Faire Exchange No Robbery: Critiques of Anthologies and Contracts in an Unpublished Gaddis Play

2024/04/17 by Severs, Jeffrey

paper · doi:10.7273/ebr-gadcent3-8

Abstract

Written by William Gaddis in the mid-1940s, “Faire Exchange No Robbery” is a short, mock-Elizabethan play in verse, about early poetry anthologies and the death of Christopher Marlowe. Jeffrey Severs brings this unpublished document to light, finding in it the germ of Gaddis’s career-long interests in art’s relationship to commerce, and in the significance of contracts.

Related

• Juvenilia in the William Gaddis Papers
• “Honored by the Error”: The Literary Friendship of Gaddis and Gass
• The Review of English Studies Prize Essay * 'It Ought not to be Lost to the World': The Transmission and Consumption of Eighteenth-Century Lyric Verse
• Giles, John, and Will: The Fletchers and Shakespeare in Bishopsgate Street, London, 1596
• The Concealed Fansyes: A Play by Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley