Abstract
One copy of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio, now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is marked with the fragmentary testimony of a seventeenth-century woman (see Figure 1.1), about whom little is known, other than her name:
margarit by is my name and
with my peen I wright this same
and if my peen hade ben better
i sholld1
Margaret By’s broken final line doubly registers the allegedly stuttering presence of her pen: she not only writes about it, but also — by ceasing to write with it — calls the reader’s attention to the presence of the quill in her hand, and to the sometimes vexed relationship that existed between the writer and her tools. An aborted first attempt at the verse, along with one complete and two partial signatures, reinforces the link between literacy and pen-work, composition and inscription.
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Notes
On writing as an embodied act, see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 23.
Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 138.
See especially Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapters 2 and 3.
James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1514–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 10–11.
See also Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’, The Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997): 1–9.
Sara Jayne Steen, ‘Reading Beyond the Words: Material Letters and the Process of Interpretation’, Quidditas, 22 (2001): 55–69.
Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 1.
Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion; or, A Guide to the Female Sex Containing Directions of Behaviour, in all Places, Companies, Relations, and Conditions (London: A. Maxwell for Dorman Newman, 1673), Q3r.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 15.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), pp. 51–2.
Hannah Woolley, The compleat servant-maid (London: for T. Passinger, 1677), B8r–v.
Wendy Wall, ‘Literacy and the Domestic Arts’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010): 383–412, at 398–9.
John Partridge, The widowes treasure plentifully furnished with sundry precious and approoued secretes in phisicke and chirurgery (London: Edward Allde, for Edward White, 1588), B5v–B7v.
Edmund Valentine Campos, ‘Thomas Gage and the English Colonial Encounter with Chocolate’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39 (2009): 183–200, at 186.
The Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston, 1603–1627, ed. R. Hughey, Norfolk Record Society, 14 (1941), p. 92 [early April 1626?], p. 83 [late April 1625?]. For this example, and the following, I am indebted to Daybell, The Material Letter, pp. 90, 40.
Joseph P. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Bacon MSS of Redgrave Hall, 4198 [1611]; CP102/56.
Letter dated 28 June 1620: The Private Correspondence of Jane, Lady Cornwallis, 1613–1644, ed. Lord Braybrooke (London: S. & J. Bentley, Wilson & Fley, 1842), p. 70.
The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1998), pp. 47, 45, 43, 34, 31.
Edmund Calamy, The Happinesse of Those Who Sleep in Jesus (London: I. H. for Nathanael Webb, 1662), E2v.
William Basse, A Helpe to Memory and Discourse (London: T. B. for Leonard Becket, 1630), B1v–B2r.
Elisabeth Jocelin, The Mothers Legacy to Her Unborne Childe. The Second Impression (London: John Haviland for William Barret, 1624), A9r–v.
See Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. chapter 8.
Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations, 50 (1995): 76–100.
Margaret Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters (London: William Wilson, 1664), M1v.
Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 44–8. A sixteenth-century painting of ‘Saint Mary Magdalene at her Writing Desk’ by Master of the Female Half-length shows a woman surrounded by the paraphernalia of writing, including a pen-knife and portable ink-pot and quill-holder at a table covered with green cloth.
British Library, MS Egerton 607; Huntington Library, San Marino, California, MS EL 8376 and MS EL 8377. For a documentary edition, see Betty S. Travitsky, Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: The Case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and Her ‘Loose Papers’ (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999).
Edmund Rainbowe, A sermon preached at the funeral of the Right Honorable Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (London: For Richard Royston, 1677), E5v.
Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye (London: R. Jones, 1573), A5r.
For Whitney’s claims to herbal knowledge, see Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), chapter 4.
This process was not straightforwardly gendered, and more research remains to be done on men’s loose papers, and use of paper scraps. For an intriguing account of fragmentation and composition, see Adam Smyth, ‘“Rend and teare in peeces”: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Seventeenth Century, 19 (2004): 36–52.
Princeton University Library, Robert Taylor Collection, MS RTC01 no. 62, fol. 11r. Transcriptions of Isham’s two autobiographical texts are at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/isham/. Isham’s fragmentary life record, known as her ‘diary’ (Northamptonshire Record Office, MS IL 3365), a sheet of paper in which she noted key events from each successive year in a series of squares, attests to her consciousness of the material possibilities of paper, as does her recollection of finding ‘a louse paper. Of the Epistle of Saint John … I folded it up and made mee a little booke of it and being veryioyent of it I kept it in my poket’ (fol. 14r). On the relationship between Isham’s ‘Diary’ and her Book of Remembrance, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Elizabeth Isham’s Books of Remembrance and Forgetting’, Modern Philology, 109 (2011): 71–84.
Martin Billingsley, The Pen’s Excellencie (London: sold by Io. Sudbury & George Humble, 1618, C2r).
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 38.
Anne Bradstreet, Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (Boston, MA: John Foster, 1678), A2v.
Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles (London: by Henry Denham, 1586), Nnnnn3r.
The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS V.b.198, ed. Jean Klene (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), p. 72.
Mary Sidney Herbert, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. I, eds Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 112 (lines 78–82). These lines are not included in the version of the poem printed in Daniel’s 1623 Workes, meaning that the printed text does not reflect upon its own material, written qualities.
Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr note the recent turn to questions of embodiment in early modern studies: ‘Scholars have emphasized the porousness of an early modern body that takes the environment into itself or spills out of its own bounds (or both)’ (’Introduction’ to Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan, Jr, eds, Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2).
Margaret Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies (London: Thomas Roycroft for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), E6r.
On the table-book, see Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery and Heather Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (2004): 379–419.
Margaret Cavendish, Philosophicall Letters (London, 1664), Qq2v.
On the seventeenth-century tendency to address natural philosophical questions through reference to the structures of the book, see Daniel Selcer, Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription (London: Continuum, 2010).
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Smith, H. (2014). Women and the Materials of Writing. In: Pender, P., Smith, R. (eds) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342430_2
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