Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature

By Manchester University Press

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? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing.

The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten 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 and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection’s essays exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111029

Book preview

Introduction

Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry

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

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 conference.

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.

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).

16  Alan Stewart, ‘The making of writing in Renaissance England: re-thinking authorship 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 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.

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.

Part I

Forming literature

1

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

Heather James

THE 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