Abstract
In 1609 appeared the first address ‘To the Reader’ to accompany a Shakespeare play. Prefacing the first quarto of Troilus and Cressida it took pains to bolster the act of reading above watching Shakespeare’s plays, promising that Troilus and Cressida was ‘Neuer stal’d with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the uulgar’ and so remained unsullied by the ‘smoaky breath of the multitude’.1 Instead, the play would appeal to a discriminating readership able to appreciate the ‘dexteritie, and power of witte’ that characterised Shakespeare’s comedies; a comic wit whose origins were to be found in Shakespeare’s hugely successful narrative poem Venus and Adonis: ‘So much and such sauored salt of witte is in his Commedies, that they seeme (for their height of pleasure) to be borne in that sea that brought forth Venus’ (sig. A2). The use of Shakespeare’s pleasure-giving poem to commend and sanction his drama is intriguing both for the status it awards to Venus and Adonis and for the suggestion that Troilus and Cressida should be approached with the savoury wit of comedy in mind. But then the preface makes a more provocative move, speculating on how differently comedies would be received if they were transformed into ‘Commodities’:
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. John Roe (The New Cambridge Shakespeare; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Dedication of Venus and Adonis to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, line 11. The important new editions of the narrative poems edited by Colin Burrow and Katherine Duncan Jones unfortunately were not published in time for me to consult them for this book. On the publication history of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece see F. T. Prince (ed.), Shakespeare, The Poems (1960, The Arden Shakespeare; London and New York: Routledge, 1988): pp. xi–xx; Roe (ed.), Shakespeare, The Poems, pp. 287–92, and Harry Farr, ‘Notes on Shakespeare’s Printers and Publishers with Special Reference to the Poems and Hamlet’, The Library, 4th series, 3:4 (March 1923): 225–50.
My figures are based on Peter Beal (ed.), Index of Literary Manuscripts. Volume 1: 1450–1625, part 2 (London and New York: Mansell and R. R. Bowker Company, 1980), pp. 452–63 and p. 633.
Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, vol. 2, p. 540. Lucrece is not far behind Venus and Adonis in amassing 25 allusions before 1649, ahead of Othello’s 19 allusions; 1 and 2 Henry IV combined achieve 38 allusions, Romeo and Juliet 36, and Falstaff (treated by the compilers as a separate category) 32. For an overview of the early modern vogue of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, see Hyder Edward Rollins, (ed.), A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1938), pp. 447–61.
See for instance Wai-Chee Dimock, ‘Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader’, American Literature 63:4 (1991): 601–22; reprinted in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Burnett (London: Longman, 1995): 122–31, p. 123.
The history of the book is a rapidly expanding field of study, too extensive to document in one footnote. Kevin Sharpe’s Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000 ) provides an astute survey of the field (see esp. pp. 34–62); see also The Book History Reader, eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery ( London and New York: Routledge, 2002 );
Jonathan Rose, ‘The History of Books: Revised and Enlarged’, in TheDarntonDebate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Haydn T. Mason ( Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998 ): 83–104;
Anthony Grafton, ‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Bude and his Books’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91 (1997): 139–57;
J. P. Feather, ‘The Book in History and the History of the Book’, Journal of Library History 21 (1981): 12–26;
Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books’, Daedalus 3 (1982): 65–83, and chapter 1 of The Kiss of Lamourette. Reflections in Cultural History (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990); also the seminal studies of Roger Chartier on the history of the book, esp. ed., The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane ( Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994 );
Roger Chartier and Alain Boureau, eds., The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 );
Roger Chartier and Gugliemo Cavallo, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), and ‘Reading, Writing and Literature in the Early Modern Age’, Critical Survey, special issue on ‘Reading in Early Modern England’, 12:2 (winter 2000): 128–42. For recent studies of reading in early modern England, see Sasha Roberts, ‘Reading in Early Modern England: Contexts and Problems’, Critical Survey, special issue on ‘Reading in Early Modern England’, 12:2 (winter 2000): 1–13;
Elizabeth Sauer and Jennifer Anderson (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001 );
Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England ( Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996 );
William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance ( Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1995 );
William Sherman and Lisa Jardine, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in late Elizabeth England’, in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson ( eds.) Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ): 102–24;
Jason Scott-Warren, ‘News, Sociability, and Bookbuying in Early Modern England: The Letters of Sir Thomas Cornwallis’, The Library, ser.7, vol. 1 (2000): 381–402;
David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ), pp. 143–59;
James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Heidi Brayman Hackel’s ‘Impressions from a Scribbling Age’ (forthcoming) will deepen our understanding of early modern reading practices, while Adrian Johns provides a compelling account of early modern print culture in The Nature of the Book. Print and Knowledge in the Making ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998 ).
Marjorie Plant’s The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939)
H. S. Bennett’s English Books and Readers, 1558–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) and English Books and Readers, 1603–40 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) remain useful overviews.
Eugene R. Kintgen makes this distinction in ‘Reconstructing Elizabethan Reading’, Studies in English Literature 30:1 (Winter 1990 ): 1–18, p. 18.
Roger Chartier, ‘Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader’, Diacritics 22 (summer 1992): 49–61, p. 50.
For an adept analysis of the material forms of Shakespeare’s plays see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 ).
Neil Fraistat, ‘Introduction: The Place of the Book and the Book as Place’, in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986): 3–17; similarly Earl Miner argues that the orderings of collections ‘add a new sense, a new meaning’ to their contents in ’Some Issues for Study of Integrated Collections’, in Poems in Their Place: 18–43, p. 18. For studies of the arrangement of poems by Jonson, Marvell, Donne, and Milton, see the essays by Annabel Patterson, John T. Shawcross, and Joseph Anthony Wittreich in Poems in Their Place.
See, for instance, F. T. Prince (ed.), Shakespeare, The Poems, p. xiii. On the casual treatment of later editions of Shakespeare’s poems by editors see Henry Woudhuysen, ‘The Year’s Contributions to Textual Studies: Editions and Textual Studies’, Shakespeare Survey, 46 (1994): 241–58, p. 248.
John Kerrigan (ed.), Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (1986; London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 46. As Stephen Orgel remarks, we ought to be aware that early modern readers ‘noticed and valued things that we have taught ourselves to ignore’ (’The Authentic Shakespeare’, in Representations, 21 (winter 1988): 1–26, p. 4 ).
Michael D. Bristol and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Introduction’, Print, Manuscript, Performance. The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, eds. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000): 1–29, p. 6;
Stephen Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s Mirror for Magistrates’, forthcoming in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks ( Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003 ).
On marginalia in the early modern period see for instance Steven Zwicker, ‘Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habits of Appropriation’ in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (ed.), Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetic and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 ): 101–15;
Stephen A. Barney, Annotation and its Texts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sherman, John Dee, pp. 60 and 65–75; Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 261–4 and 274–6;
Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 21–4; Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia as Cultural Monument and Proto-Novel’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, eds. Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti: 80–94, esp. pp. 85–9;
David McPherson, Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia. An Annotated Catalogue, special issue of Studies in Philology 71 (1974): x.1–106, esp. pp. 1012;
Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 ).
Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, esp. chapters 2 and 4; Sherman, John Dee, esp. pp. 79–100; and Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 30–78.
Richard Brome, ‘Upon Aglaura Printed in Folio’, in Parnassus Biceps. Or Sever-all Choice Pieces of Poetry, Composed by the best Wits that were in both the Universities before their Disolution (London, 1656), sig. ES.
Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1993 ), pp. 2–9.
Early modern manuscript culture is now gaining the critical attention it deserves: for recent studies see for instance Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 135–208;
Arthur Marotti, ‘Malleable and Fixed Texts: Manuscript and Printed Miscellanies and the Transmission of Lyric Poetry in the English Renaissance’, New Ways of Looking at Old Texts. Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 107, 1993): 159–73; Marotti and Bristol (eds), Print, Manuscript, and Performance;
Gerald L. Bruns, ‘The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture’, Journal of Comparative Literature 32 (Spring 1980): 119–29;
Mary Hobbs, ‘Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellanies and Their Value for Textual Editors’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 1 (1989): 182–210, and Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts ( Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992 );
Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998);
Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Steven N. May, ‘Manuscript circulation at the Elizabethan Court’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: 273–80; Edwin W. Sullivan, II, ‘The Renaissance Manuscript Verse Miscellany: Private Party, Private Text’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: 289–97;
J. W. Saunders, ‘From Manuscript to Print: A Note on the Circulation of Poetic MSS. in the Sixteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 6 (1951): 507–28;
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 1–22 and 33–4 and the journal Early Manuscript Studies (EMS).
On literary property in the period see, for instance, Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, and Arthur Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property’, in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, eds. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus ( Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1990 ): 143–73.
See Gary Taylor, ‘Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 68 (Autumn 1985): 210–46, esp. pp. 228–36 and 244–6;
Duncan Jones (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint ( 1997; London: Arden Shakespeare, Thomas Nelson, 1999 ), pp. 456–7.
John Benson, ‘To the Reader’, Shakespeare’s Poems (London, 1640), sigs. A2–A2v.
Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1996 ), p. 164.
An important exception is Charles Whitney’s ‘Ante-aesthetics: Towards a theory of early modern audience response’ in Shakespeare and Modernity. Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 40–60; see esp. pp. 49–55.
On commonplacing, see also Rosemary Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993 ), p. 18;
Peter Beal, ’“Notions in Garrison”: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts. Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 107, 1993): 131–47;
Ann Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541–52;
Max W. Thomas, ‘Reading and Writing the Renaissance Commonplace Book: A Question of Authorship?’, in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriations in Law and Literature, eds, Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jasz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994): 401–15; Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640, pp. 11–26; Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 277–83; Sherman, John Dee, pp. 61 and 64–5;
Edwin Wolf, The Textual Importance of Manuscript Commonplace Books of 1620–1660 ( Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1949 ).
On the evidence for commonplacing in Shakespeare’s works, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latin and Lesse Greek 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1944), vol. 2, pp. 616 and 647.
On applied reading and textual appropriation in early modern England, see Zwicker, ‘Reading the Margins’, p. 109; Sherman, John Dee, pp. 61–5; Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 85 and 189; and Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ’Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ): 102–24.
Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London and Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 41 n.5.
Thomas Freeman, ‘To Master W: Shakespeare’, Rubbe, and a Great Cast. Epigrams by Thomas Freeman, Gent (London, 1614), epigram 92, sigs. K2v-K3.
For Sir Thomas Bodley, see Paul Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”’, in The Library, 6th series, XI:3 (September 1989): 197–219, p. 200.
William London, Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (London, 1658), sigs. C2–C2v, V1 and Ee4v-Ff1v.
T. A. Birrell, ‘Reading as Pastime: The Place of Light Literature in Some Gentlemen’s Libraries of the 17th Century’, Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library 1620–1920 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1991): 113–31, p. 113; see also Chartier, Introduction to The Culture of Print, p. 4.
For overviews of Shakespeare’s early reputation see, for instance, Ernest A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries ( London: Macmillan, 1982 ), pp. 33–48;
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life ( London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001 );
G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945 );
Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 ).
Mark Bland, ‘The London Book-Trade in 1600’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan ( Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 ): 450–63, p. 462.
Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 120–1; see also pp. 4–5, 8–10 and 113–55.
Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in A New History of Early English Drama eds John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 ): 383–422, pp. 388–9.
For recent studies of early modern readers of Shakespeare, particularly Venus and Adonis, see Philip Kolin, ‘Venus and/or Adonis among the Critics’, in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1997): 3–65, pp. 27–9; Richard Halpern, ’“Pining their Maws”: Female Readers and the Erotic Ontology of the Text in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’ in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin: 377–88;
Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado with Red and White: the Earliest Readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, Review of English Studies 44 (Nov. 1993): 479–501;
Heidi Brayman Hackel, ’“The Great Variety of Readers” and Early Modern Reading Practices’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999): 139–57; and Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property’.
For studies of the representation of reading in Shakespeare see David M. Bergeron (ed.), Reading and Writing in Shakespeare ( Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Press, 1996 ).
For transcripts of shorter poems attributed to Shakespeare (including ‘A Song (Shall I dye)’, ’On Ben Johnson’, ‘An Epitaph on Elias Iames’, ‘An extemporary Epitaph on John Combe, a noted usurer’, ’Upon the King’, and ’Epitaph on Himselfe’), see Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Original-Spelling Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 881–7
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion ( Oxford: Clarednon Press, 1987 ), pp. 449–60.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2003 Sasha Roberts
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roberts, S. (2003). Introduction. In: Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286849_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286849_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40960-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28684-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)