My project examines the female complaint: the vogue in sixteenth-century England for male poets adopting female personae. In particular, I set out to explore the function of the complaint's feminine personae in the poets' representations of themselves as authors. The conventional critical reading suggests that the poets adopt female personae in order to master a female voice and thereby assert their own authorial presence. I contend, however, that this reading has a reductive effect on our understanding of both authorship and gender. By developing an alternate interpretation of this phenomenon that takes seriously these poets attempts to identify with their female subjects, I show how the female complaint is deployed to explore the boundaries between display and exposure these poets negotiated as their literary projects moved from the complex intimacies of manuscript exchange to the public realm of print. The female complaint, I argue, allowed authors to negotiate the changing relationship to their print readership, patrons, and stationers. On the one hand, as a state of abjection, femininity sets the poets and their subjects off from other texts, allowing them to distinguish themselves in a type of self-promotion. On the other hand, abjection contained this self-promotion within a framework of humility and dependence. Thus the poems allowed poets to promote themselves to broad, new reading publics while still decorously presenting themselves to their patrons. My project offers a prehistory of the modern author that challenges received wisdom about what it meant to be a literary artist in sixteenth-century England.