Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature 9780812208160

Citation preview

Bound to Read

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MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

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BOUND TO READ Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature

Jeffrey Todd Knight

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

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Copyright 䉷 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knight, Jeffrey Todd. Bound to read : compilations, collections, and the making of Renaissance literature / Jeffrey Todd Knight.— 1st ed. p. cm.— (Material texts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4507-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Books and reading—Great Britain—History. 2. Book collecting—Great Britain—History. 3. Literature publishing—Great Britain—History. 4. English literature— Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Material texts. Z1003.5.G7 K58 2013 070.5—dc23 2012045109

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For Jan and Kipp Knight

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contents

1

Introduction: Compiling Culture

PART I. READERS Chapter 1. Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries

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Chapter 2. Making Shakespeare’s Books: Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab

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PART II. WRITERS Chapter 3. Transformative Imitation: Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson’s Hekatompathia

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Chapter 4. Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne’s Essays

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Chapter 5. The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623

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Epilogue: ‘‘Collated and Perfect’’

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Compiling Culture

I Compyle: I make a boke as an auctour doth. —From the table of verbs in a 1530 translation dictionary

William Thomas’s Historie of Italie is one of the more important surviving documents of the literary and political culture of the Renaissance in Europe.1 Written by a clerk of England’s Privy Council and published in 1549 by the royal printer, the book offered a pragmatist’s guide to governance through firsthand accounts of Italian social organization. It passed through multiple reissues and remained popular into the 1590s; modern editions of Shakespeare often include excerpts and references that conjure an image of the playwright mining Thomas’s book for characters in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest.2 But if you call up the sole copy of the Historie at St. John’s College Library in Cambridge, the text that arrives on your desk will come as some surprise. Instead of one book, you will find three books bound together: a pamphlet entitled Information for pilgrims into the Holy Land (1524), the Historie, and the medieval story collection Gesta Romanorum (1517).3 Also bound in the volume, between printed items, is a manuscript on London churches written by the sixteenth-century physician Myles Blomefylde, who owned this eclectic group of texts and whose handwriting is present throughout the compilation.4 For Blomefylde, it seems, The Historie of Italie had little value as a reflection on Italian politics or character. In the margins, he signed his initials to the names of the Venetian tourist sites he had visited (or imagined himself visiting) on a trip to the city. On a blank sheet preceding a section on ‘‘The Venetian Astate,’’ he gave Thomas’s work a new, more appropriate title: Myles Blomefylde in Venice (Fig. 1).

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Figure 1. William Thomas’s Historie of Italie, marked up and retitled by Myles Blomefylde. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

This study is about the desire for books—the collector’s desire for books—in the production and dissemination of Renaissance literature, chiefly in English. Myles Blomefylde may have been flamboyant, but he was not anomalous among readers and writers in the era of early print. Many thousands of collected volumes like the one pictured here survive from this period under various bibliographic designations: Sammelba¨nde (or multibook compilations), personal anthologies, composites of manuscript and print, tract collections, and others. Many still reflect an early owner’s desire to appropriate and interact with the texts, to organize and repurpose them, or to transform existing works into new works. Blomefylde’s Historie of Italie stands as a witness to such processes most likely because the larger compilation and collector are of literary-historical consequence. The adjacent Gesta Romanorum is the only known copy of that translation, and Blomefylde has

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long been recognized for handing down several unique late medieval play texts, including the only complete edition of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres.5 Yet the very consequentiality that encouraged the preservation of this volume for four centuries could have led to its breakup or loss in a different institutional setting. As William Sherman has shown, libraries and collectors in the modern era privileged ‘‘clean books’’ and routinely had the marks of early readers such as Blomefylde removed from important texts.6 A similar desire for ‘‘pristine rebinding,’’ noted by conservators and bookbinding experts including Julia Miller and John Szirmai,7 drastically altered compilation structures in modern book collections. If all or part of an early Sammelband was judged to have exceptional value, the likelihood was high that the volume would be separated into its constituent units for individual rebinding or sale, eliminating the traces of early ownership. St. John’s College had neither the onsite binding facilities of a Henry E. Huntington nor the distinguished Enlightenment-era foundation collections of a British Museum.8 The Old Library, where the rare books are kept and consulted, remains very much as it was when it was founded in the seventeenth century, a short time before the Blomefylde volume was deposited there.9 Indeed, among collectors, major works of Renaissance literature constitute the most valuable, desired category of early printed books. Along with the first and grandest productions from movable type, such works have progressed through modern book markets, fine binderies, auction houses, institutional libraries, and conservation laboratories where less sought-after texts from the period have remained uncirculated and unprocessed. The literary output of the early handpress has, therefore, been disproportionately touched by the modern preference for clean, individually bound books. In some library collections, such as St. John’s, we can find important Renaissance works that look as they did to their earliest readers. But much of the literary rare-book archive—which supplies essential primary texts to editors, critics, and historians—reflects the desires of modern readers: the uniformity of industrialized printing and binding, the order of the systematic catalog, the circumscribed aura of the collectors’ item. In many of today’s most extensive and accessible libraries, a more complicated material history of Renaissance texts lies buried in institutional records. This book excavates a culture of compiling and text collection that prevailed after the emergence of print but before the ascendancy of the modern, ready-bound printed book. It focuses on the organization and physical assembly of early printed literary texts, both at the hands of their first owners and

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collectors in the Renaissance and also, necessarily, at the hands of the modern collectors—individual and institutional—who have reorganized them, classified them, and made them available to us in libraries. Its premise is the observation, shared by bibliographers and recent historians of the material text, that books have not always existed in discrete, self-enclosed units. In the early handpress era, the printed work was relatively malleable and experimental—a thing to actively shape, expand, and resituate as one desired. Copies of Shakespeare’s quarto plays and poems were bound into custom anthologies; literary masterworks were mixed with pamphlets and other printed ephemera to form topical Sammelba¨nde; texts of all kinds were enlarged by writing, binding, and even sewing in additional material. These compiled volumes were not the sealed-off textual artifacts—organized by author, genre, subject heading, and short title—that are found on shelves in most rare-book archives today. (It would take careful curatorial work, we will see, to forge this normative disposition of texts.) Rather, these were fluid, adaptable objects, always prone to intervention and change. For readers in the Renaissance, compiling was born of the everyday demands of book ownership. As Paul Needham and David Pearson have argued, in the handpress era, ‘‘there was no such thing as a ready-bound edition, corresponding to the clothbound books with which we (in Englishspeaking countries) are familiar today.’’10 The commonplace notion that early printed texts—particularly the small formats used for vernacular literature— were sold unbound or merely stitched has been refined and extended by Mirjam Foot, Nicholas Pickwoad, and other scholars of bookbinding.11 Often the task of having sheets turned into books fell to the owner at the time of purchase. Other times ‘‘certain kinds of popular books, such as religious texts, law books, school books, and classical texts, would sell sufficiently well for the publisher or bookseller to have a quantity ready-bound in stock’’ (Fig. 2).12 In both cases—user-initiated bindings and partial-edition retail bindings—we observe the tremendous agency of the consumer in determining the physicality of texts, whether through active assembly or perceived measures of popularity. More important, because these handmade bindings were vastly more expensive than the printed sheets of the texts themselves, it was financially necessary to gather multiple works of normal length into single bound volumes to ensure their preservation.13 Thus, with each purchase, the consumer played a role not only in the physical appearance of texts but also in the internal organization of texts in bindings—a central aspect of literate culture that in later centuries would become the province solely of

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Figure 2. A seventeenth-century bookshop from Johann Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (London, 1685), sig. N8v, showing books unbound, in stacks of sheets, and bound, fore-edge out, on shelves. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

producers. Every bound volume was a unique, customized assemblage, formed outside of an absolute prescription issuing from an author or publishing house. The book, in this respect, had a morphology that it would lose in the era of industrially produced texts and the classification systems based on them. Methods of collecting such books into libraries were correspondingly tentative and exploratory; wills, inventories, and catalogs from the period show a striking variation in shelving habits and methods of text preservation.14 Advances in technology had made it newly possible for an individual to own more books than he or she could possibly read,15 and without established practices for assembling and codifying the mass of texts that one could acquire in this age of cheaper print, readers and book owners experimented with the possibilities. For writers in the Renaissance, compiling was fundamentally entwined with textual production. This is a crucial theme in the chapters that follow— and a crucial bridge, I contend, between bibliography and the literary scholarship that tacitly, inescapably depends on it. Poets, playwrights, and essayists

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are by necessity also readers. In any period of written culture, they are subject to historically specific norms and conceptions of the text, embodied in reading and collecting routines, which render the world of words intelligible. The ‘‘order of books,’’ to use Roger Chartier’s influential phrase,16 limits certain modes of writing and enables others in sustaining an accepted range of categories or codes within (and sometimes against) which literary producers work. Bibliographic organization in this elemental sense defines writers’ potential relationship with texts. And in early print culture, this relationship was particularly changeable and dynamic. Jennifer Summit has written of a ‘‘formative chapter in their history’’ in which early modern libraries ‘‘actively processed, shaped, and imposed meaning on the very materials they contained.’’17 The history of bookmaking in the period is one of rapid ‘‘diversification of the product’’ as binders, wholesalers, and retailers struggled to keep up with the increase in production brought on by the handpress.18 The literary figures of the Renaissance, well into this shift, came to writing at a moment of irresolution about the boundaries and order of books—a moment in which, unlike today, there were few standard practices for assembling, preserving, and facilitating access to published works in collections. Their intellectual products were accordingly marked by contingency and the potential for change, visible at the level of presentation. As any student of early printed material knows, one of the most common ways for a publisher to market a work in the period was to claim on its title page that it had been ‘‘enlarged’’ or ‘‘augmented,’’ ‘‘annexed’’ to another text, or otherwise reconfigured. In contrast to modern conceptions of the book, a lack of fixity was normal and desirable. That the writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries wrote for and within this model of a comparatively malleable, mutable book is evident in the surface structure of works by many canonical figures. Michel de Montaigne famously enlarged his Essais by writing new material—and copying borrowed quotations—directly in the blank spaces of his printed book; the title pages of each successive edition promised a text ‘‘augmente´e,’’ or ‘‘reveu & augmente´e’’ [revised and augmented], a project that continued after the author’s death.19 Thomas Middleton and George Chapman are two of the many Renaissance poets in England who enlarged the writings of others to form works of ‘‘continuation’’: Middleton added episodes to Shakespeare’s Lucrece in his complaint poem The Ghost of Lucrece (1600); and Chapman brought to conclusion Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished long poem, Hero and Leander (1598), with the expanded Hero and Leander: begun

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by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman (1600) and, later, the further expanded (and now composite) Hero and Leander: begunne by Christopher Marloe . . . whereunto Is added the first booke of Lucan translated line for line by the same author, also issued in 1600.20 Philip Sidney’s works provide many well-known examples of continuation and composite annexation. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, his popular prose romance, ended in mid-sentence, as if inviting other writers to append, and was expanded four times in print and countless times in manuscript over the course of the next century.21 Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, was first printed in 1591, and then again that same year in an expanded quarto ‘‘to the end of which are added, sundry other rare Sonnets of diuers Noble men and Gentlemen,’’ the title page advertised. In 1599, these two already composite books were combined, Astrophel and Stella added to the end of the Arcadia. And by 1629, the contents of this volume had become too heterogeneous and collaborative to list fully in the encumbered title: The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now the seuenth time published, with some new Additions. With the supplement of a Defect in the third part of this History, by Sir W. A. Knight. Whereunto is now added a sixth Booke, by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne. Augmentations, continuations, additions, supplements. Like the bound volumes that accommodated them, printed works of literature in early handpress culture were frequently the outward products of some order of compiling. But beneath these surface indicators on title pages, we know too that text collecting and assembly were important catalysts for discursive production and even creativity. The malleability of books—figurative rather than physical—lies at the heart of what literary scholars have long identified as the essentially imitative nature of Renaissance writing: the appropriation and manipulation of existing models, primarily from antiquity, and the assertion of writerly roles through or against one’s source.22 Notions deriving from antiquity of imitatio and copia dominated ideas about literary production from the earliest moments of writing instruction in humanist schools. As Mary Thomas Crane has shown in a now-classic study, students in Renaissance classrooms ‘‘were encouraged to view all literature as a system of interchangeable fragments and to view the process of composition as centered on intertextuality.’’23 Pedagogical tools, such as commonplace books, trained poets to collect sayings and sententiae from others’ works to be assembled again into new works.24 This technique of textual reconfiguration, which Crane termed ‘‘gathering and framing,’’25 is most observable in the aphoristic

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verse of the mid-sixteenth century, but has been shown in diverse ways to have shaped later narrative works as well. Linda Woodbridge, writing on the ubiquity of plot borrowing and rearrangement in Renaissance drama, has described the period’s default compositional processes with a quilting metaphor: patchwork. Shakespeare’s England, she explains, was ‘‘an aggregator’s world,’’ where literary producers depended on a ready supply of prefabricated parts of stories or verse in circulation. Collecting and redeploying material from others’ texts to compose their own, ‘‘Renaissance writers typically do not just retell a tale . . . they join several tales together to form a novella, an epic, or a play.’’26 But despite this shared emphasis on compiling and text assembly in the rhetoric of literary production, scholars of the period think about and interpret writing as if it takes place only in the world of ideas, not in embodied practice.27 While our metaphors are insistently material, in other words, we imagine this particular, habitual intertextuality in Renaissance letters unfolding discursively. The literary producers and archival products examined in the chapters that follow demonstrate that, on the contrary, the Renaissance inclination to ‘‘gather’’ and ‘‘patch’’ was a more physical, ingrained thing than our assumptions about practice have allowed. The readers and writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not simply think of their books as aggregations of text; they physically aggregated, resituated, and customized them. Out of necessity and desire, they assembled volumes into unique configurations and built new works out of old ones. Models of literary production in the period were to a perhaps surprising degree predicated on the possibility that a text could be taken up and joined to something else. The bifurcation between ideas and material practice—between making works and making books—is, like the modern collectors’ binding, a later imposition. ‘‘Compiling,’’ in fact, was production, strictly speaking, in the semantics of Renaissance literary activities. In early usage, the verb ‘‘to compile’’ could mean ‘‘to compose,’’ to produce an ‘‘original work.’’28 It was in this nowlimited sense synonymous with writing. John Palsgrave’s 1530 translation dictionary defines ‘‘compiling’’ explicitly as authorship: ‘‘[to] make a boke as an auctor dothe.’’29 Another early dictionary, John Bullokar’s An English Expositor, which passed through twenty editions between 1616 and 1775, lists the definition, ‘‘Compile. To make, frame or set together,’’ where ‘‘frame,’’ as recent scholarship has shown, also has a potentially structural meaning.30 The term was applied in this way to many varieties of text in the sixteenth and

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early seventeenth centuries. Here are a few examples: William Caxton in his 1490 Aeneid lists Virgil as the text’s compiler;31 ‘‘E.K.’’ introduces Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender by explaining that Spenser ‘‘compiled these xii. Aeglogues;’’32 the Latin textbook A short introduction of grammar (1567) describes itself as being ‘‘compiled and set forth’’ by its author, William Lily;33 the title page to the 1561 Works of Chaucer advertises the attached ‘‘The Siege of Thebes’’ as ‘‘compiled by Ihon Lidgate’’; Thomas Lupton’s morality play All for Money appears in a 1578 quarto ‘‘Compiled by T. Lupton’’;34 John Skelton, the sixteenth-century laureate, was named as compiler in nine books of verse printed and reprinted between 1554 and 1563;35 Thomas Watson refers to his compositional practice as ‘‘compiling’’ twice in the running commentary to his 1582 book of sonnets, The Hekatompathia;36 and the cover of Gervase Markham’s domestic manual The English Husbandman (1613) makes the (only now) seemingly paradoxical announcement that it is ‘‘A worke neuer written before by any author: and now newly compiled.’’37 To compile, according to this vocabulary, was to create. The field-specific claim of this study then is twofold. It will argue first that books in early print culture were relatively open-ended and to a great extent bound (in both senses) by the desires of readers, and second that the attendant practices of compiling and collecting came to have an important structural impact on the production of Renaissance literature. In analyses of selected works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Watson, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, and others in the chapters that follow, I contend that the unsettled conventions of book assembly in the period helped foster an idea of the literary work as flexible and contingent, and a pervasive, underlying idea of writing as something closer to what we would call repurposing or recontextualization. Scholars have long characterized Renaissance writers by their habit of redeploying gathered text to form their own productions, but Bound to Read demonstrates that such discursive strategies were rooted in concrete, everyday ways of engaging with books, many of which have been concealed by modern routines of curatorship and rebinding. Using littleknown primary sources, such as library shelf lists and intact collections from the earlier period of the handpress, I uncover surprising juxtapositions of texts, like Blomefylde’s, that provide a material basis for reading across traditional genres and literary categories—according to the classification systems of early book owners instead of those of modern book culture, which shape our archives. Bringing this more fluid idea of the text to bear on the discourse

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and practice of writing in the Renaissance, this investigation recasts traditional concepts of intertextuality, allusion, and imitation as habits of the book, profoundly connected to the material organization of knowledge.38 Bound to Read thus sets out to recover a history of reading and book ownership that is also a history of literary production—one in which the parameters of writing and written discourse are set in part by the shifting ways in which texts are ordered, assembled, and made available in collections. The relationship is vividly evoked in our own moment of cultural change, in which new technologies of the book have fractured old ways of thinking about and producing works in print.39 Recently, scholars of the early handpress era have also begun to rethink long-held conceptions of the book and its physical boundaries. Sherman and others working in the history of reading have carried out inquiries into ‘‘book use’’ (and abuse) in the Renaissance, revealing that early readers intervened in the content and structure of printed volumes by annotating and even cutting and pasting.40 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, in their survey of actors’ parts, have shown that the material conditions of meaning-making in Renaissance drama challenge ‘‘Romantic-cum-Victorian notions of . . . an organically whole text,’’41 which only anachronistically apply to Shakespeare’s plays. Bound to Read contributes to these emerging conversations on both the consumption and production ends of Renaissance culture, and to the ongoing revisionism in the history of printing itself. The last two decades have witnessed a decisive turn in scholars’ understanding of the Gutenberg press and its historical effects, from earlier assessments of a print revolution that stabilized or ‘‘fixed’’ texts in the Renaissance to a more nuanced account of deliberate, uneven change and uncertainty in the period.42 In literary criticism, new perspectives on print history have gone hand in hand with a renewed evaluation of manuscript culture and its persistence—indeed, growth—in the early handpress era.43 Scholars have come to consider a variety of literary activities, including reading itself, as instrumental forms of production.44 But only very recently, and in part because of today’s digital tools and database technologies,45 have we gained exposure to the complicated range of literary materials that were available to Renaissance readers and writers. As Andrew Pettegree has observed in the field’s most recent major contribution, histories of print and the book have ‘‘tended to concentrate on the most eye-catching achievements of the new art,’’46 neglecting the unbound and uncollected texts, the uncataloged or unexhibited items in archives, the imperfect and composite volumes like Blomefylde’s that tell a different story of literate culture in the Renaissance.

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This issue of access points to the broader methodological claim of this study: that book-collecting practices—from early modern compiling to modern library curatorship and conservation—have deep and largely unacknowledged interpretative effects, both in literary criticism and in perceptions of literary history and periodization. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in its well-studied early printed form, is emblematic of this point. In every known instance in rare-book collections today, the quarto copies of Hamlet that survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime are preserved and accessed individually in hardcover bindings. But during Shakespeare’s lifetime, these arrangements would have been impossible luxuries—virtually impracticable by ordinary convention. Hamlet quartos were by all accounts cheap booklets; they were bound into collections with similarly sized cheap booklets (if they were bound at all) and kept out of serious institutional libraries such as the Bodleian at Oxford University.47 The gravity and aura of an individually bound, read, and interpreted Hamlet today is thus to a great extent a function of modern bookcollecting practices. Each preserved copy is at base a relatively undistinguished early printed book that was transformed—through conservational rebinding, cataloging, and revaluation according to the economics of the book trade—into a distinguished Renaissance masterwork. The material contexts and organizing categories that for early readers informed the text’s status and range of potential meanings have been replaced by a modern, circumscribed idea of what Hamlet should be. This contrast exemplifies what is meant by the indeterminate third term of my subtitle, ‘‘the Making of Renaissance Literature.’’ Bound to Read examines both literary production— writers and printers making meaning—in the period customarily referred to as the Renaissance and, crucially, the production of a category of Renaissance literature in library and collecting procedures customarily considered outside the domain of literary-critical interpretation. In finding meaning in practices of text assembly and organization, the analyses in this study stretch across field lines to embrace and build on scholarly convictions about collecting as cultural production. Such convictions form the basis of library and bookbinding history, two fields of knowledge that until recently have remained underutilized by scholars of Renaissance literature.48 The importance of collecting has also informed recent literary scholarship of the Middle Ages, a field too easily cordoned off by our default categories of ‘‘Renaissance’’ and ‘‘early modern.’’49 Alexandra Gillespie, writing on late medieval quartos of Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s works, has called attention to the fact that the earliest printed texts in today’s rare-book

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archives are ‘‘for the most part, slim, bound in morocco or Russian leather . . . , washed and cropped and generally presented as the ideal thing for a nineteenth-century gentleman.’’50 Underneath this artificially modernized surface, Gillespie and Seth Lerer have independently shown, lies a robust culture of anthology building in which the compiling habits and fluid canons familiar to us from the medieval manuscript miscellany continued to guide the production of Middle English literature in early print.51 The continuity of compiling and collecting practices is a theme that emerges decisively in this study, helping to fill a conspicuous gap in existing literary-historical research. Scholarship on anthologies and print Sammelba¨nde stops with the Middle English texts from the 1520s examined in Gillespie’s and Lerer’s studies, and resumes only in the allied but fundamentally different realm of collected literary anthologies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.52 Bound to Read demonstrates that this gap in chronology originates in the long processes of archival selection that give us gilt-edged, luxury quarto copies of Hamlet: the rebinding, cataloging, and other curatorial routines that seem objective and peripheral to literary-historical scholarship but which enforce the perception of a historical break—an English Renaissance—at the level of the rare book. What Lerer calls the medieval ‘‘anthologistic impulse’’53 is very much in evidence in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where book owners continued to compile in a system of production and distribution that effectively required it. As Gillespie has noted, the press may have wrested books from a slower, more careful system of medieval compilation, ‘‘but it supplied them to the same sort of readers.’’ ‘‘After printing, as other choices—about script, size and decoration of a book—were completely or increasingly circumscribed, the patrons of bookshops might still buy a book unbound and decide what to do with it next.’’54 It could be said that instead of ‘‘fixing’’ or stabilizing once-malleable texts as was previously thought, printing multiplied the possibilities for text assembly, accelerating and diversifying habits of the book that nourished a more continuous, developing early vernacular textual culture. In fact, we find that the movement from the latemedieval printers to established Renaissance Stationers’ Company is one of more control to less control over binding structures: from publisherwholesalers, such as Caxton and Richard Pynson, who issued part-editions ready bound, to the increasingly specialized tradesmen of the 1580s and 1590s, who focused on printing and financing while ceding even more of the work

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of assembly to retailers and consumers.55 What Lerer calls an ‘‘impulse’’ had by the time of Spenser and Shakespeare become praxis. A writer or publisher in the Renaissance released their work into a culture of bibliographic contingency, where the reader had seemingly infinite choices for supplying context and meaning—for giving that work material form in a book. And yet for much of modern textual history—especially after the industrialization of bookbinding in the nineteenth century (a genuine discontinuity, if not a Renaissance)56 —a cultural preference for individual, modernlooking copies of major literary works has resulted in early printed artifacts being stripped of these material contexts. The objective is almost always bibliophilic preservation, necessary and noble in its way, but the effect has been to make Spenser and Shakespeare into our contemporaries, to separate them from their contemporaries in premodern reading and compiling culture. At its most extreme, these interventions can prevent us from accessing the history of a given text’s use or formation beyond that of the modern collector. Figure 3 displays a copy of King Lear from 1619 that was most likely extracted from an early multitext anthology.57 Each page has been cropped individually down to the margin and then inlayed or mounted in fresh, modern paper. No collation of the text can be taken, and no previous reader (or reading) can be perceived. Such a radical discrepancy in modes of text preservation and reading reflects an untold history of desired books and desired meaning. Poststructuralist theorists and historiographers from the later twentieth century have argued forcefully that archiving does not merely store what is written and said; it interprets, differentiates, and codifies discourse, and ultimately defines the limts of comprehensibility in the production of new discourse.58 The curatorial substructure of books in archives determines what we can say about them. In many cases, it conceals what has been said in and about the literatures of the past. Renaissance books in today’s libraries are fundamentally divorced from their earliest readerly contexts, which established parameters for interpretation and regulated the textual field within which writers produced works. The first part of this study, ‘‘Readers,’’ begins to reconstruct these lost contexts in the compilations and collections that once populated library shelves. The second part, ‘‘Writers,’’ explores the ways in which these normative assemblages of text helped define compositional practices, and also the literary roles and subjectivities that were marketed to an emerging readership in the

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Figure 3. Shakespeare’s King Lear, part of a 1619 series of plays, detached, cut out, and inlaid, page by page, while in possession of a modern collector. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Because the available evidence in archives is unrepresentative (if it ever could have been representative), I cannot hope to provide a comprehensive or chronological account of compiling and collecting practices. Rather, Bound to Read examines the assembly and disassembly of early handpress-era texts at key cultural sites, showing how

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material arrangements and classification systems shaped Renaissance literature and how the organization of knowledge more generally exerts a farreaching influence over the making of literary texts. The first chapter, ‘‘Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries,’’ provides a historically elaborated counterpart to the set of issues raised in this introduction. Beginning with medieval compiling practices and their persistence into print, I chart the shift from a malleable early print textuality to the self-enclosed book of modernity through case studies drawn from two key archives: the eighteenth-century Cambridge University Library and the Renaissance library of Archbishop Matthew Parker, now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The University Library preserves striking evidence of the modern development of curatorial processes in a superseded shelf list of special-collections materials called the AB catalog. The catalog, long forgotten in the library records, reveals that most of the early printed books in the designated AB class at Cambridge were formerly in composite arrangements but have since been disbound into single, modern units. The pattern, as I’ve been describing it, was common in institutional libraries, but rarely do traces survive that allow us to reconstruct a collection as it looked to its early users and to actually read early assemblages of text, as we can here. My second case study offers a candid look at a Renaissance library of similar proportions whose books remain in their original composite states. Matthew Parker’s habit of aggregating and patching together manuscripts recovered from the dissolution of the monasteries is well known to scholars of the Elizabethan period, but his vast collection of printed books has not been examined for evidence of the same curatorial activities. In his collection at Corpus Christi, I uncover configurations of text similar to those listed in the AB catalog, but ones that remain intact, with traceable provenances. I go on to demonstrate that Matthew Parker used these seemingly unwieldy assemblages of material in order to generate his own text, mining his anthologies for ideas for projects on theology and ecclesiastical history, which would eventually materialize in his printed works. The second chapter of this study, ‘‘Making Shakespeare’s Books: Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab,’’ develops the historical account set out in Chapter 1 by examining early assemblages of high-prestige literary texts that are now encountered primarily in discrete and self-enclosed books. Scholars have long been interested in the apparent mutability of Shakespeare’s works in early print culture: how parts of Love’s Labour’s Lost were mixed with texts by other poets in William Jaggard’s

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printed anthology The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), or how John Benson’s 1640 Poems volume changed the order of the Sonnets (and at times, the gender of Shakespeare’s addressee), mixing his work with that of others. This chapter demonstrates that early readers also compiled Shakespearean works, creating multitext volumes to suit their tastes and uses. Surveying extant compilations—and focusing particularly on the changing contexts of Henry IV Part 1 and Lucrece—I show that the combinatory activities of publishers like Jaggard and Benson reflected a more general readerly desire for flexible, adaptable works in print. These works with each new assembly gave rise to different juxtapositions and different forms of canonicity, many of which are surprising to us today, a counterpoint to the organization of Shakespearean texts in modern editions. But as I go on to demonstrate, in modern archives most of these early compilations were disassembled, their texts rebound separately, eliminating the evidence of previous uses in favor of a Shakespearean text that looks modern. This chapter argues that such assembly practices play a role in generating meaning—that the frameworks for reading and interpreting Shakespeare emerge out of the productions of collectors and conservators who make Shakespeare’s books. The first part of this study thus introduces a concept of ‘‘material intertextuality’’—an intertextuality based on physical rather than purely discursive proximity—into Renaissance reading and reception history, excavating early compilations and assessing the interpretive implications of their varying logics of assembly. The second part investigates these methods of assembly from the standpoint of literary production, arguing that habits of compiling and customization were integral to Renaissance writing as well. Chapter 3, ‘‘Transformative Imitation: Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson’s Hekatompathia,’’ examines the work of a little-known Elizabethan choral musician named John Lilliat and a related—in fact, materially connected—printed sonnet collection from the 1580s. Lilliat, like many of his contemporaries in the Renaissance, channeled his social aspirations into poems of unrequited love using Petrarch and other writers as models. But Lilliat’s manuscript book, preserved at Oxford, physically incorporates his primary model into his text. Liber Lilliati, as he titled it, consists of fair-copy manuscript poetry written on leaves that had been added to a printed book, Thomas Watson’s sonnet sequence, The Hekatompathia. This assemblage of manuscript and print gives us a privileged look at the Renaissance compileras-writer at work: not only does Lilliat model his text after Watson’s; he makes use of decontextualized lines and stanzas from the Hekatompathia to

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form his own poetry, assembling verse in much the same way that he assembles his book. This chapter examines both texts side by side to argue that the injunction to compile and imitate in this way was already present in Watson’s sequence, giving us a new way to think about the demands printed verse collections made on readers and the poems that such curatorial routines ultimately helped produce. The fourth chapter, ‘‘Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne’s Essays,’’ explores the work of assembly in two key texts whose authors forged what we would see as hybrid compilations, much like Lilliat’s. Beginning with a well-known manuscript in Spenser’s hand now at the Folger (itself formerly part of a compilation once in Spenser’s possession) and the famous ‘‘Bordeaux copy’’ of Montaigne’s Essays, I investigate how these two Renaissance authors represented the writing self as a maker or augmenter of books, encoding what they themselves did. Spenser, I argue, marshaled the material features of the early printed text— glosses, woodcuts, typography, the apparatus—in order to announce the arrival of the New Poet in his debut, The Shepheardes Calender. The text, I suggest, is not only appropriative in the sense of deriving models from classical exempla but also in the sense that Lilliat’s is: it inhabits and transforms an existing printed work, The Kalender of Sheepehards, a humble almanac. Montaigne too, I argue, styled himself as an assembler of texts—what he calls a ‘‘craftsman’’—in his Essays, which are marked by his own practice of inhabiting and expanding printed books and those of his interlocutor, Etienne de la Boe´tie. Even as Montaigne’s work inaugurates a new, more spontaneous genre of prose, I argue, it develops an older conception of books as fluid and subject to redefinition. ‘‘Of Books,’’ in particular, dramatizes the process of writing in and on books, as The Shepheardes Calender also did, to announce a new role for the writing self in the Renaissance. Both writers, I go on to demonstrate, were themselves generative sources for early readers, who combined and interacted with their printed texts in compilations. Bound to Read concludes by reassessing the Renaissance ‘‘collected works’’ volume and the authorial corpora they marketed to readers as products of material assembly. Chapter 5, ‘‘The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623,’’ traces the development of the monumental writer-organized literary volume from the later medieval period to the more well-studied productions of Jonson and Shakespeare. Beginning with The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1532)—the earliest of such literary collections in the vernacular—I demonstrate that bodies of writers’ poetry and drama

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were recombinant, often functioning as topical compilations or marketing venues for other, related writers’ work, recalling and sustaining the protocols of Middle English book culture in the print period. Moving to the larger Works of Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and others in the early seventeenth century, I show how such collected volumes were produced and used in detachable formats, to be combined with other things; their unified appearance today reflects the familiar curatorial values of author-title-date classification and bibliographical integrity, which only began to systematically guide text assembly after the transition to industrial book production in the modern era. At our own moment of technological transition, in which ways of using and assigning value to texts once are again in flux, historically grounded understandings of text production are becoming newly important. The extent to which patterns of assembly inform reading and writing is everywhere in evidence today: word processing blurs the once-stable boundary between composition and revision; eBooks and iPods break up the perceived wholeness of cultural products like books and albums; digital textuality and new literary genres such as fan fiction reinstate notions of writing as enlargement and compilation. The surviving archive of early printed texts has again been reassembled and re-presented in digitization projects, which often rewrite the ‘‘organically whole text’’ back into literary history in following bibliographic protocols established in the modern era. Bound to Read calls attention to the limits of the self-enclosed book as a model in a period of new and exciting capabilities, shedding light on a form of textuality that prevailed before modern notions of the book were in place. It urges us to revise accounts of literary production across periods in view of a different type of creative agency—the agency of compilers, curators, readers, programmers, and others who make books, as authors do.

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PA R T I

Readers

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chapter 1

Special Collections Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries

It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927–1940) This and the accompanying 11 volumes had been bound together as one, full calf of poor quality over pasteboards. . . . Book taken down. Pages washed/deacidified in limewater bath and all folios strengthened using Crompton 10 gsm tissue with ‘‘lamatec’’ adhesive. Sewn on 3 tapes, attached to split boards. Bound 1/4 Oasis with vellum tops and marbled sides. —A modern binder’s note in a copy of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1634)

Bookbinding and collecting, like other aspects of the history of reading, are ‘‘on the order of the ephemeral.’’1 The acquisition, ordering and shelving, use, and conservation of texts in libraries are activities that leave little evidence behind. Firsthand accounts of text assembly and the organization of knowledge in early print are scarce and most often rooted in the perspective of producers, whether in manuals or as documentary by-products of printinghouse accounting.2 In modern rare-book rooms, we might find binders’ tickets or unusually detailed collectors’ notes in the flyleaves of texts showing

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later curatorial activities. But artifacts in special collections, particularly the highly prized ones, are unforthcoming about their material histories. Only under exceptional circumstances of cataloging or record keeping are we able to learn much about the past lives of the most valuable written works. Two libraries at Cambridge University, however, do give us an exceptional record of the order of books in the handpress era and a surprising look at the reordering of early works in modern archives. In 1799, a Cambridge cataloger named William Pugh was dismissed from his post for making insufficient progress on a new category of books, the ‘‘AB class,’’ which was to comprise all valuable specimens of early printing then held in the university’s Royal Library.3 Pugh, a respected fellow at Trinity College, had been at the job for nearly ten years, having been hired almost immediately after taking his bachelor’s degree on the strength of his reputation as a voracious reader. He was widely knowledgeable and passionate about working with rare books. But according to contemporary accounts, he was also eccentric, and eventually he became slovenly, obsessive, and antisocial. After his dismissal from the library, Pugh reportedly ‘‘dreaded the society of everybody.’’4 He would lock himself in his room for long periods, emerging suddenly to scandalize the college by throwing all his linens in the River Cam. One evening after a rash of unexplained vandalism in the town, Pugh was spotted outside of his room and followed. On leaving the college grounds, he retrieved a stick from the water’s edge, walked into town, and proceeded to smash street lamps, shrieking and calling them Robespierre, Danton, or St. Just. Tolerance for fellows’ eccentricities was high at the time, but the incident was enough for Pugh to be dismissed from college and declared insane. Years later he was said to have regained some of his former reputation, but he never returned to work. According to contemporaries, ‘‘He still had a somewhat insane look.’’5 Pugh’s undoing has interested scholars of the book because, by all accounts, it began with a near-pathological tendency to read rather than merely catalog the texts in the AB class. To the dismay of the university librarians, Pugh would often become fixated on a single volume when adding it to the shelf list; if it was unfamiliar, ‘‘he was not content with looking at the title page, but applied himself to reading the contents.’’6 This diversion, of course, is the sort of thing the cataloger striving for efficiency is trained to avoid. And indeed, Pugh’s unfinished AB-class catalog, long since superseded, survives today in the Cambridge library archives as a monument to

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inefficient bibliography.7 Its entries are digressive, unsystematic, and sometimes speculative. Pugh recorded not only titles, authors, and imprints, but also formal features, curiosities in the texts, cross-references, and notes to himself and to posterity with relevant thoughts that crossed his mind as he read. With such a taste for detail, Pugh frequently used up to ten folio-sized pages (rather than the customary line or two) to catalog a single book, piece by piece, at a rate that eventually exhausted the patience of his colleagues (Fig. 4). His waywardness, so the story goes, had no place in a modern library on the verge of reform—of blossoming, as it would over the next century, into a national institution.8 He simply had to be let go. But what was William Pugh reading on the job? What was so fascinating about a collection of early printed texts to this modern archivist? This chapter begins by investigating the peculiarities of Pugh’s reading materials, which I suggest can be instructive to a history of the book that is only beginning to account for the practices of selection and reorganization that have shaped the libraries and literatures we know today.9 No mere document of bibliographical incompetence, the AB catalog offers something rarely found in the field of textual history: a detailed snapshot of an early printed book collection as it looked to previous generations of readers. As David McKitterick has explained, the Royal Library at Cambridge was acquired in 1715 from Bishop John Moore, who had built his great collection out of the private libraries of English bookmen from as far back as the sixteenth century.10 The AB class was part of an effort to process those books as they moved from individual to institutional ownership. It was designed specifically to accommodate the valuable specimens of early printing from the collection, including incunabula, early sixteenth-century texts, and select literary works from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods.11 In setting William Pugh to work on such materials, the university librarians did an unexpected service to book history. Scholars of early print culture have long found catalogs and inventories from the period to be unreliable guides to the contents of English literary book collections, as compilers tended to record only the first title in a vernacular multitext volume or to relegate such low-status vernacular works to a summary ‘‘et cetera’’ at the end of the list.12 Pugh’s AB catalog, in contrast, is thorough, and obsessively so. Its excess of detail—from the texts in each binding, to the material added in by early readers, to notes on where duplicate copies may be found elsewhere in the library— allows for a privileged glimpse into the formation of a modern archive out of

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Figure 4. A leaf from the AB catalog, in which Pugh only recorded two books. The second (shelf mark AB.10.53) was a composite volume containing Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1611). In the catalog entry, Pugh has added, ‘‘N.B. E.K.’s Preface.’’ Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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numerous rare-book sources. But most important, as I will demonstrate, it allows us to compare these early catalog entries to their referent books, now under different classification at the Cambridge University Library. And the result is surprising. What Pugh saw in the 1790s is not what we see today. The collection was in large part composed of items that seem now to defy bibliographic categories and textual boundaries: multiple books bound together, printed texts mixed with manuscripts, incomplete and supplemented works, one author with another, prestigious literature with ephemera. By modern standards, it would almost be enough (as they say) to drive one mad. The processes of archival selection and reorganization that I open up for discussion in this chapter touched most institutional libraries in Anglo-American modernity; the AB class at the University Library is one prominent example that permits a degree of reconstruction. Outside the literary-historical domain, where ‘‘rare book’’ is perhaps not a guiding category in the same way, we find that reconstruction is in some key instances unnecessary. In the second part of this chapter, I turn briefly to a comparable Renaissance-era collection kept fully intact less than a mile down the road from the University Library in Cambridge, at the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. Here, in the later part of the sixteenth century, the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker undertook to generate, as Pugh would in the 1790s, a full inventory of hundreds of early printed texts in varying states of hybridity and compilation, as they were encountered by their earliest readers. But unlike the texts in Pugh’s AB catalog, the books that were recorded in what became known at Cambridge as the Parker Register were not reorganized or reclassified in the modern period.13 Because of a series of unusual provisions that Archbishop Parker himself built in to the catalog, the collection remains, we might say, unprocessed. The new mode of book preservation, in which valuable early texts are individually rebound and protected as clean, integral copies, did not supplant the older one. The library, as a consequence, is messier and less accessible by modern standards, baffling at times even to resident Parker librarians. Yet, as I will argue, the collection at Corpus Christi College reflects the largely unacknowledged extent to which books were in the early years of print customizable, always subject to enlargement and rearrangement at the hands of users. Because Matthew Parker himself, whose projects and published works are known to us, was the primary collector of these books, the Parker Library also begins to suggest some of the ways in which the malleability of early printed materials could become intellectually generative for Renaissance writers, a theme I explore in the second part of this study.

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The Modern Collector and the History of the Book William Pugh is a liminal figure in the transition to modern practices of collection management and conservation, practices that have recently come under study for their reforming effects on books from earlier periods of production.14 In both individual and institutional collections in modernity, the task of preserving premodern books was often one of reorganizing them into discrete, systematized units—one text per binding, print with print and manuscript with manuscript, in the author-title-date catalog model with which we are most familiar. Modern custodianship rationalized bodies of written information and maximized a particular kind of accessibility while also reducing wear and deterioration, which the handling of books in older, fragile, or multitext bindings is likely to bring about. These efforts also increased returns on investments since clean rare books would fetch more individually on the book market than those bound together.15 Indeed, the first significant incentives for reorganization were likely book auctions, which debuted in the later seventeenth century in England, along with the rise in trade bookbinding toward the end of that century.16 But the process reached its apex in the nineteenth century, when the industrialization of binding and book production made the single, ready-bound printed text the standard.17 The legacy of this period, as Alexandra Gillespie has shown, is on display in our best-known rare-book rooms, where valuable early printed texts are almost always clothed in grand Victorian-era bindings. In her study of Middle English Sammelba¨nde in print, Gillespie relates the story of a nineteenthcentury book buyer who, at an auction of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library in 1812, mused on how ‘‘enchanting’’ a certain early English compilation would be ‘‘when divided into parts and encased in dark red morocco surtouts.’’18 This is, for the most part, how we find the former AB-class texts at the Cambridge University Library today: individually bound in calf, sheep, or goat, often with gilded edges or matching protective book boxes. Julia Miller describes this artificial contemporaneity and uniformity: ‘‘Our hand binders, including our book conservators, have tended to learn their craft from that relatively recent tradition and have tended to apply its procedures to books that are from much older and much different binding traditions.’’19 Paul Needham explored the potential losses involved in such practices in an early account of English Sammelba¨nde, and Gillespie, Nicholas Pickwoad, and John Szirmai have since nuanced our understanding of the anachronism of

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modern bookbinding.20 Early binding, we know, was not an absolutely integral part of the production process; over the course of the sixteenth century and into the Renaissance, the work of determining a material assembly fell to retailers and, increasingly, to readers.21 Books formed according to the desires of the early consumer—whether sent to the bindery after the purchase or placed on sale ready bound owing to popular demand—could at any point in their life span be broken down and reconfigured as new desires or changes in ownership arose. More important, the cost of binding a book in the period has been estimated at 1s 6d, many times higher than the cost of most printed texts themselves.22 So especially in the case of small formats such as quartos and octavos, which encompass most printed works in the emergent European vernaculars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, single-text volumes in leather bindings were all but impracticable as a mode of storage.23 The demands of book ownership were such that vernacular works were, as a matter of routine and preservation, compiled into flexible, anthology-like formats that do not easily map on to classification systems in modern libraries. Text producers in this early period, as we might imagine, designed and marketed texts accordingly, as ‘‘annexed’’ or annexable to other texts. Early printed works, as Gillespie has explained, ‘‘suggest a remarkable openness on the part of printers and owners to the malleable, multiple forms of books.’’24 Occasionally in archives we find traces of these malleable, multiple forms, which give us a glimpse into what Pugh must have seen at Cambridge. Most literary-historical researchers have at one point or another requested a rare book at a special-collections library only to find that it is bound with other rare books; such arrangements often no longer make sense to us, but they did to their earliest owners, who read and preserved them this way. Common, less familiar forms of evidence include binders’ notes, such as the one in my epigraph, and referentless contents lists written in by early readers, which sometimes remain in the flyleaves of books that were rebound into individual units in modernity. These documents tell us what modern catalogs as a rule do not: that the early texts we research once existed in material configurations substantially different from the ones we observe now in rarebook rooms.25 Such traces are difficult to locate because archives have selected against them. As Needham’s pioneering study of the problem made clear, modern collectors, both individual and institutional, had little patience for high-value texts that seemed to exceed the boundaries of a conventionally defined book.26 Focusing on Sammelba¨nde containing early texts printed by William Caxton as a case study, Needham demonstrates that ‘‘a curiosity

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about . . . potential clues to the original marketing, or to the original purchasers of Caxton’s books was alien to the mentality of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century connoisseur.’’27 In acquiring rare books, collectors would most often impose on them—by means of rebinding, cleaning, and filling in or even forging missing text—a modern idea of what a book ought to look like. Needham concludes that collectors wanted books to reflect their possession and their possession alone. ‘‘Almost all copies, therefore, as they came into the hands of antiquarian booksellers and clients, were cut out of old covers and put into new ones. . . . The result was inevitably something smaller, thinner, meaner, and less honest than what had been before.’’28 Such modifications, Needham finds, touched more than two-thirds of the early printed books in his sample.29 This dynamic, he argues, represents a ‘‘failure of historical imagination’’ on the part of modern collectors—an almost systematic effacement of evidence for reading in the name of owning clean, individually bound books.30 As we might expect, these archival interventions have disproportionately shaped texts of high literary or cultural significance. The more a rare book was sought after by modern collectors, the likelier it was to be severed from its material history and reconstituted according to modern specifications. Indeed, scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury literature have noticed, if not explicitly investigated, this archival bias as it shapes our knowledge of how canonical texts were read and circulated. Stephen Orgel, in a study of readers’ marks in an early copy of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, has noted that ‘‘one of the strangest phenomena of modern bibliophilic and curatorial psychology is the desire for pristine copies of books, books that reveal no history of ownership.’’31 William Sherman has surveyed the attitudes toward early books in the Renaissance and today, documenting a broad cultural shift from readers who routinely wrote and intervened in published texts to readers who are institutionally prohibited from doing so.32 ‘‘Within the book trade,’’ Sherman explains, ‘‘there has been a history of aggressive practices involving bleaching the pages and trimming their margins down to the very edge of the printed text.’’ The effect is not only to erase signs of earlier use but also to reinforce the boundaries of an ‘‘ideal’’ copy—boundaries that may not have been self-evident before the modern imposition. As Sherman argues, ‘‘The ideal copy becomes, in a paradox that is all too familiar to museum curators and art conservators, a historic object with most of the traces of its history removed.’’33 Perhaps the most famous theorist of modern collecting and the historicity of collected objects is Walter Benjamin, whose musings in the Arcades

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Project form an unlikely preamble to concerns over nineteenth-century archivology among scholars of the book.34 In this, Benjamin’s self-proclaimed masterwork, the collector figure is vital to the task of capturing nineteenthcentury bourgeois society in its complexity. The archetype is often taken to refer to the collector of antique objects or curiosities, but Benjamin is careful to offer as expansive a definition as possible, incorporating and at times highlighting the book as a kind of collector’s item.35 Already in his essay ‘‘Unpacking My Library,’’ Benjamin had used his own books to theorize the collection in general terms as ‘‘a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order.’’36 Forsaking this artificial order for what he called ‘‘the prismatic fringes’’37 of the library—the loose paper, the unbound, uncataloged, and as yet unshelved—Benjamin famously meditated on the fetishistic nature of collecting, a notion that becomes the basis of his extended analysis in the Arcades Project. Here, exploring more fully the psychology of the collector, Benjamin affirms that ‘‘the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.’’ The collector sets a world of scattered and incommensurable things into order through a process that Benjamin identifies as abstraction or decontextualization—a salvaging of the object from its own perceived disorganization, irrationality, or dividedness so that it forms a self-bounded talisman of ownership and a metonym for the collection itself. Benjamin summarizes, interrogating this sense of boundedness: ‘‘What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this ‘completeness’? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection.’’38 For collectors, broadly defined, this desired completeness is ‘‘mint’’ or ‘‘original condition’’; in collections, it is the complete ‘‘set’’ or ‘‘series.’’ For book collectors, a number of analogous terms orbit around the bibliographic category of ‘‘perfection’’: a text is understood to be ‘‘perfect’’ (and of its maximized potential value) when it is bounded and self-enclosed, with nothing lacking or added on and with a clear location in a series, such as the Short Title Catalogue, or a class catalog, such as William Pugh’s. In setting forms of completeness like these in diametric opposition to utility, Benjamin alerts us to the paradox in modern collecting practices that

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strip away objects’ ‘‘original functions’’ in restoring them, as Sherman affirms, to their so-called ‘‘original conditions.’’ But books and other collected objects are in this respect not so much removed from history (Benjamin points out that history matters very much to the collector). Rather, they are removed from their particular, discontinuous histories of use. Any semblance of their circulation or ownership outside the present collection is erased as they are put into what Benjamin calls ‘‘magic circles’’ on shelves and on display. The collected object becomes an icon in a neater, more synthetic history, such as literary history.39 The collector functions in this way as a maker of meaning—an ‘‘allegorist,’’ in Benjamin’s account, who writes and reinforces a new synthetic history in each of the objects he collects.40

The AB Catalog and the Cambridge University Library Ultimately, Benjamin concedes that the status of books in modern collecting practice is problematic and in need of investigation because the book collector is ‘‘the only type of collector who has not completely withdrawn his treasures from their functional context.’’41 For this reason—the insuperable functionality of texts—William Pugh’s eighteenth-century catalog survives, permitting a glimpse into what lies behind the synthetic order of a modern collection. During Pugh’s tenure, the books in the AB class were not collectors’ items in the modern sense—they were not, as a rule, clean, individually bound, or perfect—and they would not begin to seem so until some sixty years after Pugh’s dismissal. In 1859, as J. C. T. Oates has shown, the librarian Henry Bradshaw set out to rearrange the early printed books at the University Library according to the somewhat undiplomatic assumption ‘‘that there was a right place for every book and that every book should occupy it.’’ Any volume that seemed to exceed its boundaries ‘‘could only be made to conform if it were cut up into its constituent item.’’ ‘‘This,’’ Oates explains, ‘‘Bradshaw did with horrifying ruthlessness,’’42 extracting books from their bound contexts with little sense of the information being eliminated in the process. But as the texts in the AB class were being reshaped and placed into magic circles, they could not be fully withdrawn from their archival functionality. Part of an active collection, they had to be available for reading, whether or not they were bound individually and set out in triumphant order on the display shelves. Pugh’s catalog therefore remained in use until late in the

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nineteenth century, when Bradshaw’s reforms finally made the AB class of books obsolete. Because the catalog remained in use for so long, it had to be kept up to date during all subsequent modernization campaigns undertaken at the University Library. In this updating, we find the present catalog’s most striking asset: it was annotated by successive Cambridge librarians each time an early printed book in the AB class was reshaped or reorganized.43 Pugh’s original entries, in other words, constitute only the bottom-most layer of bibliographical records, corresponding to the appearance of the books as they originally came into the university’s possession from the library of Bishop Moore. Whenever those books changed shape, the entries in the AB catalog were changed in turn to facilitate access, usually with a set of brackets and shelf marks written in pencil over the old ones (Fig. 5). If, for example, an early volume originally containing multiple printed texts was split into smaller individually bound books during Bradshaw’s tenure, Pugh’s AB catalog would be marked up to reflect the new grouping and the location in the library where the texts were now to be found. Thus, the present document, annotated in layers, allows us to do more than generate a rough reconstruction of a set of early printed books before modern interventions, valuable as that reconstruction is. It also allows us to track the subsequent interventions as they were carried out by a determined institutional collector. Each textual mutation, from each item’s acquisition to its current shelf mark at the University Library, is visible. The wide-ranging entries in the AB catalog offer a concrete introduction to the ways in which taxonomies of reading and book ownership vary over time and to the curatorial procedures through which traces of this variability have been submerged in modern collections.44 From Pugh’s records, we ascertain that at least half of the books originally placed in the AB class transgressed in some way the bibliographic categories that were institutionalized in modernity, prompting (we assume) Bradshaw’s tenacious desire to reform them.45 From the web of later annotations that now surround Pugh’s records, we find that all but a few of these books were brought into line with modern standards during the reform campaigns undertaken in the nineteenth century. Throughout, a clear pattern emerges in which premodern and early modern books with relatively flexible—at times uncertain—boundaries are transformed into modern, individual, self-enclosed texts. When these selfenclosed texts are reassembled according to the information in the catalog and thus restored to how Pugh first saw them, lines of affiliation open up

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Figure 5. A leaf from the AB catalog, showing the hands of many later librarians. Each set of brackets represents a new mutation of the books originally in the AB class. This page shows the original contents of seven books, AB.8.46 to AB.8.52, containing twenty-seven early texts between them. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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that help us begin perceiving histories of reading, book storage, and situated interpretation that have been systematically obscured. Many former AB-class volumes appear to have been assembled into early anthologies out of the exigencies of bookselling and bookbinding in the handpress era; their constituent items shared a printer or publisher as their organizing criterion before they were rearranged by Cambridge librarians so that they now stand in single textual units. Shelf mark AB.1.28, for example, once comprised a multitext volume of incunabula—works by Cicero, Martial, and Ovid in folio—that, Pugh notes in his entry, likely issued from the same press.46 When brought together today, the books contain marginalia from the same early reader, including manicules (or pointing fingers) and underlining in the same ink, revealing valuable traces of how they were used early on in intellectual alignment with one another as a collection. According to a binder’s stamp on the inside cover, the titles were separated into independent leather-bound books and given independent shelf marks in or around 1890. A similar example in the vernacular is former shelf mark AB.10.27, which comprised five books printed by Caxton, including Virgil’s Boke of Eneydos and Chaucer’s Boke of Fame.47 Beneath each of the printer’s colophons, a fastidious early reader named ‘‘R. Johnson’’ recorded that he bought the books at the same time in 1510. We might assume that Johnson had them bound together in a single volume to save money or that a later sixteenth- or seventeenth-century collector, who perhaps came into possession of Johnson’s books, did so for similar reasons. The texts are now bound and cataloged separately. In calling up one of these texts today, one would have no way of knowing that it was once packaged in a composite book or anthology. When we become aware that such configurations were normal in the period—that very few works, particularly literary works, stood alone as they do today—important questions about the interpretation of early printed texts and literatures arise. What readings were enabled or disabled by putting Ovid into material proximity with Cicero, or Chaucer with Virgil, in a single binding? What species of taste or sensibility motivated these assemblages of texts, which we now experience only separately in modern editions? Certainly, many of the volumes in the AB class exhibit thematic connections that allow us to reconstruct their earliest uses and recover information about readers’ desires. In a study unrelated to the AB catalog, Seth Lerer has reassembled thirteen early printed books from the Cambridge University Library that, according to Pugh’s catalog, once made up a single volume (shelf mark

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AB.5.37) and that can be linked to a particular recusant family from the late sixteenth century. The volume was made of incunabular and nonincunabular texts, literary and nonliterary texts, including a play by John Heywood, works by John Lydate and Stephen Hawes, books on manners and hunting, and a fragment apparently drawn from a larger book and bound in. For the modern collectors who took it apart, this mass of text was disorderly. But as Lerer determines from the continuous threads of marginalia and subject matter that emerge in the reconstruction, the volume functioned for its sixteenthcentury users as a thematic anthology: a ‘‘collection of largely instructional works, calibrated to the education of young boys in late medieval and early modern England.’’48 A similar example from the opposite side of the political spectrum can be found in AB.5.58, which once comprised eighteen books printed in the mid-sixteenth century, recorded in Pugh’s catalog as a compilation. Each of these is numbered and marked in the same early hand, allowing the contemporary arrangement to be reconstructed. The volume begins with three astronomical treatises and a political pamphlet on enclosure, followed by a number of small Protestant booklets—a sermon on the education of children, a ‘‘history of popishness,’’ a copy of Robert Crowley’s epigrams, and nine explicitly theological texts—ending with treatises on the art of memory and swearing.49 Like the anthology that Lerer reconstructed, the volume has a clear thematic current—reformist in nature—that is made obscure by its having been rebound and repackaged in discrete textual units in modernity. AB.4.58 is another, larger example, formerly comprising twenty-six books of medieval fiction and nonfiction printed in the early to mid-sixteenth century. The volume included works of popular verse by John Lydgate and others; saints’ lives; treatises on husbandry, household carving, and sewing; and a medical recipe book.50 Each text is numbered consecutively and annotated by the same two named owners, Edward Powell and Andrew Holman, whose habits of reading and circulation become visible to history again only when the volume was reassembled. Powell and Holman annotate the text and also record exchanges in ownership: the first text contains Powell’s signature; on item 12, Holman wrote in his ownership mark, ‘‘This is andrew holmans book’’; a note on item 14, Robert the Devyll, notes, ‘‘This is Anderie Holmans booke till Edwarde Powell come a gaine.’’51 Incidences of thematic cohesiveness, named owners or families, or such annotations as these are rare in AB-class books, however. Pugh’s catalog, we

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find, is much more forthcoming about archival loss. The material and intellectual contexts of early reading and anthologizing frequently remain obscure, but the curatorial practices that obscured them become clearer. AB.4.61, for example, once contained sixteen texts that exhibit few affinities from the perspective of knowledge organization in modernity. The included books span over 150 years and range from how-to manuals on carpentry, surveying, and weaponry to a masque by Samuel Daniel.52 The only evidence that unifies the disparate material is a handwritten table of contents preserved in the flyleaf of the first item that clarifies the arrangement of texts in the later seventeenth century. But what we lack in information about the volume’s earliest uses, we gain in information about its modernization at the University Library. In both the manuscript contents list and the AB catalog, a later hand records that the volume’s second item, a Latin lexicon called Promptorium parvulorum clericorum, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1516, was removed because of its particular value relative to the other, later books adjacent to it.53 Here, the status of an early printed text as the product of a known printer whose work was highly sought after prevails over its status as part of a compilation that might shed light on its meaning. These valuations are now encoded in their bindings: Promptorium parvulorum clericorum was rebound individually and given its own shelf mark, while the remaining contents of the book, likely deemed too miscellaneous or too common, were reclassified as a ‘‘tract volume’’—a category of text that did not exist until the eighteenth century.54 The question of apparently random organizing criteria in Sammelba¨nde is a persistent and important one. Joseph Dane, in a recent chapter on early printed ‘‘Books in Books,’’ draws a distinction between multitext volumes formed arbitrarily and those formed with regard to printed content55— between merely practical motivations for book assembly, in other words, and assembly according to an intellectual principle that we moderns can interpret. The distinction relies on modern measures of coherence and a problematic model of reading as the retrieval of content undisturbed by the organization of knowledge, an argument to which I will return in the next chapter. But the point reinforced by the present material is that handpress-era readers had the option of thinking about the connections between texts in a Sammelba¨nde or to dismiss those connections as an accident of binding. This option is foreclosed by conservational initiatives such as Bradshaw’s in which the diversity of earlier book structures and the range of rationales for compilation are

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forced through the needle’s eye of modern textual categories. That most arbitrary line separating incunabula from early printed books, for example, seems to have been a primary motivating factor in the reform of the Cambridge collection, which leaned heavily toward the earliest products of the handpress. AB.10.53, according to Pugh’s entry, once comprised a copy of Caxton’s medieval encyclopedia, The Myrrour of the World (1490), bound with a 1611 copy of The Shepheardes Calender, the book of pastoral eclogues by Edmund Spenser. The two texts, printed over a century apart, show evidence of underlining and annotation in the same red crayon, a marking tool common in the early period. We imagine the early reader engaging the texts in a collection, if not in the bound book that Pugh read and recorded. But in the nineteenth century, they were stripped of their common context and separated into discrete units: the Caxtonian text in lavish black leather (under a new ‘‘Inc.’’ shelf designation) and the Spenser in cheaper half calf.56 AB.8.46 is a related example, formerly containing two Caxtonian saints’ lives bound with sixteenth-century literary works by John Skelton, John Rastell, and Henry Medwall.57 Pugh’s entry and its supplementary annotations indicate that the volume was reshaped twice by modern librarians: once to extract the incunabula and a second time to separate out the remaining early printed books to make them borrowable.58 Another volume, AB.4.59, once comprised eleven texts bound together, all issuing from Wynkyn de Worde’s press. But because the volume’s final item, The Meditacyouns of Saynt Barnard, was printed in the earliest part of de Worde’s career, in 1496, all of the items had to be disbanded and set into proper order in Bradshaw’s modern library. The first ten texts now form individual books in Bradshaw’s ‘‘Sel.’’ class, while the final item was rebound and reclassed as an incunabulum.59 Numerous early compilations in the AB catalog straddle this 1500 divide; their reorganization highlights its centrality in determining the shape of archives, separating print (and modernity) from what came before. AB.4.54, for example, was a compilation of four books, two literary and two nonliterary, printed between 1499 and 1503: Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen (1502), Maximianus’s Elegiae (1503), the incunabulum Orationes Philippi Beroaldi (1499) on the topic of Cicero, and Solinus’s geography De memorabilibus mundi (1503).60 The texts were numbered in their former position by a sixteeenthcentury owner—‘‘primus,’’ ‘‘secondus,’’ and so on—who also used the blank spaces in the volume to record fragments of other texts that interested him, as one might use a notebook or a commonplace book.61 Despite the fact that these books were printed within a few years of one another and evidently

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used in close intellectual or physical proximity, the volume was split into individual units, its parts decontextualized and set into the correct categories: ‘‘book’’ or ‘‘incunable,’’ but never both. Less arbitrary perhaps, the line separating print from manuscript was another important factor in the reform of the AB collection. As Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, Henry Woudhuysen, and others have demonstrated, the distinction between the two categories of text was never as absolute in the early modern era as it is in modern culture.62 The transition from one medium to another as the dominant mode of textual and literary circulation was gradual, and in production, especially in the Renaissance, they often overlapped. Indeed, Pugh’s catalog lists several examples of composite books that contained both printed and manuscript material, specimens later deemed hybrid or composite as the categories came into use and finally disbanded by the university librarians. AB.10.54 formerly contained three printed books—a history of Jason, a poetic work on the subject of death, and a later production of The Myrrour of the World—along with a manuscript copy of Sallust’s monograph on the Cataline conspiracy written in a neat sixteenth-century hand.63 The works contain matching ownership inscriptions and marginalia, but the handwritten portion was extracted, rebound, and transported to the manuscripts department at Cambridge in the nineteenth century.64 Moreover, because two of the three printed texts were incunabula, the remains of the composite volume were themselves disbanded and reorganized into individual units in their proper categories. Another example is AB.10.57, which once contained seven books now separate—four manuscripts and three early printed texts, all related philosophical works.65 According to a note in the AB catalog dated 1799, the manuscript material was extracted and given its own binding during Pugh’s tenure. And later, in the nineteenth century, the volume was reconfigured yet again to make its printed contents into individually bound modern books. Finally, authorship seems to have been a guiding category in the modernization of rare books at Cambridge. Like the composite volumes of material that exhibited what we see as thematic or chronological incoherence, the ABclass books that contained works by more than one author were likely candidates for reform in the nineteenth century. Pugh’s entries seem to indicate that where early compilations of printed material happened to be wholly or primarily focused on a single author, they would more often be left in their contemporary bindings or bundled arrangements. AB.3.23, for example, is a composite volume of five sixteenth-century medical and proto-scientific

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books, four of which were written by the same author, William Turner.66 It is one of the few whose internal text arrangements were left intact. AB.5.29 is a compilation of medical and proto-scientific books comprising three works whose appearance in print was attributed to Richard Banckes (though they were produced from medieval manuscripts of unknown authorship); and this book was left in its original binding, retaining its original parchment tabs, marginal annotations, and other signs of sixteenth-century use and circulation.67 Most of the composite volumes in the AB catalog were not as fortunate from the standpoint of the history of reading. The evidence from Pugh’s entries and subsequent annotations consistently suggest that the only books unlikely to be subjected to reform in a modernizing institutional library were those perceived as authorial, nonvaluable, chronologically or thematically consistent, and purely one bibliographical type or another. With few exceptions, we now know such books as tract volumes.

Archival Selection, Reader Agency, and the Parker Register ‘‘If there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalog,’’ Walter Benjamin remarked while unpacking his book collection in the early twentieth century, a period of relative stability in the material organization of books in history.68 This dichotomy would not have described the state of things a century earlier with the AB-class catalog at Cambridge, a fact that no doubt contributed to the dismissal of William Pugh. In cataloging the AB-class books, Pugh not only recorded but became preoccupied with the confusion of a prominent library of premodern books. Comparing Pugh’s original entries with their later annotations and the AB-class volumes in their present, modernized states, we reacquaint ourselves with this confusion and excess most often only in its absence—in what is no longer there in the individually bound books that we consult in the University Library’s reading rooms. One of Pugh’s entries records an incunabular volume of works by Ovid with the note ‘‘Some things at beg. & end,’’ which have apparently been discarded.69 Another entry lists ‘‘something added’’ to the popular medieval poem The Chastysing of goddes Chyldern; that ‘‘something’’ is also now lost.70 His record for AB.5.65—a compilation consisting of a grammar, a dietary, and an invective against swearing, all from the mid- to late sixteenth century—has had a section torn out that corresponds to what the old class catalog at the University Library refers to as ‘‘other imperfect

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tracts’’ formerly in the volume.71 The ordering and tidying up of collections are crucial measures in the development of accessible, protected libraries of historical materials. Without them, readers would be disoriented. But order does not just preserve; it selects. Documents such as the AB catalog72 encourage us to consider how our understanding of literary and textual history has been shaped by the archival practices of collecting, codifying, and making books available on shelves and in reading rooms—practices commonly assumed to be objective. Scholarship in Renaissance literature in particular has for two decades now sought to nuance accounts of meaning-making by expanding the range of literary agents under our consideration.73 But while compositors, printers, and editors have been shown to shape rather than merely facilitate our readings and interpretations, the collectors and archivists whose activities set the terms for our interactions with texts have gone largely unstudied in Renaissance English literary criticism. To what extent, we might ask, has the privileging of certain kinds of text and the relegation of others to tract books (or worse, garbage bins) informed our notions of canon formation or the preferences and habits of readers from earlier periods? Have our default bibliographic distinctions—between incunabula and printed books, or printed texts and manuscripts—trained us to see disruption in the past where there was continuity? The force of this line of inquiry is not to condemn the biases of modern collecting or to roll back the work of the collector in the hope of finding something originary. Rather, like Benjamin, it is to take up forms of collecting as expressions of historically specific desires and material or economic imperatives—behaviors that can teach us about the cultures from which they emerge. It is to bear in mind that literary-historical objects and documents do not come down to us ready at hand but through processes of selection that are far from value free. Large institutional collections, such as the Cambridge University Library, perform an indispensable service of cultural and historical preservation. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this mission went hand in hand with sweeping conservation initiatives that have transformed what we must imagine is the bulk of extant canonical or otherwise valuable literary-historical artifacts.74 Until recently, as curatorial policies on rebinding have shifted and as collectors have begun to value rather than avoid or erase earlier signs of use, it has been difficult to recover information about historical forms of compiling and the organization of knowledge. Beyond the fact that a given text was once in the company of others, it is often impossible

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to know more. That configuration could have issued from an early retailer; it could have been formed at the request of an early reader or brought together by an antiquarian collector who purchased the first reader’s library at auction later on. The text likely passed through the hands of many owners before finding its home in an institutional library. There are no clear agents here, only a wider sphere of potential agents relative to the more circumscribed roles of modern book culture. And as we have seen, the custodians of large modern libraries, where texts of note and value would most frequently land, were more liable to discard traces of former ownership than to record them, making earlier books contemporary with our books. Work has been done on individual collections that are richer in contextual information, such as those of the great Renaissance antiquarians,75 but because those libraries have been dispersed or handed over to institutions over the centuries, they have been subject to the same changes as Cambridge’s AB class—only without the benefit of a similar paper trail that might allow us to track the morphologies of their texts. The Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker took pains to ensure that his vast Renaissance library would remain untouched at Corpus Christi College, just down the road from the University Library in Cambridge. His example offers us a rare compiling (and indeed reading) agent from early English book culture, a counterbalance to the uncertainty raised by the AB catalog and documents like it. Parker was a foremost book collector in his time, and his collecting habits were inextricably linked to his writing, as he produced a body of printed work, primarily ecclesiastical in nature, based on close study in his library. This connection between Parker’s reading and writing has been particularly illuminating for historians of the book. As Timothy Graham and R. I. Page have shown, Parker and his assistants left ‘‘such ample traces of their work that the modern scholar can reconstruct with precision both the method by which they proceeded and the purposes that guided them.’’76 Parker owned or cared for over 500 manuscripts and 850 printed books, and was a meticulous organizer of these materials: he arranged his books into sections, created thorough contents lists for many of his composite volumes, and more often than not paginated them continuously with his trademark red crayon, leaving a record of their structure and any changes made to them later under his supervision. A typical Parkerian contents list shows how frequently his books changed shape: in shelf mark MS 100, for example, the archbishop recorded, ‘‘hic liber continet pag 363

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404 342,’’ having revised the total number of pages twice. In another representative contents list, MS 114a, he left blank spaces between each entry so that the table could accommodate later changes. Parker was an avid and lifelong reader, as his profession required. But in 1568, the Privy Council issued a request that he personally take into his care all ‘‘ancient records and monuments’’77 that had been dispersed with the dissolution of the monasteries—that is, all the extant fragments of medieval and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in England at the time. With this mandate, Parker became what Page has called ‘‘a one-man Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts’’ in Elizabethan England.78 His library grew to form the most important store of English rare books in the period, rich in manuscripts and specimens of early print from the eighth century to the Renaissance. Before his death, sensing the sustained challenge of preserving such delicate materials, Parker devised an elaborate system of custodianship. His books would be given to Corpus Christi College and a thorough inventory would be taken at the time of the bequest. The document, now called the Parker Register, would be copied according to the archbishop’s wishes and distributed to two other Cambridge colleges—Trinity Hall and Gonville and Caius—whose librarians were then required to check the books in the Parker Library annually. Should anything be found missing or out of place, heavy penalties were to be levied, multiple infractions leading to the forfeiture of the collection to the libraries of the other colleges. Parker’s wishes were carried out, and his Renaissance Library remains intact at Corpus Christi.79 Ironically, however, the archbishop has aroused as much ire among scholars for mistreating books as he has praise for preserving them. His unparalleled collection of Anglo-Saxon and late medieval manuscripts has been the primary focus of attention in this respect. Historians of the book continue to be dismayed at how readily Parker would take apart, rearrange, and fuse together into diverse configurations texts that are now considered priceless treasures. ‘‘Viewing the manuscripts as his private possessions,’’ Graham has explained, the archbishop ‘‘allowed himself significant liberties in the ways he handled them. Almost every manuscript that passed into his hands has undergone some transformation as a result of his ownership.’’80 Parker frequently removed leaves, erased text, or inserted the parts of one manuscript into another, sometimes gluing or stitching them in custom arrangements that do not yield easily to modern conservation efforts or cataloging.81 For scholars, Graham notes, ‘‘it is sometimes difficult to see the

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reasons for such actions.’’82 One famous example is Parker’s apparent removal of eleven leaves from an Anglo-Saxon homily manuscript, which he inserted into a different composite manuscript of thematically unrelated material.83 The Anglo-Saxon extract contained Ælfric’s translation of the Interrogationes Sigeuulfi presbyteri flanked by fragments of the Exameron anglice and a homily by Ælfric. Moreover, perhaps more glaringly, because he was primarily interested in the Interrogationes, Parker had the latter two texts covered over with contemporary scraps of vellum that he had taken from a manuscript legal document.84 Page, during his tenure as Parker librarian, recorded similar instances of the archbishop removing leaves from one book in order to adorn another. Parker’s MS 419 and 452 comprise an eleventh-century homily book and a twelfth-century text of Eadmer, respectively, both of which were given illuminated cover pages removed from thirteenth-century psalters which, Page observes, ‘‘have no connection to the text.’’85 MS 163 is an eleventhcentury service book with a sixteenth-century cover page that Parker had taken from a printed French missal.86 The archbishop also had a bindery on site, which allowed him to reorganize the texts within such volumes as they came into his hands. Graham notes that here ‘‘in the process of rebinding, Parker not infrequently interfered with the structure of the manuscripts, making repairs and restorations, supplying missing text, combining together two or more originally separate manuscripts, or effecting other transformations.’’87 The most notorious instance of Parker’s textual manipulation is MS 197, a fragment of an eighth-century gospel. When the manuscript came into his possession, Parker reversed the canonical order of the gospels—placing John before Luke—because, it is said, he found the cover illumination of the former more visually appealing.88 He then seemingly inexplicably bound the rare early medieval manuscript into a collection of late medieval historical treatises from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century with which the early gospel texts had nothing in common. Personal preference or need in this case trumped the prescribed textual organization. Graham concludes from his numerous bibliographical investigations that ‘‘Parker’s treatment of his manuscripts provides a remarkable insight into the extent to which early modern collectors were prepared to restore and reshape their books.’’89 Such habits were not anomalous among Renaissance antiquaries, he explains; Parker’s manuscripts, because they are preserved intact, only provide the most visible evidence of something widespread. But Parker’s printed books—which are also preserved intact and which, as another Parker

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librarian, Bruce Dickins, once noted, would ‘‘themselves have brought fame to a library’’90 in the period—are not factored in to generalizable assessments of book collecting in the scholarship on Parker’s library. The reason, we might suspect, is the inclination of modern textual culture to comprehend manuscripts as malleable things and printed books as fixed or naturally selfbounded. Page channels this bias in his critique of Parker’s conservation habits: ‘‘We who have been brought up in a printed book culture find it natural to regard a book as a complete and discrete object, a finished work. It requires something of a shift of thinking to see it as a collection of quires that could be added to or subtracted from.’’91 Yet the printed books in the Parker Library, which have never been submitted to sustained study and have only recently been recataloged,92 were very much subject to the archbishop’s brand of conservation. As some of my examples of hybrid miscellanies have already suggested, Parker seems not to have drawn as rigorous a distinction between manuscript and print; he mixed together leaves drawn from both kinds of text and handled them more or less continuously in a way that Page, operating within the constraints of modern librarianship, perhaps could not.93 In a recent examination of the sixteenthcentury Parkerian holdings that remain at the collections at the Cambridge University Library, Elisabeth Leedham-Green and David McKitterick found that Parker combined and recombined his printed books in much the same way he did with his Anglo-Saxon and late medieval manuscripts. The surviving printed books with Parkerian provenances in the University Library, they explain, are strikingly untidy and unfixed, reflecting the archbishop’s ‘‘continuing wish to re-order . . . , binding up different authors so that, for example, commentators on books of the Bible should be bound by their subject matter.’’94 Such intertextual combinations, they note, were helpful for certain readers, ‘‘just as (no doubt) there were advantages in reducing the cost of binding; but the resulting fragments of books tucked into volumes with otherwise complete books have disconcerted those who have used the books in the University Library ever since.’’95 Because of their provenance—their connection to a figure of historical importance at Cambridge—the texts were not disbound during modern conservation campaigns. The vast collection of early printed books at the Parker Library offers many similar witnesses of Parkerian combination and compilation. Even a superficial glance at the entries in the Parker Register (which, as with any inventory from the period, will inevitably underrepresent the number of multi-item volumes actually in the collection) reveals that over a third of

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Parker’s printed books were listed as composite in the original document in the mid-1570s. These volumes, unlike the Parker Library’s cherished AngloSaxon and late medieval manuscripts, were not submitted to conservation in modernity and are therefore preserved with few exceptions in their original bindings. The organization of the collection has also been preserved. Parker’s large-format volumes, according to the register, were organized into a Maiore Bibliotheca with smaller or more common volumes kept in a Minore Bibliotheca, both of which contain a high proportion of compiled books. All texts listed under ‘‘Poetica’’ in Parker’s Maiore Bibliotheca, for example, are composite volumes.96 Here, some ‘‘collected works’’ volumes, comprising the poetry and plays of major literary figures from Greek and Roman antiquity, can be found attached to works by other authors, even works by nonliterary authors. Parker’s 1573 Opera of Seneca, for example, is bound with a 1544 Opera of Calcagnini.97 Similarly, his 1513 Opera of Poggio is bound with a partial 1531 commentary on Pliny.98 Parker also seems to have assembled or purchased ad hoc collected-works volumes, which resemble those few compilations organized by author that were left in their early states in the Cambridge University Library’s AB class. Shelf mark EP.S.2, paginated continuously with Parker’s red crayon, brings together four divergent early printed volumes: Sebastian Brant’s Shyp of folys of the worlde (1509), Mancinus’s conduct verse The myrrour of good maners (1518?), Sallust’s famous cronycle of the warre, which the romayns had agaynst lugurth (1525?), and The introductory to wryte, and to pronounce frenche (1521).99 The books share a common bibliographical detail in Alexander Barclay, who translated the first three and compiled the French language textbook. Parker also kept his books in order in ways unanticipated in the example of the AB catalog. Page, while serving at Corpus Christi, once joked, ‘‘I am sometimes asked how many printed books Parker left to the College, and I usually give an evasive answer: ‘That depends on what you mean by a book.’ ’’100 The library indeed preserves a range of unexpected amalgams and fragmentary volumes, especially among Parker’s smaller-format works in print. The majority of the archbishop’s early printed texts are listed in a section of the register tellingly called ‘‘Bookes in parchement closures as the[y] lye on heapes’’—books in limp vellum, that is, reflecting tentative configurations of text that could be more easily taken down and reshaped than could leather-bound books (Fig. 6). Many of the items in these ‘‘closures’’ show evidence of having been paginated differently—sometimes doubly or triply—in red crayon, indicating they were arranged in different ways

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Figure 6. An example of a book ‘‘in parchement closures’’ in the Parker Library. This volume includes seven printed texts, mostly political, and on the left is a handwritten cure for toothache. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

at different times, sometimes thematically, sometimes chronologically or by author, compiler, or translator.101 Parker seems to have shifted his texts around in units as small as individual leaves. SP 17, for example, is a collection of sermon fragments with folio sheets from other texts bound into the front and back covers as foldouts.102 Several of his miscellanies—MS 106, 113, and 121—incorporate single-page printed extracts, including ballads, religious and political proclamations, and tables taken from larger works.103 Because Matthew Parker produced so much printed material himself, and because his book-collecting practices have been thoroughly documented in his time and ours, we have evidence that helps us contextualize these malleable volumes.104 In many cases, the assemblages in the Parker Library can be shown to have been put together and used according to some goal

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related to Parker’s intellectual work. It is well known, for example, that the archbishop’s collection increased and diversified in the interest of English nation building.105 His political and religious agenda as an officer of the church are also manifest in the texts he acquired from the dissolved monasteries. But more local, particular motivations can be found in the flexibly bound anthologies like the one pictured in Figure 6. Several of his composite bindings form case studies of important historical figures or current events, for example, providing us with material records of Parker’s own reading. Shelf mark SP 348 brings together three books on the visitations of Edward VI— who was so pivotal in Parker’s political advancement—including injunctions, sermons, and homilies related to the events.106 SP 193 contains three books on Mary Magdalene that were printed in Paris, perhaps bundled together, in 1519, forming a topical religious collection.107 SP 445 contains seven early printed texts that all relate to England’s foreign relations during the clerical reform efforts of the middle part of the sixteenth century.108 Other of Parker’s multitext volumes can be linked to the projects he was working on at the time of compilation, projects that eventually materialized in printed works. One of the archbishop’s primary preoccupations in the service of Elizabethan nation building was language, particularly the languages of early Christianity in England. SP 281, a volume containing two printed texts and a manuscript, seems to have been compiled as a kind of reference in Parker’s linguistic and antiquarian research: listed as ‘‘Homilie Saxone’’ in the register, the volume brings together Ælfric’s Testimone of antiquitie (1566?), Gildas’s history De excitio & conquestu Britanniae (1568),109 and an Armenian alphabet and lexicon that one of the archbishop’s assistants had produced by hand. Another of Parker’s lifelong theological preoccupations was clerical marriage, an interest that followed naturally from his own, to Margaret Harelston in 1547, two years before marriages among the clergy were made legal. Parker’s official contribution to the debate was a treatise printed as a continuation of John Ponet’s unfinished manuscript on the subject.110 But many of the composite volumes in his library survive to reveal ways in which the archbishop as a textual consumer kept reference anthologies on clerical marriage to aid in his authorial project. In vellum bindings, the archbishop placed selected theological, historical, and practical texts into conversation with each other. A vivid example is SP 447: a collection of fourteen books, including religious orations, political treatises, epistles on marriage, and two manuals of domestic conduct and cooking, A Treatise for

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Householders (1574) and Of Cokery and Seruing of Meates (1558).111 To a modern collector, this combination of texts would perhaps have seemed in need of disbinding and reclassification. Had it been part of the AB class at Bradshaw’s University Library, it would have been separated into individual units. But for Parker it was instrumental, and for us it is a record of his intellectual work.

Compilation and Composition: Lambeth Palace Library MS 959 Matthew Parker’s life’s work was his ecclesiastical history of Britain, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, printed in 1574 at his own press in London. Many of the printed books in the Parker Library on subjects related to this project survive in composite volumes as personal resource anthologies. By midcentury, Parker was already actively involved in the translation and publication of other writers’ ecclesiastical histories; his parallel roles of book collector and propagandist for the church and nation led him to patronize the works of protestant martyrologist John Foxe and antiquarian John Stowe, for example, and to sponsor the newly published works of Matthew Paris.112 In building his library, Parker would often buy or anthologize printed histories in topical arrangements that might serve him in his historiographical research. SP 11 is emblematic of this practice, comprising two prominent ecclesiastical histories, one by the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth and another by the sixteenth-century historian John Mair (or Major), linked together in Parker’s library likely because they shared theological concerns.113 For Parker the writer, these multitext arrangements were tools for compiling and producing text, a process that can be traced with unusual clarity in De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae. The version of Parker’s masterwork that was printed in 1574 was itself a compilation of historical material drawn from many sources, and the text as a printed artifact was malleable in much the same way as the volumes ‘‘in parchement closures’’ in his library. Written collaboratively with his secretaries John Jocelyn and George Acworth, De antiquitate is composed of five printed books produced at different times: a historical introduction, the life of Augustine, the lives of English archbishops to Cardinal Pole, Parker’s own life, and a set of miscellaneous documents relating to Cambridge. The folio-sized booklets had to be assembled by the

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reader to tell a continuous history of the English church. This built-in malleability prompted the Short Title Catalogue, in its modern bibliographical entry for De antiquitate, to suggest that Parker continually ‘‘added to and rearranged the contents’’ of his book, as all copies now extant vary widely. But Parker seems to have designed his text with this feature firmly in mind. As revealed by his correspondence and the presentation copies that survive in modern archives such as the British Library, the archbishop wanted his ecclesiastical history to be able to accommodate itself to individual recipients and occasions. Parker even included a sheet of woodcuts that could be painted, cut out, and pasted in over the blank initials originally printed to begin each section of the text.114 Sensing perhaps that some of his more iconoclastic post-Reformation readers would take offense at being charged with the task of illuminating their own books, Parker explained in a letter to Lord Burleigh that this aspect of the volume can be customized: for the reader, he writes, ‘‘may relinquish the leaf and cast it into the fire, as I have joined it but loose in the book for that purpose.’’115 In De antiquitate, then, we have a printed work from the early modern period that reflects at the level of physical structure the practices of compilation, reading, and collecting that we observe in its producer. Matthew Parker’s unusually well-documented tendency to combine and recombine text explicitly informs the book he eventually wrote. The project of an ecclesiastical history is, of course, inherently compilatory. But this particular book, which draws a clear line of descent from Augustine through all the English bishops down to the date of its printing, was the culmination of Matthew Parker’s lifelong interest in collecting and arranging primary materials from the Anglo-Saxon and late medieval periods. De antiquitate would register the archbishop’s politically urgent interest in transforming those primary materials into printed texts—translations, language references, commentaries, and allied works of theology and ecclesiastical history—that would offer proof that the native Christianity in England was the most authentic form. Indeed, Parker’s personal copy of De antiquitate, preserved in the archives at Lambeth Palace Library in London, shows us the remarkable extent to which notions of the malleable, recombinant text were central to this intellectual project. Of this copy of the book Parker once wrote in a letter to Lord Burleigh: ‘‘To keep it by me I yet purpose while I live, to aid and to amend as occasion shall serve me, or utterly to suppress it and to bren it.’’116 Lambeth shelf mark MS 959 is consequently much more process than

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Figure 7. Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, title page. Matthew Parker’s personal copy of De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, showing manuscript notes in the hands of Parker and his collaborators. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library.

product—a text that seems very clearly to resist the kind of stasis commonly attributed to printed texts in modernity. Nearly every page of MS 959 is annotated by hand (Fig. 7), the annotations sometimes adding material to the entries as they were originally printed and other times correcting those entries in light of new information obtained. Blank manuscript pages were interleaved at some point for additional space, reflecting the openness to the expansion or enlargement of existing texts that I observed in Parker’s manuscript miscellanies. Segments of the volume seem also to have served as a kind of filing system for scraps of relevant documents—print and manuscript— that are tipped in at appropriate moments. Despite the book’s monumental

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Figure 8. Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, fol. 176r, showing a thirteenth-century document once sewn to the page. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library.

size and import—it had been printed and distributed to the likes of Arundel, Lord Burleigh, and Queen Elizabeth—Parker treated this volume as a working text, to be ‘‘aided and amended’’ when a new piece of evidence came into his hands. The most striking of the amendments made to LPL 959 are a series of Anglo-Saxon and later medieval manuscripts that were literally stitched to the volume. Parker and his collaborators seem to have used needle and thread as well as their pens to preserve historical material and revise the printed text. Figure 8 displays a representative example: a thirteenth-century manuscript deed formerly sewn to the top of a printed page in De antiquitate.117 The

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position of the stitched-in document here is strategic. The page comes midway through the life of Boniface of Savoy, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1244 to 1268, and the sewn-in manuscript records a deed of gift to Boniface from King Henry III. Much in the same way that medieval readers in religious communities stitched woodcuts, pilgrim’s badges, and other gathered materials into their service books,118 Parker seems to have had his volume ornamented with auratic primary documents, transforming a printed text into a curatorial space or guardbook for the material digested in the history itself. The content of the supplemental document, moreover, seems to be incorporated into the text in this case. The right-hand margin of folio 176r, pictured here, has been used to record in Latin the expenditures of the inthronizatione (enthronement) that was the occasion of the deed of gift. The marginal annotations in ink expand the account of Archbishop Boniface’s enthronement originally printed in De antiquitate with details taken from the sewn-in deed, down to the serving trays (discos) and the fifty pounds of wax used for lights (50 lib. Cere ad luminaria[m]) at the event.119 This page and several others in MS 959, which once contained stitchedin supplements,120 demonstrate a process of revision and transmission through which Parker’s collecting and compiling habits became methods of composing text. The archbishop’s longtime commitment to gathering, organizing, translating, and making accessible the surviving documents of early Christian England comes to structure in this instance the never-completed, always-expanding printed work, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesilae, which continued to be revised, amended, and altered in this way even after Parker’s death in 1575, when John Jocelyn and John Parker, the archbishop’s son, took it into their charge.121 Like many of the AB-class books at Cambridge, however, Lambeth Palace Library MS 959 was reorganized later when the original medieval documents became important primary sources in need of special preservation in modernity. Today at Lambeth Palace Library, the volume is separated into two smaller, more manageable sections and rebound in calf; the sewn-in primary texts have been taken out and are mounted in plastic on the facing pages, as shown in Figure 8. The custodial interventions were necessary to preserve the integrity of the aging paper and the manuscript evidence on vellum. But evidence of another kind—traces of Parker’s compiling and composing activities—are obscured in the preservation measures. We have to use our imagination to reconstruct the text as the archbishop and his collaborators assembled it.

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This chapter has argued through two case studies at Cambridge libraries that curatorial decisions normally taken to be objective or incidental to reading and interpretation can have major interpretative implications. In the superseded AB-class catalog at the University Library, we found that reclassification and conservation initiatives in the nineteenth century had transformed the institution’s early printed literary and intellectual materials, many of them in Sammelband, into single-text, modern-looking books. The changes introduced order and accessibility but also modern bibliographical categories into the largely premodern collection, overwriting the earlier norms of order and access that had organized the materials for two centuries or more. In the Parker Register at Corpus Christi College, we saw the full extent to which these earlier norms governed reading and book use in the era of the handpress. Archbishop Parker’s own publishing projects, drawn from his engagement with the malleable books in flexible bindings in his collection, foreshadow the argument of the second half of this study: that habits of mind grounded in this compiling and Sammelband culture gave form to Renaissance writing as well. The case studies in this chapter also introduce a tension that runs throughout this book between particular and generalizable evidence. Both documents of early library formation at Cambridge were the products of individuals who might be seen as historical outliers: the eccentric cataloger William Pugh and the sometimes imprudent reader, Matthew Parker, whose directive in book collecting came from the queen. Both documents too, I have been careful to note, were unlikely survivals: Pugh’s AB catalog, rendered obsolete long ago, was kept in library records to accumulate data where most outdated classification tools (we can think of card catalogs) simply fall into disuse; and the Parker Register, with its elaborate system of checks and balances across three institutional libraries, preserved each item in a Renaissance collection down to their material, bound arrangements where comparable historical artifacts experience inevitable change or decay. How can such cases, which seem so extraordinary, represent the ordinary habits and routines of early English book culture more generally? In one sense, this question underscores the very centrality of curatorial activities to literary-historical interpretation that constitutes the argument of this chapter. For in the extant archive of early printed materials, the fullest traces we have of early reading and writing practices are often the remarkable survivals that escaped conservation and reclassification in the eighteenth,

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nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. So much primary evidence was lost as modern book owners systematically remade the archive in their own modern image. Perceptions of what was normal and what was anomalous in earlier cultures of the text—perceptions of literary history itself, embodied in library shelves—are shaped to a great degree by the largely silent work of the book collector. On the other hand, as I will argue, Pugh and Parker were not outliers in early book culture; the relatively flexible, open-ended, recombinant texts that they engaged and maintained were the raw materials of the intellectual products of the handpress era. It will be the burden of the chapters that follow to develop the particular into the general—to trace early compiling and collecting practices in diverse readers, canonical writers, and ambitious amateurs from the Renaissance. The next chapter begins by pressing the issue of curatorial impact beyond the case study and into a field of collected artifacts from a range of institutions and individuals under the organizing category of a single author, Shakespeare.

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chapter 2

Making Shakespeare’s Books Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab

Among the most highly valued items in special collections at Oxford’s Bodleian Library is a volume of Shakespeare’s poetry containing quartos of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets gathered together by an eighteenth-century owner named Thomas Caldecott.1 So highly valued is the book that it cannot be consulted according to the usual procedures. One must first appeal for special permission at Duke Humfrey’s Library, then trudge across Broad Street to the New Library to read it under close supervision in the Modern Papers Room—and for good reason. The volume brings together rare early editions of its three constituent works: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece from a 1594 printing and the Sonnets from 1609. The texts themselves are, in the language of cataloging, ‘‘perfect,’’ with no major defects or latter-day adulterations;2 their pages have been cropped, washed, and rebound in stately tooled leather with crisp marbled endpapers. Only a few scant traces of the books’ four centuries of use and circulation remain, most of which are annotations written in by modern archivists and connoisseurs. The earliest record of provenance is one that Caldecott himself left in the flyleaves: ‘‘I purchased the contents of this volume June 1796 of an obscure bookseller of the name of Vanderberg near St. Margaret’s Church Westminster. He had cut them with Several others out of a Volume, put each of them separately into blue paper, and priced them at 4s 5d.’’ Rare books most often appear to us today as material artifacts without material histories.3 Aside from the occasional binder’s or conservator’s note, there are few reasons to suspect that the generally uniform, modern-looking

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texts we consult in special-collections libraries have ever existed in other configurations—that ways of using and assigning value to them have ever been different from our own. But Caldecott’s Shakespeare shows evidence of at least three modes of readerly engagement, not a single overarching one. First, working backward, there is that of its current owner, Oxford University, which values the book’s early imprints and relatively unspoiled condition and which protects it using a special classification number and a curatorial policy granting readers only the most limited access in highly controlled environments. Second, there is that of Vanderberg and Caldecott, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century owners respectively, who valued the texts as collectors’ items and who had no reservation about physically restructuring them to maximize profit (in the case of the former) or prestige (in the case of the latter). Third, and more distantly, there is whatever early modern compilation these items might have inhabited before they were cut into individual units and anthologized in a morocco-bound volume in 1796. At each of these historical junctures, questions arise about the influence of archival practices over our perceptions of literary artifacts. How does the administration of texts for careful scholarly use in today’s libraries conceal the work of earlier readers and collectors, who were sometimes more likely to reshape books according to their own desires than to venerate them as reservoirs of literary content, frozen in time? More gravely perhaps, how did the work of earlier collectors—in wresting texts from their contexts, in building volumes of one author’s collected verse—conceal even earlier forms of textual organization that may have seemed to them unprofitable, distasteful, or not worth saving? Chapter 1 raised these questions through case studies of compiling and disbinding activities at two key early libraries. This chapter moves outward to consider textual (re)assembly across multiple institutions and early collectors, focusing on a single figure: Shakespeare. Using a range of archival specimens that, like Caldecott’s volume, preserve evidence of their being engineered and organized by successive owners, but which have long been of interest only to bibliographers, I argue that the parameters of reading and interpretation are frequently established and sometimes imposed by the collectors, compilers, conservators, and curators who in a very literal sense make books. For each new set of attitudes concerning the order of texts in books and libraries, an earlier set of attitudes is partially concealed, preventing certain reader-text interactions and enabling a host of others. As the specimens I examined in my first chapter have begun to suggest, the problem is acute in the case of early printed texts, which were assembled, organized, and read in ways that

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are foreign to us today. Before they were extracted into individual units and clothed in decorated covers, many such texts—particularly small-format literary works—existed in composite volumes, user- and retailer-initiated anthologies, topical arrangements of disparate authors or genres, evoking complex histories of early book production and reception. But such texts are only ever available to us now through the mediations of readers and owners who suppress those histories—who (perhaps inevitably) remake what they acquire according to their own historically situated notion of the book. This chapter affirms that these processes of making and remaking books play a critical role in generating meaning, establishing links between works in the same binding, which may be read or ignored, or dissolving such links so that works can stand alone. Moving from the familiar, individuated Shakespearean texts most often found in libraries today to the radically unfamiliar assemblages of early print culture, I propose that we can ground historical interpretations— and discover new ones—in the largely reader-driven, recombinant productions of Renaissance writers’ first audiences.

Making Shakespeare in Modernity Shakespeare has long been a primary point of reference in modern bibliographical scholarship in English. As the scientific New Bibliography gave way to a more reflexive textual criticism in the late twentieth century, attention shifted decisively from the ideals of eclectic editing to the varied representational machinery through which texts and canons are transmitted in time.4 Following D. F. McKenzie’s influential dictum, ‘‘forms effect meaning,’’ critics interested in the materiality of texts have worked for two decades or more to show that print apparatuses—from early paratexts to modern classroom editions—are implicated in literary strategies and historical patterns of reception.5 But as I have been arguing, while the compositors, vendors, and editors of Shakespearean texts have been revealed as important agents in meaningmaking, those most directly responsible for the configuration and classification of texts by Shakespeare are not often discussed. We saw in the last chapter that binding, curatorship, and conservation—like other aspects of textual presentation—produce rather than simply make available literary works to be read. As with editing (or perhaps more fundamentally than with editing), collecting practices circumscribe interpretive possibilities within a

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recognizable, physical text. And also as with editing, these practices are inexorably subjective: the resulting text does not transparently re-present a literary work that exists, fully formed, in advance; it impresses into the historical substructure of that work the values, assumptions, and biases of those who make it, at each stage of its construction. McKenzie’s analysis of the early modern printing house dispensed with ‘‘the erroneous assumption that a book was normally put into production as an independent unit.’’6 Works were printed in parts, frequently across multiple presses, and put together in nonuniform ways that vex attempts to describe a standardized practice. On the consumption end of early book culture, however, the primacy of the independent unit of reading and interpretation is more often than not upheld. Modern collectors standardized early printed texts of great value as a matter of conservation, and in each multibook volume like Caldecott’s Shakespeare, broken up and rebound in individual units in modernity, taxonomies of text, work, and author from the modern period were made to organize the reception of premodern literature. In the earliest domain of printed literary materials in English, the works of the later Middle Ages, scholars have made much of the ‘‘clusters of literary writing’’ discovered in Sammelba¨nde, the ‘‘fluid canonicity’’ reminiscent of the manuscript miscellany that seems to have been generated in everyday acts of anthologization by readers and printers.7 Yet by the time we reach the age of Shakespeare in archives, we find books and collections that are seemingly indistinguishable from modern ones—that is, neat rows of independent, leather-bound plays and books of poetry. In nearly every case, as we will see, the bindings, labels, and catalog identifiers are products of the last two centuries. The works of the English Renaissance, in fact, offer a particularly promising field of primary materials within which to pose the question of how early books were made (or unmade) in this way. As common sense suggests, the likelihood that a text has undergone modernizing structural renovations such as those sketched out in the last chapter is directly proportionate to how valuable it was in the eyes of modern owners and collectors. Texts now considered literary, therefore, often reach us as the most heavily processed of all early printed materials, a fact obvious to researchers of the period’s lowerprestige, nonliterary books, which are far more frequently found in original bindings and seemingly unkempt Sammelba¨nde. Within that literary subset, the dramatic works by Shakespeare—which Thomas Bodley famously ranked among the ‘‘riffe-raffes’’ and ‘‘baggage books’’ to be excluded from his

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library8 —were eventually of the utmost value and thus subject to all forms of bibliographical intervention that may have come into fashion. As a result, the surviving archive of Shakespearean texts has a particularly varied morphology, though it is one that has been oversimplified, or suppressed, by modern collecting practices. A representative example is the sole copy of the ‘‘sixth quarto’’ of Pericles (1635) now held at the British Library.9 Like many extant Shakespearean plays, the text is trimly bound in luxury leather as it might have adorned a gentleman’s shelf in the nineteenth century, though this was not the case.10 The book was one of many bequeathed to the library by David Garrick, the actor and playwright, at his death in 1779. It owes its neat, modern appearance to the British Museum bindery, where the book was given new covers (tooled in gold with Garrick’s coat of arms) in the century after its donation. Though the library’s integrated catalog lists the text as an individual item— with no notes in the entry suggesting anything to the contrary—earlier catalogs from Garrick’s collection give us a different picture.11 Before it was rebound in the nineteenth century, Pericles was one part of a larger compilation, and this volume, left mostly intact, retains an eighteenth-century table of contents originally written in the flyleaves that confirms the arrangement of texts in Garrick’s time (Fig. 9).12 To say the least, these texts are strange bedfellows: a morality play, Conflict of Conscience (1581); an interlude called New Custome (1573); the sometime Shakespearean history play Edward the Third (1599); John Marston’s tragedy Antonio’s Revenge (1602); Pericles; the early tragedy Gorboduc (1590); and the comedy Albumazar (1634). The grouping is not arbitrary, though it may seem so to us. Garrick was an avid collector who assembled a wide-ranging library of dramatic texts, most of them in composite volumes, for his own use and others’.13 This volume, one of the few to survive the nineteenth-century rebinding campaigns at the British Museum,14 bears the traces of its shifting shapes and uses. The contents list indicates that Garrick at one point moved Albumazar to another volume (likely as he adapted it for the stage).15 Moreover, a second contents list (Fig. 10), written on the leaf preceding Gorboduc,16 indicates that this composite book has origins in an even earlier composite volume whose texts seem to have been reshaped and redistributed throughout Garrick’s collection as they were acquired. The earlier hand is that of the seventeenth-century collector and former owner Richard Smith,17 and the superseded arrangement of texts is even more peculiar: sixteenth-century interludes mixed with Stuart masques and Restoration comedies; works from authors as diverse as John

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Figure 9. An eighteenth-century contents list from British Library C.21.b.40, listing seven plays in a book. 䉷 British Library Board.

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Figure 10. An earlier arrangement of texts written on the verso of a back page of a different item in British Library C.21.b.40. 䉷 British Library Board.

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Bale, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and Matthew Medbourne.18 These composite books stand in stark contrast to the slim, modern-looking Pericles, whose status relative to the other texts is now encoded in its fine binding. That it once formed part of an eighteenth-century assemblage of texts, which itself once formed part of a seventeenth-century assemblage of texts, is made all but imperceptible by an imposed nineteenth-century notion of its fixity, autonomy, and canonicity. For generations of collectors and owners whose legacy is still visible in archives, the relatively flexible composite volume was the most conventional, practical means of storing and using most kinds of literary texts. Sammelba¨nde, binding experts and rare-book curators tell us, were staples of early book culture.19 But as artifacts of literary history—artifacts conveying a range of possibilities for intertextual reading and canon formation that are perhaps not obvious to us today—these composite volumes have not been closely examined by critics. One reason for this neglect is a tendency to see intellectual activities independently of knowledge organization, considered merely practical—a tendency that is especially evident in a figure like Garrick, whose revivals and adaptations have long proven resonant in modern interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, but whose methods of reading and organizing the texts that presumably facilitated those revivals and adaptations have hardly been explored at all. The most fundamental reason for this neglect, however, is clear in the fate of Garrick’s copy of Pericles: despite the ubiquity of composite volumes in the handpress era, Shakespeare’s books are rarely found today in these configurations. In the modern era, the most prestigious literary works—the works that attract the most critical attention—were systematically extracted, decontextualized, and clothed anew in material configurations that reflect little history of ownership or use. Where a Shakespearean text can be found in an undisturbed composite volume, it is most often one of the apocryphal or otherwise noncanonical texts. At St. John’s College, Cambridge, for example, there is a mid-seventeenth-century volume combining eight books of controversial religious and political prose with a copy of The Birth of Merlin (1662), a play attributed to Shakespeare and Rowley (Fig. 11).20 St. John’s College, Oxford, preserves a similar example: a collection from the eighteenth century (with an original handwritten table of contents) bringing together a diverse array of plays, masques, and pageants, including the 1662 Birth of Merlin text and the second quarto of The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1612), a play also attributed on its title page to Shakespeare.21 In fact, a cursory survey of the extant copies of these two noncanonical plays at

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Figure 11. A copy of the apocryphal Birth of Merlin bound here facing a religious pamphlet. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

the British Library, Oxford, and Cambridge shows that over half occur in composite configurations. Plays with less dubious canonicity almost never occur in composites.22 The implication is something of a bibliographic corollary to the point made some time ago by Stephen Orgel: the ‘‘authentic Shakespeare’’ is often one that is furthest removed (in this case, literally) from its early contexts of reception and circulation.23 Thomas Caldecott’s collected volume is thus both symptomatic and anomalous in modern economies of book curatorship and archiving: symptomatic in that its highly valuable texts were extracted from a larger, earlier book and placed into individual units (by Vanderberg), anomalous in that the volume has survived this long in its present composite state (engineered by Caldecott). Given the taxonomic pressures evidently placed on such multitext volumes over time, the book’s longevity is most likely attributable to the fact that its constituent texts share the same author and genre—criteria

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Figure 12. University of Glasgow Library Sp. Coll. Hunterian Co.3.33, twelve early printed plays formerly in one volume. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

that, I demonstrated in Chapter 1, square easily with modern habits of textual organization, precluding at least in part the need for reconfiguration in a later library. Many like it, as the volumes in David Garrick’s collection attest, were more readily separated. An instructive example can be found in one of Garrick’s contemporaries, William Hunter, whose collection is now housed at the Glasgow University Library.24 Hunter, an anatomist and celebrated book collector, acquired a number of early modern literary texts at auction in his time, and as his surviving manuscript catalog indicates, the majority of these were formerly in composite configurations.25 Figure 12 shows the typical appearance of a composite volume from the Hunterian collection today: once made up of many texts, it has been split into individual units, each unit uniformly rebound in twentieth-century calf. Of the volumes containing Hunter’s early editions of Shakespeare’s works, all were reshaped in this way except one.26 Among them was a collection of thirteen Elizabethan and

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Jacobean texts comprising masques, entertainments, two comedies by Ben Jonson, and a number of history plays, including quartos of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.27 Another volume formerly combined works by Philip Massinger, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and others with the sixth quarto of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1634).28 Still another, which seems to have served as a makeshift ‘‘collected works,’’ contained ten plays by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, including a copy of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare.29 All of these are now disbound, resembling the modernized texts pictured in Figure 12. Yet Hunter’s later, less valuable Shakespearean texts seem not to have necessitated the same conservation measures. One late copy of Hamlet (1676) was left in a socalled tract volume containing over twenty texts, both printed books and manuscripts, on subjects as diverse as the pay of British land forces, Horace, and reform efforts at Oxford.30 In this case, it was not the Shakespearean text but the manuscripts that were extracted in the twentieth century and given a new classification.31

Making Shakespeare in Early Modernity Behind the modern-looking, individually bound book lies a significantly wider range of material contexts within which Shakespeare’s works might have been encountered. It is a point made clear in the example of the AB catalog at Cambridge, but here we find a measure of consistency across libraries in ways of treating books in the early period and in modernity. The difference is in the broadest sense curatorial but with profound ramifications for readers. Where once it was acceptable and in most cases financially necessary to bind rare books into larger volumes to ensure their preservation, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the same books disbound and reshaped into individual units for precisely the same reason, only under different assumptions about the relative value of aspects of the book to be preserved.32 These library and collecting routines go beyond simple preservation: they reify notions of a text’s canonicity; they selectively impose the value systems and bibliographical expectations of the culture in which the collector is situated. An autonomous Shakespearean text today is a desired Shakespearean text, free from the clamor of intertextuality and resubmitted to later readers shorn of its history, ‘‘for all time.’’ Such texts reflect and reinforce

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notions of stylistic unity, authenticity, and other modern desires that now seem intrinsic to these works. The anthologies and multitext volumes of earlier owners reflect a different set of desires—desires less familiar to us because of biases inherent in modern ways of making (and making available) Shakespeare’s books. Moving back beyond the work of modern collectors, for whom early printed texts were necessarily secondhand acquisitions, to that of Shakespeare’s first readers, for whom rarity, exchange value, and conservation were less obviously determining factors, we find similar principles of assembly reflecting bias in the structure of books—though the bias is of a different kind. Figure 13 reproduces a manuscript table of contents from a composite volume of early printed plays now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.33 The volume, which contains copies of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV (1632) and Richard III (1629), resembles the collections of play quartos explored above, except that it was bound up much earlier, shortly after the date of its latest imprint, 1635. The reader, who likely bought most or all of the texts firsthand, seems to have had interests in the lives of the major political figures of the past. Alongside the two history plays by Shakespeare are, among others, Thomas Heywood’s King Edward the Fourth (1626); The Troublesome Raine of King John (1622), attributed at the time to Shakespeare; Ben Jonson’s Cataline his conspiracy (1635); George Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey (1631); the anonymous Tragedy of Nero (1633); and Heywood’s two-part play, The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (1632).34 This arrangement may reflect the same desire to preserve that would motivate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collectors to construct similar composite volumes. But it also reflects the more immediate bias of readerly selection, the buyer having chosen the texts and commissioned the binding at the time of the initial sale, not in accordance with the dictates of a preexisting literary canon but out of his or her own intellectual preferences or needs. Where the value systems of modern collectors such as David Garrick, William Hunter, and the British Library are often hidden in seemingly neutral curatorial practices, those of firsthand readers such as this one are visible in the artifact itself. The collection, a kind of personal anthology, documents one reader’s interest and partiality, impressed into the comparatively malleable structure of a premodern codex. Of the surviving early assemblages of printed material containing one or more works by Shakespeare, many, like this historical ‘‘lives’’ volume, have a degree of thematic coherence that we can recognize and therefore interpret:

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Figure 13. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 4619, a contents list showing a seventeenthcentury collection of plays. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

they comprise a set of books, likely sold unbound or stitched, organized into an anthology or a collection based on their associated content. We can presume the involvement of a reader or collector in the absence of identical extant configurations (which would reflect a part-edition sold ready-bound by a retailer).35 But more practical, producer-initiated schemes of organization are also apparent in these early compilations. Texts of similar size or

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works printed by the same shop could be bundled together, creating volumes of consistent form but seemingly arbitrary content (a practice that, scholars have shown, has roots in incunabular culture).36 Texts that were conceived and sold in segments—multipart plays, for example, or works with ‘‘continuations’’—also seem to have encouraged the production of composite bound volumes. One volume now at the Folger combines copies of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV (1604) and 2 Henry IV (1600) into a single contemporary binding, with a provenance traceable to the seventeenth-century owner in whose collection they stood together as a unit.37 Other methods of organizing such texts were idiosyncratic and depended on the particular sites in which they were to be used. The archepiscopal library at Lambeth Palace, for example (which in the early modern period took no great interest in literary texts), bound small-format books like Shakespeare’s into compilations by publication year, each volume thus serving as a partial record of that year’s printed output or perhaps that year’s reading. This ‘‘yearbook’’ approach to text management seems to have affiliations with Archbishop Parker’s own collecting habits, as it produced, at Lambeth as in Parker’s library at Cambridge, an abundance of flexible, parchmentbound resource anthologies that are indifferent to modern distinctions between literary and nonliterary, canonical and ephemeral.38 When the archepiscopal librarians acquired a copy of 2 Henry IV, for example, they bound the play with other material printed in 1600. The Shakespearean text became the fifth of six booklets in a parchment binding, including a verse tribute to Queen Elizabeth called E. W. his Thameseidos, the political poem England’s Hope Against Irish Hate, a declaration of war by the king of France against the Duke of Savoy, and two collections of funerary elegies in Latin and English.39 Sure enough, when attitudes toward printed books began to shift in modernity, this volume was remade according to the systems of literary value that I have been outlining. But this time it was a thief, not a dealer or owner, who separated the Shakespearean book from the others, leaving a gap in the binding that is still visible today.40 Here we can take up Henry IV as a way to begin considering the interpretive implications of the patterns of assembly that I have sketched out in this and the previous chapter. In my discussion of Hunter’s collection at Glasgow, I identified a volume, now disbound, that once contained comedies, masques, and histories, including two Shakespearean texts, 1 and 2 Henry IV. Such an assemblage, it seems, would square with the current critical consensus that the plays blend history with comedy, evoking a world in which, as David

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Scott Kastan has shown, ‘‘exuberance and excess will not be incorporated into the stable hierarchies of the body politic.’’41 But another volume that I described above, the Folger ‘‘lives’’ compilation from the 1630s, presents a different readerly context, bringing 1 Henry IV together with Richard III, The Troublesome Raine of King John, Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey, Heywood’s Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, and other plays concerned with political figures and the (frequently vexed) maintenance of power. In this volume, we might speculate, the subversive energies of Falstaff and Eastcheap would be more easily eclipsed by the problem of succession and Henry’s tenuous control over his territories. Moreover, the Lambeth volume just discussed, assembled by the archepiscopal librarians, brings the play even further into the realm of ideological orthodoxy. In this case, the juxtaposition produced by binding texts together calls attention to two related themes that are central to Shakespeare’s second tetralogy: aging rulers and the containment of rebellion. Thameseidos, written at a moment of great cultural anxiety over succession, pleads with an aging Elizabeth to ‘‘Liue thou for euer! . . . To maintaine Artes, as hitherto th’ast done; / For wayle the Muses must, when thou art gone.’’42 The two books of elegies mourn the death of Sir Horatio Palavicino, the Elizabethan intelligencer, aristocrat, and well-known financier of England’s wars.43 And the two political pamphlets concern Irish and French rebellion over land.44 Taken in this context, it is difficult to imagine how Falstaff ’s exuberance at the king’s death in 2 Henry IV—‘‘The laws of England are at my commandment’’ (5.3.125–26),45 he famously exclaims— could elicit anything but contempt. Indeed, in this archepiscopal anthology, the pathos of the final scenes might well reside not, as it does for us, in Hal’s repudiation of Falstaff, but in the epilogue’s appeal to ‘‘pray for the Queen’’ (30). In all of these cases, the compiling agent has created a rubric for interpretation in book form that we can begin to theorize, and such rubrics, it is clear, were not fully determined by the criteria of author, genre, and textual autonomy that would guide later forms of assembly. To be sure, these criteria did exist in early print culture: the Folger volume containing copies of 1 and 2 Henry IV is an example of a compilation that demonstrates authorial and textual continuity (insofar as what we recognize as authors and texts today are taken to be reflected in this earlier period’s theatrical practices), and several early collections, such as the Bridgewater Library at the Huntington, do contain volumes of exclusively Shakespearean materials.46 But the sixteenthand seventeenth-century compilations that map on to these categories were

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subject to a degree of contingency and reader intervention that is alien to modern norms of textual order.47 A well-known example of this contingent canonicity is the group of plays now referred to as the Pavier Quartos.48 Though the circumstances of their production are still being debated, these texts are generally taken to constitute an early effort at gathering Shakespeare’s dramatic works into a single volume—a volume whose constituent parts were also apparently sold in independent units. The collection, sometimes called a ‘‘nonce collection’’ to highlight its ad hoc quality,49 was published by Thomas Pavier in 1619, four years before the First Folio, with several of the individual title pages bearing false imprints and dates to hide the fact that Pavier did not own the rights to all of the plays. The first three quartos in the series—The Whole Contention, parts 1 and 2, and Pericles—were printed with continuous signatures, suggesting that an authorial collection was being planned. And indeed, several groupings of the texts either survive in early bindings that resemble the ‘‘collected works’’ format or show evidence of having once been configured in this way.50 However, the latter seven quartos in the series—A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—were signed individually, as if to stand outside of the collection, which was an indication, for many who have told the story, that Pavier was guilty of piracy.51 But the texts’ inconsistencies also demonstrate that nonteleological notions of book assembly governed even collections organized by author such as this one, and that the Pavier Quartos might be more profitably understood and read as a consumer-driven compilation rather than a never-realized ‘‘Works.’’ Of the two known ‘‘complete sets’’ that survive in early bindings, neither follow the continuous signatures—ostensibly, instructions to the binder—set out in the first three quartos: one, now at Texas Christian University, was arranged in the seventeenth century with The Yorkshire Tragedy positioned between The Whole Contention and Pericles; and in the other, now at the Folger, A Midsummer Night’s Dream assumes the second position in the set.52 The contingency of book formation in the period is vividly evoked in a third example: a set of Pavier Quartos at the Folger which, now disbound, once contained a text that was neither published by Pavier nor attributed to Shakespeare.53 The volume, which I discuss further in Chapter 5, stands today in a modern binding that includes only The Whole Contention and Pericles. But according to a contents list preserved in the flyleaves, the texts were originally accompanied by Thomas Heywood’s play A Woman Killed with Kindness, a quarto

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that in fact occupied the first position in the otherwise Shakespearean book.54 The volume shows that early owners and retailers, enabled by the built-in flexibility of printed products like the Pavier Quartos, could make books— and frameworks for reading—both within and outside prescribed schemes of organization.

Shakespeare, Assembly, and Interpretation With this broad outline of the contexts and stakes of Shakespearean book assembly, I conclude this chapter by taking a closer look at five early compilations that, like this last volume, combine Shakespearean and nonShakespearean works in formats not set out in advance by producers, but that embody distinct possibilities for interpretation grounded in historical forms of text assembly. Such Sammelba¨nde are strikingly numerous in archives when we know where to look, though their composite materiality is rarely noted outside of the local catalog notes and almost never discussed as an aspect of meaning-making by literary critics. Like many of the assemblages I have surveyed in this chapter, these volumes reflect the desires of readers or retailers, who were predisposed to compile or ‘‘bundle’’ in a system of book production very different from ours. But unlike many of the Sammelba¨nde above, the following specimens contain Shakespearean works in contexts for reading and interpretation that are significantly at odds with modern textual categories and standards of literary value, stretching our historical imagination. Indeed, where such volumes survive, their present untreated or unprocessed states are often attributable to some miracle of provenance that caused them to escape modernization. Reading these unlikely survivals together, as records of early reception practices and the organizing categories of early book culture, gives us different, often internally contrasting Shakespearean works in which potential interpretations grow and proliferate.

Folger STC 22341.8 My first compilation exemplifies the narrative of loss and recovery that often attends Shakespearean Sammelba¨nde. Folger STC 22341.8 is a unique copy of The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare (1599) that was rediscovered in 1920 in a lumber room at an English country house, where it had apparently been

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held since it was purchased and made into a book during the Renaissance.55 The volume, which retains its original limp vellum binding, includes four additional octavos of poetry printed around the same time;56 they are, in order, Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece, the little-known sonnet sequence Emaricdulfe . . . by E. C. Esquier, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The contents are remarkable for how they seem to lend themselves from the standpoint of production to such multigenre, multiauthor forms of compilation. The Passionate Pilgrim represents something of a microcosm of the volume, mixing Shakespearean with nonShakespearean works into a verse miscellany.57 And there is evidence suggesting that this edition of Venus and Adonis was sold as a unit with The Passionate Pilgrim, as the same two texts are preserved in similar bindings in other archives and bibliographers have pointed out that they probably issued from a common retailer, perhaps marketed and sold together.58 Structurally and thematically, moreover, there are strong associations between the two works. Four of the first eleven poems in The Passionate Pilgrim are fragments of the Ovidian Venus and Adonis story, dealing, often in sexually explicit terms, with the goddess’s advances on the unwilling boy.59 The narrative poem’s guiding trope of role reversal, already present in the collection, also resonates obliquely with the opening lines of The Passionate Pilgrim anthology, which do not come from Ovid’s story:60 When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutored youth Unskilful in the world’s false forgeries. (1.1–4) The lines, along with those of the collection’s next poem—which malign the speaker’s tempting ‘‘female evil’’ (2.5)—would later emerge in print as sonnets 138 and 144, respectively. But here the extent to which anthological thinking guides our interpretations and the extent to which those interpretations can change in relation to different forms of assembly are unusually perceptible. Stripped of the familiar context of the Sonnets volume, the speaker’s lying ‘‘love’’ no longer denotes any one ‘‘mistress’’ figure but is free to take on shades of reference from this volume (aided perhaps in this case by the mention of an ‘‘untutored youth,’’ which conjures up Adonis, named only a few lines later).61 The range of potential transpositions, in other words, becomes broader with a new material context. This volume asks us to read

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sonnets 138 and 144 not in the sequence of poems that for us gives them meaning and a title but in a different textual assembly: one whose most prominent scene of courtship, iterated across multiple works, is Venus’s courtship of the boy. A similar point can be made regarding the place of Lucrece in this volume. Modern critics, addressing the historical problem of Lucrece’s perceived moral dilemma, have tended to interpret the poem either implicitly or explicitly in the context of the Sonnets or that of Shakespeare’s classical sources. Nancy Vickers, in her magisterial reading, cites sonnet 106 and Shakespeare’s rejection of the poetics of praise, arguing that Lucrece exposes the violence of erotic description as it was practiced by male writers in the Petrarchan tradition.62 Jane O. Newman and others have similarly invoked Ovid’s Fasti and the tale of Philomela to show how Shakespeare departed from the convention of the vengeful rape victim, portraying Lucrece instead as a tragic sacrifice to a patriarchal power structure.63 In both of these interpretive frameworks, Lucrece’s agency is minimal, present only in constitutive relation to male agency, whether sexual or political. But in a compilation where Lucrece is linked to other works by Shakespeare—works attentive to female agency (and indeed, impropriety) in figures like Venus and the ‘‘dark lady’’ of the two sonnets—a different protagonist, one whose will can be conceived outside the male power structure, is freer to emerge. In fact, such a protagonist does emerge in Thomas Middleton’s darker, more cynical complaint poem, The Ghost of Lucrece, which follows Shakespeare’s Lucrece in this particular vellum-bound volume. Here the story ends not in the promise of Tarquin’s banishment and a historic transfer of power but in Lucrece coming back from the dead, calling out for vengeance, reinscribing what Newman calls the ‘‘countertradition of women who intervene directly in this transfer of power by killing the heir.’’64 This Lucrece, as critics have shown, inhabits a moral world turned upside down, far closer to that of Venus or the dark lady of the Sonnets than to that of Shakespeare’s Rome.65 Casting off her silence in Middleton’s continuation, she rails against the evils of that world and cries out to Tarquin, vowing to ‘‘haunt, and hunt, you to dispaire.’’66 This early compilation gives us two Lucreces: a silenced victim and an impatient revenger. Female agency, narrowly conceived (or absent) in our most familiar context-dependent readings, is recast in this unfamiliar material context as a force of retribution—a direct intervention in rather than an indirect perpetuation of male power.

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Huntington 59000–59002 A similar early assemblage with divergent interpretive implications can be found in Huntington Library shelf marks 59000–59002.67 This is a multitext volume encompassing two of the same works—Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1599) and The Passionate Pilgrim (1599)—with a third, nonShakespearean work, Epigrammes and elegies. By I.D. and C.M, a verse collection that was probably printed in the same year.68 Like the Folger compilation, these texts are preserved in an original vellum binding as they were bought and read in the era of early print. Also like the Folger volume, their preservation in this state was a consequence of the book being locked up and forgotten for generations in an English country house—in this case, Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire—only to be rediscovered and incorporated into a major collection after the golden age of disbinding rare texts had passed.69 Epigrammes and elegies exhibits many of the same structural characteristics that made The Passionate Pilgrim so amenable to compilation. Patched together out of two collections of verse already circulating in manuscript in the 1590s,70 the text presents itself as amalgamated and detachable, the first section comprising John Davies’s fiercely satirical epigrams, which profess to ‘‘Taxeth vnder a particular name, / A generall vice which merits publique blame,’’71 and a second section (with a separate title page) containing the erotic ‘‘elegies’’ of ‘‘C.M.’’: that is, Christopher Marlowe’s early translations from Ovid’s Amores. These works, though edited and read as independent entities today,72 were thus two sides of the same production at their first printing; and, to knowledgeable early modern readers, it would have been clear that the texts depend on the work of textual expansion. Marlowe’s text—called ‘‘certaine of ovids elegies,’’ registering itself as a selection of text in this way73 —opens with a four-line enlargement on Ovid before arriving at the famous first words of the Amores mocking Virgil’s ‘‘Arma virumque cano,’’ placed here at line 5: WE which were Ouids fiue books, now are thre For these before the rest preferreth he; If reading fiue thou plainst of tediousnesse, Two taine away the labour will be lesse: VVith muse vpreard I meane to sing of ames74

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The work thus frames itself as an extraction—one rooted in a mythically collaborative act of textual arrangement (of ‘‘preferring’’ certain books and ‘‘taking away’’ others) between Marlowe and Ovid, his source. The Epigrammes of Davies shows evidence of being similarly cast as an assemblage beyond the default attributes of its genre: an early manuscript version now at the Bodleian Library refers to the text as ‘‘calculated by Iohn Davis of Grayes Inne.’’75 Here the verb ‘‘calculate,’’ which defines Davies’s authorship, is used in its now archaic sense: ‘‘to arrange, design, prepare, adjust, adapt, or fit for a purpose.’’76 Read against this already composite text, the Shakespearean portion of the volume—Venus and Adonis in particular—takes on a particular tone. Shakespeare’s narrative poem is normally seen as unfolding in two clear movements: one comic, focusing on Venus’s erotic fascination with Adonis, and one tragic, focusing on her failure to woo him.77 But in this context, the comic half of the text eclipses the tragic half and becomes more forceful. The introductory sonnets of The Passionate Pilgrim, on the ‘‘female evil’’ of the mistress figure, call attention to strains of both eroticism and misogyny in that collection, which, compounded with the many incorporated fragments of the Venus and Adonis story, would have been easily continuous with Shakespeare’s epyllion. The most conspicuous presence in this sense would have been Epigrammes and elegies, which was so erotic, so misogynist and generally scurrilous, that it was banned and publicly burned by the archbishop of Canterbury shortly after its publication in 1599.78 As Stephen Orgel has shown, Marlowe’s translation of the Amores was transgressive and yet ‘‘exclusively heterosexual’’ in its preoccupations: ‘‘It is a chronicle not merely of lechery, but of adultery, pandering, promiscuity, faithlessness, irreverence. It is even, on occasion, explicit and smutty where Ovid is merely metonymic.’’79 More ostentatiously transgressive perhaps is Davies’s contribution to the volume, which vows to propagate itself and leave a mark on its (male) reader: ‘‘from henceforth, ech bastard castforth rime / which doth but sauour of a Libel vaine / shal call me father.’’80 Davies’s bawdy, frequently scatological epigrams ridicule the vices that the speaker finds embodied in certain caricatures or ‘‘types’’ of women, paying particular attention to such characters’ failed attempts to attract men. (One ‘‘type,’’ for example ‘‘hath put on her sattin gowne, / Her out lawne apron, & her veluert shooes,’’ but still ‘‘she with these addicions is no moe, / Then a sweete, filthie, fine ill fauored whoore.’’)81 Joined to these texts, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which represents one such attempt at courtship stretched out to form a narrative poem,

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lacks some of the familiar pathos and sexual energy (which, critics have shown, was also a rhetorical energy),82 finding new emphasis in its perhaps equally manifest misogynist and quasipornographic side.83 The composite volume, taken together in this way, articulates a hard-nosed, Ovidian critique of conventional Petrarchan pursuits, joining into chorus with Davies’s speaker, who is ‘‘not fashioned for these amorous times, / To court . . . beutie with lasciuious rimes.’’84

Folger STC 22335, Copy 1 My next two examples, both from the Folger, are smaller compilations containing, in addition to printed material, manuscript annotations that offer more explicit clues about how the texts included were categorized and interpreted by their earliest readers. The first example might be best described as an early modern paperback, comprising copies of two seventeenth-century plays, Shakespeare’s Pericles (1609) and Samuel Daniel’s pastoral tragicomedy The Queene’s Arcadia (1606), stitched together in paper covers (Fig. 14). The volume exemplifies the cheapest, most flexible kind of compilation produced in the period before the self-enclosed book became an industry standard: a selection of texts, issued to the retailer unbound, sewn into a single, relatively flimsy book either before the time of sale or shortly after. Also characteristic of the period are the marks in the books. The boundaries of the texts have been expanded by an early reader, perhaps the purchaser, who used the blank spaces to add manuscript text, in this case, a fragment of political satire: As nero once, with harpe in hand sirvaid his Flameing Roome, and as it burnt, he plaid Soe our Great Prince when the dutch fleet arriu’d Saw his ships burnd and as they burned, he—. The poem, taken from John Denham’s Directions to a Painter (1667),85 criticizes Charles II for his ineptness and philandering during the Anglo-Dutch war (the implied final word here is ‘‘swived’’). And as the early reader may have noted, these ideas reverberate throughout the plays included in the volume. Pericles depicts a corrupt, incestuous king of Antioch; a governor of Tarsus whose people at first are starving and later rise up to kill their leader;

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Figure 14. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 22335, copy 1, two plays stitched into paper covers. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

a governor of Mytilene who must be reformed for frequenting brothels; and Pericles himself, whose perpetual absenteeism creates unrest in Tyre.86 The Queene’s Arcadia, following its Italian models, invokes similar themes of misrule and restoration across social groups.87 Set in a pastoral world that, according to one aging onlooker, ‘‘Hath put off that faire nature which it had / And growes like ruder countries, or more bad,’’ the play traces the

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influence of a ‘‘corrupted traveler’’ who poisons Arcadian society and is eventually brought to order.88 The multiauthor pairing thus represents a kind of sourcebook on the theme of incompetent leadership and the constant threat of chaos and corruption that lies beneath the political surface. For an early reader with a demonstrated taste for anti-Royalist satire, it is not surprising that Daniel’s text would be of interest. As Annabel Patterson and Lois Potter have both explained, the literary culture of mid-seventeenthcentury England witnessed a ‘‘shift in generic consciousness’’ in which tragicomedies took on a new political significance.89 Pastoral tragicomedies in particular, implicitly allied as they were with Philip Sidney’s then politically charged Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, were hotly contested terrain between Royalist and anti-Royalist factions as part of this generic shift.90 The betterknown text in this pairing, however, is not normally considered in terms of the political possibilities embodied in its genre. Pericles, we might say, is read in relation to a different kind of shift: Shakespeare’s shift to ‘‘romance’’ and to constituent themes of faith, family, old age, and redemption that are visible in his other ‘‘late plays,’’ such as Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, all found adjacent to Pericles in most modern volumes of collected works.91 This set of works, in contrast, encourages historically specific readings that are not prescribed by that generic category (a category that was actually formed much later—and one that, Barbara Mowat has shown, is ‘‘anachronistically Victorian and inapposite’’).92 With Pericles detached from the modern textual assemblage of the classroom anthology, the traditional focus on Shakespeare’s career trajectory gives way to another important chronology: a period of intertwined literary and political activity in which, as Patterson has shown, ‘‘romance itself came to be redefined as serious, as a way of perceiving history and even a means of influencing it.’’93

Folger STC 22352 My next example is a similarly paired compilation that demands a more radically transgeneric reading. This Folger volume combines a later copy of Shakespeare’s Lucrece (1632) with a little-known book of religious poetry called The Blessed Birth-day (1636) by Church of England clergyman Charles Fitz-Geffry.94 The Blessed Birth-day is a series of meditations on Luke 2:14

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followed by what the title page advertises as a collection of ‘‘holy transportations’’: pithy extractions from the writings of church fathers and ‘‘some moderne Approved Authors’’ on subjects related for the most part to Christ’s nativity. On the surface, it is difficult to imagine what could reconcile this text with Shakespeare’s ‘‘graver work.’’95 But here, the two disparate books are paired in a contemporary binding (a finer binding, in fact, implying more forethought and investment than might be put into a limp or stitched paper binding), and Fitz-Geffry’s text is actually the first and primary text, the only title listed on the spine. As in the previous paired Folger volume, an early reader has left behind substantial annotations that give us clues about how the books were used and valued as a collection (Fig. 15), but these are far more varied. On the verso of the title page, several iterations of a ‘‘Goe little book’’ envoy are recorded and signed by the reader, J. Drew.96 On a leaf of Lucrece, written in the same hand, are two versions of a proverb: ‘‘The devill was sick, the devill a monke would be / The devill was well, the devill a monke was hee’’—a warning against those who make pious resolutions in times of distress. And further down on the page, we find, again in Drew’s hand, the Latin line, ‘‘Vix tibi praesto fidem, cor tibi restat idem,’’ a fragment from a cat-and-mouse fable about deceptive appearances, most famously recounted by Edward Coke against the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot.97 This early reader’s interest in moral sententiae is to some extent prescribed by the 1632 text of Lucrece, which, as critics have recently shown, was printed with copious commonplace markers to aid in the gathering of notable bits of text.98 But the reader’s specific interest in sententiae on falsehood and equivocation is echoed in the adjacent Blessed Birth-Day, which ends with a call to shake off ‘‘soul-clogging shackles’’ and ‘‘nere to doe nor speake nor thinke amisse.’’99 Lucrece, when absorbed into a book this charged with religious meaning, is forced to undergo a shift in emphasis relative to our expectations. While chastity and suicide are prominent moral issues in the poem, this volume brings into focus another issue that might have been compelling at this particular historical moment: the immoral example of Tarquin, whose ‘‘inward ill no outward harm expressed’’ (l. 91). In this material context, the poem’s insistent bifurcation between men who ‘‘cover crimes with bold, stern looks’’ (l. 1252) and women ‘‘whose faces are their own faults’ books’’ (l. 1253) make Lucrece something of a parable about inner duplicity. Indeed, as Sasha Roberts has shown in her discussion of the readership of Lucrece, ‘‘the deployment of literary texts as sourcebooks of exempla and sententiae’’ was common

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Figure 15. Manuscript writing in an early copy of Lucrece, adjacent to a devotional collection. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

in the period.100 And at several points, meditating on Tarquin’s crime, the poem suspends the story to convey a lesson that would be at home in The Blessed Birth-day: In vent’ring ill, we leave to be The things we are for that which we expect And this ambitious foul infirmity In having much, torments us with defect Of that we have; so then we do neglect The thing we have, and all for want of wit Make something nothing by augmenting it. (ll. 148–54)

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Bound with similar sayings and proverbs in print and manuscript, the poem becomes a series of potentially detachable set pieces. The assembly gives us a Lucrece that, as Roberts has shown, was ubiquitous in early commonplace books: one that was marked above all by its moral or rhetorical usefulness.101

British Library C.39.a.37 My final example reflects a much more elaborate mix of manuscript and printed text: a set of octavos from the British Library containing a 1624 copy of Shakespeare’s Lucrece; Thomas Heywood’s translation of Ovid’s Art of Love (1630?); Henry Austin’s Scourge of Venus (1614); the three-part, multiauthor, Ovidian verse collection Alcilia: Philoparthens louing Follys . . . Wherevnto is added Pigmalions Image . . . With the Loue of Amos and Laura (1619); and Thomas Overbury’s translation of Ovid’s Remedy of Love (1620). The volume’s peculiar sixth item, however, is a manuscript (Fig. 16) consisting of fourteen love lyrics, many of which were copied out of popular sources such as Philip Sidney and Thomas Campion, followed by a collection of largely bawdy, satirical epigrams and sayings resembling a personal miscellany or commonplace book.102 Here, Lucrece is positioned again at the intersection of Ovidian narrative poetry and the poetry of praise, but not as it is in Vickers’s reading, which links the work to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. This mixture of stories and sayings also highlights the usefulness and pragmatism of the texts but not in the same way as a pairing of Lucrece with devotional verse. This seventeenth-century compilation, in contrast to these other models, represents a kind of resource anthology on the subject of desire and its moral and ethical consequences. The volume is framed with translations of Ovid’s frequently satirical guides to seduction and the avoidance of heartbreak—The Art of Love and The Remedy of Love, respectively—and between these two works, it proceeds through a story of lust and incest between parent and child (The Scourge of Venus); sonnets depicting ‘‘Reason conquering Passion’’ (Alcilia);103 and a series of didactic epigrams, appended to the sonnet sequence, imparting suggestions to men, such as Concerning Wiues, hold this a certaine rule, That if at first, you let them haue the rule, Your selfe at last, with them shall haue no rule, Except you let them euermore to rule.104

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Figure 16. A manuscript collection bound into an anthology of printed works, British Library C.39.a.37. 䉷 British Library Board.

Blending satire, advice, and exempla, the texts in this volume share a common focus on the management and mismanagement of male affections, a set of lessons in early modern courtship keyed primarily to classical models. The compilation thus asks us to read Shakespeare’s Lucrece, which derives from many of the same models, as a contribution to this discourse: a warning against indulging passion over reason, a potent example of abhorrent lust or of seduction gone wrong. The maker of the anthology in this case created a rubric within which Shakespeare’s poem may be understood in terms of its private drama, as a cautionary seventeenth-century tale of sexual misconduct.

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What I have suggested in these brief archival investigations is that the early composite volumes submerged in modern rare-book archives not only help us reconstruct habits of book collecting and organization; they also help us read literary works historically. By submitting these volumes to bibliographical and literary analysis, as I have begun to do here, we open ourselves up to interpretive possibilities grounded not just in the familiar modern book and our own received generic, chronological, and authorial categories, but also in the frequently unfamiliar material configurations and categories fashioned by readers and retailers in early print culture. That habits of text assembly shape interpretations of literary works, especially Shakespeare’s works, is clear to us today every time an editor or publisher makes a choice about textual presentation: whether to organize an anthology chronologically to convey a career trajectory (as in The Norton Shakespeare, for instance); how to include collaborative texts like Two Noble Kinsmen or problematic texts like Sir Thomas More; whether to give readers one, two, or three texts of King Lear. Understanding the influence of assembly is even more urgent when dealing with a book culture whose readerly protocols, as I have shown, are so distant from ours—a culture in which texts are often malleable and subject to expansion, in which printed texts can be mixed with manuscripts, authors with other authors, literature with topical texts, histories, and ephemera. Scholars have already begun to look beyond the boundaries of works that formerly stood alone in self-enclosed units, reading, for example, the Sonnets with its early printed companion piece, A Lover’s Complaint.105 This same attention to intertextuality in book form—or what might be called ‘‘proximate’’ or ‘‘material intertextuality’’ to distinguish it from the related but more abstract concept—yields similar interpretive rewards when brought to bear on consumer-driven compilations, such as those I have explored in this chapter. What thematic or rhetorical echoes, we can ask, are traceable across early printed texts of The Passionate Pilgrim and Venus and Adonis? What political ideas might an early reader have taken from (or imposed upon) Pericles and The Queene’s Arcadia during the Anglo-Dutch war, or when faced with an ineffective monarch? In what ways might Lucrece be read as a collection of pieties, ‘‘holy transportations,’’ or as a meditation on the nature of truth-telling, duplicity, and treason? More theoretically, how many Lucreces were there in early modern culture? Posing such questions brings to light meanings and associations that are no longer apparent to us but that were of central, structural importance to readers in the early print period— part of the everyday experience of reading Renaissance poetry and drama.

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Beyond the singular figure of Shakespeare, the changing textual formations in this and the previous chapter on Cambridge libraries should help persuade us to reconsider a basic assumption about bibliographical history and its relation to literature. That canonical works like 2 Henry IV, Lucrece, or The Shepheardes Calender were encountered in not one but a range of material contexts over time—in sheets, limp vellum or paper covers, pairs, thematic anthologies, authorial collections, and independently bound texts— attests to a structural complexity that is concealed in the current disciplinary nomenclature. The history of the book, as Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass have recently begun to argue, can never be a history of the ‘‘book.’’106 That is, the book as a unit of analysis is not a monolithic entity but a shifting category of textual forms, each new permutation resulting from a unique give and take between the exigencies of production and compilation and the desires of readers and owners. To see such permutations as motivated and instrumental rather than (as we typically see the book form) as natural or self-evident is to acknowledge the inevitable constructedness of any encounter with an archived text. We need not seek intellectual coherence on our terms among items in a binding, or in identifiable readers or retailers, to begin extrapolating meaning from such configurations. A modern reader of The Norton Shakespeare may not ever get around to The Tempest, just like an early reader may not pore over Lucrece and The Blessed Birth-day side by side in the same span of time. But in both cases, the fact of material proximity has deep interpretative effects: The Tempest looms at the end of the Norton as Shakespeare’s supposed valediction, coloring the adjacent plays as late-career ‘‘romances,’’ while Lucrece, in the early reader’s organization of printed knowledge, offers a wealth of moral wisdom in the form of quotable, extractable sententiae. The point is that the bibliographical embodiments of early English poetry and drama, like editorial apparatuses and other more well-studied aspects of the text’s materiality, are value-laden products of archival labor, calculation, and desire. Those products are generative of, not incidental to, literary meanings and statuses. They reify and reproduce notions of canonicity. They establish (or sunder) affiliations between authors, works, and genres. They set the parameters in the most literal sense for how readers engage with texts. The early collections I have explored in the first part of this book give us a glimpse at the relatively open-ended, flexible texts that populated shelves, desks, and bookshops in early English print culture. With respect to our own late culture of print, the contrast is pronounced and surprising. Where from

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the early nineteenth century to the present, decisions about the order and physicality of books are made as part of the production process, in the time of Shakespeare a diverse group of agents—stationers, binders, retailers, book buyers—could and did shape the text. Bindings and configurations were correspondingly diverse. And a culture in which there were so many flexible, configured books of this sort was one that lent itself, we must imagine, to habits of mind—to habits of writing—that are distant from our habits. In the second part of this book, I turn to writers, who were (and are) also readers.

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chapter 3

Transformative Imitation Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson’s Hekatompathia

How do norms of textual organization influence writing itself ? Over the past fifty years, in the course of a near-global transition from one dominant media platform to another, the question has been raised with more and more urgency.1 Yet as we learn about the contemporary changes wrought in new media classrooms and literatures, perspectives on historical forms of composition remain largely inert. Particularly in the canon of Renaissance literature, in figures such as Shakespeare who are invested with notions of the ‘‘early modern’’ or the invention of modern subjectivity,2 the familiar image of the solitary writer at his desk is seductive, no matter how historically improbable. History in this sense has much the same standardizing effect as rebinding in modern book collections: it rewrites earlier literatures to seem like our own. This chapter examines Renaissance practices of compiling and text customization as generative, indeed central, for writers in the period, as it was for the readers and book collectors examined in the first part of this book. My contention is that in much the same way modern authors working in novelistic genres or postmodern authors working with digital tools write according to protocols that define the physical appearance and uses of literary works in their time, writers in early print culture produced literature with concrete—if unspoken—conceptions of the handpress-era text in mind. Scholars of the nineteenth century have identified the desire for linearity, sequential narration, and closure in part with the industrially printed novel, just as scholars of today’s so-called ergodic and electronic literatures have inventoried nonlinear and interactive narrative models as rooted in emergent

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technologies of digital storage, circulation, and remixing.3 That scholars of Renaissance literature do not as routinely attend to the compositional implications of knowledge organization is due at least in part to the disassembly and standardization of early books—thus, the concealment of period-specific norms—in modern collecting practice as I have described it. Having chipped away at some of the accretions of modern reading and collecting culture in the first part of this study, I turn my attention in this chapter to the relatively malleable, recombinant text of the handpress era as a template for composing in the Renaissance—an invitation to ‘‘place together,’’ I argue, in order to make books and make literature. In what follows, I unpack this point by investigating a single, remarkable Renaissance book now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The book actually comprises two books, which overlap and which are themselves multiple, but its controlling intelligence—its most visible assembler and writer—is a littleknown Elizabethan choral musician named John Lilliat.4 Like many of his contemporaries, Lilliat had social ambitions that became literary ambitions when he set out to write a book of love lyrics in manuscript in the 1590s.5 Liber Lilliati, as he titled it, closely resembles the ‘‘songs and sonnets’’ format that had been preferred by coterie poets since mid-century.6 It relates in a loosely Petrarchan idiom the poet’s frustrated desires as he sought personal and professional advancement in his youth, blending his own compositions liberally with lines borrowed from other writers to better serve his purpose.7 The models available to Lilliat in a culture of humanist-prescribed imitation were numerous, and he drew on a range of poets in crafting his verse, most notably Philip Sidney, who would eventually emerge as the preeminent sonnet writer in the English tradition.8 But Lilliat’s most prominent source of inspiration was incorporated directly into his text. He wrote his manuscript on, in, and around a printed book of sonnets, Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582), a then-popular verse collection that, as we will see, guided both the content and the form of the attached manuscript by Lilliat (Fig. 17). Liber Lilliati, taken together, is thus in any technical sense both a compilation and a composition. The structure of the physical book and the structure of the imaginative work mirror one another. Just as Lilliat, like so many writers of his generation, composed poetry by gathering and reframing fragments of existing poetry, he built his book by acquiring an existing book, reframing or rebinding it with additional manuscript pages, and then filling the blank spaces from cover to cover with verse. The text

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Figure 17. Opening from Bodleian Library MS Rawl. Poet 148, Liber Lilliati, bound facing a printed book. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

witnesses a symbiotic process of reading and writing in which the periodspecific, embodied experience of the early book—a book that was assembled and customized by the owner, not by a publisher—is manifest in literary content, not just in the material volume as it is preserved in a modern library. More important, Liber Lilliati witnesses a form of ‘‘imitation,’’ viewed as a hallmark of Renaissance literature, that is not part of our traditional taxonomies of the practice. In assembling a book of verse out of an existing one, Lilliat, I will argue, carried out a kind of imitation that was not only an idea or discursive strategy but a way of acting upon the book as a physical object. To situate this extraordinary volume and to better understand why it seems so extraordinary from the standpoint of modern economies of composition, we must first read Lilliat’s act of assembly against the current scholarly consensus on imitation and compilation.

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Imitation Theory and Practice ‘‘In imitation,’’ Terence Cave argues in his foundational study, ‘‘the activities of reading and writing become virtually identified. A text is read in view of its transcription as part of another text; conversely, the writer as imitator concedes that he cannot entirely escape the constraints of what he has read.’’9 Exploring primarily the work of poets from the French Renaissance, Cave takes up Erasmus’s widely influential rhetorical manual, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512), to articulate a theory of vernacular writing based in a shared humanist emphasis on linguistic plenitude, or copia.10 Copia, both a figure or motif in Renaissance literature and a fully developed concept deriving from classical antiquity,11 denoted a kind of mental ‘‘storehouse’’ of literary material and a set of pragmatic tools for drawing upon that material in speech, thus maximizing one’s rhetorical dexterity, principally in Latin. The method of Erasmus’s manual—a set of exercises in gathering worthy parcels of rhetoric and varying them to form new utterances—had the effect of grounding vernacular writing in exemplary classical works and worthy models, such as encyclopedias. But as Cave explains, it also engendered a parasitic relationship between text and source from which Renaissance poets simultaneously drew their creativity and struggled to break free. The legitimacy of this vexed relationship hinged on an implicit notion of transformation. Where the goal of De copia was to show authors how existing discourse ought to be navigated and, as Erasmus put it, how that discourse ‘‘may be transformed (commutatur) while the thought remains the same (manente sententia),’’ the ‘‘thought’’ (or ‘‘content,’’ as would perhaps be a more accurate translation of sententia here) cannot ever remain exactly the same. As Cave demonstrates, ‘‘If the writer is to achieve copia, his imitation must not appear to be a mere copy.’’12 Paradoxically then, in this account, what enables literary productivity in early modernity—the close proximity between original and copy—also threatens to undermine it, turning plenitude into proliferation, copia into copiousness. For Renaissance pedagogues and writers, Cave concludes, a ‘‘storehouse’’ of literary material was also a site of conflict: ‘‘Imitation theory is itself manifestly rendered as a plurality of voices, each seeking to differentiate itself within a prescribed textual space.’’13 Cave’s important analysis opened up the possibility that the persistent, sometimes indecorous intertextuality of Renaissance writing—the tendency of authors from the period to adapt, rewrite, or simply transcribe the work of others—could be taken up from the traditional domain of source study

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and recast as a force of literary creativity: a way of imagining one’s relation to history and of building a new culture out of the surviving fragments of the classical past.14 Complementary accounts of Renaissance imitation have since offered detailed taxonomies for the full range of appropriative and transformative activities that we find in Renaissance literary culture. G. W. Pigman III traces a history of attitudes toward imitation from Cicero, Seneca, and Macrobius to Petrarch, who famously determined that the proper imitator will ‘‘produce one thing, his very own, out of many things, and he will, I will not say flee, but conceal [celabit] the imitation so that he will appear similar to no one and will seem to have brought, from the old, something new to Latium.’’15 Pigman points out that it was ultimately through Petrarch that ideas about rebirth and imitation reached English audiences and that this Petrarchan model of ‘‘partial dissimulation’’16 created a tension central to later Renaissance poetry between, on the one hand, the inextricability of text from source (which need not be sublimated, only ‘‘concealed’’) and, on the other, the desire to assert oneself as the origin and center of one’s imaginative work. Through a range of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century examples, Pigman concludes that productive, classicizing imitation ought to be defined against a lower form of appropriating that he calls ‘‘following.’’ Here again, the hierarchy depended on a concept of transformation, for ‘‘following,’’ he wrote, is ‘‘nontransformative imitation . . . : the gathering or borrowing of phrases, sentences, passages which amount to a transcription of model(s) into the text.’’ While Pigman conceded that in ‘‘following,’’ ‘‘a certain amount of transforming occurs by virtue of inclusion in a new context, and complete transcription without changing a word is very rare indeed,’’ only occasionally, he explained, is the practice indistinguishable from imitation ‘‘in which the note of transformation is strong.’’17 Thomas Greene reached similar conclusions in a magisterial study, The Light in Troy, in which he set out like Cave to theorize imitation as a force for creative discovery.18 Greene affirms that Renaissance writing was dominated by practices of imitatio, but he seeks to shift the focus of the debate from reproduction to the problematic temporality of imitative poems and the estrangement that writers from the Renaissance felt toward Greek and Roman antiquity. As these writers became more aware of the insurmountable distance that separated them from their classical models, Greene argues, they developed more sophisticated and self-assertive ways of imitating. The resulting forms of imitatio, he suggests, could be separated into four distinct categories. First were ‘‘sacramental’’ and ‘‘exploitative imitation,’’ in which the

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writer simply rehearsed or mingled borrowings from a source. Neither of these, according to Greene, produced anything that could be viably called literature because they demonstrated little awareness of the problem of anachronism. But they furnished a starting point for the two more complex forms of imitation that did engage the temporality problem: ‘‘heuristic imitation’’ and ‘‘dialectical imitation.’’ In ‘‘heuristic imitation,’’ Greene explains, texts ‘‘distance themselves from the subtexts and force us to recognize the poetic distance traversed’’ from source to work.19 ‘‘Dialectical imitation,’’ the highest form, proceeds in the same historically conscious way, except that where the heuristic imitation mends the gap between a past semiotic universe and the present, dialectical imitation reinforces that gap through a critical interrogation of the source text, permitting a fully formed, oppositional voice—the writer’s voice—to emerge out of the imitation.20 Greene’s typology, tending in this way toward conflict and individuation, led him to a historicized theory of imitatio that was also a general theory of authorship and intertextuality. The Renaissance writer, he explained, inhabits a mundus significans, ‘‘a vast, untidy, changeful collection of techniques of meaning, expressive devices feasible for communication, a vocabulary grounded in the spoken and written language but deriving its special distinctness from the secondary codes and conventions foregrounded at its given moment.’’ Only through these codes and conventions ‘‘can a subject express himself into existence and individuate a moral style.’’21 Greene concludes, in other words, that ‘‘the major author declares himself ’’ by ‘‘extending and violating the mundus.’’22 The theories and taxonomies of Cave, Pigman, and Greene have become orthodoxy in Renaissance literary scholarship, and rightly so for their great explanatory power. As illustrated in this last quotation, however, one consistent difficulty in these accounts of imitation and borrowing is their shared emphasis on writing as individualistic self-assertion: as ‘‘escaping’’ of one’s reading in Cave’s account, as ‘‘violating’’ it in Greene’s. The applicability of such Romantic models of authorship across historical periods has been called into question—in Renaissance studies in particular—as the persistence of post-Enlightenment ideas of originality and self-expression is shown to obscure the complexity and productive potential of earlier models.23 As Stephen Orgel explains, ‘‘We know that for the Renaissance artist, the entire creative career was often conceived to be imitative, the adoption of the role of an exemplar, usually classic.’’24 But this imitativeness did not go hand in hand with a desire to differentiate oneself absolutely from other voices or to position oneself as the sole origin of a unique work. This gesture of differentiation,

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Orgel observes, became part of the artistic enterprise only with the introduction of intellectual property as a right and an ideology in modernity. In the Renaissance, especially in the late-arriving English Renaissance, readers and writers sought out the familiar, and they replicated or ‘‘followed’’ one another without in most cases any need for apology. ‘‘The question of the morality of literary imitation . . . starts to appear significantly in England only after the Renaissance, and on the whole in reaction to it,’’ Orgel notes. In the early modern period, ‘‘we are still very far from the moment when a writer’s originality was the measure of his value.’’25 An equally important problem with the broad application of early imitation theory has been pointed out by Mary Thomas Crane. The assessments made by Cave, Pigman, and Greene were based on classical texts and their reception by continental literary figures such as Petrarch, who, Crane suggests, had limited influence in other cultural traditions.26 English audiences, moreover, seem to have imagined classical literature and other inherited sources more as raw materials to break apart and recombine than as vehicles for self-assertion; they understood their interactions with existing texts in terms of ‘‘collection and redeployment . . . and not, in many cases, as the assimilation and imitation of whole works.’’27 To account for these differences, Crane turns us away from classical and Italianate models of imitation and toward the more pragmatic textual storage techniques of commonplacing and the arts of memory.28 As both Crane and Ann Moss have explained, commonplacing in England had roots in the medieval tradition of ‘‘flower gathering,’’ the selection and compilation of textual fragments (‘‘flowers’’) to form useful aphoristic collections called florilegia.29 The commonplace book—a personal notebook that was designed to digest reading material into smaller, more manageable pieces for redeployment in speech or writing— grew to such prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England that it ‘‘constituted the primary intellectual tool for organizing knowledge and thought among the intelligentsia.’’30 Crane’s reassessment of imitatio emerges from this conviction that commonplacing was both a wellestablished and widespread readerly practice in Renaissance England, as well as from literary evidence suggesting that the notebook method had become by the mid-sixteenth century a vital determinant in forms of imaginative writing. Through popular manuals and treatises in rhetoric, logic, and humanist pedagogy, Crane and others have shown that the commonplace book was not simply a technology for memorizing and organizing aphorisms or other useful information; it was institutionalized in Renaissance schools

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as a model for producing texts, in particular the humanist-inflected verse miscellanies that had become so popular and influential by mid-century.31 This institutionalization of rhetorical method made commonplacing a ready model for authorial self-fashioning among Renaissance poets and playwrights, who were educated according to humanist precepts. And the kind of writerly self-conceptions that formed in response to commonplacing techniques were very different from those taken for granted by Cave, Pigman, and Greene. As Crane explains, echoing Orgel, ‘‘The concepts of creativity, imagination, and self-expression did not figure in the scenario of authorship constructed in schools’’: ‘‘Instead, students were encouraged to view all literature as a system of interchangeable fragments, and to view the process of composition as centered on intertextuality rather than imitation in the usual sense. Texts were seen as containers and not, primarily, utterances, a fact that implies a conception of authorship radically different from that usually associated with the Renaissance.’’32 Attending to the influence of the commonplace book on reading and writing, Crane argues, raises the important possibility that there was a routine, pragmatic dimension to imitatio. The literary practices of borrowing, appropriating, and recombining perhaps reflected less a vexed struggle for self-expression than an ingrained, discursive inclination to ‘‘gather and frame,’’ to compose new texts by compiling the pieces of existing ones.

Transformative Imitation in Liber Lilliati Crane’s revisionist framework has been invaluable in the study of imitative writing, particularly from the era of John Lilliat, Sidney, and the early English sonneteers, because it shifts the focus from production narrowly defined to consumption as production.33 In avoiding the totalizing gestures that characterized earlier work on imitation, studies of commonplacing have compelled us to imagine the Renaissance writer as a historically situated reader and compiler whose habits of composition were shaped by their everyday engagement with a certain kind of text, the commonplace book. We have in a sense moved from the modernizing classroom edition to the archive. Rather than seeking a modern author and a heroic struggle for individualism in the aphoristic, collectivist style of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, we begin to think through these compositions on their own historical and material terms.34

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And yet the archive is well supplied with composite, appropriative texts that seem to owe little or nothing to the commonplace book, and less to any struggle for modernist self-differentiation. In the previous chapters, we observed a highly visible Renaissance writer, Matthew Parker, who collected whole documents, not pithy fragments or aphorisms, to form his own composition with needle and thread; readers-cum-writers who patched together quartos of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean works, adding their own contributions—from relevant sayings to sequences of poems—in ink; and an early modern poet and playwright, Thomas Middleton, who appended a verse continuation to Shakespeare’s Lucrece, altering the narrative for (re)publication.35 To these embodied forms of gathering and framing, we can add well-known instances of borrowing in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century works, including ‘‘conclusions’’ of popular romances or treatises and the interpolation of passages or lines drawn from elsewhere in Renaissance drama.36 Examples from across genres and across the period, in other words, suggest that the variety of imitative and appropriative practices in Renaissance writing extends beyond the commonplace book as a primary structural determinant. We are told that the ubiquitous practice of collecting and redeploying source material in humanist-prescribed notebooks came to define a generation of skilled literary compilers in England. Yet in many works of compiling, broadly construed, we find discursive strategies at work that seem to come not from Erasmian precepts or the pragmatic Renaissance notebook but from something more basic. Liber Lilliati, we find, is one of these—a book of verse guided by the routine imperatives of buying and owning books of verse in the Elizabethan era. Compiled over the course of the 1590s by musician and poet John Lilliat and preserved in the Bodleian Library since the early eighteenth century, Liber Lilliati comprises the entire printed book of sonnets by Thomas Watson, The Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love, and a manuscript of 163 entries—mostly verse—in Lilliat’s distinctive hand.37 Like many of the composite volumes I explored in Part I of this study, the arrangement of texts in Liber Lilliati reflects a process of active selection and customization: Lilliat appears to have bound the copy of Hekatompathia together with blank pages or perhaps some existing manuscript work at the time of purchase or acquisition. The book’s leather binding is sturdy and decorated, suggesting a desire to both safeguard and share or display the contents. Unlike many of the volumes I have explored thus far, however, Lilliat’s book was not disbound

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Figure 18. An opening from Liber Lilliati, showing manuscript material on the verso of a printed page. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

and cataloged individually in modernity. The handwritten material extends beyond the blank pages into the margins and unprinted spaces of the adjacent book (Fig. 18), which would have made it impossible for a modern collector to separate the two halves without disrupting the text of one work or the other. Indeed, Liber Lilliati’s perceived status as an authorial ‘‘fair copy’’38 (and thus, we presume, a text whose physical integrity ought to be preserved in spite of the manuscript-print problem) has largely determined its archival classification and availability at the Bodleian. The book was first cataloged at Oxford in 1895 as a manuscript collection of poetry—‘‘verses by, and in the hand of John Lilliat’’39 —and the little attention it has attracted since then has been either as the autograph work of a minor Elizabethan author or as a gathered anthology, an index of middle-class literary taste in a period from

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which precious little such evidence survives.40 Critics and bibliographers following this latter path of inquiry have recognized that there is more to the manuscript than Lilliat’s verse. According to estimates, 118 of its 163 entries are, wholly or in part, the work of other Renaissance writers, much of it altered, rearranged, and unattributed. The poetic entries, regardless of authorship, are brought together with a variety of things, including music, proverbs, recipes, notes on oratory, and prayers, all under Lilliat’s comprehensive, proprietary title.41 Such a diverse collection of material has led bibliographers to treat the text as a personal compilation or commonplace book, a designation somewhat at odds with its polished, fair-copy appearance.42 The only scholar to treat the volume in any depth as a literary work is Edward Doughtie, who produced a useful edition of Lilliat’s poems.43 But in striving to present the original text of a little-known Elizabethan author, Doughtie does not include (and mentions only briefly in the editorial apparatus) the printed text to which Lilliat’s work is bound. The modern reader, then, is given a partial perspective. In both the primary and secondary literature, Liber Lilliati is a compilation or a composition but never both. A different frame of interpretation is needed, one that suspends the assumptions about literary creativity implicit in modern editions and theories of imitation. For Liber Lilliati is a composite book and is typical for smallformat vernacular productions in the Renaissance. It is a volume custombuilt according to the desires of its reader and owner, whose principles of assembly and organization are implicated in its content. As in Archbishop Parker’s copy of De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, the method of collection that gives Lilliat’s book its shape—binding others’ texts to his own—is entwined with the author’s method of composition. And as in many of the amalgams containing Shakespearean material, the book’s innate capacity for enlargement at the bindery is mirrored in and enables the production and juxtaposition of text by the owner. The convergence of Lilliat’s habits of book ownership with his compositional activities is strikingly visible in the way in which he marked this collected text as his property. Books and paper in this early period, we know, were precious resources; readers would often find creative ways to perform ownership, from adding their names to frontispieces and fore-edges to tipping in elaborate bookplates.44 Lilliat seems to have used the comparatively unobtrusive stereotype or ‘‘book stamp,’’ a common tool—either custommade or produced at home through a method of casting45—that allowed the book owner to print his or her name in the flyleaves or elsewhere in a volume.

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Figure 19. Lilliat’s book stamp at the end of Watson’s dedicatory epistle. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Lilliat, however, did not simply stamp Liber Lilliati once, as one would customarily do to establish ownership. He printed his name throughout the book, in both the manuscript and the published portions, as a way to gather and reframe text. Figure 19, for example, reproduces a leaf from the prefixed Hekatompathia where Lilliat stamped his name to the end of a dedicatory

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Figure 20. The page as it was originally printed, without a signature, in the Hekatompathia. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

epistle addressed to Thomas Watson. The blank originally left in the printed text after ‘‘Farewell’’ (Fig. 20) seems to have furnished Lilliat, the literary hopeful, with an opportunity to implicate himself in a circuit of communication among established literary figures—the discursive milieu out of which Watson’s sonnet sequence emerged. The book stamp, a pragmatic tool for collection maintenance, thus enacts a fantasy of cultural production and mobility. Lilliat uses it to imagine himself as a literary figure. He pressed the

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Figure 21. Fol. 20 of the manuscript portion of Liber Lilliati, showing a manuscript poem by Lilliat and ownership stamp. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

tool into service in this way in the fair-copy portions of Liber Lilliati as well. Figure 21 displays a leaf containing a three-stanza poem that Lilliat wrote in ink and then signed at the bottom with his name in italic type. Though the piece is his own, Lilliat seems to want to reinforce the act of manuscript composition with a printed mark of ownership. In both instances, the proprietary gesture of the stereotype extends to the content of an owned book and

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work of literature. The book-collecting device is used to mark text as the utterance of the owner and compiler. Routines of reading and book ownership are present in this way in the bulk of Liber Lilliati’s autograph manuscript entries, which generally consist of a short verse or set of verses that Lilliat gathers and composes, and marks as his possession using his book stamp or his signature (‘‘qd. John Lilliat,’’ often in Greek). Lilliat’s interaction with the particular source text, The Hekatompathia, is also present in the organizational aspects of his writing, which give the manuscript portions the appearance of an enlargement on or a reworking of the adjacent sonnet sequence by Watson. In addition to peppering his manuscript with his name in an italic type similar to that used in the book of sonnets, Lilliat mimics the paratextual features of the printed book in his close attention to mise-en-page. He maintains neat lineation and margins, he numbers his stanzas and paginates the volume continuously, and he furnishes his poems with titles and mottos, sometimes in an engrossing script seemingly modeled on the book stamp.46 Lilliat also seems to mimic some of the formal features of the Hekatompathia in his work. While his verse varies as he moves across different genres and text types—scatological jokes, acrostics, epigrams, among other more ambitious forms—the majority of his lyrics follow the rhyme and meter rigorously adhered to by Watson in his sonnets. At certain points in his manuscript, Lilliat explicitly assumes the presentation style of the Hekatompathia by giving his poems apparatuses and glosses on difficult terms (a quasipedagogical orientation in Watson’s work that I discuss in detail below). When copying such glosses, Lilliat sometimes calls on Watson directly as an authority; other times he diverges from the printed source text. In either sense, these are textual accessories not normally found in personal manuscripts or commonplace books. Item 112, for example, is a short poem titled ‘‘The Spiders Web, or Anacharsis sayinge of Solons written lawes,’’ where Lilliat supplies a digressive gloss on ‘‘Anacharsis,’’ ‘‘who was a noble philosopher borne in Scythia, and fownd the first Potters wheele.’’47 Item 119 includes a similar marginal reference to ‘‘Hebe,’’ which Watson also glosses in the Hekatompathia: ‘‘hebe,’’ Lilliat writes, ‘‘es. Daughter to Iuno & Iupiter before he fell in love with Ganimedes. She ys of Poets, called the goddesse of Youth.’’48 That Lilliat elected to furnish his text with references such as these suggests a conception of audience rooted in the desire to interact with books, a desire that parallels his own. Lilliat envisions a reader in need of instruction— one who might use his text as an exemplar—much in the same way that he himself was drawing lessons from and building upon the text of Watson’s

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Hekatompathia. Lilliat’s mimetic desire in this sense reverberates from broader presentational strategies down to the minutiae of orthography and letter shapes. An example of this is found in Watson’s printed dedication to Edward de Vere, where Lilliat uses both the literary and typographical content of the Hekatompathia to spur his creative gathering.49 The epistle recounts the story of Apelles and Alexander, likening the relationship between the famous portraitist and patron to that between Watson and de Vere. But Lilliat takes particular interest in the letter’s handling of what we now call the stigma of print.50 Where Watson, performing the conventional role of the reluctant author, compares the merits of manuscript and print, Lilliat marks with a manicule (or pointing finger) Watson’s observation that ‘‘Alexander would like of no lines, but such as were drawen by the cunning hand, and with the curious pensill of Appelles’’51 (Fig. 22). Further down the page, Watson offers the other conventional disclaimers: he wraps his ambition in modesty and shame, describing his book as a ‘‘pettie poor flocke’’ being loosed upon the world; and in the characteristically classed language of an early author in print, he appeals for protection from unrefined or adversarial readers (who have ‘‘malicious high foreheads’’ and the ‘‘poyson of euill edged tongues’’). Here again, Lilliat marks up the printed text, underlining, among other segments, Watson’s wish for his patron to enjoy ‘‘abundance of true Friends’’ and ‘‘reconciliation of all Foes.’’52 And here the printed material selected by Lilliat becomes an aid in generating the manuscript material that seems to be of such interest to him as a reader. Just under the printed signature ‘‘Thomas VVatson’’ Lilliat copies (and underscores with a second manicule) an acrostic poem that recalls and reorients the adversarial words of the dedication: The .W. bringes double woe, The .I. is nought but Iniurie Ielozie: The .F. is but a flattringe foe, The .E. is nought but enmitie. Thus .V. with I, thus F. with .E: They nothinge bringe but miserie.53 The use of ‘‘foe’’ echoes Watson’s terms above, in the printed portion of the page. And the juxtaposition of the poem with the epistle, marked up in this way by Lilliat, has the effect of displacing Watson’s antagonism toward common readers onto the ‘‘wife’’ figure of the gathered text, a figure that perhaps came to Lilliat’s mind as he read. The poem also echoes and expands on the

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Figure 22. Sig. A3v of Watson’s Hekatompathia, as annotated by Lilliat in Liber Lilliati. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

typography of the epistle.54 The printed letter ‘‘W’’ in the signature, ‘‘Thomas VVatson,’’ is made up of a double ‘‘V,’’ a doubleness that Lilliat seems to transform into ‘‘double woe’’ in verse (reinforced, perhaps by the implication of duplicity in ‘‘flattringe’’), which characterizes the speaker’s attitude toward his object of disaffection.

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The sequence of Liber Lilliati unfolds in this way—as a selection and transformation of adjacent printed content—in its persistent appeals to themes, stretches of verse, and small textual details from the Hekatompathia. As Doughtie explains in the biographical supplement to his edition of the manuscript portion, Lilliat frequently used his blank leaves to express desire and frustration in his professional, personal, and familial roles.55 Communities of vicars choral in post-Reformation cathedrals lived a ‘‘common life approximating that of a monastery’’56 —though with the freedom to marry and have children—and Lilliat, in low-paid clerical service at Wells and Chichester, made a continuous theme in Liber Lilliati out of his conflicted duty to the church and his desire for advancement and a better livelihood for his family.57 At several points in the manuscript, he seems to react in verse to his being reprimanded for minor infractions at the cathedrals; and, at one point, he seems to have had a serious, prolonged dispute with cathedral authorities over a newly admitted vicar, which prompted a series of poems expressing discontent with his status.58 To Doughtie’s detective work, we can add that there was much about the Hekatompathia that would have made it a compelling model for such frustrations. The title page of the printed work makes a clear appeal to a notion of community grounded in social status, announcing that the Hekatompathia was ‘‘Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman; and published at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes.’’ Like many other sonnet sequences commonly circulated among gentlemen in the English Renaissance, the text purports to express the author’s ‘‘sufferance in Loue,’’ a love that served as a proxy and metaphor for the myriad social anxieties felt by courtiers and aspirants in the period.59 One of the more conspicuous images used in Liber Lilliati is that of the poet being caught in a spider’s web—a conceit deployed, in fact, in one of Lilliat’s ‘‘rival vicar’’ poems—and the same image is found in Watson’s text used to similar ends.60 Another prominent image for the poet’s frustrations in the manuscript sections of Liber Lilliati is that of his beloved as a bird, a metaphor we also find at work in the Hekatompathia.61 These are of course common tropes in early modern love poetry, and the ones Lilliat used could have come from other sources, not just Watson’s sequence. But in many of Lilliat’s thematic borrowings, we find lines and phrases taken word for word from the adjacent Hekatompathia, suggesting a sustained, close proximity to the printed source text that does not register in existing taxonomies of imitation and text appropriation in the Renaissance.62 Lilliat’s manuscript items 113, 114, 115, and 119, for example, form a sequence

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of poems that engages the central theme of desire in the Hekatompathia by reproducing and then imitating the popular lyric pair, ‘‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’’ and its ‘‘Reply.’’63 Items 113 and 114 present the two poems in the same way that countless other manuscript compilers in the period did, but items 115 and 119, Lilliat’s imitations, extrapolate parts of these lyrics to form expanded versions, transforming, for example, the Shepherd’s original promises of A Capp of flowers and a Kirtle, Imbrodred all with leaues of Mirtle. A belt of strawe, and Iuie budds, with currall claspes, and amber studds64 into a new verse pronouncement, drawn out in shorter clauses over six lines, with verbal echoes from the original: A hatt of straw a whood of Haw, Becomes the comely shepperdes Queene; And garters fine, of greene woodbine A garland all of Mirtle greene.65 In the third stanza of the ‘‘reply,’’ moreover, Lilliat interpolates a line directly from one of the poems in the Hekatompathia, extending it with his own words: Watson’s ‘‘To HEBE louely kissing is assign’d’’ becomes, in Lilliat’s poem, the expanded aphoristic couplet ‘‘To HEBE, kissinge ys assignde: / Truely then sayde, Vnkist, Vnkinde,’’ which brings the sequence to a close.66 In another example, Lilliat imports a set of lines from the Hekatompathia, transforming Watson’s verse by means of reduction rather than expansion. Lilliat’s item 70 is a virtual copy of Watson’s sonnet LXXVII, which begins, ‘‘Time wasteth yeeres, and month’s, and howr’s.’’67 But here Lilliat transcribes only the first six lines. He leaves out the last two sestets from the version in the Hekatompathia—the lines that contain the only references to the speaker in Watson’s original: ‘‘our pleasures,’’ ‘‘my heart,’’ ‘‘my behoue.68 In effect, Lilliat turns an autobiographical expression of unrequited love into a stand-alone poem that scans as a collection of impersonal sententiae:

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Tyme wasteth yeares, and monthes, and howres, Tyme doth consume, fame, honour, witt & strength; Tyme kills the greenest herbs and sweetest flowres, Tyme weares out youth, and bewties lookes at length: Tyme doth convey to grownd both fow and friend; And each thing elc, but Loue, which hath no end.69 Lilliat does not depart from his printed model in these six transcribed lines, but he does give the collected segment a new title, ‘‘Loue, liueth out Time,’’ which further reframes Watson’s untitled confessional poem in epigrammatic, nonsubjective terms. Each word ‘‘Tyme’’ is reproduced in an engrossing script, fully out of scale with the rest of the verse, permitting each line or couplet to stand alone, abstracted from the piece, with the borrowed authority of an aphorism. Lilliat adds his mark, ‘‘Finis,’’ followed by a pen flourish to the sixth line to indicate the poem’s conclusion in this partially transcribed state.

Open-Source Composition in the Hekatompathia Lilliat’s manuscript comprises 163 poems which, like these few examples, expand, fracture, and rearrange primary material on the model of assembly that, I have argued, gives Liber Lilliati its physical shape as a composite textual artifact. What I want to underscore here, however, is not only the extent to which Liber Lilliati makes visible the mechanics of reading and book ownership as strategies of composition but also the fact that the Hekatompathia itself prescribes these strategies of composition. Understanding this prescriptiveness in the context of textual assembly in this sense gives us an unusual and important perspective on Watson’s place in the history of the sonnet in England. Turning to the apparatus of Lilliat’s transcribed poem above as it originally appeared in the Hekatompathia, for example, we see that Watson lays out his own process of composition in detail for the reader. ‘‘The chiefe contentes of this Passion are taken out of Seraphine Sonnet, 132. Col tempo passa gli anni, imesi, e l’hore,’’ Watson’s headnote explains, ‘‘but this Author inuerteth the order, which Seraphine vseth, some times for his rimes sake, but for the most part, vpon some other more allowable consideration.’’70 The poem thus announces itself as a compilation—one in which the author borrows a segment of text from another poet and reorders it for his own purposes, which, as we have seen, is exactly how John Lilliat wrote. Each of

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Watson’s sonnets, in fact, is set out in this way in the sequence. Each is printed, one to a page, in black-letter type, coupled with an explanatory headpiece in roman. These headpieces not only name the sources of the poems—from classical literature down to the author’s most recent projects; they also reproduce the segments of text borrowed or otherwise used to stimulate Watson’s creativity. The borrowed segments of text are offered in a third font, italic, which is also used for marginal glosses that cite still more sources in the text. The result is a typographical hierarchy (Fig. 23) rooted in the practice of forming books in the Renaissance. Approaching a poem embedded in outside reading, and a narrative of its own construction, the reader is compelled to experience the content of the Hekatompathia as a work of material (re)arrangement. The title page of Watson’s sequence describes the text as ‘‘diuided into two parts whereof the first expresseth the Authors sufferance in Loue: the latter, his long farewell to Loue and all his tyrannie.’’ The seeming detachability and multivocality of the work form a kind of baseline structure of reception for the individual poems as well. Sonnet LXXXIX, to take a representative example, is composed of two parts. The first, described by the narrative frame as ‘‘sententiall,’’ comprises a set of lines ‘‘grownded vpon a diuerse reason and authoritie’’ on the subject of love—recounting truisms and such warnings as ‘‘Loue neuer takes good Counsell for his frende’’ and ‘‘Loue burneth more then eyther flame or fire’’—and each of these ultimately separable, self-contained lines is outfitted with quotation marks and a citation linking the reader to the authoritative text from which they are paraphrased.71 The second part of the poem comments on the act of forming the first: These are the smallest faultes that lurke in Loue, These are the hurtes which I haue cause to curse, These are those truethes which no man can disproue, These are such harmes as none can suffer worse. All this I write, that others may beware, Though now my selfe twise free from all such care.72 Here compilation again becomes a form of composition. The physical act of leafing through existing texts, collecting sententiae from others’ works, and arranging them in one’s own production comes to organize ‘‘all this I write’’ in the form of a new, gathered poem. The poem is then annotated for the benefit of the reader, presumably so that it may be regathered in still another

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Figure 23. A typical leaf from the Hekatompathia, showing the mise-en-page of a sonnet. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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new composition. Creative work in such a piece is figured as transparent, a kind of ‘‘open-source’’ model of writing verse. Modern critics have cited this system of compositional presentation in arguing that the Hekatompathia reflects an alternative (and failed) form of sonnet writing in the English Renaissance—the consensus being that Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, presented in bare text with no similar commentary, was the preferable starting point for an English tradition.73 Watson’s contemporaries, however, seem to have thought otherwise. Lines and individual poems from the sequence made their way into plays by Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, collections of printed verse such as England’s Parnassus and England’s Helicon, and countless manuscripts like Lilliat’s.74 The Hekatompathia, moreover, was among the very first sonnet sequences in print in English, and Watson seems clearly to have wanted to fashion himself at the time as an innovative poet and pedagogue at others’ disposal. S. K. Heninger has recounted the story of the book, which was first circulated by Watson in manuscript as a set of ‘‘literary exercises,’’75 then later, at the encouragement of the Earl of Oxford, expanded to a hundred poems and put to press in 1582: ‘‘This publication represents a collected edition of Watson’s miscellaneous verse to that date. It is a scrapbook of experiments: dialogue poems (III, XXII, LVI), an echo poem (XXV), examples of reduplicatio (XLI, LXIV), acrostics (LII, LXXXII), a pillar (LXXXI), a list of translated one-line aphorisms (LXXXIX), a quasi sestina (XCIII), a long poem of Latin hexameters (not numbered, but after XCVIII).’’76 In nearly all of these experiments, Watson builds on bits of literary exempla in Latin, French, Italian, and Greek to forge a sequence that tells a more or less continuous story of love and frustration. And the resulting work is then heavily annotated so that the reader may see the inner workings of his style of experiment and how to replicate that style him or herself. Crane has argued that Watson conceived of himself as ‘‘both author and editor’’ and his poems as ‘‘both self-expressive and gathered.’’77 With apparatus and narrative on parallel tracks, the Hekatompathia seems also to speak with two voices: the Petrarchan lover and the maker of books, in the material and intellectual sense of patterning literary collections. Watson positions himself not just as a poet but as a location, a point of convergence in an emerging creative experiment. The idea of assembly, we find, is central to his project. Watson refers to his poems as ‘‘compyled’’ numerous times in the text’s roman headpieces.78 The mise-en-page and typographical hierarchy—the different types suggesting, for the reader, different hands—mark the Hekatompathia as something

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brought together out of parts of other texts. Indeed, the volume’s Latin prefatory poem, ‘‘Authoris ad Libellum’’ [The Author to His Book], describes the author as a kind of compiler: ‘‘verbis quis adauxit metra solutis’’ [‘‘(he) who assembled the loose words of your lines’’].79 The verb adauxit in early modern usage could mean both ‘‘bound together’’ and ‘‘enlarged’’ or ‘‘augmented,’’ and this double figuration of the writer’s work is appropriate for the project of the sequence. Throughout the book, the commentaries that accompany Watson’s poems in print call attention to the processes of material transformation, which give the Hekatompathia its shape. In the first blazon of the sequence, for example, the conventional itemization of the physical features of the beloved runs parallel with an itemization of texts linked together to form the poem. ‘‘This passion of loue,’’ Watson explains, ‘‘is liuely expressed by the Authour, in that he lauishlie praiseth the person and the beautifull ornamentes of his loue, one after an other as they lie in order. He partly imitateth here in Aeneas Siluius, who setteth downe the like in describing Lucretia the loue of Euryalus; & partly he followeth Ariosto cant .7. where he describeth Alcina: & partly borroweth from some others where they describe the famous Helen of Greece.’’ The conventional list description thus pulls in two directions: the beauty of the object and the cross-consultation of an expanding series of source texts. Sonnet XX similarly gathers and reframes existing poetry in the context of a narrative expansion, here mixing an oral proverb with written source material: recounting a story of a kiss that ‘‘Strozza writeth,’’ Watson states that he ‘‘enlargeth his inuention vppon the french prouerbiall speech, which importeth thus much in effect, that three things proceed from the mouth, which are to be had in high account, Breath, Speech, and Kissing.’’80 The sonnet that follows from the headnote exudes both the passionate desire for a lover and a desire for expanding the writercompiler’s outside reading. Expansions such as these in the Hekatompathia frequently involve adding new lines to the source material listed in the headnote. Sometimes Watson seems to do this simply for the sake of the meter. Sonnet XL, for example, consists of fifteen lines that, Watson explains, are ‘‘almost word for word taken out of Petrarch . . . except three verses, which this Author hath necessarily added, for perfecting the number.’’81 The poem presents a series of paradoxes, such as ‘‘I Ioy not peace, where yet no warre is found; / I feare, and hope; I burne, yet freeze withall’’ (ll. 1–2), until we reach Watson’s appended verses, which close the poem with sentiments that do not carry through the pattern of paradox but transform it into something different: ‘‘Sometimes I

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sincke, sometimes I swimme at will; / Twixt death and life, small difference I make; / All this deere Dame befals me for thy sake’’ (ll. 16–18). Throughout the work, Watson’s underlying methods of expansion are based in readings of the source poems and his seeming desire to reformulate them to fit particular circumstances. The headnote to Sonnet XXII, to take a representative example, explains that ‘‘the substance of this passion is taken out of Seraphine sonetto 127. . . . But the Author hath in this translation inuerted the order of some verses of Seraphine, and added the two last of himself to make the rest to seeme the more patheticall.’’82 In cases such as these, Watson’s appended material activates a shift in tone in the preceding gathered verses. Translation and compilation work together to produce a desired reading of a source. Augmentation and assembly in this sense are the master tropes of the Hekatompathia. The language of compiling can be found in almost every poem in the sequence. In sonnet XVIII Watson claims to ‘‘busilie imitate and augment a certaine Ode of Ronsard.’’ In sonnet XC, he ‘‘varieth from Petrarches wordes’’ so that he may ‘‘make it [his Petrarchan source] serue his own turne.’’ Sonnet XCIIII ‘‘augments’’ another ‘‘inuention of Seraphine.’’ And in sonnet XCVI, Watson again ‘‘inuerteth’’ the ‘‘sense’’ of a source text, in this case Ovid.83 The work’s headnotes, as documents of a process of reading as writing, project over all such language an image of the text itself as an artifact ever subject to rearrangement and recontextualization. Here the complete, bound book is not the assumed telos, and in fact Watson casts the contingency and incompleteness of texts, especially his own, as an incitement to create new text. The most biographical of the Hekatompathia’s headnotes make reference to Watson’s own works, which are marked as processes rather than integral literary products. Sonnet LXXV, for example, builds on ‘‘certaine Latine verses of his [the Author’s] owne, made long agoe vpon the loue abuses of Iuppiter in a certaine peece of worke written in the commendation of women kinde; which he hath not yet wholie perfected to the print.’’84 Similarly, sonnet VI cites Watson’s translations of ‘‘Petrarch his sonnets into latin . . . amongst others, which one day may perchance come to light.’’85 Watson gives the reader a running bibliography of potential works, suggesting implicitly that the emergence of the writer’s texts in print will depend on the approval of his readership. The first poem in the sequence, in fact, places this issue of contingency in text assembly and production at the center of the Hekatompathia. In ‘‘open[ing] his estate in loue,’’ the headnote explains, the speaker yearns for a time before lovesickness, when he was able to write and think with better

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clarity: ‘‘And where he mentioneth that once hee scorned loue, hee alludeth to a peece of worke whiche he wrote long since, De Remedio Amoris, which he hath lately perfected, to the good likinge of many that haue seene and perused it, though not fully to his own fancy, which causeth him as yet to kepe it backe from the printe.’’86 The allusion here is to the final stanza of the poem, where the speaker mentions an aborted (and less scandalous) work in his reluctant explanation for the very different kind of poetry to follow: ‘‘I haue assaide by labour to eschewe / What fancy buildes vpon a loue conceite, / But nearthelesse my thought reuiues anew, / Where in fond loue is wrapt, and workes deceite.’’87 These opening lines of the volume ground the Hekatompathia in the author’s failure to ‘‘perfect’’ an earlier text—a Remedio that would have precluded the need for this anguished sequence of love poems. The speaker thus submits himself to ‘‘what builds vpon a loue conceite’’: the desire to transform, which becomes the primary structuring principle of Watson’s text. These last examples, with their references to the writing process and the printing house, begin to evoke the physicality of text assembly for Watson. Many of the headnotes make a conceit out of the press and the book or text as an object. At several points, Watson foregrounds the activity of compilation by describing a poem, for example, as ‘‘placed amongst’’ the others, as being ‘‘wrought out of certain verses’’ or composed of lines ‘‘joined together as they stand.’’88 When he quotes from others, he sometimes goes beyond simple citation to describe the material object that constitutes his source. One poem, an aggregation of parts taken from Seraphine, introduces a segment of verse by indicating the precise physical site of the imitated song in the book he evidently used: ‘‘The second staffe,’’ Watson writes, ‘‘somewhat imitateth an other of his Strambotti in the same leafe.’’89 Images of textual objects filter into the poems as well: sonnet XCIIII, to take one example, curses ‘‘both leafe, and ynke, and euery line / My hand hath writ, in hope to moue her minde.’’90 The most evocative expression of this sense of physicality in the Hekatompathia is found in sonnet LXVII, a late addition that Watson composed (or in his words, ‘‘compyled’’) in the printing house. The poem’s headpiece explains its peculiar origin: ‘‘A man singuler for his leaning, and magistrate of no small accoumpt, vpon slight suruey of this booke of passions, eyther for the liking he had to the Author, or for his owne priuate pleasure, or for some good he conceyued of the worke, voutchsafed with his own hand to set down certaine posies concerning the same: Amongst which, this was one,

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Loue hath no leaden heeles. Whereat the Author glaunceth throughout al his Sonnet; which he purposely compyled at the presse, in remembrance of his worshipfull frend, and in honour of his golden posie.’’91 Watson’s printed apparatus thus locates the poem’s creation in an outside reading of the as yet (or perhaps always) incomplete Hekatompathia. Sonnet LXVII is produced, we are told, first by a reduction and then by an enlargement of some unspecified literary content that preceded it: the author’s friend is so taken by what he reads in the Hekatompathia that he abstracts from the work ‘‘with his own hand’’ a set of lines or ‘‘posies,’’ one of which then migrates back into the original work by the same processes of arrangement and enlargement that Watson has followed throughout his sequence. The poem is indeed organized around the abstracted line: the first sestet announces that Cupid ‘‘neuer takes delight in standing still’’ and then explicitly that he has ‘‘no leaden heele,’’92 and the second sestet repeats that ‘‘his heeles are of no leaden kinde.’’93 The final lines complete the circuit, as the speaker recounts that Cupid ‘‘Falcon like came sowsing from aloofe, / His swiftly falling stroake encreast my smart: / As yet my Heart the violence it feeles, / Which makes me say, Loue hath no leaden heeles.’’94 Here Cupid’s actions, depicted in a posy by the author’s friend that was itself derived from the surrounding poems, ‘‘encreast’’ the author’s ‘‘smart’’ and engendered a new poem, this poem, set down by Watson ‘‘at the presse.’’95 In Thomas Watson’s reflexive compositions, in the etymological sense of text ‘‘placed together,’’ we find a technique of sonnet writing substantially at odds with modern aesthetic assumptions about the genre. The Hekatompathia narrates, in large and small details, the process of its own becoming. It unfolds in scenes of Watson reading and treating text, assembling lines to make stanzas, watching as the manuscript goes to press, and promising future poetic endeavors. In this early, experimental stage of English poesy, Watson does not so much fail at providing a viable model of the sonnet, opening the way for Sidney to form the foundation of a tradition. Rather, he provides a model of what would become tacit in the more revered sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare: the embodied practice of writing, indeed making, a book. John Lilliat found much to value in the Hekatompathia that formed one half of his book. In placing Lilliat’s text with Watson’s in an interpretive frame, as he himself had it in Liber Lilliati, we find that the compositional strategies that seem eccentric or plagiaristic in a modern edition such as

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Doughtie’s are actually there, in advance, in the text that Lilliat takes up and transforms. Lilliat’s book, like Watson’s, draws together pieces of text from a variety of sources and arranges them in ways that suit his particular needs. Lilliat abstracts from (and signs his name to) exemplary works by Ovid and Horace.96 He gathers and rearranges bits of text out of psalms, almanacs, and recipe books, positioning them among poetic authorities.97 He uses source material not just from books but also from other surfaces of inscription. Item 50 records verses ‘‘quae cum princeps Oxonium venerat foribus in aede Christi inscripta fuerant. 1592’’ [‘‘which were inscribed on the door when the Queen came to Christ Church, 1592’’] in the margins of the Hekatompathia. Lilliat’s is a capacious definition of text not seen in modern reproductions of literary works (reproductions that have a normalizing thrust). As Lilliat copied his diverse gathered pieces of text, he transformed them as Watson did. Lilliat’s item 54, recorded in the flyleaves of the Hekatompathia, is ‘‘an Epitaph fownd by Dametas, when he digged for gold.’’ Here, Lilliat draws on an episode in the fourth book of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, where Dametas is sent on a treasure hunt only to find a strip of vellum that reads, ‘‘Who hath his hire, hath well his laboure past: / Earth thow doest seeke, and store of earth thou hast.’’ Lilliat copies the content of the fictional strip of vellum and reframes it in this entry as an ‘‘epitaph’’—an act of contextualization that shifts the interpretive parameters of found text, as modeled in the Hekatompathia. A similar example can be found on the verso of the Hekatompathia’s title page in Liber Lilliati. Here, Lilliat takes up a set of lines on the subject of Edward III from Robert Fabyan’s The New Chronicles of England and France (1516) and numbers them, transforming a medieval proverb into a list.98 Similarly, but in reverse, Lilliat takes a numbered list on ‘‘oration demonstrative’’ from Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1560) and turns it into a couplet. The original appears in this form: i. ii. iii. iiii. v. vi. vii.

Who did the deede. What was doen. Where it was doen. What helpe had he to it. Wherefore he did it. How he did it. At what time he did it.99

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Lilliat’s entry, written in the blank spaces of the Hekatompathia, versifies the text to form a device: ‘‘Who, what, and Wher; by what helpe and by whose: / Why, how and when; doe many thinges disclose.’’100 The same strategies of modification structure Lilliat’s longer poems, which often put on display their more extensive borrowings, as Watson does in his sonnet sequence. In item 98, Lilliat transcribes a sonnet from Giles Fletcher’s Licia, adding two lines that are either drawn from elsewhere or are his own.101 Item 82, titled ‘‘A ditie, vpon the death of Mistris Mary Nevill: deceased the fourth of februarii, 1597,’’ builds on five lines imported from the popular lute song ‘‘His Golden Locks.’’102 But here the original lines, ‘‘And louers sonets turne to holy psalmes: / A man at armes must now serue on his knees, / And feed on prayers which are ages almes,’’ take on the imperative mood and are readdressed to the mourners of Mary Nevill, apparently a friend: ‘‘Turne lovers songes to holy Psalmes, / And bravinge vautes to bending knees: / Feed now on Prayers, ages Almes.’’103 Similarly, the original lines, ‘‘Beautie, strength, youth are flowers but fading scene, / Duty Faith, Loue are roots and euer greene,’’ are reworded with emphasis to serve Lilliat’s purpose in a mourning poem, focusing on the virtue of an individual deceased: ‘‘Strength, Bewtie, Youth, aye fading seene: / When VERTVE yonge, and euer greene.’’ Lilliat signed this poem, as he did the others, despite the fact that it was a verse enlargement composed of another writer’s material. I have argued in this chapter that Liber Lilliati and the Hekatompathia, in treating the process of composition in this way, build on the everyday experience of reading and turn book ownership into book creation. The physical experience of the text defines and is in turn defined by the intellectual and discursive strategies that give these verse sequences form and meaning. In a broader sense, recognizing the malleability and customizability of early printed books in these works, and reading them side by side as a compilation, impel to us find new ways to contextualize both imitation in the Renaissance and the investment in modern aesthetics that is implicit in that concept and the attendant histories of sonnet writing in England. The species of literary collection and redeployment investigated here show that what Pigman called ‘‘following,’’ or what Greene called ‘‘exploitative’’ or ‘‘sacramental imitation,’’ need not be conceived in diametric opposition to individual self-assertion in writing. Lilliat and Watson lay bare the processes through which the appropriation and assimilation of text can become generative. These two works demonstrate that the desire to ‘‘gather and frame’’ emerges not only out of

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the early reader’s interaction with commonplace books but with books in general, which in this culture afforded a flexibility and openness that led readers to write. Watson’s then-popular text, viewed today (teleologically) as a preamble to the more important work of Sidney, leads us to ask important questions about the agency of the material book in the early period. What demands did texts make of their readers? What could a book of sonnets ask its users to do rather than merely appreciate? Histories of writing in this period are also histories of assembly and compilation. A now decades-old adage in literary studies says that ‘‘whatever authors do, they do not write books,’’104 which rightly pushes us to consider the influence of printers, editors, and the material text itself in making meaning. But in our desire to expand the range of agents in the sphere of literary production, we have perhaps forgotten that authors do, in fact, write books. They write with a comprehension of what the material artifact of writing will look like, what the book or other medium enables, and what it constrains. They reproduce that semblance of an artifact with every new literary undertaking. Whether one is writing in the expansive narrative vein of the nineteenth-century novel, on a typewriter, or on a computer, the particular form of assembly is implicated in composition from the start. In the next chapter, I turn to two of the most self-consciously reflective Renaissance works on the nature of writerly roles—Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Michel de Montaigne’s Essays—which, perhaps unexpectedly, announce themselves as assemblages and products of the culture of the handpress.

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chapter 4

Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne’s Essays

Near the beginning of his Defence of Poesy—the earliest major work of literary criticism in English—Philip Sidney revisits the idea of the writer as imitator of nature, but with a vernacular twist. ‘‘The Greeks called him [the writer] a ‘poet.’ ’’ The term ‘‘cometh of this word poiein, which is, to make: wherein I know not whether by luck or wisdom, we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him a maker.’’1 Invoking the metaphysics of representation in which poetic ‘‘making’’ is secondary, Sidney insists on what he calls the substantiality, and also the generativity, of the imaginative writer’s work: For any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them. Which delivering foorth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air: but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright, why and how that maker made him.2 In this oft-quoted but difficult passage, Sidney figures the writer as an ‘‘artificer’’—a material maker—and by implication as a parent ‘‘delivering’’ the form of a work into substance. He sets the act of generation against wholly

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or insubstantially imaginative invention, an opposition anticipated in his metaphors. But Sidney also takes a step beyond this Aristotelianism as he appeals again to a collective English ‘‘we.’’ Writing, he argues, ‘‘works substantially’’ in a field of reception, where the thing represented (‘‘a Cyrus’’) multiplies and expands (‘‘to make many Cyruses’’) and where the mechanics of representation—‘‘how that maker made him’’—is part of the product. Sidney in this account elaborates on some of the key characteristics of the literary roles in evidence in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia and in Liber Lilliati, explored in the last chapter. In portraying writing as something that necessarily proliferates and produces copies of itself, Sidney conjures for us the now-buried etymology of the word author in the Latin verb augere: ‘‘to augment,’’ to ‘‘make to grow’’ or ‘‘increase.’’3 In yoking literary practice to artifice and reproduction, he sets forth a reflexive, open-source model of creativity—one that is more closely allied to embodied ‘‘making’’ than to interior or pure origination as we understand it. Indeed, an ‘‘author’’ in early English usage could be ‘‘an inventor, constructor, or founder . . . of things material’’ as well as things ideational or intellectual; one could author a castle or piazza as well as a text.4 This dimension has been evacuated from the modern term, but the materiality of the textual process was vital to the discursive practices and self-definitions of writers such as Watson and Lilliat. Many more forged their writerly roles on the popular model of Sidney. This chapter investigates writing that ‘‘works substantially’’ in two figures whose texts have been most central to discussions of writerly selfhood and selfannouncement in the Renaissance: Edmund Spenser and Michel de Montaigne. Spenser in his Shepheardes Calender (1579) used the established classicizing vehicle of the eclogue collection to introduce a ‘‘New Poet’’ into an English scene that had until then defined writing as the youthful pastime of gentlemen destined for higher service.5 His sequence, patterned closely on Virgil’s Georgics, evokes a pastoral world of shepherds’ songs and meditations on song-craft in which disparate verse experiments are ultimately transcended by the strong authorial voice of Spenser’s pseudonymous Immerito. Montaigne, who famously left public life in the 1570s to write in isolation in his library near Bordeaux, recorded in unprecedented, intimate detail his everyday habits of reading and thinking in the Essays, the work that by the turn of the century had bred a fresh genre of self-reflective prose in Europe and England.6 Secluded, surrounded by books, Montaigne drew quotations from classical and vernacular authorities to frame a new writerly voice that speaks from within. His Essays are so identified with the transition to modern interiority

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and authorial introspection that we customarily read them (and imagine them read by Shakespeare and others) as a ‘‘book of the self.’’7 Montaigne and Spenser, to be sure, are writers with divergent projects of writerly self-announcement that emerged in different vernacular contexts. But they are also two figures who left behind traces of the materials of their self-announcement in books. Both writers, scholars have shown, ‘‘authored’’ through some form of augmentation or engagement with works already in print. George Hoffmann, in his groundbreaking study of the financing and production of the Essays, observes that in Montaigne’s project we find ‘‘a vision of the book as an activity in which readers can participate.’’8 From the earliest edition, Montaigne revised in his own unbound copies as he wrote.9 But after 1588, he stopped drafting new essays to focus on altering and expanding his existing work, a process that he carried out in ink directly in the printed book. His autograph copy of the 1588 edition, now called the ‘‘Bordeaux copy,’’ survives to witness a remarkable compositional practice that developed alongside the material development of the text itself. With wider margins and greater space in the new edition, Montaigne began interpolating manuscript lines into printed sentences; his quotations from outside material shifted from ‘‘verse, carefully indented and separated on the page by white space’’ to ‘‘prose that he inserted directly into his French text.’’10 As he interacted with the book, Hoffmann explains, his paratextual augmentations came to structure the work, reorienting his project of textual self-presentation in later editions. ‘‘Revision was now to become his entire compositional method.’’11 A less well-known remnant of a sixteenth-century author writing in his books is the sole autograph manuscript in Edmund Spenser’s hand at the Folger Shakespeare Library.12 The text, first identified by Peter Beal, contains three items—a letter by Erhard Stibar and poems by ‘‘Artifex Athensis’’ and Joannes de Silva—that were originally written in the 1560s or 1570s to commend the work of the German Neo-Latin poet Petrus Lotichius Secundus.13 Spenser copied the texts in the blank spaces of a Sammelband containing printed books by Lotichius and other Neo-Latin writers, and as Lee Piepho has shown, he seems to have drawn on this compilation of material, both manuscript and print, in preparing his pastoral debut, The Shepheardes Calender.14 The reconstructed Sammelband reveals that Spenser’s interest in the poets of Germania Latina shaped his eclogues, many of which adapt and echo models of poesy set out in Lotichius’s printed work.15 ‘‘The texts Spenser transcribed,’’ Piepho notes, ‘‘likewise reveal themes and details in Lotichius’

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poems that would have attracted him early in his career.’’16 More superficially, the copied texts are commendatory, part of the apparatus of a typical edition, and are adjacent in the Sammelband to the commendatory verses originally included in Lotichius. Spenser thus seems to add to an existing printed paratext as part of the process of making his own. The Shepheardes Calender, we know, is a work preoccupied with editorship and the apparatus of an edition; that these manuscript texts formed part of Spenser’s studies, as they did of his larger generic and thematic frame in the eclogues, highlights again the methods of material imitation that were generative for writers of verse in the period. It is not my intention in this chapter to revisit at any length the important work done on these artifacts of Renaissance text collection, the Bordeaux copy and the Folger Sammelband. Rather, I would like to use these two unusually concrete and evocative images of sixteenth-century writers at work to begin recapturing the ‘‘substantial’’ practices (to use Sidney’s phrase) that lie behind the most enduring models of writerly self-announcement from the period. In what follows, I examine the role of writer as it was constructed in both senses of the term—physically built and intellectually formed—in these works. I begin with the well-studied strategies of self-definition internal to the texts, but I move outward to the field of reception—where a ‘‘Cyrus’’ became ‘‘many Cyruses’’ in the hands of the readers and owners who took up the books in print. The two models, we know, proliferated among cultural producers in the vernacular: Montaigne in books of essays by Francis Bacon and others, and Spenser in the growth of pastoral and the currency of his shepherd figure, Colin Clout, in later Elizabethan writing. But consumers also interacted with the material texts in early collections and classification systems, situating printed copies in space and time and reframing them relative to other texts and discourses. In excavating this reciprocal structure of assembly, I argue that the plasticity of these works—indeed, their own selfdefinition as material reworkings of other texts—came to define the conceptions of writing and the writer that emerged from them. I begin with Spenser’s debut and the productive (re)configurations that readers encountered in that text before turning to Montaigne’s self-appointed role as ‘‘craftsman,’’ material maker, of his book of Essays.

Patterning the Poet: Spenser’s Compiled Calender Critics have long read The Shepheardes Calender as an ultimately classicizing work of synthesis through which Spenser, as Immerito, heralded a new poetic

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role for himself before such a thing was conceivable to his contemporaries. Locked in an early English literary system in which humanist conventions had solidified into a set of predictable writerly gestures—the poet as a selfdeprecating amateur, writing as youthful distraction among nobles—Spenser exploited his knowledge of classical and continental literatures to reanimate a Virgilian model of authorship within and yet in opposition to the codes then in place in vernacular writing. His Calender, mapped onto the familiar progression from immature pastoral to mature epic, communicated the promise of something greater in English writing—the poet as a moral voice who speaks for a people, not just for a circle of gentleman-amateurs. In this way, as Richard Helgerson explained in his foundational study of early English poesy, Spenser ‘‘could show himself to be a poet in the Elizabethan sense while he simultaneously assimilated that modern role to the ancient one of Roman laureate.’’ He ‘‘made the familiar amateur formula say something new.’’17 But The Shepheardes Calender, we also know, is a relentlessly multivocal and decentralized work. The allusiveness of the eclogues—their persistent solicitation of text from classical sources and the more esteemed continental vernaculars—is only part of the larger intertextual web within which Spenser announces himself.18 Each of the Calender’s twelve self-contained poems, one for each month of the year, unfolds within interdependent frames of paratext, illustration, literary collection, and the learned edition. The combined presentational features recall multiple and divergent kinds of text and visual materials: large woodcut images and mottos, channeling the printed emblem book; decorative initials and glosses mimicking the mise-en-page of deluxe manuscripts; arguments and other reading aids similar to those of popular romances and fable collections; notes and an introduction underscoring the work’s roots in vernacular antiquarianism and book culture; extended dialogs among shepherd figures, recalling almanacs and how-to books; and, outwardly, the organizing template of the month-to-month calendar.19 Critics generally agree that the force of Spenser’s poetic selfannouncement emerges out of the tension between the two most prominent of these structuring voices: that of Colin, the shepherd and Spenser’s narrative persona, and Immerito, Spenser’s persona in the framing envoys of the text. While the opening envoy, ‘‘To His Booke,’’ presents the Calender anonymously and humbly—‘‘as a child whose parent is unkent’’ (l. 2) and who was ‘‘begot with blame’’ (l. 14), or apprehensive about its reception—the closing envoy narrates the Calender’s triumph as a timeless artifact, anointing itself ‘‘a Calender for every yeare / That steele in strength, and time in

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durance shall outweare’’ (ll. 1–2). Immerito’s confidence as writer, as Louis Montrose and many others have shown, contrasts sharply with the story of poetic failure recounted in the interior frame of the eclogues. Here, Colin, the pastoral embodiment of Virgilian aspiration, is suspended in a closed-off cycle of trial and disappointment. The first eclogue, ‘‘Januarye,’’ finds him breaking his pipe in anger at the perceived limitations of the role of poet (in this case, the amorous poet familiar from Petrarchan complaint),20 and after numerous attempts to don the mantle of poesy as narrated, often by other shepherds, in the intervening months, Colin concludes the cycle in ‘‘December’’ by hanging up his pipe in sadness, unable to obtain rewards through his craft. The gesture of renunciation mirrors the ‘‘Januarye’’ eclogue and overlaps with the inverted but parallel gestures of Immerito in the opening and closing envoys. As Montrose demonstrates, Colin withdraws from the Virgilian progression just as Immerito proclaims himself the successor: ‘‘Poetic and social anxieties about the possible insufficiency or rejection of Spenser’s own aspiring mind are given refined expression and symbolic containment in the pattern of Colin’s experience that is developed within the Calendar’s encompassing form.’’21 The New Poet emerges through the ‘‘containment’’ of Colin and what he represents: not only the first, pastoral phrase of the Virgilian progression but also the frustrated Petrarchan poet-lover, the humble vernacular actor (Spenser draws the name, notably, from Skelton),22 and the shepherd figure familiar from numerous of the text types invoked in the Calender. From a presentational perspective, Colin is identified with the dense intertext now securely in the background—the web of allusions and appropriated models from which Spenser as Immerito frees himself in order to speak. As Wendy Wall has argued, ‘‘Spenser designs a text that looks as if it were collectively and multiply produced, but the text does not remain caught within a network of plural voices and social transactions.’’23 Spenser as Immerito becomes singular and central in the end. And yet, however contained this internal juxtaposition may seem in The Shepheardes Calender, there is always another encompassing frame, the editorial apparatus, that calls back the intertextual source material even as Immerito transcends it. In the text’s prefatory epistle to Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey, the possibly fictional editor E.K.24 introduces the Calender as a found object and its writer as a ‘‘new Poete . . . unknown to most men’’ (ll. 11–12), whose claim to an audience becomes the occasion for the book. Opening an excursus on the merits of the found work, E.K. glorifies Immerito in terms

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that anticipate the reception called for in Spenser’s closing envoy: ‘‘I dout not, so soon as his name shall come into the knowledge of men, and his worthines be sounded in the tromp of fame, but that he shall not onely be kiste, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most, and wondered at of the best’’ (ll. 13–17). But as E.K. goes on to explain in a metaphor of material ‘‘making,’’ The Shepheardes Calender will not be accessible to all readers, ‘‘the words them selves being so auncient, the knitting of them so short and intricate’’ (ll. 25–27) as to give even the learned some difficulty.25 To aid in appreciation, E.K. supplies an editorial introduction, summaries for the individual eclogues, glosses on harder words, and notes detailing the poet’s allusions, which continually call forth outside works to which the Calender is now implicitly compared. To Spenser’s modern readers, E.K.’s apparatus has the effect of elevating the project, lending an air of authority to verse written in English, which had neither the prestige of classical languages nor the perceived utility of continental vernaculars such as French and Italian.26 Renaissance book owners would have been familiar with such an apparatus from humanist editions of Latin and Greek works, many of which are alluded to in the Calender’s gloss. But if E.K. trains readers’ expectations by making Spenser’s work appear to be an already canonical classic, as critics describe it, the editor’s more explicit claims about the newness of the poet and the new discovery of the work become problematic. So do the internal frames of vernacular text types and humbler English poesy, which would have been as familiar to the early reader. Indeed, the Calender’s aspiration to set out what E.K. in one eclogue calls ‘‘the perfecte paterne of a Poete’’ seems to work in at least two ways.27 ‘‘Pattern’’ here reflects both a ‘‘precedent; that which may be appealed or referred to’’—an early usage rooted in ‘‘patron’’ and thus pater—as well as the modern concept of a preexisting ‘‘arrangement or distribution.’’28 The Calender in this sense puts forward an elevated, classicized figure of the writer as it implicates an English reader figure who appeals to that model and ‘‘perfects’’ it. The work is both referential in traditional terms and hyperreferential in its inclusiveness: Spenser sublimates the intertext of borrowing and allusion to the strong poetic voice, but he also nourishes that intertext in a field of reception and recognition, folding his audience, through an expanding network of editorial citations, into the ‘‘knittings’’ of words and discourses that make up the text. This range in reception—how the Calender pulls readers in multiple, sometimes contradictory directions—is concretely reflected in the bound

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books in which early English readers stored their printed copies. Where the complete work can only be found, read, and interpreted today in single-text volumes or collections of Spenser’s poetry, this protocol of assembly was practically unimaginable in the years following its publication. Early buyers who wanted their copies to survive would have had them bound to other small-format texts in larger volumes. And until the appearance of the collected works of Spenser in the seventeenth century, the likelihood that a copy of the Calender would end up in a book containing work by a single author was slim. In fact, Spenser’s pastoral debut seems to be, among now-canonical literary works, one of the easiest to find in rare-book archives bound in early Sammelba¨nde, such as those explored in the first part of this study. In my analysis of the AB catalog from the Cambridge University Library, we witnessed one such compilation: a 1611 copy of The Shepheardes Calender formerly affixed to William Caxton’s medieval encyclopedia, The Myrrour of the Worlde.29 Printed a century apart, the texts were kept together by an early owner, and, according to provenance records, the volume arrived in this composite format with the donor’s collection in 1649.30 Modern library order dictates that the two works—one literary, the other nonliterary; one modern, the other incunabular—be separated and housed under different shelf marks in different departments. Yet, included in a composite volume with a similarly set black-letter text on astrology and world geography, Spenser’s poetic debut evokes something closer to the vernacular folk resource than the classical edition. The Calender’s link to the classics is visible in a similar example from the Newberry Library, Case Y 135.F86.31 The book formerly contained multiple printed texts bound together in limp vellum, the original covers of which survive. The early owner—presumably the reader responsible for the assemblage—has written ‘‘Yuichurch both Parts: Shepards Calender,’’ on the vellum spine, the former title referring to the still-present Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch by Abraham Fraunce, a series of pastoral translations printed in 1591–92 that include Tasso’s play Aminta, which drew heavily, as Spenser did, from Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. The ownership marks on the inside back cover indicate that the text arrived at the Newberry with both titles still together, suggesting that the volume was disbound in conservation in the twentieth century.32 The composite text in its earliest state seems to have formed a kind of multilingual source book on the classical pastoral mode, including multiple authors and genres, and resembling the one owned by Spenser himself, the Lotichius-Sabinus Sammelband from the Folger.

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Presumably because of the canonical literary status of Spenser’s work at the time of acquisition, The Shepheardes Calender was separated from Fraunce’s lesser work so that it could stand in its own binding. A compilation formed by a known owner—Anthony Wood, the seventeenth-century Oxford antiquarian—is now at the Bodleian Library under shelf mark Wood C.17. Wood was an enthusiastic collector and meticulous organizer of his collections; most often, according to a nineteenthcentury biography, he configured his books in bindings and on shelves ‘‘in divisions according to subject, and (generally speaking) tried to arrange each volume in chronological order.’’33 But when he acquired a copy of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, he placed it not with the classics or his other poetical works (in which, we know from his book collection, he took great interest) but with vernacular conduct and husbandry manuals for the seasons, a monthly prognostication, and a treatise on calendar reform, all together in a calf binding.34 For this seventeenth-century reader, it seems, the primary organizing feature of Spenser’s work was not the pastoral or the career of the poet but the work’s focus on time. The Calender in this multitext configuration becomes one of several ways to mark chronology and the changing seasons in English—a text ‘‘proportional to the twelve Moneths,’’ as the work advertises on its title page. A second Cambridge compilation (this one intact) is shelf mark Syn.7.64.61, which brings together a 1586 copy of The Shepheardes Calender with six other printed books of verse and drama, mostly in Latin. The volume, assembled in the mid-seventeenth century, includes funeral elegies, the early heroic poem Lepanto by King James I (then James VI), and a masque by Thomas Carew, among other texts and translations.35 In this early binding, Spenser’s Calender is part of a particular type of literary miscellany. The works share similar formal qualities in being nominally poetical, but the key affiliation is that they are works of occasional verse, whether dramatic, narrative, or lyric. The presence of The Shepheardes Calender under this rubric suggests that the early book owner placed importance on something that is largely peripheral for modern readers: Spenser’s appeal to Philip Sidney—the book as a gift—or perhaps E.K.’s equally situated claim of literary discovery and his submission of the text to Gabriel Harvey in the epistle. More puzzling in its organization from our perspective is a third Sammelband from the Cambridge University Library, shelf mark Bb*.10.18. The book is an early compilation of twenty-three printed texts ranging from vernacular histories and Latin orations to political treatises on current events,

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medical books, pamphlets on architecture, and a 1586 copy of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender.36 The book embodies what after the eighteenth century would come to be called a ‘‘tract book’’: a largely pragmatic assemblage of ephemeral or cheap print, assembled by like size and format. And indeed, this early English compiler seems not to have distinguished Spenser’s enduring pastoral debut from the nonliterary texts of passing significance that he or she kept in this volume. The modern reader is pressed in this bound assemblage to find meaning in the potential ephemerality or everydayness of a text that we are trained to regard as a literary masterpiece. In the front flyleaves of the volume, in a late-period italic, a handwritten table of contents lists the Calender simply as ‘‘A Description of ye severall moneths of the yeare in Verse.’’ These few examples of early compilation suggest that our modern practices of reading and assigning value to The Shepheardes Calender do not in any straightforward sense correspond to those of Spenser’s readers in Renaissance England. That the Calender found its way into such disparate assemblages should urge us to pay closer attention to the many more dispersed forms of authority that Spenser draws on in announcing the New Poet and the new reader. This hermeneutic of dispersal contrasts sharply with modern readings of E.K.’s problematic paratextual frame and with the work of fashioning the author and audience in the text as a whole. While for much of the Calender’s history critics have puzzled over the seeming inconsistencies of the text’s editorial apparatus37—its tendency to obscure as it instructs, to digress and distract unnecessarily—it has become orthodoxy to regard E.K.’s commentary as integral to the overarching strategy of making the work appear to be an already sacralized piece of literature.38 Whether this involves rationalizing E.K.’s contribution as an ironic one that mimics the layered commentary of the humanist edition or as an earnest one that captures the reader in an almost postmodern-seeming mise-en-abyme,39 the inclination has been to assume an integrity and unity of purpose in the Calender that meets our aesthetic expectations. Behind these expectations is a powerful teleology that forces the Calender always and everywhere to anticipate Spenser’s later work. Even the most sensitive readings of Spenser’s citational practice in the Calendar seem to unify the editorial frame as a literary exercise in preparing for The Faerie Queene.40 It would not be an overstatement to say that the incongruent frames and divergent generic appropriations in The Shepheardes Calender have been central problems in scholarship on the work since Helgerson’s theory of poetic

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selfhood. But viewed from the perspective of compilation and early book collecting that I have been advancing, Spenser’s Calender becomes less an unsettling array of materials than a skilled textual assemblage reflecting the standard, necessary mode of storing and reading works of vernacular literature in the early print period. The question in this reoriented approach is not how the printed apparatus disperses authority so that Spenser can transcend it in the end, but how it amasses and consolidates authority through appropriations of divergent kinds of text accessible to his readership. The poet that Spenser announces in this work writes through a compiled, material intertext as much as he writes himself out of it. The latter gesture has perhaps been easier to determine in a culture of modern authorial classroom editions, but in 1579, when the Calender first appeared, Spenser’s readers had exposure to a broader range of textual forms to which the work may be linked, intellectually or materially. The limits of our classification systems in this respect are most apparent when we consider that Spenser’s clearest appropriation is one that is perennially overlooked: The Kalender of Sheepehards, the humble almanac with deep roots in the vernacular culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.41 E.K.’s introductory epistle calls attention to this filial debt amid a discussion of the Calender’s purposes and prescribed uses: Immerito, E.K. explains, ‘‘compiled these xii. Æglogues, which for that they be proportioned to the state of the xii. monethes, he termeth the shepheards calendar, applying an olde name to a new worke’’ (ll. 174–78). The ‘‘olde name’’ refers to the popular title translated from the French Le Compost et kalendrier des bergiers (1493) and reprinted throughout the sixteenth century in England. Scholars have pointed out a number of possible thematic links between Spenser’s Calender and the almanac.42 But what is lost in such observations—which remain dependent on an absolute distinction between literature and nonliterature—is the more historically diplomatic insight that Spenser fashions The Shepheardes Calender by taking up a popular printed book and transforming it into something new that suits his needs. That Spenser’s text is presented as a kind of formal alteration or variation on an existing book is everywhere apparent in the printed apparatus, which resembles that of the almanac more so than any poetical work in circulation in the 1570s (Figs. 24 and 25). The Calender deploys a programmatic series of crude woodcut illustrations—rare in books of serious verse at the time—much like those that appear in the Kalender.43 Spenser’s monthly eclogues also appear in the almanac’s blackletter font, which was preferred in practical texts in the vernacular but which

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Figure 24. Page layout, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Figure 25. Page layout, The Kalender of Sheepehards. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

was almost completely out of use in literary editions by the late sixteenth century.44 E.K.’s editorial commentary, in contrast, is printed throughout in roman type, identifying it with humanist scholarly practice. The title page indeed fuses these two registers in splitting the typography of the subtitle, ‘‘tvvelue Æglogues’’ in roman and ‘‘twelue monethes’’ in black-letter

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Figure 26. The mixed typography of The Shepheardes Calender’s title page. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

(Fig. 26), reflecting the apposition of Virgilian pastoral and vernacular almanac in the text. A consistent announcement that an imaginatively resituated and transformed Kalender is at the core of Spenser’s work is the running head, which gives the month of each eclogue. The classical literary works with similar temporal structures printed in the period, such as Ovid’s Fasti, gave the name of the author or work, or both. The Kalender of Sheepehards is exactly the kind of small-format English book that might be bound with The Shepheardes Calender in an early owner’s library. We know from studies of Renaissance reading manuals that there was no hierarchal distinction in the period between the skills needed to read literature and those needed to read nonliterature45 and thus that early book owners would not have experienced the same dissonance in reading The Shepheardes Calender alongside or through an almanac as we do. But we also know that the almanac represented a distinct model of textual authority and reader inclusivity in the period, which helps us understand why Spenser, the writer, would have drawn upon it in his project of self-announcement. As Adam Smyth has observed, almanacs ‘‘might plausibly be considered the most common form of self-accounting in early modern England.’’46 They were among the most popular printed texts in vernacular book culture and the most concerned with the writing life. The makers of almanacs were well

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known and appealed to by name, which would often become synonymous with the books themselves.47 The function of the text was to help the reader organize his or her life around a calendar and other seasonal tools: The Kalender of Sheepehards, for example, contains medical notes, suggestions for activities and foods proper to each month, and prognostications. But the process of organization was also a process of writing oneself into the printed book. ‘‘Almanacs,’’ Smyth writes, ‘‘encouraged reader annotations, explicitly in title-page and prefatorial instructions, and implicitly through the inclusion of empty pages for readers to occupy.’’48 Book owners would fill these modified printed texts with writing—notes on births and deaths, poems, recipes— expanding and personalizing them to make them useful.49 The almanac, in this sense, embodies a magnified version of the textual malleability that, I have been arguing, existed in potentia in small-format printed productions from the handpress era. ‘‘Within this model of reading,’’ Smyth writes, ‘‘print culture, in the form of the almanac, did not induce connotations of fixity or stability, but signaled rather a conception of the book as reworkable, negotiable not only in terms of its readings but also its inclusions and its physical form.’’50 The Calender’s investment in this model ordering self and text is obscured by the tacit assumption held by most modern critics that Spenser’s audience was first and foremost learned, and therefore not likely to find much significance in lower textual forms.51 The assumption is reinforced by the text’s dedication to Sidney. But turning back to E.K.’s introductory epistle, we remind ourselves that the work’s imagined audience is far wider than the humanist readership of learned classical editions. Describing the ‘‘knitting of sentences’’ by the New Poet as ‘‘round without roughnesse, and learned wythout hardnes,’’ (ll. 119–22), E.K. relates again that the ensuing eclogues are ‘‘such indeede as may be perceived of the leaste, understoode of the moste, but judged onely of the learned’’ (ll. 122–24). Judgment here—synonymous in modern terms with literary appreciation—is only one (privileged) way of engaging The Shepheardes Calender, while ‘‘understanding’’ is the province of ‘‘moste.’’ The differing registers of reception are present in the divergences of the eclogues’ commentaries as well. While many of E.K.’s glosses operate in the same way as the ones that supplemented humanist editions— explaining allusions and sources, or highlighting moral lessons52—a large proportion of them would have been superfluous to readers of learned texts but useful or humorously engaging to the ‘‘understanding most’’: definitions for obvious words, such as ‘‘Belte’’ (glossed as a ‘‘wast band’’) in ‘‘Februarie’’

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(l. 66) or ‘‘Men of the Lay’’ (glossed as ‘‘Lay men’’) in ‘‘Maye’’ (l. 76); running judgments on the text, such as E.K.’s remark in ‘‘June’’ that a particularly difficult passage is ‘‘full of verie poetical invention’’ (l. 57); and redundant parallel narration, such as when, during Colin’s final lament in ‘‘December,’’ E.K. notes that the speech is ‘‘a fine description of the chaunge of his lyfe and liking; for all things nowe seemed to him to have altered their kindly course’’ (l. 67). The incongruencies and excesses of the editorial frame should urge us to take seriously E.K.’s depiction of audience and consider the potential diversity of readers that Spenser may have appealed to in announcing the new poetic vocation, freed as he wanted to be from the conventions and stock self-justifications of gentlemanly amateurism. The idea is not that Spenser invoked either the humanist edition or the vernacular almanac but rather that he compiled the ‘‘paterne of a Poete’’ out of multiple borrowed text types designed for incongruent audiences. The Kalender of Sheepehards explicitly catered to this sort of divergent readership in its own paratextual material: the prologue addresses the almanac to both the ‘‘gentle reader’’ and the humble shepherd, and its closing envoy stakes a plea for positive reception not on the figurative flock of pastoral world but on the learned ‘‘Clearkes famous and eloquent.’’53 We see a similar flexibility in reception in the range of bound compilations formed by early readers and now in the rare-book collections at Cambridge, the Newberry, and the Bodleian, where The Shepheardes Calender mingles with almanacs as readily as with translations of Virgil in early volumes. Compiling, as both a mode of writing (in page presentation and generic arrangement) and a mode of reading (projected in E.K.’s commentary, realized in bound volumes), thus comes to organize the announcement and reception of Spenser’s Calender. The New Poet is introduced in this period-specific circuit of early printed-text assembly. In Spenser’s hands, compilation becomes an art. Turning from the material book to the interior text, we find that the basic gesture of appropriation that transforms Kalender into Calender— taking up and modifying an existing text but also writing oneself and one’s audience into that text—is reproduced on multiple levels as one month gives way to another. Each eclogue consists of a central, largely self-contained unit of verse that is embedded in and modulated through successive narrative and paratextual frames. This structure of apposition led an earlier generation of scholars to hypothesize that ‘‘the Shepheardes Calender resulted from a somewhat hasty gathering together of poems already composed.’’54 The view was

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held by early New Critics and bibliographers who, dismayed with the lack of a unifying plan in the Calender, sought answers in Spenser’s supposed compiling practices. The Shepheardes Calender in this account was cast as an experimental scrapbook—an anthology of Spenser’s youthful poems that had no other place. We are led to suppose that the text is pseudonymous because he would not set his name to such a gathering. Speculations about Spenser’s motives have been discarded, but the point is that these earlier critics detected a structure of compiling in the text that is hidden in our more sophisticated laureate thesis. In contrast to both lines of argument, we find that what E.K. himself calls the ‘‘compiled’’ character of the Calender is part of, not an impediment to, Spenser’s project of poetic self-presentation. Five of the twelve central units in the eclogues are borrowed or imitated, and met after several layers of the text are peeled away. The pattern followed in these eclogues is much the same as the one that appears in ‘‘Februarie,’’ whose central unit is the self-contained fable of the Oake and the Brere (an imitation of Aesop, set off in the text by a line break and a large initial, as if it were inlaid or somehow part of another text), which is embedded in a dialogue between Cuddie and Piers (borrowed from the medieval tradition of conflictus), which is itself embedded in an editorial frame (mimicking humanist productions of the classics), which is further embedded in an emblem book (with a woodcut and concluding emblem, inviting the reader’s reflection) and a calendar (with a running head indicating the month, with which the narrative always accords).55 The other seven of the eclogues’ central units are not borrowed or imitated in any pure sense, but are given over to Colin’s verses (sung either by him or through other shepherds) on the model of ‘‘Januarye,’’ in which Colin’s complaint is embedded in the successive frames of dialogue, edition, emblem book, and calendar.56 The eclogues that fall into this latter category are the Calender’s most reflective on the role of the writer, focusing attention on the state of poesy and the nature of the New Poet rather than on ecclesiastical or philosophical issues as the other eclogues do. But by analogy with the others, Colin’s songs are read through this structure of appropriation and enframing, and the editorial commentary, as conspicuous in Colin’s eclogues as in the others, gives the reader references and notes on the text that convey both a juxtaposition of materials and a vivid ‘‘paterne’’ of poesy. The eclogues’ framing devices, much like the Hekatompathia’s headnotes, function in part to call attention to the entwined projects of juxtaposition and ‘‘patterning’’ internal to the poems, making the Calender appear to the

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participatory reader as a skillfully curated gathering of exemplary materials. In this sense, the text does not simply (by mimicking the humanist edition) invent its own reception history in order to dignify a current work of literature; it also builds upon current patterns of reception—literary and nonliterary—to model a com-position, a ‘‘placing together,’’ that can then be referenced and replicated. That Immerito conceives of his work as instructive and exemplary is suggested in the opening envoy, where the New Poet embodies the figurative shepherd feeding his flock, and where the familiar entreaty, ‘‘Come tell me, what was sayd of mee: / And I will send more after thee’’ (ll. 17–19), stakes the success of the Calender’s poetic project on reader involvement. This vision of the interdependence of writer and reader is articulated again in the closing envoy, where Immerito, in the pragmatic language of the almanac, notes of his book that ‘‘if I marked well the stares revolution, / It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution. / To teach the ruder shepheard how to feede his sheepe’’ (ll. 3–5), to perpetuate itself in the field of reception. E.K., for his part, highlights the exemplarity and appropriative manner of the New Poet in his running commentary. Introducing the work with a scene of imitation—‘‘Uncouthe unkiste, Sayde the olde famous Poete Chaucer,’’ who, we are told, won followers because of his ‘‘skil in making’’ (epistle, ll. 1–3)—E.K. explains and in part justifies the collected-and-interpolated character of the eclogues’ main units. The New Poet ‘‘hath bene much traveiled and throughly redd,’’ E.K. writes, so ‘‘how could it be, (as that worthy Oratour sayde) but that walking in the sonne although for other cause he walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt; and having the sound of those auncient Poetes still ringing in his eares, he mought needes in singing hit out some of theyr tunes’’ (epistle, ll. 33–38). Imitation here is figured as involuntary—a response to reading that by nature generates text. E.K.’s editorial work in the eclogues, moreover, stresses the reflexivity of this involuntary process as it calls to the fore the text’s exemplariness. On the one hand, E.K. records the New Poet’s borrowings and reuse of material, as in ‘‘September,’’ for example, when Immerito deploys what E.K. notes as a ‘‘speache . . . much usurped of Lidgate, and sometime of Chaucer’’ (l. 10). On the other hand, E.K. urges the reader in the glosses to locate extractable pieces of the Calender for his or her own use, as in ‘‘Februarie,’’ where he glosses the lines, ‘‘For Youngth is a bubble blown up with breath, / Whose witt is weakenesse, whose wage is death’’ (ll. 87–88), as ‘‘a verye moral and pitthy Allegorie of youth and the lustes thereof ’’ (l. 87)—a saying worthy of copying and reuse.57

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This latter type of gloss thus dignifies Spenser’s verse as it implicates the reader in the composition: it shows the reader both how to ‘‘make a Cyrus’’ and ‘‘how that maker made him.’’ Throughout The Shepheardes Calender, acts of appropriating, organizing, and expanding text are figured as generative. E.K., in this regard, appears as the arch-compiler who maps the work, as a found artifact, into discrete sections: the eclogues, he writes, ‘‘may be well devided into three formes or ranckes’’ (general argument, ll. 28–29): ‘‘plaintive,’’ ‘‘recreative,’’ and ‘‘moral.’’ He notes in the epistle that his own work of glossing the Calender depended on a privileged comparison or collation between this and other of the author’s works: ‘‘I thought good to take the paines upon me [in contributing the gloss], the rather for that by meanes of some familiar acquaintaunce I was made privie to his counsel and secret meaning in them, as also in sundry other works of his’’ (ll. 186–89). This form of collation is reflected as well in the eclogues, where E.K.’s commentary enumerates the New Poet’s sources as if to produce an image of the author reading and ‘‘knitting’’ multiple texts, and in the more peripheral elements of the work, such as the gloss on the emblem from ‘‘December,’’ where E.K. compares and expands on two Latin versions of the same pithy idea, one Horatian and one Ovidian.58 E.K.’s primary employment in the eclogues, however, is guiding the reader through the poet’s collations. And here we find that the work of the editor is similar in kind to that of the writer. In ‘‘Maye,’’ for example, E.K. remarks at the start of the embedded fable of ‘‘the Kidde and the Fox’’ that ‘‘this tale is much like to that in Æsops fables, but the Catastrophe and end is farre different. By the Kidde may be understoode the simple sorte of the faythfull and true Christians. . . . By the Foxe, the false and faithlesse Papistes, to whom is no credit to be given, nor felowshippe to be used’’ (l. 174). In addition to divulging the meaning of the allegory, E.K.’s note calls attention to the method employed here as text expansion: the New Poet takes up and builds upon the fable structure from Aesop, adding his own ‘‘Catastrophe’’ (or tragic ending, interpolating another genre) by mingling it with the traditional Reynard the Fox story. This notion of composition as augmentation later becomes thematic in Colin Clout’s ‘‘August’’ lay, sung through the shepherd Cuddie, which begins: Ye wastefull woodes beare witnesse of my woe, Wherein my plaints did oftentimes resound: Ye carelesse byrds are privie to my cryes,

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Which in your songs were wont to make a part: Thou pleasaunt spring hast luld me oft a sleepe, Whose streames my tricklinge teares did ofte augment. (ll. 151–56) Here, as in ‘‘Januarye’’ and ‘‘December,’’ Colin compares himself and his gifts to elements in the natural world, a common pastoral motif. But his ‘‘plaints,’’ ‘‘cryes,’’ and ‘‘teares’’ take in that world and turn it back out again, ‘‘augmenting’’ what was already there to form a dialectic between source and song. His affected alliterative mode offers an unwitting formal complement in a compositional technique that augments thoughts and conceits through syllabic repetition. The related ‘‘October’’ and ‘‘November’’ eclogues perhaps do the most to embody and also theorize the compilations of the New Poet in the Calender. ‘‘October’’ is structured in a way similar to ‘‘Maye,’’ with the first part written in imitation of the Italian humanist poet Mantuan’s fifth eclogue and the second part expanding this central unit—which concerns the deficient state of poesy—by praising Colin, Spenser’s pastoral persona, as the only poet that could hope ‘‘to mount as high, and sing as soote as a Swanne’’ (l. 90). The speakers in the eclogue—E.K. and the shepherds, Piers and Cuddie—seem, on the surface, to comprehend the New Poesy as a form of sudden inspiration as opposed to something that can be gained from reading or practice: E.K., in the argument, notes haltingly that poesy is ‘‘an arte: or rather no arte, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to bee gotten by laboure and learning’’ (ll. 6–7); and Cuddie confirms this when he himself assumes the vatic role (aided by drink), declaring that ‘‘the vaunted verse a vacant head demaundes’’ (l. 100). But the eclogue, in conjunction with the apparatus, contradicts itself on this point at nearly every turn: E.K. in the argument praises the ‘‘studies’’ (l. 2) of the New Poet, and in the gloss, he privileges this side of the binary when he defines ‘‘Tom Piper’’ (mentioned by Cuddie) as a figure representing ‘‘rude wits, which make more account of a ryming rybaud then of skill grounded upon learning and judgment’’ (l. 78). Cuddie’s own comically failed attempt at inspiration, or what E.K. calls ‘‘Poetical furie,’’ has a similar effect: it takes him so far out of character in his speech ‘‘that it seemeth he hath forgot the meanenesse of shepheards state and stile’’ (l. 110), disrupting the pastoral mode. The ultimate contradiction arrives in ‘‘November’’ with Colin, who, immediately after his vatic glorification in ‘‘October’’ by Piers and Cuddie, delivers a verse lament cleanly

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‘‘learned,’’ in E.K.’s words, from Cle´ment Marot. The eclogue’s argument underscores Colin’s appropriative poetics with praise diametrically opposed to that of the previous month’s internal and editorial commentary: for, E.K. writes, ‘‘This Æglogue is made in imitation of Marot his song which he made upon the death of Loys the frenche Queene. But farre passing his reache, and in myne opinion all other the Eglogues of this booke’’ (ll. 4–5). ‘‘November,’’ E.K. explains, is Colin’s most sophisticated song yet—free from the selfdoubt of previous attempts and yet manifestly borrowed and extended, structurally parallel to the New Poet’s use of Mantuan’s fifth eclogue in ‘‘October.’’ Thenot the shepherd, Colin’s audience, comments on this skill of ‘‘making’’ and mixing modes of writing when he praises the poem at the end of the eclogue: ‘‘how bene thy verses meint / With doolful pleasaunce, so as I ne wotte, / Whether rejoice or weepe’’ (ll. 203–4). E.K. glosses ‘‘meint’’ as ‘‘mingled’’ (l. 203), reinforcing Thenot’s judgment that effective poetry brings together contradictory modes, ‘‘doleful pleasance,’’ rejoicing tears. ‘‘December,’’ Colin’s farewell to poesy, continues this theme and practice of mingling as it looks back at the poet’s career from the standpoint of old age, and in doing so, it reinvokes the almanac form to conclude the Calender’s seasonal cycle. The eclogue is organized around three scenes of learning that analogize the education of the writer to that of the shepherd. The first, given voice by Immerito at the start of the poem, is a scene of reading and memorization—‘‘for he [young Colin] of Tityrus [Chaucer] his songs did lere’’ (l. 4)—and the second, described in the eclogue’s central lament, is a scene of writing instruction: for ‘‘Wrenock’’ (probably Richard Mulcaster, Spenser’s headmaster) ‘‘made me,’’ Colin explains, ‘‘by arte more cunning’’ in song (l. 42). But the third scene of learning, as Colin’s reflections drift toward middle age, initially seems less transparent as a metaphor, focusing as it does on common, everyday skills that have little analog to literary education. Here, Colin notes: To make fine cages for the Nightingale, And Baskets of bulrushes was my wont: Who to entrappe the fish in winding sale Was better seene, or hurtful beastes to hont? I learned als the signes of heaven to ken, How Phœbe fayles, where Venus sittes and when. (ll. 79–84)

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Basket making, fishing, and hunting are general concerns, frequently metaphorized in pastoral poetry, but the presence of sunrise and sunset in this passage calls forth the temporal structure of the calendar on which Spenser’s work is modeled. Colin, in fact, goes on to describe similarly pragmatic forms of knowledge, forms represented in the seasonal design of the almanac, The Kalender of Sheepehards: ‘‘the sodain rysing of the raging seas’’ (l. 86), for example, or ‘‘the power of herbs, both which can hurt and ease’’ (ll. 88–90). This final appeal to the vernacular manual, Spenser’s primary appropriation, embodies a mingling of literary and pragmatic, an opening out of the guiding form of the learned edition to the ‘‘understanding moste.’’ In this sense, we might reinterpret Immerito’s plea in the closing envoy after ‘‘December’’— ‘‘Goe little Calender, thou hast a free passeporte, / Goe but a lowly gate emongste the meaner sorte’’ (ll. 7–8)—as referencing a ‘‘meaner sort’’ of books, and thus to a kind of bibliographical mobility that would, in the compilation culture of early print, maximize readership. That the emblem of the final eclogue is missing—that there is only white space where the pithy encapsulation of the poem is supposed to be—perhaps reflects the very sort of openness to reader involvement that the almanac stood for in Renaissance culture and that was being called upon by Spenser to establish the exemplarity and appeal of the New Poet.59

Michel de Montaigne and the ‘‘Crafted’’ Book ‘‘The Shepheardes Calender,’’ Bruce Smith has argued, ‘‘belongs to a tradition of works in Western literature that could all take the name of the most recent exercise in the tradition: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’’60 Virgil’s Bucolica, Dante’s La vita nuova, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Joyce’s Portrait: ‘‘Each of these works,’’ Smith writes, ‘‘is the manifesto of an acutely selfconscious young artist; each is a gathering in of the artist’s accumulated experience.’’61 The analogy to early-career self-announcement is apt, and concepts of ‘‘gathering in’’ and ‘‘accumulation’’ unexpectedly resonate in Spenser’s debut, where metaphors of knitting, patterning, and compiling prevail and where the work is organized as and through the kind of material intertext that also guided its instantiation in early bindings and libraries. But a crucial difference between Spenser’s early-career project and those of the other writers in Smith’s list is that in The Shepheardes Calender writerly selfhood is performed in part through the material form of the book. Immerito and E.K.

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announce the New Poet in the Calender by mobilizing the presentational features of early printed texts—running heads, arguments, typefaces, emblems, glosses—and exploiting the malleable, appositional structure of small-format books in the vernacular, as they were circulated and stored in collections. The gestures of self-display and self-legitimization that we lump together uncritically as allusions or references are in Spenser’s debut produced by the interplay between printed apparatus and work—between material and intellectual engagement with text. In his project of self-announcement, Spenser thus compels us to imagine him not only writing but ‘‘making’’ the book. E.K. echoes Sidney’s etymological understanding of poesy in the first words of the Calender’s epistle, where he commends Chaucer’s ‘‘skil in making’’ (l. 3), and throughout the text in his notes on Colin Clout.62 Arriving back at Sidney’s ‘‘artificer’’—at writing that ‘‘works substantially’’—I want to underscore just how thoroughly this notion of making or working on books permeated vernacular conceptions of writership in the period, beyond early-career self-portraiture. Perhaps its most famous proponent is Michel de Montaigne, who was preparing his late-career Essays for publication in France around the same time that Spenser was compiling his Calender in England. Montaigne, it is well known, was steadfast in his use of the verb faire (to make, to do) to describe writing. As Richard Regosin has observed, Montaigne set this term faire in opposition to other available, more familiar verbs of authorship (ecrire [to write] and dire [to say]) as a structuring device: ‘‘That the reader accept this framework is essential to the validity of Montaigne’s entire project. He argues that he is not merely writing but both doing and making something of substance.’’63 In his 1588 working copy, reflecting on years of reading and writing, he added a manuscript note on the title page that would become one of his most celebrated quotations: ‘‘Je n’ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m’a faict’’ [‘‘I have no more made my book than my book made me’’].64 For Montaigne, this ‘‘making’’ flowed in two directions. I conclude this chapter by looking briefly at Montaigne’s project of selfpresentation in the Essays as a counterpoise to Spenser’s early-career announcement in The Shepheardes Calender. Montaigne’s work came at the end of a long, distinguished life of public service and was worked on intensively for more than two decades.65 Where the Calender put the burgeoning writer’s education on display in glosses and commentary on sources, the Essays models what one critic has called a ‘‘posthumanist notion of exemplarity’’66 in which the mature writing self is the mediator for intertextual

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references already assimilated in the text. In De l’experience, Montaigne explicitly parodies the humanist edition, in which ‘‘il y a plus affaire a` interpreter les interpretations qu’a` interpreter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre subject: nous ne faisons que nous entregloser’’ (III, 1069) [It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but entre-glose each other] (818).67 Montaigne’s book, too, was a monumental production of a named and known writer, and a text whose material features called for a different mode of reception. Where the scale and presentational affiliations of the Calender led early readers to bind it with other works in Sammelba¨nde, early readers of Montaigne would most likely have read the Essays in stand-alone volumes much like the folio editions of Chaucer, Ronsard, Shakespeare, and other vernacular authors’ works.68 What Montaigne shares with Spenser is a preoccupation with forging something new in vernacular writing, and doing so by consciously or unconsciously exploiting the routine practices of compilation and bookmaking. Here again, the routines of early book culture become in the writer’s hands a guiding hermeneutic and a practice of literary production. As Regosin has argued, the Essays constitute ‘‘a book concerned with books.’’69 Montaigne’s work progresses intertextually, marshaling borrowed material to define and announce its writer. But rather than taking up an existing book and transforming it into a locus of reference-accumulation as Spenser does, Montaigne spent the latter part of his life assembling and reassembling his own printed copy of the Essays, folding those references into the material book in selfimposed seclusion in his library.70 As Hoffmann has brilliantly shown, Montaigne’s situated engagement with different editions of the printed text gave shape to his writing. In the early 1580s, he expanded his book by adding essays and eventually a third volume to the end of the text. And after the publication of the 1588 quarto, with its accommodating margins, he went to work expanding individual sentences and adding patches of new and borrowed material into the blank spaces of his printed book.71 Continually in the Essays, Montaigne ‘‘directs the reader’s attention to this interplay between borrowing and inventing.’’72 With characteristic self-disclosure, Montaigne subsumes the elements of a textual apparatus into his book as he opens up his audience not only to his sources but also to the writing procedures and philosophical issues surrounding their inclusion.73 Interrogating the writer here goes hand in hand with interrogating the reader, as Montaigne evokes

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the paradox of early modern authorship: that self-made text can only reveal itself at the crowded intersection of other texts. The extent to which text assembly and arrangement—practices of the book turned to ideas—guided Montaigne’s project of self-presentation has been evident in De l’amitie´ [Of friendship], now a touchstone essay in scholarship of the work. Here, Montaigne begins as he often does by reflecting on creative practice. ‘‘Conside´rant la conduite de la bensongne d’un peintre que j’ay il m’a pris envie de l’ensuivre’’ (I, 183) [Considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him] (135). Montaigne observes as the artist surrounds the painting with ‘‘grotesques,’’ ‘‘qui sont peintures fantastiques, n’ayant grace qu’en la variete´ et estangete´’’ (I, 183) [which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness] (135), when his attention shifts to his own habits of composition, where he finds an analog for the painting: ‘‘Que sont-ce icy, aussi, a´ la verite´, que crotesques et corps monstueux, rappiecez de divers members, sans certaine figure, n’ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite´? (I, 183) [What are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies pieced together of diverse members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental?] (135).74 Montaigne foregrounds a vision of the written text cobbled together out of disparate found objects—bodily members that remain visible and undigested, extending themselves in monstrous ways. The essays are cast as a space where textual parts recovered or reconstituted by the writer mingle, forming ideas through apposition and accident. De l’amitie´ embodies this practice of (re)assembly as it stages its own collaborative composition. Extending the self-deprecating painting metaphor, Montaigne writes that ‘‘car ma suffisance ne va pas si avant que d’oser entreprendre un tableau riche . . . , je me suis advise d’en emprunter un d’Estienne de la Boitie, qui honorera tout le reste de cette besongne’’ (I, 183) [because my ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture . . . , it has occurred to me to borrow one from Etienne de la Boe´tie, which will do honor to all the rest of the work] (135). La Boe´tie, his friend who had passed away, emerges as the focus of the essay as Montaigne’s writing is figured as a compilation of grotesques that surround the central ‘‘picture,’’ La Boe´tie’s own La servitude volontaire.75 Throughout De l’amitie´ Montaigne weaves reflections on friendship and writing with passages from ancient writers, and La servitude volontaire is always palpably present: Montaigne commends the work as he seeks to reclaim it

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and its author from potentially seditious readings,76 arguing ultimately that perfect friendship—loyalty among equals—is coterminous with loyalty to the state, in extension of La Boe´tie’s text. De l’amitie´ thus takes the form of a commentary or paratext for the existing work, La servitude volontaire. The conclusion of the essay brings together this practice of ‘‘writing on’’ or ‘‘through’’ a published text with the juxtapositional logic of writing as grotesquerie. Returning from general observations on friendship to his mournful thoughts on La Boe´tie—‘depuis le jour que je le perdy’’ (I, 193) [since the day I lost him] (143), he begins— Montaigne shapes the emotional climax by letting other writers speak for him in progressively larger embedded quotations: first, one-and-a-half lines from Virgil’s Aeneid; second, two lines from Terence’s Heautontimorumenos; third, five lines from Horace’s Odes;77 and fourth, a full sonnet from Catullus. The borrowings are unattributed and introduced by a sentence fragment of Montaigne’s that they complete to form a thought. To this chorus of interpolated voices, in which the essayist’s own feeling expressions are compiled through outside reading, Montaigne adds the longawaited text by La Boe´tie. But, as if to highlight the ‘‘accident’’ of juxtaposition, De l’amitie´ does not deliver the promised La servitude volontaire. ‘‘En eschange de cet ouvrage serieux, j’en substitueray un autre’’ (I, 195) [In exchange for this serious work I shall substitute another] (144), Montaigne writes—the youthful sonnets of La Boe´tie, which remained in subsequent editions of the work.78 The ‘‘polished picture’’ thus becomes an absent center around which the grotesques of the essayist’s readings and reflections are indefinitely suspended in arrangement. Montaigne offers a fuller, less-examined reflection on this practice of engaging and assembling text in Des livres [Of books].79 Here again, the essayist opens by comparing himself to other writer-artists, whom he calls ‘‘les maistres du mestier’’ (II, 407) [the masters of the craft] (296). He defines his project, in contrast, as ‘‘purement l’essay de mes facultez naturelles, et nullement des acquises. . . . Ce sont icy mes fantasies, par lesquelles je ne tasche point a` donner a` connoistre les choses, mais moy (II, 407) [purely the essay of my natural faculties, and not at all of the acquired ones. . . . These are my fancies, by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself] (296). Yet in setting up this distinction between exemplary writing as ‘‘craft’’ and his own outpouring of ‘‘fancy,’’ Montaigne quickly undermines himself as he turns inward to find his library. Des livres, we find, is an essay primarily concerned with the essayist’s reading materials and how he deploys them

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in a method of prose composition. The piece combines observations about exemplary writers from classical and vernacular traditions with a reflexive narration of his writing process, a pattern anticipated in other essays but offered here explicitly in the service of comparison. Montaigne’s persistent desire to revise his Essays is mirrored in ‘‘des endroicts de l’Æneide ausquels l’autheur eut donne´ encore quelque tour de pigne, s’il en eut eu loisir’’ (II, 410) [the passages in the Aeneid which the author would have brushed up still a little more if he had had the chance] (298); his technique of ‘‘piecing together’’ disparate parts, as grotesques, finds a similar parallel in his reading of Plutarch and Seneca, whose works ‘‘ont tous deux cette notable commodite´ pour mon humeur, que la science que j’y cherche, y est traicte´e a` pieces de´cousues’’ (II, 413) [both have this notable advantage for my humor, that the knowledge I seek is there treated in pieces not sewn together] (300).80 The language here—‘‘brushed up,’’ ‘‘not sewn together’’—imputes the the notion of manual ‘‘craft’’ to revision and compilation, and the sustained preoccupation with analogs in others’ books challenges Montaigne’s claims about the self-directedness of his prose. Taking up again the language of craft, Montaigne begins a long discussion of his textual borrowings with the request that ‘‘qu’on ne s’attende pas aux matieres, mais a` la fac¸on que j’y donne’’ (II, 408) [attention be paid not to the matter (of the Essays) but to my fashioning of it] (296).81 He continues: ‘‘Qu’on voye, en ce que j’emprunte, si j’ay sc¸eu choisir de quoy rehausser mon propos. Car je fay dire aux autres ce que je ne puis si bien dire, tantost par foiblesse de mon langage, tantost par foiblesse de mon sens. Je ne compte pas mes emprunts, je les poise. Et si je les eusse voulu faire valoir par nombre, je m’en fusse charge´ deux fois autant’’ (II, 408) [Let people see in what I borrow whether I have known how to choose what would enhance my theme. For I make others say what I cannot say so well, now through the weakness of my language, now through the weakness of my understanding. I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them. And if I had wanted to have them valued by their number, I should have loaded myself with twice as many] (296). Montaigne here places under the reader’s scrutiny the appropriative technique that was on display in De l’amitie´: the deployment of text to expand the always incomplete, self-made thought or ‘‘theme.’’ The image of writing that emerges is one of careful selection and piecing together—the writer as a synthetic organizer of literary and philosophical material. This passage, which calls attention to its own ‘‘fashioning,’’ was part of a large-scale revision carried out in the margins of the Bordeaux copy after

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1588, where Montaigne transformed a hundred-word aside on textual borrowing into an in-depth discussion over three times as long. The bulk of the revision—itself an expansion—is taken up with the issue of ‘‘raisons et inventions que je transplante en mon solage et confons aux miennes’’ (II, 408) [reasonings and inventions that I transplant into my soil and confound with my own] (296). Montaigne notes that he often deliberately omits his sources’ names as he mixes or ‘‘confounds’’ text, not out of a desire to steal but rather ‘‘pour tenir en bride la temerite´ de ces sentences hastives qui se jettent sur toute sorte d’escrits. . . . Je veux qu’ils donnent une nazarde a` Plutarque sur mon nez, et qu’ils s’eschaudent a` injurier Seneque en moy’’ (II, 408) [in order to hold in check the temerity of those hasty condemnations that are tossed at all sorts of writings. . . . I want them to give Plutarch a fillip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me] (296–97). Inhabiting his own material text, the 1588 copy, in order to alter and expand it, Montaigne imagines himself being inhabited by the writers he quotes, Plutarch and Seneca. Borrowing becomes ‘‘entre-glosing,’’ which in turn becomes audience provocation; the compilation and juxtaposition of text is indistinguishable, in effect, from the substitutability of the writer. In a manner not unlike Spenser, Montaigne implicates his readership through a modified work of classicizing erudition in print, but, where Spenser maintains the two separate voices of writer and editor to provoke reader association, Montaigne builds the editorial structure of reference into the work and the self, challenging his audience to locate the exemplar in the compiler. In Des livres, metaphors of compiling grow into practices of writing grounded in the essayist’s reading habits. ‘‘A mesme que mes resveries se presentent,’’ Montaigne writes, ‘‘je les entasse; tantost elles se present en foule, tantost elles se trainent a` la file’’ (II, 409) [As my fantasies present themselves, I pile them up; now they come pressing in as a crowd, now dragging single file] (297). In this figuration of the creative process, ‘‘fancies’’ or fantasies are made material; the writer is reimagined as one who arranges ideas—as things—that arrive with a force and frequency of their own determination. Montaigne then presses this conception of writerly creativity into the realm of practice. Like De l’amitie´, Des livres concludes with the essayist summoning outside texts to be placed in juxtaposition, suspending narrative closure in favor of a scattering of readerly perspectives. But here, Montaigne’s habits as an active, annotating reader become constitutive of the essay: ‘‘J’ay pris en coustume, de´puis quelque temps, d’adjouter au bout de chasque livre . . . le temps auquel j’ay acheve´ de le lire et le jugement que j’en ay retire´ en

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gros, afin que cela me represente au moins l’air et Ide´e generale que j’avois conceu de l’autheur en le lisant. Je veux icy transcrire aucunes de ces annotations’’ (II, 418) [I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it. I want to transcribe here some of these annotations] (305). This vivid illustration of method in book ownership and collecting is followed by sizable transcriptions from his books—Guicciardini’s History of Italy, and the Me´moires of Philippe de Commines and Du Bellay—bringing Des livres to a close without additional commentary from the author. The interpolated texts, self-contained and detachable in this way, thus take on the appearance of essays in miniature, offering learned discussions of exemplary authors and general judgments on writerly style. Borrowed and inserted, they conjure the activities of ‘‘transplantation’’ that Montaigne makes central to his reflections on writing as selfannouncement. But in drawing their text from the flyleaves of books annotated by Montaigne himself, the essays-within locate the writer’s approach to composition directly in material books. Montaigne’s gathered commentary, a set of readings that he records in ink in the blank spaces of copies, becomes the content of the essay itself. Montaigne’s practices of writing in books and using that text to form his own compositions were common in Renaissance culture, as we have seen in the writings of Spenser, John Lilliat, and others. But Montaigne’s case is unique in that these activities of ‘‘writing in’’ and ‘‘on’’ books seem to have become implicated in the Essays’ legacy—the form of exemplarity or prescribed reception embodied in the printed volume. Many who took up Montaigne’s text, from writers and translators to readers, did so under the banner of his professed disposition to revise, expand, and modify the printed copy. Marie De Gournay, Montaigne’s fille d’alliance, famously undertook her own project of self-authorization in editing and reproducing the French Essais from the 1595 expansion to the reissues of the mid-seventeenth century.82 As Marc Schachter has shown, Gournay adopted Montaigne’s compositional practice in her work, both in the Essais, where minute changes in the text after 1595 reflect her wish to supersede La Boe´tie as Montaigne’s main interlocutor, and in her own Promenoir de M. de Montaigne, where she signed her name to lines by La Boe´tie in a prefatory epistle in order to assume his authority.83 John Florio, Montaigne’s earliest translator and promoter in England, seems also to have borrowed or internalized much of Montaigne’s

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attitude toward the malleability of text.84 In his translation, Florio added his own words to Montaigne’s without supporting notation, incorporating new explanations, etymologies, and commentaries, as Montaigne did in his copy.85 Florio’s ‘‘most confirmed habit,’’ according to early accounts, ‘‘is to draw fresh illustrations which have been suggested to him by the text,’’86 adding material to Montaigne’s original even where the addition is superfluous. Early owners of the Essays, too, seem to have felt encouraged to add and compile material in the text. Of the monumental, large-format printed productions that I survey in this study, Montaigne’s work is among the most commonly found today with early annotations. In English editions, these readers’ marks often take the form of glosses that supplement the text with identifications of unattributed sources. In the margins of a typical early copy of the Essays in translation from the Folger Shakespeare Library (FSL STC 18042, copy 5), a seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century reader furnished ‘‘Of Books’’ with names and titles corresponding to those discussed by Montaigne in the text. The reader thus continues the work of Florio, the translator, who printed select citations as glosses in the English text. In a different Folger copy (FSL STC 18042, copy 4), an early owner gathered outside material to imitate and supplement Montaigne. In the margin of the essay ‘‘Of Cannibals,’’ at a moment where Montaigne discusses the cooking habits of native peoples, the early reader has added a quotation from Pliny’s Natural History: ‘‘Harum fronde mollior specus libro vestis. Eti:anum gentes sic degunt. Quo magis ac magis admirati subit, ab i[]s principiis cædi montes in Marmora . & .’’ [Even to this very day, there are people that live under similar circumstances as these. Still more and more, then, we must be struck with admiration that from this primæval state we should be cutting into mountains for their marble &c.].87 The ‘‘entre-glosed’’ text, on civilization and its other, functions as many of Montaigne’s own borrowings to contribute meaning to the Essays by apposition. A copy of Montaigne’s work now at the Houghton Library at Harvard University (HLH TP 2750 5 35 Lobby III 4 12) displays another common supplementation for readers of the Essays in English: a set of notes added to the printed index enumerating additional terms found in the text. Here the early book owner mimics the presentational format of the printed copy, using the blank spaces of the volume to compile references deemed significant in the process of reading. The parallel treatment of the work by Montaigne’s contemporaries, translators, and book owners suggests that the ‘‘crafted’’ text and self of the

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Essays had become in the author’s wake a hermeneutic of compilation—an assemblage of materials that was both self-defining in the field of writerly roles and subject to continual modification, supplementation, and perhaps redefinition in the hands of readers. Samuel Daniel registered a similar assessment in his commendatory poem included in the prefatory apparatus to John Florio’s English translation of the Essays: And let the Critick say the worst he can, He cannot say but that Montaigne yet Yeeldes most rich peeces and extracts of man; Though in a troubled frame confus’dly set. (sig. A4r)88 Daniel’s verse calls attention, as Montaigne does in his metaphor of grotesques, to the compiled character of the Essays and the book’s fragmented intellectual ‘‘yield.’’ Yet in the final line, as the poet moves to the form or fashioning of the text, any clear sense of agency drops away, leaving the question open as to who ‘‘sets The Essays confus’dly.’’ The con-fusing, or fusing together, of work’s pieces are figured as both a mechanism of production—of making books in either the secluded study or the printing shop— and the concern in interpretation: the working on and (re)assembly of text in the field of reception. The idea is reiterated in a different context in a general prefatory poem called ‘‘To the Beholder of this Title,’’ added to the 1632 English edition.89 The verses stand opposite the text’s new frontispiece, which depicts a free-floating door opening out onto a vast city. Addressing the book owner or ‘‘beholder’’ directly, the speaker notes that the engravers had an ambitious plans for the illustration: VVhen first this portlike Frontispeece was wrought, To raise a Pile compleat, it was our thought, Whose Roomes and Galleries should have been trim’d With Emblemes, and with Pictures fairly lim’d, And drawn from those neat Peeces, which do lurke Within the Closets of this Author’s worke. The poem envisions the Essays spatially as an architectural memory device with decorated domestic spaces corresponding to the gatherable ‘‘pieces’’ in

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the book. In continuing the conceit, however, the speaker laments the impossibility of the engravers’ representational program: Walking through that Plaace of Invention (The better to accomplish our Intention) Wee found unlookt for, scattred here and there, Such Profits, and such pleasures, ev’ry where, In such Variety, that, to but name Each one, would make a Volume of the same. The problem of reading and representing the Essays is figured here as one of managing a mass of information. The suggestion that finding ‘‘scattred profits’’ in the Essays could lead the reader to ‘‘make a Volume’’ for each extracted, named part underscores the exemplarity of the book and the generative promise of engaging with it. All of this, the speaker is careful to say in conclusion, is ‘‘Beyond a briefe expression.’’ The engravers cannot be blamed for their inadequacy; to read the book of the self is to make another. Edmund Spenser and Michel de Montaigne are two Renaissance writers who for different reasons and under different cultural codes and traditions have come to stand for the early modern authorial self—that is, a model of writership that approaches and in some accounts announces, the modern author. Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, read as an early-career work that plots its own obsolescence to make way for the mature epic, The Faerie Queene, has been synonymous with ‘‘laureateship’’ and the path of an English literary career. Montaigne’s Essays, prepared and read today in editions that diagram the process of revision in A-, B-, and C-text interpolations, provides a simulated chronology of writerly development as well the archetype of cloistered writing and reflection. In this chapter, I have pushed back on these perspectives—which depend on modern vocabularies and notions of text—by bringing material copies of the works and echoes of that materiality in the works to the surface of interpretation. I have argued that in both the ‘‘compiled’’ text of Spenser and the ‘‘crafted’’ text of Montaigne, the self is written in and on books; the role of writer emerges in period-specific engagement with flexible printed texts. However much these works look forward to modern economies of literary production and reception, they tell another story of the rise of the vernacular and development of the early printed literary text in the

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hands of Renaissance writers and readers, who inherited a legacy of Sammelband collection that went as far back as the beginning of printing in the later Middle Ages. That legacy went back further, under a variety of names. Implicit in my argument thus far in this study is a longer chronology of textual practices than our period distinctions typically allow: a Renaissance culture of compiling that owes much to medieval compilatio, the Middle English ‘‘anthology culture’’ that Seth Lerer has described, and the manuscript miscellany that is such a staple of medieval literary scholarship and bibliography.90 That Renaissance literary figures such as Spenser and Montaigne break with the immediate past—Spenser in strategies of vocational self-definition and Montaigne in individuated style and voice—is perhaps in part an effect of a desired textual order that separates manuscript from book, incunable from print, medieval from ‘‘early modern.’’ We want Spenser and Montaigne to be the start of something new rather than points in the development or refinement of modes of writership rooted in the vernacular past. Our editions, library classifications, and rare-book rooms tell this first story. But beneath the rebindings and in the texts themselves, there are other stories waiting to be told. The next chapter traces this longer chronology of compiling and book collection as it is expressed in a different kind of writerly announcement: the monumental folio publication of a writer’s ‘‘collected works.’’ In this chronology, too, we find that modern categories of textual order define the field of inquiry and the questions literary scholarship can ask or answer. Ben Jonson’s 1616 Works and Shakespeare’s 1623 folio are held up as standards for editorial collection in this early period—printed books that ushered in new valorization of the vernacular literary figure writing ‘‘works.’’ But how does this narrative change when we take into account the long line of early English works produced in the sixteenth century and very early seventeenth century, culminating not in Jonson and Shakespeare, but in Spenser and Samuel Daniel? Looking backward to the lineage of vernacular ‘‘Works’’ collections beginning with Chaucer in 1532, I show how even these monumental, authorial books remained, in Sidney’s words, ‘‘made’’ objects.

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The Custom-Made Corpus English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623

In 1906, when Alfred W. Pollard reported in The Academy the discovery of two seemingly related quarto compilations, he hit on what would become one of the most enduring mysteries in Shakespeare studies.1 One compilation had surfaced in a German library a few years before, still in its early seventeenthcentury binding; the other had recently been broken up for sale at Sotheby’s. Their ten constituent play texts were identical: the two-part Whole Contention (1619), Pericles (1619), A Yorkshire Tragedie (1619), Merchant of Venice (1600), Midsommer Nights dreame (1600), Merry Wives of Windsor (1619), King Lear (1608), Sir Iohn Oldcastle (1600), and Henry the fift (1608).2 The varied publication dates suggested that the two volumes were reader-assembled Sammelba¨nde. But for Pollard, ‘‘the chances that two collectors, without any determining cause, had bound together precisely the same editions of these plays, without the admixture of any others, seemed very remote.’’ He concluded that the publishers—most visibly, Thomas Pavier, whose imprint is on most of the title pages—had been issuing the plays as a Shakespearean collection. Since the latest publication date among the quartos is 1619, the editions from 1600 and 1608 could only be accounted for by ‘‘supposing that they belonged to unsold stock, and that the news of the forthcoming folio of 1623 caused them to be thrown on the market as what we now call a ‘remainder.’ ’’3 The mystery of the Pavier Quartos—more popularly, the ‘‘False Folio’’4 — became such when, shortly after Pollard’s discovery, it was determined that these earlier dates were forgeries. In a landmark work of bibliographical forensics, ‘‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos,’’ W. W. Greg replaced the ‘‘remainder’’ hypothesis with a story of piracy that with few exceptions continues to guide critical treatments of the texts.5 Greg’s analysis of the

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watermarks in the collection showed that the individual quartos had been printed on the same mixed stock of paper, all in or around 1619. Pavier, it seemed, owned the rights to only some of the plays and falsified the earlier dates to pass off his illicit reprints as unsold editions. That The Whole Contention and Pericles had been signed continuously, while the other quartos were bibliographically independent, served to Greg ‘‘to show that Pavier was not able to carry through what must . . . have been a rather shady bit of business, wholly without protest from those who conceived their rights to have been invaded.’’6 The subsequent discovery that the Stationers’ Company, also in 1619, issued an order at the request of the Lord Chamberlain to prevent the printing of ‘‘playes that his Majesty’s players do play’’7 hinted again that the quarto compilation was aborted because the folio was in preparation. The Pavier project, it seemed, was a failed collected works of Shakespeare. Figure 27 shows the back page of a particular Pavier quarto, a copy of Henry V now at the Huntington Library.8 The play was rebound individually in the modern era and, like most collectors’ items, purged of any evidence of earlier ownership or circulation. But if you look very carefully at this leaf, you can see a trace of an earlier material arrangement. The trace is not what curators call ‘‘offset,’’ or transferred from page to page while the ink was still curing in the printing house (which is common and easier to see). It is an almost imperceptible darkening of the paper that comes from the oil in ink or its acidity relative to a facing leaf.9 The impression spells out in mirror image ‘‘woman’’ across the top of the page, with a lighter ‘‘k’’ in the line below. A search of texts contemporary with Pavier’s reveals that the image is in fact the title page of Thomas Heywood’s play, A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse (1617), which must have been bound with Henry V for some time in order to leave such a visible mark (Fig. 28). What is surprising here is not the likelihood that two dissimilar quartos were formerly bound in the same volume; this sort of compiling, I have shown, was common practice in earlier periods. It is rather that this particular Shakespearean quarto, thought to be part of Pavier’s collection project, was compiled—or ‘‘admixed,’’ to use Pollard’s term—with a work not by Shakespeare nor attributed to Shakespeare at all. The mixture, moreover, is no accident of archiving. Figure 29 shows a handwritten contents list from a similar Pavier compilation at the Folger Shakespeare Library.10 The volume that corresponds to this list has been disbound, but a former owner, Bishop Percy, recorded information in the flyleaves in the 1760s that allows its provenance and circulation to be traced with unusual accuracy.11 Though the

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Figure 27. The back page of a Pavier copy of Henry V, showing an ink transfer from Heywood’s A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

books have been reshaped numerous times, the table of contents, also in Percy’s hand, ‘‘may safely be assumed [to reflect] the original order’’ of the volume, according to the Folger conservators.12 And here we can see that the first play listed is none other than Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, originally adjacent to Shakespeare’s Henry V, and preceding the full run of play texts in the supposed Shakespearean collection of 1619. This,

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Figure 28. The title page of A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse as originally issued. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

like the ghost image in the Huntington Henry V, is a species of archival data that goes unrecorded in modern classification systems.13 But if two like combinations of text spurred Pollard and Greg to begin investigating a ‘‘False Folio’’ affair in the early twentieth century, the two combinations of text here ought to give us pause. In these cases, it is perhaps modern routines of cataloging and conservation rather than early printers’ schemes that give us the mystery of the aborted collected works.

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Figure 29. The contents list from a now-disbound Pavier collection, Folger Shakespeare Library STC 26101 copy 2. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Vernacular Writers and the Contingent Collection Pavier’s quartos resist the standard designations for a writer’s works, but one would not know that from reference tools such as Greg’s indispensible Bibliography of the English Printed Drama or the Short Title Catalogue that in later editions relies on it.14 That the series was not necessarily Shakespearean—

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that readers and booksellers were free to compile the works with nonShakespearean material15—is submerged in the Bibliography, where the 1619 texts are listed under ‘‘Shakespeare’’ and in a separate volume entitled ‘‘Collections.’’16 Thus, while the central playwright was originally a contingent force, dependent on readers or publishers to emerge in the bound collection, he is in modern book culture the primary organizing rubric, always there in advance of any effort at collecting or conserving the texts. The codification of the series as a Shakespearean ‘‘Works’’ was no doubt self-reinforcing in modern libraries, where the plays were in all but a few cases rebound, and where the Bibliography and Short Title Catalogue invariably presided on the reference shelf to guide conservation programs.17 I will return to the Pavier Quartos later in this chapter, but I would first like to use this idea of a contingent collection to investigate the early printed ‘‘Works’’ volume as, in part, an effect of compiling habits specific to the handpress era. Pollard and Greg naturally saw small-format Shakespearean texts in constitutive relation to the First Folio; the collected works is in modern book culture the assumed telos of a distinguished literary career. The calculated self-enclosure of the format—its capacity to monumentalize and stabilize an individual writer’s corpus—has been a touchstone of what two decades ago started as an effort to historicize the concept of authorship among scholars of the early modern period.18 Particularly in the field of drama, critics have uncovered the extensive debts that modern conceptions of writing owe to the forms of seventeenth-century printed collections.19 The 1616 Workes of Ben Jonson was among the first steps in ennobling the vernacular playwright in England, adopting the classical designation of Opera—and the established, classicizing folio—for a type of text that until then had been excluded from serious book collections.20 The Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies followed in 1623 with a monumentalizing printed apparatus that famously made Shakespeare, in Jonson’s own words, ‘‘not for an age, but for all time.’’21 Recently critics have taken up the early printed collection once again but to argue for a return to a more traditional, less historically variable model of authorship.22 In his study ‘‘What Is a Co-Author?’’ Jeffrey Knapp rightly notes that ‘‘other collected Works of authors appeared throughout the sixteenth century,’’23 well before the folios of Jonson and Shakespeare that have attracted so much scholarly attention. Many of these were classical Opera from long-familiar Greek and Roman examples, but some, including the 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer, were collections of vernacular English writers.

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Knapp goes on to list them: ‘‘Thomas Lupset in 1546, Sir Thomas More in 1557, Thomas Becon in 1564, William Tyndale, John Frith, and Robert Barnes in 1573, and Edward Dering in 1597. Chaucer may have been the first English literary author whose writings were published as Works, but he was not the only such author before Jonson. The Woorkes of John Heywood were first published in 1562, and by 1598 had run to four more editions; John Skelton’s Workes appeared in 1568; George Gascoigne’s Woorkes were published, after two previous collections of his writings, in 1587.’’ Knapp reasons that since the vernacular collected-works edition has signaled to critics the presence of a central, organizing writer figure, the model had been available to early modern poets and playwrights all along. ‘‘Authors were,’’ he explains, ‘‘as conventional a category in Renaissance English thinking as books were.’’24 Knapp’s equation here may be accurate, but not in the way he intended. Scholars with substantive experience in print history have been mindful of precisely the unconventionality of early books as a category,25 a point reinforced throughout this study. On the other side of the equation, Knapp’s collected authors are nearly as complicated. In every instance of a vernacular collection in Knapp’s list, the perceived integrity of the ‘‘Works’’ designation gives way to a more porous, composite structure when we move beyond the edition’s short title. In Thomas Lupset’s Workes, for example, only the first three items (of seven) listed in the table of contents are original works by Lupset; the Short Title Catalogue notes with puzzlement that the volume ‘‘includes a reprint without attribution of Sir T. Elyot’s trans. of Pico’s Twelve Rules.’’26 Thomas More’s Works, certainly one of the more monumentalizing productions of the era, contains works not only by More but a few also ‘‘collected by’’ More, along with letters by others.27 The Worckes of Thomas Becon begins with a remarkable three-page list, ‘‘the names of the Authors, whose autorities and testimonies are recited in the workes folowyng.’’28 The list reaches 278 names of church fathers before ending with an open note, ‘‘with diuerse other,’’29 marking the Worckes as a large-scale, multisource production before the reader reaches the text. Edward Dering’s Workes is composed out of four individually printed books rather than a single, monumental one.30 Like the Pavier Quartos, each book has a title page, and thus (it is presumed) the flexibility to circulate independently or to be bound with other similarly sized texts at the buyer’s discretion. The Whole Workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes is more evidently not a production of a central organizing literary figure but of

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multiple writers bound into a book. The printer John Foxe, in his preface, urges the ‘‘reading and conferring their workes togither.’’31 He explains that the publishers have been diligent in compiling the three texts for this purpose: ‘‘With which William Tyndall . . . may be adioyned also Iohn Frith, and D. Barnes, both for that they togither with him in one cause, and about one tyme, sustained the first brunt, in this our latter age, and gaue the first onset against the enemies.’’32 In this case, doctrine and chronology align the three writers. The issuing of a well-known ‘‘Works’’—that of Tyndale—is an occasion to issue additional, related, but less well-known ‘‘Works.’’ The point is to produce associations for a reader, in Foxe’s words, conferring them together, perhaps as part of the work of demarcating the writers’ corpora. Moving from the devotional writers to the vernacular poets and playwrights in Knapp’s list, John Heywood’s Woorkes is subtitled A dialogue conteynyng the number of the effectuall prouerbes in the Englishe tounge . . . , With one hundred of Epigrammes: and three hundred of Epigrammes vpon three hundred prouerbes: and a fifth hundred of Epigrams, Wherevnto are now added a syxt hundred of Epigrams by the sayde John Heywood.33 Sixteenth-century readers, who knew Heywood as a playwright, would not have recognized this expanding book of proverbs as a collected works in our sense. Moreover, Heywood, who excluded his dramatic texts from the collection, underscores in the preface the commonplace rather than (what we call) authorial derivation of the volume’s content: ‘‘our common plaine pithie prouerbes olde.’’34 He elaborates on his process of compiling, collaboratively with a friend, ‘‘as many of them as we could fytly fynde,’’ identifying himself the (co-)finder or framer—as creator—of the texts that bear his name and the title of Woorkes.35 Heywood’s collection drew from and was modeled after similar commonplace collections, such as Erasmus’s Adages, but lest the volume’s foundobjectness or didacticism overshadow its status as poetry, Heywood makes clear in the preface: ‘‘This write I not to teache, but to touche.’’36 George Gascoigne’s ‘‘Works’’ contain a similar mixture of written and borrowed material. The first of his many collected editions, The Hundreth sundrie flowers (1573), was ‘‘gathered parteley, and partly by inuention,’’ according to its subtitle. The Whole woorkes, which subsumes the 1573 text, advertises itself as ‘‘compiled into one Volumne,’’ and was made up of four books separately printed and issued, like Dering’s, with a general title page to form a collection when bound together.37 Skelton’s Workes also emerged in a tradition in which the writer was fashioned through paratextual gestures

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of compiling in addition to corpus building; indeed, he was named as ‘‘compiler’’ in earlier iterations of the collection.38 The preface from the 1568 volume to which Knapp refers mounted an elaborate justification for printing an English ‘‘Works’’ edition: the publisher compares the book to editions of Greek and Roman writers, pleading with the reader, ‘‘I pray you then my friendes, / Disdaine not for to vewe: The workes and sugred verses fine, / Of our raer poetes newe,’’39 suggesting, again, that the vernacular collection was a fraught rather than conventional undertaking. Listed in the volume’s table of contents under the seemingly unambiguous heading ‘‘Workes of Skelton’’ is a piece attributed to another poet: ‘‘a parable by William Cornishe in the Fleete,’’ which the Dictionary of National Biography supposes ‘‘was included, apparently in error.’’40 The earliest modern editor of Skelton’s Workes expresses similar surprise in the book’s introduction: ‘‘How the very dull poem by William Cornishe came to be inserted in this collection, I know not.’’41 Insertions and other forms of intrusion and compilation are surprising when the collected-works edition and writer figure that organizes it are taken as historically stable categories. But this brief survey has suggested that while early English print culture did inherit a classical Opera model that would become manifest in Jonson’s 1616 folio and beyond, the ‘‘Works’’ volumes of sixteenth-century vernacular writers had a lineage—perhaps a function—that is not exclusively traceable to that model. In every instance of a collection organized by the English writer(s) of this period, the ‘‘Works’’ designation either admitted texts not by the writer named on the title page or served to unite a number of books printed in individual, detachable units.42 (And if we choose to see the Pavier Quartos as a collected works, it did both.) The central vernacular writer figure as it emerges in these texts is in some cases an opportunity for the printer or bookseller to link writers together by association; in others, that central figure is a function of the material assembly, subject to the book owner’s will at the time of purchase or acquisition. Such collecting habits call up the vernacular forms of compilation that developed in early English book culture in continuity with the Middle Ages. To get a sense of how these contingent collections persisted in shaping the monumental folio editions of early modern writers such as Shakespeare and Jonson, I will take a closer look at the three self-declared ‘‘Works’’ productions that stand between those monumental editions and their counterparts in earlier cultures of compiling: the collected works of Chaucer (first appearing in 1532), Samuel Daniel (1601), and Edmund Spenser (1611).

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Chaucer’s ‘‘Works’’: The Medieval Auctor in Print The vernacular collections of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England owe as much to the early Sammelba¨nde of medieval writers’ works as to classical Opera that flourished alongside them in humanist book culture. Alexandra Gillespie has explored in detail the earliest Chaucer and Lydgate productions as they issued from the presses of Caxton and his successors—productions that show ‘‘the importance of the dispersed, flexible, and changeful manuscript tradition that had long been a part of English culture to Caxton’s practice.’’43 Gillespie uses the term open-endedness to describe the early book trade and its treatment of medieval writers’ corpora. Drawing on Alastair Minnis’s study of scholastic attitudes toward authorship and compilation, she underscores the centrality in this early period of Saint Bonaventure’s well-known definition of the author, or auctor: ‘‘Someone [who] writes both his own materials and those of others, but his own as the principal materials, and the material of others annexed for the purpose of confirming his own.’’44 Authorship as an organizing principle was necessarily porous in this understanding. As Gillespie explains, ‘‘To call someone an auctor is to assign him some ability to control language, to lay claim to his ‘own’ words, but also to affirm the meaning of those words by annexing those of other auctores. . . . Some authority and some part of the process is always extrinsic.’’45 In this we hear intimations of later writing practices that, I have shown, were based in part on kinds of ‘‘annexation’’—literal in the case of John Lilliat and Thomas Watson, and figurative in works by Spenser and Montaigne. But incunabular print culture, perhaps more so than in the Renaissance, was a Sammelband culture in which models of vernacular writership depended on compilation and annexation to emerge as categories.46 Gillespie and Seth Lerer have both shown that Chaucer—by far the most influential and generative figure in early Tudor literary circles—was first put to press in small, linkable booklets issued in quick succession.47 Caxton’s 1483 quarto series, in the words of one near-contemporary reader, was Chaucer’s ‘‘opera . . . in unum volumen collegise.’’48 Richard Pynson’s 1526 series followed, making the works of Chaucer available in formats that resembled—and could be treated as—the manuscript anthologies that were integral to poetic practice in the Middle Ages.49 The earliest collections thus anticipated assembly by the reader or bookseller. But, Gillespie notes, ‘‘It is . . . equally important that what was anticipated was not fixed in place. There are, for example,

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Sammelba¨nde containing Caxton’s Chaucer editions alongside texts that suggest the wide-ranging interests of an early compiler. Even individual copies of the Canterbury Tales printed within the Pynson ‘‘edition’’ ca. 1526, or Chaucer’s works described by the Short Title Catalogue, appear to have circulated separately.’’50 Like the printed collections of later sixteenth-century writers’ ‘‘Works,’’ the small-format Chaucerian series was flexibly issued, its parts at liberty to mingle in bindings with works by others. The first folio edition of Chaucer’s Workes—the first-ever vernacular English ‘‘Works’’—differed markedly from the quarto Sammelband tradition in size and form alone. Its content derived for the most part from the increasingly inclusive canon established by Pynson.51 The 1532 title page advertised the text as The workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed, with dyuers workes whiche were neuer in print before: as in the table more plainly dothe appere (Fig. 30). And indeed, among the Chaucerian works in folio here for the first time, the book included ‘‘dyuers workes’’ not by Chaucer, some of which were even attributed properly. (For example, a ballad by ‘‘[Henry] Scogan vnto the yonge lordes’’ is listed in the table of contents; John Gower’s ‘‘Praise of Peace’’ is attributed in the text.) The inclusion of poems by well-known contemporaries and disciples of Chaucer famously provoked the ire of scholars in modernity. In the introduction to his 1905 facsimile edition of the Workes, Walter Skeat wrote of the ‘‘unbounded recklessness’’ with which the 1532 volume reproduces a Chaucerian corpus.52 Of the forty-one works in the collection, only nineteen are verifiably Chaucer’s. ‘‘Even if we reckon by pages,’’ Skeat explains, ‘‘the genuine works occupy less than three-fourths of the volume.’’53 And of the twenty-two works that, as the title boasts, were in print for the first time, only six were Chaucer’s. By current estimates, the folio contained over twenty-one thousand lines of apocryphal verse.54 The book was so deficient as a collected works that Skeat retitled his edition The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others, and today’s library catalogs list the authors as Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Here again, however, the bibliographical composition of the early Workes volume is only surprising (or appalling) when the point of reference is the modern collection instead of the multiplying forms of vernacular compilation in the late medieval and early print period. With few exceptions, the pieces of the 1532 collection now identified as apocrypha had their origins in Chaucerian manuscript anthologies or the quarto series of Pynson and Caxton.55 Archival evidence also suggests that the folio, which was printed with full individual title pages for each work (Fig. 31), retained some of the malleability

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Figure 30. Frontispiece from the The Workes of Geffray Chaucer (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Figure 31. Opening of Chaucer’s Workes (1532) showing the end of The Canterbury Tales and the separate title page for ‘‘Romaunt of the Rose’’ (sig. Z6v–2A1r). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

of its predecessors in Sammelband format: in at least two survivals now at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, individual Chaucerian works were extracted from the Workes at some point in order to circulate independently.56 Emblematic of this order of transmission, in which the Workes built upon established compiling practices, are the poems immediately preceding the text of the 1532 edition: ‘‘Eight goodly questyo[n]s with their aunswers,’’ ‘‘To the kynges most noble grace,’’ ‘‘Whan faithe fayleth in preestes sawes,’’ and ‘‘It falleth for euery gentylman.’’ The first two items here derived from manuscripts—the first, an unattributed conduct piece touching sin, chastity, covetousness, and right behavior; the second, an advice poem written by Hoccleve to Henry V, well after Chaucer’s death—and the final two short, prophetic pieces were drawn from a 1478 Caxton quarto where they had been ‘‘annexed’’ to the end of Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite (though not attributed

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to Chaucer).57 In these pieces, the 1532 Workes therefore reproduced and redistributed an existing mixture of verse already under a broad Chaucerian classification and in a sense amplified it. The poems’ placement before the book’s first named piece, The Canterbury Tales, and within the classicizing apparatus of the folio Opera, confers on them the status of a preface. ‘‘Eight goodly questyo[n]s’’ and Hoccleve’s letter to the king align Chaucer’s poems at once with a tradition of useful, moral knowledge in the vernacular and with a privileged political conversation at court.58 And indeed, ‘‘Whan faithe fayleth in preestes sawes,’’ as this first line suggests, presents a bleak political vision of ‘‘Albyon / . . . brought to great confusyon’’ (ll. 5–6) by a loss of religious order, which would have resonated with a readership in the midst of the Reformation. The two linked quatrains of ‘‘It falleth for euery gentylman’’ most often discussed by critics (and anthologized separately) as advice in rhetoric,59 assumes a more solemn significance in this material context. Following the prophesies of ‘‘Whan faithe fayleth,’’ and immediately before the start of the edition proper, the poem offers a hint of redemption from religious and social disorder in the figure of the gentleman ‘‘gathering’’ text: ‘‘It cometh by kynde of gentyl blood / To caste away al heuynesse / And gader togider wordes good / The werke of wysedome beareth wytnesse’’ (ll. 5–8). The 1532 Workes, in fact, was produced in a politically charged Reformation-era court that has been called ‘‘an unofficial center for Chaucer studies,’’60 suggesting that gathering and editing the texts was viewed as redemptive work. It remains an open question whether or not the editor William Thynne and his volume were drawn in to the politics of reform this early in the period,61 but the Chaucerian corpus that emerged was certainly tailored to the needs (and fears) of the moment. Thynne was chief clerk, bailiff, exchequer, controller, and finally master of the household to Henry VIII; he enjoyed a great deal of royal favor and remuneration as he oversaw the Workes and the second folio of 1542.62 In his dedication to the king, Thynne (through a proxy in Brian Tuke) continually stresses the ‘‘dewtie, and . . . very honesty and loue to my cou[n]trey’’ that he shows in ‘‘the restauracion and bringynge agayne to light of the said workes.’’63 Using rhetoric that is familiar to scholars from John Foxe’s later Protestant martyrology Actes and Monuments,64 the epistle forges a connection between vernacular printing and the domestic religious tradition in an opening discussion of the history of language since Babel. It also calls attention in this history to the physical work of gathering in text production. ‘‘Letters,’’ the epistle explains, ‘‘were first amonges the Phenices diuysed and founde, with suche knyttynges

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and ioynynges of one to another by a marueylous subtylyte and crafte,’’ after which they came under siege at the fall of the Roman Empire by ‘‘Vandales, Gothes, Moores, Sarracenes,’’ and other ‘‘straungers of a barbare vndersta[n]dyng.’’65 Fittingly for a Henrician bureaucrat, Thynne (via Tuke) allies his own gathering and editing activities with the defense of imperial letters. The latter part of the epistle is taken up with a scene of comparison and examination of primary sources: ‘‘By the contrarietees and alteracions founde by collocion of the one [book] with the other, I was moued and styred to make diligent sertch where I might fynde or recouer any trewe copies of exemplaries of the sayd bookes.’’66 Under royal protection, the epistle explains, this edition ‘‘may go forthe in publyke & preuayle ouer’’ those who mean harm to England—‘‘straungers, vnder prestexte of highe lernyng & knowlege of their malicious and peruers myndes, but also some of your owne subiectes.’’67 The ensuing corpus of poetry, in other words, is an instrument of protection against presumably Lutheran incursions. Thynne introduces his selection of texts as ‘‘such as seme to be very trewe copies of those workes of Geffray Chaucer/ whiche before had ben put in printe/ but also to dyuers other neuer tyll nowe imprinted.’’68 As with the edition’s title page, there is no claim or expectation in this statement that the ‘‘dyuers works’’ will be works by Chaucer. Thynne, like his predecessors in Sammelband production, pieced together primary sources according to situation-specific desires.69 Scholars of editing history have noted his inclination to customize the Chaucerian corpus, both at the level of individual works and in the larger compilation. As James E. Blodgett has shown, for example, the folio’s version of the long poem ‘‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy’’ reflects a process of selective source work in which Thynne combined the printed text from 1526 with a manuscript-derived ending that he deemed more appropriate. In Pynson’s version, the lover in the poem is spurned by the woman, but ‘‘finding such a gloss on the poem unacceptable, Thynne substituted from Lg [the Longleat manuscript] the much more sympathetic conclusion that urges ladies not to emulate the merciless lady.’’70 Similarly, but more objectionably to modern editors, Thynne inserted in his version of The Canterbury Tales a spurious ‘‘Plowman’s Tale,’’ which was an outright attack on ‘‘Popes, cardinals, and prelates, / Parsons monkes, and freres fell’’ (ll. 62–63).71 This full-length tale contained references to Reformation-era events—anachronisms that could not have been overlooked by the sixteenth-century reader.72 In a 1598 tract on his father’s editing career,

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Francis Thynne recounted the story of its interpolation: William was preparing the text for the 1532 edition but was rebuked by Cardinal Wolsey for the tale’s overly incendiary reformist politics; the king ordered it removed from the volume, after which Thynne oversaw its publication as a freestanding text, only to include it later, after Wolsey’s death, in the second-edition folio Workes.73 ‘‘The Plowman’s Tale’’ started out at the end of the Tales in this edition and by 1598 had migrated into the middle of the work, fully assimilated in the Chaucerian canon. But the astonishing part of this story, as Skeat observed, ‘‘is the obvious admission of all parties concerned—the editor, the king, and the bishops—that the question as to the admission of an extra tale or two amongst the series told by the Canterbury pilgrims in no way depended on the date at which the tale was composed.’’74 Everyone at court knew that the interpolated texts, ‘‘to which they objected on the grounds of their contents had some references to events and opinions of their own time, but they were in no way influenced by such knowledge.’’75 Skeat concluded that the edition cannot therefore be trusted to deliver an authentic Chaucerian corpus. The story, however, shows that no such aim was unambiguously operative in the production of the collected works in this early period. Thynne’s edition continued to expand throughout the sixteenth century, the folios becoming ever more monumentalizing but rooted securely in the tradition of vernacular compiling. The fourth folio of 1561, edited by John Stowe, formed two bibliographically independent sections: the whole of Thynne’s edition plus a new set of works added by Stow, including the entire ‘‘Siege of Thebes,’’ a long poem by John Lydgate.76 The expanded, nonChaucerian content was advertised in the folio’s new title: The workes of Geffrey Chaucer, newlie printed, with divers addicions . . . : With the siege and destruccion of the worthy Citee of Thebes, compiled by Jhon Lidgate.’’ And within the text, the poem is marked as a kind of annexation in the text, continuing where Workes leaves off and concluding the volume.77 The subsequent 1598 folio, whose monumental import has attracted the attention of scholars of Renaissance authorship,78 included ‘‘The Siege of Thebes’’ along with other ‘‘diverse works,’’ as its predecessors had. Much of the expanded material in this edition was devoted to Chaucer’s centrality as an organizing writer figure in English culture and in the book. But the editorial presentation of this writer figure retained traces of the auctor of earlier dispensations. Among the biographical and genealogical prefaces that establish Chaucer as the father of vernacular letters, a mock dialogue, ‘‘The Reader to Geffrey

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Chaucer,’’ gives editor Thomas Speght the opportunity to define his role. Speaking to the ghost of the medieval poet, Speght describes himself as ‘‘he that hath thy books repar’d, / And added moe, whereby thou art more graced.’’79 Bonaventure’s definition of the writer who ‘‘annexes’’ or adds the work of others ‘‘to confirm his own’’ is alive in this description of textual production, as it was implicit in the editorial work of Thynne and his sixteenth-century successors. Here, in the later, authorizing productions of Chaucer’s ‘‘Works,’’ we find that models of the writer inherited from the Middle Ages are not so much superseded as implicated in conceptions of editing and issuing a printed corpus in the Renaissance.

Daniel, Spenser, and the Detachable Renaissance ‘‘Works’’ In his dedicatory epistle to Robert Cecil, Thomas Speght referred to the monumental 1598 Workes edition as a set of ‘‘collections and corrections upon Chaucer.’’80 The strangeness of this phrase perhaps reflects the liminal status of early works productions—their distance from the more settled modern category of that name. On the one hand, these books were visibly ‘‘collections’’: even when issued in single-volume folios as Chaucer’s Workes were, they retained the physical features of early Sammelba¨nde—separate title pages, detachable texts—and a flexibility in poetic content that permitted inclusions, annexations, and other forms of textual intervention by publishers. On the other hand, these were not in any pure sense collections ‘‘of ’’ Chaucer but collections ‘‘upon’’ him. The central, organizing writer figure was less a subject or an agent of literary production in the modern sense than a location: a place of convergence and sometimes-prescribed readerly association. This model was in place throughout the sixteenth century, where the vernacular ‘‘Works’’ volume was in nearly every instance a site of inclusion or compilation—where the printed book was by its nature liable to expand and be annexed to other, related texts. Two large-scale, self-declared ‘‘Works’’ collections followed the Chaucer folios of the 1500s and antedated the fabled Jonson and Shakespeare folios of the early seventeenth century: The Works of Samuel Daniel and Works of England’s Arch-Poe¨t, Edm[und] Spenser. Both writers were deeply immersed in the vernacular culture of the English Middle Ages. Samuel Daniel, praised by Spenser himself as a writer whose ‘‘accent will excel / In tragick plaints and passionate mischance’’ (‘‘Colin Clout’s Come Home Again,’’ ll. 426–

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27),81 first established himself in a pseudo-medieval complaint poem, ‘‘Rosamond.’’ His full ambitions to historical poesy were well publicized in the later, multipart Ciuile wars betweene the howses of Lancaster and Yorke (1595), and after the turn of the century, he made his life’s work The collection of the historie of England (1618), treating the Conquest through the fourteenth century in prose.82 Spenser, of course, is familiar as a Chaucerian and a selfdeclared synthesizer of English and classical traditions.83 He famously referred to himself as a ‘‘Poet historicall’’ in his prefatory letter to Raleigh and imitated Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess in his Daphnaida (1591). The Shepheardes Calender, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, borrowed liberally from the vernacular print tradition in appearance if not in lexicon. And The Faerie Queene combined Virgilian epic with English themes and a modified Chaucerian stanza, Spenser’s most enduring formal innovation. The Works volumes, too, were indebted to earlier vernacular examples. Though they do not come down to us with prefatory materials, editorial back stories, or critical documentation to rival Chaucer’s Workes, their bibliographies register an expanding, customizable format that recalls the early Sammelband and anticipates the later collections of Pavier and other seventeenthcentury publishers.84 Daniel took an active role in forging ‘‘intertextual fields’’ both within his poems and across them.85 His first printed lyrics appeared mysteriously as untitled annexations onto Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella,86 and his first devoted volumes were composites of two poetic works, ‘‘Delia’’ and ‘‘Rosamond,’’ and a play, The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594), which echoed one another. The first comprehensive collection, Poeticall Essayes of Sam. Danyel, was issued in 1599 on the occasion of the release of what the poet and his printer, Simon Waterson, deemed his masterpiece: the verse colloquy ‘‘Musophilus.’’87 Around it, Daniel and Waterson had arranged unsold copies of the first part of the Ciuile Wars from 1595, a ‘‘Letter from Octauia,’’ ‘‘Rosamond,’’ and a bibliographically independent copy of Cleopatra that circulated separately, creating a compiled volume with texts of varying dates.88 The Works collections followed, under the same protocol of assembly. As John Pitcher has shown, the 1601 Works was designed to align Daniel with Spenser in a large-format textual monument, and yet ‘‘each of the pieces has its own title-page and printer’s signature, and could be sold separately (and they were: there are surviving copies of each piece in original vellum covers).’’89 The volume was marked as expandable in advance: it advertised itself as ‘‘newly augmented’’ in its title despite being the first edition; and an extra, annexable section—the Panegyrike Congratulatorie, a book

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of occasional praise poems—was issued a year later, to be included with the Works if the reader so desired. The contents of this folio, with ‘‘Musophilus’’ again as the centerpiece, were reproduced with additional pieces, including the Panegyrike Congratulatorie (now fully assimilated) in the posthumous Whole VVorkes of Samvel Daniel Esquire (1623). This final early-period collected works, eulogistic in the same manner as Shakespeare’s folio of the same year, remained within the lineage of the bibliographical amalgam: though continuously paginated, the individual works had separate title pages, resembling separate, linked books; and the edition again was built around unsold copies of the 1609 Ciuile wars.90 The bibliography of Spenser’s Works is equally difficult to reconcile with modern classification systems. Rather than issuing from the press as an integral book, it appeared in multiple printed productions, each with its own title page, to be bound together as—or if—the reader desired. As F. R. Johnson remarked in the standard collation, ‘‘Any statements as to the sections included or their order in copies of the collected works in their original state as first issued must be mainly conjectural’’: no specific arrangement was stipulated by the publisher, Matthew Lownes, and the individual parts, like those of Daniel’s Works, circulated outside the collection as separate texts.91 The book was titled The Faerie Queen: The Shepheards Calendar: Together With The Other Works of England’s Arch-Poe¨t, Edm. Spenser: Collected into one Volume. It was published in two early folio editions, one in 1611 and one in 1617, but the dates of the individual parts, like those in Daniel’s collection, vary. The first folio was built around unsold copies of the 1609 Faerie Queen and contained three other bibliographically independent parts, all printed in 1611: the letter to Raleigh, The Shepheardes Calender (to which Lownes did not own the rights), and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (to which he did), the latter including most of Spenser’s minor poems.92 A conspicuous absence was Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale, which had been printed in the earlier book of minor poems on which Colin Clout was based; the poem’s attack on William Cecil, Lord Burghley, which led to the calling in of the earlier volume, prevented its inclusion in the Works. But after the death of Burghley’s son in 1612, Lownes was free to print the piece again for the second Works edition. The 1617 folio therefore comprises a mix of unsold stock, reprints of previous segments from 1611, and a 1612 edition of Mother Hubberds Tale. Such disparities in assembly in both issues of the Works led to consternation in modern archives, as collectors attempted to codify them uniformly by author, title, and date. But ‘‘in no case were these editions

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printed as a unit,’’ Johnson explained: they were issued in separate and separable sections, to be formed into books as the early consumer or retailer desired.93 In Chapter 4, I demonstrated just how thoroughly notions of compiling and recombination worked their way into Spenser’s self-announcement as a writer, particularly in The Shepheardes Calender, which dramatizes the annexation of an existing printed book as part of the project to establish a ‘‘New Poet’’ in the vernacular. Daniel’s poetry, too—perhaps equally concerned with the role of the writer in English culture—derives intellectual force from its physical situation in books. The centerpiece and raison d’eˆtre of his Works editions, the long poem ‘‘Musophilus,’’ was, like Spenser’s Calender, both bibliographically detachable94 and thematically engaged with its bibliographic format. The poem unfolds in dialogue between passionate Musophilus, a clerk and lover of learning, and Philocosmus, who chides him for time spent in such foolishness. Daniel’s outward contribution is to the long-standing debate between words and deeds, study and action, in a reformist spirit.95 But as the speakers lay out their philosophical and moral lessons in the colloquy, it becomes clear that ‘‘Musophilus’’ serves as Daniel’s vehicle of writerly self-announcement. Philocosmus issues his challenge to Musophilus in terms of an antagonism toward the ever-increasing number of books in Renaissance culture (and, we assume, toward their creators): ‘‘Do you not see these Pamphlets, Libels, Rymes, / These strange confused tumults of the minde, / Are growne to be the sicknes of these times?’’ (ll. 446–48).96 Musophilus responds with a defense of virtue in poetry that stretches back to the writers of the Middle Ages: ‘‘For what hy races hath there come to fall, / With low disgrace, quite vanished and past, / Since Chaucer liu’d who yet liues and yet shall’’ (ll. 149–51). In calling up images of medieval vernacularity, Daniel’s poetical imperative becomes allied with historicist preservation. Musophilus marvels over Chaucer’s achievements in temporal terms—‘‘what a time hath he wrested from time, / And won vpon the mighty waste of daies’’ (ll. 153–54)—and he goes on to figure the establishment of English poesy as a form of reclamation: the ‘‘immortal honor of our clime,’’ he says, ‘‘by his [Chaucer’s] meanes came first adorn’d with Baies, / Vnto the sacred Relicks of whose rime / We yet are bound in zeale to offer praise’’ (ll. 155–58). Here, the work of the writer, ‘‘wresting time,’’ is linked to the curatorial work of the reader; the virtue of English poets, personified as arriving ‘‘with Baies,’’ depends on later admirers preserving ‘‘relics of rhyme’’ and amplifying them with praise. The praise in

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this formulation refers to both critical commentary—the kind found in prefaces and commendatory pieces—and to the implicit praise of poetic imitation and reference. Musophilus embodies the latter in citing the first lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in his description of the decline of learning in his own time: where Chaucer arrived ‘‘in the spring, / And had the Sun, before him’’ (ll. 165–66), the poet of the Elizabethan era works in ‘‘th’Autumne, in the withering’’ season of ‘‘cloid neglect’’ (ll. 167–70). The decline for Musophilus comes from cultural loss and forgetting; relief is in remembrance, so that ‘‘the words thou [Philocosmus] scornest now / May liue’’ (ll. 177–78). This problem of preservation is made manifest in Musophilus’s view of English letters as a point of convergence between past, present, and future: O blessed letters, that combine in one All ages past, and make one liue with all, By you we do confer with who are gone, And the dead liuing vnto councell call: By you th’vnborne shall haue communion Of what we feele, and what doth vs befall. (ll. 189–94) Musophilus thus animates a scene of reading—conferring with the past— that is also one of circulation, the transmitting of present feelings to ‘‘th’vnborne’’ through learning.97 Implicit is the notion of a man of letters who writes to remember—who preserves the work of others and in so doing preserves himself. The worst is ‘‘to be forgot,’’ he says; the best, ‘‘to do worthy the writing, and to write / Worthy the reading’’ (ll. 198–99). This dual anxiety over writerly preservation—whether the self and with it ‘‘th’acts of worthy men shuld be preseru’d’’ (l. 982)—is kept in the foreground throughout Daniel’s defense of learning. Musophilus at one point relates the story of a traveler looking with admiration on antiquities: he ‘‘faine would know his birth, and what he were, / How there erected, and how long agone:’’ (ll. 345–46). And yet, in the bookless world of Philocosmus, nothing is remembered; the traveler ‘‘looks and sighs . . . , / And in himselfe with sorrow doth complaine / The misery of darke forgetfulnesse’’ (ll. 350–52). Musophilus echoes the theme of learning as remembrance in a discussion of educational reform, calling for ‘‘our drooping Academies’’ to ‘‘regaine that reuerend hand / Of lost opinion’’ (ll. 810–11). Late in the poem, he synthesizes the worlds of study and action using a metaphor—‘‘this mightie volume

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of euents / The world’’ (ll. 909–10)—that comprehends the deeds prized by Philocosmus as text preservation. Musophilus concludes the colloquy by addressing his counterpart’s antagonism toward the flood of ‘‘Pamphlets, Libels, Rymes’’ directly: ‘‘do not thou contemne this swelling tide / And streame of words that now doth rise so hie / Aboue the vsuall banks, and spreads so wide’’ (ll. 927–29). Here, the poem begins to turn inward as the speaker incorporates the production and preservation of yet another book, ‘‘Musophilus,’’ into the content of the work itself. Musophilus repurposes Philocosmus’s rhetoric of books ‘‘growne’’ in a notion of a culture of learning that ‘‘swells,’’ ‘‘rises,’’ ‘‘spreads,’’ and ‘‘comes euer amplifide’’ (l. 931). As the central piece in Daniel’s expanding collection of ‘‘Works,’’ the verse colloquy becomes an argument for its own publication, self-promoting (and self-justifying) in ways that resemble a printed paratext or preface. In the original version collected in Poeticall Essayes, the poem ends with twenty-four lines in Daniel’s voice rather than Musophilus’s, linking contextual details of the author’s biography and education to the earlier arguments of the titular protagonist. The speaker pays double honor, in this conclusion, to the work’s dedicatee: Thy learned iudgement which I most esteeme (Worthy Fulke Greuil) must defend this course. By whose mild grace, and gentle hand at first My Infant Muse was brought in open sight. (ll. 999–1002) Daniel’s appeal narrates his own coming into print as a poet. To Fulke Greville, he reports that he is ‘‘herein incourage’d by thy praise, . . . / To see if we our wronged lines could raise / Aboue the reach of lightness and contempt’’ (ll. 1007–112). Like the praise and preservation of ‘‘sacred Relicks’’ from Chaucer’s time, Greville’s commendation gives rise to writing; Daniel turns to the work’s dedicatee at the end of the colloquy and recasts the defense of learning and publication as preface to the larger collection of ‘‘Works’’ in which ‘‘Musophilus’’ is situated. The appeal in this sense calls attention to the work’s material situation: it links the poem to the ‘‘lines’’ of another poet (Greville) and bookends the verse content of ‘‘Musophilus’’ with two dedications, marking it as separate and separable, which it was, in printed form, in potentia.

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This malleability—the potential for a poem to serve as a preface or for individual works to detach and open out to other works—is also reflected in how early book owners used both Daniel’s and Spenser’s folio collections. Extant configurations of the ‘‘Works’’ volumes in libraries vary to such a degree that it is difficult to find two identical editions.98 In Daniel’s case in particular, the vagaries of the ‘‘Works’’ collection histories have left their imprint on the modern archive. Single texts, detached from the larger folio, survive in individual bindings; this arrangement seems especially common for texts that were appended to the collection after the initial publication, such as the Panegyrike Congratulatorie, the sequence of commendatory verses that, like ‘‘Musophilus,’’ was both paratextual and textual in nature.99 In some instances, the detached items form groupings that seem to reflect customization by earlier readers and collectors. At Princeton University, two dramatic works from the 1623 volume—‘‘The Tragedy of Philotas’’ and ‘‘Hymen’s Triumph’’—survive alone in a later collector’s binding.100 A similar book from the Bodleian Library, also beginning with ‘‘The Tragedy of Philotas,’’ contains a mix of drama from the 1623 collection—without the preceding poetry—in a near-contemporary early binding.101 In Special Collections at University College, London, a volume survives containing only the dramatic works as they were extracted from the 1623 publication.102 Other copies of Daniel’s Works, or sections thereof, can be found in bindings with texts that were not part of the edition and not by Daniel. A ‘‘perfect’’ (complete) copy of Daniel’s 1623 collection now at the Bodleian Library, for example, is preserved in its original vellum wrapping with an accompanying printed pamphlet, The Love of Wales to their soveraigne Prince (1616).103 The text is an account of the pageantry in London on the birthday of Prince Charles, who was, not incidentally, the dedicatee of Daniel’s Works. The early book owner therefore seems to have bound his or her edition with a related piece, adjacent in the binding to Daniel’s prefatory dedication, thereby expanding the edition’s existing paratext.104 Another volume at the Bodleian, from Anthony Wood’s carefully organized seventeenth-century library, combines the 1609 copy of The Ciuile wars, which formed part of the early issues of the 1623 collection, with works by Horace, Abraham Fraunce, and a translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde into Latin.105 At the British Library, a surviving copy of the 1603 Panegyrike Congratulatorie seems to have been customized in a way that ignores textual boundaries: not only was it preserved independently of the Works volume that it was designed to accompany, it was cut off at page signature F1v (conserving select verses and

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none of the prose) and was bound with two items by other writers that complement Daniel’s text: a single-sheet manuscript of commendatory poetry and a printed pamphlet, Prosphonesis ad Serenissimvm & Celebratissimvm Regem Iacobvm (1616), a series of addresses celebrating King James.106 Still other surviving Works volumes contain manuscript additions showing how early readers used Daniel’s work to compile and build their own. One copy of the 1601–1602 Works at the Ransom Center, for example, contains poetry written on the flyleaves in a seventeenth-century hand.107 The writer seems to have used this blank space in Daniel’s book to record verse as one would in a manuscript commonplace book. A similarly annotated 1623 Whole Works volume owned by a known writer, the early modern biographer Izaak Walton, is preserved at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Figure 32 displays a front flyleaf from the printed edition in which Walton wrote notes in manuscript toward a draft of an epistle to his friend and patron, George Morely, Bishop of Winchester. The epistle, as the provenance information at the Beinecke attests, was eventually printed as Walton’s prefatory dedication to his Life of Doctor Robert Sanderson (1678),108 its language therefore in echo of the commendatory collection, The Panegyrike Congratulatorie, only a few quires away from the manuscript draft in Walton’s copy of Daniel. Remarkably, Walton used the unprinted space of Daniel’s Works as a surface for composition and perhaps drew from the content of a printed item therein in the production of one of his own. As Daniel in a sense modeled a form of prefatory commendation in the detachable Panegyrike Congratulatorie, so Walton, the biographer, composed a draft of his own prefatory piece in Daniel’s book in manuscript, which was detached and made to serve as a paratext to a later printed book. The surviving Works editions of Spenser demonstrate a similar persistence of compiling practices on the model of earlier collections and Sammelband production. Evidence abounds that Spenser’s readers and editors, like those of Chaucer and Daniel, assembled the poet’s works in malleable multiauthor, multitext volumes. One vellum-bound manuscript at Harvard’s Houghton Library, for example, brings together a cleanly transcribed copy of Spenser’s printed Complaints (1591) collection—the first of his collections— with a scholarly colloquy and a biblical meditation, all in the same early italic hand.109 A similar compilation from the Bodleian includes a printed edition of the Complaints and seven other printed books—humorous and philosophical pamphlets, a prose romance by Robert Greene, Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592)—in an early binding.110 Additionally, some evidence suggests that

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Figure 32. Notes toward a manuscript draft of a prefatory epistle written by Izaak Walton in the flyleaves of Samuel Daniel’s 1623 Works. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Spenser’s readers were assembling his Works before it was published: at the Newberry Library, a partial copy of the 1596 Faerie Queene is preserved with the 1597 Shepheardes Calender in an early binding, mimicking the arrangement of the folio Faerie Queen: The Shepheards Calendar: Together With The Other Works of England’s Arch-Poe¨t, Edm. Spenser: Collected into one Volume, which would appear almost fifteen years later.111 The parts of Spenser’s 1611 and 1617 Works collections, when they did appear, were detached, arranged, and customized in many of the same ways that Daniel’s works were. In several cases, Works volumes survive that lack The Faerie Queene, which, we know, was bibliographically independent.112

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The Shepheardes Calender also seems to have been likely to circulate independently: one of the copies I discussed in Chapter 4—one formerly bound with William Caxton’s medieval encyclopedia, The Myrrour of the Worlde, now at Cambridge—was printed as part of the 1611 Works folio and later detached and recompiled.113 Instances of extra-authorial compiling were also carried out in manuscript. A 1611 edition of the Works at the Ransom Center contains text written in by its former owner, the early seventeenth-century engraver William Hale; the manuscript material included quotations by Martial and Pliny, a poem ‘‘Of Frendship & the choyce of Frends,’’ and sonnets written to ladies at court.114 A stitched 1611 edition from the Beinecke contains satirical manuscript lines on Algernon Sidney, recorded on the blank verso of the title page of The Faerie Queene.115 A 1617 Works at the Bodleian contains a stub from a blank page once written over in an early secretary hand, likely removed by a fastidious later collector or bookseller.116 As this range of surviving states is beginning to suggest, the malleable, multi-item ‘‘Works’’ of Spenser and Daniel became self-enclosed volumes with determinate configurations only over time and through significant stabilizing effort by book owners and collectors. The extent to which these volumes were in part produced (rather than simply described) by modern routines of bibliography and cataloging can best be seen in a final example from the extant archive of Spenser’s works. At Princeton, a copy of Spenser’s first folio collection is preserved in a contemporary binding—minus The Faerie Queene—with manuscript annotations by multiple generations of owners and catalogers.117 The earliest of these records, by Ralph Church, the book’s eighteenth-century owner and the person responsible for extracting of The Faerie Queene,118 is a contents list written in the flyleaves with a date of 1761 (Fig. 33). Over a century and a half after the initial publication, we find that the book owner conceived of Spenser’s Works as a collection of parts: not only is The Faerie Queene physically detached and unlisted in the contents, but all of the individual items are given their own titles and dates, taken from the individual imprints in the volume. We also find, however, that this early list is superseded by a typewritten page reproducing the general title of the collected edition, which would come to form the primary entry in Spenser’s modern bibliography: The Faerie Queen: The Shepheards Calendar: Together With The Other Works of England’s Arch-Poe¨t, Edm. Spenser. Collected into one Volume. The typewritten leaf is prefixed to the early printed collection despite the fact that, as Church’s note indicates, The Faerie Queene does

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Figure 33. The back flyleaf of Princeton University Library (EX) PR 2350 1611q, copy 12, showing Ralph Church’s 1761 contents list for Spenser’s Works volume, with individual titles and dates for each work. Princeton University Library.

not follow. This piece of metadata, from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century (that is, after the invention of the typewriter), signals a conception of the text that is at a historical remove from the one that informed the 1761 contents list. It is the conception of a ‘‘Works’’ found in the Short Title Catalogue and the bibliographical tools and procedures being formulated in that same late period: the collected edition as an integral, self-enclosed book,

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organized by author, whose corpus it represents, and issued with a single publication date.119

Conclusion: ‘‘False Folios’’ and First Folios The folio collections of Daniel and Spenser that I have surveyed are contingent products of readerly and curatorial desire. On the one hand, they were printed in linkable, recombinant formats that depended on consumer or retailer involvement to become collected works or, alternatively, some other fundamentally custom-made volume of materials. On the other hand, they were valued as collectors’ items in a later era of bibliographical standardization and were classified in libraries in fixed textual units. While early owners and sellers, in other words, had a certain flexibility in assembling such collections, modern owners most often tended to ‘‘correct’’ hybridized, multiauthor, or cross-genre assemblages to fit bookselling and cataloging protocols introduced later, after the integral folio collections of Jonson and Shakespeare had permeated vernacular literary culture. In this sense, the Short Title Catalogue entries and other standard reference tools, such as W. W. Greg’s Bibliography, became self-fulfilling: we are most familiar with the Works volumes of Daniel and Spenser ‘‘perfect’’ sets, in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentiethcentury rebindings in archives. Much of the evidence for earlier assemblages, like the ghost image in the Huntington Henry V with which this chapter began, is submerged. Indeed, set against the chronology of early English ‘‘Works’’ collections that I have traced here, Thomas Pavier’s ‘‘False Folio’’ seems far less mysterious than it does in today’s critical accounts and interpretations. In issuing a flexible series of Shakespearean play texts—texts that could link together or be bound with works outside the series, such as Heywood’s A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse—Pavier was following in a tradition of vernacular literary collecting that went back to late medieval Sammelband culture and beyond. While the humanist ‘‘Works’’ volumes of classical writers certainly formed a model for the textual monuments of the early seventeenth century, even the full-scale folio editions of Shakespeare’s lauded contemporaries, Spenser and Daniel, were visibly indebted to other, early English models: the ‘‘admixed’’ Skelton; the intertextual Tyndale of John Foxe; the malleable ‘‘Works’’ of William Thynne’s historical poet, Chaucer; or the annexable auctor of Caxton and Pynson’s quarto anthologies, which drew their content from the

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manuscript canons of the Middle Ages. There was no determining precedent in the varying kinds of writership in circulation for collecting and issuing a vernacular ‘‘Works’’ in Shakespeare’s time; the available sources were unstable and developing. Pavier’s ‘‘shady’’ series, with divergent dates and authors, formed to order by a desiring reader or book collector, is only shady from the perspective of modern canonicity. No clear evidence, in fact, links Pavier’s texts to the Stationers’ 1619 petition restricting play publication nor to the ‘‘stolne, and surreptitious copies’’ famously disparaged by Heminge and Condell in the preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio.120 What has been clear from historical studies is that Pavier was a publisher of good reputation for whom the Shakespeare quartos were a minor event—one with relatively little promise of profit.121 Pavier’s career output and bookselling activities have also suggested a publisher who was keenly aware of the flexibility of textual formats in bound collections. Initially a publisher of news books, he moved at mid-career to play texts, sermons, and other small-format books of devotion, all of which behaved like pamphlets in circulation (that is, it was necessary to bind multiple items together should the early reader want to keep them).122 One of Pavier’s bestselling productions, The Doctrine of the Bible, was issued in two formats, octavo and duodecimo, most likely so that readers would have the option of using the text individually or, in the case of the octavo, binding it with the Bible.123 Pavier’s choice to print the Shakespearean quartos in serial, it seems, was an informed and experienced one: on the early market for print, flexible items in collections were popular and minimally risky, and could open out to other items, inviting a wide and varied readership. The mystery of Pavier’s project, then, lies less in the conditions of its early publication than in its modern critical reception. Scholars since Pollard and Greg have been persistent in viewing the Pavier Quartos in constitutive relation to the 1623 collection—as a ‘‘False Folio,’’ or an aborted ‘‘Works’’— when little of the available evidence supports such a view.124 But if this survey has suggested that the Pavier Quartos ought to be taken out of the historical framework of the modern collected edition, it has suggested the same of the early ‘‘Works’’ productions in all of their varied forms. And this is a historical argument with wider implications, for the alternate labels used by literary critics of the period—Renaissance and early modern—are also indices of the incomplete genealogies of the era’s monumental printed productions. The flourishing of collected-works editions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is generally taken as the ‘‘rebirth’’ of a classical form or as the

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decisive historical moment in which vernacular print culture entered the ‘‘early now.’’ Both of these perspectives find their most visible marker in Jonson’s 1616 folio, whose neoclassicism and modernity seem so far removed from what scholars of the Middle Ages have identified as the often anonymous, ‘‘fluid canonicity of medieval manuscript society.’’125 Neither perspective, however, captures the complex lineage of the vernacular collections of the handpress era, which remained indebted to those early, fluid forms of canon building. Even in Jonson’s 1616 folio, each play was given its own title page and imprint, a format familiar from early Sammelba¨nde productions, and a distant semblance of detachability in this, one of the founding documents of vernacular authorship. And here we can return full circle to Shakespeare’s First Folio, which did not have separate title pages, to see how distinct it was from the Pavier Quartos and the vernacular ‘‘Works’’ collections of its time. Perhaps the real innovation of the epoch-making 1623 volume was to print a vernacular dramatist’s works continuously, running from page to page, with little reminiscence for the customizable, amalgamated collection that was so common in the era of early print. Unlike Jonson’s folio, or Pavier’s ostensible series, or the ‘‘Works’’ of Spenser, Daniel, and others going back to Chaucer, Shakespeare’s collection could not be divided or rearranged, whether physically or theoretically; the extraction of one printed item would mean loss or mutilation of another. Yet in this example again, no configuration is absolutely determined: at the Beinecke, three folio-sized early printed plays—Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra—are preserved in a bundle.126 The local note in the catalog reads ‘‘Detached from the second folio ed.’’ No additional provenance information is available. Like the bulk of early printed literary texts, we can only guess at how—and how long—these texts have circulated in their present, archived states.

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epilogue

‘‘Collated and Perfect’’

It is a note familiar to readers of the most valuable early printed materials at today’s rare-book libraries. Typically scrawled in pencil inside the back cover of a collectors’ binding, ‘‘collated and perfect’’ was shorthand for an almost universal ideal in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century book culture.1 It signaled to buyers and readers that the text had been examined, that all of its leaves were present and in the correct order according to a network of page signatures expressed in a formula.2 The notion of a perfect, stand-alone copy reflected the system of industrial book production that was standard in modernity—the familiar series of exchanges in which the writer hands a manuscript over to a publisher, who has the text printed, bound, and distributed so that it arrives on shelves exactly as it was assembled at the press. The notion also reflected a system of economic value that determined the fate of books inherited from earlier eras of production—what was kept, prized, submitted to repair (or forgery), or discarded and forgotten. The tag line of an 1897 magazine advertisement for the Boston Book Company conveyed the operative hierarchy: ‘‘collated and perfect at reasonable prices, or uncollated at bargain prices.’’3 A Renaissance reader would have had little use for such protocols of description. It is hard to imagine Myles Blomefylde, John Lilliat, or Montaigne taking up a book and assessing its usefulness and value according to how closely it resembled an ideal, original order of assembly. The difference can be stated in bibliographical terms: where modern book collectors organized the world of print through prescriptive routines in cataloging and conservation, early modern collectors—for whom the world of print was still developing—organized and built books on substantially more varied principles of compilation, including augmentation and annexation, topicality, combination and recombination, generic and formal transformation, and

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necessity. This nonprescriptiveness, or what I have been calling contingency in early book collecting, was as manifest on the production end as it was for the early consumer or collector. When writers such as Spenser, Daniel, or Thomas Watson handed a manuscript over to a printer or patron, they could have little idea of the material assembly of texts in which printed copies would be preserved and read. Even when larger editions of collected works were planned by producers, we find that such arrangements were contingent on the involvement of retailers and readers who by habit compiled in ways that made sense at a particular time or for a particular purpose, often crossing genres, authors, and text types, which would seem less than sensible to collectors in modernity. This study has argued that contingency and eclecticism in early book collecting were catalysts rather than accidents of what we now call Renaissance literary culture. In each of the preceding chapters, I have endeavored to peel back a layer of archival veneer to look critically at what modern collectors once deemed imperfections, which turn out to have been prevalent, and indeed generative, textual states for earlier readers and writers. In doing so, I have called attention ultimately to ‘‘collating’’—in the wider, nontechnical sense of ‘‘bringing together’’4 —as a habit of mind, not just of the book. Literary activities in modernity were necessarily conditioned by the prescriptive order of texts—the field of print in which each published work has a binding, subject headings, and standardized classification identifiers that separate it in a system of differences from all other texts in a library or collection.5 Modern readers and writers, however tacitly, thought this model of text organization and reproduced it when they read and wrote within this system.6 Modern book collectors (again, necessarily) did the same when they acquired and rebound or otherwise organized works. But because much of what collectors acted upon were works written, printed, and assembled for reading in an earlier period, which had its own routines of collation and assembly, we inherit an archive of historical texts that is also a space of potential misrecognition, where one way of thinking about the book and about literature can conceal others and direct interpretation. Debates in literary criticism have persisted over whether Spenser’s Garden of Adonis—in which the ‘‘father of all formes’’ lives ‘‘eterne in mutabilitie’’ (III.vi.47, ll. 4–8)—is Platonic, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, or Augustinian, or whether Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is Puritan and nationalist or Anglo-Catholic and imperialist.7 But such zero-sum choices function like prescriptive subject headings in modern libraries. The archive of early printed works, including some of Spenser’s and

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Marlowe’s own books, attest to something different and less familiar: a culture of contingent, recombinant reading and writing in which it was productive not to make choices. For every ‘‘collated and perfect’’ book from the period suggesting uniformity and integrity, there are early Sammelba¨nde, or records of them, that bear witness to eclecticism as a hermeneutic practice. For every luxuriously rebound work suggesting a hermetic literary commodity, there are untidy amalgams, or records of them, that witness compiling and combining as modes of writerly production. The majority of these remain to be excavated; a study such as this one can only begin to scratch the surface. The point is that bibliography and the history of books hold the promise of working with rather than merely for literary interpretation, offering a perspective on works grounded in period-specific habits of bringing together intellectual material. Excavation and description, as interpretative enterprises in this sense, also have important implications for our perspective on wider literary periods and chronologies. In John Suckling’s play The Goblins, printed posthumously in 1646, the speaker of the prologue looks back wryly at the standards of dramatic production and reception that prevailed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras: When Shakespeare, Beamont, Fletcher rul’d the Stage There scarce were ten good pallats in the age, More curious Cooks then guests; for men would eat Most hartily of any kind of meat, And then what strange variety each Play, A Feast for Epicures, and that each day. (ll. 3–8)8 The conceit evokes some of the key dynamics that, I have argued, lie hidden in archives of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary artifacts: the culture of experimentation, in which conventions were not yet settled; the preponderance of producers (‘‘curious Cooks’’) and consumers who were themselves producers; the eclecticism of minds and works (‘‘what strange variety’’), which mirrored the outward organization of early bound volumes. Yet, when we discuss this same period today, it is most often as a pinnacle of literary activity—a culture of refinement dominated by a small selection of masterminds and masterworks, as they appear in modern anthologies and systems of collection. Whether we use the classically oriented term ‘‘Renaissance’’ or

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the forward-looking ‘‘early modern,’’ our perceptions of the era entail an evolutionary break or discontinuity, buttressed by opposing textual categories, such as incunabula and book, collections and collected works, that are concretely embodied in modern library taxonomies.9 The old idea of English literature’s grand progression from medieval—and sometimes ‘‘drab’’—to a golden age in the time of Shakespeare10 is perhaps nowhere as visible and on display as at the surface of the rare-book collection: in bindings, departments, call numbers, vaults. Such institutional mechanisms of selection and differentiation do, of course, respond to real differences in textual content. I do not mean to suggest that any disparity in curatorial treatment between, say, an early Caxtonian production and a later quarto series by Humphrey Moseley, or between Barnaby Googe’s Sonettes and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is constructive of an artificial chronology. I am suggesting that a dialectic is at work in which literary history and book curatorship are mutually informing. Every time a modern collector took apart an early compilation, or collated and perfected a perceived Renaissance masterpiece, or dispatched earlier material to a separate department, or rebound a copy of Hamlet individually in morocco, the impression of a decisive break in English literary history was reinforced at the level of the primary text. Underneath the modern bindings and class marks, we find a much more continuous history of vernacular writing and reading than we would normally be aware of working from these artifacts. The Sammelba¨nde and ‘‘anthology culture’’11 sketched out by Seth Lerer, Alexandra Gillespie, and other scholars of the English Middle Ages persevered into the 1590s and beyond. Texts continued to be marketed and used in flexible, linkable formats. The written work in many cases continued to be ‘‘imagined as a compilation,’’12 the writer as a ‘‘compiler,’’ on the eve of the first commercial book auctions in the seventeenth century, when collectors had a new incentive to imagine the book as a single-text unit broken up for more lucrative sale.13 The ‘‘curious Cooks’’ of the English Renaissance became literary eminences only later, on modern library shelves. Historians of the book and of libraries have for almost two decades now worked to replace the determinist model of the so-called print revolution with a more nuanced account of gradual, laborious, and ideologically driven change.14 But literary critics, despite the prevailing historicism and a sustained interest in manuscript culture, have been slow to internalize the significance of this revised chronology for conceptions of literary activity and context. The story of shifting attitudes toward text collection tells us that the

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Renaissance and the book were products of the same taxonomic mentalite´ (and labor) that gave us the revolution in print. Neither were natural, spontaneous arrivals; like the culture of press technology, they required work to forge and maintain. In the genealogy of archival categories, we find that habits of the book and text flourished across many of our default period lines: medieval and Renaissance, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, manuscript and incunable, incunable and print. Such distinctions are drawn in the literary collectors’ item and reified in research and interpretation. How we collate is how we think. An analogy between the library and another important cultural institution, the museum, has perhaps been implicit in discussions of collecting practices in this study. Indeed, my argument that book collectors and compilers were producers rather than mere custodians of meaning would be unsurprising to many art historians, curators, and contemporary artists, who have carried out a rich theoretical critique of the museum and gallery space for at least the last half-century.15 But as Stephen Orgel once remarked, ‘‘Postmodern theory has not reached the world of bibliophile practice.’’16 Where the organization, distribution, and definition of the artwork in modern culture proved fertile ground for critique and experimentation some time ago, the library has for the most part seemed intuitive, the book natural and selfevident as an object format, over the same period. Museum patrons are frequently reminded of the interpretive function of curatorship and the politics of conservation. If a group of paintings changes owners or venues, attempts are often made to preserve the hanging arrangement since that arrangement produces meaning that is now embedded in the works’ historical makeup.17 If an early work was once part of a multipanel altarpiece, the viewer is sometimes provided with notes on the earlier context or an illustrated reconstruction showing the artificiality of the stand-alone appearance and frame. Rare books in modern bindings, in contrast, are almost invariably preserved and put on display for the average patron as artifacts without similar material histories.18 Only the specialist researcher, asking the right questions and probing institutional records, can see traces of earlier configurations or follow the journey from text to artifact. The work of library curators and conservators remains in large part out of sight, submerged in ostensibly value-neutral routines of classification and bibliographical description that perform a service to literary criticism without aspiring to critique.

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Books and artworks are different categories of objects requiring different infrastructures of preservation and accessibility. I make the comparison simply to suggest that our institutional division of labor is not the most selfexplanatory—or the most productive—way to engage literary history in interpretation. Scholars of historical literatures could, on the model of other disciplines, work in greater collaboration with curators, conservators, and even donors of the rare-book collections that constitute the archive of primary-text artifacts. For, as I have argued here, those who organize and assemble literary texts determine the material conditions of reading and shape the parameters of interpretation to an extent not fully realized or utilized in literary studies. To borrow language from a well-known critique of modern gallery space, a quarto copy of Hamlet that stands alone in a fine collector’s binding is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself as literature; the text and text collection are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values.19 That library space and copy of Hamlet passed through the same period of rationalization that made other forms of collecting into objects of historical expertise—the period in which, as Didier Maleuvre writes, ‘‘culture becomes synonymous with preservation, not production.’’20 The modernizing nineteenth- or twentieth-century bookbinding belies the fact that Hamlet was not in any straightforward sense ‘‘literature’’ in Renaissance culture but something rather closer to what we identify as a pamphlet, likely one item among many in a bundle of early texts.21 With curatorial information, records of provenance and circulation, and notes on conservation procedures, the shifting physical states of such early texts can be reconstructed and explored as historical sites of meaningmaking. Beyond research that is solely archival, writing practices and forms of composition can be contextualized in early dispensations of knowledge and information. Where institution and interpretation meet, books become not just objects but ideas in time—clusters of potential meanings, readings, and modes of creativity whose coordinates change with each new material instantiation, from stitched paper covers to the display case. Another analogy has perhaps been implicit in this study. Throughout my treatment of text formation in the handpress era, I have used words that are more commonly associated today with computer programming and new media: ‘‘compiling,’’ ‘‘assembly,’’ ‘‘patch,’’ ‘‘user-initiated’’ and ‘‘recombinant,’’ and ‘‘aggregate,’’ among others. These lexical choices have not come from any conscious engagement with computer or information science but

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from a thought-provoking symmetry—often commented on by scholars of the text22—between early and late print culture, or (to use slightly fraught terminology) between pre- and postmodern textual practices. This study has investigated the malleability of early books at a particular historical moment in which the future of the book is once again uncertain—in which its boundaries and definitions are once again expanding and in question. The dynamic is visibly registered in literature. Today, when a work is produced, the physical book most often constitutes only one central part of a larger transmedia franchise, which might include publisher-sponsored message boards, fan fiction forums, companion pieces of music or video, and author pages on social media sites and other online venues where readers can interact with and contribute to the text. Compiling and curation are becoming prevalent and championed means of creative production; virtually any consumer with access to a computer can now appropriate, augment, and remix existing pieces of literature or music to form new ones. The jury is still out on whether the disintegration of the book and album is something to be welcomed or resisted, but if the volume of new media works and news reports appearing daily on the subject is any index, changes in how culture is materially organized and made available assuredly do have powerful effects on how it is produced and understood. The new order of texts is reflected in the practice of literary history as well. With notions of the book now tending back toward the malleable, contingent, and interactive, new tools and techniques are being developed that intentionally or not bring scholars closer to the bibliographical worlds of early print and manuscript culture. This project has relied in many ways on the digital databases that have replaced card catalogs, which make curatorial notation systems—tags such as ‘‘bound with’’ or ‘‘bd. w.’’—searchable across thousands of texts in a collection, allowing me to see more of what an early book collector would have seen. Initiatives in digital reproduction, too, are changing the ways in which readers, locally or from a distance, can interface with literary artifacts from early periods. Where the earlier model of the Short Title Catalogue facilitated access to texts in discrete units, newer tools, such as the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto and the multi-institutional Shakespeare Quartos Archive, permit users to assemble and read plays in intertextual configurations.23 Online editions of Hamlet incorporate comment functions, revitalizing early attitudes toward marginalia, or serve as databases themselves, linking the text to other works.24 The symmetry will be even more apparent when such resources move outside the narrow Shakespearean

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domain, assisting readers in forming and interpreting early texts through the full range of potential compilations, not just the canonicity inherited from the modern period. I have used these terms, ‘‘modern period’’ and ‘‘modernity,’’ in the past tense to mark the perception that something has changed in the culture of textual collection and interpretation. This change is perhaps the story of compiling that waits to be told. Curators and conservators no longer break up early multitext volumes as a matter of preservation policy. (In fact, books with material idiosyncracies, precarious early bindings, and annotations are the most interesting and sought after among some collectors today.) Textual studies and bibliography, after being written out of the curriculum in all but a few North American graduate programs in the twentieth century, are seeing a resurgence in student demand. In literary research, there are tentative calls under various banners to move beyond the modernist cathexis on meaning to explore the conditions of meaning in objects and networks: a form of reading in which, as one provocative essay puts it, ‘‘producing accurate accounts of surfaces is not antithetical to critique.’’25 I have argued here that description has never been antithetical to interpretation in the institutional history of the printed book; critics have only chosen to see it as such. Through every text that is bound, numbered, cataloged, collated, and set in order, the custodians of literary artifacts have been critically reading all along.

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notes

introduction Note to epigraph: John Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (Richard Pynson and Johan Haukyns, 1530), sig. 3B1r. 1. William Thomas, The historie of Italie, a Boke excedyng profitable to be redde: because it intreateth of the Astate of many and diuers Common Weales, how thei haue ben, & now be gouerned (London: J. Berthelet, 1549). On Thomas’s prominent position in court and the book’s (at times controversial) influence, see Dakota L. Hamilton, ‘‘Thomas, William (d. 1554),’’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition (http://www.oxforddnb.com/), May 2005. Because this book is in part an attempt to think through the standardizing effects of modern knowledge organization on inherently variable early printed materials, I do not introduce title case in my references to primary texts in the notes, defaulting instead (where I discuss particular items in libraries) to titles as they are listed in the appropriate catalog at time of access, or (where I discuss texts in the abstract) to long titles as they appear on early title pages. Where I mention an early title in the main text of this book, I use uniform titles for ease of reference unless I am calling attention to some aspect of the long title(s). The inconsistencies herein, I suggest, are part of the theoretical problem under analysis—that of modern editorial and informational apparatuses and the often recalcitrant historical objects of information themselves. 2. See, for example, The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. Lindsay Kaplan (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 131–36; Othello, ed. Norman Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10; and The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Methuen, 1999), 23–24. 3. St. John’s College, Cambridge shelf mark A.2.18. The binding and arrangement are near contemporary, from the middle or later part of the sixteenth century. 4. A survey has been taken of Blomefylde’s book collection and annotating activities. See Donald C. Baker and J. L. Murphy, ‘‘The Books of Myles Blomefylde,’’ Library s5 31:4 (1976): 377–85. 5. See Robert M. Schuler, ‘‘Blomefylde, Myles (1525–1603),’’ DNB, online. 6. William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 151–78.

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7. Julia Miller, Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Legacy, 2010), 298. Miller, a conservator, describes what she calls ‘‘a vicious circle’’ in which ‘‘binders with limited historical awareness and craft repertoire are asked by collectors and custodians to ‘restore’ early books,’’ leading to the discarding of early binding structures in favor of ‘‘beautifully tooled leather and gilded edges when such choices are inappropriate’’ (p. 299). Elsewhere, John Szirmai describes the treatment of medieval bindings that fail ‘‘to accord with the taste of the times’’ in modernity: ‘‘Since the Renaissance, this practice has been observed by countless book collectors and bibliophiles and has resulted in the annihilation of thousands of medieval bindings. Neglect and ruthless restorations have also caused considerably losses, leaving us today with no more than one to five percent of original bindings on the surviving medieval books—an inestimable loss for the history of the book’’ (An Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding [Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999], ix). 8. The Huntington Library had an onsite bindery for much of its early history. The uniform blue covers that date back to Henry E. Huntington’s time are still a common sight. The foundational portion of the current British Library came from the King’s Library and the collections of other eighteenth-century nobles and cultural luminaries. Uniform eighteenth-century collectors’ bindings are, therefore, more common there than elsewhere in Britain. 9. The Old Library was founded in 1624. Blomefylde’s books arrived at St. John’s via Thomas Baker (1656–1740) some years before 1710, the date of its earliest college bookplate in the compilation. My thanks to Jonathan Harrison for information on library history and provenance. 10. Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1986), 17. For a summary treatment of bookbinding in the period, see David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–1800: A Handbook (London: British Library, 2004). Pearson draws a similar distinction between commercial books produced after the industrialization of the bookbinding trade in the nineteenth century and the handpress-era book, ‘‘an individually handmade object’’ (p. 1). 11. See, for a recent general account, Mirjam Foot, Bookbinders at Work: Their Roles and Methods (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2006), 15–22. Nicholas Pickwoad has treated particular problems of binding structures that cannot be categorized as trade or retail (see his ‘‘Tacketed Bindings: A Hundred Years of European Bookbinding,’’ in ‘‘For the Love of Binding’’: Studies in Bookbinding Presented to Mirjam Foot, ed. David Pearson, 119–67 [New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2000]). And on the persistence of medieval practices, ‘‘The sale of so-called ‘white books’—that is unbound sheets—in preference to the bound book was of course no new phenomenon in the early sixteenth century, and it continued to give the booksellers obvious advantages’’ (‘‘Onward and Downward: How Binders Coped with the Printing Press Before 1800,’’ in A Millennium of the Book, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris [New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 1994], 63). As Foot (p. 16) and others have noted, ready-bound books were increasingly made available toward the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. For a revisionist account of this late-period

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development, see Stuart Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles, 1660–1800 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2004). 12. Foot, Bookbinders at Work, 16. 13. See Needham, Printer and the Pardoner, 17–18. Joseph Dane estimates that texts composed of fewer than fifty sheets could not have been bound individually according to the financial and technological constraints of the period. See his What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), ch. 10. 14. Julian Roberts, ‘‘Extending the Frontiers: Scholar Collectors,’’ in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 1, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, 292–321 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 292–93. Roberts discusses early modern shelving and collecting techniques as ‘‘tentative and experimental’’ (p. 292). On the unsettled conventions of text storage in the period, see also Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 105–7, and my essay, ‘‘ ‘Furnished’ for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture,’’ Book History 12 (2009): 37–73. The most comprehensive accounts of pre- and early modern English libraries are Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright, eds., The English Library Before 1700 (London: Athlone, 1958); and Leedham-Green and Webber, eds., Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 1. 15. On ‘‘information overload’’ in early modern England and Europe, see Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), which extends insights originally presented in her essay ‘‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 64:1 (2003): 11–28. 16. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), esp. vii–ix, on defining an ‘‘order of books’’ that is presupposed in the Foucauldian notion of an ‘‘order of discourse.’’ I rely on Chartier’s groundbreaking work throughout this study. 17. Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15. 18. Szirmai, Archaeology, 173. Pickwoad (‘‘Onward and Downward’’) charts what he sees as the beginning of a long decline in quality and standards following the end of the Gothic bookbinding period in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. 19. For a comprehensive English-language account of Montaigne’s revisions in the margins of his text, see George Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), ch. 4. I discuss Montaigne’s Essays in Chapter 4. 20. On Middleton’s transformation of Shakespeare’s Lucrece into a ‘‘ghost complaint,’’ see Laura G. Bromley, ‘‘The Lost Lucrece: Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece,’’ Papers on Language and Literature 21 (1985): 258–74. I discuss this work briefly in Chapter 2. 21. The 1593 edition of the Arcadia made the invitation to ‘‘continue’’ explicit, expressing the hope that the story might ‘‘awake some other spirite to exercise his penne in that, wherewith mine is already dulled’’ (sig. 2Sv3). The printed ‘‘continuations’’ are the 1593 Arcadia, overseen by Mary Sidney; Gervase Markham’s The English Arcadia,

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Alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending (in two parts, 1607 and 1613); the ‘‘Sixth Book’’ by Richard Beling (appended to the 1627 edition); and Anna Weamys’s 1651 A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. On the manuscript additions and transcriptions by early modern readers, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 4. Stephen Dobranski has explored the phenomenon of printing apparently unfinished works, including Sidney’s Arcadia, in the early print period in his Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 22. For the foundational accounts of Renaissance imitation, which I treat in detail in Chapter 3, see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and the more concise taxonomy of imitation practices in G. W. Pigman III, ‘‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,’’ Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1–32. For an important counterpoint, which critiques the largely ahistorical notion of authorial genius inherent in these accounts, see Stephen Orgel, ‘‘The Renaissance Artist as Plagiarist,’’ English Literary History 48 (1981): 476–95. 23. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 92. See also Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 24. As Ann Moss has shown, the Renaissance commonplace book was both a ‘‘paradigm for reading analysis’’ and a tool for writing—an ‘‘interpretative grid’’ that structured Renaissance thought. See Ann Moss, Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 136. On commonplacing as the dominant intellectual technique of the period, see also Peter Beal, ‘‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth Century Commonplace Book,’’ in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–91, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, N.Y.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), 131–47. 25. Crane, Framing Authority, 3. 26. Linda Woodbridge, ‘‘Patchwork: Piecing the Early Modern Mind in England’s First Century of Print Culture,’’ English Literary Renaissance 23:1 (1993): 5–45; quotes on 15 and 14. 27. An important exception is Jennifer Summit, whose recent work at the intersection of literature and library history argues that ‘‘libraries demonstrate that reading and writing are embodied activities, whose particular meanings are shaped by the material and history-bound spaces and structures in which they take place’’ (Memory’s Library, 6). 28. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘‘compile’’ v., 3. The entry adds, ‘‘e.g. a sonnet.’’ 29. John Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (London: Richard Pynson and Johan Haukyns, 1530), sig. 3B1r. 30. John Bullokar, An English expositor teaching the interpretation of the hardest words vsed in our language (London: Iohn Legatt, 1616), sig. D8r. For a concise account of

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‘‘framing’’ as a structural metaphor, see Rayna Kalas, ‘‘The Language of Framing,’’ Shakespeare Studies 28 (2001): 240–47. 31. The reference occurs in the colophon of the The boke yf Eneydos (Westminster, U.K.: William Caxton, 1490), [n.s.]. 32. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton, 1579), sig. ‫ن‬3r. 33. William Lily, A short introduction of grammar (London, 1567), title page. 34. Thomas Lupton, All for Money (London, 1578), title page. 35. These are all printed productions attributed to Skelton during these years. All are marked on the title pages as ‘‘compiled by Master Skelton, Poet Laureate.’’ 36. Thomas Watson, The Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love (London, 1582), sigs. F3r and K4v. 37. Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613). 38. The foundational accounts of ‘‘intertextuality,’’ in the purely discursive sense, are Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Death of the Author,’’ in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146; and Julia Kristeva in ‘‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’’ and ‘‘The Bounded Text,’’ in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, 64–91 and 36–63 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). I discuss ‘‘allusion,’’ conventionally defined, in Chapter 4. 39. The death of the book has been a commonplace in news features and headlines, library and institutional press releases, and popular discourse since the rise of digital media. A noted early account of how digital technologies reconfigure literary culture was Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994). For recent, more balanced accounts, see Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), and Anthony Grafton, Codex in Crisis (New York: Crumpled, 2008), both of which grew out of pieces in the popular press. 40. See Sherman, Used Books; and also Adam Smyth, ‘‘ ‘Rend and Teare in Peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England,’’ Seventeenth Century 19:1 (2004): 36–52. Sherman, Smyth, and Juliet Fleming have organized a series of conference discussions on cutting and pasting, or what they call ‘‘the Renaissance collage.’’ The language of ‘‘book use’’ emerges from studies of marginalia and forms of so-called active reading in the Renaissance, a field with a fully developed secondary literature too extensive to sketch here. For the foundational account of ‘‘use,’’ see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘‘Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,’’ Past and Present 129:1 (1990): 30–78. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio helpfully expand the language of use in their Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005). Earlier foundational accounts of marginalia studies include Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); and Heather Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

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41. Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. 42. The classic early accounts of print revolution and the inherent ‘‘fixity’’ of printed texts are Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), and Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). This understanding has been largely replaced by the gradual model of change articulated in Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 43. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). More recently, Peter Stallybrass has argued that printing was less a clear break from manuscript culture than an incitement to write more by hand. See his ‘‘Little Jobs: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,’’ in Agents of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron et al., 340–67 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); and, coauthored with Ann Blair, ‘‘Mediating Information, 1450–1800,’’ in This Is Enlightement, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner, 139–63 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 44. On reading as ‘‘silent production,’’ a concept of Michel de Certeau’s that has been foundational in forging a more expansive definition of book use in recent scholarship, see Chartier, Order of Books, 1–23. 45. I discuss the enabling effects of digital database and cataloging technology in my epilogue. 46. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), xv. Joseph A. Dane has made a similar point: ‘‘Histories of the book, both popular and scholarly, have been disproportionately concerned with what historians refer to as ‘monuments’ ’’ (The Myth of Print Culture: Essays of Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003], 57). While I differ with Dane on the language of ‘‘myth,’’ my account largely reinforces the recent skepticism toward ‘‘print culture’’ as a category. 47. On the Bodleian’s exclusion of dramatic texts, which Bodley considered ‘‘riffraffs’’ and ‘‘baggage books,’’ see Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘‘ ‘Rowme’ of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries,’’ in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, 113–30 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 48. An important exception, again, is Jennifer Summit, who ‘‘stakes a claim for a distinctly literary perspective’’ on library history in her recent Memory’s Library (6). 49. For a summary of the historiographical stakes of the labels ‘‘Renaissance’’ and ‘‘early modern,’’ see Margreta De Grazia, ‘‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period Piece,’’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta De

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Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, 17–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 50. Alexandra Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 67:2 (2004): 189. See also Gillespie’s ‘‘Balliol MS 354: Histories of the Book at the End of the Middle Ages,’’ Poetica 60 (2003): 47–63; ‘‘Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quartos: Miscellanies from Manuscript to Print,’’ Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12:1 (2000): 1–25; and her book-length study, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 51. See Seth Lerer, ‘‘Medieval Literature and Early Modern Readers: Cambridge University Library Sel. 5.51–5.63,’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003): 311–32; and ‘‘Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 118 (2003): 1251–67. I discuss the important work of Gillespie and Lerer in greater detail in chapters 1 and 2. For key taxonomies of the manuscript miscellany and anthology in the Middle Ages, see Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson, ‘‘Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts,’’ in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1395–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall, 279–315 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Ralph Hanna III, ‘‘Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England,’’ in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, 37–51 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), as well as the edited volume of which it is a part. 52. See most notably Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 53. Lerer, ‘‘Medieval English Literature,’’ 1254. 54. Alexandra Gillespie, ‘‘Bookbinding,’’ in The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, 150–72 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); quotes on 172 and 171. Pickwoad confirms: ‘‘The bookbinding trade was one in which the small craft workshop predominated, and it remained that way, and almost entirely unmechanized, until the nineteenth century. . . . From the end of the middle ages until late in the industrial revolution, the equipment and materials used remained essentially unchanged’’ (‘‘Onward and Downward,’’ 61). 55. Early in the sixteenth century, most printers were also publishers (and therefore wholesalers) who controlled most aspects of the process, sometimes including binding. As the trade specialized, publisher-wholesalers (by mid-century, mostly Stationers) become interested primarily in printing and financing, as binding falls more and more to the retailer and consumer and by the Renaissance is relatively uncontrolled. Thus, early in the period, we have figures like Pynson and John Reynes, who made money by wholesaling and binding, where later in the period we have more specialized roles and the old scholarly adage that books were sold unbound. My thanks to Alexandra Gillespie

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and Peter Blayney for elucidating these roles and relationships for me. On the complex economics of the book trade in this period, see Blayney’s forthcoming history of the Stationers’ Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 56. See Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, on how ‘‘the introduction of mechanisation to book production in the early nineteenth century’’ meant that bookbindings were no longer ‘‘essentially unique’’ (p. x), as they were in the handpress era. Pickwoad locates the period of radical change in bookbinding practices in the 1830s. For a comprehensive account, see Esther Potter, ‘‘The London Bookbinding Trade: From Craft to Industry,’’ Library s6 15 (1993), 259–80. 57. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, shelf mark x822.33.T3 1619. The quarto, formerly part of Thomas Pavier’s 1619 anthology (discussed in Chapter 5), is bound individually in a modern collector’s binding with provenance markings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: H. Dyke Gautier, Harry Bacon Collamore, and Frank Hogan. 58. See Jacques Derrida’s musings on how ‘‘archivization produces as much as it records the event’’ in Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17. Michel Foucault offered a comprehensive interpretation of the instrumentality of the archive in his celebrated methodological statement The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972): ‘‘Far from being that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse . . . , it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration’’ (p. 129). The archive in these accounts is not a dead collection of statements but the precondition of any statement, which inevitably imposes its logic on what is said.

chapter 1. special collections Note to epigraphs: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1999), 205; Glasgow University Library (GUL) Sp. Coll. Hunterian Co.3.31. The note is dated 1982. 1. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1. In this phrase, Chartier is drawing on Michel de Certeau’s influential account of reading as ‘‘silent production.’’ See, in English translation, De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 2. See, for example, the earliest printing manual (1683–84), Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Alexandra Gillespie describes early documentary evidence from a legal case of the printer Richard Pynson binding part-editions of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes in her chapter, ‘‘Bookbinding,’’ in The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 171. 3. This story is recounted in full in D. A. Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 265–66. See also J. C. T. Oates’s unpublished

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1952 Sandars Lectures, A History of the Collection of Incunabula in the Cambridge University Library (Cambridge, 1952), 35–36; and David McKitterick, Cambridge University Library—A History: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 317–24. 4. Contemporary account from Henry Gunning, quoted in Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge, 266. 5. Ibid., 266–67, quote on 267. 6. Ibid., 265. 7. Cambridge University Library (CUL) ULIB 7/3/28. McKitterick mentions the document briefly in his Cambridge University Library (pp. 319–21). 8. Winstanley includes Pugh among Cambridge’s ‘‘unreformed.’’ For an account of Pugh’s vexed position relative to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reforms at the University Library, see McKitterick, Cambridge University Library (pp. 318–24). McKitterick argues that its transformation into a national institution ‘‘had been accomplished, if not perfected . . . in 1886’’ (p. 16). 9. Exceptions include histories of the library and studies of individual collectors and collecting practices, fields that have long concerned themselves with book and archival organization. Key works in the former category include Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, eds., A History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright, eds., The English Library Before 1700 (London: Athlone, 1958). For the latter, see the individual case studies in J. P. Carley and C. G. C. Tite, eds., Books and Collectors, 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson (London: British Library, 1997); R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and His Books: Sandars Lectures (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993); and Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 10. For provenance information, see McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, ch. 4. The library of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, was one of the largest collections in England at the time of his death in 1714. In 1715, King George I bought it in toto and donated it to Cambridge, where it would constitute the largest and most important part of the university’s holdings for some time. (It did not arrive at Cambridge until later in the eighteenth century, hence the delay between its donation and efforts to catalog it.) 11. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, 319. 12. On this point, see Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. xi–xiii. See also Robert J. Feherenbach and Elisabeth Leedham-Green, eds., Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalog of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists, 6 vols. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992–). 13. For a concise account of the formation of the Parker Library and the Parker Register, which I rely on in my analysis, see R. I. Page, ‘‘The Parker Register and Matthew Parker’s Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,’’ Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8 (1981): 1–17.

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notes to pages 26 –27

14. Book conservation and binding experts often comment on such activities, but a comprehensive survey has not been attempted. See, from a conservator’s perspective, Julia Miller’s commentary on what she calls ‘‘hasty humans’’ (i.e., rebinders) in Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Legacy, 2010), 113. John Szirmai offers a brief account in his preface to An Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999), ix. The foundational account in the history of librarianship, discussed below, is Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1986), esp. Appendix B. See also, on disbound Sammelba¨nde in particular, numerous case studies carried out primarily in the field of Middle English book culture: Alexandra Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 67:2 (2004): 189–214; Seth Lerer, ‘‘Medieval Literature and Early Modern Readers: Cambridge University Library Sel. 5.51–5.63,’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003): 311–32; and Lucy Lewis, ‘‘ ‘For no text is an island, divided from the main’: Incunable Sammelbande,’’ in Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac, ed. Barry McKay, John Hinks, and Maureen Bell, 13–26 (London: British Library, 2002). I have explored case studies in Renaissance book culture elsewhere in ‘‘Curatorial Readings: George Herbert’s The Temple, Quintus Curtius, and Their Context,’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 74:4 (2011): 575–98. 15. This financial imperative is not limited to individual collectors. See my ‘‘Curatorial Readings’’ for a discussion of early printed books being disbound and sold off as duplicates at the Huntington Library in the early twentieth century. 16. See Stuart Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles, 1660–1800 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2004). The first book auctions in England were held in 1676. 17. On the massive changes in binding and bookmaking technology in the early nineteenth century, see Esther Potter, ‘‘The London Bookbinding Trade: From Craft to Industry,’’ Library, s6 15 (1993): 259–80. Nicholas Pickwoad offers an elaboration on the technology introduced: ‘‘The structure particularly associated with the 19th-century industrialization of the binding trade is case binding, which allowed effective production line work for the first time, in that the covers of the books could be manufactured independently of and at the same time as the sewing of the textblocks, to be united, by adhesive only, at the final stage of the binding process’’ (‘‘Onward and Downward: How Binders Coped with the Printing Press Before 1800,’’ in A Millennium of the Book, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris [New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 1994], 91). 18. Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ quotes on 189–90. 19. Julia Miller, Books Will Speak Plain, 298. 20. Needham, Printer and the Pardoner, 17. For an overview of early bookbinding and bookselling practices, see David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–1800: A Handbook (London: British Library, 2004). Szirmai, in Archaeology, offers an in-depth chronology of medieval book structures through the Gothic binding period; Pickwoad, in ‘‘Onward and Downward,’’ describes the movement from craft bindings to their cheaper, hurried modern counterparts and describes the intricate diversity of ‘‘tacketed bindings,’’ representative of the earlier period of craft binding, in his chapter ‘‘Tacketed Bindings: A

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Hundred Years of European Bookbinding,’’ in ‘For the Love of Binding’: Studies in Bookbinding Presented to Mirjam Foot, ed. David Pearson, 119–67 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2000). Gillespie, whose work is central to my argument in this chapter and the next, modifies Pickwoad’s suggestion of a downward trajectory and provides an overview of the variation in early binding practices up to the sixteenth century in ‘‘Bookbinding,’’ in The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, 150–72 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 21. See Gillespie, ‘‘Bookbinding,’’ 171–72. Late-medieval printers, as Gillespie explains, sometimes issued books ready-bound, sometimes unbound. After the 1557 Charter, the Stationers’ Company seized control of printing and toward the later part of the century focused on printing and financing instead of binding, which fell to specialists in an increasingly specialized book trade. More and more books were sold unbound in the sixteenth century. ‘‘Added to this,’’ Pickwoad notes of the sixteenth-century trade, ‘‘was the lack of any form of standard binding, which made a pre-emptive decision on the part of a bookseller as to the style and expense of a binding possibly an unjustifiable risk’’ (‘‘Onward and Downward,’’ p. 64). 22. H. E. Bell, ‘‘The Price of Books in Medieval England,’’ Library s4 17:3 (1936–37): 312–32. 23. The practice, while more common in quartos and octavos, cut across formats and influenced the appearance of folio-sized books as well. See Lucy Lewis, ‘‘For no text is an island,’’ on incunabular folio compilations. I touch on folio-sized collections that resemble Sammelba¨nde in Chapter 5. 24. Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ 205. 25. There are exceptions and many variables, including individual libraries’ wealth, curatorial policies, and cataloging standards, regarding provenance. Wealthy American archives, for example, are often more heavily modernized, while smaller ecclesiastical collections, such as the Peterborough Collection at the Cambridge University Library, are more likely to survive in earlier states. This chapter, in examining two contrasting archives, offers a preliminary sketch of the variables involved in determining the states of rare books today. 26. See Needham, Printer and the Pardoner, Appendix B, for a list of Caxtonian books that were over time disbound and reorganized into individual modern-looking books by librarians and collectors. 27. Needham, Printer and the Pardoner, 17. 28. Ibid., 17–18. 29. Needham surveys all thirty-seven of the known compilations that once contained Caxtonian material, finding that twenty-seven of them were reshaped by collectors. 30. Needham, Printer and the Pardoner, 19. 31. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘Margins of Truth,’’ in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 92. 32. William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2008). See esp. ch. 6. 33. Ibid., quotes on 163 and 164.

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34. Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Benjamin famously compiled the Arcades Project in Paris’s Bibliothe`que Nationale and Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek by bringing together quotations he had gathered with his own writings. For an account of the materiality of this text, see Rolf Tiedemann’s ‘‘Dialectics at a Standstill,’’ Arcades Project, 929–45. 35. For a more comprehensive account of Benjamin’s collector figure as a modern archetype, see Ackbar Abbas, ‘‘Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience,’’ New Literary History 20:1 (1988): 217–37. And on Benjamin himself as a writercollector, see Kevin McLaughlin, Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in NineteenthCentury Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 77–82. 36. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Unpacking My Library,’’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 60. 37. Ibid., 66. 38. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 211, 204–5. 39. Ibid., 205. 40. Ibid., 211. Benjamin’s analysis begins with the collector and allegorist as opposite types and moves toward eliding that distinction: ‘‘In every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector’’ (211). In this way, he is a vital precursor to contemporary notions of collecting and compiling as meaning making. 41. Ibid., 207. 42. Oates, A History, 44. Bradshaw went on to become the university librarian, but in 1859 he was working on the rare books. 43. According to the Library Archives, the annotators were John Marshall, John Bowtell, and Henry Bradshaw. 44. A comprehensive account of the entries in the AB catalog would require a fulllength study of its own. My intent in what follows is to offer a preliminary survey of representative examples, focusing on English-language works of agreed-on literary significance. Because I discuss so many texts in rapid succession, I list only the short titles, former and present shelf marks, and dates where pertinent, according to the catalog data at the Cambridge University Library, current at the time of writing. I transcribe the short titles as they are written in Pugh’s catalog. 45. This estimate is based on the proportion of bracketed entries (as shown in Figure 3) in a representative sample drawn from across the catalog. Owing to the size and state of the document, an exact number would be difficult to determine. 46. The three books are now classed separately: Ciceronis Tusculanarum Quaestionum (1491) is now Inc.2.B.3.122 [1762], Ovid’s Epistolae Heroides (1492) is now Inc.2.B.3.122 [1771], and Martialis cum duobus commentis (1495) is now Inc.2.B.3.142 [1845]. Readers’ marks can be found throughout. Erased marginalia can be found on the back page of the Ovid volume. The hand is from the seventeenth century. 47. The five volumes, all Caxtonian incunabula, are Godefrey of Boloyne (1481) now classed as Inc.3.J.1.1 [3499]; The boke of Eneydos (1490), now Inc.3.J.1.1 [3531]; The Book of Fayttes of armes (1489), now Inc.3.J.1.1 [3524]; The Chastysing of goddes Chyldern (1491?), now Inc.3.J.1.2 [3563]; and The boke of Fame (1486?), now Inc.3.J.1.1 [3506].

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48. Seth Lerer, ‘‘Medieval Literature and Early Modern Readers: Cambridge University Library Sel. 5.51–5.63,’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003): 311– 32, quote on 315. 49. The full contents of the composite are as follows (in order), and are now cataloged separately but consecutively as Syn.8.54.81–95, with the exception of the seventh item (now Syn.8.55.60) and the eighteenth (now Syn.8.53.67): What the Husbandman shuld Practice (1543); Andrew Boorde, The pryncyples of Astronamye (1547?); Pronostycacyon of Erra Pater (1545?); Certyne Causes gathered together, wherin is shewed the decaye of England (1552); A Sarmon, of Ihon Oecolampadius (1548); Thomas Gibson, A breve cronycle of the Bysshope of Romes blesynge (1548); Robert Crowley, One and thyrtye Epigrammes (1550); Richard Smith, Of unwryren verytyes (1548); John Leland, The laboryouse Journey (1549); Wyclyffes wycket (1546); William Tyndale, The Souper of the Lorde (1533); William Turner, A new dialogue (1548); Anthony Marcourt, Declaration of the Masse (1547); The dyclosing of the Canon of the Popish Masse (1547); John Hooper, A Funerall oration (1549); A pore Helpe (1546); Petrus Ravennas, The Art of Memory (1545); and Richard Morison, Invective against treason (1539). 50. The texts are now cataloged separately but consecutively as Sel. 5.5–24, with the exception of the fourth and eighth items below (respectively, now Inc.5.J.1.2 [3557] and Inc.5.J.1.2 [3541]) and also the sixth and nineteenth items below, which are now lost. In order, the contents are Nychodermus gospell (1509); Pierre Gringore, The Castell of laboure (1506); The remors of conscyence (1510?); The abbaye of the holy ghost (1496); John Lydgate, The lamentacyon of our Lady (1510?); Pater noster, Ave, & Credo (1500?); Ars moryendi (1506); The medytacyons of saynt Barnard (1496); John Skelton, The bowge of courte (1510); The Parlyament of devylles (1509); A treatyse agaynst pestelence (1509); John Lydgate, Stans puer (1510?); Walter de Henley, Treatyse of husbondry (1510?); Robert the devyll (1500); Hystorye of Jacob and his twelve sones (before 1519); The p[ro]verbes of Lydgate (1515?); The dystruccyon of Iherusalem by Vasparyan and Tytus, Pyns (1500?); A Lytell geste of Robyn hode (1506); A lytyll Treatyse named the assemble of goddes (1500?); The boke of kervynge and sewynge (1506); The demaundes Ioyous (1509); A mery geste of the frere and the boye (1509?); Here begynneth a lytell geste how the ployman lerned his pater noster (1510?); John Lydgate, The chorle and the byrde and The horse, the sheep, and the ghoos (1510?); and The gouernall of helthe, With the medecyne of the stomacke (1506?). 51. The signatures are located on item 1, title page; item 12, fol. b4r; and item 14, fol. c8r, respectively. 52. The full contents, in order, are as follows (all but the second item contained under the present shelf mark Syn.7.60.216): Henry Manwayring, The Sea-Man’s Dictionary (1667); Anglicus Galfridus, Promptorium parvulorum clericorum (1516), now separated as Sel.5.36; Richard More, The Carpenter’s Rule (1602); Leonard Digges, A booke named Tectonicon (1614); John Roberts, The compleat cannoniere (1639); Edmund Deane, Spadacrene Anglica. Or, the English spaw-fountaine (1626); Salvator Winter, A Pretious Treasury (1649); Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor (1653); Henry Halhead, Inclosure thrown open (1650); The Assize of bread (1636); John Penkethman, Artachthos (1638); William Foster,

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Hoplocrisma-spongus (1631); Henri Estienne, The art of making devises (1646); John ApRoger, The yonger brother his apology by it selfe (1635); The order and solemnitie of the creation of prince Henrie, prince of Wales: Whereunto is annexed the royall maske (Tethys festival. By S. Daniel) (1610); and True copies of all the Latine orations, made and pronounced at Cambridge (1623). 53. A note in the contents list next to this item reads, ‘‘liber rarus et utilis,’’ and the AB catalog lists it as having been moved to its present Sel. class location. 54. On the inadequacy of the label ‘‘tract volume’’ in comprehending the products of early compilation and collection, see Needham, Printer and the Pardoner, 17. 55. Joseph Dane, What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 171–78. 56. The two texts are now, respectively, Inc.3.N.1.1 [3530] and Syn.4.61.47. 57. The texts once in the volume were The Lyf of Saint Katherin of Sens and The Reuelacions of Saynt Elysabeth (not dated, published together by Caxton), now under Inc. 3.J.1.2 [3573]; Of Gentylnes & Nobylyte, a Dialogue in Verse by Rastell (1535, sometimes attributed to Heywood), now Syn.4.52.9; Henry Medwall, Nature, a Goodly interlude (1529–35?), now Syn.4.53.11; and John Skelton, Magnificence, a goodly interlude (1530?), now Syn.4.53.12. 58. The catalog shows that the nonincunabular items 2 through 4 were first put in Bradshaw’s ‘‘select’’ class (Sel.b), and then later they were moved to his ‘‘Syn’’ class, which could be borrowed by permission of the Library Syndicate. 59. The contents of the book are as follows (the first ten are currently shelved as Sel. 5.25–34, the eleventh Inc.5.J.1.2 [3542]): The Passyon of our lorde (1521); The Forthe boke of the folowynge Jesu Cryst (1504); Margery Kempe, A treatyse of contemplacyon (1501); William Atkinson, trans., A full deuoute & gostely treatyse of ye Imytacio¯ . . . of . . . cryst (1510–19?); The Myrrour of the chyrche by Saynt Austyn (1521); The dyetary of ghostly helthe (1520); The Fruyte of redempcyon (1514); a life of Joseph of Arimathea (untitled; 1519?); Comforte agaynst trybulacyon (1510–19?); Rycharde Rolle his contemplacyons (1519?); and The Meditacyouns of Saynt Barnard (1496). 60. The current shelf marks are, respectively, F150.d.4.16, F150.d.4.17, Inc.5.D.1.49 [2656], and F150.d.4.15. 61. In the margins of Orationes Philippi Beroaldi (sigs. g8v–h1r), for example, a sixteenth-century owner recorded parts of a proclamation from Edward VI on teaching children. On commonplace books and their significance in print culture, see Ann Moss, Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 62. See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Woudhuysen usefully (pp. 21–22) lists several early miscellanies that combine print and manuscript material in one volume.

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63. The texts are The myrrour of the worlde (a reprint by Laurence Andrewe, 1527?), now Sel.3.265; The veray trew history of the valiant knight Jason (1492), now Inc.3.F.6.2 [3396]; and Cordyale (1478), now Inc.3.J.1.1 [3491]. The manuscript portion is now MS Nn.3.6. 64. Evidence of erasure of sixteenth-century readers’ marks in the same hand as those in printed items 1–3 can be found at fol. 36v of the manuscript and elsewhere. 65. The books are, in their former order, De viris illustribus urbis Romae (1512), now possibly Td.54.40; four manuscripts (now MS Hh.1.9) entitled, according to Pugh’s entry, Compendium Chronicorum Io. Trittenii, Tacitus’s De moribus Germanorum, Bapt. Mantuani Aeglogae x., and Rabbi Samuelis Libellus; then two more printed books, Henricus Glareanus, Dvo elegiarvm (1516), now F151.c.3.4, and something called Caroli Verardi, Caesenatis, In Laudem Serenissimi Ferdinandi Hispaniae regis (1492), now lost. 66. The contents are William Turner, The first and seconde partes of the herbal (1568); William Turner, Seconde parte of William Turners herball (1568); William Turner, Thirde parte of Guilliam Turners herball (1568); William Turner, Booke of the natures and properties (1568); and Hieronymus Brunschwig, A most excellent and perfecte homish apothecarye or homely physic, trans. John Hollybush (1561). The volume was rebound in the nineteenth century but kept intact as Sel.3.9. 67. The volume, now Sel.5.175, contains Banckes’s Herball (1526); Treasure of pore men (1526?); and The seynge of Urynes (1526?). 68. Benjamin, ‘‘Unpacking My Library,’’ 60. 69. The volume is now separated as Inc.2.B.3.122 [2117]. Its former shelf mark is AB.3.4. 70. Former shelf mark AB.10.27. The current shelf mark for this volume is Inc.3.J.1.2 [3563]. 71. MS Oo.7. 57 (fol. 48r). The old class catalog was created and used for the Cambridge University Library books before their reorganization into special rare classes such as the AB class. Many of the AB entries can thus be checked against their older entries in the broader class catalog, allowing for more precise information on the changes that some of its texts have undergone. The contents of AB.5.65 were Andrew Boorde, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of helth (1542?); Thomas Becon, An Invectyve agenst swearing (1543); and Grammatica Anglicana (1594). All are now Syn.54.60. 72. There are certainly others, although superseded catalogs are difficult to find largely because they themselves are not often cataloged. One example similar to Pugh’s AB catalog is the early catalog of William Hunter’s library now at the University of Glasgow (shelf mark GUL Gen. MS 1312), which shows that many early printed texts, including Shakespearean texts, were modernized and isolated from larger compilations in modernity. I discuss Hunter’s collection in the next chapter. 73. See, for example, recent scholarship on the new philology or new textualism, summarized by Leah Marcus’s introduction to Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996). The foundational effort to consolidate and summarize the stakes of the debate is found in Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass,

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‘‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 44:3 (1993): 255–83. I explore this secondary literature in Chapter 2. 74. There are, of course, exceptions. John Szirmai quotes Wilhelm Wattenbach, who worries in 1871 over the loss of bibliographical data in conservation: ‘‘Our knowledge . . . is far too limited to permit us to judge what essential data we may be destroying when we allow an old book to be handed over to a binder ‘to be restored.’ There is no such thing as restoring an old binding without obliterating its entire history’’ (Archaeology, p. x). 75. The majority of the work done on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors has focused on the now-dispersed libraries of antiquarians like John Stow, or libraries now in institutional possession like that of Robert Cotton. For an overview of the literature on book collecting in the pre- and early modern periods, see Carley and Tite, eds., Books and Collectors. 76. Timothy Graham, ‘‘Matthew Parker and His Manuscripts: A Study of an Elizabethan Library and Its Use,’’ in History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 1, ed. Leedham-Green and Webber, 322. See also Page, Matthew Parker. 77. The request was printed and is listed in the Short Title Catalogue as STC 7754.6. 78. Page, Matthew Parker, 44. 79. The Parkerian shelf marks below are the Corpus Christi College Cambridge (CCCC) shelf marks. As with my analysis of the AB catalog, I list short titles, authors, and dates. I do not include bibliographical information in the notes for Parker’s manuscripts, as that collection has been well documented by Graham and Page. 80. Graham, ‘‘Matthew Parker and His Manuscripts,’’ 328. 81. For an in-depth account of Parker’s manuscript erasures, see Timothy Graham, ‘‘The Beginnings of Old English Studies: Evidence from the Manuscripts of Matthew Parker,’’ in Back to the Manuscripts, ed. Shuji Sato, 29–50 (Tokyo: Center for Medieval English Studies, 1997), and ‘‘Matthew Parker and His Manuscripts.’’ 82. Graham, ‘‘Beginnings of Old English Studies,’’ 44. 83. They are MS 178 pt. 1 and MS 162, respectively. 84. For this story in full, see Graham, ‘‘Beginnings of Old English Studies,’’ 44. 85. Page, Matthew Parker, 51. 86. For this and other similar examples, see Page, Matthew Parker, 51. 87. Timothy Graham, ‘‘Changing the Context of Medieval Manuscript Art: The Case of Matthew Parker,’’ in Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives, ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Timothy Graham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 184. 88. See Graham, ‘‘Changing the Context,’’ 186, and Page, Matthew Parker, 7–8, for the full details of this story. 89. See Graham, ‘‘Matthew Parker and His Manuscripts,’’ 328. 90. Bruce Dickins, ‘‘The Making of the Parker Library: Sandars Lecture,’’ Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 6 (1972–76): 19–34. 91. Page, Matthew Parker, 46. 92. The printed books at the Parker Library are mentioned only in passing by Page (Matthew Parker, 11) and Graham (‘‘Matthew Parker and His Manuscripts,’’ 335–8). During his tenure as librarian at the Parker Library, Page began to track down the printed

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books in the Parker Register with the intention of creating a checklist or catalog, but the project was never taken up. From 2003 to 2006, Cambridge bibliographer William Hale recatalogued the printed items in the Parker Library online and produced a typescript catalog matching them, where he could, to the items in the Parker Register. This study owes a great deal to Hale’s work. 93. To take a few additional examples, MS 113 is a compilation of Parker’s manuscript letters bound with the printed book Reasons, why the Lordes Boorde should rather be after the forme of a table than of an aultar (London, 1550) and two of Parker’s own printed single-sheet ‘‘tables’’ on the subject of marriage. MS 101 is a manuscript compilation of Anglo-Saxon material, letters, and other things bound with two seemingly unrelated printed books bound in (and used as writing surfaces). MS 106 is a collection of manuscript material on the subject of Cambridge with a great deal of printed material bound in: broadsides, royal proclamations, tables, and so on. 94. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and David McKitterick, ‘‘A Catalog of Cambridge University Library in 1583,’’ in Books and Collectors, ed. Carley and Tite, 159. 95. Ibid., 159. 96. To take one example, EP.E.8 contains two volumes: Eyb, Margarita poetica (Paris, 1477), and Cicero, Epistolae ad familiares (Paris, 1477). These are mostly incunabula and could have been transported in this ‘‘bundled’’ state. See Lucy Lewis, ‘‘For no text is an island,’’ for more information on the transportation and transmission of large bundles of early printed text. See Page, ‘‘Parker Register,’’ for a fuller explanation of Parker’s organization techniques. 97. G.3.7. These works were printed in 1573 and 1544, respectively. 98. This is one of the few of Parker’s composite volumes that has been separated by modern librarians (now bound as EP.T.11 [Poggii Florentini, Opera (Strasbourg, 1513)] and EP.Z.10 [Zeigler, In C. Plinii de naturali historia librum secundum commentarius (Basel, 1531)], respectively). 99. These texts were all printed in London. Full bibliographical information can be found in the library’s catalog. 100. Page, Matthew Parker, 11. 101. SP 180 is one example of this form of collection, containing astronomical and political works, the items in the latter category having been once paginated separately in a different volume. 102. The text of the sermon is Gabriel Biel, Sermones Gabrielis Biel Spirensis de festiuitatibus gloriose virginis marie (Hagenau, Germany: H. Gran for J. Rynman, 1510). 103. MS 106 contains a printed extract entitled Solutiones faciendae bedellis (fol. 378); MS 113 contains two copies of a printed ‘‘Table of the degrees prohibited in marriage’’ (unfoliated), taken from Parker’s other projects; and MS 121 contains a printed pullout at fol. 523. 104. Matthew Parker had his own ‘‘life’’ written by his longtime secretary and collaborator, John Jocelyn, in his addendum, The life off the 70. archbishopp off Canterbury presentlye sittinge Englished and to be added to the 69. lately sett forth in Latin: this numbre off seventy is so compleat a number as it is great pitie ther shold be one more, but that as

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Augustin was the first so Mathew might be the last (Heidelberg, 1574). The standard modern biography of Parker remains V. J. K. Brook, A Life of Matthew Parker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). In what follows, I also draw on David J. Crankshaw and Alexandra Gillespie, ‘‘Parker, Matthew (1504–1575),’’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition (http://www.oxforddnb.com/). 105. Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 103. 106. The texts are Iniunccions geven by the most excellent prince, Edward the sixte (London, 1547); Articles to be enquyred of, in the Kynges Maiesties visitacion (London, 1547?); and Certayne sermons or homilies . . . (London, 1547). See Crankshaw and Gillespie, ‘‘Parker, Matthew,’’ on Parker’s interactions with Edward VI. 107. John Fisher, De unica Madgelena libri tres (Paris, 1519); Jacques Lefe`vre d’E´taples, De Maria Magdalena (Paris, 1518); Josse Clichtove, Cisceptationis de Magdalena defensio (Paris, 1519). 108. The texts included are A letter of a yonge gentylman named mayster Germen Gardynare (London: W. Rastell, 1534); Sir Richard Morison, An exhortation to styre all Englyshe men to the defence of theyr countreye (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1539); Illustris. ac potentis (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1537); The enquirie and verdite of the quest panneld of the death of Richard Hune (Antwerp, 1537?); Admonitio paterna Pauli III (Base, 1545); An epistle or exhortacion, to vnitie [and] peace, sent fro[m] the Lorde Protector (London: Richard Grafton, 1548); and A copie of a lettre sent to preachers (London: Richard Grafton, 1548). 109. Both of these texts were printed by John Day in London. 110. A Defence of Priestes Mariages (London, 1562). On Parker’s additions to Ponet’s text, see Crankshaw and Gillespie, ‘‘Parker, Matthew.’’ 111. The texts are John Boxall, Oratio longe elegantissima (London: Robert Caly, 1555); Epta cuiusdam Angli (Paris, 1561); Nicholas Bodrungan, An epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande, hath to the souereigntie of Scotlande (Richard Grafton, 1548); A proper newe booke of cokerye [also called Of Cokery and Seuing of meates] (London, Iohn Kynge and Thomas Marche, 1558?); An epistle of the Dukes [of Norfolk] mariage (London: Iohn Day, 1571); A discourse of the pretended match between the Dyke of Norfolke and the Queene of Scots (London, 1569); William Fleetwood, An oration of the Recorder of London (London: Iohn Daye, 1571); Catalogus eorum qui scripserunt in Biblia (1572); James Pilkington, The bourning of Paules (London, 1561); A treatise for householders (1574); George Buchanan, Ane admonition to the Lordes of Scotland (London: Iohn Daye, 1571); Thomas Norton, A disclosing of the bull (London: Iohn Daye, 1570); and An answere to the Portugall pearle (London: William Hovv, 1570). 112. For a concise account of Parker’s involvement in publishing works of ecclesiastical history, see Crankshaw and Gillespie, ‘‘Parker, Matthew.’’ 113. The texts are John Mair, Historia Maioris Britanniae, tam Angli[a]e q[uam] Scoti[a]e (Paris: Josse Badius, 1521), and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Britanni[a]e vtriusq[ue] regu[m] et principum origo & gesta insignia (Paris: Josse Badius, 1517). (The latter text is commonly known by the uniform title Historia regnum Britanniae.) On the surviving

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manuscripts that show signs of having been used in this project, see Graham, ‘‘Beginnings of Old English Studies.’’ 114. Some extant copies (such as British Library [BL] C.24.b.8, a gift copy for Elizabeth) retain these painted inserts. Others, such as BL b.24.b.7, a gift copy to Arundel, which ended up in the Lumley Library, seem to reflect selection on the part of the early reader or recipient, who painted some initials and left some blank. Still others, such as BL 11757, do not contain any painting. 115. Matthew Parker, The Correspondence of Matthew Parker: Comprising Letters Written by and to Him, from A.D. 1535, to His Death, A.D. 1575, ed. John Bruce and Thomas Perowne (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1853), 425. 116. Matthew Parker, Correspondence, 426. 117. See the catalog entry in H. J. Todd, A Catalog of the Archiepiscopal Manuscripts in the Library at Lambeth Palace (London, 1812), 242–45. Several other examples of this kind of sewing-for-revision or -enlargement can be found in other of De antiquitate’s lives. These are listed in Todd’s catalog. 118. On medieval practices of sewing objects and cloth into manuscripts, see Christine Sciacca, ‘‘Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts,’’ in Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed. K. M. Rudy and B. Baert, 161–90 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007); and Hanneke Van Asperen, ‘‘Praying, Threading, and Adorning: Sewn-In Prints in a Rosary Prayer Book’’ (London: British Library, Add. MS 14042) in the same collection (pp. 81–120). On the embellishment of manuscripts and printed books in the period, see Mary Erler, ‘‘Pasted-In Embellishments in English Manuscripts and Printed Books c. 1480–1533,’’ Library 6:14 (1992): 185–206. 119. My thanks to Josh Smith for help with the medieval Latin in this marginal annotation. 120. Because of later conservation efforts, it is difficult to reconstruct the original volume in order to know the exact placement of these documents, but similar examples (listed by their modern paginations) can be found at fol. 116–17 (a sewn-in manuscript booklet in a twelfth-century hand [dated 1181] called Inquisitio facta de pecunia Rogeri Archiepi Ebor’ defuncti opposite a page from the printed entry ‘‘Theobaldus’’), fol. 150 (a sewn-in item, Submisso Johannis, Regis Anglie, pape T. R. apud Porcester opposite a page from the printed entry ‘‘Stephanus Langton’’), fol. 192 (an item once sewn in, Mandatium dni Roberti [de Kylwardby], Cant’archiepi contra bajulationem Crucis archiepi Eboracensis in dioec’Cantuar [dated 1274]), and fol. 195 (Mandatum dni Roberti [de Kylwardby], Cant’archiepi directum dno Waltero [Bronescomb] Exon’ epo, pro excomunicatione nobilis viri dni Lewelini, dated 1277). The final unpaginated section of Lambeth Palace Library MS 959 contains a number of manuscripts and printed sheets that were also once sewn in. 121. On the continuation of De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae after Parker’s death, see Crankshaw and Gillespie, ‘‘Parker, Matthew,’’ which makes specific reference to Lambeth Palace Library MS 959.

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chapter 2. making shakespeare’s books 1. Bodleian Library (hereafter BodL) Arch. G.e.32. According to a note in the first flyleaf, the book was donated to the Bodleian in 1833. Caldecott was a barrister and prominent collector of works by Shakespeare. He also produced a controversial edition of Hamlet and As You Like It in 1819. (See Caldecott’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB) entry: Marvin Spevack, ‘‘Caldecott, Thomas [bap. 1744, d. 1833],’’ DNB [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]). 2. There is, according to the Bodleian catalog entry, an imperfection on the title page of the Sonnets volume that does not affect the text. 3. William Sherman is eloquent on this point in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2008), 164. See also Stephen Orgel, ‘‘Margins of Truth,’’ in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 92. 4. The most prominent summary discussion of materiality studies in Renaissance literature, and Shakespeare in particular, is Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 44:3 (1993): 255–83. On eclectic editing and the principles of the bibliography of the previous generation, see W. W. Greg, ‘‘The Rationale of the Copy Text,’’ Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950): 19–36. 5. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. For important early treatments of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury printed apparatuses, which have become too numerous in the secondary literature to list, see Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), ch. 4; Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993); and Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). The foundational account of the Shakespearean text as it was ushered into modernity by eighteenth-century editors is Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Andrew Murphy has recently offered a concise history of the printed apparatus in his Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). As a testament to the decline of the copy text as the guiding objective of bibliographic scholarship, much recent work on the editorial apparatus of Renaissance works has focused on ‘‘unediting’’ the classroom edition. See, for example, Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996); Randall McLeod, ‘‘UN Editing Shak-speare,’’ SubStance 33–34 (1982): 26–55; and the collection of essays, Randall McLeod, ed., Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance (New York: AMS, 1994). 6. D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: ‘‘Printers of the Mind’’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 42.

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7. Seth Lerer, ‘‘Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 118 (2003): 1254 and 1260, respectively. See also Alexandra Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 67:2 (2004): 189–214. 8. On Bodley’s exclusion of dramatic texts from his library, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘‘ ‘Rowme’ of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries,’’ in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, 113–30 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 9. British Library (hereafter BL) C.34.k.41. The ‘‘sixth quarto’’ is actually an octavo, though it matches the other quartos in size and is called a ‘‘quarto’’ for simplicity’s sake. 10. Alexandra Gillespie makes a similar point of Chaucerian material in ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ 189. 11. A manuscript catalog, produced around 1778 by Edward Cappell, is preserved in the British Library under the shelf mark 643.l.30. An informative printed edition is also available: see G. M. Kahrl and D. Anderson, The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays: A Catalogue with an Historical Introduction (London: British Museum, 1982). 12. BL C.21.b.40. 13. On Garrick as a book collector, see G. M. Kahrl and D. Anderson, The Garrick Collection, ‘‘Introduction,’’ and also G. W. Stone, Jr., and G. M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), esp. 165. As Stone and Kahrl indicate, little book-historical attention has been paid to Garrick’s collecting habits and the composition of his volumes. 14. As Kahrl and Anderson explain in their introduction, the Garrick collection was dispersed at the start because of the British Museum’s policy to classify books not by donor but by subject. Also early on, many of Garrick’s books were disbound in order to sell off the duplicate copies. In the nineteenth century, faced with a disintegrating collection, the librarian Anthony Panizzi embarked on a wholesale rebinding campaign that transformed most of the composites into individually bound books. 15. Garrick revived the play in 1747 and produced his own adaptation in 1773. 16. My thanks to Ivan Lupic for correcting my error in a previous version of this material regarding the location and date of this text. 17. As Kahrl and Anderson explain in their introduction to the catalog, many of Garrick’s plays were originally owned by Humphrey Dyson, whose collection passed to Richard Smith when Dyson died in 1632. Smith died in 1675, after which many of his plays found their way to Garrick. 18. The contents, in order, are William Davenant, Luminalia (1637); John Caryl, The English Princess (1667); George Digby, Elvira (1667); Abraham Bailey, The Spightful Sister (1667); Matthew Medbourne, The Converted Twins (1667); George Chapman, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598); Thomas Heywood, How Man may choose a good wife from a bad (1630); William Rowley, A Shoemaker a gentleman (1638); John Bale, The Chief Promises of God (1547); Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc (1590); and Ben Jonson, The Case is Altered (1609). All except Gorboduc are traceable to different volumes in Garrick’s library. In enumerating the contents of compiled books in this chapter, I list

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authors, titles, and dates. Full bibliographical information is given only where relevant. Where it is not relevant, I indicate where the information can be obtained. 19. See Joseph Dane, What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 171–78; Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ and ‘‘Bookbinding,’’ in The Production of Books in England, 1350– 1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, 150–72 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1986), 17–18. 20. St. John’s College Cambridge Gg.3.42. A full listing of contents is available in the Newton catalog at Cambridge. The volume was owned by Charles Otway, whose library came into the college’s possession in two bequests: one in 1683–85 and the other, at Otway’s death, in 1721. Many of Otway’s books are organized in this way. 21. St. John’s College Oxford HB4 / 16.a.2.15. The volume, bound in the eighteenth century, contains works by Thomas Heywood, Christopher Marlowe, and John Shirley. A full listing of contents is available in Oxford Libraries’ union catalog, OLIS. 22. I base my figures on the English Short-Title Catalogue. Of the entries with copyspecific information, four out of seven early copies of The Merry Devil of Edmonton and three of five early copies of The Birth of Merlin are in composite volumes at these three archival centers in the United Kingdom. Early copies of the more canonical Shakespearean plays survive in multitext volumes almost exclusively in special cases, such as in Edmund Malone’s collection of dramatic texts at the Bodleian Library. 23. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘The Authentic Shakespeare,’’ Representations 21 (1988): 1–25. 24. Hunter died in 1783, four years after Garrick. His collection arrived at the University of Glasgow in 1807. 25. Glasgow University Library (hereafter GUL) Gen. MS 1312. It seems that the only early modern literary texts from Hunter’s collection that were individually bound during Hunter’s lifetime were large-scale works like Milton’s Paradise Lost. The majority of his literary holdings, however, were small-scale quartos and octavos. 26. The only one that was not reshaped (though apparently it was rebound) was GUL Sp. Coll. Hunterian Co.3.22, which contains a 1629 quarto of Richard III with four non-Shakespearean plays. 27. GUL Sp. Coll, Hunterian Co.3.27. For this and all other Hunterian volumes subsequently mentioned, a full contents list is available in the Glasgow University Library Catalogue. 28. GUL Sp. Coll. Hunterian Co.3.31. 29. GUL Sp. Coll. Hunterian Co.3.32. 30. GUL Sp. Coll. Hunterian Co.3.34. 31. The volume survives in its original binding with an eighteenth-century table of contents listing several manuscripts that are now absent. (To take one example, item 10, a play in manuscript called The Female Rebellion, was extracted sometime in the twentieth century and placed in the sequence of manuscripts as MS Hunter 635.) The rationale, we might suppose, is the same as that which caused such librarians as Henry Bradshaw to

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split manuscripts and printed books in the AB collection at the Cambridge University Library, which I explored in Chapter 1. Special thanks to Julie Gardham for her generous help with this and the other Hunterian volumes at Glasgow. 32. The logic, of course, is that a text is more prone to damage the more it is handled; a text in a composite book is likely to be handled unnecessarily, as readers leaf through it to find another text. In the last half century, this practice of disbinding composite books has fallen out of favor. 33. Folger Shakespeare Library (hereafter FSL) STC 4619. Because the Folger catalogs its early printed books by STC number, the composite volumes in its collection that I discuss here have multiple call numbers, one for each imprint. I follow the Folger catalog in listing the first call number as the ‘‘main’’ one; all others can be found by consulting the ‘‘bd. w.’’ (‘‘bound with’’) tag in each entry. My thanks to Steven Galbraith and Frank Mowery for their help with this and all other Folger volumes discussed below. 34. Heywood’s Troubles of Queen Elizabeth is often referred to by its subtitle, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (parts 1 and 2). 35. On part-editions sold ready bound, see Gillespie, ‘‘Bookbinding,’’ 171–72, and Mirjam Foot, Bookbinders at Work: Their Roles and Methods (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2006), 16. 36. On incunable bundling, see Lucy Lewis, ‘‘ ‘For no text is an island, divided from the main’: Incunable Sammelbande,’’ in Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac, ed. Barry McKay, John Hinks, and Maureen Bell, 13–26 (London: British Library, 2002). 37. FSL STC 22282 (bound with STC 22288a). The seventeenth-century owner is Thomas Twisden. 38. I refer to the special section in the Parker Register for such anthology-like volumes, ‘‘Bookes in parchement closures as the lye on heapes’’ (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 575, ‘‘The Parker Register’’). On Parker’s more literary collecting habits, see Bruce Dickins, ‘‘The Making of the Parker Library: Sandars Lecture,’’ Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 6 (1972–76), 19–34; and R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and His Books: Sandars Lectures (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 1993). 39. Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL) 1600.22 (full contents available in the LPL Printed Books Catalogue). During the Revolution, the volume was sent to Cambridge along with the other Lambeth books, where the librarians recataloged it by only its first and presumably most useful text at the time. Readers at Cambridge thus knew the volume as ‘‘E.W. his Thameseidos and others,’’ as it is listed in the class catalog there (Shakespeare falling into the category of ‘‘others’’). 40. According to the notes in the catalog entry at Lambeth, the copy of 2 Henry IV disappeared shortly after World War II. 41. David Scott Kastan, ‘‘ ‘The King Hath Many Marching in His Coats’; or, What Did You Do During the War, Daddy?’’ in his Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 136. The seminal studies of ‘‘containment’’ in the play are Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,’’ in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, 21–65 (Berkeley:

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University of California Press, 1988); and Steven Mullaney, ‘‘The Rehearsal of Cultures,’’ in The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, 60–87 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). On the doubleness of Shakespeare’s history plays more generally, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 5. 42. Edward Wilkinson, E. W. his Thameseidos (London: W. White for Simon Waterson, 1600), sig. D2r. 43. The English pamphlet is titled, An Italians dead bodie, stucke with English flowers (London: Thomas Creede, 1600). On Palavicino, see Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). 44. Englands hope against Irish hate (London: W. W. for Thomas Heyes, 1600) is a virulently anti-Irish poem about the Nine Years War. The King’s declaration and ordinance containing the cause of his warre against the Duke of Savoy (London: John Flasket, 1600) concerns Henri IV’s protracted conflict with Charles Emmanuel I, who sought to expand his duchy and then, later, to align with Spain against the king. Both texts are linked by a concern to root out rebellion. 45. I quote from Shakespeare throughout using Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition (New York: Norton, 1997). 46. On the Bridgewater catalog, which lists a compilation of ‘‘Diuers Playes by Shakespeare,’’ see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249. 47. One exception to this schema can be found in the group eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collectors who infamously cut up early editions to make specimen books, among them, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, whose compilations are now at the Folger. The question of whether such activities were normal or aberrant is still up for debate. On latter-day practices of cutting, see Christopher de Hamel’s introduction to the exhibition catalog, Disbound and Dispersed: The Leaf Book Considered (Chicago: Caxton Club, 2005). On Halliwell-Phillips, see Marvin Spevack, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: The Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2001). On cutting and pasting in the Renaissance, Juliet Fleming, William Sherman, and Adam Smyth are coediting a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on ‘‘Renaissance Collage’’ 45:3 (2015). 48. The first account of the Pavier Quartos was A. W. Pollard, ‘‘A Literary Causerie: Shakespeare in the Remainder Market,’’ Academy (June 2, 1906): 528–29. Pollard’s account relied on the anachronistic notion of ‘‘remaindering’’ (selling unsold stock in ad-hoc collections, which, scholars have shown, did not actually become common until the eighteenth century), and was quickly replaced by W. W. Greg’s theory of Thomas Pavier’s piracy, first set out in his essay ‘‘On Certain False Dates in Shakesperian Quartos,’’ Library s2 9 (1908): 113–31. For recent discussions of the Pavier Quartos, which continue to rely largely on Greg’s theory of piracy, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 255–58; Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 4; and Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, ch. 2.

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49. The category, commonly used to describe a set of plays printed separately but bound into one book, was adopted from W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1939–59), 2:679–80. The category is problematic, as it describes books we consider independent productions, such as Edmund Spenser and Samuel Daniel’s earliest ‘‘collected works’’ editions. I discuss these volumes and the problems in classifying them in Chapter 5. 50. In addition to the groupings mentioned below, see Greg, Bibliography, 3:1108. 51. In 1619, responding to a letter from the Lord Chamberlain, the Stationers’ Company issued an order to prevent the publication of what is now assumed to be the Pavier collection, after which, so the theory goes, Pavier had the remaining plays printed in single units to avoid suspicion. 52. FSL STC 26101, copy 3. The copy at Texas Christian University is uncataloged. 53. FSL STC 26101, copy 2. 54. The table of contents was written in by the quartos’ eighteenth-century owner, Bishop Percy; but as a binder’s note in the back of the modern volume explains, ‘‘It may safely be assumed that the original order is shown in the list on the verso of the old fly-leaf.’’ A fairly thorough account of the volume’s provenance and circulation can be reconstructed with the records left by Percy and the Folger bibliographers. 55. See the ‘‘Note on Sales,’’ Times Literary Supplement, February 27, 1920, which comments on ‘‘the extreme probability that it [the volume] has been there ever since it was bound up in London over three centuries ago.’’ 56. The publication date of 1599 is a Short Title Catalogue estimate for all of these texts. 57. The classic account of the publication and reception of The Passionate Pilgrim is Arthur Marotti, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property,’’ in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 150–54. For a more recent account, see Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2003), ch. 4, and Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 19–20. 58. On the possibility that The Passionate Pilgrim and Venus and Adonis were sold together by the printer, W. Leake, see Joseph Quincy Adams’s introduction to the facsimile volume The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare (New York: Scribner’s, 1939). 59. The passionate pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare (London: [T. Judson] for W. Jaggard, 1599), 4, 6, 9, and 11. 60. On gender inversion in the poem, see Jonathan Bate, ‘‘Sexual Perversity in Venus and Adonis,’’ Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 80–92; and more comprehensively (on ‘‘reversal’’ as a both theme and trope), see Anthony Mortimer, Variable Patterns: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (New York: AMS, 2000). Recent critical accounts, from the standpoint of the history of sexuality, have begun to question this focus on role reversal. See Richard Rambuss, ‘‘What It Feels Like for a Boy: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,’’ in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 4, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 240–58. The Folger compilation under discussion lacks these first pages, which Adams blames on the abuse of later readers.

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61. The first mention of Adonis in The Passionate Pilgrim is 4.2. 62. Nancy Vickers, ‘‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,’’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 95–115 (New York: Methuen, 1985). Vickers’s title refers to sonnet 106. 63. Jane O. Newman, ‘‘’And let mild women to him lose their mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 45:3 (1994): 304–26. Other important readings of the poem that invoke the Philomela tale are Katherine Eisaman Maus, ‘‘Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 37:1 (1986): 66–82, esp. 73; and Laura G. Bromley, ‘‘Lucrece’s Re-Creation,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 34:2 (1983): 200–211. 64. Newman, ‘‘And let mild women,’’ 318. 65. Laura G. Bromley, ‘‘The Lost Lucrece: Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece,’’ Papers on Language and Literature 21 (1985): 258–74. 66. Thomas Middleton, The ghost of Lucrece (London: Valentine Simmes, 1600), sig. A8r. The idea of a ‘‘hunt,’’ of course, finds particular resonance in the plot of Venus and Adonis and in several of the Ovidian-influenced poems in The Passionate Pilgrim. 67. The Huntington Library assigns classification numbers to individual titles. The present volume comprises three different numbers: HEH 59000, 59001, and 59002. 68. There is debate surrounding the probable dates of composition and publication for this text, primarily because it bears the false imprint ‘‘At Middleborough,’’ probably to avoid censorship. For an early assessment, see J. M. Nosworthy, ‘‘The Publication of Marlowe’s Elegies and Davies’s Epigrams,’’ Review of English Studies 4 (1953): 260–61. On the complex issues involved in the dating of the editions, see Roma Gill and Robert Krueger, ‘‘The Early Editions of Marlowe’s Elegies and Davies’s Epigrams: Sequence and Authority,’’ Library 36 (1971): 242–49; and Fredson Bowers, ‘‘The Early Editions of Marlowe’s Ovid’s Elegies,’’ Studies in Bibliography 25 (1972): 149–72. Bowers was the first to suggest that the imprint was false. 69. A curator’s note in the front flyleaves of the book reads: ‘‘This volume discovered in 1867 at Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, the seat of the Isham Family was added in 1893 to the Britwell Library.’’ Special thanks to Liza Blake for sharing with me her notes on this volume. 70. On the manuscript evidence, see Gill and Krueger, ‘‘Early Editions.’’ 71. Sir John Davies, Epigrammes and elegies. By I.D. and C.M ([Middleborough, 1599]), sig. A3r. I quote from this text using the early edition. 72. Modern editions of the two texts rarely make reference to the early compilation (see, for example, Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Works, Vol. 1, ed. Roma Gill [Oxford: Clarendon, 1987]; and John Davies, The Poems, ed. Robert Krueger [Oxford: Clarendon, 1975]). Needless to say, the critics who do mention the volume today are usually interested in Marlowe’s translation and only peripherally in Davies’s work. An exception to this, in addition to the bibliographical discussions already listed, is Ian Frederick Moulton, ‘‘ ‘Printed Abroad and Uncastrated’: Marlowe’s Elegies and Davies’ Epigrams,’’ in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White, 77–90 (New York: AMS, 1998).

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73. The text was later expanded (and fulfilled) as All Ouids elegies 3. bookes. By C.M. Epigrams by I.D. ([Middlebourgh, 1603]). Note that the order of the texts in the 1603 reprint was reversed. Bibliographers generally agree that this version of the text was printed at London. 74. Sig. E2r. Presumably, ‘‘ames’’ should read ‘‘arms.’’ 75. BodL MS Rawl. Poet. 212. 76. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘‘calculate’’ 5. 77. On how ‘‘the poem divides rather neatly into comic and tragic halves,’’ see Richard Halpern, ‘‘ ‘Pining Their Maws’: Female Readers and the Erotic Ontology of the Text in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,’’ in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), 377. 78. For two comprehensive accounts of the Bishop’s ban and its relation to the literature of the period, see Richard McCabe, ‘‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,’’ Yearbook of English Studies 2 (1981): 188–93; and Lynda E. Boose, ‘‘The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage,’’ in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, 185–200 (Ithaca, N.Y./London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 79. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘Tobacco and Boys: How Queer Was Marlowe?’’ in The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (London: Routledge, 2002), 219. Orgel is discussing the later edition, All Ouids Elegies (1603), here. 80. Sig. D3r. 81. Sig. C1r–C1v. 82. On the intertwined sexual and rhetorical energy in the poem, see Jonathan Bate, ‘‘Sexual Perversity.’’ For a reassessment of this claim, see Rambuss, ‘‘What It Feels Like for a Boy.’’ 83. Richard Halpern, in an influential interpretation, suggests that Venus and Adonis was in fact ‘‘a piece of soft-core pornography’’ (‘‘Pining Their Maws,’’ 379). On Shakespeare’s poem as an erotic text, see Boika Sokolva, ‘‘Erotic Poems,’’ in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (London: Blackwell, 2003), 392–403. 84. Sig. D4v. 85. John Denham, Directions to a painter for describing our naval business (London, 1667), 34. The poem is sometimes attributed to Denham and Andrew Marvell. 86. On the theme of kingship in Pericles, see Constance Jordan, Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), ch. 2. 87. For recent accounts of Daniel’s Queene’s Arcadia in relation to then-popular Italian models of pastoral tragicomedy, see Jason Lawrence, ‘‘The Whole Complection of Arcadia Chang’d: Samuel Daniel and Italian Lyrical Drama,’’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 143–71; and Johanna Procter, ‘‘The Queene’s Arcadia (1606) and Hymen’s Triumph (1615): Samuel Daniel’s Court Pastoral Plays,’’ in The Renaissance in Ferrara and Its European Horizons, ed. J. Salmons and W. Moretti, 83–109 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1984).

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88. Samuel Daniel, The Queenes Arcadia (London: G. Eld for Simon Waterson, 1606), sig. B1r. 89. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 171; Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 3. 90. On the appropriation of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia by royalist readers, including Charles I, see Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, ch. 3. 91. For a recent consideration of Pericles and Shakespearean romance, see Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I put ‘‘late plays’’ in quotation marks because the term assumes a career trajectory that we can only sketch out with the available evidence. (Further, the group typically excludes other definitively late plays, such as Two Noble Kinsmen.) 92. Barbara Mowat, ‘‘ ‘What’s in a Name’: Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy,’’ in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 4, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 133. 93. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 160. 94. FSL STC 22352. (The Shakespearean text was given the primary call number, even though it comes second in the volume.) 95. I quote from Shakespeare’s dedication in Venus and Adonis, which promises a ‘‘graver work’’ in print, widely assumed to be Lucrece, published shortly thereafter. 96. The envoy reads, ‘‘Goe little booke noe longer mine / Waite on my dearest valentine / And when betwixt her armes she’l haue thee / Wish in thy place poore mee yt gaue thee. Jo:Drew.’’ 97. In context, the lines are loosely translated as ‘‘I’ll never believe you, you still have a [cat’s] heart.’’ (The cat is assumed from the context.) The attribution to Coke is commonplace. See, for example, John Lord Campbell, The Lives of the Chief Justices of England (London: Edward Thompson, 1894), 370. 98. On the commonplace markers in Lucrece, see Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, ‘‘Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare, 1590–1619,’’ in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), esp. 46–55; and Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 59:4 (2008): 371–420. 99. Charles Fitz-Geffry, The blessed birth-day (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1636), sig. E8v. 100. Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, 100. 101. See Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, ch. 3, for an account of Lucrece as it was fragmented and redeployed in early commonplace books. 102. The volume has been rebound, but its contents were most definitely compiled in this way in the seventeenth century. The early arrangement is confirmed in the manuscript acquisitions register of the library of Hans Sloane (MS Sloane 3972C, vol. II, f. 133), who donated the book to the British Museum at its founding. My thanks to Giles Mandelbrote for this information.

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103. Alcilia. Philoparthens louing Follys (London: Richard Hawkins, 1619), sig. A2r. 104. Alcilia, sig. M5r. 105. For the most recent of these re-readings and a summary of the scholarship on the subject, see Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, ch. 4. 106. Chartier and Stallybrass have made this point in a number of recent conference presentations: Chartier in a paper called ‘‘What Is a Book’’ (given at the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University, December 3, 2004), and Stallybrass most recently on the panel ‘‘Histories of Reading, Material of Reading’’ (New York University, May 1, 2008). See also Dane, What Is a Book? Dane and Randall McLeod have made this point implicitly for years from the perspective of a rigorous and minutely focused bibliography that has influenced Stallybrass and others (see De Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘‘Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,’’ 255n).

chapter 3. transformative imitation 1. On recent media transition and the shape of new cultural productions (in literature, music, and other areas), see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 2. See, for example, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998). On the problematic use of ‘‘early modern’’ to describe Shakespearean and other Renaissance works, see Margreta De Grazia, ‘‘When Did Hamlet Become Modern?’’ Textual Practice 17:3 (2003): 485–503. 3. J. Hillis Miller, for example, in an influential account of nineteenth-century narrative, writes, ‘‘The linearity of the written or printed book is a puissant support of logocentrism. The writer . . . sits at a desk and spins out on the page a long threat or filament of ink. Word follows word from the beginning to the end. The manuscript is set for printing in the same way, whether letter by letter, by linotype, or from tape by computer. The reader follows, or is supposed to follow, the text in the same way, reading word by word and line by line from the beginning to the end’’ (Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], 5). Victorian novels were frequently published in serial, but even in these cases of de facto compilation, a teleology of the complete, assembled work governed production and reception in a way that it did not in earlier periods. See also, on the rise of the novel in symbiotic relationship with anthologies, digests, and other nonlinear forms, Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ‘‘Ergodic literature’’ is a term introduced by Espen Aarseth to describe text production in the digital era. See Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1–2. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines digital storage mechanisms and electronic literatures in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). Other foundational accounts of how digital reading and writing technologies shape literary practices include Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998); N. Katherine Hayles, Writing

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Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2001); and Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). On the concept of ‘‘remix’’ in digital culture, see Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008). 4. The text I discuss in the following account is Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson Poetry 148 (hereafter BodL MS Rawl. Poet. 148). Little is known about Lilliat’s life beyond the fact that he was chorister at Chichester and later Wells. For a fuller bibliographical account, see Edward Doughtie, Liber Lilliati: Elizabethan Verse and Song (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985). Doughtie’s modern edition of Lilliat’s verse, although problematic for reasons discussed below, forms the basis for my analysis. 5. On the inextricability of social and literary registers in the sonnet, see Arthur Marotti’s seminal essay, ‘‘Love Is Not Love: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,’’ English Literary History 49 (1982): 396–428. 6. On the sonnet sequence as an expression of the class and gender position of the courtier in Renaissance England, see, in addition to Marotti (‘‘Love Is Not Love’’), Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 1, and Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 7. While formally the English sonnet sequence is rooted in Petrarchism, the familiar set of poetic conventions in which a male poet expresses his desire for an unobtainable, uninterested female figure, scholars agree that Renaissance poets used the format as a way to express displaced anxieties and emotions, from sexual violence to cultural superiority and imperialism. For a concise, foundational account of Petrarchism in its Italian form, see John Freccero, ‘‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,’’ Diacritics 5:1 (1975): 34–40. On the Petrarchan tradition and particularly the blazon as a vehicle for misogynist violence and corporeal fragmentation, see Nancy Vickers, ‘‘Members Only: Marot’s Anatomical Blazons’’ in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3–21; and Wall, Imprint of Gender, ch. 3. On love poetry as a vehicle for Western Europeans understanding and maintaining mastery over the colonial encounter in the New World, see Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 8. On Sidney’s legacy as a sonnet writer, see Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 6. 9. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 35. 10. Cave ‘‘presupposes the intrinsic interest and the broad diffusion of Erasmus’s handbook,’’ noting that the wide applicability of his theory of writing in the Renaissance is due to the fact that ‘‘this approach was disseminated among a whole generation of European students precisely at a moment when the potentialities of the vernacular were being vigorously defended and explored’’ (Cornucopian Text, 9–10).

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11. Cave offers a full genealogy of the concept as it descended from Cicero and Quintilian to Petrarch and Erasmus. See Cornucopian Text, ch. 1. 12. Erasmus quoted in Cave, Cornucopian Text, 24; ibid., 35. 13. Ibid., 36. 14. On the legacy of source study as an arm of textual bibliography in Renaissance studies, see Leah Scragg, ‘‘Source Study,’’ in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, ed. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 372–83. For a reassessment of source study as it relates to more recent critical methods in the field, see Douglas Bruster, ‘‘Shakespeare and the Composite Text,’’ in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 43–88. Much of the early scholarship on Renaissance imitation was in dialogue with Harold Bloom’s account of Romantic authorship. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 15. G. W. Pigman III, ‘‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,’’ Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 10. Pigman’s discussion is based primarily on the metaphors used by classical and early modern authors to describe their practice of imitation. 16. Ibid., 10. 17. Ibid., 32. 18. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 19. Ibid., 40. By ‘‘subtext,’’ Greene means the discursive strategies and literary content of the source. 20. Ibid., 45. 21. Ibid., 20–21 22. Ibid., 20. 23. The seminal consideration of authorship as a historical construct is that of Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 101–20. For the most influential literary-critical accounts of early modern authorship as it diverged from modern and Romantic models, see Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Stephen Orgel, ‘‘The Authentic Shakespeare,’’ Representations 21 (1988): 1–25. Recently, a number of scholars have taken issue with the displacement of the author figure, particularly in Shakespeare studies. See, for example, Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare Only (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. Appendix II, ‘‘Abolishing the Author? Theory Versus History’’ (506–41). I discuss some of this more recent work on authorship and attribution in Chapter 5. 24. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘The Renaissance Artist as Plagiarist,’’ English Literary History 48 (1981): 479. 25. Ibid., 484.

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26. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 27. Ibid., 4. 28. On this point, Crane draws on the work of Mary Carruthers and Frances Yates on the arts of memory. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 29. Ann Moss, Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), ch. 2. 30. Peter Beal, ‘‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth Century Commonplace Book,’’ in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–91, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, N.Y.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), 134. 31. Crane’s fullest discussion of these verse collections and their influence on form in poetry can be found in Framing Authority, ch. 7. 32. Ibid., 92. 33. The idea that textual consumption is also a form of production has an analogue in literary and cultural theory in Michel de Certeau’s work. ‘‘To read,’’ de Certeau writes, ‘‘is to wander through an imposed system. . . . The reader takes neither the position of the author nor an author’s position. He invents in texts something different from what they ‘intended.’ He detaches them from their (lost or accessory) origin. He combines their fragments and creates something unknown in the space organized by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings’’ (de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 169). This passage of de Certeau has become an important touchstone in the history of reading. See Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1. 34. Recognizing the extent to which commonplace books permeated conceptions of writing in the period has been especially useful in revisiting what has been called the Drab Age of Renaissance poetry: the period of ‘‘earnest, heavy-handed, commonplace’’ verse that flourished between the early Petrarchism of Wyatt and Surrey and the newly selfassertive poetry of Philip Sidney and his followers in the so-called Golden Age of the 1590s. Much of Crane’s analysis seeks to rescue the Drab Age poets from their derisive label. Her fullest discussion of how the notebook method informed these writers’ work can be found in Framing Authority, ch. 7. 35. Thomas Middleton, The ghost of Lucrece (London: Valentine Simmes, 1600). 36. Examples discussed in the introduction include Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), and Philip Sidney’s prose romance, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. To take a later example, John Suckling’s poem, ‘‘A Supplement of an Imperfect Copy of Verses of Mr William Shakespears, By the Author,’’ extracts and modifies two stanzas of Lucrece, enlarging the Shakespearean material with two new additional stanzas to form a stand-alone lyric poem. On extensions and conclusions of unfinished works in the period, which were common, see Stephen Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern

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England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In Renaissance drama, perhaps the best-known appropriation of a passage is Shakespeare’s use of Montaigne’s essay on cannibalism in Gonzalo’s vision of utopia in The Tempest. 37. The book was acquired in 1709 by Bodleian keeper Thomas Hearne, who sold his manuscripts to the collector Richard Rawlinson, who in turn left them to the Bodleian in 1756. It is unclear what became of the book between 1629, when Lilliat died and bequeathed his estate to his wife, Mary, and 1709. See Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 33–34. 38. The term ‘‘fair copy’’ is used most often in Shakespearean literary criticism to denote an author’s finished manuscript. For the problems involved in applying this designation to early texts, see Paul Werstine, ‘‘Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65–86. 39. Falconer Madan, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895), 421. 40. Miscellanies and personal anthologies from before the seventeenth century are few and far between. For a survey of the available evidence from this period, see Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pt. 1. 41. See Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, ‘‘The Manuscript,’’ for a full list of contents. 42. For the few critics who have mentioned the text, see Bernard Wagner, ‘‘New Poems by Sir Edward Dyer,’’ Review of English Studies 11:44 (1935): 466; Marcy North, ‘‘Anonymity’s Revelations in the Arte of English Poesie,’’ Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 39:1 (Winter 1999): 17; and Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 22. 43. Doughtie, Liber Lilliati. A second sustained discussion of the manuscript can be found in Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005), 72–75, though Kilroy, interested primarily in identifying crypto-Catholic transmissions in manuscript poetry from the period, argues purely on speculation that John Lilliat is a pseudonym for someone close to Thomas Watson, ignoring the facts of Lilliat’s life, which are well established. 44. On early modern England as ‘‘paper short,’’ see Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 9. On books as material resources in general in the period, see William Sherman, ‘‘What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?’’ in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 119–37. David Pearson provides a comprehensive guide to the various kinds of ownership marks left in early printed books in his Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (London: British Library, 1994). 45. In his Elizabethan how-to book, Hugh Plat provides precise instructions on how to cut and cast letters ‘‘such as Printers vse’’ at home (see ‘‘The Art of Molding and Casting,’’ in A Jewell-House of Art and Nature [London, 1594], esp. p. 67). His autograph manuscript of how-to recipes, now held at the British Library (Sloane MS 2197) also contains details on making stamps that ‘‘serue for mens names’’ to be printed both in books and on household surfaces like furniture, walls, and mantels (fol. 16r). On book stamps, see Pearson, Provenance Research, 87–91.

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46. On fol. 94r, for example, he closes a verse with the motto ‘‘Modo Vincam’’ in an engrossing script that resembles print. Other examples are given below. 47. BodL. MS Rawl. Poet. 148, fol. 43r. For all references to individual entries in Lilliat’s book, I use the item numbers given in Doughtie, Liber Lilliati. For quotations, I use Lilliat’s pagination or the signatures of the Hekatompathia, depending on where the text is recorded. 48. BodL. MS Rawl. Poet. 148, fol. 48r. 49. Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love (London, 1582), sig. A3r–A3v. My quotations from the letter are taken from the verso. 50. The notion that there was a ‘‘stigma of print’’—in which early modern writers sought to disclaim their own ambitions as authors because of the social connotations of the new technology—was first described in J. W. Saunders, ‘‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,’’ Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64. Saunders’s account has been greatly elaborated and refined by Wendy Wall, who has shown that, especially in early modern sonnet sequences, the language of publication was couched in the politics of gender and class. See the introduction to her study, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–22. 51. On the manicule, see Sherman, ‘‘What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?’’ 52. Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. A3v. 53. Lilliat attributes the poem to ‘‘doctor Sprint.’’ On the many other extant versions of this poem in manuscript, see Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 152–53. The strikethrough evidently reflects an effort to replace the incorrect ‘‘Iniurie’’ with ‘‘Ielozie,’’ which is the word used in all other extant versions. 54. Doughtie also speculates that ‘‘these lines were . . . perhaps recalled by Watson’s name at the end of the dedication’’ (Liber Lilliati, 152). 55. For example, Doughtie traces a narrative based on the datable poems in the sequence, detailing Lilliat’s troubled relationship with his wife and colleagues and also with his children, many of whom died or were estranged. For a full account, see Liber Lilliati, 24–32. 56. Ibid., 25. 57. Ibid., 27–29. Lilliat was reprimanded repeatedly for absenteeism and leaving the cathedral to ‘‘serve cures elsewhere.’’ He also seems to have had several run-ins with the bishops and other authority figures in the cathedrals, and his verse at certain points does exhibit an ‘‘unreformed’’ streak. (See, for example, entry 92, discussed by Kilroy and Doughtie, on the martyrdom of Edmund Campion.) 58. Ibid., 27–28. The events involved a vicar and peer, William Lawes, who eventually became Lilliat’s superior, much to his chagrin. This is one of several subnarratives that can be traced in the manuscript. 59. See Marotti, ‘‘Love Is Not Love.’’

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60. See, for example, sig. E2v, where Watson closes sonnet XXXVI with the couplet, ‘‘Why should I then desire a longer life, / To weave there in a webbe of endlesse strife.’’ For entries in Liber Lilliati that deploy the spider’s web metaphor, see 89, 91, 106, and 112. 61. Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. B4v. 62. Doughtie locates these instances of copying and more in his edition. I include references to the examples I discuss in the individual notes. 63. BodL MS Rawl. Poet. 148, fol. 43v. The original is now attributed to Christopher Marlowe. For a brief account of the complicated textual history of this poem, including its attribution, see Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 184–88. 64. BodL MS Rawl. Poet. 148, fol. 43v. 65. Ibid., fol. 45r. 66. Ibid., fol. 48r. The original line is from Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. M2v, line 11. See also Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 191. Doughtie attributes this point to Hyder E. Rollins (see Rollins, ed., England’s Helicon [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935], 2:127). As he explains in the notes to his edition, Watson’s poem was reprinted in the verse collection England’s Helicon, a text that Lilliat seems to have known. But this borrowed line is also the one that Lilliat furnishes with a gloss on ‘‘HEBE’’ (see above), which, Doughtie notes, closely resembles the gloss on the same term given in the Hekatompathia. It is thus far likelier that Hekatompathia was the source for Lilliat’s poem than England’s Helicon. For a full bibliographical account of this set of entries, including Lilliat’s imitation, see Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 184–88. 67. Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. K3r. 68. Ibid., sig. K3r. 69. BodL MS Rawl. Poet. 148, fol. 66v. 70. Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. K3r. 71. Quotation marks were used in the period to denote commonplaces or sentential segments that could be detached from the text. On this usage, see Margreta De Grazia, ‘‘Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,’’ in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 57–91; and Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 59:4 (2008): 371–420. 72. Watson, Hekatompathia, (sig. m1r). 73. The majority of work that has been done on the Hekatompathia and on Watson more generally focuses on the author as a translator and as having the ‘‘wrong idea’’ about Renaissance poetics. (See, for example, Wendy Phillips, ‘‘No More Tears: Thomas Watson Absolved,’’ Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 [1989]: 71–84; and A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘‘Sidney, Watson, and the ‘Wrong Ways’ to Renaissance Lyric Poetics,’’ Renaissance Papers [1997]: 49–62.) Ramie Targoff has made a similar argument in an unpublished paper given at the 2008 Renaissance Society of America meeting, ‘‘Thomas Watson and the Arts of Imitation.’’ Those who take a wider view of Watson’s work tend to treat him with similar derision. One recent study compares him to William Tyndale

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and finds him ‘‘an indefatigable transformer of others’ goods’’ (Gerald Snare, ‘‘Translation and Transmutation in William Tyndale and Thomas Watson,’’ Translation & Literature 12:2 [2003]: 189). The exception here is Crane, who positions Watson in the transitional period in sixteenth-century writing (Crane, Framing Authority, esp. 181–82.) 74. See S. K. Heninger, The Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582) by Thomas Watson, A Facsimile Reproduction (Gainsville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1964), xi–xii. As Heninger explains, Watson’s poems ‘‘retained their popularity. Later sonneteers rifled them for phrases and whole lines. Kyd borrowed Passion XLVII for The Spanish Tragedie (II.i.3–10), from whence it found a way into Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (I.i.263). Englands Parnassus (1600) quotes copiously from the Passions, England’s Helicon (1600) prints three of them complete over Watson’s name, and Davison’s Poetical Rapsody (1608) offers no less than ten with a separate title page.’’ 75. Heninger, Hekatompathia, x. 76. Ibid., xi. 77. Crane, Framing Authority, 181. Crane highlights the importance of Watson’s volume by including it in the category of sixteenth-century miscellanies that ‘‘established a powerful model of the published book as a material commodity, containing fragments of texts that could be bought and used by the public for its own social and material advancement’’ (Framing Authority, 171). 78. In addition to those examples mentioned in my introduction, one of the Hekatompathia’s prefatory poems by George Peele describes Watson’s work as ‘‘Compyl’d with iudgement’’ (sig. *4r). 79. Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. *2r. 80. Ibid., sigs. A4r and C3v. 81. Ibid., sig. 噛4v. 82. Ibid., sig. C3v. 83. Ibid., sigs. D2v, M1v, M3v, and M4v. 84. Ibid., sig. K2r. 85. Ibid., sig. A3v. 86. Ibid., sig. A1r. 87. Ibid., sig. A1r (ll. 13–16). 88. Ibid., sigs. F3r, I1v, and N1v; sig. I2v; and sig. G2v. 89. Ibid., sig. G4v. 90. Ibid., sig. M3v. 91. Ibid., sig. I2r. 92. Ibid.. 93. Ibid., line 12. 94. Ibid., lines 15–18. 95. The reader’s posy in this last line is printed in roman type, set off from the rest of the gothic verse, as if further extractable as a commonplace. 96. Appropriations from Ovid and Horace can be found in manuscript items 141 and 148, respectively. In these cases, Lilliat sometimes includes the name of the author along with his own signature ‘‘qd. Jo. L.’’

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97. For example, item 132 is taken from the Psalms, item 144 is taken from the almanac The Kalendar of Shepherds, and items 137 and 138 are recipes for ink. 98. See Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 151–52, on the textual history of these lines. 99. Quoted in Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 152. 100. The text can be found on sig. A3r of the Hekatompathia. 101. Doughtie notes that he ‘‘cannot discover the source of the last two lines in L’s version’’ (Liber Lilliati, 177). The simplest answer, knowing what we do about Liber Lilliati and the source, is that they are Lilliat’s. 102. Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, 164. I rely on Doughtie’s excellent detective work in the following quotations from the source material in Liber Lilliati. 103. BodL MS Rawl. Poet. 148, fol. 16v. 104. The quotation was originally (in a different form) Roger Stoddard’s, who goes on to argue that books are not written but manufactured. See his essay, ‘‘Morphology and the Book from an American Perspective,’’ Printing History 9:1 (1987): 4.

chapter 4. vernacularity and the compiling self in spenser’s shepheardes calender and montaigne’s essays 1. Philip Sidney, ‘‘The Defence of Poesy,’’ in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 215. 2. Ibid., 216–17. 3. Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ‘‘author,’’ n., note on etymology. In raising this issue, I follow Jeffrey Masten’s discussion of authorship in Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ‘‘Our customary modern usage’’ of the term author, Masten writes, ‘‘greatly simplifies (even obscures) the complex network of meanings the word inhabited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’’ (p. 64). 4. OED, ‘‘author,’’ n. 1a. The entry gives uses from William Lambarde (‘‘authoring’’ a castle) and Balthazar Gerbier (‘‘authoring’’ a piazza). 5. The dedicatory epistle to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender famously refers to its author as ‘‘the new Poete’’ (see The shepheardes calender [London: H. Singleton, 1579], sig. ‫ن‬2r). The seminal investigations of Spenser’s self-announcement, discussed below, are Richard Helgerson, ‘‘The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a Literary Career,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 93:5 (1978): 893–911, and ‘‘The Elizabethan Laureate: Self-Presentation and the Literary System,’’ English Literary History 46:2 (1979): 193–220; David Lee Miller, ‘‘Spenser’s Vocation, Spenser’s Career,’’ English Literary History 50:2 (1983): 197–231; and Louis Montrose, ‘‘ ‘The Perfecte Paterne of a Poete’: The Poetics of Courtship in ‘The Shepheardes Calender,’’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21:2 (1979): 34–67. See also, for a broad perspective on ‘‘laureate poets’’ in the English Renaissance, Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

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6. Foundational accounts of the essay genre in Montaigne studies include Alain Tournon, Montaigne: La glose et l’essai (Lyon, France: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983), and Richard Regosin, The Matter of My Book: Montaigne’s ‘‘Essais’’ as the Book of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). By the turn of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon and other English writers had taken up the project in their own books of essays. 7. Regosin, Matter of My Book. On Montaigne as the pivotal figure in the transition from medieval auctoritas to modern individualism in writing, see Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main (Paris: Seuil, 1979). Shakespeare famously draws material from Montaigne’s Essays in The Tempest (from ‘‘Of Cannibals’’) and elsewhere. 8. George Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 129. 9. Ibid., 98n. Hoffmann speculates that the working copies of the Essays were unbound since it would not be worth the cost to bind a book that was to be taken apart. For other foundational perspectives on the revisions, see Claude Blum, ‘‘Ecrire le ‘moi’: ‘J’adjouste, mais je ne corrige pas,’ ’’ in Actes du colloque international, ed. M. Tetel, 36–53 (Paris: Nizet, 1983); Richard Regosin, ‘‘Montaigne Between the Lines: Reading the Interstices, 1580, 1588, 1595,’’ in Le Parcours des ‘‘Essais,’’ Montaigne 1588–1988, ed. M. Tetel and G. Mallary Masters, 47–57 (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989); and Steven Rendell, ‘‘Montaigne and the Principle of Non-Correction,’’ in ibid., 253–62. 10. Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career, 98. 11. Ibid., 97. 12. Folger Shakespeare Library X.d.520. The text is the only surviving literary manuscript written by Spenser. The first account of the manuscript is Peter Beal, ed., Index of English Literary Manuscripts: Volume 1, 1450–1625 (London: Mansell, 1980), pt. 2, 523. Beal’s account was revised by Lee Piepho in ‘‘The Shepheardes Calender and Neo-Latin Pastoral: A Book Newly Discovered to Have Been Owned by Spenser,’’ Spenser Studies 16 (2002): 77–86, which I discuss below. My thanks to Lee Piepho for sharing his work on this volume with me. 13. For a description of the manuscript, including transcriptions and translations of the three texts, see Lee Piepho’s follow-up article, ‘‘Edmund Spenser and Neo-Latin Literature: An Autograph Manuscript on Petrus Lotichius and His Poetry,’’ Studies in Philology 100:2 (2003): 123–30. 14. The manuscript portion has been detached and recataloged. See Piepho, ‘‘Shepheardes Calender and Neo-Latin Pastoral.’’ Spenser transcribed the manuscript material on what was then the final leaf of a printed verse collection by the Neo-Latin poet Georgius Sabinus, which itself was bound to a collection of poems by Petrus Lotichius. The current shelf marks are V.a.341 (for Sabinus) and PA8547 L7P7 (for Lotichius). Both of the texts are titled Poemata; Lotichius’s was printed in 1576 and Sabinus’s is without a date or colophon. As Piepho explains, included with the rebound copy of Sabinus’s Poemata is a note written by Giles Dawson at the volume’s disbinding in 1960 confirming the original arrangement of the texts. Piepho draws on the obvious connection between Spenser’s transcription (on Lotichius, but written on the Sabinus volume) and the once-adjacent

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Lotichius volume to prove that the two texts were bound together in Spenser’s time and were not simply compiled by a later collector. 15. Piepho, ‘‘Shepheardes Calender and Neo-Latin Pastoral,’’ 80–84. Piepho provides a detailed list of shared themes and echoes. 16. Piepho, ‘‘Edmund Spenser and Neo-Latin Literature,’’ 127. 17. Helgerson, ‘‘Elizabethan Laureate,’’ 202. 18. On the structure of allusions in Spenser’s text, see Ruth Samson Luborsky, ‘‘The Allusive Presentation of The Shepheardes Calender,’’ Spenser Studies 1 (1980): 29–67. 19. On Spenser’s specific use of the pastoral romance format (which would have appealed to Sidney, to whom the Calender is dedicated), see S. K. Heninger, ‘‘The Typographical Layout of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,’’ in Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Karl Josef Ho¨ltgen, Peter M. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes (Erlangen, Germany: Universita¨atsbibliothek Erlangen-Nu¨rnberg, 1988), 33–71. On Spenser’s debt to manuscript presentation, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 233–43. And, on the calendar format, see Donald Cheney, ‘‘The Circular Argument of The Shepheardes Calender,’’ in Unforded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, 137–61 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). 20. Colin ‘‘complaineth him of his unfortunate love, being but newly (as semeth) enamoured of a countrie lasse called Rosalinde’’ (‘‘Januarye,’’ argument). He thus occupies the traditional role of the poet-lover articulated in countless Petrarchan sonnet sequences at the time. For an overview of this role and an influential account of The Shepheardes Calender as a critique of such poetry, see Helgerson, ‘‘The New Poet Presents Himself,’’ esp. 893–99. 21. Montrose, ‘‘ ‘Perfecte Paterne of a Poete,’ ’’ 42. 22. The name is glossed in ‘‘Januarye’’: ‘‘Colin Cloute is a name not greatly used, and yet have I sene a Poesie of M. Skeltons under that title.’’ Here and throughout, I cite simply ‘‘the glosses,’’ as the paratextual materials are not given line numbers in modern editions. 23. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 239. 24. The identity of E.K. has long been debated. The most compelling and widespread arguments are that E.K. was either Spenser himself in a different, editorial guise or Edward Kirke, a Cambridge friend of his. (For the former argument, see Penny McCarthy, ‘‘E.K. Was Only the Postman,’’ Notes and Queries, s.47 1 [2000]: 28–31; and Louis Waldman, ‘‘Spenser’s Pseudonym E.K. and Humanist Self-Naming,’’ Spenser Studies 9 [1988]: 21–31. The latter has been a long-standing counterargument. For an overview of the largely circumstantial evidence on Edward Kirke, see David R. Shore, ‘‘E.K.’’ in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990], 231.) Other, more particular arguments have been made that E.K. is Fulke Greville (see Paul E. McLane, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory [Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1961], 280–95) or Gabriel Harvey (see Heninger, ‘‘Typographical Layout of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’’).

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25. Though The Shepheardes Calender underscores its own ‘‘ancientness’’ here, the commonly held idea that Spenser deliberately used archaic English, prompting the need for a gloss, does not hold up to evidence. On how ‘‘Spenser’s deliberate archaism . . . has been greatly exaggerated,’’ see Bruce Robert McElderry, Jr., ‘‘Archaism and Innovation in Spenser’s Poetic Diction,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 47:1 (1932): 168. Much of what is assumed in the modern era to be a kind of cultivated obscurity in Spenser’s work reflected relatively normal Elizabethan usage. 26. On the apparatus of The Shepheardes Calender as conferring authority on the work, see Heninger, ‘‘Typographical Layout of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’’; Luborsky, ‘‘Allusive Presentation,’’ and ‘‘The Illustrations to The Shepheardes Calender,’’ Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 3–53; Michael McCanles, ‘‘The Shepheardes Calender as Document and Monument,’’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22 (1982): 5–19; and, more recently, Richard A. McCabe, ‘‘Annotating Anonymity, or Putting a Gloss on The Shepheardes Calender,’’ in Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry, 35–54 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000). 27. ‘‘October,’’ argument; the text refers here to the character Cuddie, Colin’s alter ego in the ‘‘October’’ eclogue. 28. OED, ‘‘pattern,’’ n. 7 and etymological note. For the modern definition, see OED, ‘‘pattern,’’ n. 11. 29. Former shelf mark AB 10.53 (now Syn 4.61.47 and Inc.3N/W.1.1 [3530], respectively). 30. Provenance marks indicate that the volume was owned by Richard Holdsworth, the seventeenth-century master of Emmanuel College. Holdsworth’s library was bequeathed to the university in 1649, and the texts were bound together in William Pugh’s time; so we can assume that they had been organized in this way at least since the early part of the seventeenth century. 31. My thanks to Tara Lyons for calling this volume to my attention. 32. The book is from the library of Louis Silver, and the note from that collection reads ‘‘Bound with 4.3.19,’’ the copy of the Shepheardes Calender. I was unable to locate the rebound copy of Spenser’s work but am told by the Newberry curators that it was likely recataloged under a ‘‘vault’’ call number. 33. Andrew Clark, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891), 10. 34. The texts contained in the volume following The Shepheardes Calender are Thomas Tusser, Five hundred pointers of good husbandrie (London, 1630); Nicholas Breton, Fantasticks: seruing for a perpetvall prognostication (London, 1626); Nicholas Breton, The Twelve Moneths, or A pleasant and profitable discourse of every action . . . proper to each partcular Moneth (London, 1661); John Brinsley, Calendar-Reformation, or an humble Addresse . . . touching dates and Moneths (London, 1648); and Hezekia Woodward, Christmas day, the old heathens feasting day (London: Henry Cripps, 1656). 35. The texts are Robert Moor, Diarium historicopoeticum (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1595); Threnodia in obitum D. Edouardi Lewkenor Equitis (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1606); a Latin translation of James I’s Lepanto, or heroicall song (London: Richard Field,

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1604); Robert King, Catena (London: J. Y., 1647); Thomas Wilson, Vita et obitus duorum fratrum Suffolciensium, Henrici et Caroli Brandoni prestanti virtute (London: Richard Grafton, 1551); Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender; Ogerius Bellehachius, Sacrosancta bucolica (London: Henry Middleton, 1583); and Thomas Carew, Coelum Britanicum (London: Thomas Walkley, 1634). 36. Because of the number of texts in this compilation, I list only abbreviated short titles for the first ten works listed in the catalog (full listings can be found in the Cambridge University Library catalog): Francis Bacon, Treason of the E. of Essex (London: Robert Barker, 1601); A short history of the Anabaptists of high and low Germany (London: T. Badger, 1642); Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender; An Answer to the Lord Digbies speech in the House of Comons (London, 1641); The anti-covenant (London: L. Lynchfield, 1643); Hugh Broughton, Master Broughton’s letters (London: J. Wolfe, 1599); True copies of all the Latine orations made . . . at Cambridge . . . on Tuesday and Thursday, the 25. and 27. of Februarie last past 1622 (London: W. Stansby, 1623); Robert Dallington, The view of Fraunce (London: Simon Stafford, 1604); Philip Hunton, A treatise of monarchie (London: J. Bellamy and R. Smith, 1643); and Sardanianus Eunapius, The lives of philosophers and oratours (London, 1579). 37. Characteristic of these early debates are D. T. Starnes, ‘‘Spenser and E.K.,’’ Studies in Philology 41 (1944): 181–200; and Robert W. Mitchner, ‘‘Spenser and E.K.: An Answer,’’ Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 183–90. 38. See, in addition to McCabe, ‘‘Annotating Anonymity,’’ and McCanles, ‘‘Shepheardes Calender as Document and Monument,’’ Sherri Geller, ‘‘You Can’t Tell a Book by Its Contents: (Mis)Interpretation in/of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender,’’ Spenser Studies 13 (1999): 23–64; Bruce Smith, ‘‘On Reading The Shepheardes Calender,’’ Spenser Studies 1 (1980): 69–93; and Evelyn Tribble, ‘‘Glozing the Gap: Authority, Glossing Traditions and The Shepheardes Calender,’’ Criticism 34:2 (1992): 155–72. Tribble extended her study of the glosses in The Shepheardes Calender in her book Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), ch. 2. 39. See Geller, ‘‘You Can’t Tell a Book by Its Contents,’’ 25. 40. See, for example, Bruce Smith on E.K. as ‘‘a kind of academic in-joke’’ (‘‘On Reading The Shepheardes Calender,’’ 89). 41. I use the spelling and the text of the almanac as it was reprinted in facsimile in S. K. Heninger, The Kalender of Sheepehards (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1979). As Heninger notes in his introduction, this particular edition is reprinted from the text of the almanac published around 1585 and thus is the closest copy we have to the publication date of The Shepheardes Calender. 42. The only sustained account of the almanac tradition as it informed Spenser’s work is Alison A. Chapman, ‘‘The Politics of Time in Edmund Spenser’s English Calendar,’’ Studies in English Literature 42:1 (2002): 1–24. Chapman discusses the politicized context of calendar reform, in which she argues Spenser’s Calender takes part by invoking the almanac. Three other discussions that briefly mention the formatting of the almanac and its place in the Calender are Donald Cheney, ‘‘Spenser’s Currencies,’’ in Edmund

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Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory, ed. Jennifer Klein Morrison and Matthew Greenfield (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000), 38–42; Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 189–99; and Smith, ‘‘On Reading The Shepheardes Calender,’’ 71–73. 43. As Halpern notes, ‘‘With the exception of the title, the woodcuts represent the clearest allusion to the old Kalendar of Shepherdes in Spenser’s volume’’ (Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 193). 44. As Heidi Brayman Hackel writes, ‘‘Black letter, or ‘English’ type, was usually considered—surprisingly to modern eyes—the easiest ‘print hand’ to read. Accordingly, it was the favored type for primers, ballads, and other cheap print’’ (Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 60). Texts we now understand to be literary were rarely printed in blackletter by the 1580s and 1590s (one exception being Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus). On this point, see D. F. McKenzie, ‘‘Printing in England from Caxton to Milton,’’ in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. Boris Ford (New York: Penguin, 1982), 211. 45. See for example, Eugene R. Kintgen, ‘‘Reconstructing Elizabethan Reading,’’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 30:1 (1990): 1–18. Examining Thomas Blundeville’s manual The true order and method of writing and reading hystories (1574), Kintgen notes: ‘‘Given that there was some recognition in the Renaissance that strategies of various types were necessary, is there any evidence that these strategies were ever seen in relation to reading what we think of as literary texts? I know of nothing comparable to Blundeville’s treatise for reading poetry, something like ‘The True Art of Reading and Writing Poetry’ ’’ (p. 8). Kintgen goes on to suggest that such instructions were embedded in literary works that do not explicitly announce themselves as instructional. 46. Adam Smyth, ‘‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England,’’ English Literary Renaissance 38:2 (2008): 203–204. In his claim that almanacs were the most popular printed books in England at the time, Smyth draws on Eustace F. Bosanquet, English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications: A Biblical History to the Year 1600 (London, 1917). 47. Ibid., 202. 48. Ibid., 204. 49. For a full overview of the kind of modifications and manuscript annotations that were frequently made to almanacs, see Smyth, ‘‘Almanacs, Annotators,’’ 205. Many almanacs were written and used out of existence, and do not therefore survive to witness this process. For a surviving example of a used almanac, which includes manuscript poetry and pragmatic information on printed and wax pages, see Huntington Library shelf mark 286650. 50. Smyth, ‘‘Almanacs, Annotators,’’ 229. 51. The only exception to this view that I have found in recent criticism is Ruth Luborsky (‘‘Allusive Presentation,’’ 55), who suggests that the woodcuts in The Shepheardes Calender were geared toward a less learned audience.

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52. Speaking of editions of Virgil’s works, Bruce Smith notes that readers would find in the glosses ‘‘(1) a depiction of rustic manners to be marveled at, (2) allusions to real persons and real events to be deciphered, (3) parallels with earlier authors to be noted and admired, (4) philosophical argument to be thought about, and (5) a moral message to be acted upon. All five perspectives, we should note, are addressed in E.K.’s scholion’’ (‘‘On Reading The Shepheardes Calender,’’ 76). 53. Kalender of Sheepehards, sig. A2r and sig. N8r, respectively. 54. Roland B. Botting, ‘‘The Composition of the Shepheardes Calender,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 50:2 (1935): 429. 55. The eclogues that have a borrowed or imitated central unit are ‘‘Februarie,’’ ‘‘March’’ (Bion’s Idyll 4), ‘‘Maye’’ (a Reynard the Fox fable), ‘‘Julye’’ (Mantuan’s seventh eclogue), and ‘‘October’’ (Mantuan’s fifth eclogue). 56. Colin’s complaint in ‘‘Januarye’’ is fashioned after Virgil’s second eclogue, but it is not an imitation in any strict sense of the word, and it actually leans toward the Petrarchan rather than the Virgilian in its themes. The eclogues that feature Colin’s verses as the central unity are ‘‘Januarye,’’ ‘‘Aprill’’ (Colin’s lay to Elizabeth), ‘‘June’’ (another of Colin’s complaints), ‘‘November’’ (Colin’s song of Dido), and ‘‘December’’ (Colin’s final complaint). The two problematic eclogues in the schema that I have set out here are ‘‘August’’ (in which there is both a central imitated unit and a poem by Colin) and ‘‘September’’ (where there is neither). 57. On how literary texts from the period announce commonplace-worthy segments of texts for the reader’s use, see Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 59:4 (2008): 371–420. 58. The Horatian version (from Odes) quoted by E.K. is ‘‘Exegi monimentum ære perennius, / Quod nec imber nec aquilo vorax etc.’’ (emblem, 7–8), and the Ovidian version (from Metamorphosis) is ‘‘Grande opus exegi quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis, / Nec ferrum poterit nec edax abolere vetustas etc.’’ (emblem, 13–14). Both comment on the assumed monumentality of the work, anticipating the final envoy, and both are misquoted. 59. The emblem was reprinted as blank throughout Spenser’s lifetime, suggesting that no effort was made to correct the apparent omission. See William Oram et al., The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 202. 60. Smith, ‘‘On Reading The Shepheardes Calender,’’ 89. 61. Ibid. 62. Poesy as a form of ‘‘making’’ is an idea that appears with regularity in The Shepheardes Calender. See, for example, ‘‘Aprill’’ (l. 154), ‘‘June’’ (l. 82), ‘‘August’’ (l. 142), and ‘‘October’’ (l. 21). 63. Regosin, Matter of My Book, 141. 64. Here I use the transcriptions of Montaigne’s marginalia provided by George Hoffmann. For this quotation, see Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career, 104–105. 65. Montaigne began work on the Essays in 1571 after having retired from public life to read and write at the privacy of his estate. The first edition of the Essays appeared in

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1580, followed by a second edition (introducing some revisions) in 1582 and a major revision and extension in 1588. The Bordeaux copy consists of notes and further revisions and extensions made directly onto the 1588 quarto by Montaigne before his death in 1592. On the question of why Montaigne never produced a new work but chose instead to work within his existing one, see Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career, esp. ch. 5. Studies of the changes undergone by the Essays as they passed from one edition to another are too numerous to list, but the foundational bibliographical account is Pierre Villey, Les Sources et l’e´volution des ‘‘Essais’’ de Montaigne (Paris: Hachette, 1933). 66. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 139. 67. In my treatment of Montaigne’s Essays here, I quote from the French edition, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), giving the volume number and the page number, and then second, in brackets, from the English edition, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), with the page number. I modify Frame’s translations and note the modifications where I find a clearer word or phrase. In this quotation, I have substituted ‘‘enter-glose,’’ used in the Renaissance English translation by John Florio, for the French verb ‘‘entregloser’’ [to annotate between]. Frame’s translation, ‘‘write glosses about,’’ normalizes the word, instating an opposition between text and paratext that is less clear in the notion of ‘‘glossing between.’’ 68. This is not to say that Montaigne’s Essays was never bound with other things. As I explained in Chapter 1, large-scale printed productions (especially incunables) were routinely bound into larger compilations. A book like the Essays, however, was large enough that it would likely not be cost-effective to do so. In my research I have only found one copy of the book bound with something else: Folger STC 14081 copy 4, a 1603 copy (in English) of the Essays combined with Henri Estienne’s A Wworld of vvonders (1607). The binding is contemporary, but there is no way to know when these two texts were bound together. 69. Regosin, Matter of My Book, 3. 70. The image of Montaigne writing in seclusion in his library comes largely from his own self-presentation in the Essays and has been called into question recently, most notably from George Hoffmann. See Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career, ch. 1 and 2, on how Montaigne’s daily concerns as an estate owner in Pe´rigord shaped the production of his text. 71. See Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career, ch. 4 and 5. Modern editions of the Essays attempt to reflect this process of revision and proofreading by marking the divisions between early versions with a letter A, B, or C. Though, as Hoffmann and others have shown, such efforts are often inadequate and do not do justice to the complexity of Montaigne’s engagement with the successive editions of his text. 72. Regosin, Matter of My Book, 88. See also the important study of the ‘‘essay’’ as a generic form in Montaigne: Tournon, Montaigne: La glose et l’essai. 73. Montaigne’s reading habits, particularly the intertextuality of his citations (or noncitations) in the Essays, has been a subject of great interest in anglophone criticism.

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For some key contributions, see Cathleen M. Bauschatz, ‘‘Montaigne’s Conception of Reading in the Context of Renaissance Poetics and Modern Criticism,’’ in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, 264–91 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Terence Cave, ‘‘Problems of Reading in the Essais,’’ in Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce, ed. I. D. MacFarlane and Ian Maclean, 133–66 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Reading in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), ch. 4; and Richard Regosin, ‘‘Conceptions of the Text and the Generation(s) of Meaning,’’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985): 101–14. 74. The earliest English translation of rappiecez was ‘‘patched and hudled up together,’’ which simultaneously introduces a sewing or craft metaphor and anthropomorphizes it (The essayes, or Morall, politike, and militarie discourses of Lord Michael de Montaigne, trans. John Florio [London: M. Flesher for Rich: Royston, 1632], 90.) 75. Montaigne’s relationship with La Boe´tie has been the subject of much critical discussion. For an overview, see Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 63–84. For a recent account of La Boe´tie and his essay, see Marc Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2008), ch. 2. On how La Boe´tie figures in the essays, see the foundational readings of Jean Starobinski in ‘‘Montaigne: Des morts exemplaires a` la vie sans exemple,’’ Critique 258 (1968): 923–35, and Montaigne en mouvement (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 11–86; Regosin, Matter of My Book, 7–29; and Franc¸ois Rigolot, ‘‘Montaigne’s Purloined Letters,’’ Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 144–66. On Montaigne’s essay as collaborative, see Masten, Textual Intercourse, esp. 33. 76. The text glorified the polity of Venice over the monarchy and was being used to seditious ends at the time. For a concise account of La Boe´tie’s text, its history in print, and its political legacy, see Schachter, Voluntary Servitude, 52–58. 77. The Horatian passage was a later addition, appearing for the first time in the 1588 copy. 78. Montaigne crossed out all the printed sonnets in the 1588 Bordeaux copy, and all subsequent editions (all of them posthumous) lacked the text. No effort was made to cover up the omission. 79. Richard Regosin touches on Des livres in Matter of My Book, 84–93, although in his discussion he takes ‘‘books’’ to mean ‘‘learning,’’ not the material text. Other recent readings of Des livres include Michael Grant, ‘‘ ‘Des livres’: Montaigne on (His) Books in the Essais and the Journal de voyage,’’ Romance Languages Annual 7 (1995): 60–66; and He´le`ne Ostrowiecki, ‘‘Images du Lecteur: Notes sur l’essai ‘Des livres’ (II,10),’’ Bulletin de la Socie´te´ des Amis de Montaigne 8:15–16 (1999): 23–32. 80. The French ‘‘de´cousues’’ literally means ‘‘not sewn together.’’ I have amended Frame’s translation of the phrase—‘‘detached pieces’’—to reflect this more literal sense. 81. Here I have amended Frame’s translation ‘‘to the shape I give it’’ to restore the French word for ‘‘fashion.’’ 82. Many of the editions survive to show Gournay’s manuscript work on the text. For a bibliographical account of Gournay’s corrections, see R. A. Sayce and David

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notes to pages 145–150

Meskell, A Descriptive Bibliography of Montaigne’s Essais 1580–1700 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1983), 119–20. 83. Schachter, Voluntary Servitude, ch. 4. Of the signed epistle, Schachter writes, ‘‘In appending her name to La Boe´tie’s words, Gournay aspires to take up a position within the hallowed rhetoric of a presumptively male friendship tradition’’ (p. 120). Gournay’s place in Montaigne’s Essays is a central topic of debate. For a concise account of Gournay as an editor of Montaigne, see Michael Simonin, ‘‘Aux origins de l’e´dition de 1595,’’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25:3 (1995): 313–44. 84. Jeffrey Masten notes that Florio’s own comments on his translation seem to reflect his acquaintance with the collaborative writing modeled in De l’amitie´ (see Textual Intercourse, p. 33). 85. On this, see F. O. Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), ch. 4. 86. Ibid., 144. 87. Folger STC 18042, sig. K3v. The annotation includes author, title, volume, and book identification for Pliny’s Natural History, 12.1. 88. Here and below I quote from the 1632 edition. 89. The leaf is unsigned, opposite the frontispiece. 90. These are long-standing objects of study, with fully developed literatures in scholarship on the Middle Ages. On concepts of compilatio, see Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 247–57; Alastair J. Minnis, ‘‘Late-Medieval Discussions of Compilatio and the Role of the Compilator,’’ Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 101 (1979): 385–421; and M. B. Parkes, ‘‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,’’ in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson, 115–41 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). On the anthology, see Seth Lerer, ‘‘Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 118 (2003): 1251–67. For a survey of scholarship on the manuscript miscellany, see Stephen Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, eds., The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

chapter 5. the custom-made corpus 1. A. W. Pollard, ‘‘A Literary Causerie: Shakespeare in the Remainder Market,’’ Academy (June 2, 1906): 528–29. 2. Ibid., 528. I list the titles and dates here as reported by Pollard. These plays comprised nine rather than ten quartos, the two parts of The Whole Contention having been printed as one. 3. Ibid., 529.

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4. I have been unable to discover the origins of this term, which is used often in popular discourse but rarely in scholarship (and those few instances are without attribution). A simple search on Google turns up over four thousand hits for ‘‘False Folio’’ and around three thousand for ‘‘Pavier Quartos.’’ 5. W. W. Greg, ‘‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos,’’ Library s2 9 (1908): 113–31. The most recent retelling of Greg’s narrative is Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 255–58. A strain of criticism skeptical about the piracy thesis can be traced in Gerald D. Johnson, ‘‘Thomas Pavier, Publisher, 1600–25,’’ Library s6 14:1 (1992): 12–50; Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 2; and Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 4. Massai’s account, in particular, offers a thorough reassessment of the Pavier texts as products of editorial planning rather than deception. My treatment in this chapter is indebted to Massai’s. 6. Greg, ‘‘On Certain False Dates,’’ 128. 7. Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602–1640, ed. W. A. Jackson (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957), 110. 8. Henry E. Huntington Library 69323. The text is part of the Elihu Church collection. 9. E-mail correspondence with Stephen Tabor, September 8–9, 2009. My thanks to Stephen and the Huntington conservators and photographers for their patience and assistance. 10. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 26101 copy 2, flyleaf. 11. Percy’s note remarks on the volume’s acquisition from someone named Orlebar (or Orlebars) as a gift, as well as its being sent to a collector friend at Cambridge, who extracted King Lear. What was left of the book was rebound in the nineteenth century and disbound into its present state shortly after. The only texts currently bound together are Pericles and the two parts of The Whole Contention. 12. The conservator’s note is recorded in the back flyleaves of STC 26101, copy 2. 13. The shelf marks in both instances refer to individual imprints. The Folger’s local notes do provide some provenance information. At the Huntington, the image was recorded in the item’s catalog entry after I brought it to the curators’ attention. 14. W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the Early English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1939–59). The later editions of the Short Title Catalogue (hereafter STC) list Greg’s classification numbers in each Pavier quarto entry. 15. The textual combination is likely the work of readers but possibly the work of publishers. Heywood’s A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse (1617) was printed by Isaac Jaggard, son of William Jaggard, printer of the Pavier Quartos. (William printed the first edition of A Woman Kilde in 1607.) Evidence has also been proposed that the 1617 text was set by Jaggard’s so-called Compositor B, who was ‘‘ubiquitous’’ in Shakespearean collections from the Pavier Quartos to the First Folio (K. M. Sturgess, ‘‘The Early Quartos of Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness,’’ Library s5 25:2 [1970]: 98).

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16. Greg, Bibliography, 3:1007–8. 17. Nearly all the Pavier Quartos that survive in archives, like the Shakespearean quartos surveyed in Chapter 2, have been rebound in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, or twentieth-century collectors’ bindings. The few exceptions that I have found are documented here and in Chapter 2. 18. The secondary literature on authorship in early modern culture is by now too vast to list. Some foundational accounts are Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). Most of these are in some way in dialogue with key poststructuralist theories of authorship (see Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 101–20; and Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Death of the Author,’’ in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977], 142–48). 19. Jeffrey Masten traces the genealogy of collected-works formats in seventeenthcentury English drama in Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For another comprehensive account, see Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 20. See Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Richard Newton, ‘‘Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book,’’ in Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 31–58; and the collection, Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen, eds., Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). 21. De Grazia summarizes, ‘‘The task of the 1623 folio was to unify the disparate and stabilize the transitory’’ (p. 32). See also, on the First Folio, David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 2; and Masten, Textual Intercourse, 120–21. 22. Recent studies in early modern authorship have focused on Shakespearean attribution and/or have attempted to return us to a notion of the playwright’s ‘‘literariness,’’ traditionally conceived. See Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist; Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Counterfeiting Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and most recently, Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare Only (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 23. Jeffrey Knapp, ‘‘What Is a Co-Author?’’ Representations 89 (2005): 3. 24. Ibid.

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25. On this point in recent scholarship, see the proliferation of ‘‘What Is a Book?’’ titles among scholars of the early modern period: the forthcoming collection edited by Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, What Is a Book? and Joseph A. Dane’s What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). Other perspectives on ‘‘the book itself as a set of possibly unfamiliar forms’’ in the period include Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use/Book Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005), 4–5; Alexandra Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 67:2 (2004): 189–214; Stephen Orgel, ‘‘What Is a Text?’’ in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (London: Routledge, 1991), 83–87, and ‘‘Textual Icons: Reading Early Modern Illustrations,’’ in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Jonathan Sawday and Neil Rhodes, 57–92 (London: Routledge, 2000); and Adam Smyth, ‘‘ ‘Rend and Reare in Peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England,’’ Seventeenth Century 19:1 (2004): 36–52. Bibliographers and curators are perhaps most aware of the compilations of the early printed book as a category. For a representative example, see R. I. Page’s discussion on page 11 of ‘‘what you mean by a book’’ in Matthew Parker and His Books: Sandars Lectures (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), drawn from his experience as librarian at the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 26. STC 2:122. 27. See, for example, Thomas More, The vvorkes of Sir Thomas More (London: 1557), sig. 2U4v, ‘‘A deuoute prayer, collected oute of the psalms of Dauid, by sir Thomas More knighte’’ and also the 2Y quire, containing letters. 28. Thomas Becon, The worckes of Thomas Becon (London: John Day, 1564), sig. A2v–A3v. 29. Ibid., sig. A3v. 30. The individual parts are listed in the English Short Title Catalogue as 6733.3 (2 sermons), 6731.3 (27 lectures), 6683 (Certaine letters), and 6681 (Briefe catechisme). There is a general title page with preliminary materials that was issued to form the collection. 31. The Whole workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes (London: John Foxe, 1573), sig. A2r. 32. Ibid., sig. A3r. 33. This composite title references the Dialogue Containing the Number in Effect of All the Proverbs in the English Tongue, which was expanded through six editions beginning in 1546. 34. John heywoodes woorkes (London: T. Marshe, 1562), sig. A1v. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. Heywood’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry explains that the Woorkes ‘‘derived from many sources, including Erasmus’s Adages (1508), but there is a sense that Heywood’s sensitive ear for demotic speech played a significant part’’ (Peter Happe´, ‘‘Heywood, John [b. 1496/7, d. in or after 1578],’’ in DNB [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Oct. 2008]). It should also be noted that in at least one case, Heywood’s Woorkes can be found in a binding with other non-Woorkes materials:

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see Princeton University Library RHT 16th-49, which includes the independent printed text, The Spider and the Fly, a narrative poem. 37. Greg has documented the contents of these collections: see the Bibliography 3:1061–66. 38. Certayne Bokes, co[m]pyled by mayster Skelton (London: Richard Lant for Henry Tab, 1545). 39. Pithy Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes of Maister Skelton (London: T. Marshe, 1586), sig. *3a. 40. John Scattergood, ‘‘Skelton, John (c.1460–1529),’’ DNB, online ed. 41. The Poetical Works of John Skelton Principally According to the Edition of the Rev. Alexander Dyce. Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), cxvii. 42. The possible exception here is the very clearly monumentalizing Works of Thomas More, but again we can compare the production to modern authorial collections to see some difference: no anthology of Shakespeare’s works would include a poem merely ‘‘collected by’’ Shakespeare. 43. Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23. See also her essay ‘‘Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quartos: Miscellanies from Manuscript to Print,’’ Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12:1 (2000): 1–25; and Seth Lerer, ‘‘Medieval Literature and Early Modern Readers: Cambridge University Library Sel. 5.51– 5.63,’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003): 311–32. 44. Quoted in Gillespie, Print Culture, 11 (my emphasis). 45. Ibid., 12. 46. Seth Lerer has influentially called this an ‘‘anthology culture.’’ See his ‘‘Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 118 (2003): 1251–67. 47. Gillespie, Print Culture, ch. 1 and 2; and Lerer, ‘‘Medieval Literature and Early Modern Readers.’’ 48. Quoted in Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers,’’ 206. On Caxton’s reproductions (and readings) of Chaucer, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ch. 5; and Gillespie, ‘‘Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quartos’’ and Print Culture, ch. 1. 49. On Pynson’s quartos and their legacy, see Gillespie, Print Culture, ch. 3 50. Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers,’’ 206. 51. For a discussion of editor William Thynne’s method of selection in relation to Pynson’s, see James E. Blodgett, ‘‘William Thynne (d. 1546),’’ in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul Ruggiers (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984), 35–52. 52. Walter Skeat, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others: Being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Collected Edition 1532 (Oxford: Scolar, 1905), xv. 53. Ibid. 54. Gillespie, Print Culture, 134. 55. On the manuscript and early print witnesses to the apocrypha, see Francis W. Bonner, ‘‘The Genesis of the Chaucer Apocrypha,’’ Studies in Philology 48:3 (1951): 461–81;

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and Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001), ch. 1. On Pynson’s precedent in canon building, see Blodgett, ‘‘William Thynne,’’ 41. 56. Harry Ransom Center (hereafter HRC) PR 1850 1532, copy 4, and HRC -Q71–51: Romaunt of the Rose and Conclusions on the Astrolabe, respectively. Thynne’s edition of the Workes included a separate title page for each of the major titles: ‘‘The Canterbury tales,’’ ‘‘The romaunt of the rose,’’ ‘‘Troylus and Creseyde,’’ ‘‘Boethius de consolatione philosophie,’’ ‘‘How pite is ded and beried in a gentyll hert,’’ ‘‘The testament of loue,’’ and ‘‘The conclusions of the astrolabe.’’ When Lydgate’s ‘‘Siege of Thebes’’ was added in 1561, it had its own title page as well. The 1598 volume followed this convention. 57. For a full bibliography of these and other pieces of Chaucerian apocrypha, see Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha, appendix 1, which corrects some of the information reported in Bonner, ‘‘Genesis of the Chaucer Apocrypha.’’ It should be noted that ‘‘Whan faithe fayleth’’ is sometimes known as ‘‘Chaucer’s Prophesy,’’ and ‘‘It falleth for every gentylman’’ is sometimes treated as two poems, ‘‘Speak No Evil’’ and ‘‘On Good Words.’’ These titles are not used in the 1532 edition. 58. On the political valences of Hoccleve’s verse and its probable appeal to Henry VIII, see Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha, 50–51. 59. See Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha, 55. 60. Blodgett, ‘‘William Thynne,’’ 38. 61. Recently scholars have argued that the 1532 collection was not tied to religious reform. See Gillespie, Print Culture, and Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 56–99. 62. On Thynne’s various titles and forms of compensation, see Sidney Lee, ‘‘Thynne, William (d. 1546),’’ rev. A. S. G. Edwards, DNB, online ed.) For a comprehensive account of Thynne as Chaucerian editor, see Blodgett, ‘‘William Thynne.’’ 63. The workes of Geffray Chaucer (London: W. Thynne, 1532), sig. A3r. 64. See Foxe’s famous reflections on ‘‘The Benefit and Invention of Printing,’’ in Actes and monumentes (London: John Day, 1570), sig. 2D5r–2D5v. 65. The workes of Geffray Chaucer, sig. A2r. 66. Ibid., sig. A2v. 67. Ibid., sig. A3r. 68. Ibid., sig. A2v. 69. Yaeger arrives at a similar point in arguing that, while Caxton’s Chaucer is ‘‘somber,’’ Thynne’s is ‘‘a poet of fin amour’’ (R. F. Yaeger, ‘‘Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne,’’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 [1984]: 145). 70. Blodgett, ‘‘William Thynne,’’ 42. 71. I quote from the second edition of the Workes, which was the tale’s first appearance in folio: The Wworkes of Geffray Chaucer (London: Richard Grafton for Wyllyam Bonham, 1542). 72. On this, see Blodgett, ‘‘William Thynne,’’ 38. 73. Francis Thynne’s manuscript account was not published until the 1860s and is doubtful in many details, though not on the basic facts and chronology of the tale’s

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inclusion. See Blodgett, ‘‘William Thynne,’’ 38, and Skeat, Works of Chaucer, xv–xix. In at least one printed copy of the 1532 folio, ‘‘The Plowman’s Tale’’ was inserted in manuscript: see HRC -Q- PR 1850 1532. 74. Skeat, Works of Chaucer, xix. 75. Ibid. 76. The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer (London: Jhon Kyngston for Jhon Wight, 1561). On the bibliographical composition of the 1561 volume, see Skeat, Works of Chaucer, xxi–xii. 77. In the 1561 edition, Lydgate’s poem begins at sig. 3R4r and goes to the end of the volume. 78. See Masten, Textual Intercourse, 63–74. 79. The workes of our antient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer (London: Thomas Speght, 1598), sig. *5v. 80. Ibid., sig. *2r. 81. Here and throughout, I quote from Spenser in J. C. Smith and E. E. DeSelincourt, eds., The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 82. That Daniel was taken seriously as a historian is attested in at least one instance: HRC DA 152 D25 1613, a copy of the Historie marked up by an early reader who seemed to have a grand design to index and plot the whole volume’s chronology. 83. On Spenser’s relationship with Chaucerian tradition, see Judith Anderson, ‘‘ ‘A Gentle Knight Was Pricking on the Plaine’: The Chaucerian Connection,’’ English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985): 166–74; Anthony M. Esolen, ‘‘The Disingenuous Poet Laureate: Spenser’s Adoption of Chaucer,’’ Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 285–311; Alice Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); and most recently, Glenn A. Steinberg, ‘‘Spenser’s ‘Shepheardes Calender’ and the Elizabethan Reception of Chaucer,’’ English Literary Renaissance 35:1 (2005): 31–51. 84. I base the following on the two authoritative bibliographies of Daniel’s and Spenser’s ‘‘Works’’ volumes. Respectively: Greg, Bibliography 3:1048–55; and F. R. Johnson, A Critical Bibliography of the Works of Edmund Spenser Printed Before 1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933–34), 33–48. See also, on Daniel’s works more generally, Harry Sellers, ‘‘A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Daniel, 1585–1623,’’ Proceedings and Papers of the Oxford Bibliographical Society 2:1 (1927): 29–54; and John Pitcher, ‘‘Essays, Works and Small Poems: Divulging, Publishing and Augmenting the Elizabethan Poet, Samuel Daniel,’’ in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy, 8–29 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000). Spenser’s bibliography has been updated routinely, but Johnson’s study has not been superseded. 85. On Daniel’s involvement in the printing of works with clear intertextual links, see Pitcher, ‘‘Essays, Works and Small Poems.’’ Pitcher focuses on the development of printed formats in conjunction with authorial self-presentation strategies in the space between the 1601 and 1623 Works volumes. 86. Syr P.S. His Astrophel and Stella. . . . To the end of which are added, sundry other rare sonnets of diuers noble men and gentlemen (London: John Charlewood for Thomas Newman, 1591). The edition was, it is supposed, printed illicitly.

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87. On ‘‘Musophilus’’ as the centerpiece and occasion of the volume, see John Pitcher, ‘‘Samuel Daniel (1562/3–1619),’’ DNB, online ed. 88. Greg notes that ‘‘two separate copies are reported’’ (p. 1050). Compilations of the 1599 collection survive in contemporary bindings; see, for example, HRC Ag D226 B599p, bound in original limp vellum. 89. John Pitcher, ‘‘Samuel Daniel (1562/3–1619),’’ DNB, online ed. See also Pitcher’s ‘‘Essays, Works and Small Poems,’’ 14–16. 90. See Greg, Bibliography, 3:1048–55. 91. Johnson, Critical Bibliography, 45. As Johnson notes, ‘‘Many of these sections were undoubtedly sold separately. We find today many copies of single sections, especially those of the Shepheardes Calender and the Prosopopoia’’ (p. 34). 92. On Lownes’s rights and the structure of this and the 1617 edition, see Johnson, Critical Bibliography, 34–45. 93. Ibid., 33. 94. On the bibliographical independence of ‘‘Musophilus,’’ see Greg, Bibliography 3:1051. 95. For a thorough treatment of ‘‘Musophilus’’ in the context of religious debates, see Gregory Kneidel, ‘‘Samuel Daniel and Edification,’’ Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900 44:1 (2004): 59–76. 96. All quotations of ‘‘Musophilus’’ are taken from Samuel Daniel: Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 97. Similar images of circulation are found later in the poem: ‘‘And who in time knowes whither we may vent / The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores / This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent’’ (ll. 957–59). 98. Johnson attempts to place the extant Spenser configurations into groups, but, as he says, any generalizations about the items as issued ‘‘must be mainly conjectural’’ (p. 45). The following account is based on a study of all surviving copies of Spenser’s 1609–17 folio collections and Daniel’s 1601–23 folio collections in twenty-four major Anglo-American archives, including all three copyright libraries in the United Kingdom and the historical repositories for early printed materials in English in the United States: the Folger, the Huntington, the Ransom Center, the Newberry Library, and the university-based collections of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, among others. 99. See, for example, Princeton University Library (hereafter PUL) RHT 17th-143, a copy of the Panegyrike Congratulatorie (1603) that, according to catalog records, was extracted from the 1601–1602 Works. Some instances of individual, detached works in circulation include British Library (hereafter BL) 161.a.13, the Tragedy of Cleopatra (from the 1623 Works); BL 11773.d.1, a fragment of Philotas (from the 1623 Works); and HRC Wg D226 B599p WRE, which contained only the Ciuile wars (drawn from the 1599 Poeticall Essayes). The latter has a counterpart volume (vol. 2), with matching provenance and binding, containing the other texts from the 1599 collection, though it is unclear why they were separated. 100. PUL (Ex) 3705.3.391. 101. Bodleian Library (hereafter BodL) Buxton 116.

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102. University College, London, Strong Room Ogden A 566. 103. BodL 4o P.50.Art. 104. An ownership mark on the title page of the Ciuile wars reads ‘‘Leache, her book 1644.’’ There is also a manuscript contents list, in a different early hand, in the back flyleaves of the book. It is impossible to know which early reader was responsible for the arrangement. 105. BodL Wood 482. 106. BL C.116.f.1. The copy of Panegyrike Congratulatorie (unpaginated) was cut off after the poem ‘‘To Henry Wriothesly,’’ deleting all subsequent poetry and ‘‘The Defence of Ryme.’’ The binding in this case is later, and so it is difficult to determine whether the early reader or a collector was responsible for the arrangement. 107. HRC Wg D226 B602w. I have been unable to trace the manuscript additions. One verse, beginning ‘‘When sturdy storms of strife arise’’ bears a resemblance to an item found in Hertfordshire Archives, D/EP F37, a commonplace book from the 1670s compiled by Lady Sarah Cowper: ‘‘When sturdy storms of strife are past’’ (pp. 255–56). 108. The Beinecke curators’ notes to the book read, ‘‘We may imagine Walton sitting in a room in the Bishop’s [George Morely’s] palace (where he spent the last years of his life), turning over in his mind how he should phrase the dedication. Having no writing paper at hand he scribbles the following incoherent phrases on the flyleaf of this book’’ (unpaginated sheet, included with item). 109. Houghton Library MS Eng 266. The hand seems to be from the later part of the seventeenth century. Spenser’s Complaints is copied directly from a printed edition. The other two items are ‘‘A conference betweene a scholler, A Lawyer, and a Merchant’’ (fol. 80–85r) and ‘‘A godly and profitable meditation taken out of the booke of Job chap:20’’ (fol. 85v). 110. BodL MS Tanner 217. 111. Newberry Library Case 4A 923 v. 2. The binding is blind-tooled full calf from early in the period, but I have been unable to track down provenance information confirming whether it was formed before the publication of the Works or after, perhaps by a later seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century collector who wanted to mimic the Works. 112. Some representative examples are Beinecke Library Yale University (hereafter BLY) 1978 Ⳮ44, HRC PR 2350 1611b, and PUL (EX) PR.2350.1611q copy 13. The first and third of these are preserved in later collectors’ bindings. The Faerie Queene, we imagine, would fetch the highest sum of the items in the book when taken down and sold independently. 113. Former shelf mark AB.10.53 (now Syn 4.61.47 and Inc.3N/W.1.1 [3530], respectively). 114. HRC PR 2350 1611b, copy 2. 115. BLY Ig Sp.35 ⳭC611, copy 1. The book’s seventeenth-century owner was Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard. 116. BodL Dunston B 1619. The stub is located between The Faerie Queene and The Shepheardes Calender. 117. Princeton (EX) PR 2350 1611q, copy 12.

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118. Church produced his own edition of The Faerie Queene in 1758; like David Garrick, his bibliographical arrangements seem to have followed his work. 119. A similar example from the surviving archive of Daniel’s Works is HRC Ag D226 B602w, copy 2: a copy of the 1601–1602 collection formed by a later collector out of different, incorrectly sized editions (‘‘Delia,’’ for example, is taken from the quarto edition and tipped into the folio binding). 120. Accounts that suggest otherwise are based in conjecture and a desire to return to a more literary, authorial Shakespeare. See, for example, Erne, Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist, 255–58. 121. See Johnson, ‘‘Thomas Pavier, Publisher.’’ ‘‘Pavier was one of the most enterprising and successful publishers during the first decades of the seventeenth century,’’ Johnson writes (p. 12). 122. See ibid., 31, for a summary of Pavier’s mid-career output. 123. Ibid., 32. 124. There are obvious consequences for interpretation as well: the theory leads to valuations of ‘‘bad quartos’’ and printer ‘‘pirates,’’ which anachronistically shape modern editions. On the anachronism of the ‘‘bad quarto’’ designation, see Paul Werstine, ‘‘Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65–86. 125. Lerer, ‘‘Medieval English Literature,’’ 126. 126. BLY 1978 Ⳮ60.

epilogue 1. The first recorded use of ‘‘collate’’ to refer in the technical sense to printing and bookbinding was in 1770, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The usage became common in the nineteenth century. (See ‘‘collate,’’ v. 4.) Most of the books in the Kemble-Devonshire collection at the Huntington Library, for example, have ‘‘collated and perfect,’’ along with Kemble’s initials, written on the title page in ink. 2. Page signatures were binders’ instructions for text assembly, not to be confused with book assembly. For the standard modern definition of the collation formula reflecting an ‘‘ideal copy,’’ see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2009), 328–33. 3. Bulletin of Bibliography 1:3 (October 1897): 34. 4. See OED, ‘‘collation,’’ n. 1a.: from the Latin colla¯tio¯n-em, colla¯t- being the participial stem of confer-re, ‘‘to bring together.’’ 5. I use the phrase standardized classification identifiers to distinguish modern uniform class systems (such as Dewey or ISBN), which apply across libraries and collections, from collection- or collector-specific class systems, which did of course exist in earlier periods. 6. Even when it was being subverted, the model was invoked and reproduced. Many works from Tristram Shandy to Pale Fire made reflexive, oppositional use of the conventional definition of the book and in doing so reified it.

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7. Spenser quoted in The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (New York: Penguin, 1978). The debate over metaphysics in the Garden of Adonis took place mainly in the twentieth century. For a recent summary, see Carol V. Kaske, ‘‘Neoplatonism in Spenser Once More,’’ Religion and Literature 32:2 (2000): 157–69. For a summary of the discussions of doctrinal differences in Doctor Faustus, see Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), 38–67. 8. Sir John Suckling, The goblins: a comedy (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646). 9. On the historiographical and philosophical significance of this periodization problem in literary criticism, see Margreta De Grazia, ‘‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period Piece,’’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, 17–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 10. See C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). 11. Seth Lerer, ‘‘Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 118 (2003): 1260. See also Alexandra Gillespie, ‘‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelba¨nde,’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 67:2 (2004): 189–214. 12. Lerer, ‘‘Medieval English Literature,’’ 1254. 13. The first commercial book auctions in England took place in 1676, and earlier on the continent. On the rise of the European (primarily Dutch) commercial book auction vis-a`-vis earlier forms of bookselling and auction, see Laura Cruz, ‘‘The Secrets of Success: Microinventions and Bookselling in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,’’ Book History 10 (2007): 1–28. 14. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15. The literature on museum collecting is vast. For recent comprehensive treatments of collecting in the European tradition, see Russell Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995), and Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1999). On the modern museum in particular, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1994). Most accounts of museum history and historiography are rooted in poststructuralist critiques of institutionality and the archive and in post-Marxist notions of the ‘‘culture industry.’’ See, most foundationally, Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 2001); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972); and more recently, Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Cabinets of curiosity and the transition from prescientific to scientific collection are topics that have been of interest to scholars of literary collecting. See Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 16. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘Margins of Truth,’’ in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 107.

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245

17. One recent example of this is the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which is seeking to preserve the idiosyncratic (and meaning-making) arrangement of the galleries in the original Merion, Pennsylvania, space. 18. William Sherman makes this point in his recent study of readers’ marks in Renaissance books. See Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 164. 19. The reference here is to Brian O’Doherty’s foundational set of essays, ‘‘Inside the White Cube,’’ which first appeared in Artforum in 1976. O’Doherty writes that ‘‘the ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art.’ The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values’’ (Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded Edition [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 14). 20. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16. 21. ‘‘Literature’’ in the specialized, aesthetic usage dates only as far back as the nineteenth or very late eighteenth centuries (see OED, ‘‘literature,’’ n. 2 and 3). The early modern definition was simply ‘‘acquaintance with ‘letters’ or books’’ (OED, ‘‘literature,’’ n. 1). 22. See, for example, the extended analogy in Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000). For the last decade or more, it has seemed almost obligatory for bookhistorical and textualist monographs to contain a short discussion of digital media and the so-called death of the book. 23. See http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html and http://www .quartos.org, respectively. The latter is a joint production of the Bodleian Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. 24. See, for example, the HyperHamlet (http://www.hyperhamlet.unibas.ch), which has been forming a database-like edition housed at the University of Basel since 2002. 25. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘‘Surface Reading: An Introduction,’’ Representations 108:1 (2009): 18. See also David Wellbery’s foreword, ‘‘Post-Hermeneutic Criticism,’’ in Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), vii–xxxiii. In Renaissance studies, an important early call to focus our attention on the conditions of meaning in addition to meaning itself is David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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Woodbridge, Linda. ‘‘Patchwork: Piecing the Early Modern Mind in England’s First Century of Print Culture.’’ English Literary Renaissance 23.1 (1993): 5–45. Wormald, Francis, and C. E. Wright, eds. The English Library Before 1700. London: Athlone , 1958. Woudhuysen, H. R. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Yaeger, R. F. ‘‘Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne.’’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 (1984): 135–64.

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Call numbers of volumes discussed are in bold; page references in italics refer to illustrations Acworth, George, 47 Aelfric, Interrogationes Sigeuulfi presbyteri, 42 Albumazar (drama), 58; Garrick’s revival of, 209n15 Alcilia (verse collection), 80 almanacs, English: function of, 131; modifications to, 230n49; popularity of, 230n46; selfaccounting in, 130–31; Spenser’s use of, 229n42; malleability of, 131. See also The Kalender of Sheepehards Anderson, D., 209nn14,17 Anglo-Dutch War, 75, 82 annotations, readers’, 1–2, 34; envoys, 78, 216n96; of Liber Lilliati, 95, 96, 96–97, 102–3, 103; removal of, 3; Walton’s, 173. See also marginalia anthologies: culture of, 183, 238n46; modern, 182; personal, 2, 65, 221n40; production of, 12. See also compilations; Sammelba¨nde aphorisms, sixteenth-century, 7–8 archival practices: affecting literary history, 39, 52, 183; affecting Renaissance texts, 13–14, 35; Derrida on, 196n58; nineteenth-century, 29. See also curatorship Austin, Henry: Scourge of Venus, 80 authors, as compilers, 9, 116, 183. See also collected works, authors’ authors, medieval: Sammelba¨nde of, 159, 177–79 authors, modern: self-differentiation among, 95 authors, Renaissance: appropriative practices of, 95; as artificers, 117–18, 139; bookmaking norms for, 6; as compilers, 9, 183; engagement with early printed books, 148; as gentleman amateurs, 121; image of, 87; imaginative work of, 117–18, 120; as

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imitators, 90, 117; introspection by, 119; legacy of Sammelba¨nde for, 149; material constructions of, 118; reception of, 120; redeployment of texts, 9; selfhood of, 118; substantial practices of, 117–18, 120, 139; as synthetic organizers, 143; use of commonplace books, 94 authorship: Bonaventure on, 159, 166; as historical construct, 219n23; individualistic, 94–95; poststructuralist theories of, 236n18; Renaissance conception of, 94; Romantic, 92, 219n14 authorship, early modern, 219n23, 225nn3–4; as craft, 142, 143; culture of, 236n18; intertextuality of, 141; vernacular, 130, 149, 179; Virgilian model of, 121, 122 Bacon, Francis: essays of, 120 Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), 244n17 Beal, Peter, 119 Becon, Thomas: Worckes, 156 Beinecke Library (Yale), 173; Ig Sp.35 ⴐ C611 copy 1, 175, 242n115; Shakespeare folio of, 179 Beling, Richard, 192n21 Benjamin, Walter: on collecting, 28–30, 200nn35,40; on library catalogs, 38. Works: The Arcades Project, 28–29, 200n34; ‘‘Unpacking My Library,’’ 29 Benson, John, 16 bibliographic description: and literary interpretation, 187; value-neutral, 185 bibliography: effect of readers’ compilations on, 5; graduate studies in, 187 Biel, Gabriel, 205n102 Birkets, Sven: The Gutenberg Elegies, 193n39 The Birth of Merlin (drama), 61–62, 62, 210n22

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Blodgett, James E., 164 Blomefylde, Myles, 9; book collection of, 2–3, 10, 189n4, 190n9; manuscript annotations of, 1, 2 Bloom, Harold, 219n14 Bodleian Library (Oxford): Arch. G.e.32, 54; Dunston B 1619, 175, 242n116; MS Rawl. Poet 148, 88–89, 89, 95–106, 96, 113–15; MS Tanner 217, 173, 242n110; Shakespearean compilations of, 54, 55; Wood C.17, 125, 228n34. See also Lilliat, John: Liber Lilliati Bodley, Thomas: on drama, 57–58, 194n47, 209n8 Bonaventure, Saint: on authorship, 159, 166 Boniface of Savoy (archbishop of Canterbury), life of, 51 book auctions: reorganization preceding, 26, 183; rise of, 244n13 bookbindings: commercial, 4, 190n10, 196n56, 198n17; craft, 198n20; eighteenth-century, 198n17; ephemeral aspects of, 21; medieval, 198n20; modern, 26, 183, 185; nineteenthcentury, 12, 13, 28, 84; tacketed, 198n20 bookbindings (handpress era), 4; continuity in, 195n54; decline in, 191n18, 199n20; discarding of, 190n7; Gothic period, 191n18, 198n20; limitations of, 191n13; organization of texts, 4–5; reader-initiated, 4, 13, 27; Renaissance scholarship on, 11; replacement of, 26–28; retail, 12–13, 190n11; role in canonicity, 64; survival of, 190n7. See also disbinding book collecting: boundedness in, 29; as composition strategy, 106, 115; Elizabethan, 95; ephemeral aspects of, 21 book collections, institutional: preservation of culture, 39. See also libraries; libraries, special collection book collectors, early: archival legacy of, 61; binding of The Shepheardes Calender, 124–26; intellectual preferences of, 65; meaning-making by, 30, 39, 56, 83; Renaissance, 4, 28; use of collected works, 172. See also compilations, readers’ book collectors, modern: concealment of knowledge organization, 88; construction of meaning, 30; cutting of books, 212n47; of early printed books, 3–4, 26–30; effect on literary history, 53; models of text organization, 181, 243n6; rebinding by, 28, 183; restructuring by, 55–57, 180 book culture: Middle English, 18, 198n14; modern, 9. See also print culture book culture, early, 198n14; consumption in, 57; experimentation in, 182; flexibility of, 53;

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humanist, 159; Montaigne’s use of, 140; readerly protocols of, 82; role of Sammelba¨nde in, 61; taxonomy of, 184; vernacular literature in, 130 books: death of, 193n39, 245n22; remaindering of, 150, 212n48; stand-alone, 140, 180, 183, 184; as unit of analysis, 83. See also early printed books; history of the book; incunabula bookshops, seventeenth-century, 5 book stamps: construction of, 221n45; of Liber Lilliati, 97–101, 98 book trade, antiquarian: effacing of books’ history, 28 book trade (handpress era): binding practices of, 12–13, 27, 198n17; open-endedness in, 159; publisher-wholesaler, 12, 195n55 book trade, industrial, 180; mechanization of, 196n56 Bradshaw, Henry: disbinding of collections, 30, 31, 35–36, 210n31; rare book librarianship, 200n42 British Library: 161.a.13, 241n99; C.21.b.40, 58, 59, 60, 61, 209n18; C.34.k.41, 58, 209n9; C.39.a.37, 80–81, 81, 216n102; C.116.f.1, 172–73, 242n106; MS Sloane 3972C, 216n102 British Museum, rebinding campaigns of, 58, 209n14 Brook, V. J. K.: A Life of Matthew Parker, 206n104 Caldecott, Thomas, 208n1; Shakespearean compilations of, 54, 55, 57, 62–63 calendar reform, 229n42 Cambridge University, early library formation at, 52 Cambridge University Library: Bb*.10.18, 125–26, 229n36; conservation initiatives of, 52; early printed collections of, 22–23, 25; eighteenth-century archives of, 15; Parker holdings in, 43; Peterborough Collection, 199n25; reorganization of, 25, 30–31, 197n8; Royal Library, 22, 23, 197n4; Syn.7.64.61, 125, 228n35 —AB class books, 15, 22–23, 25, 30–38, 64; AB.1.28, 33, 200n46; AB.3.23, 37–38, 203nn66–67; AB.4.54, 36, 202n50; AB.4.58, 34, 201n50; AB.4.59, 36, 202n59; AB.4.61, 35, 201n52; AB.5.37, 33–34; AB.5.58, 34, 201n49; AB.5.65, 38–39, 203n71; AB.8.46, 32, 36, 202n57; AB.10.27, 33, 203n27; AB.10.53, 24, 36, 242n113; AB.10.54, 37, 203n63; AB.10.57, 37, 203n65; annotations in, 31; archival loss from, 34–35;

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Index bracketing in catalog, 31, 32, 200n45; catalog leaves, 24, 32; discards from, 38–39; histories of reading in, 33, 34; preservation of, 52; reorganization of, 26, 31, 38, 52, 203n71, 211n31; representative examples of, 200n44; thematic connections in, 33–35, 38 Campion, Thomas, 80 canon formation: contingency in, 69–70; forces affecting, 39; processes of, 61; role of bookbinding in, 64 Cappell, Edward, 209n11 Carruthers, Mary, 220n28 catalogs, library: Benjamin on, 38; classed, 29; early print culture in, 23; superseded, 203n72; technology of, 194n45 Cave, Terence, 89, 92, 93, 218n10; on copia, 219n11 Caxton, William: on compilation, 9; early consumers of, 28; high-value imprints of, 27, 35; imprints in compilations, 33, 39, 124, 199n29, 200n47; The Myrrour of the Worlde, 36, 37, 124, 175; quarto series of, 160, 177; wholesaling practices of, 12 Cecil, Robert, 166 Cecil, William, 168 Certeau, Michel de, 194n44, 196n2; on reading, 220n33 Chapman, Alison A., 229n42; ‘‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy,’’ 164 Chapman, George: continuations by, 6–7 Chartier, Roger, 6, 83, 196n2 Chaucer, Geoffrey: apocrypha, 160, 164–65, 238n55; Daniel on, 169; as organizing figure, 165; quartos of, 160; Reformation-era studies of, 163–64 —works: Anelida and Arcite, 162; The Canterbury Tale, 163, 164–65, 170; Workes (1532), 158, 160, 161, 162, 162–65, 177, 239n56; Workes (1598), 166 —collected works, 17, 149, 159–66; authors bound with, 160, 162–64; editors’ customization of, 164, 239n69; first folio, 160; fourth folio, 165; prefaces to, 165–66 Church, Ralph: annotations to Spenser, 175–76; edition of The Faerie Queene, 243n118 classical literature: apparatuses of, 123; imitation in, 91, 93; Renaissance reception of, 93 Coke, Edward, 78, 216n97 collected objects, historicity of, 28–29. See also book collecting collected works, authors’, 149; detachable, 166–77; drama, 236n19; early book owners’ use of, 172; expansion of, 166; false folios,

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177–79, 235n4; first folios, 177–79; humanist, 140, 177; liminal status of, 166; manuscript additions to, 173; organization of, 156–57; readers’ customization of, 172–73, 177; recombinant forms of, 177, 182; as self-enclosed, 176–77; Shakespeare’s, 149, 155, 178, 179, 236n21; Short Title Catalogue conception of, 176, 177. See also Chaucer, Geoffrey: collected works collectors: as allegorists, 30, 200n40; psychology of, 29. See also book collectors Comenius, Johann: Orbis sensualium pictus, 5 Commines, Philippe de: Me´moires, 145 commonplace books, 7, 192n24; influence on writing, 220n34; moral usefulness of, 80; The Rape of Lucrece in, 80, 216n101; readers’ interaction with, 116; significance in print culture, 202n61 commonplacing, Renaissance, 93–94 compilation: as form of composition, 8–9, 107, 132; history of, 187; as mode of reading, 132; Renaissance culture of, 149; scholarship on, 89; in The Shepheardes Calender, 120–38 compilations, literary: access to, 6; authorial continuity in, 67; authors’, 9, 87, 116, 183; Caxton imprints in, 33, 39, 124, 199n29, 200n47; contingency in, 154–58, 180, 181; criteria for, 67–68; detachable, 166–77; discursive strategies of, 95; eclecticism of, 182; economic reasons for, 64; folio-sized, 199n25; generative practices of, 87; highprestige texts in, 15, 27–28, 35–36; historical forms of, 39, 70–83; incunabula in, 33, 36–37, 67, 199n23, 211n36; interpretive possibilities within, 56–57; logics of, 16; marginalia in, 34, 36, 200n46; medieval tradition of, 12, 49, 159; modern remaking of, 26, 28, 52–53, 55–57, 180; organizing criteria in, 35, 37–39, 65; in Parker Library, 43–47; period-specific habits of, 182; political themes of, 68, 75–77; producerinitiated, 66; reconstruction of, 33–34; remainder hypothesis of, 150, 212n48; remembrance in, 170; scholastic attitudes toward, 159; single-author, 37–38, 62–63; thematic connections in, 33–35, 38, 56, 64–65, 180; vernacular, 154–58, 160. See also anthologies; book collectors; Sammelba¨nde compilations, manuscript: malleability of, 15; medieval, 15, 149, 178, 234n90; printed texts in, 37, 43, 45, 57, 82, 202n62, 205n93; taxonomies of, 195n51. See also manuscripts compilations, readers’, 1–5, 27; binders’ notes in, 27, 33; Caldecott’s, 54, 55, 57; construction of reading habits through, 82;

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compilations, readers’ (continued ) contents lists in, 27; disbinding of, 3, 14–16, 30–40, 55, 56, 64, 183, 198n15, 211n32; of early printed books, 1–5; effect on bibliography, 5; literary-historical importance of, 2; manuscript-print hybrids in, 37, 43, 45, 57, 82, 202n62, 205n93; modes of engagement in, 55; organization principles of, 180; reflection of readers’ needs, 66–67; Shakespearean, 150; and textual production, 5; unique survivals in, 2–3 compilations, Shakespearean, 56–83; annotations in, 78, 79; at Bodleian Library, 54, 55; desire in, 80; disbinding of, 60–61, 63–64; interpretation of, 70–83; losses from, 70; modern, 82, 83; Pavier Quartos, 69–70, 150, 151, 212nn48,54, 213n51; pirated, 69, 212n48, 235n4; reassembly of, 55; role in textual interpretation, 71–83. See also Shakespeare, William; texts, Shakespearean composition: book collecting as, 106, 115; compilation as, 8–9, 107, 132; digital, 217n3; historical forms of, 87; Lilliat’s strategies of, 97, 106–7, 113–14; open-source model of, 106–15; reading as, 106; role of commonplace books in, 220n34 conflictus, medieval tradition of, 133 copia (linguistic plenitude), 219n11; in Renaissance literature, 90 Cotton, Robert: library of, 204n75 Crane, Mary Thomas, 7, 94, 224n77; on commonplacing, 93; on memory, 220n28 creativity: in digital media, 186; open-source model of, 118; in Renaissance imitation, 91; in Renaissance literature, 92–93 culture: material organization of, 186; preservation/production of, 185 culture, Renaissance: consumption/production in, 10; political, 1. See also literary culture, Renaissance curatorship: effect on Renaissance texts, 13–14, 35, 39, 183; impact on literary culture, 52–53, 183; interpretive function of, 184. See also archival practices Dane, Joseph A., 35, 191n13 Daniel, Samuel, 18, 35; bibliography of, 240n84; on Chaucer, 169; collected works, 149, 158, 166, 177, 213n49, 240n84; defense of learning, 170–71; intertextual works of, 167, 240n85; involvement with printing, 240n85; on Montaigne, 147; perfect sets of, 177; readers’ customization of, 172–73; reputation as historian, 240n82; self-presentation

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by, 240n85; use of imitation, 170; use of medieval vernacular, 169 —works: Civile wars betweene the howses of Lancaster and York, 167, 168, 242n104; The collection of the historie of England, 167; Delia, 173; ‘‘Delia,’’ 167, 243n119; ‘‘Hymen’s Triumph,’’ 172; ‘‘Musophilus,’’ 169–71, 241nn94–95; Panegyrike Congratulatorie, 167–68, 172, 173; Poeticall Essayes, 167, 171; The Queene’s Arcadia, 75–77, 82, 215n87; ‘‘Rosamond,’’ 167; The Tragedy of Cleopatra, 167; ‘‘The Tragedy of Philotas,’’ 172; Works (1601), 167–68; Works (1623), 168, 172, 173, 174, 240n85 Davies, John: Epigrammes, 73–75 Dawson, Giles, 226n14 Day, John, 206n109 De Grazia, Margreta, 236n21 Denham, John: Directions to a Painter, 75 Dering, Edward: Workes, 156, 157, 237n30 Derrida, Jacques: on archivization, 196n58 Dialogue Containing the Number in Effect of All the Proverbs in the English Tongue, 237n33 Dickins, Bruce, 43 digitization, 18, 193n39, 194n45. See also texts, digital disbinding, 3, 14–16, 30–40, 183, 198n15, 211n32; Bradshaw’s, 30, 31, 35–36, 210n31; of manuscripts, 64; from Parker Library, 205n98; of Sammelba¨nde, 198n14; of Shakespearean compilations, 60–61, 63–64; Vanderberg’s, 62 Dobranski, Stephen, 192n21 The Doctrine of the Bible, 178 Doughtie, Edward: edition of Lilliat, 97, 104, 114, 218n4, 222n55, 225n101 drama, Renaissance: Bodley on, 57–58, 194n47, 209n8; meaning-making in, 10; rearrangement in, 8 Drew, J., 77–80, 216n96 Du Bellay, Joachim: Me´moires, 145 Dyson, Humphrey, 209n17 Early English Books Online, 18 early printed books: access to, 6, 10–11, 26, 185; agency of, 116; as aggregations of text, 8, 14–15; annotations to, 1–2, 31, 34, 78, 79, 146–47, 173, 216n96, 242n108; apparatuses of, 208n5; arrangement of, 191n16; augmentations to, 6–7, 25, 180; authors’ engagement with, 148; cataloging of, 22–23; as category, 156, 237n25; collation of, 180, 181, 243nn1–2; collectors’ restructuring of, 55–57, 180; conservation of, 3, 13, 25, 26; cost of, 27; digitization of, 18, 93n39, 194n45; display in

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Index libraries, 184; embodied experience of, 89; loss of histories from, 34–35, 54–56, 204n74; malleability of, 6–7, 25, 65, 88, 115; marketing of, 13–14, 17, 26–28; materiality of, 54–55, 61, 148, 181, 221n44, 224n74; Middle English book culture in, 18; modern collectors of, 3–4, 26–30; modern reorganizations of, 13, 22–23, 25, 189n1; as modes of creativity, 185; multipart, 67; ownership marks in, 97, 221n44; page signatures of, 180, 243n2; in Parker Library, 42–47; ‘‘perfect,’’ 29, 54, 177, 180, 181, 183; physical boundaries of, 10, 43; presentational features of, 139; provenance of, 3; quotation marks in, 223n71; ready-bound, 190n11, 199n21; rebinding of, 26–28, 198n14; self-enclosed, 18; shelving of, 5, 191n14; stigma of, 222n50 Edward VI (king of England), and Parker, 46, 206n106 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 50, 207n114; tributes to, 67, 68 embodiment: of early printed books, 89; of ‘‘making,’’ 118; of Renaissance literary practice, 8 England, early modern: information overload in, 191n15; politics of reform in, 163–65. See also Renaissance, English England’s Helicon (verse collection), 223n66, 224n74 Englands hope against Irish Hate (poem), 212n44 Englands Parnassus (1600), 224n74 Epigrammes and elegies. By I.D. and C.M.: censorship of, 74, 215n78; expansion of, 215n73; modern editions of, 214n72; publication date of, 214n68; structural characteristics of, 73. See also Marlowe, Christopher Erasmus: Adages, 157, 237n36; De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, 90, 218n20 E. W. his Thameseidos, 67, 68, 211n39 Fabyan, Robert: The New Chronicles of England and France, 114 fair copies, 221n38; Liber Lilliati as, 96, 97, 100 The Female Rebellion (drama), 210n31 Fitz-Geffry, Charles: The Blessed Birth-Day, 77–80 Fletcher, Giles: Licia, 115 florilegia, 93 Florio, John: translation of Montaigne, 145–48, 234n84 Folger Shakespeare Library: Pavier Quarto of, 69, 150, 151, 213n54; STC 4619, 65, 66, 68, 211n33; STC 18042 copy 4–5, 146, 234n87;

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STC 22282, 67, 211n37; STC 22335, copy 1, 75–77, 76; STC 22341.8, 70–72, 213nn55–56; STC 22352, 77–80, 216n96; STC 26101 copy 2, 151–53, 154, 235nn11–13; X.d.520, 119–20, 124, 226nn12–14 Foot, Mirjam, 4 Foucault, Michel: on archives, 196n58; on authorship, 219n23; on order of discourse, 191n16 Foxe, John, 47, 157, 177; Actes and Monuments, 163; on printing, 163, 239n64 framing, 7, 95; as structural metaphor, 193n30 Garrick, David: library of, 63, 209nn11, 13–14, 17; Pericles quarto of, 58, 61; revival of Albumazar, 209n15 Gascoigne, George: Woorkes, 156, 157 George I (king of England), purchase of Moore Library, 197n10 Germania Latina (anthology), 119 Gesta Romanorum, Blomefylde’s copy of, 2–3 Gillespie, Alexandra, 11–12, 195n51, 196n2, 209n10; on anthology culture, 183; on Chaucer, 159–60; on rebinding, 26 Gonville and Caius College (Cambridge), Parker Register at, 41 Gournay, Marie De, 233n82, 234n83; Promenoir de M. de Montaigne, 145 Graham, Timothy, 40–42 Grant, Michael, 233n79 Greene, Thomas, 93, 115; The Light in Troy, 91–92 Greg, W. W., 153, 212n48, 241n88; Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, 154–55; ‘‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos,’’ 150–51 Greville, Fulke, 171 Guicciardini, Francesco: History of Italy, 145 Hackel, Heidi Brayman, 230n44 Hale, William, 205n92 Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, 212n47 Halpern, Richard, 215n83, 230n43 Harry Ransom Center: Ag D226 B602w copy 2, 243n119; PR 1850 1532 copy 4, 162, 239n56; Wg D226 B599p WRE, 241n99; Wg D226 B602w, 173, 242n106 Harvey, Gabriel, 125 Hearne, Thomas, 221n37 Helgerson, Richard, 123, 126–27 Heninger, S. K., 109, 224n74, 229n41 Heywood, John: Woorkes (1562), 156, 157, 237n33 Heywood, Thomas: translation of Ovid, 80; Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, 65, 211n34; A

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Heywood, Thomas (continued ) Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, 69, 151, 152, 153, 177, 235n15 history of the book: collectors’ role in, 26–30; effacing of, 28, 30, 39–40; multiplicity of, 83; role in literary interpretation, 182 Hoccleve, Thomas, 239n58; letter to Henry V, 162, 163 Hoffmann, George: on Montaigne, 140, 226n9, 232n70; on reader participation, 119 Holdsworth, Richard: library of, 228n30 Holman, Andrew, 34 Houghton Library (Harvard University): HLH TP 2750 5 35 Lobby III 4 12, 146; MS Eng 266, 173, 242n109 Hunter, William, 63, 210n24 Hunter Library (University of Glasgow), 203n72; Hunterian Co.3.33, 63, 63–64; Shakespearean texts at, 67 Huntington Library: bindery of, 190n8; Bridgewater Library, 67, 212n46; Huntington 59000–59002, 73–75, 214n69; Kemble-Devonshire Collection, 243n1 HyperHamlet (digital text), 245n24 imaginative work, substantiality of, 117–18, 120, 139 imitation: classical authors on, 91; classical models of, 93; of nature, 117; Petrarch on, 91; scholarship on, 89 imitation, Renaissance, 7, 10, 88–94, 192n22, 219n14; contextualization of, 115; creativity in, 91; in Daniel’s works, 170; dialectical, 92; exploitative, 91–92, 115; heuristic, 92; intertextuality and, 92; Italianate, 93; in Liber Lilliati, 104; nontransformative, 91; opposition to source, 92; pragmatic dimension of, 94; sacramental, 91–92, 115; self-assertion in, 92; in The Shepheardes Calender, 134; temporality of, 91; theory and practice of, 90–94; transformative, 94–106 incunabula: Caxton, 200n47; in compilations, 33, 36–37, 67, 199n23, 211n36 intellectual property, modern ideology of, 93 intertextuality, 193n38; of Daniel’s works, 167, 240n85; and imitation, 92; material, 16, 54, 82; of Montaigne’s Essays, 140, 232n73; in reading, 61; in Renaissance literature, 8, 10, 15–17, 90–91; in Shakespeare texts, 15–16, 82 An Italians dead bodie (pamphlet), 212n43 Jaggard, Isaac, 235n15 Jaggard, William, 235n15; The Passionate Pilgrim, 15–16

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Jocelyn, John, 47, 51; biography of Parker, 205n104 Johnson, F. R., 168, 241nn91,98 Jonson, Ben: collected works of, 149, 177, 179; Workes (1616), 155 Kahrl, G. M., 209nn14,17 The Kalender of Sheepehards (almanac): edition of 1585, 229n41; Lilliat’s use of, 225n97; Spenser’s use of, 17, 127, 131, 138; textual authority of, 130; woodcuts of, 127, 230n43. See also almanacs, English Kastan, David Scott, 67–68, 245n25 Kilroy, Gerard, 221n43 Kintgen, Eugene R., 230n45 Kirke, Edward, 227n24 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 217n3 Knapp, Jeffrey: ‘‘What Is a Co-Author?’’ 155–56 knowledge organization: collectors’ concealment of, 88; in early print culture, 21, 52; historical forms of, 39, 52; intellectual activities and, 61; in Renaissance literature, 88; standardizing effects of, 189n1 Kyd, Thomas: additions to, 109; The Spanish Tragedie, 224n74; use of Hekatompathia, 224n74 La Boe´tie, Etienne de, 17; Montaigne’s relationship with, 233n75; La servitude volontaire, 141–42, 233n76; sonnets of, 142, 233n78 Lambeth Palace Library (London): compilation volumes in, 67, 68; parchment-bound volumes of, 67, 68 Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, 48–51, 49, 50, 211n37; amendments to, 50–51; documents in, 51, 207n120; reorganization of, 51. See also Parker, Archbishop Matthew: De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae Lawes, William, 222n58 learning, as remembrance, 170 Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, 43, 197n9 Lerer, Seth, 12, 13, 149, 195n51; AB catalog study, 33–34; on anthology culture, 183, 238n46; on Chaucer, 159 librarianship, history of, 197n13 libraries: analogy with museums, 184; bibliographic categories of, 31; class catalogs of, 29; classification systems of, 243n5; dispersed, 204n75; early modern English, 191n14; order of texts in, 55; reform campaigns for, 31; reorganizations of, 22, 23, 25; selection practices of, 23; subject headings in, 181. See also

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Index book collections, institutional; Cambridge University Library libraries, special collection: archival selection in, 38–47; cataloging of, 22–23; display of early printed books, 184; literary progressions in, 183; material histories of, 22; modernization in, 199n25 library history: literary aspects of, 194n48; Renaissance scholarship on, 11; sources for, 21 Lilliat, John: appropriative practices of, 115; clerical career of, 104, 222nn57–58; collecting methods of, 97; compositional strategies of, 97, 106–7, 113–14; conception of audience, 101–2; discursive practices of, 89, 118; family relationships of, 222n55; life of, 218n4, 221n43; use of classical authors, 224n96; verse of, 100, 101, 104–6 —Liber Lilliati, 16–17, 89; acrostic poem of, 102–3, 222n53; annotations of, 95, 96, 96–97, 102–3, 103; author’s role in, 118; binding of, 95; bird metaphors of, 104; book stamp of, 97–101, 98; contents of, 95; Doughtie’s edition of, 97, 104, 114, 218n4, 222n55, 225n101; fair-copy aspects of, 96, 97, 100; interaction with Hekatompathia, 101–6, 222n46; manicules of, 102, 222n51; model of assembly for, 97, 106; physical structure of, 88, 89, 96; provenance of, 221n37; sequence of, 104; source material of, 114, 225n102; spider imagery of, 104, 223n60; ‘‘The Spiders Web,’’ 101; thematic borrowings of, 104; transformative imitation in, 94–106, 114–15. See also Watson, Thomas: The Hekatompathia literary criticism: interaction with texts in, 39; periodization in, 11, 244n9; and print history, 10; role of bibliographical description in, 184 literary culture, Renaissance, 1; access in, 10; book collecting in, 181; curatorial impact on, 52–53, 183 literary history, archival practices affecting, 39, 52, 183 literary production: agency in, 19; medieval, 12 literary production, Renaissance: material practice of, 8, 187; readers’ participation in, 10; role of collecting in, 11; role of compilation in, 8–9 literature: digital, 217n3; interactive, 87; and library history, 192n27; linear/ nonlinear, 87, 217n3; in nineteenth-century usage, 245n21; patterns of reception for, 56. See also texts literature, Renaissance: access to, 6, 10–11; archival aspects of, 94–95; augmentations to,

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6–7, 180; continuations of, 6–7, 191n21; copia in, 90; creativity in, 92–93; detachability of, 166–77; early printed copies of, 3; editorial apparatus of, 208n5; embodied practices of, 8; extracts from, 231n57; imitation in, 7, 10, 88–94, 192n22; instructions embedded in, 230n45; interchangeability in, 7, 94; intertextuality in, 8, 10, 15–17, 90–91; knowledge organization in, 88; materiality studies in, 208n4; meaning-making in, 10, 11, 39; modern reproductions of, 114; preservation of, 169–71; productivity in, 90–91; recombination of, 8, 17–18; relationship to source, 90–92, 219n14; transformation in, 90–91, 95–106. See also drama, Renaissance; vernacular literature, Renaissance Lotichius, Petrus, Secundus, 226n14; Spenser’s use of, 119–20 Love, Harold, 37 The Love of Wales to their soveraigne Prince (1616), 172 love poetry, colonialism in, 218n7 Lownes, Matthew, 168, 241n94 Luborsky, Ruth, 230n51 Lupset, Thomas: Workes, 156 Lydgate, John: ‘‘Siege of Thebes,’’ 165 Maleuvre, Didier, 185 Mantuan, fifth eclogue of, 136 manuscript culture: of early handpress era, 10; effect of printing on, 10, 194n43. See also book culture manuscripts: Chaucerian, 160; disbinding of, 37, 64; from monastic libraries, 15, 41–42; objects sewn into, 207n118; in Parker Library, 41; in print collections, 37, 43, 45, 57, 82, 202n62, 205n93; role in literary production, 12. See also compilations, manuscript Marcus, Leah, 203n73 marginalia, 193n40; digital preservation of, 186; in The Faerie Queene, 28; in literary compilations, 34, 36, 200n46. See also annotations, readers’ Markham, Gervase: The English Arcadia, 191n21; The English Husbandman, 9 Marlowe, Christopher: augmentations to, 6–7; elegies of, 73–74; Hero and Leander, 220n36; ‘‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,’’ 105, 223n63. See also Epigrammes and elegies. By I.D. and C.M. Marot, Cle´ment, 137 Marotti, Arthur, 37 Massai, Sonia, 235n5

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Masten, Jeffrey, 225n3, 234n84, 236n19 McKenzie, D. F., 56, 57 McKitterick, David, 197n7; on Parker Library, 43; on Royal Library, 23 meaning: conditions of, 245n25; construction by book collectors, 30, 39, 56, 83; construction by printers, 116 media, transitions in, 217n1. See also texts, digital Medwall, Henry: Fulgens and Lucres, 3 memory, arts of, 93, 220n28 The Merry Devil of Edmonton (drama), 61–62, 210n22 Middleton, Thomas: continuations by, 6–7, 95, 191n20; The Ghost of Lucrece, 71, 72 Miller, J. Hillis, 217n3 Miller, Julia, 3, 190n7; on Cambridge AB class books, 26 Minnis, Alastair, 159 miscellanies, Renaissance, 94, 220n32. See also commonplace books; literature, Renaissance Mitchner, Robert W., 229n37 monasteries, dissolution of, 15 Montaigne, Michel de: annotating habits of, 144–45, 231n64; authorial self of, 148; compositional practices of, 119; as craftsman, 120; engagement with printed works, 119; as maker, 139; parody of humanist editions, 140; reading habits of, 232n73; relationship with La Boe´tie, 233n75; self-announcement in, 119, 145; Shakespeare’s use of, 221n36; solitary writings of, 87, 148, 232n70; as transitional figure, 118–19, 226n7; use of early book culture, 140; writing process of, 143 —De l’amitie´: appropriative technique in, 143; collaborative writing model of, 234n84; embedded quotations of, 142; reassembly in, 141; self-presentation in, 141; and La servitude volontaire, 141–42 —De l’experience, 140 —Des livres, 142–46; augmentation of, 17; borrowings in, 142, 143; compiling metaphors of, 144; juxtapositions in, 144; prose composition in, 143 —Essays: as assemblage, 116; audience provocation in, 144; authorial interiority in, 118–19, 226n7; Bordeaux copy, 17, 119, 120, 143, 232n65; borrowing in, 140; in compilations, 232n68; disparate parts of, 143; early owners of, 146; expansion of, 140, 144, 145; first edition of, 231n65; interpolated texts of, 145; interrogation of reader in, 140–41; intertextuality of, 140, 232n73; inventing in, 140; making in, 139; material features of, 140; modern editions of, 148, 232n71; paratextual

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augmentations to, 119; plasticity of, 120; posthumanist exemplarity of, 139; prefatory apparatuses to, 147–48; readers’ annotation of, 146–47; reception of, 140, 145; revisions to, 6, 143–45, 191n19; self-presentation in, 139, 232n70; working copies of, 226n9; writing self in, 139–40 —‘‘Of Cannibals,’’ 146 Moore, Bishop John: annotations of, 31; library of, 23, 197n10. See also Cambridge University Library, Royal Library More, Thomas: Works, 156, 238n42 Morely, George (bishop of Winchester), 173, 242n108 Moss, Ann, 192n24; on commonplacing, 93 Mowat, Barbara, 77 Moxon, Joseph: Mechanick Exercises, 196n2 Mulcaster, Richard, 137 Murphy, Andrew, 208n5 museums: analogy with libraries, 184; collecting practices of, 244n15; display practices of, 244nn17,19 Needham, Paul, 4; on Caxton imprints, 27–29, 199n29; on Sammelba¨nde, 26 Newberry Library: Case 4A 923 v. 2, 174, 242n111; Case Y 135.F86, 124, 228n32 Newman, Jane O., 72 New bibliography, 56 nonce collections, 69, 213n49 The Norton Shakespeare, 82, 83 novels, symbiosis with nonlinear forms, 217n3 Oates, J. C. T., 30 octavos (handpress), binding of, 27, 199n23 O’Doherty, Brian: ‘‘Inside the White Cube,’’ 245n19 Orgel, Stephen, 28, 62, 184; on Marlowe’s Ovid, 74; on Renaissance creativity, 92–93 originality, post-Enlightenment ideas of, 92. See also imitation Otway, Charles: library of, 210n20 Overbury, Thomas: translation of Ovid, 80 Ovid: Heywood’s translation of, 80; Marlowe’s translation of, 73–74, 214n72; Overbury’s translation of, 80 Page, R. I., 40, 41; Parker librarianship of, 42, 44, 204n92 Palavicino, Sir Horatio, 67 Palfrey, Simon, 10 Panizzi, Anthony, 209n14 Paris, Matthew, 47 Parker, John, 51

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Index Parker, Matthew (archbishop), 15, 25; biography of, 205n104; collecting practices of, 25, 45–46, 51, 67, 95, 211n38; directives from queen, 52; and Edward VI, 46, 206n106; erasures by, 41, 204n81; intellectual goals of, 45–47; linguistic research of, 46; marriage of, 46; organizational methods of, 40–43; political agenda of, 46; promulgation of ecclesiastical histories, 47, 206n112; publishing projects of, 52; reading habits of, 41; rearrangement of manuscripts, 42; religious interests of, 46, 47; role in early book culture, 53 —De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, 47–51, 49, 97; additions to, 207nn117, 121; extant copies of, 207n114; malleability of, 48; physical structure of, 48; woodcuts of, 48; works comprising, 47. See also Lambeth Palace Library (London), MS 959 Parker Library (Corpus Christi College), 15, 40–47; Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of, 41; book culture in, 40; compilations in, 43–47; disbinding from, 205n98; EP.E.8, 205n96; EP.S.2, 44, 205n99; formation of, 197n13; fragmentary volumes in, 44; Maiore Bibliotheca, 44; malleability of, 52; manuscripts in, 41–42, 49; Minore Bibliotheca, 44; monastical manuscripts in, 41–42; MS 101, 205n93; MS 106, 205nn93,103; MS 113, 205nn93,103; MS 163, 42; MS 197, 42; MS 419, 42; MS 452, 42; parchment closures in, 44, 45, 47, 211n38; printed books in, 42–47, 204n92; recataloging of, 43, 205n92; Register of, 25, 38–47, 52, 197n13, 205n92; shelf marks of, 204n79; SP180, 205n101; SP193, 46, 206n107; SP281, 46; SP348, 46, 206n106; SP445, 46, 206n108; SP447, 46–47, 206n111 Patterson, Annabel, 77 Pavier, Thomas, 69, 150, 196n57, 212n48; falsification of dates, 150–51; publishing career of, 178, 243n121 Pavier Quartos, 69–70, 150–54, 212nn48,54, 235nn4–5,14, 239n4; as collected works, 158; continuous signatures in, 69; forged dates in, 150–51; ink transfers in, 151, 152; modern reception of, 178; rebinding of, 236n17; Stationers’ Company and, 151, 178, 213n51 Pearson, David, 4, 190n10 Peele, George, 224n78 Percy, Bishop: library of, 151–52, 235n11 periodization, in literary criticism, 11, 244n9 Petrarch: on imitation, 91; influence on English sonnets, 218n7, 220n34; Spenser’s use of, 231n56; Watson’s use of, 110, 111

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Pettegree, Andrew, 10 philology, new, 203n73 Pickwoad, Nicholas, 4, 190n11; on bookbinding trade, 195n54; on commercial bindings, 198n17; on craft binding, 198n20; on modern bookbinding, 26 Piepho, Lee, 119–20, 226n14 Pigman, G. W. III, 93, 115; on imitation, 91, 219n15 Pitcher, John, 167, 240n85 Plat, Hugh, 221n45 ‘‘The Plowman’s Tale,’’ 164–65 poetry, Renaissance: Drab Age of, 183, 220n34; as form of making, 231n62. See also sonnets, English Pollard, Alfred W., 212n48; on Shakespeare quartos, 150, 151, 153 Ponet, John, 46 Potter, Lois, 77 Powell, Edward, 34 preservation practices: individual books in, 25; infrastructure of, 184; loss of bibliographic data through, 34–35, 204n74 Princeton University Library: (EX) PR 2350 1611q copy 12, 175, 176, 242n117; RHT 17th-143, 241n99 print culture, early: bibliographic mobility of, 138; catalogs of, 23; commonplace books in, 202n61; compilation criteria of, 67–68; cutting and pasting in, 193n40; and digital texts, 185–86; English, 52; flexibility in, 83; inventories of, 23; medieval literature in, 159; open-endedness of, 9; organization of knowledge in, 21; in Parker Library, 40; production practices of, 57; readers’ configurations of, 82; Shakespeare’s works in, 15; vernacular, 178–79; writers’ assumptions in, 87 print culture, modern: erasure of reading history, 39–40; fixity in, 43, 194n42 printers, early: meaning-making by, 116; as publishers, 195n54 printing, text assembly following, 12 print revolution, determinist model of, 183 Pugh, William, 27; Cambridge catalog of, 22–23, 30–38; dismissal of, 22, 38; and library reform, 197n8; role in early book culture, 53 Pynson, Richard, 195n55, 196n2; editions of Chaucer, 159–60; quartos of, 177; wholesaling practices of, 12 quartos (handpress): binding of, 27, 199n23; Caxton’s, 160, 177; Chaucer, 160; Pynson’s, 177; Shakespeare’s, 4, 65, 150–53, 155, 234n2. See also Pavier Quartos

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readers, early modern: classification systems of, 9, 15; configuration of print culture, 82; control over forms, 13; curatorial work of, 169; customization of collected works, 172–73, 177; interaction with commonplace books, 116; marketing to, 13–14, 17, 27, 28; modes of engagement, 55; organization of texts, 4–5, 180; participation in literary production, 10; protocols of assembly, 124 reading: active, 193n40; compilation as, 132; as composition strategy, 106; constructedness of, 83; digital, 217n3; as form of production, 10, 94, 220n33; intertextual, 61; as silent production, 194n44, 196n2; symbiosis with writing, 89 Regosin, Richard, 139, 140, 233n79 Renaissance: attitude toward books, 28; reading manuals of, 130; self-announcement in, 118–20; textual categories of, 183. See also authors, Renaissance; literature, Renaissance Renaissance, English: access to literature in, 6, 10–11; nonliterary books of, 57. See also England, early modern representation, mechanics of, 118 Reynes, John, 195n55 Roberts, Sasha, 78, 80 Rollins, Hyder E., 223n66 Roxburghe Library, 26 Sabinus, Georgius: Poemata, 226n14 St. John’s College (Cambridge): Gg.3.42, 61–62, 62, 210n20; Old Library, 1, 3, 190n9 St. John’s College (Oxford), HB4 / 16.1.2.15, 61, 210n21 Sammelba¨nde (multibook compilations), 2; Caxton imprints in, 27; disbound, 198n14; eclecticism of, 182; legacy for Renaissance authors, 149; literary writing in, 57; losses from, 26; medieval, 159, 177–79, 183; Middle English, 26; physical features of, 165; random organization in, 35; readerassembled, 150; role in early book culture, 61; scholarship on, 12; The Shepheardes Calender in, 124–27, 140; topical, 4. See also anthologies; compilations Schachter, Marc, 145, 234n83 Shakespeare, William: augmentations to, 6, 109; collaborative texts of, 82; first readers of, 65; late plays of, 77, 216n91; ‘‘literariness’’ of, 236n22; materiality studies on, 208n4; meaning-making for, 56; modern editions of, 16, 82; problematic texts of, 82; quartos, 4, 150–53, 155, 234n2, 243n124; romances of, 77, 83, 216n91; transgeneric readings of,

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77–80; use of Montaigne, 221n36; use of Thomas’s Historie, 1 —First Folio, 149, 178, 236n21; modernity of, 179; relationship to quartos, 155 —Hamlet: digital editions of, 186, 245n24; quartos of, 11, 12, 185; textual history of, 11; in tract volumes, 64, 210n31 —Henry IV, in compilation volumes, 67–68 —Henry IV Part I: intertextual arrangements of, 16; quartos of, 65 —Henry IV Part II: containment in, 211n41; Lambeth copy of, 67, 211n40; material contexts of, 83 —Henry V, Pavier Quarto copy, 151–53, 152 —King Lear: quartos of, 196n57; reassembled texts of, 13, 14 —Love’s Labour’s Lost, intertextual arrangements of, 15–16 —The Passionate Pilgrim: female evil in, 71, 74; Folger copies of, 70–72; hunt imagery of, 214n66; Huntington copy, 73–75; intertextual readings of, 82; link to Venus and Adonis, 71, 213n58; publication of, 213n57 —Pericles: Folger copies of, 75–77; Garrick copy of, 58, 61; kingship in, 75, 215n86; Pavier Quarto copy, 69; political themes of, 75–76; and Shakespearean romance, 216n91 —The Rape of Lucrece, 54, 191n20; British Library copies of, 80–81; cautionary discourse of, 81; commonplaces of, 78, 83, 216n98; duplicity in, 78; female agency in, 72; Folger copies of, 70–72, 77, 78, 79, 80; intertextual arrangements of, 16; intertextual readings of, 82; link to Sonnets, 71–72, 80; material contexts of, 83; Philomela tale in, 72, 214n63; readership of, 78–79 —Richard III, quartos of, 65, 210n26 —Sonnets, 54, 113; companion pieces to, 82; intertextual arrangements of, 16; link to The Rape of Lucrece, 71–72, 80 —Venus and Adonis, 54; dedication of, 216n95; eroticism of, 74–75, 215n83; Folger copies of, 70–72; gender inversion in, 213n60; hunt imagery of, 214n66; Huntington copy, 73–75; intertextual readings of, 82; link to The Passionate Pilgrim, 71, 213n58; role reversal in, 71, 213n60; sexual/rhetorical energy of, 75, 215n82; tragic/comic aspects of, 74, 215n77 —The Whole Contention, Pavier Quarto of, 69, 150, 151, 234n2. See also compilations, Shakespearean; texts, Shakespearean Shakespeare in Quarto (digitization project), 18, 186 Sherman, William, 3, 208n3, 245n18; on book use, 10; on Renaissance book culture, 28

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Index Short Title Catalogue, 29, 48, 154; access model of, 186; Chaucer in, 160; conception of collected works, 166, 176; Folger’s use of, 211n33; role in conservation programs, 155 Sidney, Mary, 191n21 Sidney, Philip, 80; augmentations to, 6, 191n21; The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 77, 114, 216n90, 220n36; Defence of Poesy, 117–18; imitative writing of, 94; Lilliat’s use of, 114; sonnets of, 113, 218n8, 220n34 Silver, Louis: library of, 228n32 Skeat, Walter, 160, 165 Skelton, John, 177; as compiler, 9, 193n35; Works (1568), 156–58 Smith, Bruce, 138, 231n52 Smith, Richard, 58 Smyth, Adam, 130–31 sonnets, English: alternative forms of, 109; class in, 218n6, 222n50; gender positions in, 218n6, 222n50; imitative, 94; love’s sufferance in, 104; modern assumptions about, 113; Petrarchism of, 218n7, 220n34; social/literary registers of, 218n5; Watson’s, 106, 113 Speight, Thomas: edition of Chaucer, 166; ‘‘The Reader to Geffrey Chaucer,’’ 165–66 Spenser, Edmund: and Chaucerian tradition, 167, 240n83; collected works, 124, 149, 158, 213n49; authors included with, 173–75; bibliography of, 168, 240n84; customization of, 173–77; extractions from, 174–76; folios, 168, 177; manuscript annotations to, 175–76; perfect sets of, 177; as compiler, 9; engagement with printed works, 119; use of The Kalender of Sheepehards, 17, 127, 131 —Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 168 —Complaints, 173, 242n109 —The Faerie Queene: extraction from collected works, 175–76, 242n111; Garden of Adonis, 181, 244n7; marginalia in, 28; modern collectors of, 28; and The Shepheardes Calender, 126, 148; stanza form of, 167 —Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale, 168 —The Shepheardes Calender, 17; Aesop imitations in, 133, 135; allusions in, 227n18; apparatus of, 122–23, 136, 228n26; archaism of, 228n25; as artist’s manifesto, 138; as assemblage, 116, 127; ‘‘August,’’ 135–36; authorial voice of, 118, 148; black-letter font of, 127, 129–30, 230n44; citational practice in, 126; compilation in, 120–38; in compilations, 36, 83; ‘‘December,’’ 137–38; decentralization of, 121; dedication of, 131, 225n5; early readers of, 126, 127, 131–32, 140, 230n51; editorship in, 120; E.K.’s

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commentary in, 122–23, 126, 131–32, 134, 227n24; envoys of, 121–23, 134, 138; extraction from collected works, 175; extracts from, 134; and The Faerie Queene, 126, 148; ‘‘Februarie,’’ 133, 134; focus on time, 125; as found object, 122; imitation in, 134; intertext of, 122, 127; ‘‘Januarye,’’ 122, 231n56; links to classics, 123, 124; in literary miscellanies, 125; materiality of, 123, 138, 139; ‘‘Maye,’’ 135; mixed writing modes of, 137; modern editions of, 127; modern readers of, 123, 126; moral voice of, 121; multivocality of, 121; New Critics on, 133; New Poet of, 122, 126, 131–34, 136, 139, 169, 225n5; ‘‘November,’’ 136–37; ‘‘October,’’ 136; page layouts of, 128, 129; paratexts of, 121, 126, 227n22; pastoral romance format of, 227n19; patterning in, 123, 133, 138; poet-lover of, 122, 227n20; pragmatic knowledge in, 138; presentational features of, 121; reader/writer interdependence in, 134, 135; reception of, 123–24, 131, 132, 134; roman type in, 129; in Sammelba¨nde, 124–27, 140; seasonal cycle of, 137; self-announcement in, 119, 121–22, 130, 138, 139, 149, 169, 225n5; sources for, 119, 127, 135; synthesis in, 120–21; in tract collections, 125–26; typography of, 127, 129–30, 230n44; use of almanac tradition, 229n42; use of Latin authors, 231n58; use of Petrarch, 231n56; in vernacular print tradition, 167; Virgilian authorship in, 121, 122; woodcuts of, 127, 230n43 —Works (1611), 174 —Works (1617), 174 —Works of England’s Arch-Poe¨t, 166, 168 The Spider and the Fly (narrative poem), 238n36 Stallybrass, Peter, 83, 194n43 Starnes, D. T., 229n37 Stationers’ Company, 195n55; control over binding, 12; control over printing, 199n21; and Pavier Quartos, 151, 178, 213n51 Stern, Tiffany, 10 Stibar, Erhard, 119 Stow, John, 47; edition of Chaucer, 165; library of, 204n75 Suckling, John: The Goblin, 182 Summit, Jennifer, 6, 192n27, 194n48 Szirmai, John, 3, 198n14; on medieval bindings, 190n7; on modern bookbinding, 26 Targoff, Ramie, 223n73 Texas Christian University, Pavier Quartos of, 69

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texts: cultural norms affecting, 6; discarding of, 40; historical substructures of, 57; materiality of, 17, 56, 181; organizational norms of, 87; prescriptive order of, 181; readers’ organization of, 4–5, 180; unfinished, 192n21. See also literature texts, digital, 18, 87–88, 193n39, 194n45; and death of book, 245n22; and early print culture, 185–86 texts, high-prestige: assemblages of, 15, 27–28, 35–36 texts, Renaissance: categories of, 183; curatorial practices affecting, 13–14, 35, 39, 183; institutional records of, 3; interleaving of, 16–17; juxtapositions of, 9; malleability of, 6–7, 15, 88; material assembly of, 17; normative assemblages of, 13–14 texts, Shakespearean: authenticity of, 62; in early modernity, 64–70; first readers of, 65; foundational accounts of, 208n5; of Lambeth Palace Library, 67; material contexts of, 64; morphology of, 58; noncanonical, 61–62; ‘‘perfect,’’ 54; piracy of, 69, 212n48, 235n4. See also compilations, Shakespearean; Shakespeare, William textualism, new, 203n73 Thomas, William: Historie of Italie, 1, 2, 189nn1, 3 Thynne, Francis, 164–65, 239n73 Thynne, William: edition of Chaucer, 163–65, 177, 239n56; forms of compensation, 163, 239n62; selection method of, 238n51 tract collections, 2, 35, 202n54; The Shepheardes Calender in, 125–26 tragicomedies, English: pastoral, 77, 215n87; political themes of, 77 transformation, in Renaissance literature, 90–91, 94–106 Trinity Hall (Cambridge), Parker Register at, 41 Tuke, Brian, 163 Turner, William, 38 Twisden, Thomas, 211n37 Tyndale, William, 156, 157, 177, 223n73 typography: black-letter, 127, 129–30, 230n44; of The Hekatompathia, 102–3, 107, 109 Vanderberg (bookseller), 54, 55; disbinding by, 62 vernacular literature, Renaissance, 90; authorship in, 130, 149, 179; compilations, 154–58, 160; cultural producers of, 120; Daniel’s use of, 169; in early book culture,

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130, 178–79; English, 123; first folios in, 177; storing of, 127. See also literature, Renaissance Vickers, Nancy, 72, 80 Virgil: eclogues of, 231nn52, 56; model of authorship, 121, 122 Wall, Wendy, 222n50; on Spenser, 122 Walton, Izaak: annotations by, 173, 242n108; Life of Doctor Robert Sanderson, 173 Waterson, Simon, 167 Watson, Thomas: antagonism toward readers, 102; appropriative practices of, 115; composition process of, 106, 113; creativity of, 107, 109, 115; discursive practices of, 118; sonnet technique of, 106, 113; use of Petrarch, 110, 111 —The Hekatompathia, 9, 16, 88–89, 99, 100, 103, 108; augmentation tropes of, 111; author’s role in, 118; bird metaphors of, 104; borrowings from, 224n74; commentaries of, 110; as compilation, 106–7; contingency in, 111–12; dedication of, 102; desire in, 105; expansion of, 109–11; headnotes of, 110–12, 133; headpieces of, 107, 112–13; incompleteness of, 113; innovative aspects of, 109; interleaving of, 95; Lilliat’s interaction with, 101–6, 222n46; material rearrangements of, 107, 110; multivocality of, 107; open-source composition in, 106–15; paratextual features of, 101; popularity of, 224n74; prefatory poem of, 110, 224n78; presentation style of, 101; quotation mark use in, 107; reader’s posy in, 224n95; reprints of, 223n66; scholarship on, 223n73; social status in, 104; source poems of, 111, 112; text assembly in, 112–13; textual imagery of, 112; title page of, 114; transformations in, 110–12; typography of, 102–3, 107, 109. See also Lilliat, John: Liber Lilliati Webber, Teresa, 197n9 white books, 190n11 The Whole Workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes, 156–57 Wilson, Thomas: The Art of Rhetoric, 114 Winstanley, D. A., 196n3, 197n8 Wood, Anthony: library of, 125, 172 Woodbridge, Linda, 8 Worde, Wynkyn de: imprints in compilations, 35, 36 Woudhuysen, Henry, 37, 202n62 Yaeger, R. F., 239n69 Yates, Frances, 220n28

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acknowledgments

This book has been six years and exactly forty-seven reader’s cards in the making. First, I need to thank the librarians involved in its realization—and not just the specialists who respond to my queries with untiring patience and wisdom, but also the staff members who admit me to the reading room, who retrieve item after item in quick succession, often lifting request limits or finally releasing me into the stacks and the uncataloged depths of the institutional records. Part of the argument of this book is that literary researchers ought to be in greater collaboration with curators, conservators, donors and collectors, and digital-library professionals, all vital and largely unacknowledged sources of literary meaning. I hope to have taken a small step toward that goal of greater collaboration here. While writing, I have been nourished and inspired by many remarkable individuals and intellectual communities. At Cambridge University, Juliet Fleming supported the work that came to form the early chapters; Raphael Lyne, Daniel Wakelin, and Jason Scott-Warren convened seminars in textual and related studies that gave me the essential training to do bibliographical research. The American Council of Learned Societies, the English Department at Northwestern University, and Dean Andrew Wachtel of Northwestern provided heartening financial and professional assistance. At the University of Michigan, Michael Schoenfeldt (in the English department) and Donald Lopez (in the Michigan Society of Fellows) went out of their way to give me every advantage as I completed the manuscript. At key moments in the project’s development, I received encouragement from Stephen Orgel, Bill Sherman, Arthur Marotti, David Scott Kastan, Stephen Greenblatt, and Leah Price, which kept me writing and thinking. My greatest intellectual debts are to Jeffrey Masten and Wendy Wall, who have been encouraging and inspiring me for ten years now. Jeff ’s generosity, mentorship, and example are everywhere in these pages and continue to inform my

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very best writing and teaching. Wendy’s incisive readings of my work as it developed and guidance to the field and the profession are at the base of any success I can hope to enjoy. I owe them both my deepest thanks. The idea for this book came after two illuminating conversations that took place on the same day in Cambridge: one with David McKitterick at the Wren Library and the other with Elisabeth Leedham-Green at Darwin College. I doubt either of them remember these small events, but I have lived and worked by their advice ever since. For additional, no less important conversations over the years that shaped my thinking, I thank Liza Blake, Heidi Brayman Hackel, Piers Brown, Josh Calhoun, Chris Clary, Megan Cook, Bradin Cormack, Sugi Ganeshananthan, N. Katherine Hayles, Adam Hooks, Tung-Hui Hu, Rob Jansen, Adrian Johns, Andra´s Kise´ry, Seth Lerer, Elise Lipkowitz, Tara Lyons, Carla Mazzio, Sara McClelland, Sarah Mesle, Alan Nelson, Susie Phillips, Lee Piepho, James Simpson, Chris Skeaff, Josh Smith, Adam Smyth, Peter Stallybrass, Nicholas Watson, Samuel Weber, and Sarah Werner. Friends in Chicago, Brooklyn, and Ann Arbor have shaped (or offered diversions from) this project; I cannot attempt a list, but my colleagues at Northwestern, the incoming junior faculty cohort at Michigan in 2009, and the interdisciplinary appointees in the Michigan Society of Fellows are owed special thanks. Gary Handwerk and the English department at the University of Washington have warmly welcomed me to Seattle since the book’s completion and have been more than generous with time and resources as I arranged for publication. Fittingly for a book about reading, I have had dynamic, insightful readers. George Hoffmann, Doug Trevor, Tina Lupton, and Will West gave their attention to all or part of the manuscript at different stages. Alexandra Gillespie and David Kastan, reading for Penn Press, offered detailed suggestions and enthusiasm for the final product. Jerry Singerman has been supportive throughout the process. I am grateful to these seven readers in particular for their contributions to this book. Any errors that remain are my own— reminders, for me, that bibliographical work (in which risks and ambiguities proliferate in the smallest details) is as challenging as critical interpretation. Indeed, the two are often one and the same. The first part of Chapter 1 originally appeared as ‘‘Fast Bind, Fast Find: The History of the Book and the Modern Collection,’’ Criticism 51:1 (2009): 79–104; a version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘‘Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 60:3 (2009): 304–40. Material from the opening paragraphs of Chapter 5 appeared

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in ‘‘Invisible Ink: A Note on Ghost Images in Early Printed Books,’’ Textual Cultures 5:2 (2010): 53–62. I am grateful to Wayne State University Press, the Johns Hopkins University Press, and Indiana University Press, respectively, for their permission to reprint this material. My path to writing this book has been in some ways an unrealistic one. Janet Nunley, my grandmother, offered hope and support at a crucial moment in 2005 when my goals were out of reach. Harriet Beury, my great aunt, sparked a curiosity about books early on, and it stayed with me. Karleigh Koster is always my first and favorite reader. Most important, my mother, a former public librarian, and my father, who put a particular novel in my hand at exactly the right time growing up, made everything possible. This book is dedicated to them.

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