My dissertation studies the remarkable proliferation of literary personae in English literature of the 1580s and 1590s, a period in which the device found itself at the center of a burgeoning discourse about the nature and cultural place of literature. Considering these personae as elusive combinations of historical author and imaginary character, it follows them through various writings and rewritings, showing how they came to be treated as independent agents in the real world of literary production. These personae, my project suggests, were the fictions with which Elizabethan writers and readers animated what we are accustomed to calling print culture.