“I tell you what mine Authors saye”: Pericles, Shakespeare, and Imitatio

The phrase “mine author” (along with its older but still popular variant, “mine auctor”) had at the time a variety of resonances, with editors and printers using it to refer to the writer of the work being edited or printed, and with such translators as Robert Copland promising that he had translated Kynge Appolyn of Thyre “out of the Frensshe language in to our maternal Englysshe tongue ... accordynge dyrectly to myn auctour.” Most often, though, the phrase was used in reference to a source or model or literary authority. This usual sense of “mine author” as the writer on whose works one claims to draw, the authority who guarantees the truth of one’s story, the model one’s story imitates, is directly linked to the pivotal role of the auctor in the medieval university system, where the term signified an authoritative writer whose work served as a model for other writers and was the subject of lectures and textual commentaries.

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