illusion of control over the resulting authorial persona, even while acknowledging that the book itself is a deterritorialized element of their own identities with particular agencies of its own. The third chapter investigates how Renaissance drama represents human beings using books to curate their identity assemblages both publicly and inwardly, particularly as depicted in the work of Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, and the author of Arden of Faversham. The successes and failures of these assemblages on the stage reflect anxieties about the book as an agentive object in an assembled identity. The fourth chapter examines the prose work of Philip Sidney, Roger Ascham, and Fulke Greville, considering the obsession with travel books and writing as a reflection of wider notions about the permeability and possible contamination by foreign influences of the self constructed through books and writings related to travel.