"Underplayed Rivalry": Patronage and the Marlovian Subtext of Summer's Last Will and Testament

Abstract

Per Sivefors’s article addresses the issue of Nashe and authorship from the angle of imitation and literary competition. Arguing that Thomas Nashe imitated Marlowe in his only surviving play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Sivefors concludes that due to the conditions of patronage under which the play was written and probably performed, the literary rivalry represented in this text is an “underplayed” form of the often more aggressive stance found in plays written for performance at the public theatres.