Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature 9781526111036

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Front cover design based on title page from Thomas Middleton: The Blacke Booke (London, 1604; STC 17875.5), reproduced in full on back cover by permission of The Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California

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András Kiséry is Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York, City University of New York

Deutermann a n d Kiséry e d s

Allison K. Deutermann is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York

FORMAL MATTERS

Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature explores the intersections between literary and material forms of writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? The essays in this collection answer this question by uniting two distinct, even oppositional, methodologies that have transformed literary studies over the past decade: a renewed interest in formalist analysis and the broad acceptance of the study of the material text as central to the discipline. The present volume shows what is to be gained by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history, thus representing the new English Renaissance literary historiography that ties literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. Formal matters brings together studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books, and from the works of Philip Sidney and Thomas Middleton to Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. The ten featured studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism, of popular piety and of geometry, among others. Taken together, the essays in this collection exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.

FORMAL MATTERS Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature edited by :

Allison K. Deutermann and

András Kiséry www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Deutermann ppc.indd 1

02/09/2013 13:48

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Formal matters

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Formal matters Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature

Edited by Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2013

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 07190 8553 6 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Perpetua by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

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Contents

List of illustrations page vii Notes on contributors ix Acknowledgementsxii Introduction1 Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry Part I  Forming literature   1 The first English printed commonplace books and the rise of the common reader15 Heather James   2 Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously: Ben Jonson, Robert Chester, and the Vatum Chorus of Loves Martyr 34 Matthew Zarnowiecki   3 ‘Divines into dry Vines’: forms of jesting in Renaissance England 55 Adam Smyth   4 Afterworlds: Thomas Middleton, the book, and the genre of continuation 77 Jeffrey Todd Knight Part II  Translations   5   6

Greek playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England Tanya Pollard Book, list, word: forms of translation in the work of Richard Hakluyt Henry S. Turner

99 124

Part III  The matters of writing   7 The forms of news from France in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI Alan Stewart

149

vi Contents

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  8 Writings and the problem of satisfaction in Michaelmas Term Amanda Bailey   9 Saving souls or selling (virtual) godliness? The ‘penny godlinesses’ of John Andrewes and the problem of ‘popular puritanism’ in early Stuart England Peter Lake 10 How to construct a poem: Descartes, Sidney Shankar Raman

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190 219

Part IV  Afterword What’s the matter? David Scott Kastan

249

Index254

List of illustrations

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List of illustrations

  2.1 Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601; STC 5119), sigs Z4v–Aa1r. (By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library)42   2.2 Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601; STC 5119), sigs Bb1v–Bb2r. (By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library)47   4.1 Thomas Middleton, The Blacke Booke (London, 1604; STC 17875.5), title page. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 79   4.2 Thomas Middleton, The Blacke Booke (London, 1604; STC 17875.5), sigs C1v–C2r. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 90   5.1 Euripides, Euripidis tragoediae duae Hecuba & Iphigenia in Aulide (Basel: Joannes Frobenius, 1524), sigs B8v–C1r. Columbia University RBML, Lodge 1524Eu73. (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library) 103   5.2 Aristophanes, Aristophanis comoediae undecim cum scholiis antiquis / quae studio & opera nobilis viri Odoardi Biseti Carlaei sunt quamplurimis locis accuratè emendata, & perpetuis novis scholiis illustrata. Ad quae etiam accesserunt eiusdem in duas posteriores novi commentarii: operâ tamen & studio doctissimi viri d. Aeylij Francisci Porti Cretensis filii ex Biseti autographo exscripti & in ordinem digesti … (Geneva: Sumptibus Caldorianae Societatis, 1607), sig. A1r. Columbia University RBML, B88Ar5 IC07. (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library) 104   5.3 Aristophanes, Aristophanis Plutus, iam nunc per Carolum Girardum bituricum & latinus factus, & commentarijs insuper sanè quàm utiliss. recèns illustratus (Paris: Mathurinum Dupuys, 1549), pp. 78–­79. Columbia University RBML, Lodge 1549 Ar464. (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library) 106

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List of illustrations

  6.1 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598–­1600; STC 12626), Vol. I, p. 293. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 132   6.2 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598–­1600; STC 12626), Vol. III, p. 32. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 133   6.3 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598–­1600; STC 12626), Vol. III, p. 211. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 133   6.4 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598–­1600; STC 12626), Vol. III, p. 212. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 134   6.5 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598–­1600; STC 12626), Vol. II.1, p. 277. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 135 10.1 Johann Scheybl’s 1550 transcription of Robert of Chester’s Algebra, Columbia MS X512 Sch 2 fol. 82. (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library) 225 10.2 From the partial translation of al-­Khwarizmi’s Algebra by Gerard of Cremona in Regiomontanus’ codex Flores arithmeticae, MS Plimpton 188, fol. 74v. (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Plimpton Collection)226 10.3  Geometria à Renato Des Cartes anno 1637 gallicè edita: nunc autem cum notis Florimondi de Beavne … in linguam Latinam versa (Lugduni Batavorum: Ex Officina Ioannis Maire, 1649), p. 6. (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library) 229 10.4  Geometria à Renato Des Cartes anno 1637 gallicè edita: nunc autem cum notis Florimondi de Beavne … in linguam Latinam versa (Lugduni Batavorum: Ex Officina Ioannis Maire, 1649), p. 22. (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library) 237

Notes on contributors

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Notes on contributors

Amanda Bailey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (University of Toronto Press, 2007), Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Univesity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and co-­editor of Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–­1650 (Palgrave, 2010). Her essays have appeared in journals such as Criticism, Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, and Shakespeare Quarterly, and several edited volumes. Allison K. Deutermann is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her essays on sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century theatre and culture have appeared in edited collections and journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly. She is currently writing a book on hearing, taste, and theatrical form in early modern England. Heather James is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and has written widely on Shakespeare, Ovid, and classical transmission in early modern poetry, prose, and drama. She is also co-­editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University. A general editor of the Arden Shakespeare, he has published widely on Shakespeare and early modern English literature, and also edited Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. His books include Shakespeare after Theory (Routledge, 1999) and Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and he was the editor of the five-­volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2006). His Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and he is completing, with the painter Stephen Farthing, a book entitled Living Color. András Kiséry is Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York, City University of New York. His work on early modern drama and political culture and on the study of the material text have appeared or are forthcoming in, among

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Notes on contributors

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others, the European Journal of English Studies and ELH. He is now writing a book called Hamlet‘s Moment: Early Jacobean Drama and the Socialization of Political Competence. Jeffrey Todd Knight is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington and author of the forthcoming Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Production of Renaissance Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). His articles on textual studies, literary interpretation, and the history of the book have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Huntington Library Quarterly, Textual Cultures, Criticism, and Book History. Peter Lake is Professor of History and of the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt University. He has published on a wide variety of subjects in the history and culture of early modern England, including most recently The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (Continuum, 2011), co-­authored with Michael Questier. He co-­edited, with Steven Pincus, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), and is currently completing a book on Shakespeare’s drama and the politics of the 1590s, as well as preparing for publication his 2010–­2011 Ford’s Lectures in British History at Oxford, called Bad Queen Bess? Libelous Politics and Secret Histories in an Age of Confessional Conflict. Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her publications include Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Blackwell, 2004) and Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005), as well as essays on early modern plays, medicine, and classical reception in journals including Shakespeare Studies and Renaissance Drama, and edited volumes.Her co-­edited volume Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England is forthcoming with Cambridge (2013), and she is currently writing a book about the influence of Greek plays and genre theory on the development of popular stage genres in early modern England. Shankar Raman is a professor in the Literature Faculty at MIT. He is the author of Framing ‘India’: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford University Press, 2002) and Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). He is also co-­editor, with Lowell Gallagher, of Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment, Cognition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). His current project is a monograph on the relationship between literature and mathematics in early modern Europe, tentatively entitled Before the Two Cultures. Adam Smyth is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–­82 (Wayne State University Press, 2004), and the editor of A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-­ century England (Boydell and Brewer,



Notes on contributors

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2004). He is currently working on early modern book destruction, and the religious community of Little Gidding. ­ Alan Stewart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and International Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters in London. His most recent publications include Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford University Press, 2008); Bacon’s Early Writings, 1584–1586, volume 1 of the Oxford Francis Bacon (Oxford University Press, 2012); and, co-­edited with Garrett Sullivan, the three-­ volume Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012). Henry S. Turner is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford University Press, 2006) and of Shakespeare’s Double Helix (Continuum, 2008). He has edited The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2002) and he co-­edits the book series ‘Literary and scientific cultures of early modernity’ for Ashgate Press. His essays have appeared in ELH, Renaissance Drama, differences, postmedieval, Configurations, and Shakespeare Quarterly. He is currently writing a book about the history of the ­corporation as an idea and institution. Matthew Zarnowiecki is Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at Touro College’s Lander College for Men and Lander College for Women, New York. He received his PhD from Columbia University, and has published articles on lyric poetry, early modern book history and manuscript culture, and textual reproduction in EMLS, The Sidney Journal, and English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700. His book, forthcoming from University of Toronto Press, is titled Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare.

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Acknowledgements

W

e would like to thank, first and foremost, the authors of the collection for their commitment, patience and generosity. Our editors at Manchester University Press, Matthew Frost and Kim Walker, played vital roles in helping us shape and form the collection, as did our anonymous readers. We are truly grateful to all of them. Formal Matters developed out of a conference and exhibition held at Columbia University in April 2008, in which several of our contributors were participants. This event could not have taken place without the initiative of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, especially Michael Ryan and Jenny Lee, who invited and hosted the graduate-­student-­organized event. Joy Hayton and Maia Bernstein of Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature were also instrumental in putting the conference together, and we thank them for their help and inventiveness. The conference and exhibition were sponsored by Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Graduate Student Advisory Council, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University: we are glad to acknowledge their moral and financial support. We would also like to thank Gerald Cloud, Musa Gurnis, Adam Hooks, David Kastan, Molly Murray, Mark Phillipson, Ben Robinson, Alan Stewart and Adam Zucker for their help in organizing this event. Finally, we are grateful to Alan Farmer, Hannibal Hamlin, Zachary Lesser, and Peter Stallybrass, participants who were unable to contribute to this volume, but whose papers and thoughts helped to shape the collection nonetheless. For their invaluable comments and suggestions on the collection as a whole and versions (some long discarded) of the introduction, at various stages throughout the process, we would like to thank Andrea Walkden, Marie Rutkoski, Gavin Hollis, Lianne Habinek, Ivan Lupic´, Jim Shapiro, Gordon McMullan, Jean Howard, and Heidi Brayman Hackel. András Kiséry would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences of City College for indexing the volume. Allison Deutermann thanks Baruch College and her English Department ­colleagues for their help throughout the process.

Introduction

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Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry

T

his collection makes form its focus. It thus participates in a recent trend within the discipline to turn (or return) to the study of literary form, and contributes to a large and growing body of work that has alternately been labelled ‘new formalist’ or ‘historical formalist.’ But rather than simply following this turn, we seek to inflect it with an emphasis on the materials that give forms their shape – an emphasis that receives its warrant from the now well-­established field of book ­ history. Far from being the hot new thing David Kastan once so excitingly termed ‘the  new boredom,’1 book history has become something like a koiné of the historically oriented study of early modern literature, its core assumptions a mantra of much historicist scholarship. That, in Donald McKenzie’s now ubiquitous formulation, ‘forms effect meaning’ – in other words, ‘that literature exists … only and always in its materializations, and that these are ‘part of the text’s structures of signification’ – is an assumption increasingly taken for granted by literary scholars.2 That this success is sometimes acknowledged only grudgingly has to do with book historians’ perceived lack of interest in literariness. The turn to the material text subjects poems and pamphlets, novels and news, books of history and of husbandry to similar interpretive procedures, thus reinforcing the vast expansion and perceived homogenization of the body of texts literary scholars have engaged with since the rise of New Historicism. How the material forms of writing (the forms that Donald McKenzie and Roger Chartier refer to) may relate to literary form, and to the formal features of texts in general – in other words, how the two apparently distinct modes of signification intersect and interfere with each other – is perhaps less often discussed than it should be. In fact, the recent scholarly interest in the material text first emerged in the wake of precisely such questions. Exactly thirty years before this introduction was written, Jerome J. McGann asked: ‘What is the relevance of textual and bibliographical studies to literary interpretation?’3 Paradoxically, the phenomenal success of book history and the study of the material text have only made this question more pressing. Unlike textual criticism, which led a comfortably specialized existence ‘at the periphery of literary studies as such’ (so that McGann had to argue that ‘textual criticism and bibliography are conceptually fundamental rather than preliminary to the study of literature’),4

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2 Introduction the study of material texts in the early twenty-­first century has an unsettled relation with ‘literary studies as such.’ This is a clear sign of its success: rather than inserting itself in some corner of an established field, it has managed to destabilize the identity and boundaries of literature more effectively than perhaps any late twentieth-century theoretical intervention could. Following the logic of McGann’s argument, the editors of a recent collection suggested that ‘physical books have their own what might be termed bibliographic rhetoric.’5 A question such a formulation may prompt, and one which the authors in the present collection take up, is how this bibliographic rhetoric interferes and interacts with literary, textual rhetoric – that is, with the formal effects of the texts in question. How do we put literary form, the analysis of literary features of texts, back into the equation? It is at this point that the work of new formalism, the renewed attention to the aesthetic dimension of texts,6 offers itself as a mode of discussion that can usefully complement, and be complemented by, the discourse of book history.7 The past decades have seen a resurgence of interest in formalist modes of criticism, from the strictly anti-­historicist to the neo-­marxist and pointedly historical.8 This return to form is best characterized, on the one hand, as a response to the long dominance of the New Historicist critical paradigm; and, on the other, as an attempt to alleviate some of the pressures being placed on the discipline of literary studies (which, like the rest of the Humanities, faces new demands in the twenty-­first century to justify its continued existence). To study form is to do what literary scholars are ‘supposed’ to do, the kind of work that distinguishes them from the historians and anthropologists down the hall. It is to restore the text’s primacy as the literary scholar’s subject of analysis, and to turn away from a practice in which (to quote Russ McDonald) ‘context supplanted text and history dominated poetry’ towards one in which the text, literary or otherwise, is paramount.9 And yet, to say that the study of form has been absent from historicist criticism tout court is simply untrue – a point new formalism’s proponents have been eager to make, and one which even enables some of them to claim the ‘founding figures of historicist critique’ (for example, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson) as the progenitors of their own movement.10 Formal Matters is intended as an exploration of the emerging and potential links between the study of material texts on the one hand and the analysis of form on the other. The two modes of enquiry have of course a long history of interaction and interference, but these links were mostly made at the level of practice, not of sustained and widely disseminated meta-­critical reflection. Our collection brings together essays that exemplify some of the various ways in which an attention to the matter of writing now combines in critical practice with the questioning of its forms: how an interest in forms might combine with an interest in the material text and, more broadly, in matter and things material. It is decidedly eclectic and diverse: not a manifesto, but an anthology to call attention to a direction in which the practice of early modern literary and cultural studies has quietly been moving in recent years. But while we obviously expect ‘no end in our inquisitions,’ and assume with Montaigne that there may indeed

Introduction

3

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be ‘more ways to the wood than one,’ the plurality of the collection also suggests that forging such connections is no longer a challenge or a desideratum, but increasingly a condition of the study of early modern texts. The studies that follow, like other work that has been appearing over the past decade, testify to the promise of this direction. In what follows, we provide an overview of this critical history and begin to offer, if not a precise theorization of a methodology, at least a walk through the field (or forest) of recent approaches. Editorial procedures and questions of authorship have always been bound up in the study of the layout, production, and circulation of the material text. How the exigencies of production affect meaning is always evident, and often an explicit issue, in analyses driven by editorial concerns. Such work demonstrates ‘the importance of close bibliographical analysis in fully appreciating a book and its text,’ showing ‘how the very content’ of texts could be ‘determined not only by authorial and editorial dictate but also by the logistical demands of the printing process.’11 This realization has implications not only for our understanding of additions to, and the occasional compression of, a text in publication, but also (as Charlton Hinman’s analysis of the printing of the 1623 Shakespeare folio demonstrated) for our perception of the text as verse or prose.12 The connection between material text and literary form appears to be reassuringly immediate here. But, as Stephen Orgel has warned, such explorations are underpinned by the editorial assumption that, in the case of Shakespeare, bad verse must always have some non-­authorial cause.13 More recent work on the material conditions of the production of texts, while it has also had editorial consequences, reaches much further into the formal understanding of the literary work and into authorship as its enabling condition. While influential studies have used evidence from book history to restore the centrality of the author to literary reading,14 sustained analyses of material texts and practices have continued to decentralize the author in favour of more collaborative models of artistic production. Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern’s work on the materiality of the play text, for example, has not only changed our understanding of its genetics but, in doing so, has also undermined assumptions about the intentionality of composition and the hierarchies of formal considerations.15 In a similar vein, Alan Stewart has elsewhere used the example of Francis Bacon to show that collaborative authorship may mean more than a mere multiplication of agents: working with secretaries and amanuenses, the Renaissance author was sometimes a person who did not write the text at all.16 As a result of the present collection’s emphasis on the material text, the essays that follow re-­imagine authorship in plural, and not always active, terms, as a process of not only composing but also – in Heather James’s analysis of Elizabethan printed commonplace books, Jeffrey Knight’s discussion of the ‘genre of continuation,’ or Henry Turner’s chapter on Hakluyt’s networks of translation – of collecting, compiling, and compounding. The emergence of the very idea of creative invention as essential to poetic production is traced in Shankar Raman’s chapter; this concept, so central to modern

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4 Introduction assumptions about literary authorship, is shown to have a history embedded in philosophical and mathematical ideas and practices of making. Arguments about the plurality of agencies behind texts have combined with the questioning of the social and cultural conditions of the notions and affects of authorship, and more broadly, of the social institution and cultural significance of literature, making this one of the central areas of book history’s intervention in literary studies.17 Most such work has more or less explicitly participated in the project of (in Franco Moretti’s words) ‘a history of literature [rewriting] itself as a sociology of symbolic forms, a history of cultural conventions’ hoping to thus ‘finally find a role and a dignity in the context of a total history of society.’18 Book history has long been recognized as having a serious potential for cultural and sociological analysis – after all, Donald McKenzie’s classic lectures called for no less than ‘a sociology of texts.’ The focus on the material text therefore often turns out to be a focus on the people making and using it, and thus, a focus on a social world, on past people and past lives – a means to a heteronomous end.19 This has meant, paradoxically, that the book itself has at times all but disappeared from the study of book history – replaced with an emphasis on the people and c­ ultures that produced it. In current practice, Alexandra Gillespie complains, ‘the book becomes a strange sort of absence: because the concern is less with books than with the cultures that they represent in apparently uncomplicated terms.’20 If this is so, then how can we bring it back? How can we look at the materiality of literary texts and understand it neither as evidence of past life nor as a mere explanation of literary form? One obvious way to start making the book, and bookish and writerly material of all sorts, richly and densely present again is to look at them as themes, topics, and objects represented in writing – in other words, to look at how writing, and fictional writing in particular, engages with the material text. Literary texts subjected to the close and rigorous reading that is still the hallmark of our discipline allow us perhaps more readily than any other resource to meditate on printed (and other) objects as the non-­human actors of our histories – on agents that are in turn invested with agency through the social, cultural and literary fictions they participate in.21 While forms clearly do affect meaning, we need to ask how literary works shape the perception of the medium, that is, how meaning may not only reflect but also affect the material form.22 In our collection, these issues are taken up by Amanda Bailey and Alan Stewart, who examine the theatre’s thematic and, in Stewart’s case, structural engagements with specific non-­theatrical forms: the debt bond and early printed newsbooks. Genre is a key concept for many of our contributors, as it is for new formalist scholarship more generally: the predominant (although by no means exclusive) concern of early modern work of ‘new formalist’ or ‘historical formalist’ bent has been with generic forms. Here, too, we think book history has much to offer to new formalist discussions, clarifying generic and other connections among texts through inserting

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Introduction

5

genres – literary or otherwise – into the settings of their production and circulation. Tanya Pollard’s bibliographic inquiry into the transmission of notions of genre provides an interesting corrective to assumptions about genres as sets of formal features that are transmitted, and are signifying, in tacit, implicit ways.23 As many of the new formalists themselves have been quick to point out, the focus on genre is not new but represents instead a return to New Historicism’s best practices. Indeed, as early as 1992 – long before the terms ‘new formalism’ or ‘historical formalism’ attained their present currency and significance – Richard Helgerson had already described himself as a ‘historical formalist’ in the introduction to his landmark Forms of Nationhood. Carefully distancing himself from a reductive understanding of ‘formalism,’ he assumed ‘that meaning and aesthetic affinities are historically established and historically maintained … aris[ing] from the quite specific relations in which particular texts and forms are enmeshed at some particular time and place.’ Helgerson’s understanding of form included not only genre, importantly, but also how those various genres were presented in print: Forms of Nationhood is a book about the ‘discursive kinds embodied in the fat books younger Elizabethans wrote about England.’24 Of course, not only size and format but also typography may serve as generic markers,25 and research on the book trade, on the specialization of individual booksellers, can also help us discern linkings and groupings of texts obscured by later transmission.26 And, as the scope of Helgerson’s book already indicates, although an attention to genre is a fundamentally literary (poetical or rhetorical) consideration, it is also applicable and active outside of the field of literature; it is after all in the study of the early modern news market that the conditions and forms of circulation and the ‘content’ of what is circulating have been most obviously and inseparably linked. An example of such work, which considers textual and material generic markers outside the purview of the strictly literary, can be found in Peter Lake’s contribution to this volume, which tracks how the size, cost, and format of John Andrewes’s cheap religious pamphlets conditioned their approach to the doctrinal content. Adam Smyth’s chapter raises the related question of ‘literariness’ through an examination of the generic ­conventions of Renaissance jests in the context of the material form of jestbooks. Our collection hopes, ultimately, to get at the literary by turning to the matter of literature. That matter is, on one account, what literature is made of – i.e., the matter that precedes and enables it. It consists of language, genre and metre, stories, sources and topoi, conventions and expectations. It is also the matter literature is literally made of: paper, ink, binding, and all the mechanisms that the famous quip ‘whatever they may do, authors do not write books’27 refers to. What can be identified as the formalist bent of most of the chapters in this book is their shared effort to discern not – or not just – what individual texts mean, but rather – or also – how they achieve their effects, and to do so by attending to the interactions between matter and form, the material and the semiotic, the bibliographic and the literary.28 Some of our authors perform what Matthew Zarnowiecki’s chapter terms ‘medium close reading’ – often with an interest in the play of these interactions on the material, rhetorical and formal

6 Introduction

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surfaces of their texts, instead of using them to reach for repressed meanings of which they would seem symptomatic.29 And when they engage in historicist forms of ‘deep interpretation,’ they show how apparently timeless concerns, traits supposedly persisting in the longue durée, emerge from a specific historical and material conjuncture, and use the interplay of matters and forms to explore links among different cultural and intellectual domains. The chapters that follow are divided into three sections, each of which takes a different approach to the relationship between form and the materials that give it shape, or between certain matters, or subjects, and the forms that give their investigation meaning. The first section, called ‘Forming literature’, makes literary and sub-­literary forms its focus, examining notions of authorship; ways of reading, consuming, and circulating literary and non-­literary material; and modes of creative production and composition made possible by the exigencies of specific forms. Authorship turns out to be not only often a collective enterprise but also one determined by the conventions of the form for which a given writer is writing – in other words, composition itself is conditioned by the materiality of the text and its formal apparatus. The formal and material features of specific texts not only encourage particular ways of reading and of using written material but in some instances challenge existing social and political structures through the practice of such consumption. This can be seen in Heather James’s examination of late sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century printed commonplace books, a form which, it has been argued, played a vital role in elevating the status of English vernacular literature. James shifts our focus from this form’s place in English literary history to its impact on political subjectivity. For James, late Elizabethan printed commonplace books enabled innovations in the ‘politics of reading’ through their organization of decontextualized sentences grouped together by topic, modelling a form of political conversation on even the most incendiary of subjects (i.e., tyranny). Like James, Matthew Zarnowiecki examines an Elizabethan literary and textual form that is a product of collective authorship: the poetic miscellany Love’s Martyr. And, like James, Zarnowiecki sees the miscellany’s formal and material features as enabling particular ways of reading. Love’s Martyr invites, even demands, that its readers should approach its poems and essays as part of a collective poetic enterprise – as a chorus, or a conversation, on a single theme. In Adam Smyth’s study of Renaissance jests and jestbooks, collective authorship is perhaps a less accurate term to describe the genesis of artistic production than is a lack of authorship, since ‘jokes never really have owners’ or ‘authors’ (p. 59). Circulated within a community of tellers, jests are extremely mobile, and this mobility is captured in print through the recounting of the telling, or performance, of the joke. Smyth’s essay productively plays with the ambiguity of ‘form’ to ask questions not only about the jest but also about the jestbooks and manuscripts in which they circulated. Jeffrey Knight’s essay on what he terms the ‘genre of continuation’ addresses the question of

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Introduction

7

how the material, printed book enabled new modes of authorship. Distinct from the humanist tradition of ‘literary response,’ the genre of continuation in fact develops out of the ways in which men and women treated books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (binding them together, for example). In Knight’s reading, the genre of continuation imagines a kind of afterlife for the book which is akin to the human afterlife in its relative importance to the original, or starter, book. Together, the four chapters in this first section challenge anachronistic assumptions about authorship and introduce a plurality of models for literary and non-­literary composition. They trace how the material and formal conventions of certain forms enabled specific modes of consumption and ways of reading, and they demonstrate how these forms themselves could be conditioned by practices of reading, buying, and compiling books. In short, a mutually influential exchange between form and matter emerges. While books themselves remain central to each of these studies, and the impulse here is to dwell on the surface rather than to find in texts’ formal and material features symptoms of deeper meanings, the work of these contributors is anything but ­disengaged from the social life of texts. The last section of the collection, ‘The matters of writing,’ examines forms of writing, both literary and non-­literary, that grapple with other fields of knowledge, including legal discourse, foreign news and intelligence, geometry, and theology. At stake for the authors in this section is the interface between discourses encoded in, and even produced through, specific textual forms. Amanda Bailey’s chapter, for example, traces how the landmark legal decision of Slade’s Case becomes processed through Middleton’s use of the debt bond in Michaelmas Term – a play that dramatizes for the benefit of its Inns of Court audience ‘the court’s intensified interest in the intentionality of the debtor’ (p. 172). Like Bailey’s chapter, Alan Stewart’s traces the drama’s engagement with a non-­theatrical discourse, that of foreign news and intelligence. For Stewart, Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI makes structurally central the unreliability of newsletters, particularly from France, which had become by the late sixteenth century the primary model for early printed newsbooks. For both Bailey and Stewart, it is not only the formal features of the bond and newsbook that matter, but their impact on the shape of the theatrical genres in question: city comedy, with its investigation of homoerotic networks of financial and social obligation, and the history play, with its re-­imagining of past events (reported in the chronicles with a seeming inevitability) as chaotic and uncertain. Peter Lake’s and Shankar Raman’s chapters turn to strictly non-­literary material, cheap ‘penny godliness’ pamphlets and instructional writing on geometry, offering implicit correctives to scholars who would advance claims about specific forms of writing without rigorous analytical engagement of their contents or matter. Lake introduces to the study of cheap religious print a focus on not only the form of these texts (their format, title pages, dedications, and so on), but also their theological import, resisting the impulse to categorize all cheap print as ‘popular’ and therefore theologically unorthodox. John Andrewes, the so-­called ‘marketplace theologian,’ is

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8 Introduction thus shown to struggle with some of the same paradoxes and tensions that motivate William Perkins’s more mainstream protestant writing, and to therefore undermine false assumptions about the antagonism between popular and orthodox predestinarian religious thought. Raman’s chapter, similarly, brings to key geometrical texts – that is, to works that shaped the discipline, from Euclid through Descartes – an attention to their matter (their descriptions and non-­linguistic representations of algebraic and geometric problems), finding evidence of a radical change in the imagined purpose of geometric training. Descartes’s project becomes analogous, in ways Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry almost seems to anticipate, to the poet’s struggle to make rather than to imitate. For much of the period, poetry and rhetoric were assumed to be shaped out of res et verba, or, as Sidney puts it, ‘matter to be expressed by words, and words to express the matter.’30 This part of our collection asks how writing engages its matter through forms, both material and literary or verbal. Whether that matter is the stuff of English history, theology, legal discourse, or geometry, the chapters in this section show that its treatment can be both determined by and determinant of the shape of the written forms that mediate its reception. Linking these two sections are a pair of chapters that take up the subject of translation, both as a process that transforms textual matter from one formal and linguistic mode to another and as a theorization of the mediation between specific forms, materials, and cultures. For Tanya Pollard, the question of how dramatic genres came to take shape on the early modern stage becomes intimately linked to the print history of Greek plays, both on the Continent and in England. Arranged side-­by-­side with their Latin translations, and published with paratextual glosses and theoretical treatises, the format of these printed books shaped not only how Greek plays were read and interpreted but also how generic forms were theorized and reprocessed into new English compositions. Henry Turner is similarly interested in translation as a process of linguistic and cultural mediation, one conditioned (and made possible) by the matter of the book; but his essay also finds in ‘translation’ a useful term for investigating the relationship between form and matter within language itself. Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations identifies its author as a ‘material humanist’ involved in a complex network of human and non-­human agents, through which translation itself becomes ‘a process of giving form to matter and of re-­mattering the form of language’ (p. 128). Through their examination of material, linguistic, and theoretical translations, Pollard’s and Turner’s chapters therefore invite reflection on the relationship between form and matter, and the processes through which they are linked, as well as on the flexibility of the terms and categories themselves. Together, these ten chapters represent a series of different approaches to the question of how the formal, literary qualities of writing relate to the cultural, social, and political world in which it exists. Their implications are further explored in an afterword by David Scott Kastan, who first addressed some of these issues over a decade ago. Kastan’s contribution examines the uses of the words ‘form’ and ‘matter’ in

Introduction

9

Hamlet to reflect briefly on the critical potential of these terms and on some of the recent arguments surrounding them.

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Notes  1 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 18.  2 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13; David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) pp. 4, 5. McKenzie’s phrase was disseminated by Roger Chartier, who quoted it in several essays.  3 Jerome J. McGann, ‘The monks and the giants’, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 180– 199, at p. 180. The essays in the collection were first presented as papers at a 1982 c­ onference.  4 Ibid., pp. 181, 182.  5 James Daybell and Peter Hinds (eds), Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3.  6 In Renaissance studies, see e.g. Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002); Jeff Dolven, ‘Shakespeare and the new aestheticism’, Literary Imagination, 5 (2003), 95–109; Sasha Roberts, ‘Feminist criticism and the new formalism: early modern women and literary engagement’, in Dympna Callaghan (ed.), The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 67–92.  7 In a brilliant survey of the field of book history that we are much indebted to, Alexandra Gillespie asked: ‘And if, as has been suggested lately, there is a neo-­or “New Formalism”, a new interest in aesthetics and close reading in literary studies – concern with literature’s “voice” and literariness, or with the formal dimension of all the materials with which scholars work – where does the book history stand with respect to that?’ See ‘The history of the book’, New Medieval Literatures, 9 (2007), 245–286, at 273.  8 For examples of these two opposed versions of formalism see, respectively, Russ McDonald (ed.), Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Stephen Cohen (ed.), Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).  9 ‘Introduction’ in Russ McDonald (ed.), Shakespeare Reread, p. 2. 10 Marjorie Levinson, ‘What is new formalism?’, PMLA, 122 (2007), 558–569, at 560. See also Stephen Cohen, ‘Between form and culture: New Historicism and the promise of a historical formalism’, in Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, pp. 17–41. 11 Elizabeth Evenden, ‘Closing the books: the problematic printing of John Foxe’s histories of Henry VII and Henry VIII in his Book of Martyrs (1570)’, in John N. King (ed.), Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 68–91, at p. 90. 12 Charlton Hinman, ‘Cast-­off copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 (1955), 259–273, esp. 267–269.

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10 Introduction 13 Stephen Orgel, ‘Acting scripts, performing texts’, The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 21–48. 14 This question is the subject of the debate unfolding in Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Erne, ‘Reconsidering Shakespearean authorship’, Shakespeare Studies, 36 (2008), 26–36; and Kastan, ‘“To think these trifles some-­thing”: Shakespearean playbooks and the claims of authorship’, Shakespeare Studies, 36 (2008), 37–48. The discussion continues e.g. in Patrick Cheney’s introduction to Richard Meek, Jane Rickard, and Richard Wilson (eds), Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008) and in ‘“As sharp as a pen”: Henry V and its texts,’ an essay by Duncan Salkeld in the same collection (pp. 140–164), which challenges one of the central tenets of Erne’s argument, viz. the distinction between shorter performance text and longer literary text; compare also James P. Bednarz, ‘Dekker’s response to the Chorus of Henry V in 1599’, Notes and Queries, 59 (2012), 63–68. 15 Palfrey and Stern have reversed the presupposition that ‘it is the playwright and/or the finished play that remains the primal fount of meaning and direction,’ identifying ‘the actor and his part as crucial contributors, both as catalyst and vehicle, to whatever Shakespeare’s theatre became.’ Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 4. Compare also Tiffany Stern, ‘Re-­patching the play’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 151–177; James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). thinking author16 Alan Stewart, ‘The making of writing in Renaissance England: re-­ ship through collaboration’, in Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy (eds), Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing (1500–1650) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 81–96. 17 ‘An institutional history of various distinctively Early Modern authorial affects’ is how Joseph Loewenstein describes his project in Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 8. Compare Alvin B. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Seth Lerer, ‘Epilogue: falling asleep over the history of the book’, PMLA, 121 (2006), 229–234; David Scott Kastan, ‘Humphrey Moseley and the invention of English literature’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 105–124; Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The first literary Hamlet and the ­commonplacing of ­professional plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 371–420. 18 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983), p. 19, quoted

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Introduction

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by Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, p. 1. More recently, Peter McDonald identified a similar conjuncture when he suggested that Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field is where ‘book history and theoretical reflections on literature’ most readily converge: ‘Ideas of the book and histories of literature: after theory?’, PMLA, 121 (2006), 214–228, at 225. 19 See Alexandra Gillespie’s critique of the work of David Kastan and Zachary Lesser: Gillespie, ‘The history of the book’, 270–272. 20 Ibid., 270. Compare Leah Price, ‘From the history of a book to a “history of the book”’, Representations, 108 (2009), 120–138, at 123: ‘No matter how energetically they distance themselves from the aesthetic, book historians remain as attached as literary historians to narratives centered around human agents: the author, the editor, the reader, or (even more literally) the literary agent.’ 21 Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 101–137; Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Price, ‘From the history of a book to a “history of the book”’; Sarah Wall-­Randell, The Immaterial Book: Reading in English Renaissance Romance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 22 On these issues, see Christina Lupton’s incisive remarks about the ways in which literature constructs the supposed mechanical determinism of print, how ‘texts illustrate the imaginative effort involved in creating the effect of the medium having an autonomous existence.’ Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-­century Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 8–10, 16–17. 23 Several of our contributors practise a version of what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus term ‘surface reading’ as opposed to ‘symptomatic reading’ – a critical approach that ‘attend[s] to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb[s] their depths.’ ‘Surface reading: an introduction’, Representations, 108 (2009), 1–21, at 1–2. 24 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 7, 8. Although Helgerson’s focus on such works as Coke’s Reports or Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations is motivated by his interest in the discourses they represent, the fact that around the turn of the century these discourses came to be codified in just such ‘fat books’ is central to his argument about the importance of this moment in the formation of English nationhood. And although the organization of his book privileges the textual forms – and especially the genres – of discourse over their material embodiment (or, as Chartier would have it, the semiotics over the materiality of the text), in the chapter about chorography, for example, his argument about the ideological effect of maps emerges from attentive readings of the printed objects; and in his seminal chapter on Shakespeare’s history plays he also registers the social and cultural implications of the specific physical form in which these works circulated. The ‘imposing stature’ of the ‘handsome and expensive folio volumes,’ he notes, not only had symbolic significance but also put them out of the reach of the majority of the population: their material form was as exclusive as their discursive content (p. 196). See Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 26.

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12 Introduction 25 Juliet Fleming, ‘Changed opinion as to flowers’, in Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 48–64. 26 Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 27 Roger Stoddard explains his often-­quoted and paradoxical-­sounding claim by pointing out that ‘Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines.’ ‘Morphology and the book from an American perspective’, Printing History, 17 (1987), 2–14, at 4. Compare the important further caveat, issued by Peter Stallybrass, namely, that ‘printers do not print books. It is in the process of gathering, folding, stitching, and sometimes binding that transforms printed sheets into a pamphlet or book. Certainly, some printers may have undertaken or paid for all of the latter processes. But that is not what printing is about. It never was. The first dated text that survives from Gutenberg’s press is not a book but an indulgence.’ ‘“Little jobs”: broadsides and the printing revolution’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 315–341, at p. 315. 28 For considerations of the notion of form see Douglas Bruster, ‘The materiality of Shakespearean form’, in Stephen Cohen (ed.), Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 31–48; Henry S. Turner, ‘Lessons from literature for the historian of science (and vice versa): reflections on “form”’, Isis, 101 (2010), 578–589. 29 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus note how an attention to ‘the material life of books’ may result in taking a distance from symptomatic reading: Best and Marcus, ‘Introduction’, 6. 30 The Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Katherine Duncan-­Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 112.

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Part I

Forming literature

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1

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The first English printed commonplace books and the rise of the common reader Heather James

T

he first English printed commonplace books display a curious mixture of ambition and innocence. The ambition is hard to miss. Instead of offering apologies and shows of deference – staples of the prefatory matter in early modern books – these volumes are more likely to congratulate the reader on his or her good fortune in having come into possession of such a prize collection. One compiler, Anthony Munday, does just this in his letter to the reader of Bel-­vedére, or the Garden of the Muses (1600), an ‘excellent booke’ of treasures carefully ‘collected from so many singular mens works’ (sig. A3r), representing the best of the best in English letters.1 The resulting book creates a virtual space comparable to ‘the Muses Garden, (a place that may beseem the presence of the greatest Prince in the world)’ and the only question that concerns Munday is whether the reader is worthy of the book rather than the other way around: ‘Imagine then thy height of happinesse, in being admitted to so celestiall a Paradise. Let thy behauiour then (while thou art here) answere thy great fortune, and make vse of thy time as so rich a treasure requireth’ (sig. A3r–v). While early modern books frequently anticipate and defend themselves against negative press, it is unusual for readers to be made to feel that they have not previously read so good a book and may not be up to the task.2 Robert Allot, who compiled a related volume in the same year, England’s Parnassus or, The Choysest Flowers of our Moderne Poets, takes a milder approach. He informs the reader that he pities the low-­ brow who may carp at his book and then drops the reader entirely to address the book itself: ‘Go fearles forth my booke, hate cãnot harm thee, / Apollo bred thee, & the Muses arm thee’ (sig. B2v).3 Early modern books do reserve a place for self-­praise in the prefatory matter, of course, and that is the section devoted to poems penned by the author’s friends. England’s Parnassus forgoes this useful section, but Bel-­vedére does not, furnishing several poems, all of them lavish with superlatives. These commendatory poems, however, are not addressed to the authors collected in the volume or even to an aristocratic patron.4 No fewer than three of the poems, placed in a central position, shower their praises on the commonplace book itself as the ‘Abstract of knowledge, Briefe of Eloquence’ (in Richard Hathaway’s terms, sig. A8v), and a composite of the art and inspiration classically associated with Apollo and the Muses. The two poems in the final

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16

Forming literature

position are offered up to the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, the mothers of invention, who are praised for nurturing eloquence. Heading up the section of commendatory poems, in pride of place, is one that Munday himself composed for the man who made it all happen, ‘his loving and approoved good Friend, M. John Bodenham,’ the ‘First causer and collectour of these floures’ (sig. A7r) of eloquence. At the turn of the century, John Bodenham, a London grocer as well as a prodigious reader and note-­taker, oversaw the production of several printed commonplace books, which were compiled from his extensive reading notes on the standard classical and Christian authorities as well as contemporary English poets writing in the vernacular.5 These volumes, which he assembled and printed with the help of his friends – most notably Nicholas Ling, Anthony Munday, and Robert Allot – include Politeuphuia, or Wits Commonwealth (1597), Wits Theater of the Little World (1599), Bel-­ vedére, or the Garden of the Muses (1600), and England’s Parnassus (1600), as well as a collection of pastoral poems, England’s Helicon (1600). His project further inspired a companion volume of commonplaces compiled by Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, or Wits Treasury (1598). To begin with the most innovative aspect of Bodenham’s publishing enterprise: the volumes printed in 1600 compiled contemporary English poets writing in the vernacular, and did so to the exclusion of the Greek and Latin authorities that formed the basis of Tudor education in the grammar schools and universities.6 For the first time, someone suggested that modern English writers did not merely compare with traditional authorities but might in fact replace them. The change in the status of contemporary English writers took place rapidly. The line-­up of authorities in the earliest of Bodenham’s printed commonplace books, Politeuphuia (1597) and Wits Theater of the Little World (1599), consisted entirely of Greek and Latin authorities in English translation. Francis Meres’s companion volume, Palladis Tamia (1598), effected a true innovation when it presented modern English poets as the counterparts of traditional authorities. This stout duodecimo is stuffed with the usual suspects, such as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Chrysostom. But, before long, the reader encounters the name of Robert Greene, with remarkable persistence, followed by those of John Lyly, John Hall, and Sir Philip Sidney. Towards the end of his volume, Meres inserts a section that explains his choice to tuck modern writers into an otherwise orthodox arrangement of classical and Christian authorities. In passages on poetry, poets, and ‘A comparative discourse of our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italiane Poets,’ Meres discloses what he has already implied: some modern English poets might achieve equal footing with classical authorities (NN7r).7 Meres’s volume owes its fame to this section, because it is here that he invoked the ‘most exquisite wit’ of the ‘divine’ poet, Edmund Spenser, and compared William Shakespeare to the wittiest of ancient Roman poets, Ovid (NN8v). For Meres, Ovid’s spirit was reborn in the honey-­tongued Shakespeare by metempsychosis: ‘As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid liues in mellifluous & hony-­tongued Shakespeare, witnes

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The first English printed commonplace books

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his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.’ (sigs Oo1v–Oo2r).8 But the volumes that Bodenham and company brought out in 1600 are even more forward-­looking and audacious. In a single but crucial step, they jettison the ancient authorities entirely and print only modern and vernacular ones. Bodenham and his associates were the first to think these poets could obtain the authority long held by the ancients without so much as claiming the prestige of association. Why not simply place Shakespeare alongside of Spenser? Or, more adventurously, how about putting them both in the mixed company of Mary, Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Oxford, and King James VI of Scotland? And so it is that English poets such as Thomas Howard (Earl of Surrey), Mary and Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, and William Shakespeare first came to mingle sociably with each other: they did so purely because they were not grouped with Aristotle, Euripides, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca. By their ‘practice of anthologizing vernacular verse and of gathering together the best works of distinguished poets,’ as one scholar puts it, these collections grouped poets by ‘their shared language, geography, and culture,’ with the consequence that they ‘contributed significantly to the invention and consolidation of ‘national’ vernacular literatures during the Renaissance.’9 It can thus be said that the first English printed commonplace books helped to accomplish what Edmund Spenser dreamed of when he wrote to his friend, Gabriel Harvey, to demand, ‘Why a God’s name may not we, as else the Greeks, have a kingdom of our own language?’10 And while the English printed commonplace books of 1600 seem to emancipate contemporary English writers, they may also be considered to do the same for the common reader. In recent work, Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass persuasively claim that these volumes elevate the role of readers over authors and they put this argument to use in a broader challenge to the supremacy of authorship assumed in a good deal of modern criticism concerned with the rise of Renaissance English literature.11 Their essay illuminates a tenet that lies close to the heart of a movement in book history, which identifies the preoccupation with authorship as a marker of modern critical values rather than early modern practices of writing and publishing. I agree with the position they advance: authorship is not the be-­all and end-­all of literary production. Historically speaking, it is a function that is engaged or galvanized when it serves larger social and political purposes and is left unmarked when it obstructs those purposes.12 My present interests lie in the innovations that these commonplace books make in the politics of reading in the late Elizabethan period. The first English printed commonplace books radically transform the social role of the readers, who cannot be classed as students or disciples of the authors they read. Nor can they be cast as imaginary auditors of a familiar scene in humanist texts: that is, the scene of education and advice that takes place between a learned author – posing as a counsellor – and his ideal reader, the prince.13 In a r­efreshing change of pace,

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Bodenham’s readers are not asked to listen in on a dialogue about government and authority. It is my argument that they are instead enjoined to explore and even construct the dialogue themselves. In one respect, the first English printed commonplace books of 1600 are typical of the innovative literary forms in which social and political commentary took place in the early modern period: despite the ambition that they put on display, centre stage, they nonetheless maintain a studied pose of innocence bordering on aimlessness. In this sense they are consistent with the form or genre of moral and political dialogue established by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528) – and share in its sprezzatura or studied nonchalance. The compilers acknowledge their own invention and tout their industry in collecting so many specimens of English wit and eloquence and organizing them under standard moral rubrics. But if we are to take Bodenham and his associates at their word, their prodigious labour is, in the end, a strictly technical matter of compiling poetic and rhetorical specimens without reference to – or even indirect bearing on – affairs of state. The volumes are long on boasts about their feats in the archives of early modern as well as ancient literature but short on admissions of any riskier acts of self-­assertion that readers may discern within their pages. While the compilers admit to a certain daring in mixing aristocrats, gentlemen, university-­ educated men, and commoners without regard for social distinction, they fall entirely silent on a second, quite obvious, and even more sensitive matter: the directly political dimension of compiling and arranging the perspectives on moral and political philosophy voiced by contemporary English men and women. In this context it seems pertinent that Bodenham’s project of launching his printed commonplace books was wholly carried out in the late Elizabethan period, which also saw the rise of sceptical and satirical complaints against the Crown and, as some saw it, the failure of the Tudor promise of a Golden Age in England. What I hope to demonstrate in this chapter is that the first English printed commonplace books do indeed have a socio-­political dimension, which is based on its ideal reader: not the prince but the common reader, who is ultimately understood as an articulate citizen of the realm more than the subject of the Crown. The man or woman lucky enough to own and peruse these volumes has the key to a garden – a utopia, an earthly paradise, an Eden, or a conceptual model of England – in which the commoner enjoys the same entitlements as the aristocrat, university-­educated man, or (to recall the phrase that Anthony Munday coyly tucked into parentheses) ‘the greatest Prince in the world.’ This citizen-­reader is invited to view the first volumes of commonplaces by English authorities as images and hypothetical constructions of the English nation. As such, these volumes represent a bold experiment in what Richard Helgerson has called ‘forms of nationhood,’ and can arguably take their place alongside other ambitious volumes of the Elizabethan era, such as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England, Camden’s Britannia, Speed’s Theater of the Empire of Great Britain, Drayton’s Poly-­Olbion, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, Shakespeare’s English history plays, and Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.14



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The industry of the commonplace books The commonplace books associated with Bodenham, Ling, Munday, and Allott vigorously tout their own scope, rigour, and industry. Painstaking and even heroic labour went into the publication of ‘a methodicall collection of the most choice and select admonitions and sentences, compendiously drawne from infinite variety, divine, historicall, poeticall, politique, morrall, and humane’ (sig. A2r–v), as Ling described Politeuphuia.15 The work began with Bodenham’s habits of reading and note-­taking and continued in the efforts of his friends to gather the ‘most learned, grave, and wittie sentences,’ and ‘subject [. . .]’ them ‘under apt and proper heads’ (sigs A3v–A4r). Munday similarly notes in ‘The Conclusion’ to Bel-­vedére that it ‘cost no meane paines and labour, to reduce’ so many examples into ‘forme and method’ (sig. Q5v), and emphasizes that, even before he took up his own tasks, Bodenham had put in ‘whole years, months, weeks, & daily hours’ (sig. A7r). In Wits Theater of the Little World, Allott also affirms the dignity of the labour of collecting ‘the flowers of antiquities and histories,’ although they come from ‘divers learned Authors’ (‘I may not call [them] mine,’ he admits, sig. A3r–v). His work is nonetheless important: he supplies the ‘sentences and similitudes’ of the ancients that influence the minds and conduct of contemporary readers, who engage in the activities of sifting through the book, extracting its virtues, and making them their own.16 The volumes draw further attention to the sheer scope of their contents by supplying useful tables listing the topics covered. These tables make it easier for the reader to note, for instance, that Allott imagines each of his volumes as an abcedarium of moral topics: Wits Theater of the Little World runs from ‘Abstinance, vide temperance’ to ‘Zelotypia’ and ‘Zodiacke’ (complete with page references), while England’s Parnassus runs from Albion and Angels to Winter and Youth. In Bel-­vedére, Munday selects a different principle of organization – he begins with God and ends with Death – but he also provides an ‘Alphabeticall Table, of the seuerall things handled in this Booke’ (sig. Q7r). Munday thus allows the reader to choose between the more traditional organization of topics from A to Z and the more innovative itinerary he charts in the virtually narrative sequence from God to Death, a cursus that resembles the plot of a morality play, in which the reader features as Everyman. When the compilers insist on the industry and labour that went into the making of the printed commonplace books, they are laying claim to a rich tradition of innovation that had allowed humanist scholars and reformers, beginning with Desiderius Erasmus and Philip Melanchthon, to reinvent the uses of the classical and medieval commonplace book and, with it, the structures of thought that informed the Renaissance educational system.17 In Peter Beal’s influential formulation, the key to understanding commonplace books is their ‘usefulness’: they ‘constituted the primary intellectual tool for organizing knowledge and thought among the intelligentsia of the seventeenth and probably also the sixteenth centuries’ (Beal, 1993).18 And the habits of commonplacing in turn influenced the work of scholars, poets, lawyers and judges,

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preachers and theologians, and scientists. All of these professions stood to profit by the thoughtful use of authorities: just the right sentences, maxims, proverbs, axioms, epigrams, and anecdotes as well as similes, comparisons, or examples might well tip the balance and complete the act of persuasion. Hence the rise of printed commonplace books suitable for the use of the various professions and geared towards readers of varying levels of expertise: e.g., Philip Melanchthon’s Loci communes (1523) and John Merbecke’s A Booke of Notes and Common Places (1581) on theology; Matthew Hale’s ‘Preface’ in Henry Rolle, Un abridgment des plusiers cases et resolutions del common ley (1688) and Abraham Fraunce’s The Lawyers Logicke (1588) in law; Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1572) and Edward Topsell’s History of Foure-­footed Beastes (1607) in science. But what did a grocer, a publisher, and a playwright (among the other jobs held by Bodenham, Ling, and Munday) hope to accomplish by producing an entire series of commonplace books between 1597 and 1600? What goals other than the literary one of helping to make ‘a kingdom of our own language,’ independent of classical and Christian authorities, did Bodenham and his associates have for casting themselves in the role of bees, as the idiom went, gathering the sweets from diverse flowers to make their honey? As the dedicatory poems to Bel-­vedére put it, ‘this Volume’ is ‘The hive where many Bees their honey bring’ (sig. A8v) and Bodenham himself is the chief of these bees, who ‘everywhere didst rome, / Spending [his] spirits in laborious care’ as he ‘nightly brough[t] [his] gather’d hony home, / As a true worke-­man in so great affaire’ (sig. A7r). The image of the bee is of course the locus classicus for all acts of invention, understood as both the discovery of things that are out there in the world (and that generally have been for a very long time) and the creation of something new. In his Epistulae morales, Seneca (the Younger) introduced the image that was to echo throughout late antiquity and the Renaissance: We also, I say, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care which our nature has endowed us … we could so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came. (84.3–­10)19

The image of the bee serves equally well for poets who try their hand at literary imitation in acts of homage and rivalry; orators who draw on the authority of familiar sentences or maxims and redirect it to the orators themselves; and compilers who remember and sustain the great commonplaces or topics that inform the disciplines of knowledge. Its use to Bodenham, Ling, Munday, and Allott as compilers is quite likely the same as it is for the other ambitious men, born between 1551 and 1564, that shared a common interest – as Richard Helgerson proposed – in describing and ­defining the nation. The image of the bee carries with it the image of a commonwealth made harmonious by the freedom of its citizens to expatiate physically and intellectually, exercise their

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talents, and apply their industry without fear of envy (represented by the spider, the antitype to the bee in Elizabethan satire) or subjugation (imposed on beasts of burden, the antitype to the bees in georgic poetry). In the poetry of Virgil, both the Georgics and the Aeneid, the society of bees proposed the utopian image of social harmony and cultural productivity. Its idealized image of peaceful industry and flourishing is loosely associated with monarchy but also retains the particular virtues and liberties of the Roman Republic that were most threatened by the rise of the Caesars: in all of the apiarian images of his poetic manual on husbandry and imperial epic, after all, Virgil focuses on the co-­operation of the collective rather than the king bee (since he mistook the sex of the queen), and, in one of the more memorable passages of the Georgics, the status of the most industrious bees as ‘great-­spirited leaders’ (magnanimi duces, Georgics 4.4) rather than followers or subjects of the realm. The bees are active agents: they are militant and vigilant citizens and not coerced subjects of their kingdom. In this sense, the georgic bees make good on the vigorous activities implied by the verb ‘to read,’ in the Latinate senses tapped by commonplace books in the classical tradition: as the Oxford Latin Dictionary puts it, the primary meaning is ‘to gather (by picking up, plucking, etc.),’ ‘to collect (the bones of a cremated corpse),’ and ‘to gather (a person’s dying breath),’ all meanings relevant to the culling of sententiae and other ornamental passages from the ancients. It also means to extricate; to choose, select, or pick; to follow in the tracks of another; and to read, peruse, or learn about things by reading. These metaphors help shape as well as describe the practices of reading embraced by commonplacing from ancient times (by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Seneca as well as the poets) to early modern ones, beginning with Erasmus. The exertion and even violence enacted by the compiling reader also illuminate the refrain about painstaking labour that repeatedly surfaces in Bodenham’s commonplace books. But the activity of compiling involves another set of skills as well: the capacity to generalize and abstract – as the reduction of sentences to headings implies – and to organize privileged sentences in the production of a new text, which is far from arbitrary in the disposition of its materials. These skills receive less attention from modern scholars interested in both printed and manuscript commonplace books, and for good reason.20 To read commonplace books for the very issues they leave implicit – the feelings and thoughts that are to be found between the lines and among the sentences – is to enter into an area of risk that put early modern writers, compilers, and publishers on the defensive. And yet these volumes do, quite obviously, put a great deal of energy into matters of sequence and combination and not just to selection. Just one of the reasons that the commonplace books pull contemporary books of poetry and drama apart – abolishing authors, leaving the narrative in shambles, and removing all signs of character from the speeches and sentences they compile – is that they have a story of their own to tell and a plot to unfold. That story is the state of the ‘common,’ and the plot focuses on the relationship of the ‘common’ to England. A few examples may suffice. Just as the English printed commonplace books mingle

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authorities without respect to social distinction (an issue to which I will return), so do they mix ideas and opinions in ways that open up questions about the moral and political topics – such as truth, justice, and liberty – that they purport merely to catalogue. Sequence alone can be provocative: it is obvious why Hope is joined to Despair, but are we to detect a similar pattern of linked antinomies when Law is placed next to Libertie and Treason is aligned with Tyranny? Is it wholly by accident that the headings listed in the C’s of England’s Parnassus radically intensify the sense of political debate by focusing on matters of Counsaile, Concord, Conscience, Craft, Common-­wealth, Content, Court, Courtier effeminate, Courage, Courtesie, Crueltie, and Custome? It was certainly possible for Allott to disperse the political burden of the C’s by finding synonyms for some if not all of these topics. As for the examples placed under a given topic, they bring home the truth of the Terentian adage about maxims and men: tot sententiae, tot homines, there are as many opinions as there are human beings. This feature of sententiae takes on a political edge when the topics concern affairs of state and matters of topical debate. To take the loaded example of ‘Liberty,’ the authorities compiled in England’s Parnassus present alternating views. It is as precious as air and breath, the very virtue that makes men free: O liberty how much is that man blest, Whose happie fortunes do his fate areed, That for deserts rejoyces to be freede?

Th. Storer. Sweet libertie the lifes best living flame.

I. Markham Our lands may come againe, but libertie once lost, Can never find such recõmpence as countervails the cost. G. Gascoigne. (127)

And it is also the most suspect virtue, really a vice, calculated to foment rebellion against the lawful monarch: The name of Libertie, The watchword of rebellion over usde, The idle Eccho of uncertaintie That evermore the simple hath abusde. S. Daniell. (128)

What are the volume’s readers to think: are they reading a random list of sentences joined only by a common keyword, ‘liberty,’ or are they entering into a dialogue, even a debate, on the subject? Perhaps the most starting example of the conflicting perspectives appears under the headings of kings and kingdoms. The views in the four-­page section of



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England’s Parnassus alternate between assertions of royal absolutism and radical questioning of it. The mood-­swings between confidence and scepticism are as unstable as those of Shakespeare’s Richard II, whose despair in his powers of government mixes with his high-­flown assertions of his divine right. The latter are – perhaps by delightful coincidence – scattered throughout the section (119–122). This is also true of Bel-­vedére, where some of the same passages appear, albeit in slightly ­modified form: Where Angels in the cause of Kings doe fight, Weake men must fall, for heaven regards the right. … Not all the water in the rough rude sea, Can wash the balme from an annointed king. (E5v)

But Richard’s claims to divine right must take their place alongside maxims drawn straight from Stoic philosophy, which is larded with the wry and circumspect remarks uttered by long-­suffering but virtuous noblemen in the courts of tyrants. Samuel Daniel, for example, is brought forward to speak against royal favourites: – Great men too well grac’d, much rigor use, Presuming favorites mischiefe ever bring: So that concluding, I may boldly speake, Minions too great, argue a king too weake. (121)

Drawing on the annals of history, which show the inevitably bad consequences of favouritism, an Englishman claims the right to speak up and speak boldly. The Englishman is Daniel or, more properly, the rhetorical persona of ‘Daniell’ featured in England’s Parnassus. His audience is double. There is an implied audience, who is manifestly a king in the act of undermining his own authority. While it should come as no surprise to learn that this king is none other than Richard II – this time from Daniel’s poem, The History of the Civil War – it is important to emphasize that it could be any king, although preferably an English one, who presumes too much: allusion is not the point.21 The second audience in England’s Parnassus is the common English reader, who may claim a share of the sententious authority and bold speech that the English writer (‘Daniell’) uses to address the abusive monarch. But the last word on the subject of kingship is assigned to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who enters the text – or the lists – to blow past the problem of minions and instead decry the root of the problem in the sensual reign of kings: If thou wilt mightie be, flie from the rage Of cruell will, and see thou keep thee free From the fowle yoake of sensuall bondage: For though thy Empire stretcheth to Indian sea, And for thy feare trembleth the farthest Thisce,

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If thy desire haue over thee the power, Subject then art thou, and no gouernour.

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(122)

Allot, who is famously lackadaisical about making the right identifications between authors and passages, refers this speech to the ‘E. of Surrey,’ but he appears to have found it in Tottel’s Miscellany, where it is attributed to Thomas Wyatt.22 Yet either author/speaker will do, if Allot wishes to bring his sections on kings and kingdoms to a close with an admonishing voice from beyond the grave: the voice of an Englishman, who envisages himself as a loyal citizen of the realm, charged with high treason against the Tudor regime – and, in the case of Surrey, tragically executed for it. In short, the printed commonplace books offer records of modern Englishmen speaking freely and even disputing on such topics as royal responsibility and prerogative and the liberties of the subject. In the locus amoenus of Bel-­vedére, England’s Parnassus, and England’s Helicon, all English readers, poets and compilers apparently have the right to deliberate on matters central to the English realm. In this way, the printed commonplace book is capable of posing as an encyclopaedia of moral topoi, even when it in fact presents and encourages moral and political critiques of the highest ranks of the state. These volumes take an active interest in the conduct of authorities – including ‘Kings Knights, Bishops, Judges, Magistrates, Husbands in theyr houses, & Religious men in the churches,’ as Allot puts it in Wits Theater of the Little World (sig. A3v). Such persons are used to being dedicatees of publishing enterprises, but in the commonplace books they are put up for review and made objects of study and debate by the very persons they govern. And Bodenham’s readers are clearly invited to think outside the box. As Munday puts it in his Epistle to the Reader of Bel-­vedére: The walkes, alleys, and passages in this Garden, are almost infinite, euery where a turning, on all sides such windings in and out: yet all extending both to pleasure and profit, as very rare or seldome shalt though see the like. Marke then, what varietie of flowres grow all along as thou goest, and trample on none rudely, for all are right precious. If thy conscience be wounded, here are store of hearbs to heale it: If thy doubts be fearefull, here are flowres of comfort. Are thy hopes frustrated? here’s immediate helpes for them. In briefe, what infirmitie canst thou haue, but here it may bee cured? What delight or pleasure wouldst thou haue, but here it is affoorded? (Sig. A3v)

I quote at length to catch the almost Miltonic quality of this account of deliberation as an act of wandering, straying, and perhaps even transgressing in a garden of thoughts. The subject of the sentence In the previous section, I presented a story of nearly Whiggish optimism, in which the first English printed commonplace books meditate on their capacity to engage the liberties of subjects and encourage them in vernacular readers. According to that

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story, the compilers of the Bodenham commonplace books fully grasped the potential of English poetry and drama, in excerpted form, to shift moral and political authority from its default positions in both the ancients and the English Crown, thus tugging against the orthodoxies of the Elizabethan educational system and state alike. In this plotline, the first English printed commonplace books direct their energies to siphoning off at least some of the valuable authority of tradition from the hands of the Crown – the prince and her chief councillors – so that it may fall within the eager grasp of poets, publishers, and common readers. In the present section, I alter my course in order to describe the limits of authority imposed on commonplaces, sentences, and their readers. The commonplace compiler generally reads for the sentence, which is a privileged mode of speech. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the sentence is a way of thinking, opinion; a deliberative opinion on a particular question; a judgement or legal decision; an apophthegm, aphorism, or maxim; and intelligence, insight, sound judgement. As a form of speech, it seems paradoxically to be ‘out there’ and ‘in here’: rooted in a person’s deepest thought, steeped in historical examples without recourse to any particular events, and resonant with philosophical and religious truth. The powers of abstraction and generalization are impressive, and they do furnish the gravitas that Seneca ultimately has in mind in the essay in which he describes the uses of commonplace thought.23 But they come at a cost: the speakers of maxims relinquish the particularity of their place in time and space. They forfeit the weight of their own experience and knowledge, and even their option to be the subject of their own ­sentence. The cost under assessment is depersonalization, and to examine its formal features in closer detail, we might briefly consider the sentences compiled on a single ­manuscript page of an early seventeenth-­century commonplace book:24 Time. Time treadeth all things downe but truth. Destiny. Destiny is seldome foreseene, but never prevented In kings causes it is better to doubt, then conjecture; better to be ignorant, then inquisitive; they have long ears & stretched armes, in whose heads suspicion is a proofe, & to be accused is to be condemned. Cease from speaking wt becomes thee not, least thou feeleth wt liketh thee not. Fame. Report hath not alwaies a blister on her tongue.

It is hard to imagine that the compiler of these sentences took a casual or even objective interest in the themes of time, destiny, tyrants, and fame – and, of course, the entire point of compiling is that readers wished to lay their hands on materials that spoke directly to their own intimate preoccupations or prepare them for as yet unforeseen problems of the future. And it is equally difficult to imagine the compiler of these sentences taking the further step of transforming the rubrics and sentences into a ­narrative – especially a personal narrative – that might explain just how these arresting

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topics and perspectives made their way into a private commonplace book. The back story can only be imagined, but one thing seems clear: there is always a back story to the collection of impersonal or, better, depersonalized sententiae.25 Depersonalization is also a key feature of the first English printed commonplace books, for the compilers have clearly scoured English poetry and plays for memorable sentences, similes, and examples and extracted them from their original contexts. As Chartier and Stallybrass have shown, the sentence is privileged above the particular text and even its author. None of the commonplace books produces titles, much less line numbers; and even the authors’ names appear in abbreviated form in the body of the text: e.g., M. Drayton, W. Shakespeare, E. of Oxford, and, even more felicitously, K. of S. (a.k.a. the King of Scotland), along with the least embodied of all the ‘authors,’ M. of M. (The Mirror for Magistrates). Perhaps more importantly, as Chartier and Stallybrass make clear, the compilers remove all signs that would indicate that a given sentence was originally associated with a particular speaker or dramatic character. And so it is that, in England’s Parnassus, an emotionally charged dialogue between two characters in a play – such as an exchange between the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth in Richard III – becomes simply a verse sentence on a topic – ‘Words,’ as it happens – removed from its original dramatic context and, more to the point, from any context at all: – Words Windie atturnies of our client woes, Ayery succeeders of intestate joyes, Poore breathing Orators of miseries, Let them have scope, though what it doth impart Helpe not at all, yet doth it ease the heart (228)

The speech act that is, in Shakespeare’s play, Queen Elizabeth’s defence of her own expressions of pain becomes potentially more rather than less poignant in Allott’s commonplace book, which offers these lines as an expression (anyone’s and everyone’s) of an unbounded and universal desire for effective speech as well as attentive listeners. How might these features of commonplacing and sentences interest Bodenham’s common reader and raise questions about his or her status as an articulate citizen? It is the very force of abstraction, which carefully – or violently – extracts the speaker from any particular location in time and space: in a sentence (in the sense of sententia), there can be no here and now, then and there, or I and you. Sentences or maxims have absolutely no use for the demonstrative pronouns and adjectives that grammatically mark a speaker’s location in space and time and in this way affirm the truth of experience. Sententiae entirely and spectacularly lack the grammatical indices of a speaker’s location in time and space that Emile Benveniste called ‘deictics.’26 There are various ways in which sentences and maxims are pointed in meaning and deeply interested in

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acts of pointing. But they categorically refuse to point beyond the sentence to any particular speaker (or ‘I’), addressee, place, or time. In philosophical terms, this poses an interesting problem for the user of sentences or maxims, since he or she has dispensed – perhaps reluctantly – with the objective determination of the truth.27 The speaker of sententiae assumes a pose – one quite familiar in the moral and political philosophy of Seneca – of having done so voluntarily, of having transcended the need for examples, evidence, and witnessing.28 Accordingly, the truth is out there, but the writer concerned with the truth has to be satisfied with its expression in a sentence empty of reference and pointing chiefly to itself. Sententiae as a form of rhetorical authority, then, exchange the language of objectivity (reference) for the objectification of authority (reification). Beneath the philosophical problem is a political one: the extraction of the personal voice from expressions of truth, the careful removal of the witnessing ‘I’ from the scene of truth-­telling. In this sense, the capacity to transcend time might be regarded less as a triumph of objectification than a tragedy of displacement and disembodiment, perhaps even a condition of exile, if we understand that term as an index of the distance that a person in a commonwealth perceives to separate him from the liberties that guarantee his status as an articulate citizen. Sentences and maxims, in short, forfeit a certain measure of the bold and open speech known as parrhesia in Greek and licentia in Latin, where it remained the privileged hallmark of moral virtue in the a republic as well as the politically circumscribed environments of the courts of kings and tyrants.29 Sentences and maxims build their grammar around kernels of truth, but point to it gnomically rather than embodying it in a personally marked utterance. This demi-­paradise, this England The first English printed commonplace books produced by Bodenham, Ling, Munday, and Allott accept the limits of sententiae because they are more than willing to sacrifice the authorizing markers of the personal voice in order to gain a commons, a communal space in which English men and women – to recall Munday’s extraordinary image of his book as a garden for pleasure and meditation – may roam, reflect, nurse wounds and heal them, and speak up and debate their central concerns, and all without concern for social rank. Sententious thought and speech does involve sacrifice of the ‘I’ that subtends parrhesiastic speech, but the commonplace books open up an alternate route to the bold and open speech regarded as the hallmark virtue of republicanism (and, as a consequence, a necessary but embattled virtue of empire and monarchy). The volumes produced under Bodenham’s direction are acutely concerned, in the end, with the idea of England as a nation and, simultaneously, the character of its mixed constitution (both royal and politic).30 To the end of opening up a dialogue on the nature and make-­up of England as a space held in common by many people and ranks, these volumes make a small but strategic attack on social rank as an organizing principle of books. Just as importantly, they reserve space in their pages to consider

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the role of the purely ornamental qualities of poetry – detached from moral utility – in describing a nation. Even the short titles suggest the audacity of Bodenham’s series: Wits Common Wealth, Wits Theater of the Little World, Bel-­vedére, or the Garden of the Muses, England’s Parnassus, and England’s Helicon. The theme is wit as the basis of ideal community. And the community imagined is more egalitarian than stratified. If mercy brings princes closer to the gods, wit brings the prince’s subjects closer to the gods and, simultaneously, closer to the status of articulate citizens. Such a reconception of the commonplace book – from a static to a mobilizing inventory of thoughts – is audacious, and Ling, Munday, and Allot express uneasiness about likely detraction. Ling affects not to mind the malice of ‘the envious and over-­curious’ (A2v), while Allot defensively assures his book of its safety (‘Go fearless forth my booke,’ as he says, ‘hate cannot harm thee, / Apollo bred thee, & the Muses arm thee’ (4)). When Allot, Ling, and Munday exhibit deep anxieties about their daring, they typically focus their worries on organizational matters: ‘Did I forgot something, or file it in the wrong place?’ they ask, evoking a neurotic’s nightmare, in which obscure matters of intention attach to inconsequential acts. They are, of course, very much concerned with acts of omission and improper placement, but these acts are social, and not at all trivial. For Bodenham’s printed commonplace books banish class and title as demarcations of privilege, and do so at the moment they turn to English writers. Bel-­vedére is a good example, even though it provides a list of the writers it compiles, and organizes that list by chronology and rank. First up are poets at Elizabeth I’s court, followed by James VI of Scotland, then English nobles, gentlemen and common men. The prefatory attention to degree displays a scrupulous regard for orthodoxy that the body of Bel-­vedére entirely ignores. The text itself omits any reference to the authors of the multitudinous maxims. And it freely mixes authorities without respect to the social place: kings, nobles, and commons are in it together, each with an equal share of wit and moral authority. If it was bold of Francis Meres to put ancients and moderns on the same footing, the equation of modern Englishmen in Bel-­vedére is almost reckless. England’s Helicon, of the same year, spells out the principle of egalitarianism for the reader: if any man whatsoever, in prizing of his owne birth or fortune, shall take in scorne, that a far meaner man in the eye of the world, shal be placed by him: I tell him plainly … that mans wit is set by his, not that man by him. In which degree, the names of Poets (all feare and dutie ascribed to her great and sacred Name) have beene placed with the names of the greatest Princes of the world, by the most autentique and worthiest judgements, without disparagement to their soveraigne titles. (sig. A4v, emphasis added)31

In the space of commonplace English letters that have been anthologized, wit is everything and rank is irrelevant. In this respect Bodenham’s associates have a point in thinking it takes more guts to compile than compose: they are the ones, after all, to extract specimens of moral wit from English poets and put them together on an even playing field, without ceding an iota to social privilege.

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The boldest act of audacity, however, is simply the presentation of specimens of English eloquence and wit as the earthly paradise or Eden, a reflection of ‘true authority in men’ and women in the state of nature, to adopt Milton’s phrase (PL 4.295). The tradition of invoking Eden in critiques of arbitrary dominion had deep roots in England, stemming at least from the time that the preacher John Ball led the peasants’ uprising of 1381 and challenged his social superiors with the rhyme, ‘When Adam delved, / And Eve span, / Who was then / A gentleman?’ Eden was a garden of eloquence, from which common and elite readers might pluck thoughts at will. And Bodenham’s compilers expanded the political claims of their commonplace books when they reduced their authorities to a slate of exclusively modern English writers writing in the vernacular. With this move, Bel-­vedére created a realm of English letters and made it represent the very realm of England, described as a garden for the commons, devoted to the aesthetic as well as the moral character of English poetry. In short, the choice to take what modern critics would typically regard as an aesthetic move is perhaps best regarded as a polemic: the beauties provided to all human beings by nature and God form part of a moral and philosophical discourse that questions the theories of property and lineal descent that redirect authority away from the people and establish it in unregulated and possibly tyrannical forms of monarchy. England’s Parnassus accomplished a similar feat by bringing its sprawling compendium of moral philosophy to a close in a lengthy section devoted to the description of physical beauties of, as the title page sums it up, ‘Mountaines, Groves, Seas, Springs, [and] Rivers.’ This section (341–372) might be viewed as an afterthought, a grab bag of poetic beauties that somehow defied placement under a traditional moral topic. Or it might instead be regarded as an endpoint: all of the strenuous activities put into moral topics, sentences, and philosophy find a goal in their contribution to the beauties of God, nature, and poetry. The sententiae are not the ultimate ‘point,’ but rather the markers of virtues and truths that lie just beyond the power of expression in the physical world around us. Allott begins with the division of the times of day and seasons of the year, only to devolve rapidly into beauties that cannot be grouped or reduced under any heading at all, much less a moral one. The section engages the synthetic imagination of readers rather than their powers of organization. Any classical or European beauty is welcome, so long as it is ‘Englished’ by an English writer. And its only endpoint turns out to be England, a revelation that becomes fully clear when Allott supplies the final description of a topographical beauty: Faire Danubie is praisde for being wide, Nilus commended for the seven-­fold head: Euphrates for the swiftnesse of the tide, And for the garden whence his course is led, The bankes of Rhine with Vines are overspred, Take Loyre and Po, yet all may not compare

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With English Thamesis for buildings rare. Th. Storer FINIS.

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(372)

This is the last word on what distinguishes England and her literature in England’s Parnassus. As an account of Rivers, which finally trace their origins or fonts to the flourishing of England and her culture, it serves neatly as a commentary on the adaptation and exploitation of literary sources in the ongoing project of English commonplacing. The sections of England’s Parnassus devoted to the natural beauties of England (or in English) clearly anticipates Drayton’s chorographical poems, which Richard Helgerson elegantly discussed in Forms of Nationhood, and it also evokes Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, whose chief complaint to King Richard takes the form of a hymn to England: This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-­paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, … This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England! (2.1.40–4­ , 50)

To denounce Richard as a tyrant and disable the legitimacy of his rule, Gaunt seizes upon the figure of England as an Eden and, summoning the full measure of his eloquence, he transfers sovereignty from the person of the monarch to the land itself. This act is to be repeated, with a delicious difference, in the Garden scene of 3.4, where it is not a nobleman of royal blood but instead a common gardener who takes up the task of managing the government of their garden and offering sententious observations about the failure of the king to do the same. It can be argued that the gardeners’ sense of entitlement to speech and counsel – made possible by the king’s abdication of sovereign command – represents an even more radical change in the commonwealth of England than the parliamentary action of the famous deposition scene of 4.1, in which the country’s overbearing nobles claim to act on behalf of the commons. Bodenham’s volumes may not be rebel calls, but they do invite English readers to reflect on the tradition of the political and moral philosophy represented by specifically English literary forms. There is, of course, a negative as well as a positive form of argument about the collection of materials for agency, the power to do things in the world. The negative form is counsel and assumes the absolute prerogative of the monarch, and it depends upon the assumption of an ideal reader who is the prince or one of his deputies. Bodenham’s English printed commonplace books seem instead to affirm a positive argument about political as well as poetic agency, which springs from a fundamental affirmation of England’s mixed constitution at a moment in England’s history that the



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politic side appeared to be threatened by the royal one. The first English commonplace books secure a space in public discourse for debate about the liberties of subjects and the re-­imagination of England.

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Notes  1 All references are to Bel-­vedére, or, The Garden of the Muses (London, 1600; STC 3189).  2 The question for Munday concerns moral worth: the compilers have manifestly proved theirs by the painstaking labours they took in assembling the volume; what remains to be demonstrated is whether the readers, too, have the moral worth proved by industry. On this topic see Ann Blair, ‘Note taking as an art of transmission’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004), 85–107, esp. 98.  3 All references are to England’s Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allot, 1600, ed. Charles Crawford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913).  4 For England’s Parnassus, Robert Allot chooses Sir Robert Mounson as his patron and as the English Maecenas. For Bel-­vedére, Munday names John Bodenham.  5 For historical information on Bodenham see Franklin B. Williams, Jr, ‘John Bodenham, “Art’s Lover, Learning’s Friend”’, Studies in Philology, 31 (1934), 198–214.  6 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-­books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), presents a thorough discussion of the shift from classical to v­ ernacular authors.  7 All citations taken from Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598; STC 17834).  8 Meres was of course not alone in suggesting comparisons between contemporary English poets writing in the vernacular and ancient authorities. Richard Carew, for example, compared Roger Ascham to Cicero, Surrey to Virgil, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe to Catullus, Edmund Spenser to Lucan, Sir John Davies to Martial, and Samuel Daniel to Ovid in his The Excellency of the English Tongue, which was printed in 1614 but composed shortly before Meres’s commonplace book.  9 Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2001), p. 34. 10 Quoted from Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 3. Spenser tried to amend this situation in his own poetic works, but he had to rely – as Meres did – on the authority of association, and so he is sometimes known as the ‘English Virgil’ (although there is better reason to think of him, too, as one of a generation of poets inspired even more by Ovid than Virgil). 11 Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Reading and authorship: the circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619’, in Andrew Murphy (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 35–56. 12 I discuss this view more fully in ‘Shakespeare, the Classics, and the forms of authorship’, part of a forum on ‘The Return of the Author’, Shakespeare Studies, 36 (2008), 80–9. 13 The role of the humanist as teacher and counsellor to the prince was not invented, but  refined, by Erasmus in his Education of a Christian Prince, addressed to the young Charles V.

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14 Helgerson opens his important and influential study, Forms of Nationhood, with the inventory of precisely these books, which ‘belong to different fields’ but are linked not only by their ambition – they are ‘massive in size and scope’ – but also by their subject, England in relation to ‘its land, its people, its institutions, and its history’ (1). 15 Politeuphuia, or Wits Commonwealth. Newly Corrected and Augmented (London, 1598; STC 15686). 16 He provides a poetic account of how this works: ‘Very fitly is man compared to a tree, whose rootes are his thoughts, whose branches and leaves his wordes (which are sufficiently set forth in choicest Sentences & Similitudes) the fruite whereof are his workes, now shewed in Examples.’ Wits Theater of the Little World (London, 1599; STC 381), sig. A2r–v. 17 See especially Moss, Printed Commonplace-­books; compare also Earle Havens, whose Commonplace Books includes pithy and yet amply illustrated sections on the evolution of the commonplace book from antiquity to modernity, with particular attention to the ­commonplace books developed for professional use in early modern Europe. 18 Peter Beal, ‘Notions in garrison: the seventeenth-­ century commonplace book’, in W.  Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991, (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), pp. 131–147, esp. p. 134. On the ‘goal-­oriented reading’ practices of professional scholars see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for action”: how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990), 30–78. See also Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic readers: knowledge transactions and scholarly services in late Elizabethan England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 102–124. 19 Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere (London: William Heinemann, and New York: Putnam, 1920), Vol. 2, p. 279. 20 An important exception is Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-­century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 21 The passage appears in The First Booke, stanza 43, where it comments on both Richard II and his overmighty nobles, who resent the privileges granted to Robert Vere, Duke of Ireland, by the king. In the 1595 edition (The First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Warres betweene the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke (London, 1595); STC 6244), the sententious language flows from a thought about royal responsibilities and management that begins with the first person singular: ‘And yet I doe not seeme herein to excuse / The Justices, and Minions of the king / Which might their office and their grace abuse, / But onely blame the course of managing: / For great men too well grac’d much rigor use’ (sig. C4r). In the 1609 edition (also published by Simon Waterson, STC 6245), the lines compiled by Allott are among the many that are gnomically marked and consequently heighten the role played by sententiae in the formulation of a single person’s thought. 22 Wyatt’s poem as a whole is an adaptation of three passages of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, Book 3. See Patricia Thomson, ‘Wyatt’s Boethian Ballade’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 15 (1964), 262–267. 23 Erasmus elaborates in his Dialogus Ciceronianus: ‘You must digest what you have consumed in varied and prolonged reading, and transfer it by reflection into the veins of the mind, rather than into your memory or your notebook. Thus your natural talent, gorged



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on all kinds of foods, will of itself beget a discourse which will be redolent, not of any particular flower, leaf, or herb, but of the character and feelings of your own heart, so that whoever reads your work will not recognise fragments excerpted from Cicero, but the image of a mind replete with every kind of learning.’ Quoted from Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 45. Folger MS V.a. 381, p. 7. There are notable differences between printed and manuscript commonplace books and, while I do not wish to minimize them, I mean to draw attention to a particular motivation for compilation that crosses the divide between print and ­manuscript, public and private. See, for example, the discussion of Senecan sententiae in Glenn W. Most, ‘disiecti membra poetae: the rhetoric of dismemberment in Neronian poetry’, in Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (eds), Innovations of Antiquity (New York: Routledge, Chapmann, and Hall, 1992), pp. 391–419. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), esp. pp. 217–222. On this matter see particularly Wlad Godzich, ‘Foreword: the tiger on the paper mat’, in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. pp. xii–xvii. See especially the commentary of Paul Veyne, Seneca: The Life of a Stoic (London: Routledge, 2002), on the relationship of Seneca’s philosophy and style to the times in which he lived, namely, Rome under Nero. It may also be observed that abstraction and generalization are rhetorical responses to historical trauma. For the use of the term in political and religious discourse of the immediately post-­ Shakespearean period, see David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). More generally, see Arnaldo Momigliano,  ‘La libertà di parola nel mondo antico’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 83 (1971), 499–524; and Momigliano, ‘Freedom of speech in antiquity’, in Philip Paul Weiner, The Dictionary of the History of Ideas (ed.) vol. 2 (New York: Scribners, 1973), pp. 252– 263. Finally, see Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). I wish to distinguish a general interest in republican virtues and the politic side of the English constitution from ‘republicanism’ per se. For a recent summary of the concepts of republicanism in relation to the modern ones – derived from eighteenth-­century concepts of republicanism – see James Hankins, ‘Exclusivist republicanism and the non-­monarchical republic’, Political Theory, 38 (2010), 452–482. Englands Helicon (London, 1600; STC 3191).

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Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously: Ben Jonson, Robert Chester, and the Vatum Chorus of Loves Martyr Matthew Zarnowiecki the well knitte and succinct combination of a Poem, dooth make our meaning better knowen and discerned, then if it were deliuered at random in prose. Seneca, quoted in Meres, Palladis Tamia1 All nomination is too straight of sence. John Marston, in Loves Martyr2

T

he phoenix lives five hundred years and dies in a blazing fire, and from its ashes arises the new phoenix. What is the new phoenix? Is it a copy of the old? The daughter of the previous? Its defining feature is singularity, yet its various symbolic resonances make it a polyvalent signifier.3 Such paradoxes motivate this chapter because Loves Martyr (1601) both invites and defies specific interpretation. Its two main entities are the phoenix and the turtle dove, which readers have long tried to link to historical persons in a direct, allegorical reading.4 More often, however, only Shakespeare’s poem is read, often alongside other Shakespearean poems in an author-­centred Works edition. One reading method searches every corner of Loves Martyr for clues about its historical context; the goal in this case is a totalizing reading, one that accounts for every allegorical connection between poem and people. The other reading method divorces Shakespeare’s poem from all but generic and formal concerns: the New Critical fantasy of an isolated hermeneutic object that can be read to the exclusion of everything else. An alternative to these reading styles is a method I call ‘medium-­close reading.’ This method attempts to read Shakespeare’s poem together with the others in its cohort. That is, it takes seriously the medium in which Shakespeare’s poem was published, which is a miscellaneous, highly varied, and idiosyncratic book. Medium-­close reading is a way of accounting for tensions readers encounter between text and context. It insists that a poem’s subjects and concerns should be mutually informed by its material instantiation. Although I see it as a widely applicable reading method, in this case its main advantage is that ‘medium-­close’ can also mean not too close, as in New Critical readings that ignore what surrounds a poem, and not too far, as in historicized allegorical readings that ignore a poem’s imagined personae, its productive ambiguities, and its transferability to other contexts. For Loves Martyr, medium-­close reading helps us to assess whether and how individual lyric poems are incorporated into a single entity,

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the miscellany, which seems to defy totalizing description because it is so various. Loves Martyr virtually demands this balance between individual and whole because the phoenix, supposedly a singular entity, becomes a composite in this collection, as well as in Chester’s narrative poem. Miscellanies vex genre almost by definition: they are the genre genre-­less, because anything can go in them.5 Still, it is important to attempt to identify just what kind of miscellany Loves Martyr is at the outset. There are two potential answers to this question because Loves Martyr has a second section, and a second, internal title page: Hereafter Follow Diverse Poeticall Essaies on the former Subject; viz: the Turtle and Phoenix. Done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers, with their names subscribed to their particular workes: never before extant. And (now first) consecrated by them all generally, to the love and merite of the true-­noble Knight, Sir Iohn Salisburie (sig. Z1r). This title precedes the section that receives the most attention, since it contains poems attributed to Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and Chapman. This version of miscellaneity stresses communal poetic action, since the claim is that all the poets are writing on the same subject. This section is thus closely related to group-­authored collections of elegies, such as those that were addressed to Sir Philip Sidney: four Latin collections printed in 1587 and originating at the universities, and the related miscellaneous collections The Phoenix Nest (1593) and Astrophel (1595).6 In 1542, collected volumes of elegies were produced in both English and Latin to commemorate Sir Thomas Wyatt; other examples of collected epitaphs exist in the period. The miscellaneity of such volumes is partly based on different authors’ responses to the same subject. While there may be competitive attempts to outdo or overgo others’ poems, nevertheless the overall texts also emphasize communal authorship, showing the poets together producing a textual object that mirrors and enacts a larger, social grieving process. Related to, but quite different from, this type of miscellaneous collection are those texts which arise out of exchanges among members of manuscript coteries. Arthur Marotti’s label for this general phenomenon is ‘social textuality,’ and the answer poem serves as one of his chief examples.7 His examinations of miscellaneous collections in manuscript highlight the social exchanges inherent in producing verse in early modern England, from exchanging, copying, and answering poems; to the differences between miscellanies compiled at the Inns of Court, at the universities, and in the homes of noblemen and noblewomen; to the secretive exchanges of verse between thwarted lovers, or covert Catholics.8 Perhaps most germane to the discussion of Loves Martyr, however, is the phenomenon in which members of a coterie exchanged thematically related verse. Members might all contribute verse on a single theme, or pose each other subjects to write about, or gradually accumulate verses on a related topic, occasion, or person. One example of this practice is depicted in George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573). Although we must take Gascoigne’s headings sceptically, since he is constantly fictionalizing the situations of textual production, there is a group of five poems which the collection announces were posed to him by five different gentlemen on five different themes as a kind of poetical-­social entrance test:

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And being required by five sundrie gentlemen to wrighte in verse somwhat worthy to be remembred, before he entred into their felowship, he compiled these five sundry sortes of metre uppon five sundry theames which they delivered unto him, and the firste was at request of Francis Kinwelmarshe who delivered him this theame Audaces fortuna iuvat. And thereupon he wrote thys Sonnet following.9

In these poems and the description of their production, we see something like the conditions of poetic production implied by the second, internal title page of Loves Martyr: ‘Diverse Poeticall Essaies on the former Subject; viz: the Turtle and Phoenix.’ In both cases, diversity and variability are emphasized. The writer’s situation is that of being posed with a poetic subject that is relatively specific, yet allows for poetic licence and leeway. In contrast to the miscellaneous, co-­operative collections above are collections organized around an authorial rubric, but miscellaneous in their contents. These often credit one or more authors with the wide range of contents in the printed volume – often, but not always on the title page, and sometimes within the pages of the miscellany. The most influential Elizabethan printed verse miscellany, Songes and Sonettes, first printed by Richard Tottel in 1557, mentions Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ‘and other’ on its title page. In 1563, Barnabe Googe’s collection entitled Eglogs epytaphes, and sonettes was published. The former is a multi-­author verse miscellany that mentions only one of its authors on the title page; the latter is a single-­author verse miscellany that advertises the diversity of its contents.10 Other printed verse miscellanies that follow this general pattern include several whose contents are attributed to Nicholas Breton, George Gascoigne’s revised 1575 Posies, the 1599 Passionate Pilgrime, and Loves Martyr.11 The distinction I am drawing has to do with the ways in which some miscellaneous texts represent the conditions of their composition, versus the ways in which other miscellaneous collections are subsequently compiled and reproduced. That is, the distinction concerns whether the miscellany is born miscellaneous, or whether it has miscellaneity thrust upon it through the acts of compilation, editing, and publication. Again, George Gascoigne’s example is instructive. The 1573 Hundreth Sundrie Flowres seems to be a multi-­authored text, including ‘The devises of sundrie Gentlemen’ (a significant section occupying sigs Miiiv–Eeiiv), translations of classical authors, and a complex paratextual story about how the collection came to be circulated and printed. But The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575) drops the previous façade of multiple authorship, and instead organizes the contents of the miscellany into ‘flowers,’ ‘weeds,’ and ‘herbs.’ Although these categories break down under pressure, the ostensible organization shapes the whole collection into a diverse set of texts, all by a single author, which provide different kinds of poetry (and prose and drama) for different readers and different purposes. Gascoigne’s collection, formerly a diverse, group effort, now is a diverse set of materials by a single author.12 Loves Martyr, as we shall see, combines these two kinds of miscellaneity. Robert Chester’s initial section, the bulk of the work, is a single-­author miscellany that advertises the variety of its contents. Although no summary could adequately describe

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the diversity of Chester’s section, his contributions include an extensive catalogue of herbs, trees and flowers, beasts, and sea creatures; a poetic rendition of King Arthur’s birth, life, and death along with accompanying verse orations; a complaint that the Phoenix’s unparalleled beauty will die; a dialogue between the Phoenix and Nature; a poetical description of the world; a set of twenty-­four poems to the Phoenix, in alphabetical order in which each poem begins all its lines with a single letter; and a set of fifty-­eight acrostic poems (the printer gives up numbering them at thirty-­four) all in praise of, pleading to, despair about, and hope of wooing the Phoenix, all ‘made by the Paphian Dove’ (sig. S3v). Chester’s section is thus quite different from the ‘Poeticall Essaies,’ which comprise a much smaller verse miscellany appended to Chester’s.13 This miscellany, to be sure, also advertises its ‘diverse’ contents, but its diversity is counterbalanced by the unity of purpose with which its authors seem to have approached its composition. As in miscellaneous collections of elegies, the most important feature of ‘Poeticall Essaies’ is that its poets are paying careful attention to a single theme. Not only this, but in some instances they seem to be reading each other’s contributions, and even to be making formal choices that echo each other. My first argument, in brief, is that medium-­close reading is the best way to account for the tension between unity and diversity, a tension which is overriding in this miscellany, from its smallest formal choices to its largest structural conceits. Many, two, and one: Shakespeare in the Vatum Chorus of Loves Martyr Loves Martyr begins with a mysterious premise, the union of the Phoenix with the Turtle. This premise thwarts the basic features of the phoenix: its singularity, and its sexlessness. The phoenix has no need of either sex or love because it does not reproduce so much as exist until the moment of self-­immolation and self-­rebirth. Chester’s treatment, with the title page promising that the phoenix and turtle are ‘allegorically shadowing the truth of Love,’ has inspired a great deal of debate about who or what these two figures represent. Although I take up this question at greater length in the next section, it is important to note at the outset that most critics treat this as the key question regarding the collection, and Shakespeare’s poem. What do the phoenix and turtle stand for? Who are they? The three usual hypotheses are that they are Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, that they are Ursula Stanley and John Salusbury (married in December 1586), or that they are Lucy, Countess of Bedford and the third Earl of Bedford, Edward Russell.14 However, critics of the mid to late twentieth century offered other answers: the Phoenix and Turtle are Elizabeth I and her loving subjects (Axton and Hume); or they are figured in scholastic language as essences of Love, Beauty/Constancy, and Truth (Cunningham); or they demonstrate a hallmark of the uniting of truths effected by metaphor (Ong); or they simply are birds (Bradbrook).15 Cunningham’s and Ong’s reading methods treat Shakespeare’s poem according to the New Critical ideal of the poem as an isolated hermeneutic object, often concerned

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with metaphysical propositions. For them, Shakespeare’s poem motivates investigating questions like whether two beings can achieve a united existence, whether Truth and Beauty can co-­exist, and how the accidental properties of physical beings continue to exist once those physical beings have decayed, or in this case, burned to ashes. Shakespeare’s poem, with its sustained attention to unity, certainly motivates these investigations. It also rewards close, formal reading because it is full of the cleft unities and opposing effects that are the foundation of readings like Ong’s, which uses paradox to discuss how metaphor functions to create double or twin intellectual concepts.16 Even more New Critical in methodology is I. A. Richards’s reading of the poem, which proceeds line by line, mentioning no other text except, oddly, The Tempest. Shakespeare’s ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay,’ for these critics, should be read as a Donne-­style metaphysical poem, a mysterious and highly wrought artistic object, to be appreciated in a hermeneutic vacuum.17 Shakespeare’s poem, however, should be read not only for its formal particularities but also for its incorporation into a larger textual object, a composite of its companion poems. Its combination of distinguishability and unison with others is the core of the poem and of the larger collection, if we read them as I am proposing – miscellaneously rather than in isolation. Shakespeare’s poem works with, and against, those that surround it. It thus replicates the concerns of Robert Chester’s larger work, since the identity of the phoenix is at issue there, and in Shakespeare’s poem, and in those of the other poets. The phoenix is no longer singular in this work: it is composed of the many poems contained in the miscellany. And most importantly, it is composed out of combinations, first of two-­into-­one, and ultimately of many into one. Treating Shakespeare’s poem outside of this immediate context thus weakens what is a central concern both of his poem and of the larger ‘Poeticall essaies’ and Loves Martyr. It also overemphasizes Shakespeare’s small place in a larger, more complex miscellaneous collection. The unison of two into one is a key formal feature of Shakespeare’s poem. As Colin Burrow perceptively notes, it ‘works the minor miracle of being two poems in one,’ and thus enacts ‘the dissolution of separate identities into a single whole.’18 These two poems are the thirteen-­stanza ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay’ and the five-­stanza ‘threnos’ that follows directly after. Shakespeare’s poem is a single poem made out of two, or two poems that are related to each other, because the voice of Reason, referred to at the end of ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay,’ also speaks the ‘Threnos’ on the next page.19 Several other formal choices amplify the poem’s unity of doubles. The first poem’s rhyme scheme, ABBA, contains both unity and separation: each quatrain has a united rhyming couplet as its core, but with a separated, disjunct rhyme in the first and fourth lines. (It is this stanza Tennyson chooses for his long poem of lament and union, In Memoriam A.H.H.) At the opening of sigs Z3v–Z4r, divided unity is amplified by a coincidence of printing. The central stanza of the poem (the seventh of thirteen) breaks across the page, emphasizing both the idealised unity of the phoenix and turtle, and the material impossibility of that unity:



Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously

39

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So they loved as love in twaine, Had the essence but in one, [page break] Two distincts, Division none, Number there in love was slaine.

‘Threnos’ retains the rhythm of these lines, which we may define as either trochaic tetrameter or iambic tetrameter, with either the first or last foot being ‘broken,’ or cut in half.20 And while the text of ‘Threnos’ relentlessly emphasizes the death and dissolution of ‘these dead Birds,’ the triple rhymes and three-­line stanzas reaffirm the lines quoted above, so that the unity of these ‘distincts’ effects a third, hybrid object (Z4r–Zv). This object is fundamentally different from the singular phoenix, not simply because in Shakespeare’s ‘Threnos’ it appears to die rather than being reborn from ashes but because it is comprised of separate entities mysteriously united. Shakespeare’s contribution requires the reader to entertain the notion that the poem can be a divided, yet unified object. But we should also read the poem as distinct from, yet closely related to and integrated with, those that immediately surround it. For example, both before and after ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay,’ there are more traditional assertions about the Phoenix’s singularity, and its ability to be reborn from the ashes of the previous phoenix. In ‘The First,’ and ‘The burning,’ the two poems preceding Shakespeare’s, we find these expressions: ‘The world one Phoenix, till another burnes,’ ends the former; ‘One Phoenix borne, another Phoenix burne’ ends the latter (sig. Z3r). These poems are attributed to an unknown author, ‘Ignoto,’ while the two poems prior to these, the first addressed to Apollo and the Pierides and the second dedicated to Sir John Salusbury, are attributed to the ‘Vatum Chorus’ (sigs Z2r, Z2v). This phrase is a crucial designation. Sidney famously links poets to vates in The Defence of Poesie, where his point is that ancient poets were associated with sacred discourse and with prophecy. Here, the designation probably means something closer to ‘chorus of poets.’ The sonnet ‘To the worthily honor’d Knight Sir John Salisburie’ clearly points to this meaning by creating a group-­authored dedication. The juice from the Pierian spring, they say, has come from Apollo’s hand, has been ‘infusde in our retentive braine,’ and finally ‘Is now distild thence, through our quilles againe.’ In the second stanza of this poem, we see references to ‘our verse,’ ‘our spirites’ and a collective disavowal of ‘mercenarie’ purposes in favour of the hope that the product will be ‘worthy our selues and you’ (sig. Z2v). In other words, we ought to read Shakespeare’s poem miscellaneously because he may well have written it miscellaneously, as a contribution to a set of poems all on a single theme, as the title page of the ‘Poeticall Essaies’ claims. In his comprehensive study of Loves Martyr, William Matchett is convinced of this compositional process: ‘Shakespeare’s contribution adopted the requirements of a planned collection and was not merely, as some scholars have maintained, an odd poem on a vaguely related topic, a miscellaneous piece that Shakespeare happened to have around and was willing to

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Forming literature

donate when asked.’21 Matchett’s conclusion relies primarily on the formal j­udgement that not only Shakespeare’s poems but Marston’s, Jonson’s, and those of ‘Ignoto’ seem to adhere to a pattern of paired poems. The pairing pattern seems more obvious in some cases than others. Jonson’s first poem (titled Praeludium) ends with the line, ‘And now an Epode to deepe eares we sing,’ and the next poem, separated by a horizontal line, is titled ‘Epos’ (sig. Aa3v). But as Matchett admits, asserting that all poets create paired poems would not be accurate; Marston’s contributions do not fit as well into this pattern, Jonson’s third and fourth poems also seem unrelated to one another, and Chapman’s contribution is a single poem. If the Vatum Chorus were specifically assigned to create paired poems, they responded quite variously to this request, or ignored it altogether. The possibility of Shakespeare, Marston, Chapman, and Jonson composing specifically for this miscellany, nevertheless, is a tantalizing one. We have no direct evidence that Shakespeare actively participated in the circulation of manuscript coterie poetry; perhaps the closest we can come is the oft-­cited passage in Francis Meres’s 1598 Palladis Tamia, in which Meres seems to imply that Shakespeare did in fact circulate ‘his sugred Sonnets among his private friends’ (sigs Oo1v–Oo2r). Less often remarked is that, just prior to this mention of Shakespeare, Meres also claims that Michael Drayton ‘is now in penning in English verse a Poem called Polu-­olbion Geographical and Hydrographicall’ (sig. Oo1r). Meres then provides a relatively detailed sketch of Drayton’s project. Part of the value of Meres’s citation is that it precedes the first (non-­ dramatic) printing of sonnets by Shakespeare, in the 1599 Passionate Pilgrime. Meres’s knowledge of Drayton’s Poly-­Olbion, some twelve years before its first printing in 1612, provides additional circumstantial evidence that poetic works like Poly-­Olbion and Shakespeare’s sonnets were circulating in some form before their initial printed publications.22 The hypothesis that Shakespeare closely reserved some of his poetry, while taking great care with the printed publication of others, makes sense if we consider the poetic output of some of Shakespeare’s near-­contemporaries, like Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne.23 There are careful intertextual references within the ‘Poeticall Essaies’ that show how the Vatum Chorus may have been composing, as a diverse group of poets, a single miscellaneous treatment. Some of these, like the related titles and marginal notations drawing attention to phoenix and turtle references, appear likely to have been the work of whoever compiled and arranged the miscellany, likely Robert Chester himself. For example, in Chapman’s poem, the line ‘She was to him th’Analisde World of pleasure’ (sig. Aa2v) seems to recur in the title to the penultimate poem, ‘The Phoenix Analysde’ (sig. Bb1v). But in at least one instance, the first of Marston’s four poems, it appears likely that composition did indeed proceed in some sort of coterie in which authors had access to one another’s verses. Marston’s poem seems to follow directly from Shakespeare’s ‘Threnos.’ All four of Marston’s poems meditate on perfection, but he begins by refuting the finality of Shakespeare’s dead birds:



41

Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously O Twas a moving Epicedium! Can Fire? can Time? can blackest Fate consume So rare creation? No; tis thwart to sence, Corruption quakes to touch such excellence, Nature exclaimes for Justice, Justice Fate, Ought into nought can never remigrate.

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(sig. Aa1r)

From this point, Marston’s poem enters into a series of meditations on an entity which the speaker struggles to name. He calls it ‘Perfection’ not only in this poem but in the three that follow, and also applies the Latin term Ens, which in early modern English was coming to mean ‘being’ in the metaphysical sense: existence, essence, and the ‘quiddity’ with which beings are endowed (Aa1v).24 These four poems attributed to Marston effect a brief, multi-­faceted poetic treatment of perfection. Marston’s contribution seems to spring from Shakespeare’s, first reacting with contradiction, and then moving into its own, related, full-­fledged subject.25 Miscellaneity in this case means that the loosely defined subject has itself spawned several different poetic meditations. Marston, at least, seems to be reading Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously thus means incorporating ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay’ and ‘Threnos’ into a larger set of poems, and into a more diversified textual effect. (See Figure 2.1 for the page opening that offers a combined view of ‘Threnos’ and the beginning of Marston’s section.) The poetic unit, thus expanded, meditates on the confounding unity of the birds, mourns the shocking death of the phoenix-­beauty and the turtle-­truth, but it also recuperates and reincorporates these entities back into a resurrection narrative that is more consonant with the phoenix myth. Marston creates no mere answer poem. Rather, his poem effects the phoenix’s continuing identity. Shakespeare’s dead birds ‘in cinders lie,’ while Marston recalls the phoenix to life, by reminding us that fire does not consume, but rather extends, the phoenix. The simple, human terms of Shakespeare’s poem (‘dead Birds,’ ‘no posteritie,’ ‘married Chastitie’) are transmuted to Marston’s startling new phoenix (sig. Z4v). He calls attention to its metaphysical ‘strangenesse’ but this aspect is united on the page with Shakespeare’s simpler, heavier dirge. The ‘constant fate’ of the phoenix and turtle: miscellaneity and specificity The previous section argued that reading Shakespeare’s poem miscellaneously involves examining the semi-­permeable boundaries of the poems in Loves Martyr, especially in the ‘Poeticall Essaies.’ Shakespeare’s poem is two poems in one, but his contribution also changes substantially when it is read alongside Marston’s. Both poems imply, through their formal, thematic, and material features, that individuality (as inseparability) can occur on several levels. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine every potential connection, the ‘Poeticall Essaies’ ought to be read as

Figure 2.1  Loves Martyr: or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601), sigs Z4v–Aa1r (By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library)

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Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously

43

inseparable also from the contributions of Robert Chester in Loves Martyr proper. The polyvocality of the Essaies helps to ease the sense of rupture that occurs multiple times in Chester’s section, for example when we are abruptly confronted with ‘Cantoes Alphabet-­wise’ and ‘Cantoes Verbally Written’ (sigs S3v, T3r). These are short, highly standardized lyric poems that jar both with Chester’s larger narrative poem and with the Essaies. Largely uninspiring wooing poems, they nevertheless provide a startling, human dimension to the often unworldly love both in the Essaies and in the narrative poem. They may grate on readers with their relentless repetition, but they are as well integrated into the collection as any of the elements. If Shakespeare’s ‘dead Birds’ and Marston’s terms of Platonic idealism and perfection can be said to represent two extreme responses to the given theme of the phoenix and turtle, then the Cantoes suggest that the miscellany should also attempt to bridge these extremes by providing the alternative of a more familiar, Petrarchan, human, and lively amatory poetry. In other words, Loves Martyr is a copious storehouse of potential ways to respond to the mystery it poses, of how the singular phoenix can unite with the faithful turtle, and what imaginative responses are possible to this rearrangement of standard poetic characters. This copiousness aligns Loves Martyr with other diverse and more ambitiously comprehensive miscellaneous collections of the time, including Songes and Sonettes. But the ‘Cantoes Alphabet-­wise’ provide a different kind of miscellaneity. There are twenty-­four poems, one for each letter of the alphabet, each one a single seven-­line stanza in which each line begins with the given letter. This section of the miscellany thus springs from the commonplace tradition and connects Loves Martyr with its direct contemporaries: Englands Helicon (1600), a poetic compilation of some of the finest pastoral poetry of the age, including Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, Lodge, and others; Englands Parnassus (1600), which proceeds alphabetically by poetical subject, providing snippets of poems and authorial ascriptions; and Bel-­vedére, Or the Garden of the Muses (1600), which also proceeds by subject. These turn-­of-­the-­century printed collections of John Bodenham, Nicholas Ling, and Robert Allott reinvigorate the widespread and deeply ingrained habit of commonplace collection, in which the writer systematically organizes the items collected, often either categorically or alphabetically.26 As Stallybrass and Lesser have argued, English vernacular commonplacing occurs in English play texts as well as in the printed productions of the Bodenham circle, signalling a movement toward rendering not only Hamlet but many late sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century English poets worthy of entering into the realm of the timeless sentences, apophthegms, and aphorisms of more revered, classical authors. Heather James, in Chapter 1, also argues that the productions of the Bodenham circle are notable for their jettisoning of the classical tradition in favour of new, modern, vernacular authorities.27 For these critics, one crucial component of the process is an element of de-­individuation. Although there are authorial attributions in the printed poetic commonplace book collections of the Bodenham circle, nevertheless the commonplace ‘is the opposite of the topical: suitable in any period, always potentially applicable but never specifically rooted in any given moment or political situation.’28

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Forming literature

Ben Jonson’s contributions to Loves Martyr demonstrate the problems of poetic specificity in this volume. As we have seen above, Loves Martyr has enjoyed a long history of speculative attachment of its narrative elements, principally the ‘characters’ of the phoenix and turtle, to actual people. This mode of reading, of course, ties Loves Martyr to a particular time and place. It requires that the meaning of Loves Martyr and the ‘Poeticall Essaies’ primarily resides in what these poems can tell us about particular poets’ responses to, portrayals of, and socio-­poetic engagements with the Earl of Essex, or with Sir John Salusbury, or with Lucy, Countess of Bedford. This method of reading reaches its apotheosis in the conjectures of William Matchett, who contends that Chester’s collection was originally dedicated to Essex, that it made a serious case for a marriage with Elizabeth, and that its dedicatee was quickly changed to John Salusbury, whose fortunes were waxing and who could serve as a plausible stand-­in when disaster struck in 1601.29 With regard to miscellaneous reading, the main problem with this theory is not its practical plausibility (though there are severe limits there too) so much as its insistence that we confine the available meanings of the poems in Loves Martyr to the immediate events and relationships of early 1601. As Jonson’s own poems demonstrate in several ways, lyric poems, like the phoenix itself, are not bound to time and place; still less to addressee. Instead, the re-­purposing of Jonson’s poems in Loves Martyr (and elsewhere) shows the limits of poetic identity when one version of a poem is reborn from the ashes of another. This is all the more important to Jonson’s involvement in Loves Martyr because Robert Chester, Sir John Salusbury, and Jonson are all connected textually in a manuscript miscellany, Christ Church MS 184. This manuscript is especially important to the study of Ben Jonson’s poetry because it contains an autograph copy of Jonson’s poem beginning ‘Genius, where art thou? I should use.’ This poem was first printed in The Under-­wood (1640), where it is titled ‘An Ode to James Earle of Desmond, writ in Queene ELIZABETHS time, since lost, and recovered’ and has a slightly different first line. The manuscript version of this poem precedes the Under-­wood version by some forty years. It was originally on a loose sheet, and is now bound in Christ Church MS 184, which includes poetry in English and Welsh, and much Welsh heraldry material, some of it related to Sir John Salusbury. The Earl of Desmond is the declared addressee in 1640, but Mark Bland suggests that, since both Jonson and Salusbury were linked to Essex, Jonson may well have first addressed it to Essex, and then suppressed this connection after the events of 1601.30 Beyond the facts that this manuscript poem is on a single sheet in Jonson’s hand, and bound into a manuscript miscellany closely connected to Salusbury, Bland presents other persuasive evidence to show that it represents sensitive political material circulating in a restricted manner. The evidence includes an epigrammatic tag attached only to the manuscript version: Nec te quaesiveris extra. In the context of Jonson and Salusbury, Bland translates this as a kind of coded message: ‘Outside of you, you will not have looked for this’ or ‘your thoughts you have kept to yourself, but I have understood them’ or ‘you will not have expected this from someone unknown to you.’31

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Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously

45

Textual critics are trained to consider that rarest of objects, the autograph poem, to be the defining version of the work, a singular literary phoenix. But ‘Genius where art thou’ / ‘An Ode to James Earle of Desmond’ turns out not to be very phoenix-­like at all. It does not define the poem, nor our reception of it, because this and other poems like it are meant to be dispersed across time, occasion, and space: their identities are inherently composite. In their edition of Jonson’s works, Herford and Simpson demonstrate this composite identity by duplicating the first 23 lines of the autograph poem alongside their edited version; their copy-­text is the version in Underwood rather than the autograph.32 The poem, thus divided and de-­individuated, must be read significantly differently depending on whether it is the version in the Christ Church manuscript miscellany or in the printed miscellany context of Jonson’s Underwood. As with its final sententious phrase, ‘the poem’ as an individual identity is unsustainable across these different miscellaneous contexts. I dwell on this poem in its different contexts, which after all is not even in Love’s Martyr, because three of Jonson’s four poems in the ‘Poetical Essaies’ are similarly re-­ purposed. Most critical attention has gone to the final poem of the collection, ‘Splendor! O more then mortall,’ which exists in a copy dedicated (most likely) to Lucy, Countess of Bedford (sig. Bb1v).33 Far more interesting, for my purpose, is the dual, two-­in-­one combination of ‘Praeludium’ and ‘Epos,’ since these were more widely circulated in manuscript, including full alternative versions, extracts, and copies of the last line, which is itself extracted by Jonson from Seneca’s Phaedra. In National Library of Wales MS 5390D, and Folger MS X.d.246, ‘Praeludium’ (titled ‘Proludium’) is followed by ‘Epos.’ The former manuscript is quite miscellaneous. Jonson’s poems are surrounded by poetry by Elizabeth Cary, Sir Henry Wotton, Donne, Raleigh, and many others. There, the poem is thus part of a larger poetical miscellany, with its own particular idiosyncrasies. But Folger MS X.d.246 presents the poems entirely on their own, in what looks to be a fair copy on large conjugate folio sheets. These two poems, also appearing in several manuscripts as extracts, thus represent the full continuum of individuation, partial extraction, and full miscellaneous integration.34 How do we read Jonson’s poems then? Three of the four in Loves Martyr guide the reader toward a practice of active attention to commonplacing, that is, to the ways in which sections of poetic objects can be copied, transferred, and re-­purposed. The ‘Praeludium’ and ‘Epos’ unit demonstrates the free-­floating nature of commonplace extracts in both Loves Martyr and other texts. In Loves Martyr, five different sections of ‘Epos’ are marked with gnomic quotation marks. Three of these have been traced to classical texts, including Gorgias, Horace’s first verse epistle, and Seneca’s Phaedra. Another section, which does not receive quotation marks, is from Lucian’s Demosthenis encomium.35 In other words, those sections which the printed Loves Martyr marks as sententiae from Jonson’s ‘Epos’ are themselves a miscellaneous collection of textual snippets excised and translated from a variety of classical sources. These include the brash first four lines on vice, and the last line on sin. It is overwhelmingly these sections of ‘Epos’ which later readers copy into their manuscripts.

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Forming literature

Jonson’s final line, ‘Man may securely sinne, but safely never,’ is a key example of the tensions that arise when commonplacing, miscellaneous compilation, and a strong authorial presence are all combined (sig. Bb1v).36 It is triply marked in the text, since Jonson’s poem marks it with the label ‘this Sentence’ in the previous line, and the printed text marks it with both italics and a gnomic quotation mark (see Figure 2.2). Commenting on precisely this phenomenon, Lesser and Stallybrass argue that multiply marked commonplace passages are more likely to arise from an ‘author’s involvement’ than from textual interventions by the printer or compiler.37 But, in this case, Jonson’s involvement does not simply call attention to his authorship of a quotable line. His sentence is both quotable and quoted; he himself is a textual conduit here, demonstrating the free-­floating nature of this bit of text. His source is very likely Seneca’s Phaedra (or Hippolytus): ‘scelus aliqua tutum, nulla securum tulit.’ The line is spoken by Phaedra’s nurse, who warns against Phaedra’s incestuous attraction to her son-­in-­law. A different translation bears out this torment: ‘Some have commit offence full safe from any bitter blame, / But none without the stinging pricks of conscience did the same.’38 Jonson’s line, in Loves Martyr, is an adjusted and re-­purposed aphorism. In both his and Seneca’s contexts, the line seems to carry an admonitory purpose. Indeed, in Englands Parnassus, where the line (in Jonson’s form) is re-­copied, it is under the section on ‘Sinne.’39 But its free-­floating and multiply valent meaning is never so obvious as when we return to the doomed attempt to restrict its meaning to 1601, to Elizabeth and Essex. A few lines before this point, Jonson’s poet asks ‘What savage, brute Affection, / Would not be fearefull to offend a Dame / Of this excelling frame?’ (sig. Bb1r). The offence here is obscure. Certainly it is not incestuous lust. Nor is it likely that references to amorous infidelity should be allegorically understood as Essex’s falsity to Queen Elizabeth. If anything, the generalizability and enigmatic nature of ‘Man may securely sinne, but safely neuer’ releases this line to a wide variety of applications. Though his name appears twice on the final page of Loves Martyr, Jonson’s authorship of these poems is doubly dissolved, first into the ‘we’ of the Vatum Chorus40 and second by his own dauntingly learned contributions; these, as we have seen, are made from the reanimated bones of phoenixes past. In fact, three of Jonson’s four contributions are reanimated phoenixes: only the eight-­line ‘The Phoenix Analysde’ occurs in Loves Martyr exclusively. Jonson’s poems here thus provide a twist to his famous line, of Shakespeare’s being ‘not of an age, but for all time.’ For Jonson, Shakespeare, and the other poets, agelessness in this miscellaneous context means a poetry of composites rather than individuals. For that reason, we can also productively read Jonson’s final two poems alongside Shakespeare’s. To do so is to take seriously one of Shakespeare’s key images, of the two who ‘To themselves yet either neither, / Simple were so well compounded’ (sig. Z4r). The compounded simple activates herbal and recipe language paradoxically; something is either a simple or a compound, but not both. When Jonson’s ‘The Phoenix Analysde’ is compounded with Shakespeare’s poems, particularly

Figure 2.2  Loves Martyr: or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601), sigs Bb1v–Bb2r (By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library)

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Forming literature

‘Threnos,’ we can see the blunt materiality of both of their phoenix–turtle depictions. Shakespeare’s ‘dead Birds’ seem irrevocably physical things. Their deaths, contradicted and transmuted into perfections in Marston’s poems, nevertheless resurface in Jonson’s penultimate poem, when the speaker states the possibility that ‘a Bird so amiable, / Do turne into a Woman’ (sig. Bb1v). That woman, in a different manuscript version of the Ode that follows, is Lucy, Countess of Bedford. The blunt physicality of Shakespeare’s poem is echoed in Jonson’s diction, ‘a Bird’ and ‘a Woman,’ rather than the essences and perfections of Marston. Jonson’s praise poem is not completely earthy, however. Its blazon is not of body parts but of the more refined aspects of nobility: ‘her illustrate brightnesse,’ her wit, her ‘judgement (adornd with Learning),’ and, finally, her breath, which is especially sweet because it is mixed with sound. That is, her discourse is praised rather than the more sensual, spiced air associated with the Arabian Phoenix. Yet Jonson also refers to more physical, human matters: the ‘stolne sports of Lovers,’ ‘a naked vestall / Closde in an orbe of Christall,’ and his own (seemingly Petrarchan) wading and drowning in poetic musings (sig. Bb1v–Bb2r). These references, especially with Jonson’s more rollicking double rhymes, combine to achieve a mixed tone. We might even see this final poem as a compromise between Shakespeare’s and Marston’s contributions, one which draws attention to the larger Chester-­Salusbury-­Shakespeare-­Marston-­Chapman-­Jonson work. Jonson’s phoenix and Shakespeare’s phoenix can be seen as a compounded simple, at least here, in this specific miscellaneous context. Jonson’s poem allows for the possibility of specific interpretive attachment, but Shakespeare’s poem guides our sense of how this compounded, extended portrayal of the phoenix and turtle also releases each poem from singular allegorical attachments. One potential result of this compounded reading method is that Jonson’s portrayal ceases to be the more mercenary, and Shakespeare’s ceases to be the more detached.41 Rather, they present aspects of the same, larger, more confoundingly undivided portrayal of the phoenix and turtle. The phoenixes and turtles in this poetic miscellany unite and give form to a new dynastic arrangement (Chester’s phoenix and turtle, in the midst of Arthurian legend), yet they die and leave no posterity (Shakespeare’s version). They are the essence of unnameable perfection (Marston’s version), yet they can also seem fleshy and particular (Jonson’s versions). ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay,’ then, is not a single, Shakespearean poem at all, but instead a part of this extended poetic treatment. The other poems in its miscellaneous cohort force us to examine other conceptions of the phoenix and turtle, by the Vatum Chorus. These poets refuse a single, allegorical reading of Loves Martyr, especially the act of naming, which combines all the concerns of historicity, attachment of meaning, authorial intention, and community poetics. Rather than Shakespeare or Jonson, it is John Marston who best answers the question of the name, since he pointedly searches for the name of the subject of his poems. He at one point calls it ‘this creature’ (sig. Aa2r), and experiments with the name ‘perfection’ (sig. Aa1v), but even this conceptual and idealized name is too specific. Discarding options, Marston says that ‘All nomination is too straight of sence … No Suburbes[,] all is Mind / As



Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously

49

farre from spot, as possible defining’ (sig. Aa2r–v). This too-­precise naming is what Love’s Martyr stubbornly resists.42 It is, as miscellaneous poetry must be, both tightly restricted to its time and place, and free to re-­emerge from its spiced fire into the next eon of potential meaning.

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Notes  1 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth (London: printed by P. Short, for Cuthbert Burbie, and are to be solde at his shop at the Royall Exchange, 1598; STC 17834), sig. Nn4r. All citations are to this edition.  2 Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: Or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601; STC 5119), sig. Aa2r. All citations are to this edition.  3 See R. van den Broek, The Myth of the Phoenix, According to Classical and Early Christian Traditions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), esp. chapter 10. Commentators have debated whether, as van den Broek puts it, bodies subject to the law of generation and decay ‘can in essence be of one nature’, p. 359. As will become clear, this singular but multiple existence of the phoenix is key to Loves Martyr and to interpreting Shakespeare’s poem. The phoenix can be found in English poetry as far back as the eighth or ninth centuries, with a translation of Lactantius’s Phoenix, but Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes are the more likely contemporary influences. See Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Phoenix Nest, 1593 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), pp. ix–x.  4 The full title encourages allegorical reading: Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: Or, Rosalins Complaint. Allegorically Shadowing the Truth of Love, in the Constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle. A Poeme Enterlaced with Much Varietie and Raritie; Now First Translated Out of the Venerable Italian Torquato Caeliano, by Robert Chester. With the True Legend of Famous King Arthur, the Last of the Nine Worthies, Being the First Essay of a New Brytish Poet: Collected Out of Diverse Authenticall Records. To These Are Added Some New Compositions, of Severall Moderne Writers Whose Names Are Subscribed to Their Severall Workes, upon the First Subject: Viz. the Phoenix and Turtle. Mar: – Mutare Dominum Non Potest Liber Notus (London: Imprinted [by R. Field] for E. B[lount], 1601).  5 Simple operational definitions of miscellanies include Joshua Eckhardt’s (manuscript verse miscellanies) and mine (printed verse miscellanies), in The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Alan Stewart and Garrett Sullivan (n. p.: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012). For more comprehensive studies of the miscellany, see Elizabeth W. Pomeroy, The Elizabethan Miscellanies, Their Development and Conventions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-­ Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).  6 See Dominic Baker-­Smith, ‘“Great Expectation”: Sidney’s death and the poets’, in Jan van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-­Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (eds), Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (Leiden: Published for the Sir Thomas Browne Institute [by] J. Brill / Leiden University Press, 1986), pp. 83–103; G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 57. The Phoenix Nest and Astrophel are miscellaneous compilations guided by Sidney’s name and poetry, not books composed on the occasion of his death. On The Phoenix Nest’s miscellaneity, see Rollins, Phoenix

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Nest; Marotti, English Renaissance Lyric, pp. 234–235; as an extended elegy to Sidney see Pomeroy, Elizabethan Miscellanies, chapter 5. Marcy L. North’s The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-­Stuart England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) considers The Phoenix Nest a semi-­anonymous work ‘combin[ing] the best of identity and discretion’, using only initials to credit contributions (p. 72). A key difference between The Phoenix Nest and the Phoenix of Loves Martyr is the fully shadowed identity of the phoenix and turtle (see below).  7 Marotti, English Renaissance Lyric, esp. pp. 159–171.  8 Ibid., chapter 1. The fascinating ‘Devonshire Manuscript’ miscellany (BL Add. MS 17492) includes both men’s and women’s hands and poetry, where, as Elizabeth Heale notes, ‘women are copying and perhaps responding to explicitly misogynist verses.’ Heale, ‘Women and the courtly love lyric: the Devonshire MS (BL Additional 17492)’, The Modern Language Review, 90 (1995), 296–313, at 312.  9 George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde Up in One Small Poesie. Gathered Partely (by Translation) in the Fyne Outlandish Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and Others: And Partly by Invention, Out of Our Owne Fruitefull Orchardes in Englande: Yelding Sundrie Sweete Savours of Tragical, Comical, and Morall Discourses, Bothe Pleasaunt and Profitable to the Well Smellyng Noses of Learned Readers (London: Imprinted [by Henrie Bynneman and Henry Middleton] for Richarde Smith, 1573; STC 11635). The poems are at sigs Uiiv–Xiiir. The subsequent prose description claims Gascoigne created these poems in a short time, mostly upon horseback, and in answer to the sundry themes, in sundry metres. 10 Nevertheless, Googe’s single-­author miscellany includes others in its pages: the first name to greet the reader after the title page is Alexander Neuyll. Several answer poems are also included, and Googe professes the miscellany’s contents were given to a printer by an unscrupulous friend. 11 Printed miscellanies often display a loose attitude toward ascription; in manuscript miscellanies, attributions can be scarce, conjectured, absent, deliberately truncated, or falsified. On the fluidity of authorship, authorial ascriptions, and editorship in printed miscellanies see Rollins, Marotti, and Wall. For the early history of Passionate Pilgrime attributions, see Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1938), pp. 538–558; Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s sonnets as literary property’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (eds), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-­ century English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 143–173, and for a similar case see Rollins (ed.), Brittons Bowre of Delights, 1591 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. ix– xvii. On the variety of attitudes toward authorship see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 95–103. 12 The ostensible reason for this change is reform, but critics rightly question whether prodigality and reform are strategic postures. See Richard C. McCoy, ‘Gascoigne’s “Poëmata Castrata”: the wages of courtly success’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 27 (1985), 29–55; Gregory Kneidel, ‘Reforming George Gascoigne’, Exemplaria, 10 (1998), 329–370. On censorship see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chapter 5.

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13 With its own title page, and beginning in a new gathering, this section may have been separable from the main work. For an instance of this phenomenon see Steven K. Galbraith, ‘Spenser’s First Folio: the build-­it-­yourself edition’, Spenser Studies, 21 (2006), 21–49. However, given the second title page’s reference to the contents of Loves Martyr, and Salusbury as the dedicatee of both, it is more reasonable to see these as separable but united miscellanies – which, as I am arguing, is a deeply wrought thematic and structural property of the collection as a whole. 14 See Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), Robert Chester’s ‘Loves Martyr, or, Rosalins Complaint’: (1601) with Its Supplement, ‘Diverse Poeticall Essaies’ on the Turtle and Phoenix / by Shakspere, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, Etc. (London: Publisht for the New Shakspere Society by N. Trübner & Co., 1878), pp. xxi–lvi; Carleton Brown (ed.), Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College, 1913), pp. liv–lxxiv; Bernard Newdigate, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle: was Lady Bedford the Phoenix?’, Times Literary Supplement (24 October 1936), 862. These theories are reviewed in William Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle: Shakespeare’s Poem and Chester’s Loues Martyr (London: Mouton & Co., 1965), chapter 4. My chapter is indebted to Matchett’s work, though I disagree with his conclusions regarding allegorical readings of the collection. 15 See Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977); Anthea Hume, ‘Love’s Martyr, “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and the aftermath of the Essex rebellion’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 40 (1989), 48–71; J. V. Cunningham, ‘“Essence” and the Phoenix and Turtle’, English Literary History, 19 (1952), 265–276; Walter Ong, ‘Metaphor and the twinned vision (The Phoenix and the Turtle)’, The Sewanee Review, 63 (1955), 193–201; M. C. Bradbrook, ‘“The Phoenix and the Turtle”’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 (1955), 356–358. 16 See Ong, ‘Metaphor and the twinned vision’, esp. 199–201. 17 I. A. Richards, ‘The sense of poetry: Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”’, Daedalus, 87 (1958), 86–94. Richards takes the poem to be ‘the most mysterious poem in English,’ 86. 18 William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 88. 19 Matchett finds three voices in Shakespeare’s poem: the poet’s, Reason’s, and those of the ‘chaste wings’ who praise the phoenix and turtle. These voices create a ‘texture of complexities,’ a claim that helps demonstrate how this poem’s polyvocality relates to that of the larger collection. Matchett, Phoenix and Turtle, pp. 53–56. 20 Concerning the rhythm, I agree with Matchett, Phoenix and Turtle, pp. 34–35. 21 Ibid., p. 78. For the odd conjecture that Shakespeare’s printed signature in Loves Martyr is authorial see Boris Borukhov, ‘R. Chester’s Love’s Martyr and the hyphenated Shakespeare’, Notes and Queries, 58 (2011), 258–260. Borukhov’s hypothesis points up the larger problem that we have only internal evidence that there was any common manuscript shared between the poets of Loves Martyr. 22 For theories on the early circulation of Shakespeare’s sonnets see Gary Taylor, ‘Some manuscripts of Shakespeare’s sonnets’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 68 (1985), 210–246; Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s sonnets and the manuscript circulation of texts in early modern England’, in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 185–203.

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23 There is good evidence that both authors restricted the manuscript circulation of some of their writings on the basis of genre. See H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 3–24 and passim. 24 See OED definitions 1a, 1b, and 2a. 25 Marston rejects the negativity of Shakespeare’s poems and asserts a ‘pseudo-­Platonic’ or ‘somewhat Platonic’ position, according to Matchett, Phoenix and Turtle, pp. 85–91. I too think Marston is closely reading Shakespeare’s poem, but I disagree with the claim that Marston’s lines provided an impetus for Chester to add the last ten lines to his ‘Conclusion’. 26 See Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-­books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Moss shows that Georgius Maior’s 1534 printed commonplace book Sententiae veterum poetarum combines poetry with the impetus to collect useful, apothegmatic or argumentative material using ‘the carefully crafted order of the commonplace-­ heads,’ p. 188. 27 See Heather James, ‘The first English printed commonplace books and the rise of the common reader’, Chapter 1 above. 28 Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The first literary Hamlet and the commonplacing of professional plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 371–420, at 412. Compare James, ‘The first English printed commonplace books’ on how authority and abstraction are traded for the particularities of here and now, I and you in the process of making poetry and sententiae generalized and common, pp. 25–26. These are, of course, crucial components of lyric poetry, which are founded on, and play with, the particularities of amatory, pastoral, and elegiac deictic relationships. See Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 29 See Matchett, Phoenix and Turtle, chapter 5. 30 Mark Bland, ‘“As Far from All Reuolt”: Sir John Salusbury, Christ Church MS 184 and Ben Jonson’s First Ode’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 8 (2000), 43–78. 31 Ibid., 55. These are all very loose elaborations of the original, Persius, Satire 1, which has a literal meaning along the lines of ‘don’t look outside yourself.’ But this advice is encased in a larger sentence about Rome’s corruption, and the satire viciously probes both literary and social depravities. See Guy Lee, trans., The Satires of Persius: The Latin Text with a Verse Translation (Wolfeboro: Francis Cairns, 1987). The example succinctly demonstrates the untimeliness and transferability of such mottoes. In Persius, the line compels the addressee to seek Rome’s corruptions in himself. Jonson’s meaning in Christ’s Church MS 184 may well be, as Bland implies, that there is a secret understanding between poet and addressee. And for Emerson, who opens Self-­reliance with this phrase as an epigraph, the phrase means something entirely different, encapsulated perhaps in ‘trust thyself’ or ‘Man is his own star’ or ‘I suppose no man can violate his nature.’ 32 C. H. Herford, Evelyn Simpson, and Percy Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925), Vol. 8, pp. 176–180. 33 Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 31, where it is titled ‘To L:C: off: B’ and has a range of textual variants, the most significant of which is probably the first word: ‘Beautye’ rather than

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‘Splendor!’ For the misguided argument that the Phoenix of Loves Martyr is therefore Countess Bedford see Newdigate, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle: was Lady Bedford the Phoenix?’ As Herford and Simpson conclude in Ben Jonson, Vol. 11, p. 41, ‘all it proves is that he privately re-­used the poem which he did not reprint later.’ According to Colin Burrow, poets needed to write ‘verses of praise which are both new and sufficiently abstract to be applied to a number of circumstances’; he assigns these mercenary concerns to the re-­purposing of the poem. See Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, p. 89. Undoubtedly such adaptations occurred, but I am more interested in the idea that ‘the poem’ can retain any sort of unitary identity across these material ­instantiations. 34 The extracts of ‘Epos’ are in Folger MS V.a. 219 (extracting two sections with commonplace-­marked text in Loves Martyr, and two without); Worcester College, Oxford MS 58 Adjunct (pp. 11–12), where they are subscribed ‘Ben Jo: fforest. Epod. II,’ and reproduce little else than those passages marked as commonplaces; and Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 117 (fol. 276vrev), which reproduces only the final couplet. The entire poem, as well as ‘Proludium,’ is copied in Folger MS X.d. 246; this manuscript consists solely of these two poems, on conjugate folio leaves. Descriptions of these manuscripts are from The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700, ed. Peter Beal. Web (Beta version), accessed 24 July 2011. 35 George Parfitt (ed.), Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 513–514. 36 On epigrams and other short forms easily transferred between oral, manuscript, and print media, and the tensions they create between authorship and unascribed circulation see James Doelman, ‘Circulation of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart epigram’, Renaissance and Reformation, 29 (2005), 59–73; John Mulryan, ‘Jonson’s epigrams and the adages of Erasmus: a holistic analysis’, Ben Jonson Journal, 12 (2005), 73–92; and Joseph Loewenstein’s brilliant ‘The Jonsonian corpulence, or the poet as mouthpiece’, English Literary History, 53 (1986), 491–518. 37 Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘Commonplacing of professional plays’, 403. 38 Jasper Heywood et al., trans., Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, Translated Into Englysh (Imprinted At London In Fleetstreete neere vnto Saincte Dunstans church: by Thomas Marsh, 1581; STC 22221), sig. I2r. Jonson’s text highlights the variability of epigram translation and appropriation in his more economical translation of the Latin. 39 England’s Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allot, imprinted at London for N.L[ing]. C.B[urby]. and T.H[ayes]., 1600, sig. S5v. 40 As Herford and Simpson note, instances of ‘we’ and ‘our’ become ‘I’ and ‘my / mine’ in this poem as it appears in The Forest, 1616. See Ben Jonson, Vol. 8, pp. 107–108. This change potentially tempers the uniqueness of Jonson’s poetic voice, especially since Chapman’s poem, which precedes Jonson’s, is the only one that advances a poetic ‘I.’ However, one also hears the royal ‘we’ in Jonson’s poem, perhaps with a ring of poetic sway or sovereignty in the miscellaneous context. Hearing both the communal ‘we’ and the imperial ‘we’ might well be the intended effect here; the double possibility is activated by the context. 41 This analysis, which seems likely but is hard to substantiate, is Colin Burrow’s in Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, p. 89.

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42 A final irony: the epigram on the title page, ‘Mutare dominum non potest liber notus,’ can be translated as ‘A well-­known book cannot change author,’ D. R. Shackleton Bailey, trans., Martial: Epigrams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), Vol. 1, pp. 90–91. In context the line (1. 66) discourages plagiarism and asserts the author’s ownership of both text and meaning. If anything, Loves Martyr shows the opposite: just how mutable its poems, masters, and meanings really are.

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‘Divines into dry Vines’: forms of jesting in Renaissance England Adam Smyth In every period there is a pile of submerged jokes, unperceived because they are irrelevant or wrongly balanced for the perspective of the day.1

T

owards the end of his famous speech of advice to the players on modes of acting, Hamlet turns his ire on clowns who speak more than is written in their part, while ‘some necessary question of the play’ sails by. In Q2 (1604/5), this is where the advice ends, as Polonius enters, and Hamlet asks ‘will the King hear this piece of work?’ But in Q1 (1603), the meta-­drama lingers for another ten lines or so, as Hamlet fills out his critique of clowning by noting particular examples of bad jokes. And then you have some agen, that keepes one sute Of jeasts, as a man is knowne by one sute of Apparell, and Gentlemen quotes his jeasts downe In their tables, before they come to the play, as thus: Cannot you stay till I eate my porrige? and, you owe me A quarters wages: and, my coate wants a cullison: And, your beere is sowre: and, blabbering with his lips, And thus keeping in his cinkapase of jeasts, When, God knows, the warme Clowne cannot make a jest Unlesse by chance, as the blinde man catcheth a hare: Maisters tell him of it.2

This is a tantalizing passage because it seems to offer a series of punchlines to jokes which are otherwise unexplained: so we have ‘Cannot you stay till I eate my porridge,’ but we don’t know the words, or the context, or the action, to which these words respond. Similarly: ‘you owe me A quarters wages’; ‘my coate wants a cullison’; ‘your beere is sowre.’ Hamlet presents these floating punchlines – if they are punchlines – as examples of the kind of stale jest that bad clowns recycle: these are bad jokes, for Hamlet, because they are old jokes, already written down in gentlemen’s commonplace books, but reworn, like an old suit of apparel. What can we do with these fragments of jests? Some scholars want to link them to particular comic actors: perhaps these lines are a dig at William Kemp, the stage clown who left Shakespeare’s Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, possibly in acrimonious

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c­ ircumstances. Or perhaps the lines refer to Kemp’s predecessor Richard Tarlton, whose signature russet suit might be referenced in ‘knowne by one sute of / Apparell’: certainly the disempowered, outsider persona cultivated by Tarlton, and his link with taverns and alcohol, seem to chime with the joker Hamlet has in his sights.3 Some have even argued that ‘your beere is sowre’ and ‘my coate wants a cullison’ invoke particular, famous Tarlton jokes, later printed in Tarlton’s Jests, and News Out of Purgatory (1613),4 although a comparison with these ‘sources’ is not convincing. Alternatively, if the first quarto is a reconstruction from memory, as many believe, then the transcriber, perhaps an actor, struggling to recall the punchlines originally spoken in performance, might have drawn from jests that were widely known in 1603 – meaning Hamlet’s lines catch and fix punchlines that happened to be passing through the 1603 zeitgeist. Perhaps these punchlines don’t recall particular performers, or particular jokes, but rather stand for the jest, as a Renaissance form: they are phrases that, to a 1603 listener, suggest the cadence and the rhythm and the shape of a joke – in the way that a jagged line on a piece of paper, in a painting, stands for writing, without actually being writing. There is something unsettling about reading these lines, when we feel almost, but not quite, in on the joke. Partly because the experience of not understanding an offered joke is always shaming – particularly in this instance, when Hamlet’s weary familiarity compounds our sense of exclusion; but also because we’re reminded, once again, that the sense of historical-­cultural distance between us and the early seventeenth century is strongest not in moments of high learning but amid informal exchanges, local references, the shared conventions of popular forms. In many ways, Renaissance jests confound the presentist assumptions we’re inclined to bring to them. Hamlet gives us only punchlines; but what did whole jests sound like in Renaissance England, and how can this volume’s attention to form help us respond to them? Jestbooks blossomed as an English publishing phenomenon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the corpus is generally assumed to begin with A Hundred Merry Tales in 1526, although there is a case for going back further to 1484, when Caxton attached the twelve ‘Fables of Poge the Florentyn’ (Poggio Bracciolini) to his Fables of Esope. The latest collection I consider is London Jests (1684). So here is a representative joke: a vignette of a meeting between social unequals – an apparently bumbling countryman, and an imperious (although also ultimately rather bumbling) city constable. It comes from A Banquet of Jests, or Change of cheare: a popular collection that went through at least ten seventeenth-­century editions, conveying to readers ‘Moderne Jests,’ ‘Witty ieeres,’ ‘Pleasant taunts,’ and ‘Merry tales.’ A Simple Country man having terme businesse in London, and being somewhat late abroad in the night, was staid by a Constable, and somewhat harshly entreated; the poore man observing how imperiously hee commanded him, demanded of him what hee was, to whom he replyed, I am the Constable, and this is my Watch. And I pray you sir, for whom watch you? (saith the man) marry answered the Constable, I watch for the King:



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for the King; replyes he againe simply? then I beseech you Sir that I may passe quietly and peaceably by you to my lodging: for I can bring you a certificate from some of my Neighbours who are now in towne that I am no such man.5

Past studies of early modern jests have often treated jokes as sources for other things, and so their critical gaze has drifted away. Jokes have been considered as documents in social history6 – and this jest certainly could be read in terms of, for example, anxieties about seventeenth-­century urban migration, and the consequent pressures on social hierarchy and identity: the constable, after all, ‘demanded of him what hee was.’ Or scholars have treated jokes as sources for drama – and the names Dogberry and Elbow practically scream from the page as one reads this jest. As Ian Munro has noted in his seminal article on jestbooks and print, much nineteenth-­century labour went into gathering and editing Renaissance jestbooks as a source for Shakespeare, but there was an embarrassed aspect to this enterprise: jestbooks sullied an ethereal, Romantic conception of Shakespeare, and, if they were a source, they were positioned as a source Shakespeare grew away from, just as his characters conceive of jestbooks as shameful suppliers of borrowed, printed wit.7 In Much Ado about Nothing, Beatrice recoils from Benedict’s suggestion ‘That … I had my good wit out of the “Hundred Merry Tales”,’8 and, in 1899, Horace H. Furness described that same A Hundred Merry Tales as ‘a coarse book, the natural product of coarse times … its flavour … not unlike the atmosphere of … [those] houses which demand daily and prolonged fumigations.’9 For Furness and his contemporaries, jestbooks were to be identified, in order to be quarantined. As an alternative to these responses to early modern jests, I would like to consider the fruitful ambiguity of the term ‘form’ to discuss both the formal (that is, generic, rhetorical, literary) qualities of early modern jokes and the material form of the jestbooks in which they were conveyed. I want to keep my focus on the jests in jestbooks in order to treat these short textual forms seriously; that interface between jests and drama, which has been well analysed in recent years, is beyond this present discussion.10 And I hope to emphasize, throughout, the sense of alterity that a reading of Renaissance jests so often produces. In many ways, this countryman–constable joke is thoroughly representative of Renaissance jokes: the most common jest dynamic is precisely this meeting between two figures, one in a position of greater authority (often educated, urban, wealthy, older, male), one apparently marginal (often illiterate, rural, poor, younger, female). A Banquet of Jests includes many other examples, including ‘Of a Justice of Peace, and a Horse-­stealer’: A Horse stealer was brought to be examined before a Justice, who finding the felonie to be most apparent: Well friend, saith hee, if thou beest not hangd for this fact, Ile be hanged for thee. I humbly thanke your Worship, replyed the Theefe, and when the time comes, I desire you that you will not be out of the way.11

William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, carefully copied out the following in about 1690:

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A servt to be hir’d would know what he was to ^ do: & have it in writg. His Mr fallg into a Ditch & cry’d out to him to come help him out. R[eply]. Stay; I’ll look, whither it be in my note:12

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And in London Jests (1684) we read of a similar dynamic: An Old Bawd being convicted before a Justice for keeping an unlawful House, stifly denied it; upon which the Justice in heat said to her, Huswife you do keep a Base House, and I will maintain it; at which the Old Drab, drops him a fine Courtisy, replying, I humbly thank your Worship, I desire no better Warrant.13

This variety of joke presents a verbal exchange which looks like it will shore up this unequal dynamic; but then, through some confusion over a single word or phrase – often based around the literalizing of a metaphor – the relationship is, for a moment, for the life of the joke, inverted. In that opening example, the ambiguity of ‘I watch for the King’ lets the countryman momentarily triumph: who do you watch for?; the constable watches for the king; the countryman is not the king; the countryman can get away. It is not quite clear how in control of things the countryman is: whether he is cleverly exploiting an ambiguity, or simply stumbling on a fortuitous misreading. In his Arte of Rhetorique, Thomas Wilson constructed a taxonomy of jokes, and many of his types focus on the knowing (or unknowing) exploitation of ambiguity: ‘Wordes rehearsed contrarie to that which was spoken,’ he writes, ‘& (as a man would say) overthwartly [that is, adversely, contrarily, perversely] answered, do much abash the opponent, & delite the hearers.’14 This is a helpful description of what is happening in this c­ onstable– countryman joke. Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528) gives this quality the name ‘doubtfulnesse’: a sense of muddle, and then realization, like Freud’s description of jokes as ‘bafflement[,] and light dawning’.15 Another enactment on this paradigmatic form – a tussle between strong and weak which resolves through an act of misprision – comes in the following joke, printed in 1640: A Gentlewoman standing in her Belcony to see and be seen, perceiving a fellow gazing at her, began to withdraw: he cryed out to her saying, what, does the sun offend you Lady? yes said she, the sonne of thy mother does.16

What is being momentarily overturned, here, is the notionally weak, fraught figure of the publicly visible woman; and one can see this joke as an answer to the reams of Petrarchan verses depicting men gazing at distant, silent, balconied women – there is even the very 1590s pun on ‘son’ – which by 1640 had become stale, and ridiculous. (Although Petrarchan verse at the Elizabethan court was perhaps always already ridiculous: exaggeration, paradoxically, its marker of authenticity.) There are many other examples of this template: of domineering husbands being outwitted by younger wives; of wealthy travellers tripped up by tavern serving boys; and so on. Sometimes these jokes do not even draw to a misprision-­fuelled punchline, or offer any kind of comic focus: the dynamic seems to have been enough in itself to constitute a jest.

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This particular balcony jest calls itself a ‘conceit’: a fanciful, witty notion. As is so often the case, our twenty-­first-­century critical terminology flattens out the remarkable range of early modern terms deployed in jestbooks. The compiler of A Banquet of Jests (1639) favours the term ‘Jests’ out of a sense of bafflement in the face of this richness of discourse: ‘I know not how more properly to stile them.’17 The English word ‘joke’ is emerging in the later seventeenth-­century – usually spelt ‘joque’ (there is thus a pun in As You Like It on Jaques and joques, as well as ‘jacks’). ‘Jest’ is also shifting, from something that is primarily physical – a deed or action (a connotation sustained today in the word ‘gesture’) – to a tale, to a short, trifling witticism. Other collections define their contents as bulls (ridiculous, contradictory propositions), rhodomontados (brags, or boasts), novels, fits (a part or section), clinches (something like a pun), quirkes (a verbal twist), yerkes (a blow or lashing out), quips, whimzies, shifts, bourds (idle tales), lies, mistakes, and flashes – as in Yorick’s ‘flashes of Merriment, that were wont to set the Table on a Rore.’18 And the word ‘wit’, which is so central to the period, seems to be undergoing that shift, as Ian Munro has noted, from being a term describing a faculty or a person (a man of great wit; a group of wits), to being a commodity, a thing one can buy.19 Jestbooks – along with publications like printed verse miscellanies – played a crucial role in this commodification. The vitality of this discourse indicates many things, but one is the extreme mobility of jests in Renaissance culture: a conceptual mobility, in terms of what a joke actually was; and also a physical mobility, in terms of the transmission of these forms. The same joke often appears in many different printed and manuscript collections, frequently reworked,20 sometimes even converted from prose into verse, or vice versa: ‘Of Books and Cheese’, a 12–­line epigram comparing reading with the eating of cheese, appeared in Wits Interpreter (1655) and then, reworked into prose, in William Hickes’s Coffee-­House Jests (1677). Next to a British Library copy of the prose jest, a reader has added: ‘This is in verse somewhere.’21 The tremendous popularity in print of comic verse epitaphs shows that epigrams and epitaphs were often, in effect, jests in verse: Wits Recreations (1640) offers many verses along the lines of ‘Here lyes a Taylour in this ditch, / Who liv’d and dyed by the stitch’, or, for a tobacconist, ‘Loe here I lye, roll’d up like th’Indian weede / My pipies I have pack’t up, for breath I neede.’22 One reason for this mobility is that jokes never really have owners. Or at least they don’t tend to have authors: jokes find a cultural space alongside other short textual forms like aphorisms and those epigrams and comic epitaphs (in manuscripts these forms are often bundled together),23 little chunks that move from reader to reader, manuscript to manuscript, largely untroubled with ideas of the author, as we would conceive of that term. John Taylor’s title page claims his jests were ‘collected out of Tavernes, Ordinaries, Innes, Bowling greenes, and Allyes, Alehouses, Tobacco shops, Highwayes, and Water-­passages’24 – London, in effect, is the author – and while this is to a degree Taylorian comic hyperbole, the sense of jestbooks as gatherings of circulating texts reflects standard practice. At times this stress on collecting rather than creating begins to clash with an emerging sense of literary property that

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gains momentum across the seventeenth century, and that can be seen, for example, in Jonson’s epigrams, where an anxiety about, and an expectation of, the literary theft of short textual forms close to jests is a refrain (‘I will not show / A Line unto thee, till the World it know’).25 But if the jestbook compiler often acknowledges unease at the possible charge that (in Jonson’s words) ‘He marks not whose ’twas first,’26 his answer is to point to the near universality of the practice of recycling printed words: ‘should all the Writers,’ the compiler of The Complaisant Companion explains, ‘of larger Volums be obliged to return what they had stolen, or borrowed from others, we should see many bulkie Folio’s dwin[d]le into Twelves, or shrink, and hide themselves in their own Covers.’27 Furthermore: ‘I must borrow from what is already Publisht … since a nimble Theft of this kind is not only fashionable, but plausible [i.e deserving of applause].’28 John Taylor is blunter still: ‘because I had many of them by relation and heare-­say, I am in doubt that some of them may bee in print in some other Authors.’29 This culture of circulation and appropriation might prompt critics to recalibrate their expectations of the terms ‘author,’ ‘reader,’ and ‘editor.’ In ‘Merry Passages and Jeasts,’ a manuscript of over six hundred jokes compiled by Sir Nicholas Le Strange between the 1630s and 1650s, jests are indeed attributed to named individuals, but these figures are suppliers or tellers, not authors: ‘Mr Alderedge’, ‘Clem: Bell,’ ‘My Unck: Catline,’ ‘My wife,’ or – most commonly of all, with 43 citations – ‘my Moth:,’ Dame Alice L’Estrange.30 (When the manuscript came to be published in the nineteenth century, so many of its jests were deemed too crude for public consumption that only 141 were printed.)31 The index of names constructs a sense of a joking community based around the family’s great house in Hunstanton, Norfolk, in which the circulation of jests was an important aspect of communal life, and where possessive authorship gave way to a collective sense of literary ownership: a ‘process of telling-­ for-­retelling’, as Pamela Allen Brown describes it, that ‘constituted a transferral of “publication rights” to the intended audiences of the jest.’32 In his analysis of twentieth-­ century jokes, philosopher Ted Cohen notes that there are ‘kinds of music-­making and acting in which the composition / performance distinction breaks down. These are called, usually, improvisational activities.’33 In the joke-­telling community of the Le Strange household at Hunstanton, there seems to have been a similar collapse of author and teller, as the performance of a jest constituted both a sign of the teller’s temporary ownership of a joke and the mechanism by which that joke was handed on to future tellers. In the words of the compiler of Jocabella, or a Cabinet of Conceits (1640): ‘you shall meet here with a bundle of merry conceits, which, while they were in my selfe, were my owne Recreations; but are now expos[’]d at all adventures to bee the mirth of others.’34 If title pages and prefaces signal a lack of concern with originality – in the sense of newness, and in the sense of pinning down a precise source – then the jokes themselves frequently describe their own on-­goingness. Joke number 347 in a 1640 collection of 459 gives an example of this: ‘One said that some Taylors were like woodcockes, because they lived by their long bils.’35 If the inversion template is the most popular

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subject, then the jest about professions is the second most common topic; in particular, the joke centring on a pun in which a term associated with the profession is transferred on to the person: ‘One asked why Sextons did use to weare black, it was answered that in regard of their office they were to meddle with grave matters and did therfore weare black.’36 But what is striking in this example is the opening: ‘One said that some Taylors …’ This frame makes no difference to the wit, such as it is, of the joke; but it defines this joke as something already told: and most jokes repeat this structure. As Ian Munro neatly puts it, ‘jestbooks principally proceed through hearsay: the wit they publish is almost always coded as coming from somewhere else.’37 Printed jokes are, in general, not just accounts of a joke but accounts of a telling of a joke, that signal a telling (‘One asked why Souldiers did love beefe … It was answered …’).38 The way in which conditions of performance are wrapped around the joke perhaps has something to do with an unease about what might happen if this comic material is dispersed, via print: Castiglione and Wilson, in their discussions of laughter and jests, are frequently worried about the dangers of telling the wrong kind of joke, laughing too much, speaking out of turn. These descriptions of performance register a similar, lingering desire to control how jokes might be used – even in the moment when, as a result of the material form of the jestbook (cheap, printed, widely available), they are being rapidly disseminated to contexts beyond the compiler’s control. The textual form of the joke thus responds to, and registers, the material forms of circulation, in much the same way that (as will be discussed shortly) the strange verbosity of early modern printed jokes reflects – in its anxious desire to explain – the anonymous and potentially unknowing audience for printed jest books. What are the literary influences and formal traditions that lie behind jests? One important but now largely effaced tradition centres on the idea of jest as action. ‘Jest’, a Middle English term, derives from the Latin gesta, meaning ‘actions, exploits’; the original sense of ‘jest’ was ‘a notable deed or action’ and, soon after this, a narration of these actions.39 A connection with laughter comes only later: ‘jest’ develops into ‘an idle tale’, and hence in the sixteenth century into something mocking, funny, or ridiculous. The earlier sense of deed or action was still alive in the early modern period, as when Hall’s Chronicles (1548) declared an ambition in ‘[s]ettyng furthe the jestes, actes and deeds, of the nobilitie’40 – and when Sir John Thynne (1513–80) titled a manuscript description of plans for Queen Elizabeth’s 1573 progress through Kent as ‘The Quenes Majesty’s Jestes’.41 And so while it seems axiomatic to modern readers that jests be linked with laughter – ‘[e]very comedian knows that a joke that does not get a laugh is not a joke – end of story’42 – this was not the case for Renaissance culture. Many early modern jestbooks develop out of this tradition and present a collection of physical actions performed by a single figure, that, in the retelling, cohere into something like a jest biography. Andrew Boorde’s The First and Best Part of Scoggins Jests full of witty mirth and pleasant shifts, done by him in France, and other places (1626) aims to be ‘a preseruatiue against melancholy’ – the medical benefits of laughter are a jestbook refrain

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– and offers a chronological series of the deeds of John Scoggins, a (probably fictitious) fifteenth-­century court jester, vividly alive in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century jestbook culture.43 Scoggins Jests constructs a life through actions, as Scoggins journeys from college to court, fooling countrymen, and indulging in extravagant deceptions such as duping an apothecary into tasting dried excrement: ‘What first Scogin & his chamberfelow made to fare well in Lent’; ‘What shift Scogin made, when he lacked money’; ‘How a husbandman put his son to schoole with Scogin’; ‘How Scogin & his scholler went to seeke his horse’; until, death imminent, ‘What Scogin said when the holy Candle was put in his hand.’ These prose descriptions of between one and three pages – reports of actions (‘How he leapt over the Tables’) and picaresque deeds – are sometimes funny, but not always: their unifying feature is not comedy (which flickers in and out) but rather the striking physical action. Such accounts represent a tradition of the jest that is, for us, submerged beneath the jest as a form always in pursuit of laughter – we may see more connections between these jest biographies and later forms such as the novel – but this medieval counter-­tradition was still alive in early modern culture, as seen in titles such as XII. Mery Jests, of the Wyddow Edyth (1525, 1573); Merie Tales Newly Imprinted & Made by Master Skelton, Poet Laureat (1567); Robert Armin’s Foole upon foole (1600), which presents the jest-­lives of several fools, including Will Sommers; Tarlton’s Jests (1613); Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607); Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests (1628); The Life of Long Meg of Westminster (1635); and The Tales and Jests of Mr. Hugh Peters (1660). Although A Banquet of Jests (1630) was not originally conceived as the story of the court fool Archibald Armstrong (d. 1672), later editions, from 1657, made this claim as a result of the assumption by readers that this was indeed the case: a fictive ‘author’ was supplied, post hoc, in response to popular misreadings. Even the 1634 collection, however, locates itself carefully amid this field of other biographical jestbooks: Pasquels conceits are poore, and Scoggings dry. Skeltons meere rime, once read, but now laid by. Peeles Jests are old, and Tarletons are growne stale, These neither bark nor bite, nor scratch, nor raile. Banquets were made for laughter, not for Teares. Such are our sportive Taunts, Tales, Jests, and Jeeres.44

One answer, then, to the puzzle of why some sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century jokes seem so strikingly unfunny is that, quite simply, many Renaissance jests were not primarily intended as comical things – just as the serious puns of Shakespeare were not designed to gain a laugh – but were rather mechanisms for ‘recollect[ing] the memories of those … knowne, but since forgotten’.45 Within this tradition there is a particular link between jests and the remembering of the dead: a number of jest books, such as Tarlton’s Jests, and News Out of Purgatory (1613), invoke the ghost of a dead fool as a kind of voice, or unifying subject, and dedicate themselves to remembering them through jests. Perhaps this is about finding alternatives to purgatory, with jests as one way of remembering in a post-­Catholic England; or perhaps there is something more

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fundamental about the form of a joke that links it to death, and then rebirth: a joke is told, and then it’s gone, into the air; but then it’s told again, and it comes back to life. Other traditions also inform the jest. Despite that nineteenth-­century sense of the jestbook as a dirty, popular form, a classical underpinning is crucial.46 Within classical rhetoric, there is a fairly consistent assessment of the role of jokes, which finds its most influential expression in Aristotle, and later in Cicero, Quintilian, and Plutarch. Four ideas are asserted with particular vehemance. First: that laugher is a defining quality of the human (an axiom that later collides with the assumption that Christ never laughed). Second: that jokes are effective, useful rhetorical weapons, particularly in legal disputes, but are also potentially unstable. Third: that a capacity with wit cannot be taught – which resulted in the paradox that rhetorical guides stressed the need for unlearnt spontaneity: that jokes should never be ‘brought in from a distance,’ as Plutarch wrote, ‘like previously prepared entertainment.’47 And fourth: that the fit object for laughter is that which is slightly – but only slightly – ugly; ‘some blunder or ugliness,’ Aristotle wrote, ‘that does not cause pain or disaster.’48 This requires an act of calibration – too unseemly, and the object deserves pity or censure – which means that writing on laughter is haunted by the possibility of laughing out of place: well-­judged jesting that notes Cicero’s ‘personages, topics and occasions’49 is always perilously close to baser forms, like raillery, and jeering. Much of Quintilian’s writing on joking is taken up with listing (rather like Hamlet) bad jokes, which need to be shunned. It is worth stressing that, while classical rhetoric positions jokes as pragmatically useful devices in legal, pedagogical, and social contexts, an emphasis on jests’ practical utility – whether that’s a use understood as rhetorical efficacy, or moral good, or even medical well-­being – falls away across the seventeenth century. Later jestbooks stress, instead, ‘harmless mirth’, or ‘pleasure’, or offer no justification at all. This emergence of jokes as self-­sufficient texts is in part linked to the establishment of ‘literature,’ as a category, in this period. That is to say, the invention of literature is in part about texts declaring their separation from social utility: about, for example, lyric poems declaring meaning and purpose beyond their moment of production. Jests – as they move away from an emphasis on usefulness and occasion – are caught up in this shift. One answer to the question of the relationship between jests and literature is that jests slot in to literary texts; another is that the little narratives repeatedly described in jestbooks provide kernels developed by authors (Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, for example, seems to spring from the pages of a collection like Scoggins Jests);50 but, more fundamentally, jests are involved in that process by which certain kinds of writing begin to become separated from a rhetoric of application and use. That the term ‘conceit’, used to describe jests, meant not only witty notions but also a ‘quality of literary taste or style’51 indicates this entwining between jests and the literary. Despite this longer-­term decline of a stress on utility, for most of the early modern period, this classical heritage is vividly alive in printed collections. Tales and Quicke Answeres, for example, from 1532 – which styles itself Very Mery, and Pleasant to

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Rede – cites Plutarch, Diogenes, Martial, Quintillian, and Cicero, and the collection at times resembles a commonplace book in its gathering of short classical references under joke headings. The frequent setting for jokes in the tavern recalls the classical convivium and the social function of jests at the banquet table: there is a line of descent passing back from A Banquet of Jests (1639) through Erasmus’s Convivium religiosum (1522) to Plutarch’s Quaestiones convivales. In most jestbooks, classical figures and settings regularly appear. The jest usually titled ‘Of a Boy like Augustus’ was particularly popular, appearing time and time again. In Gratiae ludentes (1638), it reads: Augustus Caesar, an Emperor of Rome travelling through one of the Provinces; saw a boy very like to himselfe, wherefore in a scoffe hee askt him if his mother was never at Rome, the boy answered no, but my Father was.52

What this presents is that same dynamic seen before – a dialogue between unequals; a verbal quibble; and the momentary tripping of the stronger by the weaker – but here it is grafted on to a classical setting. And there are many similar examples. This classical inheritance reaches joke collections via early sixteenth-­century humanists, like Erasmus and More, for whom jokes and the witty exchange of short textual forms was fundamental to their conception of the scholar. This humanist mediation is regularly evident in jest collections: Thomas More’s brother-­in-­law John Rastell published both XII. Mery Jests, of the Wyddow Edyth (1525) and A Hundred Merry Tales (1526); the former was compiled by More’s servant Walter Smith, and More himself may have had a hand in the latter. More generally, jestbooks repeatedly invoke More as an important source and reference: as an early modern cultural presence, More was as much wisecracking joker – often uncoupled from learning and piety – as humanist scholar.53 Thus in London Jests, More addresses a woman who, after praying for a son, was rewarded with a boy who was ‘shallow and dull of Apprehension’: ‘you were afraid you should have had Never a Boy,’ says More, ‘but now thou hast one will be Ever a Boy.’54 Many jests are supported by a textual apparatus that recalls humanist scholarship (the pointing manicules in the margins; the references to textual sources); and several collections structure themselves as dialogues between a coterie of informed individuals. Early modern rhetorical guides which anatomize and theorize jokes, like Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553) and Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528), turn to Cicero’s De Oratore as the founding text. As we move through the early modern period, this overt invocation of a classical heritage declines: this is what Gabriel Harvey lamented when, after reading Scoggin’s Jests, he declared that ‘The Ciceronian may sleepe til the Scogginist hath plaid his part … and wee that were simply trained after the Athenian and Romane guise must bee contente to make roome for roisters that know their place and will take it.’55 And it is largely true that, if later jests have clear moorings, those moorings tend to be to an English, often London, socio-­political contemporary – and in that sense jests contribute to that broader rise of English as an increasingly confident, contemporary, literary vernacular, and of London as a setting, in all senses, for literature. But, nonetheless, the history of jokes has a strong classical humanist chapter

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that is persistently evident: as the principal scholar of sixteenth-­century jests writes, jokes are ‘a long and festive postscript to the achievements of Renaissance humanism.’56 Jestbooks have often been treated as a prime example of popular culture, owing to the kinds of subjects they rehearse (inversions, drunken men, lusty wives, scatological puns); their connections with oral culture and cheap print; their anonymity and patterns of transmission; and the ways in which readers appropriated and adapted these forms. And there is a well-­established tradition linking Renaissance laughter with a dynamic, popular culture from below, in the work of Bakhtin on Rabelais,57 and in nineteenth-­century studies such as W. Carew Hazlitt’s Shakespeare Jest-­Books, which viewed jest collections (romantically) as ‘folk literature’ offering direct access to the popular spirit of ‘Merry England.’58 But jokes are also forms with a learned classical, humanist pedigree that complicates (while not wholly overturning) these claims to popular culture. And if one index of popular culture is consumption, we know that Gabriel Harvey, Philip Sidney and Sir John Harrington all turned the pages of Scoggins Jests … full of witty mirth and pleasant shifts,59 and Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater, kept a 1626 copy of this same book – listed in her catalogue as ‘Sco[gg] ons Merry tayles’ – in her London library.60 Harvey also added marginal notes in his printed books that make clear his careful assessment of the virtues of jesting: ‘Play with me & hurt me not: Jest with me & shame me not’, he wrote in his copy of Guazzo’s La civil conversatione (1581), summarizing Guazzo’s Aristotelian emphasis on the need for jests to avoid harm or injury. Harvey’s notes also make apparent the classical and emerging vernacular heritages of jesting: in Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoricke (1567), he added: ‘One of my best for the art of jesting: next Tullie, Quintilian, the Courtier in Italian, the fourth of mensa philosoph. Of all, the shortest, & most familiar, owr Wilson.’61 We also know that, as Queen Elizabeth lay on her death bed in 1603, a Catholic at court described how the Queen ‘cannot attend to any discources of government and state, but delighteth to heare some of the 100 merry tales, and such like, and to such is very attentive.’62 Perhaps she liked the joke in that collection that begins ‘A woman there was which had had iiii. husbondys …’63 If classical literature provides a context for reading jests, then religion provides another. In particular, the exempla of medieval religion: lively little tales with an overt, strident moral lesson. Medieval preachers used exempla as resources for sermons, inserting these arresting stories – about husbands and wives; or the follies of rustics; or the hypocrisies of wealth – to seize the listener’s attention and reinforce doctrine.64 This tradition lies beneath the following jest, from Tales and Quicke Answeres: There was a man upon a tyme, whiche profered his doughter to a yonge man in mariage, the which yonge man refused her, sayeinge, that she was to yonge to be maryed. Iwys, quod her foolysshe father she is more able than ye wene. For she hath borne .III. children by our parysshe clerke.   Lo by this tale ye se, that foles can nat telle what and when to speake, therfore it were best for them to kepe always silence.65

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In A Hundred Merry Tales, each jest concludes with just such an exacting moral lesson: a clear moral tag, such as: ‘By this tale ye may se that one ought to take hede how he rebukyth an other lest it torne moste to his owne rebuke’; or ‘By thys ye may se that many one goth to chyrch as moch for other thynges as for devocyon’; or ‘By this ye may se it is foly for a man to say ye or nay to a matter, excepte he knewe surely what the matter is.’66 The collective momentum generated by these moral distillations, appended to jests, delights in the exposure of hypocrisy; ridicules careless speech or inappropriate manners; warns of the dangers of seeming ridiculous in the world; is misogynistic; and, in general, generates laughter at the expense of overreaching individualism, ambition, and pride. If the inversion paradigm with which this chapter began suggests the possibility of social reordering, this collection presents a more conservative ideology. But jests with overt moral messages – ‘by this joke you may see …’ – seem strange to modern readers, and across the early modern period the final moral distillation – that tag – falls away. Or rather, it doesn’t quite fall away, but changes form: the detached, moralizing conclusion in early jestbooks morphs into what we would call the punchline, the joke’s closing words. The countryman–constable jest with which we began concludes: ‘for I can bring you a certificate from some of my Neighbours who are now in towne that I am no such man.’ These final words are marked out in two ways: by italics (in manuscript collections of jests, the final words of jokes are often underlined)67 and also by the verbose, over-­stuffed quality of this prose – to the modern ear, there are just too many words. But this pinning things down too completely is typical of Renaissance jests, as can be seen in the following well-­known joke about Shakespeare, scribbled in the manuscript of the Middle Temple lawyer John Manningham on 13 March 1602. Upon a time when Burbidge played Richard III, there was a citizen grone soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third. Shakespeare’s name William.68

What is striking about this tale are those final, lumbering, stunningly obsolete words: ‘Shakespeare’s name William.’ Why are they there? They might be said to indicate that Shakespeare was not well enough known for the joke to work without this contextual sidecar: evidence, then, of the popular presence (or lack of it) of Shakespeare as a 1602 theatrical personality. But this seems unlikely: the notes Manningham made five weeks earlier, in this same diary, about a Middle Temple performance of Twelfth Night, suggest considerable theatrical knowledge: ‘much like the commedy of errores,’ he writes, ‘or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni.’69 Given this sophisticated response, ‘Shakespeare’s name William’ was

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surely not a means of conveying necessary information, either to Manningham or to future readers. What those closing words suggest is something of the shape of the Renaissance joke – the cadence of a jest to the seventeenth-­century ear – which is in part rooted in the legacy of that late-­medieval, moralizing conclusion: ‘Whereby you may see what a terrible thing feare is,’ as one jest collection notes.70 Freud suggested that economy is fundamental to the joke, by which he meant, principally, a psychic economy, the saving one feels after voicing an otherwise forbidden statement: the ‘relief from restraint.’71 But he was also describing a formal quality: jokes need to be brief – to exhibit a scrupulous meanness, to borrow Joyce’s phrase for his Dubliners style. For philosopher Ted Cohen, concision – ‘the insinuating quality of many jokes’ – is crucial because it reflects a shared knowledge between teller and listener that need not be spelt out: ‘so much can go unsaid’ because ‘the audience already knows it.’72 And because the audience already knows it, jokes momentarily unite teller and listener through a reliance on shared experience, a sense of community more keenly felt by being unsaid: ‘I think what you want is to reach me, and therein to verify that you understand me, at least a little, which is to exhibit that we are, at least, alike. This is the establishment of a felt intimacy between us.’73 Cohen’s contention might also explain two common experiences of mishandling jokes: first, why not understanding a joke is so unsettling, since an attempt at intimacy has failed; and second, why the process of explaining a joke robs it of its wit, since the intimacy-­inducing unsaid is now leadenly stated, as if to a stranger with whom we share no knowledge at all. Part of the significance of early modern jokes is that they do not conform, or at best imperfectly conform, to these expectations. This has much to do with the joke as an outgrowth of medieval sermons, with those overt moral tags: the lumbering wordiness of jests recalls these didactic, educative predecessors and upsets Freud’s insistence on formal economy. Such verbosity – the very opposite of what one critic calls the ‘snap’ of the modern punchline74 – is also surely a consequence of the friendlessness of print. Popular printed books, unlike most forms of manuscript, addressed an unknown readership, and so compilers could not rely on shared knowledge. Thus, printed jests had laboriously to convey contextual matter: One hearing a Usurer say he had been on the pike of Teneriff (which is supposed to be one of the highest hils in the world) asked him why he had not stayd there for he was perswaded hee would never come so neere heaven againe.75

Or, even more commonly, printed jokes were forced to spell out, rather anxiously, the wit of the joke: A certaine olde woman being almost blinde, agreed with a Physition to helpe her, which comming unto her, and finding much Houshold-­stuffe that shee had, every time that he drest her, he tooke somehing [sic] away, untill at last hee left nothing but the empty house. Now the woman at last recovering her sight, finding her house empty, and her goods convayde away, would not give the Physition his hyre, who therefore brought her

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before the Judge: to whome shee pleaded, that she was not perfectly cured, but that she saw lesse then before. Because before she saw many things in her house, where now she could see nothing at all.76

Manuscript transcriptions of printed jokes, however, often compress the original text, presumably because the joke in manuscript would circulate within a relatively confined community built upon shared experiences. Thus, when Archbishop Sancroft copied several jokes from William Hickes’s Oxford Jests (1671) into his list of 105 jokes, he cut back the prose to produce an economy more consonant with modern expectations of the form. On the left, the printed joke; on the right, Sancroft’s leaner reworking: ‘A pretty Maid having her Valentine ‘Is yor Wastcoat to be let? (sd one to a Maid, pinn’d on her sleeve, a Gentleman said, who had pin’d her Valentin on her sleeve:) Sweetheart, is your Wastecoat to be let? Yes, qth she, ’Tis to be let alone.’ Bod MS Sancroft 53, p. 372 Yes, says she, ’tis to be let alone. Well, says he, I am content to let your wastecoat alone, but not your Petticoat, if you please.’ Oxford Jests, sig. B1v ‘A great Lord having a crooked-­back’d ‘A crook-­backt Ld boastg of his stately Hall; Lady, was shewing a Gentleman the stately R[eply]. As high as’ tis, yor L can’t stand Hall which he had lately built; and ask’d upright in’t.’ Bod MS Sancroft 53, p. 372 him, whether it were not very high? Yes, says he, but as high as ’tis, your Lady cannot stand upright in it.’ Oxford Jests, sig. B1v

It may well have been the case that compilers of printed jestbooks anticipated such a pruning-­back, and offered their fuller jests not in the expectation of word-­for-­word recitation but rather as resources for adaptation: pools of words from which something could be taken. Certainly, this notion of the printed word as not definitive but rather reworkable (whether by contraction or expansion) was widespread: printed verse miscellanies like The Academy of Complements assured readers ‘thou hast choise and select complements set thee downe in a forme which … thou may imitate or with a little alteration make use of.’77 Other kinds of printed materials seem to have similarly presented themselves as potentially malleable: musical scores, for instance, often printed only a skeleton of a composition,78 and printed dramatic texts imagined reworkings by readers or actors – both cuts, like Sancroft’s, and augmentations. The revived medieval romance Guy of Warwick (1661) is short on the page in part because it envisions an improvised filling out in performance; when the comical Sparrow comes across the resting Rainborne and ‘Hollowes in his Ear,’ Sparrow’s printed text is ‘I’le wake him sure, Whoop whow, &c.’ The ‘&c’ is a cue for as much improvisation as the actor thought fit.79 Is it helpful to see these jokes as forces for radicalism – as forms of writing that

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consistently imagine an overturning of social hierarchy? Does the kind of misreading or mishearing that is central to the countryman–constable with which I began (‘I watch for the King …’) generally end up favouring the underdog? While Keith Thomas notes the conservative potential of laughter – its capacity to enforce social cohesion in village life through ceremonies such as charivari, and to ridicule republican ideas after the Civil War – he also suggests a leftist political impulse in joking: ‘[a]nyone seeking the origins of seventeenth-­century radicalism could do worse than start with the Tudor jest-­books.’80 For Thomas, jests are subversive because they highlight ‘areas of structural ambiguity in society’81 – the many jokes about cuckoldry, for example, revealing the fault-­lines in patriarchy. Other critics, while less historically sensitive, have made similar claims for joking’s transformative potential. Freud’s notion of jokes as the momentary overturning of conscious control by the normally repressed, and Henri Bergson’s conception of laughter as a critical response to the mechanization of life, both posit humour as an (albeit temporary) triumph of disorder, life, intimacy, and the subconscious, over formality, control, and a carefully policed subjectivity.82 Simon Critchley suggests that humour defamiliarizes the real, and so reveals the contingency (and folly) of our particular way of ordering the world: ‘humour might be said to be one of the conditions for taking up a critical position with respect to what passes for everyday life.’83 Humour shows us that things do not have to be the way they are. The subversive potential of jests would seem to be strengthened by the material form of the jestbook: cheap, printed, widely disseminated. In recent years, the bracketing of cheap print with political radicalism has become almost axiomatic for early modern cultural studies, particularly for the years of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. While I am not convinced about this assumption – there seems to be a slippage between radical in the sense of original, fundamental, and innovative (which the printing press certainly was), and radical as leftist and dissenting (which printed texts of course need not always have been) – it is certainly the case that jestbooks disseminated printed wit to a newly large readership. But it is difficult to align, consistently, early modern jests and radicalism. Renaissance jokes were certainly shaped, in part, by a humanist, proto-­protestant tradition of wit that was subversive in potential; but jokes were also descended from other forms, including sermons, that might work to sustain ideology. (Hugh Latimer included a jest drawn from A Hundred Merry Tales (1526) in his sixth sermon before Edward VI: a London gentlewoman, asked by a neighbour where she was going, replied, ‘I am goynge to S. Tomas of Acres to the sermon, I could not slepe al thys laste nyght, and I am goynge now thether, I never fayled of a good nap there.’)84 While Thomas is right to see jokes as responses to structural ambiguities, the position of jokes in relation to those structural ambiguities is not consistently exploitative: it is not at all clear that jokes about cuckolding wives do anything but contain and discredit the potential of women’s sexual agency. This ambivalence is reflected in the fact that recent scholars have made convincing cases for early modern jests both as forces of resistance to a dominant, patriarchal culture and as mechanisms for the upholding

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of that same culture: Pamela Allen Brown argues that women’s jests constitute a ‘counterhegemonic discourse’, ‘a previously unnoticed vector of critique and social power, which may at times threaten and even disrupt reigning ideologies enforcing female subjection,’ and which ascribes ‘non-­elite women with a measure of wit and agency and the power to wound or reward’; while Linda Woodbridge reads jests as one weapon (alongside others, such as pamphlets and anti-­poverty legislation) for the repression of the vagrant poor.85 One profitable way out of this impasse is to focus on jests as scripts which individuals might appropriate, rework, and enact, in order to, perhaps, push back at an oppressive culture: a methodological route taken by Pamela Allen Brown and Laura Gowing, to suggest women’s agency in a world of misogynistic ballads, jokes, and scandal.86 But there is another way of approaching this question of the ‘radicalism’ (or not) of early modern jests, and that is by shifting our focus from jest content (a Dutchman visiting the country; a child outwitting an emperor), to jest form (what the joke does with, and to, words). If the social and political scenario described in a joke does not consistently encourage or enable social change (sometimes it seems to; often it does not), and if jokes censure as much as celebrate the inversions they describe, jokes do, on a more fundamental level, show a radical potential to imagine or encourage remaking. This transformative potential is conveyed not through the content but rather through the form of the joke. Early modern jokes are often built around a conception of language as something profoundly unstable: the potential for words always to mean something else is perhaps the defining interest, and mechanism, of early modern jests. We see this in a preoccupation with puns; in the frequent slippage between an individual’s name and a characteristic or action (‘A Gentleman whose name was Stone, falling off his horse into a deep water … no man but would laugh to see a stone swim’),87 a form also popular in comic epitaphs; in the literalizing of metaphors; and in those many moments of misprision (‘One wondred much what great Scholler this same Finis was, because his name was almost to every booke’) that are the most frequent structural pivot in joke scenarios.88 There are also jokes which are even more overt in their interest in language games, like ‘Playing with words’, from A Banquet of Jests (1639): A Divine willing to play more with words, than to be serious in the expounding of his Text, spake thus in some part of his Sermon: this Dyall shewes we must die all, yet not withstanding, all houses are turned into Alehouses: our cares are turned into Cates: or Paradise into a Payre of Dice: our Marriage into a merry age: our Matrimony, into a matter of money: our Divines into dry Vines: It was not so in the dayes of Noah, Ah no, &c.89

Indeed, compilers of jestbooks often thought of, and defined, jests in terms of form rather than content. A New Booke of Mistakes (1637) describes its jokes as ‘divers sorts of Language, to which custome hath given sundry names: There bee Quips, Taunts, Retorts, Flowts, Frumps, Mockes, Gibes, Jests, Jeeres, &c.’90 Wits, Fits, and Fancies (1614)

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provides a classification of wit, partly by subject (‘Of Kings & Princes’; ‘Of Countrie-­ Men and Clownes’; ‘Of Noses’; ‘Of Talnes & Littlenes’) but also by rhetorical forms, including ‘Extravagant Speach’; ‘Sence Reversed by Identitie of Speech’; ‘Improper Speech’ (jokes relating, in particular, to the misuse of specialized discourses, such as the deployment of incorrect terms for falconry, that variety of linguistic slip-­up that amused Ben Jonson and writers of city comedies); ‘Evasions and Excuses in speech’ (where words are twisted, often in the cause of the weaker); and ‘Aequivocates in Speech’ (puns, particularly on people’s names – a gentleman with a mistress called Field, accused of ‘lying all night in the field’).91 In his discussion of commitment in art, Theodor Adorno suggests that an art work’s political potential is not contained in overt content: in fact, pious and histrionic expressions of political intent (‘bleating what everyone is already saying’) tend to mask a fundamental apathy (a sense of the artist’s ethical rightness as something finished and complete). If art has the capacity for meaningful political critique, that capacity is conveyed on a formal level, through the process of remaking, as ‘elements’ of ‘reality’ are ‘regrouped’ by the art work’s ‘formal laws’.92 In a similar way, it is the conception of language as malleable which is the formal basis of most jokes, rather than the more eye-­catching content, which conveys the possible political significance of early modern jokes. Since the majority of jests convey a sense of language as unstable, jestbooks, as a collective publishing phenomenon, generate a great deal of momentum behind the idea that words, no matter how authoritative the utterance, are always open for additional meanings. Jestbooks are, in many ways, properly a Renaissance, rather than an early modern form. Jokes look back to classical and medieval traditions; and ‘Renaissance’ is also a helpful term because it signals a European and, in particular, Italian context, which was important for English jestbooks. Poggio Bracciolini’s later fifteenth-­century Facetiae was an influential model and source, often invoked in English collections: it is full of jokes about adultery, clerical ignorance, and, repeatedly, about people who appear to be dead, who then wake up – a scenario which recurs in collections. The apparently curious description of some Renaissance jests as ‘lies’ – Robert Chamberlain’s Booke of Bulls (1636) offers ‘two centuries of bold jests, and nimble-­lies’ – recalls the setting of many of Poggio’s jests in the ‘Bugiale,’ a club-­like gathering of the papal secretaries, where jests were exchanged: ‘Bugia’ means ‘lie’ in Italian. In fact a case could be made for Caxton’s Fables of Esope (1484), which included the twelve ‘Fables of Poge the Florentyn’, being the first jestbook in English.93 And if by ‘early modern’ we mean the stirrings of a modernity that is recognizably our own, that putative recognition is often confounded by sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century jokes which prompt a sense of cultural and historical distance, rather than proximity. Certainly, the most interesting twentieth-­century attempts to understand why jokes work – Freud’s linking of jokes with dreams and repression; Henri Bergson’s idea of laughter as a register of an unease about the mechanization of life – do not quite work for a Renaissance corpus.

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Their poor fit recalls Greenblatt’s description of the application of psychoanalysis to Renaissance literature: a mingling of ‘invitation and denial’, he called it, in which texts seem ‘to invite a psychoanalytical approach and yet turn out to baffle or elude’ it.94 What is important about Renaissance jokes is in part that they do not conform to twenty-­first-­century expectations, and, as a result, can help contribute to a conception of a Renaissance that is not always and only proto-­modern. Close attention to form can help keep prominent this productive and compelling strangeness. Notes  1 Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’ [1975], in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (eds), Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 291–310, at p. 297.  2 The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (London, Printed [by Valentine Simmes] for N[icholas Ling] and John Trundell, 1603; STC 22275), sig. F2r–v. My thanks to Katherine Duncan-­Jones for discussing this passage with me.  3 Margreta De Grazia notes that all four jokes ‘give vent to the unsatisfactory conditions of his employment.’ See Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 139.  4 John Dover Wilson, ‘The “Hamlet” transcript, 1593’, The Library, 3rd series, 9 (1918), 217–247, at 240–241.  5 A Banquet of Jests, or Change of cheare (London, Printed for Richard Royston, 1634; STC  1369), sig. A9r–v. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations are to this edition.  6 See, for example, Tim Reinke-­Williams, ‘Misogyny, jest-­books and male youth culture in seventeenth-­century England’, Gender & History, 21.2 (2009), 324–339.  7 Ian Munro, ‘Shakespeare’s jestbook: wit, print, performance’, English Literary History, 71.1 (2004), 89–113, at 91–2.  8 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, in Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (eds), The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (Andover: Cengage, 2001), p. 919, 2.1.121–122.  9 Horace Howard Furness (ed.), A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, 14 vols (New York: American Scholar Publications, 1963), 12, p. 72n. Quoted in Munro, ‘Shakespeare’s jestbook’, 90. 10 The most helpful recent accounts of jests and drama are Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Munro, ‘Shakespeare’s jestbook.’ 11 Banquet of Jests, sig. A8r. 12 Bodleian MS Sancroft 53, p. 372, no. 13. 13 London Jests (London: Printed for Dorman Newman, 1684; Wing L2897), The Third part, no. 20, p. 88 (sig. D8v). 14 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique for the use of all suche as are studious of eloquence (London: Richard Grafton, 1553; STC 25799) fol. 77v (sig. V1v). 15 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. by Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. by Virginia

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Cox (London: J. M. Dent, 1974), p. 148; Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 6. 16 Jocabella, or a Cabinet of Conceits. Whereunto are added epigrams and other poems, by R. C. (Printed by R. Hodgkinson, for Daniel Frere, 1640; STC 4943), sig. B7v. 17 Banquet of Jests, sig. A5r. For jestbook terminology, see F. P. Wilson, ‘The English jestbooks of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2.2 (1939), 121–158, at 133. 18 Hamlet, 5.1.210. 19 Munro, ‘Shakespeare’s jestbook’, 98. 20 The jest beginning ‘A pretty Maid having her Valentine pinn’d on her sleeve’, for example, appears, among other places, in William Hickes, Oxford jests, refined and enlarged (London: Printed for Simon Miller, 1671; Wing H1891), p. 2, and The Complaisant Companion (London: Printed by H. B., 1674; Wing C5627), p. 23 (sig. C4r). 21 I[ohn] C[otgrave], Wits Interpreter, The English Parnassus (London, Printed for N. Brooke, 1655; Wing C6370), sig. Cc8r–v; William Hicks, Coffee-­House Jests (London, Printed for Benji Thrale, 1677; Wing H1884), sig. E4v, BL 12314.df.40, p. 102. 22 Wits Recreations (London: Printed by R. H. for Humphry Blunden, 1640; STC 25870), sigs Bb8v and Bb8r. 23 BL MS Sloane 1489, compiled in 1627 by a Cambridge individual, mixes many short textual forms, in verse and prose. 24 John Taylor, Wit and Mirth (London: By T[homas] C[otes] for Iames Boler, 1629; STC 23814), title page. 25 Ben Jonson, ‘To Prowl the Plagiary’, in Epigrams; and, The Forest, ed. Richard Dutton (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 55. 26 ‘On Poet-­Ape’, in Epigrams, ed. Dutton, p. 46. 27 The Complaisant Companion (London, Printed by H.B., 1674), ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, sigs A2v–A3r. 28 Ibid., sig. A3v. 29 Taylor, Wit and Mirth, sig. A3r. 30 BL Harleian MS 6395. For an edition of this manuscript see ‘Merry Passages and Jeasts’: A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange, ed. H. F. Lippincott (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974). 31 Chris R. Kyle, ‘L’Estrange, Sir Nicholas, first baronet (bap. 1604, d. 1655)’, ODNB online edition, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16513 (accessed 2 October 2009). 32 Pamela Allen Brown, ‘Jesting rights: women players in the manuscript jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange’, in Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (eds), Women Players in England, 1500– 1660: Beyond the All-­male Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 305–314, at p. 312. 33 Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 11. 34 Jocabella, or a Cabinet of Conceits, sigs [A]1v–[A]2r. 35 Ibid., sig. G12r. 36 Robert Chamberlain Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies (London, Printed by R. Hodgkinson, for Daniel Frere, 1639; STC 4942), sig. B6v. 37 ‘A Woman’s Answer Is Neuer to Seke’: Early Modern Jestbooks, 1526–1635, ed. Ian Munro (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. xiv.

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38 Jocabella, or a Cabinet of Conceits, sig. B1v. 39 OED, ‘jest, n’, 1. 40 Ibid. 41 Longleat House, Thynne Papers, vol. XLIX (1561–1576), fol. 268. 42 Simon Critchley, On Humour (Oxford: Routledge, 2002), p. 80. 43 Andrew Boorde, The First and Best Part of Scoggins Jests full of witty mirth and pelasant [sic] shifts (London: Printed for Francis Williams, 1626; STC 21850.7), title page. 44 A Banquet of Jests, frontispiece. The 1657 edition (London: Printed for R. Royston; Wing A3705) updates the verse as follows: ‘Pasquils Conceits are poor, & Scoggins dry. / Skeltons meere rime, once read, but now laid by. / Hinds Jests are new, and Tarletons they are stale, / These neither bark, nor bite, nor scratch, nor raile. / Banquets were made for laughter, not for Teares. / Such are these sportive Taunts, Tales, Jests, and Jeeres’ (sig. A4v). 45 A Banquet of Jests (1634), sig. A4v. 46 This is examined most fully in Joanna Brizdle Lipking, ‘Traditions of the Facetiae and Their Influence in Tudor England’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1970). 47 Plutarch, Moralia, ed. P. A. Clement and H. B. Hoffleit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 8, p. 138. 48 Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. W. H. Fyfe (London: William Heinemann, 1927), p. 20. 49 Cicero, De oratore, trans. and ed. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (London: William Heinemann, 1943), pp. 367–369. 50 Derek Brewer, ‘Elizabethan merry tales and The Merry Wives of Windsor: Shakespeare and popular literature’, in Toshiyuki Takamiya and Richard Beadle (eds), Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 145–161. 51 OED, ‘conceit, n.’, 8c. 52 Gratiae ludentes (London, Printed by Tho. Cotes for Humphrey Mosley, 1638; STC 15105), pp. 21–22. 53 Ian Munro notes that jests citing More appear in, among other places, William Basse’s A Helpe to Discourse (1623); Francis Bacon’s Apophthegmes New and Old (1625); A Banquet of Jests (1657); Witty Apophthegms (1658); A Choice Banquet (1660); Fragmenta Aulica (1662); Poor Robin’s Jests (1666); William Hickes’s Oxford Jests (1671); and London Jests (1684). See Munro (ed.), Early Modern Jestbooks, p. xxix, n2. For More’s use of jokes see Lipking, ‘Traditions of the Facetiae’, pp. 345–385, and (particularly for jokes in A Dialogue of Comfort, Book II), Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The ambivalent heart: Thomas More’s Merry Tales’, Criticism, 45.4 (2003), 417–433. 54 London Jests (London, Printed for Dorman Newman, 1684; Wing L2897), sig. A10r–v. 55 Pierce’s Supererogation (1593), quoted in Lipking, ‘Traditions of the Facetiae’, p. 245. 56 Lipking, ‘Traditions of the Facetiae’, p. 33. 57 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. By Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 58 Shakespeare Jest-­books: Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-­books Supposed to Have Been Used by Shakespeare, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: Willis and Sotheran, 1864). For a discussion of this see Garrett Sullivan and Linda Woodbridge, ‘Popular culture in print’, in Arthur Kinney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 265–286, at pp. 273–274; Munro (ed.), Early Modern Jestbooks, p. xiii.

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59 Lipking, ‘Traditions of the Facetiae’, pp. 245–246. 60 Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘The Countess of Bridgewater’s London library’, in Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 138–159, at pp. 144, 152. 61 Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), pp. 160–161. 62 CSP Domestic 1603, 287, 51. Discussed in Sullivan and Woodbridge, ‘Popular culture’, p. 274. 63 A C. Mery Talys (London: [by J. Rastell at Southwark for P. Treveris, 1526]; STC 23664), sig. B1r. 64 Stanley J. Kahrl, ‘The medieval origins of the sixteenth-­century English jest-­books’, Studies in the Renaissance, 13 (1966), 166–183; Lipking, ‘Traditions of the Facetiae’, pp. 38–40. 65 Anon., Tales and Quicke Answeres, Very Mery, and Pleasant to Rede (1532; STC 23665), sig. Aiir. 66 A C. Mery Talys, sigs B2r, C1v, D3r. 67 See, for example, BL MS Sloane 384. 68 The Diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent, Barrister-­at-­Law, 1602–1603, ed. John Bruce (Westminster: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1868), p. 39. 69 Diary of John Manningham, p. 18. 70 Scoggins Jests, sig. C1r. 71 Freud, The Joke, p. 144. 72 Cohen, Jokes, pp. 4, 25. 73 Ibid., p. 29. 74 Critchley, On Humour, p. 7. 75 Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies, sig. B7v. My italics. 76 The Philosophers Banquet … The second edition, newly corrected and inlarged (London: Printed by T[homas] C[reede] for Leonard Becket, 1614; STC 22062), sig. R3r–v. My italics. 77 The Academy of Complements (London, Printed by T. Badger for H. Mostley, 1640; STC 19883), sig. A5r. My italics. 78 David R. M. Irving, ‘Music and nascent notions of a global consciousness in the early modern world’, lecture at the Institute of Historical Research, London, 29 October 2009. 79 Guy of Warwick (1661), ed. by Helen Moore, Malone Society Reprints, vol. 170 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 36. Such matters were discussed at a staged reading and analysis of the play held at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 13 September 2008. For details of this discussion see my ‘Commentary’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 November 2008. 80 Keith Thomas, ‘The place of laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 January 1977, 77–81, at 78. 81 Ibid., 77. 82 Douglas, ‘Jokes’, p. 297. 83 Critchley, On Humour, p. 41. 84 Wilson, ‘English jestbooks’, 144; Lipking, ‘Traditions of the Facetiae’, pp. 31–32. 85 Brown, Better a Shrew, pp. 3, 16, 4. Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). These two texts are helpfully compared in Munro (ed.), Early Modern Jestbooks, pp. xiv–xvi.

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86 Brown, Better a Shrew, p. 31, and passim; Laura Gowing, ‘Women, status and the popular  culture of dishonour’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 6 (1996), 225–234, at 227. 87 Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies, sig. D10r. 88 Ibid., sig. B7r–v. 89 A Banquet of Jests (London, 1639), sig. E7v. 90 Robert Chamberlain, A New Booke of Mistakes (London: By N[icholas] O[kes], 1637; STC 4944), sig. A3r–v. 91 Anthony Copely, Wits, Fits, and Fancies (London: Printed by Edw: Allde, 1614; STC 5741), sigs Y4v, Z2v, Z3, Zv, Y4r. 92 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, trans. Andrew Arato, in Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 300–318, at p. 314. Quoted in W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The commitment to form; or, still crazy after all these years’, PMLA, 118.2 (2003), 321–325, at 322. 93 Robert Chamberlain, The Booke of Bulls (London: Daniel Frere, 1636; STC 4941.5), title page. 94 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance culture’, in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 131.

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Afterworlds: Thomas Middleton, the book, and the genre of continuation Jeffrey Todd Knight

T

homas Middleton has never fared well in the annals of literary-­critical judgement. As Gary Taylor writes in the introduction to the Oxford Collected Works (an edition designed in part to remedy the problem), Middleton is the quintessential Jacobean poet and playwright without a corresponding mechanism of appreciation.1 At crucial early moments in the establishment of a Renaissance canon, his work remained ‘scattered in many separate cheap individual editions, each for sale in only a few remaining copies, or none, in a world without public libraries, without bibliographies.’2 Later, eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century scholars treated the dispersed works most often as mere background data for the study of Shakespeare. Lacking a stable, circumscribed corpus embodied in a collection or folio edition, Middleton has, until recently, been resistant to literary assessment–to the comfortable fantasies of authorial chronology, autonomy, and unity of style that are customarily the prerequisites for modern ­criticism. Yet, as Taylor and others have also noted, Middleton is the Renaissance writer who, among now-­established figures, was perhaps most deeply enmeshed in the variety and dynamics of early publishing.3 He commissioned and wrote dedications for manuscript presentation copies of his plays, at least two of which survive.4 Beginning with The Roaring Girl (1611), he seems to have prepared play texts for the press, and his bestselling Game at Chess (1625) is widely cited as the first dramatic quarto in English printed with an engraved title page.5 Like Jonson and other dramatists from the period, Middleton supported himself by composing civic pageants. But, unlike Jonson, he set them down for publication with extended paratextual apparatuses, and in 1621 he oversaw the assembly and printing of a collected edition of his Honorable Entertainments.6 Middleton’s published output ranged widely in format from pamphlet and paraphrase to long poem and playbook. He adapted vernacular printed forms such as almanacs alongside more respected borrowings and translations from Latin. The works were equally varied in their genre identifications and modes of attribution, with Middleton’s name sometimes strategically absent, sometimes gestured toward (‘T.M.’), and sometimes present on title pages. His printed texts also made unusually full and robust use of the resources of early typography. The Blacke Booke (1604), for example, distinguishes the speakers in the text – the author’s persona and Lucifer

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– with, respectively, Roman and gothic or ‘black letter’ type, the latter virtually out of use in works of imaginative writing by this date.7 The text featured a special, solid black title page for the occasion (Figure 4.1), announcing to Middleton’s readers the correspondence between form and matter. The material book itself speaks the epilogue: ‘Now sir, what is your censure now? You have read me, I am sure. Am I black enough, think you, dressed up in a lasting suit of ink?’ (ll. 823–825).8 I don’t think it is any coincidence that Middleton’s books are variously and sometimes audaciously caught up in the contingencies of early modern publication, while also, for much of their history, remaining resistant to criticism. As John Jowett has observed of Middleton’s appearance in print, ‘This variable and often invisible author as read in the seventeenth century differs profoundly from the author studied in the modern university curriculum.’9 Middleton’s works are administered today in critical editions and hardbound collections, with determined author and short-­title designations reinforced by library catalogs and attribution research. From the material locale of a Collected Works volume come unifying formal judgements of ‘Middleton’s stylistic trademarks,’ his characteristic narrative ‘device,’ or of poetry that is ‘Middletonian in … nature and intensity.’10 But the same works were written and first interpreted in an unstable ecology of print and manuscript, one in which books were relatively heterogeneous and prone to change.11 In this early period, small-­format texts such as Middleton’s were made available to booksellers and readers in loose sheets, sewn temporarily, or in compilations with diverse works bound together for reasons that were instrumental and particular rather than editorial.12 His words were blended with those of other writers (with or without attributions) under individual titles, in individual bindings, and, later, in anthologies of excerpts and quotations.13 Unity of style and judgement, it could be argued, were not in the realm of the thinkable in Middleton’s early reception history. There were, we imagine, different points of contact between the material forms of texts and the formal matters of writing. In this chapter I want to begin thinking about one such point of contact in the genre of early printed ‘continuation,’ one in which Middleton, at the start of his career, was particularly invested. Even in the absence of a unifying collected edition such as Jonson’s 1616 folio or Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, Middleton’s works were numerous and popular in the early seventeenth century.14 His status, I suggest, depended in part on the malleability of books–a feature of written culture that would disappear from view with the introduction of mechanized binding technologies, short-­title catalogues, book auctions, and other institutional imperatives to reorganize early modern works into fixed, discrete collectors’ items.15 Of the first six works that appeared in print with either Middleton’s initials or his name on the title page, three announced themselves as transformations of existing works, fashioned by paraphrase or expansion.16 The two in this latter category, in particular, seem to take part in a common project of imagining ‘afterworlds,’ in both senses of that term, to already published books. In The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), Middleton offers a continuation of Shakespeare’s Lucrece (1594) by summoning the protagonist from hell to speak out in

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Figure 4.1  Thomas Middleton, The Blacke Booke (London, 1604), title page (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

revenge against her rape and condemnation. In The Blacke Booke (1604), he offers a similarly conceived expansion of Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless His Supplication (1592), a well-­known pamphlet satire in which the title character begs for patronage from the devil. Where Nashe’s Pierce concludes with a note on the artificiality of conclusions – ‘And so I break off this endless argument of speech abruptly’17 – Middleton’s Pierce wakes one morning to find the devil summoned to the surface in Renaissance London, hovering over his bed with the abruptly concluded Supplication in hand, ready to answer his plea.

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I argue in what follows that Middleton modeled these early attempts at forging a writing career on gestures of compiling – of readerly meaning-­making – that were conventional and necessary in Renaissance book culture. In both The Ghost of Lucrece and The Blacke Booke, I suggest, Middleton imaginatively takes up an existing text and adds new text to it, rehearsing a practice of early book buying and ownership that was all but absent from collecting routines in the modern era. Middleton’s enterprise of continuation – distinct from better-­known humanist and vernacular traditions of literary response18 – was, in this way, grounded in the particular privilege of the Renaissance reader to customize and contextualize books in volumes. Continuations were produced in later periods of literary activity, but what separates Middleton’s (and other Renaissance writers’) endeavours is a cathexis on the book rather than the author as the point of origin, a desire to extend an object rather than – or as – a voice in an era with comparatively fewer incentives to see texts as self-­enclosed.19 What is more, in The Ghost of Lucrece and The Blacke Booke, Middleton discloses for us the cosmology of continuation in the period–a context of thought in which gestures of reading and re-­purposing echo through different orders of existence. Middleton’s narrative afterworlds proceed by analogy to the metaphysical afterworld, marking a correspondence between the circulation of writing and the imagined circulation of souls. For texts as for humans, we find, the potential for what will come is at least as important as what is. Book-­based continuations were common in vernacular English writing in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Sermons, legal proceedings, and newsbooks frequently announced themselves in print as ‘continuing’ previously published titles.20 Scholars of literature are perhaps most familiar with the continuations associated with Philip Sidney’s prose romance, the Arcadia (1593), which famously concluded with a catalogue of narrative events in the hope, Sidney writes, that they may ‘awake some other spirit to exercise his pen in that, wherewith mine is already dulled.’21 The idea of continuation here is framed, as it would be in Middleton’s early work, in terms of metaphysical reanimation. Sidney casts the reader-­cum-­writer as a ‘spirit,’ summoning a creative impulse that is as ethereal as it is characteristically self-­effacing, perhaps even fortifying in the verb ‘exercise’ its darker, near-­homophonous relative, ‘exorcise.’22 This scene of continuation – and perhaps obliquely, possession – co-­existed in print with a similar invitation to continue in the supposedly illicit 1590 Arcadia, which ends on an incomplete sentence as if prompting new episodes in the ensuing white space of the text. The call to participate was indirect, but no less effective. The Arcadia was taken up, and the narrative expanded, by a range of writers in a range of forms over the course of next century, including most notably Gervase Markham’s The English Arcadia (1607 and 1613); the ‘Sixth Book’ by Richard Beling, which was appended in folio to the 1627 edition; Anna Weamys 1651 Continuation; and countless elaborations and variations on the story in manuscript.23 Stephen Dobranski, investigating the range of such long-­form responses to now-­ canonical texts in the period, has argued that ‘the publication of incomplete works contributed to the Renaissance authors’ emerging status.’24 From Sidney’s Arcadia

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to poems by Jonson and Milton, writers and printers unapologetically issued texts in imperfect states. ‘By focusing readers’ attention on what writers left unsaid,’ Dobranski contends, ‘these unfinished works paradoxically helped to make writers more visible.’25 The argument is canny, but somewhat misleading in the context of a print culture in which works were always potentially ‘incomplete’–in which readers and book owners could physically add pages (or works) to a text, or imagine themselves doing so in their own processes of composition. Michel de Montaigne, it is well known, expanded successive editions of his Essais by inserting material, through varying means, into his printed copy.26 In England, Richard Braithwaite, not content with his moralizing prose work Essaies upon the Five Senses (1620), composed a Continuation of These Essayes, Enlarged by the Author in 1625, which re-­inflected the text and more than tripled the size of the original.27 In the last decade of his life, Samuel Daniel produced continuations of his long poem The Civil Wars (1609) and his Collection of the History of England (1618), the latter first conceived and printed as a shorter history of the Norman Conquest.28 In 1636, aspiring writer John Trussell took up Daniel’s project, producing A Continuation of the Collection of the History of England, reorienting the work toward the variety of ‘things formerly done’ instead of the “superfluous exuberances” such as accounts of coronations, pageants, and miraculous events’ that dominated Stuart historiography.29 In these continuations, it is the bibliographic unit – not the ‘unsaid’ of the answer poem or ‘unfinished’ work – that is the unit of response.30 In the 1590s, a Chichester poet named John Lilliat composed a book of verse on a similar model of continuation, and the remarkable fair-­copy original survives at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.31 Dissatisfied with his station, and anxious about professional advancement,32 Lilliat set out to write a sequence of love sonnets, which we know as a conventional strategy of displacement for gentlemanly amateurs and a growing class of would-­be English laureates. His example in this mode was Thomas Watson’s popular printed sequence, The Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582). But rather than simply reading or drawing from this text, Lilliat incorporated it–materially–into his book. The volume that survives is a composite formation of manuscript and print, still bound in Lilliat’s original tooled leather covers and preceded by a handwritten title page, which stakes a firmly proprietary claim: ‘Liber Lilliati,’ ‘the book of Lilliat.’ The first half of the volume comprises the published copy of The Hekatompathia, with Lilliat’s manuscript verse filling the blank spaces of the printed text, expanding on lines, individual words, and even the type used to make Watson’s book.33 The second half of Liber Lilliati comprises more than thirty manuscript pages bound in with the print material and similarly filled with poetry. The composition, then, literally continues the published text on which it is modelled. I demonstrate elsewhere that Lilliat extends the intellectual project of the Hekatompathia in his sonnets, making use of themes and phrases from Watson’s work in new verse arrangements.34 But the important point here is that the seeming completeness of Watson’s book was no deterrent for Lilliat, the reader-­cum-­writer. Though the poems in the printed Hekatompathia are framed – one to a page – with headnotes and fleurons,

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and though the number of poems in the text is delimited in the work’s title, ‘Centurie of Love,’ the imaginative project of the book remained subject to reanimation. John Lilliat opens up what would appear, in a modern library, to be a self-­enclosed printed work by writing in it, on it, and making out of it a new, longer work of his own. This short series of examples points to a concept of continuation that functioned broadly in Renaissance writing as a cross-­generic category of real and potential relationships between texts. It is a concept that is not exactly in line with the traditional hierarchies of source study, of origin and iteration. Nor is continuation, in this sense, reducible to the much more well studied practice of Renaissance imitation, the rubric under which Middleton’s early works (and most others’ from the period) are customarily discussed.35 Renaissance imitation theory, drawn primarily from Seneca and Macrobius by way of Erasmus in the sixteenth century, hinged on fixed notions of form and transformation in writing. In the traditional constellation of metaphors, one either gathers flowers, ‘following’ a model, or one makes honey (as a bee), ‘transforming’ a model into something different and unrecognizable as a derivation.36 The most influential critical accounts of imitation have characterized this act of transformative reading and writing as a means of heroic differentiation, even individualization.37 But, as with the seemingly self-­evident categories of complete and incomplete texts, the opposition between ‘transformative’ and ‘non-­transformative’ writing does not bear scrutiny in early vernacular practices of the book. In continuation, we find that writers ‘gather’ or preserve the antecedent work, but they also make something new with (or out of) it.38 Meaning arises both from the text and from the juxtapositions among works in expanded contexts. Whether materially or imaginatively, literary producers could create through what we call ‘curating,’ forming works – as writers of any era implicitly do – according to the prevailing models of text organization. Middleton was deeply immersed in the culture of the book and its variations in Renaissance England. Long before he set to work on what is now among the most diverse bodies of literary publication from the period, Middleton was exposed to practices of compiling and translating as the central means of access to the textual tradition in humanist curriculum. ‘[Y]ears of translatio,’ Taylor explains, led him and his peers to ‘an interest in the effect of conflating dissimilar contexts. Middleton read the satires of Horace alongside those of Joseph Hall; he mixed Lucian with Nashe.’39 This logic of access by combination worked its way, organically, into a discursive strategy in Middleton’s earliest attempts at writing. His first published work – ambitiously dedicated to the Earl of Essex – was The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased, a dramatic re-­ purposing of the Old Testament book of wisdom. In our only comprehensive study of Middleton’s early career, Norman Brittin has examined patterns of figuration in the paraphrase, revealing ‘how thoroughly Middleton’s style was shaped by the rhetorical principle of contrast.’40 The Wisdom of Solomon structurally replicates its source text, the Geneva Bible, preserving the number of verses in the original, for example, to legitimate the project.41 But stylistically, Middleton moves outward at every turn, amplifying his source with euphuistic devices such that each carefully replicated verse

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becomes a point of convergence for stock rhetorical figures and contrasting themes of the writer’s own selection. As Brittin explains, ‘Middleton’s plan of expanding the original into his Paraphrase required him to introduce much material of his own, sometimes only incidentally related to the topic he is paraphrasing.’42 The text, like a school book or commonplace book, was an assembly of discursive combinations into which Middleton, the writer, interpolates himself by expansion. The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased has long been associated with verbal flatness and juvenilia. (Algernon Charles Swinburne called it an ‘interminable sea of limitless and inexhaustible drivel,’ with perhaps no little justification.)43 And yet Middleton ‘meant it to be excessively brilliant: the whole poem is splashed with the garish colors of his attempts at verbal brilliance.’44 This discrepancy between The Wisdom’s self-­assessment and the contempt of modern commentators may have as much to do with the bibliographic history of the works as with Middleton’s own failures in verse. For any knowledge we have of the career of a Renaissance writer has been predetermined by the vagaries of early publication, particularly the appearance of a ‘collected works’ in early print, which allows us to discern patterns and integrate them in our sense of literary history.45 From the biographical summary newly affixed to Thomas Speght’s Workes of Chaucer (1598) through the collections of Jonson and Shakespeare to John Milton’s 1645 Poems, the uneven products of early compiling form the basis for our generalizations about models of writerly aspiration in the period, such as vernacular laureateship or dialectical imitation.46 Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works, available to us only now, almost four hundred years after the fact, confront us with an unfamiliar pattern for a Renaissance literary hopeful. This material context communicates a genre, a formal reliance on techniques of expansion and contrast that echoes from Middleton’s early writing outward to the features of the early book, though it was not as visible when the works were solely available in those disparate small-­format texts. Middleton’s genre of continuation, couched as we will see in a metaphysics, is close kin to the aspirational project of John Lilliat’s book rather than the more familiar projects of writerly self-­introduction in, say, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender or Milton’s ‘Lycidas.’ Illegitimate, perhaps, from a modern critical perspective, Middleton’s early works introduce a Renaissance writer framed not by the fixed, improbable early collected edition, but by the contingency and variety of Renaissance publication–books written on, written in, and turned into new books by the reader.47 The Ghost of Lucrece and The Blacke Booke follow from The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased to reflect, separately in verse and in prose, a project of continuation as self-­ announcement. But intimations of this project were present in advance in Middleton’s antecedent texts. Shakespeare’s Lucrece, on which Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece is patterned, begins with a dedication that playfully invokes the idea of a book without determined boundaries. To his patron Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare writes, ‘The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety.’48 In layers of rhetorical paradox, the text is cast as ­excessive

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in its containment. The dedication overlays a classicizing reference to the medias res of the verse narrative with the bibliographic self-­identification of a ‘pamphlet,’ aligning Lucrece with cheap print and literary works that were customarily unbound.49 As Middleton would, Shakespeare also finds a metaphysical analog to the physicality of the work, establishing his pamphlet as part of a larger ‘love … without end.’ He continues the conceit: ‘Were my worth greater my duty would be greater, meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.’ Adjacent to the infinitely lengthening love owed to the patron, this desired happiness in reading is made to correspond, in the language of dedicatory convention, to the continuation of life. The formal and thematic innovations of Shakespeare’s Lucrece seem also to have lent themselves to Middleton’s approach to sourcework. It is well known that in addition to amplifying the psychological (rather than political) import of the Lucretia story, Shakespeare introduces a moral voice that forms a running contrast with the theologically problematic Roman narrative.50 Just before the rape, for example, as Tarquin is ‘Cooling his hot face in the chastest tears / That ever modest eyes with sorrow shed,’ the speaker of the poem interjects with a passionate plea for a different course of events: ‘O that prone lust should stain so pure a bed, / The spots whereof could weeping purify, / Her tears should drop on them perpetually!’ (ll. 682–686). Lucrece’s persistent internal voice deals in this way in conjecture and alternatives to the poem itself, continually failing to prevent the actors from the inevitable or to imagine a different narrative world compelling enough to become real. This sense of contrast is heightened at the scene of the rape, as the central action of the story out of Livy and Ovid is sublimated to a rhetorically stylized splitting of perspectives, a sudden, sustained alternation between Tarquin (‘He’) and Lucrece (‘She’) as the subject of the poem’s climactic series of sentences: He like a thievish dog creeps sadly thence; She like a wearied lamb lies panting there. He scowls, and hates himself for his offence; She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear. He faintly flies, sweating with guilty fear;   She stays, exclaiming on the direful night.   He runs, and chides his vanished loathed delight. (ll. 736–742)

Shakespeare’s hinge-­like construction underscores the dividedness of the work into two voices and two parts,51 the first of which has been dominated up to this moment by Tarquin. Lucrece’s immediately ensuing soliloquy of over three hundred lines (ll. 747–1078) marks the second part, the title character’s voice, as an aftermath to a tragic event. This play of before and after extends to the resolution of the poem, which arrives with the promise of another episode, as Brutus rouses Collatine from ­mourning, vowing that ‘We will revenge the death of this true wife’ (1841).

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The episode implicitly promised is, of course, Rome’s Republican era. But Middleton seems to have taken Shakespeare’s Brutus rather at his word, building a verse continuation from this more explicit, personal incitement to ‘revenge.’ His Ghost of Lucrece is a dramatic monologue spoken by the dead Lucrece, who is summoned from the afterworld to a theatrical stage in Renaissance London, vowing to ‘haunt and hunt’ Tarquin her assailant (l. 184).52 The long poem is fully realized in the popular Elizabethan mode of female complaint, or ‘ghost complaint.’53 But Middleton establishes a clear connection to Shakespeare’s Lucrece throughout. Like its model, The Ghost of Lucrece subordinates the political allegory and action of the Lucretia story in favour of its psychological drama. Middleton takes up Shakespeare’s dedicatory language of a ‘life still lengthened,’ wishing his would-­be patron Lord Compton ‘the fruit of eternal fruition’ (l. 2) in receiving the book. His poem uses the same antique stanzaic form, rhyme royal, as the antecedent Lucrece. And as Donald Jellerson has demonstrated, Middleton took pains to replicate and develop Shakespeare’s rhetorical style, specifically the figure of ‘cross-­coupling’ or synoeciosis.54 In The Ghost of Lucrece, this figure of contrast is elevated from the level of the sentence to the structure of the work; Middleton yokes together ‘not just “contrary words,” but contrary persons, voices, and times’55 to fashion a poetic afterworld out of the particulars of Shakespeare’s rhetoric. Contrast, contrariety, and binding voices – Middleton also takes up the structural invention of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, the assimilation of a moral voice into the story, so that the Roman events take place with Renaissance commentary. As with synoeciosis, this internal contrast in dialogue form comes to encompass the larger work: Shakespeare’s familiar, persistent interjections seem here to stretch beyond the text of the complaint, taking root in a theatrical ‘Prologue’ and ‘Epilogue’ that frame Lucrece’s speech with that of the poet’s interior persona. Like Shakespeare’s prefatory invocation of a ‘pamphlet’ but here in a dramatic mode, the speaker in The Ghost of Lucrece begins by calling forth the materials of writing: ‘Reach me a quill from the white angels’ wings, / My paper from the Via Lactea, / My ink from Jove’s high nectar-­ flowing springs’ (ll. 30–32). He goes on to conjure the ghost to his ‘pen’s round stage’ (l. 35) and, with the urgency of Lurcece’s moral voice, he establishes a markedly supernatural scene of performance. In list-­form are summoned ‘Sad spirits’ (l. 37) to ‘be … the audience’ and to take their ‘tragic places’ (l. 41); on the other side, ‘Black spirits’ (l. 44) to ‘be … our stage’s actors. Play the cooks’ (l. 50), perversely taking their theatrical ‘parts’ (l. 49), butcher-­like, from Lucrece’s heart. The complaint proper, following the epilogue, draws its beginning from Brutus’s promise of vengeance at the close of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, as the ghost depicts herself ‘sucking revenge’s dugs’ (l. 61), crying out to learn what poet has summoned her from the afterworld, her ‘paradise of death’ (l. 64). Middleton’s work proceeds as both a new verse-­episode and a conspicuous preservation of the antecedent text, incorporating words and lines from Shakespeare – ‘Tarquin from Ardea posts’ (l. 148), the ghost remarks, as if reading her own story out of Lucrece, for example – and narrative

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set pieces that recall in theatrical form the action of Shakespeare’s poem. Middleton’s Lucrece, at one point, conjures the bloody knife from Lucrece to offer the ‘Sad spirits’ of The Ghost’s audience a silent re-­enactment of her suicide (ll. 108–114). This gesture of continuation, of preserving (as a flower gatherer) while also transforming (as a bee), is most pronounced in Middleton’s treatment of Lucrece’s internal speaker. Over the course of the complaint, the moral voice from the prologue interjects, as in Shakespeare, to exhort and conjecture. But in The Ghost of Lucrece, the poet’s internal persona is gradually absorbed such that it becomes both dialogic in the narrative and indistinct from Lucrece herself. Early on, for example, after Lucrece’s dramatic re-­enactment of the suicide, the poet’s voice intervenes to call forth an imagined dumb show: ‘Now enters on the stage of Lucrece’s heart / Black appetites in flamed habilements, / When they have acted all, then they depart’ (ll. 241–243). Immediately following the procession, a new stanza denies the reader the certainty of knowing who is speaking: This is the tragic scene. Bleed heart, weep eyes, Fly soul from body, spirit from my veins. Follow my chastity where’er it lies, Which my unhallowed body now refrains. (ll. 248–251)

By the third line – the reference to ‘my chastity’ – we know we have returned from the dramatic poet’s voice to Lucrece’s. But the initial half-­line, ‘This is the tragic scene’, continues the language of stage direction, drawn in from the poet’s preamble to the dumb show. The remaining half-­line, couched in the imperative – ‘Bleed heart, weep eyes’ – reads as a moment of indeterminacy: perhaps we, the audience of ‘Sad spirits,’ are being directed by the poet; perhaps Lucrece has reassumed the role of speaker; or the poet is speaking to himself in the language of Lucrece’s lament. This is not an either/or exercise. Over the course of The Ghost of Lucrece, the moral speaker becomes entwined with Lucrece, as if Middleton is imagining the assembly of two voices in one textual (after)world. The ghost recalls at length the scene before the rape, for example, as she and her maids ‘Spin merrily’ (l. 318) at Collatium, but the story is interrupted by an aphoristic commentary on the passage from simpler times to the debased age of iron: ‘Those times are waxen bald. A prouder air / Blows in the heaven and breathes upon the earth. / That age is out of date’ (ll. 332–334). In the midst of a sustained confession, we thus shift abruptly to the impersonal voice of a Renaissance proverb, wholly lacking the ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘we’ present in adjacent stanzas. The indeterminacy here – the potential for more than one voice to speak these lines – is echoed later in the poem as Lucrece describes Tarquin’s lust, invoking the same aphorism: ‘This is an iron age. / Our souls, like smiths, with anvils of desire, / Beat on our flesh and still we sparkle fire’ (ll. 364–366). Indeed, the assembly of two voices (or writers) into one book and work becomes a guiding trope in Middleton’s poem. At a midpoint in the text, Lucrece announces

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herself as speaker in the account of Tarquin’s lust – ‘The subject I, and he the ravisher’ (l. 400) – but, immediately following this delineation of roles, the reader is plunged into a scene of writing: ‘O lust, this pen of mine that writes thee “lust” / Lies blasted at the suphur of thy fire. / The quill and feathers, burnt to ashy dust’ (l. 402–404). Though continuing Lucrece’s account, and using her language, the speaker here is undetermined, echoing in equal measure the (written) language of the poet’s interior persona. Modern theatrical readings and the Oxford Collected Works force an either/or decision: the lines are ‘either a temporary refiguring of Lucrece as the epistolary writer of her own lament … or, as in the 1996 Globe production, an interjection in the voice of the poet.’56 But both occur in Middleton’s work. Lucrece has already been figured, more obliquely, as a writer in her spoken narrative of Tarquin’s ‘lust,’ a few lines prior to this moment of indeterminacy: ‘Lo, under that base type of Tarquin’s name / I cipher figures of iniquity’ (ll. 395–396). And in the same sense, a parallel is established in this moment between the ‘quill and feathers, burnt’ and the quill and other writing implements invoked in the poet’s prologue, before Lucrece was called to speak. Middleton’s interior persona, the central intelligence of The Ghost of Lucrece, thus comes to speak and write through the dead Lucrece–Shakespeare’s Lucrece. Middleton’s Lucrece continues, reintroducing the narrative afterworld of Lucrece by writing from the Christian afterworld: ‘[T]o conclude, not able to begin, / I write of that which flesh hath never seen’ (ll. 506–507). The latter part of the poem takes the form of a separate but inseparable document, embedded in the poet’s verse but written by Lucrece. To Tarquin, she ‘send[s] the same, / Intitulèd The Lines of Blood and Flame: / The ghost of Lucrece, that’s the ghost of blood’ (ll. 573–575). The punctuation in this concluding passage, we note, sets off two titles: that of Lucrece’s new-­formed epistle narrative, in italics, and that of the material book that now contains it, The Ghost of Lucrece.57 The lines underscore a structural affinity with the composite Liber Lilliati–an approach to writing that takes place in an existing work, continuing that work’s project in a new space (or in this case, outside of space, from the Christian afterworld). This was not an isolated enterprise for Middleton. The same affinity, we have seen, is evident in his early prose work The Blacke Booke, written shortly after The Ghost of Lucrece as a continuation of Thomas Nashe’s pamphlet Pierce Penniless. At the centre of Middleton’s antecedent text in this instance was an embedded document much like Lucrece’s epistle: ‘To the High and Mighty Prince of Darkness Donzel del Lucifer,’ the supplication sent by Nashe’s Pierce, the suffering writer, to whom The Blacke Booke forms a response.58 The ‘text within’ structure thus seems to have appealed to Middleton not just as epistolary custom but as a template for writing oneself into a world of publication. Turning briefly to The Blacke Booke, we find a programme consistent with Middleton’s early endeavours in continuation and response. As was the case with The Ghost of Lucrece, a notion of text assembly or compilation as writing was present in Middleton’s model for The Blacke Booke in advance. The title page of Pierce Penniless

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announces a work ‘[p]leasantly interlac’t with variable delights: and pathetically intermixt with conceipted reproofes,’59 tortuously attesting to the short pamphlet as com-­posed (in the etymological sense of ‘placed together’). Nashe took care in his dedication to note that this mixture was ‘uncorrected and unfinished’ when first published.60 He comments on the pervasiveness of continuation among some readers of this edition, who audaciously become writers when they ‘go about to frame a second part to it, and offer it to sell in Paul’s Churchyard and elsewhere as from me.’61 Disavowing these attempts, Nashe asserts a tentative claim for a narrative response: ‘I might haps, half a year hence, write the return of the Knight of the Post from hell, with the devil’s answer to the Supplication.’62 As he did with Shakespeare’s Brutus, Middleton took Nashe seriously in his call for continuation. His Blacke Booke draws its title from Nashe’s own beleaguered threat in the epistle to the Supplication: ‘Write who will against me, but let him look his life be without scandal; for if he touch me never so little, I’ll be as good as the Black Book to him and his kindred.’63 Middleton’s book fulfils Nashe’s promise to summon hell to earth in raising Lucifer to answer Pierce’s plea, formulating once again an after-­ story that is a dispatch from the afterlife, as he did in The Ghost of Lucrece. Also like his earlier continuation, The Black Book is structured theatrically, set ‘[a]bove the stage rails of this earthen Globe’ (l. 61) with a prologue and epilogue framing the main action of Lucifer’s speech. But here, Middleton aligns his poet persona with Lucifer, the speaker, himself. The prologue is introduced with a stage direction – ‘Lucifer, ascending as Prologue to his own play’ (l. 38) – that figures the speaker as both director and actor of the theatrical paratext. Lucifer seems to narrate a process of writing as well, transitioning from the prologue to the prose of The Blacke Book with reflexive, poet-­like agency: ‘I’ll turn my shape quite out of verse’ (l. 92). The movement of the work, as in The Ghost of Lucrece, is a mingling and splitting of voices: poet and playwright, narrator and actor. In the last line of the prologue, Lucifer promises ‘[a] standing pension to Pierce Penniless’ (l. 109). Yet in the very next line, at the start of The Blacke Booke’s prose, he cites these words in the passive voice, as if distancing himself from his own speech: ‘No sooner was “Pierce Penniless” breathed forth but I, the light-­burning Sergeant Lucifer, quenched my fiery shape’ (ll. 111–112). The effect is to preserve and mark off the theatrical prologue, while also extending it into the narrative. The prose of the Blacke Booke becomes a commentary–an interaction between Lucifer, the dramatist-­writer, and a text, and a representation of The Blacke Booke itself in microcosm. The Blacke Booke makes explicit the dynamics of continuation and reader interaction that were implicit but central in The Ghost of Lucrece. In the short space of the prologue, Lucifer uses verbs of combination three times to describe his narrative work: ‘joining’ (ll. 42 and 62) and ‘weaving’; ‘For I must weave a thousand ills in one / To please my black and burnt affection’ (ll. 64–65). In this, as he did with Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Middleton recalls and maintains the self-­advertised structure of Nashe’s Pierce, ‘interlac’d’ and ‘intermixt’ in the genre of the moralizing pamphlet. His Blacke Booke

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mingles long digressions on the sins of the age with a narrative of Lucifer’s progress through London, replicating the familiar satirical style of Nashe’s pamphlets.64 But Middleton also re-­inflects the project of Pierce Penniless in extending it. In The Blacke Booke, Lucifer confers on Nashe’s orator persona a new title: ‘Pierce should be called no more Penniless, … but rather Pierce Penny-­fist because his palm shall be pawed with pence’ (ll. 462–464). Granting his wish, Middleton minimizes the satirical moralizing of Nashe’s Pierce and transforms him into a dullard, the object of the satire. In Middleton’s new episode, Lucifer assumes the moral centre, but always as a reader and respondent, ‘[m]oved with the Supplication of poor Pierce, / That writ so rarely villainous from hence’ (ll. 93–94). The centrality of the text – the Supplication and its variations – in Middleton’s repurposing of the story comes to a head when Lucifer finally approaches Pierce sleeping in his quarters. On the bed, Lucifer sees ‘the old copy of his Supplication in foul written hand which my black Knight of the Post conveyed to hell’ (ll. 428–430). As he picks up the manuscript draft of Nashe’s work, the narrative world of the antecedent text is reanimated. ‘[W]ith the rattling and blabbing of the papers’ in Lucifer’s hand, ‘poor Pierce began to stretch and grate his nose against the hard pillow’ (ll. 431–432). His waking is figured as an effect of reading: Lucifer, Middleton’s proxy in his extension of the satire, brings back Nashe’s titular character from death’s sibling, sleep, by taking up the material text. Nashe’s Pierce, we soon find in this episode, is limited in his speech, reduced to a comical type. After a string of satirical commentaries at his expense, The Blacke Booke delivers on the promised patronage from the devil, but in the form of yet another inlaid document, ‘The Last Will and Testament of Lawrence Lucifer’ (l. 590). Like Lucrece’s letter, the will takes up the latter part of the work; it becomes the work. The embedded legal document is marked off typographically as if it were a separate text in a Sammelband (Figure 4.2), distinct from the prose narrative, which is itself embedded, we have seen, in a theatrical frame–a fantasy of texts written in texts that mirrors Middleton’s practice. The epilogue of The Blacke Booke is ‘spoken by the Black Book’ (l. 822), as the text reflexively makes clear in a final stage direction. Middleton’s early reliance on the contingency of publication, on the changing shapes of books at the hands of readers, is underlined in the book’s concluding questions: ‘Do I deserve my dark and pitchy title? … Is not Lucifer liberal to his nephews in his last will and testament?’ (ll. 825–827). The speaking book wryly revokes these thoughts, noting that the reader’s inevitable silence signals that he or she is ‘pleased to agree to all’ (l. 829). But this epilogue draws our attention to the fact that readers were not, in fact, silent in the period–that the composition of books did depend on answers to such questions. Middleton answered and resituated printed works that had become resonant literary events in his Ghost of Lucrece, Blacke Booke, and Wisdom of Solomon Paraphras’d, and these explicit forms of repurposing expressed a broader, implicit (in Middleton’s case, cosmological) flexibility in early habits of the book. In at least one surviving example, an early reader had Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece bound with Shakespeare’s Lucrece, producing a two-­part

Figure 4.2  The conclusion as a compilation of printed documents. Middleton, The Blacke Booke (London, 1604), sigs C1v–C2r (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

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narrative that stands as its own kind of readerly ‘answer’ to the constellation of texts examined here.65 The same is true for The Blacke Booke: at the Bodleian, a copy survives that was bound with a series of epistolary works by a seventeenth-­century reader; another at the Bodleian, formed in the eighteenth century, mixes The Blacke Booke with literary trifles by Robert Armin, Alexander Top, and others.66 A published text in the hand-­press era could be recast and recontextualized; its afterlife, its potential generic and thematic extensions in books, supplied much of its meaning. For Thomas Middleton, in my reading, this contingency of the early book was a means of imagining oneself as a writer among writers. The question remains: how prevalent was continuation as a means of insinuating oneself into a world of print? Was Middleton exemplary of a common practice or unique? On one hand, we sense that he was doing what came naturally in a diverse and unstable culture of publication. In the preface to one of the earliest printed book catalogues in England in the seventeenth century, William London remarks that ‘in this diversity of Books, I must still keep touch with my duty in setting the Book of God above all; This we are all bound to.’67 In this early rationale for bibliographic order, we find an image of one’s book attached to a prior book (punning on ‘bound’) and an analogue to Christian metaphysics which guided three of Middleton’s first works. But, on the other hand, Middleton’s project of continuation seems very much his own, articulated in theatrical terms – Lucrece’s dumb show, Lucifer’s stage directions – that go beyond any such bibliographic convention. The prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597) famously promises ‘two-­hours’ traffic of our stage; / The which if you with patient ears attend, / What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend’ (ll. 12–14). The suggestion is that the work was subject to change at the will of the audience. This is perhaps what attracted Middleton to the theatre even before he wrote for it. For every new performance, like The Ghost of Lucrece and The Blacke Booke, takes up and inevitably alters an event that came before. In another sense, however, the question of Middleton’s exemplarity or uniqueness misses the point. As I have argued throughout this chapter, the organization of ­knowledge – in books, on pages, in collections – sets limits on its comprehensibility. We know formal and rhetorical conventions, the rule of a period and its exceptions, only from the way literature is organized historically in material forms. If Middleton is, as the editors of the Oxford Collected Works proclaim, ‘our other Shakespeare,’68 then we have a new career trajectory – one resistant to long-­held critical categories – to contend with. Notes  1 Gary Taylor, ‘Lives and afterlives’, in Gary Taylor, John Lavagnino et al. (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 25–58.  2 Ibid., p. 52.  3 See Taylor, ‘Lives and afterlives,’ on how Middleton ‘actively exploited the potencies of

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 4

 5  6

 7

 8  9

10 11

12

13

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Forming literature print’ (p. 42). I demur from Taylor’s language of active involvement in using the word ‘enmeshed’ here. For a brief bibliographical account, which also takes issue with Taylor on this point, see Sonia Massai, ‘Invisible Middleton and the bibliographical context’, in Suzanne Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 317–324. These were the Game at Chess and The Witch, produced by the professional scribe Ralph Crane. On these and other surviving Middleton manuscripts see Harold Love, ‘Thomas Middleton: oral culture and manuscript economy’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 98–109, at pp. 106–107. A Game at Chess (London: Nicholas Okes, 1625; STC 17882). I follow Taylor’s bibliographical details on this notoriously complex early text. Honorable Entertainments Compos’de for the Service of this Noble Cittie (London: 1621; STC 17886). Middleton’s involvement in the collection is clear from the signed dedication to his civic patrons: ‘So were they [the entertainments] from the first; their Suite is then, / Once serving you, to be received agen’ (sig. A2v). A notable exception is Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which was printed in gothic type throughout the seventeenth century. On the ideology and context of this choice see Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 46–47, and, more comprehensively, Zachary Lesser, ‘Typographic nostalgia: playreading, popularity and the meanings of black letter’, in Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), pp. 99–126. All quotations from Middleton are from Taylor et al. (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. I cite line numbers for the individual works. John Jowett, ‘For many of your companies: Middleton’s early readers’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 286–330, at p. 312. Taylor et al. (eds), Companion, pp. 350, 350, and 337, respectively. On the instability of early printed books compared to modern ones, and the attendant interpretative implications, see my ‘Curatorial readings: George Herbert’s The Temple, Quintus Curtius, and their context’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 74.4 (2011), 575–598 and ‘Making Shakespeare’s books: assembly and intertextuality in the archives’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60.3 (2009), 304–340. For a foundational discussion of this early culture of Sammelband production, before the emergence of the ‘ready bound edition’, see Paul Needham, The Printer & the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton for the Hospital of St. Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross (Washington: Library of Congress, 1986), p. 17. For a popular example of the latter see John Cotgrave, The English Treasury of Wit and Language collected out of the most, and best of our English drammatick poems (London, 1655; Wing C6368). Taylor notes that Cotgrave ‘quoted more excerpts from plays in the Middleton canon than from any other playwright – but he attributed none of his quotations’ (‘Lives and afterlives’, p. 52). On Middleton’s popularity in the period see Taylor’s opening remarks in ‘Lives and afterlives’, p. 25.

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15 The first book auctions in England were held in 1676, and marked a new incentive for owners to turn earlier print and manuscript works into high-­value collectors’ items, with single texts ‘fixed’ in luxury bindings. On the introduction of mechanized binding technology, which reinforced the fixed boundaries of texts, see David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles 1450–1800: A Handbook (London: British Library, 2004), p. x. 16 These are The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (London, 1597), The Ghost of Lucrece (London, 1599), and The Blacke Booke (London, 1604). The three works from this period of activity that are not explicitly dependent on an already published text are Microcynicon (London, 1599), The Phoenix (London, 1603–4), and Father Hubburd’s Tales (London, 1604). Here and below I follow the bibliographic information supplied in Taylor et al. (eds), Companion. 17 Stanley Wells (ed.), Thomas Nashe: Selected Writings (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), p. 88. I draw my quotations from Pierce Penniless from Wells’s edition throughout. 18 On humanist and vernacular modes of ‘gathering,’ and the differences between them, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-­century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 4n. I discuss imitation in greater detail below. In attempting to locate notions of readerly entitlement in the intertextual makeup of vernacular books (rather than in traditional models), I share many of Heather James’s concerns in Chapter 1 above. 19 For a later example of continuation see Warren L. Oakley, A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers, and the Art of Bodysnatching (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010). My thanks to the editors of this collection for suggestions on this point. 20 We gain a general but imperfect measure of the prevalence of the term by searching full titles on Early English Books Online for ‘continuation’ and its variants (‘continuance’, ‘continued’): 1124 hits in 1037 records before 1650. 21 Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-­Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 361. This ending first appeared in print in the 1593 edition. 22 See, for example, Richard Hodges’s punning distinction, ‘His daily exercise is to exorcise or adjure,’ in The plainest directions for the true-­writing of English (1649), quoted in ‘exorcize / exorcise, v.’, 3, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), online edition. 23 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), chapter 4. Stephen B. Dobranski explores the printed continuations to the Arcadia in Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 2. On Sidney’s legacy in this sense in general see Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 24 Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, p. 8. 25 Ibid. 26 On Montaigne’s revisions, which responded in part to the more capacious margins in later editions of the text, see George Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), chapter 4. Hoffmann speculates that Montaigne’s working copy, now called the ‘Bordeaux Copy,’ was unbound because it would have been an added expense to bind and unbind a text that he desired to use in this way.

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27 The original ends decisively with ‘FINIS,’ a benediction, and an errata list (Richard Brathwaite, Essaies vpon the fiue senses (London, 1620; STC 3566), sigs K3v–K4). The expansion first appears in the 1625 edition of the text, though the title page of the Continuation is misdated 1635. 28 See John Pitcher, ‘Daniel, Samuel (1562/3–1619)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn. 29 Adrienne Rosen, ‘Trussell, John (bap. 1575, d. 1648)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn. 30 Dobranski looks at shorter-­form continuations such as answer poetry alongside the narrative continuations of Sidney (Readers and Authorship, p. 73). See also, on the answer poem, Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 159–164; and E. F. Hart, ‘The answer-­poem of the early seventeenth century’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 7.25 (1956), 19–29. 31 BodL MS Rawl. Poet. 148. For a modern edition of Lilliat’s verse, see Edward Doughtie, Liber Lilliati: Elizabethan Verse and Song (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985). 32 Lilliat was chorister at Wells and Chichester cathedrals. For full biographical details, including a speculative account of his troubles with cathedral authorities, see Doughtie, Liber Lilliati, pp. 24–32. 33 Doughtie notes on pp. 152–153, for example, that Lilliat uses the ‘VV’ type formation in ‘Thomas VVatson’ to compile an acrostic poem, ‘The W bringes double woe,’ which appears in manuscript on a printed page of text (sig. A3v). Doughtie, though attentive to such exchanges throughout his edition, does not include the printed poems of The Hekatompathia in Liber Lilliati: Elizabethan Verse and Song. 34 See my chapter on Liber Lilliati and The Hekatompathia in Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Production of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), chapter 3. 35 See, for example, Neil Rhodes on The Blacke Booke: ‘It is the best of the imitations of Nashe’s grotesque manner.’ Qtd in Taylor et al. (eds), Collected Works, p. 206. Gary Taylor modifies the sentiment, but preserves the assumed hierarchy in describing Middleton as an ‘imitator whose powers of supplementary invention had … been liberally honed’ (ibid., p. 204). The foundational account of imitation in the English Renaissance is Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); G. W. Pigman III offered a comprehensive taxonomy of imitation in his article ‘Versions of imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 1–32. For a critique of the anachronism of imitation theory as it is traditionally applied to Renaissance writing see Stephen Orgel, ‘The Renaissance artist as plagiarist’, English Literary History, 48.3 (1981), 476–495. 36 See Pigman’s conclusions on ‘following’ and ‘transformation’, 32. 37 See Greene, The Light in Troy. Greene argues that Renaissance writers inhabited what he calls a mundus significans, and that the imitating author ‘declares himself [by] extending and violating the mundus’, p. 20. On the problem of interpolating a modern, heroic notion of the individualizing author and subject in Renaissance written culture, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the individual, and the text’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 593–609.

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38 Pigman touches on but glosses over this lack of absolute distinction: ‘A certain amount of transforming occurs by virtue of inclusion in a new context … Consequently one occasionally has difficulty distinguishing following from imitation, in which the note of ­transformation is strong’, 32. 39 Taylor, ‘Lives and afterlives’, 34. 40 Norman Aylsworth Brittin, ‘The Early Career of Thomas Middleton’ (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1946), p. 48. 41 On Middleton’s source text and the important correspondence in the number of verses, see ibid., pp. 53–67. 42 Ibid., p. 67. 43 Quoted in ibid., p. 5. 44 Ibid., p. 6. 45 On the uneven and frequently uncertain appearance of collected editions in the period see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 64–73. 46 On the ‘laureate’ thesis, our other central account of literary aspiration in the period, see Richard Helgerson, Self-­crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). The term ‘dialectical imitation’ is a coinage of Thomas Greene used to describe the heroic, individualizing brand of imitation in his Light in Troy (see pp. 39–41). 47 Even in the new Oxford Collected Works, however, the compilatory early works, The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased and The Ghost of Lucrece, are tucked away in the back of the volume in a section labelled ‘Juvenilia,’ suggesting that even in a new style of collected edition that attempts to preserve and represent the ‘diversity of textual embodiment’ (Taylor, ‘Lives and afterlives’, p. 58) we are still uncomfortable with the idea of a canonical writer ­producing an aesthetically unappealing work (according to modern standards). 48 Quotations from Shakespeare are taken from Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition (New York: Norton, 1997). 49 See the main OED definition: ‘A short printed work of several pages fastened together without a hard cover … Formerly freq. used of short printed literary works (usually unbound).’ (‘Pamphlet, n. 1b’, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), online edn.) 50 For a comprehensive treatment of the Lucretia story and its retellings through the Renaissance, see Ian Donaldson, The Rape of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). On the centrality of the story in Renaissance humanism see Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 51 In underscoring the dividedness of the poem here and in the prefatory material, I share Matthew Zarnowiecki’s concern, in Chapter 2 above, to read Shakespeare through the early compilation. 52 There have been few comprehensive treatments of Thomas Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece. Laura G. Bromley has argued that the work is primarily satirical (see ‘The lost Lucrece: Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece’, Papers on Language and Literature, 21 (1985), 258–274). See Brittin for a summary treatment of rhetoric and style in Ghost, pp. 86–111. Donald Jellerson argues that Middleton develops Shakespeare’s rhetorical program of c­ ross-­coupling in his

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recent ‘Haunted history and the birth of the Republic in Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece’, Criticism, 53.1 (2011), 53–82, which I quote below. 53 The ‘ghost complaint’, in which a female victim of male sexual violence is summoned from the dead to speak, was popularized in the Elizabethan era. The best known example outside of the Lucretia nexus is Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592). 54 Jellerson, ‘Haunted history’, esp. p. 56. 55 Ibid., p. 56. 56 Taylor et al. (eds), The Collected Works, 1995n. 57 The mention of the work’s title ‘The ghost of Lucrece,’ is syntactically linked to the rest of the sentence and the parallel ‘The ghost of Tarquin, that’s the fiery flood’ (l. 576). 58 Wells (ed.), Pierce Penniless, p. 31. 59 Ibid., p. 21. 60 Ibid., p. 24. The epistle was first printed in the second edition of Pierce Penniless. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., p. 25. 64 See, for example, the long parenthetical digression, ll. 242–286, which Middleton’s Lucifer calls ‘a pretty conceit,’ drawing language from Nashe’s title page. 65 Folger STC 17885.5 Bd.w. STC 22341.8. The two texts are bound with two other Shakespearean books. See my brief comments in ‘Making Shakespeare’s books’, pp. 328– 330. 66 These are, respectively, Wood 616 (4), compiled by the Bodleian collector and librarian Anthony Wood, and Mal. 640 (3), formed by the Shakespearean editor and critic Edmund Malone. 67 A catalogue of the most vendible books in England (London, 1657; Wing L2849), sig. F3v. 68 Taylor, ‘Lives and afterlives’, 58.

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Part II

Translations

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5

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Greek playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England Tanya Pollard

I

n the late sixteenth century, as theatrical performances took on new prominence in English schools and universities, and expanded into the new spaces of commercial playhouses, playwrights began to write in new dramatic forms. In particular, the classical dramatic genres of tragedy and comedy quickly became staples of the theatre, reshaping the earlier forms they both accommodated and absorbed. Writers’ self-­ conscious attention to the conventions and effects of these new genres was a crucial force in shaping the emerging theatre. How did this happen? Where did playwrights find these forms, and what inspired the lively debates that sprang up around these genres in the period? Critics have long acknowledged the role of Latin plays in shaping the period’s theatre.1 Yet, in order to understand the development of its dramatic forms, we need to take seriously the period’s engagement with the Greek dramatic tradition in which these forms began, and with which they were persistently identified. Widely perceived by early modern writers as keys unlocking a previously inaccessible realm of theatrical origins and authority, Greek plays and their commentaries took on a crucial role in shaping conversations about the nature of dramatic forms, and accordingly in inspiring playwrights’ approaches to them. It is a long-­standing critical commonplace that early modern English playwrights could not have been familiar with Greek drama, and recent preferences for situating the period’s theatre in contemporary rather than diachronic contexts have discouraged challenges to this assumption.2 Even the occasional wistful musings on Shakespeare’s affinity with the Greeks have typically conceded a lack of historic grounding for any apparent kinship.3 More recently, however, scholars have begun to identify specific links between early modern English drama and Greek plays, and to trace forms of transmission and mediation that offered points of contact between them.4 Yet, even in the light of these findings, privileging content over form has continued to limit our understanding of the impact of Greek drama in the period. I argue in this chapter that, although Latin plays appeared more frequently in print and performance, early modern writers habitually turned to Greek playwrights, conventions, terms, and even orthography when theorizing dramatic forms, and that these discussions about form in turn shaped playwrights’ senses of genres’ functions and possibilities. I also argue that the popular identification of comedy and tragedy with Greek origins had its origin in

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100 Translations specific historical causes, and especially in material, textual forms. Although Greek plays made their way through and beyond antiquity in papyri and then codices, their sixteenth-­century emergence in printed editions brought them a new visibility that inspired substantial changes in ideas about theatre.5 Despite many similarities to their Latin counterparts, these editions were distinguished by their necessarily extensive and heavily mediated attention to translation, their explorations of the Greek roots of generic conventions, and their rhetoric of loss and recovery, all of which encouraged specific approaches to reading, writing, and printing plays. This chapter, then, argues not only that Greek plays had a significant presence in early modern England but that the textual forms of their printed editions, combined with these editions’ self-­ conscious interest in dramatic forms, spurred the conceptualization and development of dramatic genres in the period. Understanding the impact of these plays requires rethinking our categories of form, and taking seriously the intersections between the material forms of printed texts, the conceptual forms of dramatic genres, and the embodied forms of the theatrical performances they inspired.6 Printing and reading Greek plays Despite their near-­invisibility in English literary scholarship, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were something of a phenomenon in sixteenth-­ century continental Europe. The printing of Greek plays started in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, in response to excitement over growing access to Greek manuscripts and the Greek language brought by Byzantine scholars leaving Constantinople for the West.7 In 1495, a Florentine press brought out an edition of four plays by Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, and Andromeda. Soon after, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius published editions of Aristophanes in 1498, Sophocles in 1502, Euripides in 1503, and Aeschylus in 1518, and other presses quickly followed suit. By 1600, there were at least 220 editions of these authors printed in Europe, of which at least 28 were translations into vernacular European languages. Although English engagement with Greek texts did not match that of the Continent, the English market in Continental Greek and Latin books was substantial. Books were imported into London across the channel from France or down the Rhine from Basel and German cities through the Low Countries, and sold at considerable profit through the London book trade.8 Inventories of private libraries in Renaissance England show that books printed on the Continent sometimes constituted 80 to 90 per cent of individuals’ collections, and Greek plays featured regularly among them.9 Elisabeth Leedham-­Green has listed 127 Greek, Latin, or parallel-­text editions of Greek plays in inventories from sixteenth-­century Cambridge (56 by Euripides, 36 by Sophocles, 29 by Aristophanes, four by Aeschylus, and two collections of tragedies),10 and Robert Fehrenbach and Leedham-­Green show 50 editions in inventories from sixteenth-­century Oxford (19 of Euripides, 15 of Sophocles, 14 of Aristophanes and two of Aeschylus).11 The market for Greek books was substantial enough to make an

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impact on English printers as well; although Continental presses had greater experience and craftsmanship at printing Greek, English presses produced dozens of classical texts in Greek in England during Elizabeth’s reign, including a 1575 edition of Euripides’ Trojan Women by the controversial London printer John Day, and a 1593 Aristophanes’ Knights by Oxford printer Joseph Barnes.12 Similarly, although translations from the Greek were fewer in England than on the Continent, Jane, Lady Lumley translated Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (ca. 1550–53), George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh produced a version of Euripides’ The Phoenician Women titled Jocasta (1566), and Thomas Watson made a Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone (1582).13 Greek plays appear in curricula at Oxford and Cambridge and, to a lesser extent, grammar schools, as well as in references in English books; a search on Early English Books Online before 1600 yields 420 references to Euripides, 291 to Sophocles, and 156 to Aristophanes; before 1642, the numbers more than double, to 1,000 references to Euripides, 689 to Sophocles, and 442 to Aristophanes, testifying that these playwrights were subjects of discussion.14 With a substantial presence in English libraries, curricula, and writings, the printed texts of Greek plays were neither invisible nor inconsequential in sixteenth-­century England. But what might readers have learned from these books? The textual forms that came to frame Greek plays in the sixteenth century provide information about the plays’ origins, associations, audiences, and uses. Most important, they provide templates for, and commentaries on, the dramatic genres that would come to shape the theatre. This chapter examines several aspects of these editions’ formal strategies: forms of translation, forms of paratext, and especially forms of genre theory, in which writers detailed and defined the dramatic types and conventions encompassed in these books. All of these forms, I will argue, played a crucial role in introducing and defining Greek dramatic forms to sixteenth-­century readers and writers. Forms of translation Because their relative linguistic inaccessibility was one of the most striking hallmarks of Greek plays, the translations that frequently accompanied them played an important role in shaping their reception by readers. Although critics have emphasized how infrequently Greek plays were translated into English, it is worth reminding that they were frequently translated into Latin, as well as vernacular European languages. The first editions of the plays in the 1490s were entirely in Greek, but Latin translations began to appear from 1506, and Greek–Latin bilingual editions quickly became especially popular. Latin plays frequently appeared in bilingual editions as well, but those texts juxtaposed Latin with a local vernacular language, whereas Greek was typically juxtaposed directly with Latin, offering an additional level of mediation through a second ancient language.15 The proliferation of Greek–Latin texts played an important role in providing access to the plays for readers with little or no Greek, and the forms of these translations played an active role in shaping readings of the plays and their genres.

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102 Translations The most standard Greek–Latin form consisted of facing pages. This was the original format of the first and most influential translation of Greek drama, Erasmus’s Latin version of Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis, which was first published in 1506 and frequently reprinted throughout the sixteenth century (see Figure 5.1). The text was especially visible in England, as Erasmus carried out much of the translation there and dedicated it to his English patron William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury.16 Printing the Latin translation directly across from the same lines in Greek graphically enacted Erasmus’s preoccupation with promoting the study of Greek, and implicitly presented Latin as a gateway language.17 By enabling readers to identify corresponding words in the two languages, the edition offered help both to readers reasonably competent in Greek, who could read the Greek with occasional reference to the Latin when necessary, and those with little or no Greek, who could read the Latin and gradually identify Greek words. Editions featuring two vertical columns of text, one in Greek and one in Latin, had similar functions. This format is rarer in drama than in prose, but works well with the larger pages of folio editions We can see the format in this 1607 edition of Aristophanes’ plays, edited by Edouard Bizet de Charlais and published in Geneva, through the characteristically extensive commentary below threatens to crowd out the columns of play-­text themselves (see Figure 5.2).18 Both forms of parallel translation encouraged a growing understanding of the Greek language by facilitating an easy reversion to the more familiar Latin, and copies of these editions demonstrate that readers engaged with the text in both languages. Annotations in Euripides’ Hecuba, pictured here, show underlining sometimes primarily in the Greek, sometimes primarily in the Latin, and sometimes ­simultaneously in both.19 At times printing conventions and translation work together in shaping interpretations, as with the commonplace marks printed in this edition of Hecuba. As the first translation of a Greek tragedy (which went on to become the Greek play most frequently printed and translated in the sixteenth century), Erasmus’s Hecuba offered a prominent exemplar of the genre, and singling out key lines for commonplacing lent them additional weightiness.20 In these lines, just after Hecuba has learned that her daughter will be sacrificed to honour Achilles’ tomb, Odysseus counsels her to accept her lot without protest. Yet where the Greek offers an imperative directed specifically to Hecuba and her suffering – ‘Know [gi´ gnwske] your strength, and the nature of your troubles’ – Erasmus’s Latin translation offers a curiously detached third person formula.21 ‘One thing is certainly known [Scitum est profecto quiddam],’ he proclaims, ‘that even in the midst of trouble, each man knows in himself those things which are necessary to know [et in mediis malis Ea quemque secum sapere, quae sapere est opus]’. Erasmus’s gnomic formulation self-­consciously imbues Odysseus’s words with the authority of a sententia, reinforced by the commonplace marks that single out the lines for particular attention.22 As a decontextualized aphorism, this phrase suggests that the play – and, by extension, the genre of tragedy – advocates a stoic philosophy of acceptance and personal resourcefulness. The fact that the play

Figure 5.1  Euripidis tragoediae duae Hecuba & Iphigenia in Aulide (Basel, 1524), sigs B8v–C1r (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

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104 Translations

Figure 5.2  Aristophanis comoediae undecim cum scholiis antiquis (Geneva, 1607), sig. A1r (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

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itself does not necessarily endorse Odysseus or his counsel highlights the extent to which translation and editing intervene in constructing not only a particular reading of the play but a particular model of the genre’s moral lessons. Other forms of translation offered different strategies for shaping readers’ understandings of meaning and genre. Interlinear printing followed each line in Greek directly by its Latin translation, encouraging readers to pause and consider the individual line and its translated meaning before moving on to the next. Similarly, interpassage translations printed a passage of Greek, followed by a passage of Latin translation, and typically then followed by commentary in Latin; both forms direct readers to pore over one section of the text at a time, calling attention to specific formal details. The close focus these editions encourage suggest that they were intended especially for pedagogical use, explaining not only the language but the play’s literary constructions. This is the form taken by a 1549 edition of Aristophanes’ Plutus (see Figure 5.3) – the most frequently printed and translated of Aristophanes’ plays in the period – edited and translated by Charles Girard, a Paris-­based Greek scholar who also wrote books about teaching Greek.23 Girard not only follows each passage of Greek immediately with a Latin translation but offers extensive marginal glosses singling out important words and phrases, and Latin commentaries including definitions, explanations, syntax, and even literary interpretation. For instance, on a grammatical level, Girard explains that ‘kai » m’ – ‘and me’ – is ‘me, accusatiuus pro datiuo moi Atticè positus’ – that is, ‘the accusative “me” is put in place of the dative “moi” in the Attic manner’ (78). ~sai is the impera(See Figure 5.3.) Similarly, he notes, on the lower right, that pau tive of pau´ omai, and that keklofw` ß is the Attic participle from kle´ ptw, explaining not only the Greek syntax but the distinctiveness of the play’s Attic dialect (79). More interestingly, he analyses literary implications: he explains that ὦ ’gaq’ is a contraction of ὦ a˙gaqe » – ‘oh good man’ – and goes on to note that ‘this [i.e., ‘good’] has irony, for ~,a Greek word we knows where Chremylus’s money comes from’. He also glosses feu of lament often found in tragedy – ‘alas’ – by noting that ‘this usage has mockery, with admiration’ (79). His translation, then, not only presents the play in a more recognisable Latin version but interprets its linguistic and literary nuances, implicitly defining Aristophanic comedy as a genre rooted in contemporary speech, and satiric in tone. Both commonplace marks and segmented forms of translation present the decontextualized passage, sentence, or phrase as a microcosm in which to explore the verbal strategies underpinning plays’ generic forms, privileging the individual sentence in ways that we come to see in commonplace books, as Heather James discusses in Chapter 1 above.24 As Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass have shown, classical plays were the cradle of the commonplacing industry, with printed commonplace markers first appearing ‘in the most prestigious plays in the most prestigious languages,’ including the Euripides edition discussed and pictured above.25 The heightened linguistic inaccessibility of Greek plays, and their elaborate forms of translation and mediation, lent themselves to a particular emphasis on individual phrases and sentences. Accordingly, as these plays inspired models for early modern imitations – first

Figure 5.3  Aristophanis Plutus (Paris, 1549), pp. 78–79 (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

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translations, then academic humanist plays, and eventually plays written for the com­ mercial theatre – this distinctive emphasis on identifying and examining sententiae similarly offered a model for approaches to reading and commonplacing English plays as well. Paradoxically, close attention to the forms of individual lines offered a crucial route to conceptualizing the broader forms of the plays’ dramatic genres.

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Forms of paratext Detailed editorial interventions such as Girard’s point to the ways that translations at times overlapped with the paratexts accompanying the plays.26 After translations themselves, marginal glosses and commentaries were the first elements of an expanding textual apparatus that came to frame and define the plays for their readers. Sonia Massai has argued of early modern printed plays that ‘more familiar types of theatrical paratexts, such as prologues, epilogues, presenters and choruses … were certainly not detachable’ from plays themselves, raising the question of the extent to which any paratext is ever actually outside of the text.27 Rather than understanding paratext as marginal, she emphasizes, we should ‘conceive of it as metatext, or, more simply and more radically, as text’.28 As her observations suggest, prefatory materials and annotations in these editions in effect became part of the body of Greek drama, and especially part of its early modern legacy. The earliest printed editions of Greek plays were spare compared to later versions, but their forms and minimal supporting materials quickly came to constitute a pattern that emphasized key elements of their contents. The very first edition of Greek drama, published in Florence in 1495, introduces the plays in the manner that became standard: each is preceded by a hypothesis (u˚po´ qesiß) or argument, and a list of dramatis personae (ta´ to~ u dra´ matoß pro´ sopa) or the characters of the play.29 These conventions serve similar functions: character lists act as a shorthand code for prioritizing and representing the play’s demographics, just as the hypothesis highlights, prioritizes, and communicates elements of the play’s plot, giving it particular authority for anyone who does not read the play in its entirety.30 Renaissance editors exploited the form’s deictic possibilities; in his 1562 argument for Euripides’ Orestes, the scholar Gasparus Stiblinus (Caspar Stiblin) insists that ‘the amazing representation of events and characters and the variety of emotions in this narrative must be noticed.’31 In the guise of summarizing, Stiblinus shapes readers’ expectations, and identifies the tragedy’s emotional impact as its primary achievement. Like translations and their commentaries, arguments directed readers’ attention to literary strategies and their consequences for understanding the plays’ goals. In the 1503 Aldine Press editio princeps of Euripides’ complete works, the minimal paratexts of 1490s editions were joined by more framing elements: a series of Greek epigrams on Euripides; a Greek synopsis of the poet’s life; emblems identifying the publisher; and a Latin prefatory letter dedicated to the Greek scholar Demetrius Chalcondylus (1424–1511). While the epigrams and biography serve to promote

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108 Translations and define the playwright, and the emblems advertise the particular publisher, the letter reflects directly on the plays’ significance. Not only does Aldus emphasize the edition’s scholarly integrity by appealing to a noted authority but he introduces two of the important themes that recur throughout early prefaces to Greek texts: the pathos of loss and the urgency of restoration. In contrast with Latin plays, which had never disappeared from circulation, Greek plays were prominently identified with the romance of recovery. Aldus’s letter opens this edition by lamenting the disappearance of the writings of ancient Athens, and in particular the destruction of the library in Alexandria by fire, an iconic event frequently discussed in prefatory texts.32 Chalcondylus himself comes to signal both this loss and its recovery: the letter claims that he will join in lamenting this calamity, and that he represents Athens through his learning. The Alexandrian fire, here as in other editions, acquires the poignance of the exile from Eden; before it, classical plays and their meanings were blissfully within reach, but since then readers are beset with labour, strife, and unfulfillable longing. This rhetoric of hope and sorrow framed the plays with a prelapsarian authority, and elevated those working to restore and transmit them. As prefatory letters multiplied, their emphasis expanded from the plays’ glory to their specific uses and lessons. A letter to the reader in a 1537 edition of Euripides’ plays, from the volume’s printer Joannes Hervagius (Johann Herwagen), points to the plays’ perceived pedagogical importance. Hervagius notes that he has added commentary to help instruct readers because the plays of Euripides – considered the most important of the tragedians – are required reading in public schools.33 Other texts celebrated their new access to lost linguistic and literary worlds. In a dedicatory poem to Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, published with his 1581 Latin translation of Antigone, Thomas Watson crowed, ‘I seized Sophocles. I taught the Muses to become soft. / I fashioned Latin meters for Greek measures … I taught Antigone to speak Latin words.’34 Watson’s imagined seminar with the muses turns translation into a pedagogical and dialogic act even prior to reaching readers. Perhaps most suggestively, the prefatory letters, translations, and annotations that became important parts of printed play texts were eventually joined by interpretative prefaces to the plays themselves. A 1562 edition of Euripides’ works published in Basel by the humanist printer Johannes Oporinus (Johann Herbst) added lengthy individual prefaces by Stiblinus, notable for the detail in which they explore the plays’ effects on audiences. In contrast to Erasmus’s emphasis on Odysseus’s words of restraint, Stiblinus notes that he places Hecuba first among Euripides’ plays because of the variety of its plot, its tragic atrocities, and its portrait of the instability and blindness of human affairs. ‘Whom,’ Stiblinus asks, ‘would the play not move?’35 His question recalls rising contemporary interest in Aristotle’s newly published Poetics, with its attention to plays’ effects on audiences’ emotions, as well as Plato’s writings about the contagious effects of literature on audiences.36 Also like Aristotle, he finds plays superior to philosophy, since ‘people’s minds cannot take in what philosophers tell them, but horrible images of things affect people’s souls more effectively.’37 Similarly, he finds that

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the ‘regular and attentive meditation on these images’ is more powerful than reading, evoking contemporary debates about theatre’s privileged access to the senses.38 The theatre’s lessons are political as well: again in contrast with Erasmus’s apparent approbation, he suggests that Odysseus’s glib rhetoric in Hecuba shows the difference between flattering the multitude and conveying what is just and advantageous for the republic.39 In his claims about plays’ emotional, moral, pedagogical, and political consequences, Stiblinus’s arguments anticipate the mainstays of much English literary theory, including Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (published 1595 but written ca. 1579), and could have influenced them directly. We cannot say with confidence which edition(s) of Euripides Sidney read, but his detailed references suggest familiarity, and he could have known Stiblinus’s treatises.40 Although it is hard to pinpoint which other English writers might have read Stiblinus, his edition’s appearance in an inventory of texts bought for St Paul’s School in 1582–83 suggests that it had some visibility among English readers and writers.41 As Stiblinus’s resonances in English genre theory suggest, the paratextual structures that emerged in these editions not only shaped the plays’ reception but established models for English plays and literary criticism as well. Elements such as dedicatory epistles, letters to the reader, epigrams, scholarly commentaries, treatises on genre, hypotheses or arguments of the plays, and dramatis personae lists all came to serve as models for later forms of publishing plays.42 Not only did academic plays, such as Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc, and Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta, include these elements in their own printed edition but, beginning especially with Ben Jonson’s 1605 quarto of Sejanus, commercial plays began adopting them as well.43 These paratextual elements continued to construct interpretations of the plays, and also took on new roles; playwrights such as Jonson used prefatory letters to expound their own views of the theatre, and, as Tiffany Stern has shown, arguments for plays were distributed at performances as proto-­programmes, mediating between stage and page.44 Writers’ and printers’ strategies for adapting these structures offer distinctive examples of the ways that printed forms came to shape the development of early modern theatre. Defining dramatic forms Forms of translation and commentary shaped readers’ understandings of Greek plays’ meanings and effects on audiences, then, but these editions contributed most directly to the period’s ideas about dramatic forms in the literary treatises that were regularly appended to them. These treatises took part in broader contemporary conversations about the nature of literary genres, conversations that were not only represented in playbooks but actively catalysed by them. The sixteenth century saw a surge of writings about genre in Europe and especially Italy, including but not limited to translations of, and commentaries on, Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as Aristotelian treatises on genres. Scholars have generally attributed the period’s literary debates to the p­ ublication of

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110 Translations Aristotle’s Poetics, but Daniel Javitch has persuasively argued that attention to Aristotle was a consequence of rising interest in Greek genres, rather than its cause.45 Writers turned to Aristotle, he shows, because they wanted to make modern versions of the new and popular Greek genres. Unlike Horace, Aristotle offered specific practical guidelines for writing plays, parsing the minutiae of structures and conventions to create templates for those who would compose versions of the genres. Equally important, his emphasis on measuring plays’ success through the intensity of the emotional responses they created in audiences (both pleasure and the cathartic effects of pity and fear) offered a recipe for drama with wide popular appeal.46 Although sixteenth-­century conversations about genre did not draw exclusively on Aristotle, the emergence of Aristotle’s ideas about structure and audience shaped the period’s treatises on dramatic form in crucial ways. The rise in publishing Greek plays and debating dramatic genres coincides with the change that Frederick S. Boas has noted in the terms referring to performances in English college account books, from ‘ludus’ or ‘lusores’ (‘games’) in 1485, 1587, and 1495, to ‘interludia’ (‘interludes’) in 1502, 1512, and 1531, to the Greek generic terms ‘comedia’ and ‘tragedia’ in 1535, 1539, 1540, 1541, and 1544.47 Similarly, whether in Latin, Italian, or English, Renaissance literary treatises employed an explicitly Greek vocabulary – tragedy, comedy, chorus, prologue, epilogue, protasis, epitasis, catastrophe – in analysing dramatic genres and their conventions, frequently printing these key terms in actual Greek letters, and self-­consciously attending to their etymologies. Accordingly, these editions played a significant role in constructing popular identification of dramatic genres with their Greek origins. Treatises on genre appended to Greek plays drew freely on earlier commentaries, especially the much-­circulated ‘De tragoedia et comoedia,’ which conflated two late classical essays: ‘De fabula’ of Evanthius and ‘De comedia’ of Donatus.48 Although both authors wrote in the fourth century, and the essay circulated primarily in editions of Terence, the essay’s firm identification of comedy and tragedy with Greek origins promoted the quintessentially Greek nature of these genres.49 Like most early essays on dramatic genres, the treatise postulates the etymological origin of tragedy aÓpo` to~ u tra´ gou, or from ‘tragos’ (goat), and of comedy aÓpo` to~ u koma´ zein, from ‘komazein’ (to revel), emphasizing their linguistic and ritual origins in Greece.50 It goes on to identify these genres’ origins with specific Greek writers, asserting that ‘Thespis is thought to be the inventor of tragedy by those who study ancient history. And Eupolis, along with Cratinus and Aristophanes, is thought to be the father of old comedy.’51 Even in a text several removes from classical Greek sources, then, the origins of dramatic genres are explicitly identified with the ancient Greek world, language, and orthography. The essay, which was frequently reprinted and cited in the sixteenth century, played an important role in disseminating the idea that Greek antiquity was the authoritative source of comedy and tragedy. ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’ remained popular, but, in a more important development, humanist scholars began writing their own treatises on genre, some of which

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were printed with Greek plays. In contrast with earlier commentaries, these treatises show specific responses to Aristotle’s Poetics in their attention to both the structural conventions of dramatic forms and their consequences for audiences’ emotional responses. The essay ‘De tragoedia’ by Benedictus Philologus (Benedetto Ricardini), printed in a 1506 collection of Seneca’s plays bound with a 1507 edition of Erasmus’s Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis, offers insights into the evolution of early modern ideas about dramatic forms. Like many such treatises in the period, the essay maintains close ties to earlier literary theory through the rhetorical strategy of cento, a verbal collage of quotations that drew authority from its reconstruction of earlier authorities.52 Philologus begins his discussion by reproducing a line from the Ars grammatica of Diomedes, defining tragedy as ‘a lofty form of poem’ that dramatizes ‘heroic fortune in adversities’.53 His second sentence reproduces Donatus’ and Evanthius’s etymology of tragedy ‘aÓpo` to~ u tra´ gou,’ and, shortly thereafter, he paraphrases the treatise’s most famous line: ‘In tragedy things are tranquil at the beginning and turbulent later; it is the opposite in comedy.’54 Yet Philologus departs from these late antique grammarians by juxtaposing their claims with borrowings from the Poetics, such as Aristotle’s six elements of tragedy (‘plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and music’).55 In particular, he echoes Aristotle in his strong emphasis on the emotional force at the core of tragedy. Ultimately, he asserts, ‘tragedy is nothing more than a poem about suffering.’56 The prominent place of Aristotle in his pastiche of poetic authorities suggest that emerging interest in the Poetics was already shaping discussions of genre, even at this very early stage in the text’s circulation. Even more than Philologus’s treatise, Jacobus Micyllus’s ‘De tragoedia et eius partibus prolegÓmena’ (A Prologue on Tragedy and Its Parts), published in Stiblinus’s 1562 Euripides edition, draws on the Poetics in exploring structural conventions specific to tragedy. Micyllus (Jakob Moltzer, 1503–58), a German Renaissance humanist, studied with Melanchthon, directed the Latin school in Frankfurt, and ultimately became a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He explicitly refers to Aristotle in his definition of tragedy, which he identifies as ‘an imitation of weighty and momentous matters.’57 In his discussion of the ‘Partes tragoediae’, moreover, he uses terms coined by Aristotle, such as prologue, episode, exode, and choral ode, and prints these terms in Greek letters, like those used in the treatise’s title.58 He comments at length on the contribution each of these components makes to the play, as well as on the relationship between the chorus and the plays’ acts more broadly. Tragedies, he shows, are defined not simply by a general movement from happiness to unhappiness but by particular structural arrangements that juxtapose individual and group speeches in order to build towards a specific conflict and then unravel and reflect upon it. Micyllus’s and Philologus’s explorations of how tragic conventions can heighten emotional impact resonate with early modern interest in tragedies’ affective consequences. The topic lay at the heart of contemporary debates about the theatre: antitheatrical writers such as Stephen Gosson deplored tragedies’ ability to unleash and intensify passions, while defenders such as Philip Sidney and Thomas Heywood

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112 Translations described this emotional impact as crucial to plays’ moral and didactic power.59 More surprisingly, conversations about the nature of plays’ affective power spilled over from theoretical accounts into plays themselves. As Matthew Steggle has shown, early modern playwrights frequently use framing devices such as prologues, epilogues, and choruses, as well as stagings of plays-­within-­the-­play, to voice the idea that tragedies should make their hearers weep, and comedies should make their hearers laugh.60 Even more strikingly, these moments occasionally hint at an awareness of their links to a Greek dramatic legacy. When a player’s performance-­induced tears lead Hamlet to reflect on tragedy’s emotional power over audiences, his leading question – ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’ – singles out the protagonist of the period’s most prominent and prestigious Greek tragedy.61 These and other treatises on tragedy point to crucial developments in the period’s genre theory in general, and to specific implications for English ideas about the theatre’s functions in particular. Yet we can see even more specific analysis and practical resonance in a treatise by Nicodemus Frischlin (1547–90), a humanist scholar and Neo-­Latin playwright who edited and translated the plays of Aristophanes. Frischlin’s ‘De veteri Comoedia eiusque partibus’ (‘On old comedy and its parts’), first printed in 1586 in his frequently reprinted Greek–Latin edition of Aristophanes’ plays, deliberately echoes Micyllus’s treatise in his title, as well as in his emphasis on form, but introduces several important innovations to treatises on genre. First, by carefully distinguishing the satiric and topical Old Comedy of Aristophanes from the New Comedy of Terence and Plautus, Frischlin established a foundation for contemporary analysis of the much-­dismissed older genre. Second, by closely examining the structures of Aristophanes’ plays, he identified and promoted an important Greek-­identified subgenre – comedy with a mixed or unhappy ending – that would become especially visible and influential, if controversial, in early modern England. Third, by approvingly noting Aristophanes’ engagement with contemporary social issues, he explicitly makes a case for comedy as a form of contemporary social and political commentary, a project which he took seriously in his own plays and which, I suggest – especially through Ben Jonson – came to offer a model for the contemporary urban emphasis of London city comedy.62 Even more than Micyllus, Frischlin departs from the general thematic and structural approach to genre familiar from earlier treatises. Frischlin begins by forcefully proclaiming that topics such as the origins of comedy, its founders, and the differences between comedy and tragedy are now superfluous, because anyone who is not ignorant and inexperienced in letters is already familiar with them.63 Instead, he explains, he will focus on defining Old Comedy, in contrast with New Comedy, by discussing its time period, subject matter, diction, metre, and sections. He firmly contrasts Old Comedy’s historical moment ‘in the times of the Peloponnesian war’ with the much later flourishing of New Comedy, and notes the difference between the people and subjects they depict (historical versus invented), and their language (less moderated versus more pure and elegant).64 Unlike New Comedy, which is composed of an

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argument, a prologue, and acts, Old Comedy is divided into acts and choruses. There are also stages of the dramatic action (protasis, epitasis, catastasis, and catastrophe), which each fulfil specific functions, and choruses similarly are divided into commatio, parabasis, ode or strophe, epirrhema, antode, antistrophe, and antepirrhema. Unlike Micyllus, who took his terminology directly from Aristotle, Frischlin expands on Aristotle’s terminology by turning to that of his contemporary critic Julius Caesar Scaliger; he also cites Micyllus himself.65 His structural analysis, then, represents a second stage of responses to Aristotle: the vocabulary is acquiring its own contemporary additions, distinctions, and debates. Frischlin’s treatise is valuable not only because of its highly self-­conscious attention to details of Greek-­inspired generic conventions but also because it suggests direct influences on English conceptions of comedy. Frischlin distinguishes Old Comedy from New in part by its willingness to name real people: ‘Old Comedy presents true events and deeds and true people in the theatre. The New Comedy invents people.’66 As Steggle has noted, the representation of real people in city comedy was a matter of lively debate and scandal in the early modern period, and contemporary playwrights and critics alike explicitly identified its practice with Aristophanes; I would add that the genre’s detailed depictions of contemporary London can be seen as gesturing to Old Comedy as well.67 Frischlin implicitly links these features with comedy’s political impact, which he discusses explicitly in his prefatory materials: ‘Aristophanes … with great freedom, introduced seditious and troublesome men onto the stage, criticising them by name; and he inveighed vehemently against the dissensions of the leading men of the state.’68 According to Frischlin, Old Comedy’s superiority to New Comedy lay especially in Aristophanes’ ability to provide political wisdom as well as pleasure: ‘Our poet had the goal to stir spectators who were overcome by laughter, and of admonishing them concerning wise ideas and advice hidden in the comedy. He prepared them, as it were, for improving the state as well as their own practices’.69 Aristophanes, then, offers a model for exploiting the disarming power of humour in order to make spectators susceptible to arguments about how best to govern both themselves and the state. Frischlin also suggests a specific structural legacy. In discussing the kinds of action, diction, movement, and metre that characterize the stages of the dramatic action, he notes that ‘the catastrophe [ending] contains unexpected plans and events, and it could be happy or sad or both.’70 These lines are underlined in the 1586 edition at the Bodleian library in Oxford, demonstrating that at least one early reader found this idea noteworthy.71 In fact, the mixed endings of many early modern English comedies written for the popular stage suggest a likely afterlife for Frischlin’s account of Aristophanic authority. Most conspicuously, Frischlin’s claim anticipates the dark ending of Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607), which Jonson defended through reference to classical drama. Noting that his ‘Catastrophe may, in the strict rigour of Comick Law, meete with censure,’ he pointed out that it followed ‘some lines of example drawne even in the Antients themselves, the goings out of whose Comoedies are not always joyfull.’72 Although he refers to ‘ancients’ in general, the mixed or unhappy comic

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114 Translations ending was distinctly rooted in Aristophanes’ Old Comedy, and Jonson owned an Aristophanes edition that included Frischlin’s prefatory materials.73 And although Jonson was unusually self-­conscious about the theory undergirding his theatrical practice, his contemporaries also crafted comedies with unhappy or mixed comic endings. Viola and Orsino may be happily in love at the end of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, but a deceived and tortured Malvolio ends the play shouting ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,’ and the double nuptials in Much Ado About Nothing are juxtaposed with the deferred punishment of the sinister Don John.74 Viewed in the context of Frischlin’s treatise and Jonson’s comments, the sharpness of these endings suggests playwrights’ awareness of emerging ideas about the satiric, and sometimes punitive, possibilities of the comic genre. Just as Frischlin’s 1586 treatise finds Greek literary authority for comedy with an unhappy ending, a 1605 edition of Euripides’ Cyclops does the same for its mirror image, tragedy with a happy ending. The play, translated by Florent Chrestien, was printed as an appendix to a treatise on satire (De satyrica Graecorum poesi & Romanorum satira libri duo) by Isaac Casaubon, who defined the work as ‘satyrical’, a close, but not identical, relative of satire.75 In the notes to his translation, Chrestien wrote, ‘I do not know whether to call this play a tragedy, for it does not have a sad ending, according to the common definition … and in fact the characters are mixed from tragic and comic examples. … And so, as Plautus prefaced his Amphitryo, I think that this play could be called a tragic comedy.’76 As contemporaries often noted, Amphitryo was the earliest play to use the term tragicomedy (tragicomoedia), so Chrestien’s identification of the term with Euripides marks a significant reconceptualizing of the genre’s roots, one conspicuously indebted to Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy with a happy ending.77 Chrestien’s translation enjoyed considerable attention in England, and Jonson’s references to both Euripides’ Cyclops and Casaubon’s De Satyrica poesi in the notes to his 1611 masque Oberon indicate that he was familiar with the edition.78 John Fletcher, a more visible figure in the rise of tragicomedy, similarly drew on Greek-­inspired genre theory, by way of Giambattista Guarini’s Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601), in his defence of the genre prefacing The Faithful Shepherdess (1608). With its explicit emphasis on manipulating audiences’ emotional responses through sudden and startling reversals, or peripateia, brought about through moments of recognition (anagnorisis), tragicomedy offered a vivid illustration of how and why the literary strategies identified with classical dramatic genre theory could be so successful on the stage. Tragicomedy’s striking popularity in England, beginning at precisely this moment, suggests that the theorizing and practical experimentation prompted by these treatises proved fruitful. Conclusion: Greek forms, modern forms Frischlin’s and Chrestien’s treatises, along with Stiblinus’s earlier prefaces, point to compelling points of contact between printed editions of Greek plays and early

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modern English dramatic practice. Even as their self-­conscious engagement with preceding editions and scholars links them with the broader body of critical paratexts to which they contributed, their resonance in the critical writings of poets such as Sidney, and especially playwrights such as Jonson and Fletcher, demonstrates how Greek-­ inspired ideas about dramatic form came to shape the structures and conventions of the popular commercial theatre. In partnership with other routes of transmission such as performances and classrooms, these editions and their paratexts performed the act of translating, or carrying over, in literal as well as figurative senses. As their editors’ and commentators’ reflections entered into scholarly conversations about dramatic genres, they contributed to emerging understandings of these literary forms, ultimately shaping the humanist theatrical practice not only of writers such as Frischlin himself but of classically schooled writers who contributed directly to the commercial theatre, such as Ben Jonson, who played a formative role in influencing other popular playwrights. Printed editions of Greek plays conveyed ideas about dramatic forms in a number of ways: through the texts of the plays and their translations, through the structures in which they were printed, and through the paratextual materials that reflected on, and became part of, the plays themselves. Tracing these editions’ status in England, and exploring how they conceptualize dramatic genres and identify them with Greek origins, not only demonstrates the presence of Greek drama in early modern England, but more importantly, points to specific ways it shaped emerging ides about the theatre. This chapter argues that the category of dramatic form offers a powerful means of tracing reception. Closely examining the printed forms of the Greek plays printed during the sixteenth century, and the ideas about dramatic forms they embody, shows specific ways in which the Greek dramatic tradition shaped English ideas about comedy, tragedy, and mixtures thereof. Taking seriously the impact of these textual and conceptual forms not only changes our understanding of the consequences of Greek plays on the period’s thought but offers a new understanding of the development of the genres that shaped the English stage. Notes

I am grateful for comments and advice from the volume’s editors, as well as from Pamela Allen Brown, Bianca Calabresi, Julie Crawford, Natasha Korda, Lucy Munro, Cristiana Sogno, and William Stenhouse.  1 On Latin influence see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); John William Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1925); and Howard Norland, Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009).

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116 Translations  2 For example, in 1925, Cunliffe asserted that ‘There is every indication that the knowledge of Greek tragedy was confined to a very small circle; translations from the Greek dramatists were unknown in this [sixteenth] century’ (The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 11). Scholarship on Renaissance reception of Greek plays has focused on Continental Europe; Martin Mueller is representative in claiming that, unlike Continental drama, ‘Elizabethan tragedy proudly measures its distance from ancient models’; see Children of Oedipus, and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy, 1550–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. xiv. Early New Historicist interest in contemporary settings discouraged studying authors’ responses to earlier models, perhaps most notably with Stephen Greenblatt’s description of source study as ‘the elephant’s graveyard of literary history’; see ‘Shakespeare and the exorcists’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 163–187, at p. 163. On tensions between diachronic and synchronic approaches to early modern literary study see Heather James, ‘Shakespeare, the Classics, and the forms of authorship’, Shakespeare Studies, 36 (2008), 80–89, esp. 81–82.  3 Lane Cooper, for instance, wrote that Shakespeare, ‘though more Roman than Greek in his dramatic origins, is nearer … to Aristotle and the spirit of Greek tragedy,’ and recently Michael Silk held that ‘Against all the odds, perhaps, there is a real affinity between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. What there is not is any “reception” in the ordinary sense.’ See Cooper, The Poetics of Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1923), p. 134, and Silk, ‘Shakespeare and Greek tragedy: strange relationship’, in Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (eds), Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 241–257, p. 241.  4 See Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Louise Schleiner, ‘Latinized Greek drama in Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41.1 (1990), 29–48; Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare’s Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 97–104; Douglas B. Wilson, ‘Euripides’ Alcestis and the ending of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale’, Iowa State Journal of Research, 58 (1984), 345–355; and Sarah Dewar-­Watson, ‘The Alcestis and the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60.1 (2009), 73–80. On Greek romances as texts mediating earlier dramatic structures see Tanya Pollard, ‘Romancing the Greeks: Cymbeline’s genres and models’, in Laurie Maguire (ed.), How to Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 34–53.  5 For details on early textual routes of Greek plays’ transmission see Robert Garland, Surviving Greek Tragedy (London: Duckworth, 2004).  6 On the relationship between textual and dramatic forms in this period, see Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).  7 On this and the details that follow see Rudolf Hirsch, ‘The printing tradition of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1964), 138–146.  8 See Alan B. Farmer, ‘Cosmopolitanism and foreign books in early modern England’, Shakespeare Studies, 35 (2007), 58–65; James Raven, ‘Selling books across Europe, c. 1450–1800: an overview’, Publishing History, 34 (1993), 5–19; and Elizabeth Armstrong, ‘English purchases of printed books from the Continent, 1465–1526’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979), 268–290.

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 9 See Farmer, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, 59; E. S. Leedham-­Green (ed.), Books in Cambridge Inventories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Robert J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-­Green (eds), Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-­lists (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992–2004). 10 Leedham-­Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories. 11 Fehrenbach and Leedham-­Green, Private Libraries in Renaissance England. Although these lists document a disproportionately scholarly population, they testify to the presence of these texts in England. The high cost of these books, and the relative rarity of collecting them, indicate they were usually read (Fehrenbach and Leedham-­Green, Introduction, vol. 1, p. xvi). 12 See Kirsty Milne, ‘The forgotten Greek books of early modern England’, Literature Compass, 4.3 (2007), 677–687; Chris Michaelides, ‘Greek printing in England 1500–1900’, in Barry Taylor (ed.), Foreign Language Printing in Britain, 1500–1900 (London: British Library, 2002), pp. 203–226; and Evro Layton, ‘Nikodemos Metaxas, the first Greek printer’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 15 (1967), 140–168. 13 See Patricia Demers, ‘On first looking into Lumley’s Euripides’, Renaissance and Reformation, Renaissance et Réforme, 23.1 (1999), 25–42; Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 19–47; Robert S. Miola, ‘Euripides at Gray’s Inn: Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta’, in Naomi Conn Liebler (ed.), The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 33–50; Sarah Dewar-­Watson, ‘Jocasta: “A Tragedie Written in Greek”’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17.1 (2010), 22–32; and Ibrahim Alhiyari, ‘Thomas Watson: new biographical evidence and his translation of Antigone’, PhD dissertation, Texas Tech University, 2006. 14 See Maguire, Shakespeare’s Names; T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:648–649; Eric Glasgow, ‘Some early Greek scholars in England,’ and ‘Greek in the Elizabethan Renaissance’, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 71.2 (1981), 3–17 and 18–31. 15 On the uses of Greek–Latin bilingual texts see Nikolaus Henkel, ‘Printed school texts: types of bilingual presentation in incunabula’, Renaissance Studies, 9.2 (1995), 212–227. On translating Greek texts into Latin in England more broadly see J. W. Binns, ‘Latin translations from Greek in the English Renaissance’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 27 (1978), 128–159. On the pedagogical uses of bilingual Latin–English editions see Demmy Verbeke, ‘Types of bilingual presentation in the English–Latin Terence’, in Jan Bloemendal (ed.), Bilingual Europe: Latin and vernacular cultures ca. 1300–1800 (Leiden, Brill, forthcoming). 16 See Erika Rummel, ‘Fertile ground: Erasmus’s travels in England’, in Carmine G. Di Biase (ed.), Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 45–52. 17 For an overview of Erasmus’s convictions on the urgency of learning Greek see Simon  Goldhill, ‘Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus’, in Who Needs Greek?: Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 14–59. 18 ’Aristofa´ nouß Kwmwdi ¿ai ’ E¿ndeka / Aristophanis comoediae vndecim (Geneva:

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118 Translations Sumptibus Caldorianae Societatis, 1607). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 19 The copies that I have examined of this paired text – usually titled Euripidis tragoediae duae, Hecuba & Iphigenia in Aulide, Lat. factae. Des. Erasmo Roterodamo interprete – include two from 1524 at Columbia University’s Rare Books Library and, at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, editions from 1506, 1507 (3), 1511, 1518 (2), 1520, 1524 (4), 1530, 1540, and 1544. The images are from Euripidis tragoediae duae (Basel: Joannem Frobenium, 1524), Columbia University, Lodge 1524 Eu73. Although not illustrated here, marginal comments in various languages similarly appear at times in both the Greek and the Latin texts. 20 Beyond its inclusion in complete editions of Euripides, Hecuba appeared in 37 individual or partial editions, far more than the second highest, Iphigenia, with 22; it also was made into seven vernacular translations, nearly double the next contender. See Jean Christophe Saladin, ‘Euripide Luthérien?’, in Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée, 108:1 (1996), 155–170 (at 164); Hirsch, ‘The Printing Tradition’; R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 512–515. 21 Euripides, Hecuba (227–228 in modern editions); see Figure 5.1. 22 It is unclear whether Erasmus was involved in the play’s printing, but his close friendship with Froben, with whom he lived when in Basel, and his involvement in many of Froben’s other printing projects, suggest that it was likely. 23 Aristophanis Plutus (Paris: Mathurinum Dupuys, 1549). Dupuis, a scholarly humanist, printed other Greek texts, as well as works by Erasmus and Rabelais. On the printing and translation of Plutus see Hirsch, ‘The printing tradition,’ and Bolgar, The Classical Heritage. 24 See Heather James, ‘The first English printed commonplace books and the rise of the common reader’, Chapter 1 above; also, Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Reading and authorship: the circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619’, in Andrew Murphy (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 35–56. 25 Zachary Lesser, Peter Stallybrass, and G. K. Hunter, ‘The first literary Hamlet and the commonplacing of professional plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59.4 (2008), 371–420, at 376. 26 Gérard Genette coined the term paratext in Seuils (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1987), translated as Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), trans. Jane E. Lewin. 27 Sonia Massai, ‘Shakespeare, text, and paratext’, Shakespeare Survey, 62 (2009), 1–11; at 1–2. On the impact of the ‘mise-­en-­page’ see Peters, Theatre of the Book, esp. pp. 17–27. 28 Massai, ‘Shakespeare, text, and paratext’, 11. See also Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ¿ Mh¿deia ‘Ippo¿lutoß ∆AlkhÓstiß ∆Androma¿ch (Florence: Alopa, 1495). 29 See ’Euripidou 30 See Monique van Rossum-­Steenbeek, Greek Readers’ Digests?: Studies on a selection of Subliterary Papyri (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Jeffrey Rusten, ‘Dicaerchus and the “Tales from Euripides”’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 23 (1982), 357–367, at 358; and Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 225. Judith Mossman suggests that the hypothesis may have served as a pedagogical tool for assigning rhetorical arguments;



31

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32

33

34

35

36

37

38

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‘Reading the Euripidean hypothesis’, in Marietta Horster and Christiane Reitz (eds), Condensing Texts, Condensed Texts (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2010), pp. 247–267. ‘In qua narratione mira rerum et personarum effictio varietasque affectuum animadvertenda est’. Euripides Poeta Tragicorum princeps (Basel: Ioannem Oporinum, 1562), p. 88. This argument and its corresponding preface have been posted online by Donald Mastronarde on ‘Stiblinus’ Prefaces and Arguments on Euripides (1562)’, at . ’Euripidou ¿ Tragwdiai ¿ ‘Eptakaideka ¿ (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1503), aiv. For other references to the Library at Alexandria see, for instance, ‘De tragoedia’ by Benedictus Philologus, discussed below. ‘Commentaria libenter adiecissemus, si operis idoneis & satis multis fuissemus instructi’. ’Euripidou ¿ Tragwdiai ¿ o˙ktwkaideka ¿ … Evripidis Tragoediae octodecim … (Basel: Ioannes Hervagius, 1537), A1v. This idea was echoed by epigrams praising Watson in the text: John Cook wrote ‘So Watson’s labor is worthy of praise, / Who actually taught the Antigone of Sophocles to speak / In our tongue, the splendid gifts of the graces’, and Francis Yomans addressed Watson as ‘you, who would make Sophocles a Roman.’ Thomas Watson, ‘To Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel’; John Cook, ‘Encomium of the Antigone of Sophocles, Translated by Thomas Watson from the Greek into the Roman Tongue’; and Francis Yomans, ‘On the Antigone of Thomas Watson’, in Sophocles, Sophoclis Antigone. Interprete Thomas Watsono I.V. (London, 1581; STC 22929), sigs A3r–B2v; see Alhiyari, ‘Thomas Watson’, 2.2.2, 2.2.3, and 2.2.5. Francis Meres’s identification of Watson as one of ‘our best for Tragedie,’ suggests that his translation was widely admired; Watson has no other extant tragedies to his name. See Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (London, 1598; STC 17834), p. 283r, sig. Oo3r. Gasparus Stiblinus, ‘In Hecabam Euripidis praefatio’, in Euripides poeta tragicorum princeps (Basel: Ioannem Oporinum, 1562), 38. See also Donald Mastronarde’s website, ‘Stiblinus’ Prefaces,’ cited above. Mastronarde notes Stiblin’s ‘approach is in line with the tendency of sixteenth-­century writers on poetics (for example, Scaliger, Castelvetro, Sir Philip Sidney) to attempt a reconciliation of Platonic and Aristotelian views of poetry by insisting that poets both delight and instruct, and that representations of morally suspect behavior edify by providing a model of what is to be avoided.’ The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 10. On Renaissance interest on audiences in response to the printing of The Poetics see Nicholas Cronk, ‘Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus: the conception of reader response’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 199–204. ‘Crassae enim vulgi mentes non poterant subtiles philosophorum de honestate ac virti¿ capere. Penetrant durissimorum quoque hominum bus disputationes kai » leptologiaß animos tam euidentes rerum horribilium imagines’ (Stiblinus, ‘Praefatio in Orestem’, 80). ‘Utilis admodum est harum imaginum contemplatio diligens et crebra, in quibus fortunae levitatem non obscure cernere licet’ (Stiblinus, ‘In Hecabam’, 39). See Peters, Theatre of the Book, pp. 147–165, on contemporary debates about theatre’s impact on the senses. ‘[Q]uam avid iustum, quid Reipublicae salutare sit, disserere’ (Stiblinus, ‘In Hecabam’, 39).

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120 Translations 40 Knowledge of books owned by Sir Philip Sidney is limited because the family’s library was not catalogued until the 1660s, and many of its holdings were purchased after his death; see Germaine Warkentin, ‘Sidney’s authors’, in M. J. B. Allen, Dominic Baker-­Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney with Margaret M. Sullivan (eds), Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 68–89. We do, however, know something of his readings from his own references, and we know which books in the family library were published within Sidney’s lifetime. It seems Sidney owned either three or four copies of Euripides’ plays in Greek and Latin published in this period, although we do not know the precise editions. I am grateful to Germaine Warkentin for sharing with me relevant portions of the library catalogue of the Sidneys at Penshurst, which she is co-­editing with William Bowen and Joseph Black. 41 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspeare’s Small Latin, 2:422. 42 See Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 41–87. 43 Joseph Loewenstein and John Jowett, among others, have explored Jonson’s innovations in presenting first Sejanus, and then other plays, as literary rather than theatrical texts modelled on classical editions. See Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 158, and Jowett, ‘Jonson’s authorization of type in Sejanus and other early quartos’, Studies in Bibliography, 44 (1991), 254–265. On printers’ incentives for adopting classical printing formats to distinguish between popular and ‘literary’ play texts see Zachary Lesser, ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, English Literary Renaissance, 29.1 (1999), 21–43. 44 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 63–80. Stern suggests that ‘Arguments (or plots, devices, subjects, models) tie together, through the printed word, playbooks and performances, confounding book history with theatre history’ (p. 65). 45 The Poetics was published in Latin in 1498 and in Greek in 1508, with a flurry of commentaries published in the middle of the sixteenth century. See Daniel Javitch, ‘The emergence of poetic genre theory in the sixteenth century’, Modern Language Quarterly, 59.2 (1998), 139–169. For traditional arguments about Italian genre theory and its debts to Aristotle, see Joel Elias Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), and Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, Vols 1 and 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). On the less established topic of Aristotle’s reception in England at this time see Marvin T. Herrick, The Poetics of Aristotle in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930). 46 On early modern responses to Aristotle as facilitating popular drama see Cronk, ‘Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus,’ and Stephen Orgel, ‘Shakespeare and the kinds of drama’, Critical Inquiry, 6.1 (1979), 107–123. 47 He suggests this change demonstrates ‘the broad lines of a transition from the morality to the interlude and thence to the comedy and tragedy of classical origin or inspiration.’ See Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 11–12. 48 On the two essays and the tradition of combining them see especially A. Philip McMahon, ‘Seven questions on the Aristotelian definitions of tragedy and comedy’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 40 (1929), 97–198.

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49 Selected lines and passages of the essay frequently appear in Renaissance treatises, and a close approximation of the entire essay was printed in a popular 1567 collection of selected Greek tragedies; see ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’, Tragoediae selectae AESCHYLI, SOPHOCLIS, EURIPIDIS (Geneva: Henricus Stephanus, 1567), pp. 118–128. The treatise follows both Aristotle and Horace in its claims about the origins of dramatic genres; on its debts to Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, and the fragmentary understandings of Aristotle that continued to inform the critical tradition in his wake, see McMahon, ‘Seven q­ uestions.’ 50 ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’, p. 118. This version of the essay differs slightly from the precise wording of either Donatus, Evanthius, or the typical conflated version. 51 Ibid., p. 118; for translation see Evanthius, ‘On Drama,’ trans. O. B. Hardison, in Alex Preminger, O. B. Hardison, Jr, and Kevin Keran (eds), Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974), p. 302. 52 On cento see especially Marco Formisano and Cristiana Sogno, ‘Petite poésie portable: the Latin cento in its late antique context’, in Horster and Reitz, Condensing Texts–Condensed Texts, pp. 375–394. Óscar Prieto Domínguez identifies the 1607 Aristophanes edition discussed in this essay as crucial in defining cento for the period; see ‘¿Qué era un centón para los Griegos?: preceptiva y realidad de una forma literaria no tan periférica’, Myrtia, 23 (2008): 135–155 (at 141). 53 See Benedictus Philologus, ‘De Tragoedia’, Senecae Tragoediae, (ed.) Benedictus Philologus (Florence, 1506), sig. aiiiir. Compare Philologus’s ‘grande genus poematis’ and ‘heroicae fortunae in adversis comprehensio’ with ‘Tragoedia est heroicae fortunae in adversis comprehension,’ Diomedes, Artis grammaticae Libri III, in Grammatici Latini, ed. Henricus Keil, vol 1 (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1981), pp. 297–529, at p. 487. Although he does not note its specific verbal borrowings and dates the treatise to 1514, Howard Norland describes ‘De tragoedia’ as articulating a representative model of tragedy; see Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England (Newark: University of Delaware Press), p. 21. 54 ‘In tragoedia tranquilla sunt prima, & turbulenta ultima, e converso in Comoedia’, Philologus, ‘De tragoedia’, sig. aiiiv. Compare with ‘illic [comedy] prima turbulenta, tranquilla ultima, in tragoedia contrario’, Donatus, Commentum, ed. P. Wessner, 3 vols (1902–8; rpt Stuttgart: Teubner, 1962–63), 1.21. On parallels and differences between Diomedes and Donatus see Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 148. 55 ‘[F]abula, Mos, Dictio, Sententia, Visus, & Melopoeia’ (‘De tragoedia’, sig. Aiiiiv). 56 ‘[O]stendes nihil aliud esse Tragoediam, que miseriarium poemata’ (‘De tragoedia’, sig. Aiiiir). 57 ‘[U]t Autem Aristotleles, imitation rerum gravium & ingentium’, Jacobus Micyllus, ‘De tragoedia et eius partibus prolego¿mena’, in Euripides poeta tragicorum princeps (Basel: Ioannem Oporinum, 1562), pp. 671–679, at p. 672. In the Poetics Aristotle defines tragedy as ‘a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude’ (Poetics 1449b20). 58 See Micyllus, ‘De tragoedia’, pp. 673–675. 59 See Pollard, ‘Audience reception’, in Arthur Kinney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 452–467.

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122 Translations 60 Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007). 61 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.536; all references to Shakespeare’s works are to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997). On Hecuba’s prominence see note 20 above; on Hamlet’s engagement with the play see Pollard, ‘What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65:4 (2012), 1060–1093. 62 On Frischlin and his own plays see David Price, The Political Dramaturgy of Nicodemus Frischlin: Essays on Humanist Drama in Germany (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Price discusses Frischlin’s comments on Aristotle (pp. 51–54). 63 Nicodemus Frischlinus, ‘De veteri Comoedia eiusque partibus’, in Aristophanes veteris comoediae princeps (Frankfurt: Ioannes Spies, 1586), sig. 16r. 64 He refers to ‘temporibus belli Peloponnesiaci’; ‘vetus Comoedia, res veras & gestas … nova autem personas fingit’; ‘minus aequabilem, nova, puriorem, aeqabiliorem, & elegantiorem’ (Frischlin, sig.16r). 65 ‘Hactenus Scaliger … & nostra aetate Mycillus’ (Frischlin, sig. 18r). 66 ‘Materio vero discrepant, quod vetus Comoedia, res veras & gestas, verasque personas in theatrum producit: noua autem personas fingit’ (Frischlin, sig. 16r–v). 67 Matthew Steggle, Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson (Victoria: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria Press, 1998). 68 ‘Nam is auctor est Aristophanes, qui magna cum libertate homines seditiosos ac turbulentos in scenam producit, eosque nominatim perstringit: qui principum in Republica virorum dissensiones acerbe insectatur’, Frischlin, ‘DIVO RUDOLPHO II. CAESARI, ROMANO IMPERATORI ELECTO’, in Aristophanes, sig. 2v; modified from Price’s translation in Political Dramaturgy, p. 53. 69 ‘Idem ergo finis nostro poetae fuit propositus, ut spectatores in risum solutos excitaret, et de sapientibus dictis atque occultis in Comoedia consiliis admoneret, ipsosque de corrigenda Republica et emendandis moribus quasi praepararet’, in Frischlin, ‘DEFENSIO ARISTOPHANIS contra Plutarchi criminationes’, Aristophanes, sig. 9r; modified from Price, Political Dramaturgy, p. 53. 70 ‘Catastrophe inopinatum consiliorum, & rerum gestarum eventum continet: sive is laetus sit, sive tristis, sive utrunque’ (Frischlin, sig. 17r). 71 Aristophanes veteris comoediae princeps (Frankfurt: Ioannes Spies, 1586), Bodleian Shelfmark 90 c.38, sig. 17r. 72 See Ben Jonson, ‘To the most noble and most eqvall sisters’, in Volpone (London, 1607), sig. 3v. 73 Jonson’s copy of Aristophanis Comediae undecim (Geneva: Sumptibus Caldorianae Societatis, 1607), which reprinted Frischlin’s prefatory materials, is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Although the 1607 edition would probably have been too late to have had a direct impact on Volpone, Frischlin’s commentaries had been in circulation since 1586, and Jonson’s frequent references to Aristophanes in earlier plays indicate that he had, or had access to, an earlier edition. 74 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 5.1.365. 75 ‘Isaacus Casaubonus Claudio Christiano Florentis F.S.D.’, in Isaaci Casauboni de satyrica Graecorum poesi & Romanorum satira libri duo. Cyclops Euripidae, Lat. donata a Q. Septimo Florente

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Christiano (Paris: Ambrosium & Hieronymum Drouart, 1605), sig. Aiir. See also Dana F. Sutton’s 1998 hypertext critical edition of the play at http://www.philological.bham. ac.uk/chrestien/. 76 Euripidis Cyclops tragoedia Q. Septimo Florente Christiano interprete, 32. Chrestien died in 1596; he would have completed his notes and translation considerably before their 1605 publication. 77 See Aristotle, Poetics, 1453a30–39; Sarah Dewar-­Watson, ‘Aristotle and tragicomedy,’ in Subha Mukherji, and Raphael Lyne (eds), Early Modern Tragicomedy (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), pp. 15–27; and Pollard, ‘Tragicomedy,’ in Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 78 Jonson, Oberon, The Faery Prince, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 7.341–342. The masque also features a number of ­characters titled ‘satyre’.

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Book, list, word: forms of translation in the work of Richard Hakluyt Henry S. Turner

My aim in this chapter is to use the work of Richard Hakluyt as an occasion to introduce several problems pertaining to early modern English humanism and its global imaginary, problems that lead, in turn, to a broader reflection on how the category of ‘form’ might prove useful to historicist criticism, and especially as a way of reinvigorating theoretical commitments to materialism in early modern studies. Although I experience moments of impatience with some scholarship that appears under the materialist rubric, it also seems to me that for good reasons historicist criticism will always have to answer to a theory of materialism, and I believe that the category of ‘form,’ perhaps unexpectedly, will offer an important resource for new arguments.1 In what follows, I will be focusing on three forms of writing that are central to Hakluyt’s work and that lead us, in different ways, toward the paired concerns of material texts and literary forms that organize this volume: the form of the ‘book,’ the form of the ‘list,’ and the form of the ‘word.’ The first has been an especially rich object of analysis for literary critics in the last two decades and has arguably become the paradigm-­defining form for the field. The second has not been closely studied by literary critics but has received some attention from historians of science.2 The third is probably the oldest form of all, and is truly a model specimen for literary study across the ages; it was central to the emergence and definition of ‘humanism’ as a mode of scholarship, and it becomes an especially volatile form in the context of Elizabethan encounters with the New World – volatile because changeable, or unstable, or especially delicate, or unusually plastic, to adopt materialist metaphors that were fundamental to defining the formal integrity of the word in the period, as we shall see. In order to provide some definition to the arguments that follow, I will be treating all three forms as instances of ‘translation,’ in several senses: translation as a linguistic practice, translation as a way of thinking adaptively and analogically across different situations, and translation as a way of constructing or composing among diverse materials, a ‘materialist’ theory of translation that we find exemplified in Hakluyt’s writing.



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Hakluyt as translator Richard Hakluyt is well known to early modernists, of course, for his magnum opus, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in London in one volume in 1589 and then again in a revised and expanded three-­volume edition from 1598 to 1600.3 Despite the fact that the name ‘Hakluyt’ has become synonymous with the Principal Navigations, the work was in no sense a work of his own ‘authorship.’4 Hakluyt’s art was rather the art of the fragment, and the Principal Navigations reminds us how important editing, or the collection of texts (etymologically a gathering together in one place), remained as a mode of textual authority at the turn of the seventeenth century. But the Principal Navigations also opens a window onto how important the work of the translator could be, for Hakluyt was also a remarkable translator, in several ways, all of which are important to understanding the forms of writing that he favoured, his place in the history of scholarship, and his role in English colonialist projects. Perhaps the simplest place to begin any assessment of Hakluyt as a translator is to ask a two-­fold question: what does it mean, in general, to ‘translate’? And what specifically did it mean to translate in late sixteenth-­century England as an ordained member of the Church of England, as an employee of the Crown, and as a man of letters invested in New World ventures, as Hakluyt was? England has always been a stepchild in the historiography of European humanism, especially the England of the late sixteenth century; and if we can consider Hakluyt as a species of humanist – a question that is no doubt open to debate, depending on one’s definitions and frames of reference – then he is a type that I will conveniently but unoriginally call a ‘material humanist.’5 I offer the label to strike a contrast from our usual sense of humanist scholarship in the period, in order to remind us how insubstantial, how deracinated from substance and from concrete institutions, the history of humanism has often been in historiography. Even a humanism defined narrowly and ‘correctly’ around problems of philology, the archival recovery of classical Greek and Latin, and the studia humanitatis –what Kristeller loosely described as a ‘literary’ tradition distinct from theology or natural philosophy – was always more material than we tend to remember, a method concerned with the physical substance of manuscripts, books, and documents, of historical reconstruction through archaeological artefacts and other objects, of universities and desktops and instruments and other intellectual hardware. This sense of ‘material humanism’ was central to Hakluyt’s translation work and indeed to his entire life project, whether through the physical documents he laboured to collect or through the globes and navigational instruments that he famously introduced to the study of geography at Oxford. But a notion of ‘material humanism’ was central, too, in a more familiar and more modern sense of the term, in that Hakluyt’s particular area of expertise was, after all, the history of English international travel and trade, which even he recognized as a moment of proto-­mercantilism and which we are apt to regard as the inauguration of a modern world system. So when we ask ‘what does it mean to translate in the sixteenth

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126 Translations century,’ we must also ask what it means to translate as a scholar caught up in this moment of wild enterprise and fascinated by an emerging ‘global’ imaginary. Before pursuing the suspicion that in speaking of Hakluyt I am really speaking about ourselves, let me return to a conventional sense of translation and to Hakluyt’s considerable skill as a translator of languages. On the basis of his own comments, modern scholars have attributed to him an advanced written knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, most of which he could probably also speak with some fluency.6 While in Paris as Chaplain to the English Ambassador, Hakluyt was friendly with French botanists, travellers, instrument makers, and geographers, and he is known to have met with Don Antonio, the pretender to the Portuguese crown, and to have discussed matters pertaining to New World navigation directly with Portuguese pilots and captains.7 Hakluyt himself translated, either in whole or in part, five separate editions of works from French, Portuguese, and Latin, including a book of dialogues that had first been translated into Latin from Malay, which Hakluyt probably undertook for the East India Company.8 A single copy of Hakluyt’s English translation of the Latin edition of Hugo Grotius’s Free Seas, undertaken sometime between 1609 and 1616, also probably on behalf of the East India Company, survives in manuscript and was never published in his lifetime.9 The Principal Navigations, meanwhile, and his long unpublished manuscript ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ both include assorted passages that Hakluyt translates from many of the aforementioned languages. But this is only to speak of Hakluyt’s own translation work – he was twice as active as a sponsor of foreign translations by others, often contributing to the costs of publication himself. Three examples will illustrate Hakluyt’s networks of translation and commercial publication especially vividly, and in doing so they will indicate to us the signal role that the physical book played in what I am calling Hakluyt’s ‘material humanism.’10 In 1586, while living in Paris, Hakluyt arranged for a French translation from Spanish by Martin Basanier of Antonio de Espejo’s voyage to New Mexico, a book that Hakluyt had himself paid to have published in a new Spanish edition in Madrid in that same year, with ‘a la costa de Richardo Hakluyt’ displayed prominently on its title page.11 Basanier dedicated his new translation of Espeio to Hakluyt, who promptly arranged to have Basanier’s French translated into English, publishing it in London in 1587.12 Also in 1586, Basanier and Hakluyt collaborated on an edition of René de Laudonnière’s L’histoire notable de la Floride, printed from a manuscript borrowed from the French geographer André Thévet and issued with a dedication from Basanier to Walter Ralegh and a Latin poem in praise of Ralegh by Hakluyt himself.13 Hakluyt then translated Basanier’s French into English, publishing the work in London in 1587.14 The last example is a famous one: in 1587, Hakluyt met the engraver Theodor De Bry, who was on a visit to England, and introduced him to John White, the illustrator who had accompanied Thomas Harriot as a scientific observer on Ralegh’s Virginia voyages and who would subsequently return to the New World as first Governor of the ill-­fated Roanoke colony. Hakluyt suggested to De Bry a grand international

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edition of Harriot’s account of Virginia, which had been published alone in 1588.15 This new international edition (1590) was to be illustrated by De Bry’s engravings of White’s drawings and published simultaneously in Frankfurt in Latin, English, French, and German editions. The notes to the edition were to be translated into Latin from English by the botanist Charles de l’Ecluse – notes which Hakluyt himself then subsequently translated back into English from Latin for the English edition.16 The works that Hakluyt commissioned suggest how energetically he pursued geographical writing in other languages and how widely informed he became about the topic, through a network of authors, translators, editors, publishers, diplomats, pilots, merchants, factors, friends, and acquaintances that radiated from the centres of the European book trade: London, Paris, Frankfurt, and even Madrid – an unlikely place for a minister in the Church of England to publish, especially in 1586. In this sense, Hakluyt is positioned at the node of two distinct macro-­networks of translation, one extending across and within Europe, the other extending outward much more broadly on a global scale, to the Far East as well as to the Northwest. Of the many separate translations to which we know that Hakluyt contributed in some way, we find three Dutch originals (somewhat surprisingly, Hakluyt does not seem to have known Dutch); John Florio’s 1580 English translation of Jacques Cartier’s voyage to Canada, from Ramusio’s Italian translation out of French; Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of Africa [1600], translated by John Pory from Italian into English, and a translation from Syriac of Ismael Abu al-­Feda’s (1273–1331) thirteenth-­century Geography, which a letter from Ortelius to William Camden tells us that Hakluyt was planning to arrange.17 Even more remarkable is the example of the Codex Mendoza, a manuscript of Nahuatl pictographs produced in Mexico City in the early 1540s, probably by native scribes, which Hakluyt purchased from Thévet in 1587 while in Paris. The Codex eventually passed to Samuel Purchas, who claimed that Hakluyt had ‘procured Master Michael Locke in Sir Walter Raleighs name to translate it’ but that ‘it seemes that none were willing to be at the cost of cutting the Pictures, and so it remained among his papers till his death.’18 When we add to these books and manuscripts the many partial translations and word-­lists collected in the Principal Navigations, the list of languages with which Hakluyt came into contact expands to global proportions: Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Syriac, Malay, Nahuatl, Anglo-­Saxon, Turkish, Russian, Inuit, or ‘the language of the people of meta incognita,’ Algonquin, the languages of the Saami people (Lapland), the native languages of Canada or ‘New France,’ the languages of Trinidad, and the ‘naturall language of Java.’19 I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that Hakluyt’s desktop was probably the single most polyglot surface on the sixteenth-­century planet. And it owes this extraordinary polyglot quality in no small measure to the form of the book: to the physical object, in all its variety and all its parts, that allowed him to collect in one place such a diversity of materials and such a complex network of mediating authorities. But Hakluyt’s involvement in translation does not stop here. For he was more than

128 Translations

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a practitioner of translation: he also had a modest theory, as his dedication to Robert Cecil of his edition and translation of Antonio Galvao, The Discoveries of the World from the first originall unto the yeere of our Lord 1555 (London, 1601; STC 11543), explains: For whereas a good translator ought to be well acquainted with the proprietie of the tongue out of which, and of that into which he translateth, and thirdly with the subject or matter it selfe: I found this translator [an anonymous version that Hakluyt has reworked] very defective in all three; especially in the last. For the supplying of whose defects I had none other remedie, but to have recourse unto the originall histories, (which as it appeereth are very many, and many of them exceeding rare and hard to come by) out of which the authour himselfe drew the greatest part of this discourse. And in very deede it cost me more travaile to search out the grounds thereof, and to annexe the marginall quotations unto the work, then the translation of many such bookes would have put me unto. (A3v)

Hakluyt presumes as a norm expertise in the original language of a document as well as expertise in what we now call the target language. But above all he assumes expertise in what he calls the ‘subject or matter it selfe’ – I do not want to lean too hard on the appearance of the term ‘matter’ at this point, since it functions as a fairly straightforward synonym (itself a kind of translation) for the notion of subject matter, from the common Latin res or ‘thing.’ And yet it is clear that for Hakluyt, as for us, translation involves a kind of passage or transfer of material from one form to another: that some word or figure is necessary to describe this process, and that, however conventional Hakluyt’s terminology may be, it is nonetheless inscribed in a long history of philosophical concepts and determinations of concepts, through which translation is defined as a transaction between form and matter, as a process of giving form to matter and of re-­mattering the form of language by transcribing it into new letters and new words. And in this particular instance we may hear an additional material and even technological emphasis, since Hakluyt has in mind specifically the technical vocabulary necessary for describing very particular things-­in-­the-­world: concrete objects, ingredients, textures, tools, all the myriad things that a traveller might encounter when talking to other people in other places. People interact with the world; they use language to refer to the world while doing so; and a translator must become familiar with the specific words they use when they interact with the world in significant ways. Here is another statement of Hakluyt’s translation method, found now in a dedication to the reader in the 1589 first edition of the Principall Navigations: Concerning my proceeding therefore in this present worke, it hath bene this. Whatsoever testimonie I have found in any authour of authoritie appertaining to my argument, either stranger or naturall, I have recorded the same word for word, with his particular name and page of booke where it is extant. If the same were not reduced into our common language, I have first expressed it in the same termes wherein it is originally written, whether it were a Latine, Italian, Spanish or Portingall discourse, or whatsoever else, and thereunto in the next roome have annexed the signification and translation of the wordes in English. (p. 6, sig. *3v)

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This passage adds some important details to Hakluyt’s theory, since it casts translation as a variety of empiricism, an archival, scholarly activity designed for maximum accuracy and for what we could call ‘transparent’ rendering. Hakluyt’s translation is a technical exercise, a ‘proceeding’ or ‘method’ in the sixteenth-­century sense, and not an impromptu gesture. It is impartial and inclusive: ‘either stranger or natural.’ It is scrupulous in its word-­for-­word attention, evincing a proto-­quantitative handling of the linguistic datum and offering translation as a kind of double-­entry bookkeeping. He employs orthodox textual methods, carefully weighing the authority of his sources by comparing the internal consistency of a document, by evaluating its proximity to an event, or by establishing the ‘truth’ of a text by collation: collecting multiple examples and comparing them with one another. The practice of editing and of translating is, in this sense, a way of handling linguistic material so as to create a textual space in which truth may appear in the mouths of others. By deliberately preserving the original passage, incorporating it into his own text and only then following with an English rendering, Hakluyt invites comparison and an act of evaluation; joined to a system of notation, the page itself becomes an archive that does more than merely translate: it enables further translation from the reader and thus creates a space not for a specific translation but for the activity of translation in general, a constant referring back and forth between two forms, a circuit of endless reflection and refashioning. As a physical book, we could call the Principal Navigations a machine for translation. My final example comes from Hakluyt’s dedication to Ralegh of René de Laudonnière’s A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages made by Certayne French captaynes vnto Florida (London, 1587; STC 15316), where we find a third dimension to his theory. The Virginia enterprise was not going well, and Hakluyt seems to have believed that Ralegh would welcome a public expression of enthusiasm in the project and a reminder of its extraordinary potential: And no marvell though it were verie welcome unto you, & that you liked of the translation thereof, since no historie hetherto set foorth hath more affinitie, resemblance or conformitie with yours of Virginea, then this of Florida. But calling to minde that you had spent more yeares in France then I, and understande the french better then my selfe, I foorth with perceived that you approved mine endevour, not for any private ease or commoditie that thereby might redounde unto you, but that it argued a singuler and especiall care you had of those, which are to be employed in your owne like enterprise, whom, by the reading of this my translation, you woulde have forewarned and admonished aswell to beware of the grosse negligence in providing sufficiencie of victuals, the securitie, disorders, and mutinies that fell out among the french, with the great inconveniences that thereupon ensued, that by others mishaps they might learne to prevent and avoyde the like, as also might bee put in minde, by the reading of the manifolde commodities & great fertilitie of the places herein at large described & so nere neighbors unto our colonies, that they might generally be awaked and stirred up unto the diligent observation of everie thing that might turne to the avancement of the action, whereinto they are so cheerefully entred. (Dedication to Ralegh, no page.)

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130 Translations Within the polite gestures of patronage and praise, Hakluyt has embedded an entire political theory of translation, which now consists of more than a linguistic facility. This kind of translation requires the exercise of analogical comparison across sites and enterprises: Florida is like Virginia, in its geographical location, its geo-­political encumbrances, its possible military and commercial benefits, its risks and dangers. This translation invites a kind of structural thinking, a grasp of co-­ordinated efforts and complex integrations of men and materials, goals and wills. In Hakluyt’s view, translation is valuable not for individual, personal gain but for the common good; it facilitates the organization of collectives directed toward a common purpose; by preventing conflict, it assists in the benevolent rule over other men. Philology as materialism If we return to the linguistic and technical dimension to Hakluyt’s comments on translation, it is possible to locate him on the spectrum of humanist commentary on the subject and to begin to outline what I will now call a ‘materialist’ theory of translation lying at the core of Hakluyt’s project. Broadly speaking, we may say that humanist theories of translation developed around several opposing terms, each of which enjoyed a rich history of elaboration and each of which tended to spread outward into other textual, ethical, and philosophical attitudes.20 For the sake of clarity, we may identify on the one hand a philological and grammatical attitude toward translation, one that concerned itself with the problem of literal semantic meaning and that took as the object of its operations the word or verbum, considered as an individual morphological and denotative unit. On the other hand we find a rhetorical and oratorical approach to translation that attempts to capture an overall sense and to express it in an artful style; its concern is not merely with verba but with res, the ‘content,’ ‘thought,’ or ‘matter’ (a somewhat misleading term) of a larger compositional unit, which it apprehends as a dense, energetic texture of associations, figures, and ornaments. These work together across several levels to communicate the idea in its full presence, an approach to translation that is at once Structural and Orphic, as Glyn Norton has perceptively put it, and that is signalled by the long-­standing technical humanist term for translation, interpretatio.21 Even in this second, ‘oratorical’ approach to translation, however, the notion of the literal continues to play a fundamental role; indeed, translation proper had long been distinguished from exegesis precisely on the basis of its literalist ambitions, and nowhere more so than in translations of Scripture, from Jerome forward. Translation was emphatically not a commentary or a supplemental addition: it was a faithful rendering through which all the resources of the source language lived anew in different clothing, and even the most accomplished humanist presumed that a propaedeutic immersion in the technicalities of philology – grammar, usage, historical morphology – would be necessary to produce a good or rhetorically ‘full’ translation. This required a full awareness of the physicality of the word, its particulate force and

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seed-­like potential, which could be scattered across into new sentences or ignited like a firework: these are the metaphors of Coluccio Salutati, writing at the end of the fourteenth century.22 For Cicero, the translator was a kind of banker who could either count out his translation word for word, like coins, or pay the entire thing at once, as if by weight. Cicero himself preferred the latter approach, pointing out that this was the course he had followed in his own translations of Demosthenes and Aeschines, in which he worked, he claimed, as an orator more than as an interpres or translator in the word-­for-­word sense.23 It would be fair to say that Hakluyt shows little interest in the rhetorical or stylistic dimension of the texts that he translates but instead emphasizes their practical purpose – under the category of the ‘practical’ I would include the ultimate political effects of the act of translation which I have indicated above, as well as his concentrated interest in what we could call the text’s ‘informational’ content. Something is being communicated by the word, and for Hakluyt it is vital that this something be captured and rendered as clearly as possible. In this regard we could characterize Hakluyt as an extreme literalist, a linguistic attitude that was of a piece with his empiricism, his overall historical purpose, his methodological fascination with the archive, and his general interest in technical details and particulars of all kinds. We have seen him declare this interest in his preface to Cecil in his translation of Galvao, above; and this same literalism manifests itself in those moments when Hakluyt begins to approach translation degree zero, collecting foreign morphemes and lexemes and arranging them in tabular form, much the way the botanists and mercantile agents collected specimens of natural substances and compiled lists of commodities (see Figures 6.1–6.4).24 Consider the many ways in which we could consider these lists to be forms of ‘translation.’25 Even at the level of the phoneme, the most literal moment of translation we could identify, we slip beneath the level of the signified to the ‘matter’ of language only to find that ‘translation’ has already begun its silent work. For the lists render sounds into words; they create the formal integrity that distinguishes a meaningful phonemic unit, and they do so, furthermore, in a visual or graphic and not an oral form – it is, after all, impossible to tell from the page how these words are to be pronounced. Before translation in its rhetorical and humanist sense can begin, even in the simplistic, literal, ‘word-­for-­word’ sense that Cicero rejects, the form of the word itself must first be stabilized. This invites a large question: for the humanist accustomed to working closely with languages, texts, and manuscripts, was the ‘word’ a coherent formal unit in the New World? Could the methods of philology apply on foreign terrain? Hakluyt seems fascinated by the virtual presence of strange sounds, by the act of rendering those sounds in new form and by the implications of what he glimpses through the process: the sheer fact of other languages, other systems of linguistic expression, complete and flourishing just over the horizon. At the same time, however, a peculiar effect of the list is to present the native word denuded of grammar and syntax, not to mention of inflection, connotation or other nuance: the signs stand for the idea of language, for a language that has been left behind, trailing roots clotted

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132 Translations

Figure 6.1  The language of the ‘Lappians’, Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600), Vol. I, p. 293. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

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Figure 6.2  The language of ‘Meta incognita’, Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600), Vol. III, p. 32. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

Figure 6.3  The language of ‘New France’, Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600), Vol. III, p. 211. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

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134 Translations

Figure 6.4  The language of ‘New France’, Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600), Vol. III, p. 212. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

with the dirt of foreign shores. If the lists record grammatical units and provide English grammatical equivalents for their semantic meaning, in other words, they also transport the word from its native setting back to an English reader; the effect is one of textual rapture, retrieving for a culture captivated by the written sentence the guttural sounds of speech and clothing the native tongue with the modesty of a Roman letter.26 Hakluyt, of course, never collected the language specimens himself: he relied on the expertise of others, often commercial agents and factors who were themselves positioned at an epistemological threshold in which competing systems of value jostled together. And as we can see from these examples, the matter of language and the matter of the world have begun to collapse into one another, as we enter another layer of the translation process. Strictly speaking, we find no natural things here, only deracinated names for objects that have in some sense already become – that are on their way to becoming – commodities. Certainly the word lists include the names of substances that are not yet commodities: flora, fauna, body parts, even social relationships. But these are paradigm classes for a series of as-­yet-­unrealized functions: to the mercantilist eye, everything depends on whether the objects can be functionalized, as substances are identified and enduring chains of commodities assembled across extremely long distances (see Figure 6.5). We could say that the lists are poised precisely at the point where the index passes over into sign, as the flat, descriptive record of the fact – the bare word – begins to shimmer with a potential significance that catches the European eye.27 To translate these foreign words is to assist in the act of commodification, therefore, but it is also to grasp commodification itself a translation process, an alienation of substance through transfer and the addition of a supplementary form. Hakluyt understood the problem clearly enough, since his Discourse of Western Planting recommends, among scores of other interventions, the erection of sawmills that can convert the fantastic and even overwhelming varieties of trees that the English found in the New World, so that ‘wee may with spede possesse infinite masses of boordes of these swete kindes, and those frame and make ready to be turned into goodly chests, cupboordes, stooles, tables, deskes &c.’28 And should the natives resist, he suggests ominously to the Virginia Company adventurers, they must ‘handle them gently, [for] while gentle courses may be found to serve, it will be without comparison the best: but if gentle polishing will not serve, then we shall not want hammerours and rough masons enow,

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Figure 6.5  List of commodities and their origins, Principal Navigations (London, 1598– 1600), Vol. II.1, p. 277. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

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136 Translations I meane our old soldiours trained up in the Netherlands, to square and prepare them to our Preachers hands.’29 Somewhat surprisingly, it suddenly appears that translation was always one of the best ways back to the problem of materialism, an observation I make for several reasons. First, because the primary relationship between word and meaning, or word and sense, that structures humanist approaches to translation takes, in Hakluyt’s case, a distinctly substantialist turn; we could say that Hakluyt’s encounter with foreign words accentuates a more general orientation toward language in humanist thought that emphasizes the concreteness and portability of meaning, the dense ‘opacity’ of the word, as Norton has put it, the kernel surrounded by a mystical shell.30 Translation was, in other words, an important area in humanist thought where the relationship between sense and letter, or word and thing, or language and world became the subject of scrutiny and of philosophical elaboration – these are fundamental oppositions that we have inherited and that still structure many of our arguments about representation and epistemology, especially in literary and cultural studies and especially in their historicist varieties. Consider this comment from Thomas Norton’s 1578 edition of his translation of Calvin’s Institutio Christianae: I cˇosidered how the author thereof had of long time purposely labored to write the same most exactly, and to packe great plenty of matter in small roome of wordes, yea and those so circumspectly and precisely ordered, to avoide the cavillations of such, as for enmity to the trueth therein contained, woulde gladly seeke and abuse all advantages which migh[t] be found by any oversight in penning of it, that the sentences were thereby become so full as nothinge might well be added without idle superfluity, & againe so niely pared that nothing could be minished without taking away some necessary substance of matter therein expressed.31

To Norton the word is freighted with meaning, and the translation is an unpacking – not in our colloquial, classroom sense, not a close reading or an analytic commentary, but in a physical sense: someone needs to unload the ship of words, take account of its stock of sense, and then reassemble the sentences in new forms, laying them into the book like a treasure chest or a storehouse. So when another humanist, George Chapman, announces that he ‘hardly dare referre’ his translation of Homer ‘to reading judgements,’ I don’t think we are listening too hard when we hear in Chapman’s complaint about excessive literalism a whisper of anxiety about commercial publication and disdain for the common ­commerce of merchants and their dirty hands: how I have in my conversion prov’d, I must confesse, I hardly dare referre To reading judgements; since, so generally, Custome hath made even th’ablest Agents erre In these translations; all so much apply Their paines and cunnings, word for word to render Their patient Authors.32



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‘Custom,’ ‘Agents’: these technical mercantilist terms pepper the pages of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, and they are apt figures for the theory of word-­for-­word translation that Chapman is dismissing, as Cicero had dismissed before him as a kind of money payment. To translate word for word is to grub along in the substance of language, blindly ignorant of the spirit of meaning: To the Reader. Least with foule hands you touch these holy Rites;   And with prejudicacies too prophane, Passe Homer, in your other Poets sleights;   Wash here; In this Porch to his numerous Phane, Heare auncient Oracles speake, and tell you whom   You have to censure. (A3r)

In Chapman’s severely idealist vision of translation as a kind of prophecy or even as a type of metempsychosis, none are more guilty of profanity than the ‘great Clerks’ who can ‘write no English verse’: blinded by their own prejudices against English as a poetic language, they embrace a parochial translation style that conceals the full soul of the classical originals – and this despite their ostentatious and pretentious defence of the ancients as the source of all poetry: But, as great Clerks, can write no English verse;   Because (alas! great Clerks) English affords (Say they) no height, nor copie; a rude tongue,   (Since tis their Native): but in Greek or Latine Their writs are rare; for thence true Poesie sprung:   Though them (Truth knowes) they haue but skil to chat-­in, Compar’d with that they might say in their owne;   Since thither the’others full soule cannot make The ample transmigration to be showne   In Nature-­loving Poesie: So the brake That those Translators sticke in, that affect   Their word-­for-­word traductions (where they lose The free grace of their naturall Dialect   And shame their Authors, with a forced Glose[)], I laugh to see; and yet as much abhorre   More licence from the words, then may expresse Their full compression, and make cleere the Author. (sig. A4r–v)

The indictment is severe, and richly expressed: the clerks are at once fatuous, myopic, hypocritical, ignorant, foolish, and tragic – if only they would look up from their dusty pages and savour the English language that rolls in their own mouths! One man’s ‘native’ is another man’s poetry: the uncanny mirror of translation suddenly throws its light to reveal an English that is, at least in the eyes of the clerks, little better than

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138 Translations Inuit or Algonquin or the ‘natural language of Java,’ as one word-­list in the Principal Navigations describes it.33 Chapman steps forward as a kind of smirking satirist-­priest, rescuing the transcendent glory of true poesy by clothing it in the vestments of the mother tongue. This is not Hakluyt’s mode of translation. He is much closer to the customers and merchants, the agents and factors who collected the precious language-­samples, transcribing them with painstaking effort and concentration. Imagine it: sixteenth-­ century seamen, months at sea, shivering in freezing temperatures, exhausted from epic battles with icebergs that surge up suddenly and batter the fleet, now standing on a crusty shoreline that is further north than they ever imagined travelling in their wildest dreams, straining to understand the speech of an Inuit chief dressed in seal-­skin who is understandably agitated about the fact that his dogs have been stolen, his people captured, and his village scattered.34 Who among them had the presence of mind to listen to the chief’s language? Where did they carry the ‘pen, yncke, and paper’ to which the accounts refer?35 It is incredible to think that these words were inscribed on to fragile substances in such extreme conditions, much less that they survived the seas, the floods, the shipwrecks that punctuate the English accounts. This is Hakluyt’s translation: the sheer accident of fragile substances combining together under extraordinary circumstances to somehow endure their way back to London, to Hakluyt’s desk, to the press, to archive and library and from there to microfilm and to our illuminated digital projections. Translation as assemblage By now it should be clear that I find in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations a somewhat different notion of ‘translation’ from what we might expect, one that has been proposed by the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, who has launched a materialist methodology of great subtlety and potential. For all the recent interest in Latour’s work, the signature concept of his method is not, in my view, the notion of the ‘hybrid,’ or the non-­modern, or the network, or even the strange ‘agency’ of things: it is the notion of translation that his work as a whole elaborates. We could even say that Latour’s notion of ‘translation’ finds its root in a specifically early modern sense of the word, one that was utterly commonplace in Hakluyt’s period. To early moderns, translation was a change of shape, as when a tailor or a glover re-­uses the leftover fabric to fashion a new pair of gloves, or when Shakespeare – a glover’s son – employs the term in a Midsummer Night’s Dream to describe a weaver who has been transformed into a man with an ass’s head: ‘Bless, thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated!’ No doubt many readers will be familiar with the arguments of Latour, whose fascinating case studies examine the many fine networks, assemblages, and collectives that compose the fabric of our world.36 These assemblages and their links happen at the level of basic chemistry – atoms and molecules – and at the level of tools: the hand that holds the hammer simply is a different entity from the hand without it; the hand



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with the sword different from the open palm (as the Inuit learned all too quickly). This juncture of hand with tool is a ‘translation.’ And translation creates assemblages among laboratory equipment and devices, too, and the networks of cities and ecosystems and of global commerce. Here is one of Latour’s definitions: Instead of opposing words and the world, science studies, by its insistence on practice, has multiplied the intermediary terms that focus on the transformations so typical of the sciences; like ‘inscription’ or ‘articulation,’ ‘translation’ is a term that criss-­crosses the modernist settlement [that philosophy or worldview that creates false oppositions, separating words from things, humans from non-­humans, nature from ‘society’ and ‘culture’]. In its linguistic and material connotations, it refers to all displacements through other actors whose mediation is indispensable for any action to occur. In place of a rigid opposition between context and content, chains of translation refer to the work through which actors modify, displace, and translate their various and contradictory interests. (Pandora’s Hope, 311)

Latour has a striking image for the translations that enable a scientific network: ‘scientific facts are like frozen fish,’ he argues, since they stay good only as long as the chains that transport or translate them from site to site and purpose to purpose remain unbroken.37 For a stem cell to become a specimen, it must thrive in a growth factor and form physical, chemical bonds with other cells; for it to become evidence, it must enter into an enduring relation with a microscope; to become fact, computers, calculators, statistical equations, and many other actors must be added to the assemblage; to become theory, citations and sentences must climb aboard; to become polemic, politicians must wave their arms, polish their rhetoric, and broadcast their soundbites across the globe. So what does this current notion of ‘translation’ have to do with Hakluyt, with the problem of form, and with early modern studies? In my view, Hakluyt practises a version of this translation, and all the evidence that he collects pertains to it. The Principal Navigations consists of innumerable reports generated by the enormous trading corporations of his day, reports that trace the long, rhizome-­like networks that extended from outpost to ship, from factor to agent to merchant and finally to Hakluyt back in London. These networks are composed through many small translation points: points of intervention and mediation – points of giving form – in which one substance is joined to another, or modified, or combined. Agents and factors are deputized: for the whole body of this companie, to buy, sel, trucke, change and permute al, and every kind and kindes of wares, marchandizes and goods … the same to utter and sell to the best commoditie, profit and advantage of the said corporation.38

The infinite variety of the world must be translated through the formal categories of number, weight, and measure; physical substances must be combined and compacted into a single coherent ‘masse’ and then transported through a network of distribution in which differing zones of value must be reconciled with one another. It is exactly like the process of verbal composition and translation that Thomas Norton has described.

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140 Translations We find in the Principal Navigations inventories of commodities and of the industrial processes necessary to produce them – fishes, furs, flax, hemp, honey, and wax, the perfect emblem of the metamorphic translation process – lists of geographic points of origin and distances to other trading sites, accounts of the many substances, men, and skills, and instruments necessary to the physical construction of the fleets. I have written elsewhere in some detail about how travel narratives tend to work in Hakluyt, concentrating on the principle of ‘value’ that drives these narratives, a term that we can understand in both narratological and economic terms.39 Perhaps it is going too far to ascribe to Hakluyt a version of the ‘translation’ theory I am describing, although as we have seen Hakluyt was an unusually self-­conscious translator and the Principal Navigations seems to me to offer a perfect archive in which to work. And in a sense Hakluyt’s ‘art of the fragment,’ as I have called it, could serve as a model for our own efforts. For we find in the many fragments that constitute the Principal Navigations all the many procedures of formal appropriation, of figurative transposition, of physical change and transformation that characterize the translation process and that come to constitute the early modern global imaginary as both an economic and a political system for early modern writers. This is Hakluyt’s ‘materialism,’ a materialism of force and enduring chains of association, and of the networks of forms that give those translations meaning. And although Hakluyt is exemplary, he is by no means unique: we find in Bacon’s work, for instance, another extremely subtle and complex engagement with the category of form, in several different senses, and we should remember that, when Bacon calls his new inductive method an ‘Interpretation of Nature,’ he is proposing science not merely as an active form of reading and writing or as a kind of formalism but precisely as a mode of ‘translation’ – interpretatio is his term, too, and one that shouldn’t merely be rendered as the ‘interpretation of Nature,’ as is commonly done.40 Finally, it is worth making an observation about the epistemological model that follows from Hakluyt’s practice and theory of translation as a mode of truthful discourse. Under the cover of classificatory schemes and other objectivist gestures, we may discern an active process of handling linguistic materials, a process of transformation, of making truth. In Hakluyt, truth rarely ‘is’: ‘truth’ is something done, which in turn implies a certain opacity or ambiguity around the precise ‘content’ of this truth, of what ‘is’ truthful or what things, ideas, or phenomena may be described in ‘truthful’ terms. This active, or praxical, or ‘verbal’ mode of truth, as we could call it, would seem at first glance to be entirely opposed to another mode of truth that flourishes in early modern travel writing: an empirical truth predicated on accuracy and referential transparency. Many of the documents printed by Hakluyt survive in the first place because they depend on this notion of quasi-­scientific ‘truth,’ as measured by the quanta of information they contain.41 But this active, praxical, or transformational notion of truth that we find in Hakluyt’s translation procedures does not stand in opposition to proto-­empiricist and scientific aspects of early modern travel writing: it is essential to it. It suggests that ‘truth’ is not something we should imagine

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as a depth beneath a surface or as a latent content that must be found or investigated or communicated more or less faithfully, as conventional theories of translation often imagine: the truth of a text or of a situation (‘Virginia’) emerges through and by means of certain ways of operating, acting, talking, thinking, and writing. Indeed, what we often refer to as the ‘political’ dimension to early modern writing about the Atlantic world could be described as the sum total of forces that bind or dissociate chains of translation, and in this way manufacture truth about the world; the ‘political’ is distinguished by the quanta and the ontological mode of force that is implied in any act of translation and by the modes of truth – philosophical, legal, technical, linguistic, scientific, practical – that give those translations meaning. This suggests further that modes of truth are as important in the definition of the ‘political’ as modes of power and legitimate violence, if not more so: the ‘political’ is that which negotiates among competing modes of truth and the systems of value upon which they depend. This definition for the ‘political’ is one that I believe Hakluyt would have accepted, albeit translated into his own terms. It may be surprising to learn that Hakluyt never travelled beyond France: although he was a charter member and shareholder of the Virginia Company, he remained an armchair geographer who voyaged to the New World only by proxy. By 1606, the name ‘Hakluyt’ has become synonymous with his book, The Principal Navigations, which was carried physically on to the ships as a source of historical, navigational, cultural, and linguistic information. By 1608, English adventurers began naming land-­ masses after Hakluyt: ‘Hakluyt’s Headland,’ so named by Henry Hudson in his 1608 voyage to Greenland; ‘Hacluits foreland,’ cited in a 1614 dispute between the Dutch ambassador and the Muscovy Company over rights of trade in Greenland; ‘Mount Hakluyt,’ named by the captain of a Moscovy Company voyage to the same area in the Summer of 1615; ‘Hakluyt’s Ile,’ named by William Baffin in Baffin Bay in July 1616.42 ‘Countreys new discovered where commoditie is to be looked for, doe better accord with a new name given by the discoverers, then an uncertaine name by a doubtfull Authour’: so wrote Master Dionise Settle in his account of Martin Frobisher’s 1577 voyage in search of the North-­west Passage.43 We could find no better epitaph for Richard Hakluyt: his name as a translation of the earth, inscribed on the maps of the world, and in the mouth of every seaman looking for a landmark.

Notes

I would like to thank Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry for their comments as this chapter developed, as well as Mary Bly, Julie Crawford, Mario DiGangi, Katherine Eggert, Will Fisher, Mary Fuller, David Glimp, Natasha Korda, David Loewenstein, and Scotti Parrish for their thoughts and invitations to present earlier versions of the work.  1 I have developed some of the ideas that follow in more detail in Henry S. Turner, ‘Lessons from literature for the historian of science (and vice versa): reflections on “form”’, Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, 101.3 (2010), 578–589, with additional bibliography.

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142 Translations  2 See especially ‘Listmania,’ a focus section of Isis 103 (December 2012), 710–752, ed. James Delbourgo and Staffan Müller-­Wille.  3 Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589; STC 12625); Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation (London, 1598[–1600]; STC 12626). See also Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1599–[1600]; STC 12626a).  4 On this aspect of the Principal Navigations see esp. Mary Fuller, ‘Making something of it: questions of value in the early English travel collection’, Journal of Early Modern History, 10 (2006), 11–38, esp. 19, and Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 11, 15, and 141–174; also David Harris Sacks, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s navigations in time: history, epic, and empire’, Modern Language Quarterly, 67 (2006), 31–62, esp. 31; and Henry S. Turner, ‘Toward an analysis of the corporate ego: the case of Richard Hakluyt’, differences, 20.2–3 (2009), 103–147.  5 On Hakluyt and humanism see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 70–82; Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 50–51 and 152–157, on Hakluyt and ‘legal humanism’; on humanism and travel writing see Joan-­Pau Rubiés, ‘Travel writing and humanistic culture: a blunted impact?’, Journal of Early Modern History, 10 (1–2), 131–168, esp. 141, 149–150, 154; also Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Sacks, ‘Hakluyt’s navigations in time’, examines the varieties of protestant attitudes in the Principal Navigations and shows there need be no contradiction between Hakluyt’s ‘classicism and his Protestantism’, 36.  6 Hakluyt names these languages in the prefatory matter to the 1589 edition of the Principall Navigations: ‘I fell to my intended course, and by degrees read over whatsoever printed or written discoveries and voyages I found extant either in the Greeke, Latine, Italian, Spanish, Portugall, French, or English languages’ (sig. 2r). The best discussion of Hakluyt’s translation work remains F. M. Rogers, ‘Hakluyt as translator’, in D. B. Quinn (ed.), The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols, Hakluyt Society Second Series, no. 144–145 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974), Vol. I, pp. 37–47, from which much of my own account has been taken.  7 Hakluyt Handbook, Vol. I, pp. 37, 280; David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, ‘Introduction’ to the Discourse of Western Planting, Hakluyt Society Extra Series, no. 45 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), pp. xvi–xvii.  8 Gothard Arthus, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages (London, 1614; STC 810), trans. into English from Latin by Augustine Spalding, who was working with an initial manuscript translation that Hakluyt had prepared; see Hakluyt Handbook, Vol. I, p. 328, citing a Court of the East India Company meeting on 22 January 1614: ‘A book of dialogues, heretofore translated into Latin by the Hollanders, and printed with the Malayan tongue, Mr. Hakluyt having now turned the Latin into English, and supposed very fit for the factors to learn, ordered to be printed before the departure of the ships.’ Hakluyt’s other direct translations are René de Laudonnière, A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages made by certayne French captaynes unto Florida (London, 1587; STC 15316), ‘newly translated out

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of French into English by R. H.’; Antonio Galvao, The Discoveries of the World from the first originall unto the yeere of our Lord 1555, corrected, quoted, and now published in English by Richard Hakluyt (London, 1601; STC 11543), reworking a pre-­existing anonymous translation ‘by some honest and well affected marchant of our nation,’ as the dedication to Robert Cecil puts it (sig. A3v); Anon., Virginia Richly Valued …Written by a Portugall gentleman of Eluas, employed in all the action, and translated out of Portugese [sic] by Richard Hakluyt (London, 1609; STC 22938); and Grotius (below).  9 Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, trans. Richard Hakluyt, ed. with introduction by David Armitage (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), pp. xxi–xxiii. 10 On Hakluyt’s patronage networks (his own and others’, especially within England) and the composition of the readership of the Principal Navigations, see David Harris Sacks, ‘Richard Hakluyt and his publics, c. 1580–1620’, in Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (eds), Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 159–176. 11 Antonio de Espeio, El viaie que hizo Antonio de Espeio … (Madrid, 1586; ‘y de nueuo en Paris el mesmo anno, a la costa de Richardo Hakluyt’); Histoire des terres nouvellement descouvertes … (Paris: chez veuve Nicolas Roffet, 1586). 12 Antonio de Espejo, New Mexico. Otherwise, The Voiage of Anthony of Espeio …, trans. into English by ‘A. F.’ (London, 1587; STC 18487). 13 René de Laudonnière, L’histoire notable de la Floride (Paris, 1586). 14 René de Laudonnière, A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages made by certayne French captaynes unto Florida, ‘newly translated out of French into English by R. H’ and dedicated to Ralegh (above). 15 Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia … (London, 1588; STC 12785). 16 Theodor de Bry, America. Part i. ‘A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia …’ (Frankfurt, 1590; STC 12786). With ‘the true pictures and fashions of the people in that parte of America now called Virginia … Translated out of Latin into English by Richard Hackluit. Diligentlye collected and draowne by Jhon White … now cutt in copper and first published by Theodore de Bry att his wone [sic] chardges.’ On the translation of the notes see Rogers in Hakluyt Handbook, I, pp. 38–39. 17 Hakluyt Handbook, Vol. I, p. 300. 18 Ibid., p. 294. 19 Principal Navigations (1598–1600), Vol. III, p. 742. 20 See especially Flora Ross Amos, Early Theories of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1920); F. O. Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931); two studies by Glyn P. Norton, ‘Humanist foundations of translation theory (1400–1450): a study in the dynamics of word’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 8.2 (1981), 173–203, and Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and Their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva: Droz, 1984); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Theo Hermans, ‘The task of the translator in the European Renaissance: explorations in a discursive field’, in Susan Bassnett (ed.), Translating Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 14–40; and Massimiliano

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144 Translations Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), with additional bibliography. 21 Norton, ‘Humanist foundations’, 191. 22 Ibid., 182–183. 23 Cicero, De optimo genere oratorum, trans. H. M. Hubbell, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 5.14. 24 See Eric H. Ash’s discussion of merchant advisers and experts, including Hakluyt: ‘“A Note and a Caveat for the Merchant”: mercantile advisors in Elizabethan England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 33 (2002), 1–31, esp. 26. 25 For a beautiful meditation on the list as a form, and especially as a form for the idea of the infinite, see Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay (New York: Rizzoli, 2009) esp. pp. 113–118 and 371–377. I would characterize Hakluyt’s lists as falling somewhere between the ‘practical’ and the ‘poetic,’ in Eco’s terms, and their interest as forms of translation resides in the degree to which they are simultaneously both; I would also disagree with Eco’s characterization of the practical list as a finite form (p. 116). 26 As Hakluyt put it, in his dedicatory letter to Ralegh of his Latin edition of Peter Martyr’s De orbe novo … (Paris, 1587; ‘labore & industria Richardi Hakluyti’): ‘Not undeservedly, therefore, ought the memory of that outstanding man Peter Martyr Anglerius of Milan to be particularly sacred and precious to every right-­thinking individual. For he has published to the whole Christian world in his learned commentaries all that the Spaniards have achieved, whether praise-­or blame-­worthy, in a space of four and thirty years, on land and on sea … Nor does he relate his facts disjointedly as most others have done, nor in a language, as most often happens, unknown to educated men, nor baldly or frigidly, but he depicts with a distinguished and skilful pen and with lively colours in a most gifted manner the head, neck, breast, arms, in brief the whole body of that tremendous entity America, and clothes it [induit] decently in the Latin dress familiar to scholars.’ Translated from Latin in E. G. R. Taylor (ed.), The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols, Hakluyt Society 2nd ser. 76–77 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), Vol. II, p. 363. 27 See, for instance, Hakluyt’s comment in the Discourse of Western Planting that ‘they of Canada say that it is the space of a moon (yt is to say a moneth) to saile to a lande where Cynamon and cloves are gathered, and in the frenche originall which I sawe in the kinges Library at Paris in the Abbay of Saint Martines yt is further put downe that Donnaconna the kinge of Canada in his barke had traveled to that Contrie where Cynamon and cloves are had, yea and the names whereby the Savages call those twoo spices in their owne language are there put downe in writinge’ (chapter 17, item 5; pp. 83.2002–84.2008). 28 Discourse of Western Planting, chapter 16, pp. 79.1883–1886. 29 Dedication of Virginia Richly Valued to the Virginia Company adventurers (15 April 1609; Hakluyt Handbook, Vol. I, p. 323; Taylor, Original Writings, Vol. II, pp. 499–503). Original STC 22938, sig. A4r. 30 Norton, ‘Humanist theories’, 178. Cf. Miles Smith’s introduction to the King James Bible: ‘Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel’ (qtd in Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice, p. 50). Smith draws on a long tradition of Christian hermeneutic, broadly Augustinian in orientation, one neatly captured in the Super Thebaiden (attr. Fulgentius): ‘Not uncommonly poetic songs are seen to be comparable with nuts. For as in a nut there are two parts, the shell and the

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kernel, so also there are two parts in poetic songs: the literal and the mystical senses. The kernel lies hidden beneath the shell; beneath the literal sense lies the mystic understanding. If you wish to have the kernel, you must break the shell; if the figures are to be made plain, the letter must be shattered. The shell is tasteless; the kernel is flavorful to the taster.’ Qtd in Robert P. Miller (ed.), Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 5. My thanks to András Kiséry for pointing me to these references. 31 The Institution of Christian Religion, written in Latine by M. John Calvine, and translated into English according to the authors last edition, by Thomas Norton (London, 1578; STC 4418), ‘The Preface’, sig. *iiv; cited by Amos, Early Theories, pp. 123–124. 32 Homer Prince of Poets: translated according to the Greeke, in twelve bookes of his Iliads, by Geo: Chapman (London, 1609; STC 13633), ‘To the Reader’, sig. A4r. 33 Principal Navigations (1598–1600) Vol. III, p. 742. 34 See Christopher Hall’s, Dionise Settle’s, and Thomas Ellis’s accounts of Martin Frobisher’s voyages (1576, 1577, 1578) in search of the North-­west Passage, his encounter with the Inuit of ‘meta incognita’ (Nunavut province in northern Canada), and his battles with ice, Principal Navigations (1599–1600), Vol. III, pp. 29–32, 32–29, and 39–42; sigs C3r–C4v, C4v–D2r, and D2r–D4v. 35 Principal Navigations (1599–1600), Vol. III, pp. 35, 36; sigs C6r, C6v. The mariners may also have used small notebooks or writing tables with specially treated, erasable pages that did not require ink but rather some form of sharp stylus, apparently a common writing technology among merchants; see Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s tables and the technologies of writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55.4 (2004), 379–419, and H. R. Woudhuysen, ‘Writing-­ tables and table-­books’, Electronic British Library Journal, 3 (2004), 1–11. 36 See in particular: Latour, ‘Circulating reference’, in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) pp. 24–79, and ‘Drawing things together’, in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19–68; Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), and Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 37 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 119. 38 Hakluyt, ‘Articles conceived and determined for the Commission of the Merchants of his company resiant in Russia …’ (1 May 1555), Principal Navigations … (1599–1600), Vol. I, p. 259. 39 Along these lines see Turner, ‘Corporate ego’, 103–147. 40 E.g. the title page to the second part of the Instauratio Magna, ‘Novum organum, sive indicia vera de interpretatione naturae’ (Franciscy de Verulamio, summi Angliae cancellarii instauratio magna (London, 1620; STC 1162), pp. 35; also pp. 42, 47, etc.) 41 We find in the Principal Navigations, and in an Atlantic context in particular – a pattern that is worth noting but that I am not yet able to explain – that the term ‘truth’ is often used as an intensifier to mark this empirical, referential gesture; the phrase ‘in truth’, for instance, is common throughout the documents that Hakluyt collects pertaining to North America in particular, including Florida. ‘In truth’ a certain shore is very dangerous, or a p­ articular

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146 Translations bird has a white head, or a group of native people is very courageous, or a member of the expedition party had departed in a different direction, and so forth: the phrase is both an intensifier and a conjoining construction, one that allows a narrative or a report to continue while at the same time covering over the narrational movement, or the active narrational process: ‘in truth’ points toward a domain outside the narrative to which the report is presumed to refer, either the truth of an event or of the narrator himself as eye-­ witness or reliable mediator for the account. It is as if the fact of narration – the condition of reported speech, the epistemological burden of passing on an account of a state of affairs that is impossible to verify but that cannot be allowed to exist only in writing – generates a demand for ‘truth’ not as an assembled process but as an assertion, an invocation, even a tic of discourse. 42 Hakluyt Handbook, I pp. 322–323, 328, 330, 331. 43 Principal Navigations (1599–1600), Vol. III, p. 39, sig. D2r.

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Part III

The matters of writing

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7

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The forms of news from France in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI Alan Stewart

As black-­clad mourners accompany the funeral bier of the English military hero-­king Henry V, Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy deepens its sense of unremitting negativity – with the irruption into the scene of bad news of France. The mourners’ invocation to Henry’s ghost is cut off by the entrance of a messenger: My honourable lords, health to you all. Sad tidings bring I to you out of France, Of loss, of slaughter and discomfiture. Guyenne, Champagne, Reims, Rouen, Orleans, Paris, Gisors, Poitiers are all quite lost.1 (1H6, 1.1.57–61)

Scarcely is that news absorbed before another messenger enters, bearing letters: Lords, view these letters, full of bad mischance. France is revolted from the English quite, Except some petty towns of no import. The Dolphin Charles is crowned king in Reims: The Bastard of Orleans with him is joined. Reignier, Duke of Anjou, doth take his part. The Duke of Alençon flieth to his side. (1.1.89–95)

As the lords start to rally, a third messenger appears: My gracious Lords – to add to your laments, Wherewith you now bedew King Henry’s hearse, I must inform you of a dismal fight Betwixt the stout Lord Talbot and the French. (1.1.103–106)

The narrative created by these three reports does not correspond to those of the chronicle histories – by Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1577, revised 1587)2 – that provided Shakespeare with his source materials. Henry V’s funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 7 November 1422, but many of these events occurred

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in or around 1429, when the rise of Jeanne d’Arc threatened English rule in France, Orléans fell, the Dauphin was crowned king at Rheims, and the fight between Talbot and the French at Patay, detailed by the third messenger, took place. Some events – for example, the fall of Paris – did not happen until 1436, a full fourteen years after Henry’s funeral. Shakespeare telescopes history, piling new disasters on to the grief already sparked by the king’s death, suggesting that the fall of English fortunes in France was both caused by and contemporary with the laying to rest of the great English hero. This sets the scene for the contrasted portrayal that is to come of his son and heir, Henry VI. But, as this chapter argues, Shakespeare is also playing with the forms with which this telescoping is achieved: the forms of news. All three messengers come with news from France. Shakespeare’s play thus echoes a current preoccupation of the day, the ‘newes from Fraunce’ detailing both the Wars of Religion and England’s military involvement in France, which inspired and sustained a new medium, the printed newsletter. Newsletters from France presented recent events in a highly partial and partisan manner, as do the news-­bearers in Shakespeare’s history plays. In dividing news between messengers, Shakespeare introduces a flexible motif that will become a staple feature of his history plays (and also find a place in his comedies and tragedies) – a motif, moreover, that can evoke not only a changing situation but also confusion, contradiction, and tension. I argue that, by dramatizing news in this way, Shakespeare does not get his history ‘wrong.’ Instead, he deliberately shatters the smooth narrative certainty of the historical chronicles that provide his source material, and recasts past events as they were imperfectly received at the time as news – as uncertain, provisional, contradictory, messy. The new method of reporting from the contemporary military campaigns allowed Shakespeare not only to explore the phenomenon of news from France but in so doing to develop a new and dramatically compelling form of the English chronicle play. Newsletters from France It has long been recognized that the Henry VI plays were first staged during a period of English military involvement in France, an involvement that resonated with the plays’ content in some ways. France is a constant presence in the trilogy: much of 1 Henry VI takes place in France; though set in England, 2 Henry VI begins with the return of Suffolk from France with a new French queen for King Henry, and France is mentioned in twelve scenes; and 3 Henry VI, though more concerned with English localities, has its central scene at the French court, while France is mentioned in no fewer than thirteen scenes. Taken together, the plays present a fifty-­year period of history when the modern distinction between England and France fails to hold; despite the geographical obstacles to their union, England and France are fixed in a cycle of amity and enmity, war and marriage, that means that England cannot imagine itself without its claim on France. This situation is embodied in the trilogy’s title character. Henry VI had a French princess as his mother; while one grandfather was king of England,

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the other was king of France. His father had famously fought, married, and died in France. Like both his father and paternal grandfather, Henry took a French wife. And although he visited the country only briefly, during the journey he was crowned king at Notre Dame. The situation between 1590 and 1592, when the plays were first staged, was very different. The English forces in France were not pursuing an English claim to French lands or titles; instead, they were trying to help the (then) Huguenot Henri IV, King of Navarre, to make good his claim to the French throne, following the 1589 assassination of the Valois King Henri III, who had named him his heir. These English forces were led by Peregrine Bertie, Baron Willoughby, who landed in Normandy in 1590; Sir John Norris, in Brittany in early 1591; and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, who landed in August 1591, to bolster the siege of Rouen, which stretched through the winter of 1591–92, before collapsing in the spring.3 For those wishing to make parallels between the winter campaign and 1 Henry VI, Talbot’s defiant challenge at Bordeaux, made with insufficient troops, might have provided a welcome boost to morale; and Shakespeare notably introduces a capture and retaking of Rouen in the play.4 But these echoes are at best serendipitous: more significant is the way in which the play highlights how the English hear about what’s going on in France. The Swiss traveller Thomas Platter, visiting London in 1599, famously wrote that the English spent their time in amusements, ‘learning at the play what is happening abroad; indeed men and womenfolk visit such places without scruple, since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.’5 What does he mean? With a very few exceptions, surviving plays of the period do not dramatize contemporary events in a literal fashion, and even those plays that can be classed as ‘news’ are invariably set in England with a dramatis personae list of unknowns.6 Dramatizing the court and battlefield intrigues of Europe was an altogether different prospect: there was a general understanding that living political figures should not be represented on stage. So we should not assume that Platter was claiming that London theatres literally staged ‘what is happening abroad’ – but rather, I would suggest, that the London playgoer could learn from the drama events analogous to current affairs, and learn in ways analogous to the ways that news of such events was received, and the forms it took. News-­getting was in vogue in the 1590s. As You Like It mocks the news-­bringers and news-­consumers in equal measure. Monsieur LeBeau comes in ‘With his mouth full of news,’ according to Rosalind. Celia picks up the conceit: Celia: Which he will put on us, as pigeons feed their young. Rosalind: Then shall we be news-­crammed. Celia: All the better; we shall be the more marketable. Bon jour Monsieur Le Beau. What’s the news?7

While the exchange gently mocks the news-­crazed courtier Le Beau, it testifies to the value of having news. If the women are ‘news-­crammed’, so overstuffed with

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r­egurgitated news that they die (George Gascoigne notes, ‘The crammed Fowle comes quickly to his death’), then they shall be ‘more marketable.’8 And it’s no surprise here that the mouth full of news should be a French mouth, as Celia emphasizes with her satirical ‘Bon jour’. In the 1593 Ortho-­epia gallica, John Eliot’s ‘pratlers’ seem obsessed with news from France. They go ‘To the Exchange, to heare the newes out of France.’ ‘Buy some booke, sir, there are the last newes from Fraunce,’ implores a bookseller. And when they get to the Exchange, to ask ‘What newes in Fraunce?’ the answer comes back, ‘None that I can tell, still warre, warre.’ These ‘pratlers’ would seem to be the audience that Eliot envisaged for his book: dedicating it ‘To the learned professors of the French tongue, in the famous citie of London,’ he repeats the lament: ‘Messires, what newes from Fraunce, can you tell? Still warres, warres.’9 The book teaches French as it links news with France, and France with war: it seems as if news, for a 1593 reader, is news from the French wars. And, as we shall see, there’s a case to be made for that understanding. In the burgeoning recent historiography of news, most scholars have concentrated on the advances made in the Jacobean period in the form of the newsletter, the heightened reporting on court scandals such as the Overbury murder, the rise of the ‘coranto’ serial newsletter during the Thirty Years War, and the possible implications of such printed news for the rise of a ‘public sphere.’10 News in the pre-­Jacobean period is usually discussed, by contrast, in terms of oral and private or scribal letter transmission: Daniel Woolf is typical when he writes that ‘In 1600, the provincial citizen or rural subject was more or less entirely at the mercy of oral reports, visitors, and correspondents.’11 However, F. J. Levy pointed out a quarter-­century ago that numbers of printed news pamphlets ‘increased in the 1590s, because of England’s involvement in the war against Philip II,’12 and his observation has recently been explored more fully. The last fifteen years of the sixteenth century saw the rise of a specific genre of foreign newsletters, first dealing with news from the Netherlands campaign, and then – as Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Paul J. Voss, and Joad Raymond have shown13 – from 1589 to 1592, almost entirely with news from France – 1590 alone saw forty newsletters published and/or entered in the Stationers’ Register for publication. Led by the prolific John Wolfe,14 printers such as Richard Field and Joseph Barnes, and translators including Edward Aggas, Arthur Golding, Anthony Munday, Edward Hoby and Joshua Sylvester were kept busy churning out a remarkable number of publications.15 While the appeal of these books may have been, as Raymond suggests, ‘partly out of [English] concern for fellow Protestants and the future of Protestantism on the Continent’, and because of the ‘coincidence between English and French political interests’ following the assassination of Henri III,16 the more pressing concern was for the welfare of English troops abroad: most of the news from France was focused on military affairs, not overtly religious or political. To what extent this effort was co-­ordinated is unclear: it may be, as Matthias Shaaber suggests, that the French ambassador in London had a key role in disseminating certain information.17 Some of the pamphlets seemed to have been ‘Published by Authority’: a note in the Stationers’

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Register on 5 July 1591 shows that a pamphlet was registered to Wolfe ‘by order of the [Privy] counsell certified under master wilkes his hand and one of the Clerkes to the counsel:,’18 Thomas Wilkes being a diplomat with an interest in the print trade, and currently a Clerk to the Privy Council. These newsletters began to assume a readily identifiable form, most notably in the output of John Wolfe, who commanded the French newsletter field from 1589 to 1593. As P. M. Handover notes, Wolfe standardized his title-­page layout, rendering his publications distinct: whereas other publishers filled their title pages with content detail, Wolfe ‘stripped his title-­page,’ leaving ‘only the short title, the house block and the imprint’, which effectively increased the visibility of his name as a brand. His titles themselves started to become standardized, ‘a most important development because it leads directly to the naming of a publication, a respect in which a periodical obviously differs from a book’. And there were minor touches for further recognition: ‘for French news Wolfe would use a block that included a fleur-­de-­lys.’19 In addition to these physical characteristics, the serial form was suggested by the promises for future publication contained in the pamphlets, as Voss remarks: ‘With the existence of the epilogue advertising a forthcoming publication and the subsequent publication of the document, along with the repeated promises of future news reports, English printing entered, for however briefly, a new epoch.’20 But historians of news have been notably reluctant to take this genre seriously as an early form of newspaper. Despite the standardization of format, these newsbooks were put together from a motley variety of materials including narratives, polemics, proclamations, edicts, and, especially, letters. Short of oral communication, the letter was the standard vehicle of news, and the advent of print only capitalized on that ­connection – indeed, Raymond notes that ‘Most news pamphlets consist of a narrative in epistolary form.’21 As Shaaber established many years ago, the perceived link between news and letters led to a long tradition of printed newsbooks framed as letters, written by people near the source of the news for a recipient at some distance. To strengthen the fiction, such publications often maintained the conceit that the writer and recipient were engaged in an ongoing correspondence. Some clearly government-­ sponsored publications claimed to be independent: as Shaaber notes, ‘it was felt that if these reports seemed to be the impartial testimony of persons not connected with the state, they would carry more conviction.’22 Sometimes these letters are produced as primary evidence, alongside other, official documents; sometimes they provide the vehicle for a narrative account. A single pamphlet could easily contain both. A True Discourse of the Discomfiture of the Duke of Aumalle, for example, was printed by Richard Field ‘according to the French Copies first printed at Tours.’ It contains as supplementary evidence ‘the king of Navarre his letters to the Inhabitants of Orleans,’ as well as narrative letters: ‘The Copie of a letter, written by a certaine Lord, to a kinsman of his, the twentieth of May. 1589’; ‘The letter of a certaine gentleman of Beausse to a friend of his being a Citizen of Paris, touching the overthrow of the forces of Monsieur d’Aumalle, written on Thursday the

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18. of May. 1589’; ‘Copie of a letter written by a Lord, to a kinsman of his, upon the discomfiture of the troupes of the L.of Aumalle, neare Bonnevall, on Thursday the 18. of May 1589.’23 Readers became used to reading their ‘news from France’ in letter format, and as multiple letters. Whether genuine or not, the letters often claim to be part of an ongoing correspondence: ‘Sir, by my last letters of the 20. of August, I did acquaint you with those reasons’;24 ‘Sir, by my last letters I advertised you …’25 Touches of verisimilitude are added by references to the labour of writing, the arrival of the post, and so on: ‘And so hoping that you will be as wearie in the reading, as I am in the writing hereof, I commit you …’;26 ‘I am enforced to leave my penne, and betake my selfe to the launce, for the trompet soundeth, mont a cavallo’.27 Within the narratives, written documents evince power and authenticity: in a report from Brittany, the Prince refuses to accept a report about prisoners delivered orally by ‘a Trompeter’ which ‘might be disadvowed,’ and demands instead ‘a writing signed with his hand.’28 Attention is paid to the material layout of letters: when Wolfe prints A Letter Sent by the French King unto Monsieur de la Verune, he makes sure to set out the placing of the signature and superscription.29 Particular attention is paid to letters with royal authority: A Discourse of That Which Is Past, since the Kings Departure from Gouy (1592) produces as its trump card ‘True newes from the kings Campe, by the Kings owne Letters, which came on the 4. of May. 1592.’30 These, then, were the forms of news with which English readers became familiar at the beginning of the 1590s. But, for modern historians, the newsbooks are flawed as evidence: absolutely biased, they resolutely fail to live up to modern standards of impartial news reporting – and the letter format appears to compound the problem. Handover notes, typically, ‘Though Wolfe was a superb manager … he was no editor.’ The letters would be ‘printed unabridged’ complete with personal openings (‘My good friend, the manifold courtesies by me sundry ways received at your hands makes me not unmindful of you’) and references to shared past activities (‘our last conference together at your lodging’). Handover argues that ‘John Wolfe’s customers would have been mystified by these allusions; John Wolfe ought to have edited them out of the letter.’31 By contrast, Voss argues that with new ‘claims of veracity’ there was a real attempt to separate out ‘war news … from the more sensational pamphlets,’ and that ‘the period from 1589 to 1593 when printers and publishers began to investigate claims of verification, marks the beginning of English journalism.’32 Both the criticism and the praise miss the point. These newsbooks do not attempt to perform the modern journalistic tasks of evaluation, confirmation and balance. They offer unsynthesized, highly partisan reports that bear all the flaws of real intelligence delivered by letters in uncertain and dangerous times – ‘news’ left deliberately raw, undigested and unchecked, from which the reader is forced to construct her or his own account of what is going on, preferably from multiple sources. Rather than seeing this genre as a failed version of the modern newspaper, it might be more pertinently be argued that the format demanded active interpretation on the part of its readers; there

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is material evidence that some readers understood that these pamphlets could form, cumulatively, something more than their individually slim parts – and that they read the pamphlets in relation to, or against, each other. Parmelee has drawn attention to the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey’s August 1592 marginalia on a copy of Michel Hurault’s An Excellent Discourse upon the Now Present Estate of France (1592), stating that the pamphlet was ‘given mee bie Mr Woolfe, for a special rare Discourse,’ while the title page and its verso contain a list of other related works, published between 1588 and 1592, suggesting that Harvey, a politically astute and professional reader, saw these publications as working in relation to each other.33 Voss has described a volume of 47 quarto news pamphlets (dating largely from 1589 to 1592) bound together in the period, once owned by the seventeenth-­century collector White Kennet, now in the Cambridge University Library (Peterborough K.6.15),34 and another in the British Library (C.132.h.25), a gift from the Philadelphia collector Abe Rosenbach, that contains 34 tracts, from 1589 to 1592, which again appear to have been collected together shortly after their publication.35 These examples show that some readers took advantage of this relatively cheap medium to buy multiple titles, and understood that their task was to evaluate the materials they presented in toto. It could be argued that the news pamphlet’s reliance on primary documents over synthetic reportage or commentary means, in Shaaber’s words, that ‘the sixteenth-­century reader was oftener informed of foreign political texts of official declarations, than we are to-­day.’36 Such was the experience of reading ‘news from France’ in the early 1590s. In his Henry VI plays, I shall argue, written during this period, Shakespeare brought that experience on to the stage. He reduced the chronologically organized certainties of the chronicle histories of Hall and Holinshed to raw news, mixed in format like the newsbooks (sometimes delivered in person, sometimes via letters) – and the result was to place his audience in the position of uncertainty and suspense undergone by the people who had lived through those histories. Staging news from France As the opening of 1 Henry VI suggests, Shakespeare used a simple device to recreate the uncertainty of news in his plays: the staggered entrance of a number of messengers bearing either verbal messages or letters, with the most popular model being three. Sometimes, as in 1 Henry VI, this device serves simply to speed up chronology, but elsewhere Shakespeare employs the three-­messenger motif to different effect. In the opening scene of 1 Henry IV, two pieces of bad news are erased by one piece of good: the Earl of Westmorland recounts how ‘[a] post from Wales’ came ‘loaden with heavy news’37 followed by ‘Far more uneven and unwelcome news’ from the north (1.1.50–51), before Sir Walter Blunt ‘new lighted from his horse’ brought ‘smooth and welcome news’ from Holmedon (1.1.62–66). One of the most complex uses of the motif occurs in the opening scene of 2 Henry IV, where the workings of rumour are laid bare. Bardolph claims to have ‘certain news from Shrewsbury’ that the king is wounded

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and Prince Harry killed.38 Northumberland demands his source: ‘How is this deriv’d? / Saw you the field? Came you from Shrewsbury’ (1.1.23–24). It transpires that Bardolph has not seen the battlefield, but instead ‘spake with one … that came from thence’, a well-­bred gentleman ‘[t]hat freely render’d me these news for true’ (1.1.25– 27). Northumberland’s servant Travers, who had been dispatched ‘On Tuesday last to listen after news’ (1.1.29), then appears. Bardolph insists that Travers can tell nothing new: ‘I over-­rode him on the way, / And he is furnished with no certainties / More than he haply may retail from me’ (1.1.30–32). But he is mistaken. Travers reports that Sir John Umfrevile gave him the ‘joyful tidings’ from the battlefield, and ‘turned me back,’ soon outriding him ‘being better hors’d’ (1.1.34–36).39 But since he was slower, Travers was then caught by ‘A gentleman almost forspent with speed … spurring hard’ with a ‘bloodied horse’, looking for Chester (1.1.36–39). This gentleman reported, contrary to Bardolph or Umfrevile, that the ‘rebellion had ill luck, / And that young Harry Percy’s spur was cold’, taking off before Travers could question him further (1.1.41–42). ‘Look, here comes more news’ (1.1.59): a third version of events then comes in, in the person of Morton, who ‘ran’ from the battlefield to bring his eyewitness account of the tragic news (1.1.65–67). As this wilfully complicated instance suggests, there is no strict hierarchy of news operating here. There are multiple forms: letter-­evidence is not always to be trusted over oral evidence; gentlemen are not always to be trusted over servants; speed is important, but needs not to be hasty. News from France, however, brings new challenges. As Daniel Woolf remarks in an important article, ‘News traveled as quickly or slowly as the men or women who carried it in the early modern era, which is to say that it did not normally travel quickly at all’40 – and news from France had to cross the English Channel. Although only twenty miles in width, the Channel was considered one of the most dangerous straits for shipping, and adverse weather conditions meant that ships, and the news-­carrying messengers they conveyed, could be held in port in Dover or Calais for days or weeks. This simple geographical fact therefore complicated the transmission of news, as delays in crossing the water produced strange effects: news came late – that was a given – but, more confusingly, recipients often learned of events in the wrong order, prompting acts that were now out-­of-­date or plain inappropriate. Shakespeare exploits this phenomenon in King John, in the scene (4.2) where the king’s control is seen to ebb fast. When John asks a messenger ‘how goes all in France’, the messenger answers tartly ‘From France to England’41 – an unprecedented force has been prepared in France to invade England and has already arrived: The copy of your speed is learned by them; For when you should be told they do prepare The tidings comes that they are all arriv’d. (4.2.113–115)

John blames his spies and scouts: ‘O, where hath our intelligence been drunk? / Where hath it slept?’ (4.2.116–117). He also asks ‘Where is my mother’s care, / That



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… she not hear of it?’ (4.2.117–119), only to learn, almost as an afterthought of the messenger’s, that ‘her ear is stopp’d with dust: the first of April died / Your noble mother; and, as I hear, my lord, / The Lady Constance in a frenzy died / Three days before’ (4.2.119–123). The news reports here go backwards – troops have arrived, troops are being prepared, his mother died on 1 April, Lady Constance died three days earlier42 – as it becomes increasingly clear how far behind on news John is. He claims that ‘Thou hast made me giddy / With these ill tidings’ (4.2.131–132), an apt reaction to the horribly telescoped announcements of doom. News from France in 3 Henry VI What King John toys with for a few lines is made structural elsewhere: it is in 3 Henry VI that we find the most extensive exploration of the interplay of news and time across the Channel. Shakespeare’s three-­messenger motif becomes here part of the drama’s very structure. The play frequently resorts to iconic tableaux of symmetrically placed characters flanking a central figure, a reiterated patterning that eschews realism but helps to make spatial sense of the characters’ complex political manoeuvring. In the opening scene, the chair of state, placed centre-­stage, is fought over by the Yorks and Lancasters; the final scene opens with Edward, taking that chair of state, and exulting ‘Once more we sit in England’s royal throne’ (5.7.1). In one scene of perfect formal symmetry, King Henry stands centre-­stage while there enters ‘a Son that hath killed his father at one door, and a Father that hath killed his son at another door’, carrying their bodies, who proceed to deliver parallel monologues (2.5.54 SD). In another, the opening scene is recalled visually to represent new divisions within the York house, as, according to the printed stage direction, ‘four stand on one side’ (Richard, Clarence, Somerset, Montague) ‘and four on the other’ (Lady Grey, Pembroke, Stafford, Hastings), with King Edward presumably in the middle (4.1.7). This iconic patterning reaches its fullest expression in what I shall argue is the play’s central scene, one that is deeply implicated, once again, in news from France. Throughout the play, the houses of Lancaster and York are depicted in contrast not so much to each other but to Warwick. This can be seen systematically explored in the relation of the royal houses to the conveying of news. Eschewing lowly messengers, both houses employ noblemen as quasi-­ambassadors to do the work, or even make themselves messengers. So on witnessing Henry confirm the succession to Richard of York, Clifford urges Northumberland, ‘Come, cousin, let us tell the Queen these news’ (1.1.182). When Henry writes to Warwick, Norfolk and Montague, who have just deserted him, he employs Exeter, ‘Come, cousin, you shall be the messenger’ (1.1.272). After being persuaded to move against the king, York uses his new supporters as messengers: Montague is dispatched ‘to London presently, / And whet on Warwick to this enterprise,’ Richard is sent ‘to the Duke of Norfolk / … [to] tell him privily of our intent,’ while Edward ‘shall unto my Lord Cobham, / With whom the Kentishmen will willingly rise’ (1.2.35–40). The

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military planning presupposes the kind of feudal regime where magnates can call in their local powerbase to muster in support of whatever cause the magnate espouses. The negative effects of this type of communication can be seen in the aftermath of the killing of Richard of York. While the audience already knows that Richard’s head is ‘set … on York gate, / So York may overlook the town of York’ (1.5.179–180), ten days later his sons Edward and Richard are still musing as to ‘how our princely father scaped’: Had he been ta’en, we should have heard the news; Had he been slain, we should have heard the news; Or had he scaped, methinks we should have heard The happy tidings of his good escape. (2.1.1–7)

Finally they are told the news in an eyewitness account of ‘the saddest spectacle that e’er I viewed’ (2.1.67), from a news-­bearer (‘one that was a woeful looker on’ (2.1.45)) who enters ‘blowing’ (the blown horn being the symbol of the post).43 In stark contrast to this vague wondering, Warwick is depicted as actively seeking news, and supremely well-­informed. When he rushes in with Montague, calling for ‘What fare, what news abroad?’ (2.1.95), he is not fazed by the ‘baleful news’ (2.1.97) of York’s death: ‘Ten days ago I drowned these news in tears’ (2.1.104), he claims before moving on ‘to tell you things sith then befall’n’ (2.1.106). It becomes clear at this point that Warwick is much better informed than anybody else. His intelligence relies not on first-­hand eye-­witness accounts, nor on personal interventions by senior government officials, but on a system of spies, intelligencers, and posts (high-­speed messengers). He hears about the ‘bloody fray at Wakefield’ (2.1.107) in which York is killed, while still in London, over 160 miles away: Tidings, as swiftly as the posts could run, Were brought me of your loss and his depart. (2.1.109–110)

As his use of the verb ‘run’ suggests, Warwick here employs footposts, an expensive but, at their best, highly effective means of communication. These men, who simply ran on foot over terrain rather than use horses, were prized by government officials, towns and corporations: as John Crofts notes, ‘it was found (or firmly believed) that over journeys of several days’ duration a horse was actually not as fast as a well trained man on foot.’44 Simultaneously, Warwick reports, ‘by my scouts, I was advertised’ that the queen was coming with a force to Parliament in Westminster to ‘dash our late decree,’ so he heads to intercept her at St Albans (2.1.115–120). He discovers Edward’s position – ‘in the marches here we heard you were / Making another head to fight again’ (2.1.139–140) – and races ‘haste, post haste’ (2.1.138) to join him. He also provides Edward with the position of Norfolk’s forces, only ‘Some six miles off’ (2.1.143), and explains why Edward’s brother George is in the country – both facts that are, embarrassingly enough, not known to the York brothers (‘Where is the Duke

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of Norfolk, gentle Warwick, / And when came George from Burgundy to England’ (2.1.141–142), asks Edward). With his news-­gathering credentials established, Warwick now proves to have more information and a plan – ‘Attend me Lords’ (2.1.167). The queen, Clifford, and Northumberland have persuaded Henry to abandon his oath to have Edward as successor. They have all gone to London to annul that oath in Parliament with, ‘I think,’ thirty thousand men. Warwick calculates that if the men mustered by him and Norfolk, along with the ‘loving Welshmen’ Edward can ‘procure’ in his capacity as Earl of March, will amount to 25,000 with whom they can march on London (2.1.167–184). As Edward gladly assents to the plan, the scene ends with another messenger coming to Warwick, with news from Norfolk that the queen is advancing with ‘a puissant host,’ and notice that he requires ‘speedy counsel’ with Warwick (2.1.205–207), and significantly not with the York brothers. The cumulative effect of this scene is quite stunning. Warwick is seen to have access to reliable intelligence from Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, Wales, and Norfolk. He remains in constant contact with his allies by a team of messengers. He is by no means static, as Henry is and as the York brothers appear to be, but instead races all over the country, from London to St Albans to the marches and back to London. This is how the kingmaker will plant his Plantagenet. And yet Warwick will end the play dead, having horribly miscalculated his strength and alliances – and Shakespeare depicts his downfall by re-­using, and perverting, some of the motifs that have previously been used to establish his pre-­eminence. We have early signs that, no matter his strength as an intelligence gatherer, Warwick as a soldier has his faults. When the York party confronts the Lancasters, Warwick is strangely silent until the queen goads him: Why, how now, long-­tongued Warwick, dare you speak? When you and I met at Saint Albans last, Your legs did better service than your hands. (2.2.102–104)

Warwick does not deny the charge, simply saying ‘Then ’twas my turn to fly, and now ’tis thine’ (2.2.105). It is a hint of what is to come. We next see Warwick exhausted on the battlefield, as he decides to ‘lay me down a little while to breathe’ (2.3.2), prompting Richard to question him: ‘Ah, Warwick, why hast thou withdrawn thyself?’ (2.3.14). Although Warwick vows on his knee that ‘I’ll never pause again, never stand still’ (2.3.29–30) until he has been avenged, there has been planted the nagging doubt that, for all his skill in intelligence, Warwick might fly, breathe, pause, stand still – habits that will not stand him well in battle. But the real change comes when he sails to France. Once Henry and Margaret are fleeing, Clifford is dead and Edward is clearly the victor, Warwick plans his final moments of kingmaking: they will march to London for Edward’s coronation, and then he himself will have a mission:

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  shall Warwick cut the sea to France And ask the Lady Bona for thy queen. So shalt thou sinew both these lands together … First will I see the coronation; And then to Brittany I’ll cross the sea To effect this marriage, so it please my lord.

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(2.6.89–98)

Edward gives him carte blanche – ‘Even as thou wilt, sweet Warwick, let it be; / …. Warwick as ourself / Shall do and undo as him pleaseth best’ (2.6.99, 104–105) – seeing him as an Atlas on whose strength he will found his reign: ‘in thy shoulder do I build thy seat’ (2.6.100). At this moment, as Warwick becomes Edward (as an ambassador always becomes his sovereign), the tide turns: Warwick ceases to be an intelligence broker, and instead tries to become a power broker in his own right. And it is only natural, given what happens to news in France, that the collapse of his power should take place in France. The play’s central scene, coming at the end of Act 3, and containing the crucial shift in Warwick’s loyalties from York to Lancaster, is also Shakespeare’s most brilliant experiment with news and narrative time. It depicts two suits, by Margaret and Edward’s ambassador Warwick, being made to the French king Lewis. As Lewis appears to favour Warwick, a messenger from England bursts in with letters for the two suitors and the king, letters that carry news of Edward’s marriage to another woman. Warwick turns on his erstwhile patron, and concludes a pact with Margaret and the angry Lewis. The scene has no historical referent, but Hall’s chronicle provides the narrative behind it. In 1464, Henry re-­enters England in disguise and is quickly apprehended and put into Warwick’s custody. Alarmed at this turn of events, Margaret leaves Scotland for France, to stay with her father Duke Reyner. Warwick, meanwhile, seeks a suitable wife for Edward, going to the French king Louis XI at Tours, and asking for the hand of Lady Bona, sister of Louis’s queen Carlot, trusting that this marriage will cut off French support for Margaret. Carlot, ambitious for her family, persuades Louis to assent to the plan, and the Earl of Dampmartine is dispatched to England to finalize the marriage, with Warwick being ‘highly rewarded’ by the French for his efforts. But meanwhile, Edward falls in love with Dame Elizabeth Grey, and, despite his mother’s machinations, marries her and crowns her queen. ‘The French kyng and his quene,’ reports Hall, ‘were not a littell discontent (as I can not blame them) to have their sister, first demaunded and then graunted, and in conclusion rejected, and apparently mocked, without any cause reasonable.’ In time Lady Bona is happily married off, but there are less tractable ‘Incommodities that sprang of kyng Edwardes marriage.’ When Warwick receives ‘perfit knowledge by the letters of his trusty frendes’ of Edward’s marriage, rendering his endeavours ‘both frustrate & vayn,’ he is ‘earnestly moved and sore chafed’ and decides that Edward must be deposed ‘as an inconstant prince, not worthy of such a kingly office.’ But biding his time, Warwick returns to England, ‘covertly dissimulyng’ until he can ‘spye a tyme

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convenient.’ After staying in the court for ‘a certain space,’ he obtains licence to return to Warwick Castle, and later wins over the Duke of Clarence. Finally, open warfare breaks out between Edward and Warwick, and for a short time the king is Warwick’s prisoner, but Edward escapes, and in 1470 Warwick and some followers flee to Louis’s court. At this point Margaret becomes involved, coming to the court with her son Edward, and the Earls of Pembroke and Oxford. Margaret and Warwick decide, with the co-­operation of the French king, to ‘conclude a league and a treatie betwene them’, and strengthen it by marrying her son to Warwick’s second daughter Anne, solemnly swearing to continue the war until Henry VI or his son is restored. Louis lends them ships, money, and men, and appoints the Bastard of Burgoyne Admiral of France, to defend them against both the duke of Burgoyne and the English fleet.45 The sequence of events is here six years in the making, but in Shakespeare’s play it unfolds in a single iconic scene. In creating this scene, Shakespeare recasts his three-­ messenger motif – a woman, an ambassador, a letter-­bearing messenger – by playing on the possibilities created by the English Channel. Its importance is underlined by being both anticipated and repeated in other scenes. In 3.1, King Henry, enjoying a brief moment of freedom in disguise, is overheard setting the scene: My Queen and son are gone to France for aid; And, as I hear, the great commanding Warwick Is thither gone, to crave the French King’s sister To wife for Edward. (3.1.28–31)

This too is news, and news that upsets Henry: ‘If this news be true, / Poor Queen and son, your labour is but lost’ (3.1.31–32). In a striking image, Henry produces an ironic comparison of the suits of Margaret and Warwick, positioned on either side of the French king: ‘She on his left side, craving aid for Henry: / He on his right, asking a wife for Edward’ (3.1.43–44). To her advantage, Henry claims, in a portrait of his wife not instantly recognizable from her appearances in the play, Margaret is ‘a woman to be pitied much’ (3.1.36), who can inspire pity through sighs, tears, mourning, and plaint and so ‘By this account … Margaret may win him’ (3.1.55): Her sighs will make a batt’ry in his breast; Her tears will pierce into a marble heart; The tiger will be mild whiles she doth mourn; And Nero will be tainted with remorse, To hear and see her plaints, her brinish tears. (3.1.37–41)

But ultimately, while the queen ‘for grief can speak no more’ (3.1.47), Warwick is a ‘subtle orator’, and the French king ‘a prince soon won with moving words’ (3.1.33–34) – male rhetoric will outclass female emotion. Moreover, their positions are unequal: Margaret has ‘come to beg,’ Warwick ‘to give’ (3.1.42); she ‘weeps, and

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says her Henry is deposed,’ he ‘smiles, and says his Edward is installed’ (3.1.45–46); and in his speech Warwick ‘[i]nferreth arguments of mighty strength’ (3.1.49) as he ‘tells his [his master’s] title’, his right to the throne (3.1.48). Ultimately, Henry imagines, Warwick ‘in conclusion wins the King from her’ (3.1.50). When the scene takes place, Henry’s prediction initially seems to be played out. In response to Margaret’s emotional outburst, Louis coolly points out that ‘if your title to the crown be weak, / … Then ’tis but reason, that I be released’ (3.3.145–147) from his earlier promises. ‘Title,’ as Henry forewarned, appears to win the day. But then the scene departs from Henry’s script. As Margaret continues her harangue, we hear a ‘Post blowing a horn within’ (3.3.161 SD), and Lewis remarks, ‘Warwick, this is some post to us or thee’ (3.3.162), excluding the powerless Margaret from the possibility that she might receive news. The post delivers letters to Warwick from his ‘brother, Marquess Montague’; to the French king, from the English king; and to Margaret, ‘these for you; from whom, I know not’ (3.3.163–166). (And here we meet an interesting problem: the post is sent as special envoy from Edward to Lewis; Montague takes advantage of his mission to send letters to his brother Warwick; but who writes, from the Yorkist court, to Margaret?) Dialogue grinds to a halt as ‘They all read their letters’ (3.3.166 SD) – the only time in Shakespeare’s drama that three individuals are shown reading three separate letters – but, as frequently happens,46 Oxford and Prince Edward provide a commentary on their responses: Oxford: I like it well, that our fair Queen and mistress Smiles at her news, while Warwick frowns at his. Prince Edward: Nay, mark how Lewis stamps as he were nettled. I hope all’s for the best. (3.3.167–70)

Here we have three different reactions to newsletters: smiling, frowning, and stamping in irritation. Not surprisingly then, the French king asks, ‘Warwick, what are thy news? / And yours, fair Queen?’ (3.3.171). This time, in a neat inversion of Shakespeare’s usual motif – the three conflicting pieces of news – all the letters contain the same news, which the two battling recipients respond to, once again, in formally contrasted ways: Queen Margaret: Mine such, as fill my heart with unexpected joys. Warwick: Mine full or sorrow and heart’s discontent. (3.3.172–3)

Lewis is, quite rightly, infuriated by the lapse in decorum of Edward’s behaviour: not only has the English king married another woman, but ‘to soothe your forgery and his, / Sends me a paper to persuade me patience’ (3.3.175–176). Warwick’s embassy has been superseded and Warwick compromised by ‘a paper’; a letter has overridden Edward’s own surrogate. Warwick immediately extricates himself from the situation:



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‘I am clear of this misdeed of Edward’s; / No more my King, for he dishonours me’ (3.3.183–184). The mission of England’s ‘messenger’ is not yet complete. Lewis commands him to ‘return in post’ (3.3.222) and to deliver the message

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That Lewis of France, is sending over masquers To revel it with him, and his new bride. Thou seest what’s passed; go fear thy King withal. (3.3.224–226)

Lady Bona has a personal message for her brief-­lived fiancé: ‘Tell him, my mourning weeds are laid aside, / And I am ready to put armour on.’ And Warwick has the last word: ‘Tell him from me that he hath done me wrong, / And therefore I’ll uncrown him ere’t be long.’ He does not forget to give the messenger some remuneration: ‘There’s thy reward, be gone’ (3.3.227–233). ‘England’s messenger’ thus returns to England with multiple news from France. When the king greets him with the cry from the Exchange, ‘Now messenger, what letters, or what news / From France?’, the post can only reply, ‘My sovereign liege, no letters, and few words’ (4.1.84–86) before timidly proferring the damning parting shots he has remembered from the French court, as Edward demands: ‘Tell me their words as near as thou canst guess them’ (4.1.90). In relaying almost verbatim the words uttered by the three letters’ recipients, the messenger is able to sketch with great economy the political fallout from the news of Edward’s marriage. From three figures who are meant to send separate messages comes a single story for Edward to swallow. Warwick’s embassy is ultimately scuppered by the realities of cross-­Channel communication. Travelling to France at the relatively slow pace of an ambassador, Warwick’s mission, delivered to him orally and in letters by the king, is dangerously dated, vulnerable to being overtaken, and here contradicted, by newer news. In such a situation, news by letter trumps the words delivered in person by the king’s ambassador. This has ramifications for Warwick himself. In moving from intelligence-­gatherer to political player in his own right, Warwick loses the very quality that made him so powerful. Now, relieving himself of his ambassadorial role (‘I came from Edward as ambassador, / But I return his sworn and mortal foe’ (3.3.256–257)), he immediately starts planning for ‘dreadful war’ (3.3.259), returning to his wonted status as intelligence-­gatherer, aided by the letters brought from England: ‘As for Clarence, as my letters tell me, / He’s very likely now to fall from him [Edward]’ (3.3.208–209), so Warwick and Clarence can ‘force the tyrant from his seat by war’ (3.3.206) if Lewis provides him with ‘some few bands of chosen soldiers’ (3.3.204). But ultimately, believing this intelligence concerning Clarence will prove Warwick’s undoing. It is almost as if, from his French mission onwards, Warwick loses his skill in deciphering news. In the play’s final act, on the walls of Coventry, we are given a final variation on the three-­messengers motif. Warwick receives verbal reports from three of his allies, two

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by unnamed ‘posts’ and one by Somerville: ‘Where is the post that came from valiant Oxford? … / Where is the post that came from Montague? … / Say Somerville, what says my loving son?’ (5.1.1–7). Warwick needs to ascertain how far off are the forces of Oxford, Montague, and Clarence, now his son-­in-­law: ‘How far hence is thy lord, honest fellow? … / How far off is our brother Montague? … / … by thy guess, how nigh is Clarence now?’ (5.1.2–8). Somerville is a Warwickshire name,47 and Shakespeare piles on the local references here: as J. Dover Wilson puts it, ‘the author has obviously stood on the walls of Coventry.’48 The answers given by the two posts and Somerville are all properly specific to the Warwick locality, establishing that Warwick is on his home turf. Oxford is ‘By this [time] at Dunsmore, marching hitherward’ (5.1.3), Dunsmore Heath being 10 modern miles away to the south-­east of Coventry (on what is now the A45). Montague is ‘By this [time] at Daintry, with a puissant troop’ (5.1.6), at Daventry, and so about 18 miles south-­east of Coventry (on the modern A423). Somerville reports that he left Clarence ‘At Southam … with his forces / And do expect him here some two hours hence’ (5.1.9–10), Southam being about 11 miles south-­south-­east of Coventry. These are both major highways, listed in the popular Briefe treatise: Coventry to ‘Deyntry’ is on the Caernarvon–Chester– London route, while Coventry to Southam is on the Coventry–Oxford road. Like Somerville, none of these places is mentioned in Shakespeare’s source.49 Having established the whereabouts of his confederates, Warwick is suddenly confused by the sound of a drum: ‘Then Clarence is at hand, I hear his drum’ (5.1.11). But Somerville points out that the sound is coming from the wrong direction: ‘It is not his, my Lord, here Southam lies. / The drum your honour hears marcheth from Warwick’ (5.2.12–13), south-­south-­west of Coventry rather than south-­south-­east.50 Even then, Warwick is unable to understand whose forces he is hearing: ‘Who should that be? Belike unlooked-­for friends’ (5.1.14), he speculates optimistically. His intelligence has failed him spectacularly. The drum is, in fact, announcing ‘sportful Edward come’ (5.1.18): his army within earshot, but with no advance warning. Warwick’s military failure here could be vividly contrasted with by the acumen shown by Joan Lapucelle under similar conditions outside Rouen in 1 Henry VI. There, as ‘Drums sound afar off’, she interprets them: ‘Hark – by the sound of drum you may perceive / Their powers are marching unto Paris-­ward.’ She correctly identifies a second noise – ‘Here sound an English march’ – as ‘There goes the Talbot with his colours spread, / And all his troops of English after him.’ Then a third sound (‘French march’) is deduced as ‘Now in the rearward comes the Duke [of Burgundy] and his … lag[ging] behind’.51 In the case of Warwick, Shakespeare alters his source tellingly: whereas Hall’s chronicle claims that Warwick ‘was displeased, and grudged agaynst his brother the Marques [Montague], for lettynge kyng Edward passe,’52 Shakespeare’s Warwick, like King John, attacks his own news-­gatherers: ‘Where slept our scouts, or how are they seduced, / That we could hear no news of his repair?’ (5.1.19–20). Edward threatens Warwick, taunting him with news of what has happened to Henry in London. But then Warwick’s fortunes seem to rise. With a deliberate repeat of the



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staggered entry motif, his supporters enter one by one, each ‘with Drum and Colour’ (5.1.57 SD, 66 SD, 71 SD, 75 SD) and proclaim their loyalty to Henry’s cause: ‘Oxford, Oxford, for Lancaster!,’ ‘Montague, Montague, for Lancaster!,’ ‘Somerset, Somerset, for Lancaster!’ (5.1.59, 67, 72). Three allies thus make their entrance, setting up a pattern that the fourth will overturn. As Clarence enters, his father-­in-­law Warwick boasts to his brother Edward, And lo, where George of Clarence sweeps along, Of force enough to bid his brother battle; With whom an upright zeal to right prevails More than the nature of a brother’s love. Come, Clarence, come. Thou wilt, if Warwick call. (5.1.76–80)

Warwick’s taunt that Clarence’s ‘upright zeal’ can outclass ‘a brother’s love’ is then thrown back at him, as Clarence claims he ‘will not ruinate my father’s house’ (5.1.83): Why, trowest thou, Warwick, That Clarence is so harsh, so blunt, unnatural, To bend the fatal instruments of war Against his brother and his lawful King? (5.1.85–88)

Taking back his oath, he proclaims himself Warwick’s mortal foe, and asks for his brother’s forgiveness: ‘I will henceforth be no more unconstant’ (5.1.102). The tables have been turned. In the play’s opening scenes, Edward and his brothers appear naive and unable to grasp what was going on, while Warwick, with his network of intelligencers, is able to use the knowledge thus gained to make the king. But ultimately, it is not enough. Pushed to his own powerbase of Warwickshire, his weaknesses become apparent: although well provided with ‘news’ from followers, he proves lacking in basic knowledge of his own lands, unable to comprehend the information presented to his senses (the view from Coventry walls, the sound of a trumpet) while the local man Somerville has no such problem; with a notable lack of noble magnanimity, Warwick blames those who serve him. And his misapprehension of Edward’s trumpet, believing it to be Clarence’s, prefigures his misreading of Clarence’s loyalty. Warwick recognizes his weaknesses as he lays dying, following the battle at Barnet, but in the telescoped action of the play only a few lines later. He sighs, My parks, my walls, my manors that I had Even now forsake me; and of all my lands Is nothing left me but my body’s length. (5.2.24–26)

These lines might seem to be the familiar recognition of the dying man that he will die naked, unable to take his worldly goods with him. But in his choice of those goods

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– parks, forests, manors, lands – Warwick seems to recognize that his hold over his landed powerbase is gone, and he must die while the true king wins the day. Somerset tries to buoy his spirits with more news from France but it comes almost as a taunt: Ah Warwick, Warwick, wert thou as we are We might recover all our loss again. The Queen from France hath brought a puissant power; Even now we heard the news. Ah, couldst thou fly.

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(5.2.29–32)

But Warwick cannot fly, and his grasp of the news proves ultimately fruitless. In sharp contrast, the next scene shows Edward with Richard of Gloucester displaying his new grasp of intelligence: informing his lords that the queen has raised a force in France, that it is ten thousand strong, that Somerset and Oxford have joined with her, that they are ‘advertised by our loving friends’ (5.3.18) that they are moving toward Tewkesbury. From that point their victory is inexorable. News is multiple in 3 Henry VI. There is not a single truth that can be reported but rather multiple intelligences, some true, some believing themselves to be true, some deliberately false, all of which have to be weighed up by the recipients of that intelligence. Shakespeare toys with notions of time, acutely aware that news travels at different speeds, and with different rates of success. In all of this, I would argue, he hits on a brilliant device for undoing the relentless chronological ‘truth’ of chronicle history, reducing historical events back to the fragmented, contested, contradictory ways in which they were originally reported. And in the terrain that fascinated the news-­crammed Londoners of the early 1590s, France, just twenty miles distant from England in space, but sometimes weeks away in time, he found the perfect test-­case for how news works, and does not work, in early modern England. Notes  1 William Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 1, ed. Edward Burns, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Routledge, 2002).  2 Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1548; STC 12721); Raphael Holinshed et al., The Third Volume of Chronicles … Now Newlie Recognised, Augmented, and Continued … to the Yeare 1586 (London: Henry Denham, 1587; STC 13569). For a survey of Shakespeare’s sources see Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London: Routledge and Paul, 1957–75).  3 Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 162–166; Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government, and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).  4 Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources, Vol. III, pp. 24–25.  5 ‘Mitt solchen unndt viel anderen kurtzweilen mehr vertreiben dei Engellender ihr zeit,

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erfahren in den comedien, waß sich in anderen landen zutraget, unndt gehendt ohne scheüchen mann unddt weibspersonen an gemelte ort, weil mehrtheils Engellender nicht pflegen viel zereysen, sondern sich vernügen, zehauß frembde sachen zeerfahren unndt ihr kurtzweil zenemmen.’ Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande 1595–1600, ed. Rut Keiser, 2 vols (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co., 1968), Vol. II, pp. 794–795; Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, trans. and ed. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 170.  6 Such plays would include Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, The Yorkshire Tragedy and perhaps Ben Jonson’s lost Page of Plymouth.  7 Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1975), 1.2.87–89.  8 The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (London: Richard Smith, 1575; STC 11637), sig. e.vr.  9 John Eliot, Ortho-­epia gallica. Eliots Fruits for the French (London: John Wolfe, 1593; STC 7574), sigs d1r, i2r, d2r, A3r. 10 See F. J. Levy, ‘How information spread among the gentry, 1550–1640’, Journal of British Studies, 21.2 (Spring 1982), 11–34; Richard Cust, ‘News and politics in early seventeenth-­ century England’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), 60–90; C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); the essays in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (eds) The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001); Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1666 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); David Randall, Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). 11 Daniel Woolf, ‘News, history, and the construction of the present in early modern England’, in Dooley and Baron (eds), Politics of Information, pp. 80–118, at p. 91. See also Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-­modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 5. 12 Levy, ‘How information spread among the gentry’, 20. 13 Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-­League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996), chapter 2; Paul J. Voss, Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe & the Birth of Journalism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 101–108. For older works see M. A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, 1476–1622 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929); Douglas Cecil Collins, A Handlist of News Pamphlets, 1590–1610 (London: South-­West Essex Technical College, 1943); Henry J. Webb, ‘Military newsbooks during the age of Elizabeth’, English Studies, 33 (1952), 241–251; J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), appendix. 14 On Wolfe see Clifford Chalmers Huffman, Elizabethan Impressions: John Wolfe and His Press (New York: AMS Press, 1988), esp. pp. 69–98; Harry R. Hoppe, ‘John Wolfe, printer and publisher, 1579–1601’, The Library, 4th ser. 14.3 (1933), 241–288; Joseph F. Loewenstein, ‘For a history of literary property: John Wolfe’s Reformation’, ELR, 18 (1988), 389–412.

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15 Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce, pp. 34–36. 16 Raymond, Pamphlets, p. 103. 17 Shaaber, Some Forerunners, p. 264. 18 Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554–1640, A.D., 5 vols (London and Birmingham: privately printed, 1875–94), Vol. II, p. 588. See also the entry on 23 October 1591 ‘under thandes of master wilkes and master watkins’, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, Vol. II, p. 597). These are cited in P. M. Handover, Printing in London from 1476 to Modern Times (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 105. 19 Handover, Printing in London, pp. 104–105. 20 Voss, Elizabethan News Pamphlets, p. 71. 21 Raymond, Pamphlets, p. 105. 22 Shaaber, Some Forerunners, p. 58. 23 A True Discourse of the Discomfiture of the Duke of Aumalle (London: Richard Field, 1589; STC 11291), sigs B[1]r–v, B.ij.r–B.iij.v, B.iiij.r. 24 Advertisements from Britany, and from the Low Countries. In September and October (London: John Wolfe, 1591; STC 3805.5), sig. A4r. 25 The True Reporte of the Service in Britanie. Performed lately by the honorable knight Sir Iohn Norreys and other captaines and gentlemen souldiers before Guingand. Together with the articles which the Prince D’ombes according to the defendants of the towne (London: John Wolfe, 1591; STC 18655), sig. A2v. 26 Advertisements from Britany, sig. C4v. 27 The True Reporte, sig. B2r. 28 A Journall, or Briefe Report of the Late Service in Britaigne, by the Prince de Dombes generall of the French Kings army in those partes, assisted with her Majesties forces at this present there, under the conduct of Sir John Norris: advertised by letters here resident from the said Prince to the Kings Ambassadour, with her Majesty, and confirmed bylike advertisements from others, imployed in that service (London: John Wolfe, 1591; STC 13156), sig. A3r. 29 A Letter Sent by the French King unto Monsieur de la Verune (London: J[ohn] Wolfe for William Wright, 1590; STC 13113.5), sig. A4r–v. 30 A Discourse of That Which Is Past, since the kings departure from Gouy, to puruse the prince of Parma: even til the first of May. 1592 (London: John Wolfe, 1592; STC 11270), sig. B4r. 31 Handover, Printing in London, pp. 106–107. 32 Voss, Elizabethan News Pamphlets, pp. 54–66 (‘Claims of veracity and the birth of journalism’), quoted at pp. 54, 55, 61–62. 33 [Michel Hurault], An Excellent Discourse upon the Now Present Estate of France, trans. E. A. (London: John Wolfe, 1592; STC 14005), discussed in Parmelee, Good News from France, pp. 47–50. Harvey’s copy is in the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, shelfmark 49490, discussed in Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 223. 34 Voss, Elizabethan News Pamphlets, p. 19; see also Raymond, Pamphlets, p. 104. 35 Voss, Elizabethan News Pamphlets, pp. 17–19. 36 Shaaber, Some Forerunners, p. 173. 37 Shakespeare, King Henry IV part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden 3rd series (London: Thomson, 2002), 1.1.37.

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38 Shakespeare, King Henry IV part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Thomson, 1999), 1.1.12, 14–20. 39 Most editors alter Umfrevile to Bardolph here, to make the two accounts tally. 40 Woolf, ‘News, history and the construction of the present in early modern England’, p. 85. Woolf’s article provides a different but related discussion of news and time. 41 Shakespeare, King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1954), 4.2.109–110. 42 In historical fact, Constance died three years before Eleanor. See King John, ed. Honigmann, p. 102, note on 4.2.121–124. 43 A similar scene is enacted later in the play, when Lady Grey proves herself far better informed than her brother Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers. Rivers cannot understand why she is upset; ‘Why, brother Rivers,’ she replies, ‘are you yet to learn, / What late misfortune has befallen King Edward?’ (4.4.2–3). She goes on to say ‘I further have to understand’ that her husband has been imprisoned, and ‘I am informed’ that Warwick is coming towards London – news that allows her to decide to ‘fly, while we may fly’ (4.4.34). 44 John Crofts, Packhorse, Waggon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications Under the Tudors and Stuarts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 52. One Bristol footpost, Thomas Lyne, was frequently employed by Lord Treasurer Burghley to carry letters between London and Bristol, charging between 13s 4d fourpence, and 15s, for the 240–­ mile journey (cited in Crofts, Packhorse, Waggon and Post, p. 54). 45 Hall, Union, sigs 2H3v–2K6v. 46 See Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 214– 215. 47 On the naming of Somerville, a Warwickshire name that was in the 1580s newly infamous through the recusant alleged traitor John Somerville, found dead in his Newgate cell while awaiting trial for treason in 1583, see Randall Martin, ‘Rehabilitating John Somerville in 3 Henry VI’, and John D. Cox, ‘Local references in 3 Henry VI’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51.3 (2000), 332–340 and 340–352. 48 The Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), notes on 5.1 at pp. 192–193. 49 Edward H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), pp. 135–136 (Coventry), p. 147 (Daventry), p. 160 (Dunsmore), p. 475 (Southam). For the roads see [Richard Grafton], A Briefe Treatise Containing Many Proper Tables and Easie Rules (London: John Charlwood for Thomas Adams, 1591; STC 12159), sigs H2v, H3r. 50 See Sugden, Topographical Dictionary, pp. 135–136. 51 1H6, 3.3.23SD–34. 52 Hall, Union, sig. 3M2v.

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Writings and the problem of satisfaction in Michaelmas Term Amanda Bailey Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.1

At the end of Act 3 of Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, the arriviste gallant Richard Easy of Essex has accumulated £700 in unpaid debts. Yet by the final act of the play his financial problem is resolved. With inexplicable ease, Easy’s debt is cancelled and he regains his estate, a turn of events he attributes not to his own – or any other form of human – intervention but to the force of ‘writings.’ These writings consist of various financial documents such as debt bonds, the mortgage he forfeits, and the deed of discharge that the merchant Quomodo, who despite having plotted against Easy for the entirety of the play, mistakenly signs. Easy takes stock by reviewing the ‘good deeds’ and ‘bad deeds’ that have affected his fortunes. Here he does not reflect on his actions but on the ‘writings,’ which in a chiastic crossing of agency and instrumentality, have kept and ‘gave’ his lands away, and consequentially ‘turn[ed]’ to safety or have had their just ‘deserts’: Here’s good deeds and bad deeds, the writings that keep my Lands to me, and the bonds that gave it away from me. These, my good deeds, shall to more safety turn, And these, my bad, have their deserts and burn.2

The efficacy of these writings stands in stark contrast to Easy’s impotence. If Easy’s hapless fall out of and back into fortune seems preposterous to audiences, this character’s passivity has presented an interpretative problem for critics. The inordinate focus on the play’s predatory schemers masks a more anxious suspicion of a character that would resign himself to his own demise. Several scholars have argued that Easy mars the play, pointing out that in Michaelmas Term ‘thematic unity has not found its dramatic correlative in consistent characterization.’3 Paul Yachnin avers, ‘our sympathy for Easy rises no higher than it would for any other dumb beast led to financial slaughter.’4 Even when he regains his estate in the end, readers do not regard this as convincing comic closure. Richard Levin, for instance, wonders how are we



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supposed to ‘side with Easy and enjoy his triumph,’ since his cozeners have been so ‘brilliant’ and he is known only for ‘passive gullibility.’5 The one critic who sees the appeal of Easy, Theodore Leinwand, argues that through this character Middleton showcases the allure of masculine submission in an urban context in which homoerotic bonds carry cultural cachet for certain men. As Leinwand explains in Middleton’s London: A fluid economy of dupes, dupers, and dupers duped operates … according to analogous, perhaps even interchangeable financial and sexual principles. Beggar (y)/bugger (y) neatly conflates what everyone would escape and what everyone wishes on others, but it is also the occasional discreet object of desire.6

Highlighting the interdependency of same-­sex erotic and economic bonds that establish the play’s sophistication, Leinwand observes that, even as gallants move between dominant and submissive roles in their erotic partnerships, impecuniousness is ­consistently linked to sexual passivity. Without losing sight of the homoerotic allure of men who are ‘easy,’ I want to consider the broader economic and social implications of what it meant circa 1600 to be ‘easily possessed’ (1.1.49) by examining how the states of self-­possession and dispossession were mediated on stage and off by one kind of ‘writing,’ the penal debt bond. The bond in early seventeenth-­century England was not merely a financial instrument but also a form of writing that as a document of accountability entailed its own generic conventions, which, in this instance, impinge upon those of city comedy.7 Through the character of Easy and his dealings with this form of monetary writing, Michaelmas Term offers a diacritical reading of the signature or the hand, which served as the material sign of consent. In early modern England, the word ‘hand’ referred to both instrument and object. As an appendage, the hand became a tool of agency and an entity that initiated social joining through the act of clasping. As the signature, the hand became detachable; when the signer ‘put his hand’ to a deed, he figuratively parted with it.8 A fugitive mark, the signature as a substitute for the physical person of its owner always signalled an absent-­presence. In the particular case of debt bondage, the signature’s function as a duplication of its author was even more problematic. The hand that authenticated the borrower also inaugurated his deprivation.9 The rules of city comedy, a subgenre that arguably revolves around the giving of one’s hand in marriage are, according to one critic, violated in Michaelmas Term, since Middleton undermines the ‘two central comic assumptions’ driving the subgenre: the pursuit of procreation as a means of preserving the social order and civic freedom as a virtue.10 In this city comedy the heteronormative trajectory of courtship is indeed interrupted by the quest to secure the hand of the debtor. Yet the generation of progeny and civic enfranchisement remain central to the play even as the introduction of the bond revises the connection between two. The debt bond comes to stand for the product of pecuniary parthenogenesis between men. Nonetheless, even as economic obligation binds men, the bond proves to be an unreliable contract, since the hand of

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the male debtor, unlike that of the betrothed woman, attests to his coeval status as the object of property and the subject of contract.11 While this chapter focuses, most broadly, on drama’s role in exposing the hermeneutical instability of the common law of contract, my particular aim is to analyse how the intrusion of the bond transforms Michaelmas Term into a play about writing and the will. By the late sixteenth century, the negative aspects of common law were coming to be associated with its rampant textuality. As Subha Mukherji stresses, the period witnessed a significant shift from oral assimilation to print, which allowed for the proliferation of legal commentaries, manuals, handbooks, and writs, democratizing the law and increasing its availability to the unmonitored translation and application by those ‘far-­removed from the “collective mind of the profession”.’12 Middleton’s engagement with the written culture of the law is not merely informed by the details of jurisdictional procedure but marked by a sensitivity to its elastic philosophical and affective underpinnings. In what follows, I situate Middleton’s play, which revolves around the compliant debtor Richard Easy and the devisement of his bonds, in the context of contemporaneous legal debates over the notion of consent in economic obligation that came to a head in Slade’s Case. In 1602, Edmund Coke and King’s Bench justices determined that the insolvent debtor was no longer guilty of malfeasance for actively detaining his creditor’s property but guilty of nonfeasance for failing to perform his promise. In the case of written bonds, the debtor’s signature was the means by which he entered into formal commercial and legal networks and officially bound himself to their obligations. By dramatizing the role of the hand in establishing the debtor’s liability Middleton’s play, however, enacts Bradin Cormack’s observation that ‘when a literary text uses law for metaphoric or narrative ends, it may also be testing the law’s categories, and so come to reflect back at law an intensified account of the work that, less audibly, those categories do in the law itself.’13 As a play that recognizes the bond as a complex form of legal writing, Michaelmas Term exploits the dramatic potential of the courts’ intensified interest in the intentionality of the debtor, which far from resolving the nebulous matter of economic agency amplified the hand’s ability to both affirm and vitiate the priorities of contract. The pliable hand of capital Changes in the scale and forms of moneylending at the end of the sixteenth century culminated in a marked rise in the use of the written bond and diminishment of informal verbal agreements. As Marjorie McIntosh emphasizes, ‘a new breed of lender’ emerged in early modern England, one who did not take interest but who distinguished himself by his reliance on written bonds, which discouraged the possibility of extending credit for years on end.14 Bonds were handwritten on parchment or paper and drawn to order, meaning they were not intended for use as general or all-­purpose instruments. The language of the bond did not adhere to any strict formula, other than to specify the names of the parties, the amount of the loan, and the date and place of



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repayment, though bonds often included a phrase in which the debtor pledged his ‘bodie, land, and goods.’ The bond between Theylos Walcott and Richard Hale for £50, dated 10 April 1589 is representative: The Condiconn of this obligaconn is such that yf the within bounden Theylos Walcott his executors or Assignes or any of them doe paye or cause to be paid unto the within named Richard Hale his executors or Assignes the some of ffyfty powndes of lawfull mony of England on the tenth day of April which shalbe in the yere of our lord Christe A thousand ffyve hundred ffowr score & ten at the new dwelling howse of the said Richard Hale in the poultrye in london without delay that then this pute obligaconn to be voyd or els yt to stand in full force & strengthe.15

As this bond suggests, the debtor was expected to sign a written text that he had not authored and which was cast in impersonal legalese by an anonymous scribe, who had himself devised the bond as a ‘persona fictiva,’ meaning in the name of someone else. The scribe’s use of the third person displaces the motivations of lender and borrower on to an unknowable but omnipotent generic authority. Yet, as much as the bond promotes the ideal of the bound self as unfettered from the individual, the force of the bond lay in its claim to a specific body. The crucial rhetorical work of the bond was to identify the borrower as ‘bounden’ and to remind the debtor of its penal condition, which in the event of forfeiture would ‘stand in full force & strengthe.’ While a bond could be a ‘single’ or ‘simple’ bond, meaning an unconditional contract, all debt bonds were conditional. A kind of backward contract, the conditional debt bond detailed the penalty that would take effect if its condition had not been performed. For this reason, creditors executed bonds for a larger sum than the loan (usually twice the amount) and, importantly, this penal sum was not construed as interest. Rather than charging for the use of his money, as did the usurer, the creditor legitimately contracted to receive compensation for the loss he stood to suffer by the debtor’s failure to repay on time. Those who repaid their loans by the assigned day would not have to pay the additional charge, in which case the lender would receive only the original amount he loaned. However, if the condition of the bond was not met, then the creditor was permitted to collect his penalty or seize his debtor’s property and even his person. When an insufficient borrower ‘bound’ his ‘bodie,’ he became the ‘forfeit,’ and while an unsatisfied creditor could take action against ‘the body of the defendant; or against his goods and chattels,’ as Craig Muldrew stresses, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, most actions were taken against the debtor’s person.16 The judiciary rationalized the creditor’s right to detain his debtor on grounds that the writ of capias ad satisfaciendum – another form of writing that was scripted and sealed by a judge – ensured the debtor’s appearance in court and prevented him from seeking sanctuary within the liberties of the City or his own home. The bond was thus a form of writing that summoned the body on to the scene of personhood, a legal as well as a metaphysical category, with ambivalent effects. Advancing what Karl Polanyi describes as a ‘commodity fiction,’ the bond transformed something

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that is ‘obviously not [a] commodit[y]’ into one by allowing the debtor’s body and the coins he borrowed to assume an equivalency by means of convention only.17 The homology between legal and commodity form rested on an abstraction, whereby the tension between alienable property and the inalienable self could be resolved only by the bond’s recourse to the logic of the universal equivalent. If the validity of the bond depended upon the promulgation of this fiction, this fiction relied on the integrity of the bond. Any alteration rendered a bond void. Thus, in order to perform its function, the bond, like other kinds of paper moneys such as bills of exchange or goldsmith’s receipts, had to transcend its own materiality. Early seventeenth-­century legal handbooks, such as William West’s The First Part of Simboleography, typically include a section on how to discern ‘good’ bonds from ‘bad,’ which entails identifying the signs of scriptive authority that distinguish debt bonds from other forms of writing, such as ‘ordinarie letters, privat notes, reckonings, and rememberances made by many for a mans owne privat use and memorie, and from all bookes of arts, histories, divinties, philosophie, and such like.’18 Yet as long as lawyers debated the bond’s scriptive features, this monetary instrument was denaturalized and exposed as a textual entity informed by various kinds of writings. Leading up to the watershed decision on Slade’s Case, justices acknowledged that the bond’s validity could be compromised by the integrity of the debtor’s signature. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the signature as the sign of consent was required of all legal deeds, which were signed on the front by the participating parties and endorsed on the back by witnesses and attorneys.19 In this same period, however, early modern writing manuals understood the hand to have negligible authority. To sign a document was to engage in the acts of replicating and verifying.20 The hand, from this perspective, was like the seal, a means of conferring an office or function, which meant that devising a deed did not involve the manifestation of interiority but rather the projection of a persona.21 Nonetheless, in civil law, the presence or absence of consent, as marked by the signature, determined the viability of contract. The legislative tension between the subjective will of the assenting party and the efficacy of contract was particularly pronounced in the case of debt because, as legal historian Randy Barnett explains: ‘an inquiry into the promisor’s intent allowed him to avoid liability by fraudulently undermining otherwise perfectly clear agreements by generating and preserving extrinsic evidence of ambiguous or conflicting intentions.’22 In short, there was no guarantee that promise would be performed because it had been ratified by the hand. Discussions of debt bondage in the period’s legal manuals grapple with the ways consent was not equal to and could even exceed and resist contract. West in The First Part of Simboleography, the most widely read manual of the early seventeenth century which includes an explanation of all legal forms as well as commentary, considers a situation when an ‘act of man’ and the compulsion of ‘right’ or the law are at odds (sig. A[1]v). While West stresses that debt bonds should not ‘make any bodie or service ours,’ but rather ‘bind another to us, to give, do, or performe some thing’ (sig. A[1]r), once the bond is signed, however, he acknowledges that right must override



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the signer’s will, presumably since the debtor could subsequently attempt to amend or contradict the binding nature of his obligation. For West, the dilemma generated by competing interpretations of the debtor’s intentions compromises the integrity of economic contract. West attempts to head off just such problem when he suggests to law students that while the borrower’s ‘mind and will’ are ‘necessarie’ to the making of obligation, in the final analysis it is the right (or the formal constraints of contract) that renders the agreement enforceable: For although to the making of Obligations, the mind and will of man be very necessarie, yet thereof ariseth the obligation, not for that a man willeth, but for y [the] right and fact granteth such obligation to arise. (sig. A[1]v).

It is this perspective that leads West to determine that even if ‘a man wil not be bound,’ he ‘neuerthelesse is bound if hee commit any such thing by which right will haue him to be bound’ (sig. A[1]v), a ‘thing’ such as his hand. West’s assertion of the efficacy of the hand, which works in concert with right of law, undermines the ideal of contract as representing the binding parties’ respective wills. Requiring the debtor to yield to the terms of the bond bolstered the view that contractual obligations could be imposed upon unwilling parties. West concludes that only ‘true contracts’ are based on ‘true consent’ (sig. A3r): ‘Therefore the true contracts be those, which are by mutual consent of both parties’ (sig. A3v), meaning those deeds devised under circumstances in which ‘two or more, in one selfe thing, to give, or to doe somewhat’ (sig. A2r). Ultimately, the idea that the promisor’s hand reliably indexed singularity of purpose was, as West admits, a chimera, and so the law had to intervene to adjudicate between honest and feigned intention, which mimic one another whether ‘utterd by mouth, or shewed by writting’ (sig. A2v). Even as West maintains that a valid contract is one in which ‘our wills conjoyne us’ (sig. A2r) and his contemporaries, such as legal theorist William Fulbecke, concur that the ‘chiefe ground of contracts is co[n]sent,’ at this point in the development of common law, consent could not provide a stable foundation for economic obligation.23 With the 1602 resolution of Slade’s Case, the notion that signing a bond entailed the undertaking of an assurance buttressed the authority of those lawyers who sought to locate the impartiality of the law in the primacy of the debtor’s signature.24 In one of the most significant decisions in the common law history of contract, Edmund Coke (for the King’s Bench) prevailed over Francis Bacon (for the Court of Common Pleas) on whether forfeiture on a bond could be adjudicated in accordance with a civil consideration that recognized the debtor as having committed breach of promise.25 While Chief Justice Pope’s summation of Slade’s Case, which had been argued on four separate occasions each Michaelmas Term between 1596 and 1602, that ‘every contract executory imports in itself an assumpsit’ immediately altered the status of oral agreements, lawyers applied the decision to sealed bonds by arguing that they functioned as written assumpsits.26 Those creditors who sued on indebitatus assumpsit based their case on the notion that promise was binding, and the fact that the debtor signed a bond proved

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that he had received a loan and had also ipso facto taken on or assumed the obligation to repay it on time. Even as the legitimacy of the bond rested upon the authorizing function of the hand, the introduction of the notion of liability into action of debt only deepened the difficulty of determining the circumstances under which a written bond would stand as an accurate representation of the signer’s will. Coke and the King’s Bench justices opened Pandora’s box when they recognized that credit relations were based on the exchange of words, as well as real property. Thus they regarded economic obligation not simply as verifying the transfer of things but as documenting a relationship between social actors whose interaction was only partially realized at the time of the bargain. For Coke, individuals entered into agreements knowingly, and their failure to carry out their terms constituted deceit. Yet, while creditors could be hoodwinked by irresponsible borrowers, debtors could be tricked into signing on to bonds. By introducing an interval between promise and performance, Coke produced the need for the courts to consider the space between past and future actions of the bound parties. The gap between signing and enacting a deed altered the function of the hand as that which would primarily launch a relationship rather than guarantee its fulfilment. Bacon and his Common Pleas colleagues saw assumpsit as extra-­legal evidence of the binding nature of an agreement and thus as irrelevant in the case of debt. For these justices, debt was contractus est permutatio (contract is the exchange of things), meaning that at stake in the case of default was returning to the creditor what had always belonged to him. As Luke Wilson explains, from the Baconian perspective, when a debtor forfeits on his bond: Circumstances must be brought into line with the relations which obtain legally: the plaintiff really has the thing sued for, therefore he should have it. And since the transaction occurs in an instant, no interval can insert itself between promise and performance or open a space for agency there; and there can be no articulation of intentions, states of mind, and so on, only a condition which signified by its structure that money or goods bargained for are not in the possession of the person who has a right to them.27

In cases of default, however, ‘the thing sued for’ was the body of the debtor, which would stand in for the money or goods that had been lent. Unlike the actual coins, which legally remained in the possession of the lender, the creditor did not at any point own the body of his debtor. From a political-­theological standpoint even the debtor himself could assert only a partial claim of ownership over his own person.28 Despite Coke’s victory, assumpsit while necessary was not sufficient in making economic obligation binding. In the end, arguments pro and contra Slade’s Case raised more questions than answers about the relationship between signature and intent. More particularly, Slade’s Case aggravated the already complex role of the body as one of the crucial indices of self-­ownership. Even as the hand rendered the debt bond a consensual document, the links between property and ownership – links that were tenuous before Slade’s Case

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– could no longer be secured by the presumed intention of each party. The meaning of the body as a material entity that could be either possessed or dispossessed would henceforth be subjected to the transactional force of the bond, a document whose legal mandates were influenced by the vicissitudes of the market but whose ethical presumptions were constrained by moral sanctions. Coke and the King’s Bench justices hewed to the signature in an attempt to disavow the irretrievability of the hand and attempted to move from promise implied in fact to promise implied in law in order to create the appearance of unified intention and action. Yet, as the adjudication of forfeiture demonstrated from 1602 on, Slade’s Case inadvertently made the hand the fulcrum on which to measure the relationship of the body to the will. The generative hand of capital In the first decade of the seventeenth century, drama’s ability to test and amplify the legal notion of embodied consent was most pronounced in theatre’s interest in the relation of law to desire, which, as critics have shown, found expression in plays produced for young men of the Inns of Court.29 As a play that explores the relation between law and desire Michaelmas Term is exemplary. Its characters’ general yearnings for wealth, status, and sex are expressed through the law, while they work to accomplish their specific goals by manipulating the law’s incomplete conceptualization of monetary satisfaction as grounded in the debtor’s body. By repeatedly drawing attention to the litigious activity of bonding, as well as to the frantic atmosphere of the first, longest, and busiest of the four court sessions of London’s legal calendar when landed gentlemen flocked to the city, Middleton panders to his audience.30 Performed by Paul’s boys circa 1605, the plot of Michaelmas Term turns on legal trickery, which relies on its private theatre audience’s intimate knowledge of legal detail. More particularly, the evidentiary problem of the bond as a form of writing that constructs the agency of the signer makes up the play’s dramatic crux, putting it in conversation with the recent decision on Slade’s Case. When we consider Middleton’s play in light of not only the general problem of indebtedness but also a specific transitional moment in debt legislation, its staging of the interplay of economic and erotic power takes on new meaning as the hand – rather than the ass – emerges as the corporal locus where struggles over dominance and submission are played out.31 Throughout Michaelmas Term men give their hands to one another to create a document that is imagined as the offspring of those who have engaged in an act of consensual bondage. Not surprisingly, the play’s symbolic economy is informed by the tropes evoking not only anality but also inception and pregnancy. Openness and fullness, often juxtaposed, signify, respectively, the originary transactional moment and end result of monetary and erotic satisfaction enjoyed by men. Those who exploit the hand as a compensatory instrument of an inscrutable will use it as a tool to ‘spread’ themselves open (Ind. 65). While these men seem to thrive in Middleton’s London, satisfaction, however, is elusive, since sundry

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c­ urrencies of value – notably semen and coins – cannot be retained when not all containers prove reliable. The play’s Induction is dominated by the Patriarch of the family of law, Michaelmas Term, represented here as an allegorical character cloaked in judge’s robe holding forth to the three other legal terms of the calendar year. Michaelmas Term inaugurates the play by invoking the inductive power of his hand, as he announces ‘my hand’s free’ (Ind. 9) and steps forward to address the law students in the offstage audience seated before him: But, gentlemen, to spread myself open unto you, in cheaper terms I salute you, for ours [the Children of St Paul’s] have but sixpenny fees all the year long, yet we dispatch you in two hours without demur. (Ind. 65–74)

By ‘spreading [himself] open’ to the young men in attendance (both on stage and off), Michaelmas Term anticipates the ‘free-­breasted … and somewhat too open’ Easy (1.1.55) who will be tricked out his fortune in main plot. Yet the distinction between Michaelmas Term and Easy hinges on the crucial difference between being ‘free’ and being ‘too open.’ Michaelmas Term is able to achieve satisfaction, whereby he experiences fiscal profit as bringing him a sense of bodily fulfilment. He envisions himself sated on the coins he has reaped from the ‘silver harvest’ of the term (Ind. 11), and describes himself ‘drink[ing] deep’ of his clients’ cups (Ind. 46–48). A consensual receptacle, Michaelmas Term both takes in fiscal rewards and is able to ‘dispatch’ or quickly discharge those who seek his services (Ind. 67). Suggestively overlaying the legal sense of the word dispatch, to expedite a case through court, with the implied offer to get the young men in the audience off erotically, Michaelmas Term brags of his ample capacity to ‘grasp [the] best part of the autumnian blessing / in my contentious fathom’ (Ind. 9–10). Here he conjures the image of holding on to riches in his inner depths, as suggested by the word fathom (OED), as the curled fingers of the grasping hand signal simultaneous openness and fullness, an image that resonates with the description to follow of the Exchequer itself as an over-­stuffed ‘gap[ing] hole’ that is at once empty and over-­full (1.1.4).32 Characters like Michaelmas Term who spread themselves open are shown to be generative like those men who are depicted as capable of taking in or on other men’s loads. This idea is brought home in the play’s Induction by the comparison of naive newcomers to the city to ‘asses’ or beasts of burden that scheming citizens use to bear their ‘load[s]’ (Ind. 41–42). Once they deposit their goods, citizens turn their gulls-­ cum-­asses loose ‘to graze again’ (Ind. 41). In accordance with this symbiotic relationship, gulls are productive because they incite citizens’ desires and are able to satisfy them by functioning as repositories of the riches citizens trick them out of. This logic is redacted in one character’s description of the prostitute’s vagina as like a purse into which a gallant may safely deposit his semen and money. The prostitute’s vagina is imagined not as sinkhole or a site of waste but rather as a container where ‘that which [one] gather I’ th’ day, [one] put[s] into their purses at night’ (1.1.240). Both the ass

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and the purse hold what is expended through scheming or erotic activity and may also serve as places which may yield a return. While Quomodo aims to use the gullible Easy as his ass, in contrast to the other gulls the woollen draper has victimized in the past, Easy is not able to bear his load; while he is open, his hand is not free. By the end of Act 1, he is well on the way to financial ruin. The young heir, new to London and desperate to appear urbane, borrows money from seasoned con artists to purchase expensive apparel and obtain entrée into dice games. Immediately upon his arrival, he is singled out by a group of gallants as ‘a fair-­breasted gentleman, somewhat too open’ (1.1.55), as well as someone who appears ‘fresh and free’ (1.1.120). The word ‘fresh,’ meaning new and pure, was also used to describe someone too eager and thus devoid of any discerning ‘appetite or inclination.’33 The pairing of the word ‘fresh’ with the word ‘free’ compromises its integrity, as confirmed by Easy’s self-­description as ‘easily possessed’ (1.1.49), a characterization that further circumscribes the meaning of his general announcement that he is ‘free’ (1.1.49). As one who is ready for the taking, Easy is, in accordance with common law of property, ripe for enjoyment or use. Those new to the play’s ‘man-­devouring city’ (2.2.21), as Gail Kern Paster notes, are represented as arriving with their ‘social virginity’ intact, a virginity that will be inevitably violated (21).34 Paster discusses the play’s reference to ‘city-­powd’ring,’ a metaphor for the ‘seasoning’ of ‘the fresh bodied new comer’ who becomes cured by experience as salt would work upon undressed meat (27). Here she interprets the literal meaning of the image to refer to the cosmetic powdering that once applied to the face and hair added a fashionable veneer over rustic lack, as well as to the powdery substance used in medicinal sweating tubs in the treatment of syphilis (28). As a metaphor for the impersonal urban forces that work upon the newcomer in harmful ways, we can add another referent for ‘powd’ring,’ that being the powder that scribes sprinkled over contracts, such as debt bonds, to dry the inky signature. The narrator of Middleton’s satiric Father Hubbard’s Tales laments, for instance, that the lawyer’s fines ‘went off with such powder’ that those unable to pay them were turned back to the country.35 If Easy’s passivity signals his vulnerability, it also thwarts those who scheme against him since the law must step in to fill the void that would otherwise be occupied by his will. This problem is dramatized through the play’s acknowledgement that the endorsement that renders the debt bond viable is too variable in regard to its legal implications. Through a series of credit transactions, the woollen draper Quomodo and his servant Shortyard bleed Easy of his fortune and, via the mechanism of the bond, use him as a repository as they dispense on to him assets (both material and erotic) that ultimately derive from his own largesse. Easy is first duped by ‘the commodity game,’ a ponzi scheme described within the period as attracting only the most naive.36 After having been manipulated into mortgaging his lands in exchange for an unsellable bolt of moth-­eaten cloth, he is then enticed into co-­signing several debt bonds for which his person serves as collateral. Middleton’s Easy, however, is not only gullible to financial ploys; he is also

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v­ ulnerable to erotic manipulation. While the woollen draper Quomodo orchestrates Easy’s penury, Quomodo’s servant Shortyard instigates Easy’s seduction by following through with his plan to:

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flatter, dice, and brothel to him [Easy]; give him a sweet taste of sensuality; train him to every wasteful sin that he may quickly need health, but especially money; ravish him … Drink drunk with him; creep into bed to him; kiss him and undo him. (1.1.124–129)

The image of Easy as ‘undone’ and the victim of ‘ravish’ or rape is evoked by his passivity in the protracted scene in which we witness Easy ‘putting his hand’ to a series of bonds with his ‘good sweet bedfellow’ (2.3.146) Shortyard at his side. Here he resembles the bankrupt protagonist of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One who describes his creditors as ‘ravishing’ him and forcing him ‘to play the maid and take it!’37 As a result of his misplaced trust in Quomodo and misguided affection for Shortyard, Easy forfeits all and narrowly escapes ‘the inconscionable trouble of law’ (4.1.20), a euphemism for prison. Shortyard’s disingenuous response to Quomodo’s suggestion that Easy should co-­sign a bond to generate funds for his new companion hints at the depth of their intimacy. Shortyard falsely protests that he could never ask such a favour from his companion, since their ‘purses are brothers’ and that ‘in a word [they] are man and wife; they can but lie together, so we do’ (2.3.164–169). The servant’s description of their relationship as akin to matrimony encourages Easy to regard the debt bond as a figurative marriage contract marking the culmination of their courtship. For Easy, this binding agreement serves as the material sign of what he haplessly assumes to be a mutual erotic and economic partnership. At the signing of the bond much is made of who shall assert himself by ‘enter[ing]’ first, a literal reference to who will be the primary signator but also a suggestive question as to who will first impress his stylus into the wax of the virgin document, signalling another emptiness passively waiting to be filled. As the second signer Easy prostrates himself before Shortyard and Quomodo and assumes a position of legal, and by implication erotic, passivity. Easy’s powerlessness is revealed in full when he realizes, and here he echoes the inscription of the conditional bond verbatim, that, at the moment of its sealing, his ‘body, goods, and lands’ have become collateral (3.4.226). Quomodo’s wife Thomasine, who witnesses the signing, compares observing this activity to watching a condemned man speed up the process of his own death by helping the executioner disembowel him. She comments that Easy is now ‘Alive, [but] in state and credit executed,’ as he ‘help[s] to rip up himself’ (2.3.221–222). Later she exclaims, ‘Now is he quart’ring out; the executioner strides over him; with his own blood he writes’ (2.3.367–368). Construing Easy’s act of submission as leading inevitably to a savage form of violation, whereby Quomodo and Shortyard will stride over Easy’s body and then rip him limb from limb, Thomasine’s imagined fate for Easy recalls that of Actaeon as she associates their legal consummation with the realization of other dangerous forms of desire. Oblivious to the peril he faces, Easy anticipates the scrivener’s announcement

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‘ready for your hands, Gentlemen’ (2.3.346) when he blithely volunteers, ‘here’s my hand’ (2.3.317) and coyly assures Shortyard, ‘you shall have your will of me for once’ (2.3.360). The signing of the bond is staged in specificity, allowing Middleton to satirize Easy’s presumption that the quality of his character may be discerned by the elegance of his handwriting. This supposition inspires Easy’s vaunting question to the scrivener, ‘How like you my Roman hand?’ (2.3.372). Roman hand, as Grace Ioppolo points out, was considered suitable only for the types of occasional writing women were expected to produce as opposed to the secretary hand of daily writing that remained the province of men.38 Roman hand was also distinguished by being written ‘on the form of a Circle,’ with its letters carrying ‘a visible rotundity.’39 The association of Easy with the open ‘O’ of the Roman hand, as well as the Roman fig sign, an obscene gesture made to represent the female genitals whereby the thumb was inserted in between the middle and index fingers, keeps us focused on Easy as a penetrable entity. Easy’s rhetorical question provokes a sarcastic response from the scrivener who pushes the pun into the arena of the scatological by commenting, ‘Exceeding well sir, but that you rest too much upon your R. and make your E’s too little’ (2.3.373–374). Easy rests too much on his ‘R’ or arse because he is lazy and/or because he assumes the bottom position in his sexual encounters. As a result of over-­ penetration, he has trouble making his E’s, or ‘making his ease,’ the phrase for relieving one’s bowels. Here the joke is on Easy who resembles his Roman hand, in so far as he is like an inscription that serves as the locus of various impressions that others press on to him. The joke, though, is also on his creditors who cannot gain a profit from all that they deposit into this hollow entity. As the capricious losses and gains of property among men stand in for the romantic tribulations between men and women in Michaelmas Term, patrimony emerges as the means by which men attempt to advance themselves. The scheming woollen draper Quomodo, for instance, is motivated by his desire to have his son obtain standing as a freeman of the City and eventually a place at court. While Middleton offers a cynical perspective on Quomodo’s fantasies, he does allow the arena of procreation to be expanded to include economic relations between men. Yet, through the extended comparison of debt bonds and children, Middleton explores further the crisis that a confused notion of economic agency engenders. The character Michaelmas Term of the play’s Induction has no biological children and so ‘makes those [his] heirs whom [he] has beggared’ (Ind. 26) or buggered, as Leinwand suggests, by seducing men into debt bondage and ravishing or raping them with the penalty of default. In the main play, Quomodo, too, regards debt bonds as akin to progeny in so far as they bear his imprint and go forth into the world as legally recognizable extensions of himself. He explains to Easy: As often as you give your name to a bond, you must think you christen a child and take the charge on’t too. For as the one, the bigger it grows, the more cost it requires; so the other, the longer it lies, the more charges it puts you to. Only here’s the difference: a child must be broke and a bond must not. The more you break children, the more you

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keep ’em under. But the more you break bonds, the more they’ll leap in your face. (3.4.142–50)

Bonds and children are alike, he explains, in that they are costly and require those who fathered them to provide maintenance. The difference between bonds and children resides in the fact that men may exercise their patriarchal authority over children by subjecting them to violence. Bonds, however, rebel against those who created them. They have the ability to discipline their fathers by stripping them of their authority through the demonstration of penal force. Quomodo’s procreative analogy captures the peculiar temporality of the creditor– debtor relationship, which as a commitment often made impulsively only comes to fruition in time. In plotting indebtedness along a temporal axis, the action of the play dramatizes time’s claim on the debtor in condensed form. Easy stands ready to become dispossessed at some future point that inevitably arrives too soon. A perversion of a patrilineal order that endows heirs through the linear transmission of property, the debt bond takes the debtor out of time, disrupting the relation between father and son. Thus a customary tradition, such as primogeniture that discriminates past, present, and future, is upended, leaving in its place only the enduring presentist nature of the debtor’s consent, whereby he sells himself off in perpetuity. Bonds, as Middleton shows, are unlike children in one other crucial way. As much as those creditors seeking to sue for damages would like the bond to assume a one-­to-­ one correspondence to the debtor’s intention, the bond inevitably takes on a life of its own. The most abject of all bonds, not surprisingly, are those that Quomodo describes as bastard bonds.40 These are debt bonds that no signer will claim and, without clear criteria for liability, are forfeit: Faith, they are like the offsprings of stol’n lust, put to the hospital. Their fathers are not to be found; they are either too far abroad, or too close within; and thus for your memory’s sake: The desperate debtor hence derives his name: One that has neither money, land, nor fame. All that he makes, prove bastards and not bonds. (3.4.166–173)

Quomodo’s extended metaphor of bastard bonds puns on ‘bastard-­secretary,’ the hand used by scriveners to transcribe engrossed legal documents such as debt bonds. However, he mines the metaphor further by suggesting these bonds are juridically illegible just as bastard progeny are socially discredited. Bastard bonds cannot satisfy their creditors, and, if those who authored them have fled the country or remain hidden in their own homes, the law steps in as the Ur-­Patriarch. Orphan bonds, in this respect get a second chance, and so, arguably, do desperate debtors, who in disowning their wayward offspring begin the process of creating a new legal persona. Easy’s ‘ease’ turns to dis-­ease when those scheming against him disguise themselves as officers who inform him that, in the absence of the first signer (Shortyard), as the secondary signator he alone is liable for all overdue bonds. In an effort to avoid incarceration, Easy attempts to orphan his bonds by denying paternity. His denial,

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however, is met with the officer’s insistence: ‘Is not your name there’ (3.4.38), by which he identifies Easy as the author of the various bonds. Easy’s insistence that he signed the bonds ‘for fashion’s sake’ (3.4.40) is met with the officer’s sarcastic reply, ‘’tis for fashion’s sake that we arrest you’ (3.4.41). His creditor, Easy is told, is ‘a most merciless devourer,’ who even if offered ‘money, goods, or land’ would ‘rather have [his] body in prison’ (3.4.80–83). The officer’s warning echoes Quomodo’s imagination of a man’s credit as a physical entity that may be ‘wounded’ (3.4.135) and invokes Timon of Athens’s insolvent protagonist who imagines his overdue bonds as weapons having the power to maim him.41 While Easy’s attempt to orphan his bonds proves unsuccessful, Middleton provides a glimpse into the fate of orphans through his representation of two bastard figures, the prostitute Country Wench and the pseudo-­knight Lethe. Each of these minor characters demonstrates that the abject status of the orphan necessitates the invention of a prosthetic or artificial persona, which in turn, leads to freedom from liability but also exclusion from crucial social and economic networks. Cut loose from all original ties, these members of the younger generation have fashioned themselves into works of art rather than duplications of their biological parents. Country Wench is described as begot by ‘tirewomen and tailors’ (3.1.5), and the ‘cockscomb’ Lethe (3.1.99) is characterized as the product of some ‘monster [that] won his mother’ (3.1.298). Both end up beggaring their parents, who in a perversion of biological and social orders become servants to their children. Like Easy, who is too free, each of these characters begins the play in a state of desperation and thus is no longer eligible to be bound economically, socially, or even by means of familial ties. Country Wench resorts to a life of prostitution because her father ‘spent [his] unshapen youth … and surfeited away [his] name and state in swinish riots,’ making him a beggar (2.2.21–24). The Scottish Lethe, newly transformed from the impoverished son of an itinerant tooth drawer, depends solely on his reputation at court and is thus impelled to live lavishly beyond his means to compensate for his lack of pedigree. While Easy’s father has not spent or denied his patrimony, Easy goes on to bastardize his own inheritance by trading land for disenfranchisement. After all his property has been transferred to Quomodo, he is pronounced ‘a free man’ (4.1.52), which, unlike Michaelmas Term and his ‘free hand,’ casts Easy into a state of dispossession, unburdened of liability and obligation alike. Shortyard’s disappearance puts Easy in a perilous position, and, in the end, Easy is incapable of satisfying the men who duped him since his lands are held in abeyance until the legal details of a series of fraudulent bonds – seemingly beyond any one person’s comprehension – are resolved. Easy’s anxious speculation that ‘all that I beget hereafter I’ll soon disinherit’ (3.4.174) has turned into a dark prophecy as he comes to embody the sterility of contractual limbo, confirming one character’s observation that no one ‘proves a deeper knave than a spent fool’ (3.1.21). No longer perceived to be a generative source, Easy has shown himself to be too easy, which has compromised his ability to uphold his end of the obligations he forged. By amplifying the illusory nature of contractual consent, the

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play acknowledges the discontinuities to which debt bonds and their confused notion of economic agency may give rise. On the one hand, freedom to contract signifies the right to participate in binding legal agreements and, in this play, grants certain men immunity from expropriation. On the other hand, freedom from contract allows others to remain exempt and escape the burden of liability at the cost of disenfranchisement. Michaelmas Term can achieve comic closure only by introducing the creaky device of the jury trial, and, at the final instance, an impartial judge intervenes to restore the economic and social status quo. When Quomodo realizes that he has signed a memorandum releasing Easy from the action of debt, he seeks legal recourse and brings his case to court. Technically Quomodo is correct, the contract should be nullified since, in the words of West, if there is ‘any error of deceit in the consent or thing, for which the contract is entered into, that contract is either made altogethernone [sic], or of none effect’ (sig. A3r). The judge, however, in keeping with Slade’s Case’s logic of assumpsit, is not influenced by pleading on the case and instead defers to the document, which he interprets as providing evidence of the signer’s intention to perform his promise. He reads it: ‘In witness whereof I have set to mine own hand: Ephestian Quomodo’ (5.3.70). Referring to Quomodo’s hand, the judge comments, ‘’Tis firm enough your own, sir’ (5.3.71). Quomodo is thus placed in a position in which to win his case he must surrender his agency by denying his hand and claim that he signed the bond as a ‘jest’ (5.3.73). Quomodo’s fraught reconciliation with his hand is paired in this final instance with Lethe’s troubling reunion with his mother. Through the intervention of the same judge, Lethe’s mother is forced to acknowledge her wayward progeny. Like Quomodo, Mother Gruel refuses at first to claim that which bears her imprint and in defiance castigates her son by yelling at him, ‘call’st me mother? Out, I defy thee, slave!’ (5.3.149). Only by force of the judge’s decree does she assume maternity as the judge insists that she accept that this man is her son, demanding, ‘Wilt thou believe me, woman?’ (5.3.156). She begrudgingly takes responsibility for Lethe when she enquires, ‘Art thou Andrew, my wicked son Andrew?’ (5.3.158). Quomodo’s inventive scheming throughout the play has inspired dreams of the social authority that proprietary rights may endow. In the end, these dreams are deflated by the fluidity of debt bondage that shows how the hand that enables the fantasy of autonomous reproduction also attests to the impermanence of patrilineality. Because he has staged his own death as a means of testing the loyalty of his wife, son, and servant, Quomodo’s appearance in court casts more than his hand into doubt. Here we are confronted with the dilemma generated by the existence of one natural person splintered into several juridical personae. Quomodo’s hand has endorsed a series of legal documents, including the memorandum releasing Easy, but since it has been indiscriminately disseminated it does not function as an accurate replication of its signer’s intent. As a result, Quomodo’s hand cannot be sutured back on to his person. The trial shifts its focus from the adjudication of the debt to a case of mistaken ­identity,

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illuminating further the legal ambiguity subtending all written contracts, as Easy asserts to the judge, ‘We are not certain yet it is himself [Quomodo], but some false spirit that assumes his shape, and seeks still to deceive me’ (5.3.12–13). The judge asks Quomodo the impossible question: ‘How are we sure y’are he?’ (5.3.20) and proceeds to determine that the person before him is not Quomodo ‘but a counterfeit’ (5.3.26), a word associated in the period with the scandalous proliferation of debased coins. Quomodo has produced bastard bonds and by denying his paternity he renders himself a legal entity that no longer counts. The play closes with the fracturing of will, identity, and body as Quomodo empathetically declares: ‘my deeds have cleft me, cleft me!’ (5.3.93). Here Quomodo perceives himself as having been spread open against his will, and his distress and pecuniary loss register as a poetic reversal of his original aggressive intent, expressed at the play’s opening, to use debt bonds to ‘cleave [Easy] the heir in twain’ (1.1.104). Conclusion In the final analysis, Easy’s passivity may be pleasing but it cannot satisfy.42 This is because, as I have suggested, the implication of signing onto a bond was undergoing a gradual but nonetheless seismic shift as the result of the 1602 decision on Slade’s Case. In Michaelmas Term, even as the bond seems to render consent tangible through the material artefact of the signature, at every turn the play exposes the incoherency of agency and the debt bond as a palimpsest, a document comprised of layer upon layer of uncertain causality, confused intentionality, and suspect liability. While my analysis has elucidated the links among dramatic narrative, economic practice and legal debate, I have also hoped to reveal the ways in which formal encounters between bonds and play texts generate a series of problems and possibilities for both dramatic and monetary forms of writing. As Mukherji notes, the law in this period was itself becoming an ‘upstart economy’ by virtue of its promiscuous textuality.43 And while it may have been easy to satirize the common law’s culture of writing, the efficacy of the written deed was undeniable. Thus even as the bastard bond serves to potentially discredit the proper paternity of this form of monetary writing, such representations also speak to the play’s – and the culture’s – awareness of the bond as a form of writing engaged with various contested legal and philosophical debates about contractual consent. Just as we cannot deny the social impact of the bond in the early modern period, we should not dismiss the play’s suspensions or deferrals of genre as structural weakness. Middleton’s bypassing the signposts of romantic comedy stands as a violation of generic contract as he substitutes pecuniary parthenogenesis for heterosexual marriage. We may, though, look to those moments at which the play’s logic becomes strained as instances at which it is (in)formed by the bond as Middleton exploits the tenuous nature of satisfaction in regard to both economic obligation and dramatic expectation.

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Notes  1 2 Henry VI, 4.2.75–80, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 6th edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).  2 Thomas Middleton, Michaelmas Term, The Revels Plays, ed. Gail Kern Paster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 5.1.57–61. Hereafter cited in the text.  3 Ruby Chatterji, ‘Unity and disparity: Michaelmas Term’, Studies in English Literature, 8 (1968), 349–363 (at 359).  4 Paul Yachnin, ‘Social competition in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 13 (1987), 87–99 (at 91).  5 Richard Levin, Introduction, Michaelmas Term, Regents Renaissance Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. xviii. Anthony Covatta agrees that Easy is a strange choice for a protagonist, since ‘it is difficult to summon much sympathy for him in the first two-­thirds of the play’, in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973), p. 91.  6 Theodore B. Leinwand, ‘Redeeming beggary/buggery in Michaelmas Term’, English Literary History, 61 (1994), 53–70 (at 54). W. Nicholas Knight also addresses the overlay of sexual and monetary manipulation in the play in ‘Sex and law language in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term’, in Kenneth Friedenrich (ed.), ‘Accompanying the Players’: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980 (New York: AMS, 1983), pp. 89–108.  7 Here I understand genre not only in terms of iterable conventions but also function, in so far as there is a finite range of uses to which any given text may be subjected. On moneys as forms of writing see Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-­ and Nineteenth-­century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).  8 For the phrase ‘putting one’s hand’ see the sample bond in William West, The First Part of Simboleography (London, 1615; STC 25273), sig. H6v. West’s Simboleography went through seven editions between 1590 and 1598, and six more over the next thirty years. For a rich discussion of contractual agency and the hand in the early modern period see Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), esp. ‘Introduction: Essentialism, Agency, and the Exemplary Hand’, pp. 1–24.  9 On the ‘fugitive’ as a historical form of crisis involving the legal subjection of personhood to property see Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–21. On the seal as adjunct to the signature and its ‘fugitive character,’ see Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Forms in wax: Shakespeare and the personality of the seal’, in Bella Mirabella (ed.) Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), pp. 202–221 (p. 205). 10 George E. Rowe, Jr, ‘Prodigal sons, New Comedy, and Middleton’s Michaelmas Term’, ELR, 7 (1977), 90–107 (at 102–103). 11 In 1663, England’s Lord Chancellor wrote, ‘In every contract there is mutual assent of their [the bargainers’] minds … but a feme covert cannot give a mutual assent of her mind … for her will and mind, as also herself, is under and subject to the will or mind of her husband,’ as in Craig Muldrew, ‘“A Mutual Assent of her Mind?”: women, debt litigation and contract in early modern England’, History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003), 47–71 (at 48).

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On women’s agency and contact law see Kathryn Schwartz, What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 12 Subha Mukherji, ‘Middleton and the law’, in Suzanne Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 106–114 (p. 109). On the lawyers’ objections that writs could obtained by anyone who could pay the fee see Edward Jenks, ‘The prerogative writs in English law’, Yale Law Journal, 32 (1923), 523–534 (at 523). 13 Bradin Cormack, ‘Shakespeare possessed: legal affect and the time of holding’, in Paul Raffield and Gary Watt (eds), Shakespeare and the Law (Portland: Hart Publishing, 2008), pp. 83–100 (p. 84). 14 Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Money lending on the periphery of London, 1300–1600’, Albion: A Quarterly Concerned with British Studies, 20 (1988), 557–571 (at 568). 15 Columbia RBML SMITH, DE Documents 1589 Walcott, Th. 16 Blackstone as in A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract: The Rise of the Action of Assumpsit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 587. Common law recognized the debtor who forfeited on his bond as guilty of the criminal offence of wrongfully detaining another’s property and therefore as eligible for imprisonment. See John C. Fox, ‘Process of imprisonment at common law’, Law Quarterly Review, 39 (1923), 46–59 (at 48–49); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 275. 17 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edn, foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Introduction by Fred Block (1944; 1957; Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 72. 18 West, The First Part of Simboleography, sig. B4r. 19 Charles Donahue, Jr, Introduction to the exhibit catalogue, ‘History in deed: medieval society & the law in England, 1100–1600’, 13 October 1993, Harvard Law School. 20 On early modern writing manuals and their construal of the hand see Jonathan Goldberg, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 21 Rather than regard the fiction of consent as false consciousness, Elaine Scarry understands the fiction of consent as a narrative that imparts meaning to the structures it influences. Thus the signature may be seen as an ‘artifactual response at a moment when the will is in danger of being impaired. That is, an actual recreation of one’s relation to one’s external circumstances comes about … thus the generation of the artifact by those in a position of passivity at a moment of great polarization from the active (the surgeon, the governors) equalises the relation.’ See Scarry, ‘Consent and the body: injury, departure and desire’, New Literary History, 21 (1990), 867–896 (at 882). 22 Randy E. Barnett, ‘A consent theory of contract’, Columbia Law Review, 86.2 (1986), 269–321 (at 273). 23 William Fulbecke, A Parallele or Conference of the Civil Law (London, 1618; STC 11416), sig. Ar. 24 In 1595 John Slade sold wheat and rye to Humphrey Morley on credit, but after the grains were delivered Morley refused to pay. Slade sought recompense through the recovery of debt, the usual action the plaintiff would take under the circumstances. Without a written contract, Slade, however, had no way of proving that Morley had agreed to pay him. But, by trying the case as breach of promise – a legal innovation – the court could argue that the

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delivery of the grains automatically implied that Morley, the recipient, was obligated to pay for what had received. 25 For an overview of significance of the 1602 decision on Slade’s Case see H. K. Lücke, ‘Slade’s Case and the origins of the common counts’, Law Quarterly Review, 81 (1965), 422–561; J. H. Baker, ‘New light on Slade’s Case’, The Cambridge Law Journal, 29.1 (1971), 51–67; David Ibbetson, ‘Assumpsit and debt in the early sixteenth century: the origins of the indebitatus count’, The Cambridge Law Journal, 41.1 (1982), 142–161, and Ibbetson, ‘Sixteenth century contract law: Slade’s Case in context’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 4.3 (1984), 295–317. 26 As in Ibbetson, ‘Sixteenth century contract law: Slade’s Case in context’, 317. See also J. H. Baker, ‘New light on Slade’s Case’, 61. 27 Luke Andrew Wilson, Theaters of Intention: Drama and Law in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 79. 28 For the political-­theological implications of ownership and self-­ownership in the case of forfeiture see Amanda Bailey, ‘Shylock and the slaves: owing and owning in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 62 (2011), 1–24. 29 The private theatres were known for their repertory of satirical comedies about law and their legal audience; see Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (eds), The Intellectual and Culture World of the Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 30 Richard Levin cites the early modern lawyer John Hayward’s observation that Michaelmas Term held particular interest to Inns of Court students in ‘Introduction’, Michaelmas Term, pp. xii–xiii. The speculation that Middleton was enrolled at Gray’s Inn (see, for instance, W. Nicholas Knight, ‘Sex and law language in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term’, p. 89) has been overturned; see Mukherji, ‘Middleton and the law’, pp. 106–115. 31 On the play’s locutions involving anality see Leinwand, ‘Reieeming beggary/buggary.’ 32 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. ‘fathom,’ online version, November 2010; www.oed.com (accessed 17 January 2011). 33 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. ‘fresh,’ online version, November 2010; www.oed.com (accessed 17 January 2011). 34 On the process of initiation as making up ‘the heart of the play’ see Covatta, Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies, p. 85, and Paster, Introduction, pp. 17–25. 35 As in Mukherji, ‘Middleton and the law’, p. 107. 36 In the so-­called commodity game, the lender offers to loan the borrower overpriced merchandise to garner him a profit equal to the amount of money he seeks to borrow. After the bond is sealed, however, the commodity can be sold only at a lower rate, if it can be sold at all. The borrower then defaults on his loan, awarding his creditor the collateral he put up at the beginning. For a discussion of the commodity game and other schemes detailed in late sixteenth-­century rogue literature see George R. Price, Introduction, in Michaelmas Term and A Trick to Catch the Old One, ed. Price (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1976), p. 15. On Middleton’s familiarity with rogue literature see Paster, Introduction, in Michaelmas Term, p. 13. 37 3.1.39–40. 38 Grace Ioppolo, ‘Early modern handwriting’, in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A New Companion



39 40

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41

42

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to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), Vol. I, pp. 177–189 (p. 178). Ibid., p. 179. For a fascinating discussion of the period’s ideas about textual production as parthenogenesis see Stephen Guy-­Bray, Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), esp. ‘Introduction: The Work of Art in the Age of Human Reproduction’, pp. 3–44. Upon his realization that he is ‘encounter’d / with [the] clamorous demands of debt [and] broken bonds,’ Timon understands his overdue bonds as threatening to ‘knock [him] down’ and ‘cleave [him] to the girdle!’ He regards the rising piles of bonds carried on stage by the handful as akin to knives that will ‘cut [his] heart in sums,’ let his blood ‘five thousand drops,’ and ‘tear … and take’ his flesh (3.4.90–95). William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, The Life of Tymon of Athens, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). While satisfaction was a key term within doctrines of repentance and expiation, in which satisfacere (meaning to do or make enough) described the nature and scope of human and divine atonement, the earliest recorded use of the word in English related to debt repayment. See William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 140. On the concept of satisfaction see Heather Hirschfeld, ‘“And he hath enough”: the penitential economies of The Merchant of Venice’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (2010), 89–117. Mukherji, ‘Middleton and the law’, p. 109.

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Saving souls or selling (virtual) godliness? The ‘penny godlinesses’ of John Andrewes and the problem of ‘popular puritanism’ in early Stuart England Peter Lake Introduction The use of cheap print to illuminate the nature of ‘popular’ religion and, in particular, to estimate the nature and pace of post-­Reformation religious change, in effect, to gauge the impact of Protestantism on ‘the religion of the people,’ has become something of a growth industry in recent years. The field was in many ways founded by Tessa Watt’s brilliant and, at the time, entirely original study of Cheap Print and Popular Religion. Unable to find the ‘penny godlinesses’ that were such a feature of the post-­Restoration scene in the period before 1640, Watt concentrated her attention on what her researches revealed to be a hitherto either unknown or radically understudied undergrowth of godly ballads, single sheets and religious pictures and images. Watt’s evaluation of this material – that it was of a ‘distinctively post reformation,’ rather than of an expressly protestant, nature – has become justly famous and been widely quoted.1 While Watt’s verdict might be seen as a modification of the previous revisionist account of the relationship between Protestantism and the people as entirely antagonistic or adversarial, it nevertheless prefigured the famous formulation of Christopher Haigh that, by the end of the sixteenth century, England might have become a protestant nation but it was scarcely a nation of protestants.2 Watt operated with a rather closely defined category of ‘the religious’. To my eyes, at least, things looked a little different if you included in the inquiry other, more marginal or liminal genres, like the murder pamphlet; texts which often contained undoubtedly religious concerns and conceits somewhere near their core but whose appeal was often as titillatory, even pornographic, as it was edificational.3 My own initial research into such materials revealed that there were considerable areas of at least potentially common ground linking the worldview of cheap print to that of the heavily predestinarian culture of official religion and the puritan godly. The point was not that the murder pamphlets were, in any straightforward sense, ‘godly,’ but rather that they contained ideological materials, and addressed certain beliefs and assumptions, anxieties and needs, that were very similar to those contained within

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and addressed by the works of even the most enthusiastic avatars of reformed religion. The conclusion was that, if not ‘the religion of the people,’ then at least the religion of those people who bought and enjoyed these pamphlets was not a million miles away from that of the godly ministers and laity, who, as both Watt and Collinson had shown, had, for the most part, in the period after 1580 at least, came to revile the outpourings of the popular press as profane and irreligious. Indeed so close were the relations between the mental worlds of the pamphlets and of the godly that not only did some of these pamphlets recount the heroic evangelical activities in the jails of a variety of godly ministers, but on occasion such ministers themselves tried their hand at the genre, for their own propagandistic, self-­aggrandizing, or perhaps frankly commercial purposes.4 In her magisterial study of Providence in Early Modern England Alex Walsham generalized this approach. Broadening her purview to encompass the entire body of cheap providentialized print, of which she found some 250 extant examples for the period before 1640, she organized her material under a variety of headings – divine punishments, prodigies, prophecies, providential judgements visited upon the nation, confessionally inflected versions of the above – and then read the contents of the pamphlets against a vast range of other texts: sermons, theological treatises, confessional polemic. Walsham’s conclusions – drawn, of course, from a far wider source base – were much like my own.5 Of late, the whole topic has been subjected to the sceptical gaze of Professor Ian Green. Professor Green appears to have read even more of the printed literature of the period than Professor Walsham and, on the basis of a massive (albeit eccentrically compiled) archive of ‘steady sellers’ stretching over the period from 1530 to 1730, Green argues that Watt’s verdict on the content of the ballads as ‘distinctively “post reformation” may be optimistic. Was this,’ he asks, ‘a successful fusion of new and traditional elements in popular piety’ or rather ‘the grafting onto an old stock of a few new cuttings, the great majority of which did not take properly?’ Green takes a similarly sceptical view of Walsham’s findings about providence, asking ‘whether providentialism was indeed a ‘cement’ between godly doctrine and popular culture, or rather ‘a shared frontier which looked and functioned very differently according to where one was standing.’6 In opposition to Watt and Walsham’s differently inflected, but in many ways similarly gradualist, accounts of cultural assimilation and religious change, Green offers a far more polarized model, claiming to be able to discern three levels of ‘protestantism’ within his vast corpus of ‘steady sellers’, and identifying at the bottom a stratum ‘strongly influenced by an older matrix of pre-­Christian and medieval ideas on the natural and supernatural world’ and characterized by a ‘trust in the saving value of good works that was barely orthodox at all by the standards of the clergy.’7 Because of what he describes as its leanings ‘towards the obstinate popular semi-­pelagianism of which parish clergy from different camps complained,’ Green sees the world of cheap print, of godly ballads and penny godlinesses, as closer to that third world of religious sentiment than to the higher reaches of orthodoxy. Indeed he sees the godly ballad and the emerging penny godlinesses as ‘rivals’ to, rather than as adjuncts of, ‘mainstream Protestant teaching.’8

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In this chapter I want to test some of these claims by looking in detail at the works of John Andrewes. Andrewes features prominently in the work of both Watt and Green. With typical originality, it was Dr. Watt who discovered Andrewes as the virtual inventor of the religious chap-­book format – the ‘penny godlinesses’ – that were to figure so prominently in the market for cheap print after 1660.9 Little is known about Andrewes’s career; he claims to have been called by Christ himself from his role as a schoolmaster to the ministry of the word and identifies himself at one point as a Wiltshire minister, but he does not appear to have held a permanent living there. In another of his pamphlets he also claims to have suffered severe financial losses while preaching in Ireland.10 From these scraps of information we might enlist him into the army of wannabe clergymen, many of them university graduates, who flooded the clerical labour market of early Stuart England,11 many of whom, like Andrewes’s, failed to attain permanent livings in the church. On his own account, he then turned to the pamphlet press as a source of income, and, from the late 1610s and into the 1620s, established a reputation for himself as ‘a market place theologian.’ Watt locates his activities at the bottom end of the market for cheap print in the context of the business dealings of a group of stationers who from 1624 owned the stock of godly ballads that form the core of her study. As Professor Green notes, over time, Andrewes’s works became shorter and therefore cheaper. Short, black-­letter pamphlets, they bore all the characteristics of cheap print designed for sale at the bottom end of the market. By the 1630s and 1640s woodcuts began to appear on the cover. Latterly – in this just like Dekker and Greene before him – Andrewes’s burgeoning repute and following as a popular author itself became a major selling point. Accordingly, with titles like Andrewes’s Caveat, Andrewes Repentance or Andrewes Golden Chaine, the title pages of his books came to make much of Andrewes’s name.12 Early on he dedicated his efforts to a series of worthies – like the Marchioness Buckingham13 or Francis Bacon14 – with whom he claimed to have no acquaintance, but latterly he started to dedicate them to his readers, to ‘the elect children of God,’ or to ‘the elect children of God who truly repent,’ or to those of his ‘Christian readers’ ‘that are the elect children of God’15 or even, remarkably, on one occasion, to Jesus Christ himself.16 Andrewes himself tells us of his Humble Petition that ‘The Author did this Booke forestall, / And from the Presse he did it take, / That none thereof might have the sale, / But he himselfe which did it make, / Except it be his special friend, / Which may it sell, and give, and lend.’17 Of A Celestiall Looking-­Glasse he claimed that it was ‘imprinted at my own cost & charges.’18 This may be what the title pages of many of Andrewes’s works mean when they identify him as the ‘publisher.’ Andrewes Resolution is described as ‘newly published by John Andrewes minister and preacher of the word’ and printed by Nicholas Okes. Also printed by Okes, A Soveraigne Salve was ‘newly published by I.A, minister and preacher of the word.’ A Golden Trumpet was ‘newly published by John Andrewes, minister and preacher of God’s word’ and ‘printed for John Wright,’ ‘to be sold at his shop in Giltspur Street without Newgate, at the sign

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of the bible.’ By contrast, Andrewes Golden Chaine was more conventionally described as ‘printed for John Wright at the sign of the bible without Newgate.’ All of this might be taken to imply that Andrewes started out hoping to make a mark through his printed works, through conventional, non-­commercial, or only partially commercial means; dedicating his early works to the good and the great, he may even have donated some of them to the Bodleian Library. (The copies of Andrewes Resolution and A Celestiall Looking-­Glasse in the Bodleian have ex dono authoris inscribed across the top of their title pages.) As his books attracted a large readership and Andrewes failed to acquire elite patrons or ecclesiastical patronage, he may have come to see his literary output as a direct source of income. Identifying his readers as his patrons, he sought means to finance, to publish, and perhaps even to sell his own works, thus cutting out the middleman and increasing the return on his own literary and edificational labours. All in all, Watt is surely right to identify him not only as playing a central role in the invention of the ‘penny godliness’ but also as being one of the first, if not the first, to explore the role of the ‘market place theologian’ seeking to draw a steady income, if not a living, from the sale of his own printed works. All of this makes Andrewes a major figure in the history of cheap religious print in post-­Reformation England. That being so, we surely ought to pay at least as much attention to what his pamphlets actually say as we do to the material and generic forms in and through which they attempt to say it. To adopt the idiom of a bygone era, this is to argue that, while it is undoubtedly true (as we shall see below) that the medium does indeed often shape the message, sometimes in fundamental ways, it remains very dangerous to judge a book, if not by its cover, then at least by its material and commercial form. Here Andrewes’s works are a case in point; we need to pay close attention to the sentiments and claims they contain and to the language in which those sentiments are couched precisely because his pamphlets have been almost systematically misconstrued by scholars so fascinated by their form as cheap print that they have assumed that their contents must be as ‘popular’ as their form. In play here are certain assumptions about the (adversarial, indeed mutually exclusive) relationship between the protestant and the popular; assumptions that have been central to the writing on the English Reformation, its causes, course, and consequence, produced, over the last forty or so years, by a number of revisionist scholars, who have tended to be so certain about what popular religion must have been like that they have tended to read off the central characteristics of that (‘rustic pelagian’)19 religious style from any and every text designed for a popular audience. However, as we shall see below, a close study of Andrewes’s tracts demonstrates the fallacy of this essentially circular mode of argument, for in his case, at least, it appears that the nature both of the audience being addressed and of the message being sent had been shaped by the process of religious change, and in particular by the proselytizing efforts of myriad godly preachers. The result was a hybrid (both printed and religious) form, the dynamics of which have much to tell us about the course of ‘popular’ religious change in post-­Reformation England, which, rather than a seamless web of continuity and conservatism, stretching

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from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, seems to have had a history; a history which it might be possible to write using (amongst other sources) cheap print, but only if we pay at least as much attention to the contents of the texts in question as we do to their material form and place in the marketplace of print. What follows is an attempt to do both of those things, and to examine how form and content interacted, in the case of that ‘market place theologian,’ John Andrewes. Sin and its sovereign salve, repentance Andrewes’s books pushed an emotive evangelism centred on the deleterious effects of human sin, the prospect of divine judgement and damnation, and the role of repentance as the ‘soveraigne salve to cure a sicke soule’ ‘which sinne brought out of frame.’20 The earliest of Andrewes’s ‘penny godlinesses’, A Subpaena from the High Imperial Court of Heaven of 1618, took the form of an ‘information of justice’ against sinful humankind, setting out, in execrable verse, the origins of sin in the Fall and the complete culpability of sinful humanity under the terms set by the laws both of nature and of Moses.21 On Andrewes’s account, ‘Sinne in the first entrance defileth, in the progresse hardeneth, and at his going out destroyeth. It causeth all those that commit it to dishonour God, to crucifie Christ a fresh, and to greeve the Holy Ghost.’22 The evil of sin appeared in three main aspects; ‘God doth loath it … the Divell doth love it … [and] the whole world is infected therewith.’23 The result was that ‘many millions of people, yea all the sonnes of Adam are adjudged to hell fire for ever, save onely those whom Christ Jesus hath ransomed with his precious bloud, and bitter passion on the crosse.’24 The devil has a prominent role in Andrewes’s works as the great enemy of humankind; ‘the Divell, that Roaring Lyon, in whom the full perfection of malice lies, knowing how to most hurt, hath poysoned the Fountaine, Adam and Eve: & the Fountaine once poisoned, then the streames issuing from the same are sure and most certainly infected.’25 Satan was described trying to lead humanity gradually down a chain of damning sins until the heart of the believer was so hardened in sin that he or she became unable to repent. The aim was first to render sin customary, and thence to progress ‘from custom to hardness of heart, to boasting, from boasting unto desperation, and from desperation to damnation, and thus, by degrees, if sin be not resisted, the devil will labour to bring the sinner into destruction.’26 Andrewes pictured the devil haunting the deathbeds of unrepentant sinners, using their former sins and current agony to prevent them now, at the last, effectually turning to God and thus plunging them into a final and damning despair.27 But if sin was a problem for fallen humanity in general, it was, Andrewes claimed – here echoing myriad puritan jeremiads – one of peculiar intensity for England and the English ‘in this euill declining age.’28 While England had never lived ‘so long in peace and security, nor the gospel never so generally preached amongst us, yet I fear never did men make so ill use of so good a blessing.’ Under such circumstances, Andrewes concluded, ‘God’s mercy is to

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be wondered at that he hath spared us so long; it is his mercy and nothing but his mercy that we are not consumed.’29 As this might be taken to imply, if, as A Sovaraigne Salve had it, sin was the poison or infection that was afflicting the soul, then repentance was the answer, the sovereign salve or antidote to that poison. Repentance, on Andrewes’s account, was the way not only to salvation but also to assurance or, as he himself put it, the only means to make our ‘election to salvation sure.’30 All of his tracts operated as pleas to the reader to repent before it was too late and as guides to show him or her how to do so effectively. A Subpaena from the High Imperiall Court of Heaven contained a series of speeches; one by ‘death,’ produced as he tried to serve the subpoena on a sinful humanity, was followed by two by ‘mercy’, one made to God ‘for mankind’ and the other ‘to mankind.’ The tract concluded with vivid evocations of the judgement day, of the terrors and torments of hell and of the joys and wonders of heaven31 of a sort which echoed through Andrewes’s pamphlets. The whole of the Celestiall Looking-­Glasse was given over to an often very immediate physical description of the joys and wonders of heaven.32 If anything, hell was even more ubiquitous in Andrewes’s works.33 Confronting his readers with these two alternative destinations in the next life, Andrewes’s asked them repeatedly to, in effect, choose between them and to do so by repenting.34 There might be thought to be something of a tension, not to say a contradiction, between, on the one hand, Andrewes’s entirely orthodox sense of the all-­encompassing and spiritually fatal nature of human sin, which, on the face of it, would seem to rule out any hint of free will or works of righteousness and, on the other, his apparently straightforward injunctions to his readers simply to repent and be saved; injunctions which, at least in their simplest and starkest forms, seem to invite precisely the sorts of suspicions raised by Professor Green. Given the absolute necessity of repentance, if salvation were to be achieved and God’s judgements averted, how might one know where one stood in the repentance stakes? Andrewes was ready with an answer, and given his emphasis on the deleterious, indeed damning, effects of sin, it was a remarkably upbeat one: If thou wouldst know if thou art in the right way of repentance or no, thou shalt find, if thou consider thyself, whether thou hadst ever any need of God’s pardon for thy sin or of Christ his blood to salve and cure thy soul. Or was thy heart ever wounded or grieved for thy sin, so that thy soul were even sick with the stink thereof? Or didst thou ever hunger and thirst after God in Christ? And with sighs, groans and tears beg for his mercy upon thy knees (as for life and death). If thou hast not felt nor done these things in some measure, surely thy case is very fearful and dangerous; you art not yet in the way of repentance; therefore as yet the mercies of God belong not unto thee.35

Given that hardened worldlings, the sort of people who had never experienced such pangs and scruples, were highly unlikely to have shelled out even the few pence necessary to purchase one of Andrewes’s books, in such passages Andrewes might be thought to be, if not exactly preaching to the converted, then at least manipulating

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the susceptibilities of a self-­selecting audience, the better to convince them both of the extreme danger of their current spiritual condition and of their really rather good chances of being able to identify themselves as those of Andrewes’s readers who were indeed ‘the children of God which truly repent’; so long, that is, as they followed Andrewes’s instructions on just how to examine themselves, repent, and amend, and, in particular on how passionately to petition God for the grace to enable them to do so. For, on Andrewes’s account, if the scruples and doubts, the moments of panic and fear in the face of the enormity of their own sins and the majesty of divine justice, that had prompted his readers to peruse or purchase his books in the first place, were real signs of a genuine repentance they would and must lead to dramatic, and all-­consuming, consequences. Thus, in his Caveat to Win Sinners he informed the reader that if you did feele the smart of sinne but prick in your wounded conscience, it were forcible enough to draw streames of teares out of the dryest eye that ever was in the heart of man, and to excite a multitude of sorrowfull groanes out of the hardest heart that ever God made: Yea, it would make you (like David) to pray and cry unto God againe and againe, and never leave the Lord untill you obtaine his mercy and favour, that you may get some comfortable perswasion of Gods love in Christ, for the pardon of your sinnes. Untill you do so, you shal never have peace nor quietnesse of conscience, nor any sound comfort of Gods holy Spirit in you.36

The outward sign of such inner torment and contrition was thus to be found in prayer: you must bee so fervent with God in your dayly prayers, for the forgivenesse of your sinnes, that yee must with Jacob, even wrestle with God, and never let the Lord goe, untill he blesse you: but with sighs, groanes and teares, bewaile your sinnes, beg for his mercies, and that so entirely, as it were for life and death; yea, weepe for your sinnes like Mary Magdalen, and powre forth flouds of teares like Ezechia: untill yee doe so, you shall never have peace, nor quietnesse of conscience, neither any sound comfort of Gods holy Spirit in you.37

It was, of course, no accident that nearly all of Andrewes’s works contained emotive prayers which expressed precisely this mixture of emotions, this combination of spiritual ejaculations and petitions to a just but merciful God for forgiveness of sins now fully acknowledged and sincerely repented. Here were models, indeed, if necessary, set forms of words, which would enable even the least articulate or spiritually adept of Andrewes’s readers to perform a sincere, soul-­changing, repentance; and, by demonstrating, both to themselves and to their God, the genuineness of their repentance, to claim the benefits vouchsafed by God only to truly repentant sinners. An instrumental piety? But Andrewes did not stop there. At times his pamphlets made claims that rendered the prayers proffered to the reader almost infallible means to true repentance and

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hence to salvation. The directness, indeed the crudity, of the pitch emerges most clearly from the way the pamphlets describe themselves on their title-­pages, as well as from a series of self commendations, often written in verse, which Andrewes habitually attached to his main texts. Thus Andrewes Caveat to Win Sinners (1631) commended itself on its title page as ‘a true and perfect way to win careless sinners (if there be but the least spark of grace in them) unto speedy repentance that in the end they may obtain eternal life.’ Andrewes Repentance (1631) was described as ‘perfectly guiding all those who hope to be saved in the direct way of repentance whereby they may attain eternal life.’ On its title page, The Converted Mans New Birth claimed to describe ‘the direct way to go to heaven: wherein all men may clearely see, whether they shall be saved or damned … Heere is also layd open the true estate of the regenerate man, with the certainty of his salvation: with an excellent marke, to know the childe of God which hath truely repented.’ As its title might suggest, A Sovareigne Salve (1624) presented itself (again on the title page) as though it were a medical text commending a sure-­fire cure for some disease, identifying ‘the strength and force of the poison of sin,’ and explaining ‘how man’s soul became poisoned’ and ‘how the soul of man, poisoned by sin, may be cured and restored.’ ‘The parts are all authentical,’ the reader was assured, ‘and comprised in a most short and compendious method, briefly to be read, that they may be effectually practiced.’ On the opposite page a verse addressed by the author to the reader recommended the book as a ‘sovereign salve’ fit ‘to cure your soul … which sin brought out of frame. Regard it more than worldly wealth, / No treasure like to this, / No money can buy salve to cure / Our soul, if this should miss.’ On the first page a missive from ‘the book to the reader’ repeated the message. If, with Tessa Watt, Ian Green, or indeed Alex Walsham, we were looking for continuities linking the post-­with the pre-­Reformation periods we might see such claims to immediate and instrumental efficacy attached to prayers to be bought over the counter and repeated verbatim by humble Christians as very similar both in their nature and function to some of the printed prayers described by Eamon Duffy in his Stripping of the Altars. Those were sold with various indulgences attached promising remission from the pangs of purgatory, sometimes ‘for tens of thousands of years,’ either for the praying subject or for his or her kinsfolk, if the prayers were sedulously repeated in the approved manner.38 At times Andrewes tried to protect his works from such crudely instrumental constructions. The title page of Andrewes Golden Chaine – a tract which took the form of a long prayer directed to God for true repentance and the divine forgiveness – pointed out that it was taken almost entirely ‘out of the pure fountaine of holy Scripture’ and that it would work only if used ‘with a beleeving faith,’ although, perhaps significantly, even that caveat was omitted from the brief missive in which Andrewes directly instructed his reader ‘for Gods sake, your owne sake, and your soules sake, peruse this little Booke over, for it guides you in the direct way unto Almighty God, and sheweth you how to give your heart unto God, and your sinnes unto Satan, every time you pray with this Prayer.’39

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In nearly all of the tracts readers were exhorted not to delay their repentance; time was short, the future uncertain, these were the last days and the time to repent was now.40 Readers were urged to say to themselves ‘so say I, this instant, this moment is the time of repentance; this is the day of salvation; this is the time of grace; this is the acceptable houre. O therefore embrace it.’41 ‘The theefe indeede may be saved on the Crosse, and mercy found at the last,’ Andrewes conceded, ‘but late repentance is seldome or never true repentance … In the whole book of God, there is but onely one, and that was that good thiefe, that truely repented at the houre of his death: and who knoweth whether he had repented before or no.’ The example of the good thief was left to us, Andrewes concluded, ‘for an example that no man shold despaire’, and that of the bad thief ‘that no man should presume.’42 Again the urgency of these appeals to repent before it was too late seems to concede a great deal of agency to the sinner in initiating his or her own salvation. All of which, combined with the hucksterish promises of immediate efficacy (cited above), might seem to render the operations of God’s grace dependent on the actions of the human will. Confronted with such starkly opposed options and outcomes, who would not choose to repent, and at times in these pamphlets repentance is presented as though it were simply a matter of human choice; sometimes even of the choice to purchase some of Andrewes’s wares and inwardly digest and repeat their contents. It is thus perhaps not altogether without reason that Professor Green claims that there were worryingly instrumental, perhaps even semi-­ pelagian, overtones to Andrewes’s pamphlets. A protestant (predestinarian) piety? Sin, repentance and faith under the covenant of grace However, at this point, we need to remind ourselves of the extent to which Andrewes’s texts resounded with the key terms and concepts of contemporary Calvinist or reformed orthodoxy. His references, in dedications and on title pages, ‘to the elect children of God’ were not mere figleaves. Throughout his extended evocation of the wonders and joys of heaven he made it clear that those joys were available only ‘for the true protestant, the regenerate Christian’ who ‘by faith and repentance, begges it’ and who ‘through the merits of Jesus Christ shall enjoy it’. This was a group he immediately redescribed as ‘the peculiar people, the regenerate Christians, the children of light, the elect by God’s pre-­ordination.’ ‘This is the principal inheritance of the saints, and habitation for all the elect children of God, prepared for them from before the beginning of the world.’43 The opposite of the repentant sinner Andrewes described as ‘the reprobate’; for, ‘as God is mercifull unto the penitent sinner, he also showeth his justice unto the reprobate, whose anger unto them is most dreadfull.’44 Andrewes’s claims that anyone who had ever felt the pangs of sin or the need for divine grace or mercy was well on the way to a true repentance found their equivalents in the works of none other than William Perkins himself. In his A Grain of Mustard Seed, Perkins agreed with Andrewes that the merest glimmerings of guilt for sin or

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craving for divine forgiveness might well represent the first stirrings of a true faith; ‘a man is even at that instant already entered into the kingdom when the lord, that good husbandman, hath cast but some little portion of faith or repentance into the ground of the heart; yea though it be but as one grain of mustard seed.’ Later in the same tract, he went even further, claiming that ‘to see and feel in ourselves the want of any grace pertaining to salvation, and to be grieved therefore, is the grace itself.’45 On Perkins’s account ‘a constant and earnest desire to be reconciled to God, to believe and repent, if it be in a touched heart, is, in the acceptation of God, as reconciliation, faith, ­repentance itself.’46 Elsewhere, in A Golden Chain, Perkins had explained the role of prayer in expressing just such a ‘constant and earnest desire to be reconciled to God.’ Emphasizing the necessity for a ‘continual’ ‘calling upon the name of God,’ he broke prayer down into its constituent parts. ‘In every petition we express two things: a sense of our wants; a desire of the grace of God to supply those wants. Assent is the second part of prayer, whereby we believe, and express it before God, that he in his due time will grant unto us those our requests which before we have made unto his majesty.’47 ‘When a man in his weakness prays with sighs and groans for the gift of lively faith, the want whereof he finds in himself, his very prayer, in this manner made, is as truly in acceptation with God as the prayer made with lively faith.’48 All of the prayers that Andrewes proffered for the use of his readers fell well within this rubric. Indeed we can take them as offering models or templates to the repentant Christian, so that he or she could successfully express both the appropriately ‘earnest and constant desire to be reconciled to God’ and the necessary concomitant confidence in the ‘grace of God to supply those wants.’ As for the ‘sovereign salve’ itself, for all the urgency of Andrewes’s exhortations to his readers to repent now, before it was too late, and for all his listings of the rewards they would enjoy in heaven for having effectually done so,49 he remained adamant that repentance was ‘a gift absolute, without consideration; and it comes freely from God, who is the very efficient and principall Author or Donor thereof.’ Repentance ‘is hid from the world and revealed unto none but to the elect Children of God.’50 Far from a work of the human will, repentance, Andrewes claimed, may be called a work of Grace; yea, a supernaturall Grace of a sanctified spirit, arising of a godly sorrow, from a true faith and knowledge of a man’s owne spirituall estate. I may call Repentance a worke, because it seems not to be a quality or habit, but an action of a repentant sinner, striving to return from all his sins to come unto God: and it cannot be practised of any, but such as are in the state of Grace.51

It followed, therefore, that ‘hee that turneth unto God by Repentance, must first of all be turned by God.’52 ‘The efficient or principal working cause of faith in thy repentance, is God, whereby, by faith every true beleever receiveth Christ for himselfe, as given for him, borne for him, dying for him, and rose againe for him: for hee dyed for his sins, and rose againe for his justification.’53 Accordingly, Andrewes’s works echo with prayers and petitions to God ‘who is the Author of repentance, to give us grace

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to repent, that we may record a decree in our hearts, to keepe all our sinnes with everlasting exile of Banishment, and never admit any of them again in our Coasts.’54 In Andrewes Resolution the reader is informed that ‘if thou hadst repentance in thine own power, and mightest repent when thou wouldest; yet it were but a folly; yea, it were a madnesse to presume in sinne because thou hast a remedy. But now seeing thy repentance is in the hand of God, and that none can repent without his especial Grace, it were a double and a treble folly to delay thy Repentance from day to day, or to seeke it from any other but from God.’55 There is, of course, a paradox within that claim, but it is a paradox far from peculiar to Andrewes’s works, and rather inherent in all such pitches made from the pulpit or in the press by the solifidian and predestinarian protestant ministers of the day. The most that one can say is that perhaps in Andrewes’s case the tensions contained within that paradox have been somewhat heightened by the intense voluntarism of his sales pitch. Andrewes was equally clear about the proper relation between faith and repentance. Section six of Andrewes Resolution was entitled ‘Faith is the ground or roote of Repentance’: Faith may be added unto Repentance, not as a part, but as the ground or roote thereof; for it cannot bee, that the roote and the fruit should bee both one thing: and without Faith there can never be any true Repentance, therefore they are still joined together … In order of nature, faith goeth before Repentance: in manifestation of them, repentance is first; in time, they are both joined together … By manifestation Repentance goeth before faith, for it is sooner descried than faith. Regeneration is like the sap of a tree, hid within the bark, when as Repentance is like the bud, that speedily sheweth it selfe. If wee respect the time, neither of them are one before the other, but are begotten both in an instant … so soone as a man is regenerate, so soone he repents: for he that beleeves, instantly repents. Therefore none can truly repent, except hee beleeves that he is Gods. And none can have beleefe, but hee that hath his grace, and faith in him. Furthermore, none can repent unless they hate sin; and faith causeth a man to hate sin: now none can hate sin, except he be sanctified, and none can be sanctified without hee be justified; and this cannot be without faith; for faith comprehendeth justification.56

Perkins himself had said as much, maintaining, in A Golden Chain, that ‘in such as are converted repentance doth first manifest itself, yet regarding the order of nature it ­followeth both faith and sanctification.’57 Professor Green is quite right to observe that these relatively technical expositions of core protestant doctrines – like justification by faith alone, or the proper relations between faith and repentance – are mostly to be found in Andrewes’s earlier (and longer) works; most particularly in Andrewes Resolution of 1621. But even the relatively late and very short Andrewes Golden Chaine betrays signs of a more than residual commitment to certain canons of protestant, indeed perhaps even of Calvinist, orthodoxy. Proclaimed as ‘newly made’ and ‘never before in print’ in 1645, Andrewes Golden Chaine took the form of an extended prayer and accordingly its formal doctrinal content was even slighter than that found in some of the other treatises. The tract opens with

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p­ etitions to God to ‘give my heart true repentance, my spirit contrition, and mine eyes a fountaine of teares to weepe for my sinnes.’58 Andrewes stressed God’s capacity and willingness to forgive even the worst of sinners: ‘Peter which denied, and foresware thee, wept for his sins, and was pardoned. Mary Magdalen, which had many legions of devils, with teares of unfained repentance was absolved, and made a Temple of the Holy Ghost.’ Here was the precedent for the forgiveness of the praying subject’s own ‘scarlet sinnes … in number many, in weight most heavy, and for desert most damnable.’59 Throughout, agency is ascribed first to God, and only then to the penitent sinner. The basis for the sinner’s redemption is not his or her own works or will but rather God’s ‘gracious promises towards me.’ God is enjoined to ‘behold the words of thine owne mouth, the workes and covenants of thine owne hands, how thou hast sworn by an oath, and covenanted and indented with me … which covenant thou hast sealed with thy owne most precious blood and confirmed the same by the death and passion of the Cross.’ It is the penitent sinner, ‘betrothed through faith, directed by thy word and guided by thy holy Spirit, to enlighten my mind, cleanse my conscience and rejoice my heart,’ who is now approaching a just but merciful God, asking for forgiveness.60 It is through ‘faith’ that his or her petitions are to be heard and prayers answered; ‘according unto the riches of thy mercies, thou hast promised to heare my petition, that whensoever I shall aske any thing in thy name through faith, I shall obtain the same.’61 Again Perkins had said as much and instructed the believer to pray in precisely this vein. Andrewes pictures the main parties to the struggle for the sinner’s soul as Satan and God.62 Throughout the agent of salvation is pictured as God in Christ; the sinner’s petitions are directed to ‘O Lord my God from thy seat of justice, unto thy throne of mercy, beseeching thee mine all and only Saviour, whose armes were spread on the Crosse, to embrace mee and all penitent sinners, to have mercy on mee, O Lord have mercy upon me; O naile my sinnes unto thy Crosse, and burie them in thy grave that they may never rise up in judgement against me.’63 That passage reflects a Christocentric imagery that recurs elsewhere in this tract, and indeed echoes throughout Andrewes’s other works. In Andrewes Golden Chaine, Christ is begged that ‘thy crimson drops of precious blood which trickled downe thy azure veines may wash away my scarlet sins.’64 Similar imagery is on even more prominent display in A Soveraigne Salve where Christ is described as the only antidote for the poison of sin, and the nature of that antidote given viscerally material form in the ‘both water and blood’ pouring from Christ’s crucified body when the ‘bloody sweat came trickling down to the ground … In which (no doubt) he felt the force and strength of sinne, the wrath of God against it, the justice of God requiring punishment for it, the power of the Law pronouncing condemnation to it; the force of death, the tyrannie of Satan, and the torment of hell.’65 The praying penitent in Andrewes Golden Chaine is allowed some agency, but, as these passages make clear, he or she is always pictured acting as the object of divine justice and mercy, the beneficiary of Christ’s sacrifice and the recipient of a ­justifying faith and

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a sanctifying divine grace. That grace has allowed the believer a proper appreciation of the extent and meaning of his or her own sins, and of the need for divine forgiveness. This, in turn, has produced a full soul-­shattering repentance for, and loathing of, sin and a concomitantly passionate love for God. Thus, just as it was ‘the tears of unfeigned repentance’ shed by Peter and Mary Magdalen that had elicited a forgiving response from God, so now the praying subject of the Golden Chaine is pictured begging for a similar display of divine mercy in response to his or her own display of penitence.66 It is as though the covenant under which the praying subject of the tract is claiming his or her redemption was predicated on the sinner’s sincere repentance. Thus God’s promise is described coming into operation ‘at what time soever I repented from the bottome of my heart, of all my sinnes’; then and only then will God ‘forgive me all mine offences, if they were as red as scarlet, thou wilt make them as white as snow: which covenant thou hast sealed with thy owne most precious blood, and confirmed the same by thy death and passion on the Crosse.’67 Again, this might look like the sort of semi-­pelagian exaltation of the power of the will to merely choose to repent detected in Andrewes’s works by Professor Green, but, as none other than William Perkins had explained in his Golden Chain, ‘the covenant of grace is that whereby God, freely promising Christ and his benefits, exacts again of man that he would by faith receive Christ and repent of his sins.’68 And, as we have seen, for Andrewes, repentance was in fact preceded by and was indeed both a product and a telltale sign of a true saving faith. Thus what we are dealing with here is simply a version of the same covenant of grace employed to urgent evangelical effect by myriad godly preachers throughout the period. For it is on the basis of a covenant of grace conceived in precisely these terms that the subject of the tract undertakes that henceforth he or she will ‘foresake all my sinnes and cleave unto thee for mercie, that thou maist save me: I had perished hadst not thou which didst make me, reneued me againe … I bequeath all my sinnes, and every one of them unto Satan from whence they came; and I will also both now and evermore by thy helpe, O Lord, renounce, loath and defie Satan, and all his workes, both past, present and for to come.’69 Thus, it is only the penitent ‘renewed’ by divine grace and enabled by divine ‘help’ who can come thus to repent, to loathe sin and effectually to amend his or her life. It is only the believer remade by divine grace and armed with a justifying faith who can thus bargain with God and claim the benefits of the covenant of grace, sealed with Christ’s blood on the cross. It is surely in this (entirely conventional, we might even say, ‘orthodox’, protestant) light that we should interpret the seemingly rather open-­ended injunctions to repent before it was too late with which many of Andrewes’s works conclude.70 The search for assurance and the life of faith On this basis, all of Andrewes’s urgent appeals to his readers to repent before it was too late can be construed as ministerial efforts to awake within them the ‘grain of mustard seed’ of a true faith, building on their first scruples and doubts about their



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hitherto sinful existence and fate in the next life, in order to call forth all the telltale characteristics that made up a true repentance and therefore expressed a truly justifying faith. Of these the first was an intense period, indeed a continuing practice, of self-­ examination. In A Soveraigne Salve the first part of the ‘salve that he [the believer] must take to cure this poison of sin’ was self-­knowledge and the intense self-­examination that alone would produce it, for in vain is the medicine ministered where the disease is dissemblingly covered and kept unknown … No man can rightly acknowledge his own sinnes, no man can truly confesse his fayth, no man can duly use the Sacraments, that doth not first earnestly try and examine his owne conscience: That is, thoroughly to try, narrowly to search, and dilligently to proove, who, and what manner of person he is, and in what case hee feeleth himselfe, how deeply his owne conscience is poysoned with sinne. And withall, to know how, and which way he may come into favour again with God … Examine your selves and bee sorrowfull for your sinnes; not for some sinnes, but for all sinnes wherewith you are infected and poisoned: And that not for an houre, nor a day, nor for a weeke, nor a moneth; but mourne for your misdeedes, and bee sorrie for your sinnes continually, even so long as you live.71

Again Perkins agreed, telling his readers that ‘we must not search so only as only to find gross and palpable sins of our lives, but so as we may find those sins which the world accounts lesser sins and espy our secret faults and privy corruptions.’72 Self-­examination and its consequent sense of sin must then be followed by an intense loathing of sin and an equally intense commitment to amendment of life, indeed, as Andrewes put it, by a determination to ‘sinne no more.’ Of course, in a fallen world such a resolution must be doomed to failure; ‘for it is impossible for a man to bee cleane without sinne in this life.’ What that injunction meant was that ‘he [that] hath formerly obeyed sinne, now he must withstand it, and walke no more inordinately in it, and as he was wont to yield unto it, so now he must strive against it, that it may reigne no more in him, to captive and enthrall his soule unto eternal perdition.’73 All of which meant, Andrewes concluded, that ‘you must not onely barely repent, and slightly sorrow for your sinnes, and so carelessly give them over, as though you could repent when you would; but you must accuse your sinnes, loath, hate, and detest them, your conscience must witnesse against them, and your hearts convince [i.e. convict] them.’74 And genuine amendment of life entailed a palpable growth in grace: thou must needes drive the Divell out of all the corners of thy heart by amendment of thy life wholly … If thou begin to repent, and goe nor forward from Grace to Grace, thy Repentance is of no value: … Not to goe forward (in thy Repentance) is to go backward … for there is no standing still (in the state of sin) if thou mind to repent. … he that ceaseth to bee better, ceaseth to bee good; but he that doth begin & goe on to the end, receives his reward, and this can never be obtained, except thou repent truly.75

In Andrewes Resolution he explained that ‘hee that hath earnestly repented, and is truly converted from his sinnes, hath this speciall marke in him; he is none of those fruitles

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hearers, barren beleevers, unregenerate knowers, or verball Professors: but he is the faithful doer of the will and word of God,’ and in Andrewes Repentance he offered the reader his own experience of this process to illustrate and confirm the truth of these claims.76 This again accorded with the basic tenets of puritan practical divinity. In A Grain of Mustard Seed, Perkins had made it an axiom that ‘the foresaid beginnings of grace are counterfeit unless they increase.’77 These, then, were the true characteristics of ‘the elect children of God which truly repent’; characteristics which in turn provided the grounds of that settled sense of their own election and salvation that true believers enjoyed.78 Andrewes assured his readers that just such an assurance was within their reach. ‘The scripture hath many proofes of the certainty of our salvation,’ he claimed. David would never have prayed for something he could not have, nor would Peter have exhorted us to try to attain the unattainable, so, when he urged us to ‘Make your election sure,’ he was also assuring us that such assurance was indeed attainable in this life, ‘except ye be reprobates … It is manifest that the property of true faith, guides the assurance of our salvation, and the greater our faith is, the greater is our assurance. And consequently the true believer knoweth, and is assured of his election and salvation, for Faith is the Faith of Gods elect.’79 In a somewhat crude version of the practical syllogism beloved of experimental predestinarian divines like William Perkins, Andrewes tied the believer’s assurance of his or her own salvation to the process of repentance: ‘If you bee demanded how long you may be assured of your salvation; you may answer, so long as you have truly repented, and continue in newnesse of life, your sure trust and confidence is, that God will never forsake them that put their trust in him.’80 Similar claims were repeated in Andrewes Caveat to Win Sinners, which concludes with the prayer ‘Oh let our teares bee the seas, our sighes the gales of wind, to arrive at Gods heavenly Kingdome, which God hath prepared for us, Christ hath merited for us, the holy Spirit doth assure us, and our own godly lives and conversations in learning here of our Saviour to sinne no more, will witnesse the same unto us.’81 All of which meant that, despite the huge emphasis that Andrewes put on his readers’ own efforts to repent for their sins, and on the testimony of their own self-­knowledge, and in particular of their continuing efforts truly to repent and to ‘sin no more,’ he could also tell his readers without hesitation that ‘wee are not to build the assurance of our salvation, uppon our owne sence or feeling; but uppon Gods unchangeable and gracious promises made unto us, in Christ Jesus.’82 Again Perkins agreed; for while, as Breward explains, ‘Perkins’ experience and theology led to the conclusion that the working of the converted heart infallibly revealed the operation of God,’ Perkins could also tell readers, worried by the apparent weakness of their own faith, to look outside themselves to Christ for ‘faith doth not justify in respect of itself, because it is an action or virtue; or because it is strong but in respect of the object thereof, namely Christ crucified whom faith apprehendeth as he is set forth unto us in the word and sacraments.’83 If there was a paradox in all this, even a seeming contradiction, it was a contradiction and a paradox to be found at the heart of a whole



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style of urgent hot protestant evangelism. Again, perhaps the most we can say is that sometimes the crudity and directness of Andrewes’s approach and diction operated to heighten or exacerbate paradoxes and tensions that his works shared with those of many other, far more respectable and influential, divines of the period.84

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Pennyante puritanism? Not only were there many similarities, indeed many areas of overlap, between what the great lights of the puritan ministry were offering their lay followers, clerical protégés, and peers, and what John Andrewes, ‘the market place theologian,’ was selling in his little black letter pamphlets, there were even very considerable parallels between the ways in which, in their works of practical divinity, both Andrewes and his peers in the puritan ministry lapsed from, or perhaps we should say sought to mitigate, explain, and apply, the austere demands of reformed orthodoxy. Andrewes’s relation to mainstream puritan practical divinity was thus anything but straightforwardly adversarial; it was rather imitative, exploitative, and parasitic. In both their language and governing concerns Andrewes’s works existed within, and drew much of their appeal and force from, a religious context framed by puritan divinity. The desire to be able to recognize ‘the true estate of the regenerate man’;85 to establish the nature of ‘repentance’86 and of the ‘certainty of salvation’;87 certainly to know whether one ‘shall be saved or damned’;88 to be able to deal effectively with ‘desperation,’89 to see off Satan and to die well – all these were expectations and needs framed by the discourse of puritan predestinarianism. It was precisely because these topics had become the object of such popular interest, expectation, and anxiety, that Andrewes was able to find a market for his tracts. Not only did Andrewes deal with needs and anxieties framed by the impact of decades of hot protestant and puritan preaching, as we have seen, his own works were themselves suffused with and framed by key terms and concepts taken from the discourse of puritan practical divinity. In view of all this, we can surely take the obviously very broad appeal of Andrewes’s texts as both a product of and telling evidence for the very considerable social and cultural reach and emotive force, i.e. for the positive popularity, of predestinarian protestant, indeed of puritan, religion in the 1610s, 1620s and 1630s. But as Andrewes moved to fill what he obviously came to see as a niche in the market – a niche created by the currency, at very humble social and cultural levels, of some of the defining concerns of puritan religion – he did so by precisely not merely potting or epitomizing, for a popular market, longer puritan works. Indebted to, indeed entirely derivative of, the mainstream of moderate puritan practical piety, and reformed theology, Andrewes’s works subtly distorted, even as they mimicked and appropriated, the codes and conventions of moderate puritan piety. Put crudely, we might argue that the medium, the short, cheap pamphlet – a medium itself shaped by the market expectations it was designed to meet – was, in its turn, shaping the expression of ‘popular Protestantism.’ The basic market expectation

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or demand seems to have been for some sort of ‘quick fix’ for perennial anxieties about damnation and salvation; anxieties that we might take to be endemic to virtually any and every form of Christianity. John Andrewes stumbled upon new ways to mitigate those anxieties and gratify those desires, producing, as he did so, an emergent textual and printed form – the cheap religious pamphlet or penny godliness. That form could not contain or accommodate elaborated disquisitions about the Perkinsian paradoxes of true or temporary faith or the doctrine of predestination. As long treatises and sermons became short black letter pamphlets, in Andrewes’s hands, some of the central paradoxes at the heart of puritan piety threatened to become mere contradictions; urgent evangelical appeal became hucksterish pitch; models for godly prayer threatened to become mere outward forms, which leant themselves as much to rote learning and mere repetition as they did to any very intense or involved processes of internalization or self-­fashioning. That, increasingly, Andrewes’s proferred remedies for the spiritual ills of his readers took the form of highly emotive prayers ensured that the doctrinal forms and formulas contained in his pamphlets became ever more stripped down, even reductive. But what those forms and formulas were reductive of remained distinctly perfect protestant, even ‘Calvinist,’ positions.90 The result was a relationship characterized by both dependence and divergence, by mimicry and by the vulgarization that almost always accompanies mimicry, however faithful. The nature of that relationship emerges very clearly from some of the marketing strategies with which these pamphlets were launched on the world. One of the earliest examples of the ‘penny godlinesses’ discovered and discussed by Tessa Watt was a tract called Death’s Knell or the Sick Man’s Passing Bell, summoning all sick consciences to prepare themselves for the coming of the great day of doom, lest mercies gate be shut against them. For all those that desire to arrive at the heavenly Jerusalem, whereunto are added prayers fit for householders. The only extant copy dates from 1628 by which time, the title page informs us, it was in its ninth edition. A straightforward call to repentance, framed as an exhortation to ‘linger not thy conversion, nor put off thy repentance from day to day,’ the tone of this tract was as barefacedly voluntarist as anything produced by Andrewes.91 The tract is attributed on the title page to William Perkins, but, as Professor Green has argued, that attribution seems extremely doubtful. But, if Perkins did not write the tract, why was his name attached to it? The obvious answer is that the very name of Perkins, the great puritan doctor of the soul, a pillar of English reformed orthodoxy, and a best-­selling author in his own right, was thought to have very considerable pulling power for the target audience of such tracts. Someone, presumably the publisher John Trundle, whose ‘specialities,’ Green points out, were ‘ballads, newsbooks, plays and ephemeral literature’ of all sorts,92 rather than the works of godly divines like Perkins, thought that Perkins’s name attached to the tract would make it sell. Indeed, even the famous Andrewes, who, by the 1640s, clearly had a following of his own, was not above borrowing from the charisma attached to Perkins and his works; one of the most famous of which was, of course, entitled The Golden Chain,

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a title which, as we have seen, Andrewes lifted for one of his own pamphlets. The contrasting nature of the two books helps to establish the nature of the transactions taking place between the world of pukka mainstream puritan practical divinity and reformed orthodoxy, inhabited by Perkins, and that of cheap print and the emergent form of the ‘penny godliness,’ inhabited by Andrewes. For whereas Perkins’s Golden Chain had been a lengthy treatise, which had worn its predestinarian heart on its sleeve, Andrewes’s far shorter work took the form of an extended prayer, in which the doctrine of predestination featured hardly at all, its central role usurped by that of repentance. And yet, as we have seen, Andrewes had taken care to structure his prayer in ways that preserved essentially the same basic ordering of the elect Christian’s progress to true faith, repentance, and assurance as that outlined in Perkins’s tract. The two books were thus clearly not anything like the same, but they were not simply opposed in their accounts of the way in which the true believer should and would approach a both just and merciful predestinating God and experience his or her salvation. Indeed, they enjoyed a complex relationship that Andrewes’s play on Perkins’s title, combined with the prominent display of his own name on the title page – this was most definitely Andrewes’s and not Perkins’s Golden Chain – nicely illustrates. We can gain sharper insights into how this all worked by a closer examination of Andrewes’s slightly bizarre dedicatory practices. Andrewes Repentance of 1631 was dedicated to those of his Christian readers who are ‘the elect children of God,’ which of course implied that there might well be some of his Christian readers who were not elect. In The Converted Mans New Birth, on the other hand, Andrewes told his ‘Christian readers’ that ‘I have dedicated this my book unto all you, the elect children of God,’ which, of course, collapsed the one group, his ‘Christian readers,’ into the other, ‘the elect children of God,’ so that the first group became coterminous with the second. While A Celestiall Looking-­Glasse of 1621 had been ‘directed unto all the elect children of God,’ other, later, works had been addressed or dedicated to ‘the elect children of God who truly repent.’93 As Professor Green points out, this is a decidedly ‘odd’ phrase; on the face of it, a theological nonsense, and not just for Calvinists. Of course, Arminians rejected absolute theories of election (and reprobation), holding that, since the divine decree electing some to salvation was predicated on foreseen faith, the elect must, ipso facto, truly repent. But since, on their view of the matter, it was always possible, in this life, even for the most genuinely repentant of Christians to fall into damning sin, it was always already premature, indeed not merely otiose but ultra vires, to talk about election or to use the term ‘the elect’ in relation to the current state of any members of the militant, as opposed to the triumphant, church. The tendency to do just that, displayed by many puritans, and indeed by Andrewes himself, on the title pages and in the dedicatory epistles of his books, looked to a whole range of anti-­Calvinists and anti-­puritans like a peculiarly blasphemous form of presumption. Andrewes’s addition of the phrase ‘which truly repent’ to the notion of ‘the elect’ thus seems unlikely to have represented (as Green suggests) either a ‘corollary’ or a ‘modification,’ designed to shade his use of that most charged of terms in distinctly

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u­ n-­Calvinist, and even Arminian, directions.94 Nor is it likely to have represented a simple misunderstanding of the theological issues. Rather, Andrewes’s use of the phrase was surely designed to play on his potential readers’ belief that there was indeed a group called the elect and that only they would be saved. His tracts could then present themselves as an easy and accessible way for potential readers to satisfy their desire to know whether they were members of that group and, if not, to find out how they could become so. The phrase ‘elect children of God who truly repent’ was thus intended not to imply that there might be members of the elect who did or would not truly repent, but rather to establish in his readers’ minds a certain chain of reasoning. Only the elect were saved. The defining characteristic of the elect was that they ‘truly repented.’ Thus, those anxious to become, or rather to discover themselves as, elect needed to truly repent. Andrewes’s books represented nearly infallible guides to ‘true repentance’ and so there would be a perfect fit between his readers, or rather between those of his readers who did as his books instructed them, and ‘the elect who truly repent.’ To appropriate a resonant phrase, Andrewes was claiming that his books ‘did what it said on the tin’ and that all that was necessary to become elect and thus to be saved was to buy some of them and act and emote as instructed. This was not theological or pastoral thinking of a very high order, but it did derive from and seek to manipulate a sediment of assumption and linguistic convention laid down by decades of godly preaching. However, in using the resulting conceptual assumptions and linguistic habits for such entirely reductive and hucksterish purposes Andrewes might be thought to have been letting the clerical side down. And so it should come as small surprise that when another John Andrewes – this one minister of St James Clerkenwell – came to print his Paul’s Cross sermon of 1621, he was so eager to assure his readers that he was not that other Andrewes, ‘the market place theologian’ and ‘author of divers books as petitions, subpoenas, Christ-­crosses etc.’95 The taint of commerce and the sale of virtual godliness Perhaps to counter such doubts about his bona fides Andrewes’s repeatedly claimed that he wrote his books solely for his own and his readers’ spiritual good; he had, he told the ‘Christian readers’ of The Converted Mans New Birth, written the book ‘desiring, through Jesus Christ, your health in the lord … I ayme not at mine owne profit, but at the setting forth of Gods glory, the discharge of my conscience, and the benefit of you the Children of my Lord and Saviour.’96 This was a refrain that echoed throughout his works. After one peculiarly intense passage in A Golden Trumpet, denouncing the sins of his contemporaries, Andrewes commented that if any seeme to storme at my harsh writing, let them amend their lives, & not dislike these my lines: For I openly protest, I fear none but God, whose truth I teach, and hate nothing but sin, which is the ruine and destruction of the soule. I care not for my life, so



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it were lost in the defence of the truth: I looke not for preferment, the world is so corrupted: I desire not the praise of men, it is but vanitie: I ayme not at my owne good, but to set forth god’s glory, the discharge of my owne conscience, and the benefit of Christ his Church and children.97

To make good on these claims he repeatedly connected the contents of his books with his own spiritual career and concerns. Andrewes presented his first book, Christ His Crosse, as the product of his own calling by Christ to the ministry.98 Thereafter, he claimed that Andrewes Repentance had been first ‘made and composed’ for ‘mine own private use, intending to engross it to my selfe.’99 Other of his tracts, like Andrewes Humble Petition unto Almighty God Declaring His Repentance or even Andrewes Golden Chaine, took the form of prayers or spiritual screeds apparently intended initially for his own purposes. Thus he concluded Andrewes Repentance with a heartfelt personal testimony and prayer: ‘I see (gentle readers) the more I enter into repentance, the more tender mine heart is, and the more my unrepented sins do grieve me, so that the griefe of mine heart is so great, for my sins, that I can goe no further to instruct you in the doctrine of repentance, before I have eased my own heart by bewailing my sins unto Almighty God.’ There followed a short prayer lamenting his sins, begging God’s mercy bestowed ‘through thy merits and bitter passion of the crosse,’ and pleading with ‘my sweet and loving Saviour’ to ‘look backe upon me, as thou diddest on the woman of Canaan, the poore Publican, on Mary Magdalen, or the penitent theefe, which came unto thee in his last hour.’100 Of course, this prayer, ostensibly both a product and a proof of the intensity of Andrewes’s own spiritual experiences and devotions, also became immediately available as a model, or indeed even as a script, for the reader’s own petitions to a just but merciful God. But if they were presented as being based on his own experience and aimed simply at his readers’ spiritual good, Andrewes’s tracts sometimes concluded with a plea to them to return the favour. Thus A Soveraigne Salue ended with a brief epistle ‘from the author to the reader’ which begged the reader ‘to pray unto my Saviour Jesus Christ for me, to direct me with his holy Spirit, and give me his grace, to use it to salve and cure my owne soule; that as I endeavour to cure thee in words, I may also labour in deedes to raise and preserve myself from all my sinnes, to the setting forth of Gods glory and the salvation of my owne soule.’101 The books thus strove to establish a sense of spiritual intimacy, based on a common spiritual predicament, shared between author and reader, as the author sought to bring the fruits of his own hard-­won ­experience as a repentant sinner to bear on the experiences and needs of his readers. The prayers and insights on offer in Andrewes’s tracts were thus able to claim multiple sources of authenticity and power. Firstly, as we have seen, Andrewes made great play with the fact that the prayers contained in his books were largely culled from ‘the pure fountain of the holy scripture’; a point he proved through elaborate marginal references to the word of God.102 Secondly, Andrewes’s own experience of sin, repentance, divine forgiveness, and growth in grace, of both the travails of the repentant sinner and of ‘the

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converted man’s new birth’ and the joys of assurance, could all be used to confirm the authenticity and potency of his tracts. Moreover, the (successful) use of those same words by his readers would not only confirm their own status as truly repentant sinners and therefore as members of that select group, ‘the elect children of God which truly repent,’ but would also reflect back on the truth and power of Andrewes’s works themselves. At stake in such transactions and exchanges was something like the construction, through the medium of print, of a virtual community of the godly, as the efficacy of Andrewes’s words and insights, in expressing his own repentance and godliness, was compounded and confirmed by the efficacy of those same words in constructing and sustaining the repentance and godliness of his readers. At stake was not a commercial relationship between author or bookseller and reader but rather an exchange of spiritual benefits between similarly afflicted and blessed Christian professors; a view of the situation to which the final coping stone was added by those pleas by Andrewes for the prayers of his readers, for in that one gesture he invited them into a relationship of equality, perhaps even of spiritual patronage, with their erstwhile spiritual benefactor, the very man who had taught them to pray in such movingly effectual ways, to the inestimable (spiritual) benefit both of themselves and now of their teacher himself. But while his readers could benefit only spiritually from these exchanges, Andrewes got to benefit materially as well. Even when the crudely commercial aspects of these transactions did raise their head, Andrewes did his best to construe them as merely an extension of the charitable exchanges that ought to characterize the relations between fellow Christians. In the epistle ‘to the reader’ appended to Andrewes Humble Petition, after Andrewes had outlined the extent of his financial losses in Ireland, ‘to the utter impoverishing of me, my wife and children for ever,’ he claimed that all his material hopes were now reposed on the charitable impulses of his readers. He would be ruined, he explained, ‘except God in his mercy open the harts of well disposed Gentlemen, and others, by their good liking of these my labors to relieve me in these my present wants, that thereby I may attaine unto some better estate again.’ He then went on to describe the tract as a ‘mite of my poore labours’ bestowed upon the reader ‘with as tender ­affection as ever Nurse or mother gave their brests to their children, or the Pellican suckt the bloud from her brest to feed and cherish her yong.’103 Here the relation between Andrewes and his readers is being presented not as any sort of commercial transaction but rather as a mutually sustaining exercise in Christian charity. In Andrewes Repentance, Andrewes continued to claim that he wrote firstly and primarily for his own private use and edification; it was only popular demand – the fact that ‘my former bookes are so vendible, and so well liking unto the children of God, that in short time there have beene divers impressions printed’ – that had prompted him to ‘set forth another booke,’ initially written only for himself, before the reading public.104 Even now that he was well into his career as a professional writer, a ‘market place theologian’ indeed, the production of a new title was not to be construed as a new commodity to be sold on the open market, but rather as another entirely selfless and beneficent move from the private realm of personal devotion to the public realm of print.105



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Conclusion What the analysis of Andrewes’s pamphlets conducted above makes clear is that, at least in the period before 1640, during the 1610s, 1620s and 1630s when they were first produced and consumed, the little books made by John Andrewes are not best seen as, in Professor Green’s phrase, simply ‘rivals’ to ‘mainstream Protestant teaching’ nor, in Dr Watt’s terms, as containing only a ‘post-­reformation,’ still less the incipiently ‘semi-­pelagian,’ style of piety discerned by both Ian Green and Bernard Capp106 in much of the cheap religious print of this and the succeeding period. Rather Andrewes was peddling a decidedly protestant, indeed a positively reformed, if not a distinctly puritan, style of piety. These points emerge all the more clearly if we compare for a moment Andrewes’s prayers, and their attendant implications of a certain instrumental efficacy, with some of the prayers discussed by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars. Let us take as an example the ‘fifteen oes of St Bridget.’ Analysing their spiritual and theological substance, Duffy gives these prayers an extremely enthusiastic review; on his account, they represent an ‘unrivalled epitome of late medieval English religion at its most symbolically resonant. Despite their immense popularity these are learned prayers, with roots in patristic and early medieval theology as well as in the writings of Rolle and the affective tradition.’ This Duffy claims ‘is a complex prayer, drawing on scriptural, patristic and liturgical sources as well as the Bonaventurian tradition of affective meditation.’ However, as Duffy notes, such prayers almost always came into the hands of the laity with certain legends and indulgences attached. That belonging to the fifteen Oes promised that if recited each day for a whole year they would effect the release from purgatory of fifteen of the devotee’s kinsmen and would keep fifteen of his or her living kin in grace. Those who recited the prayers would be granted ‘bitter contrition of alle his olde synnes’ and fifteen days before their death ‘schall see myne holy body and it receive … And I shall yeve him drynk of myn blood that he shall never thirst. And I shall put before him the sygne of my victoryous passoun … and before his death I shall come with my dere Moder and take his soul and lede it into everlasting joye … and whatsoever he ask rightfully of me or of my Moder it schal not be denyed.’ Every recitation would bring forty days of pardon, those due to die would have their lives lengthened, those in danger of damnation would have their sentence commuted to purgatory, those in danger of the worst sins of purgatory would endure only the pains of this world, and have heaven at last … Though the legend was usually drastically pruned in the printed Horae, the promise of delivery to the souls of fifteen kindred in purgatory was a constant, as was the promise to grant any request made of God ‘yf it be to the salvacyon of your soule.’107

Those who argue for major continuities between pre-­and post-­Reformation English religion need to ponder the extraordinary differences between even the most instrumental readings of Andrewes’s prayers and the structure and content of promises like these. Simply gone, of course, is purgatory and any notion of intercession for the dead;

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what Duffy calls the ‘simple instrumental effectiveness in releasing the souls of the devotee’s kinsfolk from the pains of Purgatory,’ wherein he locates much of the prayer’s attraction for the laity. Also gone is any promise of this worldly benefit – prolongation of life, for instance – or of the immediate presence to the praying subject, in visions or visitations, of Christ or the Virgin. All that is left is the gift to the praying Christian of repentance or, as the ‘Fifteen Oes’ itself has it, of ‘bitter contrition of all his old sins’ and the promise of divine assent to prayers, made on the basis of that contrition, ‘to the salvation of your soul.’ Far from being, as Duffy argues, ‘an anodyne and harmless formula which commits the divine guarantor to nothing,’ certainly in the mental and emotional universe sculpted by Andrewes’s prayers, such expectations tied the efficacy of prayer and the exercise of divine mercy to the sincerity of the believer’s repentance and to the genuineness of his or her faith, an insight which could, and, in the hands of a practised puritan doctor of the soul, would, have led the believer into an intense and (in this life) never-ending process of introspection and spiritual striving; that is to say, into repentance seen as a process, or as Andrewes put it ‘a work,’ rather than as a stable state, ‘a quality or habit,’ and still less as a choice or single or simple act of the human will. It was, of course, precisely to the extent that they contained phrases and promises that appeared to simplify, if not entirely to foreshorten, such a prospect and such a process that Andrewes’s works might be taken to have been selling the puritan message short. But, as we have seen, Andrewes’s prayers did not simply or even mainly do that, they merely contained elements that might enable, or perhaps even encourage, certain readers to do that with them. We are left, then, with a post-­Reformation version of the paradox with which Duffy concludes his discussion of the fifteen Oes, when he writes that ‘there is no easy resolution of this contradiction between devout interiority of devotion on the one hand, and an apparently crudely mechanical view of the power of “good words” on the other. Indeed, as we shall see, that paradox lies close to the heart of late medieval English religion.’ Something similar might be said, if not of post-­Reformation English hot protestant piety tout court, then certainly of the down-­market version thereof being pushed by the cheap pamphlets penned by John Andrewes. For Andrewes’s works have emerged from the preceding analysis as examples of an English Calvinist piety bowdlerized and modified to meet the demands of the popular market. The language and organizing concerns of Andrewes’s works were clearly designed to both create and meet a demand for improving religious books, at the bottom end of the market; a demand that fed off and was informed by some of the dominant concerns and tropes of puritan practical divinity. In the Stripping of the Altars Duffy uses the origins of prayers like the fifteen Oes in the most respectable, learned and orthodox of circles and sources to, as it were, lift their users into the world of Richard Rolle and out of the purely instrumental, calculating and rather materialist modes of thought and feeling suggested by the legends and indulgences attached to the prayers when they circulated in both manuscript and print. In the face of decades of easy historiographical generalization about the ‘superstition’ and

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corruption of late medieval religion – generalizations themselves based on centuries of protestant polemic and caricature – this is an understandable and, in many ways, an entirely salutary corrective impulse. However, rather than using such materials to deny any separation between the ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ elements in what Duffy presents as an entirely unified, integrated, and thoroughly Christian – in his lexicon an unequivocally approving term – ‘traditional religion,’ might we not instead see such texts playing a similar role to that played by Andrewes’s penny godlinesses, over a hundred years later? That is to say, might we not see them as (printed) texts, sold for profit on the open market, with the potential, on the one hand, to connect relatively humble lay persons with some of the central insights of the orthodox, indeed even of the avant garde, piety of the day, and, on the other, to render a somewhat debased version of that piety almost entirely amenable to the immediate demands and assumptions of a lay audience anxious to secure salvation through the purchase and repetition of the right forms of words and belief?108 Mixed and miscegenated forms, both the primers discussed by Duffy and the ‘penny godlinesses’ authored by Andrewes allowed travel in both directions, across what (to borrow a conceit from Professor Green) we might conceive of as an always shifting and contested boundary between the highest forms of what passed for the official religion of the day and the religious practice and beliefs of at least some of ‘the people.’ Thus, in so far as there were continuities between Andrewes’s tracts and pre-­ Reformation or late medieval forms of cheap religious print, these might be taken to be products of very similar market and generic pressures; of the same, or a very similar, demand for simple, straightforward, easily assimilated and repeated answers to the pressing question of how to be saved. Thus it was that the pamphlet form, a particular kind of cheap printed text – a form that bears so much resemblance to similarly cheap medical texts – helped to reduce the complexity of reformed doctrine and puritan practical divinity to simplistic forms and formulas that the less attentive or sophisticated of early modern readers (and indeed of modern historians) might well mistake for the sort of semi-­pelagian superstition decried by Professor Green. Therein (presumably) lay a good deal of their saleability, but the words on the page, what was being actually purchased, and perhaps sometimes even read and inwardly digested, was by no means so reductive or so simple. In the light of Duffy’s account of ‘the devotions of the [printed] primers’109 of late medieval England, might we not imagine puritan divinity enjoying something of the same sort of close (albeit also tense, distanced, and potentially adversarial) relationship to ‘popular religion’ in post-­Reformation England that Duffy shows that the sophisticated religious sensibilities encapsulated in, say, the ‘fifteen oes’ enjoyed with the religion of the laity before the Reformation? Ultimately it must remain unclear whether Andrewes’s works are best characterized as the appropriation of popular attitudes, and the exploitation of popular anxieties and concerns, in order to further the evangelical purposes of the reformed ministry, or as the assimilation of many of the defining concerns, the key concepts and terms, of the godly, to the recalcitrant works of righteousness of the people and the ­commercial

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demands of the popular press. But, just like the choice between a sincere and a manipulative, a genuinely religious and a merely commercial, John Andrewes, these, too, are surely false choices. Andrewes and his works were doing all of the above and it is precisely because of that that they represent such telling evidence, firstly, for the pervasive social reach, and cultural and emotional effect, of puritan religion in earlyseventeenth-­century England and, secondly, for the continuing vitality, during the decades before the civil war, of the dynamic, dialogic, alternately adversarial and synergistic, relationship between Protestantism and cheap print, between the religion of ‘the godly’ and, if not the religion of ‘the people’ tout court, then certainly that portion of the people who bought or read the cheap tracts written and sold by John Andrewes. Notes 1 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 126. 2 Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Christopher Haigh, English Reformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 3 On this see my article ‘Religion and cheap print’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 217–241. 4 Peter Lake, ‘Deeds against nature: cheap print, Protestantism and murder in early seventeenth century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Also see ‘Popular form, puritan content? Two puritan appropriations of the murder pamphlet from mid-­ seventeenth-century London’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Both these articles were included, in considerably expanded form, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), section I. 5 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 451, 437–438. 7 Ibid., p. xii. 8 Ibid., pp. 502, 470–472. 9 Watt, Cheap Print, chapter 8, esp. pp. 306–311. 10 John Andrewes, Andrewes Humble Petition unto Almighty God Declaring His Repentance (London: Printed for John Wright, 1623; STC 589), sig. A4r, ‘The author to the reader.’ Andrewes identifies himself as ‘minister and preacher of the word of God at Barrick Basset in the County of Wiltes’ on the title page of his Christ His Crosse (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1614; STC 594). 11 M. H. Curtis, ‘The alienated intellectuals of early Stuart England’, Past and Present, 23

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(1962), 25–43; Ian Green, ‘Career prospects and clerical conformity in the early Stuart Church’, Past and Present, 90, (1981), 71–115; Peter Lake, ‘Richard Kilby: a study in personal and professional failure’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay (Studies in Church History 26) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 221–235. 12 Green, Print and Protestantism, pp. 479–487. 13 John Andrewes, A Celestiall Looking-­glasse to Behold the Beauty of Heaven (London: Nicholas Okes, 1621; STC 592), epistle dedicatory. 14 Andrewes Resolution to Returne unto God by Repentance (London: Nicholas Okes, 1621; STC 590), dedicatory epistle. 15 Andrewes Repentance, Sounding Alarum to Returne from His Sins unto Almightie God (London: John Wright, 1631; STC 589.5), ‘To the Christian reader.’ 16 The dedication ‘To the high and mighty King of Kings, Prince of Peace, Conqueror of death, Hell and Sinne; the great Judge of the world, and Bishop of my soule, Christ Jesu, my saviour’ appears in Andrewes Humble Petition, sig. A2r. 17 Andrewes Humble Petition, sig. A1v. 18 A Celestiall Looking-­glasse, ‘The Author to the Reader’ (sig. A1v). 19 As so often, the phrase was coined by Patrick Collinson; see his The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 37. Sadly, both the phrase and the assumptions behind it have since become all but ubiquitous. 20 John Andrewes, A Soveraigne Salve to Cure a Sicke Soule Infected with the Poyson of Sinne (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, 1624; STC 595.4), title page and ‘The author to the reader’, sigs A2r and A1v. 21 John Andrewes, A Subpaena from the High Imperiall Court of Heaven (London: By J. White, 1618; STC 595.7), sigs A2r–A5v. 22 Andrewes, A Soveraigne Salve, sig. A3r–v. 23 Ibid., sig. A6r. 24 Andrewes Caveat to Win Sinners (London: Printed for John Wright, 1631; STC 588), p. 6 (sig. A4v). 25 For Satan see, for instance, Andrewes Repentance, sigs A3v, A4v–A5r; The Converted Mans New Birth; describing the direct way to go to heaven: wherein all men may clearely see, whether they shall be saved or damned (London: Printed by N. O. and J. N., 1629; STC 595), pp. 16–23 (sigs A12v–B4r); for the quoted passage see A Soveraigne Salve, sig. A6v. 26 The Converted Mans New Birth, pp. 17–18 (sig. B1r–v). 27 Andrewes Resolution, p. 43 (sig. C2r). 28 A Golden Trumpet Sounding Alarum to Judgement (London, 1641; Wing A3123), sig. A4v. 29 The Converted Mans New Birth, pp. 2–5 (sigs A5v–A7r). 30 Andrewes Repentance, sig. A5r. Also see The Converted Mans New Birth, p. 29 (sig. B7r). 31 A Subpaena, sig. B2v–B4r. 32 A Celestiall Looking-­glasse, pp. 8–9, 13, 18, 30 (sigs A12v–B1r, B3r, B5v, B12v). 33 A Golden Trumpet, sigs B1v–B3v; also see Andrewes Caveat, pp. 14–15 (sigs A8v–B1r). 34 Cf. Andrewes Caveat, p. 17 (sig. B2r): ‘To conclude, seeing God, is the infinite good that is offended: Sinne the infinite evill that is committed, & this worse thing that should come unto us, the infinite punishment of hell prepared for all those that continue in their sinnes without repentance: Let us therefore learn our Saviours Caveat, to forsake our sins, that this worse thing may not come.’

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35 Andrewes Resolution, pp. 23–24 (sig. B4r–v). 36 Andrewes Caveat, p. 10 (sig. A6v). 37 Andrewes Repentance, sig. A8r–v. 38 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 254–256, for its discussion of the legend or indulgence attached to the prayer of ‘the fifteen oes of St Bridget.’ For remissions attached to other prayers and masses see chapter 8, ‘Charms, pardons, and promises: lay piety and “superstition” in the primers,’ the quotation at p. 290. 39 Andrewes Golden Chaine to Linke the Penitent Sinner unto Almighty God (London: Printed for John Wright, 1645; Wing A3122), title page and the epistle ‘candido lectori, lege, perlege, relege’, sig. [A3]r, emphasis mine. 40 ‘we live in the last age’: A Golden Trumpet, sig. B4r, and ibid., sigs A5v–A7r. 41 Ibid., sig. A3v. 42 Andrewes Resolution, pp. 40–41 (sig B12v–C1r); compare A Sovereign Salve, sig. B2r. 43 A Celestiall Looking-­glasse, pp. 2–3, 11–12 (sigs A9v–A10r, B2r–v). 44 Andrewes Repentance, sig. B2r. 45 William Perkins, A Grain of Mustard Seed, in Ian Breward (ed.), The Works of William Perkins (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1969), pp. 391, 402. 46 Perkins, A Grain of Mustard Seed, in Breward (ed.), Works, pp. 403, 397. 47 Perkins, A Golden Chain, in Breward (ed.), Works, pp. 244–245. 48 Perkins, A Grain of Mustard Seed, in Breward (ed.), Works, pp. 399–400. 49 For such a list see, for instance, A Celestiall Looking-­glasse, sigs B12r–C1v, etc. 50 Andrewes Resolution, pp. 13–14, 3 (sigs A11r–v, A6r). 51 Ibid., pp. 9–10 (sig. A9r–v). 52 Ibid., p. 14 (sig. A11v). 53 Ibid., pp. 36–37 (sigs B10v–B11r). 54 Andrewes Caveat, p. 19 (sig. B3r). 55 Andrewes Resolution, pp. 15–16 (sig. A12r–v). 56 Ibid., pp. 32–35 (sigs B8v–B10r). 57 Perkins, Golden Chain or Description of Theology, in Breward (ed.), Works, p. 237. 58 Andrewes Golden Chaine, sig. A4v. 59 Ibid., sigs A5v–A6r. 60 Ibid., sig. A7r–v. 61 Ibid., sigs A6v–A7r. 62 Ibid., sig. A8r; Andrewes Resolution, p. 28 (sig. B6v). 63 Andrewes Golden Chaine, sig. B1r. 64 Ibid., sig. A6r–v. 65 A Soveraigne Salve, sig. A4r–v. 66 Andrewes Golden Chaine, sigs A5v–A6r. 67 Ibid., sig. A7r–v. 68 Perkins, Golden Chain, in Breward (ed.), Works, p. 213. 69 Andrewes Golden Chaine, sigs A8r–B1r. My italics. 70 In putting a rather different gloss on these materials, Professor Green quotes the peroration to the Golden Trumpet of 1641: ‘O let us speedily repent that we may be unblameable before the judge at that general day of judgement; and be clothed with the white robes of righteousness.’ This was a form of words that was anything but an exception

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in Andrewes’s oeuvre. (For a parallel passage see, for instance, Andrewes Humble Petition, sigs A8v–9r.) But, then, in an arresting display of the art of selective quotation, Green omits the last words of the tract which immediately follow on from the lines he quotes. (Compare Green, Print and Protestantism, p. 482.) There Andrewes claims that such repentance will allow us to ‘stand in the number of those unto whom Christ shall say “Come ye blessed children of my father inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world”. This God grant (without whose help all the labour of man is vain) even for his dear son Christ Jesus his sake, our redeemer and only savior, to whom, with the father and the holy ghost, be all honour, glory, praise, power and dominion, both now and for evermore’ (A Golden Trumpet, sig. B4v). In other words, the theme of repentance, and the urgent evangelical appeals to repent now before all is lost, which, of course, form the central matter of all of Andrewes’s tracts, is here returned to the same Christocentric, solifidian and (loosely) predestinarian contexts in which it had been placed in virtually all of Andrewes’s other works. In that respect, there is no real difference between A Golden Trumpet of 1641 and the considerably longer, altogether more doctrinally explicit and self-­consciously ‘orthodox,’ Andrewes Resolution of 1621. 71 A Soveraigne Salve, sigs A7v–A8v. 72 Perkins, A Faithful and Plain Exposition upon Zephaniah, in Breward (ed.), Works, p. 286. 73 Andrewes Caveat, p. 2 (sig. A2v). 74 For the intense hatred of all sins see Andrewes Repentance, sig. A7v. 75 Andrewes Resolution, pp. 11–12 (sig. A10r–v). 76 Ibid., p. 47 (sig. C4r) and Andrewes repentance, sig. B3v. 77 Perkins, A Grain of Mustard Seed, in Breward (ed.), Works, p. 404. 78 For the role of a true repentance in the process of making your election sure see The Converted Mans New Birth, pp. 29–33 (sigs B7r–B9r). 79 Ibid., pp. 29–31 (sigs B7r–B8r). 80 Ibid., p. 31 (sig. B8r). 81 Andrewes Caveat, pp. 20–1 (sigs. B3v–B4r), my italics. 82 The Converted Mans New Birth, p. 33 (sig. B9r). 83 Breward (ed.) Works, p. 95; Perkins, A Grain of Mustard Seed, in Breward (ed.), Works, p. 401. 84 For an account of some of the organizing antinomies and paradoxes within puritan practical divinity see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chapter 7. 85 The Converted Mans New Birth, title page. 86 Andrewes Repentance, title page. 87 The Converted Mans New Birth, title page. 88 Andrewes Repentance, title page. 89 Andrewes Golden Chaine, title page. 90 I owe these formulations to András Kiséry. 91 See for instance, William Perkins, Death’s Knell, or the Sick Man’s Passing Bell (London, 1628), sigs A4r–v, A8r, B1r. 92 Green, Print and Protestantism, pp. 479–480. 93 See for instance, Andrewes Resolution and A Golden Trumpet, both ‘dedicated and directed,’ on their title pages, ‘to all the elect children of God which truly repent.’

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94 Green, Print and Protestantism, pp. 482–483. 95 John Andrewes, The Brazen Serpent: or the Copie of a Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse, Decemb. 31. 1620 (London, 1621; STC 591), sig. A3r, ‘To the reader.’ 96 The Converted Mans New Birth, sig. A2r–v, ‘To the reader.’ 97 A Golden Trumpet, sig. A5r. 98 Christ His Crosse, sig. A4r–v. 99 Andrewes Repentance, sig. A2r. 100 Ibid., sigs B3v–B4r. 101 A Soveraigne Salve, sig. B4r. 102 The Converted Mans New Birth, p. 37 (sig. B11r), ‘A Right, Zealous, and Godly Prayer taken out of the pure fountaine of holy Scripture; Very necessary for all repentant sinners to use daily vppon their knees, unto almighty God.’ 103 Andrewes Humble Petition, sig. A4r–v. 104 Andrewes Repentance, sig. A2r, ‘To the Christian reader.’ 105 At least in Andrewes’s case (if not more generally), all of this renders the extraordinary confidence with which Professor Green claims to be able to identify ‘genuinely sincere authors’ from those tainted with commerce or the profit-­motive decidedly problematic. For this attempt see Green, Print and Protestantism, p. 499. 106 Bernard Capp, ‘Popular literature’, in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 220–221; Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 149. 107 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 248–256, quotations at pp. 250, 252, 254–255. 108 Duffy refers, somewhat uncharitably, to such people as ‘a rabble of indulgence hunters spawned by cheap printing, with cruder palates and courser perceptions, who thumbed through their primers in search of marvels and quantifiable benefits, temporal as much as spiritual.’ Such consumers were entirely different from readers ‘who sought the devout and recollected interiority which devotions like the “Fifteen Oes” seemed to demand.’ Rather than deal in such stark binaries – which surely represent a moralized re-­inscription of the sociologically derived (and therefore supposedly value-­neutral) division between ‘the elite’ and ‘the popular,’ a dichotomy that Duffy affects to be rejecting – we might imagine the texts analysed by Duffy operating just like those later written and sold by John Andrewes; that is to say, as commodities which took much of their power, and derived much of their saleability, from their status as sites, indeed as agents, of cultural mediation. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 292. 109 The title of chapter 7 of Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars.

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How to construct a poem: Descartes, Sidney Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Shankar Raman

This chapter explores the intimate bonds in early modern Europe between the premier science of forms, geometry, and the premier art of forms, poetry. Their connection becomes especially evident in how these seemingly disparate (at least for us) domains re-­envisage the relationship of form to content, inventing shapes to fit their specific concerns. I seek here to identify parallels that bespeak a broad, shared cultural response across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to an inherited Greek tradition, strongly marked by Aristotelian thought, in which the relation between what Sir Philip Sidney would call ‘manner’ and ‘matter’ played a fundamental role. My argument brings René Descartes and Sidney together as two key figures whose contributions to the theory and practice of mathematics and poetry respectively reveal vividly both the nature of this response and its implications for early modern selves and the worlds they sought to make. Since the breadth of poetry’s social and cultural aspirations may seem more immediately apparent than that of mathematics, let me begin with bolstering the case for the latter. The opening of Descartes’s 1637 Discourse on Method outlines an emerging and influential conception of what it means to be rational: Common sense [le bons sens] is the most equitably divided thing [la mieux partagée] in the world, for everyone believes he is so well provided with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else usually do not want more of it than they have. It is not likely that everyone is mistaken in this matter; rather, this shows that the power to judge correctly and to distinguish the true from the false – which is, strictly speaking, what we mean by common sense or reason [la raison] – is naturally equal [égale] in all men. Hence the diversity of our opinions arises, not because some of us are more reasonable [raisonnables] than others, but only because we direct our thoughts along different paths, and consider different things. For it is not enough to have a good mind [l’esprit bon]; the principal thing is to apply it correctly [bien].1

A few features evident in these remarks are worth noting: first, the identification of reason with common or good sense and reasonableness; second, the postulate of a rational capacity presumed to be equally distributed, differences being ascribed on the basis of how this capacity is applied; and, finally, the characterization of rational capacity as power of good judgement, one able to distinguish the true from the

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false – indeed, as we shall see, Descartes will seek to re-­articulate the very criteria for truth and intelligibility. For our purposes it is necessary to recall that the Discourse was originally a prefatory text to three scientific treatises. While usually published (and discussed) today as a freestanding work, it first appeared with the Optics [La Dioptrique], the Meteorology [Les Méteores] and the Geometry [La Géométrie]. Its overarching claims about the right way to use one’s reason thus envelop these more specific studies. For Descartes’s mathematical exposition in particular, the making of geometrical space is closely allied with producing the forms of rationality implied by the passage cited above. And this coupling in turn demands re-­forming selves in ways that make them adequate to these new demands. This dual emphasis takes us beyond the more narrowly technical achievements of early modern mathematics, underlining the extent to which a now recognizably modern scientific thinking was bound up from the very outset with ethical considerations in Aristotle’s sense of the word, that is, with how human beings act in the world or behave towards others and themselves. Descartes’s Geometry was never only a signal achievement in the history of mathematics – though it was this too. Its specifically mathematical dimensions are intertwined with the ethical question of how a geometer ought to do geometry, how he should comport himself as mathematician towards the nature of the mathematical objects that are his concern. The connections between how one does mathematics and the making of things and selves through mathematics become yet broader when we consider the extent to which such reformation was understood through the (renovated) Aristotelian lens of poesis or making, a term that took on renewed significance in a range of early modern intellectual domains, including literature. An apt literary analogue may be found in a seminal (for the English context at least) sixteenth-­century work of literary criticism, in which the assertion of the poet as maker takes centre stage: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (or An Apology for Poetry). In a moment that has not drawn much commentary,2 Sidney defends comedy’s predilection to imitate ‘the common errors of our life’ by drawing a parallel with mathematics: Now, as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right, and in arithmetic, the odd as well as the even: so in the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue. This doth comedy handle so in our private and domestical matters, as with hearing it, we get, as it were, an experience [of] what is to be looked for.3

Sidney posits a curious equivalence between knowing obliqueness or oddness in mathematics and the poetic creation of images of evil: just as we need to understand the odd to perceive the even, the oblique to see the straight (or, as his resonant pun has it, ‘the right’), so to do the ‘actions of our life’ demand poetic images of evil if virtue is to be visible. But these images do not simply reflect the external world, for the Defence amplifies throughout what is already an undercurrent in the Aristotelian notion of mimesis: that

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imitation is itself a generative process, a making. When Sidney defines Aristotlean mimesis as ‘a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth: to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture’ (217), each additional term in this concatenation of definitions enlarges the ambit: from re-­presenting of what is already there, to making something ‘against’ what is there, to drawing out a new figural reality. The two senses of mimetic production remain in tension in the Defence: on the one hand, the poet as a ‘maker,’ as in the famous early assertion that the poet ‘disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [to nature], lifteth up with vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature in making things better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew, forms such as never were in nature’ (216); and, on the other hand, the poet as mere ‘imitator’ who ‘counterfeit[s] only such faces as are set before’ him (218), and ‘deliver[s] to mankind’ only that which has ‘the works of nature for his principal object’ (215–216).4 That Sidney should educe mathematical analogies in discussing how comedy functions to produce both knowledge and experience of the moral is by no means accidental, given the sustained interest in geometry documented in the poet’s correspondence with his friend and preceptor Hubert Languet as well as with his brother Robert.5 The implications of ‘making’ or poesis teased out by Sidney spill over in the early modern period to the kind of knowledge that comes to characterize mathematics, whereby knowing its ‘truths’ becomes not simply a matter of discovering or imitating what is already there but increasingly that of producing those truths. David Lachterman’s assertion about modernity in The Ethics of Geometry is worth stressing here: modernity’s ‘thinly-­disguised “secret,”’ he says, is ‘the willed or willful coincidence of human making with truth or intelligibility.’6 Such an attitude is central to Cartesian geometry, contributing signally to the alteration in how mathematics was practised and understood in the early modern period. Conversely, the emerging mathematical attitude to which Descartes gives especially clear expression may already be glimpsed in the theory and practice of poetry espoused by Sidney. The implication of these claims is not, of course, that Sidney was a Descartes avant la lettre. Rather, I suggest that the commonalities and intersections in their approaches to their respective métiers reveal the changing contours of a conceptual terrain shared by mathematics and poetry before the two cultures. The intellectual currents these two practitioners so capably navigated had not yet been entirely divided. Their own contributions not only reveal the prevailing pressures of the tides but signal distinctively new destinations, mathematical and poetic, that reflect one another. Two ways of completing the square: al-­Khwarizmi and Descartes To flesh out the renewed importance of poesis or making to the geometrical project, I would like to compare two approaches to what is essentially the same problem: that of solving a quadratic equation by ‘completing the square’ (described below). The first derives from a foundational Arabic mathematical treatise that builds on

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Euclidean principles, The Algebra of Al-­Khowarizmi. Written by the great ninth-­ century Arab mathematician Mohammed ibn Musa al-­Khwarizmi, the work became available in the European world through its twelfth-­century Latin translation by Robert of Chester. (Complicating this chain of transmission further, I will cite a twentieth-­century translation of the Latin text.)7 Descartes’s 1637 Géométrie adopts a very different approach, one that has been credited with inspiring the modern mathematical domain of analytic geometry.8 Both works proffer an algebraic problem set alongside its geometrical rendition, and I will be considering here the manner in which each text achieves its solution as well as the relationship it posits between algebra and geometry. I pick these two examples precisely because what we might call their ‘truth value’ is the same. Descartes’s discussion of quadratic equations is not distinguished from al-­Khwarizmi’s by the nature of the problem and nor does his solution really mark a technical advance over what his ancient and medieval predecessors had achieved. What is new in the Géométrie’s approach is how it represents the problem. In Lachterman’s words, at issue is ‘the source of the intelligibility of the figure (or statement)’ as such. Thus, the crucial distinction concerns the mode of knowing, which in turn ‘entails a difference in the mode of being’ of what may otherwise seem identical mathematical insights.9 In the fourth chapter of his treatise, al-­Khwarizmi proposes finding the numerical value of a ‘root,’ that is, of an unknown quantity, when ‘squares [of that root] and roots are equal to numbers.’ The general case is represented through a specific instance. ‘The question therefore in this type of equation,’ he says, ‘is as follows: what is the square which combined with ten of its roots will give a sum total of 39’ (71). It is easier for us to understand al-­Khwarizmi’s modus operandi if we translate his verbal description into modern algebraic notation. But I should emphasize that to do so is already to distort the text, since one of its distinctive features is precisely that the problem is stated in prose, eschewing mathematical formalization. Throughout, problems and solutions are posed in everyday language and use determinate numbers rather than algebraic symbols. These features reflect al-­Khwarizmi’s ontological presuppositions: mathematical objects, such as numbers or geometrical shapes, are in an important sense real objects; their existence is of the same order as ours. Thus, for example, numbers are always positive. There is no conception here of such a thing as a negative number – to be a thing is, after all, to have a positive existence. At any rate, with this caveat in mind, let us nonetheless translate al-­Khwarizmi’s narrative into symbolic notation. If we represent our ‘root’ or unknown by z, we are being asked to uncover its numerical value, given the following equation:

(1)

In order to do so, al-­Khwarizmi tells the reader how to complete the square. And this is one way we might do it today. Consider the square of (z 1 5), which we arrive at by multiplying the expression by itself.



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(2) Now, from the original equation (1), we know that Consequently, must equal 39 1 25, that is, 64. In short, by adding 25 to each side of the original equation we can ‘complete the square’ to get a numerical value for the expression in (2) above. So, if , then

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(3)

If we now take the square root of each side of this equation, we get

(4)

and subtracting 5 from each side of this equation yields z 5 3, producing a determinate value for the ‘root’ z. As we shall shortly see, this logic can be applied in virtually the same manner to the problem that Descartes’s Geometry will pose. But for the moment, let us linger with al-­Khwarizmi. Notably, our Arab mathematician does not seek to explain algebraically – as I have done above – why completing the square yields the correct result. Instead, the statement of the problem is followed immediately by a description of procedure: The manner of solving this type of equation is to take one-­half of the roots just mentioned. Now the roots in the problem before us are 10. Therefore take 5, which multiplied by itself gives 25, an amount which you add to 39, giving 64. Having taken then the square root of this, which is 8, subtract from it half of the roots, leaving 3. The number three therefore represents one root of this square, which itself, of course, is 9. (73)

What al-­Khwarizmi provides is a step-­by-­step route to the desired solution – it is fitting, then, that the word algorithm derives from his name. As his many examples later in the book suggest, such instructions make the mathematical ‘truth’ operational by allowing it to be applied to mercantile transactions, the dividing of estates, and so on. However, explanatory force does not lie in algebra itself. The truly mathematical domain is not that of application but that of demonstration. That privilege belongs to geometry alone. Corresponding to each of Al-­Khwarizmi’s algorithms is a set of geometrical diagrams aimed at proving the validity of the algebraic procedure – and, once legitimated thus, the method is freed as a practical technique useful for everyday life. Thus it is that the treatise soon recognizes that it has ‘said enough … so far as numbers are concerned’ about different types of quadratic equations, and, in the interests of verification, signals the turn to geometry: ‘Now, however, it is necessary that we should demonstrate geometrically the truth of the same problems which we have explained in numbers’ (77). The ‘proof’ of the equation discussed above is ingenious, and testifies to the authoritative power of Euclidean geometry as an enduring model for establishing

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mathematical truth.10 To this end, al-­Khwarizmi first seeks to represent the terms on the left-­ hand side of original equation – that is, – spatially. The term can simply be visualized as the area of square with side z, as in the upper part of Figure 10.1. To add to this square an area corresponding to 10z, al-­Khwarizmi attaches four rectangles, each of which takes one side of the square as its longer side and one-­fourth of ten as its shorter (see the lower part of Figure 10.1). That is, each constructed rectangle has an area of 2.5*z, and the four taken together yield the requisite term 10z of the original equation. The resulting figure 10.1 (lower) thus represents geometrically, and its total area is 39, in accordance with the original equation. Finally, we simply complete the square of figure 10.1 (lower), by filling in the four small squares at each corner (see Figure 10.2). The side of each of these squares is the same as that of the rectangle to which it is adjoined, namely, 2.5. Consequently, the area of each small square is 6.25, and the combined area of all four is 25. Recalling that the area corresponding to – represented by the diagram in Figure 10.1 (lower) – is 39, the area of the completed square in Figure 10.2 must be 39 1 25, that is, 64, which means in turn that the completed square has a side of 8. A quick look at Figure 10.2 shows that this side comprises the side of the original square of Figure 10.1 (upper) plus two of the sides of the small squares used to complete Figure 10.1 (lower), that is to say, the completed square has a side whose length is z 1 5. Therefore we can see that is z 1 5 5 8, and it follows that z 5 3. Al-­Khwarizmi’s figure is not particularly complicated in its execution. Nonetheless, it is worth dwelling briefly here on the complex status of such diagrams. As commentators have noted, mathematical drawings are prey in the Platonic tradition to a more general suspicion regarding images. Although mathematicians ‘make use of the visible forms and talk about them,’ says Socrates in The Republic, they are not thinking of them but of those things of which they are a likeness, pursuing their inquiry for the sake of the square as such and the diagonal as such, and not for the sake of the image of it which they draw … The very things that they mould and draw, which have shadows and images of themselves in water, are treated in their turn as only images, but they really seek to behold those realities that can be seen only by the mind. (510d–511a)11

According to Reviel Netz, by using particular visual instantiations to illustrate general mathematical propositions, Greek diagrams seek to convey the structure or topology rather than the visual appearance of the proposition under investigation.12 Consequently, the diagram has minatory function; it seeks to block the viewer’s treating the image as an accurate visual rendition of the mathematical configuration, directing focus away from sense perception and towards the intelligible. After all, geometry is, in Socrates’ words, ‘the knowledge of that which always is, and not of a something which at some time comes into being and passes away’13 (527b). What matters, then, if I may put it thus, is not the visible matter of the image but the ideal mathematical object, which the diagram merely resembles.

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Figure 10.1  Johann Scheybl’s 1550 transcription of Robert of Chester’s Algebra, Columbia MS X512 Sch 2 fol. 82. Upper left margin: Square of side z, with area z2. Lower left margin: Constructed figure representing z2 1 10z (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

The matters of writing

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Figure 10.2  The completed square with side z 1 5. From the partial translation of al-­ Khwarizmi’s Algebra by Gerard of Cremona in Regiomontanus’ codex Flores arithmeticae, MS Plimpton 188, fol. 74v (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Plimpton Collection)

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In the case of al-­Khwarizmi’s Algebra – as for Robert of Chester’s translation and the sixteenth-­century transcriptions based on it – the import of diagrams is slightly but significantly different. Of the two manuscripts of Chester’s translation that Karpinski collates, the Vienna has no figures at all, while the diagrams in the Dresden do not seem to be derived from the Arabic text (which exists as a unique manuscript, MS Hunt 214, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library). Nonetheless, the medieval texts refer throughout either to existing figures or ones that could be drawn (e.g., ‘Sit igitur quadratum a b cuius unumquodque latus unam ostendit radicem,’ that is, ‘Let therefore the square be a b, any one side of which exhibits the root’ (76)). Indeed, the Dresden manuscript – like the later Scheybl and Plimpton manuscripts in Columbia University’s Rare Book library, from which this essay takes its images – includes diagrams that appear to be constructed on the basis of geometrical explanations the text provides. In line with the Greek tradition, such images are likenesses rather than accurate representations – for instance, there is no attempt to draw them to scale – and thus stand as particular visual instantiations of general mathematical truths. However, they do not point beyond themselves to the abstract domain of intelligibility, in the manner that Socrates commends. Instead, implicitly invoking geometry’s privileged status as model of demonstrable truth, the diagrams function as material sites of verification, authenticating the specific algorithmic procedures they accompany. The status of Descartes’s diagrams is, of course, of primary interest to us here. So, keeping this background in mind, let us turn now to his Géométrie, which also begins with a simple quadratic equation. Unlike al-­Khowarizmi, Descartes employs algebraic symbols from the outset, and is in theory indifferent to whether a number is positive or negative. Thus his ontological assumptions, be they in respect to algebra or to geometry, are different from his Arabic predecessor’s. For instance, whereas the latter’s Euclidean geometry is tied to the ontology of three-­dimensional space, Cartesian geometry does not specify the nature of the being of its mathematical objects.14 The same holds true for numbers as well – the symbolic language represents the numbers but without specifying any further what they are. Descartes uses z to symbolize what al-­Khwarizmi calls the ‘root’ of the quadratic equation – that is, the unknown whose value is to be determined. However, rather than using numbers for the known quantities in an equation, Descartes represents these symbolically as well, using a and to designate the quantities corresponding to 10 and 39 in al-­Khwarizmi’s case. These may be thought of, to use a felicitous distinction, as the ‘known unknowns’ in the equation. In other words, while a and also represent variable quantities, their values can be decided upon by the mathematician, and thus they can be treated as if they are numbers whose values are already known. The task at hand, then, is to determine the value of z – the true unknown – in terms of what are taken to be given: a, b2, and ordinary numbers. Descartes proposes to solve

(5)

2

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By subtracting az from each side, we can rewrite the equation in a form comparable to al-­Khwarizmi’s

(6)

2

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Now, we simply proceed in the manner already described earlier. Consider first the square of that is, multiplied by itself:

(7)

But we know from equation 6 that z2 2 az 5 b2. Therefore, completing the square by adding to both sides of equation 6, we get an expression for square of in terms of the given quantities a, and ordinary numbers:

(8)

Finally, taking the square root of each side, we get:

(9)

And this result allows us to express z in terms of the known quantities, yielding

(10)

While I have spelt out the algebraic logic of Descartes’s solution in some detail, he himself skips over this exercise of completing the square, not even deigning to provide the kind of algorithm that al-­Khwarizmi had offered. He will not ‘pause here,’ he tells us, ‘to explain this in greater detail, because I should be depriving you of the pleasure of learning it for yourself, as well as the advantage of cultivating your mind by training yourself in it, which is, in my opinion, the principal advantage we can derive from this science [of algebra]’ (18). This refusal is significant, for it brings into view a qualitative difference fundamental to Descartes’s way of thinking: between such ‘arithmeticians’ who emphasize only formal procedures, focusing on narrowly directed mechanical processes of calculation and proof, and those who employ mathematics properly, doing it the right way. Briefly put, he draws a crucial distinction between merely ­performing mathematical acts and acting mathematically.15 The value of algebraic symbolization lies in its allowing us to see parts of the problem that would disappear were we to rely only on actual numbers. The

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Figure 10.3  Descartes’s construction, from the 1649 Latin edition of the Géométrie (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

r­ epresentational language enables us to follow the connection from one step in a solution process to another, by showing us how something develops and how it depends on what has been given or already established. Without due care, however, algebraic manipulation becomes a mere craft, simply a mode of calculation. Thus, even though symbolization is certainly an important step because it frees calculation from an attachment to specific numbers, it is not enough on its own. For Descartes, algebra’s importance is as much social as it is conceptual: ‘cultivating [the] mind’ by ‘training’ it properly, it helps us act mathematically, and this potentially differentiates us from those who simply perform mathematical acts. But, ultimately, algebra remains too close to the idea of an algorithmic or technical procedure in al-­Khwarizmi’s sense to be able to sustain the philosophical, social, and ethical distinction so important to Descartes. Consequently – and in contrast to al-­Khwarizmi’s celebration of algebra’s power to solve a variety of practical problems – Descartes suppresses the algebraic process entirely. Instead, he immediately seeks to give his original equation 5 a geometrical interpretation and ‘solve’ the problem through an appropriate geometrical construction. But the use and implication of geometry here are very different from what obtains in al-­Khwarizmi’s example, where, as we saw, geometry was the locus of verification. Unlike al-­Khwarizmi, who uses the areas of squares and rectangles, Descartes relies on straight lines, circles and triangles (see Figure 10.3). This is how he describes his geometrical approach to the equation z2 5 az 1 b2: I construct a right[-­angled] triangle NLM in which the side LM is equal to b, the square root of the known quantity and the other side LN is [equal to] [that is,] half the other known quantity which was multiplied by z. Then, prolonging

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MN, the hypotenuse of this triangle, to O, such that NO may be equal to NL, [then] the whole [line] OM is the searched-­for line z. And it is expressed in this manner:

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16

Since LM 5 b and NL 5 Pythagoras’s theorem tells us that the side Thus NM represents the second term in the algebraic solution – see (10) – to the given equation. To represent the unknown z as a line, we have to add to NM a geometrical equivalent to the first term in the algebraic formula for z, that is, Since we have constructed the line NL with the length we need only construct a circle centred on N, with radius NL (see Figure 10.3). This construction ensures that the extension of the NM to touch that circle will be a line whose length corresponds to z in the algebraic solution. In other words, OM represents z and has the desired length of , as in (10). For al-­Khwarizmi, the geometrical construction demonstrated the truth of the algebraic procedure; it showed why that procedure worked. By contrast, Descartes’s constructions show that, given a type of quadratic equation, we can produce its solution geometrically by constructing a right-­angled triangle out of the known coefficients and extending the hypotenuse of that triangle appropriately. Rather than elaborating on the procedure of completing the square, then, Descartes simply supplies the outcome of the algebraic manipulation: the formula of equation 10. But the formula has no significance in and of itself. As Timothy Lenoir puts it, ‘[t]he only object of concern [for Descartes] was the geometric construction, and equations were employed simply as a shorthand way of performing time-­consuming geometrical operations. Equations themselves had no ontological significance. They were only a useful symbolic ­language in which one could store geometrical constructions.’17 The resultant line OM in Descartes’s diagram is the geometrical result that corresponds to the algebraic solution, and the construction reveals how that result can be geometrically generated. In sum, the diagram does not prove the validity of the algebraic formula (or, as in al-­Khwarizmi’s case, of the algebraic process). Rather, the appropriate geometrical constructions – of drawing a triangle, extending the hypotenuse and so on – make real or materialize a knowledge of the unknown. The otherwise opaque algebraic formula is thereby externalized, and the act of construction produces truth as intelligibility by making evident to the geometrician what the solution is. Nor is the knowledge produced by geometry limited as with al-­Khwarizmi to a single concrete example which we then generalize by analogy to similar cases; rather, it underpins the exuberant claim which comes at the end of Descartes’s treatise: of being able to generate (as the formula already implicitly does) the solution to an ­infinite number of related problems: But it is not my intention to write a thick book. Instead, I am trying rather to include much in a few words, as perhaps you will judge that I have done, if you consider that having reduced all the problems of a single class [d’un mesme genre] to a single construction [une mesme construction], I have at the same time given the method of reducing them to an



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infinity of other different problems, and thus solving each of them in an infinity of ways … We have only to follow the same method in order to construct all problems to an infinite degree of complexity. For in terms of mathematical progressions, once we have the first two terms, it is not difficult to find the others. (240)

In a sense, without deciding upon the numerical values for the known unknowns a and b2, we cannot actually carry out the required construction in its full generality. But, even if imagined, the geometrical operations produce for Descartes an intuitive grasp of the general solution represented by the algebraic formula, and bring with it a mastery over the entire class of particular solutions generated by the infinite set of numerical values which can be ascribed to a and b2. Central to Descartes’s endeavour here is the notion that geometrical construction functions as a creative or generative source, infinitely capable of producing truth. In this approach to the quadratic equation we begin to see a close link between constructibility – the geometrical equivalent of poesis – and the existence or objective reality, that is to say, the ‘matter,’ of mathematical concepts. The construction Descartes asks us to perform is a deliberate instrumental or mental operation aimed at producing an individual figure that is accessible to the intuition. This intuition bestows objectivity on the mathematical concept, bringing it in a manner of speaking into existence in a way that would not be possible without the construction.18 For Descartes, all knowledge has to have the clarity and intuitive obviousness that our knowledge of the simplest truths possesses – and such knowledge is not simply there, in the nature of the object, but has to be constructed; it demands the inventiveness of the mind to make the mathematical concept real. It does not suffice to assent to the truth of something; it is necessary above all for that truth to be grasped with an intuitive immediacy. In this sense, Descartes’s geometry shifts the very status of mathematical objects in ways that reflect the tension I have pointed out to above in discussing Sidney’s use of mimesis – briefly, the question of whether poetry (or in this case, geometrical construction) re-­presents or re-­makes the natures and matters to which it relates. Though already present in the Socratic dialogues, this tension can be more directly traced back to the foundational text of Western geometry, Euclid’s Elements. An indication of the ultimately unresolved double perspective emerges in the two ways in which Euclidean propositions conclude: usually, QED [Quod erat demonstrandum or, in the original Greek, hoper edei deixal], but sometimes QEF [Quod erat faciendum or hoper edei poesai]. While Euclid himself does not remark on this distinction, it nonetheless implicitly raises two important questions that are still alive for Descartes: (1) what share should fall to making or poesis in the progressive unfolding of mathematical theorems or problems, and (2) how does the temporality of making bear upon the being of mathematical concepts themselves?19 That construction plays a different role in Euclidean geometry is suggested by the fact that the Elements almost invariably uses the present perfect imperative to describe the constructive operation, so that bisecting a line segment is expressed as ‘let it have

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been cut in two,’ and so on. In other words, rather than giving the reader instructions (as Descartes does above) in how to carry out the operation, the text insists on the impersonality of what is being done. Moreover, the perfect tense marks the relevant construction as already having been executed prior to the reader’s encounter with the proof. As Lachterman puts it, In a Euclidean proposition nothing moves or is moved save our eyes and, perhaps, minds as we follow the transition from step to step … The diagram we see exhibits the antecedently executed operations the outcome of which is now confronting us … The temporality figured in the student’s coming to know the truth of a proposition by moving through its parts is not, or so it seems, inherited from a temporality intrinsic to the [mathematical] ‘beings’ on which Euclidean mathesis is focused.20

While Euclid is notoriously reticent in terms of providing philosophical interpretations that would allow us to pin him down, these aspects of his Elements imply that the movements of graphic construction does not ‘“create” or “realise”’ the nature of a geometrical object. Rather, hewing closer to the Platonic attitude towards diagrams (sketched above), constructions ‘evoke or allow it to make its intelligible presence “felt”.’21 In Descartes’ Géométrie, by contrast, despite a wariness with regard to technical procedure, the constructions nonetheless partake of the making, endowing technical operations with poetic force, and are thus closely allied to the creation of the conceptual matter of mathematics. The Cartesian emphasis on making objects – and thereby ourselves – leads us back to Sidney. The English poet consistently sees the arts and the sciences as fundamentally human endeavours, and therefore necessarily directed towards the same ends: Some an admirable delight drew to music, and some the certainty of demonstration to the mathematics; but all, one and other, having this scope: to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence. (219)

However, knowledge is not valuable for its own sake: it must be directed towards virtuous action. In noting that the ‘mathematician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart’ (219), Sidney distinguishes between the local ends of a particular knowing and the final cause it serves: as with other arts and sciences, mathematics is directed to the ‘highest end of mistress knowledge … which stands … in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-­doing, and not of well-­knowing only’ (219). What he voices, then, is an implicit understanding of mathematics too as a profoundly ethical and moral domain – and it is on this basis that Sidney asserts poetry’s superiority, as the art most apt to combine theory and practice, and by so doing shape human nature – thereby producing judgement not simply as a formal knowing but as ‘lively knowledge’: A perfect picture, I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description which doth never strike,



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pierce nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth … Or of a gorgeous palace, and architector … might well make the hearer to repeat, as it were, by rote all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceit with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge. But the same man, as soon as he might see … the house well in model, should straightaways grow without need of any description to a judicial comprehending of [it]. (221–222).

Geometry too is poetic in that it makes just such an image, and it is the ethical force of such making that connects Descartes and Sidney. As human beings, we are subject of course to inevitable limitations: ‘the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodging, can be capable of’ (219). Nevertheless, mathematics and literature, in their Cartesian and Sidneyan guises respectively, not only posit our shared capacity as human beings to reach toward knowledge but also instantiate poetic modes through which we re-­form ourselves so as to be capable of creating and entering the spaces of social life. Making poetry But what poets (or philosophers) say is not necessarily what poets (or philosophers) do – or, at the very least, their doing is very rarely transparent to their saying. I would like therefore to turn to an instance of Sidney’s practice, to illustrate one way in which he expresses – and indeed complicates – the alliance between geometry and poetry in the very form of his poetic matter. Let us consider the much-­studied opening sonnet of the Astrophil and Stella sequence – a poem especially memorable for its penultimate image of the pregnant poet, ‘helpless in [his] throes, biting [his] truant pen’ (ll. 12–3).22 The poem’s opening sestet famously deploys the classical rhetorical figure of the gradatio or ladder in the step-­by-­step movement through which the narrator imagines Stella logically progressing to a stage where she might be willing to ‘entertain’ (l. 6) his desires. Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain; Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know; Knowledge might pity win, pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain. (ll. 1–6)

We begin by assuming a desired objective: a ‘truth’ evident to the poet – loving – needs to be expressed ‘in verse.’ However, this ‘show[ing]’ does not aim simply to express the self but to produce a pleasure in the other, since the poet further imagines that the addressee will derive an immediate pleasure from the mere production of the poem itself, seeing (sadistically) in the poetic object as such an index of the writer’s pain.

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As line 3 suggests, this pleasure is prior to actually reading the poem: before all else, the verse ‘show[s],’ the visual and performative implication of the verb being amplified in line 6 when the poet seeks the right language ‘to paint’ his ‘woe.’ In short, her act of reading does not automatically follow upon the writing, but has itself to be stimulated by the pleasure she takes in another’s pain, to which the verse will point. Once the affect is set in motion thus, each successive link in the logical chain seems to follows rigorously upon its predecessor,23 each action almost algorithmically generating the next, each proposition entailed by the one that came before: pleasure leads to reading, reading to knowing, knowing to winning pity, pity to obtaining grace. Step by step she climbs the ladder, raising him in turn as she advances. All that remains for the narrator is to execute this poetic programme – in all senses of the word – by turning to what others have already written, rifling through their ‘leaves’ (l. 7) to con their ‘inventions fine’ (l. 6). However, here the projected process breaks down: studious imitation of others not only fails to aid the poet but actively hinders him, their verse stubbornly refusing appropriation: ‘others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way’ (l. 11). The result is a painful stasis, the poetic birth of the voice is forcibly checked, leaving the poet ‘helpless in [his] throes.’ The ‘truant’ pen refuses to be commanded, and agency is conceivable only in the circular form of self-­flagellation, its energy directed entirely inwards. If the circle was, as the long tradition from Aristotle to Kepler maintained, a symbol of perfection, it had also become, especially with the advent of Hindu-­Arabic numerals, the cipher of nothingness. And, tragically as well as comically, Sidney looks in both directions: in his end is his beginning (recall the comic conclusion to Sonnet 45, ‘pity the tale of me’) – and vice versa. What the sonnet stages, then, before the volta of its concluding line – where his muse steps in to save the day – is an anatomy of failure. What the poem dissects, though, is not merely a contingent failure – that of this particular poet’s endeavour here and now to win over this particular addressee. Rather, it lays before us the failure of a (poetic) mode. The inability to make a poem that can set the imagined algorithm into motion signals a failure internal to – and, indeed, constitutive of – the mimetic paradigm the narrator initially adopts (or at least of one influential understanding of that paradigm). It needs to be emphasized that the fundamental problem does not lie in the imagined concatenation of dependent events leading to the desired-­for ‘grace.’ The centre of the poem focuses instead on the difficulty of the initial construction itself, which is meant to trigger the subsequent algorithmic process. Captured in that multivalent word ‘invention’ (repeated thrice in lines 6–10), Sidney’s difficulty reflects the tension I have identified above both in the Defence and in the contrasts among Euclidean, al-­Khwarizmian and Cartesian construction. On the one hand, to study the ‘inventions fine’ of others in order ‘to paint the blackest face of woe’ construes invention as a discovery of what is already there, a finding-­out on the basis of already produced poetic constructions. To invent in this sense is closer to the use of the verb and its variants in contemporary accounting manuals, where the dis-

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covery of gains and losses, what was coming in and what was going out, was achieved by taking inventory. Even more pertinently, in this aspect invention is allied with analysis in terms of the classical opposition between analysis as a method of discovery and synthesis as a deductive method of demonstration. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance – a text with which Sidney was deeply familiar, as his correspondence shows – this distinction is formulated via the contrast between means and ends: analysis assumes the objective or end, taking it to be already given, in order to focus on the means whereby the end may be achieved. And precisely this attitude seems to governs the poem’s first half, where the narrator assumes showing his ‘truth’ – loving – and its practical correlate – obtaining ‘grace’ – as his objectives, to turn his attention instead to the techne or praxis through which those objectives may be realized. The initial poetic construction – much like its geometrical counterpart in Euclid – is not meant to demonstrate something new – for instance, to show the poetic equivalent of a Euclidean theorem; rather it is a means, that which has to be made in order achieve a certain end. But this notion of invention proves itself inadequate, and Sidney’s turn away from copying others’ constructions prefigures the Cartesian turn away from Euclidean construction. Descartes distinguishes, as we have seen, ‘between acting geometrically and performing a geometrical act’: Acting geometrically requires that one perform a geometrical act from knowledge of the underlying interconnections and that one chooses to do so given the end of creating more intuitive knowledge. A formally valid calculation or geometric construction might either be merely a geometrical act or be a product of acting geometrically.24

In other words, for Descartes, formal logical consequence or for that matter a step-­by-­ step sequence in a proof may be necessary for producing certainty but it nonetheless falls short of the kind of clear and distinct evidence that truly characterizes knowledge. Even if I am certain of a relationship between A and E because I consent to the series of relations A:B, B:C, C:D, D:E, ‘I do not on that account see what the relationship is between A and E, nor can the truths previously learnt give me a precise knowledge of it unless I recall them all.’25 What is further needed is an intuitive – or, as Matthew Jones puts it, ‘poetic’ – grasp of the relationship between A and E, so that their interconnection possesses the kind of evidentiary vividness characteristic of our grasp of any of those intermediate relationships. And the limits Descartes attributes to the formal certainty of mathematical demonstrations – as does Sidney in the case of poetic demonstrations – shape his ambivalent response to the prior labours of others: ‘In slavishly imitating and assenting to proof, one allows reason to “amuse” oneself and thereby one loses the habit of reasoning.’26 Likewise, what Sidney loses in reasoning as he does is the habit of poetry itself. To break out of the resulting impasse, Sidney must turn invention in poesis inside out, as Descartes does construction in geometry, making it instead the avenue of creation, a form bringing forth new matter: a ‘heart-­ravishing knowledge’ as the

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Defence puts it, when recounting that the Romans called a poet ‘vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet’ (214). Thus, across its repeated iterations in lines 6–10, the meaning of invention shifts: the alliance between study and invention announced in line 6 (‘[s]tudying inventions fine’) mutates into disjunction in line 10, where invention as ‘nature’s child’ is opposed to the martinet-­like rigour of what has now become the false mother: ‘Invention, nature’s child, fled step-­dame study’s blows’ (l. 10). Sidney’s association of a transformed invention with nature’s fecundity is already hinted by the intervening hope that ‘[s]ome fresh and fruitful showers’ might ‘flow’ upon his ‘sunburnt brain’ (l. 7–8) – and this connection sets up, too, the situation which will result from not making use of invention’s natural fertility: a pregnancy that refuses to end, suspending nature’s issue. Indeed, the sonnet elegantly negotiates the shift between these two senses of invention in lines 6 and 10 respectively through the ambivalence expressed in the intermediate line 9: ‘But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay.’ The multivalence of both ‘wanting’ – ­desiring and lacking – and ‘stay’ – delay and hindrance, but also support – ­captures the dynamic balance between different senses of invention, between mimesis as ­imitation and as creation. The distinctness and clarity of poetic production in Sonnet 1 is conveyed by both the brevity and the tone of the muse’s intervention, when it admonishes the poet by pointing out the obvious: ‘“Fool,” said my muse to me; “look in thy heart, and write”’ (l. 14). As in the Defence, the evidentiary vividness is located in the heart, for it is only by looking there that one can ‘invent’ the poem, and thereby act poetically (that is, write) rather than merely perform a poetic act (which the first six lines of the poem describe, and whose failure the next six recount). If, for Descartes, geometrical construction converts the formal logic of algebraic analysis into an intuitive grasp of truth akin to divination, the turn inward to the heart in this sonnet likewise achieves a re-­vision; it changes the very mode of seeing: from the observation of a series of mechanical ­movements between causes and effects into an almost vatic insight into the totality of their deeper, underlying connectedness. But this does not mean that the algebraic process, the concatenation of causes and effects in algorithmic fashion, is in itself a mistake. As I have suggested above, this is far from being the case. Indeed, for Descartes, the symbolic representation of geometric lines in order to produce a set of equations that can be solved is a crucial and necessary step, for it is through algebra that the gaps in the process leading from known things to unknown ones is filled. As Descartes puts it, while the algebraic movement does not being into being ‘a new kind of identity’ it nonetheless extends ‘our entire knowledge of the question to the point where we perceive that the thing we are looking for participates in this way or that way in the nature of things given in the statement of the problem.’27 Algebra is thus a necessary but temporary help to achieve the geometric construction, which truly does bring something new into being, not just visually but in that it produces a vivid knowledge of the interconnection among things, or among a set of geometrical objects.

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Figure 10.4  Descartes’s compass, from the 1649 Latin edition of the Géométrie (Reproduced with permission from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Hence, Cartesian geometry in a strict sense repeats algebraic labour – if only ultimately to discard algebra as mere techne, excessive focus on which blocks understanding. This attitude is best captured by Descartes’s famous compass (see Figure 10.4). Descartes envisions here a system of linked rulers. A pivot at Y connects the rulers YX and YZ, the latter remaining fixed while the former rotates. The ruler BC is fixed perpendicular to YX at B, while the remaining rulers parallel to it (DE and FG), slide perpendicularly along YX when pushed by DC and FE respectively. As the angle of the instrument XYZ is opened by rotating YX, ‘the ruler BC … pushes toward Z the ruler CD, which slides along YZ always at right angles. In like manner, CD pushes DE, which slides along YX always parallel to BC; DE pushes EF; EF pushes FG; FG pushes GH; and so on.’28 In short, the initial motion generates a series of curves. Point B (which is fixed on XY) traces a circle, while points D, F, and H (which slide along YX) trace other, more complex curves indicated by dotted lines in figure 10.4.29 By translating the steps of the algebraic equation into appropriate curves through a continuous motion (or through several successive motions, each regulated by those that precede), Descartes’s instrument shows that ‘however composite a motion is, the resulting curve can be conceived in a clear and distinct way, and is therefore acceptable in geometry.’30 The overarching epistemological enterprise, in whose service this mechanical instrument was designed, demands, too, a constructive repetition of algebraic analysis: Algebraic work produces a formula. The newly created algebraic formula guides the construction of a machine, which draws a curve. This curve/machine complex makes the interconnection among the geometrical objects evident. In this process, algebra enables us to get to this geometric order. An algebraic formula, however, should not substitute for knowledge of the geometric order it can help produce.31

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This Cartesian production of an epistemological difference in and through repetition points to a final implication of Sidney’s understanding of mimesis and invention, and leads to another sense in which Sidney’s ends and beginnings are intricated. For we should note that the muse’s injunction in the sonnet’s concluding line returns, through the poet’s self-­reflection, to the poem’s beginning, since arguably the poem we have just read is the product of his having taken the muse’s advice to heart. Just as geometrical construction repeats the algebraic, exposing both its truth and its limits in the production of intuitive knowledge, so too what is triggered by looking into the heart is a poem that rehearses its own failure in order vividly to express the difference internal to repetition, the other side of mimesis: invention as nature’s child. But even as Sidney’s complex renegotiation of the relationship between poetic ‘manner’ and ‘matter’ reveals a quasi-­mathematical logic that is cousin to the late Cartesian moment, the generic or contextual shift from the critical idiom of the Defence to the performative space of the sonnet sequence introduces a further twist. As Richard Young points out, the fact that the speaker in Astrophil and Stella is ‘a poet rather than a critic’ leads to the critical problem of the form/content relationship being raised instead as a rhetorical problem in the poetic sequence, so that the ‘matter of the Defence … becomes part of the rhetorical manner of Astrophel [sic] and Stella.’32 The place of ‘matter’ in the treatise – that is to say, the Nature or Reality that the poet is enjoined to ‘imitate’ – is repeatedly occupied in the poems by the formal literary conventions with and against which the speaker struggles (the examples are legion, but see, for instance, Sonnets 3, 9, and 15). The reason for this, Young perceptively suggests, lies in the early modern response, complexly shared by Sidney, to an Aristotelian heritage. ‘[Conventional poetry] follows a genre theory of poetic [sic], a shortcut in the Aristotelian process of mimesis: the place of the Nature to be imitated is taken by approved models, and the imitation itself is prescribed by rules of decorum.’33 (Moreover, this redoubling of the matter/manner relation is further inflected by the fact that Astrophil is not Sidney but rather a dramatic persona internal to the sequence, one who is lent concretion by a self-­ consciously staged ­autobiographical association with the actual poet.) The difference introduced by the rehearsal of the critical problem on a dramatic plane is given shape in the very second sonnet of the sequence, which repeats with a difference the quasi-­mathematical logic of the opening sonnet; it re-­materializes its precursor’s poetic form in the negative, exposing it as itself conventional – even though Sonnet 1 had announced its circuitous form precisely as a break from convention leading the speaker to the ‘true’ subject matter behind inherited models. If the reverberating ‘might’ in the opening sonnet’s algorithmic sequence (see lines 2–4) signals the speaker’s residual uncertainty about Stella’s reaction at each step in the imagined gradatio, Sonnet 2 begins by banishing all contingency where his own responses are concerned: ‘Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot / Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed’ (lines 1–2). These lines set up a second concatenation of events that counterbalances the earlier one in that its own algorithm is distinguished by an inexorable regression, repeatedly overriding the speaker’s explicit refusal to accede to its logic:



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I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not; I loved, but straight did not what love decreed: At length to love’s decrees, I, forced, agreed, Yet with repining at so partial lot.

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(lines 4–8)

Shifting attention from (the failure of) his affect on Stella to (the success of) hers on him, this reversed gradation leads downward to the present situation in which ‘even that footstep of lost liberty / Is gone’ and the speaker is reduced to a ‘slave-­born Muscovite’ (lines 9–10). The minimal agency of complaint is denied him, and on this lowest rung of the ladder he is enforced to describe his condition as contrary to its reality (‘I call it praise to suffer tyranny,’ line 11) – and indeed to construct a fabulous world that, anticipating Descartes in his treatise on The World (see below), does not simply reflect ‘the things that are actually in the true world’ but ‘that nevertheless could be created just as I will have feigned it.’ And out of these strictures arises the memorable coincidence of opposites with which the poem concludes, the invention of a state of pleasure that simultaneously expresses a state of suffering: ‘To make myself believe that all is well / While with feeling skill I paint my hell’ (lines 13 and 14) – ironically completing a poetic rendition of ‘the blackest face of woe’ that the opening sonnet had presented either as unattainable or as mistaken. Through such dynamic repetitions – and disavowal of – their own conditions of possibility do both poetic and geometric constructions themselves come into being, reinventing themselves by inventing the techniques they will ultimately seek to displace. Coda: fables to live by Jean-­Luc Nancy’s rich if elusive essay on Descartes takes its title from Jan Weenix’s 1647 portrait of the philosopher, which shows him holding an open book on whose left page is inscribed mundus est fabula, the world is a fable. The phrase ought not to be taken, Nancy argues, as repeating the Baroque commonplace that the world around us is illusory, no more real than fable. Rather, it points to the constitutive place of the fable in the Cartesian invention of the thinking subject, upon whose certitude all knowledge of the world is built.34 The opening chapter of the Discourse on the Method makes this fabulatory motive explicit: Thus my design is not to teach here the method which everyone ought to follow in order to direct his reason well, but only to show how I have tried to direct my own … But, putting forward this work as a history [histoire], or, if you prefer, as a fable [fable] in which, among a few examples one may imitate, one will perhaps find many others that one will be right not to follow, I hope that it will be useful to some without being harmful to any, and that all will be grateful to me for my frankness [franchise]. (83; translation modified)35

As Nancy perceptively notes, Descartes’s text does not itself ‘imitatively borrow the traits of a literary genre … If fable here … is to introduce fiction, it will do so through a

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completely different procedure. It will not introduce fiction “upon” truth or beside it, but within it.’36 This distinction, wherein fiction-­making enters into the very interior of truth, ought to be recognizable to us in Sidney’s own justification for poetry’s aptitude for (truthful) feigning – which is not, he emphasizes, tantamount to lying because it never purported to be literally true to begin with. Or, to cite again Descartes’s defence of his invention of the world in Le Monde, it is not that one seeks to present ‘the things that are actually in the true world,’ but rather to ‘feign[…] one at random … that nevertheless could be created just as I will have feigned it.’37 The motif of the fable also opens a more unexpected connection between Sidney and Descartes. As is well known, in 1595 Sidney’s Defence also appeared in a different edition and was called instead An Apology for Poetry. The implications of this alternative title are rich. Margaret Ferguson points out that the word apology derives from apo, meaning away and logia or speaking, and thus came to signify ‘a speech in defense.’ However, the Renaissance conflated this with the Greek word apologos, which meant story or fable, generalizing this term to apply to didactic allegories such as Aesop’s fables. ‘[F]or Renaissance defenders of poetry, there was a special link between apologos and apologia, a link suggested not only by the fact that both terms were sometimes translated as “apologie” in sixteenth-­century England, but also by a Platonic text that was crucial to Renaissance justifications of poetry,’ Plato’s Republic.38 References to Plato’s banishing of poets from the ideal republic abound in Sidney’s Apology. And the very first mention of Plato emphasizes the fabulous dimensions of his thought: And truly even Plato whoever well considereth shall find in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin, as it were, and beauty depended most on poetry: for all standeth upon dialogues, wherein he feigneth many honest burgesses of Athens to speak of such matters, that, if they had been set on the rack, they would never have confessed them. (213)

Not only does Sidney see the very dialogic form as inherently poetic, but he recognizes clearly the extent to which Platonic truth is communicated through invention: feigning their words extracts the ‘honesty’ of the Athenians beyond anything that torture can achieve. Plato’s own recourse to fables and myths at key junctures in his dialogues – Sidney notes the strategic ‘interlacing’ of what might seem ‘mere tales, as Gyges’ ring and others’ (213) – is echoed in the framing fable with which the Apology opens. In a gesture that anticipates the ostensible humility of Descartes’s presenting his life as a fable, Sidney self-­deprecatingly prefaces his own – unavoidably solipsistic – defence of poetry with the diverting story of John Pietro Pugliano, whose equestrian responsibilities led him excessively ‘to exercise[…] his speech in praise of his faculty.’ ‘Had I not been a piece of a logician before I came to him,’ Sidney muses, ‘I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse. But thus much at least his no few words drave into me, that self-­love is better than any gilding to make us seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties’ (212).



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It is likewise through the fable of Descartes’s own intellectual autobiography that the Cartesian thinking subject shows itself. Descartes refuses the position of authority from which his method can be taught, and even suggests that this frank display of himself may have only a very limited exemplary function as model to be fruitfully imitated. In fact, the Discourse distances itself even further from its potential use as imitative model: If my work has pleased me enough that I show you its model [modèle] here, it is not because I wish to advise anybody to imitate it. Those upon whom God has bestowed more of his graces will perhaps form designs more elevated; but I do fear that for many this [work itself] may already be too audacious. The sole resolve of undoing all the opinions that one has formerly received [auparavant en sa créance] is not an example that each man should follow. And the world may be said to be mainly composed of two sorts of minds to which it is not in the least suited. (90; translation modified)

Descartes’s notion of the private and particular self is itself a product of an awareness of a collective, a ‘public’ for whom the author cannot in any direct sense serve as a model to be copied. Put another way, (auto)biography is itself created in the gesture that posits the subject’s life as heuristic fiction. The Cartesian fable thus appears a paradoxical beast, both exemplary and, in a fundamental sense, inimitable. And this double articulation is, I wish to suggest, distinctive of Sidney as well. To sharpen the paradox, we might say that both writers show themselves as imitable precisely in their inimitability. In other words, simply to copy what they do would be the equivalent of merely performing geometrical or poetical acts – the failure of which the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella stages. Truly to imitate them, by contrast, would be to take their very inimitability as model, that is to say, to inhabit (as they do) a process of invention whose characteristic is a distinctive internal swerve within inherited traditions, a repetition that produces difference in the form of singularity.39 As Nancy writes apropos Descartes (in words that we could easily apply to Sidney’s poetical practice as well), ‘if the worlds of fiction and reality are not identical, what instead is identical – yielding Descartes’ very identity – is the activity of invention and creation … The subject of true knowledge must be the inventor of his own fable.’40 Consequently, what one is enjoined to imitate is less either the ‘matter’ or the ‘manner’ (see p. 248) of their geometrical and/or poetical creations than something more like their attitude with respect to the very relationship between matter and manner. Young aptly describes the poet-­lover of Sidney’s sonnet sequence as a ‘Janus-­ figure … looking in both directions: within the dramatic context toward the lady and beyond it toward a reader.’41 While the dramatic fiction is lent solidity by Sidney’s evocation of his own biography throughout the sonnet sequence, it is equally the sequence itself that invents the life, by creating and re-­creating, for instance, the figure of Stella (and, concomitantly, the figure of Astrophil) from sonnet to sonnet. In turn, showing the self through the shapes it creates constitutes the mode of address outward:

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the singular and virtuoso display of literary imitation turned inside out calls for an audience whose ‘imitation’ of the poet would ideally take the poet’s singularity as model, reading it as – to borrow again Nancy’s description of Descartes’s Discourse – the ‘fable of the generality of a singular and authentic action.’42 What poesis brings into being for Sidney, just as geometrical construction does for Descartes, is the degree to which the making of the verbal (or visual) image produces an exemplarity that is generalizable not via direct likeness but in the very mode of relating to the world that it exemplifies. But if the question be for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was, then certainly is more doctrinable the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon than the true Cyrus in Justin, and the feigned Aeneas in Virgil than the right Aeneas in Dares Phrygius. (224)

It is worth noting that the Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word individual to signify ‘a single human being, as opposed to Society, the Family, etc.’ to the early seventeenth century.43 One might say that Sidney and Descartes envisage the creation of this individual precisely through individual creation. And it is on the shifting sands of such a fabulous foundation that their geometrico-­poetic worlds would be built. Notes  1 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, in Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (trans. and eds), The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), I, pp. 82–83. Translation modified.  2 To the best of my knowledge, Henry S. Turner’s The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) is the only book explicitly to draw the connection between geometry and poetry in Sidney’s Defence. My discussion here independently converges at times with Turner’s, generally with respect to positions already well-­established through the history of Sidney criticism – for instance, the importance of ‘invention’ or the the question of poetry’s epistemological and ethical value. However, Turner focuses mostly on reconstructing geometry’s status through title pages, prefaces, and selective evidence of reading practices. There is thus little acknowledgement of the momentous change in the very content of geometry – and in its relationship to algebra – from the mid sixteenth to the mid seventeenth century. Further, the discussion of Sidney’s Defence does not attend to Sidney’s own poetic practice, an odd absence given the parallel insistence that geometry’s assimilation to the practical arts during this period opens up its connection to poetry.  3 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Katherine Duncan-­Jones (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 212–251, at p. 230. All subsequent citations of Sidney’s Defence are indicated by page number in the body of this chapter.  4 From different perspectives, critics have often remarked upon this tension in Sidney’s oeuvre. According to Sherrod Cooper, for instance, the poet swings between the claim that

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art is a means to the end of ‘representing nature accurately’ and the countervailing ­position in which inspiration seems all: ‘[o]bviously,’ writes Cooper, ‘the practitioner and the theorist seem at odds with another.’ The Sonnets of Astrophil and Stella: A Stylistic Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 14, 17. Kathy Eden’s rich discussion emphasizes instead the duality in the poet’s complex deployment of key Aristotelian texts: ‘When Sidney defines poetry not only as an art of imitation but also as an instrument of knowledge, he does so in view of the Poetics and its tradition. When, on the other hand, he claims for poetry the special task of feigning images designed to inspire the will to virtuous action, he echoes the De Anima and its tradition.’ Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 158.  5 In a 1574 reply to Languet, for instance, Sidney resists the Frenchman’s advice that he give up studying geometry, promising to ‘only look through the lattice (so to say) at the first principles of it.’ The Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), Vol. III, p. 84. In a 1580 letter, Sidney further advises his brother to ‘take delight in the mathematicals,’ and especially in arithmetic and geometry ‘so as both in number and measure you might have a feeling and active judgement.’ The Correspondence of Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. William Aspenwall Bradley (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1912), p. 223.  6 David Rapport Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1989), p. ix.  7 Robert of Chester’s Latin Translation of the Algebra of Al-­Khowarizmi, ed. Louis Charles Karpinski (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915). Further citations indicated by page number in body of essay. Karpinski’s prefatory material shows how widely disseminated knowledge of al-­Khwarizmi’s work was from the late fifteenth century onwards – either directly, as in the case of Regiomontanus and Luca Pacioli, or through Robert of Chester’s translation, as with Johann Scheybl, a professor of mathematics at Tübingen who in 1550 transcribed and prepared that translation for publication.  8 The question of whether Descartes did or did not invent analytical geometry has been much debated by historians of mathematics. There seems little doubt that analytical geometry shares a number of the mathematical techniques developed in the Géométrie, but, as Carl B. Boyer first argued, it remains unclear whether Descartes’s mathematical thought was fully compatible with the basic notion undergirding analytical geometry: that algebraic equations define curves in space. See Boyer, History of Analytic Geometry (New York: Scripta Mathematica, 1956), pp. 102ff. ‘The analytical geometer,’ according to Timothy Lenoir, ‘begins with an equation in two or three variables and, by a suitable choice of a coordinate frame, produces a geometric interpretation of that equation in two-­or three-­[dimensional] space.’ In: ‘Descartes and the geometrization of thought: the methodological background of Descartes’ Géométrie’, Historia Mathematica, 6 (1979), 355–379, at 356. While Descartes admits the necessity of algebra, he refuses to prioritize equations in this way. In fact, as H. J. M. Bos persuasively shows, how curves ought to be understood remained an open question for most seventeenth century mathematicians. Descartes intervenes here by introducing a sharp distinction between admissible and inadmissible curves precisely on the grounds of their constructibility. See Bos, ‘On the representation of curves in Descartes’ Géométrie’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 24 (1981), 295–338.  9 Lachterman, Ethics of Geometry, pp. ix and xi.

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10 As Karpinski points out, the ‘Greek influence on Arabic geometry is revealed by the order of the letters employed on the geometrical figures.’ These letters follow the natural Greek order rather than the Arabic, and ‘the same is true … [for] the letters in the geometrical figures used by Al-­Khowarizmi for verification of his solutions of quadratic equations … The Arabs were much more familiar with and grounded in Euclid than are mathematicians today, and it was entirely natural in constructing new figures that they should follow the order of lettering to which they had become accustomed in their study of Euclid.’ See The Algebra of Al-­Khowarizmi, p. 21. 11 Plato, The Republic, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), Vol. 6, 510d–511a. Translation modified. I cite the Perseus Digital Library’s text: www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc5Perseus:text:1999.01.0168. Last accessed 8 March 2012. 12 Reviel Netz, ‘What did Greek mathematicians find beautiful?’, Classical Philology, 105 (2010), 426–449. 13 Plato, The Republic, 527b. 14 Michael Mahoney insists that Descartes’s essential contribution to algebra was that of abstracting mathematical operations from visual or physical space. Descartes’s mathematics, he claims, is a science of pure structure, without any ontological foundation. See ‘Die Anfänge der algebraischen Denkweise im 17. Jahrhundert’, Rete: Strukturgeschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1.1 (1971), 15–31, at 29. This is perhaps too strongly put, but there is no denying that Descartes seeks to separate his mathematics from the reference to physical space that underlies Euclidean geometry. Thus, for example, the multiplication of two lines in the Géométrie yields not a square (as in al-­Khwarizmi’s algebra) but another line. 15 For a fuller discussion of this distinction see Matthew L. Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 32–38. 16 René Descartes, The Geometry of René Descartes, trans. David Eugene Smith and Marcial L.  Latham (London: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1925), p. 13. Translation modified. Further citations indicated by page number in body of chapter. 17 Lenoir, ‘Descartes and the geometrization of thought’, 356. The primary focus of Descartes’s Geometry is his solution to the so-­called Pappus problem, which he claimed had hitherto not been properly solved using the appropriate geometrical means. But in this preliminary discussion of quadratic equations, the attitude underlying the mathematical approach to that complex locus problem is already visible. There, as here, to cite Lenoir, ‘the justification for his solution [lies] in the fact that each algebraic manipulation he made … corresponded to a definite geometrical operation’ (358). 18 The distinction between the evidence of a proof and its formal certainty that Jones underscores in his reading of Descartes speaks centrally to this issue. ‘[F]ormal demonstrations, like syllogisms or other logical forms of proof, could, in [Descartes’s] eyes, produce a kind of certainty. They did not, however, make evident the connections on was proving.’ See Jones, The Good Life, p. 29. I return to this distinction in more detail below. 19 I draw here on Lachterman’s detailed analysis of Euclid in The Ethics of Geometry, pp. 25–123. 20 Ibid., pp. 66–67.

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21 Ibid., p. 121. 22 All quotations from Sidney’s verse refer to Katherine Duncan-­Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 23 I say ‘seems’ because the strength of the connection between each step is weakened by the reiterated ‘might,’ suggesting the residual uncertainty attending every transition. The tension between a strictly logical entailment and the possibility of a failure at each junction is perhaps heightened by the echo of the other primary meaning of ‘might’: power or force. 24 Jones, The Good Life, p. 32. 25 Descartes, ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’, in The Philosophical Works, Vol. I, p. 25. 26 Jones, The Good Life, p. 27. 27 René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984– 91), Vol. I, p. 56. Also cited in Jones, The Good Life, p. 33. 28 The Geometry of René Descartes, pp. 46–47. 29 With regard to the intermediate terms in a proof sequence connecting an initial term A to a final term E via the series of relations A:B, B:C, C:D, D:E, the compass generates a series of similar triangles – YBC, YDE, and so on – which make visible these mean proportionals characterizing the algebraic equation. 30 Bos, ‘Curves in Descartes’ Géométrie’, 310. This was not the only compass Descartes dreamt up, for it only involved straight lines as the moving parts. He also envisioned other, more complex devices that combined the movement of straight lines with the motions of simpler curves. 31 Jones, The Good Life, p. 34. The compass, as a mechanical device, falls under the same injunction circumscribing algebra’s role. In itself it is no more than an instrument, but through its appropriate use geometry reveals itself as poesis. 32 Richard B. Young, ‘English Petrarke: a study of Astrophel and Stella,’ in Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson, Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 5–88, at p. 6. 33 Ibid., p. 11. 34 Jean-­Luc Nancy, ‘Mundus est Fabula’, MLN, 93 (1978), 635–653, at 635–637. 35 The motif of the fable recurs in the Discourse – for example, in the ensuing discussion of the learning of the Schools – as well as in The World [Le Monde], which was suppressed from publication by the author upon hearing of the condemnation of Galileo in 1632. In that earlier text, Descartes solicitously tells the reader that he wishes ‘to envelop a part of it with the invention of a fable’ so that ‘you will find the length of this discourse less tedious.’ Through this fable, he hopes ‘that truth will always be sufficiently visible, and that it will be no less pleasant to behold than if I exposed it in all its nakedness.’ Cited in Nancy, ‘Mundus est Fabula’, 639. 36 Ibid., 638. 37 Cited in ibid., 639. 38 Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 2–3. 39 Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between generality and repetition is apposite here: ‘[I]t is not Federation day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation days; or Monet’s

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first water lily which repeats all the others. Generality, as generality of the particular, thus stands opposed to repetition as universality of the singular. The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without a concept, and it is not by accident that a poem must be learned by heart.’ Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 1. 40 Nancy, ‘Mundus est Fabula’, 639–640. 41 Young, ‘English Petrarke’, p. 9. 42 Nancy, ‘Mundus est Fabula’, 641. 43 The OED cites J. Yates’s 1626 Ibis ad Caesarem: ‘The Prophet saith not, God saw every particular man in his blood, or had compassion to say to every individual, Thou shalt live.’ Entry under 3a, spelling modernized. My thanks to Diana Henderson for bringing this point to my attention.

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Part IV

Afterword

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David Scott Kastan

Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Polonius: What’s the matter? Hamlet: Between who? Polonius: I mean the matter that you read, my lord.

In the introduction to this book, the editors provocatively announce as their motivation in putting together the collection the desire ‘to get at the literary by turning to the matter of literature’ (p. 5). It is a shrewdly conceived sentence, revealing both the high stakes of the enterprise and the high degree of difficulty of its achievement. The literary is here unashamedly recognized as the field of primary concern even as its own autotelic claims are refused. Literature is understood as functional (though admittedly its function has at times been understood as precisely that kind of writing that has no function) rather than as ontological, as an effect rather than as a substance. But an effect of what? That brings us, as the editors put it, to the ‘matter of literature,’ but such matter, as the contributions to the volume impressively show, is not easily delimited. Matter is both conceptual and artefactual. It may refer to the language and conventions that give imagination form; it may mean the physical platforms on which writing is preserved and presented. It may mean the subject of the writing, or it may mean the object that enables it to be read. Perhaps this is to say nothing more interesting than that a word may have different meanings, though in this case the different meanings awkwardly extend to both sides of the familiar opposition of form and content. What’s the matter? Well, it (i.e., the ‘matter,’ here meaning the problem) may be that our vocabulary keeps shifting the grounds of our thinking, unsettling the very distinctions that we are trying to make and make use of. The instability of the word undermines our normal expectations of matter’s stability. ‘Form’ is itself a word that is similarly unstable. ‘Forms effect meaning,’ in Donald McKenzie’s oft-quoted dictum (which ironically appeared as ‘Forms affect meaning’ when his essay was reprinted in the Routledge Book History Reader, at once weakening even as it confirmed the authorial claim);1 but ‘forms’ in McKenzie’s sense are the recorded forms, as he says–the fonts, page layout, paper, even the binding (or its absence)–in which a text circulates rather than its lexical elements. ‘Forms,’ however,

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250 Afterword may be used as well to refer to the conventional structures of verbal patterning, as they are often in the chapters in Formal Matters, where the ‘interest in forms’ (Introduction, p. 2) is said to intersect with ‘an interest in the material text,’ the ‘forms’ that MacKenzie is interested in. Even as we try to explore the relations of material texts with the forms they embody, we discover the difficulty of radical separation, as the boundaries of the material and the conceptual blur in the shared vocabularies that would establish them. Form and matter. Form and form. Matter and matter. Formal matters but material forms. It is all one. Or, rather, two. But perhaps one can expect no more (or no less) from abstractions with such heavily sedimented philosophical traditions. ‘The book’ may be simpler. At least it’s newer. It establishes a physical presence for the text, naming a phenomenal object that is real, existing in time and space. Or does it? ‘The book’ is often itself an abstraction, sometimes naming a technology and a cultural agent rather than an object, as in ‘The Book as a Force of Change’.2 The book? Which book? And even when we talk about a particular book, ‘the book’ is still as likely to name an abstraction (though a different one) as it is to name an entity that can be held and looked at. As D. F. McKenzie says, ‘what we much too readily call “the book” is a friskier and more elusive animal than the words “physical object” will allow.’3 We know, for example, that the First Folio (which, of course, wasn’t the first folio, only the first publication of Shakespeare’s plays in folio form, the conventional capitalization of the phrase belatedly inscribing the cultural value that has accrued to the edition) names not the first copy of the 1623 printing to be gathered and bound but the entire print run of that first edition (probably about eight hundred copies, of which some 230 have survived), but a print run understood less as the totality of copies than the essential form of their being, which no single copy, given the nature of press correction, perfectly represents. The First Folio, as we usually use the phrase, then, doesn’t actually name a book at all, though the Beinecke’s copy of the First Folio (1978 183), for example, does.4 But what about the First Folio that is digitized on EEBO? What exactly is this? Whatever it is, it isn’t a book. Nor is it an idealization of the First Folio. It is a digitization of an individual copy (in point of fact, Folger copy, number 7), reifying its textual particulars as the 1623 Folio in a remediation that erases or distorts much of its copy specificity. In fact it retains only the typographic features; the binding, the paper, the weight, the size, the color, the smell, etc., are all lost to the process. There are, of course, enormous advantages of access that EEBO’s digitization of the First Folio allows, but access to the book, or even to a book, is not among them.5 Confusing, isn’t it? T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney understandably complains ‘But I gotta use words when I talk to you’ (‘Sweeney Agonistes’), and these are the words we have for conducting the discussion. Their ambiguity seems to me consequential, even if it is frustrating. The words we turn to for a solution to the problem of the meanings of a text turn out to pose the problem themselves. The fixed ground we seek turns out to be illusory. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ as The Communist Manifesto famously

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proclaimed (1848), though Shakespeareans might optimistically want to emend ‘solid’ to ‘sallied’ or ‘sullied’. Hamlet might indeed offer us a way to clarify, though not to solve, the problem. What do we read when we read Hamlet? Words, words, words, certainly. Words printed on a page. But which page? Hamlet, of course, exists in three early versions, no one of which can be confidently claimed as authoritative, and in many more edited versions (many of which do claim, at least as a point of their advertising, to be so). What’s the matter with Hamlet (or with Hamlet)? Is it a complex textual condition or a complex psychological one? But of course the psychological exists only as it is written, so perhaps they are the same. Ophelia is ‘A document of madness’ (4.5.172). Character is a function of marks on the page. Character is a function of character. Oh dear. Hamlet is a play that uncannily (in almost every respect it is uncanny) thematizes its own textual condition. ‘A man’s life is no more than to say “one”’ (5.2.81), says Hamlet (at least in the Folio text), probably referring to the first touch in a fencing bout as a metaphor for the brevity of life, but inevitably marking his wish for a singleness, an integrity of purpose and being, unavailable to him in the world of doubles, double-­ dealers, and double-­binds that surrounds him. He wants one; he gets two: a Protestant education and a Catholic ghost; an aristocratic culture of honour and a Christian code of forgiveness; an instruction to revenge his father’s murder but to leave his mother’s fate to heaven; Cornelius and Voltimand; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; ‘to be or not to be’. Hamlet, rather than Claudius (or just like him) is ‘a man to double business bound’ (3.3.41). But the text itself lacks the singleness, the integrity, we desire. We want one; we get three: a so-­called ‘bad’ quarto, a ‘good’ one, and the Folio text, which is neither good nor bad ‘but thinking makes it so’ (as in fact only the Folio says). Hamlet’s divided condition is what defines him, but one could say as well that Hamlet’s divided condition is what defines it. We never know the Prince as Ophelia’s idealized Renaissance composite (‘conflation’, I am tempted to say) of the ‘courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword’ (3.1.150), just as we never know the play as the ideal work that the three surviving texts (mis)represent. In both cases, we have only what we are given, something flawed and endlessly fascinating. The only ‘union’ (5.2.249) the play offers is the poisoning pearl that Claudius drops into the wine for Hamlet to drink, and even that ‘union’ is unstable and incoherent: Q2 prints not ‘union’ but ‘Vnice’ in some copies, and ‘Onixe’ in others (sig. N4r). The material text at once represents and betrays, not unlike the substituted letter that results in the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where authorial intentions give way to other agencies as the text is revised and reproduced. And this is hardly the only moment when the play seems to comment on the complications of its own materializations. Hamlet remembers a speech that perhaps ‘was never acted’ (2.2.373–374), he instructs the clowns to ‘speak no more than is set down for them’ (3.2.37), but the play is full of references to the materiality of written language. In addition to the

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252 Afterword various letters that are sent – Hamlet’s to Ophelia, some of which she did ‘repel’ and some of which she returns, to Claudius, to Horatio, to the King of England, though that one under a pseudonym where he finds a way to ‘reword’ the ‘matter’ (3.4.141) Claudius had written to the King and sealed (3.4.200); Polonius writes ‘notes’ to his son (‘letters’ in Q1, sig. D2v) to be delivered by Reynaldo to Laertes in Paris – there are the books and writing tablets on which words may be preserved and read and from which they can be erased so one can try to forget them.6 It is not without significance that the word ‘matter’ appears so often. The repetition, as Margie Ferguson notes, ‘produces a curious effect of materializing the word, materializing it in a way that forces us to question the distinction between literal and figurative meanings, and that also leads us to look in new ways at the word as a spoken or written phenomenon.’7 Twenty-­six times it is printed or spoken, usually as part of a question. ‘Now, mother, what’s the matter?’ (3.4.7). ‘What’s the matter now?’ (3.4.12). ‘What is the matter?’ (4.5.98). Perhaps we should reply with Osric, ‘Sir, this is the matter’ (5.2.88–89): both the matter of the text and the matter with the text; the play’s subject and its textual condition. Hamlet and Hamlet, both Prince and play, exist only materially, and in forms that frustrate our desire for integrity and coherence. Still we must attend to what is set down for us. The Queen desires that Polonius deliver ‘more matter with less art’ (2.2.95), but Shakespeare’s art cannot be separated from the matter of its making. Letter and spirit, form and content, co-­exist, however uncomfortably, logically separable but mutually interdependent. Neither exists without the other; they are each other’s constituting principle. It is in the union (or the ‘Vnice’ or ‘Onixe’) of their practices that Formal Matters finds its purchase. The chapters here try to reconcile ‘art’ and ‘matter’, recognizing both the necessary inability of authorial intention to materialize the work and the inevitable inadequacy of any text fully to represent that intention. Hamlet may stoically admit to Horatio: ‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart – but it is no matter’ (5.2.191). But the plaint is solely matter. In Q1, Hamlet admits his ‘heart is on the sudden very sore all hereabout’ without any demurral, and more similar to Q2’s wording but still different is the Folio, where Hamlet breaks off more ambiguously: ‘But thou wouldst not think how all here about my heart – but it is no matter.’ The variants reveal how fully the sentiment is indeed matter every bit as much as it does matter. That is what the chapters here explore. In focusing on the materiality of the text, a materiality understood, in Roger Chartier’s words, both as ‘the objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading (or hearing) [and] thus the possible comprehension of the text read and heard’,8 they point to the ways that the meanings of early modern texts are collaboratively made. They are constructed by authors and by compilers, by scribes and by stationers, and of course also by readers, as texts get composed and recomposed, shaped and reshaped, by the intentions, expectations, and desires of the various people (including the authors or readers of this book) whose labour allows the text to live vibrantly in the world. Now what could be the matter with that?



What’s the matter?

253

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Notes 1 Donald F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13; ‘The book as expressive form’, in David Finkelstein and Alistair McLeery (eds), The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 29 (2nd edn, 2006, p. 37). 2 Section 8 in Lucien Febvre and Henri-­Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-­Smith and David Wootton (London: New Left Books, 1976); first published as L’Apparition du Livre (Paris: Les Éditions Albin Michel, 1958). 3 McKenzie, ‘The sociology of a text: oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand’, in: Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, p. 79 (first printed in The Library, 6th series 6.4 (1984)). 4 Joseph A. Dane, in his What Is a Book: The Study of Early Printed Books (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), makes this point using a somewhat different vocabulary, insisting on the useful distinction between books and ‘book-­copies’ (pp. 7–8). 5 For a useful account of EEBO’s history and what a user should be aware of in using the resource see Ian Gadd, ‘The use and misuse of Early English Books Online’, Literature Compass, 6.3 (2009), 680–692. 6 See Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 261–294. 7 Margaret Ferguson, ‘Hamlet: letters and spirits’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 292. 8 Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 3.

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Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Aggas, Edward 152 Allot, Robert 15, 16, 19, 43 England’s Parnassus, or, the Choysest Flowers (1600) 15–30 passim Andrewes, John 5, 7, 8, 190–214 Andrewes Golden Chaine (1645) 197, 201, 207 Andrewes Repentance (1631) 192, 197, 204, 207, 209, 210 A Celestiall Looking-Glasse (1621) 192, 193, 195, 207 A Soveraigne Salve (1624) 192, 195, 201, 203, 209 A Subpaena from the High Imperial Court of Heaven (1618) 194, 195 Aristophanes 100, 101, 102, 110, 112, 113, 114 Plutus (Latin translation: Charles Girard, 1549) 105–7 Aristotle 16, 17, 21, 63, 65, 219, 220, 221, 234, 235 Poetics 108–13, 114, 238, Armin, Robert 91 Foole upon foole (1600) 62 assumpsit 175–6, 184, 187n.16 authorship collaborative 3, 6, 35–6, 50n.11 translator’s role 125–7 see also books A Banquet of Jests, or Change of cheare (1639) 56–7, 59, 70 Bedford, Lucy, Countess of 37, 44, 45, 48, 52–3n.33 bees 20–1, 82, 86, 170

Bodenham, John 16–21, 27, 28, 30, 43 Politeuphuia, or Wits Commonwealth (1597) 16 Wits Theater of the Little World (1599) 16, 19, 24, 28, 32n.16 see also Munday, Anthony and Ling, Nicholas Bodin, Jean Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1572) 20 bonds see debt books as abstractions 250 authorship 50n.11, 53n.36, 54n.42, 192–3 layout 3, 102–6 production 3, 12n.27, 78–80, 100 textbooks 101 book history 1–2, 4, 9n.7, 80, 82, 100 as sociological analysis 4 Boorde, Andrew Scoggins Jests (1626) 61–2 Calvin, John Institutio Christianae (English translation: Thomas Norton, 1578) 136 Camden, William 127 Britannia (1586) 18 Casaubon, Isaac De satyrica Graecorum poesi & Romanorum satira libri duo 114 Castiglione, Baldassare Il libro del cortegiano (1528) 18, 58, 61, 64 Chapman, George 35, 40, 136–8 Chester, Robert Loves Martyr (1601) 34–54 passim

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Index 255 Cicero 16, 17, 21, 63–4, 131, 137 city comedy 7, 71, 112–13, 171, 178–9 Coke, Edward 11n.24, 172, 175–7 Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628) 18 comedy 110–15 commodification 131, 134, 139–41 pamphlet press 192 of repentance 195–6, 216–17n.70 common reader 17–18, 26, 29 commonplaces and commonplace books 15–16, 43, 105 alphabetical ordering 19 classical plays 105 English reader 6, 17, 22–4 manuscript and printed books 21, 25, 33n.24, 78 production 19–20 tables 19, 22 commonplacing 19, 21–2, 26, 45–6, 105 habits of 19 way of reading 22–4 content see form continuation 6, 78–81 and imitation 82 and repurposing 85–6, 89 curricula 101 Daniel, Samuel 17, 22–3, 81 ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’ [Evanthius, De fabula; Donatus, De comedia] 110 debt 170 body as bond 173–4, 176 bonds and bondage 171–7 homoeroticism 171, 177–81 passim procreation symbolism 181–5 signature as ‘hand’ 171, 174–5, 181 debtors 172– 3 de-individuation 43 deixis 26, 107 depersonalization 25–6 Descartes, Rene 219–33 passim, 235–8 Discourse on Method (1637) 219, 241 Geometry 220 Donatus see ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’ Donne, John 40, 45 drama 99–115 passim

Drayton, Michael 17, 43 Poly-Olbion (1612) 18, 30, 40 education 16, 99, 105–9 Eliot, John 152 Elizabeth I 37, 44, 61 Euripides 17, 100, 101, 108 Hecuba; Iphigenia in Aulis (Latin translation: Erasmus, 1506) 102 Evanthius see ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’ Field, Richard 152–3 forfeit/forfeiture 173, 175–7, 187n.16 form(s) 124, 139–40, 206 and content 220 dramatic 99, 101, 109 and jests 57–8 and matter 7, 8, 12n.30, 99, 128, 233, 249–50 printed 109, 153, 193, 213, 249 Fraunce, Abraham The Lawyers Logicke (1588) 20 Freud, Sigmund 58, 67, 69, 71 Frischlin, Nicodemus ‘De veteri Comoedia eiusque partibus’ (1586) 112–15, 122n.73 Galvao, Antonio The Discoveries of the World (English translation: Richard Hakluyt, 1601) 128 Gascoigne, George 22, 35–6, 101, 152 A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) 35, 50n.9 The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1575) 36 genre(s) 4–5, 35 see also city comedy; continuation; comedy; commonplace books; drama; jests and jestbooks; letter; news and newsbooks; penny godlinesses; tragedy; tragicomedy Golding, Arthur 152 Greek plays, editions of 100–1 Greene, Robert 16–17 Hakluyt, Richard 124–41 passim The Principal Navigations (1589, 1599) 8, 11n.24, 18, 125, 126–9, 138, 139–40, 141 hand 171–2, 174–81 passim, 184

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256 Index Harvey, Gabriel 17, 64–5, 155 Hazlitt, W. Carew Shakespeare Jest-Books (1864) 65 Hickes, William Oxford Jests 68 Coffee-House Jests (1676) 59 historical formalism 1–2, 5 Hoby, Edward 152 Hoby, Sir Thomas 58 homoeroticism see bonds Hooker, Richard Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594) 18 humanism 19, 64–5, 124–5, 130, 136 material 124–5 James VI of Scotland 17, 28 jests and jestbooks 5, 6, 55–72 passim as action narration 61–2 authorship 59–61 death 62 form 58, 66–8, 70–1 and humanism 64–5 and morality 65–6 as social history 57 subversiveness 69–71 Jocabella, or a Cabinet of Conceits (1640) 60 Jonson, Ben 17, 35, 40, 44–6, 48, 60, 71, 77, 78, 81, 83, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115 Kemp, William 55 al- Khwarizmi, Mohammed ibn Musa 221–233 passim Kyd, Thomas 17 languages 8, 101–7, 125–8 Greek 100–7 Latin, Greek plays in 101–7 de Laudonnière, René A Notable Historie (English translation: Richard Hakluyt, 1587) 126, 129 letters 153–4 Lilliat, John Liber Lilliati (c. 1580) 81–2, 87 Ling, Nicholas 16, 43 England’s Helicon (1600) 16, 24, 28, 43 lists 107, 131–4, 138, 144n.25

literary, literariness 2–4, 5, 10n.14, 52n.28, 63, 125, 238, 249 literary property 59–61 literary texts and performance 3, 10n.14 London Jests (1684) 56, 58 Loves Martyr see Chester, Robert manuscript coterie 35, 40 marginal glosse 105, 107 Markham, Gervase 22 The English Arcadia (1607, 1613) 80 Marlowe, Christopher 17 Marston, John 35, 40–1 materiality, materialism 4, 6, 124, 130–1, 136, 140, 174, 230, 251–2 mathematics and poetry 219 ethics of application 220, 233 fable as truth 239–241 instantiation vs. abstract intelligibility 227–8, 232, 237–8 medium close reading 5, 34, 37 Melanchthon, Philip Loci communes (1523) 20 Merbeck, John A Booke of Notes and Common Places (1581) 20 Meres, Francis Palladis Tamia, or Wits Treasury (1598) 16, 28, 31n.8, 34, 40, 119n.34 Middleton, Thomas 7, 77–91 The Blacke Booke 77, 80, 87–91 A Game at Chess (1625) 77 The Ghost of Lucrece (1600) 78, 80, 85–9 Honorable Entertainments (1621) 77 Michaelmas Term (1604) 7, 170–185 passim The Roaring Girl (1611) 77 The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (1597) 82–3 Milton, John 81, 83 miscellaneity, miscellanies 6, 35–48 passim, 59, 68 and specificity 41 moneylending 172–3 moral topoi 24 More, Sir Thomas 64, 74n.53 Munday, Anthony 15, 152 Bel-vedére, or the Garden of the Muses (1600) 15, 24, 28–9

Index 257

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Mycyllus, Jacobus ‘A Prologue on Tragedy and Its Parts’ (1562) 111–13, 121n.57 Nancy, Jean-Luc ‘Mundus est Fabula’ (1978) 239–40, 241–2 Nashe, Thomas 82 Pierce Penniless Hits Supplication (1592) 79, 87–9 nation and nationhood 5, 11n.24, 18, 20, 30, 32n.14 A New Booke of Mistakes (1637) 70 new formalism see historical formalism news 4, 7, 150–66 as correspondence 153–5 as form 151 newsletters and newsbooks 4, 7, 80, 150, 152–3, 160 printed 152–4 serial 152, 154 Ovid 16, 17, 84 paratext 36, 77, 107–9 pedagogy see education penny godlinesses 190–1, 211–14 Perkins, William A Golden Chain (1591) 198–200, 202 A Grain of Mustard Seed (1611) 198–9, 204 Philologus, Benedictus ‘De tragoedia’ (1507) 111, 121n.53 phoenix and turtledove 35–44 passim plays see drama poesis and mimesis 220–1 poetry, poetics 119n.36, 120n.45, 233–9 prefaces 107–8 production see books Raleigh, Sir Walter 17, 45, 127 Rastell, John XII. Mery Jests, of the Wyddow Edyth (1525) 64 A Hundred Merry Tales (1526) 56–7, 64, 65, 66, 69 religious pamphlets 5, 7, 190 see also commodification; penny godlinesses republicanism 27

Salusbury, Sir John 37, 39, 44, 48 Seneca (the Younger) 16, 17, 20–1, 27, 34, 45–6, 82, 111 Epistulae morales 20 sententia, sententiae 21, 22, 26–7, 29, 45, 102, 107 Shakespeare, William 16, 34–49 passim, 55–71 passim, 83–6, 78–91 passim actors’ contributions 3, 10n.15; As You Like It 151 chronicle source of histories 149 Hamlet 55–6, 112, 251–2 1 Henry VI 149–151 2 Henry VI 155–7 3 Henry VI 7, 157–66 ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay’ [aka The Phoenix and the Turtle] 34, 37–41, 46–8 The Rape of Lucrece 78–87 passim Richard II 23, 26, 30 Sidney, Sir Philip 16, 17, 35, 39, 43, 65 Arcadia (1593) 80 Astrophil and Stella 233–9 Defence of Poetry (1595) 8, 39, 109, 112, 219–21, 232–42 passim Slade’s Case 7, 172, 174–7, 184–5 social textuality see manuscript coterie Sophocles 100–1, 108, 119n.34 Antigone (Latin translation: Watson, Thomas, 1581) 101, 108 Speed, John Theater of the Empire of Great Britain (1611) 18 Spenser, Edmund 16–18, 43, 83 The Faerie Queene 18 Stiblinus, Gasparus 107–9, 111, 115 argument for Euripides’ Orestes (1562) 107–8 Sylvester, Joshua 152 symptomatic reading 5, 11n.23 Tales and Quicke Answeres (1532) 63–4, 65 Tarlton, Richard 56 Tarlton’s Jests, and News Out of Purgatory (1613) 56, 62 theatre 91, 99–115 passim, 177 Topsell, Edward History of Foure-footed Beastes (1607) 20

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258 Index Tottel, Richard Tottel’s Miscellany [Songes and Sonettes] (1577) 24, 36 tragedy 99–115 passim tragicomedy 114 translation 8, 82, 101–7 passim, 124–41 passim Asia and the New World 126–7, 141, 144n.26 as commodification 131 facing pages 102 interlinear 105 as linguistic bookkeeping 129 as materialist theory 124 truth 140–1, 145n.41, 239–242 Vatum Chorus 35–40 de Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford 17

vernacular(s) 6, 16–17, 20, 24–5, 29, 80 Greek plays in 100–1 Virgil 17, 21, 242 Watson, Thomas The Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582) 81 see also Sophocles Wilson, Thomas Arte of Rhetorique (1560) 58, 64–5 wit 16, 28, 59 and jest 63 Wits, Fits, and Fancies (1614) 70–1 Wolfe, John 152–3, 154–5, 160 Wyatt, Thomas 24, 35