Professional Documents
Culture Documents
and
Literacy
in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
A r i z o n a St u d i e s in t h e M id d l e A ges and th e R e n a is s a n c e
G eneral Editors
Robert E. Bjork
Volume 8
Reading
AND
Literacy
in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Edited
Ian Frederick Moulton
BREPOLS
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Reading and literacy : in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. - (Arizona studies
in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ; v. 8)
1. Literacy - Europe - History - To 1500 - Congresses
2. Literacy - Europe - History - 16th century - Congresses 3.Books
and reading - Europe - History - To 1500 - Congresses 4.Books and
reading - Europe - History - 16th century - Congresses
I.Moulton, Ian Frederick, 1964- II.Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies III.Renaissance Society of America
302.2'244'094'0902
ISBN 2503513964
D/2004/0095/27
ISBN: 2-503-51396-4
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction xi
IA N FREDERICK MOULTON
à*
Poems as Props in Love ’s Labor’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing 127
FREDER ICK KIEFER
Index 187
Acknowledgments
Many of the essays collected in this volume were presented as papers at the joint
meetings of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Ren
aissance Society o f America in Scottsdale, Arizona, in April of 2002. Thanks are due to
all who contributed to making that conference a success, especially Robert Bjork, Di
rector of ACMRS, William Gentrup, Assistant Director, and Laura Roosen, ACMRS
program coordinator.
I would also like to take the opportunity to thank all the anonymous readers who
gave useful and insightful suggestions on each of the essays in the volume. You shall
remain anonymous here, but you all know who you are (and so do I).
And lastly thanks are due to Karen Lemiski and the editorial staff at Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies (MRTS), for doing such a lovely and efficient job on the
production of the volume.
When you have so many good people to work with, editing doesn’t seem like much
of a job, really.
IA N F R E D E R IC K M O U L T O N
tainly wrote things down. Indeed, if he had not, we would know much less about
Socrates.
It is tempting, perhaps, to construct a history of literacy which is linear and progres
sive. In such a history, Western civilization, arising from the primordial mist of Homeric
oral culture, would emerge into the sunlight of literacy in fifth century Athens, and then
move onwards and upwards to the highly literate civic and legal culture of the Roman
Republic and Empire. But such a history is fantasy. Over two thousand years after
Homer, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath still cannot read (although that does not stop her lib
erally quoting authoritative texts to support her arguments and opinions). In ancient
Rome literacy was confined to a small proportion of the population, and it was limited
to an even smaller group in the centuries after the fall of the Western Empire. Majority
literacy had to wait for the nineteenth century in industrial countries, and later else
where. Even now, 2500 years after Homer, there are estimated to be one billion illiterate
people worldwide, about 26% of the global population. Two thirds of these are women.1
In Bangladesh in 2003 the basic literacy rate is only 41.4%. In Egypt it is 55.3% and in
Saudi Arabia 163% .2 And rates for women’s literacy are lower than these national
averages. Using a somewhat stricter definition, 22% of all American adults are said to
be “functionally illiterate,” and in Miami the figure is as high as 63%.3 In Washington,
DC, the capital of the most militarily powerful and technologically advanced country
the world has ever seen, 40% of the population are said to be reading at a third grade
level, which means, according to the mayor’s office, “4 out of 10 residents can't com
plete a job application or advance beyond an entry-level position.”4
If Odysseus serves as a reminder that reading and intelligence are not necessarily
related, the Wife of Bath demonstrates the ways in which literacy is socially determined:
Even in the most literate cultures — and Chaucer’s England was not one of these —
who reads, what they read, and how they read are affected by social factors such as
gender, ethnicity, class, wealth, and status. It is an interesting exercise to go through the
social panorama of the pilgrims introduced in Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Can
terbury Tales and to see what role reading plays in each of their lives.
At the top of the social scale is the Knight. Can he read? No one cares. What
matters is that he can fight well in his Lord’s war. The elegant Squire can “well purtreye
and wryte” (96), but in his case writing is a fashionable accomplishment, like singing,
drawing and dancing. He is being praised for his calligraphy as much as for his reading.
The clerical characters, such as the Prioress, the Monk, and the Friar can all presumably
read, but none of them spend much time at it — they neglect reading as they neglect the
other responsibilities of their position, preferring banquets, singing, and hunting to
books and study. When there are horses to ride and hares to chase, why should the
Monk “studie, and make himselven wood, / Upon a book in cloistre alwey to poure”
(184-185)?
The aristocratic world the Prioress and the Monk aspire to does not value reading
highly. In fact, the two characters in the General Prologue most noteworthy for their
reading are two of the poorest and most humble: the Clerk and the Parson: the Clerk,
a student at Oxford, looks hollow and rides a horse as lean as a rake. He lacks the
worldly skills to get a benefice and devotes all his resources (as well as those of his
friends and family) to books and learning. His voluntary poverty is a bit ridiculous, but
admirable nonetheless, and although Chaucer smiles at him, he respects his knowledge
and his moral character. Even more admirable is the idealized figure of the poor Parson.
He too is a student, a “lerned man” (480) who serves as an intellectual, moral, and spiri
tual guide for his parishioners. For both these pilgrims, reading is associated with re
ligious and intellectual vocation, and more importantly, with moral teaching and selfless
ministry to the larger community.
As one might expect, Renaissance heroes are more literate than classical or medi
eval ones. After all, the invention of printing and rise of the book market made reading
material much more broadly available in the sixteenth century than ever before. Not
only can Hamlet read, he can also write bad poetry, and forge death warrants. Indeed,
if Hamlet were illiterate, he would have sailed to his death in England, unable to read
the orders given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. At a slightly lower social level, Shake
speare’s Beatrice and Benedick, the quarrelling lovers of Much Ado About Nothing, not
only spar verbally, but also write awkward love poems (5.4.86-90). The illiterate rebel
Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI may dream of killing all the lawyers and anyone else who can
read (4.2), but he is a far from heroic figure and the play as a whole is not sympathetic
to him. In Midsummer Night’s Dream all the urban artisans, from Bottom the Weaver
to Snug the Joiner can read well enough to follow their scripts, even if the author, Peter
Quince, has trouble with punctuation (5.1.108-117).
The rise of literacy in the sixteenth century is undoubtedly related to the increas
ingly important role of reading in devotional practice. In the medieval period, as we can
see in Chaucer’s General Prologue, reading is associated primarily with the clergy and
theological scholars like the Clerk. The Protestant insistence on the importance of read
ing scripture among the lay community, and the wide availability both of vernacular
Bibles and devotional tracts helped insure that reading became an important part of the
daily life of ordinary families. The widespread practice of family Bible reading affected
not only the literate members of the household, but also the illiterate who would attend
and listen. The appearance of the printed book thus had an impact even on those who
could not read.
Literacy is often thought of simply as the ability to read the standard form of the
dominant language in a particular culture. But literacy is much more complicated than
Xll IAN FREDERICK MOULTON
this simple measure would suggest. For one thing, ability to read differs enormously
from one individual to another. A person who can read a street sign or a label on a
toothpaste tube is not necessarily capable of reading Joyce’s Ulysses, a technical
manual, or a scientific journal. Someone who can read the latest research in genetics
may have trouble reading older texts, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. A person skilled in
reading seventeenth century poetry may be confused by twenty-first century legal
documents.
Literacy can be defined broadly or narrowly, and it is important to do both. A
narrow definition would stress the ability to read and write the common language within
a given culture. A broader definition would address a more abstract ability to com
municate effectively, not only in terms of reading and writing, but also in terms of
speaking and gesture, the codes of marketing, for example, or fashion. The narrow defi
nition allows a specific focus on the importance of reading text; the broad definition
allows one to address larger questions of social communication.
Both broad and narrow concepts of literacy involve two related but distinct
functions: First, the ability to understand and process coded information (to read in the
broadest sense). Second, the ability to communicate one’s thoughts and feelings to
others within these codes (specifically, to write, but also, perhaps, to speak, or to give
an effective television interview). To be fully literate, one must do more than just de
code; one must also be able to communicate in turn.
Limiting the definition of literacy to “the ability to read and write” is methodologi
cally useful, for it allows us to focus on just how important reading and writing are in
a given situation. In our own supposedly “visual culture” reading and writing remain
crucially important, and arguably constitute the major dividing line between the
empowered and the powerless. It is useful for literary scholars to remember just how
practical reading and writing are: For most people, the crucial question is not whether
they can read Hamlet, it is whether they can read the help wanted ads, their mortgage,
or the street signs. Can they write a letter of application for employment?
The broader definition of literacy, however, is the older one. The Latin adjective
“litteratus” means not only able to read and write, but also “learned,” and “critically
skilled.” This ancient definition is a reminder that before the modern era knowledge of
reading and writing was difficult to acquire without a certain amount of wealth and
leisure. In such cultures the ability to read begins as a caste mark, and has connotations
beyond mere “information transmission.” This tendency is especially marked in ancient
Egyptian or Chinese culture, where non-alphabetic writing systems both permitted com
munication among a learned elite and ensured that information would be inaccessible
to those outside that elite. In early modern England a similar situation evolved around
the use of different handwriting styles. Women, for example, were often encouraged to
write and read the more standardized “italic” hand, and not the relatively idiosyncratic
“secretary” hand.
In English, “literate” is a late medieval term — it first appears in texts from the
1450s, and refers generally to a familiarity with letters and the cultural sophistication
such familiarity is supposed to impart. Like the Latin “litteratus,” it is almost a synonym
Introduction xiii
for “educated,” or “cultured.” The narrower definition, “able to read and write” dates
only from the late nineteenth century. This is also the period when the abstract term
“literacy” is coined — a back-formation, incidentally, from “illiteracy.” This expansion
of the vocabulary of literacy comes just at the point when, for the first time, universal
literacy was seen as both possible and desirable. Reading and writing were not high
priorities for early modern farmers. Nor, arguably, need they have been. In a pre
industrial society, where most people remain tied to the land in some fashion, the value
of literacy is very different than it is for us.
Although one may generalize and say that literacy is always a good thing, it was not
always as crucial for day to day life as it is now. As illiterate Odysseus reminds us,
ability to read is the result of education and familiarity with particular forms of written
discourse, but is not necessarily an indication of intelligence. My grandfather was an
illiterate fisherman who worked on trawlers on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Though I am “literate” in several languages, on a fishing boat in a rough sea he would
be much more intelligent and useful than I am, not least in his ability to process and
communicate information (think of the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Tempest, in
which the common sailors order the King and his counselors out of the way because
they are no use in a storm). In a pre-industrial society, the problem for an illiterate fish
erman or farmer is not that reading is necessary for their way of life; rather the inability
to read insures that they will not be able to change that way of life: they will not be able
to become clerks or merchants, or clerics, or lawyers, for they cannot read contracts or
scripture.
Literacy, then, is not simply a matter of being literate or illiterate, but an continuum
measuring the ability to interpret and communicate. No matter how educated we are, we
remain illiterate in many contexts. There are always more languages we can’t read than
those we can. The same is true of social or cultural literacy. A person who can rattle off
the names of great authors and state capitals is likely to be less knowledgeable about
other areas — hip hop music, for example, or medieval architecture.
Because literacy is always partial, the history of reading has great importance. Not
only do different people read different texts, but the same text may be read quite dif
ferently at different times and places. Understanding how people read and what they
read in a given period gives enormous insight into their values and priorities, their op
portunities and their limitations.
Unfortunately, detailed information about premodern reading practice is very diffi
cult to come by. Even today, for most people reading is not a particularly self-conscious
activity. Most people do not keep track of how much time per day they read, nor what
proportion of their reading is work-related, what proportion is practical, and what for
recreation. We do not read a novel the same way we read a newspaper, or an encyclo
pedia, to say nothing of the differences between print and online reading.
Direct evidence for early modern reading practices is notoriously difficult to find.
Some readers have left traces of themselves through their marginalia, but most have not.
Indeed, as is obvious from our own experience of reading, it is quite possible for a
reader to annotate some texts in great detail, others not at all.
XIV IAN FREDERICK MOULTON
Some evidence for reading practice can be found indirectly, through the ways in
which publishers and authors present books to their readers. For although prefaces and
addresses to readers were no doubt often ignored or skipped by readers eager to get to
the main text, they nonetheless tell us what hopes authors and publishers had for their
works and how they wanted or expected their readers to respond. Other evidence of
reading practice can be found through the ways in which readers adapted and reworked
the texts they read: early modern English poetry miscellanies are a rich source of such
adaptations. Christopher Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd to his Love” spawned a host
of responses, some from other leading poets such as Sir Walter Raleigh. Poems by John
Donne, such as “Valediction, Forbidding Mourning,” and “The Flea” were rewritten in
different meter and rhyme-schemes, perhaps so they could be set to music.5 Thomas
Nashe’s erotic verse known as “The Choice of Valentines” survives in six manuscript
copies, three of which make major alterations to the narrative of the poem.6
All such evidence is partial and anecdotal, but although the surviving record does
not permit statistical accuracy it does offer vital information for a better understanding
of how readers in earlier periods dealt with the texts they read. The essays collected here
explore late medieval and early modern reading in many forms, inscribing a movement
from Latin to the vernacular, from the penitential practices of late medieval readers to
the bustle of the early modern book market, where people barely able to read cram their
pockets with books. They deal with different genres of text, from devotional poems in
manuscript, to popular verse in print; from texts of aristocratic entertainments to schol
arly treatises. They describe a wide variety of readers: medieval noblemen, Italian
humanists, English women; “from the most able to him that can but spell,” as the editors
of Shakespeare’s First Folio put it. They situate reading in many social and literary
contexts, from the representation of reading in stage plays to the private reading of play
texts. They examine varying evidence of reading practices and priorities: marginalia,
translations, rewritings. As a group they suggest how vital and exciting a field of inquiry
the history of reading has become.
The volume opens with Martha Dana Rust’s essay “Revertere ! Penitence, Marginal
Commentary and the Recursive Path of Right Reading,” which explores the relation
between medieval reading practices and penitential self-examination. The anonymous
fifteenth-century allegorical poem “Revertere” presents reading and penitence as paral
lel processes of self-discovery. Hunting a pheasant on a beautiful morning, the narrator
of the poem catches his leg on a briar bush. Each leaf of the bush is inscribed with the
5 Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY :
Cornell University Press, 1995), 152-59.
6 Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 188-93.
Introduction XV
Latin “revertere” or “turn again,” a textual exhortation that leads the narrator to abandon
his pursuit of earthly pleasure (the pheasant, the hunt itself) and reflect on the state of
his soul. As Rust demonstrates, the allegory here is twofold. The briar functions both
as a literal text and a part of the Book of Nature. It communicates its message to the
hunter both through its natural qualities, the pricks and thorns which catch him up, but
also through its written message, a clear sign legible only to one who is learned and
literate in the medieval sense — someone who can read Latin and knows how to use
glosses to interpret text. Self-examination is thus made analogous to reading and, as
Rust suggests, it is only possible through the discipline of medieval reading practices,
in which marginal glosses are used to both elaborate on the meaning of the text and to
create an interpretive distance between the text and the reader. The briar functions as an
emblem of the need for reflexive reading, instructing the carefree or careless reader to
turn back and read more deeply.
Whereas Rust’s essay focuses on one particular text to find a paradigm of late
medieval reading practice, Burt Kimmelman’s “The Trope of Reading in the Fourteenth
Century” provides a broad overview of medieval reading in general. Kimmelman sees
the late medieval period as a crucial transition between earlier, comparatively illiterate
society and later, modern society, defined and in some sense brought into being by
widespread literacy and the printed book. Surveying late medieval writing from Heloise
and Abelard to Chaucer and Julian of Norwich, Kimmelman, like Rust, stresses the
parallels between reading and self-examination in the period, and ends by asserting that
“in the fourteenth century, what is new is the autonomy of the reader.”
While Rust and Kimmelman both explore the significance of reading within late
medieval culture, Michael Ullyot looks at the ways medieval writers such as Chaucer
and Lydgate were read in the Renaissance. “English Auctores and Authorial Readers”
examines two adaptations of medieval texts written in the early seventeenth century:
The Life and Death o f Hector (1614), a modernization of John Lydgate’s Troy Book,
and Sir Jonathan Sidnam’s Paraphrase vpon The three first Bookes o f Chaucers Troilus
and Cresida (c. 1630). Although both Chaucer and Lydgate were valued as poets in the
seventeenth century, their Middle English was seen as largely incomprehensible. Thus
if their texts were to be preserved, their language required updating. Ullyot contends
that such modernizations represent evidence of individual reading practice — by
looking at the changes made one can see what the modernizers valued in the originals,
as well as what they dismissed as irrelevant. He also demonstrates that Chaucer’s
canonical status at the founder of English poetry ensured that his language was adapted
less than Lydgate’s was. Modernization was felt to be necessary, but in Chaucer’s case
“it was more reluctant and provisional.”
Ullyot deals with the ways in which English Renaissance readers responded to their
own literary history. A. E. B. Coldiron examines the ways in which foreign writing was
transmitted into England, surveying English verse translations from French in the early
sixteenth century. Coldiron begins by noting that between the establishment of the first
English printing press in 1476 and the publication of Tottel’s miscellany in 1557 nearly
half of English printed verse was translated, and almost a third of that verse was trans-
XVI IAN FREDERICK MOULTON
lated from French. Although traditional histories of Renaissance English lyric poetry
have stressed the Italian roots of English verse, the amount of Italian verse translated
and printed in the early sixteenth century was only one sixth of that translated from
French. This translated French verse has largely been ignored by literary historians, in
part because of its perceived low quality, yet Coldiron argues convincingly for both its
social and literary significance.
The preponderance of French material is not surprising. England was intimately
engaged with France politically, culturally, and economically, and had been ever since
the Norman Conquest. English attitudes to French culture were (and still are) ambivalent
and conflicted. As Coldiron demonstrates, in the early sixteenth century (as perhaps
today) admiration for French elegance and sophistication was mixed with mistrust and
xenophobia. Coldiron divides the published translations from French into four main
thematic groups, (1) Religious works, (2) works on gender, (3) critiques of court and the
powerful, and (4) practical advice or “low-georgic” works. Her essay surveys each of
these genres and ends by encouraging further study of this culturally significant but ne
glected material.
Brian Richardson’s essay, “Inscribed Meanings: Authorial Self-Fashioning and
Readers’ Annotations in Sixteenth-Century Italian Printed Books” is a detailed survey
of typography and marginalia as evidence for Italian reading practice. Richardson ex
plores both the meanings inscribed in texts/or readers by authors, publishers, and type
setters, and also the meanings inscribed in texts by readers in the form of marginalia. On
the one hand, sixteenth century Italian authors such as Pietro Bembo and Ludovico
Ariosto paid increasing attention to the specific ways in which they presented them
selves to readers through typography and page layout. On the other hand, books from
the period are rich in manuscript marginalia, detailing the specific responses of indi
vidual readers to the texts they read. Richardson explores the role of printed books in
gift exchanges between authors and potential patrons, as well as the role of printed
dedications and commendatory letters in prefaces. Although there has been much study
of the dedications, typography, and marginalia of English books in recent years, Rich
ardson’s essay is one of the first to address these subjects in the context of the much
larger and generally more sophisticated Italian book trade.
Kathryn DeZur’s essay “ ‘Vaine Books’ and Early Modern Women Readers,”
examines another area which has received much attention in recent years — women’s
reading. Drawing on women’s manuscripts held in the Folger Shakespeare library,
DeZur demonstrates that seventeenth-century women were able to read far more than
the materials recommended for them by male authorities. The three women she studies,
Anne Corwallis Cambpell, Countess of Argyll, Elizabeth Clarke, and Lady Anne
Southwell, all made manuscript copies of texts thought unsuitable for women. Besides
examining the manuscripts owned by these women, DeZur also discusses the manu
script inventory of books owned by Lady Anne Southwell and her second husband in
an attempt to discover the range of Lady Anne’s reading. Looking at Southwell’s verse
reworkings of material by Suetonius and Sir Walter Raleigh, DeZur, like Ullyot, demon-
Introduction xvii
strates how such adaptations can provide fascinating evidence of reading practices, re
vealing what an individual reader found striking and significant in a given text.
Claiming that “in Shakespeare's romantic comedies, to be in love is to write,”
Frederick Kiefer explores the staged reading of love poetry in Love's Labor's Lost and
Much Ado About Nothing. Kiefer contrasts the use of poems as props in Shakespeare’s
early comedies with a more abstract use of love poetry in later plays. Both Love's La
bor's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing contain scenes where a character overhears that
someone is in love with them and in both cases the evidence cited is love poetry. In the
former play, the poems are produced as props and read out to the audience — a staging
that provides ocular proof of the poems’ existence but is somewhat theatrically risky
since, as Kiefer points out, the reading of lyric poems is inherently undramatic. In the
later play, the poems are not produced (in fact do not exist), but even the rumor of their
existence is enough proof for Benedick to believe Beatrice loves him. Kiefer notes that
the more sophisticated and abstract use of love poetry which characterizes the later play
is accompanied by a skepticism about the adequacy of love poetry to communicate true
passion. Later in the play, when Benedick is truly in love, he tries to write a poem and,
comically, cannot. True affection is thus revealed as inarticulate — and one might recall
that Polonius comes to believe Hamlet truly loves Ophelia because he writes such bad
poetry to her.
Whereas Kiefer focuses on the theatrical staging of reading, Lauren Shohet’s essay
“The Masque as Book” does the opposite, exploring the reading of theatrical texts.
Masques were the most visual and spectacular form of early modern theater, and per
haps because of this, scholars have tended to neglect the popularity of their published
scripts. Shohet begins with the example of The Subject's Joy, a 1660 masque celebrating
the restoration of Charles II, that was actually published and circulated before its per
formance. She demonstrates that printed masque texts were produced throughout the
seventeenth century, and contends that masque must therefore be seen as a “bimedial
form,” a private and aristocratic performance that also exists as a publicly marketed
document. Shohet points out that masque texts often contained coded political infor
mation relevant to their production at court and in an era before newspapers this alone
could account for some of their popularity as published texts. Focussing on the early
Stuart period, 1603-40, Shohet discusses several examples of provocative masque texts
and provides a catalogue of all masques entered in the Stationers’ Register during the
period. She demonstrates that far from being of ephemeral interest, many masques
remained popular over long periods of time, and that masques were so well established
as a genre of text that they appear as a distinct category in bookseller’s catalogues.
While it is difficult to tell precisely how readers read the texts of masques they had not
seen performed, Shohet examines the often elaborate stage directions for evidence of
how authors wanted their texts to be imagined.
In the volume’s final essay, Heidi Bray man Hackel addresses an issue which is
crucial to the volume as a whole — how are we to define literacy in the early modern
period? The question is much more complex than simply measuring what percentage
of the population were able to sign their names. In early modern England reading was
X V lll IAN FREDERICK MOULTON
universally taught before writing, and thus many people who could not write would
nonetheless have been able to read. Such basic reading skills, though possibly wide
spread, have left almost no trace in the historical record — how could they, since the
people in question could not write? Despite this difficulty, Hackel succeeds in finding
a wide variety of references to rudimentary reading in the period — in prefaces ad
dressed to readers, in descriptions of teaching children to read, and even as metaphors
in lyric poetry. Hackel’s discussion of rudimentary writing skills is similarly nuanced,
pointing out that those who could not master the fairly difficult skill of writing with pen
and ink on paper could nonetheless have written on walls or carved letters in wooden
furniture. Moreover, Hackel demonstrates that even those who could not read none
theless bought books — because they wanted to have a sacred text near them, because
someone else would read to them, or merely (in one documented case) motivated by a
pure desire for acquisition. Thus even the illiterate have their place in the history of
early modern reading.
Revertere!
Penitence, Marginal Commentary,
and the Recursive Path of
Eight Reading
“Stondeth upon the weyes, and seeth and axeth ofolde pathes (that
is to seyn, ofolde sentences) which is the goode wey, / and walketh
in that wey, and ye shal fynde refresshynge fo r youre soûles. ”
(X.76-77)
A penance — he commends penitence as “the goode wey”: a path that “may not
fayle to man ne to woman that thurgh synne hath mysgoon fro the righte wey of
Jerusalem celestial.”1Siegfried Wenzel has pointed out that the image of a path or way
1 Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), X.79.
Earlier versions of this essay were read at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in
Kalamazoo Michigan in 2002 and at the 2003 conference of the Illinois Medieval Association in
Chicago. I am grateful to the anonymous reader for Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance and to Susanna Fein for their generous interest in this study; for any remaining
infelicities in it, I claim sole authorship.
2 MARTHA DANA RUST
A careful study of the poem’s depiction of this second, self-reflexive turn discloses
a supplementary series of turns, in which the word revertere applies to the process of
reading as well as to the practice of penance. In that portrayal, the author of this poem
figures the activity of self-inspection as one akin to reading. “Revertere” thus exempli
fies the culmination of the closely intertwined histories of reading and self-reflection
during the Middle Ages: the moment at which, as Brian Stock puts it, “ff]or the reflec
tive reader, the text and the self became interdependent.”5 The author of “Revertere”
links text and self with a surprising degree of specificity, however, for he represents the
activity of self-“reading” as one that is akin to reading a particular kind of page: one that
includes both a text and a gloss, or marginal commentary. In doing so, he figures this
crucial stage in the penitential process as a specific kind of readerly journey, one that
Sources, ed. J. H. Baxter and Charles Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) lists
thirteenth-century sources in which revertere has the sense “to send back, turn back, reverse” and
a 1386 source in which it has the sense “to overthrow, be upset.”
“Revertere” is indexed by Carleton Fairchild Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins as number
1454 in Index o f Middle English Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943, hereafter
IMEV). It survives in three manuscript copies; the most complete of these is in a mid-fifteenth-
century devotional and didactic miscellany, London, Lambeth Palace MS 853. For a description
of this manuscript, see Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue o f the Manuscripts in
the Library o f Lambeth Palace: The Medieval Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1932); for lists of its contents, see Frederick J. Furnivall, Hymns to the Virgin and Christ,
The Parliament o f Devils, and Other Religious Poems, Chiefly from the Archbishop o f Canter
bury’s Lambeth MS. no. 853, Early English Text Society 24 (London: Triibner, 1867), xv-xvi)
and O. S. Pickering, Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library, including those formerly in Sion
College Library, Index of Middle English Prose Handlist 13 (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999).
The Lambeth witness to the poem has also been edited by Furnivall in Hymns to the Virgin and
Christ (91-94). “Revertere” also appears in Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.9.38, a mid
fifteenth-century commonplace book described by A. G. Rigg in A Glastonbury Miscellany o f the
Fifteenth Century: A Descriptive Index o f Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. 0.9.38 (Oxford: Ox
ford University Press, 1968), 1-9. Rigg also provides the beginning and concluding lines of this
witness of the poem and discusses it in relation to the other two copies (51-52). A much
abbreviated version of the poem, including only stanzas 1-3 and 11, appears in Richard Hill’s
commonplace book, Oxford, Balliol College Library MS 354, a codex of the early sixteenth
century. The manuscript and its contents are described in detail by Roman Dyboski in Songs,
Carols, and other Miscelleneous Poems, from the Balliol MS. 354, Richard Hill ’s Commonplace-
Book, Early English Text Society Extra Series 101 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), xiii—
lix, who also edits its version of “Revertere” (80-81 ). The edition of “Revertere” that follows this
essay is based on Lambeth 853 and includes variants from Trinity 0.9.38; all quotations from the
poem refer to this edition.
5 Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: Univer
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 22.
4 MARTHA DANA RUST
also proceeds along a twisting path in which each turning-away is linked to a turning-
back. This figurative association between self-study and the practice of reading a
glossed text works to commend the degree of literacy required to negotiate such a page
layout as an asset to one’s performance of penitence; at the same time, it exposes peni
tential practice as one that subjects a person’s deeds to the same kind of institutionally
invested interpretation that glossing and marginal commentary brings to bear on a text.
Finally, in a register apart from its exploration of penitence as reading, “Revertere” also
teaches a subtle lesson about the discipline the text and gloss format imposes on readers
of real books with real paper or parchment pages.
In order to explicate the several turning paths that are represented in the poem “Re
vertere,” I shall myself adhere in what follows to the multivalent admonition inscribed
on the wondrous briar bush the poem features: in my first “turn” to the poem, I shall
situate it within the tradition of penitential lyrics, focusing in particular on its promotion
of self-study; this analysis will make way for a return that considers the poem’s por
trayal of penitential self-examination as a technique that is analogous to reading a text
and gloss. A final re-reading of the poem will discuss its teachings on the disciplinary
effects of real marginal commentaries on real readers. In each of these “turns” to the
poem, its wondrous and vexing briar bush will point the way.
The speaker soon sees a pheasant take flight; his spaniel pursues it enthusiastically as
the speaker sends his hawk aloft. It was, the speaker recalls, “a deinteuose si3t” (8), and
he ran after pheasant, spaniel, and hawk “wzt/z a ful glad diere” (IO).6Quickly, however,
everything changes: the speaker’s summer frolic is abruptly interrupted when a briar
bush catches at his leg. As he recounts, “I spurned ful soone on my way. / mi leg was
hent al wz't/z a brere” (11-12). The briar, he goes on to say, “dide me grijf ’ (13), and
turning towards it, he makes the surprising discovery that each of its leaves is inscribed
with a word, the word revertere: “soone it made me to tzzrne a3e. / ffor he bare written
6 For “deinteuose,” the Middle English Dictionary (in Middle English Compendium, ed.
Francis McSparran, <http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m7mec/>, hereafter MED) has “Delightful, ele
gant, beautiful; (b) luxurious; (c) delicious, epicurean.”
Revertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 5
in Query leef. / f)is word in latyn, reuertere” (14-16). Upon reading the text on this odd
plant, the speaker’s heart sinks, and he abandons his pursuit of the pheasant: “myn herte
fil douft unto my too / . . . / 1 leete myn hauke 7 feysaunt fare” (19-21).
Following his report of this marvel, the speaker detours for one stanza (stanza 4)
from his first-person, recollective narrative to note the definition of the word revertere
— “L/rne a3en” (26) — and to register a stern admonition that clearly links the sense
of the word — and the gist of the poem — to the penitential imperative of self-
examination:
Advising readers to “{)inke hertili” and “rijfe” on both their outer and inner lives, this
commentary is reminiscent of many a penitential text. John Mirk’s Instructions for
Parish Priests, for instance, which provides a lengthy model of priestly questioning in
the confessional encounter, advises priests to urge parishioners to search their minds
carefully for sins in need of being confessed, by exhorting them, “Be-^enke ^e wel,
soné, I rede, / Of \)y synne and \)y mysdede.”; The priest is also to remind the penitent
that sin may be in thought as well as in deed, by saying, “Low myßte synge als sore in
}x>ght / As Jdou Ipat dede hadest I-wroght.”78 Looking beyond the specific situation of
confession, the Pricke o f Conscience advocates self-study as the “grund of al vertus”
and, like the author of “Revertere” in the stanza just quoted, sees it as the way to ever
lasting life: “For he J3at knawes wele, and can se / What him-self was, and es, and sal
be / A wyser man may he be talde”:
7 John Mirk, Instructions fo r Parish Priests, ed. Edward Peacock, Early English Text So
ciety 31 (London: Kegan Paul, 1902), 883-84. John Mirk flourished around 1405; Instructions
survives in three manuscripts, the earliest of which was written “not later” than 1450 in the view
of Peacock (v).
8 Mirk, Instructions, 965-66.
9 Pricke o f Conscience, ed. Richard Morris (Berlin: Asher, 1863), 209-13 and 231-34.
6 MARTHA DANA RUST
Like a handful of other Middle English penitential lyrics, then, “Revertere” begins with
a playful chanson d ’aventure opening but quickly reveals its monitory mission.10
Adding emphasis to the poem’s penitential message, each of its eight-line stanzas
ends with the refrain revertere, as does its prayerful finale: “perfore praye we to heuene
king. / Euery man in his degree. / To graunte them pQ blis euerlastinge. / ¡3at pis word
weel kan seie reuertere” (117-20). In this respect, “Revertere” is a typical Middle Eng
lish refrain poem, using its refrain to teach, as Susanna Greer Fein has put it, “a pithy
aphorism for virtuous daily life” — though the word revertere would seem to accom
plish this somewhat more cryptically than most.11 The very brevity of the poem’s re
frain, however, suggests that it may have had a familiar resonance for medieval readers;
for this reason, a short discussion of the possible sources of that familiarity will heighten
our appreciation of the poem’s intertextual relations, which appreciation will be perti
nent, in turn, to my discussion below of the poem’s reflection of glossed texts.
Pricke is dated to around 1350 and survives in more than a hundred manuscripts. It may be ar
gued that any guide to confession circulating during the late Middle Ages also had the cultivation
of self-knowledge as its implicit goal; for a discussion of this concern in Mannyng’s Handlyng
Synne, see D. W. Robertson, “The Cultural Tradition of Handlyng Synne,” Speculum 22 (1947):
166-67 (162-85). For an overview of confessional guides for laypeople, see Marjorie Curry
Woods and Rita Copeland, “Classroom and Confession” in The Cambridge History o f Medieval
English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 390-406
(376-406).
10 For a short discussion of the chanson d ’aventure opening as a framing device in peni
tential lyrics, see Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 172-73. “The Bird with Four Feathers” (IMEV 561),
a poem that appears just two leaves past “Revertere” in Trinity College MS 0.9.38 (ff. 24-25),
is an especially successful example of this variety of penitential lyric; for an in-depth discussion
and edition of the poem, see Susanna Greer Fein’s Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo:
Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), 255-268. In Lambeth Palace MS 853, “Revertere” and
the two poems it was originally sandwiched between — before the manuscript’s quires became
disordered in rebinding — formed a trio of poems that open with the kind of first-person recol
lection that is characteristic of the chanson d ’aventure: these include “As y gan wander in my
walkinge” (pp. 58-61, IMEV 349, ed. Furnivall in Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, 83-85) and
“Bi a forest as y gan walke” (pp. 66-74, IMEV 560, ed. Furnivall in Hymns, 95-100). Similarly,
in Balliol 354, “Revertere” precedes a poem on the duties of prelates that beings “As I gan wander
in on evynyng” (IMEV 350, ed. Dyboski in Songs, Carols, 81-82). Use of the term chanson
d ’aventure for first-person lyrics that narrate the events of a short outing originates with E. K.
Chambers in “Some Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric” in Early English Lyrics Amorous, Divine, Moral
& Trivial, ed. E. K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1926), 266-67
(259-96). The fullest discussion of the genre is Helen Estabrook Sandison’s in The “Chanson
D ’Aventure” in Middle English, Bryn Mawr College Monographs XII (Bryn Mawr, 1913).
11 Susanna Greer Fein, “Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle English and the Date of
Pearl,” Speculum 72 (1997): 383 (367-98).
Revertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 1
A. G. Rigg has put forward Isaiah 44.22 — “revertere ad me quoniam redemi te”
[return to me, for I have redeemed thee] — as the source of the poem’s refrain while
Richard Leighton Greene has suggested Song of Songs 6.12, “Revertere, revertere, O
Shulamite” [Return, return, O Shulamite].12 Given the Bernardine influence on late-
medieval piety, another possible source for our poem’s refrain is Bernard’s Sententiae,
which includes a commentary on this passage in the Song of Songs, which admonishes
readers to turn away from pride, empty glory and useless frivolities.13 None of these
candidates, however, relates in an especially clear way to the poem’s penitential theme,
nor would they seem to enjoy the kind of currency held by other Latin refrains in
Middle English refrain poems, which, as Fein has shown, are drawn from the liturgy.
For instance, both “Pety Job” (IMEV 1854) and “The Bird with Four Feathers” (IMEV
561) have the refrain “parce michi Domine” from the Office of the Dead, and a poem
with the refrain “timor mortis conturbat me” (IMEV 3743) draws from it as well.14 In
a similar vein, a penitential lyric that begins “Conuertimini ad me in toto corde vestro”
CIMEV 3451) uses a Middle English translation of this line as its refrain; as Rossell
Hope Robbins explains, this passage from the Book of Joel (2.12) was featured in the
liturgy and in sermons for Ash Wednesday.15
Given this identifiable tradition, it would seem most wise to look to the liturgy as
a source for the refrain revertere, and a form of the word does appear there in a context
quite appropriate to the theme of our poem: in the mass for Ash Wednesday, the begin
ning of Lent — high season for penitence. At the point in the mass when the priest dis
tributes the ashes among the congregation, he is to say, “Memento quia cinis es et in
cinerem reuerteris” [Remember that you are ash, and to ash you shall return].16 Al
though the refrain of our poem does not constitute a direct quotation of this admonition,
the imperative revertere is certainly a strong implication of the future tense reverteris
in this instance and for this reason it seems a plausible candidate as the source for our
refrain. Whether or not the Ash Wednesday service was what our poet had in mind
when he composed “Revertere,” the importance of the service both in the church year
12 A Glastonbury Miscellaney, 52; Greene qtd. in the same, 52. All biblical quotations in
Latin are quoted from Biblia Sacra luxta Vulgatam Versionem (Stuttgart: Wiirttembergische
Bibelanstalt, 1969); English is quoted from The Holy Bible; Translated from the Latin Vulgate
and Diligently Compared with Other Editions in Divers Languages (Douay, A.D. 1609; Rheims
A.D. 1582) (New York: Beiziger, 1914).
13 Bernardi Sententiae in Patrologia Latina 183, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1844-1864), 750a.
For a brief discussion of the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux’s teachings on late-medieval
English piety, see Gray, Themes and Images, 20-21.
14 Fein, “Twelve-Line Stanza Forms,” 383-84.
15 Rossell Hope Robbins, “ ‘Conuertimini’: A Middle English Refrain Poem,” Neuphil
ologische Mitteilungen 73 (1972): 353-56 (353-61). Robbins also provides an edition of the
poem in this article.
16 J. Wickham Legg, The Sarum Missal, Edited from Three Early Manuscripts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969), 51.
MARTHA DANA RUST
and for the practice of penitence coupled with the reminders of the inevitability of
human demise in the poem itself strongly suggest that a medieval reader of the refrain
revertere would have associated it with this ritual utterance. Adding to the possibility
of lay readers’ familiarity with it, this stark description of the arc of human life is just
the kind of piece that makes its way into spaces otherwise left blank in medieval
manuscripts, and it does, in fact, appear in red ink in London, Lambeth Palace manu
script 853, one of the manuscripts that preserves “Revertere.”17
Whatever the refrain’s precise origins, the change the word revertere works on the
poem’s speaker certainly accords with the mood of austerity the Ash Wednesday service
initiates in the church year. In this way, as the poem returns in its fifth stanza to the first-
person mode, the speaker recalls that the word revertere taxed him severely and took
away all the pleasure of his outing: “Lis word made me to Studie sore. / 7 binam me al
my list” (33-34). As the stanza continues, the thorny briar bush and its prickly im
perative becomes assimilated to the metaphorics of penitential discourse, in which the
sorrowful awareness of one’s flaws that was understood to be essential to true contrition
is ubiquitously figured as a painful goad.18Accordingly, having studied the briar bush’s
admonition, the speaker looks back over his recent past and realizes that he is “fui fer
y flet / al from god in maieste” (37-38), whereupon he resolves to make revertere his
byword in life from now on: “fforsohe here schal no hing me leett. / y ne wole synge
reu^rtere” (39-40).
With this noble resolution, the poem’s first-person narrative comes to an end; the
thorny briar bush has effected a bodily turning-away while its pointed inscription has
prompted a mental turning-back, a self-examination that allows the speaker to recognize
the spiritual dangers that lurked along the path he had been treading. The next six
stanzas of the poem expand upon that self-reflexive turn; here the poem’s speaker, as
if now sobered by his brush with the briar bush, goes back over the details of his jaunt
in an exegetic rather than narrative mode, viewing his outing in the light of numerous
preoccupations of penitential writings: the various and sundry follies of youth, the
inexorable approach of old age and death, and the categories of sin — in this case,
17 p. 39: ‘^[Memento homo quod cinis es et in cinerem reu^rteris ^ffac bene dum uiuis. post
mortem uiuere si uis” [Remember man that you are ash and to ash you shall return. Do good
while you live if you wish to live after death] (my transcription and translation). Paragraph marks
are in black ink.
18 As Chaucer’s Parson explains, “Contricioun is the verray sorwe that a man receyveth in
his herte for his synnes, with sad purpos to shryve hym, and to do penaunce, and nervermoore to
do synne. / And this sorwe shal been in this manere, as seith Seint Bernard: ‘It shal been hevy and
grevous, and ful sharp and poynaunt in herte’ ” (X. 128-29). Similarly, the author of The Pricke
o f Conscience explains that he titled his work thus because its contents — an exhaustive expo
sition of humanity’s wretchedness — are intended to make a reader’s “conscience tendre . . . /
And his hert til drede and mekenes dryfe, / And til luf and yhernyng of heven blis, / And to
amende alle hat he has done mys” (9554-9558).
Re vertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 9
venial and “deedli” (78).19As I shall argue in the next section of this essay, a close look
at the pattern of the speaker’s movement among these topics calls to mind the switch-
backing path of reading and re-reading supported by the text and gloss mise-en-page.
Revertere: Return!
A study of the middle stanzas of “Revertere” as an illustration of penitential self-
study as a process analogous to reading a glossed text must begin with a return to our
narrator’s account of his run-in with that troublesome briar bush, for certain details of
that narrative invite a perception of this marvelously textual weed as a figurative gloss
and in this way anticipate the particulars of the speaker’s subsequent “reading” of his
recent past. Before taking that second look, however, we may note that in my discussion
of the poem’s portrayal of its speaker’s change of heart, the briar bush has already
functioned in the manner of a gloss or marginal commentary, for just as these forms of
textual apparatus work — in theory, at least — to guide a reader to an institutionally
sanctioned interpretation of a text, the briar bush and its helpful inscriptions pointed the
poem’s speaker towards a new and more propitious understanding of his noon-time
antics.20 With that elucidating function of the briar-bush in mind, we may revisit the
poem’s opening stanzas and see that the text-laden briar bush functions as a gloss in a
more concrete sense as well, for now we may recognize it as part of a “book” that en
joyed special prominence throughout the European Middle Ages: the Book of Nature.21
19 Squandered youth and the shortness of life are favorite topics in Middle English peni
tential texts; for examples, see Gray, Themes and Images, 173-75.
20 I note that marginal commentary functions to direct an institutionally approved reading
of a text “in theory, at least,” since, as several scholars have remarked, the very presence of an
interpretive apparatus suggests the possibility of multiple interpretations. In this way, as Chris
topher Baswell has put it, “[m]arginal voicings . . . at once construct authority and undermine it”
(“Talking Back to the Text: Marginal Voices in Medieval Secular Literature” in The Uses o f
Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory ofJudson Boyce Allen, ed. Charlotte Cook
Morse, Penelope Reed Doob, and Margerie Curry Woods [Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publi
cations, 1992], 130 [121-60]). Martin Irvine makes a similar point in “ ‘Bothe text and gloss’:
Manuscript Form, the Textuality of Commentary, and Chaucer’s Dream Poems” in Uses o f Manu
scripts, ed. Morse et al., 85-86 (81-119).
21 Two of the most well-known attestations of this trope include Augustine’s elaboration of
the firmament as scripture in Book 13, chapter 15 of the Confessions (in Basic Writings o f Saint
Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates [New York: Random House, 1948], vol. 1,236-37), and Alanus
de Insulis’s poem beginning “Omnis mundi creatura, / Quasi liber, et pictura / Nobis est, et
speculum” [Every created thing is to us like a book or picture or mirror] (J. P. Migne, ed.,
Patrologia Latina 210, 579a-580c). For discussion of this metaphor in relation to the medieval
“idea of the book,” see Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea o f the Book in the Middle Ages: Language
10 MARTHA DANA RUST
In keeping with that medieval commonplace, which figured all creation as a book
authored by God, the briar bush first gets its point across as a briar bush proper rather
than as a Latin text, for even in the act of catching sight of its inscribed leaves, the
poem’s speaker follows their mandate: “{ns brere forso^e dide me grijf. / and soone it
made me to tume a3e” (13-14), where “a3e” denotes “back” or “in the opposite direc
tion” (MED s.v. “aye”). Considered in view of the painfully arresting message encoded
in this “passage” of the Book of Nature, the superscription revertere may be understood
as a text that serves to interpret a difficult — dare I say, thorny — text and in this way
functions in the manner of an interlinear gloss or marginal commentary. In effect, the
inscription on the briar bush’s leaves translates what is in this case the botanical idiom
of the Book of Nature into a human idiom and, significantly, into Latin, the preeminent
language of books made by humans during the Middle Ages.
The speaker’s reference to the briar bush’s text as a “lessoun” (24) adds specificity
to the gloss at hand, situating it within the covers of a school book, and framing the
ensuing discussion of the speaker’s summer sport as a disciplinary reading initiated by
a particularly pointed marginal annotation, one that he approaches, as he reports, “wif)
si3ynge sare” (23). A further evocation both of school rooms and school books may be
noted in the poem’s repeated approbation of learning either to sing or to say the word
revertere, for as Carleton F. Brown has explained, medieval schooling was designed to
prepare pupils to participate in the liturgy, which required training in both reading and
singing.22 While these allusions to schoolroom life may appear somewhat faint at first
glance, their significance stands out more clearly in the light of Marjorie Curry Woods’
and Rita Copeland’s recent discussion of the close ties, especially in the late Middle
Ages, between confessional and grammatical education.23 In her part of this discussion,
Copeland adduces an especially striking example of the ground shared by these two
areas of culture in a manuscript produced around 1434-35 (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Library MS Additional 2830) preserving the texts that schoolmaster John
Drury of Beccles made use of in his teaching. The compilation includes a Middle Eng
lish treatise on confession, De Modo Confitendi, written by Beccles himself together
with numerous additional texts of use in the Latin grammar curriculum.24 Copeland
Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29-35; for an
overview of metaphors of the book, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin
Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990), 302^17.
22 Carleton F. Brown, “Chaucer’s ‘LitelClergeon,’ ”Modern Philology 3 (1906): 474(467-
91). On this topic, see also Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London: Meth
uen, 1973), 117, and Woods and Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” 379-80.
23 Woods and Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” passim.
24 Woods and Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” 402-4. An edition of De Mode
Confitendi appears in Sanford Brown Meech’s essay “John Dury and His English Writings,”
Speculum 9 (1934): 76-79 (70-83).
Re vertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 11
argues that the De Modo Confitendi “concisely represents the tradition of lay confes
sional instruction and its assimilation to formal pedagogical programmes”; she goes on
to assert that together the compi lation of texts of which De Modo is a part “demonstrates
not only the overlapping of pedagogical and confessional genres, but also the virtual ab
sorption of one method into the other.”25 Given the cultural phenomenon Copeland de
scribes, a reading of “Revertere” as a poem that reflects both penitential and classroom
discipline would appear to be well justified.
The leaves over which a youth like the poem’s speaker would have been most
accustomed to say or sing or sigh would have been the well-glossed pages in books used
to teach Latin grammar. Before examining his self-explication as a reflection of a
reader’s experience with such pages, it will be useful to review briefly their characteris
tic appearance. Since VirgxYsAeneid was a venerable school text throughout the Middle
Ages, a consideration of a page from a copy of the Aeneid that was used in this way will
serve this purpose well. Folio 36 of Oxford, All Souls College Library MS 82 preserves
the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid together with a generous complement of instruc
tional commentary placed in the margins and between the lines (figure l).26 This leaf
provides examples of two major categories of textual apparatus found on the pages of
works used to teach Latin grammar and composition, each of which corresponds, in
turn, to an aspect of the grammatical curriculum. First, interlinear glosses — which pro
vided synonyms or translations of the words over which they were placed — aided with
a rudimentary, word-for-word comprehension of the text and thus correspond to an
early stage of grammatical education.27 Instruction in more complex matters such as
figures of speech, characterization, and moral exegesis, was taken up in the margins of
the page. These commentaries were headed by lemmata, which consisted of the words
or phrases from the main text that were to be explicated, recopied in the margins and
often underlined in red or marked with a red or blue paragraph sign ® . At this juncture
we may note that both the appearance and function of lemmata are remarkably well
illustrated by the briar bush in our poem: its inscribed revertere, which has been
extracted from an authoritative Latin text, appears in the “marginal” space of vernacular
|«in^omnt‘ficaWínflfe*r mundtf.
\ «inaifcanáô» tibieyuour .Vbocrf.
1 ¡jttnifofAwfitoaxwoKuC
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Figure 1.
Folio 36 of Oxford, All Souls College Library MS 82.
Reproduced with the permission of the
Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Revertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 13
literature where it undergoes extensive explication while its thorns function in the
manner of a lemma's underlining or paragraph sign to catch the attention of a passerby.
Returning now to our narrator’s first commentary on the lemma-Yikt briar bush (in
stanza 4, quoted above) with this typical page layout in mind, we can see that he
proceeds in a fashion that suggests the underlying, imaginative presence of such a page.
In this way, the narrator’s first comment consists of a translation of revertere into
English, precisely the kind of information that would be found in an interlinear gloss:
“Reuertere is as myche to say. / In englisch tunge as twme a3en” (25-26). Immediately
following this translation, the speaker — or speaker-reader — repeats the words “turn
a3en” (26), as if now finding them copied in the margin of a page as a lemma. Ac
cordingly, the ensuing lines of the poem elaborate upon the words “turn a3en” exactly
in the manner of a marginal text accompanying a lemma: “Turne a3en man y j^ee pray
/ and f)inke hertili what \)u hast ben. / Of \)i liuynge be ^inke (3ee rijfe. / In open 7 in
priuite” (27-30). If this short commentary on the word revertere sounds a lot like a
reading of a “lessoun” that consists of a glossed text, the subsequent stanzas suggest that
the lesson our student has learned has pointed to new fields of study.
Adhering to the admonition he has just “read” in the marginal exposition of the
phrase “turne a3en,” the speaker now begins his own self-inspection by considering his
actions of that very noon: that is, by reviewing the summer frolic already narrated in the
lines of the poem preceding the moment of his encounter with the conveniently glossed
briar bush. In the process of that review, the speaker returns to the story of his playful
outing as if it were itself a glossed text — another “lessoun” for study — for his
technique of self-examination also proceeds as if with the aid of a marginal and inter
linear textual apparatus. The product of our narrator’s work with that lesson, as we shall
see, bears little resemblance to the recollection with which the poem began: inflected
by its commentary, the narrator’s personal anecdote becomes transformed into an alle
gorical exemplum for the instruction of others. In view of the regulatory and authorizing
functions that a glossing apparatus serves, however, such a transformation is just what
we should expect. As Martin Irvine has explained, the text and gloss page layout dis
plays institutional attempts “to at once disclose and control the text” even as it con
stitutes texts as “objects of knowledge and cultural value to a reader.”28The re-visioning
of the speaker’s brief personal recollection that transforms it into precisely such an
object of cultural value begins with his return to that summer day, this time as if con
sidering it in the light of a marginal commentary. Accordingly, the first line of the
speaker’s self-explication acts as a lemma of the first two lines of his opening narrative,
for the poem’s opening lines, “In a noon tijd of asomers day / \)Q sunne schoon ful myrie
(3at tide” are here repeated almost unchanged, “This noon hete of |3e someris day /
whanne [?e sunne moost hi3est is” (41-42). Like a lemma from the Aeneid in All Souls
College MS 82 — or indeed, like the lemma-leaves of the briar bush in this poem — the
poem’s first lines have here been extracted — both from their place in the narrative and
from their implicit place at center page — to a spot where they may be subjected to
further scrutiny.
In keeping with the highly intertextual character of many marginal commentaries
in schoolbooks — and in medieval books in general — this lemma is now interpreted
in the light of other written authorities: in this case, Gregory the Great and the prophet
Daniel. According to “gregorie,” as the speaker notes, the hour of noon “may be lik
ened” (43) to youth and its follies — its “dyuers syrcnis in fele degre” (46). The
speaker’s self-reading here makes reference to a symbolic system traditionally held to
have begun with Gregory the Great’s homily on the Parable of the Workers in the
Vineyard (Matt. 20.1-16), which links the ages of human life with the canonical hours
of the day. In that scheme, youth is symbolized by noon, or “sext”: “Sext is youth,
because, just as the sun is fixed in the center, an abundance of strength is concentrated
in youth.”29 In Gregory’s homily, each of the hours and its associated age is an oppor
tunity for conversion, a point that the poem “Revertere” elegantly promulgates in its
depiction of its youthful narrator’s propitious noon-time response to his close encounter
with the word revertere. In addition, since in the terms of my analysis, the poem por
trays that conversion as one that is accomplished by means of the procedures employed
in reading a glossed text, “Revertere” also represents that particular reading skill — a
skill that is learned, in fact, during one’s youth — as a capacity that is vital to turning
a frivolous young person around.
As sometimes happens in the course of this kind of marginal examination of a
lemma, the text under review here is not only being explained but also allegorized.30 In
the margins of a copy of the Aeneid, as Christopher Baswell has shown, Virgil’s epic
may be rewritten as a moral allegory; similarly, on the glossed page that implicitly struc
tures our narrator’s self-study, his first-person narrative is beginning to sound like a
ventriloquization of none other than Youth himself. The narrator’s ensuing self-
examination continues to follow a reader’s turning path among text, interlinear glosses,
and marginal lemmata; along the way, his resemblance to Youth personified becomes
29 “Sexta vero juventus est, quia velut in centro sol figitur, dum in ea plenitudo roboris
solidatur” (Homiliae in evangelia 1.19, Patrologiae Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 1155 [1153-1159]
my translation). For a discussion of interpretations of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard
by Gregory and others, see Elizabeth Sears, The Ages o f Man: Medieval Interpretations o f the Life
Cycle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 80-90. Two other valuable studies of
medieval views of the hours and seasons of human life are J. A. Burrow’s The Ages o f Man: A
Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986) and Mary Dove’s The Perfect
Age o f Man's Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The well-worn comparison
of the periods of human life to the hours of a day is repeated in the poem that precedes “Re
vertere” in Lambeth Palace 853, IMEV 349, “As I gan wander in my walkinge.”
30 See Baswell’s studies of the marginal commentaries in Cambridge, Peterhouse College
MS 158 and London, British Library Additional MS 27304 for detailed explications of this phe
nomenon (Virgil in Medieval England, chapters 3 and 4 respectively).
Re vertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 15
evermore striking. In this way, the speaker treats the next part of his recollection — “I
took myn hauk al for to play” — as if it were equipped with an interlinear gloss: “30u[)e
beri]} Ipe hauke upcm his hond” (57). As the first-person singular pronoun in his narrative
is here replaced by the word “30u|3e,” the allegorization of our narrator is crystal clear:
in the process of his self-study, the narrator’s personal account of his excursion with his
spaniel and falcon on a summer day is becoming simply another rendition of the story
of juventus, who is iconographically represented throughout the Middle Ages as a
falconer.31
The speaker’s reading of this somewhat depersonalizing gloss is quickly followed
by a reading of a lemma of another lexical item in his narrative, this time the word
“hauke”: “This hauke is ma^nis herte y undirstcmde” (59). This brief interpretation is
followed, in turn, by an explication of the similarities between these two apparently dif
ferent things: as the next line explains, the too-jolly heart, like a hawk, is “3011g 7 of hi3
romage” (60). The speaker elaborates on this basic similarity for the rest of this stanza
and all of the next (stanza 9), using a method that continues to substitute elements of the
emerging allegory for words in his original narrative, as if he were moving between the
lines of text and its interlinear and marginal spaces. For instance, “I sente my faukun y
leet him flee” (7) from his first-person account appears now as “he putti¡3 his hauke fro
his fist. / he ¡3at schulde to god be free” (61-62), where “he” now stands for youth.
Similarly, “my faukun ÍIÍ3 faste to his pray” (9) appears in the speaker’s self-exegesis
as “ful of corage is 30ugejie in herte / and waitynge euere on his pray” (65-66), where
“30ugef}e in herte” now stands for the narrator’s falcon. The speaker completes an
examination of his memory of setting out with his falcon and putting it into flight with
a reiteration of the metaphoric equivalency of “hawk” and “youthful heart”: “This hauk
of herte in 30uf)e ywys” (73). As he does so, we can almost see the movement of our
speaker-reader’s eyes following a line of text that includes an interlinear gloss: first he
reads the word on the line of the text — “this hauk” — and then his eyes move up to
take in the gloss written over it: “herte in 30u]3e.”
Having thoroughly mastered the symbolic significance both of himself and his
falcon, the speaker turns next to an explication of the sought-after “feisaunt hen.” As if
he were reading its textual apparatus, he finds that it stands for “likingnes,” or sensual
31 In this case, then, the lyric “I” is less an “Everyman,” as Gregory Roper puts it, summar
izing Leo Spitzer and Judson Allen on the topic, than an Every-Youth (“The Middle English
Lyric ‘I’, Penitential Poetics, and Medieval Selfhood,” Poche« 42 (for 1994): 77 (71-103). Sears
provides a thorough overview of Youth as falconer in the west and also discusses several at
testations of this iconographie representation in specifically English contexts in The Ages o f Man,
137-40 and plates 78, 85, and 87. The poem that immediately precedes “Revertere” in Trinity
0.9.38 (IMEV 4090) also features the sport of falconry but figures the “sperhawke” as a desired
yet unfaithful woman, thus lending emphasis in that manuscript to the connection in “Revertere”
between falconry and spiritually ruinous games of love.
16 MARTHA DANA RUST
pleasure: “[)is feisamtt hen is likingnes” (75).32 And “likingnes,” the speaker then notes,
as if reading a commentary that ties all the metaphorical elements of the text together,
is what hawk-hearted young men are always pursuing: “and euere folewij) hir [}ese
3onge men” (76). The commentary on the pheasant concludes with the sweeping as
sertion that this bird of happiness that hawk-hearted young men follow stands for
“likinge in every sywne / venial 7 deedli whe^er it be” (77-78). The final stanza devoted
to the speaker’s self-commentary (stanza 11) begins as a kind of commentary on a com
mentary, for it treats the abstraction “liking,” the term used to translate “feisaunt hen”
in the previous stanza: “Liking,” our narrator notes, is “modir of syrmis alle. / and nor-
ischif) euery wicked dede. / In feele myscheues sehe makif) to falle / of all sorowe sehe
doo\) |)e daunce leede” (81-84). As the narrator finishes his self-exegetical lesson, he
reads the “deinteuose si3t” of his first-person account — his falcon set free to pursue the
pheasant — as a text completely transformed by the terms supplied in the course of his
peculiar method of self-reading: “]dís herte of poulpe is h¿3 of port. / and wildenes makij}
him ofte to fie. / and ofte to falle in wicked sort” (85-87).
At this point in the poem, the speaker has completed a properly penitential reading
of his own brief sporting adventure, a reading that also stands as an exemplum of the
urgent necessity to turn away — to reuertere — from the follies of youth. At the same
time, the speaker’s self-exegitical procedure draws an implicit analogy between the
process of self-inspection and the kind of recursive reading processes supported by the
interlinear and marginal apparatus typical of grammar textbooks as well as more
scholarly works. That analogy, as I have shown, has two closely-related implications.
These I shall reprise by turning to yet another book metaphor: the Book of the
Conscience. As Sylvia Huot has explained, a well-known attestation of this metaphor
may be found in the Ovide moralisé; there the anonymous author exhorts readers to
reexamine perpetually this crucial book: “One should read and reread one’s book, dis
tinguishing the good from the bad, and search within oneself, and if there are any faults,
correct them.”33 In structuring the speaker’s review of one short episode in his life in a
manner that evokes the text and gloss page layout, the author of this poem repeats im
plicitly the Ovide moralisé's admonition that readers not only read, but also re-read the
Book of the Conscience; in so doing, he also presents that page layout as a technology
that will facilitate the recursive mode of reading that the Ovide moralisé recommends.
In the light of the conventional exemplum our narrator produces from his reading, how
ever, “Revertere” also figures penitential self-study as a practice in which the Book of
32 For the gerund “liking,” the MED has “a feeling or experience of pleasure, enjoyment,
delight. . . a sinful feeling or experience of sensual pleasure; esp., sexual pleasure.”
33 “Le bien doit Ten dou mal eslire, / Et son livre lire et relire, / Et cerchier entérinement,
/ Et, se faute y a, si Tament” (5.2400-2403, qtd. in Huot, “The Writer’s Mirror: Watriquet de
Couvin and the Development of the Author-Centered Book” in Across Boundaries: The Book in
Culture and Commerce [Winchester: Oak Knoll Press, 2000], 30 [29-46]).
Revertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 17
one’s Conscience becomes subject to the same kind of controlling interpretations that
glosses and marginal commentaries exert upon texts.
Revertere: “tum a fe n ”!
Equipped with an understanding of “Revertere” as a poem about the importance of
re-reading as well as a poem about self-study and self-revision, and following the exam
ple of the reader it figures, we as readers may ourselves return to the beginning of the
poem, this time apprehending there yet another level of exemplarity — yet another
product of re-reading. With this return, we may now recognize in the poem’s brief de
piction of an interrupted noontime outing an allegory about the applicability of the
admonition revertere to an ethics of reading as well as to youthful exuberance. In addi
tion to the oddly-inscribed briar bush’s function as a narrative device — one that causes
the poem’s speaker to turn away from the pleasure he feels in watching his hawk in
flight — and in addition to its function as a prompt to self-reflection, it now works as
an emblem of the role a marginal annotation plays in supporting correct reading: that
is, to catch the attention of an overly carefree reader, and help him to see the instructive
aspect of a text more clearly. Such a carefree reader, the poem now suggests, is one who
approaches a text in the manner in which the poem’s speaker sets out on the summer
day — seeing it only as a “deinteuose si3t” (8). Such a reader, for instance, delighting
in what would seem to be a chanson d ’aventure, might miss the indications at the be
ginning of this poem — the time of day, the falconer — that predict that it is, instead,
a didactic piece warning against youthful frivolity. Again, such a reader follows a text
too impulsively, like the poem’s speaker following his falcon in flight “wzt/z a ful glad
chere” (10). Finally, and perhaps most dangerously, this kind of reader engages a text
purely to satisfy his “likynge.” For this kind of recreational reader, then, a marginal an
notation interrupts a self-gratifying jaunt through a text even as it prompts a return to
it with a more well-informed sense of its significance.
As an emblematic marginal annotation with a specifically prickly attribute, the briar
bush in this poem also works within a network of symbolic associations that, as Mary
Carruthers has shown, connect physical pain to proper reading. In his “De afflictione et
lectione,” Peter of Celle — twelfth-century French Benedictine and acquaintance of
both John of Salisbury and Thomas of Becket — advocates a modicum of pain while
reading, seeing it as a necessary condition to ward off “the spirit of fornication” — an
attitude that may be akin to our author’s “likynge.”34While Peter of Celle recommended
corporeal irritation, the poem “Revertere” represents the marginal gloss as a more subtle
aggravation for readers: one that is situated on the page itself, where a licentious reader
34 Mary Carruthers, “Reading with Attitude, Remembering the Book” in The Book and the
Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1997), 11 (1-33).
18 MARTHA DANA RUST
would be sure to encounter it. Placing this thorny marginal gloss back into the context
of penitential self-study with which I began this essay, its piercing effect takes in the
double sense of the Latin word compunctus, which Carruthers explores in her discussion
of Peter of Celle: that is, “both the sense of piercing a surface and the emotional sense,
of goading and vexing the feelings.”35 In its figurative depiction in the poem “Re
vertere,” then, the humble way-side marginal gloss exerts a compunction on readers to
avoid spiritual error by eschewing pleasurable wandering: in the high-spirited days of
one’s youth and especially while reading, whether the book at hand be a school book
or the Book of one’s Conscience.
Revertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 19
R e ver tere*1
1 Edition based on London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 853 ; lexical and syntactical variants
from Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS 0 .9 .3 8 .1thank the Lambeth Palace Library and the
Master and Fellows, Trinity College Cambridge for permission to consult their manuscripts in
order to prepare this edition. Letters in bold are red in the manuscript; paragraph marks are black.
In the manuscript, the poem is written as a block of text; in this edition, I have followed the
Trinity College manuscript in giving each poetic line its own physical line.
17 be] this
18 redde] radde hendeli] enteryly
19 unto] on to
20 sitten ful] to sytt so
21 myn hauke] my fawcon; feysaunt] the fesant
22 to] on to
23 bane] hyt; y] omits; si3ynge] a syghyng
26 turns a3en] to turne a ye
28 ben] be
29 of bi liuynge be binke bee rijfe] thynke how thow haste lad thy lyffe
31 bat bou may come to euerlastinge lijf] or thow be browht to endless stryffe
33 made me] me made
34 list] reste
35 ledde] ladde; to] so
36 I] he; it] omits; in] omits
37 flet] sette
Re vertere! and the Recursive Path o f Right Reading 21
2 lines 41-43: The Trinity MS has “To noone hete of the somerday / When the son most
fervent us / Yowth may by likened yn goode fay, making explicit the comparison that is
somewhat garbled in Lambeth.
39 fforsobe] y wysse
40 wole] schall
41 this] to; someris day] somerday
42 hi3est] fervent
43 it] yowth
45 3onge] that; doon] doth
46 fele] feld
47 bou3 a] thogh that
49 blindi))] a blyndyth
50 he] they
52 benkib he] he thynkyth; on] in
53 preuef) it weel rÌ3tfulli] hit prevyth full prestly
54 as susannis storie tellif) me] and sampson hys story tellyth it me
56 {)ei knew] knowyth
22 MARTHA DANA RUST
BURT KIMMELMAN
uried within our concept of what constitutes modern civilization there lies a basic
1 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing o f the Word (London and New
York: Methuen, 1982), 78.
26 BURT KIMMELMAN
in the later Western Middle Ages is of special import — since literacy, and concomi
tantly philosophy and science as well as literature, then existed in a relative state of flux,
as compared with the era of the printed book. Later medieval readers, so very different
from their comparatively illiterate forbears, are also distinct from their modern progeny.
Even so, medieval readers can tell us a lot about who we are today. Reading in later
medieval times, to be sure, came to be the vehicle for self-realization and self-enunci
ation as well. To read was not only to be empowered, but also to be distinguished as a
singular person possessing a unique point of view. This development, in the later
Middle Ages, anticipated the modern world’s prizing of individualism.
Contrary to what may be assumed, the long distance academic marriage is not a
problem unique to our present time. From her abbey, writing in reply to a letter from
Peter Abelard, Heloise expresses gratitude that his token is “at least [...] a way of re
storing your presence.”2 She offers consolation that their shared experience of simul
taneous distance and intimacy is not uncommon among literate people, quoting Seneca
writing back to his friend Lucius:
I have never had a letter from you without the immediate feeling that we are
together. If pictures of absent friends give us pleasure, renewing our memories
and relieving the pain of separation even if they cheat us with empty comfort,
how much more welcome is a letter which comes to us in the very handwriting
of an absent friend.3
Lucius’ handwriting is more palpable, psychically more important, than his portrait
could ever be — the handwriting a synecdoche, the portrait a metonymy, the hand
writing inherently an extension of the person, the portrait inevitably the mediation of a
painter’s skill, the handwriting personally connected, the portrait circumstantially
connected and thus at a comparatively greater remove from the person himself. How
ever, while Heloise enlists Seneca in her effort to console Abelard, the analogy she is
proposing may not finally be all that helpful — for in what sense could Abelard, or
Heloise in her written rejoinder, be ontologically present in, or through, a text? What
did it mean for her to be reading that letter?
As a metaphor, textuality, such as would have been experienced by either Heloise
or Abelard, has roots in both the Greco-Roman and Hebrew past. Textuality truly comes
into its own during the Middle Ages when text can actually embody Christian belief.
And the act of reading is eventually thought of by medieval theologians and philoso
phers, as well as writers and artists, as the act of individual communion with the world.
2 The Letters o f Abelard and Heloise, trans, and ed. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1974),
110.
3 Letters o f Abelard and Heloise, 110.
The Trope o f Reading in the Fourteenth Century 27
Augustine, for instance, describes all of creation as an unfurled scroll.4 Hugh of St.
Victor later describes it as a book written by the hand of God,5 while Bonaventure’s
notion of the Book of Nature emphasizes, not the image of the book itself, but the act
of reading that joins the reader to it.6 In the later Middle Ages, annunciation scenes
come to supplant the image of the Virgin weaving (a figure for writing) with that of her
reading.7*In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as Albrecht Classen has maintained,
“mystics [describe] themselves as the pages of a book on which God” has written His
The authority of your divine Scriptures is all the more sublime because the mortal men
through whom you gave them to us have now met death which is man’s lot. You know,
O Lord, how you clothed men with skins when by sin they became mortal. In the same
way you have spread out the heavens like a canopy of skins, and these heavens are your
Book, your words in which no note of discord jars, set over us through the ministry of
mortal men. Those men are dead, and by their death this solid shield, the authority of
your words delivered to us through them, is raised on high to shelter all that lies
beneath it. While they lived on earth, it was not raised so high nor spread so wide. You
had not yet spread out the heavens like a canopy of skins; you had not yet heralded to
all the corners of the world the fame that came with their death. (XIII. 15)
Eugene Vance writes that Augustine conceives of the mortal world as a “scroll of the firmament,
a layer of ‘skin’ ” (i.e., parchment as well as garment) on which “the primal dictation of creation
is dispensed as a written text, as Scripture.” Eugene Vance, “Augustine’s Confessions and the
Grammar of Selfhood,” Genre 6.1 (March 1973): 8. Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Con
fessions, ed. and trans. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1961). Cf.
Confessiones, ed. Pius Knöll and Martinus Skutella (Leipzig: Teubner, 1934).
5 “The entire sensible world is, so to speak, a book written by the hand of God. [.. .] All
visible things, visibly presented to us by a symbolic instruction, that is, figured, are proposed for
the declaring and signifying of things visible.” Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalion: de studio le
gendi, ed. C. H. Buttimer, trans. Jerome Taylor (Catholic University of America Press, 1939,
Columbia Records of Civilization 64, 1961), PL CLXXVI.814. Cf. J. P. Migne, ed. Patrologia
cursus completus, series latina (Paris: 1844-64), 176.
6 Ashlynn K. Pai, “Varying Degrees of Light: Bonaventure and the Medieval Book of Na
ture,” in The Book and the Magic o f Reading in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York
and London: Garland, 1998), 7.
7 David Linton, “Reading the Virgin Reader,” in Classen, ed., Book and the Magic o f Read
ing, 253.
28 BURT KIMMELMAN
message depicting Christ as both “scribe” and “reader.”8 Likewise, Christ’s “body,
hanging on the cross,” in the words of the Monk of Farne in the fourteenth century, can
be “a book, open for your perusal. [...] His wounds [...] the letters or characters, the
five chief wounds being the five vowels [.. .].”9 And, similarly, Nicholas of Cusa says
that “the world [is] like a book which [reveals] its inner truth when read properly.”10
Overall text, as well as language and grammar, were rulers not only for understand
ing but also for calibrating experience.11They have been imagined as such in the ancient
and, later, the modern world; text, however, and notably the act of reading a text, have
enjoyed the greatest measure of interest in medieval times. This is when the technology
of the codex comes into its own. The trope of reading, nevertheless, is also powerful
because, fundamentally, symbology is central to the Christian dispensation. Christian
symbols were the more potent, too, because of the concatenating uses made of meta
phors like text and book — both of which grew out of oral experience but came in
creasingly to be understood, as the technologies of textual production changed, in terms
of chirographics and then print. This textual evolution included nothing less than a
transformation in the definitions of nature, human being, and otherwise reality.
In the twelfth century, when Heloise and Abelard were writing their letters to one
another, ideas about the social and psychological effects of both language and text
undergo rudimentary alteration, and thus the issue of what exactly was, not only a text
but a person, became extraordinarily protean, and continued to be so into the Renais
sance. A highly educated woman, Heloise wrote letters of consolation to Abelard, and
these same letters were meant to carry on an intellectual, indeed a philosophical dis
course. Yet at no time is this period of change more profound than in the later fourteenth
century, a time deeply affected by the thinking of William of Ockham whose nomi
nalism could understand humans as engaging written texts and deriving meaning from
them through a process in which the imagination acted upon and construed the visual
signifiers — not wholly unlike how modern readers read books or, say, computer
screens. Especially fourteenth-century literary works reflect a period of transition
merely hinted at in Abelard’s and Heloise’s writing. The adjustment is most obviously
perceptible when tracing the various uses made of the trope of reading that tells us how
selfhood was understood, and as such demonstrates how the fourteenth-century version
of selfhood was a formulation of individual autonomy that looked ahead to the modern
concept of the ego.
Ong, among a number of scholars, has shown how the very nature of thinking, the
sense of personal identity and the capacity for self-definition, are all profoundly dif
ferent for people living in oral societies than for those in literate societies organized
around writing and especially around the artifact of the printed book (as has already
been suggested). Marshall McLuhan, Ong and others have maintained that printed text
allows for a consistency of tone and argument,12 and a ’’fixed point of view.”13 The
printed book, even the codex, provides a sense of control, moreover, the possibility of
a singular voice, and closure. Integral to the book-as-artifact is self-containment, which
has been the prototype for the self-contained human. Seeking truth within a person can
Langland’s strategy here is to come full circle, through these like sentiments, linking together
issues of language, knowledge, and salvation (Kimmelman 205-6). Cf. Kimmelman, Chapters
3 and 4.
12 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making o f Typographic Man (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1962), 126-27, 135-36.
13 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 135.
30 BURT KIMMELMAN
be like divining what is inside a book. As Michael Camille says, “once opened the
book’s metaphors become those of exteriority and interiority, surface and depth, of cov
ering and exposure, of taking apart and putting together.” 14
In the fourteenth century as well as earlier, the idea that to read is to become oneself
is taken quite seriously. The trick here, however, is to define what is meant by both
reading and self Is it Abelard’s body, for instance, which is the signified of his “pres
ence,” in his letter? If it is, then we need to ask about Heloise’s understanding of
physicality. Or perhaps Heloise’s act of reading was to be purely a communion of souls.
Augustine had distinguished the body from the soul as well as from the flesh, yet
reading was widely thought of by him as a sensual activity. Today, notes Camille, we
“have lost much of [reading’s] corporeal [...] associations with the speaking/sucking
mouth, the gesturing/probing hand, or the opening/closing body.”15The act of reading,
for Augustine a powerful metaphor signifying the divine machinery, was used by him
to explain “our hesitant relationship with our body, the encounter and the touch and the
deciphering of signs in another person,” as Alberto Manguei puts it.16In the Confessions
Augustine writes that, just as the manifest world is God’s book, so too is the human skin
a text — an integumentum constituting the soul’s outer covering, a covering of signs.17
According to this formula, in his letter Abelard’s body could perhaps be the phenome
nological agency of his presence; his written words, in all their palpability, contain his
soul’s aspirations, and also can be understood as the extension of his body. Would
someone in the fourteenth century likewise have understood Abelard’s literary presence
as being somehow of a physical nature? To the modern mind the notion of physical
presence in a written text is fatuous, purely fantastical. But for Abelard or, say, Chaucer,
the physical body, as well as both the physical and metaphorical text were intensely rich
problems to be savored.
It is significant that later medieval literature, as it approaches the Renaissance, pays
increasing attention to its own textuality and, more to the point, to its own writtenness
whether material or otherwise. Critical commentary on this phenomenon is abundant.
Dante’s use of allegory, for example, as Jessie Gellrich has observed, concerns itself
with its own signifying process.18 Domenico Pietropaolo discusses “[t]he iconicity of
the written word [in the Commedia], as defined on the one hand by the physical nature
of its graphic representation and on the other hand by its dependence on a moment of
14 Michael Camille, “The Book as Flesh and Fetish in Richard de Bury’s Philobiblonf in
Dolores Warwich Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, eds., The Book and the Body (Notre
Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 35.
15 Camille, “Book as Flesh and Fetish,” 40.
16 Alberto Manguei, A History o f Reading (London: Penguin, 1996), 169.
17 Augustine, Confessiones, XIII. 15. See note 4.
18 Jesse Gellrich, The Idea o f the Book in the Middles Ages: Language, Theory, Mythology,
and Fiction (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 182.
The Trope o f Reading in the Fourteenth Century 31
vision for its very existence.”19 And, as William C. Maisch has said, the Vita Nuova
centrally presents the reading process; the poet poses as a reader and his reading is
metatextual.20 Brian Stock notes how in Petrarch’s work the “relationships between
reading, writing and the self’ are described in “unprecedented detail.” Indeed, for
Petrarch the “reading of a book and the understanding of the self became analogous
intentional activities.”21
The image of the human being caught up in the process of reading, a deciphering
of signs, comes front and center. And the reader becomes immersed in the text being
read. Grail romances are read “on a metonymic and not a metaphorical level,” Robert
Sturges argues. “They thematize indeterminacy, unlike the literature that preceded them.
This inclusion of the indeterminate leads to, as in Machaut, a more thorough-going in
determinacy, one that playfully includes the reader.” Machaut, not unlike what we find
in Chaucer’s work, “invites the reader’s ironic participation in a game.” Machaut’s char
acters, furthermore, are “[aware] of their own textuality [...] aware as the book is being
made that they are, of course, literary characters in it, and that they will in the future be
read as such.” The complexity of this literary dynamic is remarkable. Sturges goes on
to maintain that in Machaut’s writing “texts generate more inserted texts, and inter
pretations generate further interpretations as the [poem’s] lovers continually exchange
the roles of author and reader.”22 There can be an interchange between character and
reader, as if the the text is an equivalent world. In a similar vein, Jerry Root has com
mented that in the Voir Dit “love letters are more important than the love experience”;
Machaut plays with what is purportedly fiction and what is purportedly real
throughout.23 The text can become even more important than the “real” world in which
the reader, whether fictional or not, resides. In this poem the “lovers’ affair is conducted
largely by these inserted texts.”24 Not unlike Machaut, moreover, Froissart engages in,
as described by Philip E. Bennett, a “blurring, or even abolition, of the traditional boun
dary between the fictive and the ‘real’ worlds.”25 And in the Libro de Buen Amor, in
Classen’s words, Juan Ruiz holds that “the written word serves as a guarantor against
forgetfulness and functions as a mirror for sinful man in which he can reflect his soul.”26
Yet it is particularly in Chaucer’s Troilus and Crysede that written words are real, even
existing in a kind of physical dimension. This poem’s personae are engendered and
sustained by written texts, a process epitomized by the presentation of Crysede’s inner
life; as Classen maintains, love is “artificially set ablaze” in Crysede by interpersonal
letters.27 She is actualized by writing. The same might be said for Chaucer’s readers (as
will be discussed below). To be sure, Chaucer “often takes as the primary subject of his
poems, not life,” Liser Kiser observes, “but the nature and function of writing itself.”28
All the same, it is important to recognize the agency of the reader in this textual
equation. A reader — either a character in a story or a person reading that story — is
needed to make the text come alive.
These later medieval works make up a new “literary” literature, one whose under
lying basis is philosophical. Abelard contributes greatly to twelfth-century philosophy;
not as significant as that of Ockham in the fourteenth century, what he achieves none
theless makes Ockham’s thinking possible. In Abelard’s time, Thomas Gilby explains,
“[t]he problem of universals was the main philosophical topic [...]. Are species [of
individual things] objective and real, or are they merely the mind’s generalizations from
[these] individuals [...]? ” Through a determination of his reasoning, Abelard held that
“a thing was always an individual.”29 He also believed that even when a statement is
objectively false, it had significative value. Statements in and of themselves were in
some sense substantial, therefore. And so he could hold that there could be a “ ‘quasi
res’ required by the necessity of such an implication, a reality indifferent to the presence
or absence of a real subject.” Lastly, Abelard recognized respective distinctions between
empirical knowledge and rational knowledge, and between imagination and intellect
that depends on the imagination and that is capable of “[constructing] likenesses, effi
gies, of things outside it. Of these, some are particular and others universal; [and] they
are distinct both from the mind and from the things they designate.”30 In brief, then, we
might say that Abelard sketched out a phenomenological dynamism, one we see
graphically amplified in a work like the Roman de la Rose whose early evocation of
Narcissus gazing at his own image is counterpointed by, late in the poem, a discussion
of Pygmalion; both stories are meant to manage a reader’s apprehension, and inter
pretation, of the protagonist-lover and his relationship to the rose, to its image, its
substance and meaning for him (the late erotics of de Meun, in comparison with de
Lorris’ rendering more cerebral, infused by the theologies and philosophies of its day,
posed against the poem’s early courtly erotics that are simpler and stronger for their
sheer visuality). Abelard sought to distinguish, and at the same time to relate, image and
object, and individual and universal. And he found that words in and of themselves were
substantial. Language could exist on its own; it had a signifying potency apart from any
possible truth it might indicate.
In the fourteenth century, Ockham’s ideas are a renovation of what had been pro
posed by Duns Scotus, following on the work of Abelard and others, who had intro
duced the theory of intuitive knowledge. Scotus allowed for abstract cognition based on
the concept of separately existing entities that were likenesses of any directly appre
hended object — what Aquinas, Bacon, Scotus and others called species. Ockham,
however, simply denied the notion of abstraction as dependent on species. It is one thing
to know an object by experiencing it directly, by experiencing it sensually. It is another
to know of it in its abstract sense. Rather, abstraction is a function of the object per se
in an indirect form, which occurs when different acts of experience are repeated.31 In
short, he eliminated any intermediary entities between the intellect and the object of
knowledge. An individual’s mind was capable by itself, as it were, of sustaining abstract
concepts. “Any sign,” Andrea Tabarroni explains, “could but only be rememorative and
was not needed for there to be knowledge,” even as it reproduced knowledge, and, so,
an “immediacy” of a “subject-object relationship [was] affirmed.”32 Ockham refused,
on the basis of an assiduous application of logic to his examination of language, furth
ermore, to grant that names (or other representations) in and of themselves of entities
were ontologically grounded. He came to the conclusion that what can be known and
spoken about is only the experiential entity, as a singular fact. More pertinent to the case
of the Troilus, Ockham set aside Augustine’s criteria for signs as being either natural
(such as smoke signifying fire) or artificial (such as writing), and maintained that “signs
are decided on by an act of will to be joined with certain signified meanings”;33 hence,
as Gellrich argues, they are not “natural” after all. Indeed, “Ockham concludes that
[...] ‘voice is not the natural sign of anything’ {Logica 1.1.9). That is to say, spoken —
and written — words are ‘conventional’ or ‘artificial’.”34Moreover, Ockham separates
31 William of Ockham, Quodlibeta septem, ed. J. C. Wey (St. Bonaventure, NY: St.
Bonaventure University/Opera Theologica, 9, 1980), I, q. 13.
32 Andrea Tabarroni, “Mental Signs and the Theory of Representation in Ockham,” On the
Medieval Theory o f Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Costantino Marmo (Amsterdam and Philadel
phia: John Benjamins, 1989), 209.
33 William of Ockham, Summa logicae, ed. P. Boehner (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan
Institute, 1951-52), 1.1.9.
34 Jesse Gellrich, Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts o f
Writing in Philosophy, Politics, and Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 49.
34 BURT KIMMELMAN
spoken and written language from conceptual terms and mental words.35 Overall, then,
he “relocates being from the Platonic and Aristotelian orders of transcendent forms and
categories into the real existence o f the individual thing [and a] new ontology arises to
replace the older scholastic priority of the concept.”36 In short, Ockham “moves away
from the priority of transcendent categories and concepts and toward linguistic differ
entiae [.. .].”37 He brushed aside the idea behind Abelard’s quasi res\ and, “[w]ith re
spect to the notion of cause,” as Ernest Moody has explained,
So, we see in Ockham a tendency to isolate the physical from the soul but not neces
sarily, as in Augustine, from the flesh. Likewise, Ockham seems to be rendering lan
guage, written or otherwise, as conventional and inert. And yet, the written word in the
works of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer and others is extraordinarily powerful. This
purely literary phenomenon is not simply a reflection of the philosophical Realism that
Ockham opposed, but is rather a consequence of the gradual tectonic shift in philosophy
over several centuries. And yet it is Ockham’s demoting of the written word to being
merely a signifier which most reflected a paradoxical effect of elevating the imaginai
worlds writing could engender to a greater status than before. This elevation is possible
because human beings are shown to be able to think of things in the abstract — indeed
to fantasize — on their own with no other cause but themselves. According to Ockham’s
precepts, the individual human being is liberated, able to interpret words, conventional
language, is able to act upon what is an expediency. Hence, the possibility for the
imagination to play an acknowledged role in human affairs was magnified.
The change in philosophical outlook due to Scotus and then Ockham was in part
fueled by a simultaneous spread of literacy that in itself affected life variously. The late
Middle Ages was a time of intense book production.39 “Before the fourteenth century,”
Paul Saenger asserts, “writing in Gothic textualis on parchment had been arduous. The
adoption of informal Gothic cursive on unbound quires and sheets in the fourteenth
century made the physical act of writing less laborious and more compatible with in
tellectual activity.”40 Writing became easier to read and this ease enhanced an author’s
sense of intimacy and privacy. Moreover, “[t]he complex structure of the written page
of a fourteenth-century scholastic text presupposed a reader who read only with his
eyes.”41 Manguei observes that, starting in the fourteenth century, paintings showed
people wearing eyeglasses.42 “Later fourteenth-century chroniclers,” furthermore,
“noted the dominance political and economic by the population requiring literacy,”
Janet Coleman has maintained, in an “an expanding middle class.”43 As already
suggested, a greater “intimacy in reading,” in the words of Andrew Taylor, was created
by people engaging written texts silently, much like what was occurring in “devotional
practice and the development of religious individualism.” This intimacy also “[encour
aged] a rebirth of erotica.”44Intimacy established an individual space in which commun
ion of one sort or another could take place. Meditation came to mean “meditative
reading.” And, interestingly, in “some ways this form of meditation is not far removed
from erotic reading, since both cultivate the habit of extensive fantasizing on short
passages, and encourage readers to visualize events in vivid and intimate terms even to
the extent of inserting themselves in the picture.” Clearly, Taylor concludes, “[b]ookish-
ness, piety and privacy were intimately connected.”45 (48). In this reading process the
individual reader is recognized as such — an individual. Saenger notes that, “[psycho
logically, silent reading emboldened the reader because it placed the source of his
curiosity completely under personal control [and] private, visual reading and private
contemplation encouraged individual critical thinking and contributed to the develop
ment of skepticism and intellectual heresy.”46
The greatest effect of this technological change, of course, was detectable in liter
ature itself. “In Petrarch,” Stock writes,
40 Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins o f Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 257.
41 Saenger, Space, 258, 260.
42 Manguei, History o f Reading, 294.
43 Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers 1350-1400 (New York: Columbia Uni
versity Press, 1981), 14.
44 Andrew Taylor, “Into His Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval Eng
land,” in The Practice and Representation o f Reading in England, eds. James Raven, Helen
Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43.
45 Taylor, “Secret Chamber,” 44, 48.
46 Saenger, Space, 264.
36 BURT KIMMELMAN
by the putative reading public of a lay author. The self no longer resonates
with its own inwardness but with the inner meaning of the texts read, written,
and mentally recreated.47
Hence the self came to be composed by the language it engaged, a language whose
power was coming from its increasing status as distinct in and of itself, as substantial
for itself; the written word, in its objective condition, was in fact substantial. Writing
could exist on its own and for the delectation of a subjective reader. Ockham proposed
an unknowability that extended even to God as well as to the things of the world, and
not least of all to language and writing too. Ironically, the status of writing was height
ened even as writing was shown to be separate from the thing it represented; this
separation opened the door to modernity’s understanding of the psychological as real,
insofar as the process of reading could create a viably psychological experience.
Of course, as Janet Coleman has argued, Ockham’s influence included a new meth
od of reading.48 “The via moderna, following Ockham and in the tradition of Abelard,
placed linguistic exegesis at the centre of their concerns to interpret varying modi lo
quendi correctly in order to get at the a-historical truth that was meant for all time [..
The fundamental issue was “the proper relationship between language, logic and reality
[...].” And so “Ockham and the moderni distinguished style and modes of signifying
from meaning.”49 Writing thus came to exist distinctively qua writing. As Gellrich
points out, “Ockham separates spoken and written from conceptual terms and mental
words.”50 This state of affairs is reflected in a poem like Piers Plowman — in which,
Britton Harwood argues, “interpretive activity bridges the space between visible mani
festation (sacramentum) and invisible reality. Yet this gap becomes the page on which
nominalism writes the unknowability of God [and so the protagonist] Will demands a
kynde knowing, an act showing a wish that God might again be part of sensible experi
ence.”51 Just as God becomes unknowable, the material world, as well as the individual
human being, become more present. And the written, material word becomes the agency
of both the world in which humanity resides and that world humanity contemplates as
being over and against itself.
When it comes to Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s reader of this poem is vicari
ously living out history in the Troy story embodied in characters who, not coinciden
tally, are constantly reading and writing to each other, and whose fates are determined
by what they are reading; the artificiality that is the mainstay of courtly love, with its
aggressively invested meaning in ritual, can now find its quintessential expression in the
written word as the site of human love. More to the point, in the Troilus the erotic is
contained within an artifice that extends to the poem’s palpable awareness of itself as
a written text. Indeed, as Paul Strohm comments, Pandarus, Troilus and Cry sede are
“like characters in postmodern fictions [inasmuch as they] seem constantly on the brink
of discovery that they are characters in a book.”52 The poem’s peculiar writerly quality
is what defines this awareness. To borrow a phrase from John Dagenais, Chaucer’s work
exudes a sensitivity to writing’s “peculiar plenitude,”53 and thus writing and the char
acters inscribed both possess a psychological, and, perhaps, an ontological presence for
Chaucer’s readers. Yet there is a contradiction here — for the written text is also ob
served to be inert; writing is an object residing over and against the subject reader (both
within the poem and without). In fact, writing is inert to the degree that its fourteenth-
century reader has adjusted to the world of the written text; for the materiality of writing
has become more commonplace, a “form of life” (in the words of the techno-philoso
pher Langdon Winner54 — Ong has said as much in different words).55 Writing is now
so integral to daily life that it is, to a significant degree, taken for granted. All the same,
in its time the implicit questions being asked about (and in) the Troilus are: What and
where are the boundaries between written fiction and fact — or between the integral
self, the physical body as well as the soul? And, How is the world beyond that self dis
tinguished, a world that can be viewed as the agency of fate, the potentia absoluta that
impinges on free will?
Any history of ideas is also a history of technological change. That latter history de
scribes human conformity with contemporaneous technology, which can include re
imagining the human condition; that is, how we conceive of what and who we are is
contingent on our technologies. Who and what was the later medieval individual, vis-à-
vis the proliferation of the book, and how can the transliminal communication between
text and reader, which we find impulses of in the Troilus, for example, shape the change
of individuality as a concept? As Stock has maintained, “from the eleventh century on,
people’s relations themselves are seen to behave like texts in possessing both sense and
52 Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 61; and
Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169.
53 John Dagenais, “That Bothersome Residue: Toward a Theory of the Physical Text,” in
Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, eds. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun
Pasternack (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 254.
54 Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search fo r Limits in an Age o f High
Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 11-16. Winner is echoing Ludwig
Wittgenstein who writes: “speaking of language is [...] a form of life.” Philosophical Investi
gations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), lie .
55 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 81-82.
38 BURT KIMMELMAN
reference.”56 It is in this context that Peter Travis notes how “all of Chaucer’s poetry is
highly conscious of itself as linguistic artifice and of its readers’ role as coconspira
tors.”57 This assertion begs the question of whether the Troilus was taken as fiction or
history in its own time, but it also implicitly requests that this artifice be understood
within the context of the greater Middle Ages when subjects were spoken of as texts —
Jesus Christ, Nature, people were texts. Setting aside the problem of whether or not a
poem like the Troilus was taken to be fiction, fact, or a little of both, we still need to ask
how a flesh and blood reader can connect with merely written characters in the sort of
reality-switch we take so much delight in when we see it in a film such as Woody
Allen’s The Purple Rose o f Cairo (the Jeff Daniels character stepping off the movie
screen, out of the storyline being depicted there, in order to run off with the Mia Farrow
character who is sitting in the audience). The transgression of boundaries between the
worlds of the fictional movie and “fictional” movie goer, memorable in its delight for
a modern audience, is precisely so because it stands as an icon of the audience’s own
investment in a non-real but compelling world. What is interesting about Chaucer is that
he imparts to his reader the very power to create a text’s meaning. “[I]n Book III of the
Troilus the narrator actually entreats the reader” to re-write his story:58
How different is this ploy from that of Allen’s film whose positive-negative plot
allegorizes this same co-authoring process? “Symbolizing introspection, self-absorption,
and self-reflection,” Jean Jost maintains,
56 Brian Stock, Listening fo r the Text: On the Uses o f the Past (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 45.
57 Peter W. Travis, “Affective Criticism, the Pilgrimage of Reading, and Medieval English
Literature,” Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke, and Martin B.
Shichtman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 205.
58 Travis, “Affective Criticism,” 303.
59 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Crysede, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D.
Benson, Based on The Works o f Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mif
flin, 1987), III. 1331-36.
The Trope o f Reading in the Fourteenth Century 39
or her a step further — into the text, into the character, but most evocatively,
into the self. Narcissus-like, the reader in the outer domain, reading about a
character who is reading about yet another character akin to himself or herself
[...] effects the ultimate solipsistic activity.60
brings two new perspectives to mystical writing [...]. The first is the idea that
the visionary is not a vessel but a text, a body in whom or on whom a text is
inscribed. The second point is her emphasis on the act of writing; the text
written within her is physically transferred by her to the pages of a book.62
Notably, the same forces that give rise to courtly literature typified in Chaucer’s Troilus
also sustain affective mysticism typified in the work of someone like Julian. In Julian,
as well as in Chaucer, the real physical body and the fictional textual body are ulti
mately equatable. While Julian and Chaucer, as authors, may seem far apart generically,
ideologically and aesthetically, they are joined under the aegis of reading. Note how a
poem of Lydgate’s, “The Fifteen Ooes of Christ,” bridges the two distinct experiential
realms these authors represent:
60 Jean E. Jost, “Chaucer’s Literate Characters Reading Their Texts: Interpreting Infinite
Regression, or the Narcissus Syndrome,” in The Book and the Magic o f Reading in the Middle
Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 172.
61 Lochrie, Margery Kempe, 35.
62 Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 215.
40 BURT KIMMELM AN
The very characters of a written text possess, here, great power as they exemplify — as
they become, in fact — the physical body. How could fourteenth-century secular and
religious texts be so unlike yet in certain respects so similar to one another? In the
Canterbury Tales, as Allen Shoaf demonstrates, the human body is consistently por
trayed as “broken and breakable, fragile and frangible — beaten, battered and abused:
in a word, fragmented,” and yet, “frequently, rhetoric knits up the fragmented body, per
sonal as well as social, when nothing else can.”64 For the mystic, the body imagery
employed in Lydgate’s poem can be taken literally (in all senses of this word).
“As imitatio,” according to Lochrie, “reading images allows the one who reads [..]
to dwell temporarily and imperfectly in the region of similitude.”65 Indeed, as Meister
Eckhart says, “[a] 11attraction and desire and love come from that which is like, because
all things are attracted by and love what is like them.”66In fourteenth-century mysticism
“imitation is the desire and effect of love. It is the equivalent to the transformation of
the mystical lover into the object of his love.” To be sure, “the lover becomes an imago
herself through the direction of her thought”; this point of view is grounded in St.
63 John Lydgate. The Minor Poems o f John Lydgate, ed. Henry Nobel McCracken. EETS,
e.s. 107. London: Oxford University Press, 1911,rerp. 1962,248. Translated in Lochrie, Margery
Kempe, 176.
64 R. Allen Shoaf, Chaucer's Body: The Anxiety o f Circulation in the Canterbury Tales
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 14, 11.
65 Lochrie, Margery Kempe, 32.
66 Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and
Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 214.
The Trope o f Reading in the Fourteenth Cen tury 41
Bernard who said that we long to recover the likeness lost in the fall.67 Thus, for Rolle,
the mystic experiences a direction of his thought that is a “ ‘recording’ of Christ in the
mystic’s mind and heart. Imitation in this sense is a kind of inscription — of tokens” in
one’s heart. Such inscription was called a recordatio. One mystic’s self-flagellation was
described as such. She “becomes the written record of Christ’s suffering, and spectacle
[...]. By making a spectacle of her body, [she] joins Christ as image, as corporeal sim
ilitude, in harmony with spiritual intentions.”68 Maria R. Lichtmann notes that “for
fourteenth-century English mysticism, incarnationalism becomes far more than doctrine,
as Jesus’ fleshliness is, through the Benedictine tradition’s lectio divina and scriptural
meditations, taken, embedded in the body.”69Rosemary Drage Hale has pointed out that
“[I]n the Johannine sense the Logos was made Flesh and then eaten through reception
of the Eucharist. The mystical experience reflects a theological inversion — tastes the
sweetness of the divine flesh within, converts to word through written recollection the
experience of divine union.”70
Julian wishes to see and suffer as witness and have her body be filled with rec
ollection:
[[...] I desired a bodily sight, through which I might have more knowledge of
our Lord and saviour’s bodily pains, and of the compassion of our Lady and
of all his true lovers who were living at that time and saw his pains, for I would
have been one of them and have suffered with them.]72
Suffering is the operative mode here, and ultimately a textual experience. Lichtman
comments that
Julian’s woundedness allows soul to emerge and guide her life. As the Passion
of Christ becomes her passion, in all the meanings of that word, passion leads
naturally to compassion. No dissociated sensibility can obtain, for it is her
body that is fulfilled with ‘mind of feeling’, a feeling-minded body, an em
bodied soul, an ensouled body. As Julian draws more deeply on her bodily
experience, she becomes a more integrated and therefore a more truly spiritual
self.73
Writing, reading and meditation can transmute the physical and the soulful. As Lochrie
comments, “From meditation on images, comes the translation of the mystic’s own body
into an image of suffering and yet another sign of remembrance.”74 The bleeding
wound, generally, is a source of revelation as it is a text to be read. Julian writes,
Wyth a good chere oure good lorde lokyd in to hys syde and behelde with joy,
and with hys swete lokyng, he led forth the vnderstandyng of hys creature by
the same wound in to hys syd with in; and there he shewyd a feyer and delecta
ble place, and large jnow for alle mankynde that shalle be savyd and rest in
pees and in loue.
[With a kindly countenance our good Lord looked into his side, and he gazed
with joy, and with his sweet regard he drew his creature’s understanding into
his side by the same wound; and there he revealed a fair and delectable place,
large enough for all mankind that will be saved and will rest in peace and in
love.]75
Given the textualizing of the body, which can even enact the reading of wounds,
so to speak, as in Julian, not only does the generic boundary between lay and secular
writing dissolve; so too do the intellectual constructions of text and body, in relation to
one another, become blurred or confused in Chaucer. In Julian, understanding arises
from, literally out of, wounds. And “[a]s she reads the text of her God-inscribed body,
she finds her sensuality filled with God and God filled with sensuality.”76 Belief is
“sought in the body’s ruptures [...] interruptions of the body’s integrity,” and, in due
course, “[words] and flesh are no longer distinct.’’77 In Chaucer, characters are under
stood as texts, essentially, yet verge on the corporeal real. The fictional world inhabited
by a Troilus, Crysede and Pandarus is one determined by writing. The characters’ be-
lievability, their coming alive, as it were, has everything to do with an active reading of
what has been written by Chaucer and by his characters who, as readers, become icons
of a time when reading was already an activity central to experience. The act of writing
is a membrane separating but also at times uniting author and reader.
The lay reader engages the text itself in a one-to-one psychological correspondence.
The mystic reader has a colloquy or dalliance with God, rather than being passive.
Carolyn Coulson argues that, for example, Margery Kempe’s “self-awareness is central
to her use of speech and to her ability to inject herself into the Christian Narrative. This
active self-awareness brings about a new type of relationship between herself and the
holy family in which the normally passive meditator inserts herself into the social circle
of Christ.”78 Yet both literatures, lay and religious, model a human, independent, as
sertive self, one that is realized through the dynamic act of reading a text with which a
reader has been presented. Coming to the fore in late medieval mysticism is a realization
of a relationship between language and body. Yet what is the body, particularly the
mystic’s body, but a product of self-abnegation? More to the point, how do a body’s
wounds, Christ’s or anyone else’s, contextualize our understanding of physicality?
Lochrie asks, “If the fissured flesh permits the transgression of that imaginary zone of
Christianity, the integrity of the body, what is its textual equivalent?” What Lochrie
calls the “fissured text” presents the reader of the mystical tract with a “perviousness”
whose effect is “a breakdown of a construct which otherwise rests securely on the
external/internal demarcation of the body: the distinction between literal and figurative
language.” Rolle, for example, avoids distinguishing “between physical and spiritual,
and hence, figurative and literal semantic fields.”79
For the reader of mysticism, “the body is transformed into a written corpus,” one
that may be read; and, likewise, “Christ’s suffering body is a book read by the Virgin
and others who are compassionate.”80 This equivalence of text and body was not nec
essarily metaphorical. And yet this text-body intercourse is dependent on the human
capacity to recognize similitude. The greater presence of physical texts in later medieval
life has encouraged the mystical and/or scientific thinking of the world as a text and vice
versa, at the same time that, in logic and epistemology, this presence has encouraged the
dividing of materiality and ethereality. The mystical experience features the merging
with the object of love — while the lay textual experience features the contemplation
of an inert text as residing over and against the reader-self. And yet, as writing becomes
more widespread, its power to consume the reader’s consciousness, so that the extra-
narratorial world falls away from it, in effect causes an ontology of textuality that is a
phenomenological presence. The text takes on the kind of authenticity reserved in the
modern world for physical reality.81 Lastly it must be pointed out that, in fourteenth-
century mysticism, the mystic’s body “is not merely a passive cipher for God’s will, but
the center of a different kind of discourse, a discourse which is allocutionary, present,
[and] dialogic.”82 The text of life, like the text of a book, is negotiated in terms of a
reality that is both dynamic and fluid, where “fiction” and “fact” are beheld together,
at times as one. That the reader can participate in the text actively is a possibility, given
a semiotics that comprehends both textuality and corporeality. The reader, either lay or
religious, greatly empowered, reads the text that stands forth in its own right. The text,
before its reader, leaves that reader free to interpret it as a separate although at times a
conjoined entity. The autonomy of the reader is what is new in the fourteenth century.
81 It is notable that in the postmodern world the integrity of the physical domain has been
called into question.
Lochrie, Margery Kempe, 63.
English A u c t o r e s
and Authorial Readers:
Early Modernizations of
Chaucer and Lydgate1
MICHAEL ULLYOT
3 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey read his
Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30-78.
4 To these myths, Andersen and Sauer cite the objections of D. F. McKenzie, Jerome
McGann, and Adrian Johns (Books and Readers, 3).
5 On elements of New Histoiicism relevant to the history of reading, see Kevin Sharpe,
Reading Revolutions: The Politics o f Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 2000), 21-27.
English Auctores and Authorial Readers Al
(1614), an anonymous and wholescale modernization of John Lydgate’s Troy Book. The
second is Sir Jonathan Sidnam’s Paraphrase vpon The three first Bookes o f Chaucers
Troilus and Cresida (c. 1630), a partial modernization of Chaucer’s poem.6 Both texts
recapitulate part or all of their sources in an early modern idiom, and thus provide docu
mentary evidence of their authors’ readings of Middle English verse in this period. It
is self-evident that modernization, like translation, begins with an act of reading, but in
the modernized text, its author’s reading is revealed through the alterations this text
introduces to bridge differences between its language and that of its original. By exam
ining these substantive differences between these two texts’ treatments of these poets,
this study concludes that while both poets’ language was viewed as impenetrable to
seventeenth-century readers, Chaucer’s was viewed with greater respect. The cause of
this difference rests with Chaucer’s precedence: because he was the first poet to use
English explicitly and extensively for poetry, his language is more inviolate than Lyd
gate’s. Modernization of both poets became necessary with shifts in the language, but
as this argument will prove, in Chaucer’s case it was more reluctant and provisional.
Deference to Chaucer’s language has a very long history, beginning with the Eng
lish ‘Chaucerians,’ the fifteenth-century poets who followed immediately after Chaucer.
To read the poetry of Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve is to sense the imminent demise
of English verse, if not for constant reassurances of its quality and pedigree. Embodying
what A. C. Spearing has called “the first age in which it is possible to speak of the his
tory of English poetry,” these poets praise Chaucer for establishing English as a poetic
language, and English literature in the classical literary pantheon.7 In one of many
6 The manuscript, BL Add. 29494, has been edited by Herbert G. Wright, A Seventeenth-
Century Modernisation o f the First Three Books o f Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” (Bern:
Francke Verlag, 1960). For its attribution to Sidnam, see 14-17; see also Richard Beadle, “The
Virtuoso’s Troilus” in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Hon
our o f Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 213-33; 220. For Chau
cer’s increasingly versatile Renaissance adaptations, see Alice Miskimin, The Renaissance Chau
cer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); and Theresa M. Krier, “Receiving Chaucer in
Renaissance England,” in Theresa M. Krier, ed., Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gaines
ville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 1-18.
7 A. C. Spearing, “Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale: The Siege o f Thebes and Fifteenth-Century
Chaucerianism,” in Robert F. Yeager, ed., Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays (Hamden,
CT: Archon, 1984): 333-64; 358-59. The best definition of fifteenth-century English Chaucer
ianism is Derek Pearsall’s: “the patient, thorough exploration of areas of literary practice that he
[Chaucer] had opened up for them, the blending of Chaucerian with more traditionally English
genres and techniques, the consolidation of Chaucer’s poetic language . . . and the final creation
of a kind of literature — sober, serious, unironic, preoccupied with moral, social, and political
issues — which we come to recognize as genuinely of its age.” “The English Chaucerians,” in
D. S. Brewer, ed., Chaucer and Chaucerians (London: Thomas Nelson, 1966): 201-39; 201-2.
48 M IC H A E L U L L Y O T
examples, in the midst of his Troy Book Lydgate refers readers to Troilus and Criseyde
for material Lydgate dares not cover, because Chaucer handled it more capably:
Both poets pay such tributes to Chaucer for establishing English as a poetic language,
because he enabled this generation of poets to follow him.910Lydgate rarely misses an
opportunity to praise Chaucer because he owes more to him than any other poet, writing
nearly 150,000 lines of verse in the vernacular which Chaucer made acceptable. Some
of Lydgate’s major works — the Fall o f Princes, the Seege o f Thebes, and the Troy
Book — respond directly to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Troilus and Criseyde.10The
Seege o f Thebes is framed by Lydgate on horseback telling the tale to the Canterbury
pilgrims, and was printed in editions of Chaucer throughout the sixteenth century.11
8 Lydgate ’s Troy Book, lines 4237-4243, ed. Henry Bergen, part 2, Book III, Early English
Text Society, n.s., 103 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Oxford University Press for
the Early English Text Society, 1908), 516-17. Modern letter-forms (th-, -gh) have been silently
inserted. Unlike Robert Henryson, Lydgate does not encroach on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,
deferring to its greater authority whenever the stories overlap.
9 For example, see Lydgate’s Troy Book (Book 2, lines 4697-4700 and Book 3, line 553),
and his Flower o f Courtesy (lines 239-240); also Hoccleve’s Regement o f Princes (lines 1962—
1963 and 2084-2086).
10 On the Troy Book’s emphasis on its historical source as criticism of Chaucer, see Nicholas
Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament o f Cresseid as
Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde,” in Karen Pratt, ed., Shifts and Transpositions
in Medieval Narrative: A FestschriftforElspeth Kennedy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999): 89-
108; 91-95. For the relationship between these texts, see also Christopher Baswell, ‘Troy Book:
How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin,” in Jeanette Beer, ed., Translation Theory and
Practice in the Middle Ages, Studies in Medieval Culture 38 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute,
1997): 215-37; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval
England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 34-84; and Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 14-15.
11 The division of authorship between Lydgate ’s Siege o f Thebes and Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales had been clear since Stow’s edition of 1561, the first to identify Lydgate on its title page:
“. . . with the siege and destruction of the worthy citee of Thebes, compiled by Ihon Lidgate,
Monke of Berie.” For relations between the two poems, see Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate:
English Auctores and Authorial Readers 49
A Study in the Culture o f the Fifteenth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961),
62-65; and Alain Renoir, The Poetry o f John Lydgate (London: Routledge, 1967), 113-17.
12 Derek Pearsall compares Lydgate with Chaucer with a memorable metaphor: “If Chaucer
sharpened the fine blade of language, Lydgate, by sheer constancy of use, wears it down to a
solid, commonplace tool of practical expression and workmanlike virtue,” “The English Chaucer-
ians,” in Brewer, Chaucer and Chaucerians, 201-39; 222. See also his “Chaucer and Lydgate,”
in Morse and Windeatt, Chaucer Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 39-
53, 40. Ironically, Lydgate’s deferential tributes to Chaucer were largely responsible for Chau
cer’s better reputation.
13 The Troy Book’s first printing was by Richard Pynson in 1513. Braham’s comparison
appears in his self-congratulatory “Epistle to the reader” in TheAuncient Historie and onely trewe
and syncere Cronicle o f the warres betwixte the Grecians and the Troyans (London: 1555).
14 “Troilus and Criseyde,” Larry D. Benson, gen. ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Bos
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1987): 473-585; 489 (II.Proem. 15). Until my discussion of Sidnam, all
references to Chaucer are to this edition, cited by book and line numbers.
50 M IC H A E L U L L Y O T
Reading Chaucer, in any period, one is struck by his assumption or, if you prefer, pre
sumption of textual authority. He aspires to a permanent future for his “litel bok” by
grounding it in the permanence of the past, the grander Latin books in whose footsteps
it aspires to pace.15 This is the practical element of humility, what Larry Scanlon calls
the ‘triangulation’ of auctoritas: “it involves not just deference to the past but a claim
of identification with it and a representation of that identity made by one part of the
present to another,’’ or in this case, a part of the present to the future. “The power to de
fine the past,’’ as Chaucer does with this pantheon, “is also the power to control the con
straint the past exerts in the present. Authority ... is an enabling past reproduced in the
present.’’16 In the next stanza, he expresses his anxiety that this future will involve
changes to his language. Chaucer’s envoy, installing his book in an intimidating pan
theon of classical writers to oppose its future misrepresentation, is calculated for maxi
mum effect on its overhearing readers. He directly or indirectly addresses his readers,
citing the authority of his sources to preclude future revisions or ‘miswritings.’17
To elide between narrative authority and your own poetic achievement, as Chaucer
does, the poet must convince the reader that his text’s credentials compensate for its
linguistic inadequacies. This formulation requires a steady hand, and the right genre.
Translations are particularly amenable to it: unlike conventional imaginative literature,
they claim resemblance to their original as the reader’s sole criterion of judgment. “Lor
as myn auctour seyde, so sey I,” claims Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (II.Proem.18).
His humility effectively repudiates the prospect of the reader’s amending the text, mak
ing it appear simultaneously humble before a superior source, and intimidating to any
15 For a discussion of Chaucer’s projection of his book into both the past (tradition) and the
future (readers, scribes), see Spearing, “Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale,” 334; for his debt to Dante
for this technique, see 360, n. 4. For an exemplary study of Chaucer’s use of the classical tradition
throughout Troilus and Criseyde, see John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in
Chaucer’s Troilus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
16 Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The medieval exemplum and the Chau
cerian tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 38. Thomas Greene defines
autorità and its cognates as “that unflawed capacity for patriarchal communication and instruction
through time which few if any medieval men perceived as problematized by history.” The Light
in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale Uni
versity Press, 1982), 12.
17 Spearing interprets “myswrite” as Chaucer’s projection of “a future of continued scribal
copying and textual corruption,” which is merely to say that he intended the term to be literal as
well as figurative (“Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale,” 335).
English Auctores and Authorial Readers 51
reader who would challenge its resemblance to that original. When Chaucer identifies
an original by name, this effect is even more acute. At the end of Book III of Troilus
and Criseyde, Chaucer defers to his ‘auctor’ Boccaccio, whose 11 Filostrato is his
poem’s principal source:
Chaucer grants prospective revisers license, “as youreselven leste,” only to correct his
“sentence” or fealty to Boccaccio, not to meddle with his words. His inversion of hu
mility allows Chaucer to appear open to those who might “Doth therwithal right,” even
as he claims linguistic pre-eminence. He successfully identifies his texts with both the
provenance and the fate of English, through tactics which are audacious, yet justified
by his poetic skill.
The reader might expect Lydgate to falter in the same attempt because of some in
adequacy of his poetic skills, compared to Chaucer’s. Yet this modern view scarcely re
sembles sixteenth-century opinion, which viewed both poets’ language with the same
mix of admiration and incomprehension (of which more in a moment). Chaucer assumes
greater textual authority by virtue of both his precedence and his precedents. To clarify:
Chaucer’s auctores are entirely foreign, many of them classical, because these were the
only precedents available to him. Lydgate adopts many of the same auctores, but makes
an important domestic addition in his tributes to Chaucer. Lydgate’s use of Chaucer for
his textual authority was more expansive than Chaucer’s use of any of his sources,
entirely because of Chaucer’s lack of domestic precedents. Chaucer adapted foreign
genres, narratives, and other poetic forms to an English language which was only be
ginning to be used for poetry. While Lydgate adapted poetic forms from foreign and
domestic sources, he inherited his poetic language directly, and openly, from Chaucer.18
At this vulnerable stage of vulgar English, Lydgate’s rationale for this open acknowl
edgment has been sufficiently discussed. Its effects, however, would determine his
reception for two centuries.
With the passage of time, a language familiar to one era becomes incomprehensible
to another. Many early modern readers of Chaucer and Lydgate made the distinction
between poetry’s contents and the language of its composition, if only to complain that
18 On Henry V’s role in the rise of English as a poetic language after 1400, see John H.
Fisher, “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,” PM LA 107 (1992): 1168-80.
52 M IC H A E L U L L Y O T
this language impeded access to their poetry. John Skelton wrote of Lydgate that “It is
dyffuse to fynde | The sentence of his mynde,” though he added that there is “No man
that can amend | Those maters that he hath pende.”19In 1550, Nicholas Udall cited both
Chaucer and Lydgate as poets whose outworn language threatened their works with
neglect.20 Spenser’s admiration and imitation of Chaucer’s language provoked a revival
of Middle English diction among early seventeenth-century poets like Giles and Phineas
Fletcher. Nevertheless, “the presence of hard words, more gradual changes in pronun
ciation, morphology, syntax, and so forth had rendered the reading of Chaucer a diffi
cult and resistant task to many by the early seventeenth century,” writes Richard
Beadle.21 By 1614, this difficulty prompted John Norden, in “The Authors farewell to
his Booke” prefacing his Labyrinth o f Mans Life, to advocate a poetic diction unfettered
by the language of medieval poets:
Though he praises Spenser in this envoy, Norden opposes obscure Chaucerian language
in modern poetry, advocating a diction reflecting common usage: “Why should it not
befit our Poets well, | To vse the wordes and Phrases Vulgar know?”22 His double use
19 “Phyllyp Sparowe,” lines 806-807, 809-810. In The Poetical Works o f John Skelton, ed.
Alexander Dyce, voi. 1 (London: Thomas Rudd, 1843; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965),
61-108; 88.
20 Udall prefaced his translation of A discourse or traictise ofPetur Martyr Vermilla Flo-
re[n]tine,. . . concernynge the Sacrament o f the Lordes supper.. . (London: 1550) by asserting
the need for this book to be in common English, despite the obscurity of its ideas; if every book,
he asks, could thus be understood by unlearned readers, “then what should Chauncer, [sic] Goore
[Gower], Lidgate and others doe abrode, whom some euen of the learned sorte doe in some places
scarcely take?” (*4r). For the history of this sentiment from Peter Ashton, John Bridges, Brian
Melbancke, George Puttenham, and John Norden, see Wright, Modernisation, 7-12.
21 Beadle, “Virtuoso’s Troilus,” 219.
22 The Labyrinth o f Mans Life. Or Vertves Delight and Enuies opposite (London: 1614),
A3v.
English Auctores and Authorial Readers 53
of the term ‘vulgar,’ to denote the language of common understanding then and now,
signals his awareness that one era’s vulgar is another’s ambiguous language.
Long before Norden, editors and writers anticipated their readers’ incomprehension
by glossing, or even replacing, a range of Middle English texts in prose and verse.
Thomas Speght’s 1602 edition of Chaucer’s works provides a glossary with “The old
and obscure words in Chaucer explaned [sic]” indicating their derivations from Greek,
Latin, Arabic, French, Italian, and Dutch.23 But for evidence of how foreign Middle
English itself was to many readers of this period, look to its modernizations: William
Fiston’s editions of Caxton’s Recuyell o f the History es o f Troy e with “the English much
amended’’ (1596, 1597, 1607, and 1617); The Life and Death o f Hector (1614); a mod
ernization of Hoccleve’s Tale o f Jonathas, in William Browne’s The Shepheards Pipe
(1614); Sidnam’s modernization of the first three books of Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde (c. 1630); and Thomas Purfoot’s modernization of Henry Watson’s Valentine
and Orson (1637).24 By the end of the sixteenth century, there was evidently a thriving
market for revised editions of medieval romances, histories, and pastoral verse.
The authors of these texts sought to mitigate their sources’ distance from potential
readers, offering new editions written expressly for their readers. Their demands were
most directly articulated by an unknown reader of Lydgate’s Troy Book, no less, who
wrote this adversaria on the flyleaf of a late-fifteenth-century manuscript in 1586:
23 The Workes o f our Ancient and lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chavcer, newly Printed
(London: 1602), fol. 378; 3Tlr. Preceding editions were printed by Pynson (1526), Thynne
(1532, 1542, 1550), and Stowe (1561).
24 Beadle’s account of “the nascent trend towards the modernization of ancient vernacular
works” in this period mentions only Hoccleve, The Life and Death o f Hector, and Sidnam (“Vir
tuoso’s Troilus,” 220).
25 Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. poet. 144, fol. 407r. Partly quoted and discussed in Henry
Bergen, “Bibliographical Introduction,” Lydgate ’s Troy Book, part 4, Early English Text Society,
n.s., 126(1935): 52.
54 M IC H A E L U L L Y O T
This reader distinguishes between literary ‘ryme’ and narrative ‘substance,’ evidently
using different words for different stages of the literary process: ‘artte’ is the skill nec
essary to render matter in rhyme, in verbal ‘stille’ or aural ‘townges.’26As evidence that
men have made both discursive modes “more pure,” the reader cites recent translations
of Ovid and Virgil into contemporary English: Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses
(1567), and Thomas Phaer’s Aeneid (1558-62). By implication, Lydgate’s “rude
phrases” also must be translated now into a “stille, & townge[ ] more pure.” This com
parison of Lydgate with Latin masters is perhaps higher praise than our fickle reader
connotes, but this argument is concerned less with origins than with outcomes. It fore
sees a rise in the numbers of modernized texts in the years to come, when many authors
followed Golding and Phaer’s ambitious projects of ‘Englished’ epics with their own
offerings of modernized Middle English texts.
This reader’s request for a modernization of Lydgate’s Troy Book would be met,
but not for nearly three decades. In 1614, the same year Norden’s Labyrinth was
printed, Thomas Purfoot the Younger printed The Life and Death o f Hector (LDH), an
anonymous and wholescale modernization of Lydgate’s poem. To use the terms of this
1586 request, LDH replaces each line of Lydgate’s ‘artte,’ while preserving and even
augmenting its ‘matter.’27 The poem is remarkable for its mix of audacity and modesty.
Its modernizer preserves Lydgate’s authorial control over the poem by updating only
his language, leaving his narrative and, most importantly, his purported authorship
intact. Its only mention of an author is in the attribution on its title page: “ W ritten by
lohn Lidgate Monke o f Berry, and by him dedicated to the high and mighty Prince
Elende thefift, King q/England” (i[2r). A reader of The Life and Death o f Hector would
therefore be excused for believing that this book is simply another edition of Lydgate’s
poem. Even those familiar with the sixteenth-century editions of Lydgate’s poem might
have been prone to this initial misattribution.28 Printing the poem under a new title
26 William Thomas’ Principal Rules o f the Italian Grammar (STC 24020) defines “Stile,
a certein phrase of style in speakyng or in writyng” (London 1550). Cited in Ian Lancashire, ed.
Early Modern English Dictionaries Database
<www.chass.utoronto.ca/english/emed/ernedd.html>.
27 LDH is 30,829 lines in length, while the Troy Book occupies 29,743 lines in its source,
the edition of 1555. Franz Albert convincingly argues that LDH is based on the 1555 edition of
Lydgate’s poem: “Since none of the variants found in [the 1555 text] can be found neither in [the
1513 text] nor in any of the MSS, it follows incontrovertibly that the reviser used the edition of
1555 as his source.” Über Thomas Heywoods The life and death of Hector, Eine Neubearbeitung
von Lydgates Troy Book (Leipzig: A. Deichert nachf. [G. Böhme], 1909), 7; I gratefully ac
knowledge Hans Werner for this translation. With the sole exception of Book II, each book of
LDH is longer than its source by as few as fifty or as many as five hundred lines.
28 In the absence of other evidence, some readers have concluded that this volume is a new
and retitled edition of Lydgate’s Troy Book. Some of L D H s early readers, including Fuller and
Winstanley, assumed that Lydgate had written this poem in the early fifteenth century, and
English Auctores and Authorial Readers 55
would be nothing extraordinary: it had previously appeared as The Hystorye, Sege and
Dystruccyon ofTroye, in 1513, and as The Avncient Historie and onely trewe and syn-
cere Cronicle o f the war res betwixte the Grecians and the Troyans, in 1555.29
Turning past LDH's title page, however, these readers did not find the Troy Book's
long columns of pentameter couplets, broken by the occasional chapter-heading. Rather,
they found Lydgate’s five books recast into six-line pentameter stanzas, rhyming
ABABCC .30 Like us, they might have wondered which is more remarkable: the monu
mental task of crafting some five thousand such stanzas from Lydgate’s couplets, or the
anonymity of its craftsman.31 The modernizer’s identity is subordinate to the name of
Lydgate. By removing any sign of this text’s difference from Lydgate’s poem, and by
disavowing personal responsibility for it, the modernizer seeks not merely to supple
ment preceding editions of Troy Book, but to replace Lydgate’s poem altogether.32
expressed their surprise that Lydgate’s language was so advanced beyond Chaucer’s (Albert,
Neubearbeitung, 3).
29 Its printers were Richard Pynson (London: 1513), and Thomas Marshe (London: 1555).
The full title of the 1555 edition was The Avncient Historie and onely trewe and syncere Cronicle
o f the warres betwixte the Grecians and the Troyans, and subsequently o f the fyrst euer cyon [sic]
o f the auncient andfamouse Cytye ofTroye vnder Lamedon the king, and o f the laste and fynall
destruction o f the same vnder Pryam, wrytten by Daretus a Troyan and Dictus a Grecian both
souldiours and present in all the sayde warres and digested in Latyn by the lerned Guydo de
Columpnis and sythes translated into englyshe verse by lohn Lydgate Moncke o f Burye. And
newly imprinted. An. M. | D. L. V\.
30 The use of a stanza was perhaps inspired by Chaucerian and Spenserian precedents, but
its form originated in the Elizabethan minor epic or ‘epyllion,’ a genre for which Elizabeth Story
Donno prefers the term “the erotic-mythological verse narrative” (Elizabethan Minor Epics (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 6; for a history of the term ‘epyllion,’ see 6, n. 3.).
Thomas Lodge popularized the ababcc stanza for this genre in Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589);
most notably, it served for William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), Thomas Hey wood’s
Oenone and Paris (1594), John Marston’s The Metamorphosis ofPigmalions Image (1598), and
James Shirley’s Narcissus or the Self-Lover (1646).
31 George Ellis’ memorable account of the modernization, in Specimens o f the Early English
Poets (London: 1790), reads as follows: “An anonymous writer has taken the pains to modernize
the entire poem . . . to change the ancient context and almost every rhyme, and to throw the whole
into six-line stanzas; and yet, so little was he solicitous to raise his own reputation at the expense
of the original author, that, though he has altered the title and the preface of the work, he has still
ascribed it to Lydgate. This strange instance of perverted talents and industry” remains, Ellis adds
enigmatically, “well known to the booksellers” (298). The LDH's alterations to Lydgate’s ‘pref
ace’ are slight, though its placement (discussed below) of Lydgate’s envoy, Verba translatoris
ad librum suum, before the poem’s beginning alters the reader’s perspective.
32 The only extended study of The Life and Death o f Hector (LDH) is Albert, Neube
arbeitung. Its attribution of LDH to Thomas Heywood led G. C. Moore Smith to marvel, in his
56 M IC H A E L U L L Y O T
In the absence of a corrected reissue of The Life and Death o f Hector with a revised
title page and a preface from this translator, we can only conclude that this anonymity
was a deliberate decision by its author, by its printer Thomas Purfoot, or by some
collaboration between the two.33 Purfoot believed strongly enough in the need for
modernized texts that, more than two decades later, he would preface his Valentine and
Orson (1637) by saying, “I am now incouraged to put this old story into a new livery,
& not to suffer that to lie buried, that a little cost may keepe alive.”34 The origin of this
encouragement is unclear, but Purfoot’s emphasis on what readers may take from this
text reveals that he is motivated by the needs of these readers as paying customers, not
by the need of his modernizer (and perhaps his collaborator) as a noteworthy author.
Yet there is a translator’s preface, of sorts, preceding The Life and Death o f Hector.
After Lydgate’s dedicatory epistle to Henry V, two stanzas appear in which he instructs
the book not to resist future improvements. All three are transplanted from the end of
Lydgate’s poem.35 In so doing, LDH misrepresents Lydgate’s intentions for his poem’s
reception, turning a concluding afterthought into an opening premise. It predicates all
that follows with a misplaced sense of incompletion and uncertainty. Comparing this
1614 preface (at right) with its source, the Verba translatons from the 1555 edition (at
left), both appear to emphasize the ameliorative effects of future revision, though with
subtle differences:
review of Albert’s book, that “It can only have sprung from a very enthusiastic admiration of
Lydgate on the part of the seventeenth-century dramatist” (The Modern Language Review 5
[1910]: 222-23). This attribution has since been discredited; see Charles Rouse, “Thomas Hey-
wood and The Life and Death o f Hector,” PMLA 43(3) (1928): 779-83. LD H s authorship re
mains a subject for further research.
33 Marcy North’s The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures o f Discretion in Tudor-Stuart
England, “a groundbreaking . . . study of the nature, types, and strategies of purposeful literary
anonymity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” was published too recently for this
article to consider (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); the phrase is Frank
Ardolino’s in his review in Early Modern Literary Studies 9.2 (September, 2003): 10.1-13
<www.shn.ac.uk/emls/09-2/arnonor.html>.
34 Valentine and Orson. The Two Sonnes o f the Emperour o f Greece (London: 1637), A3v.
35 For a full bibliographical description of LDH, see Bergen, “Bibliographical Introduction,”
67-84. LDH rearranges other parts of Lydgate’s poem: it prefaces the poem with his concluding
dedication to Henry V, and with his two stanzas titled “Lenuoye” and “Verba translatoris ad
librum suum.” These rearrangements effectively adapt Lydgate’s conventions to those of an early
modern paratext. As Renoir writes of LDH, Lydgate, “like Bernard Shaw, . . . needed compen
dious prefaces and appendices . . . [and] was unfortunate enough to write at a time when there
were no provisions for frankly separate introductions and editorial commentary” (Poetry o f John
Lydgate, 141).
English Auctores and Authorial Readers 57
And when thou arte most likly go And when thou likeliest art to go
to wracke, to wracke,
Agaynst them thine errour not Seeme not gainst them thine error
diffende, to defend;
But humbly tho withdrawe the & go Bur rather yeeld a little and giue
abacke. backe,
Requiring them that they thy And pray them, that they will thy
amisse amende. faults amend.
(1555: 2E3r) (1614: î[4v)
Lydgate leaves the reader with a final impression that his book does not preclude any
future correction. In the modernized text the impetus for this improvement is displaced
from the book’s own inclination, signalled by its ‘withdrawal,’ to the corrector’s better
judgment, to which it must “yeeld a little and giue backe,’’ evoking the two meanings
of ‘give’ as both permitting and providing. The alliterative “thy amisse amende” be
comes “thy faults amend,” more explicitly acknowledging the original poem’s problems.
These metatextual moments in the Troy Book, when Lydgate appears to speak
directly to his modernizer, provoke corresponding moments of self-consciousness in the
author of The Life and Death o f Hector. They are the moments when the modernizer
must defend his practice, because he is being addressed directly by the poet. A more
direct address to the judgment of future readers comes at the end of Lydgate’s prologue
before Book I of the Troy Book, which LDH reprints as a “Preface to the Reader.” Lyd
gate seeks a balance between earning his patron’s confidence and his readers’ approval
of the poem,
Prayinge to all that shal it read Beseeching all that see ’t, with heart
or see, & mind
Where as I erre there to amende Not spare to speake, if any fault
me. they find.
Of humble herte and lowe And with good will I shall amend
entencion, the same,
Committing all to theyr (For many eies may see much more
correction. then one.)
And therof thanke my will is y[t] Correct then freely where you find
they wyn, the blame,
Lor through theyr support thus I But find not fault whereas deserueth
wil begin. none.
(1555: B2v) (1614: %6v)
prêts these words. The LDH-author takes Lydgate’s plea at face value, finding “blame”
where it is deserved and otherwise “amending]” the poem “with good will.” The
slippage between first- and second-person pronouns in LDH is a matter of necessity. It
arises from the author’s self-assumption of Lydgate’s third-person reference to his
readers (“theyr correction”), evidenced in “I shall amend,” and in the line about “many
eies,” before it returns to the literal address to “you,” the reader who Lydgate predicts
“shal it read or see.” The modernizer’s response to Lydgate’s plea for amendment is The
Life and Death o f Hector itself. It is not an homage to the Troy Book, but a correction
of its faults, particularly of its antiquated and difficult language.
Lydgate openly confesses his inadequacies throughout the Troy Book, particularly
in his utter inability to emulate Chaucer’s language. In the following excerpt from The
Life and Death o f Hector, its author emphasizes Lydgate’s degeneration from Chaucer,
originator of English eloquence and
This emphasis on Lydgate’s decline from Chaucer’s language is the premise behind The
Life and Death o f Hector. The Troy Book's language cannot presume to match Chauc
er’s, only revealing the beauty of its model by contrast, through presumptuous imitation.
The LDH is a derivative text, but its premise relies on this conception of Lydgate him
self as a derivative author, reading Chaucer’s book only to see what he vainly pursues.
English Auctores and Authorial Readers 59
However, it moves in the opposite direction, fleeing the language of Chaucer and Lyd
gate to meet the demands of its readers.
How does Lydgate lend his text more readily to stylistic revision than Chaucer
does? When his early-seventeenth-century readers consider Lydgate’s confessions of
linguistic failure, they conclude that the difficulty of reading his language would not
repay their efforts as readily as if they read Chaucer’s. To these readers, Lydgate’s
dependence on a model for his language signals his belatedness, his unsuitability for
reading once this language moves out of common usage. Translations and moderniza
tions aim to mitigate this distance, to restore a text’s distant language to local usage,
when its narrative is worth retelling. Chaucer’s emphasis on his narrative inheritances,
rather than any linguistic debts which were (it was believed) unnecessary, gave him a
greater authority than Lydgate’s.
The birth of early modernization was a falling off, a shift from direct to mediated
expression, a degeneration from reverence for originals to a sense of their vulnerabili
ties. For Middle English verse, it began with Lydgate because his vulnerabilities were
far more overt than Chaucer’s. Though Chaucer was not far behind, he would be treated
very differently. To early-seventeenth-century readers, his texts were beset by the same
difficulties with Middle English, which Thomas Speght’s 1602 glossary sought to
reduce. Nonetheless, some felt that Speght merely began what others would finish,
because this language was difficult enough to merit more than a glossary. The 1602
edition of Chaucer also contained a tribute to Speght by Sir Francis Beaumont, praising
him as one who has “restored vs Chaucer, both aliue againe, and younge againe” and
“opened the way to others, and attempted that which was vnattempted before you----”36
The effect of Speght’s edition, as Beaumont suggests, was to open the way for future
poets to overcome the language barrier and appreciate Chaucer anew.
Unlike The Life and Death o f Hector, Sir Jonathan Sidnam’s partial modernization
of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers him a respectful tribute, rather than seeking
to supplant him. It is incomplete, and was circulated only in manuscript, among a lim
ited coterie who could not appreciate Chaucer’s language, yet still respected his prima
cy.37 Its full title reveals Sidnam’s motive for producing this text:
In the absence of a translator’s preface, all that we know of Sidnam’s attitude to Chau
cer comes from this title-leaf, and from the text that follows. The advertisement leaves
little doubt of his admiration for his source’s language, and explicitly identifies what
follows as a translation. Sidnam evidently falls into the latter of the two categories he
identifies, of readers who crave access to Chaucer’s poetry but are unwilling to read his
obsolete language. Unlike The Life and Death o f Hector, Sidnam’s modernization
acknowledges its inferiority to its “more Exquisite” source because it indirectly encour
ages more capable readers to take up Chaucer’s original text. As a manuscript, its effect
on seventeenth-century receptions of Chaucer was far more contained than the potential
readership Thomas Purfoot pursued with LDH. Its use of initials on the title-leaf would
have sufficed for the manuscript’s coterie audience, but it also suits the author’s
evidently low profile. Sidnam offers this coterie a more accessible, reader-friendly
Chaucer, free of the difficulties involved with reading “obsolete” and difficult texts, but
he certainly does not attempt to supplant his source. This is Sidnam’s homage to
Chaucer, his humble and imperfect tribute which (pace Lydgate) will not attempt to
emulate his style.
Without further extrinsic evidence of Sidnam’s rhetorical self-fashioning, the evi
dence for his understanding of translation can only be found in his treatment of Chaucer.
Like Lydgate, Chaucer addresses the subject of future revisions, but as discussed above,
he effectively inverts the humility topos by allying his works with their sources. The
following parallel citations juxtapose Sidnam’s modernization (at right) with Speght’s
1602 edition of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (at left):
Chaucer: Sidnam:
Me needeth here none other art Me needeth heere none other art
to vse: to vse
For why to euery louer I me Then to entreate all louers to
excuse, Excuse
That of no sentement I this What is not mine; For I translate
endite, this song
But out of latine in my tongue Out of old English, to our
it write. Moderne tongue. /
38
Wright, Modernisation, 89.
English Auctores and Authorial Readers 61
I know, that in forme of speech I know our language hath beene apt
is chaunge to chandge
Within a thousand yere, and In euerie age, and wordes that
words tho heeretofore
That hadden prise, now wonder Haue beene in vse, would now seeme
nice & straunge wondrous strange
Thinketh hem, and yet they Yet men haue vsd them soe in time
spake hem so ... of Y o re ...39
Sidnam’s substantive alterations visible in these parallel texts arise, in part, from dif
ficulties inherent to translating rhyming verse across the language’s shifts of stress and
pronunciation.40 But one, in particular, reveals the deep divide between Chaucer’s atti
tude toward his sources, and Sidnam’s toward Chaucer: it is Sidnam’s literal interpreta
tion of Chaucer’s humble self-characterization as a mere translator of his source, at the
end of this first stanza. Sidnam’s replacement of “latine” with “old English” at the end
of this stanza gives Chaucer’s assertion a more literal meaning than he intends with his
references to the fictive Lollius. Sidnam introduces the word ‘translate’ twice in this
excerpt: “I translate this song” and “I translate mine Author.” These come before
Chaucer’s reflections on natural changes in language, which Sidnam evidently found
prescient. At the opening of the final stanza of this citation, Sidnam’s first-person
pronoun is again deliberately ambiguous: both he and Chaucer are aware of linguistic
change, but Chaucer locates this change only in spoken language. Sidnam also expands
39 Chaucer, Workes (1602), 2C4v; fol. 148v. Ligatured letters have been silently inserted,
as in “hadden.”
40 For a detailed discussion of Sidnam’s linguistic compromises, see Wright, Modernisation,
17-55.
62 M IC H A E L U L L Y O T
Chaucer’s “thousand yere” to “euerie age,” with the archaism “time of Yore” added for
good measure. “I” in Sidnam is both his presumed authorial persona, and his imper
sonation by Chaucer. Though translators are secondary to their originals, an understand
ing Sidnam intimates in his concern not to overstep the bounds of “What is not mine,”
they often seek this impersonation as a means to legitimacy.
These two texts exemplify two categories of early modernization, each with oppos
ing aims and functions for their auctores: those like LDH, which aim to replace their
original, and more provisional efforts like Sidnam’s manuscript, which aim to facilitate
the original’s survival by assisting new readings. In both his title and his text, Sidnam’s
deference to Chaucer is evident: he is expressly a mere translator who renders Troilus
and Criseyde accessible to present-day readers. He uses the term ‘paraphrase’ to de
scribe his authorial function, which recalls Roger Ascham’s definition of paraphrasis
in The Sc hole mas ter (1570), an educational technique whereby the pupil independently
revises a passage from a rhetorical model. Sidnam’s other term is ‘translation,’ which
imputes a fuller range of interpretations of translatio, beginning with metaphor proper.
More selectively defined, translatio is better suited to Sidnam’s act than paraphrasis,
whose aim Quintilian defines as the pupil’s imitation of the model’s style in order to
surpass him.41 Sidnam’s function is best described as an inverted paraphrasis, trans
lation via a specialized form of prosopopoeia in which the model, impersonating the
pupil, rewrites itself.
To be loyal to its source, translation requires this inverted paraphrasis. But to be
discernible in present language, its model must not contaminate the translation with
overemphasis of its own language. Lydgate’s authorial function in The Life and Death
o f Hector is undermined by his reliance on an English auctor. Language, qua language,
does not translate well, and in an age of increased resistance to antiquated idioms, Lyd
gate’s preoccupation with it is his undoing. The language Chaucer polished for use in
poetry Lydgate wore into consistency, and ultimately could not protect itself from its
readers. Unlike Chaucer, the very model of linguistic self-determination, Lydgate’s
overt dependence on an earlier, more distant model for his language, irrespective of its
nationality, discredits his ability to speak fluently in a later tongue. Though early mod
ern English is hardly a different language, for the two authorial readers considered here,
it is a sufficiently advanced idiom to render Middle English “obsolete,” in Sidnam’s
words. Little did Lydgate suspect that future challenges to his poetry would come from
what he considered his own, and Chaucer’s, greatest strength: their vernacular. No Eng
lish auctores after Chaucer could exert such control over their own reception, because
such opportunities are limited to originary moments in the development of literary
language.
41 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans H. E. Butler (Loeb Classical Library [1922; repr.
Cambridge, MA, 1961]), vol. 1:114-15 (10.5.5). See JoAnn DellaNeva, “Reflecting Lesser
Lights: The Imitation of Minor Writers in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989):
449-79; 465-66.
A Survey of Verse
Translations from French
Printed Between Caxton and Tottel
A. E. B. COLDIRON
ometimes a single fact of printing history can promise — if we pursue its impli
1 The present essay is based on my early work in the whole corpus; my book-length study
of one part of the corpus, the verse treating gender issues, is under advance contract with the Uni
versity of Michigan Press. Thanks to Melanie Parker for research assistance on this project, and
thanks to Ian Moulton for patience, kindness, and skill.
2 William A. Ringler, Jr., Bibliography and Index o f English Printed Verse (London: Man
sell, 1988), 1-7, discussing the verse printed 1501-58; my own work is confirming these figures
and even increasing these ratios a bit for the period before 1501.
64 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
of lines translated from Italian.3 The verse translated from French forms a very large
corpus, the contents of which I’ll introduce and survey in the last section of this essay.
Most of it, however, is unedited, and some is hard to find even on microfilm — no
wonder so few people read it, since “unedited” means “unmodernized” and, often
enough, “barely legible.” It’s uncanonical, unstudied, unwept, and unsung. Yet the dis
junction between its large quantity and its small canonicity reveals some important gaps
in our constructions of literary history .
This period between Caxton and Tottel, which is to say, between England’s first
printing house and first major printed poetic miscellany, is often dismissed as the dull-
drab age, represented in our canons and curricula only by the usual suspects, Skelton-
Wyatt-Surrey. Yet this is one of the most exciting, rich, and formative times in our
literature, with a new technology fostering rapidly expanding readerships and stimu
lating experiments in verse that are connected to nearly every wider ideological and
aesthetic change that we now call “Renaissance.” This unread poetic corpus of course
deserves more scholarly attention, but the point here is that it also invites and will
reward different kinds of attention. This body of verse promises to change not only what
we are studying, but how we study it. As you know, most scholarship about English
Renaissance poetry, at least since Jacob Burckhardt, tells the story of Italian influence,
especially Petrarchan influence. Clearly, the size of the French-derived corpus, its pro
duction values, and its quantity relative to Italian-derived verse challenge our canons
and our usual accounts of literary history of this period.
We might initially try to explain these translations as French-filtered Petrarchan
verse making its inexorable move into English. One of our first questions about this
French-born corpus might well be “Isn’t it all just ‘Petrarch in a beret’?” This explana
tion would make sense if the translations were Petrarchan in origin, if they imitated
Petrarch or were post-Petrarchan or anti-Petrarchan in character. If that were the case,
we could treat this large corpus with the usual methods of the influence study. These
translations, however, are almost entirely not Petrarchan, are not French vehicles in
which Petrarchan cargo comes early to England. There are no sonnets, first of all, in
these 100,000+ French-born lines, no canzoni, no burning-fr eezing-pale lover persona,
and no love-lyric sequences. Curiously, among these translations from French are found
3 Of course, the largest amount of verse is translated from Latin, but French leads the ver
naculars. Between 1501 and 1558, more than 74,857 lines are translated from French as against
about 13,450 lines from Italian. My initial survey of incunabula pushes that ratio higher, but
35,440 of the pre-1500 French-derived lines, not included in Ringler’s count, are Lydgate ’s trans
lation of Laurent de Premierfait’s Des Cas et Ruyrie des nobles hommes et femmes, a version of
Boccaccio’s De Casibus. The early French editions of this that I have found include Bruges:
Mansion, 1476; Paris: Du Pré, 1483; Lyon: Husz & Schabeler, 1483, Paris: Vérard, 1506; Des
nobles malheureux, Paris, 1494; Des Nobles malheureux, nouvellement imprimé, Paris, M. Le
Noir & J. Petit, 1515; Paris, N. Couteau, 1538. Even ruling out such ambiguous cases, early
printed poetry is heavily and unambiguously French-derived.
A Survey o f Verse Translations 65
no grand patriotic laments like the “Italia mia,” no idealized Laura figure (though there
is Chartier’s resistant Belle Dame Sans Merci), no self-laureation, no post-Augustinian
introspection. Certainly, these features do not exhaust the vast poetics that is Petrarch-
ism. But we have here a side of Renaissance poetics that has received very little critical
mapping. It is thus worth describing this terra incognita here. The essay will do so, after
first pursuing the implications of this significant fact: the fact of the predominantly
French rather than Italian origins of early printed English verse.
4 Steven May, “Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical Stigma of Print,” Renaissance Papers
1980 (1981): 11-18, countering an older view represented by J. W. Sanders, “The Stigma of
Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Elizabethan Poetry,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139-64.
5 Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, “The French of England: A Question of Cultural Traffic?” Plenary
Lecture, International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 10, 2003.
66 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
we then wish to posit a “decorum of media,” in which Italian poetry can somehow be
readily naturalized in manuscript, but French poetry, already familiar to bilingual read
ers, now gravitates towards print translation as the readership expands to include more
(and a greater proportion of) English-only readers? The unproven and I think unprova-
ble comparison to be made on this point would be between the number of non-
italophone readers and the number of non-francophone readers. More precisely, one
would need to track the increase in the number of non-italophone readers (i.e., the
increase in the need for translations from Italian) and compare it to the presumably
greater increase in the number of non-francophone readers (i.e., the increase in the need
for French translations). Since the non-italophone number would start off much larger
than the non-francophone number, the relative increase in the need for French trans
lation would be greater. We cannot know these things; I propose here only another way
to think of how translations are distributed across print and manuscript media. We
would still have to wonder if non-italophone readers are somehow less attached to print
— or to posit some other, non-linguistic way to explain the lack of Italian and the heavy
preponderance of French translated into printed verse.
I would suggest that that line of inquiry (and perhaps those like it that seek to spe
cify the social class of readers of print), while interesting to contemplate, is backwards,
and a better way to think of “decorum of media” is to think more pragmatically and to
think of media first. In other words, let’s simply start with the crucial, plain fact that
most of the early printers translated material from French: William Caxton, Robert
Copland, Wynkyn de Worde, Robert Wyer, Richard Pynson — all of them either took
up French works to be translated by others or were themselves translators of French into
English verse. These printers, with their continental origins and connections, may have
found French material an easy, fast way to fill the sudden content vacuum created by
the new technology; since so many were francophone, in-house translations would have
been practical and economical as well. Philip Gaskell notes that “Most of our earliest
printers, indeed, were aliens, welcomed for their skills; and even after 1534, when aliens
were denied full membership of the Stationers’ Company, alien printers continued to
reside as gild brothers” (174). (The Act of 1484 was an act encouraging foreigners to
print in England, not rescinded until 1534.) We shouldn’t miss that the printing houses,
the source of the first mass distributions of English poetry, were at the same time centers
of multilingualism, and in their most formative decades, were especially centers of the
English appropriation of French poetics. The printers’ work with French material was
thus implicated in translation of a broader sort: they “translated” between whole systems
of literary production, distribution, and reception — systems undergoing rapid change.6
6 Nor should we think that printing in England and in France took place under identical
conditions. Philip Gaskell, in A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972),
explains that “At the beginning of the sixteenth century England was a small, backward, and un
important appendage of Christendom, where printing had arrived late and where it was deficient
in technique and provincial in content. The increasing importance of England in Europe during
A Survey o f Verse Translations 67
A slightly more theoretical line of adjustment to the Petrarchan model might ad
dress its silent assumption that literary change is linear and teleological, a matter of
canonical dominoes tumbling northward in the line of the translatio studii. What our
significant fact points to instead is that during this period, synchronic contacts, espe
cially those with France, seem to have been catalysts at least as powerful as the long
diachronic lines of author-to-author influence. Indeed, the most prolific author on both
sides of this corpus was “Anon.” Influence models as traditionally construed can only
tell part of the story here, so the promise of this corpus is in part theoretical, inviting
alternatives to influence models and linear-change models of literary history. Just as
these translations challenge our accounts of literary history in the period, they also pose
broader methodological and theoretical challenges, a topic there is space only to men
tion here.7
As you can tell, the implications of this fact for adjusting the Petrarchist-based can
on and criticism of English Renaissance poetry are considerable. This simple fact of
printing history gives us some clear reasons to read (and teach) beyond the Skelton-
Wyatt-Surrey triumvirate. The poetry printed between Caxton and Tottel is where we
can read the actual record of our poetry, not its retrospectively imagined teloi. Here we
can see not so much what the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canon founders sel
ected to edit, but what early moderns were actually reading and writing. This means
reading (in addition to some pretty interesting and skillful verse) what we would now
think of as dead ends, experiments, meanderings, unknown treasures, and yes, dreck —
dreck being perhaps the corpus’s greatest silent gift. When we experience the poems as
dreck, we have been given an immediate index to the differences between our sensi
bilities and theirs, and a clue to understanding theirs better. This unread translated verse
the next two hundred years was not accompanied by a corresponding advance in its book trade,
which remained small and backward, confined by tight political control and by the restrictions
of a monopolistic trade gild. During the same two centuries, the book trades of France, the low
Countries, Germany, and Italy, while differing in many respects from each other, were all or
ganized on a much larger scale than the English trade . . . and operated a sizeable international
market in which England took little part except as an importer of foreign books” (171). There is
some evidence that later in the period, English printers were restricted while French printers were
encouraged to expand. Marjorie Plant (The English Book Trade, 3rd ed. [London: George Allen
and Unwin Ltd., 1974], 86-88) explains that by 1615 the fear and complaint of the English
printers was that too many presses existed, and government restrictions were imposed, such that
fourteen of the nineteen printers were restricted to two presses each and the other five to one”
(86). In France in 1618, the Provost of Paris ordered “that each master printer should keep not less
than two presses in running order” (87). This may help explain, for example, why there are so
many misogamous satires in France and so few in England, or so many more imprints overall in
France.
7 But pursued further in “Translation’s Challenge to Critical Categories,” Yale Journal o f
Criticism 16.2 (October 2003), forthcoming.
68 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
offers, in other words, not an italianate national poetry selected from 20/20 canonical
hindsight and from great aesthetic and historical distances, but something that I hope
will prove more accurate (dare I say it — better-historicized). So the theoretical failure
of Burckhardtian Petrarchism to account for a third of earlier printed English verse
translations is really not a failure at all, but a great opportunity for a generation of
scholars.
Here, someone will no doubt say to my modest adjustments to critical hegemony,
“Good grief, what have you got against Petrarch?’’ Nothing: in fact I love his poetry; I
burn and I freeze for the Rime sparse; the octaves are stars, the sestets are pearls . .. and
before the Italianist scholars reading this essay fling it down in disgust, a few qualifi
cations are needed. The Italianist or Petrarchist line of scholarship has been enormously
productive and successful and has charted, for example, the development of English
sonnets, the silencing and re-voicing of women in early modern lyrics, the relation of
poetry to Tudor court politics, the importance of patrons, and more.8 Furthermore,
studies of Wyatt’s and Surrey’s translations of Petrarch into English helped establish the
disciplinary habit of looking back in time and to the continent for literary sources, ana
logues, and methods (looking, in other words, in the same directions the English poets
themselves had looked). To the idea of Renaissance as a revival of the classics, a long
line of scholars after Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein
Versuch ( 1860) has drawn attention to an extra layer of vernacularity — the English re
birthing of the Italian fourteenth century’s re-birthing of the classical past, in which
Petrarch was a chief figure, his own work richly varied and vast. Scholars preferring
“early modern” have also seen Petrarch as an originator of subjectivity and modern con
sciousness (though that view is not unquestioned).9It would be hard to overestimate the
enduring importance of this side of early modern studies, and this essay is no “Oedipal
8 See, for instance, Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); William Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY : Cor
nell University Press, 1994); Ignacio Navarrete, Orphans o f Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the
Spanish Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Roland Greene, Post-
Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations o f the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1991); Stephen Minta, ed, Petrarch and Petrarchism: The English and French
Traditions (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1980); Heather Dubrow, Echoes
o f Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press,
1995); Joseph Vianey, Le pétrarquisme en France au XVIe siècle (Montpellier: Coulet et fils,
1909); Thomas Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press,
1989), and many more.
9 David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists Writing the History of Subjec
tivity,” in Culture and History 1350-1600, ed. D. Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1996) .
A Survey o f Verse Translations 69
10 .. in which the father of Renaissance studies is periodically held up to scorn by his un
grateful children,” Randolph Starn, “Renaissance Redux,” American Historical Review 101.3
(1998): 122-25; 122.
11 See Mary C. Erler’s edition of Copland’s Poems (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1993), 3, 4, 11, 20, 26, 43-48, 112; especially 43-48.
12 In separate conversations, 2001 and 2002 respectively. On Burgundy, see especially Gor
don Kipling, The Triumph o f Honour: Burgundian Origins o f the Elizabethan Renaissance (The
Hague, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 1977); C. A. J. Armstrong, England, France, and
Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1983).
70 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
corpus: instead of learning about “another side” of English Renaissance verse we may
end up learning about a number of sides.
**
Finally, the significant Frenchness of this poetry (even as we have just qualified it)
makes good sense in terms of the cultural infrastructure and confirms other aspects of
its interest even beyond the literary-historical. Between Caxton and Tottel, contacts with
France were pressing, immediate, and tense. The early-modern culture wars with France
reached into nearly every area of English life: this is the time of repeated Tudor in
vasions of France and continuing claims to the French throne (Henry VIII’s wars with
France, of course; but even Elizabeth styled herself Regina Angliae et Franciae, and
James kept the titular claim too, if not the serious efforts to actualize it). Henry VIII had
been tutored by Frenchman Bernard André, an orator regis or poet laureate to Henry
VII, and he wrote letters in French, ordered clothing of “French Tawney” for his house
hold servants, and eventually married the French-raised Anne Boleyn.13In 1513 Henry
VIII started a war with France, and in 1514 married his sister Mary to Louis XII; in
1520 came the rival displays at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, but also the spread of
syphilis, called most commonly after 1494 Morbus Gallicus or the “French disease,”
and several works about it.14 Competition and contempt in fashion and literature run
throughout the century: there is a mid-century loathing of French fops and “inkehorn
termes” for example, alongside a desire for beaded bodices and portrait miniatures, and
comments circa 1514 about the superiority of French fashions in the literature surround
ing the wedding procession of Mary Tudor. (Apparently, after she changed into French
fashions somewhere near Abbeville, she looked more acceptable to the crowds and
commentators.15) Agincourt long remained a point of national pride, and the loss of
13 Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic Henry Vili, Vol. l,pt. 1, 1509-(London: H.M.
Stationery Office, 1862-1932); see especially entries for 4, 19, 30 May; 11, 23, June; 17, 29, 30
August; 9, 13, 14 September; 6, 21, October; 5, 11, 15, 28 November; 3, 21, and 30 December
1509.
14 It seems to have taken that name during the French wars in Italy in 1494. See Jean de
Vigo, Le Mal français, Chapter V in his Practicae in arta Chirurgica copiosa (Rome, 1514), ed.
and trans. Alfred Fournier (Paris: G. Masson, 1872); English trans. Wallace Hamby (Fort Laud
erdale, FL: Warren Green, Inc. 1979). Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilidis, sive Morbi G allici. . .
(1555) is edited by Geoffrey Eatough in Fracastoro’s Syphilis (Trowbridge, Wiltshire, U.K.:
Redwood Burn Ltd., 1984).
15 See Hippolyte Cocheris, Entrées de Marie d ’Angleterre, femme de Louis XII à Abbeville
et à Paris (Lyon: Louis Perrin, 1859), especially 4-19. Pierre Gringoire, “De la Reception et
entrée de la illustrissime dame et princesse Marie d’Angleterre (fille de Hen. VII.) Dans la ville
de Paris, le 6. Nov[re] 1514. Avec belles peintures,” ed. Charles Read Baskervill, Pierre Grin-
gore ’s Pageants fo r the Entry o f Mary Tudor into Paris: An Unpublished Manuscript (Chicago:
A Survey o f Verse Translations 71
Guyenne and Normandy one of national shame. The crushingly expensive English occu
pation of Calais until 1558 thus had the backing of historical memory as well as current
nationalist impulses. There were also economic tensions: not only import-export issues
and the problem of territorial rule past Calais, but regulations favoring and later re
stricting foreign apprentices in the London trades. Printers were directly affected by this,
of course, as noted above; the Act of 1484 encouraged foreign books and printers while
laws made in 1515,1523,1529, and 1534 restricted both.16In short, France was directly
under England’s skin, and had been since 1066, in ways that Italy simply was not.
Now, beneath these pervasive Tudor Anglo-French culture wars there is a lingering
and complex biculturalism, perhaps the result of a very long, post-Hastings decoloniza
tion. Let’s push this idea beyond its reasonable limits for a moment: what if we think
of early modern England as a former French colony, as the locus not only of colonizers,
but of the emergent post-colonized? This would alter our understanding of English
poetic subjectivity: not only is that subjectivity largely translated (that fact alone de
bunking all sorts of anachronistic Romantic and expressivist notions about poetry that
have driven criticism since Wordsworth), but English subjectivity can be imagined as
at once colonizing (or self-aggrandizing) and also as post-colonized, resistant, or strug
gling to emerge and assert itself in the face of France’s greater cultural weight. Asser
tions of English national virtue and power and poetic excellence look rather less arro
gant when they are in fact trying to arrogate an identity unto themselves out of what had
University of Chicago Press, 1934). Francis Wormald, “The Solemn Entry of Mary Tudor to
Montreuil-Sur-Mer in 1514,” in Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. J. Conway Davies
(London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 471-79. For a new study, see my “Calling and Journey
in the Marriage Literature for Mary Tudor (1496-1533),” in Love, Prophecy, and Power, ed.
Bainard Cowan and James Hardy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming).
Some background details are in Petrus Carmelianus, Solennes Ceremoniae et Triumphi (London:
Pynson [1508]); and [anon translator] Spouselles o f the Ladye Marye . . . (London: Pynson
[1509]). Both are reprinted in The Camden Miscellany, Volume the Ninth (London: The Camden
Society, 1895; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965).
16 H. S. Bennett describes the changes this way: “Their [foreign persons in the printing
trades] numbers were gradually decreased, first by the series of restrictive regulations on all
foreigners, such as that of 1515 which declared that a double subsidy was to be paid by all
denizens, and secondly by Acts directly concerning the printing trade. Thus in 1523 aliens were
prohibited from having any but English apprentices, and were also forbidden to employ more than
two foreign journeymen in their printing-houses......in 1529 a new Act prohibited the setting up
of a press in England by any alien, although it did not forbid those already established from con
tinuing to print. The net was drawn still tighter in 1534, when a further Act concerning binders
and printers came into operation. . . The Act of 1484 was repealed, and new clauses provided that
aliens could only sell their wares wholesale to an English-born printer or stationer, and that no
bound books were to be imported at all.” English Books and Readers 1475-1557 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), 30—3 1.
72 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
The Corpus
With these more-and-less speculative implications in mind, a brief survey of the
corpus may give a closer sense of the translations themselves. They range widely across
genres, forms, and topics. In tone, voice, flavor, and skillfulness they vary greatly. It’s
nearly impossible to give an accurate picture of such a large body of verse without red
uctiveness, and what follows claims no exceptional virtue in that regard. I’ve selected
examples that are at once representative of some aspects of the wider corpus, but I’ve
also tried to offer memorable or interesting examples. This body of poetry breaks down
fairly well into four main thematic groups, although that’s just my arbitrary initial way
of trying to deal with such a large and varied list. (1) Religious works, (2) critiques of
court and of the rich and powerful, (3) practical advice or “low-georgic” works, and (4)
works on gender form the main thematic groupings. Most of the works necessarily pos
sess characteristics of more than one thematic group here, and the thematic groups nec
essarily overlap. In short, each grouping is provisional and suggests new questions.
First, the religious poems: many are translations of prayers, rosaries, ten command
ments, and other devotional verse, often in horae and prayerbooks. Pilgrimages of the
17 Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), 4; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Pour une Littérature Mineure (Paris: Édi
tions de Minuit, 1975); Itamar Even-Zohar, Papers in Historical Poetics (Tel Aviv: Porter Insti
tute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1978).
A Survey o f Verse Translations 73
soul, pilgrimages of the life of man, visions of the devil in hell, a versified life of Saint
Alban and Saint Amphabel, and an ars moriendi (The crafte to lyue well and to dye well
translated out offrensshe {London: de Worde, 1505}) either include or are made entire
ly of verses translated from French. Andrew Chertsey translated the very popular Ordi
naire des Chrétiens into a religious omnibus of prayers, sacraments, articles of faith, and
more, the Ordynarye o f Crystyany te.18Chertsey, a prolific and passionately committed
religious translator, also versified an elaborated ten commandments, The floure o f the
commaundementes o f god translated out o f Frensshe (London: de Worde, 1510; anr.
ed., 1521). The ten commandments made a perennially popular topic (Calvin, for one,
wrote on them). As suggestive as these religious imprints are, they do not record the
truly widespread verses scattered through English liturgies, primers, and books of hours.
Religious verse translated from French appears in at least fifty-four books of hours,
liturgies, and other such imprints that I can find in preliminary searching, not to mention
the religious verses in the many shepherds calendars.1819However, not a single translated
French poem appears in the twenty-six editions of The Prymer, Set Foorth by the
Kynges maiestie and his Clergie, to be taught lerned and read: and none other to be
used throughout all his dominions (R. Grafton, 1545, STC 16034, with subsequent
printers and dates to 1551, STC 16035 -16054). The conspicuous absence in the official
Tudor primer of the French-derived verse so widespread elsewhere may indicate that,
despite their prevalence, their seeming ubiquitousness, the verses translated from French
were not innocent and were not so fully absorbed as to be uncontroversial. What does
it mean to translate devotional verse — really a kind of applied doctrine — from France
both before and after Henry VIH’s break with Rome, when French religious discourses
were also undergoing change, though with different reasons and at a different pace?
This material should be of real interest to scholars writing the cross-cultural history of
the Reformation in England.
A second thematic group brings to England a French template for speaking truth
to power. These verses translate anti-court critiques and moral verse about wealth and
power. Alain Chartier’s Curial, translated by William Caxton in prose and verse, is
18 STC 5198, entitled Here foloweth a notable treatyse .. . named the Ordynarye o f Crys-
tyanyte or o f crysten men (translated out o f Frenshe). London: de Worde, 1502. The second
edition is STC 5199, Thordynary o f Crysten men. London: de Worde, 1506. I have learned of
eleven French editions before 1506, nine of which are before 1502.
19 My preliminary survey shows Sarum primers and hours from 1506 through 1558, some
printed in Paris, some in Rouen, some in London: STC numbers 15904.5, 15917, 15919, 15928,
15932, 15935, 15940, 15954, 15955, 15957 (an enchiridion), 15958, 15961.3, 15964, 15965,
15968, 15970, 15973, 15974, 15978, 15980, 15981, 15982, 15984, 15985, 15985a, 15985a.5,
15986.7, 15987, 15988, 15994, 15995, 15996, 15997 (Ringler’s note: “the first Marian primer”;
claims a Latin origin), 15997.5, 15998, 16001, 16004, 16006, 16007, 16008, 16008.5, 16008.3.
Printed in Rouen, in English, are STC 16055, 16056, 16058, 16068, 16070, 16071, 16076,
16078, 16081, 16106.
74 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
printed in 1483 and revised by Francis Segar in 1549 with the title A brefe declaration
o f the great, and innumerable my series . .. in courtes ryall.20 In this work, court life
brings “nothing but shame, ruine, and destruction.” The translations of the Curial are
printed at very sensitive moments for the critique of power in England, years of sedition
and rebellion.21 Caxton himself may have been involved in the rebellion of 1483.22 In
June of 1483, his collaborator, patron, and fellow translator of French verse, Anthony
Woodville, Earl Rivers, was executed while trying to protect his nephews, the young
princes, sons of Edward IV, from Richard III. Later, at Bosworth field in 1485, Henry
VII would restore stability and a pro-poetry Tudor court culture, complete with a French
poet laureate.23 Likewise, if to a lesser extent, Kett’s rebellion in 1549 posed serious
trouble in Edward’s early rule, thus making Segar’s revised translation especially time
ly. But “court” (Valois) and “court” (Tudor) — not to mention “court” (Edwardian
Tudor) — were not identical or even seamlessly similar sites, despite the many ties of
marriage, trade, and diplomacy between them. A study of the translation of topical ele
ments in such court critiques would yield a sensitive measure of the current situation as
perceived by the translator; my larger study of which this essay is a part aims at just
such measures. Not only the difference between the two (really three) sites of critique,
but the historical differences must be considered in such an endeavor. After all, Alain
Chartier’s poem was created in France in the early 1400s, during the truly terrible latter
years of the Hundred Years’ War, when dukes of Burgundy were murdering Valois
princes and when Armagnacs plotted for the throne. English translators and printers, not
20 STC 5057, Here foloweth the copye o f a lettre whyche maistre Alayn Charetier wrote to
hys brother... (Westminster: Caxton, 1483). STC 5058, A brefe declaration [London: J. Day and
W. Seres?, 1549].
21 In France, these moments are not as tense, though Louis XI died and Louis XII succeeded
to the French throne in 1483. In England, however, these are the years when Richard III claimed
the throne of Edward IV upon his death in 1483, and (probably) murdered the princes in the
Tower. Woodville, translator of French verse and patron of early English printing, was executed
without trial in June 1483 while protecting the princes, sons of Edward and his sister Elizabeth
Woodville. Woodville was “the noblest and most accomplished victim of Richard III” (DNB).
The Calendar o f State Papers (Domestic) shows that 1549 was also a terrible year of uprisings,
rebellions, treason, sedition, and the calling of nobles to court to support the monarch, Edward
VI. Francis Segar, the translator, is not named there, and the details are beyond the scope of this
essay, but the entries for the months June through November, especially, give an indication of
court intrigue as a serious problem for the realm; Segar’s translation is timely.
22 Louise Gill, “William Caxton and the Rebellion of 1483,” English Historical Review
(February 1997): 105-18.
23 As noted above, orator regis Bernard André was tutor to Prince Arthur and the future
Henry VIII. See David Carlson, “Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VIII,” Sixteenth Century
Journal 22 (Summer 1991): 253-79; and “Reputation and Duplicity: the Texts and Contexts of
Thomas More’s Epigram on Bernard André,” ELH 58 (Summer 1991): 261-81.
A Survey o f Verse Translations 75
once but twice, during the rebellions of 1483 and 1549, found new relevance in the
older critique by Chartier, a French poet who died c. 1430. So an important part of what
the translators are up to here involves their perception of an earlier moment’s relevance
— and of the relevance of Chartier’s pronouncements on that moment — to the current
Tudor situation.24 That perception of relevance is even more complex, even more ob
lique, since each of its layers will be shaded by folklore, historiography, commonplaces
about the events, and so on. Still, can it be a coincidence that the translators choose to
revive a poetic critique of such a bloody time in French history for re-presentation in
1483 and 1549?
Such translations do give English printers a French template for speaking truth to
power, but they also drive home the never-comfortable point that The Other Is Us. They
make it impossible, in other words, for English readers either to be smugly insular or
to be nostalgic about an idealized past, as the fictional and romance translations in this
corpus may encourage readers to be. Since translation here equates three sets of ills
having very different historical contexts, it asks for a (nearly counterintuitive) study of
similarity between, rather than difference between, widely distant historical contexts.
And it poses the problem of corrupt power as a transnational, even a transhistorical one.
Luckily for the translators, who were subject to being hauled up before some
authority or other, critiques of court are not always so timely or so vibrantly topical.
They’re more often safely general, included in other advisory wisdom about the use of
power, such as Christine de Pizan’s advice translated as The Morale Prouerbes o f
Cristyne (Westminster: Caxton, 1478; reprinted in The Boke o f Fame, London: Pynson,
1526). Caxton’s printing of Christine’s opening lines illustrates how Woodville’s trans
lation subtly emphasizes English national virtue.25 The Morale Prouerbes o f Cristyne
24 Likewise, Fabyan’s Chronicles include short, scornful translated verses against the early-
fourteenth-century duke Phillip of Valois (STC 10659, 10660, 10661, 10662, dated 1516 to
1542).
25 When compared with the French original, the first couplet shows a concern for nation
hood that resonates with the rest of the translation’s implicit critiques of court. The English
begins:
Unremarkable, by itself, but Christine’s French version, found in BL Harley 4431, a manuscript
owned by Woodville, begins:
Roughly, Christine begins by saying that good morals or manners and notable wise people are
profitable often to remember. Woodville, on the other hand, says that it is a profitable thing often
76 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
advises the rich to be more sympathetic to the poor and warns the powerful to be just.
Such advice seems to be easily naturalized into English verse, and common tropes
against court life show up consistently through the period (e.g. Wyatt’s “Circa regna
to n a f or “Mine Own John Poins,” or Raleigh’s “The Lie”). In Andrew Cadiou’s trans
lation, The Porteous ofnoblenes translatid out o f Franch in scottis (Edinburgh: Chep-
man and Myllar, 1508), each section is a numbered noble virtue: “the tenth vertu in a
nobili man is larges” and “the xi vertu in a nobili man is clenlynes.” Generosity, clean
liness, perseverance, courage, faith; the general virtues are all here. But the translator
addresses nobles directly at the end of this breviary: “Nobles report your matynis in this
buke/ And wysely luk ye be not contrefeit.” Morning prayers and sincerity, along with
the virtues, are counseled: no counterfeit nobility allowed. This imprint, like several
others, also recalls the strong, lasting connections between Scotland and France during
the period, connections felt by the English to be threatening. Any specific poem, critique
or advice, aimed at court life will have to engage with a broadening readership’s under
standing of current events, so it makes sense that the advisory verses are more often
general than specific. It would be exaggerating to say that the first broadly democratic
discourses begin here — Christian exhortations to charity, declarations of the equality
of poor and rich souls before God, dances of death in which kings’ crowns rest on skele
tal heads, and any number of omnia vanitas topoi provide deeper foundations for dem
ocracy. But translation and print technology make moral critiques of power like
Chartier’s, Christine’s, and Cadiou’s more widely available to a larger group of English
readers, many of whom probably would not have had access to them in manuscript or
in French.
Certain exemplary works here, like Robert Copland’s romance-historical translation
Kynge Appolon o f Thyre (London: de Worde, 1510) or some of the wisdom-literature
to remember the great virtues (not “meurs,” morals-manners) o f(not “et,” and) our (not just any)
notable elders (not “sages”). Woodville adds an awkward extra syllable to these lines, but more
significantly, adds a possessive genealogy of virtue. The translation changes mean that these are
not just any sages but our own elders, whose virtues, not only whose wisdom, we (English) read
ers naturally inherit. Woodville opens with a familial implication, a rhetorical “we” that places
the new English reader not in a cosmopolitan, aristocratic coterie but as the obedient child of a
tradition, defined now by nation and language, not class, and about to receive instruction in “our”
heritage of virtue (a heritage “englished,” despite the high French visibility of the printed title).
Woodville’s claim to the Frenchwoman’s advice as “oure” heritage recalls England’s claims to
the French crown and to French lands, claims Woodville himself sought to enforce in several
overseas campaigns. With their presentation and pronouns, Woodville and Caxton “english” its
instruction for good, absorbing its wisdom into “our English elders’ virtues.” For analysis of the
English printings of this translation, see my “Taking Advice from a Frenchwoman,” in Caxton's
Trace, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
A Survey o f Verse Translations 77
26 STC 3545, Sebastian Brant, This present boke named the shyp offolys . . . trans. Alex
ander Barclay (London: Pynson, 1509); STC 3547, The Shyppe offooles, trans. Henry Watson
(London: de Worde, 1509); anr. ed., 1517; STC 5732, The Hye Way to the Spytell Hous (London:
Copland, c. 1536).
27 Robert de Balsac, [La] Nefdes princes et des batailles de noblesse: avec aultres enseign-
ments utilz et profitables. . . Item plus le regime d ’ung jeune prince etoles prouerbes des princes
et aultres petis livres . . . (Lyon: [G. Balsarin]: 1502).
78 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
literary conventions and aspirations of a medieval dream vision poem.28 The copiously
but rather cheaply illustrated Castell o f Labour, extremely popular on both sides of the
channel, uses a fairly plain allegorical method and middling poetic register.29 Not quite
a high-medieval dream-vision, this poem depicts a husband and wife who are visited in
bed by a long series of personifications and advisors. But its wisdom is strictly low-
georgic: get up early; get to work soon; save money; don’t drink up your wages; don’t
get married, but if you must, then certainly don’t listen to your wife. (This imprint offers
another example of overlapping categories: the CastelVs economic advice is heavily in
flected with misogyny.) At the more practical or lower end of “low georgic” are many
short translations like our commonplace mnemonic “Thirty days hath September,”
found in four editions of A goodly prymer in Englysshe.30 Several printings of Fitzher-
bert’s Boke o f husbandry, or Newe tracte or treaty se moost profitable fo r all husbande
men (London: Pynson, [1523]; editions STC 10994-11000), include common verse
from French about horses. “The sayenge of the frenche man” is quoted first in French
and immediately restated in English:
The French and English verses are not set as poetry in any of the extant imprints of this
work I have seen but rather are fully incorporated into the prose, just as short verse
tended, I suspect, to be more fully integrated into everyday lives than it is now. One
poem on the ages of man is longer — forty-eight lines — and appears in at least thirty-
28 This imprint needs further study: it is a Wyer print of 1532 using a modified Caxton 2
typeface, with a cut early in the print that looks like one of the cuts in the Pigouchet Epistre
Othea. The prologue sets a Chaucerian tone and date: the fourteenth of April. See “Paratextual
Chaucerianism,” Chaucer Review 38 (2003), forthcoming, for further discussion of another
example.
29 STC 12379, 12380, 12381, 12381.7, 12381.4, 12382, [various
titles, several editions]. Paris: Vérard, 1503; London: Pynson, 1505; London: de Worde, 1506,
1510. French editions of Pierre Gringore’s Chasteau de Labour abound: preliminary searching
yields five editions before 1501, one of 1503, and one of 1532.
30 Editions between 1535 and 1538, STC numbers 15988, 15998, 16007, and 16008. The
mnemonic is also found in English in Harley ms 2341 and copied in a flyleaf of Cicero’s Epistles
(Basel, 1546).
A Survey o f Verse Translations 79
one imprints between 1527 and 1556.31 Several shorter poems, for instance “Called I am
Ianuarye the colde” (couplets) and “The fyrst is prymetyme” (rhyme royal), translate
French verses on the seasons.32 Mnemonics for saints’ days or ember days and verse
captions to woodcut illustrations are further examples of the “low georgic” verse
brought from France. Such items had proven best-sellers on the continent, so the eco
nomic risk of such imprints must have seemed small. Parisian printer Antoine Vérard
himself may have set the English fashion for shepherd’s calendars (or at least may have
given other printers something to improve). Vérard printed a somewhat badly translated
and produced English Kalendayr o f the shyppars ... wyth syndry [sic] addycyons new
adjowstyt in Paris in 1503, apparently seeing a niche for himself in the young English
market.33
But relations were not always as cross-culturally open as Vérard’s enterprises might
suggest. Occasionally one sees in the low georgic imprints a resistance to things French
(and Scottish), or at least a gesture to English national sensibilities. The low-georgic
compendium Le Debat de Ihiver et de leste (S.I., s.d., but perhaps [Paris: J. Hubert,
1529?]) includes verses on the state of humankind, on the characteristics of the pro
fessions, on the benefits of rising early and eating moderately, on how to choose a good
horse, and more. The anonymous translator of this imprint as the Debate and Stryfe be-
twene Somer and wynter (London: Wyer?, c. 1520) makes one telling change to his
source text. A French dixain lists what appear to be the fine qualities of each nationality:
“Larges de Francoys/Et Loyauté d’Anglois . . [generosity of the French, loyalty of the
English ...], and so on. The enumerated national traits build in nine parallel lines, only
to be deflated in line ten: they’re all worthless, these national “virtues.” In English, the
positive catalogue and deflating twist are the same, but the disloyal Englishman of the
original is translated into a disloyal Scotsman, alone in a long list of (un)kind Picards,
31 “The fyrst vj yeres of mannes byrth et aege,” twelve tetrameter quatrains, found in STC
15951, 15954, 15955, 15957, 15961, 15961.3, 15965, 15968, 15970, 15973, 15978, 15980,
15981,15984,15985,15985a, 15985a.5,15986.7,15987,15994,15997,15997.5,16001,16004,
16008, 16008.5, 16055, 16058, 16068, 16076, 16106.
32 Both are found in STC 22410, 22411, 22412; “The fyrst is prymetyme” is also found in
STC 22408,22409. These are shepherds’ calendars of various titles, between 1506 and 1556. See
Ringler, Bibliography and Index, 124-25 for full publication data.
33 Julia Boffey traces a number of imprints from French and stresses the importance of their
early dissemination in English, “Wynkyn de Worde, Pichard Pynson, and the English Printing
of Texts Translated from French,” in Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Sixteenth
Century, ed. Jennifer Britnell and Richard Britnell (Aldershot, Hants, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2000),
171-83. See Mary Beth Winn, Anthoine Vérard, Parisian Publisher 1485-1512 (Geneva: Droz,
1997), for full information on the printer; Winn explains that Henry VII obtained a number of
French books from Vérard but that the English books he prepared — the Kalendayr o f Shyppars,
the Art o f Good Living, and Sarum hours c. 1503 and c. 1506 — were not in the royal collection
(140).
80 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
34 Christine in early English print: Morale Prouerbes ofCristyne (Caxton, 1478); re-edited
in the Chaucerian anthology, The Boke o f Fame (Pynson 1526); “Letter of Venus to Cupid,”
printed in Thynne’s Chaucer collection of 1532. No French imprints of these poems before the
nineteenth century are known. Some of Christine’s prose works were also translated into English
earlier than their printing in France. For more see P. G. C. Campbell, “Christine de Pisan en An
gleterre,” Revue de littérature comparée 5 (1925): 659-70, and the essays in The Reception o f
Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Glenda McLeod
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). However, some of her works did appear earlier in
French print than in English print: The .C. hystoryes ofTroye, Wyer 1549 (L ’epistre Othea is
printed in French in 1522, with a Pigouchet imprint c. 1500); what is now her most famous work,
the Boke o f the Cyte o f Ladies (Pepwell 1521) is printed in French as early as 1497.
A Survey o f Verse Translations 81
English, and the English opposition to her views was, in terms of the querelle, sec
ondary, derivative).35
What idealizing of women can be found here comes from a chivalric rather than
strictly Petrarchan tradition.36 French chivalric romance and its related shorter forms
(e.g. the complainte amoureuse, the demande d ’amour, the débat) appear alongside mis
ogynist and misogamous poems.37Blanchardyn and Eglantine, Marie de France’s Lan-
val, and the Life o f Ipomydon, for instance, like the love complaints in Lamant mal
traicte de samye, the allegorical Castell o f Love, the Rornaunt o f the Rose, the Chauc
erian Loue and complayntes bytwene Mars and Venus, and the Complaynt o f the herte
thorough perced with the lokynge o f the eye typify the romance and romance-related
translations here.38 Although French romance and its ideals fill many lines of translated
35 However, some scholars have found her work to have been handled by misogynist trans
lators; see Jane Chance, “Gender Subversion and Linguistic Castration in Fifteenth-Century
Translations of Christine de Pizan,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna
Roberts (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1998), 161-94. Chance treats Anslay’s
translation of the City o f Ladies, Stephen Scrope’s translation of the Epistle o f Othea, certain
manuscripts of the Faytes o f Armes, and Hoccleve’s translation of the Letter o f Cupid. On the
letter, where the evidence seems strongest, see also Diane Bornstein, “Anti-Feminism in Thomas
Hoccleve’s Translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au Dieu d'Amours,” English Language
Notes 19 (1981): 7-14. Chance’s conclusion is that the translators “silenced her by excising her
authority and her authorship” (172); precisely the opposite thing happens in the translations of
the Morale Prouerbes and some other translations. See my “Taking Advice from a French
woman” for details.
36 The two strains, of course, are not unrelated in origins (troubadours, stilnovisti) or in
effects; Laura/Beatrice and the donna types are certainly cousins to courtly lady types.
37 As Anne Prescott points out, verse that we now call sexist may not then have been in
tended or thought of as woman-hating; misogynist-then and misogynist-now are two different
things (private correspondence, 2001). Misogamous or anti-marriage poems, too, may include
misogyny, and/or may include what we now think of as sexism. But there is also misogamous
verse that is not particularly anti-feminist or misogynist. One of the imprints I treat in the larger
study in fact voices the wife’s sufferings in marriage fully in a central section (Compiamele de
trop tost marie/Complaynt o f the to soone maryed); this is true of both French and English
versions.
38 STC 3124, Blanchardyn and Eglantine, trans. Caxton (Westminster: Caxton, 1489); STC
15187, The treatyse of Sir Lamwell (London: J. Mychell, 1548); STC 5732.5 and 5733, The Lyfe
o f Ipomydon (London: de Worde, 1522; anr. ed., 1530); STC 546, A certayn treatye . . . oryg-
ynally wrytten in the spaynysshe, lately traducted in to F renehe entytled, Lamant mal traicte de
samye. And nowe out ofFrenche in to Englysshe, dedicat to . . . Henry Erie o f Surrey, trans. John
Clerc (London: Wyer, 15437); STC 21740 and 21742, The Castell o f loue (London: R. Wyer for
R. Kele, 1552; anr. ed., London: J. Kynge, c. 1555); STC 5068 and 5069, The workes o f Geffray
Chaucer. . ., ed. Thynne (London: T Godfray, 1532; anr. ed., London: W. Bonham, 1542), con
82 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
verse, they are not imported without question. Christine de Pizan’s “Letter of Cupid,”
like the anonymous translation of Octavien de Saint Gelais’ version of Dido’s lament,
put in print a darker spin on romance ideals.39 The Belle Dame Sans Mercy has a nega
tive answer to every lover’s plea.40
In fact, several longer poems in a satiric, misogamous, and misogynist vein descend
variously from the traditions of the Miroir de Manage, the Lamentations de Mathéolus,
and the French anti-clerical farce. The Complaynte o f them that be to soone maryed, The
Complaynte o f them that ben to late maryed, the long satiric tales of the Fyftene Joyes
o f Maryage, and A Mery Play betwene lohan lohan the husbande, Tyb hys wyf and syr
Ihann the preest (John Heywood’s translation of a misogamous farce) certainly balance
in vivid, earthy, anti-idealizing tone the rather larger number of romance lines.41 In sev
eral of these translations, marriage is portrayed as a trap, a violation of a natural human
liberty. The idea of individual liberty as a natural right is, I find, a remarkable antici
pation of Enlightenment discourses. Furthermore, marriage in these translations is satir
ically treated, even beyond what we might consider fabliau style: noisy, crying children,
boring sex and/or the fear of cuckoldry, the lack of money, constant hassles with in-laws
and neighbors, spousal arguments and even abuse. The bawdy humor and the unmask
ing of the domestic economy here certainly provide English readers with a sharp alter
native to the idealizing romance themes also translated from France.
Sometimes the translator adds misogyny to an original. When Robert Copland, for
instance, versifies the prose Chemin de L ’Hôpital, as the Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous
(London: de Worde, 1536?), he adds a section at the end asking why there are no
taining The Romaunt o f the Rose; STC 5089, The Loue and complayntes bytxvene Mars and Venus
(Westminster: Julian le Notary, 71500); STC 6915, Here begynneth a lytel treatyse called the
dysputatcyon or complaynt o f the herte thorough perced with the lokynge o f the eye (London: de
Worde, 1516).
39 Lydgate’s anti-idealizing translation of Laurent de Premierfait’s Cas des ruynes des
nobles hommes et femmes charts the falls of great ladies (and gentlemen) in a version of Boccac
cio’s De Casibus; STC 3175. The Letter o f Dydo to Eneas is found on fols. 3v-5 in STC 5088,
The Boke o f Fame (London: Pynson, 1526). Hoccleve’s translation of Christine’s Letter o f Cupid
challenges the masculine tradition rather less than her original.
40 Found in STC 5068 and 5069, The Workes ofGeffray C haucer... ed. Thynne (London:
Godfray, 1532; anr. ed., London: W. Bonham, 1542).
41 STC 5729, A complaynt o f them that be to soone maryed (London: de Worde, 1535); STC
5728 and 5728.5, Here begynneth the complaynte o f them that ben to late maryed (London: de
Worde, 1505? and 1518?); STC 15257 and 15258, The Fyftene Joyes o f Maryage (London: de
Worde, c. 1507, 1509); the French .XV. joyes de manage (used to be misattributed to Antoine de
la Sale); STC 13298, John Hey wood, A Mery play betwene lohan lohan the husbande, Tyb hys
wyfe, and syr Jhann the preest (London: W. Rastell, 1533).
A Survey o f Verse Translations 83
women among the many classes of foolish, wretched, destitute folk in the estates-satiric
“Hospital.”
Copland
Yet one thyng I wonder that ye do not tell
Come there no women this way to swell[?]
Porter
Of all the sortes that be spoken of afore
I warraunt women enow in store
That we are wery of them euery day
They come so thycke that they stop the way
The systerhod of drabbes, sluttes, and callets
Do here assorte / with theyr bagges and wallets
And be partener of the confrary
Of the mayteners of yll husbandry
Copland
A lewd sorte is of them a surety ...
In this case the translator has taken a French text that does not mention women and has
created what we might too charitably call gender-inclusive stanzas, specifying misogyny
within the French work’s general misanthropy.42
42 Sometimes French misogyny enters English in translations of works not ostensibly titled
as if they were concerned with women. For example, The Sayenges or Proverbs o f King Salomon
with the Answers ofMarcolphus tra[n]slated out o f french to englysshe (London: Pynson, for R.
Wyer, 1529?), caps each of Solomon’s points with Marcolphus’ pronouncements against whores
and “rybaudes.”
“Solomon
Men accompte them as wyse as fooles
That the bumyng coles
In theyr bosomes will hyde;
Marcolphus:
For a foole he is tolde
That wasteth all his golde
To clothe a hoores syde.”
Likewise, in the Castell o f Labour, really a poem against idleness, there are stanzas on how
marriage impoverishes one and should be avoided, and the woodcuts depict a man and wife in
bed hearing exhortations to work from a stream of personified visitors; when the man tells the
wife, who was asleep, of the visits, she mocks him; finally, he returns to the “Castle of Rest,” de
picted in a woodcut as a domestic scene, a dog and a hot meal by the hearth (but the wife is not
84 A . E. B. C O L D I R O N
A complex tension between romance ideals and misogyny shows up in the anony
mous translation, A Lytell treaty se on the Beaute o f women translated out o f Frensshe
(London: R. Fawkes, c. 1525; anr. ed. Wyer, c. 1540).43 The title woodcut depicts a
nude woman in a plumed hat playing a lute with a devil-jester at her feet. Its cautionary
inscription (peccati forma femina est ...) illustrates this tension and suggests moral
dangers in beauty and sexuality. Women are great and gracious, says the translator, and
their praises need to be sung and translated; but “The woman sholde haue the forehed
hygh & fayre” like a romance heroine to be acceptable, for otherwise she is ugly and
probably also evil. Women’s physical and moral qualities are inextricably and cau-
tionarily linked in this work. When the translator lets the untranslated French refrain
stand in the English text — “Beaulte sans bonté ne vaut rien” {Beauty without goodness
is worth nothing} — the translation joins a wider debate on the nature of things. With
medieval roots in the discussion of res and verba in Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana,
the issue is not only about women but rather about the connections between inner being
and surface appearance, between signs and essences. Many of the translations on wom
en and gender, if not philosophical in this sense, are dialectical and serious, taking their
first cues from the literature surrounding the French querelle des femmes. An interlocu-
cyon betwixt a man and a woman (London: de Worde, c. 1525) actually takes the form
of such a debate and gives the woman the longer part and the last word. Overall, the
poetic translations from French devote considerable energy to “woman questions”; yet
they bring English readers a large dose of conflicted, dialectical, post -querelle material
removed from its originating contexts.
Obviously there is more to say about this verse corpus. To conclude briefly for
now: the verse translations printed between Caxton and Tottel can teach us a lot — first,
about the transmuted but predominant Frenchness of the poetry English people were
actually reading in the first seven decades of print; and then about the highly selective
construction of our canons and literary histories. L. P. Hartley famously says that the
“past is a foreign country — they do things differently there.” This corpus has the po
tential to illuminate the significant literal foreignness, specifically the Frenchness, from
which that metaphorical alterity derives much of its force.
resting: she is serving him the meal!). The translations often include incidental misogyny and/or
misogamy of this sort.
43 This Treatyse is quite unlike Italian literature on the topic, for instance, Firenzuola’s “Dia-
logho delle bellezze delle donne.” Agnolo Firenzuola, Opere, ed. Adrian Seroni (Firenze:
Sansoni, 1971); or in English, On The Beauty o f Women, ed. and trans. Konrad Eisenbichler and
Jacqueline Murray (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
Inscribed Meanings: Authorial
Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations
in Sixteenth-Century Italian
Printed Books
BRIAN RICHARDSON
ithin the field of the history of the book, the history of reading, after long
W neglect, has in recent years become, as Anthony Grafton put it in 1997, “hot.” 1
We can measure this rise in temperature by comparing the attention that read
ing received in two landmark studies in book history of the second half of the twentieth
century. The first is the very influential L ’A pparition du livre by Lucien Febvre and
Henri-Jean Martin, published in 1958. Until then the history of the printed book had
meant above all the history of typography, remote from society, culture, and economics.
Febvre and Martin set out to bridge this gulf, to set books in their contexts, and thus to
study the profound changes caused by the printed book (in Febvre’s words) “non seule
ment dans les habitudes, mais dans les conditions de travail intellectuel des grands
liseurs du temps, religieux ou laïcs” (not only in the habits, but in the conditions of intel
lectual work of the great readers of the time, religious or lay).2 This brought a shift of
1 Anthony Grafton, “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and
His Books,” Papers o f the Bibliographical Society o f America 91 (1997): 139-57 (139).
2 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Mtartin, L ’Apparition du livre, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel,
1971), 11; English translation: The Coming o f the Book: The Impact o f Printing 1450-1800,
trans. David Gerard (London: NLB, 1976). Studies of the impact of this work include: Armando
86 B R IA N R IC H A R D S O N
focus from the book as an object to the book as a diffuser of ideas to its users: historians
now also asked what books were available for reading, by all social classes, and what
was the role of reading in the history of culture. Consequently, after 1958 reading at
tracted growing attention, as we can see from its high profile in a second landmark
work, the four-volume Histoire de Védition française, directed by Martin and Roger
Chartier, and published between 1982 and 1986. In their introduction, the two French
scholars pointed to a greater interest in reading as the essence of new developments in
the years since 1958. As they wrote, the book was now seen as not only “le support
neutre” (the neutral support) of a message but also, or even above all, as “un objet qui
par ses formes mêmes définit les lectures qu’il est susceptible de recevoir” (an object
that by its very forms defines the readings it is capable of receiving). After the previous
twenty years of research into the production and distribution of books, the problem was,
therefore, that of their uses and appropriations. Martin and Chartier also concluded that,
paradoxically, it was necessary to return to the accurate description of form, and then
to learn how the formal organization of the printed text can define the conditions of its
intelligibility.3 This new interest in the materiality of texts showed, as D. F. McKenzie
and G. Thomas Tanselle in particular pointed out, how the history of the book, as it had
come to be understood in France, could find some common ground with the more tra
ditionally Anglo-American discipline of analytical bibliography.4
Pétrucci, “Introduzione: Per una nuova storia del libro,” in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin,
La nascita del libro, trans. Carlo Pischedda, ed. A. Pétrucci, 2 vols. (Rome and Bari: Laterza,
1977), v-xlviii; Wallace Kirsop, “Literary History and Book Trade History: The Lessons of L ’Ap
parition du livre,” Australian Journal o f French Studies 16 (1979): 488-535; Luigi Balsamo,
“Bibliologia e filologia umanistica,” in Sul libro bolognese del Rinascimento, ed. Luigi Balsamo
and Leonardo Quaquarelli (Bologna: CLUEB, 1994), 7-26.
3 Histoire de Fédition française, 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1982-86), 1:10. For more recent
developments in the history of reading, see especially A History o f Reading in the West, ed.
Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1999); The Practice and Representation o f Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small,
and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jennifer Andersen and
Elizabeth Sauer, “Current Trends in the History of Reading,” in Books and Readers in Early Mod
ern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: Uni
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1-20.
4 See, for instance, the essays in Part 3 (“The Sociology of Texts”) of D. F. McKenzie’s
Making Meaning: “Printers o f the M ind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael
F. Suarez, S.J. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); G. Thomas Tan
selle’s introduction to Books and Society in History: Papers o f the Association o f College and
Research Libraries Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference, 24-28 June, 1980, Boston,
Massachusetts, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York and London: R. R. Bowker, 1983), xvii-
xxiii, which stresses that analytical bibliography should be seen as complementary to l ’histoire
du livre; and Tanselle, “Printing History and Other History,” Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995):
269-89.
Authorial SeIf-Fashioning and Readers' Annotations 87
Studying the book as an object is thus, Chartier and Martin argued, inseparable
from the problem of the history of reading, or rather, of readings. They distinguished
between two aspects of this problem, one that concerns the producers of books and
another that concerns its consumers. On the one hand, there are the readings that are, as
they put it, physically “inscribed” in the book from the outset, ones that are placed there
by those who make it and that define the ways in which it may be appropriated. On the
other hand, there are the readings that are subsequently “brought” to the book by the
culture of those who read it and bring their own sense to it.5
This survey will look in turn at these two facets of reading, the creation of meaning
for the reader and by the reader, in the context of sixteenth-century Italy. In each case
it will focus on one aspect that has attracted recent interest, and that also offers prom
ising opportunities for future research.
5 Histoire de l ’édition française, 1:10. This subject has been developed in Chartier’s own
writings, such as his Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to
Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
6 D. F. McKenzie, for example, argued that “the material forms of books, the elements of
the typographic notations within them, the very disposition of space itself, have an expressive
function in conveying meaning:” Bibliography and the Sociology o f Texts (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1999), 17.
7 Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization o f “Orlandofurioso ” (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991); Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology : Dante in the Ren
aissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); William J. Kennedy Authorizing Petrarch
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth o f Venice:
Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
88 B R IA N R IC H A R D S O N
them.8 It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that certain authors of this period
rapidly developed a typographical mentality, and might thus choose to play their own
role in the presentation of the printed text, in both the material and the paratextual
respects just identified. Their aim was to influence the ways in which they, as authors,
were perceived by their readers, both by the general reading public and by specific
subsets of this public such as their peer group or potential patrons. Print, in other words,
provided another means of self-fashioning, to use the term with which Stephen Green-
blatt described the “increased self-consciousness,” typical of the sixteenth century,
“about the fashioning of human identity as a m anipulate, artful process,” functioning
“without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life.”9
When a collection of poems by Vittoria Colonna was printed without her authoriza
tion in 1538, Pietro Bembo, arguably the most influential writer and grammarian of
sixteenth-century Italy, criticized the edition on two grounds. The text of the poems was
very incorrect, he said; but, just as important, the edition was low-grade both in its
“form” (here probably its small size, with its octavo format) and in its paper.10 Bembo
was by no means the first Italian writer to realize how valuable print could be in
promoting the career of an author but, helped by his close association with Aldus Manu-
tius and other Venetian printers, he was perhaps the first to pay close attention to the
effect that physical presentation in print could have on readers. When he came to have
his own works printed, we can see from his correspondence and from the appearance
of the editions themselves that he took exceptional care that he would not suffer in the
way that Colonna did. Not only did he have proofs of the text checked on his behalf, but
he also exercised a strict quality control over the materiality of the text, in particular
8 For the wariness or outright hostility shown by some towards print, see Brian Richardson,
“The Debates on Printing in Renaissance Italy,” La Bibliofilìa 100 (1998): 135-55.
9 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Se If-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2-3. An interesting study of authorial self-consciousness,
understood as “the various ways in which a text may foreground its author’s creative investment
in it,” in the context of French literature is Adrian Armstrong, Technique and Technology: Script,
Print, and Poetics in France, 1470-1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); quotation from p. 7.
The question of authorial control of print is discussed in Lotte Hellinga, “Printing History as
Cultural History,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (2001): 20-26 (24-25).
10 “Di pessima e forma e carta:” Pietro Bembo, Lettere, ed. Ernesto Travi, 4 vols. (Bologna:
Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1987-93), 4, no. 1967 (8 November 1538), to Carlo Gual-
teruzzi. Bembo uses “forma” to refer to the dimensions of a book in Lettere, 2, no. 862 (30 March
1528: “forma reale,” i.e., printed on royal paper). The extent to which inked impressions can be
seen through the thin paper of the 1538 edition, particularly where there has been too much
pressure on upper-case letters at the start of each section of a sonnet, can be judged from the
illustration of exhibit 1 in Letizia Panizza, “Women and Books in Renaissance Italy,” in Sguardi
sull ’Italia: Miscellanea dedicata a Francesco Villari, ed. Gino Bedani and others (Leeds: Society
for Italian Studies, 1997), 84-116 (97).
Authorial Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations 89
over the design and freshness of the fount to be used, the layout of the page, the quality
of paper, and the format of the volume.11Bembo, as editor of Petrarch (1501) and Dante
(1502), had played a part in the introduction by Aldus of a series of pocket-size literary
classics in octavo, setting vernacular texts alongside Latin and Greek ones and thus
raising them to the same rank as classical literature; however, for his own works he al
ways chose folio or quarto, never octavo, perhaps in part because the use of octavo had
swiftly been extended by other printers beyond the classics to works of much lesser
stature.12
As Mirko Tavoni has shown, Bembo took great care over the appearance of the first
two editions of his dialogue on the Italian language, the Prose della volgar lingua, using
very different typographical presentations in order to designate and attract a different
readership on each occasion.13 The imposing dimensions, the gravitas and sobriety of
the first edition of 1525, printed for him in folio format and roman type, without
running titles, recall humanist manuscripts and indicate that at this point the ideal read
ers that Bembo was primarily trying to reach and persuade were the traditional-minded,
predominantly male, humanist elite. The book, as an object, thus mirrored and rein
forced the message of the text, a Ciceronian dialogue that begins and ends with the aim
of persuading a Latin poet, Ercole Strozzi, that writing in the vernacular was just as
worthy a task as writing in the classical languages, as long as it was undertaken with due
seriousness.14 By the time the second edition appeared in 1538, almost all writers had
been convinced that the vernacular deserved more careful cultivation than it had
enjoyed in the past, but some were still hesitant about following to the letter Bembo’s
arguments about scrupulous imitation of the language of the great Florentine writers of
the fourteenth century. The text of the Prose was now altogether transformed in its
appearance, in comparison with the severe design of 1525, in order to ensure that it
would be read in a fresh light, and that it would appeal to readers as a work that was
refined, yet up-to-date and approachable. The work was presented in quarto format
11 For examples of Bembo’s procedure, see Brian Richardson, “From Scribal Publication
to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo’s Rime, 1529-1535,” Modern Language Review 95 (2000):
684-95 (691-94). For the paper of the Prose della volgar lingua, see Bembo, Lettere, 2, no. 543
(3 July 1525). Bembo wanted the paper of the Rime of 1535 to be better than that of the 1530
edition: Lettere, 3, no. 1480 (24 February 1533).
12 The expansion of the octavo format in the early sixteenth century is traced in Nadia
Cannata, Il canzoniere a stampa (1470-1530): Tradizione e fortuna di un genere fra storia del
libro e letteratura (Rome: Bagatto Libri, 2000), especially 69-75, 193-95.
13 Mirko Tavoni, “Scrivere la grammatica: Appunti sulle prime grammatiche dell’italiano
manoscritte e a stampa,” in Armando Pétrucci and others, “Pratiche di scrittura e pratiche di let
tura nell’Europa moderna,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e
Filosofia, 3d ser., 23 (1993): 759-96 (784-93).
14 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, in his Prose e rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti, 2nd
ed. (Turin: UTET, 1966), 1.2, 3.79.
90 B R IA N R IC H A R D S O N
(more manageable than folio and less expensive for the reader), with an intricate
scrolled woodcut border on the title page, running titles for ease of consultation, and
with the main text in an italic typeface modeled on the script of a leading contemporary
calligrapher, Francesco Alunno. Further, it was produced for Bembo by a printer, Fran
cesco Marcolini, associated with vernacular rather than humanist printing.
Another example of the meaning added by an author through printed form is that
of the first printed Italian grammar, slightly earlier than Bembo’s Prose: the Regole
grammaticali of Giovan Francesco Fortunio, also based on the doctrine of linguistic
imitation. It was first printed in the small city of Ancona in 1516, under the author’s su
pervision, in quarto format and in italic type. The Latin grammars that were the main
forerunners of this Italian one had always been in roman or gothic type, never in italic.
Nor had the few printers working in Ancona ever used italic before; the author must
have gone to the added expense of hiring the types from a neighboring city. Why, then,
did Fortunio choose this presentation? Probably because he wanted his readers to asso
ciate his work, even though it was printed in a culturally peripheral city, with the elegant
italic editions printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius, and in particular with the first
contemporary example of linguistic imitation of the fourteenth century, Bembo’s Aso
larli of 1505, also printed in quarto and in italic.15For contemporary readers, Fortunio’s
choices would have given a strong indication that his grammar was to be read in relation
to Bembo’s work; in fact he followed the Venetian’s linguistic example in most re
spects, though he challenged it in a few details. Fortunio’s choices also put the price up
considerably: we know that this first edition cost about four times as much as one of the
octavo editions of the same work printed later in the century. Both Bembo and Fortunio,
then, were doing their best to promote a new literary vernacular by associating it with
elite readers. Their attentiveness to the presentation of their works helped to confer pres
tige on this variety of the vernacular, which was eventually to form the basis of standard
Italian; but it was only later in the sixteenth century, and through the initiatives of
printers rather than of grammarians, that a wider readership began to gain access to it.
So far we have been considering the concern of authors for the form in which their
work would reach the generality of their readers. However, they could also use print
publication, just as they might use scribal publication, as a means of seeking influence
with one or more favored readers. The most common method of privileging individual
readers of an edition was to present a copy of the book to them as a gift. In her recent
study of the gift in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis has pointed out that
the older system of reciprocal gift exchange can function in a society alongside a
commercial or market system of exchange, and that this held especially true for the
15 In the Asolarti, the normal number of lines to the page is 36 and the italic type measures
79 mm. for 20 lines; these figures are close to the 37 lines and italic 83 of the Regole. For biblio
graphical descriptions of these editions, see respectively Conor Fahy, Saggi di bibliografia
testuale (Padua: Antenore, 1988), 154, and Giovan Francesco Fortunio, Regole grammaticali
della volgar lingua, ed. Brian Richardson (Rome and Padua: Antenore, 2001), 189-91.
Authorial Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations 91
exchange of books. “As physical objects,” she writes, “sixteenth-century printed books
operated under the sign both of sale and gift.” The publisher’s name indicated the source
from which one could buy the book, while the dedication “was on the inside, inserting
the book into a gift relation.” Thus “in publishing there was a double expansion:” the
printing of many copies of a work led to the growth of the commercial book market, but
at the same time it allowed authors to make even more use than before of the presen
tation of their own books as gifts.16 Let us look, then, at some ways in which Italian
authors inscribed added meaning in printed texts through gift-giving.
Some authors arranged for their printers to produce a certain number of special gift
copies of their works. Baldesar Castiglione in 1528 had thirty copies of the first edition
of his Book o f the Courtier, out of a press run of about one thousand, printed on a larger
size of paper than other copies, thus giving more ample margins, and he had one copy
printed on vellum. He intended to present these special copies to people of influence,
in order to seek their favor.17Rather more complex was the case of the definitive 1532
edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic, the Orlando furioso, studied by Conor Fahy.18Like
Castiglione, Ariosto had copies printed on three different supports: vellum, and paper
of two sizes. He had at least five vellum copies printed, and used these for presentation
to readers whose favor he, as a courtier, wanted to gain: members of ruling families or
very highly placed acquaintances such as Vittoria Colonna. Of the copies printed on the
smaller size of paper, the majority were offered for sale to the general public. However,
both the vellum copies and the bulk of these paper copies contained a number of textual
errors, because some sheets had been printed off before all corrections had been made.
The poet enjoyed a close cooperation with his printer, and indeed he had no doubt cho
sen one from his own small city of Ferrara precisely with such collaboration in mind.
The printer and the poet were aware that interventions during printing were almost
inevitable, and they arranged to create a special set of copies to be printed, once final
corrections had been made, on slightly larger paper. Most of these would have been
probably destined for personal friends of Ariosto. There were probably thus three sep
arate readerships for the three groups of copies that made up the edition, and the two
more restricted groups would have been aware of being favored, for different reasons,
16 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 11-12, 78, 87. For a study related to sixteenth-century England, see Jason Scott-
Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
17 Fabio Massimo Bertolo, “Nuovi documenti sull’edizione principe del Cortegiano,” Schi-
fanoia 13/14 (1992): 133-44 (140-41), and Amedeo Quondam, “Questo povero cortegiano: ”
Castiglione, il Libro, la Storia (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), 74-90. See too Conor Fahy, “Collecting
an Aldine: Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (1528) through the Centuries,” in Libraries and
the Book Trade: The Formation of Collections from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed.
Robin Myers and others (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 147-70.
18 Conor Fahy, L ’“Orlando furioso” del 1532: Profilo di una edizione (Milan: Vita e Pen
siero, 1989), especially 167-75.
92 B R IA N R IC H A R D S O N
over the main group. It was important to be able to offer special copies in this way,
since, to adopt a term used by David Carlson in studying the situation in England, print
had tended to “depersonalize” publication, in comparison with manuscript circulation.19
Authors could also privilege individual readers by having their presentation copies
specially bound and sometimes decorated by hand. Castiglione ordered that the vellum
copy of his Courtier was to receive the best possible binding and to be sent to Spain,
doubtless to be offered to the emperor Charles V. He wanted the binding to be done as
well as possible “perché io lo desidero quanto non posso dire” (because I desire it more
than I can say),20 and it is entirely plausible that, even though seventy years or so had
passed since the introduction of printing into Italy, one copy, intended for one reader,
should be so important to the author, in spite of the existence of a thousand or so other
copies of the edition. Gift copies of other works show how the binding could use the
language of symbolism to tell the praises of the person whose patronage was being
sought. Anthony Hobson has pointed out that the binding of a legal volume dedicated
and presented to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici by a certain Marcantonio Marescotti de
Calvis in 1519 contained symbolic images designed to encourage the cardinal to favour
the author: these included a triumphal arch that flatteringly associated Giulio with he
roes of antiquity, and a vase of flames that declared the author’s ardent devotion to his
patron. Such a gift could not easily be forgotten, and later, when Giulio had become
Pope Clement VII, Marescotti was rewarded for his allegiance with appointments in the
Vatican. Dedication, as in this case, could be a move in a long-term game. In contrast,
the architect Sebastiano Serbo won the favor of Francis I soon after the dedication and
presentation of a richly bound copy of his third book of architecture in 1540: the king,
who had already contributed three hundred scudi towards printing costs, invited Serbo
to France in the following year and appointed him royal architect.21
An unusual way of personalizing or customizing the relationship with the reader in
the hope of obtaining reward was to insert a dedication specific to a copy or a subset of
copies. This might be done in print by means of an alternative dedication, printed on a
cancel, or by adding a second dedication.22 Another method, adopted by figures as
19 David R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Readers, Manuscript and Print,
1475-1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 77.
20 Bertolo, “Nuovi documenti,” 140-41; Quondam, “Questo povero cortegiano, ” 86-88,
542-43.
21 Anthony Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders: The Origins and Diffusion o f the Human
istic Bookbinding 1459-1559, with a Census o f Historiated Plaquettes and Medallion Bindings
o f the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 171 and fig. 138 (Marescot
ti); 150, 153, 171, and fig. 120 (Serlio).
22 For examples of dedications using cancels, see Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and
Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 169 n. 31. James
Carley shows, in a forthcoming article on the library of Henry VIII, how Gian Matteo Giberti
presented to Henry a vellum copy of the editio princeps of John Chrysostom’s commentary on
Authorial Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations 93
different as the philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the poet Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguil
lam, was to add handwritten dedications.23 In the case of Anguillara, discussed recently
by Kallendorf, individual dedications were penned by him in some copies of his
translation of Virgil. Then, once readers had reached the end of the book, they would
have found a printed promise that those who sent thanks for his gifts, at least in words
or letters, would go to the Elysian Fields, while others would go to hell. Those who
chose the Elysian option, whether out of fear or out of generosity, were invited to send
their “replies” to Anguillara care of a Venetian bookshop. We know that he received at
least one reciprocal donation, from another translator of Virgil, Annibai Caro, who said
he was afraid of hell and would respond with an unspecified gift.24 Anguillara’s appar
ent donations, in other words, were given with a semi-humorous but explicit expectation
of reward.
More ambiguous inscriptions of added meaning were the printed texts that an auth
or often composed in order to introduce or conclude an edition in its entirety or near
entirety. Such dedications would be addressed to a private individual, usually in the
hope of obtaining his or her favor, but at the same time they must be numbered among
the paratexts intended to have significance for all readers. It would have been hoped that
the presence of the name of a duke, a cardinal, or suchlike (often given prominence on
the title page) would be seen as adding a stamp of authority to the work in question. The
medium of print also encouraged the rise of prefaces or dedications addressed to readers
in general and designed to win them over. As Kevin Sharpe has observed in a fine
survey of critical approaches to reading and of the relationship of the history of reading
the Pauline Epistles (Verona: Stefano Niccolini da Sabbio and brothers, 1529) with a second
printed dedication addressed to the king.
23 For Ficino’s De Christiana religione, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Supplementum ficinia-
num, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1937), Tlxxviii and clxxiv, and Kristeller, “Some Original
Letters and Autograph Manuscripts of Marsilio Ficino,” in Studi di bibliografia e di storia in
onoredi Tammaro De Marinis, 4 vols. (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964), 3:5-
33 (16-17). For Anguillara’s translation of Virgil, Aeneid 1, printed in 1564, see Craig Kallen
dorf, “In Search of a Patron: Anguillara’s Vernacular Virgil and the Print Culture of Renaissance
Italy,” Papers o f the Bibliographical Society o f America 91 (1997): 294-325; Kallendorf, Virgil
and the Myth o f Venice, 169-71; Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto: la stampa e le
revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470-1570) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), 27-28. For
some added handwritten dedications dating from the early years of printing in Rome, see Paola
Farenga, “Le prefazioni alle edizioni romane di Giovanni Filippo De Lignamine,” in Scrittura,
biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel Quattrocento: atti del 2° seminario 6-8 maggio 1982, ed. Mas
simo Miglio, Paola Farenga, and Anna Modigliani (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia,
Diplomatica e Archivistica, 1983), 135-74 (157-58).
24 Annibai Caro, Lettere familiari, ed. Aulo Greco, 3 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1957—
61), 3, no. 725. The bookshop used by Anguillara was the “Libreria della Serena” (or Sirena),
which must have been that of the Varisco family.
94 B R IA N R IC H A R D S O N
to the history of the book, “the growing number of dedications to readers . .. implies a
reciprocal recognition of their growing authority, indeed a nervousness about their
independence.”25 A desire to forestall possible criticism is perhaps implicit in Ficino’s
note addressed to the “friendly reader” of his Latin translations of Plato’s dialogues
(printed in Florence, 1484): here, as in a modern author’s “acknowledgements,” he
praised the distinguished scholars, such as Politian and Landino, who had helped him
in his task.26 In letters to the readers of sixteenth-century works that concerned the con
tentious topic of writing in the emerging Italian language, authors represented them
selves in the best possible light, defended themselves against past or future opposition,
and sometimes attempted to construct their audience by means of the terms with which
they defined them. Fortunio excluded from his readership those who might be hostile
to the notion of linguistic imitation by addressing his Regole “agli studiosi della regolata
volgar lingua” (to students of the regulated vernacular).27 Lodovico Dolce implied that
right-minded readers would be on his side when he appended a letter “ai nobili e
giudiciosi lettori” (to noble and judicious readers) to the second edition (1552) of his
grammar of Italian, the Osservationi, as a counterattack on criticism of himself by
Girolamo Ruscelli.28 In two editions of his own works, Ruscelli used letters to all his
readers, placed after dedications to individuals, in order to outline his writings, past and
future, and to defend his use of language.29 In passing, one can note how little system
atic knowledge we have of practices of book dedication and prefacing in Renaissance
Italy, and how useful a project it would be to create an index of dedications and other
prefatory material in Italian printed books, along the lines of Franklin B. Williams’
index of dedications and commendatory verses in early English books.30
A few writers used figurative elements within their printed texts in order to rep
resent, directly or obliquely, their selves and their beliefs. Ariosto included, in the first
two editions of the Orlando fur ioso( 1516 and 1521), a woodcut emblem, of bees being
25 Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics o f Reading in Early Modern England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 34-62 (54).
26 Kristeller, Supplementum ficinianum, 2:105.
27 Fortunio, Regole, 3-11.
28 Salvatore Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito d e’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato stam
patore in Venezia, 2 vols. (Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1890-95), 1:353-56.
29 Respectively in his Del modo di comporre in versi nella lingua italiana (Venice:
Giovanni Battista and Melchior Sessa, 1559), fols. A8r-C3r, and Le imprese illustri (Venice:
Francesco Rampazetto, 1566), fols. *2v-**lv.
30 Franklin B. Williams, Jr., Index o f Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English
Books before 1641 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1962); see also Williams, Jr., “Dedications
and Verses through 1640: Addenda,” supplement to The Library, 5th ser., 30 (1975). An index
of dedicatees of music editions 1536-72 is provided in Jane A. Bernstein, Music Printing in Ren
aissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539-1572) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 923-32.
Authorial Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations 95
smoked out of a log, that symbolized the ingratitude of the world. The 1532 edition con
tained, near the end, a woodcut portrait of the author, from a drawing attributed to
Titian. The text of the poem in this third edition was followed at first by a small wood-
cut of a sheep suckling a wolfcub, alluding again to the theme of ingratitude; however,
after a few copies of the final sheet had been printed off, Ariosto replaced this illus
tration with the unambiguous motto “Pro bono malum.”31 Textual and figurative self
allusion was used, too, by Ariosto’s contemporary Gian Giorgio Trissino, an author who
controlled the printing of his works exceptionally closely. In works produced for him
by the printers Bartolomeo Zanetti (under the pseudonym Ptolomeo or Tolomeo Iani-
culo) and the brothers Valerio and Luigi Dorico, he incorporated within woodcuts his
own Greek motto, a line from Sophocles’ Oedipus rex. In the case of the works printed
in 1529 and 1548 by “Ianiculo,” the motto is linked somewhat enigmatically with what
a reader might take to be the emblem of the printer, whose initials “Pt. Ia.” indeed ap
pear within the 1529 version. The sufficiently well-informed reader would, however,
have solved the puzzle, recognizing that the emblem of a serpent guarding the golden
fleece was that of Trissino himself, and would thus have received the discreet message
that this was no run-of-the-mill edition but one produced by a writer of unusual re
sources and influence.32
Authors could, then, seek in a number of ways, some more explicit than others, to
inflect the reading of their text in print, either on the part of readers in general or on that
of certain individuals with whom they could attempt to establish a personalized
relationship. The various methods of self-representation at their disposal — including
the visual presentation of the printed page, the choice of paper and binding, handwritten
and printed dedications, and added visual matter — would all have been influential in
“inscribing” meanings within Renaissance book culture.
Annotations in Books
We saw that the second category of readings identified by Chartier and Martin
contains those that are “brought” to the book once it has passed into the hands of its
readers. Readers can, of course, use a book in ways quite different from those intended
by its producers. One important kind of evidence for these readings is provided when
meanings are inscribed in the literal sense, that is, when books are annotated by their
users. Interest in annotations has grown greatly in the last twenty years. Notable studies
in the Anglo-American world include Roger E. Stoddard’s catalogue Marks in Books,
of 1985; the papers from a conference held on this subject at Yale in 1997; Lisa Jardine
and Anthony Grafton’s account of how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy, as an example of
the “goal-orientated” nature of scholarly reading in early modern culture; Robin Al
ston’s Books with Manuscript, a catalogue of books with manuscript notes in the British
Library; the catalogue of the Rosenthal collection of printed books with manuscript
annotations; Grafton’s study of Guillaume Budé’s annotations; and H. J. Jackson’s
lively Marginalia, which concentrates on English-language books in the period since
1700 but offers many suggestions of interest for the earlier period.33 In Italy, there has
been a similar recent rise in interest. Giuseppe Frasso led in the 1980s a pioneering
survey of copies of early editions of Petrarch’s verse with handwritten notes, using the
term postillati for such annotated books.34 However, Italian scholars have recognized
for some time that marginalia can provide crucial evidence for the history of early Ital
ian texts and for the history of textual scholarship in the vernacular, since most of the
leading sixteenth-century vernacular philologists — figures such as Pietro Bembo,
Ludovico Castelvetro, Vincenzio Borghini, Lionardo Salviati, Iacopo Corbinelli — were
keen annotators, as Angelo Poliziano and other fifteenth-century classical scholars had
33 Roger Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: Houghton
Library, 1985); papers from “Marks in Books: The Conference,” collected by R. Stoddard, pub
lished in Papers o f the Bibliographical Society o f America 91:4 (1997); Lisa Jardine and Anthony
Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action:’ How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy,” Past and Present 129
(November 1990): 30-78; Robin C. Alston, Books with Manuscript (London: British Library,
1994), on which see Giuseppe Frasso, “Libri a stampa postillati: riflessioni suggerite da un cata
logo,” Aevum 69 (1995): 617-40; Bernard M. Rosenthal, The Rosenthal Collection o f Printed
Books with Manuscript Annotations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) (this collection
is now in the Beinecke Library, Yale; see too Rosenthal, “Cataloguing Manuscript Annotations
in Printed Books: Some Thoughts and Suggestions from the Other Side of the Academic Fence,”
La Bibliofilìa 100 [1998]: 583-95); Grafton, “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise?”;
H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
On annotations and glosses, see too J. B. Trapp, “Literacy, Books and Readers,” in Cambridge
History o f the Book in Britain, voi. 3, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 31-43 (40-43); Edoardo Barbieri, Il libro nella storia: tre percorsi, 2nd
ed. (Milan: Edizioni CUSL, 2000), 150-64, 203-80; Henri-Jean Martin, La Naissance du livre
moderne (XIVe-XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2000), 28-49; Stephen
Orgel, “Margins of Truth,” in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew
Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 91-107; William H. Sherman, “What
Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?,” in Books and Readers, ed. Andersen and Sauer,
119-37.
34 Giuseppe Frasso, “Per un censimento di incunaboli e cinquecentine postillate dei Rerum
vulgarium fragmenta e dei Triumphi, I. London, British Library,” Aevum 56 (1982): 253-62, is
the first of seven surveys, continued in Aevum by M. C. Fabbi (57 [1983]: 288-97 and 63 [1989]:
336-60), M. Gazzotti (58 [1984]: 301-16, 59 [1985]: 361-70, and 64 [1990]: 285-306), and
M. G. Bianchi (58 [1984]: 317-30).
Authorial Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations 97
been before them. An outstanding example of the value of annotations in these respects
is a series of variants that was recorded in 1548 in an early sixteenth-century edition of
Dante’s Comedy and provides the only surviving evidence for the earliest known manu
script of this work, dating from 1330-31.35
One of the many types of Renaissance marginalia derives from what one can call
“reading for writing:” in other words reading texts in order to learn to write well on
one’s own account. Those fortunate enough to have studied Latin authors at school
would have been accustomed to using interlinear and marginal glosses.36 A set of auth
ors whose texts were studied closely outside the classroom for the purpose of writing
well in the vernacular was the great fourteenth-century trio of Dante, Petrarch, and Boc
caccio. Typical of the results of this study are copies of Petrarch and Dante annotated
probably by Camillo Capilupi, a member of a family of courtiers from Mantua who
were themselves poets.37For example, in the margins of fol. t3r of the Dante, containing
Purgatorio 25.4-33, the annotator diligently jotted down any words he wanted to re
member in one of two ways: if their meaning was obvious to him, he just copied the
text, as with che che or trafigge, but with the more difficult terms he added a synonym
by way of explanation, so that affigge was both copied and glossed as “afferma” (stops).
Notes such as these were intended to help interpret the text, of course, but it was pointed
out by Carlo Dionisotti that in them lay the origins of the new grammar of the ver
nacular.38 The only language taught systematically in schools in this period was of
course Latin; it was not until, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, writers
pieced together evidence for the usage of fourteenth-century Tuscan from the evidence
of the model texts, beginning in the way we see here, that it was possible to imitate these
models correctly with good Tuscanizing verse or prose of one’s own, and to put together
printed grammars and dictionaries of Italian. Marginalia of this kind thus have a dual
35 Giuseppe Vandelli, “Il più antico testo critico della Divina commedia,” Studi danteschi
5 (1922): 41-98.
36 Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition
and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 2001), 171-330..
37 The annotator’s hand in a copy of the Florence 1506 edition of Dante’s Commedia in
Leeds University Library is very close to that which annotated, probably c. 1522-25, an Aldine
Petrarch of 1501, owned by “Camillo Cap.,” i.e., Capilupi, and now in the Biblioteca Nazionale
Marciana, Venice (Aldine 498). On the latter, see Carlo Dionisotti, “Ancora del Fortunio,” Gior
nale storico della letteratura italiana 111 (1938): 213-54 (249 n. 1); Paolo Trovato, “Per un
censimento dei manoscritti in volgare (1470-1600),” in II libro di poesia dal copista al tipografo,
ed. Marco Santagataand Amedeo Quondam (Modena: Panini, 1989), 43-81 (73,75); Aldo Manu
zio e lambiente veneziano 1494-1515, ed. Susy Marcon and Marino Zorzi (Venice: Il Cardo,
1994), 220, no. 44.
38 “Dalle postille, che si addensavano sui margini dei mss. o delle stampe di Dante, del
Petrarca e del Boccaccio, nasceva la grammatica nuova:” “Ancora sul Fortunio,” 249.
98 B R IA N R IC H A R D S O N
importance, for the making of the Italian language and for the invention of a new Italian
literature, based on the imitation of canonic authors.
Once grammar books began to be printed, they too could be annotated by their
users. In copies of Fortunio’s grammar, readers quite often highlighted key points in the
author’s very densely printed text and transcribed them into the margins in order to be
able to refer to them more easily.39 A copy of Bembo’s 1525 Prose della volgar lingua
in the National Library in Rome shows that Bembo’s work could have a dual function,
as a source of information and as a model for aspiring authors in its own right. On fol.
D3r, for instance, part of P rose , 2.2, a reader dutifully copied into the margins infor
mation on the Bolognese writer Pietro Crescenzi and the observation that Boccaccio was
primarily to be esteemed as a prose writer. On the other hand, this reader also under
lined or noted in the margins words and elegant turns of phrase to be remembered and
perhaps reused on a future occasion, such as “da indi innanzi” (from that time on), “pur
gata dalla ruggine” (cleansed of rust).40 We can see a more sustained and interactive,
even critical, engagement with the printed text in a copy of the first edition of Fortunio’s
grammar heavily annotated by a contemporary humanist, Fulvio Pellegrino Morato.
Morato entered at times into a spirited confrontation with the author; on fol. H3v, for
example, he wrote angrily “Questa tua raggione è falsa” (this reason of yours is false).41
Marginalia such as these could usefully be mentioned in modern editions of Renaissance
texts, as one of the indicators of the reception of those texts.
Annotators were only human, and it has to be said that the kind of jottings intended
to improve their knowledge and style sometimes cease almost entirely after the first few
pages: good intentions and diligence could fade away after an enthusiastic start. Never
theless, some sets of notes are very methodical and are sustained for many pages, as in
the Dante of 1506 just mentioned. One exceptionally assiduous annotator was the hu
manist Scipione Forteguerra, who mentioned to Aldus Manutius in 1504 a habit of his
that he describes with the verb intavolare : he would mark notable words in the margins
and then use these words in order to compile an index or “tavola” of the text.42 Exam
ples such as these demonstrate, as Anthony Grafton has put it, “more clearly than any
secondary account can, just how hard the reader in the age of print still had to work to
memorize, and thus to make his own, the contents of his texts.”43
A natural extension of this kind of “reading for writing” was the use of a printed
book, not just as a preparation for writing, but to record compositions of one’s own.
These works could be more or less closely related to the printed text, and the technical
ability that they display could be of any level. A prisoner in a Paduan jail, for example,
copied into his Virgil a poem on enduring adversity, with a note that these things were
in conformity with the opinion of the Roman poet.44 A work as seminal as Petrarch’s
vernacular verse inspired the copying of reworkings of various kinds as well as original
verse. Inserted into a British Library copy of the 1470 edition are translations of sonnets
and of a sestina into Latin.45 A copy of another edition in a library in Treviso contains
a rather naive reworking of one of the sonnets into an epigram in ottava rim a46 Beatrice
del Sera, the nun and playwright studied recently by Elissa Weaver, wrote into her copy
of Petrarch a sonnet of her own that reworked one of Petrarch’s, and another sonnet of
freer inspiration.47 Annotations of this kind are ancestors of a genre that, H. J. Jackson
suggests, flourished in English verse especially in the nineteenth century: poems repre
senting themselves, truly or falsely, as “written in a blank leaf’ of another text, in order
to pay homage to an earlier work and to acknowledge the poet’s source of inspiration.48
A second broad category of reading, also going beyond mere elucidation of the text,
is revealed by annotations that are still closely related to what is printed, but link it with
the users’ own experience of the world, with their concerns and interests, and with con
temporary issues. These are annotations that reflect what one can call “reading for liv
ing.” A desire to relate the text before the reader to the sixteenth-century contexts in
which it was being read is seen, in different ways, in copies of two fourteenth-century
works in the British Library. At the end of a Venetian Dante of 1478, a certain Lodovico
Nadalin compared in 1556 the connections of Dante and himself with the Holy Roman
Empire. Dante had lived in the reign of Lewis of Bavaria; Nadalin lived in that of
Charles V, who had recently appointed cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo as governor of
Milan, while Nadalin was currently in the service of Cristoforo’s brother Nicolò, imper
ial captain at Riva del Garda.49 One of the British Library copies of Giovanni Villani’s
Cronica printed in Venice by Bartolomeo Zanetti in 1537 has textual variants copied by
a Florentine, Agnolo Guicciardini, and by a second hand from a manuscript then in the
hands of Sperone Speroni, of Padua. This second annotator was also interested in reac
tions to the chronicle from the contemporary Veneto, and he copied, presumably from
the same manuscript, a note originally written by a Venetian soldier in 1512, complain
ing that the Florentine Villani did not give enough credit to Venice for its support of the
pope.50Readers’ concerns with a text might be specifically religious. In one of the anno
tated copies of Virgil studied by Kallendorf, a devout reader showed “a constant
concern with the religious content of the poetry,” particularly as it could be used to dis
tinguish false gods from the Christian God.51 The Colloquia of Erasmus, condemned in
the Index of Paul IV (1559), attracted comments that appeared to accuse the author of
heresy, as well as others that show approval of the work.52
Printed books could also be annotated for very practical purposes. A survey of
readers of the early fourteenth-century work on agriculture by Pietro Crescenzi, in its
Latin and Italian versions, showed that forty-seven out of ninety copies held in Italian
libraries have handwritten notes or underlinings, and that the work was not read only
for its historical or linguistic interest.53 Each set of markings provided a personal and
local “customization” of the text. We see, for example, a Lombard reader adding per
sonal tips on where to buy the best whetstones in Milan or noting that, to get the best
results from one’s flowers, they should be planted at the full moon in March and
August. We can guess at the homely diet of some Milanese friars from the fact that in
their copy they noted references to vegetables and eggs. The reader of a Florentine copy
seems to have had learnèd interests, since he or she drew attention to the names of
classical authorities on agriculture and medicine, but the same reader also noted
practical advice on topics such as pruning vines. Marginalia in texts of plays can show
how a copy was used, or not used, in connection with the theatre. On the one hand, a
copy of Trissino’s Sophonisba (Vicenza, 1529) in the Rosenthal collection includes
handwritten stage directions.54 On the other hand, a copy of Giovanni Battista An-
dreini’s comedy Li duo Leli simili (Paris, 1622) in the British Library was evidently read
by an impresario or actor who found the play not worth staging (or plundering) and
wrote in it “Letto ma non v’è cosa di cui possa farsi uso” (read, but there’s nothing
usable).55
A different and perverted form of “reading for living,” that was inflicted on some
texts in the sixteenth century, consisted in censoring the printed text in order to make
it conform with contemporary religious orthodoxy. In some copies of Petrarch’s Can
zoniere, the three sonnets (136-38) attacking the corruption of the papal court were
inked over.56 Castiglione’s Book o f the Courtier was suspect to the authorities of the
Counter-Reformation because of its depiction of the clergy and its ideas on platonic
love, and a small number of copies have words, phrases, or sentences crossed out, in
order to prevent others from reading them, or maybe just to persuade others that one did
not read them oneself.57 Some printed texts were annotated in order to provide copy-text
for an expurgated edition; thus, for example, the Florentine scholar Vincenzio Borghini
revised a copy of the 1557 edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron in preparation for the
Florentine edition of 1573.58
This 1557 edition of the Decameron, prepared by Girolamo Ruscelli, also illustrates
the use of printed marginalia. These became increasingly common in sixteenth-century
editions of the major vernacular authors, as editors and publishers tried to enhance the
value of an edition by anticipating a reader’s need to annotate the text. Like the
handwritten notes on Dante and Petrarch that were considered earlier, these ready-made
marginalia form part of the process, characteristic of the sixteenth century, of canoniz
ing the principal texts from the fourteenth century onwards and of elucidating them,
thereby also helping some readers to create new works worthy of belonging to the same
tradition. Printed notes could point to important topics, or gloss terms in the text, or
propose variants with the same seriousness as if this were a text in a classical language.
Some editions highlighted, in the margins, passages suitable for copying into the com
monplace books that students were advised to compile.59 But what was welcome to
some readers was resented by others. The invasion of margins by printed notes aroused
some hostile reactions from defenders of the intellectual rights of the reader. Objectors
suggested that margins should be left empty by printers precisely so that readers could
then choose what to inscribe in them. The Venetian printer Gabriel Giolito claimed that
he had not troubled to add marginalia in his edition of Bartolomeo Cavalcanti ’s Retorica
(1559) “sì per lasciare netto, et bello il margine delle carte, sì per non togliere occasione
a gli studiosi di scrivervi quello, che essi vorranno” (both in order to leave the margin
of the leaves clean and beautiful, and in order not to prevent learnèd readers from writ
ing there what they wish).60 In the Renaissance, then, the empty margins around the
printed text could be seen as having aesthetic value, but they were not a no man’s land
that had to be left unoccupied. Rather, they were territories that could be claimed by
reader or editor or both, in order to enhance the text by highlighting its details, correct
ing it, or adding to it, in what for many was an integral part of the process of reading.
In both types of “goal-orientated” annotation considered so far, reading for writing
and reading for living, marginalia were clearly related to and responsive to the printed
text beside or within which they were inscribed. Some annotations, however, belong to
a third type: those that have no apparent direct relation to the printed text. Books could
become places to record memorable occurrences. The Petrarch owned by Camillo
Capilupi records events that he experienced or that came to his ears at the court of
Mantua, including an earthquake, deaths, and news of a monstrous birth. A reader of a
copy of Virgil noted in it the death of a lady, presumably his wife, as if in a family
Bible, as Kallendorf comments.61 Copies of Pietro Crescenzi were used to register nat
ural events such as a passage of locusts or deaths from the plague, or a comment on the
variability of fortune.62 An extreme instance of this kind of annotation is a catechism
owned by a Milanese nun, Prospera Corona Bascapè. Into this book sister Prospera
copied all sorts of texts and comments, including prayers and notes on the appearance
of comets, on the creation of the world and the cosmos, on Old Testament figures, on
the Amazons, on Milanese history, and on the history of her own order.63 This is one of
the cases in which, as Jackson puts it, an “enterprising reader establishes a special rela
tionship with a particular book, making one copy distinctively [her] own by investing
labor and imagination in it.”64 The choice of printed books for all these annotations,
rather than the blank pages of a notebook, shows how, in the Renaissance as in the later
period investigated by Jackson, books could sometimes be regarded as close personal
possessions, an extension of one’s existence or a silent companion in the same way as
a journal or a commonplace book would be.
**
All these examples of the engagement of authors and readers with the printed book
illustrate important developments in the study of reading in the Renaissance. We have
seen that authors still retained some power to fashion images of themselves in their
readers’ eyes even when using a process of mass production. Armando Pétrucci has
pointed out that one of the factors that differentiated the printed book from the manu
script book was the dislocation of the production process outside the environment in
which the text was composed, with a consequent distancing of the author from those
who made books.65 This was undoubtedly true in general; but, in this respect as in
others, the transition from manuscript to print culture was a gradual one. Some authors,
including major figures such as Bembo, Ariosto, and Castiglione, were successful in
controlling print publication in order to inscribe meaning through the physical appear
ance of editions of their works, or of subsets of these editions down to a single gift copy.
We have seen, too, that the notes written or sometimes printed in margins can reveal
something of how readers from a range of social and cultural backgrounds negotiated
with texts, adding meaning to the printed word. Some of these readers were making
their small individual contributions to the process of the invention of a new Italian lit
erature, a process that was being carried out severally by printer-publishers, editors, and
the public of book users. All of these readers were showing how strongly they felt the
force of a maxim that went back to classical times and that was cited at important mo
ments by such Italian writers as Dante and Machiavelli: there can be no knowledge
unless one retains what one has understood.6667
Taken together, these instances of the direct involvement of authors and readers
with books illustrate the fertility of the broadly based approach to the study of the book
that has emerged in the last twenty years or so,, Leading scholars on both sides of the At
lantic, such as Robert Darnton, Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, Luigi Balsamo,
and Roger Chartier, have all emphasized that book history must embrace the whole life-
cycle or “communications circuit” of the book. It should not look just at the physical
book, central though this is, but should start from the composition of the text, move
through the creation and marketing of the book as an object, and lead on to its eventual
reception by the public — “bringing into the same history,” in Chartier’s words, “every
one who contributes, each one in his or her own place and role, to the production, dis
semination, and interpretation of discourse.”6/ The roles of authors and of readers in the
life of books, alongside the roles of the professional producers and disseminators of
books, are both deserving of further study, certainly in the context of the Italian Ren
aissance and also, one suspects, in other European cultures. To continue to gather evi
dence for the meanings that — to return once more to the terminology of Chartier and
Martin — could be “inscribed” by authors or “brought” by readers can only lead to a
better understanding both of the history of reading and, more generally, of the multiple
roles of the book in the history of the written culture of the Renaissance.
66 Beatrice’s words in Paradiso 5.41-42, “non fa scienza, / sanza lo ritenere, avere inteso,”
belong to a tradition going back at least to a maxim of Seneca, De beneficiis, 7.1.3: see Dante
Alighieri, Commedia, ed. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1991-97),
3:138. Machiavelli quotes this passage of Dante in his letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 December
1513, in Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 1160.
67 Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 1. See also Robert Darnton, “What is the History of
Books?,” in Books and Society, ed. Carpenter, 3-26; Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, “A
New Model for the Study of the Book,” in A Potencie o f Life: Books in Society. The Clark Lec
tures 1986-1987, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: British Library, 1993), 5-43; Balsamo, “Bib
liologia e filologia umanistica,” 9-10; Barker, “Storia della stampa e storia del libro,” in II libro
in Romagna: Produzione, commercio e consumo dalla fine del secolo XV all ’età contemporanea.
Convegno di studi (Cesena, 23—25 marzo 1995), ed. Lorenzo Baldacchini and Anna Manfron, 2
vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 1:1-9 (5).
“Vaine Books” and
Early Modern Women Readers
KATHRYN D eZUR
n the past three decades, part of feminist literary criticism’s project has been to re
1 Margaret Ferguson, “Literacies in Early Modern England,” Critical Survey 14.1 (2002):
1-130 and “A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers,” The Com
parative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. Clayton Koelb and
Susan Noakes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Wendy Wall, “Circulating Texts in
Early Modern England,” Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. Susanne Woods and
Margaret P. Hannay (New York: Modern Language Association, 2000) and “Reading for the
Blot: Textual Desire in Early Modern English Literature,” Reading and Writing in Shakespeare,
ed. David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996); Jacqueline Pearson,
106 K A T H R Y N D eZ U R
I hope to add to this trajectory of study by examining in detail the reading of three
early modern women and how their reading might have simultaneously expressed and
shaped their understanding of their positioning within literary culture. That positioning
must have been complex since early modern English culture — at least that represented
by educators, counselors on marriage, and preachers — discouraged women from cer
tain kinds of reading. For instance, while some humanist educators such as Thomas
More believed that women should be taught to read so they could provide intellectual
companionship for their husbands and become more pious through the reading of the
Bible, many others worried that women’s access to texts would have a profound affect
on their virtue; if they read the wrong material, they and their chastity could be
compromised. The three women I will focus on here, Anne Corwallis Campbell, Count
ess of Argyll, Elizabeth Clarke, and Lady Anne Southwell, read texts copied into
manuscript miscellanies; these texts generally fall into the category of “unsafe” for
women in the period, yet these commonplace books reveal that women within the socio-
literary context of manuscript culture often had access to them. When we examine both
the textual and paratextual elements of these manuscripts, we see that the texts these
women owned or produced not only reveal what they read and to some extent how they
read it, but also show — especially in the case of Southwell — that their reading made
possible their writing in a culture generally unsupportive of female literary endeavor.
Campbell, Clarke, and Southwell were certainly not the first women to read books
culturally designated as inappropriate; in fact, they were predated by a woman who not
only read such books, but did so in a public forum, by translating a Spanish romance
into English and publishing it. When Margaret Tyler published The Mirrour o f Princely
Deedes and Knighthood in 1578, she expected harsh criticism. Not only was she a
woman with the audacity to publish a text during a time when women were expected
to remain silent, but she also translated a secular literary text, unlike the few previous
female authors such as Margaret Roper who translated religious treatises. To make her
transgression even more egregious, her source was a romance, a genre castigated by
early modern humanists as a group of “vaine books” that “breede vanitie in mens
willes” and lead to rash and promiscuous behavior.*2
“Women Reading, Reading Women,” Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, ed. Helen
Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, Or plaine and perfite way o f teaching children, to
vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong, but specially purposed fo r the priuate brynnging
vp o f youth in lentlemen and Nobel mens houses, and commodious also fo r all such, as have
forgot the Latin tongue, and would, by themselues, without a Scholemaster, in short tyme, and
with small paines, recouer a sufficient habilitie, to vnderstand, write, and speake Latin (London:
Printed by John Daye, 1570), fol. J4r. Significantly, Ascham draws his terminology in this
quotation from reproduction; frivolous books such as romances impregnate the reader with cor
rupt notions.
Vaine Books ” and Early Modern Women Readers 107
Fully aware that she will be the object of censure, Tyler anticipates her foes’
arguments and defends herself in a preface addressed to the reader. From the start, she
asserts her authority to speak, and to speak as a woman. Fier preface is set in black letter
type, unlike the dedicatory epistle to Lord Thomas Haward in italic type. Black letter
type, because it so resembles the formal script of scribes, imbues the preface’s content
with an authoritative air associated with official legal, religious, and literary manu
scripts.3Moreover, the preface is set in the same type as the romance, elevating its status
to one equal with the literary text. This equivalence reappears in the content of the
preface itself in Tyler’s justification of herself as translator. Tyler’s presence as an
author is emphasized by the preface’s title: “M.T. to the Reader.”4 Though the initials
do not indicate her gender, Tyler soon reveals it when she says she hopes the work will
be well received even though “it is a womans work, though in a story prophane, and a
matter more manlike then becorameth my sexe.”5 Although the narrative may contain
“manlike matter,” she rejects the argument that a woman cannot know enough of the
military arts to write of them convincingly by comparing herself to the drummer or
trumpeter who may not be a good fighter, but may still inspire valiant action.
Tyler relies on two positive arguments in her favor as a translator: first, the work
has kept her from being “idle” and therefore prone to vice,6and second, since men have
3 E. P. Gold Schmidt, The Printed Book o f the Renaissance: Three Lectures on Type,
Illustration, Ornament (Amsterdam: Gérard Th. Van Heusden, 1966), 11-12. Schmidt notes that
by 1580, the majority of the books printed in England were in Roman type (25). Gothic type
usually appeared in vernacular texts (24) of sermons, law books, school books, prayer books, and
breviaries (11).
4 Margaret Tyler, The Mirrour o f Princely deedes and Knighthood: Wherein is shewed the
worthinesse o f the knight o f the Sunne, and his brother Ros idee r, sonnes to the great Emperour
Trebetio: with the strange loue o f the beautifull and excellent Princesse Briana, and the valiant
actes o f other noble Princes and knightes (London: Thomas East, 1578), fol. A3.
5 Tyler, Mirrour. I have expanded Tyler’s abbreviations with italicized letters in the
quotations taken from her preface. Juan Luis Vives, in his A very frutefull and pleasant boke
called Instruction[n] o f a Christen woma[n] made fyrst in Laten and dedicated vnto the quenes
good grace by the right famous clerke mayster Lewes Viues and turned out o f Laten into
Englysshe by Rychard Hyrd, whiche boke who so redeth diligently shal haue knolege o f many
thynges wherin he shal take great pleasure and specially women shall take great co[m]modyte
and frute toward the [injcreace o f vertue & good maners (London, 1540), writes “Hit can nat
lyghtly be a chaste mayde that is occupied with thynkynge on armour and tumey and mannes
valyaunce” (fol. E3r).
6 Although Vives agreed that reading is an excellent way to avoid idleness and women’s
“vnstable walkyng and wandryne out from home” (fol. C3v-D lr) thoughts, he had this to say
about the romance genre and idleness: “Yea but these be written say they for idei folke as though
idelnes were nat a vice gret inough of it seife without fire brondes be put vnto it” (fol. E3r).
108 K A T H R Y N D eZ U R
dedicated their texts to women, women are intrinsically included in the process of
literary creation. She comments:
And if men may & do bestow such of their trauailes vpon gentlewomen, then
may we worries read such of their works as they dedicate vnto vs, and if we
may read them, why not farther wade in them to the serch of a truth. And then
much more why not deale by translation in such argument, especially this
kinde of exercise being a matter of more heede then of deep inuention or
exquisite learning . .. if women be excluded from the view of such workes as
appeare in their name, or if glory onely be sought in our common inscriptions,
it mattereth not whether the parties be men or women.7
For Tyler, it is a series of short steps along a continuum from reader to translator,
translator to published author. The form of her preface reinforces this belief in the
collaborative effort of writer and reader in creating meaning; it contains marginalia,
likely added by the printer, set in italic type. What distinguishes these marginal
comments from those found in many other early modern printed texts is that they use
a second person point of view rather than the traditional third person. The glosses
summarize the author’s points and respond directly to her: “That a woman of your
yeares may w rite in this argument” and “That you meant to make a common benefit of
your paines.”8The notations comprise a model of interaction between the reader and the
author. Later, Tyler states “my meaning hath ben to make other parteners of my liking,”9
and her preface has provided both the logic for and an example of this kind of
partnership.
It is this stunning connection that Tyler makes between reading and writing that I
wish to explore with respect to other early modern women readers. She has been
inspired to transform a text through the activity of translation by the “delight which my
seife findeth in reading the Spanish”10 version of the tale. In Tyler’s case, and as I will
argue in the cases of Campbell, Clarke, and Southwell — the risky pleasure of reading
texts culturally designated as “dangerous” prompted these readers to become producers
of texts themselves, an action with significant and far-reaching implications for the
positioning of women within a British literary tradition that had, for the most part,
denied space for the expression of specifically female subjectivities.
The three commonplace books Campbell, Clarke, and Southwell owned had one
important characteristic in common: all contain secular poetry. Clarke’s and Southwell’s
books contain other material as well. Clarke’s pages had receipts and jests; Southwell’s
book includes receipts, inventories, summaries of texts, and letters, among other items.
All three manuscript miscellanies primarily feature hands other than these women’s.
Clarke’s jest book contains a collection of different hands, including her own in a poem
transcribed on the last folio. Campbell’s book contains a professional secretary hand.
Though Campbell did not write the material in her book herself, and it cannot be
established with any certainty that she directed what material would be in the
mansucript, she appropriated the text as her own with her signature that asserts “Anne
Corwaleys / her booke” on folio two.11 Southwell’s book contains the hands of her
second husband, Henry Sibthorpe, and her amanuensis Samuel Rowson. Rowson’s hand
appears throughout the volume, usually transcribing poems; Southwell initials one of
these poems, appearing on folios 28 and 29, as her own. Furthermore, there are several
other places (fol. 5v, 22r, 22v) where Southwell has revised Rowson’s transcriptions in
her own hand. This is typical of what Harold Love describes as “scribal publication’’ by
an author, very prevalent in the seventeenth-century, especially among women writers.12
The insertion of scribes into the textual process makes attribution of intention and
potential interpretation more difficult and complex, but it does not entirely obscure
women’s participation in the literary equation. These women, even when they did not
grasp a pen in their hand, more than likely read the large majority of the material in their
books, and by signing their names to the pages, asserted their ownership over it.
Reading can be viewed as a form of copying — it internalizes a text, though never
in a pure and complete form, for the reader’s imagination always works on the text to
transform it through the activity of interpretation. This paradigm, which we find in
current reader response theory, was common during the early modern period as well.13
In Barnabe Googe’s dedicatory epistle to William Lovelace in Eglogs, Epytaphes, and
Sonettes (1563), Googe worries not only about his own faults as a writer, but “also I
feared and mistrusted the disdaynfull myndes of a nombre both scornefull and carpynge
Correctours, whose Heades are ever busyed in tauntyng Judgements.” 14 He is fully
11 Arthur F. Marotti, “The Cultural and Textual Importance of Folger MS V.a.89,” English
Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, ed. Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, 11 (2002): 70.
12 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993), 54-58. Love indicates two criteria by which “author publication” in the scribal
system can be evaluated, both of which are met throughout Southwell’s commonplace book: “An
important criterion for identifying author publication is the presence of signed dedications or
epistles to particular persons” (47), and “A second criterion is the presence of passages or
corrections in the author’s own hand, or those of known amanuenses” (48). Also see Jane
Stevenson, “Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century,” English
Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, ed. Peter Beal and Margaret J. M. Ezell, 9 (2000): 1-32.
13 For an excellent discussion of the necessity of applying critical theory to historical
readers, see Kevin Sharpe’s Reading Revolutions: The Politics o f Reading in Early Modern
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
14 Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 298.
110 K A T H R Y N D eZ U R
aware that he must ultimately give control over the interpretation of his work to readers,
who if disdainful may deliberately misinterpret or misjudge the text. George Turbevile
in Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567) highlights the active role the reader
can play in receiving his text when he writes to the Countess of Warwick and his
readers:
if there be any thing herein that maye offend thee, refuse it, reade and peruse
the reast with pacience. Let not the misliking of one member procure thee
rashley to condemne the whole. I stand to thy judgement, I expect thy aequitie.
Reade the good, and reject the evill: yea rather con-demne it to perpetuali
silence.. .. But assuredlye there is nothing in thys whole slender Volume that
was ment amisse of me the Writer, howsoever the Letter goe in thy judgement
that arte the Reader.15
While Turbevile attempts in this preface to limit the reader’s authority over the text, the
final judgment is reserved for the reader here; he or she has the last say about what the
text means, and this meaning may differ from that intended by the author. Turbevile’s
preface reveals that women (specifically female patrons, such as the Countess of
Warwick) were acknowledged participants in this process.
In reading, copying, or having others copy passages or poems they liked, Campbell,
Clarke, and Southwell exercised this agency, sometimes replicating the texts exactly as
they found them, sometimes changing them to suit themselves, and sometimes creating
an entirely original response. Even when the texts were reproduced exactly, the new
context of the works — both in terms of where they were placed within a collection and
in terms of being “written” by a woman, either literally or at the command of a woman
— potentially changed their meanings. As Susan Miller points out in her study of early
American commonplace books, “Positions in discourse are always provisional, even
when they are assumed through language that is rooted in tradition and directly copied
in a new circumstance.”16Because of the provisional nature of language, the meanings
of even highly traditional forms cannot be permanently fixed, but are susceptible to
changes in cultural and/or historical contexts, including who reads and responds to those
forms.17 This allows for a certain flexibility, within limits, in the way in which readers
interact with texts.
An additional phenomenon that aids in the changing of meaning is the multiple
possibilities for identification within the process of reading poetry; those possibilities
include identifying with characters, with the speaker, with the author, and with the
implied reader figured in and by the text. The varied possibilities of identification and
the provisional positions of discourse Miller discusses mean these women could assume
subject positions culturally identified as male (e.g., politician, historian, knight, male
lover, writer) otherwise presumed to be unavailable to them. The historical specificity
of the occasion of copying/reading and of the identity of the copier/reader may render
him or her aware of the constructed nature of subject positions and make alternate posi
tions conceivable, especially should the newly assumed subject position taken through
the process of identification be outside the “norm” for that person.18 This would mean
early modern women readers could become aware of the possibility of themselves as
writers. And although these commonplace books may have been meant for “private” use
by the women and their families, reading, copying, and writing were “never ... act[s]
exempt from unavoidable confrontations with the demands of socially warranted self
perception.”19
That confrontation must have been all the more apparent when we consider in detail
what Campbell, Clarke, and Southwell were reading and copying. Their participation
in the circulation of amorous poetry indicates a possible site of resistance to the
idealized cultural paradigm of women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Early modern
humanist educators had strict guidelines about the curriculum their charges undertook;
they emphasized the trope of gathering and framing as a means for the responsible
reader to avoid the “poison” lurking in some texts.20 Some texts were considered so
dangerous as to be banned from the curriculum entirely. For instance, St. Bees School’s
statues of 1583 state: “the schoolmaster shall not suffer his scholars to have any lewd
or superstitious books or ballads amongst them.”21 Humanists’ rules for girls’ education
were even stricter and based on the essentialist assumption that females were less phy
sically, intellectually, and morally capable than males, and therefore more likely to be
led astray by seductive texts. In 1524 Richard Hyrde noted that,
I have heard many men put great doubt whether it should be expedient and
requisite or not, a woman to have learning in books of Latin and Greek. And
some utterly affirm that it is not only neither necessary nor profitable, but also
very noisome and jeopardous. Alleging for their opinion that the frail kind of
woman, being inclined of their own courage unto vice, and mutable at every
novelty, if they should have skill in many things that be written in the Latin
and Greek tongue, compiled and made with great craft and eloquence, where
the matter is haply sometime more sweet unto the ear than wholesome of the
mind, it would of likelihood both inflame their stomachs a great deal the more
to that vice that men say they be given unto of their own nature already.22
Others worried not about classical texts, but about those in the vernacular since they
were so much more accessible to a population rarely educated in Latin and Greek. Juan
Luis Vives, tutor to a young Mary Tudor and writer of one of the most popular tracts
on the education of women, cautions: “There is an vse nowe a dayes worse than amonge
the pagans that bokes writen in our mothers tonges that be made but for idell men &
women to rede haue none other matter but of warre and loue.”23 He perceives, as do
many early modern humanists, chivalric and courtly romances as particularly dangerous.
The problem of idleness caused by reading romances is compounded by the problem of
desire, for “Many in whom there is no good mynde all redy reden those bokis to kepe
hym self in the thoughtes of loue.”24 In his Instruction o f a Christian Woman, Vives in
sists, “It were better for them nat only to haue no lernyng at all but also to lese their eies
20 Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority : Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century
England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 58.
21 David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1975), 83-84.
22 Richard Hyrde, “On the Education of Women— 1524,” Vives and the Renascence Edu
cation o f Women, ed. Foster Watson (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), 162-63. Hyrde
here presents the common view, which he goes on to argue against, stating that “reading and
studying of books so occupieth the mind, that it can have no leisure to muse or delight in other
fantasies” (166).
23 Vives, Instruction, fol. E3r.
24 Vives, Instruction, fol. E3v.
Vaine Books ” and Early Modern Women Readers 113
that they shulde nat rede”25 such texts. When we turn our consideration to these three
manuscript miscellanies, we realize that all of these women — Campbell, Clarke, and
Southwell — should have lost their eyes, at least according to Vives.
Anne Corwalis Campbell, Countess of Argyll, did not limit her reading to the types
of texts Vives recommended such as the Bible and hagiographies of female saints;
instead literary texts fill her commonplace book.26 One poem, probably by Gervase
Markham, charges the reader with attaining virtue and fleeing vice and is a poem Vives
might have appreciated. Of particular importance in it to women is Markham’s warning
that “a silent tonge dothe often fynd great ease / upon lavyshe Speeche doethe offen-
tymes displease”27 since this targets one of the virtues so esteemed in women. The poet
also emphasizes the care that should go into choosing friends; one should shun any
whose “fruite are nothing sounde.”28 That “fruite” could refer both to benefits begotten
of friendship or to a child. In terms of the latter, such a “fruite” of the womb would be
“unsound” if illegitimate. The poem reveals how easy it is to be led astray if unwary.
The speaker of the poem states the reader should “trust no more although they seme full
gaye.”29
Campbell has not, however, taken the poem’s warning to heart, at least as far as
“gay” poetry goes. She has been reading De Vere, Dyer, Sidney, and possibly Shake
speare and Spenser. In the poem attributed to Shakespeare on folio 25, the speaker of
fers instructions to men on seduction. The third person pronouns “she” and “her” and
the second-person direct address to the reader — “thou” — aligns the speaker with those
who would seduce women. The poem specifically addresses the use of language in the
seduction process; the speaker warns that “when thou comest thy tale to tell/ whett not
thy tonge with fyled talke / leaste she some subtill practyse smell.”30 Men will be better
served, it turns out, with money — a “golden bullet” can “beat downe” that “strongest
castell tower or towne.” Eventually, women will likely relent; their “feble force will
yelde at lengthe / & crafte hathe taught her thus to say.” According to the speaker, wom
en do experience erotic desire: “were kyssinge all the Ioyes in bedde / one woman wold
another wedde,” and any indication to the contrary is “dissembled with an outward
showe.” Arthur Marotti has argued that the poem “has an implied male audience, whose
sexist assumptions about women it confirms.”311am curious, however, about what hap
pens to the meaning of the poem when its audience is not the intended male one, but a
female one. The speaker of the poem claims his lady would blush to “heare her secretes
thus bewrayede.”32 What does it mean that a female audience would know that the
“secret” was out? Would she blush or would she laugh? Would this lessen or heighten
her need to protest her sexual innocence? How would she apply the sexist stereotype to
her experience — would she confirm or reject it or do something in between? Could the
appropriation of the male speaker’s voice by a female make possible an ironic reading,
one that implicitly mocks the male speaker’s knowledge of female desire?
These same questions haunt a carpe diem poem expressing female erotic desire on
folio 12 verso. In it, the speaker is a spinster who laments the fact that while once she
had suitors — so many that she begged them to “go, go, go, seek some other, importune
me no more”33 — now that she is older, she has none. She “repents that I said before”
and wishes she had taken advantage of the offers to become a “mistress.” In this poem,
the female speaker stands in direct opposition to the cultural ideal of female chastity.
After the poem, in the same hand, is an attribution to L:Oxford; in other manuscripts,
including Cambridge University Library’s MS Dd.V.75 and the British Library’s MS
Harley 7392, the poem has been attributed to Queen Elizabeth.34Though the attribution
is uncertain, Campbell probably believed De Vere wrote it. The name not only ascribes
the poem to him, but would remind Campbell that a man authored the piece, and
therefore the female subjectivity represented in it has its origins in a male imagination.
Campbell must have understood that the male perspective may not be the only valid
one; included within her miscellany is a poem attributed to Anne Vavasour, a woman
with whom Oxford had an extra-marital affair. Vavasour bore his child, and De Vere
was imprisoned briefly and denied access to Queen Elizabeth’s court for two years as
a result. Furthermore, a blood feud between De Vere’s supporters and Vavasour’s
family commenced and continued for four years, resulting in De Vere’s wounding and
the deaths of four men.35 Vavasour’s text appears on folio 8 verso, directly after a com
plaint by De Vere on folio 8 recto.36Campbell read both “sides” of the relationship, the
male and the female. In the De Vere poem, the speaker indicates that death is preferable
to life, for no “woordes nor wronges nor love nor hate nor feares”37 must be endured any
longer. The speaker in Vavasour’s poem expresses the limitations she experiences as a
woman in the Elizabethan court:
Vavasour’s poem explains why a woman’s love might appear to be hate and further
more presents the speaker as an ever faithful lover.39The speaker claims that the stifling
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The attribution in the commonplace book shows Camp
bell likely believed it to be Vavasour’s poem, and as I argue, a response to De Vere’s complaint.
37 Folger MS V.a.89, fol. 8r.
38 Folger MS V.a.89, fol. 8v-9r; also quoted in Marotti, Manuscript, 58.
39 This self-representation is rather ironic, considering Anne Vavasour’s marital future, in
116 K A T H R Y N D eZ U R
atmosphere at court, the suspicion surrounding her relationship with the inscribed audi
ence of the poem, and the necessity of maintaining her reputation have caused her
rejecting behavior. Campbell likely saw this as a response to De Vere’s poem. In the
placement of the poems, a dialogue has been opened between the texts and the two
poets, creating a model of response for the female reader of De Vere’s text.
The poem found on folio 13 verso of Campbell’s miscellany reveals the extent to
which identification as both a reader and writer of text can be fluid. It deploys all the
imagery of a typical romance scene: the male speaker spies on a veiled woman who
weeps about her love in the woods.40 The speaker seems to feel a rush of forbidden and
voyeuristic pleasure as he penetrates her veil and sees her face; he says “I might dys-
cerne her face / as one mighte see a damaske rose thoughe hid with crystall glass.” He
follows this conventional simile of the rose and the woman — a simile that also ties this
poem to the carpe diem tradition — with more conventional romance tropes including
Cupid’s arrows and the bondage of love. The end of the poem suggests that the speaker
suddenly realizes he is the object of her affection: “And I that knowe this ladye well said
lorde how great a myracle / to heare the eccho tell for truthe as twere Apollos oracle.”
In speaking her complaint, the woman becomes a producer of text and the speaker be
comes an interpreter. This process is then reversed with a female reader of the poem
such as Campbell; the male speaker is the poet and the woman the interpreter. There
fore, the female reader has multiple possibilities for identification: she can occupy both
the positions of the subject and the object of desire, the producer and interpreter of text.
If Campbell read romance and carpe diem poetry and reveled in that which sprang
from real and scandalous romantic relationships with pleasure and some risk, Elizabeth
Clarke’s manuscript book probably would have horrified early modern preachers and
humanists educators. This is true not so much because of what she herself wrote on its
pages, though she too had a fondness for erotic poetry, but because of what she could
have read on those pages.41 Clarke had a jest book filled with pornographic jokes. For
example, one joke begins, “The friar and the tailor made a match that he which thrust
which she bears the child of a man other than her husband and is later convicted of bigamy.
Somerset, Ladies in Waiting, 90.
40 A later hand in the commonplace book attributes this poem to Babaser. However, Jones
attributes it to Edward de Vere. Campbell’s version omits the echoes in the second verse that
directly point to De Vere as the object of the female character’s desire found in Jones, Sixteenth
Century Verse, 159-60. In some versions, this portion is called “Anne Vavasor’s Echo Song.”
41 Unfortunately, I have no biographical data on Elizabeth Clarke. According to London
marriage records and parish inquisition records, a number of Elizabeth Clarkes lived around the
time of the commonplace book’s composition, ca 1595. See Joseph Lemuel Chester, Allegations
fo r Marriage Licences Issued by the Bishop o f London, 1520 to 1610, ed. Geo. J. Armytage, Voi.
1 (London: Harleian Society, 1887). Furthermore, the search is complicated by not knowing
whether Clarke was her maiden name, or where within the British Isles she lived.
Vaine Books” and Early Modem Women Readers 117
his prick the farthest between the legs of the wife of the tailor .. .”42 Another reads “a
gentlewoman one a time seeing one want a knife she say cut my finger he replyed you
would say finger my cut.”43 Marotti states that “Since the manuscript transmission of
verse was most frequently associated with all-male environments such as the univer
sities and the Inns of Court, it is not surprising to find a large amount of bawdy and
obscene verse in manuscript collections.”44 While it might seem surprising to find a
woman with access to such manuscripts, Ian Moulton and Pamela Allen Brown have
both delineated women’s participation as readers within an erotic and/or pornographic
textual economy, though it is not as abundant as that of men. Moulton points to verse
miscellanies owned by Clarke and Margaret Bellasis, and Brown documents many in
stances of women’s involvement as audiences or creators of jests.45 It is clear that the
jest material was in the manuscript book when Clarke received it, for she practiced her
signature in the margins of the first folio, and the final downstroke of a “k” covers the
beginning of a pornographic jest.
What is significant about Clarke’s commonplace book is not only its testimony to
women’s access to erotic texts but also its demonstration of a poetic response to these
kinds of texts — one that may take on a male speaker’s voice, but which reserves some
agency of desire for women. Clarke’s contribution to the commonplace book is much
more modest than the jests, if still interested in the relationship between the sexes. The
single poem in her handwriting may well be original to her; it does not appear in the
Arundel Hartington Manuscript o f Tudor Poetry nor in the First Line Index o f English
Poetry 1500-1800 in Manuscripts o f the Bodleian Library Oxford. It reads:
In the first verse, the main cause of the speaker’s emotion is not any of the standard
romance causes: beauty or Cupid. Like the jests, it denies the Petrarchan tradition,
which incorporates paeans to a woman’s shining eyes, her softness and her delicacy.47
Instead, there is a certain cynicism hinted at here; the speaker loves the woman not for
her own virtues, but simply because she loves him. The fifth line can be read in two
ways: the statement “I would fayne know what it might be” could either constitute a
rhetorical question the speaker poses to himself, or it could interpolate his audience —
it may be a line spoken by the inscribed audience in response to the speaker. If the latter
is the case, the poem’s dialogic form openly acknowledges the dual subject positions
available to the reader in identifying with the speaker and with the audience, and in fact,
confuses them, for both are objects and subjects of desire. The speaker wants and is
wanted; so does the addressed audience. The line also possibly models an intervention
by the audience that is recorded in the text; it is an interruption that contributes to the
final form of the poem, placing the audience in a crucial position as a co-maker of meaning.
The second stanza has a distinctly more carnal tone, focusing on the “fire” of “de
sire” and the “kiss” that, frustratingly, does not lead to consummation. The addressed
audience is a “Lady of cannot please” either because she cannot please him or because
she cannot be pleased by him. The speaker’s rejection of the audience is a reaction to
the lady’s rejection of him — her “harts not his.” This rejection demonstrates the power
of choice the addressed woman has exercised. Although the speaker of the poem seems
to occupy, at least primarily, a male subject position, the poem itself stands in contrast
to the bawdy jests in the rest of the commonplace book. While it does seem in the sec
ond verse to move closer to the notion that women’s primary purpose for men is a
sexual one — a view overwhelmingly propagated in the jests — it also reveals a certain
agency that women can exercise in choosing lovers, an agency completely denied, for
instance, by the jest that assumes the tailor’s wife will have no say in the competition
between the tailor and the friar.
That Elizabeth Clarke believed her contribution to the book was significant is dem
onstrated by the way in which she copied out the poem. She wrote it in large, clear
letters, very unlike the cramped scrawls of those who wrote the jests and took up as little
space as possible. She featured it prominently, as the only item on the verso side of the
last folio — even though folios 1 verso and 2 recto and verso are blank — so that some
one picking up the manuscript would be likely to see it, even if the reader did not open
it. Her addition to the manuscript miscellany constitutes an active form of participation
within a literary exchange.
Like Clarke, Lady Anne Southwell featured her own compositions in her manu
script book in addition to copies of her favorite poems and aphorisms. The folios were
given to her by her second husband Henry Silbthorpe upon their marriage in 1626.48 In
fact, her commonplace book is a remarkable example of the way in which reading be
came an empowering force in early modern women’s writing.
Southwell’s commonplace book carries within it a boon to scholars interested in
early modern personal libraries, for it contains an inventory of all the books Southwell
and Sibthorpe owned. The inventory was created by Sibthorpe after Southwell’s death
in 1636, and some of the books listed there she clearly could not have read since they
were available only after her demise. However, out of the 110 books listed, she could
have had access to 90 of them according to their publication dates.49As Jean Cavanaugh
points out, “Final evidence that Lady Southwell had books of her own is furnished by
an inventory of her personal possessions made five years before her death, an inventory
that lists three trunks of books.”50 The library inventory not only names religious tracts
and instruction manuals on hunting, falconry, and war, but also catalogues Orlando
Furioso, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a book of John Donne’s poems, The Tryall o f Witts,
and The Golden Flute.51 Her manuscript book indicates that her reading interests were
widely varied; throughout it, she mentions, alludes to, or summarizes Cicero, Aristotle,
Seneca, Quarles, Plato, Suetonius, Coxe, Henry King, Virgil’s Eclogues, St. Augustine,
James I’s Demonologye, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, Conradus Gesner’s History o f
Foure-Footed Beasts, Daniel Featley, Sir Philip Sidney, and a book titled The Jests o f
Scoggin.52
Southwell’s commonplace book reveals that one of her methods of reading and
appropriating a text was distillation. In an exercise much like early modern grammar
school translation exercises, Southwell has read Suetonius’s description of Julius Caesar
48 Jean Kiene, Introduction and Notes, The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, Folger
MS. V.b.198 (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), xi.
49 Jean Carmel Cavanaugh, “The Library of Lady Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe,” Studies
in Bibliography: Papers o f the Bibliographical Society o f the University o f Virginia 20 (1967):
247-54.
50 Cavanaugh, “Library,” 243.
51 Folger MS V. b. 198. Lady Anne Southwell, Commonplace book, Special Collections,
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. (ca 1588-1636), fol. 64v-66.
52 The references to these authors appear on the following folios: Cicero, fol. 4r; Aristotle,
fol. 5v; Seneca, fol. 8r; Quarles, fol. 17r; Plato, fol. 20r; Suetonius, fol. 30v; Coxe, fol. 21 r; Henry
King, fol. 24r and 69r-v; Virgil’s Eclogues, fol. 25r; St. Augstine, fol. 33v and 67r; James I’s
Demonologye, fol. 42v; Pliny’s Histo ria Naturalis, fol. 43r; Conradus Gesner’s History o f Foure-
Footed Beasts, fol. 68r; Daniel Featley, fol. 26r; Sir Philip Sidney, fol. H r — possibly his
Arcadia influences the poem on fol. 9r; and a book titled The Jests o f Scoggin, fol. 23v.
120 K A T H R Y N D eZ U R
in The Twelve Caesars and written a verse abstract of the work. This abstract shows
what fascinated Southwell in this classical history: the role of women within the inter
section of the domestic and the political.
Southwell’s condensed version of Suetonius and Plutarch reads as follows53:
The first five lines describe in generalized terms Caesar’s greatness, his status as a hero
and a conqueror, with the only specified detail that of the number of battles. The re
mainder of the poetic abstract focuses on the domestic details of Caesar’s life and how
these domesticities profoundly affected his political life. Southwell specifically men
tions the rivalry between father-in-law and son-in-law, unmitigated by Julia, the daughter/
wife they shared. The woman, who is supposed to cement the political alliance, in fact
has very little power to do so.
From this woman, Southwell moves on to another: Cleopatra. Southwell’s descrip
tion of her as “Faire Cleopatar” may allude to the tradition in the early modern period
of Cleopatra as the beautiful temptress who resembled Eve in her role in the Roman
Empire’s downfall.55 In the source text, Suetonius describes the relationship between
53 The abstract is in the hand of Samuel Rowson, who also served as the amanuensis for
Southwell’s original poems throughout the commonplace book; therefore it seems reasonable to
assume that Southwell is the author of this verse.
54 Folger MS V. b. 198, fol. 30v.
55 The most famous early modern example of Cleopatra as a seductive and nationally
destructive force appears in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606-1607). Aemilia Lanyer
figures Cleopatra as an Eve figure in her lines from Salve De us (1611):
“Vaine Books” and Early Modem Women Readers 121
Caesar and Cleopatra thus: “For, with her, hee both sate up many times and feasted all
night long even untili the breake of day; and also in the same Barge or Galley called
Thalamegos, had passed into /Egypt, almost as farre as to /Ethiopia, but that his Armie
refused to followe.”56 Caesar circumscribed his relationship for the sake of his political
duties — that is, for his soldiers’ loyalty, which he was in danger of losing. This how
ever, as Southwell points out, did not prevent him from siring an illegitimate son with
Cleopatra.
Although the material regarding Cleopatra appears in Seutonius’s text within a lar
ger discussion of Caesar’s sexual relationships — including his reputation for homo
sexuality and a repetition of Cicero’s graphic description of Caesar’s deflowering by
King Nicomendes57— Southwell makes no mention of Caesar’s relationships with men
in her summary; instead her interest lies in his adulterous behavior with women.
Southwell vividly alludes to it when she adds the adjective “bastard’’ to modify “sonn’’
in referring to Brutus. Here she infers from the original text that Brutus is the offspring
of the adulterous liaison between Caesar and Servilia, who was “the mother of M. Brv-
tvs” and upon whom “above the rest, he [Caesar] cast affection.”58 The sexual impro
prieties detailed in Suetonius come to a political crux in Southwell’s rendition with her
designation of Brutus as the “bastard sonn” who kills and deposes his father. In her brief
abstracted biography, Southwell emphasizes the role women have played within Cae
sar’s political life though they do not take direct political action.
Barbara Bowen demonstrates that the reference here to Cleopatra as “blinded” connects to a later
reference to Eve as without the “power to see”; therefore the “forbidden fruit” works doubly as
Cleopatra herself and the temptation of adultery. Barbara Bowen, “Aemilia Lanyer and the In
vention of White Womanhood,” Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women ’s Alliances
in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 284.
56 G. Suetonius Tranquillus, The Historie o f Twelve Caesars, Emperovrs o f Rome: Written
in Latine by C. Suetonius Tranquillus, and newly translated into English by Philêmon Holland,
Doctor in Physicke, Together with a Marginali Glosse, and other briefe Annotations there-upon
(London: Matthew Lownes, 1606), 21.
57 Suetonius, Historie, 20, 22.
58 Suetonius, Historic, 21.
122 K A T H R Y N D eZ U R
Distillation was not the only strategy Southwell used as a reading method; she also
edited and revised source texts. On folio 2 appears Southwell’s version of Sir Walter
Ralegh’s satiric poem “The Lie.” The poem begins as Ralegh wrote it:
For four more stanzas, the poem follows the original, critiquing the court, the church,
potentates, statesmen, and spendthrifts. The next three stanzas however, save for the
chorus, are unique to Southwell.59 Two of them transform Ralegh’s poem by revising
words and switching the order of lines; one of these combines two of Ralegh’s stanzas.
The third seems to be completely original though it echoes the sentiments found in the
original poem. One of these original stanzas concentrates on the arts and education, and
Southwell’s revisions to Ralegh’s original make the critique more biting.
Southwell’s version inverts the topics and the criticism to create a new meaning:
a re n o t so u n d e
Southwell has made revisions in her own hand. In changing schools from “wanting
profoundness” to “are not sounde,” she has transformed the meaning of her criticism to
one more radical: the education offered is not just trivial, it is harmful. The scholars
impress others by “seeming” learned when in fact they know naught. Her satire on the
arts is no less unflinching. She accuses them of being without “true ground,” true
meaning and worth. Rather, their worth is inflated based on the “esteeming” of certain
people in power, likely those who attended “unsound” schools. In the fourth line of this
stanza, Southwell has revised “live” to “thrive.” In her first version, art that falls outside
the scope of courtiers’ “esteeming” dies. In Southwell’s second version, art may not
“thrive” or do well without that “esteeming,” but it still has a chance at survival. With
this transformation, she reserves a space for true art outside the socially accepted arena
of male composition. Southwell’s criticism feels even sharper when we realize that she,
as a woman, would have been denied access both to extensive formal schooling (and her
handwriting shows it) and to the literary fame accorded to male authors.
Southwell considered this poem her own; she signed her name at the end of it, not
merely to practice her signature as Elizabeth Clarke did, but to indicate proprietorship.
She has also signed her original poems elsewhere in the collection.62 Her reading and
copying has become a clear version of composing; she has not only occupied the subject
position of the original author but has included her own subjectivity within the poem.
Her transformation of a traditional male subject position as speaker becomes very
clear in two poems in which she addresses the position of women in her culture. In both,
she rereads the text of Genesis against the traditional and patriarchal interpretation of
it that served as a rationalization for women’s social inferiority in early modern Eng
land. As Barbara McManus has noted, “Because the biblical account of the creation and
fall of human beings carried the weight of divine authority, it constituted the foundation
of Renaissance discourse about the essential nature and function of women; Genesis
therefore became an especially complex site of negotiation for writers whose explicit
agenda was to challenge from, a feminine perspective the dominant cultural attitudes
toward women.”63 Though in a third poem Southwell cautions women to “learne to
know your station and your duty / both to your lord in heaven and lord on earth,”64 these
62 Southwell placed her initials or her name on folios fifteen times (fols. 1r, 2r, 3r-v, 4r, 18r,
19v, 20v, 21r — three times; 22r— twice; 29v,45r, and59r). Significantly, she places her initials
as a pun within a poem praising Coxe’s Booke o f the Birth o f Christ (fol. 21r) and in a draft of
an original composition (fol. 45r).
63 Barbara McManus, “Eve’s Dowry: Genesis and the Pamphlet Controversy about Wom
en,” Women, Writing, and the Reproduction o f Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E.
Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2000), 193-94, original emphasis. McManus discusses five pamphlets that defended women in
part by focusing on the Genesis story: Ester Sowemam’s Ester hath hang’d Haman (1617);
Constantia Munda’s The Worming o f a Mad Dogge (1617); Jane Anger’s Jane Anger her Pro
tection fo r Women (1589); Rachel Speght’s A Mouzellfor Melastomus (1617); and Mary Tattle-
well and Joan Hit-him-home’s The womens sharpe revenge (1640).
64 Folger MS V. b. 198, fol. 51r.
124 K A T H R Y N D eZ U R
two poems place women in the superior position to men. The first is short and to the
point:
Here, Southwell’s speaker manipulates the metaphor of the body for the family so often
deployed to assert women’s inferiority. She acknowledges this trope when she says men
are the head and would have women be the heels of the family body, but then she points
out the power the “heels” have to make the body “reel” if they “kick” or rebel against
unfair treatment. Southwell’s speaker then turns to the creation story to establish the
importance and equality of women to men. She indicates that “the text says” that Eve
was taken from Adam’s side, and she then performs a symbolic interpretation of that
text when she says this becomes a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice for the good of the
Church. Here we find echoes of defenses of women found tracts like Rachel Speght’s
A Mouzell fo r Melastomus, The Cynical Bayter of, and foule mouthed Barker against
Evahs Sex (London 1617), where Speght “adds the commonplace that [Eve] was not
produced from Adam’s foot to be his inferior, or from his head to be his superior, but
rather ‘from his side, neare his heart, to be his equall’.”66 Southwell’s speaker’s wry
reference to “blockish Adam” who was asleep and therefore not privy to the miracle of
women’s creation casts doubt upon the sons of Adam’s ability to interpret “the text” or
women’s position properly.
The second poem also confronts and transforms the justification for a gendered
hierarchy based upon the Genesis story.
65 Folger MS V. b. 198, fol. 16r. Kiene discusses this poem in the light of Southwell’s
relationship with her husband since it appears in Sibthorpe’s hand. Jean Kiene, “ ‘Monument of
an Endless affection’: Folger MS V.b. 198 and Lady Anne Southwell,” English Manuscript Stud
ies 1100-1700, ed. Peter Beal and Margaret J. M. Ezell, 9 (2000): 165--86.
66 McManus, “Eve’s Dowry,” 201.
Vaine Books ” and Early Modern Women Readers 125
In this poem, the speaker’s distinctly feminine identification with Eve and then with
women as a category is clear when she calls Eve “my Grandam” and refers to “our
bodies.” The speaker begins by again asserting the sexes’ equality. First, she calls the
belief that women were created to serve men a “heresy,” attacking the very method of
interpretation as it has been applied to scriptures. She emphasizes the similarities be
tween men and women with her consistent repetition of the word “one”: “one birth, one
death, one resurrection, one god, one Christe, one lawes subscribtion.” Here men and
women are equals in life, in death, and in relationship to their religion. Southwell’s
speaker then relies on a typical strategic maneuver employed in other defenses of wom
en that appeared in the early seventeenth century; whereas “Adam’s priority was usually
interpreted as primacy ... Defenders of women ... stand this point on its head, arguing
that Eve was God’s masterpiece because she was created last.”68 Comparing women to
gold taken out of the red clay that comprises mien, the speaker moves from an argument
of equality to one of superiority. The poem reveals Southwell’s distinctly female subject
position as a reader and writer. Just as her male counterparts may have taken a “resolv’d
and wilfull” position about women, so has she, though it is a decidedly different one.
Southwell’s commonplace book shows her absorption of reading material and then
her transformation of it through occupying the position of writer, a process also under
gone, in a less amplified manner, by Anne Cornwallis Campbell and Elizabeth Clarke.
These three women, though not studied by many scholars nor featured in anthologies,
reveal the responses of early modern women to the literature of their culture and show
their active involvement in its transmission and its transformations.
FREDERICK KIEFER
I Labor's Lost Don Armado falls in love, he at once envisions putting pen to paper:
“Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise,
wit, write, pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio” (1.2.183-85).1It doesn’t matter that
the object of his affection is illiterate; he writes to her anyway. Love poems are the
reflex action of a person in love. Nor is this true only of such extravagant characters as
the affected Don Armado. Berowne too makes a similar resolution when he finds him
self the target of Cupid: “I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, groan” (3.1.204). The juxta
position of the words “love” and “write” suggests how closely connected are these two
activities. Cupid, god of love, is responsible for both; that’s why Berowne calls Cupid
“Regent of love-rhymes” (3.1.181). Later the princess invokes Cupid when asked
whether anything accompanied the love letter she received: “Yes, as much love in
rhyme / As would be cramm’d up in a sheet of paper, / Writ a’ both sides the leaf,
margent and all, / That he was fain to seal on Cupid’s name” (5.2.6-9). Blind Cupid
may not be a reader, but he is a generator of love poems.
1 Love’s Labor’s Lost, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans et al., 2d ed. (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997). All Shakespearean citations are from this edition.
128 F R E D E R IC K K IE F E R
Although both Love's Labor's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, separated in
composition by perhaps five or six years,2 make use of the same convention — that
lovers write poetry — the two plays differ in their theatrical treatment of the written
word, and that difference points to a direction of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in the
1590s. In his earlier comedies the written word usually takes the form of a love letter,
and that letter functions most obviously as a hand property3: love letters are sent from
one character to another; the letters are opened and scrutinized; and at least some of
those letters are apt to be read aloud by either the recipient or the sender.4 In comedies
near the turn of the century, the written word tends to have a less physical presence:
characters may talk about love letters without actually producing them. The audience
is less likely to hear the contents of a love letter. When the audience does hear such a
letter, the contents are likely to prove aesthetically disappointing; in fact, the recitation
is likely to be satiric.5 And the actual writing of love letters proves not so automatic as
in the earlier comedies.
The differences that mark the treatment of the written word in Love's Labor’s Lost
and Much Ado may be illustrated by comparing the eavesdropping scenes in the two
plays. Both evince a careful design: they seem schematic, as though we were witnessing
a dramatic pattern whose overall effect were more important than the realization of any
single part. In Love’s Labor's Lost four men enter seriatim, and each of three proceeds
to read aloud a love letter of his devising, unaware that he is being overheard. In addi
tion to being in love, all four men have something in common — deception — for they
would conceal their love from their friends. The fourth man, pretending indifference to
love, does not actually read aloud his poem in this scene, but the entry of yet another
character with a love letter, earlier penned by the fourth man and previously read aloud
by Nathaniel at 4.2.105-18, defeats his pretense and reveals his resemblance to his
2 In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Stanley
Wells and Gary Taylor suggest that Love’s Labor’s Lost, first published in 1598, “was probably
written some years before publication, in 1593 or 1594” (315). Wells and Taylor speculate that
Much Ado was written five or six years later: “Probably Shakespeare wrote the play between sum
mer 1598 and spring 1599” (609).
3 For an overview of the significance of stage props, see Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha
Korda, “Introduction” to Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-31. This collection of essays, however, does not treat love
letters as props.
4 Another Shakespearean comedy that makes considerable use of love letters is The Two
Gentlemen o f Verona, which Wells and Taylor suggest “may be his first work for the stage” (1).
For an examination of the handling of love poems in this early comedy, see Frederick Kiefer,
“Love Letters in The Two Gentlemen ofV ero n a f Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 65-85.
5 Consider, for instance, Orlando’s written expression of love (read aloud by Rosalind) in
As You Like It (3.2.88-95) or the fake love letter (read aloud by Malvolio) in Twelfth Night (act
2, scene 5).
Poems as Props 129
comrades. In Much Ado, following the entry of one man who disparages love, three
others enter and, knowing that their friend is listening, proceed to discuss a woman’s
love for him. Like the corresponding scene in the earlier play, this too enacts a decep
tion, for apparently the woman has never declared her love for any man. Nevertheless,
the eavesdropper is convinced and, by the end of the scene, he is at one with his friends
in acknowledging the power of love.
Not only do the two eavesdropping scenes depend upon a common premise (that
lovers write) but they also generate laughter by much the same stratagem. In dramatiz
ing the reading of a love letter, Shakespeare presents onstage what is essentially a
personal activity. Contrasting the assumptions governing letters as opposed to dialogue,
Claudio Guillén remarks, “dialogues presuppose usually a public space and the direct
ness and enveloping involvement of speech, while letters or epistles imply, more often
than not, solitude, separation, silence, privacy, even secrecy.“6 Such secrecy is dram
atized in The Two Gentlemen o f Verona, perhaps Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, when
Julia conceals from her own maid the contents of a love letter; indeed, Julia tears the
letter to pieces lest its contents become known to others.
In Love’s Labor’s Lost Shakespeare makes love letters theatrically interesting by
defying the expectation that they will remain secret.7He accomplishes this by providing
an unusual context: an audience within the play. In effect, a private activity becomes
public. In Much Ado a woman’s writing of love letters is made public when an ostensi
bly private conversation among three friends is overheard. Once again the playwright
creates an audience (of one, in this instance) within the play.
Despite such similarities the scenes work rather differently. What particularly marks
the eavesdropping scene in Love’s Labor’s Lost is the attention to written words as in
scribed on physical objects. Their courtly makers — Navarre, Longaville, and Dumaine
— recite the entire texts of three poems, while a fourth poem is read silently by
Berowne. The various authors ponder the fate of their love poems, thereby emphasizing
the tactile existence of those artifacts. When Navarre finishes reading his poem aloud,
for example, he wonders how best to transmit the poem to his beloved: “How shall she
know my griefs? I’ll drop the paper. / Sweet leaves, shade folly” (4.3.41-42). Longa
ville, just before reciting his poem, entertains the notion of destroying it and beginning
anew: “O sweet Maria, empress of my love, / These numbers will I tear, and write in
prose!” (11. 54-55). And Dumaine anticipates the conveyance of his poem to his lady:
6 Claudio Guillén, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance
Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Harvard
Studies in English 14 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 100.
7 Although R. S. White, in “The Rise and Fall of an Elizabethan Fashion: Love Letters in
Romance and Shakespearean Comedy,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 30 (October 1986): 35-47, claims
that “not much is made of love letters” in Love's Labor’s Lost (43), anyone who sees the play in
production knows how important those letters (poems) are both in advancing the plot and
generating laughter.
130 F R E D E R IC K K IE F E R
“This will I send and something else more plain / That shall express my true love’s
fasting pain’’ (11. 119-20). All of this is just a warm-up for the last incident involving the
written word. When the illiterate Jaquenetta enters with a love letter and asks that
someone read it aloud for her, Navarre assigns the task to Berowne, who quickly
recognizes the letter as his own to Rosaline, not the letter that Jaquenetta supposes was
sent to her. To conceal the evidence of his own susceptibility to love, he tears up the let
ter, whereupon Dumaine collects the pieces, saying, “It is Berowne’s writing, and here
is his name” (4.3.199). By emphasizing the actual handling of the paper, Shakespeare
wrings from the device of the misdirected letter the maximum comic effect.
In its treatment of the written word, Much Ado moves in a new direction: no text
of any love poem is presented in the eavesdropping scene. All that Don Pedro, Leonato,
and Claudio need do is say that Beatrice has been up late at night writing love letters to
Benedick. Hearing this, Benedick is instantly convinced.8 Even though the men speak
of her letters as though they really existed, those letters never appear; the three friends
do not produce a single instance. In fact, they fail to quote a sentence, a phrase, even a
word from the supposed writing of Beatrice. Should Benedick wonder why he has never
seen those missives, the three men anticipate the question: Benedick never sees them
because Beatrice never sends them, or so they say. As Leonato explains to his friends,
“O, she tore the letter into a thousand half-pence; rail’d at herself, that she should be so
immodest to write to one that she knew would flout her. T measure him,’ says she, ‘by
my own spirit, for I should flout him, if he writ to me, yea, though I love him, I
should’ ” (2.3.140-45). The action that Leonato describes may remind us of Berowne’s
destruction of his letter in the eavesdropping scene of Love 's Labor's Lost.9 The differ
ence is that the destruction in the later play is wholly imaginary, unseen by the audience
as well as by the victim of the deception. No physical evidence is required, for the three
friends have aptly gauged Benedick’s character and accurately described Beatrice’s.
In a companion scene, Beatrice’s friends deceive her into believing that Benedick
has expressed his love for her. They say nothing, however, about missives written by
him. Instead, they claim to have heard from the prince and Claudio of Benedick’s
affection for Beatrice. This difference between the two scenes probably has nothing to
do with gender. After all, there is ample evidence that Beatrice is a reader; in fact,
Benedick jestingly accuses her of finding her ‘"good wit” in the “Hundred Merry Tales,”
a collection of jests and stories (2.1.130). What’s more, Beatrice is herself a writer, as
we learn at the end of the play when her sonnets are produced as evidence of her love
for Benedick. Shakespeare’s decision not to have the women cite written materials
springs from a pragmatic calculation: he has already employed the (ostensibly) written
profession of love in the deception of Benedick. To use exactly the same device in the
very next scene would place undue reliance upon a single dramatic device.
The eavesdropping episode of Love’s Labor’s Lost illustrates as well as any scene
he wrote Shakespeare’s flair for inventing and deploying props. We can almost see his
mind at work because we know the scene’s theatrical inspiration. The playwright gen
erates laughter by adopting a situation very similar to that previously exploited in John
Lyly’s Galatea: there the nymphs of Diana appear in succession, each confessing that
she has succumbed to love, while other nymphs listen (3.1).10Shakespeare’s dependence
on this earlier comedy may seem unlikely since Lyly intended his plays for sophisticated
private theaters, where the actors were entirely boys, or for the rarified atmosphere of
the court, while Shakespeare’s plays were ordinarily performed by adult men at outdoor
public theaters.11 The audiences at these two kinds of theaters were quite different,
Lyly’s playgoers being socially prominent, better educated, and generally more astute
about literary matters. Why, then, does Shakespeare borrow so directly from Lyly? Per
haps because the auspices of production for Shakespeare’s early comedy were, atypic-
ally for him, similar to Lyly’s. Just as Galatea was first acted (1584) by Paul’s Boys at
their playhouse, so Shakespeare’s play “may have initially written Love’s Labor’s Lost
in the late 1580s for performance by an amateur company of boy actors and then later
revised it.” 12And just as Galatea was performed at Greenwich before the queen, so too
Love’s Labor’s Lost apparently had a court performance, for the title page of the 1598
Quarto reports that it “was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas.” The
sensibility that informs Lyly’s work certainly resembles that of Love ’s Labor’s Lost. It’s
even possible that some of the same courtiers who had earlier seen Galatea were among
the first playgoers of Shakespeare’s early comedy.
Close in spirit as the two playwrights are, Shakespeare is not content simply to copy
mechanically when dramatizing the overheard profession of love. Instead, he diverges
markedly from Galatea in one important respect. Lyly’s lovers articulate their feelings
spontaneously, while Shakespeare’s produce written poems, which are then recited. A
spoken passion in the earlier play becomes a written artifact in the later. If this departure
from Lyly defies our expectation, it is because Shakespeare made his living chiefly by
writing for the public theaters, where the playgoers were much less likely to be literate
and less likely to have direct experience of pen, ink, and paper than playgoers at Paul’s.
Whatever the rate of literacy at the public theaters, it cannot have approached that of the
private theaters.13And yet Shakespeare superimposes those written letters on the model
Lyly created.
Does the later playwright make this change because the nymphs in Galatea are
female and thus, in the context of Elizabethan culture, less likely to be literate than their
male lovers, while Shakespeare’s characters in the eavesdropping episode are men?
Most letter writers in Shakespearean comedy are male: Valentine writes to Silvia, and
Proteus writes to both Julia and Silvia in The Two Gentlemen o f Verona’, Orlando writes
about Rosalind and makes public his poetry in As You Like It; Falstaff writes to both
Mistress Ford and Mistress Page in The Merry Wives o f Windsor; and Bertram writes
to Helena in All ’s Well That Ends Well. Eve Sanders, in a discussion of writing in Love ’s
Labor’s Lost observes, “Women are the objects of inscription and interpretation; only
men are ‘authors.’ ”14But is there another, less local, explanation for Shakespeare’s de
parture from Lyly’s precedent? Does the recourse to written materials in Love ’s Labor’s
Lost, a decade after Galatea, express the priorities of a culture increasingly inclined to
give such materials importance and prestige?15
Although both of these possibilities are plausible, I should like to propose another,
more pragmatic and specifically theatrical, consideration: that Shakespeare’s use of
written materials arises out of a practical concern for achieving certain theatrical effects.
In Love’s Labor’s Lost, as in his other plays, Shakespeare adds visual interest through
the letters as well as humor; and he creates the basis for all sorts of stage business. By
so doing he gets even more mileage out of the overheard profession of love than did
Lyly.
At the same time, Shakespeare’s decision to create props consisting of written love
poems entails a problem that was all along inherent in Lyly’s dramaturgy. However
amusing the elaborate parallelism Shakespeare emulated, there is a potential risk in de
ploying love letters as he does here, for in this scene his dramaturgy has — like his
predecessor’s — a somewhat static quality. The love poems in Love’s Labor’s Lost, like
the overheard professions of love in Galatea, are not part of a dynamic conversation;
they are, rather, like gems placed within an existing setting. Significantly, the sonnets
of Berowne and Longaville, along with Dumaine’s poem, are sufficiently independent
of their dramatic context to have been reprinted in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599).
If love poems of this kind are suitable for anthologizing, it is because they do not
depend upon a dramatic context for their effect: they look inward. Joseph Brodsky
explains: “ultimately a love lyric, by necessity, is a narcissistic affair. It is a statement,
however imaginative, of the author’s own feeling, and as such it amounts to a self-
portrait rather than to one of his beloved or her world.”16 Admittedly, love poems
sometimes circulated as manuscripts in Shakespeare’s England.17But those poems may
not have expressed a particular poet’s own feelings. Sonnets were as likely designed to
enliven a conventional conceit as to make distinctive a common emotional experience,
and there is, of course, no evidence that any of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to
or about any particular woman.18 By contrast, there is every reason to believe that the
men who profess their affection in Love’s Labor’s Lost do so because they are in love.
In this play written expressions of love have the self-contained quality that Brodsky
identifies; the reading aloud of the poems betokens self-involvement. Those poems,
moreover, are not so much composed as displayed. They offer little in the way of sur
prise; the audience can easily guess what those poems contain even before they are
recited. All are laden with conventional sentiments and conventional imagery ; the lovers
speak of kisses and tears, vows and perj ury, blossoms and thorns. The Petrarchan verses
are not especially compelling, nor could they be without overshadowing the dialogue
of the characters onstage.19
16 Joseph Brodsky, “The poet, the loved one and the Muse,” Times Literary Supplement
October 26-November 1 1990: 1150.
17 On this point see Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric
(Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).
18 Elizabeth Heale, in Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles o f
the Self(New York: Paigrave Macmillan, 2003), remarks that Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, like
those of Petrarch and Sidney, “masquerades . . . as a version of the author’s own story” (154).
19 In “Artifice and Realism in Lyly, Nashe, and Love’s Labor’s Lost,” Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900 23 (Spring 1983): 207-21, Peter Berek argues: “Each speaker purports to
be displaying his true feelings, but the cliché-ridden rhetoric of their love-sonnets and the fact that
they make their brave avowals only when they think no one can hear them raise doubts about their
134 F R E D E R IC K K IE F E R
self-knowledge and their sincerity” (216). Although the sonnets hardly represent great poetry,
their style, it seems to me, need not necessarily betoken false emotion. The very convention of
love letters demands a certain degree of artifice.
20 In “Poem or Speech?: The Sonnet as Dialogue in Love’s Labor’s Lost and Romeo and
Juliet,” Papers on Language & Literature 19 (Winter 1983): 13-36, Jackson G. Barry observes,
“the unexceptional quality of the lords’ sonnets in comparison with the poems by Sidney (and
Shakespeare himself), as well as v/ith the dialogue in which these sonnets are imbedded, conveys
a very sharp sense that they are to be taken as stage properties, not as works important in them
selves” (22).
21 Robert Ornstein, in Shakespeare’s Comedies, observes of the four pairs of lovers, “The
quadrille pattern is amusing, of course; it offers the simple childlike delight of ‘follow-the-leader’.
. .. But wooing and disdain à quatre becomes a bit tiresome after a while” (37).
Poems as Props 135
Leonato. O, when she had writ it, and was reading it over, she found
“Benedick” and “Beatrice” between the sheet?
Claudio. That. (11. 134-139)
Without ever slowing the pace, the conversation manages to convey Beatrice’s state of
mind (whether she is conscious of it or not) and to suggest the nature of her incipient
relationship with Benedick. The dialogue, moreover, advances the plot, for even though
this is the second-hand version of an imaginary conversation, it prompts Benedick to
renounce his stance as scoffer at love (2.3.7-35) and adopt the attitude of an enthusiastic
lover (11. 220-46). What permits the transition, of course, is Benedick’s conviction that
the letters spoken about by his friends are incontestably real.
Given the diminished role that the written word has as theatrical property in Much
Ado, it seems fitting that Shakespeare should dramatize a character, Benedick, in the
throes of composition, unable to produce a poem:
Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried. I can find out no rhyme to
“lady” but “baby,” an innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn,” a hard rhyme; for
“school,” “fool,” a babbling rhyme: very ominous endings. No, I was not born
under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.
(5.2.36-41)
Because of Benedick’s self-awareness, the speech works well by poking fun at the stan
dard language of love letters. (Longaville, in Love ’s Labor’s Lost, concedes that predic
table quality when he entertains the idea of forsaking the writing of sonnets and
expressing his sentiments in prose [4.3.55].) What Shakespeare has discovered is that
it can be more theatrically interesting to portray someone in the act of writing than to
portray that figure reciting a polished poem. That is, Benedick engages us in a way that
Berowne does not when in Love’s Labor’s Lost he says that he will write a poem and
then proceeds to produce it. Benedick’s attempt at composition in Much Ado gives a
sense of verisimilitude, of a mind in motion.
By this attention to the writer’s travail, moreover, Shakespeare explains, by impli
cation, why we do not find as many love poems in Much Ado as in Love’s Labor’s Lost.
In the world of the later comedy, writing is not necessarily the automatic expression of
a lover — he or she does not always succeed at transmuting desire into verse. In effect,
Shakespeare questions the premise that underlies the writing about love in his earlier
comedies. After all, there is no doubt that Benedick loves Beatrice. His inability to
rhyme does not betoken lack of passion. Rather, his difficulty arises out of a jumble of
emotions: he has been shocked by Claudio’s denunciation of Hero and jolted by
Beatrice’s demand that he “Kill Claudio” (4.1.289). The formal writing and presentation
of a love poem have come to seem less important to him (and thus to us) than the emo
tion that leads a lover to turn to poetry in the first place. What Shakespeare dramatizes
is the primacy of the inner disposition, not that of the outer artifact.
136 F R E D E R IC K K IE F E R
That primacy finds negative expression in the person of Claudio, who, alone in the
play, produces a poem whose words we actually hear. When he falls in love with Hero,
Don Pedro predicts, “Thou wilt be like a lover presently, / And tire the hearer with a
book of words” ( 1.1.306-7). The term “book,” however, must refer, at least initially, to
the spoken word in Claudio’s case, for it is his speech, not his writing, that reflects his
altered disposition, as Benedick attests: “he was wont to speak plain and to the purpose
(like an honest man and a soldier), and now is he turn’d ortography — his words are a
very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes” (2.3.18-21). Not until after the
broken wedding ceremony do we actually see Claudio write. What he produces may not
exactly constitute a love poern (he believes Hero dead), but it is the closest he ever
comes to composing one. At her tomb he reads aloud what he has written:
This is much shorter than the poems we find in Love 's Labor's Lost, and we are grateful
for that. However moving the ceremony of atonement may be in production, the poem
itself is aesthetically disappointing: the combination of unimaginative rhyme and sing
song rhythm makes it seem rather pat. This itself constitutes an indictment of Claudio:
his ability to rhyme so readily while Benedick struggles suggests a certain glibness on
the part of a man who so recently and cruelly accused Hero.22 By this incident the value
of the written word is questioned in a way it never is in Love's Labor's Lost.
The status of the written word in Much Ado — important but largely invisible ex
cept for Claudio’s funerary inscription — is epitomized in the last scene, when Beatrice
and Benedick seem on the verge of slipping back to their old ways, letting banter usurp
the place of true feelings. At that point their friends produce sonnets by each of them.
Claudio says of Benedick, “I’ll be sworn upon’t that he loves her, / For here’s a paper
written in his hand, / A halting sonnet of his own pure brain, / Fashion’d to Beatrice”
(5.4.85-88). Similarly, Hero says of her friend, “And here’s another / Writ in my
cousin’s hand, stol’n from her pocket, / Containing her affection unto Benedick” (11. 88-
90). The effect of the letters (i.e., poems) is immediate and salutary. Benedick cries, “A
miracle! here’s our own hands against our hearts” (11. 91-92). This moment bears a
close resemblance to the eavesdropping scene of Love’s Labor’s Lost, for in both plays
the missives prompt a public acknowledgment of the writers’ love. In keeping with the
dramaturgy of Much Ado, however, the sonnets of Beatrice and Benedick are not read
aloud. They exist only as pieces of paper, theatrical properties without a text.
**
When he says this, Berowne’s letter to Rosaline has just been (mis)delivered. In re
questing a book, he apparently means a Bible so that he might swear an oath. This is,
138 F R E D E R IC K K IE F E R
of course, not the oath sworn in the play’s opening scene, when Navarre’s academy
beckoned. The failure of that original enterprise is anticipated even before the courtiers’
signatures are dry, for in that first scene of the play Don Armado’s letter about Jaque-
netta’s dalliance with Costard is delivered and read aloud by Navarre.
Near the end of the eavesdropping scene, Berowne makes explicit his abandonment
of books for another kind of reading. Having been revealed as a lover by his misdirected
letter, he turns from the actual words he has written and frames this metaphor:
Berowne sees in his beloved nothing less than the source of true wisdom. Writing, he
contends, originates in feelings, which, in turn, have their origin in the eyes of a woman.
Those eyes are the figurative books that need to be read, not the literal books that the
men had pledged themselves to read in the play’s first scene. The figurative has replaced
the literal.
In keeping with the recognition that literal must give way to figurative reading,
literal writing must be replaced as well. Berowne, the most articulate of the lovers, for
swears the artful expression of love:
When we hear this repudiation of extravagant language, we recall the judgment of the
princess when she refers to “Navarre and his book-men” (2.1.227). Without an acknowl
edgment of “maggot ostentation,” Berowne and his fellows might indulge a penchant
for the hyperbolic expression characterizing Nathaniel and Holofernes, who are also
termed (by Dull) “book-men” (4.2.34). Thanks to the inspiration of their women, the
courtiers know better than to emulate the model that Nathaniel proposes when he criti
cizes Dull: “he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; / He hath not eat
paper, as it were, he hath not drunk ink” (4.2.24-26). Love letters, like books, are to be
put aside in favor of something less literary.
If Much Ado makes much less use of the love letter as prop, its use of writing as
figurative language remains important. We observe the connection between the literal
and the figurative most clearly in the actions of the Friar following the broken wedding
ceremony. There he directs that, after Hero has been secreted away, her tomb be deco
rated with epitaphs:
The nature of the Friar’s request has puzzled contemporary Shakespeareans, who are
not entirely satisfied by the Friar ’s explanation : namely, he means to allow for Claudio ’s
change of heart and to “quench the wonder of her infamy” (1. 239). Shakespeareans
account for the Friar’s injunction and Claudio’s behavior variously. David Cook sug
gests that Claudio’s penance and the abruptness with which he revises his opinion of
Hero “must be seen as part of Shakespeare’s consistent stylization of his role.”23 Laurie
Osborne proposes, “The Friar’s dramatic play unites the impulse to complicate the
situation and the desire to resolve Hero’s dilemma, as he asserts that obstacles are nec
essary to promote her marriage, delay is necessary to effect union.”24 Anthony Dawson
23 David Cook, “ T he Very Temple of Delight’: The Twin Plots of ‘Much Ado about
Nothing,’ ” in Poetry and Drama, 1570-1700: Essays in Honour o f Harold F. Brooks, ed. An
tony Coleman and Antony Hammond (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), 45.
24 Laurie E. Osborne, “Dramatic Play in Much Ado about Nothing-. Wedding in Italian No
vella and English Comedy,” Philological Quarterly 69 (Spring 1990): 183.
140 F R E D E R IC K K IE F E R
suggests that the nature of the mistake Claudio makes in the wedding scene must be rec
tified. That is, he has failed to read and interpret aright the evidence before his eyes.
Hero’s blushing signifies, of course, not culpability but embarrassment at her public
humiliation: “Hero’s appearance and behavior are textualized, raised to the level of a
sign, and interpreted. Claudio’s is the subtlest reading, but also the most naive. He sees
the sign as disconnected from its proper referent, as an appearance only.”25 Ignorant of
the context necessary for accurate interpretation, Claudio misreads what he sees: “Deny
ing the accepted relation between signifier and signified, he reinterprets the sign,
investing it with new semiotic value, as proof of his contention that ‘she knows the heat
of a luxurious bed.’ He is, we might say, redefining the language of the blush.”26 Before
he can be worthy of Hero, Claudio must learn to see all over again.
We have something to learn from all of these interpretations. In view of the sig
nificance of writing and reading for Much Ado, however, another suggestion may be
proposed: that the form of the Friar’s injunction is in keeping with his priestly role. By
profession he is closely connected with the written word and disposed to esteem it. In
fact, he specifically cites his association with books when he comes to Hero’s defense:
When he refers to the “tenure of my book,” he may well have in hand a book — the one
used in the marriage service. But here, presumably, he is speaking metaphorically rather
than literally. His affinity with the written word leads him to express confidence in
Hero’s chastity by means of this particular language.
Even more important, the Friar’s direction to Claudio likely owes something to the
form that the denunciation of Hero takes. Claudio repudiates her with this metaphor:
“Out on thee seeming! I will write against it” (4.1.56). Leonato, accepting the calumny
as true, asks, “could she here deny / The story that is printed in her blood?” (4.1.121—
22). And he expresses his opinion of his daughter in language drawn from the realm of
writing and printing: “O she is fall’n / Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops
too few to wash her clean again” (11.139-41). The language of denunciation — “write,”
“printed,” “ink” — precedes and in some sense generates the form of penance dictated
25 Anthony B. Dawson, “Much Ado About Signifying,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-
1900 22 (Spring 1982): 219.
26 Dawson, “Much Ado,” 220.
Poems as Props 141
by the Friar, for the written word in its literal form is required to undo what the written
word in its figurative form has done: the figurative writing of slander must be replaced
by the literal writing of love.
Whatever the emphases of these two plays in dramatizing reading and writing, both
comedies are alike in binding fast the literal and the figurative, plot and metaphor, and
this coupling would characterize Shakespeare’s stage practice for the rest of his career.
But as the trajectory from Love’s Labor’s Lost to Much Ado About Nothing suggests,
there would be little onstage reading and writing about love in the later comedies.27 In
Pericles Thaisa may write a letter to her father, indicating her decision to take Pericles
as a husband, but we never hear the text of that letter, and Pericles himself never writes
to Thaisa. In Cymbeline Posthumus may tell Imogen to write to him in Rome and Jac-
himo offers to deliver a letter to her husband, but we never hear the contents of any such
letter; and although she receives a letter from Posthumus, the words that she reads aloud
have nothing to do with love, only with Jachimo’s character; another letter that she later
receives from Posthumus contains not an expression of affection but an indictment of
her behavior. In The Winter’s Tale the oracle of Apollo may be read aloud, but neither
of the lovers, Florizel or Perdita, ever puts pen to paper. In The Tempest Prospero may
recount his love of books and their utility in preserving himself and his daughter, but
Miranda herself seems innocent of letters, and the man she will marry never expresses
his affection in writing. In all of these late comedies the written profession of love, so
important at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career, has virtually disappeared.
27 For an excellent treatment of the written word in the late comedies, see David M. Ber
geron, “Treacherous Reading and Writing in Shakespeare’s Romances,” in Reading and Writing
in Shakespeare, ed. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated Uni
versity Presses, 1996), 160-77.
The Masque as Book
LAUREN SHOHET
A London in 1660, a masque entitled The Subjects Joy for the Kings Restoration,
Cheerfully Made Known in a Sacred Masque already was in print as Charles
landed at Dover.1The cultural logic of welcoming the king with a masque is clear: as
the Restoration heals the breach in continuity of Stuart rule, Charles should be cele
brated in the same genre used so famously for festive occasions of state by his parents
and grandparents. The masques of Charles’s forebears — the elaborate emblematic en
tertainments produced at the courts of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, of James I
and Queen Anna, to introduce evenings of festive dancing — have been the focus of
much discussion in recent decades, with historians and literary critics alike exploring
masque performances as central articulations of Stuart culture. Some scholars have
emphasized masque’s efficacy as an instrument of absolutist monarchy; others have
understood masques more as “tools of cultural and political negotiation’’ available to a
range of (elite) voices engaged in political dialogue.2 Shared by almost all masque
1 Anthony Sadler, The Subjects Joy (London, 1660). Sadler, whom Dale Randall calls a
“rambling-headed divine,” was the author of sundry eclectic texts. See Randall, Winter Fruit:
English Drama 1642-1660 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 369.
Research for this essay was undertaken with the support of fellowships from the Folger
Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library; I am most grateful for both the financial support
and the willingly shared expertise of both libraries’ staff.
2 James Knowles, “The ‘Running Masque’ Recovered: A Masque for the Marquess of
144 LAUREN SHOHET
Buckingham (c. 1619-20), English Manuscript Studies 8 (2000): 79-135, 79. For an absolutist
view of masque, see especially Jonathan Goldberg, James la n d the Politics o f Literature (Balti
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Stephen Orgel, The Illusion o f Power: Political
Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Graham
Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: the Culture o f the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (New York: St. Mar
tin’s Press, 1981). Martin Butler summarizes masque’s usefulness for New Historicist inquiry,
which tends to emphasize masque’s absolutist ideology, by noting that masque offers “works of
art in which spectacle most emphatically became a tool of state. .. symptomatic of the ineluctable
magnetism by which kingly absolutism pulled its age’s representational forms into its own orbit.”
“Courtly Negotiations,” in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds., The Politics o f the Stuart
Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20-40, 21. For a less absolutist
— but still firmly aristocratic — view of masque’s functions, see especially Martin Butler,
Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Kevin Sharpe,
Criticism and Compliment: the Politics o f Literature in the England o f Charles I (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Knowles, whose work has elucidated many aspects of
masque’s life beyond the purview of court.
3 The major exception here would be Jonson scholars’ interest in Jonsonian texts as projects
that advance a model of authorial presence. In a way, this work also emphasizes “performance,”
although here the sense is metaphorical, by focusing on production instead of reception. See
especially Joseph Loewenstein, “Printing and the ‘Multitudinous Presse’: The Contentious Texts
of Jonson’s Masques,” in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen
(Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991, 168-91); Loewenstein’s “The Script in the
Marketplace,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1988,265-78); and Stephen Orgel, “Marginal Jonson,” in Bevington
and Holbrook, Stuart Court Masque, 144-75.
4 Sadler, The Subjects Joy, B.
5 Sadler, The Subjects Joy, 39.
The Masque as Book 145
Moses, Psyche’s presenting the king with this text about rebellion formally mimics the
writers and publishers of pamphlets, petitions, and broadsides so active since the 1640s.
Moreover, when, in anticipation rather than recollection of historical fact (or perhaps
in violation of it), the masque text represents Psyche having interacted with the “king”
— a king in text only, upon seventeen May; a king granted authority by the masque
rather than granting authority to it; a king feted by a masque spontaneously offered
without royal commission or control — we see masque mediating complex relationships
among monarchs and subjects, among producers and receivers, in ways more char
acteristic of print culture than of our customary, performance-based notions of masque
as a form wherein “the mysterious powers of kingship” manifest their glory to docile
spectators.6
This emphasis on masque as a print form initially might seem specific to the Res
toration context of The Subjects Joy. But many masques enjoyed robust lives as print
artifacts from the beginning of the seventeenth century.7Masque criticism has not fully
acknowledged masque’s presence as a bi-medial form, its dramatic occasions consis
tently delivered into print. Court masque lived a double life: an elite, private, densely
emblematic performance form, saturated with insider knowledge — but one that was
conveyed regularly into a nascent print public sphere. Indeed, print could supplant per
formance: King James canceled the 1624 court performance of the controversial
Neptune's Triumph (inflected by coded disagreement about Spanish policy), but the
masque was published in quarto nonetheless. Its circulation — with or without the bless
ing of its patrons — is confirmed by its listing in bookseller Edward Archer’s catalogue
in 1656.8 This example demonstrates how considering masque uniquely as a perfor
mance form leaves the genre too firmly in the grasp of producers. Martin Butler argues
that Neptune's “colliding priorities” were resolved “in the most absolute way imagina
ble: James simply refused to allow the masque to be performed.”9But remembering that
many masques circulated as material texts allows us to consider masque more broadly:
in this instance, how the publication of Neptune's Triumph brought Spanish policy
debate into the sphere of print even as the king denied it courtly rehearsal.
6 Graham Parry, “Entertainments at Court,” in John Cox and David Kastan, eds., A New
History o f Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 195-212, 202.
7 For a discussion of printing even earlier, Elizabethan, pageants, see Wendy Wall, The
Imprint o f Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY : Cornell
University Press, 1993).
8 Neptune ’s Triumph is one of the masques that has been assumed to have been printed pri
vately, for limited distribution to its primary audience, rather than for sale to the public. However,
as discussed below, these assumptions may be unfounded; moreover, even if it was not intended
for public sale, copies made their way into commercial circulation.
9 Butler, “Courtly Negotiations,” 35,36. Neptune ’s Triumph was, according to its title page,
“celebrated in a masque, at the Court, on the Twelfth night [January 6], 1623/[4].”
146 LAUREN SHOHET
Considering masque’s textual life can provide a useful counterweight to our per
formance-based discussions of masque. Not only can a history of masque publication
illuminate the bibliographic aspects of the genre that we often ignore entirely, such a
history also can draw our attention to questions about masque reception in ways that po
tentially inflect our understanding of masque performance as well (since the latter has
admitted little consideration of receivers).10 Drawing masque into our inquiries about
early modern reading can be mutually useful for both masque scholarship and the
history of the book. Evidence that masque circulated through a variety of distribution
networks yields an intriguing picture of events we have thought of as exclusively
aristocratic being disseminated to a wider, more public audience. Indeed, masque’s
overlay of performance, insider gossip about performance, public gossip about perform
ance, manuscript circulation, and print circulation offers an ideal place to heed Roger
Chartier’s call for book history to “question the long-recognized contrast between the
10 One exceptional instance where masque texts have been quite thoroughly studied is the
Gypsies Metamorphosed. This was scripted by Jonson in 1621, was offered to King James in a
series of performances at different venues, and exists in an unusually large number and variety
of manuscript copies. The fact that W.W. Greg’s and Dale Randall’s books on this phenomenon
are mostly cited by bibliographic scholars, and have not been greatly visible in our studies of
masque, demonstrates modern masque scholarship’s emphasis on performance, and the need for
intersecting study of masque and the history of material texts. See Greg, The Masque o f Gipsies:
in the Burley, Belvoir, and Windsor Versions. An Attempt at Reconstruction (London: Oxford
University Press, 1952), and Randall, Jonson's Gypsies Unmasked: Background and Theme o f
The gypsies metamorphos’d (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975).
Jerzy Limon, in The Masque o f Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1990), does attend to material masque, but by way of postulating a distinction between “literary
masque” and “masque-in-performance” that limits masque’s possibilities to producers’ intentions.
Furthermore, Limon’s argument rests upon some questionable assumptions. For example, Limon
follows Herford and Simpson’s taking any entry in the Stationers’ Register that predates perform
ance to signal souvenir printing. There is indeed good evidence that texts often were distributed
at performances, but not that this was the unique use to which such a printing was put; it is dif
ficult, for instance, to see why imprint information would be offered, or licensing undertaken, if
not to advance the commercial ends of directing purchasers to the booksellers or protecting
publishers’ rights. Furthermore, Limon claims that any masque giving its stage directions in the
present tense is provided only for participants and audience members, with accounts of masque
intended for publication serving only as records of a singular event that has already happened,
indicated by past verb tenses. This over-reading of tense as evidence is shaky for several reasons.
First, some masques were presented many times, in different relationship to issue date. Second,
the different self-presentations of scriptors like Jonson, Daniel, and Campion suggest that we
should read their tenses quite differently. The abstraction of the present tense may signal quite
different things for Jonson-the-King’s-Servant and for Daniel-beloved-of-poetry-readers. Finally,
texts may not have been produced for such a segmented market at these notions assume.
The Masque as Book 147
completely oral and gestural forms ... and the circulation of writing.”11 The import of
multiple reading frames for masque emerges still more fully when we consider that
court masques often encoded information about political policy du jour — and this in
the decades before the distribution of political news became legal.12Furthermore, inso
far as seventeenth-century masque reading encompasses literary, journalistic, and other
readerly modes of reception at a moment of tumultuous historical change, investigating
material masque can help us consider the relationship between modes of reading and
historical change. This full project lies, of course, beyond the scope of the present essay.
Here, my concern is to present evidence about masque printing, circulation, and reading
in an effort to establish the importance of masque as material text. Although a thorough
sense of masque’s functions in seventeenth-century culture will demand coordinated
consideration of masques and pageants, of court and non-court masques, and particu
larly of masques from before and after 1642, I focus here on Jacobean and Caroline
masques, 1603-40, because taking this as a starting point opens up particularly useful
perspectives for exploring the picture of masque that emerges when we think about
masque’s readers and readings, in the years that saw simultaneous assertions of abso
lutist monarchal theory (whose relationship to masque has been well studied) and devel
oping articulations of public politics (whose relationship to masque has not).13
11 Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Ber
keley: University of California Press, 1989), 154-175, 170.
12 Public discussion of matters of state was statutorily prohibited in Stuart England, although
these laws were circumvented in various ways. On early “news,” see especially David Zaret,
Origins o f Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern
England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Richard Cust, “News and Politics in Early
Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 112 (August 1986): 60-90; F. J. Levy, “How
Information Spread among the Gentry, 1550-1640, Journal o f British Studies 22 (1982): 20-24;
and Joad Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Cass,
1999). On relationships between early news and contemporary drama, see especially F. J. Levy,
“Staging the News,” in Print, Manuscript, & Performance, ed. Arthur Marotti and Michael Bris
tol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 252-78 and Stuart Sherman, “Eyes and Ears,
News and Plays: The Argument of Ben Jonson’s Staple,” in The Politics o f Information in Early
Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron (London: Routledge, 2001), 23-40.
13 The nature and extent of civil society or a public sphere in seventeenth-century Britain
is much contested, although it is clear that major changes occur between 1603 and 1660. See
especially Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992);
Brendan Dooley, “News and Doubt in Early Modern Culture; or, Are We Having a Public Sphere
Yet?”, in Dooley and Baron, Politics o f Information, 275-90; and Zaret, Origins o f Democratic
Culture.
148 LAUREN SHOHET
à*
From the earliest years of James’s reign, masque texts circulated both within the
court community and more widely. Throughout the Jacobean era, epistles from court
enclosed masque texts for their recipients to read, or alluded to the coming publication
of these texts. Courtier Dudley Carleton’s letter to John Chamberlain about Queen
Anna’s second masque of her English reign, the Twelfth-Night 1605 Mask o f Blackness,
declines to describe the device in detail because “there is a pamphlet in press which will
save me that pains.”14Edward iSherburn enclosed a text of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue
with a letter to Carleton in 1618; Sherburn writes, “The Maske which was had on
twelvth night wherein the Prince was one your Lordship will perceive the conceipt by
perusing this little book.”15Although Nathaniel Brent declined to send Carleton the text
of For the Honour o f Wales (a new version of Pleasure, also 1618), his remarks indicate
that he could well have done so: “The princes masque was shewed againe at Court on
Tuesday night with som few additions ... without deserving so great honour as to be
sent to your Lordship.”16 Epistolary circulation of masque texts also was undertaken
outside the court: immediately after the first performance of The Triumph o f Peace in
1634, Inns-of-Court gentleman Thomas Coke sent a copy to his father in the provinces,
writing “I Have sent you a booke of our Masque which was presented on munday last
with much applause and commendation.”17
Masque texts, then, were among the information reported among the networks of
interested readers who consumed the court gossip, political information, and opinions
that in the Stuart era were just becoming something we might recognize as “news.” As
panegyric, court masques might not at first glance seem promising sources for the novel
political content whence “news” derives its name. But examining court masques in con
junction with questions about the history of reading suggests that the traditional critical
sense of court masque as straightforward propaganda may be oversimplified. Most
broadly, recalling that masques have readers (in the literal sense for textual encounters,
in the figurative sense for both textual and theatrical iterations) reminds us that inter
pretive encounters are complex negotiations among producers, artifacts, and receivers.
As Hans Robert Jauss remarks, “In the triangle of author, work, and public the last is no
passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but rather itself an energy formative of his
tory.”18 As well trained humanist readers, the courtly and gentlemanly recipients of
14 Letter to Chamberlain 7 January 1605, State Papers o f the Reign o f James I (hereafter
“SP”), 14/12.
15 SP 14/95.
16 Letter to Carleton 21 February 1618 (SP 14/96).
17 Historical Manuscripts Collection 12, Appendix II, part 2, p. 34, quoted in Trois Masques
à la cour de Charles 1er d ’Angleterre, intro., trans., and commentary by Murray Lefkowitz
(Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1970), 39.
18 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics o f Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1982), 19.
The Masque as Book 149
circulating masque texts were well positioned to observe the propagandístic elements
of court masque with a critical eye, rather than necessarily merely acquiescing to lauda
tory proclamations. With the critical distance such training offers, receivers can evaluate
representations, cross-read different moments within a piece, look for gaps and silences,
watch masques thematizing their own functions. For instance, when Ben Jonson’s 1608
Masque ofBeautie features a moving “Island floting on a calme water,” then closes with
the benediction .. let your state, the while, / Be fixed as the Isle,” the potential (if
likely unintended) irony of “the Isle” referring either to Britain, or to the clearly unfixed
“Isle” of the masque scene, can be just as available to contemporary receivers as it is to
us.19Even the most ideologically motivated of absolutist masque spectacles, that is, con
tain more information of potential political interest when we acknowledge that receivers
may reflect upon the ideological performance, rather than be assumed to be merely sub
ject to it.20
A second strand of court masque’s significance to an emergent reading public is ob
servable in masques that are explicitly edgier than the Masque ofBeautie. The 1616
Golden Age Restored (Jonson), for example, refracts political changes at court. The
masque depicts a Golden Age of virtue supplanting an Iron Age of vice at just the mo
ment that King James’s erstwhile favorite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, was impris
oned on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. As Martin Butler and David Lindley
have illuminated, The Golden Age Restored topically reflects upon the question of the
king’s intentions regarding Carr’s trial. By celebrating the decline of an “Iron Age” that
“distinctly registers the concatenation of crimes of which Somerset stood accused,”
Butler and Lindley argue the masque signals the king’s intention to let the current crim
inal investigation run its course (or, in Butler and Lindley’s argument, Jonson’s hope
that James had so decided).21 Considering masque’s textual life shows how such vexed
and indeed newsworthy issues as factional reorganization at court or the king’s rela
tionship to the judiciary can reach readers outside the court as well. Rumor and specu
lation ran wild about nearly every aspect of the Somerset case — but the only repre
sentation of the king’s own position available in print was the Golden Age text sold in
1616 as part of Jonson’s Works. Interested parties with access to the London-based trade
in illegal manuscript could and did purchase copies of Chief Justice Edward Coke’s
speech to Parliament that sought to elicit James’s assent to the legal proceedings — but
the sole source of legal print representations of the king’s position (purchasable by all,
19 The Complete Works o f Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson. 11 vols. (Oxford: Clar
endon Press, 1925-52), VII: 186; 194.
20 For a more complete discussion of the critical elision of reception from masque studies,
see my “Interpreting The Irish Masque at Court and in Print,” Journal fo r Early Modern Cultural
Studies 1, 2 (Fall/Winter 2001): 42-65.
21 Butler and Lindley, “Restoring Astraea: Jonson’s Masque for the Fall of Somerset,” ELH
61:4 (Winter 1994): 807-27, 816.
150 LAUREN SHOHET
ents; they preside over songs and dances offered to their own “parents,” Jove and
Themis (King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria).26 Glancing at the dynastic masques
often performed for weddings, which present geneology more literally (recall how
Milton’s Ludlow masque concludes with the presentation of the Lady and her brothers
to the Earl and Countess of Bridgewater: “Heer behold so goodly grown / Three fair
branches of your own”), the Triumph o f Peace metaphorizes geneology to make the
lawyers the grandchildren of the monarchs, who in turn are complimented, perhaps
coercively, as the source of lav/ and justice.27 On one level, then, the masque plumbs the
relationships between law and state that become increasingly pressing throughout the
1630s and 1640s. To the gentry, invested in the relationship between the legal profes
sion and the monarchy, the broad publication of this masque would disseminate state
ments of something like “public” interest.
Moreover, this masque also more specifically engages one immediate issue touch
ing upon monarchs and lawyers — this one more particularly touching the Inns of Court
and the urban community more generally — the prosecution of lawyer William Prynne,
whom the monarchs took to have criticized the queen’s court theatricals in his treatise
Histrio-Mastix. One of the masque producers, Bulstrode Whitelock, wrote that the Inns
undertook Triumph o f Peace to “manifest the difference of their opinion, from Mr.
Prynne's new learning, and serve to confute his Histrio-Mastix against interludes.”28
Broadening the masque’s commentary on issues of public interest yet further, the ex
pansive antimasques feature a variety of London figures, balancing the masque-proper
discourse of law and state with antimasque discourse of middling-sort goods, services,
and conditions of life. One antimasque features London craftsmen who explain that they
have constructed the scenery and costumes for the masque spectacle itself: displaying,
that is, how the masque spectacle of ethereal harmony depends upon materials and
goods they have provided. In another antimasque, tradesmen parade novel (if parod-
ically presented) inventions for improving productivity. Whitelock took this antimasque
as a commentary on recent Crown actions regarding commercial monopolies, writing
that “by [the Antimasque of inventors], an information was covertly given to the King
of the unfitness and ridiculousness of these projects against the law.”29 Yet another
antimasque speaks to another topical issue of broad interest: the widely flouted, but
recently reaffirmed, prohibition of gentry residing in London. As Lawrence Venuti has
demonstrated, the antimasque of Opinion and Fancy parody precisely the behaviors
26 The estimate of 3000 copies is G. E. Bentley’s. See The Jacobean and Caroline Stage,
7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-68), VII: 1162.
27 The Complete Poetry o f John Milton, 2nded., ed. JohnT. Shawcross (New York: Anchor,
1971), 11.968-969.
28 Trois Masques, 30.
29 Trois Masques. Whitelock claims that encoded critique was the intention of Attorney
General Loy; Orgel and Strong are less certain that this attribution is accurate. See Inigo Jones:
The Theatre o f the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 1:64-65.
152 LAUREN SHOHET
recently cited by the Crown as consequences of gentry forsaking their country obliga
tions for urban pleasures.30 These examples of ways the masque provides legible, if
encoded, information of public interest, in a very wide-selling format, show how print
masque can enter into something resembling news dissemination — and in ways that,
by their very encoding, demand critical reading.
à*
Given masque’s finger on the pulse of cultural and political changes at court, and
its potential to represent courtly negotiations in potentially nuanced ways to a reading
and gossiping public, the tendency to consider the long-known publication record of
court masques of solely esoteric interest seems misguided. Early masque scriptors re
mark the consistent market for print versions of masques from court — a readerly
appetite that should be of interest not only to bibliographers, but also to students of the
history of reading and the emergence of public opinion. Masque scriptor Samuel Daniel
writes in the reader’s preface to the 1610 Tethys’ Festival (produced by Queen Anna,
for Henry’s accession as Prince of Wales), “it is expected (according now to the cus
ióme) that I, being imployed in the busines, should publish a description and forme of
the late Maske.”31 Daniel’s phrase “according now to the custome” confirms that
masque publication was expected, and indeed suggests that we should continue looking
for more published Jacobean-era masques than we have yet found. Similarly, masque
scriptor Thomas Campion claims a market demand for masque texts to be made availa
ble: his preface to the Lords’ Masque (for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding festivities in
1613-14) asserts that “I have now taken occasion to satisfie many who long since were
desirous that the Lords maske should be published.”32Campion’s claim that an audience
has “long since” desired masque publication (like Daniel ’s invocation of the “late Maske”)
reveals that masque texts were not consumed only simultaneously with performance.
The following table offers a minimal sketch of masque publication 1603-1640; for
reasons detailed below, masque publication probably substantially exceeded these
instances.
30 Venuti, “The Politics of Allusion: The Gentry and Shirley’s The Triumph o f Peace,” ELR
16:1 (Winter 1986): 182-205.
31 Daniel, Complete Works in Verse and Prose, ed. A. Grosart, 5 vols. (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1963), 11:305.
32 The Works o f Thomas Campion: Complete Songs, Masques, and Treatises with a Selec
tion o f the Latin Verse, ed. Walter R. Davis (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967), 249.
The Masque as Book 153
Although this chart offers a minimal starting point, issues of medium (print versus
manuscript), durability, and licensing practice complicate the investigation of material
masque. Indeed, it is worth laying out some of the difficulties in recovering the record
for masque books because in many ways they offer a usefully unexceptional object of
study. Precisely because many were small and inexpensive, because they were not con
sidered weighty or significant enough to catalogue or annotate, because they bridged
elite and popular audiences, masques are paradigmatic of the invisible majority of early
modern books. The evanescence of the material record, and the subtlety of the evidence
it can present, is suggested by Dudley Carleton’s implication cited above that the forth
coming text of Blackness will be a print artifact: “a pamphlet in press.” No 1605 print
text of Blackness survives. Carleton may have simply been mistaken; other possible
ways to account for this provide a useful window into several characteristics of masque
printing, and indeed the printing of “ephemera” in general. Establishing publication his
tory from surviving libraries, or catalogues of dispersed or lost collections, is difficult.
Printed masques were short books, usually small quartos, and many were printed on
lower-quality paper (although others were not). Early modern purchasers of small books
often left them unbound so that their paper might be recycled for household use, or
purchasers might bind them together with other miscellaneous small works that rendered
them unlikely to be catalogued in ways we can decipher. Dramatic genre can exacerbate
this problem: in seventeenth-century libraries, small books generally, but perhaps small
dramatic texts in particular, often were considered ephemera and not catalogued.33
Hl·
33 E. S. Leedham-Green writes that many early-modern libraries had more light literature
(the category that would include drama) than they catalogue; see Books in Cambridge Invento
ries: Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart
Periods, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1986), I:xiii. Heidi Brayman Hackel cautions that
“the absence of a title from an inventory . . . does not necessarily indicate the absence of a book
from a collection” (“ ‘Rowme’ of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries,” in Cox and Kastan,
History o f Early English Drama, 113-30, 125). On ephemera, see also Margaret Spufford, Small
Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Sevententh Century Eng
land (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982).
The Masque as Book 155
34 Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce o f Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-
Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
35 Greg, “Entrance, License, and Publication,” The Library, 4th ser., 25 (1944-45): 1-22;
Kirschbaum, Shakespeare and the Stationers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1955). See
also Maureen Bell, “Entrance in the Stationers’ Register,” The Library, 6th ser., 16 (1994):
50-54.
36 Peter Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in Cox and Kastan, History o f Early
English Drama, 383-422, 397.
156 LAUREN SHOHET
commissioned pieces, court masques may well have been taken to implicitly enjoy such
status. These difficulties in recovering the material record for masque publication, then,
suggest that we take the information we can establish as the lower limit of what was, in
all likelihood, a more extended practice.
Both complaints of piracy and brisk successions of reprints for certain masques
indicate a lively commercial interest in the genre. Queen Anna’s 1604 Christmas
masque, the Vision o f the Twelve Goddesses, was published twice that year: an unauth
orized quarto from Edward Alide, and an octavo from Simon Waterson. In the latter,
Daniel writes that
Daniel wonderfully betrays here the tensions between a vision of masque as private,
aristocratic form (“divulged” through “indiscretion” and “presumption”) and a model
of masque as public, print genre — which deserves promulgation by a reliable source
(Daniel), and which is moreover already public knowledge (“as the world wel knows.”)
Extending the irony, Daniel’s exercise in public enlightenment comes in his dedication
of the print text to a major aristocratic patron: Lucy, Countess of Bedford.
Masques were not competition-worthy properties only when they were new, but
rather retained commercial potential over time. Twenty years after the performances of
The Gipsies Metamorphosed, in 1640, its print text came out not only in the second
Folio of Jonson’s Works, but also in a variant, duodecimo version from John Benson.
The jockeying for rights to the previously unpublished masques in Jonson’s 1640 Works
confirms commercial interest in masque rights.38
often as quartos. Others are issued as parts of booklets printing together several aspects
of one event: Tethys ’ Festival, for example, was printed in The order and solemnities
o f the creation o f Prince Henrie, Prince o f Wales, Whereunto is annexed the Royal
Maske (published by William Stansby, in two editions during 1610), which also gives
an account of Henry’s investiture ceremony and the civic pageant London ’s Love to the
Royal Prince Henry. Other masques are issued as part of anthologies containing other
works by the same scriptor: Samuel Daniel’s Certaine Small Workes (1607 and 1611)
contained the masque Vision o f the Twelve Goddesses ( 1604); Beaumont and Fletcher’s
Comedies and Tragedies (1647) includes the Mask o f the Inner Temple and Gray ’s Inn
(1613, with two quarto editions that same year); and of course Ben Jonson’s Works
(1616 and 1640) contain most of his masques. The inclusion of masques among other
poetic or dramatic works raises further questions about both reader demand and about
implied models of genre and oeuvre41 When masque reprints are included among col
lections, we cannot know how much demand was excited by the masques themselves.
But their inclusion is certainly notable; for example, Daniel’s Certaine Small Works
( 1607 and 1611) does not aim for completeness, and hence the inclusion of Twelve God
desses bears remark. Moreover, as James Knowles has shown, given masques certainly
can be excluded from “Collected Works” that give an appearance of comprehensive
ness, as when Jonson left two early Cecil masques (the Burse entertainment and the
Salisbury House masque) out of the 1616 Works42 Thus, conversely, inclusion is also
noteworthy. The variety of these formats, these scriptors, and the readers they imply all
adduce further evidence that masque publication and masque reading cannot be ac
counted for by a single, simple model of reception.
**
41 For instance, what, if anything, should we make of some masques’ inclusion among
poetic works (such as Shirley’s 1646 Poems &c., which includes the 1634 Triumph o f Peace) and
others among dramatic (such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies)? Marketing
probably accounts for some of this: the kinds of works for which a given writer is known, and the
somewhat different market connotations of the more culturally privileged genre of poetry versus
“ephemeral” drama. Francis Johnson notes that “poetical works by well-known authors seem
definitely to have sold at prices above the average.” “Notes on English Retail Book-prices, 1550-
1640,” The Library, 5th series, 5:2 (Sept. 1950): 83-112, 91. Investigating this would require
locating each scriptor’s self-positioning in the realm of letters; Daniel, for example, appearing
invested in thinking of himself as a poet.
42 James Knowles, “ ‘To raise a house of better frame’: Jonson’s Cecilian Entertainments,”
in Patronage Culture and Power: The Early Cecils, 1558-1612, ed. Pauline Croft (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002), 181-98.
The Masque as Book 159
An important feature of this list (one shared by other booksellers’ catalogues, such as
Francis Kirkman’s 1661 and 1671 lists) is the listing of individual Jonson masques that
we do not know to have had separate quarto issue. This includes both masques per
formed before prior to publication of the 1616 Works (for instance, the 1611 Oberon or,
in Kirkman, the 1613 Irish Masque) and masques performed between the 1616 and
1640 editions of the Works (for example, the 1617 Vision o f Delight, the 1621 Masque
o f Gypsies, or, in Kirkman, the 1624 Mask o f Owls). This reminds us that books were
generally sold unbound; extant partial and out-of-order bindings of the Works show that
some purchasers bought portions of the book at a time, sometimes binding them irregu
larly, and presumably sometimes not binding them — or ever completing their purchase
— at all.48 Whether separate listings for these masques indicate that purchasers con
tinued to acquire portions of the Works into the second half of the century, or whether
particular masques were taken as sufficiently desirable to excite buyers’ interest in the
complete collection, their separate listings clearly indicate that a purchasing, reading
public was understood to be interested in individual court masques. Individual masques
were not encountered merely as a by-product of reading the Works. Similarly indicating
interest in individual masques are listings in William London’s 1658 catalogue that
specify the inclusion of masques among mixed-genre works.
If booksellers’ data allows us to deduce some information about the market for
masques, other (unfortunately rather scattered) sources help fill in a bit more informa
tion about who owned printed masque texts. Humphrey Dyson’s records of his book
purchases between 1610 and 1630 are one useful resource, both because they itemize
books collected by one bibliophile, and because his recording of their prices gives some
sense of these texts’ affordability. Francis Johnson’s study of book prices indicates that
“In the early seventeenth century, masques usually sold at 3d., even though they con
sisted of no more than two sheets. Longer masques, requiring three or more sheets for
their printing, were usually sold at 4nf.”49 Dyson’s least expensive purchases, at 2d.,
include three Jonsonian court masques; the most expensive, at 6d., include two of his
three accession accounts. (For calibration, note that a loaf of bread cost id at this
time.)50
49 Johnson, “Notes on English Retail Book-prices,” 93. Blayney challenges many of John
son’s price estimates based on Blayney’s belief that Johnson mistook wholesale for retail prices
in sellers’ price lists, but Blayney’s reservations would not be relevant to the masques Johnson
lists, because all masques Johnson examined came from the private collection of Humphrey
Dyson, with listed purchase prices.
50 Natascha Würzbach, The Rise o f the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650, trans. Gayna
Walls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
162 LAUREN SHOHET
These masque quartos appear, then, to be fairly inexpensive (averaging well under Peter
Blayney’s estimate of an average unbound-book price of 6d).
Masque texts of recoverable provenance suggest a widespread ownership for
masques.5253Sir Richard Paulet offers an example of a provincial commoner who owned
masque texts. A member of the House of Commons from Herriard Park, Hampshire,
Paulet owned Tethys’ Festival.53 Robert Burton, a London commoner (author of The
Anatomy o f Melancholy) owned a quarto copy of the 1624 Fortunate Isles. Richard
Browne, a boy actor in Cupid’s Banishment (a Deptford Ladies’ Hall masque of 1617,
attended by the queen), owned a printed text of the masque, which eventually became
part of the library of diarist John Evelyn, Browne’s son-in-law.54Evidence of academic
readers comes from the manuscript of a Cambridge miscellany now in the Folger
collection, which contains Christmas His Show; penned on the flyleaf in what appears
to be a seventeenth-century hand is “Mock-maske. For Christmas before the kinge.
1615.”55Examples of prominent aristocrats who owned masque texts include the second
Earl of Bridgewater, Thomas Edgerton (the younger brother in Milton’s Cornus, and
member of a family who danced in several court masques); his library included a quarto
of Jonson’s accession pageant, twelve of Jonson’s masques in the 1640 Works, and a
quarto of the Fortunate Isles.
Masque texts indicate their writers’ expectations that some readers will approach
the masque without prior knowledge of its performance circumstances, while other
readers will experience the masque text in conjunction with their memories of perform
ance. Campion indicates in the published account of the 1613 Entertainment at Caw-
some House (put on by Lord Knollys for Queen Anna), that “For as much as this late
Entertainment hath beene much desired in writing, both of such as were present at the
performance thereof, as also of many which are yet strangers both to the busines and
place, it shall be convenient, in this generali publication, a little to touch at the de
scription and situation of Cawsome seate.”56 Daniel’s Tethys preface “To the Reader”
similarly invokes two kinds of receivers, one reading the masque text in relationship to
recalling the performance, the other reading it without having attended: the print record
of the masque should both “preserve the memory thereof’ and “satisfy their desires,
who could have no other notice, but by others report of what was done.”57 Richard
Paulet — the Hampshire MP who bought Tethys ’ Festival in June 1610 — offers an
example of a reader using the masque to extend access to an elite event. He reports in
his diary that after taking the oath of allegiance with other Commons members on 5
June 1610, he “came to the Court, walking in the garden to see those that went into the
Mask that night.”58
à*
54 Burton inscribed the British Library quarto of Fortunate Isles; for Browne, see C. E.
McGee, ed. “Cupid’s Banishment ( 1618),” Renaissance Drama XIX (1988): 227-64.
55 Folger ms J.a.l. For discussion of this manuscript, see Malone Society Collections, voi.
XIV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
56 Works o f Thomas Campion, 235.
57 Daniel, Complete Works, 305.
58 Jervoise of Herriard Park MSS 44M69/F2/15/1, Hampshire Record Office. I thank Eric
Lindquist for this reference.
164 LAUREN SHOHET
The greate hall... received this division, and order: The upper part, where the
cloth and chaire of State were plac’d, had scaffoldes and seates on eyther side
continued to the skreene ... the right hand whereof were consorted then Musi-
tions, with Basse and Meane lutes, a Bandora, double Sackbott, and an Harpsi-
cord, with two treble Violins; on the other side somewhat neerer the skreene
were plac’t 9 Violins and three Lutes; and to answere both the Consorts (as it
were in a triangle) sixe Cornets, and sixe Chappell voyces, were seated almost
right against them, in a place raised higher in respect of the pearcing sound of
those Instruments; eighteen foote from the skreene, an other Stage was raised
higher by a yearde then that which was prepared for dancing.60
Such detail certainly can offer readers a “you were there” experience. But journalistic
recreation is not the only function such passages can serve. Campion himself implies
something perhaps more literary, indeed mock-heroic, in the copiousness of his scene
description: “As in battailes, so in all other actions that are to bee reported, the first, and
most necessary part is the discription of the place, with his opportunities, and properties,
59 Documents Relating to the Prosecution o f William Prynne in 1634 and 1637, ed. S. R.
Gardiner (London: Camden Society, 1877), 14, 16.
60 Works o f Thomas Campion, 211.
The Masque as Book 165
whether they be naturali or artificiali.”61 The relationship this creates between the pre
face’s narratorial persona and the reader is complex: shared wonder at the scale of the
event, perhaps also a bit of amusement at its epic proportions, a briskly pedagogic mo
ment — also a bit self-deprecating? — as the narrator instructs the reader in appropriate
strategy for the chronicler.
Modes of readerly response are perhaps even more multiple in Campion’s perform
ance details from the masque itself. A passage describing a glorious stage effect gone
awry has simultaneous dramatic, reportorial, and self-fashioning aspects for the auth
orial persona. At the end of the first formal dance, the text gives the sublime design
wherein the five-voice, four-player band of “Sylvans” begin the “song of transforma
tion” that will turn golden trees into masquers. As they sing,
that part of the stage whereon the first trees stoode began to yeeld, and the
three formosi trees gently to sincke, and this was effected by an Ingin plac’t
under that stage. When the trees had sunke a yarde they cleft in three parts, and
the Maskers appeared out of the tops of them; the trees were sodainly con-
vayed away, the the first three Maskers were raysed againe by the Ingin.62
Campion provides a marginal note, however: in performance the transformation was not
quite so stunning as the one he has just helped his reader imagine. Instead, “Either by
the simplicity, negligence, or conspiracy of the painter, the passing away of the trees
was somewhat hazarded; the patterne of them the same day having bene showne with
much admiration, and the 9 trees beeing left unsett together even to the same night.”63
Providing this deflating news just after the reader has visualized a wonderful trans
formation accurately chronicles the performance event, to be sure. Beyond this, it may
contribute to a sense — with which Ben Jonson would concur — of the reader’s en
counter with the performance as scripted being potentially cleaner than an audience’s
encounter with the hazards of theatrical realization. Only the reader, that is, “sees” the
effect as it was meant to be instead of as it was. Additionally, whether amused or exas
perated, Campion’s comment creates a relationship between the authorial persona and
the reader.
61 Works o f Thomas Campion, 211. Campion also might envisage a readerly audience that
overlapped with the readers of his musical treatises, who might have been interested in the acous
tical issues addressed in the staging details.
62 Works o f Thomas Campion, 221-22.
63 Works o f Thomas Campion, 222. In the quarto, this note is in the margin of C3, in italics.
Its typeface and position on the page align it with earlier notes glossing mythological emblems.
This information, that is, meets the eye in the same format as notes on, for example, Diana: “The
Moone and Queen of Virgins, as sai de to be regent & Impress of Night, and is therefore by Night
defending her quarrel for the loss of the bride, her Virgin” (B4).
166 LAUREN SHOHET
In some ways, reports dense with performance detail position the authorial persona
as gracious dispenser of aristocratic information to the hungry reader. In other ways, the
textual personae create an intimacy with the reader that can convey a solidarity of taste
and understanding in the face of messy performance problems and aristocratic dimness.
Thomas Dekker includes speeches in the Magnificent Entertainment quarto of Jacobean
accession pageantry (1604), then concedes, in an afterword to the reader, that “Reader,
you must understand, that a regard, being had that his Maiestie should not be wearied
with teadious speeches: A great part of those which are in this Booke set downe, were
left unspoken: So that thou doest here receive them as they should have bene delivered,
not as they were.”64 Similarly, Jonson records in the Hymenaei text (1606) that “this
song, of which, then, onely one staffe was sung; but because I made it both inform e,
and matter to emulate that kind of poeme, which was call’d Epithalamium . .. I have
here set it downe whole.”65 Both Dekker’s and Jonson’s readers, then, have access to an
experience that the performance audience was not privileged to enjoy.66
George Chapman’s Memorable Masque (one of the Inns of Court masques for the
1613 Palatine wedding, issued 1613 and 1614) directly addresses the reader with a
complaint not about collaborators or other hitches in the performance, but rather about
the process of book production. Breaking seamlessly into the description of the Temple
of Honour (with no material signal of discontinuity), Chapman complains of not being
given the opportunity to proof the printers’ pages:
These following should in duty haue had their proper places, after euery fitted
speech of the Actors, but being preuented by the vnexpected haste of the
Printer, which he neuer let me know, and neuer sending me a proofe, till he
had past those speeches, I had no reason to imagine hee could haue been so
forward. His fault is therefore to be supplied by the obseruation, and reference
of the Reader, who will easily perceiue, where they were to bee inserted.67
Proffering an alliance with the clever reader against the unmannerly printer (whose
unexpected haste suggests a publisher’s sense of immediate consumer desire), Chapman
produces a text that requires a certain amount of mental cutting-and-flipping, to align
descriptions with the apposite text. Similarly, readers need to cross-reference entrances
as represented in the text with entrances as they must have chronologically occurred:
“After the speech of Plutus, (who as you may see after, first entred), the middle part of
64 The Dramatic Works o f Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1953- ), 303.
65 Herford and Simpson, Complete Works of Ben Jonson, VIL225.
66 Davenant included “songs” “to be printed, not sung” in Salmacida Spolia. Dramatic
Works, 5 vols. (Edinburgh: Paterson, 1872-74), 11:320. Similarly, Chapman appends a themat
ically appropriate but non-performative “Hymne to Hymen” to the Memorable Masque quarto.
67 Memorable Masque, 1613, B4V-C.
The Masque as Book 167
the Rocke began to moue.”68 Interestingly, the 1614 edition does not make any of the
changes Chapman claims to have wished to make in the first edition.69
If it requires readerly labor to parse the discontinuous text of the Memorable
Masque, Campion produces a discontinuous text of a different kind when he prints
music from the Lord Hay’s Masque at the end of the text. Like the activity Chapman
requires for any readers wishing to fully imagine the courtly performance, any of
Campion’s readers who wishes to hear or imagine the masque songs in their proper
places must bookmark, index, and cross-reference the text. Campion also suggests that
readers may use different parts of the text differently when he appends to the songs “the
last three Ayres [which] were devised onely for dauncing, yet they are here set forth
with words that they may be sung to the Lute or Violi” (230.)70 Out of sequence, the
songs serve not to inform the reader what happened at court, but rather to be more use
ful for domestic recreation. Campion’s redeploying music from court masques in do
mestic settings — a practice common far beyond Campion, as suggested by the number
of instrumental pieces titled after masque productions in both lute and harpsichord
collections — brings masque practice into private homes, just as printing moves masque
from the Banqueting House into the hands of booksellers and book-buyers. As material
text, masque delivers courtly event into the active, judgmental purview of readers.71
The publication — the making-public — of masque texts allows us to return with
a fresh eye to the bibliographic aspect of masque that has been uniquely emphasized in
previous scholarship: the court-distributed copies of printed masques. I have argued
against assuming that printed masques were produced only for court distribution, but
presentation of copies at masque events indubitably occurred. Since some presentation
and souvenir copies of masque texts were manuscripts, we are now in a position to ask
why others were not. If the print runs of some or all of the un-imprinted masques were
indeed small, printing was not an economical choice; this suggests that we must con
sider the cultural as well as the economic logic of print presentation.72 We must, that is,
read the “printness” of print presentation. In the opposite situation of accounting for
scribal duplication in circumstances wherein print texts also were available, Love notes
that scribal publication sometimes is preferred when it connotes “privileged information,
not meant to be available to all enquirers,” “bonding groups of like-minded individuals
73
Love, Culture and Commerce o f Texts, 177.
Rhetorics and Practices of Illiteracy
or The Marketing of Illiteracy
T picts a culture in which the majority of people were illiterate. Women and laborers
register as almost entirely illiterate, even in London, as late as 1640 in David
Cressy’s much challenged, but still essential study, Literacy and the Social Order:
Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Turning to the “one type of literacy
[that] is directly measurable,”1Cressy determines the percentages of English men and
women who made marks rather than signing their names on legal and ecclesiastical
records between 1510 and 1730, extending these figures to rates of illiteracy. From his
most nearly comprehensive sample, Cressy calculates that a full 70 percent of the over
40,000 male subscribers to the loyalty oaths of the 1640s affirmed their declarations
with marks rather than signatures.2 Ninety percent of women are similarly classed as
illiterate by this measure. These figures have flummoxed scholars who are otherwise
convinced that basic reading ability was widespread, if not quite universal, and no
1 Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 53.
2 Cressy acknowledges that “the figure of 70% is probably an accurate enough indication
of the level of illiteracy in rural England, but it does not take full account of the sometimes
superior level found in the towns” (Literacy, 72).
170 H E ID I B R A Y M A N H A C K E L
longer — in Adam Fox’s words — “the crucial divide.”3But signature literacy does not
measure basic reading ability; it depends instead upon the equation of reading and writ
ing. To make a mark rather than a signature on a legal document is to be counted as
illiterate in such studies. As Cressy concedes, literacy rates based on signatures erase
altogether readers unable to write; further, they elide all other gradations of readerly
skill and sophistication. Even as this methodology fails to register nuances in literacy,
the documents upon which it depends omit much of the information necessary for un
derstanding the roles of class and gender in the distribution of early modern literacy.
Ecclesiastical court depositions, which Cressy deems the most “promising” evidence
and which form the basis for his widely cited statistics, “severely” underrepresent
women; more problematic still, laborers and servants “were hardly heard at all although
they accounted for a quarter or more of the population.”45Further, while these records
tend to give the social status of male signers, they rarely provide such information about
female deponents. Husbands’ occupations or status appear “in no more than a quarter
of the depositions made by wives and widows”; otherwise women remain “socially un
differentiated in our sources.”3Figures generated from signatures on these documents,
therefore, fail to separate the roles of class and gender in women’s access to literacy,
grouping women of all classes together as “massively illiterate.”6 In contrast, illiteracy
rates for men ranged from 0% for clergy to 85% for husbandmen in London between
1580 and 1700, and these rates can be further broken down by class and even occupa
tion, yielding illiteracy rates for, say, ironmongers (8%), bricklayers (38%), and tailors
(44%) during this same period.7Built into signature studies at the level even of primary
documents, therefore, is the absence of sufficient, reliable evidence about women, la
borers, and servants — precisely the groups perceived by their contemporaries as newly
engaged in the marketplace of print during the period.8
At the center of the ongoing debate about early modern literacy is what Margaret
Spufford has described as “the crucial relationship of writing ability to reading ability.”
As Spufford and Cressy have shown, at all social levels reading was taught before
writing; consequently, many people unable to sign their names would, in fact, have been
able to read. Parallel studies of nineteenth-century literacy indicate that as many as 50%
3 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2000), 409.
4 Cressy, Literacy, 117, 115, 113.
5 Cressy, Literacy, 224 n. 25, 128.
6 Cressy, Literacy, 106, 112, 128.
7 Cressy, Literacy, 134-35, Table 6.7.
8 Lori Humphrey Newcomb argues that “the elite perceived that new groups of nonelite men
and a noticeable number of women were reading for pleasure”; while this “nouveau literate” also
encompassed craftsmen and country folk, women and servants were central to stereotypes of the
new readers of prose romances (Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England [New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002], 88, 79).
Rhetorics and Practices o f Illiteracy 171
of “markers” may have been readers, if not writers.9 This methodology is ultimately so
problematic for the early modern period, especially for the study of women and the least
skilled readers, that many scholars have moved away from such statistical analyses
altogether. Margaret Spufford concludes that there is “absolutely no way of knowing
how many women below the level of the gentry in England learnt to read,” Adam Fox
considers signatures “no reliable guide” to reading ability, Margaret Ferguson rejects
signature rates as “arguably useless” as an evidentiary field, and Frances Dolan urges
a reconsideration of these “definitional categories” themselves.10
Following Dolan’s lead, this essay examines early modern definitions of reading
and literacy, especially those practices that are invisible in signature studies. While I
share these scholars’ sense that Cressy’s illiteracy rates massively underestimate the
number of readers in early modern England, I want to make use of his observation that
a large number of early moderns were not writers. A rudimentary level of reading un
accompanied by writing skills — what I will call abecedarian literacy — seems to have
been common in the period. Understanding this level of skill and its construction by
authors and publishers is essential to the story of early modern reading. Acknowledging
abecedarian literacy compels us to examine our theoretical claims about literacy and our
methodological approaches to early modern reading. For abecedarian literacy resists the
definitional categories of literacy and illiteracy, emphasizing the continuum of compe
tencies of reading and writing. As Evelyn Tribble and Adam Fox have recently argued,
the boundaries between these categories were “permeable and shifting” in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.11If one must speak of multiple literacies in the period to rec
9 Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Reader-
ship in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 38 n. 11,
22, 39 n. 15.
10 Spufford, Small Books, 35; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 408; Margaret W. Ferguson,
Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chi
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 77; Frances E. Dolan, “Reading, Writing, and Other
Crimes,” Feminist Readings o f Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M.
Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 143.
Although Cressy defends this methodology, he engages many of its limitations, acknowledging
that “reading leaves no record, so some of the most tantalizing and important questions about
literacy in Tudor and Stuart England will have to remain unanswered” {Literacy, 53). Micro
historians have objected to studies like Cressy’s on the slightly different grounds that they lack
historical particularity; for an overview of these objections, see Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth
Sauer, “Current Trends in the History of Reading,” Books and Readers in Early Modern England:
Material Studies, ed. Andersen and Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002),
9-10. Ferguson’s book, published while this essay was in press, provides an important challenge
to many scholarly assumptions about literacy (61-82).
11 Evelyn Tribble, “Social Place and Literacies in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,”
Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur, Pittsburgh Series
172 H E ID I B R A Y M A N H A C K E L
ognize the variety of hands, typefaces, and languages that readers negotiated, so too one
must consider the range of skills and practices assembled together under the category
of “illiteracy.”12 The categories used in the admission register at the Great Yarmouth
Children’s Hospital late in the period begin to suggest the inadequacy of this binary
opposition: “knows not his letters,” “cannot read,” “in his horn book,” “in the primer,”
“reads Testament,” “reads Bible.”13 Though students at these various stages of accom
plishment would all appear illiterate by the standard of signature studies, these calibra
tions clearly register the early modern capacity to understand and to name points on a
continuum of illiteracies and literacies.
Yet, despite this continuum and the example of the Yarmouth register, reading on
its own is nearly always a historically invisible skill: readers who did not sign loyalty
oaths, write letters, or inscribe their books vanish from the archives of literacy. In early
modern Europe, Sweden alone seems to have institutionalized a documentary record of
its people’s reading skills independent of any writing ability.14Accordingly, our emerg
ing histories of early modern reading largely chronicle the activities of readers who
wrote. Yet many early modern people, especially women and laborers, surely read with
out being able to write. Not only was such literacy arguably more nearly normative than
other models we have for the period, but it was also sufficient basis for a reader’s
participation in the marketplace of print. I do not mean to refer here only to the fluidity
of oral and literate culture that Tessa Watt and, more recently, Adam Fox and Lori
Humphrey Newcomb have so skillfully chronicled.15 By the seventeenth century, Fox
argues, even someone ignorant of all letters inhabited a world “permeated” by text.
Rather, this essay will focus on several contemporary suggestions that the most im
perfect readers participated far more materially in the world of print as browsers,
buyers, and readers of books.
in Composition, Literacy, and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 95; Fox,
Oral and Literate Culture, 39. Tribble usefully notes, too, that “what counts as ‘literacy’ is vigor
ously contested in this period” (94).
12 Cheryl Glenn makes a parallel argument about the similarly “uncalibrated” medieval Latin
terms “litterati” and “illiterati,” which are “insufficient to indicate the rank, importance, expertise,
or education of those people so described” (“Popular Literacy in the Middle Ages: The Book o f
Margery Kempe,” Popular Literacy, 272 n„ 3). See Keith Thomas on the necessity of considering
a number of early modem literacy skills (“The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,”
The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann, Wolfson College Lectures, 1985
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986], 99-101).
13 Recorded between 1698 and 1715, this register is discussed in Cressy, Literacy, 30-34
and Table 2.1-2.2.
14 Lutheran parish records preserve the results of annual reading examinations, which adults
had to pass before communion and marriage (Cressy, Literacy, 178-79).
15 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1991); Fox, Oral and Literate Culture; and Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance.
Rhetorics and Practices o f Illiteracy 173
The title to one early modern preface neatly defines the abecedarian reader. Letters
to the English reader in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spawn a number of
common epithets and adjectival pairings, as readers are routinely hailed as “gentle,”
“learned,” “friendly,” “courteous,” and “indifferent.” The epistle to the 1604 quarto
Diaphantus plays on this convention, addressing its reader instead as “The Mightie,
Learned and Ancient Potentate Quisquis; Emperor of © King of Great and Little A.
Prince of B. C. and D. &c. ... Or to the Reader.”16The long title to this epistle accom
plishes at least two things, it seems to me: it is at once a typographical joke about the
reader’s limited grounding in the hornbook with its cross, its ABC’s, its “great” and
“little” letters, even its closing ampersand. This reader’s domain, that is, consists of the
hornbook and abecedaria rather than more sophisticated texts. And it is also an ac
knowledgment of the anonymous exchange in the marketplace of print, where the reader
may bear the moniker “Quisquis” (or whoever) but surely would not understand its
Latin meaning. The figure of Quisquis is emblematic of the most rudimentary English
reader — someone with only abecedarian literacy who accordingly registers as illiterate
in any quantitative signature literacy study of the period. The two aspects of this witty
epithet are, I will argue, tightly related; it is the very anonymity of Quisquis as a brow
ser, buyer, and reader that ties him to the most elementary form of reading. For the ano
nymity of Quisquis pushed authors and publishers to articulate what constitutes reading,
to assess how much skill someone must possess to be labelled a “Reader,” and to clarify
their receptiveness to a variety of readers. As they tried to name Quisquis, authors and
publishers defined readers alternately by class, skill, and experience. The shifting and
contradictory definitions of a “reader” point both to the bustle of the print marketplace
and to common anxieties among the producers of books.
Recent work in the history of reading has allowed many readers to trade in the title
“Quisquis” for their proper names. In the past decade, a handful of early modern readers
have emerged into full scholarly view from the margins, flyleaves, and catalogs of their
books — most visibly, Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, and Sir William Drake, but also, if
less clearly, Lady Anne Clifford, Frances Wolfreston, Elizabeth Puckering, and Lady
Frances Bridgewater.17 The model of reading that has emerged most clearly from the
period is goal-orientated and scholarly. This model has been privileged in the schol
arship of the last decade for at least two reasons: first, its archival survival in copious
written traces and second, its proximity to the ways of reading that we practice
professionally. The methods, spaces, and preoccupations of this form of early modern
reading resonate with those fostered by the modern academy: our book-lined studies,
our habitual annotation, our solitary silence, our bibliophilie acquisitiveness — all are
markers of a serious, highly skilled reader in our culture. Who among us could not put
to good use a book wheel like that imagined by Agostino Ramelli? If in fact such a
ferris wheel of books was a fantasy — as John Considine suggests18 — it is as much
ours as theirs. Precisely because I covet that book wheel, I want to examine instead
abecedarian literacy, a form of reading in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen
turies that is far less recognizable as the activity at which we are all professionals.
“Spelling ”
Reading at the most rudimentary level, sounding out each word letter by letter, was
often referred to as the ability to “spell” or to “read imperfectly.” As the stage that
builds upon a beginning reader’s familiarity with the ABC’s, “spelling” routinely pre
cedes reading mastery and writing instruction in the period.19 In a pedagogical treatise
Elizabeth Puckering,” The Library, 7th series, 1 (2000): 359-80; and Heidi Brayman Hackel,
“The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library,” Books and Readers, 138-59.
18 John Patrick Considine, “Bookwheels, Pigeonholes, and the Untidy Workspace,” paper
presented at the joint annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America and the Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 12 April 2002, Scottsdale, Arizona. Ramelli’s
engraving of the book wheel has become a nearly iconic representation of early modem scholarly
reading, appearing in Jardine and Grafton’s essay (“ ‘Studied,’ ” 47) and as the front jacket illu
stration of Sharpe’s Reading Revolutions. In contrast to my sense of recognition of the book
wheel, Jardine and Grafton posit that such a reader is “an unfamiliar type,” for whom “his own
selfhood as a reader is not at issue” (48).
19 For examples from 1580 to 1660, see Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherin those primitiue
circumstances be examined, necessarie fo r the training vp o f children (London 1581), 29;
William Kempe, The Education o f children in learning (London 1588), F3v; William Hornby,
Hornby es Hornbook (London 1622), B2v~B3v; Charles Hoole, A new discovery o f the old art o f
teaching schoole, in four small treatises (London 1660), 34-35. For surveys of manuals for ele
mentary reading instruction, see Cressy, Literacy, 19-41, and Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion
and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1999), 78-84, which emphasizes
especially the “distinctly religious content” of these guides. For a discussion of instruction beyond
“spelling,” see Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England, Pittsburgh Series in Composition,
Literacy, and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 18-57.
Rhetorics and Practices o f Illiteracy 175
printed in 1659, Charles Hoole summarized the “ordinary way to teach children to read”
in the seventeenth century:
after they have got some knowledge of their letters, & a smattering of some
syllables and words in the horn-book, to turn them into the ABC. or Primar,
and therein to make them name the letters, and spell the words, till by often use
they can pronounce (at least) the shortest words at the first sight.20
Informal instruction followed this sequence as well. Spufford has recovered the literacy
histories of several seventeenth-century autobiographers, the poorest of whom described
his struggle to become educated. Thomas Tryon (b. 1634) briefly attended school as a
five-year-old but “scarcely learnt to distinguish my Letters” before being pulled out and
sent to work. At about age thirteen, he learned to read with the help of a cheap primer
and the guidance of his partially literate fellow shepherds:
I bought me a Primer, and got now one, then another, to teach me to Spell, and
so learn’d to Read imperfectly, my Teachers themselves not being ready
Readers: But in a little time, having learn’d to Read competently well, I was
desirous to learn to Write, but was at great loss for a Master, none of my
Fellow-Shepherds being able to teach me.21
20 The Petty-Schoole. Shewing a way to teach little Children to read English with delight
and profit, (especially) according to the New Primar (London 1659), 20, emphasis mine.
21 Some Memoirs o f the Life o f Mr. Tho. Tryon, Late o f London, Merchant: Written by Him
self (London 1705), 14; quoted in Spufford, Small Books, 28-29.
22 Syr P. S. his Astrophel and Stella (London 1591), 48, “Second Sonnet,” 11. 21-28.
176 H E ID I B R A Y M A N H A C K E L
those who waited might not lose their time, but have a bait laid to catch them.”28 The
observation of a French emigré at the end of the century suggests that basic reading
ability extended even beyond domestic servants; “there is hardly the meanest peasant
in England,” he observed, “but what can read.”29
Most of these “meanest peasants,” however, presumably could not write. For in
struction in writing, unlike in reading, required a teacher with more skill and could not
be a primarily oral task. Francis Clement emphasizes the equipment required by a wri
ter: “paper, incke, pen, penknife, ruler, deske, and dustbox, of these the three first are
most necessarie, the foure latter very requisite.”30 Juliet Fleming, however, has recov
ered a range of writing surfaces independent of paper, ink, pen, penknife, ruler, desk,
and dustbox, and she argues that the “whitewashed domestic w all. .. [was] the primary
scene of writing in early modern England.”31 Her fascinating and provocative argument
shifts attention away from desks and ink and paper — the signs of formal education —
locating writing instruction instead on domestic walls. Such a shift would make writing
available to people unequipped for the discipline and the expense of pen and ink writ
ing, and it would make writing instruction possible away from a desk and in the absence
of ink. As Fleming points out, “Cressy’s illiteracy rate consequently includes not only
those who can read but not write, but also those who can write with charcoal or marking
stone but not with ink.”32
Charles Hoole in a chapter on reading instruction provides a set of alternatives to
the printed hornbook and, indeed, to the whitewashed household wall: ivory squares “in
every one of which was engraven a several letter,” dice or white bits of wood inscribed
with letters, a spinning wheel with a hole through which a child can see one capital letter
at a time, and a trencher on which the teacher writes a letter for the student to imitate.33
These “sundry” methods preserve glimpses of the non-paper writing surfaces potentially
available to students and their teachers. More ephemeral even than the hornbooks and
ABC’s that have all but disappeared,34 the marks on these trenchers and “bits of wood”
28 Charlotte Fell Smith, Maty Rich, Countess o f Warwick (1625-1678): Her Family and
Friends (London: Longmans, 1901), 172.
29 Quoted in Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 409.
30 Francis Clement, The Petie Schole (London 1587), D2v.
31 Juliet Fleming, “Graffiti, Grammatology, and the Age of Shakespeare,” Renaissance
Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of
Penn Press, 1999), 329. This argument is extended in her book, Graffiti and the Writing Arts in
Early Modern England (London: Reaktion; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2001 ).
32 Fleming, “Grafitti,” 348 n. 42.
33 Hoole, A new discovery, 6-10.
34 Ian Green notes that the low survival rate of ABC’s raises questions about their very
contents (The Christian's ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530-1740 [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996], 174-75).
178 H E ID I B R A Y M A N H A C K E L
may have introduced many early modern children to the prospect of literacy. With
practice on texts and surfaces that Margaret Spufford and Juliet Fleming have demon
strated were widely available, a “speller” would become a more skilled reader in time.
Even so, the gulf between making out these trencher letters — an early modern Al
phabet Soup, as it were — and writing one’s signature on a Protestation Oath is clear
and deep.
Even “spelling,” however, proved difficult and inaccessible for some early mod
erns. John Hart, an early orthographer, proposes a more transparent method of learning
to read “for such as can not read, and are otherwise out of al hope euer to be able to
attain to read.” Ninety years later, Charles Hoole similarly stresses the need for a new
method for “many [children] of more slow capacities . .. not much more able to read,
when they have ended their book, then when they begun it.”35 Though Hart and Hoole
emphasize the obstacles facing many would-be readers, other indicators — including
their optimism about their programs — suggest that attaining a “spelling” ability to read
was within reach of most early modern people. Regardless, even those early moderns
without any reading skills still inhabited a world with many opportunities for both
seeing print and manuscript and hearing books read aloud. Further, they might even own
printed books themselves. Addressing such non-readers, a late Elizabethan preacher
urged people who could not read to “get the Bibles into their houses” nevertheless, so
that the family would be prepared to hear the Bible read aloud whenever a literate
visitor chanced by.36John Foxe memorializes such bookish piety in John Maundrel, who
was never “without the New Testament about him, although he could not read himself.”
In 1700, Jean Leuduger presents a similar exemplar: Armelle Nicolas “always carried
The Imitation o f Christ with her, and when she found someone who knew how to read,
she would beg him to read her a few lines from her book, after which she would pause
to reflect on them.”37 A possible visual representation of bookish piety among the
unlettered survives in Gerard Dou’s portrait Rembrandt's Mother Reading (1631). An
old woman holds and gazes at an open folio Bible, the pages of which are distinctly
enough drawn that a viewer can read the chapter and verse headings. Though the wom
an seems absorbed in the book, her gaze falls not on the text but upon the illustration to
Luke 19, perhaps the only part of the page she can read. These images, exemplars, and
exhortations depict non-readers owning and interacting with devotional and sacred
books. But while the Bible may serve as the “supreme example” of this phenomenon,
non-readers bought secular texts and broadsides as well.38
If the absence of reading skills did not necessarily exclude an early modern person
from the community of bookowners, the absence of writing ability or indeed formal wri
ting equipment did not preclude several practices usually aligned with more sophisti
cated readers: private reading, note-taking, and instructing others. An ABC or Holy
Alphabet describes the “priuate Reading” of both writing and non-writing readers: “let
people come with due reuerence, desire, and hope o f p ro fit... in their reading, taking
notice, (or some Note also, if they bee able for remembrance) of any thing wherein is
occasion of doubt, till they meet with an opportunity of inquiring resolution.”39 The
inability to “take Note” — or annotate a book by writing — did not preclude a reader’s
“taking notice.” And, indeed, even a reader unable to write might still “take Note” by
following the suggestions in contemporary treatises to make a “pinprick” or an impres
sion with a fingernail next to difficult or notable passages. John Brinsley recommends
such a method for “the very little ones, which reade but English,” who “may make some
secret markes thus at every hard word; though but with some little dint with their
naile.”40 And, as Thomas Tryon’s account reveals, those who weren’t “ready Readers”
themselves might still teach someone how to spell and “Read imperfectly.”
Perhaps more significantly, the ability to “spell” or “read imperfectly” placed some
one on the spectrum of readers in the early modern marketplace. Invisible in census
documents as participants in literate culture, these “spellers” were considered readers,
if only mere readers, by their contemporaries — a fact encouraged by orthographical
innovators and pedagogues, exploited by publishers, and resisted on many fronts,
including the fronts of many books. Such “imperfect readers” were not always imagined
as participants in the marketplace of print, of course. In Nicholas Breton’s The Court
and the Country, for example, a country fellow explains to his courtier kinsman the little
use he has for his limited literacy skills:
this is all we goe to schoole for: to read common Prayers at Church, and set
downe common prises at Markets, write a Letter, and make a Bond, set downe
the day of our Births, our Marriage day, and make our Wills when we are
sicke, for the disposing of our goods when we are dead: these are the chiefe
matters that we meddle with.41
This fellow, who would in fact register as literate in a study like Cressy’s, expresses no
interest in the book market as his class and rural status trump his technical ability. But
other authors, printers, and publishers did imagine such “imperfect readers” as potential
members of their audience — and not just for the cheapest print and the most essential
devotional works, but also for a range of genres and a range of formats, including the
First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Such readers occupy one end of the spectrum of the
“great Variety of Readers . .. from the most able to him that can but spell” defined in
1623 by John Heminge and Henry Condell as the potential buyers of the First Folio.42
While it may seem absurd for such an “imperfect” reader to attempt Hamlet or even
Comedy o f Errors, this least able reader was figured as a potential and often threatening
consumer of other contemporary books as well.
No longer contained within the social and intellectual elites, reading and book own
ership were increasingly available to a “great Variety” of early modern English people,
including shepherds, servants, chambermaids, laundresses, and merchants’ daughters
in the seventeenth century. In the letter to the reader of The Wonderfull Yeare, Thomas
Dekker mocks these new readers by suggesting that they have scarcely attained abece
darian literacy:
[the reader] must be honyed, and come-ouer with Gentle Reader, Courteous
Reader, and Learned Reader, though he haue no more Gentilitie in him than
Adam had (that was but a gardner) no more Civility than a Tartar, and no more
Learning than the most errand Stinkard, that (except his owne name) could
neuer finde any thing in the Horne-booke.43
The “gentle reader” and the “learned reader,” that is, were no longer tautologies as the
category of readers expanded beyond the gentry and the clergy.44 Still, the opposition
42 John Heminge and Henry Condell, “To the great Variety of Readers,” Mr. William Shake
speares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London 1623), A3r. Reproduced in Charlton Hinman,
ed., The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio o f Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1968).
43 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (London 1603), A3r. Repr. in The Plague Pam
phlets o f Thomas Dekker, ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925).
44 Spufford investigates the reading patterns of those on the periphery of literacy in Small
Books and Pleasant Histories, and Adam Fox produces a glimpse of “the least literate levels of
society” by focusing on scurrilous verses that circulated aloud and in print (“Popular Verses and
Their Readership in the Early Seventeenth Century,” The Practice and Representation o f Reading
in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1996], 125-37). Included in the range of associations with “readers” should be the
fact that the “most prestigious teachers of the Renaissance [at Paris or Louvain] .. . carried the
exalted title of ‘readers’ ” (Jean-Claude Margolin, “Reading(s) in the Renaissance,” trans. John
F. Logan, Annals o f Scholarship: The Renaissance and its Readers 6 [1989], 18).
For a discussion of the new “semantic ambiguity” of the titles “gentleman” and “master” in
the period, see Laura Caroline Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in
Elizabethan Popular Literature, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Rhetorics and Practices o f Illiteracy 181
between “gentle” and “vulgar” readers organized much of the rhetoric about print circu
lation and readership in the period, with “gentle” shifting from a description marking
class status to a prescription framing readers’ behaviors. “Vulgar” reading, with its
etymological root in the Latin vulgus or “mob,” was associated with the distribution of
print, sometimes referred to as the process of “divulging” or “divulgating.” As they still
do, “gentle” (with its cognate “genteel”) and “vulgar” conveyed both aesthetic and so
cial distinctions, which were disentangled during this period of an expanding market
place of print and an increasingly various set of readers and buyers of books.45 As the
spread of literacy and the accessibility of print pushed authors and publishers to define
the activity of reading, several early seventeenth-century writers imagined the least able
readers — or “spellers” — as potential participants in the book market.
Resisting an inclusive marketing ploy like Heminge and Condell’s, Ben Jonson
slights the least skilled of the “great Variety” of potential readers of his first folio,
directing the bookseller to turn away a “clarke-like seruing-man, / who scarse can spell
th’ hard names.”46 In repelling this prospective reader, Jonson’s caricature makes ex
plicit this man’s humble class status and his incomplete mastery even of spelling. A
contemporary epistle by Rachel Speght alludes punningly to such “common” class
status but focuses on the rudimentary skills themselves of a broadening untrained
readership:
Press, 1984), 82-87. She argues that the paradox of a phrase like “gentle craftsman” typified the
literary praise of commercial men late in Elizabeth’s reign (7). Just as “gentle reader” was no
longer tautological, so “gentle craftsman” became possible as a rhetoric of praise.
45 For a discussion of the emergent capitalism of the print marketplace, see Alexandra
Halasz, The Marketplace o f Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Focusing on the prose romance, Newcomb
offers a sophisticated analysis of the degrading of texts by their association with nonelite readers
(.Reading Popular Romance, especially chapter 2); “scenes of consumption” of romances by such
readers defused “the social threat of shared reading material” (79).
For a complementary discussion of new notions of authorship and the broadening of the
category of “poets,” see Sharon Achinstein, “Audiences and Authors: Ballads and the Making of
English Renaissance Literary Culture,” Journal o f Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992):
323-26. She cites William Webbe’s lament in his Discourse o f English Poetrie (1586): “Yet if
these be accounted Poets. . . surely we shall shortly have whole swarms of Poets” (quoting from
Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England [Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1935], 92).
46 The workes o f Benjamin Jonson (London 1616), 770, “To my Bookseller,” 11. 9-10.
182 H E ID I B R A Y M A N H A C K E L
Speght despairs here at the limits of abecedarian readers, who have advanced neither to
vernacular mastery nor to classical learning. Yet Speght’s definition of these new
readers depends not merely upon their abecedarian literacy but also upon their voicing
of judgment. The form of this “verdict” suggests these readers’ exclusion from full
literacy, for their opinions will be voiced rather than written, but it also epitomizes for
Speght the danger that such unworthy readers will publicize their opinions. While
Speght directly addresses only a worthier readership, George Wither addresses two
classes of readers in his Satyrical essayes; the abstract undifferentiated “Readers”
named in the prefatory epistle, that is, encompass both skilled readers and mere spellers.
Having first addressed “Reader s . .. that haue vnderstanding,” Wither turns his attention
to those “Readers . .. that are no more but Readers” for whom he has tried to make his
work “plain”: “I make no question if this booke come to your spelling, it will haue many
halting verses, and disioynted sentenses: for I haue had experience of your insuffici-
encie.”48 Wither’s emphasis on these readers’ inability to read aloud fluently and his
definition of them as “no more but Readers” identify them as the “imperfect” readers
invisible in signature studies. Strikingly, Wither, like many of his contemporaries, as
serts that he has encountered such readers of his work before and assumes their partici
pation in the audience for this volume.
In the “Post-script” to Satyres and Satyrical Epigrams, Henry Fitzgeffrey imagines
and resists an even less skilled potential market for his book:
Unlike the other imperfect readers cited here, this “Mecannick Asse” has not mastered
even the hornbook, having never made it past “his Horn-booke crosse,” the first symbol
in a standard hornbook, which began “^ABC.” This mechanic, that is, cannot even
spell. What might a historian of reading make of this striking moment? To what extent,
that is, should illiteracy figure into a history of early modern reading?
47 Rachel Speght, Mortalities memorandum, with a dreame prefixed (London 1621), “To
the Reader,” A3v.
48 George Wither, Abvses stript, and whipt: or Satyrical essayes (London 1613), “To the
Readers.”
49 Henry Fitzgeffrey, Satyres: and Satyrical Epigram’s (London 1617), G4v. This address
to the stationer comes at the end of the volume as a “post-script”; only booksellers who read
beyond the preliminaries, therefore, could heed this satirical warning.
Rhetorics and Practices o f Illiteracy 183
This moment is instructive on at least two counts: first, it suggests that just as print
permeated the experiences of all early moderns, literate or not, so perhaps all early
moderns, literate or not, permeated the marketplace of print. Secondly, this fantasy of
the illiterate Gull stuffing his pockets with books he cannot even “spell” captures a mo
ment of pure proto-capitalist consumption.50 In contrast to his pious unlettered con
temporaries who keep devotional texts “about” them, this Gull seems to want only to
acquire books; perhaps since he cannot read them, it does not matter that he fills his
pockets with multiple copies of the same unbound quarto verse epigrams. Finally, like
my earlier examples, it reveals; an anxiety about the handling of books by anonymous
consumers. For each of these examples ultimately is a gesture of protection of the text,
as criticism and distortion are attributed to “imperfect readers.” Uncivil, disruptive read
ings are defused, therefore, because they are constructed as the work of mere spellers,
whose opinions can be dismissed by readers of more understanding. Strikingly, if con
ventionally, Fitzgeffrey marks illiteracy in terms of class and regional distinctions,
dismissing an uneducated provincial audience with the “Pesant” and the “Rusticke”
would-be buyers and disdaining manual laborers as “Mecannick Asses.” Even the seem
ingly solicitous inclusion of “spellers” as readers of Shakespeare’s First Folio turns at
the end of that letter into a preemptive gesture when Heminge and Condell claim that
the reader who does not “like” the plays does not “understand” them. This rhetoric of
illiteracy is a strategy in part, therefore, to accommodate shifting circumstances of the
transmission and circulation of texts. It reveals the interconnections between the history
of reading and the history of authorship, and it makes a place in both for someone who
otherwise would seem irrelevant to those histories — our “mighty” and “ancient” friend,
Quisquis.
50 Newcomb posits that such bookshop scenes depict nonelite buyers “tum[ing] cultural
objects into worthless commodities” (Reading Popular Romance, 96).
Notes on Contributors
KATHRYN D eZUR is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York
College of Technology at Delhi. She recently won the SUNY Foundation for Research
Award for Scholarship in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts. She has also
examined early modern representations of women readers in her article “Defending the
Castle: The Political Problem of Rhetorical Seduction and Good Huswifery in Sidney’s
Old A r c a d i a which appeared in Studies o f Philology 98 (2001).
FREDERICK KIEFER is a professor of English at the University of Arizona and the author
of Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (Huntington Library, 1983); Writing on the Ren
aissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (University of Dela
ware Press, 1996); and Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Charac
ters (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
186 N O TES O N C O N T R IB U T O R S
MARTHA RUST is an Assistant Professor of English at New York University. Her recent
publications include an article on a fifteenth-century abecedarium, “The ABC of Aris
totle,” and a study of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as it is rendered in Oxford, Bod
leian Library MS Arch. Seiden B.24.
MICHAEL ULLYOT is a Graduate Fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance
Studies, University of Toronto. In the Department of English, he is finishing a disser
tation on textual authority, vulnerable exemplars, and the elegies for Henry, Prince of
Wales (d. 1612).
Index
Prefaces, xiv, xvi, 56, 87, 107, 110, Rewriting, 45-62, 110, 119-25
165, 173. See also Dedications Rich, Lady Mary, Countess of War
Prescott, Anne Lake, 69 wick, 176
Presentation copies, 90-93 Richard III of England, 74
Pricke o f Conscience, 5 Rigg, A. G., 6
Printed books, xi, xiv, xvi, 29, 85-95, Robbins, Rossell Hope, 7
101-4 Rolle, Richard, 39,41,43
Printing, xi, 63-66, 76, 87-95, 101-4, Roman de la Rose, 32-33, 81
144-47,152-56,155-58,167-68 Romances, 31, 53, 81-82, 106, 116
Printers, 66,70-71,74-75,77,87,90- Ronsard, Pierre de, 69
91, 145, 157-59 Root, Jerry, 31
Privacy, 35, 129, 156 Roper, Margaret, 106
Prynne, William, 151, 164 Rowson, Samuel, 109
Publication. See printing Ruiz, Juan, 31-32
Puckering, Elizabeth, 173 Ruscelli, Girolamo, 94, 101
Purfoot, Thomas, 53-54, 56, 60
Pynson, Richard, 66 Saenger, Paul, 34-35
Saint Gelais, Octavien de, 82
Quarles, Francis, 119 Salisbury, John of, 17
Querelle des femmes, 80-81 Salviati, Lionardo, 96
Quintilian, 62 Sanders, Eve, 132
Scanlon, Larry, 50
Raleigh, Sir Walter, xiv, xvi, 76, 122 Scotus, Duns, 33-34
Ramelli, Agostino, 174 Segar, Francis, 74
Reading Seneca, 26, 119
children’s, xviii, 174-78 Sera, Beatrice del, 99
devotion and, xi, xiv, 1-18, 39-44, Serbo, Sebastiano, 92
176, 178 Shakespeare, William, xi-xiv, xvii,
history of, xi-xiv, 34-35, 45-46, 113, 127-41, 180, 183
85-87, 93-94, 103-4, 147, 173- Hamlet, xi-xii, xvii, 180
83 Love’s Labor’s Lost, xvii, 127-41
medieval, x-xi, xiv-xv, 1-18,25-44 Much Ado About Nothing, xii, xvii,
online, xiii, 29 127-41
onstage, 127-41 The Tempest, xiii, 141
pain and, 17-18 Sharpe, Kevin, 93
playscripts, xiv, xvii, 101, 143-68 Sherburn, Edward, 148, 155
self-knowledge and, xiv-xv, 1-18, Shirley, James, 150, 159-61
26, 29-31 Shoaf, R. Allen, 40
silent, 35, 129 Sibthorpe, Henry, 109, 119
women’s, xvi-xvii, 27, 105-25, 70, Sidnam, Sir Jonathan, xv, 47, 53, 59-
178 62
Religious verse, 1-24, 72-73, 123-25 Sidney, Lady Mary, 105
“Revertere”, xiv-xv, 1-24 Sidney, Sir Phillip, 113, 119, 175-76
Index 193
Udall, Nicholas, 52