Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England

F. Connor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137438362
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This monograph makes clear how the format of the literary folio played a fundamental role in book history by encapsulating the unstable negotiation between commerce, cultural prestige, and the fundamental nature of the printed book.

CHAPTER 1

“Ungentle Hoarders”: From Manuscript to Print in Sidney’s Arcadias?

Manuscript Publication in Practice

Philip Sidney’s work began to appear in print during the 1590s, at a time when a vibrant market for literary publications was emerging and when newly profitable printed genres proliferated: dramatic publishing finally became viable in the decade; many editions of sonnets appeared, creating the decade’s sonnet fad; ballads and secular music started appearing regularly after 1595, and, by the decade’s end, Nicholas Ling and others turned the printed commonplace book into a viable literary genre.¹ Even so, literary work continued to be published in manuscript. Francis Meres’s praise of William Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends” in 1598 is perhaps the most famous evidence of the continued practice of manuscript publication: although Shakespeare’s sonnets would not be printed until 1609 (barring the two included in the 1599 collection, The Passionate Pilgrim), copies had circulated widely enough that a well-read gadfly such as Meres was aware of them.² In addition, presentation manuscripts such as the Sidney Psalter (1599), a verse translation of the Psalms by Philip and Mary Sidney, appeared in ornate editions intended for individual, elite readers rather than the bookbuying public.³

While these literary manuscripts and others circulated within and without many social groups, the manuscript poetry sought by publishers most frequently originated in Tudor courts and coteries consisting of writers from socially prominent households, such as the elite coteries Philip Sidney wrote for, Queen Elizabeth’s court, and the Pembroke coterie at Wilton. Such coteries, Arthur Marotti writes, broadly shared two fundamental characteristics: the manuscript texts they produced were communal, unfixed, and authorially collaborative, and they were exclusive, closed systems that published literary work “imbedded in specific social situations”; that is, often occasional and intended to be shared with a certain group, often as part of gift-giving, patronage, or to celebrate personal achievements or difficulties.⁴ Harold Love proposes the term “scribal community” for “groups . . . bonded by the exchange of manuscripts”; this definition provides a useful foundation for discussing manuscript circulation as a cultural practice within what has traditionally been called the “Sidney circle.” Love notes that “the socially circulated text [is] a group possession”; as such, literary coteries considered authorship a collaborative social function, a relationship between a work’s initial writer and the readers among whom the text circulates.⁵ Marotti terms such practices “social textuality,” meaning that compilers of manuscripts take on authorial roles: their additions are not merely corruptions, but rather emendations, parodies, responses, supplementation, and so on.⁶ Each version of a socially circulated work has its own unique authority. As a result of this communal exchange, Stephen May explains, Elizabethan courtiers adhered to the literary conventions of their particular groups, as they “drew upon a common and homogeneous body of courtly literature,” which is evinced by the many poems and genres shared by the surviving manuscripts of the period.⁷ Ultimately, the social value of courtier manuscript publication derived both from the written poem and its exchange; texts were not expected to be final, authoritative copies, but rather currency exchanged within the limited circle of courtier poets.⁸ Manuscript publication within literary coteries may thus be understood as performance as well as publication: the performed action of writing and publication remains the vehicle through which the important cultural work of exchange can occur.

The material condition of manuscript publications frequently corresponded to the social nature of scribally circulated work and the inherent instability of manuscript texts. Works shared within literary coteries circulated in loose sheets and booklets before they were included in more comprehensive manuscripts or print anthologies. Sidney’s description of writing Arcadia “in loose sheetes of paper” demonstrates that it circulated this way.⁹ As such, many forms of manuscript publication conceived of the book in a manner that may be considered antithetical to speculative trade publications. Manuscript books would be unique items designed for a small audience, thus requiring no marketing. They could be shaped by the scribe or reader who copied them, while printed books would offer a shared experience; a printed book was a text offered to the audience but without incorporating its input. The ongoing relationship between manuscript and print publication has generated a substantial body of scholarship that has attempted to discern if any cultural assessment of the value of each mode of publication guided the decision to publish in print or manuscript.¹⁰ This work has emphasized that the sociable practices of manuscript coterie publication sometimes involved print; manuscript and print media were not in opposition.¹¹ Joel B. Davis has written that the 1593 and 1598 editions of Sidney’s Arcadia “mark the absolute difference between print and manuscript culture, and open up the space in which an investigation of the interplay between print and manuscript culture may take place.”¹² This chapter will emphasize the continuities between manuscript and print cultures in these volumes by arguing that they embody a negotiation between elite manuscript practices and printed books, ultimately presenting an idea of the book as a collaborative object, responding to a marketplace for printed courtly literature by democratizing some practices of manuscript culture.

Literary Coteries and Manuscript Publication in the Popular Imagination

To describe how these books essentially worked with a mixed media, as well as identify the ongoing influence of coterie publication in printed literary books, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the practices of courtiers writing for the queen or coteries circulating work in the Pembroke household from how these practices were described to a general audience through their representations in printed books. This is because printed descriptions of literary coteries would contribute to making literature a desirable commodity, and would encourage writers affiliated with coteries to collaborate with members of the book trade to produce speculative trade books that would retain some of the exclusivity and cultural prestige of manuscript coterie publications. The development of a market for coterie literature, in tandem with nascent recognition of print’s potential influence on the shape of literary culture by people associated with coterie literature, resulted in, among other books, the literary folios of John Harington, Thomas Speght’s Chaucer, and Philip Sidney.

Popular descriptions of literary coteries often recognized that the exclusivity of such coteries allowed their participants to claim their work as particularly, if not uniquely, valuable. This idea prevails throughout The Arte of English Poesie, an early work of literary criticism first published in print by Richard Field in 1589 but which had previously circulated in manuscript sometime around the 1570s.¹³ The Arte admires manuscript publication as a socially privileged practice. The following excerpt is perhaps the locus classicus for our contemporary understanding of Elizabethan manuscript publication as a social practice:

And in her Majesties time that now is are sprong up an other crew of Courtly makers Noble men and Gentlemen of her Majesties owne seruauntes, who haue written excellently well, as it would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke with the rest, of which number is first that Noble Gentleman Edward Earle of Oxford. Thomas Lord of Buckhurst, when he was young, Henry Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Rawleigh, Master Edward Dyar, Master Fulke Greuelle, Gascon [Gascoigne], Britton, Turberuille, and a great many other learned Gentlemen. (61)

This catalog of courtly makers orders the writers by rank, from high to low, suggesting that literary coteries operated within the strictures of class and aristocratic status.¹⁴ Although the individuals are named, their relation to the Queen primarily identifies them: The Arte collectively terms them “courtly makers” and “her Maiesties owne seruauntes.” Their work has limited individual agency—although named as authors, even the Arte’s author (who is, fittingly, anonymous) cannot reveal the individual “doings” of these poets, and the suggestion that their work needs to be “found out” and “made public” indicates the sort of limited field of production inhabited by Elizabethan courtiers.¹⁵

The Arte argues that such writings remain private not simply out of deference to their authors, nor out of a culturally proscribed disapproval of print, but because courtly writers perceived that the general reading public would not properly appreciate their work. In the first section of the book, “Of Poets and Poesie,” the author claims that courtly poetry—that written by “learned princes”—is not widely published because in England, “as well Poets as Poesie are despised . . . subject to scorne and derision.” This is the result of “the barbarous ignoraunce of the time, and pride of many Gentlemen, and others, whose grosse heads not being brought up or acquainted with any excellent Arte.” Because this audience of “Gentlemen” associates the imaginative work of courtly makers with “superflouous knowledges and vayne sciences,” the courtly poets are inclined to keep their work to themselves (18). This section of The Arte ends with a supplication to Queen Elizabeth, praising her “most milde and gracious iudgement” upon his work, which he presents as “the best and greatest of those seruices I can” perform for the Queen (63). By closing with a statement on the need to write poetry in the service of the Queen, The Arte attempts to wall itself from such a “barbarous” audience, restricting its advice on poetry to this rarified coterie.¹⁶

The Arte affirms that readers and writers associated literary coteries with cultural esteem, and its descriptions of the practice seem to have influenced Marotti, Love, Wendy Wall, and others who argue that print was thought an inferior medium for literary publication because its potential as a stabilizing and authorizing force undermined the privileged practices of manuscript publication.¹⁷ Such arguments contrast print’s apparent fixity with the vibrancy of courtier manuscript publication, in which the fluidity of text and authorship invests courtly literary work with a prestige that the book trade depreciates when it turns this work into commodity and changes their authors into marketable creative agents, rather than defining them as privileged representatives of a hierarchical literary and political system.¹⁸ At best, printed books attempted to avoid a “stigma of print” by trying to disguise themselves as coterie publications; for instance, Wall argues that manuscript was the default medium for poetry—“the book was an alien environment for most sixteenth-century poetry,” and, because of this, sonneteers of the 1590s went “to extraordinary lengths to define their poems as invitations to love issued within a manuscript system of exchange” even when seeing their books into print.¹⁹

Printed books did have the potential to disrupt the performative elements of manuscript publication, as when Marotti observes when he argues that the Sidney publications of the 1590s “fundamentally changed the culture’s attitudes toward the printing of the secular lyrics of individual writers, lessening the social disapproval of such texts and helping to incorporate what had essentially been regarded as literary ephemera into the body of durable canonical texts.”²⁰ The canonicity allowed by print comes at a price because printed books “yield a distorted picture of literary history or of the place of literary texts in the life of the society that produced or received them” (xiii). In short, Marotti identifies the textual instability of manuscript publication as an inevitable, but acceptable and welcome, outcome of “social textuality.” However, for Marotti, once a poem enters the book trade, social textuality transforms into textual corruption, and the printed text distorts where the manuscript text was collaborative.²¹ While, as Marotti claims, a printed text should not be automatically considered the authoritative witness to a literary work, a printed text is always another witness to manuscript transmission, one that possesses its own valid social and literary contexts and claims to textual authority. As such, printed texts did not preclude further collaboration: in the case of Arcadia, for instance, as we will see, the 1590 quarto overseen by Fulke Greville motivated Mary Sidney to publish her own version of the romance. Although print may stabilize a particular literary text, the potential for collaboration on the literary work remains undeterred by print.

Ungentle Hoarders: The Elitism of Literary Coteries

Steven Mentz, writing about the 1591 first printing of Astrophel and Stella, concludes that the Sidney publication of the 1590s reveal that “print and manuscript cultures seem less separate than formerly believed . . . The boundary between print and manuscript was negotiable.²² The book trade offered one locus where authors and publishers negotiated the boundaries between print and manuscript, and the literary folios of Harington and Sidney would be attuned to these boundaries. These folios, however, result from a negotiation of print and manuscript publication that began in the print miscellanies of the late sixteenth century. Throughout the later half of the sixteenth century, literary coterie practices would gradually become familiar to readers of printed books as work initially published in manuscript began to be printed and sold. An unintended consequence of the exclusivity of manuscript publication was that the manufactured scarcity of courtly v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   “Ungentle Hoarders”: From Manuscript to Print in Sidney’s Arcadias?
• 2   Samuel Daniel’s Works and the History and Theory of the Book
• 3   Ben Jonson’s Workes and Bibliographic Integrity
• 4   “Whatever you do, buy”: Literary Folios and the Marketplace in Shakespeare, Taylor, and Beaumont and Fletcher
• Epilogue: Henry Herringman’s Restoration Folios
• Notes
• Index