Abstract
Philip Sidney’s work began to appear in print during the 1590s, at a time when a vibrant market for literary publications was emerging and when newly profitable printed genres proliferated: dramatic publishing finally became viable in the decade; many editions of sonnets appeared, creating the decade’s sonnet fad; ballads and secular music started appearing regularly after 1595, and, by the decade’s end, Nicholas Ling and others turned the printed commonplace book into a viable literary genre.1 Even so, literary work continued to be published in manuscript. Francis Meres’s praise of William Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends” in 1598 is perhaps the most famous evidence of the continued practice of manuscript publication: although Shakespeare’s sonnets would not be printed until 1609 (barring the two included in the 1599 collection, The Passionate Pilgrim), copies had circulated widely enough that a well-read gadfly such as Meres was aware of them.2 In addition, presentation manuscripts such as the Sidney Psalter (1599), a verse translation of the Psalms by Philip and Mary Sidney, appeared in ornate editions intended for individual, elite readers rather than the bookbuying public.3
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
Peter Blayney (following W. W. Greg’s Bibliography of the English Printed Drama) begins “the Age of the English Printed Play” in 1583, but the printed play exploded as a viable print commodity in the 1590s. Blayney has found 51 plays entered in the Stationers’ Register between 1590 and 1599, which far outnumbers those registered in the 1580s, or any previous decade. (“The Publication of Playbooks,” A New History of Early English Drama, eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan [New York: Columbia U P, 1997], 385). See also W. W. Greg, “The Stationers’ Register: Some Statistics,” Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), which lists 77 printed dramatic works and 54 dramatic works entered in the register from 1591–1600, compared to 16 and 6, respectively, from 1581–90 (347). Tiffany Stern’s work on performance and the historical conditions of the theater reminds us that the boom in dramatic publication more likely results from the sudden necessity of new plays triggered by the opening of the Globe and other public theaters (see esp. Rehearsal From Shakespeare to Sheridan, New York: Oxford UP, 1999).
For print and the emergence of sonnet sequences in the 1590s, see Marcy L. North, “The Sonnets and Book History,” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (New York: Blackwell, 2006), esp. pp. 207–9
and Joel B. Davis, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 79–80, 99–117;
for the practice of commonplacing as published in the 1590s, see Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619” (A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (West Sussex: John Wiley, 2010), especially 43–52.
Noel J. Kinnamon comprehensively surveys the Psalter manuscripts in the recent OUP edition of Mary Sidney’s work; see The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke, Volume II: The Psalms of David, eds. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), II. 308–36.
Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), 7.
Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 180–1.
See also Steven May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 1999), which focuses on the individual courtiers, rather than the implications of the collaborative nature of their work. See in particular 2–5.
Steven May, “Manuscript Circulation at the Elizabethan Court,” New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1993), 276.
Sidney, Arcadia, ¶3r. For a comprehensive catalog of various type of literary manuscripts, see H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts (Oxford, 1996), 134–73.
The basic critical engagement of the relationship between early modern manuscript and print publication remains Arthur Marotti, Manuscript. Additionally, H. R. Woudhuysen’s Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts offers a detailed history of manuscript publication that extends beyond lyric as a manuscript genre. See also Michael Rudick’s edition of The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), which refines the historical models of Marotti and Woudhuysen by recording Raleigh’s texts through manuscripts to their printed forms.
See also Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999.)
For an excellent survey on the development of scholarship on manuscript and print cultures, see Zeynep Tenger and Paul Trolander, “From Print versus Manuscript to Sociable Authorship and Mixed Media: A Review of Trends in the Scholarship of Early Modern Publication,” Literature Compass 7/11 (2010): 1035–48.
The Arte is usually attributed to George Puttenham; see Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker, The Arte of English Poesie (Cambridge, 1936), xi–xliv. This may be the case, but it never circulated with an author’s name attached, so I will consider it an anonymous publication. Field’s introduction, which notes that the book came “to my handes, with his bare title without any Authours name or any other ordinarie addresse” (2), indicates that the text had long circulated without attribution. All citations from Arte refer to this edition.
William Webbe’s A Discourse of English Poetry similarly reveals the hierarchy of rank in courtier aesthetics in his comment on court poetry: “I may not omitte the deserued commendations of many honourable and noble Lordes and Gentlemen in her Maiesties Courte, which in the rare deuises of Poetry have beene and yet are most excellent skylfull, among whom the right honourable Earle of Oxford may challenge to him selfe the tytle of the most excellent among the rest” (qtd. G. Gregory Smith Elizabethan Critical Essays. vol. 1 [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1904, rpt. 1950], I.243.) George Whetstone, in his memorial to Sidney, confirms that his court writing remained largely within that circle and out of public view: while praising Sidney as “not like a Carpet knight,/Whose glory is in garments,” he laments, “If men but knew, the halfe that he did write” (Sir Philip Sidney, His Honorable Life. [Thomas Cadman, c. 1587], B2v.)
See also Michael Brennan’s Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1988), which, though primarily concerned with the Pembroke family, maps the strategies Elizabeth employed to effectively control her court officers by fashioning them into “mirrors of monarchic taste”: “At court, where so much intense concentration was brought to bear upon the personality of the sovereign, royal tastes could exercise a marked influence over the cultural pursuits of the aristocracy” (7).
Additionally, Ralph M. Sargent’s At the Court of Queen Elizabeth (New York: Oxford, 1935), esp. pp. 14–55, which uses Edward Dyer’s literary career as a touchstone for his history of Elizabethan patronage.
For example, Harold Love, citing Walter Ong, argues that “while the printed book makes the experience of language passive and linear, script can be allowed a degree of ‘residual orality.’” Scribal publication preserved a “more intimate relationship between author and reader” and “rejected print-culture claims for words being the property of an author or copyright holder for a sense of texts as communally possessed” (“Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV: 1557–1695, eds. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, assisted by Maureen Bell [Cambridge, 2002], 117). However, aspects of printed books certainly contain moments of “residual orality” as well— note, in the Arcadia, several poems whose scansion is included; note the scaffold that notes the lacuna in Arcadia; note the courtly dialogue of Certain Sonets; note the Queen’s immaterial presence in the Lady of May— all of these moments illustrate how the printed book, however “linear” or “stabilizing” it may be, can offer moments of communal interaction as well as scribal publication. Wendy Wall also argues for the textual stasis of print, noting that the literary folio “stand[s] at the end of a process of evolution in which publishers presented the book more as a monumental literary artifact inhering within itself and its origin and less as a process-oriented function that harkened toward more powerful readers and patrons” (Imprint of Gender [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993], 89.) Wall describes publishing’s “evolution” from “a process-oriented function” into one producing “literary artifact[s] inhering within [themselves]”; however, the printed book continues to be “process-oriented.” The need for laborers to manufacture, edit, and correct books—as well as readers’ continued roles in contributing to printed books themselves (as recently outlined by Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England [Cambridge, 2005]
and Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England [Cambridge, 2005])—ensures that a printed work, no matter how “monumental” or stable—always bears witness to the process of its creation and the history of its usage.
Wall, Imprint, 31, 44. Marotti, Wall, Love, and, to a lesser extent, Woudhuysen accept the existence of what J. M. Saunders has called “The Stigma of Print,” which argues that “for the amateur poets of the Court an avoidance of print was socially desirable” (“The Stigma of Print,” Essays in Criticism 1 [1951], 141; Saunders’ emphasis). The “stigma of print” has been usefully challenged, notably by Steven May, Richard Wollman (93–4) and Jean R. Brink (“Manuscript Culture Revisited,” Sidney Journal. 17 [1999]: 19–30.) It may be more accurate to understand such anxieties as evidence of adapting literature to a new technology and a new economic system for literary circulation.
For example, Adrian Johns, in The Nature of the Book (Chicago UP, 1998), argues that “gentlemen repudiated authorship not out of simple snobbery, nor from affected repugnance at ‘the stigma of print,’ but because the character of the Stationer impinged on the fundamental elements of the genteel identity” (176). A. S. G. Edwards’s measured account of the relationship between manuscript and print usefully synthesizes theories of the sigma of print with recent skepticism about the concept. The circulation of Thomas Wyatt’s and Henry Howard’s lyrics in script and print “do not wholly endorse a view of them as representative of the ‘stigma of print,’” but the manuscript work of a poet like William Forrest reminds us that exclusive systems of manuscript publication remained after Songes and Sonets and other printed literary texts (“The Circulation of English Verse in Manuscript After the Advent of Print in England,” Studia Neophilogica 83 [2011], 74–5.)
Steven Mentz, “Selling Sidney: William Ponsonby, Thomas Nashe, and the Boundaries of Elizabethan Print and Manuscript Cultures,” Text 13 (2000), 169. Similarly, Michael Rudick reminds us that “the court was permeable” and poems could find a wider audience even without print (xxiv).
Ros King, Introduction, The Works of Richard Edwards, New York: Manchester UP, 2001, 42.
In the preface to Sundrie Flowers, the book’s supposed publisher, H. W., claims that he had it printed by “his friend A.B.” from a manuscript he received from the tale’s narrator, “G. T.”; see A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 41–2. Watson, in his Hecatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love (Gabriel Cawood, 1582), recalls how his poems had been well received in the Earl of Oxford’s literary coterie, and because of this “many haue oftentimes and earnestly called vpon mee, to put it to the presse, that for their mony they might but see, what your Lordship with some liking had alreadie perused” (A3r–A3v).
Heeding Paul Marquis’s observation that the second edition was “the most influential version of Songes and Sonettes in the Elizabethan period” (“Politics and Print: The Curious Revisions to Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes.” Studies in Philology. 97 (2000): 145–65, 147), my text quotes the 1559 edition. For a survey of these changes, see Hyder Edward Rollins, ed. Tottel ’s Miscellany, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965), II.7–12.
The exchange between Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns in American Historical Review 107.1 (2002), 87–126, conveniently summarizes this debate.
W. W. Greg, “An Elizabethan Printer and His Copy,” Collected Papers, 99–100; Gerard Kilroy, “Advertising the Reader: Sir John Harington’s ‘Directions in the Margent,’” ELR 41 (2011), 64–5; 69–70.
Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality:The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 1993).
Simon Cauchi, “‘Setting Foorth’ of Harington’s Ariosto,” Studies In Bibliography 36 (1983), 139.
Tribble, 96. On Harington’s marginal notes, see also Judith Lee, “The English Ariosto: The Elizabethan Poet and the Marvelous,” Studies in Philology 80 (1983), 277–98.
Gerard Kilroy, The Epigrams of Sir John Harington, (Ashgate, 2009), 15. See also Kilroy, “Advertising,” 70–5, for descriptions of other unique copies of the folio.
Kilroy, Epigrams, 70–1, from which I quote Harington’s letter; see Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as a Gift (New York: Oxford, 2001), 105–12 for a facsimile and a close reading of the letter and the included epigrams as part of Harington’s strategy for earning his mother-in-law’s acceptance.
Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 12.
Richard Field secured a patent “to imprinte a Booke called Orlando furioso in English verse translated by Iohn Harington prohibitinge all other persons to ymprynte the same” (W. W. Greg, A Companion to Arber [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967], 151–2), perhaps suggesting Field’s need to protect his investment into this rather large but potentially unsalable book. Field subsequently printed (but not published) the 1598 Arcadia, so perhaps his economic savvy here suggests his experience with publishing literature in folio may have been crucial to the development of the format.
See Mark Bland, “The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England,” Text 11 (1998), 114–7.
Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (New York: Oxford UP, 1989). Citations from the Defence follow this edition.
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1991), 147, 170. For the relationship between manuscript publication and advancement within the court, see Ted-Larry Pebworth, who notes that the practice “provided … a useful screening procedure for applicants to the civil service” (62).
Steven Mentz, Romance For Sale in Early Modern England (London: Ashgate, 2006), 107. It is worth considering whether by the time of the printing of Sidney’s Defence, his complaints about print may have come across as anachronistically insular. Indeed, the fact that Sidney’s family and close associates were fairly quick to print his work perhaps suggests that Sidney’s reluctance may actually have been seen as eccentric or old-fashioned not long after he wrote his essay.
The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 544.
For a further analysis of the text of the quarto, see MacDonald Jackson, “The Printer of the First Quarto of Astrophel and Stella (1591),” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978), 201–3.
“[F]or any understanding knoweth the skill of each artifacer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering forth in such excellency as he had imagined them” (Defence 216–7). For a survey of debates surrounding this concept, see esp. Michael Mack, Sidney’s Poetics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2005), 54–108. I have elsewhere discussed idea, and Sidney’s preface, as part of his larger attempt to reconcile the mental labor of creating poesy with the material objects that imperfectly record an author’s idea (“‘Delivering Forth’: Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Idea’ and the Labor of Writing,” Sidney Journal, 31 (2013), 53–75.)
The contentious relationship between these two early editions of Arcadia is mapped in Joel Davis, “Multiple Arcadias”; Victor Skretkowicz, “Building Sidney’s Reputation: Texts and Editions of the Arcadia,” Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, eds. Jan van Dorsten, Dominic BakerSmith, and Arthur Kinney (London: Leiden UP, 1986), and Woudhuysen, Manuscripts, 224–32.
Gerald O’Brien, “William Ponsonby,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008. See also Jean Brink, “William Ponsonby’s Rival Publisher,” Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography 12 (2001), 185–205. Brink challenges the conception of Ponsonby that “as a literary connoisseur in contrast to his mercenary contemporaries”; she further notes that “Ponsonby did not immediately identify himself as a publisher of sixteenth-century literary texts” (186–7).
For criticisms about the accuracy of the 1593 Arcadia see Michael McCanles, The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World (Durham, NC: Duke UP), 1989, 134–43;
for Mary Sidney’s editorial approach to Arcadia and the Psalter, see Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’ s Phoenix (New York: Oxford, 1990), 69–73; Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke, vol. I, 6–9.
Lisa M. Klein reads the entertainment as “a further attempt to fill the role of right poet at the center of public life” (The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer [Newark: University of Delaware, 1998], 73). Robert Stillman acknowledges that the work has a “topical relevance,” although he is unsure “about what that relevance is” (“Justice and the ‘Good Word’ in Sidney’s Lady of May,” SEL 24 [1984], 29); never the less, he accepts the conventional reading that “justice demands” that Elizabeth choose Therion (36), and her choice of Eshpilus “destroyed the work’s unity” (37). See also Edmund Berry, “The Poet as Warrior in Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, SEL 29 (1989), 32–3.
For a recent political and allegorical reading, see Michael G. Brennan, The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy 1500–1700 [London: Ashgate, 2006], 73–4.
Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998, 49.
Edward Berry, reading the entertainment in the context of Elizabethan May games, argues that the text clearly presents Therion as the winner, by virtue of his livelier, carnivalesque responses (“Sidney’s May Game for the Queen,” Modern Philology 86 [1989], 254–5). Many critics, following S. K. Orgel (“Sidney’s Experiment in Pastoral: The Lady of May,” Journal of the Warberg and Courtauld Institutes. 26 (1963), 198–203) identify what Berry calls notes “the incongruity of the ending” of the work (Making 219) as evidence that Elizabeth was supposed to choose Therion. Later critics such as Robert Kimrough & Philip Murphy, who assume that “surely Leicester and Sidney were Disappointed” in her decision (“The Helmingham Hall Manuscript of Sidney’s The Lady of May: A Commentary and Transcription,” Renaissance Drama 1, (1968), 105), build on or accept this proposition. Katherine Duncan-Jones and JanVan Doorsten’s edition tries to resolve this incongruity by having the final poem sung by both Espilus and Therion—each taking the stanzas appropriate to their character. However, this lacks any textual precedent—both the folios and the manuscript assign it to Espilus alone. Indeed, the preceding stage direction resolves this fairly clearly, noting that “Espilus [did] sing this song, tending to the greatness of his own joy, and yet to the comfort of the other side, since they were overthrown by a most worthy adersary” (Miscellaneous Prose [Oxford, 1971], 30). The direction explicitly states Espilus as the lone singer, and part of his song is meant to assuage Therion. He does this by singing “two short tales,” one in his style, and the other in Therion’s—Espilus, the winning poet, demonstrates his skill by courteously appropriating the style of his opponent. Taken in context of the folio, the Queen’s choice of the Petrarchan Shepherd Espilus over the more rhetorically sophisticated Therion makes better sense within a book that features Arcadia. The work, then, ends on a note of unity, not discord or incongruity.
This may have been conventional in printed courtly entertainments; see, for instance, the Kenelworth entertainment in Gascoigne’s Workes, which begins “A briefe rehearsall, or rather a true Copie as much as was presented be-fore her maiesties at Knelworth” (Whoole workes of Geogre Gascoigne Esquire: Newlye compiled into one Volume [Abell Jeffres, 1587], 2A.1). For the development of the title page from manuscript incipits, see Margaret Smith, The Title Page: Its Early Development, 1460–1510 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2000), 35ff.
Thomas Hackett published the first English Amadis, which included selections drawn from the first thirteen books by Thomas Pannell, in quarto in 1577. The first selection from Anthony Munday’s translation was published in quarto by Edward Allde in 1589 or 1590; subsequent quarto editions appeared in 1595 (book two, translated by Lazarus Pyott, and printed for Cutbert Burbie) and 1598 (book five, published by John Wolfe and Adam Islip, who also printed it.) For the influence of Amadis on Arcadia and Philip Sidney’s knowledge of the romance, see Helen Moore, intro. and ed., Amadis De Gaule (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), xx–xxi.
Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 230.
Hannay, Mary Sidney, 234–5. Hannay suggests that the offer “may have been a rhetorical ploy” since there is no evidence that Urania was actually recalled, although she suggests that the lack of prefaces to the work may indicate that Wroth may have, at the last minute, decided not to go ahead with the printing. The book may nevertheless have been printed because the stationers, likely having already invested in the book, “needed the profits from selling it” (235). See also Rosalind Smith, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The Politics of Withdrawal,” ELR 30 (2000), 408–31.
Copyright information
© 2014 Francis X. Connor
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Connor, F.X. (2014). “Ungentle Hoarders”: From Manuscript to Print in Sidney’s Arcadias?. In: Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438362_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438362_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49391-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43836-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)